Sheinbaum Gets it All Wrong and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq in Retrospect

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our Saturday edition in which we look at

a historical topic in the middle segment.

And this week, Victor's going to be addressing the second Gulf War.

So stay with us for the middle segment, but we'll look at a few news stories first.

And our southern neighbors president Scheinbaum has given a speech recently, and we'll talk about that first.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin Annely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskee Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com is the URL.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus.

So please come join us there for what all of Victor's works and his podcasts, his articles, and his books are are linked there as well, and you can purchase them.

We highly recommend purchasing The Second World War as it has his views and his new ideas on the Second World War

that he's been talking about in some recent podcasts.

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So Victor, we have our southern neighbors, President Scheinbaum, and she's recently given a speech where she wants to criticize the ICE ICE raids and criminalization of illegality and illegal immigration in particular.

And she claims that

the United States and California in particular would not be what it is without Mexican labor in all sorts of industries and hotel service, not just hotel, but service industries and also industrial industries.

And she says if you're going to look at the fentanyl problem, it is a problem of consumption and not the cartels.

And that's her argument.

Yeah, I don't think anybody ever wants to go down that road.

And we saw it earlier with that film, A Day Without a Mexican.

No group wants to say that we are integral to the United States.

And if you take blacks out, Asians out, whites out,

you know what I mean?

Because then you get into a reply.

She says

people from Mexico, nationals,

California, are integral.

Well, Well, half of all hit-and-run accidents in L.A.

County, and I think it's true in Fresno County, are from people from Mexico.

I could go on about the gangs and everything.

So, and I could say that 50% of all births in California are on Medi-Cal, and 40%

are on Medi-Cal.

And there's a

large demographic from people who came from Mexico illegally on that.

So, I don't think that's wise.

Now, when she says fentanyl is a problem of consumption, she's right superficially, but here's why she's wrong.

If China did not send the raw product to Mexico,

then there wouldn't be fentanyl smuggled into the United States.

So why does she allow that to happen?

Because the cartels either do one of two things or both.

They tell the Mexican government, whether it's Obador or Scheinbaum, don't mess around with our product.

Or they say, just don't think about it because we bring in $20 billion to the Mexican economy.

But either way, she's allowing it to happen.

And number two, it's not like they send these cartel factories, say, stamp F on every single pill.

Here's my green fentanyl pill.

Here, take it.

They don't do that.

They do it as valium.

They do it as Atavan.

They do it as metamphetamines.

They do it as

prescription drugs, at least they try to hide it because it is so fatal.

And they think that people, if they see an F on a tablet, will think, well, that can kill me, so I won't take it.

And the market for the homeless people, 600,000, is not enough for them.

In other words, they would kill their own buyer if they identified the product.

In other words, there's not enough people who knowingly take fentanyl every day to support the cartels.

So, what they're doing is they're spreading it around to millions of people who inadvertently take it, thinking it is a less toxic drug.

So, that's second.

And then, when Mr.

Oberdar said it was a beautiful thing that 40 million people came here,

she agrees with that, but what is she basically saying is this:

I need to send a million or two million a year to your country, and they're mostly indigenous people from southern Mexico in Chiapas, Michokan, Oaxaca, south of Mexico City, along with people who are going through Mexico.

And I have to send them there for three or four reasons.

Number one,

We don't have jobs or we don't care to have jobs for them and we don't supply them with enough social services.

So, if we don't have your open border, they may march on Mexico City and say you are racist.

It's a conquistador legacy of white European Spaniard Mexicans who are running the country, and they're not treating people who are indigenous, Nahutul native speakers originally.

So, we need your safety valve.

That's number one, she's telling us.

Number two is we are exporting our people because we see them as valuable serfs.

They go across the border.

We don't care about them in Mexico.

She doesn't give a lecture to people living in Oaxaca and say, I'm very worried about how you're being treated by the Mexican government.

It's only when they go across this government boundary between the two states that she cares.

And she cares not because she wants to help her own people.

She cares because they send $63 billion to Mexico, and they send another $65 to Central America that warps into the Mexican economy.

So she's basically saying,

be careful, you can't cut off the largest source of foreign exchange.

We drain $63 million out of your economy and we even drain more because your local, state, and federal entitlements, welfare on housing, food,

I don't know, law, education, health care, freeze up that cash.

So a person illegally from Mexico who may be working in landscaping gets free all this stuff.

He's one of the people who's 50% of all the residents in California on Medi-Cal.

And then he can get $300 or $400 a month to send to his family in Oaxaca.

And then that saves us all this money that we don't have to pay for our own people who can't make it, and it adds to the economy.

Then there's another subtext.

Can I insert something first before the other subtext?

The banks that are Mexican banks that often get these remittances are reporting that these remittances are down by 12%.

Just want to put in the little Trump victory there.

That's very good.

One million people have self-deported, and there's another 200,000 who were

already through the system and had received their deportation orders, or they were criminals.

Another thing, there's an estimation there's 500,000 criminals.

So you're trying to tell me, Ms.

Sheinbaum, you don't know that a lot of your criminals come up here, that when you release these people, rather than have to spend the money to house them, feed them, and watch them, you just let them come across the border where they wreak havoc on us.

Number two.

Number three,

you're very worried because you run up a hundred and seventy-one billion dollars surplus on a supposedly free market NAFTA-like origins of our trade.

And you do that deliberately, often through letting the Chinese circumvent our tariffs by sending you raw product, which you reassemble in Mexico as your own, i.e., and then you send it up here.

So you do not pay that.

So for you, it's a Frederick Jackson-Turner safety valve to relieve social pressure.

Number two, you get rid of a lot of your criminal population.

Number three, you get enormous, enormous amounts, billions of dollars of remittances.

Number five, you don't do anything about the cartel.

You blame the person who is a young teenager and he wants to take some Adderall pills.

And he goes to a party and some goes, I got whites.

And then they find out that they're not whites, they're fentanyl that's looked packaged in Mexico to look like metamphetamines.

And then you blame people for that.

And

so we don't accept what you say.

And it's going to come to an end.

And Mexico needs the United States.

Let's just put it this way.

If there was a wall,

and there is going to be a complete wall, and there are no people coming from Mexico, and there are no people coming from, who loses on that?

She will say, well, you're having all this cheap labor.

Well,

I can tell you that the problem we're having having right now is

AI is taking over everything

and we are going to have a job glut.

People graduating and they think they're going to be coders or going to be journalists and they're not.

We're short plumbers, electricians, roofers, and we only have a 62% labor participation rate.

And number two, everything is being mechanized.

Like I said in an earlier interview, if I look at these almonds, what they're doing today outside the window, the shaking is automatic, the sweeping is automatic, and the pickup of

almonds.

And one guy is doing the whole thing.

One day, one day, one day.

It's not Victor and his brothers and cousins out there with mallets and canvases and gunnysacks, you know, to do, it would take us about three weeks to do 20 acres.

not one man in one in three days to do 40 acres.

So we're mechanizing.

And so don't give us these lectures that if we don't have Mexican nationals coming illegally into the United States, this country is going to shut down.

We have a way to get around that.

Your country will shut down because you will have to deal with the cartels.

You will have to deal with $63 billion and less income.

You will have to deal with a zero-out trade, not $171 billion surplus.

You will have to deal with 12 million people that are back in your country and they need help from your government, which is corrupt, and you're not going to be able to satisfy them.

So I don't think it's very smart for you to start lecturing a foreign nation about what they do or not do to enforce their own laws, what your country deliberately undermined and sought to break.

That's a losing argument.

And I would redirect you, Ms.

Scheinbaum, to the latest Pew Poll of last year.

They ask people in Mexico and people in the United States, do you have a favored or unfavorable view of the United States?

And Mexico, 61%

favorable.

After all the negative publicity.

Why?

Because it's a big, big money machine.

And Americans, do you have a favorable?

It's like 65%.

No, we do not have a favorable view of Mexico.

So every time you interfere in our affairs and then you you play victim and say, don't interfere, you can't come across the border and tell the cartel.

You are interfering.

You just drive down the popularity of Mexico.

And believe me, the 12 million people who came across the border,

they voted with their feet.

And the 20 million that are here and will wave a Mexican flag, they're not going to go back to Mexico.

Because your government is corrupt and you cannot provide basic, safe social services, the rule of law, etc., in that country.

Half the country is run by the cartel's money.

Yeah, so thanks for that.

You should not lecture the United States.

That's only going to get people angry.

And we can see by her lectures that Donald Trump is being successful because it's...

I wouldn't lecture Donald Trump.

I wouldn't.

I think that is a very stupid thing to do when you have so much

vulnerability and he has so much leverage over Mexico.

He really does.

I mean,

she's trying to tell me that in 2021, when Joe Biden entered office, the United States was just crippled because it didn't have an extra 12 million illegal aliens.

Four years later, it had 12 million illegal aliens.

The crime rate had soared in 21 and 22.

And our deficits, state, local, and federal, have soared.

And she's telling us that that 12 million people who came across the southern border is essential to us.

I think I like 2020 better than 2025.

If you want to ask me,

Professor Scheinbaum.

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So, Victor, we had a case a while ago where a climatologist, Michael Mann, brought defamation charges against Mark Stein.

And the case has gone through the courts, and a recent judge has reduced a million-dollar defamation fee that Mark Stein was charged to only $5,000 because he found that the climatologist Michael Mann, he's at the University of Pennsylvania, had had inconsistencies and misleading information in his case against Michael Mann.

So-called hockey stick, that global warming looked like the handle on a hockey stick and then the the edge or the

the paddle part just soared because of global warming.

And Mark Stein hadn't

and he's a comedian, he's a satirist, and he had made fun of that.

And

Michael Mann got a lot of left-wing money behind him and thought he was going to make Mark Stein pay as an example so no one would ever criticize or suggest that the climate change advocacy of Michael Mann was flawed.

It was a long case.

Mark Stein started out that case fairly healthy and now he's had a whole slew of health problems because the lawsuit threatened to ruin him financially.

It tied up all of his time.

He was one of the marquee columnists.

So it did a lot of damage to Mark Stein and it was unnecessary.

I'm glad that Mark, whom I know and like, I'm glad that he won.

But it's sad that it took that long to have it.

And

the thing about climate change is

there's one central truth to it.

Europe is destroying its economy through

quote-unquote renewables.

Germany especially, they're getting this very, very expensive kilowatt per hour

as a result of shutting down coal, natural gas, oil,

not developing nuclear or new hydroelectric.

And China is just going full blast.

They're going to build in China on the Tibetan border the largest

hydroelectric plant in history, bigger than the Three Gorges project.

It's going to be able to produce enough hydroelectric for probably 50 million, and it's going to alter the environment.

They're going to build a huge tunnel, they're going to do everything.

It's on the border with India, the Indians are very upset.

But China doesn't care.

But what it does do, it keeps lecturing the United States about its sins in Europe.

And so the United States and Europe then spend a lot of money and become less productive because of their energy costs, while China feels, well,

they're going to cut their emissions and we'll just triple ours and do it cheaply, and then we'll get an edge in trade and production, and maybe the world won't get that hot because

the other

billion point four people will do what's necessary, but we're not.

And then they dress that asymmetry with, oh, you had the Industrial Revolution, you did all before we did, now you're changing the rules when we industrialize.

No, when you were not industrialized and you wanted a steam engine or you wanted a shovel, you imported it, and somebody had to produce it in their country.

So,

it wasn't just the West that was releasing emissions for itself.

It was releasing emissions in the 19th century and early 20th century for the whole world.

Got industrial products from the West.

And if you thought that emissions were so bad, nobody forced you to buy them or import them.

So,

it's too bad that we're doing this.

And that's

and it's the project of a and in this country, a bi-coastal affluent elite who basically say, I'm in the right zip code, I have the right letters after my name, I'm wealthy, I don't really care what the price of gas is, I do not really care what the price of electricity is.

I have my big SUV, I fly private a lot, and I feel terrible about the planet and all those suckers that are deplorables and irredeemable.

They've got to change their lifestyle.

Get rid of those Winnebagos, you guys.

Get rid of that jet skis.

Get a sailboat like ours.

Well, let's turn then last before we go to a break and then to the second Gulf War.

The Teamsters have made a switch, and if you ask me, it's a long-needed one, of financial support, and they're starting to support Republican candidates as their constituency would like.

So I thought that was a great victory for Donald Trump in a way that the Teamsters now.

And a fundamental change culturally that we're seeing.

I feel like you should just add that to all of the disparate problems that the Democratic Party is having and lack of leadership, et cetera.

And now we see some very serious results from that.

And I think the Teamsters are one of them.

Trump's greatest legacy.

He broke the Democratic Party.

And he turned it, he exposed it for what it was.

It was a bi-coastal elite party with a bunch of billionaires who spend lavishly and a bunch of subsidized poor

and a professional class that feels frustrated.

They make $200,000 and $300,000 a year, but they live in these blue cities that are very expensive and they can't buy their beautiful home.

That's what the Mondami constituency is.

Frustrated young white professionals.

And then then you've they've lost the working class.

They've lost it's not just the

they have lost the muscular classes, Hispanic muscular classes, black males, white.

As I said before, if you look at 2016, 20, and 24, Donald Trump's white vote, it's pretty constant.

And he did not win the popular vote in 2016 or 2020.

And his voting and yet he did win the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2024 with the same percentage and actual numbers of white voters.

So what happened?

He picked up some women, he picked up some young people, and he got 55% of Hispanic males, and he got about 25% of black males, and he picked up another 10% to 15% of Asian males.

And how could that be if he was supposed to be a racist, according to the Democrats?

It happened because they don't like,

it's not that they, they're just people.

They don't want to be talked to.

Nobody wants to be talked to.

And basically, this is a caricature, but the democratic attitude toward a black truck driver or a Mexican-American electrician was something like this.

Now, you don't know what's good for you, but those 10,000 people crossing the border every year that we're going to, every day, and the 2 to 3 million people that cross every year illegally in the Rio Grande Valley, they're going to be good for you.

I don't care what you say about your schools being swamps, crime going up.

They're good for you.

Remember that.

Now,

men have a right to transition, and they are now women, and they're going to compete in your daughter's sports, and you don't know what's good for you because you're too ignorant.

But I will represent you.

I'm a black

woman with a PhD.

I'm a Hispanic woman that's your Congresswoman.

I am your white liberal Chuck Schumer or Nancy Fluid, and I will tell you what is good for you.

Got it?

And then they'll say, you know what?

You don't understand that gas at $5.50 a gallon is really good for you because the planet is heating up and the new Green Deal is going to save you.

Get some solar panels and get on the team.

So they talk down sanctimoniously.

And that was never clearer when Barack Obama confronted those black Democratic activists, young men, and said, basically, you don't know what you're doing.

You think Donald Trump's good or something.

You've got to get out there and support Harris.

You're suffering basically from Marxist false consciousness.

And I, as an elite, know what's good for you, and I will tell you.

Now go do it.

That's what he basically said to them.

And they don't, you know,

for me, the locus classicus, the epitome of this is Pete Buttigig.

Everything about him represents what I just said.

Sanctimonious, self-righteous, talked down.

I know the answers.

I know what's good for you.

I am the transportation secretary.

I don't think California is suffering from not enough freeways or it's too crowded.

It's suffering from racist legacies of clover leaves.

And I'm going to make non-racist clover leaf.

Nobody wants that.

And that's what the Democratic Party is.

It's a Karen skull.

Well, to add to it, you find out so many things they say are lies.

And I think that's even more.

I think they might tolerate the Karen Skold if this Karen School wasn't gaslighting them or essentially lying to them but

so well it is

Jasmine Crockett is like a gift that's Christmas gift to the Republicans that was gift-wrapped I mean here's this preppy woman who went to prep school in Atlanta from upper middle class parents and then she

She gets in the house from Texas and she doesn't do anything other than spout off about Donald Trump and white people in this fake inner city patois

and she intersplices the F-word, the S-S-H-I-T word, and she's vulgar, and she screams about all the

offenses that she's suffered as a proud black woman.

And it's just everybody who watches that, black males, Hispanic males, they don't like it.

Nobody does.

And yet she...

And then there was Elizabeth Warren.

I mean, remember when she ran for president?

She opened a refrigerator to get a beer in that commercial.

Hey, everybody, open refrigerator.

It was like she was reading a placard.

Elizabeth, open refrigerator slowly.

Go in.

That thing on the shelf is a beer bottle.

Open it.

She comes over and goes, boom.

I am drinking a beer.

I am one of you.

I am a non-elite.

Harvard former law professor who faked

a Native American ding.

Ha ha.

And then she's back again with Mom Dami.

So they're sitting on a park bench, and then the script says, laugh and kid around with Mom Dami to show your real.

Oh, Madame.

It's so fake.

I did an interview today with Senator Eric Schmidt, and he's a really good guy.

He's very smart.

I really like him.

And he made a good point.

I was talking about this performance art,

you know, with

smashing watermelons, Icum Jeffrey with with his Hercules club,

Spartacus out there, I am Spartacus, no, I am Spartacus, that kind of stuff, his filibuster.

And he said, I said, it's performance art.

And he said, yeah, but it's fake performance art.

They don't even believe it.

It's just fake.

It is.

It really is.

Just before we go to break, I want to be sure nobody forgets Hillary and the Boilermaker in West Virginia, just

saying.

So Elizabeth's not the only one.

Remember the

Sojourner Truth.

Hi, everybody.

I'm so tired.

I didn't get on.

I didn't come this far.

Just to stop now, everybody.

Hillary, the Southern Draw, Boilermaker.

Didn't Barack Obama and the primary call her Annie Oakley?

Because she started shooting rifles at the range?

That is the most fake candidate we have ever seen.

Bill could pull it off because he was actually from a poor family and

dysfunctional.

And he had those appetites that were dysfunctional.

But she tried to act like she was lower, lower, lower, middle class.

And she couldn't get rid of her upper middle class.

Yeah.

All right, let's go to a break picture.

And we'll come back and talk a little bit about the second Gulf War.

So stay with us and we'll be back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

You can find Victor on X.

His handle is at VD Hansen, and you can find him on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So, if social media is the place you find news, please add Victor to your following.

All right, Victor, so anxious or interested in hearing about the Second Gulf War, which went on after 9-11, I believe.

Yes, there were two elements that 2022 November invasion of Afghanistan, which wasn't really in the Gulf.

We'll just call that, and I'll get to that.

So when we say Second Gulf War, we're talking primarily about Iraq.

And so

on March 20th of 2003, the United States invaded Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

They

did so for a variety of reasons.

They didn't get UN support support to do it as they had for Afghanistan

because the French and everybody were not on board.

Now, why did they go in?

They went in because

they felt that after 9-11 they were going to destroy radical Islam that had caused that, bin Laden, and they believed there were particular governments that were secretly using terrorists.

And in the case of Saddam Hussein, they said things that were true and not true, they being the Bush administration.

They said that he was sponsoring terrorists that had been involved in the First World Trade.

And there were, that was true, the First World Trade attempt to blow it down, I think it was 1993, and they were there.

Abu Nadal, a wanted terrorist, was there.

And so they said that Saddam Hussein had been involved in terrorism akin to bin Laden.

But then they went through, I think they had 21 UN resolutions that authorized the war,

which were passed.

And if you read them,

only three or four had anything to do with WMD.

They were things like the genocide of the Marsh Arabs, the use of chemical and biological agents after the First Gulf War that Saddam had done,

the murdering of his own people, the harboring of international terrorists, the harboring of criminals that attacked the United States.

And then I think they made a mistake.

They said, and he has WMD.

Well, we knew he had WMD at some point because he gassed his own people.

But they made such a big deal that that was the only real reason because it was an existential threat.

And they thought that the other legitimate reasons why he might be an enemy, but maybe not justified a preemptive attack,

they didn't showcase.

So they had an argument that the UN had approved,

but they didn't showcase it.

So the nerve gas,

this was all in the fall of 2002,

and that period when they invaded in March 20th, they didn't find it.

Now, we don't know what happened to it.

got rid of it or there was these narratives that there were trucks in the night that were taking it to Bashar, Assad, Syria.

It could have happened.

I don't know if it did.

But that was a fundamental weakness that they had said, we're going into Iraq

not for prior things he did, but to prevent what he might do if

he has his chemical and biological weapons.

And then they said he was actively

making a bomb.

Well, the Israelis had already in the past hit that,

And then there was yellow cake.

And there was no evidence that he was on his way to get a bomb.

Not that he wouldn't want one or not that he wasn't trying.

So the reasons that you might have a case for him to be removed were not emphasized.

And the reasons that you did emphasize could not be adjudicated and documented.

So then we went in, and it was absolutely

George Patton from France all the way to the Rhine.

It was brilliant.

Thunder Row.

They just went in there, they landed, and they toppled the statue, and in three weeks, they destroyed the government, and they destroyed the military.

And when that statue topped, there was legitimate jubilation.

And then by

April, mission accomplished, everybody was happy, and then it was like, well, now what?

Obviously, if the United States planned such a brilliant invasion,

they've got 25 million people, they've got all this oil, They've got rid of Saddam.

The people are happy.

And what happened?

There was no plan for reconstruction.

They had a general who was going to do it.

They got rid of him.

And then it was going to be democracy, democracy, democracy.

And then by 2004, we started to see the roadside bombs.

Iran started to send shape charges in.

roadside bombs, rockets.

There was the Baathist pushback from scattered Baathist people.

There was ISIS.

There were all these contingents that were attacking the United States.

The United States was trying to create a consensual government, which it did.

And the problem was that it was a Shia-majority country.

And the Shia majorities looked to whom for support?

Our arch enemy, Iran.

And Saddam was a minority Sunni leader.

but had put a lid on Iran.

He'd been at war with him.

So we were in this very weird position of trying to say: if we free Iraq and people like it, maybe it'll spread to Syria.

Maybe they'll have an Arab spring there.

Maybe they will want to overthrow the Irans.

Or the pessimistic view: Iran loves what's happening because you got rid of this Sunni killer, and now our Shia can take over and be an extension of us.

And that's what happened.

That said,

by 2006 and 2007,

and I went once for a brief embed on Black Hawk helicopters and inspecting things with a group of Americans, and then I went back the next year with just one person, and I was attached to H.R.

McMaster's inspection tour for a few days.

And it was very clear to me that

this was during the surge when we had been taking away troops.

The 2008 election was on the horizon.

And remember, there's Howard Dean, and we're going to go to Washington, we're going to go, and

we're going to win the election.

And then John Kerry had stepped in in 2004.

That was a 2004, and got rid of him, and he lost.

But that was the issue that brought Obama to the fore.

He was in the Senate saying, ah, this is not going to work.

This is terrible.

And he had some points.

And

the surge worked.

So when I went over there, I thought, wow, what's going on with this surge?

And then I discovered what was going on.

All the journalists were shown that the Americans were putting little parks in Baghdad, and they had

the Bechtel Corporation building really sophisticated generators and energy production.

I never quite understood.

I was taken out to look at one of them.

It's much better than anything in California we were building.

It was just crazy.

And then I looked at a row once of Humvees.

It was endless.

I couldn't see the end.

I was upstairs of a building.

I thought, oh my God.

And then I saw all these poor kids that were there fighting, and they had won.

But the weird thing was they were telling everybody that they were nation-building, but they had let people like Stanley McChrystal go wild, and they were killing Baptist.

and ISIS-type people.

And that's what broke the back of the resistance.

So by 2008, during the campaign season, there were fewer people dying Americans.

We lost 4,600 dead.

But most of those were prior to 2008.

So in 2008, Obama didn't have a signature campaign anymore because he was saying that John McCain is for the war.

And John McCain was running against

Obama.

And he was saying, well,

I wouldn't have gone in there, but, you know, folks, let me tell you folks, we can win.

We always got to win.

And we're winning.

We won.

It was stupid Donald Rumsfeld and his tactics.

But now we got the surge.

And I'm for the surge.

And the surge worked.

And there is no resistance.

And the actual deaths per day by the middle of the 2008 campaign, there were more in accidents in the military, on an average day, three or four, than there were in Iraq.

So Obama did not really have an issue against McCain, except in September, the economy melted down.

So if you go back and look at that campaign, basically it was all about the near depression that we were in after September.

But what we don't say is that he ran on that we're in a depression.

But September, October, November, December, January, five months later,

we were starting to recover already.

And we would have recovered quickly if he hadn't nationalized the economy.

But the point I'm making, he didn't really run on the war anymore.

And when he came into office in in 2009,

there was hardly any violence.

And there was a consensual government.

We had a residual force of about 30 or 40,000.

And he started to yank them.

And

he had been against the surge, the surge at work, and he started yanking them out.

And by 2010, 2011, they were all gone.

And guess what?

ISIS came over, and Obama said, we're not really worried about we're not really worried about ISIS, they're the JVs.

We don't around here we call them the JVs.

Well they weren't the JVs

and so

they took over Iraq gradually and so when Donald Trump came in in 2017, you remember those horrific

they put people in orange jumpsuits and they beheaded them on the beach.

It's horrible what they did.

They ran half the country and then Trump came in and just basically told the Air Force and the spotters, we'll just bomb the blank out of them, and don't, there's no holes barred.

And within like six months, they destroyed ISIS.

And Baghdadi was always screaming and yelling, you know, they thought he was, and they killed him.

Soleimani was giving them shape-sharp, they killed him.

So that was tragic that if you're going to go in there and you're going to fight and lose all those Americans, and then you have this surge to break the back of the resistance, which they did under David Petraeus.

And then

what happened?

In a weird way, every single person that was involved in the war, for reasons that were legitimate or illegitimate, good or bad, sad or good, tragic or not, they all ended up poorly.

Tommy Franks was kind of

attacked.

If you remember, David Petraeus, after he was like the hero and the Obama administration, it was terrified that he was going to run in 2012.

He was our national icon.

I think Lindsey Graham was suggesting to get a fifth star, like MacArthur, you know, or

Omar Bradley, etc.

And then suddenly Petraeus imploded with the charges against him.

And then when you looked at

all of the commanders that had been very heroic.

They ended up, McChrystal,

all of them, they ended up very political.

They were attacking Donald Trump as a Nazi, a liar, a Mussolini.

Everybody, it was just

the military went through all of that and they did a wonderful job.

And then,

I don't know, they all in lockstep sort of joined the Obama revisionism.

And so what was the end of it all?

The end of it was there were about 35,000 wounded Americans.

You see them on T V every night with wounded warriors or tunnels to tower and stuff.

And then there was 4,600 dead.

And is it better now after losing there were about 300,000 dead Iraqis?

Is Iraq better off now?

Yes.

Is it calmer than it was?

Yes.

There's no ISIS?

Yes.

Did the Americans do that?

Yes.

Does anybody give us credit?

No.

Is Iran taken over Iraq?

No, they're not now, but it's not because necessarily of the Iraq war government, the government didn't particularly, Shia government didn't particularly like Iran,

but

due to the Israeli emasculation of Iran and what we did to it, we ended it, and then the destruction of Hamas and Hezbollah.

Suddenly now the Iraq, the Iraqi government is sort of free because they look around and there's no Assad dynasty in Syria and Lebanon doesn't have a Hezbollah, it's not grabbed it by the throat, and Iran has no way to resupply anybody because they don't have any air defenses and anybody can stop them.

They're not afraid of them anymore.

There aren't 200,000 missiles in the area threatening Israel.

The United States has got its deterrence back, so this is all good for the Iraq government.

Was it worth what they did?

Probably not.

I supported the war because I thought Saddam Hussein, I did believe, I wasn't sure about the WMD, I was skeptical of that a little bit, but

I did think they'd find it.

I think it did exist somewhere.

I don't think it was nuclear.

I think it was the stuff that

Susan Rice said that we got rid of the stockpiles that Bashar Assad had.

That was a lie.

They didn't.

But he was using things, I think, that had been sent to him by Saddam.

But when you look at all the people who were killed and maimed, and then we just pulled out and let ISIS take over the country and all of that,

as a general rule, when I went over there the two times and I looked at all the kids fighting, I got to the impression that I wouldn't want one American dying for that country.

because it was utterly corrupt.

The people did not like the United States.

And here these these people were trying to build schools and roads, and they were being shot at.

I'm getting to the point as you get older, you don't want any Americans to die anywhere in these places where their heroism is not appreciated.

It's not like World War II or Korea.

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So, I have two questions.

One's sort of specific to the war or the after effects of the war, and that is, I know that they went after Baathis.

You were just talking about that, but the Baathists were also, most of them had been generals in the Iraqi military.

And I was wondering if you thought taking out the officer corps in that fashion was a good idea or not, or do you feel like they didn't kill enough Baathists to interrupt the Officer Corps?

Well, when you took away the Baathist party and the echelon of the Iraq Army, they were kind of veterans.

They had fought for ten years against Iran, and they kind of won that war.

I mean, Iran was the one that asked for the armistice and lost twice its number of casualties, even though it had twice two and a half times the population.

You have to replace something with something.

And the problem was, once you said,

it was kind of like they were influenced by World War II.

So they came in and in World War II they said there's not going to be any Nazification.

They relieved Patton from command post-war because he said in Bavaria, he was pro-consul of Bavaria.

with the Third Army.

I don't have anybody else but people who fought.

I don't know if they're all Nazis or not, but I'm not going to have a litmus test for the mayor or the water guy or the power guy.

I need these people or the police.

But we denazified immediately, and it took a long time, but then we were there with these huge amounts of troops from different countries, and we had destroyed Nazism.

When we went in there, we didn't destroy Baathism.

We got rid of Saddam, and we did some damage.

But then the question is, well, who's going to be the police?

Who's going to run the sewer plan?

Well, they were all Baathist bureaucrats.

So rather than just keep them there,

we kind of got and said, well, we're going to get rid of all of them.

And there was nobody to replace them.

And we had no plan.

And we didn't have enough troops.

We only went in there about 175,000.

And this is a huge country.

And we hadn't really defeated it like we did

Germany.

And so we were basically trying to imprint a foreign solution on a people that had not been defeated or had not really suffered that much at that time.

And then they felt that we were foreign interlopers.

And then another problem was

we had gone in in November to Afghanistan.

And everybody said that was the graveyard of empires.

Excuse me, in September we went in.

late September, as I recall.

But by the first of the year, the Taliban was gone.

And Al-Qaeda and bin Laden were gone.

And we were controlling.

Everybody was happy.

And so rather than just stay there and fix that,

we redirected all of our military and foreign aid and everything to the Iraq problem.

And when we did that, the Taliban started to resurface, and they started to

cause problems.

The other problem was

we looked at Iraq

and we said to ourselves, this is the big problem.

Saddam Hussein, he might have a nuclear weapon.

He's got oil.

Afghanistan was the easy thing.

So we've got to go into Iraq now.

And we had it backwards.

The problem was going into Afghanistan and trying to do something because Iraq was flat.

And we had shown in the first Gulf War, you had control of the whole airspaces.

It had a port in the Persian Gulf.

You could bring in things by water.

You had people in the area that were friendly to you, such as the Gulf states and Jordan, etc.

And you had a pretty educated population you could work with, the Iraqis, and they had been secularized in some part by Saddam.

You go into Afghanistan, it was landlocked, it was mountainous, it was cloudy.

The Taliban Taliban were pre-modern.

You had people in Iran and Pakistan that hated our guts, that were helping.

And you never knew what was going on.

So it was always much harder.

So when we went into Iraq, that thing just

erupted again, and we were there for 20 years.

So the irony was

that we had gone into Afghanistan in 2002 and felt we won the war and

it was over with and the Taliban were gone and now we've done this great thing.

We'll just tiptoe in and Iraq was the same thing.

So you had people in the Bush administration said, well, we got rid of the Taliban, the graveyard of empires in Afghanistan.

And then we just went right into Iraq.

And he got rid of him in three weeks.

And now we're going to go into Syria if we have to.

We're going to democratize and do the whole thing.

And you think, well, each time you go to a different place, the other place is not pacified because you really didn't show a level of force to deter your enemies.

And they're going to pop up behind you.

And that's what happened.

So the irony was that

although we lost more people in Iraq,

it was possible to do something because of terrain and sea power and sea supply, I should say, and air power and the population.

And today, Iraq is much better off than Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, we were there for 20 years.

We thought we had solved the problem.

It was just impossible to solve.

You couldn't supply anything.

You had to fly over enemy territory.

In a lot of cases, you had a duplicitous Pakistan on the border.

It was mountainous.

The people were not educated.

It was just,

it was a nightmare.

And that ended up the greatest humiliation in history of the U.S.

military.

I think it was, what we saw in Kabul in August of 2022.

Well, given all that you've said.

Given all that you've said, my question is just, do you think if we had the chance to do it over, would we do it?

Do you think we should do it over?

No,

because

the MAGA.

Donald Trump supported, he doesn't say that, but he supported going into Iraq.

But very quickly, he flipped and said it's not worth it.

In fact, he also said that George W.

Bush should be impeached, which really is a source of a lot of the anger of the Bushes at him.

But he learned from it.

So when he went into Iran, he was there for 30 minutes.

And when he killed Soleimani, he didn't do anything.

He didn't want the Americans on the ground in Syria 200 insulate.

200 times they were attacked, and Biden didn't do anything much.

So his whole thing was, America is preeminent and cannot be defeated if you understand where the U.S.

military should be deployed.

It should be deployed mostly in a conventional situation.

It must have air power, and it should not put troops on the ground in non-conventional terrorist insurgency types.

Not that we don't do it well, but it will be a forever war and you'll never be able to maintain the support of the American people.

We learned that from Vietnam.

So you want to go take out Noriega?

Fine.

You want to go into Grenada?

Fine.

You want to go bomb Milosevic out?

Fine.

You want to go and take out the nuclear facilities in Iran?

Fine.

You're Reagan.

You want to go bomb Libya?

Fine.

You want to get involved in Libya and keep bombing and doing this and this?

No.

You want to get involved on the ground in Iraq the way they fight?

No.

You want to get in the ground

in Afghanistan the way they fight?

No.

You want to fight the way you want to

And then Trump basically is a businessman.

So in a cost-to-benefit analysis, he just says to himself, Huh, I'm going into

Iran.

Bad deal on the ground.

I'm going to take out the nuclear facilities.

Bad deal if it's a tit for tat.

World oil prices will go up.

Well, then what's a good deal?

Go in there for 30 minutes, say the war is over, make Iran great, and then let them have a performance art, symbolic little attack on our base and gutter and say they didn't touch one American hair on any American head, and the war is over.

It's the end of it.

And that's how he does it.

A typical Republican president would have said, Okay, you attacked

our base and guitar, so we're going to hit you back again.

And it would have been, yeah, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm.

You know what I mean?

So I don't think

that's a good question.

Yes, we wouldn't do it again.

Does that mean there weren't good things that came out of it?

There were good things that came out of Iraq.

Was it worth all of those maimed Americans and killed?

I have mixed emotions because to say it's not is horrific because they fought so heroically and they did get rid of Saddam Hussein who was a monster.

I don't know what he would have been doing, but he killed over a million people.

And they did leave a consensual government finally, and it does function sort of.

And Iran didn't really take it over like they thought they could, especially now.

And something happened by mixing the pot in that area, because now Lebanon has a chance, Syria has somewhat of a chance,

and Iraq has somewhat of a chance, but whatever I mean by what, it's their business, not ours.

We're not going to get involved.

We have too many problems at home.

Yeah, we sure do.

And I I don't like to see, get older too.

I don't like

when I go to the Midwest or I go to places in the San Joaquin Valley and I see Americans that don't have a lot of stuff and there's not a lot of opportunity.

I don't want to go spend a lot of money on people who don't like us.

And that's mostly the Arab-Muslim world, to tell you the truth.

All right, Victor, so let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about polls from the Washington, D.C.

area from their residents.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find these podcasts videos on YouTube and on Rumble and on Spotify.

So we have all of those outlets.

So Victor, I wanted to combine two things here.

We've seen some comic incidents or ex-posts by Eric Swalwell and J.B.

Pritzker, the Illinois governor, and then also the Washington polls.

And these occurred after Donald Trump had brought the National Guard into Washington, D.C.

Pritzker started yammering about this is evidence of tyranny and authoritarianism.

And on his ex, he got it straight back at him because he had

capitulated to lockdowns over COVID 40 plus times in Illinois.

Swal thought he was going to be smart and say on Monday when Donald Trump was just beginning his action that, well, there was a murder in D.C.

in a neighborhood, and so Donald Trump has to own this, but he didn't realize that he was actually making Donald Trump's case because it was a murder after all.

And then finally, Washington Post did poll of D.C.

residents, and 50%

said

D.C.

is either very serious, crime crime in D.C.

is either very serious or extremely serious.

So as you always say, they are, it is lose-lose with them, but some comic incidents in D.C.

I went to Washington late, the last time was early June.

And I can tell you that everybody you talk to knows that it's not safe.

I think even Joe Scarborough said all the Democrats called him and said, I'm so happy they're bringing in troops.

Oh my gosh, but I have to attack him publicly.

That's basically their attitude.

Eric Swalwell, well, as I said, I wrote some critical things of China, and Fang Fang came to see me as a consular official out of the Bay Area.

And I think she was a, she told me she was a political operative that monitored American politics.

But when she walked in my office at the Hoover Institution,

I kept the door open.

I had one of my research people with me the whole time.

And the way she changed accents and how she was dressed,

you would have to be a stupid, narcissistic idiot to fall for that.

I'm serious.

In my case, it was maybe he would say it's easier because I'm an old man, but my point was it was about 10 or 12 years ago, and he fell for that.

And he got involved with her when he was on the House Intelligence Committee.

So end of story with that guy.

He's Anybody who would fall for her,

honeypot, it was just a joke.

Anybody could see that.

And so, that explains his stupid exercise.

Anything he says, he's a Beto Aurora of the House.

You know what I mean?

They get these certain loudmouthed people that are not very bright, and

they think they're young, and they're hip, and they're going to shoot baskets, or they're going to skateboard like Beto.

Beto's run for governor, he's run for president, he's run for senate.

He loses every time and now he's in the news too.

So

bottom line is it's kind of like Iraq.

You nationalize

this police force, you bring them in, you show

military National Guard presence, and then you supposedly free up the police to go after the criminals.

But the agreement that what's going to work is you've got to arrest the criminals.

They said we arrested 26 criminals the first day.

Great.

What happened to them?

Where are they now?

Well, they went into the D.C.

jails, and then you have a D.C.

prosecutor, and then you have a D.C.

judge, and then you, what, let them go?

Yes.

And most of the people are fronts, they're criminals that are 14, 15, and 16 below the juvenile criminal liability age.

I have to be very careful here because

the mayor, Muriel

Bowser, she switched all over, and

Karen Bass has weighed in, and the Chicago mayor is weighed in, and

all of these people in the big cities have weighed in.

And then we juxtapose this to, I mean, the person who was the negative foul term, big balls, remember him?

He was beaten up.

So my point is this.

There is a crime epidemic statistically, and they say that crime has gone down, but of course the Washington Police Commissioner was chastised, or they're investigating him for doctoring crime figures.

And as I said earlier in a broadcast, most of these big cities do not report all of the assaults, thefts to the FBI Crime Statistics Center, because they know if they do, it's a referendum on their crime-ridden cities, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Los Angeles.

They don't comply.

So, when they say crime is down, those statistics don't represent what's actually happening.

The people know what's going on.

So, this is the point.

If you look at this situation

and you look at the statistics that we do know, that African-American males, who make up about

5% to 6% of the population,

they are committing about 55%

of all murders.

And when you look, most of them are they're black men that they're killing.

But when you look at assaults, when you look at theft, you have a group of about 5% of the population that's committing 50 and 60% of the crimes.

Only 7 or 8% of the crimes that they commit are interracial,

but of those 7 or eight percent, it's about anywhere from four to twelve to one black on white, then white on black.

So these are the statistics that

basically, if you're going to give a generalization in these big cities,

they're mostly in blue, not all.

There's some, you know, red state, Memphis, for example.

Memphis, Tennessee, it's supposed to be a red city, but it's one of the most dangerous places.

But most of them, not all, you know, Houston's got a big crime, but most of these cities, whether they're in blue or red states, are run by left-wing people in the city council.

And

12% of the population is black, but I would say 70% of the mayors of these big cities are black.

And maybe that's, if you're thinking in racial terms, that's probably justified because the populations are much larger than the national average in these jurisdictions.

But here's my point.

The left racializes it.

Al Sharpton is weighed in and said Donald Trump is a racist and

Mayor Johnson is weighed in.

He's a racist.

He's trying to come into an African American.

But they never,

nobody on either side of the question ever wants to talk about it.

How do we address this problem demographically and data-wise.

What do I mean by that?

If you take the 12%

population of the African American, let's say 6% males, and all you said was the crime rate of black males in these cities will represent their demography nationwide, okay?

Or maybe citywide.

20% of crimes will be black, 6%, no, whatever.

You would not have a crime problem.

And then you get into the question, well, why is it inordinately a black male problem?

You can argue that's a legitimate question.

You can say it's if you're on the left, it's a history of slavery and Jim Crow.

And if you're on the right, you can say, no, it's the $20 trillion that we put in for great society programs and Black Lives Matter.

And we created this whole idea of

victimology.

And we've said the government's going to give you all these repertory programs.

And then somewhere in the middle, people would say, well, it's a history of racism, but it's also cultural problems.

But what I'm getting at is no one talks about it at all.

The only time to the extent anybody talks about the racial component of it, it's always on the left and they always say it's racist, when somebody wants to address the problem.

So you have this disconnect where in these cities, most of the people who are white or non-black are left-wing.

So you have all these terrified people of this crime rate, wealthy, professional people, and they all know it's inordinately the result of black male, inordinately, not all, but inordinately, demographically, statistically.

But they won't say anything about it because they're on the left.

So they all want Donald Trump to come in and do stuff, but they all want to say that this is the wrong thing to do because you have to systemically deal with a social problem.

And what are the social-cultural problems?

We all know it.

It's 75% of these families have no male figure.

75% of these families are on public assistance.

The schools are run by teachers' unions.

These students are not given an adequate education.

The left will not allow people to discipline children that are tardy, disruptive in the classes.

You cannot hold teachers to account because it's considered systemic racism.

etc., etc.

And if you're not going to talk about that, then you create cynicism.

So the country is cynical.

They basically say,

I am not going into downtown Washington, Baltimore, Chicago at this time, this area.

I'm not going to go in there.

And the reason I'm not going to go in there, I'm not going to tell you.

Because if I tell you why I'm not going to,

and then somebody will say, well, just imagine the worst thing that could happen.

If you did, you go into downtown Cincinnati and you come out of a bar and a black man and a white man change words, and one person slaps him,

and then the whole thing deteriorates into a riot.

And white people are beaten up, kicked, and there's outrage, and then everybody cynically says, well, nothing's going to happen.

They'll have charges, they'll be dropped, and then we'll get down to he said, he said.

So one person says something mean to another person, they get in a fight, and that explains all the reason why a young woman comes in and kicks somebody the head.

See what I'm saying?

It's always going to be that way.

So nobody wants to talk about it.

So what they do is they just avoid it.

Then you get this bull in the china shop, Donald Trump comes in and says, wait a minute.

This is the world's capital.

This is the capital of the most powerful country in the world.

And half the city you can't go to, day or night.

And it's dangerous.

And two miles from the White House, they're killing people.

And we can't talk about it because you'll be called a racist.

But I'm going to talk about it.

I'm going to put, and everybody goes crazy.

Why doesn't Al Sharpton and Jasmine Crockett,

Maxine Waters,

why don't the squad, when they get all together and say, we're going to have a national conference and bipartisan, and we're going to say, these are the statistics of illegitimacy of single-child homes.

and women who are raising, trying to raise,

and we're going to see how we can stop this and bring it up to national norms, which national norms are not so good.

Mexican, white,

except for Asians.

But nevertheless, why don't we get it up to national norms?

How can we encourage a cultural shift where a African-American man thinks that he has a responsibility to stay married and be a father?

If he's divorced, to be a father.

And how can we get a two-parent family?

And how can we inculcate that it's shameful to break the law?

And how can we change the culture?

Or should we not change the culture and just say it's white racism and expand

the federal and local and state entitlement?

Definitely the second is easier.

That's why they do it.

Quoting Tom Sowell, he said that.

He was one of the most brilliant people I ever met.

And he said, you know, when people have to go it on their own, you look at illegitimacy and divorce rates and employment.

Blacks were not that much different statistically from whites up till about 1964.

And then the white feel-bad, guilty, liberal, great society program and said you don't have to keep doing what you're doing.

And

he faults white liberals for the destruction of the black family.

Well, Victor, we're at a stop here, so we're going to have to go.

But I wanted to read a couple of comments on your YouTube account, your recent Jack, and you did on Tuesday of this week.

One comment from Goomba226.

As a former Howard Stern fan, I would say VDH's analysis of Stern is spot on.

I became disgusted with him years ago.

He is an old, out-of-touch Karen.

Thank you, Goomba.

I'm calling Howard Stern old and out-of-touch.

I know, isn't it?

He's my age.

Yeah.

And then the second one, this one reflects a lot of comments that you got on this.

Very nice.

Richard Gray 802.

In today's world, you have, and I mean have, to be spot on and accurate on your words and statements if you're a conservative.

Thank you, Mr.

Hansen, for being just that.

You're not biased and call it like it is on both sides.

I really like you keeping it clean and calling out anyone who curses.

Even though I'm guilty, I realize how right you are.

Thanks for being a beacon of hope in a corrupt world.

So thank you, Victor.

I mean, I've said things in private that were cuss words, but I just remember, I think I mentioned that we were driving one day up to the mountains, and we had this old car, and my father, it had the wires coming out of the seat, you know.

They used to have springs,

and my dad was driving, he was bouncing.

He was sitting on a sharp spring, and he said to my mom, my B-U-T-T hurts.

And my mother said, what did you say?

Did you three hear that?

You didn't hear that.

And we were kind of smart,

too smart.

And my one brother said, well, actually,

there's such a thing as the butt of a gun.

There is the butt of an argument.

So butt, mom, refers to the essence or the lower part.

So dad, she said, I don't care what you say.

And then my dad started giving other names just to tease her like ASS.

And

she said, can we just agree on one thing?

You have two choices, Bill.

You can say that your bottom hurts or your rear hurts.

And he said, I don't think so.

I think it's my ASS.

But we were told not to use those words.

One final thing before we go.

I mentioned that I was asked, you asked, and I hadn't thought about it, the translations of the Aeneid, and I said that I had liked that early one by Rolf Humphreys.

It's kind of loose, but it was a good poem.

He was kind of a classicist poet in the 50s, I think.

I grew up reading that one, and then I mentioned Robert Fitzgerald.

But I didn't, I said, I've got to remember the other person.

It was Robert Fagels who did one.

There's one by David West.

It's newer, but the one that I assigned when I was a professor was, I remember, Alan Mandelbaum,

which was very good.

So,

anyway.

Well, thank you.

Thanks very much, and thanks to our audience for joining us on this Saturday edition.

And we'll be back with another show at the end of next week.

So stay with us, and Jack and Victor will be.

And Victor has some interviews that are going to be a good question.

I have an interview with Senator Schmidt from Missouri.

I think you're all all going to like him.

He's really a wonderful senator.

He's one of the most eloquent and blunt, honest people that I've had on.

And then we have Barry Strauss, the historian, and he's written a new book on Rome and the Jews.

And it's fascinating.

You're going to read about the destruction of the Second Temple and the historian

Josephus.

And you're going to,

I think you're going to enjoy it.

All right.

So, thank you, Victor.

Thanks to the audience.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.

Thank you very much.