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June 17, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:37:48
U.S. and Israel vs Iran: Repeating War on Iraq Scripts; Overwhelming Bipartisan Consensus for Israel's Wars

The bipartisan ruling class is repeating the same War on Terror script in order to sell war with Iran to the American public. Glenn Greenwald dissects the dangerous propaganda and lies.  -------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn  

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Transcription by CastingWords Good evening.
It's Monday, June 16th.
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.
President Trump has boasted of his pre-war coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He's already been using U.S. military assets to protect Israel.
He's now even redeploying aircraft carriers from the Pacific where we're told they are guarding against America's greatest enemy, China.
Now to the Middle East, where Israel has demanded they go to support its war.
And President Trump just a few minutes ago ordered the 16 million people who live in Tehran to immediately evacuate a city where it's now 2 a.m., with Israel, as always, demanding more.
Now they want the U.S. planes and bombs to destroy Iran's underground nuclear facilities for them.
The former Israeli defense minister went on CNN just an hour ago and told President Trump and the U.S. that it's our obligation.
To fight this war with them.
And for them, President Trump has repeatedly opened the possibility of even greater U.S. involvement in the war.
There are so many aspects of this new conflict worth covering and dissecting.
And we will do so throughout the week.
But for tonight, we want to focus on the amazing ease that the U.S. government has in convincing its population to support whatever new war is presented to it.
More than four years ago, intense war propaganda, or just over four years ago, intense war propaganda from the US political class and media persuaded Americans to want to fund and arm the war in Ukraine, a war that is still dragging on with no favorable end in sight.
And overnight, huge numbers of people in the United States have suddenly become convinced, without having ever said so previously, that war with Iran is some sort of moral imperative.
As well as a strategic necessity for the survival of American citizens in the United States.
What makes this propaganda success even more startling is that it follows practically verbatim the same scripts, the same exact scripts used to sell the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.
And it's not just the same script being used, but it's coming from the same people, starting with Benjamin Netanyahu himself.
And the cavalcade of loyalists he has in the United States who always want to involve the U.S. in the maximum possible way in Israel's wars.
No matter how debunked, discredited, and disgraced that Iraq war narrative has become, as long as one just waits 20 or 25 years, then apparently that same script just works like magic all over again.
You just haul it out, fear monger, and huge numbers of people respond by saying, yes, let's go to war, let's kill people.
We'll examine all of that as well as the standard bipartisan unity.
In support of new American wars, and especially wars involving Israel, you hear Democrats almost unanimously either staying quiet or praising President Trump with just a few exceptions, a few exceptions of both parties, and we'll look at that as well.
Before we get to all of that, a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
System Update, starting right now.
If you're an American citizen, as an adult, you have seen the United States repeatedly go to war.
Anyone 18 or over has seen the United States involved in all sorts of war, and that's after the Iraq War, which is now 22 years ago.
Essentially, if you're American, it means forever, for a long, long time, for many decades, that you are a citizen of a country that's always at war.
And after World War II, there's a very visible and clear pattern, which is that the U.S. government convinces its citizens, enough of them, to support the war at the beginning.
They deluge them with war propaganda, which is extremely strong, primal, tribal.
And enough Americans initially support the war to let the U.S. government politically go and drop bombs or fund finance some other country to go drop bombs for it.
And then after six months or a year or two years or four years, polls show that Americans overwhelmingly opposed that war that they were convinced in the beginning to support.
Going back to the war in Vietnam, all throughout the 1980s, wars and the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and Libya, the financing of the war in Ukraine, Israel's destruction of Gaza.
Bombing Yemen.
And now this new war that the United States is becoming increasingly involved in in lots of different ways.
And we're only on the fifth day or the fifth day.
And you just see so many Americans on a dime.
The minute a new war is presented to them, with whatever pretext can be conjured, even if they're exactly the same pretext that most Americans live through watching.
Proved to be complete lies the last time it was used in 2003, even though it's exactly the same script, exactly the same pretext, coming from exactly the same people.
You can get enough Americans to immediately stand up and start cheering for death and destruction and bombing.
Not all.
A very substantial minority oppose it.
I think if the US overtly gets even more involved in the war in Iran, obviously anything resembling ground troops entering Iran, but even pro-Sahab.
Maybe some of that will erode, that support will erode.
But all that's needed is enough support at the beginning of the war to let the government start it.
And once the U.S. government enters the war, it doesn't matter anymore whether the people continue to support it.
Then it's just already done.
And all the normal arguments are assembled about why we can't stop, why we can't cut and run.
Why that would be appeasement, etc., etc.
All the same scripts all the time used over and over.
And even though they get proven to be discredited or unpersuasive or full of eyes, you just use the same ones each time.
And that's how the United States stays as a country at war.
Now, we've been hearing a lot of people saying, look, I'm happy that Israel is bombing Iran as long as the U.S. has no involvement in the war.
It's not our war.
We don't enter it.
We don't have to pay for it.
As long as it's not our war, I'm fine with it.
But, of course, the entire U.S. military, Israeli military, rather, is funded by American taxpayers.
Every time Israel has a new war, the arms that it uses, the weapons that it uses, comes from the United States, transferred to Israel.
We pay for their wars.
We arm their wars.
We support diplomatically those wars.
And we use our military assets every single time and our intelligence apparatus.
To support and enable the war, as the United States is already doing.
We already have multiple new U.S. military assets ordered to the region by President Trump.
They're already active in protecting Israel from retaliation.
And here from Axios on June 14th, "Nothing is never enough for Israel.
They want more.
Israel urges the U.S. to join the war with Iran to eliminate the nuclear program." Israel has asked the Trump administration over the past 48 hours to join the war with Iran in order to eliminate its nuclear program, according to Israeli officials.
The big picture, Israel lacks the bunker buster bombs and large bomber aircraft needed to destroy Iran's Fordo uranium enrichment site, which is built into a mountain and deep underground.
The U.S. has bolted with flying distance of Iran.
But the Trump administration has so far distanced itself from Israel's operation and argued that it would be illegitimate for Iran to retaliate by striking U.S. targets.
Directly attacking Iran, even if the U.S.' involvement is limited, to bombing a single site would pull the U.S. directly into the war.
Behind the scenes, an Israeli official claimed to Axios that the U.S. might join the operation and that President Trump even suggested that he do so if necessary in a recent conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Note that was on Saturday.
President Trump has openly said that he is considering the possibility of involving the U.S. even more directly in this war with Iran.
Here from ABC News.
This was on Sunday.
This was yesterday.
Trump says, quote, it's possible U.S. gets involved in Israel-Iran conflict.
Quote, in an interview with ABC News' Rachel Scott, Trump declined to comment on whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a personal plea for the U.S. to get more involved.
Quote, we're not involved in it.
It's possible we could get involved, but we are not at this moment involved, the president said.
Now, that all depends on what you mean by involved.
We're paying for the war.
We're arming the war.
We've deployed military assets that are actively now trying to shoot down missiles coming from Iran as retaliation for the Israelis launching a completely unprovoked attack on Iran based on the claim that Iran was about to get nuclear weapons just weeks away.
Something they've been saying for 30 years, as we've shown you many times.
Same thing that was said in 2002.
Here is Trump today.
This is just about 30 minutes ago.
He issued this decree on True Social.
So let's just look at that last part because obviously that's quite a statement to make just to be clear when we say Everyone should,
when he says everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran, notice he's not saying political leaders or military command or the Iranian military or the Revolutionary Guard.
He's saying everyone, every living person in Tehran should immediately evacuate the city.
That follows a similar instruction that emanated from the government of Israel earlier today.
Check him out.
14, depending on how you count, 10 million people in the city, 14 or 16 million people in the area of what would be considered Tehran.
Why should 16 million people evacuate Iran?
What is Israel and the United States planning on doing to Tehran that...
Aren't we just constantly being told that what makes Israel morally superior, I mean, I've heard this a thousand times from senators and members of Congress and both political parties, is that unlike Tehran, unlike Iran, which randomly bombs Israel, purposely kills civilians, the Israelis are extremely, excruciatingly careful.
Never to hurt a single hair on a civilian's head, and if they do, they're so sorry for it.
Even though the entire world has spent 20 months watching and is still spending the 21st month watching Israel on a daily basis, blowing up children into a million pieces, extinguishing entire families, bombing refugees in tents, and deliberately imposing starvation on Israel, even though we've watched them all with our own eyes do that?
For close to two years, something the U.S. has also paid for unarmed.
They have the audacity to say that what makes Israel morally superior is that they don't target civilians.
Huge numbers of Iranian civilians have been killed just in the last four days alone, whereas a handful of Israelis have.
But here's President Trump ordering close to 60 million people to evacuate Tehran.
It sounds like the United States is quite involved, given that This order of evacuation is coming from Donald Trump himself.
Now, it's not surprising, or at least it shouldn't be, that Donald Trump is very close to Israel, very subservient to it, the way every American president has been since George H.W. Bush.
He was the last one who actually tried to stand up to Israel.
But in 1992, Bill Clinton's campaign against George A.W. Bush was resting on accusing him and his administration of being anti-Semites.
The entire Israel lobby accused George A.W. Bush and James Baker of being anti-Semites for not capitulating to every Israeli demand, for telling them that expanding settlements harms U.S. interests, and therefore we won't keep giving them loan guarantees if they continue to expand West Bank settlements.
Why would we fund a country harming our interests?
And ever since then, no president has really stood up to Iran.
President Obama did enter the Iran deal with Iran over the objections of Israel and deserves credit for having done that.
But other than that, I mean, President Obama also on his way out signed a deal with Netanyahu to give Israel $4 billion minimum every year.
Much of which is required to be spent on weapons from U.S. arms dealers like Raytheon and General Electric.
So it's just a taxpayer transfer.
They're like gift certificates where we're giving to Israel to Raytheon and General Dynamics.
Like buy bombs, buy missiles, buy aircraft.
Here's your gift certificate courtesy of the American public.
But not all of it is.
Israel just uses it for whatever they want as well.
Trump campaign throughout 2024, even explicitly saying on a couple of occasions, we want to make Israel great again.
He talked about, quite proudly, how Sheldon Adelson and Miriam Adelson, one of his biggest funders, would come into the White House in the first term more than anybody else and constantly ask for things for Israel, and he would give them everything he said, including stuff they didn't even ask for.
And he specifically, the first time that Israel bombed Iran, And you may remember the sequence of events.
First, the Israelis detonated, blew up the Iranian consulate in Syria, an attack of active word that any country would respond to as such, and assassinated people on Iranian soil who were invited by the government of Iran.
Same thing.
In response, Iran shot 200 old ballistic missiles, which were slow, which the U.S. and the Persian Gulf states and Jordan successfully intercepted.
Almost all of them did virtually no damage.
No Israelis were killed.
And any of that, it was really a symbolic retaliation.
And when Israel was getting ready to strike back, Joe Biden and the Biden administration said, we don't think this is the time to strike Iran's nuclear facilities.
And here's what Donald Trump, in the middle of the campaign, speaking in North Carolina in October of 2024, said.
He only takes like a half a question.
Usually can't answer it.
But they asked him...
Would you hit Iran?
And he goes, as long as they don't hit the nuclear stuff.
That's the thing you want to hit, right?
I said, I think he's got that one wrong.
Isn't that what you're supposed to hit?
I mean, it's the biggest risk we have.
Nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry.
You know, I rebuilt the entire military.
Jets, everything.
I built it, including nuclear.
And I hated to build the nuclear.
But I got to know firsthand the power of that stuff.
And I'll tell you what.
We have to be totally prepared.
We have to be absolutely prepared.
But when they asked him that question, the answer should have been hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.
And that's why they should.
If they're going to do it, if they're going to do it, they're going to do it.
But we'll find out whatever their plans are.
All right, so that was a month before the election.
so nobody should be surprised that he's supporting Israel in its attack, but let's remember that There are no nuclear facilities in Tehran.
So if the idea here, the goal here supposedly is to destroy Iran's nuclear program, why do 16 million civilians have to evacuate Tehran where none of these facilities are located?
And, again, there's been lots of civilians already killed in Iran, and they're obviously planning on building huge more.
Now, speaking of the kind of war propaganda to which we're being subjected, here was Netanyahu today.
Every time Israel goes to war against whatever country, every time the U.S. tells its citizens we have to pay for it, we have to arm it, we have to fight with Israel, you'll never guess what country We're told to think of as being equal to the new country that Israel wants to attack.
Moments ago Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a targeted military operation to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival.
This operation will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.
For decades the tyrants of Tehran have brazenly, openly called for Israel's destruction.
They've backed up their genocidal rhetoric with a program to develop nuclear weapons.
In recent years, Iran has produced enough highly enriched uranium for nine atom bombs.
Nine.
In recent months, Iran has taken steps that it has never taken before.
steps to weaponize this enriched uranium.
And if not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time.
It could be a year, it could be within a few months, less than a year.
This is a clear and present danger to Israel's very survival.
Eighty years ago, the Jewish people were the victims of a Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime.
Today, the Jewish state refuses to be a victim of a nuclear We were told Hamas is the new Nazis, worse than ISIS.
We were told that about Saddam Hussein.
He was repeatedly equated with Adolf Hitler.
That's a crucial part of the underpinning of war propaganda for both the United States and Israel, to invoke this World War II example that now happened 75 years ago, and that has been used and hauled out to justify every war.
We've shown you before all the footage.
Everyone has seen now the montage of Netanyahu over 30 years of Israel, over 40 years going back to the 1980s.
Ever since the Iranian people overthrew the Shah of Iran, the puppet installed by the CIA to serve Israel and the United States and use Iranian resources in servitude to be able to stay in power, repress the Iranian people.
Ever since that revolution occurred in 1979 that drove out the Shah and We've swept in a government, an Islamic government, vowing to protect Iranian sovereignty at all costs, Iranian nationalism, Iranian sovereignty.
Ever since then, we've been told for decades that they're about to get nuclear weapons, they're on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, they're weeks away, they're months away, maybe a year, milliseconds, and it never came true.
And yet the amount of people who are now willing to just start nodding The minute Netanyahu says, oh, they were about to get nuclear weapons this time, it's so alarming how easy it is to just convince people to nod and cheer as some other country just gets blown to bits as our U.S. resources are diverted to the military-industrial complex,
to weapons manufacturers, starving again the people at home in the United States, the American working class, the American middle class, all of whom were promised and constantly are promised.
That this time it'll be different, that we're going to stay out of foreign wars.
You just give somebody a pretext, and they're so eager to believe that their country is fighting for the right reasons.
I think a lot of it, too, is that when people feel impotent in their lives, they start getting vicarious strength.
They like watching bombs going off and people being killed and feeling like, yeah, we're the more powerful ones.
We're crushing them.
We're destroying them, which is why the world stood by.
Most of it did.
Certainly in the West, as all of Gaza has basically been destroyed and huge numbers of people killed.
But what makes the Netanyahu claim that Iran was about to get a nuclear weapon this time so extraordinary, when we watch members of the political class involved parties repeating it, Donald Trump repeating it, is that less than three months ago,
Donald Trump's hand-picked Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, whose job it is to assess the intelligence and speak with one voice on behalf of the intelligence community about their best assessment, about what the intelligence shows, went to the US Senate and was asked about whether there's intelligence showing that, as Israel claims, Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons.
Just listen to what she said.
How is this being so easily disregarded?
This is not some deep state This is not a functionary.
This is not a career service person.
This is not a holdover.
This is Donald Trump's choice, who he fought very hard to install as DNI because he trusted her to give him the real intelligence.
And this is what she said under penalty of perjury, under lying to the Senate is a crime when asked whether Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons.
The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.
The IC can monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program.
Amen.
So that was the assessment of the intelligence community just three months ago, which has been repeatedly affirmed by the intelligence community that Iran is not, in fact, pursuing nuclear weapons.
What has happened in American discourse and in Trump's brain as well is that the distinction between a nuclear energy program, which the entire world has always agreed Iran has the right to have, and a nuclear weapons program, I think that distinction has been deliberately obscured.
You may remember at the start of the negotiation process between the U.S. and Iran, which President Trump was very enthusiastic about, Steve Whitcoff said, "Of course the deal has to allow." The Iranians to enrich at a low enough level to have nuclear energy.
What we can't have them do is enrich at 60% or 90% where they can get close to a nuclear weapon.
That is what the Iran deal did.
It put huge inspectors and surveillance inside of Iran, inside of these facilities underground, and we were able to monitor that Iran was not enriching uranium anywhere over the limit to which they agreed to keep it for nuclear energy purposes.
And when President Trump withdrew from that deal, despite you can read every congressional report saying that Iran had been abiding by that deal, the U.S. government, Western governments, and NATO monitoring services.
Once President Trump withdrew from that deal, the inspectors were no longer permitted to be in there, but we still have all kinds of intelligence, including all kinds of spies and everything else, as we've seen over the last five days.
Tons of spies working for the U.S. and Israel.
That's how the intelligence community knew, and eavesdropping and surveillance, that the Ayatollah had not authorized or directed Iran to seek a nuclear weapon, despite what Prime Minister Netanyahu was claiming to justify this war.
Now, I want you to listen to this.
This is in 2002, September of 2002, so just a little bit under six months before the U.S. went and invaded Iraq, which overwhelmingly People in the United States agree it was a huge disaster, a massive mistake, or really destroyed faith and trust in what our US government tells us because it turned out that everything they said about why that war was necessary turned out to be a lie.
We were told it would be quick and easy.
It lasted many, many years.
Thousands of Americans died in that war for reasons no one understands.
And I'm not really sure why, but when the US Congress was debating whether to authorize The United States to go invade Iraq, one of the people they wanted to come and testify before the Congress to tell them what to think and how to understand things, they invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
And he went to the U.S. Congress, gave a ton of interviews publicly as well, urging and encouraging the United States to go invade Iraq.
Promising that it would bring all kinds of peace and harmony and democracy throughout the Middle East, would transform it.
The United States had a unique chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein and transform the Middle East forever, for the good.
But he also insisted that Iran had a WMD program and was pursuing nuclear weapons.
Exactly what he's trying to convince Americans now about Iran.
Listen to what he said.
Just listen to how identical this is.
This is Netanyahu, 23 years ago.
Convincing the United States to go fight a different war in the Middle East against one of Israel's most steadfast enemies.
And this is a tyrant who is feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons.
And today the United States must destroy the same regime because a nuclear-armed Saddam will place the security of our entire world at risk.
It's simply not… I just want you to listen to the Dick Because, as we said, Yoav Gaunt, the Israeli defense minister, until Netanyahu fired him just six months ago or so, went on CNN earlier today and said the United States is obligated, Trump is obligated to go fight this war against Iran with us.
Like, giving out orders.
Like, obligated by what?
By Israel's dictates?
Listen to Netanyahu using that same language.
We'll place the security of our entire world at risk.
It's simply not reflecting the reality to assume that Saddam isn't feverishly working to develop nuclear weapons.
If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the regime.
I guarantee you, he said.
I guarantee you.
There's no way to deny, he said, that Saddam Hussein is rushing feverishly to get those nuclear weapons.
We have to stop that.
But also, he said, I guarantee you, to Americans and to the U.S. Congress, that if you go in and take out Saddam Hussein, you're going to spread peace and stability and democracy to this region.
Saddam's regime, I guarantee you.
That it will have enormous positive reverberations on the regime.
The principles of real estate, the three L's, location, location, location.
The three principles of winning the war on terror are the three W's.
Winning, winning, and winning.
The more victories you amass, the easier the next victory becomes.
The first victory in Afghanistan makes the second victory in Iraq that much easier.
The second victory in Iraq will make the third victory that much easier.
So we were going to have the first victory in Afghanistan that, of course, we never got.
It took 20 years.
We left after 20 years.
Blew up a bunch of civilians on the way out.
They then killed a bunch of our service members on the way out.
And within seconds or days, the Taliban marched right back into power as if nothing had happened.
After we were told for years that the U.S. military spent billions and billions and billions of dollars building up the Afghan security forces, that one day we're going to rule Afghanistan in our favor once we left, we left after 20 years in a deal negotiated by President Trump, implemented by President Biden, and the Taliban marched right into power.
So there was no first victory there.
There was no second victory in Iraq that Netanyahu promised.
Even Tony Blair.
Who, when he realized there were no weapons of mass destruction, despite having been one of the most vocal and ardent supporters of joining George Bush, having the UK join George Bush in that war and did so, when he realized there were no WMDs, as he kept insisting there were, he said he resorted to, well, at the very least, the worst that will be said is that we removed a vicious dictatorship and freed the Iraqi people from this vicious dictator, so it still will be a noble war.
And by 2012, Tony Blair was admitting that what gave rise to ISIS and all of its splinter groups, that we were told was so much worse than al-Qaeda, which we had spent a decade fighting, was the power vacuum that we left in Iraq by taking out the government, balkanizing the country, letting huge amounts of civil war take place, war against the United States, insurgency battles against the countries that went to war.
So there was no second victory in Iraq.
As well, and if anything, the Iraq War redounded most to the benefit of Iran.
Saddam Hussein and Iran hated each other.
They went to war against each other.
And by removing the Ba 'athist Party, it empowered Shiite militias who have more power in Iraq now than ever before, and therefore emboldened and empowered Iran in the region.
That was the result of the Iraq War that Benjamin Netanyahu promised would transform the region.
And of course, the nuclear weapons that he swore Saddam Hussein was pursuing and the chemical and biological weapons he assured us they had were all non-existent.
But you see, he said, we're going to do that first victory in Afghanistan, the second victory in Iraq, and then we can do the third victory all the more easily.
So what was that third victory?
War in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, what was it?
You can go back, starting around 2004, 2005, Neocon started.
Going on a propaganda campaign saying the next step after Baghdad is Tehran.
That was their intention.
They wanted to have regime change in Afghanistan, regime change in Iraq, and then go to Tehran.
That was the big prize.
And because the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq failed, they never got to go do that.
But he wanted American troops.
Thousands of American troops died in these wars he was urging.
And he wanted a lot more to go die in Iran.
So that was the third victory he was promising.
It just took...
23 years to get the U.S. to green light and then start supporting and funding the war that Israel has craved the United States fighting with them for decades.
His regime will do because Saddam's nuclear program has fundamentally changed in those two decades.
He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs.
He can produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country.
And I want to remind you that Iraq is a very big country.
It is not the size of Monte Carlo.
It is a big country.
And I believe that even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover these portable manufacturing sites of mass death.
I mean, just think about it as a rational person.
This foreign leader, for some reason, is invited to tell the United States what it should do and whether or not to launch a major ground invasion on the other side of the world.
Everything he says, things that he guarantees, things he promises, things he insists on, all of it turned out to be lies.
That same foreign leader returns two decades later, reads exactly the same script, only this time about Iran, and people just start nodding their head without any kind of skepticism.
Or doubt about the truth of what he's saying to lure the United States into another war?
Oh yeah, sure, this time he's telling the truth.
Listen to this speech from George W. Bush.
This was kind of when the Trump and the Bush administration had decided it was going to war in Iraq.
There was no turning back.
And it was this question of selling the war robustly enough to get 70% of the people to get on board with it, which ultimately happened.
And this was one of Bush's Primary initial speeches where he basically laid out the case for why we had to go to war with Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein.
I just want you to note in every second of the speech how identical, not similar, identical it is to what we're hearing now.
This is a speech he gave in Cincinnati in September of 2002, so right around the time that Netanyahu was in the United States, assuring everybody about how great the Iraq war would be and the necessity for it.
Listen to what he said.
Information from a high-ranking Iraqi nuclear engineer who had defected revealed that despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue.
The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his nuclear Mujahideen.
His nuclear holy warriors.
Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past.
Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.
If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal, An amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.
And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed.
Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who poses his aggression.
He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East.
He would be in a position to threaten America.
And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists.
Some citizens wonder, after 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now?
And there's a reason.
We've experienced the horror of September the 11th.
We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people.
Our enemies would be no less willing.
In fact, they would be eager to use biological or chemical or a nuclear weapon.
Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us.
Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
So, we can't provide you proof or evidence that this is happening, but do you want to wait and have the proof be the mushroom cloud that Saddam Hussein drops on the United States or gives to his terrorist friends to drop on the United States?
Now, as we know, Every word of that was absolute bullshit.
Every word of that was false.
Every word of it was disproven within a short period of time.
I don't mean most of it or some of it.
I mean all of it.
At least then Americans had the excuse that this was barely a year after 9-11, like a truly traumatic attack on the United States.
People were still quite emotional about it.
If you told them that Osama bin Laden al-Qaeda Somehow had an alliance with Iraq, which of course Jeffrey Goldberg and others convinced Americans they did falsely, that Iraq would get these nuclear weapons that they're about to have and give it to Osama bin Laden, who would then use it like a similar 9 /11 attack, but this time with nuclear weapons.
At least there was like an emotional manipulation there that was still an open wound.
What's the excuse now for believing this?
Look at all the countries with nuclear weapons.
War, two countries that hate each other, hate each other for decades.
And it ended fairly quickly with minimal damage.
It was a real war.
It was quite aggressive.
But it ended quickly.
And one of the reasons is because both sides know the other has nuclear weapons.
It serves as a deterrent.
Saddam Hussein is going to take nuclear weapons and drop one on the United States despite the fact that we have the largest nuclear stockpile in the world after Russia, the most powerful, and obliterate Iraq.
North Korea, which we're told is the most twisted, most demented, most bizarre, most psychologically unhinged country, has nuclear weapons.
They've had them for a long time.
Where are their suicidal impulses driving them to use nuclear weapons?
The Iranians have demonstrated incredible restraint as they've been attacked in so many ways by Israel, threatened by the United States and Israel over many years.
But we watched the government lie to us using this exact script.
What is the excuse for believing it now?
And just deciding that it's true.
I want to show you one more part of George Bush's speech.
I could show you the whole thing.
It's 35 minutes long.
And I could just press play on the whole thing.
And everything that you would hear in that speech is exactly what you're hearing now about why war with Iran is necessary.
Everything.
But just listen to this one minute and one and a half minute clip just to underscore that point a little more.
Weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people.
The same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States.
By its past and present actions, by its technological capabilities, by the merciless nature of its regime, Iraq is unique.
As a former chief weapons inspector of the UN has said, the fundamental problem with Iraq remains the nature of the regime itself.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.
Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world.
The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time.
If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today, and we do, does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?
Again, all false, all eyes.
And let me just say one other thing.
This idea that the Iraqi regime is this homicidal dictatorship.
The Iranian regime represses its own people.
It represses women.
We were told that about the Taliban, too.
We had to go to war with the Taliban to liberate the Afghan women who are so repressed.
Yes, that's why we fight wars.
We fight wars for women's rights.
Right around that time that neocons started leaking, oh, real men don't stop Baghdad.
They go to Tehran.
There was suddenly all those stories about how Gay men in Iran are hung by a crane as though that was what was driving us to go to war in Iran, to do regime change in war in Iran.
The United States doesn't dislike homicidal dictatorships, especially in the Middle East.
The United States loves homicidal dictatorships in the U.S., in the Middle East.
Remember, all of this antagonism, all of this animosity toward Iran happened because in 1954, The CIA overthrew their elected government because they perceived him as being too independent and replaced him with a homicidal dictator, the Shah of Iran, who proceeded to rule viciously and savagely over the Iranian people for the next 26 years, killing them and imprisoning them for any dissent, all at the behest of the United States and Israel.
That's what gave rise to the Iranian revolution.
If you lived in a country that had a The liberal democracy or something resembling that where you are basically freeing your political rights and some other country wanted to impose a dictator on you and engineered a coup and imposed that dictatorship on you and then kept it in power through money and weapons and intelligence.
Wouldn't you hate that country too?
That's what led to the animosity from Iran to the United States for good reason in the first place.
That we took out a democratic elected leader and imposed a homicidal dictatorship on them.
Our closest ally after Israel in the region is Saudi Arabia.
Just this weekend, Mohammed bin Salman ordered a journalist who had been critical of repression inside Saudi Arabia to be hunted down, his identity uncovered, and he was ordered executed.
No trial or anything like that.
We're not upset by that, we love.
We helped overthrow the Egyptian democracy when they elected the wrong person.
Mohamed Morsi and reimposed dictatorships that they had fought so hard to get rid of under Hosni Mubarak.
And we have General Sisi there now, who is a brutal dictator as well.
We're not upset by that.
We love that.
We love when those countries are controlled by pro-US, pro-Western dictatorships.
That's our foreign policy.
It has been since the end of the Cold War.
That's the other thing I can't believe that you can watch Donald Trump go and hug Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis and the Qataris and then come back two weeks later and have everybody say, oh, we hate Iran because they're a dictatorial regime.
And everyone's like, yeah, we've got to get rid of them.
We want to liberate the Muslim people in Iran as though that's in any way part of our goal.
Everyone says, yeah, let's get rid of them.
They're really repressive.
We want to free the Muslims.
That's what we're there to do.
This has all been engineered.
By the same exact people who sold the Iraq war in the first place, one of which is Mark Levin, as loyal, as much of a steadfast loyalist to Israel as it gets because he's been on Fox News.
Trump has liked him and known him for a long time.
While Trump was saying that he was dedicated to negotiations, Mark Levin went to the White House and listened to what Mark Levin told him.
Here's Politico June 10th.
Inside the MAGA vs.
Hawk battle to sway Trump on bombing Iran.
Quote, during a private lunch with the president at the White House last Wednesday, conservative talk show host Mark Levin told Trump that Iran was days away, days away from building a nuclear weapon.
Not even weeks or months.
It was days.
Why not?
Why not seconds away?
Like milliseconds.
An argument Trump's own intelligence team has told the president is not accurate.
According to an intelligence official as well as another Trump ally familiar with the matter, Levin urged Trump to allow the Israeli government to strike Iranian nuclear sites, which Trump has told Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu would torpedo the diplomacy.
And two days later is when Israel got the green light from Trump to go ahead and do that.
It's the same exact people.
Here's Mark Levin in 2014 talking about his support for the Iraq war and WMD and whether or not Karl Rove covered up WMDs in Iraq.
Here's what Mark Levin said, "This is outrageous how this administration shot itself in the foot, how people who defended this administration, both in the administration and outside the administration, going to war for, among other reasons, to get these chemical weapons." And then Karl Rove and other senior advisors to the Bush White House When evidence of the weapons started to appear because soldiers saw them, were taking pictures from them, and some of them were affected by these chemicals, were told, quote, don't say anything because it might hurt us politically.
We sent people to war to get these damn weapons, and the President of the United States should have announced we found these weapons.
But they didn't because they say they lost the argument.
So Mark Levin, as recently as 2014, I'm sure he would say it today as well, is like one of the few people on the planet who believes there really were weapons of mass destruction.
Inside Iraq, as if George Bush and Karl Rove wouldn't want to immediately seize on that and show the world, look, we found them.
You think they found them and then didn't mention it?
The whole George Bush legacy, his reputation for life, is contaminated by that war.
You think he wouldn't have wanted to claim that he found those weapons?
But that's Mark Levin's view, that they found the weapons but were too scared to tell the world that they covered it up and pretended they weren't there.
You can turn on Fox News any night if for some reason you're inclined to do so at the 9 o 'clock hour and hear Sean Hannity cheering Israel, cheering Trump, cheering the U.S. to get involved more in this war.
Here was John McCain with Sean Hannity on February 21, 2003.
Just to give you a taste for what the discourse was like back then and how identical it is now, especially on Fox News, most of Fox News.
This was two weeks or so before.
The US invaded Iraq.
Here's what John McCain and Sean Hannity said.
I'll tell you, I didn't always agree with Mr. Blair in some things he did, but I think he's almost Churchillian at this particular time in history.
I think he absolutely is, and we can only hope that he doesn't politically suffer Churchill's fate either at the end of the day.
Well, I'll tell you why he won't.
It's because we're going to win this victory.
Tragically, we will lose American lives, but it will be brief.
We're going to find out massive evidence of weapons of mass destruction, and we're going to find the incredible brutalities that this dictator has inflicted upon the Iraqi people.
Okay, so here's John McCain.
He's guaranteeing this war is going to be quick.
We're going to win it quickly.
Yeah, we're going to lose some American lives, but it's going to be totally worth it because we're going to find massive evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
He went to war.
John McCain did.
George Bush did.
Half of the Democratic Party did.
Most of the Republican Party did.
Based on these utter lies.
That should ruin somebody's standing politically forever.
You go to war on the other side of the world, and you make a huge number of claims that all turn out to be false?
You think it ruined John McCain's reputation, the things he was saying here, or Sean Hannity's?
Sean Hannity's on the air still.
22 years later, if John McCain hadn't died, I'm certain he would be in the Senate, still representing Arizona.
In fact, four years later, McCain ran for president and got the nomination of the Republican Party.
Not despite having said this, but because he said this.
You do not suffer in American politics or American journalism if you tell lies on behalf of American wars.
You thrive.
As we said, Jeffrey Goldberg was the leading journalist who told the lie, the crucial lie to the American people, that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had an alliance that convinced Americans Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9-11 attacks to support why we were going to.
Iraq, a country which had nothing to do with 9 /11 in response to 9 /11.
And Jeffrey Goldberg got awards for those lies, for that journalistic fraud.
And today he runs The Atlantic.
You thrive if you tell lies.
And that's why they keep doing it, the same people who were doing it 20 years ago.
They thrived, they prospered for telling these lies, so why wouldn't they be lying now again with the same amount of enthusiasm?
Here's the rest of this.
And so I think he's going to be justified.
I'm confident that he will be justified.
I am confident that all those things that you predict are going to come true and a lot of people that have been laying out the case against this are going to be very embarrassed.
I mean, how do you hear Sean Hannity saying that?
Especially if you are one of his fans or his viewers and you listen to him at the time and you believe that?
How do you turn on the TV?
And listen to him tell you the same thing about Iran and be like, yeah, I'm sure he's very credible.
He's very trustworthy.
And of course, this is a linchpin of now American war propaganda as well.
You have two choices.
Everything goes back to World War II.
That's the only historical event that we learn about, that we study, that we hear about.
Everything is like the Nazis.
Everything is like fighting Hitler.
And therefore, you only have two choices.
You can be Churchillian, like Winston Churchill, which means you support every war that's presented to you, or you stand accused of being like Neville Chamberlain, the weak appeaser who didn't want to go to war with Hitler.
Those are the two choices.
So Tony Blair was Churchillian for supporting this disastrous war in Iraq based on lies.
And now here's Barry Weiss's state administration.
And here's an article praising Donald Trump for his involvement in the war and urging him to get even more involved.
It's by Andrew Roberts, and it says Trump's Churchillian choice at Fordow, meaning Trump can either be like Neville Chamberlain and refuse Israeli demands.
To have the U.S. military and planes and jets and bombs go and join Israel in bombing Iran, or he can be like Churchill and get the U.S. military directly involved.
You see, it's the same script every time, every time.
They never change it.
Israel is using it as well.
Benjamin Netanyahu boasted 25 years ago about his skill and adeptness in how to manipulate the American people and the American political system, and he is very good at it.
So he understands how to talk to the Americans.
So here's an article in the Jerusalem Post.
This was today by Yitzhak Jerry Gershon, an IDF official.
And the title is, I urge you, President Trump, to be Churchill, not Chamberlain, on Iran's nuclear program.
It's always Hitler, always the Nazis.
Every war is just like World War II.
Everyone you want to fight is just like Hitler.
Here is Sean Hannity and this is him 22 years later as if nothing happened telling his audience why you absolutely have to stand by Israel, fund Israel, arm Israel, and fight alongside Israel.
And many others.
Ask yourself, as an American, ask yourself a simple question.
How many missiles would it take from a foreign country and their proxies that would be fired into the USA, into our country, killing American citizens, terrorizing American citizens, before you would want that country stopped?
Would it be one missile?
What's your threshold?
Two missiles?
100 missiles?
1,000?
10,000?
What would you expect American leaders to do if this country, the number one state sponsor of terror, was, according to reports, a month to six months away from arming themselves with a nuclear weapon as they have been firing these tens of thousands of missiles throughout the years?
And also the country pledging to wipe the U.S. like they have pledged to wipe the U.S. and Israel off the map repeatedly, chanting repeatedly, death to Israel, death to America.
Now, I assume 90-plus percent of you, you would want your government, you would want your country to defeat this clear and present danger.
They've been feeding on this stuff for 25 years with Sean Hannity.
And Tucker Carlson was very off-script when it came to these wars, which is why he got fired.
That's why Tucker Carlson is no longer at Fox News, despite being by far the most popular and watched host on all of cable, including all of Fox News.
Because Rupert Murdoch has a political agenda involving Israel and the United States, and people who work for him and make many millions of dollars a year are required to cheerlead for it and support it.
Again, to hear the very same people standing up today and acting as though they're credible, being treated as though they're credible despite telling these lies is extraordinary to watch.
It's a testament to how potent the science of propaganda is.
Speaking of people who lied back then and are lying now, here's Condoleezza Rice.
She went on CNN with Wolf Blitzer.
None of these people have changed.
It's all the same.
This is back in September of 2002.
Condoleezza Rice is currently urging the United States to stand by Israel, of course, in this war with Iran, using all the same rhetoric she used, as you're going to see in this interview.
Wolf Blitzer asked her, based on what you know right now, how close is Saddam Hussein's government, how close is the government to developing a nuclear capability?
Condoleezza Rice responded, you will get different estimates about precisely how close he is.
We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon.
We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance, into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to, high-quality aluminum tubes that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.
We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists, to make a nuclear weapon.
And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought, maybe six months from a crude nuclear device.
The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Here's Ted Cruz, not in 2002, yesterday.
On Fox News, when asked about why the U.S. has to support Israel, listen to the language he used.
President Trump drew a very clear red line in the sand.
He said on April 12th, he told Iran, you have 60 days to negotiate.
I led a coalition of 52 Republican senators, and we all said we stand with President Trump.
President Trump has been clear that the standard for any deal must be No centrifuges, no enrichments.
There is no reason a theocratic lunatic who chants death to America should have nuclear weapons, the tools to murder millions of Americans or millions of Israelis.
Right.
On the 61st day, the Ayatollah publicly said he would not shut down a single centrifuge.
He said he would build more centrifuges.
He would make more enriched uranium in order to make more nuclear weapons.
That's an absolute lie.
It's just an absolute, complete, and total lie.
Do you believe what Ted Cruz just said there?
Do you actually believe that the Ayatollah stood up in public and said, we're going to keep- Do you think Iran, for the first time six days ago, stood up and said, you know what?
We're confessing.
We are pursuing nuclear weapons, and we're going to continue to build nuclear weapons, no matter what you do.
Do you think that's what happened?
The audacity of these people to go on and just lie so brazenly.
No matter how much you watch it happen, it's still kind of amazing.
And I guess they assume that the Fox audience doesn't need much Consideration in terms of what they're willing to believe, and he's probably right about that, but not just the Fox audience, but well beyond that as well.
They're deliberately, again, obfuscating the distinction between centrifuges and facilities for nuclear energy versus nuclear weapons.
So he just fabricates that the Ayatollah stood up and said, we are going to build, we're going to keep building nuclear weapons.
It's effectively, Maria, a giant middle finger at President Trump, but it was also a message to Israel, we're not going to stop, and if you don't act, you're going to find out when we've achieved success.
And then we cut it off there, but then he goes on to say that you're going to find when we achieve success that the proof will come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
I mean, the rhetoric is identical.
You just listen to it.
It's amazing.
I mean, obviously, there are a lot of people who are paying attention to this who didn't live through the Iraq War, weren't born yet, or weren't old enough to really have a good understanding of what happened.
But for anyone who lived through it, for anyone who remembers it, you just listen to this, and you're like, how do they get people to believe this this time?
They don't even pretend to change the script even a little bit.
Here's Sean Hannity and Bill O 'Reilly on Fox News Radio.
This is June 11th.
It's basically the day Israel started the war.
And listen to what these two said about what would happen.
Remember, we showed you Sean Hannity before with John McCain, saying this war will be quick.
We're going to win quickly.
The people who are against it are going to be embarrassed.
We're going to find tons of weapons of mass destruction.
Here's what they said this week.
My ex-fight with him at all?
Did you catch upwind of that?
I said all that.
You should say, Hannity, I'm proud of you.
You make me proud.
You should say that.
Okay.
He was trying to come back to the middle in the last few months, but his internal polling said it wasn't working.
Exactly.
I did know that.
Yes, it's obvious he decided to make a shift because he's putting his blind political ambition above the safety of his own citizens and law enforcement.
So his short-term venture back into the middle didn't work because people hate Trump so much, his constituency in California.
He had to get back to that.
And that's what happened in the ICE demonstrations.
Now, this is off topic, and just shut me down if you want to, but I talked to the president three hours ago about China.
Do you have any interest in I talked to him as well today about that very issue.
I think it's a big deal.
So I just want to note one thing.
Is this the right clip, by the way?
Because so far they haven't talked about Iran.
Can we just check that?
Okay.
Just to be clear, this is June 11th.
This is the day that Israel attacked.
Iran, maybe it's the day after they're going to talk about Iran in just a second.
But I just want you to see what President Trump was doing during this time when Israel was getting ready to start this war, when President Trump was giving the green light.
He was spending his day on the phone with Bill O 'Reilly and separately with Sean Hannity, listening to them, taking their advice.
Could you imagine that?
These two chronic liars, these people with extremely disgraced records of cheering American wars, getting huge numbers of people who trusted Fox News to follow the United States into these wars that turned out to be lies, that's who Donald Trump is getting his wisdom from.
Tulsi Gabbard, who said that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon, was notably absent from that final meeting at Camp David, which they had about Iran and most of the people there.
We're people who wanted war with Iran.
She was not there, but he found the time not to talk to the Director of National Intelligence, but to talk to Sean Hannity and Bill O 'Reilly.
This isn't just any day, either.
This is the day that Trump is giving them the green light to go start this major war with all kinds of incredibly consequential aspects to it.
And this is how he's spending his day.
Anyway, here they are giving their wisdom, first done.
The ICE protests now on China, and I'll get to Iran in a second.
Okay.
So as you know, I was there in Beijing and talking to the Politburo there.
A unique experience, something I'll write about in a book, but it's off the record for now.
However, I did tell the Chinese I was going to have to brief the president of the United States about the entire thing, which I did.
But this morning, the conversation was about the present deal with China and Xi himself, the key to all of America's well-being.
This is by far the biggest story on Earth.
You've got 30 seconds.
Keep going.
You know what?
Why don't I hold you over?
It looks like it's one minute to midnight with Iran.
It really does, Bill.
The Iranians rejected the deal.
Trump came back and said, okay, it's on you.
And I honestly think that it's now inevitable that these nuclear sites are going to have to be taken out.
I would rather it not be.
I don't believe this will be a long protracted war, but we'll talk about that too on the other side.
Bill O 'Reilly will stay with us.
All right, that was a long clip to get through, but for just to hear that last 15 seconds, but basically said exactly what he said on that clip with John McCain.
Not going to be a long war.
Don't worry, we're going to win quickly.
We're going to take out the nuclear sites.
Obviously, that's not the goal of this war.
That's the pretext for the war.
The goal is to turn Iran into Syria, to have the central government collapse and crumble, have it just be subsumed by endless civil war, ruled in tiny little segments by various religious factions, have the CIA and the Mossad backing the people they want to back.
Someone who, until six seconds ago, was considered an ISIS and Al-Qaeda leader that the Justice Department had a $10 million bounty on his head to find, takes over Syria, and now he's giving his airspace over to Israel?
It's amazing how little ISIS thinks about Israel or cares about fighting Israel.
They turned Syria into a bloodbath and then to a puppet state for Israel.
And that's what they want to do with Iran.
They want it to crumble.
They want the people to suffer.
And then Israel will be the dominant country in that region.
There will be no other forces left that can oppose Israel.
Israel will essentially dominate the entire region, including the Persian Gulf, Suez Canal, all the ingress and egress of where oil comes from the Middle East.
Israel will dominate that region.
That's the goal.
That the United States and Israel are fighting for.
Here is Bill Kristol, someone who has indicated his support for President Trump in terms of what he's doing, even though he hates President Trump in every other single possible realm.
Obviously, he's happy that Israel is being supported by the U.S. and by President Trump in this war.
Here's Bill Kristol a week or so after the Iraq War began, and here he is giving his assurances about what's going to happen.
Whatever else you can say about this war, let me just make one point.
George Bush is not fighting this like Vietnam.
Saddam may be.
That's the danger.
Saddam may be.
But it's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
This is going to be a two-month war, not a...
Hey, Brian.
How's it going?
Good, sir.
What would you like to say?
All right, there he was with Daniel Ellsberg, and there was Bill Kristol saying, this is going to be a very short war.
It's not like Vietnam, and Daniel Ellsberg was saying, you don't know that.
It's very possible once he's a worse start, they go on forever.
Bill Kristol said that's not going to happen.
Of course, Bill Kristol is as influential now as he's ever been.
All these people are—it's the same people.
It's the same cast of characters, starting with Netanyahu.
And it seems to be working even better the second time around.
At least with The Rock, there was a meaningful amount of opposition, a minority to be sure.
But in the pundit class, in the Democratic Party, There was some opposition at least.
Now, as we're about to show you, as is always the case for American wars, as is always the case for Israel, you can't really find bipartisan support for Donald Trump anywhere except when it comes to American wars and to Israel, where the two parties unite because they're funded by the same factions, for the same goal, for the same reason.
And you'll see what Democrats and Republicans are doing.
With this new war and the utter lack of real dissent or debate about any of it.
All right, I'm not exaggerating when I say, and this is one thing that I actually became opposed to and irritated by in Donald Trump's first term.
No matter what he said, no matter what he did, the Democrats were automatically opposed to it.
Automatically opposed, always on the opposite side of Donald Trump.
Same with the media.
It was reflexive and instinctive.
The one time the media praised Donald Trump was when he bombs Syria.
They love when the U.S. bombs countries.
That was when Brian Williams on MSNBC waxed poetic about the beauty of our missiles and how they fly through the air and explode on impact.
That's when CNN said Donald Trump became the president today.
But other than that, everything was opposed.
So this is a huge policy decision.
That has not gone to Congress.
Polls have shown that, and it depends on how I asked the question, but the American people overwhelmingly do not want the U.S. to enter this war with Israel.
But you see almost no debate.
All these Democrats who usually condemn Trump are either quiet, because they obviously support it, or affirmatively saying they support Donald Trump for what he's doing.
There are, I don't know how many, eight, nine?
Former Democratic presidents or Democratic presidential nominees, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, all the way back to Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, either Democratic presidential nominees or Democratic candidates for president or Democratic presidents, not a single one of them, not one, has commented on this major new war.
Here is the type of discourse to which we're being subjected.
Here's Lindsey Graham, who always wants every war.
And favors everywhere, literally everyone.
Soon as Israel started bombing Iran, again, unprovoked, Iran wasn't attacking Israel, wasn't threatening to attack Israel, he posted this, quote, game on, pray for Israel.
Israel goes and attacks Iran, dropping all kinds of weapons on there, and he's like, game on!
It is a fun game for him.
Like I said, a lot of people who feel weak get vicarious strength in.
They feel good about it.
And clearly, Lindsey Graham sees it as a game.
That's exactly what he said, game on.
Pray for Israel.
At that point, Israel was just bombing Iran.
Here's Donald Trump.
This is today.
Making clear his support for Israel, which every American president is required to do.
We do, yeah.
Thank you very much, everybody.
The question is, do you support Israel and its war in Iran?
He said, yes, we do.
Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House, posted this on June 13th, praying for Israel and its people.
America stands with you.
Here's John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, the Republican Senate Majority Leader.
June 12, 2025.
For too long, the mullahs in Iran have publicly aspired to wipe the only democracy in the Middle East off the face of the map via any means possible, funding and arming terror groups on Israel's borders, choking off international sea lanes and multiple barrages of missiles and drones.
The United States Senate stands ready to work with President Trump and with our allies in Israel to restore peace in the region and, first and foremost, defend the American people from Iranian aggression.
Defend the American people from Iranian aggression.
What Iranian aggression against the American people?
By the way, every single one of these people that we're going to show you, starting with President Trump and on down, who says, I pray for Israel, I stand with Israel, I support Israel, blah, blah.
You wind them up and they say that.
They're all drowning in cash from AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
All of them.
John Cornyn, Senator from Texas, who ran to be the Senate Majority Leader.
Israel has an unquestionable right to defend itself.
I am proud to stand with Israel.
Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina.
Israel has the right and responsibility to defend itself against Iran's growing nuclear capabilities.
We must support Israel's right of self-defense and keep our troops safe in the region.
Here's Chuck Schumer.
From the official Senate Democrats' account on X, Leader Schumer's statement on Israel strikes on Iran, quote, Isn't it amazing?
That the two parties sound exactly alike, whenever Israel is involved, exactly alike.
In fact, Chuck Schumer, earlier this month, earlier this month, Chuck Schumer was mocking Trump, mocking him as too weak and too soft, as insufficiently supportive of Israel because he was trying to negotiate a diplomatic deal with Iran to avert the need for war.
Listen to what Chuck Schumer said in mocking Trump for that.
When it comes to negotiating with the terrorist government of Iran, Trump's all over the lot.
One day he sounds tough, the next day he's backing off.
And now, all of a sudden, we find out that Whitcoff and Rubio are negotiating a secret side deal with Iran.
What kind of bull is this?
They're going to sound tough in public and then have a side deal that lets Iran get away with everything?
That's outrageous.
We need to make that side deal public.
Any side deal should be before Congress and, most importantly, the American people.
If Taco Trump is already folding, the American public should know.
No side deals.
He was mocking Trump for trying diplomatically, or at least pretending to, to avert a war.
And by the way, this thing, Taco Trump, I forget now what it is.
It's some like Democrat.
Yeah, it's T-A-C-O.
Trump always chickens out.
Taco Trump.
So he's basically saying, by not Obviously, Chuck Schumer is a gigantic loyalist to Israel, always has been.
He just wrote a book saying anti-Semitism is the number one problem.
People hate Israel.
He said that his job is to keep the left pro-Israel.
That's his job as a United States senator, not to attend to the constituents who elected him or to the well-being of Americans, but to keep the left pro-Israel.
He was attacking Trump for not— Want to go to war with Israel enough?
And then once Trump gave the green light and thumbs up and says we support Israel and redeploys military assets from what we're told is our greatest threat, China, to support Israel, leaving Taiwan exposed, if that's something you're concerned about.
Chuck Schumer's statement, like most Democrats did, saying we support President Trump and what he's doing.
Adam Schiff, I don't think I've ever heard Adam Schiff express support for Donald Trump, but as soon as it comes to Israel, Adam Schiff sounds very respectful when talking about President Trump.
Here he is on NBC News on Meet the Press yesterday over the weekend.
I do want to turn to the Middle East and what Israel calls its preemptive strike on Iran.
It's an active situation, Senator, as we're having this conversation.
Of course, Israel's actions met by Iran's retaliation, which has dramatically raised fears about the possibility of a wider war.
Would you support the U.S. military assisting in taking additional actions against Iran's nuclear sites?
Well, first of all, I think Israel has a right to defend itself.
Senator Schiff, as you know, President Trump issued that stern warning to Iran not to hit U.S. targets.
Let me ask you, would your calculation change if Iran were to hit U.S. targets in the region?
Would you then condone the United States getting involved?
Yes.
If Iran attacks the United States, when the administration has made it very clear that we have not been part of the offensive operations against Iran, if they should respond by attacking us, then we should respond by defending ourselves.
And then I think Iran opens itself up to potential attacks on Fordow or elsewhere.
So I second the president's statement.
That Iran must not attack the United States, our forces, our people, or our interests.
Now, everybody knows that the U.S. is involved.
Everybody knows this.
Just like everyone knows that the Israeli destruction of Gaza was the U.S. destruction of Gaza.
We paid for it.
We encouraged it.
We've armed it.
And when he says if Iran attacks the United States, it doesn't mean the country of the United States.
He means a military base in the region or any oil assets or anything else.
And you see the respect.
Adam Schiff has for the president and his foreign policy.
Because all of these people are funded by AIPAC.
They're lifelong loyalists of Israel.
That's just the reality.
I don't know how else to get around saying that.
Under the new definition of anti-Semitism that the EU has long adopted into its criminal law at the encouragement of Israel that President Trump is now demanding that colleges adopt, that Harvard has already adopted, it's actually deemed outlawed to accuse any Jewish person of having supreme loyalty to Israel.
And the reason it's outlawed is because it's so often true.
And it's certainly true for Adam Schiff.
It's certainly true for Chuck Schumer, which is why you won't ever hear them praising President Trump unless it comes to his support for Israel.
Here's Amy Klobuchar, just to take some random Democratic senator.
Quote, I've long been committed to ensuring Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon.
We must work with Israel and our regional partners to de-escalate and avoid a devastating regional war.
That is the best way to keep people safe, including the thousands of U.S. service members stationed in the Middle East.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the longtime chair of the Democratic National Committee until she was forced to resign in disgrace in 2016 when she got cheating on behalf of Hillary Clinton, went on Is this NBC?
I think it was MSNBC, and she was asked about And she was asked about her view of Israel and Iran.
It's not like Iran has been this benign actor that has sat dormant for years and Israel suddenly attacked them.
The maestro, the puppeteer of horrific terrorist proxy groups, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, they've been funding terror attacks against Israel and threatening the United States and killed Americans for years.
Poor Israel.
All they want is to just be left alone.
They just want to be left alone.
They just took a bunch of land from Syria and then blew up their military assets, did the same in Lebanon, now doing it to Iran.
But poor little Israel, they just sit there minding their own business, just like the United States does, never bothering anybody, just going about its business.
And all these terrorist groups, out of nowhere, just decide they want to attack Israel.
Just like happened in the Holocaust.
It's a country that has the utterly subservient bipartisan backing of the most powerful and richest country in history, funding its wars, arming it to the teeth, doing everything it's told to do, and somehow Israel is the little victim, the David in the David versus Goliath fight.
Here's Kathy Castor.
And I saw this tweet today.
I have no idea what party she's in.
I don't know anything about her.
I mean, I do this for a living.
There's just so many of these random ones.
I was thinking about that, too, with the whole Senator Alex Padilla thing.
You know, I believe that nobody knew who Alex Padilla was, even though he's a Democratic senator from our largest state, California.
Think about all the charismatic people they could choose to be a Democratic senator from California.
They purposely choose the most Banal, unnotable ones who just, like, mesh into the Democratic establishment ideology where it's there to vote how they're told.
So you get Alex Padilla?
Like, no one does know him.
I absolutely believe that.
So Kathy Castor is a member of Congress.
I saw her tweet, and I was like, let me just read this and see if I can discern whether she's a Democrat or a Republican.
Play along with me.
Here's what she posted today.
I'm just choosing her randomly just to show how.
These people's brains just operate with groupthink whenever Israel is involved.
Obviously, she gets a lot of AIPAC money.
Quote, Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have destabilized the Middle East for decades, funding and fueling Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi rebels, and terrorist organizations that have directly attacked Israel for decades.
Nuclear weapons at the hands of Iranian hardliners is an existential threat.
Nations across the globe have consistently warned Iran to abandon its push to nuclear armament.
In fact, the IAEA recently determined that Iran breached the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a violation that poses a national security threat to the international community.
Israel's aim to eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons from the malign Iranian regime is an act of self-defense and should be an impetus to build greater stability through the Middle East for all purposes.
I was just like, do you have any guess about whether she's a Democrat or a Republican?
So I looked her up.
I think she's been in Congress for like six years or something.
She represents some district in the middle of Florida, like Tampa or St. Petersburg, something like that.
And she's a Democrat.
Obviously, this could come out of Martha Blackburn's mouth or Lindsey Graham's mouth or Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz.
But it also comes out of the mouth of Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, they just joined together.
There's no debate.
It's like, Israel?
Yes, we stand with Israel, period.
We don't assess if our own interests are aligned with Israel or divergent from it.
It doesn't matter.
We do what Israel needs.
That's one of our functions as members of Congress.
That's how we keep getting reelected.
And you see what happens to the handful of people who don't.
AIPAC spent $15 million.
To find some pro-Israel servant to run against Cori Bush, some random black local politician who promised to love Israel, spent $50 million and got him into Congress, took out Cori Bush and did the same with Jamal Bowman.
Like, just a handful of people in Congress who question whether the U.S. should fund everything Israel does, they're gone.
And everyone in Congress sees that, and they know they better stay in line, and they do.
There is a handful of noble exceptions.
A handful.
In both parties.
Here's Rand Paul speaking on NBC when asked about Lindsey Graham's tweet where he said, game on.
If Iran refuses this offer of the United States, I strongly believe it is in America's national security interest to go all in to help Israel finish the job.
How do you respond to Senator Graham's call to go all in and help Israel finish the job, Senator?
Well, his initial response was game on, and I don't consider war to be a game.
The hundreds of thousands of people that potentially will now die on both sides.
A couple thousand years, we've had this discussion over what is just war.
Not only our civilization, but other civilizations have had this discussion.
And one of the things that many people came to a conclusion was that preemptive or preventative war wasn't just.
And so there is that.
But there is also the idea that what happens to Iran, you imagine what happens in Iran now.
Do they coalesce around their government, even though their government is unpopular?
Does nationalism thrive?
And you would think that they would probably be less likely to want to negotiate at this time.
Particularly when they may feel that negotiations were a ruse to put them at ease until the bombing happened.
So I think it's going to be very hard to come out of this and have a negotiated settlement.
I see more war and more carnage, and it's not the U.S.'s job to be involved in this war.
Iraq was a mess.
Afghanistan was a mess.
And one of the things I like about President Trump is he has shown restraint.
And so I think his instincts are to not be involved in this war, but there will be a lot of pressure from Lindsey Graham and others to get involved in this.
And I hope that his instincts will prevail.
Yeah, I think Rand Paul knows that that hope is likely to be futile.
The U.S. is already involved.
And if the idea is, you know, President Trump just ordered 16 million people in Tehran to evacuate the city at 2 in the morning, sounds like he's quite involved.
For like three years, I would have MAGA people on my show.
And including members of Congress, and they were all opposed to the war in Ukraine, to the U.S. funding the war in Ukraine.
They all had the same argument, which was, it's not our fight.
Why are we funding this war?
It has nothing to do with the United States.
Our communities are falling apart.
We don't have health care for people.
We're deindustrializing.
Our towns are filled with fentanyl and other forms of addiction and depression and mental health problems.
Why don't we spend the money at home rather than funding foreign wars?
Why are we constantly...
And I would say, wow, that's so convincing when it comes to Ukraine.
Do you feel the same way about Israel?
And obviously the only honest answer would be to say, yes, why are we funding Israel's wars?
But they weren't any of them ready to say that.
They would kind of stumble around and try and distinguish why Israel is just somehow different.
And I remember when Marjorie Taylor Greene was on my show, she wasn't very convincing, not just to the audience, but I know her heart wasn't in that.
And over the last six months, and especially over the last month, she has become increasingly, I would say, quite brave and outspoken in not even hedging around the fact that we're constantly being manipulated into war for Israel, for wars that don't affect the American people.
When Trump announced he would bomb the Houthi, she came out and said, I've never once heard in my entire life anyone in my district who sent me to Congress to represent their interests talk about the Houthi.
The Houthi have nothing to do with their lives.
They don't think about the Houthi.
They're not afraid of the Houthi.
Why are we bombing the Houthi?
Why are we sending our military to bomb the Houthi?
And now she's sending that same exact note about Iran.
Here's one of many tweets from yesterday.
Quote, everyone is finding out who are real America First MAGA and who were fake and just said it because it was popular.
Unfortunately, the list of fakes are becoming quite long and expose themselves quickly.
Anyone slobbering for the U.S. to become fully involved in the Israel-Iran war is not America First MAGA.
Wishing for murder of innocent people is disgusting.
We are sick and tired of foreign wars, all of them.
And this one will quickly engulf the Middle East, BRICS, and NATO as countries are required to take a side.
Real America First MAGA wants world peace for all people and doesn't want our military killed.
And forever injured physically and mentally.
We love our U.S. military and love them helping to secure our borders and our cities for the defense of our people and our countries.
They are our friends, spouses, cousins, nieces, nephews, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters.
We have spent trillions in the Middle East and we have dealt with the aftermath of death, blown apart bodies, never ending suicides and disabling PTSD.
All because they told us propaganda as to why we must sacrifice our own to defend some other countries' borders.
I don't want to see Israel bombed or Iran bombed or Gaza bombed.
I don't want to see Ukraine bombed or Russia bombed.
and we do not want to be involved or required to pay for any of it.
We are $36 trillion in debt and have mountains of our own problems.
We have giant planks sticking out of our own eyes while we complain about splinters in others'eyes.
Every country involved and all over the world can be happy, successful, and rich if we all work together and seek peace and prosperity.
and Taking this position is not anti-Semitic.
In fact, it's amazing that she even has to say that, but she does, knowing exactly what she's going to be accused of.
It's rational, sane, and loving toward all people.
Taking this position of peace and prosperity for all is not isolationism.
It leads to great trade deals and great economies that help all people.
It's what many Americans voted for in 2024.
America first, America first, America first.
This is how we make America great again.
Show me a Democrat who's saying that with that kind of moral clarity and that kind of fearlessness.
There are a couple standing up and objecting, and we're going to show you them in a second.
But the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is saying to the MAGA movement in America First, if you're going to now just cheer this and applaud this because you like seeing Iranians blown up or you want to support President Trump and his policy, this is exactly what we were promised we would not get.
Congressman Thomas Massey, who notably President Trump called to be removed from Congress, not over this, but over other things, but he's one of the few in the House who question Israel, and that just happens to be who Trump stood up and said should be removed from Congress.
He said this, quote, This is not our war.
We should not engage our military here.
Furthermore, doing so would require a vote of Congress.
Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, who has a lot of influence on foreign and military policy, to his credit, Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said on June 13th, The Netanyahu government's decision to attack Iran only makes a very dangerous situation worse.
Instead of bombing wars to an end, Trump is facilitating them, leading to civilian death and threatening American lives.
This is a moment that requires real American leadership.
Yeah.
In 2002, Bush and Cheney, the administration, took the position that we can invade Iraq, we can do a ground invasion on the other side of the world without congressional approval.
We don't need congressional approval.
They had invented all these Article II theories about how the president can basically do whatever he wants in the realm of foreign policy and national security.
Congress has no role in it to the point that Congress can pass laws and they have a right to ignore them or violate them.
And the Senate and the House were left pleading Pleading with the administration, please allow us to vote on this war.
And only once they basically promised that they would vote yes, did Bush and Cheney say, fine, you can have your vote.
And all Republicans except one and half of the Democratic caucus, including Joe Biden and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, all voted yes on the Iraq war.
And then the House did too.
And that's what happened here too.
Even if they say you can't go to war in Iran without Congress, When you see people like Chuck Schumer and Deb Wasserman Schultz and all these Democrats joining with the vast majority of the Republican Party who are still warmongers, neocons, the ones who sold the Iraq war, who still secretly think it's a good idea even though they can't admit it, overwhelmingly you would get a yes vote to do anything for Israel.
But at least there is some attempt to say we should debate this as a country.
Like, do we really want to put our service members in harm's way, which we're already doing?
Israel starts a war against Iran.
We immediately go there to protect Israel to shoot down and intercept ballistic missiles and other forms of weaponry that might harm Israelis.
We're already in combat there.
That's combat, intercepting missiles.
And you have Trump threatening a lot more.
Even though polls are showing that the American people are finally starting to ask, Why is it always our government, why are our politicians always talking about Israel?
Why are they wanting to send all our money to Israel?
Why did we have to go to war for Israel?
Why are we being told we can't talk about Israel?
Why is there censorship in the United States to protect this foreign government?
Why is our government so obsessed with Israel?
And people watched over 19 months what the Israelis did in Gaza and got a sense of who Israel is for the first time.
And polls show, again, every demographic group except all people who watch Fox News and the Republican Party.
Having their support for Israel recede rapidly, alarmingly from the Israeli perspective, there's no correlation between public opinion and the people's representatives in the House and the Senate.
That unraveling of support is not visible in the House and the Senate.
Because the people in the House and the Senate know that their real constituents are not the people who vote for them, but the people who finance their campaigns to ensure that they can swamp the airwaves with propaganda every six years in the Senate, every two years in the House.
To just keep themselves there for life, basically.
And that's who they serve.
And that means AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
And that is the reality of how our country has worked for decades.
is the reality of how our country is still working, even though Donald Trump absolutely did run, as Marjorie Taylor Greene said, on a promise to stay out of foreign wars.
Since then, the EU, Scott Benson was just in the Treasury Secretary, was in Ukraine today to sign a minerals deal that ties the United States further to Ukraine.
No negotiable diplomatic resolution in sight, so that war goes on.
There was a brief ceasefire that President Trump boasted of having engineered, which he did engineer, but then he immediately gave the green light to the Israelis to go back destroying Gaza.
He restarted and escalated President Biden's bombing campaign in Yemen.
And then saw after a month that none of what he was promised would happen was happening.
And so to his credit, he stopped that.
But now there's the most dangerous war in the Middle East.
And once a war starts like this, you have no idea where it's going to go.
Maybe it'll end quickly.
Maybe it'll end in a week.
The Iranians will wave the right flag of surrender.
Maybe.
But look at all the times we were promised that when that didn't happen.
And it really doesn't matter.
We can debate it all we want.
They're prominent NAGA.
Influencers and pundits and the like, activists, Charlie Kirk and Kenneth Solins, Tucker Carlson, others as well, standing up and saying, this is not our war, we shouldn't be fighting war for Israel.
But at the end of the day, Congress listens to people who fund them, and the people who fund them is the Israel lobby, and that's why the United States has always, for decades, and still continues, to remain subservient to anything Israel wants.
You wind them up and they know the script they read.
We stand by Israel, we pray for Israel, Israel has the right to defend itself, etc., etc.
And so whatever President Trump wants to do, fight the war for Israel, go bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, there's going to be no real political opposition to him in the Congress.
They're controlled by Israel.
They answer to Israel in the Israel lobby.
And it's good that people can say this now openly without recrimination.
It was only a few years ago when you weren't even allowed to say that.
At risk to your reputation or political career.
People are saying it because it's so blatant.
It's so brazen.
But it doesn't change the fact that it's true.
And we're seeing that.
We are definitely getting more and more involved in what is, by all metrics, no matter how well it goes, with respect to Brendan quickly, an extremely dangerous war.
All right, so that concludes our show for this evening.
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