 So, I think that anyone who watches this podcast is politically astute enough to realize that what we're seeing now is Donald Trump's administration build a case for intervention with Iran. It's incredibly transparent what they're doing, and this isn't surprising because even if Donald Trump campaigned as a non-interventionist, when you stack your administration with neo-conservatives, what do you think is going to happen? When you put Mike Pompeo and John Bolton in positions of power, what do you think they're going to advocate for? What do you think they're going to push for? So it's not surprising what they're doing, and people who have been following these regime change warhawks know exactly what to look for, and this time it's no different. And it's not even like Donald Trump and his administration is trying to be persuasive because they're just using the same exact playbook that George W. Bush's administration used when they were building the case for war with Iraq. And this all started because Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran deal. He then reimposed sanctions on Iran, which explicitly violated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA. And what did that do? That demonstrated to the world that the United States' word is good for nothing. You know, we form a treaty with you, doesn't matter, because we might violate it if we get a new president. So that's been a horrible precedent, and as Donald Trump elevated warmongers within his administration like John Bolton, who vocalized his desire to literally overthrow Iran by 2018, well, what happened? We started to see more and more escalations, and now we're in a situation where Iran is being blamed for attacks on oil tankers and the United States government is declassifying videos that supposedly prove Iran's culpability. The problem, however, is that other countries like Germany and even Japan are casting doubt on this claim. In fact, the owner of the Japanese tanker itself claims that something hit the ship, but it wasn't explosives. But regardless, even if this intelligence and the quote-unquote evidence that has been presented is dubious at best, well, Mike Pompeo pretty much is saying, well, they say that, but we're still insisting that Iran is culpable. And you should definitely believe me, because why would we ever lie to you, wink, wink? President Trump says flatly that Iran was responsible for the attack on those two tankers, and the Pentagon has released this video, which appears to show a revolutionary guard crew removing an unexploded mine from the hull of one of the boats. But as Rich reported, Germany's foreign minister says the video is not enough, and the Japanese owner of one of the ships says that he believes from the crew that it was hit by a flying object, not a mine. Two questions. How certain are you that Iran was responsible for these attacks, and do you have more evidence that you can share with us? Well, Chris, it's unmistakable what happened here. These were attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran on commercial shipping, on the freedom of navigation, with a clear intent to deny transit through the Strait. This was on the Gulf of Oman side of the Strait of Hormuz. There's no doubt. This community has lots of data, lots of evidence. The world will come to see much of it, but the American people should rest assured we have high confidence with respect to who conducted these attacks, as well as half a dozen other attacks throughout the world over the past 40 days. Now I absolutely doubt the legitimacy of what he's saying, but here's the thing. We don't even have to try to disprove what he's saying. Let's assume for a moment, hypothetically speaking, that Iran was in fact culpable. Does that mean that the US would be justified in further escalation? Absolutely not. If Iran was, in fact, culpable, that would be more reason for us to be the grown-ups and de-escalate. Get them to come back to the table and negotiate with us, even if they have reason to not want to negotiate, but try to quell what's happening here before it leads to confrontation. So even if they were guilty, which I don't believe they are, but even if they were, that still doesn't give you a reason to invade or further escalate with Iran. But the problem is that as we continue to poke Iran, we are making matters worse and worse and we're making the likelihood of escalation and allow war more possible. Because here's what the United States did by withdrawing from the Iran deal. They are empowering, hardline, extremists within Iran's regime, who are now announcing that they will be enriching uranium past what was allowed under the JCPOA. Because I'm assuming that they believe this is the only thing that will deter further US aggression, which honestly, I mean, if I were Iran, I would think it seemed imminent. Now a large part of the reason why Donald Trump's administration presumably feels emboldened to keep escalating further and further with Iran is because the mainstream media has been doing a very poor job at framing the situation and informing the public. I know that it sounded like in that clip that I showed you from Fox News with Chris Wallace that he was doing a good job relatively of holding Mike Pompeo's feet to the fire. The overall takeaway if you watched that entire clip was that anything Iran did was bad and anything the United States did was inherently good by definition because we're doing it. So of course, we're the good guys and everyone else is the bad guys. And it's not just Fox News here because as Adam Johnson a fair points out, things are being framed in an incredibly biased way. So when Iran enriches uranium, they're violating the Iran deal. But when the United States reimposes sanctions, it's because we withdrew from the Iran deal. So whenever they do something that violates it, they're violating it. If we do something, well, we withdrew. So that's fine. This is how a pro-war consensus ends up emerging. It makes it seem like any and every action that the United States takes is justified because Iran is inherently more hostile. But in actuality, we're the ones that are being hostile. We're the ones that are being overly hostile, but it's not framed that way. If you tune into the mainstream media, you'd think, oh, well, Iran obviously is acting irrationally and the United States government is just responding to them. That's not what's happening. We're the aggressors. We're the ones who are imposing harm on them. Think about what we did. We withdrew from the Iran deal and we imposed harsh sanctions to the extent where we are squeezing their economy. And it's not just that their economy is tanking and the standard of living in Iran is decreasing. What's happening is there are medicine shortages that are happening. We have collapsed their banking system, which makes international suppliers reluctant to give them food because they don't know if they're going to be able to get paid. So I mean, we're harming them in a really overt and severe way, but yet we're still being portrayed as the good guys who are just responding to Iranian hostility and aggression when the opposite is true. Now, I want to play a clip of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC. He was interviewed by Andrea Mitchell and he did a phenomenal job at really deconstructing all of these propagandist pro-war talking points that we've been seeing from Donald Trump's administration and that have been reinforced by the mainstream media. And in this very interview, I don't even know if Andrea Mitchell realized that she was doing this, but she was helping to craft this pro-war narrative, this pro-war consensus, because when she talked about this attack that was allegedly the result of Iranian aggression, she said, well, look, you know, at least the UK agrees that it was in fact Iran. They didn't even mention that Japan and Germany, they disagree and they're telling us to cool it. But with that being said, I want to show you this clip because Bernie Sanders does a brilliant job here at just dismantling the pro-war propaganda that we are being hit with now, perhaps more so than ever. I want to ask you about Iran because we're seeing increasing tensions. Now a thousand more troops deployed. Secretary Pompeo momentarily is going to be speaking from Sencombe. Iran is now threatening to break out of the nuclear deal for the first time after complying for 14 months, according to international inspectors, even though the president withdrew from it. So we see these hits on the tankers. They say there's intelligence. At least the Brits agree with the U.S. that this was Iranian-based or Iranian-proxied. You know, there could be an accidental war. What do you do if you're the commander-in-chief Bernie Sanders? You're President Sanders. What do you do right now where Iran is arguably acting aggressively, even if it's in reaction to the U.S. policy-making? Well, first of all, just a couple of points, Andrea. First of all, what is absolutely necessary is an objective investigation as through these incidents. The destruction or the bombing or the attacking of oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman is not acceptable, and we need to investigate it. You don't accept with the Secretary. Let me just ask, you don't accept the declaration from the Secretary of State? No, I don't. I mean, it needs to be an objective investigation. As you know, the Japanese take, in fact, the owner of the tanker that was attacked disagrees with Trump. But here's the main point that I want to make. If you look at the recent history of this country, I think we understand that the two worst foreign policy disasters were based on lies that came from the White House. You remember the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident that led us to increase military involvement in Vietnam? And man, I could speak. That was my generation. 59,000 brave young men never came home from that war, and tens of thousands of more died, committed suicide, got into drugs when they came home. That was based on a lie. And then you look more recently at the war in Iraq, which I vigorously opposed, because I did not believe Cheney and I did not believe John Bolton. I did not believe the Bush administration. Again, based on a lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Let me just say this. I will do everything that I personally can as a United States senator to stop the United States attacking Iran. If we go into a war with Iran, this will be an asymmetrical war, which will go on and on and on. There will be never-ending wars in the Middle East. It'll make the war in Iraq look like a cakewalk. So we have got to do everything we can to bring the antagonists, Saudi Arabia, which is a brutal dictatorship, together with Iran, bring them together, use the power of the United States to work out a diplomatic solution, not a military solution. So that was absolutely fantastic. And I applaud Bernie Sanders for being consistent here. And he said what you always want to say. He said what is absolutely necessary is an objective investigation into these incidents. This is always going to be the first and most proper reaction, because if the US government makes a claim, well, then what do we say? All right, that's fine. Let's have an objective, impartial actor go in and investigate. The United States is not an impartial actor. They have an agenda, and they're not acting in good faith, and they're working backwards from their conclusion. They want you to think that Iran is guilty, so that way you feel as if they're justified in further aggression and hostility towards Iran. So we can't trust that their assessment is actually accurate, because they're not objective. They're not impartial actors. Have an NGO or an IDEO come in. Have the UN conduct an investigation. But the US, if they conduct an investigation, should we take them at their word? No, because I'm sorry, they've lied to us before. They'll do it again. And Bernie Sanders made this point. He brought up the Gulf of Tonkin, the Iraq War. And the point was, we need to learn our goddamn lesson. The last war that we were lied into, we're still there. We never left. We're currently conducting drone strikes in numerous countries. Pakistan, Somalia, we're giving Saudi Arabia the bombs that they're using to commit genocide in Yemen. When are we going to learn our lesson that what the United States government says isn't always going to be something we should take at face value, because they have an agenda. They have an agenda, and we have a capitalist war machine that profits off of death and destruction. So it behooves them to constantly have us in these never-ending wars, because that's a moneymaker. And the military-industrial complex funds politicians that are more than willing to do their bidding. So Bernie Sanders here is speaking truth through power. He's speaking out against this. And there have been few people that have spoken out. Tulsi Gabbard speaks out about this all the time. And to her credit, Elizabeth Warren has spoken out, even if she hasn't been great. In fact, she's been really horrible on foreign policy issues previously, but we need all hands on deck here. We need every single person to speak out about this. And what we need is someone who is going to be a leader on this issue. And that's what Bernie Sanders essentially said he would do as president. He said we need to bring Saudi Arabia and Iran together and use the power of the United States to work out a diplomatic solution. This is what a leader does.