Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein analyze Iran's April 14th missile strike on Israel, debating whether it signals wider war or calculated "war theater" driven by decades of U.S. interventionism. They critique Benjamin Netanyahu's "Clean Break" memo strategy, which prioritized regime change over peace, and argue that current unconditional American support contradicts national interests despite President Biden's calls for restraint. Ultimately, the hosts contend that destabilizing the Middle East for political gain harms U.S. security, urging a shift from blind allegiance to strategic realism. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Stand Up New York00:06:22
Fill her up.
You are listening to the cast.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
We're back home from Portland.
What a fun time we had out there, huh, buddy?
That was so cool.
Doing a theater, that was really a lot of fun.
It was a cool, a cool thing, man.
Really cool.
It was, as we've talked about before, this was the first time we've ever done a theater show together.
It's my first time ever headlining a theater show together.
And it was really cool.
It was cool to be in front of a thank you to everyone in Portland for selling it out for us and all of that.
And yeah, it turns out there's some normal people out in Portland.
They are largely outnumbered.
That's for sure.
But it was, I will tell you, buddy, it was a cool thing.
Like I was, I came down.
There's like a green room upstairs, but I came down to watch like side stage for like part of your set.
And it was really cool.
Like I, I literally, me and you have known each other for a long time.
And I, you know, I met you during doing stand-up, whatever it was.
It's over a decade ago at this point.
Yeah.
It's, cause I remember I, for whatever reasons, my reference in times, I did New Faces at Just for Laughs in 2013.
And I knew you before I got new faces.
I remember like we were friends when I got it.
You know what I mean?
And so I met you when you were a brand new comic.
I mean, I cannot stress this to everyone listening enough.
Rob was at the absolute bottom.
The absolute bottom.
What I bet him.
And it's just, and I don't know, it's kind of like we became friends pretty quickly.
So anyway, I cannot stress how much Rob was at the absolute bottom.
And no, but you know, when you're a new comic, there's, I mean, first off, me and you got along, but there's some, like, I remember even then, I could like, I could see something in you.
Like, I was like, oh, Rob's like a funny guy.
He's got like funny ideas on stage.
He's still brand new and trying to figure it out.
But I was like, oh, Rob's like got a thing about him.
And then we just became friends and like drinking buddies and shit.
And I just knew you were like a very funny person.
So you always, you always kind of believe like funny human beings.
If they're trying stand-up comedy, you're like, well, you'll, you'll figure out how to be funny because you're already a funny person.
But anyway, the point that I was more just making is just that you fucking had a rough set.
There's no, just, it was just, it was cool to sit there and I'm watching Rob just murder this like packed theater.
And I don't know.
It was just, it was a very cool moment.
Like there's just, it's, it's a cool thing to watch people come up like that, and especially somebody you love who deserves it, who's like, you know, a very funny comic.
It was just very cool.
And then, and then, you know, I had to go up there and show you, show you what's up.
I do love that, though.
I love that feeling of like when like when you're just murdering.
And then I'm like, all right, I better bring my A stuff tonight because I got to keep this going.
But anyway, it was a great show.
A lot of fun.
Really, thank you to everybody who came at it.
It was a real, really cool one.
And it was enough to make us risk our lives again next year and go back to Portland.
We'll do it.
We'll do it for you, fine people.
And of course, next up is St. Louis.
And we love the funny bone out there.
It was such a great time last year.
So very much looking forward to that.
And then, of course, I also should let everybody know.
Well, let me pull up my website so I don't miss anything that I'm supposed to be talking about.
But yeah, we got St. Louis right after that, the following weekend, Tacoma and Spoken, Washington.
Then we got the next week, one night only at New York Comedy Club in Stanford, Connecticut.
A little bit of a misleading name of that comedy club, but it's great guys.
Love the guys who run that who run that club.
It's the one they own New York Comedy Club in New York, and then they also opened up a club in Stanford, Connecticut.
Empire at this point.
It's crazy.
Yeah, that's right.
I heard that they just bought Stand Up New York.
Is that true?
That's what I heard.
That's the rumor.
Maybe that's them.
Maybe that's not out in the world yet.
I was glad I couldn't ruin that announcement for the club I don't work in.
Well, I'm real out of the loop on what's going on at Stand-Up New York.
I would love if those guys bought it, though.
That was like my first home club.
I love that club.
I have a lot of positive memories about that club because it was really where I cut my chops.
And then listen, May 25th, I will be speaking at the Libertarian Party National Convention.
The Thursday, which I believe the 23rd, I will, I will, me and Rob will be doing a stand-up show and a live part of the problem podcast.
That ticket length will be up tomorrow on the website, I'm told.
It's not quite up yet.
But then we got Atlantic City, Las Vegas.
I'll be back at the Comedy Mothership in Austin, Texas.
Zane's in Nashville, Tennessee.
A whole lot of fun stuff coming up.
ComicDaveSmith.com for all the ticket links.
And of course, RobbieTheFire.com for all of his stuff, gearing up for summer porch season.
And Run Your Mouth is Rob's other podcast.
So make sure to check that out.
All right.
Releasing a ton of dates probably at the end of this week.
Porch tour is nearly complete.
Still looking for porches in Philly and Atlanta.
If you got a porch out there, hit me up.
Rob'snewsroom at gmail.com.
Going to be an epic porch tour.
All right.
Sounds good.
Sounds good.
All right.
Iran Invasion Perspective00:07:13
So obviously the big news that's going on right now, which is a developing situation, it's April 14th, the evening of April 14th as we're recording this.
So there might be some more to it by the time you're listening.
But of course, we'll continue talking about this stuff, I'm sure, as it continues.
But the big story is that last night, Iran directed an air attack against Israel.
They sent a barrage of missiles and drones into Israel.
As of right now, it seems that there were no nobody was killed.
There's a discrepancy between what Iran is claiming and what Israel is claiming.
Iran's claiming that they did damage to some military targets.
Israel's basically claiming that they didn't.
So, you know, obviously both two governments who are incentivized to say both of those things.
I would, in this instance, I do kind of lean toward believing Israel more than Iran, but you never know.
Always take governments with a grain of salt because they lie.
All right.
So obviously, this is a big development.
This is what like I've been talking about basically since October 7th is probably the greatest concern is this spreading to a wider war.
There's obviously a lot of people, a lot of very powerful people in Israel and in the United States of America who want a war with Iran and have been very vocal about that.
I don't think I'm overstating that case.
This has been the case.
I do think it's kind of necessary to at least give a little bit of background information on the dynamics here.
And I think it's important to like understand how to view these things.
So just to start, let me just say that Iran has, if you even slightly try to think about this from Iran's perspective, which is, I know a lot of people have an allergy to doing.
And as soon as you start saying things like this, there are people out there who go, ah, you're on Iran's side or something like that, as if that's the case, which is, you know, it's a pretty ridiculous thing, but this is whenever we talk about any of these conflicts,
I'm somehow labeled a Putin apologist who's pro-Hamas and I guess pro-Iran too, whatever, which, you know, I mean, me and you, we are a couple of Jews who preach liberty.
And so we're, I think, by definition, not fans of the Iranian government.
Let's just say that.
They're not big on Jews and liberty in Iran.
Or at least their government certainly isn't.
But I do think to understand these things, it's always worthwhile to put yourself in their shoes.
And so from the Iranian perspective, you have to understand that after 9-11, George W. Bush labeled Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the, what did he call it, the axis of evil.
And there were loud calls throughout the entire George W. Bush administration for war with Iran.
And in fact, Dick Cheney tried to get it done, but it was too late in the George W. Bush administration and all of his advice had been so disastrous so far that nobody was listening to him anymore at that point.
But we did invade two of their neighbors.
Like if you could picture Iran on a map and then think about where Iraq and Afghanistan are, these are both countries that are touching Iran.
And so we invaded both of those countries and just totally wrecked the place.
And that is however you feel about who the good guys and who the bad guys are here, that's the perspective that Iran was coming from, that, oh, these guys are talking about invading us and they just did it to both of our neighbors.
It's very difficult for Americans to truly appreciate that perspective, right?
Like if you were in a situation where some country that was much more powerful than us was blaming us for an attack that we had nothing to do with, or at least putting us on this list of evil countries right after, you know, imagine there was some attack.
None of us had anything to do with it.
And they said, Mexico, the United States of America, and Canada are these three evil countries.
And then they went and invaded Mexico and Canada.
And we're just sitting here like, whoa.
So that more or less is the position that Iran is in or has been in.
And I think it's reasonable to say that they've been signaling for quite a while that they do not want it.
Like, we do not want this war.
We do not want America to invade us.
Of course, Iran could do a lot of damage to a lot of our military in the region, but we could do a lot more damage to them.
And so anyway, I think that's worth pointing out.
I think it's also worth pointing out that during this entire time since the George W. Bush called, put them on that list, and since we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and fought wars there for two decades, Benjamin Netanyahu has been lobbying for the U.S. to go to war with Iran,
constantly lying about how many years away from having a nuclear weapon they are.
In some cases, explicitly calling for the U.S. to preemptively attack Iran.
And I'm not saying that that's the entirety of the story.
It is certainly true that Iran is allied with the Shiite groups that are hostile to Israel.
They certainly are allied with Hezbollah and to some degree, Hamas as well.
The Babel Problem00:02:39
But this is what's going on here.
And Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government not only have been trying to push the American regime, which has many war hawks who very openly want war with Iran.
A few of them were calling for bombing Iran right after October 7th.
Just we should do it now, you know?
And Israel is trying to use its, let's say, not insignificant influence on America to push us in that direction.
At the same time, Israel regularly bombs with impunity their allies, their allies next door in Syria.
This is just a regular occurrence that Israel bombs Syria.
They also have done things like murder Iranian scientists and stuff like that.
So there's a lot of tensions, let's say, kind of in the background of all of this.
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Escalating War Theater00:12:32
And of course, a week ago, Israel bombed some Iranians in Syria and killed a few of them.
And so this attack was a response to that.
So I just think that that much is important to put in the backdrop because it seems that on almost every, you know, again, not every, because there's a lot of good platforms on the internet, but almost every corporate media outlet and so much of the kind of so much of the response on social media and stuff leaves out all of this.
And I mean, even leaves out the fact that this was a response to an Israeli strike against Iranians in Syria last week.
Like I've seen so many people on Twitter talking about this and it's almost presented as if like, oh, Iran's just crazy and they just did this crazy thing.
That's not exactly right.
So anyway, just wanted to start with that.
Any thoughts that you want to add about your take on this situation, Rob?
Well, I would clarify they bombed an embassy in Syria, which is typically against international law and will lead me to my next point, which is for some reason the leaders get to spend time on base in some giant game of tag.
And now after they bombed that embassy in Iran, Iran became it.
And what we just witnessed thus far, and I'm not saying it can't escalate, but it was war theater.
We watched coordinated war theater where seemingly Iran, I don't know why we can't get along with Iran, but somebody's able to have conversations with them of what kind of strike they're allowed to do that won't actually escalate so that they can pretend like they did something and Israel can pretend like they're defending against something.
But it seemed to me, people text me yesterday, World War III is about to pop off.
I was like, believe me, nothing's going to happen.
And to my eyes, we watched a nice fireworks show of coordinated war theater of Iran looking to figure out how can we respond in a way that you guys are comfortable with and won't escalate.
And so they got permission.
I can't say specifically, but seemingly permission for this specific attack, which was basically negligible.
Yeah.
Well, look, I mean, I think there's something that's important to understand about governments or gangs, but I repeat myself.
But that one of the core foundations to their own survival is at least an illusion of protection.
That this is essentially why people submit to governments or submit to gangs is because they're like, well, we'll protect you.
You know what I mean?
This is why people join gangs in prison because like the idea is like, oh, well, I'm stronger if I got these guys around me.
And maybe I got to give up some of my stuff to them, but that's better than me getting killed or whatever.
And the truth is that, look, this is, it's part of the reason why Israel is responding the way it is to October 7th.
It's part of the reason why Hamas is responding the way they are to the occupation or the blockade.
It's because it's like their role is to at least tell their own people that we're going to fight on your behalf.
We're going to do something.
I'm not just going to let you get pushed around.
And if you don't, you feel like you're at risk of losing legitimacy with your own people.
And so I think the situation with Iran, which again, it's very similar to their response when Salmani was assassinated.
where if you remember they sent some missiles at an American base in Iraq and nobody was killed.
You know what I mean?
And like it was one of those things where it was like, it could kind of be enough where they were like, look, we responded, but not enough to provoke, you know what I mean, a major counter response.
And it seems like that.
They gave warning.
It seems like they were basically like letting primarily, I think, America know that we like, okay, we got to do a thing, but we're not really doing the thing here.
That's what it seems like to me.
Now, I will say, and I give Donald Trump credit for this.
And obviously I think that it was a very dangerous move and a terrible decision to take out Salmani.
But because, you know, like say Iran didn't handle it that way and did kill some U.S. soldiers.
Well, now we could have, you know, he could have walked us into another disastrous war.
But I will give him credit that at that point, he went, fine.
We'll take it.
You sent your little missile.
You feel better about yourself now.
None of our guys were killed.
That's it.
No more retaliation.
That does, that also seems to be the attitude of Joe Biden after this, these rockets and drones were fired into Israel.
Sorry, go ahead.
It almost seems that Netanyahu would love a war and that there's war hawks over here that would love one.
And I think some of these people see this being the end of Joe Biden's run and maybe their last opportunity to even have this war.
But I think Joe Biden and whoever he had at the CIA and their fraction basically said, this is the strike that you guys can do and we're not going to escalate.
And Iran even afterwards said, we see this matter as being concluded.
And now it's a function of whether or not Israel decides to strike again and ramp it up even more.
Well, Israel has announced that they are going to, which is not a great sign.
According, at least according to Axios, they had a piece about this.
According to them, Joe Biden got on the phone with Netanyahu and urged him not to respond to this.
It was basically like, like, you got to win.
Take the win.
Stop.
And then they came out and announced that they will be responding to this.
Again, just kind of like a flagrant giving the finger to the U.S. government that somehow, and look, like, I'm fine.
Like, I'm a pure non-interventionist.
I'm okay with saying if somebody says like, well, we can't tell the Israeli government what to do.
That's their business if they want to respond to this attack or whatever.
It's like, okay, but then you don't get our money and our weapons.
I think that's a reasonable position that if we're, if, if it's our job to fund your wars, then we do get a little bit of a say in it, right?
Like just in the same way that like if If you had a bum friend of yours who was asking you to, you know, lend him money every month, and then you come over and you find out that he's just like smoking weed and eating junk food, like you have a right to be like, if you're like, what are you doing?
You're just wasting all this money that I'm giving you.
And if he was like, I'm an adult, you have no right to tell me what I can do.
It's like, well, yeah, okay, that's fair enough.
But I do have a right to say I'm not paying for it anymore.
Right.
So like, I do that that makes sense to me.
Anyway, America also worth noting that the U.S. was also involved in shooting a lot of these drones down.
Because of course we have, you know, soldiers all over the region and in Israel as well.
And so they were involved in helping them.
And it seems to me that like what Joe Biden said, I think is pretty much right.
That's something you don't hear a lot on this show.
But I think what Joe Biden said is pretty much right.
That it's like, look, like Netanyahu, you got to win.
You could just say, look how good our defense system is.
You couldn't even get anything.
I do think, and I've heard a few people with like some military expertise say this, that there was a symbolic win for Iran because they kind of demonstrated that like, look, we have the capability of sending these missiles toward you.
And we could, if we wanted to, send a whole lot more.
You know what I mean?
And so it's kind of like, oh, there is a little something like, don't think we're powerless to like hit you at all.
I don't know enough to know whether that's right or not, but I've heard some people making that argument.
But anyway, it's my, you know, like major takeaway from all of this is kind of, look, what I've been saying since October 7th, basically, that we're in a very dangerous situation for this spreading into a wider war.
I think that I'm blown away by the hubris of the Israeli government that there seems to not even be a concern on their part that they're totally turning world opinion against them with what they're doing in Gaza.
They've now got issues with the Houthis, with Hezbollah, now with Iranian missiles coming in their direction.
The U.S., the big bully who protects them, is telling them not to retaliate.
And they're going, nah, we're going to anyway.
It all just, you know, kind of concludes to like, yeah, this is why the non-interventionists are right on foreign policy.
And this is why we just shouldn't be involved in this.
Because it's just, it does nothing but embolden Israel to do crazier things that they otherwise wouldn't be able to get away with.
And it discourages them from even at this point listening to us.
And it's like, why?
Why would we be playing with this type of fire?
What benefit is there to our nation to do this?
I don't know.
Any thoughts on any of that, Rob?
You want to jump in on?
Go ahead.
No, I agree 100% that they're playing a dangerous game that can escalate.
And that's why these entire things are dumb.
And even for Israel's strategic interest, as they lose American support, I wonder how that plays out for them long term.
But just this specific strike really strikes me like theater.
The way that they were talking about it.
Oh, yes, I agree.
I agree with you.
I agree with you.
The concern is like, what, what's the next move here?
And is this just more theater or is this?
If Israel doesn't want to, otherwise, it just seems so dumb to do a strategic strike that can't actually land a blow or why you wouldn't actually do something more substantial or more sneakily engage in something and pretend like you weren't going to respond.
It just, unless this was just to turn around and go, look, we did something so we can tell our population that we did something and really just trying not to engage.
I don't understand.
I don't understand the actions or any of the conversations that took place before and after.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, one of the things that's very interesting about all of this is that there is the Republican Party has, and obviously I'm not speaking about the establishment of the Republican Party, which is still indistinguishable from the establishment of the Democratic Party, certainly on issues of war, where they're locked up about every single, every single war.
But the voters in the Republican Party, led by their presidential candidate, Donald Trump, have at least rhetorically embraced America first since 2016, when Donald Trump just beat down every neocon in the Republican Party relentlessly and won with super majorities of the voting base.
And this is, it's kind of an interesting test, this whole thing has been, but particularly this chapter right now.
America First Contradictions00:15:05
And I had this like a brief exchange with Will Chamberlain on Twitter a few hours ago.
Me and Will Chamberlain, we debated Israel on Michael Malice's podcast.
And it just kind of got me thinking about some of this stuff, which is like how incredibly like contradictory the idea of being America first and still supporting this policy that we're going down.
But so Will tweeted and he tweeted, you know, he didn't link the studies, but he just he tweeted like pictures of the headlines from the Military Times.
And the title of the article was Iran Killed More U.S. Troops in Iraq than Previously Known Pentagon says.
So again, take it with a grain of salt.
The Pentagon says that Iran killed 603 American soldiers.
They're not great at accounting, though.
Number 10.
That's not what they're known for, Rob.
That is true.
They go, I'm sorry, we were off by a few billion.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Anyway, so Will tweeted, he said, Iran killed 603 American soldiers in Iraq.
You can't be America first and stand with Iran.
To which I responded, if you're America first, you have to oppose troops ever being in Iraq in the first place.
Right.
Because what are our troops doing over there?
If anybody wants to argue with me that our troops in Iraq have helped America, you've got a tough argument on your hands.
To which Will responded.
Isn't that a fake binary?
I can just be indifferent to Iran.
Not only is it a false binary, who is standing with Iran?
I just don't even know.
I could, even if you said like standing with Hamas or something like that, I guess like, well, yeah, I guess there are some lefties out there who will kind of like shout slogans about them being freedom fighters.
But standing with Iran, I don't even know who he's referring to.
But I said, anyway, I said my thing that if you're America first, you got to be against troops being in Iraq to begin with.
And he responded by saying, and I do.
So I said, you have to oppose this.
He said, and I do.
I do oppose this.
And I said, that's good.
Israel sure didn't.
And he responded to me and said, was Israel supposed to be angry about Bush going to war with one of its long-term adversaries?
Or are you hinting that Israel was secretly behind the invasion of Iraq, thus absolving Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz?
And I responded and I said, I don't think there's anything secret about it.
Anyone can read a clean break, which of course the memo written by David Wormser and Richard Pearl to Benjamin Netanyahu, who I've mentioned several times on the show.
I said a major contributing factor to the neocons' desire to remove Saddam was Israeli interests.
And they were openly supportive of the war.
Of course, that doesn't absolve anyone of the response.
Like, it's not like, oh, because Israel was pressuring us to fight this war in Iraq, therefore Bush and Cheney are off the hook for doing it.
Like, no, of course, they still have responsibility for it.
But I said, my point is more that Israel pressures America to take anti-America first positions.
So standing with them and being America first seems not to jive.
And that was kind of the point that I'm trying to get at.
That, look, if America first means that we don't want to be taking care of the rest of the world at our expense, that we don't want to fight wars for the sake of spreading democracy to other regions and protecting other countries that hurt America.
If America first means anything, it means that the priority is what benefits this country.
And if it doesn't benefit this country, then we don't do that because we put America first.
Like the same way I put my kids first.
Like I might help other kids in some situation, but I would never help other kids to the detriment of my children.
Right?
Like that seems to.
So anyway, I just want to Let's play this clip just because it's it is kind of crazy to me that you say something like this and it gets a reaction of like, oh, so you're claiming Israel secretly, you know, like orchestrated the war in Iraq?
Because all I said is, Israel sure didn't oppose us invading Iraq.
And I was like, no, I'm not claiming anything secret.
Let's go to Benjamin Netanyahu in his own words.
You take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.
And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others will say the time of such regimes, of such just bots, is gone.
There is a new age.
Something new is happening.
And then rough speculation on your part, or you have some evidence to that effect.
I was asked the same question in 1986.
I had written a book in which I had said that the way to deal with terrorist regimes, well, with terror, was to deal with the terrorist regimes.
And the way to deal with the terrorist regimes, among other things, was to apply military force against them.
The way we did in Afghanistan.
The way, for example, I want to answer your question.
I guess I'm running out of time, so I quickly was trying to get that.
We've done, I think, what you propose in Afghanistan, yet I haven't seen that sort of neighborhood effect.
Well, I think there's been an enormous effect.
The effect was we were told that there would be a contrary effect.
First of all, people said that there would be tens of thousands of people streaming into Afghanistan, zealots who would be outraged by America's action, and this would produce a counterreaction in the Arab world.
But I think you're not saying that when you take an action like we did in Afghanistan, we're going to see all the other countries just fall.
No, what we saw is something else.
First of all, we saw everybody streaming out of Afghanistan.
The second thing we saw is all the Arab countries and many Muslim countries trying to side with America, trying to make, to be okay with America.
The application of power is the most important thing in winning the war on terrorism.
If I had to say, what are the three principles of winning the war on terror?
It's like, what are the three principles of real estate?
The three L's, location, location, location.
The three principles of winning the war on terror are the three W's.
Winning, winning, and winning.
The more victories you amass, the easier the next victory becomes.
The first victory in Afghanistan makes a second victory in Iraq that much easier.
The second victory in Iraq will make the third victory that much easier too.
But it may change the nature of achieving that victory.
So they just get easier and easier as you fight these wars.
We fucked up.
We didn't go to Iran.
That was the third one.
That was where the payoff was.
That's when it started getting super duper easy.
Yeah.
It was when we get into Iran.
Yeah.
And by the way, later on in this, this was in 2002 when he was testifying before the Congress.
Later on, I couldn't find the video of it, but I promise me I'm right about this.
Trust me, I'm right about this.
I promise.
But when Dennis Kucenich was grilling him, he explicitly said that he, because Dennis Kucenich was like, anyone else you want us to go to war with?
And he was like, yes, Iran.
I want you to preemptively attack Iran.
And he literally said that.
And anyway, all I'm saying is that, look, Will Chamberlain can say that standing with Iran is like, you can't be America first and stand with Iran.
Okay, I mean, fine.
I guess you can make your argument that if they were, you know, killing some of our soldiers in the region, you know, whatever, however exactly the Pentagon interprets that to me, you know, does that just mean like a Shiite killed some of our people?
Does that actually mean Iran coordinated it?
Was it a group that Iran was friendly with?
They use a lot of tricks like this that's not exactly clear.
But okay, I'll say that.
Fine.
You can't stand with Iran and be America first.
How exactly can you stand with Israel and be America first?
How can you stand with a country whose prime minister, the longest serving prime minister in their nation's history, is repeatedly over the years lying to the American politicians and the American people, attempting to get them to do blatantly anti-America first things.
How exactly does that work?
Like, how can you support the guy who's trying to get our country into another disastrous war on the justification that it will like help the region?
This nonsense, this thing, by the way, that turned out to be obviously completely wrong.
And in fact, by any metric, the region was completely destabilized by the removal of Saddam Hussein.
And it did not, it did not put more pressure on Iran to be better or something like that.
It just gave Iran more power and influence in the region.
But how is it that like, it's just, it's wild that there's so many people on the right in this country who will say that they're America first and yet also believe that we must unconditionally support a country who objectively is trying to push us in the exact opposite direction of America first.
Do you get my point on that, Rob?
It's an interesting Richard Nixon clip.
I don't know if you ever saw it where he's talking about Israel and that there's a fatal flaw in politics that some people affiliate that what's in the interest of Israel is in the interest of the American people.
And that for some reason, and he kind of goes on, I think he says like they don't really explain why they have that philosophy, but for some reason, they seem to feel that whatever's best for Israel is also best for America.
Right.
Right.
And it seems to be just as true now 30 years or 40 years, whatever.
I don't know how long Nix ago.
Nixon was 70s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, Nixon, right.
Nixon lost to Jack Kennedy in 1960 and then came back and what was it, 68?
He came back and won the presidency.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that there's, and then there's also almost like one more level of, you know, to that, which is that what Israel's government says is in the best interest of Israel is not necessarily in the best interest of Israel.
You know what I mean?
In the same way that like what our government says is, you know, governments don't act on what's in the best interest of their nation or their people.
They act on what's in the best interest of powerful people.
And those are not always the same thing.
And so I think a lot of these policies are not in the best interest.
I mean, look, there's one of the advantages that Israel has, and this is something that's been true since the very beginning of Zionism and is still true to this day.
It's part of the reason why Benjamin Netanyahu is the prime minister and has been the longest serving prime minister in Israel is that he's like that he's like speaks English very well.
There's a lot of people in Israel who don't speak English very well and have very thick accents.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who doesn't, he went to school in America, I believe, right?
I think he went to MIT.
Could be wrong about that.
Double check me on that.
But he's a, look, this was one of the issues that the Arabs would always have in very like, very in the very beginning of Zionism is that the Zionists were all the early Zionists were all a bunch of Europeans and the Arabs were a bunch of Arabs.
And so when you start, like talking to the international community which, let's get real, all the power was in Europe and America in the beginning of, you know, in the early 20th century, and here would be these Zionists and they'd come talk to I don't know if they were trying to.
You know, at the time England was the, the most powerful government in the world, but there was, there was power in England and France and the United States Of America and all these different nations.
And here you'd have some guy who was European and had a name that you know was like what Christians had read about in their in the Old Testament, you know.
Handling the Mess00:08:48
I mean like they Christians aren't Jews, but that is part of their religion too, you know.
So you have a name like David or Benjamin or whatever it might be that you're coming with, like a name that's somewhat familiar to them.
And then there's like some Arab guy with like 13 consonants in a row and doesn't speak the language and does, and you just naturally, the Zionists always ended up kind of besting the Arabs with the international community, and I think to your point that Richard Nixon was making.
There's something about that too where, you know, to the average American, if you look at Benjamin Netanyahu, he just looks a lot more familiar than any Arab leader does, is his name is Ben, you know what I mean, and he speaks English fluently and like all these things, and that's just not the case with, with um, Arab leaders, and so that's part of the reason, I think,
why people just kind of associate these things together and they're told over and over again that like well uh, Israel is the only democracy in the region and that's what we are right, they're the same thing that we are, and and there is some degree of truth to that, like I do think that like, if you and you've you've been to Israel i've, I have not um, but I think that is, Israel is a first world country,
at least inside of of Israel proper.
You know what I mean.
It's a first world country and you go there, and it's a first world country and it's more similar to a European country or to uh uh, you know America or Canada or something like that, than you would probably find just in like if you just picked a Muslim country and went there, and so there is this natural kind of feeling of like, oh yeah, like we should probably share interests then.
But in this situation I mean when you're talking about like my, my point almost, is that if anybody who's like an America first guy or who's a Donald Trump supporter, if someone stood on stage next to Donald Trump in a primary debate and argued all the stuff that Netanyahu's arguing for, they'd immediately look at them and go ah, you Neocon Rhino, sell out,
you just want America to fight these wars that do nothing but our disasters, but yet, having unconditional support for this guy, somehow you're going to like, you're gonna fit in with being for America first.
It's just look, it's just so obvious that the America first position here ought to be, get our troops out of this region and we're washing our hands of this situation.
And why the hell is it?
When we are broke, we are 34 trillion dollars in debt and we are now flirting with this broader conflict?
I mean, look, I tend to agree with you.
I'm not trying to be an alarmist here, Rob.
I mean, I do think that this was, this was theater.
And I, I gotta believe that Israel is not actually going to be stupid enough to take on Iran right now, like in some major way, like actually start a full-fledged war.
And again, just to be clear, when Netanyahu was testifying there in 2002, we just saw the first words of his of the clip that we just played was, if you take out Saddam, all these great things are going to happen.
And Netanyahu wasn't coming to America and saying, just let us take out Saddam and then let us go attack Iran.
You know what I mean?
Just get out of our way and we'll handle this mess for you.
He's like, no, no, no.
You handle this mess for me.
You guys, you send your boys to go fight and die there.
No, I'm sorry.
Like that is just, that is as anti-America first as anything that George W. Bush or Barack Obama or John McCain or any of them stood for.
So to me, like my, my response to, to Will's point is that I just go like, hey, fine.
If you're going to say, oh, you can't stand with Iran and be America first.
All right, fine, but you can't stand with Israel either.
There's two, the two things are just not compatible.
And that doesn't, you know, like people are so trained at this point to think that if you say something like that, that means you hate Jewish people or that means whatever it is, you're pro-Hamas or something stupid like this.
But that's just not right.
None of that's true.
And I also like, I certainly root, and I'm sure you do too, Rob, and you have more connections to the state of Israel than I do.
But I certainly like, I root for everybody in Israel to like all the like the civilian population, I root for them to all have peace and prosperity and all that.
I don't want to see any innocent people get killed.
But like they got to like, the standard can't be that like we have to unconditionally support Israel.
And then like in the middle of this white hot situation, our president, as embarrassing as he is, he is going to go, all right, just take the win.
Don't retaliate.
And they go, nah, screw you.
We're retiating.
And then you still, as a response to that, somehow we can't muster the political ability to just go, okay, then you don't get our support.
All right, fine, but then we're not propping this whole thing up.
If you won't even listen to us, if you won't even go like when we go, hey, please, like stop killing so many goddamn civilians, wrap this war up.
And they're like, nope, as long as it takes, it takes.
Please don't retaliate to Iran.
Nope, we're, we're going to retaliate.
It's like, all right.
What's the obvious answer there then?
It's like, we, we have no way of setting any type of boundaries on our support.
It just must be unconditional.
No, that doesn't seem right.
I don't know.
Any thoughts, Rob?
Well, I do like the Republicans trying to drum up the, look at how embolden Iran is.
And this is because you sent them the money.
And this is the, you know, the first time direct attacks.
This is escalating, trying to sell it like this one's a Biden failure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, you know, it's, I see all that stuff.
You know, whenever you're in a presidential election year, you can always count on things to just be really dumb.
Right.
You know, so there's just like a whole lot of like, you know, Trump supporters like this would never happen if Donald Trump was president.
And, you know, they say the same thing about Putin, you know, invading Ukraine and stuff like that.
And it's just like, I mean, look, obviously, like there would be different variables.
There'd be a different cabinet.
There'd be a lot of these things, but it's just like it's there.
There is no reason whatsoever to think that October 7th wouldn't have happened if Donald Trump was president.
Like, what?
Hamas.
Love me.
Yeah, like that.
Like, Hamas was going to just like be like, ah, man, we sure would love to execute this plan, but I don't know.
Donald Trump's sitting in the White House, so we can't do this.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
And, you know, as I've mentioned before on the show, both with the war in Ukraine and with October 7th, Donald Trump does not have clean hands.
Breaking the Peace Process00:05:31
And I'm not putting the entirety of it on him.
I mean, obviously there's many, many contributing factors to both of these conflicts.
But look, if you go, if you read the memo, A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, which was the document that I mentioned earlier was the letter written by Richard Pearl and David Wormser to Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
Basically, what they outline in the document was very similar to what ultimately became the Netanyahu doctrine.
And the previous, the previous kind of Israeli doctrine under Yitzhak Rabin was, and look, this is not perfect.
Like this is, this is broad strokes purposes.
There's more details to this if we're going to really get into it.
But basically that we're making good on our promise of one day giving the Palestinians a state.
That was kind of the idea that Yitzhak Rabin had, that we will begin the peace process, as they called it, which was the process of one day allowing the Palestinians to be free.
Now, Israel had made a commitment in 1979 at Camp David that they would give the Palestinians a state.
And in the early 90s, the Oslo Accords were meant to be the beginning of this process.
And then it was about negotiating, you know, like a few key factors and the factors were like borders and different territories and land swaps and the question of the right of return or how many Palestinians could come back to Israel and stuff like that.
But what the neocons wrote to Benjamin Netanyahu was that you basically, that's what the clean break was, that you can break from this.
You have an opportunity now to break from this whole like this idea of like a peace process.
And what you can do is instead, you know, have this strategy of taking out your hostile enemies in neighboring countries.
And one of the ones they mentioned is Saddam Hussein, specifically overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
And that then if you can kind of remake the broader world, because from the very beginning, right, the issue that Israel has felt is not, it's not that the Palestinians have some real like threat against Israel.
It's like, yeah, they deal with the terrorism problem, but it's not like they ever saw that as like an existential threat.
The issue that they always saw as an existential threat is like all the surrounding Arab countries who are on the Palestinian side and don't like that Israel kicked them all out and is occupying them.
And the whole strategy of Netanyahu became ultimately that like, well, I don't have to negotiate with the Palestinians.
Because the Yitzhak Rabin idea, at least, was always that, well, we got to make peace with the Palestinians so that all the neighboring Arab countries don't hate our guts.
And what Benjamin Netanyahu's strategy was, was that we will deal with the neighboring Arab countries through either supporting U.S. regime changes or working out deals where, you know, essentially we bribe them all with U.S. taxpayer money, like the deal they made with Egypt or the Abraham Accords or something like that, right?
And so basically the Netanyahu doctrine was we can make rather than saying we have to make peace with the Palestinians so the surrounding Arab nations don't hate us, we have to make a deal with the surrounding Arab nations so we never have to give the Palestinians a state.
That was the clean break strategy.
That was the Netanyahu doctrine.
And what Donald Trump did when he came in and bragged about the Abraham Accords and how brilliant they all were, he's like, look, I made peace.
I made all these peace deals.
You'll still hear Trump supporters who will say that.
Oh, pretty good, right, Dave?
I mean, you hate war and you made peace.
He made peace with Israel and the Arab countries.
The problem is that there was no war between Israel and these countries.
So it's not a peace deal.
It's not a peace deal if you come in and say, hey, the UAE and Israel just agreed to like be friendly because we bribed them.
It's like, no, what you're doing was you were bribing these countries to sell out the Palestinians.
And on top of that, he also did this thing, which may seem largely symbolic, but believe me, it was heard in the Palestinian world when he moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Because of course, Jerusalem is like disputed territory.
Like part of that was supposed to belong to the Palestinians.
And so when you put the embassy there, it was a sign that like you are never getting this back.
That none of these other countries are coming to help you.
Trump and Mises00:01:46
You're never getting your own state.
What you live in now, if you had any hope for the future of it not being this situation, abandon that.
You have no hope.
And that's a dangerous game to play.
And it absolutely contributed to the current situation.
So yeah, anyway, that stuff with if Trump was here, nothing would be like this.
I don't think that's exactly right.
By the way, I just literally saw on my phone.
Yeah, Hanato Mocano just messaged me.
We're going to set up a podcast.
That's the guy who shouted out Mises on the UFC.
Dude, one of the greatest, I'll just maybe, Brian, do you have that video up here?
He was making the rounds.
People were all you could just pull that up.
One of the greatest.
First off, he, in unbelievable performance, beat the shit out of a really tough dude who's like seven foot 12 and then gave what is the greatest UFC post-fight interview of all time.
Here it is.
Blend the show on this.
I love the Constitution.
I love the First Amendment.
I want to carry a non-fucking guns.
I love it.
Probably property.
Now let me tell you something.
If you care about your fucking country, I'll read Ludovic von Mises and the six lessons of the Austrian Economic School, motherfuckers.
Hanato Moikano, ladies and gentlemen.
Dude, so great.
So great.
Shout out to Hanato.
Excellent performance.
Excellent post-fight interview.
I just love to see it.
Warms my heart.
All right.
That's our episode for today.
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Go check out the Run Your Mouth podcast, and we'll be back soon.