Lindsey Graham DEMANDS 'IWO JIMA' Level Sacrifice

Meanwhile, while we're on Taco Watch, we have to continue, of course, to pay attention to the thousands of U.S. ground troops that continue to move to the Middle East. And we have Lindsey Graham trying to set expectations for everybody here, taking to Fox News Sunday and saying not only should the United States take Carg Island, but comparing it to the Battle of Iwo Jima. Let's take a listen.

Here's what I tell President Trump. Keep it up for a few more weeks. Take Karg Island where all of the resources they have to produce oil, control that island, let this regime down a vine.

Is this going to though take Karg Island? Is it going to involve US troops on the ground? Let me just read you something. I don't know yet. The Atlantic does an assessment on that. They say US troops may well take Karg Island. and we believe their ability to do so, but only to endure ballistic missile strikes, drone attacks, petrochemical smoke, all without a reliable means of obtaining logistical support.

The result could be a grinding war of attrition. They talk about how far away they would be from resupply.

I'm sort of tired of all this armchair quarterbacking. This has been an amazing military operation. God bless the fallen.

But it's a difference when we talk about troops on the ground.

I trust the Marines, not that guy. I trust DOD. We got two Marine expeditionary units sailing to this island. We did Iwo Jima, we can do this.

We did Iwo Jima, we can do this. Anybody want to tell me the casualties on Iwo Jima? We got about 7,000 killed and 19,000 wounded. Was that a, is that the similar stakes that are involved here in the middle of this expeditionary, you know, adventure, chosen excursion.

Yes, not even a war, it's an excursion. That's what Iwo Jima, I mean, it's being fluid. I think this is the perfect clip to show you how these individual Marines are just pawns on a chessboard to people in Washington. Yep.

That they use the mythology of the heroism of the past to whitewash all of the ways in the post-World War II era that their lives have just been carelessly thrown into these wars of choice and adventurism, which accomplished nothing to the benefit of the United States, has bled us dry, blood and treasure. And meanwhile, the individual families who either lost somebody or have somebody wounded

or whose family member was affected by PTSD, they have to deal with the wreckage. That's why this bothers me so much. Like this bravo, bravado, the chest thumping, each one of those individual lives who was lost on Iwo Jima is not fodder for you to then claim some of their glory in order to advance your regime change war of choice,

which has now been a total and a complete disaster. And I think it demonstrates how all of these service members have been treated now. The 13 killed, the 200, 300, who knows how many, who have been wounded now so far. The thousands that are already just being moved into the region for some sort of potential operation. But that is what they're now trying to prepare the American public for. And also, by the way, I should say this. Iwo Jima had a huge backlash here in the

United States. A lot of people don't remember that time period. After there was, after clearly the war in Europe was either winding down or, you know, there had been the armistice or whatever had been signed, well, the American public started asking some serious questions.

They're like, wait, why are we taking tens of thousands of casualties out here? Like, we need to wrap this up very quickly and the Pentagon, or I guess the War Department or whatever at that time was having a lot of conversations. How do we prepare the public for a ground invasion of Japan? So like even in the conflict, with the most bought in US public,

whenever we were taking these level of casualties, they were like, whoa, we need to hold on. They're like, what's going on here? Are we sure this is necessary? The atomic bomb ends up happening and so everybody conveniently forgets Iwo Jima's casualties and Okinawa, but it was not like that domestically.

That again was a war where probably 90% of the public were on board.

People were really bought in on that war effort.

He wants to try and recreate this disastrous type of circumstance. We talked with Professor Pape about the parallels, Karg Island or the Straits of Hormuz. We're talking about Gallipoli. These are like global changing events. The Aussies still remember Gallipoli. I mean, you know, like one of my tour guides

when I did a World War I battlefield tour, like they, 100 years later, the descendants still come to Gallipoli to see what their great-great-grandfathers had to go through. I don't think we should be going about that. I think we should do everything in our power to avoid some sort of a nightmarish situation.

And this is the problem, is that they're so, they're so caught into this mythos, everything is always World War II. That's why, what do they say about the Iranians? What does Mark Levin, oh, they're Nazis, right? Everybody's always a Nazi.

It's always 1938, There's no in-between. That's the only conflict that you're ever allowed to talk about.

Reminds me, which Iranian official was it that posted online, like, Americans remember well when General Westmoreland came and said things were going well?

It was Arachi, the foreign minister. He said, Americans remember well General Westmoreland. I'm like, sir, I wish we did. You are vastly overestimating us, I'm sorry to say, sir. I'd be like, sir, I wish that were the case. A lot more Americans should know General Westmoreland's name, one of the most villainous military figures in US history.

There's a handful of historical events that you could count on maybe most Americans remembering or having learned about. That's definitely not one of them.

They don't make Saving Private Ryan movies about General Westmoreland. Again, literally one of the biggest liars in US military. The most villainous military in modern history.

Yeah, we like to sweep that one under. Those don't get approved by the Pentagon, you know, people who look at the scripts for Hollywood. Yeah, I mean, this is sick and it's disgusting and it's also really important because this is not just some senator, unfortunately.

This is a guy who was extremely influential in bringing us to this point of war. There was a, I believe Bloomberg did some digging into like, how the hell did this happen? And you know, the Mark Levins of the world, the Ted Cruz came out and also said he was really pushing in this direction. I don't know if that's true or not, how influential he was, but he's like wanting to take credit

for this right now for some reason. So you had a handful of voices you know here in the US and then obviously the Israelis very influential as well. You had these media personalities too and then you know you had Trump high in his own supply after Venezuela and all those things came together to create this horrific horrific set of circumstances. So when Lindsey Graham is out there talking you know he's saying these things directly to the president. The other thing that I'll say about,

you know, the whole setup there is, he's dismissing this analysis of like, oh, this is gonna be really bad. And he's like, I don't trust that, I trust the Marines. Well, and I trust the military. It's like, well, the military,

the ones that tried to tell Trump that this was gonna be a disaster. how forcefully it was done, but they had war-gamed this out years ago, especially the straight and foremost part, and were like, this is not going to go well for us. They saw all of the peril on the horizon, but he thought he knew better and wanted to listen to Israeli intelligence instead of US intelligence, wanted to listen to Israeli war planners instead of US war planners, and now here we are.

The other thing I've been thinking a lot about, Sagar, is, you know, I really was resistant to this idea that you had of like, we should actually have age limits, but I am coming around to it because when you have these old men.

Childless.

Old men, who, not just childless, like Trump is not childless. I'm talking about Bibi, I'm talking about Trump, I'm talking about now the, you know, martyred Ayatollah, I'm talking about Lindsey Graham. They don't have to live in the world that they're authoring and they're thinking about, I mean, Trump talks all the time about whether he's gonna get into heaven or not.

Like clearly he's thinking about his own mortality. I think Bibi is too, Netanyahu is too. And so they're willing to take extraordinary risks with the entire world because their major concern is like, I want to be viewed as this great man of history, as this historical figure. And I really think in Trump's case, I'm not sure he cares whether it's for good or for evil.

He just wants to be remembered. He wants to leave his mark on the world. And he really doesn't have to give a shit what's going to come after because this man is not going to be on this planet for that much longer. It creates grave dangers. It creates a risk landscape that is truly, truly

unacceptable for all of the rest of us. So I do genuinely think it is a massive problem the way these old men are thinking about their legacy and how they wanna leave their mark versus like how do I make sure that we are considering risks appropriately and not ending up

in some sort of an insane nuclear escalation?

There's a lot to be said. When we were talking with Trita Parsi, he was talking, I mean, you could tell he is very concerned that the Iranians will make a similar mistake to the U.S. and that we will not try for some de-escalation, that they will not seize their moment, which will lead to their inevitable destruction. To your point, I don't think it's an accident that the youngest president in American history is the person who got us onto a diplomatic off-ramp,

which basically didn't exist during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And sorry for the history lecture, but it is important to think this was a person who literally broke his back on PT-109 and had to swim in the ocean carrying a wounded man whose life jacket strapped in his teeth

to try and save him. Now, it was kind of his fault in the first place, but whatever. The point that remains is that while he's in the situation room, he was a guy who at that time was, you know, low level, I think he was like a lieutenant,

and he's sitting across from these generals who successfully fought in the Second World War, and he's like, they don't understand the stakes of what it actually means to fight and to die in combat. And so for him, it was so important to seek that diplomatic off-ramp and to at least gamble and to try in the Cuban Missile Crisis,

the famous responding to the first letter, not the second letter, and agreeing to some things which were anathema to the U.S. security establishment, the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. That is the most courageous act, I think, in the history of the American presidency. It saved the world from Armageddon. I don't really think it's an accident that you had a very young person who was willing

to reject the 60, 70-year-old security establishment of the people who are around him. And you can see now very clearly, as it's repeated now all throughout history. Yes, these older men, people like Lindsey Graham, people who are, like Lindsey wants his legacy to be total regime change in the Middle East. He has no children and he's in his 70s. Like, this is it for him. He wants a Senate building named after him.

By the way, unfortunately, the Senate buildings, two of them, Rayburn and Russell, are named after childless old men who their entire life was, you know, the Senate and that's fine, but like, of course, they didn't have anything to live for. They didn't have to live necessarily in the world

of their making and of their consequence. Like this is really important to the Ayatollah as well. He was 86 whenever he was killed, you know? And yeah, I mean, he's just-

Although out of all of them, he showed a lot more caution. He showed a lot of, you know. And then his younger replacement is likely to not follow in those footsteps.

See, that's the problem. His caution, he was too cautious to start a war and not cautious enough to avoid one. I actually think he was the worst of all wars. I mean, with old people, what do they do? They dot her and they're indecisive. I really don't think he's very blameless. I think he really made a lot of mistakes, especially in the last five years of his reign.

They should have pursued a nuclear weapon. He wouldn't be in this right now. I mean, that's the reality. And as much as I hate to say that because I abhor nuclear weapons, I would love for proliferation to be rolled back,

that's just not the reality we live in right now.

Exactly. thing I do want to show everybody too is that before the taco it's not like the American establishment wasn't sounding very, very bellicose. Let's put A9 here, Secretary Scott Bessen, who is somehow the war defender on television this weekend, saying sometimes you got to escalate to

deescalate. Take a listen. We are taking out their missiles, their missile systems, and the factories that build those missiles. And now the General Kane, Secretary Hegseth are leading a campaign to destroy all the fortifications along the Straits of Hormuz.

Just to put a fine point on this, though, is the president in the process of winding down this war or escalating the conflict?

Again, they're not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you have to escalate to deescalate, Chris. Sometimes you got to escalate to de-escalate, Chris.

Sometimes you got to escalate to de-escalate. Do not forget, as they covered on the Friday show, A10, put that up there on the screen, that you just had American officials telling their counterparts in Israel there may be no choice in order to launch a ground operation to capture Karg Island. There could be various other schemes and plots that are afoot. There's another 2,500 Marines. Let's put that one up there on the screen that are currently on their way. They're not even

going to arrive for three weeks. So don't, you know, this really could be a delaying action. You've got two of these Marine expeditionary forces that are on their way to the Middle East. The one that's coming from Asia, they said it would take two to three weeks. That was about a week ago, so it's still on track. And this one, I think, also has to sail from the West Coast all the way to the Persian Gulf, which is going to take a little while. So we are in no way out of the woods here just yet. I want to make sure that we take that with a grain of salt.

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