J. Michael Waller on the Jenny Beth Martin Show on "Operation Epic Fury: America's Strike on Iran," February 28, 2026.
When regimes do this to us, and we don't retaliate against them, we don't severely punish them and go peer to peer on it, they understand, and the other bad guys understand, oh, you can mess with the United States, you can hit them at this threshold, and they won't retaliate. It was the Iranian regime who killed 600 or more of our people in Iraq and Afghanistan because they were inventing and supplying the IEDs. So everyone aho was killed by an IED, or maimed by one, met their fate at the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. So they've been making war against us all this time. Imagine that in Iraq and Afghanistan say what you will you know about how well those Wars we're done or where they should have been done at all we had Iran surrounded eastern border with Afghanistan and we never did anything to them. They were attacking us the whole time.
It's a wonderful thing to see that the next generation is not going to have to deal with that regime. Of course, when you smash something, things scatter and we don't know what's going to come afterward. But the regime would have come after our future Generations had president Trump not been doing what he's doing right now.
Why do you think other presidents did not take decisive actions like we've seen from President Trump?
Well we didn't have the technology then. In every other case you'd be sending a lot of troops in there. It would be a very costly conventional War as we saw even in the 2000s it was costly conventional War you would have had to have it all out invasion at the time you could have dropped some B-52 bombers capabilities
Operation Epic Fury was not about building democracy. This is where the forever Wars comes in. If you're going to install a new regime you have to put troops on the ground much of the time depending on the situation. That's why Trump just snatched Maduro in Venezuela but he left the cartel in power but he now behaviors so it's not a threat like it was. But it's not bringing democracy to Venezuela because the Venezuelan Democratic people can't organize themselves to do it. Same thing with Iran the internal opposition has been squabbling among themselves and fighting among themselves for decades they can't set foot together a cohesive force. And the shaw or the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi he's been a pretty weak character recently until he started speaking out so they don't have a lot to go with so building democracy is certainly not part of the Trump agenda and actualroughlypr you think about it one of the first things he did as president was was to rip out the Forever War industrial complex when he tore up USAID and that whole giant contracting apparatus incentivizes these democracy building forever Wars.
Elaborate on that and how it prevents the forever Wars that so many people are concerned about and I want to go back to the Iranian resistance.
When you have a clear-cut objective, as a military objective, let's say it's destroy their weapons of mass destruction. Make sure they're not a threat to us and to our interests. Destroy the regime elements that are harmful to us, which in this case is the Ayatollahs, their political theocratic leadership, and the Revolutionary guard. Not so much the army; that's not really the problem. The Iranian Navy has been destroyed. That was a threat to international shipping and also to our Navy. So those were the threats that had to be destroyed. But Trump said in his statement when he announced the attack. He called on the Iranian people to take this into their own hands. It was entirely up to them. So he was very clear. His objective is not a Forever War to run the place, to have Americans administer the place, and have some sort of a transitional Authority under American control. And this is a very important point. He was signaling to the Iranians, "Do it yourself. We've done the heavy lifting for you."
How does dismantling USAID play into that?
The USAID had a purpose during the Cold War when President Kennedy set it up. He gave many speeches on this. You can have all the nuclear weapons in the world, and it's important for us to be supreme in that, but we can never win against subversion by having nuclear weapons. We have to use development. We have to use humanitarian aid as a means of fighting communism. Not as a do-gooder mission, but as a means of showing appeal to the United States, making people become pro-American which they were but helping them to have the basic needs of a humane society was an aid industrial complex. So you were getting and I had been a subcontractor for USAID in the late 80s and early 90s and I saw the fraud. I only lasted a few weeks. There's so much padding so much waste, so much abuse in the USAID funding that something that might cost literally $10,000 to implement, the taxpayer would pay a million bucks for it. So there's all this padding in there where you're allowed if you set up a Contracting Company, one of these Beltway Bandits, you can pay yourself up to $600,000 a year off these government contracts and roughly up to 10%, 10.5% profit on top of that. So if you own a company, you have a $10 million contract, you pay yourself $600,000/year, you pay your spouse half a million dollars a year and you get 10% off that remaining roughly 9 million dollars, so you're making $2 million dollars a year just starting out on a relatively small contract. So you look at all the houses in the McLean Virginia, Bethesda Chevy Chase Potomac, so many of those homes are owned by these Beltway Bandits whether it's the Pentagon or US AID. But their incentive is to have conflicts because that's what lines their pockets and builds their entire standard of living.
Those numbers are really staggering that is a lot of money and a lot of waste to the people who are getting the grant or the contract and implementing it I'm glad that we've worked to try to untangle that and reduce the amount of waste and fraud it is disgusting to think that they are doing that with our hard-earned tax dollars.
I think some foreign aid can be in our interests. If there's a country that needs help and the Chinese are going to bribe the leadership and the leader of the country is like, "Look, I need your help on something with a public works program with . . . private charities can and should do it, but it can be in our national interest to do it if we're competing with the Soviets back then, or the Chinese Communists now. It makes sense if it is done judiciously and we make sure that we get a return on our investment like Charities through churches or volunteer contributions foreign aid is a weapon. It's like intelligence it's like the military it's a weapon and when it becomes a cause unto itself like the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned about well there is an aid industrial complex that Trump took down in his first month as president.
