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Notes -
People are contrarian signaling over “why should he know the population”
Because it shows that he has a general idea of the makeup of the country. Compare a country like Iraq (45M) or Afghanistan (41M) with Iran (90M).
It’s twice their size.
Iran is also a space-faring nation. They started launching satellites in 2009, they have advanced hypersonic missiles.
It’s just a very, very different country than our previous Middle East adventures, and Tucker quizzing him on this was to elucidate the fact that Ted’s primary driving motivation to get the US involved is (as Ted himself admitted in another section of the interview) a doomsday prophecy based on a hilariously absurd (and Israel-serving) misreading of the Bible.
Ted Cruz is a voting member of the Senate Committee responsible for US policy in the greater Middle East. So knowing the approximate population of America's main adversary in the region is basic job-related knowledge. "I'm not good with figures but I know it's a lot bigger than Iraq" would be an acceptable answer if Ted Cruz is, indeed, not good with figures.
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I’m not sure where the misreading of the Bible is here, because I’m not sure what the prophecy he’s going on actually says. It’s plausible he’s actually right about those verses.
But I think hyper fixating on “omg” he doesn’t know the population doesn’t mean much for very obvious reasons.
First of all, he’s not remotely involved in planning the war. The people who are absolutely have the relevant information and probably intelligence assets on the ground telling them where the targeting drones should go first. It’s like being shocked that the CEO at apple doesn’t know exactly how much RAM the new iPhone has — he’s not the one designing the phone, he’s the one who demanded the phone be designed at built. As with most high powered elites, he has people to handle the details and he has been told that the military can probably pull this off. That’s all he needs to know.
Second, the exact population is irrelevant compared to things like geography, technological levels, military strength and enlistment numbers, and so on. China has a billion people, but how many of them are in the military? How many are rapidly aging members of the generation before the one-child policy? How many are women? Deciding Cruz doesn’t have any idea about Iran because he didn’t know off by heart tge exact population of Iran is really silly.
The implication is that if he doesn't even ballpark know how many people live in Iran, there's no way he knows any of that other stuff. And if he did, he could have said something like "well they are enlisting X people per year, and American enlists 2X, so probably roughly half of the American population" and at that point if Tucker said "um ackchually it's not 160 million it's 90 million" people would just think Tucker was being pedantic and wouldn't care. But Cruz didn't try to switch to a statistic that he did know, he just got defensive and butthurt which makes everyone assume (IMO probably correctly) that he really knows next to nothing about Iran.
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The prophecies he’s referring to are mostly Christ’s foretelling of the destruction of the second temple- which, as you may recall, happened in 70 AD. Ted Cruz’s misreading is the claim that these are end times prophecies as opposed to a divine punishment for the deicide of Jesus.
I would be interested in @Felagund’s take on millennialism. Last I checked, the stridently Reformed are generally fully on-board with the more reserved interpretations of apocalyptic prophesy, because it’s Augustinian.
I don't have an opinion on end times things at the moment (but thanks for the mention!). Among many of the contemporary reformed, I think amillenialism (we're living in the millenium right now) is the most common view, and is probably what you refer to as the most reserved interpretation, though there do exist postmillenials (especially among the Doug Wilson-adjacent) and premillenials. Dispensationalism is usually seen as beyond the pale, though.
Historically, many in e.g. the 17th century read Romans 11 as talking about a future conversion of ethnic Israel to Christianity, though that's less popular of a reading now.
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I would argue that the exact population does not matter that much, often. If Afghanistan had twice the population (and area), the US would still have conquered them, and if they had only half their population and area, the Taliban would still have taken over again once the US moved out.
Obviously, the order of magnitude matters, as in "Is the population count similar to Belgium, Germany or China?"
Then there is the area to consider. I would have guessed that Iran was about the same size as Afghanistan, and I would have been off -- they are 2.5 times as large. This does not bode well for any invader who wants to engage in nation-building.
I would add that Iran is also supplying Russia with drones. Now Russia is obviously not the prime military adversary that it was some decades ago, but the fact that they find Iranian drones useful against Western equipment -- and the fact Iran produces enough to sell them to Russia -- clearly indicates (just as the space program does), that this is not a country full of goat-herders.
There is an example of an easy mode regime change target. A theocratic polity with only 2M people in less than 400 square kilometers, whose weapons industry is very much on a DIY level. That example is the Gaza strip. If Trump wants to prove that he is better at nation building that GWB was, this is where he might want to start.
Afghanistan's population more than doubled during American occupation, from 20 to 42-5 million. The Gaza strip similarly went from 1 to 2.1 million, at the same time.
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He's a politician and this is a game all journalists and politicians have played forever ("what's a leppo?") at the least he should have some canned answer when he doesn't know the specifics.
Trump would have never in a million years fallen into that trap, he'd just enthusiastically move it on or make shit up doggedly on the spot "it's a lot of people Tucker, great people, some of the best people, but we have to make a deal, we can't allow nukes Tucker, they're very dangerous..."
‘They’re gonna build big, beautiful nukes Tucker, the best. We can’t let that happen.’
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