Debating Iran on Piers Morgan with IDF Spokesman, Ana Kasparian, and a former US General
Piers Morgan’s panel with IDF spokesman Jonathan Cornicus, Ana Kasparian, and former US General Mark Kinnett devolved into a clash over Israel’s use of civilian infrastructure—Cornicus confirmed the Kirya bunker’s proximity to Tel Aviv residents—while critics accused Israel of human shielding. Former VP Mike Pence’s push for war echoed past U.S. interventions like Iraq and Libya, dismissed as hypocritical by the speaker, who tied Iran policy to enabling Israeli expansion in the West Bank. With global opinion shifting against both nations, the debate exposed a fractured moral and strategic foundation for military action, revealing U.S. support as a tool for regional dominance over democracy. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, I really want to show you the key excerpts of this debate that I had earlier today about the war in Iran on the Piers Morgan show.
As many of you know, I avoid panels like the plague.
I almost always say no because it's just people screaming over each other, trying to get attention, throwing poo at each other for the entertainment of the audience.
I just would rather not do it.
But when I heard that this panel was going to include the former IDF spokesman, Jonathan Cornicus, I immediately said yes along with him on the panel and myself was Anna Kasparian, who's become a very outspoken, inarticulate critic of Israel and U.S. support for it, as well as the former general Mark Kinnett, who's also served as an assistant secretary of state, didn't always agree with him.
But I really appreciated his candor about certain key aspects of this war, as you'll see.
And there was some Iranian activist, exile type who used to be in the Canadian legislature, who wants the U.S. and Israel to go fight a war and change the government of her country.
So she can go back.
She's not really relevant to this particular discussion.
So I'm just going to, that's the setting.
Now, the guest that they had on before the panel, and I didn't realize this when I said yes, was former Vice President Mike Pence.
And part of what I want to show you in the debate that I had involved my comments about Mike Pence.
So I do just want to show you briefly, very briefly.
I'm sorry to subject you to Mike Pence, but I had to endure him for almost 20 minutes of my ear.
But I actually think it's worth it.
Mike Pence is somebody who not only, when he was in Congress, voted for the Iraq war and publicly advocated for the Iraq war for years after it was over.
He's one of the people in Washington who never bothered to apologize or admit that he was wrong.
To this day, he believes the Iraq war was the right thing to do.
He became an outspoken supporter of President Obama's war in Libya as well.
Yet another disaster.
Obviously, the war in Afghanistan, yet another disaster, all based on falsehoods and lies.
And the fact that Mike Pence can go around advocating this new regime change war in Iran using basically the same exact script, not even bothering to change it.
Just like Fox News, you turn that on.
It sounds like 2003.
They don't even bother to change the script.
It's not just an insult to the intelligence of the American people who lived through that, but also just such a proof of what lack of accountability we have in our politics and journalism that the people who sold those destructive wars based on lies are still welcomed as the experts to whom you're supposed to listen, who have, who are supposed to have credibility.
So here was just a little glimpse of what Mike Pence had to say.
This action.
President Trump has unleashed the armed forces of the United States.
Israel's unleashed its armed forces to take the fight really to the heart of terrorism, which is the mullahs in Tehran, many of whom have been eliminated.
But now comes the time where I think we have to see this through and create the conditions where the people of Iran who have longed who have longed for freedom and democracy and human rights can reclaim their country.
We have to go to the region, fight the heart of terrorism.
That used to be Baghdad, now it's Iran.
We have to go free the people and bring them democracy that they've created for so long, which used to be the Iraqi people, now it's the Iranian people.
Same exact script.
This is a person who has lied continuously as a public official to lie the country into wars, has been wrong about every war he's advocated.
He barely changes the script that he used for all those other wars.
And it's amazing how many people in media are also repeating the same script that they repeated themselves as servants of government messaging.
Mike Pence is just so robotic that you can really see it vividly in him.
All right.
Here was the part where I want to show you that Pierce came to me.
There was a lot of back and forth between Anna and the IDF spokesman.
I had my own back and forth with him a couple of times.
So I just want to show you the clip.
It's about seven minutes long, but I think it's really worth understanding the dynamic of what this war really is, of how Israel thinks about it, of what the IDF spokesman had to say when I questioned him.
Here it is.
So do you think that the mission here is even achievable?
And do you think what has happened is legal?
I am glad, Pierce, that we started the segment with Mike Pence because he is an American elected official who voted for the Iraq war in 2002, 2003, continued to defend it for many years.
And unlike many American politicians who did that, who ended up saying they regretted it or it was a mistake, Mike Pence to this very day believes that going into Iraq was the right thing to do.
And everything that he said in justification in defense of this new war was exactly the things that he and all the other American leaders who wanted this war in 2002 and 2003 were saying then.
But it's not just the Iraq war.
It's also exactly what happened in Libya.
President Obama said, oh, don't worry, this isn't a regime change war.
It's just to protect the people of Benghazi and that it ended up being a regime change war that destroyed Libya.
It's what we did in Afghanistan, where we were told, oh, we're just going in to get Osama bin Laden.
And then 20 years later, our troops leave, trillions of dollars spent, huge numbers of dead, and the Taliban march right back into power.
And you can even go back to Vietnam, where we were lied into that war, lied through that war by many of the same people who telling us now that we have to do this.
It is astounding to me that somebody like Mike Pence or so many other people who lied to the public continuously, led our country into disastrous wars, one after the next, are now just speaking as though none of it ever happened.
It would be like as if a journalist, I published eight or nine different fraudulent stories with fake quotes and fake sources.
And then the next day I woke up and said, Oh, I know I did those things in the past, but I think I should still have credibility for you to listen to my reporting today, even though I did all of that.
The other point I want to make is I want to ask Jonathan, because I mean, honestly, it is very, very difficult.
I have to confess, not just for me, but for the world as the polls show, to listen to an Israeli official in an Israeli accent give lectures on the need to have compassion for civilians after everything we just watched Israel do, vaporizing tens of thousands of people in Gaza, all throughout the Middle East, attacking countries.
Bunker Under Tel Aviv00:03:08
But since he is here, I do want to ask him, Jonathan, there's a lot of reports in mainstream Western press about how the IDF has built its primary military and intelligence structures, not just within key residential areas in Tel Aviv, but also underneath.
Is it true that the IDF has built key military and intelligence targets within residential areas of Tel Aviv and beneath residential targets in Tel Aviv, the way that the Western media has continuously reported?
Is that actually true?
Yeah, I can give a relatively short and plain answer to it.
Surprising question.
I've read some of your reporting and you seem like an informed guy.
But yes, the IDF headquarters, referred to as the Kirya, is indeed located in Tel Aviv.
It is surrounded by civilian buildings.
And inside the headquarter, not underneath civilians, but underneath the headquarter itself, is a bunker, which is not a revolutionary concept of militaries.
And that bunker is a few stories below ground.
Its name is indeed the Zion Citadel.
And that is where some of the Israeli officers, generals conduct military operations from.
I suppose some of the strikes, if not all of the strikes that are ongoing in Iran today, are managed from there.
When Iran targeted that location, okay.
I just think it's unbelievable to admit that Israel builds its key military command and intelligence structures smack dab in the middle of Tel Aviv, in the middle of residential buildings and other civilian infrastructures, not just within it, but beneath it, so that the only way you could actually bomb the key command center, where he himself said all military strikes on Iran are ordered from, obviously meaning it is a legitimate military target,
is to bomb the residential buildings and use bunker bombs to get underneath to the bunker that they built.
And unlike in Gaza, which is the most densely populated population on earth, where they have basically no space everywhere where there are gods and civilians, that's where they take up land.
So there is no field or city where Hamas, remote land, where Hamas could build their headquarters.
Israel has a whole country.
And they do put certain facilities, military facilities, intelligence facilities in isolated areas.
This they chose on purpose to put in the middle of Tel Aviv, meaning that they use their civilians as human shields, what they accuse everybody else of doing.
The civilians in those residential buildings, in those shopping centers, in those museums, in those restaurants, where they purposely embedded their key military command headquarters.
I think he admitted it because he knew I was ready with multiple reports from all over the world proving that that's exactly what Israel does.
Just extraordinary how he just so casually admits what they accuse everybody else of doing.
Moral Case Debunked00:07:39
They've targeted it now.
They have targeted it in the past.
It's a very big dose that it's there as human shields.
None of us should be mourning a vicious dictator.
And the one thing, you know, you said, so I want to just, I just want to show you this part where I had an exchange with a general because one of the things that Piers Morgan asked Mike Pence about was the moral component of the war, not just the legal component.
Of course, Mike Pence oozed about how moral it was for us to go and take out a savage dictator and bring freedom and democracy to the Iranian people.
And here was the exchange I had with the general about that.
Can I just make one quick point?
Can I just make one quick point about the moral aspect that we raised?
You know, you said none of us should be mourning a vicious dictator.
And the one thing, the two quick things I will say about that is, you know, we were told that about Saddam Hussein.
We were told that about Muammar Gaddafi.
Certainly in Libya, we were told, oh, Muammar Gaddafi said that's certainly a good thing.
What came after in Libya was some of the worst, most nightmarish dystopia that the world has seen in the past 50 years, certainly far worse than what it had under Gaddafi.
And I think a lot of this depends on what succeeds in Iran.
Is it going to be this incredibly destroyed state, balkanized with anarchy, where ISIS and al-Qaeda can fill the power vacuum as they did with the invasion of Iraq?
Is it going to be an even worse tyrant like the Shah of Iran was or some other worse militias and factions?
And then the other point is it's a little bit hard to hear the United States and Great Britain and other countries say, oh, we're doing this for the moral reason that we want to cleanse Iran of tyranny when our closest allies and partners in that region that we prop up and give military technology and spying technology are at least as savage and brutal dictatorships as Iran is.
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Emiratis going throughout the rest of the world to Uganda, Rwanda.
We love dictatorships.
We prop up tyrannies all the time.
I think it's very hard to make a moral case, especially as you're bombing civilian places all throughout Iran, that we somehow are doing this because we want to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, the Iranian people.
The last time we did change the government in Iran, we imposed a horrific dictator on them for 20, 30 years called the Shah of Iran.
And now we want to do it with his son.
So these moral questions are much more complex than is the Ayatollah a good or a bad guy.
Okay, go to Mario.
We should have no moral reasons at all.
Again, there was no morality in our negotiations last Thursday for no nukes, no missiles, and no proxies.
And I don't think if we start getting into the moral regime change, everything you're describing, Glenn, if we're trying to get into another Iraq, that's the mission creep we don't want to see.
We are now using the military force to achieve the end state that our negotiations weren't able to do.
And candidly, I also agree with you that we shouldn't completely wipe out the leadership of the country.
LBJ, Lynette Baines Johnson, once said, he's an SOB, but he's our SOB.
We now have Darcy Rodriguez as one of our SOBs.
We have Ahmed Al-Shara as one of our SOBs.
Emmanuel Noriega in Panama was one of our SOBs.
The fact remains is we ought to have a very limited mission, which is simply to use military force to compel Iran back to the negotiating table for them to give up their missiles, their nukes, and their proxies.
We can do it now.
We won't be able to do it when they have a nuclear weapon.
I just quickly agree with that.
I wish everybody were as candid as the general about the absence of a moral case here.
And Pierce said, yeah, he agrees.
I mean, I can deal with those kind of arguments.
It's not true that we weren't able to achieve this in negotiations.
But when he's making his case, honestly, yeah, we're not there to on some moral crusade to bring freedom and democracy to the Iranian people.
We don't care that there's tyranny there.
Those are all the pretexts that I can appreciate in terms of candor.
Now, I want to show you one final clip.
There was like five minutes of Pierre Hasborough from the IDF spokesman just on and on and on about how Israel is so besieged and the whole world is against us and we all and they want to destroy Israel and they're all looking to.
And I think in this exchange that I had with him emerged the actual truth about who the apocalyptic fanatical nuclear armed aggressor, aggressor, expansionist state is in the Middle East.
And it's not Iran.
Listen to this.
They're serious.
And I'll finish with this, Piers.
The motivation for Israel is we want to live in our homeland without Iranian terror organizations without Iranian ballistic missiles and without Iranian nuclear weapons that are aimed at us.
Does your homeland include the West Bank?
Does your homeland include the West Banks?
Okay, let me If you ask about Judea and Samaria, yes, that is part of the judgment.
Which the whole world thinks is not yours, which the whole world believes is not yours.
You're the expansionist state.
You're the aggressor.
No, we're not expanding.
You're the terrorist state, and you're financed by the United States.
That came back to our homeland.
We were expelled from it.
Please don't.
Okay, don't talk.
I don't think Jonathan.
You've had to get excuses.
Jonathan, I gave you good time, Jonathan.
I want to let Glenn finish with a response to what you just said.
Glenn.
I mean, this is the victim mentality.
The whole world is against us.
We just want to be a peaceful country.
The reality is it's not the position of the Iranian government that their borders should be expanded.
It's the position of the Israeli government that their borders should be radically expanded, including into places and in ways that the United States government for decades under both Democratic and Republican leadership has said is a direct threat to American interests.
Settlements in the West Bank, annexing the West Bank, moving into Gaza, bombing Lebanon, expanding into Lebanon.
This is the fanatical, expansionist, nuclear-armed, dangerous power in the Middle East that the United States pays for, that American soldiers die for.
And this narrative used to be dominant in the West, but people have seen the true face of Israel and U.S. support for Israel over the past couple of years.
And you see it in polling, not just in the United States, but around the world, that people see Israel and increasingly the United States as the rogue countries that are the true danger to the world.
As an American, I wish that weren't true.
I'm doing everything possible in my power to change it.
A lot of other people are as well, but that is the reality for now.
You know, I mean, that sums it up in my view in terms of where the United States and Israel have arrived.
And I think that it is so interesting.
I mean, I know as somebody who has talked about these issues for so long, the sea change is difficult to describe.
It's so radical.
You know, with first the Israeli destruction of Gaza that the U.S. paid for, finance, deployed troops for under Biden and then into the Trump administration.
And now with this new war that the U.S. and Israel started against Iran that is incredibly dangerous, starting up the escalatory ladder already, creating regional conflagration with so much more risk.
Two more dead American soldiers today.
I think people are really going to, it's going to be impossible to hide any longer what has been the truth about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.