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Feb. 9, 2026 - Judging Freedom - Judge Andrew Napolitano
25:18
Prof. Mohammad Marandi : Iran’s Readiness for Escalation
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Time Text
Persian Gulf Targets 00:10:14
Undeclared wars are commonplace.
Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government.
To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government?
What if Jefferson was right?
What if that government is best which governs least?
What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong?
What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave?
What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
Hi, everyone.
Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom.
Today is Tuesday, February 10th, 2026.
Apologies for the late start.
We have gotten rid of the internet gremlins and are joined today by my dear friend and colleague, Professor Mohamed Mirandi, who, of course, was born in the United States, teaches at the University of Tehran, comes to us now from Moscow.
Mohamed, a pleasure, my dear friend.
Thank you for your persistence this morning and thanks for accommodating my schedule.
Does sure does the government of Iran fully expect the United States and Israel to wage an attack one day soon?
No one really knows, especially since Trump is unpredictable and he flip-flops.
But the expectation in Tehran is that we should prepare for the worst case scenario, and that means war.
So that is what the armed forces has been doing.
The best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war.
And of course, if there is war, the armed forces have to be prepared.
Do the Iranian military people expect boots on the ground or just missiles and drones launched from ships 500 miles off the coast?
Well, if boots on the ground means an invasion, no, because the United States would have to have maybe a million soldiers or close to a million soldiers at least to do such a thing.
And they don't have the funding nor the soldiers to do so, especially since they're overextended across the world.
But maybe they would use, in some instances, special forces.
But for the most part, the expectation is that it will be missiles and bombs.
And the Iranians have said that even if it is a token attack or a limited strike, the Iranians are going to carry out all-out war.
And all-out war means an attack on American military bases in the Middle East and an attack on America's ally slash vassal slate slash master, depending upon how you want to look at it, Israel.
I think actually it would go even beyond that.
The countries or the small entities in the Persian Gulf that host U.S. bases, They are deemed to be fair targets because those US bases, as we speak, continue to be used to work against Iran and to conspire against Iran.
So those entities that host US bases should not expect to get off lightly.
And I think that oil and gas exports from the Persian Gulf region and the Caucasus and West Asia in general will come to an end.
And in addition to that, Ayatollah Khamenei, the leader, said that this will be a regional war.
And that implies that the resistance in Iraq, which is very large, that they will become completely active.
And Yemen, of course, and others will all be involved.
So this will be a very wide-ranging war.
And U.S. allies in the region, Qatar has a population of 350,000.
The Emirates has a passport population holding group of 1.34 million.
They're in no position to add anything to the United States.
So it would be a regional war, but also it would be a war where the Iranian strikes hard.
The Iranians strike hard across the board.
And I should add that Iran's capabilities that are directed towards the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean far outweigh what they have that's directed towards the Israeli regime.
Long-range missiles are used to strike the Israeli regime.
But for the Persian Gulf, Iran has countless underground bases with short-range missiles, medium-range missiles, and drones that are in the hundreds of thousands.
And they can destroy anything in the Persian Gulf and on the other side.
Will the, cognizant of the potentially catastrophic economic effects of this, will the Iranian military close the Straits of Hormuz?
I would imagine that they will do more than that because they can destroy the oil and gas facilities.
They can destroy the ports.
They can destroy the ships in the Persian Gulf and in the Indian Ocean.
And they can close the Strait of Hormuz.
Any one of these is more than enough to end the oil and gas trade.
They can destroy the pipelines, whether in the Caucasus, in Azerbaijan, or across the Arabian Peninsula.
It is not difficult for Iran, especially if their allies are engaged.
For the United States, this would be a war of choice, Judge.
For Iran, this would be a fight for survival.
And for the entire resistance, it would be a fight for survival.
So the United States should expect all-out war on all fronts.
Chris, do we have President Trump being interviewed by the anchor from NBC where they're standing up during the interview?
I'd like you to watch this.
This is just about two days old.
The president struggles a little to answer, but the questions are profound.
Chris, should the Supreme Leader in Iran be worried right now?
I would say he should be very worried.
Yeah, he should be.
As you know, they're negotiating with us.
I know they are, but the protesters have said, you know, where are the Americans?
You promised them we would have their back.
Do we still have their back?
We've had their back.
And look, that country is a mess right now because of us.
We went in, we wiped out their nuclear.
If we didn't take out that nuclear, we wouldn't have peace in the Middle East because the Arab countries could have never done that.
They were very, very afraid of Iran.
They're not afraid of Iran anymore.
Those beautiful B-2 bombers went in and they hit their target, every single bomb, and obliterated it.
And within one month, they were going to have a nuclear weapon.
That was a big threat.
They're not going to have it anymore.
But if we obliterate it, what's the deal about?
I mean, if there's no more, are they trying to restart the nuclear weapons?
Well, we heard that they are.
And if they do, and I let them know, if they do, we're going to send them right back and do their job again.
So you're understanding they tried to restart it, and that's why you're threatening force.
They tried to go back to the site.
They weren't even able to get near it.
There was total obliteration.
But they were thinking about starting a new site in a different part of the country.
We found out about it.
I said, you do that.
We're going to do very bad things to you.
The young man asked some very good questions.
The president really didn't give any direct answers, but some of what he said, I want to ask you about.
He three times used the word obliterated.
I mean, they may have closed the entrances to some underground facilities, but did they really obliterate the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, as the president has boasted many times?
No, I don't think so.
I don't think any serious damage has been done to the essential components of the program.
But the reality is that that program that he bombed or attempted to destroy has always been monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In fact, the intrusive inspections that we have in Iran are unprecedented in the world.
And so every single site is regularly visited.
They have cameras.
They've been closely monitored, especially when Iran was implementing the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was signed in 2015.
So it's obvious that none of those sites could have had anything that was anything but peaceful because the IAA was regularly visiting each and every one of those sites and each and every part of those sites.
President also said something that I don't know if he, how he meant it.
He said that country, meaning Iran, is a mess because of us.
I don't know if he meant this false bravado about obliterating nuclear capabilities or what his Secretary of the Treasury acknowledged, that the U.S. intentionally devalued the Iran currency so as to foment economic unrest.
Mossad And The Iranian Streets 00:03:52
And then Mossad MI6, CIA, came in and tried to pull off a coup.
Did Donald Trump just admit to all that?
I think he sort of implied that.
Really, what the United States government is doing in Iran is similar to what it's been doing to Cuba, and that is strangling ordinary people, the same as they did in Syria, as they did in Venezuela and elsewhere.
They strangle people, they kill people, they kill children, they create a lack of medicine, they destroy jobs, destroy families.
They try to destroy the fabric of different societies to get their way, to make people desperate and then rise up.
What happened in Iran, as the Treasury Secretary of the United States admitted, was that the United States brought down the currency to bring people to the streets.
And then we saw professional rioters and terrorists come to the streets after day three.
And the Mussad admitted that they were on the streets.
Pompeo, both on Channel 13 of Israel, said that the U.S. was supporting them.
And in the tweet, he said that Mussad is on the ground.
And Channel 14 of Israel, which I understand to be close to Netanyahu, said that they, foreign government, brought in weapons that killed hundreds of Iranian police officers and security agents.
This is their own admitting, not admitting, they brag about it.
But Western media, or what I like to call the Epstein-class-owned media, they are completely silent about this.
They pretend that these were just peaceful protesters walking on the streets, being machine gunned by security agents, which is just basically an attempt to make the case for war.
And they went up to all the way up to 80,000 people being killed, which I think was an attempt to sort of minimize what the Israeli regime is doing in Gaza.
After the Iranians declared all the names and gave all the details of each person that was killed, they went down from 80,000 to, I don't know, 5,000, 6,000.
But the reality is that 3,117 people were killed.
Hundreds were police officers, hundreds bystanders that these people killed, and hundreds were the terrorists and the rioters who destroyed hundreds of ambulances and fire engines and burned alive 15 people and hundreds of banks.
And what they did on the 9th, 8th, and 9th of January was quite extraordinary.
But, Judge, tomorrow is the anniversary of the Iran's revolution, and people will be going to the streets.
And I think your viewers should watch some of the live stream that will be coming out of Tehran to see if really Iranian people oppose the Islamic Republic of Iran or they support it.
I think a lot will be visible for all to see tomorrow.
And if people watch, they will see that the Western media is simply fabricating facts in order to justify aggression.
Does the average Iranian understand that the coup in the streets was fomented by Mossad, MI6, and CIA?
And of course, they recognize that it was an abject failure, but do they recognize its origins?
Yes, according to polls.
And by the way, the Americans are carrying out their own polls regularly in Iran from Turkia, from Turkey.
And they know these facts, just as Iranian pollisers know these facts.
That overwhelmingly, Iranians recognize that the rioters, they do not support what the rioters did.
And the foreign hand or the hidden hand is visible for all to see because no one is hiding it.
Mussad, they put out a statement in Persian saying that their people were on the ground.
Iran's 12-Day War Lesson 00:09:03
So it's not as if it's something that the Iranian government claims.
It's something that people like Pompeo, people like Netanyahu, people from the Mossad they're boasting about.
Are the Iranians and the Americans negotiating?
The reason I ask that is because the foreign minister of Iran, in my view, I'm pretty sure in yours, quite properly rejected Secretary of State Rubio's absurd and sovereignty-assaulting demands that Iran should have no nuclear enrichment,
not even for domestic medical and energy purposes, that Iran should have no offensive weapons, even though its arch enemy is not far away, and that Iran should not be able to aid its allies.
I mean, if Iran agreed to any of these, it would be an assault on its own sovereignty.
So, assuming Iran did reject these terms, what are they still negotiating?
Well, you're exactly correct.
The Turkish government and the Qatari government and the Egyptian government put forward a proposal, which I think angered many Iranians, where the Iranians would put limits on their military capability, their alliances, and their peaceful nuclear program.
Iran rejected that.
Iran told the Americans that we either negotiate in Oman and simply about the nuclear program and not to shut it down, but for Iran to give assurances that the nuclear program is peaceful, something like the JCPOA.
But of course, Iran will not accept the JCPOA as it was in 2015 because Iran gave many concessions back then.
And Iran's technology has advanced over the last decade.
And the United States sanctioned Iran, and that's why Iran restarted the program.
So Iran suffered as a result of the U.S. sanctions.
So Iran would expect the new realities of Iran's peaceful nuclear program to be acknowledged.
So if hypothetically there were to be an agreement, which I'm highly doubtful of, it will be simply about assurances and Iran's nuclear program.
But Iran knows quite well that if it lets down its defenses, Trump and Netanyahu will endlessly bomb Iran.
We saw that when al-Qaeda, the U.S.-backed al-Qaeda forces in Syria, took the capital and murdered many of the air defense officers, the Israeli regime went and bombed everything and destroyed all of Syria's air defenses permanently.
And now they reign supreme over the skies of Syria.
So there's not a chance in the world that the Iranians are going to negotiate their offensive or defensive capability, their alliances, or the right to enrich uranium and have a peaceful nuclear program.
Here's an interesting observation from just two days ago by former German Chancellor Scholz about the responsibility of the British and the Americans for the problems in Iran today.
I'd like your thoughts on this.
Chris Cut number eight.
The whole dilemma in Iran arose because the British and American governments overthrew Iran's democratic government and replaced it with the dictator Shah, who was then overthrown by today's rulers, who subsequently established a brutal dictatorship, contrary to what the people had once hoped for.
But if in the beginning the democratic government of Iran had not been overthrown because of oil interests, today it would be a truly wonderful Western country.
Pretty interesting.
I never heard him say that when he was in office.
Well, I think there are a number of things to be said.
One is that if the democratically elected prime minister of Iran was in power today, he would be the former German chancellor would be his enemy and using the same language against Iran against him as he uses against Iran today.
Iran is not a dictatorship judge.
And some of our mutual friends have visited Iran regularly.
We have elections and we have more freedom of speech here than American allies have across this region.
And we're not ruled by the Epstein class.
But what I can say about the German chancellor is that his regime, his regime, gave Saddam Hussein chemical weapons to use against Iranians and Iraqis.
I survived two of those chemical attacks.
He never apologized.
His regime never apologized.
I visited the city of Halabche in Iraq soon after the chemical attack there took place.
6,500 people, according to one estimate, died within minutes in Halabche and two other towns nearby, but mostly in Halabche.
And the German government never apologized.
No Western government apologized.
They supported Saddam.
And then years later, they invaded Iraq, destroyed Iraq in the name of the very same chemical weapons that they gave to him.
So for the German chancellor to speak about Iran, Whether today or in the past, in any demeaning fashion, only reminds me of the crimes that they've committed against Iranians and Iraqis and my own friends and myself.
Is there any question but that the Iraqi people are united behind the government in support of the government against these threats from Israel and the United States?
If you mean the Iranian people, yes, I think that they are.
And of course, yeah, I meant the Iranian people.
Forgive me.
Yes, without a doubt.
And we saw that during the 12-day war, Judge.
The whole problem in the West is they create, just like this former German chancellor, they create this image of Iran that they like to believe in and that we are, we want to be like them.
No, we don't want to be ruled by the Epstein class.
Iran is a country that supports the Palestinian people.
They are the ones who support the genocide.
Iran supports the Cuban people.
They supported strangulation.
Iran supports the Venezuelan people.
They support bombing fishing boats.
And the list goes on.
So the Iranian people, when the Israeli and Americans attacked, they were steadfast.
But the Americans and Israelis and the Europeans were expecting Iran to fall like a house of cards because that Iran that they built and created in their imagination through their own narratives would have collapsed.
But they listened to these so-called Iran experts who've never been to Iran or these Iranians who left Iran decades ago and simply repeat what they know wants to be heard in the West.
And that's why the West constantly conspires against Iran, miscalculates, and fails.
And if the United States chooses to attack Iran, I have no doubt that it will end very badly for the United States.
It will collapse the global economy.
It will collapse the U.S. economy.
And I think I'm sure that it will be the end of the presidency of Donald Trump.
But will these people finally come to the conclusion that we miscalculated on Iran or we misunderstood Iran?
No, because that's just how they've, that's just how they're hardwired, and that's the software that they use.
In June of last year, at the end of the 12-day war, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu begged President Trump to stop bombing Iran so that Iran would stop bombing Israel.
We understand that last month, mid-January, when Trump was preparing to bomb, Prime Minister Netanyahu asked him not to do so for fear of an enormous Iranian attack.
What do you think he's going to ask him tomorrow?
I mean, what's changed?
It's hard to say, Judge, because Netanyahu's calculations are very much bound to his own personal interests and the interests of his wife.
And they're not necessarily, they do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the Israeli regime.
And the same is true with Trump.
Many in Iran actually speculate that maybe the Epstein files that are being gradually viewed by, increasingly viewed by the public, it may cause Trump to attack Iran to create a distraction.
No one really knows what will happen and no one knows what Netanyahu will say.
What I can say, Judge, is that Iran has been working 24 hours a day to prepare itself for another war.
Iran's War Preparedness 00:02:04
And each day that goes by, Iran is going to become stronger than the previous day.
Time is not on the side of the United States or the Israeli regime when it comes to war.
Iran has learned a lot from the 12-day war.
Unlike the American government and the Israeli regime that have been constantly at war testing their weapons, Iran, ever since Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, after that war, Iran has never had a war.
The 12-day war was an enormous learning experience, and the Iranians have been taking advantage of that.
So, in my opinion, if they were saying we've lost contact with you.
Well, it was a great, great interview, Professor, and ended just a few minutes earlier than I had planned to do so.
But thank you very much for your time.
Thank you for your extraordinary insights.
Be well, travel safely, and I hope we see each other again soon.
All the best.
Coming up later today at two o'clock this afternoon, Aaron Mate at three o'clock this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwatkowski at 3:45 this afternoon on all of this.
How close is the war, how prepared, poorly prepared.
Are you back with us, Professor?
Yes, I am, Judge.
Sorry about that.
You were just finishing, and I was, I don't know if you heard me, but I was thanking you very much for your time, as always, and wishing you safe travels and a safe endurance for God knows whatever is going to happen in Iran.
Thank you very much, my dear friend.
I hope to see you again soon.
Thank you, Judge.
It's always a pleasure, always an honor, and I hope we all see better days.
Thank you.
As I was saying, at two this afternoon, Aaron Mate at three this afternoon, Colonel Karen Kwatkowski at 3:45 this afternoon on all of this.
He believes that war is imminent.
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