00:00Do you think boots on the ground were always an option?
00:04And is President Trump looking for a face-saving exit?
00:08If you can believe it, I think both are true.
00:10This is the kind of bizarre place the Americans find themselves in
00:17because you can't have both, right?
00:20You can't have a face-saving measure and total victory,
00:23or as the president said last week, unconditional surrender,
00:27whatever that means.
00:28You can't have that if you're looking for face-saving
00:30because the Iranians, and I think your other guests have pointed this out,
00:35and I'll just point it out here, and I warned about this in my book.
00:37The Iranians have created a very, very serious defensive perimeter for themselves.
00:44They have disaggregated many of the command and control functions
00:48that are traditionally centralized, and they gave it to field commanders
00:52and some of those lower echelon battlefield commanders,
00:55knowing that the center of the regime in Tehran would become the center of gravity
01:01for the American and Israeli attacks.
01:03And so it's a very deft strategy of resistance plus unconventional,
01:09attritional-style warfare the Iranians have implemented.
01:12The Americans were not prepared for that.
01:14I spoke to a source who said that basically the Americans punched hard and fast in the beginning,
01:20hoping to knock the Iranians on their butt, but ultimately the Iranians were ready for that.
01:26And this is why now you're seeing these kind of endless cogitations on the part of the Trump administration.
01:31How do we find victory?
01:33How do we get unconditional surrender?
01:35My advice to them is to abandon those goals.
01:38They're not going to get them.
01:39And my advice to them is to basically seek an off-ramp now,
01:44because right now, as it stands, the idea that we're going to be able to end this thing with air
01:49power alone,
01:50that's out the window.
01:51I don't think anybody really believes that.
01:53And this is where the ground troops come in.
01:55And, you know, I wish I could say that's a hilarious absurdity.
02:00Unfortunately, the White House press secretary a few days ago was on an American,
02:05I think it was MSNOW or one of them, and she was asked about, you know,
02:09the possibility of ground troops and would a draft be necessary,
02:12and she wouldn't deny the need for a draft.
02:15And the White House has yet to refute those claims by Caroline Levitt as being a misspeak.
02:22So now I think we need to start thinking, uh-oh,
02:25maybe there is some grand plan to defeat the Iranian regime
02:29by invading them with a bloated American force.
02:32And I'd just like to say we don't currently have the force structure
02:36to replicate what we did in Iran.
02:38Iran, I'm sorry, Iraq.
02:40Iran is a topographically very different country than is Iran.
02:46Iraq, sorry.
02:47And the Islamic Republic of Iran will be able to resist
02:51in much the same manner that the Mujahideen did to the Soviet Union in Afghanistan
02:56and the way the Viet Cong did against,
02:59and the North Vietnamese did against the Americans in the Vietnam War.
03:02This is shaping up if he doesn't, Trump doesn't get an off-ramp.
03:05This will be the single greatest strategic disaster
03:08of modern American military history,
03:11and I think this is going to end one way or the other
03:14with U.S. military force projection no longer viable
03:17in the Middle East for at least a generation.
03:21You
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