“Heading To WORLD WAR 3!” Israel & US 'Armageddon' in Iran | Feat. Jeffrey Sachs
The new Ayatollah shares not only a name and a bloodline with his assassinated father - but also the hardline views that America and Israel are sworn enemies and weakness and chaos in the region makes its neighbors easier to control. It’s therefore no surprise, under current circumstances, that Israel says it will kill the new Ayatollah - and the one after that.But many people are still struggling to answer the two prerequisite questions: Why is the US at war? And why does it have to be now? Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a senior advisor to the United Nations, was recently caught on film confronting ambassador Danny Danon about Israel’s ‘suicide’ mission - and they both join Piers Morgan to give their view on the escalating situation. Piers also speaks to former IDF international spokesman Doron Spielman, former Israeli negotiator and president of the US/Middle East Peace Project, Daniel Levy, ‘Provoked’ author Scott Horton and Tehran University’s Dr Foad Izadi. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Mars Men: For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://Mengotomars.com Polymarket poll on crude oil prices in March - https://polymarket.com/event/will-crude-oil-cl-hit-by-end-of-march Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Joint Israel-U.S. Madness00:07:15
Benjamin Netanyahu told us in a tweet last week this fulfills a dream of 40 years.
This is a joint Israel-U.S. madness creating havoc for the world.
With all due respect to this so-called professor, Iran Fidel Gressor, Iran is the one who is spreading a bit radical ideology.
I'm struggling right now over this definition of evil.
What about the decades in which Palestinians lived under a brutal regime of structural apartheid?
It's simply your vision of history.
Over the last two and a half years, Israelis have been living in shelters, attacked over our peaceful border, and it all leads back to Iran.
This has nothing to do with America.
This is Israel's problem.
Yeah, you wipe that smile off your face real quick there, Mr. Israeli spokesman.
The new Ayatollah shares not only a name and a bloodline with his assassinated father, but also many of his hardline views.
America and Israel are sworn enemies.
Dissent and protest must be crushed.
Weakness and chaos in the region makes its neighbors easier to control.
It's therefore no surprise under current circumstances that Israel says it will kill the new Ayatollah and the one after that.
None of this brings us anywhere closer to any of the stated justifications for going to war.
In fact, it's the opposite.
And many people are still struggling to answer the two prerequisite questions.
Why is the U.S. at war and why does it have to be now?
Last week, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, and many others said it had to be now because Israel was going to do it anyway.
The so-called imminent threat was actually the threat of a retaliation to Israeli aggression.
Unsurprisingly, they hurriedly walked that back.
But this narrative that the Israeli tail wagged the American dog is not going away.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Senator Lindsey Graham flew several times to Israel in order to coach Netanyahu on how to persuade President Trump to join the war.
And Anthony Blinken, the former Secretary of State, said they've seen this playbook before.
This has been a long story when it comes to Iran.
And back during the Obama administration, the Israelis were pushing President Obama to take military action against Iran and were warning that they would do it themselves if he didn't.
And he wouldn't because he thought the better way to get at the nuclear program, which is what we were focused on, was through very muscular diplomacy backed up by very, very strong sanctions that we rallied the world to put in place.
And then we got the Iran nuclear agreement.
An esteemed panel is standing by.
And in a moment, we'll hear from UN Ambassador Danny Dannon, one of Israel's most senior diplomats who lives and works in New York.
We will begin with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a senior advisor to the United Nations who joins me now.
Professor Sachs, always great to have you on on Sensib, but particularly after the last week or so.
Just first of all, your overview about this war, which nobody wants to call a war, and where we are nine, ten days into it.
It's a war, and thousands are being killed.
Israel and the United States are carpet bombing Tehran, and there is lots of death, schoolgirls being killed, a bloodbath underway.
At the same time, the world economy is about to go into one of the biggest crises in the modern period, driven by the complete collapse of oil supplies coming from this region, a predictable consequence of the Israeli-U.S. aggression.
So this is a calamity.
This was a war of choice.
Benjamin Netanyahu told us in a tweet last week, this fulfills a dream of 40 years.
This is a war not caused only by Israel.
This is a joint Israel-U.S. madness.
The U.S. wants to rule the world, and Israel wants to rule its region, the Middle East, and they partner together.
So it's not really right to say that Israel determined this or the U.S. determined this.
This is a partnership.
It was interesting that you had Tony Blinken on just a moment ago.
He partnered in the genocide in Gaza.
It was the same with his administration, a U.S.-Israel partnership that goes back decades.
It has created a disaster around the Middle East, absolute disaster from Libya to Iran, with many countries desolate and destroyed in between.
And it now will create a disaster for the whole world.
I know you're going to have Ambassador Danny Dannon on after me.
He represents, in my view, a government that is doing more damage to the world and to humanity than any other government.
He doesn't like my saying that, but that is actually the point, together with his partner, the United States.
Both of them are rogue nations led by megalomaniacs, creating havoc for the world completely unnecessarily.
Well, you actually confronted Danny Dannon at the UN.
Let's take a look.
Those of you who like, yes, very clever.
Suicide.
You're welcome.
No, it's suicide.
You're welcome to support Iran destroying Hamas in a good manner.
You can fly there if you want.
It was an extraordinary encounter.
What were you actually saying to him?
I was saying that Israel is committing suicide because it is destroying any remnant of sympathy or empathy in the United States and all over the world.
So I said that that suicide was tragic.
We have polls, Pierce, that show that for decades, U.S. sympathy ran 60 to 70% for Israel, 15% for Palestine.
Now they run 41% for Palestine, 36% for Israel.
In other words, the American public is on the side of Palestine, and that's going to grow dramatically.
What's going to happen, whether Mr. Dannon or his colleagues like it or not, the world is going into a profound economic crisis in the coming weeks and months.
And this is Israel's choice.
Grim Situation Beyond Iraq00:05:36
Israel set this off together with the United States.
The world will pay a fearsome price for this delusion, and people will know where this came from.
It's very, very sad.
Very sad.
It's suicidal for Israel.
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Right.
Is there a way that it could work in the sense that it appears from the amount of missiles that they're putting up that the Iranian capacity to attack back is receding very quickly, which is unsurprising given the overwhelming superiority, of course, of the American military coupled with the Israeli military.
But is there a moment in here where if all their military firepower is pretty well taken out, that the regime begins to collapse from within?
Look, I'm not able to answer any definitive military judgment, but the people who are opining on this around the world believe that that is not the case, that Iran has held together and will continue to hold together, has vast arsenals of missiles and drones.
And we'll see, because this war is not ending in the next few days.
And Israeli generals themselves have said publicly, this could go on into the fall.
And the American public is being prepared for a long war.
So even the progenitors of this war are not claiming that this is about to be won.
I don't hear that from anybody.
I don't see it in the markets either, in the soaring oil prices.
I don't see it in the behavior of the energy producers, suppliers, and shippers.
I don't see it in the shutdown of production in Qatar on its gas, in Iraq on its oil, and the destruction of oil fields.
I see a calamity building and a lot of blood flowing.
It's a kind of mass murder of civilians by Israel and the United States.
This is shocking, actually.
We should keep it in mind.
This is not targeted bombing.
This is carpet bombing Tehran.
And I've been speaking on the phone with absolutely desperate people in Tehran in the last 48 hours, and it's carpet bombing.
And they're killing indiscriminately.
So this is a disaster that is not likely to go away.
No one's claiming in Israel or the U.S. that it's likely to go away.
And the consequences for the world will be utterly awful.
And Piers, we have a lot of Americans.
We have a very particular society.
We have a lot of Americans who are saying, move on.
This is Armageddon coming.
This is the promised end of the world.
We are hearing lots of reports about this being preached in the military.
We're seeing a lot of people who believe that the worse it gets, the closer we are to the second coming of Jesus Christ.
That's a motivating factor in the United States, I have to tell you.
It's a significant part of Mr. Trump's base.
And so bad news is not necessarily deterrence.
It may just mean escalation to Armageddon.
It is a grim situation that we're in.
We've not seen anything like it, actually, since World War II.
This is even beyond the Iraq war.
They then had, I won't say the dignity. but they then had the impulse to hide the motivations.
Here there is no impulse to hide the motivations.
It's just complete kill anybody and kill everybody and overturn this society of 100 million people and an ancient society of 5,000 years.
So it's dreadful.
Suicide and World War III00:08:08
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, I've interviewed you many times.
I don't think I've ever heard you speaking with such raw emotion, but I appreciate it.
We're heading to World War III and we're being led by extraordinarily violent governments in Israel and the United States.
And you'll hear a great defense in a moment by a skilled Israeli diplomat.
But what they are doing to the world is absolutely unforgivable and it will be recognized as such.
And it's a tragedy.
That's why I didn't use the word homicide when I talked to Mr. Dannon.
I used the word suicide because what Israel is doing is committing suicide.
Jeffrey Sachs, thank you very much indeed.
I appreciate you coming on Uncensored again.
Good to be with you.
Thank you.
Well, joining me now is Israel's ambassador to the UN Danny Dannon.
Danny, welcome back to Uncensored.
You heard Jeffrey Sachs there.
Obviously, you heard him in person in the UN when he confronted you.
Very emotional, very angry.
Talks about what you have embarked on here with this war in Iran as a suicide mission that will trigger World War III.
What is your response to him?
You know, there's so many lies, so many hate.
You know, he's driven by an agenda, you know, to go against Israel no matter what.
You know, we saw it during the war we had with Hamas and now with Iran, but no connection to reality.
You know, either professor is teaching economics.
So I hope he knows economics better than you know geopolitics, because let's go for the basic facts.
Why we are now in a war with Iran, why we have this operation.
Not because it's like a conflict between the American people or the Iranian people.
Not because we have a dispute over borders or over resources.
Basically, the cause of the conflict is the radical regime.
They decided they don't like the US and they don't like Israel without us saying anything or doing anything.
And they took it to the next step, building the capabilities to actually destroy us.
And we decided enough is enough.
We are not going to wait for them to achieve the ability to destroy us.
So with all due respect to this so-called professor, you know, we have facts.
And the facts are that Iran is the aggressor.
Iran is the one who is spreading this radical ideology.
You know, when you speak with Israelis, we love the Iranian people.
We have good memories from the day we actually used to go and visit Tehran before the revolution.
You know, we admire the wisdom of the Iranian people.
But once the revolution happened, and all of a sudden Iran became a wag state, and they promote the radical ideas of the Ayatollahs.
That's why we are where we are.
Okay, I mean, you say you love the Iranian people.
The cold, hard reality on the ground is that more Iranian civilians have now been killed in the last eight, nine days of this war than Hamas killed on October the 7th, according to the official figures.
That doesn't sit very easily with your love of Iranian civilians.
I beg to differ with you.
I think the Iranian people, they cannot say it out loud, but when they look up in the sky and they see the Israeli aircraft and the U.S. Air Force, they are grateful.
They have been waiting for those moments for 47 years.
They were oppressed.
And today we come to unchain them, to give them the tools to rise up.
Yes, it's going to be painful.
Also, it's painful for us in Israel.
It's painful for the Gulf countries.
You know, Iran, they are attacking more Arab countries in 10 days than Israel did in 77 years.
So it's not easy for anyone today around the world, but that's a price we have to pay in order to make this place a better, safer place.
It's been reported that up to 170 schoolgirls were killed in an airstrike on a school that was next to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps base.
We still don't appear to know for certain who caused that strike.
Can you give any clarity on that?
It's been a week now.
So, you know, we are looking into that incident.
You know, I don't think it was our involvement.
We regret the loss of life of any civilians.
It doesn't matter who is behind it, whether it was the IRGC or someone else, but we regret the loss of life of civilians.
And we target military infrastructure.
When I say we, it's Israel and the U.S. Iran, they're doing exactly the opposite.
You know, and I saw the interviews of Iranian officials, and they are saying we are not targeting civilians, only military targets in the Gulf.
They are lying.
Look at the airports in Dubai, in Abu Dhabi.
Look what's happening in Tel Aviv for the last 10 days.
They are targeting only civilian targets.
So there is a huge difference about the intentions.
But, you know, we regret the loss of life.
I just finished now an event at the UN where I hosted brave women from Iran who came to share with my colleagues about their experiences with this regime.
One of them, a very brave young woman, lost her eye in a demonstration.
The other was not allowed to come back into Iran.
So we know that the people of Iran, they pay a heavy price.
And I believe that soon they will be able to take the future in their own hands.
You must know, Ambassador, now, whether it was an Israeli plane that fired the missile into that girl's school, albeit it may have done so unintentionally.
It may be naming for the base.
I don't want to prejudge what may have happened there.
But you must know as a country whether it was one of your planes that did that or not.
So can you rule out that it was an Israeli plane?
No, first I have to tell you that from my experience in Gaza, and I think we spoke about it in the past, there were incidents that Hamas or the Islamic Jihad launched rockets into Israel and they fell in Gaza.
And there was an incident, a very tragic incident in a hospital.
It took a few hours for everybody to realize it wasn't us.
It was actually a rocket that flew from Gaza and fell in Gaza.
So we don't know the details.
From the information I have, I don't think that our air force was involved in that incident.
I know it's being investigated both by the IDF and also by the US airport.
People are looking at what's happening in this war, and they're seeing a regime which remains intact.
They're seeing the Ayatollah that was killed replaced by his younger son, also a Khomeini.
They're seeing the Islamic Revolutionary, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps still exercising ruthless control over the people.
There's no sign of any uprising by the Iranian people, perhaps because they're fearful of the bombs, perhaps because they're fearful of the IRGC, but they're certainly not rising up in the way that Donald Trump was talking about his hopes would be happening.
And we're seeing massive global economic mayhem driven by the virtual closure of the Strait of Homus and by the attacks by Iran on all the neighboring Gulf states, which are severely damaging the economies of all those countries.
And that has a knock-on effect, obviously, for the global economy.
And the longer this goes on, the worse the global economy will suffer.
The more lives are going to get lost on all sides.
And if ultimately the regime remains intact, how will you claim victory?
What is victory?
Global Economy Suffers00:15:06
So, first, allow me to look at the upside also.
You know, today we are degrading the capabilities of Iran that don't have the same capabilities as they had 10 days ago.
And we haven't finished yet.
We will continue to hammer the infrastructure of this terror machine.
And when I speak about capabilities, you know, you focus on the ballistic missiles, on the nuclear capabilities, and their proxies.
So, I think, you know, we can agree that it will not be the same.
It will be a weakened regime.
The question is whether there will be a regime change, I hope so.
I pray for that.
But it is up for the Iranian people to decide when they do it, when they rise up.
You know, if they are watching us now, I'm telling them, Maudou Mei Iran, the people of Iran, be brave, be strong.
Your time is coming very soon to go back to the streets and to lead this nation after 47 years of oppression.
I think it will come.
We know in the first few days, we focused on targeting the launchers to minimize the casualties in the area and in Israel.
But I think in the next few days, we will continue to target the IRGC and regime's assets, and hopefully it will encourage the people to move to the next stage.
Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the UN, I appreciate you coming back on our sense of thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Well, I'm going to be joined now by my panel, Dorren Spielman.
He's the former IDF international spokesman and author of When Stone Speak.
Daniel Levy, the former Israeli negotiator and president of the US Middle East Peace Project, and Scott Horton, author of Provote.
Welcome to all of you.
Scott Horton, let me start with you.
Clearly, very different views of what is happening here from Jeffrey Sachs and Danny Danon.
They had a very heated exchange in the UN, which says it all.
I imagine that your agreement probably lies a lot more with Jeffrey Sachs than Danny Danon.
But again, I put the same question to you about the possibility that this could eventually work in the sense that Israel believes, with good reason, that Iran has been the tentacle, the octopus with tentacles, for all the terrorism in the region that's been aimed at them through the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, and so on.
That it's run by an evil, repressive regime, which has been that way for 47 years, repressing its own people, repressing everything else in the region it can repress.
And that they've had this coming.
And that by decapitating the regime, you may then lead to an uprising from the Iranian people, many of whom hate the regime.
And that in five, 10 years, we may look back in history.
This is what I hear from many Israelis and be grateful for what has happened.
What would you say to that?
Well, I mean, it's built into the question, of course, that this is all Israel's interests at play here.
The great revolutionary Shiite menace is their problem, not ours.
Our problem is the bin Ladenites, al-Qaeda and ISIS, the radical Salafi edge of Wahhabi Sunni Islam and their terrorist movement, mostly America and Britain and Saudi Arabia's pet terrorists, although they oftentimes turn on us and kill us too.
But the Shiites are the Israelis' problem.
And even though every time America runs an errand over there to try to spite them, we end up empowering them like we did in Iraq War II.
And then inadvertently, when Obama built the caliphate to spite them, we ended up, that blew up too big.
So they had to take the Iranian side again in Iraq War III, which is, you know, that we have strikes going on against Shiite targets in Iraq right now because that's the regime that we put in power.
You quoted David Petraeus a minute ago about telling us how this ends.
Well, Iraq War II ended with David Petraeus putting Iran's best friends in power there and training up their army, the Bada Brigade, to be the Iraqi army.
And that's who we got a problem with as the war spreads right now.
But then secondly, as far as will the war work, no.
And as far as, well, it depends on who you ask, what their goals are.
The Trump administration says they want stability.
And they even told the Wall Street Journal, anonymous officials, told the Wall Street Journal, they might be happy with the Ayatollah Khomeini's grandson.
They don't like Khamenei's son.
They want Khomeini's grandson instead.
They have no capability, as Marco Rubio testified to the Senate.
They have no one to put in power.
They don't think for a minute they can parachute the monarchists in there.
They don't think for a minute that the Mujahideen e-cult communist terrorist cult can take over.
They don't think that the Kurdish communists, the PJAC, which are the Iranian Kurdish branch of the PKK in Turkey, they don't think that they can take over.
They don't think that the Baluki suicide bombers, Jandala, that America and Israel backed 10, 15 years ago, can take over the country.
But as the Israelis told the Financial Times, that's fine.
What they want to see is civil war.
What they want to see is chaos and destruction in Iran taken off the board.
They don't want to see a friendly new Iran, as Donald Trump said.
They want chaos.
They want Iran to look like Obama helped Israel turn Syria into back 15 and 10 years ago.
All right, Dorren Spearman, there are many people who think that is exactly what Israel wants.
They just want total chaos, a sort of rudderless Iran.
That's why they're blowing up all the oil refineries.
That's why their general view seems to be to cause as much mayhem as possible.
What do you say to that?
You know, Pierce, it's simply your visionist history.
Listening to Jeffrey Sachs and, you know, Scott is just, it's ridiculous.
It ignores the reality that over the last two and a half years and before Israelis have been living in shelters, running in and out of shelters, attacked over our peaceful border with Gaza, received thousands of missiles from Hezbollah, thousands of missiles from the Houthis.
We've been targeted in Israel and overseas.
And it all leads back to Iran.
It's as if Israel woke up one morning and said, we've got a great idea.
Let's fly 2,000 kilometers and try to attack a country that has 95 million people and we have 10 million people that is 90 times bigger than Israel, put our soldiers at risk just out of the blue because Israel wants to take over the world.
I mean, there's not a shred, a single shred of truth about this scenario.
Let's wake up, everybody.
At what point does a country have the right to defend its civilians against an enemy country that not only has said it wants to destroy you, but has launched 500 ballistic missiles in June, another series of ballistic missiles, including one that flew over my house and killed a worker in the middle of Tel Aviv today who will not go home to his family.
At what point do we have the most basic, basic right to defend our country?
Should we just sit here and wait for them to keep firing and lay down and roll over?
You know, there is such absolute hypocrisy.
You know, I'm listening to Jeffrey Sachs.
So you just Pierce, you let him speak for half an hour and it was, you know, so emotional.
Israel's committing suicide.
Well, let me ask Jeffrey Sachs and you, how do you suppose that Israel should respond to the Iranian terror threats from four different countries that have been attacking Israel?
Should we not fight back?
Should we just lay down?
Is that not suicide?
At the end of the day, Pierce, we are leaving Israel.
My point, that's exactly what you said.
This is Israel's problem, not America's.
Israel's not an ally of the United States.
Scott, just one second.
At the end of the day, this will go down in history the exact opposite of what Jeffrey Sachs said.
You have Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump.
Mark my words, they will go down in history like Churchill and Roosevelt, who were the first ones to confront the evil that spread throughout Germany and saved the West.
We are the very first ones because there's an imminent threat against us that are going to stop this threat before it hits American soil.
It already hit Israeli soil.
They will go down in history.
And everybody else that decries this war will be a minor footnote of those who said we should give in to the regime.
We can't defeat the regime.
If this was 1945, they'd have just said, no, let's not finish off with Germany.
Let's just let them reconstitute with Hitler's son, which is what Mujata is.
He is Khomeini's son.
For heaven's sake.
Okay, let me bring in.
Hang on.
Hang on.
Hang on one second.
Hang on, Scott.
Okay.
Well, very quickly, because Daniel's been waiting patiently.
Very quickly.
Just very quickly.
I said, this has nothing to do with America.
This is Israel's problem.
And he said, this is Israel's problem for five minutes.
Yeah, that's what I said.
Israel's not a state in the Union.
We have no treaty.
I'd like to respond.
I think that the United States wants a secure Middle East.
I don't think anybody wants a destabilized Middle East when Israel, which is the United States' greatest ally, is under mortal threat.
As we now see Saudi Arabia Scott, who is the United States' supposed ally, is now also under threat.
You've got the UAE who is under threat.
All of them are under threat by Iraq's war has the courage, and this president has the courage, Scott, beyond just protecting the U.S. troops, thousands of which have died over Iran over the last few decades, to say, you know what, I'm going to support the friends of the United States and to do the very simple act, which seems like none of you can accept, of defeating evil.
Good standing up against evil.
It can be defeated, and it must be defeated.
Okay.
The point I would make to that, Doran, is that you're very optimistic that the regime is going to be defeated.
And I think that the problem at the moment is there is no immediate sign of that happening.
In fact, the opposite seems to be the case.
You could bring in Daniel.
It's not a fairy tale.
Okay.
We actually have a lot of people.
Yeah, but we were told a year ago, actually, not even a year ago, that the attack on the nuclear installations was incredibly successful and had neutralized the threat of Iran and its nuclear capability.
And yet here we are, less than a year later, launching a massive war in Iran because apparently they were, you know, imminently about to acquire the ability for a nuclear weapon.
And those two positions seem to me completely, completely incompatible.
As I either it was neutralized last night, but it's stretching.
Shall I force my way in?
Yeah, Daniel, let me bring in Daniel.
Daniel, you've been very patient.
Thank you.
Over to you.
First, I'm struggling right now over this definition of evil.
I saw a country lay waste to Gaza.
I've seen a country that occupied Palestinians.
October 7th was a crime.
But what about the decades in which Palestinians lived under a brutal occupation, a regime of structural apartheid?
And then I look at what was done subsequently and I'm shaking because when I hear these glib comparisons to the Holocaust and to the Nazi regime, I feel it's a form of cheapening, almost of Holocaust revisionism.
You know, I'm quite confident that the Jewish population in Germany was not keeping the Germans under a brutal occupation for decades.
What a horrible analogy to draw to call this some kind of Holocaust.
Now, first of all, if one's talking about evil, what we have witnessed in Gaza should be painful and shameful to anyone who has grown up in a tradition which respects and values Jewish life and which considers never again to not be a parochial call, but a universal global call.
Now, let's come on to the subject at hand, which is what is going on with Iran.
Iran didn't attack Israel.
Iran hasn't attacked Israel.
I wish I could say that Israel hadn't attacked Iran, but as in your expressions of astonishment are wonderful, but they believe a revolution.
The attack in the Israelites.
It landed in June on Tel Aviv.
The attack in June was initiated by Israel.
The attack earlier this month, earlier this year, was initiated by Israel.
And my question is twofold.
First of all, is this extreme ambition, extremism, this maximalism likely to play out well for Israel?
And what do we think is going to happen as this plays out, as Mr. Horton just suggested, with the US?
Because I would argue that you have an Iran that has a strategy and you have an Israel that has a strategy.
It seems very clear, very transparent that the Israeli strategy is not some fairy tale of a happy new regime coming into place.
It is precisely regime collapse, state implosion, dismantlement and chaos.
Why?
Because Israel has been very clear that it has an agenda of regional domination here.
Why does it need an agenda of regional domination?
Because that's not about security.
We can come back and talk about that.
But that is central to the notion of a zero-sum endgame versus the Palestinians.
I think the Iranians have come into this with strategic coherence.
This time around, they've changed their national security posture and said, if this is going to be done against us, if this kind of a war is going to be launched against us, we will make it costly.
We will establish a deterrence and we will challenge the notion that America can stay cost-free in the West Asia region.
The worry I have, amongst others, is that the party Israel is relying on, I don't think, has a strategy whatsoever.
America used to go to war, wars that were often problematic for the world, for those who suffered, for America itself, with some degree of competence and coherence, some degree of a multi-layered interagency process.
Today, I think you have rank incompetence and incoherence.
And on any given day, the question is, what is this about?
You can make a geopolitical case.
Avoiding Perilous War00:15:54
You could say this is...
Daniel, let me ask you this.
If I can finish just this one thought, Piers, I'd be appreciative.
You could say this is about a chokehold, like they see Greenland in geopolitical, geoeconomic terms, about oil.
But you can also hear them talking about capitulation.
You can hear them suggesting this can be a Venezuela 2.0.
You can perhaps hear people say...
I'm sorry.
Who's the they, Daniel?
The spokespeople of the administration that is carrying out war, Mr. Spielman.
I would suggest, I would suggest that this could end in a couple of days or it could go on indefinitely.
But what you have here is Iran has not tried to say we will escalate toe to toe with Israel and the US.
They have said we will go vertical.
We will expand the theater of war and make this a question not of military capacity where the balance of power is clear, but of political endurance.
And if you go into war, not like Afghanistan, if you're America with 90% public support, not like Iran, Iraq with 70% public support, but with barely 30% public support, bipartisan criticism inside MAGA, your economy taking the stress, then the question of political endurance, which I think will decide this, I don't think looks good from an American.
And by extending the...
Okay, I mean, let me jump in.
Okay, let me jump in.
I mean, I would say the political stroke economic part of this cannot be understated because the economy is getting shredded globally.
Oil and gas prices are absolutely rocketing.
No one can get through the Strait of Hormuz pretty much without Iran say so.
So this is a very perilous moment for the global economy, I would say, notwithstanding the military part of this, where the strategy of Iran has been just to scattergun attack its neighboring Gulf states because they know that by effectively doing that and the way that they've been doing by targeting hotels and airports and so on, they are acting as a massive deterrent to people who are not naturally born in those states to want to go back to wherever they came from.
You've seen lots of Brits go back to Britain, for example, because they suddenly think that this safe oasis is not as safe as they thought.
But let me just ask you one question, Daniel, before I go to the others for their response to what you said.
And it says, when You said that Iran has not attacked Israel.
And the two examples you cite were indeed retaliatory.
But surely that ignores the reality, which is for decades, the Iranian regime, which has publicly talked about being wedded to the annihilation of Israel and here the chance of death to America at the same time.
And has killed lots of Americans and Israelis.
But the part you're missing, which I'm really curious about your response to, is that surely you would accept that by propping up and supporting with arms and lots of cash, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, they have been attacking Israel relentlessly for decades, but doing it through their proxies.
And that is, to me, that is the same thing.
Whether they're doing it directly or whether they're doing it through proxies, they have been attacking Israel.
Now, you might have concerns about the way Israel has responded.
And I would share some, you know, many of those concerns.
I've expressed them.
But no one could persuade me that Israel isn't fundamentally justified in trying to defend itself from the tentacled attacks by the Iranian regime through its proxies for many, many years.
So I'm not going to carry the brief for the Iranian governing structure and what it has set out to do.
What troubles me is...
What does that mean?
Daniel, what's your answer to Pierce?
What does that mean?
Just answer the simple question.
Do you consider the fact that Iran has funded and trained Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis to kill Israelis and are they actually attacking Israel or are they some parallel vertical regime?
What's your answer?
Here's my response.
I would consider it highly problematic.
If the response to Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, if the response to Israel being led by a war criminal with an international criminal court arrest warrant against his name, if the response to that would be an attempt to wipe the Israeli Jewish community off the map, Israel is a nuclear with whether Iran is a nuclear.
Is there any point at which you think Israel carry out military intervention?
I believe that Piers asked for anyone.
You see, when you can't, if you can't listen to a response to your army, Daniel, are we just going to shout over each other?
I know.
I'm trying to answer the question because I don't understand.
You shut up and I'll answer Pierce's question.
Take it easy.
Take it easy now.
We don't have to get over this.
Well, I think this is.
Okay, Daniel, let Daniel answer the question.
Let Daniel answer the question.
So I think the fact that Israel has maintained control of the sovereign skies of Lebanon, violated Lebanese sovereignty for decades, the fact that Israel has maintained a vicious violent occupation against the Palestinians does not mean that the solution is a military solution.
I think we should eschew and avoid war.
And war in this instance was avoidable.
Iran was manageable, not through kinetic military means.
I don't think this is going to make the Jewish population of Israel or anywhere else even safer.
I think quite the opposite.
It will be more dangerous.
Israel is going to have to step back from its illegal criminal activity.
Iran should step back from its illegal criminal activity.
And I would suggest that the way to do that is not by bombing schools, whether they're in Gaza, in Israel, or in Iran.
I would suggest the way you do that is you pursue other options.
And if anyone told me that Israel as a nuclear power, which has attacked Iran, not been attacked by Iran, where Iran's so-called proxies were more of a deterrence than an offense, that Israel is more than capable of handling itself militarily, but apparently absolutely incapable of handling itself politically and of having a defendant game.
It sounds like you're defending Iran and persecuting Israel.
Sorry, I'm not defending Iran.
It sounds a heck of a lot like yours.
My question to you, Mr. Daniel Zern is a single moment.
I'm trying to ask a question.
Can I just ask one question?
Sorry, I didn't realize that was your job.
I promise I'll be quiet.
Daniel is a single moment at which Israel, you think Israel is justified in carrying out military intervention against one of the enemies that are facing it, Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran.
Is there a single instance?
Yes, but I do not think that Israel is going to succeed militarily.
But what is it if the premise of its position is we will continue to manage a permanent illegal occupation against the Palestinians?
Sorry, sorry, because you are, you are therefore in a belligerent state in the region.
Israel has bombed several countries in the region.
Israel hasn't tried what should we have done after October 7th, Daniel.
Let me bring it up.
Before October 7th, I'm just going to call a timeout.
Let me call a timeout because Scott has been waiting very patiently.
Scott, look, you know, there are passionate arguments on all sides of this.
Of course there are.
Do you have any sympathy with Israel's clear, look, there's a massive majority support for this in Israel, for what's happening in Iran, because the Israeli people have reached a general consensus that they believe Iran has been responsible for most of their problems in the last few decades with these proxy terror groups just constantly trying to attack them.
And that has caused this massive security crisis as they see it, which has to be somehow brought to an end.
Do you have any sympathy with the way the average Israeli feels about this and why they're supporting this?
Well, I understand it just the same as if you swapped them out with any other nation in the world in the same position if there was such a situation.
It's fine.
It has nothing to do with the United States.
And this goes back to a falsehood that Danny Dinon said earlier in your show, where he was claiming that ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iran has been at war with Israel this way.
That's not true.
Israel stayed friends with Iran all through the 1980s.
As everyone knows, when Ronald Reagan switched sides in the Iran-Iraq war for a minute and sold weapons to the Ayatollah, he used the Israelis as the cutout because they had the ongoing operation.
And I highly suggest everyone, especially you, Pierce, read this fantastic book by Trita Parsi called Treacherous Alliance about the real history of America, Israel, and Iran's relationship throughout that period.
And where he shows that it was in 1993 when Yitzhak Rabin simply changed his strategy and Israel turned on Iran.
And Iran started funding Hamas after that.
And now after Rabin was killed, the Likud basically took up the same policy of demonizing Iran, but instead of using it as an excuse for dealing with the Palestinians, they use it as an excuse to distract from the fact that they were going to never deal with the Palestinians in good faith.
But it was the Israelis who turned on the Iranians first.
And that wasn't until 1993.
And Parsi even has Clinton administration officials laughing because the Israelis are demanding that America be hard on Iran when one week ago they were taking Iran's side in the very same type arguments and all that.
The book is called Treacherous Alliance.
It's absolutely fantastic.
And it shows all that.
And then this is also crucially the basis for the argument in the clean break strategy by David Wormser and Richard Pearl in 1996 when Benjamin Netanyahu was first coming to office the first time.
These are American neoconservatives who wrote this policy that says the clean break is with Oslo.
Said we're never going to deal with the Palestinians.
We're going to take what they have.
But in order to be able to get away with that, we need a whole new position of dominance in the region.
And in order to do that, our first priority is we have to break the arch of power between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah.
And they said the way we want to do that is by getting rid of Saddam Hussein, which sounds insane.
And it is.
He was the Sunni roadblock in this Shiite arc of power here.
But they thought that Turkey and Jordan would be dominant in the new Iraq.
And then they would get the Iraqi Shiites to tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start making nice with Israel.
It's called the Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
And the partner companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States.
And this is the naive pipe dream of the neoconservatives and the Likud.
And this was the policy behind Iraq War II, which Netanyahu, of course, championed and his neoconservative fifth column in America champion, and which backfired and only resulted in America fighting an eight-year war to install Iran's best friends from Dawah and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in power there and to build their militias into the Iraqi army.
And as I said, Iraq War III against the Caliphate also was literally for Iran and their friends on the ground when the Iranian Quds force liberated Tekries.
They had American airplanes flying overhead.
And all this just goes to show, all this just goes to show the vast divergence of interests between Israel and the United States.
And one more point here, and I'll be quiet, and you guys can keep arguing for the rest of the show.
But we already, on the first day, had a blowback terrorist attack from Israel's war in my hometown of Austin, Texas.
And three innocent people were murdered by a Muslim immigrant who went down to the bar.
Yeah, you wipe that smile off your face real quick there, Mr. Israeli spokesman.
Murdered three of my hometowns.
Why would I smile when you go to war?
That's killing a bunch of people.
And there was, shut up, shut your damn mouth while I'm talking.
And there was also an attempted bombing attack at the American Americans in Norway last night.
And Americans are already dying and suffering blowback terrorism from another war on behalf of Israel.
Just like Omar Mateen's slaughter in Orlando, just like San Bernardino blowback from Israel's foreign policy.
Okay.
I just want to end very quickly with you, Doran F. May.
Looking at the prediction markets, polymarket, they asked what price will crude oil hit by the end of March.
A lot of money coming in here with options ranging from $40, so a lot less than it is now, to $200.
I don't think it's too big a stretch to say that politically, I saw Netanyahu is calling for potential election in Israel in the summer.
Donald Trump is facing the midterms in America in November.
Should oil reach $200 a barrel, then it is, I would argue, never mind militarily, never mind all the reasons you put forward for why this is a good idea, never mind anything else.
That purely economically, stroke politically, that one fact alone could bring down both the Netanyahu government and the Trump presidency in terms of its effectiveness to govern past the midterms.
What would you say?
I'm glad you asked me, Pierce.
I think that it really lays bare the question: are we going to allow Iran to blackmail the entire world by saying we are either going to close the straits of Hormuz and drive up oil prices, or you're going to allow us, the Iranian regime, to survive, to create a nuclear program which they threaten out loud and say death to America and death to Israel.
A ballistic missile program, which will reach 8,000 ballistic missiles by 2027, multiply 8,000 by the 10 people that died in Beit Shemish.
That's 80,000 Israelis alone.
Are we going to allow the largest terror cancer in the world to survive because of oil prices?
I think, Pierce, the answer is that we need to have steel nerves.
I think that we have to not lose faith in the American people, the Israeli people, most of which understand, maybe not the two guests that I'm on the show with, that you have to have courage to defeat evil.
If you think that we're going to leave the Iranian regime alone and it is just going to become a peaceful regime, that is a pipe dream.
They are going to develop a nuclear weapon.
And had we not struck them in June, the same ballistic missile that landed near Daniel today would have had a nuclear warhead on it.
Every time I ask anyone on this panel, it is U.S. interests, it is Israel's interest.
And if we do not defeat Iran now and give those Iranian people, which is where this began a month and a half ago when Trump said help is on its way, 32,000 people were massacred in the streets.
If we do not continue to deplete this regime and allow those people to bring in a leader, then we will be back in the same spot with a nuclear regime.
And then I ask one question: What will be the price of oil when Iran has a nuclear regime and it strangles Hormuz and it says, You're going to give me whatever I want, otherwise, I'm going to drop a nuclear bomb on you.
Destroying Their Legacies00:10:20
That is not far.
Piers, I okay.
Guys, I'm sorry.
We've run out of time, Piers.
As long as it's very, very brief.
It will be very brief because I think what we've heard here, and this is important, is a very glib, unfact-based, fantastical position from an Israeli spokesperson or spokesperson of a nuclear power.
And we've heard something from Mr. Hornton, which I think should really have Israelis thinking long and hard.
This is America.
Israel is dependent on America.
What are you doing to an Israeli image in America, which has already tanked during the relentless assault on Gaza?
Americans are going to blame Israel for this and they'll have a reason.
This is seen as Israel first.
And I think Israel is playing with fire in ways that could be spectacularly a blowback.
Well, I think my overview would be: I think it was, I think it was Doran who said earlier that history will look back on this and judge accordingly.
I completely concur.
I just have no confidence that it will look back in quite the way you think it might, but it may be that history will look back and say this was the moment when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu conspired to destroy their legacies, or it will end up being their legacy in the way they see it.
But I do think the stakes are incredibly high.
And I do think anyone who says with any confidence they know how this is going to play out is living in cloud cuckoo land.
I've got to leave it there.
Very interesting debate.
Thank you all very much.
Because joining me now, live from Tehran, is Dr. Fawad Izadi, professor at Tehran University.
Dr. Izadi, thank you for joining me on Ancensa.
What is it like to be in Tehran at the moment?
They had the bombardment just a couple of hours ago.
We have lost over 1,400 civilians, including 165 little girls.
We are dealing with the upsiding class.
are bombing and killing little Iranian girls and raping little American girls.
The Americans and the Israelis believe ultimately this is the beginning of the end of the Iranian regime, which has been obviously in power since 1979.
What do you say to them?
You know, Netanyahu asked Iranians on the first day of war to come to the streets in millions.
And they are every night shouting against him and Trump.
He has managed to unify Iranians.
We have this rally around the flag effect.
Trump single-handedly has unified Iranians more than any Iranian politician could ever do.
It's a pipe dream.
It's not going to happen.
We have the Iranians have elected a new leader.
The country is resilient.
There is this culture of resistance.
And you cannot bomb people and expect them to like you.
People are not going to be foot soldiers of Trump.
And Netanyahu, they know these guys.
They just finished conducting a genocide in Palestine.
Why would you want to work for them?
But if that is your position, then why would you think you could bomb all your neighboring Gulf states and not expect the same reaction from them?
I mean, we've seen the Prime Minister of Qatar overnight in an interview for Sky News expressing his outrage at what Iran has done in attacking Qatar.
And we've seen Iran attacking Saudi Arabia, the UAE, other Gulf states, Bahrain.
Why is Iran doing that?
It seems to me that of all the things that you could do, which would be the most self-defeating, attacking your own neighboring Gulf state and alienating all of them in the way that you're doing is the last thing you should be doing.
You know, we have U.S. bases there.
After the assassination of Qosam Soleimani, the Iranian general, Iranians' response to that assassination was minimal.
After the killing of Ismail Hanir, the Palestinian leader, Menemon, after the assassination of Hassan Nasrul in Lebanon, Menemon.
After the 12-day war, Iranians announced they're going to hit one U.S. base.
They announced the timing.
They announced the number of missiles that they're going to use.
And the base was empty.
Menemot, no American soldier was killed in all these attacks on Iran.
In the 12-day war, we lost over 1200 civilians.
The people who were exercising restraint are no longer with us.
They were all killed by the Americans and Israelis.
The new leaders in Iran realize that unless the United States and Israel pay a price, these type of attacks will continue every few months.
You cannot run a country when two nuclear regimes attack you every few months.
So the decision is to attack US spaces, not these countries.
The only problem is that the US bases are in these countries.
So Iran is attacking US spaces.
Iran is attacking hotels when they are full of American soldiers.
What they have done is that they have evacuated the bases.
They have put the soldiers in hotels.
That becomes a legitimate military target.
CIA offices, headquarters, in office areas in these cities, legitimate military targets.
CI is providing the data for these attacks on Iran.
And then you have Iranian missiles.
Some of the missiles that are shot down, they create debris and Iran cannot control where the debris falls.
I was watching CNN.
We had this oil facility in UAE in fire because of the debris.
And then we had Taka Carlson, the American journalist, reporting that in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they have arrested Mossad agents trying to blow up things so they can blame it on Iran.
I think Netanyahu has done a good job using American soldiers to fight his war against Iran.
I think he wants to use Saudi soldiers, Qatari soldiers to do the same.
I think the leaders of these countries realize that's not a good idea.
Okay, but I would counter.
Let me counter to you, which is that the leader of your country, both the assassinated leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini and now his son, but also the previous supreme leader as well,
have waged a systematic policy as a country of funding and sponsoring terrorism through proxies like the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas against Israel with a specific aim of killing Israelis and trying to extinguish Israel as an entity, as a country.
Why shouldn't Israel seek to properly defend itself in that eventuality?
You know, last time I was on your show, we went through this.
Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization.
They were formed after Lebanon was occupied by Israel.
Defending your territory, pushing out occupation is allowed under international law, and you can use force to do that.
And so these are freedom fighters.
And Iran wanted to make sure that Israelis would not do to Iran what they are doing today.
Iran created deterrence in these countries like Lebanon, like Yemen.
So Israelis would think that the cost of attacking Iran would be too much.
And now that these organizations are weakened, you see what happened.
They're killing Iranian leaders.
This is a war of choice.
They are not worried about Iran's nuclear program.
I encourage your lead to read the U.S. intelligence community's assessment.
It came out a couple of months before the 12-day war.
It's available at dni.gov.
It says three things about Iran's nuclear program.
The first thing, Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons.
The second thing, this is the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community.
It says that Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon program.
And the third thing, it says that Iranian leaders have not decided to have a nuclear weapon program.
When they asked Trump about this report, he dismissed it.
He chose to accept Netanyahu's version and he dismissed his own intelligence community.
So if you want to make sure that Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, you can go back to the 2015 agreement.
I don't know if you saw the interview of the Omani foreign minister.
He went to Washington about 10 days ago asking the Trump administration to accept an agreement with Iran.
He said that the agreement was available in 24 hours, his words.
It's available in YouTube at CBS News.
He basically begged the Trump administration not to attack Iran.
He said that Iran was willing to provide concessions that Iran was not able to do in 2015.
And Trump attacked Iran.
And it's understandable.
If you want to change a country's government, you don't enter a diplomatic agreement with the government that you want to change.
But they're not going to be able to change Iran's government.
So it's a huge policy mistake.
And unfortunately, we are seeing a lot of people get killed.
Responsibilities of Trump and Netanyahu.
Professor Azadi, professor at the University of Tehran, I appreciate you joining me.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Iran's Offer Rejected00:00:25
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