- 2015 deal from which he pulled the US.

Heather, back to you.

- Thank you, Mark.

And we are joined now byLieutenant Colonel James Carafano,

Vice President for theHeritage Foundation's

Davis Institute for NationalSecurity and Foreign Policy.

Lieutenant Colonel Carafano,it appears that Iran,

with no casualties in thisattack, is backing down,

and that President Trump wantsto deescalate the crisis.

Is that how you read this?

- Yeah, I think this might beconfusing to a lot of people

that Iran fires a bunchof ballistic missiles

and this is actuallyan active deescalation.

But if you put it into larger context,

first the Iranians actuallynotified the Iraqis

ahead of time that theywere going to do this.

So clearly they would'venotified the United States,

so everybody knew this was coming.

The missiles almost seem to be aimed

not to hit the targets.

Not only were there no casualties,

but, the Iranians werevery quick to come out

and say "Hey, hey, we're done,

"you know if you don't shoot Iranian soil,

"we're not gonna shoot anymore."

So this seems reallykind of be a face-saving

fireworks display on thepart of the Iranians.

And it's a very, very,clear signal to the US

that they're not gonna do anything else.

So essentially they'vealready deescalated,

and I think what the President's done

has actually been incrediblyconsistent since day one

with dealing with Iran, is Iran's tried

a whole series of provocative measures,

the United States has been consistent

in keeping its policies in place.

- I'm wondering though,if we are out of the woods

because today the Supreme Leader of Iran,

the Ayatollah Khameneisaid that the strike

wasn't necessarily thetotality of Iran's response,

do you think there mightbe more retaliation?

- Well there's going to be more Iranian,

I mean there could wellbe more Iranian activity,

this is a pattern we'veseen from the Iranians,

they've tried a numberof different things,

blocking the channels, seizingships, shooting down a drone,

attacking Saudi Arabian territory,

weaponizing the militiasagainst US forces in Iraq.

So, they've tried a bunch of things,

they might well continueto try other things,

but I think from the US perspective,

we'll see the same thing is,

the policies will stayin place, the US response

will be measured and proportional.

- We've also got a planecrash in Iran today,

a Ukrainian passengerjet crashed just moments

after it took off from the capital,

killing all 176 people aboard,

and you tweeted that Iran shouldhave shut down its airspace

when it launched the air strikes on Iraq.

What do you think happenedhere with this plane crash?

- I don't know, there are waymore questions than answers.

Look, Iran announced to the, to Iraq,

essentially to the world,the hour before the attack,

they were going to attack.

So clearly they had an hour

that the cat was out of the bag.

Why they wouldn't groundall civilian air traffic

as a measure of safety, is just a complete

and utter head scratcher, so I just

think we have so manyquestions, so few answers.

We can't really speculate at this point,

but, something's not right.

- You served in the Army for 25 years,

we have now suddenly thousands of troops

that have been deployedto the Middle East,

how do you see them being used,

and at this point in the game,

do you think that was the right call?

- One of the things that's happened

is because of Iran's reckless behavior,

we actually see othercountries in the region

wanting to step up andpartner with the US more,

both to secure themselves andto flush out the deterrent.

And one of the thingsabout these deployments

is the US has reallybroadened its footprint

in the region, so we'renot really dependent

on one particular country,

or one particular base to be able

to fight ISIS or to deter Iran.

I think it's greatlycomplicated Iran's destabilizing

activities, in theregion, it's significantly

expanded our ability to fight ISIS.

Largely these are nottroops that we're putting

in harm's way, they're puttingthem in friendly countries,

they're actually not at great risk and,

and still this is you know

a few thousand soldiers, so it's a fairly

measured deploymentcompared to what we did,

say for example at theheight of the Iraq war,

or in Afghanistan.

- Well as you said,still so many questions,

a lot of people trying to figure out

what's going on right now,

Lt. Colonel James Carafano with Heritage,

thank you so much for your time.

- Thank you so much for having me.