War in Afghanistan, Palestinian Patsies and Biden Bumbling

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Hello, America.

Thank you for joining the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

And we have people from all around the world too.

So, thank you for joining.

This is our weekend episode.

We're recording it on Saturday, so it'll be up as soon as we can get it up after Saturday.

We hope you enjoy it.

We've got some news stories, and then we're going to talk about the war in Afghanistan for the United States between 2001 and 2021.

So, stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

Victor, so just first, we had a writer on our website say they couldn't believe that you had said, I would vote for

Nikki Haley in a second.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

You said I said I would vote for her in a second.

That's what the reader said?

That's the quote I have.

Yes, that is an incomplete statement and a misrepresentation.

If somebody would like to go back and replay it, I'm almost positive.

I said,

whatever a person's

preferences are with these three

candidates, it seemed to be the only viable ones, Donald Trump far ahead, then DeSantis and Haley sort of closing, or maybe in third.

That everybody on the conservative side should vote for whoever is the winter.

And I gave

an example of just the opposite of what your reader implied.

Of the three candidates, I'm least sympathetic to Nikki Haley.

But for points of emphasis, I said even Nikki Haley, I would vote for her in a second.

If it was a choice between

Joe Biden, which I think is very unlikely, I don't think he's going to be able to run.

Or Gavin Newsom or Michelle Obama or whomever they put up, I would vote for her in a second over any of those left-wing candidates.

And so would the writer, I think.

Yes.

What we don't want to do,

what we don't want to do is, on the one hand, the MAGA base stay home because a Nikki Haley would be the nominee as much as we don't fully support her agendas, nor would we want the suburban rhino Romney establishment person to stay home if the nominee would be Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis.

The only way you're going to win 40 or 50 seats in the House and 10 seats or something in the Senate and the White House is to stick together.

If you don't do that, the country's lost.

It's just very simple.

It's very hard, though, to convince somebody to do something when they see an imperfection in it.

You know what I mean?

But we did learn in in 2008,

and I wasn't a big fan of John McCain, but we learned in 2008, and nor was I a fan of Mitt Romney.

But

as disappointing as both were, they would have been preferable to, believe me, Barack Obama.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I was thinking since we're on the topic of current candidates, Tim Scott dropped out of the race.

Did you have any thoughts on that?

He's a very nice guy.

He's a capable senator, but he never was able to resonate

beyond his personal story.

So every time he gave a speech, it was very emotional and moving.

But he said, even a person like me, a black, impoverished rural resident from the south, could come to such prominence as a testament of the wonders of this country.

And we heard it, and we heard it, and we heard it, and it was wonderful.

But what we wanted to hear is an agenda that he could push through that A, was superior to

Trump's DeSantis' Haley,

and

that he could push through, that it was both superior to and it was workable or viable.

And he couldn't do that.

So he didn't appeal to very many people, unfortunately, for him.

Aaron Powell, do you think it will get him a spot in if

a Republican wins in an administration?

I think he was aiming for a higher billet than that, that he felt that if Donald Trump is the likely nominee and he was ahead, and he never really criticized Donald Trump, and I think he expressed clear intentions to support him, that

a white controversial

Manhattanite would be balanced by a black Southerner.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

So on the next subject, Biden, I know we've talked about the visit of Xi

or Xi, however you say that name, but anyways, his visit to San Francisco, which seemed as

short, it seemed a very short visit, so he got away as fast as he could.

But nonetheless, after the visit, Biden had a news conference, and he seemed to be bumbling around.

And I noticed that there was absolutely no attempt to hide the pre-chosen reporter of a question and the matching answer which Biden read off of his notes.

And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that conference.

Well, I had said that he was failing at a geometric rate, not arithmetically.

And I think if you look at his performance, the APAC conference in San Francisco

this past week and compare it to what he was doing six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, it's obvious he can't perform.

He doesn't.

Every time he gets up on the stairs to the dais,

it's a 50-50 whether he's going to fall.

He's fallen two or three times.

And when he finishes the speech,

you don't know where he's going to go.

He doesn't know where he's going to go.

Sometimes he exits stage left.

You usually go into

a speaker's podium and then you go the opposite direction.

But he turns around.

And

it's very sad.

He's saying, where is my...

who's going to rescue me?

That's his attitude.

Where is my,

what am I going to do?

This man is in charge of 7,000 nuclear weapons.

He has no idea where he is.

And then when he gives the speech, you can just

anticipate that his handlers are thinking, hmm, make sure that he doesn't read the question and the answer because

we've got the reporters to give the questions in advance, secretly.

And here are the questions.

And sometimes he doesn't know that.

Or he'll read the prompts, turn left, talk, face face the crowd.

He'll read that out loud.

And so he should have never run.

But it was, again, the Democrats'

preference for power over the good of the country when they looked at that 2020

ensemble and they said to themselves, Kamala Harris, no way.

Corey Booker, no way.

Julian Costro, no way.

Pete Buttigieg, no way.

Elizabeth Warren, no way.

Bernie Sanders, no way.

They're going to frighten people.

Joe Biden.

Well, yes, he's senile, but we can can prop him up and get the Obama puppeteers out and they can program it, pull the street, and that's what they thought would work.

And it might have worked, but he's running out of gas.

I don't think he's going to be able to pull it off in a second term.

And I think it's really debatable whether he'll finish his first term.

Yeah.

Well, he seems to have his adopted son, Gavin Newsom, if I can borrow some of the terms.

I don't understand that.

Yeah, he's embraced Gavin Newsom, but Gavin Newsom

doesn't look too well because

you don't

become inert when people are saying there's human feces all over the streets of San Francisco.

There's homeless people that are injecting and fornicating and urinating and defecating.

There's smash and grab at random all over.

You can't go into a pharmacy.

It's either closed down or it's behind a cage, all the things you need.

It's a dysfunctional, dystopic city.

And he said, it may be that, but it's not going to be for a week.

And I'm going to clean it up and everything because you people of San Francisco are not nearly as important to me and my presidential aspirations as showcasing the Chinese leader.

And that's what he did.

Yeah, and he said, you think I'm cleaning it up for cheat?

Well, that's, quote, true because it's true.

I can't get over that statement.

As though he doesn't have to bother himself about his Democratic constituency because there's I don't know I mean if I were a Democratic constituent I would feel like do you think we're that stupid and apparently he does you know so

he thinks it's also cute and smug to shock people once in a while Of course I'm a hypocrite.

Ha ha.

What are you going to do about it?

That's what his attitude was.

Yeah.

But I'm honest that I'm a hypocrite.

And so.

Well, he's an empty suit and he's representative of the 21st century hollow people that we have around this country and our leadership.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, let's turn then to the Palestinian support of Hamas.

There's been a poll that came out by the Arab World for Research and Development, and they asked the question:

How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?

And the poll came back.

83.1%

of West Bank Palestinians either supported it extremely or somewhat.

And 63%

of

Palestinians in the Gazan Strip supported it extremely or somewhat.

And that is just

damning nice.

Surprise, surprise, when everybody on the international left is saying,

Gazas are not, they don't support Hamas, they're separate, they're separate.

And you would always say, well, they did vote the men.

Well,

hundreds of them, when they heard there was a hole in the wall and there was loot to be had,

Israeli throats to be cut, women to be raped, they tagged along.

Well, when they brought back captives on motorcycles or corpses in jeeps, they

ran out into the street to spit on them and desecrate them.

Well, they expected that that the Israelis would do what they did in 2021, or usually they would,

you know, they'd go kill some Israelis and then they would, you know, bomb for a day or two and go into Gaza and, you know, tear down a Hamas headquarters and then leave.

But they didn't because they had no choice because they killed 1,400 people.

And now all of a sudden it's, well, don't reply.

The Gazans are separate.

No, they're not.

They agree from this poll was not conducted by some settler colonialist power, but by an Arab research and development institute.

And it shows you that I think it will change as the wages of Hamas's aggression are borne by people.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Do you think that there's any parallel or anything we can learn from the Germans post-Nazi, post-losing World War II at all?

Aaron Powell, I do.

I mean, I think

once they went down that road of aggression and mass murder, it was very hard for them then or now to say, oh my god, you bombed Dresden, you bombed Hamburg.

Because the Allies just said, Bomber Harris and everybody who got angry, I mean,

it was pretty brutal what they did,

but they said, you're telling me that Dresden had no importance as a transportation hub or Hamburg had no importance as an

assembly manufacturing depot?

It did.

And you're telling me that when we bombed them back to the Stone Age, it didn't hurt the Third Reich?

It did.

And wasn't the Third Reich killing 6 million Jews and probably starting a war that killed 70 million people?

Yes.

And so people made the necessary arithmetic of death and said, well,

The 1 million German civilians out of 80 million that were,

I guess, funding or supplying or fueling the war effort and were indistinguishable between military facilities.

They were at work.

I know there wasn't much choice they had, but there was, I'm not saying I agree or disagree.

I'm just saying there was a consensus

that

no one was going to

stop it.

And no one after the war said, oh my God,

we bombed Hamburg.

That was so unfair.

And remember, it was kind of like Gaza as well.

In August

of 1940,

September after the fall of France, they started the Blitz.

And they bombed Coventry, England.

They bombed London indiscriminately in what we call area bombing or carpet bombing.

We're not supposed to use the word carpet, but that's what they did with incendiaries.

And they killed 50,000 Britons.

And it was disproportionate.

The idea with Winston Churchill was, you want to bomb our cities

and you want to burn up 50,000 British women and children and you started this war, I guarantee you we're going to have fighter escort and we're going to have Lancaster bombers and we're going to pay you back in kind.

But it will be disproportionate.

Disproportionality wins wars.

Proportionality means Stalingrad or trench warfare in World War I.

It's just the way it is.

So this idea that

why is the Israeli disproportionate?

They've killed more Gazans.

We have a right to go over there and slit their throats and rape them and decapitate them and commit necrophilia on corpses, but they don't have a right to kill more than what we did.

No, that's not the way war works, I'm sorry.

It's called deterrence.

No.

Once you are an aggressor, you have to be defeated in a disproportionate fashion so you don't do it again.

And that's just the way of the world.

The locus classicus on that is William Decomposed Sherman.

Again, I know it's repetitive, but everybody should look at his memoirs.

And I quoted him at length in Savior Generals and earlier in the Solo Battle.

He had some of the most articulate exegesis on disproportionality.

When he came into Atlanta in August and September of 1864,

He had a series of replies to the mayor of Atlanta, but more importantly to John Bell Hood, the Confederate general who was opposing him.

He said, it's the height of hypocrisy for you to start a war and to commit bloodshed and murder in the border states and then to fire on Union troops at a time of peace at Fort Sumner and to treat

prisoners at Anderson well.

And then when we finally get the gumption and the ability to come down here and to confront you, you will not confront us or you can't stop us.

And then you beg and scream and yell that you're impotent and that we should not pay you back in kind.

And so

I don't know whether he set Atlanta on fire on purpose.

He claims he didn't do that with either Atlanta or Columbia.

But the point was they were on fire and he

created a swath of destruction 50 miles wide all the way to Savannah.

And the point was...

You started it.

You thought you were going to win.

You said we could never get our way down here.

You said you were superior to us.

We

don't like to fight.

You love to fight.

Here we are.

Yeah.

And everybody says, well, you can't defeat Hamas because they claim they love death and the Israelis love life.

I don't think that's true.

If it was true, they would say.

After we raped and killed and murdered, there's 2,000 of us.

We're just going to go to Tel Aviv and keep doing it.

But they said, if we go to Tel Aviv, we're going to be killed.

Or when they got back into the tunnels, they said, come on, IDF.

We're waiting for you.

We have 50,000 people in tunnels.

We're going to come out en masse and kill you.

They didn't.

Instead, what did they do?

They hid behind hospitals and schools and mosques in the most cowardly fashion possible.

So maybe they do love death, but they seem to love their own skins much more.

At least the ringleaders are in gutter billionaires, and they don't seem to say, you know what?

We organize this Hamas death spree.

We want to leave gutter and get back to the tunnels and lead it firsthand.

No.

And as far as the Israelis loving life and don't want to fight, they seem to me like they want to fight.

Yeah.

They're going right into Gaza and they're going yanking people out of tunnels and they're losing some soldiers and they're not saying, oh, we can't fight.

We love life so much, we can't do anything.

So I get really tired of that propaganda that's so

inexact and untrue.

Yeah, so Israel has a long way to go to take Atlanta or to stop the

holocaust.

Everybody said they would lose thousands of troops.

Took us months to take Mosul and Fallujah.

And we killed a lot more civilians in Mosul than they have so far in Gaza.

And I don't know why we take these figures.

Does anybody really believe that Hamas has ever told the truth about anything?

So they tell the world that the Israelis deliberately bombed a hospital and killed 500 people when we know Islamic jihad rocket hit a parking lot and probably killed anywhere from 50 to 200.

And the people who said that, we're supposed to be quoting every single day to the exact person,

8,521 people.

That's what we're doing, if you're the New York Times or Washington Post or Guardian.

Why would anybody believe that?

I don't know how many, but I can guarantee it's not what Hamas says it is.

No.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about the war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com, and it is called The Blade of Perseus.

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everybody is welcome.

We hope to see you there.

Victor's, the war in Afghanistan.

I know we talked about the Soviet one in the 1980s, but now we're looking at the American conflict in Afghanistan after 9-11.

And I know that one of their goals was to get Osama bin Laden, but it seemed to spread beyond that as their goal.

And so I was wondering, you know, partly

I think me,

myself, I guess, and your listeners may not really quite understand what the beginning and the end of the war was and who was on what side, not so much the American, well, the American and the coalition, but

what was, who was on the side of the Taliban?

Because it seemed sort of decentralized in that the war was being fought from all directions.

So, who was on what side

and who won?

After 9-11, the mission was we're going to make

the perpetrators of that mass murder, i.e., bin Laden and al-Qaeda, pay.

And they had been in Afghanistan along the Pakistani border dug in in their al-Qaeda camp.

Okay,

so we invaded in October, about a month, and we went by December in six weeks.

We banished the government that had housed them, but we had bombed and bombed and bombed areas at Torobor and et cetera, where bin Laden, but he had escaped into friendly Muslim Pakistan, friendly Muslim Pakistan and a recipient recipient of vast amounts of U.S.

military aid.

And the Pakistani government, as all Islamic governments do with us, say, I don't know what you're talking about.

We've never seen him.

And we find out, as you remember, a decade later, he's right there in a compound in Pakistan, right under their noses, protected by the Pakistani government.

But anyway, the point that I'm making is

we

didn't get rid of him.

So then we changed, I guess we call that mission creep.

We said, okay,

but he may come back to this government because the Taliban housed him.

And the Taliban had said to us, we didn't try to bomb them at first.

We just said,

give us bin Laden.

I said, well,

there's no proof they were like lawyers, you know, Manhattan lawyers.

Give us, we have to be 99% of your legal rig.

Go to court and show that he did this, even though he was bragging about it at the time.

So we said, okay, we're going to get rid you.

And that was hard because, yes, there were a lot of different groups with Iranian affinities, with Pakistani affinities, with Turkey, all of these different tribal groups in Afghanistan.

Nobody ever wanted to go in there.

The British had finally conquered it.

There had been kind of a figurehead king.

It was pretty stable, you know, from World War I, when they installed him after the Allies kind of controlled that area, the British, I should say, and the king was there until the Russians came in.

So it was, the idea was: well, you know, you can get a government of some sort in the lowlands of Kandahar or Kabul

and turn over the tribal territories to your enemies and then bomb them every month.

That was the idea.

Six weeks later, in December, we got rid of the Taliban,

And then it got interesting because then what do you do?

So we picked some leaders.

Karzai was supposed to be the Churchill of Afghanistan.

We gave them some aid, and then we turned our attention to Iraq in March of 2003.

And that kind of coincided with a resurgence of the Taliban.

Because we had a two-war front, but that was called the Good War, the Good War.

So when Barack Obama ran for president in 2008,

not at 2008, but earlier in 2007,

he announced his candidacy and he was going to finish the Good War.

Everybody wanted to win in Afghanistan because it was directly associated with 9-11.

And Mr.

Karzai was the same.

He spoke perfect English.

He'd worked for oil companies.

He was installed.

The violence was very sporadic.

And Iraq was the bad war, where there was no

weapons of mass destruction.

It was extraneous.

And we were losing.

There was an insurgency.

I wrote an article about good and bad wars and pointed out at the time:

Iraq is easy compared to Afghanistan.

Iraq has harbors where you can bring ships in.

Iraq has friendly areas around it, like the Saudis or the Israelis or the Jordanians, maybe even the Egyptians.

Iraq has an educated population of sorts.

Iraq has oil.

It's rich.

Iraq

is of strategic importance to Europe and to us.

Afghanistan has no natural wealth.

Maybe it's precious metals someday, but it has no natural wealth.

It's right near Russia and China and Pakistan and Iran.

All of us, all of them either fake friends or outright enemies.

It's mountainous.

It's cold.

It's hard.

It's cloudy, and the people have no history of an educated elite, or it has no history of constitutional government.

So, to go in there and make them into Democrats

while you try to create a hostile territory for the Taliban to return, would require trillions of dollars.

And so, what happened is

By 2011,

10 and 11, the Taliban had controlled all of the the bad lands, and we had doubled down, and we were doing things that were just typical American.

We were making 10 or 12 million Afghans into Americans.

We had

Western stores.

We had, as I said, when we left, we had gender studies programs at the unit.

We were educating women.

We were doing all of this.

And a small fraction, maybe 25% of the country, loved it.

And the rest were pre-modern.

And they were terrified terrified of the Taliban and then we would bomb every once in a while.

Then Obama was told by the military they had to build and hold, build and hold.

That meant control the areas of resistance in the countryside.

So being Obama, he said, okay, what do you want?

And they said, we need to do an Iraq-like surge of 20 or 30.

But unlike George W.

Bush,

I am going to surge and this is how many troops I am sending and this is when they're going to come back.

So, what was the purpose?

And then he applied international rules of conduct to our own troops: you know, you can't do this, you can't do this, international criminal court, this, you and this.

And

it got hairy, and it ended up costing us as much as Iraq.

And it was 20 years.

So, then Joe Biden came along, he thought, wow,

I got to do something before I go completely cognitively incoherent.

So, I will plan a big 9-11 20th anniversary.

But how can I put my signature on it?

I mean, I wasn't involved in the 9-11 recenses.

Ah,

I will declare victory in Afghanistan and I will pull out all troops.

And I'll blame Donald Trump because he and Pompeo said they wanted to wind down the war, but there was a difference.

They were bombing, bombing, bombing when they told the Taliban, basically, we're going to go into Bagwam Air Force Base

and don't try to screw around and kill Americans.

And they kind of sold out the Afghan government, which was corrupt and had no popular support that we propped up.

And I guess they abandoned them.

But they said, we've got this big, beautiful base and we don't have an embassy and don't touch it.

And when they tried to do stuff, we bombed them.

And the idea was we were going to have these enclaves so at least we could operate strategically within that area, which was, as I said, it was

strategically near Russia and China and Pakistan and Iran.

Okay, so then

Biden thought, well, I'll just pull out, and then that will be coinciding with 9-11.

I'll have a gradual, and then I don't know what Mark Milley says now, he says he told him not to, but who knows what Mark Milley says in the Joint Chiefs.

So they went along with it.

We yanked everybody out after 20 years, 19 years, 10 months or something.

It was a total disaster.

It completely humiliated us.

We left $50 billion, that's a distributed figure, of military hardware and support structures in the hands of the Taliban.

We left a billion-dollar embassy.

We left a $300 million refitted, beautiful Air Force base.

And we left

10 million westernized Afghans at the hand of the Taliban and probably 100,000 Afghans who were directly helping us and probably

hundreds of contractors who

of various national

identities who didn't get out.

We don't know the fate of any of these people.

And we just left.

And then,

as I keep saying, we left our pride flag, we left our George Floyd murals, we left our gender studies program.

And the world looked at that and they said,

ah.

International relations, diplomacy, strategy are all interconnected.

When a nation that's powerful shows weakness in one place, it should be exploited in another.

So Vladimir Putin massed troops.

Joe Biden said in perfect cabal fashion, I don't know if I'll react.

It'll depend on whether it's a minor or major offensive.

Putin thought, hmm,

he won't react at all, so I'll just do a thunder road strike and decapitate the government in Kiev and he won't do anything.

And so that loss of deterrence, and then Qi almost immediately started talking about taking Taiwan.

And then there were some people in Gaza who said, Let's accelerate this, get this plan now.

We can start drafting a way to murder a bunch of Jews in a way that no one has ever even imagined.

And I don't think the United States administration that had just fled Kabul is going to be in any position to help Israel.

And that was that.

And that was the epitaph for the the misadventure in Afghanistan.

And we'll never go back in.

And I guess Obama was trying to say that when he killed

bin Laden in Pakistan, there was no need to be in Afghanistan, but he stayed there.

I was wondering if the operations that were run by the coalition, like for example, Operation Red Wing,

they seemed to be on independent regions that had independent warlords and that that was a very decentralized organization.

We never had a national government.

They have carved the country out to regional tribal

entities, warlords, and we usually paid them off

and worked with them and played them off against each other, and then we just held the cities.

And it was by 2011,

most of the coalition's partners were leaving.

They said, Bin Laden is dead.

The reason we went in here was to get bin Laden.

He's dead.

There's no reason.

You can't make constitutional Republicans or Democrats out of these people.

It's just impossible.

Yeah.

It's not.

How can you take a pre-modern Islamic society and set up a gender studies or wave a homosexual flag from your embassy?

It makes no sense.

Yeah.

It sure does.

It sure seems senseless now.

I mean, I guess Americans are very optimistic that they can achieve, and wouldn't everybody want to have so much freedom and so much

liberty?

I know that.

But that's how an American thinks.

They do want so much freedom, and they do not want to be butchered when the Americans inevitably leave.

So they want us to stay around so they can attack us.

And I think Americans are getting tired.

Everybody says, well, you're isolationist.

No, they're not isolationists.

It's just that

after Vietnam and after the Balkans and after Libya and after Syria and after Afghanistan and after Iraq, all the blood and treasure is never

treated as anything valuable by the people it was intended to help.

They despise us.

And so we don't want to do it anymore.

And then people say, well, they're abusing human rights.

Yes, that's what goes on in most parts of the world.

And you're in isolation.

No, if they screw with us, we'll bomb them or we'll hit them.

And then we will conduct the war in a way that's conducive for own manner of military operations.

But we're not going to go in the ground anymore and build a society from the ground up to emulate ours because to do that we know now after 80 years there is one prerequisite.

One prerequisite.

You've got to bomb, blow up, kill and devastate that country, whether it's Germany or Italy or Japan.

Do that, or maybe Korea even, North Koreans.

Do that and you can work with the people who are surviving because they're terrified of you.

But if you don't do that, as we didn't do it in Vietnam, I know people say, How can you say we didn't do that?

No, we didn't.

We didn't.

We didn't try to win Vietnam.

And we kind of did, and Korea kind of didn't, but we did end up with a good government in South Korea.

But we dropped more TNT on Vietnam than we did in the entire

World War II, they say.

I mean, I don't know how true that is.

But we didn't do what we did at the very end

that was very effective and brought them to the peace.

We were not using strategically smart weapons, which we didn't have for most of the war.

But when we finally got a primitive version of them, we started hitting Hanoi and the homes of the Communist Party.

And that made them want to negotiate.

So had we said to ourselves, this is where the

supplies come in.

These are where the elite leave leave, and we're going to wipe them out.

It might have worked.

Yeah.

Well, back to Afghanistan.

There is a movie out that

quite a while ago, and I was wondering your opinion on it.

It was called Lone Survivor, and in fact, it was about the Operation Red Wing.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

It's a Mark Wahlberg movie.

He seems to do a lot of those types of movies.

It's a very tragic movie because these outposts of special force-type people were out on patrol, and they're out in the middle of nowhere on a mountain and they start to

operate as if they're Westerners and when they see people that are civilians or paramilitaries that are going to report their position, they can't kill them.

And so they let them live and they follow the rules of war and they're completely outnumbered and they don't have access.

in this god-forsaken mountain, hillside, etc., to get reinforcements.

They don't know really what the strategic strategic aim is other than to

go after an aggressive tribal contingent of the Taliban.

And so

all but one person are killed.

And then the question is: how did such great young people who are so valuable to this country, how did we let them die on a mountainside in Afghanistan to pre-civilizational murders and killers?

That's what's tragic about it.

They were very heroic.

But

again,

I don't think Americans want to raise their children and send them into optional wars unless they're going to win.

And in a cost-benefit analysis, they can prove that it was worthwhile as far as furthering our interest.

And Afghanistan, which I supported, and I supported,

they don't work.

I don't see it.

As I said, I went over twice to Iraq and I talked to hundreds of people over there.

And

I just saw billions of dollars of Humbees and tanks and

I went to five or six bases.

They were beautiful bases.

We were doing wonderful things but in the end

they didn't want us there and maybe they have a constitutional government.

I'm sure that it's better than Saddam Hussein but I don't think they think they think us.

I don't think today an Iraqi who votes

and a woman who doesn't have to wear the burqa type outfit or

she can criticize the government without having her family wiped out, I don't think she said, I really help.

I really like the Americans.

We killed

probably 50,000 to 100,000 civilians with bombing and stuff, same in Afghanistan.

So I don't.

This is a lesson that the Israelis are trying to digest now in Gaza City because they're going to destroy Gaza City.

And you're not going to be able to rebuild it because

it's like a tinker toy city that's on top of tunnels so we in it was just built i don't know on toothpicks gaza was destroyed by hamas and their little rat-like mole-like tunnels and so what once you bomb these things and they cave in who would want to

i don't know invest it would be kind of like building a city on world war ii subterranean bombs that had never exploded There's so many bombs and rockets down there, and there are so many tunnels that are probably just bombed and collapsed or they we don't even know exist.

I just don't think it's going to happen.

I think they're going to go in and level and get rid of Hamas and then they're all Hamas is going to flee down to the southern part.

Yeah.

And

they'll be with the 83% you reported, Sammy, that like them.

And that will be good for 10 years.

And then they'll regroup.

And the United States and Europe and the UN and the Gulf monarchies will all give them money.

Yeah.

Well, just before we go to break, I want to ask you one last, and you're going to

tell me it's a t-ball question.

But wasn't our, and we can call him our hour now since he lives in the United States, Prince Harry in the Afghan war?

Didn't he spend some time there, I think?

He did.

I think he was in a helicopter,

an airborne unit.

Yeah.

He got in trouble because he called one of his companions a packy.

Yeah, remember that?

It's a little bit of a slang in the middle.

But I mean, it was courageous of him.

He was in a combat role and he was a member of the royal family.

I think there were two Harries.

There was pre-Meghan Markle and there was post-Meghan Markle.

He met a gold digger that wanted to use his lineage and his position to fabricate a narrative that British

people were colonialist and racist and it wasn't fair, and then she would try to leverage that to a position of prominence and wealth.

That's what she's done.

Yeah, that is.

And she's kind of brainwashed him.

And she turned somebody who was pretty sympathetic, as kind of a happy-look-go-lucky royal who had served his country and distinguished into kind of a buffoon.

Kind of like she did to him what that professor at Stanford who was just put on suspension for his anti-Semitic behavior in class did to Colin Kaepernick.

Or maybe what Colin Kaepernick, I guess he had a Palestinian or radical Arab girlfriend that instructed him on the ways of the world.

Women are very dangerous, Sammy.

They tend to get, they go after powerful men and they change their ideologies.

The British seem to know that.

Every time one of their royals wants to marry an American, they say, this is a very, very bad idea.

Wow, they remember Hope Simpson, don't they?

Yeah, that.

Although a lot of the aristocracy wanted that American money so well won by

Downhampton Abbey, stereotypes.

It is, exactly.

Well, I mean, it wasn't a one-way thing.

The Gilded Age wealth wanted prestige, so they sent their daughters to Britain.

Yeah.

And they became countesses or whatever, you know.

All right.

They had titles.

Yeah.

Let's go to a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about TikTok and the bio lab in Readley.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

back.

We're back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

And Victor, there's TikTok videos praising Osama bin Laden's letter to America that says a lot of things and really accuses America of having done all things evil in the world or being the architects of it.

But it also has things that you would think the left would be a little bit leery about, which is to strike out against homosexuality, intoxication, gambling, and usury, and the objectification of women.

But maybe they wouldn't be against the objectification of women, but certainly

Islam

doesn't produce societies that look for women's liberation.

You know, it's really weird.

I know people get tired of me saying the universities are turning out a generation that's ignorant and arrogant.

But when you start to look at those TikTok people,

it was like, wow, wow.

It's like, I saw this letter, man.

Woo.

There's something in there.

Maybe I'm,

this caused an existential crisis.

Some people can tell me.

I don't know what it is, man.

It was like this valley girl or whatever.

It was, no, you're an idiot.

You don't know anything.

It would take anybody two seconds to go find the letter and then just read it and then compare whether it was accurate or not.

But instead, you thought it was cute to trash your own country when you didn't even read it.

And if you read it, it was prima facie evidence that somebody like you would be shot in an Arab country.

And yet we're supposed to take your little

boutique criticism of your own country that gave you everything seriously?

No, we're not going to do that.

And

I said to Jack, he brought it up, and I said, you know, Raymond Ibrahim was a student of mine.

He's a very brilliant guy.

And

he's

of Coptic Egyptian lineage.

His parents were immigrants, and

he translated a lot of documents that heretofore had never been seen before.

And among them was that letter, and it was called the

Al-Qaeda Reader, the Bin Laden Reader, excuse me.

It was the book, yeah.

Yeah, a book.

And I wrote the introduction to it, and it was obviously written.

All of that stuff was not written by that half-literate bin Laden.

It was written by Dr.

Zawahiri and a bunch of Americanized leftist leftist Arabs.

And they pushed every button.

And all that, that letter, the later letter of 2011,

the radio communications, the transcripts, it was like, okay,

we want to make the world hate the United States, and we want to create dissension in the United States.

So what does the left hate?

Well, we'll mention capitalism, that's exploitive.

Hmm.

Well, we'll mention environmental desecration.

We'll mention, somebody should go to Egypt and see how the Arab world treats the environment, but no.

And then we'll mint campaign finance reform.

That's a winner.

And they put all these ridiculous leftist talking points in, but they couldn't quite restrain themselves.

They had to put in the Jews, the Jews, the Jews, the Jews, and

homosexuality and sodomy, and women, women, women.

And so all these women on campuses that cheer on this stuff, like the Hamas Charter, they should read what the Hamas Charter says about women.

Every one of these Harvard or Stanford emancipated women, if they really did believe in that ideology, they'd say, you know what?

These people are

virtuous and they're being attacked by the Zionists.

And I want to

promote what they're trying to do.

And so therefore, I'm going to marry a man and I'm going to cover up and I'm going to do everything he has

in mind.

And I'm going going to obey everything he says.

I'm going to stay home and raise children for Hamas.

To be killers.

To be killers.

Exactly.

That's the perfect picture.

Megan Kelly was really funny.

She

was quoted.

Did you see her quote?

Jack Reddit.

What did she say?

I'm not going to take you people seriously when your parents let you run wild, basically, and didn't educate you.

And you're monsters.

And you're just going to make life miserable for my kids.

And

that's true.

Yeah.

And sent you into the college indoctrination camps.

Well, I read a lot.

I think it was 10 things that you could expect at a pro-Hamas demonstration.

And then they reflected 10 things that Hamas does abroad.

So the type of people who, as I said, were vandalizing, attacking people, wearing masks, shouting profanity, shouting for death.

It's no accident that their side were

rapists and murderers and mutilators.

And the side that picks up their trash and is very orderly and doesn't attack the police, doesn't have masks, is the idea of dropping leaflets and stuff.

But I haven't seen a leaflet.

Maybe you have.

They've sent 7,500 rockets, I see, but I don't think they ever sent one leaflet.

Did Hamas send one rocket and it blew up in air and thousands of leaflets came down and they said, People of Israel, we are attacking your government, but not you.

We're after your military.

So please, in the next 24 hours, get in shelters because we are going to send indiscriminate rockets as terror weapons.

We don't want to kill you.

No.

They're medieval murderers, Victor.

They didn't do that, but a person, it takes a person,

it takes a person with a bachelor's of a degree of Harvard to guarantee you can't see the difference.

If you got a BA from Harvard or Stanford, then we can assume that you're a useful idiot.

Yeah, absolutely.

An indoctrinated

whatever drone.

All right, so let's then turn to the bio lab and Readley.

I know that that was discovered long ago by that Reedley.

I don't know whether she was a

journey.

She was kind of like

Argo, huh?

I think she was just an employee that looked at...

zoning complaints and people saw a hose, you know, and all this crap.

And she actually balled it through.

Yeah.

Where is this place?

What go in there and see?

Oh my God, Chlamydia?

Yeah.

Ebola?

What do these labels mean?

What are all these dead rats on the floor?

And then the state came in, and the CDC didn't want to talk about it because

once that story came got to official levels, it was like,

look,

we have a policy in the Biden administration.

If they want to send a balloon over and spy on all of our bases, fine.

If they want to buy farmland, fine, fine, next to strategic locations.

If they want to have biolabs and fool around with deadly

toxic viruses and say they're really working for vaccination kids, fine.

Don't rock the boat.

They are our strategic partners.

That was the Biden and Obama position.

Well, now we have David He on trial and he's pleaded not guilty.

His Chinese name is Jia Bei Zhu, but he he goes by David He.

And he pleaded not guilty in federal court, so they are trying him in a federal court.

And for

materials that were found labeled Ebola and 20 other pathogens, and for counterfeit COVID and pregnancy tests, he faces three years in prison for mislabeling and five years for false statements plus some fines.

He's connected with the communist Chinese police.

Yes, and that doesn't sound like a lot.

He's eight total years.

He needs to be there forever.

I wish everybody would just think.

You know, where I am an employee of Stanford University, they had a Confucius Institute, and all that did was spy.

And they hired a visiting lecture neuroscientist.

She was a member of the People's Liberation Army.

The Trump administration, I think, fined them several million dollars for not reporting gifts from the Communist Party.

Why don't we just have have a policy of reciprocity with the Communist Party?

So

we tell President Xi,

if you send a balloon over, we're going to send a balloon over.

If you want 380,000 students here that we can't monitor, you're going to let in 380,000 Taiwanese or Americans in your country.

If you're going to set up biolabs, we're going to put biolabs in your country.

If you're selling,

if you're buying hundreds of thousands of acres of U.S.

farmland, we're going to buy strategically located Chinese farmland and just see what happens.

If you steal patents, copyrights, if you buzz this, that, we're going to do that and see what you like it.

See if you like it.

And I think he would like he would like us to do that.

And then he would say, what took you so long?

Now I can treat you as a partner.

But when he keeps doing it and we don't do anything back, he he has nothing but contempt.

And

it gets very dangerous.

People, again, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but the reason that wars start is that the military capability and the political intentions of the major players are not transparent.

So the aggressive parties make miscalculations about the true nature and power of a potential opponent.

So in 1941, the Japanese military, they had watched London burn.

They had not seen any American concrete

help to the British, Lynn Lease a little bit, but they made calculations that in the Pacific, they thought that the world's second largest fleet was no better than their own.

And they had the advantages of being a home turf.

And they made some stupid, aggressive moves

at Pearl Harbor and afterwards.

And no one in Japan said, you don't understand.

The Americans are trying to be nice.

Roosevelt's a humanitarian, but they have a fleet in the Pacific alone that's the same size as ours.

And they have shipyards capable of building a fleet 10 times larger.

And they have a science and technology and research development apparatus that can bury us.

And they have an economy five times bigger.

And they have a population three times bigger.

Don't screw with these people.

Don't misinterpret their apparent willingness to let us do stuff with weakness.

But we didn't send that message.

So they gambled and they did something really stupid.

And the end of it was they got their cities flattened.

And they should have never, they should have.

There were people in Japan that were very smart and said, don't do it.

But when you don't make that manifest, what your power is and what you could do, what you will do.

That's why nobody, I mean, let's face it, when Donald Trump upped the military budget and he jawboned NATO into spending more and he killed Solomani

and he bombed the crap out of ISIS and he killed 200 Wagner

contractors in Syria and he told Putin if he went into Ukraine the following would happen.

They didn't know what he was going to do, but they did know whatever he was going to do, he had more wherewithal than they did as far as ships and planes and bombs.

But with Joe Biden,

they have contempt.

Their attitude is, hmm, if I was Joe Biden and I had the U.S.

economy and the U.S.

military at my beck and call, I sure wouldn't act like Joe Biden.

I wouldn't act demented or confused.

I would be telling people, don't screw with us.

So the fact that they don't say, don't screw with us when they have military superiority must mean that their diplomatic decadence or lack of confidence is such that it will nullify their military capability.

And therefore, I'm going to be aggressive.

That's the story of war throughout history.

Yeah.

Well, with China, it seems like not just aggressively

military aggression.

It seems like they are very aggressively assailing our culture through things like TikToks.

Everything they've done is

they told Donald Trump they were going to stop fentanyl.

They didn't do it.

They told us that they were never going to take

Spratly Island,

the archipelago that was claimed by Vietnam and Philippines.

They'd said they'd never absorb it.

They did.

They do all that.

And we just let it happen.

And I think it's time.

One thing that people really underestimate is that we have a very powerful tool, and that's called immigration.

There is something about the United States that our enemies love to come to.

I don't know what it is.

I have my suspicions.

But again, I'm a broken record.

But if you go back and look at all the controversial things that Donald Trump did, move the embassy to Jerusalem,

say certain things about Haiti, the one that got the left the angriest in the international community when he said, I'm putting a travel ban on the following countries and he enumerated them and among them were countries in the middle east suddenly the elite of the middle east in places like the west bank or

syria iraq or lib oh my god i can't come to the united states i don't get to have that guggenheim oh my gosh that visiting professorship at harvard is not mine anymore i can't

iran oh our former ambassador is a professor

i think he's a professor at oberlin we can't go see him.

Oh, my relative, we can't do that.

No, you can't.

And if you would apply that to the Chinese, no, you're not coming over here, period.

You're not coming over here.

You're not getting an electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech.

You're not going to Stanford.

You're not going to Caltech.

You're not coming at all.

No.

Because you're a belligerent, not until you change your behavior.

And we could tell Mexico the same thing.

You've sent

across your territory 8 million people.

They're not going to be coming in anymore.

And the 8 million that are coming are going to go back.

And you thought that was cute.

You were a staging area and you flooded them in here.

Now they're going to flood back.

And

we'll just see how you like it.

And they would like us so much better if we did that.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you for all of the.

reflections today.

I really appreciate, especially on the war in Afghanistan.

I know that your listeners appreciate it.

I certainly do too.

And so I'd like to thank you, and I would like to thank our listeners as well.

Thank you.

And I'm drinking my, as I'm speaking, my premium hydrogen-infused elevate functional fuel water.

Yes, and you can get that at drinklevate.com, and it has antioxidant water.

And it's a gift.

It's a gift from dear friends Michael and Adrian Weiner.

And

send it to me.

Yeah, and I noticed that they send it in

aluminum cans.

And I've been noticing that lately, that if you go to hotels where they provide water or, you know, in the evening or something, everybody's turning to these aluminum cans.

I think that's it.

I think it's because of worry about plastics.

Are they worried about plastics?

I thought maybe something like that.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, drink elevator.

So aluminum toxicity in your brain.

Well, maybe it's good to be just diverse on things.

I guess.

All right.

Thanks, everyone.

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

Thank you, everybody, for listening.