President Trump demands unconditional surrender from Iran one week into the conflict, sparking debates over congressional authorization and rising gas prices. Military historian Pete Mansoor argues air power cannot achieve regime change without ground troops, while Daniel Yudkin of More in Common urges bridging political divides through shared civic values rather than algorithmic polarization. Ultimately, the episode highlights the tension between aggressive foreign intervention strategies and the urgent domestic need for unity amidst global instability. [Automatically generated summary]
Live, retired U.S. Army Colonel Peter Mansoor on the ongoing U.S. and Israeli combat operations in Iran.
And then Daniel Yudkin, director of the Beacon Project at Morin Common, will talk about survey findings on how Americans define civic responsibility in modern life and what it can mean for addressing political polarization.
Washington Journal is next.
Join the conversation.
Good morning.
It's Saturday, March 7th, 2026.
The conflict in Iran has now hit one week.
And with strikes continuing in the region today, Iran's president this morning called President Trump's demand for unconditional surrender a, quote, dream that they should take to their grave.
This morning, we'll begin by getting your reaction on phone line split as usual by political party.
Democrats, it's 202-748-8000.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can also send us a text, that number, 202-748-8003.
If you do, please include your name and where you're from.
Otherwise, catch up with us on social media.
On X, it's at C-SPANWJ on Facebook.
It's facebook.com slash C-SPAN.
And a very good Saturday morning to you.
You can go ahead and start calling in now.
This is the headline this morning from NPR.
Iran's president apologizes for strikes on neighbors as strikes pound their cities.
That story noting that Iranian President Massoud Pezzeshkian said on Saturday that it would suspend attacks on countries in the region unless an attack on Iran originated from those countries and also said the U.S. demand for surrender is, quote, a dream that they should take to their grave.
The president responding on his true social page within the past hour, this is President Trump up and posting his truths this morning saying Iran, which is being beat to hell, has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore.
This promise was only made because of the relentless U.S. and Israeli attack.
The president going on to say they were looking to take over and rule the Middle East.
It is the first time that Iran has ever lost in thousands of years to surrendering Middle East countries and the surrounding Middle East countries.
He said, they have said, thank you, President Trump.
I have said, you're welcome.
Iran is no longer the bully of the Middle East.
They are instead the losers of the Middle East and will be for many decades until they surrender or more likely, completely collapse.
The president saying, today, Iran will be hit very hard under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death because of Iran's bad behavior.
Are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time.
The president thanking the American people for their attention to that matter.
That's his truth social post this morning.
We're expected to hear more from President Trump around 10 a.m. Eastern time.
He's set to deliver remarks to the Shield of America Summit that's taking place in Miami, Florida.
The president also today, this afternoon, 1:30 p.m. Eastern, will be in Dover, Delaware for that dignified transfer ceremony for the first Americans to have died in this conflict.
That's the president's schedule today.
Our schedule this morning on the Washington Journal.
We're with you for three hours today and beginning by getting your reaction to the latest one week into the conflict in Iran.
202-748-8,000 for Democrats to call.
Republicans, 202-748-8,001.
Independents, 202-748-8002.
Roy is up first out of Florida this morning, line for Democrats.
Roy, go ahead.
Yeah, this is Roy.
Yeah, I'm sick of this war.
We never should have went in there without Congress authorization.
And Congress has ceded to one man, Trump.
He can do anything he wants.
But the sad part about it is, is the gas prices are way, way, way up.
Just horrendous.
Plus, we've left our citizens over in the Middle East, and we don't know if they're going to be able to get home.
This should have been worked out better, and it should have gone through Congress.
This man is fuming chaos in the world, and from day one, he's been a literal failure for his voters and everything, worrying about Iran.
I didn't vote for him, but I'll tell you one thing.
We could end up in World War III because of this.
You got Russia, you got China, and he did not think clearly about this.
Iran's more than, they bit off more than he can chew with Iran.
That's why no president has ever went into Iran because of a regional conflict.
And this is, what does he want?
The oil?
I mean, I have no idea.
You tell me, because I certainly don't know what this is about.
We still haven't been given an objective of it.
So that's all.
The president using that term yesterday, unconditional surrender, that's what he's calling for from Iran now, posting that very early yesterday morning.
And as we showed you, he's up and posting on True Social again this morning.
There's no possible way that he'll ever get it.
There's just not.
That's Roy in Florida.
You mentioned Americans Overseas, the Wall Street Journal, their Saturday edition with a story about it today.
Americans say that the U.S. left them stranded is the headline.
The State Department says 24,000 Americans have returned from the Middle East since the U.S. and Israel began launching their strikes on Iran on Saturday, and that 13,000 of them received direct assistance, including evacuation flights beginning on Wednesday.
That's the Wall Street Journal today.
This is Kevin Staten Island, Republican.
Kevin, good morning.
Kevin, you with us?
Hi, good morning.
How are you?
Nice to be on your show.
What are your thoughts this Saturday morning?
I support the unconditional surrender.
Former military, I was involved in intelligence gathering in the Middle East and happened to know the atrocities that the Ayatollah has committed, both present and in the past.
If you look at the slaughter of the Bakhtiari family in the Pierre Hotel, which they were the former Shaw of Iran's oil minister, and up to today, he went to prison because they kidnapped his mother and sister, and they tried to force him to make WMD since he's a biochemical engineer.
This is Kharush Bakhtiari.
Unfortunately, he did go to prison, but this goes to show you the great lengths that the Ayatolli regime will go through and put its people through and put human beings through, period.
Kevin, how long did you know?
How long did you work in the intelligence community?
Excuse me?
How long did you work in the intelligence community?
I did two tours overseas in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
What years, do you mind saying?
Sure.
85 to 90.
Okay, and before that, I was abroad without revealing what I was doing.
But the idea is, when you have people like this, you need to take them down.
You need to put a peaceful regime in there.
You need to put a pro-democratic regime.
And these people, there's no bargaining with.
They don't like Christians.
And they will imprison Christians and kill them also.
As you've seen recently with these leftists from their groups, the Islamic fundamentalists beheading a priest in France in the middle of church.
I mean, you know, so this is nothing new to people, but the Democrats have to come around and say, hey, listen, Donald Trump is doing a great job.
He's performing like he is supposed to.
And not only America is looking up to him, but the world has prayed.
The Islamic community, period, which is very trivial on what people do to their own people, they're praising him.
I've got your point, Kevin.
That's Kevin in Staten Island.
This is Al in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Independent.
Good morning.
Go ahead.
Good morning.
You know, I'm old enough to remember where politics ended at the shore's edge.
That stopped many years ago when Democrats wanted to politicize this.
I mean, my God, we're seven days into this.
No way could we fight a World War II today, what the Democrats and the leftists are saying.
I want to roll this back to the Carter administration.
We have followed your policies, the leftists.
It was a battle in the Carter administration between two factions, and they went with the leftists.
And we didn't back the Shah.
Yes, the Shah of Iran was brutal.
But what do we have today?
Something more brutal with potential nuclear weapons.
They've killed over a thousand Americans.
They've blown off legs of many others.
So they are not our friends.
And this isn't about doing what's right in Iran with the Democrats.
They want a political win here.
So I don't know what you're going to do with this.
Biden had four years to deal with it.
Obama sent them money.
So this is the right action.
And folks, if you have to pay a little more for gas in the context of what's going on, I think we can absorb that for a little while.
That's Al in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
This is Gail, Glen Cove, New York.
Gail, good morning.
One week into this conflict.
What are your thoughts?
Yes, good morning.
My thoughts are, I'm scared, to tell you the truth.
And I'm scared because it feels like our president is drunk on power.
And I think he has very childlike almost fantasy about we're going to get them, you know, bomb them to smithereens.
I mean, we're going to leave Iran totally destroyed like Gaza.
I just, you know, and I don't think that's good for us in the long run.
They're going to hate us.
Not just Iran, but the whole world.
We're supposed to be the good guys.
And we don't feel like the good guys to me.
We feel like the bad guys.
It's like, oh, and the other thing is that the guy in charge of defense, he's so macho.
He reminds me of teenage boys that they really go around bragging, you know, through chest outs and thumping themselves.
It's not that simple.
This is very complicated.
This has been going on for years.
It's just so complicated.
You need smart people to be involved, not macho people.
And I just hope we come to our senses.
Thank you very much.
That's Gail in New York.
Her thoughts on President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
This is Peggy Noonan.
If it's Saturday, it's Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal.
Her thoughts on Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump.
First on Hegseth from her column today.
Someone has to calm him down, she says.
He's supposed to be trying to get the world to see wisdom of the administration's actions.
Instead, he's something between an excitable morning TV anchor and the rooster who thought he brought the dawn.
We're playing for keeps, quote unquote.
We're punching them while they're down.
He brags about our, quote, lethality.
Stop talking like that, Peggy Noonan says.
Don't feed the stereotypes.
Don't tempt the gods on President Trump.
This is what she has to say.
Mr. Trump first won the presidency with fiery denunciations of illegal immigration and forever wars.
He doesn't like war, but he looks to have grown to like sparks.
And he had a lot of recent good fortune with the use of force.
When he first bombed Iran, that country did little in response.
When he moved on Venezuela, plucking their ruler from its bed, there was no blowback.
It's possible this has left him thinking the world's bad guys are a Potumpkin village, that they talk big but fold quickly.
But is that true? She asks.
He is gambling when he thinks he's on a winning streak.
Iran's government ducked in cover through the June bombings, but now they'll be fighting to keep from losing everything.
It's hard to imagine the regime's death throes, if it comes to that, will be pretty.
Peggy Noonan in today's Wall Street Journal.
This is Bill, Lexington, South Carolina, Republican.
Good morning.
Yes, hi.
You know, it's a shame that this country has gotten to where it is.
Come home and fix America, you jerk.
And I'm a Republican.
Robert Trump had a home just up the street from me when I lived in New York.
And those two guys that you had on previously, you should ask people one more question before you see.
You say, where do we live?
What's our area code?
Well, those two guys from Staten Island or whatever, they were Jewish.
And that's what we're doing.
We have no idea what their religion was.
And it's not something we usually ask when people call in unless we're having a specific question about a religious topic.
Yeah, about a it is religion, but it's Palestine there.
And let's leave other people alone and stop just using, letting people use America.
Because in this country, okay, and I'm of Jewish heritage, Hungarian Jewish heritage, okay?
In this country, the media, Wall Street, and everything is controlled by Washington.
Of 435 people in the House of Representatives, over 200 of them are Jewish.
All right, that's Bill in South Carolina.
This is Deborah in Lutz, Florida, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
I just feel very, very, very concerned that there's no plan for the tomorrow.
I mean, there's no plan for when the bombing stops.
I don't think he really had any plan for the bombing to begin with.
I mean, because we've heard so many versions of what his plan was.
It doesn't seem like there ever was a plan.
We just seem like bullies of the world now.
Feeling Avenged and Concerned00:14:58
Venezuela says he's going into Cuba.
It just seems very inappropriate, un-American.
It kind of makes you ashamed of your government.
Thank you.
That's Deborah in Florida.
This is the lead story in today's New York Times.
The headline: Trump says surrender must be unconditional for any deal with Iran.
They also looked at the polling when it came to this action, the latest polls that we've seen.
They write he's the first president in the modern era to take the United States to war without the support of the public, pointing to support of his bombardment for Iran has ranged from 27% in a Reuters Ipsos poll to 41% in a CNN survey, far below the level of public backing that Mr. Trump's predecessors initially enjoyed when they used force overseas.
The New York Times today.
This is Dennis Lexington, North Carolina, Democrat.
Good morning.
Good morning, sir.
I want to thank you for taking my call.
I'm a disabled veteran.
Now, Trump talked about he won the unconditional surrender.
What is the cost?
The cost is American men and women of the military.
If we send grand troops over there, we will have greater losses than the ones that we have now.
He do not respect the military.
It said do not respect the military.
They think of us as toy soldiers.
The military is there.
We shouldn't have been in that situation like we are now.
But we got the people that calling in and praising him and all this.
What is the cost of your freedom and the people that are fighting for us?
If we go over there and fight, our military will get overrun, killed off, and we will have greater numbers than we had in the first, the Gulf War and the Iraqi War, and equal to Vietnam.
Now, American people need to ask themselves: are you willing to send your Men, I mean, young men, young women to a brand new war.
Y'all need to ask yourself.
I could tell a big game on the phone, but you need to ask the parents of soldiers.
How do they feel?
It's Dennis in Lexington, North Carolina.
Again, the first casualties of this conflict will be brought home today to Dover, Delaware.
The dignified transfer taking place today, 1.30 p.m. Eastern.
President Trump is expected to be in attendance along with the First Lady.
President Trump was posting on True Social this morning in the 6 a.m. hour about the latest promising more strikes today.
And yesterday from the White House, going back and forth with reporters at an event, originally about college sports, but he was asked quite a bit about the conflict in Iran.
This is the president from yesterday.
Iran, we're doing very well.
Somebody said, how would you score it from 0 to 10?
I said, I'd give it a 12 to a 15.
Their army is gone.
They're just about, look, their navy is gone.
Their communications are gone.
Their leaders are gone.
Two sets of their leaders are gone.
They're down to their third set.
Their Air Force is wiped out entirely.
Think of it.
They have 32 ships.
All 32 are at the bottom of the ocean.
Other than that, they're doing very well, Coach.
Very well.
We're doing, our military is doing phenomenally.
That's the big thing for this week.
We seem to have a new thing every week.
But the situation with a very bad and very sick group of leaders who were killing a lot of people, a lot of our people were being killed.
They were being maimed.
They were being destroyed with their bombs all over the place, planted in roads, and we call them the roadside bombs, walking around without legs, without arms, face blasted, killed many, many people.
And we had a choice.
We could take it and go on like that for years or do something about it.
And we did something about it.
And people are very impressed with our military and they admire our military with what happened in Venezuela and what's happening now.
What's happened with the B-2 bombers before this, where they took out the nuclear capability or potential of Iran.
I think we're right now we're a country that's more respected than we've ever been respected before.
It was President Trump yesterday from the White House taking your phone calls this morning on the Washington Journal.
202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8001 for Republicans.
Independence 202-748-8002.
We'll stay specifically on Iran for about the next 10 minutes or so, and then we'll open it up at 7:30 at the bottom of the hour for open forum.
Plenty more going on, including the labored report that came out yesterday: job losses to the tune of almost 100,000 job losses, and then the replacement of Chrissy Noon at the Department of Homeland Security.
So, plenty for you to talk about after quite a momentous week here in Washington.
So, we'll give you that opportunity.
We'll stay on Iran, though, for the next 10 minutes.
This is Paul in Fort Myers, Florida, Republican.
Good morning.
Yes, hi, my name's Paul, and I just want to say that I am also a disabled veteran.
And I respect the gentleman that called earlier who is a disabled veteran and all veterans.
I just want to say that I do support President Donald Trump.
When this started, representatives from Iran met with our representatives in Oman and then in Switzerland.
When they started their negotiation out, they said they had 460 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, which could form 11 nuclear weapons.
Once this happened and they stalled on negotiations, President Trump Israel made a decision, and their decision, I stand by.
And to the people that are complaining about a little bit of gas going up, let me tell you, you're going to be complaining a lot more if a nuclear weapon goes off in your city, destroys your family and friends.
So, I support Donald Trump 100% on this.
And I think he's doing a great job.
I think the Iranians here in the United States support him in that because they didn't want to be under their families being under an Islamic regime that's pressing them and that sort of thing.
And also, I just want to say that I'm an American patriot.
I was at 3rd Ranger Battalion at Fort Benning, Georgia.
I love this country.
I love the freedoms that we have in this country.
I fought for our freedoms, for what we have.
And I just want to say to everyone also that I'm a Christian and I put my faith and trust in Jesus Christ.
And if you're listening, you know, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
And it says, If my people will turn, if my people who are called by my name will repent and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and I will heal their land.
And this is a message that should hopefully awaken us in the United States.
Thank you for taking my call, and God bless.
It's Paul in Fort Myers, Florida.
This is Marty Del Mar, New York Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, I tend to think of myself as somebody who tends not to believe in conspiracy theories and such.
But in my opinion, the margin that Trump means.
Does that mean we're about to go down a conspiracy theory, Marty?
No, well, okay, slightly, yes, actually.
But I'll be brief about it, I promise.
But to me, the decision to go to war in Iran, I think Trump would know that it's really a horrible decision.
I think the economic toll it's going to pay, that we are all going to pay, I don't think we've come to realize it yet.
I think it could be very severe.
And there's no possibility that Iran is going to surrender.
They are committed.
We are attacking them on their home.
Imagine if somebody did that to our country.
We would not surrender, please.
And it's a huge country, 90 million people.
They can absorb all this.
But anyway, and also, we can't, it's not like we can afford this.
This is costing us a billion dollars a day of money that we are borrowing.
So we're just getting deeper into debt.
And the real crisis that we're facing in this country is the debt.
And that might be why we're going into war here.
But it makes me wonder.
The decision is so irrational.
It really makes me wonder, getting back to the conspiracy, about what is in these Epstein files that he is maybe trying to distract us from.
It must be, it might be really bad.
That's all.
That's Marty in New York.
This is Linda Orange, Connecticut.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning, John.
First of all, I listen every day faithfully, and I respect your efforts.
Secondly, I also hear every day some untruths.
One is Barack Obama did not give Iran any money.
It was their money.
Ronald Reagan froze it during his presidency.
We went to the world court.
We lost our case.
We had to turn the funds back to Iran.
And Barack Obama was the president when that happened.
This is something that anyone could research and find out.
It's the truth.
Secondly, even if Iran gives an unconditional surrender, if you recall, they had the war with Iraq.
Iraq devastated them for a while.
Even if they give an unconditional surrender now, they'll lay low for a while and then they'll come back.
These wars go back thousands of years.
We have no threat from Iran.
I deeply love and respect our military, and I don't want to see them go and sacrifice for That really is out of our control.
That's what I have to say today.
I too am a Christian, and I don't see how any Christian could follow a man who doesn't speak and speak the truth.
And with that, I'll bid you all a good day.
That's Linda in Orange, Connecticut.
This is Fareed Zakaria in the pages of the Washington Post today in their opinion section.
The headline of his piece, An Iranian Civil War is not in America's interest.
He writes, the most dangerous element of this war is not that the lead actor is improvising like a saxophone player.
It is that the two countries waging the war have separate and perhaps incompatible agendas.
For Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the war is clearly about destroying the Islamic Republic.
Iran is a country that could easily explode, he writes, and that's how civil wars begin.
For Israel, this is likely an acceptable outcome, he says.
It rids the country of its greatest foe, and if it produces chaos in Iran, so be it.
Though he writes, an Iranian civil war is not in America's interest, and it is not in the interest of America's closest Arab allies who depend on the region being stable and predictable so that oil, goods, money, and people can flow freely and easily through it.
Washington needs to find a way to ensure that it secures the gains it has made in this war, a disarmed and defanged Iran without pushing the entire country into civil war.
Fareed Zakaria.
Today in the Washington Post, if you want to read a couple minutes here in which we'll focus specifically on Iran and then we can open it up at 7.30 at the bottom of the hour for open forum, any public policy issue, we can continue to talk about Iran if you want to do that.
Just want to give you the opportunity.
Again, with a lot going on in Washington, including the jobs report that came out yesterday that got a lot of attention.
This is the front page of the Washington Post.
So flipping over from the opinion page to the front page, the labor report flashes a warning light is their headline.
The unemployment rate ticking up to 4.4% as employers shed 92,000 jobs in February, dimming rebound hopes.
Forecasters had predicted that employers would actually add some 50,000 jobs last month.
That was very wrong.
92,000 jobs lost last month, according to the latest jobs report and previous jobs reports revised down from previous months.
Laura in Spokane, Washington, Republican, good morning.
You're up.
Good morning, John.
I have felt I have been just more or less holding my breath over all of this situation.
And I guess my hope is that I feel avenged for all the horror and all the pain and all the suffering and the death of our military and our civilians inflicted by this Iranian regime.
And I feel avenged and I feel better about it.
Don't feel good, but I felt avenged for it.
And I have hope for the Iranian people, which I believe are Persians.
And this is going to sound really gruly, but those girls had the most beautiful dresses.
Traditional Persian dresses were so gorgeous.
And their hair ornaments and all this other stuff, they were really, really an advanced shark culture before this Muslim regime moved in, Republic, whatever it is.
Can you come back to avenged for me?
What incident, what were you looking for revenge for?
What was the incident that in your mind needed this vengeance?
Incident Of Revenge00:13:16
Oh, all of it.
I'm an old lady, and I've watched our military get blown up, and I've seen our men on the ship crying, you know, with their hands behind their backs when Obama was in.
I've seen all of that, and I felt pain over it.
And it's been a burden on me, you know, and just total frustration for years.
Specifically, towards Iran.
Towards, yes, the regime that wants to kill all of us, you know, and they just killed 40,000 people.
And they wonder why we want to bomb them, you know, take them off the face of the earth.
I mean, really.
So I hope to see.
I just, like I said, I'm holding my breath, but I do feel somewhat avenged and a little bit more at peace with what was done to in the past by this regime.
Gotcha.
That's Laura in Spokane, Washington.
It's 7:30 on the East Coast, so open forum.
You can go and call in on any public policy topic, or we can stay on Iran if you want to.
This is where we let you lead the program.
So go ahead and keep calling in.
We'll do this until 8, 8.05 or so Eastern Time, chatting with you this morning and hearing from you after a momentous week in Washington and at the top of the list, of course, one week into this conflict in Iran.
This is Hubert in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Independent.
Good morning.
Hey, I hope you're doing well this morning.
I'm just calling in because this war is absolutely a mistake.
It is something we should not be doing.
The president has made the sole decision to enter Iran against the better interests of the American people.
The only people this benefits is the largest sponsor, state sponsor of terrorism in the world, Benjamin Yetan Yahoo and the Israeli government.
They are the only ones who benefit from this uncertainty and instability in the region, backed by the largest military power in the world.
APAC is the largest sponsor of your representatives in the Congress.
And they have been pushing the button, poking the bear, trying to get us into this war for two years.
How are we going to, as an American people, divest from this terrorist state and move towards peace in the Middle East?
Because at the end of the day, there's only one party that's always involved in these conflicts, and it's Israel.
That's Hubert in Minnesota.
This is Lynn in Statesville, North Carolina.
Democrat, good morning.
Yeah, I wanted to talk about Trump starting a war that he lied about.
Iran didn't have any reason to fight just hit us first.
It was just a lie to begin with.
And a president that would lie about that doesn't do anything.
He doesn't care about our troops.
He doesn't care about the people.
He has other things to worry about more than starting a war across the other side of the world.
He got problems here.
He don't want to deal with them.
And his poll numbers drop.
That's the problem.
That's the reason he wanted to start a war.
So we ain't got no worry about what's going on in his life.
If the Epstein file will pop up, that's the main reason we ain't talking about it now.
Trump doesn't care about nothing but Trump and what makes him look good.
He don't care about this country.
If he would, he'd be trying to bring the prices down.
And that's my decision.
Now, I mean, it's just that we got an eating in the White House.
And it's power crazy.
And that's my opinion.
That's Lynn in Statesville, North Carolina.
This is the Open Secrets website, opensecrets.org.
The previous caller was talking about biggest donors to American candidates, political action committees is what they're known for.
Open Secrets tracks spending by candidates, but also political action committees.
The caller was talking about APAC, the American Israel Political Public Affairs Committee.
They rank third, at least in the 2023-2024 cycle in terms of total amount given to candidates at just over $3 million.
Never Back Down, Ron DeSantis' PAC at $5 million.
The National Association of Realtors at $4.2 million.
If you want to go and look at spending by political action committees, by candidates, where they're giving money, who candidate organizations are giving money to afterwards, all available at OpenSecrets.
OpenSecrets.org is where you can go.
Margaret in Alabama, Republican, good morning.
You are next.
Good morning, Mr. John.
I am to the point where I believe it was the time to do something about Iran.
I understand fully why the president has decided with our troops, with the Navy and every CIA, whoever, Israel, to go after this tyrant.
I personally knew someone who was killed on 9-11, and to think that terrorism isn't happening here, it is.
It is, I do not understand how you could say this isn't something that needs to be done when their own leader had all those people massacred.
What, 30,000 just for protesting.
So I don't understand it.
Maybe they've never had, know someone who was put in the ground or burned up alive at the Pentagon because someone hated us.
We are a Judeo-Christian country.
I think that's a good thing.
There are a lot of good things about this country.
And we need to support our troops, support the military, support the citizens who work over there in the Middle East.
There are a lot of people who work in the Middle East that are from the United States.
That's Margaret in Alabama.
This is Robert, Waldorf, Maryland, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning, John.
You know, there's an old saying about those who don't know their history is doomed to repeat it.
And you had a lady calling earlier, and she was trying to remind everybody who's young and doesn't remember.
This all started in the fall of 1979 when the Irene's overthrew the shawl and they took, I think it was 45 hostages for, I don't know, 400 and some days.
You remember yellow ribbons around the trees and oh, we got to set her free.
Maybe you were too young for that.
But that's not the only incident.
Jimmy Carter didn't do nothing with that.
He didn't have the testosterone to do something with it.
But secondly, in our lives in the United States, when you kill 250 Marines in their barracks in Beirut, do you remember that, John?
Where they ran a C-Mec truck full of explosives into the Marine barracks in 1983, killing 250 Marines.
Irene did that.
And you know what?
Ronald Reagan didn't do nothing with that.
Then what do we have, John?
Cobalt Towers.
They blew up a bunch of American soldiers in Cobark Towers.
They've killed thousands and thousands.
And here in Waldorf, Maryland, we have a guy, a local hero.
His name is Robert Steedham.
The Iranians threw him out of an airplane dead on a tarmac.
And we have a park here, Walter.
Don't take my word for it.
Hit the Google machine.
Research it.
See what kind of research you should about this.
So they have killed thousands.
They've killed thousands of military people in Iraq, in Afghanistan.
So if ever I may agree on Afghanistan was a waste of time.
I agree Iraq was a waste of time.
But this has been going on for 50 plus years.
These people have been killing us for 50 years.
And Trump is the only president, including Reagan, that's had the nerve to do this.
And it is well overdue.
When you blow a hole in the side of a U.S. Navy battleship and you don't declare war on the people that did that, that's Bush.
Bush and Clinton, they did nothing with that.
But these people have been killing us for years, John.
Got your point.
That's Robert.
This is Kate in Marlborough, Vermont.
Democrat.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I'd like to stay with the war as well.
It seems like it's a topic that people feel passionate about.
You know, in terms of the history, you know, I think that callers often give quite a selective history.
I mean, if we're going to do the history, I would like us to include the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh in the 1950s, as well as the Iran-Contra affair.
I mean, you know, we sold weapons to our enemy in Iran in order to divert them to the Contras.
At any rate, I don't really want to talk about the history, and I don't really want to talk about the reasons for going to war.
I mean, I do think Iran, you know, has posed a threat.
And I just would say that it's pretty clear that the president has misrepresented the intelligence on this when he said we were, you know, two weeks away from, you know, being, that there's a threat that we're going to be bombed, imminently bombed.
I mean, there just isn't intelligence to back that up.
That's fundamentally a misrepresentation.
But mostly, what I want to highlight is now that we're in war, how this country is, how this country is celebrating and glorifying bombing.
I mean, I'm just, I listened to Pete Hegse, and he talks again and again about maximum lethality.
And we don't have to, we should not be bound by rules of engagement, unlike our pearl-clutching allies Are concerned about things like rules of engagement, which have been in place to protect American soldiers.
And the whole dismantling of an international order is just so, so unsettling to me.
And also, I just want to make one other point about the use of social media to glorify bombing.
I mean, it's just, it's sickening to me.
Linda's a lot of people.
Do you follow the White House X feed?
Well, no.
I read news reports.
Reuters had a whole summary of the gamification of war.
So, Kate, just for folks who don't know, and then I'll let you finish, what Kate's referring to, the White House has posted videos combining real footage from the war in Iran interspersed with footage from movies and video game clips and phrases like wasted over images of explosions, Justice the American Way, the caption read on a video posted on Thursday night, along with an American flag and a fire emoji.
The video included clips from superhero movies as well as clips from anime films, Top Gun, Braveheart, and electronic tunes underneath before clipping in videos of the ongoing strikes in Iran.
It ends with a voiceover saying flawless victory, audio from the video game Mortal Kombat.
Kate, go ahead.
So, yeah, I mean, are we aware that there are actually civilians who are being killed in these bombings?
I mean, we have said, you know, what has the administration said about the killing of the teachers and the girls at the school that it is now apparently clear that the U.S. bombed?
I mean, is there remorse for that?
Or are we just celebrating that we're just bombing the hell out of this country?
I mean, I just, you know, Linda said she's increasingly at peace, and I just, I don't recognize my country anymore.
I'm almost 70 years old, and I just, you know, I understand that sometimes we have to use force to defend our interests, but to celebrate and glorify the use of force and turn it into a game the way that we are, it really, really upsets me.
Thank you.
Kate, I can give you the latest on that bombing at that school.
Self-Deported Dreams00:05:05
This is the Wall Street Journal today.
The U.S. military investigators say American forces likely were responsible for the strike that killed dozens of children at a girls' elementary school in Iran, according to U.S. officials.
The school in the town of Manab near the Strait of Hormuz was hit Saturday on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli air campaign in what appears to be the deadliest strike of the war.
Iran said more than 160 people were killed, including children, a figure that couldn't be independently verified.
The school's on the edge of a compound linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a branch of Iran's armed forces, according to an analysis of images by the Wall Street Journal.
There are indications the building had been used as an IRGC headquarters officials had said.
But that's the latest on the story today and the ongoing investigation there.
This is Jim in Cottage Grove, Oregon, Republican.
Good morning.
Yeah, I was going to switch direction to a little bit more local.
When the deportation started, there's an offer that if people self-deported, they'd be allowed back in.
And I've never seen an actual number of how many did took up that offer.
And if any of them actually come back, I don't know if you have access to that number or what.
I don't have that at my fingertips here, Jim.
But what are your thoughts on Christy Noam out at Homeland Security and Mark Wayne Mullen, the senator from Oklahoma, being now the director of Homeland Security or will be at the end of the month when Christy Noam officially steps down?
Well, I think for what she was given with as many people that were here and the kind of tactics people use, fighting ICE and stuff like that, Homeland Security, she just got in over her head.
And I'm not too familiar with Mullen.
Have you ever watched any of his hearings?
No.
Or have you seen him on Fox News and he goes on other channels, CNN, quite a bit?
Yeah, I've seen him occasionally, but I hadn't really paid that much attention to what he was saying in regards to anything else.
But from what I hear, he's probably their best choice.
And then just the, I can give you the number on self-deportations.
This is from the Department of Homeland Security.
At the end of 2025, one of their press releases, they're saying more than 2.5 million illegal aliens have left the United States, breaking down that 1.9 million of those voluntarily self-deported.
So their estimate is that just under 2 million illegal immigrants have self-deported.
What do you think of that number, Jim?
It's good because the ones that give me are the ones that said they've been here for like 20 or 30 years, yet they've never actually followed through with becoming a citizen, and they're being taken away too.
We have a lot of them in our area that I don't know if they're citizens or not, but the ones that I run into being out in the country, most of them are hardworking people.
The guy that put the roof on my house was Hispanic, and the guy that did my floors when we remodeled was Hispanic.
And they work and just keep working until they're done.
And there's jobs that I can't do, so I'm happy to pay people that do the work.
That's Jim in Oregon.
You said you don't know much about Mark Wayne Mullen, who will be the new Homeland Security Secretary.
The Washington Post today in their Saturday edition, giving a bio piece to Mark Wayne Mullen, the headline, Trump's new pick to lead Homeland, a one-time cage fighter from the heartland.
They go back to his childhood.
As a child, Mr. Mullen did have a clubfoot, wore leg braces, and had to undergo several surgeries.
He said in a 2019 interview, he also worked to manage a speech impediment.
Mr. Mullen learned to wrestle instead, and he excelled.
He attended college on the athletics scholarship.
He dropped out to take over his family plumbing business when his father fell ill.
He was drawn back to organized sparring in his late 20s and had a brief but successful career as a mixed martial arts fighter, claiming a 5-0 record.
Mr. Mullen returned to college.
He never earned a bachelor's degree.
He was the only senator without one in 2023, the year that he was sworn in before his political career.
Mr. Mullen transformed his father's plumbing company.
And if you want to read more on the background and bio of the incoming head of the Department of Homeland Security, a department that is currently in shutdown mode, you'll recall that is in today's Washington Post.
This is Tim in New York, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning, John.
Tim's Concerns About Leadership00:15:25
I wanted to clear up one thing that gets mixed up a lot about APAC and Jews and stuff, because it's really a Zionist movement, and it includes only some Jews, and it includes a lot of Christians.
So, you know, a lot of times it comes out as being anti-Semitic, and, you know, it shouldn't be looked at that way.
It's really a political movement.
And if you want to know more about, quite frankly, there's a very good book by Dylan Mershaw called the, I think it's Israeli Lobby.
It was written about 20 years ago.
Tim, what interested you in this topic?
Are you Jewish?
No, no, I'm not Jewish.
I went to high school, and when I went after high school, it was about 79.
I started a political science degree in college.
So I was learning a lot about the Middle East.
And back then, even the Israelis were making their way up to West Bank.
And it was a small thing back then.
It wasn't what it is now, but it was still, I think, troublesome.
It could have been handled way back then.
But anyway, that gets into a whole nother area.
When you say trouble, you're talking about the West Bank?
Are you talking about the Gaza Strip?
What are you talking about?
What's that?
When you say troublesome, were you talking about the West Bank?
The West Bank and the Israeli expansion.
There's a whole religious theory about expanding Israel into what they call Greater Israel, which is described in the Bible, which encompasses Syria, Lebanon, a whole bunch of countries in that area.
And that's what they're getting to now.
And during the war, the Middle East war, I guess, the well, I should first say that Iran, you can forget about going into Iran because we were backing Iraq for 10 years and it was a stalemate.
Even with our help, they couldn't beat Iran.
So Iran is just like off the table, okay?
People can forget about taking over Iran.
So what's the end game here, Tim?
What's that?
What do you think the end game is then?
Well, personally, I think Netanyahu and a lot of Zionist people, they really want to expand.
It's really kind of a religious thing for some, and it's a political thing for others where they want to expand their country.
And back when they had the West that they wanted to take, not the West, the Middle East that wanted to be taken over, there was a general Wesley Clark who pointed out very specifically that there were plans to take over the whole Middle East.
And it was called the Project of the New American Century.
And I can't remember the group of people, but they were very expansionist and militaristic.
And they tried to do that.
That's what ended up why we ended up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But there was a general McSheely who tried to give a report in front of the House or Senate military committee.
And when they asked him how many people it would take to actually take over Iran, he said it would be over 500,000 soldiers it would take.
And he was actually fired for that.
They dismissed that whole number and tried to make a you know make a fool out of him.
But that's really, really the case.
So, I mean, there's so many people that would have to go into Iran to take it over.
It's just ridiculous.
Gotcha.
That's Tim in New York.
This is Andre in Rhode Island.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning, John.
Thanks for taking my call.
What's the curious why this is all town in Rhode Island, where you're from?
Winsocket.
Winsocket is how you say it.
Thanks.
Go ahead.
Thank you.
I believe this is obviously a war of choice with Donald Trump.
It's also a holy war with Israel.
And the reason why I say that, I'm thinking about Donald Trump lately, has been saying that he doesn't know if he's going to go to heaven.
He's doubtful about that.
He said that to thousands of people.
He said it on television.
Do you think he's contemplating his mortality?
Yes, absolutely.
We witnessed him saying this.
So I believe that because on a personal level, Donald Trump doesn't believe he's going to go to heaven.
I believe he's trying to ingratiate himself with God and the Zionist Israelis to promulgate a holy war so that it'll just work out in his favor.
In other words, I got a feather in my cap.
God made me do this because it's written in the law somehow or other.
I think it's a delusional proposition, but I somehow feel like Donald Trump is doing this on a deeply personal level because he knows he's not going to go to heaven.
He doesn't believe he's going to go to heaven.
But if I do this, maybe, maybe, maybe, I'll have a, I can get to the Prilly Gates, as he calls it.
That's Andre.
This is John in Scheiner, Texas.
Republican, good morning.
Good morning, John.
How are you?
Doing well, John.
I just, that last call kind of knocked me off there.
There are sometimes people call in and you have to go like, what did you have for breakfast this morning?
But there are several points I want to address about this whole Enchilada thing is that the first thing is that AI says, well, what can the Iranians do?
They don't have any arms, any firearms.
And that brings us back to the Second Amendment in the United States.
Our founding fathers knew that if you take away the right of people to protect themselves from a tyrannical government, you will get a tyrannical government.
And that is one of the reasons why the Democrats have been for years trying to take away our guns.
Because if you don't think they would turn just as bad as the Iranians were and become authoritarian, if they took away our guns, well, good luck.
The other thing, my wife had been watching some good movies, and one of them is called The Darkest Hour when Winston Churchill took over from Neville Chamberlain.
And at that time, this is when Hitler was invading all of Europe.
And almost all of the politicians in England wanted to surrender before the war even started, basically, with Hitler.
They wanted to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.
You're talking about.
The appeasement is what we look back on it as now, right?
Appeasement, big time, yes, sir.
And even now, you have the Prime Minister of England and the leaders of Spain and France appeasing.
And the main reason they are doing that, because they have such a large Muslim population, they're really afraid of ticking them off and having a riots in their own country.
So they've allowed themselves to be invaded by Muslims, and now they can't stand up for what's right.
And this agreement that Obama signed, the TP something, Has sunsets in it.
We basically allowed Iran to build a nuclear bomb.
And Iran has stated for the last 47 years, death to Satan, death to America.
And the lady earlier called said that possibly Israel wants to take over the Middle East.
No, Israel just wants to live without fear.
They don't have a neighbor next to them that's threatening to build a nuclear bomb to kill them all.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it.
And I am so glad that Trump, he's not doing this because he wants to go to heaven.
He's doing that to protect Americans and the world because Iran, I told her, I hate to say this, these people are nuts.
I mean, they're absolute nuts.
And there's no way you can glorify killing people by saying, God wants me to kill you.
You know, the Christian God says, love your neighbor.
You know, Ada says, kill everybody you can.
All right, that's John in Texas.
This is the Wall Street Journal today, the review section of the Wall Street Journal.
The headline on this analysis of Donald Trump's strategy when it comes to Iran, decapitate and delegate is what they have to say.
President Trump, they write, is betting his legacy on a new playbook for U.S.-led regime, James.
We bomb, you decide.
In Venezuela, Trump ousted autocrat Nicolas Maduro, but left the rest of his leadership intact, with his administration saying it will be up to Venezuela to push for democratic transition.
Weeks later, after ordering airstrikes in Iran, Trump urged the country's more than 90 million people to overthrow the regime following the killing of the Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini.
And he has urged Cubans to cut a deal, saying that their Kashdar government looks like it's ready to fall under U.S. blockade, saying Trump has a new model of U.S.-led regime change, wondering, will taking out leaders of America's enemies be enough?
Today's Wall Street Journal, if you want to read it.
Just a couple minutes left here.
This is Joanne in Portsmouth, Virginia, Independent.
Good morning.
Thank you for taking my call.
Good morning.
I live in an area where we have lots of military.
If it has to be said that they do, someone shoots a rocket of death, it will be headed to the East Coast where most of the military is.
So we're in ground zero here.
And I'm looking at my life of three-quarters of a century and worried for my grandchildren and my children.
This is not the America that I used to believe in.
Something is very wrong.
And this started decades ago with Citizens United allowing dark money into our system to pollute our politics and a 24-7 cable station that allows to have lies told to the American citizens 24-7.
It breaks my heart the way people show so much hate for those who wear a different color political shirt than the other.
Most of us Americans don't have hate in our hearts.
We're scared right now.
This is very unsettling.
And ultimatums to religious fanatics is even more frightening than ever.
I pray for our military, my neighbors here, and those who serve.
And I hope that Congress will grow a spine and do something about this insanity.
This cannot go on.
This does not have a positive note.
Joanne, in the way we see our neighbors, and we'll get to this again later in our program, we've got a segment on it, but on how we feel political division in this country and civic responsibility, those are kind of the topics we're going to take up this Saturday morning in our 8-15 segment.
I'm sorry, 9-15 segment.
But this came out today in the Washington Post, and I just want to hear your thoughts on it.
The U.S. is the lone nation in the worldwide poll to say most of its fellow citizens are bad.
53% of American adults describe the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens as bad.
In the 24 other countries polled by the Pew Research Center, most people said other residents there in those countries are somewhat good or good.
So at the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States, just to give some perspective here, Pew found that 92% of people say, in Canada, say that fellow Canadians are good, while just 7% of Canadians say that their fellow citizens are bad.
What does that say to you?
That 53% of Americans describe their fellow citizens' morality and ethics as bad.
I think the propaganda they've been listening to by the media has made this worse.
It's exacerbated the way people look at each other.
The way our own president talks about the Democrats.
I have never heard a previous president in my 75 years say horrible, hateful things about the opposing party.
I do know that my husband and I watched January 6th.
And to me, I was just flabbergasted that people were actually attacking the capital of the United States trying to undo our elections.
I cannot believe this is the America that I grew up in, that I pledged to the flag every morning in school.
I knew as a college student that our government isn't perfect, but it's still the best thing that we had on the planet.
Our president has maligned our allies to a point that no one respects us.
You can see in the media every day that people look at us and either pity us or find what we've done is disgusting.
This is not what I call leadership.
This is the most anxiety-driven life I've ever had to have to think about my government every day and what the leader has done to upset things.
It shouldn't be this way.
This is not what government is supposed to do.
It's supposed to make us reassure us that we are going to do better, that we're going to have our children will be protected, that they are there on the line watching for us.
But all of these media attacks with true social and X.
And what did people think when Peak Headset says he's changing the name to the Department of War?
That told us something right then and there.
That's Joanne in Portsmouth, Virginia.
This is Tony in Chicago, last caller in this first segment.
Tony, go ahead.
Thank you.
Every war has a domestic and internet.
Excuse me.
Tony, you still with us?
Yes, I am.
Losing my voice here.
Pardon me.
Every war has domestic and international reasons and causes.
United States has a long memory.
The war that's going on now is a war of necessity because we have a Shiite Muslim nation that is spreading poison throughout the Middle East and internationally.
And after 50 years, in fact, the United States history with Iran goes back 100 years.
After 50 years of listening death to America and all of the mayhem that the Iranians have caused in Iran and around the region, it is time now to remember all of the things they have done, from coal to Beirut to 9-11.
It's time to make sure that this regime is exercised.
That does not mean that the United States should take over Iran.
United States should not take over Iran.
You think Iran was involved in 9-11?
Time to Exercise Regime00:02:12
Yes, I believe they had a hand in it.
Yes, they did.
It's Tony in Chicago.
This is Bruce in Bryant Lake, New York.
One more call, Harry.
Go ahead.
That's Bryant Lake, but that's all right.
Yeah, now, I don't know what's going on.
You got Donald Trump on there talking about the P.T. Barnum Zelensky comes to the White House and gets everything given to him from Biden.
What's the difference with Netanyahu coming over here and pulling his fiddle strings?
And he gets us into wars.
Every time Netanyahu shows up, Trump jumps to his beckon call, gets us in a war in Iran, and then, you know, asks Zelensky how to fight drones in drone warfare.
You know, Zelensky's given United States how to fight them.
You know, Trump has us so far in debt and then turns around and promises another up to $20 billion to reinsure so these ships can go through the Hormuz Strait and start shipping again.
Well, I don't think I'd be putting my ship through there anyways with this going on, but I don't know.
Netanyahu, I think he's supposed to have an election coming up in April or something.
You know, I don't know.
That's why these wars are going on.
That's Bruce in New York, last caller in this first segment of the Washington Journal.
Stick around, though.
Plenty more to talk about this morning, including a little later.
We'll be joined by Daniel Yudkin with the group More in Common.
We'll talk about American civic responsibility in a time of political polarization.
But first, after the break, retired U.S. Army Colonel Pete Mansoor, who served alongside General Petraeus in Iraq, joins us with his thoughts on the ongoing military operation in Iran.
We'll be right back.
C-SPAN's Unbiased Civic Role00:02:26
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I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices.
You bring these divergent viewpoints and you present both sides of an issue and you allow people to make up their own minds.
I absolutely love C-SPAN.
I love to hear both sides.
I've watch C-SPAN every morning and it is unbiased.
And you bring in factual information for the callers to understand where they are in their comments.
It's probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country.
You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions.
Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark.
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Air Power Limits00:05:08
Stay engaged.
Washington Journal continues.
One week into U.S. combat operations in Iran, we're joined by retired Colonel Pete Mansoor.
He's currently with the Ohio State University's History Department Military History Chair.
Colonel Mansoor, as someone who spent 13 months in combat in Iraq, what are you watching for right now in Iran as we all try to figure out how long the fighting is going to go on for and how long the Iranian regime can stand up to these strikes?
Well, the operation right now is going tremendously successfully in terms of the tactics and the operations and the air campaign.
According to Admiral Brad Cooper, they're ahead of schedule in their list of targets that they're trying to hit.
They have air dominance over Iran, so they can fly legacy platforms like the F-16 and F-15 and B-52 bombers overhead without getting shot down.
That opens up the array of munitions that they can use and makes it a much less expensive war.
You can use gravity bombs with laser-guided warheads rather than these more expensive Tomahawk cruise missiles or, you know, flying B-2 bombers overhead.
But that's only the tactics and the operations.
Strategically, I think the administration potentially could be making the same mistake that the Bush administration made in Iraq in 2003, in that they put a lot of effort into the combat operations, the so-called phase three of the operation, and put very little thought into phase four operations, which is stabilizing the regime or the nation after surrender.
It's not clear that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is going to surrender, the IRGC.
It's unlikely, in fact, because they're so embedded into the fabric of the politics and the economics and the ideology of that regime and the nation.
About 20% of Iranians are, you know, are for the regime and benefit from it.
And that was about the same percentage of Sunnis in Iraq that, or Iraqis, that benefited from Saddam Hussein's regime.
And you can see how much problems they caused for us even after the regime fell.
In the case of Iran, I think it's unlikely that the regime will voluntarily surrender.
They're going to have to be pushed off the ledge.
And so the question is: what comes after this air campaign ends?
And it will end at some point.
I'm betting four to six weeks.
But at that point, Iran might not surrender.
And then what?
So I'm not sure that the administration has thought through the second and third order effects and the branches and sequels to the current plan, but that's where we are.
Let me stay on the air campaign for a second, and if past is prologue here, what can be accomplished through air power and bombing alone, even one as intense as this one?
And what can't be historically when it comes to military aims?
That's a great question.
So as I see it, there's five major goals of this operation.
Three of them can be accomplished by air power, two of them cannot.
So the ones that can be accomplished by air power are destroying the Iranian nuclear program, destroying its missile capability, although perhaps not its drone capability.
That's a lot harder to take out, and destroying the Iranian Navy.
But even then, it doesn't take much to close down the Straits Hormuz because insurance companies aren't going to allow vessels to go through the straits if there's even a slight chance of being hit by a drone.
And those, like I said, are much harder to take out because they're mobile.
The two goals that cannot be accomplished by air power are stopping Iranian support for their proxy militias around the Middle East, like Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis, and the popular mobilization forces in Iraq, and regime change.
Regime change would be incredibly difficult and would require either fomenting an insurgency, which we could do, but it would take months or years to play out, or having some portion of the regime turn on itself, which I think right now is highly unlikely.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guards are not likely to all of a sudden say we're going to side with the United States and overthrow our own government.
When a president uses the term unconditional surrender, making that demand of Iran, what does that make you think of as a military historian?
Unconditional Surrender Risks00:15:06
Does that create new concerns for you?
It makes me think of the last time we demanded that, which was World War II.
So President Franklin Roosevelt at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 set the Allied goal as unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.
It took from that point on, it took two years and four months to affect the surrender of Nazi Germany and two years and seven months to effect the surrender of Imperial Japan, with hundreds of thousands of dead, millions of casualties, and a lot of blood and treasure spilled.
So when you're talking unconditional surrender, it's a high bar to meet.
You're basically saying the enemy must give you total control over the future of their nation, and they're not going to go down willingly.
So I think if the president is serious about this, it's going to mean American boots on the ground and probably hundreds of thousands of them.
Colonel Pete Mansour is our guest, a retired U.S. Army Colonel, now chair in military history at the Ohio State University, joining us this morning to take your phone calls.
If you have questions about this conflict, where this conflict fits in military history, now a good time to call in.
202748-8000 for Democrats, 202748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8002 for independents, and then setting aside a special phone line for active and retired military in this segment, would especially want to hear from you.
202748-8003.
As we said, Colonel Mansour is retired military.
When and where did you serve?
What's your military background, sir?
So I had a 26-year career in the U.S. Army.
I was an armor officer, but I commanded a brigade of mostly infantry in Baghdad in 2003-2004.
And then I finished my career as executive officer to General David Petraeus during the surge of U.S. forces to Iraq in 2007, 2008.
So I was in Iraq for 28 months total.
I've seen counterinsurgency warfare up close and personal.
And I've seen the difficulties that these operations can run into at the strategic and political level, which I think would be the case here.
And you talk about the infantry that you commanded.
I want to talk just briefly about the picture that's over your left shoulder.
I'll pull it up for viewers.
It is the cover of Time magazine from 2003 when they were picking their Persons of the Year.
That year, they picked the American soldier.
You have it framed up in your office.
Explain who these three men are.
So actually, two men and a woman, soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery, which was part of the Ready First Combat Team, the brigade I commanded.
The Time Magazine reporter spent a couple of weeks embedded with this unit as it went about conducting cordon and search operations and marching around the streets of Baghdad.
And it was a real honor that our soldiers were able to represent the nation as a whole and the military in receiving the honor of the person of the year by Time magazine.
Do you know what eventually happened to those three individuals?
I do not.
I lost contact after we returned to Germany and they left the unit.
I'm going to cover again from the 2003 Persons of the Year from Time magazine.
It's framed up in Colonel Mansoor's office, and he's taking your phone calls this morning.
And there are plenty for you, sir.
We will go to Kay in East Lansing, Michigan, Line for Democrats.
Good morning.
Kay, you with us?
State, yeah.
Can you hear me?
Yes, ma'am.
What's your question or comment?
Oh, I was just saying hello, the Ohio state from Michigan State, and he knows what I mean by that.
So what I have, I don't know much about strategy.
All I know is that I can't blame Israel, who they need the safety of their own country.
And Iran has been spewing out hatred for them for years.
I don't know why.
And maybe the colonel can express, describe or give the reason for that.
But I also want to mention that it is interesting that the Trump family had purchased millions of dollars invested in Israeli drones just before We attacked Iran.
And I'm trying to think of what else I wanted to say, but that's enough for now.
Thank you.
That's Kay.
Colonel Mansoor, what do you want to pick up on?
Yeah, I'll pick up on the first part of that.
You know, let's be clear: Iran has been at war with the United States since its revolution in 1979.
It's a theocratic regime.
In other words, one based on religion and a religious ideology, in this case, Shia Islam.
It wants to dominate the Middle East.
And as part of its goal, it wants to destroy the state of Israel.
And it believes the United States is its major enemy.
It calls, you know, at every opportunity, they say death to the great Satan.
That would be us.
And they've done great damage to us over the years.
The Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, the coal, the ship that was bombed in harbor in the Middle East,
Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, funding and providing weapons to Shia militias in Iraq that killed at least 600 U.S. soldiers with Iranian provided explosively formed penetrators.
So Iran has been at war with us and with Israel for quite some time.
You know, you can agree or disagree with whether we should have gone to war against them at this point, but I don't think there should be any disagreement that Iran did not have our best interests at heart in the Middle East and wanted to dominate the region.
The caller brings up drones.
Every war brings something new when it comes to the battlefield and technology.
What are you seeing on this battlefield as a military historian that interests you in terms of warfighting in the modern age?
Right.
So a couple things on drones.
One, this is not new because drones have dominated the war in Ukraine now since 2022.
So, and in fact, the Middle Eastern countries are asking Ukraine to send experts down to help them establish counter-drone defenses.
Ukraine has done a much better job of this than we have, just looking on from the sidelines.
In a historical sense, drones are going through the same evolution that manned aircraft did during World War I.
It was a new technology going into World War I, first used for reconnaissance, which is what drones were first used for.
Then someone decided that you could strap a bomb on a drone and you could bomb enemy troops or behind the lines.
And that was the case when we created the predator drone.
And then someone decided: well, we can use an aircraft to shoot down another aircraft, and the fighter jet or the fighter aircraft was born.
That's the next evolution in drone warfare.
You're going to have fighter drones, basically.
And Ukraine, in fact, is already producing them in the hundreds of thousands to counter Russian drones over its airspace.
The final two aspects would be strategic bombing and using drones as cargo aircraft.
And that's coming to a war near you.
And then, can I just ask about the U.S. submarine sinking the Iranian vessel and what you thought of that, something that conjures up images of the Battle of the Atlantic and World War II?
Yeah, it's really sad.
The Iranian ship didn't stand a chance.
It was in India, actually, in an exercise with the Indian Navy, and it was returning to Iran.
It should have just been pulled up in port in India and interned by the Indians for the duration of the conflict, but it was not.
And I mean, the difference between the technology, the Los Angeles-class submarine and the Indian frigate, gave the Indian frigate no chance to survive.
The Iranian, as we're talking about.
Iranians.
Yeah.
Just want to make sure we're using the right terminology.
This is Wayne in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Republican.
Good morning.
How are you doing today?
I would like to know, right, what is the psychological effect of the bombs falling in the country?
And then I would like to know, right?
The United States didn't drop so many bombs on the Middle East.
What is the effect that it's going to have on the earth?
Could you tell me that?
Kerman said.
Yeah, so the yeah, so the first thing, the psychological effect of bombing, you know, it does two things.
One, it makes people angry.
We saw this in the Battle of Britain.
The morale of the British actually increased during the Battle of Britain as German bombs fell on British cities.
But over the longer term, and this is a very long term, years of bombing, people will get depressed and turn against their government, but not to the extent that they're going to rise up against the government.
We saw this in, say, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
So bombing alone won't cause people to rise up or to surrender, but it does cause them initially.
It could spike their support for the government because they hate what's happening to them.
And over the longer haul, it could make them less willing to support the government in a war that to them might seem endless.
As far as what the bombs are doing ecologically to the planet, I think that that's your point.
Probably not much unless nuclear weapons are used and then you have radioactive fallout.
But conventional bombing doesn't do much to the ecology unless you hit something that could cause damage, like you hit an oil refinery and then the smoke goes up in the air or a dam and then you have flooding.
To that line for active and retired military, this is David in California.
Thanks for waiting.
You're on with Colonel Mansoor.
Yeah, hi.
What I'd like to say is this is the biggest part of the problem.
The retired colonel there is lying to this warming.
He said that the problem goes back to 79 when Iran had this problem with us.
He neglects to go back a little further.
In 1953, Iran had elected their president, and the United States stepped in and said, no, he's not going to be the president.
And they put in the Shah of Iran.
And it's because of things like that, that these people are upset and want death to America for interfering in their elections and their lifestyle.
And it goes even further than that.
Why men?
You look at Hawaii.
How did Hawaii become a state?
Look at.
We'll hold off on Hawaii.
We'll keep it to Iran.
But Colonel Mansoor, let you jump in on history.
Well, yeah, the caller is correct.
I mean, we supported a coup that overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1953.
The Shah was put in power.
And that still, you know, does not sit well with the Iranian people.
But that was over by the 1979 revolution.
Advise Iranian aggression.
Sure.
And Colonel Mansoor, having a little bit of trouble with your volume, and we're going to work on that as I'm going to take a couple calls, and we'll come back to you.
We'll let you, I think you can hear us.
We just can't hear you very well.
Dale in Ohio, independent.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Thank you for your service.
First of all, Colonel.
I'm a 30-year veteran of the Army and Air Force.
And I just have a question on Iran versus Mexico, as far as what do you think the greatest threat to America is, should we be taking out the cartel and securing our Mexican border?
Or was the missiles a greater threat?
And Dale, thank you for that question.
As soon as we get the Colonel's audio fixed, I'm going to let him answer.
But I want to get through a few more callers and I'm writing down these questions as we do it so we can run them by him when he can respond to you.
This is Steve in Ohio, where Colonel Mansoor is.
Steve, go ahead, line for Democrats.
Hey, good morning, John.
Good morning, Colonel.
Yeah, good to be on.
Hey, I have to agree with Major General Smedley Butler, who won the Medal of Honor twice in 1935.
He said war is a racket.
We provide Israel with $3.8 billion in annual security assistance under a 10-year memorandum of understanding that runs through 2028.
So we're paying for Iron Dome.
We're paying for the Arrow missile systems.
We're paying for David Sling.
We're paying for these weapons.
So this is really Israel's war.
Scorched Earth Policy00:15:54
This really isn't ours.
It's, you know, it's the military-industrial complex.
But, anyways, I should have called in on the military line because I was on the USS Midway in 1979 and 80.
That was called Gonzo Station when the Iranians took the hostages.
And, Steve, for folks who don't know the Midway, give us some history on it.
USS Midway aircraft carrier, commissioned right after World War II, 65,000 tons.
And we're about 5,000 on there, 1,500 on the air wing, 3,500 ships crew.
Anyways, yeah, we ended up in Gonzo and like four-month deployment.
But anyways, some of these deployments, like the Abraham Lincoln and Ford, those guys, those sailors, they're on there for 10 months.
We're being stretched out here.
Anyways, yeah, the Strait of Hormuz, very dangerous in there.
You know, I don't think they really thought this through when they went in there.
It's not, we can't go back 47 years ago and try to get revenge for what happened.
And I want to clear something up because President Carter sent a rescue operation in there in April of 80.
It was Operation Eagle Claw and Desert 1.
And those brave heroes gave their lives.
I think there were eight killed trying to rescue the hostages.
So I want to clear that up because, you know, there's some falsehoods being put out there that Carter didn't do anything.
That's not the truth.
Anyways, I don't believe in this.
I think it's wrong.
I think if we were worried about the Iranians obtaining a nuclear weapon, the IAEA should have been in there.
If they had 60%, they shouldn't have had 60%.
They could have had maybe 20% for a power plant.
But, anyways, we should be more worried about the Russians since there's 12,500 nuclear warheads in the world, and the STAR Treaty was expired in February, which is the strategic arms reduction.
I think we should be talking to the Russians.
And, Steve, let me take that question because we have Colonel Pete Mansoor back with us.
And the question from the caller there, Colonel, wraps up a couple of questions.
I don't know how many of them you heard, but that caller was talking about we should be more worried about the Russians right now.
There was a previous caller who said, What about Iran versus Mexican cartels?
Should we be more worried about those?
It speaks to a question of greatest threats America faces, where Iran is on that list, where you think they are, where this administration thinks they are, and where the American public thinks they are.
It's an interesting question because I would think that most people.
And Colonel Mansoor, I would love to get that answer to that question, but our audio is still struggling there.
So let me go to Ed in Jacksonville, Florida.
Ed, go ahead.
Yes, good morning.
I'd like to know if the Colonel goes along with the ideology that no war is won until boots are on ground.
And I've got another question.
I happened to have the opportunity to go to a forum, two forums, and one of them was with Schwarzkopf, and the other one was with Dick Cheney.
And they both said the same thing about Desert Storm and going beyond Baghdad, and that was that area was a bad neighborhood.
So we were recognizing that whole area and that area was a bad neighborhood.
What is the Colonel's opinion on why we changed our opinion about that?
Ed, how do you think this war is going?
What's your assessment of one week in, where we are, what the military leaders are telling us?
Well, I served, John, I served in Vietnam, I served in Iraq, and I served in Afghanistan.
So I have a pretty good perspective of where I think at my level, and I want to be very clear at that.
I was the first sergeant, that What we're doing now is pretty awesome in the airstrike because we've always had the philosophy.
I say we, the troops on ground, why didn't we just bomb it out of existence?
So that's kind of where, you know, from where I stood.
And, Ed, can I ask, just I haven't met many people who've served both in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
So what was your don't forget Vietnam, man?
Yeah, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Ask Dana.
That's a long length of service.
So what did you, what's your military career, if you can just take me through it?
Well, I was born at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, basically, and grew up in the Special Forces world with my father.
So it kind of was my path for career was kind of already before me, and I took that path.
But anyway, the wars were mainly aviation, mainly gunships.
And last in Iraq, I had a medevac unit.
So I've got a perspective from where I sat.
And I always say this: it's how you see life will where you sit in the foxhole.
So at my level, it was I've seen it pretty much the same as all wars.
It can be won.
I never took that position.
I was just a soldier and took orders.
Ed, thanks for talking about your career in the military.
Let me get to another Ed in the Garden State in Washington, New Jersey, Republican.
Ed, go ahead.
Hello, thank you very much.
Yeah, I'd like to say I respect the professor there and his education, but I have to strongly disagree with him.
First of all, Iran and Iraq are two different places.
You know, Iran, they recently had an uprising.
They're more educated.
Iraq was in the dark for centuries.
And you have to consider that.
You know, this action, I'm not in favor of any war.
My father was a survivor of World War II, had a lot of friends, survived Vietnam.
I've lived through Jimmy Carter, LBJ, George Bush Jr., Clinton.
These people did nothing about the situation.
You know, this administration is going.
They're flexing the muscles of the rest of the world.
They're finally standing up to this organization that if they did and they do get a nuclear missile, they would use it.
These other countries like Russia and China, they want to prosper.
They're into business.
Iran is totally different.
And foots on the ground, nobody wants to see that.
Also, 1953 to 79, the difference was that, you know, okay, Iran, they got control of the country in 1979.
What have they done?
They've slaughtered and killed their own people, especially very recently.
And some of the ignorant people, with all due respect, have called this program, they talk about all the ills of this administration.
They never mentioned the do-nothingness of all the other administrations, which allowed this out-of-control government over there that is also, they made all the roadside bombs in Iraq.
Iran built those.
And by bombing them, it's going to slow them down.
You don't need boots on the ground because they're not going to have anything left to work with.
So you think the goals here can be accomplished without boots on the ground.
Is that fair?
I think they will.
I don't think these people do not want another Vietnam.
We learned from Korea.
We learned, okay, the mistakes.
George Bush Jr., let's get him on the show.
He was totally incompetent.
LBJ couldn't run for office in the second term because he didn't have the ability to lead us through that Vietnam situation.
Okay?
Well, Ed, let me let Pete Mansoor jump back in because I think we have him back.
And by the way, Ed, if the former president ever wanted to come on this program, any former president, I am certain that we would have him on this program, especially if they take calls from viewers.
But Pete Mansoor, I think we have you back.
Lessons of the past, whether we've learned the lessons of past military campaigns and how they could be applied here.
Go ahead.
Well, I think the biggest lesson from the Iraq war, which is the one that is the greatest parallel to what's happening now, is you've got to plan beyond combat operations.
You've got to plan for what comes next.
That could be regime change.
It could be Iran continuing this war indefinitely against us now that we've attacked it directly.
So you've got to think beyond just the bombing and taking down these various targets to, you know, the sequel to this campaign.
And that's what I would like the administration to discuss.
And it should be discussing it with our representatives in Congress.
The Constitution in Article 1 gives Congress the power to declare war.
By that, the framers meant Congress should be the ones to decide whether the nation goes to war.
And if this campaign goes on longer than four to six weeks, Congress should step in and should either authorize continued military operations or pull the plug.
I want to go back to a previous caller who asked what's the greatest danger to the United States.
China is our greatest strategic competitor.
They are the nation that has the greatest economic capability compared to the United States, the greatest military capability compared to the United States, except for the nuclear realm.
And clearly, they're going to be the biggest competitor going forward.
But Russia in Europe is our biggest challenge right now.
It's at war with Ukraine, which is not an ally, but is an ally of sorts.
And certainly, if Russia were to take Ukraine, it would have designs on NATO members in the east.
And that's a direct vital national interest for the United States to protect its NATO allies.
And then behind that would be, I say, I would say, Iran, North Korea, they're about in the same basket.
But Iran has, as you know, attempted to foment insurrection around the Middle East by supporting the Hezbollah and the Houthis and Hamas and the popular mobilization forces in Iraq.
And so that's where it stands in the list of potential dangers to America.
I think much further down is the list is what's happening in the Western Hemisphere: drug trafficking mainly.
And those things can be handled by working with Mexico and working with the various nations of South America rather than attacking them.
When you talk about Congress stepping in here, authorizing the use of military force, AUMFs as they're called, there hasn't been one since after 9-11 and 2001, 2002.
Why should Congress step in this time?
Why is this different?
There's been military conflicts since 2001 and 2002 that we've entered.
Right.
So strategy and policy are better done and better considered when the arguments are fully explored.
That was done in Desert Storm.
That was done after 9-11.
It was not done in Libya, for instance.
So President Barack Obama authorized the bombing of Libya without an authorization for the use of military force.
And how has that worked out for us?
You know, how is Libya today?
So it should be more than just one person deciding to take the nation to war.
It should be a deliberative process.
And then what I'm talking about, the assumptions behind the campaign plan, the second and third order effects, the end state, how to get there, the ends, ways, and means, the supplemental appropriations, all that can be discussed in the proper forum, which is in Congress.
This is Patrick in Ohio Independent.
Patrick, good morning.
You're on with Colonel Pete Mansoor.
Good morning.
And thank you for your service, Colonel.
You cannot win a war unless you do the scorched earth theory.
I'm recollecting of all the conflicts that we've had in the past.
And the only way that you can win a war is with the scorched earth theory.
Thank you.
Colonel Mansour, scorched earth.
Well, you know, you don't want to save Iran by bombing it into smithereens.
The only way I would see to do something like we did in World War II is to use nuclear weapons.
The last time we tried a bombing campaign that was really scorched earth was the firebombing of Japanese cities.
We took down every one of them with a firebombing raid, and Japan still would not surrender until we dropped two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So I don't think we want to go down that road, and it would be considered a war crime in today's environment.
It sounded like you were referencing that famous quote, it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.
Explain what that's from.
That's from Vietnam.
A town was napalmed.
You could see the villagers streaming out that famous picture of the little girl crying as she was naked running away from the bombing.
And one of the U.S. advisors was asked why we did this, and he said it was necessary to destroy the town in order to save it, which, you know, didn't sit well.
Thomas in Derwood, Maryland, Democrat.
Good morning.
You're on with Colonel Pete Mansoor.
Hello.
Go ahead, Thomas.
What's your question or comment?
Oh, my question is, what is the end game of this war?
And also, I got a question for your C-SPAN host.
Why aren't there any African Americans sitting in the chairs across from you?
Oh, Thomas, I don't understand.
I would recommend you watch this program a bit more often, and you can see that we have quite a diversity of guests who come through this show.
But all our segments are available online at c-span.org.
You're welcome to check them all out, and there are many, many hours of programming there.
So I hope you do it.
Colonel Mansour, go ahead.
Yeah, so this is a huge question.
Production Arms Race00:07:59
You know, what are the goals of the Trump administration?
And they've come up with about five of them, and they keep adding them daily.
So as far as I can parse out, the immediate military goals are to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, its missile program and drone program, and to destroy the Iranian Navy.
And then beyond that, it's a stated goal to prevent Iran from providing arms and financing to its proxy militia groups around the Middle East, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis.
And then finally, you know, the president has said, well, it would be nice if the Iranian people rise up and overthrow their regime.
So regime change is on the table as well, depending on what day it is.
So some of those goals are achievable with air power.
I think the last two are probably not.
And also what we don't have control over is when the war ends.
I mean, we can stop the bombing campaign at any time.
Israel might continue, though.
Their goals are much more expansive than ours.
And Iran might continue to fire its missiles and drones around the Middle East, continue to keep the straits of Hormuz closed, even if we stopped our bombing.
So, you know, General Petraeus once famously asked the question of the Iraq War in 2003.
Tell me how this ends.
And we're at the same place now, I think, in Iran.
On Iran firing off its weapons, what's been Iran's most dangerous lethal weapon in the fight so far as we enter day eight?
So I'm not sure of the terminology, but it's got some very capable ballistic missiles that it's been firing off.
Now, those have been mostly shot down because those are the primary targets for the air defenses in the region, the Patriot anti-aircraft missile and the theater high-altitude air defense weapons, the THAD system.
But we're running low on those very expensive weapons.
And if we ever run out, then the area will be vulnerable to those missiles.
But I think in the longer run, the more dangerous thing is actually these very cheap Shahed drones that fly a thousand miles.
They have a 200-pound warhead on them.
But there's lots of them.
And in this case, mass might trump quality.
Time for one or two more phone calls with Colonel Pete Mansoor joining us from Columbus, Ohio.
He's a professor of military history at the Ohio State University.
This is Tom in Smithfield, North Carolina, Republican.
Good morning.
Hi, yes.
Good morning, gentlemen.
Colonel, thank you for your service.
The callers from New Jersey and Ohio have brought up some valid points.
I think we're seeing the peaking of a global arms race.
You know, the industrial war complex was created after World War II because obviously we had to retool our industries to supply the war hardware and the tools of war.
Fast forward to today, a lot of countries buy these tools of war.
And what we're, at least, the evidence has been presented to us.
Iran and their proxies and their rockets, they've been able to acquire these things.
Previous administration, the Obama administration, you know, potentially helped fuel the funding of it.
You know, they have centrifuges.
Iran supposedly has 60% grade nuclear material, and once it reaches the 90% grade, then they've got the fuel for the bomb, and they've obviously got the delivery systems for that.
Our current government has stepped in, along with Israeli intelligence, and we're trying to neutralize that threat to the region.
And obviously, there's a collateral fallout from that, but it's going to be a challenge.
And like I said earlier, we're at the peak of the arms race.
And when you have bad countries that have the tools of war that can deploy them recklessly, it has to be curtailed.
It has to be brought back to order again.
That's all I have.
Thank you.
Colonel.
I want to correct something the caller said, and that is that we supplied Iran with the wherewithal to produce these weapons.
We have not done that since 1979 and the fall of the Shah.
Actually, Iran's biggest suppliers of material and expertise are Russia and China.
So I wanted to correct that.
In terms of the military-industrial complex, it was enormous during the Cold War, an existential conflict where we had millions of troops under arms and a lot of weapons ready to fight the Red Army in Europe and elsewhere.
But our defense industrial base has been significantly downsized since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In fact, I would say it's going to go the other way, that the production of weapons is going to ramp up from this point because it's clear that we don't have enough air defense missiles in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and elsewhere.
And so that production of those are going to have to ramp up.
The fact that we used a lot of bombs in this campaign against the Houthis first and then against Iran, the production of those weapons is going to have to ramp up.
And then the military is looking for what to do in a potential conflict with China in East Asia, and that's going to be this kind of war on steroids.
And so I think the production of munitions is going to go the other way.
We're not at a peak.
We're at a trough.
Since we have you as a military historian, I want to connect the caller Tom's comments about World War II to something you brought up on quality, on quantity over quality.
Was it Joseph Stalin in World War II that said quantity has a quality of its own?
What did he mean by that?
You know, the Red Army was not qualitatively as good as the German Army, at least initially.
But the Red Army dwarfed the German Army in terms of numbers and production capability, tanks, aircraft.
And they were eventually able to just swallow the Wehrmacht and destroy it.
But having said that, the Red Army became very, very good by the end of the war.
By 1944, it was every bit the equivalent of the Wehrmacht.
But yes, mass has a quality all its own.
And we're finding that in Ukraine, for instance, where dumb artillery rounds still rule the battlefield.
And Ukraine is producing millions of drones to rule the skies overhead.
And Russia is countering with similar capabilities.
And so numbers matter in warfare.
Colonel Pete Mansoor, retired U.S. Army Colonel, Chair of Military History at The Ohio State University.
Open Forum: Policy Calls00:03:26
We'd always appreciate your time, especially on a Saturday morning.
Thanks for stopping by.
Thank you.
A little later on this morning, a conversation with Daniel Yudkin with the group More in Common.
We'll talk about the ideas of civic responsibility in this country and also political polarization.
But first, it's our open forum.
About 25 minutes here.
Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, we're turning the show back over to you.
Go ahead and start calling in, and we'll get your calls right after the break.
Sunday on C-SPAN's Q&A, a conversation with California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom on his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, chronicling moments in his life that influenced his political career.
From mayor of San Francisco in 2004 to becoming governor in 2019, Governor Newsom also talks about his personal life, living with dyslexia, and his relationship with billionaire Gordon Getty.
Sunday night at 8 Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.
You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series.
Sunday with our guests, married writers Peter Baker, New York Times chief White House correspondent, and Susan Glasser, who served as top editor for Politico, Foreign Policy, and others.
Both prolific authors and together have written several books, including Kremlin Rising, The Man Who Ran Washington, The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, and The Divider, Trump in the White House 2017 to 2021.
They join our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
I don't want to cause any marital problems, but let's suppose you're working on a book and you get a scoop.
Who gets the scoop to go say something that's current and you want to take to the New York Times or the New Yorker?
Who gets the chance to give it first to somebody?
Oh, you're a troublemaker.
You must have thought of that at the time.
I'd like to hear Peter's answer to that question.
Well, she brought, no, she brought the Iran scoop to our reporting and then she reported it in the New Yorker.
Watch America's Book Club with Peter Baker and Susan Glasser Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.
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Washington Journal continues.
Coming up on 9 a.m. Eastern, and we are in open forum.
Any public policy, any political issue that you want to talk about, phone lines are yours to do so.
Phone lines for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
Those numbers are on the screen for you.
Go ahead and start calling in, and we will get to your calls as you are calling in.
But first, the president's schedule today, the president beginning his day in Miami, Florida, 10 a.m. Eastern.
We're expecting the president to deliver remarks at the Shield of America's summit.
And that is taking place early this morning.
And this afternoon, the president will move to Dover, Delaware.
The president and the first lady participating in the dignified transfer ceremony for the first American casualties of this conflict in Iran.
That taking place today as well.
Reverend Jesse Jackson's Burial00:04:00
On the C-SPAN Networks today at 11 a.m. Eastern, did want to let you know of our coverage of the Reverend Jesse Jackson's life and his burial.
The ceremony taking place today at the Rainbow Push Coalition headquarters in Chicago.
Musician Stevie Wonder, Grammy Award-winning gospel artist set to give musical performance to honor the life of the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Live 11 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN.
You can also watch on C-SPAN.org and the free C-SPAN Now video app.
And oh, by the way, on C-SPAN's American History TV, starting at 1 p.m. today, we'll be showing you historic speeches by Jesse Jackson throughout the years, including his addresses to the 1984 and the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
That's C-SPAN 2, starting at 1 p.m., about six and a half hours of Jesse Jackson speeches, if you want to watch it, for American History TV today.
Speaking of Jesse Jackson, of course, he was also mourned and celebrated yesterday at a public tribute in Chicago.
President Barack Obama spoke at that event.
Here's what the former president had to say about Jesse Jackson.
Each day we're told by those in high office to fear each other and to turn on each other and that some Americans count more than others and that some don't even count at all.
Everywhere we see greed and bigotry being celebrated and bullying and mockery masquerading as strength.
We see science and expertise denigrated while ignorance and dishonesty and cruelty and corruption are reaping untold rewards every single day we see that.
And it's hard to hope in those moments.
So it may be tempting to get discouraged, to give into cynicism.
It may be tempting for some to compromise with power and grab what you can or even for good people to maybe just put your head down and wait for the storm to pass.
But this man, Reverend Jesse Lewis Jackson, inspires us to take a harder path.
His voice calls on each of us to be heralds of change, to be messengers of hope, to step forward and say, send me wherever we have a chance to make an impact, whether it's in our school, our workplaces,
or our neighborhoods, or our cities, not for fame, not for glory, or because success is guaranteed, but because it gives our life purpose, because it aligns with what our faith tells us God demands.
And because if we don't step up, no one else will.
How fortunate we were that Jesse Jackson answered that call.
I was former President Barack Obama yesterday in Chicago.
Again, the tributes to Jesse Jackson continue today ahead of his burial that's happening in Chicago as well.
This is Charlie in Arizona, Line for Democrats.
Good morning.
This is about the war in Iran and our participation in it.
This is not a war from us against Iran to start with.
We are being what would be called a good neighbor.
Good Neighbor Policy00:06:21
Now we're not close.
We live across an ocean.
We are there where we're at to protect all of the Gulf states, all of the Arab states in the area.
That goes from all the way down at the bottom with Yemen all the way up to Turkey.
We are protecting them from the anger of the dead Khomeini or whatever his name was.
That's what we're being.
We are taking out drones that are being fired into other countries.
Syria, Lebanon, Jordan.
All of them.
Little, big, doesn't matter.
They are being assaulted by a crazy regime, and that's it.
That's Charlie in the Grand Canyon State.
This is Crystal in the Peace Garden State, Republican line out of Fargo.
Go ahead.
What a wonderful way to talk about Women's Month.
This is Women's History Month.
And I, as a woman, I have the power in my hands to help the economy.
And what we're doing right here in Fargo this morning is we are delivering 54 gas cards to the local airport right here in Fargo.
Those are $20 gas cards to go to the TSA workers that are showing up at 4 o'clock in the morning to process us.
And I speak about that because I flew in from Tampa two days ago and also through Texas.
And I saw people from TSA welcoming the passengers, helping us all get on with our freedom to travel.
We're feeding the economy right now and showing appreciation to the TSA people.
This is coming from my own service club.
Also, people who are members of the Chamber of Commerce.
We are speaking to people in Bismarck, Grand Forks, Minot, along the southern border because they're donating to Aberdeen.
And I'm speaking to the people who, wherever your site is.
If you're a flying person, reach out to people who are the airport directors in your area.
It is okayed by the federal group that hires the TSA agents.
And you can hand the gas cards to the airport director, and he will hand those gas cards out to the TSA employees.
So it's a win for people to show their appreciation for those who are not getting paid right now.
Crystal, on well, what's the name of your service group, first of all?
We're with Lions, but I also have friends who are with Kiwanis.
and Rotary, and I'm meeting with them next week.
I've got a person, Chamber of Commerce and Lion, who owns a small-town bank, so he's like the boss, and they are also donating gas cards.
Do you think people realize right now that folks who work for Homeland Security aren't getting paid because of the shutdown, and it's just this one agency, it's not the entire federal government, so it gets less attention?
Yes, yes.
And as I'm speaking to them, I'm a good talker, and I network.
I know a lot of people.
We have 100 clubs right here in North Dakota that are just with Lions.
There are other small towns that have Rotary, there's the Kiwanis, we have American Legion, we have the VFW.
So anybody who's flying, they know the hassle that it's been.
We know that our economy right now is in a little bit of crisis.
We know there's a political crisis right now in Washington, D.C.
But we also know that TSA is welcoming us with smiles because they know eventually this will get handled.
In the meantime, we the people, we've got the power to be part of the solution rather than being part of the problem whining and complaining.
And Crystal, you might be a good person to ask this to.
We're going to talk about civic responsibility and political division in another 15, 20 minutes here on the Washington Journal.
But there was a poll that came out from Pew Research, and it asked people how would they describe their fellow Americans generally?
Good or mostly good or bad or mostly bad.
Before I tell you the results of the poll, how would you describe your fellow Americans?
Good, because as a Lion, we don't get involved in politics.
We help in humanitarian.
During the pandemic, we delivered food to people who were shut in their homes.
We delivered groceries.
We bought gas cards for people who had lost their jobs during COVID.
We learned because for 100 years, Lions was doing service.
We usually focus on eyeglasses and blindness.
But our mission is to help our communities.
And right now, nationwide, we need to help our communities.
Would you be surprised to find out that by saying that you would describe your fellow Americans as mostly good, you would be in the minority.
53% of respondents to this Pew Poll, 53% of American adults describe their fellow Americans' morality, their ethics, as bad or somewhat bad.
Those were the answers.
And that stands in stark contrast to the 24 other countries that were polled here.
No other country had the majority of people saying bad or somewhat bad.
Is that surprising to you?
Well, yes, because I haven't seen it.
I've been traveling to Paris.
I've been traveling to Spain.
I've been traveling all across Europe in the past five years.
And they might, they're dependent on the government.
We do not.
We're not a socialist government.
Senator Mark's Vision00:05:07
And we have democracy representatives and people who, like me, can reach into our own bank account, pull out $1,000, pull out $2,000, and buy those gas cards.
That's my whole point, is sharing with you, because you today are the vehicle where I can reach out across our nation and say, please, it's not the fault of TSA agents that they're not getting paid.
The turmoil right now, the crisis right now, is in our federal city to handle this.
And everybody else from Homeland Security is doing our job.
But we have to look at Secret Service.
We need to look at the Coast Guard carrying on with Senator Mark Wayne Mullen.
He's going to breeze through with the Senate confirmation because the Democrats are going to be saying, you know, we're going to be part of the solution.
Do good.
And it's going to rise up because when the prayers go up, the blessings come down, and we are going to be united to help others and get away from that political turmoil.
The blame game, I'm not being part of that today.
We, by the end of next week, will have $3,000.
And as this grows in North Dakota, we're probably going to have $10,000 that are going to go Minot, Bismarck, Dickinson, Grand Forks, Fargo, as well as throughout South Dakota because we are helping others.
Crystal, thanks for the call from the Peace Guard and State from Fargo this morning.
I appreciate that.
You mentioned Mark Wayne Mullen.
He's the incoming Homeland Security Secretary.
He does require confirmation, as you point out.
Christy Noam set to step down at the end of this month.
But Mark Wayne Mullen on Thursday spoke to reporters on the steps of the United States Capitol shortly after finding out that he had been tapped for this position by President Trump.
This is just about two minutes of what he had to say.
Tell us your reaction when you got the phone call from him.
I was excited.
I mean, I was saying, well, it came from the White House, so it came from the switchboard.
But I was excited.
The president, first of all, the president and I have a really good relationship.
We talk all the time, anyways.
I wasn't, I've got to be honest with you, I wasn't expecting the call today, but super excited.
And I'm more excited about just ready to get started.
There's a lot of work we can do to get the Department of Homeland Security working, you know, working for the American people.
You know, the Department of Homeland Security has a very broad jurisdiction.
And I think there's a lot of work that we need to do, and I'm excited about that.
So you said you were saying that.
John already texted me.
And of course, you guys know John and I are friends too.
And so I don't know.
We're going to try to earn everybody's vote.
I want people to understand, I'm not, when I go into this position, yes, I'm a Republican.
Yes, I'm conservative.
But Department of Homeland Security is to keep everybody.
Regardless if you support me, if you don't support me, regardless of what your thoughts are, I'm here to enforce the policies that Congress passed.
And right now I'm part of it.
But once I make that transition, my focus is to keep the homeland secure.
That's going to be my focus.
And we're super excited about this opportunity.
And I mean, looking at some of the criticism that Noam has faced, is there any learning lessons that you have picked up from Noam and the ways in which you want to lead the agency with its own?
Christy is a friend, and I haven't had time to call Christy yet and our Secretary Noam.
And our families are friends.
She was tasked to do a very difficult job.
And I think she has performed the best she can do underneath the circumstances.
Is there always lessons that can be learned?
You know, listen, my wife and I, we have, over the years, we have been fortunate enough to purchase companies and grow our companies.
And every day there's something you can do better.
And so I think there's an opportunity to build off successes.
And there's also opportunities to build off things that maybe didn't go quite as planned.
Senator Mark Wayne Mullen there speaking on the steps of the United States Capitol on Thursday.
He's the likely incoming Homeland Security Secretary.
He was asked about outgoing Homeland Security Secretary, Christy Noam.
She's the subject of a column written by Michelle Cottle in today's New York Times.
It reads, in part, it surely stings to be the first member of this cabinet to get the axe, Michelle Cottle writes, not Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Laurie Chavez-DeRima, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
But Ms. Noam can take solace, she says, in knowing she's not the first ambitious woman who tried to remake herself in the MAGA image only to be misused and ultimately discarded.
She says, as Ms. Noam is finding out, it's hard out there for a MAGA woman.
You have to jump through trickier hoops than the men to get attention, but your efforts to please can work against you.
The second your swaggering performance becomes a problem, the president kicks you to the curb.
Birthday Dan Exploited00:07:47
Just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, after falling out with the president, fled the House and is now devoting herself to viciously critiquing his Iran policy.
Michelle Cottle in the pages of today's New York Times, if you want to read more.
Linda, Columbus, Ohio Independent, it's open forum.
What's on your mind?
Yes, I was listening to the survey that was taken about a lot of Americans feel other Americans are bad.
I want to say this, and this goes back to a previous caller in your earlier segment.
Americans are so ill-informed about the Middle East, especially Iran.
It was our government, along with the British government, that went in there in 1953 after Mosaddegh was democratically elected in 1951.
They wanted the Americans out, the American oil people out, who at that time, or British government was VP, I forget the name of our oil company.
We have exploited that area of the world and their natural resources, their oil.
It's still about oil.
And that's what I have to say.
But I'd love to see many Americans start to read more about this history, at least going back to the 1950s, 40s, and 50s, about Iran.
We have exploited them.
We have exploited a lot of areas around the world.
British MI6, our CIA, what we did to other governments going back decades and decades.
So that's what I'd love to see more Americans do.
Read about the history of your country, America, that's exploited other countries.
Got your point, Linda.
This is Dan in Oregon Democrat.
Good morning.
Good morning.
First of all, I'd like to say thank you and good morning to C-SPAN.
Good morning to the United States.
And furtherly, good morning to the rest of the world because I know you're listening.
I am 71 years young this day.
It's your birthday, Dan.
It is.
Happy birthday, Dan.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for spending your birthday with C-SPAN.
To speak to everybody is a treat.
I would like to say a huge thank you, and I'm just so impressed with the last Republican caller who gave out the gas cards and had such civic care for and loving kindness for America's neighbors and people in it.
Before I speak, my question that hopefully C-SPAN can answer and my comment.
Now, my question is: what happened to all of the fired federal workers at the beginning of Doge's rampage?
And the reason I ask this is because it was never mentioned that I heard, it probably was mentioned, but I didn't hear it, that they, because they were fired, were not able to receive unemployment or even be on the out-of-work list, the touted numbers, so to speak.
And I thought that was hugely misleading and unfair of the present administration to do that.
So, Dan, I don't have that at my fingertips.
I'm not sure about the status of federal employees, how many have found jobs and how they were accounted.
I don't have that at my fingertips.
But what else did you want to say?
Good morning, America.
That'll do.
All right.
Have a great day.
Have a good birthday, Dan.
Thanks so much.
Bye.
Raymond in Oxford, Michigan, Republican.
Good morning.
What up, Doe?
This is Raymond from Michigan.
How are you doing, John?
I'm doing well, Raymond.
What's on your mind?
You're always well, man.
I'm very well.
Well, I was just wondering, is there any update on the dark web?
DEA says one bill can kill, and I want to know, is there anything out there nowadays?
Not sure what you're referring to, so we'll go to Carrie in Albany, New York, Independent.
Good morning.
Hi, John.
I want to say happy birthday to Dan.
It's delightful to know he's got his birthday celebration today.
I'm worried about the use of nuclear weapons during this war with Iran that we've started with Israel.
When I hear the president say unconditional surrender, I've heard other people say that to require unconditional surrender is like a country giving permission for your women and daughters to be raped by whoever is the victor.
And that would mean that the people we're fighting are not going to allow that to happen, and they'll just keep fighting.
And if this becomes a war where the Gulf countries and Israel are being pummeled because the Iranians see no other option for them, such as the relinquishing the sanctions that we've put on them for many, many years, Israel, with its nuclear weapons,
which are not allowed to be discussed in our media.
Why do you think they're not allowed to be discussed, Kerry?
Me?
Why do you think they're not allowed to be discussed?
Because, you know, there are people like MIT's Ted Polson, I think his name's Ted Postal, and he's very knowledgeable about weapons and nuclear weapons.
And I rarely see him except on, you know, some select podcasts, but not on the mainstream media and the newspapers or the TV.
Sometimes he's quoted in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but very rarely.
Israel doesn't acknowledge them.
That doesn't mean they're not discussed in the media.
We've had segments before about nuclear proliferation and countries that have nuclear weapons and don't.
Certainly a topic that's come up when we have that discussion, Carrie.
I'm always talking about, you know, who has, you know, Iran has these nuclear weapons plans, but I'm talking about actually, you know, being involved, engaging, like we would never directly confront China or Russia during the Cold War.
But now, here we are always just picking on smaller countries, even countries that have, you know, they have a government policy of not developing a nuclear weapon.
And I think I'm just, you know, going all over the place.
But I think that the nuclear weapons ploy about, you know, reason for going to war is a red herring.
I don't think that had anything to do with why we're in the war.
I think it's because we're fighting to make the world safe for Israel.
Just on nuclear weapons, one last thing.
I would recommend watch a segment with Darrell Kimball.
He's with the Arms Control Association.
He comes on this program a decent amount, but one of those arms control groups.
Nuclear Weapons Ploy00:08:21
And he often talks about countries and their nuclear arsenals and gets questions about it.
So all those segments available online.
And next time he's on, maybe call in and chat with him about it.
That's Carrie in New York.
This is Tony in Salisbury, North Carolina.
Democrat, good morning.
Oh, yes.
Good morning, John.
You know, John, don't get me wrong, because I watch C-SPAN a lot.
You know, I'm just like some of these white people up in here, just watched a lot and old, right?
But I noticed today you've just been asking a lot of white people questions.
Now, I don't want no questions from you.
I just want to get my comment out, and I hope you give me a little time like you do others.
Like that lady who said she gave $1,000 to here and there with the Lions Club and all that for gas cars.
Where was she, like the gentleman said, when Doge was firing people?
Where was she when the eggs were so high?
Where was she when the board aligned with?
And she said, oh, don't complain.
Just do something.
But that's all we heard when Biden was president.
Every MAGA Republican white person complained.
And you know what else?
They don't even talk about the Elstein file.
There was something that just dropped the other day about Trump raping and beating this little 13-year-old girl.
And she tried to testify and tell the FBI.
And they wouldn't even follow up on it.
And check this out.
We had to do certain things just to get those documents to show the American people that Donald Trump started this war for we will not talk and you and we will not talk about the Elstein file to keep your mind twisted.
Now he wants to put boots on the ground and kill your babies.
And the lady feel guilt now and she giving out $25 gift cards.
All of you should feel guilty for what Trump is doing if you voted for him because the blood is going to be on your hands with this crazy man.
See, John, you ain't had to ask me no questions, and I'm saying goodbye.
Tony in North Carolina, this is Viola in Niceville, Florida, Republican.
Good morning.
Yes, I'm talking about the price of gas being a barrel is over approaching $100 a gallon.
So that's going to help all those people that want to fracture oil, which is injecting into the ground and causing superheated water to go in and causing earthquakes in places like Oklahoma.
And now they're talking about reopening the gas components out on the West Coast to drill for oil again out there in, I forget where it is, off Malibu, going to get the gas coming out from over there and more earthquakes happening and results of that.
Yeah, I think that's great for, and Trump is talking about opening the oil reserves so it'll flood the market with more gas.
So we shouldn't have to worry too much about the cost of gasoline.
You know, it's going to come down someday and everything will be rosy.
I also worry about the doomsday clock.
The people that were talking about the nuclear peripheration, watch what's going on with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Pakistan's talking about nuking Afghanistan.
The countries in the world that have nuclear weapons, you should do some research on it.
I can name a couple that maybe people don't know.
There's South America, and they have a nuclear weapon.
A country in South America?
I've got the names of these countries.
That's okay.
That's Viola in Niceville, Florida.
A couple callers brought up the latest when it comes to the Epstein files.
Here's the story that came out yesterday from Politico.
Justice Department publishes documents with sexual assault allegations against Trump is the headline.
They posted a trio of FBI interviews with a woman who alleged President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was young and a teenager when she was introduced to him by Jeffrey Epstein.
The three files come as Democrats are investigating whether the department purposely withheld materials that included sexual assault allegations against the president.
Trump has denied wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein allegations, and he has been charged with the crime in connection with them.
The Politico notes.
There's no evidence to suggest Trump took part in the Epstein sex trafficking operations.
Many of the materials released by the Justice Department lack substantially and context.
White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt called the allegations completely baseless in being asked about them.
The latest from Politico.
This is Diane in Fort Myers, Florida, Independent.
Good morning.
Good morning, America.
So many things to talk about, and it's stimulated by your callers.
The callers are very informative.
As far as our commander-in-chief, how in the world can you trust a man who lies like he breathes?
Everything, if you would stop watching Fox News, you might educate yourself.
If you watch C-SPAN, you might educate yourself.
It is very frustrating.
My question to you is: do you know if there is a transcript that went on with these diplomatic relations that two real estate agents were trying to, I don't know what they were doing, buy land?
You're asking if I'm privy to a transcript about that, Diane?
Are we as U.S. citizens privy to that?
Not that I'm aware of, Diane.
So that would be interesting, right?
When you listen to Ambassador McFaul, who has dealt with Russia for a very long time, diplomacy takes years, years of trust.
This man is a lunatic.
We've all better get down and pray that he doesn't push the button just out of though it's cloudy out today.
I think I'm going to push a button.
And it really is coming down to that.
Listen to what the man says.
You don't need to take any other document.
Listen to his words.
Wake up.
Thank you.
That's Diane in Fort Myers.
A few more minutes here for Open Forum.
This is Sharon Hanover, Pennsylvania.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning.
Just some points as quickly as I can.
The forever wars, suppressed wages, rising costs, many young people enticed into the military.
Understandably so.
So then this administration wants to keep war slash violence going in many places.
That is his stated plan.
to detract us, as others say, from the Epstein files, ICE, mass imprisonment, domestic problems, protests, etc.
And to possibly delay or halt the midterm elections because he can say, we are in state of emergency.
You all must sacrifice for the war effort costing billions of dollars.
And finally, does anyone think the German people ever thought they'd see their nation shattered because of madmen in charge?
Did the Roman emperors think their empire would fall into dust?
These are lessons in history to be heeded.
And Ukraine gave up their deterrence.
Lessons in History00:10:41
Look what happened to them.
And sleeper cells, rogue people, et cetera, looking for vengeance from these operations.
Pretty easy for small efforts to wreak havoc.
We had better be careful.
Thank you.
That's Sharon in Hanover, Pennsylvania.
President Trump today is doing an event at the Shield of America Summit.
You can see some of the video, the lineup taking place, the class photos, as they call them in the news, when these gatherings happen.
President Trump set to speak at that event at 10 a.m. Eastern.
That's where we're planning to go when this program is over.
So stick around on C-SPAN 2 for that event at 10 a.m.
That's going to do it for Open Forum.
Stick around.
We've got 30 minutes left in the Washington Journal this morning.
In that time, a conversation with Daniel Yudkin with the group More in Common on American Civic Responsibility and Political Polarization.
We'll be right back.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series.
Sunday with our guests, married writers Peter Baker, New York Times chief White House correspondent, and Susan Glasser, who served as top editor for Politico, Foreign Policy, and others.
Both prolific authors and together have written several books, including Kremlin Rising, The Man Who Ran Washington, The Life and Times of James A. Baker III, and The Divider, Trump in the White House 2017 to 2021.
They join our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubenstein.
I don't want to cause any marital problems, but let's suppose you're working on a book and you get a scoop.
Who gets the scoop to go, say, something that's current and you want to take to the New York Times or New Yorker?
Who gets the chance to give it first to somebody?
Oh, you're a troublemaker.
You must have thought of that.
I'd like to hear Peter's answer to that question.
Well, she brought the Iran's scoop to our reporting and then she reported it in the New Yorker.
Watch America's Book Club with Peter Baker and Susan Glasser Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.
Only on C-SPAM.
Washington Journal continues.
In our final 30 minutes this morning, we're talking about political polarization, civic responsibility.
Our guest is Daniel Yudkin of More in Common, a 501c3 nonprofit whose mission is what, Mr. Yudkin?
Well, our mission is to better understand what's driving people apart so we can have them find some common ground and bring people back together.
How do you go about achieving that mission?
Well, the first thing we do is we use tools from social psychology and social science to better understand where people are coming from.
What are their beliefs?
What are their values?
How do they see the world?
We think that if you can understand people's core beliefs, you can better understand what's driving them apart, what's causing them to disagree in the first place, and then maybe even find a way to tell a story that can bring them back together again.
Joining us on a day that a new Pew Research poll comes out, there's a headline in today's Washington Post on it.
The United States is the lone nation in the world to say most of its fellow citizens are bad.
53% of American adults describe the morality and ethics of their fellow citizens as bad.
The story notes, in the 24 other countries polled by Pew Research, most people said other residents of their countries were good or somewhat good.
Is that result surprising to you?
It's not surprising.
It's consistent with years of work that's been done on American politics.
Looking at this term called effective polarization, it's this idea of a deep animosity that each side holds towards the other.
But what our research finds that's heartening here is that a lot of that animosity is driven by something that we call perception gaps.
Perception gap is a belief that one side holds about the other that is not actually reflected in reality.
And so part of the work that we're doing is animated by this idea that Americans actually oftentimes have more in common than they think.
And if they actually had an opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with someone from the other side of the aisle, they would figure that out.
Define civic responsibility.
Civic responsibility is a way that we show up for each other.
It's the kinds of responses, the duties and obligations that we hold as Americans, as Americans, that allow us to be active and participatory members of civic life.
What are the duties and obligations that we have to each other?
What do we think of when we try to define those duties?
Yeah, well, it's a great question.
This is something that what we were, something that we were exploring as part of the work that I'm doing in the Beacon Project.
The Beacon Project is a new initiative at More in Common that's trying to better understand what are the ways that we show up for each other, how do people think about being an American and a citizen today.
So in this study, we ran a study of 5,000 Americans.
And what we asked them is just a simple question.
What does it mean to be an American and what are the civic responsibilities that we hold?
And what we found is that Americans have really a shared core of responsibilities that many agree upon.
So this includes things like you might expect, things like obeying the law, paying your taxes, showing up for jury duty.
But there's other things like defending freedom or helping out your community that we found are widely shared across Americans regardless of their position on the political spectrum.
Do our civic responsibilities, what we owe each other as Americans, does it change at a time when our country is in an active shooting war?
We haven't looked at that.
It's not something that we have explored particularly.
What we're looking at specifically is kind of like these domestic responsibilities.
I do think that at times of war, it changes the way that we think about Americanness and it raises deep questions about not just our responsibilities to each other, but our responsibilities to people overseas.
What do we owe the people who are in a country that we've never seen or we've never met before?
And how does that humanity carry over into the way that we show up as people in the world?
So it's a really important question, but what we were really focused on is how do Americans think about what our obligations are to each other as part of the country that we all share together?
How long has More in Common been around?
We've been around for about nine years now.
We were started in 2017.
Again, our sort of our effort has always been to try to better understand where people are coming from and try to find and highlight and identify areas of common ground.
In those nine years, are we finding more common ground or less as a society?
It has been an unfortunate fact that we are seeing, if anything, a deepening of American polarization in our politics right now.
We find that people are increasingly distrustful of each other.
They're increasingly prone to these perception gaps that we identified.
And what we think that we were trying to kind of bring people back to is a better understanding of the social glue that's holding us together.
And this is why we're focused on responsibilities.
We think that civic responsibility is the kind of force that we can use to remind ourselves how we show up for each other as Americans and what are the values that we all share.
Of course, people are going to be different, and that's totally fine.
We should disagree about different things.
And in fact, part of our research shows that Democrats and Republicans hold some importantly different views about what it means to be an American and what our responsibilities are to each other.
So for example, liberals or Democrats think it's more important to defend equality and Republicans think it's more important to love America and be patriotic.
But at the same time, the number of responsibilities that Democrats and Republicans support is about the same, suggesting that people care equally about being a citizen, about what it means to be a citizen.
They just express it in different ways.
Your group's been around nine years and your group is not the only group working on this issue of trying to bring people back together to heal division, to try to understand the divides in this country.
But if in nine years things are getting worse, when do these efforts start paying off?
When do we know that things are getting better?
Yeah.
Well, we'll know that things are getting better when Americans, you know, we'll feel it.
There's something that is, I think, widely shared in the American psychology right now.
We all feel this deep sense of despair and distrust and animosity towards the other side.
This is sort of a kind of a ubiquitous feeling and it comes up in conversations all the time.
How do we find our way back to a sense of shared understanding and respect for our common fate, the fact that we are here together and we need to work things out?
And so how do we know?
Well, we'll feel it.
It will also show up in polls, of course.
But I think that the most important thing is the feeling that we'll have where we feel less concerned about the decay and the erosion of these basic norms in our politics.
And we feel a greater sense of respect and acknowledgement that everyone is here together and we need to work things out in order to be able to make progress as a country together.
Daniel Yudkin is our guest joining us from New Orleans, Louisiana this morning.
He's with More in Common, the project that he works on there, the Beacon Project.
BeaconProject.us is where you can go if you want to check it out.
Taking your phone calls on phone line split by party, Democrats, Republicans, Independents.
We'll put the numbers on the screen for you.
He's with us until the end of our program today at 10 a.m. Eastern.
So go ahead and get your calls in.
And we will begin on the Independent line, Bridgewater, New Jersey.
Joan, you're on with Daniel Yudkin.
Hi, good morning.
Civic Responsibility in Conflict00:02:27
I think your topic would have been good maybe years ago, but I think there's so many other bigger issues that I feel is just going to like water it down.
Such as what?
I'm going to say that because I'm going to say this.
I think that we look at things too conventional now, and we need to start looking at things in different ways.
For instance, the war that we just had with Israel and in Gaza.
My personal opinion, when I really look at big picture and I say, who won that war, you would say Israel won that war, but I don't think Israel won that war.
I think Hamas won that war because I don't think Hamas went into this war to really win a war, conventional war against Israel.
And if you look, Hamas won the war in public sentiment because when before October 8th, everybody was with Israel.
And then at the end of the war, when you look at how they plummeted Gaza, all the children that died, all the people that are displaced, that Israel actually thought it was okay to bomb hospitals.
Well, Joan, got your point.
Daniel Yudkin, to bring it back to this conversation, are there lessons from the Middle East in a place where there's so much division, historic division, are there lessons that your group can look to to try to heal the divide in America or create more of this ability to have civic responsibility towards One another.
What lessons can you learn from such an ingrained conflict over there?
Yeah.
Yeah, look, I mean, you know, if anyone who's looking around the world is seeing with increasing concern just all of the different ways in which there's war, there's deep levels of violence, and just troubling,
you know, chaos around the world in a way that is, you know, many people had thought, okay, we're entering a period of peace, we're entering a period of prosperity, and it's just for many people, there's a sense of despair that this stuff is going to be continuing to take place and is going to just is ongoing.
Core Values Crisis00:15:33
And so the question I think that needs to be asked is: what are we doing wrong, and how can we return to a better sense of the first principles?
What do we actually need?
How do we, what are our roles as Americans?
How do we show up for each other?
And how can we recommit to the fundamental principles of what it means to be American in a way that can kind of present a new understanding of how we navigate these intractable, seemingly intractable problems around the world?
So, again, for me, what it comes down to is this recommitment to the fundamental principles of how we operate as Americans.
We're with Daniel Yudkin this morning.
We're talking about civic responsibility in this country.
It's our final 20 minutes of the Washington Journal this morning.
By the way, if you're looking for President Trump's remarks at the Shield of the Americas conference that's happening, the president has stepped up to the microphone and we're taking that over on C-SPAN 2.
If you'd like to watch it, he came to the mic a little bit earlier today.
We're expecting him around 10 a.m.
But if you want to watch it, it's happening over there.
You can pop back over here afterwards and you can also call in on this program like Paul did in Kingston, New York, Line for Democrats.
Paul, good morning.
Hello, this is Paul in Kingston, New York.
I started out a political life as a right-winger, and today I'm farther to the left than probably anybody you've ever met in your entire life.
It was a long journey.
I started out as a right-winger because my family was.
But then I started writing letters to the editor of newspapers.
I started meeting and talking to all different kinds of people.
And I just never stopped moving to the left.
And that's where I am today, far, far, far to the left.
I was during Vietnam for several years, the head of the anti-war movement in my area.
And then through that, I became friends with Everett Hodge, who was the founder of the Ulster County Branch NAACP.
And after he passed, I remained active.
And so I'm white, and I became president of the Ulster County Branch NAACP.
So I've never stopped moving and I'm still moving.
And I can't go back to the right because what I've learned about the right is, and I think it's true in all places at all times, the right wing can be summed up in one sentence.
And that one sentence is, I've got mine in the hell with everybody else.
And I care about everybody else.
And that's why I never stopped moving.
Paul, can I ask you before you go, you said you started by writing letters to the editor.
I asked because somebody asked me recently, I want to write a letter to the editor.
Do you think it's worth it?
What would you say to that person as somebody who started this path that you're talking about, just writing letters to the editor for newspapers?
Absolutely, it's worth it.
I can honestly say I've never lost a debate.
I started writing letters to the editor, then people started responding to my letters.
And we'd go back and forth and back and forth.
I always won every darn time.
How do you know you won, Paul?
Because other people sided with me, because my own judgment, and because I never wrote a letter to the editor that wasn't published.
Every single one of them was.
Paul, thanks for the call from New York.
Daniel Yudkin, let you jump in on what Paul was talking about.
I think it's really interesting, this idea that people can change their trajectory over time.
You can start off on the far right and then end up on the far left.
And what are the life experiences that people have?
What are the insights that people gain that allows them to change their political point of view?
I mean, this is something that we see in our research, that people do change their views over time, in both directions.
And so it suggests maybe that these boundaries that we consider to be so set in stone are maybe a little bit more malleable than we give them credit for.
Jason, in Hellertown, Pennsylvania, Independent, you're on with Daniel Yudkin.
Hi, my name is Jason, and I'm a teacher in Pennsylvania.
And I'm so glad you have your guest on this week because this week is Civic Learning Week in schools across America where teachers are encouraged to use different resources to teach civics.
She Stay in the Classroom is a great resource, by the way.
And in Philadelphia, we're having a civic learning convention down there.
And my question for your guest is, for every $50 spent on STEM education in America, five cents is spent on civic education.
How do we convince people that civic education is vitally important and you need to start at a very young age?
Because I think education, obviously, as a teacher, is extremely important.
Jason, before you go, how are the kids doing today?
Are you optimistic?
I am optimistic.
Kids, you know, they ask very genuine questions.
They're curious.
We just watched the State of the Union the past week asking different questions about that.
And I am.
I am optimistic, but I worry about the fact that it's not getting enough focus, not getting enough funding, not getting enough attention.
Daniel, Jankin.
Yeah, I think this is great, and congratulations to you, Jason, for your work.
I mean, citizenship and understanding how we live together in a democracy starts, as you say, at an extremely young age.
We need to learn the basic rules of how do we show up for each other?
How do we navigate difference?
How do we make sense and form our own opinions?
How do we get information and use it to inform our views of the world?
And so, these basic skills, not to mention, of course, some of the basics of American history.
What were some of the contradictions at the heart of the American founding?
How have we navigated and tried to resolve those contradictions over the past 250 years?
These basic skills are absolutely critical for the fabric of a pluralistic democracy where we're going to disagree.
And in fact, disagreement is what we want.
We just need to just disagree in the right way.
And so, the skills that are being taught to children and to kids from that young age are going to carry them through and help them to become active and productive members of civic life later on.
So, I can't agree more that civic education and some of these basic skills need to be taught at a young age and need to be increasingly prioritized.
As somebody who's been in this work for a long time, how do you feel about social media?
Well, as you might imagine, I think I have mixed views about social media.
It is a tool that can be used for ill or for good.
It is a fantastic way of democratizing information, allowing people to have a voice in the conversation, for allowing people to get a huge amount of information at their fingertips, of course, as we all know.
And then at the same time, it can be used as a force, as a deep wedge that drives people apart for all the reasons that are well known at this point.
Algorithms that are dividing people and raising up the most outraged and incendiary voices in the conversation.
So, I think that social media is an important element.
It's not going away, but we need to, number one, as individuals, treat it with the kind of caution and respect.
And by respect, I mean a cautious acknowledgement of the powers that it has.
So, we need to do that, and we also need to be exploring ways of regulating this industry, kind of in the same way that the tobacco industry was regulated in the 90s, to make sure that it is being used as a source for good rather than for evil.
In your mind, is all social media created equal, or is there some sites that you think do better at bringing people together or at least don't do as much damage to tear us apart?
I do think that there are some sites that do a better job, and I don't exactly know why.
I don't know exactly what's going on with their algorithms, but I spend time on, for example, LinkedIn.
I think that that's a wonderful platform.
People talk about their work's successes and challenges, and it generally avoids being a source of division and outrage.
Then, of course, you have other platforms where that is not the case.
And so, I would say Twitter, for example, has become kind of a cesspool of incredibly divisive rhetoric.
So, there are things that can be done.
I think that the fact that these are so different is proof positive that there are ways that these organizations have of helping to regulate and create norms and a culture on those platforms that's either healthy or unhealthy.
So, it is within their power.
The question is: is there a will to do so?
Troy, New York.
Owen is a Republican.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I appreciate being on C-SPAN.
Appreciate you having you on, Owen.
Go ahead.
As a Republican, I am hard-pressed to trust anything the Republicans say.
During the January 6th episode leading up to it, enduring every Republican knew what was going on.
I mean, congressmen and senators, they knew what was going on, what was about to take place, and yet they just let it happen.
And currently, they just close their eyes to the things that are going on right now.
They must know that this is not normal, that this is the road to fascism.
How can that be?
Oh, and why are you still a Republican?
I'm conservative.
I really believe that the country does better when it takes care of its resources and people.
And I just believe in that.
Daniel Yudkin.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right?
I'm hearing a conflict in the caller's voice, right?
There's a sense of values that are being expressed.
I am conservative.
And yet the Republicans, I can't believe the ways that they're devolving into these fascism and these types of things.
And I think that that actually speaks to some of the work that we've done at More in Common at the Beacon Project.
We're finding more and more that the narratives and the ways in which politicians are behaving is increasingly at odds with the values of the American people.
And so that's part of the reason at the Beacon Project.
What is the Beacon Project?
The Beacon Project is an effort to identify a story or a narrative or a vision that speaks to the core values of Americans, what we call the exhausted majority of Americans that feel as though their views aren't reflected in current politics and they want something better.
And so, what we're trying to do is we're trying to go back to these first principles.
We're trying to figure out: okay, what do people actually want?
What do they believe?
What is their shared vision for the country in a way that's not reflected by current politics?
And generate that and then offer and hopefully allow that to emerge as a better and more healthy and more unifying story for the country.
If the narratives of today's politicians are increasingly at odds with the American people, why hasn't a third party arisen that can challenge Republicans and Democrats?
Why does this dominant two-party system still exist if you're seeing this thing of people saying that's not my politics, the people who are doing it, increase more and more?
The problem is that there are deeply entrenched systemic factors, institutional factors, that are making it extremely difficult to leverage a third party.
I know that in history there's been many attempts to do this.
Some have been more successful than others.
There have been new parties that have emerged in American politics.
But it's very, very difficult to do so, especially today for all of the reasons that political scientists have identified, ranging from gerrymandering to party primaries to the Electoral College to just the two-party system itself.
It is sustained and perpetuated by this binary type of thinking where there's just two sides.
And the problem is that when a third party comes along, it is so often the case that it can be what they call a spoiler because it pulls more votes from one side than the other and then ultimately gives the other side a greater chance of winning an election.
So there are systemic factors that are preventing this from happening.
What we're trying to do is to go upstream of that.
We're not even trying to talk about a political party.
We're trying to talk about what some people call a narrative, a framework, a value system.
What are the values?
How do we get back to the core values that the exhausted majority of Americans share?
And then let the parties work it out as they will.
But what is a story or a value system that better reflects the core beliefs of the American people in a way that can hopefully transform our politics from that direction?
What are three or four core values that you would hang this on?
Let me say, I'll start with one.
A sense of purpose and communal effort.
So one thing that More in Common has found is that when you ask people what they really want and what they're most interested in when it comes to bridging divides, they talk about working together to solve a shared problem in their community.
People don't want to necessarily talk about their differences.
Oh, I think about this, about gun control, you think that about gun control.
What they want to do is they want to work together to solve a shared problem in their community.
And so this and this, and what this speaks to, I think, is actually something even deeper, which is this sense of purpose that people want.
So there's questions, obviously, we've talked about artificial intelligence and the ways in which that is promising to reshape the American economy.
And at the core of that is, how can we maintain a sense of purpose and really think about what it means to be human in an age in which technology is capable of doing many of the things that human beings are capable of?
And so recommitting to this sense of purpose, and let me actually bring it all the way back to the original topic, responsibility.
When we talk about purpose, we're talking about taking responsibility for the ways in which we show up in the world.
And so one of the reasons why we're so interested in responsibility and civic responsibility is because we're interested in how this sense of obligation that we have to each other, this social glue, can help to cement and strengthen the bonds that we have as a country together and also speak to some of this sense of alienation and disconnection that Americans have both from each other and from the institutions that form the heart of this country.
Finding Common Ground00:03:37
After this program, in about four minutes, we're going to go to a program called Ceasefire, where we bring two often a Democrat-Republican on, but it's two people on the opposite side of an issue when we try to find common ground.
Have you watched it or have you watched programs like this?
Do you think they help?
I think they do help.
I think that people, it's about modeling, right?
People often want to find common ground.
They want to find ways of identifying the core issue or the core value that they share, but they often don't know how.
And there's important research that shows that, for example, talking about personal experiences rather than facts actually can help to identify ways of meeting that, of bridging or finding that common element here.
So if we talk about our own experiences or how we came to the beliefs that we did, as opposed to, oh, I read this statistic in the New York Times the other day, It is a way of humanizing the disagreement and allowing people to kind of cut beyond the surface level: okay, I think about this, about this policy, and you think that about that policy, and then go below to the question of what are the values or concerns or world views that are animating those disagreements?
And are there things that we can, even if we don't share those or prioritize them to the same amount, are there things that we can sympathize with and be like, okay, you're talking about a deep concern for people, or you're talking about wanting to ensure protection or security for people who are vulnerable, whatever it might be.
That's something that even if I don't agree with it, I can relate to it.
And that I think is the essence of finding common ground and resolving our differences today.
About two minutes left here.
How did you get into this work and what motivates you to keep up at this work?
Well, I got into this work a long time ago.
I have family, I grew up in Massachusetts in a very liberal enclave.
And I have family who is in Kansas.
And I remember a very kind of formative experience for me when I went to a family reunion in Iuka, Kansas, outside of Wichita.
And this was some of the first time I had really encountered a group of many, many people who are politically different from me.
And I just remember being struck by the level of humanity and warmth.
And it was a different way of life.
There are different values that these people who are in my family I'd never met before, but they held.
And this was a formative moment because it really showed me that this group of people that I had kind of absorbed in the groundwater being like, oh, they're evil, they're terrible, they're racist, whatever it might be, there's actually a huge amount of humanity that I was able to see in people just by having that conversation.
So that, along with a number of other different life experiences, that alerted me to the different ways that the world views that we bring to the table shape our perceptions of reality and our opinions about political issues and about deep moral topics, moral disagreement.
Those types of that sort of acknowledgement of the humanity and the values that people bring to the table as they try to make sense of these difficult issues that we're grappling with as a country and as a society, that was the kind of like the guiding light for me that brought me to this question of how can we find more common ground.
Daniel Yudkin is the Beacon Project Director at Morein Common, moreincommonus.com or beaconproject.us, both places you can go to learn about his and his group's work.
Finding Common Ground00:00:41
We appreciate your time on a Saturday morning on the Washington Journal.
Thank you so much, John.
It's been a pleasure.
And that's going to do it for us this morning on the Washington Journal.
We'll, of course, be back tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. Eastern, 4 a.m. Pacific.
Up next, it's C-SPAN's Ceasefire.
Welcome to Ceasefire, where we look to bridge the divide in American politics.
I'm Dasha Burns, Politico White House Bureau Chief.