Erik Prince Tells Steve Bannon Trump Should Bomb a Few More Targets and ‘Be Done’ In Iran

Screenshot via War Room

Blackwater founder Erik Prince joined Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast on Monday and urged President Donald Trump to “call this a win” in Iran, possibly bomb some additional Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps targets, and then “be done.”

Prince, the brother of former Trump cabinet member Betsy DeVos, has long been a close ally of Trump and remains active in the global private security business.

“Hang on, hang on. What would Erik Prince’s — if this is a Roman punitive raid, like the empire used to do, or even the Republic — if you’re going to hit them, what is your recommendation? You’re an expert,” Bannon asked, adding:

What — what do you — from what you’ve seen in operational security, they haven’t put a lot out, but what would you do in the next 24 to 48 hours to make sure that they understood this is rough Roman justice? The Persians should respond to that. They got enough of it when those two empires wanted each other, sir.

“Every IRGC — not that they would be in the barracks anymore — but anything that was of value to the IRGC that enables the IRGC, Quds force, and MOIS to continue to suppress the people: bomb the hell out of those, and then be done. And then cut away,” Prince replied, adding:

And then tell the Iranian leadership that remains: if we have to come back, we’re going to take apart all your economic infrastructure. The problem — the problem with bombing, with picking a fight now with Iranian clerical religious extremists — is they are really willing to die for their cause. And they will take everything else with them, and they will burn down the rest of the Middle East.

I suspect they will continue to launch drone attacks into the GCC countries. They even hit Cyprus yesterday — the British base at Akrotiri — because there are US aircraft launching from there. So they have the ability to punch much harder than we expected. For all the smoke and thunder about the US action against the Houthis, the fact is the Houthis are still there, controlling the same terrain with a significant weapons load.

And for those months, they effectively shut off the Suez Canal at the southern end. And now we’re thinking we’re going to do the same to the Iranians in their home country, with as much as they’ve been stockpiling. Look, the Russians have been at war in Ukraine for four years. The Iranians have been learning. The Russians bought that Shahed drone for $20,000–$30,000 a piece, and they have produced many improved variants of it. The Iranians certainly have been working as well. They had good capability before. They reinvested.

And for us to have to shoot down a Shahed drone with a one-, two-, or three-million-dollar Raytheon PAC-3 missile — it’s really, really bad math. On top of that, we lost three F-15s today. It was probably an accident — likely a friendly fire incident. Not sure. I doubt it was over Iranian territory, but it’s an important note nonetheless. To my knowledge, there are not a lot of US aircraft going over Iranian territory going after these targets.

So, again, the president should call this a win — like he said in his comments: “I have paid my debt to the Iranian people. I removed this leadership, which killed them. Now I leave it to the Iranian people.” The other thing the administration should do: it’s ripe for a change in Afghanistan. Even the Taliban are sick of their leaders — not to mention all the other ministers, all the former generals, all normal Afghans. They very much want to shift back to the middle and be closer to America. Make a couple of quick changes there, go to Bagram, and now you have a staging area from which you can threaten Iran if you need to.

Watch the clip above.

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