The First Gulf War and Middle East Diplomacy

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Hello, America, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is our weekend edition, and when we look at some news, but then we also turn to a historical topic usually.

And we've been on wars recently, and we're going to be talking about the Iraq, the First Gulf War, sorry, the United States invasion of Iraq and protection of Kuwait.

So that will be our middle segment, but we will start this episode talking about China and then a little bit more on Hamas.

And maybe we'll do it in that opposite order.

We can talk Hamas first.

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

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So Victor, I know that there's a lot of new evidence coming out about the Hamas and the assault by the gunmen

from prisoners.

that the Israelis have taken.

And I was wondering if you had reflections and information on that, because I know you read copiously about these things.

So please let us know what you've seen recently.

Well, there's some information that some of the wounded

Hamas killers were taken prisoner by the Israelis and they've been interrogated.

And they've given first-hand descriptions.

about what happened on October 7th.

So let's just stop for a second and look at where the evidence is coalescing from.

You have the videos on the helmets, or if they did have helmets, headbands, and iPhones of the killers themselves that reveled in the killing and then

broadcast it.

So we have that evidence.

We have some

videos from the victims who survived.

We have the testimonies of the people who survived.

We have the dead, and we now have new pathology reports coming out from Israel about the actual bodies and the circumstances of which.

And then we have the IDF accounts who finally helped to drive them out and now we have the actual perpetrators.

So it's a 360 degree matrix of evidence and what does that evidence coalesce at?

It coalesces that somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000, maybe 2,500 gunmen left Gaza.

Some of them came up in a tunnel right before the wall.

Some of them

were guest workers.

Some of the 20,000 tagged along.

After the gunmen led the way, they blew up holes in the fence.

They had gliders.

It's hard to know whether the actual sea assault succeeded or not.

There's mixed reports.

But they coalesced and then they were told and given orders and they knew where to go.

It had been planned for a year.

And they had first-hand reconnaissance from drones.

They had people who worked on the kibbutzes that knew exactly where to go.

And

their orders were to kill as many Jews as possible and mutilate them and behead them.

Now that's not me.

It's not you, Sammy.

It's them saying that.

Wow.

And this is important because as soon as the IDF soldiers who went into those homes said they saw beheaded babies,

that was considered an Israeli lie because the IDF and the government didn't officially confirm that.

Now, that has been confirmed by pathology reports.

And there's a video circulating of

what from captured Hamas videos and people who were there video and IDF video.

So that is a proven.

They mutilated.

They even tried to desecrate bodies, and these

prisoners admitted they committed necrophilia.

So in humankind's list of

barbarities and savagery, we have a certain rogues gallery that's in the ninth, seventh inferno ring.

And we know what that is.

It's mutilation of the dead.

It's rape.

It's necrophilia.

It's beheading.

It's torture.

They did all of that.

And they burned people

alive.

They burned people alive with necklaces.

So

that's what people at Stanford and Harvard and Yale and on the streets of Bookham, that's what they're cheering on when they have Hamas chanting, saying, you know, from the river to the sea, kill every Jew.

Make no mistake about that.

So that was clear what they did.

And the second thing that was interesting is

there are videos that are starting to emerge of civilians.

that wanted to tag along as if they were Lithuanian or Ukrainian irregulars

on the Eastern Front, say 1944 that

had accompanying SS death squads and then were outsourced.

Hey, you guys, you can go out and kill Jews and loot, but just help us.

And that's what they did.

They went in and looted and killed and mutilated.

These are civilians,

Gazan civilians, lots of them, and looted.

And they were given, apparently, anybody who took a captive got $10,000 and an offer of a free apartment.

And so

what does this suggest?

It suggests, first of all, that you cannot believe anything that these crowds say or Hamas says, because the Hamas leadership in Qatar was assuring the world that they did not kill civilians, even though their own people said they not only killed them, they raped them, they committed necrophilia, they beheaded them.

And we have this idea that it's collateral damage.

And Barack Obama came out, as you know, Sammy, and kind of refuted his earlier sympathy with Israel, Israel, unqualified sympathy, and said, you know, they're going to lose all of the goodwill if they go in there because X amount of people have been killed.

Why would you believe that, Barack?

That figure of how many people is coming out is coming from the people who said they didn't behead or that the Israelis blew up a hospital and killed 500 people.

That's all false.

Hamas

is the hospitals, it's the health care system, it's the public relations system, and it's a closed system.

If you disagree with it, they'll kill you.

So why would you believe any of that?

And more importantly,

where do you think and why do you think the Israelis are hitting places?

They're hitting places where they get intelligence that Hamas killers are at.

And they don't have to do that.

They could do exactly what Hamas is doing.

Does anybody think that Hamas is trying to use their sophisticated, we're told their sophisticated GPS, deadly rockets that are not primitive anymore, but they're Iranian imported state-of-the-art, and they can take out particular targets.

Are they saying to themselves in the Hamas planning room below Hamas, now listen, we've got 500 rockets that are going to go out today against Tel Aviv, and let's make sure that we do not hit any Israeli civilians.

No.

If you put an Israeli civilian and you did as a human shield in the way Hamas did it, that would be an invitation to kill him.

So they just send him out there and no, and Barack Obama doesn't say a word, six, seven thousand rockets.

But he only says a word when you react to that and you may in

accidentally or collottal damage or it's factored into your attack that you're going to hit some civilians and then suddenly it's moral equivalence.

But you see what I'm meaning?

We're so concentrated as we should be on the 1,400 that were killed, we're forgetting that every single day they're sending rockets to kill civilians while Western leaders are lecturing Israel.

You can't kill one civilian to stop that.

They use, again, they use

civilians to protect rockets, and the Israelis use rockets to protect their citizens.

And they can't see the difference.

And so, but

we're going to hear more about this as the more of the testimonies come out.

And they said they were just like ISIS.

They were asked, are you any different than ISIS?

No, we are ISIS.

That's what we do.

And they were bragging about it.

And the videos confirm that.

And the pathologist reports confirm that.

So do not believe what a college professor or student says.

They're lying.

Just like they lied about there was no beheading, just like they lied about the hospital, just like they lie about everything.

Aaron Powell, you know, there's been a lot of writing recently about the universities.

I know that you and Jack just discussed them recently, but it seems one of the things that's coalescing is that these universities are supposed to be producing the educated people, but the educated people are condoning and cheering on this medieval slaughter.

And that's something is very strange about that.

Well, it's not.

If you remember, Heidegger and the intellectuals in Germany were the spokesmen for the Third Reich.

Yeah, that's what, I think that's something that's interesting about the fact that.

That's what the intellectual can always do with his verbal gymnastics.

Inside every professor, there's a fascist waiting to get out because they think they're smarter than everybody, they think they know more, they think they're better educated, and they think they have a particular right to run society.

Goes back, you can argue the same of Plato in his Laws and Republic.

You know, he felt that, if you read it, there is a fascistic streak in both of those works.

And so I guess the two big casualties, there's three big casualties of this war here in the United States.

One is the university, because it's pulled off that ugly scab, and there was an uglier wound, and nobody...

understood.

So today,

or yesterday at Stanford University, there were some pro-Hamas students tearing down

posters

of

Israeli captives that were pert up.

Photographs of those who had been captured and are held by Hamas.

And these, I guess, pro-Hamas students felt that was, and they said they looked Middle Eastern, describing themselves.

And I guess some students, one or two students, tried to stop them.

And of course, that's moral equivalent.

If you touched a Middle Eastern student tearing down some other person's property, then you're guilty.

So that's the moral equivalence that goes on at universities.

So universities,

as I said to Jack, they only have two points of argument anymore.

One, that everybody should be broadly educated to form their civic functions in a constitutional system.

They need to know about civics, history, language, philosophy, just general education.

And two, they have professional schools and scientific research that makes the United States the place

in the world for for cutting-edge

technology, engineering, medicine, etc.

But you know what?

They're not doing that anymore because the people who are the more educated are the more amoral on this issue.

They're the ones chanting all these slogans.

These professors, every single day, a professor can't keep his mouth shut, reveling in the death of Jews.

And as far as science goes, I mean,

Anthony Fauci is a spokesman for University Science.

The people at Stanford University that tried to destroy Scott Atlas on the bogus grounds that the lockdowns were perfectly logical and they would stop mass death and the vaccines were an ironclad defense of this and that herd immunity really didn't exist.

That was science.

Peter Dosick was science.

They all came out of universities.

And they were affiliated with universities.

And if you go to a university and

you're a scientist and you say, you know what, I want to look at all the data before I believe that humans created an existential threat through global warming and we can do much about it.

I just want to see that.

Or if we do much about it in a cost-benefit analysis, it will be arguably positive and you can't talk about it.

And so you can't talk about genders.

If you're a scientist and you say there's no evidence that gender is constructed, it's biologically determined, you're going to be in trouble.

So if they they can't deliver on those two promises, then

they're not university.

So then why not say, you know what?

You have nothing to offer us anymore.

You're just an indoctrination machine and you do a lot of evil.

You turn out students who are evil people.

They are ignorant and they're arrogant.

And you're a racist institution with separate racial graduation, separate racially segregated places, segregated dorms, segregated safe spaces, no First Amendment, no Fourth Amendment, no Fifth Amendment, racially loaded admissions, retention, promotion, etc.

And

there's nothing redeemable about you anymore, at least in terms of the money that you charge us.

And so they're a big loser.

So is,

I think, besides them, I think the whole idea of an open border, and mass illegal immigration, and for that matter, 50 million people here in the United States that were not born here with no ability or effort or desire to assimilate, integrate them into the body politic of the United States.

So I think we're going to, if we ever get a sane administration, somebody's going to say: Does it really help the United States to have 370,000 Chinese students?

Does it really help the United States to tell people from illiberal, terror-supporting governments in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Libya, in Somalia, in the West Bank, and is take, take all, we want all of your refugees to come to the United States because the time since they arrive on the soil of the United States in gratitude for delivering them from the chaos of the Middle East to the point where they're emboldened to trash this country, get on the street, and cheer on killers, is maybe a year or two.

And I think everybody's sick of it.

And so I think we need to close the borders, radically reduce immigration to legal, diverse, merocratic, maybe $100,000 or $150,000 a year, and that's it.

And I think that's another big loser is BLM.

That's totally bankrupt now.

And everybody sees it now.

Everybody sees it.

Professor Kendi has revealed was a complete fraud.

took $50 million, produced, shook down corporations, did nothing.

No intellectual research came out of that.

No new ideas, no helpful programs.

It was all absconded or wasted, as everybody knew.

The architects that founded BLM are all in retirement after stealing the money and nice homes.

BLM is an anti-Semitic, vicious, anti-Israel organization.

You see it at all these

rallies in New York.

You see their hang glider glorification of the airborne murders, killing Jews.

And I think this is a joke.

And I don't know why there's a

BLM area in these major cities two and a half years after George Floyd.

But in Washington, D.C., there's BLM Square.

It's a Marxist, racist organization.

People should see that.

And I think you're going to see that because in a civil

suit, there were interrogatories that were published.

in communications between a prosecutor and the coroner concerning George Floyd.

And you see that transcript, and now it's mostly published.

Some is redacted.

And you see very clearly that

George Floyd, who was arrested in the process of committing a felony and who had felony convictions, that he was trying to pass counterfeit money, and he resisted arrest, and he had been in the past convicted of a felony of home invasion, putting a gun at a pregnant woman's stomach.

And

anyway, the autopsy report, as vicious as maybe Officer Shalvin was by putting his knee on his neck, he did not crush the windpipe.

He did not cause asphyxiation.

According to the initial autopsy report, that was squashed and silenced.

But if you

read this exchange between the coroner and the

prosecutor, he said, you know, this is what's going to end a career because you

can't tell the truth.

And

he was high on fentanyl, high on methamphetamines, but more importantly, he had three major arteries blocked.

And he was suffering from an enlarged heart and coronary vascular disease and maybe the excitement of being arrested or resisting arrest or the use of drugs as a contributing factor.

But the main thing was he had a massive heart attack.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go to some messages and we'll come back in our third part of the segment here to talk a little bit about China because we need to turn to the first Gulf War.

So stay with us and we'll be back.

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Welcome back.

You're listening to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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at VD Hansen, and you can find him on his Facebook at the Morning Cup, or Hansen's, sorry, Morning Cup.

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Victor, so we are our historical topic this weekend is the First Gulf War, and it went on for a month and a half in January of 1991 under George Bush Sr.'s presidential

term.

And he was helping the Kuwaitis to roll back Iraq that had invaded Kuwait.

And there was a coalition of about 42 countries.

So he was well supported and even more so by the Saudis and the Egyptians, who put a lot more money in, even than European countries, into

forcing Saddam Hussein back out of Kuwait.

And so I'm looking forward to your discussion of that, and then I've got lots of questions for you, but go ahead.

Well, very quickly, that war broke out because in 1980, Iraq, taking advantage of the tensions between Iran and the U.S., invaded Iran over disputed areas, boundaries.

And after its initial success, the Iranians

regrouped, recalibrated, and it became a Stalingrad, a horrific war.

And we in the West were not unhappy to see it happen because we were a de facto war with Iran.

They had our hostages.

And we didn't like Iraq.

So the attitude in the West West was sort of like during 1941 when the Soviet Union was invaded by Hitler.

We had one totalitarian regime attacked by a fascist regime, and for a while we thought maybe they should just kill each other off.

But then we decided that Hitler, I think correctly, was worse than the Russians.

That said,

out of that war, Iraq emerged with half a million casualties and was flat broke, and it wanted a high oil price.

And the Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the Gulf monarchies were, we were in a recessionary Carter recession.

And

we hadn't been out of it.

I shouldn't say Carter recession.

It was part of a Reagan recession.

It was 1980 recession.

Reagan had a boom.

Then we went back into another recession.

And the demand for oil, not a severe recession, but a downturn.

The demand for oil slackened, the price dropped.

Saddam could not pay back the $10 to $20 billion that he had borrowed from the Kuwaitis and the Saudis.

So he wanted to get out of that loan.

He said, you're lowering the price of oil.

You didn't help me.

I was trying to stop

the Iranian-Persian Shia that threaten your regimes and you don't help me.

And therefore, I want this money.

And they wouldn't give him the money.

And so he invaded.

And it took him about 12 hours to go right into Kuwait and grab it.

He said this was the 19th province because the British imperial boundaries were inexact.

And he said in Ottoman times it had been considered

one province.

Okay.

So we sit there in August, this happens, and why did he go in?

People suggested that April Glasby, I don't know if this is quite true, but she was our ambassador.

She said that America didn't take an interest in inter-Arab rivalries or disputes over boundaries.

So he thought we wouldn't do anything.

He goes in there, and then all of a sudden, he's got 5,000 tanks, he's got a million troops, and here's Saudi Arabia with this huge oil and all of this money, the next domino to fall.

So George Bush makes the decision at that time, I think it was called Desert Shield,

in late August to send a huge American contingent and then they sent James Baker around begging, cajoling, planning to get Europeans, even got Syrians, believe it or not.

We gave

the amount of things we had to do to get that, everybody praises that coalition, but we were willing to give arms to that horrible Hassad regime to participate.

We were willing to give money, basically, sanctions relief to the Iranians that had taken our hostages.

just so they would

not object.

We had to deal with the Russians.

The Cold War wasn't quite over.

But anyway, we got this huge coalition, and then we unleashed the air campaign.

And the air campaign went on mid-January all the way to February.

And it was devastating.

That was sort of the first

public awareness of smart bombs and laser-guided munitions, and they were deadly.

And they attributed the Iraqis in a way.

And remember what the mood was in the country.

We lost in Vietnam, we're humiliated, humiliated, we're not going to fight any wars,

this won't work, Saddam's got 5,000 tanks, he fought the Iranians, these are the toughest people in the world.

And it didn't happen that way.

So when the ground game came at the beginning of February, essentially in three weeks after this long bombing campaign of another three weeks, it was just like a knife through butter.

We went around in this hook, we went right through the desert, we went after the Imperial Guard and cut off the Iraqis in Kuwait.

And then we had the Marines come in from Saudi Arabia and they were going to be destroyed.

They fled back to Iraq on the so-called highway of death, where our aircraft destroyed all of their transportation.

I don't think we killed nearly as many as the media said we did.

And lo and behold,

it was

George H.W.

Bush's greatest moment.

And then the controversy started

because our Saudi friends,

all of the Arab countries said, look, he's a strong man, but now he's weak.

He has no military.

He has no Air Force.

He has no wherewithal.

And he is a bulwark against Iraq, excuse me, Iran

and the radical Shia in our own country.

We do not want you to remove him.

And that was very hard for Americans to understand.

You mean you brought us all the way over the world to save Kuwait?

And then

it was a dispute against the Iraqis and the Saudis, and then all of a sudden you're saying, keep him in power.

So Schwartzkopf, our commander of all coalition forces, allows him in that crazy peace conference to keep

air support.

I mean, he still had helicopters and jets, a few of them.

So George Bush says, well, we're not going to get rid of him, but if you want to rise up, you can get rid of him.

And so they did.

And the Kurds especially.

And they were slaughtered like sheep because they had no air support, and we were told we couldn't help the Kurds.

And so that in and then all of a sudden, we left

all of a sudden, gradually.

And then what?

He reverted back to being Saddam Hussein.

So within five years, he had a huge army.

Oil prices were high.

And he was killing people, whether it was some Marsh Arabs or Kurds.

And then everybody had a big debate.

Why did we go all the way over there

and destroy his army but leave him in power?

And then the debate would warp and woof, change, change, react, challenge, response, because depending on whether we wanted to intervene or not.

So the second war of 2003, at that point, people said, this is the way we should have done it.

Should have gone in there and deposed him.

And everybody agreed with that.

And then,

given the resistance, the quagmire, the insurrection, whatever you want to call it, and by 2004, people said, we should have done what we did in the Gulf War for one.

We just went in there and we weakened them and we left.

So we could have taken Saddam Hussein out and just got out of Iraq and let them be stew to each other.

So there was no,

I think there was no consensus on how the war, I thought that we should have gone in and got rid of them and turned over, turned the country over to the Arabs and just said, you know what, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, all of you people, get some type of intern peacekeeping force and you could run it and get your Iraqi indigenous people and we're out of it.

But wouldn't they be vulnerable to Iran?

I think is what the argument is.

That's what they thought.

They thought, exactly.

But I don't think Iran was in a position at that point to do much.

We could have stopped that.

But anyway,

the consensus after the First Gulf War, and then we'll talk about the Iraq War of 2003 later, was

I think everybody said, well, whether we should have taken Saddam out in the First War or not, or whether it was good to get rid of Saddam in the Second War,

we don't ever want to go into the Middle East and put troops on the ground in these urban environments.

They're not worth it.

Our friends are not worth it.

The enemies are getting rid of the enemies are not worth it.

We can use air power to get rid of ISIS or Solomania

or maybe even if they attack our ships, get rid of Hezbollah.

But we are not going to put an American soldier on the ground and fight in that hellhole.

I think that's the consensus.

And whether you can maintain that, I don't know.

But that's what was the net result of the First and Second Gulf Wars.

Do you think that's true?

I mean, that we can take care of our problems through air and drones and things?

It depends on

how you define problems.

So if Hezbollah

starts shelling an aircraft carrier, we have 2,000 Marines, do we put 2,000 Marines in the streets of Beirut to find them?

Or do we just say, you know what?

You started it, we'll finish it.

And we're going to use intelligence, work with the Israelis, and take out all of those rocket launchers.

And that means a lot of collateral damage.

Yes.

And would you, and we're going to have to tell American people, would you rather have kids from Tulare, California, and fighting and dying over in that hellhole?

Or would you just like to take out an apartment building that's the place of origin of a missile that kills American Navy people?

I think the answer is we're going to be punitive.

We're not going to nation-build anymore.

And so I think that's what came up.

There were some horrific tank battles, the Battle of Medina Ridge and 73 Eastern,

where the Bradley tank came into its own and

it faced off against T-72s and it just blew them out.

It just blew them out of the desert.

That 120 millimeter smooth bore cannon was so accurate and the tank was so invulnerable at that point.

And that was, again, over 30 years ago.

It just blasted the Iraqi armor, made a mockery of them.

That's what really made H.R.

McMaster famous.

He was a captain, I remember, in the army, and he was in command of the tank

group that destroyed, I think, on the first volley, all but one Iraqi tank, so well over a mile and a half.

Did the Americans supplying Iraq in the Iraq-Iran war through the 1980s mean that we were fighting a military that had some comparable ability or was...

No, no, they had Soviet weapons.

Oh, mostly Soviet.

We didn't give them weapons.

We helped them with intelligence, I think, mostly.

With satellite pictures of Iranian facilities.

And then we, but after the First Gulf War, because we didn't take Sanaq, we had a decade, right?

more than a decade.

12 years of no-fly zones.

So because he started killing people, we said, well, okay, you can't fly here and you can't fly there and you can't fly over there.

And the Europeans started and they said, this is a waste of time.

Why do we want our pilots wearing out our planes flying over that God-forsaken country?

And they all peeled off and we were stuck.

And he violated them all the time.

And he made a mockery of that, too.

So then we went back in, and it was the irony was Bush I

didn't want to go in, and then Bush II felt that because Bush I didn't want to to go in, that Bush II had to go in.

And

everything went like clockwork, just like the first Gulf War.

He was removed very quickly, as we'll see in our next discussion.

And then the question was,

do you want to impose a Western-style democracy on this type of country?

And we tried, and it did not work.

And we would have been better off going in, decapitating him, saying,

luche Libre, it's free for all of you guys to do what you want.

That wouldn't have been a good solution.

We saw what happened.

It would be like Libya.

We went in and bombed Gaddafi out of power, and then we left a wasteland.

That was Hillary, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power's war.

Yeah.

You know, given that this war only went on a month and a half, and so it was a very short war, the fighting itself, is it considered sort of a textbook invasion into a place that obviously doesn't have arms arms of the same caliber as your own.

It was,

what I don't think people understood in Iraq, it was as if you served

the country up on a platter for the United States military.

And what but I'm what I mean by that was, unlike Afghanistan and unlike later Iraq,

it was entirely punitive.

The whole war was defined by the UN and the Bush administration as expel Iraq out of Kuwait.

There was no discussion what happens next.

So the desert was clear, the weather was clear, there was a seaport that made it supply.

You had allies nearby in Saudi Arabia for depots and supplies.

It was easy to get to and there were no restrictions because you had Olive's coalition, you had the American people and he had the UN.

You could do whatever you want.

And that made it very easy.

The only problem was that

we had not fought a war for 15 years after the helicopters fled the American embassy in Vietnam.

And everybody was saying, oh, those Iraqis are so mean.

And

no one can fight the Iranians.

They had to use electrical cables in the marshes

to electrocute them.

They're so deadly, those

Iranians.

And look what they'll do to us.

And of course...

If you try, I remember at the time I wrote, I was on NPR and I wrote some things about it.

If you looked at what the military had done after Vietnam, it had really reformed itself.

It had rearmed under Reagan.

It had F-15s.

It had Abrams tanks.

It even had a huge 600-ship navy that was still in existence.

So

Saddam walked right into a minefield and we blew him up and we got him out of Kuwait.

Everything went well.

But again, no one had said,

don't go into Iraq.

And the problem was that after that war, Dick Cheney was the Secretary of Defense and Colin Powell was the National Security Advisor.

And they spent much of that decade from 91 to 2003 explaining why they had been correct not going in.

And they made eloquent,

persuasive arguments, so it seemed.

But then they worked in a higher capacity for George W.

Bush, the son.

So Cheney was promoted from Secretary of Defense in a way to Vice President.

Colin Powell was promoted from Chairman of the Joint Chief to Secretary of State.

And so when they go in there the second time, they're making the exact opposite arguments that they made for the decade.

Remember, for the decade, you don't go in and remove Saddam because it's a mess, and then what do you do?

You're responsible.

Now you go in and move him because we didn't do it the first time.

So they lost a lot of credibility aside from the weapons of mass destruction argument.

And we'll get into that later.

But as I had written at the time, if you're going to have 23 resolutions in a bipartisan Congress that justify the war, why in the world would you focus on three of them, WMD, and not say we're going in to get rid of Saddam because

he's giving bounties to suicide bombers on the West Bank, he's got

Nadal

and the bombers of

the best,

excuse me, cut that, Robert.

He's got the most vicious terrorists in the world harboring them in Baghdad.

He's got the people who were responsible for the First World Trade Center bombing in Baghdad.

He has gassed the Marsh Arabs or destroyed them.

He's gassed the Kurds.

It goes on.

They had 20 of them.

And then they didn't mention one.

Yeah.

Not one.

It was only WMD, WMD, WMD.

Which he probably had and moved to Syria or something, but he didn't have it in the quantities they said he did.

Yeah.

Did this have any impact on

George Bush Sr.'s re-election, the failed re-election in 1992?

It did.

The idea was

originally his advisors had said to him, this is a very dangerous, risky war, but you should get it over now before we get into the full prime campaign season, which is coming up.

Kind of like what they told George W.

Bush opposite, don't go into Fallujah or get out of Fallujah because the campaign's coming up.

And then when he did so well,

for a brief moment, his popularity went up to 85, 90%.

And everybody said, who wants to run against the most popular president in recent memories, more popular than Reagan?

But then what happened?

We started having a recession.

I said it was a recession.

It was, you know,

Bill Clinton said it was the worst recession since the Great Depression.

It was a complete lie.

James Carville said, you know, it's horrible, we're starving.

George Stephanopoulos said economy, all that stuff, Carville.

But we were in economic tough times the next year.

And more importantly, there were pictures every day on the network of Kurdish women and children on hillsides in the winter without blankets, being rained on, starving, and being strafed.

And everybody said, we did all of this and we let this guy do this.

So public opinion turned on a dime.

So it went from being the most popular American intervention to unpopular.

And then when you put Ross Perot into the equation, who hated the Bush family, and he ran, as you remember, in 92, it was curtains for George Bush, George H.W.

Bush.

Yeah, he sure took the votes away from it.

Yeah, it did.

Well, Victor, we are on to a break here, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about China's role in the Middle East and maybe

RFK speaking of somebody who might take votes away from other candidates.

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

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, so China, I know that there's a lot of news out there, China's battleships in the Indian Ocean and brokering deals between countries in the Middle East and that kind of an active role.

But I was wondering if

you have any ideas of what they hope to gain or if, you know, what is expected from what's happening with China?

Is this just a a parlor game for them that they're engaged in just because there happens to be a lot of press in the Middle East or what?

Well,

China's interest in the Middle East is it supplies 40

percent of the world's oil.

And while we are not as dependent on it, at least once Biden is out of office, we'll be independent again of it.

And Russia has got oil.

It's It's basically the Europeans need it and the Chinese.

So Chinese interests are involved and what is that interest?

It wants to support any government in that area that has oil and it wants the sea lanes protected.

And who would not protect them or who would endanger them is Iran.

So it makes sure that it's on the side of the North Korean-Russian-Iranian access.

So they can get their tankers to go in and get out.

If that's okay and there's no theater war, they have another interest and that is hurting the United States.

And that would be to whip up Middle East sentiment against Israel and the United States

and to cause chaos to the point

that it doesn't all the way to the point that it doesn't endanger oil production.

So that's their interest.

They have a third interest.

When they look back at the Cold War, they understand that the Soviet Union was able to cause the United States a lot of problems in Latin America, in Asia, in Africa, South America,

of course Eastern Europe, by the idea that it was a nuclear power and it would guarantee that these terrorist groups or these quote-unquote insurrectionists or national liberationists would ultimately be protected from retaliation from the West by the nuclear shield of the Soviet Union.

So China is desperately building up its nuclear forces.

It says in 10 years it'll have 6,000 or 15 years

a nuclear deterrent the size of ours, and it's trying to become the patron of Hamas.

of the Palestinian Authority, of Hezbollah, of Iran, of Syria, of what Barack Obama created, that Shia Crescent.

And it wants to play both sides, and then it says, we're going to protect you from the evil United States.

So now they're sending six ships to say, see, we've already started to protect you.

Six Chinese ships would be blasted out of the water in two seconds by the U.S.

Navy.

So it's a token of what's

precursor of what's coming.

Yeah.

Well, since we're speaking about China, maybe we can move on.

I know I promised RFK, but you just made me think about old Gavin Newsom.

He seems to be running for president.

He's got his trips now going to Israel and making his face shone.

And then he's on to China for climate talks.

And I was wondering if you had some reflections on this

new and changed Gavin Newsom.

Well.

Gavin Newsom says he's not going to run, and then he goes down to the border and says he's going to stop fentanyl.

He wants to close the border because he's worried about that as an issue.

He might run, and his opponent might say

he'll do to America what he did to California.

Look at what happened to San Francisco.

So he's done that.

When you drive on a California freeway all of a sudden, it's the most amazing thing.

I drive

on the 99 sometimes to work, on the I-5, on 152, on the 101, and I can tell you every single piece of that

trajectory is under construction.

In other words, this decrepit road system that was utterly neglected despite having the highest gas taxes in the United States, suddenly

Gavin Newsom wants to improve roads.

It's not to make them so bad that you have to go get on high-speed rail, which is what they like, to regiment people and take away their freedom of driving.

But he's now fixing the roads.

And he's now, you see, crews, I saw some in Fresno yesterday, cleaning up the freeway.

They were so dirty and there was all the trash and he's got people out there cleaning with state funds, the Caltrans trucks.

And then

he's now over in Israel to reassure the Israelis, but not the reassure the Israelis, to reassure the California Jewish community that's very left-wing, but very angry at Bush.

I mean, at Biden.

He's trying to reassure them, look, I'm not like Joe Biden and Barack Obama.

I'm a strong Israeli supporter, and you should support me.

And then he goes to China because he's worried that by fixing the roads and doing everything, people might say he's not for the Green New Deal anymore.

And so he's trying to work out a help China with battery deal, California, which is stupid.

But it virtue signals us in California that he's still still green.

So he's covering all the bases,

and he's basically a shadow candidate right now.

And when you look at Joe Biden's conduct of this war,

I can't believe it.

It's just incoherent.

I'm a Zionist, but I'm giving $100 million to Hamas-control relief.

Don't do it, Iran.

Don't do it.

I'm going to give you $6 billion, $1.2 billion a hostage.

I lifted oil sanctions.

And I support Israel 100%.

They have not only a right, they have a responsibility.

But I don't want them to go into Gaza on the ground.

No, can't go into Gaza on the ground.

So,

you know, he just hears one advisor in one ear and one the other, and he doesn't know what to do, so he mouths both

views.

Can I, our last thing, because we're at the end of our podcast here,

and I apologize to your listeners if I get them angry, but if the Republicans can't get together with a candidate that can take the votes, then

is your

least case or least worst case scenario Gavin Newsom rather than having Joe Biden or Kamala Harris back?

What do you think?

Gavin Newsom is coherent,

and so he is a, he could be a president.

Joe Biden is not a president, he's just there.

He's like being there, that Peter Sellers movie.

Yeah.

Camel Harris is dangerous because she's,

I don't know what the adjective, incoherent, incompetent, silly, a joke.

But he, I mean, this is a guy right during COVID who said that this is the chance for more progressive capitalism as he started having people arrested for skateboarding in skateboard goring little courses in L.A.

while he took his mask off and ate at the French laundry with his lobbyist.

So

I don't know.

I can't answer that.

And it would be a disaster if Kamala Harris or Joe Biden were re-elected or Camilla Harris was elected or Gavin Newsom.

Just pick your poison.

They all have

they all pose different types of dangers to us, the people.

And I don't know,

you know, as I said with Jack, I get kind of angry when somebody writes to me and says, well, you say Trump can't win.

I never said Trump couldn't win.

I didn't say that.

I said I didn't know how as a candidate he could campaign.

It's not the question that he's not a far superior choice to any of the Democrats.

And he's way ahead in the Republican primary, but they know

And the more

that Biden fails, the more they're going to double down on lawfare.

And as I said, they're going to try to gag him, house arrest him, imprison him, do anything.

And he needs a strategy how to get out of that.

That's all I'm saying.

Yeah, you do.

And then they need a backup, whether Haley or DeSantis, they need to have a debate, as I said.

People need then in the primaries to

reveal what they feel the recourse of the Republican Party is.

Is it kind of going back to the Romney-McCain Bush, and that's kind of what you get with Haley?

Or do you want a MAGA agenda and what DeSantis did in Florida?

And then whoever emerges from that conundrum should then challenge Trump, and they should have debates.

And then they can debate in front of the whole American people.

The winner can say, well,

Donald, how are you going to get out of this?

And he can say, This is how I'm going to get out of it.

And they're going to say, Well, that won't work.

Yes, it will.

But we need that discussion.

And then we need to very quickly wrap it up and unite so that everybody that's listening and everybody who's involved in this process says to themselves, I swear, I swear a great oath that I will support the Republican who wins the nomination.

Because whoever that is of the three, they're all superior to this socialist agenda.

And

for any of you never Trumpers, you can write all the sophisticated mea culpas or why you were right, but ultimately you put Joe Biden into the White House.

I don't mean that you had the power to do it, but psychologically, that's who you wanted.

And this open border, this economy, this crime wave, this woke revolution, this disastrous foreign policy, this war, and God, that is what you voted for and empowered.

Because you were not, you didn't get your way that Donald Trump was a bad tweeter and he was vulgar and he was repulsive and he was orange and he didn't fit your idea of a statesman.

And you've got somebody who was the worst president in modern memory.

Yeah.

Well, with that, Victor, we're at the end of our show.

I'd like to thank you for everything today.

It was absolutely wonderful to talk to you about the First Gulf War.

I always wondered about, especially the argument of why Bush didn't go all the way into Iraq.

But I think you answered that.

So thank you very much.

I didn't want to go into Iraq and depose Saddam.

Yeah.

And then they always said, oh, and his son had to follow him in to do that if he said that at first.

He said, I really...

feel terribly that I put that onus on my son to remove somebody that should have been removed.

Yeah.

But then after they removed him and then there was a civil war and we were,

we lost what, 170 in the first war, and 4,000 plus in the second.

And then people said, well, wait a minute,

George H.W., you were right.

And so

the verdict is mixed.

And then you look at the Middle East today and you say,

is Iraq now better than under Saddam?

Is it exporting death?

Is it supporting terrorism?

No, and not to the same degree.

But then the next question,

okay, it's better than Saddam for the Iraqi people and for the world at large, but was that better worth the cost and blood and treasure that we expended?

And did they feel grateful for it?

And the answer is: I'm not sure of the answer.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you, Victor.

This is the end of the show, and thanks to your listeners, too.

We appreciate all of them.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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