Israel at War Continues

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is another special edition.

We'll try to get this out on Monday or Tuesday of this week.

We are recording on Sunday, and the show is going to be dedicated, of course, to the war in Israel and things that have to do with that.

So we've got a lot on our agenda.

I'd like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne, and Marcia Buskie, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

So welcome to the show.

Again, this is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show, and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Welcome back.

So, Victor, we've got a lot going on, of course, and unfortunately so.

So, I was wondering if we could just start with the protests in the United States and across the world, too, because they've been so

vocal and quite a few people, although I doubt seriously it's the majority because we see people coming out everywhere, you know, obviously appalled by what's going on.

But I thought with these protests, in addition, they seem to be overly worried whether babies got their heads cut off.

And

in my opinion, I'm missing the bigger problem of the atrocities or the barbarity of just killing young kids, women, unarmed people, and innocents, which goes against everything in Western tradition, but obviously not in the Hamas tradition.

I was wondering if you could address the protests and that.

Well, soldiers that were on the scene, and when you have 1,300 murdered,

it's a lot of work.

They had reports, some of them were picked up by French reporters, that there were several babies that were beheaded.

And necklace, that's the term for what we saw in South Africa, where you put tires around a person's neck and then light it.

And so when the IDF did not feel comfortable yet, or will, we don't know, to confirm that particular,

then the crowds of protest said, see, they didn't do anything wrong.

Well, no, they did.

There's no

controversy over they murdered people, they took children, tiny children, captives, they shot and killed babies.

They dismembered and mutilated people.

They raped people both before they killed them and after the kill.

That's all documented.

And

our listeners have seen with their own eyes how they treated an Israeli soldier when they pulled him out of the tank,

desecrated him, beat him to a pulp, what was left of him, and then the poor woman that was in the jeep, and there's been a lot more since, and pictures of cribs full of blood.

So

that was just a kind of

construct by these crowds to alleviate their guilt.

I don't know if they really had any, but at least their media sensitivities.

But what I think everybody that's listening is very disturbed because when you looked at those thousands of Middle Easterners of Middle Eastern

descent,

And you listened to them, many of them had strong accents and they were either first or second, and probably first generation

immigrants into the United States.

And so my question is this.

You come to the United States from Syria, from Lebanon, from the West Bank, from Gaza, from Egypt, and you do so because you feel that these regimes do not give you prosperity, they do not give you freedom, they do not give you security.

I get that.

So then you come into Europe or the United States, a Western society.

And they give you everything you didn't want.

And once you're comfortable and you're secure and you're free and you have a chance to prosper, what do you do?

You go out in the street and you both attack the host, and many of those people were anti-American, both in their placards and also in what they said.

And then they support the killing of 1,300 civilians.

And what never arises in their collective minds is this.

What if you

were a Middle Easterner and you were living in Gaza,

or West Bank, or Syria, or Lebanon, or Iran, and you had the same uncomfortability about that country, which was your own, that you do about your adopted country, and you went out and protested.

What would you do if you were in Gaza and you said, you know, I'm a Gazan and I think Hamas is corrupt.

They're using all the money for tunnels and drones.

I'm going to go out and protest.

They kill you.

Or let's say that you said, you you know, I'm dissatisfied with radical Islam.

I'm going to be a Christian.

Or a Buddhist, so I'm going to start a little Buddhist temple.

What would they do to you?

So these people never ever understand the effect they have on other people who watch them, which is 95% of the United States.

They look at them and they say, wait a minute.

You left tyranny, dictatorship, monarchy, and autocracy

because you didn't want it.

We didn't force you to come over here.

Then you come over here and you cheer it on.

And so that begs the question: if you think it's so good over there and it's so bad here in Israel, which is the only

democratic, consensual society in the Middle East, then why don't you go back and enjoy it?

And they never understand that.

And so we have Representative Talib with her Palestinian fry, and she's so excited that Hamas,

I guess, was successful as what you call butchering innocent people.

But she never thinks,

I'm a second generation Palestinian.

I'm here, I'm in the U.S.

Congress, only in America, but I love the West Bank and Hamas, and I love the PNA, and I would never have a chance as a woman to be a prominent elected official because the elections, if they do exist, are one time.

One time.

One election, one time.

That's the truth with the Hamas.

That's the truth with Abbas.

That was the truth with Arafat.

And they never get it in their head.

But we do get it in our head.

And I think most people are sick of it.

And so when you see Mr.

Bowman, who last came into the news for letting off a fire alarm in a sort of a

I don't know, I don't want to say terrorist attack, but a desperate move to disrupt his own Congress in a very anti-democratic fashion.

I haven't heard anybody who

cites chapter in verse January 6 that a Congressman himself would try to disrupt the proceedings of Congress.

He's asking for more Palestinian-Gazan immigration.

That's not going to happen.

And the next Republican president will have no credibility unless he promises to finish the wall and to deport everybody who came in illegally under Joe Biden.

And I think he will reenact the Trump travel ban.

Remember what Trump's travel ban was?

He said the following countries, and there were Somalia and Iran,

Syria, and the West Bank and Gaza, promote terrorism.

They're not coming in here.

And he meant not just immigrating, but not a visa.

People went nuts because they wanted to get on the left-wing gravy train.

If you're an intellectual or an artist or professional, you want to come over here because there's so many fellowships, university billets, foundational spots.

And then you're kind of like a medieval gesture, a court gesture.

You make fun of the host that gave you that.

And that's why they really hated Trump.

Of all the things they hated Trump for, that travel ban was one of the most prominent.

I hope that they reenact it.

And so,

yeah, that's what Hamam.

The final thing is: what was the celebration for?

It was for Day of Jihad, which is defined classically through history as holy war to force people to convert to Islam by destroying other religious believers that were not Muslims.

I know John Brennan, the person who twice lied under oath

to the U.S.

Congress former CIA director and one of the architects of the 51

intelligence authorities who were hoaxers,

says that jihad is just a personal discovery experience, but it's not historically.

It's a holy war.

I know the word might mean self-improvement or renewed emphasis on purity, but it's used in the practical sense for holy war.

And that's what people were out on the streets of New York and Los Angeles saying, basically, we want a holy war.

Sure, they're responding to a war that was started.

We like people who mutilate.

We like people who kidnap.

We like people who

kill women and children in their sleep.

And that's what we do.

Because remember, there was no war going on.

No war at all.

No, and they weren't out in the streets for jihad then.

No, only when it's an.

Only when they got the taste of Jewish blood in their nostrils.

Yeah, exactly.

Let's turn to the Hamas charter.

Everybody talks about it, so I had a look at it, and there's things in it that are no surprise, i.e., that the day of judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.

And Hamas sees itself as the vanguard of that movement, and that they are defending and taking back Palestine.

But what I thought was interesting in this charter as well was that it says, quote, peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic resistance, unquote.

And that also

Egypt was a disappointment after the Camp David Accords.

And I thought that, especially that last one included in there.

I was wondering if you had any comment in general on the charter.

Well, the main thing is:

don't believe what you think they mean.

Believe what they say they mean.

And they said

that they had no interest in having a two-state solution, whether in Gaza or anywhere else, that's what Hamas said, that they were always going to try to destroy Israel.

And people in Israel had told the Obama administration, who gave them funds, cut off during Trump, and told the Biden administration that.

And yet,

they, under such pressure, they thought, well, maybe Hamas, who was elected in 2006 after we left in 2005, maybe,

maybe

if we let 20,000 people in who were spies and were helping to diagram and report back how to kill Jews in their beds, maybe that will give an economic incentive or it'll be magnanimity or maybe the

the breakthrough or the revival of the Abraham Accords, which Biden, of course, Trump destroyed because of Trump's fingerprints, then he thought it might be valuable to wait a while and then recalibrate it with his imprimatur.

Maybe that'll work.

Or maybe the fact that we're going back to the Iran, no, all of that just shows weakness.

And you know what's one casualty of all this, and I don't think the supporters out in the streets understand it?

I don't think it will be politically viable for any Israeli leader to engage in talks about a two-state solution with anybody on the West Bank or Hamas.

You know why?

Because the Hamas leaders are saying now, we never wanted to be Singapore.

We fooled them.

We acted like we were looking internally and we were going to govern responsibly.

We didn't want that.

We want to take over and kill all the Jews and take over Israel.

That's what we wanted.

And people know that now.

And they know that even the Abraham's Accords, I don't know if the Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the Emirates were involved in that, but that too gave the illusion that there was going to be a normalization, and that empowered the strategic planning of Hamas.

Bottom line:

the next time someone from the West Bank or Hamas or from the Arab world in general goes to Israel and says,

Let's have economic integration, let's have détente, the Israelis would be wise to think, hmm, in 2023, that was entirely the premise that they embarked on or they accepted for one year of planning how to kill us.

And that's what they're doing now.

And what does that mean?

That's a tragic confession because it means Israel is going to have to be a garrison state.

It's going to have to be on the watch all the time.

And it's very important.

Everybody has it all wrong about this going into Gaza.

If they go into Gaza, and it will be maybe like Stalingrad or Fallujah, and they pull out, and we did, we pulled out once at Fallujah.

I think the Bush administration made a terrible mistake.

I think they were worried about the 2004 elections and later the 2006 midterms.

But they did go back in and

they performed superbly to the U.S.

Marines.

So my point is, if they go in there there and they stall or they yield to pressure, they're going to have a wide war.

If they go in there and

go medieval on Hamas, they won't.

And why do I say that?

Because the history of the Middle East is when you react in Israel disproportionately, they back off.

And when you do it proportionally, or you listen to the Europe, the United States, or the UN, you're going to ask for more dead troops, just the way it is.

Hezbollah talks a lot right now,

and they keep threatening, but they haven't gone in yet.

And that's because in 2006, they surprised the Israeli.

The Israeli government was weak.

They didn't react quick enough.

But they did finally start bombing.

They had Nasrallah inside a basement terrified.

And they destroyed the infrastructure of Beirut.

And just the other day, the economic minister...

of Lebanon said, if we get another war, we'll be back in medieval dark age times.

We can't afford it.

We're broke.

The country has been ruined.

I went there in 1974 when I was in Greece as a 20-year-old.

And my gosh, it was like France in the Mediterranean.

And then Hezbollah and the Shia radicals destroyed it.

And Israel paid them back.

And they know, they know

that every time they do that, they won't do it again.

So if Hezbollah sends in 100,000 rockets, Israel will make Beirut and maybe the Damascus airport and Damascus unlivable.

Not by targeting civilians, but by targeting water plants, power plants,

freeway exchanges, airports, military bases, and installation.

They know that.

They know they have the ability to do that.

Yeah, you can see it even just watching their bombs.

Their bombs take down whole buildings, and they're so targeted.

Those are conventional.

They're going to have bunker buster bombs and they will go down 30, 40 feet before the first explosion will get them down there and then the second one will blow everything apart.

So you're not safe if you're Nasrallah ordering another war while you're in a basement.

Somebody will find out about it.

And they know that.

And there's two aircraft carriers there, so if Iran tries to intervene, I have no confidence in the Biden administration.

But we do have the wherewithal

to

tell Iran,

don't do it.

When they killed an American contractor in Iraq, Donald Trump killed Soleimani.

And everybody said there was going to be a worldwide jihad.

And then he said, if you kill another American, you're not going to like what's going to happen in Iran.

And they didn't.

They didn't at all.

And this administration, then all that hard work of deterrence, they destroyed.

They gave them, they lifted sanctions.

They gave them $50 billion in oil revenue.

They gave them a first infusion of cash.

They were ready to give them $6 billion.

They still may.

They gave $700 million immediately to the Palestinians.

They put Robert Maui in charge of the Iran deal until the FBI kind of forced them to remove him, give him his contacts with the Iranian government, rather than, well, I guess where his loyalties were.

I can't say that until it's proven, but he lost a security clearance for that reason, apparently.

Yeah.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit more about this war.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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So Victor, on Gaza, I was just thinking that weren't the Gazans themselves almost better off

under the occupation of Israel from, I'm not sure how long that occupation went, but it went all the way up until 2005.

And now they've been under Hamas and it seems to me that ironically they would be better off under

another Israeli occupation, which I know.

Yeah, the British had enclaves of different territorial jurisdictions.

and one was Gaza, and then when they left in the 40s, and there was the Jihad wars all during this time,

they were under the jurisdiction of Egypt.

And then after the Six-Day War, when Egypt and the Arab

attack collapsed, then they became under the jurisdiction of Israel.

And then

during some of these negotiations, it was suggested that Egypt, who had earlier control for a while, why don't you take control?

When the British left until the Six-Day War, you had control.

And they didn't want it.

And they don't want it now.

I mean, they're welcome to have...

I mean, we let in 8 million people, and there's only 2 million in Gaza City.

Why doesn't and they're fellow Muslim Arabs?

And why doesn't Egypt say, come here, we've got UN money, we've shaken down the Europeans and the Americans, we've got tent cities, you're welcome to come.

And they d why don't they do that?

And you know why they don't do that?

Because they had Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, and they don't want two million radicals to infiltrate their system in the fashion that they killed Sadat.

They don't want them.

And they can't say that publicly, so they're blaming Israel.

But nobody wants control.

So when the Israelis had control, basically from 67,

all the way, 73 war, all the way up to 2005,

And they decided, Sharon decided to build a wall, and then it wasn't worth the settlement, so they got out.

Okay, and then they turned it over, and the Bush administration green lighted an election, and Hamas won the election.

Everybody, and it killed a couple of hundred of Palestinian Authority who thought that they were going to win.

So when people say, well, the people of Gaza are not culpable, they threw the Palestinian Authority out because they wanted jihad.

They did not want a two-state solution.

They thought they were corrupt.

So they elected an even more corrupt government, which for the last 18 years has done one thing, according to their own words, not mine.

They have given an enormous deception to the Western world and the Arab world.

Well, not the Arab world, the Western world.

They said, give us our money and we will make Singapore.

And what do they do?

They made the Paris metro system underneath their city.

And then they bought drones and they bought rockets and they prepared every four or five years to kill Jews.

That's what they do.

That's a killing machine.

Yeah, it sure is.

And everybody's sick of it.

Yeah.

And apparently, not everybody, because as I said earlier, we have a lot of people who are completely deluded.

One of the things that was really weird is the word apartheid.

Whenever I hear that word, it just, gosh, I can't even describe my emotions.

Apartheid.

Apartheid.

It's apartheid society.

20%

of the population of Israel is Arab.

They vote.

They elect their leaders.

They have a voice in parliament.

Anybody's free to go over into Israel and walk through the Arab,

predominantly Arab areas,

especially in the north of Israel.

and then just take a little hike over to the West Bank or Gaza.

And I'm not talking about prosperity and relative

security.

I'm talking about freedom.

And ask yourself, if you're an Arab and you are in Israel as an Israeli citizen, or maybe you're a resident, and you scream at the top of your voice, I hate Israel, what's going to happen to you compared to if you go over to Gaza and Palestine, you get on a soapbox at the corner and you say, I love Israel.

Which all those people I'm asking you that you were in the street, which would you rather be?

The Palestinian who yells, I hate Israel in Israel, or the Palestinian who says, I love Israel in the West Bank or Gaza.

It's your choice.

And if you make the wrong choice, you're dead.

And why is that?

And so when they use the word apartheid, it only applies to one society.

Apartheid societies are the Palestinians in Gaza.

If you go into any of those societies, And you say you're a Christian from America and you want to be a, you know, open a Christian church and be a mission, you're going to be dead.

And the Christians that are already there, that have been there since the Crusades, before the Arabs even in some cases,

they're under constant persecution and they're leaving in droves.

They're leaving Lebanon in droves.

They're leaving the West Bank in droves.

They're leaving Gaza in droves because they have to.

So this asymmetry, you know, it's so, these people that are protesting, you just take a deep breath and ask yourself,

who has freedom, who has prosperity, who has security,

and then who persecutes women, who persecutes gays, who believes in polygamy?

Who does that?

Where is indentured servitude still common in the world?

And it's, why don't you protest against that?

And you don't protest against that because they'd shoot you.

So you come over here and you enjoy all the fruits of Westernism that you hate, and then you trash your host, and you cheer on all of the death and destruction and autocracy and dictatorship that you fled from.

And you ask us to think that you're moral, you're amoral, and all the stupid lackeys that you enlist with you in the university.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn to the questions of proportionate response and then expansion of the war.

I thought Roger Kimball had an interesting article.

I think it was in the Standard.

And it was titled, What Does a Proportionate Response Look Like?

And he does look at Sherman and his response.

And I was wondering if you had some reflections on what a proportionate response would look like by the Israelis but a second thing because toward the end he says that anti-Israeli force Hezbollah sorry leaders met with an anti-Israeli force forces in March of this year and it's reported to have been a conversation to quote get ready for a war with Israel with a scope and reach that would mark a new era unquote and so I was wondering those are the two issues proportionate response and expansion of the war to other Middle Eastern powers and maybe even further than that

I just say promises promises you promised a war where is it all so far all the war on your part has been going in on a holiday, a religious holiday, and going to a concert and butchering unarmed teenagers and then going into a military military base that was basically unguarded in people's homes and slitting their throat or blowing them up or burning them up or shooting them, execute.

And that's what you call war.

See, the funny thing is, they say proportionate.

We should be portion.

What would be proportionate?

Is Israel supposed to say, hmm.

The Arab world is only calling for a proportionate response.

So we're going to send the IDF in on Ramadan one morning and we're going to slay and cut the throats and mutilate and rape 1,500, 1,200 Palestinians to make them happy?

Is that what they want?

So it wasn't a war.

It was a death squad.

It was sort of like the

irregulars that the SS enlisted when they went into Poland and Lithuania and Ukraine.

And they didn't, you know, they organized it and they said, you know what?

Go out, out, and kill these Jews.

And you have a blank check to do it.

And that was not a war.

That was the beginning of the genocide.

And that's what they're doing.

And so they don't want a war.

They have a war right now.

It's going on in Gaza.

All they have to do is all these people who they can enlist.

I don't understand it.

I mean, I was just at the Dulles Airport Thursday, two days before I'm speaking.

And guess what I saw?

I saw middle-aged American Israeli citizens.

Some of them didn't look like they were in fighting trim, and they were volunteering to go over there.

And Hamas said, I want everybody to come over here.

Well, they can go over there and get a uniform on and go fight.

But they don't want to do that.

They want to slit somebody's throat in Paris.

They want to slit somebody's flip throat in China.

But they don't want to fight.

And why is that?

Because they're going to lose.

So it's all this beat your chest, we're tough, we're mean, the Jews were easy to kill, but just go, just go get over there and fight them.

And they don't want to do that.

So

they're terrified of a disproportionate.

And what is disproportionality?

It's what wins wars.

Can anybody tell me a war that was ended by proportional responses?

I can't.

Can't think of a thing.

What ended World War II in the Pacific?

What ended World War II in the Pacific?

It was not just the atomic bombs.

It was B-29 raids starting on March 10th.

all the way 11th into Tokyo with Napalm.

And they did that.

They put flyers out there.

They said, flee, just like the Israelis did.

And then they said,

you are building aircraft and munitions inside civilian homes.

And we can't target only factories because you're doing that.

So flee.

And then they burned down 55% of the city.

And everybody's saying that was a war crime.

Maybe it was, but per day, the Japanese Imperial forces in China and the Pacific and in Asia were killing about 20,000 people if you do the math to the whole war.

And so they stopped.

They stopped within about six weeks the ability to do that.

They mine the harbors, they destroy Japanese industry.

And pretty soon, 20,000 people were alive every day.

The proportionate response would be something like this in World War II.

So we wake up, all of us, it's December 8th.

They've had a sneak attack that killed 2,400 Americans and wounded another thousand.

thousand.

And we say violence never stops anything.

It never solves anything.

And we don't want to be disproportionate.

And we don't want to start a cycle of violence with the Japanese Imperial.

And we have some culpability because we had an oil embargo.

So we're going to do this.

We're going to try to find a proportionate response.

So maybe, just, maybe, just, maybe,

we will send our little puny three aircraft carriers

and we will try to do the dool little raid on December.

We couldn't do it, but let's say we did.

And maybe we can hit their fleet in Yokohama and then we'll sit back and then there will be peace.

Does anybody believe that?

Anybody understand the Japanese militarist doctrine as stated by themselves what Bansai victory was?

And how did World War II end?

Was it to tell Hitler, please don't go into Poland?

Nobody in Denmark attacked you.

You don't need Belgium.

Yugoslavia is not your country.

The Greeks are good people.

Don't go in there.

No, nobody said that.

They said, this is ours.

We're taking it.

The war goes the strongest.

Come over and stop us.

So then when we did, what were we going to do?

We had no mechanism to get in Europe on the ground, so we started to bomb, and we lost 80,000 British and American flyers.

And then finally because of brave people, 400,000 who gave their lives, we were able to bomb, bomb, bomb and make them

withdraw 88 millimeter personnel away from the Eastern Front to the Western Front in

anticipation of D-Day and because of the bombing and the Soviets started to make progress.

And then

we unleashed the Soviets on Berlin.

100,000 people were killed.

Yes, it was terrible, but not as terrible as 20 million Russian citizens and soldiers.

Not as terrible as that.

And I've been to Dresden, I've been to Hamburg, I feel bad about all that, but I don't feel bad about all that as I do Auschwitz.

And the German people were a little different.

During the war, we know they claimed, and after the war, for sure, they said, A, we didn't know about the killing,

the death camps, the 6 million, or we knew about, but we just couldn't stop it.

The Gazans and the Palestinians don't even make that effort.

They don't say, we didn't know about the 1,300.

We didn't know about that.

Or we couldn't have stopped Hamas, what we were supposed to do.

No, they say, They were settlers.

They weren't civilians.

They were all combatants.

I've heard people say that in the United United States.

I'm glad they killed them.

I wish they'd kill more.

So that is their moral compass and you can rate them, listeners, given what the German public said versus what the Palestinians said.

Yeah.

Well, let's turn to expansion of the war, but first let's go to a few messages and we'll be back.

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Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to send it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

What a performance by Team California.

The power is ours.

Welcome back.

You can find Victor on X, and we've got quite a crowd on X, so come join us.

That's the former Twitter and Victor's handle is at V D Hansen.

So come join us.

Facebook, Hansen's Morning Cup also has the same

information that goes onto it.

So join him there as well.

Victor, so in terms of expansion, what I was thinking was

listening to everything in the news waves and reading,

what if this war in Gaza or this incursion into Israel by the Hamas is only a diversion and that there is a bigger plan?

Now what would that be, Sami?

That they're going to attack.

I know you've addressed attack from the north, attack from Syria, and that the Iranians are going to get more involved in this.

And we, just in defense of my idea here, the United States is sending another carrier, and it's got quite a fleet of the US.

We've got the Gerald Ford.

It's our biggest, newest carrier that I think it has 75 to 80 aircraft and the Eisenhower have 65 to 70.

So we've got

almost 150 sophisticated jets plus a battle

two carrier groups that have guided missiles with the ability to do a lot of damage.

And they're in between Gaza and Iran.

And so if they wanted to, if you went to DEF CON two or three,

they could interdict every single Iranian flight into the Damascus airport and every single

overland route and every single maritime route into Gaza.

They could very easily do that.

And the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, Russia, is not going to do anything about it because they are tied down in a major war.

And everybody says, well,

Russia's going to do that.

No, they're not.

They don't have any weapons.

They're importing importing Russian drones, and

they're in the process of making public what's probably been private for a long time that Turkey is supplying them.

But

they have lost probably 400,000 people, dead or wounded.

So there's a blank check.

This is the first time in my lifetime there's a blank check on Israel.

Yeah.

So all of that yelling and screaming that we're going to do this and this,

Israel was much weaker vis-a-vis the Arab world that had sophisticated Soviet arms and had five different nations attacking them in 67,

73.

And they took a lot of casualties, but they won.

And they won decisively.

And Jordan is not going to come across the border.

And Egypt is not going to come across the border.

Hezbollah is the only major thing they have to worry about.

And that's mostly an aerial attack.

If Hezbollah decides to invade, they would be slaughtered.

If Syria, to the degree it's even...

Syria has been in a civil war for 20 years.

It's decimated.

If it thinks it's going to go up in the Golan Heights like it did in 1973, it'll be wiped out.

There has never been a larger call-up.

So Israel is going to have in the field five, I don't know how long the economy is going to sustain that, but they're going to have 500,000 soldiers.

They don't need that many in Gaza.

And they're going to have 200 to 300 aircraft on the northern border.

And they have pilots that are ready for righteous revenge.

and they get the green light that Hamas sends more rockets or Hezbollah sends from the north.

They're going to go and take out not just the rocket launchers.

They're going to take a lot of damage.

A lot of people are going to get killed, civilians, because they're going to blanket the skies with these rockets.

But they're going to leave Beirut

in a condition that will take 50 years to repair.

And I don't think they're going to limit it to Beirut.

I think they're going to go,

if these people are launching things from Syria as well on the other front, I think they'll do the same thing.

Notice one thing.

How did the Yom Kippur War end?

It ended with two things.

One, the entire Third Egyptian Army, which had been very successful for the first 40, was trapped in the Sinai.

250,000 soldiers.

were completely surrounded and cut off from all logistical support.

They had no food, they had no water.

And Henry Kissinger's part of that was to save the Third Army so Sadat wouldn't be completely thrown out of office for

so he could say that he won the war because for two days they did and everybody would forget the next two weeks.

And so that's number one.

And then what happened on the Golan Heights after they were surprised and they had were short.

They had a counterattack and the Israelis pushed them off the heights and guess what?

There was nothing between them

and Damascus.

They could have done, and that's why the Syrians quit.

They were told.

They could have completely rendered Syria to the Dark Ages.

And

that's why they sued for peace.

Now, they didn't say they sued for peace.

They called up the Russians and said, please, please threaten the United States so we can have peace.

And they did.

And so, what I'm getting at, yes, they can invade from the north.

and they can send rockets, and they can do all that.

But they will lose, and they will not lose a conventional war.

They will lose a war that puts them back a half century, and they won't do it, I don't think.

And I think a lot of people in Israel say, bring it on.

This is an existential war now.

And I would rather get it over now and live for 50 years in peace.

with vanquished enemies than have

these people doing it every other year.

And I don't think Iran is going to intervene.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Oh, but I was thinking, and to that end, isn't this the moment to address the power in the Middle East, which is all centered around Iran and very dangerously so since they're getting away from the United States?

I think Donald Trump came very close.

People had to talk him out of responding at Iran when they sent rockets into Saudi Arabia.

And he was almost ready to do it.

And

I think

when they killed Solomoni, why didn't they just go shoot rockets all over America, every American Edgar?

And in Syria, we had some troops.

Why didn't they do it?

Because he told them what he was going to do.

And they knew that the U.S.

had the ability.

They weren't going to go into Afghanistan.

There's not going to be any more Iraqs in Afghanistan.

Everybody's given up on that.

The neoconservative dream of maybe offering democracy.

You saw there was a million people in the streets of Baghdad.

We got rid of Saddam Hussein.

We spent a trillion dollars.

We gave them new infrastructure.

They hate us more than they ever do.

And they have some kind of rudimentary consensual system that was a gift of the United States.

But my point is that nobody is going to say, we're going to go into Iran and fix it.

No.

It's going to be punitive.

And they know that.

And so they won't do it.

And they have the ability,

if they want a major confrontation with the United States and there's no restrictions, the United States has the ability to stop the nuclear program.

Two or three weeks of strategic bombing, they could stop it.

Nobody wants that.

And so Iran knows that.

So I don't think they're going to intervene.

And I don't think Hezbollah is going to intervene.

No,

you're probably right on that, but isn't it the moment for Israel and the United States to at least take out their nuclear capabilities?

If I were in control

and I would just pause right now.

And if there were any American hostages killed, executed by Hamas, I would take out Hamas and I would take out myself, our troops take out the Iranian nuclear facilities and pay them back for that.

I don't think that's a widely shared view.

And I'm not at some guy sitting on my farm in Salma saying, I want a bunch of Americans to get killed.

It's a very serious step.

But if they kill Americans with impunity, what that means is they're going to do it all the time.

And as we speak right now, I mean, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have to have security details because they've threatened them, you know, in the United States.

So we should have a complete travel ban of all travel to Iran either way.

And we should lift the visas immediately if there's any Iranian here who's not a U.S.

citizen.

I don't care what their status is.

And that should be immediate.

And we should, what I'm worried about, if you ask me what I'm worried about and what our listeners are worried about, this is what they're worried about.

We've spent $120 billion in Ukraine.

They are using 250,000 artillery shells a month.

We just emptied all of our strategic artillery shell

depots in Israel.

They were there for a purpose, that if Israel is an extremist in an existential war, they would have that American aid and we wouldn't have to ship it over.

Javelins, we took it all.

And it was only worth about a month in Ukraine.

And now we're going to keep going and going.

Okay, I support helping the Ukrainians.

And now we're going to have to get a massive airlift because the type of things that are going on with Irondome, these are sophisticated systems that are very a million dollars a missile.

And you're talking about the munitions necessary maybe to hit Hezbollah.

So we're going to have a massive

have to to keep Israel viable.

And then we have what?

We have China threatening Taiwan.

So we're going to have to build up our Pacific forces.

And then we have the southern border that's wide open, and it needs a multi-billion dollar investment.

And then we left $50 billion.

And the latest reports this week is $50 billion of equipment, munitions, weapons in Afghanistan.

Nobody even gets mad about that anymore.

And that's that's filtering into the Middle East.

So what are we saying?

We need something like a war production board at World War II.

And we need to start transferring monies from these crazy programs.

We don't need to spend millions of dollars on gender studies programs.

In the Middle East, we need to cut all aid off to these illiberal regimes.

And we need to start ramping up our defense forces to re-establish deterrence.

The most dangerous time in American history since World War II will be the next 15 months because people abroad think

that this is not a sustainable operation, the Biden administration.

And they know or they fear that either Donald Trump will be president or Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis.

And it doesn't matter who of those three is president because they will utterly reject this appeasement of Joe Biden.

Now, how do they, Sammy, how do they look at that paradigm?

They think,

well,

if I'm Iran or Hezbollah,

what's coming is more of those four years of Donald Trump.

We're going to get no aid.

They'll take out somebody like Soleimani whenever they want.

They'll give ultimata, and there'll be no restrictions on Israel.

So we have 15 months of this construct presidency, and we better do whatever we're going to do now.

So you're right, we're in a window of danger.

I don't think they're going to try it, but if you're right, if they're going to try it, they're going to do it now in the next 15 months when Biden's president.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's then to that end, we're looking at the American domestic situation.

Just to go over a few things because we're close to the end of the podcast.

Did you have anything on or ideas about Jim Jordan as the proposed Speaker of the House so that our Congress can get moving?

Well, I mean, the left actually has an argument that we have no speaker.

It doesn't mean that we're completely dysfunctional, but the House is the body of Congress that approves appropriations, and we need this appropriations moving because we're in a de facto double proxy war.

And so we can't have eight Republicans or nine Republicans vetoing the Speaker.

It should have never happened.

I know a lot of people listening, and I've got a lot of angry, angry letters to me, because I have been no big fan of what Matt Gates did.

But the problem is now that the MAGA people have a guy, so they're all going to rebound, but there's rhinos in there, and the rhinos are going to say, well, we wanted Kevin McCarthy.

He was better than the alternative, and now you didn't give us that alternative.

So we might not give you your alternative.

And then the Democrats broke all precedent when when it was kind of a rule by Nancy Pelosi that one side or the other in a closely divided house did not in unison vote lock step

against the

majority party, the Speaker's party.

And she broke that.

So all the Democrats voted against Kevin.

So what that meant was...

The Republicans have to have absolute unity to get a speaker.

They can only afford four or five or six defections.

And when you made that ultimatum,

seven or eight people said, we can stop it, they did two things.

They set a precedent that other people then could use their tactics and stop it.

And they weren't sure that they had the votes to get their type of speaker, given the complexity and the diversity of the Republican caucus.

Jim Jordan's a good guy.

I hope he's Speaker.

I had hoped that Kevin McCarthy would continue.

But they're going to have to do something.

They're going to have to do it very quickly.

Jim Jordan now has a Republican consensus, but that doesn't make him speaker.

He's going to be the candidate to go up in front of the House.

Every Democrat will vote against him.

And then it will be gut check time because there'll be six or seven people who are Romneyites in the House, and they have to make a decision.

They have to say, well, they did this to us, so we're going to do this to them, or we're in a war right now, a de facto proxy war, and we can't afford this anymore.

It's completely reckless on either side, whether you're a MAGA

Matt Gaze hyper

paleo or you're a Rhino-Romnei.

You can't do that.

You've got to stick with your party and get a speaker in.

Otherwise, you're going to end up with a Democratic minority and a Democratic speaker.

Well, you mentioned our other proxy war, so I was wondering, just we don't hear anything about the Ukraine, or at least not much, in the news.

I was wondering if you could give us an update as the end of this podcast

well I mean

I think some of us have been warning that the euphoria after the aborted attack on Kiev

and sort of the problems that Russians were having and the success of Ukraine was very welcome news but it wasn't the news

that when you're fighting a country that has 30 times your territory and 10 times your GDP and three times your population or four times almost now probably,

it's going to be very difficult.

And everybody knows the Russian way of war.

They're incompetent on the offense.

When they go into other countries, whether it's Finland or whether it's sailing their fleet to Japan in 1905 or whether it's going into Poland in the 20s, they're incompetent.

And when you invade their country, whether it's Napoleon or Charles XII in Sweden or whether it's Adolf Hitler, they're incompetent, Japanese on the Mongol, and then they're not incompetent because they rally and they have enormous resources and they're completely brutal and they usually have pretty good weapons and they transmogrify the war from why did we do that and go into Finland to this is Mother Russia

and they win.

And anybody who said that was considered a traitor and there was all these taboos.

So now they're deadlocked in these cities, and the Russians are pouring resources in.

And the poor Ukrainians have lost a quarter of their population.

The Europeans are scared.

They're getting no natural gas from Russia.

Winter's coming on.

It's going to be a mess.

We want to supply Ukraine, but we don't know whether if we supply them with sophisticated missiles and aircraft that they want, are they going to use it to go in, which is strategically rational, to go into Mother Russia and hit things to stop their own country.

That's what military doctrine says.

Except in the history of proxy wars, there was a more prevailing rule.

And the rule was if you're in a proxy war with a nuclear superpower, you do not give the wherewithal of your client to go attack their homeland.

Russians do not give Cuba missiles to attack us.

MacArthur, do not take South Korean and Taiwanese troops and go into China.

Please don't do that.

And And Russia, when you're in Vietnam, do not

use the Vietnamese, the Vietnam War to attack the United States homeland or use the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese to attack other U.S.

interests, bases, or whatever.

They don't do that.

They confine the proxy war to that theater.

So there are historical reasons why we

have violated strategic doctrine that says to get the aggressor off your back, you have to hit him at home because to do so can widen the war and will inflame the Russian people.

And so I don't see any end to this.

And we're up to, I don't believe there's just 600,000 dead or wounded on both sides.

I think it's more like 800 from what I'm reading.

And nobody, I don't understand the left.

They just, it's on to Moscow, on to Moscow.

They don't care about, they never mention the carnage.

And I don't understand the asymmetry between Ukraine and Gaza.

Maybe you do, Sami, but

Anthony Blinken met with the Turkish foreign minister before Israel had even recovered or knew before the last Palestinian had been expelled.

And he said,

we want to cease fire.

And the U.S.

State Department, via their Palestinian Affairs Bureau, said that cycle of violence, avoid it.

We want to cease fire.

Did anybody say that to Ukraine when the Russians surrounded?

No, this is just a cycle of violence.

It's just pointless.

You know, Ukraine, don't be disproportionate in your response.

It would just inflame things.

They don't say that.

They only say it to Israel.

I don't quite understand that.

Yeah,

it's just anti-Semitism.

It is anti-Semitism.

You saw it pour out onto the streets in New York and other people.

It's hating Jews.

Let's just be honest, everybody.

If you look at the world today,

nobody says anything about the one million Uyghurs in China that die daily from being in a forced labor camp or they're operated on for organ

transplant material.

Nobody says anything about what the Russians did in Chechnya.

They just flattened it.

When Putin today said, oh, he thinks this is disproportionate, somebody should have said,

You killed a lot of Muslims in Chechnya.

You just leveled it, their main cities.

And nobody said a word.

Nobody says a word about what

Arab people do to their own people.

Nobody says a word.

Nobody says a word about any

mass slaughter in Africa.

Nobody says a word.

Nobody around the world says we've got to stop these cartels.

They're slaughtering people right on the U.S.

border.

Or nobody says a word that Mexico is importing via the cartels Chinese-supplied fentanyl that we know will kill another 100,000 Americans who are, some of them are addicted, but some of them are thinking that they're at a party and they're going to take, you know, Valium or Xanax and it's fentanyl.

And so they will die.

And nobody says anything.

But the Jews,

they lose 1,300 people dead and mutilated, and they want to respond, and all of a sudden it's disproportionate.

And there's no other explanation except anti-Semitism.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, this is the end of the podcast, and we'd like to thank all of your listeners, and thank you, too, because

we've got a whole new perspective, I think, on what's going on

in Gaza.

And also, I was really interested in the discussion or the explanation that a disproportionate response is, in fact, necessary to end things, and that largely you think Iran will keep itself safe and out of the war, which I hope you are correct on that.

So, thank you very much.

Thank you, everybody.

And

try to keep a perspective and don't be bullied by what you see on the screen or your left-wing associates if you have some.

Don't listen to them.

You can always tell a person when he says two words, disproportionate,

disproportionate, and apartheid.

And once they use those two words, end of conversation, you know what's going to follow.

So, just avoid it.

Yeah.

Just say no, which is Nasty Reagan used to say.

Yeah, all right.

Well, thank you very much, and this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.

Thank you, everybody.