Transcript
Steve Bannon (0:00)
Operation Epic Fury. Is that a great name? Well, it's only good if you win, you know, you can only do. And we've won.
Jim Rickards (0:11)
Let me say we've won.
Newt Gingrich (0:13)
I think we're at a very dangerous moment. It is clear that the White House did little to no strategic planning for this war. You can see that in the shifting objectives. Where at first this was a regime change war, then it wasn't. It was to re obliterate the Iranian nuclear program, and now that's not one of the objectives they list. You can see it in the failure to plan to get American citizens out of harm's way in the Gulf, to evacuate our embassies that were put in harm's way. You can see this in the fact that they were surprised that the Iranians have launched attacks against Gulf nations, even though the Iranians have threatened that multiple times over the years. And you see that, I think, most of all in the White House's lack of any plan for Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. Something that everyone that's worked in the national security community can tell you has always been their number one kind of point of leverage.
Beau French (1:07)
That's the reason.
Newt Gingrich (1:07)
That's the ace card that they have in the hole. And so now what you see is a president who clearly gets that this is a political problem for him. You can see a couple of days ago, he started trying to talk about how we, you know, we're getting close to ending the war. Although then an hour later, he'll come out and say, but we still have weeks to go. You can tell he feels the problem. What I worry about now, look, I think the president is likely to end the war sooner rather than later. I think the military campaign probably has two weeks or so to go until it reaches its objectives. But the president may decide to stop the bombing. That doesn't mean Iran is going to end the war. They may decide that they have lost all of their other deterrent measures. They've lost their proxies that they had throughout the region. Their missile program has been decimated, first in the attacks last June and then over the course of the last almost two weeks. The one deterrent they have is the economic pain that they can cause us. And they may decide that they want to ramp the pain up. Even if the president wants the war to end, to send a message to Donald Trump in the future and to future American presidents and future Israeli prime ministers that they do have leverage and they're willing to use it. You can disagree with the war, but not the war effort.
Steve Bannon (2:13)
We are accelerating these bombing runs, and their offensive output is collapsing.