Glenn Greenwald argues the U.S. and Israel are losing a war against Iran, where missiles struck Demona and Arad while overwhelming Iron Dome defenses. He compares current propaganda to Vietnam and Iraq, noting failed regime-change goals and rising blowback like the Austin terror attack. Despite Trump's claims of victory, Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and possesses hardened retaliatory capabilities. Greenwald concludes the conflict, driven by the Israeli lobby rather than necessity, endangers Americans and global stability with no clear path to de-escalation. [Automatically generated summary]
But I want to talk about the events that have been taking place over the last few days, but also especially today when it comes to what is clearly an increasingly dangerous and escalating and spiraling out of control, U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.
And there's so much to say about this.
Right now, as we speak, there are Iranian missiles pummeling.
various strategic Israeli towns and cities that are signifying what people have long been warning would happen, which is an erosion and a weakening of Israeli air defenses that are just being overwhelmed by the number of Iranian missiles that have been sent.
There's mass casualty attacks in Israel, where large numbers of people are seriously wounded or dying.
Massive devastation from these missiles that Israeli's vaunted Iron Dome is starting to be increasingly incapable of intercepting.
You see similar things throughout the Gulf states, the ones that are home to American military bases that have been used to stage attacks on Iran.
Iran has obviously targeted them as well.
And some of the most major devastation, including in Qatar, where the Iranian missiles, an Iranian missile took out a huge chunk of their natural gas facility that took many years to build.
At the same time, you have the Strait of Hormuz, which remains under Iranian control and closed.
And this is something that President Trump either has to try and resolve, which can only be done with lots of ground troops and Marines on the ground, at least on various islands close to Iran, if not on the shore of Iran itself.
And you have what is a much greater military retaliatory capability on the part of Iran than a lot of American military planners and media figures predicted.
Betrayal and the Strait of Hormuz00:09:58
We are now about three and a half weeks into this war, a little bit over three weeks.
When it began, we were told likely three weeks, four weeks, something like that.
In order for it to be concluded, maybe a little longer, there's no possibility that we are close to the end of this war if we're to do anything other than obviously suffer a serious loss because none of the real aims of the war,
regime change, all the stuff about saving the Iranian protesters and liberating the Iranian people, to say nothing of the demand that President Trump very melodramatically and flamboyantly insisted would be the only one he would accept to end the war,
which is unconditional surrender, to say that we're very, very far from unconditional surrender on the part of the Iranians, absent some unthinkable event where the United States and Israel just go completely berserk in ways that alter humanity and world history forever.
Absent that, we are obviously nowhere near close to anything like unconditional surrender.
In fact, we're not really close to anything close to Iranian surrender at all.
Quite the contrary, the Iranians absolutely do believe they're winning.
And if you talk to Iranian sources, people who are close to the government, to officials in Iran, they will tell you that, not just stating it publicly, but they will tell you that they are very happy with the war's progress.
And we're trained in the United States to believe that we win every war, that we're always winning every war.
And it's not just that we're accustomed to believing that.
It's that it's very important for us to believe that.
If you say to an American during a war, especially at the beginning of a war, look, we're not really winning this war, they few things will provoke as much fury and rage at you for saying that, for suggesting that.
People feel like it's some kind of betrayal or even like almost treason.
Like you're rooting for the other side, if you're pointing out that the American war plans are not going as a lot of people were led to believe that they would.
And it's a very important patriotic, nationalistic, tribalistic need to believe that we win wars.
In fact, when I was a kid, I was taught that every war that the United States has fought, the United States has won.
The United States never lost to war.
And then I came to understand what happened in Vietnam, among other things, and realize just how false that was.
The United States absolutely lost the war in Vietnam, even though the United States fought there for more than a decade, lost close to 60,000 Americans, killed millions of Vietnamese.
The war did.
It's an absolute atrocity, left generations impaired by chemicals and Agent Orange and the like.
And yet, Americans were constantly told, oh, we're winning the war.
They were told that from the beginning.
Americans were absolutely taught to believe from the beginning of that war that we were on the verge of defeating the North Vietnamese communists.
And the whole point of the Pentagon papers, which Daniel Ellsberg released and almost went to prison for, was that he discovered, despite having been an early advocate of the Vietnam War, despite having been somebody who helped planned it inside the Rand Corporation, he came to realize that the United States was lying to the American people about exactly that issue.
They were telling the American people, oh, we're on the verge of winning.
We just need another six months.
But internally, the Pentagon knew that there was no possibility they could win the war in Vietnam, no matter how much indiscriminate force they used, no matter how many civilians they slaughtered, that the best they could hope for was a standstill.
And that's why Ellsberg came forward and came very close to going to prison.
He would have gone to prison for life the way they're trying to do with Joe Kent now for him having revealed the truth about the war that Iran was posing no imminent threat because the American government was telling the American people the whole time that we were winning the war.
Now, I will remind you that the same exact thing happened in Iraq.
I don't think anybody thinks the United States won the war in Iraq.
Even Tony Blair, one of the most important architects of that war, one of the probably the single most important salesmen of the war internationally, admitted afterward that not only were there no weapons of mass destruction, but that the reason there was an ISIS is because of the power vacuum the United States created in the middle of the Middle East through the anarchy and instability that spread throughout the region.
Remember the point of that war, Benjamin Etna who said this when he came to testify before the U.S. Congress in late 2002, and George Bush and Dick Cheney said it over and over as the reason we were going to go do this war was that we were going to go and bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people.
And that would spread stability and democracy throughout the region.
The exact opposite happened.
Nobody thinks we won the war in Iraq.
And yet for the first six weeks, two months of that war, it was nothing but triumphalism.
Bill Crystal had promised the war would be over in three to four weeks.
Donald Rumsfeld, I posted a clip the other day.
He was asked almost immediately before the invasion, how long he thought the war was going to last.
And he said, look, you can't know for sure.
My guess is it would be a matter of weeks, could be a few months, but unlikely.
And after a couple of weeks, the theme of what the American people were told was that we were winning.
We won.
We toppled Saddam.
The Iraqi people were welcoming us as liberators.
They manufactured a fake scene in Baghdad where the U.S. Marines pulled down that statute of Saddam and pretended it was some spontaneous uprising on the part of the Iranian people, telling people that we're winning wars, even if we're not, is an absolutely vital part of American war propaganda.
And I think it's worth remembering people remember this, but they don't remember the timeline.
The United States attack Iraq, principally Baghdad, through what was called shock and awe.
It's going to bring such a display of terrorizing destruction everywhere that everyone in Iraq was just going to psychologically be so traumatized into submission.
They wouldn't even fight.
The display of force and destruction that we were going to bring was so terrifying, so psychologically destructive, unlike anything anyone has ever seen, shock and awe.
It was going to shock them into submission.
And we were told that's what happened, that there was no fight back.
There was no pushback.
Saddam's government had dispersed.
The Iraqi army was no more.
They were surrendering.
They were defecting exactly like we were told.
And that attack happened on March 19th, 2003.
Less than six weeks later, on May 1st, 2003, George Bush flew to the region onto a aircraft carrier that he very melodramatically landed in in a fighter jet that he was sort of piloting, pranced around in a fighter pilot costume for a while.
then got into his presidential gear, spoke in front of a sign that said mission accomplished because we were told we had won the war.
This was six, less than six weeks.
This is May 1st, 2003.
And everybody understands what happened.
And so here we are.
And I just want to remind you about what President Trump was saying.
Here, it was President Trump on May 9th.
So this is almost two weeks ago.
This is about 10 days into the war.
President Trump said, quote, the war is very complete and he's considering taking over the Strait of Hormuz.
Quote, in a phone interview with CBS News on Monday afternoon, President Trump said the U.S. war with Iran could almost be over.
Quote, I think the war is very complete, pretty much, the president said, speaking from his Doral Florida golf club.
Iran has no navy, no communications.
They've got no air force.
Their missiles are down to a scatter.
Their drones are being blown up all over the place, including their manufacturing of drone.
The U.S. military said it struck more than 3,000 Iranian targets in the first weeks of operation.
Quote, if you look, they have nothing left.
There's nothing left in a military sense.
He was saying they have no communication.
Do you know how many spectacular attacks Iran has carried out since then, since we were told they have no communications, basically no missiles left, no drones, no manufacturing of drones, just a scatter?
They've been barraging Israel over the last 48 hours and pummeling many of their cities.
What the government tells you in a war, and it's not just the U.S. government, it's every government, but also the U.S. government, our lives.
They tell you propaganda.
They want you to keep supporting the war by believing that we're winning and that if you were to stop the war now, you would snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat because we're always on the verge of winning.
There was a dark, sick joke during the Iraq war where they would always say, I know things haven't gone well, but the next six months are critical.
Just six months more.
This is really, we're turning the corner now.
And there was a liberal blogger named Matrios who coined it, the Friedman unit, because Tom Friedman, who favored the war in Iraq, would write a column in the New York Times pretty much every three months saying the same thing, which was, yeah, things aren't going well.
None of the things we said were going to happen actually happen, but don't worry, the next six months are critical.
That's when we're going to turn it around.
We just need six months more.
We always need six months more.
We always need six months more.
Because otherwise, how would American citizens continue to support the war unless they believe that we are about to win?
Just like the American government was telling people in Vietnam, we're just about to win, six months away.
The next six months are critical.
We're going to really turn it around.
The TED offensive and this and that, we're going to really start winning.
And it just never happened.
That is the history of our war.
And in the last 25 years, the only options have been stay and fight forever and then leave and lose anyway.
The United States finally left Iraq, basically turned it over to Iran.
Iraq and Iran were sworn enemies previously.
And after the Iraq war, the big winner of that war was Iran, which had more influence inside Iraq than ever, as well as the emergence of ISIS.
We stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years, eliminated and vaporized an innocent family on our way out for good measure by drones under President Biden.
And then the Taliban marched right back into power.
We were told we were winning in the war in Afghanistan easily all along.
And yet the minute we left, the Taliban just marched in like the whole thing had never happened.
So you can stay and fight or you can just get out really quickly, like we did in Libya.
We didn't stay that long in Libya, just bombed it for a while.
We were told we were going to liberate the Libyan people from the repression of Mu Mar Gaddafi.
And then we leave and Libya is the worst hellhole on the planet.
Anarchy and slave markets and the control of ISIS in a country where ISIS had basically no foothold, to say nothing of the absolutely tragic migrant crisis where huge numbers of people die, Libyans fleeing that country, swamping much of Europe, the effects of which politically and culturally and socially are still very much visible today.
Killing Officials Without Winning Wars00:10:45
These are what American wars are.
And it has been unbelievable to me.
And I confess that maybe I've been naive.
I really thought that having lived through the Iraq war, and it was really the thing, it was the post-9-11 events that really were the impetus for me to leave law and start wanting to be involved in our political discourse and ultimately do journalism.
Having lived through the Iraq war and everything else, the war on terror ushered in, all the disgraces of worldwide torture regimes and CIA black sites and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, putting people in cages for life with no charges or due process, kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and calling it rendition, even imprisoning American citizens, arrested on American soil with no charges, no trial for years, no access to lawyers, holding them incognito, just calling them NMB combatants.
And somehow that was sufficient for due process.
Having lived through all of that, especially the war in Iraq, I thought we were never going to live through that again.
I really did.
And maybe I don't mean I thought we were never going to live through another war or an unjust war, one based on life.
I thought that they would at least have to come up with some different and new script.
And this has been what has amazed me to watch the same exact script used by the same exact people over and over.
And it has been, that has been the most remarkable thing.
Now, it is the exact same script.
Iran has nuclear weapons.
We can't allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
We don't want to wait for the proof to be a mushroom cloud over the United States or over precious Israel.
Even worse, they're a funder of terror groups.
Like we were told by Jeffrey Goldberg when he was a reporter at the New Yorker in 2002, having gone to Israel and enlisted in the IDF a decade or so earlier, where he worked as a prison guard in a dungeon holding Palestinians who had not been charged with or convicted of crimes.
That was the reporter who then convinced the American public that Saddam Hussein basically was responsible for the planning of 9-11 because he was in bed with Osama bin Laden, giving safe haven to al-Qaeda in Iraq, all of which relies.
But by the start of the Iraq war, a few months into the Iraq war, 70% of Americans, 70%, believed that Iraq was the worst terrorist regime and had actually that Saddam Hussein had participated in the planning and the perpetration of the 9-11 attacks.
So weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, funding terrorist attacks, funding terror groups, all the same propaganda, all the same lies by the same people, by the same news outlet.
That's what amazes me.
And then I was noting over the past few days in various platforms that although we're told, because we're always told that we're winning triumphantly, somehow we don't have the straight of hormudes.
Iran has more control over that and is exploiting their control of that, a problem that did not exist before the war began, that is now an extremely difficult problem to solve to the point where President Trump is basically saying, oh, we may just leave and leave that to other countries.
We don't need the straight of Hormuz.
But President Trump says completely different things from one second to the next.
Oh, we basically won.
We're probably going to wrap up quickly.
No, actually, here's a huge convoy of Marines headed to the region, thousands of them.
Just completely contradictory messages.
Maybe it's because he thinks it's cute and clever to try and create disinformation for Iran that doesn't seem to be bothered.
Maybe he wants to deceive the American public or markets that are freaking out with massively high oil prices.
Oh, don't worry.
We're leaving soon.
We're wrapping it up soon because he wants the markets to believe that there's no reason to panic, even though it's not true.
Maybe he doesn't have any idea what his plan is.
One minute he wants to leave, the next minute he doesn't.
Whatever the reason is, there's completely conflicting messages.
And yet you try and convince people who support this war that we are not winning the war.
I'm not saying we've lost the war.
I'm not saying we are going to lose the war.
The United States has by far the most expensive and powerful military on the planet still.
And Israel, because of our largesse, also has a very powerful military.
And both countries are obviously very devoted to destroying Iran.
Not saying Iran is going to win, just saying the United States and Israel haven't won anything and aren't even winning.
Not saying Iran is winning, but the U.S. and Israel definitely aren't winning.
But if you say that, people get enraged at you as though it's your fault.
As so you shouldn't be saying it, even if it's true.
And this was very representative of the kind of response that you get.
I got this today.
I just singled it out when I noted that Iran wasn't winning.
And this person said, if this is Iran winning, I'm rooting for more wins for Iran.
And it's a graphic that is very much making the rounds among MAGA and war supporters, IRGC leaders who are now resting in pieces.
Bunch of pictures of Iranian officials who are dead with the big red X crossed out over their face.
And it is true.
The United States and Iran and Israel have killed a lot of Iranians, including Iranian officials.
Congratulations.
Incredible success.
U.S. has a much better air force than Iran, has been able to degrade their air defenses.
And the United States and Israel have free reign over Iran.
So we can bomb at will and kill a bunch of people, including Iranian officials.
And we have killed Iranian officials, just like we killed a lot of Iraqi officials.
And in fact, it used to be another dark joke.
I mentioned the one about the Friedman unit, which Adria was dubbed, what Thomas Friedman's calm was.
They were called Friedman units six months.
Oh, we just need another Friedman unit.
Six more months.
And you're going to see we're going to win.
We're going to turn the corner.
Another dark joke was that the United States, every two or three months, would always kill the number three person in Al-Qaeda.
We weren't killing Osama bin Laden, obviously, which was supposed to be the purpose of the war in Afghanistan to get him, nor the number two, sorry.
And so every two months they would announce, hey, we got the number three.
And maybe it was true.
Maybe we killed the number three person in Al-Qaeda every two months.
And then there was another one and another one, another one, another one.
And that was the point.
It didn't get us anywhere.
So yes, the United States has killed a bunch of Iranian officials, including, by the way, the Iranian officials with whom the United States was negotiating to try and supposedly avoid a war diplomatically.
And also the Iranian officials that Trump said he would have liked to have seen as candidates to govern Iran because they were more moderate and restrained.
But they were the ones that Israel killed, just like Israel killed the Iranian negotiating team at the start of the last war, the 12-day war.
The people with whom Trump was negotiating were the ones that Israel killed first because they don't want anyone there who is willing to negotiate a peace because they want war.
They want to lure the United States into a war to destroy their main adversary in the Middle East, which is Iran now, after Iraq is gone.
After Syria is broken up into tiny little pieces, after Lebanon is in nothing but debris, the Israelis are taking more and more of southern Lebanon, just taking it as their own.
Apparently, Lebanon doesn't have a right to exist the way we're always forced to say that Israel does.
Lebanon is being eaten up.
And so yes, we have killed a lot of Iranian officials.
I don't know if people remember, but this is one of the most laughable pieces of propaganda, and yet it was central to the attempt to try and tell Americans that we were winning the war in Iraq.
It's what led to Mission Accomplished and all those months of people believing that we won, which is the Pentagon actually created playing cards.
This was the level of propaganda, like creating Marvel movie and having that be some serious analysis of war.
They were treating the American public like children.
They created playing cards.
And every Iraqi official that the United States government wanted to kill each had their own assigned number in the playing deck.
So Saddam Hussein was the ace of spades.
His son Qisi was the ace of clubs.
His other son, Uday, was the ace of hearts.
The presidential secretary of the Ace of Diamond, various presidential advisors, five of spades, four of spades, five of diamonds.
This was passed around by the media too.
They treated this as they loved it.
CNN, Fox News, all of them.
They constantly showed these playing cards.
And every time the U.S. would kill or capture one of these officials, they would put a big X over it, exactly like the propaganda that we're seeing now to convince people that we're winning the war in Iran.
And it was truthful.
We did kill and capture a lot of the people who were on that playing deck, including Saddam Hussein and his two sons.
Two sons were killed in a U.S. airstrike as their father, Saddam Hussein, was captured and then executed in a completely undignified and brutal way.
So yeah, congratulations to the United States.
We killed a lot of Iraqi officials, but it didn't mean we win the war.
And we killed a bunch of Iranian officials too, including many who we probably would have wanted around if we're actually serious about dealing with that country in a constructive way.
And yet, knowing that this was exactly what was done to tell us that we were winning the war in Iraq and it all proved to be a lie, this is what I mean.
The script doesn't change.
The graphics don't even change.
They're not even more advanced, these graphics from that, that a preposterous playing card that the press office of the DOD in 2003 created to let idiots at CNN and Fox News have fun with killings of various Iraqi officials.
We killed Gaddafi.
Didn't really help in terms of the objectives of Libya.
Certainly didn't make things better in Libya.
Killed a ton of North Vietnamese.
Didn't really help with that war either.
And we're right back to this.
I mean, this is something, this is a version of what Trump is saying more or less every day.
Now, here is the headline today of the Wall Street Journal.
I just want to show you this.
I think I have it.
Let me just see.
It's right here.
This is a headline today of the Wall Street Journal.
Iran believes it's winning and wants a steep price to end the war.
Now, I know because I posted this and I knew before I did what people's reactions are when they see that.
Oh, Iran thinks it's winning.
Ha ha ha.
There was an Iraqi press spokesman who used to give press conferences in Iraq every day, and he was nicknamed Baghdad Bob.
And he was supposedly a joke because he kept saying how Iraq was winning.
And a lot of his claims were false.
But as it turned out, the joke was kind of on the United States because at the time, he was supposed to be a joke because we were so obviously winning so easily and so completely that the claim that there was any kind of Iraqi resistance, that was a big joke.
Just like a, he was like in some delusional world.
And that's how people react to this.
Ha ha, Iran believes it's winning.
The reality is that Iran does believe it's winning.
As I said, you have, you talk to people in the Iranian government, as I have.
You talk to people in Tehran who are close to that situation.
Talk to military analysts who aren't just people who go on Fox News or CNN.
And they will tell you the same thing.
That Iran is in a much better position than a lot of people were led to believe they would be in.
They clearly have a massive arsenal left because they're using it and they're using it with great efficacy and precision all over the place.
A U.S. fighter jet that supposedly stealth was shot out of the sky.
U.S. army bases in Iraq are being pummeled.
They just took out a huge natural gas facility in Qatar and purposely didn't take out the whole thing just as a warning shot.
Ballistic Missiles Hit Strategic Targets00:15:10
Today in Israel, they struck strategic towns as I'll show you and caused an immense amount of damage, which were also just warning shots as well.
This is something that is very much a huge propaganda.
So if you see a headline that says Iran believes it's winning and you think to yourself, oh, come on, that's propaganda.
Very well maybe.
You should have the same reaction when a U.S. officials go on Fox News or New York Times editorialist or op-ed writers tell you, oh, we're kicking ass.
Israel and the United States are kicking ass.
Very little supports that if you just look at it rationally without a AI toward wanting to be patriotic or whatever.
Be as patriotic as you want, but it shouldn't impede your rational, informed understanding of what actually is going on here.
Here are a few things that happened today.
Let me just show you this.
This is President Trump from March 9th.
Again, this is now 12 days ago.
And think how much has happened in the 12 days since he said this.
Everybody said the same thing.
Make sure you win.
We will.
We've already won in many ways, but we haven't won enough.
We've already won in many ways.
And of course, then he went on to say, basically, this is all complete.
Now, let me show you some of what has happened in Israel today because it's really quite remarkable.
Here is video footage of a missile striking.
This one is the video footage of a missile that struck the town of Demona.
And Demona is a very important town because right outside of it lies Israel's most important nuclear facility, the heart of Israel's nuclear weapons program.
And the nuclear scientists and engineers who work in that facility right outside of Demona live in Demona.
They work there.
They live there.
Their families live there.
It's considered one of the most sensitive, strategically sensitive places in all of Israel for obvious reasons, which is what I just described.
If Israel had air defenses, intensive, effective air defenses anywhere, they would have them in Demona to protect that nuclear facility and all of the people who work and live there.
And yet, the Iranians were able to strike in a very aggressive and harsh way with a very heavy missile that injured and killed people the town of Demona today.
Here is part of the video footage showing that there is video footage all over the place showing that.
Here's a little more.
And even Israeli sources are saying that there are mass casualties in Israel.
In fact, here's another hit on an Israeli city today, a very serious one.
This is one that is called a mass casualty attack by the Israeli government.
And the latest report is that I believe nine people are dead.
It's the city of Arad.
Here's what Israel's Channel 12 News says: massive destruction from a direct hit in Arid reports of multiple casualties.
Helicopters were scrambled to evacuate the injured, 30 injured in the direct hit in Arid.
A multi-casual, a multi-casual incident has been declared.
And here's some of the footage about.
Yeah, from that of that.
Here you see people, Israeli citizens being taken away, very bloodied.
According to the Israeli government, all sorts of injury and death.
I think the really important thing here is that to note is that here's Herod, the headline right now: Iranian barrages wound around 100 in direct missile strikes in southern Israel.
One of the really important things to note here is that there's a lot of military censorship of the media in Israel.
We have a lot of Western journalists in Israel.
And yet, if they report on or show direct hits by Iran of missiles, unless it's authorized by the government, they can and will be arrested.
Their footage will be seized.
In the 12-day war, President Trump himself said that Israel has been pummeled very hard.
They've been hit very, very hard by Iranian ballistic missile.
That's why it was in Israel's interest to demand that Iran not have ballistic missiles because they provide retaliatory capability when Israel wants to attack Iran.
And obviously, Israel wants to be able to attack Iran and not have any retaliation.
It's not in American interest.
The United States homeland was not being attacked by Iran.
U.S. bases in the region have been attacked because of the U.S. Assistance to Israel in their attacks on Iran, obviously, making U.S. military bases legitimate targets.
Everybody would say that, but Iran has no capability to attack the United States.
They only have the capability to attack Israel.
And that's one of the reasons why it was so bizarre that President Trump said Iran has to give up their ballistic missile capability.
Otherwise, we're going to attack Iran.
Why would it be in the interest of the United States that Iran gives up its conventional arsenal that any serious military has?
We're not talking about nuclear weapons, we're talking about ballistic missiles.
And the reason is because those ballistic missiles, despite the vaunted Iron Dome, can cause great damage in Israel.
It caused great damage in Israel last year in the 12-day war.
And you can talk to a lot of really smart military experts who work in the Pentagon or have worked in the Pentagon who will tell you that the reason the 12-day war ended is because Israel and Iran were basically in a race.
Israel and the U.S. on one side, Iran and the other, were in a race.
Iran was trying to shoot as many missiles as they could at Israel to exhaust and deplete the anti-missile air defenses of both Israel and the United States.
And Israel and the U.S. were trying to destroy Iran's missile capabilities before that happened.
And yet, more and more Iranian missiles were hitting Israel, which is why President Trump said Israel got hit very hard.
They had to stop the war.
These anti-missile air defenses are not things you just snap up in order and get on the phone with Boeing and say, hey, send a thousand more.
These are extremely expensive systems.
They take years to develop.
And the United States has depleted so many by sending them to Ukraine, by giving them to Israel, by using them in defense of Israel over the entire course of the destruction of Gaza.
And the U.S. is running low.
Israel is running low.
The Gulf states are running low, which is why they're now getting pummeled.
It's a very serious vulnerability.
And President Trump tried to say, We already based on March 9th, as I showed you, he tried to say, We basically have took out their missile capability.
They basically have nothing left.
There's no, they can't even communicate with each other.
They're out of missiles.
They just have a scattering of drones and missiles.
And yet, over the past three days, the barrage of missiles to Israel, to the Gulf states, has been not only larger in number, but far more effective because more and more missiles are penetrating air defense systems.
On top of that, the nuclear facility in Iran was attacked and potentially injured today.
Thus far, the IEA says there's no detection of radiation, but when you start bombing nuclear facilities with enrichment and radio enrichment, where there's active enrichment taking place, you get a Chernobyl-like incident from that.
And what the Iranians are doing is they're retaliating in kind.
The Israelis attacked their oil refinery, did it again.
And so Israel attacked, so Iran attacked Qatar's natural gas facility.
They bombed the oil facility, a refinery in Bahrain too, showing that they're plenty capable.
They have lots of capability and lots of missiles left, lots of drones left.
And that's why this missile attack on Dimona, although they didn't appear to hit the nuclear facility itself, they came very close.
They hit the town right outside of which the facility sits, is obviously a warning saying we can hit your nuclear facilities too.
When you're talking about this level of escalation, you are already in a very dangerous escalatory ladder.
And the idea that Iran is somehow running out of weapons, that we have obliterated all of Iran, there's nobody left, there's nothing else hit to hit all things that President Trump has said is obviously false.
Very, very false.
Iran is choking off the straight of war moves as we speak, causing a skyrocketing of energy prices.
This is all going to be cyclical.
In fact, the United States is so desperate about rising energy prices that we already lifted sanctions on Russia.
Remember, we still have that other war that's on in its fourth year that we've been very active in in funding and financing and arming in Ukraine.
Russia has been a very significant short-term beneficiary of rising oil prices, but also the easing of sanctions because we need Russian oil on the market.
And then yesterday, Scott Benson, the Secretary of the Treasury, announced that we're lifting sanctions on Iranian oil.
This has been one of the amazing things.
Iranians have cut off the straight of our moves, not allowing the passage of ship through unless there are favored countries that they want to reward, and including China.
But Iran is using the straight at will.
Iranian oil is getting out all over the place.
And the United States is letting it because the United States wants Iranian oil on the market.
And so yesterday, while we're supposedly cutting off and choking off the regime and destroying Iran, the Secretary of the Treasury announced a lifting of sanctions for Iranian oil already at sea.
And of course, the claim is, oh, we're going to do what we can to prevent them from getting the money, but of course they're going to get the money.
If they can sell their oil, they're going to get the money.
Otherwise, why would they be selling it?
This war is a shit show.
It is a complete mess.
And exactly the way that if you lived through the other American wars up until this one, you would have known what happened.
But between people who are just swept up in war fever, combined with a bunch of Trump supporters who believe, oh, it's different because it's Trump and he's going to do this.
You had enough people willing to support the war.
And I should say, obviously, polls have pretty much uniformly shown that a majority of Americans are opposed to this war.
But it doesn't matter.
You don't need a majority of American support, especially if you do it the way Trump did it by just doing it.
No public campaign, no public debate, no congressional vote, none of the things the Constitution requires.
You just do it.
As long as you can have the majority of people opposing it, but if they're not out in the streets protesting, even when American men and women are coming back in caskets, which is happening, the government doesn't really care.
We're going to keep doing this war for as long as they can.
The war is not going in any way like we were told it was going to go.
And it was so obvious that would happen.
Iran is a serious country.
It's three and a half times bigger in population than Iraq was at the time that we invaded Iraq.
And we were told we would win that war so easily.
Iran is a much more serious country, a much more formidable country.
The United States has also, along with Israel, sent a message to the world, a very obvious message to the world.
If you are a rational leader, you're going to want nuclear weapons because that's the only way you can ensure that the United States won't attack you at will.
We're not going to attack North Korea, no matter how crazy they are, no matter how oppressive they are, while we pretend we care about Iranian Russian.
What North Korea does is a zillion times worse on all levels, but we will never attack them because they have nuclear weapons.
That's the only way that you could be safe from United States aggression and Israeli aggression is if you have nuclear weapons, which is why Iran would be well advised to get them.
That's the world we've created.
But at the very least, you want a very significant ballistic missile capability, a conventional weapons capability, because you need to be able to be prepared to fight the United States and Israel if they attack you, which they will if the whim arises.
These are the aggressor states in the world.
That's the reality.
Pete Hegset actually had the audacity to criticize Iranian leaders for wasting their money, not on their people and on their society and their educational system and their healthcare, but on their military.
What?
That's the United States.
The middle class is disappearing in the United States.
People don't have anywhere near the opportunities that their parents had.
They can't go to college.
They can't buy a house.
They can't start a family.
Even up until the 30 years old, they have no chance of that.
Their retirement is grim.
And we just keep pouring.
No matter how many times we vote for the candidates like Trump, who says, I'm going to keep us out of foreign wars and all the draining of our resources that entail, we just keep having these foreign wars over and over that go enrich the same people, Palantir and Boeing and General Dynamics and all these intelligence companies.
We're the ones who spend more than the next 15 countries combined on our military.
Trump came into office saying he wanted to cut the military.
Then he said, no, actually, I'm going to raise it the first ever trillion dollar year budget, which he did.
Now he's saying he wants to raise it to a trillion and a half.
When the whole point of the Trump movement was supposedly we're going to tend to the forgotten men and women, the working class, the people who have been living in towns that have been de-industrialized and overrun with addiction and societal decay and no jobs.
That was what the Trump administration was supposed to be about.
Instead, there's now a $200 billion appropriations request from the White House to Congress just to pay for this very first part of the war.
And then Pete Hexas goes and says Iran is the country that foolishly spends its money, not on its people, but on its military.
How can Iran not?
They're living in a region with a maniacal, nuclear-armed, extremist, increasingly religiously apocalyptic cult that runs the government, which is Israel, even though we're told it's Iran.
It's Israel along with their military servants, the United States.
Why would you not?
You couldn't survive if you don't spend a huge amount on your military.
And Iran has.
And they didn't just spend.
Iran is a very is a country with a lot of intellectual talent, a lot of scientists.
It's a Persian culture and civilization has been around for thousands of years.
It's an extremely impressive civilization.
These are not dumb people.
They understand the threats they've been living under, and they've obviously prepared for them quite well.
Not saying they're going to defeat the U.S. military or Israel.
I'm sure the United States could destroy Iran with a nuclear weapon, a battlefield nuke, some other just like insane carpet bombing where we just eradicate the very people we were told we were going to liberate and save.
And some people actually believe that, the denses among us.
I don't doubt that we could just destroy Iran.
I'm not suggesting that otherwise, but they clearly have a lot of strategies to impose a great deal of pain on Israel, on the Gulf states, on the global economy, on the oil trade, on commercial shipping, and on the United States.
And they're doing that.
And this is not an easy war for us to extricate ourselves from.
Trump has very few good options here.
He can commit himself to the kind of protracted, prolonged war that his entire political existence has been devoted to vowing he never would get involved in the Middle East.
Or he could just stop and pretend that he won, even though he won nothing and everyone will see he won nothing.
He insisted Iran will have to unconditionally surrender.
That's the only outcome of the war that he'll accept.
They're obviously not going to do that.
And Trump can decide he wants to end the war.
That doesn't mean the war ends because Iran also has to decide that they want to end the war.
And it's not at all clear the Iranians want, again, they believe they're winning and they want to extract benefits and protections because they don't want to stop the war only to be back in this position six months later.
The smartest people I know after the 12-day war, when President Trump said we obliterated the Iranian nuclear program, completely and totally obliterated on the White House website, there's still a document saying that.
He said that anyone who questions that is disrespecting and degrading the troops that the pilots that bombed the nuclear facilities, that it was fake news.
But people were saying, why aren't we in six to nine months just going to be back to attacking Iran?
And the smartest people I knew said, told me, like, that is absolutely what's going to happen.
The Israelis are just replenishing.
They had to stop.
They needed replenishing.
Their troops and military are exhausted from Gaza, from Lebanon.
The reserves have been called up over and over.
They've been put through hell in Gaza.
And obviously, more importantly, brought hell to Gaza.
Exhausted Troops and Replenishing Forces00:08:13
But unless you're a complete psychopath, which of course a lot of the people in IDF are, but not all, you're very traumatized when that happens.
All kinds of people came back from Vietnam, completely psychologically damaged for good reason because of what they saw.
The Israeli soldiers are exhausted.
Their military is exhausted.
They're fighting multiple fronts, including Hezbollah and Lebanon and missiles and rockets coming from there as well.
And there's no guarantee at all that Iran will stop or want to stop.
And if I were them, I wouldn't either, unless you're really forced to.
Because if you stop, you're just going to get attacked again.
The Israelis and Americans have already proven that.
But this isn't like the 12-day war.
We opened a much bigger can of arms here.
This is a full-scale war.
The very first day we killed Iran's spiritual leader, the spiritual leader of their revolution.
Since then, we've killed some of their most beloved leaders.
On the very first day, we vaporized 170 Iranian schoolgirls by blowing up an elementary school, lying about it, and finally admitting it.
The Iranians poisoned the air into Iran by burning and blowing up an oil refinery.
Think people in that country want to just stop, be like, oh, yeah, let's make peace.
These are proud people.
These are people who are just like if the United States were invaded and bombed, you would hope Americans would get off their couch and want to go defend their culture and civilization.
I'm not sure they would, but you would hope they would.
The Iranians definitely will.
There's no doubt about that.
They're proving that.
And anyone who's trying to tell you that, oh, we're destroying them, we're winning them because we're killing their leaders and we're bombing the shit out of them.
We are killing their leaders.
We are bombing the shit out of Iran.
Tons of Iranians are dying.
No doubt about that.
And they'll continue to die.
Just like happened in Iraq, just like happened in Vietnam.
It doesn't remotely guarantee that the United States is winning this war.
Winning was never even defined clearly.
That was one of the major problems of this war.
It was just started without any clear, clearly defined objective.
They tried the problem.
It was very much like Venezuela.
We were told, oh, it's all about the drug boats.
We're going to Venezuela because we're going to stop the drug trade and because we want to take out this repressive government.
And then all we do is go and snatch the president.
The drug trade obviously isn't stopped.
Anyone believe that it is or impeded?
The drug trade never really mostly came from Venezuela anyway, certainly not fentanyl.
But all the entire government is still in place.
There was no liberation.
And so this war was all about the protesters and we want to go liberate the Iranian people.
We don't care about the Saudi protesters who are gunned down or the Egyptians or the Emiratis or the Ugandans or Rwanda.
We don't care about the gay people or the women in any of the countries.
For some reason, we just care so deeply about the Iranian women and their ability to wear their hair the way they want.
This war has nothing to do with that, obviously.
We're killing Iranian women and girls.
We're not liberating them.
And liberating them would take a massive, sustained ground war.
If by liberation, you mean changing the government, putting another government in place, bringing stability, democracy, election, whatever.
That's nation building.
And if we don't do that, obviously we haven't accomplished that.
What have we accomplished?
Does any American actually think they're safer as a result of this war?
Americans are less safe.
Remember that terrorist attack in Austin, Texas that started right at the beginning of the war?
Remember how that just disappeared from the headlines?
Three Americans were killed.
Another 13 severely wounded by were wounded, some of them really, by someone going and gunning down indiscriminately a bar in Austin, in the middle of Austin.
And we never heard really the conclusion of that investigation, but the perpetrator of that violence was wearing clothing that suggested he was acting in retaliation for the attack on Iran.
That blowback is infinitely more dangerous to the United States than the Iranian regime ever was to Americans living in the United States.
This is a war that has made Americans more dangerous.
It's a war that Israel and the United States are in danger because of.
And I'm not in any way suggesting my concern is Israel or their welfare, just observing that they're paying a big price.
And if this war goes on, we'll continue to pay a big price.
Clearly, Iran has the ability to use very serious missiles and cluster munitions to bring serious pain and harm to Israeli life and Israeli cities and Israeli civilians.
And so does Hezbollah.
And American interests throughout the region are in danger.
Our economy is in danger.
If we send more troops, they're going to be more endangered.
This is exactly the kind of war that is very similar to the other wars.
And a lot of people, myself included, did as much as we could to try and say, this is what's going to happen.
This is going to happen.
This is exactly what happens with every one of these wars.
You're being lied to.
You're being manipulated.
You're being propagandized.
You're being deceived.
And I'm not someone who works in U.S. intelligence.
I don't know exactly or didn't know exactly the Iranian capability.
But my strong guess was, and people I who do know, I've talked to, have told me that, of course, the Iranians spent the last nine months, eight months, preparing for another war.
Why wouldn't they?
You think they're dumb?
They were told that Trump wanted to negotiate with them.
Trump was saying publicly up until 48 hours before the attack by Israel.
I think we're about to reach a deal.
We're very close.
The negotiations are going great.
And then suddenly they weren't and we attacked.
And there were a lot of people, including the Iranians, who thought that was a ruse.
The Iranians don't trust Trump at all.
He can say, oh, we're winding it up.
In the meantime, there are thousands of Marines headed toward that region.
That suggests the high possibility, if not the probability, of some kind of ground operation.
And the Iranians are very prepared for it.
And even if they lose at the end of the day, they're going to afflict a great amount of harm on Israel, on Israelis, on Americans, on the United States, on the global economy, on the Saudis, on the Qataris, on the Emiratis, the Bahrain, on Bahrain, entire gulf region this is a incredibly destructive war it's a stupid war It's a immoral war.
It's a disgusting war.
It's a war based on lies, based on propaganda, justified by the same people and government and media that have been selling American wars based on lies for the last two and a half decades who belong far more in prison than they do in TV studios.
And who knows where it's going to end?
Talking about bombs in the very places where nuclear reactors exist and missiles.
And here is, you know, and you can believe it or not, could be propaganda, as is true for any statement.
But here's the speaker of Iran's parliament who said this today, quote, if the Israeli regime fails to intercept the missiles in the highly protected Demona area, it is operationally a sign of entering a new phase of the battle.
Israel's skies are defenseless.
As a result, it seems the time has come to implement the next pre-designed plan.
Happy New Rus to the Iranian nation.
Now, you could say he's a government official from Iran.
Could be propaganda.
Could just be bluster.
Could be.
Could not be.
I think the Iranians have earned some credibility that this isn't just all bluster, that they have serious military capabilities, serious strategic retaliatory plans to understand the vulnerabilities.
They're not looking to fight the United States in a major air war or a naval, traditional naval war.
They're looking to use guerrilla tactics of the kind the Iraqi resistance.
And they also know that air defenses are thin and thinning by the day.
And clearly they have a lot more missile launchers and missiles than we were led to believe.
They put a lot of them underground in hardened places that are difficult to bomb.
Again, these are smart people.
These aren't idiots.
And every single war, we're told, don't worry, it's going to be easy.
We're going to crush them.
We're going to win.
We're going to win in a short period of time.
And every time it turns out that's not the case, and for some reason, everyone is willing to believe, oh, this time it's going to be different.
Venezuela was different only because of how limited it was.
If we had actually tried to go into Venezuela and remove the entire government and stall Maria Machado and that crowd, there would have been a huge resistance by an extremely armed-trained prepared population waiting for us there.
Not saying the United States wouldn't have won, but it would have been an extremely protracted and bloody conflict.
But Trump chose not to do it there.
Here, he did it because, as Marco Rubio and Mike Johnson and Tom Cotton and Trump himself have all said, they had no choice because Israel said they're going to do it.
And we had to go do it in order to protect our assets there.
He did it because the Israeli lobby insisted.
At the end of the day, it's Trump's decision and he bears the responsibility for it.
And there's been several American presidents, including LBJ and George W. Bush, whose presidencies and legacies were absolutely destroyed by wars of this kind.
Trump seemed to have recognized that, constantly said he understood that for that reason, would never get involved in one.
Trump Bears Responsibility for the War00:01:12
And yet here we are.
So we'll see what happens.
I'm not claiming I can predict the future.
I'm only seeing the present.
The present does not look good at all from an Israeli or American perspective, nor from a perspective of people who believed and who claimed this war would be over quickly, that we would win easily.
None of that's happening.
And the dangers are escalating and there's a lot more escalatory potential as well.
And I think anyone who cares about the United States, cares about Americans, cares about the safety of the world, only has one option, and that's to do everything possible to agitate for and demand an end to this war as quickly as possible.
Obviously, we'll continue to follow all this in every platform.
I've been writing articles about it on Substack.
If you want to go and read those, you can go read those there.
We'll continue to follow it through the kind of video content we do on YouTube and on Substack as well.
I don't really know that there's very many important things that compete with this war, given its dangers than this topic.
So it's certainly something that will be the primary, if not exclusive, focus of our journalism and our work for a while.
Wish I had better news, but to me, it is quite grim.
That's what often happens in wars.
It's a reason not to go start them unless you absolutely