Tucker Carlson Responds to Israel’s War on Iran

**Tucker Carlson** (0:00)
So whenever something big happens, particularly something really big, like a war that will change world history, the first four questions you have to ask are these. One, why did this happen? Two, what was the point of it? Three, where does it go from here? And four, how do we respond? So let's assess the war in Iran now ongoing in its second day, and try to answer those four questions. First, why did this happen? Now in this case, there's a really simple answer. This happened because Israel wanted it to happen. This is Israel's war. This is not the United States' war. This war is not being waged on behalf of American national security objectives to make the United States safer or richer. This war is not actually even about weapons of mass destruction, nukes, chem bio. No, this war is waged purely because Israel wanted it to be waged. Now, why say that out loud this early in the conflict? Isn't that dispiriting for, say, American troops fighting this war? Yes, it is. We thought a lot about whether it was wise or decent, even to say something like that out loud, and have decided that it is for the following reason. First, because the truth is always the only basis for wise decision-making. When you lie to yourself, or you lie to your people, you not only commit, well, a kind of moral crime by lying, but you also tend to hurt yourself. Hubris is the product of lies, for example. You can get way over your skis if you're not honest with yourself and the people around you about what's happening and why it's happening. But long-term, that is also true. In other words, it's important to say why this war is happening because 50 years from now, people may not know. Your grandkids may learn that this war started because the Ayatollah showed up in Miami and started machine gunning people in a shopping mall, and so we responded. There was a kind of Iranian Pearl Harbor. You don't know what the future will believe about the present. You don't know how history will be written. And if you're skeptical of that, if you're asking yourself, well, how could historians, popular historians, how could future culture so misunderstand something so big? How could people lie about something so obvious, so giant? Well, history is your guide. A lot of the big events we think we understand, including wars from the past and not so distant past, are completely distorted in our memories. In other words, that's not actually what happened at all. And the truth is, if enough people lie about something at a high enough volume and they do it for long enough, loudly enough, while threatening anyone who refuses to lie about it, over time, their lies become conventional wisdom. Everyone believes them. There is something about repeating a lie over and over and over again that's almost like a spell or an incantation. It's almost a form of witchcraft.
It assumes reality or a version of reality, an ersatz reality, a fake reality, but reality nevertheless. And if you're interested at all in history, going back thousands of years or even more recently, you know that the understandings of certain events that you grew up hearing about probably totally inverted. The opposite is true, but you didn't know that until you dug a little deeper, in some cases a lot deeper, to find out because they have been distorted in the retelling. And because they have been, because a lot of our most basic assumptions are based on untruths, we wind up getting into the same messes again and again. So it's just important to tell the truth about this now in the early stages. This is, by the way, widely known, this is not a conspiracy theory. Everyone's saying it out loud now because it's true. The United States committed troops to this conflict because the Prime Minister of Israel, not Israel as a nation, but the guy who runs it, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bibi, demanded it, seven trips to the White House over the last year. And the point of those trips never varied. The United States needs to commit to regime change in Iran. We need the US military to overthrow the government of Iran. And Bibi himself has basically said that, that it wasn't that we thought Iran was going to get nukes this week, and that's why we did this. Nobody's even saying that now. They will be in the future when our memories get a little dimmer and they can manipulate us more. But right now, they're admitting, no, actually, they were not on the verge of getting nukes. Bibi himself said, you can pull up the video, I've been dreaming about this for 40 years, we've finally done it. So this is the culmination of a long time plan of strategy. And actually, if you look at it backwards and try to assess recent events, even in this country, in American political life over the past several years, certainly over the past six or eight months, you can see that a lot of what was happening here was preparation for where we are right now. In other words, people who wanted war in Iran were softening up the public for it, were manipulating the US government in order to affect it, and were doing their very best to silence anyone who doubted its wisdom. A lot of the things we have seen in the recent past are, and now it's very obvious, they were all designed to get us to where we are now, war with Iran on behalf of Israel. Now, just a caveat at the outset, just because the Prime Minister of Israel wanted a regime change war with Iran does not mean, in any sense, that it was a wise idea for Israel. It certainly wasn't a good idea for the United States. No one really disputes that. But was it a good idea for the country or for the Prime Minister who advocated for it? No, probably not, actually. Just because we want something doesn't mean it's good for us. Sometimes when we get what we want most, we're destroyed by it. Hope that doesn't happen to Israel, of course, or anybody, but it could. So when you get to the truth of things and you see who's pushing for them, that doesn't mean that person understands his own best interest or his country's own best interest. Often they don't. Often we don't. But it doesn't change the fact that we got here because Israel lobbied for it. And virtually everyone in the US government, certainly in the Pentagon, understood the risks. The risks were obvious from day one. First, if you knock off a government, we have a long history of doing that. It's not that hard. The individual bravery of the US military personnel, the soldiers who do it is laudable, impressive, amazing sometimes. But that is, we have learned, the easy part. Killing Saddam? OK, amazing. What comes next? Et cetera, et cetera. This is all very, very well known. And it was very well known 48 hours ago that there was no real plan to replace the government we were hoping to topple. At which point, what? Well, now you have a country, Iran, the size of Western Europe, with 92 million people, a country that's, you know, only a little over half Persian that has its own internal divisions and dynamics and rivalries. You have that country potentially breaking apart. And what does that mean? Well, I mean, hard to see that as a good thing for the rest of the world on so many levels, which we pray don't become more obvious, but they're even now becoming obvious. That could be a true, true disaster. So why would we want that? Well, of course, we wouldn't want that. The only country that seems to want that are the only leader, to be fair, once again, not speaking for every Israeli any more than Joe Biden or Donald Trump or anybody else who runs this country speaks for every American. Of course, but Benjamin Netanyahu wanted that. He thought that was his mission, but more than his mission, maybe his destiny. He suggested that in his remarks today. And that's why. But nobody in the US government, who I ever talked to or heard quoted on TV, seemed to believe that this was primarily in America's interests. There might be ancillary benefits. I mean, you hear these analyses of how, you know, the world is changing and it went from being unipolar to multipolar. All true. In the United States, ran the world uncontested from the summer of 1991 until, I don't know, pick a date pretty recently, the rise of China. And all of a sudden, you have multipoles. You have more than one great power vying for control of the world and its trade routes and its resources, etc, etc. And that somehow knocking off the government of Iran would be good for us in that complex chess game. And that's a real argument, I guess. These things are kind of hard to understand. And any wise person looks at the world and says, okay, there's no stopping the rise of China. Their manufacturing capacity, their economic power is really the world's largest real economy, is not going to end tomorrow. So there has to be a way to strike a kind of power sharing agreement with China, with the East. The United States doesn't rule the world uncontested, and for the foreseeable future is probably not going to. So how do we live in some semblance of peace and preserve our own interests? And again, you enter into some informal power sharing agreement with the other great power or powers probably can't stop that process. It's probably too late to stop China from controlling the East at this point. Killing the Ayatollah is probably not going to do it, so there's probably a better way to do this. But anyway, there are people who disagree, and if we do this, it'll be better for us long term, and at least you have to give them credit for trying to think of a way in which this might benefit the United States.