"No Endless War: A New Middle East?" pits Sean Hannity’s defense of a U.S.-led strike against Iran—targeting Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and nuclear sites—as a preemptive move against a $100B+ program, dismissing Democratic opposition as hypocritical. Navy SEAL Jack Carr calls it a surgical decapitation, avoiding Iraq/Afghanistan-style wars by leveraging precision tech, while Benjamin Netanyahu frames Iran’s 47-year reign of terror—embassy bombings, assassinations, and nuclear advances—as an existential threat neutralized. With Iran’s uranium offers rejected and strikes crippling its defenses, the operation signals a shift: no boots on the ground, just irreversible deterrence—and a Middle East finally free from Tehran’s shadow. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, news roundup information overload hour here on the Sean Hannity show.
Toll-free, it's 800-941-Sean, if you want to be a part of the program.
In spite of just what has been spectacular success in this joint mission with the United States, Donald Trump, and the Prime Minister of Israel will play part of my interview with P.B. Netanyahu coming up.
The Democrats, but remember, the one thing they can't have is for Donald Trump to be successful.
So they have to cheer for American failure.
They don't want the economy to recover the way it's recovering, and they're hoping it doesn't recover anymore.
It's a horrible position for anybody to be in, but it is what it is.
And in the case of this effort to prevent the Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon to hold the world hostage, here's Hakeem Jeffries.
He is the minority leader in name only, appealing to the radical base squad.
This is going to be a failure.
It'll end in failure.
Listen.
The American people want us to focus on making their life better, making their life more affordable, not getting involved in another endless war in the Middle East that is going to end in failure.
Now, this affordability thing is not working out too well for the Democrats as interest rates are down, inflation is down, gas prices have been down.
They may go up temporarily a little bit because of the disruption of the free flow of oil at market prices, but that will change rather quickly.
But, you know, on every measure, job creation, everything in between, and trillions in new investments in manufacturing, things are getting a lot better, but not that he wants us to or is cheering for American success.
Over on that hard-hitting news show, The View, Sonny Houston, is out there saying Iran war is an illegal, unconstitutional war.
No, it's not.
But listen.
I was going to say, you know, the bottom line is that this is an illegal war.
This is an unconstitutional war.
Only Congress can wage war and declare war.
Oh, presidential war.
Now, let's just take a trip down memory lane.
And when Barack Obama and Joe Biden were involved in conflicts around the world, not one Democrat ever called for the War Powers Act.
They just, they don't want Donald Trump to be successful.
Here's Nancy Pelosi saying, oh, there's no need for this.
Madam Speaker, Madam Leader, you're saying that the president did not need authorization initially and still does not need any authorization from Congress, one Libya?
Yes.
Yes, of course.
Only Donald Trump does because we hate him.
We don't like him.
John Brennan, I've been hearing from sources now for weeks on end that he may be on the verge of some indictment.
We'll see if, in fact, my sources end up being correct.
Him out there attacking the Trump administration, saying that they're making things up to justify the Iranian attack.
They're not making things up.
They are looking at the stark reality is that the Iranians, and you can actually see satellite imaging that proves it, were reconstituting their ballistic missiles program and their nuclear program, as evidenced by the interview that I had with Steve Wickoff, the Middle East envoy involved in the negotiations.
But it doesn't stop John Brennan from just being the liar propagandist that I think he's always been.
Now we're going ahead and carrying out this major attack against a very large country, Iran, which is much larger than Iraq.
And there's a lot of history here, obviously, in the region and so on.
But what we've seen in the past several days is devastating attacks against Iran.
And the Iranian government, the Iranian regime, is not relenting at this point.
And that's why they're throwing everything they have at nearby targets, whether it be U.S. bases or the Gulf Arab states, whatever.
This is such a tragic, senseless, and needless loss of life that we're seeing right now.
As Senator Warner said, there was no imminent threat.
Clearly, I think the administration is now making things up in order to try to justify what is happening.
Okay.
You know, just ignore all sense of reality and truth.
And by the way, they're not relenting.
No, they're dead, you idiot.
I mean, how stupid can you be?
Marco Rubio responds to all of this and slamming the media for questioning the reasons for this operation in Iran.
I haven't had a chance to see a lot of reporting.
I don't understand what the confusion is.
Let me explain it to you, and I'll do it once again as clearly as possible.
Perhaps you'll report it that way.
The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran's short-range ballistic missiles and the threat posed by their Navy, particularly to naval assets.
That is what it is focused on doing right now, and it's doing quite successfully.
I'll leave it to the Pentagon and the Department of War to discuss the tactics behind that and the progress it's being made.
That is the clear objective of this mission.
The second question that's been asked is, why now?
Well, there's two reasons why now.
The first is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel or anyone, they were going to respond and respond against the United States.
The orders had been delegated down to the field commanders.
It was automatic, and in fact, it bear to be true, because in fact, within an hour of the initial attack on the leadership compound, the missile forces in the South and in the North, for that matter, had already been activated to launch.
In fact, those had already been pre-positioned.
The third is the assessment that was made that if we stood and waited for that attack to come first before we hit them, we would suffer much higher casualties.
And so the president made the very wise decision.
We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.
We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.
And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed.
And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that in Dick.
Author's Upcoming Book00:06:54
I mean, Marco's just a rock star.
He's killing it.
He's crushing it.
Anyway, joining us now, Jack Carr, retired Navy SEAL, author of the upcoming book out in May the 4th option, gives his military analysis of what's happening.
I think the opening 30 seconds that we saw and witnessed and the entire they decapitated the head of the leadership in Iran, I think was something that will be studied, as I said to Steve Witkoff for decades and probably the next 100, 150, 200 years.
I said that to BB too.
And I'm looking at all of this and I'm looking at the other news of the day.
And it's like, okay, so now the remaining Iranian leaders meet to pick a new leader and all of those people were taken out today.
I've never seen anything like this in my life.
Yeah, it's quite remarkable.
It just speaks to, obviously, our intelligence services, the level of penetration we have within the regime, or former regime at this point.
So it is quite remarkable and will be studied, as you said, for decades here to come.
But the whole attack really is a long time coming, in my opinion, here.
And I'm of the age where some of my first memories are of the 1979 hostage crisis.
I was in Catholic school at the time.
They marched us all to chapel and we prayed for the hostages.
And then, of course, the Marine Corps headquarters and barracks bombing in 1983.
That was very impactful to a kid who's already on my path into the military.
And I see this on time and Newsweek and all over the news.
And I even wrote my first nonfiction book about it called Targeted.
But for a lot of us who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're understandably, I think, skeptical when we hear words like regime change, WMD, just with the wounds and memories and lessons being so fresh.
But that being said, Iraq and Iran comparison that everyone's making, it's not apples to apples.
Every situation, obviously, is different and requires that you adapt to it, especially in the middle of combat operations where the enemy always gets a vote.
Situation is chaotic, dynamic.
There's a host of variables that you can't predict.
And there will, of course, be unintended consequences.
There always are.
But what's important now, I think, is that we adapt to those unintended consequences, to the ever-changing environment on the battlefield.
And we're very good at doing that tactically.
On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, very good at that.
But our senior military leaders, elected representatives, appointed executives across government, they were not over those 20 years we were in Afghanistan and all those years we were in Iraq.
Very slow to adapt if they adapted at all.
And everyone remembers how we went from WMD to regime change to nation-building to counterinsurgency efforts, all while nation-building hampered by inept strategic decisions like disbanding the Iraqi army, depathification, which essentially created the insurgency supported by Iran, where the insurgents had a safe haven across the border where we couldn't go.
And that's where they could build their EFPs, which were the explosively formed penetrators, which could defeat our armor.
But the question is, when I hear all the opposing views of what we're doing right now, is how close to developing a nuclear weapon do you allow a hostile authoritarian regime whose organizing principle has been death to America since 1979?
How close do you allow them to get to developing that weapon?
Five years, two years, one year, six months, a week before you eliminate that threat.
And we can go back to, we all remember Al-Qaeda, they declared war on us 1996, 1998, embassy bombings in Tanzania, in Kenya, the USS Cole.
And we still didn't take them seriously, even though they were very clear that they had declared war on us.
And we treated it as a law enforcement matter all the way up until September 11th, 2001.
So there are examples in the pages of history.
And let's go to 1983 really quick.
And there's a host of reasons I'd like to go back to the 80s.
I think that's the greatest decade in the history of mankind.
But there are lessons from 1983, Beirut, and when our headquarters and barracks were bombed in October of 1983, 241 servicemen killed, the largest number of Marines killed since Ibojima in World War II.
The lesson that the enemy took from that was that terrorism works.
And what Iran took from that specifically is that terrorism through proxies work, because there was a lot of tough talk out of the administration at the time.
And then we left very quietly in early 1984.
So there's a direct line between the inept response in 1983, 1984 to September 11th and beyond.
All right, quick break, final moments.
Jack Carr is with us, retired Navy SEAL, author of the upcoming book out in May, the fourth option, giving his military analysis of what has been going on inside of Iran and this massive, overwhelming show of force and victory by the U.S. armed services.
You know, now that the adults are back in office, maybe we can get some work done around here.
Are you ready?
Welcome back, President Trump.
This is the Sean Hannity Show.
All right, we continue now.
Jack Carr is with us.
He's a retired Navy SEAL, author of the upcoming book.
It's out in May, The Fourth Option, giving his military analysis of what is happening on the ground in Iran and the incredible work of the U.S. military and the might of the U.S. military and the vision of the president in this entire issue and the moral clarity he's showing.
I know it's beyond comprehension, but what we learned from Steve Witkoff, the Middle East envoy who, along with Jared Kushner, was trying to negotiate a deal with the Iranians under the principle that Donald Trump laid out, which is they cannot have nuclear weapons.
They offered the Iranians low-level enriched uranium for civilian purposes only, that not only would they allow them to have that, but they would allow them to have it for free, and they'd allow them to have it for free in perpetuity.
And they rejected that deal, which shows that they were clinging to their nuclear ambitions to the very end.
And now that leadership's been wiped out.
I mean, just wiped out cold.
Clearly, clearly.
And if they're not going to take that deal, they're not going to take any deal.
And it's just a stall tactic until they can get to a point where they actually have developed this nuclear weapon.
Action Taken Together00:15:07
You can see the satellite imagery.
They were reconstituting their ballistic missiles programs, which Donald Trump mentioned on day one.
And the same with the nuclear program.
And you can see the images proving that that was all true.
Yep.
In every administration, really, from 1979 onward, multiple administrations, both parties, they've had that same pillar of U.S. foreign policy, which is not allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
That is a red line in the sand.
They've all had different ways they've tried to deal with it.
Well, it wasn't for Biden and it wasn't for Obama.
I mean, they were delivering cargo planes full of cash and other currency to try and bribe them out of it.
That is very true.
And now we have this administration where you have people in positions within the administration that served on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They remember those same lessons that I do.
They remember being there on the ground, and they remember what our senior level leaders did and essentially putting us in harm's way, then making us targets and also allowing the worldwide jihadis to point to us as the infidels and use that as a propaganda tool.
They were very effective at doing that, much more effective than we were in countering it.
Let me bring up one thing that I think needs to be said, and that is this idea of endless wars.
As the Prime Minister, B.B. Netanyahu said, no, it's not going to be an endless war, but it's not part of the Trump doctrine.
There's not going to be boots on the ground, not going to be an endless war.
This will end with the Iranian people having an opportunity to change their destiny, perhaps once in a generation opportunity, as the president said.
And the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, the chance death to Israel and America, is gone.
And they won't have any nuclear power for the foreseeable future, unless, of course, another regime similar to the one that just got killed comes back in power.
It seems that they're taking those lessons of the past, applying them to the present problem set as wisdom, which is really all we can hope for.
It seems like the days of if you break it, you buy it, the Colin Powell pottery bound rule, Barn Rule is not in play anymore.
Seems like nation building is not in play anymore.
And putting us on the ground as targets essentially is not in the way that we did.
Those days are over.
The days of sending kids door to door, you know, stepping over IEDs without up armored Humvees.
Those days, we're never going back to those days.
And I predict future wars are going to be fought from air-conditioned offices.
We're seeing the beginning of those days right now, and it's only going to get more sophisticated over time.
I could talk to you all day.
Jack Carr, really appreciate your retired Navy SEAL.
Thanks so much for being with us.
We do appreciate you.
Thanks for having me on.
You take care.
All right.
So last night I had the Prime Minister of Israel.
This is a joint operation, the Israeli IDF and America's military might.
And what they have been able to accomplish is beyond spectacular.
But anyway, here's my interview with the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Joining us now is the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Mr. Prime Minister, thank you for being here.
I know you probably have gotten very little sleep in the last number of days.
Why now?
What precipitated this moment at this time?
I know you have talked about it.
We've known each other 30, 35, maybe more years.
And why at this point was this necessary?
Well, the first thing to understand is why it's necessary at any time.
Iran, for 47 years, has been chanting death to America, death to Israel too.
But you're the big Satan.
We're the small Satan.
Death to America.
They've murdered and maimed thousands of Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan with their IEDs.
These are roadside bombs.
They've bombed your embassies.
They tried to assassinate Donald Trump, the president of the United States, twice.
They've murdered their own people.
They massacred so many.
And they spread a worldwide web of terror.
So this is a regime committed to destroying the United States of America.
It's the only country on the planet that says so openly and works tirelessly to achieve that goal.
The reason that we had to act now is because they were, after we hit their nuclear sites and their ballistic missiles program, you'd think they learned a lesson, but they didn't because they're unreformable.
They're totally fanatic about this, about the goal of destroying America.
So they started building new sites, new places, underground bunkers that would make their ballistic missile program and their atomic bomb programs immune within months.
If no action was taken now, no action could be taken in the future.
And then they could target America.
They could blackmail America.
They could threaten us and threaten everyone in between.
So action had to be taken.
And you needed a resolute president like Donald J. Trump to take that action.
And we are his very strong and able partners.
And our alliance today is so strong, we had to take the action now, and we did.
Otherwise, the Iranian mass murder regime would have immunity from future action.
Steve Witkoff made this statement, the Middle Eastern envoy, and he made it last week, that they absolutely are clinging to their ability to build out a nuclear weapons program.
And the president, as he said, he wanted a peace deal, gave them every opportunity for peace like they did before Operation Midnight Hammer.
And they steadfastly refused.
In the first 30 seconds, I've never seen anything like this in my life.
The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, and his top 40 leaders were wiped out, Ahmadinejad among them.
That is incredible intelligence.
And wow, I'm sure this will be studied for centuries to come, not decades.
Well, you know, when America, the indispensable ally for Israel and the greatest power in the world, and Israel, America's model ally, as the National Security Council just called it, when we work together, amazing things happen.
We work together and amazing things happened.
But I have to tell you that it wouldn't happen without the leadership of President Trump.
Because he just, you know, I met him in Mar-a-Lago.
You may remember this because I think you live close by and I saw you at that time right before his re-election, okay?
And or before he was inaugurated the second time.
And we met.
We met in Mar-a-Lago.
And the first thing that Donald Trump said to me, he said, you know, we have to prevent Iran from getting nukes.
As simple as that.
He said that because he saw that as a clear and present danger to the security and well-being of the United States.
To have a regime like that so fanatic that it just defines itself by destroying America, exporting revolution, exporting terrorism, exporting the worst Islamist fanaticism that attacks Arabs, attacks Israelis, attacks Americans, attacks everyone in sight.
They just fired now their sight around in the Middle East, including Cyprus and Europe.
To have a regime like that that plans to eradicate the United States, have the weapons of mass death would have been the greatest threat that America would face in the coming decades.
And so he said to me right off the bat, I didn't say to him, he said to me, we have to make sure they never get the nukes.
And that's what he did.
We tried first to take them out in Midnight Hammer and Rising Lion Operation.
And we took out their missile sites.
But then they started again.
Their missile and nuclear sites.
They didn't learn the lesson.
He tried to get negotiations.
He negotiated with them.
They didn't get it.
They tried to string him along.
So action had to be taken, and we took it.
President Trump repeated over and over and over again, and I would argue that the leadership that is now dead was a death cult and an existential threat, not just to the region, not just to Israel, death to Israel, death to America.
But I am very convinced and have been convinced, as you have been for decades, that if they ever got nuclear weapons, that they would, you know, along with their fanaticism, it would cause them to use it.
That that is what that death cult would cause them to do.
Is this now the culmination of decades of your work and your belief and your passion that these radicals needed to be defeated?
And what is next for Iran?
You know, we talk about, well, the regime's changed, but we don't know into what yet.
What are your thoughts?
Well, you're right.
I have spoken about it for decades.
And I tried to persuade successive American administrations to take firm action.
And President Trump, in his first term, did.
He got out of the disastrous Iran deal right off the bat.
And he did everything he could to prevent them from going into the nuclear program that they seek to build atomic bombs to threaten us and you and ultimately to attack both of us and to destroy as much as they can because this is what these people do.
They basically are in the business of mass death.
And you're right to call them a death cult.
I worked with several presidents.
I always appreciated the fact that we had, well, forthright discussions.
Often we agreed, but often we didn't.
We disagreed.
And I appreciated that we kept the alliance going.
But I want to tell you something.
I'm not a youngster, so I've been around.
There's never been a president like Donald J. Trump.
His resoluteness, his decisiveness, his clarity of thinking, the way he gets things gets right to the crux of things.
It cuts through all the fluff, cuts through the chase, gets down to the main point, and it gets down to the main action that needs to be taken.
And I think for Israel, and I think for the countries of the free world, let me tell you, I think for the world, we're very lucky to have him as the leader of the free world, and in fact, the leader of the world.
He's brought America back to being the leader of the world, and it makes a huge difference.
I'm talking to America's allies in the region, just one by one by one.
And I can't quote from these conversations, but I can tell you they all share this, and they all say, thank God that Donald Trump is here.
Thank God that the two of you are acting together to remove this threat, not only to you, but to us.
And Iran today just bombed with these ballistic missiles, these weapons of mass death, these weapons of terror, their terror weapons.
They bombed all these countries.
They bombed Cyprus, which is Europe.
I've said it won't take very long.
They're bombing us, they'll bomb Europe, and when they develop the intercontinental ballistic missiles and the nuclear wars to fit on these nuclear, on these ballistic missiles, they'll threaten you and eventually they'll bomb you.
This is what President Trump understood.
And alone among U.S. presidents that I've worked with, he took action.
And we're all very, very lucky that he did.
I think that history will, through the prism of history, he will be viewed very favorably by recognizing the threat.
In the last century, you're a historian, Mr. Prime Minister.
You know, between Mao, China, Stalin, Russia, Hitler, Germany, Mussolini, fascism, Tojo, Japan, Pol Pot, the killing fields, estimated over 100 million human souls slaughtered in the name of some ism.
Now we see a president and a prime minister partnering together to stop a threat before it emerges and becomes unstoppable, which I've got to give you both so much credit for.
It is transformational.
It is consequential.
I guess I want to look forward a little bit.
We had in his first term the Abraham Accords.
I know that there are countries in your region of the world that have been looking for a window of opportunity.
I'm talking about the likes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Dubai and Egypt and Jordan, et cetera.
Do you see a path to a long-lasting peace in the region, which we've not seen in forever?
Yes, I do.
In fact, I hear the people are saying we're going to have an endless war here.
You're not going to have an endless war.
Because we've been, and Iran, this terror regime in Iran is the weakest point that it's been here since it hijacked Iran from the brave Iranian people 47 years ago.
So this is going to be a quick and decisive action.
And we're going to create the conditions first for the Iranian people to get control of their destiny, to form their own democratically elected government, which will make Iran a different Iran altogether, because Iran has been the main engine of war over these years.
It's just 95% of all the problems you see in the Middle East are generated by Iran.
And the worldwide terror network that they built is generated and orchestrated from Iran.
So when you take away Iran, when you let the people of Iran have the opportunity to act to liberate themselves, free themselves from the yoke of this terror machine, you get a different future.
I think that will open up the way for many peace treaties with other Arab countries, with Muslim countries.
I think it changes the world.
Now, of course, it's up to the people of Iran in the final count to change the government.
But we are creating, America and Israel together are creating the conditions for them to do so.
I think that if we go through what we plan to do, I think it will create conditions for peace.
This is not an endless war.
This is, in fact, something that will usher in an era of peace that we haven't even dreamed of.
Mr. Prime Minister, I think history will study this military effort.
And it'll be, as I said, be studied for centuries.
But, you know, also you took out their air defense systems, their missile defense system, ballistic missile systems.
Creating Conditions for Peace00:01:44
You know, you got the 10 top guys in Hamas.
You got Nasrallah, who'd been in power for 30 some odd years.
You had the Pager incident.
Donald Trump dropped 14 bunker buster bombs and took out and obliterated their nuclear facilities.
I mean, I know there's war colleges.
Just all of these incidents combined will be a lifetime worth of study, in my view.
And I want to ask you this.
You know, there are people that say, well, the Prime Minister of Israel dragged Donald Trump into it.
And as somebody that's been friends with him over 30 years, nobody drags Donald Trump into anything, number one, but I want to get your reaction to that.
Well, you're right.
I mean, that's ridiculous.
Donald Trump is the strongest leader in the world.
He does what he thinks is right for America.
He does also what he thinks is right for future generations.
And frankly, we're partners in that effort because I've devoted my life to securing the life of the one and only Jewish state.
And believe me, it's been a struggle.
All right, that was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
All right, Hannity tonight, Nine Eastern on the Fox News channel.
As we now took out the next round of leadership in Iran, as they were trying to pick the next supreme leader, everyone in one building, they all got taken out today.
Jack Keem will analyze that.
Senator John Kennedy, General David Petraeus tonight.