Darryl Cooper Deep Dive: Zionism, Islam, Spain & Why the Iran War Is a Pivot Point in World History

**Tucker Carlson** (0:04)
Darryl, thank you for doing this.
We must think of you every two weeks. We should call Darryl Cooper, so. But we try to keep it to once a year, because you live so far away, and I'm just grateful you made this effort. And I just have to say, not simply because it vindicates me, but because it's such an amazing and wonderful fact that you actually are, literally, measurably, America's most popular and important historian. That's just a fact, which is incredible. It gives me hope, because you do like five-hour podcasts on things that happened 100 years ago in granular detail, and there are a million and a half people listening to that. It's like, this country is not lost. So anyway, thank you so much.

**Darryl Cooper** (0:42)
Always a pleasure.

**Tucker Carlson** (0:43)
We were speaking at breakfast about how the Iran War started, and you were putting it within the context of how Western nations, European nations, fight wars historically and why this was different. Can you recap what you were just saying?

**Darryl Cooper** (1:03)
Sure. I mean, I think that when you look back at the period of limited warfare in the 18th and first half of the 19th century, that was really one of the pinnacles of not just our civilization, but human civilization in general. War is something that is sometimes necessary, sometimes interests conflict and you have to fight over it. But to be able to arrive at a place where you can treat your enemy with respect even in defeat, is really an amazing accomplishment.
You start to see the breakdown of that over the course of the 20th century, of course, the First World War. But even still, there was a sense of what's the saying that hypocrisy is the tribute that virtue pays to vice. Exactly. We still had to pretend, we still had to come up with stories to tell ourselves so that we could go to sleep at night. We hadn't given up on those values completely.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:02)
And what are the values?

**Darryl Cooper** (2:04)
Fair play. Yes.
The idea that even somebody who you have to put bullets down range at is a human being and deserves to be treated as a creature of God. These are things that became very deeply embedded in our social consciousness and as individuals as well. So that again, even as those values started to fade in practice, we still held on to them in our hearts.
And I think a lot of people today, or well, I should say maybe a few years back, just a few years ago, if you talk to your average American soldier in Iraq, for example. Well, actually, that's a perfect example. If you look at Iraq, I have a lot of anti-war libertarian type friends, and they're very strident in their views sometimes of American militarism. And I always tell them, like, look, when you compare, there were incidents in the Iraq War, no doubt about it, in the Afghanistan War, where soldiers got out of hand. But when you compare their behavior, the level of discipline and honor that they displayed in those wars relative to any previous conflict in American history or world history, probably, let alone in a really vicious insurgency like they were fighting. This was not a conventional war, but especially in Iraq, the enemy was vicious on a level that is hard for most people, I think, in our society to really even believe. And yet our guys continue to treat the people that they were, who were under occupation with dignity and respect, by and large. And they really did have the idea that they were there to try to help these people and to free them from this. You know, again, whether we agree with that or not, they believe that. And if they hadn't believed that, they would not have been as willing to risk themselves and their friends the way that they did. I mean, we took a lot of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan because we refused to do certain things that we could have done much easier.
We could have done in ways that would have killed a lot more of their civilians, but preserved a few of our soldiers' lives. And we chose not to do that. And that, you know, it's unfortunate because over the course of the war on terror, and I think largely in more recent years, due to our just compulsive need of our, in our political discourse, to find ways to rationalize everything that we see the state of Israel do, it's forced us to really compromise on a lot of those values, because there's just, if you don't compromise on them, then you have to condemn what's going on in Gaza, right?