Episode 5182: Destroying the Basic Apparatus Of Iran While The Regime Still Survives
Stephen K. Bannon and guests dissect Operation Epic Fury, a U.S.-led military campaign against Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, where 10 ships were sunk and strikes targeted regime infrastructure—yet Iran’s leadership remains intact. Brandon Weichert warns of China exploiting U.S. resource depletion, while Trita Parsi dismisses calls for Iranian defections, citing deep regime loyalty and distrust of U.S. promises. Brian Kennedy proposes nationalizing elections via executive order to ban Chinese-made voting machines, framing it as a 2026 safeguard against foreign interference. The president insists the mission will persist until Iran’s nuclear threat is eliminated, but critics like Kurt Mills argue decapitation strikes alone won’t topple the regime, urging a clearer strategy to avoid Iraq War comparisons and regional backlash. [Automatically generated summary]
It's Monday, 2nd of March, Year of Alert, Year of Our Lord 2026, the East Room of the White House.
We're going to go to momentarily a ceremony for the recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
President, now we're hearing may actually talk to the press, answer a few questions, maybe do a spray, maybe address the Iranian people.
We're going to find that out as we go on.
Our own Neil McCabe is there.
We can't communicate because of just setting up.
Brandon Weichert, I got Kerb Mills and we get Kurt up in a second.
Brandon, you kind of dropped a bombshell.
The president's saying four or five weeks.
And the question people are going to ask, well, hang on.
We have a $1 trillion defense budget.
We got the greatest weapons manufacturing capability in the world, second to none.
Is this because we've been sending weapons to Ukraine?
Is it the 12-day war for Israel?
And because so far, the CC, the Chinese Communist Party, and let me be brutally frank, the Chinese Communist Party in Venezuela and now in Iran with their two of their biggest allies kind of look cucked.
I mean, she, I don't, I believe right now you're not even going to see a state visit in April.
I don't know how Xi saves face with his military and his people by having President Trump, but the conquering hero that's taken out Maduro and now taking out the Ayatollah, which are the two, those two combined, I believe, sir, are 80 or 90% of the Chinese Communist Party energy output deal.
So what are you talking about that we're running out of weapons?
15% of China's oil comes from Iran and less than 4% came from Venezuela.
80% of Iran's oil is sold to China.
But the Chinese have been shifting significantly away from Iran's oil over the last several weeks.
Fact, two weeks ago, the Chinese bought more oil from Saudi Arabia in the last three weeks than they have in the last year because they were anticipating the strikes.
I actually, unfortunately, say that I don't believe China is sitting cucked at all.
I think they are watching us deplete ourselves in real time, and that's going to give them a lot of strategic leverage.
And I actually think the Chinese and the Russians are both counting down the days until the CENTCOM AOR's arsenal is depleted and we are forced to pull from Indo-Paycom.
Now, look, Taiwan was expecting two years ago massive amounts of air defense systems and coastal defense batteries that Biden had to pull out of Taiwan and send to Ukraine, promising, hey, you'll get them in 2027.
If this thing, now, Trump expedited that, it's supposed to be coming online to them sooner.
But if this thing goes on beyond this next weekend, the Americans are going to have to pull those systems set for Taiwan again, only this time for Iran.
So this is a, if Trump can't get an off-ramp, and I think, you know, you guys were talking about the four-week strategy.
I think the real reason he's got these off-ramps built in is because our logistics guys are sitting there going, we got to stretch a very finite amount of resources.
But just very basically, this thing could be depleted by Sunday, Monday of next week if we don't get an off-ramp.
So he can either keep doing this sort of delay strategy where we go in a little bit, we pull back, we reassess, which will stretch out those logistics longer, or if he's planning for one big one in the next 72 hours, this could be like the Battle of the Bulge with us in the losing position.
We go in hard.
Huts hope we can knock out all these guys.
The thing is, the regime has survived.
Now, we've taken out 40 of their leaders.
We got the Ayatollah, good on us.
But the regime has clearly been hardened to a degree where they can bring up new meat, if you will, to lead them.
But I'm just saying the big, the big ticket items we've gotten already.
And the regime is still not only popping off missiles, but they're doing it in a very effective way to the point that the Arabs are now complaining that the U.S. is prioritizing defense of Israel over the Arab states where U.S. bases are located, which is actually causing a rift now in the Arab-U.S. alliance, which we need to be stronger than ever as we go forward here.
So there are a lot of complications here.
And with these depletion rates coming online, I talked to a guy from a retired missile defense agency guy who's saying that he thinks in the next 72 hours, the entire situation is going to flip on its head because it's a race to depletion and we're going to be depleted faster.
You can find me at We The Brandon on Twitter X. Find me writing NatSecGuy section on emerald.tv and senior national security editor at 1945 with my buddy Harry Kazianis.
As long as I got the easiest job in the world, I just cut the microphone on and bring guys like you didn't know what they're talking about.
Kurt Mills, an update.
Your thoughts so far.
He just told Brett Baer that it's the Venezuelan model.
We've talked about that over the last two days, Saturday and Sunday.
He's told, you know, Pete Heggs has said, hey, it could be four or five weeks.
It could be longer.
It could be shorter.
We're not going to tip our hand.
Eric Prince was on here as discussed.
The Roman punitive model, you go in and hit hard.
You shatter it until you find somebody that you can find that's appropriate, you think to run the deal, and then you make sure that they're installed and then you move out.
Yeah, not to directly contradict the president or far be it for me to contradict Eric Prince.
I think either model is not exactly going to be apropos here.
The Carthage model, of course, they salted the earth.
I mean, we're nowhere near that with the Iranians.
I mean, we haven't collapsed the regime.
And that's why the administration is all over the place on whether or not regime changes the goal.
The regime remains in charge.
They have decapitated Ale Khamenei.
But I mean, frankly, behind the scenes, it was unclear whether or not Ale Khamenei was frankly a net plus for the functioning of the regime.
He was very old.
It's like any like large company.
A lot of times, you know, the 90-year-old CEO is not exactly making it work super well.
It may very well be that the successors are frankly more vicious, more able.
There could be opportunity, though, because they could be more pragmatic, understand the U.S. system better.
It's entirely unclear.
As towards the approach here, can we just replicate Venezuela?
I don't think so.
It's a lot further away.
And Iran is, I don't want to say like much more of a real country, but much more of a real state.
It has a serious military.
It can impose reprisals as it's doing now across the Gulf and in Israel, and unfortunately, to our assets in the region.
And I think finally, the main thrust here is that it is a fearsome regime that is going to fight for its own survival.
They're not even taking, per multiple reporting, they're not taking the American calls.
It's very possible it's going on in a deep back channel.
But I mean, the reality is a lot of times the deep back channel is run by the CIA and the CIA is run by John Gratcliffe, who presumably opposes any discussion with the Iranians.
And so I think we're immediately in a quagmire.
And I think the president's best option is to acknowledge the sunk cost fallacy, which is we've only been involved in this in 48 to 72 hours.
There's very little cost of getting out just now.
Imagine if the Kaiser in World War I had just left in August.
They've talked about, and the word is that the degradation of this is much deeper.
And for OPSEC, they haven't said that.
I take it you're hearing differently, that the regime, and of course, Trita Parsi and yourself both said they're not going to surrender and they're not going to surrender through negotiations because these guys, if they surrender, if they capitulate, they'll be overthrown by their people and they're not going to let their people turn on them because they understand that that's a, they'll be graveyard dead shortly.
And President Trump has reiterated that and reiterated that.
In fact, we know that Tom Cotton and General Raisin Kane are in the East Room right now.
They're in the audience.
We're hearing that the president may even say a few words directly to the Iranian people to kick off this Medal of Honor ceremony.
Your thoughts on that?
Do you think you think he's done enough?
You're saying we're well short of, is that the president right there?
Let's cut right to the East Room, President of the United States.
Oh, General Kane, is he going to say anything?
I'm sorry.
Throwing my glasses on.
There we go.
Okay, they're mulling.
They're milling around smartly, as we say in the military.
Yeah, it's a little bit like the Mike Davis character who was on your show earlier who said there was a difference between doing war and making war or something like this.
I'm not sure that's how verbs work, but like, I mean, I think this is this distinction without a difference.
The reality is the administration is obviously flirtatious with regime change policy.
I don't think they've decided.
I think they're open to it.
Like, if they knock out the regime, quote unquote, and then the people spontaneously rise up and install a Jeffersonian democracy in Tehran, they're happy with it.
I keep saying their parents, their parents, and their grandparents are the ones that threw out the Shah, threaten the United States with no ceremony and beg for, they begged for Islamic Republic.
Yeah, no, listen to what the actual regime is saying.
I mean, you should always listen to your antagonists, your adversaries.
You should study them very hard.
What the regime is actually saying on the airwaves on Middle Eastern TV at this point, they are saying that, look, the regime has supporters among basically their baby boomers and older because they remember the anti-American rhetoric that installed the Islamic Republic in the 70s.
They are seeing this actually as an opportunity to remind their younger residents who were more pro-American the dangers of the quote great Satan, right?
And so they're actually using this as a chance to galvanize among a new generation of leadership that'll be hostile to the U.S. From the perspective of American foreign policy, this is a cataclysm.
We are creating a more radicalized, potentially more formidable Islamic Republic.
Okay, I've got my glasses on now so I can actually see who's coming into the East room or not.
We're going to go cut there in a moment for the Commander-in-Chief, President of the United States.
Trita Parsi, Trita, I want you to stick around because I want to get some detailed analysis of you.
But quickly, there's some rumor going around that the president may actually address directly, use this occasion to directly address for a couple of minutes the Iranian people.
What do you think would be from the Iranian people's perspective?
What could the Commander-in-Chief, our President of the United States, say to them, sir?
I got to tell you, Steve, I find this really hard because the most likely thing he's going to say to them is that they should rise up and overthrow the government and that essentially he has paved the way for them to do so.
That is much, much easier said than done.
So I'm not so sure that message, any variation of it really would land particularly well because last time he did encourage them to go out, several thousands of them were killed.
And we see already now that even under the 24-hour in which perhaps there was a window after the Supreme Leader had been killed, we didn't see any mass mobilization or anything that suggested that the organization.
First of all, the protests were clamped down on so brutally in January that while it created even more anger at the same time, it was also very clear that it really scared people.
It was also quite scary to a lot of people who were out there protesting legitimately because they really detest the regime, that they also were scared by seeing that there were elements inside the country that was using the protests to foment violence, to burn mosques, burn banks, police stations, fire trucks, et cetera.
And they were not really ready for that type of a civil war type of a situation.
The regime still has the monopoly on force.
They are the ones who are armed.
They're the ones who are in control.
They, in my view, do not have the support of more than 15, perhaps 20% of the population, but 20% of the population is still 18 million people.
That is not an insignificant number.
So this is not a type of a scenario as it was in Libya or in Iraq, in which, you know, all power is with one single person within this regime and everyone else is essentially against them.
Trita, the president twice when he's done these videos has gone out of his way to tell the army apparatus and the police apparatus and a lot of the people, not just simply the IRGRC, but everybody in law enforcement and in any type of service that you have an opportunity here.
We will give you complete and total immunity if you essentially surrender or come to us or come to our side or come to the side of the Iranian people.
But if you're part of these guys that are putting it down like so viciously back in January, he's blunt.
You will die.
Is that, you believe that having, is that having any impact at all?
We have seen no signs at all that that has had any impact.
And again, part of the reason why it doesn't, or it doesn't, at least so far, is because A, people don't trust Trump.
After seeing twice now in the midst of negotiations, him ordering military force, you know, why would anyone in that system believe that if they defect, they will be safe?
You're asking them to put a tremendous amount of faith in a promise of a person that they have no reason to trust.
And I'm not saying that the U.S. has any reason to trust the Iranians either, but bottom line is the experience of the last couple of years has not convinced anyone on that side, apparently, that this is a promise worth banking on.
Secondly, the remaining people that support this regime who are in the IRGC, they're the most hardcore supporters of the ideals of this revolution, which in their view is about resisting subjugation and surrender to the United States and to Western powers in general.
The idea that they would give up, the idea that surrender is something that they would contemplate rather than thinking that fighting until they die is a more worthy way of going out, particularly when they cannot trust that surrender, again, I think creates a situation in which it is much more likely that they will stay and fight rather than surrender.
And again, if this theory had worked, we would not be in this situation in the first place, because after having moved one third of the U.S. Navy to the Persian Gulf, they should have surrendered.
He just told Brett Baer, because he's been doing a series, you know, Jonathan Carl, you got Jake Tapper, now Bray.
He just told Brett Baer, my concept here is the Venezuelan model, okay, which is they were obviously having discussions with Venezuela beforehand, the people that are in charge today, and they took out the leader and his wife and kind of a decapitation.
What do you interpret?
As someone that's obviously, you've worked with the Persians, you were with President Obama doing the deal.
Is that resonating, you think, of any command structure that's left?
Is a possibility for us to have basically a punitive strike, have a new group come on board, maybe that some people have relationships with, and turn it over to them in 72 hours?
It was a very effective way of taking out that element of the leadership and getting the rest of the leadership to stay in power.
But what did that leadership do?
They completely surrendered.
Trump issued that tweet in which he said that he's now running the country.
One of the first things Venezuela did under this new variation of the regime, they started selling oil to Israel.
So the surrender option for or the defection option for these people essentially means that they would be completely subjugated and they would have to then agree to policies that they have fought their entire lives against.
So it is just inconceivable for me to see that there would be anyone defecting from within that system if that is the outcome, if that is what Trump is looking for.
And so far, every time he says Venezuela, that is what he is saying to them, that it would be that type of subjugation.
And then Iran would have a foreign policy that would be much more similar to that of the UAE, completely catering to the Israelis.
So if it was something else, if he was offering a different type of relationship that would be more even between the United States and Iran, then perhaps you could get people to defect.
But if the defection then automatically leads to them surrendering to policies that they have fought their entire lives against, I just don't find that being something that would attract the critical mass of defections that are needed.
Well, Steve, the confusion really arises from a problem we've dealt with for the last five years.
That's just how to disentangle the imagination that people have of what artificial intelligence is and can do and the reality which is constantly changing with each new advancement.
As far as Claude or OpenAI's GPT or Google's Gemini, any of these, the capabilities are quite limited in a battlefield scenario.
The best that you're going to get out of something like Claude, which is a large language model, is it's going to be able to scrape over classified documents, classified information, and organize it for Intel agents or anyone else that's working with that information.
One of the problems is that as it advances, it allows for things like mass surveillance.
It allows for possibly in the future something like autonomous weapons control.
This was at the heart of the conflict between Pete Hegseth at the Department of War and Dario Amadei at Anthropic.
So I think a real way of looking at what AI as far as large language models is doing is just think of it as a tool that Intel agents or other military personnel are using to organize information and even something as mundane as, say, writing emails or to bounce ideas off of it in a kind of wargaming scenario.
That being said, the capabilities are increasing every week.
So the reason that Pete Hegseth is so intent on having access to something like CLOD or having access to something like GPT and unfettered access is surely an anticipation that even with the limitations now,
that those limitations are going to shrink day by day and that the increased capabilities of these systems will prove that as we've been told over and over and over again, AI will be decisive in warfare.
One other point to make, Steve, is that these large language models are just one type of many different types of AI systems or algorithmic systems.
So you have tons of systems that are used for detecting incoming fire.
You have tons of systems that are used for autonomous response to the incoming fire.
You have tons of different systems of like perception and control that are used for drones and in the near future, swarms and swarms of swarms of drones.
These are all very different from something like Claude or something like GPT.
But GPT, CLOD, any of these large language models, as they get quote unquote smarter, are going to be able to direct, to sense what the drones are sensing and to direct these drones.
This is also an intended use.
And so you could in the future, maybe the near future, have a system like CLOD or a system like GPT that is in control of other systems like drone systems.
It's very complicated, but one thing to emphasize is that these systems aren't like traditional computer programs.
You don't simply put an input in it and a predictable output comes out the other end.
Because they are non-deterministic, they make their own decisions.
I think the most important thing he should do is to talk to the American people and find an off-ramp out of this.
I think he thought that this was going to be quick.
This was going to be like Venezuela.
By Sunday evening, he would have this wrapped up.
It would be glorious.
By Monday morning, when markets open, this would all be gone and it would have no impact.
It's not turning out that way.
The Iranian strategy is to prolong this war, to expand this war.
And their calculation is that they're going to try to inflict as much damage on the U.S. as possible because they believe that's the only way that there could be a durable ceasefire afterwards, meaning that it has to be so costly that no one wants to go back to this war.
Their conclusion from the previous war is that they prematurely agreed to a ceasefire.
They went for a ceasefire after 12 days.
And then six, seven months later, Israel is back pushing the United States to go into this war.
So if there's going to be a ceasefire again, they're going to probably try to make sure that it's as costly as possible before they agree to it.
This means that this can drag out way longer than what President Trump has said about four weeks.
And I think that's something that he just came up with.
I think he wanted it to be much shorter than that.
And this could very easily then end up into a scenario that starts looking like an endless war.
And we saw earlier today that there's this opening of the door for ground troops.
This is all starting to look like a disaster.
And off-ramp in a speech to the American people is what is needed at this point.
We have no indication whatsoever that the president thought this was going to be a quick couple-day war and it was going to be in and out.
They've done months and months of planning.
They've done, they've moved a third of the Navy over there.
I'm persuaded that the president sees this as part of World War III.
He's going to do what it takes to make sure that Iran does not have the capability of hurting the United States in the region.
I don't think there was any indication that this was going to be quick.
When he says he wants to have a Venezuelan-style outcome, he means a regime of the Iranian people, in the case of Venezuela, it's the Venezuelan people who are running the place.
It's not our job to liberate the Iranian people.
If they do that, great.
And I agree with some of your earlier guests.
That's not an easy thing to achieve.
The Iranian people are not Jeffersonian Democrats.
They practically invented slavishness in so many ways.
They're not going to become a democratic regime in probably my lifetime.
If that ever happens, it will be because they decide that's what should happen.
The job of President Trump has been to make sure that they cannot cause harm to the United States.
This is not going to be an easy thing.
We may run out of munitions.
Good.
We'll make more munitions.
That's difficult.
Our defense industry is not quite up to speed on so many things, but they should be working around the clock to make sure that we have the munitions we need to defend the United States.
And so I think, in a way, take a deep breath, not you, but anybody who's opposed to all this and just take this for what it is.
Part of the history that is playing out today that will over time accrue benefits to the United States.
I'm going to get Captain Finnell sent me an amazing piece about this was the opening salvo in the Indo-Pacific age and the end of the Pacific War.
This is much more about that part of the Eurasian landmass and all about the Chinese Communist Party, but we'll do that at another time.
While I have you, before we go to the East Room, you wrote a brilliant piece.
And to me, this is a priority.
You wrote an incredible piece, as only you can, about why you make the argument the president of the United States has to nationalize the elections in 2026.
Brian Kennedy, can you want me to throw a few points before we go to the East Room?
And when you're in a war, you can't rely on a voting system that could any way be compromised.
And because it's compromised, undermine the authenticity of the election.
In this piece, I argue that we ought to ban the voting machines, the electronic voting machines, in part because they use Chinese hardware.
Almost every single system we have operating in the United States, even those that are made in the United States, use Chinese hardware, meaning computer chips, what have you, that could easily compromise the system.
The Democrats in years past themselves were very concerned about the ability of the machines to be compromised after they stole the 2020 election.
That narrative went away.
So I'm encouraging the president because of the potential for foreign interference to ban the voting machines.
Once he does that, you're going to have to have a nationwide system where we use paper ballots, voter ID, everything that we need to do.
I want to thank the blaze for putting up Brian Kennedy's magnificent piece.
And if Mo and Grace and Elizabeth can push it out to everybody, we need people to read it and we're going to have you back on.
But just because I got to go to the east room here, president's a couple of minutes going on.
Brian, let's say we assume, let's say you're right.
There's no doubt.
Just the logistics of that.
One is the president of the United States, if you were counseling him, you would say, hey, you're drop dead date to announce this so we can get all the logistics done because it's a massive logistics exercise.
What's the kill date that on this side of it, we can do it?
It says most of the right things, but it leaves it the hand, the current executive order will ban most of the electronic voting, but not all of the electronic voting.
It does much of the right thing, Steve, but we cannot leave any of the machines or tabulators or what have you.
We can't leave any of that in place.
It is mostly pretty good and pretty sound.
What's going to have to happen, though, is that states are going to have to sign some kind of consent decree where they agree to follow a system in their state.
Imagine the state of California, for instance.
They're going to have to sign an agreement.
They're going to have paper ballots counted by human beings, voter ID, et cetera.
Either we're going to, with Mike Johnson and John Thune, again, not the strongest of reads here, but they're going to have to say, if you don't follow this system, we're not going to sit those members of Congress or the Senate that get elected.
Because a third of the country would not be represented.
The more commonsensical thing is to have a federal system where either you nationalize the National Guard or federalize the National Guard in each state to oversee this, but they have to consent to some kind of system where they actually carry out the paper ballots and the voter ID and the hand counting.
Either we're going to take this seriously or we're not.
Trina Parsi said, hey, you don't need to talk to the Iranian people.
You need to talk to the American people.
If you're advising the president of the United States right now, before he walks out, what is your guidance of what you think he should say to the American people, sir?
He should explain a clear rationale about why they did this, address the potential, and I think clear contradictions by other administration officials and Hill Hawks and neoconservatives and the Israelis, our partners over there.
And then additionally, he should explain the path to an off-ramp and how this is going to be a quick military exercise, frankly, and that we are going to leave.
I think he should additionally, very importantly and most importantly, speak to the anxieties within his own base and within the broad swath, tens of millions of Americans who gave this guy a chance because he was a different type of Republican, opposed to regime change war, opposed endless wars, and opposed to the Middle Eastern expansion imperial project.
And I think he should explain why this is different and why he's not going to be George W. Bush.
I think he should address it directly.
I don't think he should take for granted his supporters.
And I think he should explain why this is not a bad deja vu trip to 2006.
What about he's said over and over again, he's decapitated the regime from the senior level, from Ayatollah, the 40 top guys, like Ninejod and others, right?
We understand it goes much deeper.
Don't you believe he has, don't you believe he's gone a long way to taking out the bad guys and that there is some, you know, this Roman punitive punch that you can do and then toss it to who's left and just go?
Or you don't believe that?
Because are you saying Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham are pitching something else on Capitol Hill?
I think clearly Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham are pitching something else on Capitol Hill.
I think basically they're selling him a bill of goods.
The president has bought some of the items on the menu, but not all of the items on the menu.
Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton are old guard 2000s George W. Bush era neoconservatives.
They are taking what they can get from this president.
And they're frankly driving him, as PJR work, the late great PJR work said, they're driving the president like a rented car.
They're going to move on from him whenever he leaves the scene and they're going to continue their ideology into the 2030s if they're unfortunately still in government.
I think to the question of decapitation within the Iranian government, yeah, they removed the head of state, Ali Khamenei.
But as mentioned earlier in the segment, there is an entire apparatus beneath them.
And I do have to flag the Pentagon did a $500 million war game on this in 2002.
Granted, a lot of things have changed, and the taxes have changed, but strategically, they identified one key part of what this would look like, which is that the Iranians would be extremely resilient to leadership decapitation strikes, that they would just go next man up, as you would say, and they would prepare from there.
And additionally, to an extent, like a lot of modern societies, Iran has lapsed into gerontocracy.
If you remove the gerontocrats, you're just installing younger, potentially more able, more vicious successors.
Now, there's also opportunity there.
Maybe these are people that will understand the U.S. system and negotiate more pragmatically than their predecessors.
But I don't fail to see how this is actually going to collapse the regime.
I think the U.S. needs to be moved towards, number one, telling Israel no.
This will never stop unless the president tells Netanyahu that he's out on this for the rest of his term.
I mean, because isn't part of the part of the off-ramp is you hit them, you've done as much regime change as you can, you toss the keys, and then you tell Israel, hey, if you want to continue on, you guys go for it.
I mean, we can't, we should not try to control them.
If they want to go for it, as long as we're not involved, do you have any problem with that?
I mean, this goes back, you know, Jack Posovic has mentioned it earlier.
I think he did a documentary or something on it, but the Clean Break memo authored on June 1st, 1996, was 30 years ago this year, argued that the U.S. and Israel should allow to, quote, break different countries in the Middle East and quote, secure the realm.
What is securing the realm?
It's greater Israel.
I think, you know, it's not as if the U.S. was totally naive.
Ladies and gentlemen, please bow with me as I ask God's blessings upon this ceremony.
Almighty God, your steady hand has guided this Republic for nearly 250 years.
From its birth in the wilderness to this very hour, we come to you now with grateful hearts.
We assemble here today to honor men who, when the test came, were steadfast and unmovable.
We thank you for the unyielding conviction of Master Sergeant Roderick Edmonds, who looked evil in the eyes and did not flinch.
And we thank you for the battlefield grit of Command Sergeant Major Terry Richardson, courage that saved lives in Vietnam, and courage that stands before us today.
And Lord, we thank you for Staff Sergeant Michael Aulis, who, in a final selfless act, made his own body a shield for a friend.
Bless the family and friends of these great men of honor, O Lord, and forbid that we leave this place as mere admirers of their heroic deeds.
Plant in our hearts a measure of their courage that we might prove worthy of the freedom for which they and generations before them defended.
And Lord, now let the light of liberty continue to shine on our great nation.
We pray in the strong name of the one who guides us, this will defend.
So before we begin this important ceremony, and there's no ceremony that can be much more important than this, let me provide a brief update on Operation Epic Fury.
Today, the United States military continues to carry out large-scale combat operations in Iran to eliminate the grave threats posed to America by this terrible terrorist regime.
Following our obliteration of Iran's nuclear program in Operation Midnight Hammer a short while ago, we warned Iran not to make any attempt to rebuild at a different location because they were unable to use the ones that we so powerfully blew up.
But they ignored those warnings and refused to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons.
In addition, the regime's conventional ballistic missile program was growing rapidly and dramatically, and this posed a very clear, colossal threat to America and our forces stationed overseas.
The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases both local and overseas and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America.
The purpose of this fast-growing missile program was to shield their nuclear weapon development and make it extraordinarily difficult for anyone to stop them from making these highly forbidden by us nuclear weapons.
We were the ones that were complaining.
We were the ones that wanted it stopped.
But everybody was behind us.
They just didn't have the courage to say so.
An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat to the Middle East, but also to the American people.
Our country itself would be under threat, and it was very nearly under threat.
I was very proud to have knocked out the Iran nuclear deal by President Barack Hussein Obama.
That was a horrible, horrible, dangerous document.
They would have had nuclear weapons three years ago, and they would have used them.
But I'll not let that happen.
For almost 47 years, this regime has been attacking the United States and killing Americans.
Every time you see someone with missing arms and legs or a face that's been absolutely shattered violently, it was almost certainly caused by an Iran roadside bomb.
They were put there by General Salome, who was the father of the roadside bomb.
Very proudly, he thought, but I terminated him in my first term.
This was our last best chance to strike what we're doing right now and eliminate the intolerable threats posed by this sick and sinister regime.
And they are indeed sick and sinister.
Our objectives are clear.
First, we're destroying Iran's missile capabilities, and you see that happening on an hourly basis, and their capacity to produce brand new ones, and pretty good ones they make.
Second, we're annihilating their Navy.
We've knocked out already 10 ships.
They're at the bottom of the sea.
Third, we're ensuring that the world's number one sponsor of terror weapon, never going to have a nuclear weapon.
I said that from the beginning.
They're never going to have a nuclear weapon.
They were on the road to getting one legitimately through a deal that was signed foolishly by our country.
And finally, we're ensuring that the Iranian regime cannot continue to arm, fund, and direct terrorist armies outside of their borders.
And we thought we had a deal, but then they backed out and they came back.
You can't deal with these people.
You've got to do it the right way.
Today, we grieve for the four heroic American service members who have been killed in action and send our love and support to their families.
In their memory, we continue this mission with ferocious, unyielding resolve to crush the threat this terrorist regime.
A threat indeed it is.
We have the strongest and most powerful by far military in the world, and we will easily prevail.
We're already substantially ahead of our time projections, but whatever the time is, it's okay.
Whatever it takes, we will always, and we have right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that.
We'll do it.
Whatever somebody said today, they said, oh, well, if the president wants to do it really quickly, after that, he'll get bored.
I don't get bored.
There's nothing boring about this.
Do you agree with that, Pete?
I don't think there's anything, Mr. General.
I think there's nothing boring about it.
Somebody actually said from the media, I think he'll get bored after about a week or two.
No, we don't get bored.
I never get bored.
If I got bored, I wouldn't be standing here right now, I guarantee you that, to go through what I had to go through.
We also projected four weeks to terminate the military leadership, and as you know, that was done in about an hour, so we're ahead of schedule there by a lot.
But please join me in thanking every American service member who bravely is standing in harm's way.
They really are incredible, and I just want to thank you.
We have a lot of them right here.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody.
We have a lot of great service members here with us, too, in this beautiful building.
Isn't it beautiful?
We're adding on to the building a little bit.
We're improving the building.
See that nice drape?
When that comes down right now, you see a very, very deep hole.
But in about a year and a half from now, you're going to see a very, very beautiful building.
And there's your entrance to it right there.
In fact, it looks so nice, I don't think I'll even save money on the doors because it can't get more beautiful than that.
I picked those drapes in my first term.
I always like gold, but I think we can save a lot of money.
I just saved curtains.
But, and it will be, it'll be spectacular.
It'll be the most beautiful ballroom.
I believe it's because I built many a ballroom.
I believe it's going to be the most beautiful ballroom anywhere in the world.
And when you hear all that hammering out there, you know why the first lady is not thrilled exactly.
She said, Will the pile drivers ever stop?
You know, they go from 6 in the morning till 11:30 in the evening.
But now, for the reason that we're gathered this morning to recognize the unsurpassed courage of three really incredible American heroes, one living and two no longer with us.
So together, we recognize the exceptional valor of Master Sergeant Roderick Edmonds.