Click on Owen Jones: Is a ground invasion of some description looming? Of course, we're talking here about US troops. Iran troops are heading to the Middle East in their thousands.
Sina Toossi : Thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for your kind words. Really happy to be back on.
Owen Jones: Always. Let's just start with this. The troops. Do you think I mean that's where this is heading because the only way Trump thinks he can well he's stuck isn't he in the sense he's he's stuck between accepting a strategic catastrophe militarily for the for the United States can't just walk away because the Gulf of is closed and it can't obviously allow the economic damage to continue as you would see it there. But so then he thinks he he has to escalate it with ground chiefs. Do you think that's where this is heading?
Sina Toossi: Yeah, I mean Trump I mean it's very scary because if he does choose to escalate to ground invasion of Iran, that's not going to make this easier for him. I don't think that's going to give him the leverage he thinks it may give him to get Iran to concede on the trade of Hormuz. It's just it's more going to be him doubling down on this failed policy and this failed war where it was launched on a bunch of deeply flawed assumptions about Iran, about the viability and durability of the Iranian government of its ability to retaliate and they clearly didn't expect that this is the way the war was going to go. This war has so far been very costly on every indicator really for the US including just on purely military conventional terms which I think many people didn't really expect. Like there was this New York Times article yesterday saying that pretty much all it seems like all the military US military bases in the region like 14 or 15 military bases have been made quote unquote uninhabitable. There's been strikes against you know radars air defences you know air refueling tankers you know US forces have been kind of fleeing into hotels waging the war remotely going to Europe. So now that the idea that you know with these assumptions having proven wrong with the regime still there intact…….’
