Top Generals Issue Stark Warning on Trump's War Strategy

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2:26As Donald Trump continues to escalate this catastrophic and unlawful war in Iran, and as more American soldiers are dying and being seriously injured, top military officials are giving massive red flags and warning signs through leaks to major media outlets in the United States. And these top officials who are still speaking on background, meaning they're not giving their names, but they're giving quotes and data and information, are saying the United States simply lacks the military equipment to fight this war. That the United States has run low on munitions, on Patriot and Thad interceptors.

3:11that the United States does not have ground troops capable of invading Qesham Island or on the coast of Iran, and that any escalation is going to be completely devastating. And these top military officials are also leaking that Iran is clobbering these American military bases, and the U.S. is getting hit hard. I think one of the things these top military officials are deeply worried about, the risk that their troops are in right now who are positioned in these various bases in the Middle East. And also this military equipment of the United States, whether it's the strata tankers, the C-17s, the MQ-9 Reaper drones, the Apaches, the other helicopters that are out there, the early detection warning systems.

4:06Iran is striking with an unbelievable precision, these targets in the Middle East. And one of the notable things is that what we're learning from these anonymous sources, but they're top officials, and also by looking at just the open source intelligence data that's out there, the US is moving some of its most valuable assets out of the Arab nations and moving them in Ben Gurion Airport in Israel and in other facilities in Israel because Israel is protected by the Iron Dome. The Arab nations, whether it's Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, et cetera, they believed they were getting the security umbrella from the United

4:59Ben Meiselas:States. Heck, they were doing the quid pro quos with Donald Trump and they thought, hey, aren't you going to then help us out? No, no, no. And they're watching as Israel has the protection, but Iran is able to pick off these bases that are right there and target not just the bases, but as the United States strikes desalination facilities in Iran, power plants in Iran, as the United States kills the equivalent of Coast Guard and civilian police in Iran, and just civilians in general in Iran. Iran has been hitting desalination facilities in Kuwait, power plants in Kuwait, the Babco Petroleum Facility in Bahrain, oil facilities in Iraq, major infrastructure in these Arab nations, and they're getting crushed.

5:50And then what Iran is doing is they're putting out these messages through the IRGC to unite the Muslim communities

5:58Ben Meiselas:and saying, look, we're doing this because your leadership, the princes and the kings have thrown you, the Muslim community, under the bus in favor of Trump and in favor of the United States. And look what you're left with. And Iran is then publishing these messages. Thank you to the people of Jordan for giving us the coordinates of where to strike. Kuwait, did you see how the people of Jordan helped us strike the bases? We welcome your support. We want you to join. And this is the strategy that Iran is pushing. And we're also seeing that these high-level military sources who are leaking information to the press here and also leaking information to the Midas Touch network, They're aware that Iran is pursuing a very sophisticated five-dimensional chess strategy while Donald Trump is playing Dumbo, MAGA, checkers right now and Iran uniting the Arab world while Donald Trump is causing these nations to get hit and get hit very hard.

7:12and you're seeing Donald Trump fall deeper into the escalatory trap, sending more equipment there

7:19Ben Meiselas:to the Middle East. And it's like the early detection's gone. The Patriot interceptors are not effective against what Iran's doing. Iran's sending salvos of eight to 12 ballistics. That's it. And a lot of them are hitting the targets, right? And this says we're learning more U.S. casualties, dozens of service members injured. I mean, take a look at this story, Washington Post. U.S. teeters on return to all-out war with Iran after more troops killed. The military announced Sunday that a service member was killed in action. The third in the past, you know, since Friday, that they're willing to actually announce.

7:57Ben Meiselas:They found the remains. They found the body parts in Jordan. And then a fourth killed in Iraq, which they say was caused by a controlled detonation. I'll get to that in a moment, though. New reporting from Washington Post paints a sobering picture of the growing cost of the Iran war for the United States. As American officials, these are top military officials, leaking to the Post that the U.S. military is absorbing heavy damage while facing mounting constraints if the fighting escalates further. These top officials are saying that key military installations in Jordan have been struck repeatedly.

8:36Ben Meiselas:Black Hawk helicopters have been damaged. Hardened barracks have been destroyed by Iranian ballistic missiles, and U.S. munitions and air defense stockpiles are being depleted. One U.S. official, when anonymous, told the Post that the Pentagon is now planning for the possibility of a wider war, but warned the military is running short on air defense systems, long-range munitions, troops, and aircraft needed to sustain a major expansion of the conflict. Another top official said, we're getting beat up across the board. Military experts cited in the report also caution that the U.S. is not prepared for a potential ground conflict with Iran, even as Trump has declined to rule one out.

9:24Ben Meiselas:How about this message. We do not have enough to safely sustain operations. And I don't think the White House is aware of that. I think the White House is aware of that. I think this is a message to the public. You may be saying, well, why would Donald Trump do this if he knows that we're getting crushed because he is psychotic. He is a malignant narcissist. This is the guy who's saying that vandals destroyed the reflecting pool. This is the guy who put up tarp to cover where it says the Kennedy Center after his name was removed. This is the guy who held the, stop acting like we're dealing with a normal freaking person.

10:14Ben Meiselas:Stop viewing this through a normal lens of this is a leader's debt. We're dealing with literally a psychotic, deranged, not normal person who has bankrupted almost every company he's touched. And people said, don't build those three casinos next to each other and incur so much debt. They're going to go bankrupt. You know what Donald Trump says? I'm going to do the biggest. I'm going to do Michael Jackson, and it's going to be so great, and everything's going to be fake gold and fake gold. Bankrupt, bankrupt, bankrupt, bankrupt. His whole life is making the dumbest decisions, bankrupting it, and then he blames people for it.

10:57Ben Meiselas:By the way, WTF America. That's one of the things we talk about in this book. WTF, Stop normalizing this damn behavior. Pre-order. Scan the QR code. Now, as Babi Taghvi explains over here, Trump and his administration are lacking enough intelligence to understand they are acting exactly the way the IRGC generals like Achmin Wahidi and Mohammed Bagar Zolgadar and others dream of them behaving. like Trump is setting the trap for himself and walking right into the escalatory trap, causing the price of oil to surge crude up now over$90 a barrel. That's going to hit$100 a barrel soon. You may have thought, Ben, you've been saying that and you sounded so hyperbolic a week ago when you said it's about to hit$90.

11:49Ben Meiselas:Nope, I was being accurate. I was being accurate regarding the fatalities when no one else was reporting on them and the dozens of troops that were seriously injured when nobody was reporting on them as well. As Trita Parsi explains, to say the U.S. underestimated Iran's missile capabilities, it's only half true. Yes, there was an underestimation, but there's also a deliberate effort to downplay Iran's capabilities and silence and deplatform those who early on pointed to their efficiency after the first round of attacks between Israel and Iran. And the reason was clear. To get Trump to agree to a larger war, a media narrative of Iranian weakness, Iran's a paper tiger, it's on the brink of collapse, etc., had to be manufactured.

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14:45Ben Meiselas:And take a look over here. New York Times account of the four Iranian attacks on the U.S. forces in Jordan in the past week. U.S. officials offered a recounting of the last five days of Iran's attacks on Jordan, which the Pentagon has not yet discussed in detail publicly. The first attack to hit U.S. forces in Jordan struck a residential facility at King Faisal Air Base, wounding as many as five U.S. service members, they said. The second hit a base in eastern Jordan, where U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were operating from damaging a significant number of them. Then 48 hours ago, Iranian missiles, this is 72 hours ago, hit Jordan's Muwafik Salty Air Base in Azrak, which is the same base where the troops were killed on Friday, the officials said.

15:32Ben Meiselas:The earlier strike wounded about 20 U.S. troops, rushing to take cover in bunkers. No one was killed in the barrage, so they say. But on Friday, when the Iranian struck the base again, two U.S. troops were killed and four other service members were injured. According to U.S. officials, other personnel were evaluated for minor injuries and returned to duty, or so they say right there. Now, one of the other things that's leaking out as well is that part of Donald Trump's plan this week to distract and pay attention. What I try to do in these videos is prepare us for the next few weeks so when it happens, we know the setup.

16:14Ben Meiselas:We know the manipulation. We need to stay ahead of what these fascists are doing. So that's why I read international sources as well. And you take a look at what's going on right now and what Japan is saying that intelligence officials are leaking to them. If you look today in the Nihon Kazishinbona Nikkei, senior foreign affairs commentator Hiroki Akita is saying that his sources, likely U.S. sources connected to bases in Japan, are saying that Donald Trump is going to try to pursue a bilateral deal with Pyongyang, Kim Jong-un, in order to show, look, I am stopping nuclear proliferation in North Korea.

17:03Ben Meiselas:Kim Jong-un has never said he's going to stop the nuclear capabilities that they now have in Iran. that Donald Trump allowed him. But what Trump and Kim Jong-un are apparently planning is to do one of those fake deals that are going to claim they've capped North Korea's ballistic missile capabilities to try to give Donald Trump a win and say, okay, we'll cap them to some short and medium range missiles. And this way, we, the United States will recognize Kim Jong-un. You can have these medium and short range missiles, but that you're not going to do long range. And Trump will try to take a victory lap, but that's going to expose Japan and South Korea to nuclear blackmail.

17:51Ben Meiselas:And Trump wants to do this to try to deliver a win on nuclear issues because he's failing so miserably in Iran. And now we have that being leaked as well to Japanese analysts who are then reporting it on their paper. And it's one of the things that we are studying here as well. Also, these military officials also told the New York Times that the soldier killed in Iraq, right? Three they're claiming killed in Jordan, although I think there may be more deaths in the region. One in Iraq, while an Iranian one-way attack drone was being rendered safe was apparently not an explosive ordnance disposal technician.

18:33Ben Meiselas:It was a soldier who was struck by blast fragmentation and debris when the drone was detonated. Now, let's talk about this leak and why there would be a leak like this, right? Because the generals are saying, look how incompetent they are. They don't even know how to handle and diffuse the Shahid drone. And so it wasn't even the drone technician or the person who was responsible for doing the controlled detonation. They controlled detonation and a soldier who wasn't even dealing with the controlled detonation got killed because a fragment hit him. But you take the totality of all of this, and that's what's going on.

19:27Ben Meiselas:I'd like to leave you with the following, if I may. And I really want you to watch these two clips right here, because to me, they're very revealing of everything. It's Foreign Minister Aragji. and Foreign Minister Aragchi is talking about the failed negotiations with the United States and everything. I'll just play one clip here. I'll do another clip later. He talks about his discussions with Whitcoff, Steve Whitcoff, the real estate slumlord guy, in my opinion, who Donald Trump uses as our top negotiating envoy. Aragchi is a world-class negotiator, wrote the book on negotiations, foreign minister, actually known as a brilliant person.

20:19Ben Meiselas:Whitcoff is like a scumbag slumlord, in my opinion, who would brag about going in to collect rent in Harlem with a gun in the 1980s. That's why Trump liked this guy. And so what Araujji said, I'm looking at Whitcoff. I'm looking across from him and we're negotiating. I said, hey, Whitcoff, you think I'm scared of you? Have you ever had to be on the phone trying to negotiate something and believe at any moment you could be blown up and killed you ever have to deal with that you think that we're like venezuela we're just going to roll over listen to what he says over here i told the americans have it called for vitkov i said have you ever been in a meeting where you thought it could blow up at any second

21:11they were just staring blankly. I said, have you ever been on the phone and thought that right as you're speaking you might get like blown up, destroyed? Have you ever, like I don't know, when you're on the phone asking how your family is doing, thought to yourself, this might be the last time? I said, we've been through all this. And we stood our ground. You need to talk to us differently. You can't threaten us. You can't buy us off. In the negotiations before the 12-day war, they came to buy us off. Not me personally, but the Islamic Republic. Saying, we'll do this, we'll do that, we'll build this, we'll build that.

21:58And right there I told him, our enrichment is not for sale. in this is something the iranian people have endured 20 years of sanctions for their scientists blood has been spilled for it how can we just sell it you're telling me i'll build you this power plant i'll build you that right here i said look no bribes no threats you should threaten someone who's afraid when we go out every day expecting anything to happen to us you can't scare me by saying i'll come attack I'll do this. I'll start a war. You're Venezuelanese. Yeah, this isn't Venezuela, where you take out one person and the rest get scared and back down.

22:35I told you.

22:36Ben Meiselas:We translated that, obviously, into English, but deliberate, deliberate. And I'll just show you one other clip because I want you to get an understanding of how they think at the civilian leadership level on Iran about the failure of negotiations here play this clip well they came you can try diplomacy as I said diplomacy is a less costly path they demanded zero enrichment even before the 12-day war during the negotiations that were underway well we resisted their illegal and unreasonable demand for zero enrichment We stood our ground.

23:49in the 12-day war. This is where the story of the 40-day war begins. After the 12-day war, I believe they made another miscalculation.

24:04They hadn't anticipated this level of resistance, so they realized they needed to be better prepared, and thus they increased their equipment and weaponry. They had this notion, the Zionist regime thought that with a few days of attacks, they could destroy everything, tear it apart, and the system would collapse, and the Islamic Republic would surrender. All those vain illusions they had. When that didn't happen, because they weren't prepared for a prolonged war, and because they saw the people didn't turn against us, but instead supported the system and stood by it, they were forced to end, to halt the war.

24:41Ben Meiselas:Well, there you have it. We have to study what's really happening. That's what we do here at the Midas Touch Network. It's not about cut out the propaganda, cut out the bullshit. Let's focus on what's really happening. By the way, WTF America. That's why I call it. Check it out. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Pre-order WTF America. I think there's a QR code up there. Thanks for watching. We appreciate you.

25:37The Pond Python