Diplomacy is DEAD w/IRAN /Lt Col Daniel Davis & fmr Amb Chas Freeman

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American foreign policy, it used to be the envy of the world, it used to be respected

and admired by our friends and allies, and deeply respected even by our adversaries because

of the depth of knowledge and statesmanship and craftsmanship, those days are gone.

It's very, very sad to report that and instead they have been replaced by a bunch of empty

suits or people who are not qualified to get the job done and they do so unqualified with

a lot of aggressiveness as we're going to see here.

Now this has tremendous impacts, personally, on issues of war and peace, especially on

those issues as we're going to see here.

Obviously, the context today is primarily the war that's going on in Iran, at least if

you're a human being, you would call it a war.

If you're President Trump or Mike Johnson, you would call it something different.

I don't know.

We don't want to use that word because it would look bad.

But there are some real consequences to this and we're going to talk about what's really

going on and what are the meanings behind some of these things and then where maybe there's

any kind of hope for the future.

We have with us today, we are absolutely delighted to have back with this Ambassador

Chas Freeman, former Assistant Secretary of Defense, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia

in just an incredible guy.

So Ambassador, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Danny.

Glad to be back with you.

Well, I wish we could just come on and say, you know, let's just have a good conversation

and a good chat about some things and have something to aspiration all that we can go

to, but holy crap.

I mean, I have to start off, and we talked about it on some of our earlier shows, but

I just can't go anywhere besides starting right here.

After Mike Johnson yesterday, which we will be sure minute, was just emphatically saying

we have voted down any kind of vote on the constitutional war powers or the 1973 War

Powers Act.

We are not going to authorize anything from Congress.

We're just going to hand over to the President of the United States, whatever he wants to

do, but it's not a war.

He said it's not a war.

And then today, this morning at 8 a.m., or 9 a.m. almost, you have President Trump

saying there will be no deal with Iran.

IE, there is not going to be any diplomacy now, and we just want unconditional surrender.

What in the world do you make of that?

Well, we have a problem.

We don't have a strategy.

The strategy has been supplied by Israel.

It involves the rumbling of Iran, and that is doing to Iran what we've done to Syria,

depriving it of effective sovereignty and agency, removing it as a possible threat to Israel.

In response, Iran has said, well, you pose an existential threat to us.

We're going to pose an existential threat to you, to Israel and to the American presence

in the Gulf.

Unconditional surrender is a very dubious objective under any circumstances.

It presumes that time is on your side, and the other side will eventually have to give

up.

And exact no terms from you.

That is not the situation here.

Unconditional surrender incentivizes the enemy to fight to the death.

It's rather like charging at the enemy with war crimes.

Then they have no incentive to do a deal.

In this case, we know that President Trump apparently approached Italy with a request that

they ask Iran to return to the negotiating table.

Iran's answer was not just, no, it was El No.

Not after the experience we've had negotiating with your private sector, Kroni, and Sun

and law, who have twice deceived Iran with a cover of negotiations serving to enable

a surprise attack.

So the first part of that statement by the President is correct.

There will be no deal.

Iran is in this for keeps.

It has a good chance about lasting us on the logistical level.

This is a war of attrition.

It's a contest between industrial capacities.

It has all kinds of knock-on effects.

As we run out of weapons, we're beginning to cannibalize our defenses in South Korea and

Japan.

The United Arab Emirates has asked for replenishment of the missiles for their $2 billion defense system

that we sold them.

They were told, no, sorry, we have to give them to Israel.

We don't have them for you.

That's a message that is going to resonate in the Gulf.

It plays right into the Iranian strategy of not only devastating Israel, but also

putting sufficient pressure on the Gulf Arabs to convince them that far from protecting

them, the American presence results in there being attacked.

It is a point of vulnerability rather than defense, and they would best get rid of it.

Iran has made it clear it's going to continue to up the anti until they come to that conclusion.

They may or may not.

But this thing isn't going to go away any time soon.

And if there is a deal, it looks to me as though it will be on Iran's terms, not ours.

Let me ask you something Gary's showing there.

That's Beirut.

That's not Tel Aviv, that's not Tehran.

That Israel is going after, they're going after, I guess they say, Hezbollah in Beirut,

but also in talking about going in southern Lebanon, what is the Israeli position here

because they seem to be expanding their target set and really taking on a lot of enemies

at the same time.

What can you tell us about that?

Well, the Israeli objective, which we are now serving with a campaign plan, we don't

have a strategy, but we do have a campaign plan, is to implement their fantasy of greater

Israel.

Part of that is seizing everything in Lebanon, south of Lytani River.

When they have ordered the evacuation of southern Lebanon, they are contriving another

Nakba, another expulsion of native peoples so that they can settle that land.

They're doing this under the cover of a war that they persuaded us we should carry out.

We have seen Prime Minister Netanyahu gloating in videos, saying that this fever dream of

40 years that he had of expanding the borders of Israel and knocking out Iran as a possible

competitor is now being realized.

Thanks to, he finally got a president who would go along with him.

Let me ask you something here because there's something that's starting to really be troubling

like there's a shortage of that, but from a specific point of view here, you were talking

about the southern Lebanon.

Now, this is right now, we just, we're in date, what is this, six or, I guess, a day seven.

Seven.

Seven of this war.

So, this still, we're talking about all this ordinance we were using the Secretary of

War and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff are telling everybody, no, we have enough

ammunition here.

We've used to stand off stuff.

Now we're using the stand-in stuff and we have a lot of stock piles and we're using it.

We're going down quite a bit in some of our inventories here.

One would imagine, since we're doing this allegedly in coordination with Israel, that they

would be taking on, if not the lion's share, certainly an equal burden here.

But yet, they seem to be looking like, okay, y'all take care of this Iran stuff.

We're going to take care of our near-term stuff that we're actually looking for freedom

on.

Let me show you something here that was said, no, this, I'm not seeing this anywhere

in Western media, but we certainly found it.

This is from the Israeli opposition leader, one of their leaders, Lepid, talking about

where they plan to go in Lebanon.

So yeah, we'll just scrape it off whatever's in there, but that's their problem, not ours.

Why are we, okay, with them doing this in Lebanon while we're actually taking the big

brunt in Iran?

Well, we've been co-belligerents with the Israelis in their conductor genocide in Gaza.

We have done nothing to stop the pogroms and abuses, other abuses in the West Bank, the

evictions.

We are now allowing them undercover of this war with Iran that they called for.

We are following them, this is not U.S. interests, it's Israeli interests.

We are following, we are allowing them to expand their borders again as they have in Syria.

They have taken land in Syria, they have absolutely no intention of withdrawing from it.

A lot of their soldiers have a patch on their shoulder which shows a map of greater Israel

of going to the Euphrates in Iraq, extending to the Nile in Egypt, part of Saudi Arabia,

all of Jordan, all of Syria, most of all of Lebanon, and this is another case of expansion

under cover of a war that we have stupidly joined.

I guess they are just saying it out loud and we just keep on believing, well that's not

really the case, we are not really doing that yet, I mean if it's all patch is more

investor doing it.

Our investor, Israel, Mike Huckabee knows exactly what it is, he said it was okay.

Yeah, I saw that with Tucker Carlson, that was odd, so we just are in this weird position

to where we are trying to, President Trump is trying really hard to justify our helping

of Israel create this expanded living zone by claiming that this is actually something

that we need.

Here is, I think this was yesterday trying to explain it basically, I had no choice in

this matter.

If we didn't hit within two weeks there would have had a nuclear weapon, if we didn't

do the B2 attack a number of months ago they would have a nuclear weapon and when crazy

people have nuclear weapons bad things happen.

So we are a very good shape now, I want to let you know that and we will continue forward.

But it's a great display of military strength and I am very proud to have with some of the

people in the room, both senators and congressmen we rebuilt and women.

So there he says, yeah I didn't have any choice because they were going to attack us, they

were going to get a nuclear weapon, so my hands were tied, what do you say?

Well first of all the crazy people with a nuclear weapon are the Israelis, not the Iranians.

They don't have one.

There's a joke going around on the internet showing Stila from 3000 BC with uniform writing

on it that says, you know, Iran is within two days of getting a nuclear weapon.

Iran has not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon up to now.

But we've just done, however, guarantees in my view that they will now make that decision.

The cork in the bottle on this issue was the late Supreme Leader.

He was adamantly opposed to the to Iran acquiring any weapons of mass destruction.

He's gone.

His successors, those in line, the probable successors, all favor a nuclear weapon.

So we have just created another North Korean-type threat.

We pushed so hard on North Korea that it developed ICBMs that can strike the United States

with multiple warheads in a single missile.

We're going to see the same thing from Iran.

They weren't doing that.

They will now.

You know it's interesting.

You talk about the claim that they have been racing to the bomb all this time and even

after it was so called obliterated last June that, well, but they were rebuilding it.

That's been going all around on Capitol Hill, among the President's supporters.

There's also some things going on about how Netanyahu, over the last number of years,

especially with you, and Security Council was talking about, oh, there are two weeks

away from a bomb and all this kind of stuff.

Well actually, I found one from 1986, the first one I can find, where a very much younger

Netanyahu was already warning about that.

Get these regimes, Libya, Iran, think of Qaddafi or Khomeini being accustomed to the idea

that they can do anything they want, send their killers anywhere, strike at anyone, anytime.

Then you may very well find yourself in a world in a few years from now with a Qaddafi

or Khomeini with nuclear weapons.

The stakes here are enormous.

We find ourselves in a world where Israel believes they can do anything it wants.

Netanyahu resembles Qaddafi and Khomeini in the way that he describes them.

As ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1992, I was directed to brief the then crown prince

Abdullah later the king that Iran was two years away from a bomb.

That was 1992.

There was no evidence for that.

It was conjecture.

The intelligence agencies, whether they're more sad in Israel or CIA or MI6 in Britain,

have all been watching this very closely and every one of them has come to the same conclusion.

Iran has an enrichment program for uranium.

Iran has ballistic missiles, but it has not made a decision to build a warhead to go on those missiles.

I think the fact that what we've done now makes such a decision inevitable.

So we have greatly increased the threat just as we did in the case of North Korea where

we never attempted to make the peace that the truth, the armistice we negotiated in the

mid-50s required us to do.

We just forgot it.

There is no effort.

There are no terms for Iran that it can accept.

Unconditional surrender.

The guarantees this is going on.

I see that there's no instance in history in which an air power overturned a regime.

We bombed the hell out of Nazi Germany, but it took ground troops from the Soviet Union,

Britain, and the United States to get rid of that regime.

The 82nd Airborne, which was scheduled for an exercise, has just been told to stand

down, clip-pending deployment somewhere.

What do you think that's about?

I can't imagine we're this stupid.

There's quite a history of attacks deep into Persia.

I don't know if you've ever read the Annabasus by a xenophone, the March of the 10,000.

These were Greek mercenaries hired to intervene in a civil war in Persia who found themselves

having to fight their way out through a long march from the interior of Persia over the

desert and the mountains to the Black Sea.

They distinguished themselves.

It's a great piece of military literature, but by God, we should not try to replicate

that experience.

Yeah, well, conditions are rather different right now, especially with the capabilities

and the terrain in Iran by itself would be enough to disabuse any kind of an actual military

analyst that that would be an insane thing to do.

I've asked a couple of our guests to talk about something that we've had previously

on.

I definitely want to get your view here, too, because this gets to the heart.

When you're talking about diplomacy and credibility abroad and people listen to your word or not

listen to your word, they have to have some level, minimal level of trust and understanding.

But when we say things that are so grotesquely as the kind of word I can think of that it

detached from reality, this would seem to undermine almost anything we would ever want

anybody to do.

That is on, and we're going to show you Mike Johnson here.

President Trump has said all throughout this, he said this was a war from the beginning.

He said, here's our war update.

He keeps calling it a war and now that he's given unconditional surrender, which are only

exclusively used in terms of war.

And yet, just yesterday, and I want you to talk about this from two separate perspectives,

when the House voted down the war power resolution that they were trying to exert their actual

constitutional authority and responsibility, he's going to sit here, he's going to brag

about not doing that, but then he's also going to go into 1984 or well in language.

We just had an important series of votes on the House floor, as you know, the war power's

resolution failed.

That is the right result.

We are not at war.

We have no intention of being at war.

The President and the Department of Defense have made this very clear, the Department of

War has made it very clear.

This is a limited operation.

It's a operation that's limited in its scope and duration.

It has a very clear mission and that mission is nearly accomplished by all estimates.

We are taking down Iran's ballistic missile capability, its stockpile and its ability

to produce more.

They were doing that at a scale and a speed that was more than our regional allies could

keep up with.

And it was a serious and imminent threat to the United States.

We don't need to re-litigate all that today, but also we wanted to take down the capability

of their Navy and all of that has been very successful.

So this needs to continue.

It would have been a very dangerous gambit to take the Commander-in-Chief's ability

to complete this mission.

It would have been a very serious misstep by Congress and I'm grateful that that resolution

failed.

He is grateful to feel it because he didn't want to handcuff the President of the United

States.

What do you say?

Well, the Constitution is very clear.

Only the Congress can authorize a war of choice.

This is a war of choice.

There was no attack on the United States.

The claim that there was an imminent threat is totally preposterous.

There's no evidence of that whatsoever.

Even the war power as resolution is a papering over of previous congressional defaults on

their responsibility out of the Constitution to take charge to stand up, be counted, have

a debate about whether a war is necessary or not.

The war power as resolution was an effort to rein in uncontrolled presidential power.

We've just seen un-tongued presidential power affirmed.

Now, of course, Mike Johnson says this is to come in a phrase, a special, new, military

operation.

It's a war.

You know, you've heard that before.

So I want to just say, you know, the knock-on effects of this are considerable.

I'm mentioning Ukraine obliquely.

There are going to be no weapons available for Ukraine to be sold to the Europeans to

hand them to the Ukrainians because those weapons, to the extent we produce more weapons,

they will be going to replenish our Israel stocks and our stocks.

I go back to what we told the UAE.

If you are sitting in a Gulf country and you hear that there's no defense available

for you from the United States, what do you do?

Do you sit there with American troops on your territory who are a legitimate target of

the Iranians?

A final point.

The notion that this is a limited war somehow is crazy on many, many levels.

It's not limited for Iran.

It's existential.

It may turn out to be existential for Israel.

The war has already been spilled over the borders of the immediate region.

We sank an Iranian cruiser off Sri Lanka.

That cruiser was part of a multinational exercise.

It was unarmed.

We were part of the exercise too, I believe, and yet one of our subs sank the thing.

Not only that, we did not take any action whatsoever to rescue the survivors.

We left that to the Sri Lankan Navy.

In World War II, when this happened, when the Germans, who at the beginning of the war,

they'd rescue sailors from ships that they had sunk.

We bombed them, and as a result, the German high command declared an unlimited war and

began a machine gun there of the survivors.

We're no better than the Nazis in this context.

This has enormous consequences for our credibility, our reputation, which is somewhere at this

point in negative territory, well below zero.

The associate yourself with the United States, and become vulnerable to attack by the enemies

of the United States attacks.

Here we are.

That's in Beirut, we're seeing on the screen there.

No, this is, you know, Israel has gone down.

It's like Gaza.

They're trying to turn it into Gaza.

They have explicitly said so.

They're going to turn the area of South Beirut that they're bombing into Gaza, they say.

So there is, what is the military utility of this, or what is the objective here?

Well, it's part of a ridiculous notion continuously and disproved.

Two notions, one, that if you knock out the leadership of a hostile movement, it will

collapse.

There's been no example of that.

Hamas is still alive and well in tunnels in Gaza.

Husbalah was decapitated, but it's there.

You can decapitate the leadership in Iran.

I think on Donald Trump's theory that just as he's the only important decision-maker in

the United States, the Ayatollah wasn't the only important decision-maker in Iran.

In other words, as he said, I took him out before he cooked me out, and that if Donald

Trump were to fall, the United States system that he's created would collapse, and the

same must be true in Iran.

But it isn't.

Iran actually has a constitutional system, institutions, and a commitment.

The second fallacy is disproven by multiple examples, for example.

Many people in the Soviet Union feared and loathed Stalinist system they lived under.

When the Germans attacked, they remembered their patriotism.

They loved their country more than they hated their system.

The same is absolutely true in Iran.

If the system is feared and loathed by many Iranians, they are Iranians, they are patriots,

and they rally to the flag when attacked, and that is what is happening.

These are crazy theories that have no success behind them, but we keep making the same mistakes.

You know, I'm just wondering, it's one thing to say we're going to take this tiny little

Gaza strip and just turn it into moon dust, which we've done.

And as you correctly just pointed out, even that did not succumb and destroy and decapitate

the Hamas, the Hamas fighters, their leadership, or the people of Palestine.

There's to continuing to resist even this day.

The Hamas is refusing to surrender its weapons, et cetera.

So you haven't totally militarily quelled them.

But now that you're talking, you're starting to take on Southern Lebanon, you're taking

on Beirut.

At the same time, you're taking on Iran with this massive four times bigger than Iraq.

And I'm just wondering, there's not enough ammunition in the whole of our inventories

and anything we can produce to turn Iran into a Gaza strip.

And yet, when asked that question, a heik set a couple of days ago, or maybe it was yesterday,

said, you know, I think we have plenty of ammunition.

We've got no shortage of munitions.

Our stockpiles of defensive and offensive weapons allow us to sustain this campaign as long

as we need to.

Again, our munition status only increases as our advantage increases.

If you think you've seen something, just wait.

The amount of combat power that's still flowing, that's still coming, that we'll be able

to project over Iran is a multiples of what it currently is right now when you add up

our capabilities and those of the Israeli defense forces.

Now in addition to being a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, you were also a former senior

Department of Defense official back when it was the Department of Actual Defense.

Do you think, obviously, that's been many years ago, but from what you know of the system,

do we actually have enough ammunition to ramp it up as he's saying to pulverize Iran into

submission?

No.

And I have to say that he's made his career on BS.

That's what he did for a living at Fox, Donald Trump liked that BS.

That is why he is Secretary of Defense, self-styled Secretary of War.

No, not true.

And his own military, General Cain and others, warned Donald Trump privately and then

publicly through leaks in the press that we did not have the logistical capacity to carry

out a prolonged attack on Iran.

Now, what we are doing is a very intensive form of warfare.

Every time Iran fires a missile, by the way, they're still firing their old, older missiles,

not their hypersonic missiles, that Israel, they're using drones mainly in the Gulf.

Every time they do this, it takes two to three patriots or thad loads to attempt to intercept

them.

We believe contrary to what is reported in the subservient mainstream media is probably

five to ten percent.

So two to three patriots or two to three thad missiles go off every time the Iranians

fire something into Israel.

Those things cost millions of dollars.

The missiles that are coming in are the older ones.

I think it is every evidence that the Iranians, which who have stored their arsenal underground

in places we can't effectively bomb, are biting their time, hiding their capabilities,

waiting for the attrition of our defenses.

And they will then start firing their more accurate missiles at the targets they choose.

And those targets in this war are not going to be like the one in June last year, limited

to military and intelligence targets.

We posed an existential threat to Iran.

They're going to pose an existential threat to Israel, a final note.

We believe that the, or we appear to believe that Iranian air defenses have been knocked

out.

But their whole strategy is rope a dope to borrow Muhammad Ali's strategy.

Take the punishment.

Keep landing enough punches on the other guy to exhaust him so that at the right moment

you can knock him out.

And I think that's the Iranian strategy.

So it's an open question as far as I'm concerned whether we have in fact knocked out all the

mobile air defense missiles that we think we have.

And here I would note our mutual friend, Doug McGregor, recounts that when we conducted

our air campaign against Serbia in order to sever close the vote from Serbia, setting

a precedent for you, for the Crimea, I guess, without really considering the implications.

When we did that, the service had 17 tells, you know, launchers for their air defenses.

We reported killing 64 of them, you know, I mean battle damage assessment is always

imprecise, but in an air war, it is utterly unreliable.

So I think it's an open question whether, in fact, we have wreaked the damage we say

we have.

We've certainly fired a hell of a lot of Tomahawk missiles into Iran.

We've done enormous damage to various fixed structures in Iran.

Have we knocked out their weapons systems?

It remains to be seen.

And I say that we're talking, let's look at the example of the June war last year.

It took 12 days for Israel basically to cry uncle because it no longer had the capacity

to intercept Iranian missiles sufficiently to retain its population, which was fleeing

the country.

And there is no reason to believe that it's got more than 12 days capacity this time.

So maybe 12 days for now, where this is the seventh day of the war, we're talking midweek

next week when some of the defense capability that we rely on is going to go away very

likely.

Israel will be first, we will be second.

And one wonders if, because you mentioned what you perceived the Iranian strategy to

be, the rope adope thing to absorb the body blows, but continuing to be viable until a

point comes up later, that may be what has seemingly given the Iraqi, I'm sorry, the Iranian

foreign minister a pretty confident conversation.

You mentioned just a second ago, I saw it just hit my screen also that the 82nd airborne

had suddenly had an exercise canceled, giving some people thinking, are they going to go

somewhere else?

And we of course know that there's been some attempts to get the Iraqi Kurds to go into

Iran and join the Iranian Kurds and somehow use them as some sort of a sensible ground

force.

And maybe this is going to join with it.

Well, when that question was put to foreign minister Iraqi, he had a very confident answer.

Boots on the ground in Iran, are you afraid of a U.S. invasion in your country?

No, we are waiting for them.

You are waiting for the U.S. military to invade the ground troops?

Yes.

Because we are confident that they can confront them and that would be a big disaster for them.

So you're saying that Iran is ready and willing to take on the U.S. military if there were

to be ground troops?

When we were ready for this war, even more than the previous war.

So you can see the quality of our resize, how much they are upgraded after the last war,

because we learned lots of lessons.

And we are prepared for any other eventuality, even a ground invasion.

So our soldiers are prepared for any scenario.

You know, and I can just tell you from someone who's conducted a ground invasion of another

country in Desert Storm in 1991 and has studied this particular terrain here, it would be orders

of magnitude more difficult, even if we had 300,000 troops like we did in Iraq to do something

like this and we don't.

We don't have a fraction of that number of troops.

So I don't know what we're talking about, but I can understand his confidence because

he's like, yeah, if you want to impale yourself on us, bring it on.

How do you read it?

Well, he remembers the story of xenophon that I mentioned at the outset.

The Zagros Mountains are terrible terrain.

We, in a previous era, our war plans consisted of defending Iran against the Soviet attack

in the Zagros Mountains, and every simulation that was done showed how very difficult it would

be to conduct a war there.

I think a ground invasion would be an incredible mistake.

And by the way, when I was ambassador to Saudi Arabian, we conducted the war to liberate

Kuwait.

We had, I had 550,000 U.S. troops.

The entire 7th Corps was moved out of Europe through Saudi Arabia.

And in addition, we had allies.

And Syrians, others, the Saudis had a coalition of troops from many, many countries, of some

of dubious quality, others quite good.

And we don't have anything like that.

And that was Iraq, which is a flat place, and which we spent weeks, many weeks, softening

up with air attacks before we finally conducted the Hail Mary maneuver, came around the Iraqis

from the West.

And we don't have that capability.

We don't have that military.

Right.

Any more?

Not there.

We have it.

Yeah.

So we've got a military, which was repurposed to fight bearded men with lice and caves, you

know?

And Afghanistan, you were there, and this is not bearded men with lice and caves.

This is an armed force, several, actually, because you have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard,

as well as the regular army.

This is an army that took a million casualties in the Iranian Iraq war.

And it's bravery and its competence are vastly in excess of what we encountered in either

Iraq or in Afghanistan.

So this is not a good idea.

And one has to hope that while President Trump clearly ignored General Cain's advice

in starting this war with Israel, one hopes that, you know, listen to General Cain, General

Cain has the courage to speak up directly rather than do what his other advisors do, which

is kiss his ass and say nothing.

Well, we'll have to hope, and we'll certainly watch what happens, hopefully insanity will

not continue to prevail.

And we'll get some sort of rational thought there.

But I don't, we can probably talk another time about how we might be able to get out of

this.

But I want to, in the time we have left here, I want to look at, this is not our only

problem.

And in fact, I see a lot more evidence of unforced errors that are just waiting to happen.

And I want to talk about a couple here too because Stephen Miller was just talking in our

hemisphere here and putting out this impression, this image that basically says, hey, this

is our show here.

Everybody needs to get in line.

And because everything is about what we want.

So if you want to be on board the Trump train, get on board or else we're going to do something

different.

What's this?

We are not going to seed an inch of territory in this hemisphere to our enemies or adversaries.

Our national security, our homeland security, the safety and well-being of our people begins

at home, begins in our neighborhood, begins in our home region.

And for too long, we have allowed foreign enemies, foreign adversaries, and enemy terrorist

organizations to control territory and spaces in this hemisphere where they can project

power, project threats, and directly threaten the lives of your citizens and our citizens.

What in the hell is he talking about foreign adversaries controlling territory and rejecting

power against us?

What is that?

This is a delusion about China.

And it's expressed very nicely in a recent directive from Marco Rubio to the government

of Chile, which is discussing a Trans-Pacific fiber optic cable to China.

And Rubio told the Chilean government, you cannot do this.

If you do this, we are going to destroy it and you.

This is no way to make friends.

So Stephen Miller's approach, basically the result of it will be to turn every country

in the region that has been neutral or pro-American, anti-American, and give precisely the opening

to foreign adversaries that he claims to be opposing.

We don't have any foreign country with bases, external power with bases in the hemisphere

anymore.

The Soviets went left Cuba.

There's nobody anywhere else.

And we're opening the possibility that people will see people in South America, Central America,

Caribbean, will see that they have to invite China, Russia, and some other country to defend

them against the United States, which is not constrained by international law or a decent

respect for their opinion and independence.

So this is a disaster.

And it is a disaster that is not entirely new.

We did something like this with multiple interventions in the Caribbean and Central America.

And finally, FDR had to adopt something called the good neighbor policy to try to undo

all the damage that we were doing.

And the opening we were giving at that time to Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany to establish

relations, friendly relations, cooperative relations, defense relations, with countries

in our hemisphere.

Stephen Miller wants to repeat that mistake, I guess.

Well, and it turns out so much as his boss.

Because just right before we came on the air here, Dana Bash had a phone call on CNN with

President Trump, ostensibly to talk about the Iranian War.

And according to her, he brought up another topic that he wanted to talk to that pretty

soon, Cuba is going to fall.

He said, I'm going to send Marco Rubio over there.

And what he wanted to think she wrote about is a day earlier, Trump said, the White House,

it's only a question of time before American Cubans can return to their home, appearing

to say that that's next on the administration's agenda after the war with Iran, but how

successful that is is a separate issue.

But the intent is he's doing some job, Trump said, and your next one is going to be we

want you to do that special Cuba, Trump said on Thursday.

He's waiting, but he says, let's go get this one finished first, we could do them all

at the same time.

But bad things happen if you do that, if you watch over countries over the years, if you

do them all too fast, bad things happen, we're not going to let that happen to this country.

This sounds like that, okay, we did what something in Venezuela, and now then we're going

to look to do something in Cuba.

What do you make of that?

Well, I think the purpose of going after Venezuela really was to set the stage for bringing

the legacy regime of Castro to an end in Cuba.

The idea of however that you can do that by depriving Cubans of electricity in closing

their hospitals, shutting the place down, making them miserable, again, has no historical

precedent.

Generally speaking, when you injure people, they don't react by agreeing with you about

what should be done, they resist, and I think we can expect the Cubans to resist.

How much they can resist, I don't know.

And so we're going to invade Cuba.

Cuba has a serious army.

I watched it perform in Angola against the South Africans who are no slouches.

This is not a cakewalk.

It may be only 90 miles from Florida, but on the other side of that 90 miles, there is

a serious fighting for us, and they will fight.

And help me understand, though, what's more, other than just apparently Marco Rubio has

a hatred for Cuba because of some stuff that happened to his family in the past, it's

not just him.

What is it that's motivating the United States to talk so gleefully about choking Cuba

to death?

A country that can barely keep its people fit.

I went there on a religious retreat several years back, and they barely had food on the

shelves.

So they're a threat to literally no one.

Why do we care about Cuba so much?

Oh, I think it's electoral politics as much as anything.

It's a convenient cause.

It generates campaign contributions, support in South Florida.

It's a new conservative bug-a-boo.

We have a large number of Cuban Americans, and they're very prominent, very successful in

our politics, guys like Ted Cruz, Minindus, and former New Jersey politician, Marco Rubio,

quite a few.

And so this is a domestic political cause, and it's a prime example of fantasy foreign

policy, which is a game we prefer to the real thing, I guess.

I guess it's hard for me to get my head around that, at least in the America that I used

to know or thought that I knew, because we didn't, we used to at least pretend to be moral.

But now that it seems to me, you tell me if you disagree, that at the top of the, at

least of this current government that we have said, and I think I can actually say that

the previous government had some similar levels of real problem with the lack of morality

and the use of power abroad to get what we've done.

The Biden administration was just a little bit more subtle about it.

But now that all the claims are off, all the chains have gone.

And now all I see is just living with combat power to solve every problem to the point

that we don't even want to do diplomacy anymore.

Do you see it different?

No, and we don't have the capacity to do it either because we've lost our best people

to the politicization of our establishment.

You know, we have a, we are, we glory in our amorality.

We have a policy in the Middle East that the bonds will continue until peace breaks out

or until we run out of bonds, whichever happens first.

With regard to the hemisphere, we have a, a policy of its, its our way or your, your,

your roadkill on the highway.

Then this is, this is not appealing to anyone, certainly not to Americans who remember

with us as a country that aspired to be better.

We had a declaration of independence with guaranteed life liberty and this pursuit of happiness

to our citizenry.

And we expanded that right to include those excluded from it, the enslaved people,

the indigenous people who were not taken account of at the time of our independence.

We have a record of self-improvement, we've abandoned that.

Now we are resorting to the worst instincts of human beings.

We're guilty of murder on the high season, the Caribbean, we're guilty of participation

in genocide in the Middle East, we're guilty of wars of aggression, which is a crime that

is punishable under international law.

We have abandoned the Nuremberg Presidents, we took such pride in developing against the

Nazis, we, we, we are regarded internationally as the embodiment of evil, not good aspirations.

So the cost of all this, not only to our own self-regard, but to our reputation abroad

and through the willingness of allies to work with us, is extraordinarily high.

What where can this go?

Because if we now live in a place where all across and if I could have pulled it up here

or would have, there was a mashup we put together in January after the Venezuelan operation,

which of course violated every law that you could imagine in the Constitution, when we

took Maduro out by force and killed a lot of people in the process, and there was a lot

of people saying, hey, where was Congress, it's violating rules of law, et cetera, and

there was this whole group of folks, mainly from the conservative, but not only saying

there is no more international law.

There is no rule, you know, the international rules based order all this stuff, that's

a bunch of hoey.

It's the law of the jungle, they said this proudly, it's the law of the jungle and we're

the lion.

And a whole bunch of them said that, and that, that permeates the elite right now, such

that I don't think they want to go back to any diplomacy where there's a give and take

and the discussions and things take time, et cetera, but where can this lead?

Can we keep going on?

Do we have enough power that it doesn't matter if we have morality, we can just keep

doing whatever we want and everybody in the world will just have to suck it up?

No, and I go back to what Mike Johnson said.

He seems to assume that Iran will not retaliate against our homeland, against our leaders.

We can kill their leaders, we can make their people miserable, we can bomb them, we can

destroy their buildings, we can wreck their livelihood, we can ruin their currency,

we can sink their navy, we can do whatever we want.

And they won't do anything to us.

And I go back to the Iranian cruiser that was Sankhaw Sri Lanka, we have globalized this,

and it's going to come home to Roost.

So where does it end?

It ends when we mend our evil ways, I guess.

Or when we're made to suffer because of it, whichever comes first.

Well, that, you said.

But I mean, you don't cure a mule of obstinacy and bad behavior by petting it on the nose,

you hit it on the head.

And I think we're very much asking for a hit on the head.

I don't like that.

I spent 30 years serving my country.

It's not my country anymore.

It's not what I served.

And I discuss me, really.

Danny, I've got to bring this to a close if you don't mind, huh?

No, totally understand that's a great place to start to end.

I really couldn't add anything to what you said anyway.

So thank you very much, Mr. Ambassador, always a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you for having me on.

And look, we want you guys to join us here in about eight minutes.

We have Scott Ritter, who's going to be talking his version of the Iran Iraq war, especially

looking at how things, anything connections with Russia and China, we're looking at a different

angle of this from his perspective.

And man, does he have some good experience in this issue with illegal wars and fake

justification?

Don't miss that.

Coming up just in eight minutes on the Daniel Davis deep dive.

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