'You Don't Stand Up To Evil, You LOSE!' Iran Ground Invasion | Feat John Kiriakou & Rudy Giuliani
For all the talk of Vice President JD Vance being marginalized by the war on Iran, he could play a defining role in ending it. The Iranians say they don’t trust the President’s chief negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and they’ll only talk to him. And Vance has now kickstarted the blame game for a war that’s becoming more complicated, expensive and unpopular by the day. Netanyahu, he says, ‘oversold’ Trump on the chances of an easy victory and a swift uprising - neither of which look close, if they’re still possible at all.Polymarket says there’s now a 70% chance that US forces will enter Iran by the end of April; an upward swing of 20 per cent in just two days on a $54 million market. Anyone who has paid any attention to big market moves relating to this war and this White House will know exactly why that’s worthy of our attention. Joining Piers Morgan to discuss this is Brigadier General, US Army (Ret) Mark Kimmitt, author Aimen Dean, IDF spokesman Doron Spielman, former CIA officer John Kiriakou, ex-NATO commander General Sir Richard Shirreff and former New York Mayor and lawyer to President Trump Rudy Giuliani. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Escalating Ground Operations00:15:03
Extraordinarily dangerous.
Unfortunately, Iran has proven to be a pretty clever adversary.
You can't do that kind of invasion with a couple of thousand troops.
You need a couple of hundred thousand troops.
They do want to die.
Ayatollah knew he was going to get it.
He sat there and I think he thought he was going to go up to paradise and find his 72 virgins.
The Iranians have been reactive to this, not proactive.
There has to be a response.
You can't just say, well, you know what?
We're an existential threat to the Israelis.
So of course the Israelis are going to have to bomb us.
There's never been a guarantee to defeat evil, but there is one guarantee.
If you don't stand up to it, you're going to lose.
Please help us bomb Iran.
And the president's always said no.
President Trump was duped by Benjamin Netanyahu, and now we're in a war that we cannot win.
I don't think I've ever seen a gathering of more spineless people in my entire life.
For all the talk of Vice President JD Vance being marginalized by the war in Iran, he can play a defining role in ending it.
The Iranians say they don't trust the president's chief negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jaron Kushner, and they'll only talk to him.
And Vance has now kick-started the blame game for a war that's becoming more complicated, expensive, and unpopular by the day.
Benjamin Netanyahu, he says, oversold Trump on the chances of an easy victory and a swift uprising, neither of which look close, if they're still possible at all.
According to the vice president, everything the U.S. is doing now is to prevent a drawn-out war.
We've accomplished the gross majority of our military objectives.
I think you can make a good argument we've accomplished all of our military objectives.
The president's going to keep at it for a little while longer to ensure that we, once we leave, we don't have to do this again for a very, very long time.
The problem is, as it always has been, that the objectives are unclear and ever-changing.
Trump says he's negotiating with a new regime in waiting, but we don't know who that is.
Thousands of U.S. Marines are now in the region with special forces and paratroopers on the way.
They're reportedly preparing for a ground operation that could take weeks.
There's talk of seizing and occupying Haag Island to choke off the oil exports, which keep the Iranian economy alive.
The Wall Street Journal says Trump is weighing up a Hollywood-worthy raid on Iran's uranium, involving diggers, nuclear scientists, and thousands of troops behind enemy lines.
Polymarket says there's now a 70% chance that U.S. forces will enter Iran by the end of April, an upward swing of 20% in just two days on a $54 million market.
Anyone who's paid any attention to big market moves relating to this war and this White House will know exactly why that's worthy of our attention.
And running in parallel to all of this is the ongoing escalation by America's partner in the war.
Israel is expanding its invasion of Lebanon, raising fears of a scorched earth campaign modeled on the Gaza War.
The IDF is facing intensifying criticism for several attacks which appear to have targeted journalists.
JD Vance may want a swift end to the war in Iran, as do a majority of the American people.
There's currently no indication they're going to get it.
To debate this, I'm joined by Amark Kimmett, retired U.S. Army Brigadier General.
Amin Dane, who's the author of Nine Lives, My Time as MI6's Top Spy Inside Al-Qaeda, and Doran Spielman, reservist IDF spokesman and author of When the Stones Speak.
Well, welcome to all of you.
General Kimmer, welcome back to Uncensored.
Every time we talk in this war, it seems to have escalated at the same rate that President Trump and others try to reassure us it's over and America has already won.
So forgive me if I'm a little bit confused sitting here in London.
Where are we with this war?
Because from where I sit, it's not over.
The Straits of Hormuz remain pretty well closed.
The attacks on the Gulf states by Iran continue.
There is enormous economic damage from a month of the world's oil and gas being held up along with the world's fertilizer.
And the President of the United States is now committing a lot of troops to the region.
And the briefings that the papers are getting is that he is planning potentially some sort of land invasion, which I have to say again, as I've been saying for a while now, that is completely contrary to everything that Donald Trump campaigned on.
The one thing he reassured his supporters was: I will not take America into any more senseless, expensive wars in the Middle East, and I definitely won't put boots on the ground.
Here we are.
What do you make of it?
Well, first of all, you've asked about 10 questions, made about 10 statements.
So let me get first focused on.
As much time as you like, General.
No, I'm just going to say let's remain focused on what I believe either are or should have been the objectives of this war.
We went into negotiations with the Iranians to do three things: end their nuclear program, end their ballistic missile program, and their proxy program.
We were unable to achieve that at the bargaining table, so we've taken it to the battlefield.
I think that we've heard a lot of noise, a lot of chatter, a lot of flack over the last few weeks, but I certainly hope those remain our core interests.
And if those remain our core interests, and candidly, the core interests of countries around the world to include Great Britain, no, we haven't achieved our objectives yet, nor should we be discussing off-ramps at this point.
Okay, but my sense is that Donald Trump would love an off-ramp if he could claim any kind of legitimate victory that gets him out of this, because he knows that, never mind anything else, politically, as he edges nearer to the midterm elections, this is proving incredibly unpopular.
All the polls show that.
And I think that for that reason alone, coupled with the economic mayhem it's causing, it makes no sense to a businessman like Donald Trump, a deal maker, to allow this to continue for months and months and months.
And yet, I don't see how he can stop it if the Iranians have worked out that it's the economic part of this war that they're currently winning.
No, I agree with you.
First of all, I don't think Donald Trump cares about the midterms.
He's already accepted them as lost.
Even if they're won by the Democrats, the fact remains that nothing is going to get done in the United States Congress, whether the Republicans are still in charge or whether the Democrats are in charge.
Our legislative body seems to be generally irrelevant.
But look, I think that Donald Trump now recognizes that the advice he took or the orders that he issued are not achieving the results he wanted.
Unfortunately, Iran has proven to be a pretty clever adversary.
The Israelis went for regime decapitation.
The Americans went for blow up as much stuff as possible.
And the Iranians kind of did a jiu-jitsu move and said, okay, we're going to move down to the Strait of Hormuz.
If you want to do regime decapitation, we're going to do economic decapitation.
As we used to say, old dead Karl Clausewitz, he had some great lines.
And one of them is, after a war starts, it takes on its own character.
And while this president may have hoped for a quick and easy victory, as he had in Venezuela, or a negotiated settlement, as he had in Syria, this war has definitely taken on a character of its own.
And before I go to our two other very patient guests, thank you to both of you.
Just one final question purely on the military reality of any kind of ground invasion.
Because if this seems to be the case, the only way to guarantee getting the enriched uranium, which is believed to be buried way below the ground and heavily protected, if the only way to do that is with ground forces.
Is it not going to be incredibly hazardous to do that in a country like Iran when they believe that regime change is absolutely on the mind, certainly of the Israelis and probably quite a few people in the Trump administration too?
In other words, they have little to lose.
If America was to put ground forces down, potentially with IDF, we don't know.
Is that not a very dangerous mission, General?
Extraordinarily dangerous.
These two gentlemen to my right don't remember what you and I do, which is a 1979 mission to try to get the American hostages out of Tehran.
That was an absolute goat.
I'll leave it at that.
But unfortunately, when you also not only have a tough target, but your mission is being bleated out by every broadsheet like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, makes life kind of difficult.
So I simply think that that may be, again, to use another trope, a bridge too far at this point, unless we pull some real magic out of our house, hats.
And I don't think we're going to be, quote, invading or conducting an invasion.
That brings to mind of your audience another attack into Iraq to go up to Baghdad.
You can't do that kind of invasion with a couple of thousand troops.
You need a couple of hundred thousand troops.
So what I see those ground troops being used for primarily is short, quick operations, probably no further in than the littoral to go against the speed boats, the mine factories, the missile factories along the beaches, maybe even a dumb idea like Carg Island.
Although I think the better way for Carg Island is just take out the electricity.
That way you can quickly turn it back on when you need it.
I mean, the problem, and I'll come to our other guests now, Doran Spearman, the problem here is that Donald Trump has kind of signaled everything that America may do.
He does it on a kind of every few hours basis on social media.
And then he changes it two hours later.
Right, right.
And the problem, Doran Spearman, is, you know, I can remember watching movies about the code breakers of World War II, where there were whole teams of people whose job it was to crack sophisticated codes that the Germans were leaving, for example, planning their military operation.
The Iranians don't need any code breakers.
They've got the President of the United States just broadcasting it all.
So, you know, they know that there may be an attack on Haag, for example.
They know that the Americans may do XYZ because Trump keeps saying that's what they may do.
Is that, apart from anything else, is he sensible?
Look, these are all the million-dollar questions, how we're going to look back at President Trump.
You know, 100 years from now, I can say this, that he's definitely knocking off balance a lot of terror regimes throughout the world, including Venezuela.
I think he's sending a different message than has been sent.
It's not the typical diplomatic message.
This is kind of the Trump dealmaker where he comes in, and we've seen him multiple times when he offers with one hand a carrot and with the other hand, if it's not taken, he's got Marines moving in.
And I'm not sure that it's the incorrect way.
I think we'll know when this is over.
But I do, Pierce, kind of want to zoom out a little bit.
I think, you know, this is not a new story.
I think we need to kind of take a few steps back here.
This is a story that I can say as a Jew who's, you know, we're going to be celebrating Passover in two nights.
It goes back to the Passover story.
It's really a question, are we going to stand up against oppression?
Are we going to make a move that there's no guarantee what we're going to do, but we have a chance at changing a paradigm?
Or are we just going to accept, okay, you know, we're slaves, we're oppressed, and we're going to allow a terrorist regime that has expressly said they want to kill and destroy the United States multiple times.
They've said that they want to destroy Israel.
Are we going to allow them to become nuclear?
Are we going to allow them to build up their ballistic missile program?
Or are we going to say, you know something?
There's no guarantee.
Well, we're going to hearken back to a story that is 3,000 years old, which has inspired multiple stories throughout the world, which is, you know what, there's no guarantee.
There's never been a guarantee to defeat evil, but there is one guarantee.
If you don't stand up to it, you're going to lose.
Eamon Dean, you've made a point that you've got to filter out all the noise in a fast-moving situation like this and try and get to the reality of the movement of military assets.
You say deployments don't lie, narratives do.
The rest is theater for markets, publics, and gullible media.
And of course, that is often the case in every war.
Again, from where I sit out here, it's not that I don't think that the Iranians are a very bad regime.
They are and have been since they took power in 1979.
It's not that I'll lose any sleep over the death of Ayatollah Khomeini.
He was an appalling human being who terrorized his own people, who sponsored terrorism all over the region, largely aimed at Israel.
So I can totally get all that.
However, launching such a full throttle attack on a country with 90 million people where the regime clearly has a lot of firepower to protect itself, 250,000 of the IRGC, you have half a million paramilitaries, you have nearly a million regular army, that they've got a lot of people around to enforce their will.
And so far, there's no sign of any public uprising.
There are a number of reasons for that, not least of which bombs flying around.
But I just don't see any sign of a victory here.
I see a lot of bombs going off, a lot of show of military might, but I also see the Iranians winning the economic war quite easily and quite devastatingly.
You know, I'm looking at the markets.
I'm looking at the oil production, gas production.
And now I see Trump in a message this morning in which he talks about potentially going after desalination plants in Iran.
Well, the first reaction of Iran to that would be to go after desalination plants in the Gulf states, which would be utterly devastating.
I mean, for people who don't quite grasp what that means, you're talking about desert states that rely on desalination plants for water.
If you get rid of those, they don't have much drinking water left before they all start dying.
So these are incredibly bellicose, serious threats that Trump is lobbying out all the time, whilst at the same time saying, actually, you know what?
We're talking to them and it should be over soon.
I just find all this not just confusing, but borderline ridiculous.
NATO and North Korea Threats00:15:23
Well, Piers, March 2019, so that's about seven years ago on my podcast, I talked about the reason why Saudi Arabia went to war in Yemen against the Houthis.
And in that conflict, I told, in that podcast, I said that one of the reasons is that Saudi Arabia wanted to protect above everything else water desalination.
Because you see, during the Gulf War between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, and I grew up in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia at that time, and I was from Bahrain.
So I know all about Lakin, I mean, the situation, you know, in the Gulf at that time and how it was really harrowing and really threatening.
But at the same time, the Saudis realized that their water desalination plants on the Gulf were under threat from Iran in a future conflict.
Since I grew up, Lakhan, I mean, I always hear about Iranian threats from across the water.
So it's not something new.
So the Saudis moved many of these water desalination plants to the west, to the Red Sea, even though it will cost far more, you know, in terms of economics of doing it.
However, then 2014, the Iranians chase the Saudis all the way into the southwestern flank of their country and they push the Houthis into taking over the power in Yemen and after a bloody civil war.
And then they absolutely start threatening water desalination in the west of Saudi Arabia.
So Piers, the Iranians have been threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz since I was a seven-year-old child.
And that was 40 years ago.
I mean, I feel old now.
And they've been threatening the water desalination of the Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries for 40 years.
And they've been threatening to attack energy facilities.
In fact, the attack against energy facilities happened already at the hands of the Iranian proxies in September 2019 against Aramco, the biggest thing.
Right, but what they've been given here is license to do it under the guise of retaliation.
They had the license from a long time ago, Piers.
No, no, I'm not disputing what you're saying.
They're not licensed anymore.
They've always been doing it.
No, I understand.
But to the world, what it looks like is that, all right, fair enough.
You know, Iran's getting bombed everywhere.
The Israelis are bombing their refineries.
Why shouldn't they bomb other people's refineries?
So they're using everything that's happening to them as an excuse to do probably what, as you say, they've wanted to do for a long time.
But what they have worked out is that they can control the global economy in a way that I think the Americans have massively underestimated.
And I think it's come as a nasty shock.
Periodically, I don't think you can't win a war this way, Pierce.
I mean, this kind of reasoning, I'll give you an example.
Imagine there's, you know, there's an illegal arms dealer on your street, right?
And so you call the FBI, you call the police, and they surround the house, and the guys inside the house start shooting at you, right?
So what are you going to say?
Oh, you know, we gave them an excuse to shoot at us.
You know, we gave them license to shoot at us.
No, if you're going to go after the arms, then the guys are going to pick up the arms that they're threatening and you're going to use it.
What's the difference?
Iran would have used this anyway.
They would have closed the straits of Hormuz, Pierce.
The difference is had we waited, they would be closing the straits of Hormuz with a nuclear threat, with an armed nuclear weapon.
Could you imagine the price of oil?
If there's a nuclear Iran and they're crazy, right?
I've got ballistic missiles landing next to my home with massive warheads, which if one of those landed in England, God forbid, you know, and if it's unprojected, it can take out 50 blocks.
If we don't stand up now, Iran's, this isn't giving license to them.
This is trying to defeat them and they're using whatever they have at their disposal.
Okay, but then it comes down to how an impending threat you feel Iran was posing.
And I am not convinced, as I wasn't by the argument about Saddam Hussein back in 2003, I am not convinced that there was an imminent threat from these weapons in the way that people have tried to sell it.
And I think that's the problem.
And I think that there are lots of bad regimes.
Lots of bad regimes around the world.
Well, Durin, there are lots of bad regimes around the world, like North Korea, that America does not attack, right?
Even though every argument you would use against the Iranians works equally to the Iranians, to the North Koreans.
So there are reasons you don't do this kind of thing.
Not at all.
Not at all.
Well, okay.
Not at all.
Well, there's a reason to do it.
No one's attacked North Korea.
I'm sorry, Lakan.
I mean, that's a false equivalence, Piers.
I mean, comparing North Korea to Iran.
First of all, North Korea did not recruit 700,000 young men from across the region, from Iraq, from Iran, from Iran also, from Yemen, from Lebanon, from Syria.
They did not recruit all of these young people into joining non-state actors, terror militias, in order to destabilize their own countries and then attack neighboring countries with ballistic weapons.
They were not supposed to get them in the first place.
So you see, the problem here is it's not, North Korea is just sitting in its own little box.
Perfect.
At least it is contained.
It's a contained threat.
However, Iran refused to be a contained threat.
They're true.
Let me, first of all, I think it's a good equivalent for a number of reasons.
Yesterday, North Korea tested a ballistic missile that can reach the United States homeland.
They're not sitting in their own.
But I also believe it's a good comparison because the United States and the four parties and then the sixth party spent many, many years negotiating with North Korea who convinced the world that they weren't going to build a nuclear weapon.
We threw money at them, we threw food at them, we threw access to the international system, and they continue to say, no, we'll never develop a nuclear weapon.
Do you think that Iran is not following that same playbook?
Of course it is.
Yeah, well, I'm sure that's true.
Just hold fire panel for a moment.
I want to bring in another guest now, General Sir Richard Shiriff.
He's a former NATO commander.
General, welcome to Uncensored.
Thank you for having me.
You've been pretty scathing about this.
You've called Operation Epic Fury staggeringly arrogant.
And you wrote in the Daily Mail: So we are living through, and as a lifelong soldier, I don't ask this lightly, the outbreak.
Are we living through the outbreak of World War III?
Certainly, I can't remember a more perilous moment in geopolitics in my lifetime.
And I'm now 70.
I can't either.
I'm actually 61 today, and I can't remember that either.
As it's gone on, we're a month in now.
Does your fear about this escalating to that kind of level has that increased or decreased?
It's increased without question.
I think the attack a month ago was launched without thinking through the possible consequences.
I'm sure that military commanders would have wargained to death the potential for closing the Strait of Hormuz and would normally have taken sort of action to prevent it.
But clearly, it did not happen on this occasion.
And I think the assumption was made that a lightning industrial scale aerial assault, such as we've seen, would be enough to do what?
I mean, we didn't know.
There's no clear design for battle.
There is no clear strategy.
There is no clear idea of how this war ends.
I think, and my concern is that we are about to see escalation, potentially putting troops on the ground on the islands of the Strait of Hormuz or wherever.
And then I think we have to take account of the linkages, the linkage between what's going on in Ukraine with Russia's genocidal war there, the fact that Russia is now supplying drones and targeting information to the Iranians.
And I've no doubt there are further and wider linkages.
So I think this is a deeply, deep, deeply globally destabilizing event, not least, of course.
It has completely knocked the global economic, the potential for knocking the global economy awry in a major way.
Let's not assume the Strait of Hormuz is going to be opened anytime soon, because if America, if the Americans land amphibious troops for whatever on that coastline, this thing is going to run and run and run.
And we're going to be back into a worse situation.
You're probably not old enough to remember 1973 and the oil crisis then.
Well, you might be, but we'll be back into that.
But time's 10.
Yeah, I was eight actually then, but I do remember it vaguely.
But I think the trouble is no one's learned the lessons from history.
And I look at what's going on.
I think you were the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander for Europe.
You see some of the rhetoric coming out of Donald Trump now, very bellicose and negative about Europe, about NATO, about what he perceives to be the lack of cooperation here for Operation Epic Fury.
If you were still in your old job, how would you be handling this?
Well, I think I would make the assumption that Donald Trump has pretty much single-handedly torpedoed NATO as an alliance.
You have to understand NATO is an alliance which flourished for pretty nearly 80 years.
And it's based on trust.
It's based on common values.
It's based on the doctrine of collective defense, that the alliance is there to support an ally if attacked, the famous Article 5.
From the moment we saw Trump II come into power, we saw Vance and Hegseth announce very clearly that America was not going to underwrite European security.
Now, I get that because the Europeans, frankly, have been freeloading from America for decades.
And so there's a part, you know, Europe has a part to play in this.
But then move forward, the fact that two months ago, Donald Trump threatened to attack the territory of a NATO ally, Denmark, over Greenland.
Nobody has forgotten that.
Europeans will not forget that.
That is a grotesque breach of trust that the lead dog in the pack turns on the other, a smaller dog in the pack, as it were.
So no surprise that no NATO ally is prepared to support Trump in this particular ill-starred mission.
No surprise for a start, because it's not a NATO operation.
NATO does not look at cover the territory of the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf.
And absolutely, it does not support an ally launching an unprovoked, although you may argue that, but an attack which could well be construed as illegal against a party that had not attacked it.
So there's no way that NATO should or could support it.
But the message for NATO now is that NATO's got to pull its act together.
The European members of NATO have got to get their act together, recognize that, yes, they have to maintain links with America.
And certainly in the UK's case, the intelligence and the military links are much deeper than political.
They are built on, frankly, shoulder to shoulder brothers and sisters in arms over many years.
But that America as an alliance ally, a member of the alliance, is not going to play a central part.
So Europe needs to step up to the mark and drawing on Mark Carney's words from Davos, develop and build an alliance based on the middle powers, which it can do if it's prepared to make the necessary sacrifices and European leaders are prepared to show the necessary leadership.
In one word, is the special relationship done, over, Kaput?
I think the special relationship is a fantasy put about, if I may say so, Piers, by the media and politicians.
It died, if it ever was one, it died in 1956 at Suez.
And it's crazy to go on banging on about the special relationship.
Couldn't be clearer.
General Schuff, thank you very much, David, for joining me.
I appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
Well, back to my panel now.
I'm pleased to say we've been joined by the former CIA officer John Kiriaku, who I'll come to in a moment.
John, welcome back to you.
General Kimmett, you were shaking your head throughout a lot of that interview with a British former general.
You didn't agree?
Well, a couple of things.
He first said that NATO has never operated in that region.
He's just absolutely wrong.
Operation Ocean Shield was conducted by NATO as part of the counter-piracy operations.
So they have been there before.
Second, the special relationship is not something that simply was a whim of the media.
I lived that my entire 30-plus years in the military.
I served side by side with Brits.
We shared intelligence and we shared foxholes.
So I think that special relationship still exists.
And this notion about in his lifetime, he had never seen something this whacked up.
For God's sakes, the 300,000 dead and wounded at Gallipoli because of British arrogance seems to me a fairly good comparison.
So it just always bothers me when somebody with a nice Oxbridge accent comes on and starts lecturing to the Americans.
You're sounding unable.
And one last point.
There is a solution to the Strait of Hormuz, which is I do not believe that Iran wants to fight with the British, the French, the Germans.
1981 to 1989, the United States escorted Kuwaiti flagged and escorted Kuwaiti tankers in and out of the Strait of Hormuz.
We can't do that this time because the Americans are belligerents.
I wrote an article recently and the title was, Where are the Allies?
So why aren't the allies like Britain and France and Germany who have far better capabilities in countermeasure and they're not active belligerents in this war, why are you not escorting the tankers in and out?
China would join you as well.
So as everybody is wringing their hands as the United States is bringing the world economy to its knees, why doesn't Britain and France and, you know, God forbid NATO take on that mission?
Just out of interest, General, where were you educated?
The United States Military Academy and Bishop O'Connell High School, a trade school in Arlington, Virginia.
You have a remarkably eloquent and clipped American accent, I have to say.
Not without...
It's that special relationship I've had with the Brits over these years.
John Kiriaku, welcome back to Uncensored.
Risky Military Gamble00:11:53
Let's just talk for a moment about the domestic jeopardy that I think Donald Trump is risking here.
And I think it's significant.
The polling is terrible.
It's the first time I can remember an American armed forces at war, even if they're not calling it that, which has not had the majority support of Americans.
Gas prices are skyrocketing.
Food prices are and will go higher because of the issue with the fertilizer.
You've got the midterm elections coming.
I mean, General Kimmett thinks he's already given up that.
I'm not sure that's how Trump will be thinking.
But certainly all the polling again suggests that the Republicans could lose both the House and the Senate now if this continues the way that it's going.
It just seems a hell of a throw of the dice by Trump.
And I'm increasingly thinking he's made a massive miscalculation.
What's your view?
Oh, I think this is a disastrous miscalculation.
Where do you even begin?
You know, there's a very significant split right now within the Republican Party here in the United States.
There were a lot of Republican voters who voted for Donald Trump because they believed that he really was the no foreign wars president.
You might recall February 14th, Valentine's Day, 2016, during a Republican debate in which Donald Trump called George W. Bush a war criminal for getting the United States involved in the war in Iraq.
And now all of a sudden, it's as though it's John McCain's neoconservative Republican Party again.
It seems to me that Trump surrounded himself with some people like Tulsi Gabbard, for example, and JD Vance, who reportedly have been opposed to these foreign interventions.
But then others like Marco Rubio, who is sort of the successor to the John McCain wing of that party.
And the party and the president himself don't know which direction to go.
Well, I think Lindsey Graham, I would add Lindsey Graham.
I'm not sure if I disappointed.
I would add Lindsey Graham into that room.
Lindsey Graham.
I think he's been extremely.
100% right.
But you're really, it's so true about the split in the party.
I saw Matt Walsh yesterday from the Daily Wire making the point that almost every Republican he's been talking to is against this war.
And he said, that's highly unusual when you have a Republican administration that's gone to war for Republicans to be as against it as he is hearing personally, anecdotally.
He thinks it's not showing up yet properly in the polling.
But I saw a thing about enthusiasm for the midterms.
And I think the Republican enthusiasm knows down to like 60% and falling like a stone, right?
Which again...
That's the danger.
And I think that's the kind of quiet, that's the quiet voice there of people saying, we don't get this.
This guy, the whole point of Trump was he would not take us into foreign wars, especially in the Middle East, and definitely no boots on the ground.
I do think if he commits boots on the ground and it goes even half wrong, as many military strategies think it could, then I think this becomes his legacy.
And again, I just asked the question.
Oh, okay.
And I would ask it to the president myself if he calls me.
I would just say, why did you do it now?
I don't get it.
I don't think I've ever seen a gathering of more spineless people in my entire life.
This is just simply, it's like a vacuum, Pierce.
Like President Trump woke up one morning and decided to go attack Iran because Israel convinced them as if Iran does not pose a nuclear threat as if there's a problem.
Well, hang on, yeah, but Dora, hang on, hang on.
Dora, Pierce, to say that they're an imminent.
Hold on, Dora, Dora.
We'll take your insult, but let me just respond.
The reason people think that's what happened is because that is what the Secretary of State of the United States told everybody on camera.
Just to remind you, Marco Rubio said when he was asked why did America take preemptive action in this way, he said because another country, brackets, Israel, had informed the United States they were attacking Iran, and the expected result would be that Iran would, under that incidence, it would then attack American interests, and therefore they had to get in first.
And JD Vance has also said the same thing.
We're not making this up.
This is something coming out of the mouth of the senior people in the administration.
Pierce, why did Trump join the 12-day war at the end of the war?
Well, the 12-day war.
Israel had been fighting alone for 11 and a half years.
The 12-day war.
Why did Trump swoop in his nuclear reactor?
Because he believes that nuclear Iran poses a major threat.
Sure, and we were told.
Pete Hag Seth, they've all said many different things.
Duran, we were told that Trump was eliminated.
The president himself said that Iran has killed thousands of Americans over the years.
I understand that.
Nobody just speaks of it.
The American people, this is their story.
They don't need a reason to understand that there's evil in the world and stand up for evil.
And by the way, the Brits are the ones who taught us this.
Sure.
The importance of standing up against evil.
What I don't understand about any of the people you brought on, are we just then going to surrender and let Iran just grow into a nuclear-armed terror regime?
Or does anyone, including you, have another idea of how to prevent this?
Yeah, I think the honest answer about that is that...
I didn't think so.
Well, I haven't answered.
Well, while we're doing that, I'm going to take a look at my spine here.
Apparently, it's going to be a lot of fun.
Not all of you, but some of you.
I see three with spines, including myself here.
So you're one of the...
But there's nothing...
Look, I don't think there's anything particularly heroic or courageous about launching the biggest military attack of modern times with the most overwhelmingly powerful military in history against Iran.
That doesn't take particularly...
It's not to be a hero.
Who needs to be a hero?
It's a hero.
No, but I don't understand what the impending thing.
I don't agree that there was an imminent impending threat.
I think the imminent thing...
What did you say?
Well, let me answer.
The only imminent impending thing was that Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump we're going to attack.
We now know from Anthony Blinken, a previous Secretary of State, that he tried the same thing with Obama and Biden, told them he was going to attack.
And then both Biden and Obama said, well, we're not coming with you.
And then guess what?
Israel didn't attack.
And that is why people believe, when you add Rubio's comments and Vance's comments, that what happened here is that Netanyahu railroaded Donald Trump into going along with this in a way that was actually rejected by Biden and Obama.
And that the actual threat, which is we're going to do it anyway, he probably wouldn't have done it anyway if it wasn't for the Americans.
So, you know, history will tell us, I guess, the answers to these questions.
But it was fascinating to me that Blinken said what he said.
And as to where we are now, how does it square?
Surely, Duran, you must see the unbelievable risk of committing ground forces to Iran to get enriched uranium from deep under the ground when we know how heavily protected it is and we know how cunning the Iranians have so far been in the way they've responded in this war.
I think it's a terrifying potential escalation that could lead to the deaths of many, many, many Americans, right?
And I say, I say for what?
Where was the impending threat?
Where was the evidence?
It takes me back to 2003.
Hang on, you say I'm spineless.
Let me answer you about spine.
I was editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper in the UK, one of the biggest selling newspapers in the world at the time.
I took on my own government, Tony Blair, the Labour government.
We were a Labor-supporting newspaper.
I waged one of the most ferocious campaigns against a war in media history.
And it failed.
And we know what happened in Iraq because I did not believe that there was the evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or that he was about to use them or hit London in 45 minutes or any of that bullshit.
And you know what?
It turned out very sadly, I was right.
And yet 20 years later, utter mayhem followed that illegal invasion, as I see it.
So I don't think it's necessarily lacking in a spine to say sometimes that these wars are wrong and they're fought on false pretexts and that the public is entitled to stand up and say, not in my name.
That actually can often take more courage than simply dropping a load of bombs on people.
Pierce, we see that Iran has fired now thousands of ballistic missiles, including those that land in Israel and population centers.
They fired two ballistic missiles towards Diego Garcia, which yes, had they not fired them to the east and they fired them to the west, could have landed in London.
The warhead on a single ballistic missile, if it's a ton and a half, do you know what the impact zone is?
It's 100 square blocks in London.
What would it take for you to acknowledge that there's actually an imminent threat?
We have ballistic missiles landing all over.
When the nuclear warhead is on the ballistic missile and it's on its way to Israel, do we then say, okay, this is an actual threat?
Or do we stand up today against a terror regime that has developed proxies throughout the Middle East that created Hezbollah, created Hamas, created the Houthis, took over the United States embassy in Iran, has driven trucks and blown up thousands of hundreds of Marines and have tried, MI5 has prevented 22 mass casualty terror attacks in London since 2022.
Let me take.
Okay, let me bring John back in.
John, your response to that.
Where do you even begin?
The Iranians have been reactive to this, not proactive.
You know, people watch on the news what's happening in Lebanon, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Syria.
There has to be a response.
You can't just say, well, you know what?
We're an existential threat to the Israelis.
So of course the Israelis are going to have to bomb us.
That's just not real life.
I can tell you in all the years that I was in the CIA, no matter who the Israeli prime minister was, every single time an Israeli prime minister came to Washington, no matter who the president happened to be, the Israelis would say, please help us bomb Iran.
Please help us bomb Iran.
Please help us bomb Iran.
And the president's always said no until this one.
I think that President Trump was duped by Benjamin Etanyahu, and now we're in a war that is not ours from the beginning and that we cannot win.
And this is another thing, too.
My own experience in the CIA and at some of the highest levels of government, I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director throughout the Iraq war.
There's never an exit strategy.
It's easy to attack a country.
It's easy to overthrow a government.
But then what do you do?
That's the hard part.
Right.
I mean, Ayman Dean, that is the reality.
And that is why Donald Trump was always so vocal.
I'm not going to do this.
And yet here he is.
He's doing it to the biggest place he could possibly be doing it with the greatest risk.
And that's the bit I don't understand.
I think you're one of the spineless three.
So maybe you'd like to respond to.
No, he's got a spine.
Oh, he's got a spine.
Okay, great.
We're down to two.
Okay, we're down to two.
Unraveling Global Order00:03:58
There's two spineless people.
One.
So it's just the CIA guy and the guy that rightly called the wrong illegal wars.
Got it.
Okay.
Look, this war was going to happen by hook or crook.
Because at the end of the day, you know, Iran represented not the perfectly rational, logical player in the established global order.
You know, in this poker table, the global poker table where the Russians, the Chinese, the Brazilians, the Indians, the Europeans, the Americans, you know, you see, at the end of the day, if you come to the poker table and you try to cheat and undermine everyone and to try, like, I mean, to be absolutely loudish and brutish about it, at the end of the day, you will be escorted out of the premises unceremoniously, and then you will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
And this is a problem with people who don't understand that the Iranian threat was accumulatively growing stronger and more dangerous as the years progress.
Again, what is so normative about Iran's politics in the region, you have to understand that Iran was expanding across the region, a region that actually contained more than 50 plus percent of the world's traditional energy reserves.
And that is a threat to the global established financial order that is backed by the dollar as a reserve currency.
You cannot allow Iran to become the hegemon of the entire region, and then Iran can do whatever it wants when it comes to charging for the petrol with other currencies, undermining the status of the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world.
If you allowed Iran, I mean, to have such unchecked power across the region is going to be tremendously, I mean, as always, President Trump says, tremendously dangerous to the status of the United States financial system as the financial system of the world.
And add to this, the fact that you cannot basically say that Iran's politics and rhetoric towards its neighbors, it's not just only Israel.
Some people always say it was an existential threat towards Israel.
Since I was a child, their entire rhetoric wasn't just only about Israel and America.
It was also about Saudi Arabia.
It was about Kuwait.
It was about the UAE.
The fact that they, UAE trading with Iran for more than 40 years, and at the first sign of trouble, they threw more than 2,500 ballistic missiles and drones at the UAE.
What does that tell you?
It tells you basically that their entire plan, their entire military strategy was about hegemony over the oil-rich neighbors.
As simple as that.
They recruited so many young men, 700,000, to be parts of non-state actors, illegal non-state actors.
In what world can we tolerate that?
And the United States, at the end of the day, if they want, for the America first crowd, America cannot be first at home if it's not first abroad, if it's not first overseas.
Because at the end of the day, the entire economic system depends on it being the hegemon of the world and the guardian of the maritime global established maritime imperial.
Okay, but look, you're making an assumption that America is going to win this.
And I think that's quite an assumption to make right now.
I don't know.
Yes, it is.
Because at the end of the day, it's the calculus of the firepower.
At the end of the day, despite all the rest of the world, we will see whether the firepower alone can win this.
It's not just only firepower.
At the end of the day, what is a victory?
America First Hegemony00:07:24
Arabs always say, you know, that victory is just to be patient.
Is your patience outlast your enemies?
And here is basically the fact that there is no economic patience in Iran anymore.
My guess is that their economy will collapse.
My guess is that the Iranians will have a lot more patience than Donald Trump.
We shall see.
We shall see.
We will see.
All right.
We'll have to wait and see.
I've got to leave it there, panel.
Thank you.
Interesting debate.
Thank you very much indeed.
Well, I'm pleased to say that I'm joined now by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and lawyer to President Trump.
Rudy, welcome back to Uncensing.
How are you, Piers?
I'm good.
I missed you.
You well?
I do.
Me too.
You're doing very well.
Thank you.
Good.
We don't agree completely, but I really appreciate your ability to really put out both sides.
I want to compliment you on what you did do, Fuentes.
Oh, thank you.
That was one of the best interviews I've ever seen ever.
Particularly after he basically got that interview from Tucker where Tucker put him on his lap and was patting his head.
Well, I just think, I think the people like Fuentes, you've got to challenge them.
That's the point.
You can't give them a free run.
You did really well.
You did it without being nasty.
You're like a good cross-examiner.
I would have hired you as an assistant.
Do you know what?
I sometimes think I wish I'd been a lawyer.
But that's for another life, Rudy.
Let's talk about Iran, Rudy.
You've said, I think, that Trump is reasserting himself on the global stage.
Do you still feel that a month in?
I do.
I do.
And, you know, I have to tell you, knowing him 40 years, I can tell you that his views on Iran go back long before all, I mean, in the 1980s, he's actually on record talking about it, but I can remember having conversations with him where we both felt, particularly after the Marines were hit in Lebanon, we wondered why Ronald Reagan didn't take him out.
After the hostage, taking the hostages, embarrassing the hell out of the United States, and then killing our Marines.
I think he, this is like, this should have happened like 35 years ago, and a lot of people would be alive today and the world would be a lot better.
But we can't live with nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational regime.
This is not Putin.
This is not Xi Jinming.
They're terrible people.
They're very evil, but they're not irrational.
They don't want to die.
The Ayatollah and the people around him are actually displaying the fact that they do want to die.
The Ayatollah knew he was going to get it.
He sat there and I think he thought he was going to go up to paradise and find his 72 virgins.
So this really fits in what my biggest hero used to say, Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan used to say, mutually assured destruction is the way we kept this world together for a long, long time during the Cold War, but it's immoral because it rests on the fact that both sides have to have a rational leader.
You get a crazy man on either spot.
Goodbye world.
And we got a crazy man who wants to get nuclear weapons, has already killed thousands of Americans, chance every week that he wants death to America.
I don't know how much more of a threat you have to have.
But given he's been replaced, it appears by his son, although we haven't seen the son as supreme leader, and the son has now lost his father, his mother, his wife, and two of his kids, reportedly, and may even have died himself.
We just don't know.
But clearly, the ideology hasn't died.
The IRGC remain in place.
And I just think, and General Kimmett just shared this concern, that if America was to now commit ground forces into Iran to try and get, for example, the enriched uranium, it could be one of the most dangerous operations American forces have ever engaged in.
And if, as you say, you're dealing with unstable people who don't mind dying for their cause, does that not concern you, Rudy?
Of course it concerns me.
I mean, when we lost our first soldier, you say to yourself, is it worth it?
And now, what, 13?
But the reality is it worries me more that we have a world in which a, I mean, at one point, Iran was a substantial power in the Middle East.
It looked like they had an empire across the northern part of the Middle East.
I mean, they control Syria.
They control Lebanon.
They had three or four proxies that were extremely dangerous.
I mean, Hezbollah was undefeatable at one point than we thought.
So to let them move back into that situation again puts the whole world in danger.
Why do you think they shot that missile that went, what would it go, 2,000, 2,500 miles?
They wanted to show Europe, you know, we can hit you at this point.
And they've actually attacked the Emirates more than they have Israel.
Right.
Which has to tell you that their aim here is either totally irrational or it's to be the dominant power in the Middle East.
Or there's a third way you could look at it, which is it shows you they're actually being quite rational and quite cunning.
They know they can't compete with America stroke Israel militarily.
They can't compete with the military firepower in terms of just numbers.
But when it comes to strangling the global economy by closing the Straits of Hormuz, and when it comes to attacking the Gulf states in the way they have, attacking refineries and tourist areas and so on, killing for now, stone dead, the business models of those states until this is over, that shows a lot of rationality, actually.
It's a rational response to defending yourself when you can't do it purely with military firepower, isn't it?
They've shown a cunning which appears to have been underestimated by America and Israel.
Well, I'm not sure it was.
I mean, I think I always thought an action against Iran would be a major war.
It's a country that's been building up militarily.
In fact, I think had it been two or three years ago, it would have been even worse.
We've deteriorated them a lot in the last two years.
But I mean, the reality is that probably makes sense at the beginning, because that's what I thought.
I thought they were doing this in order to get the Arab states to put pressure on the president to call a ceasefire.
But the reality is it's the opposite.
European countries want a ceasefire.
But they want, I mean, they would surrender if I declared war on them, and I'd be able to take them over.
I mean, they're all a bunch of useless cowards.
Do you really believe that, Rudy?
Muslim Immigration Misconceptions00:03:35
Oh, my God, yeah.
I mean, the prime minister in your country, sad to say, sad to say, I have people from England telling me you're going to be a Muslim country in 10 years.
I mean, the Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church is bigger in England now than the Anglican Church.
And Charles III might be the Muslim monarch of England.
I mean, they're taken over.
And they want to take over, and it's Iran.
And Iran is the fuel behind that.
You take out the Islamic Republic of Iran, the whole thing moves in the other direction.
You realize, Rudy, only 5% of the UK is Muslim, dude.
It doesn't matter.
I mean, they have tremendous power.
How many mayoralties do they have?
But this idea, there's a lot of Americans.
I'm increasingly concerned that a lot of you guys seem to have this idea that we're literally being overrun by Muslims.
And I don't know where it's coming from because I'm the prayer.
I live in London.
I don't get any feeling I'm being overrun by Muslims.
Well, I mean, I was in London about a year and a half ago, and it seemed to me there were an awful lot of women with veils on that I had never seen before.
And you have you have debates over whether Sharia law should be respected.
Of course it shouldn't be respected.
Sharia law is a cult of death.
I mean, the Quran is a cult of death.
But Sharia law has no legal standing in the UK.
Well, not according to a lot of reports that I read in different parts of England.
It actually dominates.
And Steermer seems to be very, very affected by them politically.
He seems to want to make them happy, make them contented.
And certainly he doesn't seem to be trying to make them English.
Nor do the French seem to be trying to make them French.
They're contrary to immigration and assimilation.
They just do the immigration part, immigration, and then follow Muhammad.
What did Muhammad tell them to do?
Take over.
You're suggesting that all the millions of Muslims who live in the UK have a kind of radical mindset.
And I would say back to you that that is simply not the case.
All the evidence suggests that that is not the case.
I don't think they all have a radical mindset.
In fact, the majority of them don't.
I know Muslims in the United States.
I've studied the Korean.
They have about the same number of Muslims in the United States that we have here.
And most of them are.
They're very, very silent.
There's a very, very excessive, militaristic form of the Muslim religion, which is justifiable based on the literal words of the Quran.
And then the rest of the Muslims are very silent.
You rarely hear an objection to the horrible things that they do.
And very often you hear a defense of it.
It's very hard to get Muslims to stand up to the atrocities that they commit.
And there's a defensiveness that's extraordinarily dangerous.
Reminds you a little of Germany.
Certainly all of Germany weren't Nazis.
They just were afraid and they were defensive and wouldn't stand up to it.
That is a significant problem in the Muslim world.
Dangerous Defensive Defensiveness00:03:09
And it's beginning to change in the Arab countries.
You also can't discount the fact that what you have going on between Iran, Persia, and the Saudi Arabian desert is a 1,500-year, 2,000-year war between the Persians and the Arabs.
I mean, they despise each other deep down.
Now, what happened and why your theory that it was very rational doesn't work is because the Arab countries are now telling Trump, don't end this and leave them there.
Because to leave them there is just to kick this down the road.
If they're going to do this to emirates now, if they get more powerful, they'll do even worse.
So if I were the emir, I would be very much in favor of anything and everything that gets this theocracy over with.
And I think it's possible to do it.
I don't think they're as powerful as they appear to be.
I think that we've done tremendous damage to them.
God knows we don't know because most of the press and most of the reporting is very much against us.
To suggest that they're winning this war like the economists did is absurd.
You're not winning a war when you've lost thousands and we've lost 13.
I mean, it's absurd.
And where you've taken more people out in the Emirates than you have in Israel.
The reality is, we don't know how much longer it has to go and we don't know when they're going to break.
But we have them going in that direction.
And it's going to take an awful lot to get them back there again if we have some other president has to do it.
Well, Rudy.
Listen, there are many people that share your view about this.
I have serious misgivings about this whole thing.
I know you do.
And you are entitled to.
And I think it is a difficult.
War is always.
War is always very, very difficult.
And it always should be debated.
But you know what?
I will always allow people that have a completely different view to me to come on and air their views, as you've done.
And I appreciate that.
And there are times in which I sit back and run through my head all of the things that you're saying.
I don't think this is an obvious.
That's why I hate people who describe themselves as interventionists or isolationists.
You shouldn't be either.
I mean, it really depends.
It depends very much on how much danger is there to you.
And I think, you know, maybe we evaluate that danger differently.
Yeah.
Rudy, I've got to leave it there, but great to have you back in Uncensor.
Thank you very much.
Always good to be with you, Piers.
And I tell you, your analysis is terrific.
I appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
You're doing a real service.
Thanks, Rudy.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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