Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/3/26 Daniel Davis on Trump’s Dangerous New War with Iran

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Daniel Davis joined the show for a quick rundown on the war Trump just launched on Iran. He and Scott talk about what’s happened so far and where things may go from here. Discussed on the show: Daniel Davis / Deep Dive 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.  Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. It's the babies I make it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. All right. Welcomeing back to the show, the great American hero, Danny Davis. And I say that not because he bought in three wars,

but because he told the truth about the Afghan war at great risk to himself professionally and even legally probably branking ranks as he did to tell the truth about what a damned liar David Petraeus is in 2012. And we'll always be remembered for that, as well as his incredible insight in writing, and now especially on his daily show,

Daniel Davis, Deep Dive, here on the YouTube. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Danny? I'm doing good. Thanks for having to be back, Scott. I'm very happy to have you here, but I'm really pissed off that they started this war, and I know that basically you and I both gave the same warnings

about why not to do this for the last, well, 20 years on my part and at least a good 15 years. or so on yours, what might happen if we did this? And for all I know, you warned while you're still in the service too, why not to? But I mean, to me, this looks like almost like exactly what so many of us in the anti-war movement had predicted that they can hit all of these targets up and down the Gulf, and including our guys in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, et cetera, et cetera, a zillion dollars worth of economic targets up and down the Gulf.

And then I guess they still haven't started firing on the Navy yet. I don't know if they're going to try to pick that fight by really like targeting the U.S. Navy out at sea there. Or if they have the range to or what, I don't know. But maybe they do. But so far, I think this is the only thing that I really care about in the scheme of things seems to be the absolutely most crucial thing is that the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Iraq, who is in Iranian,

and is the highest-ranking Shiite religious cleric in the world, has not declared holy war and has not said, like for example, he did against the Islamic State Caliphate. He said, all true believers must sign up and go fight the caliphate in 2014. He's not said that about the West now, but he could, and I don't know what that would mean, but I know that he would command a legion many-fold, greater than bin Laden could have ever dreamed of if they want to activate

Shiite martyrdom against the West in the world. Man, I don't know what all that could entail. That seems to me to be their equivalent of a hydrogen bomb, potentially that they're holding there. But anyway, whatever, I'm done talking. You just tell me everything that you think about what's going on here, man, and then I'll let you go. Listen, I have grave concerns about what this means,

both in the present term, the medium, and the long term, because I think that we have set ourselves up for some real trouble. There is the hope that we can just destroy the Iranian regime. And I would say, I thought about saying so that we can get a friendly government in there. But you know, when you look into it, really, you had Secretary Rubio about three or so weeks ago, before the U.S. Senate, he was ostensibly talking about the Venezuela operation. One of the senators asked him, way about this potential thing in Iran, if you can succeed in a regime change, what is the plan

for afterwards? And he said, yeah, we don't have one. I don't really know. He said it's kind of early to figure that out three weeks ago. He said, we have no plan. You had Lindsey Graham, who flat out said on, I think it was CBS News a couple of days ago, that's not our job, man. That's not President Trump's job. It's not my job. Our job is just to kill everybody and blow shit up and then see what happens and then let them figure it out. That's the plan. So what that tells you is that in the unlikely event, but you can never completely eliminate it, that there is somehow the success of it. Apparently, the plan is to create chaos. So a, quote, success on our part is to create and so complete chaos in the Middle East. Basically like what happened with Libya back in 2011,

where they just shattered that country after Gaddafi fell. And then I think to this day, I think you still have competing governments, and there's a low-level civil war going on there. So many people have died in between. Of course, you've got Syria. which is fractured when we had the, you know, Al-Shera, the former terrorist leader that we had a $50 million bounty on, but hey, he worked for us at this point, so we'll see what happens with that. And now then you want to do the same thing to Iran, to just create this chaos into the region so that there's no uniform government. I doubt very seriously that that would be benign. I think that if you, quote, succeeded and changed your military objective, you're going to create more violence for Israel, more terrorism, the region and certainly more destruction and violence on the people inside who I think that the intent, especially from the Israeli side, would be to foster division among the various groups that would be resulted. I don't think there's even a desire to have a unified democratic government that would be friendly to the U.S. and anything. I think they don't even want that.

I think they would. That's why I think they're pushing this, raise the offspring of the Shah of Iran in there because they know that that's an incredibly polarizing figure. that has, you know, so much hatred from so much of the population. And then they would facilitate other groups, too, so that they would go against one another. That's what I think that they would do if they were successful. But I think that's pretty unlikely that they're going to be successful. The task here is extremely difficult because once you start attacking another country, you know, you get the whole rally around the flag kind of situation,

because there is no question. There's a big constituency inside of Iran that is genuinely against the I, you know, have protested against him for decades and would love to have seen him fall, but on their terms, not on our terms. And I think it's unlikely that we're going to get these opposition figures to join with the Israeli defense forces and the U.S. military who's blowing up and killing people all over the country to include hundreds of little kids in a school,

but apparently over a thousand total civilian casualties already. I just don't think that they're going to say, yeah, that's cool. I understand there's casualties in Warsaw. I get it to shed to kill a lot of us, but hey, thanks for coming in and getting rid of the Ayatollah. We'll take it from here. I just don't see that happening, but I do see millions of people so far protesting in support of the government. And there's news out just right before we came on the air here that Israel, apparently their intelligence had another major success. They've not only knocked out the Ayatollah in the first hours, but now apparently they hit the governing council that was meeting and calm to actually.

bring a new to vote on a new one and at least the report is that they destroyed that and killed who knows how many people so that's another big gas to the government especially the the clerical portion of it uh so it's anybody's guess as to what kind of impact that's going to have but you have whatever the military capacity of iran is what's proven that we're in a real big time crunch here it's got we have got to get this done in the next couple of weeks or we're going to start getting into some real trouble because we don't have enough interception their missiles and we don't have enough offensive missiles to sustain this combat for months. And so therefore, Iran will do everything and its power to make sure that's exactly what

happens. We have set for ourselves a military objective that is incredibly difficult to attain and the Iranian side, their objectives is much more attainable and much less complicated, which is to just survive. They have to endure this. Like Hezbollah, ignored it in Lebanon, like the Hamas has endured it for two and a half years inside of the Gaza Strip when everything in the world is against them, like the Houthis have done. You know, like the Taliban did against us. They endured for two decades, even though we just decimated them left and right. That's all the history that's against this working.

And we appear to have gambled on just making this, hoping that we get the regime change, hoping that we get to people turning against them. I think that they looked at Libya and said that kind of worked there. Let's hope that works. I mean, it took 11 years to get rid of Bashar al-Assad. I just don't think that we can get this done. And Trump even said four to five weeks, but I don't know that we can go even that long

because we don't have the amount of missiles and we don't have the production capacity to sustain something like that. So the real question is how much capacity does Iran have? How many Shaheed-top drones do they have? Is it really tens of thousands like is reported? How many missiles do they have? Is it really three or four thousand, lack has been claimed?

Is that enough? Is there more or is there less? Senator Ted Cruz said just a couple of days before this war started off. Is that he said, intelligence said, that Iran had the capacity to manufacture 100 missiles per month. So that means that they apparently have, even with all the sanctions we've had and all the other things that have been going on against them, they are still producing underground, safe from our bombs, those kinds of missiles. So it implies then they can continue going on and maintaining this for a long period of time. Even if they don't get the density they're having right now, that implies that they can keep going on.

So if they can keep it together politically and that they can keep the government viable and the people under control, then it appears militarily that they can continue. Now, we have tremendous amounts of firepower that are falling all over. And especially in this couple of week period I'm talking about total, we can be profound amounts. And you see it on the screen every day. There's a lot of damage going on against Iran. But there's also damage going against Israel.

There's damage going against the U.S. And, of course, our allies throughout the region, military and civilian targets. The Strait of Hormuz has been, if not totally shut down, certainly significantly constrained. And Iran hasn't taken the step so far to totally and physically shut it down. they haven't mined the straits, et cetera. So it's kind of in a suspended situation, which is now causing, and I think I saw this morning, that since this started oil has gone up 11 percent, it's just kind of creeping up because people are going,

where's this going? Is it going to be over quick? Will they shut down the straight? And I mean, like, block it off so it's impenetrable. All those things are still open right now. So there's a lot at stake here. It is possible that Iran could collapse and this could end up working. I doubt that it will, but you can't rule that out.

But the bottom line is in any scenario, Scott, there is chaos that's going to be set. We again violated the Constitution by going to war, flat out, straight up war. No declaration, no authorization, and we were not attacked. So you can just say now the Constitution is a dead letter. I'm sorry, but that's the fact. The U.S. law is a dead letter. International law is a dead letter. The U.N.

The U.N. Security Council have no power, no meaning. This is unleashing something here that is really good. dangerous for the world, whether this quote succeeds or fails, we're in a world to hurt. And I'm very concerned about where this is all going. Expandesigns.com. That's my friend Harley Abbott's company. And he is the webmaster for the Scott Horton Show, as well as the Libertarian Institute. He is the guy that redesigned the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website.

He's done a lot of great work for other friends of mine. And unlike a lot of webmasters and. web developers and different guys that I have worked with over the years. The thing is about Harley Abbott and his team is they do what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it and are just extremely reliable and extremely knowledgeable and 100% vouch for the great Harley Abbott over there. You got a website. You need it fixed up.

You need a new one. You're setting up a business working on any kind of online project like that. check out expanddesigns.com. Man, all right, so there's so much there, but let's focus on the militias there. You got Kurdish communists, you got Baluki bin Ladenites, you got potentially Sunni Arab bin Ladenites,

you got Azeri factions, but there are dissident factions in America too, none of whom, even if armed by the Chinese, have the ability to overthrow the U.S. government whatsoever. So, like how powerful, even if armed by, CIA and Assad and connected with our Starlink satellites and whatever, how powerful can they possibly be versus the Kuds Force? And like, for example, do we even see now on the ground in Iran the armed groups of militia men

killing cops and attempting to take over government targets on the ground like we just saw one and a half months ago? Yeah, we have it. Everything will depend on scale. How many of these can they get together? can they get the various factions to cooperate for a mutual benefit of getting rid of the government? I mean, that's what you would have to do. And I'm certain that there are members of, you know, whatever, British Special Forces,

U.S. Special Forces, Massad, CIA, who knows who all else. I'm sure there are some on the ground. I have heard it from reputable sources that tell me that there is, it is in fact on the ground. So they're trying to get that done. But see, what it doesn't get calculated into that is that there are another significant percentage of the population that is for the government. So it's not just that they would have this, if you arm these people,

they would have to go against, you know, the cuts force or the besiege or the police, et cetera. There's also other people in the population that don't want their country destroyed and would also stand up. So it's a big task. It's a big ask to be able to get done even if you succeed to getting them together

and who knows whether that's going to happen or not. Yeah. All right. So now, as far as all the missile strikes against American targets from Iraq to Oman. Can you give us some kind of appreciation of the scale of how bad that really is compared to how bad it looks or doesn't or what? Yeah, at least what's being officially reported,

and I always have to put an asterisk on that because I don't trust anything anybody says anymore on any of the sides, so we'll just put it like that. We have admitted that there are six people, six Americans that have been killed in action, some other number are still seriously wounded and some additional number on that were slightly wounded, return to duty.

They call it RTD. That's what's being admitted, but we see a lot of video evidence that there's a lot of bombs going off. So either our measures, our countermeasures, successful guys are in basements or in bonkers, et cetera. And so when these missiles are going off, they're not killing anybody or they're not reporting it to us.

But so far it seems like that there's a lot of fire and fury, but maybe it's not that much. specific damage. We've, we minimized the risk before this by getting a lot of guys out of bases, consolidating them at others. So they tried to minimize how much we could get hit here. And then apparently some reports, and this is conflicting on this, is that we relocated a lot of them out of harm's way, even after that,

further outside of range. So it looks like Iran is really scatterhooting a lot to cause a lot of damage, a lot of harm, especially to some of the civilian targets, frankly. that's some of the more concerning and worrisome. But I don't know that they've caused a lot of physical military degradation so far. The biggest issue, Scott, is that we are continuing to expend profound amounts of interceptor missiles and a lot of offensive missiles. And the real question is, who's got the most? Really, all of this stuff comes down to, it doesn't matter how many planes you have, how many ships you have, how many the other side has.

what matters is how many offensive missiles or long-range drones can you fire in a sustained manner and how many does the other side have? Because the one that runs out of interceptor missiles first is the one that's going to be losers. I don't care how much great stuff you have or help train your force. In this kind of a conflict, if you run out of interceptors first or if you start getting low and the other side is still able to lob offensive weapons of various sorts, you're screwed because then you can't stop them. And that could affect either side. Iran isn't the same issue to.

I have no earthly idea how many interceptor missiles they have, what their production capacity is. And if they run out first, then they're going to be in a world of hurt. But the bottom line is everybody is going down low. And again, back to the if you succeed thing even, we have expended so many now. And we were already low because of the two and a half years

we've been supporting Israel, the four years we've been supporting Ukraine, And now all of a sudden, we're using them on our own. And I'm telling you, whatever the number is, our stockpiles are critically low. We're definitely in the red here. And our reproduction capacity is they're trying to get it bigger, but it's a slow process. It'll take years to get really up to scale. And it's minimal right now.

So we now have made ourselves, Scott, no matter what happens at this point forward or how long this goes, we have already made ourselves much more vulnerable strategically globally than we were before any of this stuff started. So it could be a peering victory, even if we succeed, but we may not. So this is a really, really bad decision and a dangerous time for our national security. Hey guys, Scott here for Mundo's artisan coffees. It's the Scott Horton show flavored coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee and they'll forge you on there to Mundo's artisan coffees. get it they hate Starbucks because they represent the war party of course and so they're moon doze and

they support peace and guess what scott horton show coffee is the number one bestselling coffee at moondos artisan coffees right now just go again to scotthorton dot org slash coffee well and the diplomatic consequences already too where the Saudis and the UAE are screaming that we betrayed them by moving the missiles out of their countries to go protect Israel instead that's so much for all the promises of America's umbrella and all this comes down to it. We'll let the bombs rain down. And, oh, but don't worry. There's not going to be any worrisome consequences as a long-term result of that.

All right, last question real quick before I let you go. I know you've got to go. But what about the Ayatollah Ali al-Sastani down in Najaf? What about Iraqi Hezbollah, the Bada Brigade and essentially the Shiite regime that you help George W. Bush put in power there back in Iraq or two, buddy? Listen, I mean, the claim was. always this axis of resistance, as the Iranians called it, the Shia arc, I think, as the Israelis called it. I mean, we got to be honest. I mean, since Israel has been going into the Hamas

and the fighting in the Gaza Strip, since that stuff started, since the 12-day war last year, since the attacks on the Houthis, and now then this war here, and you have not seen the Hezbollah rise up. You have not seen Hamas do anything additionally inside. You have not seen the who these stand up, I don't think they're going to. I mean, they, and why would Sistani enter the fight when all these other ones that were outright armed and prepared by the Iranian side? It looks like it was an empty promise all the way through. I guess you can never say never. True. If we, if they start seeing it's getting weaker and there's a vulnerability of here, then they might. But right now, I mean, they haven't so far. I don't know why, why they would

certainly do it now. Well, so there were attacks at the green zone, which were, you know, defended off the American embassy in Baghdad. And there was an attack on a base in Irrbal that was reported to have come from inside Iraq. And we have seen, you know, they call Khadib Hasbala there, Iraqi al-Qaeda, has done strikes against American troops in Syria and in Jordan, et cetera, although, you know, nothing like on the full scale. Right, right. Yeah, it's all low-level stuff.

And it's kind of ankle-biter stuff. It's something I'm watching to see, but it would have to get turned into a sustained and widespread for it to have any operational impact so far. I guess the why I'm worried about it is, you know, America has been doing Sistani's bidding since especially January 2004 when he called out George W. Bush. And it was him. He said, we want one man, one vote, right? Everybody and every Shiite in Iraq said, that's right.

And they all went outside and said, one man, one vote. And he enslaved George W. Bush that day. And America bought the whole work for him. And then even when we built the caliphate, still he was able to call up enough Iraqi Shiites to fight that off back, you know, a decade ago. But so if America's at war, we already killed the Ayatollah, as you reported, it's out today that they killed the ruling council of Mullahs who had gathered to pick the next Ayatollah and whatever, then isn't that their religion that they really don't mind dying and martyrdom, especially

like among the Shiites can be an extremely powerful motivating factor and force. And it seems like one that is, I'm not like predicting, oh, worst case scenario. This is, I'm saying this is going to break out, but I'm just saying, isn't that the greatest danger of all that Sistani? It is a danger. It would say like bin Laden did on the Sunni side, that it's your religious obligation now to resist these people because we say so. And they have literally millions of Shiites who would obey that in a way that bin Laden could have never rallied and never and Baghdaddy could never rally Sunnis to follow them that far, you know?

Yeah. And the question is, can Sastani or anybody else, can they also mobilize that much power and will people follow that and really go into that? We don't know. If they do, if they get to that point, if they say, you know, you're actually causing harm to our religion across the board, then they may. they do that. And then who knows what can happen as a result of that. But like I just said, at least so far, when there's been many opportunities to do it, they haven't done it so far. So I don't know if they now value, you know, Sistani and they say, yeah, I kind of like my little spot here in Iraq. I'm going to keep on keeping it in. I don't want to bring any fire on myself.

I don't know. Right. Yeah, the good news is he's like 89 or something, which means he's a slow and patient, conservative old guy now. But, you know, they just killed the Ayatollah in Iran who always said that God said you're not allowed to make nuclear weapons. So we don't know what the next guy's opinion about what God's opinion is about nuclear weapons, but it might not be as conservative as the last guy. It might not be. Yeah. All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on my show and talking to us all about this stuff, man.

Thank you, Danny. You great, man. Thanks, man. See you soon. Absolutely. All right, everybody. That is Daniel L. Davis from the Daniel Davis Deep dive. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom,

Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc., moon dose artisan coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest, Provote,

how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audio book of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and Patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music

Inter and outro videos by dissident media Audio mastering by Potsworth Media See you all next time