This Is the Only Option…

0:00 Just to your point about the president believing that Iran was

0:03 a house of cards that just needed one swift push to collapse.

0:08 Where did he get that idea?

0:10 He could only have gotten that idea from Benjamin Netanyahu.

0:14 That's it.

0:15 Because the CIA analysis has been consistent over the course of decades.

0:21 We can't just fire a couple of rockets and take

0:24 down a government in a country of 93 million people.

0:28 That's just not the way real life works.

0:30 They're going to rally around their leadership because we're outsiders.

0:36 Um, and just you make the point about history,

0:39 but I mean I think you could Saudi is probably in uh competition,

0:44 but I mean of all the countries in that part of the world,

0:47 Iran is the most durable.

0:51 I mean, it's a real country.

0:52 It's a real country with a proud history stretching back millennia.

1:00 Yes.

0:59 I have a lot of Iranian-American friends, some quite close,

1:05 and they never stop talking about the history to the point where I have to say,

1:09 "Please, can we please talk about something other than, you know, Cyrus?

1:14 Please, and Xerxes, and I I I just can't anymore.

1:17 I need a break." But that's how proud they are of their

1:20 You don't see that with say Kuwaitis.

1:22 No.

1:22 No.

1:23 Who you know, God bless them.

1:24 I love Kuwait.

1:25 Oh, me too.

1:25 I'm not a good They don't have a history.

1:27 No.

1:27 Right.

1:28 So, Iran of all the countries maybe in the world,

1:32 that would be high on the list of ones is pretty hard to to beat.

1:36 I couldn't agree more.

1:38 Okay.

1:38 So, even I know that and the country is the same size as Western Europe.

1:43 Yeah.

1:43 It's not like you can just launch a couple

1:44 pin prick strikes and the whole thing falls apart.

1:47 It's the size of Western Europe.

1:49 93 million people with a forbidding topography on top of it all.

1:54 For sure.

1:55 So, yeah.

1:56 So, not easy.

1:57 We go in on February 28th and Iran does not strictly

2:02 speaking control the straight at um the outlet of the Persian Gulf.

2:09 There's unimpeded shipping.

2:11 This the six Gulf states are thriving.

2:14 Mhm.

2:15 Iraq also in the Persian Gulf is kind of is pretty peaceful for Iraq,

2:19 you know, or whatever.

2:20 It's fine.

2:20 We're not reading about it every day.

2:22 Things are fine.

2:25 Mhm.

2:24 Now, they're not fine at all.

2:26 How are they restored to fine only through diplom diplomacy?

2:33 That's it.

2:34 Whether we like it or not, especially whether the Israelis like it or not,

2:37 we are going to have to sit across the table

2:40 from these people and come up with an agreement.

2:43 It's going to be an agreement that we are not going to be 100% happy with.

2:47 But that's what diplomacy is all about.

2:49 Not by not happy with you mean Iran will be more

2:53 powerful at the end of this than they were at the

2:55 I think that's an inevitability.

2:56 We have forced the Iranians into the embrace of the Chinese

3:00 and the Russians and the Indians and we're going to get

3:03 to the point where we're just not going to be able

3:07 to stand up against that kind of an alliance and make meaningful gains.

3:14 Just think about think about this.

3:16 Iran is a bricks country, right?

3:18 Brazil, uh, Russia, India, China, plus, you know,

3:22 South Africa and Argentina and Iran and a couple of others, South Korea.

3:26 eventually using the the European Union as their model,

3:30 they're going to come up with a unified currency.

3:33 It's probably 20 or 30 years down the road,

3:35 but it's going to happen one of these days.

3:37 That will be the end of American hegemony

3:41 in the in the region because as things stand now,

3:45 all oil transactions in the world, almost all are done in dollars, right?

3:50 The famous petro dollar.

3:52 Well, a year ago, Kuwait sold a shipment

3:54 of oil to China for Yuan and the Indians,

3:58 what a week ago paid for a shipment of uh of oil in Yuan.

4:02 So, we're already seeing the cracks in the dam and then and then

4:06 just blasting the place is only going to make this inevitability come sooner.

4:11 I think it weakens us.

4:13 I couldn't agree more.

4:14 I think it's it's definitely the end of something uh profound.

4:19 So, but what are our military options at this point?

4:25 I'm not sure that there are any viable military options.

4:29 I mean, God forbid we should target the civilian infrastructure.

4:34 That's a war crime.

4:35 It's actually very clear in international law.

4:37 You can't bomb the civilian infrastructure.

4:39 You can't bomb the electrical grid or the water treatment plants.

4:43 You can't.

4:44 We do, but it's a war crime.

4:46 You can't do it.

4:47 And so, what are we going to do?

4:48 just keep blasting the IRGC.

4:51 Okay.

4:52 Well, where's that gotten us?

4:54 They're survivors.

4:55 It hasn't led to the collapse of the government.

4:58 So, when are we going to finally come to the conclusion

5:00 that what we're doing is just simply not working.

5:04 Maybe we can rest some concessions

5:07 from the Iranians across the negotiating table.

5:10 Maybe we can figure out how to use their closeness

5:14 with the Chinese and the Russians to our benefit.

5:16 I'm not really sure how, but maybe we can get there,

5:19 but we're going to have to let the diplomats do what diplomats are paid to do.

5:23 I don't think we have any left.

5:26 No, I mean, all of these negotiations have been run by non-diplomats.

5:30 Realistically, I'm glad that you brought that up.

5:32 I I had made a mental note to raise that and I forgot.

5:36 We have almost no US ambassadors in the six GCC countries,

5:40 Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Katar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

5:44 Most of them were relieved of their duties

5:46 a year ago and have never been replaced.

5:49 And so there is no Philip Habib to go from country

5:52 to country right now as there was in the 1980s.

5:55 Why?

5:55 Why do we have no ambassadors in our most important allies?

5:58 I think the president concluded that these ambassadors were not fully bought

6:03 into his uh foreign policy and he withdrew them short of tour.

6:08 They were all um professional diplomats.

6:11 not career diplomats, not political appointees,

6:14 and the department just never named new ambassadors.

6:20 It almost seems like this is an intentional effort to destroy the United States

6:24 by our own government.

6:25 Sounds that way, doesn't it?

6:26 Yes.

6:27 The president said, well, two things.

6:30 One, that we destroyed Iran's nuclear program in June.

6:33 And but you're saying that

6:35 it

6:35 that there was no nuclear program.

6:36 There was no nuclear program.

6:38 They had partially uh enriched uranium certainly

6:41 which under the NPT they're allowed to do.

6:44 It's it's subject to United Nations inspection.

6:47 Um yeah they were not but there was no nuclear program in in June.

6:51 No nuclear weapons program.

6:53 So nuclear weapons program.

6:55 Right.

6:55 So we destroyed the nuclear weapons program which doesn't exist.

6:58 But then in February we were told again that the nuclear

7:02 weapons program is absolutely real that the threat is imminent.

7:05 Yes.

7:05 Yes.

7:05 People go on television on Fox News and say Iran

7:08 can lob an ICBM into Miami and obliterate the United States.

7:11 You know, I'm I'm glad that you brought

7:13 that up too because that is also not true.

7:15 And a lot of people a lot of people are saying it.

7:17 The Iranians did something recently that was that was interesting

7:22 in that they took they took two of their medium-range missiles.

7:27 They stripped them down to the point where it was

7:30 just the missile and the engine and that was it.

7:32 There was nothing inside of them just to see how much distance they could get.

7:36 And they made it almost to Diego Garcia, which is far.

7:41 So if you instead point them toward Europe.

7:46 Yes.

7:47 Without anything inside these these missiles, they could reach Western Europe.

7:52 That's not a delivery system.

7:54 That's just smoke and mirrors.

7:57 They can only go that far if they're completely empty.

8:00 If you weigh them down with explosives or, god forbid,

8:03 with, you know, nuclear material,

8:06 even if it's just to make a dirty bomb, they can't get that far.

8:09 They could get to Cyprus.

8:12 They could get certainly to Israel and easily to the the Arab Gulf countries,

8:18 but there was no threat to the United States.

8:20 So the IC, the American intel community, the those 18 agencies you referred to,

8:27 did anybody in those agencies say to the president,

8:30 "This is a major threat, the nuclear program in Iran,

8:34 the people that I still talk to at the agency say specifically, no." No.

8:39 So that information, that lie came from Israel.

8:44 Yes.

8:43 Right.

8:43 Why would a president believe a foreign intel agency before his own?

8:49 I don't know.

8:50 That's really the $64,000 question.

8:52 You you recall in the in the first term

8:55 when President uh Trump met with uh Vladimir Putin,

9:00 he did not take his intelligence people into the meeting with him.

9:04 Putin took his intelligence people into meeting

9:06 with him because the president said

9:07 he trusted the other side's intelligence people more than he trusted his own.

9:12 And I I get it.

9:13 I get that he believes that he was under direct threat from, you know,

9:18 the deep state and the John Brennan's of the world.

9:21 I understand that.

9:22 But um I'm surprised that that feeling,

9:27 that belief has held over all this way into the second term where

9:31 you would believe the Israeli information before

9:36 you would believe your own people's information,

9:38 especially when you know that the Israelis have a vested

9:41 interest in you doing their dirty work for them.

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