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Donald Trump has taken America into war with a country whose population is approximately the size of Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s combined. He has done this without making a case to the American people, and without approval of any kind from their elected representatives.

During the planning for President Trump’s latest strike on Iran, Britain refused to allow the United States to launch air attacks from the U.S.-U.K. base at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. Only a few hours’ flying time from the Middle East, Diego Garcia offers airfields long enough for the heaviest bombers and has naval docks large enough for aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. It is British territory, left over from colonial times, but was jointly developed under a U.S.-U.K.

On Wednesday, March 4, Atlantic staff writers Tom Nichols, Toluse Olorunnipa, and Missy Ryan will discuss the United States and Israel’s joint attack on Iran with staff writer Vivian Salama. In this virtual event, they’ll discuss the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Trump administration’s response, the complicated history of regime changes, and what comes next. Attendees can submit questions in advance for The Atlantic’s journalists to answer live during the session.

There’s an old rule of thumb that you retain about 10 percent of what you read, 20 percent of what you hear, 30 percent of what you see via image or video, and so on up the ladder of experiential learning, until you get to a 90 percent retention rate for the things you learn by doing yourself.
The teeny problem is that none of this is backed by science; it’s a bastardization of the “cone of learning” that the education theorist Edgar Dale developed but never intended to be prescriptive.

Just about the only thing that the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump have agreed on is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was too timid to pull the trigger. “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit,” a senior Obama official told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg in 2014, explaining that the Israeli leader was “scared to launch wars.