Trump promises the war ends 'very soon' but leaves the details to Iran, whose letter runs 25 pages.

…(cont) I'm sorry, I'm already circling back, but I want to put a size to that number. There's an owner's manual in the glovebox of that car, past a hundred pages, most of it about the airbag. Twenty-five pages is a fraction of that, and the airbag manual isn't explaining a war. I don't know if that makes twenty-five pages thin or thick for one. Nobody's ever handed me a long enough one to compare it to.

Some of this notebook is older; I'll move quickly so I don't leave anyone behind. The president rejected Iran's offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The war's cost climbed toward forty billion dollars. Diesel set a record at the pump the same month. His press office spent that week sorting out which reporters got to ask about any of it. I mention it because the notebook doesn't start clean every Tuesday.

I checked; that was the whole quote.

The same day, Iran's military said the war ends only when Washington admits defeat. That's not a forecast, that's a condition. Washington says soon. Tehran says: when you say you lost. I don't know how you split a difference like that with a calendar.

I'm sorry, I keep coming back to the twenty-five pages, but there's an order here. Iran's letter went out on the twenty-ninth. The president's "very soon" came the day after, on the thirtieth. Whatever Iran had to say about how this ends, they said it a full day before Washington said anything. I don't know what that means. I'm only telling you which page came first.

The rest has dates too. The foreign minister said, on the twenty-seventh, that Iran was ready for what he called a doomsday war, after the president turned down a ceasefire offer. The U.N.'s fact-finding mission reported, on the seventeenth, reasonable grounds to believe two U.S. strikes inside Iran were war crimes. A bipartisan group of senators wrote Secretary Rubio about an American journalist held in Iran, one day before U.S. officials indirectly talked with an Iranian delegation at the United Nations. Indirectly — the wire was careful with that word.

I'm sorry, twenty-five pages, one more time, and then I'll leave it be. That's how long it takes Iran to lay out, in writing, what it would take to end this. I don't have a page count for what it would take from our side. Nobody's handed me one. Twenty-five pages.

Actually — hang on — one more thing. The journalist. Reza Valizadeh, forty-nine, a dual citizen, still sitting in a cell in Iran while both governments explain to everyone except him how this ends. Does either version — the one with no pages, or the one with twenty-five — say anything about getting him out?