David French
speaker
3,314 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 19 Sep
David French’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 4.
Appearances
I never was more motivated.
I don't think in my life I've been more motivated to do anything than to crush those guys.
Because what they would do to innocent people, it's just even hard to put into words some of the things you would see.
And they would do things like, for example, we were known in an area that was known as the female suicide bombing capital of the world, where women were blowing themselves up.
And one of the ways that they would quote unquote recruit women to be suicide bombers is they would rape them
and then tell them the only way to restore their honor was to blow themselves up, say, at an American checkpoint or in a restaurant or at a wedding or in a hospital.
It was horrific.
So that was number two, that the enemy was far more brutal and evil than I imagined.
But the third thing was...
Democracy and civil order, anything like we would recognize here in the United States, was far more elusive than I thought.
And so, you know, one of the things that I think is a mistake that previous administrations have made is that we're just too idealistic.
I think George W. Bush was too idealistic about Iraqi society without Saddam Hussein.
I feel like Barack Obama was too idealistic about sort of how the Muslim world would, or say jihadists would be less motivated to attack us if we changed policies or moderated in our stance.
And so we had a lot of this view that I think
was just sort of too idealistic about the complexities of the situation.
And so I'm now, I have less idealism about what's possible in the Middle East over time than I did before.
I was one of these people who I thought that genuinely, and I'm embarrassed to admit it right now, that if you remove Saddam Hussein in 03, the trip from Saddam Hussein to a functioning democracy in 2003,
Iraq would be much shorter than it's proven to be, that it actually was much more painful.
It's still an ongoing process.
I mean, obviously, Iraq is much more of a democracy than it ever was under Hussein now.
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