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Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews
3/3/26 Daniel Davis on Trump’s Dangerous New War with Iran
00:24:47
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- [00:06]
Daniel L. Davis
You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest according to the American people. What's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
- [00:15]
Scott Horton
This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly.
- [00:22]
Daniel L. Davis
When the president does it, that means that it is not a liberty. We're gonna take out seven countries. They don't know what the they're doing.
- [00:29]
Scott Horton
Negotiate now.
- [00:31]
Daniel L. Davis
End this war.
- [00:34]
Scott Horton
And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, welcoming back to the show the great American hero, Danny Davis. And I say that not because he fought in three wars, but because he told the truth about the Afghan war at great risk to himself professionally and even legally, probably breaking ranks as he did to tell the truth about what a damned liar David Petraeus is in 2012 and will always be remembered for that, as well as his incredible insight in writing. And now, especially on his Daily Show. Daniel Davis, deep dive here on the YouTubes. Welcome back to the show. How you doing, Danny?
- [01:17]
Daniel L. Davis
I'm doing good. Thanks for having me back, Scott.
- [01:20]
Scott Horton
I'm very happy to have you here. But I'm really pissed off that they started this war. And I know that basically you and I both gave the same warnings about why not to do this for the last, well, 20 years on my part and at least a good 15 or so on yours of what might happen if we did this. And for all I know, you warned while you're still in the service, too, why not to? But I mean, to me, this looks like almost like exactly what so many of us in the anti war movement had predicted that they can hit all of these targets up and down the Gulf and including our guys in Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Cutter, et cetera, et cetera, a zillion dollars worth of economic targets up and down the Gulf. And then I guess they still haven't started firing on the Navy yet. I don't know if they're going to try to pick that fight by really like targeting the US Navy out at sea there or if they're, if they have the range to. Or what, I don't know. But maybe they do. And then they. But so far, I think this is the only thing that I really care about in the scheme of things. Seems to be the absolutely most crucial thing is that the Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani in Iraq, who is an Iranian and is the highest ranking Shiite religious cleric in the world, has not declared holy war and has not said, like for example, he did against the Islamic State caliphate. He said all true believers must sign up and go fight the caliphate in 2014. He's not said that about the west now, but he could, and I don't know what that would mean, but I know that he would command a legion many fold greater than bin Laden could have ever dreamed of. If they want to activate. Activate Shiite martyrdom against the west in the world, man, I don't know what all that could entail. That seems to me to be their equivalent of a hydrogen bomb, potentially, that they're holding their. But anyway, whatever, I'm done talking. You just tell me everything that you think about what's going on here, man, and then I'll let you go.
- [03:23]
Daniel L. Davis
Listen, I. I have grave concerns about what this means, both in the present term, the medium and the long term, because I think that we have set ourselves up for some real trouble there. There is the hope that we can just destroy the Iranian regime. And I would say, I thought about saying so that we can get a friendly government in there. But, you know, when you look into it, really, you had Secretary Rubio about three or so weeks ago, went before the US Senate was he was ostensibly talking about the Venezuela operation. One of the senators asked him, by the way, about this potential thing in Iran, if you can succeed in a regime change, what is the plan for afterwards? And he said, yeah, we don't have one. I don't really know. He said, it's kind of early to figure that out. Three weeks ago said, we have no plan. You had Lindsay Graham, who flat out said on, I think it was CBS News a couple of days ago, that's not our job, man. That's not President Trump's job. It's not my job. Our job is just to kill everybody and blow up and then see what happens and then let them figure it out. That's the plan. So what that tells you is that in the unlikely event, but you can never completely eliminate it, that there is somehow the success of it. Apparently the plan is to create chaos. So a, quote, success on our part is to create and so complete chaos in the Middle east, basically. Like what happened with Libya back in 2011, where they just shattered that country after Gaddafi fell. And then I think to this day, you. I think you still have competing governments and there's a low level civil war going on there. So many people have died in between. Of course, you've got Syria, which is fractured when we had the, you know, Al Sharad, the former terrorist leader that we had a $50 million bounty on. But hey, you know, worked for us at this point. So we'll see what happens with that? And now then you want to do the same thing to Iran to just create this chaos into the region so that there's no in uniform government. I, I doubt very seriously that that would be benign. I think that if you quote succeeded and change your military objective, you're going to create more violence for Israel, more terrorism throughout the region and certainly more destruction. Violence on the people inside who I think that the intent to especially from the Israeli side would be to foster division among the various groups in the that would be resulted. I don't think there's even a desire to have a unified democratic government that would be friendly to the US Anything. I think they don't even want that. I think they would. That's why I think they're pushing this razor, the, the offspring of the Shah of Iran in there because they know that that's an incredibly polarizing figure that has, you know, so much hatred from so much of the population. And then they would facilitate other groups too so that they would go against one another. That's what I think that they would do if they were successful. But I think that's pretty unlikely that they're going to be successful. The task here is extremely difficult because once you start attacking another country, you know, you get the whole rally around the flag kind of situation because there is no question there's a big constituency inside of Iran that is genuinely against the A has protested against him for decades and would love to have seen him fall, but on their terms, not on our terms. And I think it's unlikely that we're going to get these opposition figures to join with the Israeli Defense Forces in the US military who's blowing up and killing people all over the country to include hundreds of little kids in a, in a school. But apparently over a thousand total civilian casualties already. I just don't think that they're going to say, yeah, that's cool, I understand there's casualties in Warsaw. I get it, you had to kill a lot of us. But hey, thanks for coming in and getting rid of the Ayatollah. We'll take it from here. I just don't see that happening. But I do see millions of people so far protesting in support of the government. And there's news out just right before we came on the air here that Israel, apparently their intelligence had another major success. They not only knocked out the Ayatollah in the first hours, but now apparently they, they hit the, the Governing Council that was meeting in calm to actually bring a new to vote on a new One, and at least the report is that they destroyed that and killed who knows how many people. So that's another big gash to the government, especially the, the clerical portion of it. So it's anybody's guess as to what kind of impact that's going to have. But you have whatever the military capacity of Iran is, what's proven that we're in a real big time crunch here, Scott. We have got to get this done in the next couple of weeks or we're going to start getting into some real trouble because we don't have enough interceptor missiles and we don't have enough offensive missiles to sustain this combat for months. And then so therefore Iran will do everything in its power to make sure that's exactly what happens. We have set for ourselves a military objectives that is incredibly difficult to attain. And the Iranian side, their objectives is much more attainable and much less complicated, which is to just survive, they have to endure this like Hezbollah ignored it in Lebanon, like the Hamas has endured it to for two and a half years inside of the Gaza Strip when everything in the world is against them like the Houthis have done, you know, like the Taliban did against us. They, they endured for two decades even though we just decimated them left and right. That's all the history that's against this working. And we appear to have gambled on just making this, hoping that we get the regime change, hoping that we get the people turning against them. I think that they look at Libya and said that kind of worked there. Let's hope that works. I mean it took 11 years to get rid of Bashar Al Assad. I just don't think that we can get this done in. Trump even said four to five weeks. But I don't know that we can go even that long because we don't have the, the amount of missiles and we don't have the production capacity to sustain something like that. So the real question is how much capacity does Iran have? How many Shahid type drones do they have? Is it really tens of thousands like is reported? How many missiles do they have? Is it, is it really three or four thousand like has been claimed? Is that enough? Is there more or is there less? Senator Ted Cruz said just a couple of days before this SAR war started off, is that he said intelligence said that Iran had the capacity to manufacture a hundred missiles per month. So that means that they apparently have. Even with all this, the in sanctions we've had and all the other things that have been going on against them, they are still producing Underground, safe from our bombs, those kinds of missiles. So that implies then they can continue going on and maintaining this for a long period of time. Even if they don't get the density they're having right now, that implies that they can keep going on. So if they can keep it together politically and that they can keep the government viable and the people in under control, then it appears militarily that they can continue. Now we have tremendous amounts of firepower that are falling all over them and especially in this, you know, couple of week period. I'm talking about total, we can be profound amounts and you see it on the screen every day. There's a lot of damage going on against Iran, but there's also damage going against Israel, there's damage going against the US and of course our allies throughout the region, military and civilian targets. The Strait of Hormuz has been, if not totally shut down, certainly significantly constrained. And Iran hasn't taken the, the step so far to totally and physically shut it down. They haven't mined the straits, etc. So it's kind of been a suspended situation which is now causing, and I think I saw this morning that since this started, oil has gone up 11%. It's just kind of creeping up because people are going, where's this going? Is it going to be over quick? Will they shut down that straight And I mean like block it off so it's, it's p. Impenetrable. All those things are still open right now. So there's a lot at stake here. It is possible that Iran could collapse and this could end up working. I doubt that it will, but you can't rule that out. But the bottom line is in any scenario, Scott, there is chaos that's going to be set. We again violated the Constitution by going to war. Flat out, straight up war, no declaration, no authorization and we were not attacked. So you can just say now the Constitution is a dead letter. I'm sorry, but that's the fact. The U. S Law is a dead letter. International law is a dead letter. The UN UN Security Council have no power, no meaning. This is unleashing something here that is really dangerous for the world. Whether this quote succeeds or fails, we're in a world of hurt and I'm very concerned about where this is all going.
- [11:56]
Show Announcer/Producer
Expand designs.com that's my friend Harley Abbott's company and he is the webmaster for the Scott Horton show as well as the Libertarian Institute. He is the guy that redesigned the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website. He's Done a lot of great work for other friends of mine. And unlike a lot of web masters and web developers and different guys that I have worked with over the years, the thing is about Harley Abbott and his team is they do what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it and are just extremely reliable and extremely knowledgeable and 100% vouch for the great Harley Abbott over there. You got a website, you need it fixed up, you need a new one. Setting up a business, working on any kind of online project like that. Check out expanddesigns.com man.
- [12:49]
Scott Horton
All right, so there's so much there. But let's focus on the militias there. You got Kurdish communists, you got Baluki bin Ladenites, you got potentially Sunni Arab bin Ladenites, you got Aziri factions. But there are dissident factions in America too. None of whom, even if armed by the Chinese, have the ability to overthrow the US government whatsoever. So like how powerful, even if armed by CIA, Mossad and connected with our Starlink satellites and whatever, how powerful can they possibly be versus the Koods force? And like for example, do we even see now on the ground in Iran the armed groups of militiamen killing cops and attempting to take over government targets on the ground like we just saw one and a half months ago?
- [13:38]
Daniel L. Davis
Yeah, we haven't. Everything will depend on, on scale. How many of these can they get together? Can they get the various factions to, to cooperate for a mutual benefit of getting rid of the government? I mean that's what you would have to do. And I'm certain that there are members of the, you know, whatever British Special forces, U. S Special forces, besides CIA, who knows who all else. I'm sure there are some on the ground. I have heard it from reputable sources that tell me that there is a. It is in fact on the ground. So they're trying to get that done. But see what, what it doesn't get calculated into that is that there are another significant percentage of the population that is for the government. So you. It's not just that they would have this. If you arm these people, they would have to go against, you know, the cuts force or the besiege or just the police, etc. There's also other people in the population that don't want their country destroyed and would also stand up. So it's a, it's a big task. It's a big ask to be able to get done even if you succeed at getting them together. And who knows whether that's going to happen. Or not. Yeah.
- [14:39]
Scott Horton
All right, so now as far as all the missile strikes against American targets from Iraq to Oman, can you give us some kind of appreciation of the scale of how bad that really is compared to how bad it looks or doesn't or what?
- [14:56]
Daniel L. Davis
Yeah, at least what's being officially reported. And I always have to put a asterisk on that because I don't trust anything anybody says anymore on any of the sides. We'll just put it like that. We have admitted that there are six people, six Americans that have been killed in action. Some other number are still seriously wounded and some additional number on that were slightly wounded return to duty. They call it rtd. That's what's being admitted. But we see a lot of video evidence that there's a lot of bombs going off. So either our, our measures, our countermeasures successful, guys are in, in basements, they're in bunkers, etc, and so when these missiles are going off they're not killing anybody or they're not reporting it to us. But so far it seems like that there's a lot of fire and fury, but maybe it's not that much specific damage. We've, we've, we minimized the risk before this by getting a lot of guys out of bases, consolidating them at others. So they tried to minimize how much we could get hit here. And then apparently some reports, and this is confused or conflicting on this, is that we relocated a lot of them out of harm's way even after that, further outside of range. So it looks like Iran is really scatter shooting a lot to cause a lot of damage, a lot of harm, especially to some of the civilian targets. Frankly that's some of the more concerning and worrisome, but I don't know that they've caused a lot of physical military degradation so far. The biggest issue, Scott, is that we are continuing to expend profound amounts of interceptor missiles and a lot of offensive missiles. And the real question is who's got the most. Really the, all of this stuff comes down to it doesn't matter how many planes you have, how many ships you have, how many the other side has. What matters is how many offensive missiles or long range drones can you fire in a sustained manner? And, and how many does the other side have? Because the one that runs out of interceptor missiles first is the, is the one that's going to be losers. I don't care how much great stuff you have or help train your force in this kind of a conflict. If you run out of Interceptors first or if you start getting low and the other side is still able to lob offensive weapons of various sorts, you're screwed because then you can't stop them. And that could, could affect either side. Iran is in the same issue. I have no earthly idea how many interceptor missiles they have, what their production capacity is. And if they run out first, then they're going to be in a world of hurt. But the bottom line is everybody's is going down low. And again back to the if you succeed thing. Even we have expended so many now is and, and we were already low because of the two and a half years we've been supporting Israel, the four years we've been supporting Ukraine and now all of a sudden we're using them on our own. And I'm telling you, whatever the number is, the, our stockpiles are critically low. We're definitely in the red here and our reproduction capacity is, is they're trying to get it bigger, but it's a slow process. It'll take years to get really up to scale and it's minimal right now. So we now have made ourselves, Scott, no matter what happens at this point forward or how long this goes, we have already made ourselves much more vulnerable strategically, globally than we, than we were before any of this stuff started. So it could be a Pyrrhic victory even if we succeed, but we may not. So this is a really, really bad decision in a dangerous time for our national security.
- [18:17]
Show Announcer/Producer
Hey guys.
- [18:17]
Scott Horton
Scott here for Mundo's Artisan Coffees. It's the Scott Horton show flavored coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to scotthorton.org
- [18:28]
Show Announcer/Producer
coffee and it'll forward you on there
- [18:30]
Scott Horton
to Mundo's Artisan Coffees. Get it? They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course, and so they're
- [18:37]
Show Announcer/Producer
moon do and they support peace.
- [18:39]
Scott Horton
And guess what? Scott Horton Show Coffee is the number one best selling coffee at Mundos Artisan Coffees right now. Just go again to Scott Horton.org Coffee well, and the diplomatic consequences already too where the Saudis in the UAE are screaming that we betrayed them by moving the missiles out of their countries to go protect Israel instead. That so much for all the promises of America's umbrella. And all this comes down to it. We'll let the bombs rain down and oh but don't worry, there's not going to be any, you know, worrisome consequences as a long term result of that. All right, last question. Real Quick, before I let you go, I know you got to go, but what about the Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani down in Najaf? What about Iraqi Hezbollah, the Baada Brigade and essentially the Shiite regime that you helped George W. Bush put in power there back in Iraq there too, buddy.
- [19:28]
Daniel L. Davis
Listen, I, I mean that the, the claim was always this, this axis of resistance, as the Iranians called it, the, the Shia arc, I think is the Israelis called it. I mean, we got to be honest, I mean since, since Israel has been going into his, the Hamas and the fighting in the Gaza Strip, since that stuff started, since the 12 day war last year, since the attacks on, on the Houthis and, and now then this war here. And you have not seen the Hezbollah rise up, you have not seen Hamas do anything additionally inside. You have not seen the Houthis stand up. I don't think they're going to. I mean they, and, and why would Sistani enter the fight when all these other ones that were outright armed and prepared by the Iranian side? It looks like it was an empty promise all the way through. I guess you can never say never. True. If we, if they start seeing us getting weaker and, and, and there's a vulnerability appeared, then they might. But right now I, it, I mean they haven't so far. I don't know why. Why they would certainly do it now.
- [20:27]
Scott Horton
Well, so there were attacks at the Green Zone which were, you know, fended off the American Embassy in Baghdad and there was an attack on a base in Irbo that was reported to have come from inside Iraq. And we have seen, you know, they call Katib Hezbollah there. Iraqi Hezbollah has done strikes against American troops in Syria and in Jordan, etc. Although, you know, nothing like on the full scale. And, and Right.
- [20:51]
Daniel L. Davis
Yeah, it's, it's all low level stuff and, and it's, it's kind of ankle biter stuff. It's something I'm watching to see. But it would have to get turned into a sustained and widespread for it to have any operational impact so far.
- [21:04]
Scott Horton
I'm worried about. It is, you know, America has been doing Sistani's bidding since especially January 2004 when he called out George W. Bush and it was him, he said, we want one man, one vote. Right? Everybody and every Shiite in Iraq said that's right. And they all went outside and said one man, one vote. And Geor, he enslaved George W. Bush that day. And, and America fought the whole war for him. And then even when we built the caliphate, still he was able to call up enough Iraqi Shiites to fight that off back, you know, a decade ago. But. So if America's at war, we already killed the Ayatollah, as you reported. It's out today that they killed the ruling council of Mul who had gathered to pick the next Ayatollah and whatever. Then isn't that their religion, that they really don't mind dying? And martyrdom, especially like among the Shiites, can be an extremely powerful motivating factor and force. And it seems like one that is. I'm not like, predicting, oh, worst case scenario. This is. I'm saying this is going to break out. But I'm just saying, isn't that the greatest danger of all? That Sistani is the danger would say, like bin Laden did on the sue, that it's your religious obligation now to resist these people because we say so. And they have literally millions of Shiites who would obey that in a way that bin Laden could have never rallied and never in Baghdadi, could never rally Sunnis to follow them that far, you know.
- [22:34]
Daniel L. Davis
Yeah. And the question is, can Sustani or anybody else, can they all also mobilize that much power and will people follow that and, and really go into it? We don't know. If they do, if they get to that point, if they say, you know, you're actually causing harm to our religion across the board, then. Then they may do that, and then who knows what could happen as a result of that. But like I just said, at least so far, when there's been many opportunities to do it, they haven't done it so far. So I don't. I don't know if they now value, you know, Sistani may say, yeah, I kind of like my little spot here in Iraq, and I'm going to keep on keeping it in. I don't want to bring any fire on myself. I don't know.
- [23:12]
Scott Horton
Right. Yeah. The good news is he's like 89 or something, which means he's a slow and patient, conservative old guy now. But, you know, they just killed the ayatollah in Iran who always said that God said you're not allowed to make nuclear weapons. So we don't know what the next guy's opinion about what God's opinion is about nuclear weapons. But it might not be as conservative as the last guy.
- [23:34]
Daniel L. Davis
It might not be.
- [23:35]
Scott Horton
Yeah. All right, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on my show and talking to us all about this stuff, man.
- [23:39]
Daniel L. Davis
Thank you, Danny. Great, man. Thanks, man. See you soon.
- [23:42]
Scott Horton
Absolutely. All right, everybody, that is Daniel L. Davis from the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.
- [23:47]
Show Announcer/Producer
The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Robertson Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Mundo's Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fool's Errand, Enough Already. And my latest, Provoked How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above@scothorton.org and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at scothortonshow.com and patreon.com ScotThortonShow Bumpers by Josh Langford music, intro and outro videos by Dissident Media Audio Mastering by Podsworth Media. See you all next time.