Houthis Seize More Territory as War Turns Against America /Patrick Henningsen

0:00The war in the Middle East is entering a new and more dangerous phase. And we haven't even left the last dangerous phase where it. You notice I didn't say the Iran War. Now I'm saying the war in the Middle East because it is now expanding. The Houthis are not just being a problem in the Red Sea. They're not just interdicting traffic in the ocean. They're now actually moving and taking cities and islands in the Red Sea and on the territory of Yemen itself and entire brigades on the Yemen-slash-Saudi side are melting away very much like what happened to Iraq in 2015 when the ISIS first started moving across its country. There could be a similar situation unfolding right here. Now meanwhile, you also have Iran hitting and devastating American bases and we still don't seem to have an answer for that. And the Strait of Hormuz is at best partially open and economic problems are continuing

1:00to pile up. And we're going to try and unpack all of this with our good friend Patrick Kinnickson, host of the 21st Century Wire and the Sunday Wire. Patrick is always welcome back to the show. It's great to be with you, Daddy. Well, listen, let's just jump in here again. I've always loved it when we have you on the show because you have so much history in the region and even specifically in Iran. So you bring a wealth of knowledge and experience. You're just not going to get very many of the mainstream media places, frankly. And let's look at this whole situation here because that's kind of what's dominating everything right now is what's going on in Yemen. For a long time, there was this, there was basically a civil war in Yemen that the Saudi Arabia took the side of what is currently being viewed as the UN recognized government in Yemen. And the understanding is you can correct me if I'm wrong. I think they only possess about 20% of the territory and the so-called rebels have a much larger percent of that. And there's been kind of a, I don't know if you call it a piece, but certainly a cease-fire

2:03kind of situation has been going on for a number of years. But now it's sparked back up. And from all I've been able to see, Ray, just earlier today, the Yemen government side is in an absolute panic. And whole brigades have been melting away. And the Yemen, the Houthi side, the Ansar al-A' has been making gain after gain and taking at least three major cities that we've seen. What can you tell us about what's actually happening down there? Well, first thing is the framing is very confusing of this. I just watched a CNN report yesterday that was a masterclass in propaganda. And this was, I think, Nick Robertson, one of the main CNN, British on the ground running around in a speedboat pointing at things. And basically saying that he is with the Yemeni government. When, in fact, he is with the coup government backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. The problem is, Ansar al-A' or what we call the Houthis in the West, they control the

3:05capital city of Sanaa. So normally, if there's a civil war, whoever controls the capital and most of the populated areas in the country, that is the government and the other factions, whoever they are, especially if they're backed by foreign countries. That's the kind of coup government or the challenging government. Those are the foreign backed, you could say, insurgents in that respect. So there was a civil war in Yemen. It then was followed by a long proxy war, which was initiated by Barack Obama and using Saudi Arabia and the UAE as its local enforcers from 2015. And so now, and they've laid siege to the Ansar al-A', the Houthi areas. So the Ansar al-A' control majority of populated areas, in terms of square miles, they don't control the majority of territory in the country right now, but they're now flipping key strategic

4:07areas, as you've mentioned, in the Babylon Mandub Straits. And I think just recently taken the port of Mokha as well. But what the Western media aren't saying is that the US, Saudi, the UAE have been, and Israel, have been enforcing a brutal siege on the various ports entering into the Ansar Al-A' control majority of populated areas in Yemen, causing famine, starvation, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. I'm just saying, that's the way I think it should be framed if you're going by the facts. But it's so confusing in the West because we obviously have an agenda, which is to demonize Ansar al-A' because they're allied with Iran, one might say, and they're supporting the Palestinian cause, so they get automatically demonized and delegitimized throughout the Western media, including how the basic framing of what the situation is in Yemen right now. And what you said, though, Daniel is absolutely crucial.

5:09There was a truce from 2022, and it had held relatively well until just two months ago. And why? Because somebody has pressed Saudi Arabia to attack Yemen, starting with the airport in Sana'a, with the plane coming with the Yemeni delegation from the Supreme Leader's funeral, and then it just escalated from there. And now you've got MBS reportedly. I don't know how to believe any of these reports, but let's just take it at face value. He has asked the United States to help intervene on behalf of Saudi Arabia by bombing certain targets in Yemen and has been denied by Trump just in the last 24 hours. So if that's true, I don't know quite what to make of that other than Saudi Arabia's been hung out to dry. At least temporarily, my read on that is that Trump would want to extract some leverage from Saudi Arabia for something.

6:10It's hard to know. It could be financial, who knows. So that's the current state of affairs right now. Saudis' exports have been completely devastated by answer Allah's attacks on the key fuel lines, distribution, storage, Jazan, as well as Yambu and all of these areas that were used to bypass the straight and foremost are largely inoperable or not safe to be doing business with. So that's the situation. So the question is, where is this going? Because just before we came on the air here, I was watching an alleges era report where they had a reporter on the ground in the Houthi areas. Actually, he was in both the Houthi areas and also they were reporting from the government control areas as well, the other government control areas. The other government control areas, I guess, and we try to get the terminology consistent. He said that the Saudi-backed government side isn't an absolute panic because there's

7:14apparently a lot of internal fighting inside of their forces. They have formed a committee to find out why their brigades have collapsed. They said there's a lot of concern because if they said if they don't have some sort of counterattack pretty quickly, then the Houthi side is going to either manifest its positions and get even deeper in the cities or their worry is it's going to keep going. And when you see right there, these are some of the Saudi side, some of their brigades have surrendered in large numbers. And I want your opinion on this, Patrick, because this looks to me very similar to what happened when ISIS first made its movement through Iraq and the Iraqi security forces, which were more numerous, just melted away in the heat. How do you see it? Okay. Well, I mean, I have experience on the ground with Iraq and that story during the ISIS

8:14period. So I can comment on that as to why the Iraqi forces seemingly melted in the face of the ISIS onslaught. But just put that off to the side for a moment. The footage you're looking at here, Daniel, okay? The UN recognized, quote, government, the Saudi backed government forces as we've rightly labeled them because that's kind of what they are. These are not fighters. They don't have a lot of native Yemeni soldiers within those ranks. Saudi Arabia has been outsourcing a lot of their ground troops throughout this war from 2015 forward, as well as the UAE, they've been buying them from Sudan. They've literally been subcontracting off anybody they could suit up and boot up and give a weapon to and pay $500 a month salary, whether that's even RSF, former RSF soldiers. But mainly from Sudan, people who needed money from the Sudan army who were available for

9:16mercenary services. And then as well as a collection of other sources and patchwork together to make infantry, Daniel, you can't fight any kind of a war like that. And the other problem, Daniel, is that the public support overwhelmingly, I think throughout Yemen, is really behind Ansar Allah. So that's you're going against another factor there that you can't really win in that kind of thing. In short term, yes, there's certain things that they could do. They got off to a very good start at the beginning of this conflict by taking aid in and then controlling the mouth of the Bab al-Mandeb as well as Soqatra and these other key islands like Parham and so forth. But as time wears on and these guns for hire and the UAE's resources are really diminished compared to what they were a few years ago. They don't have nearly the influence. They've had to pull up stakes and Soqatra and this key islands that basically act as gatekeepers

10:18in the Gulf of Aden. So an answer log just keeps getting stronger. Every time they're attacked by Israel and the United States, they then reorganize and double up. They've improved their air defense, their anti-ship missiles. I mean, where they are now compared to where they were 10 years ago or even five years ago or even two years ago. Here's answer log going to be in two years time or in five years time much stronger than they are today. That's a trend that has not changed in terms of the development of this conflict where Saudi has just become more ham-fisted, more weaker, more problems organizing and holding territory. That's a trend that has not reversed. The United States is not going to improve their influence over Yemen over answer a lot. They've already had their big run at Yemen and that lasted for 70 days or whatever and then it's finished. Since then, it's been intermittent bombing runs by Israel, assassinations. That's not going to turn the tide long-term.

11:20Daniel, the trends here are beyond argument. You can't deny them. It's not going in the positive direction for Saudi. It will never recover. It's not going to improve for the United States either. This is just a reality of the way things are. Actually, this analysis by Denys and Trinowitz yesterday got my attention here. I don't want if you can expand on this part a little bit around the first paragraph. It says the challenge is even greater today because the Houthis are not the same force Saudi Arabia confronted a decade ago, pretty dear point, just a second ago. They have accumulated significant combat experience and developed increasingly sophisticated air defense capabilities. One of you could just tell everybody how did they get that? If they've been in this period of not war, it seems like if they've been fighting with the Saudi-backed group, then both sides would be equally getting combat experience. But apparently, it's only adding up on the Houthis side.

12:21How is that? Two things, Daniel. The big mistake from the United States is to have a protracted campaign against Yemen and to have a lot of time to study the United States. Take down U.S. reaper drones. Other aircraft were either a hobbled law store had problems with regards on the aircraft carriers that were also targeted by the Houthis. They got a lot of experience there. They've been able to profile almost every single package in terms of interacting with U.S. forces that's hugely valuable. That was a big mistake by the United States, obviously, to do that over to plus month period. There's that issue. The report there speaks to the advancements and capabilities of answer along the sophistication. What you'll notice, Daniel, you learn a lot from propaganda. Nobody does propaganda better than CNN when it comes to geopolitics.

13:22CNN keeps running reports now, which I find interesting about this hanger that the so-called government forces, they call them the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces, keep this hanger with intercepted shipments of missiles, anti-ship missiles and machine guns. It's all very well staged for the cameras. What they're trying to do is push across to the Western and to the Trump administration probably to signal to Western politicians that Iran is pumping weapons into Yemeni. That's not true. Yemen has a long tradition, a long history of their own indigenous domestic missile programs and technology and engineering. They're doing all of, a lot of this stuff is homegrown. There is some technology transfer. You can be sure of that, but I would argue that as much as coming from China in terms of components and technology transfer, then it's coming from Iran.

14:22That's not anything that you can't, they can put a siege on the port of who data, but they're not going to be able to change the fact that this technology has already entered Yemen years ago. Years ago in the Yemenis are master engineers. Anybody who doesn't believe that or is not willing to admit that these aren't just a bunch of Arabs and sandals and serongs firing a Kileshnikovs at Saudi fighters. This is not what's happening in Yemen right now. The West is still predicating their view of this conflict based on images from 15 years ago and these over confident declarations coming from the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth over the last year and a half and so forth. This is why they're going to continue, as they have with the Iranians, to continue to underestimate what Yemen can do to defend itself. Also to inflict pain and act as a deterrent over one of the key strategic waterways in the

15:27world. Can we argue really against the fact that that's happening now. That's what's actually happening. Right. And now I want to go back to what you said the second ago that you have some experience on the ground in 2014 or 2015 2017 2017. Is that okay? We were in 2017. In Iraq. Yeah, in Iraq, right. So we saw, then certainly I didn't want another ground, but I certainly read a lot about what happened over that time and how the ISF melted away when the ISIS came in there and then they ended up taking some territory for a while. ISIS was nowhere near as good as what Ansar al-Ali is from what you've described and what I've read some other places. Do you see any similarities between those two states because they drove the Iraqi security forces out of quite a bit of territory as well as in Syria before they were end up stopping. Where do you see this one going? Well, the difference is Ansar al-Ali is defending its home territory. And again, this has to do with how we're framing this issue coming from a Western or pro-Israeli

16:31or pro-U.S. position or pro-Saudi position. They've had 15 years to build up their defense of their homeland. ISIS was an invading force against Iraqis at the time. So we're talking about this summer of 2014 when they arrived and stormed Mosul and then marched to Raka and suddenly we have this international crisis on our hands. But I believe Daniel, the record may show for those who are in the know or who have researched closely. I mean, what I'm telling you was relayed to me by the head of the PMU's, the commander who was killed with Qasim Suleimani in the same car Abu Madhi Al-Mahendez, who told me and a host of other international journalists at a press conference in October 2017 that the United States withdrew technical support to the Abrams Tank Division magically and mysteriously

17:35six weeks roughly before the appearance of ISIS. And their stockades and arsenals ran empty during that exact same time frame. That's, there's two coincidences there. And so one of the reasons why the Iraqi army, which is fully trained and equipped by the United States, wasn't able to fight ISIS. One of the reasons was because they didn't have the resources at that time. And so they got spooked. The other reason is the reports that we have from those soldiers and I had the same reports from Syria, exactly the same from Syrian Arab Army soldiers, that the ISIS fighters that they faced in those first two years were the best trained fighters they had ever faced or seen. Best, most well organized, best trained. So these are mercenary extraordinaires, battle hardened from Kosovo and all of these other theaters, including Grozny and all of these other various theaters over the years.

18:35This was the Kremlin of international tech theory terrorist mercenaries that appeared in the summer of 2014. So I would imagine the levels degraded over time and then the West started actually launching some airstrikes against ISIS targets. But I can tell you, without any reservation that the heavy lifting and the defeat of ISIS was done on the ground by Iraqi PMUs, by the Hashel Shabi, by these various fighting groups. And there was 130,000 of them that were mobilized to do just that. And so it wasn't from American forces fighting on the ground because they didn't fight ISIS at all. Right. So what about in this situation here because there are, I mean, whatever you want to save out the lack of training that the ISF had in the 2014 period, they ended up getting their stuff together. Do you see a similar thing with the Saudi-backed group that's trying to fight unsurrow love? No, no, they just don't have the manpower of indigenous actual Yemenis in infantry, like

19:41actual ground fighting forces. They don't have them. They're having to outsource them or they have been outsourcing them. And those numbers have dwindled and there were problems with corruption, people not getting paid. There's all sorts of stories with the Sudanese. And even many dead Sudanese soldiers where they left the bodies to rot in the desert and couldn't repatriate them back to the families didn't pay compensation to the families in Sudan as was promised by the Saudis. All of these problems are in the littered over the last 10 years with this war in Yemen. So they really, the reason these positions are collapsing is because they can't defend them. They really can't. And they don't have nearly the caliber of fighters. And the answer Allah has was, and nor the political, nor the will. And I think the battlefield, the will in the battlefield, what answer law believes they're fighting for? I believe they're much stronger than a foreign-backed U.S. and Saudi paid professional army who are

20:45trying to hold territory in and around Aiden and these other key players. And Marie been all of these other, you know, really key fortress cities. They've all fallen. They've been long defeated by answer Allah. So again, there's no way that Saudi can turn this tide unless Saudi is grown in army that we don't know about somewhere in Saudi Arabia. And they're being trained as we speak and they're all Saudis. It's not going to happen. They can't even mobilize if they wanted tech theory fighters to come in to fight answer Allah and say that they're apostates as they did to recruit them to fight in Syria and in Iraq. They're not able to mobilize those sort of numbers here. That'd be the only hope was to mobilize ISIS or al-Qaeda to fight answer Allah and just weigh them down over time with a terrorist insurgency like they did in Syria and other

21:46places. There's no way they can do that here. Right. Yeah, because there's no, certainly no plan for that. But the question is where is it going to go? So here's the map of Yemen on the screen here. I want to zoom back out a little bit interestingly though and look at the religious contour of the area because I think that's important here. You see, there's Yemen in the lower left hand corner. Of course, the dark green there is that you see is Shia Islam. As you can see, Iran up in the top part there, which is almost entirely green, dark green. And then some of the other at the lighter green is some of the Sunni areas. And you see a lot of that area in the southern part of Saudi Arabia is still a lot of the religious cohort of some of the same people that are fighting in Yemen here. So the question is, is Yemen, are the answer Allah? Are they going to move and take actual Saudi territory? We've been hearing reports that there is a lot of concern on Saudi side of that. Well, they certainly could for strategic leverage and if Saudi is not able to defend those

22:50positions, I mean, I'll be hugely embarrassing for Saudi Arabia, but that's actually something that's been going on for a number of years. So the answer Allah has been challenging Saudi and they do have a territorial dispute, by the way, over some of these areas, not just those ones that you're pointing to, but others as well. So there's that side as well. But the answer Allah, what they call the Houthis, they're not strictly Shiite in the sense that you would understand Iranians or Iraqis or the people in the Levant to be Shiite. They're Zadi, which is a slightly different type of a sect of Islam. But the other thing here that confounds that ethnography or that religious map, as you called it, Danny, is that what's happened in the last year and a half with Iran standing up to the United States and Israel and then dealing a fatal blow to the US and the region

23:54in terms of their military positions, the same thing, the global Islamic community, the Umas they call them. Iran has now, has moved up in the sort of perception, even there are Sunnis rooting for Iran. There's Sunnis that support Iran's principal position on Palestine and against the US dominance in the region. And so what's happened has confounded sectarian divisions. And the same I think is going to happen in Yemen as well is that the more resolute and rebellious instead fast that answer a lot remain as, they're also going to confound some of those sectarian issues because then it's not about playing off the sex against each other, which is what Saudi and the US with all of their money and Israel and the military might and the British and all the colonial powers have done for centuries.

24:54That becomes secondary to real issues about regional survival, sovereignty and how are you going to be governed and under what, what laws is it going to be under international law or the new rules based order that the US is in Israel trying to impose here, which is a brutal barbaric rules based order if you think about that. So those are now the new issues and Iran has led the way on this. Now, and we're going to see, let's take a look at some of that in a second. By the way, thanks to our friend Matt Bracken, who posted a lot of these maps where he pulled them off of his ex account. So appreciate that Matt, if you're watching. But the question is now that you see that especially with that island that the Houthis have taken, they now effectively have control of the Babel Mendoff. And what they've been saying, at least as of this morning, is that the Babel Mendoff is open for business except for Saudi traffic. So they said other people can continue to go through.

25:55So it's not that they're going to cut everything off, but they now have control of it so that they could do that. But apparently they are going to sit down the Saudi traffic. There's also been attacks on the Saudi pipeline. What is your understanding of the objective of the Houthis here? Are they just want to destroy Saudi Arabia? Do they want to get them to just to lift the blockade? What is their objective? No, they're very pragmatic, much like the Iranians. They respected the truth until Saudi didn't. And they warned Saudi Arabia of what the ramifications were if Saudi resumed aggression against Yemen. When I say Yemen, I'm talking about the capital, Sana'a, and answer a lot again to be clear. And Saudi has paid an incredible price for it. I can only, as I've said previously on your show, Daniel, I can only guess and speculate that the initial move by Saudi Arabia to break this truce was at the insistence of the United States.

27:00I can only assume that that was the case. And it was probably a quid pro quo. It happened around the time of the Saudi nuclear deal that was announced between enrichment deal and between the US and Saudi Arabia. There's all sorts of other triangular transactional diplomacy transactions currently that the Trump administration are running at any given time. We know that's how the US, this administration is running foreign policy. It's transactional, it's chaotic, it's all based on leverage, it's quite short term and petty in a certain way, but it's completely tactical, but to what end? To what's strategic end? That's the question. The US does have a strategy with Iran. It's not a very good long term strategy, but it's a strategy will most likely endure throughout the remainder of Trump's term over two years, which is to degrade Iran's ability to manage and administer the straight-of-one lose. And so they'll just use provocations and Trump admitted it, intermittent strikes, he blurted

28:05out the other day in the Oval Office. So that's the strategy, intermittent strikes. It's creating excuses and pretext to hit a bank of targets that's probably in the thousands terms of infrastructure, energy, military targets, anything to do with any maritime, energy or infrastructure along the South Coast and in straight. The US is just going to continue doing this because that's the US strategy is to take away Iran's leverage over the straight, even if it takes the remainder of Trump's two years in office. So that's a timeline, Daniel, that goes way beyond the midterms. And I don't think the United States is going to abandon that. You know? Yeah, but we don't have a real good track record here. If anybody's thinking that we're going to maybe, Mohamed bin Salman from Saudi Arabia thinks that he's going to get President Trump to go in and start being kinetic in sub. Well, President Trump has some bad experience with that. Who can forget this blast from the past? I think this is March 2025 when a very confident Secretary of War Pete Hickseth said this.

29:12We're sitting on four years of deferred maintenance from Joe Biden, where in particular when you talk about the Houthis, they were allowed for over a hundred times to shoot at US ships to shoot at commercial shipping. Four months ago, when we sent a ship through, it was shot at 17 times. Ships haven't been able to go through for over a year without being shot at. Freedom of navigation is basic. It's a core national interest. And President Trump has said, we will restore that and we will be unrelenting. I want to be very clear. This campaign is about freedom of navigation and restoring deterrence. The minute the Houthis say, we'll stop shooting at your ships, we'll stop shooting at your drones, this campaign will end. But until then, it will be unrelenting. We got the reports last night. The Houthi Capitol felt like an earthquake. A dozens and dozens of precision heavy munitions dropping precisely on the targets that we wanted to hit, sending a very clear message. And the message is clear to Iran as well. And the President said it in his truth. Your support of the Houthis needs to end immediately.

30:15We will hold you accountable as the sponsor of this proxy and I echo his statement. We will not be nice about it. Yeah, well, it turns out they weren't nice about it either. And a barely a month and a half later, President Trump says, you know what, I've got a deal. They begged me for a deal. He loves to say that. And we're just going to just not do that anymore. Even though they continued to stop traffic, it was going to Israel and so. And then this little jewel came out right after that that the $7 billion we wasted bombing a country we couldn't even find on the map. And part of the story here from the New York Times is that the Houthis in six weeks shot down seven MQ9 reaper drones, which cost about 30 million a pop. And the United States lost two FN 18 super horned fighters planes at 67 million each. Defense priorities by a former organization. A Washington think tank positively estimates that between Biden and Trump, the United States wasted more than $7 billion on bombing Yemen over a little more than two years.

31:18And neither the Biden administration nor the Trump administration ever succeeded militarily. And so they just finally quit. What is changed now? Well, it's much worse is what the answer is. Pete Hankseth, unbelievable. Not as confident today, is he? Yeah. He doesn't have that spring in his step, does he? He looked a lot less stressed back then because back then it was a video game. And now between that misadventure against Yemen and also Operation Midnight Hammer and then the war against Iran, the war that's not a war according to JD Vance since February 28 has pretty much expended the lion's share of US munitions stock. And I don't know how many fixed wing aircraft the US has lost between Yemen and Iran since the last year and a half to years.

32:18It's a lot. And I would argue it's way north of 100 in total. And a significant portion of the US MQ9 reaper drone fleet. And all the technology transfer into the hands of the Iranians and the Yemen's as well. As well as the recently the underwater autonomous Palmer Lucky expensive toy that the US said just floated to the surface and it wasn't a big deal. But it maybe it is a big deal because it's not the first time Iran's hijacked the comms link as they did in 2010 and landed a state of the art sentinel drone under Barack Obama's term in mint condition because the Iranians hijacked the satellite link between the US satellite and the most advanced US unmanned aerial vehicle at that time, which was that sent the sentinel.

33:19And they landed in mint condition and they reversed engineered it and based their latest generation of drones on the US model. I mean, come on. What you think? The headsets talking like he's dealing with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army or the Taliban here is these are advanced very sophisticated in the case of Iran. I don't need to make that that case for anybody they should know by now. But Yemen the Yemeni forces, answer law forces are not backwater a third world rag tag terrorists. And you know, I think that is a surprise to most of you because the mainstream meeting in the West, you know, it's written, written or published on mainstream news or whatever. They always refer to them as the Houthi rebels making it sound like they're kind of like the Taliban or some of the Iraqi rebels during the 2005 war like they're the outside guys. No one thinks about them as an actual capable military force with drones, with ballistic missiles,

34:23with the engineering capabilities that you mentioned. We need to wake up to realize that don't underestimate this enemy because right now it looks like the Saudis have. It's not just that. Even Daniel, the reports of the last exchange between the US and the Iranians that Iran has electro optical infrared guidance that allows, you know, hypersonic missiles to hit moving targets, change course in trajectory during flight. These are things that I remember telling you on this show when I came back from Iran in February that I didn't know whether they were real or not or we're going to be seen on the battlefield. But this is what now six months later people are talking about. But the other thing is multiple warheads deployed prior to impact similar to the Areshnik missile technology and the list goes on and on. Next month we might be talking about some other new capability or feature.

35:26And then Daniel in 2027, a whole bunch of other new capabilities and features. Who's advantage is that in? Is that helping the cause of the US in the region or the Iranians? And that's what what does the US have in terms of conventional capabilities that's going to somehow change the tide. But those minor what seem to be small details are game changers when it comes to deterring naval power of which the US is almost completely reliant on aircraft carriers and other heavy naval assets to do staging for attacks and to do blockades and things like that to project power in the region because they can't do it from their own bases anymore. Yeah, a couple of very remote locations like Israel and less and less so Jordan. But forget about that's being hit lately. Even some of our aircraft been wound hit on the ground.

36:26You know, you mentioned a second ago, you said, heck, that's a lot less confident than then he was back in 2025. But you might not know it from earlier today from just a little bit north of where I am right now. It's the 9-11 25th anniversary here and the Secretary of War and President Trump were both there and they made some speeches. And here's how heg set is viewing this current situation. The United States has killed their leaders, destroyed their air force and their navy rests at the bottom of the sea. Their defenses are gone. We're still sending terrorists where they belong to hell and tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong. And we're ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The economic pressure tightens every day. We control the straight. We will finish this fight. Yeah, do we control the straight though? What do you think?

37:27Look, there's some, there's a couple of things. One of them is what John Meersheimer, who often talks about, when you're talking about evaluating the two sides in any war or conflict, there's one of the key decisive factors is as well as the balance of military power, artillery on a ground war and all of these sort of main points. But one of them is the balance of resolve. The balance of resolve. And it is by orders of magnitude to the advantage of the person fighting on their home field and who is in a defensive position and is well equipped to fight a defensive war like Iran, you have to put the balance of resolve on the side of the Iranians. They're not going to surrender. There's no sanctions package that's going to isolate them. Well, Lee, there's no sanctions package or economic warfare tactic from the U.S. that's going to cause them to surrender. It's not going to happen.

38:29It's a 0% chance of success. Those two, I've just mentioned, militarily, I think we can all agree which way things are moving in that direction and have been for the last six months. So what, what headset is making there is a desperate kind of political plea by somebody who's probably not going to be in a job very much longer. And he, in fact, will be the scapegoat for this epic failure. You're talking about, think about this, Daniel, in U.S. history that this self-styled Secretary of War and this president too, and I'll throw vans in everybody else in the administration because they ought to own this. The United States having to cut and run from 17 bases in the Middle East in a matter of months. And how on earth can you fashion this into a win? No matter how smooth you are of an orator. I mean, even Obama couldn't sell this as a win, I think, not credibly anyway.

39:32And he was the best orator in U.S. history. But it's a huge loss. And the U.S. can't defend its allies. Another big L. U.S. can't really defend Israel either. They're running out of interceptors. The last bastion of deterrence, air defense can't seem to manage that either. What multiverse is this a win? That's the question I would give the glorified fraternity pledge, otherwise known as Pete Hegseth in this case. You know, you see this headline that Gary's putting up there. The acting Secretary of the Navy, I think his name is Hung Cow, said, he admitted, and I think it was a congressional testimony that, yeah, they blew the hell out of our base at the Bahrain. So we've known that for a lot of time in anecdotally and from satellite imagery that's come out. But now here, he's just kind of fully admitting it. That's also on the heels of the fact that in the last exchange with Iran, they hit our

40:36base in Jordan. You talked about the distances we had to go. Well, even that's not enough. And apparently several, I think it was F-16s and 1A-10 were hit, et cetera. Even though we claimed, oh, we intercepted everything except for two missiles, which fell in the middle of the desert and did nothing. Now we found out, well, I mean, other than eight or not aircraft that were damaged. But what does that tell you about the balance of power? I mean, forget about the, you know, who's got the bigger morale incentive. But even just the balance of military power, it doesn't look like we're on the top side here. No, it doesn't. But even putting the military capabilities aside, Daniel, if for US soldiers who have enlisted or professional soldiers who are serving the United States military, whatever branch that is, they themselves have to justify what's going on here. And one of the last things you could use to justify any operation and full commitment of forces is that we're protecting our allies.

41:36I mean, that's sort of the last backstop in terms of rationale. And the United States cannot pretend that they're even care about protecting their golf allies. They can't even pretend that that was even a priority because this Trump administration spends so crass as to admit that they're going to be rationing missile interceptors to protect US facilities. They're not there. The armies or the host countries. So basically, you're running a protection racket at that point. US military service men are not stupid. Okay. So I know this. This is now spreading through the ranks. And you have a huge morale problem at the same time P Kseth is doing a full purge of, I don't know how many generals and decorated commanders throughout every branch of the military. So we have a military right now in the US that is without management right now. It's a zombie. It's a zombie military.

42:36That's what the US has at this current moment today as we speak. And what are the, what are the plans and provisions to replace these people and to integrate new command for sure and streamline things? That takes a long time after you've done the night of the long knives, which HGSET seems to have done in a petulant way. Yeah. Right. That's what it's going to point out. It's not what done in a will thought out or has a good criteria involved. It seems petulant. Like as you said, like I don't like that person. I don't like that person. What do you like? They wanted, they wanted scalps from the embarrassment withdrawal from Afghanistan. And that big, then he hexath was on the G-Hod at that point to impress Trump. And so this is what happens when you put an underqualified person in a massive position of responsibility. They're totally overcompensating all the time to prove that they deserve to be there. Okay. They make this, the conservative right make the same argument against putting women in

43:40a high positions in the military or in corporate America because they're overcompensating. They become more masculine than the men. I would say that's the case for an underqualified person like Pete HGSET in actuality. And that's what he's trying to do. He's a Fox News weekend host who got kicked out of the DC National Guard. I think over his tattoos probably. That's the report that we read. But he's also got all these personal problems. He's a mess. He's a train wreck and one wonders how on earth he got confirmed by the Senate. Well, I have a rough idea of how that worked. Had something to do with the Israel lobby making a few phone calls and behind the scenes working the hallways of the Senate during confirmation. But there's no way on paper that you would ever want to confirm someone like that to be in charge of the world's largest military industrial complex. It just doesn't make any sense. And by the way, I'm in agreement with you. I just published this at Responsible Statecraft here a couple of days ago. He has been a disaster and it is time for him to go.

44:42So I've been back in you up right there. Okay. Yeah, I'll read that piece Daniel. I did not see that, but that looks interesting. But listen, let's, I mean, HGSET is one thing. But let's take a look at his boss because last night in Dallas, Texas, for as a Trump was, you know, before in the Doring audience. So he always loves to fire up the base. But it seems to be a little askew of the actual facts and his understanding of reality on the ground is, so we say questionable. Built the strongest military in the world. We had to use it a little more than I thought, but we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon and they will never have a nuclear weapon. And they're folding all over the place. And by the way, we control the straight, the Trump straight, I call it. We control the Trump straight. They're collapsing or folding all over the place and we control the straight. It's hard to win a war when you don't even, not even honest with yourself about where

45:44things are. Well, there's the Iran can have a nuclear weapon, straw man, that old trope, that's constantly being injected in there. HGSET also does this as well. That's very weak and kind of tired talking point by now. The fact is still hanging their hats on that is amazing. But the thing that drives me crazy, Daniel, is Trump keeps claiming he rebuilt the military, not once, but twice. Like in four years, he somehow rebuilt it during his week first term where he was on his back heels battling two impeachments and all the rest of it. And then suddenly, he rebuilt it again in the last 18 months, which is quite a news flash. And I guess you don't, why do you need 1.5 trillion to up the military budget if it's been rebuilt twice? And if it's been rebuilt twice, how can you haven't been able to subdue the Houthis or the Iranians in the last 18 months? I mean, something's not right here.

46:45Something's not working. How can you keep Zelensky fed and watered with patriot interceptors if you've rebuilt the military? So not able to fight a three front war clearly. So it's fiction, basically. These are all just talking points. Trump was able to get away with some of these things initially because people just were thinking positive. They're projecting positive things on this president because he campaigned. He was going to stop all the wars and end the forever wars and so forth and not go to worthy, Ron. And of course, what we got was the opposite. So now America is having buyers remorse aside from the few people I think that come to those rallies to support the president. Nobody believes any of this stuff. And one of the things that people do believe, some people believe, clearly you look at the polls. We had Rich Beres on the show here not long ago and he was talking about how he's bleeding magasupport, not just popular opinion, but magasupport on all these different categories.

47:51He's bleeding that too. But that's not for lack of effort because we talked about a headset in a minute or a minute ago. Also Scott Besen. He went out there and said, you know what? Actually, these whole array of guys, they're just a bunch of losers. The Iranians get out zero. So over a two week period, the score 140 billion to zero. So if they want to say that they have control the street, it's like for those of us who are old enough to remember, the he-man women haters club on the little rascals, they're just a bunch of losers like sitting around saying, yeah, we're going to do this. We're going to do that. I mean, they're comical, don't they? Yeah, I'm not sure who the comical one is in that spare, but I pulled up here. There's some stats for the last 72 hours. And the outbound of what's visible anyway on the AIS. So there's also obviously some darks that are getting through there. But 11 to 14 ships that we know of getting through, and even if you double that, that's well below the 135 ships that would have gone through in that same period of time.

48:55So I don't know what number he's talking about, whether it's 140 or zero, but in terms of what's actually passing through, it's not that much. And it's not even in the best case. It's on some days, maybe 40% of the pre-war stuff. You see, that's the reason why the price of oil is either add or write up around $100 a barrel again. Well, you know, Iran can wait out this crisis. They have enough domestic fuel for their domestic needs. And what do you think the Iranians are paying for a barrel of oil, Daniel, right now? They're not paying $100. I can tell you right now. They're paying probably something like $15 or $20 in real terms for a barrel. So there is a comparative, relative purchasing parity that Iran and Russia also had this advantage during sanctions. So they're still going to be able to make balance of payments domestically. And Iran has said they're digging in for a long war.

49:59What's Scott Besson? Scott Besson, you know, he's talking about what's kind of who the loser is. Iran's not going cap and hand to the global community begging them to buy their junk bonds with, you know, their short-term bonds to raise money to buy back the long-term debt that the U.S. can't afford to pay back because their interest payments have now topped $1 trillion per year. That's the third biggest line item budget in the federal government now is the repayment on U.S. debt. So I mean, who is fooling who here? So while Besson might be making a kind of grandstanding there for the cameras, the reality is the United States is bankrupt. And they're having to raise money to pay for this military largest so that they can run these illegal blockades halfway across the world. That's the reality. The rest of the world sees that and it's reflected in the market in the U.S. specifically in the U.S. long-term yields for bonds.

50:59No one's, Besson's not fooling anybody. Well, he may be fooling some people because he keeps saying a lot of these things and puts on this happy face and that stupid grin that he has that just drives me crazy. But you and I have talked about this before. It just kind of put it up here to remind people. There's a few mountains in Iran. I don't know if people were aware that it's not flat like it is on a map. And underneath some of those mountains, you have somewhere around 30 or so of these top of facilities that cannot be defeated with conventional weapons. In fact, many of them can't be defeated with nuclear weapons. That's where they're primary, where they're missile and long-range drones, the factories have been located so that they're out of range of our air defense and our air offense rather. Scott Besson also, one more thing, he seems to think that there's something different involved. The Wall Street Journal of the New York Times this afternoon, to say the Iranians are

51:59rebuilding their missile inventory. Maybe, but where's the calibration? Where's the magnitude? We've destroyed 85% of their factories. So are they building one new one a week? Are they building two? It's just these headlines. Did we destroy 85% of those? Maybe I missed that. When you hear stuff like that, what are you thinking about if you're wrong and we haven't destroyed maybe 85% of whatever is on the surface, but the majority of what they have for the actual missiles is underneath the surface you can't reach. So you haven't destroyed any of it. Listen, you can blow up Iran's steel factories. I can tell you the Iranians will have it back online in record time. But even if they didn't, they're not isolated. They can get materials from China and a host of other countries, even India via Pakistan. You really think that the secondary trade on a lot of these key even rare earths is

53:00close to Iran. It absolutely is not. So that's the other part of this that bests in this and calculates. But he's repeating the propaganda. And this is what happens when US officials are marinated in their own propaganda. The Ukraine war is the ultimate example of this. Now going into its fifth year coming up in February. But people just believe the the hope and all of these lies and false assumptions that they've fed themselves to the point where they they fall. Sorry, you know that Trump always saw in the headset that they've love their whole air forces been destroyed. I mean, that that's the new air force right there and it is very much intact. Yeah. These are might be the expensive drones. They have reams and reams of inexpensive drones and Shaheed models that they use as fodder against our to empty out our air defense. That's also part of one of their forward strategies when they when they launch salvos. So this is just one example of many that Iran is ramping up production as we speak.

54:05That's what they've said. I have no reason to disbelieve that in terms of missiles and drones and ammunition. And so what so Daniel, if Iran has enough for a like let's just say conservatively a one year sustained campaign against the US. Does the US have enough for a one year sustained campaign against the Iranians? I'm betting Iran can sustain a year against the US. I'm not betting the US can sustain a month against Iran. Yeah, we're about to see now there's lots of discussion about where this is going to go next. President Trump made some headlines here in the last few days of saying, you know, the war's going to be over right after the midterms. That's it. It's going to be over. So it'll just kind of drag on until then it'll be fine. Meanwhile, some people in the Iranian side are saying, yeah, about that. We're not just going to sit by and let you just continue to try and strangle us and starve us to death and then wait to find out what you're going to do after November the third.

55:07We may be doing something beforehand. How do you see that playing out? Because I think Professor Mohamed Morandi who we've had on the show many times, he said on another program a couple of days ago that Iran is now their mentality is now they've gone over to offensive. They're no longer going to sit back and just wait to find out what we do. What do you think that's going to look like? Well, they've already given a stink preview of what that's going to look like with some of the attacks against US military facilities in Jordan as an example. So they're basically setting the pace. They're setting the pace of escalation. So what's that going to mean for Iran in terms of the elections coming up? The Iranians are very cognizant of the politics in the US and also in Israel with the two upcoming elections. They are absolutely going to use these two elections I will bet to improve their leverage either by threatening to attack and then gaining leverage or some advantage on their side,

56:11knowing how vulnerable and how exposed both the Israeli government, the regime at the moment of Nanyahu and the Republican White House are as the trepidation starts to set in ahead of the midterm elections. And so I think Iran is in a very good position there to either extract some kind of concessions from the US or get some strategic advantage that they didn't have before using our Achilles heel of short-term electoral motivations in the US to gain some kind of advantage. I would expect that would be the case. I would do that if I was Iran because it's an opportunity that's on the table. So I would be surprised if they don't take it. Yeah, and where that's going to go and what can that leverage produce anything that can in the war that is a big unknown. And I don't think anybody knows anything about where that can go.

57:11And unfortunately this is probably not going to be ending anytime soon. But we'll keep on watching it. And as always we're really grateful for having you come on today and we're about everybody to see the Sunday wire that Patrick does every Sunday that's coming up here in just a few days. Always appreciate you coming on and tell people to go look at you there. Thank you very much. I appreciate Danny. We appreciate you guys too. We will be back by the way in just a little less than a half hour from now. Joe Ken is going to be back on this. He's talking about some of the longer-term issues that are going on with since we're looking at, you know, what's happening right now, what may be happening the next few weeks. But he's saying we need to be looking at next-generation enemies we're creating. There's some dangers here that we're not even aware of. Fortunately, Joe is and you will be too at 1.30 pm today on the Daniel Davis Dig up. See you then.