Best Frenemies Forever - August 13, 2026

**Cenk Uygur** (0:00)
You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome, thank you.
Welcome to The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, guest hosting today, John Kiriakou. Fun for everybody. John, of course, famously a former CIA agent, that's fun.
And he's got his podcast now, that's John Kiriakou's briefing room. Everybody should check that out. And John, you're joining us from Greece?

**John Kiriakou** (5:43)
I'm joining you from Greece. I am in Athens in the 24-hour-a-day party neighborhood of Sidi. I hope you can't hear what sounds like a raucous soccer hooliganism party going on outside.

**Cenk Uygur** (6:01)
No, no, no. And it was good to see the Greeks are having a good time. Okay, I like it.

**SPEAKER_3** (6:07)
Okay, all right.

**John Kiriakou** (6:08)
This is like their old chorus.

**SPEAKER_3** (6:10)
Yeah.

**Cenk Uygur** (6:12)
So today, we do have some somber news, of course, unfortunately. We are gonna talk about the Iran war and the state of it and how badly that's going and get to the realities of the situation. We're also gonna talk about Yemen in a second and some of the disasters that's unfolding there. Wanna talk to you a little bit about media and the media's reaction to the war here and a lot more to get to, including price of war. So, let's get started.
We've got our first story now.
So in Yemen, unfortunately it looks like we have killed four more civilians than we realized and now we realize that there's 150 civilians at a minimum that we killed in strikes in Yemen. It looks like there might be a lot more and that was right after Pete Haggis have gutted civilian protections. So, John, I'm gonna ask you more about this after I give you all the facts of this story. But let me just start by asking you one quick question here. Do you think that we've loosened the rules of engagement too much here and that's what's leading to a lot more civilian deaths?

**John Kiriakou** (7:17)
Oh, very much so. I think that's clearly what has happened here and it's so much broader to Cenk.
The president has been very clear and very public about his ongoing desire to attack civilian infrastructure, whether it's in Iran or in Yemen. Attacking civilian infrastructure is a black and white war crime. You can't do that and we do it anyway. If we do it, then the Israelis are gonna do it, the Saudis are gonna do it, the Emiratis are gonna do it. And the next thing you know, four, five, six different countries are at war in Yemen, which can barely defend itself and frankly is at war with itself. And then you get these ridiculous numbers of civilian casualties.

**Cenk Uygur** (8:04)
Yeah, so I wanna talk more about the downsides for us as well about that and why we're doing it. But first, let me tell everybody what's happening there now. So these are reports from 2025 that are now coming in. We had a window of time there where we were bombing the hell out of Yemen. Let me go to the Washington Post to explain here. US forces attacked at least 1,000 targets in that time.
And it was a span of about 50 days, according to Pentagon figures, in a bid to diminish the Houthis' arsenal and restore freedom of navigation to the waters off of Yemen.
Now this is when the Houthis were striking ships in the Red Sea to try to protect the Palestinians in Gaza and impose costs on Israel and other governments that were not basically not caring about the Palestinians and helping and aiding and abetting the Israelis. So they were trying to prevent a genocide from their point of view. We attacked them for 50 days. We hit 1,000 targets. And then US forces, they acknowledged last year, killed 153 civilians and wounded nearly 250 others, and that's what we know so far. Now, one attack on April 28th, 2025 alone killed 68 civilians in northwestern Yemen, according to the Pentagon's review. So now the Pentagon has reviewed three of those attacks, and that's where we're getting this information. But they've yet to review 15 more attacks that have not been analyzed yet. They're getting around to it, they assure us.
So the executive director of Air Wars has stated, how are they gonna keep up with the scale and pace of the war we've seen in Iran? They chose to hit 13,000 targets in Iran in 40 days. That's ten times more than in the Yemen campaign. And let's remember how this all started. This is what Pete Hegseth said about Iran.