Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So I mean, again, the sort of view of the regime in Iran, and I think Scott wisely said at the beginning of this discussion, what did you say? “I don’t have any love for the Ayatollah. I’m a Texan. I don’t have any love for the Ayatollah in Iran.” And yet, despite the fact, Scott, doesn’t have love for the Ayatollah, I agree with him and I think he’s being sincere, in every discussion that we’ve had on every topic, it’s always about everyone’s lying except the Ayatollah in Iran. He’s not lying about having a nuclear weapons program. He didn’t actually support all of these terrorist organizations that he founded, financed, and supported to kill Americans. It wasn’t the Ayatollah in Iran. He’s not lying about his deception campaign against the United States. He’s not lying about negotiations with the Americans. It’s the American’s fault all the time. So he’s presented all the time in Scott’s conception here as a sincere actor who doesn’t want to develop nuclear weapons, who doesn’t actually want to kill Americans. He’s just always a victim of American and Israeli aggression. I think it’s an interesting conception. I think let’s talk about it. And I mean, I’m fascinated by the conception because it’s very contrary to mine, obviously. It’s very contrary to I think, decades of overwhelming evidence that the Islamic Republic has been worth the United States since 1979. And I don’t take too much stock in what people say. I take stock in what they do. So “Death to America, Death to Israel” could just be a slogan. It could be just propaganda. But when it’s actually operationalized, then you start to ask, “Well, maybe it’s not just propaganda, maybe it’s intention operationalized into capabilities.” What we’re forgetting here, and again, it’s this causal relationship. It’s we aggress against Iran and the Israelis aggress against Iran, and Iran is always reacting. I mean, let’s give the Iranians their due, because Khomeini made it very clear when he established the Islamic Republic that there will be a revolutionary and expansionist regime, and they will expand their power through the Middle East. And so he built, and to his credit, was very successful until October 7th, this axis of resistance, as he calls it, which are these terror proxy armies, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian, Islamic Jihad, the Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and certainly supporting the Assad regime in Syria. as he calls it, which are these terror proxy armies, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian, Islamic Jihad, the Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and certainly supporting the Assad regime in Syria. He built a very, very impressive and deadly axis that he turned against the United States and against Israel, which saw its culmination on October 7th. I think after October 7th, that was a huge miscalculation for Khomeini, and we’ve seen the results of what’s happened to his axis of resistance through quite devastating Israeli military capabilities over the past number of months. But he has an ideology, and I think where I agree with Scott is I’m not sure if Khomeini would actually use a nuclear weapon against Israel, the United States, because I don’t think Khomeini is suicidal. But I think what Khomeini wants is he wants a nuclear weapon as a backstop for his conventional power, right? It’s very much the Kim Jong-Un model of North Korea, right? I’m going to have nuclear weapons with ICBMs to threaten America, but what I’m actually going to do is threaten South Korea with having massive conventional capabilities on the DMZ that I could take South Korea in a week, I could destroy in a week. So, you, the United States and South Korea have no military option. That’s Khomeini’s view. He can actually building up this massive ballistic missile arsenal that he’s unleashed in the past 12 days that according to, again, the US and Israel was going to go from 2,000 to 6,000 to 20,000, that from Khomeini’s perspective, he didn’t need to drop a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv. What he needed to do was use the threat of nuclear escalation in order to use his conventional capabilities, his missiles, to destroy Tel Aviv. And you’ve already seen the damage from just a few dozen ballistic missiles getting through the kind of damage that he’s wrought on Tel Aviv already. That is the conception that Khomeini has. It’s a revolutionary regime. It aggresses. And I do think it’s interesting, and I think we should talk about it. Actually, that’s a good cue.…

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