Nancy Youssef
speaker
293 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 13 Jul
Nancy Youssef’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 — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
For example, we don't have the 170,000 U.S.
and allied ground troops that we did in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, right?
We don't have the capability, for example, to go in and remove the leadership of Iran or...
put in a regime change such that we are there and able to shape that post-outcome.
They're preparing for an outcome where it's the same strikes over targets, potentially nuclear targets, potentially ballistic missile and other defense targets, I would say, and potentially to go after leadership from the air.
No, it's such a great point.
So right now we have two carriers in the region, more than 120 aircraft and drones and roughly 40,000 ground troops.
In the run-up to the 2003 invasion, we had five carriers, multifold more aircraft, and 170,000 U.S.
and allied troops assigned to go in Iraq.
That's the difference in scale.
That doesn't mean that this is small.
It's one of the largest military buildups we've seen since 2003, but it is not on the same scale of 2003.
Stephen Wyckoff said as much.
He said in an interview with Fox earlier this week that the president was curious that the presence of U.S.
military forces near their shores wasn't enough to lead to a capitulation of some kind.
So they've said that.
I would argue that that's a fundamental misreading of the Iranians in that the Iranians see the threat to their program as an existential threat and are prepared to risk war to protect it and are prepared to suffer casualties arguably more than we are prepared to suffer casualties to dismantle it.
So it was revealing to me in terms of how they're revealing the Iranians if what Stephen Witkoff is saying is an accurate description of the president's position.
The other thing I would note is if the use of force is designed to be leverage, and let's assume that I'm wrong and they're right and they've read the Iranians correctly, it is a very, very large presence for leverage.
I think the accurate way to think about it is that at one point it was potentially a form of leverage, but they're also there in place to be ready to go should negotiations fail.
Showing 241–260 of 293 · page 13 of 15
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