 There's a special relationship between the U.S. and Israel, and America sent giant aircraft carriers to the Mediterranean. Many of the usual suspects have been rattling sabers against Iran. There's been a lot of speculation about Iran's involvement. That is still not nailed down, but suffices to say the level that even though that's undetermined at this moment, it has not stopped the beat of the war drums within the GOP. So I want to roll a montage of Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, and Lindsay Graham talking about the current situation in Iran. President Joe Biden is cow-towing for the last two and a half years to the mullahs in Iran lifting sanctions begging them to get back in the Iran nuclear deal, and then paying $6 billion in a ransom for hostages. I think set the conditions for this unprecedented terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel. But I also believe this is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump, Vivek Ram Swamy, and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America's role as leader of the free world. When they took these hostages, when they murdered these families, they were celebrating, and what were they celebrating? They were saying death to Israel, death to America. This is not just an attack on Israel, this is an attack on America, because they hate us just as much. For every Israeli or American hostage executed by Hamas, we should take down an Iranian oil refinery. The only way you're going to keep this war from escalating is to hold Iran accountable. Israel has a self-interest to respond to this with great force. For Nikki Haley, though, to say that an attack on Israel is an attack on America, it's an attack on Israel, and that should be bad enough. And to immediately start conflating those interests, and then for Lindsey Graham to, you know, we have an interest in getting U.S. hostages back, but to start saying we should be bombing Iran's oil refineries and just ratchet it up to level 10 immediately, am I wrong to view this as really alarming rhetoric? I think that you're right to be worried, especially given the war on terrorism and how voices just like these led us so far astray. And it was, I don't need to repeat to your audience, but going into Iraq was not just a humanitarian disaster for the Iraqis, but strategically idiotic for the United States in terms of its counterterrorism goals by taking out Saddam and enabling, you know, al-Qaeda and Iraq to really flare up and over the years to morph into ISIS. We need to be really careful about American missteps at a time when, you know, in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist tragedy. I also think that the media has an important role to play in this. And even before we start talking about policy prescription, you know, what should the U.S. response be? We need to understand what exactly happened, right? I mean, with 9-11, there was a lot of false talk or lies about the role of Iraq. Even before we start thinking about what the, you know, response should be, if any, to Iran, we do require more clarity into precisely what Iran's role was. And I think that the media can do a really good job of explaining to citizens what it is that we actually do know and what our confidence level is in the things that we say. So, for example, what we do know, and this is, again, this precedes any discussion about what the American policy response, if any, should be, it's just as a basic factual matter here. You know, what we do know for sure is that Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. If you, of course, to include Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist groups, not everybody does, but the State Department does, and most academics do, certainly political scientists in North America. We know that there's a level of Iranian support of these groups. They're not the same for Hezbollah. They have an even stronger connection to Iran than Hamas does. Hezbollah was there at the very origin of Hezbollah, whereas Hamas is more of an autonomous group that I believe essentially could have formed even without Iranian backing. It's not hard to imagine. So you don't need Iran to explain Hamas in the same way that you need Iran to explain Hezbollah, which was part of exporting the Iranian revolution, etc. So we know that there's a certain level of baseline Iranian support of these groups to various extent. There was a report, which we're kind of talking around, which came out of the Wall Street Journal, which suggests a much higher level of direct Iranian involvement, that they not only were aware of the operation, but they green-lighted it, and it goes to the very top of Iran and these terrorist groups. So some people... If I could, just for just a second. Let me just read a couple excerpts from that article you referenced. Iran, the headline, which our viewers can see, but I'll read for our listeners. Iran helped plot attack on Israel over several weeks. This came out on October 8th. Iranian security officials helped plan Hamas' Saturday surprise attack according to senior members of Hamas and Hezbollah. U.S. officials say they haven't seen evidence of Tehran's involvement. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said we have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship. There was some subsequent reporting from Newsweek, which talked directly to some Hamas fighters or leadership. They said the Iranian mission to the United Nations, who they talked to, told Newsweek that Iran did not have a direct hand. They say we've supported Palestinian fighters in acquiring fishing skills. They independently determined when, where, and how to engage in fishing according to their very own needs and interests. So, I mean, to your point, we just need to tread carefully here and understand that all parties involved are going to have incentives to spin this one way or another. And until things are, I think we've learned from very recent history that we need real confirmation before kind of jump taking the next step forward. This is an extraordinarily weighty allegation. And the more consequential the allegation, the more important it is to get the basic facts right. I've heard people say things like, well, look at the sophistication of the attack. Like, that's like, it's so fact, you know, evidence that it must have been there must be Iranian involvement. I mean, I think that's some of the strongest evidence is that a Hamas leader said, I believe, that there was Iranian involvement. But honestly, I was doing this same sort of work in 2003. And I was duped about all sorts of allegations about Iraq. And I said that I would never do that again. That for me, the evidence would have to be higher. For other people, they may have seen enough. But I do think that there's an important role in the media of clarifying what it is that we do know and don't at this point. I do think that if a second front is opened up in terms of Hezbollah, we could assume that that second front does have the blessing of Iran. I don't believe that Hezbollah would open up a second front without Iran greenlighting it because they've been so involved in all aspects of Hezbollah. But again, historically, the same has not been true about Hamas. I also want to just make it very clear that I'm not ruling out the possibility that Iran was involved in this attack, that it did help Hamas more than its traditional baseline levels. I'm just saying that I would like to see even more evidence along those lines for drawing the conclusion. One thing that I'm curious about is you are saying if Hezbollah opens up a northern front, you know, then we have a little bit more evidence to substantiate this idea of Iran being involved. With the fighting that's currently going on on the northern front, do you sort of characterize that as like not quite, you know, it's more sort of routine, something that happens fairly frequently where the Iron Dome intercepts some amount of Hezbollah activity, but that just sort of hasn't gotten to the point where we really consider that to be a northern front opened up? Or how do you look at that? Because there have been some reports of activity there. I would say a northern front has not been opened up. In close to Israel's border to the north of it, there are other militant groups, and they sometimes, you know, commit attacks. And there might even be some Hezbollah members who commit some small attacks. It's basically a communication strategy among these aggrieved groups, and Israel will respond sometimes in a proportional way. It's basically a way for them to talk to each other through violence. But when I'm talking about opening up a second front, there will be no doubt. I'm talking about taking advantage of tens of thousands of these rockets, really negatively impacting, you know, large numbers of Israeli civilians. If Nasrallah really opens up and basically doesn't hold his military power in reserve, an authorization like that by Nasrallah, I believe would require Iranian consent. That makes sense. The peril that I would draw, because I know a little bit less about the part of the world that we are talking about right now, but I do know a fair bit about China and Taiwan, is, you know, we see a lot of news reports when Chinese jets fly into the Taiwan's air defense identification zone. And so frequently there are these very sensationalist sort of breathless reports of like, oh my God, is China invading Taiwan? Is this finally it? And in fact, some number of, you know, airspace encroachment is actually pretty routine. It's not to say that Taiwan welcomes that or enjoys it, but it is just to say that for people for the uninitiated who don't follow Chinese-Taiwanese relations very closely, that can look very alarming, but in fact is actually a somewhat routine thing. So it seems like you're drawing that careful distinction on the northern front, too. I just wanted to make that clarification. The other thing is that when we're dealing with militant groups, a common, you know, thing to happen is that there could be some sort of a principal agent problem where, you know, lower level members, like, you know, low level operatives, could act in ways that don't necessarily have the blessing of the principal, of the leader, you know? So what we're looking at, what we've seen so far, is basically relatively small amounts of violence. But I'm talking about the amounts of violence which would require Nasrallah to essentially declare war on Israel that would involve Iran more. So but then the next question everybody wants to know, of course, is just moving us along, is what should the U.S., you know, response be? Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Max Abrams about Hamas's attack on Israel. For another clip, click here. For the full conversation, click here.