Name: Bombing Iran won’t bring victory, only diplomacy can: Former US general
Uploaded: 2026-03-08T21:31:31.000Z
Duration: 4 min 48 s
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Bring in Mark Kimmet, who's a retired American general and a former Assistant Secretary for Political Military affairs, joins us now from Washington, D.C.

As you see, what is Iran hoping to achieve with the strategy that it's conducting?

Well, I think the easiest way to think about it is look at Ukraine and Russia.

Right now, Russia is conducting a strategic bombing campaign and as we've known for months and months, they're trying to really degrade the will of the people, who in turn will then pressure their country's leadership to try to stop the war.

It does not seem at this point that that is happening.

The resolve of the Israeli people seems to be quite strong.

Okay, and what about its attacks on its regional neighbours, particularly in the Gulf?

It is clear that the regional countries did not want to be drug into this war.

They are being forced to make a choice in this war, although public opinion is less important in those countries.

Nonetheless, the pressure on the leadership demonstrated through the press, through social media, they hope to have an impact on turning those countries leadership around and, and

either completely telling the American forces to leave or at least being neutral on the war, or even worse, potentially asking the countries in the region for the Americans to either not fly or leave the country at worst.

All right, from the US Point of view, they say it's going better than expected and plenty more is to come.

From what you see, is it going as well as the United States might expect?

They're plinking the targets that they have.

They've demonstrated the capability of the United States military and the ability to just put sheer volume on Iran.

However, as I said a number of times before on other outlets, this reminds me of my Vietnam years when we thought body counts were going to lead to victory.

I don't see how knocking out these targets are in any way going to lead to victory.

And that's the concern that has been expressed throughout the world.

Okay, on this question of boots on the ground, which Donald Trump is not ruling out, there's this issue of more than 400 kilos of enriched uranium somewhere in Iran.

And one presumes that neither Israel nor the United States will end this without getting their hands on that.

And that would entail sending people in, right?

Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be done with boots on the ground.

Let's hope that this entire war ends at the diplomatic table, that both sides either understand that we're not going to win this by bombing each other into the stone Age that it's eventually there's going to be have to be some sitting down at the diplomatic table to hash out the issues that they were working on a couple of weeks ago.

Although I would suspect that the Americans will make that cost of coming back to the diplomatic table much higher.

But it is certainly the case that if this does end at the diplomatic table, there will need to be inspections, verifications of where that enhanced uranium is and clearly having that enhanced uranium handed over to either the Americans or another third country so that it can be removed from the Iranians hands.

There's another factor, isn't there, as far as the United States is concerned that we've alluded to already in this, in this program that is the cost of war.

And Politico is reporting that Republicans on Capitol Hill privately fear that Pentagon is spending closer to $2 billion a day, $2 billion a day on this and that somewhere down the line is going to have implications, right?

Well, it will be down the line because remember when you add those numbers together, those are sunk costs.

We have already bought this ammunition we've already paid for in our appropriations bill, the pilots, the soldiers, the sailors.

It's the cost of replacing those inventories that will be so expensive.

So a billion a day right now is not having an effect in future appropriations budgets.

That's Mark Kimmitt speaking just there from Washington D.C. thank you, sir.