Verdict with Ted Cruz - August 26, 2021


Taliban Takeover


Episode Stats


Length

30 minutes

Words per minute

160.10406

Word count

4,882

Sentence count

326

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

16

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ted Cruz explains why the Biden administration is a disaster in Afghanistan, and why we should all be worried about it. He also points out the parallels between the current administration and the Carter administration in the early days of the Vietnam War.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.420 Guaranteed human.
00:00:04.220 We've all seen the terrible images coming out of Afghanistan.
00:00:08.020 Bagram Air Base abandoned.
00:00:10.220 The Kabul Embassy evacuated.
00:00:12.900 Now everyone just at the airport with Taliban all around the rest of the country having already fallen.
00:00:21.760 Biden doesn't seem to have many answers for any of this.
00:00:25.240 Biden's Secretary of State can't even guarantee that the president knows what's going on.
00:00:30.960 Things have gotten so bad that even the media are beginning to ask questions.
00:00:36.600 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:00:43.660 Welcome back to Verdict with Ted Cruz.
00:00:45.680 I'm Michael Knowles.
00:00:47.200 So glad to be back with all of you.
00:00:49.660 Thank you so much.
00:00:50.440 If you have not liked, subscribed, left a five-star review, we would really appreciate that as we ramp up again, get ready for our fall tour, all while we've got this crazy news from Washington, D.C., from Kabul.
00:01:06.380 It seems as though the American foreign policy is just collapsing around us.
00:01:12.500 Senator, what's going on?
00:01:14.220 Well, it's an absolute mess.
00:01:15.400 It is heartbreaking to see the disaster that's unfolding in Afghanistan.
00:01:20.880 And no matter how low of expectations you had for the Biden administration, what has unfolded in the last two weeks, I think, has been even worse than anyone anticipated.
00:01:34.460 It's a really dangerous combination of radical ideology and manifest incompetence.
00:01:43.420 And I got to say it, it reminds me of the border crisis.
00:01:47.460 The two are really quite similar in that both are catastrophes under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
00:01:53.780 And they're both catastrophes because they embrace left-wing ideologies that are disconnected from reality, what they believe is wrong, and they combine that with a really stunning inability to execute with any effectiveness, and that produces disasters.
00:02:12.680 It's reminiscent of Jimmy Carter in the 1970s of naive leftist ideology and blatant incompetence.
00:02:23.820 Well, so, Senator, I think it's important to note there are these two sides of it.
00:02:28.160 We're all debating what happened in Afghanistan, what is currently happening.
00:02:31.520 But they're really two separate questions.
00:02:33.760 The strategy, should we pull out, should we stay in, some middle ground in between them.
00:02:38.160 And then also just the basic questions of, as you say, competence.
00:02:43.880 How is this being done?
00:02:45.180 Could this have been done better?
00:02:46.940 People might disagree on what should have happened in Afghanistan, but I don't think anyone disagrees that the way in which it happened could have been much, much better. 0.51
00:02:55.600 So let's break down each of those pieces because I have a lot of thoughts on what the overall strategy should be.
00:03:00.500 But let's focus on what's happening right now first.
00:03:02.960 When I talk about radical ideology, a couple of days ago, I was on a conference call with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
00:03:15.060 And they were giving an update on Afghanistan and what was happening, and it was really stunning.
00:03:19.680 They were laying out the steps that they believed the Taliban needs to take to be accepted and welcomed into the community of civilized nations. 0.69
00:03:31.320 And it was truly absurd.
00:03:33.560 I was staring at my phone in disbelief.
00:03:35.760 These folks are incredibly naive.
00:03:38.540 They don't understand that the Taliban are theocratic thugs.
00:03:42.740 They are terrorists.
00:03:43.760 They are murderers.
00:03:44.840 They don't want to be accepted into the community of civilized nations.
00:03:50.400 And the entire Biden foreign policy is like you're at an Ivy League college faculty lounge and you're sitting there musing about, well, don't the Taliban want to be loved by all the enlightened liberals like us?
00:04:05.840 It's like, no, they want to murder you.
00:04:08.740 You know, you used to see this, Senator, out of the Obama administration.
00:04:12.500 Barack Obama famously would say the reason that they are trying to attack us is because they don't have enough iPhones or because they don't have enough jobs in the streets of Kabul.
00:04:21.780 As if nothing else beyond mere financial motivations can actually impel someone to action.
00:04:27.940 This Biden administration does not understand that our enemies are, in fact, enemies.
00:04:34.160 And, in fact, it was striking.
00:04:35.480 The Pentagon spokesperson was asked, is the Taliban our enemy?
00:04:39.160 And he refused to say, it's like, it ain't complicated.
00:04:42.380 You know, you fly planes into buildings in the United States and kill 3,000 Americans, you're our enemy. 0.92
00:04:48.740 And we should not be deluded otherwise.
00:04:51.640 But they combine that, look, the people yabbering in a faculty lounge are pretty harmless.
00:04:58.400 But the problem is these guys actually have operational responsibility.
00:05:03.600 Joe Biden is, in fact, the commander in chief.
00:05:06.620 Our military is obliged to follow his orders.
00:05:09.740 And what is stunning about this withdrawal is it doesn't seem anybody asked even basic questions about how it would go about.
00:05:18.460 It doesn't seem like they had any plan to evacuate the thousands of Americans that were there.
00:05:24.540 It doesn't seem they had any plan to evacuate Afghans who assisted the U.S. military.
00:05:31.100 It doesn't seem they had any plan to vet those Afghans.
00:05:34.160 And it was almost like they were surprised.
00:05:36.180 Wait, wait, you mean the Taliban are bad guys?
00:05:38.840 And I'll tell you, Michael, I think the most indefensible decision of all the decisions in the past month or so concerning Afghanistan was the decision to abandon the Bagram airfield.
00:05:53.100 Bagram is a secure base.
00:05:55.720 We've invested over a billion dollars into building Bagram.
00:05:58.840 It has an airfield, a secure perimeter.
00:06:03.400 I've been to Bagram.
00:06:04.260 I visited the troops there in Afghanistan, and we just gave it away.
00:06:10.340 About a month ago, the Biden administration, in anticipation of leaving the theater, decided to just leave.
00:06:19.120 And it's bizarre.
00:06:20.240 They did it in the dead of night.
00:06:21.720 They literally just one night disappeared.
00:06:25.000 The Afghans woke up.
00:06:26.860 They look around.
00:06:27.940 Where are the Americans?
00:06:28.820 They just disappeared.
00:06:29.620 We abandoned Bagram, and, of course, the Taliban comes in. 1.00
00:06:33.840 So now the Taliban controls Bagram.
00:06:35.580 Now the Taliban has a secure airfield close to Kabul.
00:06:40.240 Now the Taliban has the military hardware that the Biden administration apparently abandoned there.
00:06:46.520 And they're conflicting reports, but it appears they've got a significant number of black helicopters that we,
00:06:51.480 for reasons that defy any understanding or articulation, gave to the Taliban.
00:07:02.400 And that was just dumb.
00:07:03.940 Whatever your ideology, if you've got to evacuate, tens of thousands of Americans,
00:07:09.420 having a secure airfield with a secure perimeter would really help rather than relying on a commercial airport
00:07:17.640 in the center of a big city surrounded by and controlled by the Taliban now.
00:07:22.500 Well, there's a report out now that the Biden administration is considering launching targeted strikes
00:07:28.780 to destroy the very expensive military equipment that we left at Bagram and elsewhere,
00:07:34.620 which raises this question, again, whether or not you think we should have left,
00:07:38.240 whether or not you think that it was always going to kind of turn out in a tough way,
00:07:42.820 shouldn't you think about that before you leave the airfield?
00:07:46.200 Isn't that just, to your point, a question of basic competency?
00:07:49.700 And so what I don't understand, I don't just want to dunk on Biden.
00:07:53.100 I don't just want to – it just doesn't make sense to me that after 20 years in this intervention,
00:08:00.500 whatever you want to call it, after years and years of planning to leave, they bungle it this bad.
00:08:06.540 And I think there need to be serious congressional investigations.
00:08:10.240 There needs to be a public inquiry into what happened.
00:08:12.700 And there are two alternatives.
00:08:15.600 Number one, the intelligence was horribly flawed and the military planning and execution was horribly flawed.
00:08:23.400 That's one possibility.
00:08:24.740 The second possibility is the intelligence accurately predicted what was going to happen.
00:08:28.960 And the military planning laid out a reasonable approach to mitigate the damage, including not handing Bagram over,
00:08:37.900 including getting our Blackhawks and other equipment and weapon systems out of there.
00:08:43.660 And the Biden administration disregarded that intelligence and that planning.
00:08:48.520 They ignored what was put forth.
00:08:51.580 We don't know for sure which one it is.
00:08:53.680 Now, we have seen – it's interesting, the State Department and the Defense Department are both leaking like crazy trying to say it's door number two.
00:09:03.480 They're trying to cover their own rear end and said, no, no, no, we had this figured out, and the political hacks at the White House disregarded us.
00:09:10.380 So we know, for example, that there was a dissenting report from a number of folks at the State Department laying out their view that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan incredibly quickly if we pulled out.
00:09:24.820 And we know the political operatives in the Biden administration disregarded that.
00:09:29.860 You know, my instinct is the same as yours, that our military is usually very, very competent.
00:09:35.640 It's not difficult to think about why are we giving away the airfield before we evacuate people.
00:09:41.360 This is not subtle national security or military strategy.
00:09:46.340 Nor is, well, gosh, maybe we shouldn't leave multimillion-dollar helicopters with advanced weapon systems for crazy lunatic terrorists who want to kill us.
00:09:55.620 Listen, if we have to bomb them now to prevent them from having those weapon systems, yes, we should do it.
00:10:02.320 Bombing them is better than letting the Taliban have them. 1.00
00:10:06.480 And, by the way, letting the Taliban allow the Russians and the Chinese to get in them and learn all about them, that's a bad outcome, too. 0.86
00:10:15.320 But how the hell did it come to this point?
00:10:18.460 What idiot said, well, you know, let's just leave our helicopters there?
00:10:23.340 That needs to be answered.
00:10:26.800 And right now, the Biden admin doesn't seem to want to answer those questions.
00:10:31.080 I joined with a number of senators in writing a letter to the administration calling for a specific itemization of what military hardware was left there, what was abandoned specifically, and why.
00:10:44.640 We haven't got an answer yet.
00:10:45.760 Now, Senator, what do you make of President Biden's excuse, such as it is, that any exit from Afghanistan was going to be chaotic?
00:10:55.820 Oh, yeah, sure.
00:10:56.940 You know, to quote a leaked reported phrase from former President Barack Obama, you should never underestimate the amount of effing things up that Joe Biden is capable of.
00:11:10.180 If this was reported during the campaign, I don't know, it seems seems accurate to me.
00:11:14.380 But regardless of him bungling it a little bit more, what do you make of his excuse that, look, it was always going to be this way?
00:11:20.360 Trump campaigned on getting out.
00:11:21.800 Biden campaigned on getting out.
00:11:23.300 The Taliban were always going to come in. 1.00
00:11:25.180 So you just got to deal with it.
00:11:26.740 Well, it wasn't foreordained that it would be done incompetently.
00:11:30.080 On the question of Afghanistan and what should we do, I am someone who believes it makes sense for us to exit Afghanistan, for us to leave, bring our troops home, and end the war.
00:11:43.560 And this is probably a good time to sort of step back a little bit and think about foreign policy and approaches to foreign policy.
00:11:51.520 For a long time in the Republican Party, there were two polls.
00:11:55.420 On the one side, you had the interventionists, also called the neocons, people like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton.
00:12:07.860 You know, sometimes it seems they've never seen a country they didn't want to invade.
00:12:11.720 On the other side, you have the isolationists, most notably Rand Paul, who are extremely reluctant to engage with our military abroad.
00:12:25.420 I actually think most Americans disagree with both of those views.
00:12:31.020 I certainly do.
00:12:32.820 And I have long described my view as a third point on the triangle.
00:12:38.040 The way I describe my views is that I am a non-interventionist hawk.
00:12:44.800 What that means is the following.
00:12:48.280 I think the vital, the touchstone for any military action and the touchstone for our foreign policy should be protecting and defending the vital national security interests of the United States.
00:12:59.900 That we should not be engaged in nation building.
00:13:02.460 We should not be trying to transform distant lands into democratic utopias.
00:13:07.600 We should be protecting America.
00:13:09.760 What does that mean in practice?
00:13:10.760 Because that's all theoretical.
00:13:11.880 So let's break it down in practice.
00:13:13.240 And let me give a couple of examples from the past.
00:13:16.300 And then let's fast forward to Afghanistan.
00:13:18.740 In the past, Barack Obama was president.
00:13:20.920 And Obama proposed attacking Syria because they crossed the red line of using chemical weapons.
00:13:27.420 He'd drawn a red line.
00:13:28.620 Bashar Assad used chemical weapons.
00:13:30.540 He said, all right, let's launch an attack.
00:13:32.400 I initially, Michael, kept an open mind to that.
00:13:35.600 And I said, okay, let me hear the commander in chief articulate how this is in our national security interests.
00:13:42.180 Articulate how it makes America safer.
00:13:44.140 And had there been a clear defined mission that was defending our national security interests, I might have supported that.
00:13:50.620 What ended up happening is the Obama administration was utterly incoherent.
00:13:54.620 At one point, John Kerry said, we're going to launch an unbelievably small attack.
00:13:59.800 And it's like, well, okay, well, then what's the point of it?
00:14:03.280 Like, what exactly are you trying to accomplish?
00:14:06.080 And it was basically a press release.
00:14:07.080 That'll show you, Bashar. 0.51
00:14:08.440 You'll barely even notice it.
00:14:09.720 It's going to be so small.
00:14:10.680 That was their defense of it.
00:14:12.340 And listen, I will readily concede Bashar Assad is a monster who's murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens.
00:14:19.140 But the question I asked is, okay, if you topple his regime, how do you stop the chemical weapons from falling into the hands of radical Islamic terrorists like al-Qaeda and ISIS and al-Nustra?
00:14:29.440 And that would be a much worse outcome.
00:14:32.020 That would make America less safe than it was before.
00:14:35.480 And the Obama administration had no coherent answer to that question.
00:14:40.060 So I opposed military action in Syria because it wasn't furthering our national security.
00:14:45.120 And in that way, Rand Paul and I were both agreed on that, although for very, very different reasons.
00:14:50.640 On the other hand, when it concerns Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei is a theocratic zealot who wants to kill us.
00:14:59.460 And I believe we should do everything necessary to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. 0.83
00:15:05.420 That means sanctions.
00:15:06.520 That means diplomatic pressure.
00:15:08.160 That means cutting them off on cash.
00:15:09.620 And it means if they are on the verge of getting a nuke, using military force to take out those facilities.
00:15:16.200 It doesn't mean invade Iran and try to turn it into Switzerland.
00:15:20.660 It means bomb the hell out of them to stop them from getting weapons they could use to murder millions of Americans.
00:15:27.340 Now, in that regard, I agreed with some of the more interventionist folks.
00:15:32.080 But it was keyed to are we protecting our national security?
00:15:36.160 Donald Trump's views, if you look at the foreign policy of the Trump administration, I think we're very, very consistent with my views as a non-interventionist talk, which is he wanted to get us out of endless wars.
00:15:49.460 But he was also willing to act vigorously, for example, taking out General Soleimani, the leading state sponsor of terrorists in the world.
00:15:57.940 And if you go back before Trump, Ronald Reagan, when he talked about peace through strength, in eight years, the biggest country Reagan ever invaded was Grenada.
00:16:10.520 But he was strong enough that our enemies didn't mess with us.
00:16:14.220 So what does that mean for Afghanistan?
00:16:16.320 For Afghanistan, I think 20 years was long enough. 0.99
00:16:18.960 I think we should not be engaged in a permanent war there.
00:16:21.740 We shouldn't be trying to turn it into a beautiful Athenian democracy.
00:16:27.820 We should focus on keeping Americans safe.
00:16:32.140 That means we don't have the naive view of the Biden administration that the Taliban are nice guys who love us.
00:16:38.120 We understand they're crazy terrorists who want to kill us.
00:16:42.160 That means we understand that when we leave, we need to evacuate the Americans. 1.00
00:16:45.960 That means we understand that our enemies will try to stop us from evacuating the Americans.
00:16:51.900 That means we need to have a plan with a secure perimeter that uses Bagram Air Force Base, air base that protects our black ops and our equipment, and that anticipates it's a dangerous world. 0.97
00:17:06.580 What Biden did is their naive ideology was married with this utter incompetence and failure to ask when we leave, what happens, and how do we get out in a way that we don't effectively blow ourselves up?
00:17:25.960 Right.
00:17:26.680 Right.
00:17:26.960 Well, and so this actually does clarify thinking because certainly for me, I'm not a Rand or Ron Paul non-interventionist isolationist.
00:17:36.640 I'm not a John McCain bombing country that looks at us the wrong way.
00:17:41.920 So there has to be some kind of third option.
00:17:44.580 But it has – I think it remains a very serious debate throughout the country and especially on the right.
00:17:49.460 Are we a nation modeled after James Madison saying that continual warfare is the greatest threat to liberty, Washington, Jefferson saying to avoid entangling alliances, or are we an empire much as we were in the late 19th and 20th centuries where we're going to go into countries and we're going to stay there for decade upon decade and we're going to rebuild Korea and Japan and Germany and we're just – we're going to be everywhere all the time.
00:18:18.340 And in some places, we are still there.
00:18:20.200 So what do you make for the hawkish people, the interventionist types, the neocons who are today saying, look, Afghanistan, we didn't have a whole lot of soldiers there.
00:18:31.900 We were just trying to keep a strategic location, maybe fend off Russia and China.
00:18:38.200 If we stay there forever, it's no big deal.
00:18:40.960 Why would we leave?
00:18:42.520 Yeah, look, I don't agree with them.
00:18:44.100 And to be honest, it's most of the Republicans in the Senate fall into that camp.
00:18:47.720 And so the arguments that are being made directed at Biden are very much directed at why did you leave?
00:18:54.300 You should stay there forever.
00:18:55.420 And a lot of the Senate Republicans believe that.
00:18:57.800 I don't.
00:18:58.680 I don't think that makes sense.
00:19:00.440 I think the American people – I've talked to too many soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines, including stationed in Afghanistan when I went there to visit them, who were ready to come home.
00:19:10.020 And keeping them in harm's way in perpetuity.
00:19:13.440 I think the threshold for sending our sons and daughters into harm's way should be very, very high.
00:19:20.500 But where I differ from the isolationist, where I differ from the naive liberals of the Obama administration or the Biden-Harris administration, is I understand our enemies are evil bastards who want to kill us.
00:19:37.760 And the way to avoid military conflict is strength.
00:19:43.860 You know, Reagan talked about peace through strength, and it's a very important insight.
00:19:48.520 When you are strong, the bad guys don't want to mess with you.
00:19:52.100 When you're weak, you end up getting in many, many more fights because they do not fear you.
00:19:58.700 And in many ways, the worst consequence of what's happening in Afghanistan is not even the aftermath of what's playing out today, but what's going to come in six months or a year.
00:20:09.400 Because every enemy of America is watching this.
00:20:13.140 She in China is watching this.
00:20:15.500 And one of the consequences of Biden's cluster in Afghanistan is the chances of a Chinese military invasion of Taiwan have just increased dramatically.
00:20:28.700 They already told us that it would.
00:20:30.400 There was actually a tweet from Chinese state media that was directed ostensibly at Taiwan, but it was obviously really directed at America.
00:20:38.140 And it said, look, look at what the Americans will do.
00:20:41.660 They're not going to come running when we invade you, and you'll give up pretty quickly.
00:20:45.400 Because of that weakness, China is emboldened.
00:20:49.840 Because of Biden and Harris's weakness, Russia is emboldened.
00:20:54.320 Because of Biden and Harris's weakness, North Korea is emboldened.
00:20:57.680 Because of Biden and Harris's weakness, Iran is emboldened, as is Hamas and Hezbollah.
00:21:02.500 Every enemy of America is celebrating right now because they see the president as weak.
00:21:09.100 And that is very, very dangerous.
00:21:12.080 And it's what the left doesn't understand.
00:21:13.880 Weakness is provocative.
00:21:16.380 Weakness invites attacks.
00:21:18.740 There's a reason, Michael, that nobody goes to study and get a degree from the Neville Chamberlain School of Foreign Policy.
00:21:26.060 Appeasement is a really bad idea.
00:21:28.300 You don't have to go all the way to the other side of, let's always invade.
00:21:33.940 We have lots of tools.
00:21:35.440 Look at how Reagan took on the Soviet Union.
00:21:37.700 He didn't shy away from engaging, from calling them out, from calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, 0.95
00:21:44.360 from saying Marxism, Leninism would end up on the ash heap of history.
00:21:48.560 They asked, what's your strategy in the Cold War?
00:21:51.560 He said, very simple, we win, they lose.
00:21:53.460 And people were horrified that the enlightened left, like, no, no, no, you can't win.
00:21:57.240 You need detente.
00:21:58.340 You need a sophisticated solution that never does anything.
00:22:03.260 Reagan used the bully pulpit of America's leadership.
00:22:06.940 But he didn't send American troops in to fight the Soviets.
00:22:10.520 He didn't roll our tanks in.
00:22:13.200 He stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate and said, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
00:22:18.300 And our economic pressure, our military buildup, although we didn't use our strength,
00:22:24.500 our strength and our clear moral leadership caused the Soviet Union to collapse.
00:22:31.540 Biden is reminiscent of Jimmy Carter.
00:22:34.020 He's making the same mistakes, the same weakness.
00:22:36.360 And when I look at Afghanistan, I fear the most where we will be in a year,
00:22:43.680 whether it is China invading Taiwan or Iran announcing they have a nuclear weapon
00:22:49.080 or some other or horrific example of our enemies being emboldened because our president is weak.
00:22:58.320 This reminds me of a line from my old professor, Donald Kagan, who just died about a week ago.
00:23:03.600 A wonderful historian of ancient Greece, good military historian.
00:23:08.700 And he'd be reading Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War.
00:23:11.720 And he'd say, OK, here's how I know Thucydides is right about this point,
00:23:14.880 because it would have happened in the Brooklyn schoolyard.
00:23:17.760 This idea that if you're strong, the bullies are not going to feel emboldened to attack you.
00:23:23.320 And actually, you will have a sort of peace through strength.
00:23:26.660 Now, you raise the point of moral leadership.
00:23:29.400 And I guess that's the question that is on everybody's mind today,
00:23:32.240 because I think your take on where we ought to be on the pole of isolationism or interventionism,
00:23:38.700 I think you are offering one of the few sensible takes I've heard out there,
00:23:43.880 you know, that that it's actually a bit more complicated.
00:23:45.780 And we're going to we're going to pursue a strategy that is in the interest of the United States.
00:23:50.100 What you see from Biden is just so a total absence, it seems, of any kind of strategy at all.
00:23:56.380 So then the question for us is, we're out of the Cold War.
00:24:00.420 We're out of the freewheeling 90s.
00:24:03.760 We're now past the Bush years and the kind of war on terror.
00:24:08.060 We're going to stay in the Middle East forever. 1.00
00:24:10.020 So so what determines when we intervene?
00:24:13.240 What determines when we stay home?
00:24:15.120 Who are the enemy?
00:24:16.380 We're not fighting the Soviets anymore.
00:24:18.080 Might still be fighting the Russians. 0.78
00:24:19.260 But what is that that grand strategy that will will determine how we react to the rest of the world?
00:24:25.040 Well, and I think the right answer to that is is protecting our vital national security interests.
00:24:31.480 So the example I used of the Ayatollah Khamenei on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon.
00:24:37.940 He's a theocratic zealot who chanced death to America.
00:24:41.740 If he had a nuclear weapon, the risks that he would use a nuclear weapon either against us or our allies,
00:24:47.820 I think are unacceptably high.
00:24:49.600 And so I would emphatically support military force to take out nuclear capacity.
00:24:55.680 I also supported military force to take out General Soleimani, which Trump, it was the most significant use of military force under President Trump.
00:25:04.740 You know, I'll also point out.
00:25:07.060 All right.
00:25:07.240 Let's go back to strength.
00:25:09.180 Let's go back to the problems of Biden in Afghanistan and see how they also applied to Obama in Iraq and fighting ISIS.
00:25:19.860 January of 2017, Trump comes into office.
00:25:23.620 Obama's been fighting ISIS for years.
00:25:26.540 Very limited success.
00:25:29.120 Trump comes in.
00:25:30.560 I remember it was spring of 2017.
00:25:32.740 It was like March or April.
00:25:33.620 And I run into General Milley.
00:25:36.860 He's now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
00:25:38.260 At the time, he was the Army Chief of Staff.
00:25:40.680 And I've known General Milley a number of years.
00:25:42.920 And we're talking about Iraq and the war against ISIS.
00:25:47.600 And he made a prediction to me then.
00:25:49.780 He said by this fall, so four or five months from when we were talking,
00:25:54.340 he said we will have taken every square inch from ISIS.
00:25:59.880 Their caliphate will have fallen.
00:26:02.220 They had at the time they controlled land about the size of the state of Indiana.
00:26:06.680 He says we're going to take every inch of it and they will lose all of their territory.
00:26:11.140 And I asked him at the time because we're just a few months into administration.
00:26:14.400 And I said, General, what's changed?
00:26:16.440 I mean, why is this different?
00:26:19.800 Is it the rules of engagement?
00:26:21.320 Did they change?
00:26:22.440 And his answer was fascinating because it actually – they had not changed the rules of engagement.
00:26:26.660 What had changed is that under Obama, decisions of engaging the enemy went all the way up the chain,
00:26:39.520 literally to the White House, to the National Security Council.
00:26:42.840 So when you would encounter the enemy, you would have some bureaucrat at the NSC deciding whether or not to engage.
00:26:50.860 The joke in the Pentagon is they called Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor, General Rice,
00:26:56.820 because she was deploying troops and moving them here. 0.86
00:26:59.700 And it was like a game of risk sitting in the White House thousands of miles away.
00:27:04.340 And Trump early on made one very simple decision.
00:27:08.020 He delegated decision-making down to the warfighters, to the warfighters on the ground,
00:27:14.660 so that under Trump, when you encountered ISIS terrorists, you could just take them out.
00:27:18.680 You didn't need to wait days for White House approval on that specific interaction.
00:27:24.480 If you encountered the enemy, you could take them out.
00:27:27.580 And within months, we defeated ISIS.
00:27:30.740 That same principle, if you look at a contrast, and by the way, once we defeated ISIS,
00:27:36.360 Trump, I think, rightly said, all right, let's get out.
00:27:38.420 That is a balance that makes sense of be strong and vigorous when you are defending our nation,
00:27:45.380 but don't leave our soldiers in harm's way permanently.
00:27:49.360 Don't lose sight of their mission.
00:27:52.660 And the weird thing, Michael, I think the overwhelming majority of Americans agree with that.
00:27:58.540 I think it's, I mean, you're looking at 70, 80 percent of Americans,
00:28:02.580 and virtually nobody in the U.S. Congress agrees with it.
00:28:08.360 It's one of the oddest disconnects between the voters and our elected representatives.
00:28:14.440 And one final point.
00:28:15.840 One of the challenges of foreign policy is when it's discussed in the news,
00:28:20.160 it's discussed in 15-second soundbites.
00:28:22.680 So everything gets sort of simple and binary.
00:28:26.180 You're either always invade or never invade.
00:28:30.080 And this stuff, frankly, I think these topics are much more suitable for something like a podcast,
00:28:35.040 where we can discuss something in a little bit more depth to understand
00:28:40.520 that you don't have to have a choice of zero or 11,
00:28:44.800 that you can, in fact, be strong and, at the same time, judicious about when and where you use your strength.
00:28:53.040 You would hope that these kind of conversations that parse the nuances,
00:28:57.740 that recognize that different situations will call for different American responses,
00:29:02.640 recognize that all of these situations call for basic confidence.
00:29:06.260 You would hope that if we can discuss them on a podcast,
00:29:09.340 that it would be discussed in that way at the White House, State Department, the Pentagon.
00:29:13.440 But unfortunately, in the past couple of weeks, we have not really seen that.
00:29:18.240 And talk about the disconnect.
00:29:19.600 I think the American people, one of the few things that's truly united everyone in the past several years
00:29:24.940 is that this was just completely bungled.
00:29:28.460 Well, at a minimum, someone at the Pentagon or the White House should have said,
00:29:32.640 hey, maybe we shouldn't give a bunch of Black Hawk helicopters to the Taliban.
00:29:36.340 You would think that would have occurred to somebody.
00:29:38.700 On that audacious, Metternichian sort of grand strategic idea, 0.94
00:29:45.460 maybe we shouldn't be giving Blackhawks to terrorists.
00:29:47.700 We've got to leave it.
00:29:48.800 There will be much more to talk about in coming weeks.
00:29:50.840 But that's all for right now.
00:29:52.260 I'm Michael Knowles.
00:29:53.000 This is Verdict with Ted Cruz.
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