The Jordan Harbinger Show - 982: Israel vs. Iran | Out of the Loop
Episode Date: April 25, 2024Should we worry that the complex dynamics between Israel and Iran might ignite WWIII? Intelligence analyst Ryan McBeth brings us in from Out of the Loop. Welcome to what we're calling our "O...ut of the Loop" episodes, where we dig a little deeper into fascinating current events that may only register as a blip on the media's news cycle and have conversations with the people who find themselves immersed in them. On This Episode of Out of the Loop: Israel and Iran have been engaged in recent attacks on each other, with Israel striking Iranian officers in Syria, Iran launching drones at Israel, and Israel firing missiles back at Iran. However, neither side seems to want a wider conflict. Iran's military is split between the regular Artesh forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC gets better equipment and training and has a Quds Force that specializes in unconventional warfare. Iran and Israel both lack strong expeditionary capabilities to directly attack each other. Iran's navy is mostly small fast attack boats, while Israel has a defensive-oriented military. Many ordinary Iranian citizens oppose their government and the Ayatollahs. The people should not be conflated with the regime. Iran has a large young population that is quite pro-Western. Overall, a massive conventional war between Israel and Iran remains unlikely due to the geographic and military constraints on both sides, despite the harsh rhetoric. However, proxy conflicts and tit-for-tat strikes may continue. And much more! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/982 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Today, Ryan Macbeth back on the show.
He's an open source intelligence analyst and a Newsmax contributor.
I know, Newsmax.
Come on, man.
Anyway, today is out of the loop on Israel versus Iran.
There have been strikes from Israel against Iranian officers in Syria.
Then Iran fires drones back.
And then Israel fires missiles back.
What's going on with all this?
Is this the beginning of World War III?
Can Iran destroy Israel?
Is Israel going to start a full-blown conflict with Iran?
We're going to get into all this here on this out-of-the-loop episode with Ryan Macbeth.
All right, here we go.
Ryan, thanks for coming back on the show.
It seems like we're doing World War III speed run.
but I don't know. I'm here to have you talk me off the ledge, I guess.
I am actually of the opinion that World War III started in 2014.
With the invasion of Ukraine from Russia?
With the invasion of Crimea. That's absolutely correct.
So it's sort of like slow lead-up.
Actually, I don't know how much you know about World War II.
I don't know enough to say, is this normal speed or is this ultra-slow?
Because it's, you know, when you think of a war starting,
layman like me are kind of like, oh, something surprising happens, like Pearl Harbor,
and then you just join the fray.
And it's like, well, actually, I don't know how World War II started.
Was it over a decade and change?
Because it might have been.
I could say as the Nazis rose to power or perhaps in Poland was invaded, which I believe
was in 1939.
I might have to check my math on that one.
But you can say that when we think of World War II, we go, oh, well, World War II,
it started in 1941.
Well, for us.
But Europe had been fighting it for two whole years beforehand, right?
Yeah.
That's not a super long time if you're saying that World War III started with the invasion of Crimea in 2014, right? So we're going on a decade now. So we're sort of slowly warming up that flywheel of destruction. That is certainly possible, yes. Great. Well, on that cheerful note, we don't have time to go over the whole World War III prequel. But I think let's focus on Iran and Israel, because when Iran threatened Israel during the initial stages of the Gaza invasion, I was like, okay, are they going to do anything? Everybody
kind of said, eh, proxies will do something. And Hezbollah was like, we're going to destroy Israel.
And then they launched some rockets. And then Israel was like, no, we're just going to take out some of
your stuff. And they were like, oh, we're not really going to do anything. And Iran was kind of like,
I'm over here in the corner, not paying attention to this. I know we talked a big game, but we kind of
don't really want to do this. It was just sort of for PR and we're going to sit this one out.
And everyone was like, a lot of the simps online, the sort of warhawk, like everybody
destroy Israel, those kinds of folks. They were pretty disappointed that Iran didn't
anything. And then Israel's just blowing up embassies. Let's start from there, because that's
kind of where people start wondering what the heck is going on, because I think that went under
the radar for a lot of people, and now there's drones and missiles going in both directions.
Absolutely. So to take you back even further, one of the reasons, I know I say Iran instead of
Iran, I'm sorry, I'm from Jersey. It's really difficult for me to say Iran, but to go all the way back,
Really, Iran wants to dominate the Middle East. They're actually creating something that they kind of call the Shia crescent. And the whole idea behind this is that Iran can project power because Iran doesn't really view Israel as its enemy or the U.S. as its enemy. It looks at Saudi Arabia and Sunni Islam as the real enemy. Iran wants to project power by using proxies because it can't build aircraft carriers.
It can't build huge amphibious landing ships.
It can't build an expeditionary army.
But it can create a separate religious military.
And if you want, we can talk about the Kuds Force and the IRGC.
Yeah.
And they can use that to kind of formulate dissent and project power softly and with a lot less expense associated with fighting.
Okay.
So I believe what happened on October 7 was that Hamas got Iran's help with this
attack and the intent was that
Mahmoud Abbas, who is, I believe,
88 years old now,
Mahmouda boss runs the West Bank.
And there hasn't been an election
in the West Bank since I believe
2006. Now, the whole
idea is that when you're 88 years old,
not a lot left on the actuarial tables,
right? So he's going to die
one day. And I'm sure
Hamas would love to walk into the West Bank
and declare themselves the rulers of the
West Bank. So they attack.
they attack Israel, they grab a bunch of hostages, and then hopefully, at least to them,
over the next three to five years, they release one hostage, two hostages, Israel tries to negotiate.
Instead, Israel hit them with a sledgehammer to the face.
Now, all of the help that Iran was giving Hamas was very useful in this attack.
But now, I'm sure Hamas was like, hey, Iran, you're going to actually help us out?
I was like, yeah, you know, we really don't care about that.
much about you guys and would really rather remain a country we don't want to get into a long
protractive war that we can't afford. So I think that's kind of the mentality that Iran is in right now.
So there was a meeting in Syria, in Damascus, and a number of IRGC commanders were there.
Now, the IRGC is a fascinating organization. Because if you think about it, imagine America's a
mostly Christian country, right? Imagine us America had an army and then we had right next to it
a Christian army, an army just full of religious zealots. And we didn't just have an army. We also
had an Air Force. We had a Navy Force. We had a special forces. We had a strategic rocket forces.
And they were all religious forces. That's kind of what the IRGC is. Think of it as the religious
wing of Iran's army. And Iran's regular army called the Artesch, they have a mirror image where
they actually don't get as good of equipment and as good training as the IRGC does.
So Iranian army, regular army, is like protecting Iran's borders and doing whatever armies
maybe do in regular countries, I almost said real countries, regular countries, and the IRGC,
which I think stands for Iran Revolutionary Guard Council or something like that.
You're absolutely correct.
Yes.
They are like, they're the favorite child.
They're not protecting the people of Iran.
They're protecting the Ayatollahs and the government in the regime of Iran.
That's how it was explained to me by an Iranian recently.
On this very show, I want to say, Yas al-Zade, she was kind of like,
yeah, there's an army like we have, which supposedly protects the people in the country.
And then there's an army that's just for like the government and the elites and the Ayatollas, especially.
That's absolutely correct.
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, I think it's also called Sepal.
They have a ground force and Navy.
They tend to get the better equipment.
And in addition to that, they also have the besiegee militia,
just sort of like a religious militia that can be called up.
Think of it like a religious National Guard.
That can be called up for riot control duties.
And they have the Quds Force, which you may have heard of before.
Quds is like a Persian word for Jerusalem.
And think of the Quds as like a combination of the CIA and special forces.
And they specialize in assassins.
nation, training irregulars. They trained Bosnian Muslims. Kusam Soleimani, who was killed in a drone strike
under the Trump administration, he was a general in the Quds force. So these 16 Quds officers were
meeting at a compound at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, and somebody destroyed that embassy.
Right. The somebody is the question, because Israel never claimed responsibility, but then again,
I'm pretty sure it wasn't Butzwan.
Yeah, it wasn't a gas leak.
It probably wasn't a gas leak even.
By the way, earlier, I think I said IRGC is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Council.
That was not correct, by the way.
It's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
So I don't remember what I said earlier,
but I meant to say Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,
regardless of what I said earlier,
just in case people think I have my head in my keister.
These episodes are supposed to clarify things for people, Ryan,
and I'm just muddying the waters.
It's not going to get better when I do stuff like that.
We are dealing with the Middle East and Iran.
We're dealing with two countries that don't necessarily talk about what happened next.
No. But the least I can do is get the freaking acronyms, right? So Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, IRGC.
Correct. So that's the Islamic army of Iran. And the Quds Force is the CIA Special Forces wing.
It seems like they don't really need all these, but what do I know? We have multiple branches of our military, too. It just seems like they have a lot of parallel branches for whatever reason.
You're absolutely correct. And that is.
necessary to them because these parallel branches can get better funding and they are filled with
the kind of people who want to go on these missions. Whereas Artesh, it's an army. Every male has to
serve time. They're drafted. I've spoken with guys who said, look, I did Artesh for two years. I fired
seven rounds out of a rifle. Yeah. Other than that, we did absolutely nothing. It's almost like
by having this separate religious military, they can direct funding toward that. And the Artesch
kind of becomes a way to keep young men busy for two years. So they're not rioting in the
streets about the conditions that they're actually under. And then after those two years,
and they can go to college and start their lives. Ryan, this is more geopolitical. So feel
free to pass on this one. But I feel like I often see things like this in authoritarian regimes, right?
There's like this army and then there's this parallel army and then there's this other sort of
mini parallel guard force.
And you see that in authoritarian nations and I wonder if it has to do with, well, if there's
an army here and they wanted to take over the country, we've got another army here that's sort
of more loyal to these folks and another one over here.
So they're busy fighting for funding and power.
If one tries to take over, we've got another one.
We can sort of bounce off of them.
Whereas the United States, we don't have to worry about the Air Force taking over the White
House and the Senate. It's not a thing we sit here at night over. You're absolutely correct. I think
there was a book called How to Be a Dictator, which kind of talked about this, how essentially
dictators, they need to please like three groups of people, the political class, the military,
and the police forces. And if you have two organizations that are constantly competing with each other,
maybe they won't join together and go after you. Yeah. A good example is Sudan. Sudan had a military,
and they also had a military called the RSF,
which is sort of like a militia that would do the dirty work.
If you heard of Darfur and the John Weed militia,
Jean-Weed militia became the RSF or, I believe, rapid security forces.
And the current Civil War in Sudan is all about the army saying,
hey, RSF, you need to actually kind of come into the fold.
And the RSF said, nah, we kind of want to be independent.
Yeah, we covered that on episode 905.
That was also an out-of-the-loop episode on Sudan.
And the reason I think I had that little bit of knowledge about the dictators is we did
The Dictator's Handbook is something I read for this show, Episode 794.
And I think Alistair Smith, who came on the show, I think he was the one who talked about.
Dictators want competing factions, even if it results in massive inefficiencies, because
part of that is it's less efficient to then go, hey, we're all generals here.
Why do we give that guy all of our money?
What does that guy do again?
Let's just kill that guy and then we can split the past.
And it's like, oh, because that guy also has another army with another bunch of generals that aren't sitting in this room.
They want to kill us, too.
So maybe we just, and the dictator's kind of there with his arm's length army over here, arms length army over there.
And he's like, let me juggle you two guys and keep you from killing each other.
So he makes it so you need them.
They almost need the dictator in order to avoid imploding.
It's diabolical, but it's quite clever.
The problem is it's fragile, right?
That's kind of what we're hoping is the case with Iran.
But again, this is more geopolitical than I wanted to get.
I want to talk about the embassy mysteriously explodes, or was it a consulate that mysteriously
exploded? Do we know?
I believe consulate is the actual appropriate term.
I think embassy is the mission.
You have the ambassador of that is the embassy, but the consulate is the physical building.
Right.
And technically it wasn't really the consulate.
It was a building that was inside the consulate compound.
But again, you know, most countries don't normally attack someone else's
consulate. No. You could say that blowing up an embassy or a consulate is a declaration of war. I think just
recently, Ecuador actually went into Mexico's embassy, which is not something nations normally do.
No, that was big news, although it was eclipsed by the massive gas leak in the embassy. So it killed a
bunch of Iranian military officers of various branches. Can you discuss who these people were?
It was a really well-timed gas leak that was just a total freak accident that nobody claimed responsibility for, and it killed some pretty important folks, eh?
You're absolutely correct. I know that one person was the head of the Quds Force, I believe was General Mohammed Zahedi, and a deputy of General Zaheddy.
So those are the two main people that Israel is probably going after, and most likely those people had something to do with assisting Hamas in October 7.
So that's kind of on brand for Israel, right? Because when we had the Munich attacks, which were essentially who did that, I don't even remember who did that. I know it was Palestinian. I believe it was the PLO. The PLO. Yeah, I think you're right. The Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was a back then strictly terrorism. They went and killed a bunch of the Israeli Olympic team in 1972, was it in Munich? I believe so, yes. And Israel basically, if there's a movie called Munich, which is actually really good.
and Israel just spent the next, I think, 20 plus years hunting those guys down in the safe houses where they were and killed all of them.
You're absolutely correct. They don't tend to forget.
No. And so they're going to go after everybody who had anything to do with October 7th that's not already pink mist essentially at this point.
And so Israel gets rid of these officers, takes a couple of staffers with them.
And that's when everybody's like, uh-oh, that's a declaration of war.
Iran can defend itself.
And what happens after that?
Because it gets a little bit confusing about why these counterattacks happened that were not super effective.
After that, nothing happened for about two weeks until Iran basically announced that they were going to attack Israel.
And they fired 350 weapons.
I believe it was 195 drones, 110 ballistic missiles, 25 cruise, 25 cruise missiles, and five cruise
missiles. It was a very strange attack, mainly because Iran fired off the drones, which could take
about 10 hours to reach Israel. We're talking about should have 131s, 136s, which are powered by
a lawnmower engine, essentially, right? They fired these drones off and they said, hey, we just
did this. They let everybody know, and they say, we consider this matter settled. Before the drones
even hit. So not only was it not a surprise attack, it was like, this is our mic drop, whatever,
happens. But then what happens is Jordan, the U.S., I had nothing to do with it, the country of Jordan,
just to be clear, the United States and Israel shot down like 99 plus 99 and a half percent of these things.
I mean, it was like, you're absolutely correct. One or two hit. And we also have to include Saudi Arabia in that.
We have to include France and that. A lot of our allies, they took it upon themselves to help out with this mission.
And it's number one, it's good practice.
You get good telemetry data and information as to what's going on.
It's within no one's interest to allow Israel to be hit with ballistic missiles and cause casualties.
So everyone seems to be afraid of a wider war.
And also, in addition to that, the USS Eisenhower participated.
Their aircraft launched from their ship to participate in this attack, or at least the command control of it.
They also had the USS Carney.
The USS Carney, this plucky little destroy.
has been doing circles in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, shooting down Houthi missiles,
and they had one final mission. They certainly went out with a bang. I mean, those guns are going
to need a refurb on that boat because they are just, they've gotten a lifetime worth of use
in the past few months on that thing. The Carney should definitely win defensive player of the year.
They've been fired missiles. I believe this was the first SM3 kill of a ballistic missile ever. And
The SM3 is a, it's called the standard missile.
It's fired from the, from the USS Carney.
But those, those magazines must be getting pretty dry right now.
I believe it was headed back to Florida, to their home port in Florida.
When this happened, there was just one last, they had to give it their all one last time.
Yeah, one last rep.
It's kind of a bummer that they named it the standard missile three.
You see all these other missiles with really cool names like Storm Shadow.
And it's like, oh, what are we going to call these?
standard missile three. During the Gulf War, I mean, you couldn't have gotten any better. You had
the Scud versus the Patriot. You couldn't get a more perfect name, right? And now we just have this like,
hey, guys, we are out of ideas. Let's just call it the standard missile three for now. We'll think of
something cool later on. Oh, you shipped them already. Well, that's what they're called then in that case.
That's what's printed on the box. So, okay, they shot down all the drones. And Iran's like,
fine, this is over. It seems like they also are on board with not wanting a wider conflict.
It was really kind of entertaining reading the messages online. Iran's going to destroy Israel.
And then nothing. Oh, this is such a bummer. Why aren't they doing anything? Oh, look at all this stuff
they launched. Israel's done for. Oh, only one missile hit a airfield with nothing on it. Oh, okay.
Well, they must have did that on purpose. And then, of course, oh, well, it costs Israel in the United
States a bunch of money, which is like a 0.001% of one month of the defense budget or something
like that whenever stuff like this happens because the numbers are so astronomical.
And then fortunately, unfortunately, Israel's like, we're not done here.
And I was just kind of like, you know, my opinion as a layman was it's kind of fortunate that
you were able to destroy these officers.
And all it cost us was a bunch of money and target practice to down all these drones.
Maybe we call it a win.
And Israel was kind of like, not so fast.
going to take this one step further. And I originally wasn't even going to record this because I thought
this is over with. And then the day I talked with you, it was like missiles headed from Israel to Iran.
And it's like, hey, can you do this tomorrow? Can we record this tomorrow?
I always love coming on your show. You have the best fans. You have the smartest fans. That's for darn sure.
That's for sure. I can tell you that I think one of the reasons Israel had to do some sort of
counter strike was that one of the missiles fired from Iran landed near, and I might be pronouncing
this wrong, a Nevitim airbase, which is where Israel has their F-35s, which is a stealthy fighter plane.
Now, what's interesting is that Nevitin is about 11 miles or 17 kilometers, for your European
listeners. 11 miles away is Hatsrazine Air Base, which is 11 miles, 17 kilometers to the east.
That's where Israel keeps their nuclear weapons if they have any.
So this might have been a way for Iran to say,
hey, we know where you're keeping your nuclear weapons that you don't admit you have.
We can drop a weapon right on top of your airfield where you will load those missiles on.
So they'll take them from Hatsra-Zim to Nevitim, load them on F-35s and move toward targets from there.
So that might have been Iran's way of saying, hey, we know your secret and we can drop the missile here anytime we want.
Now, Israel's response, assuming it was Israel, was actually kind of right.
So what may or may not have happened, and this is why I said, I'm glad people want to get in the loop on this,
but I'm not even sure anybody really knows what happened a couple of nights ago.
But here's what may have happened.
Israel may have brought F-35s over Syria.
They hit some radar sites in Syria on the way, and they end up in Iran, and they fired a ballistic missile called a Blue Sparrow.
Now, these are ballistic missiles that kind of hang off the wings of these planes.
It could have been F-35, could have been F-15, not really sure.
And Israel, of course, is insane.
But the Blue Sparrow isn't a weapon that has a warhead.
The Blue Sparrow is kind of like a decoy or a dummy missile.
And these missiles are used to train operators and test missile defense systems.
So Israel has a couple of missile defense systems.
Everyone's heard of the Iron Dome, but that's a really short-range system.
There's another system called David's Sling, which is a medium-range system.
And there's another system called Arrow 2 and Arrow 3.
So these weapons, these Blue Sparrows, would be used or might be used to test.
test the arrow twos and arrow freeze.
So they send a couple of F-15s or perhaps F-35s over,
and they go vertical, and they launch these blue sparrow missiles.
And these blue sparrow missiles fly in an arc,
and they head toward this airbase.
The Hesse aircraft manufacturing base,
which, believe it or not, had actually been built by Textron.
That's where they used to build the Bell 214 helicopters
that Iran had in the 70s.
Back when they were an ally of the United States.
Absolutely, when they were an ally.
So we fire these unarmed missiles, and we do it in the middle of the night.
So it's probably not going to be anyone at the air base.
And we program these things to kind of land in the desert, just bang right up into the dirt.
And it's a way of saying, hey, we can also strike back at you, but we're not going to put any warheads on these things.
Now, another thing that may or may not have happened was a drone attack, maybe.
Iran said that they had shot down three drones or several drones.
So that might be a lie.
In fact, Iran said that Israel had launched toys,
but it's certainly possible that special forces or Mossad or Iranians
who were against the government could have launched these toy drones to do something
or even just to be launched and then shot down just as a way of saying,
hey, we have operatives in your country and we can strike you anytime we want.
You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ryan Macbeth.
We'll be right back.
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just a few weeks here. Now, back to out of the loop, Iran versus Israel and Ryan Macbeth.
Yeah, Iran actually said infiltrators had done whatever had gotten done in Isfahan,
or Isfahan, I think is the name of the city.
And it's just been interesting to see, right?
Like, you can see it sort of being de-escalated.
I originally was like, oh, no, Israel, don't do anything that's going to get
everybody pissed off again.
You know, we don't want to escalate this conflict?
But it really is kind of like, you know that game battleship?
It's like you strike right next to the ship.
It's like they can see the ship and they're striking right next to it.
And they're like, look, we didn't hit it, but we didn't hit it on purpose.
Iran, same thing.
Hey, guys, we're launching a bunch of pretty slow drones that are going to take about 10 hours
to get there.
care. And then we're done. We're taking our ball and we're going home because we've done our thing. And then it's like they all got shot down and he
run is like, like we said, we're done here. And Israel's like, well, not so fast. We just want to show you that we also know where you keep your expensive stuff. We're not going to blow it up, but we're just going to put that right there so that you know that if you guys far around too much, what we put there next time is going to be a massive explosion. It's going to take out whatever, your uranium refinement or whatever it is that they're doing over the.
there and is fun. So this is hopefully kind of the end of it, but I don't know, what do you think?
Because it seems like now everybody's said their peace, but who knows because now Israel's
going to go into Rafa from what we understand, correct? That is most likely the next step.
We don't know when that's going to happen. It probably won't happen this week because this
week is the Jewish holiday at Passover. So probably what happened this week. But the longer they wait,
the more chances the world has to get angry at Israel, demand a ceasefire,
and the case of a ceasefire, Hamas wins.
So what we're probably going to see, if you want to talk about Rafa,
as we're going to see something that was very similar to the Battle of Fallujah,
or perhaps Mosul, where Israel surround the entire city,
and they're going to drop leaflets and send out text messages
and put broadcast out on the radio.
It says, if you are a non-convests,
combatant, get out, and they'll probably put them to the left of Con Unis in Gaza. There is this big
farmer's field area. It's kind of between, I can't remember the darn name of the towel. It is to the
west of the city of Con Unis. There's some farmers fields, and they're probably going to tell people,
okay, go over there, you're going to be safe there. Women and children can leave, and any man leaving is
going to be biometrically scanned to see if you're in a database. They'll probably use a swipe
on their hands as well to check their hands for explosives or residue. Wow. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
That's what I would do. But how do they do? Do they go into Rafa and let people through a protected?
What they would do is create a cordon. Now, ideally, Israel should go to this farmer's field.
And darn, I can't remember the darn name of it. It was Al-Masawi.
Almasawi. So between
Kahn Yunis and Almasawi is this large
multiple kilometers of farmers fields.
So what Israel should do, and hopefully they will do this,
is set up camps there where people can get food and shelter
and medical attention or at least let NGOs,
non-government organizations, set up camps there.
That way people can get treatment and live and eat
while Israel conduct this operation.
They have to go out through a cordon,
meaning there's certain areas that people
can go out through. If you're a male, they have biometric scanners. They're going to check your eyes.
And they'll also take a cloth. And they'll, I don't know if you've ever dealt with this at the airport
where the TSA, they put a little piece of cloth on a wand and they wipe down your suitcase.
I get that all the time, actually. And I don't know if it's just me or if everybody gets it. I get it all
the time. So sometimes they do that, right? It might be random or it might be targeted, right?
So they'll put it on a cloth and they'll stick it in the machine. The machine will analyze that cloth for
explosives. So if you're a male and you have explosive residue on your hands or gunpowder on your
hands, you're getting pulled aside for further questioning. Everybody else, women and children go through.
And that'll pretty much ensure that everybody else left in the city of Rafa is a combatant.
Now, 10% won't leave. 10% of the people are not going to leave. That is just no matter what happens,
even when the National Guard goes to people during a hurricane and says, hey, you really need to leave.
about 10% of people don't.
The actual great way of countering that, by the way, is to hand them a sharpy marker
and say, right, you'll serve security number on your body parts, that way we can identify
you later.
That's got him an aside there.
Yeah, wait, interesting.
I always wondered what those people are thinking.
When it's like your house is in the middle of the hurricane zone, everybody's got to evacuate.
Why are you still here?
I ain't leaving.
Okay, but you're probably going to die.
Some people are afraid of looting, and, you know, some people, if nothing bad has ever happened
to you, it might be very difficult for you to understand that something very bad can happen to you
under the right set of circumstances. That is true. But it's like Jedediah. Nobody wants your black and
white TV. Nobody. Nobody wants it. Nobody wants your bugbed mattress, man. I understand you don't want to
leave. But yeah, more likely it's what you said, people who have not had horrible things happen to
them don't understand that horrible things can happen to them. That's when I got kidnapped the first time in
Mexico, I remember thinking, this isn't a kidnapping. I've never been kidnapped before. And then I had to be like,
that's a really dumb counter argument. This not being a really bad thing right now, the counter that
this hasn't happened before is not really, doesn't really make sense. It's kind of like saying,
I've never gotten shot before, so I can't get shot now. It's like, no, no, you can absolutely get
shot right now if you are staring down the barrel of a gun. So yeah, you're right. It's in a side,
but you got to wonder who's in a war zone going, I'm not leaving. It's like, this is a level of
that I don't know whether to just be in awe of or what. It's just shocking. You're also dealing
with people who, I mean, the Nakpa, the catastrophe. When many of the Palestinians were kicked out
of their homes, I believe only one third of the people in Gaza lived there originally. Everybody
else fled there because even the Arabs kicked them out or the Jews kicked them out. So
being removed from your home is, it is a genuine fear for a lot of Palestinians.
And in fact, if you go to some homes, they have a key hanging in a picture frame. And this was the key to the house that we had. And one day we're going to go back to that house, inshallah, right? Yeah. So the idea of leaving your house is very difficult. And there also might be people who don't want to leave because they're elderly. You know, look, I've lived my life if I die here. Inshallah, I die. There might also be terrorists who do not want people to leave because it is within their best interest to cause a humanitarian crisis and to cause
civilly in casualties. That is a horrible thing to think that there will be people who don't want people
to leave. We need you to stay here and die. You will die a Shaheed. You'll go right to heaven. So it's
okay. Don't worry about it. But that's not something that a lot of Westerners can really understand,
both being kicked out of your homes and the concept of, well, you know what? If you die, it's God's
will and you'll go right to heaven. But it's not God's will. I'm trying to leave right now and you're
keeping me here. It's your will. It's not God's will. That is the issue.
with Hamas. Yeah, that is the issue with Hamas, yes. Like, also, hey, man, guys, I'm Christian,
because there's tons of Arab Christians, Palestinian Christian, like, hey, I'm Christian. I don't need to
do. What do you mean, Shahid? No, I'm, no, thank you. I'm here for a few more Christmases,
if I can get the hell out of here. I do feel, of course, horrible for this whole situation is
absolutely terrible. Do we know what Israel's plan is in Rafah? I mean, after they try to evacuate it,
I mean, it's going to be very difficult to do that, but are they just going to go house-to-house fighting Hamas? Is that the idea?
Yes and no. They will go house to house, but they probably won't be as surgical as they could be.
Because remember, this is the last stretch. I've said this before, that a dead Palestinian can vote for the prime minister of Israel, but the mother of a dead Israeli soldier can.
So if you have a choice between, you know, hey, there's a house, there's a machine gun in that house.
there might be people in it too.
Which IDF soldier wants to be the last one to die in this operation, right?
So now if you have a choice like, hey, we got Artie, we got artillery support, we can call it a J-dam strike.
How likely are you to call in that J-dam strike?
Yeah.
You might be pretty darn likely.
It's safer for you.
It might be pretty darn likely.
This is such a mess, this conflict.
It's really gross.
Like, I understand both sides in so many ways.
And I understand Israel has to respond to October 7th, but man, it's a lot.
It's so difficult to wrap my mind around the number of civilians that are dying as a result of this.
Anyway, that's a whole tangent we don't need to get into, but it's just this is going to be so horrible.
It's tough.
It's tough because, you know, when the whole thing started, I had said that the reason that Hamas
when grabbed these sausages was, hey, we're going to parcel these guys out for the next five years.
There was a gentleman, Gilhaj Salet, I might be pronouncing his name wrong.
He was an Israeli soldier who was captured.
I want to say back in 2006 or so,
and he was held prisoner until 2011.
He was an Israeli soldier.
It was at a checkpoint.
Hamas came through a tunnel.
They killed a couple of his friends.
They grabbed him, dragging him back to the tunnel.
And he was held hostage for five years.
And a huge embarrassment to the Israeli government.
I think these guys said...
Galad Shalit.
Gilad Shalit.
And I think that Hamas said,
we're going to grab 200 people or so.
We're going to hold him hot.
For the next five years, Israel will be tripping over themselves.
And when Mahmoud Abbas finally dies, we'll see we'll give you back all the hostages.
And as long as you make us, well, as long as you appoint us the rulers of the West Bank, we'll give them all back.
However, what they did not expect was for Israel to take a sledgehammer and hit them in the face.
Right.
So I've said that one of the miscalculations, at least on Hamas's side, is that Hamas thought Israel would be doing coin, counterinsurgency.
And they were prepared for a counterinsurgency operation.
We will fight them one by one.
They come in with the helicopters.
We'll shoot at them.
We'll move.
We'll fight this insurgency against them.
And it said, Israel did Liscoe, or large-scale combat operations, where they just went in with a steamroller and just destroyed everything.
And Hamas went, OK, was not expecting that.
And just a couple of days ago, there was talk of a ceasefire.
And Israel said, I'll give us 40 prisoners.
And unfortunately, Hamas can't find 40 living prisoners.
Right.
Whether that's because Israel has killed them inadvertently or more like, I mean, there's probably some of that, but it also seems like this whole October 7th raid was not just Hamas surgically going and grabbing people and bringing them back, right? I mean, you have reports from hostages that they were kept with seemingly quite random Palestinian families in their house.
That is one thing, and it's also possible that other, I know one gentleman who works in an NGO. He works in non-governmental organization, Paul Wagner. He fought in Ukraine. And when this war occurred after October 7th, he left Ukraine and hooked up with an NGO. And now he is working every day tirelessly to feed Palestinians as part of an organization that helps support World Central Kitchen, which we could talk about that one if you'd like as well.
Yeah, that's a good, yeah, let's do that.
This guy works every single day to feed these people.
One of the things that he's said is how these people were not prepared for this absolute onslaught that they were facing.
And there just wasn't the strategic reserves to feed people when, you know, if an incident like this happened.
So this guy, Paul Wagner, fascinating guy.
You mentioned World Central Kitchen.
Can we talk about that?
That was this like massively horrible, I'll say mistake, accident.
some people don't think it was. Tell us what happened. So the World Central Kitchen is an
organization that's owned by Jose Andres. He actually has a number of restaurants in Washington, D.C.
I've eaten at them. He's an incredible guy. So you're basically an expert on Jose Andreas.
I eat some of his food. And he is a humanitarian and a real humanitarian. He doesn't care who
is hungry. He will feed them. And he has operated in Ukraine. He has operated in many conflict zones,
even inside the U.S. after a hurricane, he will set up shop.
And World Central Kitchen was operating at a convoy of three trucks,
and they were moving to a warehouse where they unloaded a certain amount of food.
And they had already set up what's called the Deconfliction Notice.
So World Central Kitchen, any NGO, any non-governmental organization coordinates with the IDF,
they tell them, here's where we're going, here's how long we're going to be there,
here's the route we're taking, here's what our trucks look like,
here's how many personnel we have, here's how long we're going to be in each location.
There's actually a website that Israel has and you upload that information.
Now, whether they get that information is a different story.
And I think that's what might have happened.
So these trucks, they went to a warehouse, maybe or maybe not, there was a Hamas or some sort of militia there, some sort of armed gang.
Those armed gang members may have entered the same warehouse.
So when those trucks left, the drone operators are looking,
And all they know is that there were armed gang members who entered this one house and then these trucks leave.
And I don't think anybody looked at the actual paperwork that said, hey, World Central Kitchen is operating in this area.
Now, another problem, on these World Central Kitchen trucks, on the sides and on the top of the truck,
where the World Central Kitchen logos as stickers.
Stickers are great during the daytime.
When you're traveling at night and you're using Night Vision, it's hard to see a sticker.
stickers don't tend to show up all that well in infrared.
So the Israelis saw those trucks leave.
They tailed those trucks.
They went up their chain of command.
Hey, we saw a bunch of guys going to a warehouse.
Trucks left that warehouse.
Do we have permission to engage?
Yes.
And they engaged those three trucks with drone drop munitions,
most likely hell fire missiles.
He killed seven World Central Kitchen employees.
Now, what they probably should have done was coordinate with the Israelis and use
where they're called infrared strobes.
Think of them as little strobe lights that only operate in the infrared frequency.
Yeah.
And every day they might put the different pattern of strobes on top of their vehicles.
And that way the IDF knows, okay, that's this particular unit or that's this particular NGO.
They have this particular strobe code.
We know that they're okay.
But a number of Israelis were fired over that because they just didn't follow procedure
and actually take a look at their documents and go, oh, yeah, we shouldn't fire at this convoy.
It could be a World Central Kitchen.
This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Ryan McBeth.
We'll be right back.
This is such a tragedy.
And I'm active in the Palestine subreddit, which is a Reddit forum, but also the Israel
subreddit, which is, of course, very active these days, both of them.
And it was really interesting because, of course, the Palestine subreddit is full of
people who are very pro-Palestine.
The Israel subreddit's full of people who are very pro-Israel.
After this convoy was hit, you couldn't tell which message was from which subreddit.
Everybody was so horrified by this.
even inside Israel, it was just like, how did this happen? I want blood for this. And I was like,
oh, they're really angry over there in the palace. Nope, this is the Israeli suburb. I mean,
they were just really, really, really upset about this, understandably. I mean, it's a terrible
look, but also, for God's sake. I mean, how does a mistake like this happen? It's just absolutely
tragic doesn't do it justice. It doesn't. There were a number. So I always pronounce this
incorrectly. There is a term in Hebrew. Yabaset.
there. Ah, don't worry about it, right?
Kolbyseda.
Yeah, Bissette.
So I could easily see someone from the IDF going like, okay, yeah, we have it.
We have your boat.
Don't worry about it.
We have the route.
Everything's fine.
And just one person doesn't talk to the other.
Deconfliction is hard.
Russia found out how hard deconfliction was over the skies of Ukraine, where they're
shooting down their own planes because they don't know which plane is where.
We still screwing them.
People in the J-Soc and the Joint Commands,
Center in Qatar, who are controlling missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is very difficult.
When you have all these air assets flying and stuff on the ground, imagine spinning plates,
but some plates are up in the air, some plates are on the ground. You have to know where all this
stuff is. However, why does Ryan McBeff have to come up with the idea of, hey, why don't we
put IR strobes on top of our vehicles? It's funny you thought of that, because I thought,
how did they not see IR strobes on the vehicles? That was the first thing.
I thought of. I feel like they must have had that and still something went wrong, right? Because
these are sad stickers. The closest I've come to the military is training guys in the Rangers and
stuff like that, basically giving a keynote speech and running some drills. Like, that's the closest
I've come to the military. I was in the Marine Reserves at college, but like that doesn't really
care. That's just you getting yelled at a bunch. And so this is not so novel that somebody like me
should have thought of it. So I refuse to believe that that wasn't already, it just must have so
many drawbacks that they didn't do it, right? Either that or they didn't care. It always worked
before. We haven't had a problem yet, so it's not a problem until it is. If you're kind of under
that mindset or under the mindset of, you know what, this is one of the bad things about Israel
losing the information war. It might be a situation where they go, like, look, if we accidentally
strike an aid worker's vehicles, is the world going to hate us more? That's kind of a horrible
calculus, right? That's interesting. Like, you know, look, we could spend all this extra time,
sure these eight vehicles are okay so they don't get hit or we cannot do that. It probably won't
happen. And if it does, what's the worst that can happen? The world hates us more. The world already
hates us. Are they going to hate us harder? Yeah, that's right. We're in last place already.
I mean, what they can't afford is to be hated so much. The United States says, we are no longer
going to back you. But I'm wondering what you think is the likelihood of this. Because, you know,
you hear these murmurs like, Biden, we need to sanction Israel. It worked for South Africa, right? We
arms embargo and then boycott everything and yada. And it's like, okay, probably not going to happen.
On the other hand, if you blow up enough aid workers trying to deliver food to Gaza, the pressure
starts to mount pretty quick. That's a tough one. And it's not just a lot of people who don't
understand how the military works just think that Israel has a blank check. And whenever they want
more hellfires, they just write out the check. They enter into America, America ships over a bunch
of hellfires. Doesn't really work like that. Now, one thing,
that we do have with Israel is a symbiotic relationship in the sense that we actually bought some of
their trophy systems and a trophy is almost like an iron dome for a tank. These trophy systems shoot
down incoming anti-tank missiles. We bought, I think about a hundred of these trophy systems and we
installed them on M1 tanks and those tanks are in Germany right now. We're getting telemetry data
for how their missile systems work shooting down incoming missiles. So we help them develop technology. They
help us develop technology. So actually creating some sort of embargo or sanctions wouldn't necessarily
be with our best interest defense-wise. And also, if you can withhold weapons, you have a lot more
control over somebody than if you don't. If you just sanction somebody and say, we're not going to
give you weapons anymore, then you just totally lost control over those people. That's true.
But as long as you are holding that carrot, dangling that carrot off the stick, you can say,
listen, real armies make sure they have a humanitarian plan. So before you go into Rafa,
you need to set up camps in that area between Con Unis and Almas Hawley and make sure those camps
are staffed with people that have food, you have good hygiene, latrines, and a place for people
to sleep. We're not going to release this, that, or the other until you do that thing. So as long as
do you have some sort of thing to offer, then your partner might actually listen?
I know the EU and the United States sanctioned Iran more as well after this latest sort of
back and forth. I am no Iran sim. People on this show will know that I am not a fan of the Islamic
regime. I love, in fact, I should be really clear. Iran's like the top of my list in places I want
to visit. However, I am not going there until the Ayatollah, the last Ayatollah has taken his last breath and
is lowered into the ground, right?
I might get there just in time to throw a couple handfuls of dirt on that casket or whatever.
But it sort of baffles me why we needed to pile on, right?
Isn't the Israel-Iran thing kind of done?
Why do the EU and the USA have to be like, yeah, and throw a little bit of spite after it?
It doesn't make a ton of sense to me.
I am actually not quite sure what else we can sanction.
Yeah, that's the other thing.
What are we tightening the screws on?
This is already...
Yeah, I think the only stuff we really allow in is humanitarian aid anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if you, are you familiar at the Apple computer stores in Iran?
No, are they real?
They're fake, right?
No, they're fake.
So a couple of months ago, I made a lot of, made a lot of Iranian.
I had no idea I had so many Iranian fans.
When Mishal Manny was murdered by the religious police or the morality police in Iran,
I had all of these Iranians write me because they were protesting in the streets.
They said, Ryan, help us fight back, teach us how to make a bomb.
They were everywhere.
I got a ton of those too. We need your voice, right?
Make a, make a bomb.
That was a large effort.
I don't know how to make a bomb. And if I don't know how to make a bomb.
If you don't know how to make a bomb, you shouldn't be making a bomb.
Because there's no such thing as a bomb maker who got to be, right?
You're great at pass-fail.
That's true. Yes, it is a pass-fail class.
Don't be making a bomb in your mom's kitchen, right?
These Iranians would contact me, and the best I could do is actually I've released the Iranian police radio spectrum.
So, yeah, you want to make a jammer? I can help you do that.
So I didn't really realize how many Iranian fans I had.
And one of these kids, he wants to study computer science.
And he said to me, Ryan, should I buy a Mac or a PC?
And I said, Mac, you can buy a Mac?
He's like, yeah.
They have these Apple stores.
They look like Apple stores.
They dressed them up to look like Apple stores.
They have the white, the natural wood tables, and they have everything laying out on the tables.
Wow.
People will travel to Qatar and Turkey.
And they'll buy iPhones and they'll buy iPads.
and they buy Macs, and they bring them back to Iran, and they set them up in their Apple store,
just like they're a real Apple store.
Wow, capitalism.
That's how badly Iranians want to be Western.
I see that all the time.
My show actually has quite a large footprint of Iranian fans.
It's like a, not a double-digit percentage, but a large single-digit percentage of the audience
just happens to be listening from Iran, which is highly unusual.
And that, whenever I say this on the show, I always get messages like, it's more than that,
Because we all use VPNs. It's more than that. We all use VPNs to say we're in Canada or the United States or the UK. So could even be a double-digit percentage of the audience, which is shocking, actually. Because one, this is one of those countries, which is really easy to conflate the people with the government. And it's kind of, it's really not. You know, when you go to North Korea, everyone's pretty on board with Kim Jong-un. But when you talk to Iranians who are even the ones that are in Iran,
They're like, hell no.
These Ayatollahs are insane.
Screw these guys.
The government's insane.
And they'll say things like, we're normal.
Look at us.
This is a party at my house.
And what you see is a bunch of teenagers drinking beer and wine, hanging out, playing music.
You couldn't tell, aside from the occasional hijab, that this was not a college party in Indiana.
You really couldn't.
Now, one of the best movies I've ever seen, it was called the Iran job.
And it was about an American basketball player.
It was never quite good enough to make the NBA,
but he got a chance to play in Iran.
And at one point in the movie, this is a documentary.
This film grew following him.
At one point in the movie, he wanted to get a Christmas tree.
These Iranians, they didn't really understand the concept of a Christmas tree.
But my God, shopkeeper went to shopkeeper to help this guy try to find a Christmas tree.
That's funny.
And it was heartwarming seeing that.
I think they are some of the warmest darn people.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, it's, again, top of my list of countries I would love to visit a little bit scared to do it right now.
Given shows like this that I make, I don't know how much they would.
Like, you're a journalist.
No, no, I'm a podcast.
It's kind of like a journalist only I have no qualifications and some of it is talking out of my ass.
Oh, okay, well, you're still going to prison with the other journalists.
So maybe you can learn some more of your craft inside.
You are a spy.
I know we're running up on time here.
I see a lot of cope online.
Like Iran should just finally destroy Israel.
What do you think of that?
I mean, Israel is, we're doing wink, wink, nudge, nudge, maybe a nuclear power.
But you mentioned earlier, more importantly, Iran just doesn't have an expeditionary army, right?
Which means they can't fight outside of Iran, correct?
So both Iran and Israel have short arms and short legs.
They can't bring stuff to the fight, and once they get to the fight, they can't sustain.
So you've heard that term, what if they had a war, but nobody came, right?
And it was popular during the 70s, right?
or Vietnam. What if they had a war, but nobody came? What if they had a war and nobody could
actually get there? Could you imagine Mexico trying to invade like Ecuador? All right. Well, how?
So if Iran actually wanted to fight a war with Israel, all right, well, they would have to go through
Syria, that have to go through Iraq, that have to go through Syria. Those two countries might have
something to say about mass divisions of troops traveling through their country, right?
And then once they get to Israel, they're going to have to actually sustain and feed those
troops. And that's a really tough thing to do when you're giving your Artaic seven rounds of ammunition
a year, right? So if you want to talk about a seaboard invasion, Iran has maybe seven amphibious
troops, ships that can actually perform an amphibious landing. And by the time they got out of the
Persian Gulf, they would be sunk.
Right?
That's not.
And Israel, they don't have any expeditionary capability to go much further than Lebanon,
southern Lebanon, if that.
You know, a lot of it, it just comes down.
And I don't believe they have a single, their Navy doesn't have a single amphibious
assault ship.
And why?
Right.
Who are they invading?
Right.
Israel is a mostly defensive army with some minor expeditionary capability near their borders.
So you can say you're having a war all you want.
want, but a war might actually be tossing missiles and cyber attacks at each other. It won't actually
involve physical troops fighting on the ground because how do you get there? And once you get there,
how do you sustain? It seems like Iran is also really tough to, even the United States, I would
say, would have a really tough time with Iran because it's mountains galore. The terrain is crazy.
Iran, if they are going to overthrow the despotic Ayatollah crazy, kooky regime, it's really got to come
from inside, and it's got to be like a lot of people got to be on board with that in order for
that to fall.
It is.
We could probably sink the Iranian Navy in an afternoon.
Yeah.
That wouldn't be so much of an issue.
What was that operation where we kind of already did that?
Oh, that was, oh, my goodness, it was during the 1980s.
It was, oh, my goodness, I cannot remember.
Oh, it's so often that I hear this.
Operation Praying Mantis.
Praying Mantis, yes, where we destroyed some of their oil platforms that they were
using...
April 18th,
1988.
So we just
passed the
anniversary of that.
The operation's
goals were to
neutralize surveillance
posts on gas
and oil separation
platforms, sink
something called
the Sabalon,
which I assume is a,
it's a frigate,
Iranian frigate,
and avoid civilian
casualties and
minimize environmental
effects, which I'm
surprised to see
there in the 80s.
Like,
oh, we should probably
care about not
dumping a bunch of oil
in the water.
That was like,
they sunk a huge
percentage of the
Iranian Navy in one day.
And that was in the
80s.
So one of the things that Iran has is they have entire squadrons of fast attack boats.
Think of a cigarette boat, like a cartel cigarette boat.
Yeah.
And they'll just strap two anti-ship missiles on the cigarette boat.
Iran is really good at doing things on the cheap.
Now, they might not be able to afford a large frigate.
I think they have a couple large frigates, but I don't believe any of them are new.
But they can pump out these small, fast attack boats that are very difficult to hit.
And if you do shoot some ordinance at them, you're firing a $5 million missile at a cigarette boat that costs $250,000, maybe the missiles, both the ordnance on those boats probably cost more than the actual boat.
You have a lot of targets out there.
You can have these swarms where you have multiple ships coming at you.
So it might actually be, we don't have to take that up back.
It might actually be harder to sink the entire Iranian Navy one day if we're talking about the cigarette boats as well.
Yeah.
But Iran is so good at doing stuff on the cheap.
Either way, not a conflict that Israel can handle and not a conflict that Iran could also
handle. So we're not worried about these two. Although if Israel has nukes, which again, like,
you know, we kind of know that they do, that would go a long way. We obviously hope for,
we don't have any nuclear escalation because that's the whole thing about, quote unquote,
destroying Israel. It's not going to happen, right? If it gets close to, hey, we're being invaded
by seven armies on each side, they're just going to drop bombs on the capitals of those countries
doing that, correct? Yes, I could see that. I also, one of the other issues with a lot of those
armies is that if you, you know, they say Israel's surrounded by adversaries. And that's sort of.
For the most part, the Jordanians, at least they're woolers, the Jordanian king, they're very western.
Their military is not going to invade Israel. The Egyptians, their military is more of a for-profit
industry these days. Yeah. If you ever, if you want to do a show,
of the Egyptian military. It's a fascinating military. They own like soda bottling plants and they have
their own. Really? Oh, absolutely. They're building a new governmental center, a new capital that's,
think about 40 miles away from Cairo out in the middle of the desert. Their military headquarters is
actually larger than the Pentagon. It's going to be larger than the Pentagon. The Egyptian army is
basically a for-profit industry. So you don't necessarily want to go to war or profit. What else do you
have Syria. Syria is a basket case. All right, they can barely defend themselves. You have
Lebanon. All right. Well, Lebanon, for the most part, the military and Lebanon is busy
try to keep the peace. They're not necessarily anti-Israeli. Hezbollah. They're kind of like their
own military. They might be able to invade Israel, but they certainly wouldn't be able to hold
any ground. They wouldn't be able to sustain as well. So what other countries do you have? Iraq,
it would be a tough time getting there. Saudi Arabia, same thing. So you could
have that scenario of seven nations invade Israel, but these days, all those other seven nations
are occupied, and for the most part, they don't have expeditionary armies. They're all what are called
palace guard armies, like you alluded to before, how the function of the army is to keep the
ruler in power. Ryan, thank you very much. We're probably going to end up doing something else,
because I feel like this conflict is going to get messier before it gets better. What do you think?
I hope not, but I love coming on the show. I always appreciate you reaching out to me.
You're about to hear a preview of my previous interview with General Spalding, recorded a few years back.
Underneath everything that's going on in our peacetime environment, our democracy is being undermined.
Nearly every connection with the Chinese Communist Party, the techniques that they use and the strategies that use to acquire technology are so diverse and so widespread.
The entire economy is driven by the Communist Party, and they can force entire.
higher industries to do exactly what they say. What you're seeing is the actual execution of a document
called unrestricted warfare, and it was written by two PLA colonels back in 1999. I read it when it came out.
It didn't pertain to the way at the time I thought about warfare. You used military forces to take
territory. This was pervasive across the society in such a way that you could see the elements of an
irstrike using bonds, except you were using ones and zeros and dollars and cents.
data in finance to essentially displace the United States on the world stage and force us to submit.
You think, wow, this is 1984. This is a science fiction movie. It can't be real. A country can't actually
be doing this. Yet, there it is. This was all so surprising to me how deep this all goes.
We are actually financing the construction of the Chinese military, the government, all of their
cities, their whole country that they are now using to try to control the behavior of the rest of the
world. It's just outright insane. To hear more about how the Chinese Communist Party has quietly
been at war with the United States and the West for years, check out episode 268 of the Jordan Harbinger
show. Thanks again to Ryan for coming on the show. I don't know. Did World War III start in 2014?
I guess time will tell. All things Ryan Macbeth will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com.
He's over there, Ryan Macbeth.substack.com. Also, we'll link to his YouTube channel in the show notes.
transcripts in the show notes as well,
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