The David Knight Show - The David Knight Show - 03/03/2026
Aired: 2026-03-03
Duration: 24:56


=== Why Now Attack Iran? (07:09) ===

[00:00:58]  In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
[00:01:05]  It's the David Knight Show.
[00:01:13]  As the clock strikes 13, it's Tuesday, the 3rd of March, year of our Lord 2026.
[00:01:19]  Well, he had a very interesting revelation yesterday from Marco Rubio.
[00:01:24]  Why now?
[00:01:26]  Why now did we attack Iran?
[00:01:28]  As Trump has said, you know, for 40-some odd years, I've been shouting death to America.
[00:01:33]  So why do we do it now?
[00:01:35]  Well, we're going to tell you the very interesting reason.
[00:01:39]  And it's something that unfortunately a lot of us have been talking about for quite some time.
[00:01:44]  We have War Pete saying he is a recovering neocon.
[00:01:50]  I think he fell off the wagon.
[00:01:53]  That was ever the truth.
[00:01:55]  We're going to have Charlie Kirk and his comments about Lindsey Graham and the neocons and the failures, both pragmatic and philosophical.
[00:02:05]  But folks, the real failure is moral.
[00:02:09]  And we're going to talk about how their war plans have already gone sideways.
[00:02:13]  Yes, Trump taco.
[00:02:16]  He doesn't check any out, but he always changes orders.
[00:02:20]  He always changes objectives.
[00:02:23]  It's that chaos and not able to steer a course that is really the concern here as we look at the commander and thief.
[00:02:32]  We'll be right back.
[00:02:38]  Well, Pete Hegset says that this war in Iran is not Iraq, but he can't say what it is.
[00:02:47]  And he scolds the press for saying, how dare you ask what our objectives are, right?
[00:02:52]  I mean, don't you know that we're supposed to be the rulers of the world?
[00:02:55]  And that's all you need to know.
[00:02:57]  By right, we are the exceptional power.
[00:03:02]  We can project power.
[00:03:04]  And he made some vague mentions about how Iran should not be allowed to project power.
[00:03:11]  Well, the Pentagon has named this Operation Epic Fury.
[00:03:17]  And Hegseth doesn't really have any objectives except to say lethality.
[00:03:24]  Let me just say, killing everybody is not an objective.
[00:03:29]  Killing everybody is not legal.
[00:03:30]  It's not moral.
[00:03:32]  But that's all that Pete Hegseth can come up with.
[00:03:35]  Lethality.
[00:03:37]  They even have this thing about lethality maxing, which goes back to a lot of the slang on some of the discussion boards and stuff.
[00:03:47]  It's people who are doing crazy stuff to their body men to affect their jaw, to get the square jaw, whatever.
[00:03:55]  They think that it's all about looks.
[00:03:57]  Quite frankly, I think it is an appropriate way for the Pentagon to describe itself because it is all about looks, isn't it?
[00:04:06]  It's all about cosmetic surgery.
[00:04:08]  Forget surgical strikes.
[00:04:10]  This is about cosmetic surgery, about image, projecting an image, not necessarily power.
[00:04:17]  Well, the question when we look at whether or not he is a recovered neocon, I guess we could always question whether or not war, Pete, is going to become repeat.
[00:04:34]  I've been a recovering neocon for six years now.
[00:04:38]  Like the foolishness with which we ricocheted around the world, intervening, think it was in our best interest when really we just overturned the table and created something worse in almost every single scenario has led to almost, I mean, the hubris of the Pentagon is that they want to now tell other countries how to do counterinsurgency based on what we did in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[00:05:02]  Are you kidding me?
[00:05:03]  So you really have learned nothing.
[00:05:07]  That's right.
[00:05:08]  I think he really has learned nothing either.
[00:05:10]  By the way, while we're on the topic of what should U.S. policy be and should we ever have a president who makes a case for war?
[00:05:18]  You know, like, hey, they attacked us.
[00:05:21]  Let's stop this threat of violence that's killing our own people.
[00:05:24]  No, we are the ones who are doing that.
[00:05:27]  We are the aggressor.
[00:05:28]  We are the Hitlers in all of this.
[00:05:31]  Charlie Kirk got it right before he died.
[00:05:34]  On one side is the Lindsey Graham, John Bolton types, where they are actively calling for regime change.
[00:05:41]  Here is Lindsey Graham.
[00:05:43]  This is just lunacy.
[00:05:45]  It says nothing new with nuclear weapons at this point.
[00:05:47]  This is now that we want to go all in and take out the regime.
[00:05:54]  It's time for us to close the chapter on the Iranian Ayatollah and his henchmen and start a new chapter in the Middle East.
[00:06:03]  That sounds good, doesn't it?
[00:06:05]  But what have we learned when it comes to wars and especially wars in the Middle East?
[00:06:09]  What you draw up on a whiteboard rarely happens.
[00:06:15]  What you think theoretically is going to occur, there might be unintended and unforeseen consequences, especially when you're talking about a country two and a half times the size of Texas.
[00:06:30]  It has 90 million people and was an ancient and great power with well over a dozen ethnic groups.
[00:06:37]  You have underground Christians.
[00:06:40]  You don't really have many Jews left in Persia.
[00:06:43]  But also you have secular, younger Persians.
[00:06:45]  Who's going to run the country exactly, Lindsey Graham?
[00:06:48]  This sounds like Hillary Rodham Clinton in Libya.
[00:06:51]  So I'm pointing to the first extreme right now, the neoconservative extreme.
[00:06:56]  The we must go take off the head of the snake right now.
[00:06:59]  Be all in, President Trump, in helping Israel eliminate the nuclear threat.
[00:07:04]  If we need to provide bombs to Israel, provide bombs.
[00:07:07]  If we need to fly planes with Israel, do joint operations.
[00:07:11]  But here's the bigger question: Wouldn't the world be better off if the Ayatollah's went away and replaced by something better?
[00:07:17]  Wouldn't Iran be better off?
[00:07:19]  It's time to close the chapter on the Iranian Ayatollah and his henchmen.
[00:07:23]  Let's close that chapter soon and start a new chapter in the Mideast, one of tolerance, hope, and peace.
[00:07:29]  Okay, that sounds good, but that's pathologically insane.
[00:07:33]  I'm sorry.
[00:07:34]  It is.
[00:07:34]  How do you know it's going to be better?
[00:07:37]  Yeah, the Ayatollah is awful, but maybe he's one of the few guys that can keep that country together and not have a 90 million person civil war.
[00:07:46]  Lindsey Graham is so consistently out of his mind, it's hard to even comprehend.
[00:07:51]  Regime change is not like changing the head coach at the Chicago Bears.
[00:07:55]  It's not how it works.
[00:07:56]  It's not like a clean transfer.
[00:08:00]  Typically, in the Mideast, it's very messy, creates a quagmire, and then there is civil war.

=== Defining U.S. War Terms (12:56) ===

[00:08:08]  Yeah, well, their well-defined plans went away right at the very beginning.
[00:08:12]  Very first thing they did was the decapitation strike when all the leaders were meeting.
[00:08:18]  And Trump told Jonathan Carl, he said, yeah, we had three or four candidates that we wanted to replace the Ayatollah.
[00:08:25]  We killed them all.
[00:08:27]  That's how this stuff goes.
[00:08:29]  They don't have a plan.
[00:08:31]  They're the gang that can't shoot straight.
[00:08:33]  They don't know what they're doing.
[00:08:34]  And of course, we've got to get the Ayatollah out of there because he's a horrible guy, and he is.
[00:08:39]  It's kind of interesting.
[00:08:40]  All of the things that people are talking about in terms of what the Ayatollah did.
[00:08:45]  He's got his secret police.
[00:08:47]  He arrests, tortures, kills dissidents, on and on and on.
[00:08:50]  One of the longest authoritarian leaders that the world has had, longest surviving.
[00:08:56]  I looked at it and it's like, you know, the Shah did all of those things.
[00:09:00]  Our guy.
[00:09:02]  The Shah was there for another year, longer than Khomeini was.
[00:09:09]  And the Shah is the one who basically paved the way for Khomeini to take over.
[00:09:16]  There's a lot of things here that are really working against themselves.
[00:09:20]  One of the things in terms of when you look at the motivation of people to fight a war and don't underestimate that.
[00:09:30]  I think that counts a great deal, especially in asymmetric warfare.
[00:09:35]  Motivation is a big part of the equation.
[00:09:41]  And they want to talk about how they did this precision surgical strike and we can pinpoint accuracy.
[00:09:47]  We can do this and that and everything.
[00:09:49]  And at the same time, how do you explain then these two schools that were killed, where they killed 150 or 160-something kids, girls in one school alone, about another 50 or 60 in the other school?
[00:10:03]  How do you explain that?
[00:10:05]  At the same time, you're boasting about the accuracy of your weapons and your targeting and your planning.
[00:10:10]  And of course, what Scott Ritter was saying yesterday, I played that clip for you.
[00:10:14]  He was involved in targeting when he was in the military.
[00:10:18]  And he said he is haunted by the fact that they got bad intel and they targeted this bomb shelter and killed so many civilians, a lot of them children.
[00:10:30]  And so his take on it was, this is just kind of a quota system.
[00:10:36]  You know, the Trump administration comes in and the Pentagon and we got to have X number of strikes.
[00:10:42]  So give us targets.
[00:10:44]  And he said, these guys are just going through grabbing targets sloppily, grabbing targets.
[00:10:49]  That's what this is about.
[00:10:51]  And I think people are going to see, talk about blowback.
[00:10:54]  That's one of the very first places it begins.
[00:10:56]  First of all, they have their decapitation strike.
[00:10:58]  They not only kill the Aitolla, but they kill the people they think they can work with.
[00:11:02]  Secondly, they brag about their precision strike while they kill two schools full of children.
[00:11:12]  And so this is not Iraq.
[00:11:14]  This is not endless, said Heg Seth.
[00:11:18]  He said, all you people talking about mission creep, it's not mission creep, I guess.
[00:11:21]  It's just creeps on a mission, right?
[00:11:25]  Committee to re-elect the president.
[00:11:27]  Sounds like going back to Nixon.
[00:11:29]  And Dan Kane had laid out the mission in operational terms, protect U.S. forces, prevent Iran from projecting power beyond its borders, and disrupt and destroy its ability to sustain combat operations.
[00:11:41]  Well, Dan Kaine had some other things to say, and I reported that before the strike went out.
[00:11:47]  Dan Kaine, and it was widely leaked, apparently, by JD Vance, who would like to become president.
[00:11:55]  He sees his chances evaporating with this war.
[00:11:59]  He pointed out that Dan Kane said, you know, we're short on ammo and we're short on allies.
[00:12:07]  That's a big deal.
[00:12:09]  And so there was a lot of reluctance there in the Pentagon from the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and yet Trump does it anyway.
[00:12:18]  We're going to talk about why he did it here in a moment.
[00:12:21]  So emphasize the U.S. is setting the terms of this war from start to finish.
[00:12:26]  Are we really?
[00:12:28]  Are we really?
[00:12:29]  You know, what are the legal basis for these combat operations?
[00:12:33]  And are we setting the terms for it?
[00:12:35]  Are we in control?
[00:12:37]  Or is there a tail that's whanging the dog?
[00:12:40]  That's basically what Rubio said in a meeting with some congressional leaders that they call the Gang of Eight.
[00:12:48]  Destroying missile stockpiles and we're degrading naval capacity.
[00:12:52]  These are measurable tasks.
[00:12:54]  Well, we're also, we're not just destroying the stockpiles of ammunition of the Iranians.
[00:13:00]  We're destroying our own stockpiles, leaving us vulnerable as we're trying to provoke a war with China as well.
[00:13:09]  Ensuring that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon is a strategic objective, but it can't be secured by air power.
[00:13:16]  A durable nuclear outcome would require verification, monitoring, and inspection framework that's capable of confirming compliance over time.
[00:13:25]  You're going to have somebody on the ground to do that.
[00:13:28]  When the secretary promises, quote, no stupid rules of engagement and rejects the constraints associated with prior conflicts, he signals a posture that is centered on unilateral force.
[00:13:41]  This is why I say he only talks about killing people.
[00:13:45]  That's his only plan, lethality.
[00:13:49]  And when he despises rules of engagement, that's why War Pete despises international rules of war, why he despises the Geneva Convention, why he despises the Pentagon's rules that have been there.
[00:14:04]  You know, things like we don't kill people who are shipwrecked.
[00:14:11]  There's so many of these things that they're doing, of course, in the Caribbean.
[00:14:15]  A Daily Call reporter, Reagan Rees, asked Trump, said the U.S. would leave when all the objectives are complete, and then asked Trump directly, well, what are those objectives?
[00:14:30]  War Pete, how dare you ask the president what his objectives are?
[00:14:35]  Do you not realize that you're talking to a king here?
[00:14:39]  And of course, his objectives always change.
[00:14:43]  That taco.
[00:14:45]  Hegseth replied, Iran's, Iran projects power in a way that we can't tolerate.
[00:14:52]  Let's think about that.
[00:14:54]  U.S. and Israel have armies.
[00:14:55]  U.S. and Israel have planes and missiles.
[00:14:58]  U.S. and Israel have nuclear weapons.
[00:15:00]  None of that can be tolerated by Iran.
[00:15:04]  We project power.
[00:15:05]  As a matter of fact, that seems to be the only thing that we're concerned about is projecting power.
[00:15:09]  Iran can't project that.
[00:15:11]  But if you're going to stop that, here's this, you know, this double standard that we've got here.
[00:15:16]  If you're going to stop them projecting power, is that not an open-ended mission?
[00:15:22]  Well, yes, it is.
[00:15:23]  Preventing Iran from projecting power is not a narrowly defined condition.
[00:15:27]  Projecting power can include support for proxy militias, weapons transfers, cyber operations, missile tests, maritime activity, political influence to aligned groups.
[00:15:38]  This is what we do, right?
[00:15:40]  We do all of these things, but they better not do that.
[00:15:43]  They don't have a right to exist.
[00:15:46]  They don't have a right to protect themselves from us, even if we attack them.
[00:15:51]  If suppressing power projection becomes the organizing principle, the mission's boundaries become inherently movable.
[00:15:58]  Any remaining influence can be treated as justification for continued action.
[00:16:04]  These are these same people who tell us we're not getting into a quagmire.
[00:16:08]  We're not going to do an endless war.
[00:16:09]  And yet, if your goal, the only goals that we can kind of suss out of these people is to stop them from projecting power.
[00:16:19]  That is an endless conflict.
[00:16:22]  Punitive strikes without occupation are precisely what the Iraq Lexon was supposed to teach.
[00:16:27]  Degrade the capability, impose the cost, and leave before the insurgency starts.
[00:16:33]  Hexes, explicit rejection of nation building isn't evasion.
[00:16:38]  It's a doctrine.
[00:16:39]  The problem isn't that the strategy is incoherent.
[00:16:43]  The problem is that projecting power as a terminal objective has no natural stopping point.
[00:16:50]  It expands to meet whatever resistance it encounters.
[00:16:53]  Kind of like the war on terror, right?
[00:16:56]  It's a war on a tactic.
[00:16:59]  It's not even a well-defined person.
[00:17:02]  And of course, the terrorists were being trained and funded by the U.S. government as well.
[00:17:06]  Al-Qaeda, the Mujhideen before them, then Al-Qaeda, then ISIS, who actually ran air cover for this guy who had this long rap sheet, or I guess you could say his resume, of being in every one of these terrorist groups.
[00:17:22]  We helped to install him as leader in Syria and destabilize that area.
[00:17:28]  Everywhere that we go would leave chaos and death.
[00:17:33]  The doctrine has precedent.
[00:17:35]  The precedent is not encouraging.
[00:17:37]  The 1986 Tripoli strikes, which is what Kirk was saying, and this sounds like Hillary Clinton, right?
[00:17:43]  1986 Tripoli strikes were declared a success within 48 hours and a failure within a decade.
[00:17:50]  Hegseth has also said the U.S. will fight to win.
[00:17:53]  Winning presumes that something can be identified and measured.
[00:17:58]  If the desire to avoid nation building produces a strategy defined almost entirely by punitive force without a clearly articulated political settlement, then success becomes synonymous with contained degradation rather than a stable, verifiable outcome.
[00:18:14]  And of course, they will let us know when they have won.
[00:18:20]  They will let us know.
[00:18:21]  They're not going to define what the mission is.
[00:18:24]  They'll let us know when the mission has been accomplished, just like George W. Bush did on the deck of the aircraft carry.
[00:18:29]  Remember that?
[00:18:31]  Mission accomplished.
[00:18:33]  One lie after the other.
[00:18:36]  Hegseth said Monday, I think one of those fallacies for a long time is that this department, Department of Defense, or presidents or others should tell the American people and our enemies, by the way, here's exactly what we'll do.
[00:18:52]  Here's exactly how long we'll go.
[00:18:55]  Here's how far we'll go.
[00:18:56]  Here's what we're willing to do and not do.
[00:18:59]  That is foolishness, he says.
[00:19:03]  Well, is it foolishness to define what you are fighting for?
[00:19:08]  Why you're fighting?
[00:19:10]  I guess the people who fought World War II are fools, right?
[00:19:13]  Matter of fact, the U.S. government went through a great deal of trouble with the Frank Capra series of films, Why We Fight.
[00:19:22]  Everybody knew why they were fighting.
[00:19:24]  They were fighting because they were attacked, right?
[00:19:27]  And other countries were attacked by Hitler.
[00:19:30]  The same way that we do it now.
[00:19:33]  You know, the preemptive strike from Japan.
[00:19:35]  Hey, we got to attack them because they've put these crippling sanctions on us or whatever.
[00:19:39]  So we knew why we fought in World War II and we knew what the objective was.
[00:19:46]  We don't have that kind of clarity anymore because the people who are leading our government and our armed forces don't have that kind of clarity themselves.
[00:19:57]  That is foolishness of the worst kind.
[00:20:02]  All war Pete wants is lethality, killing.
[00:20:05]  That is his objective.
[00:20:08]  That's the only thing you're going to get out of this guy.
[00:20:11]  When the objective is undefined, allies cannot calibrate their own risk.
[00:20:16]  So it makes it more difficult to get allies, right?
[00:20:20]  You're asking me to buy into something that you don't have a defined objective to achieve here.
[00:20:27]  What's that all about?
[00:20:29]  And that's what we're doing, and that's why we're in the situation that we're in.
[00:20:32]  Public fatigue with an open-ended war is well-defined.
[00:20:36]  Establishing explicit boundaries to keep the campaign from expanding addresses strategy.
[00:20:44]  Do you have one?
[00:20:46]  Well, as I said, Trump, from the very beginning, from the very first strike, things went in a different direction.
[00:20:56]  Trump told Jonathan Carl in an interview that he had successors in mind after the strikes in Iran, but they were all killed.

=== Public Fatigue With Open-Ended War (02:50) ===

[00:21:05]  And so it goes when you are going to be the policeman of the world, right?
[00:21:12]  And he said, the attack was so successful that it knocked out most of the candidates, Trump told me.
[00:21:19]  It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because we killed them all.
[00:21:24]  And so first, striking how stunningly successful the president believes this military operation has been.
[00:21:30]  He actually told me nobody else in the world could have done this.
[00:21:35]  It's not geopolitics, folks.
[00:21:37]  It's egopolitics.
[00:21:40]  It's not 3D chess.
[00:21:41]  It's a fool's errand.
[00:21:43]  Anyway, he said, the attack was so successful, it knocked out most of our candidates.
[00:21:48]  So how is that successful?
[00:21:52]  It's successful in a way that only somebody who has bankrupted a half dozen casinos who is that stupid could think that it's successful.
[00:22:02]  You had a plan, did you?
[00:22:04]  Well, Trump completely ignored White House reporters on Sunday night.
[00:22:08]  He decided that he would point to and hang around statues of Jefferson and Franklin that he recently put in the Rose Garden area.
[00:22:18]  I got to say that is as close as you'll ever get to Jefferson and Franklin.
[00:22:23]  He rejects Declaration of Independence.
[00:22:26]  He rejects the Constitution.
[00:22:27]  He rejects their politics, their philosophy, their actions.
[00:22:31]  But he embraces the statue.
[00:22:33]  I got to say, going back to the late 90s, I told the family, I said, I don't ever want to go to Washington again.
[00:22:40]  I don't have to.
[00:22:41]  I said, this place is nothing but a cemetery of liberty.
[00:22:47]  You can look around it and you can see the statues of Jefferson and Franklin, other people who appreciated and understood liberty and gave it to others.
[00:22:55]  As I've always said, liberty is one thing you can't have unless you give it to others.
[00:23:00]  They were wise enough to understand that.
[00:23:02]  But I look around and it's a mausoleum.
[00:23:06]  It's a cemetery of monuments to great men that we don't have anything like them anymore.
[00:23:14]  I mean, the picture of this orange pig standing next to a statue of Jefferson makes me want to throw up.
[00:23:22]  You're not even of the same country.
[00:23:25]  Get out of here.
[00:23:27]  It's like Stephen Miller talking about we, we, we when he talks about America and the founding of America.
[00:23:34]  His parents came here as refugees during World War II.
[00:23:37]  He didn't do anything to build this country.
[00:23:38]  He's destroying it.
[00:23:39]  He's antithetical to everything this country is about.
[00:23:42]  Stephen Miller is one of the most anti-American, un-American immigrants we've ever had.
[00:23:47]  I'd take a million Mexicans if we could get rid of Stephen Miller.
[00:23:52]  10 million.

=== Monuments to a Lost Country (01:00) ===

[00:23:55]  Unbelievable.
[00:23:56]  On welfare.
[00:23:58]  Just get rid of this guy.
[00:24:00]  Unbelievable.
[00:24:02]  So he hangs around the statues of the non-interventionists.
[00:24:05]  Hopefully, something will rub off on him.
[00:24:07]  I don't know.
[00:24:09]  Trump skipped out on answering questions from the press the day after he had done this strike.
[00:24:15]  We were shouting questions.
[00:24:16]  What's your message for the families of the service members who were killed?
[00:24:20]  How long are we going to be in this conflict?
[00:24:23]  He doesn't talk about any of that.
[00:24:25]  As a matter of fact, there is a reporter, host, I guess, Joey Jones, who's on Fox News.
[00:24:35]  I don't know who this guy is.
[00:24:37]  But he told MAGA, he said, it's okay to ask questions about troops killed in Iran.
[00:24:42]  Americans, he said, demand answers when our blood is shed.
[00:24:48]  You know, I don't think he was talking to ordinary rank-and-file people, right?
[00:24:55]  MAGA or whatever.