← Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Trump, Iran, “War Crimes” Claims, and the Double Standard on Targeting Infrastructure | Victor Davis Hanson
01:33:08
Debate over Trump’s rhetoric on Iran has sparked fresh accusations of “war crimes” from critics. But a look at history—from World War II through Iraq and Libya—shows U.S. presidents in both parties have long targeted dual-use infrastructure in wartime.
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- [00:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
So everybody got very angry. And it's true that Trump could have used a better noun for civilization.
- [00:08]
Sammy Wink
The Congressman Ro Khanna has insinuated that these war crimes, and he's specifically referencing blowing up bridges or industry plants as war crimes. And he's equating that to World War II criminal courts, meaning Nuremberg. Do we know of anybody at Nuremberg that was tried for blowing up bridges or. Or military industry?
- [00:34]
Victor Davis Hanson
The Soviets starved to death. They lost about 7 million people that were under German control. They had the two largest encirclements in history where they basically trapped 2 million people. 10% survived. They deliberately starved them. The critics who say that he's genocidal, he should be charged with war crime, they know what he meant. Before we even went in, he said to the Iranian people, help is on the way. And unlike prior American wars, Donald Trump, for over five weeks, has not targeted civilian infrastructure. He has not targeted the civilization of Iran.
- [01:12]
Sammy Wink
I know that you and Jack spoke a little bit about the airman that was rescued, and I think that you guys obviously applauded it like everybody else who was smart did, with the exception of the Democrats and the Europeans.
- [01:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
I gotta stop you right here.
- [01:28]
Sammy Wink
Okay.
- [01:28]
Victor Davis Hanson
Are you going into the Candace Owens tweet?
- [01:34]
Sammy Wink
No, but you could go ahead. This rescue of the airman in Iran was very different from the Nibia Benghazi. Yeah. Misadventure, death of an ambassador.
- [01:48]
Victor Davis Hanson
And the annex braved people at the annex. Hillary Clinton was warned that the consulate was not defensible.
- [01:56]
Sammy Wink
What difference at this point does it make?
- [01:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
And once it proved not to be defensible and they killed, our ambassador would be ambassador or consular official whom I met in Libya before he was consular. He was looking for sites in Libya, and he came into my room in the clinic where it was being operated on with a bunch of food. And he represented the United States informally, but she was given memos that was not secure. But more importantly, there's a lot of controversy that at the moment that started and the crowds formed and they threatened the annex and the consulate. There were people with special forces in Sicily. And as anybody knows about the geography, you can get to Libya in an hour. And they didn't call him.
- [02:51]
Sammy Wink
Hello, and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson. In his own words. Victor is the Martin and Elias Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics, the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com and the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. He's got all his work there, all his articles, these podcasts, both in audio and video, and you can find links to his books. So please come join us there. And we have a lot on the agenda today. This is the Friday News Roundup. So we're going to be talking about Iran, of course, first, the accusation of, of war crimes, perhaps a little bit more about the airman that was rescued. So stay with us for that story and we'll be right back.
- [03:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children. The faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we keep first things first. We've only just begun. America the Beautiful.
- [04:11]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So, Victor, I think we just saw, it's Wednesday almost, just about noon or a little bit before. And we just saw Caroline Levitt give a news conference and she was addressing what has been accomplished and the ceasefire and how Trump has been dealing with Iran, especially his rhetoric on Saturday of blowing up a regime that has ceased to exist.
- [04:45]
Victor Davis Hanson
The civilization will be end. So everybody got very angry. And it's true that Trump could have used a better noun for civilization. But the critics who say that he's genocidal, he should be charged with war crime, they know what he meant and they know what he meant for two reasons. Before we even went in, he said to the Iranian people, help is on the way. And unlike prior American wars, Donald Trump, for over five weeks has not targeted civilian infrastructure. He has not targeted the civilization of Iran. What is he? He hit one bridge. He was threatening to hit dual use. Dual use. These are assets that can be used militarily and for civilian. And he said, they're going to end tonight. But he said, your civilization. And he was talking directly to the theocracy because he should have said, if he was a linguist or explicit or his advisors could have said, your fascistic Islamic culture that runs the country will cease, and there would have been no problem. But he gave his enemies an opening by being a little bit vaguer. But here's the flip side. By saying civilization and by having his critics say that he was crazy, that he was unhinged, that he was Hitlerian, it may have strengthened the credibility to the Iranians. They may have thought, wow, he's gone way over. He's jumped the shark. He's talking about the existential destruction of the physical Space of Iran. Oh, my gosh. And they came to negotiations, at least temporarily. So that brinkmanship reminiscent of Curtis LeMay and we should bomb him back to the Stone Age in Vietnam. It worked. Is it a good thing to do? No. But he did. They know he didn't mean it. They can't decide because on Monday, after that tweet, they were comparing him to Adolf Hitler by Wednesday. Yesterday, we're speaking on Wednesday. By Tuesday, they were calling him a taco. Trump always chickens out. That was Bill Kristol and the. The new coalition of the Democratic Borg. That's what they are. They are mindless mimics that are controlled by an overarching war room that feeds them their rhetoric. And then the vestigial elements of the Never Trumpers, the Bill Kristols and all those people at the Bulwark and partly in the Dispatch, and then I would call them the Remnant maga social media influencers. They. They can't decide whether he's Hitler on Monday or whether he's Neville Chamberlain on Tuesday, the appeaser. I would just like to remind everybody I can't think of a war offhand where we didn't hit dual use. So here's my question. Will all you people on the left and the right go back to World War II and say, we want to strip FDR's name off buildings and monuments because we obliterated, while he was still president on March 11, 1945, Tokyo and 11 cities that followed. And the argument was that they were assembling war materials in their suburban workshops. And we dropped leaflets and said, you should get out. We went in the next day after Dresden and hit all of the rail yards. Locomotives, yes, they were being used to supply the Eastern Front. They were being used to ship Jews. And I have no problem with it. But they were also dual use in Korea. Harry Truman ordered all of the hydroelectric plants of North Korea to be wiped out. There was a movie, a great movie, I thought, with Bill Holden, Mickey Rooney and an array of movie stars, and it was called the Bridges at Tokyo Ray, about bombing the North Korean bridges. We knocked out all the hydroelectric civilian use in North Korea during Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson, Rolling Thunder, Richard Nixon, Operation Linebacker. Both of them went into North Korea and they destroyed bridges and roads and train yards and electric plants. So what I've just talked about is a Democratic Roosevelt, a Democratic Truman, a Democratic lbj. But that's not all. If I could continue, with your permission, Please go ahead. Okay. So then they said, and after Vietnam, they said, we're going to go into the first Gulf War. And that was the decision of George H.W. bush. But his close advisor was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, who incidentally said, when we spot the Iraqi Republican Guard, Iraqi soldier, we're going to cut it off and kill it. Kill it, annihilate it. Did anybody say at the time, well, General Powell, what if they surrender or when you kill some of them, you're going to kill it, you're going to destroy it and kill everybody? They wouldn't say that. But here's the thing. Mark Kelly, senator from Arizona, has been caught charging that Trump is a war criminal. But he was a Navy pilot in the first Gulf War. I don't know the exact missions that he flew. I think he flew over 30 missions quite heroically. I have no problem. I think he did us a service. But those missions that naval pilots flew included hitting telecommunications, hitting TV stations, hitting power plants, hitting bridges. I don't know which he did in each one, but it's likely that he hit dual use as he was ordered. Should I have said or we said, Senator Kelly, we're going to investigate you post facto because you hit things that rob civilians of their civilization. And then we go to the locus Classicus and That is the 1999 bombing of Serbia to stop its war in Kosovo. That was the Bill Clinton adventure. He was asked by our NATO allies, and again, the NATO allies always go on their misadventures. First Libya, and then they go into the Falklands, which was successful. They go into Chad and then they ask us for help. And then they say, now that you're, you're going on misadventures and we can't help you, it's yours. And they're going to find out it's a two way street very soon. But we go into Serbia and we bomb a European country and we took out every bridge on the Danube and paralyzed the entire city of over 1.3 million at the time. And we took out all of the electrical grid for days, hours, every day. Did anybody say to the NATO pilots, and by the way, they wanted to start this and we ended up flying 80% of the missions. But did anybody go back and say, well, we're going to call the International Criminal Court. Pilot, Pilot, pilot. You hit a bridge and you, you hit the power grid and Belgrade and people were being operated on, they died. If that's not enough, we can then go to the 2011 bombing of Libya that was cooked up by the French and the English with the coalition of NATO powers. Gaddafi was on his last legs. The Arab Spring was a mess. It wasn't the democratic renaissance. They told us I had visited the country, he was liberalizing it. He was turning over power insidiously to the next generation that were Westernized. But we decided to go bomb him because the French and the British said it was a humanitarian gesture. And we had the triad, the three sirens, the three graces, if you could say it. We had Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice speaking for Obama, and they said, we've got to go in and bomb these people. We bombed them for seven months. And by the way, after 60 to 90 days, the war Powers Authorization act ends. In other words, you can negotiate from 60 to 90 days about whether you need Congress's approval to make war. After that, it's illegal. Supposedly courts have challenged us, but Obama just said, no, I'm Barack Obama, I'm a left wing. You're not going to do anything because you controlled Congress and they didn't. So he bombed for seven months. Did he hit dual use? You know, if you look at some of the reports, they said, well, he didn't hit. He did. He hit TV stations, he destroyed the port facilities at Benghazi and Tripoli. He hit civilian ships that were transporting material to Libya and oil out of Libya. He hit TV communications, he hit government buildings. Did anybody say these people were war criminals? Those pilots are still around. Can we go try them? How about Barack Obama ordered 540 targeted drone assassinations, assassinations on the Afghan Pakistan border, and he killed four Americans? Not that they didn't deserve, in at least one case, killing. He was a known terrorist. But was there congressional authorization? It went on over six to 90 days. And what was. People were mad at Trump's rhetoric. But let's look at their rhetoric. Did anybody object that John Brennan went before Congress and put his hand on the Bible and swore that he was going to speak under oath, truthfully, and then said there was no collateral damage of these targeted bombing and there was along the border. And I guess you could call the drone assassinations collateral damage because we didn't get all of the terrorists. Every time we blew up kids, we blew up Americans. Did anybody say we should impeach Obama? No. And then more or less. Well, Trump was. Obama wasn't sloppy in his noun use. Yes, he was. He was at the White House court correspondence dinner and somebody. He made a joke about anybody who wanted to date his daughter and he said, be careful, I've got Predator P R E D A T O R lurking. So he was joking about killing 500 people. It was a big joke to him. Nobody said a word. I wrote something about it. So, yes, Donald Trump should have said the civilization of radical Islam theocracy will end. And that would have had no problem. And I know that he meant that because he is one of the only presidents, except for the one bridge he hit, who has not hit any infrastructure and no civilizational dual use targets, as every other president has done. His problem is in art of the deal fashion, he uses bombast, exaggeration, crudity, all to confuse everyone and to stake out an existential crazy position. And then he negotiates downward from it. And who knows, we don't know who he's negotiating with. Apparently the theocrats have their own little counter proposals that are lunatic, fantastical, mythical, but I don't think they speak for we don't know who's in charge. So everybody's freelancing. Some people say, regional people say we're going to close the strait. And the other people say, no, the strait will be open. Nobody knows what's going on. And the chances are Jack Keane and others may be right, that the only thing that they will understand in that chaotic situation is to take out, start taking out bridges and then start unfortunately doing what Obama did in Libya and take out the TV communications, what Clinton did in Serbia and take out the power plants and what Bush did in the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War, they deliberately had learned and they deliberately had avoided in Afghanistan and Iraq, power plants, water, sewage. But they hit a lot of communications, they took out the communication system, they took out a lot of government buildings, they bombed stuff and then they had to rebuild it for the so called replacement government that turned into chaos.
- [18:23]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, I have some questions on that. But first I want to welcome back a sponsor, My Patriot Supply. Everyone's focused on how conflict in the Middle east is raising oil prices. But there's another grim reality to this contention. Oil isn't the only source being constrained. About one third of global fertilizer trade happens through this region. And with spring planting season on top of us, American farmers are sounding the alarm with some saying they can't afford to plant their fields. When one piece of the supply chain gets hit this hard, you know what comes next? High food prices, reduced availability, maybe even panic buying. That's why having an emergency food supply at home makes so much sense. And that's where our friends at Patriot Supply come in right now at preparewithvdh.com that's preparewithvdh.com when you get a three month emergency, emergency food supply. They'll include a free mega protein Upgrade, an incredible $200 bonus you don't want to miss. It's a simple way to protect your family from whatever comes next. Go to preparewithvdh.com that's preparewithvdh.com to get your emergency food supply today. That's preparewithvdh.com we'd like to thank my Patriot Supply for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, I feel you mentioned Mark Kelly and his accusations of war crimes against Trump, but that I think other people need to be pointed, pointed out and that one person at least is the congressman Ro Khanna has insinuated that these war crimes and he's specifically referencing blowing up bridges or industrial war and industry plans as war crimes. And he's equating that to World War II criminal courts, meaning Nuremberg. Do we know of anybody at Nuremberg that was tried for blowing up bridges or, or military industry?
- [20:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
The Soviets starved to death and they had, it was a tit for tat. They lost about 7 million people that were under German control. I mean, they had the two largest encirclements in history where they, they basically trapped 2 million people in the Kiev pocket and outside of Moscow. And they, Most of them, 10% survived of Russian prisoners. They deliberately starved them. So my point is the Russians were on the panel, the judges, so the ally, nobody, the right. The Germans mentioned it. The convicted war criminals. They said that their lawyers pointed out to Dresden, they pointed out all these things that took place, but the winners make the rules. And so, yeah, there was discussion that the United States and the United States, the United States position was morally defensible. And it was consistent. They said in 1941 we were not bothering anybody. You started it. You came over here and bombed Pearl harbor. And then you began a reign of terror. You started killing American prisoners and civilians in the Bataan Death March. You started butchering Chinese. You killed over 16 million of them. So it's very rich of you to suggest that we shouldn't have bombed with incendiaries. 12 wiped out 12 cities and then the two atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So I didn't phase that generation the same thing we said about Germany. We were minding our own business. You declared war on us. We didn't declare war on you first. December 11th, they declared war on us. 10th, 11th. So we went over there and you were in control of all of Europe. And then at great cost to us, 450,000 dead in the two theaters. We liberated Europe and we defeated you. And we know what you would have done had you won, because we saw what you did to Poland. We saw what you did to other countries. So the way that we stopped you was we waged unrestricted, what the British call area bombing. We didn't do it. We didn't do it very well in Europe. We started with precision bombing and B17s, the swine fort raid of ball bearings, the oil raids in Romania. And it was a complete disaster. And Then the earlier 1942, 1943 missions from England all the way into Germany without fighter escort. It was a complete. We lost 40,000 men. So finally we said it only works because the Dresden bomb site is way oversold, especially in Europe with its bad weather, cloudy. So we're going to use what the British called area bombing. We'll try to get closer to the target. We killed 70. We, the allies, killed 70,000 French civilians. We killed more than the Germans did. That came up at Nuremberg. So I don't know what. I don't know what Kelly did. So I have heard people make the argument that he's a hypocrite because he was a naval A6 Skyhawk pilot and their job was not air superiority, but tactical aircraft bombing. In other words, once the more sophisticated planes had achieved air supremacy, then they sent in the tactical aircraft that actually hit the targets on the ground. Ground support, but also infrastructure. And I know that in that war, and I wrote about was conducted much differently than the bombing of Iraq the second time. That's called the good war because it only lasted on the ground 4 days and 72, 42 days in totality. But we didn't remove Saddam. We had to go back. We had the no fly zones. But the point I'm making is there were no. Everything was on target. The UN approved it. NATO wanted to participate. And yet they took out everything. They took out radio, tv, sewer, water, everything to hurt him and to hope that he would be dislodged. It didn't work. And you know, I'm not going to go back and fault them. But for Kelly to be an active participant, I don't hear him say as, and I have a lot of friends, I have to be very careful. But there's a lot of them have gone on social media and said, I want to warn everybody that once he said he was going to end the civilization, you have a duty to disobey that order. No, you don't. If you're in the military and the order is done, is it constitutional? Yes. Is it the wrong word? Civilization could he have said culture or theocracy or. Yeah, he should have. But you're a soldier, so, you know, at least you should know that if you want to risk court martial by disobeying a direct order, you would first say because you'd be put on trial for it. The first question you would be asked is, did you see any concrete examples in the last five weeks where Donald Trump tried to destroy the civilization of Iran that is this the civilian pop. No, I did not. He hit one bridge. Then why did you disobey that order when you knew that was a rhetorical flourish and they would be court martial? Yet I don't like all these civilians people telling military people to disobey orders. And Kelly, he suffers the charge of peddling in things that are not true, but he also suffers the additional wage. He's a hypocrite because he was in that war. And I know those plane Navy pilots and I know what the particular miss and they often hit duel. And I don't know if his critics are correct that he personally in those 30 some heroic missions, I mean, he risked his life and we honor him for that. But I don't know if he hit. He was one of the particular pilots in that squadron that hit those things. But if he did, he was ordered to do it and faithfully carried out the orders to hit a power plant, a TV station, a bridge, a garage, you name it, a rail line. Because he knew and his superiors knew they were used to perpetuate the war and that we were more worried about protecting our soldiers than we were putting Iraq back into the stone age, so to speak. And we did. We inflicted an enormous amount of damage from 91. So when we came in 2003, I went to Iraq twice and I saw things that were destroyed and I asked people, wow, that looks kind of old. He said, yeah, they did that 12, you know, they did that 12 years ago. They still hadn't rebuilt it.
- [27:40]
Sammy Wink
Do you think that the Democrats are speaking first off, I just want to reiterate the point that they. It's an abuse of history and I'm glad that you could bring it back to us. What was the truth about these things? But also, do you think that they're just speaking out of both sides of their house or if the Democrats get back into power, will they really try to run a foreign policy where US Military might. A lot of things about it are off the table, so to speak.
- [28:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
There's no evidence. The only way I can answer all these questions is historically. So I say to myself, Democratic President fdr, unlimited warfare, Truman, atomic bombs, fire raids continued the fire raids after Roosevelt died and the atomic bombs. And then I say to myself, John Kennedy was willing to use nuclear weapons in a stand down off Cuba and tried to invade Cuba with the CIA and the Bay of Pigs and got us into Vietnam. And then I look at LBJ and he was the one that accelerated. Nixon was the one that tried to get out. He inherited that war in 69, it had been going on since 63. So that was another Democratic president. And that was the thing the Republicans used. If you remember in the 60s and 70s they said, Bob Dole said that you were the party of war mongers because he said you got us in World War I with Wilson, you got us in World War II with Roosevelt, you got us in war in Korea with Truman, you got us in war with Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam. That was the tag on Democrats. And then more recently the so called pacifist new Democrats, Bill Clinton, he wanted to really go into Serbia. I went into Wall Journal op ed supporting the NATO use to stop the slaughter of its innocent civilians in Kosovo. But I got in big arguments with a lot of my Greek American friends. And in fact I went in 1999 to Greece and I went to the publishers, I won't mention any names, to a party for the book. And who was there? Milosevic's daughter, very striking blonde, very attractive young woman with a miniskirt with, surrounded with security. Security, believe me, looked pretty scary. And they, she came up to me and said something about. I had supported bombing, very polite by the way, but mentioned it. And so Democrats did that in Serbia and they were, it was three liberal left wingers who wanted to go bomb Libya and Obama wanted to kill, he killed far more people than did George Bush in Iraq through Predator assassinations. And he joked about it. So I don't see any pattern. And then you have Biden, you don't have Biden because Biden never knew where he was. He didn't know when he, he didn't know what was going on in Afghanistan. But they killed 13 civilians with a crazy bomb hit mistakenly. And Mark Milley said it was a righteous hit. It wasn't, it was a mistake. And then you could argue that the lack of security and the complete fallout and the military is not to be blamed because they could never get a coherent order from Biden. And we got what, 13 Marines killed. So Democrats show no reluctance to use force. The only difference is that when they do it, they have a media academic Corporate popular culture, entertainment nexus that rationalizes and institutionalizes. As far as Roe Quana, he can't be believed as a credible person because he's not a serious person. He had tried to carve out a position that he thought might translate to a senatorial bid in California or maybe an appointment by the Biden administration so he could elevate himself from his congressional seat by being the left wing voice of reason. So he tried to be a little bit reasonable, not centrist. But he was on Fox. That's what I'm trying to say. And now he's decided that the party has been hijacked by the Mondame AOC and he's going to outlift them. So now he gets on TV with these crazy statements. And it was so embarrassing to listen to these people. I just watched him. He was saying just two days ago he should be charged with war crimes and he's going to be impeached. And then today he said, well, this is pathetic, this, this peace effort. Well, what is it, Roe? Do you want him to go bomb the infrastructure or do you want him to be impeached because he didn't bomb the infrastructure? And then there was Chuck Schumera. Did you see his talk today? I never laugh out loud by myself, but he basically read this thing. He said there is no solution, he has no strategy. What we need to do now is stop the fighting and enter into diplomatic negotiations. I'm thinking, duh, that's what Trump is getting hammered by the military and by a lot of people who with good cause, don't believe one word, including the word, the Arabic word, the, if it exists. And it's just crazy. You can't win with these things.
- [33:15]
Sammy Wink
As though Trump was not going to do that. Schumer was just.
- [33:18]
Victor Davis Hanson
Did you see the biggest thing that Trump is ecstatic. You got to bring him down to earth. Because he's ecstatic. Because almost immediately the stock market took off. And I had said yesterday in an interview with Steve Edginson from GB News, I like him a lot, but he said that we were in a recession. I said, all they have to do is get a little sniff of a negotiation that hints sort of, kind of maybe those traits. And all these people who are speculators who were convinced by the doom and gloom media that this was going to go on for months and we're going to get global recession. And then they looked at the price of oil under Obama and had gone up to 100 in today's dollars, up to $170 a barrel looked under Biden right before the midterms when he had to basically try to empty this strategic Petroleum reserve to win the 20, 22 minute. They saw all that and they said, this is worse. It's not going to end. It's going to spike. I got to get all the oil I can get at 110, 115 bucks. So they went into the oil market and they're buying like crazy. And now they say, oh, my gosh, Russian oil is back on the market. Venezuelan oil is back on the market. Carg island is still able to export oil. The strait may be open. The United States is draining their reserve. Biden like, or at least a million barrels a day. They've got 14 million barrels of capacity. What am I going to do? I'm going to get rid of it, sell it. And nobody wants to buy it at that price. And they're taking enormous hits. The price is crashing as we're speaking. It can go up again. But I think what I'm trying to say is the left doesn't believe that the midterms are going to be a walkover because they're looking at internal polling and they see that their brand is more unpopular than Trump and they have to have a civil war to tell these people to shut up. That want open borders, illegal immigration, trans, all that stuff. And they can't. They can't shut up. So they're going to keep doing it and they're afraid. So then they think, we got to go back to the playbook. Key Teslas run Tesla drivers off firebomb. Their sales spit in the faces of ICE officers, call them Gestapo, have big shutdown, Shut down the government 3 times. Anti ice will lead into no kings get violent in LA. All of that couched with periodic appearances of Robert De Niro or Jimmy Kimmel or Ro Khanna or Chuck Schumer or Hikem. Jeffries is almost illiterate. I mean, he can't even finish a sentence. Every time I see that guy, he looks like deer in the headlights. His eyes start spinning around like some kind of. Like, what am I going to say? I'm halfway through this sentence and I can't figure out the grammar or the content, but I'll just look around like that sound from the Twilight Zone. Come on, you can do it. You can do it. Haika. But they're worried because if this war ends and the strait is open, then people are going to be into Iran. They're going to look at that and they're going to see rubble. They're Going to see a trillion dollar military devastated. They're not going to find any plan. She was right to say that they were flying 30 or 40 sorties every day in their jets. They're gone. Their missile assembly, they hit the steel plants, they hit the optic plants, they hit all of the military industries that are capable of replenishing on their own. Their mountains are sealed. The nuclear material have to be. Somebody's got to go down in there and get it. But, but the mountain is sealed. And when you look at those posters, I don't want to laugh, it's serious stuff. Of all the theocrats and the revolutionary,
- [37:37]
Sammy Wink
the heads of the Islamic Guard, when
- [37:40]
Victor Davis Hanson
you look at those and you look at those people, there are none left. They've wiped them all out. So that's going to take them years to reconstruct and that's going to be that knowledge will, if they can stop and get the straight open by hook or crook, by June or July, the price of gas is going to be cheap for the summer driving and the foreign investment. The Gulf, he's going to go over to the Gulf people and he's going to say to them, you know he is okay, I neutered Iran for you. And you have 600 fighters you Six nations and you didn't send one, not one. The Israelis did with half your jets. So you promised five or six trillion dollars. I want to see it now. And if you don't, you can deal with the wounded bear yourself someday. And that's going to be a powerful incentive for them to invest in the United States. And then he's going to be in a very popular position vis a vis that Europeans are going to look stupid because the price of the strait will be open and, and suddenly for the first time in years, there's no threat of a nuclear Iranian tipped ballistic missile hitting their cities. And that threat is gone for, I don't know, five or six, seven, eight years. If you have a good president that follows them, it can be gone forever. But they're going to look stupid and he's going to be in a good position to have a fighting chance of keeping the house. I really believe that.
- [39:10]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, I think so too. Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back with a little bit more on this war. Stay with us and we'll be right back.
- [39:17]
Bradley Devlin
Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen. Whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words or his short form content for the Daily Signal. Victor Davis Hansen In a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new.
- [39:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands War.
- [39:34]
Bradley Devlin
And in the age of clickbait and rage bait, that's a really good feeling right?
- [39:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
The media. Thank you. You can leave now.
- [39:42]
Bradley Devlin
Well, if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals long form interview podcast called the Signal. Sit down. Every week we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington D.C. as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policy making process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever with the Trump administration back in office. Because in 2020, 2024, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government and together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you enjoy. Victor Davis Hansen or there too. And drop me a follow on X radleydevlin to stay updated with what's happening on the Signal.
- [40:24]
Sammy Wink
Sit down. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can catch Victor on F. His handle is Dhanson. And on Facebook, Hanson's Morning Cup. So, Victor, I think that Donald Trump has the Iranian regime, their military, et cetera. He's got them all the way down, but he doesn't quite have the foot on the neck. What do you think are the possibilities for any negotiations?
- [40:55]
Victor Davis Hanson
I like Jack Keane. Is it David Bellavia, the Medal of Honor winner? He has dark humor. He said, I'm going to really miss Bridge and Power Plant Day. He didn't mean it to be macabre. I think he meant it to say that that's the quickest way to end the threat. This came up with General Sherman. He, contrary to popular opinion, he did not attack everyday things. He skipped the what was the poor and the middle class. He didn't go after people's homes or farms. He did. He did target plantations. He burned them down, he stripped them of their infrastructure, he destroyed armories, he destroyed rail yards and it really devastated the South. And he said, I'm going to make Georgia howl. And it worked because he said, basically he said in so many words, we're not going to sit here while the army of the Potomac is losing 100,000 and dead and wounded by the rich people in Georgia and the Carolinas still have their slaves and plantations and are feeding that war. So he inaugurated this idea that those were legitimate targets and he championed the idea of the indirect approach. Everybody should be aware that there's two schools of military theory, I guess you would call it die on the vine. Say you have a toxic fruit. Do you cut it off and get into the messy idea. Messy. Or you just go cut down the vine at the stump and kill all the other good fruit with it. And so the indirect approach, it was championed by the General Epaminondas. He first created it, and rather than go fight the Spartan army, he said that the Spartiates, 10,000 of them, don't work, so they can train all day and achieve a level of superiority that is on match on the battlefield. Except for Thebes, eventually. But they get a lot of their food from the Messenian helots. So he went over the Mount Taygetus Pass and freed them all and created this fortified city. And at that point, there weren't enough helots left in Laconia to feed the army, so they had to become productive citizens. And that meant less war training. But the idea was, you go. You want to save lives, so everybody's to going. Said Trump is a war. I mean, Sherman is a war criminal. But there's a great argument who's the war criminal? Neither one was. But if you're a Confederate, who is the war criminal? Ulysses S. Grant, who ground your army down and you lost 300,000 Confederate soldiers? Or William Tecumseh Sherman that almost killed nobody on those marches. He didn't kill very many people. All he. He fought one or two battles and they were standstills. And the final one, he was successful, but he avoided battle. And he wanted to destroy the infrastructure. Excuse me, especially the rail yard, so they couldn't transfer units to the front. And so by the time Lee surrendered, he was under enormous pressure from the legislature of the Confederacy and the plantation class that were saying to him, we're brought. Our currency is worth nothing. The slaves are deserting. We're starving. He's burned our beautiful blood. Please stop. And that's why they stopped. Lee was never defeated in the siege of Richmond. Grant was never able to break through and then physically put him on his knees and say surrender. He surrendered because this huge army was coming from the rear. Sherman. And more importantly, the people of the Confederacy had tasted war and they didn't want any part of it anymore. Anymore. And you can't blame them. They were destitute.
- [44:52]
Sammy Wink
No, I know. I. If we can stay on this, I. I know that you and Jack spoke a little bit about the airman that was rescued. And I Think that obvious? You guys obviously plotted, applauded it, like everybody else who was smart did, with the exception of the Democrats and the Europeans.
- [45:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
I gotta stop you right here.
- [45:11]
Sammy Wink
Okay.
- [45:12]
Victor Davis Hanson
Are you going into the Candace Owens tour week?
- [45:18]
Sammy Wink
No, but you could go ahead. I'm trying to remember. I did read what she said. It was so stupid, I couldn't keep.
- [45:24]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, she left off with the Mrs. McRone phallus conspiracy, the Charlie Kirk Mosad, the fake moon landing, and she basically said the whole thing was fake. And she said that the CIA made it up and. Yes, and they tried to. They tried to rescue a general with a capital G. And I'm thinking, Candace, that's easily, demonstrably false because he was a colonel. Where's the general that they rescue? Well, you'll say that they're going to produce the guy that they rescue. They just want to make sure his family's safe and he's well. He'll have a press conference. Then. What are you going to say? He's not a general. But they take pictures of those wreckages of the two planes and all this, and they say it's just like the Carter rescue failure. And look at all the damage. They blew them up themselves. And if you doubt that, believe me, Candace, there's 300 people were involved. There was 150 pilots and drone operators involved in addition to the 300 on the ground. Or maybe there was 200 on the ground and another hundred in the air. And all of them know what went on. And they're all going to talk as soon as the war is over. They're going to write books about it, they're going to write articles, they're going to be consulted and you'll get the story out. And you're not going to find out that the whole thing was made up. I'm sorry. You're not. Then she said that he was a satanic president should be impeached. I remember those pictures when she had a Make America great hat on. Then Tucker, I don't know what he's. He said that he defiled Easter because of some of the tweets. And the whole thing is. I guess he is. I guess they've all just said. Said they've abandoned their prior strategy, that they agreed with Trump on 90% of his agenda, but not the 20% that involved foreign affairs. So after the bombing in Iran and Tucker said it would be World War 3, I guess he made the decision, as did Candace and Steve Bannon and mate Joe Rogan and the others, they said Well, I can't agree with him of everything, so I'm abandoning everything. The problem with that is what's the alternative? If you can't get 80, you get 80%. I happen to support his foreign policy. But if you don't, you still get good judicial appointments if they can be approved. You get a secure border. You get deportations of criminals. You have a historic low on crime. I think you'll see the end of, of the green agenda for a long time. The radical green agenda, the trans agenda, the DEI agenda. You're getting almost everything that you've railed about, but you disagree about the use of force and optional wars, and therefore you nullify his entire presidency and candidacy. And then what you say you're a principal critic. You don't compromise your principles and you get what you get. Get Kamela or Gavin elected. Yes, that would be a nightmare. Believe me, it would be.
- [48:36]
Sammy Wink
And that was kind of where my direction of my question was going, that this rescue of the airman in Iran was very different from the Benghazi, Libya, Libya, Benghazi.
- [48:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
Misadventure.
- [48:51]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, misadventure. Death of an ambassador. And we know, of course, the Afghanistan and the annex.
- [48:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
Brave people at the annex.
- [49:00]
Sammy Wink
So if we did get Democratic Democrats in again, they would be back to, I think, the same old, same old with those kind of disasters in hand.
- [49:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I mean, Hillary Clinton was warned that the consulate was not defensible. And once it proved not to be defensible and they killed our ambassador would be ambassador or consular official whom I met in Libya before he was consular office. He was looking for sites in Libya, and he came into my room in the clinic where it was being operated on with a bunch of food. And he represented the United States informally. But my point is, she was given memos that was not secure. But more importantly, there's a lot of controversy that at the moment that started and the crowds formed and they threw, threatened the annex and the consulate. There were people with special forces in Sicily, and as anybody knows about the geography, you can get to Libya in an hour. And they didn't call them. They could have had drones come over there and helicopter gunships, and they could have stopped all of that attack on the annex and those guys would not have been dead. But they didn't want to do that. It's the same Democratic idea. It's very strange. They want to go to war, but they want to go to war to protect their own soldiers a lot of the times. Remember the Mogadishu blackout down. They're all sitting there and they're waiting for the Pakistani tanks to come. And you think, well, where are the Abrams tanks? And they didn't want to offend, I guess, the Mogadishu rebels by escalating. And they got Those Americans killed, 19 of them killed. I remember one of the fathers of one was just he didn't want to see Clinton at the retrieval of the bodies back to United States, the flight in. So they do that all the time. They do that.
- [51:03]
Sammy Wink
And we hope they never get back into power to do it once again because I think they would do it once again. But Victor, before we go on, let's welcome back a sponsor, Allegiance Gold. If you've studied enough history, you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations. And policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth. Every society that pushes its currency beyond the discipline eventually paid a price. The wise never waited for collapse. They prepared for the correction. That's why so many thoughtful Americans, especially those nearing retirement or in retirement, are allocating their wealth into something that has has outlasted every paper experiment in human history. Physical gold, not as speculation but as insulation. Our reputation matters to us at vdh, in his own words, which is why we've partnered with Allegiance Gold, a company distinguished by integrity, reliability and an A rating with the Better Business Bureau. For years, they've guided Americans through transparent education and long standing relationships built on trust. And right now, they're extending a special liberty offer for listeners to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank. If you believe as I do, the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm becomes obvious. Call 844-790-9191. That's 844-790-0-9191 or visit protectwithvictor.com again. That's 8447-9091-9184-4790, 9191 or visit protectwithvictor dot com history rewards those who take the long view. And we'd like to thank Allegiance Gold for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. So where where were we? We were talking about the crazy Democrats getting in. So I just wanted to conclude that with if they do get in. We will probably have the same that we've seen with Libya, with Afghanistan, even with Vietnam for that matter.
- [53:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
Proof of the pudding. Yeah, proof of the pudding is that Joe Biden, when he came in, the Middle east was calm. Trump had neutered the Houthis, they had sanctions, they were declared a terrorist entity. Hezbollah was in their box and Iran was broke. And all of a sudden he lifted all the sanctions. He listed the terrorist designation. Their so called ring of fire around Israel increased. He distanced himself from Israel. The Arabs saw that the Abraham Accords were stuck. He didn't want anything to do with them because they had Trump's handprints, fingerprints on them. And it wasn't more than a year and less than a year. He had destroyed the whole 20 year Afghan idea. And Trump had left office with, we spent a billion dollars on the Embassy. We have $300 million in Bagram Air Force Base. It's the best base. It's completely defensible, it's out by itself. And we have $50 billion of weaponry here and we can get down to 3,500Americans and defend that and we'll have complete airspace and we'll make cut a deal with the Taliban. And that was all blown up by him in August. And then the Russians watched that and people said, Vladimir, look at those Americans. They've got the tail between their legs and they're running out of our neighborhood. Just think what they'll do with Ukraine. You'll go into Ukraine, it'll be a walk over. The Europeans are neutered and impotent in the United States. It'll be a cake. And that's. And then when they asked Biden, he said, well, it depends on if it's a minor invasion, if I'm going to react. And then he said, knock it off, Vladimir. That's what Obama said to him about the hacking. Knock it off. And then he said, Biden said to him, if you're going to hack, you know, basically don't hack hospitals and humanitarian sites. You didn't say quit it. Because he couldn't say quit it. And next thing we knew, we had two theater wars on his watch. And we were for a time losing both of them.
- [55:49]
Sammy Wink
You know, I was thinking that about Trump's war here, that the absolute defeat of Iranian forces by the US Military has really shown something to China because we're always talking about, oh, are they going to Taiwan, will they not go into Taiwan? But China would hit right here, right now. Have to be rethinking it its, you know, any plans it does have into Taiwan because they're the ones that provided the Iranians with a lot of their military that got decimated by the United States.
- [56:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
Put it this way.
- [56:21]
Sammy Wink
Which by extension would have to be.
- [56:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
You can put it in so many different ways. You're right. They see a how effective American air power is, B that even a disabled, a disabled enemy with PT boats can stop this strait horror moose. And they're going to say, you know what if we try to get a whole armada of half a million soldiers to go across 90 miles of the South China Sea. You don't have to have much to harass them. You could have a bunch of, you could mine the whole thing. We could never get there. United States Air Force in three hours could drop enough mines off the coast of Taiwan that they couldn't even get a ship near it. And if they tried to bomb it then Taiwan is now being saturated with ballistic missiles. They could just say to them we're going to take out the Three Rivers Dam. And that would cause the worst flooding in the history of civilization. So I think Ty and I think the reason that the Iranians are even thinking of negotiating is the Chinese went to them, no doubt and I think it'll be confirmed. And they said look, the price of oil is astronomical. We can't afford it. And you were always giving us barter and you gave us good prices and we gave you our wasn't quite true state of the art air defenses and missiles. And we unleashed the North Koreans. We gave them the technology, they make the missiles, they give them to you and then you give us oil at half price and we need the oil. We're broke. Not broke, but we need oil or it's too high. So you negotiate with Trump and you open those structures and then they'll go to the Iranians and say okay, we're going to sail into Cargill and we want all the oil you have. They buy 80% of it. And then they say well we equipped your whole thing and we'll see what happens. But they are the ones that are wanting peace more than anybody because they want to restore this lost relationship with this subordinate. It's very funny isn't it that the so called purely ideological radical theocratic Shia regime. Islam, Islam, Islam, its closest friend is a communist secular atheist country that has a million Muslims in re education work camps, the Uyghurs. And they don't care one bit. The thing about all those people when you look at and we'll no doubt talk About Soleimani's progeny. They're partying it up in la, but it was Lauren Johnny, his daughter was going to be a professor at Emory University. And they rallied to get her out and she was mouthing off about, they have all this real estate in. They have all this real estate in London, Washington, New York, Los Angeles. So they just robbed that country. And then they claimed they were these fundamentalists, established ascetic true believers. But they were completely cynical. I'm not talking about just the Revolutionary Guard, Islamic Guard, I'm talking about all of them, the theocrats. They were corrupt. As when you see those posters that the Iranian opposition is putting with Khomeini's son with gay pride colors in the background, his picture. And we were told that he was completely well and he was up and around, and now we're told that he's. By the Iranians, he's unconscious.
- [60:00]
Sammy Wink
There were some newscasters today on Fox that were saying. And they sounded like they had information from somewhere inside that in fact, Trump was negotiating with Mataba, who is the
- [60:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
new Ayatollah, Not Khameneia. Khamenei. Yeah, yeah, the son.
- [60:18]
Sammy Wink
The son.
- [60:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think he's incoherent.
- [60:21]
Sammy Wink
Yeah. Well, anyways, they appear to believe the administration, I guess from inside.
- [60:27]
Victor Davis Hanson
I think he has about as much cognitive ability as I did after I came out of two four hour surgeries, because I've been told that the surgeon came and another person came in the ICU and they gave me a detailed description of the unfortunate thing and I have no recognition. And they said, I talked. All I knew was about what had happened is basically before I was discharged, they gave me an X ray and I saw three big titanium clips on my arterial branches. And I said, what are those? You left them there? And the technician said, no, you had a bleed and aneurysms and they, they put these on. I said, when do you take them out? Well, they're going to stay there forever. And then someone said. And you were completely apprised of that? When I said I wasn't. And they said, yes, you were. And I said, I was. Well, that's where he is. Yeah, it's called La La Land.
- [61:21]
Sammy Wink
Okay, okay. Anyways, let's move on. Just one more thing about this war is, I think in all of the ceasefire talk and war crime rhetoric, et cetera, from the left, Israel's role has been diminished in the presses anyways. The things that they've been up to, they've decapitated Iran's oppression and terror forces. They took out the head of intelligence, and they took out the head of the organization that does clandestine activities, meaning out like our CIA. That's how I understood it. And so they've been hard at work, and I don't know how much role they had actually in the rescue of the. Well, they had a lot airmen, I would imagine.
- [62:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
They did. They called off all of their. They called off all of their operations, and then they had the Mossad and their contacts give them information about what the local resistance was and everything. They were very instrumental. I think. You got to remember the Israeli left is as crazy as the American left. And they're very adamant that Israel lost the war. They didn't. They come out pretty well because of the contrast. So all of a sudden, the countries that did not want to participate in the Abrams accord thought it was too risky. Coerced Kuwait, Saudi, the other Gulf states where their money is. Now they're thinking, wait a minute, Iran attacked us more than they did Israel in aggregate, you know, and they were a fellow Muslim country, and we're scared to death of them. And the people that we didn't trust, The Israelis were attacked by them, too. So their fellow victims. And then they went out and they wiped out and helped us by neutering that regime. Regime. And we had twice the number of planes that Israel did. And we didn't do a thing. The Israelis did. And then we're trying to champion Hamas. Well, Hamas is just an Iranian puppet. It may be a Sunni entity, but they're no different than Hezbollah. They don't help us. They're getting money from the people that are hitting our airports and hotels and ruining our tourist industry and hitting our desalinization plants. So who's not doing that? The Israelis are not. They're the enem of our enemy. And in the Middle east, that makes us, for now, a friend. So they come out well, and then they're contrasted with the Europeans. Almost every day somebody in the administration says, well, unlike the Israelis, the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the Italians, the British, blah, blah, blah. And so they come off as pretty good. Good.
- [64:15]
Sammy Wink
Yes. And which they are. Yeah. They come off even better when their prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, gets on and posts that Israel is celebrating with the United States.
- [64:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
Put it this way. Let's say you're.
- [64:27]
Sammy Wink
He looks much better than our last.
- [64:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
Let's say you're an F35 pilot and you're flying right now over Iran. And it's still. I mean, there's people out there with shoulder Fired SAM missiles. Right. They're not missile defense, but. But they're ad hoc and they apparently shot an F15 down. Would you. And you know that there's 200 at any given day, there's 150 or 200 pilots helping you from Israel. Would you say, well, they got us into the war. I would prefer Spanish pilots right now and maybe some Italian and French pilots at my side. I don't think anybody would say that. They're going to say, I know these guys and they're as good as we are. And the other guys aren't. Because I know what they did in the Serbia bombing and I know what they did in the Libyan. They called us in to help as auxiliaries and then they went into the fetal position, covered their ears and said, we don't fly in the morning when it's foggy, it's too dangerous, we have to have our cappuccinos. So then they turned over 80% of the missions for the United States, and everybody knows that. So if you want an ally in war that will stand by you, the Australians do it very well, although they're going after their most decorated soldier in the history. History of Australia. I don't know the details, whether it was just an informant or a spotter in a village that he tossed over the cliff or what.
- [65:53]
Sammy Wink
But in Afghanistan, I think it was right.
- [65:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, we'll find out about what actually happened. But he saved a lot of Australian lives from people who were in the Afghan army working with the Australians, who were killers and turned on them. And they came from particular villages and which there were people in league with them trying to warn them when the Australians were coming to find out who was doing what.
- [66:21]
Sammy Wink
The Australians were kind of off topic, but nonetheless, the Australians have a left wing that's as strong almost as Canada's, I think.
- [66:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, every once in a while, not every once in a while, but commonly the Australians go full Cockney. They go back to the idea that the people who founded the country were the dispossessed, the unfairly charged, the incarcerated, the lower classes. And they have a strong class. I don't know what the word is. Class is so different in the English speaking countries other than the United States. It's an envy. The poet Hesiod in 700 wrote a poem, everybody should read it, called the Works and Days. And he talks about this word, thonos in Greek, which means jealousy and, or can be translated envy. And he says there's two types, the good and the bad. The Americans have the good envy so when they see a Porsche and a guy gets out of a Porsche, at least most Americans, they'll go up and say, wow, that's a nice car. Where'd you buy it? How much did you finance it? But in the. And the other English speaking countries, the lower classes that have been treated so badly and can never be upwardly mobile, no matter how much money they make, because their grandparents didn't have a title or they don't own land or, you know what I mean, they don't have the right accent, they come up and say, how'd you get that? And then kick in the tires and envy, anger, because they think it's unfair that he has that and they don't. You know, Tocqueville said that pretty well. He said that most people in democratic societies, if they had the choice of all being better off, all being better off than they were, but a few being really well off, they would choose to go back to be all the same and poorer, everybody the same. And he said that what made the United States singular is they had all of this land and they championed a farming class where people, people were autonomous or as the Greeks called it, autorkia, the ability to be economically self sufficient. And he said that middle class would save America from that peasant mentality. Peasant mentality means you're envious and angry. Or as they say in the Russian peasantry, when one person in the village got a nice wagon and he had a nice horse and he was hauling people thing around and making money rather than hiring them out, they'd bur to kill the horse.
- [69:05]
Sammy Wink
Okay, very sad, but he is probably right and I'm glad we got a lot of the good kind of envy in the United States. Let's go to a. Did you say Canadian that they're more left wing at times than the Canadians? The Australians are?
- [69:20]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't think so. Remember, Canada is just like Australia now, their government.
- [69:26]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, that's what. So the, the Australians sometimes seem more left wing than the Canadians.
- [69:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't know about that. I did. I didn't ment Canada only by omission, not because it was more conservative.
- [69:38]
Sammy Wink
Remember in, during COVID though, when they had all their lockdowns, we had some real, like, we're not going to let people in, we're not going to let people out.
- [69:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
That was left wing. Did that.
- [69:50]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, yeah. So that's.
- [69:52]
Victor Davis Hanson
They were just as left wing as the Australians.
- [69:54]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, well, no, the. I'm talking about the Australians. When.
- [69:58]
Victor Davis Hanson
But Canada did too. Look what they did to the truckers they shut down the whole trucking industry. They criminalize them. They criminalize them. If you go into Canada and you put a little shingle and say, I'm a doctor Freebie, they're going to go after you. If you go pull out a 3006 and you're shooting your backyard out in the country, they're going to go after you. Except in places like Alberta maybe, but. Except for Mulrooney and the one wonderful. I keep praising him. I know him a little bit. Stephen Harper. They're all been left wing.
- [70:35]
Sammy Wink
All of them in Canada.
- [70:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, And Canada, Australia. Everyone thinks that Trump caused this rif because it was bombast. I just said this. It's the same thing as NATO. He tore off a happy face scab and ripped it off. And there was a putrid wound of, you know, trying to get huge trade surplus with us and then euthanasia with 5% of all their deaths and then open borders and then crazy green, wild green ideology and then pro Chinese with this nut Carney, who was citizen in three countries, globalist. And then. And of all the countries given their heroic and distinguished prior military record, they were welching, completely welching on their NATO. They were like 1.7% on GDP because they just said, oh, we're a really good NATO. We follow the rules based order and we don't like what the United States is doing. But they call up, oh, we want to make sure now that we're under your missile shield and we want to make sure that it was go to, you're going to be supporting us. That's what they do.
- [71:52]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, the rhetoric sounds different. Yes.
- [71:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
The problem we're going to have with Canada are not diminishing and they're going to be apparent under a Democratic administration just as much because they, like Europe and at times Australia have pursued this left wing version of Western civilization and it leads nowhere. It leads to doomsday fertility, a shrinking aging population. It leads to open borders and unassimilated people from antithetical cultures. It leads to completely being defenseless. So you're going to be, I don't know if the United States said tomorrow. They keep talking about Greenland, Greenland, Greenland. When Trump's bombast, you know, did anybody ever think he was going to annex Alberta? No. Did anybody ever think he was going to invade Greenland? Carney said if he goes into Greenland, we have contingency prior. Do you hear what he said? Carney? He said that he had contingency plans to help the Danish repel the United States. I'm thinking how's that going to work out?
- [72:55]
Sammy Wink
Talk about strange rhetoric, right? I mean if they're going to yell
- [72:59]
Victor Davis Hanson
the so called Northwest Passage is kind of opening up and there's going to be gads of Chinese and Russian icebreakers all through Canadian waters in the north and they're going to be going around. If we get what Trump should say is I was trying to help you with Greenland. I wanted to base you US Defensive missiles, but if you want it, go to it and I will just pull back and get more defense of our continent. And he will. But does Canada think and Denmark and these people think they're going to protect themselves from the Chinese and Russians when they start to probe their post colonial possessions. Canada's got a huge Canada has a bigger area than the United States and they've always said it's too cold and remote. Nobody wants to well, not in the age of sophisticated travel and communications and shipping and rare minerals and oil in your northwest northeast provinces up near the Arctic Circle. All of that's full of valuable resources for resource starved places like China. I think they have 10 times as many icebreakers as can Canada does, and us too.
- [74:17]
Sammy Wink
Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back, maybe talk a little bit more about the Iranians in the United States as you've alluded to, but there's a few more things to say about it. Stay with us and we'll be right back after these messages.
- [74:33]
Bradley Devlin
If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, the Tony Kenneth cast, the same common sense perspective you Love, weekdays at 7pm Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American sarcasm. Thom Tillis, I'm pretty sure, might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find the Tony Kennett cast on YouTube, X Radio TV or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [75:03]
Sammy Wink
Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own Words. So Victor, as you were mentioning, there's a lot of the leadership in Iran sent their daughters and sons, et cetera, over here. And we've seen Soleimani's daughters and many of you who are listening to this now have probably seen the pictures that are a little bit salacious in very skimpily clad clothes, mother and daughter, et cetera, mother and daughter in very luxurious conditions. And what I want was but the thing that was added to that was not just the whether you call it hypocrisy or the unbelievableness of them being strict Muslims, but also that they were posting rhetoric in support of the regime and calling the United States the Great Satan.
- [75:57]
Victor Davis Hanson
Put it this way, if I brought in a room of 20 people and I'm going to say to them the following. The great warmonger imperialist United States has been in a veritable war with Iran for 47 years. Iran has killed more Americans than any other terrorist entity. But the chief culprit of that death cult was General Soleimani. He was the one that dreamed up to use Shia radicals in Syria and Iraq to attack American installations. But more importantly, he developed from Chinese technology great stores of what we call shape charges for ied. And that means that they're able to penetrate any shield mechanisms, are tanks even, and they're very deadly IEDs. The official people claim 600 deaths and maybe 1,000 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. But you see people on TV who have been there and said, no, no, it's been more like 2000. The Obama administration didn't really want to count the actual. So what I'm getting at is General Soleimani killed more Americans than any other terrorists, maybe as many as a 911 culpr. So now we hear that his grandniece and niece and grandniece of the biggest war criminal in our eyes there was in Iran are living on absconded funds from the Iranian people in decadent Baghdad Utopia. It's not Baghdad on the Bay, but it's LA at its worst. And they're living there with Iranian money and they're going on social media trashing the United States and championing the cause. And by extension, their name is associated with the biggest killer of Americans, probably of any terrorist in history. And they're doing it with impunity. And people would say to me, you're crazy, Victor, quit exaggerating. Why were they ever allowed to come in here? Why have they ever allowed to? How long did it take for us to. And why. But the most important question is why in the world did they think on green cards that they would go on social media right in the middle of a war and start rooting for Iran in general, in particular, with their name of their killer, and against the United States, where we're losing 13 soldiers over there. And the answer has to be that they thought that the left is so crazy and so anti American and is rooting for Iran that once they got on social media that the Robert De Niro's of the world and the Jimmy Kimmel's of the world and the Nancy Pelosi's and the Chuck Schumer, but especially the Mandamis, they would be folk heroes. And the right would be so scared of that to say what were they thinking?
- [79:12]
Sammy Wink
Well, I have a person to add to this. There is a Michigan candidate for Senate, Abdul El Said. And he, he has not condemned Hassan Piker who said the US quote, the US deserved 9 11. And that piker has also critiqued Israel post October 7th. And this guy El Said will not condemn that.
- [79:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
He said something else. It's the same guy. They caught him in a strategy meeting for a Senate campaign and they asked him about the Iran war and what was his position about the killing of Komine. Should he say something? And he said no, that would go down bad in Dearborn. No, no. You got to realize it's going to be a close race. I got to hide what my real feelings are. But all my supporters were really angry that their hero, Khomeini, who hates America and wants to kill all Americans, was killed. So we can't make mention that. That should have been disqualifying. If anybody in Michigan votes for him, they should have their head examined.
- [80:19]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, well, I mean, I'm thinking that he's also. I mean, it's similar that that left is so crazy left that he doesn't even think he has to pretend.
- [80:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
I like Hassan Piker. Every other word is about the Jews in Israel. So Stanford has just culminated a comprehensive review about two years ago of antisemitism. It's 900 pages long. I looked at it and it was compiled by two liberal, one of them from Hoover and liberal people. And it found systematic anti Semitism all through Stanford, in the classrooms, in the curriculum, in the professorate, in the speakers. And what do they do to dispel any knowledge they invite to speak whom? Hassan Piker. He just came over to Stanford and I think. I think he's the one that has given Nazi salutes and everything. And he's a folk hero. So at some point, I think at some point Americans are going to say, you know what? I am tired of Chinese national anchor babies putting IEDs at US bases or attempting to. I'm tired of drones coming over our B52 bases. I'm tired of balloons coming across the United States. I'm tired of bio labs. I'm tired and read and Las Vegas. I'm tired of Chinese nationals in our graduate programs bringing in some esoteric type of deadly mold to destroy our wheat crop. I'm tired of it all. I'm tired of the Confucius Institutes on campus. I'm tired of the PLA disguised professor. I'm just sick of it. Just go home, all of you. And the same thing for the Middle East. I think they're going to say, I don't want Lara and Johnny's daughter here. I don't want her on a faculty. I don't want the Soleimani girls here. I don't want anybody connected with radical Iran. You know, who's been the best people. I'm not talking about everybody. I'm talking about anybody who has a tie to the Chinese Communist Party. Even remote, get out. Anybody who has a tie with the regime, get out. And the people who have been really good about it are the Iranian expatriates that are, you know, that are here in the United States. They spot all these people and tell us, and then they're baffled. And then I think one of them, she was kind of the Tokyo Rose of Iran. She's her, her son is in the United States and he's a lecturer. She was one of the spokesmen for the, the hostage takers. You know, she had that, she was in the, the whole, everything, you know, the Afghan, the whole thing.
- [83:06]
Sammy Wink
I don't see job and everything.
- [83:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, everything. And she was on TV. I remember it. Depta. MacArthur and spokesman. And she's been a spokeswoman for the regime. She goes to international conference. Her son is in the United States. Went to a United States and he's, I think he's a part time teacher in the United States. States. Why is he here? It just doesn't make sense. It's like saying, well, it's 1941 and the Mussolini twins and Eva Braun's son is here and the Guring boys are here at Harvard. Oh, has anybody seen the Goble, the six brothers, I should say Goebbels brother, he's here. Oh, Tojo's son. He popped up. They wouldn't have stood for that for one second.
- [84:03]
Sammy Wink
No. So you're suggesting that eventually the American people are going to get a sane immigration policy.
- [84:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
They're so tired of. They're so tired of mass murders, killing people and walking out of the streets because some liberal guy in a secluded wealthy area never sees a criminal and lets them out. They're tired of all, all these big shouldered, small waisted, muscle bound, quote unquote girls dressing in women's and destroying women's sports. They're tired of 10,000 people coming across the border a day and then telling, we're being told that these are, we're a nation of immigrants. Why 500,000 criminals prey on the week. They're tired of all that. And I have trust in their being tired that it's not just conservatives, independents and they can poll all they want, but when they get in the polls, I think there's a good chance they're going to say, I don't want that back. If the Republicans have the money and the willpower and the smarts to run good commercials, they should have a commercial every day in October, just a series of them. And the first picture should be all of those immigrants coming across cross and then mug shots a second later of about 20 in a row. And then they should show the Solomanic girl and then they should go into the killing in by Carlos de Carlos Brown and the slit throat of the poor Ukrainian and they should show all that. And Chinese labs, yes, Chinese labs. They should show all of the balloon. They should show Biden stumbling around. They should all of that just quick images and say, do you want this? You want it? Or just say it's back, Johnny's back, Demis are back. And I think people will remember that.
- [86:00]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, they sure will. Well, Victor, we have a lot more to talk about on Saturday episode, so be sure to listen to us on the weekend as we do at the end quite often. I have some comments. I went on to rumble and YouTube for these. The first one, I kind of like the name of the person Mad Max on Rumble said, EU and the UK are fair weather friends. He put quotes. So I think you and Jack must have said that. I hope when the weather turns bad and they call for help, we give them the same bums rush.
- [86:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I think we'll do as I said last time to you, that as some of my nephews and my son did, unfortunately, when they were taken by my cousin out for a Lake Sunday visit and they didn't want to leave the lake and they were late and they were on the shore, the adults yelling to my niece, nephews and my son, come back. We got to get. Can't hear you. Can't hear you. Oh, the lake tide is taking us out. We can't get back for an hour. So that's what's going to happen. The French are going to have some imperial crusade into an African country or Haiti or something. And the British are going to at some point want to do something with. You know what I mean? Maybe the Argent, maybe Malay will want the. If Malay right now went to the Falklands, can you imagine that the United States would say yes, take it. It's Yours. Call it the Malvinas. Go Malay, because we know one thing, Malay. You will have a free market economy and speech and no illegal aliens. And the Falklands will be sort of Western.
- [87:47]
Sammy Wink
And you'll be our friend.
- [87:48]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, and I would not. If Sturmer. If he did that and Sturmer said, we need a carrier in reserve. We need Tomahawk missiles. We need 2 million gallons of gas. We need photo reconnaissance. We need to know where every ship is. We need your intelligence. And we'd say, can't hear you. This isn't our war.
- [88:10]
Sammy Wink
Well, the Europeans look kind of stupid enough not allowing for airspace and the bases that we built, largely, as you and Jack pointed out. So bemused. And berserker is the second one, as far as I'm concerned. Ilhan Omar publicly pledging her loyalty to the Somali government is reason enough for her immediate removal from office and deportation from the country. Same with any office holder that states or even hints that their loyalty is to a foreign.
- [88:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
I wish this breakaway Somaliland government. Did you hear what they said? They want to extradite her because they have relatives and friends that were butchered by the army of which her father was a leading officer. So basically, you get a tyrannical, wealthy, exploitive elite from Somalia who is despised by most people there. And then she comes over with her money and resources and then plays the refugee, poison poor girl. And then marries, talks about all the evil white terrorists and marries this white guy that has 30 million bucks mysteriously, after working with her as a consultant. And we're supposed to buy this, that she's the face of the oppressed when the people back in that area of the world feel that her family were war criminal. It's just only in the United States because you believe that story.
- [89:33]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, well, I have to hand it to her. She's as smooth as butter with the lies. When she goes on to tell us
- [89:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
she's not smooth, though, she loses her temper about two seconds in, and then her face tightens up and she starts screaming. She hates white people. She always. Well, not all white people, obviously. If they have money and she can marry them.
- [89:52]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, there you go.
- [89:53]
Victor Davis Hanson
But she always ends up about white terrorism and all this stuff.
- [89:57]
Sammy Wink
I have a last comment by Katarin Johnson, 4416. Oh, and this is from the Dominican. And from the millennial generation. She says, I'm from the Dominican Republic. I love vdh. My favorite political commentator. Please, keep going. Keep going. You are of great value for my generation, the millennials.
- [90:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
As long as I can breathe. I'll keep going. Some days it's easier than others.
- [90:23]
Sammy Wink
Yeah, exactly. And thank you to Mad Max and Bemused Berserker and to our audience for choosing to join us on this Friday.
- [90:32]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thanks everybody for listening and watching. I'll make a final comment. When you have liberal crazy places like France, France or Europe, and you meet conservatives there, they're smarter than us because they're a hostile. They're in hostile territory. And there's nothing quite like a French conservative intellectual or British intellectual conservative or Dominican, yes, Katharine Johnson or a Chilean, anybody in an area where socialism is predominant. They have to be at their wits peak. They have to be very astute. They have to be well spoken. They have no margin of error. They're targeted and they're very brave people.
- [91:18]
Sammy Wink
Thank you everyone. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hanson and we're signing off.
- [91:22]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website@victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features. In addition.