U.S. Policy is Radicalizing the Middle East / Joe Kent & Lt Col Daniel Davis

0:00Any time a nation goes to war, it's always vital to make sure you go to war for the right reasons and that you have counted the cost before you start. But it's also important once you have begun to make sure that you don't make matters worse for yourself and not to pay so much attention to what's happening at the end of your nose that you lose sight of potential blowback, things that could actually circle back around to harm you even more if you don't conduct the war the right way. There is already some of that happening in this war but not enough focus has been paid on it and we want to talk about that in a lot more detail today because there are some growing risk to our country that very few are even aware of. We're going to solve that today. We have nobody better to do that with today. Back with Joe Kent, former director of National Counterterrorism Center and you say also what is it? An 11 time combat vet Joe Kent. Welcome back to the show. Great to be with you, man. Thanks. You know a thing or two about combat and a thing or two about the Middle East here.

1:01That's one of the reasons I'm really grateful to have you on here. You talk about some of the cost of war and some of the blowback. Some of the things that are at the proximate are bad enough. Just a handful right off the top, 18 American dead so far, 840 plus aircraft damage are destroyed. Actually that number is now higher, closer to 50. 20 bases have been damaged are destroyed. 200 billion dollars in costs. We've lost control of the straight or hormones and we've actually lost control of the war itself. It's now somebody else's to control. That's all bad enough. Then you can add in the personal cost with the, we've had some real problems with strains in the force. The troops aboard the Abraham Lincoln to a lot of fanfare. We're in out the force because we've been there so long, both our Navy and our Air Force, et cetera. Now then we have this issue though with the Houthis. It's not just now the straight or hormones get nopened. Now it's not even just the bottle of Monda but now it's on the ground about what's happening

2:02with the Houthis actually taking territory as this article here shows. The insallah, Houthis have effectively taken over a six districts in Al-Muha and in the province of Hudaida and that stretches from the Hays in southern Saudi Arabia all the way down to Babel Mendeb and even the island of Mayoon. So it's a significant advancement. It's a significant strategic win for the insallah, Houthis as you heard from YAHYEAH, they have full control of Babel Mendeb, they have full control of any ships, any traffic that goes through the Red Sea. You know, Joe, if we just look at that one thing right there, that one thing that they have basically now complete control of the Babel Mendeb, they've taken at least three major cities, apparently they're at risk of doing a lot more. They've taken that island that there is at the choke point of the straight, given them the effective control over that. I mean, what do you make of this? I mean, this is a, we haven't really covered this a lot in the US because America hasn't

3:08been directly involved in Yemen except for last year when we attempted to knock out the Houthis and we failed to do so because we failed to assess the Houthis grasp on key terrain in Yemen, in particular, the mountains. And as we're learning in Iran, mountains and terrain really, really matter. This is very bad because this is another key choke point. It's bad enough that we really lost control of the Straits of Formues. Now the Babel Mendeb and this has been like one of the pressure relief release valves from the frustration we've had with the Babel Mendeb, a lot of traffic was going to flow east to the west through Saudi Arabia, knock out or get out at that Port Nyanub and then proceed to the north up to the Sinai. Now the Houthis have been able to basically reach whatever they want to reach in the Red Sea with their missiles and with their drones. They've been able to successfully target the Saudis, but this is taking it to a whole next level because now the Houthis have expanded to the south where they're historically not from. We can get into all that because I think it's important.

4:09But now they actually physically control by controlling these key islands that are right there in the center of the Babel Mendeb, which is incredibly narrow. They physically control the Babel Mendeb. And so we're going to have to deal with the Houthis once more and we should realize based on our experience with them in 2025 that there's not a military solution, which is why I do think you're seeing the President kind of pause and hesitate to get involved in this fight. There's a call yesterday between him and the Saudis according to some media reports. And I think Trump said we're more or less going to stay out of this, which I think is the right maneuver. However, we can get into all this because I think it's important, the amount of popular support now that the Houthis and those who are aligned with the Iranians and the IRGC have, it's something that we should really be taking note of. Yeah, we are definitely going to get into that here. We have a bit of breaking news that there was that report you mentioned yesterday. That Mohammed bin Salman personally apparently talked to Trump twice asking for military help.

5:11He said, no, but now then we have right now, US Central Commander Admiral Cooper is in Saudi Arabia right now. And it has to do with the Houthis here. So one can only hope that he's just given some suggestions and advice and not setting the stage for using American military power. What concerns do you have? Well, no, just even if I was for us getting involved in Yemen right now, I would be concerned that we just don't have the resources. We're having hard enough time, you know, successfully defending our fleet that's there in the Straits of Formuz in that area. We can't have those ships go into port in Bahrain or anywhere in the Gulf like they historically have. So our logistics supply line has been hampered, our interceptors, you know, even if our interceptors, there wasn't an issue with how many we have remaining. We would still need a logistical supply train to get those interceptors to our ships and to our bases. And those logistical supply trains have been heavily hit. Those bases have been hit. So just in terms of how thin we're spread right now, I'd be very concerned.

6:17I'm sure we're over there trying to like reassure the Saudis that hey, we've still got your back. But like really the Saudis have got to be thinking, okay, what does that mean? Even if the Americans mean to come help us out here, they tried in 2025. We couldn't make it happen. And now they're actually under attack by the Houthis. So I kind of think the Saudis, I'm just guessing I don't know, but I'm assuming the Saudis might be delivering a message to us that says, hey, we're going to have to start cutting some deals here and you're probably not going to like that. Because look, the Houthis, you can say all kinds of bad things about them. They're aligned with Iran and they've shut down shipping, etc. They're not unreasonable. Everything in Yemen is very tribal in nature. And cutting deals is literally a part of the tribal culture there. And the Saudis know this better than we do. So I would imagine that's kind of what the Saudis are telling Admiral Cooper right now. Like, hey, we're going to cut some deals that you guys aren't going to like, but because you can't come bail us out of this and you couldn't protect us from the Iranian onslaught and you can't protect our critical energy infrastructure. We're going to cut some deals and you're probably not going to like it.

7:19Yeah, let's take a look at why Saudi Arabia may be saying that. Let me show you what Secretary Warpede Hexeth to said to much fanfare in March of last year about how we can handle the Houthis. We'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. Things 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.

8:20Dozens 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. We will hold you accountable as the sponsor of this proxy and I echo his statement. We will not be nice about it. Turned out, they are not either. And if we were trying to reestablish deterrence, we didn't. And it was just six weeks later that we ended that because we said, oh, you know what, this is really cost and a lot. And in fact, the New York Times put a number on it with both of what Trump tried to do and the Biden administration before it was about $7 billion that we wasted. And then we're tactically ineffective. And then we finally just quit trying. That message was received. If you talk about some blowback, what were the ramifications of Houthis seeing that they could stand up to the United States and the Red Sea? I mean, put them in the driver's seat.

9:21And they kind of knew they had been in the driver's seat for quite some time. And I think we overestimated the capabilities of American air power. And this is going to sound real basic. But I was, you know, in the administration at the time. And I know we didn't take this into account. We didn't fully appreciate it. Terrain, when you look at where Yemen is on a map, you think, oh, that's the Arabian Peninsula. It's a desert. Yemen, once you get pretty much north of Tias there on the lower left-hand corner of your map, you really start gaining an elevation. And Sinai, the stronghold of the Houthis, Sada, that northern area where they've put a lot of their key air defenses and ballistic missile systems where they've spread them out like the Iranians, it is incredibly mountainous. I served for about eight months in Sinai Yemen before the revolution when the old government was in charge. So we lived in Sinai and we trained the Yemeni Special Forces at their compound. Now itself, people can look it up. But I think it's around, you know, 75,000 or 75,500 feet or so. And then our Special Forces compound was at 10,000 feet. And Sada even has even more elevation.

10:22So we thought that we were going to be able to go in there and bomb the Houthis into submission, kind of thinking that, you know, Yemen looked like Iraq or looked like Saudi Arabia and it was flat and we could just dominate that terrain. That terrain is incredibly hard to dominate. And this is why the Houthis or the northern tribal alliances that have always been formed up there, they have always been very, very hard for any central government to dislodge. And they have always used their control of that terrain to their advantage. And with the proliferation of technology from Iran with drones and missiles, they've just been able to extend that now to the Red Sea, to Saudi Arabia, and in many cases to Israel as well. So the Houthis are very, they're notoriously brave and courageous and just tough fighters. But now they have this technological capability as well. So our campaign really underestimated that, but then proved to the Houthis that they could take down most of our, you know, ability to get overhead and to get after them.

11:23And then they continue to deter us from coming into the Red Sea. So again, this is something else that we should have factored in when we started this war, what the Houthis would do. And I know from where I was in the intelligence community that that was included in the assessment, that was brought to keep policymakers that, hey, this could happen. But again, we believe that because it didn't happen during the 12th day of war, that it just never could happen. And you know, everything else would be easy with Iran and, you know, Yemen wouldn't play in. But here we are. We just didn't look at the second and third order effects, very basic military stuff, very basic intelligence types of procedures that just simply weren't followed and it's gotten us into this disaster. And that's always very disheartening to hear. And that's that echoes things that you have told us in previous times when you've been on our show about the warnings that were given prior to the Iran War. Well, obviously those things have been ignored here too. Basic military fundamentals that seems to keep popping up. You have just posted yesterday on X, I thought a really good talk here about looking at the

12:26blowback effects. I wanted to look at some of those things today because some of the key things and I did not realize you had been there before, which makes us even more poignant. But this one is one of the first things that got to my attention here. You say the Houthis ability to capture key terrain and strategic ports along the Red Sea speaks not just to their military capabilities, but also to their ability to gain support from the tribes far from their traditional Houthis strongholds in northern Yemen. This is very significant. These tribes are predominantly Sunni while the Houthis are Zaidi Shias. And how that works because it would seem like it would work the exact opposite that they would be at cross purposes. But you say that that is somehow that they're working together. How is that? Well, I mean, this just speaks to how our war and everything that we've supported with the Israelis, the way that we attacked Iran with the Israelis have done in Gaza, how that has really made a lot of former rivals kind of unite. Basically, it's created this factor where you have people that are aligned with the IRGC

13:28where you have Hezbollah, where you have the Houthis, you have the Iraqi PMF and all those groups that are now basically seen as being the defenders of the region. They're seen as being the ones who can actually push back America and push back the Israelis. That's really, really powerful. And in Yemen, everything is tribal. There's always been the Houthis are the biggest tribe up in the Sada area. And there's always been other tribes that have aligned with them. But then defected back and forth. If you look at the old president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, he was against the Houthis when I was there in the 2010s. But then he actually defected and was part of the Houthi coalition. And then he, you know, he was in northern as well. But then he defected once again, we think when he was killed from the Houthis. And now his nephew, Tarak Saleh, is leading some of the Yemeni government resistance forces against the Houthis. So everything is always back and forth up north and in Sinah. But then there's a whole different tribal dynamic. Once you start getting south of Sinah, where you start getting more into southern Yemen,

14:29more traditional Arab tribes and especially out east. But we're seeing these groups that had formerly been rivals. And they're not religious rivals in the way you have in Iraq. The Zadi Shiaism is much closer to what the Sunnis practice. And people can look that up. It's not as sharp of a contrast as there is with the 12-she'as you find in Iraq. And then I ran. And this is another reason why the Houthis aren't naturally aligned and naturally connected with the Iranians in the way like the Iraqis are. They don't share a border. They're not all 12-vers. They don't share holy sites other than the fact that the Zadi Shia's revere, you know, Najaf and Karbala as well. But to a lesser degree. And so seeing the tribal alliance that is the Houthis, be able to absorb a lot of these Sunni tribes into their movement, especially in Hudaida, South, especially Red Sea when you get down to Namoqa and down in these areas that are pushing up onto Aiden. It is two very different cultures. As a matter of fact, prior to, I believe, 1988, it was two separate countries. It was Northern Yemen and Southern Yemen. It was really actually like kind of East and West.

15:31But they were two different countries. And so now seeing these groups that are along the Red Sea, they're not just surrendering from my view. It doesn't look like they're just surrendering and capitulating to the Houthis because the Houthis have a superior military force. As a matter of fact, it seems like a lot of these different tribes to the South are actually saying, you know what? We're going to go, we want to be with the Houthis because the Houthis are standing up against, you know, the Americans are standing up against the Israelis. And a lot of this, too, is just a basic human nature, but also Arab tribal culture. They like to back a strong horse. And right now, because of the way the war is going with us in the Persian Gulf, we don't look like the strong horse anymore in Nida. Do the Saudis, Nida, the Israelis. Actually, the axis of resistance is looking very strong. And that's why you're seeing them gain a lot of this tea terrain outside their traditional boundaries. Yeah, and that's actually the very next thing I wanted to ask you about because it's, it's, it again seems counterintuitive. It says you wrote now, however, the Houthis are fighting alongside the IRGC as a member of the axis of resistance against the Saudis, the US, and Israel.

16:32This has given them far more popular support than a standard tribal deal or military victory ever could, which by itself is like, wow, that's a big issue. Not because humanity support or particularly care about the Iranians, but because especially during times of conflict, we go travel. It's human nature. So why would that be that they're not particularly care about the Iranians? Because what we've all been led to believe is that the, the Houthis are just a proxy and extension of the IRGC, and they basically tell them what to do. What do you say? Well, we have a heck of a way of making self-fulfilling prophecies, don't we? We will scream and say our hands like five minutes away from getting a nuclear bomb. They're going to get a nuclear bomb. And even though for over a decade, they had a father who had prevented them from getting a bomb. Now we've basically forced them into a position. And based on what we're the way we're treating North Korea, we're creating a scenario where they're going to get a bomb. It's almost the same thing here. For years, the former leader of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who eventually defected to the Houthis, said that the Houthis were the number one threat.

17:32And he meant they were the number one threat to him. He was taking our money that we were giving him to go after Al Qaeda that was in Yemen. But Al Qaeda in Yemen really wasn't much of a threat to him. It was actually kind of a cash cow for him because of us. He was taking that money. He was using it to fight the Houthis in order to continue his dominance over Yemen. The Iranians exploited this in solid for years. We're like, these guys are going to be aligned with the Iranians because there's AD Shea's even though he was a Zadishia. There wasn't that close blood linkage like you have in Iraq, like you have in Hezbollah. There was none of that. But then we started backing the Saudis because the Saudis wanted the Houthis off of their border because that overflow border area there between Saudi and Yemen. There's also some shea's in there on the Saudi side as well, who are a threat to the Saudi government. So the Saudis via us and with our funding and our backing, they went in and waged a very brutal proxy war against the Houthis, resulted in a lot of blockade shortages, starvation tactics inside Yemen,

18:33shortages of critical medicines and all that. And so that really turned a lot of the people against Saudi and against us. And then this iteration of the war, when we kick it off by killing the Supreme Leader, we kick it off by bombing the girls school. Already Gaza, those images coming out of Gaza, was really, really powerful for the Houthis because the Houthis really early on in the Gaza conflict, sided with Hamas and sided with the people of Gaza and started firing ballistic missiles at the Israelis. So they had already kind of taken a lot of the moral high ground there. But now the combination of Gaza, the image is coming out of Gaza for the last couple of years, the decades of the blockade that the Saudis and us have had against Yemen, occasional on-off bombing campaigns, combined with the war in Iran. Now you have basically the Houthis emerging and being able to unify people they normally wouldn't have unified with under this banner of Ansar al-Ala, the Houthis and now they're taking over the Bab al-Mandib in places where they really shouldn't have much reach.

19:34You know, one of the other things that there's some similarities between what's happening right now and what happened in Iraq in 2014 when the Iraqi Security Force was basically melted before ISIS at that time. A lot of, some are pardon me, a lot of mistakes that we've made, many of which the whole reason ISIS ever came to be is because how we misplaced al-Qaeda in Iraq in the years before that. And you described kind of a similar dynamic here, and maybe not exactly the same, but it kind of resonated to me. You wrote that the Yemenis have witnessed what the U.S. back's Saudi Houthis have done to their people and what the U.S. back, Israelis have done to the people of Gaza and see how the Iranians are fighting back after the U.S. Israel attacked them. Now they're uniting against the common enemy to fight back. The U.S. is war in Iran and simultaneously backing up Saudis war in Yemen along with our government support for Israel's genocide in Gaza have given the Iranian Islamic revolution a massive boost that reaches far beyond the Iran.

20:35So now it's like if what we had been doing in these other places was helping Yemen, now then what we've been doing with Yemen and the Saudi Arabia is actually helping now turn back in its blowback and helping Iran, which is just compounding our bigger problem. Yeah, 100% again, like self-fulfilling prophecy blowback, however you want to look at it. I mean, this is what we have a horrible habit of doing because of our support for Israel and just never raining in the Israelis and saying you can't go, you know, crazy in Gaza and committed genocide, just giving them basically that blank check to do so. And then us being suckered into the war in Iran, we've created this scenario now where the Iranians are merging as a unifying force and kind of like I as the good guys. I'm not supporting the Iranians here, but I'm just saying they're winning that messaging war and inside Yemen because of our support for the Saudis and what the Saudis have done to the Houthis. And again, like the Houthis aren't unreasonable. They did after we had our little spat with them last year,

21:38they agreed to basically stop shooting, you know. And then with the Saudis, they had had a relatively tentative cease-fire since 2023, but the Saudis were feeling emboldened and I think they thought that maybe we are going to follow their lead or they were trying to get ahead of the Houthis. I'm not sure what the rationale was there, but after the funeral of the Supreme Leader and when the Yemeni delegation tried to return from Iran, they decided to bomb the airport in Sinan. That kicked off this last round of escalation. And they tried to motivate the forces that have been coupled together by the Emirates, by the Saudis, and sort of by us. This government in exile right now of former Yemeni government officials that's backed by the Saudis, it's based out of Saudi. We're trying to back it. The Emirates had tried to put together this group called the Giants Brigade and a few others. And unfortunately, a lot of those guys have ties to people that are actually a threat to us, like Al Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula, because they were from that region where AQAP was, had a stronghold and safe haven.

22:38And so now we had to cobble them together to go against the Houthis. Now they were cobbled together, they were supported by foreigners, even though they had all the fancy gear, they weren't able to put up a real fight versus the people that actually had popular support, which was the Houthis. And this is exactly the scenario that you described in Iraq when ISIS came back. We had cobbled together that Iraqi army after we basically disbanded Sinams, Iraqi army. It took us several years and nearly 5,000 dead Americans and several trillion dollars to stay in the Iraqi army up. But the first time it faced a real threat, it crumbled because it wasn't real. It wasn't organic. And unfortunately, the thing that ended up saving Iraq was a Fathwa biya'zul-Azostani that mobilized the Shia militia against the Sunnis. So anytime you try and cobble together something or build it and we try and force it from the outside, it ends up crumbling. And that's exactly what's happening to the anti-Kuthi coalition right now and the Houthis are emerging stronger as a result. Now you also wrote in that, in your ex-post there,

23:40that you have some concerns that this same kind of dynamic it happened not just in Yemen, but also in Bahrain and I think Lebanon. So what do you see there that concerns you? Well there's Shia populations there. There's already existing resistance groups. Bahrain's a big concern because the Bahrainian Shia population, if they see that Saudi is weak or if the Iranians hit the bridge, the causeway that connects Saudi to Bahrain and the Saudis can't get in there to reinforce the royal family, there could easily be a Shia uprising. This happened during the Arab Spring. There was a massive Shia uprising. The only thing that saved the Bahrainian royal family was the Saudis cruising across the causeway to save them. The Saudis got a lot going on right now. There was just a report this morning that said that one of those fuel stations that was hit along the East West pipeline that potentially that actually didn't come from the Houthis that came from Iraq. So that means that's the Iraqi resistance groups, probably Kataba, Huzbullah, Harakah, and Nijaba. One of those organizations, Iraq is on a tight timeline right now.

24:40They're supposed to be disarming all of the rogue groups, all the Iranian-aligned groups. It's pretty murky in there because, again, that entity that was stood up to defeat ISIS after the army that we funded and trained crumbled the popular mobilization forces, they are now part of the Iraqi MOD. And by and large, these are just patriotic Iraqis who want to defend their country. They joined because of the counter-ISIS fight. They've been absorbed in the MOD. But also a lot of these groups that actually do answer to Iran have been included as part of the popular mobilization forces. We've given the Iraqi government, I think, a timeline of September 30th to disarm all of them that does not seem to be going very well because you still, potentially, if those reports are accurate, you have Iraqi groups that are now shooting from Iraq into Saudi, hitting those key pipelines. Obviously, some degree of coordination with the Houthis, the Houthis have sent some of their fighters and missile technicians into Iraq in the past before to get to share training and to share TTPs, tactics and techniques and procedures

25:41with the Iraqi militia groups back and forth. So that's a major concern. Hezbollah is obviously a major concern as well. They see that the Israelis might get engaged once again in Iran. They could use that. But also, they see that the Israelis are going really hard in Lebanon and that puts us in a precarious situation. But also, this would be a time where Hezbollah would probably receive a lot of popular support. Something else that's going to give Hezbollah, I think, a decent amount of popular support is fear of the Shara government up in Syria because of Shara's past. He's a former al-Qaeda guy. The last time that al-Qaeda and ISIS were beating on the doorsteps of Lebanon, it was Lebanese Hezbollah that stood in the breach and actually defended the Lebanese people, which is why you do see some Lebanese people still defend Hezbollah because of that. So the situation, I think, couldn't be more dangerous right now. And again, our actions are really emboldening a lot of these different groups and could provide Iran opportunities to apply additional pressure on fronts that we are just not anticipating. Now, one of the things that surprised me about a month ago,

26:42and it's been kind of quiet since then, but I wonder if you can kind of give us an update on it. When the US joined Saudi Arabia to attack some of these PMFs in Iraq, and that surprised me that Saudi Arabia would want to take on somebody in Iraq. At the same time, they're taken on the Houthis down in Yemen. That seems like they're trying to take on maybe more than they can chew. Well, yeah, definitely for the Saudis. But also just a bad play on our part. I mean, look, we're trying to convince the Iraqis, and look, the Iraqi government is controlled by, you know, Bishias. It's controlled by a lot of them who have very close ties with Iran. But they're pragmatists. Most of them are actually pragmatists. The ones that are in power right now, like the border corps is in power. And they want to be able to thread the needle between us and Iran. And so these guys who want to control, who want to keep control of the Iraqi government and keep good relations with us, they will at least attempt to work with us to disarm some of these militias. But now the second that we join with the Saudis,

27:42the Sunnis, who they believe, who a lot of them believe back, Al Qaeda, back to ISIS, in an air strike against PMF locations, that just has the blowback effect of supporting the rogue elements of the Iraqi government who are now going to say, see, it's the Americans and the Wahhabi Saudis who are here to bomb us. We should be using diplomacy. We should be a little more shrewd here and saying, hey, if you guys can't go disarm Qatab al-Hazbullah, Harakat, and New Jaba, who has the capability of shooting from your territory into other sovereign countries, then that's going to change the way that we behave towards you guys economically. We'll cut off some aid. We'll cut off some of the military assistance that we're giving you. We have a lot of leverage right there. So why we would opt automatically just to start blindly swinging with the Saudis inside of Iraq, to me, that seems like we just didn't think that through and we didn't think about all the possible blowback that could have. And it really puts some of the key shea leaders in Iraq that we need on our side. It puts them in a very precarious situation because then they have to go to their people to the shea's,

28:43who stood in the breach against ISIS and who were very wary of us, very wary of the Saudis and say, hey, we need to keep supporting the Americans and the Saudis effort to disarm the guys who fought against ISIS force. It doesn't work. It puts them in a very, very difficult position. So I hope we don't do any more of that. And is there any concern? Because my understanding isn't you, Kretmy, if I'm wrong, that there's apparently over 100,000 members of the PMF in Iraq. And is there any concern that they may get mad enough and it could be enough anger and blowback because of our bad policies that they actually move into some of the other direction? Maybe a double involvement on the Saudi side. Is that even possible? It's possible. And we should definitely watch that. I personally think, and I was over in Iraq a couple of different times as the NCTC director, I really think the Iraqis want to move on past all the war, even the members of the PMF. I think they want to secure their borders. I think they want to secure their country.

29:44However, if this war keeps going the way it's going, we killed a Supreme Leader in Iran. Most of the Iraqis actually follow Ayatollah Sustani who's in Najaf. And so they weren't loyal necessarily to the former Supreme Leader of Iran. But if we keep doing the things that we're doing, the girls school, we keep having civilian casualties, and the Iraqis keep getting dragged into this. And if we force them to pick a side, I don't think that we should assume they're going to pick our side. Like they're not going to be our proxies. And I think they're proving that right now. So we should be very, very careful with this. We still want to be able to do business with Iraq. Iraq can be key partners. I think the Iraqi government in general wants to do the right thing. But we should be very wary. We should be very judicious when we say, we want all the Arabian back groups disarmed because the PMF, the bottom core, a lot of these different groups that have, I understand why veterans of OIF would say, but those guys were the bad guys 10, 15 years ago. That ship sailed. I mean, we gave these guys the government essentially.

30:46Through our bumblings before, we should make do with it. And we should really be judicious on the ones who won't cooperate, who are going to take orders directly from the IRGC and not partner with the Saudis to bomb them. But I do think there is some degree of concern. And if we keep pushing it, like after the elections, I'm concerned and we can get into all this, that there might be an effort by us or the Israelis to start going after civilian infrastructure inside Iran. Basically, just to double and triple the suffering of the Iranian people. If that happens, I don't think that we should think that will only happen in a vacuum in Iran. Again, when you start looking at where all the other shia populations are in the region between Iraq, between Bahrain, Yemen, Lebanon, etc. There could be major effects there that blowback on us as well. Yeah, and you've just already mentioned just in the handful of things we've talked about here about a number of things that we did, which it seemed like we didn't think this through or it seemed like we didn't actually have enough thought put into what we were doing

31:46or think about some of these blowbacks. And that kind of led me to one of the last things you wrote here is you said our policies and interventions abroad are encouraging radicalization, which internal inspire blowback terrorism here in the US. This is a destructive self-licking ice cream cone and it's going to get more people killed. President Trump and the advisors know better and they know that ending our foreign engagements now is the best interest of the American people. The question is whether they have the moral courage to do so. But do they know? I mean, are you giving them more credit than they deserve? I'm just not clear on that. What do you think? That's always the question, right? I mean, we have the institutional knowledge and I know there's still people on the inside who understand this. And again, but do we have the moral courage right now to reign all this kind of back in before it gets even worse? I'm concerned about the blowback terrorism that's going to come from what's taking place in Iran. At the early stages of the war, we already saw that guy with the Iran t-shirt going to a bar in Texas, he killed some people. When you look at all of the acts of terrorism

32:48that took place here in America over the last year, the vast majority of them cited our support for the Israelis and what was taking place in Gaza as part of their radicalization or why they were conducting the act of terrorism. Obviously, there are terrorists out there that pose a threat to us that we should hunt down and we should kill before they can get us. But we have to be judicious and make sure that those are the right people. If we just look historically at our actions in the Middle East, post 9-11, even pre 9-11, like, look, I'm not condoning al-Qaeda by any means, but we should listen to the manifestos and the reasons why al-Qaeda says they had said they attacked us on September 11th. They cited our occupation of the Holy Land. They cited our support for the Israelis. They cited the specific massacres that the Israelis had conducted again, like not condoning the attacks, obviously. We should hunt down members of al-Qaeda and kill them. But if we don't understand that our actions in the Middle East are going to lead to jihadi recruitment, recruitment for al-Qaeda for ISIS, and now, in this case, because of what we've done in Iran,

33:49the way that we radicalize so many people in Iran, I think there was before this war, I don't think that there was a lot of Iranians or Iranian-backed individuals seeking to come to America and kill us. But I think that's now an open question after this war and the way that we've conducted ourselves. So if we're not honest about the ramifications of our policies and our actions in the Middle East, we're going to stay in this cycle forever. Yeah, and obviously that's something that we saw when we were so happy when you were on the inside, where at least you had a voice in there. Let's hope there's still some that have survived you that are given the right kind of information here. Now, on the one positive side, there was yesterday on Fox News, Dan Hoffman, former CIA guy, actually was one of the few guys on the Fox News to these days that actually had a breath of fresh air was kind of honest about what we're not doing in Iran. We are delivering a massive amount of economic pressure on Iran through sanctions and a very effective blockade,

34:52but Iran does retain enough ballistic missiles dispersed around the country to cause harm in the region. And they're not hesitating about striking. Iran wants to demonstrate to their own proxy terrorists, not just the Houthis, but his Bala and Hamas as well, that they are still engaged in this fight against the United States. And they believe that by making the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea, the center of gravity, it gives them more leverage to deal with the United States. We are not talking about negotiating away Iran's ballistic missiles or dealing with their nuclear program or their support to proxy terrorists. All the reasons why President Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in his first administration. We're still talking about ensuring that traffic can flow freely through the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. Yeah, he's right. I mean, we're all these grand deost things that President Trump talked about at the beginning. They're not even on the table right now. We just want to get the dams straight opened up and now we want to keep the bubble mid up from closing up. Where do we go from here?

35:52No, we're good, unfortunately. I mean, my recommendation is the same that I've had since I resigned is that we just need to walk away. If President Trump could get our forces and even our ships out of there, the Iranians would kind of be in checkmate. They wouldn't be able to hit us and suck us back into the war. And then they would be left as essentially being the aggressors in the Straits of Hormuz. If they wanted to continue to charge a fee, etc. There would be a lot of negotiations back and forth that would have to happen, but they would be diplomatic. The Iranians wouldn't be able to restart the hot conflict again without being seen solely as the aggressors, which I think that they want to avoid in order to keep the high ground. And then also because they know that they're eventually going to have to come with some kind of deal with their neighbors. But the problem is the President seems unwilling to do this because he would be sort of admitting some kind of defeat. I personally think that President Trump is skilled enough politically that he could sell it, but I think right now President Trump is a captive of, basically his own ego and his own mind. He wants either a piece of paper where the Iranians give him everything that he wants

36:53or he wants a military victory. And but he also knows at the same time, like he's not going to get either one with the current tools he has as his disposal. The limited air strikes that we've done, they have been effective. The MOU that we signed, we immediately realized that, you know, the pressure from the Israeli lobby here in Washington, DC wouldn't tolerate that. So we let Marco Rubio go over and cut a side deal with the Israelis that left the Israelis inside Lebanon. We immediately encourage ships to violate the agreement that we had just, you know, actually signed our name to. So the MOU is out the window. So diplomacy is pretty much out the window. The Iranians are basically saying like, we don't want to talk unless you guys want to get back into the MOU because they know that we're not going to go back into that. So I'm worried that President Trump thinks he can kind of hold this status quo until after the elections. And then I'm afraid in order to end this, he's going to be talked into something that sounds good, like Operation Midnight Hammer on steroids where we just, you know, drop a tactical nuke on pickaxe mountain and say, there Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. But we always, we tend to always factor in that the enemy will just be reactive to us

37:55and that the enemy won't react. But that hasn't been the case for this entire war. But I'm afraid in his frustration, he'll be tempted to go for that, maybe even boots on the ground because we're running low on the more sophisticated munitions, boots on the ground to give us a foothold to let us shoot the more low tech stuff at the Iranians. Not a good plan, but, you know, maybe he'd be talked into that. But I think more realistically, though, the Israelis would come to him knowing he's frustrated and say, hey, let us do something. And then the Israelis will do something like employ a nuclear weapon or hit critical civilian infrastructure that increases the suffering that could even, you know, result in some kind of just chaotic situation inside Iran that's going to be sold as regime change, but really actually isn't full on regime change. It's just the Libya model on steroids. That's what I'm worried about right now. And it's all because President Trump simply won't just get up and walk away. When I think he has the political power to sell that to the American people and to pull a victory out of it once the military options are off the table. Well, and I share that concern because what President Trump said, this is a couple of days ago, when he was asked, you know,

38:57how long is this war going to go? And he says, well, I think it's going to be over right after the midterms. I would say that the attacks, of course, by us, yeah. And you're going to see a lot more. We've taken out about nine of their tankers, many of our guns, though. I think the war is going to end immediately after the election. I think the war will end immediately after the election because they can't hold out any longer. They're desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice week group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon. All they want is a nuclear weapon. And if they had a nuclear weapon, the whole world is in deep trouble. Yeah, but yeah, the world may be a deep trouble because of the Israeli nuclear weapons. We'll get to that in a second. But that, his words are tickled in my ear in a bad way when he said, yeah, it'll be over immediately

39:58after the elections, implying that he's going to do something. But I got to think, what could you do that's different than the 40 days we did before or the 13 days or the last few rounds we hit? I mean, what are you going to do militarily that you haven't succeeded at doing before that you think you're going to get it over right then? Do you think somebody's telling him that hey, a tactical nuke on pickaxe, that'll cause him to back down finally? I'm afraid so, yeah. I mean, when he says something definitive like that, I know like you obviously rule number one with Trump, you shouldn't take him literally because he'll just speak sometimes to control a narrative or whatever. But I do think in this case, we should be really wary of what he's saying. If he's saying it's going to be over right after the midterms, that means he is being told that there's something that he has that's going to be able to get him an outcome. He hasn't been able to achieve yet. So that's either going to be a bigger bomb or he's waiting till after the midterms to just walk away. I hope he's waiting for after the midterms just to walk away because some Republican strategists told him, you can't walk away yet. It'll look weak, whatever.

40:59And he's just going to walk away after the midterms, knowing that like, okay, we got beat. I'll just get our guys out. That's my best case. But best case hasn't worked out so far. So I am worried that he is being told, hey, if you just do one big strike. And this was the logic behind Midnight Hammer. It was like, hey, take their ability to enrich off the table. And then we don't have to deal with this issue anymore. And again, this is another reason why the Israelis love bringing up the issue of the nuclear enrichment, the nuclear dust, nuclear dust, nuclear that because it basically makes us chase wherever the nuclear material is until we either commit ground forces or we drop significant ordinance. I'm concerned that like he could be told, hey, we need to either drop bomb pickaxe mountain or something even boulder where we go in to pickaxe mountain or one of the other facilities puts on the ground and physically secure the uranium so that no one can come back and say, oh, it's just like when you hit the three sides before, the nuclear dust is still buried beneath there. You didn't actually capture it.

42:00I do think he wants some kind of a grand finale, a big bomb or a big operation. That really worries me. But then also like if he got briefed, hey, you might take a bunch of casualties or that doesn't go well because it probably wouldn't, obviously. In a moment of frustration, this is where I'm very worried. The Israelis would know when to go approach him and say, hey, we can take care of this for you. So that's where I think we're heading. Again, I hope I'm right. I hope he's just gonna pick up and leave after the midterms but it does make me a little bit nervous when he says things like that. And unfortunately, to kind of reinforce your concerns there here in just the last couple of days, you had Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel of the Defense Minister in separate meetings. One, Netanyahu from his read about in Syria says we are a primary objective is the defeat of the Iranian regime. So he's still talking military victory there and then you had Israel caught, said if anybody in Texas from Iran, we were gonna hit them in an overwhelming way they have never been hit before,

43:01which would seem to, I guess, get some justification for your concerns. That Israel might be trying to do that, trying to trick Trump one more time. Yeah, I mean, and another huge factor to you is it's almost election season in America and in Israel and the Israelis are basically saying like, we're gonna take care of this. It's not done until Iran's completely defeated. We're saying after the midterms. And again, it's like, do we really think the Iranians are just gonna sit back and be like, well, let's see what the Americans and the Israelis are gonna do. Right, right, right. That's exactly what it's about to ask you. What are the pros and what is the military capacity? What can Iran do of their own initiative to take the initiative away from us? I think they could either, they've already proven if they went to, they can hit our ships. And ships are not like bases. You can't just disperse everybody on a ship like we do with a base and let the rockets come in and put the people back. If they decide and they want a volley fire and they want to vector in on our ships, I'm afraid, regardless of what kind of provato we talk,

44:02I think over enough time, they would be able to do it. They haven't run, the Iranians have not run short on sophisticated missile and drone systems. They've already shot at our destroyers, they've shot at our aircraft carriers. The Iranians said that like they basically were able to hit the range and they, you know, they didn't, thankfully, that we know of, actually hit the ships, but they proven they can reach them. And because they did it with so few missiles and rockets, I think basically showing us we could hit you if we wanted to. So if they were to volley fire, you know, just barrage after barrage, I think they could overwhelm our ships as long as they're there in that very, very small area within range. And eventually they'll get lucky. And so if they did do that, it would probably be a mass casualty type of event. And then we would immediately have to react in a way that we're not prepared for. And that's where we could get it over our skis. And look, right now the Iranians, I think they do want to actually suck us in. I think that they actually want us to take the bait of trying to grab one of the islands, trying to grab one of the ports because then they can really apply, you know,

45:04unconventional warfare and they can keep us further sucked in and making us bleed on their terms. So that concerns me if they get lucky, if they get a lucky strike on some of our bases in the region that we continue to lead people at for some unknown reason, that's massive. Or they can sit back and they can just continue to do tanker for tanker in the Straits of Formos. And then they can have the Houthis do the same thing in the Babal Mondev reaching all the way up into the Suez. You have the Iraqi proxies and the Houthis who continue to pipelines that are there. And you just choke us on the energy front heading into election, which is almost gonna make Trump have to do something that he's probably not anticipating right now because Trump's trying to basically say he can kind of hold this thing out until the election. We can ride it out until the election. I don't see why the Iranians would let him do it. I think bare minimum, they're at least gonna do the constriction of the flow of oil out of the two strategic choke points. Now that is worrisome and especially this recent reports just earlier this week that the 82nd Airborne has been extended

46:06through the end of the year. I can't think of any good reason why we need them there. But is there any viable ground operation at all? Whether you're talking pickaxe, whether you're talking to Carlisle Island, Syracco, any of these other islands in the Straits of Formos. Do we even have enough black ground power to even make a viable attempt to hold, to take and hold something? I don't think so. And I believe also that like in the air of drones and ballistic missiles, I mean sure, I bet we could take one of the islands, I bet we could take the port of Onda Rabas with the Marines in the 82nd right now. I'm sure it'd be spectacular shock and awe for a couple hours anyways. But then when the missile barrage just came in and we couldn't resupply or get our guys in and get our guys out, then they would essentially be hostages. I mean, like we can't pull our carrier battle groups up to the ports in the Middle East. They have to go to Thailand right now. So even if they don't sink our ships, they basically have cut off our ability to project power in a meaningful way, the way they were used.

47:07This is just like in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes they hit the Convoy, sometimes they'd attack us when we were going on a raid. But in general, they hit the logistic lines, they hit the bases, they took away our ability, they made it very difficult for us to do logistics. We had a technological advantage there, the drones and the ballistic missiles and satellite imagery that's kind of been, that's really leveled the battlefield out. So I don't see any viable ground options whatsoever. Unfortunately, we continue to leave these guys over there. Even if I was advocating for us to continue the war against Iran, I would say to get our guys out of there. We proved with Midnight Hammer that we can project power from America and hit Iran. We've already proven that. Like if I wanted to continue the war, I'd be like, man, get all of our guys out of shooting distance from the Iranians. Let's get our high-end stuff. We'll hit the Iranians when we want to and we're trying to affect an outcome that way. But let's get into a position where we have the ability to maneuver and they don't have the ability to maneuver, but we're not doing that. We're basically leveling the playing field for the Iranians by leaving our guys

48:08within range of their ballistics and their drones. So let me ask you one final question here on the blowback theme. If we got into a situation, which is not hypothetical, it's not even an outlandish that we could get in over our skis and a lot of these things can start falling, especially if we make a number of bad decisions. God help us if we do anything on the ground. And then like one of our ships does get hit, we get our troops bogged down. The bottom and the doves get closed. The straight or hormones get closed. They hit more tankers, whatever. I mean, we could be in a real world of her. What is that gonna do to American prestige around the world? And that's just, I mean, just limited to Asia, the Indo-Pacific, and then Europe slashed with the potential conflict with Russia, NATO Article 5. Does that put it risk the reputation of the United States as to being this big powerful state that's gonna keep everybody else in bay? Yeah, I mean, I think that that might expedite the bleeding out of our empire essentially.

49:11I mean, already like the ability for us to go and say that we're gonna be the security guarantors of the Middle East. We're gonna be the ones that stabilize. We're basically in charge of the world, especially the Middle East. I mean, that's been shattered. I mean, I ran whenever this whole thing ends, they're gonna emerge as one of the regional powers as a middle power of the world. And they're gonna have, I think, a lot of credibility militarily because of the blow that they've dealt us because of our miscalculations. And we've already got major issues. Like you said, our objective is no longer, we're gonna crush the Iranians. It's like, can we please get the straights open back up again that we're open before we start the war? So now we're basically just in like damage mitigation mode. But if we get suckered into all these different scenarios that you and I just discussed, I mean, this is, I mean, before a couple of months ago, people were arguing with me back and forth of like, oh, this isn't gonna be a forever war. And the argument was always like, nobody plans to get into a forever war. We set a rack and Afghanistan were gonna be short. But now the argument is basically like, this is the early phases of World War III. You have all these different alliances that are being formed. You know, you have the front up in Ukraine and Russia.

50:12We've been supporting that proxy war. The fronts have the potential of merging. They've already somewhat merged. If we do take drastic action like the scenarios we just talked about were a tactical nuclear weapons used by us or the Israelis, I think very shortly thereafter Putin uses one in Ukraine because he says, okay, if you guys, you know, you went and did it and so that's the new norm, I'm gonna pursue my national security interest. And then where does it go from there? Then we do have an article five issue potentially as if Putin decides to take the war into Poland or into some somewhere else. So again, I mean, if you just look at the lead up to World War I and where we're at right now, there are so many similarities. And also too, as you know, in combat, I mean, unintended consequences and strategic corporals like one guy in the, one missile guy in the IRGC man, he could make history and, you know, the Iranian leadership never even intended on it. And same thing on our side, the Ukrainian front, I mean, for us to just take on this much risk right now for so little gain, it's absolute insanity. I mean, for the amount of balls that are in the air for us just to say like, yeah, we're cool with this amount

51:14of risk for zero gain to the American people. It's just absolute insanity and incompetence. That's the most important thing I think we even talked about here today. There is literally nothing to gain in all of this incredible risk that we're dancing around the edge of taking. And already the blowback in the unintended consequences that you wrote about in that exposter all over the place right now with Saudi Arabia is wobbling. The bubble in Dobs now under the control of another power that we can't take away from them. You talked about the Russian Ukraine situation. We didn't even talk about anything in the Indo Pacific. You could add that to the list here. But man, all this we need to, I'll just advocate again what you said, the walkaway plan is absolutely the best thing for American interest. And let's start closing off some of the stuff so we can start rebuilding our strength in case we actually have to use it in a war against us. That's what we should do. So I'm with you on that. Yeah, absolutely. If we don't get serious about this, I mean, we're gonna be in a world of hurt. I mean, if one of these things goes wrong,

52:16we're gonna be in a major, major war without really understanding why we're there in the first place. We've got enough problems here at home. So right now, the smartest actor in the room really looks like China. I mean, they're sitting back right now and they're able to benefit the most. We had to pull our fleet out of the Indo Pacific region. China is still doing business with Iran. They've been underpinning and helping Russia and do our sanctions. And so the fact that we basically just lit the petro dollar on fire after we threw Russia off the SWIP system. I mean, it's almost like you couldn't plan it better if we were trying to destroy our currency, our prestige on the world stage and basically our military power. I don't think it's deliberate coming from this administration. I just think we've gotten horrible, horrible advice from the Israeli lobby and we're locked into this like heubristic egotistical trap that we put ourselves in where we refuse to just say, okay, we gotta walk away and let's do some real prioritization of where we wanna spend our resources. But until we do that, we were teetering on the verge of a disaster. That's, I couldn't improve on anything you said. I just agree with all that and I appreciate you saying it.

53:18And I appreciate you coming on the show and saying this today and certainly reflow the send folks back to Joe Kent's ex-posts. I follow him all the time and so should you. Appreciate you coming on today, Joe, a lot. Anytime, Danny. Thanks so much. And we thank you guys too. Appreciate you. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow at our intelligence brief that we always give on Saturday at 11 a.m. Looking forward to seeing you then. If anything breaks in between down then, you know where to check because it will be on top. Thanks very much. We'll see you tomorrow on the Daniel Davis Deep代.