00:00Let's get back to our top story now. And these are the continuing developments, the troubling
00:03developments out of Iran, which is, as we know, showing no sign of slowing down. Joining us live
00:08now, the former U.S. Army colonel, State Department official, Anne Wright. She's there with us. Anne,
00:13thanks for your time this morning. So the war's ending. Now it's going back to the Stone Ages.
00:18Where do you think we are at this hour? Well, I think it's a pretty stupid thing that Trump and
00:24this administration has done to blow up a country like Iran. They say thousands, I think it's 7,000
00:34missile attacks on Iran. Supposedly, the danger from Iran was coming from its potential nuclear
00:42weapons. Of course, the Iranians have said they would never, ever have a nuclear weapon, and they
00:47haven't so far. Trump and his first administration threw out the JCPOA. And then now following the lead
00:56of Israel, where the U.S. now is the lapdog of Israel, the United States have mounted a horrific,
01:04horrific set of attacks, 30 days of attacks on Iran. And sadly, I think the U.S. will pay for
01:14this
01:14in many, many ways. Iran was certainly heading towards nuclear, though. Isn't the world safer
01:20and better off with that taken out of the picture? Well, it always has had this nuclear program,
01:27and it was under inspection and observation through the JCPOA that Trump threw away. And nuclear
01:36inspectors had been back into it. There was no evidence that there was movement toward nuclear
01:41weapons. But of course, you always have to wonder that. And one would say, if you don't want to be
01:48attacked by the United States, you ought to have nuclear weapons, which is a sad state of affairs
01:52for that to be the world diplomacy. And for the peace president of the United States now to have
01:59severely, severely damaged the civilian infrastructure of Iran, a country, you know, Trump said,
02:06we're bombing it back to the Stone Age. Well, in the Stone Age, there was a vibrant society in Iran
02:12where there was no society to speak of other than the Stone Age and many other parts of the world.
02:19So
02:19what they're doing in destruction of a sovereign country, of a country with huge, huge historical
02:27impact and cultural impact on our world is terrible.
02:32It's also been conducting terrorist attacks and terror related activities over recent years,
02:38either through itself or through its proxies. Did that not need to be checked?
02:42Well, it can be checked, but you don't, you definitely don't need to just blow up a whole
02:47country over it. I mean, if you want to target certain elements of international efforts by other
02:55countries, then you target those efforts, but you just don't blow up a country. One could argue that
03:01the United States does terrorist things, for example, kidnapping the head of state of Venezuela
03:08and his wife, threatening the leadership of another country, Cuba. I mean, so, you know,
03:16once you start on this horrific destruction of huge, huge civilian infrastructure of any country,
03:23as we saw in Iraq, you know, it doesn't lead anywhere good. And I would hope that my country at
03:33some
03:34stage will find that war is not the answer, that continued negotiations and things like the JCPOA are
03:41ways that you resolve issues rather than wholesale destruction of other countries.
03:47The problem is, these other countries, they're not interested in resolving issues, whether it is
03:51Iran or whether it is Venezuela that you're talking about, which is a hotbed of getting drugs into the
03:56United States. Well, no, Venezuela is not a hotbed of that. And if you look at what the court things
04:05are
04:05right now against Maduro, much of what they were talking about earlier about, you know, large scale
04:13movement of drugs and like that. That's not it. There are other countries that certainly are
04:18that are moving drugs into the U.S. because the U.S. has a drug problem. I mean, if we
04:23could solve our
04:24own drug problem, that would eliminate a lot of the gangster drug problems that we have in the world.
04:34I mean, our own country, men and women, the users of so much of that drugs are causing
04:41instability throughout the Americas, from South and Central America all the way up into North America.
04:47All right. And we will leave it there. Thank you so much for your time. Well,
04:51there's a different view of things.
