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Mark Kimmitt
Extraordinarily dangerous. Unfortunately, Iran has proven to be a pretty clever adversary. You can't do that kind of invasion with a couple of thousand troops. You need a couple of hundred thousand troops.
Rudy Giuliani
They do want to die. Ayatollah knew he was going to get hit. He sat there and I think he thought he was going to go up to paradise and find his 72 virgins.
John Kiriakou
The Iranians have been reactive to this, not proactive. There has to be a response. You can't just say, well, you know what, we're an existential threat to the Israelis, so of course the Israelis are going to have to bomb us.
Doran Spilman
There's never been a guarantee to defeat evil, but there is one guarantee. If you don't stand up to it,
Mark Kimmitt
you're going to lose.
John Kiriakou
Please help us bomb Iran. Please help us bomb Iran. Please help us bomb Iran. And the President's always said no. President Trump was duped by Benjamin Netanyahu, and now we're in a war that we cannot win.
Doran Spilman
I don't think I've ever seen a gathering of more spineless people in my entire life.
Piers Morgan
For all the talk of Vice President JD Vance being marginalized by the war in Iran, he could play a defining role in ending it. The Iranians say they don't trust the President's chief negotiates, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and they'll only talk to him. And Vance has now kick started the blame game for a war that's becoming more complicated, expensive and unpopular by the day. Benjamin Netanyahu, he says, oversold Trump on the chances of an easy victory and a swift uprising, neither of which looked close, if they're still possible at all. According to the Vice President, everything the US Is doing now is to prevent a drawn out war.
Doran Spilman
We've accomplished the gross majority of our military objectives. I think you can make a good argument.
Piers Morgan
We've accomplished all of our military objectives.
Mark Kimmitt
The President's going to keep at it
Piers Morgan
for a little while longer to ensure
Doran Spilman
that we once we leave, we don't
Piers Morgan
have to do this again for a very, very long time. The problem is, as it always has been, that the objectives are unclear and ever changing. Trump says he's negotiating with a new regime in waiting, but we don't know who that is. Thousands of U.S. marines are now in the region with Special Forces and paratroopers on the way. They're reportedly preparing for a ground operation that could take weeks. There's talk of seizing and occupying Hag island to choke off the oil exports which keep the Iranian economy alive. The Wall Street Journal says Trump is weighing up a Hollywood worthy raid on Iran's uranium involving diggers, nuclear scientists and thousands of troops behind enemy lines. Polymarket says there's now a 70% chance that US forces will enter Iran by the end of April, an upward swing of 20 in just two days on a $54 million market. Anyone who's paid any attention to big market moves relating to this war and this White House will know exactly why that's worthy of our attention. And running in parallel to all of this is the ongoing escalation by America's partner in the war, Israel, is expanding its invasion of Lebanon, raising fears of a scorched earth campaign modeled on the Gaza war. The IDF is facing intensifying criticism for several attacks which appear to have targeted journalists. JD Vance may want a swift end to the war in Iran. As to a majority of the American people, there's currently no indication they're going to get it. To debate this, I'm joined by Mark Kimmitt, retired U.S. army Brigadier General Amin Dain, who's the author of Nine Lives My Time as MI6's Top Spy Inside Al Qaeda, and Doran Spilman, reservist, IDF spokesman and author of when the Stones Speak. Well, welcome to all of you. General Kimmel, welcome back. Every time we talk in this war, it seems to have escalated at the same rate that President Trump and others try to reassure us it's over and America has already won. So forgive me if I'm a little bit confused sitting here in London, where are we with this war? Because from where I sit, it's not over. The Straits of Hormuz remain pretty well closed. The, the attacks on the Gulf states by Iran continue. There is enormous economic damage from a month of the world's oil and gas being held up along with the world's fertilizer. And the president of the United States is now committing a lot of troops to the region. And the briefings that the papers are getting is that he is planning potentially some sort of land invasion. Which I have to say again, as I've been saying for a while now, that is completely contrary to everything that Donald Trump campaigned on. The one thing he reassured his supporters was I will not take America into any more senseless, expensive wars in the Middle East. And I definitely won't put boots on the ground. Here we are. What do you make of it?
Mark Kimmitt
Well, first of all, you've asked about 10 questions, made about 10 statements. So let me get first, you have
Piers Morgan
as much time as you Like General
Mark Kimmitt
No, I'm just going to say let's remain focused on what I believe either are or should have been the objectives of this war. We went into negotiations with the Iranians to do three things. End their nuclear program, end their ballistic missile program, end their proxy program. We were unable to achieve that at the bargaining table. So we've taken it to the battlefield. I think that we've heard a lot of noise, a lot of chatter, a lot of flack over the last few weeks, but I certainly hope those remain our core interests and if those remain our core interests, and candidly, the core interests of countries around the world, to include Great Britain. No, we haven't achieved our objectives yet, nor should we be discussing off ramps at this point.
Piers Morgan
Okay. But my sense is that Donald Trump would love an off ramp if he could claim any kind of legitimate victory that gets him out of this, because he knows, nevermind anything else. Politically, as he edges nearer to the midterm elections, this is proving incredibly unpopular. All the polls show that. And I think that for that reason alone, coupled with the economic mayhem is causing. It makes no sense to a businessman like Donald Trump, a dealmaker, to allow this to continue for months and months and months. And yet I don't see how he can stop it. If the Iranians have worked out that it's the economic part of this war that they're currently winning.
Mark Kimmitt
No, I agree with you. First of all, I don't think Donald Trump cares about the midterms. He's already accepted them as lost, even if they're one by the Democrats. The fact remains is that nothing is going to get done in the United States Congress. Whether the Republicans still in charge or whether the Democrats are in charge, our legislative body seems to be generally irrelevant. But look, I think that Donald Trump now recognizes that the advice he took or the or the orders that he issued are not achieving the results he wanted. Unfortunately, Iran has proven to be a pretty clever. The Israelis went for regime decapitation, the Americans went for blow up as much stuff as possible. And the Iranians kind of did a jujitsu move and said, okay, we're going to move down to the Strait of Hormuz. If you want to do regime decapitation, we're going to do economic decapitation. As we used to say Old dead Carl Clausewitz, he had some great lines. And one of them is after a war starts, it takes on its own character. And while this president may have hoped for a quick and easy victory, as he had in Venezuela, or a negotiated settlement as he had in Syria. This war has definitely taken on a character of its own.
Piers Morgan
And before I go to our two other very patient guests, thank you to both of you. Just one final question, purely on the military reality of any kind of ground invasion, because if it seems to be the case, the only way to guarantee getting the enriched uranium, which is believed to be buried way below the ground and heavily protected, if the only way to do that is with ground forces, is it not going to be incredibly hazardous to do that in a country like Iran when they believe that regime change is absolutely on the minds, certainly of the Israelis and probably quite a few people in the Trump administration, too? And in other words, they have little to lose if America was to put ground forces down potentially with idf, we don't know. Is that not a very dangerous mission, General?
Mark Kimmitt
Extraordinarily dangerous. These two gentlemen to my right don't remember what you and I do, which is a 1979 mission to try to get the American hostages out of Tehran. That was an absolute goat. I'll leave it at that.
Piers Morgan
Yeah.
Mark Kimmitt
But unfortunately, when you also not only have a tough target, but your mission is being bleeded out by every broadsheet like the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times makes life kind of difficult. So I simply think that that may be, again, to use another trope, a bridge too far. At this point, unless we pull some real magic out of our house hats, and I don't think we're going to be quite, quote, invading or conducting an invasion that brings to mind of your audience another attack into Iraq to go up to Baghdad. You can't do that kind of invasion with a couple of thousand troops. You need a couple of hundred thousand troops. So what I see those ground troops being used for primarily is short, quick operations. Probably no further in than the littoral to go against the speedboats, the mine factories, the missile factories along the beaches, maybe even a dumb idea like Karg Island. Although I think the better way for Carg island is just take out the electricity. That way you can quickly turn it back on when you need it.
Piers Morgan
I mean, the problem. And I'll come to our other guests now, Doran Spielman. The problem here is that Donald Trump has kind of signaled everything that America may do. He does it on a kind of every few hours basis on social media,
Mark Kimmitt
and then he changes it two hours later.
Piers Morgan
Right, right. And the problem, Doris Spearman, is, you know, I can remember watching movies about the code breakers in World War II where there were whole teams of people whose Job it was to crack sophisticated codes that the Germans were leaving, for example, planning their military operation. The Iranians don't need any code breakers. They've got the President of the United States just broadcasting it all. So, you know, they know that there may be an attack on Hog, for example. They know that the Americans may do X, Y, Z, because Trump keeps saying that's what they may do. Is that, is he sensible?
Doran Spilman
Look, these are all the million dollar questions how we're going to look back at President Trump. You know, 100 years from now. I can say this, that he's definitely knocking off balance a lot of terror regimes throughout the world, including Venezuela. I think he's sending a different message than has been sent. It's not the typical diplomatic message. This is kind of the Trump dealmaker where he comes in and we've seen him multiple times when he offers with one hand a carrot and with the other hand, if it's not taken, he's got Marines moving in. And I'm not sure that it's the incorrect way. I think we'll know when this is over. But I do, Pierce, kind of want to zoom out a little bit. I think, you know, this is not a new story. I think we need to kind of take a few steps back here. This is a story that I can say as a Jew who's, you know, we're going to be celebrating Passover in two nights. It goes back to the Passover story. It's really a question. Are we going to, you know, stand up against oppression? Are we going to make a move that there's no guarantee what we're going to do, but we have a chance at changing a paradigm, or are we just going to accept, okay, we're, you know, we're slaves, we're oppressed, and we're going to allow a terrorist regime that has expressly said they want to kill and destroy the United States. Multiple times they've said that they want to destroy Israel. Are we going to allow them to become nuclear? Are we going to allow them to build up their ballistic missile program? Or are we going to say, you know something, there's no guarantee? Well, we're going to hearken back to a story that is 3,000 years old, which has inspired multiple stories throughout the world, which is, you know what, there's no guarantee. There's never been a guarantee to defeat evil, but there is one guarantee. If you don't stand up to it, you're going to lose.
Rudy Giuliani
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Mark Kimmitt
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Rudy Giuliani
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Piers Morgan
Eamon Dean, you've made a point that you've got to filter out all the noise in a fast moving situation like this and try and get to the reality of the movement of military assets. You say deployments don't lie, narratives do. The rest is theater for markets, publics and gullible media. And of course, that is often the case in every war. Again, from where I sit out here, it's not that I don't think that the Iranians are a very bad regime. They are and have been since they took power in 1979. It's not that I'll lose any sleep over the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. He was an appalling human being who terrorized his own people, who sponsored terrorism all over the region, largely aimed at Israel. So I can totally get all that. However, launching such a full throttle attack on a country with 90 million people where the regime clearly has a lot of firepower to protect itself. 250,000 of the IRGC, you have half a million paramilitaries, have nearly a million regular army. They've got a lot of people around to enforce their will. And so far there's no sign of any public uprising. There are a number of reasons for that, not least of which bombs flying around, but I just don't see any sign of a victory here. I see a lot of bombs going off, a lot of show of military might. But I also see the Iranians winning the economic war quite easily and quite devastatingly. You know, I'm looking at the markets, I'm looking at the oil production, gas production. And now I see Trump in a message this morning in which he talks about potentially going after desalination plants in Iran. Well, the first reaction of Iran to that would be to go after desalination plants in the Gulf states, which would be utterly devastating. I mean, for people who don't quite grasp what that means, you're talking about desert states that rely on desalination plants for water. If you get rid of those, they don't have much drinking water left before they all start dying. So these are incredibly bellicose, serious threats that Trump is lobbing out all the time, whilst at the same time saying, actually, you know what, we're talking to them and it should be over soon. I Just find all this not just confusing, but borderline ridiculous.
Amin Dain
Well, Piers, March 2019. So that's about seven years ago on my podcast, I talked about the reason why Saudi Arabia went to war in Yemen against the Houthis. And in that conflict, in that podcast, I said that one of the reasons is that Saudi Arabia wanted to protect, above everything else, water desalination. Because you see, during the Gulf War between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, and I grew up in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia at that time and I was from Bahrain, so I know all about the situation in the Gulf at that time and how it was really harrowing and really threatening. But at the same time, the Saudis realized that their water desalination plants on the Gulf were under threat from Iran and in a future conflict. Because since I grew up, I always hear about Iranian threats from across the water. So it's not something new. So the Saudis moved many of these water desalination plants to the west, to the Red Sea, even though it will cost far more in terms of economics of doing it. However, then 2014, the Iranians chased the Saudis all the way into the southwestern flank of their country and they push the Houthis into taking over the power in Yemen and you know, after a bloody civil war, and then they absolutely start threatening water desalination in the west of Saudi Arabia. So it appears the Iranians has been threatening to close the Straits of Hormuz since I was a 7 year old child, and that was 40 years ago. I mean, I feel old now. And they've been threatening the water desalination of the Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries for 40 years. And they've been threatening to attack energy facilities. In fact, the attack against energy facilities happened already at the hands of the Iranian proxies in September 2019 against Aramco, the biggest.
Piers Morgan
Right, but what they've been given here is license to do it under the guise of retaliation because they had the
Amin Dain
license from long time ago. Piers.
Piers Morgan
No, no, I'm not disputing what you're saying anymore.
Amin Dain
They've always been doing it.
Piers Morgan
No, I understand. But to the world, what it looks like is that. All right, fair enough. You know, Iran's getting bombed everywhere. The Israelis are bombing their refineries. Why shouldn't they bomb other people's refineries? So they're using everything that's happening to them as an excuse to do probably what, as you say, they've wanted to do for a long time. But what they have worked out is that they can control the global economy in a way that I think the Americans have massively underestimated, and I think it's come as a nasty shock.
Doran Spilman
Seriously, I don't think. You can't win a war this way, Pierce. I mean, this kind of reasoning. I'll give you an example. Imagine there's, you know, there's an illegal arms dealer on your street, right? And so you call the FBI, you call the police, and they surround the house, and the guys inside the house start shooting at you, right? So what are you gonna say? Oh, you know, we gave them an excuse to shoot at us. You know, we gave them license to shoot at us. No, if you're gonna go after the arms, then the guys are gonna pick up the arms that they're threatening, and you're gonna use it. What's the difference? Iran would have used this anyway. They would have closed the Straits of Hormuz. Pierce. The difference is, had we waited, they would be closing the Straits of Hormuz with a nuclear threat, with an armed nuclear weapon. Could you imagine the price of oil if there's a nuclear Iran? And they're crazy, right? I've got ballistic missiles landing next to my home with massive warheads, which, if one of those landed in England, God forbid, and if it's unprotected, can take out 50 blocks if we don't stand up. Now, Iran's. This isn't giving license to them. This is trying to defeat them, and they're using whatever they have at their disposal.
Piers Morgan
But then it comes down. Okay, but then it comes down to how an impending threat. You feel Iran was posing. And I am not convinced, as I wasn't by the argument about Saddam hussein back in 2003. I am not convinced that there was an imminent threat from these weapons in the way that people have tried to sell it. And I think that's the problem. And I think that, you know, there are lots of bad regimes. Lots of bad regimes around the world. Well, Dorian, there are lots of bad regimes around the world, like North Korea, that America does not attack. Right. Even though every argument you would use against the Iranians works equally to the Iranians, to the North Koreans. So there are reasons you don't do this kind of thing.
Amin Dain
Not at all. Not at all.
Piers Morgan
Well. Okay.
Amin Dain
Not at all.
Piers Morgan
Well, there's a reason no one's attacked North Korea.
Amin Dain
I'm sorry. I mean, that's a false equivalent. Please. I mean, comparing North Korea to Iran. First of all, North Korea did not recruit 700,000 young men. From across the region, from Iraq, from Iran, from Iran, also from Yemen, from Lebanon, from Syria. They did not recruit all of these young people into joining non state actors, terror militias in order to destabilize their own countries and then attack neighboring countries with ballistic weapons. They were not supposed to get them in the first place. So you see the problem here is it's not. North Korea is just sitting in its own little box. Perfect. At least it is contained. It's a contained threat. However, Iran refused to be a contained threat. They explained.
Mark Kimmitt
That's just not true. Let me. First of all, I think it's a good equivalent for a number of reasons. Yesterday, North Korea tested a ballistic missile that can reach the United States homeland. They're not sitting in their own. But I also believe it's a good comparison because United States and the four parties, and then the six parties spent many, many years negotiating with North Kore, who convinced the world that they weren't going to build a nuclear weapon. We threw money at them, we threw food at them, we threw access to the international system. And they continue to say, no, we'll never develop a nuclear weapon. Do you think that Iran is not following that same playbook? Of course it is.
Piers Morgan
Yeah. Well, I'm sure that's true. Just hold fire panel for a moment. I want to bring in another guest now, General Sir Richard Sheriff. He's a former NATO commander. General, welcome to Uncensored.
General Sir Richard Shirreff
Thank you for having me.
Piers Morgan
You've been pretty scathing about this. You've called Operation Epic Fury staggeringly arrogant. And you wrote in the Daily Mail. So we are living through. And as a lifelong soldier, I don't ask this lightly. The outbreak, are we living through the outbreak of World War Three? Certainly I can't remember a more perilous moment in geopolitics in my lifetime. And I'm now 70. I can't either. I'm actually 61 today and I can't remember that either as it's gone on. We're a month in now. Does your fear about this escalating to that kind of level, has that increased or decreased?
General Sir Richard Shirreff
It's increased without question. I think the attack a month ago was launched without thinking through the possible consequences. I'm sure that military commanders would have war gamed to death the potential for closing the Strait of Hormuz and would normally have taken sort of action to prevent it. But clearly it did not happen on this occasion. And I think the assumption was made that a lightning industrial scale aerial assault such as we've seen would be Enough to do what? I mean, we didn't know. There's no clear design for battle. There is no clear strategy. There is no clear idea of how this war ends. I think, and my concern is that we are about to see escalation, potentially putting troops on the ground on the islands of the Strait of Hormuzen or wherever. And then I think we have to take account of the linkages, the linkage between what's going on in Ukraine with Russia's genocidal war there, the fact that Russia is now supplying drones and targeting information to the Iranians. And I've no doubt there are further and wider linkages. So I think this is a deeply, deeply, globally destabilizing event. Not least, of course, it has completely knock the global economy, the potential for knocking the global economy awry in a major way. Let's not assume the Strait of Hormuz is going to be opened anytime soon because if the Americans land amphibious troops for whatever on that coastline, this thing is going to run and run and run and we're going to be back into a worse situation. You're probably not old enough to remember 1973 and the oil crisis then. Well, you might be, but we'll be back into that. But times 10.
Piers Morgan
Yeah, I was 8 actually then, but I do remember it vaguely. But I think the trouble is no one's learned the lessons from history. And I look at what's going on and I think you were the deputy Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. You see some of the rhetoric coming out of Donald Trump now, very bellicose and negative about Europe, about NATO, about what he perceives to be the lack of cooperation here for Operation Epic Fury. If you were still in your old job, how would you be handling this?
General Sir Richard Shirreff
Well, I think I would make the assumption that Donald Trump has pretty much single handedly torpedoed NATO as an alliance. You have to understand NATO is an alliance which flourished for pretty nearly 80 years. And it's based on trust, it's based on common values, it's based on the doctrine of collective defense, that the alliance is there to support an ally if attacked. The famous Article 5 From the moment we saw Trump too come into power, we saw Vance and Hegseth announce very clearly that America was not going to underwrite European security. Now, I get that because the Europeans, frankly, have been freeloading from America for decades. And so there's a part, Europe has a part to play in this. But then move forward the fact that two months ago Donald Trump threatened to attack the territory of a NATO ally Denmark over Greenland. Nobody has forgotten that. Europeans will not forget that. That is a grotesque breach of trust that the lead dog in the pack turns on the other, a smaller dog in the pack, as it were. So no surprise that no NATO allies prepared to support Trump in this particular ill starred mission. No surprise for a start, because it's not a NATO operation. NATO does not cover the territory of the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf and absolutely does not support an ally launching an unprovoked, although you may argue that, but an attack which could well be construed as illegal against a party that had not attacked it. So there's no way that NATO should or could support it. But the message for NATO now is that NATO's got to put its act together. The European members of NATO have got to get their act together, recognize that, yes, they have to maintain links with America and Certainly in the UK's case, the intelligence and the military links are much deeper than political. They are built on, frankly, shoulder to shoulder, brothers and sisters in arms over many years. But that America as an alliance ally, a member of the alliance, is not going to play a central part. So Europe needs to step up to the mark, drawing on Mark Carney's words from Davos, develop and build an alliance based on the middle powers, which it can do if it's prepared to make the necessary sacrifices and European leaders are prepared to show the necessary leadership.
Piers Morgan
In one word, is the special relationship done over? Kaput.
General Sir Richard Shirreff
I think the special relationship is a fantasy put about, if I may say so, peers by the media and politicians. It died, if it ever was one. It died in 1956 at Suez. And it's crazy to go on banging on about the special relationship.
Piers Morgan
Couldn't be clearer. General Schiff. Thank you very much, Steve, for joining me. I appreciate it.
General Sir Richard Shirreff
Thank you for having me.
Piers Morgan
Well, back to my panel now. I'm pleased to say we've been joined by the former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who I'll come to in a moment. John, welcome back to you. General Kimmet. You were shaking your head throughout a lot of that interview with a British former general. You didn't agree?
Mark Kimmitt
Well, a couple of things. He first said that NATO has never operated in that region. He's just absolutely wrong. Operation Ocean Shield was conducted by NATO as part of the counter piracy operations. So they have been there before. Second, the special relationship is not something that simply was a whim of the media. I lived that my entire life, 30 plus years in the military. I served side by side with Brits. We shared intelligence and we shared foxholes. So I think that special relationship still exists. And this notion about in his lifetime, he had never seen something this whacked up. For God's sakes, the 300,000 dead and wounded at Gallipoli because of British arrogance seems to me a fairly good comparison. So it just always bothers me when somebody with a nice Oxbridge accent comes on and starts lecturing to the Americans.
Piers Morgan
You're sounding a little.
Mark Kimmitt
And one last point. There is a solution to the Strait of Hormuz, which is I do not believe that Iran wants to fight with the British, the French, the Germans. 1981-1989, the United States escorted Kuwaiti flagged, flagged and escorted Kuwaiti tankers in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. We can't do that this time because the Americans are belligerents. I wrote an article recently and the title was Where Are the Allies? So why aren't the allies like Britain and France and Germany, who have far better capabilities in countermeasure and they're not active belligerents in this war? Why are you not escorting the tankers in and out? China would join you as well. So as everybody is wringing their hands as the United States is bringing the world economy to its knees, why doesn't Britain and France and, you know, God forbid NATO take on that mission?
Piers Morgan
Just out of interest, General, where were you educated?
Mark Kimmitt
The United States Military Academy and Bishop o' Connell High School, a trade school in Arlington, Virginia.
Piers Morgan
You have a remarkably eloquent and clipped American accent, I have to say, notwithstanding
Mark Kimmitt
from being around the Brits. It's that special relationship I've had with the Brits over these years.
Piers Morgan
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John Kiriakou
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Piers Morgan
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John Kiriakou
Oh, I think this is a disastrous miscalculation. Where do you even. You know, there's a very significant split right now within the Republican Party here in the United States. Yeah, there were a lot of Republican voters who voted for Donald Trump because they believed that he really was the no foreign wars president. You might recall February 14, Valentine's Day 2016, during a Republican debate in which Donald Trump called George W. Bush a war criminal for getting the United States involved in the war in Iraq. And now, all of a sudden, it's as though it's John McCain's neoconservative Republican Party again. It seems to me that Trump surrounded himself with some people, like Tulsi Gabbard, for example, and J.D. vance, who reportedly have been opposed to these foreign interventions. But then others like Marco Rubio, who is sort of the successor to the John McCain wing of that party, and the party and the president himself don't know which direction to go.
Piers Morgan
Well, I think Lindsey Graham. I'd add Lindsey Graham into that.
John Kiriakou
Lindsey Graham.
Piers Morgan
I think he's been extremely vulnerable.
John Kiriakou
100%. Right.
Piers Morgan
But what you're really, it's so true about the split in the party. I saw Matt Walsh yesterday from the Daily Wire making the point that almost every Republican he's been talking to is against this war. And he said a. That's highly unusual when you have a Republican administration that's gone to war for Republicans to be as against it as he is hearing personally. Anecdotally, he thinks he's not showing up yet properly in the polling. But I saw a thing about enthusiasm for the midterms, and I think the Republican enthusiasm now is down to like 60% and falling like a stone. Right.
John Kiriakou
Which, again, that's the danger.
Piers Morgan
And I think that's the kind of quiet. That's the quiet voice there of people saying, we don't get this. This guy. The whole point of Trump was he would not take us into foreign wars. Especially in the Middle east and definitely no boots on the ground. You know, I do think if he commits boots on the ground and it goes even half wrong, as many military strategies think it could, but then I think it's. This becomes his legacy. And again, I just asked the question and I would ask it to the president myself. If he, if he calls me, I would just say, why did you do it? Now I don't get it
John Kiriakou
either.
Doran Spilman
I don't think I've ever seen a gathering of more spineless people in my entire life. This is just simply. It's like a vacuum, Pierce. Like President Trump woke up one morning and decide to go attack Iran because Israel convinced them as if Iran does not pose a nuclear threat. As if there's a.
Piers Morgan
Well, hang on. Yeah, but Dory, hang on, hang on.
Doran Spilman
For you, Piers, to say that they're
Piers Morgan
an imminent threat, we'll take your insult, but let me just respond. The reason people think that's what happened is because that is what the Secretary of State of the United States told everybody on camera. Just to remind you, Marco Rubio said when he was asked why did America take preemptive action in this way? He said because another country brackets Israel had informed the United States they were attacking Iran and the expected result would be that Iran would under that incidence, it would then attack American interests and therefore they had to get in first. And JD Vance has also said the same thing. We're not making this up. This is something coming out of the mouth of these senior people in the administration.
Doran Spilman
Pierce, why did trump join the 12 Day War at the end of the war?
Piers Morgan
Well, the 12 day war, Israel had
Doran Spilman
been fighting alone for 11 and a half days. Why did Trump swoop in these nuclear reactors? Because he believes that a nuclear Iran poses a major threat. Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, they've all said many different things.
Piers Morgan
We were told that freight was eliminated.
Doran Spilman
The President himself said.
Piers Morgan
We were told the 12 day war has killed. Let me answer.
Doran Spilman
Thousands of Americans over the years. Understand, nobody just speaks to the American people. This is their story. They don't need a reason to understand that there's evil in the world and stand up for evil. And by the way, the Brits are the ones who taught us this.
Piers Morgan
Sure.
Doran Spilman
The importance of standing up against evil. What I don't understand about any of the people you brought on, are we just then going to surrender and let Iran just grow into a nuclear armed terror regime? Or does anyone, including you, have another idea of how to prevent this?
Piers Morgan
Yeah, I think the honest answer about that is that.
Doran Spilman
I didn't think so.
Piers Morgan
Well, I haven't answered.
Mark Kimmitt
Well, while we're doing that, I'm going to take a look at my spine here. Apparently, it's been eviscerated.
Doran Spilman
Well, not all of you, but some of you. I see three with spines, including myself here. So you're one of the.
Piers Morgan
But there's nothing. There's nothing. I don't think there's anything particularly heroic or courageous about launching the biggest military attack of modern times with the most overwhelmingly powerful military in history against Iran. That doesn't take particularly.
Doran Spilman
It's not to be a hero who needs to be here.
Amin Dain
It's to be a threat.
Piers Morgan
No, but I don't understand what the impending. I don't agree that there was an imminent impending threat. I think the imminent.
Doran Spilman
What would it take?
Piers Morgan
Well, let me answer. The only imminent impending thing was that Benjamin Netanyahu told Trump we're going to attack when we now know from Antony Blinken, a previous Secretary of State, that he tried the same thing with Obama and Biden told them he was going to attack. And then both Biden and Obama said, well, we're not coming with you. And then guess what? Israel didn't attack. And that is why people believe, when you add Rubio's comments and Vance's comments, that what happened here is that Netanyahu railroaded Donald Trump and into going along with this in a way that was actually rejected by Biden and Obama, and that the actual threat, which is we're going to do it anyway, he probably wouldn't have done it anyway if it wasn't for the Americans. So, you know, history will tell us, I guess, the answers to these questions. But it was fascinating to me that Blinken said what he said. And as to where we are now, how does it square? Surely, Doran, you must see the unbelievable risk of committing ground forces to Iran to get enriched uranium from deep under the ground when we know how heavily protected it is and we know how cunning the Iranians have so far been in the way they've responded in this war. I think it's a terrifying potential escalation that could lead to the deaths of many, many, many Americans. Right. And I say, I say, for what? Where was the impending threat? Where was the evidence? It takes me back to 2003.
Doran Spilman
Here's the evidence.
Piers Morgan
Hang on. You say I'm spineless. Let me answer you about spine. I was editor of the Daily Mirror newspaper in the uk, one of the biggest selling newspapers in the world at the time. I took on My own government, Tony Blair, the Labor government. We were a labor supporting newspaper. I waged one of the most ferocious campaigns against a war in media history, and it failed. And we know what happened in Iraq, because I did not believe that there was the evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction or that he was about to use them or hit London in 45 minutes or any of that bullshit. And you know what? It turned out very sadly I was right. And yet 20 years later, utter mayhem followed that illegal invasion, as I see it. So I don't think it's necessarily lacking in a spine to say sometimes that these wars are wrong and they're fought on false pretexts and, and that the public is entitled to stand up and say, not in my name. That actually can often take more courage than simply dropping a load of bombs on people.
Doran Spilman
Pierce. We see that Iran has fired now thousands of ballistic missiles, including those that land in Israel in population centers. They fired two ballistic missiles towards Diego Garcia, which, yes, had they not fired them to the east and they fired them to the west, could have landed in London, the warhead on a single ballistic missile. If it's a ton and a half, do you know what the impact zone is? It's a hundred square blocks in London. What would it take for you to acknowledge that there's actually an imminent threat? We have ballistic missiles landing all over. At what point when the nuclear warhead is on the ballistic missile and it's on its way to Israel, do we then say, okay, this is an actual threat, or do we stand up today against a terror regiment that has developed proxies throughout the Middle east that created Hezbollah, created Hamas, created the Houthis, took over the United States Embassy in Iran, has driven trucks and blown up thousands of hundreds of marines and have tried MI5, has prevented 22 mass casualty terror attacks in London since 2022.
Piers Morgan
Okay, let me bring John, but John back in. John, your response to that.
John Kiriakou
Where do you even begin? The Iranians have been reactive to this, not proactive. You know, people watch on the news what's happening in Lebanon, in Gaza, in the west bank, in Syria. There has to be a response. You can't just say, well, you know what, we're an existential threat to the Israelis, so of course the Israelis are going to have to bomb us. That's just not real life. I can tell you, in all the years that I was in the CIA, no matter who the Israeli prime Minister was, every single time an Israeli prime minister came to Washington, no matter who the President happened To be. The Israelis would say, please help us bomb Iran. Please help us bomb Iran. Please help us bomb Iran. And the President always said, no, until this one. I think that President Trump was duped by Benjamin Netanyahu. And now we're in a war that is not ours from the beginning and that we cannot win. And this is another thing, too. My own experience in the CIA and at some of the highest levels of government, I was the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director throughout the Iraq war. There's never an exit strategy. It's easy to attack a country, it's easy to overthrow a government. But then what do you do? That's the hard part, right?
Piers Morgan
I mean, Amyn Dean, that is the reality. And that is why Donald Trump was always so vocal. I'm not gonna do this. And yet here he is. He's doing it to the biggest. The biggest place he could possibly be, doing it with the greatest risk. And that's the bit I don't understand. I think you're one of the spineless three. So maybe you'd like to respond to.
Doran Spilman
No, he's got a spine.
Piers Morgan
Oh, he's got a spine. Okay, great.
Mark Kimmitt
We're down to two.
Piers Morgan
Okay, we're down to two spineless people. So just the CIA guy and the guy that rightly called the wrong illegal wars. Got it. Okay.
Amin Dain
Well, look, this war was going to happen by hook or crook, because at the end of the day, you know, the Iran represented not the perfectly rational, logical player in the established global order in this poker table, the global poker table where the Russians, the Chinese, the Brazilians, the Indians, the Europeans, the Americans. You see, at the end of the day, if you come to the poker table and you try to cheat and undermine everyone and to try to be absolutely loutish and brutish about it, at the end of the day, you will be escorted out of the premises unceremoniously, and then you will be terminated with extreme prejudice. And this is the problem with people who don't understand that the Iranian threat was accumulatively growing stronger and more dangerous as the years progress. Again, what is so normative about Iran's politics in the region? You have to understand that Iran was expanding across the region, a region that actually contained more than 50 plus percent of the world's traditional energy reserves. And that is a threat to the global established financial order that is backed by the dollar as a reserve currency. You cannot allow Iran to become the hegemon of the entire region. And then Iran can do whatever it wants when it comes to charging for the petrol with other currencies, undermining the status of the US Dollar as the reserve currency of the world. If you allowed Iran Amin to have such unchecked power across the region is going to be tremendously, I mean, as always, President Trump say, tremendously dangerous to the status of the United States, you know, financial system as the financial system of the world, you know, and add to this the fact that you cannot like, I mean, basically say that Iran's politics and rhetoric towards its neighbors, it's not just only Israel, Some people always saying, like it was an existential threat towards Israel since I was a child. Their entire rhetoric wasn't just only about Israel and America. It was also about Saudi Arabia, it was about Kuwait, it was about the UAE. The fact that the UAE trading with Iran for more than 40 years and at the first sign of trouble, they threw more than 2,500 ballistic missiles and drones at the UAE. What does that tell you? It tells you basically that their entire plan, their entire military strategy was about hegemony over the oil rich neighbors. As simple as that. They recruited so many young men, 700,000 to be part of non state actors, you know, illegal non state actors. In what world can we tolerate that? And the United States, at the end of the day, if they want for the America first crowd, America cannot be first at home, if it's not first abroad, if it's not fast overseas. Because at the end of the day, the entire military, the entire economic system depends on it being the hegemon of the world and the guardian of the maritime, global, Established maritime imperium.
Piers Morgan
Yeah, okay, but look, you're making an assumption that America is going to win this. And I think that's quite an assumption to make right now. Yes.
Amin Dain
Because at the end of the day, it's the calculus of the firepower. At the end of the day.
Piers Morgan
Okay, we'll see. Despite all that, Iran, we will see whether the firepower alone can win this war.
Amin Dain
It's not just only firepower. At the end of the day, what is a victory? Arabs always say, you know, that victory is just to be patient. Is your patience outlast your enemies?
Piers Morgan
Yeah.
Amin Dain
Basically the.
Piers Morgan
My guess is, my guess is there
Amin Dain
is no economic patience in Iran. My guess is their economy will collapse.
Piers Morgan
My guess is that the Iranians will have a lot more patience than Donald Trump. We shall see. We shall see.
Amin Dain
We will see.
Piers Morgan
All right. We'll have to wait and see. I've got to leave it there. Panel, thank you. Interesting debate. Thank you very much. Indeed. Well, I'm pleased to say that I'm joined now by Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and lawyer to President Trump. Rudy, welcome back to Uncensored.
Rudy Giuliani
How are you, Piers?
Piers Morgan
I'm good. I've missed you.
General Sir Richard Shirreff
You?
Rudy Giuliani
Well, I do. Me, too. You're doing very well.
Piers Morgan
Thank you.
Rudy Giuliani
We don't agree completely, but. But I really appreciate your ability to. To really put out both sides. I want to compliment you on what you did do Fuentes.
Piers Morgan
Oh, thank you.
Rudy Giuliani
I was. That was one of the best interviews I've ever seen. Ever after. Particularly after he basically got that interview from Tucker where Tucker put him on his lap and was patting his head.
Piers Morgan
Well, I think the people like Fuentes, you've got to challenge them. That's the point. You can't. You can't give them a free run.
Rudy Giuliani
Really well. And you did it without being nasty or you're like a good cross examiner. I would have hired you as an assistant U.S. attorney.
Piers Morgan
Do you know what? I sometimes think I wish I'd been a lawyer, but that's for another life. Rudy, let's talk about Iran. Rudy, you've said, I think that Trump is reasserting himself on the global stage. Do you still feel that a month in?
Rudy Giuliani
I do. I do. And, you know, I have to tell you, knowing him 40 years, I can tell you that his views on Iran go back long before all. I mean, in the 1980s, he's actually on record talking about it. But I can remember having conversations with him where we both felt, particularly after the Marines were hit in Lebanon, we wondered why Ronald Reagan didn't take him out after taking the hostages, embarrassing the hell out of the United States and then killing our Marines. I think this is like, this should have happened, like, 35 years ago, and a lot of people would be alive today and the world would be a lot better. But we can't live with nuclear weapons in the hands of an irrational regime. This is not Putin. This is not Xi Jinming. They're terrible people. They're very evil, but they're not irrational. They don't want to die. The Ayatollah and the people around him rationally displaying the fact that they do want to die. Ayatollah knew he was going to get it. He sat there, and I think he thought he was going to go up to paradise and find his 72 virgins. So this really fits in what my biggest hero used to say. Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan used to say mutually assured destruction is the way we kept this world together for A long, long time during the Cold War. But it's immoral because it rests on the fact that both sides have to have a rational leader. You get a crazy man on either spot. Goodbye, world. And we got a crazy man who wants to get nuclear weapons, has already killed thousands of Americans. Chants every week that he wants death to America. I don't know how much more, how much more of a threat you have
Piers Morgan
to have, but given he's been replaced, it appears, by his son, although we haven't seen the son as supreme leader. And the son has now lost his father, his mother, his wife and two of his kids, reportedly may even have died himself. We just don't know. But clearly the ideology hasn't died. The IRGC remain in place. And I just think, and General Kimmitt just shared this concern, that if America was to now commit ground forces into Iran to try and get, for example, the enriched uranium, it could be one of the most dangerous operations American forces have ever engaged in. And if, as you say, you're dealing with unstable people who don't mind dying for their cause, does that not concern you, really?
Rudy Giuliani
Of course it concerns me. I mean, when we lost our first soldier, you say to yourself, is it worth it? And now what, 13? But the reality is it worries me more that we have a world in which, I mean, at one point, Iran was a substantial power in the Middle East. It looked like they had an empire across the northern part of the Middle East. I mean, they control Syria, they control Lebanon. They had three or four proxies that were extremely dangerous. I mean, Hezbollah was undefeatable at one point that we thought. So to let them move back into that situation again puts the whole world in danger. Why do you think they shot that missile that went, what did it go, 2000, 2500 miles? They wanted to show Europe, you know, we can hit you at this point. And they've actually attacked the Emirates more than they have Israel.
Piers Morgan
Right.
Rudy Giuliani
Which has to tell you that their aim here is either totally irrational or it's to be the dominant power in the Middle East.
Piers Morgan
Or there's a third. You could look at it, which is it shows you they're actually being quite rational and quite cunning. They know they can't compete with America, Israel, militarily, they can't compete with the military firepower in terms of just numbers. But when it comes to strangling the global economy by closing the Straits of Hormuz, and when it comes to attacking the Gulf states in the way they have attacking refineries and tourist Areas and so on. Killing for now, stone dead the business models of those states until this is over. That shows a lot of rationality, actually. It's a rational response to defending yourself when you can't do it purely with military firepower, isn't it? They've. They've shown a cunning which appears to have been underestimated by America and Israel.
Rudy Giuliani
Well, I'm not sure it was. I mean, I think I. I think I always thought an action against Iran would be a major war. It's a. It's a country that's been building up militarily. In fact, I think had it been two or three years ago, it had been even worse. We've deteriorated them a lot in the last two years. But I mean, the reality is that probably makes sense at the beginning, because that's what I thought. I thought they were doing this in order to get the Arab states to put pressure on the President to call a cease fire. Yeah, but the reality is it's the opposite. European countries want a ceasefire, but they want. I mean, they would surrender if I declared war on them and I'd be able to take them over. I mean, they're all a bunch of useless cowards. But do you really believe that, Rudy? Oh, my God.
Amin Dain
Yeah.
Rudy Giuliani
I mean, the Prime Minister in your country said to say, I have people from England telling me you're going to be a Muslim country in 10 years. I mean, there are the Anglican Church, the Catholic. Roman Catholic Church is bigger in England now than the Anglican Church. And Charles III might be the Muslim monarch of England. I mean, they're taking over and they want to take over. And it's Iran, and Iran is the fuel behind that. You take out the Islamic Republic of Iran, the whole thing moves in the other direction.
Piers Morgan
You realize, Rudy, only 5% of the UK is Muslim.
Rudy Giuliani
It doesn't matter. I mean, they have tremendous. They have tremendous power. How many mayoralties do they have?
Piers Morgan
They have a few merits. But this idea. There's a lot of Americans increasingly concerned that a lot of you guys seem to have this idea that we're literally being overrun by Muslims. And I don't know where it's coming from, because I live. I live in London. I don't get any feeling I'm being overrun by Muslims.
Rudy Giuliani
Well, I was in London about a year and a half ago, and it seemed to me there were an awful lot of women with veils on that I had never seen before. And you have debates over whether Sharia law should be respected. Of course it shouldn't be Respected Sharia law is a cult of death. I mean, the Quran is a cult of death.
Piers Morgan
But Sharia law has no legal standing in the uk.
Rudy Giuliani
Well, not according to a lot of reports that I read in different parts of England. It actually dominates. And Stirmer seems to be very, very affected by them politically. He seems to want to make them happy, make them contented. And certainly he doesn't seem to be trying to make them English, nor do the French seem to be trying to make them French. They're contrary to immigration and assimilation. They just do the immigration part. Immigration and then follow Mohammed. What did Muhammad tell him to do, take over?
Piers Morgan
You're suggesting that all the millions of Muslims who live in the UK have a kind of radical mindset. And I would say back to you that that is simply not the case. All the evidence suggests that that is not the case.
Rudy Giuliani
I don't think they all have a radical mindset. In fact, the majority of them don't. I know Muslims in the United States. I've studied the Korean society.
Piers Morgan
You have about the same number of Muslims in the United States as we have here. And most of them is there.
Rudy Giuliani
They're very, very silent. There's a very, very excessive militaristic form of the Muslim religion which is justifiable based on the literal words of the Quran. And then the rest of the Muslims are very silent. You rarely hear an objection to the horrible things that they do and very often you hear a defense of it. It's very hard to get Muslims to stand up to the atrocities that they have that they commit. And there's a defensiveness that's extraordinarily dangerous. Reminds you of a little of Germany. Certainly all of Germany weren't Nazis. They just were afraid and they were defensive and wouldn't stand up to it. That is a significant problem in the Muslim world and it's beginning to change in the Arab countries. You also can't discount the fact that what you have going on between Iran, Persia and the Saudi Arabian desert is a 1500 year, 2000 year war between the Persians and the Arabs. I mean, they despise each other deep down. Now, what happened and why your theory that it was very rational doesn't work is because the Arab countries are now telling Trump, don't end this and leave them there. Because to leave them there is just to kick just down the road. If they're going to do this to Emirates now, if they get more powerful, they'll do even worse. So if I were the emir, I would be very much in favor of anything and everything that gets this theocracy over with. And I think it's possible to do it. I don't think they're as powerful as they appear to be. I think that we've done tremendous damage to them. God knows we don't know because most of the press and most of the reporting is very much against us. To suggest that they're winning this war like the economists did is absurd. You're not winning a war when you've lost thousands and we've lost 13. I mean, it's absurd. And where you've taken more people out in the Emirates than you have in Israel, the reality is we don't know how much longer it has to go and we don't know when they're going to break, but we have them going in that direction and it's going to take an awful lot to get them back there again if we have some other president has to do it.
Piers Morgan
Well, really, I. Listen, there are many people that share your view about this. I have serious misgivings about this.
Rudy Giuliani
I know you do, and you're entitled to. And there are. And I think it is a difficult war, is always. Yeah, war is always very, very difficult. And it always should be debated.
Piers Morgan
But you know what? I will always allow people that have a completely different view to me to come on and air their views as you've done. And I appreciate it.
Rudy Giuliani
And there are times in which I sit back and run through my head all the things that you're saying. I don't think this is an obvious. That's why I hate people who describe themselves as interventionists or isolationists. You shouldn't be either. I mean, it really depends. It depends very much on how much danger is there to you. And I think, you know, maybe we evaluate that danger differently.
Piers Morgan
Yeah, Rudy, I've got to leave it there, but great to have you back on Sensor. Thank you very much.
Rudy Giuliani
Always good to be with you, Piers. And I tell you, your analysis is terrific.
Piers Morgan
I appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Rudy Giuliani
You're doing a real service.
Piers Morgan
Thanks, Rick.
Rudy Giuliani
Thank you.
Piers Morgan
Take care. Piers Morgan Unsensed is proudly independent. The only boss around here is me. If you enjoy our show, we ask for only one simple thing. Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan uncensored on Spotify and Apple podcasts. And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate and entertain. And we'll do it all for free. Free, independent, uncensored media has never been more critical and we couldn't do it without you.
Guests:
This episode explored the dire and destabilizing consequences of the ongoing U.S.-Iran war, focusing on the potential for ground invasion, the unpredictability of the conflict, and shattered public consensus. Host Piers Morgan conducted a passionate and combative debate with military and intelligence insiders, politicians, and authors, scrutinizing America’s objectives, President Trump’s motivations, and the realities facing the region and the world. Notable throughout were disagreements about the nature of evil, the potential for escalation, the legitimacy of pre-emptive war, and the risk—both military and political—facing the U.S. and its allies.
| Segment Topic | Start | End | |--------------------------------------------|----------|----------| | Military challenges & escalation | 00:00 | 10:53 | | Trump’s shifting objectives & politics | 05:32 | 10:53 | | Philosophy: Standing up to evil | 10:53 | 12:34 | | Regional escalation, economic leverage | 13:05 | 19:34 | | Rhetoric: imminent threat, “spinelessness” | 19:34 | 37:09 | | NATO & U.S.-European relations | 21:52 | 30:54 | | Domestic politics, Republican split | 32:23 | 36:04 | | War pretexts, Netanyahu’s role | 35:01 | 41:24 | | Exit strategy – is victory possible? | 43:29 | 47:42 | | Rudy Giuliani extended interview | 47:55 | 60:55 |
This episode captured the furious arguments and uneasy consensus—or lack thereof—facing Western decision-makers, military strategists, and the public as the Iran war enters an unpredictable and perilous new phase.