Welcome to Beg to B to differ the Bullworks weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left to center right. I'm Mona Charon

syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork, and I'm joined by our regulars.

Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution and the Wall Street Journal, Damon Linker, who writes a

sub-stack newsletter, Notes from the Middle Ground, and Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center.

Our special guest this week is Ben Wittis, editor-in-chief of Law Fair.

This is a different sort of episode of Beg to Differ because as it happens, Ben Wittis, Bill

Galston and I are all in the same room.

We're attending a meeting in Texas and the others are in their usual posts which means it is a little

bit of a fly by the seat of your pants operation I don't have my mic, Ben's using his phone, but I hope you'll all bear with us, should be

fine. Oh, and also there's going to be a lot of extraneous noise. So we apologize in advance for that.

All right, so I'd like to begin with the foreign policy news. Iran conducted a huge

attack against Israel over the weekend launching more than 30 missiles of different varieties, drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, they say.

Well, there are two things to say about this.

First of all, the United States, France, Britain,

and a number of Arab nations participated in blunting this attack on Israel.

So let us start there.

Ben Wittis, first of all, do you think the Iranians knew when they launched this attack with the slow moving

drones with the, you know, telegraphing their attack well in advance and then announcing

as soon as it was over, we're done. Do you think it was

intended to be sort of not that damaging and therefore kind of more for show than for real damage or are you in the camp that

says no no they didn't know that all these things were going to get blown out of the sky they

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