All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 8, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:58
The War That Wasn’t | Ep. 927
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Iran launches ballistic missiles at Iraqi bases with U.S.
soldiers, President Trump makes a statement, and the media lose their ever-loving minds.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
It's how my listeners secure their internet.
Join them at expressvpn.com.
With all of the craziness going on in the world, ranging from the situation with Iran to impeachment, you may have noticed that prices of gold have been spiking.
Now might be a good time to diversify your assets at least a little bit.
And you know who I trust when it comes to diversification of assets.
Of course, I'm talking about my friends over at Birchgold.
If you haven't yet taken the first step of requesting a free information kit on gold, Go ahead and do it.
If you haven't converted a portion of your eligible IRA or 401k to an IRA in precious metals, ask all your questions to my friends over at Birchgold.
Birchgold will go to work and make things super simple for you.
No obligation.
You have nothing to lose to take that first step again.
When there is a lot of chaos in the world, people tend to rush to precious metals because they've never been worth zero and they are a good hedge against inflation and uncertainty in the market.
Text BEN to 474747 during the month of January.
When you open an IRA in Precious Metals, you'll get a signed copy of my book, The Right Side of History, for free.
Again, you have to text Ben to 474747 to get a signed copy of my book, The Right Side of History, along with all those other conditions.
Text Ben to 474747.
Again, this would be a good time to think about diversifying because the world is growing chaotic.
Birch Gold can help you make sense of it.
Text Ben to 474747.
Well, the president of the United States just exited the stage after making a statement over the situation in Iraq and Iran.
I'm going to give you the background and then we'll inform you as to what President Trump just had to say and what it actually meant.
His speech was actually quite good.
The president's speech was given from a teleprompter.
He did not take any questions.
It lasted about 10 minutes and he said everything that needed to be said.
We'll go through his actual statement in a second.
First, the event of last night, which threw everybody into a panic, at least momentarily.
So after the killing of Qasem Soleimani, which followed hard on the attempt to burn down the United States embassy in Baghdad, an act that was coordinated and ordered by Soleimani.
And Soleimani had then come to Iraq to coordinate further attacks.
The fact that the the fact that the Iranians were going to respond after Soleimani was killed, that was inevitable.
Iran was going to do it.
Everybody knew this was coming.
And so the President of the United States orders Soleimani taken out.
He is taken out.
So is the head of the popular local militia front, which was responsible for the Baghdad embassy attack.
Trump orders the death of Soleimani, and we get these theatrics, these hysterics from the Iranian government, the Ayatollah Khamenei standing in front of the box containing the remains of Soleimani and weeping.
We get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the streets in Tehran.
And we get the media losing their minds over all of this.
Obviously, this is going to be the prelude for war.
And all of the last 48 hours has been the media basically suggesting that World War III was imminent.
Well, last night the missiles started flying and the media declared, in the moment, that World War III was upon us.
That World War III was upon us.
So what exactly happened?
According to the UK Daily Mail, Iran's quote-unquote crushing revenge strike against the U.S.
largely failed to materialize Wednesday as the country launched 22 missiles against two American air bases in Iraq, but failed to kill a single soldier.
Well, it appears some missiles failed to explode on impact or missed their targets altogether.
U.S.
and European intelligence sources said the regime deliberately pulled its punches for fear of provoking a disproportionate response threatened by President Trump.
In other words, these missiles were flying and the immediate response of the media were, well, here it comes.
Now the Iranians are mad.
Now the Iranians are going to go full out.
Well, the Iranians have been engaging in low-level rocket attacks for a very long time.
They've been doing it for literally a year.
And they've been engaging in attacks on American soldiers going back decades.
But this was something that was at least a little bit new.
It was a ballistic missile attack from Iranian soil into Iraq proper.
Now, that is an act of war on Iraq.
I mean, the Iranians going into Iraq without permission and attacking Iraqi bases.
Remember, these are not U.S.
bases.
These are Iraqi bases where there are coalition soldiers.
That is a distinction that makes a difference.
This was Iran attacking Iraq.
That was an act of war against Iraq and against U.S.
soldiers.
So in that sense, this was an escalation.
But the fact that nobody was killed, that nobody was harmed, that no casualties happened, that basically this appeared to be Iran signaling to its people that it was willing to respond but not willing to go particularly far in order to do so.
Basically, Iran had been convinced by Trump killing Soleimani that if they went hard back at Trump, that Trump would do something really escalatory.
If they had hit a U.S.
airbase without any sort of warning, for example, and they killed some American soldiers, the likelihood that Trump would have then sunk their navy was incredibly high.
So if you look at Iran's strategic vulnerability in the region, their ballistic missiles are not supremely vulnerable because a lot of them are on mobile launchers.
They have lots and lots of ballistic missiles that have been developed over the years, and also with the help of Obama-era cash.
Because remember, the Obama administration shipped $1.8 billion in cash to the Iranians, allowed their $150 billion of withheld assets to flow back into Iran, tried to open the world economy to Iran.
And Iran was promptly using all of that money in order to build up its conventional assets, its military, its terrorist groups all around the Middle East, stationed around the Middle East.
They're building up their ballistic missiles.
So Iran really has sort of three assets that were at its disposal.
One is its ballistic, well, four, their ballistic missile system.
Their ballistic missile system, they are not supremely sophisticated ballistic missiles, but they are ballistic missiles, and they are widespread, and they are on mobile launchers, many of them.
Those would be a little bit hard to take out.
The second asset is the enormous Iranian Revolutionary Guard, which is a very, very large standing army, but is a conventional army and would have to cross over conventional borders, which would precipitate actual international action against Iran.
Then, there was the Iranian Navy, which is the weak spot for Iran because their navy is pretty rinky-dink.
They have a few submarines that might be somewhat hard to locate, but their surface ships are really not a tremendous threat, especially if they don't get to take the first punch.
And then they have their terrorist groups around the region, All of whom are not really prepared for war.
Last night, Iran threatened that if there was some sort of retaliation from the United States, that they would activate their terrorist groups like Hezbollah against Israel.
Hezbollah does not want to go to war with Israel right now because Israel's military has been prepping for this for years, really since the 2007 Southern Lebanon War.
And so Israel would go in and wipe them off the map pretty quickly.
So Iran is in a strategically vulnerable position.
Their economy is incredibly weak.
And so they did sort of the minimum of what they had to do to signal to their people that they're mad.
But let's put it this way.
Soleimani was a top leader in Iran.
He was also their terror leader.
He was the number two.
He was widely perceived to be possibly the successor to the number one, Ayatollah Khamenei.
Soleimani gets taken out.
Imagine, in the United States, the equivalent.
Let's imagine that a foreign actor takes out the Vice President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the head of the CIA, and the head of the FBI all in one.
Because that is basically what Soleimani was.
And imagine that then there were pictures on television of millions of American mourners in the streets.
And imagine there are pictures of the President of the United States openly weeping over the corpse of this person, or these people.
And then imagine that the response was, we fired 22 ballistic missiles, all of which failed to kill anybody who had actually ordered the attack, or any of the soldiers on the other side.
The American people would rightly consider that to be an act of weakness.
Well, what happened last night was an act of weakness, and it is now apparent, it's becoming more and more apparent, that it was a deliberate act of weakness because the Iranian government did not want to provoke a serious response from the United States.
As the Daily Mail is reporting, Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi said that Iran warned him about the attack on the Ain al-Assad and Erbil airbases an hour before they took place.
And then, Abdul Mahdi turned around and he warned Iraqi and U.S.
troops to take shelter.
Finland and Lithuania said they were also informed to get their soldiers to safety.
In other words, this was staged.
Okay, this is what it sounds like.
It sounds like this was staged.
It sounds like the Iranian government basically signaled to the Iraqis, listen, we gotta do something because otherwise it looks like our regime is so weak that we can't even Retaliate in response to the killing of one of our leaders.
And so here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna fire some ballistic missiles.
It'll be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Because we're warning you beforehand to get your people out.
So you get your people out, nobody gets killed.
We get to claim that we took a crushing response to all of this.
And then you get to basically claim that we didn't do any damage and everybody goes home happy.
And that is effectively what happened last night.
Now, the Iranian government played it up to the hilt, and one Iranian official, the Iranians really did play this up.
The Iranian state TV was reporting that Ayatollah Khamenei was coordinating the attacks himself, which was supposed to be an indicator of the seriousness of the Iranian response to his MSNBC reporting on that last night.
We have reports as well from the IRGC that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of this country, was in the control room coordinating all of these attacks.
They're also reporting that Iran's air force has been deployed and they are ready to intercept any attacks from the United States.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei then described the attacks as a quote slap in the face of America, but he admitted they were not enough to avenge Soleimani.
He did a televised address where he promised Iranians the true revenge would be kicking U.S. forces out of the Middle East altogether.
The problem is that the strategy he just pursued actually made that more difficult.
So the media were claiming yesterday and basically since Soleimani's killing that killing Soleimani was going to prompt Iraq to throw the U.S. out.
out of Iraq.
That is just sheer nonsense.
They were proclaiming that the parliament had voted that the United States should leave.
There's only one problem.
Only the cabinet can ask the United States to leave.
There is no cabinet in Iraq because the acting prime minister has been under significant pressure to step down specifically because Iran was dominating his foreign policy.
In fact, the vote that was taken in the Iraqi parliament was taken with barely a quorum available.
Every Sunni legislator, every Kurdish legislator boycotted the vote and the vote was non-binding.
So none of that made any sense.
And then Iran actually made its case worse yesterday because Iran is claiming that the United States should pull out of Iraq.
And then saying that the Iraqi people want the United States out of Iraq?
There's only one problem with that.
Everybody in Iraq who is not Shia knows that the minute the United States is out, Iran rushes in and takes over every bit of the government.
They understand that.
So, and having Iranian missiles flying into Iraqi territory trying to kill Iraqi citizens is not a very good way of showing that you don't have territorial aspirations to take over Iraq.
So actually, this is pretty counterproductive for the Ayatollahs.
They were put between a rock and a hard place.
They were sort of boxed in here.
And so they lashed out in the most minimalist way they could, deliberately, apparently, avoiding casualties so that they couldn't give Trump an excuse to go after their navy or go after any of their important military sites.
Now, the media last night played this as an act of sheer panic.
World War III is upon us!
It's a massive war.
I've been saying for weeks, when no one wants to go to war, nobody's going to war.
The Iranians don't want war because if there's a war, Ayatollah Khamenei, that dude is dead.
Okay?
If there's a war, the Iranian Navy is gone.
If there is a war, the United States military is the best war-making force in the history of the world.
The United States doesn't want war because we don't want to occupy anybody, because we are not interested in a protracted conflict.
No one, no one, from Tucker Carlson to Donald Trump to me, nobody wants war with Iran.
No one is interested in a full-scale military conflict with Iran.
But that means there's not going to be a full-scale military conflict with Iran.
And this entire situation does give the lie to the notion pushed by the media and pushed by the Obama administration that the only two alternatives were appeasing the Iranians or going to full-scale war with them.
That was a lie from the outset.
It is a lie today.
The two choices were not signing giant checks to a terrorist entity or going to complete war with the terrorist entity.
One of the possibilities is deterrence.
And that's what Trump was reestablishing here and successfully reestablished here.
Iranian television tried to claim that 80 American tourists were killed, but that figure was quickly rubbished by Iraqi and U.S.
officials.
According to the Daily Mail, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said they show what we didn't retreat in the face of America.
This was an attempt to save face.
He says, if America has committed a crime, it should know that it will receive a decisive response.
If they are wise, they won't take any other action at this juncture.
So basically they're trying to claim now that they have somehow, that they are the barking dog and they have scared away the United States.
Absolute sheer nonsense.
They understood that if they killed an American, Trump was going to unleash the beast.
And so they called in advance the Iraqi government and warned them what was coming.
Hey, by the way, there were a bunch of weird incidents that happened last night.
There were a couple earthquakes near an Iranian nuclear facility.
Don't know what that means.
We also don't know what it means that the Ukrainian Airlines Boeing 737 caught fire and crashed near Tehran, killing all 177 passengers and crew, including 63 Canadians and 3 Britons.
It is unclear whether, in fact, that plane was shot down, and the black box is not being Is not being released at this point.
President Trump, for his part, credits the early warning system that had been established for preventing casualties.
We'll get to that in just one second.
First, let us talk about the fact that you need to protect yourself online.
So right now we are seeing a widespread spate, like a huge spate, of attacks globally.
By the Iranian government against particular websites.
And they've hacked like actual private people before they hacked Sheldon Adelson a few years back.
You see hackers all the time looking for information.
And it's not just government.
Sometimes it's big tech just monitoring you or it's the government checking into you.
And sometimes it's hackers who just want your credit card information.
You ought to be protecting yourself online.
You must protect yourself no matter whether you're famous or whether or not whether you're a target of a foreign country.
or whether you are not.
ExpressVPN is the best way to do this.
ExpressVPN does not log your data.
There are lots of really cheap or free VPNs that actually make money.
By selling the data they say they are protecting to ad companies, ExpressVPN has developed a technology called Trusted Server that makes it impossible for their servers to log any of your information.
They are fast, it's easy, You install it on your computer with one click.
It is now running in the background of your computer.
There's a reason the TechRadar, the Verge, CNET, and many other tech experts rate ExpressVPN the number one VPN in the world.
I love ExpressVPN.
I've been using it for years.
I want to protect myself.
You should protect yourself as well.
Use my link, expressvpn.com slash ben today.
Get an extra three months for free on a one-year package.
That is expressvpn.com slash ben.
Again, visit expressvpn.com slash ben to learn more.
That's expressvpn.com slash ben.
So, according to a U.S.
official telling USA Today, U.S.
officials did have advanced warning of Iran's missile assault that damaged two Iraqi bases housing U.S.
and coalition forces.
A hangar at Al-Asad, a sprawling complex 100 miles west of Baghdad that houses about 1,500 coalition forces, was severely damaged, according to a U.S.
official speaking to USA Today on the condition of anonymity.
The official added the early warning systems gave U.S.
forces advanced knowledge that the missiles had been launched.
It's also possible, by the way.
We're hearing about the early warning system to cover up for the fact that Iran actually created a back channel to the Iraqi government saying that they were not going to kill Americans.
So get your guys out right now because the last thing we want is a full-scale war with you guys.
We've now saved face.
You get to claim that we were a failure.
We all go home happy and then maybe we work toward negotiating a new agreement.
The fact is that what Iran just did forces the Europeans into a bad situation.
The Europeans would love nothing better than to go back to the failed JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, that was basically an act of appeasement.
By the way, that sucker was 10 years long.
That was set to expire, like, very, very soon.
It was signed in 2013.
So it's been a while.
And that thing was already going to be defunct and Iran was going to start its nuclear testing, its nuclear missiles program, its nuclear weapons program, right back up in the next couple of years, no matter what.
So Trump Saying that we need to cut a new deal with Iran and that has to be done on the basis of no more terrorism, no more ballistic missile testing, no more nuclear technology.
That is exactly right.
One of the things you keep hearing from the media is that the Iran nuclear deal was keeping Iran in check?
Well, only with regard to their nuclear program at best.
At best.
In reality, what it was doing was bribing them with the possibility of greater regional power and economic strength so that one day they could move forward with an actual nuclear weapons program.
That is why the Democratic takes on all of this are so silly.
So, in the middle of all of this, the Iranians basically backed down.
Iran issued all of these sort of empty warnings.
One of their Iranian leaders tweeted a picture of the Iranian flag.
supposedly sort of the response to Trump tweeting a picture of the American flag as he treated the Iranian flag because, wow, look at us.
We're just like the United States.
Yeah, except for the fact that you shot a bunch of missiles and didn't even hit a camel in the ass.
So there's that.
And then Iran issued further warning saying they're going to attack Dubai, that they were going to attack Haifa in Israel, Tel Aviv, which, of course, is just silly talk.
And then Javad Zarif, basically the foreign minister who was talking tough just a few moments ago, all of a sudden he is backing down on Twitter.
He said, Iran took and concluded proportionate measures in self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter targeting base from which cowardly armed attack against our citizens and senior officials were launched.
It wasn't against your citizens.
You literally had terrorists in the country of Iraq, a foreign country where you were facilitating terror attacks.
We do not seek escalation or war, but we'll defend ourselves against any aggression.
That was Zarif basically saying, we're done now.
We're done.
We're finished at this point.
And Trump then tweeted out, OK, fine.
You want to be done?
I guess we're done.
And he tweeted out last night, all is well.
Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq.
Assessment of casualties and damages taking place now.
So far, so good.
We have the most powerful and well-equipped military anywhere in the world by far.
I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.
Then, this morning, President Trump actually made his statement.
That's why we delayed the onset of the show this morning.
He opened by walking out, flanked by his national security team, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as his Secretary of Defense and Vice President.
And he said, right off the bat, Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.
Like, this was his first statement.
The only difference between Trump and Obama is that Trump actually means it.
See, the thing is that if you say, never, what that means is beyond your term.
Obama was fine with Iran gaining a nuclear weapon.
He just wanted them to do it a few years down the line when he thought he couldn't be blamed for it, and he sort of wanted to appease them until that time.
Trump actually means this thing, and he showed it by killing Soleimani.
Here is President Trump this morning.
As long as I'm president of the United States, Iran will never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
Good morning.
I'm pleased to inform you The American people should be extremely grateful and happy.
No Americans were harmed in last night's attack by the Iranian regime.
We suffered no casualties.
All of our soldiers are safe.
And only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases.
Our great American forces are prepared for anything.
Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world.
That, of course, is exactly true.
The fact that Iran backed off of the signal... Again, when no one wants World War III, World War III ain't happening.
Also, worth noting... I mean, this is sort of a didactic point, but it's true.
If the United States had actually gone into a shooting war with Iran, that's not World War 3.
World War 3 actually would involve coalitions of people siding against the United States.
The Russians would not have gotten involved.
The Chinese would not have gotten involved.
It would have been a regional war, more like the Gulf War, the First Gulf War, the Second Gulf War, Vietnam.
It would not have been World War 3.
World War 3 actually requires there to be serious risk of heavy American casualties.
It requires there to be Many other countries involved.
It would have been an actual war between Iran and the United States.
There would have been proxy wars between Hezbollah and Israel.
None of that is happening.
Okay, I'm just making the point that the overblown talk by the media, even in the worst case scenario, was indeed overblown talk by the media, even in the worst case scenario.
But nobody even wanted the regional war, right?
Nobody was for this.
It was so funny watching people in the media, ranging from the sort of isolationist right to the radical left, and the mainstream left, suggesting that there were people inside the administration who were desperate for war.
I saw people tweeting last night that John Bolton wanted war.
John Bolton, when he was the NSA, wanted something like this.
What he wanted was, we kill off your worst people, and then you end up, in cowardly fashion, you end up Sending us messages to get our people out so that you don't kill our people because you don't want us to break you.
Right?
That's exactly what happened.
President Trump says there will be consequences for the actions of Iran last night, but they're going to come in the economic and diplomatic sphere, which of course is exactly the right move.
The fact is, now, what are the Europeans going to do?
Side with the Iranians?
And in fact, it's obvious that that's not what is going to happen.
The fact is that the UK has already come out against Iran.
Boris Johnson saying the United States has a right to defend its soldiers, saying that he is going to work with President Trump.
You're going to see the other Western countries come around on this.
Boris Johnson said today that the United States has the right to protect its troops and told Iran to de-escalate.
So, this is moving in President Trump's direction.
It turns out that deterrence has always been and will continue to be good policy.
President Trump announced this morning that there would, in fact, be new sanctions on Iran.
And as you'll see, he then urged the Europeans to get on board.
As we continue to evaluate options in response to Iranian aggression, the United States will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime.
These powerful sanctions will remain until Iran changes its behavior.
Okay, and then President Trump came out and he suggested that other countries need to pull out of the failed JCPOA, the Iran nuclear deal, and it's time to actually negotiate a deal that contains Iran and deters Iran.
Again, the biggest problem with the Iranian nuclear deal...
It was not with regard to the nuclear program.
Yes, it was a problem that the verification procedures, which were heavier than other verification procedures, still were not completely bulletproof.
The bigger problem was that it basically just said to Iran, OK, you develop as much as you could possibly want to develop your conventional military, your terrorist branches, your economy, and then in 10 years you can develop a nuke.
That was basically what the JCPOA said.
And then you had the Obama team declaring victory.
Which, again, is sort of like a person walks into the doctor's office and says, I have cancer, and also I have a cold.
And the doctor says, OK, well, here's what we're going to do.
Here's some Nyquil.
That should take care of some of your cold symptoms.
It won't cure the cold, but it'll take care of some of your cold symptoms, put them off for a little bit.
And you're fine.
Turns out you're fine now.
And the person's like, wait, hold on.
I also have cancer.
And the doctor's like, it doesn't matter.
We're not going to ignore the cancer.
The fact is that Iran's terrorist threats on the world stage and its growth as a regional power are a significantly greater danger than its mere nuclear program alone.
It's when the nuclear program is attached to a broader terror threat that it becomes a real threat to the world.
The Obama administration facilitated the terror threat while, quote unquote, delaying the nuclear program for a certain preset period of time.
President Trump says, listen, this deal was bad.
It was always bad.
In fact, President Trump suggested in this speech correctly that the ballistic missiles that were fired at this Iraqi airbase could have been paid for by Obama cash.
Because again, it was the Obama administration stated position that the Iraq that the Iranians could use money from the opened economy and from the United States to build its terror capacity.
John Kerry used openly admitted this in March 2016.
He said, of course, they're going to use it for terrorism.
Sure, they might use it for ballistic missiles.
Okay, those ballistic missiles were falling on Iraqi and American troops last night, or would have been if the Iranians didn't warn the Iraqis ahead of time.
Here's President Trump saying other countries need to pull out of this crap deal.
The time has come for the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, and China to recognize this reality.
They must now break away from the remnants of the Iran deal, or JCPOA.
And we must all work together toward making a deal with Iran that makes the world a safer and more peaceful place.
Okay, that of course is exactly true.
That is exactly true.
And in a second, we're going to get to President Trump's conclusion of the speech and some of the other stuff that he said during the speech, which is pretty important.
Then we'll get to the media response, which again was wildly overblown throughout this.
It was just plain bad media coverage.
It is obvious that many in the media were rooting for Trump to be humiliated.
And that's not really because they love Iran as much as it is because they love Obama.
And they've been trying to justify Obama's garbage foreign policy for a decade at this point.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
First, let us talk about the fact That it is the new year, that means that you're going to be sending a lot of business mail.
You run a business or you're at home and you're going to be sending birthday gifts.
Valentine's Day is coming up.
Lots of times you're going to be sending mail.
Do you really want to schlep all that stuff over to the post office?
Post office is great.
Do you want to schlep all that stuff over to the post office or do you want to do all this stuff from the comfort and security of your own home or your own business?
Stamps.com brings all the services of the U.S. Postal Service directly to your computer.
Whether you're a small office sending invoices or an online seller shipping out products or even a warehouse sending thousands of packages a day, Stamps.com can handle it all with ease.
Simply use your computer to print official U.S. postage 24-7 for any letter, any package, any class of mail, anywhere you want to send it.
Once your mail is ready, just hand it to your mail carrier or drop it in a mailbox.
It is indeed that simple.
With stamps.com, you get five cents off every first-class stamp and up to 40% off priority mail.
It's actually cheaper than going to the post office.
Not to mention, it's a fraction of the cost of those expensive postage meters.
Stamps.com, it's a no-brainer.
It saves you time, it saves you money.
It's no wonder over 700,000 small businesses already use stamps.com.
If you value your time and value your money, why wouldn't you use stamps.com?
So, head on over to stamps.com, no risk, with my promo code SHAPIRO, you get a special offer that includes a four-week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale, no long-term commitments or contracts, just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage, type in SHAPIRO, that is stamps.com, promo code SHAPIRO, stamps.com, never go to the post office again.
Now the way that you know that this whole thing has de-escalated is that the oil prices actually dropped this morning.
They had spiked last night in the aftermath of the attack, but More importantly, it was pretty obvious that this was not going to escalate to a giant war.
Now, does that mean that Iran isn't going to continue acting out?
American forces in Iraq failed to destroy major energy infrastructure that could have disrupted global crude supply.
More importantly, it was pretty obvious that this was not going to escalate to a giant war.
Now, does that mean that Iran isn't going to continue acting out?
No, of course they're going to continue acting out in low level terrorist ways.
They will plan attacks in the West that they think cannot be traced back to them.
This is what they've done.
They have a longer time horizon than any president.
Every president basically has a four-year time horizon.
Iran has a decades-long time horizon, so they can wait a couple of years to quote-unquote retaliate and then claim that the retaliation is in response to Soleimani.
So this does not end the Iranian threat by any stretch of the imagination, but we have certainly deterred them from taking overt actions like burning U.S.
embassies.
and trying to kill American soldiers, at least under President Trump.
Now, President Trump, at the end of his speech this morning, he suggested, listen, now what we would like to do is come back to the table and renegotiate an improved JCPOA, that includes ballistic missile testing, that includes terror funding.
He said, listen, this is very easy.
You want to have a good future?
Just stop being terrorists.
Here's President Trump talking to the Iranian people directly.
Finally, to the people and leaders of Iran, we want you to have a future and a great future, one that you deserve.
One of prosperity at home and harmony with the nations of the world.
The United States is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it.
I want to thank you and God bless America.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
So listen, everybody wants to back off right now.
The Iranians better back off.
And this is what they know.
Again, the greatest indicator that this deterrent act worked is that the Iranians were notifying the Iraqis that the missiles were coming and that the United States and the Iraqis were able to get out of the way, let Iran save face.
The Iranians, again, after all of that dog and pony show, after the entire millions in the street outrage, people beating at their breasts, gnashing, wailing of teeth, sackcloth and ashes, the Ayatollah standing over the coffin of Soleimani and weeping his eyes out, the Ayatollah in the command center directing the attacks.
It turns out that this is it.
If this is it, that's a huge win for Trump.
Huge win for Trump.
Huge win for the United States.
Deterrence re-established, at least at a very baseline level.
It doesn't mean this is the end of the battle.
It does mean that deterrence is a thing again.
President Trump then re-upped the game, right?
He gave Iran a face-saving way out.
In this speech, he did not overstate how ineffective the Iranian missile attacks were.
He didn't try and shove the Iranians face in it, which would again put the Iranians in the position of having to try to do something else in order to save face with their own population.
He did give them a way out by citing the early warning system.
He said Iran does appear to be standing down.
He also said people have been tolerating their behavior for decades.
Those days are now over.
Obviously, the killing of Soleimani says that directly to the Iranians.
Trump described Soleimani in full detail.
I mean, this was one of his better addresses.
It really was.
It was short.
It was sweet.
Yes, it was on teleprompter, but teleprompter Trump can be very good because when he reads the teleprompter properly, that is good.
Now, the media will be mocking his pronunciation.
Who cares?
None of that matters.
Barack Obama's pronunciation was impeccable, especially when he said things like Pakistan, but it doesn't matter.
The pronunciation doesn't matter.
It's the message that matters.
Trump said that the failure of the Obama deal Was resulted in additional Iranian aggression and around the Middle East, not just with regard to the United States, which of course is true.
He called on other countries to join the United States.
He said he would ask NATO to become more involved in the process, which is perfectly appropriate.
And he mentioned the fact that the United States is in very strong position to take really crucial sanctions against the Iranians and listen, we are energy independent.
We do not need Iranian oil.
We don't need Middle East oil, period.
He said, I've been rebuilding the military.
So don't, this was Trump in a rather subtle way, actually saying, just don't F with us guys.
Like, don't try this again.
Just stop.
And now the media's response to all this was just unbelievable last night.
Incredible last night.
Because the media, their narrative here was not that deterrence was being reestablished.
Their narrative is that a madman was leading us to the brink of war with these pitiful Iranians who had of course been converted into the Swiss by the JCPOA.
That the Iranian nuclear deal had magically turned the Ayatollah Khamenei into a Western European leader.
Suddenly he was Emmanuel Macron and basically Soleimani was Justin Trudeau, just a little bit more angry with a beard.
And that was all because of the JCPOA.
Basically, the Iran nuclear deal had defanged the Iranians.
And this is why you get Ben Rhodes, who's the architect of the Iran nuclear deal, who lied openly to the American people about the moderation inherent in the Iranian government, that they were about to moderate if only we sent them cash.
And last night he was tweeting out things like, this didn't need to happen.
You're right, it didn't need to happen.
You could have stood up to the Iranians the way Trump did, but instead you decided to pansy out, which is exactly what the Obama administration did.
The media have an interest in upholding that narrative.
That is the common thread to the media coverage here.
The media narrative is that everything was hunky-dory until Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, at which point Iran randomly started acting nasty again because they hate Trump, and if it weren't for that bad orange man, orange man, bad, bad orange man, then everything would have been hunky-dory in the Middle East.
That ignores the thousands of dead Americans due to Iranian involvement in Iraq, It ignores the hundreds of thousands of dead Muslims in Syria, backed by Soleimani's play in Syria.
It ignores the buildup of Hezbollah's military force in the wrecking of Lebanon, which was an Iranian development.
It ignores the fact that Iraq has continued to be a roiling sectarian hellhole because of the Iranian involvement in Iraq.
It ignores the attacks on Saudi oil facilities.
It ignores the consistent monthly attacks, rocket attacks on American bases.
It ignores the attacks on shipping against non-American targets in the Strait of Hormuz.
Yeah, the fact is that the Iranians have been pursuing terrorism for literally decades.
That escalated in the immediate aftermath of the JCPOA.
Right before Obama left office, the Iranians took a bunch of Americans hostage, right?
They took a bunch of American military men hostage, and then Trump and then Obama had to basically wheedle it out of them.
But the narrative again from the media side is that this is all Trumpian craziness.
So the problem is this didn't result as they wanted it to result.
If the media had its way, we would be at war right now.
If the media had its way, Iran would have retaliated much more harshly.
They would have killed American soldiers.
I'm not saying the American media are rooting for the death of American soldiers.
They are rooting for an outcome bad for Trump so that they can prop up their narrative.
And if that outcome that is bad for Trump involves more American assets being put in danger, they're happy.
You could see the celebration in media last night.
The thinly veiled celebration in media last night when Iran started firing the missiles when it turned out it was a big nothing.
You can see the disappointment this morning.
Lawrence O'Donnell is a perfect example of this.
Over at MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell actually tweeted, Trump wagged the dog.
Now the dog is wagging Trump.
Celebrating the idea that Trump had wagged the dog in order to avoid impeachment coverage, but now he had lost control of the situation.
And the media need this narrative, because again, the narrative is that the Iranians were perfectly reasonable, that Obama had made them perfectly reasonable, and that Trump just drove them mad because Trump is a madman.
Jim Acosta over at CNN doing the same routine.
Jim Acosta, who doesn't know his ass from his elbow, suggesting last night, this is what the experts feared.
This is exactly what the experts feared!
Oh my god, Jim Acosta!
By the way, ladies, find you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves him some Jim Acosta.
The President's attention has been gotten by the Iranians, no question about it.
And getting back to what I was saying earlier, Wolf, this is exactly what many foreign policy and national security analysts feared here in Washington.
A lot of Democrats have been talking about over the last 72 hours that the President, by targeting Soleimani, has essentially set this chain of events into motion.
And the question is whether the President will be able to get on top of it and handle it.
Well, you know, Jim Acosta looking real sad about that.
This is what the experts feared.
It's what they feared.
Chris Hayes over at MSNBC doing the same thing.
It's strategically and morally a disaster to go to war with Iran.
No one's going to war with Iran, but you're going to have to explain how it's a moral disaster to kill the leading terrorist in the Middle East responsible for literally tens of thousands of deaths, most of them Muslim.
Before we go, I just want to say this very clearly, that a war with Iran is madness, and it is strategically and morally a disaster in the making, and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
Again, they're setting up that false narrative again and again, that deterrence is full-scale war, and that appeasement is the only solution, because that was the Obama solution, was impeachment.
We'll get to more of the media coverage which was egregious, and which, if the media had their way, would have driven Iran to new rounds of actual violence against Americans.
Because the Iranians are watching the media coverage too.
They are.
And we'll get to more of this in just one second.
But first, if you're not already a subscriber, you're really missing out, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe.
For as little as 10 bucks a month, you get our articles ad free, access to all of our live broadcasts, our full show library, select bonus content, and our exclusive DailyWire app, which is a pretty great feature if you haven't checked it out yet.
If you choose the new all-access plan, You'll get all of that, plus the legendary Leftist Tears Tumblr and our brand new Ask Me Anything style discussion feature that allows you to engage our hosts, writers, special guests on a weekly basis.
Like tonight, for example, we have a Daily Wire backstage, and then all of the hosts of Daily Wire backstage will be joining you online to ask your questions.
So, stop depriving yourself, come join the fun.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So it's all about the narrative, all about the narrative.
And the narrative absolutely collapsed in on the Democrats last night when the Iranian response was not only ineffectual, but apparently telegraphed to America and her allies to avoid Iran having to up the ante.
But if you listen to the way Democrats have been talking about all of this again, it is to preserve the Obama-era narrative, defend the precious, Defend the precious at all costs.
Barack Obama is the precious.
The Iran nuclear deal is the precious.
It was garbage from day one.
Anyone who watched foreign policy knew that it was garbage from day one.
This was Neville Chamberlain-esque appeasement of the worst regime on planet Earth.
And the fact is that the media are fully invested, and so are the Democrats, in defending that garbage strategy.
And the only way to do that is by declaring that Donald Trump is a madman in trying to re-establish deterrence.
And that's why you see Nancy Pelosi yesterday Lamenting needless American provocation.
She tweeted yesterday closely monitoring the situation following bombings targeting US troops in Iraq.
By the way, her close monitoring involves her going to some sort of fundraising event, I believe.
She said, we must ensure the safety of our service members, including ending needless provocations from the administration and demanding that Iran cease its violence.
America and the world cannot afford war.
What would be those needless provocations?
Killing the world's leading terrorist Soleimani, a man responsible again for thousands and thousands and thousands of dead Americans.
And Iraqis, and Syrians, and Lebanese, and Yemenis, and Iranians, by the way?
Would those be the needless provocations?
Then there's John Kerry saying, it's a- It's a tragedy that Donald Trump rushed a confrontation.
If he had been me, he just would have signed a giant check to the Ayatollahs so they could have used it to kill more people, and then declared that peace had been established.
Here's John Kerry, who's beginning to resemble more and more something from Tales of the Crypt.
Here's the former Secretary of State.
Now we're seeing the repercussions of going back to where we were when we began the process of trying to eliminate a nuclear weapon.
I think it's a tragedy for the world that instead of diplomacy, this administration has rushed to confrontation.
And if this develops into a tit-for-tat increased effort, it will become a war That is needless, it didn't have to happen, and it will be a reckless war of choice by the President of the United States.
Is the President of the United States responsible for Iran being a terrorist entity for the last 40 years?
Also, here are my medals from Vietnam because I'm a terrible person.
John Kerry.
That man was the 2004 Democratic nominee.
Speaking, by the way, of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Michael Moore was tweeting out this morning pictures from Soleimani's funeral with the tens of thousands of people in the street saying, is there any general in America who would get this kind of adoration?
That guy, Michael Moore, that schmuck who's begging in Farsi, In badly translated Farsi from Google Translate, the Iranians not to hit America just yesterday?
That schmuck was in a presidential box with Jimmy Carter at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Talk about a party that's lost its way.
By the way, the idea that Donald Trump rushed to confrontation for a year, he did basically nothing as Iran upped the ante.
He did nothing when there were attacks in the Straits of Hormuz.
He did nothing when Saudi oil facilities were targeted.
He did nothing when an American drone was shot down.
Seriously.
So this idea that Trump is rushing to war is such absolute, absolute crap.
Joe Biden, of course, defending the precious as well.
He has to.
He was the vice president when the garbage Iran nuclear deal went forward.
He says, we brought the world together over Iran.
We did.
We brought it together over, brought the world together over Iran.
If by that you mean this was the Munich agreement, then sure, sure.
I don't think the Secretary knows what he's talking about there.
Look, what we were able to do is bring together the world to see to it that Iran would not be able to get a nuclear weapon.
Period.
Well, I guess the only issue on the table was Iran getting a nuclear weapon.
The only issue on the table.
Because, again, the Obama administration played doctor who ignores the cancer but treats the cold symptoms.
That's exactly what they did.
Joe Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy issue of his entire career.
By the way, speaking of Joe Biden, the man can't even keep Iran and Iraq straight.
He gave a little speech yesterday in which he was ripping on Trump's Iranian foreign policy, and then he just mixed up Iran and Iraq because the dude is barely functional at this point.
The Iran parliament.
The Iran parliament voted to eject all Americans and coalition forces from the country.
The Iraqi parliament.
They're separate countries, you doof.
Not only that, the Iraqi parliament did not vote to eject all American forces from the country.
They issued a non-binding resolution in which literally half the parliament abstained and walked out because it turns out that Shia-dominated sections of Iraq are not fond of the United States.
But the propaganda that is issued, I mean, I've never, whenever, when it comes to issues of foreign policy, the media just become the DNC.
They merge.
And the media, which sometimes tries to hide it a little bit, it just ends immediately.
Anything Democrats do on foreign policy is good.
Anything Republicans do is bad.
War in Iraq?
Very, very bad.
Pursued by a Republican.
Pull out from Iraq precipitously, leading to the rise of ISIS?
Good.
War with regard to Afghanistan?
Very bad when a Republican pursues it.
When pursued by Barack Obama?
Very good.
Hitting Soleimani?
Very bad.
Drone war for years by Barack Obama?
Very good.
War in Libya, very, very good, because pursued by Barack Obama.
Killing of Muammar Gaddafi, very good.
Burning of U.S.
Embassy in Benghazi, not that big a deal.
Burning of U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad, very big deal when it's under Trump.
I mean, the media just become a mouthpiece for whichever Democrats are in power.
That's all that happens here.
This is a false narrative.
It is a giant gaslighting effort that has been pursued from the very beginning by the Obama administration and now it is carried forward a few years and the media are just parroting this stuff as rote.
Senator Tammy Duckworth of Wisconsin, I believe, she came out and she says that what's happening here is that Iran is winning because Iraq is asking us to leave.
Again, Iraq did not ask us to leave.
The Prime Minister of Iraq did not ask us to leave.
The Prime Minister of Iraq is powerless anyway right now.
He's the acting Prime Minister because he's been forced into a position of powerlessness by his own population, which feels that he has been kowtowing too much to Iran.
Here's Tammy Duckworth just saying something that's absolutely untrue.
The incompetence of this president as commander in chief has actually achieved the end goal that Iran wants in the region.
You have to remember, Rachel, that we actually since October have had protests in Iraq against Iranian influence by Iraqi people.
You know, within the space of just a couple of days with this poor decision made by this president, we have now turned that around so that now Iraqi, the Iraqi parliament has voted to kick us out of their country.
And we have now turned the sentiment into one that is much more pro-Iranian in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East as well.
There's always a myth.
You think that Sunnis are desperately mourning the loss of Soleimani?
You think Sunni Iraqis are desperately mourning the loss of Soleimani?
Do you really believe?
That the Kurds are desperately mourning the loss of Soleimani?
The Kurds who are not exactly friends with the Iranians?
Like, this whole thing is just, it's ridiculous.
And it's based on bad information, and the media understanding that most people don't understand anything like the complexities of Middle Eastern politics.
Benjamin Haddad, who is the director of the Future Europe Initiative at the Atlantic Council, and no friend to President Trump, he's tweeted out this thread, and this is exactly right.
At this time of their presidencies, Trump's two predecessors had started wars in the Middle East.
He has not.
The apocalyptic commentary of these last few days has completely ignored Trump's famous reluctance to use force, especially for broad value-based objectives.
The Soleimani killing was about brutally but punctually re-establishing escalation dominance after Iran stepped up nefarious activities, drone destruction, strike on Saudi Arabia, attack against U.S.
embassy, and broke an explicit red line with the killing of an American citizen.
The Iranian response, and especially the Zarif tweet, seemed to show that Iran got the message.
It had no choice but to respond, but calibrated it in a way that would not cross red lines and communicated that explicitly.
He said, I'm seeing commentary saying that Trump is backing down.
Actually, the message has been clear.
We don't want war, but we're ready for it.
I'm always surprised by the same analyst describing Trump as a calculating, selfish cynic and as an irrational, crazed madman.
You have to choose.
The rest is pretty standard.
Peace through strength, more burden sharing from allies in the Middle East, JCPOA, etc.
Europeans should 1.
Welcome no escalation, 2.
Step up troop presence in anti-terror in Middle East, which will also increase their diplomatic weight, and 3.
Try to put some meat in Trump's little diplomatic opening, the mention of common interests with Iran against ISIS.
Getting questions on the war under the Obama administration, I'm referring to its Libya in 2011.
This is exactly right.
This is exactly right.
People who are not friends with President Trump are acknowledging that Trump gets a win here.
Ian Bremmer, who's been no friend to President Trump over at the Eurasia Group, he signaled today that this is a pretty big win for Trump.
It is a win for Trump.
More importantly than a win for Trump, it's a win for the United States because, again, the lie was always that the rules of politics and international affairs and force in international affairs ceased to apply when Donald Trump became president and when Barack Obama became president.
Obama so magically changed the world, magically changed the world, that he could simply sign a check to the Iranians and then they would become wonderful neighbors to everyone around them.
It was absolute bullcrap from the very start.
And then Trump comes in, he kills Soleimani, he ends the nuclear deal.
And then the logic is, well, the world began spinning when Barack Obama was president.
He had magically changed- so Trump magically changed them back.
Here's the reality.
Iran has not changed its goals.
It has not changed its orientations.
It has not changed its tactics.
Not one iota, for 40 years, they've been incredibly consistent.
That tends to happen in dictatorships.
The fact that the media want you to believe that we were on the verge of World War III here, is demonstrative of the fact that either the media don't know what they're talking about or they're malicious, and I happen to think that it is probably the latter.
Okay, meanwhile, impeachment is moving forward.
Nancy Pelosi is now in a debate with Nancy Pelosi about whether Nancy Pelosi ought to release the impeachment charges to the Senate.
She's being urged by members of the Senate to do so because Mitch McConnell says, I'm gonna continue forward with this impeachment trial without naming witnesses, which of course is exactly what happened under the Clinton administration.
During the Clinton administration, during the impeachment hearings about Bill Clinton, The Clinton Senate moved forward with the procedure.
They said, we will name the witnesses later.
They ended up calling like three witnesses.
And that was it.
McConnell says, I'm not going to preset the witness list.
We have to hear the arguments from the House managers.
We also are going to have to hear from the prior witnesses, presumably.
And then we'll start talking about what exactly comes next.
And this, of course, has driven Pelosi to the point of distraction.
She wants John Bolton to be named in the witness list, as though this is going to change things radically.
I have serious doubts that that is the case.
The New York Times running pieces about Mitch McConnell being afraid of John Bolton.
Maybe Mitch McConnell is just not going to cave to Nancy Pelosi's pressure to do an investigation where she refused to.
Remember, the House could have called John Bolton and waited on it.
They didn't.
They didn't because Bolton probably was not going to give them what they wanted.
My favorite element of the whole impeachment debacle is the theatrics surrounding it.
Yesterday, a bunch of impeachment protesters were walking slowly around the Senate building, wearing shirts that suggested that Trump should be removed.
That obviously is going to change things radically.
A bunch of unemployed morons in the middle of the day in Washington, D.C.
walking slowly around the Senate building.
First of all, if I want unemployment, unemployable morons walking around the Senate building, we always have senators.
I actually don't need these people walking around the Senate building in order to push for impeachment.
I do love the one little girl who's been dragged there by her parents, but at least she doesn't have to go to school today.
Now that they're walking around the building slowly, under Article 39 of the Constitution, I believe that Trump has automatically been impeached.
Nancy Pelosi, is going to have to decide today whether or not she wants to release those charges to the Senate.
McConnell's going to move forward either way.
Her bluff has been called.
So that basically ends that.
Where it moves from here, it's probably a pretty quick disposal.
Unless John Bolton says something earth-shattering, which is very doubtful at this point, this whole thing is going to basically amount to nothing, and we'll all move on with our lives.
Okay, so we don't actually have time for things I like today, so instead we'll do a very, very brief thing that I hate.
Elizabeth Warren appeared on The View.
And Elizabeth Warren's appearance on The View was garbage as per her usual arrangement.
First, Meghan McCain had to cudgel her into acknowledging that Soleimani was a terrorist.
And then Elizabeth Warren started just spewing nonsense about Merrick Garland.
So here is Elizabeth Warren explaining that Merrick, that Mitch McConnell's handling of Merrick Garland was unconstitutional, which is amazing coming from a lady proposing a wealth tax that is blatantly unconstitutional.
When President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to be a Supreme Court justice, he, He had a year as a sitting president.
And when Mitch McConnell just said, sorry, he's not getting a hearing.
We're not even going to meet with him.
The Constitution says the president will nominate and the Senate will then offer its advice and consent.
And you really want it in a confirmation.
We never wrote it with the assumption that, oh, you've got to say within 30 days and then someone's got to come in.
That was unconstitutional.
Because the assumption wasn't.
Apparently it's unconstitutional to fully abide by the Constitution and just say, we're not going to vote on this president's nominee.
You don't have to vote on anything.
I'm confused.
Does Elizabeth Warren think that Nancy Pelosi has a duty to convey the impeachment charges?
Because she does not.
She can hold them back.
She can do whatever she wants.
If the Constitution doesn't say you have to do it, you don't have to do it.
Nothing says that the Senate has to accede to a vote on a Democratic nominee if the Senate does not wish to.
Alrighty.
We'll be back here later today with two additional hours of commentary.
Also, we'll be back here tonight with Daily Wire backstage.
I'm sure it will be very heavily involved with Iran talk and impeachment talk.
And we'll be back here tomorrow.
So, so much good stuff.
Go over to Daily Wire right now and subscribe if you really want the behind the scenes and all of our content.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkowitz.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior Producer Jonathan Hay.
Supervising Producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Technical Producer Austin Stevens.
Associate Producer Colton Haas.
Assistant Director Pavel Lydowsky.
Edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is Mixed by Mike Karmina.
Hair and Makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production Assistant Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2020.
On The Matt Walsh Show, we're not just discussing politics.
We're talking culture, faith, family, all of the things that are really important to you.
▲
Export Selection