Is War With Iran—Long-Time Neocon Fantasy—Finally Here? Nancy Pelosi Says Pro-Palestine Protesters Are Russian Agents—or Chinese. Plus: Expert Sal Mercogliano on Houthi Attacks in Red Sea
Timestamps:
Intro (0:00)
War with Iran Imminent? (8:48)
Deranged Kremlin Conspiracy (40:59)
Interview with Sal Mercogliano (55:34)
Ending (1:13:14)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, is Joe Biden leading the United States into an even more expanded war in the Middle East, this time targeting Iran?
After the October 7th attack by Hamas, the Biden administration pledged full and unconditional American support for Israel, not only promising to pay for and arm Israel's war, but even deploying military assets to that region, including two aircraft carriers.
The objective, they said at the time, was to ensure that there would be no regional escalation.
Yet exactly that has happened.
The Israelis in Hezbollah have been repeatedly attacking one another for months.
The U.S.
has repeatedly and fatally bombed targets in both Syria and Iraq that it alleges are the home of Iranian-backed militias.
And the U.S.
has bombed multiple targets in Yemen over the last month in retaliation for attacks by the Houthi on commercial ships connected to Israel and the U.S.
But all that escalation, though dangerous in the extreme, could make what happens next seem like child's play as members of both parties are urging, even demanding, that Biden now attack and bomb targets inside Iran in retaliation for the death of three American soldiers at a U.S.
base in Jordan caused by a drone attack that the U.S.
says Iran is responsible for.
Now, if one looks at this incident in complete isolation, three American soldiers were killed by a drone attack on a U.S.
military base, then the question of what the U.S.
should do might seem simple, namely the U.S.
must retaliate, perhaps even aggressively, against whichever country was to blame.
But if you pull back the analytical prism just a few inches, much broader and more complex questions arise, ones which complicate that question significantly.
To begin with, why does the U.S.
have military bases and U.S.
soldiers deployed all across the Middle East, including in Jordan, Syria, and Iraq?
Looking at things purely from a pragmatic perspective, what does one expect will happen if the U.S.
involves itself in multiple wars in the Middle East, including paying for and arming Israel as it destroys Gaza?
Is it reasonable to assume that all these other countries will simply stand by passively while the U.S.
continues to interfere in and assert its military force in that region?
And how far is the U.S.
willing to go?
What price are Americans willing to endure in the name of protecting Israel and empowering its war in Gaza?
Such questions regarding the use of force and bombing campaigns and the like had traditionally broken down years ago along left-right lines, but not anymore.
After the standard establishment Republican warmongers, people like GOP Senators Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and John Cornyn all demanded that Biden quote, strike Iran.
The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in a mega-viral tweet, proclaimed them to be, and I quote, quote, fucking lunatics.
Other Republican politicians, including Rand Paul and Vivek Ramaswamy, have long questioned the wisdom of trifling with the U.S.
war with Iran, something that has long been the goal of Israel's most ardent supporters in the U.S., as well as typical cheerleaders for the military-industrial complex and the doctrine of endless war.
We'll report on these latest events involving Iran and examine all these obviously important and quite grave questions that arise from them.
Then, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went on CNN on Sunday and announced her belief that pro-Palestinian protesters in the United States are likely Russian agents, or in some other way are tied to the Kremlin.
As a result of Pelosi's suspicions, which she insisted were well-founded in what she described as her longtime interest in the topic of Russian infiltration, Pelosi called on the FBI to immediately investigate those who are protesting against the Israeli war in Gaza To find out about their connections to the Kremlin.
In an odd turn of events, however, the very same Nancy Pelosi, when pro-Palestinian protesters showed up at her house earlier today to protest her support for Israel's war, screamed at them, quote, Go back to China!
That's where your headquarters are!
She did not appear to realize that only 24 hours earlier she had claimed that their headquarters were in Moscow, not Beijing.
Now it is tempting just to laugh off Pelosi's rantings as the delusions of a deranged elderly lady who has spent her life accustomed to being shown great deference.
And while that is of course true, and is undoubtedly part of what is driving her uncontrolled rage against these protesters, there are several revealing aspects to this incident showing not only how reflexively Washington Democrats seek to weaponize the FBI against their political opposition,
But also how demented is this core Democratic Party tactic that has dominated this party's discourse for almost eight years now of insisting that anyone who questions or opposes them must be controlled by and loyal to Russia.
Along those same lines, we'll examine the latest campaign literature of Congressman Adam Schiff, who is Pelosi's candidate for the U.S.
Senate in California, where he boasts that he proved that Trump and Russia illegally colluded.
Finally, one of the most inflammatory events driving the conflict in the Middle East has been the attack by the Houthi on U.S.
and Israeli-linked commercial ships in the Red Sea.
The way that the Houthi have caused so much turmoil and difficulty for commercial shipping is actually quite fascinating, given how little resources and military sophistication they actually possess.
To help us understand exactly what is going on, we will speak to Sal Marcogliano, a former merchant marine and expert in the maritime sector, who is the host of a YouTube show entitled, What's Going On With Shipping?
Last week, he produced a very informative video explaining in detail exactly what the Houthi have been doing, why it is far more serious than it has been appreciated, and what the U.S.
response has been and still might be in the future.
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As one final programming note after tomorrow night's show on Tuesday we will not be having our after show and that's because instead of a regular show we will be having a live one-on-one debate with the YouTuber named Destiny who participated in the debate that I did several weeks ago with Alex Jones and Darren Beatty and the Krasenstein Brothers about
Whether January 6th was really a coup or some kind of an attempted coup that merits historical fear of that kind, what the role of the federal government was in all of this, what the consequences ought to be, we decided to have a one-on-one debate instead of this kind of three-on-three format that we had the last time in order to try and clarify and focus a little bit more subtly on the key questions, and that will stream tomorrow night live at 7 p.m.
on this channel, so look for that.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
If neocons in the United States have had any one overarching dream for at least two decades, it is that the United States goes to war with Iran.
them.
It has been so clear, often explicitly, that what they want more than anything is for the United States to go and confront the country that just so happens to be the arch rival, the main threat, to the country of Israel and have the United States go and have a war with Israel's principal adversary.
There have been all kinds of ways that that has been averted, often narrowly.
In 2005, there was a notorious quote, while the United States was still engaged in that war in Iraq, that we were told it would take weeks for the U.S.
to win, and instead we got dragged into a conundrum there that lasted for years.
And even though that was happening, even though Americans were dying by the thousands in Iraq, to say nothing of the number of innocent Iraqi civilians who were killed, There were neocons saying things to the press like, real men go to Tehran, meaning it's not enough that we overturned the government of Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein by force.
Real men understand that we now need to go do that in Iran as well.
They've been thirsting for and craving this war with Iran for decades.
They've been concocting all sorts of reasons why the United States needs to go and bomb Iran.
And as it turns out, they've been doing it since the beginning of the October 7th attack on Israel when people like Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham came out and didn't just say we should arm and fund and finance Israel's war as we've been doing.
But Nikki Haley, Lindsey Graham, and that whole crowd began saying, before anything even happened after the October 7th attack, we need to go and strike Iran and strike them hard.
And it now appears that the precipitating event that might cause that to happen is finally here, namely that there was a drone attack on a United States base in Jordan that the United States blames on or attributes to Iran and Iran-backed militias, and it ended up killing three American soldiers.
There have been lots of these attacks over the past three months that the United States has been also engaged in.
The United States has been bombing what they claim are Iran-linked military bases in Syria and Iraq and killing the people who are there.
And Iran or Iranian-backed militia, according to the United States, has been launching attacks on U.S.
bases in Syria and Iraq and Jordan.
It seemed like it was only a matter of time before it actually did real damage.
It has wounded American soldiers on several occasions, but it hadn't killed any until now.
Now, I don't even think most Americans realize that the United States has bases in Jordan.
Let alone in Syria and Iraq.
Why do we still have a military base in Iraq when that country has made clear they want us to leave?
Why do we have a series of military installations in Syria, a country with whom we were never officially at war, even though the government of Syria obviously does not want the United States military present in its country?
Why do we have military bases in Jordan and all throughout the region where we're risking American lives?
in the form of our soldiers who are not very well protected in a region where we are now involved in a very serious war that is extremely polarizing and inflaming in that region.
Obviously it's predictable that the anger in that region, not just toward Israel, but to its main patron, the United States, Well, put those troops in harm's way has a very high likelihood of provoking attacks by people in that region angry at the United States for funding and providing the arms for Israel's war.
And that is exactly what has been happening.
You cannot go around the world financing other countries' wars and putting your troops all throughout the region and expect that at various points you won't be attacked.
That's not a realistic way of thinking about the world.
And now that there's this attack that killed three American soldiers, a lot of people in Washington finally see this as not just the opportunity, but the necessity for Joe Biden to go and bomb targets inside Iran, which is so dangerous for so many reasons.
Iran is three times the size of Iraq.
They have much more sophisticated military capabilities.
They have their tentacles in multiple countries throughout the region and can do a great deal of damage.
Here's the New York Times article, which always gives the kind of dynamic in Washington, which I think is important to understand.
From today, there you see the headline, Biden's options range from unsatisfying to risky after American deaths.
Quote, President Biden is balancing political pressures, military calculations, and regional fragility after a drone strike killed three service members.
Mr. Biden couldn't order strikes on the proxy forces, a major escalation of the whack-a-mole attacks it has conducted in recent weeks in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
So far, those attacks have put a dent into the abilities of the Iranian-backed groups that have mounted more than 160 attacks.
But they have failed, as Mr. Biden himself noted 10 days ago, to deter these groups.
Mr. Biden could decide to go after the Iranian suppliers of drones and missiles, perhaps including inside Iranian territory, which poses a much higher risk.
His first targets could be members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, many of whom are based in Syria and Iraq.
Depending on how these strikes are conducted, it can open up another front in the war with a far more powerful adversary and trigger Tehran to accelerate its nuclear program.
Now let's just stop there for a minute.
Obviously the focus on Iran over the past decade has been primarily targeted on the question of whether Iran will acquire a nuclear weapon.
And the question is not only how you stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but how do you prevent them from wanting a nuclear weapon?
Typically countries know that there are real consequences if they pursue a nuclear weapons program in the form of the kind of crippling sanctions that have been imposed on Iran.
But the question is why would a country want nuclear weapons?
And the answer is they would want nuclear weapons if they feel sufficiently threatened.
Threatened by other countries around the world that have nuclear weapons and who can therefore attack Iran without much fear, unless and until Iran has nuclear weapons.
And with so many threats issuing from Washington and Tel Aviv to attack Iran, obviously Iran has a great deal of incentive to acquire nuclear weapons.
One of the things you can look at throughout the world is that countries who have nuclear weapons are respected and not trifled with.
That's one of the reasons the United States, it's unthinkable that it could go to war with North Korea.
That's one of the reasons why both Pakistan and India have to respect one another so much, even though they have long standing and deep seated animosities towards one another.
We have more or less created the framework.
Where countries know that if you have nuclear weapons, you are invulnerable to attack, and if you don't have nuclear weapons, you are liable to being attacked by the United States.
That has been the framework that has been created over the past many decades.
And so if the goal is to keep Iran from proliferating and acquiring nuclear weapons, continuously threatening them with a conventional attack, either by Israel or the United States, seems like a very poor way to go about that.
The article goes on, quote, because Iran has been an adversary for so long across eight presidencies, there is no shortage of such options.
The United States has identified the major drone making factories and their overseas suppliers that are fueling the Russian attack in Ukraine and supplying Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other proxy groups.
The Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called for, quote, crippling costs for Iran, not only on frontline terrorist proxies, but on their Iranian sponsors who wear American blood as a badge of honor.
So Mitch McConnell, very predictably, like every Republican in the Senate, with the exception of a few that he's been leading for decades, supports every American war, every proposed American war, and he's using rhetoric to demand that the United States not only attack Iran, but do so with a great deal of aggression.
Senator John Corbyn, the Texas Republican, demanded strikes on Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard, its military elite, and the guardians of the nuclear program.
Time to kill another Iranian general, perhaps?
Representative Daniel Crenshaw, also of Texas, wrote on social media on Sunday, recalling this little mini-attack.
Quote, that might send the right message.
Now, it is interesting.
That in the Republican Party, 20 years ago you would have had almost nobody questioning this kind of thinking.
Probably Ron Paul and a couple of other people maybe, and that would have been it.
The Republican Party would have been completely united in the idea.
That the United States should go and bomb Iran.
No questioning about the geostrategic implications, about the risk of escalation.
No questioning at all about the reasons we are in that region in the first place and why our troops are vulnerable to attack.
There is now, however, a significant sentiment on the American right that, in fact, These ideas of attacking Iran are lunacy.
In fact, Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential conservative in American media, went to Twitter yesterday, something he rarely does to manifest on a political topic, and he Took the graphic of two tweets, one from Lindsey Graham saying, hit Iran now, hit them hard.
And one from Senator John Corbyn saying, target Tehran.
And at the top, he wrote simply, quote, fucking lunatics.
And this tweet went mega viral.
It's been retweeted like something like 50,000 times.
It's been liked another four or 500,000 times more, viewed by millions of people.
This is finally a significant mentality on the American right that has been becoming increasingly anti-interventionist, being more and more willing to question the wisdom of why we go around the world constantly subjecting our troops to attacks and our countries to attacks, even though we don't really have any direct interest in doing so.
You can kind of see this division illuminated in the most vivid way when Tucker Carlson, I think for the only time that he had a show on, interviewed John Bolton back in March of 2018.
John Bolton, needless to say, one of the most maniacal warmongers in the United States that the United States has ever seen.
Has been forever demanding that the US attack Iran.
But in particular, in 2018, he was doing so because of some sort of scuffle between the United States and Iran.
And his solution was, let's go to war and bomb Iran.
And Tucker Carlson was vehemently scornful of that mentality.
And I think we had a discussion that illustrates this division, this very real split In the Republican Party and the American Right on the question of whether or not the United States should be using military force in the region.
They're all bad places.
Though in 2015, you wrote a piece for the New York Times saying we ought to bomb Iran in order to stop their weapons program.
That's not quite what I said.
That's what the New York Times headlines said.
Right.
Well, that's how I read it anyway.
I mean, as you know, they write the headlines and the op-ed writer... Right.
But I don't think that's the only time you've called for conflict, armed conflict with Iran.
But if we had done that then, where do you think we'd be now?
Well I think Israel could have done it 15 years before and we'd be in a much better place as Israel itself and the United States are in a better place today for Israel having bombed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor in 1981 and for Israel having bombed the reactor that North Korea was building in Syria in September of 2007.
So you've called for regime change in Iraq, Libya, Iran and Syria.
In the first two countries we've had regime change and obviously it's been I'd say disaster, I think we agree.
No, I don't agree with that, and let me... You don't think it's been a disaster?
No, because to argue that, you have to argue, let's just take Iraq to begin with, you have to argue... Just for those keeping score at home, those are four countries that John Bolton very explicitly and seriously argued the United States should go to war with and change their governments.
And two of whom are countries that the United States actually did invade and change the governments of, Libya and Iraq.
The Obama administration spent a billion dollars a year in a covert CIA war in Syria to try and remove Bashar al-Assad.
It did not succeed, but it destroyed that country.
And then the fourth country is Iran, the country that neocons and warmongers have been long thirsting to invade.
And despite seeing what we did to Iraq and Libya, leaving both countries in ruins, Killing enormous numbers of people.
John Bolton, who needless to say never served in the military, his family does not fight in any of these wars that he constantly urges, looks with a straight face and says, no, I don't actually think it was a mistake at all to invade Iraq and Libya.
I think that worked out really well.
That everything that followed from the fall of Saddam Hussein followed inevitably, solely, and unalterably from the decision to overthrow him.
And that's simply not true.
I would never argue that.
I'm merely arguing the macro picture.
You have to.
Well, you just said that Iran is the single greatest threat.
to us and to that region, I think you'll concede that Saddam was the greatest counterbalance to Iran and they were empowered by his fall.
So I think it's fair to say if you think Iran is the real threat that way, you know, it's kind of hard to defend that decision, right?
No, because I think your analysis is simple-minded, frankly.
The Iranian threat, which stems from the revolution of 1979, was underway quite apart from what Saddam Hussein was doing.
The Iranians have been trying to get nuclear weapons for 25 years.
But you don't think the fall of Saddam made Iran stronger?
I think it made... The fall of Saddam, no, did not make Iran stronger.
What made Iran stronger, ultimately, was the withdrawal of American forces in 2011.
So, okay.
First of all, what he's saying is that the problem with the Iraq war is that it did not go on long enough.
The reality is that Saddam Hussein was the worst enemy of the Iranian regime and the Shia in Iraq who aligned with Iran understood that very well.
And so there was no bigger favor that the United States could have done for Iran than removing its gravest enemy, Saddam Hussein, on the other side of the border.
And that allowed Iran to have so much more influence in Iraq through the Shia militia.
So John Bolton's claim here is, look, the problem with the Iraq War is that we left after eight years.
And had somehow we just stayed there, Somehow it would have made Iran weaker.
Now, of course, the real dream that he had, and there are amazing documents that I've actually reported on, including one where former General Wesley Clark said he had been in the Pentagon in 2006, and there were documents coming out of the Pentagon from Don Rumsfeld's Pentagon that was filled with neocons like Douglas Fyfe,
And all those people from the Bush era, where they laid out a series of nine or ten countries, Paul Wolfowitz, in the Middle East that they wanted the United States to go and conduct regime change in.
And it turned out to be pretty much every country that the United States has gone to war with.
This was all part of the neocon vision.
You can go back to the late 1990s, when Bill Kristol and Victoria Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, were creating these grand visions of the New America Century Project.
That word.
The neocon framework.
We did an entire show several months ago on Bill Kristol's rotted career in helping to bring so many of these policies about.
Dominating that region.
has been the goal of these kinds of people for decades, and they will exploit anything.
They'll exploit the 9-11 attack to make it happen.
They wanted to go to war in Iraq before the 9-11 attack.
They convinced Americans Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9-11 attack, which is why Americans thought that it was justified for the U.S.
to go into Iraq.
They will use any kind of conceivable pretext, Bashar al-Assad using chemical weapons, now we have to go in and Change that government.
Threats by Gaddafi to attack his own people in Benghazi.
Now we have to go in and change that government.
And now they have the perfect pretext here, which is the fact that now these three, the death of these three American soldiers can be blamed on Iran.
The other crucial part of this history to realize is when he says it all stems the threat of Iran does from the quote revolution in 1979.
That revolution happened because in the early 1950s the Iranians democratically elected their own government and the United States came and overthrew that government and imposed on that country a savage barbaric dictator named the Shah of Iran.
And he ruled with great barbarism and violence for 25 years until he was overthrown by an Islamic revolution that obviously blamed the United States, as it should have, for that dictatorial regime that oppressed them so much.
So all of this comes from constant U.S.
interference in these countries, constantly trying to change governments for our own sake.
And obviously the people in these countries are well aware that that's what we're doing, that we're imposing on them dictatorships.
Right now, these same people want to re-install the Shah of Iran through his son, who has become a big media celebrity in neocon outlets.
He wants to re-govern Iran and put it in servitude to the United States.
These kind of people are responsible for more bloodshed and more destruction than literally anybody on earth, and it's not even close.
And the fact that they constantly come back, and you can find John Bolton on CNN pretty much on a weekly basis now because of his anti-Trump sentiments.
These people have as much influence as ever.
They've re-migrated back to the Democratic Party.
They're in both political parties.
And these are the people now guiding the country to try and pressure or support Biden in what they hope will be his direct attacks on Iran, something they've been dreaming of forever.
And obviously, if the United States does that, actually strikes inside Iran, that will cause even greater escalation from Iran.
And then you will have an unraveling escalation very quickly.
It could easily lead to a full-on war between the United States and Iran, which is why Tucker Carlson called these people fucking lunatics.
How is it that the United States would be willing to fight a new Middle East war of that magnitude while we're already financing two other countries, Ukraine and Israel, in their wars?
Let's just hear the end of this.
I mean, I'm not saying you're the only person who thinks that.
You're the only person I've met who thinks that.
What would you say, if you could sum up the one lesson from what has happened in Iraq, what would it be?
Well, I think the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, that military action, was a resounding success.
I think the mistakes that were made subsequently Setting up the coalition provisional authority and others that followed from it Are lessons about what to do after a regime is overthrown But I also point out because of President Bush's surge policy when his administration ended Stability had returned to Iraq.
It was not a place you'd go for vacation, right?
But he turned it over to Barack Obama and it fell apart subsequently and And the point I think you need to understand is that life is complicated in the Middle East, and when you say, well, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a mistake, is simplistic.
I would argue that I'm the one who understands how complicated it is, but just my view.
It's your long experience in foreign policy.
Better record than yours, I would say.
But thank you, Ambassador.
Good to see you.
I mean, there it is.
If you like the Iraq War, by all means, cheer Joe Biden or pressure Joe Biden or demand Joe Biden.
You have Republican politicians saying if he doesn't attack Iran directly, he will be a coward.
These people believe that somehow moral courage is required or physical courage is required to send other people to fight wars.
It does not take any courage of any kind to send other people to go fight wars.
It takes courage to fight in a war to actually put your life at risk.
But people like Lindsey Graham and John Bolton will never do that.
Lindsey Graham was technically in the military.
He was a lawyer in the military.
He never got anywhere near combat and never would.
But John Bolton hasn't even served in the military.
None of these people who are this obsessed with casually cheering war, very few of them have because those people actually understand the realities of war and what it means and what it's like.
Now, in contrast to President Biden, who has involved the United States in two or three major new wars, depending on who you count, the one in Ukraine with Russia, which is a proxy war against Russia.
The one in Israel where we're financing and providing the bombs and weapons to Israel for its attack on Gaza and the kind of broader Middle East war that has already started.
We're bombing new targets in Yemen.
We weren't doing that before.
We're bombing bases in Syria and Iraq.
And now we've become, we're definitely going to bomb in a very direct way, either Iranian backed militias or even kill Iranian soldiers outside of Iran or within Iran.
These same pressures were put on Donald Trump throughout his presidency to attack Iran.
Here in 2019 is a New York Times article.
It tells the revealing story.
You see the headline there.
An abrupt move that stunned aides.
Inside Trump's aborted attack on Iran.
And what had happened there was that Iran shot down an unmanned surveillance drone.
Unmanned meaning nobody died.
It was a machine they killed, not human beings.
And the pro-war faction inside the Republican Party that had infiltrated the Trump White House, led by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, were insisting that Trump launch a massive retaliatory attack on Iran.
And they had drawn up plans to bomb all sorts of targets inside Iran, Trump gave the go ahead for it.
He finally concluded that he thought it was worthwhile and then he started getting second thoughts.
The New York Times actually attributes a telephone call he had with Tucker Carlson.
As a factor in why he chose not to, including this claim that Tucker Carlson had reminded him that you ran on a pledge not to involve the U.S.
in greater new wars in the Middle East.
Why would you do that?
If you start a war with Iran, you have no chance of winning re-election.
And 10 minutes before what the military had set for the moment of no return, Trump ordered this attack cancelled.
on the grounds that it wasn't worth the risk.
The Pentagon had told him that 150 Iranians were likely to die from these attacks in response to zero Americans being killed, obviously, by the downing of this unmanned drone.
And Trump, therefore, decided not to attack.
Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and others were furious and enraged.
They did get him, six months later, to kill an Iranian general.
That did come close to bringing the United States and Iran to actual conflict, but Trump was able to avoid that by making clear that that was the only attack he intended to perpetrate.
But this is what I mean when I say that things do not break down along left-right lines in any way, because if you look at what happened in 2019, you had members of both political parties pushing Trump to attack Iran.
And yet it was conservative influencers and conservative voices who convinced him not to.
Now here was what Trump said in July of 2019 when he made this decision to cancel this attack.
Quote, President Obama made a desperate and terrible deal with Iran.
Gave them $150 billion plus $1.8 billion in cash.
Iran was in big trouble and he bailed them out.
Gave them a free path to nuclear weapons and soon...
Instead of saying thank you, Iran yelled death to America and terminated the deal, which was not even ratified by Congress, and imposed strong sanctions.
They are a much weakened nation today than at the beginning of my presidency, when they were causing major problems throughout the Middle East.
Now they are.
Bust.
That's Trump trying to show that even though he canceled the stack, he's strong in Iran, whereas Obama is weak.
And this is how Trump typically depicts his avoidance of war by saying i'm so tough and i'm so strong that i cause peace through strength that people know that they cannot mess with the united states when i'm in office and that's why these words don't break out now i think it's in part as well because trump actually came into office believing that a major part of his legacy would be shaped by
by whether he succeeded in fighting the bipartisan war machine in Washington that constantly succeeds in getting presidents to start new wars.
That's what feeds the Washington military-industrial complex.
Without wars, their power and their money dry up.
And then Trump explained his decision this way, quote, on Monday, Iran shut down an unmanned drone flying in international waters.
We were cocked and loaded to retaliate last night on three different sites when I asked how many will die.
150 people, sir, was the answer from a general.
Ten minutes before the strike, I stopped it.
It wasn't proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.
I am in no hurry.
Our military is rebuilt, new and ready to go.
By far the best in the world.
Sanctions are biting and more added last night.
Iran can never have nuclear weapons.
Not against the US and not against the world.
So this has been a driving force in US foreign policy for 20 years.
What changes is the pretext.
The thing that never changes is the goal.
The goal is to bring the United States to a war with Iran and have the United States cripple or take out or destroy or facilitate regime change in the country that Israel coincidentally considers to be its gravest threat.
Now, The reason we have always been given about why we have to go into the Middle East and have such a large presence there and fight so many wars there and change the governments there is because we need to preserve our access to oil.
And yet there's no reason to believe on any level That Iran would be unwilling to sell the United States its oil.
The Iranians would love to do that to get out of the sanctions regime.
There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was unwilling to sell the United States oil.
We've had access to oil in the Middle East forever.
And would have it regardless because of the economic imperative to sell oil to the global market.
That is often the pretext given for why we have to fight so many wars there.
But clearly that's not the motive now.
And so when you go back and look at 2002 and 2003, actual policymakers in Washington understood that Saddam Hussein had no participation in the 9-11 attack.
But they knew the only way they could convince Americans to get on board with attacking a country that had no role in the 9-11 attack would be to convince them that they in fact did.
So they were constantly leaking meetings about Iranian intelligence and Al-Qaeda in Czechoslovakia, Mohammad Maada, one of the ringleaders of 9-11 supposedly met with an Iraqi general, you had Jeffrey Goldberg.
Who was writing articles in the New Yorker claiming that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had an alliance with Al Qaeda, also to try and convince Americans to support this war.
And the question has always been, what was the real motive in having the United States fight that war?
It's probably an unanswerable question because lots of different factions have to unite to support a war.
And oftentimes they have different motives.
And so it's impossible to reduce it to just one.
But to this day, I think it's a mystery to try and explain what was the real reason why the United States went to war in Iraq, why it ended up losing thousands of its lives of American soldiers, tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, insane amounts of money lost.
And as even John Bolton admits, even though he blames it on Obama, the only country that really benefited was Iran.
It gave rise to ISIS, that vacuum power that was left when we removed Saddam Hussein, gave a rise to ISIS.
And so anybody who says that not only was the war in Iraq justified, but that it was a wise thing to do, is somebody who should be instantly ejected from any kind of consideration when talking about American foreign policy.
You've already proven that you have no judgment at all.
And the same is true for these people who want every war fought in Libya, in Syria, in Afghanistan even, where the United States got nothing for it 20 years later.
The Taliban marched right back in.
These people could not be more wrong.
But the question of what they're really motivated by is one that I think is worth asking.
And at least for some people, I don't think it's a coincidence that Iran is the country that Israel perceives as the greatest threat.
Removing the current government of Iran and replacing them with American puppets, the Shah of Iran's son.
Would not do much to improve the lives of American citizens, but it would do a great deal to improve the security situation of Israel.
Now again, a lot of these people just want wars because that's where they get power and profit, so I don't want to reduce the motive just to that or overstate the extent to which that is a motive.
For sure, that is part of the motive though.
And as I said at the start, if you want to just reduce this episode, To the immediate question of, well, Iran started this by killing three American soldiers and now the United States has to strike back, that may seem like convincing rationale.
It's difficult to object to that.
But history didn't start in the day that Iran attacked a base in Jordan, or Iranian-linked militias did.
It started long before that, and the question is, why do we have this permanent, pervasive, and very aggressive military presence, where we have bases spread throughout the region, where we constantly engage in military attacks?
On countries in that region, to the point that three American soldiers are able to lose their lives because there's so many people in that region wanting to attack the United States.
There is no way to analyze the question of the extent to which the United States should attack Iran or the dangers of it without addressing that fundamental question.
All right, Nancy Pelosi made an appearance on CNN on Sunday yesterday with Dana Bash and
And just three days earlier, Nancy Pelosi was at a fundraising event in California that was disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters demanding from her an answer as to why she supports the war in Gaza, which she does, Nancy Pelosi is.
One of the most steadfast and most loyal supporters of Israel she has been her whole career.
And Nancy Pelosi obviously does not like when her swanky fundraising events are disrupted by dirty protesters who are criticizing her.
And as a result she went on CNN and had a lot to say about people in the United States who are exercising their constitutional rights to protest Not just the war in Israel, but the role that the United States is playing in enabling that war.
And here's what she had to say about these people.
They're in front of my house all the time.
So I have a feeling for what feelings they have.
But we have to think about what we're doing.
And what we have to do is try to stop.
OK, I just want to say that there is hard.
It's hard to imagine any sentiment more insincere than what she started off by saying.
Look at the anger.
In her face when she says, these people are in front of my house all the time.
And then she went on to so insincerely claim that that's why she has empathy for their views because she hears it all the time.
Nancy Pelosi wants those people dead.
Anyone who protests Nancy Pelosi, you can see the rage and the just notion of being offended that anybody would protest her.
In this way, especially people in her own party, but that's what's been happening.
So you can see when she sets up the foundation for what she's about to say, what's really going on in her head, in her brain, is that she's filled with rage at these people.
House all the time.
So I have a feeling for what feelings they have.
But we have to think about what we're doing.
And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip.
This is women and children, people who don't have a place to go.
So let's address that.
But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin's message.
Nancy Pelosi sees a war in the Middle East that has created a deeply polarized reaction around the world.
would like to see.
Same thing with Ukraine.
It's a-- Nancy Pelosi sees a war in the Middle East that has created a deeply polarized reaction around the world.
There are millions of people in every country on this planet who are looking at what the Israelis are doing in Gaza and reacting with all kinds of outrage and anger Now obviously there are a lot of people in many of these countries that support what Israel is doing as well, but it is a debate that is taking place throughout the world.
And Nancy Pelosi sees this Middle East conflict and can only see it through the prism of what Vladimir Putin wants.
This is a pathology that the Democratic Party has cultivated, not just among its followers, but also among its leaders.
It is a really deranged conspiracy theory to believe that these protesters who are every day marching against American leaders who are supporting and funding Israel's war in Gaza are somehow doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin.
And that somehow they're serving Putin's interests by asking for a ceasefire because that's what Putin would want and she thinks that that's the right prism for understanding these protesters is that they must have some allegiance to Vladimir Putin because their view happens to align with what she claims is his view about the Middle East war?
That kind of leap, the logical stretching that requires, is just demented.
But it has become completely normalized in Democratic Party discourse.
This is what they've been saying for eight years about basically everything.
Anybody who criticizes Democrats automatically is either a Russian agent or unwittingly doing the bidding of Putin.
And you can see how insane it is when it's stripped out of any context that's actually directly related to Putin.
I mean, even people obviously who oppose U.S.
funding of the war in Ukraine got accused of this all the time, as though nobody could question why the U.S.
government should be involved in this war unless they were doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin.
At least there, there was an actual proximity of that war to the Russians.
To decide you're going to look at the Middle East conflict through this prism of what Vladimir Putin wants, just because this is what you've talked yourself into for eight years, shows how extreme This framework has become.
It's really quite demented.
But she didn't just stop there.
She had a lot more to say about these protesters.
Putin's message.
I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere.
Some, I think, are connected to Russia.
And I say that having looked at this for a long time now.
Do you think some of these protests are Russian plants?
See, they're plants.
I think some financing should be investigated.
And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.
I mean, that is an extraordinary statement.
Just to kind of throw on at the end, I want the FBI to go and investigate these people who are protesting American leaders for their support for a war in Israel that has provoked indignation throughout the world.
Just the mere belief that she has the right to call on the FBI to investigate people exercising their constitutional rights to protest the government's war policy, based on some completely concocted connection she's invented, Between these people that she hates because they're protesting her and the Kremlin is as authoritarian of a claim as can be imagined.
The fact that though it is invented out of whole cloth is something that even the New York Times generally reports very favorably on Nancy Pelosi.
Obviously it's self-thought was quite indefensible.
Here they had to do a report, even though Nancy Pelosi is not the House Speaker, because it's a pretty amazing event to hear An American politician, still a member of Congress with a lot of influence, make a claim of the sort and to call for the FBI to investigate political protesters.
So here's the New York Times said while reporting it.
Quote, Pelosi wants the FBI to investigate pro-Palestinian protesters.
Quote, the former house speaker suggested without offering evidence that some protesters calling for a ceasefire in Gaza had financial ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin.
Now normally this phrase here Suggested without evidence or without offering evidence is reserved for statements made by Donald Trump.
They will often say Donald Trump today claimed with no evidence that X, Y, and Z. I don't think I've ever seen the New York Times use that phrasing for Nancy Pelosi or the pronouncements of leading Democrats, but this was such an extreme case that even they felt compelled to do so.
Now, here is Nancy Pelosi today, who returned to this topic, but had a much different claim to make.
She was confronting the pro-Palestinian protesters who were outside of her house, the ones that she mentioned on CNN.
And this time, for some reason, she decided to accuse them of being controlled and financed by China and not by Russia.
watch her screaming at them as her security guard or aid guides her into her armored vehicle.
We have this video up in just a second.
The Democrats want to cease fire.
I mean these are basically like old white leftists in San Francisco who are doing this and yesterday she went on CNN and accused them of being controlled by the Kremlin and then today she just decided to accuse them of being controlled by Beijing.
She said go back to China where your headquarters is.
I guess she just is going to accuse them of being controlled by a foreign country or questioning their loyalties and their patriotism no matter what.
And it's just kind of which country she decides to accuse them of being loyal to changes day by day.
Now, just to underscore how central this belief is in Democratic Party politics that everyone is connected to Russians, everyone's controlled by Russians.
The New York Times reporter Ken Vogel noted today that Adam Schiff sent out a fundraising letter, and as Vogel put it, the fundraising letter says, quote, he proved that Trump's campaign colluded with Russia.
Now, and by the way, this whole, this email begins by saying, I've been called Schifty Schiff, Pencil Neck, a scum socialist, and a whole lot worse.
And then he was referring to how the Republican Senate candidate Steve Garvey had called Adam Schiff a liar for saying that he had smoking gun evidence that the Russians and Trump colluded to interfere in the 2016 election.
And he then goes on to say that actually during his time as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he was able to prove exactly that connection, even though The special counsel that he references here, Robert Mueller, closed his investigation after 18 months without ever charging anyone with that core conspiracy, criminal collusion or conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election.
They charge people for alleged crimes during the investigation.
They convicted Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, on various unrelated tax issues and financial issues involving his lobbying efforts.
But on the core question, Of whether the Trump campaign criminally colluded with the Russians.
Not only did Adam Schiff charge zero Americans with that crime, but he also explicitly stated in his report, when he submitted his report at the close of the investigation, we could not find evidence that established this conspiracy.
That was the framing, the words that he used.
And yet, in Democratic Party politics, in the mind of Adam Schiff, the Trump-Russia collusion Conspiracy theory wasn't debunked, it was actually something that was proven.
To the point where Adam Schiff can boast about how he was the one who actually proved it.
Now, again, this is what Democrats have been doing for years.
You wind them up and they accuse people, whoever they're trying to defeat, whoever they're trying to undermine, of being financed and controlled by the Russians.
Here's the Washington Post from February 2020.
This was the day after Bernie Sanders had won first Iowa, then New Hampshire, and then had a massive victory in Nevada, where he looked like he was on the way to the nomination.
And the Washington Post published this report.
Quote, Bernie Sanders briefed by U.S.
officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign.
Here from the Washington Post, I just clicked the wrong button.
In July of 2020, so right as the Black Lives Matter protests were unfolding in the United States.
They reported the following, quote, Russia's disinformation campaigns are targeting African-Americans.
Russia is making its involvement by outsourcing its disinformation operations to West Africa during this summer's historic Black Lives Matter protests across the United States.
Social media platforms have been rife with disinformation.
And then they go on to blame Russia for help sowing those seeds of racial divide in the United States.
And so Nancy Pelosi sees protesters.
She's enraged by them because they're targeting her events and protesting outside of her house.
And the only thing she can say, because this is how Democrats reflexively respond to anyone opposed to them, Is I want the FBI to investigate them because somehow they're doing the bidding of the Kremlin and even potentially being financed by them, even though today she decided to switch that to China.
So again, it's tempting to dismiss this as just kind of the rantings of a woman who's aging.
She's above 80 years old.
She's obviously extremely angry at these protesters for being at her house.
But the reality is, is that this is not operational in Democratic Party politics.
Weaponizing the FBI, accusing people with no evidence of being linked to the Kremlin for exercising their constitutional rights to protest in the United States.
This has been Democratic Party discourse for eight years and it just is so embedded in Nancy Pelosi that just the slightest bit of anger or emotion causes her to make that accusation, even though it's so preposterous on its face.
And the belief that the FBI can be summoned To go after people who are protesting her because of her support for a war that huge numbers of Americans oppose is just a very mask-off moment in terms of how authoritarian so many of these people are in Washington who spend way too much time in power and start to believe that it's some kind of an entitlement that they have as opposed to anything resembling, quote-unquote, what they call it, public service.
Okay, we are delighted to welcome to our show to help us understand a lot of what has been happening in Yemen.
An expert whose video I saw just a few days ago, and I thought this video was incredibly informative, he said, He is Sal Mercagliano, a former merchant marine and expert in the maritime sector.
He's the host of a YouTube show entitled What's going on with shipping?
And he explained in a way that I just don't think the media has conveyed, both the seriousness as well as the complexity of what the Houthi have been doing in the Red Sea, the reason it's been so extraordinary and so effective, and why the United States' response has been a little bit confusing.
So we are delighted to help him, to help us kind of navigate through this question, no pun intended, and to understand exactly what's going on in the Red Sea.
Sal, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
It's great to see you.
Glenn, thank you so much for having me.
I appreciate it.
Absolutely.
So, one of the things that I thought was really informative in that one video I watched, and I watched several others as well, and they're just, you know, they're very clearly explained videos of something that we don't often understand much about, which is shipping lanes and commercial shipping and maritime attacks and the like.
is you were, I think, arguing quite persuasively that what the Houthi is doing in the Red Sea is really quite extraordinary.
The impact that they have had, the amount of costs that they've imposed is something that really would be difficult to have predicted and hasn't really been seen for many years.
Why do you see these attacks as so significant?
Yeah, I mean, if you really have to go back to almost the world wars to see a point where shipping on the world's oceans have been jeopardized and actually forced to divert around, in this case, around Africa, So the Houthi, you know, very small little group, really not even a nation themselves, you know, one part in a three-way civil war in Yemen, have been able to interdict 11% of the world's trade.
They initially started off attacking vessels they believe was associated with Israel, but then their attacks became very indiscriminate.
And they started attacking vessels, really at random in many cases.
They tried to make an attachment to the ships they attack, but in truth, they're just trying to hit ships.
And what we've seen happen is the bulk of the world's major container liners have diverted their vessels around Africa.
This adds 3,500 nautical miles to a trip.
That's an extra 10 to 15 days, depending on where the ship is going.
And this means billions of dollars of extra freight costs, charter hire fuel, you name it, is going in.
And this could impact the world's economy by causing inflation.
But now, just the other day, we saw an attack on a tanker just off the coast.
Actually caught it on fire.
The ship's crew, along with the assistance of the Indian Navy, were able to extinguish it.
But now we're starting to see the diversion of energy ships, ships carrying liquefied natural gas, ships carrying refined petroleum products.
And what the Houthi have been able to do by cobbling together a patchwork of missiles is force a reduction of about 30% of the number of ships sailing through the Suez Canal and a total of over 50% of the total tonnage Going through it.
So it's really disproportional.
The Houthi are getting a great return on investment for shooting some missiles and rockets in terms of the chaos and havoc they're having on the world's economy.
Yeah, and I think one of the things that makes this so confounding is the United States spends $850 billion a year on its military, close to a trillion dollars, three times more than the next highest spender, which is China.
All these statistics you can do, more than the next 12 countries combined.
And yet we watch in Ukraine as neither the United States nor its NATO allies can provide the Ukrainians with enough artillery to keep up with the Russians.
I think a lot of people We're confused by how it can be that we spend so much on our military and yet we can't even have enough artillery.
And there the answer was, well, we really weren't preparing for that kind of a grinding ground war.
Why is it that the U.S.
Navy, along with other countries, European countries and other countries in the region that are now responding to these 50 attacks, don't have the military capability to ensure safe passage for these commercial ships?
Well, the U.S.
Navy has stationed a series of destroyers, supplemented by the Royal Navy, in the position around Yemen.
The problem is that it's almost impossible to be 100% and catch every missile that the Houthi are flying, even after, first of all, it took the U.S.
long time to get this kind of ramped up.
The very first attack took place in the middle of November when Houthi forces helicoptered onto the deck of a ship called the Galaxy Leader and hijacked that vessel, sailed it into Yemen waters, and they're still holding the ship and crew hostage.
But it was almost two months before the U.S.
decided to initiate operations.
And that is a slow ramp up.
And what we saw happen is the Houthi got emboldened.
They started attacking more vessels.
Now we're in a situation where the U.S.
Navy along with the Royal Navy have stationed their vessels along the perimeter of Yemen.
But the problem is they're still able to get missiles past them.
It's not a 100 percent shield.
And what is really driving this diversion is the Houthi found a very vulnerable spot to hit the world economy because To sail through this region now with that risk involves what's called war risk insurance.
This is the added insurance you pay above and beyond what is normal insurance, like having flood insurance on a house.
If you don't have it, you're not covered.
Well, that war risk insurance, because of the nature of a tax, has become extremely expensive.
And it's now more economical for the shipping firms to take the longer route.
And that's had the intended consequence of causing a lot of pain in economies around the world.
And the Houthi who are in line with Yemen, excuse me, the Houthi who are in line with the Palestinians in Gaza and Hamas, see this as their only way to really reach out and influence policy.
Well, I guess that is a question I have.
And maybe this is a little bit beyond the kind of strictly maritime expertise and kind of gets into the geopolitics of the region.
But I think they ultimately are inextricably linked.
This is not something the Houthi were doing prior to It's something that started once the Israeli attack on Gaza began in earnest, and they said they were targeting both the U.S.
and Israelis principally, even though you're right that it has reached out almost indiscriminately to other countries.
But they say they were doing it, at least in large part, as retaliation against the U.S.-backed Israel war in Gaza.
Do you think it's fair to view this as a cost that the United States is paying?
Well, I think the Houthi actually had been doing this beforehand, but had been very isolated at times.
We've seen attacks by the Houthi on shipping back in 2016 and 2017.
We saw an attack on a UAE vessel.
We saw an attack on a Saudi frigate.
And we actually saw some attacks on U.S.
destroyers.
I think supporting Israel and the U.S.
policy, they should have been aware of the potential of the Houthi to do this.
Just two years ago, the United States stood up as a part of the Combined Task Force, a task force in this region, Combined Task Force 153, with the intended purpose to watch this area and ensure the safe passage of vessels.
And, you know, the U.S. has taken this on, this role of being the world's ocean police force.
And what's really interesting is, you know, post-World War II, we saw the making the seas safe for everybody.
And what we saw happen was many shipping companies decided to put their ships in these open registries, which were very low budget, very low cost.
And really the defense came on the United States.
So the U.S.
finds itself in this position of lots of times of having to defend the world's oceans.
And in many ways, if you're going to support Israel, then you're going to see that happen.
And a lot of trade goes through this region heading up toward Israel.
The very first shipping lines we saw that evacuated from this area was Zim, one of the big container lines, but a very strong connection.
To Israel, and then we saw other attacks.
Remember, we've seen Iranian attacks against Israeli-owned ships now for years.
They've been doing it largely coming out of the Straits of Hormuz, but now through their clients in the Houthi, Iran has control over two major choke points in the world.
The Straits of Hormuz that goes into the Persian Gulf, and now the Bab el-Mandab that connects the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean.
Yeah, and well, speaking of Iran, what just happened was that Iran had been launching, or Iranian-backed militia, according to the United States government, had been launching a bunch of attacks on various U.S.
bases.
And until now, no American soldiers had been killed.
Some had been injured, but none had been killed.
And I think the Biden administration really felt that it was just a matter of time, that it was only luck.
That soldiers hadn't been killed and now American soldiers have been killed.
There's a lot of pressure now to retaliate in an aggressive way against Iran.
Is that situation analogous to the Houthi?
The fact that all of these attacks thus far have not actually killed anybody.
As you said, they took a crew hostage, they've damaged some ships, but so far no personnel have died.
Do you see that as more just a question of luck and almost as inevitable that at some point one of these missiles is going to get through and kill people on these ships or potentially American soldiers?
Yeah, well we did see two Navy SEALs during a boarding operation trying to find weapons going to the Houthi drowned and so they did die.
But you're right.
I mean, it's only a matter of time.
The ship that just got hit, the Maran Luanda, which took a hit, was carrying naphtha, which is a very volatile fuel, very flammable.
Very fortunate that ship actually survived and that no one was hurt.
It was due to the great effort of the ship's crew and the Indian Navy, along with support from the French and the U.S.
Navy on scene.
It's only a matter of time till you'll see a casualty just because of the nature of the warfare that's involved.
And, you know, it's this escalation that we're seeing that's happening here.
This attacks on commercial shipping have been ratcheted up.
We're seeing more and more ships diverting around the area.
You're seeing lower-cost ships coming through, crude oil tankers and bulk carriers carrying grain and other cargo.
And we're in a very weird situation, actually, where a lot of the vessels that are associated with the United States and its allies are now no longer going through, but the ships that are going through Our ships that are carrying Russian oil or Chinese ships, and they're being guarded by the US and the British navies at this point.
So it's a very strange situation that's evolving.
And we're seeing shipping starting to adapt to this.
But the question is, long term, does this have a negative impact on the world's economy?
And I would say, yes, you're going to start seeing the impact of this through inflation and some delays in getting cargo to where it needs to be.
One of the things you mentioned that I don't think I gave a lot of thought to is that people who work in maritime and commercial shipping often have to navigate waters that can be dangerous, exactly because they may be places where various countries are in conflict.
And you had spoken about how essentially any crew that is now passing through the Red Sea or passing through these waterways are basically being asked to enter War zones and yet their compensation is not really being increased and you feel like they haven't been treated fairly.
Can you talk a little bit more about the dynamic between these shipping companies and their responsibilities to their crews when they're asked to do things that are obviously dangerous like passing through these waterways?
Yeah, you know, when ships sail into contested waters, there's actually an insurance committee that determines where war zones exist in the world.
And they require the ships to have this war risk insurance.
However, for a lot of mariners, and remember, there's about 1.8 million mariners who crew all the vessels that move all the cargo for us around the world.
The vast majority of them come from overseas, Philippines, China, India, Indonesia, and Russia and Ukraine.
But there are American vessels out there.
There are Europeans and other Asian crews that are out there.
And many times when these ships sail into harm waters or into dangerous waters, the crews themselves are not always compensated.
Companies like to not pay extra money because crew cost is a big operating expense.
And so lots of times they'll do it.
So just recently we had two American ships of an American shipping company that was attempting to sail through that region.
And they had to turn around because they were attacked.
Well, two of the four unions of the ships had negotiated an agreement so that their crews were getting more money.
But two of them hadn't.
And you know, I think it's absolutely upon these companies to ensure that if you're going to ask a mariner to do something above and beyond, and particularly sail into a potential war zone, get shot at, then you have to compensate them for that.
And a lot of times this isn't just money.
It's medical insurance, it's life insurance should something happen to you because you sign on for a set voyage.
And if that voyage differs and you put a different situation in it, we've seen it.
And we've seen mariners get killed.
We haven't seen mariners killed in this situation, but if you go up on the Black Sea, the Russians have killed several merchant mariners and ships that were sailing to and from that region.
So it is a hazardous position to be in.
Last question.
The United States, working with the Saudis, spent years bombing the Houthis in Yemen.
And it created a lot of impact in that country, an extreme humanitarian crisis.
Lots of people spent a lot of years on the brink of famine.
A lot of died from hunger and from other causes of this war.
And yet here the Houthi are having survived many years of Saudi bombing with the support of the United States and the British and obviously they continue to have missile capabilities and places in their country where they can hide these, this military hardware.
Do you think the United States actually has the military capability without launching a full-on war in Yemen to actually weaken the Houthi and make these attacks Impossible?
Or is there some reason why the nature of where the Houthi are in Yemen makes that very difficult to do?
I think it's going to be extremely difficult.
If you look back to the piracy that took place off the coast of Somalia, when you had international cooperation to put together a fleet off the coast and try to minimize the amount of piracy that was taking place out of Somalia, they were able to do it.
They forced the pirates to go further out, they provided security, but they never eliminated it.
It really wasn't until the situation in Somalia was resolved, and that was through the African Union, that the piracy issue went away.
And in many ways, that's the same thing with the Houthi.
Unless you get Mideast peace, where the issue underwriting the Houthis, which is the issue between Israel and Gaza, is resolved, then they can keep this up almost indefinitely.
The options you have are very limited.
Number one, you maintain the shield of ships you have right now.
But as we've seen, that's not foolproof.
The second thing you do is initiate a blockade, but that's going to have an economic and really bad impact on the population of Somalia, excuse me, of Yemen, if you start slowing down the importation of food and other goods, because you're searching for weapons.
And then obviously, the worst case scenario is a full-blood invasion, where you would have to go in and...
and basically control the entire real estate to prevent that from happening.
I think, again, the way these issues are largely solved is more political and diplomatically than through military force.
While the military is providing a shield, it's not 100 percent.
And that means as long as missiles are getting through, the insurance to go through this area is going to be very prohibitive for very expensive vessels to go through.
When you start talking about these massive container ships, you're talking about ships that are valued at over, you know, several hundred millions of dollars, maybe half a billion dollars.
And so the insurance cost becomes really prohibitive.
So unless the U.S.
can use some leverage against them, and that leverage here isn't going to be against the Houthi, Because the Houthi are ideological.
You would have to use leverage against the Iranians because the Iranians have levers against them.
And I'm not sure the U.S.
can do that.
I'm not sure the British can do it.
The Chinese maybe.
But it's going to be really hard pressed to fix this because the Houthi are getting a great return on their investment by throwing a few missiles at commercial shipping.
Yeah, or the alternative is the U.S.
could use leverage against the Israelis to end that war.
The U.S.
could decide to withdraw its support.
This is a cost, clearly, of that war.
That's something that people who support the war, I think, at least, should take into account.
Well, it was really fascinating finding your channel.
I'm so glad I did.
Obviously, maritime policy and Commercial shipping lanes and the like have a huge impact on the world and how it operates It's something we don't hear a lot about so I really encourage people to look at your channel What is going on with shipping it is?
So much more interesting than I think a lot of people might anticipate Thinking about the title and I know I found that video in particular that you did on analyzing this situation Incredibly informative and enlightening so thank you for that work, and I hope people will check out your video Glenn, thank you so much.
And as you said, there's always unintended consequences, and you're seeing that played out right now in global shipping.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
Have a good evening.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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As a reminder, tomorrow night we will be having this live one-on-one debate about January 6th and whether it was a coup, the extent to which the FBI was involved, and related issues between myself and the YouTuber Destiny, hosted by someone who volunteered for that job, who's hosted and moderated several other debates that were very well watched.
So, that will be starting right about 7 o'clock p.m.
live on our show.
So, tomorrow night we won't have a regular show.
We'll have that live debate instead, so we don't have that after show.
But for those of you watching, we are, as always, very appreciative.
So we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m.
