Video transcript
Welcome back, America. We're here with our good friend, Hudson Institute senior fellow Keystone Defense Initiative director Rebecca Heinrichs. Rebecca, thanks for coming back. Well, we're at this point now where really I think it comes down to containment through a deal or some sort of victory where we keep the pressure on, military pressure, economic pressure, and so forth and so on. How do you see this right now? Well, I actually think there's a third way, and that's essentially you put the pressure back on, you do another military operation, and that is going to be more conducive to getting a deal that works. President Trump has been incredibly patient with this rump regime, but it has not delivered. When the president says, look, we're going to have a ceasefire, you still have IRGC militia firing on Navy ships. Now, our military is still in place, Mark, as you know, so we continue to take out these small boats that are trying to harm either tankers or our ships. But, you know, enough is enough. I mean, we've got them economically squeezed. They are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a day because of what President Trump's economic pressure campaign is doing. The military pressure is still in place if President Trump gives the go-ahead, but I still think we have got to do another round. We know what targets we still have to hit inside Iran. That needs to come next, and then we're going to be in a better position to get these Iranians to actually start playing ball. Well, let's say we do that, and let's say we get there, and they say, OK, Uncle, we give, now we really want to talk to you again. What do we want? We know we want no nukes. We know we want no enrichment. We know we want to remove all the stored enrichment. What else do we want? We want control of the Strait of Hormuz. But President Trump was completely right to initiate Operation Epic Fury, and whenever you saw his critics come in and say, oh, my goodness, the United States didn't prepare for the Iranians to threaten the Strait, it's nonsense. We always knew that this was the only thing the Iranians could do. They could terrorize the Strait of Hormuz 20-plus percent of global shipping, and so we cannot give them that card ever again. And of course, we know that as long as the Iranians can terrorize the Strait, and by the way, there's still 1,500 ships being held hostage by the Iranians stuck in the Strait that President Trump wanted to be able to release with Project Freedom. We've paused that because the Iranians want us to pause it. I think that's a mistake. But I think we've got to take that away. They cannot be funding proxies throughout the region. We're really handling that by depriving them of any resources. They're not even able to pay their militiamen at this point because of the economic squeeze they're in. But we don't want them to control the Strait. They can't have nuclear weapons, and they can't have a ballistic missile program that can act as a shield so that the United States, with our great partners and allies, the Israelis, so that we can't come in and do this again if we need to in 10, 15, 20 years. Now, that is a great point. They can't do it again, but we may have to come back in 10, 15, or 20 years. You see the opposition to what the president is already doing. I see the opposition here in the United States is growing. We have this isolationist movement. We have this Marxist Islamist movement. We have these woke right neo-fascists. We have a Democrat party that is radically pacifistic. This is my concern. How long can this be managed once President Trump leaves office? Can it be managed in an effective way given our politics and given the Democrat party and these other elements? Well, it's a great question. I think that President Trump is really the only president that has decided to finally take on this terrorist regime that has been an enemy of the United States killing Americans for 47 years. And we know that all of this diplomacy, the Iran deal, Obama's attempt with the JCPOA, it was a failure. At the end of failed diplomacy, you have to have military force to reestablish deterrence. President Trump has done that. The Iran regime, I think, Mark, is already completely crumbling. And we basically have a rump regime in place. It's splintering. It's part of the reason that we can't get a deal at this point because the IRGC isn't listening to the people who are negotiating with the Americans at this point. And so I think that we have to do what we can to eliminate those who are the most obstinate, the most committed to the Islamic revolution and try to get to a point where we can have a regime that can comply with the United States in our demands. Let me come back. My question to you is this. Why don't we just keep the pressure on economically if they're crumbling? Do as you say. Our military is sitting there. It's a beautiful military ready to do what it needs to do. Put this additional pressure on them and that way maybe they will collapse. And that's the surest way to make sure in 15 or 20 years from now, they won't be back. We'll be right back. Welcome back, America. We're here with Rebecca Heinrichs. Rebecca, so why have a deal at all? Why not keep the pressure on, the pressure on, pressure on? They want a deal. Of course they want a deal. That's the nature of the beast there. They'll take a deal. Maybe they'll sign something that's really in our favor but probably won't honor it in the out years and so forth. If they're crumbling, why don't we give them the extra push? Yeah, I think we do need to give them the extra push. And whenever I say that we might have some sort of diplomatic, you know, political outcome to this, it's really not a deal that I'm looking for. It's not something that I'm not going to believe anything that the Iranians signed. It just means that they've completely submitted to American demands. President Trump has not moved off of his red lines. He has kept his red lines in place to his credit. But I do think we keep the economic pressure in place. We keep the blockade in place. Their economy is crumbling. They cannot sustain this kind of pressure. But I do think that we need to go on the offensive again because we have seen the IRGC using cruise missiles, using other kinds of weapons systems that we didn't see that they had when we stopped Epic Fury. So we know where they are. We know where they are along the coastline. I do think that there's more munitions facilities that we now know exist. So I think we do have to have another military operation go through there, take out more IRGC and Basij. And then the last point, Mark, I would say arm the Iranian people. We don't even have to do the heavy lifting at this point. The Iranian people support the United States. They oppose the Iran regime. They're the victims of oppression and they can handle the rest if they have the weapons to do it. There seems to be some opposition to this. I don't know who it is or why it is. I'm just wondering if the CIA bureaucracy is not up to it or doesn't want to do it or somebody doesn't want to do it because this is something that works. It's something we did throughout the Reagan administration. It doesn't involve our troops on the ground, you know, fighting the Iranian troops and so forth and so on. And we have a willing people, tens of millions of them that just want to be able to take on this regime. How many times do they have to prove it? They've had 50,000 dead this time, 100,000 dead before that. They want to be free. Why don't we use this resource and at the same time help free these people? Well, I think it's a great question. And we saw early on in Epic Fury, President Trump essentially implied that we had a plan in place to get arms into those who could get it into the opposition. And that plan didn't work. But I would hope that we try again and see if there's another avenue to do this. During the ceasefire, we should have the CIA with the Israelis, intelligence services who have completely penetrated the regime. They know who the different factions are, who the people are, who they can work with. And in fact, the Iranian people have given coordinates to the Israelis to show them where the besieged leaders, those are the people who are controlling the Iranian populations, the dissenters. So there has been some collaboration already. Those individuals just need the weapons. They stand no chance unless they are completely armed. This is something that the United States should absolutely take advantage of. And as you said, Mark, that would enable them to take their own future in their hands. It's not something that the United States would have to do from the top down. Yeah, when people keep saying they need to rise up and get shot in the head, they want to have a fighting chance. And we Americans believe that people who want to be free, who are being abused, ought to have a fighting chance. I mean, Rebecca, if it wasn't for the French in the Revolutionary War that wanted to make sure America had a fighting chance, we wouldn't be the United States of America. You look throughout the history of these things here, the mujahideen in Afghanistan, in Angola, in Nicaragua, the US are back, but the people did rise up under Reagan. We did push communism out of so much of our hemisphere and so forth and so on. I think we know how to do this, don't we? We do know how to do this. And the other thing that's really important to keep in mind is the standing army in Iran is not like the IRGC. They're nationalistic Iranians. They're not all, you know, ideologically committed to the Islamic Revolution like the IRGC, which is why in the past you heard some US officials say, look, we haven't taken out the army. We have completely taken out the Iranian Air Force, the Iranian Navy and we've left the army pretty much in place. Why? Because that is a moment of opportunity to overthrow the Iran regime, the Islamic Revolution. And so you have people there and then you have the civilians who are willing to take their country back. It was only just a few decades ago, Mark, that these people had a more secular country. These people know how to be self-governing. They know how to have a secular government. It would work, I think, if the United States used and took advantage of these people who just want freedom. I'm with you 100%. I've been blowing this horn for a couple of months now. And particularly when the army is not getting paid, particularly when the economy is hurting, they're going to lose more and more of their loyalty to this regime. And you're right. People confuse the army with the IRGC. It's not the IRGC. It's separate and apart. The IRGC is there to try and keep the army in place. And so those guys don't go running when they want to run. Rebecca, I want to thank you very much, the Hudson Institute, a great organization too. God bless you, my friend.
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