Trump Gets Torched by Four-Star General Over War!!

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1:21Ben Meiselas:They're certified organic by GOTS and meet multiple non-toxic and safety certifications. made for people who care about their health and the environment without sacrificing comfort. I love that Avocado proves you don't have to choose between comfortable, supportive sleep and your values. And now you can get up to 15 % off all avocado mattresses. Just go to avocadogreenmattress.com. Get up to 15 % off at avocadogreenmattress.com. avocadogreenmattress.com. Donald Trump was just torched by his former defense secretary, General James Mad Dog Mattis. He served as Donald Trump's defense secretary during Trump's first term from 2017 to 2018.

2:06Ben Meiselas:And General Mattis, who is a four-star general, says that Donald Trump has no plan at all when it comes to this disastrous war in Iran. General Mattis says it will take at least 8 to 12 years to try to rebuild America's relationships with our former allies after Donald Trump eviscerated it by attacking NATO, by attacking our former allies. And General Mattis makes it clear that he believes that this Iranian regime is not going to be toppled. They are not going to crack and that Donald Trump is utterly failing right now. I want to show you what General Mattis said when he appeared on PBS's firing line with Margaret Hoover.

2:58Ben Meiselas:This deserves to get more attention because let me also be clear. In addition to being a four-star retired general, General Mattis served in that region in leadership roles in the Middle East, probably with more experience than any living person today. First off, after the revolution in 1979 in Iran, General Mattis was in the region. He saw firsthand how the Iranian regime engaged in terrorist attacks throughout the region. He also led troops in the Persian Gulf War, in the war in Afghanistan, as well as the Iraq War. He headed the U.S. Joint Forces Command and the U.S. Central Command, CENTCOM, from 2010 to 2013, overseeing operations across the Middle East, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen.

3:52Ben Meiselas:Then he served as Donald Trump's defense secretary. You'll recall that somewhere right around the end of December of 2018, he resigned because he didn't like what he saw Donald Trump doing foreign policy wise. Then Donald Trump acted like he fired General Mattis. But General Mattis said, nope, I absolutely resign. So let me show you what went down on this PBS program. This first clip I'm going to show you, General Mattis says that he believes that the regime, the Iranian regime, will not fall, that Donald Trump does not have any coherent plans at all, and that we absolutely need allies. We need NATO.

4:36Ben Meiselas:We need to have friends in the world. Otherwise, doing anything internationally, engaging in any wars, it's impossible. And again, this comes at a time where earlier today, earlier yesterday, Donald Trump's been posting attacks on NATO. NATO is a paper tiger, right? It comes as Doug Burgum, Donald Trump's interior secretary, is saying, ah, it seems like the United States right now is much closer to Russia and other countries in Russia's orbit than to NATO. Watch General Mattis eviscerate Donald Trump. Let's play this clip right here. How would you estimate the likelihood of the regime's falling?

5:19I do not believe the regime will fall in the near future. Now, understand war is fundamentally unpredictable. Fundamentally, that is part of war. So what I'm saying could be completely reversed in 24 hours. But I think it is very unlikely that that regime will fall anytime soon. And I think we're going to have to deal with it. So how do you deal with it? I'd suggest that America has got some of the greatest strengths, our economy, our education system. We have ways of engaging with the world. No other country has. And yes, we need a very strong military to defend this idea of a democracy. But at the same time, if we don't use all of our strengths, and there I would point to allies, without them we're not going to get there.

6:16Ben Meiselas:You say in your memoir, nations with allies thrive, those without them die. Whether we like it or not, we are part of a world that needs allies. And yet, President Trump has said, we don't need anybody, we're the strongest nation in the world. So can the United States succeed in this war without allies other than Israel? No. What is your sense of the biggest concerns from our allies right now? Well, there are many of the same concerns that we hear from our fellow citizens. America is becoming predatory. America is unreliable. They say one thing and they change. seven days later, two days later.

7:07So there's a sense that we are not a reliable security partner right now. The first time NATO went to war was after we were attacked. And one of the countries that lost as many boys per capita fighting alongside us after America was attacked on 9-11 was Denmark. And Denmark is, of course, the country that owns Greenland. So when you think of a threat against a NATO ally, or when you hear that we're putting tariffs on allies at the same time, we're demanding they increase their defense expenditures, which requires a robust economy, You're seeing a strategic disconnect. And right now, many of the actions we're taking, unfortunately, mean that we're working against our own strategic outcome at the end.

8:04And you can't bring allies on board if they don't trust you. We're going to have to deal with this threat by this aberrant, bizarre, murderous regime in Tehran and we're going to do it at the end of the day with allies. Lots of allies.

8:21Ben Meiselas:More from General Mattis in this powerful interview with PBS right here where he talks about how it will take at least eight to 12 years to try to repair the wreckage of Donald Trump's wrecking ball to the entire world. And it'll probably be even longer than that. We may not be able to recover, General Mattis says. And also he says that Donald Trump is basically a Putin bootlicker and China is benefiting from this as well. Here, play this clip. General Mattis, if we are going to deal with a regime that is in place and we are not going to do it without our allies, is there a method or a mechanism for trust rebuilding?

9:04Ben Meiselas:Is there a path forward. Yeah. And you go to the heart of it right there. There's a saying about trust. It departs on a horse at a gallop. It comes back at a very slow walk. And I get the sense it's going to take us eight to 12 years to restore the levels of trust that the allies believe that we are once again someone they can count on. We've treated them poorly. And I think it's going to take a while to recover, but it's going to be by giving our word on something and living up to it and going back to a strategic approach. And a good strategy is an appetite suppressant to war. It is not an appetite increasing tool because you don't go off and do silly things if you've got a strategy because it sets priorities and you don't do something.

10:03For example, reopen Russian oil, take sanctions off Russian oil because, you know, that's a key problem for Europe right now. You don't do certain things that end up actually causing you more problems down the road. So we're going to have to get back to thinking strategically and giving our word and living up to it.

10:23Ben Meiselas:You mentioned easing the sanctions on Russian oil. President Zelensky said that that certainly does not help peace and only strengthens Russia's position. It sounds like you agree. How is China reading these actions? Well, China is benefiting from a lot of this, and Russia is benefiting militarily because weapons that could have been given to Ukraine are not being given. They're being used in other places, that sort of thing. Economically, Russia is benefiting. So right now, China and Russia are probably benefiting from this war. All right, fellas, real talk. Spring cleaning is here. And before you pretend that your kitchen is fine, go look at the pan you've been using since college.

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13:08Ben Meiselas:I've studied this Iranian regime. It is very unlikely that they are going to crack. And also, Donald Trump's purported goals are very muddled and murky. And it's unclear what the hell he even wants. And when you are engaged in warfare, if you are also a student of warfare, if you study at military academies, having very clearly defined objectives, Seems like an obvious thing to say, though, that that's very important. And from one minute to the next, Donald Trump will be like, all right, we're done. And on the other hand, like yesterday, he's like, we're going to be sending in thousands and thousands of troops.

13:51Ben Meiselas:Remember yesterday, he sent in a huge amount of troops from San Diego, thousands and thousands of the 86th Airborne Division. Heck, they were separately called. And then in addition to other Marine Expeditionary units that won't even get there until April. So what the hell is the plan? Here, play this clip. They are not, quote unquote, not cracking, and they are willing to fight to the end. Is it your understanding, based on what you know of the Iranian regime, that it seems plausible that their will is unbroken?

14:27I think it would be very unlikely that this regime would break right now. but like Hemingway's point about how a man went broke gradually and then suddenly you know it is a very fragile regime in terms of its grip but it's strong enough with its murder and all they've told for example they've told the Iranian parents don't let your sons and daughters demonstrate because we will shoot them we will you we will go after them so no they're not going to go away anywhere right now, I would not think that they're going to break.

15:02Ben Meiselas:So you've summarized one of your leadership techniques as, and especially on the battlefield, as clearly stating the purpose, sparsely outlining the methods that are to be used, and then explaining the desired end state of any mission. So how do you understand, as a civilian now. The Operation Epic Fury's purpose and desired end state. As you can see, the lady does her homework.

15:40It's murky. It is murky right now to understand what we in the military call the commander's intent. And we've heard things like unconditional surrender. We will select the next leader. We've heard all sorts of things, frankly, and it's been murky and it's hard to articulate an end state that's achievable. For example, as the American president has said, it just takes a couple people to screw up the Gulf because they can get down there in their fishing boats and drop mines in. And Lloyd's of London objects the insurance rates up and people don't want to send their ships through and for the American president to say, well, you know, they're just going to have to show guts.

16:28Let me tell you, I've been in minefields and I hate them. And every ship can be a minesweeper once, but that's not the way you want to find the mines, I guarantee you. So right now, yeah, it's pretty confused.

16:42Ben Meiselas:More from General Mattis right here, talking about how Donald Trump has described what he's doing in Iran, whatever the hell it is, as an excursion by its nature that is limited, whereas the Iranian regime views this as a total war, limited war, excursion. That's Trump's definition. For Iran, this is about survival. So when you're talking about a regime that's in survival mode and that regime has lots of weapons and the citizenry is unarmed, it's unlikely to topple them. And also you're likely to have an outcome where you have even more extremists within the regime taking power. That's precisely what we're seeing now.

17:29Ben Meiselas:Mount Jaba, Khomeini, the new Ayatollah. And when the Trump regime and Netanyahu kill a new leader, a more extreme person takes their role. Play this clip. We have seen one administration after another try to find what I call the fruitless pursuit of the Iranian moderate somewhere in that regime. And we haven't found him yet. OK, it doesn't exist. This is a regime that if the CIA is analyzing the regime to show you how we learn about them, they have a list of what are the indicators of an autocrat staying in power. There's over 70 indicators, and they look at all these things. One of them, one of those indicators outweighs all the rest.

18:16Will the regime murder their own people at the industrial level? If they will, they're going to stay in power. You have an unarmed population up against a very well-armed regime that is fighting a total war right now. Total war. We're fighting a limited war. The American president a week ago called it a little excursion. But they are fighting for their lives, the Mullahs are, because the people probably will kill them if they overthrow them. They're just that angry at them. So they're fighting like that. What have we learned from it? It's going to be a darn difficult problem. A darn difficult problem.

18:58I hope we learned it.

18:59Ben Meiselas:Let me share you this last clip from this interview. Again, a very powerful interview indeed. Let's play it. Is this a reflection on unpredictability in war? That and some other things. But what happened in 1979 when this was being filmed is that changed everything in the Middle East. In Iran, the Shah falls, and this regime that we're now dealing with comes in some 47 years ago whatever it is the the grand mosque falls to the uh nutcases the political islamists uh the terror what eventually becomes the sunni side of the terrorist uh organizations coming out of the mid east and so out of that the question when this war started uh some couple weeks ago were we going to fundamentally change on from a strategic point of view fundamentally change the construct of the Middle East.

20:03Israel using hard power had basically shattered two of the militias. And was there an opportunity now to rock them back so far on their heels that the regime would fall? That obviously has not happened, although it's been defanged in terms of its proxies, in terms of its nuclear program has been set back. But the regime is still there. So basically, the war on a strategic level has not changed the overarching framing principle of what we have to deal with in that area. And we will have to deal with it. We can't walk away and say, sorry, we got distracted or we got tired of this. We're going to have to deal with whatever comes out of this current war.

20:44And I think it's going to include that regime still there that goes back to that fateful year, 1979 in the Middle East. Well, there you have it, folks.

20:53Ben Meiselas:I think that was such a critical interview. I mean, there's no one, there's really no living person more knowledgeable about this stuff than General Mattis. Put simply, what you heard there, I think is an unbiased, unfiltered view of what's really going on. Tell me what you think. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. You may think you're subscribed, but you may not actually be subscribed. So double check. Thank you all so much for watching. Have a wonderful day.

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