REOPEN HORMUZ

“Could Israel continue the war without The United States? Basically not for one day. Could Israel actually survive the global opprobrium, including the American opprobrium of Israel's extremism? I don't think for one day, actually. Israel needs to trade. It needs tourism. It needs contracts. It needs finance.”

“First of all, we should look at, Iranian invasions of other countries. As I said, it hasn't happened for two hundred thirty years if I have the, the arithmetic right. As far as I know, the the last actual military operation of Persia or Iran, was against Basra in the seventeen nineties. Iran is not out to destroy Israel. Iran does not want to be destroyed by a, a petulant, annoyed American empire from which it escaped.”

“What he thinks he learned from kidnapping the Venezuelan president and then suborning the Venezuelan government is I can do a decapitation and then own the oil of that country. And so part of the motivation now was revenge, bring Iran back into the empire. But part of the benefit of bringing Iran back into the American empire is you get the oil. And he thought within one day, he'll get the oil because just like removing Maduro, he thinks gave America Venezuela's oil, he thought killing the Iranian governmental leadership starting with this religious supreme leader and then the top, officials of the government that were meeting that day with the supreme leader, he would take the oil.”

“The world economy is reeling. It's reeling because, as everybody has learned in their geography in the last few weeks, the Strait Of Hormuz is closed. As long as it's closed, it means that there is a worldwide economic crisis building. So time is not, permissive right now. We can't say, well, we'll decide in another month.”

“I can recall the first time I went to Baghdad. We ended up going to the arched swords that Saddam Hussein had erected after the Iran Iraq war and we got out of the MRAP because it was a secure area and walked around stretching our legs. As I was walking around under these bronze swords and this hand holding the sword which is supposedly cast to look like Saddam Hussein's hands, I thought I was walking on cobblestones. I was walking on helmets. Helmets of the Basij who were the young Iranians that attacked Iraq and were either gassed, killed, blown up in hundreds of thousands. And then the Iraqis got all these helmets and sunk them in concrete and made the road, if you will, underneath the sword.”

“I was at sea on the Mount Whitney and I thought, you know, they launched the missile, they shot it down. This was a really bad plan. It turns out that it was a mechanical failure. And I called my classmate, Admiral Pegg Klein. She was the commander of the Expeditionary Strike Group Number Five on the Keir Sarge. And I said, you got to get your trap ass at Zereborn and get two aviators that are out there that went down. She beat that timeline because there were Americans in Jeopardy and we launched the V-22s to go get these guys. Those aircraft went in feet dry over Libya, not knowing what they were going to be exposed to, without hesitation.”

“So I don't want to get too much into the Battle of the Atlantic, because that is Admiral Foggo's forte. But this is not the Battle of the Atlantic, where we'll convoy up a bunch of ships, we'll put some escorts around them, and we got to make our way into or out of the Gulf. And some of the ships are going to make it, and some of them aren't. We don't live in that kind of world. If you own one of these very large crude carriers and it gets sunk, the insurance will cover your loss. But you're not going to get another ship for five years. And they won't cover five years of no wages.”

“I don't think the regime wins in the long term, regardless, but I'll tell you, it would be a mistake for us to cease hostilities before, whether it's by negotiation or through military conquest, before the Strait of Hormuz is open. It has to be open at the end of this. So we have a mission to make sure that the seas are open and free, all of them. And so the Strait of Hormuz is part of that.”

“In 1953, Iran was a parliamentary democracy. Iran had not invaded or attacked another country for a century and a half. This was a peaceful country. And in 1953, the Iranian prime minister elected, respected, prime minister Mosaddegh had the audacity, to say the the thing never to be said by this region, which is I think the oil under our ground is Iranian, not British. And, when he uttered that thought, that maybe Iran's oil belonged to Iran, immediately the British Empire, in the form of MI6, came to the new ascendant American Empire in the guise of, the CIA and said, we got to overthrow this guy, which of course they did successfully.”

“I would speculate that the decapitation strike that took place in the first hours of this particular war with Iran or this campaign with Iran, there was an assumption that once the leadership went away, that the IRGC would fall apart, and they haven't done that. So we probably made some incorrect assumptions, and the IRGC has proven that it is resilient and that it has a C2 structure that is diversified, so they're able to continue to do these strikes.”

“Kharg Island is a particular problem. We don't have to have the ships transit through the Strait to do that is the point I want to make. Kharg is a little bit different not just because it's close, a lot of these islands are very close to Iran, but because it has all the oil infrastructure. And presumably we would like that oil infrastructure replaced at the end of the conflict. How you seize that island, how you take that island without destroying any of that is a little bit tricky.”

“It's more speculative, but the daily evidence is growing that the what we call the inter annual phenomenon of, ENSO, which is fluctuations in air pressure and currents in the or sea surface temperatures in the Pacific which cause El Ninos, which people know about, and La Ninas. It looks like a very large, maybe what they're calling a Super El Nino, is building for later this year. One of the things, for example, that happened in the nineteen seventy three, seventy four oil shock was that there was also an El Nino that year. It just, I'm remembering, and it was the combination that sent food prices soaring worldwide.”

“Normally, there would be the National Security Council with detailed interagency assessments. There would be the, national intelligence agencies reporting. Our friend, Tulsi Gabbard, the head of the director of National Intelligence would be weighing in heavily. The joint chiefs of staff would be explaining doubts which they clearly had. There would be consultations with senior members of Congress. That was routine. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president of The United States consulted with the leaders of Congress in detail, by the way, even though this was an emergency commander in chief.”

“There's a sustainability issue that we obviously are learning, particularly with the Shahed drones. We're on the wrong side of the cost curve when the Iranians are launching ballistic missiles in terms of how much it costs them versus how much it costs us. We're way on the wrong side of the cost curve when it comes to drones. And so what we've seen is the Ukraine Armed Forces come rushing to the GCC countries to be able to show them, okay, this is how you do a counter drone campaign, and this is how you do it at a price that you could afford.”

“Let me talk about how the Iranians are likely to mine. We have reports, as Admiral Foggo mentioned, that they put some mines in the Strait. Probably not true. Nobody's seen one, nobody's hit one. But if you're going to mine someplace, generally speaking, it's going to be someplace you don't want to go. And the Strait is someplace Iran wants to go.”

“They're a very smart population. They flew F14s from the mid-70s, when the airplanes first came out, until last month. You know, we had trouble flying F14s as much as I love the airplane. It was a difficult airplane to maintain. And we owned the supply chain. They flew F14s for 40 years after the revolution, without having access to any of the supplies that they needed to maintain the airplane, yet they did it. So, we shouldn't discount their ingenuity and their drive to succeed.”

“Israel, thirty years ago this year, when Netanyahu first became prime minister, adopted a strategy that was explained in a public paper called the Clean Break Strategy. And those governments were Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. And we've now been pulled into Israel's seven wars. Six of those wars have led to blood baths and disasters, from Libya still in civil war, Sudan unbelievably in two civil wars because we broke the country apart and each of those two parts now has its own civil war.”

“Zionism did not originate with Judaism, strangely, and or with Jews, I should say. Herzl was encouraged in his Zionism by a Christian Zionist. And Christian Zionism was an evangelical belief that the Jews should go back to make a homeland in the promised land or the holy land. And that has roots hundreds of years before these Jewish secular Zionists started at the end of the nineteenth century. It happens, interestingly, that these Christian Zionists were often rather confirmed anti Semites, that wanted the Jews out of their own country.”