Gen. Jack Keane Warns Iran Is Set on Rebuilding Its Military Capabilities: “No Amount Of Negotiations Are Going To Change This.”

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Guy Benson:
Now it’s time for another Guy Benson Show Benson Bite, where we bring you the day’s most interesting interviews in a bite-sized package. For the full episode, visit GuyBensonShow.com or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Guy Benson:
With us now is General Jack Keane, a retired four-star general. He is chairman of the Institute for the Study of War and is Fox News’ senior strategic analyst. General, welcome back to the show.

Gen. Jack Keane:
Good to be with you, Guy. Good to be talking to you again.

Guy Benson:
Happy to have you. And I want to start with this. It’s my understanding you recently met with a pretty high-level delegation or group of Israeli officials. Based on what you can tell us, what did you glean from that conversation? What is significant about that conversation, and what did you learn that you think would be important for the American people to know?

Gen. Jack Keane:
Yeah, sure. Well, so people understand, I made an extended trip to Israel, to Gaza, and also to Lebanon. I met with the president, the prime minister, the chief of the Israeli military, the Mossad chief, the former Mossad chief, the chief of the Israeli military’s direct reports, and the field commanders in Gaza and also in Lebanon. So it was an extensive trip because I really wanted to get an in-depth sense of where we are.

A couple of quick takeaways.

One, the coming together of CENTCOM, U.S. troops, and the IDF, Israeli troops, and working together–the degree of cooperation, respect, and admiration for each other–is really quite seamless. It’s extraordinary.

And for our audience to understand, we have not had an ally like Israel since World War II. Every other ally we’ve had to work with in wars always came to the table with less capability, requiring U.S. support. Sometimes they had the same amount of will and motivation we had, but a lot of times they lacked the same will or motivation.

Here come the Israelis, and they have huge capability. They are a proven military, and they have the same determination and passion for getting the job done. What they represent–the United States and Israel–are the two most proven militaries in the world. And for the first time ever, they’ve been working together.

The second takeaway is the Israeli people. This war that started on October 7th in 2023 is approaching three years. That is the longest time the Israelis have been at war. They normally measure their wars in terms of days, and one time a couple of weeks, much less months. And this time, years. And that is quite extraordinary.

For such a small military to be under such significant stress, they depend heavily on their reserves. And I ran into soldiers that have been out there 540, 500, 600 days. Really quite extraordinary for a reservist to be away that long, in addition, obviously, to active-duty soldiers.

But where the Israelis are, they want to finish this as soon as possible, and they want Iran to be finished as well. They are fed up with all of these years of Iran, through these proxies, attempting to kill them and destroy the State of Israel.

Guy Benson:
Can I just ask you real quick, just before you move on from that point? For anyone in our audience–and I’m sure some of them exist, and I don’t view it this way at all–but there are some Americans, maybe a growing number of Americans, who say, “Okay, that’s all fine and good, but what does that have to do with us? Isn’t that their business?” How would you respond to that?

Gen. Jack Keane:
Well, the Iranians began killing us in 1983 when they blew up the embassy in Lebanon, the embassy in Kuwait, and our Marine barracks–hundreds killed at that time.

There began a hostage-taking campaign that involved the United States and some European leaders and businesspeople. They killed our station chief in that. And they went on and blew up an Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia a number of years later.

And they conducted a campaign using their proxies against the United States–the Iraqi militia–and used an advanced penetrator that took down our tanks and our fighting vehicles and our tactical vehicles in Iraq. A conservative number is 600 Americans killed. The last commander there, Lloyd Austin, a four-star general, who I know very well, told me it’s closer to 2,000.

During the Biden administration, they attacked U.S. bases–by Iraqi and Syrian militias–about 175 times before October 7th and 125 times after October 7th.

That is just what Iran and its proxies have done to the United States through the years.

When this was presented to Donald Trump, and the decision in January of 2020 to kill Qasem Soleimani–and the case I just made to you was laid out before him–I know for a fact who was making the case to him. And he said, “Why didn’t somebody do something about this?”

And the recommendation, obviously, is to take down the kingpin who had done much of all of this.

Everyone through those years tried appeasement and diplomacy to try to placate Iran and to try and contain them. It has never worked. And that is why the United States is dealing with Iran once and for all, to take them off the table.

And obviously, as the president has said time and time again, they were getting dangerously close to a nuclear weapon. Then that affects the entire region and the world writ large.

If they had nuclear weapons, maybe people would say, “Well, they would never use it.” Iran is a diabolical, tyrannical regime. And you can count on the fact that they would have maximum consideration for using it.

And I can tell you for a fact, when I spoke to a Mossad chief a number of years ago in Israel, he at the time had conversations with the Supreme Leader and his team talking about the impact of using a nuclear weapon on the State of Israel and absorbing multiple nuclear weapons back, and how they could possibly survive that.

They were planning for that. They were absolutely planning for it. They worked through the matrix on what the casualties would be, et cetera.

And at the end of the day, the speaker in the room said words to the fact: “Yes, many of us would be martyred, but we would still survive and be able to rebuild the great state of the Islamic Republic.”

That’s the kind of people that we are dealing with here. And we have a president and a prime minister who surely understand this. And I think we’re likely moving towards finishing them once and for all.

Guy Benson:
So we have two minutes left. I want to give you that runway. You’re about to make a third point of a takeaway from Israel, or you can go in whatever direction you want. Where things stand with this Iran conflict–what comes next? We have about two minutes.

Gen. Jack Keane:
Yeah. The Iranians have absolutely determined to continue, survive the regime, rebuild it, recover it, and go back to all of their objectives.

We know that for a fact. That is not disputable. Recover their nuclear weapons, increase ballistic missiles, support for the proxies–they have not changed one iota.

And that’s the reality of it. No amount of negotiations are going to change this. We should not even make a deal with them because it would involve financing them and recovering them and putting them on the pathway that they have been all along. That makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Economic sanctions, blockade, and military action, covert actions to finish the regime once and for all–and there are very good plans to do all of that.

Guy Benson:
Okay, 30 seconds. Is that something that we can expect soon?

Gen. Jack Keane:
This is the president’s call. He could begin military operations before the midterms. I know he’s been considering it, or likely after. And you can assume that covert operations are underway.

Guy Benson:
Okay. Well, this is a conversation that I’m eager to continue sometime, hopefully very soon. Fascinating stuff. Those conversations must have been really quite something.

I’m so glad you joined us, General, to give us a little bit of an insight into those important issues that you guys were bandying about, and hopefully we can follow up in the very near future with your expertise.

General Jack Keane, thank you, as always.

Gen. Jack Keane:
Yeah, wonderful talking to you and your audience, Guy. Thank you.