Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 10/2/24 Daniel Davis on the Iranian Missile Strike on Israel
Episode Date: October 6, 2024Scott brings Daniel Davis back on the show to talk about the large waves of ballistic missiles that Iran shot at Israel earlier in the week in response to various Israeli strikes on Iran and its allie...s. Scott and Davis compare the strike to the one back in April, speculate on the Iranian objective and examine the larger context that this strike falls in. Discussed on the show: Daniel Davis Deep Dive on YouTube “US officials quietly backed Israel’s military push against Hezbollah” (Politico) “The Return of Peace Through Strength” (Foreign Affairs) Daniel Davis did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his time in the army. He is a Senior Fellow at Defense Priorities and is the author of the reports “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” and “Go Big or Go Deep: An Analysis of Strategy Options on Afghanistan.” Find him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1and subscribe to his YouTube Channel. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Probably on that one.
Yeah, I probably would.
Yeah.
It's worse and worse every day, but I think it'll still help you with the Danny and a Daniel.
Anyway, hey, man, welcome back to the show.
How are you?
You know, I'm doing all right.
Thanks for asking.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to hear that.
I saw the news yesterday, and they said a ton of missiles are flying toward Israel.
And a lot of people were saying, oh, no, now it's on, and it's the war.
And Netanyahu had said he's fighting seven nations would be six.
But Bush gave the Shiites Baghdad.
So that's the thing.
But then they call the All Clear.
I went to check the New York Times, and they said,
eh, it's over.
And I was like, oh, good.
It's just another one of those, huh?
But then, of course, there's obvious questions about today and tomorrow.
So first of all, can you just give us an assessment on the strikes?
Can you compare it to the last missile volley with the percentages shot down and the damage done and all that?
And then we can talk about the politics of where we are and what comes next, you think?
Yeah, I can. So the strike that happened last April was about 350 total projectiles,
combination of drones and ballistic missiles. Most of them were drones, and it was important because
that was a signal that they don't want to escalate, but that they had to respond to the destruction
of their embassy. And so they sent these drones, which had several hours to flight time before they
got to the target so that gave everybody time to shoot them down, pardon me. This time there were
fewer projectiles, about 200, but they were all ballistic missiles. And some of these had a
flight time of 10 minutes. So there was no, no advance warning there. And from at least what we've
seen so far, Iran again sent a signal that they don't want to escalate, that they don't want
this to go into general war. But again, they feel like they had to do something because of this time,
two assassinations, one in their capital and one in Beirut against their personnel or supporters.
But you would look at what was hit and what was targeted.
It shows that Iran did not want to cause casualties so they didn't.
They could have easily, all these videos you've probably seen of all of these incredible scenes of missiles flying through the sky, you notice that none of them landed into cities, or at least not many of them, I think a handful did.
most of them were outside, which I think was to send a signal that these ballistic missiles,
your Iron Dome and your Aero System and your David Sling, they're not going to knock these down.
They're going to come through, and they'll hit whatever we aim at.
And that's actually what Iran said.
They did say that we hit what we aimed at.
And I think that's an important statement.
And reportedly, one of their air bases, Israeli air bases, has been hit.
There's been a lot of confusion or counterclaims about what did or didn't happen on that
base, I don't know. But again, afterwards, Iran said, okay, this is it. We have responded
for what you did there, and there doesn't need to be any further escalation. But, huge
but, if Israel does respond back in a painful way, then the next shot will be far, far bigger
and more painful. And they specified that these were not all of, these were not our best stuff.
We have better ones, and we have more of them. And, of course, on the other side of that,
you had Netanyahu, who I think that even you and I've talked to this before,
But I've been arguing that Netanyahu has for many months been doing everything he can to spawn a war with Iran so that he could get them to attack and then claim that, oh, my gosh, now we've been attacked and we have to respond and all this kind of stuff.
And his objective is to draw the United States in.
And so what I expect to happen next, and literally could come as soon as tonight their time,
but probably not more than a few days from now, I would guess, is that he's going to hit something really big and really hard.
And all of their statements have been coming out from their ambassador, from former Prime Minister Benjamin Nathale, from current Prime Minister Netanyahu,
that it's going to be a painful and big strike, which I interpret to mean they're going to hit IRGC military sites.
They're going to hit nuclear program sites and probably oil infrastructure of some sort
refineries, et cetera.
Something's going to be a significant cost and wounding to Iran, which will then spawn a big attack.
And again, I think this is what Netanyahu wants.
He wants Iran to fire something big that does hit and does hurt Israel so that he can
finally draw the U.S. into the war.
And it looks like we're set to play the fool's game and do it.
man that is just something so first of all um on the air base thing minor point i heard that this morning
claims that the iranians had destroyed all of israel's f35s on the ground and i thought oh that
well that's some good targeting you know and i went and i looked it up and i couldn't find anything
but iran media saying that so i know that they have you know vast censorship in israel and i'm
not saying that the truth definitely would have come out from there
On the other hand, I am saying the Iranians embellish a lot, so I'm not willing to take their word for that at all.
And from that, what I've also heard from others in the region is that this apparently the standard procedure when there's incoming ballistic missiles is that Israel takes all of its jets and gets them in the air to avoid just that outcome there.
Now, there were also some videos that were geolocated that definitely showed a lot of hits in the base area.
but what it hit is no one's been able to see that yet.
So we don't know.
So I doubt that they might not have lost any F-35s,
but it certainly looked like something was hit.
All right, well, so that'll be interesting to see developments there.
But as you say, it seems like they deliberately tried to minimize the damage
and not kill people.
And, you know, I don't even know if F-35s are within the protocol there,
that what they're trying to do is essentially a symbolic strike.
And I did see, I'm sorry, I thought it was in the journal, but it wasn't.
It was a different article that I read this morning, where they replicated the tweet from the Iranian president, which I think is probably the statement that you're paraphrasing there, where he's saying, listen, we don't want to fight.
We had to do this.
It's a symbolic kind of a thing.
We can't let you just attack us without attacking back.
But we don't want a real war, et cetera, like that.
So, now, of course, on the Israeli side, they're just going to say, yeah, well, Hitler made a lot of promises too.
And obviously, if Iran didn't want a war, then they shouldn't have unleashed Hezbollah to shoot rockets at Israel.
And so this is the Shiite war against Israel and the Israelis are just defending themselves, right?
I saw actually on the deep dive a clip from your show where you played the IDF minister saying, well, you're messing with us.
us. Now we have to defend ourselves from you, right?
Yeah, yeah, and that's exactly what they're saying. And that's what it's being repeated on
nearly all the Western media. I've been just scanning through all of it this morning and just
it just makes me sick, quite frankly, because nobody. And I've been on a couple, so I've been on
NBC and Fox News in this current spate. And I make a big point of saying, you've got to look at
the context. This is not coming out of nowhere. You know, Israel has been taking these highly
provocative actions against Iran, trying to draw them in, like the destroying of the embassy
and the assassination on an inauguration in their capital, which no Western country would ever leave
unchallenged. Yet they did until you then took out, what's his face, Nazrallah, the leader of
Hezbollah. And by the way, I saw this morning, and I'm going to use it on my show this afternoon,
there was an interview with Christian Amin Poor with the foreign minister of Lebanon, who publicly
it confirmed that there had been a deal between Netanyahu and Nazrallah for a ceasefire
and that Nasrallah had agreed to it. And apparently they were meeting to work out the details
of the ceasefire when he was hit. So he said he was literally lied to and then assassinated as he
thought he was doing it. So everywhere you want to look, Israel is doing everything it can to
foment a large war because, and the reason is not that hard to figure out. Netanyahu wants
to in one fail swoop.
And by the way, Neftali Bennett did say this on CNN last night.
And I will also play this in my show today where he said this is a once in a 50-year
opportunity to get rid of all of our enemies, Palestine, the Hezbollah, and Iran.
And he says, we should take it and destroy them all.
Wow.
And by the way, and I had overlooked this for years, but it's widely reported if you go and Google it.
Naftali Bennett is literally the guy who ordered the strike on the UN shelter at Kana, Lebanon in 1996 that got the mention in bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States that convinced Mohamed Atta, the pilot of flight 11 to join al-Qaeda and go to war against the United States of America.
It was literally Bennett who did that under Shimon Perez's command at that time.
Well, I may have to add that to the show as well.
Don't you like it? Isn't that something?
So, and by the way, I should be specific about this because people sometimes confuse it, and it's a narrow point, but fact checkers like to over-embellish the importance of it.
Shimon Peres invades in Operation Grapes of Wrath.
Then, Mohamed Atta and Ramsey Bin al-Shib fill out their last will and testament, which is like joining the Army, swearing that they're going to do something about it.
then the Kana masker happens a couple of days after that.
But the important part is that bin Laden goes on and on about it in his 96 declaration of war.
And that was what convinced the two of them, and I think maybe a few of the others from the Hamburg cell,
that that was the cause that made them say, okay, this is our path then.
We want to do something about it.
Signing up with this Saudi Sheik is the way to do something about it.
Well, I'm sure nothing like that will happen this time.
I mean, all they've done is wipe out, you know, scores of thousands of people in the Palestinian areas.
And now they're invaded in another country while they're getting ready to go to war with another.
I'm sure that that won't happen this time.
Yeah, no, no question about it.
And then, so listen, this goes to the statement the other day.
I guess it was at the U.N. speech, right, where he said, we have seven enemies.
So that's Iran, Iraq, because W. Bush, at Netanyahu, not just Sharon and Lekud, but at Netanyahu's behest, got rid of Saddam Hussein.
Oops, Syria, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and then who am I leaving out?
What was he talking about?
No, no telling.
I didn't get the seventh one.
I'm not sure.
So, wait, who did I miss there?
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hasbala, and the Houthis, that's only five.
There's no other axis of Shiite power there that a missile.
What's he going to do?
Attack Jordan?
oh and i guess just the palestinians on the west bank and the gaza strip maybe that was what
he meant maybe they count for two yeah yeah okay the pa and hamas um well and so listen i mean
and this election i mean i don't know kamala harris is such a pushover but i can see don't
Trump just getting out in front of the parade to cleanse the West Bank and just take Netanya
Naftali Bennett's word there. That's right. Once in a lifetime opportunity, let's just go ahead
and do it. Yeah, that's one of the disappointing things to me is that the almost the only
difference between Harris and Trump is that they're trying to outdo each other to be the most pro
Israel. And the only reason that Harris adds in, oh, but we care about Palestinian people too
pretty much is because of her
base and she knows he needs the votes
but not that she cares a whit about them
there's no concern clearly
no concern whatsoever because there's no action
behind any of it and so there's no
electoral help coming
yeah well and I'll tell you what I mean if
Netanyahu can't start a war by bomb
and Ishafan or Natanz or whatever
he does or some oil refineries or
this kind of thing
that you go ahead and start carpet bomb
and the Palestinians and forcing them out of East
Jerusalem force them to give up
control once and for all of the alaksa mosca and the other holy sites in east jerusalem and all that
there's your war between the west and islam that they never were able to get the whole region because
then i don't i think even even turkey may not withhold anymore uh but egypt and jordan possibly even
the uae yeah i think it i think it'd be balls to the wall then which probably won't happen
uh there may be some limitations at least so far but uh but no i think i think that they're going to they're going to get
some success out of this engagement with Iran because it's going to be a back and forth.
Israel's going to do something heavy.
Iran's going to do something heavy in response.
And obviously it's not going to stop.
See, nobody even wants to think the next step.
I'm sick and tired of seeing all these guys like Bolton and Pompeo and a bunch of other people
talk about how this is what Israel should do and they should take out all this infrastructure,
et cetera.
No thought given whatsoever to what comes next.
So you know that Iran's going to retaliate, and then what?
Yeah.
Are you going to, where are you going to hit the next time?
And then where does it stop?
Because now that you're in a war, and what's the objective?
What is the militarily attainable objective that you would have a war for?
Because you're not supposed to, it's foolhardy, if not outright, self-defeating,
to get into a military conflict if you don't have a way out.
If you don't have an objective, you can attain with that military power so that you, whatever,
you compel your enemies to do what you want, you cause them to surrender, whatever.
But you can't do that with Iran unless you go in on the ground.
And who's got 500,000 troops to go in on the ground and fight probably a long, bloody war?
For what?
See, no one's given that stuff any thought.
And that's what just actually angers me is that you're taking steps one and two.
And you don't even know what step three or four is, much less eight, nine, or ten.
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Okay, so go back to 2007.
This is why W. Bush did not go to war with Iran
and why he told Ehud Olmerk, forget it.
And we know this story is, you know,
Quinn Tupley confirmed that Dick Cheney had David Wormser,
the author of the Clean Break Strategy in the first place.
Go around and say that they were considering working with Israel
to start a war in the Gulf,
to do an end run around W. Bush
and force him into the war.
And it sounded crazy, but it was confirmed like seven different places or whatever.
I have it in my book.
And but what had happened there was, and this was widely reported too, or in a couple of good places,
Joe Klein and Time Magazine was one, and there was a couple more, I think, where the chiefs had taken W. Bush down into the tank in the basement of the Pentagon and told them, look, we'll do the escalation, the surge escalation in Iraq, but we're not going to Iran.
We don't want to do it.
And the reason why is because just what you just said, they don't have escalation dominance.
They're not able to tell you exactly what's going to happen at every stage of the war.
And they don't want to fight a war unless they have escalation dominance over the entire situation.
And they said, essentially, once we start a war with Iran to paraphrase David Petraeus, tell me how this ends.
And I guess that's the exact quote about Iraq.
Tell me how this ends.
And they couldn't.
Because just what you just said, what are we going to do?
a D-Day landing and invade Persia and march to Tehran, nobody's saying that, right?
So we're talking about an air war from the Air Force and the Navy, but then they have sophisticated anti-aircraft.
They haven't been at war since 1989, and they got all kinds of Russian anti-aircraft missiles and the rest.
And then they've got just a short Persian Gulf distance between them and all of America's bases in Qatar and in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia.
right there. So obviously, America can hit them from those bases, but they can hit those
bases, too. And Kuwait as well. We've got tens of thousands of troops in Kuwait, an entire
air base in Qatar, and the 5th Fleet stationed at Bahrain. And all that's essentially up for grabs
if we're in a real war with Iran. And the Aitole's got to have a red line somewhere where he
goes ahead and goes for broke, right? I mean, you would certainly think so. But, you know,
it's funny. I mean, you're talking about that. Something that happened a long time ago. There's
a piece in Politico from, I guess it was, was it yesterday, two days ago, U.S. officials
quietly backed Israel's military push against Hezbollah. Have you seen that one?
No, sir. Go ahead.
Okay, yeah. Well, you definitely need to go read it because it's nearly the same thing happening right
here. What it says is that the U.S. was publicly saying, you know, we want a ceasefire.
We want you guys to work it out. Don't go fight against Hezbollah. But then it said that privately
some in the administration were working hard to help Israel assassinate Nazrallah
and to have that issue turned into a war.
And it says that there were members of the White House or the Pentagon and the State Department
that were opposed to it.
But apparently a couple of these guys, and I forget which two it was right off the top of my head.
Brent McGurk, I think, was one, and one other fellow were helping Israel do that.
And so the first thing that jumped to my mind is like, hang on.
Did the president of the United States authorize this?
Because if not, then you're guilty of sedition.
I mean, you are literally working outside of the government without the knowledge of the White House.
I mean, I don't know if it went that far.
Maybe Biden was guilty of it and he agreed to it.
I don't know.
But the way the article's written is that these rogue guys were actually helping Israel, not helping the United States.
Yeah, Hotstein.
I don't know anything about him.
I know about McGurk, and I know he's a hawk, but I guess I don't know that much about him.
Yeah, but it sounds like history just keeps repeating itself.
And, you know, that's not too much of a surprise in the current administration because, you know, I mean, all kidding aside, I mean, Biden is limited and what he can focus on right now.
And he doesn't have any interest, you know, to do anything bold and decisive.
And he'll just kind of, I think he's looking forward to having his victory parade on next January.
And that'll be the end of it.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it says here he's just a presidential advisor.
Well, without portfolio.
he just like hangs around and tells uh and you know what i've read about this guy before but i'm just
so focused on russia's stuff that i i don't remember it very well but there was something
scandalous about this guy six weeks ago wasn't there wasn't there is now yeah um well so listen
um now on the indications of just how brave net njahu's getting here as in terms of
drag in America into a war.
I mean, I guess tonight
we'll tell, right? Like you're saying, in the
next couple of days, he's either going to
blast the crap out
of Iranian oil and nuclear infrastructure
or he's going to
ramp things back down again.
Right? I mean, it's...
Yeah. I mean, although
with his bold declarations
and his United Nations
Ambassador Danny Dannon
with the
Yoav Galant, I mean, you talk at
Hagari, all of them, every one of them have been emphatic and used these strong language that a severe
retaliation is coming. I don't see how they can back down. I mean, I don't know how you can,
because you remember after the 350 missile and drone strike in April, Iran, Israel, I had like a
literal pinprick where they hit like a rocket launcher, a rocket launcher, and then that was the end
of it. And everybody said, okay, problem solved. We avoided any escalation. They can't do that
get because they he's nettingyahu's put himself out there and you know and the i don't know if you
saw on the israeli media uh after nazrallah was assassinated there was you'd have thought it was
like fourth of july or something there was singing on news channels uh news people handing out
candy on the streets i mean it was crazy it was going on so they were jubilant with all that
and and and for nettingahu to be making the statements he's at and then not do something
equivalent because he's now set the standard higher. I don't know that he survives politically. So I don't
think he would take that risk. And I just don't see how he can do anything besides do something really
painful. Yeah. Well, and also, I mean, there's a question of how much land they want to take
in Lebanon. I saw announcements that they had invaded. And then I saw Lebanese denials that there were
any Israeli troops on their territory at all. And I remember in 2006, they got their asses handed to them and
turn around and left. So I wonder whether you think the, you know, what is the status of the
ground invasion there and all of that? Yeah, that was yesterday. There was some claims that, but then
this morning, there, there are now reports of direct clashes. So probably yesterday, Israel probably
crossed the border and made some marshalling areas probably from which then they could set up,
you know, bases of logistics and supplies on that side. And then from there, then they would
launch off. And apparently that has begun today as Israel actually announced its first
casualty that they lost a captain, an armor captain, I believe.
Tanks have been reported at least two different places inside Lebanon. So it looks like that
is now picking up some steam. And by the way, that can't be won.
Israel doesn't have an army big enough in the logistics situation big enough to push back
Hezbollah all the way to the Lassani River. You're talking something to about 125 kilometers
wide at most points, you know, in Lebanon and about 25 kilometers deep on some very, very
difficult and highly defensible terrain.
I mean, you talk, it would be many, many months of heavy fighting.
And I don't think Israel can sustain the casualties, you know, like Russia could.
Russia did spend, you know, actually they spent close to a calendar year now fighting
and through these defensives that were set up in 2014.
Well, these defenses were set up in like from 2006 forward.
So you know that there's a substantially difficult defensive positions throughout that whole area there.
And it would be very, very difficult for the IDF to actually succeed in pushing them out there.
So if that's his goal, then he set himself up an objective that's going to be very painful and bloody for himself and very time consuming.
And time doesn't seem to be something that Netanyahu has a lot of, but I don't know.
We'll see.
now so back to your statements about how it's so clear to you that he really is trying to drag
the united states into a real war with iran here i mean this is a game that the israelis and not
just him but uh ehud olmer and sharon i don't know about sharon i shouldn't say out
the top of my head but um certainly i know for a fact omer kind of played the same game all the
time of uh although probably not as bad as nettingyahu um
But he did this hardcore in, what is it, 2011 and 12.
He had people in Washington really panicking that he was going to attack Iran.
And then he was just bluffing, ruining Obama's diplomacy and whatever, trying to at the time.
So I wonder like, you know, any more indications that you can describe to us where you think that, you know, he really means to go that far.
Because, you know, like you say, he's got to do something more.
but I don't know even then like I wonder if the Israelis and the Iranians are talking on the phone secretly some of the time and coordinating some of this stuff they used to do that you know like in treacherous alliance he talks about when the Ayatollah and this is the mean old Ayatollah in the 80s
he would be on TV denouncing oh we're going to destroy you Zionists and that day they'd be taking a giant shipment of missiles from the Israelis and that's why he was out there talking so much smack
You know, it's because they were actually had this secret relationship still going on.
And I don't know about that, you know, missile sales and all that.
But I just mean, I wonder whether they're talking and coordinating some of this and escalating it.
But, you know, as they talked about in the case of Ukraine, the rules of the road, Burns and Lavarov set the rules of the road for the Ukraine war six months before it broke out, three months before it broke out or whatever, remember?
Yeah.
You know, there's so much self-diffusion, so much lying that just you literally can't.
take anybody at face value. It's one of the blights of our time. Certainly not just the United
States. It's really across the board. So who knows? But I'll just tell you my gut from watching
Netanyahu now, he's in a different place than any Israeli leader that since they've started,
you know, since the 1948 time. He is just like wild-eyed that, no, I am going to succeed
militarily with everything.
I just don't see him
doing anything about diplomacy.
I mean, you see he's physically,
literally sabotaged any efforts
at diplomacy across the board.
And I don't know why he would suddenly stop now
because, I mean, it would be political suicide
for him and probably literally land him in jail
because of the legal issues.
He's already got hanging over his head
waiting for his time in office to be done.
So I don't see any evidence
that he's going to do anything to back off.
Okay, so speaking of which, how goes the counterinsurgency operation in Gaza?
Oh, yeah, there's also that war going on, forgot about that.
So did they.
Hamas didn't, and I can assure you they will be doing everything they can to keep the forces that the IDF has still in that area
to keep them busy and keep them tied down so they can't be redeployed to go up into Hezbollah.
And it's just going to be a counterinsert, or it's going to be an insurgent, and it's
saddle sore underneath Israel because it's going to keep them focused on there because you can't
just ignore it because they won't allow themselves to be ignored. They're going to keep fighting and
doing stuff. And again, that's why I say Israel doesn't have the force structure, the number of
forces, even if they mobilize everybody, you just can't sustain a multi-front war over multiple
months. That's why it is absolutely vital that Netanyahu get the United States to join in the
war with him, not supply him, but join in with him.
fighting, whether it's in the air, in the sea, or on the ground, or all three, that's what he
needs. And if he doesn't get it, then he's going to lose and see. And that's what I think is part
of his gamble is, is that if he doesn't get us and he starts to lose, then the sympathy will
just go up and they'll be pleading for help from America. We can't be allowed to lose.
And there's so many Americans who will go, yeah, they can't. We, we shouldn't have gone in,
but now that they are down, we can't let them lose. And so I think that one way or another,
he's going to get his war.
Man, can you imagine American troops cleansing the West Bank, cleansing the Gaza Strip?
No. No, I can't imagine that. And if, and if, I think that if that, if we ever got to that point,
I think you would literally start to see Americans refuse, American military refused to obey those orders.
I mean, we're actually trained not to obey an illegal order. And I can't see any way that could
be made legal.
Well, you know, they just rationalize it
the way they did in Baghdad. We're just going to move people
from this neighborhood to that neighborhood and
get them out of the way of the conflict
and just call it coin and do whatever you want.
They do whatever they want a lot,
you know. God help us if we get
there, Scott. Yeah. Well, I mean,
in terms of
the actual
like the trauma
and difficulty from the point
of view of the U.S. military,
that'd be a lot easier than fighting it, right?
Iran, you know, wouldn't they rather fight Hamas than Iran?
Yeah, but here's the problem.
Which service, right?
The Air Force would rather fight Iran.
That's where they get their big bang for the buck, right?
Yeah, yeah, because Iran's air defenses are antiquated.
I mean, they're not zero, but they're something that we can defeat, and so that would be easy.
But here's the problem with that, Scott.
Nothing exists in an isolation.
This exists in the larger context of, by the way, we just gave the, in the last seven days, check this out.
In the last seven days, we have given the biggest military package ever to Taiwan.
We gave $8 billion to Ukraine and $8.7 billion all in the military aid to Israel.
And you already see that we are running low of all these key weapons systems, especially interceptor missiles, artillery shells, and other kinds.
kind of rockets and missiles.
And we cannot get into a war where we all of a sudden start using that stuff
in addition to giving it to Israel.
We simply don't have enough.
And our industrial capacity can't gin up fast enough to be able to keep up with it while
we're also trying to keep these other freaking wars or future wars going on in the Indo-Pacific
and in Russia.
We just can't do it.
So something's got to give.
And I don't know.
We'll either lose.
and I know that people can't even get their heads wrapped around to how that work could ever apply to us militarily.
And I'm talking about a defeat, not something embarrassing like Afghanistan where we just left.
But I'm talking like military forces defeated in the field.
That is possible if we start down this path, then all of a sudden we get, you know, sucked into multiple wars with that we can't possibly fight and win.
Yeah.
Well, now, have you read the Robert O'Brien piece in foreign affairs outlining what's supposed to be Trump's new foreign
policy, which is might as well have been written by, you know, Jake Sullivan or Anthony
Blinken, right? Have you seen that thing? Yeah, I saw the headline and I heard what it was
about and I frankly couldn't, couldn't bring myself to reading it, just it was too discouraging.
I saw it, but I haven't read it. Yeah, it's a bummer. It is. It's, you know, it's, um,
look, we don't call it neoconservatism anymore. We're pretending that we move to click to the
right. So now we call it America first. But all it is is George W. Bushism, 100% through
through you know so they renamed the wolfowitz doctrine that's the big news it's got a new
name they they stole america first from the america firsters okay all right well i'm even more
discouraged than i was before so thanks for that yeah well you know what uh turnabouts fair play here
danny um listen thank you for coming back on the show and explaining all this horrible stuff to us
uh next time we'll do ukraine okay
all right man i would say i look forward to it but i look forward to talking to you but i'm afraid to touch that subject too but yeah it's got to be talked about it's got to be talked about i know i know well that's the job all right everybody that's the daniel davis deep dive and check out his great book too it's called the eleventh hour in 2020 america thanks bud all right man see you next time the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7 fm in l a psrador dot com
anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and libertarian institute.org.
