When deterrence fails: A hard look at Iran

In a world full of lies and deception, it takes courage to speak the truth.

In a nation held bent on its own destruction, it takes honor to seek return to glory.

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Join us as we seek the truth on cutting through the fog from the America Out Loud Network.

And here's your host, Wallace Garneau.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to cutting through the chaos of the America Out Loud Network.

Where we cut through the lies in the propaganda to bring you the out loud truth.

I'm your host, Wallace Garneau, and believe it or not, but this is our 100th episode.

So we are at cutting through the chaos, number 100.

I want to start out talking about Iran, because Iran calls the nuclear bomb or the sword of Allah.

Now that phrase is not a metaphor.

It comes from Quranic verses that call to spread Islam by the sword when other means fail.

When Iranian leaders use that language, they're not speaking about deterrence.

They are describing a weapon that they believe advances the faith and punishes its enemies.

Iran is not just want to have nuclear weapons.

A lot of people seem to think that they're defensive only in nature that nuclear weapons are deterrent only.

That's not the way I ran seas.

And when I say I ran throughout this, by the way, I'm not talking about the Iranian people.

I'm talking about the Ayatollah system or now the IRGC system.

I'm talking about the leadership of the country that is currently in charge.

I'm not talking about the Iranian people.

The Iranian people love America.

Ironically, they love Israel.

The Iranian people are 85% of them do not support their government.

Only 15% do.

And that 15% would support a whole lot less if they realized that the IRGC forced the mullahs to vote for the new Ayatollah.

Literally at gunpoint.

So the Iatollah system has already fallen.

This is now the IRGC regime.

Well, I don't trust them anymore than I would have trusted the Ayatollah system.

The fact of the matter is that the government of Iran has been very, very, very clear for decades.

They don't just want to have nuclear weapons.

They want to use nuclear weapons.

They want to eradicate Israel with them.

They want to eradicate the United States with them.

We like to think that Iran cannot hit the United States.

If their missiles don't have the range, we now know they can hit much of Europe.

They can almost get to Paris, not quite.

Can't get to London, but they can cover much of Europe.

They cannot fire a missile that will hit the United States at this point.

But we have to remember is that a jihadist with a minivan would prove to be a very accurate delivery system.

So we should all agree that the Islamic Republic of Iran can never have nuclear weapons.

Now, why are we at war?

Well, we're at war because during negotiations before the war,

Iranian officials told our negotiating team that Iran possessed enough enriched your radium to build 11 nuclear weapons in about a week.

They thought that telling us how close they were would strengthen their negotiating position.

But what I actually did was to end the negotiations and force us to act.

Now, war is of course destructive.

It destroys cities, economies, and lives.

Any serious nation prefers peace, and anyone who has experienced war understands that.

Anyone who's trained to go to war understands that all of our veterans, we all know that a peace is better than war.

But sometimes the choice is not between war and peace, so much is between war and surrender.

Or perhaps between a small war now or a much larger one later on.

In the United States, of course, we could avoid World War II by surrendering after Pearl Harbor.

Japan would have taken what it wanted, the Pacific, Germany would have ruled Europe,

and America would have lived under the shadow of regimes that hated us.

Peace wasn't really an option at the time.

Peace would have cost more, it would have been worse.

We had to take out Hitler, we had to defeat Japan.

We didn't really have a choice.

Pearl Harbor pulled us into a war that you could argue we should have been in any way protecting England and trying to retake France.

But the point is World War II was a just war.

It was a war that we absolutely had to get involved in after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.

Surrender was not the right thing to do, and we tried to continue to have peace.

It would not have been a very strong peace or a lasting peace.

What people have to understand is that peace survives only when a nation's enemies know that the nation is willing and able to fight.

Once enemies decide the threat of war is empty, they begin testing until either they conquer,

or they push too far and end up in a war.

That's as simple as that.

But we like to think that we always have a choice we don't.

Whenever there is conflict, all parties have to agree to have peace.

Any one party can cause war, and there are certain conditions that make war the best option.

Now let's talk about those conditions, because this isn't just Iran, this is any war.

Anytime you're looking at the possibility of war, these are the conditions that should be looked at,

determine whether or not war is the right thing to do.

The first condition is of course a real threat.

That threat might be to our country directly, or it might be to an ally.

But whatever the threat is, it must be something serious enough to justify a military reaction should it occur.

In other words, if this happens, we have to go to war, we have to fight.

We have to do something about that.

So it has to be a real threat, and it has to be serious enough to justify a military reaction should it occur.

The second condition is time-favoring the enemy, such that waiting makes the threat either stronger, more likely, or both.

Condition three is that negotiation isn't viable.

Diplomacy only works when both sides are actually seeking peace.

When one side is negotiating in bad faith, or negotiating just to buy time while preparing for war,

or diplomacy at that point becomes a weapon for that side, it's not really a solution.

Diplomacy has to have a condition where it can work.

Both sides have to actually be seeking peace.

Both sides have to be negotiating in good faith.

The fourth condition is a strategic moment that favors action.

This could be a situation that makes immediate attacks strategically favorable, or it could be a situation that makes preemptive action necessary.

Now, when all four conditions are met, the negotiation isn't viable.

This is a strategic moment that favors action.

Time is favoring the enemy, and there's a real threat.

When all four of those conditions are met, in action does not preserve peace.

At best, it delays creating a larger and more dangerous war in the future.

We saw this in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich, waiving a piece of paper, and declaring that he had secured peace for our time.

What it actually done was to give Hitler the Sudan's land from Czechoslovakia, and Hitler didn't just take the Sudetenland.

He took the entire country of Czechoslovakia, and in the following year, of course, he invaded Poland.

In 1938, Germany was not yet ready for a major war.

Hitler's general, by the way, his generals knew that.

Several of them were prepared to remove him from power if he provoked a conflict Germany could not win.

Czechoslovakia, before Germany got the Sudetenland and then invaded the rest, it possessed a strong army, and had formidable border fortifications.

Had France invaded Germany from the west while Germany attacked the Czechs, even after giving them the Sudanland, had France moved.

Hitler could not have fought both fronts at the same time.

That's just a simple fact, he did not yet have the military to do it.

When Hitler moved on Czechoslovakia, in fact, he did not leave enough troops facing France to do much more than provide directions.

About all the Germans could have done his point toward Berlin.

Had France invaded, it would have been an absolutely open door.

Hitler's generals would have rebelled, he would have been expelled from power, probably would have been killed, and the war would have been over in two weeks.

But instead of confronting the threat, while Germany was still relatively weak, what did the western powers do?

Well, they forced Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland.

That decision stripped the Czechs of their off of their defenses, and it handed Germany the industrial base that would then fuel the German war machine.

The war chambering believed he had avoided. Well, it arrived anyway, and when it came Germany was far stronger and France was far weaker.

Iran has followed a pattern that should feel somewhat familiar to anyone who has studied the lead up to World War II.

For 45 years, the regime in Tehran is funded militias, armed terrorist groups, and attacked western interests across the Middle East.

Has Bolton Lebanon operates as an Iranian forward arm on Israel's northern border, and Shiite militias in Iraq attacked American soldiers and Iraqi rivals alike.

The losses we had in Iraq, some of the losses in Afghanistan also, wasn't the Taliban, and they were not Iraqi militias. It was Hezbollah.

They were cudd's forces. They were fighting on behalf of Iran to kill Americans.

I don't know how many of the troops we lost in Iraq were actually killed by Iranian cudd's forces, but that's what was happening.

Some of them were killed by Iraqis. I'm not saying that there was no Iraqi militia fighting us, but it was also being driven by Iran.

Iran had every up to their armpits in killing Americans in Iraq. It's one of the reasons why we had as many losses as we did.

Now, I think everybody here knows I was at the Marine Corps. I was not yet a Marine in 1983, when 241 American servicemembers, including 220 Marines, were killed by an Iranian embankment.

Iraq attacked Hezbollah truck bomb, while conducting peacekeeping operations in Lebanon. They blew up a barracks. Hezbollah was created inside Lebanon, Shiite population, then it was armed, trained, and financed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The same group in charge of Iran right now, the whole country. We should have responded then.

Matter of fact, what we should have done is we should have said, okay, you killed 220 Marines, here's 2,200, or here's 20,000, we should have said in a much larger force.

Maybe we should have basically invaded the country and wiped out Hezbollah. That's what we should have done. We should have completely destroyed Hezbollah, and then we could have left and let the Lebanese have their country back.

Instead, what did we do? We withdrew, and Iran's proxy only grew stronger. Then you have the Iranian-backed counties in Yemen, who've launched missiles and drones towards shipping lanes and cities throughout the region.

The regime rarely confronts its enemies directly. No, instead what it likes to do is fight through proxies, allowing others to bleed while it denies responsibility.

The result has been a long war conducted in fragments, a campaign meant to wear down opponents without provoking a decisive action.

Nor does Iran really hide its involvement. These proxy forces operate under the guidance of the Quds Force, which is the foreign operations arm of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which trains, directs, and arms malicious across the region.

While waging this proxy war, well, I ran quietly built a nuclear program. Western governments tried to stop it through sanctions and negotiation. Through all of it, the centrifuges continued to spin.

Iran agreed to restrictions while steadily building the technical base required to produce weapons grade uranium. At each stage, diplomats celebrated temporary progress while Iran continued edging closer to Obama.

The Obama administration's Iran deal imposed limits on enrichment and centrifuges. But for a number of years only, those limits came with expiration dates.

Once the sunset clause has arrived, Iran would have been free to expand its nuclear program with international legitimacy. They would have been free to build a bomb they wouldn't even have had to hide it because the agreement gave them the right.

We should all agree that the Islamic Republic of Iran should never be allowed a nuclear weapon.

When you tell somebody that and they say, well, what about North Korea? Yes, North Korea should have been stopped also. We should never have allowed North Korea to get a nuclear weapon.

We did. We had a week present at the time. We did allow them to get nuclear weapons. Now it's a little bit hard to defang them. Deal with that some other day right now. We have to read about Iran.

The one thing about North Korea with nuclear weapons is as crazy as the Kim regime may be, they do want to survive. The Islamic Republic of Iran, I don't know what the IRGC wants.

I just know that they were the force that the Iranians used to consolidate the Mullah system used to consolidate power that I ran to suppress the people and, of course, to run the CUDS force, which, as we said, directed all the militias in other countries.

I don't really know what the IRGC, now that they are in charge, what they really want, what I do know is that the Mullahs believe the Iatola believed that if there were a major nuclear war, then all of the good Muslims would go to paradise and everybody else would go to hell, so that was considered to be a good outcome.

The Iatolas of Iran, both of them, the first one and the second one, the third one I don't know about, but the first two Iatolas, they both were very, very clear that they wanted to have nuclear war.

They hoped to die in a nuclear war. They hoped to end the world through nuclear war. And if they couldn't end the world, they could at least take out Israel and cripple the United States.

Jihadist with the minivan, they could have done it and they would have denied responsibility for it. They would have said, oh, not our bomb, I don't know who did that. Of course, it would have been them.

So we should all agree that the Islamic Republic of Iran should never, never be allowed a nuclear weapon.

Now, luckily for us, the agreement that Obama signed with Iran was never ratified by the Senate, so it was not a treaty. It was just a gentleman's agreement between Barack Obama and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

That allowed Donald Trump to withdraw from the United States from it.

Understand, too, the Iran deal did not eliminate Iran's nuclear program. It was only designed to push Iran's breakout time from a few months, which is what it was considered at the time to about a year, and then to keep them roughly a year away from a bomb for about a decade after which the restrictions would have expired and Iran could have built nuclear bombs to its heart content.

Incidentally, it would have expired. They would have, they'd be right about where they are now had that deal still been in place.

So when people say, well, they only have it because we broke the deal, no, they would have had it right about now anyway.

The difference is that because we didn't sign it, because we're not still a part of that agreement, we have the right to do something about it.

We'd have a much harder time justifying to other countries why we're attacking Iran right now if that agreement had still been in place because the agreement specifically said 10 years and then you can build bombs to your heart's content.

Well, that's a problem because they should never be allowed a nuclear weapon. You can't give a general-sidal, suicidal theocracy the tools to commit genocide and suicide. You just can't do it.

The thing is that even if Iran had not cheated under the deal, think about the timing here, an Israeli child born on the day that deal took effect could have seen a nuclear I ran before they started high school.

And I ran wanted the bomb. I ran as never hidden its intentions. When leaders of the regime openly state the intent of using nuclear weapons, they're not talking about strategic deterrence.

They are invoking a religious narrative in which violence advances faith while killing the infidel. That rhetoric might be dismissed as theater for not paired with decades of militant action across the region.

And I ran his always been clear that they don't just want to have nuclear weapons they want to use them.

As a consequence, when Iranian officials opened negotiations by stating that they could produce enough weapons, great material for roughly 11 bombs within about a week, well, that rarely became impossible to ignore and waiting longer would not have reduced the threat.

Let's look at it this way. When Iran announced that it could have 10 nukes in a week, conditions 1 and 2 that we talked about earlier were met.

It became clear during the negotiations that Iran was only negotiating a stall and of course that satisfies condition 3.

Then something unusual happened. Iran's senior leadership gathered with the Ayatollah in one place that provided an obvious target which of course satisfies condition 4.

So what happened is real struck and killed roughly 40 senior leaders in one blow. They may have also injured the current Ayatollah that nobody has seen or heard from.

I think he's dead. I don't know that the rumors that he had lost a leg or was severely injured.

Some people are saying he's in a hospital in Russia. Nobody really knows where he is. I don't think that we don't even know who's really in charge of Iran right now. That's how badly decimated their leadership is.

When people say well Trump is saying this but the Iranians are saying that Trump says he's negotiating. They say that there will be no negotiations that we're going to destroy the United States and the infidel will punish.

We'll be punished for attacking us and all that. Understand. Trump is talking to somebody or Trump's team is talking to somebody in Iran whether directly or through proxies.

They would never have done what they did if they did not have high level leadership possibly political leadership.

Definitely somebody in the IRGC somebody high ranking up in the IRGC. It probably a number of generals in the Iran regular army.

They would never have done this if they had not already gotten people that they thought they could build a cool round.

What we're seeing is Trump negotiating not with all of Iran's leadership but with the portion of the leadership that the Assad and the CIA have already cultivated.

That is what we're going to see at some point. What we have to do is we have to reduce their ability to maintain their power base as much as we can.

Destroy their military capabilities as much as we can while protecting whoever it is that we want to have do the coup and then the coup can happen but you only get one shot at the coup.

So you have to make sure it works which means that there's a lot of fighting a lot of bombing a lot of stuff has to happen before they can allow that to happen.

My guess is Trump is negotiating with the people that he wants to take power through a military coup after they've destroyed enough of Iran's ability to defend itself.

Understand, too, when people talk about Iran being difficult, being formidable, much of that conversation seems to assume that the country is a formidable military power.

In reality, Iran's conventional military is aging, poorly equipped and unevenly led.

Much of its equipment is actually from before the 1979 revolution.

Think about how much technology has changed since then.

The Air Force flies aircraft that modern militaries retired decades ago. I should say the Air Force flew aircraft that modern militaries retired decades ago.

We've destroyed their Air Force and their Navy.

Well, even before it relied heavily on small boats and arasement tactics, it was not a real traditional naval power.

And now most of their Navy, they've still got some small fast boats, but most of their Navy, everything that you would call Navy, is at the bottom of the ocean, at the bottom of the sea.

They've little more than bass boats now. You know, attack us with a trolling motor or something, I don't know.

Now, Iran's strength lies in asymmetric warfare and proxy forces rather than in conventional battlefield dominance.

The regime survives not because its army is powerful, but because its enemies have always avoided decisive action.

The real difficulty confronting Iran, it's never been its army. The real difficulty in terms of a ground fight against Iran, it's its geography.

The Zagros Mountains run across that country like a natural fortress wall protecting the Iranian Plateau.

Mountain slow armies and they multiply the cost of attack. It's very, very difficult to fight through mountains.

It's slow. You take a lot of weaponry. You lose a lot of people. It's a very, very difficult type of terrain to fight through.

And that geography has protected Iran far more effectively than its military ever could.

But not all of Iran lies behind those mountains.

Now, the oil fields of Kuzestan, they sit west of the Zagros range. Very near the border with Iraq.

The city of Al-Wazliz, right at the center of that region.

Kuzestan represents one of Iran's Achilles heels. They have more than one, but this is a big one.

Because much of Iran's oil production flows from those fields.

And that oil finances the regime's ambitions both at home and abroad.

If you control that region, then the regime loses most of its revenue.

Reclaiming it would require Iran to cross the same mountains that protect the rest of the country.

Which turns their geography. Right now, it's like a shield wall.

Well, if you take that, then stop. You don't try to take all of Iran. You just take its oil resources.

Now you're turning that geography into an obstacle that they have to cross.

Now you get to easy defense and they don't really have the capability of taking it back.

That's the simple fact for Iran.

If we take their oil fields, it's not much they can do about it. They can fire missiles at us.

They can fire rockets at us. They can fire drones at us to the degree they still have the ability to launch those things.

That's been degraded at a great deal.

But that's what they'd have to do. They just have to try to blow it up.

And we have defenses we can use that can really make that difficult for them.

Including in terms of drones, we're building drones now that go after drones so that we can take out their drones without spending a lot of money.

That is a huge, huge, huge Achilles heel.

In my opinion, we should take and hold that area until the Routola regime falls.

The Strait of Hormuz presents another vulnerability.

Iran threatens global shipping, not from the mainland, primarily, but primarily from small islands that are scattered across that waterway.

Radar systems, missile batteries, and mines positioned on those islands allow Iran to menace one of the most important energy routes in the world.

Well, what happens if you remove the foothold by taking the islands?

Whether the threat to global oil shipment collapses.

If I were Trump, I would take the Iran's islands and the Strait of Hormuz, in particular Kesham.

I didn't want to pronounce it. It's QESHM.

Really, we should have done that with the first few days of the operation.

I would have done that. I would have been starting to do that right after we radically reduced Iran's ability to launch missiles and drones in the first place.

So within the first few days of the engagement, it would have been nice to have boots on the ground on those islands,

so that they don't have the option of closing the Strait.

We could also put an eye-droning and missile resources on those islands and take away Iran's ability to threaten shipping through the Strait even from their mainland.

We could simply open the Strait by taking those islands.

And as long as we're at it, you know, we might as well take Carg Island too.

That's a little more difficult because it's a little more difficult to defend.

It's very, very flat. It's not very big. You can't dig very deep because you hit water.

But understand that 90% of their oil goes through Carg Island.

It's not the Strait of Hormuz, but Iran's entire economy runs through it.

Their entire economy is based on Carg Island.

And nearly all of its oil exports, they leave from that small strip of land too.

They don't get it from Carg Island, but it goes through Carg Island.

That's where the resources are to put it in ships and ship it off.

Carg Island is absolutely vital to the Iranian regime.

So success at a conflict with Iran, incidentally, it doesn't require the immediate collapse of the regime.

A regime that suddenly finds itself weak and exposed tends to look inward to make sure that it's not going to get overthrown by its own people or by a military coup.

Leaders begin worrying less about projecting power abroad and more about surviving the turmoil at home.

So even if the regime were to remain in place, a weakened Iran would spend years dealing with its own internal fractures rather than funding malicious abroad.

That even if we don't flip the regime, even if we don't make it fall, that would represent a major strategic victory.

And if we took a health cash and a cousin stand where the regime is going to be bankrupt, so at some point it's going to fall, we just have to deny it access to its oil resource, deny it access to its economy.

Note, too, that the Ayatollah Motorjebi pronounced his name, Khameini, I've heard it pronounced, but I can't pronounce it.

You know, the guy that nobody has seen or heard from since a cardboard cut out of him was sworn as Supreme Leader.

He was selected by the Mullahs, as I said earlier, at gunpoint by IRGC leadership.

Now, eventually, the 15% of Iranians who supported the theocracy will figure out they no longer live in one, but are ruled purely by a military terrorist junta,

with no legitimacy under Iranian law.

And when that happens, even the fanatics are going to reject the cardboard cut out.

Iran has proven very adept at creating disseminating fake videos and other AI resources through social media to present an image of strength.

But understand that the truth is that the USSR's Abraham Lincoln has not been hit by anything.

And Iran's missile and drone capabilities are down more than 90% while the United States and Israel we have complete air supremacy over Iran as we continue to bomb them at will.

Iran stands as the central engine, driving much of the region's conflicts.

If you remove that engine, the entire political landscape of the Middle East changes.

Many Arab governments now quietly accept Israel's existence.

Trade relationships between Israel and other states in the Middle East have formed and expanded.

Security cooperation is growing as well.

A free Iran would transform the region in ways that are difficult to overstate.

The Persian people possess one of the oldest civilizations in the world.

And many of them hold deep resentment toward the clerical regime that rules them.

About 85% don't support it.

A government in Tehran that pursued normal relations rather than revolutionary struggle would alter the strategic balance overnight.

This would also isolate Qatar.

As without Iran the propaganda networks and diplomatic maneuvering that flow through Doha would lose a critical source of both deflection and support.

Regional politics would then begin reorganizing around a completely different set of incentives.

Now war, of course, it remains tragic.

It always will be.

But refusing to confront certain threats carries its own price.

And the four conditions that make war necessary, those don't go away.

Iran has declared ideological intent.

Its approach nuclear capability, its use negotiation is a stalling tactic.

And we were able to put a very severe blow, a very rare opportunity, by the way, to its leadership.

That meets all four conditions.

War is not free for either side either.

Iran has killed several U.S. and Israeli service members wounded more.

It's hit a number of military and civilian targets across the region.

It's struck shipping the Strait of Hormuz about 21 ships I think of this point.

It's made cyber attacks against the United States, most notably incidentally against a company called Striker in my own hometown of Kalamazoo, Michigan.

And it's threatened to unleash Iranian allied terrorists smuggled over the years into the United States and across Europe to strike what it considers to be, what it thinks would be decisive blows.

Now we could do like Chamberlain and back down, but Chamberlain did not provide peace for his time.

When a regime calls nuclear weapons the sort of Allah and announces it can build them in a week, delay does not preserve peace.

No, delay invites a larger war fought under a mushroom cloud.

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Also, don't forget that we have over July 4th, we have the big powwow in Nashville.

I will be there opportunity to meet me also an opportunity to meet all of the other hosts for America out loud.

I'm not sure who all is going.

I think there's a list on the website of who has so far said they're going.

I am going. I've already bought my ticket.

We've got, I don't know if we're flying or driving.

I think we're looking at driving at this point, but we've got the hotel booked.

We will definitely be there.

So if you want to meet me show up and and I'll be there with that.

Don't go anywhere.

We still have a lot to go over on the other side of the break.

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to cutting through the chaos on the America Out Loud Network.

I'm your host Wallace Garneau and before the break we're talking about Iran, today I want to talk about something else.

After the second half of the show, I want to talk about something else.

I want to talk about toxic masculinity because we are told over and over again that masculinity is toxic.

Well, tell that to Chesty Polar.

Lewis Burwell, Chesty Polar, was the most decorated marine in the history of the core.

He was born in 1898 in West Point, Virginia and he joined the Marines at the end of the First World War.

Here in his reputation, the jungles of Central America during the Banana Wars, where Marines hunted insurgents through thick countryside, fighting a close combat, often with little support.

The Pacific War hardened his reputation into that of a legend.

Polar commanded Marines at Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, and Pellilu.

He held ground through repeated assaults and steadied his bed whenever the line started to bend.

Combat neither excited nor frightened Chesty Polar.

It was simply responsibility he carried for the Marines under his command and he carried it always with discipline, honor, and courage.

At the Chosen Reservoir during the Korean War, eight Chinese divisions poured down from the mountains and surrounded the First Marine Division.

Polar pushed his regiment forward into the enemy to keep the division intact.

When the division commander, General Oliver Smith, was appraised to Polar's movements, he replied, retreat, hell.

We're just attacking in a different direction.

Polar's regiment then was instrumental in helping the division fight over 70 miles to the coast, surrounded by eight enemy divisions, fighting at eight to one odds.

They survived and attacked, made it to the coast.

We're rescued and then brought back into Korea so they could resume the fight against that point, the North Koreans, as well as the Chinese.

Temperatures in that battle dropped to as low as negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit and Marines still call it the Frozen Chosen.

The Navy Cross is the second highest award for Valor in the United States, after only the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Well, the Navy Cross, the Chesty Polar earned at the Chosen Reservoir, it was his fifth, and he retired for the Marine Corps in 1955 as Lieutenant General.

He never got a Congressional Medal of Honor, but he got five Navy crosses, the man was an absolute legend.

Away from the battlefield, he was quiet and reserved.

Marines saw the hard commander who expected discipline and courage, but when he came home, he was not the most famous Marine in the history of the Marine Corps.

He was either Lewis or Dad, spending evenings with his wife, talking with his children, and showing the same loyalty to his family that he demanded from Marines in the field.

Marines trusted Chelly that Chesty, they gave him the nickname Chesty because he shared their danger.

His family trusted him while he shared their love.

Polar never chased fame and he never tried to polish his reputation.

The Marines who served under him remembered that when the fighting started and the ground shook, Chesty moved toward the sound of the guns, carrying his men with him.

Now, I chose Chesty Polar for the intro to this, but I could have chosen Thomas Saul, who was also a Marine during the Korean War before he became America's greatest living economist, which in my opinion he is.

I could have chosen Jimmy Stewart, who collided with a B-24 and flew 20 combat missions over Nazi Germany, earning the distinguished flying cross twice before returning home and becoming one of the most beloved actors in history.

I could have actually chosen any number of great men.

Audi Murphy became the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War.

Later, he appeared on movie screens across the country.

Clark Gable was already a major film star when he joined the Army Air Force.

He flew combat missions over Europe and B-17 bombers.

Charlton Heston served as a radio operator and gunner on B-25 bombers in the Pacific long before he stood in front of cameras as Moses or as Ben Hurr.

George H. W. Bush climbed into a torpedo bomber when he was only 19, flew combat in the Pacific, and climbed aboard a burning torpedo bomber on an aircraft carrier's main deck, risking his life to pull a fellow pilot out of the cockpit while the crew pushed the plane overboard.

They were going to push that overboard, whether he was still on it or not. He would have been pushed over with it.

He later, of course, became President of the United States.

We can debate how good of a President he was. I think he's overrated, but he was definitely a brave man in World War II.

When danger came, all of these men stepped forward to defend our nation and the American way of life.

They accepted risk as a part of their duty and carried that sense of responsibly with them for the rest of their lives.

Were these men masculine? Absolutely they were masculine, but they were the opposite of toxic.

We're told that men start wars, but do men start wars or does power start wars?

Women in power have historically wielded the same way men do. Look at Hillary Clinton.

Catherine II of Russia pushed the Russian Empire south in multiple wars with the Ottoman Turks.

She tore Poland apart, splitting it with Austria and Prussia. My wife's Polish, there was a period, but about 150 years there was no Poland.

Elizabeth I of England fought Spain and Crusherbellians in Ireland, while English ships and soldiers spread her empire across the seas.

Maria Teresa spent years fighting across Europe in the war of Austrian secession.

And then when that was over, what did she do? She plunged right back into conflict with Prussia during the Seven Years War.

Isabelle I of Castile finished the reconquista by conquering Grenada and ending Muslim rule in Spain.

Empress Wuzitan expanded Chinese power through campaigns into Korea and Central Asia.

Queen Rana Velina, the first fought European powers to hold Madagascar under her rule.

Armies march, no matter which gender is in power.

By extension, there have also been a large number of weak men in power.

James Buchanan watched the Union fracture and treated as a problem to be managed rather than a crisis to confront.

He insisted that he lacked the authority to act, even as states prepared to leave the Union.

With a time stronger leadership arrived, well, the lines had hardened and war was unavoidable.

His restraint did not preserve peace. No, it allowed the situation to deteriorate beyond recovery and made the civil war unavoidable.

Zarniclus II held absolute power and exercised it very poorly.

He wavered between repression and concession, satisfying nobody and stabilizing absolutely nothing.

As Russia collapsed under the strain of war, he drifted completely away from reality and, well, authority without resolve doesn't really hold the state together.

It accelerates the collapse, in this case leading to a disastrous experiment with communism in the Soviet Union.

Jimmy Carter failed to support the Shah of Iran, leading to the rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

When students led by the Ayatollah Khmerni captured the American Embassy, the Iranian hostage crisis dragged on for 444 days.

I was alive. I remember it. It was embarrassing. It wasn't just horrific. It was embarrassing.

The failed rescue attempt reinforced the image of American weakness that had been forged in Vietnam.

Now, the Shah was not just having problems because the Ayatollah Khmerni.

He allowed Iran to become economically very. He gave them a lot of economic freedom, what he didn't do was give them a lot of political freedom.

What Carter should have done is kept the Shah in power, but he should have ensured the Shah understood that he needed to provide his people more political freedom by starting a transition to a constitutional monarchy.

That's what Carter should have done. It didn't do that. He was weak.

Fact is adversaries don't need overwhelming strength. What they need is to believe that there will be no response.

Once that belief takes hold, pressure follows. Then boundaries are tested, then they're crossed.

Only when they meet resistance, as Iran is meeting right now, do they stop?

Masculinity may blame it for the violence, but it is disciplined strength that prevents violence.

And disciplined strength will prevent war regardless of the gender wielding it.

The same traits that make men capable of war, those are the traits that also defer war to turn war. Strength through or peace through strength.

Remove those traits or teach men to distrust those traits. What do you get? Is it peace? No, you get instability waiting for someone stronger to exploit it.

I usually start contentious discussions with definitions, but in this case, if I define masculinity precisely, I'm going to invite debate over the definition.

And this isn't about semantics. So for once, I'm not actually going to provide a stronger definitive definition.

Well, I will say that masculinity includes strength and aggression. And of course, those things can be toxic.

But this is precisely why these traits need to be controlled rather than suppressed.

Masculinity becomes toxic when it is mixed with isolation or meaningless or the breakdown of family structure or the loss of responsibility or something like that.

Toxic masculinity, basically, it's masculinity when it's still immature. Toxic, of course, means poisonous or contaminated.

Something toxic is dangerous by nature. And we say the natural tendencies inherent to masculinity are toxic.

Well, we do a great deal of harm to adolescent boys. This for casts the traits that build soldiers, sailors, explorers, and fathers into social hazards to eliminate.

You know, for what proof that masculinity is toxic, well, we're told that the vast majority of violent criminals are male.

As are the vast majority of mass shooters. And that's actually true. Men commit the vast majority of violent crime.

What does that fact really mean? What does it tell us? You see, there are differences between genders in a number of different traits.

Men measure higher on aggression, whereas women measure higher on agreeableness.

The differences are trivial in the middle of the bell curves, but violent criminals are not in the middle of the bell curves.

Violent criminals are outliers. And because men score higher on aggression, well, most of the outliers are, of course, men.

So too, by the way, are most of the heroes and for the exact same reason.

There are other differences as well. Men and women have the same average intelligence levels. The bell curves rubble on top of each other.

But the bell curve for men is wider than the one for women, such that most of the world's geniuses and idiots are both men.

We're talking outliers. So when you get past the bell curve into the real tail of it, outside of three standard deviations from the mean, that's where your idiots and geniuses are, they're almost all men.

Until very recently, incidentally, we lived in the world ripe with ways to kill us. A life was frequently dangerous and short.

The notion that men were oppressive to women, it simply wasn't true. Men and women had to work together to protect their families and to survive.

Men built the cities, they worked the fields, they fought the wars. Women, they faced dangers, but they faced different dangers.

Pregnancy slowed movement and drain strength and dying during childbirth was not uncommon. A mother with an infant, she couldn't run for miles.

She couldn't swing an axe all day and she certainly wasn't going to march into fight.

The simple truth is that one man can impregnate multiple women but can bear no children. Societies need children to survive.

So biology made men not superior. No, biology made men expendable and we evolved around that fact.

This affected not only biology but also culture. Look at the Titanic, women and children first. We protect the women not because we're superior to women but because women are sociologically biologically, they are more important than men. It's that simple.

Now the modern world is different. Now we live in climate controlled houses. We have power tools, hydraulics, robotics and other forms of automation that have replaced most back breaking labor.

Women today are just as capable as men in most fields and perhaps better in some and perhaps more importantly women have every right of course to pursue whatever careers they want and women have now been in the workforce in large numbers for over 50 years.

Now perhaps over time men and women will evolve to be more biologically alike in terms of strength and what have you, agreeableness and aggression and things like that.

But let's be real. You cannot erase millions of years of evolution in a single lifetime and nor is masculine detoxic. Aggression is a fuel. Aggression sits in the body. The same way heat sits in a furnace.

Power waits for an outlet, then it explodes. Suppression aggression, it doesn't make it go away. Aggression either will find a positive outlet or it finds a negative one. For most of human history we understood this and we built structures to discipline men's natural aggression.

The boys as boys grew up, we built the discipline, you know warrior codes, they demand restraint, their honor systems, they punished, they punished both cowardice and cruelty. You think of like chivalry for example. Brotherhoods, bound men to one another slits strength serves the group instead of the ego.

So fathers, they hand discipline down to their sons. This is why having a father in the household is so important. This is why boys raised without fathers are so much more apt to become criminals.

Competitive sports are another way to channel aggression to something positive. Sports take male volatility and they force it through discipline.

The wild edge stays sharp, but it does not cut everything around it. Competitive sports they used to be considered so important in guiding boys into men that military academies used to require students to participate in at least one.

And if you're my age, I almost guarantee you probably played AYSO when you were growing up and you probably played little baseball. Almost everybody back in the day did.

That discipline shows up both on and off the field. Men who learned to control aggression, what they become reliable under pressure, when something breaks controlled aggression is what turns chaos into action.

A man who has learned to master himself, well he can focus, endure and finish what he starts. He can carry weight without complaint, he can solve problems without panic, and he can keep going when others might quit.

People don't follow the loudest man in the room and they don't follow the most emotional. No, the person people follow is the one who does not lose control when things get tough.

This discipline makes strength predictable and predictable strength is something other people can rely on. The same traits that cause harm when left unchecked, well those are the traits that protect others.

People follow strength. It doesn't matter where it comes from somebody like Chesty Polar, Bob Dole, another World War II hero, or Margaret Thatcher. It's not about gender, it's about leadership, and women should want men who are competent, they make better spouses.

Control man, he doesn't look for fights, but he does not run from them either. He stands between danger and the people who cannot stand for themselves. A weak man on the other hand, well he retreats and becomes a coward in a strong man challenge, and he backs down.

Men being physically stronger than women, well this makes them poor partners. That's just I'm sorry if you're a weak man, you're a poor partner, I don't know what else to tell you, toughen up.

Discipline of course builds a strength, a man who knows he can act, he chooses when to do so and when not to. Discipline also builds brotherhoods.

Men who are tested together, they form bonds that endure. When Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks made a mini-series about paratroopers in World War II, they didn't call it men who fight. No they called it band of brothers.

When I was in the 82nd Engineer Battalion in Bamberg, Germany after I got out of the Marine Corps and went in the army, I was reserved in the Marine Corps.

I felt the same thing. My platoon mates, they weren't just co-workers, we lived and suffered together. And being overseas in a nation that spoke another language, we really were like brothers.

Was I a man before I joined the military? Well I guess I don't really know, but I certainly was eight years later when I got out.

To this day I still believe in chivalry. I open the door for my wife, I carry things for, I don't do that out of dominance, I do it out of respect. I would not only die for my wife, but I would if necessary kill for her.

The simple truth is that her life is more important than mine. Do I consider myself expendable? No, I'd like to live, but my wife is more important if one of us must die, it will be me.

Now no one marked the moment that masculinity supposedly became toxic, but as the idea of toxic masculinity grew, the ideals that had previously guided and shaped men started to disappear.

Boys spent more time in classrooms and less time in garages on job sites or in fields. They still had the energy and the urge to compete, and they still wanted to test themselves, but they were told that their natural instincts were a fault they needed to learn to suppress.

Well, I was a divorced father living in a small apartment when I got a German short here pointer named Cody.

GSP's, they're loyal affectionate dogs, they're often called Velcro dogs, but they are hyper active, they have a tremendous amount of energy, and if they do not get enough exercise, they can become destructive.

And the sounds like a new topic, it's not, I'll break this in. Cody chewed up a couch, a lazy boy, a number of blankets and about a half dozen shoes.

He would try to sneak out whenever someone opened a door and would run, usually chasing deer, he'd run like the wind, he'd run for hours before finally trotting home link nothing was wrong.

I once had a friend babysit Cody, she watched him for a week, afterward she told me she wanted to get a dog, but she said she was going to research breeds to make sure she got a dog that was nothing like Cody.

She loved his intelligence and his affection, but she could not handle the energy.

Now Cody calmed down quite a bit once I remarried and bought a house with a big enough yard from the running.

My wife and I, Cody unfortunately passed away a few years ago, my wife and I now have a GSP named Sherlock, Sherlock is bigger and faster than Cody was.

Cody was kind of vote, they call a pocket pointer, Sherlock is not. Sherlock however is an absolute gentleman, he gets all the exercise he needs.

We don't have his grass in our backyard because he runs so much, it's almost all dirt.

What happened here is that when I suppress Cody's natural instincts, like in finding him to a small apartment, well he spent his energy in destructive ways.

Guess what, the same is true with people.

If you suppress natural instincts, they don't go away, they become destructive.

So when young men suppress their masculinity, they still have the strength and aggression of other boys, what they lack is the control.

Competence must come before authority, a man given authority without hurting it does not understand its weight and he will not use it correctly, he'll use it poorly.

Boys who are never given responsibility, they do not become men who seek responsibility.

They learn to delay, defer and avoid.

When responsibility finally arrives, it crushes them.

A lack of responsibility then leads to a lack of meaning and people who lack meaning are not emotionally stable.

This does not just impact the individual, individual problems will always exist.

Some people always have mental health issues and some people it is broken.

But when a lack of responsibility scales upward, it impacts the entire civilization it is a part of.

Status must be earned, hand it out and it means nothing.

Earn it though and it creates standards men rise to.

Failure has to have consequences.

Without consequences there is no feedback and without feedback there is no growth.

The simple truth is that a man who never pays for his mistakes also never learns from him from those mistakes.

Back in my day, boys didn't hit girls and on the rare occasions when a boy did hit a girl another generally bigger boy beat the hell out of them.

It wasn't just women.

The vulnerable were often protected by the strong that has always been one of the defining responsibilities of men.

Strength exists in part to stand up for those who cannot defend themselves.

I was a bit of a wimp when I was young and it was another boy standing up for me that embarrassed me enough to get me to toughen myself up.

For a decade or so I went the other way and started fights and never tried to intimidate me.

Very quick to throw a punch once upon a time.

Strength with wisdom that's somewhere in the middle but even without wisdom it's better to fight a bully than to back down to one.

And none of this is new.

These are the same principles that have shaped men for millennia.

What is new is the idea that those principles are somehow harmful.

They are not.

You do not reduce danger by attacking masculinity.

You reduce danger by maturing it.

Calling masculinity toxic does not solve the problem.

It only makes it worse.

Masculinity is the mechanism through which male traits are shaped and directed.

When you label that mechanism as harmful, you don't eliminate the traits.

You remove the structure that gives them purpose.

Boys must not only be allowed to become men, they must actually become men.

A world full of adult boys, I'm sorry, it would not be a very pleasant place to live.

Now Lewis, Burwell, or Chesty Polar, he didn't lack aggression or strength.

He mastered and directed them.

The same was true with Jimmy Stewart, Audrey Murphy, Bob Dull and millions upon millions of other men.

Slavery did not end in this world because women decided it should.

No, it ended because men killed other men to force the practice to end.

Every evil ended through war is ended by men.

The same traits that produce the most dangerous men of course they also produce the men of society depends on to survive.

The difference is not the traits, it's how they are used.

And we don't call it masculine when it's weak.

We call it that only when those traits are used with discipline and honor.

We call it masculine and react like Chesty Polar and move toward danger rather than away from it.

Our society does not struggle because it is too much masculinity.

No, ladies and gentlemen, it struggles because it is too little.

And just like that, we are once again at a time on our 100th episode.

Thank you for sharing it with me.

But we got through everything I wanted to cover.

I ran, we got through supposedly toxic masculinity as always, thank you for tuning in.

Please tell others who might be interested in cutting through the chaos to listen in either on Saturday and Sunday at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

or on Sunday at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time or on podcast whenever they have time.

And we will see you next week at the same time in place.

We will once again be time to get involved and to get loud on America out loud.