"This is bad. This is very bad." w/Arms Expert Joseph Cirincione
The Bill Press Pod
BP Pods
4.7 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2020
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
Bill talks with Joseph Cirincione, President of The Ploughshares Fund (Ploughshares.org) and one of the nation's top experts on national security and nuclear policy. Joe explains how the killing of Iranian General Soleimani has already caused irreparable harm to U.S. interests from the Middle East to Europe to North Korea. That's before whatever hot conflict we are likely to get into with Iran.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Bill Press Pod. So are we at war yet? Well, that's what |
| 0:13.1 | everybody's wondering. That's what we're all afraid of after President Trump stirred up trouble |
| 0:18.3 | in the Middle East by ordering the assassination of Iran's top |
| 0:21.7 | general Kasim Soleimani. Was this assassination in any way justified? What are the likely consequences |
| 0:28.3 | and when, how, and where will Iran retaliate? Well, for some insights into this volatile |
| 0:35.3 | situation in the Middle East, we sat down with one of America's leading foreign policy analysts and head of the Plowshares Fund and host of the podcast, Press the Button, Joe Sirencioni. |
| 0:47.9 | Joe, it's good to see you. Thanks for giving us some time. |
| 0:50.2 | My pleasure, Bill. Thanks for coming to my office. |
| 0:52.3 | Right. Now, I think everybody wants to know, how much trouble are we in in the Middle East? |
| 0:58.5 | This is bad. This is very bad. You have to go back to the prelude to the war in Iraq to think about what this could lead to |
| 1:06.1 | and the kinds of projections we had back then that proved to be an underestimation of how bad |
| 1:13.5 | it could be. |
| 1:14.9 | This is clearly the biggest foreign policy crisis of the Trump administration. |
| 1:19.3 | And I would argue you'd have to really go back 40 years to think about this kind of crisis |
| 1:23.9 | that it could become. |
| 1:26.1 | Because the war with Iran will make the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan look like warm-up |
| 1:31.7 | acts. |
| 1:32.7 | This could get quite big quite quickly. |
| 1:35.5 | Susan Rice in an op-ed in the New York Times, former National Security Advisor, said |
| 1:40.8 | it's hard to imagine that this could end up with any other consequence than war with Iran. |
| 1:47.8 | Yeah. |
| 1:48.3 | Do you agree? |
... |
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