Listen to Room Go Quiet as Rubio Says the Ugly Truth About Iran
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Previously on the Ruby.
I don't think a lot of people have that lovely tattoo.
Iran has been fried.
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I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a former CIA covert operations officer, Mike Baker, as well as activist and attorney, Elika LeBron.
Mike, Elica, welcome to the show.
Thanks very much, sir.
Thank you.
I thought you guys would be a great duo for today's show.
We're only going to cover the Iran situation today.
Obviously, there's a lot happening in America domestically with everything going on with Minneapolis and Minnesota and ICE and all that.
We've still got the backdrop of the Venezuela stuff, which actually in some sense is connected to Iran.
But I wanted to sort of do a little bit of what I think you guys, what your area of expertise is.
Mike, you on the military side of this and the CIA operations side of what potentially could be coming.
And Elika, you on the human side of what has gone on in Iran over the years.
And you've had a couple of videos that have gone super viral lately.
You've both been on the show before, but maybe I'll give you each just a moment to reintroduce yourselves for audience that don't know you.
So Elika, maybe just a quick 30, 45 seconds on who you are and how you got involved in all of this.
If you could do that, I'll give you a minute.
I got a minute.
No, I'm still trying to figure that out myself because it all seems just so accidental.
So I'm from Iran.
My parents are from Iran.
I was born and raised in London.
I moved to the States to become an attorney.
I live here now as an attorney.
I sort of started speaking up for Iran when these protests and uprisings started to happen a few years ago.
And then since then, I've just sort of become deeply involved in the conversation about the Middle East, especially because of how much distortion there is around the facts, around the context.
And I just think that right now more than ever, people need to understand the Middle East through a non-Western lens, which is often how they're looking at it.
So yeah, that's kind of how I got here.
Yeah, and you've had a couple of videos.
We played one of them earlier in the week that have gone mega viral, just explaining the disconnect between the people of Iran and the ruling party of Iran.
Mike, I know my audience is well familiar with you, but if you want to do a quick Mike Baker bio, we can do that and then we'll dive in.
Sure, I like long walks on the beach and quiet nights at home.
Yeah, I know 20 years.
Do you like cats?
You know what?
I've got young kids and they always bring home strays.
We have three cats currently.
People are making notes now.
But no, about 20 years with the CIA and operations side of things, all of it overseas.
Got out, got a business, CEO of a company called Portman Square Group, which is an intelligence and investigations and due diligence firm.
And of course, host of the President's Daily Brief podcast, which look at me marketing all these things.
Wow, very professional.
All right.
Well, let's dive in.
I thought this video of Marco Rubio from January of last year during a Senate hearing, I thought this would be a nice way to kick us off.
Take a look.
Two points I want to make about Iran, and it's really important.
When we talk about Iran, I'm talking about the radical Shia clerics and not the people.
The people of Iran are people of an ancient civilization, an ancient culture with tremendous pride and advances.
And I don't know who take great pride in their Persian heritage and identity.
And I don't know of any nation on earth in which there is a bigger difference between the people and those who govern them than what exists in Iran.
And that's a fact that needs to be made repeatedly.
In no way is the clerics who run that country representative of the people of that country and of its history and of contributions it's made to humanity.
And it's a point I wish we would continue to make.
All right, Elica, I think you can see that there's a reason that I wanted to start with that clip.
You were nodding along.
Can you explain a little bit more?
Can you dive in a little bit deeper on that?
Because I think the average person who's watching the protests or seeing stuff on CNN, they just simply don't understand the ethnic makeup and obviously the history of the country.
Yeah.
I mean, look, as far as the percentage of people who are against the regime in Iran, it's at a steady 85%.
And we know this because we've had consistent polling throughout the past several decades that reveal that the great majority of the people are against the regime.
And I think the conversation is just such almost an absurd conversation to have because on what planet, on what universe could you ever assume that any people, much less the Iranian people, who are very pro sort of these values of freedom, would be happily subjugated by a terrorist or authoritarian regime.
And this is where the conversation just goes into the territory of absurd propaganda.
I mean, imagine saying that, you know, during Stalin's rule, the majority of Russians were pro-Stalin.
How can you be pro a dictatorship that is massacring you en masse, that is robbing all of your rights, all of your freedoms?
And if you remember, I mean, you don't remember because we weren't alive, but during that time, the same media, the same New York Times reporters were going there and saying that, you know, Stalin was a great guy and there was no famine and none of this stuff was happening and the Russians were huge fans of Stalin.
And we've seen this cycle over and over again.
It is just to be basically assumed that if there is a terrorist organization that is ruling a nation, a dictatorship, an authoritarian regime that robs you of your rights and freedoms, the people of Iran, the people of any such nation are against them.
And I think even the assumption, we've seen a lot of people saying this online now on going on Piers Morgan and all of these shows saying most Iranian people are pro-regime.
You have to have the most bigoted assumption of any people to believe that, that they are so savage, that they are such barbarians that they enjoy being murdered for some type of upholding some type of ideological extremism.
That is the underlying assumption.
So that's all to say that I could sit here going back and forth endlessly about polls, about evidence, about how many people are out in the streets, but to just, it's such an obvious thing to believe that it just doesn't even bear explaining.
Right.
I mean, if nothing else, the complete hypocrisy of the mainstream left has been so exposed during all this where they're suddenly rooting for a fanatical religious group of people who are oppressing women and minorities and et cetera, et cetera.
Mike, can you say that?
Not suddenly.
Not suddenly.
Very outwardly now, particularly with social media, but yes, basically for four decades at least.
Mike, can you talk a little bit about the disconnect?
I think it's hard for people in a Western lens to understand how there can be such a disconnect between the government and the people.
Like, how can they rule such a large landmass with so many people who have such a rich history of Western values?
How is it even possible?
I think people just can't imagine that.
Well, they've got a very, in a way, don't misconstrue the way I use this word, but they've got a very sophisticated and entrenched security apparatus.
And they've developed that over decades.
Look, I've got an old buddy of mine, now deceased, was one of the hostages back when this regime came to power.
And they beat the hell out of him repeatedly during that thing.
But he would, if he was alive still, he would be a very sort of sad individual because of the cycle of what we're watching.
Just right now, the protests feel different or they had felt different.
You know, they were building, they were spreading.
It crossed over a variety of sectors and demographics, population.
And so it was feeling different to people who have watched this ever since 79 when protests have come out and then they've fizzled or they've been crushed by the regime.
This one felt different.
But I got to tell you, I'm a very cynical person because right now I'm feeling like this may just be part of that cycle.
And if the White House, I know I'm going a little off topic here from the question.
No, no, no.
We were going to get there, so it's okay.
If the White House, when they say help is on the way to those protesters, to the dead and to the people who are risking their lives, when you tell them that after years of relatively meaningless support from the international community in the U.S., it means something.
And it gave them courage and strength, I believe anyway, over the past week to continue.
So if that help at the end of the day is nothing more than, well, we put diplomatic pressure on them.
We told them to stop the killings.
They've told us they pretty much stopped the killings and they're not going to do any public executions.
So yeah, there we are.
Well, we're back to business as usual then.
And that sad cycle just keeps going.
So we will do more on the on the military version of this.
I should note, we're taping this on Thursday afternoon and this will go live at 11 a.m. on Friday.
So anything can happen basically in the next 20 or so hours.
So some of the military moves specifically may change.
But Elica, I want to show you this collage of pictures, which I'm sure you've seen.
I mean, it's really just so illustrative of what's going on there.
These are young Iranian women who are lighting cigarettes with Khomeini's image.
I mean, this literally could get them killed or thrown in jail or God knows what else.
Can you talk a little bit about what it has been like for women living under this oppression?
Well, so you have to realize that the young people in Iran, especially young women, they are the same as young women everywhere.
They have access to TikTok.
They have access to when they can get through.
And these are people who are seeing the standards and way.
Yeah.
These are people who have been seeing the standards and ways of life of liberal democracies across the world.
They see young American girls dancing on TikTok.
They want to dance on TikTok.
They see young kids in the West, you know, making music, living their lives, having fun, and they're not able to even do it.
They can't do any of those things in public.
They can't sing in public.
They can't dance in public.
They can't make TikTok videos.
They can't show themselves without their hair.
They're living in, it's not just that they're living in extreme repression.
They don't even have the ability to normalize their circumstances because they have access to the outside world now.
That is living completely different, right?
This isn't history where you could be so isolated and so insulated from the outside world that you could effectively normalize your conditions and believe that you were fine.
Those days are over.
The Iranian women have been long seeing the way that women live freely out in the world.
And that is what has made them so indignant.
It is what has made them so angry.
And it's what is propelling them to take to the streets because they just want a normal life.
You know, this isn't just about, you know, sure, there's the political prisoners, there's the executions, there's the fact that this Iran right now has the highest executions per capita, more than North Korea.
China, obviously, we don't really know those numbers.
But that aside, just the basic daily life is what young Iranian women are looking for.
They're looking to be able to go out and show their hair without fear.
They're looking to be able to express themselves the way the rest of young women in the world express themselves without fear.
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So, Mike, to that point, how much of this do you view as sort of the revolution, as an inevitability of technology in some sense?
So, when they had the last real uprising, which was when Obama was president, even though we had internet and we had social media, it wasn't as ubiquitous everywhere where now it's non-stop 24 hours a day, even though the internet has been cut and phone lines have been cut there.
And even they're going after Starlink now and all sorts of stuff.
But the point that Elek is making is the Iranians know what life outside of the country looks like in a tremendous way now.
So, in some sense, you can't stop a revolution in that way.
I mean, you can kill a lot of people, but you may not be able to stop it.
Yeah, the regime can certainly try to kill their way out of it.
And they haven't shown any reluctance in the past to go that route with violence and arrests.
But there's no doubt that technology has made it more difficult for locking down a population, right?
And saying you can't know what life is like.
You go back to the Cold War, to the old Soviet Union, right?
And the difficulties for Russian citizens, as an example, to understand what the West looked like, right?
They were incredibly hungry for information about what was going on out there.
And when they found out about it, it was a revelation.
But now you can tweet through the Iron Curtain.
Exactly.
And so there's only so much stakeholders.
That's good.
And those images.
I just wrote that down.
I'm going to.
You guys can use that.
No, I'm taking it.
Okay, now it's going to be.
I'm just kidding.
Yeah.
So the way that information flows nowadays, it absolutely, you know, it shows when they cut communications, when they do an internet blackout, it is obvious, obviously.
It's an effort to try to prevent images to get out.
It's an obvious effort to try to prevent the protesters from communicating with each other.
But they've shown an amazing resilience, as have other populations, in learning workarounds.
And certainly, you just mentioned Starlink.
Starlink has been very important and is playing a role right now.
So I want to throw to a video.
You sort of referenced this a moment ago, Mike, but Trump is now saying the killing has stopped, which is perhaps offering a pause in whatever our military maneuvers might be.
Take a look.
Iran, you said that the killing has stopped.
Who told you that the killings have stopped?
We have been informed by very important sources on the other side, and they've said the killing has stopped and the executions won't take place.
There were supposed to be a lot of executions today, and that the executions won't take place.
And we're going to find out.
I mean, I'll find out after this.
You'll find out.
But we've been told on good authority, and I hope it's true.
Who knows, right?
Who knows?
Alica, my general take on Trump is that he's done so many good things that he offers a little bit of stuff out there and then he does other things, right?
So I don't think this means we are not going to do anything.
But when you heard that, okay, so some people over there told us the killings have stopped.
What was your reaction?
Well, first of all, the goalpost has been moved, okay?
Because the first statement was if the killing begins, we intervene.
Now the goalpost has been moved.
Well, since the killing has stopped, we won't intervene.
That wasn't the initial promise that drew people into the streets.
So I think what concerns me is that, you know, a lot of people have been saying to me lately, this is, it's happening.
They're going in.
Iran's going to be free.
And I have been very, very hesitant to become excited about this, not because I'm a pessimist, but because of pattern recognition.
I've spent the past two years carefully paying attention to detail on how the U.S. and Israel is reacting in Iran.
And so far, they've been taking conservative measures.
If they were going to give us the Maduro package, we would have gotten the Maduro package on October 8th.
Why would we suddenly wake up tomorrow and get the Maduro package?
We're not getting the Maduro package.
Everything that they've done thus far has been extraordinarily conservative in response to the massacres that these terrorists have been committing across the Middle East.
And so there's a reason why, in my eyes, there's a reason why Trump keeps making these statements.
We're going to do something.
We might do something.
Well, we'll change the goalpost is because there's some data there.
There's some data in the conservative measures that they've taken that leads a reasonable observer to say that it doesn't seem that anything that happens going forward is going to be beyond conservative.
I'm not saying that they aren't going to do anything.
What I believe is that Trump said that to try and, as a sort of, you know, bluff, thinking that the regime wouldn't respond, wouldn't respond.
And then if it did respond, knew that he would cover his ass somehow by doing something.
And that is what I expect.
I expect that he will do something.
I expect that Israel will do something.
But will they initiate a regime change?
No.
And I have a lot of opinions about why, but I'll just stop there for now.
Well, maybe we can get to that a sec.
But Mike, can you talk about like, what do you think the legitimate military options are?
If the idea is, okay, we want to help the people of Iran rise up, but we know that, first, I mean, the country is absolutely huge also.
So it's not like you're just going in and snagging Maduro in the middle of the night, right?
And we don't even necessarily know where Khomeini is and the mullahs and blah, blah, blah.
But what would it look, what would be sensible that you could hear that Trump could put out there that you'd be like, all right, I think maybe this could work.
Yeah.
Look, I mean, when they talk about, you know, doing something, this sort of help concept, it's on its way, you know, you have to put it in different buckets, right?
So one of the things they could do in today's world is cyber attacks, right?
Why would they do that?
Well, they would take down the mechanisms, sort of the machinery of communications blackouts, right?
So you would then try to open up the country to the outside world.
That's one concept.
You know, obviously another is economic sanctions.
I don't believe that that inspires the people on the streets.
So if you're talking about kinetic action, military action, then they've already got their target packages, right?
This is something that's been sitting on the shelf for a while now.
It's not as if the most recent NSC meeting was so we could come up with, well, okay, what targets do we want to hit?
They know that.
And you're talking about possibly military bases in and around Tehran that would be housing units that are responsible for getting out of the streets.
You've got a combination of law enforcement and police and paramilitary and militias out there.
But you hit those military units because they put the army out, which showed you how serious these protests were from the regime's point of view.
They actually, you know, they unleashed the army to deal with protests.
So you could go after those units that are responsible.
You could take out some individual senior leadership, right?
The intel is pretty good.
And a lot of them were taken out during the 12-day war.
So I think that's kind of where they would be focused is to try to say this is not about regime change.
It's punishment for your behavior.
But the idea underlying all that is to provide some meaningful support that would allow the people to stay in the fight, right?
To give them the hope and courage and strength to stay in the fight.
That's what you would be looking to do.
Because again, regime change, you know, always brings with it a lot of pushback and sort of a reputation there.
But I think that's kind of where we'd be with me.
I think personally, President Trump is look, there may be history of doing this with head fakes, right?
So as to your point, Dave, you know, he'll say something and then there's something else on the way.
That could be the case.
Personally, I hope it is.
Because again, going back to that comment, I would hate to see this end in the same sort of cycle that we've seen over the years.
Right.
In this specific instance, it seems like his rhetoric and the messaging he's put out has gone so far that if we don't do anything, it seems worse than the Obama red line.
I'm not saying I know what to do or anything else, but it seems like knowing Trump, I mean, he does follow.
Unlike Obama, he follows through.
So his red line actually is in marker where maybe Obama's was in pencil.
But I'm curious, let me ask you both the same question.
What would you say to people, to just like the average American who's just like, you know what, I see the stuff and it's terrible and I don't want people to die or anything else, but it's another part of the world and I just don't care anymore.
What would your response mean to that, Alicia?
Well, I just want to, you know, kind of reiterate this point because this is the foundation of it is that people don't think that the U.S. or anyone should ever really get involved in regime change.
And then you can actually make a pattern out of this, what all of these presidents have in common, starting with Jimmy Carter, then Obama, and now we don't know about Trump maybe.
But what they have in common is that they were almost all arrested by ideology, this idea that Western imperialism is the greatest evil.
And they said it.
They didn't, you know, they weren't shy about admitting it.
When Carter helped to bring Khomeini to Iran, there was this idea that the Shah was a Western puppet.
And to do the right thing was to eject anything to do with Westernism and bring this indigenous revolution to Iran, right?
And then you had Obama, who in 2009, during the Green Movement, had an opportunity to intervene.
And he said out of his own words, when he admitted that he made a mistake, he said, people said to me that I would be a Western tool and all of those things, right?
Same rhetoric, same ideological arrest.
I can't move forward because of this anti-Western rhetoric.
And now we're living in the exact same, we are in a historic groundhog day.
Donald Trump, the thing that's going to hold him back is that he doesn't want to be the one who gets the reputation for regime change in Iran.
Why?
Because the concept of Western intervention has been made the greatest evil, even against the greatest evil.
Now it has gotten to the point where the crime is not the crime.
The help is the crime.
How have we become so distorted, mentally distorted, that criminals committing mass murder is no crime.
But the intervention from the outside world is the real danger.
And so, what you can see through all of this is, go on.
No, sorry, go ahead, finish up, please.
No, just how much humanity has been forsaken for ideology.
And it isn't just any ideology.
Let's be honest.
It is the ideology of the elite, of the intelligentsia.
It is this romantic intelligentsia concept that people should free themselves.
But how do you free yourself?
It's like telling a nation, hey, you know, we'd really love to stop this atomic bomb dropping from you on you, but we really think that you should free yourselves from the atomic bomb.
You know, it's like telling somebody who's been tied up by a murderer, calling 911, hey, you know, we'd love to send help, but we just, we really think you should free yourselves, right?
It's this concept of this sort of noble martyrdom, which is which is really just the righteous fantasies of the Western intelligentsia.
And that is what rules everything.
And that is what's so scary about this entire situation is that we are all we all have to surrender to this these righteous fantasies of the intelligentsia.
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Mike, so to that point, I mean, it's one of the bigger problems with the Western intelligentsia is that if we don't do anything, meaning America, then nobody does anything.
We all know that.
France isn't getting involved.
The UK is not getting involved.
The Dutch aren't coming to save anybody.
Even the other countries in the Middle East are not going to do anything.
So there's a weird disconnect where the Western intelligentsia can say whatever the hell they want, but everyone knows it's Trump or bust.
Yeah, and that's been the case, whether it's been Trump or not over the years.
People do turn to the U.S., they complain about it, but they do expect the U.S. to lead in some fashion when you get a situation like this or the Balkan War, whatever it may be.
So again, I think, look, Venezuela, whether we want to call it regime change or not, that's what it is, right?
And so, you know, maybe the dam's broken already and, you know, the mindset has shifted in the White House because I think they do look at what happened in Venezuela as sort of proof of concept in a way for certain actions.
And so I think that maybe we will see something different.
Look, operationally, you could do this.
Now, whether that spurs the people further to do this, you know, because again, part of this, the difficulty of having a population rise up against such an established security apparatus, such a hardened force as even the Revolutionary Guard Corps, right?
Not to mention the militias and other elements, is massive.
There's just, there's so much to it.
But if they don't get some meaningful support in some fashion from the international community, it can't happen because the Iranian regime has no upside in giving up power.
Right.
So now I want to get to some of the mixed.
And they're unarmed.
And they're unarmed.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So Unarmed cannot win against the alt.
So let's get to some of the mixed messaging here.
First, this truth from Trump.
This was a Fox News headline.
Iranian protester will no longer be sentenced to death after President Trump's warnings.
Likewise, others, and Trump wrote, this is good news.
Hopefully it'll continue.
But then, of course, we see videos like this.
It's a short video of a Tehran medical center filled with body bags.
a look how much of the the confusion here is that when that the phrase regime change mike you kind of just hit on this that the phrase regime change now has all these attachments to it where i think i don't think people fear the average american if you said to them hey we're going to have a couple-day war where we're going to drop a hell of a lot of bombs to take out the Ayatollah and the Mullahs and free the people to whatever extent that can work.
I think most Americans are okay with that.
What they don't want is an occupation.
They don't want boots on the ground like we did with Iraq, where then it just ends up as a, you know, in essence, a failed state.
So maybe this is a, what do you think, Mike?
Maybe there's like a messaging thing here that should be changed.
Because when you look at the body bags, I mean, the lefties that are silent about it were going crazy about it elsewhere in the Middle East not too long ago.
So there's a messaging issue, I think, that still is a little lost here.
Yeah, I think just like with the earlier discussion, sort of the cultural issues, the social issues within Iran, I think there needs to be better messaging about why it's important and to what degree.
Look, you'll never get stability or long-term or mid-term peace in the Middle East and all the ripple effects that spread out across the globe as long as the Iranian regime stays in place.
It's just that it's that simple, right?
They are the number one cause of chaos in the region, right?
And beyond.
So I think you have to explain what they're about and why this benefits not just the Iranian people, but the situation throughout the Middle East.
And I don't know if doing that, you know, kind of brings those people who are on the edge or kind of teetering on the fence saying, I don't know, maybe this gets them on board with this idea, right?
Because I know a lot of isolationists, libertarians, whatever.
And of course, they don't want anything, right?
They live in a world where you just shouldn't do anything, right?
Because it's just all wrong and we're just evil anytime we do.
Property rights.
You can't, yeah, you can't shift.
Kevin Man is an island.
Yeah, exactly.
But the truth is, we all know this.
I think that the world's been shrinking for some time.
And we're all interconnected in ways that we don't even understand.
And so what happens in the Middle East, if you had some ability for the Iranian people to create something more and become a real part of the international community, I guarantee you, it would be a seismic shift for the better in the region and beyond.
Yeah.
Well, that's why, again, I'm not saying I know exactly what we're supposed to do, but their proxies are all destroyed now, too, right?
Like Hamas is basically, they're not completely gone, but like Hezbollah is largely gone.
The Houthis are being quiet.
Like there is a moment here just across the region.
Aleka, go ahead.
Yeah, I mean, can you just imagine if we had a policy of isolationism during the Cold War?
You know, well, let's just let communism spread everywhere and it's just not our business.
We'll just stay here with our little liberal democracy.
Your liberal democracy would be gone.
So that's just, it's just a flawed ideology.
But what I was going to say about this concept of regime change, I think there also needs to be a lot of education about it because people often, you know, people online, they just use these buzzwords.
They say, oh, we don't want another Iraq.
We don't want another Afghanistan.
It's like these are apples and oranges.
First of all, because they are so against Western intervention, they look at Iraq from the most negative lens.
Obviously, the aftermath was a disaster, but it would have been far worse under Saddam Hussein.
He was committing chemical genocide.
He was expat.
It obviously was bad, but it's better than the worst.
But because they hold everything to an anti-American standard, they always see it through a negative lens.
And then Afghanistan is a completely different situation.
You already empowered the Taliban through Operation Cyclone.
You put them in power, you entrenched them, and then you had a war to try and take them out.
It's a completely different situation, although they did also help bring the mullahs to Iran.
But what people need to understand about Iran, which is unique about Iran in the Middle East, is that in general, under the caliphate, when the Middle East was under the caliphate, it unfortunately missed the Enlightenment era.
So all of us who were born and raised in the West, we were raised with these principles of rationality, right?
We were raised with these principles of enlightenment, and that didn't reach the Middle East.
And that's why there are masses in the Middle East who would sooner an Islamist regime than this concept of Western liberal democracies, which seems so foreign to them.
But for the Iranian people, not only did the last Shah of Iran send a lot of students out into the world, including my dad, to Oxford in the UK, to be educated, to bring these Western ideals into Iran, which it successfully did, and even before the last Shah, but we have to remember that Iran is from a nation.
It's our ancestors, Cyrus the Great, right?
These are people who penned the first Cyrus Cylinder, the first human rights bill in all of history.
So our Persian values mirror Western values very closely.
So when you say, we don't want to have a regime change because, you know, who knows if more Ayatollahs are going to come to power, we think that the Iranian people are just these radical Islamists.
You couldn't be more wrong about the Iranian people and our values.
And that is the thing that they don't understand where they're against the concept of regime change.
Yeah, and that's why I wanted to start with that Rubio clip because that's exactly what he was laying out.
Mike, I don't want to get too far too deep into this, but do you think it's possible that had the U.S. not cut and run from Obama, really, from Iraq when we did, that people would view regime change differently in that for as crazy as the Iraq war was, they were having free elections.
I mean, most people remember that around 2006, 2007.
It did seem like it was stabilizing.
And then Obama just happened to, he kept promising more than Hillary, if people remember that primary, I will get us out the second I'm in.
She was like, oh, well, we should just take our time and we don't want to break it again and all that.
But do you think maybe we'd all look at all of this differently had we stayed there and helped that stabilize?
Well, sure.
I think if you had, you're absolutely right.
I think if you'd had a successful end result, you know, in terms of how I suppose the U.S. population would define success, but there were a series of mistakes starting with, you know, ousting the entire Iraqi military structure, right?
And creating a vacuum that I was out there at the time.
And then usually just, you could see this heading south very quickly.
And the chaos arrived before you could even blink.
And then it just, it kind of went downhill, obviously, from there.
So I think if that transition had been handled properly, and not to veer off topic, but I think that's why you're seeing what we're seeing in Venezuela in part, because they're realizing that you can't just say, Maduro's gone, everybody leave.
We're going to put in Machado.
Everything's going to be great.
You've got a military in place.
You've reshuffled the deck chairs with some of the regime cronies.
You've got a security apparatus.
You've got to figure out how to make that transition happen so that the opposition, when they do come in and you're trying to move towards a more free and fair society for those people, that the military's on board with it in some fashion.
So I think you're right.
People have fatigue in this country for all the good reasons, all the right reasons.
20 years in Afghanistan, the Iraq, devocal.
And so people are tired of it.
But you're absolutely correct.
Elika is right.
It's apples and oranges.
You can't make comparisons here with those incidents, but that's human nature.
And most people are so busy with their daily lives that they're not going to sit and ponder this very, very long.
They're going to go whatever the media tells them.
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We already addressed this a little bit, sort of the betrayal of the left in America and the human rights activists.
But this tweet by Ayel Yacobi, I thought summed it up perfectly.
He wrote, breaking live look at Columbia University after they learned that over 2,000 unarmed Iranian civilians have been massacred by the Islamic Republic.
I mean, that's kind of it, right?
Elika, like that's it right there.
These kids, they don't know what they're protesting for.
And then when it comes to something that they probably should be protesting for, crickets.
Yeah, I mean, look, these are the kids that are graduating out of these elite institutions that are heavily left-wing.
I think of our academic institutions and the left-wing.
And what I describe this process as is re-education, which is a Maoist term, right?
Mao's re-education system was about training the Chinese to see the West as the greatest enemy.
Briefly, the greatest good.
And so naturally, they graduate out of this re-education.
And they say, oh, Islamist terrorists, enemy of the West, that must be the good.
The terrorists being attacked, they pour into the streets.
You know, say they don't even pretend to be about humanity.
They say, Hamas, Hamas, we love you.
We support your rockets too.
Right?
They are openly admitting that they stand with the Islamists because the Islamists are against Iran, where the Iranians are against these Islamists.
Well, the Islamists are the ally.
They are the ally in the war into the West.
Why would the Fdis pour into the streets into the Gambia encampments to protest their ally?
Are secretly hoping that their ally wins and proves to the West if you're evil and that the Islamists are the good force in the world just fighting the Western oppression?
I guarantee you, if the U.S. does take kinetic action and particularly if Israel steps in to provide assistance, you'll see those students back out there protesting.
Right, exactly.
I thought it would be nice to end on this because there are so many incredible videos of what Iran used to be like in the 70s and before that, and just the advancements and the just wonderful culture that was there until 1979.
I thought this would be a nice way to wrap up.
Take a look.
Mike, I want to give Elika the last word on that.
But when you see something like that and knowing that we can maybe do something, is that just the biggest selling point that maybe we could just help these people again?
That those girls, if they're still alive, are probably wrapped up in what Bill Maher calls beekeeper costumes right now.
Yeah.
No, I think it wouldn't take much.
I think you know.
No, I was going to say, just so you know, that clip would just be a cast off as Zionist propaganda anyway.
So, you know, you're going to have a hard time getting through to these people.
I don't think that we're going to move the hearts of the anti-Westerners and the anti-Zionists.
As Lizzie Savetsky once said, we can't change their hearts and their minds because they don't have hearts and they don't have minds.
But I do think that I do think that, you know, it's in for people who are not sure, people who are on the fence, people who have not been consumed by ideology, I do think that, you know, explaining to them the Iran that once was, the long history of Iran that once was, explaining them to the history, the history of, you know, the 1400-year-old Islamic invasion and the influence that has, you know,
really suppressed the native culture of Iran.
If they see this more from sort of like an anti-colonial perspective, you know, you have to use their words.
You have to use their language, that this Islamist force is like a colonial force that they're trying to free themselves from and show them what their native culture is, that the Persian culture and their values that are much more closely mirrored to the West.
I do think that they'll have no choice but to get on board because otherwise what you're saying is essentially that you want individual rights for yourself, but not for the people of Iran, even though those people are asking for it.
And so I think that puts them in a bind where they have no choice but to get on board.
Right.
If basically two and a half years post-October 7th hasn't exposed the hypocrisy, this thing has just ripped it wide open.
Mike, you get the last word.
Yeah, look, I don't know what's going to happen in the coming days.
And I think we'll understand that here soon.
But it wouldn't take much.
It wouldn't take much.
And it would just to see some meaningful support, help from the international community, the U.S., perhaps others, for the protests so that perhaps this time, after all these years and all these past efforts by the people coming out on the streets, that we get a different result.
And I go back to what I said earlier, which is that for the people of Iran, it would mean more opportunity, a better life, freedom.
Theoretically, everybody should be behind that concept.
And for the rest of the world, it would mean a more stable region and a better opportunity for really the entire globe.
So that's all I can say.
Again, whether that help comes is what I'll be watching over the course of the next 48 hours.