JD Vance’s Warning to Israel, the Last Desperate Move of Israel-Firsters & Iran’s Growing Strength

**Tucker Carlson** (0:00)
It's always a kind of sketchy proposition to cite casualty figures in the middle of a war, because if there's one thing combatants, governments lie about, it's how many people have died. You could almost never get a straight answer. Everybody lies about it. They're lying about it now. Four and a half years in, we really have no idea how many Russians, Ukrainians or people from other countries have died in the Russian-Ukraine War, and we definitely don't know with precision how many people have died in the war with Iran. But we thought it'd be interesting to pull up the official numbers, to the extent they exist. We don't know, by the way, with total certainty how many Americans have died, the official numbers may be 16 Is that true? We hope it's no more. Every death is a tragedy, but we just don't know. But there are official numbers, and so again, just as an exercise, as something that might reveal a deeper truth, we pulled up the numbers a minute ago. So here are the numbers. On the Iranian side, the official number is about 3,600. 3,664, about that. Iranians dead. Combatants and civilians, majority civilians, as is true in every war. 3,600. But that's not the biggest total of dead in a country in the last three months since this war broke out in the Middle East, launched by the United States and Israel. The biggest number of dead is not in Iran, it's not in a Gulf state, it's in Lebanon. Lebanon? Yeah, over 4,000 Lebanese, almost all of them civilians, killed by Israel since Israel and the United States launched the war against Iran. Think about that for a second. Now again, we have no confidence in the precision of these numbers, but in the relative scale of the numbers, in other words, more killed in Lebanon than killed in Iran, sounds right. It was even close to right. It tells you something amazing. And it tells you, which if you've been paying attention, something you already knew, which was that Israel cajoled, convinced, threatened, however they did it, got the US government to fight this war, a regime change war, in Iran on its behalf with it as a partner, Israel and the United States partnered in this war, different goals, but somehow a partnership, and then immediately used that war as a pretext to launch another war against a neighbor, Lebanon, the only country in the Middle East with a Christian head of state, Christian head of the military, the only even semi-Christian country in the whole region, and kill a bunch of Christians and other people, more than the US and Israel together killed in Iran. Think about that for a second. Think about what that says about Israel's attitude, not toward Lebanon or Hezbollah or Hezbollah or whatever we're calling it, the Iranian-backed Shiite militia that they're supposedly at war with. Think about what that says about Israel's attitude toward us here in the United States. It's sponsor, the people paying for all of this. This would be like you get a call from a friend, your closest friend, your only real friend who says, I've got a home invasion in progress. MS-13 is beating down my door. They're going to kill my family. Come help. It's existential.
And so you get in your car, you drive over there with armed. And he's right. You begin a pitched battle with the MS-13 home invaders. But while you're fighting his home invaders, he splits out the back door and shoots his next door neighbor in the head and steals his house.
You would say to him, probably, if you had any self-respect at all, what are you doing? You told me that I had to fight this battle on your behalf because we're such close friends, and that your existence, your future depended on winning this battle. And the second I joined the battle that you convinced me to join, you split and started another battle to increase the size of your property.
That's not a good friend. That's a friend who's taking advantage of your generosity, of your loyalty, of your help. That is, in fact, someone who's betrayed you.
And that is, roughly speaking, or maybe a little more than roughly, that is pretty much exactly what Israel just did to the United States. So Israeli leaders somehow convinced, controlled, threatened, whatever they did, they overrode the advice of the American president's advisors and intelligence chiefs and convinced him that Iran was on the verge of building a nuclear weapon despite the fact that that same president had told everybody a little more than six months before that that threat had been neutralized during the 12-day war back in June, that they were somehow building a nuclear weapon again despite having no nuclear facilities because we blew them up or whatever. You remember the story. And we needed to neutralize that threat. The Iranian nuclear program was the justification for this regime change effort for killing the Ayatollah, bombing the girls school, everything that's happened in the last three months.