About this episode
Three U.S. service members were killed in Jordan this week, and now some Republicans are proposing that the United States should attack Iran. Fred Kaplan, Slate's War Stories columnist and the author of many books, including The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War (Simon & Schuster, 2020), explains why we even have troops in Jordan and other places in the Middle East at all, and how this is all related to the Israel-Hamas war.