In this episode, we discuss the latest on the latest in the Iran situation, including the Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites, and the reaction from President Trump and others in the White House. We also talk about the impact of the strike on the Iranian nuclear sites and whether or not the president will go through with it.
00:00:00.000It seems kind of strange that the prime minister of Israel would launch this attack knowing they don't have the capability to take out the main enrichment site.
00:00:07.680He must have been expecting Trump to get involved from the very beginning.
00:00:10.720I think he's probably, yes, I think he probably has anticipated that this is something that he's wanted to do for the entire time that he's been the Israeli prime minister
00:00:19.140and has never had such a supportive voice in the White House as he sees in Donald Trump.
00:00:26.020I don't I don't think Trump wants to do this, by the way.
00:00:28.600Let me also own that. I don't think this is something Trump wants to do.
00:00:32.840I think he wants a negotiated resolution.
00:00:35.780But it just seems as if Israel has put us in this position where now almost the U.S. is feeling backed into a corner.
00:00:43.900This 30,000 pound massive ordinance penetrator, the mop, as they call the bunker buster.
00:00:55.600And if anyone's been to an air show and seen this, it's quite an impressive thing.
00:01:00.280Can fly up to 50,000 altitude capable of midair refueling.
00:01:05.680Yeah. And so it's you can also use a B-52.
00:01:08.960But this is the preferred aircraft because of its stealth, because this aircraft won't be seen coming.
00:01:14.760Tuesday, when he had a National Security Council meeting, he was presented with attack plans on Iran, including going after Fordow, the nuclear site that is deep within a mountain about a mile and a half a mile, excuse me, underneath that mountain that would require pretty large American bombs in order to destroy.
00:01:30.440He approved of those plans, but he did not give a final order.
00:01:34.200So effectively, he has the defense community, the military community being prepared for if he were to say go to go.
00:01:40.800But once you make that decision, once you say once you get those attack plans ready, it does build a bit of momentum towards saying go.
00:01:49.900Now, he can always pull back. And it seems like he has with this with this two weeks play.
00:01:53.080But he's now having meetings with, you know, people like Steve Bannon about whether or not actually going ahead would break the MAGA coalition.
00:02:01.760He's having meetings with, you know, people out of the traditional Republican hawks who would like him to go ahead and even push further towards regime change.
00:02:09.080He's he's caught in a in a bit of a bind here between, you know, in his own politics and the military situation.
00:02:13.960You saw the movie, the latest Top Gun movie eerily enough, this is that plot kind of coming to fruition in real life.
00:02:21.440It's not just one bomb. It'll be a bomb after a bomb to get through that penetration.
00:02:26.460Iran has had five decades, five decades, almost half a century to talk.
00:02:30.120And what they've done instead, kill 609 American troops in Iraq.
00:02:34.340What they've done is put an assassination plot on President Trump's head.
00:02:38.500What they've done is take American hostages and wreak havoc on the world.
00:02:42.440America first is not sitting in a beach chair and using words.
00:02:45.420It's taking decisive action when we can take out four dough, one swoop of an airplane.
00:02:51.440Do you buy what Gabbard is suggesting that the media is twisting her words and that she actually is in lockstep with Trump?
00:02:58.660I think she's more lockstep with Trump now.
00:03:03.200It is true that that was said back in March.
00:03:05.740There is a discrepancy to a degree between what you saw then and what you see now.
00:03:10.160But things have also changed since then.
00:03:22.160What she was giving there was the perception of all of the different intelligence agencies assessed together.
00:03:30.640What the president is relying on now is the intelligence assessment largely of the CIA and, to a degree, the Israeli intelligence services.
00:06:40.040Your hit last night with Coats on CNN.
00:06:44.480Can you walk us through, just once again, what your logic, what your sources are telling you about the intelligence that the President of the United States is actually getting that informs his opinion on this situation in Persia?
00:07:01.040The main intelligence briefer for Donald Trump has been the CIA.
00:07:05.580It's been John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA.
00:07:07.480And the CIA, its new assessment, its intelligence, based on I don't specifically know what, because it is the CIA, I shouldn't know what, had led the President to believe that there was a significant change in posture and a threat level of Iran and a need to move.
00:07:31.660Now, since I've got more time here, one of the great things about doing podcasts is that we're not kind of hemmed in by, you know, two, three-minute commercial breaks is I should also add that.
00:07:42.580But hang on, hang on, hang on, Caputo.
00:07:58.200In the old cable, they're just boom, boom, boom.
00:08:00.640All they want is up there and just get, like, two soundbites.
00:08:03.440Here, we understand a reporter like yourself that is deeply dialed in with great sources.
00:08:08.640In fact, some of the most explosive stories coming out of the Trump White House are coming via you and Axios.
00:08:16.400Have they ever come out and refuted any major story that you've broken at the White House, given your sources throughout the administration?
00:08:40.540The CIA, you know, as I said on Laura Coates, there's two ways to look at intelligence.
00:08:45.540And this is one of the problems with reporting saying, oh, there's no new intelligence in Iran, and the president just acted.
00:08:52.480Well, that might mean there's no new bits and scraps and pieces of information.
00:08:56.700But that doesn't mean there's not a new intelligence assessment based on old ones.
00:09:01.660Now, we're not quite sure exactly what the CIA has obviously said to Donald Trump and briefed him on, but it's the lead briefer.
00:09:08.680And it is working closely, and it always has in the Middle East, and certainly when it comes to Israel, will work with Israeli intelligence services.
00:09:17.900I'm told the intelligence shared between the two is about 80 percent, or it's about 80 percent identical between the United States, CIA, and Israel.
00:09:27.220And based on CIA's assessment, that is when Donald Trump said, you know, I need to do something.
00:09:35.040Now, what I didn't mention there, and what we didn't go into there, and we'll go into here, is two other factors played into Donald Trump's posture.
00:09:43.880One, the IAEA report, the International Atomic Energy Agency, come out, or its administration, had come out and said things are a lot more dire or threatening with Iran.
00:09:58.840And then two, there was a feeling that, in the words of one Trump advisor told me, that the Ayatollah had, quote, given us the middle finger.
00:10:08.220And Trump had said, you've got to make a deal or else, so this is what the or else looks like, the building up.
00:10:16.700And then I think kind of thirdly, or in addition to all of these things, is the fact that Netanyahu launched his attack.
00:10:23.580And we have to look at what Netanyahu was looking at.
00:10:28.840One, Hamas and Hezbollah are degraded.
00:10:32.540They were great proxies to tie Israel down, Iran proxies.
00:10:41.880And Israel had already had this operation sort of in the works.
00:10:47.120And at a certain point, with all of these different factors working up, is Bibi Netanyahu had continually, for a long period of time, been sort of almost a dog on a leash here, an attack dog, wanting to go after Iran.
00:11:03.560And finally, with everything happening, Trump essentially said, I'm not going to stand in your way.
00:11:11.820Now, once that attack looks so successful, you know Donald Trump better than I do.
00:11:17.840You're the guy who had lunch with him the other day.
00:11:21.260Trump just saw that success and really wanted to be in that slipstream, as I mentioned at CNN.
00:11:27.240But the thing about being in a slipstream is you're in someone else's wake, and eventually you can hit some turbulence.
00:11:32.420And Donald Trump is suspicious about going to war.
00:11:37.760He is not ready to go to war yet or drop bombs yet.
00:11:42.240And the reason we know that is he hasn't done it.
00:11:44.460And I think some of that initial blood being up from Trump in those initial first days has cooled a little as he sought more information, more opinions.
00:11:55.140As you know, he crowdsources a lot of big decisions.
00:11:59.280And so I can't predict what's going to happen now or, you know, by 6 p.m., but I think it's safe to say that Donald Trump is taking in all of the information he has.
00:12:09.880And he's torn between wanting to go ahead and do this and stop Iran from getting a nuke, in his view, and also, on the far end of his spectrum, wanting a Nobel Peace Prize.
00:12:22.200I think he understands you don't win Nobel Peace Prizes by dropping bombs in the name of peace.
00:13:10.260I tell you what, why don't you hang, I want you to think about that.
00:13:14.080I want to make sure you have a reasoned response.
00:13:17.060We're here on a Saturday at the traditional Saturday morning war room.
00:13:22.100As you know, one of my favorite show of the week.
00:13:26.000Because we can catch our breath and go a little more in depth.
00:13:28.600This afternoon, if things play out like we think they may play out, we will be back live around 4 or 5 o'clock to see the president come back and kind of hang around the rim to see what happens at this national security briefing.
00:13:45.940There are people saying, there are a lot of people saying, hey, they're trying to play out the negotiations.
00:13:51.700There are also people saying that the Iranians, one, there's a lot of dead senior people.
00:13:58.600Number two, they're pretty, the Persians are pretty bureaucratic and slow anyway.
00:14:04.280It's tough to even get somebody to answer Wyckoff's call about who you even sit down with.
00:14:10.120There's also this, some of the Persians saying, well, hey, you got to, you got to put Bibi back on a leash.
00:14:15.860We can't keep getting bombed and shelled while we're negotiating.
00:14:19.220We're not going to be able to sell that to our people because it's going to look like it's coercive, right?
00:14:35.380So another big weekend in this unfolding aspect of the Third World War.
00:14:44.440And no, anyone that's telling you that the Third World War is not here is absolutely does not understand the development and evolution of kinetic war.
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00:16:18.220Seems kind of strange that the prime minister of Israel would launch this attack knowing they don't have the capability to take out the main enrichment site.
00:16:25.740He must have been expecting Trump to get involved from the very beginning.
00:16:28.540I think he's probably, yes, I think he probably has anticipated that this is something that he's wanted to do for the entire time that he's been the Israeli prime minister and has never had such a supportive voice in the White House as he sees in Donald Trump.
00:16:43.700I don't think Trump wants to do this, by the way.
00:17:04.940As you know, we're a very pro-Israel show and site and platform, and we catch a lot of grief for that.
00:17:13.600We've been very supportive of going after the Muslim Brotherhood Hamas in Gaza, also what happened in Syria, the destruction of Hezbollah, even the taking out of the Persians' air defense, which the Israelis have done.
00:17:28.160And we're not a fan of this, and we're not a fan of this because of what Smirkanis just said.
00:17:34.060If the United States is going to be involved, we have to understand that at the beginning.
00:17:37.740And you're reporting, you just said something last block, Caputo, that President Trump and his team kind of acquiesced when these guys came with this because the intelligence is 80 percent Mossad, right, in CIA.
00:17:54.200Yeah, that sense of urgency is built up.
00:17:57.300Yeah, they're about 80 percent in agreement is what I understand.
00:17:59.980Essentially, like, allegedly, and I don't know what the intelligence is, they sort of mesh up about at an 80 percent rate, right?
00:18:08.380Okay, how did this – but how did this – was it intelligence that something was happening?
00:18:13.920Or is it intelligence that, hey, we can make a move because it's good?
00:18:18.580And at any time – as your reporting showed you, at any time, Smirkanis' point, that it was brought to President Trump's attention that, yo, when this attack starts, they do not have the capability.
00:18:32.380And they admit it, they don't have the capability to finish what they started, and unless it's finished at Fordor, it's not finished.
00:18:40.920It's really – it doesn't matter if you did the – the 80 percent or 90 percent you got or 75 percent you got doesn't matter because you've got to get that last 25 percent, sir.
00:18:53.640What I can tell you – what I was told by one senior official when I asked, okay, it's been reported that there was no new intelligence, but then Donald Trump essentially said there was, what's the deal?
00:19:06.080And I was told this is that in the view and the assessment of the CIA and, therefore, the administration now, the Iranians were making progress three ways, making the delivery system for a nuclear weapon, huge progress there.
00:19:19.740I'm quoting, by the way, getting more centrifuges and the guts to make a bomb, huge progress there, enriching from 20 to 60 to 90 percent, not as much progress.
00:19:31.140We're talking months and weeks, not days and not years either.
00:19:35.340And what I was led to believe is where the two intelligence agencies or countries might differ is the degree of the enrichment and the speed with which a nuclear weapon can be assembled and deployed.
00:19:54.880So that would confirm – I just want to go back to the wrong words.
00:20:00.540That would confirm on Sunday evening and Brett Baer, who's the star of the really news side of Fox, interviewing Bebe, and he asked kind of the same question I just asked you.
00:20:11.080And he said, look, why was it Thursday night?
00:20:15.740And he kind of went through some of those, but he said it's about 12 to 13 months away, right?
00:20:21.480Is it any – it's all the summation of yours that it's sometime in the – it's sooner than it's been in the past.
00:20:28.600And the IEAE, we shouldn't miss this in Israel's side.
00:20:34.000They're saying now they're getting enrichment for, I don't know, 10 to 15 bombs or the potential for 10 to 15 bombs.
00:20:39.780Am I correct about that report, which shocked everybody?
00:20:42.180I can't remember that specific number, but when that report – pardon the pun, not intended when I thought of it – it was a bombshell report because it just showed the degree of uranium enrichment that was happening.
00:20:56.820And when we go back to what Tulsi Gabbard was saying before, she was saying the amount of enrichment that – and this was in March – that Iran was engaging in was not consistent with a peacetime nuclear development.
00:21:10.740So there's been this narrative out there that she's some sort of peacenik who sort of massaged the numbers.
00:21:18.660And now some of her emphasis obviously probably with the benefit of hindsight could have been harsher, harder, or more dire.
00:21:25.160But what's clear and what really was made clear in the IAEA report was Iran was doing a lot of enrichment in their assessment, and that had a major effect.
00:21:37.180Understand that when Donald Trump withdrew – I can't remember if it was 2019 or 2020, 2018 – in his first administration, Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal,
00:21:46.360the JCPOA struck by Obama and other nations with Iran, and one of the criticisms then was that the United States shouldn't have done it,
00:21:56.760and Iran would have been able to then enrich more uranium and would have freehand to do it.
00:22:02.200However, it was still sort of bound by the other signatories.
00:22:05.000Nevertheless, in the agreement, there is something that they call snapback,
00:22:08.860which essentially calls for much more sanctions and much harsher treatment of Iran if it did stuff like what the IAEA report showed.
00:23:44.940And Israel was looking at being overwhelmed by a bellicose Iran should it launch those.
00:23:51.600So everything for Bibi – and I understand this – and he obviously has domestic problems at home, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
00:23:57.900All of those things just lined up where this just was the time for them to attack.
00:24:02.700And to Smirconish's point, in the back of Netanyahu's head, it is widely believed he thought that Trump would get caught in the slipstream and would just sort of be brought along to do this.
00:24:12.960I don't know, though, when it became clear that they'd need the United States to bunker bust the Florida nuclear facility under a mountain.
00:24:21.180It's, number one, unclear how effective that's going to be.
00:24:24.020And despite the saber rattling on Fox or other shows that, oh, we just have this sort of magic bomb that's going to blow things up, there is a long history of war of those who are unaccustomed to the horrors of it are most eager to engage in the activity.
00:24:41.760And we've seen time and time again what the famous quote from Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I that the boys will be back by summer.
00:24:50.340And so Trump is well aware that the promise of technology or swift battles and effective victories and bloodless wins is a sort of a pie crust promise, to use the Mary Poppins term.
00:25:07.400You know, it's easily made and easily broken.
00:25:09.240No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, as Klaus Witz had said.
00:25:12.780There's so much there, and I want to get, I want to get Jack Posovo, but I just want to get one point very clear.
00:25:40.580If you start this and you have to, you've got two issues.
00:25:44.860One, the ballistic missile program that clearly you're absolutely correct that they were making huge, the Persians making huge progress on it.
00:26:23.780Now, in the past, Israel had actually offered, and this has been known for a while, to say, hey, look, we'll fly the planes, right?
00:26:31.240You know, blood won't be on your hands.
00:26:33.340So I know that was said in prior, or I was told that was said in prior administrations.
00:26:38.780I'm not sure how in play that is here.
00:26:40.860But, yes, in order for there to be more certainty and in order to really destroy the facility, they will likely need the American, you know, the B-2 bomber and this massive MOP ordinance.
00:27:01.680That said, there is a component, and there are people who say the famous, you know, military idea that, you know, fire without maneuver is inconclusive, maneuver without fire is suicide.
00:27:13.520But in order to really make sure there's a school of thought that there does need to be boots on the ground, or do need to be boots on the ground, that some commando or other sort of group of men, soldiers, or whatever, have to go in there and get the stuff and then blow it up.
00:27:32.620Now, the United States is not going to do that.
00:30:26.420So I'm going to bring you in, but I've got to mention, I've never had a reporter of any type actually quote Clausewitz the way it should be quoted in a perfect time.
00:30:36.400But I would be remiss if I didn't say that your father, First Lieutenant Philip Caputo, I think wrote, if not the best book in the Vietnam War,
00:30:45.940one of the best books in the Vietnam War, The Rumor of War.
00:30:55.640In fact, the reason you know about Mayor Daley's voting fraud is because he was part of that Pulitzer Prize winning team for the Chicago Tribune back in 72.
00:31:01.360But I was certainly brought up with, as a son of a Vietnam vet and who was there on the shores in 65 and then returned as a reporter to cover the fall of Saigon in 75,
00:31:13.740had seen what happens with the promise of war and then the realities of it.
00:31:18.340And very often those jingoistic people who predict that things are going to go great very often don't know what they're talking about.
00:31:31.040By the way, if people have never, you want to read a great book on Vietnam, Da Nang 1965, from a ground pounder's view of the Marines,
00:31:39.500a rumor of war would be a great weekend read for folks compared to the Gulf of Tung King and all the all the chess beating that went into Vietnam.
00:31:47.920And then the the men that actually had to deliver in the brutality of it.
00:32:57.380So there are some indications that they may be riding heavy as they fly out across the Pacific.
00:33:04.360Fox News reported earlier this morning that they have indications they're headed for Anderson Air Force Base.
00:33:09.280Now, that's on the northern end of Guam.
00:33:11.300I was out of the southern end of Guam a couple of times on the naval base there.
00:33:16.640But up in the northern base, they have a huge Anderson Air Force base.
00:33:19.980This is the key role of Guam and the island hopping campaign that was undertaken in World War II regarding this.
00:33:27.380Now, that would put them just at the outside of strike range for an Iran run.
00:33:34.140Now, this is not as close to Diego Garcia, certainly not as close as Saudi or our air base in Qatar, which are there, obviously, in the Gulf.
00:33:41.220So if they wanted to strike Iran from Guam, they would have they would have the ability to through air to air refueling.
00:33:48.320We know these KC-135s have created this air bridge basically around the world at this point.
00:33:54.060And, of course, they could also redeploy to Diego and then fly up from there.
00:33:57.920But currently, it looks like those B-2 bombers, four to six of them, flying in formation with refuelers and others, are headed towards Guam, right smack dab, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as we speak.
00:34:08.300So President Trump clearly ratcheting up the pressure here on Iran to make a decision.
00:34:13.120He's getting the assets, he's getting the assets in place, there's no doubt, to give him alternatives.
00:34:25.280Understanding you didn't have the ability to actually get this done, completed, complete the mission, right?
00:34:32.940What was the urgency from your reporting and what you've heard and what you know, what was the urgency that you had to have a sneak attack Pearl Harbor type strike last Thursday night to kind of as the initiating event of this conflict?
00:34:53.200What was it that, if anything, more than just the urgency of the matter and since their stated objectives have been from the beginning, including what you said, the acquiescence of prompts of administration to go, when did this – because this clearly shifted to a decapitation regime change.
00:35:12.140Now, we said on Friday when we started our coverage that this was a decapitation, at least of the military, maybe not the Ayatollah, but the senior military command, even people outside the nuclear program.
00:35:23.420It was a decapitation looking like regime change at the time because to us it looked pretty obvious.
00:35:30.180But what was the urgency to do this and then when did they get into the upsell?
00:35:35.160Let's try to upsell the Americans on regime change, sir.
00:35:38.140Well, I can't speak to Netanyahu's mind frame, but as described to me, this was the time where it would never be more propitious for Israel to strike.
00:35:53.100Iran was on its – its proxies were gone.
00:35:58.060It was close to developing a nuke, allegedly.
00:36:01.360It definitely had a missile program that was a dire threat to Israel.
00:36:06.400Well, Trump had finally said, I'm not going to hold you back.
00:36:13.980I don't know all the factors and all the intelligence.
00:36:16.920I think if you were to feed all of these factors that I laid out into chat GBT or some sort of logic game, it would have told Beebe to make the strike when he did.
00:36:28.960So that is just a guess on my part based on just my understanding, filtered through others, of what Israel's calculus was.
00:36:38.600The administration has told us and we have reported at Axios that, yeah, the Israelis want regime change.
00:36:45.400We don't – that's not really our concern, I was told by a senior administration official.
00:36:50.060And as evidence of that, Netanyahu did want to strike the Ayatollah, we are told, and Donald Trump said, don't do it.
00:37:00.080And when I asked this official why not, they said, consider this to be – it's a case of the Ayatollah you know versus the Ayatollah you don't know.
00:37:09.460And Trump still wanted sort of more time to make a deal.
00:37:12.680He still might want some more time, but to Jack's point, boy, the pressure really is ratcheting up.
00:37:18.880When you say the pressure is ratcheting up because there's colleagues of yours that are in the party – because right now, as we sit here on Saturday morning audience, there are two schools of thought of what's happening.
00:37:30.580One is that the party is on, that a decision not only has been made, but it looks like it's totally futile to try to negotiate with.
00:38:53.700Did your father, in your knowledge and study of military history, did that come from your father, or is that something that got you interested later as you realized who your father was?
00:39:25.080But these are from the OCS, from the Marine Corps back in the day.
00:39:28.600But after he was a soldier or a Marine, he became a foreign correspondent and covered a number of conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, including, I think, the Six-Day War in Israel, the war in Eritrea, in Ethiopia.
00:39:45.880So he did quite a bit of foreign correspondent work.
00:39:49.220And he left that line of work after, well, almost after he was shot in Beirut, not fatally, but when it went to hell there in, I guess, what, 76, 77?
00:40:00.900That's when it was sort of time to get out of the combat zones.
00:40:06.340Mark Caputo, thank you very much for sharing this.
00:40:15.860Well, Steve, the one thing that I would add to some of the calculus on here is that in Israel, it's not as if Bibi Netanyahu is currently sitting on top of a strong coalition the way that President Trump is.
00:40:30.760President Trump is currently 54%, 55% popularity among the American people.
00:40:35.980Bibi Netanyahu is currently around 30% among Israel.
00:40:40.040And this is mostly because of the situation regarding Gaza.
00:40:43.580And he faced, just about two weeks ago, right on the eve of when all these strikes kicked off, he faced a serious challenge to his premiership in that his coalition almost broke apart.
00:40:55.060And he narrowly survived a leadership vote by just single-digit votes on the question of this ultra-Orthodox party wanted to pull out.
00:41:05.560And they didn't want to do the conscription.
00:41:06.900They didn't want to be conscripted anymore.
00:41:08.660And this has been a longstanding issue of theirs in Israel.
00:41:11.280So, and there are also elements, by the way, of, that I'm told, of the Israeli national security infrastructure saying that, wait a minute, is this being done out of political concerns for Bibi Netanyahu personally, or is this being done out of any, you know, claiming that it's being done out of national security concerns?
00:41:31.260And so, you know, I would just like to throw that in the mix because we do always have to consider the political calculations here as well as the national security calculations and the intelligence.
00:41:41.580And that really could be the question for why, as anyone can agree, Steve, how many different versions of the intel have we heard at this point, right?
00:41:59.280Then, you know, and you've got Israeli military telling AFP last night, the Associated Free Press, that they, because of the initial strikes and the runs that have gone over the past week and a half or so here, that Iran's missile program has been, or their nuclear program has been delayed by two to three years.
00:42:17.080And Netanyahu, and the New York Post has it up right now, and no, you know, Murdoch paper has Netanyahu saying we can go it alone.
00:42:24.080So there's, it's all over the map here.
00:42:26.840And I think that one of the reasons that a lot of Americans are scratching their heads at the lightning fast speed that all of these events are moving is that we haven't had to sit down and have a serious adult conversation about why this had to happen right now.
00:42:45.060And no one can really kinnis down on a clear answer on that.
00:42:51.140I know you're busy with the family, Dave.
00:42:52.840I just want to hold you through this short break because I want to talk about the ballistic missile program and the citizens of Israel are taking some serious incoming.
00:43:01.340You've got to talk about the dome, how it's worked, the American involvement, the naval assets that are helping, the air assets that are helping because underreported stories that the citizens of Israel and Bibi's, I think, his polling has got to be at a record high.
00:43:16.740They are, I believe, all the controversy around Bibi has been, I think, settled because they are obviously very focused on taking out the Persians.
00:43:28.420To them, they know it's an existential threat.
00:43:32.180And there is conflicting reporting this morning, both agency free press saying, the Israelis saying they've knocked the nuclear program back two or three years, and Bibi telling the New York Post they can go it alone to finish the job, finish what they started.
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00:45:16.260I'm informed by the engine room that it is not Clausewitz.
00:45:23.680It's Von Mulkey about the Von Schliefflin plan, that any plan only survives, no matter how well thought through, first contact with the enemy.
00:45:32.200Jack Posobiec, those officer candidate books that Caputo's dad had to read in officer candidate school at Quantico back in the mid-1960s before he went to Vietnam as a first lieutenant infantry officer, are the ones that you've had to read and I had to read.
00:45:49.780Talk to me about, or Mike Tyson put it better, or more succinctly.
00:46:42.640Have you seen what happens when troops get involved?
00:46:45.940And you get so many people, Steve, and they have this Marvel movie thinking, you know, like it's Star Wars and Luke Skywalker is going to fly up.
00:46:53.680And, oh, you just drop one missile in and it's going to blow up the whole Death Star.
00:46:56.740And I'm sorry, that's just not how the real world works.
00:46:58.940Plus, the Iranians also understand how our bunker busters work.
00:47:03.200And Caputo mentioned the MIT professor said, wait a minute, there's a lot of problems with this plan.
00:47:07.760You've got angles upon angles that you have to deal with.
00:47:10.000You're talking about reinforced granite that has – they have ways to deflect the explosion.
00:47:26.900So you're talking potentially if each B-2 can carry – and these things are the size of a bus.
00:47:31.400Okay, these bombs, massive, massive bombs.
00:47:33.360And so if each one goes over, so you've got two in tandem, they're flying sorties over, potentially over.
00:47:41.660Now let's pray to God that nothing happened, no malfunctions, no anti-aircraft fire comes at them.
00:47:49.480Sure, they're going to be able to fly high enough for that, I assume.
00:47:52.040But you've got to hit this thing dead on each time possibly ten strikes to get the job done.
00:47:58.440And then there's real questions as to whether or not the technology is still just going to survive and really all you're going to do is set them back and you have to be back here in two years when President Trump is still president because they're going to be able to dig it out or reconstitute it somewhere else.
00:48:10.880And so there's serious questions of, look, if you put in this much, that's why – that we're going to get sucked into a wider thing.
00:48:20.280And that's what a lot of people are scratching their heads on.
00:48:22.900And I'm sick, by the way, of this smear campaign, Steve, of people calling you an isolationist and calling all the MAGA isolationists and saying, oh, you're – no, no, excuse me.
00:48:33.620We are America first populist nationalists.
00:48:37.260Was President Trump an isolationist when he posed the Iraq war?
00:48:40.020Was President Trump an isolationist when he said we need to get our troops out of harm's way in Syria where they're not doing anything, sitting there as human shields for all the chaos that's going on in the land?
00:48:48.260As President Trump said, the land of blood and death.
00:49:03.400They're not listening to the war room, not doing any of this stuff.
00:49:06.440So they don't know about the danger of imperial overstretch because the danger of imperial overstretch is that you forget about the heartland.
00:49:15.620You forget about your core population.
00:49:18.100And the core population of the United States is hurting right now.
00:49:21.840That's why President Trump is the president.
00:49:24.240That's why we don't have Jeb Bush as the president.
00:49:26.640Jeb Bush is now the president of, you know, the anti-Iran coalition over there, by the way.
00:49:31.300It's like the band is getting back together over on that side.
00:49:59.860They are still licking their chops, looking at the oil fields of Iran, saying, you know something?
00:50:06.680We couldn't quite get all the oil out of Iraq, and so we go and look over at Iran, and you know what?
00:50:11.640There's all that oil there, and, you know, we had access to it under the Shah, and then Mosegadeg came up, and he was trying to nationalize everything.
00:50:18.900So we got rid of him, and we got a new Shah in.
00:50:20.780But then these pesky little Islamists came up, and now we got kicked out again.
00:50:26.260Well, first it was the British, and then we got kicked out as well because we tried to backfill the British because after the war, they couldn't.
00:50:31.140These guys, Steve, they don't read any of the history.