MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Tuesday said he personally warned President Donald Trump not to launch major U.S. combat operations in Iran, adding with frustration on “Morning Joe” that he wasn’t the only one to do so, as “experts told everybody” the same.
“I told him on the phone, ‘Iran is not Venezuela!’” Scarborough recalled Tuesday. “‘Don’t listen to Lindsey Graham! Don’t do it! Iran is not Venezuela!’ But he thought it was. Experts told him it wasn’t.”
He continued, “If he had talked to anybody on the Iran desk in the CIA, they would’ve said, ‘No, this is a nightmare, you will get entangled in a quagmire there, don’t go.’ And so yeah, you know, experts, sometimes actually you need to pick up the phone and call one or two of them.”
Scarborough argued such experts might have stopped the president from getting involved in what Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank, has warned could lead to one of the most consequential U.S. military defeats in modern history. Kagan suggested as much in a recent op-ed for The Atlantic titled, “Checkmate in Iran.”
Trump has since spent much of his focus on his exorbitant White House ballroom project, which many voters firmly oppose. The Iran war is similarly unpopular among the American people, while Graham has called its staggering taxpayer burden the “best money ever spent.”
U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in February led Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes, resulting in high gas prices and fears of a global energy crisis. Trump claimed last month that a “whole civilization will die” if the strait isn’t reopened.
The war has already cost at least 13 U.S. military service members and more than 3,000 Iranians their lives, including dozens of children at an Iranian school. The U.S. is blockading local ports to pressure Iran amid ongoing negotiations to accept a deal to end the war.
Scarborough explained the rather basic reason for not waging war against Iran. “Let me tell you what experts told everybody about Iran: ‘Don’t go! Don’t go into Iran,’” he noted. “Because if you go into Iran, they’ll cut off the strait immediately ... People have been saying it since the early 1980s, ‘You can’t do it because they’ll cut off the strait.’”
Scarborough added, “And yet they did it anyway. So, the so-called experts were warning him, [MSNBC contributor and journalist] David Ignatius, every day on this show ... leading up to the war, what did he say? ‘Mr. President, with all due respect, sir, Iran is not Venezuela.’”
