March 1, 2026 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
54:44
Radio Show Hour 1 – 2026/02/28
James Edwards interviews Mark Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, on Trump’s escalating U.S.-Israel war with Iran after a 2025 bombing and the Ayatollah Khamenei’s death in February 2026. Polls show 70-80% American opposition, yet Trump acts without congressional approval, contradicting his past anti-interventionism. Weber argues Trump prioritizes Netanyahu’s demands, risking backlash as Iran—with 90M+ people and historical resilience—may harden under Ali Larajani, a nationalist successor. This "exceptionalist" policy, warned against by State Department officials in the 1940s, fuels global distrust, with Epstein-linked corruption adding to skepticism, while economic dissatisfaction in Iran remains overshadowed by anti-U.S. sentiment. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the political cesspool.
The political cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the political cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
And so it begins.
Welcome to a most unfortunate broadcast this evening.
Live we are this Saturday night, February the 28th.
Mark Weber on deck first as we begin to sort through what appears to be the onset of a wide-scale war.
Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, will provide a clear and composed perspective on Trump's fateful decision today regarding Iran, including background, consequences, and possible outcomes.
Of course, Mark Weber is a historian, a lecturer, a current affairs analyst.
You know that.
But he is unusually well informed about Iranian relations with other countries and with the United States, as well as 20th century Iranian history.
Now, interestingly, Mark has made three visits to Iran while there.
On those three visits, he met and spoke with a wide range of people, including ordinary citizens, writers, scholars, activists, and government officials from various countries.
He has addressed meetings in Tehran, including a lecture to hundreds of young Iranian university students and spoke at a government, excuse me, a conference of government leaders where the then president of Iran also spoke.
So when we have Mark Weber on tonight, it's an expert opinion you'll be hearing and commentary on this matter is of the utmost importance and needs to be heard by all.
Mark, welcome back.
I wish it were under better circumstances.
You and I had talked about an email that you would sent out to the IHR mailing list a few days ago.
No more wars for Israel.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like anybody in the White House read it.
Every time we get you on, it seems to be America's involved in some kind of war, right?
Well, it's not the first time.
Take it away, Mark.
Thank you very much for having me on again.
It's especially timely.
The last time that we talked specifically about Iran was back in June or July, and it was during the time that I was on with you that the word came out on the news that the United States had bombed Iran.
And now we're on together today, I guess about 24 hours after this new joint U.S.-Israel attack against Iran.
There's a whole lot to say about all of this.
Events are unfolding very quickly.
President Trump now says that the supreme leader of Iran, Tolki Khomeini Khomeini, has been killed.
It's probably true because it would be pretty foolish for the United States or Israel to make such a claim if they didn't have fairly strong evidence that that's the case.
So events are happening very quickly.
But my goal in this, and I think what we're trying to do, is step back a bit and see this in a larger context.
This is a really unusual thing.
And as you know, James, I was holding out the hope that Trump would refrain from actually carrying out this because this is unused there's no popular support for this war.
Public opinion polls show 70, 80% of the public is against a war by the United States and Israel against Iran.
Trump has no authorization, not even a debate in Congress for this.
And there will be a lot of pushback very soon by members of Congress, even including some Republicans, who will say this is going way beyond the authority of the president to go to war without even the pretense of any kind of popular backing for it.
I want to stress the parallels that this attack against Iran that the United States and Israel are making with the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war and the Vietnam War, all of which had those wars actually had popular support when they were first carried out by the United States, and they all ended as catastrophes, as fiascos for the United States and for the countries involved, of course.
And what's an astonishing aspect of all of this is that the Trump administration has given conflicting and very unpersuasive reasons for carrying out this attack.
Donald Trump, just in his State of the Union address a few days ago, said that Iran's nuclear facility had been obliterated in the attack that the United States made in the summer.
If that's true, it just underscores that Iran, by no stretch of the imagination, represents any kind of immediate threat to anyone.
Iran's power and its military strength has been severely degraded over the past year or so because of the damage inflicted on Hamas and Hezbollah and the attacks that Israel and the United States have made some months ago.
But in spite of that, Trump has, at a time when the United States was actually carrying out negotiations with Iran, negotiations that seem to be, according to many outside people, making progress, Donald Trump kills the leader of the country he's actually negotiating with at that time.
Those are all important aspects of this, but the main point that needs to be stressed, I think, is that this war is not one in the authentic, real interests of America or the region of the world.
This war is another war for Israel.
Above all, that's the country that's been pushing for it.
No other country has been pushing for this kind of military action as Israel has.
And Netanyahu has been urging this, and other Israeli leaders have been urging this for months.
So here we are.
Well, what's new with that, though, Mark?
We've been fighting wars for the last 20 years, basically, that were in Israel's interest and not in America's interest.
Right.
Go back a little further, Radi.
I mean, of course, Americans, many of them don't seem to care how many people are killed overseas in these wars because they're far away from our shores and maybe they're indifferent.
But these are wars that America cannot even afford internally.
These wars, whatever the war is, however it goes, whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or Iran, cost hundreds of billions, some say trillions of dollars.
The United States can't afford that.
We have, and this is borne out by numerous public opinion polls that show that Americans believe we have such overriding problems, such grave problems here in this country, that going off for regime change or trying to change things in countries far away from our shores that don't represent any kind of immediate or a threat to the United States is just crazy at this point in time.
But this is what Donald Trump is doing.
And it underscores once again how the Trump administration in particular seems especially beholden to Israeli and Zionist interests.
It doesn't really seem to matter what is in the best interests of the American people.
We're going to do what Israel wants.
And, you know, the military overextension is just incredible with this thing.
You know, we don't have, well, they're running out of weapons for the Ukrainians in Ukraine.
China could move on Taiwan at any time.
I mean, if they did, we just don't have the weapons or the armaments or the munitions necessary to fight three wars.
And it's just, you know, it's foolhardy.
But then on the other hand, you know, what they say, if mom ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
We'll change that to if Netanyahu ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.
Well, I was going to ask you about this, Mark, with regards to Keith's point on Netanyahu, and that being, do you believe that he sees this action here and now with Trump before the midterms, but especially before 2028, as the last chance for America to take Iran on on the behalf of Israel before this window closes forever?
Or is that being too hard?
That's an extraordinary good point you're making, and that is Netanyahu, I'm sure he's calculating that his best opportunity to take advantage of American power for Israeli interests is when Donald Trump's in power, is when Donald Trump's in the White House.
He knows that if a Democratic Party were in power or any kind, even a, you might say, rational Republican regime, they would not be carrying this out.
Netanyahu knows how to play Trump.
Of course, many people speculate that Netanyahu, the Israeli government, has something on Trump, which to try to explain not only Trump's pro-Israel policy, but the extreme blank check nature of it, how open-ended his support for Israel has been.
I wonder if the name Epstein has anything to do with that, Mark.
Well, that's right.
Many people have made this point.
Who knows?
I mean, there's so many aspects of it.
Donald Trump has, of course, deceived foreign countries, has gone back and forth, has shown bad faith to foreign countries.
But in a way, he's showing very bad faith even to his own base of support.
This is very much out of line with what Donald Trump used to say himself about what his foreign policy should be.
I have several quotes here from Trump over the last year or two that people should keep in mind.
Here's what Donald Trump said.
We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with.
Another one, we must abandon the failed policy of nation-building and regime change.
Another one, we will build up our military not as an act of aggression, but as an act of prevention.
In short, we seek peace through strength.
In other words, I'm not going to start a war.
Hold on right there.
This is a perfect place for a quick pause because when we come back, you are onto something that I wanted to bring up and ask you about, and that is Trump against Hillary Clinton and his position on foreign policy then and now.
We'll be right back.
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Why don't we say to the government writ large that they have to spend a little bit less?
Anyone ever had less money this year than you had last?
Anyone have a 1% pay cut?
You deal with it.
That's what government needs, a 1% pay cut.
If you take a 1% pay cut across the board, you have more than enough money to actually pay for the disaster relief.
But nobody's going to do that because they're fiscally irresponsible.
Who are they?
Republicans.
Who are they?
Democrats.
Who are they?
Virtually the whole body is careless and reckless with your money.
So the money will not be offset by cuts anywhere.
The money will be added to the debt, and there will be a day of reckoning.
What's the day of reckoning?
The day of reckoning may well be the collapse of the stock market.
The day of reckoning may be the collapse of the dollar.
When it comes, I can't tell you exactly, but I can tell you it has happened repeatedly in history when countries ruin their currency.
Okay, yes, okay.
I'm ready to go.
Yeah.
Hello?
Well, okay, I was quoting some of the statements that Donald Trump himself made to the American people promising he was going to avoid regime change wars.
And one of them, he said, I'm not going to start a war.
I'm going to stop wars.
And Donald Trump kept on emphasizing repeatedly in both in all the times he's run for president that he's a deal maker.
He's the person who doesn't make wars, he stops wars or ends wars.
Now, we've seen, of course, he was not able and has not been able to end either the Israel-Palestine conflict or the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
But for him to launch the war that he has along with Israel is completely contrary to not only his statements, but the spirit of what Donald Trump had been claiming and that his base of support, of course, the American people have wanted.
They want the United States to stay out of foreign wars, and especially because of the fiasco, the disaster, the catastrophic record of America's attempts to reform and change governments to be in line with the United States.
Okay, Mark, I'm back here.
2016 Trump Social Media Blast00:11:54
We had a little hiccup there.
You missed my intro.
I think there was a disruption in the connection.
What I was saying was, to your point, as we continue this conversation with you about the situation in Iran, is that there was a litany of content on social media today, Twitter especially, quoting Trump's positions from the 2015 campaign, 2016 campaign against Hillary, and then even years far prior to that.
And of course, the discrepancies then and now are as wide as the Gulf.
But that was very much one of the things that propelled him to this upstart win in 2016, where he was the underdog.
His position on immigration, maybe number 1A, and his refreshing position on foreign policy as a 1B, especially when contrasted with the horrible doctrine of the Republican Party under the neoconservative Bush administration.
That's all gone now.
Right.
Yes, in fact, that's one of the reasons why I'm just very disappointed that Trump actually took this measure, because this is such a crass repudiation, betrayal of his own promises that this will be bad for the Republicans in the upcoming elections.
And Trump has said himself, and I think it's true, that if the Republicans lose control of either House of Congress, that whatever House of Congress where Republicans have lost control will begin a whole series of hearings and efforts to impeach him.
This will be very embarrassing because there's a whole lot about Donald Trump that at least plausibly makes one can make a good argument that he has broken the law and has acted in a high-handed way that's suitable for impeachment.
In any case, it's embarrassing, and it'll be bad for the Republican Party.
Supposedly, within the administration, there was a dissension among members of its inner circle about going to attack Iran.
And supposedly, JD Vance and Tulsa Gabbard, who is the U.S. intelligence director, both opposed the attack against now taking place.
So, I mean, Vance, of course, his agenda, his interest is not just what's happening right now.
He's looking ahead to the time, I'm sure, that he will be the presidential candidate after Donald Trump, and he will be president himself.
And it is going to hurt, he knows it'll hurt him and his Republican Party if Donald Trump launches the war as not only as unprovoked and as illegal as this one is, but also as clueless about what the exact agenda is, what's going to happen on the day after, the day after that.
That's an astonishing aspect of this whole thing.
Well, you know, we're going to have Patrick Martin on in the second hour.
Patrick is going to be talking more about the actual hour-to-hour military actions that have taken place yesterday and today.
So he's going to be talking about something obviously very closely related.
You're talking about it from a slightly different but overlapping lens.
And it's all important and it all helps inform the bigger picture.
But I want to go back to something that you had touched on just for a brief moment in the opening segment.
And that is, again, how is this, I mean, certainly it's not being sold at all to the American public, not through the media, not through the support base of MAGA, not through Congress, not at all.
They just did it, or the Trump administration just did it.
And I'm still trying to understand if they have put forth any reasons.
What exactly is the reason?
Is it the same old, tired and worn-out Iran is very close to getting nuclear weapons, which Netanyahu's been saying since at least the early 90s?
Is that what we're going with here?
Right.
That's one of the very important points.
Trump has not even given a coherent, straightforward answer about why this war is necessary.
Today, in what he posted, he seems to imply that the great advantage of this war is it'll overthrow the regime in Iran and the people of Iran will be liberated.
The American public has no interest in that.
Okay, let them be liberated, but that's not our job.
It's not something that we should be concerned about.
It's exactly the opposite of what Trump promised.
Sometimes he'll say, well, Iran's very close to having nuclear weapons.
Last year, Tulsi Gebard told Congress that the consensus of American intelligence is that Iran does not even have a nuclear weapons program.
Now, much of the American media is guilty of a great deception.
Fox News in particular, the Wall Street Journal, conflate a nuclear program with a nuclear weapons program.
Many countries in the world have nuclear reactors.
They have nuclear programs.
Brazil has nuclear wrappers.
Argentina, France.
Many countries have nuclear wrappers.
That doesn't mean they're making nuclear weapons.
And if Tulsi Gabbard and the consensus of intelligence people around the world is that Iran is not even trying to make nuclear weapons, especially if Trump says he's destroyed whatever facility they have, it seems that his claim or pretext that he has to attack Iran because of that problem, that doesn't seem to hold water.
So Trump has not even given coherent reasons for the American public or even his own administration exactly what it is he hopes to achieve and why.
Now, let me ask you this, Mark.
We're back five by five here.
Let me adjust my levels again.
So I would say your opinion is as good as anyone's on this, but in point of fact, it's actually more informed than most.
And I'm talking about not just most that we talk to, but most that anybody can talk to.
I've always said you should be hosting a Sunday morning current affairs show.
But so I would ask you this, and this is more of an opinion-based analysis than anything.
But when you try to make sense of this, would it stand to reason that a Faustian deal was made with Trump, that his Jewish benefactors basically said, we're going to let you do some things domestically, and we're certainly going to let you say some things domestically that's going to excite your base, but you're going to give us Iran.
Do you think that that could have been pretty much how it went or is that too conspiratorial?
Something like that.
But again, Trump is unusual.
He doesn't operate in the normal way.
He seems to, he says things at the moment that strike his fancy, that seem important, but he doesn't even have that level of sort of consistent thinking through problems.
I mean, he said.
Self-awareness.
No, I mean, come on.
I mean, I'm not trying to be too harsh here, but some months ago he said it was essential, critical, the United States take control, take ownership of Greenland.
Now, did he really believe it?
Who knows?
But that's what he said.
Now, he backed down on that.
And he's made many statements over the years that sound very important at the time.
He seems to really believe it.
But later, he sort of abandons.
I don't know how many people still remember when he was promising and his followers were all yelling, lock up Hillary Clinton.
He was going to go after Hillary Clinton after he never did that.
It's hard to know what he really believes.
He used to say that Mom Danny, the mayor of New York, was going to destroy the city and he's a communist.
Now he says, well, he's a great guy.
He'll sort of do well there.
Who knows?
Donald Trump is more than any other American leader I know of motivated by impulsive considerations.
Well, he may seem that way, but on the other hand, he may just be doing what his master tells him of Netanyahu.
Well, okay.
But again, is that really any he's put he's putting in a way even his own legacy interests and the interests of his family and his party then above the interests of behind the interests of Israel and the organized Jewish community.
That's extraordinary because he doesn't, does he even need that level of support now that presumably this is his last term in office?
He might, you could argue that he needed it when he was running in 2016 or 2020 or 2024 when billionaire Jewish Zionists were his strongest and most important supporters in these campaigns.
Today, he, I mean, unless he's planning another run for president or some other something we don't really know yet.
Well, he could just be coming up to these midterms.
Well, I mean, but this doesn't help him.
This doesn't help him with the midterms.
If anything, this is going to be, I don't think they were going to hold on anyway, the way things were going with the affordability crisis.
But this certainly hurts him.
Mark, you bring up an excellent point.
Even if there were a quid pro quo, as we were hypothesizing there a moment ago, I don't know what holds him to it now.
He's done.
That's right.
That's right.
That's one of the reasons why I thought there might not be a war, because Donald Trump is first of all concerned about himself.
Well, all right, let's bring it back right there.
We're back five by five now with the great Mark Weber, IHR.org, James Edwards, Keith Alexander, Patrick Martin up in the second hour.
Sam Dixon's still to come tonight as well.
It's all about Iran and where we go from here.
Stay tuned.
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Breaking news this hour from Town Hall.
I'm Erry Rose.
President Trump says Iran's supreme leader has been killed in a joint U.S. and Israeli military operation.
The president announced the death of Ayatollah Khamenei in a social media post, writing that the supreme leader was one of the most evil people in history.
Donald Trump also said the Ayatollah's passing is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their country.
The death occurred after a joint U.S.-Israeli aerial bombardment, and the president said heavy bombing would continue for several days.
Greg Klugston, Washington.
University of St. Andrews Strategic Studies professor Phillips O'Brien says the answer to a key question should come soon after the military operation ends.
Have they been able to devastate the regime to a degree that the regime's rule is threatened and the leadership is safe and decapitated?
That is something we should know in a few days, whether they've gotten that part of the operation under control or not.
If, you know, within a week they have not gotten rid of the regime, the regime is still there, the military is still loyal, and the Iranian people have not risen up, then I think we can say they have not done their preparation work.
Public policy expert Matthew Contanetti believes President Trump's State of the Union address was a resounding success.
I think he reset the political conversation.
He wove these stories of patriotism into the speech in such a kind of dramatic and captivating way, the Democrats didn't know what to do.
And then in that very important moment, when he asked Congress to stand up, if they believed that the government's primary responsibility was protecting American citizens, not illegal aliens, the Democrats sat down.
World leaders have responded cautiously after the attacks.
Saturday, European leaders held emergency meetings and moved to protect citizens in the Middle East.
More on these stories at townhall.com.
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Why We Take Our Side00:11:48
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What they want, Chris, is especially in the Middle East.
They want the United States to fight Israel's war against Hezbollah, Syria, but especially Iran.
And the Israelis want us to fight Iran as well.
But it's not in the interest of the United States.
None of those countries, even Hezbollah and Hamas, have not attacked the United States of America.
I don't think the country's listening to the neocons anymore.
I think they're discredited.
The question is, is Bush listening to them?
Because he was gone for a while up through his second inaugural, very much according to a script they wrote.
So, Mark, of course, that was the voice of Pat Buchanan, the best president we never had.
And that goes back, God, about 20 years.
Well, no, this was during the Bush age.
So about 20 years ago, thereabouts.
And it could have, that was commentary.
If you hadn't mentioned Bush, that could have been well received on television today.
We are back with Mark Weber.
Mark is such a regular guest, one of our mainstays here.
And as Mark mentioned, it was on the evening.
I had to go back, Mark, and look it up myself.
But I certainly vividly remember the night.
It just so happened to be June 21st of last year.
It was part of the so-called 12-day war.
But you, my friend, were live on the air with us as the news reports began to flood out that America had bombed the Iranian nuclear facilities, which I think had been largely abandoned.
Trump at that time said that they had obliterated Iran's nuclear capacity.
Yet here we are again.
What is that about?
And you can respond to the Buchanan quote if you'd like.
Well, yes, Pap Buchanan articulated and expressed what the world increasingly understands.
The astonishing thing is how different the mood of the world and of the American public is just compared to two years ago.
Polls show that support for Israel has fallen drastically over the last couple of years because the world can see what Israel has done and is doing in Gaza and toward Palestinians.
Remember, the essential attitude of the Israeli government toward non-Jews, not just whether they're Arabs, but entire in the world, is a very suspicious, adversarial one.
One that those people, well, sorry, what?
The Goim.
The Gohem.
Basically, everybody in the southern tears is a gom and they're cattle.
And so, and Pat Buchanan understands that.
And the American public over the last two years has learned what societies throughout history have learned about this power because its agenda and its interests are very different than the agenda and the interests of other people.
And this has happened over and over in history.
These wars are not in America's interest.
Before Israel was founded, America had no enemies in the Middle East.
No one in the Middle East was anti-American.
If anything, they were very pro-American.
Iran and these other countries are unhappy with the United States precisely as a consequence of America's longstanding support for Israel and Israel's seemingly insatiable desire for conquest and oppression of non-Jews within its power.
We're the bodyguard of Israel.
Yeah, we're basically the bodyguard of Israel, and everybody in the world, and particularly in the Middle East, knows it.
Well, Mark, respond to this.
I'm getting information now here through the media as of four minutes ago that, and this could be a bluff.
You never know who's posturing and what's rhetoric and what's more than that.
But the Chinese Ministry of National Defense is weighing the possibility of China intervening on behalf of Iran.
When you were on last year, excuse me, the bombs fell while the markets were closed.
If you had to guess or predict, do you see this as being a similarly short-scale thing?
Now, they moved an awful lot of equipment over there, naval and air equipment over there in the course of the last week.
But even up until a couple of days ago, you were optimistic, or at least had hope, but let me just put it that way, that Trump would not do what it appears he has done today.
But do you still see this as possibly, potentially being something that ends in a few days and he declares victory and goes back and hoping he has satisfied Israel?
Or do you see this as developing into something much, much bigger with more bulletins?
Well, that's a very good question.
It seems like Trump was holding out the notion.
He thought already in June that when they attacked that Iran would basically run up the white flag.
They'd say, okay, Mr. Trump, whatever you want, we'll do.
Or he thought just in the last few weeks that the threat of military force would make the Iran government say, okay, Mr. President, we'll just do whatever you want.
Iran isn't going to do that.
Iran is not Venezuela.
It's not Panama.
It's not Guatemala.
Iran is a country of 90-plus million people.
It's a very old and venerable civilization.
Iranians are not pushover people.
It's a big country.
It's an important country.
And they're not going to be treated and kicked around the way European powers and the United States have treated them in the past.
It's U.S. domination of Iran that was a major factor in the overthrow of the Shah in 1978-79.
Iran fought a war for eight years against Iraq at a time when Iran was far more isolated than it is today.
But they held out in the face of use of poison gas by Iraq, by missiles and bombs, over an eight-year period fought against their country.
But they held out.
Now, I want to make a so Donald Trump seems to think that either the Iranian government will now say, okay, Mr. President, we surrender, or that the government will be overthrown.
I want to make a point that I haven't heard the media make.
Just a few days ago, that was last week, Ayatollah Khomeini in the government said, if I die, he said, the person who will take over is a man named Ali Larajani.
Now, I was at a major meeting, a huge conference in Iran at which Ayatollah Khomeini spoke and also Larajani spoke.
Larajani was for years the speaker of the Iranian parliament, and he's now been the national security advisor to the government and effectively has become a kind of head of the government in recent months because Khomeini himself is elderly, he's more infirm, he's not on top of things, and so Larajani has taken over a lot of the duties.
And so the speculation is, and this is, I think, valid, the government isn't just going to collapse.
There is a solid base of support for the Islamic Republic, and it'll increase during this time because the people are rallying around a government that at least is trying to defend them against a country, the United States and Israel, that are bombing them.
Apparently, just this morning, the Israelis bombed a girls' school in South Iran and killed a whole lot of girls.
I mean, people, this infuriates people, especially people with a strong sense of national identity, as Iranians have much more so than many other countries.
So what will happen probably if Khomeini is dead, which seems to be the case, Larajani will probably be the new supreme leader.
I said this, you might remember in the interview that you and I did for American Free Press.
If there's a regime change, it will not be more friendly to the United States.
It will be more nationalistic, not less.
And Americans don't understand that.
And especially Trump doesn't understand that.
Many American leaders have this fantastically childish view that, well, everybody in the world just wants to be like America.
And we just give them a chance and they just can't wait to follow the lead of the United States.
Just the opposite is happening under Donald Trump.
Most of the world now looks at Trump as completely unreliable, as deceitful, mendacious, and untrustworthy.
And he's increased that.
He's actually, in foreign policy anyway, accelerating the very trends that he said he wanted to stop.
He's not making America greater.
He's actually making up for America's lack of or fall in prestige and power and influence with military strength.
That's a very dangerous thing.
Military strength cannot make up for the weaknesses in political life, in social life, cultural life, and political life.
And those are very, America is a more fragile, more divided country than it has been.
And making up for it with a lot of appeals to patriotism and military power, it's not a way to, it's not a substitute for real strength and health and well-being of a society.
Well, Mark, it's not just Trump, though.
The Iranian people ever since Ayatollah Khomeini was around.
You know, basically, people in that part of the world, you topple one government or one leader, and there are, you know, another one just like him, a clone to take his place.
And that's what happens in Iran.
You know, finding somebody that is a Western liberal to take over the place is, you know, like trying to find their scarce hens' teeth.
Well, look, how many is the second supreme leader?
First one was Khomeini, the person who took over after the Shah.
That's Khomeini.
And how many are religious figures?
They're Ayatollah's.
Larajani is not.
He's not a religious figure.
He's also rather unusual.
He's blonde-haired and blue-eyed, which is not a common thing in Iran, although it's not unknown.
He's more secular.
He's more sort of practical in how he looks at things.
That's one of the big problems of the Islamic Republic: its leaders are chosen or selected in large measure on the level of their piety, not the level of their competence and though, from his predecessor based on what the fact is, he won't be terribly different, but if anything, he will be, in a sense, more adroit and also more nationalistic, if anything.
Truth Over Time00:02:18
We'll be right back with Mark Weber.
We're going to get the report from the scene itself with Patrick Martin in the next hour and how this may turn out.
Can't Iran quote-unquote win this thing?
We'll be talking about it.
Stay tuned.
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Iran's Future: Representing the People00:11:36
For the second consecutive week and the third time already this year, former government contractor Patrick Martin will be with us in the second hour.
He has worked in 78 different countries on behalf of Uncle Shmuel, including the Middle East.
He knows the people there, as does Mark Weber.
We'll be talking about the political ramifications on Trump's legacy with Sam Dixon in the third hour.
But, Mark, again, just to reiterate the point one more time, it was last summer, June the 21st.
You were with us when the bombs started falling.
Here we are now on February the 28th, and you're back with us on the same day that this war appears to be taking on a brand new dimension.
And we look ahead to what's to come and what it means for our people, what it means for politics here, what it means geopolitically.
Where do we want to go with this, Mark?
What are some things that we need to be covering?
I think one thing I would be not doing my duty if I didn't ask you this, because it is so rare, I think, that people in our movement can talk to someone who's actually been in country.
What can you tell us about the Iranian people, perhaps their resolve?
I mean, it has been mentioned, of course, that America has been around, what, 249, 250 years total.
I mean, if you go back to the colonies, obviously, you go back to the, you know, the 16 and 1700s.
But that's a drop in the bucket to the thousands of years Iran has been there.
Do you think Iran will still be there next year?
And also, is there a large group of people that are looking for regime change over there?
Is that another manufactured image for the consumption of the couple of things?
First of all, the kickoff or the reason that people are unhappy is mainly economic.
There's a high inflation rate.
This has been true the times I've been there.
The government and the Revolutionary Guard Corps plays a very oversized, outsized, and very unhelpful role in the economy.
But the biggest problem is the sanctions policy.
The sanctions policy of the United States, of course, promoted by Israel to strangle the country has had a big effect and has hurt the country.
I mean, there's many examples of that.
And people are unhappy about the economics of the thing.
Having said that, there is a very important minority that will support the Islamic Republic.
The primary identity of most Iranians is not religious.
The Islamic Republic came out of the revolution because Ayatollah Khomeini became the rallying point of opposition to the Shah.
Most Iranians, yeah, they're Muslim, but their identity goes back far before the time that the country was even Muslim.
They're not religious fanatics, in other words.
Well, some are, yes, but their primary identity is Iranian.
Remember, Iran is the name of the country, is just a cognate.
It's just related to the word Aryan.
They're not Semitic.
If you talk to Iranians, one of the first things that often they'll bring up is, we're not Arabs.
Their language is an Aryan language, related to European languages.
Their heritage is not Semitic.
And their own version of Islam is different than it's Shia.
It's a different version of Islam.
It's something like the difference in Shia and Sunni between Protestants and Catholics.
But that's simplifying the thing.
The point is, the identity is more Iranian than it is religious.
And so the Islamic Republic, to that extent, is sort of an odd fit for the country.
It'd be like, imagine if some Baptists were to take over the United States of America.
Well, would they be, would their primary interest be, well, I mean, seriously, Mike Huckabee people.
Well, okay, yeah, Mike Huckabee.
But anyway, my point is that whatever happens, there will be whatever government comes in, if it's going to have any kind of credibility, any kind of endurance, is going to be first and foremost one that represents the Iranian people and who they are.
And they are, yes, they're Muslim overwhelmingly.
It's a rather conservative society, too.
Now, just the other day, a former prime minister of Israel said that we have to worry about the new Iran.
He says he made a point that Turkey is now looming as a great threat to Israel and that we have to get ready now to fight a rising Turkey.
Well, do Americans want to make Israel's enemies our enemies forever?
This isn't going to go away.
And this was predicted by people in the state.
And this was predicted by American leaders in the State Department in 1947 and 48 when Truman even faced the question of whether even to recognize a Jewish state.
All the leading people, including the Secretary of State Marshall, said we shouldn't even recognize a Jewish state in Palestine.
But Trump said later, I did it because of this enormous pressure.
He said on no issue did he receive such pressure as he did over recognizing Israel from the usual power brokers in the United States.
And that's what I call the original sin of American foreign policy.
I mean, Truman, yeah.
And that has been a hallmark of American policy in the Middle East ever since.
American presidents have put the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of what's good for the United States.
And this was foreseen by State Department people and by people who knew the region already in 1947, 1948.
This point has been made over and over by people who know the regime.
So the alternative increasingly is going to be a very stark one between Israel or the interests of America and the world.
And for a long time, you could justify supporting Israel as part of the whole Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.
That's all gone now.
That's gone.
And supporting Israel means supporting policies that are not only contrary to American interests, they're contrary to the very principles that American leaders claim to support and have claimed to support for years.
That is self-determination, democracy, equality before the law, all of those things.
And America is anyway, this is now more obvious than it was just a few years ago, and it's reflected in public opinion polls around the world.
Let me ask you this very quickly because we are getting short on time.
I want to encourage everyone to stay abreast of what Mark is doing at ihr.org, Institute for Historical Review.
Always a favorite.
Always great to have you on, Mark.
Anytime bombs start dropping, we're going to call you.
We don't have to worry.
All we have to do is schedule them and bombs will start dropping.
We're going to keep this new tradition, this newfound tradition we've established these last couple of years.
But of course, you've been appearing with us consistently and faithfully for the entirety of our 22-year run.
But if you could, just again, to give us some depth and perspective here.
America's 250 years old.
Iran is thousands of years old.
And do you think they'll be around next year?
Of course, yes.
I mean, and the idea that, I mean, this has been a fantasy of American leaders for years.
This was during the 1930s and 40s.
American leaders thought they could turn China into some sort of version of the United States, or that we could make Vietnam a kind of example of the United States, or that we were going to bring democracy or American-style democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.
No, this isn't going to happen.
And this delusional idea is part of, you might say, this misguided idea of American exceptionalism, that we can somehow America can make over other countries and other people.
That's not going to happen.
It's doomed to failure from the outset.
And for Trump to talk now about how he wants the Iranian people to take over with this idea.
See, Israel is a lot smarter.
Netanyahu knows that that's foolish.
He doesn't care.
His interest is just degrading and bringing down the power of Iran or any country in the region that is hostile to the US.
It's free of charge by having America do it.
Yeah, have America do it.
Yeah, Israel will do some bombing, but they know that.
I'm sorry?
What?
I said that heavy lifting will be done by America.
That's always a good question.
Of course.
Israel's very existence as a country is dependent upon outside support and has been from the get-go.
It's not a self-sufficient country.
It requires constant effusions of support from the outside, even to stay in place.
It has big problems of its own internally.
But we've made from the very beginning, our political leaders put their own personal interests ahead of the interests of what's good for America and the world.
That's corruption.
That's the definition of corruption.
And American government is, in that sense, a very, very corrupt one.
Now, Americans don't see that because they've been very influenced by propaganda, which makes which tells America, tells the American people, that what's good for Israel is really good for America.
Well, that lie is having less and less credibility, especially over the last few years, because people can see what the consequences are.
And especially the Epstein thing shows the enormous power and influence of this network of very corrupt, self-interested people who put their own interests ahead of what's good for the country as a whole.
I mean, a healthy society has leaders who are sacrificing their own personal interests for the good of the country that they're responsible for.
Mark, we are out of time.
Before what happened today happened, we had originally thought to bring you on.
You were going to be on to discuss will he or won't he in terms of what might answer to that.
So that's changed.
We were also going to talk to you.
Unfortunately, we have an answer at least.
But as you say, the question now is: when any war starts, then all the predictions are sort of out the window.
It's hard to know.
It can go a number of different ways because very few wars end up going in the direction that everybody at the beginning knows or thinks it will.
Well, Machiavelli had a famous comment on that.
No battle plan survives the war is another one.
But we were also going to talk to you about the state of the union, but I guess that's all in history now.
A lot's changed since Monday and Tuesday.
But thank you, Mark Rep, for being on.
We're going to go to Patrick Martin next and Sam Dixon.