Монолог о войне с Ираном и интервью с Дугласом Макгрегором

in a moment we're going to speak to former colonel douglas mcgregor about what is happening around the world in the wake of the war in iran that began a little over a week ago and so much is happening and it's not exactly clear how it's all connected all of a sudden you read that israel is occupying parts of southern lebanon killed a priest last night really what is that is that true you read that there are power outages in bangladesh bangladesh yes asia is suffering the world is suffering due to the choke point of hormuz the straits of hormuz that are closed or semi-closed by iran and have been since this began and that's causing massive downstream effects in markets in manufacturing in the global economy how long is that going to last what's the end game there and then of course the war itself which is playing out in iran and israel and throughout the arab world really primarily in the gulf states but not just the gulf states what's the damage well the truth is in a lot of cases we don't really know because the censorship of this war on social media and of course the big mainstream outlets are censored always have been but the promise of social media was you could get unmediated information you could get videos live from the scene and now suddenly you can't that lasted about 24 hours before the clampdown and in part that was by governments governments the gulf states they don't want physical destruction of their countries broadcast to the world the government of israel is clamped down completely they don't want videos of tel aviv or haifa burning you can in fact in some of these countries go to jail for posting that stuff online but it's not just the governments of those countries that are imposing censorship it's the social media companies here that are imposing censorship on the american people who are paying for all of this so they can't know and then there does seem to be a kind of censorship practiced by the u.s government around casualties and deaths how many people have died so far in this conflict how many how many have been injured where and under what circumstances now these are sensitive questions in any conflict and of course you don't in any way want to degrade the effectiveness of the u.s military you don't want to dispirit the troops whom we are rooting for sincerely always and everywhere rooting for americans in whatever theater in whatever war it wasn't of their choosing in some cases they are just the people who suffer first and most to do the decisions of politicians so we're always on their side and you don't want to make things worse for them on the other hand americans do have on a fundamental level a right to know the effects of this war on their countrymen if americans are killed we have a right to know that and yet there's some indication that we really don't so as you try to figure out what's going on keep in mind you can't really get the full picture because the clamp down on information so in the conversation that we're about to have we're going to go through what we think we know in some cases we might be wrong just want to be honest about that up front very hard to know what the truth is at this stage really at any stage but particularly in the face of this kind of censorship but we're going to try to be as honest as we possibly can and provide as much information as we possibly can given the limitations because this war matters maybe more than most wars this war hasn't been settled clearly there are parties who would like to settle it but no one person is in charge of whether it gets settled israel is a partner in this war probably the first war the united states has ever fought with a like a true partner with decision making authority it's very different from going into afghanistan with a nato coalition norway didn't have veto power over anything but israel does and so it's complex very complex and the iranians have their own of course completely different agenda so it may not be settled anytime soon we're praying that it is but more fundamentally this is a different kind of war so over the course of our lifetimes most wars the united states has fought all of them really on some level wars of choice the u.s hasn't been invaded really since 1812 so all these are wars that the u.s government decided to become involved in or start and pretty much all of them were initiated on the same pretext which is we are preserving the order of the world the international order the rules-based order whatever you want to call it we're preserving the way things are and this country we're going to war with violated the rules therefore we're going to war to restore the rules that is not what we're watching now there's some evidence that the president of the united states donald trump thought that's what this was about iran wants to get nukes they can't have nukes we can't have more nuclear proliferation you can't have rogue states with nuclear weapons weapons of mass destruction are bad god we've heard that before of course the effect of this will be to radically accelerate proliferation around the world because what's the lesson of what we're doing right now you better have nukes or else you're going to get regime changed no one's trying to regime change north korea because they have nukes so the incentive for every small but reasonably wealthy country as of right now is get nukes as quickly as you can because you're going to get regime changed if you don't potentially and if you're a bystander to a war and happen to get caught up in it like the gulf states are right now no one is going to protect you these security guarantees formal and informal are not real downtown dubai can still get destroyed and your economy destroyed for a generation because who's going to stop it you're on your own so countries that feel they're sincerely on their own have every incentive to have the most effective deterrence possible and that would at this point be nuclear weapons so you're going to see a lot more nuclear armed states in the next few years without question so if the point of this was to preserve the status quo on nukes it had the opposite effect but the point of this was not to preserve the status quo at all it was to overturn the status quo to usher in a new age that's the point of this war this is a pivot in history and a lot of the people supporting it know that now they're really in two groups one are people motivated by religious impulse that would include some israelis some religious jews not all but some and that would include some christians christian zionists and both groups believe that they're helping to accelerate the end of history armageddon the end of time the return of the messiah whatever you know however you want to describe it but both groups believe that history is linear it began in one place and arrives at another with the return of god to earth and then history ends and we are redeemed or damned depending so that's the that's the basic idea and both of these groups seem under the impression that they can force god's hand that they can bring this about through an act of will or violence which is to say both groups believe on some level that they are god which they are not they're not in charge of history you can't force god's hand he's in charge you are not but both groups have lost sight of that so that's their motive and then there are secular boosters of the war promoters of the war planners of the war and their vision while not strictly speaking religious is not really so different they would like to usher in rule by technology whether that's mass surveillance whether it's transhumanism the merging of man and machine but the rule of the earth by technology and there are a lot of people who want this and a lot of people who think it's inevitable and this is the moment where that age of history begins with this war so again this is not a war that is confined to the region this is not a war between the united states and israel and iran this is not a war designed to prevent a rogue state from getting nukes it was never that this is a war designed to usher in a new age of man a new period in history a new world and so wars like that are fundamentally theological in nature that's theology whether it's secular or religious it's still theology these are articles of faith this is an eschatology and wars like that aren't resolved quickly because we're talking not just about disarming a madman we're talking about changing the nature of life on this planet forever so big stakes in the minds of the people pushing this and that means this is going to go on uh for a while declared or not and as it does how do we respond well we pray number one the most effective thing you can do is to say prayers for peace number one most effective thing you can do but to keep an eye on the effect of this war on us here in the united states we're prosecuting this war we're the main combatant here we're spending the most money dropping the most bombs and how do we do that so the key really whether you think this is insane as a lot of people do probably the majority of the country believes that or you think it's necessary some people do believe that fox news viewers believe that democratic leaders believe that in the house and senate but no matter what side you're on the united states needs to behave with honor now why is that because that's the whole point of being the united states you can't have wars in a democratic republic or in a country where the people supposedly rule where their consent is necessary whether it is or not that's what we tell ourselves you can't have wars unless you believe that you are on the deepest level better than the people you're fighting we're not savages they are therefore we get to kill them and we've always told ourselves that in some cases it has been absolutely true whether we can kill them or not is another question it's a moral question but as a sort of matter of civic engagement the population has to believe believe they're better than the people they're fighting or else you can't have the war and you're really sort of flirting with revolution at that point and we don't want that so in order to believe you're better than your opponent you have to be you have to behave with honor and so for example if innocents are killed girls at a school to name a current example you have to believe that it was accidental and you have to say out loud that was wrong and in this specific case the bombing of a girls school next to an iranian naval base that was apparently the school of choice for officers at the naval base these were the children the daughters of the people were fighting you have to believe that was accidental despite the fact it was hit twice 40 minutes apart looks very much like a double tap which is to say a bombing and then an attack on the people coming to rescue the injured that's what it looks like but as an american you have to believe this was a tragic mistake but we have to verify that we have to know for certain that it was in order to keep our honor because if you wake up one morning and you're living in the kind of country that thinks it's okay to kill not simply military officers but their daughters that country is not worth fighting for now speaking for myself i am assuming that was a tragic mistake but it's important to get to the bottom of it how did this happen were these autonomous weapons have made the decision was there an ai program that targeted this school that thought it was something else or thought it was within bounds and targeted it bombed it and then bombed it again 40 minutes later if that's the case no more autonomous weapons for us should we really be making life or death decisions with a machine with no human interaction no human sign off on that of course not that's grotesque to hand the power of life and death over to a machine that's just transparently insane of course you would never do that if you were a civilized country and we can't do that did we do that we need to find out and if we did we can't do that again and we have to apologize for it you can't kill the children of your enemies in fact you can't kill kill innocence period because we're the west and we believe that people are responsible for the sins they commit not for the sins their relatives committed or their ancestors or their future descendants or people who look like them we don't believe that because we believe in the individual soul each person individually accountable to god and to the u.s military for the things he does right and wrong period collective punishment is the opposite of what we believe that's what israel believes and that's why on a basic level israel is not does not have a western outlook because the israeli government believes it is okay to kill people on the basis of their bloodline they are amalek as the prime minister often says again and again and again this is amalek kill not just the perpetrator but his wife his children their children his pets this is a theological concept that christians and the west reject as grotesque as grotesque and evil we cannot participate in that ever because the moment we do we are not better than the people we're fighting at all and we can't have that it's a stain on all of us so we need to find out what happened there and the second thing we do need to do is make certain that the diplomatic efforts the united states made to get to a political agreement before the war were legitimate that they weren't a ruse designed to distract and trap the iranians why because an honorable nation does not engage in that kind of deceit and trickery an honorable nation states its objectives out loud attempts in good faith a political non-violent solution and then if that fails resorts to force that's the american tradition that's the western tradition that's not the eastern tradition but it's our tradition and we have to uphold it and as of right now we have to believe that's what we did and that it just didn't work couldn't come to terms and so president trump was effectively forced by the israeli government into this decision to go to war but if it ever emerges that our diplomatic efforts with iran both in february of this year and in june of last year were fake and they were designed to lull the iranians into a false sense of security so we could launch a sneak attack on them how is that better than pearl harbor how is that better than any dishonorable sneak attack in history of course it's not it's low it's beneath the united states it's beneath us as american citizens and anyone who participated in that needs to be punished for it right away and as a practical matter it makes diplomacy of all kinds impossible how do we settle the conflict between the united states and russia using ukraine poor ukraine as a proxy we fight the war ukrainians die how do we settle that conflict by the way a lot of us we should had been settled before launching a war on iran because now the russians are of course giving targeting information to the iranians why wouldn't they we've done the same with ukrainians for the last four years that should have been settled but it's going to be hard to settle it now because the message to the rest of the world is american diplomacy is fake it's not real you send negotiators in they distract us and then you prepare a sneak attack on us now we don't know that's what happened there's no proof that's what happened but we need to find out what exactly did happen because you can't behave that way it's a disservice to american citizens if you behave that way and it makes our future much much tougher much much tougher spring is the most refreshing time of year nothing compliments it better than black rifle coffee lots of it it's an american company founded by veterans with conviction they built the whole thing around a simple idea do it right or just don't do it they're definitely 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to a man who is highly informed on this again we're feeling in the dark but we're going going to tell you what we think we know uh because you need to know colonel douglas mcgregor doug thanks so much for doing this so energy markets spiked um future spiked last night today they've come down quite a bit they appear to be pricing in a shorter war of the belief that the president of the united states will find what they're calling an off-ramp and that things will cool down quickly is that a good bet do you think what's likely to happen do you believe well i think that's a call that we can't make at this point i think it's going to be very difficult for the president to retreat from some of the more strident remarks that he's made not the least of which is his recent demand for unconditional surrender and we have to remember that from the standpoint of iran and everyone in the in the region looking at this he's demanding unconditional surrender to israel and israel's demands so i i don't think that's likely to happen and i don't know how he gets out of that particular box you know you have to add to that lots of what i would call toxic inflammatory rhetoric about chopping the heads off of babies which iranians have not done and have nothing to do with and i think some statements about deliberately killing children insisting that the children at the school that was bombed in iran in iran were deliberately killed by iran uh there's no evidence for that and and that's the sort of thing that if you're looking for an off-ramp that's not how you find one so i i just in the intro said that i i don't think there's ever been a war led by the united states in which we've had a partner with decision-making authority as israel obviously has have well ever done this no i think the british had uh considerable influence over us during the second world war not because we liked it we didn't uh we had britain as a staging base the the island offshore was invaluable to us or we couldn't have landed on the continent i i would say something else about your introduction by the way after i heard that if i were a drinking man i would have had a stiff shot of single malt scotch because it's a very sobering introduction i hope everybody listened to you we live in a world today that is so remote from the world that i grew up in it's it's almost impossible to recognize and one of the things that historically presidents have tried to do is they go back to abraham lincoln and he made a number of statements and one of them was paraphrased by reinhold niebuhr i'm sure you've heard of niebuhr yep today nobody studies him anymore but he was a very thoughtful man a theologian a philosopher and someone who studied international relations and he quoted lincoln by saying that the challenge in american foreign policy is to link the contingencies of power with the principles of justice he said you've got to do both yes can't simply justify armed action on the basis of well it's it's a great we're a great power we've decided to do it has to be done that was unacceptable to him now this was spoken in the 50s in the aftermath of world war ii we did a lot of things during the second world war that we subsequently viewed as having been very wrong curtis lemay famously told his staff if we don't win this war while the war was going on against japan after the war we will all be executed as war criminals because they were fire bombing german or excuse me japanese cities and killing tens of thousands of people so we do know the difference we know what's right and what's wrong and i think we have tried to be on the right side of that equation the problem is that we haven't always linked our actions in the way that lincoln said in other words we don't always link the contingencies of power with the principles of justice and i don't think that our attack on iran is justified it's not something that if you put it to a referendum in the united states people would overwhelmingly support i think people would reject it but we're doing it nonetheless and each day that it that it continues we look less and less justified less and less legitimate and less and less moral i don't think that's something americans want and i don't think a lot of americans are really paying attention at this point sadly because these are things that always happen on other people's soil remote from the united states and so the average american says well that's too bad i'm going to go down to the 7-eleven and buy a six-pack that's part of our problem we're a big country and there are a lot of people that have decided well i don't have any influence it doesn't make any difference who you elect you know you still get the same outcome what's the difference between tony blinken and marco rubio i mean there really isn't what happened with biden well biden was viewed as this very corrupt and not terribly smart man who was then manipulated by people now we have president trump and many people are beginning to wonder whether or not that's also happening to him so it seems as though we haven't seen dramatic change from one administration to the next that's another serious problem but i think your introduction hit something very very hard that we need to focus on you know we need to be concerned about injustice we need to be concerned about human life we can't afford to surrender to the impulse to murder anything that stands in our way and that's effectively what prime minister netanyahu and the israeli state is engaged in well well i mean anyone who does that will be punished for it um it not just in the next life but in this life i mean that's just it's just a fact right that when you murder people you are punished and so you can't engage in that and it and it also saps sort of like the reason for having your country and being proud of it we as you said we've and you've you've led troops in battle you've seen war and you know that for all the ugly things that happen the united states has made in general a good faith effort to remain decent you know at the level of like shooting people like try to shoot the right people and if we give that up then i you sort of wonder like what we're left with well i think we need to keep something in mind having worked with the air force and knowing people who were targeteers uh back in 1999 we had six layers of privateers in other words if you multiplied it i guess there were like 24 25 26 people all professional targeteers who studied maps who studied photographs studied intelligence and after your targeting had gone through all of these tiers that's when the target became valid in other words two people didn't walk in the room put a picture up on the wall and say okay let's blow that up no not at all i'm absolutely certain that whatever we did in iran was an accident absolutely just as our striking of the chinese embassy was an accident yes and that's not necessarily because the targeteers weren't doing their jobs frequently the photographs don't tell you everything frequently you don't have the best maps you should but they're not always perfect you would think at this point having planned for decades to bomb iran let me let's face it this has been on the shelf for a long time in the department of defense excuse me now the department of war so we've looked at lots of targets but this may have been something else earlier or mistaken for something but i know absolutely without question this was not delivered what i don't like is if it becomes clear and i think it will that we did it it was a tomahawk missile or some standoff munition shouldn't lie about it right this is a big problem everybody's impulse at the top is to lie and if you do that you destroy your credibility not just overseas but here in the united states yes so it's always best just to tell the truth but that seems to be the last thing anybody wants to tell during war inflation makes credit card statements particularly scary you 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i'm sympathetic to the impulse to lie during war because and and even now i mean i think certain things are true i don't know that they are but i probably wouldn't say it because you don't you know there are consequences so i i understand that i think it's wrong but i get it and i agree with you i it's impossible for me to imagine that an american would press go on a tomahawk headed for a girl's school i just i just can't believe that and i don't believe it but i do believe that we have autonomous weapons at work and that some of these targeting decisions are being made by machines not people there's a park called police park in tehran that apparently was blown up because and you can understand if it was an ai program making these decisions it says police and that's not i'm just guessing i don't i don't know why it was blown up but it was a park no reason to target it that suggests that autonomous weapons that machines are making these decisions and that strikes me as as totally wrong tempting i get it but is that acceptable to you no but i think you have something else at work and i also saw this in the past in another air campaign that is enormous pressure from the top give us more targets we need them now we have all this equipment we have all this aircraft all these ships they need more targets where are the targets and at the time we were engaged we couldn't find very many valid legitimate military targets in yugoslavia yugoslavia is not a very developed country it's quite backward and so that's when you begin to say well look we'll hit the you know this golf vw golf factory why well it could have military use how well you know they could take the automotive parts and it could be put into the argument this is the sort of mentality that you get and you you blow it up you blow it up because you can find it you have multiple bridges across the river and somebody comes and says there are only two bridges there with any military utility so you get those then you come back later on and say well we've got to get we need more targets well what about these bridges well they don't really have any could it be used could soldiers cross that bridge well i suppose so blow it up and i think that's what happens over time with air and missile campaigns you go into something where you don't have a ground force there is no long-term strategic outcome that forces you to include all the elements of power and to think through carefully your objectives you're being told our job is to go in there and bomb the iranian government into submission and that means it's 93 million person population is going to be made to suffer until the government relents and surrenders and says okay we'll do what the israelis want i don't think that's plausible i don't think it's militarily useful i don't think it's strategically attainable but it looks to me as though mr netanyahu's delusions and you were talking a little bit about this when you touched on the issue of greater israel have now become president trump's reality i think he is fully absorbed assimilated into the israeli mentality that this state these people must be destroyed or bent to israel's will because if they're not then israel will never be safe and if israel's not safe then potentially we're not safe well you and i know that's wrong you know israel's safety is one thing our safety is another their interests are one set of things one set of goals but not necessarily our interests do we have an interest in destroying iran you know during the war admiral leahy who was uh fdr's effectively chairman of the joint chiefs he was a senior military advisor he'd been cno of the navy very very very very brilliant man and well very experienced he brought in uh arnold who was chief of the chief of staff of the air force at the time de facto under marshall and general marshall was chief of staff of the army and he sat them down and he said do you understand that when this war ends we actually want to be friends with the germans and the japanese and they both sat there with blank faces and he obviously it was obviously they didn't understand he said this war is going to end you are destroying everything in these countries this is a catastrophe well leahy was thinking into the future is it really in the interest of the united states in our lives to flatten germany to turn it into rubble and of course you always have people that are eager to hate in the plural and internalize hatred and say oh yeah let's get those people they're terrible and so forth same thing japanese attacked us in december 1941 they deserve it really you know we destroyed both countries for all intents and purposes and then we spent 50 years paying for it it was called the cold war because we turned half the world over to communism now we are we're apparently on the road to destroying iran and make no mistake about it we have the capacity to destroy iran now if this doesn't come fast enough or we begin to back away from it what does mr netanyahu do and i think that's a question that we need to answer because he is not clearly under the authority of the president of the united states he is you know in other words the president is the commander-in-chief of nato if nato goes to war they look to us our c4 isr our command structures and everything and the president to make final decisions the british and the french would never launch a nuclear weapon without consulting with us is that the case with mr netanyahu who leads a country that refuses to admit that it has any nuclear weapons and i would argue no so while we may be partnered this relationship is not is not an easy one and we should not delude ourselves into believing that under the worst case scenario if they're not satisfied or they think that their country is being finished off and quite frankly right now even though we're not seeing a lot of footage from israel israel is being subjected to pulverization the the large missiles the koremshar 2 that landed on top of haifa and destroyed the refinery the oil infrastructure i'm sure the docks have taken a beating i mean that's a very important port for israel and if we were going to bring troops into the region we would probably have to come through that port right now it's in bad shape it may get worse so is this going to go on and on and on i think right now there's no end in sight because there's really no strategy other than we're going to bomb you into submission and a war with no strategy tends to be a war effectively without end and then if you pour oil onto the fire and say either you surrender unconditionally or we destroy you what does the enemy do what is the incentive for him to surrender to someone who is demanding effectively the submission of his country as people to a state like israel that hates them and they're well aware of that why would the u.s government ever yoke itself in a war to a country with different aims with different objectives and this is not an attack on israel but any country that had a different goal why would you ever be a co-equal partner with that country well we concluded in the aftermath of world war one uh that the bank of england and the british empire had enormous influence over us had misinformed us misled us yes with the unfortunately with the assistance of president wilson and of course the man who was his quote chief of staff and national security advisor was not even an american citizen he was a british subject his name was colonel house and that led to conclusions after the war that this should never happen again one of the reasons it was so much opposition to going to war in europe again was because of the experience during world war one not we took terrible casualties that's another story awful worse frankly in a shorter period of time than world war ii and i think what we have now is a similar situation we have large numbers of people who are dual citizens and we have large numbers of people who they call them zionist billionaires uh pick whatever name you want they have spent enormous quantities of money over many years to reach the condition that exists today a condition under which israel's demands and you have to link israel to the larger financial picture because these billionaires control more than just a fraction of finance they control the financial system in our country have a huge impact on it globally certainly in the west and they have interests in expanding that power and influence israel is a way to do that and the israelis of course they see themselves in a position of either we expand or eventually we die that's because we don't have enough people our birth rate isn't high enough so we have to annihilate the people that are close to us in our country and eventually on our borders and expand that means you march into lebanon it means you march into the sinai and into egypt it means you go south into jordan and saudi arabia all you have to do is look at the map i mean from their standpoint this is a rational calculus i just don't think it's attainable by them and that's why we're involved because the only way to attain these goals and objectives is with the enormous power and influence of the united states and we have committed ourselves heart and soul to this project it's as simple as that all you had to do was listen to the state of the union speech by president trump and the one time everybody stood up left and right democrats republicans was when he talked about depriving iran permanently of any nuclear weapon and everybody stood up and applauded and i will not allow that i will prevent that well first of all there's no evidence that they've got a nuclear weapon we haven't had any evidence for that for a long time so is that really what this is about no i don't think so i think it's about more than that it's it's also about the missile arsenal that they want to eradicate in other words iran has to live in a state of permanent vulnerability to israeli attack and destruction otherwise israel is not safe now many of these corrupt arab states have accepted that bargain and they are in the view of many of the people that live in the region in arab countries as members of the arab version of the epstein class and they're hated so when you go to the emirates for instance there are plenty of people living in these countries who privately are very happy to see these people removed from power these family dictatorships which are hopelessly corrupt they're sick of it so we're we're involved in much more than just iran this has global implications for power and influence and it's no accident that you have mr whitkoff and mr kushner as the principal diplomats and in russia the russians have sort of looked at this and say okay fine we understand you want your son-in-law and you want your friend to negotiate and they want to enrich themselves in the process fine we'll help them do that but please can't you find your way to an agreement with us can't we hammer out something concrete that serves our interests as well as yours and of course the answer to that thus far has been no and i think you do anything with the same people vis-a-vis iran we pray that the war with iran ends immediately but the truth is it doesn't seem to be ending immediately if you're the head of household you need to think through what this could mean for you and the people you're in charge of the ones who love you who rely on you and in a time like this you can't really know what's going to happen next energy markets are one indication they're rattled people are dying the world is well one miscalculation what's going to happen from something really really bad so it's really clear you can't outsource your responsibility for your family for your people to the government when systems fail they fail and they fail quickly no one's coming to stock your pantry or keep the lights on so at minimum you should be thinking this through don't wait for disaster to strike to ensure that you have the basics covered food water light energy and that's exactly why we started a company called last country supply it's our store it carries the same preparedness products that we have well in this barn for example the products that give any head of household peace of mind knowing that if something bad happened you could take care of the people you're responsible for no matter what so continue to pray for an end to war and violence but also at the same time make sure that your family is ready stock up on the products that we trust at last country supply dot com slash tucker why would the united states ever allow its own citizens to be killed in order to expand the israeli empire well it's not an empire let's face it it's a relatively small country the size of new jersey so i guess if you live in jersey that's an empire i've got some friends were in the army with me and they were italian and it was an empire uh but that's another story i think americans don't completely grasp what's happening and they have been force-fed for decades a narrative that is designed to depict the iranian state and its people as the sworn enemies of mankind and most of all of us of course people that have been there spent any time there especially over the last 20 years have come back and said look iran today bears very little resemblance to iran of 47 years ago iran has changed a great deal in fact i think you could make a good case that had we not bombed anybody and stayed out of this that within the next six months to eight months the islamic government would be gone because i think the country itself sees it not as this islamic state at all it sees itself as a persian state with a persian history and culture many many people in that country view islam itself as a unwanted import from the arab world now there are plenty of people who are very religious there's no question about it most of them live in the rural areas very few of them live in in the large urban areas and here's another interesting insight i received this lengthy note from someone in the region who explained that we had when we bombed and the israelis bombed tehran they killed large numbers of people in these what they called middle class upper class neighborhoods who are actually very much in agreement with us that the islamic government should go away yeah i think if left alone it'll go it'll go that way one way or the other but iran is a nation state they're not prepared to sacrifice their sovereignty put their citizenry at permanent risk essentially to live under the control of what they see as the epstein class and on a plantation run by the epstein class and that's the way they look at it and we don't see it that way because we're not thinking in those terms all we can do is go back to 1982 talk about these marines and that barracks that were killed but nobody knows the whole story behind that business and i stumbled on this because cap weinberger who the former secretary of defense his office called asked me to fly to washington he wanted to talk to me about this book i'd written called breaking the phalanx which he liked and so i i said sure i flew back there and i ended up spending instead of the expected hour i was there for almost two and a half it was a wonderful meeting and one of the things that came up was beirut because one of the arguments i was making is that if we followed this plan went to a very small but but potent presence in kuwait and just kept that there we might avoid any any future war in the middle east he said of course absolutely no question about it makes perfect sense and i said well what happened in beirut and he said you know that's an interesting story i was sitting in my office watching television and suddenly uh it was announced that president reagan had approved uh the commitment of u.s marines in and around beirut as part of some sort of peacekeeping operation to separate the pla or the plo from the israelis and so forth and he said no one called me he said ronald reagan didn't call me didn't say anything so i picked up the phone and i called the office and i said can i see the president and the secretary said of course mr weinberg come over i'm sure he'd be delighted to see you he and reagan got along very well so he showed up and he walked in the office and uh he said sit down cap what's going on he said well you just announced this what are you doing and he said well you know george schultz was here he spent a couple of hours and he convinced me that we had a moral obligation to participate in this peace keeping force multinational that's going to bring peace to to lebanon and beirut and keep the israelis and the plo part and he said sir that you're not going to get that in that part of the world all we're going to be are targets this is a waste of time it's worse than that it's dangerous can't you rescind the order he said well cap i made a public speech i committed myself and my administration to this how would i look if i suddenly within a few hours announced that no i've reconsidered it we're not going to part to participate in what this is being billed as a moral mission so he said all right he said well i'm sorry cap i should have called you but you know george was here and so forth well you know george schultz is a secretary of state was considered on the very liberal side and cap weinberg was furious said fast forward several months and i get a call in the middle of the night and it's the secretary to reagan he says the president wants to see you immediately so he gets up and he finds out about this bombing you know he finds it's coming through cnn and everything else this time when he when he gets to the white house he walks to the door the door opens and ronald dragon is standing right in front of him and he walks in and he grabs weinberger's hand he said you know cap you were right i was wrong now we need to get our men out of there immediately yes and the rest is history he did now there were lots of statements about will track down whoever did this everything else but he understood we were blown up because we were there most of the people that we lost in iraq and i would argue afghanistan have been killed because we were there and the real question is why were we there and i've never been satisfied with the explanations because if you wanted to remove somebody from power in a place like iraq that's a fairly straightforward operation you don't have to kill a lot of people and the army will help you you know we look what was demonstrated in venezuela i mean i i think that was a a bad decision but nevertheless what did we demonstrate that we could pay everybody off and we could shut everything down go in and bring out the president and his wife fine well those kinds of things can be done in certain countries under certain circumstances i don't think it was a good thing i wouldn't have done it but that's water under the bridge now you're dealing with a civilizational state persia represents much much more than people in the united states realize they owe some of their culture and language to sanskrit and indian civilization which is another civilizational state russia is a civilizational state china is a civilizational state these are foundation stones in the edifice of humanity and world civilization now you want to destroy persia which has been around for 2 700 years well good luck i don't see it happening and i don't think if it even gets close that the russians and the chinese are going to sit there and do nothing how do we get out i think you have to find an intermediary first of all someone who is not part of the problem my my personal preference if i were advising the president is to call president or excuse me prime minister modi in india now you can say well he was just in israel well that's fine he has good relations with israel that's not a bad thing he also has good relations with iran uh he's he's never been an enemy of the iranian people neither are the shiite uh iranians his enemy and he knows that and he has reasonable relations with the chinese they have their differences up in the mountains in the himalayas the hindu kush and that is a legacy of british colonialism but my point is that he's historically leading a neutral state and a neutral state that is growing in in stature in power in influence and importance we should recognize that and welcome it not treat it as a problem and i think if president trump talked to him and said look we we need to end this and somebody will say well why do you need to end it because if we don't we're going to hit 300 per barrel of oil we're going to watch 60 to 80 percent of the stock value crash people are going to lose trillions in wealth it will be a disaster and it's not something we'll recover from we've we've already seen that the israelis hit a refinery on the outskirts of tehran and what did iran do they destroyed the refinery and it's supporting infrastructure in haifa how does this help us how does this help anybody the damage that's being done is going to be semi-permanent and by that i mean it's going to take years to recover from this the qatari government has said we're shutting down we can't store anymore we can't drill anymore we can't refine anymore i mean this this is a catastrophe we look at this and say well only three percent of our oil comes from the gulf well i got news for you 50 of it goes to india 50 goes to china you know 70 plus percent goes to japan mid 60 percent or so 64 65 goes to south korea now did we call the president or the prime minister of japan did we call the president of korea and say by the way we're considering a war against iran action against iranians and we want to know what you think the impact will be on your country because you are friends of ours you are our allies did we do that i don't think so i think we are acting like the biggest bully in the schoolyard the hell with everybody else this is what i want and i'm going to pound your face into the dust i mean we've all seen those people they exist i grew up with some of them had the crap kicked out of me once or twice at recess i know exactly what that is well you can't do that in international relations for very long before people gang up against you and we already have this thing called bricks and we seem to be determined to destroy that because we see bricks and right now it has what 10 members something like that and there are 50 60 standing in line ready to join we don't like it because they're looking at potentially gold-backed currency what a novel idea and if it's not gold it'll be gold plus maybe platinum silver who knows other precious metals and we're saying well this is a threat to us it's a threat to our petrodollar tucker we're killing the petrodollar right now in the gulf this is going to end this very lucrative cycle where people we buy oil they take the dollars that they that they get from us and they reinvest it in our country in a place called the bond market not anymore and that's one of the engines that drives our economy we've thrown all caution to the wind think of any number of worst case scenarios and they are on the horizon president trump is still president of the united states not president of israel and he has to think about the consequences here at home for us for the average man not for the billionaire class the epstein class for the rest of us i don't see that we're thinking this through and i don't just blame him because he's had wholehearted support from everybody on the hill don't believe any of those democrats from chuck schumer to slot any number of them oh i was always against it really well you sure as hell aren't on record and things are getting very bad eventually i think members of his own party will desert him if he doesn't find an off ramp so back to your question step number one find a mediator somebody that they will listen to because no one is going to listen to us if you're an iranian would you pay any attention to what we say how many times have they been attacked in the midst of negotiations now twice why would the russians pay any attention to us it this is this is a catastrophe and if we do nothing eventually we will wake up and discover there are some aircraft in the airspace over iran they're probably russian and they probably will put up something similar to awax and if that shows up then the message is stop and the question is what do you do you know we used to have this thing in the ranger course it's three o'clock in the morning it's uh below zero outside you're in the mountains and snow up to your rear end and somebody walks in and says you're now the patrol commander you're now the platoon leader uh where are you on the map what are you gonna do now ranger i mean that's kind of where donald trump is headed what's he gonna do that i mean i clearly the wise course at this point since it doesn't appear to be a way to open the straits using the u.s military is to try and decelerate to find that mediator but the hitch or one of them is is israel i mean if iran remains intact with a functioning government that is a descendant direct descendant of the previous government that we tried to overthrow we wound up killing the wife and the child of the current ayatollah apparently that government will acquire nuclear weapons why wouldn't they and will dedicate itself even more resolutely to the destruction of israel so if you're i think why wouldn't they and they've said they will so if you're israel you you can't you cannot allow that you can't have a ceasefire and leave this government intact and that leaves you no recourse but weapons of mass destruction does it well it could there is also the other possibility and that is that as the pakistani government has said they will provide a nuclear weapon to the irians now the pakistanis have always had a very close relationship with the turks and that's one of the reasons that erdogan who's the ultimate fence-sitter never quite aligns with anybody and it's worked well for him by the way yes i don't think he can do that much longer has always said we're not afraid of you because the pakistanis have made it clear they will have a nuclear weapon if they need it in fact the exact conversation was held back under the obama administration and i think it was the deputy secretary of state who was there and he said what do you do if iran gets a nuclear weapon and he asked the chief of staff of the turkish armed forces and he said well that's not a problem he said why not because pakistan has said they'll provide us with a nuclear weapon if that happens yes this is your life saudi arabia as well yeah and this is your logic playing out exactly what you described so you gotta you really want to stop this train now that's headed down the side of a mountain and doesn't seem to have any breaks so you've got to go to someone who can stand in there now you've got to tell this man what are you prepared to do you know are you prepared to cease fire immediately which is not difficult to do because we're talking about air and naval forces if you had seven eight hundred thousand men under arms on the ground in a massive army that stopping everything is very difficult but air and naval forces could immediately disengage pull back yeah that can be done uh are you willing to do that and if you are willing to do that uh what should i ask the iranians to do you know the first step is to get this fighting to stop because of exactly what we're discussing it's going to run out of control and i have worried from the beginning because i i have people in israel that i cared about very much some friends and they're all angry with me because i'm not unconditionally supporting what they're doing and i told them from the beginning i don't think this will work and i do not think this is in the interest of the israeli state and i have said if this goes to the to the inevitable conclusion israel may not survive this and i think the hatred the hostility that is growing in the region not just against us but especially especially against israel is just earth shattering beyond anything anybody has ever seen it needs to stop now i hear all these people worrying about anti-semitism well if you're worried about that then stop doing what's what's going on that's the quickest and easiest way to try and bring this under control no they're they're thinking is if we kill everybody who doesn't like us we'll be fine yeah that that attitude doesn't have a good track record that's self that's self-defeating um i would say and i i agree you know there's one other thing i i'd like to mention real quick and this was a conversation believe it or not that churchill allegedly had with stalin and through an interpreter i have to understand churchill knew stalin was a criminal and a murderer no doubt about it and he certainly did not see him as morally superior to hitler in fact he probably thought he was worse and stalin knew that and he used to sort of jab at him because fdr was stalin's poodle anything stalin did was good any stalin was morally superior to the british empire anyhow stalin said to churchill you know what the difference between me and hitler is and churchill's no he said i know when to stop yeah he was right he was right hitler never figured that out and he vanished stalin survived yep until he went too far domestically and his own guys killed him but yeah no i mean he lived another eight years may i may ask what do you think the likelihood of the u.s committing ground troops is i i think it's zero i don't even know why they they maintain the pretense first of all the army today is a shadow of what it was 30 years ago and i hear all this well i've rebuilt the military during my first term come on that's just silly uh armies take about 10 years to build you know that's what it took us after the vietnam war and it took us 10 years to build an army uh it probably takes 20 plus years to build a navy because the building ships and submarines is time consuming resource consuming very expensive takes a long time to train people one of the reasons that yamamoto attacked pearl harbor he said was if we're going to fight the americans we have to kill all the officers in the united states navy so we need to kill them in the harbor in pearl harbor if we can kill them it'll take the united states years to recover from the loss of all those trained officers he was right didn't work thank god but i don't think people understand civilians have no idea what it takes to build effective military power and the second thing is a draft privately i would like to have a selective draft because i think the average young man not woman but the average american male who he's got an iq of a hundred or above and is physically fit should spend a couple of years in the military i think it's a healthy thing but that's not widely accepted in our country we don't like it the british never liked it so the idea of of this being something good is impossible to convince people to support and if you go back you lived through the vietnam period at least some of it and i as soon as nixon ended the draft suddenly all the demonstrations against the war went away now there were some very sincere people who were against the war for all the right reasons my point is the vast majority just didn't want to go yeah what's it going to be like now why are we going to iran where is this place how long is it going to take us to get there and then we have to look at what's happened in eastern ukraine warfare has changed it's changed dramatically we have persistent surveillance above we can see everything everywhere all the time we can target everything everywhere all the time so where are you going to concentrate two or three hundred thousand men how many ports are you going to get into how soon are you going to be taken under effective ballistic missile attack and we already know that however much money you spend on air and missile defense it's not going to be good enough to deal with modern hypersonic missiles can't be done so it's it's an accident and a disaster waiting to happen we're not prepared for that and the nation psychologically is not prepared for it because no one has sold anything to them we haven't had any fireside chats from donald trump saying i just want to spend a few minutes and explain to you why i'm doing what i'm doing have you ever heard that no so why would anybody go do you think it's possible since you're describing a cul-de-sac you know box canyon here um once again do you think it's possible that nuclear weapons are used if a nuclear weapon is used it will be by netanyahu and his government not us yes good i i you know i i've met and talked with president trump i like president trump personally and you can say what you will about the man but i see no evidence that he would be talked into that by mr netanyahu i just don't i hope i'm not wrong but i just don't see that happening i also see little evidence that people at the top of the military establishment collectively would sign on for that you might get a few unfortunately most of them are airmen or in the navy but i i don't think they would be very supportive i think they'd say is this really the right place time and reason yes because increasingly we view nuclear weapons as something that protects your territorial integrity everybody knows that if you try to invade the united states from canada or mexico yeah we'll nuke you no no question about it right but why would we do that with iran but israel is different as we've discussed and the more desperate they become if iran does not submit and i see no evidence that they will submit the more likely that option could be embraced and employed and that's why we started this because you asked specifically about who has the authority i hope president trump does but i don't think so i think mr netanyahu is going to do whatever mr netanyahu wants to do i mean because we're implicated in that and because the million-odd americans who live in the region and the energy interest there and just like the fate of the world are all part of this calculation why wouldn't we bring him to heal and prevent that how do you do that how do you do that i mean you're going to have all the people that put you into the white house that spent billions on your campaigns who gave you the power and the congress that is essentially being purchased by the lobby not by the lobby directly but by the zionist billionaires that pour money into the process to get people elected you know how that works what are they going to do are any of them going to sober up and and go to trump and say look this has gone too far i don't see any evidence for that before this started we are now learning and i think these are accurate reports that members of the uniformed military understood advisors to the president understood that this was not the things we were promising we would achieve were not actually achievable and that this was a very unwise course they knew that that but apparently none of them threatened to resign if the president went forward what do you think of that well we have to understand something about the people in uniform and i don't think we've ever had anybody that resigned in protest. The only one that I can think of who made his views on Vietnam heard was General Decker. He only served two years as chief of staff of the army because McNamara went to Kennedy and said, he doesn't support our policy in Southeast Asia. He won't put any troops in. So Kennedy said, get rid of him. So he simply retired at the end of the first two years of his service as chief of staff. But we say in theory that, and this is something that goes back to Frederick the Great of Prussia, any officer whose conscience will not permit him to execute an order always has the right to refuse that order and resign his commission without prejudice. The problem is we don't let people go like that. If General Cain were to go in and say, this is it, can't do this. I'm tendering my resignation. He loses his retirement benefits and his pension. So if you're in the military and you do that, you lose your, whether you're a sergeant or whomever you are, the law says, if you resign in protest over something, you don't get to keep your pension and you don't get to keep your benefits. So it's, it's really not true.

Now, when you move to the civilian side, the cabinet members, what's to stop them? Nothing. And that's where the resignations should take place. But that's the last place I would expect to see any, even though you and I know a couple of them and consider them friends. I don't see any evidence for that. And the theory is, interestingly enough, if I do this, I poison the waters against me for the rest of my life. If you're in the military, I'll never get a job after, you know, I leave. No one will hire me in the defense establishment. No one will hire me anymore. And the civilian says, well, I won't get any cushy jobs, no bank boards, no, no industrial, you know, concerns. Nobody will have me around. It's a, it's a terrible thing because the ones who really have the flexibility to simply stand up and say, thank you very much. Here's my resignation. I'm handing it to you right now. As of this moment, I resign as X and you could walk out of the oval office and that's just fine. Instead, what will happen if we're going to project into the future is if we don't change course, we're going to escalate. We're going to double down. In other words, well, if the last, uh, 2000 bombs and 800 missiles didn't do it, we'll drop 500,000 bombs and 200 more missiles. You understand that's where we're headed. Double down, escalate, escalate, escalate. And then at some point it's going to dawn on everybody. This has gone too far. This is dangerous either because the Russians make it clear they won't tolerate or the Chinese or both, or because they suddenly look in the United States and people have said, wait a minute, you know, I can't put gas into my car. I don't have a job anymore. I mean, you just go down the list.

Economic catastrophe will visit us. Then all the heroic figures in the cabinet will say, oh, I resigned. You know, I never saw a more empty place than the West wing of the white house and the executive office building right after the election in 2020. That's what you'd see. Everybody just says, oh, I'm out of here. Do you think, I mean, you're describing a system that doesn't serve the country it governs and that moreover has been revealed as useless, in fact, counterproductive. Like everyone knows this isn't working now. You can't lie about it anymore. So does that mean we get a new system? Are there, after this war, however it's resolved, however it ends, do you think that there will be structural changes to the country? I think we have to anticipate something like that happening because government, federal government is a big part of our lives. I listen to people all the time say, well, I want a smaller government.

Well, check your mailbox. What are you getting in the mail? What's coming into your bank account? How much of it is government? How much of it is federal? People don't realize that what is the percentage of gross domestic product now for the government? Somewhere in the 30 plus percent. You know, back in 1900, it was what, 2%? You go back before the Civil War, less than 1%. I mean, the government was there, but it wasn't a big feature of the economy and involved in our lives. You know, General Sherman, and everybody's heard of Sherman and his Civil War War Service. He became commander of the United States Army. In those days, we didn't have a staff system, so he just was designated commander in chief U.S. Army. And he was so frustrated with the corruption in Washington that without telling Grant, who was then president, he packed everybody in the war department up and he went to St. Louis. He said, I'm getting out of Washington.

And when Grant found out, he said, oh, my God. And he said, why did you do this? He said, this is a cesspool. It is full of corruption. I hate those people. And finally, Grant persuaded his old friend, you got to come back to Washington. And eventually he did. So this is not an entirely new problem. But in those days, the government was not what it is today. It's very intrusive. It's a source of wealth. Everybody that is sitting in the various cabinet departments over there, a lot of them have their eyes on money. What comes down the pike? What sort of new generous program, grant, or opportunity is presented? And they're involved. They're part of this process. A friend of mine said the other day, he said, these people are parasitic. They're like crustaceans, you know, or remora on the body of a shark. I said, well, that's pretty rough. But, you know, as I said, this is a huge problem. And the American people, when things go very badly for us in the financial system, in the economy, they're going to want answers and it's not going to be pretty. And this, unfortunately, what we're doing right now is put us on an accelerated path into disaster, I think. Yeah. And I mean, it was so obviously going to happen. It was, it was just couldn't be clearer that there was no compelling national security related reason to do this, that the aims, even to the extent they were articulated, were going to be hard to achieve, if not impossible. And that we were dragged into this by a foreign government, which is what happened. That was all so obvious that you have to kind of think maybe destroying or weakening the United States was, was the point. I, I don't think so. But now you're up against a different problem. There are a lot of people in Washington that do not understand what Stalin talked about limits. They don't understand the limits of power. They don't understand the financial limits of expense. They don't appreciate debt. Remember, oh, this is the, the new economy. Debt no longer matters. I mean, I don't know how many times I've had people tell me that for the last 10 years. You know, after World War II, when Eisenhower was president, what does he do? He shrinks the defense budget. He cuts back on the size of the army. He invests in nuclear weapons. He sees this as a relatively inexpensive way to maintain deterrence, tries to keep the Navy and the Air Force within bounds, which is why everybody in the services at the time as president hated him. Now, why? Well, he understood that investment in military power, there's no salvage value to what you produce.

Right. In other words, it's the sunken cost is enormous. He also understood something else. He didn't want to be involved in wars. Why not? Why would the man that was at the top of the military establishment in Europe not want to be involved in a war? Well, in January of 1945, he had sent a letter to Marshall and said, Oh my God, this bulge is terrible. The Germans have done something we didn't think they could do. I need more men. And Marshall wrote back, you're not getting anymore. You've got all the forces that you're going to get, you better get out there and win the war. So Eisenhower learned there were limits to what we could produce. That's right. Limits to how much we could invest. And we were not Stalin, we could not pave the road to Berlin with millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dead troops, dead soldiers, and destroyed lives and civilians. So he kept us out. Now, then you get Jack Kennedy. And later on, you get LBJ and Nixon. And these three people were at a very low level during the Second World War. And they were in the Pacific. And they saw these vast fleets on the ocean and aircraft in the sky. And they said, we're the greatest country in the world. My God, no one can do what we can do. Our power is limitless. And Eisenhower always said, that's a mirage. Our power is limited, always. Yes. And we have to operate within limits. I don't see anyone with a sense of that in Washington. No one, not in the White House, not anywhere. Yeah.

It's called hubris. And it's the death of men and empires. Colonel Douglas McGregor, thank you for that wise summation of everything that's happening. Thank you, Trevor. God bless. God bless. Thank you.