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America is repeating the Iraq mistake in Iran · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:11
  It's the tip of the spare in the epic battle to defend the United States of America.
• 0:19
  A national security hour exposes the wolves in sheep's clothing and the nefarious plots to undermine and destroy U.S.
• 0:27
  national security.
• 0:31
  Hello and welcome to the National Security Hour.
• 0:34
  Thank you for joining us on the mission.
• 0:37
  The National Security Hour is the tip of the spear in the epic battle to defend the United States of America.
• 0:42
  I'm Brandon Weinkert, your friendly neighborhood host.
• 0:46
  You can catch me right here every single Wednesday night at 8 p.m.
• 0:51
  Eastern.
• 0:52
  And you can follow me at We The Brandon on Twitter X.
• 0:56
  And check out my writings at 1945.com and the NatSec Guy section on Emerald.tv.
• 1:03
  Today we have somebody I'm super excited about talking to.
• 1:09
  His name is Sam Fattis.
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  He is a CIA operations officer, not an analyst.
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  He wanted to be very clear.
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  He's got a bevy of experience in the Middle East.
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  And he's a he's just a very well-informed guy, obviously.
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  So without further ado, Sam, it is great to have you here with us.
• 1:28
  It's great to be here.
• 1:29
  Thanks for making that clear.
• 1:30
  I was introduced once as an analyst and I went into anaphylactic shock.
• 1:34
  It took me like 10 minutes to recover.
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  We don't want to have that happen on air.
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  No, look, I mean, all kidding aside, obviously it it collecting intel doesn't mean much if there isn't somebody to actually do something with it and write up reports.
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  So analysts are kind of critical.
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  But as long as it's not one of John Brennan's hires, I think we'll be as long as it's not somebody, yes, who's writing communist fiction.
• 1:54
  Yeah, that would be nice.
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  We could get into that later too, because I've been a deep critic of Mr.
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  Brennan for many years, as has our friend Mike Scheuer.
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  Mike Scheuer calls him the uh former American, John Brennan.
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  Um perfect.
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  So I want to start out with sort of we're we're recording on St.
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  Patty's Day.
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  So I want to, and I am for everybody, I'm wearing have green pen.
• 2:17
  I've got my green watch, so you know, everybody's getting on me because I have pink on today, but whatever.
• 2:22
  Um I want to get into this breaking news.
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  Joe Kent, National Counterterrorism Center, uh puts out a absolutely beautiful resignation letter.
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  He's done with what's going on, and opposite he's uh he's opposing the Iran War, which is in its second week now, more than its second week now.
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  It doesn't appear to be coming to an end.
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  Sam, Joe said something interesting in his letter, and I I studied it very closely.
• 2:47
  He called out Israel and he said, Look, Israel has had an undue influence, not just on American politics, but specifically Donald Trump.
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  And he says that uh, you know, he says that for the last year, they've basically just been feeding Donald Trump pro-Israeli neoconservative propaganda.
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  And he also said something interesting.
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  Joe Kent says this is the same things they did to get us to go to war in Iraq, where I know you spent some time, many a lot of time.
• 3:16
  So just talk to me about what you think is really behind this this Joe Kent letter and where you think things are going within the administration, because to me it looks like everything's falling apart.
• 3:27
  Yeah, well, up front, I think it appropriate to say as a caveat look, I know Joe.
• 3:31
  Um we didn't really serve together downrange, but I got got to know him sort of later on.
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  I knew his wife better, Shannon, who was killed in Syria because I trained her.
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  I was the senior tradecraft instructor running the training program for the unit, the classified unit where she was working at that time.
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  So I trained Shannon and then worked alongside her, if you will, for a number of years, and she was she was a class act.
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  She was everything you would.
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  I mean, she knew her job, she was squared away, and she was easy to work with.
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  She was one of those people that was serious about the job and not carrying an ego around, if you know what I mean.
• 4:13
  Um, so I say that as a caveat, right?
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  Uh look, uh Joe has resigned.
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  Uh and his letter, you know, his notice is there for everybody to read.
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  It's pretty clear.
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  I think he's exactly right.
• 4:27
  Right.
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  Um, I think it takes a tremendous amount of moral courage to do what he did to say that.
• 4:35
  You know, to to say I mean, he's not staying inside, sabotaging things, dragging his feet.
• 4:42
  He's doing the honorable thing, submitting his letter of resignation and saying I cannot be part of this.
• 4:48
  Yeah.
• 4:49
  Um, which I think is we'd love to see a lot more folks do at critical points in history, right?
• 4:55
  Yeah.
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  Under the Biden administration, we were always asking for the equivalent of the FBI.
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  When is the guy going to stand up and say, no, I'm not gonna go raid Roger Stone's house with a platoon of guys when you could just call him down to the courthouse and hand him some papers.
• 5:11
  We're not doing that.
• 5:12
  Uh I think he's right.
• 5:14
  I mean, look, we um my opinion, and I think based I've you know, talked to a lot of folks with access who feel exactly the same way, believe exactly the same thing.
• 5:27
  Yeah.
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  This was not a war that we went into because we sat down with the intelligence community, the defense department, and made a sober judgment based on their recommendations that we needed to do this and that we were going to prosecute it this way.
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  That is not how this happened.
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  I know that's a lot of people assume that because that's typically well, that's the way it should be done and has been done.
• 5:55
  Uh this is actually pretty close to the opposite, in my estimation, which is we were pushed by certainly by the Israelis and their friends here, and I think probably a certain segment of just the the neocon crowd that seems to be ready to invade anywhere at any time.
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  Uh, into doing something actually contrary to the advice of folks who really understand the region and and what we're gonna do.
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  Uh so I think Joe, you know, jumps Joe summoned it up much more succinctly.
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  I think he's dead on.
• 6:32
  Yeah.
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  That's exactly where we are.
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  And now uh I mean, basically, as far as I can tell, we went into this with the expectation that in about 72 hours the Iranians would fall apart, the people would rise up, there would be joy in the streets, happy ending, fairy tale, and now reality has intruded and it it didn't happen, and it ain't gonna happen.
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  And now we're trying to figure out what the hell do we need?
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  What do we do now?
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  That's where I think we are.
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  I think you're 100% correct.
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  And and as you know, I I do occasionally do consulting work with usually the Department of the Air Force.
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  So I I'm aware of Dan Kane and some of the people around him.
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  And uh I haven't heard a single person I know at the kind of top levels of the Pentagon uniformed side who was cheerleading this thing on.
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  In fact, everybody I spoke with, in fact, in fact, I remember a year or two ago, I was up in DC and I was asked to give a briefing about my book on Iran, and I kind of told them what I had been seeing and what I had heard.
• 7:37
  And I had a uh colonel who was uh flew the tankers, the the refuelers, who said, Have you ever seen Iran from above?
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  And I said, No.
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  I said, why?
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  And he said, We are never going to be able to take this country because it's just the logistics are just flying over, just flying near it.
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  He said it's it's it's too much.
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  It's too much for us to do.
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  And so uh how do you think the president?
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  I know that the uniformed commanders told him this is a bad idea.
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  How do you think the president came to this conclusion?
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  Is it just he just was listening to the neocons?
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  Or do you think he really just believed that that the country would collapse?
• 8:20
  Well, I do think absolutely that he believed that he took this action because he believed it would collapse.
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  I mean, I at this point, that is my assessment.
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  Literally, that we're gonna bomb the hell out of these guys.
• 8:31
  We're gonna decapitate their leadership.
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  The Israelis seem to have some obsession with this concept that you decapitate a regime and it collapses.
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  I'm not sure what they're didn't happen to Hezbollah.
• 8:43
  I I'm trying to figure out, you know, usually when you say that, it would be nice to show an example of when it had worked, right?
• 8:50
  If I'm in the NFL and you tell me to run a play, I'd like to know you have a track record that it works, and they don't actually have one, but they're obsessed with it.
• 8:59
  Um he was absolutely convinced of that.
• 9:02
  I mean, it do I think he is very poorly served by his advisors around him.
• 9:07
  I do think that, absolutely.
• 9:10
  I mean, I don't and and look, I mean, there are many facets to this.
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  One piece I'll throw out because I'm an old case officer, you know, operations officer.
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  Uh, our human collection, our human intelligence collection on Iran, is of no consequence whatsoever.
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  It's nil.
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  It has always been a tough target.
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  But we used to run a lot of sources inside Iran.
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  I mean, it there were times in my career when I alone was running a dozen Iranian sources at a time.
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  Uh we run almost none inside, so we have almost no collection.
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  So, you know, a decent think tank in DC reading the newspapers is putting out assessments on a par with what you're getting out of the agency.
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  And that's not a knock on the individual's.
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  There's a whole bunch of structural reasons for that, which is a whole other conversation.
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  So, okay, that means we know actually almost nothing about the internal workings of the leadership.
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  Which means that the Israelis hold enormous power because they're when we're talking about our intelligence, particularly human intelligence, what we're really talking about is what the Israelis are telling us.
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  And when you're in that position, you just think about that.
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  If you don't have your own intel, they can tell you the truth.
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  They can tell you decide not to tell you things, just omit things, and then they can flat out lie to you.
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  And if you don't have your own sources, you're basically led around by the nose by these guys.
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  They and that, you know, the antidote to that is you have to have your own intel.
• 10:52
  Yeah.
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  And I've sat in, I've sat in many briefings with senior guys in foreign intel services, talking to the head of the service in the Gulf, for example.
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  He's telling me, he gave me his assessment of terrorist activity in his country.
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  And I have my own collection, very robust.
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  I know when he's lying to me.
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  I know when he's omitting things.
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  And actually, I can tell you when he's telling me what he thinks is true, but I know he's wrong because my sources are better than his.
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  So the Israel that's that is absolutely the our status with the Israelis right now.
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  So when it comes particularly to human intelligence, we're either accept what they say or we're blind.
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  I mean, you got two choices, because we got nothing.
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  And that you know, it's hard to maybe to convey to people the amount of power that gives you.
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  You know, the Israelis say this is going to happen, and we got nothing.
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  What if now what do you what do you do?
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  It leaves you in a very bad position.
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  Do you believe because in the letter Joe wrote, and this is something I've been saying, as you know, I'm banned show.
• 12:17
  Um, do you believe that the claim that Iran was eight or twelve days away from surge capacity with nukes, or do you think that that was just some, you know, I don't want to say made up, but probably made up or exaggerated claim.
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  Well, I got about nine million questions about that assertion, right?
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  And let's just be clear for folks that are unfamiliar with me.
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  I am no friend of the Iranians, and I've worked against the Rayatolis forever, and actually worked against their nuke pro program for a long time and recruited sources inside it.
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  And I've been saying for a long time we need to be a lot more concerned about and focused on this.
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  So I have, but our own intelligence community assessment last time I checked was that they don't have an active nuclear weapons program.
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  That's our official assessment.
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  That was okay.
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  So we've got that, that's a big question.
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  If you're telling me they're 10 days away, but our IC says they don't have a program at all.
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  Well, something doesn't add up there.
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  Either our IC isn't doing its job.
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  Well, where the hell did that information come from?
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  And also that number, you know, for people who were into the inside baseball crap and actually have nothing better to do to track the status of the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
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  This number seems to jump around all the flipping time.
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  They're either 10 days away or they already have nukes, or you know, the last time we checked, they hadn't the last sense I got from the administration was no devices have been constructed.
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  They had highly enriched uranium.
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  Well, they had 60% enriched uranium or whatever.
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  So they were within potentially a few weeks of having the fissile material.
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  Yep.
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  But meaning you got this stuff inside that will ultimately go boom, but you haven't built the thing that you put it into to take the physics and boil it, boil it down to my grade level.
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  Anyway, the point is all of a sudden they're 10 days away from having a nuke.
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  You're like, what?
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  How is that consistent with anything that has been said prior to this?
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  Also, let's keep in mind as of what, six months ago, eight months ago, whatever it was, we were told we obliterated their nuclear weapons program, and that nuclear weapons program was gone.
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  So how did we I mean, by the time we're talking about it?
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  Heg seth fired the DIA director who was secretly telling everybody we didn't obliterate, we degraded.
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  And remember, Hegsa fired uh the Air Force generals.
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  Well, when you're when you're done, you're sort of like, okay, you know what?
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  Even for the average person who doesn't want to get lost in the intricacies of how to build a nuke, you're like these assessments, these statements do not compute.
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  They are all over all over the map.
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  They're political assessments, they're not actually intelligence.
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  Well, that's what you're left with.
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  Your common sense tells you.
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  So you're kind of telling me whatever suits politically the moment.
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  I'm Brandon Wyckert, your decipherer of truth in an age of lies.
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  You can catch me right here every Wednesday at 8 p.m.
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  Eastern.
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• 18:33
  I I I think maybe I said this to you off air at one point.
• 18:37
  Anyway, you know, I was in Iraq.
• 18:40
  I took the first team into Iraq in 02, almost a year in advance of the invasion.
• 18:44
  So we went into Iraq, they were originally all a grand total of eight guys.
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  And then we plussed up eventually, probably a little over 50.
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  And we're the only guys in Iraq.
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  Okay, we landed Iraq.
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  By the way, we didn't pick up contact with an exist a single existing source.
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  Meaning when we went into Iraq, it was like we parachuted under the face of a new planet.
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  So there was no intel, I mean, other than what the Kurds might have been telling us.
• 19:13
  We had no sources.
• 19:15
  We started from scratch.
• 19:16
  And by the way, and the guys, I'm not personally take credit for it.
• 19:21
  A bunch of guys are working their asses off.
• 19:23
  I mean, ultimately recruited hundreds of Iraqi sources.
• 19:26
  But the point is, we started from ground zero.
• 19:29
  There was nobody before us.
• 19:31
  So whatever came out of Iraq was what we produced.
• 19:35
  We never found proof that there was a functioning existing Iraqi WMD program.
• 19:41
  That they had had chemical weapons in the past and use them on the Kurds.
• 19:44
  Okay, everybody knows that.
• 19:46
  That uh they're all kind of a lot of those chemical weapons, by the way.
• 19:51
  You know, and that they might reactivate the program at some point.
• 19:54
  Whatever.
• 19:55
  The point is we never told anybody we found WMD.
• 20:00
  Because we did not find Debian.
• 20:02
  And I remember very clearly sitting in the team house, the base house, watching on our pirated CNN channel, our pirated TV, watching CNN, when Colin Powell addressed the United Nations.
• 20:15
  You know why we were all watching?
• 20:16
  Because we were curious what the information was about Iraqi WMD, because we didn't know.
• 20:23
  So we figured, I don't know who he is, but somebody somewhere's got a source telling them something that we don't know.
• 20:30
  And we would really love to know that, Colin.
• 20:32
  And when he was done talking, this is like probably 30 guys sitting around cross-legged on a floor in a house, right?
• 20:41
  And this is a bunch of CIA guys and a bunch of black soft guys from various units.
• 20:46
  Pretty hardcore group of guys.
• 20:48
  And there's dead silence.
• 20:51
  And finally, one guy, one of the black soft guys, maybe the hardest guy, nicest guy, but also hardest guy ever met.
• 21:00
  In the sense of really squared away hard-nosed operator.
• 21:05
  He speaks first, and he says, that's it.
• 21:10
  Those are the first words out of his mouth.
• 21:12
  At least looking at everybody in the room.
• 21:14
  I mean, keep in mind, these are all guys that volunteered to be the first people in the war.
• 21:21
  Nobody was forced to go there.
• 21:24
  And they're all living in the, you know, the mountains under constant death threat to take down this regime.
• 21:30
  So they're pretty predisposed to be, you know, not friends of the Iraqi regime, and their reaction is like, what?
• 21:38
  Yeah.
• 21:39
  That's it.
• 21:40
  Where's the beef, man?
• 21:42
  And this is playing out again, you think, with Iran.
• 21:47
  You certainly have that fear, don't you?
• 21:48
  I mean, they that feel to it.
• 21:50
  It's like, okay, wait a second, man.
• 21:52
  Yeah.
• 21:53
  Again, there's no friends of this regime.
• 21:56
  Absolutely.
• 21:56
  And you know, somebody putting together a coherent long-term plan to focus on containing them.
• 22:04
  Yep.
• 22:04
  Maybe even working toward regime change over the long term.
• 22:09
  Yep.
• 22:09
  Let's build an opposition.
• 22:11
  Let's cut off their money.
• 22:12
  Let's, you know, the kind of anaconda approach.
• 22:16
  Yep.
• 22:16
  That would make sense to me.
• 22:18
  And this is what I thought what they were doing.
• 22:20
  That's fine.
• 22:21
  This is what I thought what they were doing with uh the Abraham Accords.
• 22:24
  In fact, that's what Jared and Avi told me in 2018.
• 22:27
  This was sort of part of the grand plan was that they were gonna empower the Arab and Israelis to come together.
• 22:35
  And you know, and I thought that was the best of bad solutions.
• 22:39
  And um we apparently have just shredded that.
• 22:42
  And I can't, for the life of me, the only thing I can think of because of the connections I have with certain Israelis, the only I can think of is I remember the Abraham Accords.
• 22:51
  Every Israeli I knew were dumping all over it behind the scenes.
• 22:55
  They hated it.
• 22:56
  Um so clearly there is a push from the Israeli side for total war against Iran.
• 23:03
  Can you just talk to us?
• 23:05
  You know, put on your well, put on your analytical cap for a moment.
• 23:09
  Um and talk to us a little bit about how you think the war is really going.
• 23:14
  Those who've seen me on Bannon, seen me on Tucker, they've heard my assessment.
• 23:17
  But I'm kind of curious to see, you know, what do you, with all your years of experience in the region and with our intelligence and military capabilities, how do you think the war is going for Uncle Sam right now?
• 23:30
  Yeah, not well.
• 23:31
  Yeah.
• 23:32
  I mean, look, from a conventional perspective, if that's the right term to use.
• 23:38
  Are we cleaning their clocks?
• 23:41
  Yes.
• 23:42
  Anyone who actually thought the Iranian military would stand up to the American military in a conventional fight must have been on drugs, right?
• 23:51
  I mean, okay, so their Navy doesn't exist anymore, not that it was any gray shakes to begin with, but okay, it's gone.
• 23:58
  It's Air Force, which was essentially non-existent, is gone.
• 24:02
  And we've trashed command and control and and leadership and all sorts of other things.
• 24:08
  Okay, but they're not actually attempting to fight us on in that realm.
• 24:13
  Right.
• 24:14
  Right?
• 24:14
  They're that if you will that's never been their shtick either.
• 24:18
  No, that has never been their intention.
• 24:20
  They never no matter what they say, you know, beating their chests and talking into a microphone and appearing on video, they never had any idea that there would be a result other than that.
• 24:31
  But the point is, so they planned for this.
• 24:33
  So we know, it's been very clear, right?
• 24:37
  Long ago they focused on this whole idea, I guess it's called the mosaic doctrine, but anyway, you know, there's like something like 31 separate commands, and essentially each command has access to the military, the besiege, you know, the thugs that beat people up in the street and disappear people.
• 24:56
  Anyway, and they're all autonomous, and they all just continue to fight and act on their own.
• 25:02
  So it doesn't matter that orders are not coming from Tehran anymore, you just drive on.
• 25:06
  It's sort of like Al-Qaeda's approach to to the franchise approach.
• 25:10
  And something that his history would tell you, we don't have a really great track record of of combating, right?
• 25:17
  Yeah, particularly when we try to combat it with conventional forces, which it doesn't friggin' work.
• 25:23
  I mean, I always felt about Afghanistan, you know, the first five months of Afghanistan and one of the most brilliant military campaigns since the second world war.
• 25:31
  Grand total of I think 402 Americans on the ground at its peak.
• 25:36
  Tribal forces, CIA guys, SF guys, USAIR, unbeatable.
• 25:43
  Yeah.
• 25:44
  Then all of a sudden the bureaucracy came in and big DoDs got a play, and now we're we're gonna take a 12th century country and turn it into Switzerland and South Asia.
• 25:55
  And now and now we're friggin' doomed because we're just gonna keep doing stuff that doesn't actually impact the real war, right?
• 26:06
  Instead of fighting that tribal leader, we should have gone up there and made a deal with them.
• 26:10
  Yep, and we pay him X number of dollars a month, and some of our guys hang out.
• 26:15
  And the only thing we care about is don't let the Arabs come back, which is their term for Al-Qaeda.
• 26:22
  And we would have won, we were done, right?
• 26:24
  The war was won, but we gotta keep this.
• 26:28
  We're almost like fighting ourselves in some psychological sense.
• 26:31
  Anyway, so it's not just that there's the decentralization thing, and then obviously their methodology is you know, we're not really fighting you, and we don't have to.
• 26:41
  If if we hit an oil tanker every couple of days and blow it up, nobody's gonna run the strait through Hormuz.
• 26:50
  And pretty soon this will happen in the Red Sea too with the Houthis.
• 26:53
  And the Strait of Babel Mandab.
• 26:56
  Precisely.
• 26:56
  So we win because we just crashed the world economy.
• 27:03
  And you actually and and you know what?
• 27:06
  We can do this with a fishing boat that we rigged with cheap hobby level remote control gear and some explosives.
• 27:15
  That's what we need to attack your oil tanker.
• 27:18
  And our Shahid drone, I don't know, the cost what?
• 27:22
  I mean, it's impossible to estimate.
• 27:24
  30,000?
• 27:25
  Yeah, I've heard 30, I've heard 100,000, but anyway, you look at it, it's cheaper than anything we're shooting at it.
• 27:31
  You know, and and this is sophistication necessary.
• 27:34
  You know, guys that work on fiberglass boats and do remote control aircraft for it's a hobby, have all the sophistication necessary to build this friggin' thing.
• 27:45
  Yeah.
• 27:46
  You straight and put some explosives.
• 27:47
  So you can build it in a garage, you can build it in your friggin' house.
• 27:52
  You could build it anywhere for almost nothing.
• 27:56
  And there's no end to the supplies.
• 27:59
  You can't, this is all commercially available cheap crap.
• 28:03
  And they're tethered with China, and China has all those supplies.
• 28:06
  And and that's before we get to the part where the Chinese are gonna hit getting the Russians are gonna give them targeting data, and okay, and you don't need to fight the a carrier battle group and send it to the bottom because you've got the whole world by the well, the short We've got a stranglehold on the whole world.
• 28:27
  We'll keep it clean.
• 28:27
  But anyway, that the bottom line is right, you could do that forever for nothing.
• 28:32
  That's right.
• 28:33
  Um I guess the real frustration for me is we've done this a whole bunch of times where we're fighting an unconventional enemy that fights in this fashion.
• 28:48
  And we we decide we're gonna use conventional forces to combat them and think in conventional ways.
• 28:56
  And then we seem mystified when it doesn't work out well for us, right?
• 29:01
  Yeah.
• 29:01
  And I was talking to Bannon the other day.
• 29:03
  I mean, I know you knew this stat.
• 29:05
  We dropped what at least three times as many bombs on Indochina.
• 29:08
  5.2 million sorties were flown by the U.S.
• 29:12
  Air Force alone.
• 29:13
  That's not including Navy and Marine aviation for through for the duration of the war, and we still lost.
• 29:18
  Yeah.
• 29:19
  We brought dropped more bombs on Laos alone than you can put, I think than on all of Germany in World War II, something like that.
• 29:27
  You're like, you know, Laos, which is and and yes, and we've still and we still lost because it's friggin' irrelevant to to the outcome.
• 29:37
  The human element, the human factor drives the and the human will to, you know, win or to to survive whatever that outweighs whatever technical capabilities you bring to the target.
• 29:51
  Yeah, I mean, I know you and I have said this before before.
• 29:57
  One of the things that has really really bothered me since the beginning is.
• 30:00
  Is this idea that okay, we're gonna bomb these guys for a few days and they're gonna capitulate.
• 30:04
  Either they're gonna capitulate or the people are gonna rise up and the government's gonna be overthrown.
• 30:08
  So anybody who's ever been involved in planning any kind of operation at any level in the field headquarters, wherever.
• 30:14
  Their first question would be so when that doesn't happen, what do we do next?
• 30:20
  What's plan B?
• 30:22
  Right?
• 30:22
  You never plan an up based on the assumption that everything, yeah.
• 30:27
  Hope is not a plan and everything will go your way.
• 30:31
  You don't, that's not no.
• 30:33
  In fact, if experience, if experience is any guide, you plan everything's gonna go wrong from the moment you go outside the wire, right?
• 30:42
  That's right.
• 30:42
  That's all everybody knows that who's ever been involved.
• 30:46
  Stop.
• 30:46
  So when we bomb them for three days and they don't quit, what?
• 30:52
  And when we bomb them for another three days and they don't quit, what?
• 30:56
  And you get the feeling, unfortunately, and I'm not trying to be snide because it's a very serious matter.
• 31:03
  You get a feeling that in terms of the people who made the decision to go to war, there is no answer to that question.
• 31:10
  I agree.
• 31:11
  They never contemplated.
• 31:12
  I don't think that's being snide.
• 31:14
  I um I think that's I think it's very clear.
• 31:17
  Um again, General Kane and his team.
• 31:19
  I mean, I we we were on Bannon together, and I mentioned this.
• 31:22
  Vice Admiral Cotcher was kicked out of the the Joint Chiefs uh his role there as I think he was director.
• 31:29
  I don't I remember what his role there was.
• 31:30
  He was the senior guy there, because he leaked to the press the conversation that Kane had the night the night or the afternoon before the war began, in which he was explaining um exactly that after three days, what do we do?
• 31:43
  And Trump wasn't listening.
• 31:45
  In fact, at one point, Kane supposedly kind of got in Trump's face and said, Mr.
• 31:49
  President, I really don't think you're here hearing me on this.
• 31:52
  And he wasn't hearing him because Trump wasn't listening.
• 31:54
  Trump is, you know, I I many people that have briefed him before who says the man doesn't read, he doesn't listen during briefings, and you know, Cheney was like that too.
• 32:04
  I know somebody who briefed him about WMD in Iraq, and he was reading The Economist the whole time.
• 32:09
  Um, you know, that's just how some of these personalities in power are.
• 32:14
  Um toward that end, though, we're clearly at an impasse.
• 32:18
  The Iranians are not going to quit.
• 32:20
  I was told the Iranians actually have anywhere between 18 to 24 months' worth of ballistic missile capabilities still.
• 32:26
  Um, so they can go at least that long.
• 32:29
  Is that correct?
• 32:29
  Do you think that's correct, or do you think we've really done damage to their their capabilities?
• 32:34
  I I don't know because I hear dramatically different things.
• 32:36
  One is that they're almost expended, and the others they have a ton, but I keep coming back to the part where it's like, okay, let's assume best case.
• 32:44
  You're right, they're about to run out of ballistic missiles, and those are relatively sophisticated in it, and it takes a while to build them, and plus maybe you can identify the locations where they're being built because there's some signatures, yada yada.
• 32:56
  Okay, let's just take that off the table.
• 32:58
  Even if we're just back to drones and other crap that they can build in the garage, and and they aren't even really engaging the U.S.
• 33:07
  military, they don't have to engage U.S.
• 33:08
  milk.
• 33:08
  Right, right.
• 33:09
  And I'm not suggesting they haven't, because they're questions about to what extent they've degraded our air defense capabilities that are legit.
• 33:17
  Yeah.
• 33:17
  But even if that wasn't on the table, okay.
• 33:20
  There are completely civilian targets of enormous importance.
• 33:24
  First of all, to all our allies in the region, I mean, like the Gulf states kind of it matters when Abu Dhabi Airport is shut down.
• 33:33
  In death as it was yesterday, maybe still is.
• 33:36
  Yeah.
• 33:36
  Uh but oil is clearly the centerpiece of this oil and natural gas.
• 33:44
  And they can take oil and natural gas off the market with drones and suicide boats, remote controlled boats and other crap.
• 33:53
  And so it becomes a test of wills uh between Trump and whoever's running Iran now.
• 34:00
  Well, and you've put them in a corner, haven't you?
• 34:02
  Because if you've if your plan is you're just bombing them into submission and taking everything away, and it gets to this point that I I think I describe this to Bannon as, you know, let's all go to hell together, kind of that's exactly right.
• 34:14
  You burned us down, so cool.
• 34:16
  We're all that's right.
• 34:18
  Let's let's let's burn you down as well.
• 34:21
  And so, you know, they hear people talking about we're at a crossroads, time to go with the let's declare a victory and go home plan.
• 34:31
  And increasingly my concern is we lost that capability because they won't stop.
• 34:39
  They'll be like okay, you stop bombing us, that doesn't mean we have to stop shooting at oil tankers.
• 34:44
  And Pezeshki and the president recently said as much.
• 34:47
  He came out and said that uh we have to hurt the Americans in such a way where they will never again threaten us.
• 34:54
  Which honestly, you know, I hate the regime, but it's a rational response to what's gone on.
• 34:59
  I mean, I can't say that he's crazy.
• 35:01
  I say, well, that's that's what these guys are gonna do because it's what we would do.
• 35:06
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• 37:34
  We begin our final segment.
• 37:36
  With that in mind, it seems like the only thing the United States can do.
• 37:41
  I'm not convinced Trump is looking for an off ramp.
• 37:44
  He might in two weeks.
• 37:45
  They always said four weeks was like the maximum amount of time they wanted to do this.
• 37:49
  So that's that'd be two weeks from the this time of recording.
• 37:52
  So maybe we get lucky and he's like, I'm done.
• 37:55
  Um, but it doesn't look like that.
• 37:57
  And it looks and sounds like Trump is really a believer in this thing.
• 38:01
  So we go up the escalation ladder, and they've already moved 25.
• 38:05
  I hear two different numbers, 2500 or 5,000 Marines as part of the part of this MEU scuttlebutt is they're gonna be deployed uh to some point along the coastline of Iran so that they can try to it sounds like Gallipoli to me, and I think John Meersheimer recently said that.
• 38:23
  Have you heard this?
• 38:24
  Is there any reality to this?
• 38:26
  And what will happen if we try to do that?
• 38:29
  Look, you know what I hope to God, I hope to God that somebody is moving these Marines there to prepare for contingencies like we have to evacuate embassies, we have to do NEO operations.
• 38:41
  Yeah.
• 38:41
  Or Shiite and Rest in Bahrain gets to the point where the marine platoon that's typically deployed there for security purposes, whatever the acronym is, I can't remember.
• 38:53
  They decide, okay, those that's not sufficient.
• 38:55
  We need to put in a couple of years.
• 38:58
  Purely contingency, then.
• 39:00
  I I am hoping to God that's the that that's the case.
• 39:03
  Where somebody's looking at sooner or later we're gonna have to go get a down flyer out of Iranian soil, and we might want to have more than just kind of a hodgepodge of capabilities.
• 39:15
  We might want to have.
• 39:16
  I mean, I assume these guys are coming with the Mew will be coming with a typical Marsock component, right?
• 39:24
  You can you know, potentially in any event, it it's a it's it's not a hodgepodge, it's a self-contained entity with aviation and supporting logistics and all that stuff.
• 39:37
  So I'm hoping that that's the case because if anybody has any insane idea that we're gonna start putting American troops ashore on any Iranian soil and holding that territory, particularly if they're gonna do it with like 2500 Marines.
• 39:53
  That is, yeah, that is Gallipoli.
• 39:55
  That's I mean, come on, you know.
• 39:58
  I mean, let's be real, you were talking about.
• 40:00
  Taking you know Iran and the size of it.
• 40:03
  If you wanted to actually invade Iran, which is an insane idea.
• 40:09
  You would you need a bigger army.
• 40:11
  Yeah.
• 40:11
  You don't just need the U.S.
• 40:13
  Army.
• 40:13
  You need a bigger U.S.
• 40:15
  army.
• 40:16
  You better go reactivate a bunch of divisions that we shut down and plus up.
• 40:22
  And I don't know how you're going to do that short of a draft.
• 40:24
  Well, and Caroline Levitt has never walked back those comments from a week ago.
• 40:28
  So I mean the U.S.
• 40:31
  Army as constituted does not have the force necessary to do this.
• 40:35
  The entire army doesn't have.
• 40:38
  Forget about the fact that, you know, we might want to keep some troops in Korea and be prepared for other contingency.
• 40:44
  And North Korea is popping off their new regiments.
• 40:46
  And North Korea is popping off, and right.
• 40:48
  I mean, there's all of that aspect.
• 40:50
  So, you know, no offense to the United States Marine Corps because God bless them, they're squared away outfit.
• 40:57
  But 2500 Marines in the scheme of things is nothing.
• 41:00
  I mean, that's not there.
• 41:01
  Not there.
• 41:02
  Maybe some, maybe geography were different, but not there.
• 41:05
  No.
• 41:05
  Not with those shaw heads.
• 41:07
  You know, it's an interesting anecdote.
• 41:09
  I I wrote about I I was asked to comment on this for the Australian broadcasting corporation recently, but um, you know, we just are our advertising we captured a Iranian drone a few years ago in Ukraine and we've successfully reverse engineered it.
• 41:24
  I think it's the Lucas drone.
• 41:25
  Yes.
• 41:25
  And as I told the Australians, I said, I don't know why we're proud of this.
• 41:29
  I mean, this is it means that the Iranians have obviously leapfrogged us in a key area.
• 41:35
  And uh they have better mass production capabilities, especially with being partnered with China and Russia and North Korea than we do right now.
• 41:43
  And um, why don't you tell the audience though, one thing?
• 41:47
  Um what could those drones, the way that they're arrayed on the along the coastlines of the Strait of Hormuz, if we were to land marine units carg island or somewhere, you know, somewhere on that coastline.
• 42:02
  What do you think would happen with with those Marines?
• 42:05
  They wouldn't be fighting Iranian ground troops, would they?
• 42:09
  No, I mean certainly that would not be the preference of the Iranians, right?
• 42:12
  Again, that they look at look at the psychology of the current conflict, right?
• 42:18
  They're not attempting to fight us man for man, weapon system for weapon system.
• 42:23
  They're responding in a completely asymmetric fashion.
• 42:27
  So, yes, it would not be trying to line up and face off with the United States Marine Corps.
• 42:32
  I mean, they got these cheap drones they can make for nothing.
• 42:36
  Um, you know, it's interesting the way you let into this because one of the things that really strikes me about this whole business with the drones and how we were reverse engineering a captured Iranian drone is what does that say about our defense procurement process?
• 42:57
  That's right.
• 42:57
  Right?
• 42:58
  Why it's broken.
• 42:59
  Why is our system producing unbelievably expensive systems that take forever to produce such that we have to go copy what amounts to a hobby shop drone that the Iranians cobble together?
• 43:17
  Well, now you know why I'm not invited back to the Pentagon anymore.
• 43:20
  Yeah.
• 43:21
  I mean, uh I ask questions like this all the time to them.
• 43:25
  Right?
• 43:26
  Did it ever occur to us that maybe we should have been doing this on our own?
• 43:31
  Right.
• 43:31
  Yeah.
• 43:32
  Why don't we produce something that we can act?
• 43:34
  Of course, we have this problem, as you well know throughout our whole procurement process, right?
• 43:39
  Producing ships and planes and missiles that okay, that's great, it's the greatest in the world.
• 43:46
  You know we can't afford to buy them, right?
• 43:48
  And uh maintain them.
• 43:50
  And we can't maintain them, and it's been 10 years since we asked you to produce this thing.
• 43:56
  And it still doesn't actually work right.
• 43:58
  You know.
• 43:59
  Look at the USS Ford.
• 44:01
  Well, I mean, that thing's been a boondoggle from day one.
• 44:05
  You think about this psychology.
• 44:07
  I mean, Sherman tanks in World War II.
• 44:12
  Right?
• 44:12
  Not necessarily feature by feature, the best tank on the battlefield.
• 44:18
  Yep.
• 44:18
  But man, they could be maintained and they ran, and we could produce them by just crank them off the assembly line and ship them all over the world.
• 44:30
  And then guys out in the units could actually keep them running.
• 44:33
  Yeah.
• 44:34
  And opt.
• 44:34
  And they would just swarm, they would just swarm the enemy.
• 44:37
  That's what they did.
• 44:38
  That's that was the method.
• 44:40
  That was also how, by the way, General Grant beat the South, was he just threw more equipment and men than the South could muster, and you just grind them down.
• 44:48
  That's the Russian way.
• 44:49
  It's attritional warfare.
• 44:50
  You just grind grind them down.
• 44:52
  So it helps if the weapon system actually works, right?
• 44:55
  Yes, it does.
• 44:56
  And it's if it's affordable too.
• 44:58
  Because people want to.
• 44:59
  Well, I mean, you know, we used to say that I certainly used to say this in the field all the time when somebody from headquarters would show up with some new G Wiz gadget that they wanted us to use.
• 45:09
  And I'm like, you know, I can't afford to play with this thing.
• 45:12
  That's right.
• 45:13
  So if this thing actually works and it will work consistently under the conditions that it must, then uh and it actually is makes my job easier or I'm more effective.
• 45:26
  Man, I'll adopt this thing in a heartbeat.
• 45:28
  I will be I won't go out the door without it.
• 45:32
  But it has to pass all those tests, man.
• 45:34
  If it works sometimes or takes me half of my time just to maintain the damn thing, I'm not sure if it'll power on, won't power on, then screw it.
• 45:44
  I can't, I can't it's not a game.
• 45:47
  I can't afford to be in the middle of an op with a guy who wants to kill me and find out that your radio doesn't work or your little gadget doesn't work.
• 45:55
  I can't I can't do that.
• 45:56
  Which is happening now in the Middle East.
• 45:59
  And uh not only that, the Iranians have effectively degraded the radar systems throughout the Middle East that we built.
• 46:06
  Uh so we're now deploying the Hawkeyes, which are the the you know, the the the base of the detection planes, and then the F-35s, this is not well reported.
• 46:15
  We've used the F-35 more as air defense sensor than we have as actual attacker, which is definitely not what the plane was built for.
• 46:26
  I mean, it was you know, it can do that, but it was supposed to be this big aggressive attacker.
• 46:30
  It's not doing that.
• 46:31
  So clearly it's it's the Iranians are degrading us as much as we're degrading them.
• 46:37
  And my question to you is now as we talk about escalation.
• 46:40
  I know we have about about like nine minutes left, but you know, as we as we enter the discussion of escalation, we're looking around the region, we're seeing our Arab partners.
• 46:50
  I think the economic miracle of the Arab states is gonna be over for a while at least.
• 46:54
  Um, and then we look at Israel, and contrary to what is being said in American media, Israel's getting pounded.
• 47:01
  There's there's uh there's reports and rumors that Netanyahu is either dead or incapacitated.
• 47:06
  There's another rumor I heard from someone today this morning telling me the IDF is basically operationally controlling the country now because the political leaders and intelligence professionals, the leadership have been basically made inactive.
• 47:21
  Um what does Israel do?
• 47:24
  Because they have an escalate an escalatory option as well, which is their nuclear weapons that they supposedly don't have.
• 47:31
  Um do you think that we are approaching the the moment where nukes might start popping off in the Middle East?
• 47:41
  Well, I hope to God not.
• 47:43
  I I don't think we're I don't think we're the we are there yet with Israel.
• 47:47
  Okay.
• 47:48
  But maybe the word yet in that sentence is the most significant, which is we come back to sort of the point of origin where we started talking.
• 47:57
  This war in my mind got launched based on a this whole idea just to simplify it.
• 48:04
  We're gonna bomb the hell out of these guys, and in three days they're gonna quit the regime is gonna fall, people are gonna rise up.
• 48:09
  However, that happens, we're ending this problem once and for all.
• 48:12
  And it's gonna be that simple.
• 48:14
  Not a bunch more sophisticated analysis now.
• 48:17
  Okay, that didn't work, and it was never gonna work and it was never based on it.
• 48:20
  Reality.
• 48:21
  And now we're sort of in we're just in the mode of the people that started this don't know what the hell to do next, other than just keep escalating, keep hitting more things.
• 48:35
  But okay, that didn't work.
• 48:37
  That failed.
• 48:38
  Your premises were wrong.
• 48:40
  You went into this under completely that's that was all wrong and it was never gonna happen, and now you're trying to figure out how to get out of this mess to be blunt.
• 48:52
  And you don't know any way, anything other to do than just keep making it worse by hitting hitting escalating.
• 49:00
  So, yes, you start to wonder like at what point then do we say, okay, well, all bets are off.
• 49:10
  Nuclear weapons are on the table.
• 49:12
  I also throw into that analysis the fact that, and I've said this before, Trump, I believe, perceives that the end of this is Iran is free, liberal, and democratic, there's a happy end, there's a happy ending.
• 49:29
  Yeah.
• 49:30
  The Israelis, I don't think have the same idea.
• 49:33
  No, they don't care.
• 49:36
  If Iran ends up as a wasteland torn apart by famine, civil war, and chaos, that's a happy ending for the Israelis, because they presume it means they can't they won't be busy building missiles and funding Hezbollah.
• 49:54
  So chaos and destruction.
• 49:56
  If uh if Iran ends up as a much bigger, much worse.
• 50:00
  Libya.
• 50:02
  For Netanyahu, that's that's a job well done.
• 50:07
  Um it hasn't worked out in anywhere that that has uh occurred.
• 50:13
  Libya, Syria.
• 50:14
  No, it hasn't worked out, and Iran could make all of those look like nothing.
• 50:19
  Right.
• 50:21
  Uh so I don't, you know, I'm wandering around now and responding to your question.
• 50:25
  I you know, I think we need to try to find our way toward we we should if assuming we were going to do this in any form, which I would have not have advocated for.
• 50:38
  It should have from the beginning been with limited goals.
• 50:43
  Yes.
• 50:43
  To if you will defang them.
• 50:46
  Yes.
• 50:46
  Again, I would have still had grave hesitation about that.
• 50:49
  But at most, we're going to take off the table these capabilities.
• 50:54
  At least for the foreseeable future.
• 50:56
  Yeah.
• 50:57
  Call it a day.
• 50:58
  And somehow we need to get back to that.
• 51:02
  I agree.
• 51:03
  Um, which is okay.
• 51:05
  We degraded this, we took out this, we took out that.
• 51:08
  It won't solve the problem forever, but it solves it for a long time.
• 51:12
  And we'll call it a obvious concern about that is I'm not convinced the Israel, the Iranians will let us quit.
• 51:19
  Yeah.
• 51:20
  I that you know, we'll announce we're gonna stop shooting, and then next thing they'll do is hit another oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz and say, Well, we're not quitting, buddy.
• 51:31
  So we're not done.
• 51:33
  Our last question, and I know you've got a few minutes left only.
• 51:36
  My last question to you is this is clearly an intelligence failure.
• 51:40
  Yes.
• 51:41
  Um, just like Iraq, an intelligence failure.
• 51:44
  How do we go forward?
• 51:45
  We cannot keep doing this with the Intel community where they're I don't know if it's ignorance or if it's they're just being railroaded by the politicians.
• 51:55
  What are some things you think we should do to prevent this from repeating in the next 20 years again?
• 52:01
  Because I feel like that we're going to be in store for this down the line somewhere else.
• 52:06
  Well, look, I you know, I I've said this for a long time, right?
• 52:09
  I I wrote a book uh well over a decade ago about CIA called Beyond Repair.
• 52:15
  So you know, the title kind of gives you a clue as to the tone.
• 52:19
  Um our Intel apparatus is broken.
• 52:24
  I mean, we got spy satellites and we got drones, and we got a lot of people with technical knowledge and very dedicated folks.
• 52:30
  We don't actually have any spies most places.
• 52:33
  Sources worth a damn.
• 52:35
  And we've lost that edge long since.
• 52:39
  And we're and and this extends to the analytical core too.
• 52:42
  We don't have real experts with integrity who are going to say operating in a system where they're allowed to and encouraged to give you their honest assessment based on their experience and the information.
• 52:56
  We've broken this whole apparatus.
• 52:59
  So again, when when, as I said much earlier in the interview, when Netanyahu's boys are coming and telling us we got this super secret sexy intel, and the Iranians are going to have a missile and it's going to be able to hit here, and they've got this nuke and it's almost assembled.
• 53:16
  You should be in the position to say, okay, that's cool, and then walk out of the briefing room and say, well, that's bullshit, because our guy, we got better access than they do, and we know none of that's true.
• 53:28
  But we don't have that access anymore.
• 53:31
  I mean, that's CIA.
• 53:32
  What was the answer?
• 53:33
  Radcliffe needed to walk through the front door.
• 53:35
  He needed to fire every top executive on the top floor of that building day one.
• 53:39
  Yeah.
• 53:40
  And then he needed to take all of these Brennan era reforms, so-called, and throw those out the window and say we're going back to the business of espionage and doing it.
• 53:53
  That's right.
• 53:55
  We're gonna become a serious spy agency again, and all this manby pamby crap and focus on DEI, but also just all this corporate bureaucratic mindset is gone.
• 54:09
  You know, we're going back to the way the OSS worked in World War II.
• 54:13
  Get the job done.
• 54:14
  That's right.
• 54:15
  Come back with the crown jewels.
• 54:16
  We never did that.
• 54:17
  They haven't changed anything at CIA in 14 months.
• 54:20
  Well, Ratcliffe is, I think, compromised, and he's a Zionist.
• 54:24
  And so 100%.
• 54:25
  He's compromised.
• 54:26
  Plus, he's walked through the door and doesn't know anything about the business.
• 54:30
  He doesn't understand.
• 54:31
  He doesn't care.
• 54:32
  And uh, you know, we'll we'll end it there because I've been a critic of Ratcliffe for a while.
• 54:37
  And uh Sam, is there anywhere you want people to follow you on social media or anything?
• 54:42
  Go to Substack.
• 54:43
  My wife and I, she's actually a retired spook as well.
• 54:47
  My entire my entire career, to be honest, is Operation Coattails.
• 54:51
  Just follow her around and try to take credit for what she did.
• 54:54
  Um go to Ann Magazine at Substack, Andmagazine.com.
• 55:00
  And uh she and I and some other old spooks, right.
• 55:05
  Phenomenal.
• 55:05
  Phenomenal.
• 55:06
  Well, thank you so much.
• 55:07
  He is Sam Fattis, he is uh America's James Bond in many respects.
• 55:12
  Uh uh, so we we appreciate him giving us his time.
• 55:16
  Thank you for joining us.
• 55:18
  I am Brandon Wyert.
• 55:19
  Don't forget to subscribe and like to NatSec Talk on Rumble.
• 55:23
  Check me out, NatSec Guy on Emerald.tv and 1945.com, where I'm a senior national security editor.
• 55:29
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• 55:32
  Uh Luis Cannone will be coming on.
• 55:34
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• 55:36
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• 55:39
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• 55:45
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• 55:50
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• 55:54
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• 56:41
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• 56:44
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