Tucker Carlson Show: w/ James (Jim) Webb on Ground Troops In Iran (Transcript)

And as a product of that decision, we’re putting an awful lot at risk.

# Why Can’t We Constrain Israel?

TUCKER CARLSON: So constraining Israel, bringing it to heel — it’s a much smaller country than the United States. We pay for most of their military. We make all of this possible. So it shouldn’t be hard to tell them to get in line, at least for the purposes of this conflict. Don’t do things that violate our core interests. But so far, no one’s been able to do that for some reason. Again, that’s another why proposition. Why? Why would that be so hard? If Ghana was doing this to us, we’d say, hey, Ghana, stop it. But we’re not doing that with Israel.

And because we’re not doing that with Israel, the Israelis feel completely free not simply to make public announcements that they’re going to pursue their own interests to the detriment of ours, but to humiliate the U.S. government and our nation by so doing.

# The Humiliation Dynamic

TUCKER CARLSON: This is a feature that may be unique to Israel. Hard to know exactly, but it’s certainly the most obvious feature of our relationship with Israel, which is an ongoing humiliation process. We spoke two days ago to the former interim president of Israel, Avraham Berg, former Knesset leader, a guy who knows Israeli politics and culture. He’s in his 70s. He’s born and lived there his whole life, knows the country well, and he noted, unprompted, that a feature of the way that Israel deals with other nations is humiliation.

It’s not simply enough to come to terms. You know, “we’re both a little bit dissatisfied, that means it’s a good deal” — you often hear that. That’s not the Israeli view. The Israeli view is, “I have to crush you. I have to put my boot in your face. I have to diminish you. I have to humiliate you.”

Now, who knows where that comes from? But you should know it as you watch the interplay between the United States government and the Israeli government, because there’s a whole lot of that.

And here’s a perfect example. And this is both a problem — a tactical problem for the U.S. government, like, how do you strike a peace deal with this kind of stuff going on? We’ll show it to you in a second. But it’s also a deeper problem for us. Watching your country get humiliated by a tiny country in a faraway place, and getting no explanation for why they’re allowed to do that, humiliates you and discourages you. And if you watch it long enough, you start to lose faith in your own nation. You start to become humiliated yourself.

# Netanyahu’s Defiance

TUCKER CARLSON: So we could pick a million examples of this, but here’s one. So Monday, the president, before markets open — which was interesting — announces that the United States is pulling back from his promise to start hitting civilian infrastructure, energy infrastructure in Iran. And we’re doing that because we’re going to try and find some negotiated settlement. And we’ve been talking to the Iranians, and there is a way out of this. We don’t have to get to the point where we’re waging total war, not just against the government of Iran or the ayatollahs or the theocracy or whatever we say we’re doing, but against the people of Iran — turning off their electricity, ending their drinking water, letting them die of exposure or whatever. Total war against a country of almost 100 million people. And nobody wants that, or at least no one should want that.

So the president announced, hey, we’re in talks, we’re pulling back. But within just a couple of hours, our partner in Jerusalem, Benjamin Netanyahu, the guy we’re in this war with, issued this statement. Listen carefully.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: “We’re safeguarding our vital interests.”

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

TUCKER CARLSON: The prime minister of Israel said, “our vital interests.” Now, what are those vital interests? Well, no one’s really explained that. Not even clear the Israeli public really knows the extent of their own country’s, quote, “vital interests” as envisioned by their prime minister. We’re not really sure, but clearly they entail territorial expansion, moving the borders of Israel outward, taking other people’s land.

And they’re saying that in the Israeli government — this is a win because we’ve moved our borders outward. So we’re paying for that. We’re making that possible. As Americans die — and a number have died in this war — Israel is using that opportunity, our money, our weapons, the lives of our soldiers, to expand its territory. So that’s not our vital interest. You can agree or disagree with that.

By the way, if you’ve been yelling about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you should probably yell about this because it’s even less defensible, really. But they’re saying that, and no one in the U.S. government has told them to stop.

# Mossad’s Role and the Decision to Kill the Ayatollah

TUCKER CARLSON: And so what does that mean for us? Well, it means that Israel somehow is in control of the course of this war, and they have been since the beginning. We learned this week, for example, that the decision to go into this war and to kill the Ayatollah in the opening hours of this war was made on intelligence, on the basis of intelligence supplied to the U.S. government by Mossad, the Israeli intel agency, not from the CIA.

The CIA — which no one wants to defend, but in this specific case — sounds like, was a voice for restraint. And again, that’s why we have intel agencies, so they can advise the president about what to do next on the basis of the best available information. That’s the idea anyway. And apparently the CIA was telling the White House, no, you can kill the head of Shia Islam, but that probably won’t topple the government. And there probably won’t be, in the aftermath of that killing, this spontaneous creation of a liberal democracy in Southwest Asia. Probably not going to happen.

But Mossad had another scenario. They believed, or said they believed, that knocking off the religious leadership — the head of the snake in this theocracy — would result in spontaneous regime change and we wouldn’t have to really get involved beyond just the initial bombing campaign. And that’s very appealing to Americans who fought war from the air for a long time. And that’s at this point pretty much the only thing that the American public will accept — a low risk, very expensive, but low risk operation that doesn’t take very long, where you achieve your objectives by killing the right people with bombs.

# The Boots on the Ground Nobody Wanted to Admit

TUCKER CARLSON: But nobody in the United States — well, almost nobody — has any great desire to send U.S. troops. In fact, in June, when the government of Israel and its many paid spokesmen in the United States were pushing for what became the 12-Day War — “we’re just going to take out the nuclear sites” — there were people who said, no, that’s not what this is. This is a regime change effort. And if pursued, it will wind up with boots on the ground, with the commitment of American troops. And once that happens, it’s kind of hard to see how to extricate them. And a lot of them could get killed.

And anyone who said that at the time was denounced as crazy, a conspiracy theorist, a grifter. Well, nine months later, that’s exactly where we are today.

The head of Mossad — smart, seasoned guy — said that he believes, apparently said this, that he believes regime change in Iran, which is apparently another stated goal, will require at least a year to change the regime in Iran. So that right there is Israel saying, we’re going to need the commitment of American troops. Americans are going to have to go there.

And surprise, surprise, Americans are going there. There’s not been an invasion of Iran, of the mainland, or any of the islands in the Persian Gulf just yet. But there is clearly preparation for that. There are many thousands of U.S. troops headed there right now. Some are already stationed in the area. And this looks like the kind of preparation that you would do if you were planning a land assault on a huge mountainous country that’s surprisingly cohesive and very well armed.

# The Blase Insouciance of the War Hawks

TUCKER CARLSON: And from what we can tell, there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for doing this among people who spend their lives thinking through military tactics and strategy. This doesn’t seem like the kind of move that’s going to end the war in our favor quickly. It seems like the kind of move that could result in disaster — we pray it doesn’t — but that once made, will almost certainly result in a long-term commitment to fighting on the ground in Iran. The very thing we were told we were insane to worry about.

Now everyone’s going to say, “oh yeah, it’s going to take some boots on the ground.” And one of the things you learn as you watch this change — where something that was totally unimaginable and insane, it was space-aliens-level crazy just nine months ago to suggest this could happen — one of the things you notice as you watch people now advocate for it, those very same people advocate for this thing that was never going to happen and you were crazy to worry about, is the kind of blasé insouciance they display. The kind of “boots on the ground” as they call for it.

And there’s no place where you see this more. The world headquarters for “boots on the ground” would of course be Fox News. So here is Keith Kellogg, retired General Keith Kellogg, who’ll be 82 years old in a month, telling you that, yeah, boots on the ground, not a big deal. Watch.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

KEITH KELLOGG: I’m a big believer in putting boots on the ground, not necessarily into Iran, but taking Karg Island and also taking the Strait of Hormuz. Look, we kind of need to do it the way the Romans used to do it. You need to put your legions on the ground to secure the territory and give them confidence that they can do it, that we can open up the strait.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The Cost of War and the Neglect of America

TUCKER CARLSON: Look, I know there’s risk involved. There’s always risk involved. But those kids, those young men and women, they understand the risk involved on taking both Karg and opening up the Strait of Hormuz.

Just got to put boots on the ground. Now, what’s interesting is the last line. What’s interesting, by the way, that it’s Keith Kellogg. Keith Kellogg is one of the reasons there has been no settlement in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia.

So Keith Kellogg was appointed by the new administration very, very early in January to be the emissary from the White House to Eastern Europe to try and get some kind of deal between Russia and Ukraine. And without getting boring about it, Keith Kellogg is one of the main reasons that we don’t have that agreement. And hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans, Slavs, Russians and Ukrainians, probably decent kids with nothing to do with starting this war are dead and Ukraine is totally destroyed.

And Keith Kellogg was never — having talked to him at some length — ever in favor of settling that. And that may or may not be connected to the fact that his daughter works with the Zelensky government. Never want to blame people’s relatives for anything. But she’s on the record saying, “I’m working on my dad to make sure he stays on Ukraine’s side.” Well, you can’t have a side in a foreign conflict if you’re an American emissary charged with settling that conflict. The only side you can have is the United States, and Keith Kellogg didn’t.

So that’s shameful. And he’s not responsible for that war, and he’s not wholly responsible for a failure to settle it, but he’s definitely partly responsible for helping to destroy American diplomacy and making the United States globally not a trusted partner in any discussion about anything. Because when you’re dishonest with other countries, when you don’t state up front your biases, when you don’t do your job, which is to bring resolution to the conflict, people start to figure it out, and all of a sudden your diplomacy doesn’t work.

The Power of Diplomacy

Now why does this matter? There are a lot of people in the United States who think diplomacy is stupid. Why would we have diplomacy? Are you liberal? No. Because diplomacy is a kind of power. In fact, it’s a key form of power. In fact, it’s the main form of power that big countries get to exercise globally. And it’s the power to settle disputes on their terms.

So if all of a sudden no one trusts or believes you because you’ve lied too much, you’ve been sneaky and tricky and actually working for some third country as you pretended to work for the United States, which has happened, no one wants to deal with you. So why is that bad? Because you’re unpopular? No, it’s not about popularity. It’s about power. Once you lose the power to settle conflicts by negotiation, the only power you have left is armaments. So you better have overwhelmingly superior weapons systems in order to protect your interests, because that’s all you have at that point.

And it looks like we may not have, short of nuclear weapons, overwhelmingly powerful weapon systems in this or any other theater. Lots of other countries have sophisticated weapons too, conventional weapons. A shockingly large number of U.S. military aircraft apparently have been damaged or downed just in the last month over Iran. That’s not good. It’s not good at all.

But when you don’t have credible diplomacy, that’s all you have, and Americans get killed and your power ebbs really fast when they do and those lives are ended. Not an insignificant problem. Keith Kellogg doesn’t seem to be that interested in it. Just put boots on the ground.

Has Anyone Explained Why We’re Doing This?

But the key line in the clip you just saw is the end. He’s like, “No, these people are really eager to do it.” Well, has anyone explained to them, to the people massing in the Persian Gulf, the Americans in uniform, massing first special operators and 82nd Airborne or whatever, any part of the gun-toting U.S. military that’s massing for whatever’s coming? Assuming something is. Don’t know, that seems like it.

Has anyone explained to them why we’re doing this? Not at the tactical level, like your job is to go in and secure this land, this island, or this part of the Iranian mainland, but the strategic goal — like what? Why are we doing this? Probably not. And we know that because no one’s explained this to the American population. No one has bothered to explain what the point of this is.

And that’s a huge problem. Not only because it shows that democracy doesn’t really work and that the people we thought were in charge probably aren’t really in charge. They’re taking orders from Benjamin Netanyahu, who got us into this war. They’re trying to erase that from history. You’ll never see that on Wikipedia, but it’s true. That’s a fact and they admitted it. Don’t let them steal the truth from you. Ten years from now, they’ll be like, “What are you talking about? Anti-Semite.” No, that happened.

But is there something in it for us? And has anyone explained to the guys risking their lives and to the rest of the country paying for it and grieving over the loss of our troops, like, what’s the point? And no one has. So at that point, you have to wonder, like, is that legitimate? Can you just tell people, go do this without explaining why? Well, they signed up for it. No, no. You still don’t treat people like that. You don’t treat countries like this.

What Does This Say About Our Leaders?

And in the course of all of this, you have to wonder what happens to our country if there’s no stated benefit to us from this war. Ask yourself, would you ever do something like this if it didn’t help the country you represented? It probably wouldn’t, right? What does that say about how the people in charge feel about our country?

Well, you don’t have to guess. Look around the country. Been to an airport recently? TSA going on strike. Of course there are reasons for that and the Democrats are responsible for it. Fine. But in a country the size of a continent, you need internal air travel, period. Not simply for commerce, but so people can see their kids, et cetera. So you can have a functioning country and all of a sudden we don’t.

Then it turns out, oh my gosh, someone sent an ambulance across a runway and a plane hit it and people were killed. Well, how did that happen? Because there was inadequate air traffic control. Well, that’s been known for a while. Has anyone fixed it? Apparently not. Then a barge runs into the Key Bridge in Baltimore. Kind of a critical piece of infrastructure. And as of this morning, it’s like not even close to being rebuilt. That was a long time ago.

Then you drive around the country and you think, wow, looks kind of shabby. Not all of it — very pretty places. The landscape’s amazing to the extent it hasn’t been destroyed by solar farms and CBD outlets. But the actual infrastructure of the country is not great. Our airports are not great. When you fly internationally, you’re amazed, including to poor countries, like, wow, why do they have such nice airports here in Mumbai or Bombay or whatever they’re calling it now? I thought this was a poor place. I read about Calcutta. I thought people were dying of starvation. Why is their airport nicer than LaGuardia? What is this?

And what it is is neglect. It’s neglect. It’s what happens when your leaders are so outwardly focused, managing their empire and stoking their dreams of power that they forget to tend to the country they run. And at this point, it just absolutely couldn’t be clearer what’s going on. Our leaders on a bipartisan basis now are so distracted by what’s happening outside of our borders that what’s happening inside is becoming dire. May be an overstatement, certainly depressing.

The Unemployment Numbers Nobody Talks About

What are the unemployment numbers? We could do an hour on this. Maybe we will. It depends how you read them. So if you got here from West Africa or Somalia or Punjab or Bangladesh, you probably have a job, probably make a lot more than you made in the country you grew up in. But if you were born here, you’re less likely to have a job. These are the numbers.

Right now the unemployment for native-born Americans is going up. And that’s before the energy shock and the rollout of AI. How could that happen? And if you didn’t know that, how did you not know that? That’s not picking a fight with anyone or criticizing anybody. That’s like a baseline measurement of how your country’s doing. The people who were born here. Not the immigrants to whom you’re offering the American dream, but the people who thought they would live the American dream because they were born here. There are birthright citizens, and they’re paying for everything. How are they doing? Not great. And by that measure, it’s not improving.

So, okay, how much are we spending on this war? Unclear. Of course, nothing is clear in war. You can’t get an accurate count of anything, including the dead, but it seems like about a billion a day, probably more. It’s classified. A billion a day. You see the point? You give up a lot when you wage a war. And when you wage a war in return for no promise of a return other than the theoretical safety you feel because Iran, which you probably thought about like four times in the last 10 years, doesn’t have nukes, which they told us in June they didn’t have anyway. Do you feel better? No. The whole thing’s ridiculous.

War Transforms Societies — Pay Attention

So I think the rest of us probably need to pay pretty close attention as we’re tempted to be distracted by following what’s happening in Iran and the Persian Gulf. Pay close attention to what’s happening here in this country because things change fast in war. That’s the number one thing to know. Societies are completely transformed by war. In fact, every major societal change — the big ones — have come during war. And the bigger the war, the bigger the change. And some changes have been good, like all change. And some changes have been, well, really bad.

But whatever changes are in progress are likely to be accelerated during wartime. So if the country’s feeling a little weak in some area, it’s likely to become very weak in that area. And then things will happen that nobody expected. But all of it is likely to happen during war. So this moment is profound but also kind of hard to read.

The Destruction of Europe

So there are a couple of things you should be aware of that are happening that you might not know about. And they’re going to have long-term effects for the world and for the United States. And one of them is the destruction of Europe.

Now why should we care about Europe? Well, in the United States, most of our ancestors came from Europe. And so there’s that sentimental attachment, that cultural attachment, that religious attachment. That’s the Christian West that we sometimes talk about. Christian West. What is that? Well, it’s like Istanbul in this direction. That’s the Christian West. And Europe is the bulk of it.

But maybe as important, certainly geostrategically as important — if China rises and takes the east, what do we have here in the West? Well, we have Europe, and we have the Americas, and that’s our world. That’s what we influence. Those are our actual allies because they live close to us. Much as you might like the Philippines, in 30 years, will the United States have a lot of influence in the Philippines? Probably not. Anything in the South China Sea is going to belong to China. Whether you want that or not is totally irrelevant.

So what happens to Europe really, really matters to us here in the United States. And despite having a lot of silly leaders, we basically are aligned on the level of values. I mean, they’re liberal and annoying and eat cheese and all that stuff. But ultimately, if you’re looking around the world and trying to figure out who are my real allies, who are my baseline allies, it would be the Europeans.

Well, one of the things you notice, if you pay any attention to this at all, is that the main victim of this war after the six Gulf states is Europe. Because it’s their energy that’s being destroyed both by Iran and probably also by Israel, despite a lot of lying about it. It’s their energy. And by the way, if you’re paying any attention at all, you may have noticed it just the other day — the Ukrainians, really a proxy for, if there was ever a proxy for the American deep state, it’s the Ukrainian government — just went and hit a Russian energy installation. Really? So who’s the victim of that? Europe.

Now, why would Europe be the victim? Too little has been written and very little even is noticed about this. But the hostility that Israeli government leaders feel toward Europe whenever they speak about it is very, very obvious. Here’s the former leader of Israel, Naftali Bennett, talking just the other day — maybe, I think, yesterday — about Europe. Watch this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

NAFTALI BENNETT: Had we not acted, all of Europe would be under a terrible nuclear ballistic missile menace.

So we’re fighting your war and we expect not to be criticized, and we expect your backing. That would be the decent thing to do. I think any European leader who sort of says, “This isn’t our problem” — so when will it become your problem?

When they have a nuclear weapon? When the missile is on its way to Madrid, when it hits Madrid or Barcelona, is that when you’re going to wake up? So we’re doing the fighting.

We didn’t ask you for any help. Nothing.

All we’re doing is fighting against this horrible radical Islamist menace.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The Moral High Ground and the Consequences of War

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re reducing and hopefully eliminating this threat. And instead of thanking us, you’re criticizing us. We’re the victims. Why haven’t you thanked us enough, Europe? We pushed the United States, which has bases in all your countries, a fellow NATO member of the United States. We pushed the United States into a war that shafts you completely, to end a threat that was not actually a threat to you.

And in so doing, we constricted your energy supply to the extent that you’re going to have a depression in Europe. And by the way, in case that’s not enough, we’re going to give you a migrant crisis. We’re going to give you a migrant crisis. Because Iran is pretty far from Milwaukee, but not that far from Paris. And the aftermath of every Israeli inspired war over the past 30 years has been to send desperate migrants into Europe.

So if you’re one of those people who consumes dumb stuff on the Internet, it’s like, how did this happen? London’s becoming Muslim. Well, it happens because the Brits hate themselves, of course, and masochistically want to import people who don’t share their values. But it also happens because we have wars in the Middle East that have downstream consequences. And this war, the biggest country in the region, watching its infrastructure get destroyed, will inspire mass migration. And ultimately a lot of those people are winding up in Europe.

But Naftali Bennett is saying to Europe, you haven’t thanked us for that. So what you have here is the never ending battle, the real battle, which is over the moral high ground. That’s the real battle. Who occupies the moral high ground. And high ground is a real thing. If you’re on the high ground, you aim down at people, you’ve got a clearer field of fire, you’re in charge.

And if you control the moral terms, if the conversation begins with, “Hey, you’ve wronged me, I’m the victim,” there’s really no way to win that fight. And that’s what Naftali Bennett was just doing. And that’s what Bibi does. Benjamin Netanyahu does it in every sentence. “Hey, no one suffered like Israel has suffered. Therefore shut up and do what we want and don’t complain about it. In fact, thank us for it.”

The Threat of Blowback and Domestic Consequences

So you should know that Europe is in very serious trouble because of this, and that matters to Americans. But the concerns that we’re going to have to deal with, we pray not here in the United States, are not limited to the slow death of our true allies. They would include attacks here, both acts of terror that are pretty predictable.

When you kill religious leaders in foreign countries, it does tend to inspire extremism. It’s not an excuse for it. It’s horrifying. But that’s why you don’t want to do anything to encourage religious extremism, particularly if you pretend you don’t like it. Maybe don’t kill ayatollahs and you’ll get less of it, obviously.

But that’s not just it. The United States has never engaged in a policy openly of targeting other heads of state because countries don’t do that. Why don’t they do that? Because it’s not a precedent they want to set. It’s one of several precedents that countries hesitate before setting in warfare. Don’t assassinate the head of state because we don’t want our head of state to be assassinated. Don’t openly target civilian infrastructure, of course. And if you can help it, don’t call for absolute, total, abject surrender. Because that’s a lot to ask of any nation. And it tends to inspire people to fight to the bitter end.

When you start talking like that, you are opening yourself up. And maybe most of all, don’t say out loud that we’re replacing a government in order to control it and steal its resources. Now why wouldn’t you do that? Two reasons. One is a kind of abstract moral reason. Because it’s wrong. That’s why theft is illegal in every country in the world. You can’t just say, “I want that, I’m going to shoot you.” We have laws against that. And those laws are rooted in the understanding that you’re not allowed to just take something because you want it by force. We think that’s immoral. That’s the basis of our legal system and of our religion and of most religions, by the way.

America’s Resources and the Danger of Setting Precedents

So there’s that. But the other reason is because you don’t want it done to you. And it might be a good time just to remind ourselves that the United States has a lot of resources. In fact, by some measures, it’s the most resource dense nation in the world. And it’s also, by say, Nigerian standards, pretty lightly populated. 350 million people spread out across a continent, the prettiest continent on the planet with abundant everything.

Now, we don’t extract a lot of it because we decided we’re just too rich to mine things, but it’s still here. We also have the largest fresh water reserves of any country in the world. Maybe after Russia, but certainly close. Massive amounts of fresh water, most fertile farmland in the world, abundant oil and gas.

So we have resources too. And so if you set up a precedent, because we make the rules, because we have been the beneficiary of this unipolar system, we’re in charge of the world. And the new rule is, if you’ve got a lot of resources and we want them, we can just overthrow your government and kill the people who run it and take them for ourselves. Is that the standard? Apparently.

Then at some point it’s at least conceivable that we would have to suffer that standard. And you just pray that that never happens. But it’s worth thinking past next Wednesday and acknowledging that it could.

And if we’re blowing up other people’s civilian infrastructure, which we have done for a while now, since we blew up Nord Stream because we don’t like Putin, because he’s bad, he’s just bad. But that was the vital energy artery into Europe, our supposed allies, and we just blew it up. Proving simultaneously that we didn’t care about global warming, of course, because that was the largest man made emission of CO2 in history, but that we’re disregarding our own rules.

Explosions at Home and the Question of Blowback

Okay, so we have to live by the new standard. It’s a very long way of saying there could be consequences to this. Consequences. You don’t have to be some sort of liberal who loves the UN or whatever, or is pro French. Stop. If you care about the United States, you should be worried.

So there was a Valero refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf coast of Texas, where there are a lot of refineries, where a lot of our refined petroleum products come from. Those would include jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, all the way down to asphalt. And there was a massive explosion two days ago. And they had a stay in place order and it was high drama. And now they’re saying it was just an industrial accident. No one was killed, thank God. But it happened.

And maybe it was an accident. Accidents do happen. And just because a whole bunch of food processing and energy and ammunition plants in the United States seem to be blowing up over the past five years doesn’t mean they’re not all accidents. They absolutely could be. Have no information to the contrary.

But if we’re blowing up other people’s civilian infrastructure and partnering with a country that blows up other people’s infrastructure as a matter of course, just took out a ton of bridges in Lebanon yesterday for some reason, Israel, and we think that’s fine, then at some point you have to wonder about our infrastructure in this giant, largely unprotected country. Could there be blowback that hurts us? That’s not a liberal position. That’s a common sense position. If you’re trying to protect your own country, you have to keep that in mind. But no one is keeping it in mind at all.

So there is a potential physical threat to the United States. And without going on and on about it, you should know that it exists. And it’s one of the downsides of this war.

Israel’s Strategic Goals and the Christians of Lebanon

The other downside that people are not considering in any great detail, mentioned it a minute ago, are the long term effects of Israel’s strategic goal in this war, which as noted differs from ours completely, which is territorial expansion. What exactly does Israel want? We don’t know. But they clearly want to extend their borders or at least the buffer zone around post-67 Israel, whatever their actual goals are.

While the rest of us are focused on whether we’re going to invade Kharg Island, probably not, by the way, who knows, the Israelis are tending to their own agenda using the cover of our military and our tax dollars. Okay, just a fact.

So one of the things they’re doing is trying to grab southern Lebanon. Now why does that matter? What’s Lebanon? Who cares? Well, I don’t know. If you’re a Christian, you care because Lebanon has the largest population of Christians in the region by far. In fact, it was a Christian country for centuries. There’s a Christian president of Lebanon. Did you know that?

Every time Lebanon is mentioned, it’s through the lens of Israel’s interest. But if you’re a Christian, you don’t have to hate Israel, but you may have different interests. Like, what about the Christians? Well, Lebanon has a Christian president. The head of the military in Lebanon is Christian and there are a lot of Christian villages, ancient Christian villages, villages Jesus probably walked through, that have been Christian ever since. Only 2,000 years. And they’re being destroyed because under the cover of this war, paid for and led by us, Israel has decided to take a big chunk of Lebanon.

Watch.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Israel’s defense minister on Tuesday said the country’s military will control southern Lebanon up to the Litani. The remarks are the first time Israel has clearly spelled out its intent to seize swathes of territory that make up nearly a tenth of Lebanon.

Israel has been trading fire with Iranian backed Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. That’s after Hezbollah struck Israel following joint Israeli American attacks on Iran. Rockets damaged buildings and vehicles in northern Israel on Tuesday. Katz has previously threatened Lebanon’s government that it would lose territory if it did not disarm Hezbollah. Israel has destroyed five bridges crossing the Litani river and has accelerated the demolition of homes in Lebanese villages close to the Israeli border. Katz said, “The principle is clear.”

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

The Truth Will Come Out

If there is terror and rockets, there will be no homes and residents and the IDF will remain inside. Did you know that was happening? And why does it matter?

Well, it matters because this episode in history is going to end. At a certain point this war will end. Pray it’s sooner rather than later, but at some point all wars do end. And at that point the truth comes out, because the truth about everything will come out. Everything. Just a matter of where on the timeline. It does. But at some point we will know what actually happened in this period and over the last two and a half years.

So if you look at the Internet and you see pictures of war crimes committed in Gaza or the West Bank or now in Lebanon, you can’t be certain they’re all real. And of course the shills on the Internet will say they’re all fake. But they’re not all fake. Actually, some of them are real. Tens of thousands of people, non-combatants, women and children, have been killed by the Israeli military using our weapons, American weapons, paid for by the US Congress. And there will be a reckoning over that.

And there are indications, real indications, not anti-Semitic propaganda, but actual indications that war crimes have been committed. Torturing people, killing people, unarmed non-combatants, kids, on purpose. There’s a lot of that and some of it’s probably fake, some of it is propaganda, undoubtedly, but some of it isn’t. And in the end we’re going to know, because we always know in the end.

And so you have to ask yourself, the people who are defending this and paying for it, would you want to be one of those people when we find this out?

The Silence of American Evangelical Leaders

How about the religious leaders, the American evangelical leaders, not rank and file evangelicals, who, if they knew, would be horrified, but the people who run the biggest evangelical associations in the United States, the people who are in Liberty University, for example, or Franklin Graham, these are household names. Have they said anything about the destruction of churches and ancient Christian villages in a country in the Middle East with a Christian president? Do they even know Lebanon had a Christian president? Who knows? They haven’t said word one about it. Why? Well, that’s a good question.

That was the question a lot of people asked the Reich Church after the Second World War ended in Germany. How could you have gone along with that? And there was not a good answer other than, I don’t know, didn’t want to offend the powerful.

There is going to be a consequence to this. And one of them is very easy to predict. Big evangelical institutions, which have done good things, by the way. If you’re for the family and you’re pro-life, you’re grateful for what they’ve done, for their personal decency of the people in the pews. A lot of really decent people. But the leaders of American evangelical Christianity, not all, but some, will have no legitimacy at all when this is over. Where were you when a country that you pledged fealty to was murdering Christians, your brothers in Christ in the Middle East? Where were you when people were starving, when kids were starving in Gaza and the Gaza aid program was run by some kind of crypto Christian preacher?

Someone’s going to have to answer for that. These people will have to answer for that. And if you’re wondering, in this moment where there’s a religious awakening underway in the West, there’s really no question about that. If you’re wondering why not a lot of new converts are going to the evangelical institutions, this may be why. There’s going to be big change. Because remember, once again, the truth always comes out. Always.

The Political Consequences

And this will affect American politics maybe more than anything we’ve seen over the past 20 years. It’ll change the Republican Party forever, that’s for sure. Most of the polling you see about the attitudes of the Republican Party toward this war, polling Fox News viewers, polling MAGA people. How do you find MAGA? Well, people who agree with anything the administration does. Well, by definition, they agree with this. But people under 50 also vote. In fact, because they did vote in the last election, Donald Trump is currently president, and it’s not close there. Try to find one who supports this. Good luck. Unless he works at Liberty University, probably not for it.

So that will have massive consequences. Massive. Is the Democratic Party going to absorb all those people? Who knows? But there will be big political change because of this. And the reason is really simple, because the people who endorse this and lie to us about it and selectively ignore the suffering of other human beings, including their fellow Christians, have lost their moral authority and they will not regain it anytime soon.

And you just hope that this ends soon enough that the nation itself doesn’t lose its moral authority, because that is, in the end, the most compelling kind of authority. That’s where your actual power comes from, is from your decency, which is far more powerful than nuclear weapons, in the end, is more powerful than anything.

And it is one of the main reasons, more than Coca-Cola and Marlboros and blue jeans and capitalism and the democracy agenda, the decency of the American empire, often indecent, but compared to what other empire? It was the decency of America’s stewardship of the world that made it powerful. And now it’s very fashionable to say, oh, it was always bad, and threw up Mossadegh, and it was always bad. But the rest of the world didn’t feel that way about the United States for most of that time. Most of the Cold War, for example. But a lot of the world now does feel that way. And that’s a loss for the United States.

It’s not a matter of caring what foreigners think, though an awful lot of people care what Israel thinks, but they don’t care what anyone else thinks. But it’s a loss of power and authority for us. It’s a huge loss. It makes us weaker and more endangered.

The Expansion of Government Power During Wartime

And the final thing to remember, the thing to meditate on about this moment, and you may not catch this because you’re breathlessly watching Fox News to find out if we’re going to invade the Isle of Kharg, the thing that you should be paying attention to is the change in American authority and the level of power our authorities domestically here in the US feel like they can assume, because that always expands during war. Wartime leaders become authoritarian. Every single one of them. Every single one of them. And authorities below the Executive also become authoritarian.

Did you know that in 1942 when Franklin Roosevelt issued his famous Executive Order to intern about 120,000 Japanese Americans, mostly in the West, Oregon, Washington, California, in concentration camps? Did you know the most interesting fact of that decision is often omitted from it. The overwhelming majority of them were American citizens, actual citizens, or legal residents. But two thirds were American citizens with full citizenship who’d been convicted of no crime, hadn’t even been charged with a crime. But they were thrown into concentration camps for three years and lost their property. And there was some effort in the 80s to be like, oh, we’re so sorry. And also, who really cares?

Imperial Japan was bad, but these people weren’t actually subjects of Imperial Japan. They were American citizens and they were thrown into concentration camps with their families and no one really said anything. It’s complicated. It’s complicated. That’s not complicated, actually. That’s totally wrong. You can’t treat American citizens that way if you’re the US Government, ever.

And yet Roosevelt was able to do it because it was 1942 and the war wasn’t looking good. And that’s the other thing to remember, that as wars get tougher, say if you commit ground troops and find yourself stuck in a place and can’t get out, it’s happened many, many times. As things get tougher and leaders become less popular, and people become more enraged and discouraged and sad and distracted, governments can assume powers unimaginable in peacetime, even more dramatically than they did during the COVID epidemic. That can happen. And it may be starting to happen.

Speaking for myself, I’ve been threatened with more FBI investigations in the last month than during the entire Biden administration. So maybe that’s an indicator of something. Two more than during the entire Biden administration, which I criticized every single day for its duration. So there’s that.

A Sheriff Who Arrests People for Memes

But here’s one pretty specific example. A piece of tape that should tell you what to be on guard against. And that’s at the local level, not at the level of federal law enforcement, but like your local sheriff, assuming powers that no man short of God possesses and certainly no one in the United States possesses. In flat, obvious contradiction to our founding documents, to the Bill of Rights, this sheriff, Sheriff Bouchard from Michigan, has decided that he’s going to arrest and imprison people who make memes mocking him. This is real from last Friday. Watch this.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

SHERIFF BOUCHARD: I give you this by way of example. Some pond scum felt empowered and emboldened enough to put this picture of me up to try to threaten and intimidate me, which, of course, he didn’t do, because I signed up for this. And by the way, the person that did this said a bunch of terrible things, not just against me, but against a lot of groups and individuals who, by the way, was arrested today in Wisconsin. My point is this, though. If this person is emboldened and empowered enough or feels safe enough to do this for me, what does he do to a kid? What does he do to a Jewish family walking down the street?

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

He didn’t do anything. He made an ugly meme. But the sheriff’s not intimidated. I signed up for this. I knew the risks of the job when I became your sheriff. This guy’s like some former Republican politician in the state of Michigan. I knew the risks. I signed up for this. Someone made a funny meme about you or an ugly meme about you. It’s a meme. It’s an image on the Internet that was on Instagram, not on the battlefield. You faced no physical risk. You just admitted that, and you had the guy arrested in another state, and he’s in jail.

How is this not leading to mass protests? Why did they not shut your sheriff’s department down? Where’s the Department of Justice? Where’s the Civil Rights Division? Are you allowed to just arrest people who make fun of you?

Oh, it’s so ugly. It’s anti-Semitism. Okay, well it’s racism. You’re mocking the vaccine. It’s all the same. These are all pretexts that we take literally because we’re dumb. And no one wants to be an anti-Semite or a racist or deny science. Whatever they tell you your crime is, the actual crime is always the same. It’s mocking and impeding the authoritarian impulses of the people in charge. It’s making fun of the sheriff, which is exactly what this criminal did. But the sheriff’s okay tonight. He’s going to be all right. He signed up for this.

The rest of us did not sign up for this. This is illegal under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It’s also totally incompatible with what it is to live in this country. You get to say what you think. There is no legal category of hate speech. There’s only speech the people in charge hate.

So this guy should be the subject of a federal investigation, like in about one minute after that hits the Internet. Don’t think he has been. Let’s hope he will be. But that’s exactly the kind of change that can bubble up in your country during war. And it’s like some kooky sheriff, Republican, that’s the Republican, that’s the Free Speech party guy, really. And it’s in Michigan, and who even knows some county in Michigan. And all of a sudden you wake up and you get arrested for a meme because it’s hate speech, which means it’s speech the people in charge hate.

The Threat of a Draft

And then if this goes on long enough, or if the United States were to really suffer, it gets more extreme. There are already neocons saying if there’s a terror attack in the United States as blowback from the war that they pushed for, that they will make certain that people who oppose the war are arrested for the terror attack. Follow the logic chain. Oh, you can’t, because there isn’t one. They’re openly saying we will use the deaths of Americans to settle our political scores using your government law enforcement. Not so different from, we will settle our ancient tribal disputes on another continent using your military. Kind of same principle. But it’s not acceptable here.

If the Iran war was bad, allowing the US government to arrest, persecute, investigate, spy on US citizens for exercising their God-given rights is worse. And you’ll know it’s bad when they start talking about a draft.

Now what is a draft? Well, of course it’s the definition of tyranny. It is somehow the right of a government to take the fruit of its population, its young fit citizens, the ones who are supposed to build the civilization, continue the country, take them and force them to risk their lives, in some cases die, for a decision they didn’t make. And in this case, they don’t support at all.

What percentage of 18-year-old American men support the war in Iran? Haven’t seen the polling. Imagine it’s quite a bit below 30%, maybe even lower than that. And by the time we get to a draft, you can be assured it’ll be even lower than that. So that would be tyranny.

If there’s another definition of tyranny, forcing people to die for a war for another country when your country is not even conceivably in peril of invasion, except the long-term kind created by immigration, but an imminent invasion of foreign troops. But we went into this war because Benjamin Netanyahu wanted us to. And it’s not going well. And you need to fight that war at the risk of your life even though you hate it and have never really understood what it’s about because everyone lied to you about it. And if you don’t do that, we’ll arrest you and put you in jail. I think that’s the definition of tyranny. And simply because it’s happened in the past doesn’t make it any less tyrannical.

Interview with James (Jim) Webb

But don’t take my word for it. So want to bring you now an interview that we did a short time ago with a man called Jim Webb, James Webb III. And if the name sounds familiar, that’s because he is from one of the most famous military families in the United States. His father was Navy Secretary, a US Senator. And Jim Webb, the man we’re about to speak to, was himself an enlisted United States Marine, third in a row in his family, a family that, as he’ll tell you, has fought in every American conflict since the French and Indian Wars.

And we thought we would push him a little bit on what it would look like if those fabled boots on the ground that Fox News so badly wants to commit actually came to pass. What would that look like and why are we doing this and how would it work? And most critically, what would the end result be? And we thought it was a pretty interesting conversation. So we hope you will stay for it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Jim Webb, thank you for doing this very much. One of the many reasons I wanted to talk to you, in addition to the fact that you’re knowledgeable and honest, is that you’re a veteran of the last big American military effort, the Iraq war, and you grew up steeped in this world and have some perspective on it. So first to the question of likelihood of ground troops. We don’t know, of course. We’re kind of trying to figure out what’s going to happen. But what’s your view? Do you think the United States will commit meaningful ground forces?

U.S. Troops Being Dragged Into Iran

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I’ll start by saying I hope not. Yes, judging by all of the indicators that are out there, the Marines floating in, there’s — I guess not even rumors. There’s reports that elements of the 82nd have already been deployed forward. Their command element. I think Jennifer Griffin confirmed that today. It’s looking like it is and it’s looking more and more likely.

And I have to say, what really concerns me is sort of the piecemeal fashion that we’re going into this from a ground fighter perspective.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: And then the bigger picture is that there has been no real debate about our involvement in Iran at all at the congressional level. There was never really a case made to the American public. And we are charging into an environment that has not effectively been cleared according to our Constitution. Nor is there consensus among the American people that this is necessary for our national security.

While at the same time it’s very, very clear through the statements of the administration, such as Marco Rubio, that we are doing this because Israel decided that we should do it. Therefore, by virtue of that, it’s not in our national interest. We are committing our treasure and our blood to fight somebody else’s war. And it would be really great if we could have a debate about that before that happens. But I mean, you look at it, it may be too late.

No Public Debate, No Clear Objectives

TUCKER CARLSON: I think one of the reasons that there hasn’t been a real debate, there hasn’t been any meaningful demonstration anywhere against this, is that people are having trouble believing it could be true that we’d be committing ground troops to a war with Iran. Can you just explain a little more fully why you think that might be in progress?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Sure. Well, the complicated thing about that, right out of the gate, is that, as an American citizen, we have not been given any type of tangible objectives for this entire operation. Is this a regime change? Is this to reduce their military capacity? Is this to reopen the Straits of Hormuz, which is actually probably the most — the biggest imperative right now. So without an end state objective, at least even at the operational level, it’s very, very difficult to find a justification for it.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, that’s what you’re saying is clearly true. I haven’t heard anything. I pay close attention. But what does that mean for the guys who are sitting at home thinking, “I’m about to head over?” You said there were elements of the command of regular army units headed over. Do they know why they’re doing this?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Ultimately, if we don’t know the long term plan or even the interim plan, the medium term plan, I doubt they know. They have an operation in front of them which they’ve more than likely been briefed on — going to execute. They may know that, but what’s the tie in? How does this further the interest of the country? How does this further our strategic objectives around the world or even in the region?

And I look at the prospects of ground troops in particular to reopen the Strait of Hormuz as an indicator that we do not have the initiative in this fight. The straits are closed, gas prices are going up, and we are looking at a scenario — by all accounts, you can talk to any number of economists about this — where if this goes on for much longer, the entire global economy could potentially be brought down. But we’re already feeling the ramifications of it.

So in effect, what it appears that we’re doing is we are committing people to regain the initiative to open the straits. It would be a bold or over the top stroke in order to put the Iranians on their back foot. Myself, as a former Marine, grew up in the Marine Corps. I have had a relative or ancestor fight in every single American conflict going back to the French and Indian War.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, it’s kind of the French and Indian War.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: That was not on CNN.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No, it was not on CNN. It may have been on OAN, but I doubt it.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s amazing.

A Family Legacy of Military Service

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Appreciate it. And we’ve never been really career soldiers or Marines or airmen — with the exception of my grandfather who was a career Air Force officer — or people who step up and who fight because it’s… I mean, you can read one of my dad’s books. It’s in our nature, but at the same time, it’s a sense of honor and duty to the country. When the country calls, you step up and you do your part in my family, and then for whatever reason, you go back to civilian society and you live your life. The career aspect has never really appealed.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not in it for the free healthcare.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Not at all. Not at all. It’s okay. It’s fine. Private helicopter somewhere else. But when you’re inside of that, when that’s your mindset, you’re going to go fight. Because I can use my own experience with the Iraq War. I didn’t agree with it when we went in. I had a unique perspective due to the way that I grew up, about the inner workings and the lack of a strategic objective. But it was clear that something was going on. Our country needed young men to go fight and I volunteered to go. Dropped out of college to go do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you enlisted.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: You were not ROTC?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I was in ROTC. And then I went to Afghanistan with my dad in 2004. Had a chance to do some photojournalism there. Liked it so much that I came home and decided to sign up and be a Marine Corps infantryman.

TUCKER CARLSON: You could have been a Marine Corps officer. But you decided to be a Marine Corps infantryman instead.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: I have not met a lot of people who turned down the chance to be a Marine Corps officer in order to enlist in the Marine Corps. Well, you’re pretty enthusiastic, it sounds.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I was. I was. It just seemed like the natural place for me to be. I was amongst my peers, guys the same age walking around Helmand Province and up on the Pakistani border.

From Penn State to the Battlefield

TUCKER CARLSON: How long between — you went to Penn State.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: So one day you’re at Penn State holding a plastic beer cup, and then how long between that and finding yourself with a rifle in a foreign country?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: About 18 months. Roughly 18 months.

TUCKER CARLSON: So your classmates were still at school when you were —

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct. They were graduating the summer that I was in Iraq or getting ready to go, most of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. Why did you do that?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Duty. Patriotism. I love this country to death also.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s literally unto death. I mean, that’s what you’re saying, right?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: It’s been my family’s home for 400 years. On my dad’s side, on my mom’s side, they came over in the early 1900s from Eastern Europe, and they did the same thing. My mom’s dad, my grandfather, was on Iwo Jima as a Marine. She was an army nurse in Vietnam. It’s just —

TUCKER CARLSON: Your father was in Vietnam and your mother was an army nurse in Vietnam. Correct. Both your parents were in Vietnam.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct. And from my mom’s side, both my parents were the first in their family to go straight through college. My grandfather on my dad’s side graduated college when my father was a senior in high school. He was an officer in the Air Force. And in a different time, when you could fly an aircraft as a pilot because you had a high enough GT score. And he flew in World War II. He flew bombers, and then he flew in the Berlin Airlift, and then he went into the missile program after that. He was a test pilot in between for jets. Very accomplished man.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Absolute legend. But the military gave him that opportunity, and also the country gave him that opportunity to advance up into society. My mom used the army for the same reasons. My grandfather came back from World War II and got a job as a foreman in a factory in a small town outside of Pittsburgh. And it was light years ahead of where their family had been. And the military was not only a vehicle to get out, but it was also a way to kind of pay back the opportunities that they had had.

And my dad, same cut. His mom was a sharecropper in Arkansas. And my grandfather didn’t come from any kind of means in Missouri. And they had found a way to succeed, and part of that was being in the military.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Thank you.

Dropping Out of College to Enlist

TUCKER CARLSON: What’s so interesting is that you’re at Penn State in 2004. The Iraq War has been in progress for a year. By that point, it’s clear that we’re not getting out anytime soon. It started to get squirrely there. We can’t really pacify it. And it’s not just liberals who are starting to say, “Wait a second.” And you’re one of them. You’re not a liberal in a conventional sense, but you think this war is bad, but you drop out of college to go anyway. Enlisted in the Marine Corps.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Figured I would get it over with. It was coming anyways.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you didn’t have to.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No, absolutely did not. The catalyst was the Battle of Fallujah in 2004. I, of course, had been in Afghanistan over the summer. In the fall, Fallujah happened. I had friends who were involved in that. And I found myself thinking —

TUCKER CARLSON: So you knew guys who were serving there?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct. And I figured it was my turn. I was going to do it anyways, but the war was really picking up. College would be there when I got back. And so just decided to get up and go and do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: What did your parents say?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: As you can imagine, they were proud, I’ll say that. But my dad always told me, “Never enlist for a war.” And I went ahead and did it. So I’m sure that there was a little consternation. And that was largely based on the fact that he had been wounded twice in Vietnam and understood what it meant to do that. I had no clue.

Jim Webb Sr.’s Legacy and the Vietnam War

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, and not only understood it — for people who don’t know, he was a legit war hero in Vietnam. He was also a public intellectual who explained not just that the war was bad, but why it was bad in a way that non-liberal peacenik types could understand. Because it was rooted in an American understanding of what war is for. I think it’s fair to say so. Is it fair to say your parents were not pro — what happened in Vietnam?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. My father always — we’ve talked about the same number of times, and we had an agreement with the South Vietnamese to defend them against communism, and we went and we did it. And in a sense, in a very real sense, it was a just cause. And I agree with you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, no, no, that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying the view was that the U.S. Government had not made good on its promises to its people and to the South Vietnamese.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yes. Oh, that. Yeah, absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. That’s what I’m saying. Like, there were a lot of people who joined in Vietnam, particularly early on, who thought they were doing this good thing. And our government basically didn’t back them up at all, honor their service at all.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: At all. At all. There was no safety net for those guys when they came home.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know.

The Reality of War: No Strategy, No Explanation

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: You know, I think of our experiences, or my experiences, I’ll say our is collective veterans with the GI Bill, with the way that the VA takes care of disabled veterans. It’s one thing that we did learn after Vietnam. We’ve been really, really well taken care of. Because they were not. And I’m thankful for that.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, but your dad had told you, don’t enlist for any war.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct. He gave me the story of, I think, a mutual individual we know, who enlisted for the Cuban missile crisis, and by the time he got to boot camp, it was over. So.

TUCKER CARLSON: Interesting. So what was your experience like in Iraq?

Iraq: Violent, Disorganized, and Without a Clear Plan

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Violent is a good way to put it. I saw the warts up close of our policy, and once again, I was in a really unique place to see that because of all the discussions that my father and I had before I went. He was very much opposed to the war in all phases of us going in. But it was very disorganized.

For example, they brought in a bunch of Shia troops to Sunni Ramadi and tried to put them in the middle to do security. And those rivalries bubbled to the top any number of times. It was kind of wild to watch in person when some Sunni policemen and some Shia troops, both on the same side, get in an intramural firefight. It happened on occasion.

But overall, it was very informative in all kinds of different ways. It’s probably the best way to put it. You could see that fairly early on. And I don’t want to speak for everybody in my unit who was there, but most people came around by the end of the deployment to understand that what we were doing was completely temporary. We didn’t really have a coherent plan.

The biggest event that happened on the ground there was the Sunni awakening. And that changed the nature of our battle space virtually overnight in a way that really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Not in the sense that we wanted to keep getting out there and getting shot at and blown up and the rest of it. But one day we would be fighting military age males in track pants and then literally the next day those same guys around the corner saying they’re on our side, but at times taunting, saying they had been on the other side. And we had no control over that. That was not forced by any policy that we were doing. It was just the result of internal politics within the Sunnis out in Anbar Province deciding to make the switch.

I watched as a city was, you know, it was already pretty torn apart, was effectively torn down to the studs while we were there. And it was a wreck. But at the same time, I kind of made a mental note. It’d be too strong to say it’d be a promise, that if I found the same kind of diddling, non-strategic focused situation happening again, that I would do whatever I had in my power — and there’s no way to gauge that when you’re 20-something years old — to speak out against it, to try and find a way to convince whomever I could to look for a saner option.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you actually thought that while you were in Anbar Province, Iraq? “When I get older, if I’m still around and I have any influence at all, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure we don’t do this kind of thing again.”

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Right, 100%.

No Strategic Objective in Iraq

TUCKER CARLSON: Now, when you were in Iraq, did you have any sense of what the strategic objective was?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No, none whatsoever.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did anybody?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I’m sure somebody might have. They might have drank the Kool-Aid and decided that, hey, this is the strategic objective. Maybe it was bringing democracy to Iraq. “We’re going to fight here until the Arab Thomas Jefferson stands up and writes a bill of rights for the Iraqi people.” But if you truly bought into that, I would say you’re at best delusional. It’s just a different society, not for better, not for worse.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s obvious now. But in Washington, where I was most of that time, people said that. I don’t know if they actually believed it or not, but they did say it with a straight face, including from the White House briefing room. But you didn’t meet many men fighting the war who thought that.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No, not at all. Conversely, we had several true believers, as I would refer to them, who flipped the other direction. It’s just the way it was.

And strategically, the reality was that we tied down the greatest maneuver force in the world into a counterinsurgency fight that wasn’t necessary. And at the same time, we weren’t really trained to do it. We got trained to do it, we got better at it as we went along. But when we went to Iraq in 2003, we were still designed to take down a major conventional force rapidly, which is what we did right out of the jump.

Then over the arc of Iraq, we reoriented all of our forces. And you could say Iraq would be a little short sighted, but the entire global war on terrorism — we reoriented everything to fight counterinsurgency, stripping out many, many different capabilities that are highly effective in a conventional fight. And we found ourselves over the past probably five or six years trying to reorient the force towards a conventional fight. And we’re not quite there yet.

But in terms of strategic force projection and our presence, it’s been very detrimental. You’ve seen the South China Sea open up. China’s become more aggressive. The Russians have really cut their teeth in the next generation of conventional warfare in Ukraine. And we’re still trying to figure out how to pull ourselves out of the muck of the GWAT, and now we find ourselves at war yet again.

Are We Ready for a Conventional War?

TUCKER CARLSON: In a pretty conventional looking face off. Right? So I think what you’re saying is our force isn’t necessarily ready for this kind of war.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No, I would assess that it is not. We are in the middle of a major overhaul at multiple levels. And to accent that, I think one thing to really look at right out of the gate is drones. The war in Ukraine has been effectively defined by drones for the past few years. We’re still trying to figure out how to field equipment to counter drones. Our tactics, our operational methods are infantile compared to, say, the Russians.

And you might ask yourself, okay, why is that important? Well, a large bulk of what the Russians are doing in Ukraine is with Iranian Shaheds and other technology that we may or may not know about. So they are very, very far ahead in their development, and they’re undoubtedly passing that back to the Iranians.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, how can that be? We’ve been on the other side of that conflict. Our intel services are still deeply involved in that war, though I guess Congress isn’t funding them directly. We are still — American dollars are still going to Ukraine as of right now, as we speak. And we’ve had a front row seat to it for over four years. So how could we not have adjusted our force based on what we’re seeing there?

The Steep Learning Curve — Paid for in Blood

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I think the best way to examine this is to take a look at, say, World War I. So the opening rounds of World War I, you had a whole bevy of new technology on the battlefield.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: And the bloodiest parts of that war were on the front end. People didn’t understand the impacts of high explosive artillery, machine guns.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. Gas.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Gas. And there’s a very steep learning curve that you pay for in blood whenever you’re trying to adjust.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, the whole British ruling class died.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah, 100%. So you can kind of look at it like a sine wave, where on the front end you run into these technologies and your ability to deal with them is at its lowest point. And eventually you adjust — the top of the sine wave — you become much more operationally effective. And that’s where I would peg the Russians are at right now.

We’ve been observing. They have been practically applying and using Iranian Shaheds, for example, and they understand how to counter our equipment. We have put a lot of defensive equipment out — Patriot missile batteries, anti-aircraft fire, probably some signals and jamming equipment — in overall kind of a piecemeal fashion. It’s probably the best way to put it, where we’re not massing these types of fires.

If you take a look at, say, the HIMARS system in an offensive capability, you’re not massing these fires in the way that we’re supposed to use them, or massing, say, ELINT capabilities in a way that we would use them. But we put just enough out there to give the Ukrainians cover. And then what the Russians can do, and have been doing, is engaging them piecemeal, building a profile, and taking those lessons and then incorporating them into their own doctrine, and undoubtedly passing those off.

So one of my fears at the big picture level — and we can drill our way down into possible contingencies, operational stuff, in a second — but my big fear is that the Iranians understand how their systems work against our equipment. And there’s evidence all over these last couple of weeks that that is the case. And if we commit ground troops without the appropriate countermeasures to defend them against, say, suicide drones, larger drones, ballistic missile systems, we could be positioning ourselves for a lot of bloodshed unnecessarily.

Sending Troops Without Telling Them Why

TUCKER CARLSON: And you’re telling me that none of those guys who are preparing to do this, assuming it happens, has any idea why we’re doing this? Just as you had no real idea in Iraq why you were risking your life? No commanding officer sat you down and said, “Just so you know, here’s why we’re here. Here’s how we’ll know when we’ve won. Here’s when we can leave.”

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Nah, that never happened in Iraq.

TUCKER CARLSON: How can that not happen? I don’t understand. How can you ask someone to risk getting killed without explaining why you’re doing it?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Well, it ties into — I mean, first of all, it’s your job to go out there and do it.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s not like other jobs. You can get killed in any job, but the likelihood is very low and the expectation is zero. I don’t expect to get killed as a talk show host. If I do, I’ll be very surprised. I would not be surprised to be killed as a Marine in Anbar, because that’s just part of it. That’s a risk that you understand when you sign up.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: It’s bad policy.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, but just like — how — I didn’t — I mean, I thought someone would make up a story at least, like, “We’re doing this for —” I don’t know, remember the Maine.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Whatever.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Right. Yeah. I mean, we certainly don’t have that right now.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what do the guys think? What do you tell your wife?

“They Are Confused” — Troops Don’t Want to Do This

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: That’s a great question. I can tell you what some of the people that I know who are out there doing this thing — they are confused. I know people who have told me that they can’t believe we’re doing this, they don’t want to do it. And they’re not talking about individual cowardice. They’re talking about the broad opinion of the units that they’re in, because there hasn’t been a stated American interest in this. That’s the bottom line. Everybody sees it.

When you have Marco Rubio stand up in front of a bunch of reporters and say, “We did this because Israel was going to do it, so therefore we did it,” that is not inspiring. That’s not exactly MacArthur out there.

The Joe Kent Interview and Its Aftermath

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s the opposite of MacArthur. It’s a betrayal of the country. We’re not doing this for us. We’re doing it for somebody else who gives us campaign contributions. To say that out loud, which is what they did, puts the guys who are away from their families, risking death in a very weird position. They know that they have Internet access. And I’m sure if any of them refuse to fight, they’ll be called cowards or anti-Semites or whatever they’ll be called, but they’ll be slandered. But it still leaves unanswered the question, why are we doing this? And don’t you owe the guys who may die in the next week or two an explanation for why they may die?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: You would think that. And I think this is a good point to bring up your interview with Joe Kent the other week.

TUCKER CARLSON: I was shocked by that interview. And in the slander of Joe Kent or the FBI investigation into him and me — I mean, okay, fine, let’s have an FBI investigation, but how about you answer the question? Nobody ever answered the question. Were you shocked by that interview?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yes and no. I was shocked by the response to the interview. And you have this incredibly bifurcated view about Joe Kent. Those of us who have been out there and done it, to a man, applaud him for getting out there. And they applaud his courage. Back him 1000%.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really? So Joe Kent is popular with the troops?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Insanely. Well, he’s popular in the veterans community. I imagine he’s popular with the troops as well.

TUCKER CARLSON: But he is popular with the veterans big time.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Big time. And what it also gave everybody was a view under the hood, right, about how you are viewed and treated should you step out of line, should you question what is going on. It reminds me of the poem “Tommy” by Rudyard Kipling. Everybody wants Tommy when the guns begin to shoot.

TUCKER CARLSON: “Tommy” is a slang term for British troops in the Crimean War. Right?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: But should you step out of line and question and say, “Hey, we need some clarity, we need to understand why this is in the American interest,” they come for you, they come after you. And it’s very illuminating to this generation of veterans, I believe, myself included.

TUCKER CARLSON: And a lot of people coming for you aren’t even American. And they certainly don’t have this country’s interest at heart. And they can’t point to relatives who fought in the French and Indian War. So it’s actually one of the most insulting things I’ve ever seen in my entire life — the attacks on Joe Kent.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Agreed.

TUCKER CARLSON: And if you disagree with Joe Kent, tell me how. But they won’t.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: They won’t debate him on anything he says. They will go after him.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so veterans see this, and so what’s their conclusion?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Their conclusion is that you can connect the dots. Just because you’re in the military and you don’t go to Harvard doesn’t mean you’re stupid. You can read the room. You can see what our elected officials and our cabinet officials say about the justifications for this war. And then you can turn around and see what happens when somebody else mentions that out loud — as if it’s negative, as if it’s a bad idea, or it’s perhaps dishonorable as a country to send your military to fight on behalf of somebody else. So they put it all together and understand what that full picture is, if you will. And it does not make the war more popular, let’s put it that way.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I guess the bet is that these are guys who are so duty-oriented and so focused on tactics and good at their jobs — in a lot of cases, you’re trained to do this thing, go ahead and do this thing — they’ll be so focused on that that they’ll be compliant. And then I assume the guess is if there’s domestic resentment against us, that technology will somehow allow them to stay in power by crushing that dissent. Perhaps.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: And I think I would take it a step further. I think that we have slipped into somewhat of a caste system, or are attempting to be pushed into a caste system. I’m a third-generation Marine — third generation in a row Marine. And, well, that’s great, that’s your family business now. And the people in power, the elites, the hyper-wealthy, they get to call the shots and then we have to carry their water for them. And that’s not what this country was founded on at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: No. Citizen soldiers, citizen legislators. Yeah. And that’s literally a caste system you’re describing. Right?

The Contempt for Troops — and the Slander Against American Soldiers

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I ask about the attitudes — you said the most revealing part of the reaction to the Joe Kent interview was the contempt that a lot of the people sending troops into battle have for the troops. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t hear any disagreement at all.

I’ve noticed that contempt also, and it came out in an interview I did with the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. I asked him about what’s happening in Gaza and the murder of all these children — and it is murder, done on purpose, obviously. Well, now they’re just saying it: “Let’s just kill the kids.” I mean, Israeli cabinet officials have said that, so we know. And he said, “Well, they’re more humane than American troops were in Iraq and Afghanistan.” And I’ve heard others say this too, comparing the Israeli military to the US military and saying the Israeli military is more humane, that there are more war crimes committed by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a Marine who served in Iraq, A, is that true? And B, what do you think of that?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: If it wasn’t so insulting, it would be completely laughable. I’d want to just laugh out loud at the absurdity. It’s completely baseless. We did everything in our power in Iraq — at least in my AO, which was Ramadi in 2006 and 2007, described by an intel officer when we got on the ground as the most dangerous couple of square miles in Iraq — in a very densely built-up urban environment. We did everything in our power to avoid civilian casualties, to the point where our heavier weapons at the infantry level — 50-caliber machine guns, for example — were cut off a lot of the time because we didn’t want to risk responding to us being attacked. And this is not even at the individual level. This is at the battalion or division level. It wasn’t worth risking hitting a civilian or hurting civilians.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that applied to 50 cals? That’s a heavy machine gun, but it’s not artillery.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Right. If we called in attack helicopters to back us up, they would do a show of force, which means they would fly around and just kind of try to scare the bad guys or scare the insurgents into going away. Same thing with aircraft. Granted, it’s one of the cooler things you could ever experience — an F-18 coming in above the speed of sound, right above your head. But they weren’t dropping ordnance. On occasion they would, but the situation had to be unique for that.

And that gets into the way that the American military fights its wars. It’s based on Enlightenment principles. It rolls all the way back into — and I would very eagerly argue — Christian ideals, where you avoid unnecessary death all the way around, civilian and combatant. You engage with proportionality with the enemy. You don’t drop a 2,000-pound bomb on one guy because of the collateral damage that can cause. And that is the way we fight. That’s the way we fought.

And that is why in conflicts such as World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the civilian population of those countries — and even the enemy combatants to a large degree — viewed us favorably. Our tactics on the battlefield in the European theater, in particular of World War II, shortened the war, where millions of Germans surrendered to us rather than risk it with the Russians, because the Russians went pure total war — crushed the ant with a sledgehammer, no quarter.

And that actually, in the long term, when you apply those principles — saying, “Hey, we’re here to solve a problem with violence, but we’re going to limit it to the absolute minimum that we have to inflict” — it sends a very clear message that you can be approached, that you have good intentions, you’re not there spreading around evil. And it enables somebody on the other side who may not believe in their cause to put down their rifle and say, “You know what, actually, I’m out.” And that’s just as effective, if not far more effective, than killing somebody on the battlefield.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it’s an unrecorded fact of history that a lot of those German POWs grew up in the United States in refugee camps across the country, including in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. There was a German prisoner of war camp in downtown Nashville during the war, because so many surrendered — because they knew they wouldn’t be tortured to death, shot on sight, sold into slavery. They knew that they were dealing with a humane opponent.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: And the flip side — we talked about this before I resigned from the RFK campaign — over a statement that backed up the perception you just talked about. And when I look at what was the statement, that the IDF and the American military in Iraq conducted themselves the same way. Or as you said, the IDF was actually more humane than the American military, that they avoided civilian casualties more.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s such a slander against American troops. I don’t understand how anybody could say that.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah. And I mean, all you’ve got to do is take a look at the conduct of, say, IDF operations in Gaza — or the war on the people of Gaza — to get a glimpse of that. They killed between 50,000 and 70,000 non-combatants in a couple of years by just blanket bombing, bulldozing, working their way through.

TUCKER CARLSON: So Mike Huckabee told me to my face that US troops killed more per capita non-combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: False. I mean, it’s just false on its face.

TUCKER CARLSON: Not even in the realm of real.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Not even in the realm of real.

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you think when you see an American official say something like that about you?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Shameful. I mean, first of all, I think they’re ignorant. That’s the first thing that comes to my brain — like, that guy is probably both stupid and corrupt. And the other part is, how can you do that? How, if you’re an American, how can you slander your own people? Even more so, the people who volunteer to fight these wars — we were not conscripts.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. Why do you think that? And he’s not the only one who said that, as you just pointed out. A lot of them have said that. Why would they say something like that?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: It’s pretty clear that the way the IDF operated in Gaza is very below board, and they deliberately targeted civilians. So you have to find a way to deflect that from being the narrative.

TUCKER CARLSON: But why? Why, if you’re an American official or politician, why are you in the business of covering for some other country’s war crimes?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I would love to know the actual —

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’m serious, though. Why couldn’t you just say, “I like Israel, I want to protect Israel, they’re our friend or ally — but that’s disgusting, and we’re not backing that. I love my country. I’m not into the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden.” Okay? Doesn’t mean I hate America. That’s beneath us, and I’m against it. Why can’t they say that?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Might get them fired. They might be —

TUCKER CARLSON: Or what? What is this?

The Cost of Dishonorable War: Faith, Service, and the Price of Silence

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah, it’s the million dollar question. I would love to peel back the onion on the base rationale for so many of our recent decisions. As a country, who is allowed to be in power, why do when they get into power, their views change so rapidly? And then why is there this undying need to refuse to discuss what is out in the open in a logical and straightforward fashion?

You know, it’s not a slander on anybody to want to discuss the goings on in Gaza in a, shall we say, an academic way. It’s not a slander to want to discuss why we’re in Iran or what our objectives are or have this go through Congress. If you ask these questions, you’re immediately attacked. And it makes very little sense other than what could possibly be the, unfortunately, the open, glaring reality in the room, which is those at the top are being suppressed deliberately from that debate for whatever reason. Is it corruption? Probably, who knows?

But without answers, without a public discussion, people’s opinion default to that. It’s like, okay, well, you are deliberately screening and running interference for another country. Therefore, what’s the incentive? What’s the natural incentive? That country perhaps has dirt on you somehow. And I think there’s a lot of different things that have happened in the past 20 years, possibly further back, that need some light shown on them in order to ameliorate ourselves from that.

Destroying Faith in the Nation

TUCKER CARLSON: In the meantime, I see two obvious effects. One is to destroy people’s faith in their own nation. If you wanted to dispirit a country and make people feel like it wasn’t worth defending, if you wanted people to lose confidence in their ancestors and what their ancestors built here and the whole idea of being American, this is exactly what you would do. You’d shake people’s confidence in their own country and in the virtue of its mission.

And the second thing that jumps out is the malice, the loathing of the American population by the people in charge. It’s not enough. You could just lie and say, IDF’s doing nothing wrong in Gaza, but to say actually what the IDF is doing in Gaza is better than what we did, that tells me that you hate me and that I should be afraid of you. You’re accusing my country of war crimes. You’re supposedly one of its leaders. You’re accusing my country of war crimes. I don’t know. I think you might hurt me. I’m serious.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: It’s hard to disagree with that, Tucker.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you’re willing to do all of this and just say aloud, “No, we’re not doing this for us. There’s no potential upside here for you, but we’re doing it anyway. And if you don’t like it, you’re a terror sympathizer and we’re going to think about putting you in jail.” I don’t know. I think anyone who expresses those views is probably willing to hurt you.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I would agree completely. Whether it’s physically. Whether it’s —

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, physically.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Physically, character assassination, the whole gamut.

TUCKER CARLSON: If I talk that way about somebody, you could be certain that I wish that person a bad end.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: You’re not wrong.

TUCKER CARLSON: I wouldn’t talk that way about someone unless I was willing to hurt them. Would you?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No, not at all. No. I think you’ve pretty well hit the nail on the head. But I think what we need as citizens in this country is to get rid of the people who are being held hostage in that situation. Because I don’t believe for a second that someone like Mike Huckabee really believes the words that come out of his mouth when he mentions that he is being puppeted to say that at expense of his career, perhaps other things. And to be governed effectively, you can’t have those people in power or in positions of influence. And I’m not speaking, I’m not calling for any kind of revolution. What I’m saying is that you’re calling —

TUCKER CARLSON: — for a hostage rescue operation.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Absolutely, absolutely. To be done at the ballot box by putting the correct people in charge.

A Military Reduced to a Mercenary Force

TUCKER CARLSON: To the military for a second — you said we basically created a caste system. I think a lot of people watching will be amazed by the number of people in your world who’ve served in the military. You said, “I know people who are getting ready to deploy right now.” Most Americans don’t know anyone who’s getting ready to deploy right now. Just because of the division between the people who serve, which is mostly young white men from far away from the coasts in general, flyover country, the South, deep South — it’s just separated from everybody else.

But you already said you joined up, you joined to fight in a war you didn’t agree with without knowing why we were doing this.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But you did it anyway out of love of country, which is kind of beautiful. But now people are so discouraged about their country that who’s going to join the military?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: It’s an interesting question. I’ve talked to a number of people who have decided that they are the last of their line to serve. And it gets into the demoralization part. I’m one of those. As of right now, I hate to say this. I love this country. I am not as proud of anything as I am of my service in the Marine Corps. But I will not let my kids join because of the way that we went to war with Iran.

Because if you look at it philosophically, we have gone to war on behalf of another country to further their interests. Those are not my war. Those are not my words. The administration has said as much. The Speaker of the House has said as much. And when that’s the case, you have reduced our military to effectively a mercenary force. And there’s no honor in that. This is an offensive war of choice. One of our allies was not being run over by an outside power. The democracy is not being destroyed — all the different ways that you can —

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re not even liberating Poland.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No, we’re not. We are simply trying to — I guess, I mean, it depends on the day of the week — eliminate a regime, get nuclear weapons, reduce capabilities, all these different pieces. Not because there’s any threat to America, not because of anything other than it threatens one of our key partners in the region. And that is — I don’t think there’s a whole lot of honor in that. And I don’t want to see my kids go do it. And I know a lot of people feel the same way.

But I will say that I don’t feel that people in my peer group are necessarily demoralized by this. I mean, it’s heightened their awareness of how we’re viewed, what’s going on, and it’s zeroed in on these specific needs for change in this country. Can we get there? I don’t know. We have to get out of what we’re doing in Iran first before we start talking about that. Just because it’s such a huge deal — it’s impacting our global standing, it’s impacting our economy, it’s impacting our alliances. I mean, you name it, it’s having a detrimental effect on the American way of life and the way we’ve done things for the last 70 years, at least.

The Conduct of War: Honorable or Not?

TUCKER CARLSON: So you describe the motive for going in, the impetus, as dishonorable, inherently dishonorable, because it was not done in defense of the United States or its interest. So by definition, it’s illegitimate. What about the conduct of the war so far — is it honorable?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Well, I mean, we can start with the way it opened up by killing the Ayatollah. And saying this may not be very popular, but that is the absolute worst thing we could have done for any number of reasons. First and foremost, assassinating the leader of another country has been taboo since at least the Treaty of Westphalia, almost 500 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Was that in the 70s?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: It was just before the 1670s. In doing that, one of the things that we did was we violated one of the fundamental principles of humanity. We killed an unarmed man and his family who were effectively out in the open. The second tier down from that —

TUCKER CARLSON: I agree with you really strongly. But back to the Treaty of Westphalia — why did the civilized world decide that we’re not going to assassinate each other’s leaders in wartime?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Practically, it makes it difficult to negotiate. That is the first bullet point on that. And by doing so, when we assassinated the Ayatollah — and if I’m correct, it was not the Americans who assassinated the Ayatollah — it ensured a number of different things along those lines. We took away somebody who could be considered comparatively immoderate to the rest of Iranian society, as someone we can talk to. And then we created him into the martyr of martyrs, if you will.

This is going to be a little bit of a paraphrase here, but we effectively killed the Pope during Lent while he was standing on a street corner with his family, including a grandkid. And that would be bad enough in the Catholic religion, but when you take into account the nature of Shia Islam, where there is no greater honor than to die in defense of the faith, and then layer on top that it was in defense of Iran, we emboldened the entire civilian population to stand up and fight us.

Had we taken a step back — and not that I would have agreed with this as a policy move — and hit targets and decided just to reduce their capabilities and cause, say, the IRGC pain in a large area, then at some point we probably would have had a pretty decent chance of once again sitting down with the Iranians and discussing off ramps. But by creating a martyr right out of the gate with effectively a cheap shot, that also is completely taboo in terms of international law and international relations, we have cemented these people’s will to fight and their need to protect their own honor. And this creates a huge problem long term.

World War II and the Precedent Against Assassination

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you know — World War II, which is whatever you think of World War II, is the largest conflict in human history, provably. Were there documented, persistent attempts by our side or the other to kill one another’s leaders?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I’m not aware of that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Assassinate.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah. I mean, there was obviously an internal attempt by the Germans, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right. There was dissent within Germany against Hitler and they tried to kill him, tried to blow him up and failed. But there’s no — in the 80 years of declassification efforts, nothing.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Nothing I’ve come across. I mean, if it’s out there, I’d love to see it.

TUCKER CARLSON: So we’re waging total war against a couple of different enemies, several different enemies, and we don’t plot to assassinate their leaders.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, just trying to establish how far out of precedent —

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Oh, yes, it’s way outside precedent.

The Silence of Leaders and the Courage It Takes to Speak

TUCKER CARLSON: Why did nobody say that? I didn’t hear — not that I hear everything, but I didn’t hear anybody prominent stand up and say, “Whoa, wait a second, we’re killing an 86-year-old leader of the country who’s, by the way, also the religious leader of an entire religion.” I didn’t hear anybody say that. It was like he was the most evil man who ever lived. Anyone who’s against this is also evil. You’re on the Ayatollah’s side if you have questions about this.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah, it’s a fantastic question. I mean, that gets back to the need for leadership. I mean, if we had more leaders in the legislature, they would have forced an AUMF vote, at least, let alone talking about this. The people we send to Washington should be bringing this up. Why they’re not saying it — it could be any number of things. You’re familiar with D.C. just like me. You may just have a problem with low IQ in some areas. They just don’t understand or know, but also don’t have a thirst for the knowledge to understand. But also possible ramifications for stepping out and saying something like that. Maybe they consider it political suicide. But at the end of the day, it’s ultimately just cowardice, in my opinion.

Those Who Fight vs. Those Who Cheer

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course it’s cowardice. One thing I’ve noticed is that whenever you talk to people who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam or World War II, or anybody who’s actually pulled a trigger on behalf of the United States, there is a notable absence of bloodthirstiness, at least in comparison to Lindsey Graham or Mike Johnson or any of these performers on the right or left. They’re always very excited about someone being killed. I almost never heard anyone professionally under arms express that. Have you noticed this?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah, it’s pretty ubiquitous.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is that?

The Horror of War and the Duty of Transparency

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: When you’ve seen it up close, it’s something that A, never leaves your mind, and B, something you can do without. I mean, it doesn’t mean you’re not capable of it. You can never ramp up and do it again. But it’s — once you’ve been to the extreme, you just prefer not to go back. Because war is the most horrible of all things. It’s not clean like it’s on TV or a video game. There’s no respawn point. And when people die, whether they’re your friends, whether they’re civilians, whether the guys on the other side, it’s rarely clean, and it’s just a horrible thing to witness.

So once you see that, I think it becomes part of your psyche to just — you understand that you can go to that point, but you really want to do everything in your power to avoid it. Conversely, when I see people out there who have never done it, such as Lindsey Graham, there’s a certain bloodthirstiness that comes off basically as evil, straight up. I’m not calling Lindsey Graham evil straight out, but I’m saying if you think that killing is a good thing, double tapping boats, killing for the sake of killing is good, then you should probably reexamine your entire moral ethos, because generally speaking, it’s unnecessary and it’s not effectively human in its core nature.

Reverence for the Dead — The Mueller Question

TUCKER CARLSON: I’ve noticed even since the war began, a lot more talk like that — the president saying he’s glad Mueller’s dead. Good.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And I thought, as someone who vocally opposed the Mueller investigation — every night that it was ongoing, every single night. So obviously not for the Mueller investigation. Yeah, I was more opposed to it than anyone else. But when a man dies, even if it’s someone you disagree with or even hate, there’s a certain reverence in death that’s required if you’re going to have reverence for life.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: There’s something awful about that. Yeah.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: You judge society by how it remembers its dead, like straight up. And people can have any problem they want with Robert Mueller, but at the same time, he has a grieving family, he has a wife, he has kids. This is a man who served the country honorably for decades, starting in Vietnam as a Marine. He was wounded in combat. His first child was born while he was deployed. He flew to Hawaii and got to see her for a brief minute before he flew back and went back to war. And then after all of that, he decided to stay in service to his country for another few decades. And that is incredibly honorable. I disagree with the Mueller investigation. I remember watching you every night talk about it. You were my touch point for that, for my daily.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t think Mueller had a lot to do with it, to be totally blunt. And I think everyone attacking Mueller knows that Mueller was not driving that investigation at all. And they’re too afraid to say what was actually happening. But a lot of evidence that Mueller was incapacitated by illness, so whatever. And everyone knows that. So just watching the disingenuousness — Mueller did that — I don’t think Mueller was really — I mean, there are lots of reasons to criticize Mueller. I’m happy to — not defending Mueller, but nobody’s perfect. Just the lying is driving me insane. But it was one of his deputies who drove that, who I think is an MSNBC contract now. But he never gets attacked.

But anyway, I noticed that it’s very easy for a society to become a death worshiping society. And I feel like the US has made a real effort generationally not to become that. But no one seems to be making an effort now. Am I imagining this?

A Death-Worshiping Culture — Hegseth vs. Rumsfeld

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I don’t think you’re imagining it at all. When you have daily Pentagon press briefings which focus less on successful hits — compare Pete Hegseth’s briefings to, say, Donald Rumsfeld. Not a huge fan of Donald Rumsfeld.

TUCKER CARLSON: I bet you’re not.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah, but at the same time there was at least an attempt to be somewhat transparent in his briefings. We now see Hegseth talking about no quarter and how incredibly lethal — and we need $200 billion to kill bad guys. That’s beneath the station, it’s beneath his office to talk like he’s a lance corporal, quite frankly. But also it’s always focused on killing. And that’s not a headspace where I think people who have participated in that a whole lot usually sit. And honestly, it worries me.

But what worries me even more about it is the message it sends our enemies or adversaries. And I don’t think we have few enemies right now. We have one country which we have created into a massive enemy that we’re trying to muck our way out of a fight with. But to glorify the killing of its citizens, of its people, and then to tell the press that we’re giving them no quarter — that also backfires. You’re going to see that on the battlefield. You’re going to see that in the way they approach fighting us.

I can speak as a fighting man here — if I knew that the people on the other side, if they got their hands on me, were going to finish me off no matter what — and we talked about this a minute before — you better believe that I would be amped up in doing everything in my power to take as many of them with me. I’m not even going to think about surrender. It’s very much, I think, the attitude of the Marines in the Pacific during World War II. That was the Japanese approach, and they deliberately told their own troops — this is the Japanese — that the Marines were the same way. You had to commit atrocities in order to become a Marine, murder your family, all kinds of random stuff. And it creates this fight-to-the-end mentality, which is not conducive to allowing any kind of diplomatic space.

The Message We Send — and What We Are Fighting For

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, and they convinced hundreds, if not thousands of civilians on the Pacific Islands — famously on Okinawa — to kill themselves rather than surrender, because they were going to be eaten or raped or sold into slavery or whatever. So that is the message that our command is sending to the Iranians.

I want to get back to the question of honor — what is honorable and what is not, and why you would fight for your country in the first place, since the pay isn’t that great. So what are you fighting for when you leave Penn State to enlist in the Marine Corps in a war that you don’t agree with? You say loyalty to America. You love America. But why would a patriotic young man love America more than Liechtenstein? Pick a country. What is it about America that we are fighting for? What is worth fighting for?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Corn dogs, baseball and church on Sunday. But in all seriousness — decency, right? Decency. Yeah. It is the city, the shining city on a hill. The different aspects of this country — just the whole story of this country. People pouring in and carving out an entirely new way of life, throwing off the bonds of being under repressive kings and governments from all over the world for incredibly long periods of time, and reforming this under ideals that are stipulated in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Nobody has the right to prevent you from defending yourself. You can always speak your mind. You can’t incriminate yourself.

And I think a lot of people take this for granted here. And a lot of these are slipping away, by the way, which is very troublesome. But those are why — that’s what motivated me — seeing the historical arc of this country growing up, knowing that my dad, my grandfather — you run it all the way back — people served to defend those ideals. And the quality of life that you have here, the freedom of movement that you have — you can move wherever you want. You’re not constrained to an area by a repressive government or forced to repopulate an area like the Soviets did. It’s all of those things.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a gift.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: It is truly a gift from God that we have this experiment occurring in such a rich, rich piece of land on earth. And the flip side of that is coming from different areas where you didn’t have that. So that’s the contrast, if you will.

Now, when it comes down to actually fighting on the ground, you end up doing that for the guy next to you, for your peers. And one thing that was always evident in the Marine Corps is that there’s a deep sense of institutional history. We are in the fight. I could sit there and turn to a 19 year old — what did they do on Iwo Jima? And they know. They may not know the entire historical arc of the battle, but they know those guys didn’t run. They knew. They stood there and fought because Marines at Belleau Wood stood there and fought. And it goes all the way back through history. You hold yourself accountable through your peers.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they wear decorations from previous wars. Right.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: My unit had the French fourragère, which they earned in World War I, and we had to memorize why. That was the cord, correct?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, yeah. My dad had that.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah. Green cord, yeah.

Fighting on the Right Side — and the Bombing of the Girls’ School

TUCKER CARLSON: So interesting. So you’re fighting for the man next to you. You’re fighting for the institution of the Marine Corps, but you’re also fighting because you think on some moral level you’re on the right side. We’re better than they are.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Absolutely.

TUCKER CARLSON: For all of our faults, this is still a better country than theirs. If you got to a place where you no longer thought that, it’d be pretty hard to fight the war. Correct.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: It would be.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, right. So I guess my concern is we’re tampering with the secret sauce here. For example, what is your read on the bombing of the girls’ school next to the IRGC naval base?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Gut wrenching.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course, gut wrenching. I mean, any normal person would feel that way, but what are we to make of that?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I would love to know where that target package came from.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that was my thought.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Who gave us that target? How was it generated? Because I know that our uniformed services would never deliberately target a school. I believe that 100%. I mean, could it be something as simple and perhaps nefarious as an AI targeting program deciding that because there was a key word, we were going to launch a missile at that particular building? Perhaps. But I would think — and I would like to think — that that was verified beyond just a blip on a screen. “Hey, this says Shahed, therefore we’ll hit it.”

So I will say that at every point in turn in this conflict in Iran so far, every time that we seem to be headed for an off ramp, there has been some sort of obfuscation, interference, interjection by the Israelis to prevent that. And it started with the killing of the Ayatollah right out of the gate. I mean, we got blooded right out of the gate. We got put in a situation where it was impressed upon the Iranian people that this was total war by basically our very first action. And in conjunction with that, I believe the girls’ school was hit. And that’s another message being sent, I think, by somebody.

Unless we could have transparency and say, “Hey, how did this mistake happen? Who gave it to us?” And traditionally, that would be a very easy decision to make. I mean, I know there’s probably a number of officers in the military who are involved in that strike who would love to step forward and say they gave us the information, and that would be the right thing to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where are they?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Good question. Being muzzled. Maybe it wasn’t even that. But these are the things that we need to have — that we’ve traditionally had with our military — a little bit of transparency on what we’re doing, as far as objectives go, how it’s going on the ground, and why did the mistakes that we made happen? We probably had more clarity out of Lieutenant Calley in Vietnam during a lot — a lot more than that.

The Demand for Accountability — and an Apology

TUCKER CARLSON: But can I say — I mean, I grieved when I saw that, because it’s awful. But I also was not entirely surprised. I assumed the target package came from the Israelis. I don’t know that. But it fits a pattern of behavior designed to keep the United States in far beyond our own interests. But I don’t know if that’s true.

But what really bothered me was the official response to it. All kinds of people get killed in wars. Non-combatants get killed, innocent people, children get killed. That’s why I’m generally not that in favor of wars if we can help it. But I’m not surprised by it. But when you do something like that, you have to apologize immediately. Don’t you?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: That’s the right and just thing to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: Isn’t that what we demand of our children?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah. 100.

The Folly of Ground Troops in Iran

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t understand how you wouldn’t just apologize and say, look, we’re not sure how this happened. No American would do that intentionally. I believe that because I’ve lived here my whole life. I know what Americans are like. They’re not bombing girls’ schools on purpose. I don’t believe that. Everyone knows that. But how could you not say, “We’re going to find out what happened, but in the meantime, holy smokes, I’m so sorry.” Did anyone say that?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Not that I heard.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, damn them, then. Yeah. How could you not say that?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Hubris.

TUCKER CARLSON: Does it diminish you to apologize for a mistake that killed children? I don’t think it does.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah. Not at all. Absolutely not at all.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s when I started to think, you can’t do this in my name. I’m from here, right?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No, I’m right there with you, Tucker. It’s the combination of that and the opening strike on the Ayatollah, combined with the lack of objectives. We’re doing something in our name which literally makes no sense and has the attachments or the riders of evil attached to it. Killing a bunch of kids is quite possibly the absolute worst thing that someone can do. Killing a kid.

TUCKER CARLSON: I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. So can this be solved with ground troops?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why?

Why Ground Troops Cannot Solve This

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Go back to what I was talking about earlier. If we thought that we could drop the 82nd Airborne over Tehran and overthrow the government, we would have already done it. What we’re looking at is an operation or a series of operations to effectively reopen the Straits of Hormuz, which is a problem that we created due to our operation there.

But to roll it back a little bit more, it’s also because we didn’t have the contingencies in place to deal with the most obvious thing that an Iranian regime that was fighting an existential fight would do. This is their trump card.

TUCKER CARLSON: Shut off global oil supply. Yeah.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: And the rationale behind it is quite simple. In primary, it puts global pressure on the United States or whomever is attacking them to come to the table and resolve this quickly. Because if it goes on for long enough, it can crash the entire economy of the world.

So the fact that we didn’t have people in place to even address that contingency, or moving into the region to address that contingency, tells me this whole operation in Iran was not our decision. We are following along with somebody else — the Israelis — and that is not how America fights its wars. We are not known to fight wars in an unprepared fashion.

American Leaders and Israeli Influence

TUCKER CARLSON: Quite bluntly, American leaders made these decisions to go to war in Iraq, to wage war in Afghanistan as we did, and to go into Iran. So it’s the fault of American leaders. Just to be completely clear, it’s the fault of the commander in chief.

However, it’s also a fact that the Israelis pushed us to go to war in Iran, that some of the fake intel came from them. Did you know that when you were serving in Iraq? Was there a wreck?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: You had no idea that Israel had anything to do with the Iraq war when you were fighting it?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No. I mean, it was a rumor, but it seemed kind of crazy. Yeah, it’s one of those things. It just seemed like there were ulterior motives in place, but how that was being governed and driven was way outside of what I — yeah, I get it.

TUCKER CARLSON: But now there’s not a single person awaiting deployment who doesn’t know that.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I mean, it’s literally — the plan is literally in writing, and it’s been there since the 90s. “A Clean Break,” written by the same policymakers in the Pentagon who pushed the Iraq war. And in six, maybe seven pages, you can go through it and read the entire arc of the different conflicts that they felt were going to be beneficial to enhance the Israeli state in the region. Iraq was in there. Iran was the big one.

How the Troops View Lindsey Graham

TUCKER CARLSON: So how do the troops feel about Lindsey Graham, would you say?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: If you had to guess, I would say the opinion is probably not very high.

TUCKER CARLSON: Really? He’s not a hero to the troops?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: No. In at least the circles I run in, which are pretty broad, he’s a bit of a laughingstock. Yeah. He’s a caricature of himself. People from all over the country that I know are hoping that he loses his election finally.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: And part of that — the big part of it — is he gets out there and talks a tough game and flexes his military creds, which have nothing to do with combat. And everybody sees it. And in the context of the war in Iran, it’s so clear that he is pushing a narrative that has nothing to do with the American people. It’s all about Israel and the Israeli government and furthering their objectives.

It has nothing to do with advancing American prestige, because it’s costing us all of our prestige. It has nothing to do with American troops, because American troops are going to be dying on behalf of another country, so on and so forth.

Can the Service Chiefs Be Trusted on This?

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think that there’s anybody from the service chiefs, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who’s telling the President we can actually fix this problem with ground troops?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Fixing the war?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, opening the strait.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Opening the strait. I would hope that they’re cautioning against that. There is plenty of data out there that speaks to the folly of trying a headlong assault into the Straits of Hormuz. And everybody keeps talking about Kharg Island. That’s probably not the target.

But before we get into that, I think it’s important to go back and talk about Millennium Challenge in 2002 with General Van Riper. He’s a legendary Marine Corps general who was the head of the Red Force — AKA the Iranian force — in a massive war game, a multimillion dollar war game in 2002, where this exact scenario was gamed out at a very, very large level.

It was a 14-day war game that he ended on day one, fighting as the Iranians came after the American force stepping into the strait and annihilated it, causing — I think it was — 20,000 simulated casualties in one day. Just ended it straight out of the gate. And the services were so upset by this that they reset the war game, limited the capabilities that the Iranians could use, and then progressively won.

TUCKER CARLSON: They rigged their own war game?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Oh, yeah. I mean, come on, it happens all the time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would you do that? That’s like rigging an MRI. Why would you do that? “We’re giving you a lung X-ray, but we’re scrubbing out the spots.” Like, what?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Hey, look — full bill of health. You might want to talk to a coroner on the way out the door.

But no, yeah, they rigged it and they redid it, and he hung around as an advisor for the rest of the game — 13 more days — under protest. It was designed to produce a result that people wanted to see within the DoD. It was not designed to take a look at a particular problem set.

And I’m sure there’s a PAO out there who’s having heartburn right now for me saying it like that and is going to refute it. But the reality is you can talk to the man himself about what exactly happened.

War Games, Terrain, and the Reality of Iran

This is not the first time. I have a number of friends who went through high planning levels as senior warrants and staff NCOs, talking about different types of war games — how, if they didn’t rig it, say in a scenario where you’re dropping a unit into the fight with Russia, we would be annihilated. And that doesn’t demonstrate the capabilities.

The overall justification coming out of Millennium Challenge was, “Well, we had a 14-day exercise planned and we spent all this money. So why should we end it on day one when there’s plenty more to experiment with?” But that’s data point one — we have war gamed this and it didn’t go well.

The other parts of it are, if you look at the terrain of Iran, it is Afghanistan, but worse, with a larger population that is obviously more equipped than any other war we fought in recent memory.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s why it’s the oldest empire in the world, probably. Geography matters.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Absolutely. And their traditions matter. They have survived for two millennia, and a lot of that was by having to fight. They’re not pushovers. I’m not a fan of their policies. I don’t want to live in Iran. But at the same time, you have to recognize realistically who you’re dealing with. They’re not a backwater. They are a very advanced philosophical, mathematical society. They’ve given the world a lot. And if you don’t take that into account and you rely on hubris to make your planning, you’re going to walk into a trap.

The Problem with Taking Kharg Island or Qeshm

So when you start looking at the actual Straits of Hormuz, which is our current problem that we are trying to fix, opening that is not going to crash the Iranian government. That moment is gone. That moment was probably dead the second we killed the Ayatollah. And thinking otherwise is folly.

At this point, there’s a lot of talk about taking Kharg Island. The problem with taking Kharg Island is twofold. One, it lies a long way on the other side of the Straits of Hormuz, where we have no ships and no logistical capabilities. It is closer to Kuwait than it is to where our current troops or Marines are located.

There’s another place called Qeshm, which is located literally right in the middle of the Straits of Hormuz. It is a 600 or so square mile island that is effectively in a U in the strait. If I was going to try and reopen the Straits of Hormuz — and I’m not some grand tactician — I would think that’s a pretty good spot to go. Which also means your opponent knows exactly that.

That being said, is there the potential for us to land troops in either one of those places? Yes. Could we do a contested landing into those areas? Possibly. There would be casualties, in my assessment.

But speaking to Kharg first — if you drop a bunch of guys into Kharg, which is, I believe, eight square miles, it’s a small spot. You are assuming that they can hang out there and shut down the Iranian oil exports without receiving any kind of counter fire. You’re banking on the Iranians deciding not to destroy their own infrastructure when you’ve already signaled to them that this is an existential fight.

So to me, that makes no sense. You can rebuild infrastructure, but you can’t take your country back after it’s been taken down. So that math problem seems very, very simple.

I would think that if we landed there, we would get ashore one way or the other — whether we’re led on, whether we have some fighting that goes on. This is not going to be Iwo Jima. This is not going to be force on force, uniformed. The Iranians have fought us asymmetrically the entire way. They understand our vulnerabilities in an asymmetrical environment. They sat right next door and participated in Iraq to a degree.

But what they will do is let us stop moving and then make us a giant sponge for drones, missiles, and indirect fire. I think that’s your game plan for either island.

Qeshm is a much bigger problem to try and solve. But I think the scenario is rather similar — if we got ashore, that’s not the end of our problems. You’re not going to end the war by doing that. You’re going to have massive problems trying to resupply these guys, trying to evacuate wounded, and it builds from there. Their capabilities in drone and ballistic missiles are immense, as have been demonstrated.

TUCKER CARLSON: So it’s not a question of taking, it’s a matter of holding.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Exactly.

How Do We Get Out of This?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So my last question, hoping to bring these threads together into a tapestry of hope — realizing that’s unlikely — but how would you, were you the commander in chief, get out of this right now?

A Diplomatic Path Forward — Or World War III?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: The first thing I would do is put our partner in their place. Recognize that between us and Israel, we are the senior partner in this relationship. Without us, they have a very hard time existing in that neighborhood. So we snatch the initiative back from them and say, listen, you’re on our time, and at any point in time we can walk away from this and you’re going to have big problems. So act like the grownup in the room. That’s what we’re supposed to be. We are the superpower. We dictate the terms.

The second piece is through diplomacy. It’s one thing we’ve lost sight of in this country — in order to have an agreement of some kind, you have to have an exchange. We have gotten way too comfortable with dictating terms to other countries backed up by the use of force. And that’s not diplomacy at all. That’s just bullying your way around the world. You don’t have any diplomatic relationships.

But I will say that the President has an opportunity to do something super duper bold, that I believe he’s the only one who can pull it off. He managed to steamroll the process and get us into this mess, and he can steamroll the process to get us out. The one thing the Iranians, I believe, want more than anything else is the removal of Americans from that region. I think that is a very effective card that can be played.

That’s also the same card that much of his base, which has abandoned him to this point — where you can see 62% of independents — and I think that’s a very presumptive number. I think it’s high. I mean, pardon me, it’s very low. Disapprove of this war. I think it’s way higher than that. And many of the independents, myself included, voted for him because he was the President of no more stupid wars. He was going to get us out of the Middle East. He wanted to get us out of Syria, all these different things going back to 2016.

So there’s an exchange there that I think can be made. It’s a bit of a Hail Mary. Some people might call it ludicrous. But if we were to talk to them and reduce our footprint across the region, pull out of some of the areas that we no longer have an interest in — large basing in Iraq, I don’t know why we’re still doing it. Large basing in Kuwait, well, that’s to counterbalance Iran, so on and so forth around the region. The Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, that’s probably an important piece for us, just for protecting commerce globally. We could probably keep that.

But give them the option to save face by having them turn to their people and say, “We had all this sacrifice and look, we drove these guys out of the region.” President Trump can turn around and say, “My promise was to get us out of the Middle East. Iran is no longer a threat. I’m bringing these troops home. You’re welcome.”

And I think that is probably the best hope that we have right now. But unfortunately, the situation looks like it is careening out of control in the opposite direction. So somebody’s got to make a decision.

The Risk of Ground Troops and Endless Escalation

TUCKER CARLSON: Where could it go if it continues on its current course?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Unfortunately, nowhere good. But if it continues on its current course, we are going to have the commitment of ground troops and we are going to amp up our involvement. It’s going to be a Vietnam-like push of more and more men and materiel into the region in a ground war or a conflict that we are not going to be able to win. They’re not going to quit. And there is no real way that I believe that we can drive them from power. They’re not going to leave voluntarily and we’re not going to be able to snatch it from them.

And every time that we commit a new unit into theater, it weakens us in other parts of the world — it weakens us in the Pacific, it weakens us in Europe — and it provides larger freedom of movement for adversaries in those theaters. And quite frankly, you give them enough space and enough bad will towards the US for what we’re doing, and what happens after that could be unbelievably catastrophic and global.

The Specter of World War III

TUCKER CARLSON: What do you mean?

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I think you could legitimately have a World War III type of scenario if we are once again tying our military down in the Middle East to deal with a regional nuisance, which is what the Iranians are, which is what the Iraqis were. However, this time it’s costing the global economy and all kinds of other nations their economic prowess. It’s costing our reputation. We could align the rest of the world against us.

And not in short order, but not over a very long arc either — it could cause other countries to consider using a different currency, which would be the kind of the kill shot for the American empire and the American experiment.

And I’m not convinced that the Chinese want to take Taiwan by force. But if there’s nobody home, what’s to say they don’t walk across the strait in an administrative manner and just say, “Okay, now you guys are part of us” — and then what? We wouldn’t have the ability to do anything about that. Beyond that, you have our reduced footprints in places like Japan and South Korea.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: And those are very important economies to keep aligned with the United States. Militarily, okay, that’s one thing. But economically, we need them.

TUCKER CARLSON: And Japan is the biggest buyer of our debt. Number one.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: Yeah.

So in essence, the wheels fall off — that is the worst case scenario.

Closing Remarks

TUCKER CARLSON: Jim Webb, thank you very much for spending all this time and explaining. I hope all the predictions are wrong.

JAMES (JIM) WEBB: I agree with you, Tucker. Thank you so much for having me.

TUCKER CARLSON: Thank you. We’ll be back next Wednesday. Thanks for watching the Wednesday edition of the show. We stream live every week, Wednesday, 6pm Eastern on TuckerCarlson.com. Members can watch the show live, join the members-only chat and take part in the conversation in real time. We’re grateful to be doing it and grateful that you watch it. Thank you.

Related Posts

• Transcript: World’s First AI Actress Interview on Piers Morgan Show: ft. Tom Conti, Tom Bilyeu & Prof Jiang
• In Vivo Podcast: w/ Cathy Tie and Prof. Jiang on Editing Embryos (Transcript)
• Transcript of Evy Poumpouras Interview: Read People, Spot Lies & More – FO563 Raj Shamani
• DOAC AI Emergency Debate: ft. Ed Zitron, Andrew McAfee, Nate Soares & Roman Yampolskiy (Transcript)
• Transcript of Norman Finkelstein Interview: Tucker Carlson Show