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retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel James Carofano, 25 years in the U.S. military as an Army veteran and senior counselor now to the Heritage Foundation president. You joined me live recently when we were broadcasting just ahead of the 4th of July and the tall ships were starting to come in on the Hudson River. And that's really when I learned a lot about your military strategy, more than I had ever known. So I'm so grateful to you to join us on this day. This war is now ratcheted up. We could see it coming. The president promised if Iran didn't come to the deal or come to the table to do a deal. How do you categorize this day? Yeah. So first I would go back to something I said when we were together before the 4th of July, which was that people said, well, why doesn't the president go just go in and finish it? Why don't we do more of this? And because the president doesn't want to waste lives. I mean, we tragically lost some American in uniform because they're always at risk. So here's the good news, which is the strikes are relatively limited. The way they did this was relatively novel that they had a successful strike. I'm pretty sure the U.S. is going to adjust for that, so they won't be able to do that again. And what's really important is all of our regional allies are even more with us than ever. So and that's, I think, really important. And then the most important thing is, look, I mean, we went from saying the big deal is the Iranians can close the strait to them be saying, well, they can interdict the strait. And now they're rapidly losing the capacity to do that. So they're there the longer they fight this war, the worse off they are. And the most important thing is look at what a whole they're digging themselves in. Now they've got to rebuild bridges, power plants, all their military. I mean, to get back to where they were a year ago, that is just going to take forever. Look, I have a couple of questions that just have to do with getting the job done in whatever amount of time it would take. And everybody roots for quickly, I'm certain. We don't want to see any loss of life. I mean, the president says that on all sides. We don't want any loss of life, especially not our own as American citizens. But you talk about the Gulf and everybody being on our sides in terms that you've got the Abraham Accords, got a lot of partners, now friends in the region. When they take incoming, though, it's a lot different than us. Our militaries are not our military. And our protection mission just got bigger. Right. And we are seeing a rapidly increasing capacity in the region for countries to protect themselves. And what's really interesting is working with Israel and seeing Israeli capabilities being brought to the table. But again, a lot of this is there's a much diminished capacity in the part of the Iranians to do anything. This has enormous long term consequences. These people are never as long as that regime is there, they're never going to trust this regime again. So these countries will work together in the future to build up deterrence against future Iranian threats. I'm really sure of that. Yeah. And that took me right to my second question. You did it. We know we can't trust them like we know they've shown us many times who they really are. Now everybody in the region says, well, wait a minute. We don't want to sink money and time and resources into something that's also not going to bear fruit. Who do you deal with on the ground in Iran? Well, I don't know. The important thing is you deal with the things you can deal with. What we can deal with is really build up the deterrent force against that. So for example, we are in Iraq in a way that we have not been since the early days of the war. We have an Iraqi government which is cooperating with the United States more than ever. We just sealed a huge oil deal with them to bring more resiliency to the oil industry in the region. They are working to kick the Iranian militias, diminish them and get them out of the country. This was unthinkable four or five years ago. So I know people are fixated by the losses, which are terrible, and how long does this take, but our position in the region is the strongest that it's been since the end of World War II. I mean, we are so – we have been dealing with this from Jimmy Carter. Since the days of Jimmy Carter, we have never had a position in the region this strong to create a better future for the region. And then that means less trouble for us, less work for us, safe for America. And I just think that this is at the price we are paying. Trust me, it is going to pay off for decades. An Iranian-American academic identified as a regime mouthpiece says that Tehran, the capital of Iran, wants U.S. troops on the ground in Iran. Watch this. The focus of Iranian strikes are on Bahrain and Kuwait, and that's because that's where all the American – most of the American assets have been placed for a ground invasion. The Iranians – we discussed this too during the 40-day war before on your show when I said that the Iranians actually want the Americans to carry out a land invasion. And the same is true now. Because they felt that if there was a land invasion, they would win. My dad said one of the lessons that you learn from wars like Vietnam is that some people just like to fight. And while the communists in that war, my dad would say, may have had a vision, the one that we were clear eyed on was they wanted to kill and they wanted to fight, which is why it was so hard. Your take on what was just said in that clip. Yeah, you don't fight the war of the enemy once, right? This is a country that's the size of Texas. We could put every American in uniform in the middle of Iran, and we could not control that country. So the idea that we're going to go invade this thing, that's just nuts. We're not going to fight them on their terms. That's just stupid. And then when they try to bring the fight to us like they have, what do they get in return? They get absolutely decimated. So I don't see this administration changing course. You know, again, we've talked about regime change. It brings all other kinds of challenges and things. The point is, we don't know the dollar figure or the life figure, you know, what would it take to get the regime? We don't know that. So that's, I don't think, a credible goal for the U.S. But the U.S. can do what it's doing now, which is completely eliminating their capacity to interdict the straits. They've taken nuclear weapons off the table. The country can't build a nuclear weapon. Their arsenals are shadow. A matter of fact, these attacks show, actually, that Iran cannot threaten the reign of death, that it literally could have threatened a country with a year ago. And what have we heard from the surrogates, the Hamas, Hezbollah and everybody else? I mean, they're just sitting on their hands, which is exactly what we want. So I think we're in good shape.

Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.