00:00This is Israel's war.
00:03That's what it is.
00:04It's not an attack.
00:05It's not an attack on Israel, by the way.
00:07It's hardly anti-Semitism or Jew hatred.
00:09It's just, it's a fact.
00:10Head of state came to our country.
00:12Head of state of 9 million people came to a country of 350 million people
00:16and demanded that we help them, or in effect, do it ourselves,
00:22topple the regime in Tehran.
00:24Now, how did they get the leverage to do this?
00:26That's a complicated question.
00:28And it's something really worth thinking about.
00:30But how did this tiny country with no resources and 9 million people
00:33convince the world's great superpower with the greatest military in history
00:37to do its bidding in a way that was going to hurt it?
00:40Hmm.
00:42Well, again, many layers to that question.
00:44But the most obvious and immediate answer is because Bibi told the president
00:51of the United States, you can join me or not, but I'm going.
00:55And the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, said this in a call to congressional leaders yesterday.
01:00He said Israel said they were going.
01:02And at that point, you really only have two choices.
01:06You can get on board and try and help or contain Israel's war.
01:15That's part of the calculation here.
01:16Israel's going.
01:18Let's try and keep this within bounds.
01:21Let's try to be a moderating force on this adventure, whatever it turns out to be.
01:24Or you can tell Israel, no.
01:30And they'll just do it.
01:32And if they did it, that would not protect us because there are hundreds of thousands of Americans
01:38in the Middle East, both in uniform and out, civilians and military personnel.
01:45And there are also the world's most important oil projects, oil, energy infrastructure, oil and gas,
01:52which has more than any other factor determining effect on the global economy.
01:56So everybody needs their oil and gas, period.
01:59You can't change that.
02:01Sorry.
02:02And so if that infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, it affects all of us, all of us, everybody, but us.
02:10So you can't just let Israel go and do this.
02:14Now, of course, there's a third potential theoretical option, which you say to Israel,
02:19which is a client state, which we pay for, whose creation we made possible.
02:24You say, no, we're not doing that.
02:26I get it.
02:27You don't like the Ayatollah.
02:30You don't like Iran.
02:32But this is bad for us, and we're not going to let you do this.
02:35And if you do it, we're going to, I don't know what, cut off aid, something.
02:39We can apply the pressure that is inherently ours to apply since we're paying for all of this.
02:45But that was not even on the table.
02:47That's never been on the table.
02:48No one has ever in the last 63 years considered doing that.
02:53Really, the last president to do that was John F. Kennedy in 1962, when he got in a not as
03:00famous as it should be dispute with the founding prime minister of Israel,
03:03then the prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, over Israel's nuclear program at Damona.
03:09And then President Kennedy said, no, I don't believe in nuclear proliferation.
03:14This is one of the pillars of my administration, and you can't keep testing, and I'm demanding inspections.
03:23And, of course, he was not able to make good on those promises because he was killed in November of
03:291963,
03:30and the person who took his place, his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, gave a green light to the Israeli nuclear
03:35program.
03:36So that was the last time an American president said no, a hard no, to Israel, tried to restrain its
03:43core ambitions.
03:44The second question that's been asked is, why now?
03:47Well, there's two reasons why now.
03:48The first is it was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone, the United States or Israel
03:55or anyone,
03:55they were going to respond and respond against the United States.
03:58The orders had been delegated down to the field commanders.
04:01It was automatic, and, in fact, it bared to be true because, in fact, within an hour of the initial
04:07attack on the leadership compound,
04:10the missile forces in the south and in the north, for that matter, had already been activated to launch.
04:15In fact, those had already been pre-positioned.
04:18The third is the assessment that was made that if we stood and waited for that attack to come first
04:23before we hit them,
04:25we would suffer much higher casualties.
04:27And so the president made the very wise decision.
04:30We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.
04:32We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.
04:36And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks,
04:40we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed.
04:44And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't happen.
04:47Do it.
04:48Do it.
04:48Do it.
04:49Do it.
04:49Do it.
