Rex Jones and Tim Tompkins dissect Iran's escalation following Israel's strike on the South Pars gas field, which damaged Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG facility supplying 20% of global exports. They analyze the Pentagon's $200 billion funding request amidst eight years of failed audits and critique Pete Hegseth's "maximum lethality" rhetoric. The hosts debate whether President Trump was manipulated into this conflict or if it serves Israel's agenda to draw U.S. ground troops, while Iran executes an attrition strategy to close the Strait of Hormuz and pressure American politics. [Automatically generated summary]
And to Trump's credit, Trump has demonstrated that he wanted to stay at air power and he wanted to stay like trying to do the targeted strikes and trying to assassinate people, whatever.
Israel just said, okay, we're going to hit the oil infrastructure.
And you think about it from this level, it makes zero sense.
So Iran is this massive country.
Their big oil field that Israel hit, they share it with Qatar.
And I watched an excellent segment on my dad's show.
My dad is on vacation.
He's at the beach with my little sisters and my grandparents.
So he's been having other people host the show and whatnot.
It was Mike Adams, and I believe it was, oh, I'm going to get the other guy wrong because I always get him confused.
It wasn't Ivan Ranklin, but it was another balder, shorter, like a special forces guy.
So it was these two dudes and they were talking about like the controlled collapse or like not controlled collapse that's about to happen because of this situation that we're in.
And like no one understands the ramifications of this yet.
We're trying to provide value to you guys at the end of the day.
I know I do a lot of deep dives here, like on Sundays, but then I was like, there's a lot of things that are happening throughout the week that we're not being able to cover.
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I mean, a digestible version of the news that's not biased, that's nonpartisan, and actually gives you guys more context.
And this is what we came up with.
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The thing that's interesting to me about this is if people want to see kind of like a preview or a post view of like really good shows we're either going to do or already are in the process of doing, you can go here and see a lot of what we're working on.
We're going to get a lot of contributors for this as well.
If you're interested in watching the larger story as it develops from a technical angle, you're going to want to go ahead and subscribe to the Gray Area Files newsletter.
This is really cool.
This is one of the really phenomenal things we're working on in the future.
And Rick, right now, it's available.
So, if you want to support the show, click on it real quick, Wes.
We're going to get a lot of people to write for it.
It's going to be really cool.
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Let's start with the troops because let's play that Iran oil strike thing during the, like, like once we get down past Fox News host claim Iranians want to be bombed.
The Boxer Amphibious Readiness Group and its embarked 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit have deployed early from the U.S. West Coast.
They're expected to sail directly to the Middle East via the Indo-Pacific region.
I believe this is another 4,000 troops to accompany the 5,000 that are already being moved into position there.
I mean, it's a drop in the bucket.
The Iranians have a million-man army, but I think that they are really going to try to take that island, even though it's stupid and really doesn't achieve anything.
Trump wants some sort of military victory.
And then what I predict about all this is that there'll be a horrific battle.
A lot of Americans will die.
They'll take the island, whatever.
And then Trump will say, if you want the island back, you have to end the war.
And that'll be the deal.
You see what I'm saying?
Because then he can lie about, like, I took a lot of their land.
I took their most valuable site.
I took it away.
I took it away from the stinking Iranians.
And then, like, to make a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to end the war, we'll just give you the island back.
And then that's us like having to give away nothing.
So we're going back to Congress and folks there to ensure that we're properly funded for what's been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition is, everything's refilled, and not just refilled, but above and beyond.
I mean, President Trump, as he said, rebuilt the military in his first term.
Didn't think he'd use it as dynamically in his second, but he had.
So thank goodness he did that.
And an investment like this is meant to say, hey, we'll replace anything that was spent.
And now that we're reviving our defense industrial base and rebuilding the Arsenal of Freedom and cutting deals like our great deputy secretary here is doing long lead times on exquisite munitions.
We're going to be refilled faster than anyone imagined.
And I think, you know, we're also still dealing with the environment that Joe Biden created, which was depleting those stockholds and not sending them to our own military, but to Ukraine.
Which is when you, every time we reach back and look at any sort of a challenge we have, it goes back to, well, send it to Ukraine.
Ultimately, we think this should be these munitions are better spent in our own interests.
So let me follow just like the chain of events that just went, that Pete Hegseth just took us through.
So Trump's first term, he rebuilds the military.
Biden, we don't talk about Biden.
Trump comes in the second time.
Oh, it's so great that Trump can use the military that he built up.
But oh, wait, addressing Biden.
Biden depleted the military in Ukraine, which is why it's so good that President Trump is now starting the new weapons contracts to get the new missiles.
We only make a few hundred to like closer to 1,000 a year.
And it was crazy because we were talking about it back in 2024, 2023, and our munitions levels were going down to the point where we didn't have reserves.
Oh, we walk into a bank and ask for a loan for a particular vehicle right yes, they'll be like, sorry sir, we don't trust you with that money, we can't give it to you because you have bad credit or you did something bad that allowed you to not pass certain metrics.
Yes, but when the government and big old Pete says hey, we need, you know, not even just 200 million, we forgot about the 50 that they asked for last week.
Okay, so let's say 250, and they failed every single audit in which they lost 800 billion already that they have unaccounted for.
So we're giving them an additional 250 to also potentially, so it's another trillion unaccounted for, a trillion dollars in total.
That's right okay right, and so the worst part about this for me is just the hypocrisy.
They can do it.
We don't get any credit card, cash back on the loans that they're taking against us when we pay our taxes.
But you know that this is the game.
It's to have knots and have yachts and have tomahawks.
Yeah, it's to have tomahawks versus the ones that don't have tomahawks and like, it's just.
Here's the thing.
It's so crazy.
We'll just go through another example really quick and we'll go to the next thing after this, citizens upset clip, citizens upset.
He's out there, Hegseth is out there, talking about maximum lethality, talking about no mercy, talking about like, we're going to like obliterate, destroy them.
This is the type of language that Trump uses.
Okay well, we've killed a lot of their leadership, we've hit a lot of their military infrastructure, we've destroyed their navy.
That's all true.
Uh, we also obliterated elementary school.
So like, is that a part of the obliteration, no mercy, whatever or is that just a tragic, tragic accident?
When I talked to the Boomer, the boomer just phrased it as a tragic accident.
I'm just like that's the number one war crime is a war of aggression.
Like when you embark on a war of choice and do something like this, all the other things are wrapped up into it by default and like everyone on the internet and i've seen this like, whatever your stance is, just listen to me and hear me, especially if you're on the pro-war side people that are making justifications, well, we'll be out in a couple of weeks.
So we killed the ayatollah Ron's about to fall.
Blah um, like you don't get to decide the length of the conflict, so you can say, you can say those things like you know those things.
And when something doesn't work out, you change course and you look for something else.
You don't double down the thing that isn't working.
That's literally the definition of insanity, Tim.
It's doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
And the people on the ground, they're not stupid.
They're in a hellish situation having to work in this damned economy with the damned prices and the damned inflation and the damn mortgages and all of that.
But they understand what's happening.
And they elected you, not because they liked you, Trump, not because they believed in your aura or whatever.
It's because you actually, and this is why you voted for him as well.
You think about this, and when I was out on the street interviewing people, I must have asked like 100 people, like, your thoughts on the Iran war, positive, negative, no judgment.
Doesn't matter.
The vast majority of people are just like uninterested and they got like their work and they got their family life.
And they're like, who is this asshole on the street putting a microphone in my face?
But when people begin to care about their wallet being impacted, you bet they're going to have something to say.
So I'll be tracking this.
Hopefully, we'll do some stuff together in the future as the weeks and months go by.
People are really not going to be happy about this.
So this guy, I think he's like a Greek guy or like a British guy by nationality/slash ethnicity, but he works for RT and he's in southern Lebanon right now.
Well, hey, no, You got to understand that the girl on the right, she's also got a necklace and whatever, but you have to trust, you know, the Washington, D.C. establishment Zionists about what the Iranian people want.
Like the Iranian people, they want a giant poison cloud of oil rain to drift over two subcontinents.
And that's what I was literally saying this to somebody the other day.
I'm like, well, you know, for the ounce of actual courage that these people actually wanted to have their regime changed, cutting off their oil supply and making them go into like this black mode of depressed, their inflation's already out of control.
You have the people who were talking to Iranians in Iran saying, you know, they're most afraid of the bombs stopping because if the bombs stop, they believe the United States might be done.
And when they have the moment to tweet, they're tweeting and saying, please don't stop.
Because the worst thing that could happen to us is if you leave this regime in place, which means who is going to pay the price we, the Iranian people, are.
They're going to torture us more.
They're going to kill us.
They're going to throw us in prison.
You've got to finish the job.
They are celebrating every time a bomb goes on.
Just imagine, Trace, for a moment that you'd be celebrating when you hear a bomb go off because that is a freedom mission.
It's a freedom mission for them.
This is not a war.
They are finally going to be free from their oppressors that have held them hostage for the past 47 years.
All right, let's just do a little thought experiment.
Say you lived in a city and everyone in the city and government was Mormon, and they enforced that there was no coffee, that there was no energy drink, no pornography, whatever.
You lived in a Mormon society, and you were able to walk around and do whatever, but you know, everything's Mormon.
And then one day, the Mormon city is completely on fire and they're assassinating all the leadership.
And they're like, rise up, rise up and take over your city.
And you're like, well, you know, I may have even hated the Mormons or not like the Mormons, but everything that they built, the place that I lived in, is on fire.
So who am I going to support?
The invader from like 30,000 feet up who's in a B2 bomber in a plane, some guy in a black mask, or the person who was martyred for the country.
What changes your mind?
Like, you're not going to support the people who bomb you.
You know, so like it's like the Iranian government does crack down on their civilian population.
They rule by fear.
I mean, guys, the average American would not want to live in that type of regime, especially during these times where people are protesting and people aren't happy.
Whatever the true number is of protesters that they actually killed, it is a big number, right?
And at the end of the day, everything that we put into the show go or get from the show goes directly back into the show itself because everything that you're seeing from this backdrop to the props to the people who are trying to help us behind the scenes to the video editing, like all of that stuff, and not even just that, the subscriptions.
The biggest thing is, is like, I want to keep doing things bigger and better and bigger and better.
We covered this on the show far before the actual conflict, the war kicked off.
This reverses about half a decade of U.S. foreign policy, a little less than that, but about half a decade, you know, maybe like three or four years.
We have been sanctioning the hell out of Russia in an effort to bleed them dry in the war in Ukraine to make sure they didn't have funds for their military.
We have been sanctioning them over and over and over again.
We blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
The Ukrainians did it, but we did it.
Preventing Germany and Europe from getting cheap LNG, and we make them buy it from us at three times the price.
Not only that, how many sanctions packages have we passed?
Still going on, but oil prices at that point went insane.
And then at that point, Biden had to step in and had to be like, okay, India, we need you guys to stabilize the market and we need you guys to buy Russian oil.
Okay.
Not even two years later, we then punished the country of India for having 60% of their oil coming from Russia where it was 0.2% prior to that, in which we asked them, hey, we need you to do this for us.
And then we punished them with 50% tariff after already telling them we need your help.
And then we wonder why people don't want to do business with America anymore.
And after that, it'll be the Qatar stuff because it'll all have come off the leash.
you let the dog off the leash and this is what kind of happens because they did this in i think they did this without well they did it with somewhat u.s consent but they probably went over overboard to be honest but Go ahead and play this clip real quick and we can talk about the escalations here.
It's an undersea natural gas deposit straddling the maritime border between Iran and the nation of Qatar, and with both nations' shares added together, South Paz is the largest natural gas deposit in the entire world.
On Iran's side of the border, there's an estimated 51 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, trillion, with a T.
But although Qatar chooses to take most of its share and convert it into liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for export, Iran uses the South Paz deposit very differently.
Iran's domestic energy infrastructure is heavily dependent on natural gas, and the vast majority of all natural gas that Iran uses to keep the lights on comes directly out of South Paz.
For that reason, it's arguably Iran's single most important energy deposit of any kind.
Strike an Iranian oilfield or a refinery or even Karg Island itself, and as catastrophic as the impacts might be, you'll still essentially be targeting the Iranian economy.
But attack South Paz and you attack a facility that makes daily life in Iran possible.
It's the sort of target that Iran's enemies would only ever target in one of two situations.
Either they were willing to escalate the entire conflict to an unprecedented level of intensity, or they didn't understand the gravity of their decision.
As for which of those options applies to this scenario, you will have to be the judge, at least until more information comes out of Jerusalem and Washington.
But what we do know, as of the time of writing, is that Israel carried out the airstrike on South Paz alone, but with the awareness and most importantly, the approval of the United States.
According to White House insiders, speaking to the national press, US President Donald Trump intended the strike to be a sort of warning shot, punishing Iran for its decision to blockade the Strait of Hormuz and warning of the consequences if Tehran didn't reverse course.
Unfortunately for the Donald Trump of Wednesday morning, the Donald Trump of Thursday afternoon has the benefit of hindsight, and in hindsight, it seems that Iran didn't receive the message in the way that Trump intended.
Instead, Iran responded with what seems to have been its most significant missile strikes since the start of the war.
Those strikes were concentrated primarily on the installation that handles Qatar's side of the two nations' shared deposit, the liquefied natural gas facility known as Ras Lafan Industrial City.
We've actually discussed Ras Lafan on a couple of recent Warfronts episodes, but the key details are worth reiterating.
This single facility supplies roughly 20% 20% of all LNG exports on Earth.
It also exports about a third of the purified helium that the world needs to build advanced semiconductors.
LNG is a source of energy that is in extremely high demand, especially in Asia and Europe.
And Iran has already threatened the LNG facility at Ras Latham on multiple occasions.
But while Iran has hit the facility before, its strikes have only been enough to force a temporary shutdown, with Qatar committing to shutter Ras Latham through the end of the war, plus the two weeks it'll take to restart production afterward.
So when Israel chose to escalate the Middle East conflict with a strike on Iran's most important natural gas reserves, Iran focused its retaliation against the same source of energy and against a target that would hurt the rest of the world as much as a strike on South Paz would hurt Iran.
It's the same exact logic with killing the supreme leader, right?
Because killing the supreme leader makes absolutely no sense unless you're Trump and they tell you that it does and you're stupid enough to believe it.
I did a show with Anthony Graffio last night, the conspiracy talk show that we do together once a week.
And I was talking to him and like, here's the thing.
Like I, with how crazy things are, I'm willing to like hear anything and consider it.
And like, I think it's more rational to like say like this is all like preordained and set up than saying it's totally random because like these people are really really weird.
It's like, well, if we hit the island, they're going to crumble and they're going to unblockade the strait of Hormuz.
Well, all their operations are not on this one island.
Sure, you destroy their economy and really hurt their ability to make money.
The strait is still going to be blockaded.
And it's a matter for them.
It's like, literally, they are like what Iran is like, they're like a person hanging on a pull-up bar.
And if they let go of that pull-up bar, then the person sitting in front of them with the gun is going to shoot them and they're going to die.
But that person standing in front of them is 90 years old, 400 pounds, has locked arteries everywhere, and is literally in like the middle of like a diabetic coma and is about to lose control of the gun.
So like, will Iran hold on to the pull-up bar longer or will the U.S. be able to?
They know, just like Russia knew with Ukraine, that they're in a position of power almost.
Because the moment this, yeah, the moment that this hits home for every single person, you're going to start seeing riots in the street.
Either that or protests will be the first thing, honestly, before riots.
You're going to start seeing political pressure because not just that, you're going to start seeing companies and corporations and that pressure.
And when that pressure hits, that's the one that moves the needle.
And that is probably why you're seeing Trump sending out that tweet now being like, right, yeah, Israel is not going to be doing any more attacks going from here out.
I don't think that they're going to listen because like what interest do they have in listening?
Their interest is in like causing the conflict to engulf the U.S. to the degree that the U.S. has to put ground troops in there.
Like that's Israel's win condition.
Israel's win condition is successfully getting the empire involved in the conflict.
Iran's win condition is keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed.
Now, which one is more easy?
Which one is more difficult?
To Trump's credit, and I hate him now.
I'm anti-Trump now.
Like, I should be getting all the alt girls lining up at my door now, all the ones that hated me for years because I don't like Trump anymore, okay?
Benefits of not liking Trump anymore.
That being said, even though I don't like the guy, he has been like, if he was true, like bloodthirsty, like, I'm ready for the entire world to die, like, we would already, we'd already be in the ground war.
He's being, even if he's inevitably going to get pushed into it, he's still getting pushed into it.
You know, even if he's corrupt and evil and whatever, I don't think he wants this.
In Ras Latham with a barrage of ballistic missiles and appeared to score multiple direct hits, sparking fires and explosions on a scale that goes far beyond most of the destruction in this conflict.
Qatar Energy, the state-owned company that oversees Ras Lathan, indicated that the site suffered, quote, extensive damage.
Or in other words, damage that went far beyond what the facility had previously endured.
Nor was that the extent of Iran's retaliation.
Although this hasn't been confirmed, as of the time this episode was written, Iran claimed to have struck a critical Saudi oil processing plant at a port city called Yanbu, not on the coast of the Persian Gulf, but on the coast of the Red Sea.
Over the last few weeks, Saudi Arabia had been urgently shifting its crude oil to start exporting out of Yanbu, a place that all sides had seemed to agree was far away from the epicenter of the conflict.
The United Arabs took hits at a key gas processing complex called Habshan 5, one of the world's largest installations of that kind, and at its bourbon Bab oil fields, the largest onshore source of oil in the country.
Even within the context of this ongoing conflict, the scale of Iran's retaliation was exceptional.
Not only did Tehran reveal that it's still in possession of highly meaningful missile launch capabilities, but it chose to respond to the South Pars airstrike in a way that couldn't possibly be misunderstood.
If South Paz was a legitimate target, then Iran was willing and more importantly, able to cripple global energy to an extent that the world had been hoping to avoid.
For America's Barnes Washington clearly got Iran's message as intended.
Of course, when it comes to this version of the White House, there's always a layer of bluster and bravado that we've got to filter through to see what's really going on.
But far and brimstone aside, it took Donald Trump practically no time to announce in all caps, no more.
Yeah, no, I have it, but I can go ahead and read this here.
It's fine.
Israel, out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East, has violently lashed out of a major facility known as South Pars gas field in Iran.
A relatively small section of the whole has been hit.
The United States knew nothing about this particular attack, and the country of Qatar was in no way, shape, or form involved in it, nor did it have any idea that it was going to happen.
Okay.
Unfortunately, Iran did not know this or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack and unjustifiably and unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar's LNG gas facility.
But as I kind of understood and I've been researching and getting the ground understanding from people who live there, Bibi seems to be the problem more than anyone else.
Like, it's not the Israeli people themselves.
It's like Bibi has always had an agenda, it seems, where he wanted to exert that control.
And even before the original prime minister that was before BB, he was on stages speaking about, you know, moving these people and doing all the things that he currently is enacting, you know, almost two decades later.
The people that are shrewd enough to get into Israeli government at the highest levels and stay there for decades are like the most monstrous people we've ever seen really on the global stage.
Well, this is really incredible that like this, this guy, this Netanyahu is able to warp the government over like a 25 plus year period of time to where it's his country.
Ultimately, Israel feels like they have like the magic button where they can summon Superman to fight the bad guys for them.
And like, we can't exist in that state anymore because we're broke.
Our people can't eat.
Our soldiers are dying.
Our military is degraded.
And all of this is just if they can make the statement, if the U.S. government can make the statement that we're getting involved in Ukraine and we're backing Ukraine so that we can deplete Russia's military, wouldn't the Russians and the Chinese get involved with the RO they could deplete our military?
If you look at what's happening right now in the straight, they are telling Iran is telling specific countries, hey, you're allowed to go through the strait if you pay in the Chinese currency, right?
Like, China is behind the scenes negotiating and having backdoor conversations because they see this as a way of like, hey, we don't have to send missiles.
We just have to silently siphon power away from the West by allowing these situations to play out and let the monster hurt itself.
But like, the vast majority that got inoculated with the propaganda, like, you talk to the boomer on the street, and like the main thing is, like, don't you think it would be a better idea not to get involved?
And he goes, oh, that's a pipe dream.
And it's like, it's a pipe dream.
Like, but so it's more realistic to wish for a biblical apocalyptic war in the Middle East than to wish for like pro-America stuff.
Because someone else is going to do it if we don't do it.
Like, it's, it's like, you know, like someone getting abused and then you abuse other people because where I see it is like if we just talk about the history itself, it kind of bunny hopped.
We want to let everyone know we are going to be hosting the American Journal, guest hosting it, whatever you want to call it, until the network goes away.
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You know that.
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