By Rich Lowry
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Comic Dave Smith came to the attention of many of us when
Douglas Murray bested him in a viral debate on Joe Rogan’s podcast a couple of
months ago.
He’s a libertarian anti-interventionist who is a huge fan
of the noxious amateur historian Darryl Cooper.
He is not the most important or sophisticated
anti-Israel, anti-interventionist voice out there, but he has a following and
is representative of how and what his camp argues.
It is, in short, not impressive. There’s a reason that in
his debate with Douglas Murray he defended the proposition that you don’t have
to know much about a given topic to have valuable things to say about it.
Ignorance, or half-knowledge, is Smith’s mode. He brings
to the question of Israel and our foreign policy in the Middle East the
touching enthusiasm of someone who has read a book and found it a fascinating
and transformative experience.
It’s completely legitimate to say, as Smith does, that
military interventions often lead to unintended consequences, and point out
that the optimists about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya were wrong — so, beware.
He doesn’t leave it there, though. On top of these banal,
but fair-enough observations, he layers all sorts of twisted stupidity, most of
which speaks to an irrational hostility to the Jewish state.
The podcast Breaking Points had him on the other
day, amusingly, as an authority on military affairs in the Middle East, and
Smith unloaded a typical farrago of poorly informed or deceptive nonsense.
Reacting to Bibi Netanyahu’s assertion that the Iranians
have been trying to kill Trump, he, like many isolationists, pronounced himself
incredulous: “I would just say, first off, the accusation that Iran was trying
to assassinate Donald Trump just doesn’t meet the most basic of smell tests.”
Well, here’s the DOJ indictment of a man named Farhad Shakeri who
was allegedly told by the IRGC to surveil and assassinate Donald Trump,
referred to as “victim-4” after the first reference in the indictment.
Perhaps Smith believes this is Deep State misdirection,
but it’s not clear why Merrick Garland’s Justice Department would attempt to
nail Trump to the wall on one hand and portray him as the sympathetic target of
a foreign assassination plot on the other.
The Trump team also took measures to evade a potential Iranian assassination
attempt, so they — with considerable more skin in the game than Dave Smith —
thought it passed the smell test.
“As all the hawks are bragging right now,” Smith averred,
“or saying that essentially Israel was already at war with Iran because Iran
attacked first on October 7. Their proxies attacked. And what does that mean?
“You know, it’s like when they say Iran is the number one
sponsor of terror. Do they ever have to back that up with data?”
Uh, Iran backs Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansar Allah, and the
al-Ashtar brigades. The militias it supports have routinely attacked U.S.
forces in Syria and Iraq. As a recent State Department report put it, “The
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) and the Ministry of
Intelligence and Security remained Iran’s primary actors involved in supporting
terrorist recruitment, financing, and plotting across Africa, Asia, Europe, and
the Americas.”
Smith referred to Iran’s support as having “given Hamas
some weapons in the past.”
This is a laughable euphemism. Iran has strongly
supported Hamas with financing, materiel, and training for decades and
since the terror group’s founding in the 1980s. The relationship weakened for a
time when Hamas severed ties with the Assad regime, but Tehran and Hamas
patched that up long ago. Iran has been providing Hamas roughly $100 million a
year.
Hamas wouldn’t have been nearly as capable a terrorist
force prior to October 7 without Iranian backing, and the entire point of the
enterprise from the Iranian perspective was to have a proxy force that could be
relied upon to attack Israel.
By the way, Iran has American blood on its hand going
back decades. As my colleague Phil Klein notes: “Iran-backed Hezbollah carried out the
1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. service members;
Iran-backed militias killed 603 U.S. troops in Iraq (according to 2019 Pentagon
figures); U.S. intelligence agencies found that Iran offered bounties to
Taliban fighters who targeted U.S. troops in Afghanistan; last year, a drone
attack on a U.S. outpost in Jordan killed three Americans; and for years
Iran-backed Houthis attacked U.S. ships.”
Smith either doesn’t know any of this or is unimpressed
by it.
He also asked, do they “ever like show you, look, this is
how much terrorists have gotten support from Saudi, and this is how much more
they’ve gotten from Iran?” He continued, “Compare how much money the U.S. has
given to terrorist organizations, or Israel has given to terrorist
organizations.”
It’s hard to know what he means. Perhaps he’s referring
to Israel at times encouraging or turning a blind eye to the growth of Hamas as
a counterbalance the PLO. This is obviously different from fully sponsoring the
group and its capacities to kill and destroy, which Iran has done since the
group’s inception.
As for the U.S., is he thinking of long-ago American
support for the Mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when we
were aiding an insurgency against the invasion of a brutish totalitarian state
(and tried to steer clear of the most radical fighters)? Or the least savory
elements of the Syrian and Libyan oppositions?
This is supposed to compare to Iran’s systematic,
regime-defining support for anti-Israel and anti-U.S. terrorism?
Now, it is certainly true that the Saudis have a lot to
answer for regarding their support for Islamic extremism over the years, but
they were partners in the effort to defeat ISIS and have cooperated on sundry
other counter-terrorism initiatives over the years.
Smith complained of the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear
program, “We’re left in the position where you’re supposed to sit here and
justify a sneak, aggressive, preemptive attack.”
Yes, the Israeli campaign was sneaky. What was October 7?
What was the Iranian nuclear program? Smith makes it sounds as though Israel
has been dealing with a peaceable nearby country — the Middle Eastern
equivalent of Canada — and then hauled off and attacked Ottawa from out of
nowhere.
He underlined the point by saying, “Somehow you’re
supposed to feel like you’re the good guys in an absolute war of choice against
a country that does not have nuclear weapons.”
The last sentiment is quite rich, of course. Iran is not
going to have a nuclear weapon nearly as quickly as it might have otherwise, or
perhaps ever — because of the military campaign that Smith is so upset about.
It apparently doesn’t occur to him that he’s conceding
the premise that it would be a bad thing if Iran had a nuclear weapon, which it
was actively trying to achieve — although there’s not any
premise that he can’t switch around to suit his anti-Israel purposes.
Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon right now, so he says
Israel shouldn’t attack because it doesn’t have a nuke and isn’t
bothering anyone. If Iran did have a nuke, he’d say that Israel shouldn’t
attack because it has a nuke and is too dangerous to confront (this
would be a better argument, by the way).
Smith took a bizarre swipe at the Abraham Accords.
“People brag about the Abraham Accords and what a success they were, and you’re
like, oh, yeah, they worked out so great,” he said. “They led to this.”
He added, “It’s been a nightmare all across the worst
fighting that we’ve had there in 20 years.”
It’s hard to see, though, what role formalizing relations
between Israel on the one hand and the UAE, Morocco, Bahrain, and Sudan on the
other had in fomenting war in the Middle East. It’s ludicrous to skate over
Iran’s support for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Assad regime, all
malign forces devoted to the destruction of Israel, and then drop the hammer .
. . on agreements that were a step toward normality in the region.
Smith views the current conflict in apocalyptic terms.
“We’re playing with the destruction of the region,” he declared. “We’re playing
with the destruction of the United States of America.”
Regarding the region, there might be some truth to that
if Iran still had its full complement of proxies operating at maximum capacity.
It doesn’t — thanks to Israel. Regarding the United States, that might be true
if Iran had an arsenal of nuclear weapons deliverable by ICBM. It won’t anytime
soon — again, thanks to Israel.
Smith’s alarmism is driven not just by animus toward
Israel but the belief that the Iraq and Afghan wars fundamentally altered the
trajectory of America as a country and threw us into long-term decline. “We
didn’t have the crushing debt that we have today,” he said, “we didn’t have the
cultural and racial and political divides that we have today. You know, we’re
in a much different situation.”
Even if you believe that Iraq and Afghanistan were costly
mistakes, the U.S. debt is fundamentally driven by domestic entitlements, something you’d expect a
libertarian to know. Nor did those wars create domestic cultural radicalism,
which was rising in the universities prior to these conflicts and took off
after they had ended or were in less intense phases. Of course, it was the death
of George Floyd that was the catalyst for a wave of woke activism and that
occurred in Minnesota, not Anbar province.
“Our country was in a much stronger position in 2003,
when we first invaded Iraq, or in 2001, when we first invaded Afghanistan than
we are today,” Smith declared.
Actually, in terms of relative economic power, the U.S.
has sprinted ahead of the rest of the world over the last
couple of decades.
This is a fact that, given his dire view of his country,
Smith presumably can’t fit into his world view.
He is willing to concede that Iran isn’t a human rights
exemplar, but, in doing so, he brings it back to us and our ally. “They
mistreat their own people,” he said of the Iranians, “they mistreat their women
particularly. But like, okay, we didn’t need to go to war with them. And if
we’re going to just start going to war with every regime around the world who
mistreats its own people, well, I mean, we could start with the U.S. and
Israel.”
Comic Dave Smith is a representative of the Whoopi
Goldberg Right, or is a Whoopi Goldberg libertarian.
For all his focus on the grim lessons of past
interventions, he doesn’t grapple with the success of Israel’s prior attacks on
Iraq and Syria’s nuclear programs, or Trump’s effective, low-cost campaign
against ISIS in his first term.
In short, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the trouble with
Smith is not so much that he’s ignorant, but that he knows so much that isn’t
so — and all of it passes through a pervasive and perverse anti-Israel filter.
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