Judging Freedom - Scott Ritter: How Syria Fell.

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

Scott Ritter: How Syria Fell.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. With courses available online 24-7 and monthly start dates, WGU offers maximum flexibility so you can focus on your future. Learn more at wgu.edu. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, December 9th, 2024. Scott Ritter will be here with us in just a moment on how the Assad regime fell and the Syrian government collapsed. But first this. We're taught to work hard for 35 to 40 years. Save your money, then live off your savings. Unfortunately, there are too many threats undermining the value of our hard-earned dollars. The Fed's massive money printing machine is shrinking your dollar's value.

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gold and silver as your bedrock financial asset. Call my friends at Lear Capital, the leader in precious metals investing for over 27 years. They help me diversify into gold and they can help you too. Call Lear today at 800-511-4620, 800-511-4620, or go to learjudgenap.com. Scott Ritter, my dear friend, welcome here. As always, thank you very much for joining us. What role did the American government, either the State Department, the CIA, or other intelligence assets, or even the military, and what role did the Israelis play in the fall of Assad? Well, the answer is we don't know right now. I mean, this is literally something that took the world by surprise. I know that President Biden went out and made a presentation where he took credit for this. There's no doubt we've known for some time that the United States has been providing

financial support for anti-Assad forces, both based out of Jordan and based in Idlib and operating out of Turkey. Turkey's been also underwriting the HTS terrorists. I mean, I know people are calling them, but they're terrorists, they're head choppers. Jolani, I just want to remind people that the man who's currently sitting in Damascus at the head of what passes for a government in Syria, started his career as an Al-Qaeda terrorist in Iraq, killing Americans. And then he went to Syria

and he was a deputy to al-Baghdadi and ISIS. And he was part of that whole ISIS thing. Donald Trump, you were supposed to beat him. Remember, I killed all ISIS. Well, there he is. Joe Lani's back. He's now, you know, head of, you know, Al-Qaeda became al-Nusra. Now it's HTS. Now he's raised the black flag over Damascus.

Let me just interrupt you for a minute. So a human being who cuts off the heads of those who disagree with him and on whose head is a bounty posted by the United States State Department has been supported by United States intelligence assets lauded by the president by the United States State Department has been supported by United States intelligence assets lauded by the President of the United States and now is at the head of this government. Correct. Or what passes for a government. There's still, there isn't a government in Syria right now, but he has claimed the mantle of government. And it's worse because you know cnn um which is supposed to be a news media outlet um you know and i'll tell you dating back to 2002 they work hand in glove with the u.s government to put out a u.s government narrative i was in the war room of cnn in the

fall of 2002 as they prepared for the invasion of iraq which wasn't going to take place until March of 2003. The United States hadn't committed to it, hadn't told Congress about it, hadn't gone to the United Nations, but the U.S. government certainly had gone to CNN and said, we're going to invade Iraq, get ready to shape the narrative for us. CNN sent a reporter who sat down with Jolani and did this, just the greatest whitewash you've ever seen. And that was done with the permission of the U.S. government. The CIA and CNN, again, I know this firsthand because I was there when it happened, they collude on shapey narratives. And this is definitely a CIA operation where I told CNN, go in there. We need you to whitewash this guy. You

need to make him look clean because otherwise he has the blood of so many victims that he personally has beheaded and ordered to beheaded. He is literally a head chopper, but he's the guy in charge. U.S. government has been supporting them, supporting HDS, supporting these other Islamist fundamentals. Al Qaeda. thing I can tell you right now is that a large proportion of these people who float in to get rid of the Assad regime are al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda derivatives. They're the ones who attacked us on 9-11, maybe not these people, but that mentality, that organization, and we're backing them now, and we've put them in control of Syria after we committed American forces to drive them out of Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2020. We've now surrendered to al-Qaeda and given them Syria, and now they have their eyes on Iraq.

They're talking about making the caliphate that we said we didn't want to be made, but now it's politically convenient. The United States played a role. Turkey played a role. Israel played a role. But here's my take on this. Nobody expected this to happen. And the reason why I can tell you I believe that is the chaos. There is no orderly transition. There is no identified government. Jolani came in because HTS started what was supposed to be a limited attack in the Idlib area, basically to capture some highways that the Syrian government, together with the Russians, had taken from them back in 2020 to recapture those and solidify their position. And as they pushed in, the Syrian army evaporated. So they kept pushing.

The Syrian army evaporated. They went into Aleppo. The Syrian army evaporated. So HTS pushing. The Syrian army evaporated. They went into Aleppo. The Syrian army evaporated. So HTS just said, keep going. And they kept going, and there was not any resistance. And then behind them, the Syrian National Army was sitting there. They weren't part of this original offensive. And so they go, hey, guys, we got to get ginned up, and let's get going. Everything that's happened since then is reactive in nature. It's not part of a proactive plan, carefully coordinated. Down south, they weren't prepared for this. The operations center that operates out of Jordan, they had to assemble their forces and then they

sort of slowly went in and were surprised that there was no resistance. Next thing you know, they're thrusting into Dara, moving to Damascus. This took everybody, including the militants, the terrorists, the operatives, the opposition that succeeded in overthrowing Assad, took everybody by surprise. Nobody anticipated this happening. So the key question is, how did this happen? I mean, and this is the great unknown. You know, Russia and Iran have a heavy presence in Syria, and they're not stupid people. They've had their thumb on the pulse of Syria since 2014, 2015.

It was Qasem Soleimani, the Al-Quds Force commander, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander, who went to Moscow in the summer of 2015 and pleaded for Russia to intervene. And in September 2015, the Russians came in and together, the Russian Air Force, the Iranian leadership, Iranian forces and proxies propped up the Syrian army. And in several years time, they won an impressive victory, liberated the territory around Damascus, and drove the jihadists, al-Nusra Front and others, out of mainstream Syria into Idlib, where they were sort of hemmed in there, and that's where they've been hemmed in ever since. The problem comes with the Syrian government and the Syrian army.

This goes back to 2000, when Bashar al-Assad took over. He took over a rotten edifice. The Ba'athist regime, the generals, the governors were all very corrupt. failing in his ability to ascertain. So people around him stepped in and they started to enrich themselves. When Bashar al-Assad came in, one of the first things he did is shut down the corrupt general that was running the Syrian operation in Lebanon. And he actually moved to pull the Syrian troops out. That almost cost him his life because in doing that, he disrupted

not only the economy of the corrupt generals and governors, but the economy of Syria, which and governors but the economy of syria which isn't an economy it's a it's a it's just this corrupt edifice and so he had to slow down and now this war came and he can't afford to shake up his power base and so he has to let the generals and the governors do what they do which is is enrich themselves. And once the fighting stopped and things settled down, these people, instead of preparing for war, enriched themselves. And this gets worse when you have sanctions. You know, the United States has put the Caesar sanctions on and all the other sanctions on Syria. Everybody who knows this, and I saw this firsthand in Iraq, when you sanction

an economy, the first thing that happens is you get a black market economy. And that's an economy off the books. And in Syria, the economy that already existed was a corrupt economy. Now the sanctions come in and it becomes an even more corrupt economy, where the generals, the governors, the civil servants are all making money. Nobody's focused on doing their job. Everybody's focused on how much money they can make, how they can consolidate their wealth. And they stopped training. They stopped organizing. They stopped doing anything. And so what looked like it was supposed to be a solid military of around 200,000 was a house of cards. Apparently the Russians knew this. In 2018, the Russians approached Assad and said, you have to reform this from the bottom up. Our generals are telling us that this system isn't going to work.

We won this battle because of our air force, Iranian leadership, the sacrifice of 4,000 pro-Iranian proxies. But now you have to take over. You have to reform. But Assad couldn't because to reform the military meant that he had to change the power base and he wasn't confident enough in his ability to step forward military meant that he had to change the power base and he wasn't confident enough in his ability to step forward and do that so he pushed the russians back and the russians were very frustrated the iranians attempted to come in and do the same thing but they ran into a problem

too the russians had said we don't want we we you know they told the iranians you came in you helped solve the situation now you have to go home. Syria cannot become an outpost of Iran. The Israelis don't want it. The Americans don't want it. The Turks don't want it. And we don't want to be in the middle of this geopolitical nonsense. We came in to stabilize Assad, not promote the greater Iranian axis of resistance empire. And so there was Russian pushback, but there was also Syrian pushback because the Iranians come in, they are very ideologically motivated. They put up the posters of Qasem Soleimani and their Khamenei, and then Hezbollah comes in, Iranian proxy puts up Hassan Nasrallah, and the Sunnis, who are the majority population in Syria, are resentful of this. And so the Iranians also had to take a step back.

That meant that the two entities that propped up Syria and helped them win in 2017 to 2020 aren't playing a role. And when HTS attacked the other day, they came in, and what was supposed to be a brick wall that they were supposed to chip at, they touched it. It turned out to be a deck of cards. They hit it, and the whole thing collapsed. It took everybody by surprise. President-elect Trump has said over the weekend in a typical hyperbolic way, but maybe there's some credibility to it, that the reason Syria fell is its principal benefactor let it go, and he identified the

principal benefactor as Vladimir Putin. This is an absolute, total, this is part and parcel of the whole narrative that the United States tries to portray, that Russia is weak, that the Russian economy isn't as strong as it needs to be, the economy isn't as strong as it needs to be, the military is not as strong as it needs to be, that Russia is overextended in Ukraine, and therefore unable to do anything else. I would throw back at Donald Trump and say, so you're telling me, Donald Trump, that because the United States fled Afghanistan in the most humiliating fashion in August 2021, that means that we're overextended and broken. We don't have anything that works anymore.

And you know that's an absolute lie. We left Afghanistan because it was untenable. It was untenable because of the political reality of what was happening on the ground that had, you know, taken place over 20 years. But it's not a reflection. It's a reflection of bad policy, but it's not a reflection of the overall weakness of the united states what happened in syria is a reflection of bad decision making not so much by the russians but by assad um horrible decision making even when things calmed down if you remember this past summer assad was doing all the tours all around the gulf arab states What was he doing? He was getting the money to come in and rebuild. But that money was coming in, and it was going into the pockets of corrupt generals, corrupt politicians. It wasn't going to rebuild Syria. It just was a way to

further enrich. And this, I'm still doing some digging right now. I'm just running with an idea. I think that that influx of money was controlled by the CIA, controlled by the Israelis, controlled by the Turks. What I mean by that is that they colluded with the benefactors in the Gulf Arab states to flood Syria with money, but made sure it got into the pockets of the corrupt people and maybe a certain number of those people were bought off and told you know when the time comes you need to go here's the money go get your house and all that kind of stuff I can't say that that's absolutely certain but I can say that all this money that was flooding in and being promised wasn't going to rebuild Syria was going straight into the pockets of the corrupt generals and the corrupt governors

who were already corrupt and destroying Syria. And Bashar al-Assad had to be living in a fantasy land not to be aware of this. Either he was aware of this and was as corrupt as they are, which I don't believe,

or he was sequestered and surrounded by people who led him to believe that everything's okay and don't worry about it. We got this under control, boss. And they didn't. And now he's fled with his family to Moscow. Talk to us about Turkish President Erdogan and the role of Turkey in all of this. I mean, is he still on speaking terms with Vladimir Putin? Oh, they'll always be on speaking terms. Turkish President Erdogan is the president of Turkey.

He's an important regional leader. I can't speak to what's inside Vladimir Putin's mind, but I do know that there's an element of frustration in the Russian government towards the Turks. They, after all, continue to say that Crimea is Ukraine But I do know that there's a element of frustration in the Russian government towards the Turks. They, after all, continue to say that Crimea is Ukraine and that the territories that Russia has brought in through referendum have to be returned to Ukraine. That's not going to happen. And they operate in a way that does not suit Russia's interests. But Russia is their neighbor.

They collaborate where they can collaborate. Turkey clearly was operating in bad faith with the Astana agreements. I mean, everybody knew that to begin with because HTS continued to be funded, but the question was, what do you do about HTS? I saw in your comment,

I'm not supposed to read your comments, but I read them. Ritter has to apologize for being wrong for the last two weeks. He can apologize. You don't know what intelligence analysis is. You operate with the data you have to make the best assessments that you can with that data. And when the data changes, you redo your assessment. I got it wrong.

The CIA got it wrong. MI6 got it wrong. The whole world got it wrong. Nobody called this it wrong. MI6 got it wrong. The whole world got it wrong. Nobody called this. Not a single person called this. It came out of the blue. And now I, like everybody else, woke up in the morning and went, whoa, the whole world has changed. And I'm trying to get my head around it.

But I'm not going to apologize. Why is the White House and the State Department and the deep state crowing over this? Why are they happy? Well, because this has been a goal and objective of the United States and Israel. If you go back after 9-11, General Wesley Clark gave his famous speech where he talked about the seven nations that were going to fall. Syria was supposed to be number two after iraq if you look at the war plans and seymour hirsch has written about this um after baghdad fell we surged a uh a military force up towards al-qaim uh and then out of takrit and we were going to go into syria to overthrow bashar al-assad but then the instability in the South and in the North prohibited that, so we had to pull

back. But we wanted Bashar al-Assad gone. We have viewed him for the longest time as a linchpin of the anti-American establishment in the region. And we've been pushing to topple him from day one. The whole 1912 or 2012 up until now, this whole unrest thing is something that Turkey, the United States and Israel has been promoting. We have had an anti-Assad, you know, policy in place and now he's gone. So, of course, we're cheering, but that's like cheering the death of Muammar Gaddafi. Syria, unless there's something going on that I don't understand, Syria is going to devolve into Libya worse. The sectarian violence is going to be horrific. These head chopping jihadists, they haven't changed their colors. I got in trouble last night. I did a book event last night.

And even though it was about the INF Treaty, somebody asked me a question about Syria, because of course it's on everybody's mind. And I mentioned, I said, the black flag of Islam, of jihad is now flying over Baghdad. And this lady came up afterwards and she was furious at me. She said, the black flag of Islam is not there. And I who's Jolani she said no he's just temporary it's the Syrian National Army and she showed me the flag which is basically the flag of uh French Colonial Syria but they've adopted it uh you know three green stars and stripes on a white field um and I said that's a CIA flag you do know that we funded that that has nothing to do

with syria and it's not flying the black flag is flying and the black flag and this flag don't get along and every time they fought in the past the black flag has beaten this flag um the these people cheering in the streets have this notion that you know ding dong the witch is dead the wicked witch um and they're running around cheering they don't understand that whatever you want to call assad he's gone but what has replaced him is a nightmare it's there it this is going to be a debacle for syria and again from our perspective this is good this is what i've tried to tell people from day one. America doesn't care about Syrian people, about Lebanese people, about Iraqi people, about Iranian people. Our job is to facilitate chaos in regions that we don't control. And right now, we, together with Israel and Turkey, are trying to break the back of the axis of resistance,

which was Iranian-controlled but had been stiffened by the Russians. And it looks like we have succeeded, whether it is because we react to a situation that developed or whether it was by some strategic design that has yet to be articulated. We succeeded. Bashar al-Assad's gone with it goes the syrian land bridge between iran and hezbollah hezbollah is now isolated in lebanon they claim to have enough weapons to be able to continue resistance but they're not going to get resupplied and the other thing is the whole this whole dynamic has changed israel now who was defeated two weeks ago literally nobody's gonna i i know people were saying it was a big israeli scheme they were planning this was all that no israel was getting

their butts kicked in lebanon by hezbollah that's why they had to have a ceasefire and pull back but then this thing happens and israel went well here's here's what the thing every military has contingency plans every military has themency plans. Every military has them. And a contingency plan is what if this happens? Well, here's our plan. It tells you what forces to do. Israel had a contingency plan for the fall of Damascus. And even though their military had been defeated by Hezbollah, not winning against Hamas and has been demoralized for a year and a half, they pull out the contingency plan and off they go into the Golan Heights, advanced towards Qanathra, and look what they're doing with their air force right now.

They're destroying the entire military infrastructure of Syria. All the research and development, military industry, ammo depots, military bases, they're destroying that because they don't want whoever took over to fall in on this capability remember Syria has Scud missiles who owns those Scud missiles right now and if the United States is right I don't believe they are but if the United States is right Syria has chemical weapons I'll tell you why they don't have chemical weapons because if they did have chemical weapons you'd have a whole bunch of Delta Force guys going into Syria right now to secure the chemical chemical weapon sites to make sure they don't get in the hands of Al-Qaeda so now we've exposed the reality that the United States has lied the entire time about Syrian chemical weapons

because we're not running in there to to get these events over the weekend? The United States has a presence in Jordan that operates with the southern, what they call the Southern Operations Center, and we help set that up with the Jordanians, and we have a presence there. And then our presence in, I guess, the part the um the northeastern part of syria where the kurds are you know we have 900 to 2 000 depending on what day of the week it is american soldiers stationed there amongst those soldiers are um jsoc operatives who have a special remit to do things such as maintain liaison. And they have CIA paramilitaries with them who can go and maintain liaison with different factions. They're also in

Turkey working with the Turks. Yeah, the U.S. military had a whole bunch to do with this. One of the things that happened, again, reactive in nature, but when HTS started moving, they suddenly had an air Force it was the American Air Force flying close air support for Al Qaeda on the ground in Syria judge this is mind-boggling this is the kind of stuff that logically should lead to criminal charges against people um you know impeachment 9 11. I don't ever I know i'm going to get a lot of people mad with this we could never have another 9 11 ceremony because how in god's name can we mourn the deaths of nearly 3 000 americans who were killed on that 11 by al-qaeda and now turned over syria to al-qaeda

i don't want to hear about it anymore guys al-qaeda is our ally uh that's the de facto reality of this this is the disgusting aspect of it but the other thing is millions of syrians who think they have been liberated are going to find that they've just been sunk down into a quagmire and this region will not be stable israel keeps talking about breaking the back iran is not defeated all this does is engendered even more instability into the region and it just shifted the whole conflict. Judge, we were this close to peace, this close to peace. Here it's Sir Richard Sawyers, who's the former head of MI6, giving his opinion on all of this last night. Cut number four. Well, I think it was a surprise to everyone,

Trevor. It probably came as a surprise to Tahrir al-Sham, the group you're calling HTS, which have been the main rebel group involved in this march on Damascus. I don't think they expected to go so far so fast. I think we're all surprised at how the regime forces have just completely collapsed, even those most loyal to the regime and closest to the regime. So, yes, it is a surprise. It's not a failure of intelligence. It's a surprise to everyone. John Sawyers, I misspoke on his first name.

I know he says it's a surprise, but his people must have been involved in some way, no? They certainly were surprised. But, Judge, just because you're involved doesn't mean you can't be taken by surprise right following pattern behavior uh you you're operating off of um off of a plan that doesn't take this into account um you know i i can i don't know i'm trying to come to an analogy i i can be planning to take down a tree i used to be a sawyer in the wildland fire service i'm going to take down a tree. I used to be a sawyer in the wildland

fire service. I'm going to take down a tree. I look at the tree, I sound the tree, and I start cutting the tree. I have a plan where I want it to fall. But what I don't know is that inside that tree, there was rot and stuff like that. And as I cut, the tree takes on a mind of its own and twists and goes in another direction. That took me by surprise, even though I was cutting down that tree. All these people who were supporting the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad weren't looking for this sudden rush. If they were, Judge, there would be a government coming in. There would be teams ready to come in to prevent this chaos. But right now, throughout Syria, there's 100% chaos in the streets. There's

fighting. Anybody who says that this is peaceful, they've rounded up thousands of Syrian soldiers who weren't able to get out of the country, and they're all going to be killed. They're going to be marched out into the countryside. They're going to be shot. They're going to be beheaded. They're going to start going into the Christian villages. They're going to start killing the priests. They're going to start raping the women. They're going to start, I mean, this is a nightmare. All those people out there cheering this on, it's a nightmare that's happening right now, because this is how- Including Joe Biden, who in his own unique, stumbling, bumbling way, cheered it on

last night. What does this mean for Iran? How is Iran likely to respond, maybe perhaps with the acceleration of a nuclear weapon, or in what ways, Scott? Well, I don't think Iran's going to be accelerating a nuclear weapon. Iran right now, I think, first of all, we have to do some analysis about this dynamic that's going on inside Iran. Iran had a very pro-axis of resistance um posture when rayishi was president i met with rayisi in september of 2023 and listened to him as he talked about things um and for anybody that says look syria was a house of cards iran is too you're just showing your ignorance because in 2023, the CIA, MI6, the Mossad, Pakistani intelligence, everybody tried to take down the Iranian government. There was major internal unrest that erupted after the death of a, I think it was a Kurdish lady who got pulled in by the hijab police and she died in police custody. And demonstrations rose up around the country in protest.

But what happened is everybody said, we're going to take advantage of these demonstrations to make a nationwide uprising that's going to topple the regime. And Raisi said this to my face in the question that I asked him. He said, no, this was a regime change move that they were trying to do. It is one of the most dangerous periods in Iran's history. We were fighting for our lives, but Iran won. He said, we won. We won a great victory over the forces of the West. And the reason why I bring that up is anybody think that Iran's about to topple, they've proven that they have the loyalty of the security forces and

they have the support of the majority of the Iranian people so Iran's not about the topple but Iran does have some interesting domestic political dynamic Raisi was more popular in death than he was in life uh he was a conservative and there there's there's a there's a moderate faction in Iran that wasn't happy with it. This is why the Guardian Council, who reviews all the candidates for presidency, allowed the current president to be on the list. And this is why in the second runoff, the Supreme Leader sort of gave the nod to him because they realized that they had to give a voice to the moderate population of Iran that wasn't ready to do all this conservative stuff. And this

president has, and the reason why I say this president, his name begins with a P and I can't pronounce it. So I'm not going to try and butcher it. But he has been challenging the policies of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He opposed the decision to strike Israel. He delayed it. And he's one of the reasons why there hasn't been an Operation True Promise 3, because he believes that he should wait for the Trump administration to come in to see what kind of, you know, compromises and things can be made so that they don't have to have a larger war. He's also, Raisi was all about the strategic relationship with Russia and jumping two feet into bricks. The Raisi government was part of all that negotiation, but then Raisi died

at a critical time during key ministerials in the early summer of 2024. The new president comes in and his government was reticent. They took a step back. They weren't as enthusiastic because he didn't want to alienate the West and uh and you see this in the internal Iranian discussion there are so many people that call him a traitor they call former for Mr um Zarifa Trader anybody who uh articulates a policy stance that says we can get along with the west they're being called traitors because there's this ideological divide so iran has to get its act together they just got punched in the face the hezbollah thing that's been going on since the 1970s unless something dramatic happens it's over iran's not going to restore this land bridge they don't have the ability to resupply by sea

and they can't come in by air because israel going to shoot everything down. So Hezbollah is isolated. This is a huge victory for Israel. Iran now has to re-examine its role. I think this is the end of the axis of resistance, and it is going to be the beginning of either a strategic shift towards BRICS and a solidification of this Russian-Iranian strategic relationship, or we may see Iran actually turn to Donald Trump and say, we want to have good relations with the West. We want to do what we need to do to have good relations with it. And they're going to try

to pull an India and straddle the fence between BRICS in the West. But Iran is in a very difficult spot right now domestically. And it's made even more so now because the thing that they were doing, this axis of resistance, has been shattered because of the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. Here's Sir John Sawyers again arguing, similar to what you just did, that Iran is nervous. Cut number six. Iran will be watching this with great nervousness, great anxiety. The events of the last week or so in Syria are exactly what the Iranian regime fear could

happen in Iran at some point. I think they are more sophisticated in Iran. They've got some institutions of their regime, but it is still a minority regime with limited consent from the Iranian people, as we've seen at numerous times over the last 30 years when there have been opposition protests and unrest against the regime. So the Iranians seem to be pulling back. They've been weakened by Israeli airstrikes around their main nuclear facilities, not on the facilities themselves, but taking out the air defense units around them. encouraged by the fact that the Iranians do seem to be willing to re-engage with Europeans, with Americans, and to see if there is a future arrangement between Iran and the West, which meets our fundamental security requirements about their nuclear weapons program,

about their support for militias in the region, and so on. Reid? Yeah, just so you know, I know him personally. I used to interface with MI6 and I was at a wedding where he was the guest of the groom. Smart man, MI6 is full of smart people. They sometimes, when it comes to the Middle East, have a colonial look, a colonial approach. What I mean by that is that they sort of have the white man's burden where they assume that they know more about what's going on in countries. But roughly speaking, he got this right. I mean, it's the Iranians right now are on their back feet. They have problems domestically that they have to sort out

before they can assert themselves aggressively on the foreign states. Another interesting thing, I'll just put it out here too. And again, I keep looking at the comments and there's all these, Ritter's always wrong, Ritter's always wrong. Don't let that. No, no, it's a joke. But on the nuclear weapon thing, I'm telling you right now that the assessment that I gave you in the past, that Iran is on

the cusp of nuclear weapons, was an accurate assessment. They are today. And in the lead up to this, Iran had paused its enrichment of 60% uranium, which is the one step below the final enrichment process to get you up to 90, 90 plus for the nuclear weapons. But recently they started redoing it again. That's under the pressure of the conservatives who said, no, no, no, we have to get this up. What Mr. Sawyer said is 100% correct. Iran is going to put the nuclear program back on the table. See, Iran had broken away from the JCPOA because of the failure of the European E3 to abide. And so by law, they were able to back away from all this.

But to get in good graces with the West, I'm predicting that there will be new nuclear talks and that this is the end of the Iranian nuclear bomb. That whatever they had that they were building up there is going to be pulled back and be given away. And in some ways, that's good. In some ways, that's bad. I mean, it would be good if we also could do that with the Israeli bomb. But in order for Iran to get back into the good graces of the West, they are going to have to give up major aspects of this nuclear program that has been the centerpiece of their, not only foreign policy, but also their domestic pride.

And this just shows you how utterly confused and shattered Iran is internally that they would even consider this course of action and not be hung by the neck as a traitor. I mean, the fact is, though, Iran will have to make a strategic decision. And I think it's going to be that they're going to partially pivot back to the West and that that nuclear program is going to be back on the table. And Donald Trump is going to walk away with a major foreign policy victory. Because remember, he's the guy that pulled out of the jcpoa uh the the original Iran nuclear

deal saying it was a bad deal because it could get Iran to a nuclear weapon well he was right on that um I don't think it was a bad deal but because the other people didn't give the agreement a chance and they had these external factors you got there he always said I can make a better deal and he's going to be in a position right now can make a better deal. And he's going to be in a position right now to make a better deal. And this could be, you know, you look at the potential of bringing it into the conflict in Ukraine and bringing the Iranian nuclear program under control. Donald Trump could start off his presidency with two huge foreign policy victories. Scott Ritter, thank you very much, my dear friend.

Your analysis is extraordinary, just as the breadth of your knowledge. All the best. Thank you very much. Of course. Coming up at 10 this morning, Ray McGovern at 11, Larry Johnson at noon, Pepe Escobar from Moscow, and at two o'clock, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom. We'll be right back. Resolve to earn your degree in the new year in the Bay with WGU. WGU is an online accredited university that specializes in personalized learning. With courses available 24-7 and monthly start dates, you can earn your degree on your schedule.

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