06-25-25 Interview - War Historian Paul Rahe on Today

I guess I'm very excited to talk about. He is a historian at the glorious Hillsdale University and Paul Ray works. I don't want to put words in your mouth, Paul, but you are a war historian.

So you're one of.

Those people that deeply gets into war and its effects and its outcomes and all of that good stuff. And today let's talk about a war whose history hasn't been written. Of course, the President has tried to name it the twelve day Iran Israeli War, but is it really a twelve day war?

Paul Ray, welcome to the show. First of all, pleasure to be with you.

Now, it's a forty six year war. It begins with the takeover of Iran, the flight of the Shaw, take of Iran by the heretic Sheeite Muslims following homony, and then they set out on a path that has led to continual conflict.

It starts with the hostage crisis involving.

The United States, and they were calling us the great Satan, and they were calling Israel the little Satan way back then. Now, this is when the crisis, which has existed for a.

Very long time, comes to.

A head and you know, we think of it perhaps as a battle between Iran and Israel that we are involved in. The larger battle is between Iran and the Sunni Muslim powers, and quietly, those people are welcoming what's happened in the last twelve days because it means a significant reduction in the threat to them. You know, just a couple of years ago there were Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia on their oil fields. They're involved too, and I don't happen to believe it's over.

You know, I don't either.

And Paul and I were talking off the air about the conversations that I've had with my nephew in Israel, and he says, the Israeli people, and of course there's so much robust discussion happening every day in Israel about how to prosecute this war and why haven't the hostages come home? And you know, so many people are saying, we just want peace. But there's a larger faction in his view of Israelis who say, look, this is never going to end until we deal with the Iranian regime.

Yes, no, I agree with that entirely.

Let me say, we may have just destroyed their nuclear weapons production. I say may because it's not absolutely certain, and they may have sent for refuges elsewhere, and you know, warehouses and so forth operating quietly that we don't know about. But it seems to me that if there, if the ceasefire turns into a kind of settlement, it just means they'll be back in.

A few years.

I agree.

The crucial issue is the regime.

And though I do not favor America going in taking over Iran and trying to run things, I do think it the only way that this will be over is if the radical heretic Shiite regime that was founded by Honuani forty six years ago is overthrown.

What do you mean by heretics?

So I would be hitting their political leaders.

What do you mean by heretic?

Decapitate that and the Revolutionary Guard? Because they're an awful lot of people in Iran who hate that regime.

So what do you mean by heretic is she regime? What is that phrase specifically mean.

Historically within Sunni Islam, there has been no difference between what we call church and what we call state.

They were very closely tied to one another.

Islam is a religion of holy law, so it is by its very nature a political religion that the law.

Requires enforcement.

And the you know, in originally within Sunni Islam, the caliph was what we would call a secular ruler.

And a really just ruler at the same time.

And what I'm trying to say is that distinction between sacred and secular doesn't exist right there among the Shehites, it did exist, and the site clergy of the Molas have never before been involved in ruling. There was always a secular ruler, and then there was a sort of secreate Shite establishment. Homani breaks with that and is regarded as a heretic by many Shehites, both outside Iran and

Well.

There I saw an interesting video on x a few days ago, and it was the Sun of the Chavran. Obviously he was thrown out of the country during the revolution in the late seventies, and he's essentially saying, look, we're ready to step in. We're not going to allow Ron to fall into a failed nation state. We're ready to provide structure and government that can lead. And I don't know if he said free elections. I'm not sure if he went that far, but essentially saying to the

It's conceivable.

But my guess is if he went back and tried to rally people, he'd be assassinated. In other words, there are going to be people on the side of the regime, right there are many people against the regime.

I'll give example.

In two thousand and one, nine to eleven and stretching into two thousand and two, there were spontaneous demonstrations at soccer games in Iran. Spontaneous pro American demonstrations. I was in Istanbul.

I lived in.

Istanbul for some years, so I know that part of the world a bit. And I was at a party of journalists and I ended up in a corner with an Iranian journalist who was assigned to cover Turkey, and I asked him if the regime was going to go under, if these demonstrations were the beginning of the end for the regime, and he said no.

The people who run this country right.

Now were educated in Eastern Europe and the communist period. They know how to control the population. And then he paused and he said, there's one thing they don't know how to control their own children.

Ah.

And a lot of you know, regimes like this, think of the Soviet Union, tend to come apart when the generation that made the revolution has departed from the scene. So Garbatschoff was the first Soviet leader who was not, even as a very young person, a witness of the

The regular army.

So things could happen, and it would be a very good thing, because this obsession with taking over the entire Middle East, to which we are an obstacle. The Israelis are an obstacle, the Saudis are an obstacle. Egypt is an obstacle. That might come to an end, and you could have a reconciliation between Iran and the Sunni Arab States and Iran and Israel, but it won't happen as long as the heirs of Homany are running Iran. I don't think it's over yet.

Trump came out the other day and said, well, we'll call this the twelve day Israel Iran War. And really, I do believe that Donald Trump, for all of his many foibles and faults, is probably the most anti war president we've ever had.

He's not interested.

I think he've used war as a waste of blood and treasure and capital and you know, a man power that could otherwise be devoted to building something economically, and you know that would be productive. I really think that's his worldview. But is he being realistic? Is this over?

It's it's not over, but our direct involvement may be coming to an end. Hard to be certain of. That depends on what the Iranians do, right. You know, they could start by launching an attack on American basis all over that region and not one that's been forecast, and knowing that we can shoot everything down, but something big in West case it will erupt again because Donald Trump will not tolerate that.

He's made that clear.

Do you think the way that they gave Katara heads up about the attacks. I mean, they've essentially warned everybody, Hey, we're going to fire some missiles. The only reason I could think they would do that is because they don't actually want to hit anything. They don't want to hurt anybody, because they don't want a larger entanglement with the United States of America. But whereas when we were at the Cold War with the Soviets, we had mutually assured destruction

I mean, we've heard all of these stories.

About how suicide bombers are going to get their seventy two virgins. Do they have the same sense of self preservation that ensured that mutually assured destruction would be a deterrent?

It's hard to know.

That's comforting.

Religious zelotry comes into the picture. There may be decisions made on the basis of calculations that you and I would not recognize as rational. They think are rational. So I'm hesitant in that regard. Donald Trump's position has been They're not going to get nuclear weapons.

I think that's pretty smart.

Yeah, And our interests are deeply involved in They're not getting nuclear weapons. Our interests may not be so deeply involved in other matters.

Can Israel go it alone and pull this off? I mean, I have a lot of respect for the Israeli military. I have a lot of respect for their technology. I do think that they in doing the kind of targeted strikes in Iran to take out leadership, to take out very specific military positions that may maybe weren't supposed to be known as military positions, they're definitely signaling to Iran that they know way more than they've led on about

Other than that, can they pull this off?

I think so? You know.

I think they know who their political leaders are and where they live. They certainly know a lot about the Revolutionary Guard, which is the sort of guardian of the regime and includes you know, true believers mainly.

I think they might well be able to pull this off, but that would take a renewal of the war.

And they're sufficiently dependent upon US for weapons and so forth for replenishing their stocks that they may not be able to risk a renewal of the war if we don't want it.

Hard to know, I mean.

One other possibility is that the remaining figures in the Iranian regime.

Want out right, you know what I mean?

Yeah, they want out of the whole mess, uh, And that would cause them to negotiate, and to negotiate seriously an end to the nuclear threat and also an end too their support for their proxies in Lebanon, in Yemen and of course in Gozam.

It's hard to know.

I'm talking with historian Paul Ray about war in general. I want to ask you this question because it seems like whatever ceasefires have been signed in the past or eventually broken promises made. Even in the Iran deal that was done with Obama, they did not follow through on their responsibilities to allow inspectors into certain sites. Has there ever been a negotiated peace that stuck when someone was not brought to their knees first.

I can think of one.

When I was living in Istanbul, I spent a fair amount of time on both sides. In Cyprus, there was a ceasefire in Cypress in nineteen seventy three. It's fifty plus years later and they haven't gone back to war.

Now.

Part of the story is the Turk's got everything they really wanted and the Greeks don't see any way to overcome the disadvantage in which they live, right, and so the two sides have cooperated. You know what, in Nicosia, one side supplies the water pre and the other side supplies the electricity pre.

Everybody's invested, and.

Neither side agrees to accept the status quo. Right, but they have done anything about it in a very long time.

So let me ask this because I have watched documentaries, I've seen countless news stories about the level of indoctrination that has occurred in these Islamic regimes, whether you're talking about in Gaza or you're talking about in Iran. So in terms of being able to negotiate any kind of real peace with Israel with that includes the agreement that Israel simply has the right to exist, is that even possible in a population that has been not just steeped

How does that work?

Well?

You know, in a lot of these places, in Iran in particular, there are people who hate the regime and who would embrace it Israel for the simple reason that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And the leadership in countries like Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia and UAE have embraced Israel, and the reason is they're afraid of Iran.

Now you remove revolutionary Iran.

From the scene, what happens with the relations between the Israelis and the Sunni world, I don't really know.

But they won't go sour immediately.

And I don't think they'll go very, very sour, and that might change relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which is to say, if there is no outside supporter for radicalism among the Palestinians, there may be accommodations reached. There's certainly accommodations in daily life.

Well, I think it's easy to.

Embrace hatred when there's no cooperation with the person that you're hating. And right now, with the leadership in the Gaza Strip and to a certain extent, the leadership of the West Bank, there's no incentive to be more collaborative or to work with Israel. And I think that that does allow those barriers to not only be raised, but to be sort of fortified in terms of the way people feel about Israel. And we were talking before the break, and when I was in Israel, I talk to everybody.

When I travel, I.

Talk to taxi drivers, and I talked to waiters, and I talked to everyone. And I met several Arabs that I just chatted with, and they all said, I live in Israel because I want to live in a free society. They don't want to live in the West Bank. They don't want to live in Gaza because of the restrictive nature. I would hope that once people in the West Bank or people in Gaza got to understand that that freedom would come their way if they simply embraced a more

I think it exists, but the obstacles are have proven to be insuperabole. And the key thing is do the irreconcilables have outside support? Ah Outside support is crucial. Look, the Russians supported the PLO. The Russians actually put are Afi in charge.

Of the PLO. He was their man. They supplied money.

Hamas received money from the United States, from Europe through the United Nations Relief Works Administration, and quite a bit of money from the Iranians. Earlier they received money from Saudi Arabia, but that's over.

So it's hard to know. What I can tell you is people.

In that part of the world are extremely good at negotiation. The negotiation. You know, if you go and do a bizarre the price is very often negotiable. They're used to negotiations and that could suddenly take over.

Let's hope Paul Ray Thank you so much for your time today, fascinating conversation, and for everything. I wanted you to give me a firm answer on You didn't, so you didn't make me feel better, but you did educate me, so I will accept that.

Thank you for your time today, Paul.

Pleasure to be with you, and pleasure to be in Denver where I was once a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grader.

I told Paul, it's changed a bit since then. Thanks a lot, man. We'll talk again soon, I hope.

Okay, take care