On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” CNN Senior Political and Global Affairs Commentator, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, and former Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel stated that “I don’t agree with the president of the United States, do not, on many, many issues. But you have to admire that when the United States says all options are on the table, he just proved all options are on the table. And China and Russia and even North Korea have to step back, because that has a level of deterrence.”

Emanuel said, “[T]he one big loser, in my view, … is not just Iran…but is Russia. Russia, if you take a step back, all their weapons, the S-300 did not protect Iran. They’ve been proven to be a feckless ally. They didn’t come to their defense. They’ve been kicked out of Syria. [They’ve] now been shown to be weak, not only in Iran, they have a war going on three and a half years on a country 1/10 of their size they can’t win. Their intelligence was wrong about Syria. Their intelligence was wrong about Wagner. Their intelligence was wrong about Ukraine. They’ve become dependent on China. And they’ve lost Europe. They have had the worst record here strategically, militarily. And if the president would press the point, you could actually, not only end the war, you could actually set back Putin’s desires.”

He continued, “Second, this is not the Persian Empire recreated. Everything that’s been done over 40 years by the ayatollah has been blown up. The nuclear program costing $100 billion, … lost in Hezbollah, lost in Hamas, hundreds and billions of dollars obliterated. They have a brain drain in Iran. They have a weakening economy, major loss. I don’t agree with the president of the United States, do not, on many, many issues. But you have to admire that when the United States says all options are on the table, he just proved all options are on the table. And China and Russia and even North Korea have to step back, because that has a level of deterrence. So, the blast radius of this goes much farther. Now the question to the president is, are you going to use the military window, diplomatically and politically, to strategically make this win significant and lasting? Saying you’re not going to have an Iran nuclear agreement is crazy and it’s wrong. You’re — are you going to press the point in Gaza and end the war? Are you going to press the point in Ukraine now that you have leverage, or are you going to fritter it away because of your relationship with Putin? And, lastly, I don’t ever remember, Jake, a situation where the president of the United States took military action on a foreign country’s intelligence, not American intelligence. They in the Situation Room should have said, why [is] our intel. over here, Israel’s intel. over here? What do they know that we don’t know? What do we know [that] they don’t know? Not only after the fact, but before. And I think there’s a real question here. America’s intelligence was degraded in 2003 in the Iraq War, when it was manipulated. It resurrected itself in Ukraine, showing we knew a lot and post-Ukraine. We just took military action as a country — and I just gave you my view of the consequence of that — and we did it based, not on our own intelligence, but on other countries’. And so, to me, beyond the Senate briefing, that is a real step for the United States. And we put — it hasn’t proven to work, but it’s put — it could have put our troops at risk. So, there’s a real, in my view, unanswered question here that needs to be really dug into.”

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