DSR Daily March 2: War with Iran Expands Across the Region

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Thank you and enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to the DSR Daily. I'm David Rothkoff, your host, joined by your other host, Riley Fessler and Minnestine. How are you guys doing today? All right, I guess.

Hang in there.

“Which one of you is the ones that predicted that we would have a war over the weekend?”

Probably we, Minna. Yeah, much. Yeah, yeah. It does sound like something you'd say. Well, you know, hey, look, what was DSR last week about?

What was Steve State radio about? It was about the inevitability of war with him, Ron. Did we get that right? We got it right. Is the war a giant shit show?

You know, a cluster fuck to the ninth degree? Yes.

We'll talk about that in a second.

Well, no. Let's talk about it right now. Kick off. Give us the first story. Following the death of Supreme Leader Kamani, the United States and Israel

have significantly escalated their air campaign against Iran.

“Can I just introduce, can I just introduce, say something?”

Because there were a lot of people referring to the death of Kamani on the news. And I saw our friend John Wolfstall referred to it slightly differently. You said no to journalists. I believe the term you were looking for is assassination. So are we going back?

Try it again with that word. There we go. Following the assassination of Supreme Leader Kamani, the United States and Israel have significantly escalated their air campaign against Iran, triggering widespread retaliatory strikes from Tehran and Hezbollah across Lebanon,

Cyprus and the Gulf states. This rapid expansion is crippled at regional energy production and sent global oil prices, soaring threatening the stability of the international economy. President Trump remains committed to operation epic fury, despite low domestic approval and hesitation from European allies,

vowing to continue the strikes until his administration's objectives are met. And those objectives just just rattle those off for me. I could not tell you, because I don't think they know either. They don't know either. It's really stunning that we are proceeding at a war where at one point,

a rationale was a nuclear program, which by the way, they said they obliterated. At another point it was defending the poor protesters in Iran. At other points it was Iran's intercontinental ballistic missile program. Mostly it was that Benjamin Netanyahu really wants to get rid of the Iranians and Trump needs a distraction.

But I think on Thursday he wasn't sure he was going to do it, and then on Friday he said that he was going to do it. We, of course, had the forces in the region. But I think the reason the forces were in the region was to provide pressure to get a deal, which he thought he was going to get, but he didn't get.

On the other hand, the last time we attacked Iran,

“and you'll remember that, because it was only seven or eight months ago,”

the last time we attacked Iran, we were also negotiating with them and then attacked in the middle of the negotiations. It's interesting, we want to strike a deal with the Iranians, because the last deal we struck in 2015, Trump unilaterally abrogated and left. Then we were negotiating and we attacked them, then we were negotiating and we attacked them.

I'm not sure that's the best way to build the kind of trust that you want. But as far as trust with the American people, here you have Donald Trump saying,

I'm America first, I'm not going to continue all these wars,

and one thing we know now, in the past year, Donald Trump is attacked seven different countries. That's a record, congratulations, Donald Trump, you attack seven different countries. It's actually eight. If you count the troops, he's deployed in the United States to attack American citizens. He says he ended eight wars, now we know that's nonsense.

Because one of the ones he is claiming credit for ending is the one that he just started again. But among the others, the people involved say that he didn't necessarily actually end those wars as he said he did. And so in fact, he hasn't really ended any wars, but he has started eight wars.

But he's not just a war-monger, and I think that's super important.

“He's an incredibly competent war-monger.”

I'm not saying the U.S. military is not executing the missions that's been assigned to do expertly. I'm saying that there is no set of goals, there is no consistency, there is no planning process. There is no honest communication between the president and the congress. There has been no authorization from the congress, so the war is illegal. And it doesn't seem that we really know exactly what we're doing there.

The president says the war will last another four or five weeks, but to what end? What's the end game? What do we try to achieve? You know, regime change is not regime change if you just kill some people and the people who work for them continue.

By the way, see Venezuela.

But here is an interesting update on all this from Jonathan Carl, a respected and respectable journalist. You know, one of the real serious guys out there came from last night. President Trump told me tonight that the U.S. identified possible candidates to take over Iran. That's good, right? We're in the business. I mean, I don't believe we should do it.

“It's an illegal war, but if you're going to do regime change, you should identify possible candidates.”

Good. But they were killed in the initial attack. Well, the attack was so successful and knocked out most of the candidates Trump told me. It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they're all dead. Second or third place is dead. What the fuck folks? I mean, you're doing regime change, but you're killing the people.

You thought you were going to change the regime too? I mean, you know, it's an illegal war. Hundreds of people have already died. School children have already died. American soldiers have already died. And we don't know what we're doing.

It's something. It's really, we've never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.

We've seen the U.S. with shitty foreign policy. We've seen the U.S. with illegal foreign policy. We've seen the U.S. do horrible things. They rack more. One of the worst ever undertaken by us that we never seen anything quite this reckless or incompetent. And it's it's quite a sight to behold.

But else do we got the FBI is investigating potential terrorism indicators after a shooting outside a bar on West six street in Austin left two people dead and 14 injured. Officers fatally shot the suspect. Authorities said the suspect who reportedly had a history of mental health issues were clothing referencing Iran and Islam and investigators are examining whether the attack

was motivated by geopolitical tensions, though no official motive has been confirmed. Local police, the FBI's joint terrorism task force and emergency responders credited their rapid response with saving lives as the incident became the deadly mass shooting in the U.S. so far this year according to the Gun Violence Archive. "Mama, how do you feel the great love on you?"

"Mama, how are you?" "So creamy." "Hey, how can a Papa creamy sign?" "Notella." "You're from Mama, and for Papa believed."

"Notella is notella." "Yeah, well that's saying something deadly is mass shooting in the U.S. since we have a mass shooting approximately every day. And I'm not sure whether this has anything to do with terrorism, but to go to the last day, there's all this talk while we have to get up for the Iranians because they're terrorists.

But guess what? If you go into Iran and you murder their leader and you destroy their military, but you leave

“in charge of hostile regime, their only option to defend themselves is what?”

Yeah, that's right. Terrorism. So, you know, part of the reason that one worries about what is being done here recklessly and without an endgame is that what it could be is deeply destabilizing. It could destabilize the region.

It could produce protracted war. It could produce other unintended consequences.

and after all the Iranians were the leading state sponsors of terror in the world for a long time.

They know how to do this.

“So, if you think this is far away and it's not going to touch your lives, think again.”

Congress is moving to vote on bipartisan war powers resolutions this week in an effort to legally restrain President Trump's military operations in Iran following recent escalations in American casualties.

While proponents argue that the Constitution requires congressional approval for such conflicts,

the measures face a steep climb as they would likely require a two-thirds majority to override a certain presidential veto. The political landscape remains deeply divided with most Republicans standing by the administration's campaign.

“While Democrats and America first conservatives express concern over a lack of clear objectives.”

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I would hope this would pass.

And there's even a chance that it would pass. But Trump's going to not sign anything and he's not going to be bound by it. So, it's just a gesture of the Congress to remind the President that Article 1 says only the President, the only the Congress can approve a war, which that has not happened here. You'll recall back in the day, in the battle days of the battle war with Iraq, which was a terrible mistake,

that President Bush and his team felt it was necessary to brief Congress and to get the support of Congress for pursuing the war. So, you know, this is just one other area in which the Trumpian process is out of bounds illegal and different from what we've seen before. Trump didn't even, you know, you know, to really answer questions on this or speak directly to the American people on it. He did a late night video and then there were some other remarks, but he has just not felt any compulsion to do it because he's the king and he can do whatever the fuck he wants.

And that's the world we live in and he's that fantastic. Open AI swiftly secured a contract with the Department of Defense to deploy its models in classified settings after the Trump administration designated competitor anthropic as a "supply chain risk." Despite CEO Sam Altman's admission that the deal was rushed and carried poor optics, the company maintains that its multilayered safety stack, including count, count, count, count, count, count, count only deployment and human in the loop oversight prevents usage in autonomous weaponry or mass surveillance.

Skeptics, however, point to the agreements compliance with executive order 1, 2, 3, 3, as a potential loophole for controversial domestic surveillance, even as open AI argues its architecture provides physical barrier against weaponization. Yeah, you know, this looks pretty shady because it's shady. Open AI was negotiating with the Pentagon to do this deal even as the Pentagon was publicly trying to pressure anthropic into doing, you know, to getting rid of its guidelines, which ultimately to their credit, they did not do.

And so this is clearly example of somebody sliding in the back door, doing it while saying, "Oh yeah, we're the virtuous ones out here, they're not anymore certainly." Or we're telling them the truth and we're transparent, they're not, that's clearly the case. And, you know, we start to see the consequences of what fighting wars in this era look like because seems to be the case that some of these tools were used for targeting and there have been some big targeting mistakes here in this war. And what potentially could be unleashed by using AI to conduct surveillance against Americans in the United States, which is one of the things they anthropic objected to, or having AI drive autonomous vehicles out into the world and pick their own victims, which is real terminator stuff, is grim and dangerous.

“And the fact that their companies willing to step up and do this reflects badly on the marketplace, but we should expect no less from companies which are essentially greedy by charter their greedy, that's what they're supposed to be doing.”

But that the government is pressuring for this, considers providing these kind of services a gaining issue with who's a higher.

Well, I don't know. I'm sorry. Is it a downer? Am I starting things off down and down? We're going to do a special podcast that a little later today on the war. We'll do more on the war, obviously, is it unfolds?

“Because that's what we do real well here, and we will get some really high-level experts to come and join you to talk about that, and they'll be able to talk at greater length on these subjects here than anywhere else.”

So if you care about these things, be here, subscribe here, support here, this is the moment that you need the DSR network more than any other kind of time.

Anyway, thank you, Raleigh. Thank you, Mena. Thank you, everybody, for listening. We'll see you soon. (upbeat music)