There's a lot of stuff happening, peace steals, trade deals, tax deals. It's stuff like that. Check you in often for all this stuff. You need to know this stuff on fifty five KRCD talkstation eight oh five, the fifty five KRCD talk station. It is that time of the week we get the inside scoop from bright Bart News. I'll always start by reminding folks to bookmark the site b R e I t baart dot com. Great stuff there, particularly stuff from my guests Joel Pollock. Joel, welcome back
to the morning show. My friend. It's always a pleasure talking with you.
Always good to talk with you as well.
And expert on things Israel we're talking about. The situation is unfolding rapidly now. I woke up this morning very excited to read that they had negotiated a ceasefire. Iran Israel going to put their guns down and play nicely together. We can talk about what that might mean in the long term. But over the course of the morning I find out that Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel after agreeing to the ceasefire, and of course necessitating
Israel to mounter. Apparently, Trump was screaming at both sides. I've got, you know, different quotes and posts on true social media. But Israel apparently has recently decided to pull its planes back, apparently not bombing them. What in the hell is going on here, Joel block Well.
Trump announced the ceasefire yesterday and Israel accepted the ceasefire. Iran said it would not accept the ceasefire but would stop firing at Israel if Israel stopped firing in Iran, so effectively, it did accept the ceasefire.
Yeah.
What then happened is what usually happens in most wars before a ceasefire, which is that the two militaries scramble to make sure that they achieve certain objectives before the ceasefire takes effect.
So Israel was.
Attacking Iranian military targets and targets associated with the Iranian regime, and Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel. The Iranian fire continued through the ceasefire deadline, so it actually fired beyond the ceasefire, but Israel ignored that. Iran also managed to get one of its missiles through Israel's defenses, and it hit an apartment building and murdered for Israeli's wounded many others.
That caused a huge amount of anguish in Israel, right, and it really cast a pall over what should have been a day of celebration that the war was over and that it had been successful. Then there was KLM for several hours, and Iran then fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. Both of the missiles were intercepted, but it was a clear and flagrant violation of the ceasefire. So the Israeli said, Okay, we have to respond to this because otherwise Hern's just gonna violate the ceasefire whenever it
wants to, right. So Israel then sent pilots to conduct an airstrike on some target or targets in Tehran, and Trump blew up and made some pretty off color remarks on camera. Yeah, he basically blamed both sides, and he claimed that Israel had violated the ceasefire. He said that if Israel carried out the air strike, it would violate the ceasefire. But it's not really a violation of the ceasefire. To respond to a violation of the ceasefire, so.
That Joel, I mean, it's the natural logical thing for Israel or do you know, Okay, you shoot at me, We're coming back at you. And we've already proven we can be very successful when we do it.
I can understand Trump's frustration. He wants there to be calm because he has broader goals in mind, and he doesn't want the war to continue. He doesn't want the United States to get drawn into the war. He wants to preserve what has been a success for both the United States and Israel. At the same time, there has to be more outrage at what Iran is doing. I
said this last night. Perhaps I should have said it publicly, but I said it to colleagues that after Iran hit the Israeli apartment building, the President really should have condemned Iran's attacks in moral terms. His primary concern was the ceasefire, and that's understandable, but there really had to be a
strong condemnation of what Iran had done. Israel is attacking military targets and the regime Iran is attacking civilians, and there really needed to be a strong condemnation of what Iran had done so that Israel would feel that it didn't need to respond, that it didn't have to restore its deterrent in order to protect its civilians. A democracy, Yeah, a democracy cannot sit and do nothing when innocent civilians
are attacked. It just is not an option. And I think Trump knows that he's just trying to preserve the greater piece, which again is understandable. I think this all blows over because I do think the ceasefire will hold, and I also think that the strong relationship between the two governments of Israel and the United States is just stronger than it's ever been. So I get the frustration.
I think this is a minor blip, But at the same time, there really needs to be an acknowledgement that the Iranian regime is a Nazi like regime that didn't try to achieve any real military objectives before the ceasefire deadline. It just tried to kill as many civilians as it could. Yeah, and that's what we're dealing with here.
Yeah, it's like October seventh. It was just done via Iranian proxies in the form of a terrorist operation. But those are just innocent women, children, grandmothers, and I mean non military targets. It was an outrage. It's just an offense against humanity. It isn't even warfare, it's just murdering innocent people. So with that backdrop and recognizing the Iranian the theatocracy that is Iran and its leadership is really predicated on the eradication of Israel. What does a cease
fire mean long term? If they're not bombing each other, sorry about that, and then they realize they had my volume on. But if they're not bombing each other, does that mean that they're going to play nicely together and just coexist peacefully into the future. I just I find that hard to swallow.
The long term trajectory is that Iran becomes weaker and weaker and the Iranian regime collapses. There's no situation in which Iran can continue running itself the way it has while losing a war to a much smaller country, while losing its nuclear weapons program, while remaining isolated. You know, they've already alienated most of the countries in the region, the Arab Muslim countries in the region. But now they've also proven to Russia and China that they're not a
very good investment. So the Aranian regime is basically cornered, and over time it's going to have to collapse. I don't think anything good comes out of this war for Iran. I don't think that we need to think about questions of coexistence or long term peace between the two countries. Iran does not want to make peace with Israel, doesn't want to make an agreement with the United States. Even the Iran deal that Obama organized was not any kind of treaty that was signed by both sides. I mean,
it was a treaty for I think constitutional purposes. It should have been ratified by the Senate, but there was no agreement where the two sides sat down. The Iranian regime, let's understand this. The Iranian regime is founded on an ideological commitment to destroying America and destroying Israel. Yeah, they will not talk to anybody, they will not acknowledge the existence of Israel, and they will not sit down with the United States in any kind of friendly or the
legitimate manner. And they're just they're fanatical. So you know, we just have to accept there's not going to be some kind of movement toward peace and prosperity until the regime is out of the way. Meanwhile, the rest of the region is going to try to move on and you'll see an expansion that I think of ties between Israel and the Sunni Arab States. But nothing's going to happen, in ironic except the slow demise of the Iranian regime I think.
Fair enough, and so Iran safe to say is not going to be joining the Abraham Accords.
Well not under this regime.
It will in the future. Now thinking about that, I mean, there's always uncertainty with regime change, and I know Donald Trump is encouraging and I think his post the other day about if current Ibranian regime is unable to make
Iran great again, why wouldn't there be regime change? He's not advocating for us to create that regime change is I think that was a shout out to the Iranian people that they can control their own destiny, because by all accounts, the vast majority of the Iranian people don't like living under this theocracy.
Well, look, there's no clear alternative to the Iranian regime right now, right, You're right that most Iranians don't like their government. At the same time, the Iranian regime has been very good at eliminating all the alternatives. You have the son of the former Shah living in exile in the DC area, who plans to return. Whether that means a monarchy or a transition to democracy, he says he's a democrat, a lowercase key, so who knows. I think it's going to take a while to figure out what
post regime Iran really ought to look like. But it's not our concern right now. It's not something Trump wants to get involved with. It's not something Israel wants to get involved with, even though they want to destabilize and weaken the regime. And Trump's right, you know, if the Iranian regime can't function the way a normal country should function, white, why shouldn't there be regime change. It's just not going
to be up to us. I think the best we can do is to try to get whatever factions of the Iranian opposition are accessible to us, get them on the same page about what happens next, because the it really does have to be a contingency plan so that
the country doesn't fall apart into warring factions. I think the likeliest thing that we might see in the next six months is some kind of military coup where the Iranian military decides that the Iotolas are leading the country down a path of self destruction, and so they step in the way the military stepped in in Egypt, and they start running the country, and who knows, maybe they will be maybe they won't be a transition to democracy, But I think there's going to be an authoritarian phase
before there's a democratic phase, before the results hadn't done.
Yeah, that's that's kind of where I was going to be heading with our conversation, because that seems like the most logical thing. Then you'd have to hope that the military didn't embrace the you know, death to America, death to Israel philosophy that the Iotola embraced and has been been screaming about for well a couple of Iotolas anyway, since they overthrow the Shava ran back in the seventies.
So do you see do you anticipate the military would drop that as a political philosophy or ultimate goal the existence of the country to destroy America and Israel, which obviously is an impossibility, But what would it just be like martial law declared in the military would just keep the citizenry in line and try to keep commerce and industry organized and just and move forward that way.
I would think so yeah, I think that the Iranian military will decide that preserving Iran is more important than destroying America. Okay, right now, the Iotola is you know, it's a religious cult. Religious cults often destroy themselves. You know, the Heaven's Gate cult thirty years ago.
Yeah, they all they all committed.
Suicide because they thought the giant spaceship was coming. I mean, that's the Iranian regime. They are cult that believes that they can bring about the end of the world and therefore the salvation of the world. Remember that the end of the world is just you know, destruction. It's it's the elect get saved and everybody else is doomed to hell. And they can bring that about if they destroy themselves in the process of destroying the United States. Hitler was
the same, you know Hitler. Toward the end of the Second World War, I mused that maybe it was better that the Russians were defeating Germany, because then we would know who the superior race was. Hitler was fundamentally a racist more than he was a nationalist. He believed in the struggle of different races, so at some level he was willing to sacrifice Germany to his racial obsessions. That's
the Iotolis. The Iotolis are prepared to sacrifice Iran for their site obsession with the arrival of the twelfth Madi, as they put it, in the end of the world. And eventually you're going to get some generals who come in and say, you know what, we love our country and we thought this was the way to serve it.
But obviously this is not.
And we love our country more than we hate America. We love our country more than we hate is world. Let's step in and get some sanity going here, because otherwise we're all going to just be dead, and that's what's going to happen.
They did enjoy a much greater peace and prosperity under the Shaw. I had a woman w used to cut my hair when I lived in Chicago, and she was from Iran, and she talked about how wonderful it was. It was modern cities and women were not forced to wear burkas and cover their faces entirely. And the whole thing went to hell after the shaw or the shaw
was thrown out. So you know, maybe there are people who have that recollection and can see a future vision for the country along those lines, and that would be great. For everyone. I guess I'm kind of curious about the broader implications. If Iran pulls the plug or as otherwise has regime change, they're no longer state sponsors of the terrorist organizations that they've been funding and providing weapons too.
Does that bring about a broader peace in the Middle East generally, or there's still a pro Palestinian pro Palestinian state faction out there, We're going to continue to see conflict from some other areas.
Well. In terms of the Palestinians, you know, the last remaining part of this war is the in Gaza, and there are twenty Israeli hostages who are still in captivity fifty total if you include those who are already dead. The Palestinians have their fate in their own hands. If they want to live in peace with Israel, then they will. But if they continue trying to destroy Israel, they will
also destroy themselves. And what needs to happen now is the Hamas leadership needs to let the hostages go and find a way out of Gaza and allow ordinary Palestinians a chance to rebuild their lives with the help of the United States, with the help of Israelis, with the help of Arab allies. I think that Palestinians can have
a better life. It's different than having a state. I think the Palestinian state is a dead idea, at least for a generation, because these Raelis have seen what Palestinians do with self government and basically they try to kill Israelis and that's just not acceptable obviously to the israel So I think you'll have some people in this country
and elsewhere we all free palace and all that. Some will know what it means, some will not know what it means, but it's really for them about symbolic confrontations with symbols of authority. It has nothing to do with reality on the ground of them. At least it's the new fashionable left wing thing, and then six months later it'll be something else. So I think we shouldn't really
take it seriously. The reality is that the Palestinians do not care about their own future as a movement to take any serious practical steps toward achieving any kind of progress, and it's just not going to be possible to do anything while Palestinian terrorists still hold Israeli hostages and still try to run the lives of other Palestinians, and I think the Guisa phase is now where his war ends, and there's going to be a huge amount of pressure
on Hamas and maybe not the organization itself, maybe individual commanders, individual units to give up the hostages they have, and once that happens, I think they're working it fair enough.
Well, real quick here and random, we're out of time, Joe. I'm to tell my producer, I'm aware of the time I just had to. China seems to I think they enjoy the fact that we're so busy dealing with problems in the Middle East that were not as focused on the South China Sea and Taiwan, and they appreciate that our resources are being soaked up in the Middle East dealing with these challenges as they have been for years and years and years trying to play any role in this. Real quick, Joel, I.
Think China had played a role, and I think they're going to step back because I think their investments have gone bad. You know, they supported Iran, they even met with Hamas. Yeah, after October seventh. I think they thought things would go a certain way. You know. The one thing nobody counted on was the resilience of the ordinary Israeli soldier. And it was that man or that woman, often a reserved excuse me, often a reservist away from
their families. That was the force that nobody reckoned with. Yeah, and that really turned the tide in the middle. And I think the Chinese realized that investing in your on is not is not a good one.
Joel Paulock. Always enjoy our conversation. A pleat. You appreciate your very thoughtful analysis on this complex issue, and I'll look forward to having you back on. Remind my listeners brightbart dot com and check it out and bookmark the website. Joel, take care and have a wonderful week, my friend.
Thank you.
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