00:12:14.100It is not entirely clear that the assassination of Khamenei really changes the political calculus there.
00:12:20.100In fact, they're poised to just appoint another Ayatollah Khamenei, his son Moshtaba.
00:12:25.100So at this point, the Iranians have shown themselves far more plucky and adversarial in resisting the U.S. and Israeli assault than, say, Hamas was in Gaza, or Hezbollah certainly was in Lebanon, or even the Houthis were the Houthis in Yemen.
00:14:07.100The senators on both parties, from everyone from Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut to Josh Hawley of Missouri,
00:14:12.100hardly, you know, a liberal, have seemed spooked after the Hill briefing earlier this week about how long this campaign may be.
00:14:20.100And Hegseth, the Secretary of War, keeps moving the goalposts on how long it may be.
00:14:24.100Additionally, there was reporting out in Politico this morning that fascists of the administration are considering a war that is as long as 100 days, even stretching into the autumn.
00:14:33.100Obviously, the president himself has castigated the idea that he couldn't fight a forever war.
00:14:39.100Of course, President Trump ran against forever wars when he won in 16 and 24.
00:14:43.100And the fact that he is sort of reading from the neocon script is obviously disheartening for those who voted for him in that reason.
00:14:50.100We got a bounce to break. But if you can hang with me, I got a I got a cold open that I want your reactions to.
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00:16:21.100I know you have to keep a lot of cards close to the vest on this, but we've already lost six troops, sir.
00:16:27.100The president says he does expect more.
00:16:29.100A lot of Americans and military families want to know if their loved ones are about to be deployed to Iran for this.
00:16:35.100Will there be boots on the ground? The president has yet to rule that out.
00:16:39.100Well, I certainly hope not. If there are boots on the ground, I hope they're not on the ground any longer than the boots on the ground were in Venezuela.
00:16:50.100But I think that that's something the president knows that members of Congress certainly hope doesn't happen.
00:16:57.100But sometimes that's unavoidable in a situation like this.
00:17:01.100And you mentioned six troops had lost their lives. Some had been from Fort Knox in Kentucky, my home state.
00:17:08.100So, you know, we're devastated. And obviously our thoughts and prayers are with the families of anyone that's been lost or wounded thus far.
00:17:19.100Caroline, could you tell us about the president's current thinking about ground troops and whether they could be used if they were to be sent into Iran?
00:17:28.100What would they be used for? What's the situation?
00:17:30.100Well, they're not part of the plan for this operation at this time, but I certainly will never take away military options on behalf of the president of the United States or the commander in chief.
00:17:40.100And he wisely does not do the same for himself.
00:17:43.100I know there's many leaders in the past who like to take options off of the table without having a full understanding of how things could develop.
00:17:49.100So, again, it's not part of the current plan, but I'm not going to remove an option for the president that is on the table.
00:17:56.100You're back in the war room. We still got Kurt Mills, Brian Kennedy going to be joining us after.
00:18:02.100I would just say I think this boots on the ground discussion is obviously kind of the thing itself or at least one of the most determining and determinative factors into how this war, not war, whatever you want to call it, shakes out.
00:18:17.340But I do think it's important to note that the second, third and fourth order, fifth, the list goes on, order effects of, you know, invading Iran, even if it's not actual kinetic, traditional boots on the ground type style conflict, are still very real, whether that's, you know, refugee influxes, refugee mass flows, terrorist attacks, sleeper cells.
00:18:41.000I thought it was quite interesting that Lindsey Graham is just like, oh, well, I guess there's going to be a terrorist attack in the United States. Oops.
00:18:47.340That is, I guess your America last is showing, but I guess that's always on display. But there's still orders of magnitude of impacts, I think significantly higher than the American people would like that come with any sort of kinetic engagement with an adversary like Iran.
00:19:04.720I want to bring Kurt on, though, because I am a little confused. I mean, I would posit, I think, in the next week or so, you're going to start seeing, you know, some iteration, whether it's JSOC, SOCOM, kind of a limited hangout version of boots on the ground, maybe turning out into a fuller force, more traditional boots on the ground when colloquially you hear that.
00:19:28.680But I'm curious, your thoughts, both through a historic lens, but also just with what you're hearing from the admin, is this sort of laying the groundwork for a more traditional kinetic insurgency, or do you think there is a chance that they get out now?
00:19:43.720Okay, well, first, I think you were right to flag the Lindsey Graham comment. I think it was unbelievable that he told Secretary Noem yesterday, just casually, that the danger of, quote, Islamic terrorism is up, quote, because we hit Iran.
00:19:58.060I mean, it's not even clear if it's cynicism or imbecility, frankly. Like, does it even occur to him, the causality here? It's really not clear if he doesn't care or he doesn't know. And at a certain point, it doesn't matter.
00:20:12.660But it just shows you how casual these foreign policy mistakes are in sort of compounding America's problems. America's problem with terrorism is related to its forced posture overseas. And I think he just conceded it casually.
00:20:29.180To your actual question, my apologies, as to boots on the ground, like, look, the president is now allied with the faction of neoconservatives who are giving him poor counsel. And there are all the hallmarks of neoconservative foreign policy mistakes in the making right now.
00:20:45.640I would flag, you know, the sort of Kurdish farrago that the administration seems to be flirting with. You can't say for sure, but that very well could be a stalking horse for special operations that are already on the ground.
00:20:58.040And I would flag the administration has not been extremely forthcoming about how all six servicemen or service people were killed.
00:21:06.740And I think it's very possible the U.S. already has ground operations. I don't have evidence, but I don't.
00:21:12.080The administration hasn't really ruled it out that they already have some personnel on the ground.
00:21:16.220And of course, as the secretary of state and the former CIA director, Mike Pompeo, said into the new year when the Iran protests kicked off, he highly implied that CIA and Mossad were, you know, we had assets on the ground that were involved in spurring these protests in Iran.
00:21:32.200Not denying the organic frustrations of the Iranian people with this government, but they were obviously used as a tinder and a causes belly for U.S. intervention at this point.
00:21:42.080Yeah, that Lindsey Graham clip, I think sort of gets to the heart of it, the, you know, flippancy with which the homeland is treated in comparison to this like extremely steel-manned, ideologically aspirational version of what could maybe potentially, if 9 million things go right in an order that we've never seen happen before in history, makes us believe exactly the opposite.
00:22:08.280If that happens or materializes in Iran, it's just sort of a very interesting cost-benefit analysis.
00:22:14.680And I think what I would say to that mindset is, I just wish, Lindsey Graham, that you cared about the American people, like one one-hundredth of how much you cared about the Iranian people, which it seems to me that there's this idea that there's this organic uprising going on there.
00:22:30.020Then I'd ask why the CIA is so busy arming, you know, supposed rebellious forces, whether it's the Kurds or whatnot.
00:22:37.320I don't know if that was bad intel, if we thought we were going to go in there and the people would sort of take it over in this populist-style revolt.
00:22:43.260I don't necessarily think that we're seeing that happen, but even if you take away what is going on in Iran, I just think the premise, right, people like Lindsey Graham, you know what, Lindsey Graham, if Iran is such an imminent threat, which I learned apparently something can be an imminent threat if it's been around for 47 years, I don't really think that makes sense.
00:23:03.100But I digress, because that's all we've been hearing from the neocons that I voted to get away from as a party, but shouldn't have all these senators then been, I don't know, absolutely apoplectic, breaking down, crying down, trying to secure the border under Joe Biden because all these Iranian sleeper cells would be embedding in the country?
00:23:21.100Like, you would think they would have cared a little bit more about border security enough to, like, I don't know, go on Fox News and call for us now invading basically every country in the region and outside the region because apparently we're getting involved in Cuba, too, now, or at least the Cuban diaspora is lobbying the Trump administration.
00:23:38.900You know what I'll say, and then I'll toss it to you, Kurt.
00:23:41.060I'm a little tired of these, you know, ethnic diasporas here in the United States that we take in out of the goodness of our hearts, then demanding that American blood and treasure and the lives of the best and brightest Americans, like Sergeant Cody that you just saw, 20 years old from Iowa, have to die so these communities that are, like, vaguely American can somehow fulfill their vengeance against regimes in the country.
00:24:10.200They no longer have allegiance to that's just not the point of what the United States of America is, and I wish why people like Lindsey Graham, that neocon ideology pisses me off so much and really makes me mad.
00:24:22.540It is the flippancy with which they treat American lives and the American homeland, yet the way that they speak about these foreign countries, the people there, it's as if they have the revolutionary spirit and the American people, well, sorry, you just have to sit down and accept a terrorist
00:24:40.200attack because Raytheon wants to make a little bit more money despite being years behind on all their drone orders that we should be able to have actual weapons stockpiles, but apparently we don't because, you know, defense primes are the way the Pentagon wants to go.
00:24:54.300Kurt, I know there's a lot of debate going on right now back and forth, and MAGA, I'm sure some of the comments section, probably getter, is lighting me up for that, but I think the difference between our side and the left is that we can have disagreements and you don't have to hate the people who are sharing these viewpoints.
00:25:08.980I think that's what makes our side really unique.
00:25:12.280What would your pitch to people who are listening to you and are wanting to pull their hair out saying you're skeptical, you're a Trump doomer, you don't know what you're talking about.
00:25:19.920I'm sure they'd say we're probably both too young, we don't know, we're too anti-war.
00:25:24.740What would your pitch be saying that you represent actually real MAGA?
00:25:31.140Well, just first, I mean, the people who are dying, the service people are young people, so I feel like they get a vote.
00:25:36.180And I think their perspective matters.
00:25:38.800And I mean, the sergeant, the late sergeant that you flagged, his life was tragically bookmarked by, I mean, he was born after 9-11.
00:25:46.900And he died fighting a global war on terror that is arguably still going that hasn't ended even with the exhaustion of his life.
00:25:57.340And I think it's not in the American national interest to be fighting this war or really to particularly care about what happens one way or the other in the Middle East.
00:26:07.980As to the point that you make about the right having a robust conversation right now, yeah, I think it's a good thing.
00:26:13.920And I think it is something that makes the right better than the left.
00:26:16.000I remember, and people well remember, the Ukraine debate four years ago, the left shut down the conversation.
00:26:23.560They excised any left-wing critics of the Ukraine war.
00:26:27.260They tried to cancel the Congressional Progressive Caucus from even writing a strongly worded letter about the Ukraine war ahead of the midterms.
00:27:37.820And I think if you turn your back on the future, we run the risk of running an increasingly, you know, it already is, but an even more laughably gerontocratic society.
00:27:47.840Kurt Mills, if people want to follow you, read the magazine, where can they go?
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00:34:52.120Well, they could attack the United States.
00:34:55.400And they weren't going to do it from the territory of Iran.
00:34:59.400Their own Iranian nuclear strategic doctrine is to be able to launch a nuclear ballistic missile from a ship,
00:35:08.960presumably off the coast of the United States, in order to attack either an American city or to use it as an EMP weapon against the United States.
00:35:18.420Now, the mere fact that that hasn't happened before now is not at all indicative of what could happen in the future.
00:35:25.160And President Trump had certain intelligence he must have to lead him to believe that that was going to happen sometime in the future and that he wasn't going to let that progress any further, hence where we are today.
00:35:40.440So for all the folks who, you know, think this is a neocon project, President Trump's not a neocon.
00:35:47.420And I don't even think the people around him are necessarily neocons.
00:35:52.080They're people who are looking at the hard facts of the Iranian nuclear program and discerning that they cannot have nuclear weapons,
00:36:01.000which they will use first and foremost against the United States.
00:36:05.020I'm curious because Senator, I believe it was Senator Cotton, was on Fox, I think, a day or two ago.
00:36:12.120And why I brought up the word imminent, it was, I think, actually quite an interesting community note on X,
00:36:18.480where the senator was talking about the reason why we went in is that Iran has been an imminent threat for 47 years,
00:36:24.740which I do think is sort of an oxymoronic sentence.
00:36:27.160Of course, I understand it. I agree with your assessment.
00:36:29.560I don't think the president is a neocon either.
00:36:32.360But I'm curious then how you square this idea of imminent threat with the other rhetoric and documents that we've seen from the administration,
00:36:42.080whether it was the national defense strategy, the national security strategy,
00:36:45.380or even a lot of the press post-midnight hammer, saying that Iran was as weak, as vulnerable, as degraded.
00:36:52.720In some cases, they even used the word, you know, obliterated, as we've ever seen,
00:36:57.780which for me makes it a little hard to square that positioning of Iran with then, you know,
00:37:03.700this was going to be the time that they would attack.
00:37:06.680And I would also tack on there, I'll ask you a couple of questions and you just engage how you'd like.
00:37:12.000But who's to say, too, that going in like this, when a clear successor, it's clearly not, you know, a Venezuela-type operation.
00:37:20.500I also do think the fact that it's an Islamic theocracy complicates the Venezuela template a bit,
00:37:25.660at least from like a sleeper cell perspective.
00:37:28.000But who's to say that changing the regime there even necessarily results in a non-nuclear or nuclear-seeking state?
00:37:38.280Who's to say that we don't get a more radicalized Iran?
00:39:41.020But it will be a dictatorship that has the interests of Iran at heart,
00:39:47.440and that interest in Iran will be not to attack the United States.
00:39:52.480Not to build nuclear weapons and to keep to themselves.
00:39:57.160And so we should have, and I don't think the president has any illusions that we're going to create a free society in Iran.
00:40:04.900He does have the very clear objective of making sure that in Iran you have a regime that believes nuclear weapons are a very bad idea,
00:40:13.400and that trying to kill Americans is an even worse idea.
00:40:19.120And so from that point of view, this seems perfectly consistent with the America First approach of MAGA and actually a rejection of neocon ideology.
00:40:31.400And look, Lindsey Graham is a ridiculous human being.
00:40:33.980And so, you know, the fact that the people who are for the war, many of them are ridiculous human beings,
00:40:41.920doesn't make the objectives of this military engagement in Iran wrong,
00:40:47.100or in any way, you know, discount what it is President Trump's trying to achieve here.
00:40:52.520I'm curious your perspective, both the kind of, you know, de jure de facto, actually what the admin is pursuing,
00:41:01.580but then your opinion too, when you talk about these sort of security guarantees,
00:41:07.300you know, maybe accepting some sort of Islamic theocratic regime,
00:41:10.500but as long as they're not explicitly seeking to attack the United States,
00:41:14.200there's some form of compromise there.
00:41:16.700Do you think that the kind of calculus for that also includes Israel and our allies and partners in the region,
00:41:25.900or do you think that that is something that President Trump is negotiating purely from it's only about America?
00:41:32.880Or do you think our partners, junior partners, everyone to call them, in the region are also part of that too?
00:41:39.680I think President Trump is doing first and foremost what is good for America.
00:41:43.780And the fact that you hear these stories of Israel not knowing what these back-channel deals are,
00:41:50.620or potential negotiations are, is a sign that the President's going to do what he thinks is best.
00:41:56.560It may benefit Israel in the long run, it may benefit Saudi Arabia in the long run,
00:42:01.780but his first and only interest here is what's good for the United States.
00:42:06.640And I really, I can't, I'm a little, you know, the young folks within the MAGA movement who don't understand that,
00:42:14.640I think, simply don't have enough, I would encourage them to look deeper into what the President's objectives are,
00:42:21.960and not have a reflective sort of dislike of military engagements,
00:42:28.460because they think it will lead to a broader war.
00:42:31.920And let me say, this may lead to a broader war, and I hope it doesn't.
00:42:35.260But, you know, we've been talking on this, on War Room for some time about us being in World War III.
00:42:41.360And this is one front in World War III.
00:42:43.960And you simply can't, you can't dismiss this notion that the President sees it that way,
00:42:52.600and that he wants to take Iran off the table, because Iran is a proxy of communist China.
00:43:00.120And so the communist Chinese interest here has to be first and foremost.
00:43:05.100And frankly, I'm worried about Islamic terrorism in the United States.
00:43:09.940I'm also worried about the 200,000 Chinese men of military age who look like special forces,
00:43:17.800who came over during the Biden administration, and what they could be doing in our country,
00:43:23.320and what they are doing in our country, as you pointed out in your own investigative reporting.
00:43:30.200And so that leads me to the conclusion that we're in war.
00:43:31.120Brian, we're going to have to jump to break shortly.
00:43:33.300I want to hold you through, because you're just ahead of me.
00:43:37.820I want to get to the China angle on all this.
00:43:39.780I will say I was recently on the campus of Stanford, and I actually saw a Chinese national jogging there wearing a PLA t-shirt.
00:43:47.880So if that doesn't tell you the threat that we face, then I don't know it does.
00:49:13.440The administration should not be selling our advanced chips to Communist China.
00:49:20.760I'm for decoupling, a systematic decoupling with Communist China entirely, as you know.
00:49:27.640And I'm for selling arms to Taiwan and doing it at a rapid pace.
00:49:34.260And our so-called military-industrial complex needs to be more industrial and industrious
00:49:40.440in producing munitions for us so that we can sell them to whatever country that is in our interest to sell them to.
00:49:49.580And so, yes, the administration should be more consistent when it comes to that.
00:49:54.260They should be making sure that Communist China does not have access to U.S. capital markets.
00:49:58.640They shouldn't have Communist China being able to buy up U.S. farmland.
00:50:02.220They should be buying back from Communist China the farmland they've already bought.
00:50:06.580We need to get much more serious about Communist China.
00:50:09.640And in the meantime, we have to use kinetic action to make sure that Communist China's proxies around the world
00:50:16.260are defanged, as Captain Fennell said yesterday, from being able to harm the United States.
00:50:24.180Yes. And look, we talk about nuclear war and nuclear weapons were the cause for President Trump going into Iran.
00:50:32.980And because we've not had a nuclear war doesn't mean there won't be one someday.
00:50:37.400And President Trump is trying to avoid that.
00:50:40.340And he only would have done that if he believed that whatever track Iran was on would have led to that eventuality
00:50:47.580or that they already had them and he wanted to degrade their capability of ever being able to use them.
00:50:54.620And so, as undesirable as many of these things are, they were done for a reason, and a very serious reason.
00:51:01.960And he wouldn't have done it unless that reason was very serious.
00:51:06.480And, Brian, we've got about two minutes left.
00:51:08.760I want you just to sort of sketch what you think the contours of both a politically positive but also geopolitically safe kind of off-ramp or timeline would look like,
00:51:24.260specifically in Iran, what that kind of level of escalation would be, what is the kind of crescendo, are we there yet, are you expecting more action there,
00:51:34.920or when do you think the administration, or by when, do you think they need to, you know, colloquially, we would call it, get out?
00:51:45.740The administration has certain objectives when it comes to degrading their military capability.
00:51:52.540I would say that we should leave when the Iranian regime, whoever that is, believes they've been defeated.
00:52:01.320Not only defeated, but that they know they've been defeated, and that they believe deep within them that it is a bad idea to think about attacking the United States in whatever way they can.
00:52:16.720Look, for 47 years, they've committed textbook acts of war against the United States.
00:52:22.720Whether it was taking our embassy, or using surrogates to kill our men in Beirut, or, you know, the final pre-flight training of the 9-11 hijackers was in Iran.
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