What Everyone Gets Wrong About Iran, with Clarissa Ward and Lyse Doucet (Part Two)

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**Mia Sorenti** (0:56)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorenti.
In this episode, we return for part two of our recent live event with CNN's Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward. Ward joined us recently at Conway Hall to discuss the human cost of war and rapidly changing world order. She was in conversation with BBC Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet. If you haven't heard part one, we recommend jumping back an episode to catch up. But now let's return to the conversation live at Conway Hall.

**Lyse Doucet** (1:27)
Let me just rise up a bit above the specifics of this war. One of the last times we worked together was in Afghanistan, which was another war that was a debacle for the United States. How many people in the audience are American passport holders? Just so we don't, we want to... Yeah, okay, a number of you.
People are now looking at this Clarissa on a broader thing.
To be blunt about this, they say another war that the great American military has lost. They lost this war. They didn't win it, but they won it tactically, but not strategically. They lost the war in Afghanistan. Mistakes were made, of course, of course. Then they're going back to Vietnam. You're working for a global channel, but it's also known as an American channel. Does this cause you to reflect about America's place in the world now, like when you travel, what people say? Oh, that's okay. I know you're American, British, and many other things. No, no, no, no, no.

**Clarissa Ward** (2:27)
Look, I became a journalist literally at almost one week before the US invasion of Iraq. So if ever there was a time for 2003, yeah. So if ever there was a time for soul searching as an American and trying to understand better our actions in the world, the way we saw our own actions in the world, the way the world saw our own actions. And this was coming after 9 11, which was the very reason I became a journalist. So I feel like we have been through a pretty brutal and intense cycle of pretty much back to back wars with a few little interludes there. And at the same time, I am also old enough to remember the Obama presidency, which while there were a huge number of drone strikes, there was less military intervention, and that brought its own issues with it as well. Which is not to be like an apologist for America at all, but rather to say that I think the idea that this like Goldilocks sweet spot of how much force to use versus not to use is a really difficult spot to find.
And it is interesting to me that President Trump, after again running on this platform of wanting to end these wars and not have any more of these wars, has somehow felt himself pulled back in. And perhaps it was because of something we haven't mentioned yet, which was Venezuela, which is how this insane year began. 2026, thank you very much.
I think there was something intoxicating because I think he thought he'd found the Goldilocks sweet spot, right?

**Lyse Doucet** (4:37)
The Delcey Rodriguez.

**Clarissa Ward** (4:38)
The Delcey Rodriguez. You send in your special ops guys, you get rid of Maduro and his wife, you co-opt the Chavistas, like Delcey Rodriguez, and you basically have yourself a client state and everyone's a winner in his mind. And I think honestly, he thought that we're going to be able to pull off something similar with Iran, which belies a staggering lack of humility, because as you know better than I do, if you spend some time in Iran and understand a little bit about the way the power structures were there, particularly with the IRGC, particularly after the lessons learned, because they had a dress rehearsal last year, and I think they were able to decentralize remarkably effectively.