Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton - EP:42 - Will the Ceasefire Hold?

Episode Date: April 11, 2026

In this episode of Provoked, Scott Horton and Darryl Cooper probe the complexities of the precarious ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran. They analyze President Trump's contradictory military rhetoric and internal dissent within his administration. Cautioning against escalating tensions and miscalculations, the hosts emphasize the humanitarian impacts of ongoing conflict. They discuss the limitations of U.S. influence in the region and advocate for a reevaluation of foreign policy strategies, calling for compassionate approaches to international relations and prompting listeners to reflect on the moral dimensions of warfare. Chapters (AO): 0:36 Welcome 1:16 Recent Developments 1:22 Ceasefire and Controversies 3:15 Schrodinger's Ceasefire 3:27 Military Strategies and Leaks 6:04 Trump's Decision-Making 13:17 Netanyahu's Stance 16:04 Potential Consequences 17:37 The Role of the Media 20:02 Diplomacy and Deception 22:23 Iran's Strategic Position 25:19 The Impact of War 28:23 Historical Context 30:22 Understanding Military Power 37:04 Perils of Overconfidence 42:12 The Future of US-Iran Relations 46:36 Polls and Public Sentiment 51:24 Troop Movements and Implications 1:14:32 Uncharted Territory 1:15:56 Concluding Thoughts (Cleaned up w/ the Podsworth app. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://podsworth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) Provoked show site: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://provoked.show⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Darryl's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@martyrmade⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://subscribe.martyrmade.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Scott's links: X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@scotthortonshow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthortonacademy.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://libertarianinstitute.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://antiwar.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scotthorton.org/books⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.scotthortonshow.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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End this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton, debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present, and future. This is provoked. All right, type of the show again. Hey, Jerome Cooper. How you doing, man? Good, brother. How are you? I'm doing good.

All right. How's the world doing? Well, the world's had better days. There are problems need to be resolved for sure. I've had a very busy day being interviewed about things I already know. So the problem with that is that I didn't learn anything new today, really, about the most important recent developments. And by the way, we're recording this about 24 hours before it's going to go live here on Thursday. So there could be even worse developments or better ones, I guess, between now and then.

But I'm traveling. I'm going to the Texas State Libertarian Party Convention this weekend and giving a speech. And so there's that. But anyway, there is a ceasefire, which is really great. As we talked about, Donald Trump could just stop. And it turns out even all the worst bluster of erasing Iranian civilization off the face of the earth was really just cover for him back and all the way down. but then changing his mind about whether he's back and down or not.

Of course, it's very controversial that Israel's still bombing Lebanon and claiming it's exempt from the deal. And America's taking Israel's side, even though that was not the deal that the Trump administration originally struck with the Iranians there. So already breaking it on Israel's behalf. And I don't know if you saw it was more than 300 killed in Beirut. And they bombed a funeral in the Buccah Valley with a massive bomb

and all kinds of civilians killed. They live over 300 killed, and they were bombing all different parts of Beirut that are not the so-called Esbalah strongholds in the southern suburbs, but all across the territory. And I was asked actually in an interview today, what was the strategy behind that?

And I don't really know, but I guess my best idea is it's an attempt to turn the rest of the different factions in Lebanon against the Shiites and against Hezbollah for that. And in fact, I got a email, Daryl, from a guy that I interviewed on the show back years ago. I don't know if this was supposed to be on the record or not, but I won't quote his name directly to you. But he emailed me, said he's in Beirut now and said that that strategy seems to be working.

Maybe I could find that email and read exactly how he put it. But essentially, I think he was saying, like, surprisingly, because this doesn't usually work in other countries, but this is working in Lebanon in making people blame Hezbollah for getting them into this mess. which there's obviously some truth to that. But anyway, so that's where I'm at. That's what I know. What do you think about what's going on here, man? Well, we kind of have Schrodinger's ceasefire right now, right?

Nobody's really sure if it's, you know, is this a tenuous ceasefire? Is there really even one? Like, nobody really seems to be quite sure. You know, I was really interested in the sort of sequence of events leading up to the announcement of the ceasefire and the cancellation of the destruction. of Iranian civilization. You know, the, in the day, like the day that the ceasefire was announced and the day prior, there were several news items, all very prominent, well, some of them more prominent than others, but all of them were in major outlets. There was a general, a retired general

that went on, I think MSNBC, might have been CNN, and was reporting on, you know, a rumor, he said it wasn't like he had firsthand knowledge of this, but it's what he was hearing from his friends who were flag officers still in the service that there was some brewing discontent and even talk of potential insubordination after after trump you know started making the threats about destroying civilization and whatnot that they that they felt like some people at least within the flag ranks felt like they were going to have to be the ones to say no then there was there was a there was sorry darrell did you say what the source was for that this is something you

You heard? No, it was a retired general, went on MSNBC or CNN. And he was reporting it as a rumor. Like, he wasn't saying, I know this for a fact, but this is what I'm hearing from my friends who were still active, you know. And then there was also the story that CENTCOM was vetoing target selection from that Pete Hegseth was sending them and demanding certain things get hit. And they were refusing to do it because there were civilian targets. You know, the fact that that was happening is significant. But what's really significant to me about that. is the fact that that leaked out and went public, when it did. Then there was the crazy story, the day that it came out the day of on ceasefire in the New York Times

by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, where, I mean, they just lay out in, not in general terms. Like, they have quotes from all these senior cabinet members, which tells you, like, however they got this information out there was coming from people, like, in the room, that everybody in the Trump administration, with like the exception of Hegset, tried to tell him not to do this,

tried to warn him off of this. Some of them were like more assertive about it than others, but like the entire attitude of virtually all of his advisors, again with the exception of Heg Seth, was this is a bad idea. And for that to come out that day, it was another story. This one didn't get, you know, it wasn't quite as prominent because the New York Times one

kind of sucked up all the oxygen. but there was another one, I think it was Susie Wiles or maybe another source in the cabinet who was concerned that Trump was not getting like the full picture of what was going on. Like people were presenting a rosy, you know, a rosy picture of what was going on on the ground in Iran. And so all of these came out either the day of

or the day before the ceasefire was announced, right? And when you couple that with what had just happened with this sort of, you know, was it a failed, raid? Was it just a, you know, a really kind of strange rescue mission or whatever? Like, you know, I think what probably happened is somewhere in the middle of the official story and the speculation that people are putting out there. I think that probably it was something like, you know, a pilot went down or a plane went down in the region, general vicinity of Isfahan. And it was too far inland to just try to send a couple heloes.

to go scoop this guy up or do some small operation like that. And they already had this large special operations force that had been studying the area and was like ready to do another operation there, if called upon, and that they just sent them in there to either rescue the guy or maybe, you know, in the meantime while the guy was being rescued, try something, I don't know.

But we all know how it ended. You know, something six or seven aircraft destroyed, including two H.C.130s, you know, large planes that that, though that specific configuration is very expensive. There's a lot of gear on board, destroyed those things. And our guys, you know, they ended up on the ground waiting for another pickup. I mean, there's a few hundred guys apparently on the ground and arranging to pick those guys up when their C-130s have been destroyed.

And you've got to figure something out is, you know, there were people scrambling to get that done. And they were on the ground for three, four hours, apparently, waiting for that to happen. And, you know, it was only just through overwhelming close air support blowing up, basically, from what it sounds like, every military age male and vehicle within several kilometers of those guys. Who knows how many innocent people got killed as a result of that? Because it sounds like we were blasting everything that even was close to them, you know, is probably the only thing that kept them from being, overrun. And, you know, if there had been like a point, if they had gotten stuck out there for a few more hours so that just because of the available resources, there had to be a gap in the sortie generation, you know, where it had to slow down as planes refueled and kind of like, you just, you know,

a gap of even, you know, an hour or two, there's a, there's a chance that the Iranian militias and forces around there would have been able to come to grips with our special ops guys there and get close enough, but couldn't use close air support on them. And who knows what would have happened? And so this was a very close run thing. You know, obviously the aircraft losses are the big story, but I mean, this was an operation that was very close to going terribly wrong. And so when you have that happen, which whether or not it was a, you know,

an attempt to use the pilot rescue to pull off this Isfahan raid or whatever, whatever it was, it was definitely those guys who were planning that raid doing an operation that was very similar to the one that got leaked to the press just a couple of days before about finding a landing strip and all the different things right in the vicinity of where it would have taken place, which, you know, whatever it was would mean you would think that that operation after the way that just went, that that whole thing about going stealing their uranium is off the table. And so if you think about where we had arrived up to that point, like, why was Trump saying, I'm going to destroy Iranian civilization, you know, just going crazy like this? It was because we had

gotten to the point where, you know, our military target deck was starting to run very thin. I mean, there were, there, there are several of these underground missile and drone bases underneath mountains and just heavily underground bunkers that we've hit three, four times with, heavy, heavy, heavy weapons, and we have not stopped them from being able to continue to produce out of those things. And so we had gotten to sort of the limit of what we could do to their military capabilities directly through air power alone. And we were facing, you know, this sort of moment of truth, which was, are we going to do what the Israelis want to do, which is just destroyed Iranian civilization, you know, bomb everything that people, all the life support systems that the

people their need. Or are we going to, you know, do some even crazier versions of what we just tried near Isfahan and, you know, send guys in to go try to secure these places like manual, you know? And so, in other words, we were at a point where all of our options were either, we're both extremely risky, uncertain to meet with success, and certain to be just massive escalations that would have caused immediate, massive reprisals across the region. And, you know, once Trump got to the point, you know, I think this whole time, he's really been hoping

that there would be this DeSX Machina, you know, with the Delta guys would go in there and get the uranium and they come out. And now he can say, all right, we win again. And, you know, let's slow this down, Iran and, like, look for this way out that would be face-saving for him. And that would be the way to expultrate.

himself from this situation. But once that was taken off the table, and you have all of these stories coming out that are clearly based on very, very high-level cabinet and Pentagon leaks saying that, you know, either we're telling them no to some of the targets they want to hit, or, you know, we all tried to tell them this was a bad idea

from the start. Where all of these things starting to come out shows you, there was some real resistance that was starting to push back from within the system and, you know, he was at this point where it was either massive escalation when you know you don't have the full support of your own people, you know, because they're showing you that or figure out a way out. And that's why we got to hold of Pakistan and said, you guys got to help us do this. And then it makes sense, too, because when you think about like how strange the whole sequence was regarding Lebanon, right, where it was like the day that the ceasefires released, It includes all of the allies, including Lebanon.

The Pakistani prime minister puts out the official message like announcing the thing, and it mentions Lebanon directly. The White House doesn't contradict them. Nobody in the U.S. government contradicts that. And then the next day, Benjamin Netanyahu says, yeah, we're not doing that. We're going to bomb Beirut and do whatever we want in Lebanon. And you have all these U.S. officials who are backtracked and they're like,

oh, it was a misunderstanding, or, you know, it was never made. to be Lebanon. I don't know what they're talking about or, you know, just all of these sort of just equivocations and denials of something that is very, they're very obviously lying. I mean, like, there's just, you know, the Pakistanis say they're lying. Everybody knows they're lying, because everybody who would have been involved with the situation knows that Iran never would have accepted a ceasefire. That they're not, it didn't include Lebanon. And so, you know, the only way I can make sense of that, you know, it's people want to say like, well, Benjaminette and Yahoo got on the phone and like, his foot down, but they knew Benjamin Nanyahu was going to be unhappy with it when they did it

to begin with. Like, I think it was just the moment was coming where his civilization ending threat was either going to have to be carried out or his bluff called. And we were just like, tell them whatever they need to hear to take the ceasefire. What, 10 point plan? Yeah, sounds awesome. Lebanon, yeah, whatever. Just fine. Seasfire. Just do whatever you have to do to sort of get us away from this deadline and then we'll work out, you know, the consequences of that the day after. And so now we're in this place where it's going to be very interesting because, you know, if this thing wants, if they want to restart this thing, we're going to be right back where we were that same day, where the military targets are hardened and going to be very hard to access

with any, like, really good return on investment. And our only real options are extremely risky operations involving a lot of ground troops or just massive escalation against civilian infrastructure. And we're going to be right back where we were. And so Israel obviously seems very intent on trying to drag us back into that place and force our hand again. But now that we really do see through all of these media stories that came out, you know, the, I mean, there are there are literal like word for word quotes of what Rubio and, you know, some of the other cabinet members said to Trump in the situation room when he was after he was briefed by Netanyahu. So I mean, this is like, these are very high level leaks, you know.

And for these things all to come out, like in the two days before this big moment of truth comes, right after this operation really goes south, any escalation is going to be, like Trump's in the position of he's going to have to once again basically tell his entire cabinet and the DOD. I don't care what you think. We're going to do what I want to do and what I want to do is what Benjamin Netanyahu wants to do, or he's going to have to finally grow a sack and tell these

people no, you know, and tell Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israelis no. And we're kind of at this point. We're going to find out if he's really capable of that, you know, because all of the things that are arrayed against continuing and escalating this war, you know, that's a

litany of stories that came out that really like sends the message that there is a huge amount of resistance within the American system to pushing this any further, that we have done what we could using military means that wouldn't involve just a massive, long, protracted, destructive war that nobody wants, that for, you know, that Trump really at this point, you know, if he can't say no to Israel, when under those circumstances, when there is so much public resistance from his own highest level officials and military advisors, I mean, we might as well just bring Netanyahu over here and let him sit in the Oval office.

Yeah. That was my joke. I wouldn't be surprised if Trump made him the prime minister of the Senate somehow or whatever, kicked himself upstairs to just Supreme Overlord while letting Netanyahu run the whole government. It has been like that. So, yeah, well, look, I mean, right off the bat, they took the Israeli side. They sent J.D. Vance out there to go, oh, you know what? this was a misunderstanding, but we never said Lebanon.

Ah, come on, man. Well, have you seen? You said you were, like, wrapped up in interviews today, so you might not have seen the stories. Like, it's being reported now. First, it was reported that we helped draft the Pakistani's statement. Well, yeah, that was late yesterday, because the original post on Twitter included the thing at the top that said,

this is for the Pakistanis to vote. Yeah, which, like, the Pakistanis own... the Americans and mentions Lebanon. His own staff would not say the Pakistan Prime Minister. They would just say the Prime Minister, right? So like there was further. So he was reporting that that is like we did help draft that apparently. And then there was further reporting saying that President Trump personally and specifically

approved the message that included Lebanon as part of the ceasefire. And so. Of course, as you said, no one, if you just stop and think about it for a second, does anyone believe that Iran would have ever agreed to a ceasefire that didn't include Lebanon? Give me a break. Just forget about that. They're entirely entertaining the possibility that the lie is true. It's a lie.

Yes. And the fact that they would, this is what really gets me, you know, like, the fact that they would lie so obviously and so brazenly about something that, you know, this is not a neutral lie. This isn't like, what were you doing in the closet over there? Oh,

nothing wrong. Don't worry about it. By saying what they're saying, they're saying, they're saying that the Pakistanis are liars, you know, and that all the people who were involved in are present, like, you know, for this thing as it was going, all those people are liars. And that's a dramatic step to take. I mean, and it's the second time that we have done this with mediators

that we engaged with. We asked to, like, mediate. First, with the Oman Prime Foreign Minister, you know, they just, he came out and just said, we're, you know, right before this whole thing started, we're extremely close to a deal. The Iranians have made all of these just on, precedent it offers foreign access of anything they've ever offered before. And then they just come out

like the next week, you know, as we start the war saying, oh, they were like bragging about how many nukes they could make and like just refusing to budge on any, just calling that foreign minister a liar, which, you know, if you really think about it, like when you, this is like a real question of like, that's not a, that's not just a regular lie. Because, you know, when you ask somebody to mediate, you're getting them to vouch for your honesty, right? Like, if we're not just lying about Iran now, we're not just doing deception that involves Iran, we're bringing you in as a mediator because now, if we lie, if we deceive, we're deceiving you, too. And that's like, that's like an elevated level of like, you know, of wrongness, especially in international diplomacy. And we've done it

twice now. And I'll be honest with you. I think, probably at both times, you know, both times probably went the same way. I think that we probably, like at least a lot of people involved on our side, probably wanted it to go a de-escalatory direction. But again, Israelis, they just, they have the power, dude. I mean, it was funny. I don't know if you saw this today. And I'm kind of half joking about this, but only half, I guess, at this point,

because who knows, there was this really strange, like, Melania Trump called this like short notice press conference. And she goes out and gives a short speech, just denying that she and Jeffrey Epstein had any like kind of close relationship and like, you know, just that kind of thing, like just to announce that, I guess. And and then a couple hours later, the story comes out in The Daily Beast. And now there was another story I just saw come out. There's like a 2002 email from her to Galane Maxwell asking about Jeff and Palm Beach and all this other kind of stuff.

like, hmm, it's like, okay, wait a second. So you've got the country that Jeffrey Epstein word for is very, very, very upset with Donald Trump for doing something that agreeing to a ceasefire that they did not want. And then the next day, Donald Trump totally backtracks and flip-flops and says, okay, yeah, they were right, like forget about it, like whatever, whatever they say is true. And then this little, this little story about Epstein comes out. It's like, that feels like a warning shot to me. Yeah, it sounds to me like, because people were flipping out.

Like, why does she even do this? It seems so apropos of nothing that she would come out and do this speech. And then it was like, oh, I get it. What happened was the Daily Beast called for comment before they published their piece. And her and her people slapped together this thing to let her go out and kind of preempt the thing. It was interesting the way she said, I was never a victim of Epstein. I just saw him at a party a couple of times. but that's all, you know, man.

And yeah, it's pretty hard to conclude any other thing. Then, yeah, the Israeli state is using their cutouts at the Daily Beast to do this hit. And I mean, at this point, it's like, okay, we're going to go meet in, you know, Islamabad. Or that seems to be like on suspension right now too. But like we're going to go meet and talk about what, like. Is that canceled? It seems like it's. it's in a state of uncertainty, like right now, you know, because the Iranians are saying,

you know, look, it's like you just, you know, you just said, like, anybody that, that thought that the Iranians were just going to abandon Hezbollah, like, forget the fact that Hezbollah was, you know, they proved their loyalty to Iran fighting ISIS, taking thousands of casualties, prove their loyalty again by stepping into this war. There's that and that there's like a matter of just, you know, of honor and reciprocal loyalty there that I'm sure a lot of the IRGC officials like really take seriously. But it's more than that. I mean, it's just everybody talks about the ballistic missile program and the drones. Dude, like, the loyalty of their regional proxies is a massive, massive component of Iran's deterrent capability. I mean, the fact that they get into a war and you got

the PMRF, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, who were. all there, like, either ready to go at a moment's notice or just jumping into it, I mean, that's a huge part of their deterrent. And if they abandon Hezbollah, which is the most important one by far, you know, an organization that has, I think, distinguished itself, you know, in 2006 and in this most recent conflict is probably the best light infantry in the region. I mean, they're just, you know, just for that reason, you wouldn't think Iran would want to abandon them. But if they abandoned Hezbollah, the Houthis, the PMRF, like all the Shiite militias, they're going to look at them and be like, oh, okay, they'll drop us like a bad habit, like no problem.

So they're just not going to do that. And anybody who's remotely involved with this situation would have known that. And that's just, again, leaving aside the fact that that issue was made completely explicit in the negotiations for the ceasefire and in the announcement that came out. Well, so let me change the subject backwards a little bit to, the New York Times story and what it reveals about the talks there, or the decision making. So not the talks.

We're talking about the decisions start to work. The first part is about Netanyahu came to town. And amazingly, Trump doesn't even sit at the head of the table. He sits right hand of his own seat so that he can sit directly across from Netanyahu. And then Netanyahu, you know, the way they describe it, he gives his talk with his people surrounding him as a sort of he's in charge in a way or whatever. And then he gives them this lie that we already knew this.

We said this, you know, at the time. They said this publicly at the time. All you got to do is hit them and they'll fall. It's such a weak and crumbling regime. They had to put down, they had to murder 45,000 people or 85,000 people or whatever number you like in order to just barely cling on to power just six weeks before. And so all you got to do is just hit them and they'll fall right down and all that. And then the story says that then Netanyahu left

and then the head of the CIA, Ratcliffe, and the Secretary of State slash National Security Advisor, Rubio, and then all agree that it's bullshit. In fact, I thought it was funny. Ratcliffe says it's farcical. And then Rubio says, in other words, it's bullshit just to make sure that Trump understands what the word farcical means.

I mean, according to Matt, Maggie Haberman, who knows. But here's my point, Darrell Cooper. I do have a point. The point is that the way they recount the story in the times, this is credible enough. It's at least coming from principles involved, obviously, not just from their deputies,

but somebody at the highest level was given them that stuff. And to me, it sort of highlighted just what a regular guy Trump is, rather than the cartoon character we're so used to all the time. that when he's not on TV and he's just in a room with his guys, that they all are really just kind of regular dudes. And so is he, right? Like, Ratcliffe and J.D. Vance, like there's nothing particularly special about these guys in terms of, you know, their deep experience in diplomacy

or their deep readings of international policy or their, you know, whatever study of Iranian nuclear technology or any other. There was no Kissinger in that room, you know? Yeah, that's right. And there's no, look, and they even excluded Tulsi Gabbard, and you have to assume, I think fairly, to be fair to her, I think it had to have been because she would have too much to say that the president didn't want to hear. She just knows too much about this.

And the fact is, she can be in a Ron Hawk. And I think in certain circumstances, I mean, we saw her come out and give rhetorical support for this thing after it started. And I think, you know, it's even possible that she's, supported it in the first place for all I know. I don't know. But I know that she really hates Al-Qaeda, and that's the opposite of Iran, and she knows that. And so, you know, I could see how she would be excluded for knowing too much about it.

But anyway, my point is this. And honestly, I ain't bragging, only like slightly a little bit bragging about this piece that I wrote in August. I'm sorry, I said on some other guys show July, but that's not right. It was August 2005. Okay? years ago, who's behind the coming war with Iran? And in this article, you got a page down.

I have this whole thing about how these idiots empowered Iran in Iraq War II. I even say in one of these articles, I think it's this one. I say, if you think this fighting's bad, just wait until the real civil war kicks off. Because this is still just the summer of 05, right? But anyway, it got much worse after that. So anyway, here I say, our soldiers could get killed in Iraq. because they're embedded with the Shiites there.

You've got to look out for that. And then I have this exactly backwards here, by the way. Think of Iran as a fancy Western word for Persia. It's coastline comprising one side of the Persian Gulf. Access to Saudi oil and the Arabian Sea could be easily halted, which would destroy the world economy and quickly. And so there's me when I was 28 years old or just turned 29 years old, 21 years ago

and warning about that Iran could close down the Persian Gulf because how are you going to stop them because it's called that because it's Persia and they own that entire coastline on the northeast side there

and so the point being is not hey Coop look at me like I'm so bright or whatever although yeah I was doing a good job but the point is that I was just reading the American conservative and interviewing their guys but the point is that, man, someone in that room

should have been able to say to Trump. I mean, hell, this is a year and a half before the chiefs took George W. Bush to the tank and explained to him why we don't want to attack Iran, boss, because it's too much to bite off and chew, man. They got too many missiles and too many levers that they can push back. We don't have escalation dominance. We don't want to do it.

They told W. Bush that a year and a half, I wrote this article. They told him explicitly what for, why not? And then Joel Klein leaked that and wrote that, or it was leaked to Joel Klein, and he wrote that in Time Magazine, I think a month or two later in early spring 2007. And, you know, of course, I got access to the great Gareth Porter.

So it's just, we've known about this. Anti-war.com folk have always known that the real danger here, I mean, for 20 years, that the real danger here is they got more missiles than we know how to defend from. And also we got troops in Iraq that are embedded with the Shiites and can be, you know, turned on. And when these guys are very close to Iran and all this stuff. So, but then if you read that time story, listening to, you know, their retelling of even the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff now, along with the vice president, the Secretary of State, the CIA director, and the president sitting there talking about all this, that essentially none of them

said this. None of them said, listen, Mr. President, worst case scenario, they decide to go, and we talked about this on our show over and over again for weeks ourselves. Worst case scenario, they do the thing they've been saying for weeks that they will do. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They were very explicit about it and that they can do it, you know? And apparently not. Apparently, he bought the earlier kind of Israeli line that like, no, whatever it is that they have, we can handle it. Don't worry about that. Or that they'll fall before it becomes an issue. Yeah.

And I can picture the conversation being, you know, had between like any six drinking buddies anywhere in America. Well, I heard they're making news. Well, come on, nobody can stop us. We should just kick their ass. Should we wait or should we do it now? Let's do it now. Blah, blah, blah.

But it's just Tommy and Billy and Joey. And they just, they don't really know what they're talking about. And they don't know anybody who really knows about this stuff, you know? Yeah, it's even a little bit worse than that. I think that Tommy, Billy and Joey would be like a group of buddies who all are, you know, at least, you know, on some level like each other's equals in terms of the respect they have for each other. And, you know, Trump is a guy who surrounds himself with sycophants and with people who, you know, he surrounds himself with people. Like, look, somebody like Marco Rubio, who I'm not like a Rubio hater. I think he sounds like he's an intelligent guy, certainly like in comparison.

into what you get out of Washington most of the time. He sounds very articulate and fairly knowledgeable. But, you know, this is a guy who Trump was, I mean, he was, he was belittling and mocking him and just like, just the most, you know, emasculating terms. And now he has this guy who's just out there running cover for him, telling lies for him, just sucking up to him. And, you know, you even have Trump given that speech at the Saudi Forum in Miami a few weeks ago when he was saying he doesn't like to surround himself with people who were really successful

because then you have to listen to them and tell their stories about their success. I like to surround myself with people who aren't so successful because then they've got to sit around and listen to me, talk about my success. And so when you have that kind of like a narcissistic personality complex and you relate to people in that way, you get into this trap where anybody that you're able to get on your side, anybody you're able to either manipulate or intimidate or do whatever you're magic is to get them to come over and be one of the people in your entourage that you're going to have around, you do not respect those people. Because if they were respectable people, they would have

stood up to you and they wouldn't have put up with, they wouldn't have been, you know, so easily manipulated by you. And so when the Israelis come and they make a presentation and everybody else in the room around him, people he doesn't respect, tell him something opposite of what the Israelis are saying. I think he just thinks, yeah, the Israelis know better than any you idiots you know and you know it's but it's what's really remarkable about it though is you would think that trump i mean he just you'd think he would have a certain level of just understanding that of the israeli's willingness to to lie and manipulate him i mean because i don't know about how you feel about this i don't believe for one second that the Israelis actually like i believe trump bought it

But I don't think the Israelis for one second thought that we were going to go in there and kill the Ayatollah and the whole government was going to collapse and we win and they lose. I don't think they thought that for one second. They know better than that. And I think that what they were thinking is we just got to get the U.S. into the war. Like once they're in there and we've killed the Ayatollah and we've done all this stuff, boy, they're in it now and we'll figure out how to win after that. Once we got the U.S. like completely embroiled. No question. I think that's what they were doing.

Yeah. No question. These aren't stupid, dude. They've penetrated Iranian society for so many years, so deeply. They can be stupid, but not this time. Not like that. Yeah, I put an actual screw to him and say, you really think the Mujahideenic can take over?

You really think the Shapella, Paula V can take over. You really think that the Pchak or Jandala or whatever combination of these groups could sack Tehran and take it from the IRC, get the hell. out of here, do you? Not to mention the fact that they already shot their shot in January. You know, they had this network of insurgents that they probably spent a decade or more building up

and preparing for the... Yeah, and it got blown up, you know, and once that was out of the picture, I mean, they definitely should have known better. But, you know, I think one thing I do think is possible. I don't think the Israelis thought that what they were selling Trump was actually going to happen, but I do think the Israelis

probably like Trump, like so many of our own people, they probably did buy into this myth of just unlimited American military power. You know, like, because like I was talking to, too, I was talking to somebody about this yesterday, how, you know, you go back, you look at Iraq, you look at Afghanistan, and you say, well, we lost those wars. It's like, yeah, we failed to achieve our mission in those countries, you know, for sure. But it wasn't like we went in and lost.

to another military. This was not like a military defeat where, you know, they just, they, they overcome our ability to continue carrying on the war or something. It was a, you know, it was, it was a more proof that, you know, the U.S. military is not well suited to turning a bunch of posthune, you know, goat herders into Vermont Democrats, right? But nobody looked at it as a military defeat. And so nobody was really quite sure. Like, what, like, what are the limits of American power. Like when it just comes to just kicking another military's ass and beating them into submission, like, what are the limits of that? And nobody really knew. And obviously, on both sides, Israel and ours, we just dramatically overestimated it, you know, and underestimated the

Iranians' ability and willingness to take it and keep getting up and punching back. And it's what you know, there, hold on. The great Gareth Porter wrote a book about this about Vietnam or his Vietnam book is called Perils of Dominance. And the peril of dominance, in this case, it was a reference to the fact that the leaders of the national security state at that time,

they knew good and well, despite the lives they were telling the American people. They knew good and well that the United States was far more powerful than the Soviet Union and China combined. And that there's no power that could resist us. At that time, the Russians had four intercontinental

ballistic missiles, and they were all within one atom bomb's blast radius of each other and, you know, completely take outable in a first strike, no problem. And so they were so full of hubris about the overwhelming technological power of the American Empire. That was how they knew that Ho Chi Men would simply have to give in to them. And this is how they got caught in that escalation trap is, I don't know if Robert Pape coined the phrase, but he's the one talking about that. That's his substack about it right now. And it starts with what you do is you hit them really hard and then they do what you say. And then if that doesn't work, then you hit them again. And then you just keep hitting them until you freak out and say,

I'm going to end your whole civilization. And then they better give in. And then, of course, underlying all this is the mythology of Harry Truman ending the Second World War by using nuclear weapons against Japan when that's not what did it. But they all kind of believe that. And so if you either threaten to hit them that hard, you do hit them that hard, then they'll give in. even though there are so many examples of that not working, including Gaza recently, where they just absolutely pummel the crap out of those people, but they're fighting age males,

guess what, to not just throw down their arms and surrender. It was remarkable. Netanyahu was giving a speech in Hebrew to an Israeli audience, television audience, yesterday, I think it was, and he was bragging about, he was telling all the accomplishments of these wars and everything, and he was bragging about how we now occupy 50% of Gaza. And I remember, like, I followed, you know, over the course of the last couple of years,

has this been going on. Like, you know, I haven't been following it day to day as closely as I was in the early days. And I was like, kind of surprised. I was like, you only control 50% of Gaza at this point after all this, you know? And yeah. I found the crap out of it every day. Yeah. I saw a footage today, man, right before we went on here, Dara, I saw horrible footage of the bombing of Gaza.

They shot a little girl in the head today, too. nine-year-old girl. Yeah, it's really, it's really nasty that like, you know, the Israelis, and they do that, they've done this, they've done this on multiple occasions where, you know, they'll be doing something to the Palestinians and they'll start another more flashier war with somebody else in Lebanon or something that takes everybody's eye off of what's going on. And while that's happening, man, they just, they just ramp up the atrocities in the West Bank in Gaza. And now Iran is big enough that they can. ramp up Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza under the cover of Iran. Although hopefully now that's

kind of canceled, but I guess we'll see how it goes. I mean, Iran is still firing rockets and Israel still bomb in Lebanon. Yeah, it seems to me very simple. Like if we are really going to allow Netanyahu to derail this thing over the question of Lebanon, then the war is just going to pick back up. Because there's just, I can't see any way that the Iranians can afford to just abandon Hezbollah like that at a time like this. Like just their own deterrent, their own national security just requires, you know, the loyalty of their proxies. And I just can't see that happening. And so if we're going to allow Netanyahu to, I mean, just think about like how stupid he made the administration look, you know, where they're out there literally like retweeting and sending out the Pakistani prime

minister's message announcing the ceasefire that includes Lebanon. When they know that President Trump personally approved it. When they know that we help draft the statement that the Pakistani prime minister put out, they know all that. And despite it all, they're just going to go out the next day and be like, I don't know what they're talking about. Like, there's nobody that believes that. And launched a massive bombing campaign that kills hundreds of innocent people.

And one that is like, you know, I mean, this isn't like huge change in their MO, but maybe an escalation of it where, you know, there was not even a protest. that these were like strikes against Hezbollah headquarters or anything like that. These were pure terror strikes against, you know, civilian targets in Lebanon, as you said, just to put pressure on the non-Shiite civilian population there. Yeah. Which is, that's, we have a word for that, it's terrorism. That's what terrorism is, you know?

That's exactly what it is. All right, so now, listen, let me ask you more about your opinion about the Iran situation here. I mentioned Robert A. Pape earlier, the academic from the professor from the University of Chicago. I know him from writing the books dying to win and cutting the fuse about suicide terrorism back in the terror war years. I think I interviewed him for the first time back in 2005 as well. Man, I'm old. But the thing is, so he also wrote a book, in fact, before that, called Bombing to Win. That's his study of the use of air power.

And again, it's lack of efficacy. And you can see how the airplane, you know, video brochure guys can put together a slick package and can promise incredible results with exquisite weapons that, you know, are highly accurate in their delivery and all of that. But translating it to strategic goals is a whole other thing. And they have not been able to do that. And so, you know, I saw some guy on the Twitter there was saying, So all the terrible things that the people warning against the war said would happen haven't happened. Like the war spreading to World War III, worst case scenario, or whatever it was all he said.

Massive refugee crisis, nuclear weapons being used, massive American boots on the ground and casualties there. None of that has happened. And then so my obvious response is, yeah, but that's because they canceled all the goals. If you really want to get that uranium, you're going to need a. massive effort and it might still not work. You might lose a whole army trying to get that uranium. If you really put that kind of a force on the ground near Isfahan, whatever you put in there, you really could lose in the time that it would take to get bulldozers in there and find all the uranium caskets and our casks and pull them all up and all of that from wherever all they're

dispersed and buried. It would be a massive mission that absolutely would include massive. casualties and would probably include some sort of absolute massive bombing campaign in order to in the attempt to protect the troops that are trying to do it. Reopening the strait of Hormuz by force would require

sending in the Marine Corps not some guys but them to go and reconquer somehow conquer that straight, those nearby islands and that coastline which is lined with mountains and all of that And so, and destroying the entire missile force of the country.

You're talking about having low-flying airplanes and special operations forces on the ground, essentially wherever they want to go at will to somehow discover all these in a big scud hunt and take them out from the air. You're talking about an absolutely, I won't say impossible, but a near impossible effort. You're talking D-Day level, let's invade Western Europe in the Second World War. type effort in order to accomplish those goals inside Pershing. It's absolutely, it's virtually impossible. Agarist tax advice. Matt Sersley is a tax lawyer and he's a damn good one and he knows that you're just barely staying afloat in this economy. It's such a wreck, but you got your own

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and he will, maybe you're in trouble with the IRS monsters, and you need somebody to help pull your chestnuts out of the fire. This is your guy for that too. So check him out at agoristtaxadvice.com and thank him for supporting this show. Now, yes, Mr. Cooper, so I was going off and explaining something, but do you remember what it was?

Yeah. You were talking about, you had brought up the guy raising the issue of, you know, all of the dire predictions that people were making not happening. Oh, yes.

And how, boy, it would have taken all of that to accomplish what they said they wanted to do. Yeah. And also, like, you know, the thing is, it's like I was saying at the beginning,

like we had gotten to the point in the war where, I mean, we were either faced with doing, the things that that guy said didn't happen or backing away. Like, that's where the war was. I mean, the, you know, Iran was at a point, like, we were at a point where it was clear that their regime was not going to fall and that we did not have the capability to stop them from launching drones

and missiles at the rate that they were. And, you know, you talk about our missile defense capability, not being able to handle the number of missiles that they have. That turned out, to be even worse than, you know, than people expected beforehand. Because, I mean, we talked about this early on when I told you that I was watching the videos at the very beginning and you'd see a vampire coming in and it'd be like maybe two, maybe four interceptors would go up like max. And then as like, by the time you got a week, week and a half in, it's like every ballistic missile is coming in. You're seeing just six, eight, ten interceptors coming up. And when I, when I, when I, when I, first started, when I first said publicly that I don't think the intercept rates or the hit rates

are anywhere close to what, you know, are being claimed. A lot of people, you know, kind of called BS on that. They were like, no, we're shooting down 99% of them, 98% of whatever. And it's like, that's kind of misunderstanding what I'm saying. Like, yeah, that's true. But you're taking eight, 10 interceptors to do it. Like, that's, that is just. They misunderstood you to say so many more getting through when you were saying, no, no, it just takes that many more to shoot each one down. And so when you look at the, I mean, Israel was at the point where, like, there were whole regions of the country that they weren't even bothering to defend anymore. You had, like, some of the mayors of these northern towns and stuff complaining because they weren't even

getting air defense because they were running low enough that they had to ration that and protect Dimona and some of the other, like, really important strategic spots and dedicated to that. They just, and so, you know, when you, when you couple all that with the fact that, you know, we have intelligence estimates of how many missiles Iran has, what their ability to rebuild on the fly, like in these underground missile cities is, their ability to repair and build new launchers or repair existing launchers. We have in their drones as well. We have, like, our estimates of what those are, but we don't know. You know, you had people saying in the, like people in the U.S. government saying in the early days of this war, week, week and a half in that we had taken out 90% of their launch capability. And you hear that. And it's like, oh, okay, well, it's just another matter of a few days, right? And this thing's going to be wrapped up just because the Iranians aren't going to be able to do anything. Well, you know, you everybody's seen the chart. You know, they had the big, big, big explosion on the first day and a half where they were launching tons of stuff just to say, we're here and the war's on. But the next, you know, By the third day, it dropped down, and it stayed level. You know, it stayed to the point where, you know, they were launching as many missiles and drones on day 35 as they were on day three or four.

And because of their adapting, you know, to new tactics and because we were having to ration our interceptor stockpile on the Israelis as well, and because, you know, it turned out we couldn't have the U.S. Navy as close as we thought we could to help, you know, participate in the air defense campaign. And that, you know, in the first couple days, we found out now a huge number of our THAAD and early warning radar systems got wiped out. And so by the time you get to day 35, it's the same number of missiles and drones they're launching on day three or four. But now, you know, on day three or four, it was like 98% of them getting shot down. And now it was like, you know, 30% of, you know, 30% are getting through. It was my headline this evening that said,

I didn't get a chance to read the thing, but it was a leak from the Americans saying, oh, it's to drop site news. It was Ryan Grimm tweeted it, saying that the Israelis are down to tens of interceptors. Yeah, which I mean, you know, that being the case, like it, you know, well, if, you know, if that really is true or if it's anywhere close to true,

then, I mean, it doesn't matter, like, what happens after this. I mean, unless, because, like, people would hear that and they would say, well, then why would Iran accept a ceasefire at this time? It's like, well, they can actually, they can rebuild, they can build ballistic missiles faster than we can build interceptors. Like, for sure, like, you know, our supply chain on that stuff is not very impressive. And so, you know, a brief breather, other than us being able to rush new forces into the region and stuff, you know, might benefit them. I think that, like, it really comes down to this, right? That Iran, what they have proven is that as long as the regime remains intact, there is nothing you can do short of going full World War II, tell Chevy and Ford to start making tank parts and, you know, pumping out 10,000

aircraft a day and just full mass conscription, you know, there is absolutely nothing we can do to keep them from controlling the straight-oan loops. There's just not. And there's nothing we can do to keep them from devastating regional infrastructure in direct proportion to how we damage theirs. There's just nothing you can do. Let me turn that into a question for you then, because this is how I want to finish the thing here. So this is something that Robert Pape has been talking about. And I interviewed him on my show yesterday. And it's on my substack, but it'll be out for everybody, well, on Friday. By the time anybody sees this, it'll be on my, on my substack,

Scott Horton Show.com and Scotthorton.org and YouTube and all that. Anyway, so Bob Pape has been saying that, look, this is a massive strategic defeat for the United States, way worse than Iraq War II even, because of what you just said. Essentially, I'm going to paraphrase you both here.

Because America's entire bluff that our Navy guarantees security in the Persian Gulf and the international mess of those waters from all enemies and whatever through our 5th Fleet naval base at Bahrain, but also just our entire military presence throughout the Gulf, from Iraqi Kurdistan all the way to Oman and everywhere in between there, that that bluff has been completely called and blown

by the worst-case scenario Iranian missile salvo attack, as we've talked about. And it's not that every one of those bases has been devastated, but they've all been hit and they've all been basically evacuated, Although I guess they're still flying sorties out of Saudi Arabia. I'm not sure where all things are flying out of. I think they are. It's mostly Israel and Cyprus, but yeah, they're still flying some out of Saudi Arabia. Yeah.

So, but regardless, the ability of the United States to continue to maintain those bases or to claim that we literally can protect the GCC states from Iran, like, that has been already proven false there. So that changes the dynamic of power in the region, at least as much as Iraq War II handing Baghdad to Tehran's best friends there. But also it's given them control over this choke point that, as Pape confirmed to me, since the age of oil being exported out of that Gulf, it's always been treated as international waters. And nobody has put a toll booth on the Strait of Hormuz in that kind of way. and that now they have total dominance there. They've shown, we can't even sail our ships in there,

our nady in there without their permission now, and neither can anybody else sail their oil in and out of there. And so Robert Paid, anyway, long story short, is saying, hey man, oh, and also he says it's virtually guaranteed by his academic math, which makes a lot of sense. You have to admit that they are going to race to an atomic bomb now, and then they'll have an atomic bomb, and they will have a huge percentage of the world's oil in hand,

especially with their alliance with Iraq next door. And they will be able to exercise global power on a level competitive with Russia and China and the United States and the world. And that America has really just enthroned Iranian power in a way far beyond what anyone would have guessed could happen as a result of this thing. I don't know anyone,

but I guess I never played out the war game that far in my own mind. what does happen after they close the straight of Hormuz, and the president has to come begging for them to reopen it again and all of that. But I wonder what you think of that, the idea that Iran is now, now that this power's been handed to him, they're going to lord it over the Gulf states on the other side of the water there, and they're going to lord it over the world's oil supplies, extract as much as they can, and expand their power and influence.

as much as they can, which will be a lot in these circumstances. I think that, you know, they recognize, like, one of the things I was impressed as far as their approach went at the beginning of this war, especially, you know, considering it came on the heels of the 12-day war, and they had done so much damage to Israel in those 12 days, that, you know, a lot of people were expecting Iran to respond to this by just hammer and Tel Aviv, just everything into down. downtown Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem, just hammer the Israelis, make them pay. And they really did not focus on that this entire time. Because they understood very clearly

that the Israelis by themselves are not a problem for them. The Americans are the problem. And if they can get the Americans out of here or at least clip our wings enough and show the world and the region that our power has limits and, you know, we meet that limit when we try to go all out against Iran, that they can handle everything else. It's one of the reasons that I'm not, I'm still not convinced, like, I could be wrong.

I always know wrong is not even the right word because I'm not like married to this idea, but like I'm still not convinced that they'll race to a nuclear weapon. For the simple, I agree with you on both counts, actually. For the simple reason that, you know, right now they've got Turkey. is a powerful country, you know, Pakistan as nuclear weapons are not a particularly powerful country. And then Israel is over there,

but Israel can't invade them or anything like that. They're a problem, obviously. But, you know, if Iran goes and gets a nuclear weapon, and then Saudi gets one, and then UAE gets one, and then, you know, Qatar gets one. All of a sudden, these Gulf countries, that right now, Iran is a dominant conventional power

with respect to those guys, that now they're all at parity. They're all nuclear powers. And so, like, why would they invite that, you know, and create a situation where that might be possible? Like, as it is right now as a conventional power, because, you know, the thing is, like, what they have learned and what we have all learned

during this period is they already have a mutually assured destruction deterrent. If it's not nuclear, they can blow up the whole world economy by shutting down that straight and, you know, the alternative access to the Red Sea, if it came down to it, that's a mutually assured destruction capability right there. And so, I mean, you've seen, like, anybody who is trying to address this, I mean, look, this could still end up where, you know, whatever, two weeks goes by and the ceasefire breaks down and we nuke Iran or something.

Who knows what's going to happen? But as of right now, like, if this ceasefire holds and this thing kind of peters out, anybody trying to spend this into anything other than a massive, honestly, like, strategic defeat that is going to define geopolitics for the rest of this century. Like, that's like the scale of defeat we're talking about. And people don't feel it that way because, like, Washington, D.C. isn't burning. And, you know, we don't have, like, just pictures of ships sinking everywhere and whatnot. And so they don't feel it like that. But, I mean, just look at what happened yesterday where the leader of Taiwan went and met with she's, Jinping and pledged to embark on a path of reconciliation with China. Oh, is that right?

Yeah. And it's because before this happened, everybody, friends, enemies, rivals, we ourselves, like, all of us sort of wondered, like, man, like, how badass are the Americans? Like, you know, the Russians might, they might think to themselves, like, you know, I think if they came in here and, like, met us on the battlefield in Ukraine, I think we could take them. The Chinese might think, you know, if they, I don't, I think we could take Taiwan. I don't think they could stop us. But still, there was like, there had to have been some doubt.

Like, but I don't know if I want to test that. But now everybody sees it. Everybody sees what the limit is. And that changes everything, you know. You're right. And the thing is because they have just been, you know, proverbially provoking and patrolling posthunes in Pactica province over there all this time. And the limit on counterinsurgency is you can.

can't just use nukes and kill them all. So you can either tame them or you can't, but it's essentially our professional soldiers standing around trying to impose themselves as the security force of the families of the men that they're fighting and some idiot, you know, mathematics that never works out. And then finally they quit. But that just isn't at all the same question of what happens if it's our armor up against their armor, our planes up against airplanes, our missile defenses up against their missile offenses, and our Navy versus theirs and the rest of these things. And then we find out our Navy can't get anywhere near their country, right? And our military bases are no good there at all.

Yeah. As I always said, didn't I always say that, see, just like that map of everyone would always joke of that meme, if Iran doesn't mean us any harm, how come they put their country so close to all our military bases? And say, but, yeah, essentially, those things, are the guarantors of peace because they're all at risk. Our own government has put all these bases in a hostage situation. And so actually, in a way, it's good that they're there because they're preventing us from starting a war in which we lose all our bases. Well, so much for that logic, Horton, but I was trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Yeah, the performance of the Navy has really been eye-opening because it's the starkest example. and one of many, but the starkest example of just how completely our force structure is not matched to the reality of modern warfare at all. You've had all these doomsayers for a long time talking about the end of the carrier

strike group and all that. These things are just floating targets. And look, if you're sitting off the littoral of a country with no anti-ship cruise missiles or drones or anything like that, you're just using your F-18s to blow up a bunch of dudes with AK-47s. And yeah, it's an amazing platform.

It's great. But what we learned in this, I mean, you think, I mean, just think about it, dude. Like, I've always told people with regard to China, you know, they think there's going to be some time, like, that China's going to just do a massive invasion of Taiwan. I always tell them, like, why would they risk, why would they do something that even risks anything going wrong, like a failure like that? they could literally blockade Taiwan completely without putting a single ship in the water. It's like 100 miles from the Chinese mainland.

Just from their own aircraft flying over China itself, land-based missiles and other assets, they could just say nobody is to come near Taiwan. If you do, we're going to blow you up. That's it. And then there's nothing anybody can do about it. We just learned that. We couldn't get within 8-8, you know, we crept up one time, the Lincoln Strike Group. to about 350 kilometers from the Iranian coast,

and we got chased away, like, within hours, and we didn't go closer than 7 or 800 kilometers after that. And when you think about, like, the range of our air defense systems on those things is nowhere close to... I'll tell you're not even close to 700 kilometers, you know. Okay, but wait. So bottom line here, Coop, first of all, there's two things.

One is the expiration of the American World Empire here, our entire conventional bluff called. We still got H bombs. Don't nobody mess with us. But don't nobody call 911. Expect America to intervene and do your job for you now because it's proven we can. And then the second question,

well, say whatever you want about that still more. But then also get around back to also, what does this mean for the enhancement of Iranian power and influence in the region from Iran? I mean, look, once the dust, once the dust settles from this, there's going to be, I assume, probably, there's going to be a period of time where the regime's legitimacy is going to be bolstered

by this, by these events. I'm assuming they come out of this like on the trajectory it's on right now. Again, anything can change or happen. But like, but that eventually is going to wear off. And they're going to have to actually govern. And if I was running Iran, what I would be doing is I'd be going to, you know, not the people who were taking Starlink terminals and explosives from the Assad and the CIA back in January, not those people, but the people who were out protesting in masses before that, the people who, you know, whose protests got hijacked by those insurgents that we sent in there, I would be going to those people and working with them and making some concessions and reforms. And because it's just as you said, like, if this regime can hold on, they are in a

dominant, an unquestioned dominant position in that region. I mean, I mean, there's, yeah, there's just the fact that they have demonstrated the ability to, I mean, who knows if they'll actually follow through with extracting tolls from the Strait of Hormuz, I would if I was them. I'd call it reparations. And, you know, that is hard to argue with, I think, especially if they're splitting them with Oman or maybe even splitting them with Saudi and Qatar as well to, like, help pay for the damages they incurred. That would probably have a more legitimacy than we would like. It may be a bargaining chip too, who knows. But, you know, what they have shown is that when they go forward in the future and sit down across the table from American negotiators, that the threat of military force is, it really has lost its potency. And so you have, and what that means is if the threat of military force has lost its potency, it's another way of saying that if we want to fight you, then it's got to be an all in, like, real commitment. war because short of that, we can't compel you to do anything you don't want to do.

Then another word for that is, you know, you're essentially talking about a, maybe not a great power because they don't have power projection capabilities like, you know, in South America or something, but a regional great power, you know. And what this is is it's, you know, this is our ideas of how things work, running into the reality of how things actually work, right? Like the fact that Iran has this long coastline over the Strait of Hormuz that a massive portion of the world's energy fertilizer,

all this other kind of just core, core, core level trade passes through, and the structure of that coastline with the cliffs and all the mountains in Iran that make it damn near impossible to invade, all of those things make it so that, no, dude, like Iran controls the Strait of Hormuzum. And you can not like that, you can rage against it all you want.

That is the geographical reality of the situation, period. You know, Turkey controls the darned knows. It doesn't matter if anybody likes that or not. That's how it is, you know? And, you know, the thing that's worrying, I guess, is that no matter how clear things like that, no matter how clear reality it makes itself accepting reality, has not been one of the strong suits of American policymakers for a very, very long time. And so,

who knows? Who knows where this is still going to go? You know, let's pray that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that the ceasefire holds and we managed to get Israel back on a leash. And, and, and, and we can just, you know, sweep this thing aside. And I, you know, if I was president, I'd be paying reparations to the families of those little girls we killed just as a gesture of goodwill and, and, and, and, and hopefully moving on. Like, but, you know, Yeah, I mean, we're, we're, you know, it's actually interesting, right? Because the American Empire has suffered a massive defeat. And even if, even if we go nuke Iran in two weeks and like destroy everything and we win, they lose, whatever, it doesn't matter.

Like the damage has been done to our credibility and to the, you know, exposure of the limits of our conventional power. And so the American Empire has suffered this massive defeat and is going to be much worse off than it was. but the American people, the American nation, I don't know, man. Like, might be way better off. I'm saying from the beginning of this thing as like unpatriotic as it sounds to say, I hope we lose this war. I was saying that in hoping it could be done with as few American casualties as possible. But for the simple reason that I would much rather find out the limits of our power against Iran

than against China or Russia. Or somebody where it could really, really, really come back on it. It's like, you know, if there's like a bully who's beating everybody up, you know, and he's just, you know, pushing everybody around, and one day he decides to go down to the bar where all the bikers hang out and kick over their Harley Davidson's and he gets murdered, you're going to say, it would have been great if that nerd had kicked his ass at school one time

because he might have stopped that from happening, you know. And, you know, it might not have gotten at that point. And so as of right now, I'm not going to go that far, but I, I, let me put it like this. Let me put it like this. Like from our standpoint, like the standpoint of our sort of perspective on this thing, if the ceasefire holds now, it's almost a best case scenario in the sense that we have been chastened. We have found out the limits of our own capabilities without having to lose 100,000 soldiers or something like that. You know, I know, like a lot of people have suffered.

I don't want to downplay that. Yeah, no, and yeah, there's, you know, 14, 15 guys have been killed and hundreds wounded. And, you know, actually I saw people had reacted against that tweet I was describing earlier where I was saying all of our failure to achieve these strategic goals and all of that. And then people objected that I didn't list the casualties. And it wasn't out of disrespect to the casualties. It was just I was making a point about the strategic defeats there. And losing 15 men is not a strategic.

defeat. It's a tragedy as hell. It's strategic defeat for those families, for sure. I wouldn't plan it down, but I was just saying, this is what the American Empire, what leverage it has lost in all of this game and all that. So different discussion. But of course, that is absolutely huge, and it should have been none. This whole thing was absolutely crazy. But, you know, and most likely, rather than learning any lesson, just like all the previous ones, this will just be another crisis that sets the stage for the next intervention, which will set the stage for the next crisis. I mean, maybe there, I think there's reason for hope on that front, though.

Dude, did you see the poll that came out from Pew? I think it was yesterday. Maybe the day before I think it was yesterday. Or for Israel. The percent, 60 percent have a negative view of Israel. And even Republicans under 50, 57 percent have a negative view of Israel. And so if this thing comes to an end, and I don't think we're going.

I don't think that they're going to be able to gather the support to go back and do something like this again. Because Trump is the only one who would do this. They tried it with Bush. They tried it with everybody else. They all said no. And now after seeing how this played out, I just don't think we're going to do it again.

Oh, you know what? I'm sorry, man. I wanted to bring this up earlier and I forgot. But the end on this was there has been, you know, all these reports of still massive numbers of troops being moved into the region. In other words, and the narrative being built that the ceasefire is really a joke. And despite even just the violations that we're talking about, that it's meant to only be a timeout before we go to a much worse stage of the war.

Do you put me stock in that? It's possible, but you know, you really have to keep in mind that when they say massive numbers of troops, it's not close to invading Iran numbers of troops. Even when they say there's 50,000 troops, that's not all guys with rifles. Like, that's a lot of support personnel, that's maintenance crews. That's a lot of like, you know,

these units have a lot more people in them than just shooters. And so, like, one of the, you know, the Marine Expeditionary units is 2,500-ish guys there. That's like 11,200 shooters. And then a lot of airplane mechanics and support personnel of other kinds. And so I don't know how many actual, I mean, look, even if it's 20,000, you got 20,000 light infantry, which is all any of these guys are. Amazing light infantry, you know, the Rangers and all these guys amazing at what they do.

But there's just, they have certain capabilities. And there are certain things that they don't have. They don't have heavy armor. They don't have heavy weapons that can go in and deal with certain things. They don't have the capability to park themselves in a place without air defense for. like a significant period of time and survive. Like there's just limitations to what they can do. And so I would be, I don't know, man, like after the near debacle of that pilot rescue,

if they put a bunch more troops on the ground, I mean, what that really tell, I'm just going to default to, you know, like guilty until proven innocent that they've got something on Trump. Because, I mean, it's just, you know, again, like with all those stories that were being leaked out in the last couple of days, it's very clear. There is massive resistance to going any further with this from within the highest levels of the system. And if Trump overrides all that again and just escalates, then I don't know. We're in kind of uncharted territory, you know. All right.

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