00:00:00.000First off, I'll ask you a kind of a harder question, harder in the sense of brass tacks hard, and then I'll ask a kind of deeper or maybe more highfalutin question.
00:00:10.460So what is the plan exactly? Because they seem to be pursuing these differing rhetorical strategies to different audiences.
00:00:21.480Because Trump has outright said, as clear as day, we are going to annihilate their military.
00:00:28.880They didn't just fire in military targets. They fired directly on political targets. In fact, they killed the head of state.
00:00:36.900And did they kill Ahmadinejad as well, or was he appearing on podcasts?
00:00:41.520Apparently he's going to be on Patrick Bet-David.
00:00:43.660Is he literally or spiritually dead? That's the question. Both, perhaps. He'll appear on PBJ's podcast, as I call it, PBJ's podcast.
00:00:54.800He'll just appear dead on the body and just let, you know, Patrick continue to talk at him.
00:01:01.540But OK, so they say it's this very contradictory thing.
00:01:06.560So they are going balls to the wall on the one hand, yet their messaging on the other reminds me of Vladimir Putin's declaration that he was engaging in a special military operation.
00:01:20.280They're using the same words. But in both cases, you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound.
00:01:26.820There were little actions in the Donbass region for a decade between Ukraine and Russia.
00:01:35.100And you could say it was a war of sorts.
00:01:37.880But once you go in and you, Putin certainly wanted to kill Zelensky or at the least capture him and put him on trial or something like this.
00:01:49.820Who knows what else he was claiming at the time, but it was it was depicted as a special military operation, this little unique thing.
00:02:00.360It's very precise. We're going in. But the fact is, it can't be like Vladimir Putin is engaged in a four year long war of attrition at this point in order to, quote, denazify Ukraine or whatever he was claiming at the beginning.
00:02:15.520And I feel the same as well with the United States in the sense of, yeah, this is a little bit more than what we did last summer, but maybe it's not regime change.
00:02:30.160Maybe it's not boots on the ground. But again, you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound.
00:02:35.420I don't know how you get out of this without doing a regime change or how you would do a regime change without boots on the ground.
00:02:45.480So I just feel like there's some and I guess maybe I'll ask the more highfalutin question along with this one, since I'm I'm rambling a bit.
00:02:53.920But it's like Bush and Cheney and the neocons from UChicago, they studied philosophy, etc.
00:03:04.560They were able to create an ideology, even a sort of theology about what they're doing in the Middle East.
00:03:13.800We every human heart yearns to be free. That is basically what there is.
00:03:18.180Bush literally said that in 2005. We are bringing democracy and democracies never go to war.
00:03:23.480So our greatest ideals and our hardest realism are the same. That that was how they pitched it.
00:03:29.960It's brilliant. In fact, it almost is Hegelian. It's like the ideal is real and the real is ideal.
00:03:36.200And again, it's coming from these philosophers in the Pentagon, which is, I guess, not surprising that they would couch it in this way.
00:03:45.040And yet they never went into Iran. They were politically neutered by 2006 in the midterm election.
00:03:54.760They were seen as illegitimate. They were made fun of on various comedy shows.
00:04:00.760They were willing to go all the way to destroy Iran, which was part of their long term objectives, even in the late 90s.
00:04:09.800And now we have Trump who and the Trump administration and the PR wing who can't message to save their life,
00:04:20.020who are saying just blatantly contradictory things to different audiences.
00:04:24.340They don't care. They don't know. They're just dumb. All of the above.
00:04:28.980And yet they've done it. They did the thing that Cheney feared.
00:04:34.640They did the thing that that was probably a bit too much for John Bolton.
00:04:39.240He would eat these. Whoa, we might want to slow down here with the war stuff, which is hilarious, ironic.
00:04:46.120But so we're in this like contradictory situation where there's no justification, no legitimacy, and yet they're going farther than the people who, as you rightly point out, seem competent and, dare I say, cool in comparison with these assholes.
00:05:09.240On the plan, obviously, I've been racking my brains to figure out what the hell they're doing for the past, like all of us, for the past four, five days now.
00:05:16.580And I think it's day four as we're recording this, and they've changed the reason every single day.
00:05:22.180In fact, I watched a Marco Rubio press conference where he seemed to change the reason about three or four times within the same press conference.
00:05:28.080So that suggests to me that something hasn't gone, something has not gone to plan, whatever the plan was, has not gone to plan.
00:05:36.380Otherwise, you're not getting this making up reasons on the fly business and the mission creep.
00:05:40.860Originally, it was about nuclear stuff and regime change.
00:05:44.340Then it's somehow transformed now into you can't allow Iran to have short-range missile capability, which on the face of it is an insane doctrine that I don't think they can, I'm not even convinced it's in the remit of American power to be enforced.
00:06:01.220Essentially, what you're saying there is Iran is not allowed to have an army or not allowed to have a defense, which I don't think was the original purpose.
00:06:09.920Which means that you have to do regime change.
00:06:12.480They've just painted themselves into a corner.
00:06:15.060I honestly think, Richard, that it is as simple and as stupid, I'm afraid to say, as they went in there thinking that they create conditions for the people to rise up and overthrow the government.
00:06:27.220And when that didn't happen and Iran started fighting back and fighting back in a way that surprised even me, all the stuff with the Gulf states and hitting the strategic assets in the Gulf and so on has surprised even me with how quickly they were able to do that.
00:06:43.560I think that they're like, oh shit, what do we do now?
00:06:46.760And there's a lot of signs that this did not have, unlike the Bush wars, Bush-Blair wars, if you want to put it that way, unlike those wars, there are lots of signs that this does not have what I would call regime consent writ large, by which I mean the media clearly are not as on side as they were back in the Iraq war.
00:07:10.520I've seen critical segments on CNN and on BBC and I listen to the shitly radio station here and there's also a memory of Iraq, one looms very large, but also I get the distinct sense that the media is not quite sure that the Democrat Party, I saw that speech from Chuck Schumer earlier on, was being like, what's going on?
00:07:32.700Why haven't you asked for Congress approval for this?
00:07:38.680Taking us to war, you haven't even told Congress what's happening.
00:07:43.160You've got the Pentagon leaking against the administration.
00:07:47.040So I think there's a lot of telltale signs, Richard, that the Trump admin has gone a little bit rogue and the rogue action was precipitated, as Marco Rubio said, by Israel.
00:07:58.820And that, in a way, Israel has gone rogue and the Trump admin, that one part of the American system has gone rogue with it in a way that the rest of the, even National Review, which is neoconcentral, were saying like, hold up here.
00:08:13.920So when people like John Bolton and National Review are saying, hold up, are we sure about this?
00:08:19.060You can tell it hasn't had the normal kind of, they haven't gone through the normal protocols.
00:08:24.900Also, Foreign Policy Magazine, which is another, I guess, establishment, they also are not sure.
00:08:31.820In this country, it is extremely unusual for our establishment, for the British establishment, for the British government, for former generals and things like that, not to be 100% on board in my entire lifetime, whether Afghanistan or Iraq or Ukraine.
00:08:47.640OK, it was complete consensus in our media.
00:08:50.840OK, you get the occasional Jeremy Corbyn or Peter Hitchens or something, but generally they're all on board.
00:08:56.840In this one, all week, there's been very senior voices, former ambassadors, former generals, current generals, the actual government being like, yeah, we don't want any part of this.
00:09:08.960So all of that suggests to me that something unusual has happened here.
00:09:12.840This is not normal, quote unquote, neocon war.
00:09:16.080I think it's very much an Israel Trump admin war.
00:09:19.220At the risk of sounding like Rachel Maddow, are we living, not that stopped me before, but are we living in a dictatorship in the sense that now I know that according to the Constitution, Congress should declare war and so on.
00:09:38.940But since, what was it, the Korean War was actually justified on the basis of the UN, in fact.
00:09:45.640And anyway, let's just put, to put it mildly, we've been living in an imperial presidency for many decades.
00:09:51.360Nevertheless, the buildup to the Iraq War was at the least a year in which the headline on every paper was about the Middle East and about the debate.
00:10:03.600And the justification with WMDs, most notoriously, and with the freedom agenda, and so on.
00:10:12.840And we're at this point where it doesn't even matter.
00:10:18.400Donald Trump gave a State of the Union address in which Iran was mentioned, but it was mentioned rather lightly.
00:10:24.560He certainly didn't give anyone the impression that we're going to go to war this week.
00:10:29.960And if you think about it in this other way, maybe all of that consensus is a 20th century, a holdover from the 20th century in the technological society where you've got to have the papers and the big pundits and the neutral journalists and the politicians from the other side.
00:10:52.120You've got to get them all on the team, and then we'll go to war together.
00:10:56.260Maybe we're just living at this point where not only does Congress not declare war, Congress doesn't, in fact, do much of anything.
00:11:04.960And they can't because we're so polarized.
00:11:07.220And we're just living in a dictatorship of Donald Trump where he just does what he does alongside Bibinette Yahoo.
00:11:19.140And half of the public is on drugs or watching a pornographic live stream of three transgendered lesbians playing video games to the point where they don't even know this is happening.
00:11:37.540It's almost like if the Iraq War, the first Gulf War, that is the George Herbert Walker Bush 90s, if that war didn't exist because it was being played out on television, it's almost like now the legitimization of it doesn't exist.
00:11:53.960It's not even played out on television.
00:11:56.300It's almost like postmodern on a new level or something.
00:12:12.000We're down to the point where he's even lost people like Matt Walsh and kind of Indian level slop grifters like Dissident West and people like this.
00:12:21.080Even there you're taking off the MAGA hats.
00:12:23.740But at least he's got Captive Dreamer.
00:12:27.200On this score, one of the things that I have thought more than once when I've been watching the propaganda efforts, which I actually think, again, have been Israeli-led, not US-led, about the Bolivian bringing the crown prince back and the dancing Iranian girls and flying that flag with a lion on it, is that I get the impression that a lot of that was built up something 10 years ago.
00:12:53.460It feels like it's somehow outdated in a way.
00:12:56.840And the arguments were designed for 10 or for an operation that never quite happened.
00:13:02.180Now they're doing it and they've just dusted it off without any respect to what the reality is on the ground, how normal people are feeling, how.
00:13:10.580And if you want to talk about moral justifications, it really does seem to come down to, in Iran, they make women wear the hijab, which is not even true anymore, by the way.
00:13:21.360But they made, when I was 12 years old, they made me wear the hijab and I want to express the full range of fashion choices.
00:13:28.220So bomb, bomb the country so I get to wear a bangle in my hair and accessorize, which is not the strong, when you're up against people who have genuine, radical, religious zeal of faith.
00:13:41.060And it's not fake, they really do believe these things.
00:13:43.860I wonder about liberalism as a doctrine that can animate.
00:13:47.180You're asking people to go and fight and die for this.
00:13:49.280This is actually something James Burnham talked about in his famous book, in Machiavellians and in the Manigiri Revolution.
00:14:00.060He said, look, during World War II, it was a time of mass unemployment.
00:14:04.020The Germans basically were able to call on blood and soil.
00:14:08.540And it was a very strong animating doctrine to get men to fight and die.
00:14:12.360OK, and then he said, look, in Britain and in France and in America, they had to appeal to abstract principles like liberty and freedom and the free market and things like that.
00:14:25.700And he said at the time he wrote the book, I think it was like 1941, something like that.
00:14:29.580It was a time of mass unemployment and they were struggling to recruit.
00:14:48.200I see even James Burnham saying you need some animating narrative or story to tell that's going to that's going to that's going to make people want to fight for you.
00:14:58.660And I think this has been America's one of America's great problems since the Second World War that they got away with that one.
00:15:45.220And I do think it can't easily be written off as something that's important for a for any country or empire.
00:15:52.960This is probably why Putin has spent the first decade trying to rewrite Russian history and come up with whatever it is, orthoduganism or whatever.
00:16:02.920He's trying to find something that's going to animate Russians to want to die for him, right?
00:16:07.160Because liberalism doesn't get you there.
00:16:09.320So this is something that I see as something that maybe a lot of these Iranian diaspora massively underestimate when it comes to the will of Iranians to want to be liberated for what?
00:16:23.100Like burgers, french fries and a range of fashion.
00:16:28.040I mean, in the sense of the brilliant thing about the neoconservatives is that they did offer a compelling doctrine, one that was ineluctable, to be to be honest.
00:16:43.600I remember reading when I first read Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and The Last Man, he said in his preface to the second edition or something, it was like, all of these people don't like my book and they criticize it, yet none of them disagree with me.
00:16:59.560Because their critique of Fukuyama was basically, yeah, the Soviet Union's gone.
00:17:05.240There's actually a lack of democracy in Iran or there's a lack of democracy in Mongolia or Africa.
00:17:11.420So they're in a sense affirming his thesis, which is that it's not just that America is powerful and markets are most efficient and thus will win.
00:17:23.380It's that there is no other source of legitimacy outside of a mixed economy of liberal capitalist democracy.
00:17:34.200You just can't argue for anything else.
00:17:42.120There's nothing else that you can come up with.
00:17:46.280And so I think he was actually getting at something.
00:17:49.500But I would say this, Irving Kristol wrote very specifically that, like the Soviet Union of old, the United States is an ideological nation.
00:17:59.680So he was just outright saying this thing that MAGA dislikes now and they're like, we're a people, not an economy or whatever.
00:18:08.900Irving Kristol, he didn't say you were an economy, although that was a part of it.
00:18:12.220He said you're a theology in a way like you are a revolt against the old order.
00:18:19.980Gods are not, excuse me, kings are not given to you by gods.
00:18:44.060Like the Soviet Union, we are just as radical as the Soviet Union.
00:18:47.840And after we defeated the Soviet Union, we're moving forward.
00:18:52.160We're not retreating as Buchanan wanted to do in some of his articles in the National Interest against Fukuyama, where it's like, congratulations, we won this ideological battle, but now no more ideology.
00:19:18.580The Soviet Union, at least between 1917 and let's just say 1968, the Soviet Union captured the imagination of most every educated person with an IU above 115.
00:21:17.700A lot of this, again, just to reiterate, it's an expression of the fact that all of that stuff that was powerfully legitimizing to the United States is now just withered away.
00:21:31.760And they're treating it as something new or something powerful or realistic.
00:21:36.300But they're actually just, like, other people surf that wave.
00:21:40.540And now the wave's gone, but they haven't sunk yet, mangling the metaphor.
00:21:57.320It's worth mentioning that after Burnham made those comments in Managerial Revolution, the original neocons, of which Burnham was one, don't forget.
00:22:06.360This is even before they founded National Review and the Buckleyite doctrine and so on.
00:22:12.080There were some Straussians involved, Irving Kristol, people like this.
00:22:15.920They were very, they were acutely aware of this problem that you're talking about, of the lack of a coherent ideology.
00:22:23.100And they almost, they were cynical, right?
00:22:27.600But they were like, look, people need something to motivate them.
00:22:32.560And what they basically settled on in the 1950s and the 1960s was a very simple good versus evil narrative, okay?
00:22:42.720A very simple, whether it's you're always refighting World War II or during the Cold War, right?
00:22:48.960This is why they were such ardent anti-communists, right?
00:22:52.080Because they were able to have the Russians there as the permanent bad guy, as the permanent bad guy.
00:22:58.720And in fact, I've got a book here called Who Played the Piper, where you can actually watch James Burnham and his friends putting together and inventing out a whole cloth, basically what we call today the center and the center left.
00:23:11.380The liberal, the non-communist, the anti-communist left was a creation of James Burnham and the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as was the kind of, I guess you want to call the non-fascist right.
00:23:23.900The non-like we needed a right that's all about Buckley, essentially.
00:23:28.720They created both of those, but kind of operating software underneath it was just a very simple story of we're the good guys, we're going to fight the bad guys, cowboys and Indians.
00:23:40.780It's World War II when we're fighting the Nazis, or it's fighting the bad Ruskies or whatever else.
00:23:47.700And make sure that you keep all messaging, whether it's media, whether it's magazine, whether it's intellectual work, on those rail lines as a way of having powerful counterbalance.
00:24:01.000And part of it, part of the vision of the good, and I've called this boomer truth before, but like a construction, is individual self-expression as the highest good.
00:24:13.440Something like, something like a consumer choice, something, and so when you get to Fukuyama and you're thinking about freedom, right, it's the, it's a, it's a kind of doctrine of, what do they call it?
00:24:25.180It's not a word that people use in wealth, in kind of meditation circles and things like that, self-affirmation, self-actualization, there we go, self-actualization, Jane Fonda workout videos, self-bessement.
00:24:42.620Yeah, individualism, writ large, whether in various different forms, whether it's John Wayne style or John Lennon style, all of the different, Ronald Reagan style, Rambo style, these are all different articulations, He-Man and Hulk Hogan, articulations of the same idea over and over again.
00:25:03.740And what I think you've seen with MAGA, and I think you're right, Richard, is that they are still feasting on the fumes of all of that, that all of that was built up, nothing has replaced it, but they're still, as they've been trying to sell this war, it's been interesting how often they go back, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago in some cases, and this is probably why it's only really landing with booms.
00:25:27.920And older, like older Gen Xers, like you would say, and it's not really landing with the younger folks that much, because none of this shit means anything to them.
00:25:36.540And they didn't get, they didn't get a proper dose of the operating software.
00:25:40.920And I think a huge reason of the reason, huge reason it's not landing, both in this country and in America, is because back then, back when I was 18, everybody believed in democracy.
00:25:53.280Everybody believed our government worked for us.
00:25:55.260Everybody believed that the economy kept on getting better.
00:25:57.920Everybody believed that you could go to university and buy a house and have a family and all those sorts of things.
00:26:03.180In 2026, none of those things are true.
00:26:05.480In this country, just this year, we've had a 45% drop in graduate vacancies here.
00:26:20.880And so it's much more difficult to make the argument, we stand for liberal democracy, and we're going to bomb you into democracy too, when basically nobody at home buys into the central vision anymore.
00:26:34.020This was the problem with late, this was the problem with the late Soviet Union as well.
00:26:37.780Nobody believed in communism by the end either.
00:26:39.660Except Gorbachev, who wanted to reform it, and in the reform, ironically ended it.