The Daily Signal - #488: What Was Iran Thinking Shooting Down a US Drone?

Episode Date: June 19, 2019

U.S.-Iran tensions just reached a new level: Iran shot down an American drone. In today's episode, we unpack the situation with Tom Spoehr, director of The Heritage Foundation's Center for National Defense and a former Army general. Plus: Days after Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez compared U.S. border camps to Nazi concentration camps, a Polish member of Parliament is inviting her to Poland to potentially rethink her comparison. Rachel and Daniel discuss.We also cover the following stories:-Supreme Court rules the Peace Cross war memorial can stand-Democratic staffer who attempted to doxx senators heads to prison-Rhode Island legalizes abortion up to birthThe Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet,iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, June 21st. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Daniel Davis. U.S. Iran tensions just reached a whole new level, with Iran having shot down an American drone. We'll unpack the situation with Tom Spore, Director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for National Defense, and a former Army General. Plus, days after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez compared the U.S. border camps to Nazi concentration camps, a Polish member of parliament is inviting her to Poland to potentially rethink her comparison. Harrison. We'll discuss. By the way, if you're enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Well, President Trump is weighing options in responding to Iran's shooting down of a U.S. drone. Iran claimed responsibility for shooting down the drone on Thursday, saying it had violated Iranian airspace. But the U.S. disputes that, saying that the drone was clearly in international airspace, over the Strait of Hormuz, which is near Iran.

President Trump tweeted that Iran had made a very big mistake, but at a press conference Thursday, he seemed more cool about the issue, even suggesting the attack may have been a mistake. Here's what he told reporters. And I think probably Iran made a mistake. I would imagine it was a general or somebody that made a mistake in shooting that drone down.

And fortunately, that drone was unarmed. It was not, there was no man in it. There was no, it was just, it was over international waters, clearly over international waters, but we didn't have a man or woman in the drone. We had nobody in the drone. Oh, you still open? It would have made a big difference. Let me tell you.

Would have made a big, big difference. But I have a feeling, I may be wrong, and I may be right, but I'm right a lot. I have a feeling that it was a mistake made by somebody that shouldn't have been doing what they did. I think they made a mistake. And I'm not just talking to the country made a mistake. I think that somebody under the command of that country made a big... Are you still in talking to Iran's leadership? Let's just see what happens.

Let's see what happens. It's all going to work out. Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif responded on Twitter saying, quote, we don't seek war, but will zealously defend our skies, land, and waters. We'll take this new aggression to the UN and show that the U.S. is lying about international waters, end quote. The president invited top congressional officials to the White House Situation Room for a briefing on the matter on Thursday. Advocates for Religious Freedom received welcome news Thursday when the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that a Peace Cross war memorial that sits on public land outside Washington, D.C., does not violate the Constitution and can remain standing. Those who oppose the Cross's presence, including residents of Prince George's County, Maryland, and the American Humanist Association, had sued to have the Cross's presence.

removed, and the American Legion whose symbols on the cross stepped in to keep it standing. Justice Samuel Leda wrote in the court's opinion, quote, for nearly a century, the Bladenburg Cross has expressed the community's grief at the loss of the young men who perished. It's thanks for their sacrifice and its dedication to the ideals for which they fought, end quote. A former Democratic congressional staffer was sent to prison for four years Wednesday after being convicted of a whole package of politically motivated crimes. Jackson-Cawks, who worked as an IT aide for Senator Maggie Hassan and Representative Sheila Jackson Lee,

pleaded guilty back in April to what prosecutors say was the largest known data theft in the history of the Senate. As an IT worker, Costco obtained and published the personal information of several Republican senators in the middle of Brett Kavanaugh's judicial confirmation fight. According to Fox News, court records show Costco wanted to intimidate the senators and their families. His accomplice, Samantha DeForest Davis, is also now facing misdemeanor charges. The governor of Rhode Island, Gina Ramando, signed a sweeping abortion rights law Wednesday, which allows abortions up to birth, promises not to restrict abortion access before fetal viability, and repeals a law charging doctors with murder and jail times for abortions, according to the daily caller. Ramando, the governor of Rhode Island, praised the bill before she signed it, saying, quote, fundamentally, this bill is about health care. With all the uncertainty in Washington and frankly around the country, there is a lot of anxiety that a woman's right to health care is in danger.

Well, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, had strong words for corporations coming out against pro-life laws. In particular, he cited film companies threatening to boycott Georgia over its recently passed fetal heartbeat bill, which bans abortion as early as six weeks. Here's what Cotton said on the Senate floor Wednesday. The loudest objections to these pro-life laws haven't come from the bottom up, from normal citizens who happen to disagree with one another, but from the top down, from cultural elites, and increasingly from giant corporations who wield their economic power as a weapon to punish the American people for daring to challenge their pro-abortion extremism. Giant media companies like Disney, Netflix, and Warner Media have threatened to cripple Georgia's film. film industry if its residents don't bend the knee and betray their pro-life convictions. And just last Monday, the New York Times ran a full-page advertisement organized by the pro-abortion lobby and signed by the CEOs of hundreds of companies saying that legal protections for

unborn babies are, quote, bad for business. How disgusting is that? Caring for a little baby is bad for business. Now, I get why outfits like Planned Parenthood or Nairal would say babies are bad for business. Abortion is their business, after all, and they're just protecting market share. What about all those other CEOs? Why do they think babies are, quote, bad for business? Perhaps because they want their workers to focus single-mindedly on working, not building a family and raising children.

All these politically correct CEOs want company men and women, not family men and women. Well, up next, Heritage Foundation expert Tom Spore unpacks the latest developments with Iran. Did you know you can now listen to all of our events through SoundCloud or just by visiting our events page on heritage.org? You now have access to hundreds of events and compelling discussions on policy issues from your car, on the train, or the comfort of your own home. Visit heritage.org slash events for more information or search for the Heritage Foundation on SoundCloud. Well, U.S. officials are considering how to respond to Iran having shot down a U.S. drone. The two countries dispute whether it was shot down in international airspace, but of course the larger backdrop is one of ongoing tensions in the region.

To unpack it all, we're joined by Tom Spore. He is director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for National Defense and served as an Army General. Tom, thanks for being with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me. And just for our listeners, we are recording this on Thursday, so there may be further developments after this. So, Tom, how much do we know at this point about what happened with the drone shooting? Yeah, we know a great deal. I mean, these type of air travel is recorded.

It's on radar, and so there's a history of it. And so we know for a fact that the drone was operating in international airspace. And a lot of people don't know what that means. That means you're 12 miles away from the shore of a nation or something like that. that. So up and down, 12 miles away. So in international airspace, operating at a fairly high altitude, a U.S. Navy drone was shot down by an Iranian surfaced air missile, and then it fell and crashed into the Gulf of Oman. Tom, would you say that this incident was an active war? Yeah, it's a great question. So there is nothing written in the Constitution about what's an

active war in history. An active war is what a nation has perceived as an active war. So in World War I, when Archduke, Ferdinand was assassinated, one country took that as an active war. But there is no playbook on what's an act of war. You can stand down from what would seemingly be a very hostile act if two countries agree not to consider it an act of war. It's an unmanned drone, and so it's not as provocative, say, if somebody had lost their lives or things like that. So I don't think we're at a place yet where war is imminent. So this comes just a week after the attack on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. And it makes you wonder what do you think could be motivating Iran to act so provocatively like this?

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think anybody really knows what's going through their heads when they do this, because it's commonly believed they're making themselves look worse and worse as day goes on. And so they're operating under some fairly significant sanctions that the United States is leading. You know, you could probably surmise they'd like to get out from under those sanctions. It's hard to understand how attacking oil tankers, shooting down our drones, is going to relieve them of these sanctions. And it's also hard to understand how that will gain the many friends in the international community,

especially if somebody gets hurt. Tom, why do you think that the president has been so cool so far on this issue? We've seen him be very strong on threats in the past, but not as much yet. Yeah, you know, the president, at his core, does not want to get us entangled in any overseas engagements more than he has to, more than, you know, absolutely required for the national security of the United States. And so he views this currently as a place where we can still pull back. We don't have to engage in hostilities. And he believes this for a number of different reasons.

One, obviously, doesn't want to put U.S. lives on the line unless there's a vital U.S. national security interest. The second is these wars are costly, and he'd like to reduce our overseas costs of defense operations. So he's got that. And so I also think he's getting advice from a broad base of folks that say, hey, and nothing has happened yet that we can't stand down. down from. How do you think Iran's nuclear ambitions factor into their own thinking here? I saw a report. Maybe you can verify this, that they're about six months away from having a new. Would you say that that's a reliable report? So we have now, we have clear evidence that Iran for decades has been interested in pursuing a nuclear weapon. It's only in 2003. They put

those plans aside for a little bit when they saw what happened in Iraq and when the U.S. went in there. And I think we think that sent them a message that might not be a good idea. So they've got this long-standing desire to have a nuclear weapon. The current, I think the current tensions we're seeing is probably more about trying to get the sanctions relieved than to restart their nuclear program. As you suggest, they've made hints that they're starting to refine uranium again, trying to bring it up more than there's allowed by the agreement and in greater percentages of purity. I don't think we should make much of that. That's really just posturing, I think. So leaders of both the United States and Iran have said that they don't want war, and yet we seem to be inching

closer and closer to it. What would war with Iran look like? Yeah, and I don't even know that we know what it would look like. I think probably it would be a series of smaller type operations. I don't think there's anybody that thinks that we would go in and try and change the regime in Iran. I don't think that's a good course of action. But assuming that this escalates, I think you would see if the president decided it was necessary some sort of retaliation. And so it would probably be proportional and very limited. So, for example, in the case of this drone strike, it wouldn't be too unreasonable to see us attacking the same launchers that launched the missile that brought down the drone. And the same thing with a tanker

attacks. Let's say that happens again. Maybe the United States or with its partners would choose to attack the naval ships and the bases from which these attacks originated. I mean, that's the type of thinking typically you see when we're trying to keep things at a lower level. Would you expect that gas and oil prices will rise out of this? I know there's, I mean, there's so much oil that comes right through this straight. Do you expect there to be an economic impact of this? Yeah, there is an economic impact. I don't know what the barrel of crude is at today. I was hearing it was a couple dollars up. I also saw people talking about it. If this had happened five or ten years ago, the price of oil would have got up $20, $30 of

barrel because there are so many other sources now in the world for oil, including the United States, we're much less dependent on getting oil through the Straits of Hormuz. Most of Asia still gets a lot of oil through the Straits of Hormuz. The Western nations really not as much anymore. And so I think unless the straits completely close, we're not going to see oil go through the roof. Just go back here. You mentioned a proportional strike in response.

Do you see that escalating further Iran being emboldened by that? to lash out again, or do you think at some point they would back off and realize, okay, we don't want this? Yeah, that's kind of a good question. You try and keep it limited. You try and signal that, hey, this is not about, you know, we're trying not trying to damage the regime. We're not trying to take out your leaders. We're trying to make you stop, and we're trying to take out the tools from which you were launching these attacks. And so you always hope that this stops at the lowest level possible. We saw that when President Trump decided to retaliate against Syria for using chemical weapons. He very specifically went after the facilities and the aircraft that they were

using to deliver the chemical weapons, didn't go to Damascus, didn't go anywhere else outside those parameters. All right. Well, Tom Spore, thanks for coming in. We appreciate your time today. It was my pleasure. Thank you. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe. Tuscotus 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Dominic Tarzinski, a member of parliament in Poland, is inviting Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Poland so she can, quote, study the concentration camps here for real, so she can see firsthand how different it is from your immigration processing centers on the U.S. border.

Earlier this week, Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram Live and said the United States is running concentration. camps on the southern border. Here's an excerpt from her video. The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border. And that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps. And if that doesn't bother you, I don't, I like, we can have, okay, whatever. I want to talk to the people that are,

concerned enough with humanity to say that we should not, that never again means something. And that the fact that concentration camps are now in institutionalized practice in the home of the free is extraordinarily disturbing. And we need to do something about it. this week children, immigrant children were moved to the same internment camps where the Japanese were held in the early, in the earlier 20th century. And this is, this is not even about a crisis. In his letter to Ocasio-Cortez, the Polish member of parliament, said that, quote, I understand that there are heightened tensions in your politics right now, but I would urge severe caution in attempting to leverage phrases such as concentration camp for political ends.

It will lead nowhere good. So Daniel, what do you make of this whole situation? Should AOC book a trip to Poland? I think it'd be great. I think she'd get a lot of media, which I think is something that she likes to get. This is true. And, you know, she could tweet about it. She could talk to locals. I think it'd be great. You know, obviously making that trip would be a huge concession that she was wrong, which, you know, so she won't do it. You know, comparing what's happening on southern border or two concentration camps is just outright dishonest. And she was tweeting about this. She got some pushback.

And she responded by saying, well, you know, the definition of concentration camp means so-and-so, like something not as mild, more mild than what the Nazis were doing. But clearly, the point of her initial comment was to compare it to Nazi Germany. Yeah, that's exactly what she did. And so, you know, we saw this also recently this week, CNN's Don Lemon was talking to Mario Cuomo. And he was saying, he was basically making a similar argument. saying that Trump's comments, you know, inflammatory comments are kind of like, you know, early on in Nazi Germany, it's just started with, it started with comments. It started with, you know, letting things go. And, you know, Cuomo pushed back and said, hey, hey, hey, now, you know, don't compare this to Nazi Germany, you know. And I think part of the problem here is that if you're a liberal and you're smart, you don't want to make that comparison because you want to save that comparison for when it really matters when it's actually real.

So I think part of the problem here is like they're crying wolf again and again and again. So if you actually did have another Hitler down the road, you know, calling that person, Hitler would be a bit less credible. But you were actually on the border recently, Rachel, and you've actually seen, unlike Ocasio-Cortez, you've actually seen some of the crisis down there. Yeah, I mean, I was there. And the one thing I would like to put out just because I was there and I have seen all over Twitter is people want to come to this country and the people who are crossing over the border the men and women and children that we saw one night

there were 40 people that we ran into that had just crossed over and waiting for Border Security Patrol to pick them up and take them to a holding facility they were literally waiting for them to do that there's a bus that picked them up took them there and while there are lawmakers right now in Congress asking for funding to help out these centers to give them more people more resources to handle the sheer numbers

these are not concentration camps and they're not waiting line to go to a concentration camp. They know by coming to the United States, they'll have a much better quality of life. And what I would like to point out is I was also at Yad Vashem in 2017, and actually Yad Vashem, it's a Holocaust museum in Israel. They called out AOC on Twitter and they said, and I quote, concentration camps assured slave labor supply to help the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of extermination through labor, learn about concentration camps and they included links to, you know,

different stories and documentation about concentration camps during World War II. And being there, seeing the, they had models there of what, you know, the cattle cars looked like, of what the actual camps looked like about, you know, what Auschwitz looked like and everything that the people had to go through there,

the Jews and other people that were processed through. And when you have, you know, an international memorial and museum calling out a member of Congress for saying something so egregious, I mean, you know this is serious stuff. And by comparing the immigration system here and the situation at the border, well, it's not optimal. It's definitely not even coming close to what happened during the Holocaust.

Yeah, not even the same. It makes me mad. Partly because it doesn't even come close to accurately describing the camps on the border, but even more so because it really does an injustice to the actual Holocaust and misportrays it. It was just an absolute slaughter of human beings. That's what it was. Right. And to AOC's point, I'd like to point out this is a conversation I had with a Border Patrol

officer when I was there. I'm not going to mention his name, but he was a very kind man. And while they're there to enforce the law, I was just astounded by how caring and concerned they were for the people that they dealt with every day. And this one Border Patrol officer told me, he said, I can count. He's like, I can't even count on all my fingers. The amount of times that I've given lunch to someone who's crossed over the border, he would have brought a lunch, you know, any day of the week when he was out on patrol.

And he said there were many times I just gave it to someone because I felt so bad for their situation. I wanted to help them and do whatever I could. So while, I mean, AOC is painting them as horrible people. And while the situation it's not optimal and we're trying to fix it, that's what the border crisis and the conversation that we're having right now is all about. It's not what she's painting it as. Well, our listeners can find that article on Rachel Del Judas's author page at The Daily Signal. Just search for her name and scroll down a bit and you'll find that report from the border.

Also, you can find one of our recent episodes with Congressman Michael Cloud who took a trip to the border. That was a really interesting interview. We're going to leave it there for today. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation. Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, and please leave us a review or rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. Rob and Virginia will be with you on Monday. You've been listening to the Daily Signal podcast, executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound design by Michael Gooden, Lauren Evans, and Thalia Rampersad.

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