Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, opened with what his generation of officers keeps telling him near the end: they never expected to live long enough to see the country in this shape.
He raised an Iranian nuclear weapon five times in one conversation, more than in any appearance before, and when asked why, he laid out the case.
In his read, the decision came after the funeral and moved through every body that needed to approve it, ending with Iran's parliament.
The fallback, per his sourcing, runs through Islamabad and possibly Beijing.
And Tehran can exit the Non-Proliferation Treaty any morning it chooses with its legal case already written: we complied with everything, we were punished anyway, now we leave.
He believes the door on talks is closed for good: "The next thing they'll do is show us that they have a nuclear weapon."
His arithmetic for disarming Iran by force instead: 2.5 MILLION troops, years of occupation, trillions spent, in a country the size of Western Europe.
Anything smaller gets fed in piecemeal and lost. Meanwhile the one officer with the legal power to walk into the Oval Office and force the truth, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, has not visibly used it.
Powell used it twice and won both times.
Asked which scenario worries him most, he did not pick the bomb.
He picked Iran turning its new precision onto the machinery the world economy runs on, Saudi export terminals above all, and put a date on the fallout: global depression by fall.
