Judging Freedom - JAMES R. WEBB (Jim) : Six Months Into Iran — Did Washington Ignore Every Warning?

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

JAMES R. WEBB (Jim) : Six Months Into Iran — Did Washington Ignore Every Warning?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Undeclared wars are commonplace. Pragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression with no complaints from the American people. Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected. What if sometimes to love your country you had to alter or abolish the government? Jefferson was right what if that government is best which governs least what if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong what if it is better to perish

fighting for freedom than to live as a slave what if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now hi everyone judge Andrew Napolitano here for judging freedom today is Wednesday August 26 2006 Jim Webble we with us in just a moment. Why didn't Trump listen to the people who warned him? But first, this. You know, a few years ago, if you told people you were stocking up on emergency food, they would have thought you were crazy. Not anymore. We've all seen supply chain chaos, devastating natural disasters, inflation, war, and civil unrest, and preparedness has now gone mainstream. That's why we're partnering with my patriot supply, America's original patriot preparedness company. Right now,

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Jim Webb, welcome here, my dear friend. Thank you for having me. You know, when the war in Iran started, we got a variety of reasons offered by the government. I think the most candid was by the vice president who said, or maybe it was Marco Rubio, excuse me, the Secretary of State who said, well, Israel was going to go in without us and we're friends with Israel. And that's why the president was persuaded to do it. Now, the president didn't say that.

The vice president didn't say that. The president gave a litany of goals. Has the U.S. achieved any of them? No, not at all. And it's hard to quantify exactly what the objective is here. I mean, you can peel back the onion a little bit and kind of see what it is based off the initial strike in Iran when we took out the Ayatollah and any number of key leaders in the regime. It was to collapse the regime on itself and change it and effectively balkanize Iran itself, much like we balkanized Iraq to a large degree because it benefits Israel. And when you have Marco Rubio and Speaker of the House Johnson echoing the exact same thing in terms of objectives, it becomes very, very, very, very important.

very clear and as to what that is. And I don't know if you saw, I'm sure you did the Wall Street Journal article yesterday, which laid out the concerns of any number of people in the administration to include J.D. Vance, in particular quoted right at the top was Tulsi Gabbard. And this wasn't so much as a warning in my opinion, but as it was a, we just don't want to do this. These are all those things that are going to happen. You're going to have the straight of whore moves be closed. Our allies in the region are get hit. It's going to destroy our credibility. And on top of that, the objectives that you're setting out in the short and medium term to include collapsing the regime are effectively unattainable. And this is no surprise. Go back to March, any number of

people, including myself, or talking about how the way that we went in was not set up for success, probably because it could not be attained. And this goes way, way back. Marine Corps General Van Riper was in charge of a war game in the early 2000s, you know, simulating exactly what was going to happen here over the last couple of months. And the results were absolutely just god-awful. We had any number of ships sunk in the Strait of Hormuz during the simulation in the opening round. It became an entire cluster to the point at which they stopped the simulation of the war game and they reset it because it was over so fast for us that they couldn't get, quote, unquote,

the data that they wanted out of the simulation itself. So no, nothing's been accomplished. And we're seeing the aperture shift, right? We've gone from an economic war to a kinetic attack back to basically an economic war where we're, I guess, attempting to impose a complete embargo on Iran. And that's also, it's the latest unrealistic objective these guys are set now. Wouldn't the Pentagon have presented the president with pros and cons? Mr. President, here's a list of what we think.

There's two lists of what we think will happen. Here's the good things that we can accomplish for you. And here's the downside because we're human and we're imperfect and we don't fully understand the Iranians. I'm going to guess, given Hegssz-Hutz-Hutzhutzhutzh, that such a conversation did not take place. It doesn't sound like it, Judge. doesn't sound like it at all. And what they're going to do when they go into that situation is they provide options. Hey, we can hit these targets. We can do this. And in the case of what it looks like Hegg Seth presented, his opinion was that we will just overcome what, you know, what challenges

the intelligence community is presenting as far as outcomes. And we can hit their, speaking from his perspective here, we can hit their silos and their weapons manufacturing and their naval assets and their radars at a speed at which they won't be able to respond. And I think that from the gist that I get, this became almost a competition. It was not something that was rationally laid out saying, okay, well, here is, you know, according to military orders that I worked in for a long time in the Marine Corps, which is you take a look at the enemy's most probable course of action, their most dangerous course of action, how that potentially impacts the operation you're about to run.

and then as a leader, you have the job to make an assessment. Are these objectives attainable? And what cost are they attainable? There seems to be this idea, particularly with the neoconservatives out there, that, you know, we're not taking casualties like World War II and we can amp up the volume on this and get what we want. Okay, maybe grant them that, right? But what would be the acceptable cost of imploding the government of Iran, which never presented a threat? to the U.S. homeland whatsoever.

It's, you know, do you, would the gallons of blood, of American blood be justified? Absolutely not. And that's something you got to, you know, that was not taken into account on the front end for sure. So we only know of three people by name who warned him, his vice president, who's now was cheerleader, Tulsi Gabbard, who at the time was director of national intelligence, she stated under oath a year before the war that the intel community was satisfied that Iran did not have a nuclear weapon

and hasn't been working on one since 2005. She said that under oath to a congressional committee, you remember this, the president said on Air Force One, I don't care what she said, I believe they are. Translation Netanyahu and David Barnaya, the head of Mossad told me they are. And I'm inclined to believe whatever the Israelis tell me. And then, of course, Joe Kent, who's going to be on judging freedom shortly after you today,

who famously resigned and in his letter of resignation, unlike Tulsi Gabbard, listed all the reasons why the war was wrong and why he had to resign. The president doesn't take any of that into account. He doesn't even acknowledge that he was warned. So why has war started because of the president's personality? I mean, don't we have better safeguards than that? I mean, yeah, we do, Judge. And one thing I'd like to also point out is that when we went in and did this, he said nobody could have predicted that they would close whore moves.

Nobody could have predicted that the situation would end up as it is. And it turns out, I mean, the obvious is right out. in the open. And yes, we do have safeguards. Our entire system is supposed to be designed to safeguard against this. The executive is not supposed to be able to take us unilaterally to war. And one of my great lamentations about this is the complete neutering of the legislative branch. You're supposed to have three, as you know, supposed to have three co-equal branches of government. And there are ways to get that power back. And they will not use them. This is quite frankly, a massively impeachable offense of the worst kind. It violates Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.

The power of war is in Congress. And they have seemingly no interest in taking this back. But this gets down like another layer beneath, right, where you have guys like Joe Kent, who I have a tremendous amount of confidence in his leadership ability because he's demonstrated it. He put his entire neck on the line to do the right thing. And I was brought up, you know, inside of the military, inside of the government. And it's one of those things where it was always preached to me. I saw it on display when I was on active duty, where if you're in charge, you have a greater responsibility

than just preserving your own self-interest, right? You have a responsibility to those underneath you who are going to go and do the dirty work, who are going to risk their lives. And that extends all the way up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And everybody in between. And this is a complete, complete abdication of any leadership responsibility. And the only rationale that I can come up with is that these folks are looking at their careers outside of the military.

They want to move on to the defense industry or wherever it is, get their cushy board seat and continue doing what they're doing because they're more worried about themselves than the fate of the country and the men and women who serve underneath them. One of the chatters, but people that write to us just wrote, I won't give the person's name, U.S. Congress is mostly filled with cowards in caps, not doing the job the Constitution gave it. That's true. So what you just said about people looking for their post-government jobs applies not only to generals and admirals and senior defense department people. It applies to members of Congress as well. The president, terrifyingly, Jim, keeps asking about low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. He shouldn't be discussing, and the Pentagon pushes back, rightly so.

He shouldn't be discussing or considering nuclear weapons at all. No. No, not at all. I mean, this is... What are these tactical or low-yield nuclear weapons? or what happens? Is this something you shoot from your shoulder? No, not necessarily. It's, uh, they're,

they're exactly, they're low, low yield means it's a smaller warhead. Um, in the Cold War, there is a large inventory of artillery shells, smaller bombs. You can put a smaller warhead on,

uh, something like a Tomahawk cruise missile. And the objective of these is if you have, for example, uh, a large gathering of the Soviet army, say in the fold of gap. you could drop one of these in and take out a large number of people perhaps blow a hole in the line.

The problem with this is the moratorium, if you will, on the use of nuclear weapons. If we get out there and use those on Iran, the entire precedent globally of using nuclear weapons at any level just comes right off the top. And we will undoubtedly see them used in other conflicts. I would not be surprised if the Russians responded in Ukraine by using nuclear weapons or somebody, like the Israelis who don't have them, also chip in and start using them as well. And this is a, I mean, this would be the ultimate Pandora's box that once the genie is out of, or that would be more of a bottle. But once the genie is out, once that box is open, man, you cannot control how or who uses them or how they use them.

And there are a large conflict points around the world to include a low grade conflict. that continuously goes on between the Pakistanis and the Indians, where they might decide, hey, you know, the global leader, if you will, the United States has just used nuclear weapons. Why don't we use them? And then you have all the secondary and tertiary effects of that, not just the use of them, but the like the literal fallout of the use of them. And it could be an unmitigated environmental disaster, which then trickles into the food supply. And this is one of those things where if someone like the president, who is,

is unilaterally taking us to war in the first place in violation of the Constitution is talking about wanting to do this. People need to be out in public calling for some sort of change in leadership, quite frankly. I have to ask you this. It's a little off the beaten path, even though you were a Marine and not strictly speaking in the Navy. The Marines are under the Department of the Navy. So I'm sure you have an opinion on this. What's wrong with the Navy today? Oh, man, that's multifaceted. One, I'm going to throw my bias out the window here, or at least it's empty to you, Judge. But they have a couple of problems, right?

It stems from leadership at the top. They're not taking care of their people. And this is a constant theme in DOD right now, in government right now. And it is a massive problem. It all starts there. The second problem is that we have, I believe it's a 238 ship Navy. total combatants. That includes our submarine force, and that is, that is, that is down from probably around 1,000 in the 60s and 70s. And the issue is, is that the deployment tempo and the

operational tempo has not become more constricted. They are out there covering the same amount of ocean, the same mission set with fewer people and fewer ships, and it is an incredible strain on the force itself. And then immediately in the person, Gulf, we're seeing with the Lincoln, their supply issues, the fact that they've had to stay on stations so long, is that, quite frankly, all of our logistical bases in the region are no longer accessible. You're either destroyed or cut off due to a mixture of Iranian strikes and the capabilities they possess with anti-ship missiles and the capability is someone like the Houthi possessed with anti-ship missiles. It's a combination of bad leadership, logistical hiccups,

beyond hiccups, but then also an overextension of the force posture. And we need to be building more ships if we're going to prosecute this mission. And at the same time, we need leadership who takes care of their people and speaks truth to power, saying, hey, maybe we can't do what you're telling us to do. And I can no longer put my people through this. So adjustments have to be made. And we're looking at, I think, quite possibly a complete implosion. from equipment, which is being burned through.

Some of these ships you're seeing out there are all rusted out because they're permanently at sea and they're not getting enough time back in port and turnover with personnel. And it's something we need to correct because once again, you go back to the Constitution and the Constitution itself calls for a Navy to protect our sea lanes and our trade. And we're not doing that right now. We've dedicated almost our entire force to bombing Iran for some strange reason. do you believe because Trump and Hegeseth condemned and he announced the complaints,

do you believe the complaints emanating from the USS Abraham Lincoln? I do. I do. I have been in contact with a mom who is a Navy veteran, her husband, or ex-husband is a Navy veteran who actually served on the Lincoln. Her son is on the Lincoln. And, you know, it extends way past just food. And I've been deployed. I have been, I got caught up in the surge in Iraq, so I've been extended. And when this happens to you, it really rocks your life. You know, it's like you're no longer home for your birthday.

Your wife, which I didn't have at the time, is waiting for you. It strains your personal relationships. It strains your ability to function mentally. But beyond that, it's, you know, beyond the food is the fact that we are asking more and more and more from these people without seemingly any regard for the type of impact that this really has. And it is an issue of functioning as a coherent Navy more than anything else. Because once the USS Lincoln gets back into port, roughly half of our carrier force will be in dry dock and maintenance. And that ship's going to be down for quite some time.

Then you're going to have to deal with the fact these people have been at sea for so long that they probably don't want to sign back up to do that again. And this is not just one deployment in isolation. This is the third deployment in a row that the Lincoln has done. For example, this gentleman who is aboard the Lincoln right now has spent his last three birthdays at sea and during a four-year enlistment. And he comes from a very strong family. And I have no doubt that he's a great sailor, but he's getting out. And I'm sure that is the posture across the board for these folks. So do you think that Admiral Cooper or Secretary Hegseth or General Kane said, Hey, Mr. President, these ships have to get into Bahrain for everything from food to toilet paper.

If the Iranians destroy the port in Bahrain, the next place that they have to go to is 2,000 miles away. Have you considered this? How could they not have considered it? I don't think they care. And that's the problem. It's, you know, if you had some leadership with some empathy or just basic practicality, they would understand this. That is a five-day trip one way from Diego Garcia to the Gulf.

And like, you can see the comments from the president himself saying they weren't deployed long enough. And I find that very comical considering that guy did everything. he could to avoid military service during Vietnam. Right. Who do you have on your podcast today, Jim? Oh, we have Dave Benner coming up. He is the nemesis of neocons. He is coming up in about 40 minutes.

And then tomorrow we have Larry Johnson. And then Daniel McAdams is tomorrow. It's the Jim Webb podcast over on YouTube. I know really, really original name. But it's a fun show. We have a good time and probably going to talk a lot about a lot of the stuff we talked about today. All friends of mine, give them my best. And thank you very much for your time today, Jim.

It's always a pleasure to chat with you. And of course, my regards to your father, who I thought was your grandfather. Oh, I appreciate that, Judge. I'll remind him again, he gets a kick out of it every single time. All right. All the best. Thank you. And as mentioned in my conversation with Jim, coming up at 2 this afternoon,

the former director of counterterrorism who told the president, Don't go into this war because you'll never get out of it. Joe Kent right here. At 3 o'clock on all of us, the great Phil Giraldi, Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.