2026-03-19
2 小时 10 分钟We want to start tonight with a clip from January of 2024.
This is from this show, and this is Joe Kent,
who later went on to become, until yesterday, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
Here it is.
What do you think the immediate and then longer term effects of a war with Iran would be on the United States?
Immediately, it would be very bloody.
I have no doubt that we could probably defeat some of their air defense and go in there
and have another shock and awe campaign.
But again, we saw how the shock and awe campaign in Iraq really didn't actually work in the long run.
So I have no doubt that we'd have some immediate results that people would cheer about here in the United States.
But Iran.
Persia has always been an empire.
It 's been around longer than any of the other players in the modern Middle East right now,
and they are not going anywhere.
If we get deeply involved and deeply entangled with Iran,
we are playing right into China's hands because China would like nothing more than for us to be committing our military
industrial base to a war in Eastern Europe,
in Ukraine, and then to be committing our conventional military power, our blood and our treasure.
Back in the Middle East, that will make the Pacific, our actual border, extremely vulnerable to Chinese aggression.
Or China will simply just watch us bleed out economically as we bleed out on the battlefield