Bill Kristol: Keep Up the Pressure, Dems

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, so of course, we have editor-at-large Bill Kristol. Hey, Bill.

**Bill Kristol** (0:20)
Hey, Tim, how are you?

**Tim Miller** (0:22)
I'm doing well. I've got some announcements for people real quick. Tickets for the live shows ACC Country are on sale. Bill is going to be with us in Atlanta.
We're going to do Atlanta stuff while we're there, so get your tickets now. We have, I think, a really exciting guest on Jynxit coming in Charlotte. Not that Bill is not exciting for Atlanta, he is.

**Bill Kristol** (0:42)
I can take it. I'm not offended. It's just I'm happy to be second banana. Second banana is me.

**Tim Miller** (0:49)
I think people will be excited about the Charlotte guest. I'm planning on getting a little loose. I've got one of my buddies coming in Columbia.
Any of the shows will be a win. Get your tickets to the bulwark.com/events. Last week, Bill and I discussed that the Labor Day pod be a retrospective on 1994 and 2006, and then also a look ahead to this midterms, sort of a wave year special episode. We heard a lot of feedback. People want that. I'm getting my Harriet Meyers stories ready. Bill's refreshing his memory about 1994 I got this T-shirt brought to me. My former pod co-host, Cameron Caskey, brought this to me. This is a Operation Desert Storm T-shirt.
That was freedom and justice for all. So we're getting in the 90s spirit for Bill Kristol. Thank you, Tim.

**Bill Kristol** (1:39)
I'm pleased you didn't have a World War II T-shirt for me. World War I, Spanish American War.

**Tim Miller** (1:43)
Operation Desert Storm, the good old days. Anyway, so that's all coming up. Today's show, the world is so strange. I guess we're going to start with war. If we're going to do some Operation Desert Storm references, we'll start with the war being back on-ish in Iran. There was an exchange of fire in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday. First, US forces struck Iranian launchers on the Larek Island. The rockets were allegedly, according to Central Command, set to disperse sea mines into the Strait.
Now, that is interesting because the administration was bragging to Axios just 36 hours prior to that, that the seas were open.
Seas were open. You know the seas are open when you've got to bomb the launchers that have the sea mines on them. That's a great sign that seas are open. The insurance companies love that. Hours later, Iran retaliated by firing a few missiles towards Jordan, all of which were intercepted. We are running out of interceptors, though, so partial good news there. That is the state of play. Meanwhile, there is also a leak with some warnings from top generals, military leaders advising Hegseth that prolonging large scale operations that Iran is unsustainable, at risk of weakening their ability to confront threats everywhere, there are too many troops there, 50,000. The warnings came from the head of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and four-star commanders overseeing US operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. That was quite the leak to the Washington Post. So that's the state of play.

**Bill Kristol** (3:11)
Honestly, it's good that some of the military or someone in the Defense Department, I suppose, or maybe elsewhere in the government, the National Security Council, are revealing certain things to us since the military, the defense department has been utterly unrevealing about anything that's happened, very struck by this recent report. People who were in the military are getting more and more alarmed and also outraged about what's happened to our bases there, for example, something we've discussed before, and the degree to which the damage that was done to huge US hubs by Iranian drones disabling them. We know that that's why the sailors on the USS Lincoln couldn't get the provisions and all that.

**Tim Miller** (3:46)
Particularly that base in Bahrain, the naval support actions.

**Bill Kristol** (3:49)
Yes, it's our biggest naval base anywhere, certainly abroad or anywhere in the region, certainly. The idea that it just gets put out of commission, basically. Then, of course, we're not told about it, and they mislead everyone about it, saying, Oh, we're Troy's, we're dominant, we're winning. It's a slaughter of the Iranians.
Anyway, yeah, it's bad.

**Tim Miller** (4:12)
Just on this, this was as Captain John Cordele, retired captain, wrote about this in Military Times. But, you know, he's basically saying that the more we learn about the attacks on the NSA, the naval support base in Bahrain during the opening days of Operation Epic Fury, the clearer it becomes why the news of its near destruction was not initially reported or acknowledged, extensive damage, et cetera, et cetera. So the base is more damaged than acknowledged.