And I want everyone to ask themselves the question, for what?

For what?

There were scheduled to be negotiations between the United States and the Iranians, agreed to by the United States and the Iranians, last Sunday.

They were getting geared up for these negotiations to try diplomatically to resolve this.

I want to remind people of something.

Colin Powell, remember him many, many years ago, the first black secretary of state, if I remember correctly.

We're talking 2004, 20 years ago, was asked the question, is Iran developing a nuclear war that we have to worry about?

And he answered, no, it's not.

And if you look up this business about a nuclear war, it has been going on for at least 20 years.

Every year or two, there's a flare up.

They're building a nuclear weapon.

They haven't.

They didn't develop one in those 20 years.

This is the old story of crying wolf.

You keep doing that, and then no one will believe you.

And most of the world doesn't believe it now either.

Israel has wanted to bomb Iran for many years, particularly Mr. Netanyahu.

I won't go into here, although everyone ought to.

What are you doing if you're a country of 7-8 million Jewish members of Israel?

The rest are Arabic.

Very small country.

Iran has 90 million.

You get it?

More than 10 times larger country.

Israel is already warring on the people of Gaza and causing itself unspeakable damage for years to come.

Why would you open a second war in another place, this time with someone who can fight back, which the Palestinians in Gaza could scarcely do?

Wow.

This is a craziness.

This is self-destructive, unless Mr. Netanyahu can count on the United States coming in.

And if that were to happen, then where will Russia go?

Who has a defense treaty with Iran?

And where will China go?

Who has a defense treaty with Russia?

This is how World War I and II got going, when one country invaded another, and then the alliances were called in.

What in the world are people thinking?

This is nuts.

And the fact that there might be this much chance that Iran is somewhere near nuclear weapons, by this point, how much difference does that make?

There are probably 20 countries that have some kind of nuclear weapons program.

North Korea, we know, has it.

Russia, China, we know, has it.

France and Britain have it.

Germany, likely going to get it soon.

India has it.

Pakistan has it.

Come on.

This is a matter of when, not whether.

And Iran isn't the only one.

We are being led down the garden path by people whose decision-making is off.

The United States has gotten together with all kinds of dictators around the world, non-dictators around the world, seeming not to care what they were, except for internal publicity.

We don't like dictators.

Sure, we don't.

We are in bed with all of them.

And we're in bed with some who aren't dictators.

Well, then what is it that we are doing?

Answer.

We are protecting our interests, which is a polite way of saying we are taking care of the big oil companies who have interests around the world, and the big large corporations who have interests around the world.

And that means supporting governments, whether they're dictators or not, that are friendly to American business, and smashing governments that are unfriendly.

Indeed, the only change that has happened is the change since Vietnam.

And that change is one that has to be spoken of honestly.

In Vietnam, the United States lost.

It lost the war.

The enemy was the Communist Party of Indochina, of Vietnam.

And that's what runs that country now.

We were defeated.

We invaded.

We had hundreds of thousands of troops.

They were defeated.

They were driven out.

And the Communist Party of Vietnam is now in charge of the government.

That's what it means when you lose.

A lesson was drawn from that, which is that even if you're the biggest, richest, most militarily developed country in the world, and you go to war against one of the poorest countries in the world, Vietnam, at that time, you can be defeated.

And one of the ways you get defeated is that your own people back home become upset by the dead soldiers coming home, by all that that implies, all the pain, all the suffering of the people who are hurt, or killed, or wounded, or driven to suicide, which a large number of our soldiers were from that time.

So the idea came, can we in the future try to minimize the American losses, the American involvement?

Can we, to be blunt with you, can we find other people to fight our wars for us?

And that's what we're living through now.

We got the Ukrainians to fight the Russians since February of 2022.

They're losing, but not American troops, not very many.

And now we have Israel trying to do the same for us in Iran.

Now, Ukraine is a small country, and it turns out Russia isn't.

And it turns out that Ukraine, even with the support of the United States militarily and monetarily, and Europe, still can't win.

That ought to teach another lesson, which it will, although we're not talking about that now.

And Israel attacking Iran, there we go again, somebody else doing what we would like to see done.

And Mr. Trump, with his usual waffling back and forth, is moving in that direction, at least as of what the news is that I can study now, not quite yet decided whether to commit American troops.

And let me say, as an American citizen, born here, lived here all my life, worked here all my life, to this minute, Iran is a bigger, more powerful country than Vietnam was.

And this is not going to be anything like the make-believe comic book discussions we have.

And let me remind everyone as well, there are treaties, mutual defense treaties, that we know of between Iran and Russia, and then again between Russia and China.

Really?

We're really going to risk a war whose outcome is the end of all of us, of the civilization we've created, if we're not literally wiped out as a species, we will be driven backwards in time in a way that ought to make everyone stop and sit down.

Last thing, as recently as March of this year, Tulsi Gabbard, as the head of our intelligence operations in this country, responded to questions in the Congress by saying there was no immediate danger that Iran would even have a nuclear weapon, let alone the capacity to use it.

And let's remember, if Iran did that, it would be alone.

It would be at risk of damage far beyond anything Israel could or would do.

That's our own intelligence leader.

Afterwards, Mr. Trump contradicted her, and as do the people Mr. Trump has around him, she immediately said, oh no, she and he are on the same page, even though literally they said the opposite.

So we don't know anymore that we know that there's a tariff or not, because when he says it, it's one thing.

What he will do now, we do not know.

By the way, it is a peculiar kind of torture of the Iranian people, of the Israeli people, and of the American people, to have questions that are vital to our survival in the hands of an individual who has demonstrated his instability over and over again.

What we accept as a people tells you that either Mr. Trump is extraordinarily skilled in this up and down roller coaster, or the American people are extraordinarily passive in the face of it.