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Aug. 24, 2025 - Lex Fridman Podcast
10:26:23
Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex | Lex Fridman Podcast #478
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The following is a conversation with Scott Horton.
He's the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antiwar dot com, co host of Provoked, and host of the Scott Horton Show, on which he has done over six thousand interviews since two thousand three.
He's the author of Provoked, Enough Already, and other books and articles that have over the past three decades, criticized US foreign policy, especially in regard to military interventionism and the military industrial complex.
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's scott horton i think one of the darkest and most disturbing chapters of modern american history is everything that happened around conducting the so-called wars on terror i think to me it was a wake-up call i think it was a wake-up call to a lot of americans in understanding and seeing the military-industrial complex and seeing what the government's capacity is
to mislead us into war and to continuously erode basic human freedoms.
If I can, allow me to list some of the estimates from the cost of war project from Brown University, just so we understand the cost of these wars.
The post nine hundred eleven wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen led to an estimated nine hundred thousand to nine hundred forty thousand direct deaths and three point six to three point eight million indirect deaths.
And the cost in terms of dollars was eight trillion dollars with two point two trillion on Afghanistan and two point nine trillion on Iraq and Syria.
And the result on every front, as we'll talk about, I think it's fair to say that it did not accomplish.
this purpose.
And in fact, if we even just look at the human toll of the people of Afghanistan, I was also looking at the numbers before the war and after the war.
Percent of Afghans facing food insecurity went from 62% to 92%.
Percent of children under five experiencing acute malnutrition went from 9% to 50%.
Percent of Afghans living in poverty went from 80% to 97%.
So it was extremely costly for Americans and it was extremely costly for Afghans.
As you do in your book enough already, can you lay out how the full history, the full context of how it is that the American people were led into this war against terror that was so costly in so many ways.
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you for having me again.
It's great to be with you on the show.
One important statistic that you could have mentioned from the Cost of War project as well is 37 million people displaced from their homes, right?
And the same group, um, it was Lex, I'm telling you, it was like at least five years ago.
God, it's the future.
Now, this may be seven, eight years ago that they did a study that determined that 30,000 American servicemen had blown their own brains out since then while one way or the other deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it is is.
So talk about the cost of war that's far beyond, you know, the actual deaths in the war.
We had about 4,500 in Iraq and about 2,500 in Afghanistan of just official airmen, marines and soldiers on the ground killed, plus contractors and all that.
So that's speaking not just to the things that could be measured, but you can just imagine the scale of suffering that's going on in the veterans' minds.
Yeah.
And you know what, too, like you would have guessed this probably right.
You probably know more about this subject than me.
There's a New York Times headline, I think yesterday was, Oh my God, look at, or maybe it was the Wall Street Journal, look at this insane list.
of the kinds of drugs that all these depressed soldiers get put on.
Here's fifteen different psychoactive drugs, all to temper the side effects of the others and whatever, where you know, and then they say that this could lead to suicide because of course we know that, right?
They even have to say that on TV sometimes that some of these drugs cause suicidal or homicidal obsessions and this kind of thing.
We know that's one of the side effects.
So some percentage of these guys might have made it if the government health care system hadn't helped them in the end is another bitter irony, you know?
The whole thing is just you know, you said we got nothing out of it.
I said half in jest, but it is serious, but it's also it shows by relief what a disaster this is that the only thing we did get out of it, like literally, was advancements in prothetic limbs for amputed, whether they lost their limb in war or otherwise, like If you want to boil it down, what did anyone get out of this other than, you know, some people got a dividend check from Lockheed or that kind of thing, but that's not to the benefit of the society whatsoever, so that doesn't count.
You want to talk about what society got out of it, what America got out of it.
We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before.
That's it.
I don't think there are any more clear illustrations of the complete failure of the military industrial complex.
How did this begin?
How do we get into this?
Yeah, well, so I'll try to tell the somewhat fast version, although, Lex, that's a kiss of death every time I say that.
Please go the slow version.
Okay, so the slow version is, I'll start with the end of Vietnam.
Okay, so one major aspect of the end of Vietnam was that Richard Nixon felt like he had to bribe the military-industrial complex some other way.
And so one of the things that he did was he turned to the Shah of Reza Pahlavi in Iran and asked him to increase arms sales.
Now I guess I could go back.
I think everybody knows that the CIA helped with the coup of 1953 to reinstall the Shah who was the son of the last dictator and had already been in for a while and they put him back in.
And so now this is and that was in fifty three.
So now this is in the early seventies, twenty years later.
And Nixon's saying, Hey, you know, it would really help me would be if you would buy a bunch of fighter jets.
So I think it's kind of notorious, right, that Iran still has F four's and F fourteen's.
That's where they got them from was the Nixon and Ford administration this push to do that.
And the Shah was apparently pretty obsessed with looking very first world with his very fancy first world army that he couldn't really afford.
And it helped to destabilize his regime somewhat.
And then I don't know the full extent of America of America turning against him before the revolution.
I know that by the time of the revolution in 1979, he was sick of cancer and very sick.
And the Americans secretly knew that.
The CIA knew that, you know, but it was not public knowledge that it was whatever, stage four, whatever, he was doomed.
And so they knew the revolution was coming and they were trying to figure out how to handle it, and there was the revolution was coming anyway.
And it wasn't just there was going to be a change of leadership.
When we say revolution here, we mean mobs in the streets demanding an end to the old regime in huge numbers, right?
A very large scale popular revolution.
And they're trying to figure out how to get the handle on it.
Some of Carter's critics said what he should have done was had the military just massacre all those people.
That'll shut him up or like, you know what I mean?
They're trying to figure out what to do.
Well, the CIA and the State Department told Jimmy Carter, listen, this Ayatollah Khomeini, he's not so bad.
We know this guy.
He was part of a group of Shiite clergy who helped to agitate against Mossadegh in 1953.
And so we have at least some contact and we think that we can deal with him.
Did they actually believe that?
I think so.
Is this incompetence or malevolence?
Like, how does this whole process happen that you go into this process of regime change and keep installing people that are creating more and more.
more instability and destruction in the world.
And then you use that to then justify invasion and starting wars.
How does this happen?
Well, there's a lot of things.
And the whole time we're in our discussion here, we'll be talking about a massive conspiracy of interests at play all the time.
But this is, and I've never read a bunch of books about this.
I probably should at least interview these guys.
You'd be interested in this if you don't already know the subject is public choice theory.
It's kind of a branch of libertarian political economy studies that says that essentially one of its major aspects is that there really is no national interest the way you and I might think of it.
sitting here hashing it out across the table because what becomes the national interest is the interest of the people in charge of making the decisions for the nation.
And so they all ultimately are private choices, aren't they?
And the national interest becomes subsumed by what's good for me now, and so telling all my bosses they're all wrong is not good for me now.
And on the very basic level, you know, I've read quite a few books just from former insiders like Daniel Ellsberg and other people like that.
Ellsberg tells a story of where he's the deputy undersecretary of state for making up nonsense or whatever it is, or defense of the no, no, state, I believe.
And his whole job is making his boss look good, whether he agrees with him or not.
And then the hope is that next year he'll be in his boss's position and his boss will move up one and then his job will be making his boss look good then and how and he explains how the truth and reality just gets washed out of this, right?
Another famous one or should be famous is my friend David Hardy who wrote the best book about the Waco massacre.
He is a great lawyer and he had been a former Interior Department cop and he said, There's truth and there's falsity.
Like that's the world we live in.
But in government work, there's our position.
And our position takes place on an entirely different plane than truth and falsity.
Our position is the thing a bunch of people in a room agreed that they would say and do as they can in committee like come to a consensus.
And then a lot of times, once those decisions are made, now to go back on that decision means that you are attempting to disgrace the people who led the decision making on that thing and say that they were wrong and they shouldn't have done the thing they did.
Now they got to do this instead.
And so you see just an absolute unwillingness to make change.
And this is something that capitalism, ultimately, like everybody's got ego problems, but ultimately the boss has to look at an accounting sheet and say this isn't working.
So I'm going to have swallow my pride or go out of business, right?
In government, it's not like that.
The worse they do, the better off they are.
This is why it was the soldiers in Vietnam called the military itself, the army itself, the self-licking ice cream cone, because it means that they cause chaos, but then chaos is their job is to go and fix that.
And so, you know, and if you're a government bureaucrat getting paid way above the market, then what do you want to do?
Go get a job.
A great example of this I cite in the book is at the end of the Afghan War, there were multiple military officers, like not too high, but like high enough to be quoted by the news saying, well, now that that's over over, we're looking for other things to do.
So we're going to pivot to Africa and go find some Islamists there.
Because we are looking for ways to stay globally engaged.
Because of course, that's their interest to do.
Whether that's good for Africa or good for the American people is just it's kind of a separate question that they're not really dealing with.
And so I think that's a huge part of it.
I mean, one of the things was William Sullivan said that, well, Khomeini, he's like the Iranian Gandhi.
Well, first of all, he's not a pacifist.
But second of all, didn't Gandhi kick the British Empire out of India?
So what are you saying?
You're deliberately putting in a guy who's going there and it's going to declare independence for you from you.
How are you going to handle that?
Like they don't seem to think this through.
And I have to say, one of the great disappointments of growing up is you find out that the rest of the adults aren't so smart.
They're just regular dudes like you.
And I think a lot of times State Department people might have very advanced knowledge, doesn't mean they have very advanced wisdom.
You know, there's something else Danielle Ellsberg talks about is when you have access to classified information, then you don't pay any attention to anybody who doesn't because what do they know?
You know all these things that they couldn't possibly be taking into account.
So you immediately close your circle of people you listen to.
And I'll tell you a great example of this from my own experience was I interviewed a CIA analyst apparently a pretty important executive at one time in the terror war named Cynthia Storber.
And I asked her, I forget if it was in the interview or not, I hope I'm not like speaking out of school.
I believe it was in the interview that I asked her about, well, I can't remember the exact context, but I asked her about, well, don't you read Patrick Coburn?
And she goes, Who's Patrick Coburn?
And I go, Who's Patrick Coburn?
Patrick Coburn is the most important Anglo in Iraq.
He's the one who understands all this stuff more and better than all of you.
and he writes in the Independent, you can read it for free.
Just register with your email address, for God's sake, man.
I can't believe.
And she's like, Who is that?
So a lack of basic curiosity, rigor of research, understanding the situation.
And she could know a lot of secret things, but without understanding what he understands, she doesn't understand what she needs to know.
I can promise you that much, you know?
I think it's a basic lack of humility.
The ego grows, the power grows.
Then you, to self preserve, to maintain power, you start deluding yourself in those closed rooms.
You start shutting yourself off from the reality of the world.
And then as your own delusion drifts, You're more incentivized to grow that delusion, incentivized to hide, to do secrecy, and then it just goes off.
And that's why I was hoping you could talk more to Daniel Ellsberg.
So the importance of someone like that.
So it sounds like if we think about the machinery of how this happens, it feels like heroic whistleblowers are central to this process.
If we talk about Snowden and Assange and one of the OGs is Daniel Ellsberg, who just reading here was an American military analyst, economist and renowned whistleblower best known for leaking the Pentagon papers in 1971.
Can you tell me about who he was and the importanceance of him?
Oh, yeah, well, he's an absolutely brilliant guy.
I'm proud to say I was a friend, you know, for ten, fifteen years there.
I don't know, a little, quite a while.
So he endorsed my first two books, I'm very proud to say.
And he didn't have a chance to read Provoked, unfortunately.
But I know he would have liked it because we were email buddies.
And I know that he thought very much along the same lines as me and John Mearsheimer and others, you know, as people are probably familiar.
I think we'll get more to that.
But on that issue, he was great.
But he was a brilliant genius and he was a nuclear war war planner.
That was his second book, it was called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
And he had liberated a bunch of documents about nuclear war as well.
But he had decided with his quote unquote co-conspirator that they should just focus on Vietnam first.
That's the thing that matters most right now.
And that was the Pentagon papers and then all the papers that he had hidden away, he gave them to his brother and his brother lost them.
And so then he decided later, you know what?
I remember enough of this stuff that I can go ahead and just write it from memory.
And he was so brilliant, dude.
I mean, I don't know what his IQ was, but I know his father built the first assembly line for the atom bomb.
And they asked him if he would do the same for the H bomb and he refused for moral reasons.
So that was his background in the first place.
And he's just such a great guy, man.
So he's a person who's able to see the situation.
Like you mentioned, like that room and in that room, understand that there's some shit that's wrong that's going on here.
Yeah.
To be able to speak up.
And he was at Rand, right?
His job was writing.
And this was when Rand, I guess, was much more important and very closely tied to the Pentagon.
And their whole thing was like writing up game theory nuclear warfare plans.
One of the things he did was he found out and Jack Kennedy had to fight like mad.
They had to go back and forth over and over and over again to even get.
the war plan from the Pentagon.
And they finally got the war plan from the Pentagon.
And it said that if we have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China.
So that would be, I don't know if that includes all the Warsaw Pact, but it includes all the republics and China.
And the thinking was that if America and the Soviet Union destroy each other and Europe, well, we'll be damned if we're going to leave Earth to those dirty chicoms.
So we're going to kill all of them too.
And that was the thinking and the thing.
It was Ellsberg told Kennedy that and Kennedy told Ellsberg to make sure and force the Pentagon to rewrite the plan and narrow that thing down.
So that's part of the guy's background, where he comes from.
I beg people to read the Penta, it's called Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and then also the Doomsday Machine.
And by the way, his first book, Secrets, begins with his first day on the job.
I was joking around early.
He's deputy undersecretary of state for whatever it was.
I can't remember if it was state or defense.
Maybe it was defense.
It had to have been defense.
Forgive me for before.
And then the first thing that happens when he clocks in that day for his job is the thing starts coming across the teletype ships attacked in the Tonkin Gulf.
And then he sees the president run with it anyway.
And now the historian Gareth Porter says that actually McNamara lied to LBJ and he can prove it.
I can't cite all the chapter and verse, but I trust Gareth.
He's great.
And he says that actually it was McNamara lied to LBJ when they knew that it was a mistake.
And the same thing happened again and again.
You take a little piece of information and run with them in order to justify war.
That's right.
That's going to be a theme.
Absolutely.
What was important in the Pentagon Papers?
What are some key ideas?
Okay, so the Pentagon Papers, first of all, was, and he wrote this while he was working at RAND.and, but he had full top secret clearance and they were commissioned by Secretary of Defense McNamara to write a real secret top secret history of the Vietnam War and the entire history of our involvement in Indochina since the end of the Second World War.
And so that was what they did, was they wrote like eyes only for the Secretary of Defense type material.
So it had everything in there.
And Ellsberg was in charge of writing it along with Leslie Gelb, who shut his mouth and went along and later became the Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a good dog, right?
But anyway, they were the ones who wrote it together.
And Ellsberg was brave enough to liberate the thing.
And he tried to leak it to the Senate over and over and over again.
Mike Rovell eventually started reading it into the record.
And then finally the New York Times got the courage to start publishing the thing.
And it showed that they knew that they couldn't win all along.
They knew that the South Vietnamese government could not stand.
They didn't have popular consent that the insurgency in the South was not just based on support from the North, but their own indigenous revolution against what they see, you know, as intolerable foreign intervention and wanted to force us out.
And it's funny because McNamara later says that I guess he didn't read the Pentagon papers that no, we were just sure that it was the capitalists versus the communists.
Like all this stuff about they didn't want to be ruled over foreign white devils., that never occurred to us, you know, like, come on, you know, as Chomsky said, come on, America invaded South Vietnam, that the government that was inviting us to stay was the government that we put in there, or at least after we overthrew the one we didn't like, the one we put in there, no different than, as we're going to talk about, Hamid Karzai inviting us to please stay in Afghanistan.
It's like, come on, who's zooming who here?
But so it showed, and that was the deal, and that was why it was such a big deal in how he made Nixon's enemies list and all these things, even though it didn't really expose Nixon, it exposed LBJ and the predecessors, but it was a huge shock that they had been lying.
to us and lying to us and lying to us deliberately, knowing that this has to be someone else's problem.
Right.
There's a phone call of LBJ saying to a Republican senator friend of his that I can't be the first president to lose a war.
So right.
He's just going to retire for us and make it Nixon's problem, right?
The same as George W. Bush said, oh, the end of Iraq?
Well, that will just have to be up to other presidents to decide.
Not my responsibility.
All I did was do it.
You know, and that's how they are.
And they have, that's their, this is also part of the economics of democracy too, where they have such, and I'm not just saying the reality is you have such short terms of office, you have very high time preference, right?
Instead of like working on long term projects about what's the future of mankind going to look like 100 years from now, you're looking at a much shorter time horizon, you know, including who's going to finance your next election so that you'll have any say so whatsoever.
And as Yoda and Palpatine agree that like all who have power are afraid to lose it because what if the other guy had it instead?
It would be worse.
Everybody knows that, which is of course a huge part of the story of the American Empire here, you know?
Well, but fundamentally that's cowardly, right?
What you want from leaders, from great leaders is courage.
And courage means making difficult decisions that are going to make the world a better place long term, the country a better country long term.
And that means if you start a war, that means understanding the full cost of that war and how it's going to have to end.
And then if you understand the full cost of the war, you're not going to start it.
Yep.
Right.
So how does, how do we go from the CIA 1979 to Shaw, Ayatollah, Nixon?
What is the thread that now starts inching towards the nineties and towards 911 in Iraq?.
I know there's so much, but we're gonna do it, man.
So here's what happens.
America goes ahead and allows the Ayatollah get on the plane in Paris, France and go home.
And I remember even as a kid saying, but aren't the French our friends when they had checked with us before doing that?
In fact, I just recently found the clip of Peter Jennings interviewing him.
And the smartest thing Peter Jennings can think of to say is, So how do you feel on your triumphant return, mister Ayatollah?
Right?
Which USA is just completely aiding and abetting.
Right?
These are shots they called and made happen.
Right?
They sent him home to inherit the thing.
And then they did work with him.
People forget, man.
And I was just raised kind of in the atmosphere of all this, And even back then, people conflated the revolution itself with the hostage crisis as just one story, it all is spoken in one breath.
But in fact, the revolution was in February of 1979, and the hostage crisis didn't break out until November.
So what was happening in the meantime?
Well, one of the things was the Americans were warning the new Iranian regime about threats from the new dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had just overthrown the government in a bloody coup d'état.
No revolution there.
And you can watch the video of this.
Have you ever seen the video of Saddam's overthrowing Iraq?
And he has a huge stadium of guys and he just starts calling names.
And everyone whose name he calls has to go out and get shot.
Like, it's gnarly, man.
I think that video is a dark study of human nature.
It's terrifying.
Oh, it is.
It's ugly, man.
Because everybody is afraid and there's a disgusting face that Saddam Hussein has.
Oh, I don't know.
I don't know if there's a sadistic Sure.
He was a psychopath, man.
No question.
He was a brute of a dictator.
Right.
There's a lot of el presidentes in the world.
Not all of them like training their sons to torture people from the time they're young and stuff.
Oh, fuck.
All the cowards in that room.
But then you have to ask yourself, what would you do if you were in that room?
Yeah, you've already been bested at that point.
I mean, they could all rush the stage, but that ain't going to do them any good, you know?
But before you, how did you get to that room?
Yeah.
And then that's why you have to give props to whistleblowers.
You have to give props to people that stand up and risk their lives in situations like that, which in those parts of the world is even harder than it is in the United States of America.
And you know what, by the way, I usually forget to mention this when I tell this story.
It takes a few seconds to mention that Saddam Hussein had been groomed by the CIA since the 1950s on and off, and he had been part of different dictator regimes on and off.
He had been in exile in Cairo for a little while and this kind of thing.
And then in the 70s leading up to the coup, I think it was really closer to the Soviet Union.
And so we'll get to the, I guess I'll mention it now, the huge irony of the fact that in the Iran-Iraq war, it was America supporting Saddam Hussein and his Soviet military versus Iran and its American one, right?
But the absurdity of this is.
Well, I'm skipping ahead step, but I just like that part.
But so okay, so America supports the revolution in 79 in February.
They're warning this guy, hey, you better watch out.
for Saddam Hussein and his intentions, and we're going to get back to that in a moment here.
And they were also warning him about the threat from the Soviet Union.
Now, why is that?
Well, that's because skip over Iran.
Now we're talking about Afghanistan and Zabidjin Brzezinski's policy that let's support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to try to provoke Soviet intervention there.
And so there's a memo and people can find this at scotthorton dot org slash bare use if you want if you allow me to read President Jimmy Carter's July 3, 1979 finding in quotes authorizing covert support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
Secret, sensitive.
And the important part is provide unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support to Afghan insurgents.
This is now a finding is an order from a president to the CIA to do something.
That's what a finding means.
So this is an order to the CIA to do this.
Now on that order, they did start pouring in support to the Mujahideen.
Now I have to tell you that my best experts on this, like Eric Margoles, and I got this also from Re reading Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident.
They both said that it wasn't American support for the Mujahideen that really provoked the Russians into invading Afghanistan, because what it was was the sock puppet dictator was a basket case, and he had created so many enemies that he just couldn't hold it together.
So the first thing the Soviets did when they invaded in December of'79 was take him out back and shoot him and replace him with a new guy.
So that was really the cause of the Soviet intervention there.
They had a Kami sock puppet regime.
It was not one of the Soviet republics, right?
But they had a sock puppet regime there, but they wanted to.
You know, um, maintain it and it was falling apart.
So they rushed to intervene.
However, Lex, the point still remains that the United States of America was trying to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.
And we're going to get back to why this is so relevant to the Iran thing in just one second, but let's stop and talk about this for a second.
Why would they do that?
And they would do that also because of Vietnam.
Because at the end of Vietnam, Americans had what the government considered to be a mental illness, Vietnam syndrome that meant that Americans didn't want to do this anymore.
Contain communism at this cost.
Who really cares if Vietnam goes communist?
We do business with them now.
And so.
People weren't into it anymore.
So this is where Zabigni Brusinski and his he was national security advisor under Jimmy Carter and his I guess counterpart at defense, a guy named Walter Slocum, they came up with this brilliant idea that what we'll do is we will bait the Soviets into over expansion.
Now we don't want them to invade West Germany, but the Afghans are expendable.
So if we can bait the Soviets into Afghanistan and bog them down, we will be adding straw to the camel's back.
This is a way to inflict because by then think of it.
The word Vietnam, that's not even the name of a country over there somewhere anymore.
Vietnam at that time, that word means some horrible, stupid, no wind, quagmire thing that you shouldn't have done.
You shot yourself in the foot and the leg and lost your friend Jimmy down the street and everything.
And we don't want to do that, you know, that was what Vietnam meant to America was like, God dang, what a mistake that was.
So now they're saying, let's do that to the Reds, okay?
We'll bog them down, bleed them to bankruptcy and force them out the hard way and hurt them and doin' that.
So that's what they were trying to do.
That was the wisdom behind the operation in the first place.
And now if you go, click back one to present.
Brzezinski, you'll see where and he later misphrases this a little bit.
He's kind of cute Brzezinski, but National Security Advisor's big new Brzezinski's memo to President Carter on December 26, 1979 regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
And the important part here, I mean, there's a lot, it's a bit, but if you go down, you'll see where, oh, here, this could become a Soviet Vietnam while it could become a Soviet Vietnam.
In other words, see they're already talking about it in that context here in writing, we see.
And it's from Robert Gates' first memoirs, by the way, where he says it was Brzezinski and Slocum.
By the way, that's my source for that when I say that those two were the ones really innovating this policy.
And he says the initial effects of the invention are likely to be adverse for us for the following reasons, and then he says that it'll make the hawks talk about how we better do something about Iran, and he says this could bring us into a head to head confrontation with the Soviets.
So this is very interesting, Lex, because well, one, this is why America's passing intelligence to the Ayatollah about threats from the Soviets.
We think that now that Iran is essentially destabilized because of the revolution, and we just deliberately or at least were trying to and apparently succeeded in a sense in baiting them into invasing Afghanistan.
Now we're worried that they're too expansionist and that they're going to roll into Persia next and then they'd be right on the Persian Gulf and we can't have that.
So that was when Jimmy Carter announced in his speech in 1980 the Carter doctrine that said that the Persian Gulf is now an American lake and we will take any move by any power, read the USSR, to move into the Persian Gulf as an attack on the United States itself.
Right?
We're like bringing the Gulf, those waters into NATO, right?
Giving a full war guarantee to keep the Soviets.
And by the way, a regime, oh, I'm sorry, I'm skipping one.
See, go back..
I'm forgetting me for the.
It's hard to stay in line here.
The hostage crisis breaks out in November 1979 because David Rockefeller from, of course, Standard Oil of New Jersey, AKA Exxon and Aramco and all those things.
The Chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank at that time.
He was very close with Jimmy Carter and he convinced Carter to let the Shah into the United States for cancer treatment.
That was what caused the riot at the embassy and the seizure of the hostages.
Now, I don't know and I'm sure there are books about this that I just haven't read yet, you know, kind of thing that explains whether it really was the IRGC that took the lead in that or whether it was the students who did it it or what, but obviously the government held the hostages and kept the thing going, so they bear responsibility for that.
But the point being that America had been trying to work with the Ayatollah up until then.
The idea was not that, oh, Shiite fundamentalist Islam says that all white Christians from North America must lay down dead right now because that's their religious belief.
Look at them ranting, we're the great Satan and burning our flag.
And then, but so when so many people, when the story begins, with their calling us great Satan and burning our flag, then, well, they just hate us.
And so we're just going to have to do something about that.
And, you know, I've I remember meeting a guy one time who said, listen, Al Qaeda hates us for all these complicated reasons.
And then he goes, but not Iran, they just hate us.
I remember when I was a boy they were burning our flag and calling us Satan.
So it's like, yeah, but well, they had a reason too.
Not that justifies them doing anything sinful or criminal, but I'm just saying they also had reasons for reacting the way they reacted.
America had launched a coup in 1953 from that same embassy.
And by saying that they were going to cure the Shah's cancer, it seemed to be an indication to them that we were going to try to reinstall him in power and cancel the revolution.
And so they were preempting that.
Again, not a justification for everything that happened there or whatever, but just to tell the whole story in a way that I've told that story to people before.
I never knew that.
I always thought that it all happened in one big show, you know, and never do they admit, unless sometimes the Republicans accuse Carter of this, they'll tell the part about that Carter was so naive as to send the Ayatollah home, although that's usually always left out.
But so now he announces the Carter doctrine, giving a war guarantee to Iran that he now officially hates and is holding our hostages and completely humiliating him, right?
And there's Operation Eagle Claw, where they sent forces into Iran.
And that was a, it was supposed to be a rescue mission that ended in disaster where the planes and the helicopters crashed into each other other.
They were already leaving anyway because it was going to be botched and then they crashed on the way out.
And so that was a big humiliation for Carter as well.
And then, oh, and I should also tell you that Gareth just found this.
It was a classified document that he only found in the State Department records that showed that just after the Carter Doctrine speech, Brzezinski in a private meeting with the Saudi foreign minister and also with his deputy Warren Christopher, who was later Clinton's Secretary of Defense, he admitted that we don't think there's really a Soviet threat to Iran.
Brzezinski himself admitted that.
So the pretext for the Carter Doctrine was fake, and he admitted it himself., they were not really afraid of that, even though they were pretending to be afraid of that as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that they were trying to provoke.
And we should also give a shout out to Gareth Porter.
He has written about the Vietnam War books including Perils of Dominance and Balance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
I have to say, I believe that he is the most important journalist of the War on Terrorism era.
I call him Gareth the Great.
He's a good friend of mine.
I've interviewed him three hundred something times on my show about essentially everything he's written since 2007.
He is the best of the best of the best.
It's not just the war in Vietnam.
He writes also about the continued war.
Absolutely specialized in Iraq, Afghanistan, exposing the entire fraud of David Petraeus and his career.
He wrote the book Manufacturing Crisis on the Iranian nuclear program.
That is by no means the very best book on that.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Syria, Iran and the war on terror, all things he's written extensively about.
Gareth Porter the Great Man.
Absolutely.
That's great.
I learned so much from him I couldn't begin to explain.
Very enough.
So the story continues.
Yes.
Carter.
So another aspect of the Carter doctrine was that Carter gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran.
Now, first thing is, why'd Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran?
It ain't just because he likes doing what Jimmy Carter says.
He had his own reasons.
Now, picture your map of Iraq.
I know you got one in your head there.
Everything from Baghdad over east to Iran and down to Kuwait, that is what you could call Shiistan, predominantly Shiite Iraq, right?
And then there's sixty percent of the population, super majority.
In the north, you have the Kurds who are Sunnis, but their Kurds are a separate ethnicity than the Arabs.
And then you have the Sunni Arabs who are another twenty percent.
Well, Saddam Hussein was a secular Sunni Arab, leading essentially like in The Simpsons, the Kami Nazis, the Both Party, who are sort of both a little just a fascist state essentially, right?
With Arab characteristics or whatever.
And but and not entirely sectarian one.
He had Christians and Kurds and Shiites in his government and things like that.
It wasn't, you know, like just a caricature or whatever, it was a balance of power act.
But after the Iranian Revolution, Saddam had real reason to fear that the Shiite revolution was going to spread to Iraq and that Iraqi Shiites, at least the armed and convinced ones, would choose their religious sect and their alliance with Iran on that basis over their national and ethnic sect as Iraqis and Arabs, right, separate from the Persians.
So and he had real reason to believe that, including that members of the Dawah Party and people loyal to the Hakim family were Abdul Aziz al Hakim and his people, they left to go to Iran and they chose Iran's side in the war.
So Saddam Hussein's solution to that was to conscript all these people and force them into his army and march them east against Iran and use them in that way.
And this led to an absolutely brutal World War one, maybe Russia, Ukraine style trench warfare, tanks, artillery, and there's planes and ships, and it was a hell of a war for nine years all through the nineteen eighties, as the United States almost entirely backed Saddam Hussein, except for when they backed the Ayatollah, remember Iran Contra.
And during Iran Contra, what did they do?
They went to the Israelis and they said, Hey, you're still friends with the government in Iran.
You guys don't mind the Ayatollah one bit and have maintained your friendship there.
We want to sell them some missiles and try to get the hostages out and then take the rest of the proceeds from the missiles and give them to the Contras in Nicaragua.
And this is what became the great Iran Contra scandal.
And so we should also say, and you highlight the importance of understanding Iran Contra.
So this here reading a major political scandal in the United States during the mid-nineties, senior officials in President Ronald Reagan's administration facilitated the secret sale of arms to Iran, which was under an arms embargo with the proceeds being used to find Contra rebels fighting the Sandinista's government in Nicaragua, despite Congress explicitly prohibiting such funding.
And this is of course supposedly a side story, but a huge part of it the side story is it absolutely was true, as the great Gary Webb reported in the Dark Alliance series and in his great book Dark Alliance, that and many other great journalists as well, that the CIA had a massive operation to bring cocaine into the United States by the truckload and plane load, to sell it to poor Americans, blacks, especially in LA, but also, yes, it's true.
They even made a Tom Cruise movie after years of colonist conspiracy coupes and all this.
The movie's about a guy named Barry Seal, whose job it was to fly guns and money down there and cocaine up here for the Contras for the CIA and into Bill Clinton's's Arkansas, where he was read in on this, and the operation was run out of the vice president's office, George HW Bush.
And that much is true.
And the same, they had the, I know less about, but they had, this is where all the cocaine from Miami Vice was coming into Florida in the same way.
And this is where the crack epidemic came from in South LA and throughout the country, really, in many places.
And they just don't give a damn about us, man.
Congress said you can't have any money to fund the Contra, and they said, yeah, but we want to anyway.
So this is how they did it.
So the CIA would help orchestrate this kind of transport of drugs.
Absolutely right.
And they completely destroyed the heroic Gary Webb for exposing this.
And they didn't murder him, but they drove him to suicide.
And his good friend Robert Perry, the great journalist, verified that.
No, it really was a suicide.
People thought it was suspicious because he shot himself twice, but that does happen sometimes where people flinch on the first one.
But it was his father's gun and he was totally depressed and he had signed his house over to his wife.
And so he stole his motorcycle and he was like at the, but they had driven him out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News.
They first drove him to the Hollywood Beat and then he eventually he just quit and went to become an investigator for the California State Legislature.
So the CIA doesn't have to kill you directly, they can psychologically destroy you.
That's right.
Yeah, they put the gun in his mo mouth either way, um, for doing the right thing.
Uh, but anyway, and and didn't get any facts wrong.
The only thing that anyone had to attack him on was like the graphics editor put like a phrase out of context big on the page or something in the newspaper.
You know what I mean?
It was like something silly that made it sound like he was saying the purpose of the mission was to destroy the black community when that he never said that.
What he said was they didn't give a damn about those people.
I don't even know if he addressed that, right?
But he certainly wasn't saying that was what it was about.
It was about funding the Contras.
But anyway, so they found their separate ways of doing it.
And this is one of the things that made me like this is I don't even have any idea where I first learned this, but I knew this while Reagan was still in office or at least by the time Bush Sr. was in office when I was still just.
like maybe a freshman in high school or younger than that, I knew that Ronald Reagan was a dope pusher, the same guy with the just say no and the same guy with the massively increased penalties for people engaging in just simply the possession, much less the sale and trade in drugs.
And so their people went to prison for decades for life essentially and literally for just possession of the same drugs that the government was bringing in.
And so how are you ever going to believe in a security force like that again?
I never have.
I don't know why you'd even need to see a Waco massacre or any other or an Iraq war or any other thing to detest these people.
That's who they are.
You know, I had this it's the only part I really remember about it.
it, but there's this great film producer named Kevin Booth.
He was Bill Hicks' best friend and producer.
And he did a documentary about the drug war where they show this guy and he goes, oh, they're all in prison and they're filming him through the gate.
And they're all yelling and whatever, you can't really make out much, right?
They're all like yelling over each other.
And one guy finally like makes everybody be quiet and he looks at the camera and he goes, listen, I'm doing 35 years because I had a few rocks in my pocket.
Does that sound right to you?
I was like, dude, it was Ronald Reagan's cocaine in his pocket.
Like that guarantees a full pardon, man.
Right?
What are we talking about?
That's not fair.
It's a dark aspect of human nature that the people that try to, if we talk about drugs, to ban drugs, and really anyone who tries to ban a thing are often secretly participating in doing that thing.
Bootleggers and Baptists, you know?
Just on a small tangent, sure.
Have you ever, since you're a Texan, have you ever met Bill Hicks?
No, man.
I learned about Bill Hicks like a month after he died.
And so they started playing Sane Man on the Access channel all the time.
And I was like, oh my God, who's this guy?
And then they're like, oh, he just died.
But as a legend, he has been a huge influence on me, you know, in a lot.
Yeah.
In a lot of ways.
So I'm very much a Hicksian.
I apologize for that.
It's good to do a shout out back to the drug war.
And that involvement from Carter and on and Reagan and Iran.
Well, yeah, let's go back to Iran.
Because the cocaine is really tied up in the contra end of the scandal.
Point being America's back in Saddam, except when they're helping Israel back Iran and by selling them these missiles.
And they're even, I don't have my footnote anymore, but it's findable, I'm sure, where they did talk about, you know what we do is we support one side until they start getting ahead a little bit.
Then we support the other side a little bit more and go or we authorize the Israelis to increase support for Iran and play them back and forth against each other.
So that's not just, you know, offshore balancing in peacetime.
That's balancing in wartime, encouraging them to keep killing each other, which is some pretty horrific policy to do.
Could you also comment during this stage and this threat will continue, what role does Israel have to play in this, in this part of the story with Iran?
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know much about what they were saying about America's Iraq policy during that time, but I know that they were still friends with the Ayatollah and we're not going to get to them changing gears on the Ayatollah until Rabin in 1993.
So keep that thought.
So the war is still going on.
We have to mention the chemical weapons too.
America bought them, taxpayers bought them.
There was a huge Iraq Gate scandal, it was called, where people were put on trial for the money, but then their defense was, but the government made me do it.
What are you talking about?
This was the whole thing to do.
And they were, it was German chemical weapons, I believe, and maybe some French, but that were bought with supposed agricultural loans from the United States to Iraq.
And they had a sophisticated biological weapons program too, with anthrax and the rest.
And the Americans sent them the precursors for the germs that he would need.
During the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime used chemical weapons extenstensively against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians, most notably in the 1988 Halabja attack that killed an estimated five thousand people and injured twenty thousand more.
There is substantial documentation that Western governments, especially the US and some of its allies provided Iraq with dual use technology, intelligence and materials which facilitated Iraq's chemical weapons program.
And it goes on.
Let me drop two good footnotes for people here.
The first would be Shane Harris, who is now at the Washington Post, you know, very official national security beat reporter.
He wrote a piece about this at foreignpolicy dot com a few years back where he goes into extensive detail.
So as far as like authoritative sources, there you go.
Okay, nothing conspiratorial about this narrative at all.
But then you want to do a deeper dive onto it, then go to fff dot org and it's this is the Future Freedom Foundation and there they have a page and I'm sorry I always get the headline wrong, but it's something like where did Saddam get his WMDs or where did Saddam get his chemical weapons?
You know what you can do?
You can go site colon fff dot org and then that way you search just that site and then you can do chemical weapons Iraq and I bet you'll find it.
Yeah, right there.
Where did Iraq get its weapons of mass destruction?
And I had mentioned this, I guess on the Tucker show.
And so I actually talked with Hornberger and I went back and I found and I made sure that all those links are up to date and work for each of those stories.
So people can go through and take a very close look at those are just articles, never mind all the books about it and stuff, which there are plenty.
So this is a set of links assembled by Jacob Hornberger.
The title is Where did Iraq get its weapons of mass destruction on fff dot org that people should check out.
And then, oh, there's the, there's the Shane Harris and Matthew M. eight CIA files prove America helped Saddam as he gased Iran.
The US knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history and still gave him a hand.
And now by the official rules of confirmation bias, when Shane Harris admits something that I'm accusing, that means it's definitely true.
If I ever disagree with him, well, he's a liar from the Post.
Got that?
Okay, good to know that's how truth works.
Good.
Of course.
I'm sorry.
There's your authoritative source, everybody.
Shane Harris from the Post.
And that's a special inside joke for fans of where the Buffalo roams to.
Remember Harris from the Post?
You've ever seen that?
It's the original Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Bill Murray.
I didn't realize there was original Fear and Loathing Las Vegas with Bill Murray.
What really?
Where the Buffalo Rooms.
Well, I promise you will have a good time.
And there's a joke in there about I'm Harris from the Post.
He's pretended to be Harris from the Post and he's hanging out in the bathroom with Richard Nixon.
And I forgot the conversation.
It's funny as hell though.
Similar type of wild journey of fear and loathing.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I have to admit, I don't remember the story that well.
It's very different than fear and loathing, but it's also very good.
Well, I know what I'm doing tonight.
Okay.
Cool.
Now the Buffalo Rooms.
It's good.
Everyone will like it.
I promise.
Okay.
Underrated Bill Murray.
He's forever underrated.
Actually, genius actor.
Okay.
And so back to chemical weapons and uh uh saddam so okay the war finally comes to an end in 1989 and uh at the same time the soviets are withdrawing in afghanistan we're getting back to them in a minute but uh the war comes to an end and for the next couple of years saddam hussein is in a struggle over war debts with his creditors Kuwait,
Saudi and the AAE are demanding all their money back that they gave him for the war they loaned to him for the war.
Now, of course, he feels like he fought that war partially in their defense.
And so, and also at this point, oil is trading at $12 a barrel.
So he has no ability to repay them, rebuild his country or do any kind of thing.
And they're completely putting the screws to him.
And on top of that, this is disputed whether they were literally the Kuwaitis literally slant drilling under the border or whether it's really that's kind of shorthand, I think, usually for they were over producing from shared oil wells that straddled the border.
And when you have a contract that where your property and my property but up next to each other and we got mineral rights but we have a shared oil well down there, then we have a quota how much we pump and you're not allowed to cheat and pump more out of our shared well than me in any given month or whatever as per the contract.
That's kind of how that thing works.
So in this case, it's the same thing over an international border.
And the Kuwaitis, at least, they're also accused, and I know less about this, but they're accused also of using slant drilling techniques that they've been taught by Americans to drill that way and steal Iraqi oil, you know, from the margin.
So Hussein's pissed about this at the same time they're putting the screws to him over calling in the war deaths.
Now, I don't believe that this was a deliberate trap, but in effect it was.
I think what happened was it was a matter of, you know, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.
There wasn't a real unified policy that had been sent down from on high how to handle this, evidently.
And so the CIA and CENTCOM were encouraging, which had been created as part of the Carter doctrine, were encouraging Kuwait to be intransigent against Saddam and tell him to go to hell.
But the State Department, James A. Baker, through Ambassador Glaspy and through Margaret Tuttweiler and John Kelly were sending signals that actually go ahead, we don't really care.
And we just celebrated April Glaspy Day the other day.
We do every year on July 25, where she told Saddam Hussein, listen, it's the same thing as when I was the Ambassador to Kuwait.
The Iraq issue and your border dispute is not associated with America and we have no position on this.
You're going to have to settle it.
And now we always had the Iraqi version of that story published in the New York Times, but then we got from Manning and Assange, we got the State Department's version of that document.
And so it's a little less explicit as far as how it makes the Americans look, but it's essentially the same.
And in there, she says, now listen, George Bush wanted me to emphasize to you that he does not want a war in the Gulf.
And so Stephen Walt from Harvard University at foreign policy dot com, he said, now listen in diplomatic language, you know, these things are.
mathematical formulas.
You have to be very careful how you say these things.
Saddam Hussein wasn't anticipating a war.
He knew he was going to roll right into Kuwait.
They couldn't stop him.
He was counting on a coup d'état.
So when she says the president doesn't want a war, it sounds like she's saying the president won't go to war with you if you do this, and that he very well could have read it that way.
And that was at the very least a blinking yellow light, if not a green light, to go right ahead.
And we know that, again, John Kelly and Margaret Tuttweiler also made statements essentially downplaying American concerns about what was happening.
I should give a quick shout out since you mentioned Stephen Walt.
I had a few email exchanges with him.
He's a coauthor with John Mearsheimer on one of his books.
He's a prominent, just reading here, prominent American political scientist and currently professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.
He's the best of a man.
He's Mearsheimer's partner in a lot of things.
They're basically considered like the co deans of the Realist School of Foreign Policy in America.
So they're like Henry Kissinger, Realpolitik, only without the bloody hands and the hawkish instinct.
They're, I think both would be relative hawks on China compared to me, for example.
They're not libertarian, non-interventionists, but they're very skeptical of a lot of this misuse.
You know, both of them opposed the Iraq war, for example, in the first place and that kind of thing.
If I may, I can never sing enough praises to John Mearsheimer.
Of course, his work is very important.
He's fearless as an academic, as a writer, as a historian, but also as a human being.
I got a chance to know him.
We had dinner, we had many conversations, we've exchanged a lot of emails, and he's a sweetheart.
Yeah, he's a great guy.
I emailed back and forth to him.
I'm trying to get him on next week, but and he just killed it on Tucker the other day too.
He was fantastic on there.
He sets such a great example, you know you know.
With just a good human being.
Yeah.
Yeah.
With a real deep compassion.
Yeah.
And sometimes when you cover these topics and you just like you said, you realize the adult is in the room.
Yeah.
And people call him some kind of hater and it's like, come on.
That's because that's all you have.
That's the only reason you could call him that is because you have no other thing to say, you know.
Yeah.
A real heart of gold.
This is a really special day.
Anyway, sorry.
Yeah, yeah, no problem.
So, the Iraq War won.
So, America gives like a flash and yellow light to Saddam Hussein, their client, that to go ahead and take back the northern oil fields.
And oh, I left out one piece was when I saw him out, the left hand on the right hand.
Wolfowitz worked for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon at that time and he was always an Iraq hawk.
And he had warned, maybe not knowing that the CIA or that Carter was encouraging it explicitly, but he had warned that Saddam was going to attack Iran back in 1980, so he was always an Iraq hawk and he was very worried that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait.
And he convinced Dick Cheney that we should make a statement telling Saddam not to do it.
But then, oh, I'm going to think of his name in just one moment, Pete Williams, who later became the NBC news reporter.
He was the Pentagon spokesman at that time.
Isn't that funny how that works?ks?
If you go back in time, that's how it worked.
He was Pentagon spokesman.
He made a statement where he seemed to walk back their warning, which was probably just incompetence, right?
He didn't know exactly what he was doing, but the way that he phrased it was softer than the way they had phrased it.
So then they were like, oh man, and they tried to get George Bush to write a letter.
I believe it was like this, that Bush sent a letter, but then they thought, I believe Chani and Wolfowitz thought, it's too conciliatory.
It's not clear enough that we're saying, don't you do it.
So send another letter, but by then it was too late.
And Hussein went ahead and rolled in.
So this is from all very elite accounts of the story from the inside, you know, these different books and whatever I read and all that, this version of the story.
And then you can see if you check the timeline where for the first few days they weren't threatening to do anything about it.
Colin Powell chaired the National Security Council meeting.
He was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
And they announced the first day, well, they better just not move on Saudi Arabia.
You roll into Riyadh, you got trouble with us, Bob.
But they were essentially prepared to accept the invasion of Kuwait.
It's crazy that Cheney was involved with all this.
Because then the story.
So yeah, he's he's Secretary of Defense at that time.
So wild.
And he was the only one in the government at that time who was not from the Reagan administration.
He had been in the Congress.
All the rest of these guys were Reagan's guys.
The vice president was now the president.
Colin Powell had been national security advisor for Reagan.
He's now chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
And then you have James Baker was Treasury Secretary.
He's now Secretary of State.
Like this is Brent Scowcroft.
I forgot.
Maybe he was Deputy National Security Advisor under Reagan.
Now he's National Security Advisor under HW Bush.
So this is the third Reagan term without Reagan, basically.
And Cheney would have been the newer guy and tended to be more hawkish.
And in this case, it was like hawkish.
trying to stop the war from breaking out in the first place.
In that sense, was more concerned about the danger of the thing or whatever.
Sorry if this is a distracting question, but when we talk about the birth and evolution of the Neokon movement, how does it connect to this?
Yeah, we can mention here that, you know, there are when I go through and look at like who were all the worst hawks on Iraq War one, many of them were the neoconservatives.
So we probably shouldn't get into that whole, like, biography of a movement here or whatever, but they certainly were very much in support of this intervention in Desert Storm or Iraq War one, as I call it.
I'm trying to get that to catch on because we're in Iraq War three and a half or four now.
So like, we're going to have to keep these things straight somehow.
But some of the same characters that were responsible for Iraq War 2.
That's right, because of course Clinton's in there for a while, but then it's President Bush's son, it's the next president.
He brings Cheney and Powell with him, and then all this other stuff.
But hold your horse in now, be patient.
So what happens is Margaret Thatcher comes to town, and she gives this is her people's term for it.
She gives Bush Sr. a backbone transplant, and she says to him, Don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush.
In other words, calling out his manhood, and she's a woman, so and from a smaller, weaker country, and so what's he when he says, Yeah, this will not stand just out of his own personal embarrassment.
Speaking of Bill Hicks, this was a Bill Hicks joke that this was the wimp present.
It was a cover news week, wimp present.
Apparently, that's stuck in this guy's crawl a little bit.
I'll show you who's a wimp.
And he had to go and really feel like he had to do something about that.
And when Margaret Thatcher called him out, instead of being prudent, as he would say, and patient and conservative, he went, No, I'm tougher than you, lady.
I'll show you how tough I am.
I'll do a big tough thing.
But meanwhile, what did America care about Kuwait?
Right?
They had Britain had interests in Kuwaiti oil and the Kuwaiti royal family.
His Highness Al Jaber had investments in British debt, but what do I care about that, Lex Friedman?
Not a bit.
You know what I mean?
But that was a big part of how the war started.
So after the first three days they said, We're not going.
It's we're going to they're not going to invade Saudi Arabia.
We're warning them, they better not invade Saudi Arabia.
And it was after that that they decided, okay, now we are going.
And then once they decided that, they refused to negotiate in good faith for the rest of the time.
And Noam Chomsky did the best of documenting this, but what did he document?
He documented like ten different sources from the summer of nineteen ninety through january ninety one, where the Americans refused, the Bush administration in Washington, DC refused time after time after time after time.
time after time after time after time to negotiate in good faith with Saddam to get him out of there peacefully.
Because once the gauntlet was thrown down, now we have a big set peace battle.
Now we're going to go in there and we're going to rock him.
And I have the quote from Brent Scowcroft in there.
This was long an accusation from some liberal types that you might dismiss, but it is true.
It was literally an explicitly stated part of their thinking was we have to defeat Vietnam syndrome.
The reluctance of the American people to do things like this.
We gotta give them one that we can do.
That'll be short, that'll be sweet, that'll be fun, that'll be easy that we can hold a big ass parade and be victorious again like the old days, rebuild that martial spirit and make that normalcy in America, not the post Vietnam anti-militarist malaise that you remember from the 70s and 80s.
Now it's time to get back to work, remake in the world and give some give the American people something to believe in again.
And Bush Sr. then after the fact said, By God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
This is a huge part of it.
And if you think about Iraq War 1 to this day, people still think of it as short and sweet and we used all this Space Age technology and we whooped them.
good, right?
And Colonel McGregor and Daniel Davis and General McMaster, men of lower rank, they went in there and won the big tank battle of 73 Easting and showed the superiority of American tanks versus Soviet tanks and all these things that were so much fun for them, such a big deal for them at that time that they wanted to do again for our nation's overall long term interest or what was good for them,
their donors, their benefactors and the, the, essentially, the psychological warfare campaign that they wanted to wage against the American people, that this is what we're here for.
We go and rescue helpless little countries like his Royal Highness Al Jabber's monarchy in Kuwait so we can reinstall the monarchy because everybody knows how much superior they are to fascist dictatorships like the Iraqis have.
That we've supported for the last decade, by the way, including helping him gas people, not just while he gassed people, while he's gassing his own people, supposedly the Kurds and the Antball campaign, and along with the Iranians and the rest.
But now he's Hitler.
Now he's going to roll on Saudi, he's going to take over the next thing you know, he's going to take over all of the Middle East's resources.
to build up a thousand year reich and roll on Paris.
Saddam Hussein is and that was the way that they put it and they absolutely lied us into war.
They claimed that he had lined up his massive armored tank divisions on the Saudi border and was preparing to roll on Riyadh and that was a lie and it was the St. Petersburg Florida Times hired a Soviet company to or maybe the Soviet government to provide the satellite photos and show that there's nothing but empty desert out there.
You know, they'd sent a couple of patrols near the border, whatever.
There's nothing like armored divisions preparing to expand the war into Saudi Arabia.
They knew they were lying about that.
Petersburg Florida Times published that like a week and a half before the invasion.
And AP, Reuters, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, whatever, all refused to run it and just buried it.
Then the other thing was a major part of this was, it's amazing, it sounds so silly now after everything going on and that's gone on since then, but it was a huge deal.
They did the Iraqi incubator hoax where they brought in a girl who claimed to be a nurse who said that she was in the hospital in Kuwait City when the Iraqi soldiers came in there., stole the incubators, threw the babies out of the incubators onto the cold floor to die and then ran off with the incubators.
Whether to just destroy them out of sadism or to bring them back to Baghdad, because they have a big incubator shorter in Baghdad, she didn't say.
But it turns out she wasn't a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion.
She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, and the thing was a one hundred percent hoax.
Zero percent of it ever happened, but Amnesty International vouched for it and said it was true, and so that was all you needed.
So George Bush repeatedly brought this up and said, see, this shows that Iraq was determined to systematically dismantle Iraq, that this isn't just an invasionasion, it's these horrible crimes against humanity.
And what would we do if they were doing it to us?
And oh, we have to help the poor people.
And that was a big part of what they used to beat people over the head about that war.
And the other one was, and they learned this from the focus groups, was we have to threaten the American people with nukes, that even with moral atrocities like the incubator hoax going on, that Americans are still like, I don't know.
You know?
Like Richard Pryor said in 1986, he had a bit where he stops joking and he just says, isn't it weird like we stick on the Germans and the Soviets and now we're bombing Libya?
Does that sound right?
Like they can't fight back even like it's just weird.
It seems weird.
So people needed a real reason to go and that was atom bombs.
And so people forget this now because the Iraq War 2 takes the place in their memory, right?
But in Iraq War 1, they also alleged repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons or he very well could be.
He did.
And this was one of the reasons why we had to go.
Now here's the screwed up part about that.
They were lying, but they turned out to be telling the truth accidentally.
Because in fact, what they found out in the aftermath of the war when they occupied southern Iraq was there was a bear, but a beginning, the beginnings of a nuclear weapons program there very, very early.
We're talking 91, right, early 91, at the end of Iraq War 1.
So what happened was, people always cite the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981 and say what a great success it was.
No, that was a IAEA safeguarded facility that was not producing weapons grade anything of any kind.
And when they bombed it, all they did was drive his program underground.
Now it became a nuclear weapons program.
And it was only a coincidence that America, after launching Iraq War 1, found his secret program that the CIA had no idea about.
And so this became a major consequence, and here's why.
Because Dick Cheney would later cite this and go, well, if the CIA can't find it, that doesn't mean mean it's not there.
Remember that one time?
And so it became a big part of the Hawks' talking points after that.
If the CIA claim, like confirmation bias again, the CIA agrees, then they're right.
CIA disputes, then yeah, well, we don't have to listen to them.
Right.
Even when they're the ones that they cite as the authoritative source for every positive claim they're making.
So the playbook even with the Iraq War one is you try to look for different stories, whether it's anecdotal stories with nurses or it's anecdotal or it's stories about nuclear weapons.
You're trying to find a way to justify war.
That's right.
And the same playbook was applied in the Second Iraq War.
Yeah.
And, and, and back to Noam Chomsky for one second about them refusing to accept Hussein's surrender was that by the end of the thing, like he had been demanding, come on, let me keep these uninhabited islands at the north of the Persian Gulf where I could make like a oil shipping facility there or something like that.
You know, he dropped all those demands.
Here were his final demands, right?
He wasn't just going to turn tail for nothing.
He had to save some face.
So his final demands were promise that America will leave the Middle East and that Israel will leave the occupied territories.
Some day, right?
In other words, nothing.
He's demanding nothing.
He's demanding, please let me keep the skin on my face only is the only face he's saving, right?
And they wouldn't give it to him because that would have stopped the war from happening, Lex.
I'm sorry, man, but that's the history of how that happened.
I mean, think about the relative power of the United States of America with the entire UN Security Council on board to tell Iraq for six months, five months.
You better give in.
And they couldn't figure out a way to get him to give in, huh?
Yeah, they could too.
They didn't want him to give in.
You know, they had all these chances and there were reports in Newsday and the New York Times and whatever and that had all the stories where he kept making all these offers and they would just reject them out of hand.
In fact, Noam Chomsky talked about how it would be in the business press in England that, oh, look, um, oil prices fall because they think there's a peace deal and And the business press knows that this is happening.
Oh, it looks like they're going to have a peace deal.
And so the price of oil falls from the relaxed tension.
And then nope.
Right?
And then they cancel the thing and they go on anyway.
You mentioned the part which I think is fascinating about defeating Vietnam Syndrome and reinvigorating Marshall's spirit.
Can you just psychoanalyze the State Department, CIA, people in government?
Why did they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit?
Is it money?
Is it power?
Is it just coming up with a narrative, age-old narrative of nationalism is good and one of the ways to achieve nationalism is to invade somebody?
What is the motivation in a room, these folks sitting together?
Why do they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit?
So they can enforce what they called the new world order, which was?
As George Bush Sr. himself said, what we say goes.
So this is what Biden and them call the liberal rules based international order of global governance.
What it means is forget the UN Charter.
Forget the UN Security Council.
There's the U.S. National Security Council, and everybody's going to bow down and do what we say.
It's our unipolar moment, as Charles Krauthammer put it in Foreign Affairs, and we're going to take full advantage of it, but don't worry, Lex.
Again, as Bush Sr. said, the world trusts us with this power because they know that we are good people and we know what we're doing and we only have their best interests at heart.
We care about them so much.
And so the world allows us to be the global police force to enforce the law and make sure everything is fair.
Because man, what if we stopped holding the world together?
Boy, then it would all just fall apart.
So just people hammering for power.
It would be Germany and Japan.
I don't know if you remember this, but when the Soviet Union fell apart, oh my God, Germany and Japan are going to rise up again and take back over the world again.
Really?
Yeah.
And before the war on terrorism, they tried for a while, they made, you know, Harrison Ford movies out of it and everything to try to build up the war against the Mexican drug cartels and the Peruvian drug cartels.
Because we got to have someone to fight in the nineties while we're trying to get something else going here, basically.
That they don't want to have to get a job.
And yet, like Bush Sr., you got to give him credit for this.
He absolutely slashed military spending, slashed the bomber fleets, slashed the military, slashed army divisions and ships and everything.
We don't need an anti-Soviet military for a world without the Soviet Union, and he really cut it way, way back, and especially on nuclear weapons.
In fact, I hate to say this because I never was a HW Bush guy and I'm so critical of all of his Middle East policy and all these things, but in a way, you could say he's the most heroic guy who ever lived in the sense of working with the Russians, the Soviets, and then the Russians.
the Soviets and then the Russians on these treaties to bring the global stockpile down from approximately seventy thousand down to where we have about seven thousand each, which is way more than enough to do you.
But when the Soviets had forty thousand and we had thirty, come on, somebody's got to do something and Bush Sr. is the man who did something about it.
And as I show in the book, he, well, we're skipping ahead of the other Cold War book here, but he did make unilateral cuts because he didn't have time to do negotiations.
So you say made massive unilateral cuts in hopes that Gorbatchev would respond in kind or was it Yeltsin by then?
And then I think it was Yeltsin by then.
And then Yeltsin did respond in kind and made these drastic cuts on his own unilateral basis just without even an agreement.
But you know what?
We'll get rid of our class of those same kind of weapons too.
So I gotta give credit where it's due.
He handled the end of the Cold War, you know, a lot better than he might have, I guess you could say, you know.
Yeah, anybody who's trying to decrease the number of nuclear weapons in the world is it requires some degree of heroism to do that.
Yeah.
And he wasn't a neocon, right?
He's an old waspy guy from the older establishment and he called the neoconservatives the crazies and he had told General Scowcroft to keep the the crazies in the basement.
In other words, they're allowed to kill people down in Latin America, but you keep them away from Middle East policy, right?
They're not allowed to mess around with what we're doing over there.
And I guess here's where let's start talking more about bringing Israel into our narrative here because, as I said, the Israelis had stayed friends with Iran through the Iran-Iraq war, they had no problem with fundamentalist Shiite Islam then, sold these guys' weapons.
In fact, Trita Parsi shows in his absolutely excellent book, Treacherous Alliance, which if you haven't read that, you'll absolutely love.
I'm so good.
You want to pull that up?
He's one of the co-founders of the Quincy Institute for International Statecraft.
Treacherous Alliance.
The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States by Trita Parsi.
This work examines the complex, often contradictory relationship between Israel, Iran and the US, countries whose alliances and rivalries have repeatedly shifted since the mid 20th century.
Oh, it's just fascinating.
Of course, the poor Iraqis are stuck in the middle of this thing, is a big, like, subtext of the story, right?
But what's so great about that book is it's all, there's no news cycle stuff in there anywhere.
It's all told from the point of view of the highest level military strategists in all three countries.
And it started out, I believe, as his PhD and became this thing, but it's just a masterpiece.
But, uh, anyway.
Anyway, he's the best guy to read about this and the way that all this transpired that essentially when the Ayatollah, the mean old Ayatollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, when he would be threatening the Israelis, they're like, oh, we're going to destroy you one day or whatever.
They would be shipping him missiles that day, right?
So this was this covert relationship that was going on behind the scenes even when they were, you know, saying very malicious things about each other in public that was really cover for the extent of their covert relationship that was still going on at that time.
And so now it in, we got to put this off one second.
I'm sorry, I I left out, it's important to go back to the Shiite uprising of 1991.
Because in the aftermath of Iraq War I, Saddam Hussein crushed the Shiite uprising, which George Bush Sr. had encouraged.
And I'm not sure if you've ever seen the movie Three Kings.
I like to bring this up as kind of a touchstone for people because a lot of people learn history just from movies, you know.
So the movie is Ice Cube and Marky Mark and George Clooney.
And they're soldiers on a gold heist.
But they're in southern Iraq, occupying Iraq in the aftermath of the First Iraq War.
And in the background, Saddam Hussein's forces are murdering everyone, crushing the Shiite Uprising.
And that's what's going on in the background.
So people remember that movie.
That would be probably the most they ever learned about the crushed Shiite Uprising in 1991.
That's fair.
You know, that's how it is.
They didn't make that big a deal out of it at the time because it was a horrible bea pigs type situation where America told them to do it.
George Bush, his own voice on Voice of America, encouraged them to rise up and finish Saddam Hussein.
The Air Force dropped leaflets over predominantly Shiite army divisions and the rest of them, I guess, too, and said, Now's everybody's chance to rise up and overthrow this guy.
But let's say then they changed their mind.
And the reason they changed their mind was, remember when I said in nineteen eighty, why Saddam invaded Iran?
Because some Iraqis were choosing Iran's side in the war, and he was afraid they all were, and that the Iranian revolution was going to come for him, right?
So he conscripted the army and sent them to war against Iran instead.
Well, now in the Shiite uprising, those very same Iraqis who've been living in Iran for ten years and fought on Iran's side in the war, they're now coming across the border to lead the uprising.
Does that make sense?
Okay, this is namely and most importantly the Bada Brigade, BADR.
The Bada Brigade is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is run by at that time a guy named Abdulul Aziz Al Hakim, who's now dead, but he's a very important guy and he's going to come back up in our story here.
So when the Bada brigade started coming across the border was when George Bush, Brent Scowcroft and the boys all flinched and said, Uh oh, we, because again, this is the third Reagan term essentially, right?
So we just spent a decade supporting Saddam to contain the Iranian revolution.
Now we're the ones importing it into Iraq.
That is a mistake.
And so he called it off.
He was more cautious and said, Let's not do that.
And but the problem with that was one hundred thousand Kurds and Shiites were killed.
But also that then became the excuse for America to stay in Saudi Arabia.
They had promised the king, you let us get rid of Saddam and drive him out of Kuwait.
And we have this on Dick Cheney's word himself.
It's so funny.
There's a podcast that of Bill Crystal's podcast.
Do you know Bill Crystal has a podcast?
And he interviewed Dick Cheney, someone put this on archive dot org before it's gone forever, man.
And it's great because they talk about everything except Iraq War two.
They don't say a word about it, either of them the whole time.
So Dick Cheney explains in that interview to Bill Crystal that he was the one never even mind James Baker, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense.
He promised King Fod of Saudi Arabia that we promise we'll leave as soon as the war is over.
And now I really screwed this up, man.
I'm sorry.
When we talked about Afghanistan before, I should have dwelled a little longer on the fact that as we all know, when we talked about bogging them down into their own Vietnam, the Soviets in the nineteen eighties, that America supported not just the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, but what became the international Islamic brigades, meaning Arabs and other Muslims from all around the world, but especially from Arab lands, to go to Afghanistan to bite on the side of the Mujahideen against the Soviets.
And this included Egyptian Islamic Jihad and what was then called the Azam Group, which was the main group controlled by the Saudi intelligence services during the 1980s.
And that was the thing that the United States wanted.
Yes.
So Zabigni presented this, he was trying to bait Russia into invasion, the Soviet Union into invasion Afghanistan, and then they wanted to extend the war.
So America had a deal with Saudi Arabia.
We would match them dollar for dollar, and we would work with their intelligence services and the Pakistanis to support local Mudjahideen like Gubal Din Hekmajar and Jalala Din Haqqani, who later became America's enemies in our Afghan war, and various other Pastun warlords.s of different descriptions.
So US is essentially helping train up these militia groups.
Yes, and including bringing them to the United States and having our special forces train them in car bombs and sabotage and assassinations and everything.
Yes.
Full scale US support for building up the bin Ladenite movement as long as they're killing Soviets.
And those same people then come back and become the enemies of the United States.
That's right.
So when we talk about Al Qaeda, what we're talking about is eventually the merger of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Azam group.
After Azam was killed, and I don't think anyone really knows who killed him, Osama bin Laden took over his group and Osama bin Laden.
So then.
This is the main reason, and there are many, but this is the main reason that Al Qaeda turned against the United States was that Hussein bin Laden was outraged that the king had allowed the United States to liberate Kuwait instead of him and his men, which is not like they have a bunch of mountains to hide out in Kuwait, but he wanted to try it to throw Saddam out.
And then he was just driven crazy by the fact that the king allowed white Christian combat forces to come and occupy the sacred land.
It's not just their country, but their sacred land where Mecca and Medina, the birthplace of Muhammad and the birthplace of the religion of Islam are, and the two holy places bin Laden called them.
And that then we didn't leave.
This is the ultimate outrage, right?
And this is the main overriding reason for the bin Ladenite, well, at least for his jihad, which was really based on the idea of trying to get all the disparate groups from around the Middle East, these are more or less stateless groups.
They're in some cases backed by Saudi, you know, more or less at different times, but there are jihadists from all over the place, you know, Egyptians and Saudis and Syrians and, and, and, and, you know, Azam himself was Palestinian, raised in a refugee camp in Kuwait, but, um, yet all these different people.
And then so bin Laden's geniius was to figure out the one thing we can agree on is let's attack the United States because America is at the root of all of our problems.
And just like we had helped them to bog the Soviets down in Afghanistan, they wanted to do the same thing to us.
And so this was the beginning really of Al Qaeda's war against the United States began at this time in reaction to the declaration of this new world order, the permanent stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia and what became the permanent,
the unrelenting full global embargo, United Nations Security Council full global sanctions regime against the Iraqi state, which led to at the very least 300,000 excess deaths, although a UN study later embellished that and bin Laden would embellish the numbers even higher than that to 600,000 or a million.
But whatever, it was a ruthless economic war of collective punishment against the entire people of the country, even though they had their chance to throw him.
USA encouraged it and then let Saddam keep his helicopters and tanks while we were standing right there and let him crush the insurrection.
Now the Bush administration and later the Clinton administration's position was the sanctions stay until Saddam is gone.
But he's still young and in pretty good health.
And no one in Iraq is in any position to do anything about this.
So it's just this policy that Clinton inherited from Bush and ended up keeping.
Can we go to can you linger on bin Laden?
So this gave enough fuel for bin Laden to construct a narrative for America to the bad guys.
And this is such an important thing.
There's this great book by Michael Scheuer, who is the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit.
It's called Imperial Hubris.
And I will say that he went a bit crazy in later years and said really mean things like we ought to help all the Muslims kill each other and we ought to have a civil war over Russia Gate.
And which I'm very, very opposed to Russian Gate Lex, but I wouldn't go that far.
So he went a little nuts later on, but he's a very bright guy and a very honest guy for what it's worth, a very straightforward guy, I should say.
I don't know if he's ever told a lie or what.
Purely Hubris, Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, by Michael Shore.
And I should also say, echoing that statement, that some of the smartest people I know are walking the line between genius and madness.
It happens.
And so, and when you study the dark aspects of human nature and geopolitics, sometimes it's easy to lose yourself in the madness.
Yeah, it's totally true.
But so in this book he makes it so clear there are six overriding reasons that bin Laden cited for why the United States should be attacked.
Okay.
And he compared this directly to the Ayatollah Khomeini who would relentlessly criticize our culture and, you know, licentiousness and Hollywood R-ratedness and all of that kind of stuff as like the degenerate society.
But he can't recruit people for a war over that.
You know what I mean?
Not that he was really trying to, but that only inspires, inspires so much resentment.
You know, and conservatives don't like libertinism.
Teenism, right?
Like that's okay, but it only goes so far, right?
Bin Laden, on the other hand, said they occupy the land of the two holy places.
They help Israel kill Palestinians and Lebanese.
They support the dictators, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but around the Middle East, they put pressure on those dictators to keep oil prices artificially low, to subsidize our economy at their expense.
Just think of all the times you've heard presidents say, I'm telling the Saudis, they better ramp up production and get the price of gas down for election day, right?
As blatant as it can be.
But what does that sound like to a poor person in those countries?
Isn't that money supposed to go to them?.
And then, as Bin Laden would say, falsely turning a blind eye to Russia, India, Kazakhstan, and China in their persecution of Muslims.
So they say they love us so much, but they don't really because they don't say anything when this group or that group are the ones killing us.
So these were the things, and look, let us stipulate, Lex, okay, that Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer.
And by tradition, I don't take the word of mass murderers for meaning very much, and I don't expect you to, okay?
That's not the point.
The point is what did he say that got anybody to listen to him and do what he said.
He wasn't in charge of a government.
He had no coercive apparatus at all.
His organization is purely volunteer based.
And he's asking people to blow themselves up over something important enough to blow yourself up for it.
It's not virgins.
It's we have a policy.
I should stipulate virgins after you die.
We have a policy.
We're trying to provoke a war with the United States of America and you're going to help us do it.
Why?
Because of these six reasons.
That's why.
And that was what worked to recruit people to attack the United States of America.
Okay, major, important case in point, and oh, whatever, the timeline jumps around here a bit, but major case in point is in 1996, when Israel under Shimon Perez reinvaded Lebanon in what was called Operation Grapes of Wrath.
And during that invasion, it's hard to believe this.
Wait, don't Google yet, search this part.
It was Naftali Bennett called in the artillery strike on a UN shelter and killed one hundred six women and children in Khana, that's QANA in nineteen ninety six.
Naftali Bennett while serving as an Israeli army officer in nineteen ninety six commanded a commando unit during Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon.
During this operation, his troops came under mortar fire near the village of Khana.
Bennett radioed for artillery support, swan, swan, swan, killing one hundred six people and injured many others in a UN shelter.
This humanitarian tragedy is widely known as the Khana Massacre.
So when Shimon Perez launched that war, Mohammed Ata, the ringleader of the September eleventh plotters in the United States, pilot of Flight eleven, I believe.
He and his buddy Ramsay bin Alshib.
engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany.
And when this invasion started, they both signed their last will and testament, which their friends and family and neighbors and whatever said was their expressed intent to like they're joining the army.
They're deciding, forget engineering, I want to join the Mujahideen and go fight the good fight somewhere, whatever.
Then, just a couple of months later, Bin Laden put out his first declaration of war against the United States.
It's called Declaration of War against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places.
Pretty subtle, right?
And then on the first page, he goes on and on about the Khanna massacre and says we'll never forget.
the severed heads and arms and legs of the babies and the children in Khanna.
He told Robert Fisk, I believe, How come your blood is blood but our blood is water?
Well, we'll see about that.
That's a strong reminder that there's a cost to killing people.
Oh yeah, so what happened was Mohammed Ata and Ramsay bin Alshib, they read that declaration of war, and that was when they decided to join Al Qaeda was based on the Khanna massacre that Israel had perpetrated in Lebanon.
So again, we're skipping ahead in the story.
We're going to do the whole nineties here, but literally on september eleventh.
You had Egyptians volunteered for a Saudi sheikh to slaughter Americans by the thousands as revenge for American support for Israel killing people in Lebanon.
That, my friend, is why George Bush said they hate the Taliban did it because they hate your freedom.
Right, because they couldn't tell you that.
One hundred and six people.
It's a reminder that killing can cause immeasurable escalation, trillions of dollars, all of it.
And here's the other thing.
Bill Clinton, I think foolishly said something about how he would like to normalize relations with Iraq or at least look into it or something.
And boy, he should not have said that because people got all upset and tried to figure out how to stop it, including the Kuwaitis.
And what happened was, I know you're familiar with this, we all are.
And virtually everyone gets this wrong.
The myth that Saddam Hussein tried to murder George HW Bush with a truck bomb assassination attempt in Kuwait in nineteen ninety three.
Total hoax.
Debunked by Seymour Hirsch by the end of the year in an article for the New Yorker called Case Not Closed.
He shows it was just a whiskey smuggling ring that they embellished into this plot against Bush.
And then it was Martin Indick, who was Bill Clinton's advisor.
Who was he?
He was an Australian who'd been working for Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud Party, well, former terrorist murderer and then Likud Party Prime Minister of Israel.
And Indick had gone from there to go work in, I don't know exactly the time off a year or so.
He stopped and went to work for Clinton.
In the meantime, he founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Winnep, which was directly a spin-off of APAC.
APAC put up the money.
That's the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the heart of the Israel lobby.
They put up the money for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which you have heard that name a million times, and you're going to continue to hear it because they are always cited as middle of the road scientific experts on American foreign policy when they were, and this is not the same about all neocons think tanks, but this one was literally created by the Israel Abbot in the United States.
And then he became an advisor to Bill Clinton, and he was insisting on this policy of essentially continuing the HW Bush policy of staying in Saudi Arabia in order to patrol the so-called no-fly zones over Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein from killing the Iraqis.
and enforced the blockade, which was enforced by world law anyway, right?
Like there's some smuggling going on or whatever, but no nation state is violating the embargo against Iraq here.
So it's completely unnecessary on both counts.
But the Israelis, and this is Rabin's government, Yitzhak Rabin's government is, I guess, in agreement with this Likud guy, uh, Indick on this.
They're pushing for a policy that they called dual containment.
And the point was that Iraq, now that we beat them up so bad in Iraq War one Desert Storm, First Gulf War, now they're not powerful enough to balance against Iran.
So now America has to stay in Saudi Arabia to balance against them both.
And Bill Clinton resisted this and resisted this until the big fake assassination attempt against Bush Sr., which again, I don't have any reason to believe the Israelis were behind that.
It was the Kuwaitis who rigged up.
Oh, did I leave out that it was the girl who pretended that she saw the babies thrown out of their invaders?
It was her father was the one who spun up this story.
So in other words, the same guy who spun up that story was the same guy who spun up this story about the assassination attempt against Bush Sr., which everyone still believes and which I'm sure Bush Jr. believed at the time that he launched that war.
Probably was he Rhys Seymour Hirsch?
He doesn't know.
And it was just conventional wisdom.
And I was still just a teenager in the nineties, but I don't remember, wow, that assassination against Bush thing was debunked.
I don't remember that ever getting around.
You know what I mean?
I don't know who was reading Hersch at that time.
It was pre internet times by a year, right?
It just wasn't, it just wasn't a hot enough topic.
You know what I mean?
How do you fight those false narratives that the military industrial complex tries to produce in order to get us into war?
Well, the most important thing is speak up.
I think the most important thing is read antiwar dot com every day for a long period of time in a row and you will have a very good handle of what the hell is going on in the world.
It was founded by Eric Garris and Justin Ramondo, who are both a couple of libertarians.
Ramondo was a student of Murray Rothbard's, or at least one of his mentees, you know, learned a lot from error of his foreign policy thought, Murray, Murray and Rothbard, the best libertarian.
And so that's where we come from, is that tradition and, you know, Ron Pauly and non-interventionist types.
And but the news is and but our opinion pieces come from all over the spectrum as long as we're anti war.
We're not sectarians at all.
It's a one issue thing.
And really, we just do the hard news more than anything.
We have a lot of great editorials as well.
But it's Eric Garris and Dave de Camp and Kyle Ans alone who get the lion's share of the credit for the actual work that goes into the site every day.
And that goes through every single war in the world.
Everything every day.
We have our top news.
We have our front line section.
And then at the bottom, we have every region of the world where there's conflict breaking out.
Trump sends two nuclear subs towards Russia.
So obviously, Russia.
That's reassuring.
God.
And you see our spotlight article is by Bronco March Teach and he's a leftist, but we love him.
He does absolutely fantastic work.
It doesn't matter if you're left or right.
That's right.
And we're very close with the American Conservative magazine, for example.
Pat Buchanan is a good friend of ours and we ran his articles for many years.
Ron Paul's amazing.
And you give love and respect to Ron Paul all the time.
He absolutely deserved it.
We talked about heroes.
He's one of the legends.
That's how I knew antiwar dot com was for me the first day I laid eyes on it.
My friend said, look, they run Ron Paul.
And I went, all right, I like these guys.
Can we take a quick pause for Beth and Break?
Sure.
So before we go too far into Bill Clinton, I should say, because I did say these words, I know the New World Order thing, that was a very popular conspiracy theory in the nineties and even before that, which was about building a one world government under the United Nations and subsuming the United States under it and all that.
That's not what I'm talking about.
And I actually was a New World Order cook in the nineties, but I was a kid., it's fine, I grew out of it.
But the point being, Bush Sr. did use that phrase repeatedly.
And what he meant by it was, you know, in the guise of the United Nations baby blue flag and all of that for PR purposes more than the real agenda, he was saying American power is the guarantor of world peace and we will enforce it through war, right?
And that's the deal of it.
Nobody's allowed to fight or we will intervene, right?
So it's just essentially it's the irony, right?
That any government powerful enough to keep the peace between the fifty states is powerful enough to try it for the rest of the world as they can.
They do this.
We're just extending our security umbrella.
Everybody who joins up with us, it's guaranteed nobody's going to ever mess with you or else they'd have to mess with us, except for everyone on the outside who now are put in the position of having not just the United States, but all of their allies lined up against them and feel that much more threatened, namely, of course, Russia and China and the other major potential adversaries and nuclear weapon states.
And I think the lesson there is if you think you can run the world by threatening everybody with military power, considering all the very cultures and peoples and histories of the world, you're going to fuck things up.
You're going to create a lot of hate.
You're going to create a lot of increased war, increased terrorism, increased threats to America versus decreased.
Yeah.
So more on the neoconservative here too, before we get too far into Bill Clinton is in 1992, a year after the end of Iraq War One, under Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, his deputies Scooter Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad wrote what was called the Defense Planning Guidance for 1994, for fiscal year 1994.
And it cost a huge upset.
It was late to the New York Times and it became a really big deal because what it said was America is essentially world police.
We're not going to tolerate the rise of any near peer competitor against us in the world.
We'll fight them before we allow them to get powerful enough to even be one.
We'll not let any nation or group of nations become powerful enough to ever even be able to think about challenging our military dominance on the planet.
And of course, we're doing all this in the interests of world peace.
And that means that we have to have total military dominance in the Middle East.
We have to expand NATO and have total military dominance in Eastern Europe.
And of course, we have to maintain our position.
Our position with Japan and Korea and the rest in order to maintain total dominance in Asia as well.
And this is what Charles Krauthammer called our unipolar moment again and said we should stop short of nothing less than total world domination.
That was the quote.
And at that time, Jean Kirkpatrick, who had been a neoconservative, she was a member of the Young People's Socialist League of the Social Democrats USA, which were the Trotskyites under Max Schachtmann, who was Trotsky's most important guy in the United States.
And this is something that Mark Dubowitz tried to deny and argue with me about whether she was a neoconservative or not.
Well, she was like James Woolsey, a Presbyterian.
Now, most neoconservatives are Jewish and/or Catholic, although you have Pazalmay Khalilzad and Francis Fukuyama and others who are of other, you know, different, you know, cultural heritages, you might say there.
And so the defining characteristics and he was saying, well, she didn't believe in democracy as the single most important thing in the whole world.
And of course, she had written this article in the National Interest and that had gotten Reagan's attention okay to support authoritarians as long as they're right wingers and anti communists, that anti communism is more important than democracy, and so we should put, for example, we should support people like Somoza in Nicaragua and things like that in order to keep the Communes at bay, that that's number one.
And so some of the neocons disagreed with that.
Dubowitz was trying to say that's what makes her not a neocon, but that's really not true.
Because neocons, there's about a hundred of them or something, and they disagree about all kinds of things.
They sure do work together on lots of things, but sure they disagree on things.
I'll give another example on democracy where Robert Kagan said in twenty thirteen that we should allow the Muslim Brotherhood to rule in Egypt because they won fair and square, Parliament and the Presidency just a little.
They won in fair elections, and after all we've done in the name of democracy, don't we have to allow them to have a chance?
Well, Frank Gaffney was like, Are you kidding me?
Like, I'll go overthrow myself right now.
Are you crazy?
He's got a H bomb going off over his head.
Is anyone going to deny that Frank Gaffney is a neoconservative just because he differed with Robert Kagan on his order of importance in democracy in this or that instance?
Give me a break.
Jean Kirkpatrick came from the neoconservative left.
She wrote for commentary magazine with Norman Podhortz and all the guys.
And I don't mean again, just a leftist.
She was with the Trotskyites, Max Schottman and the Young People's Socialist League and the Social Democrats USA.
So she's like a card carrying neoconservative.
This is what it means to be a neocon.
And she wrote, and then she was Reagan's second ambassador to the United Nations, was widely respected by the Republicans as a conservative hawk and a very American interest oriented type.
And she would even rail against the UN itself in almost a Berkshire sounding kind of way that appeals to me.
Although she didn't really mean it.
She was just mad that they would ever get in our way rather than that they really are a threat to our independence in any way.
But the point is this man that I'm trying to get to is that.
is at the end of the Cold War, a year before the Soviet Union was even gone, in the fall of nineteen ninety, and so she must have written this in the summer of nineteen ninety.
This is a year before the failed Comic coup and the final unraveling where the Russians overthrew the last of the Soviet Union government at that time at the end of ninety one.
This is a year before that, and she, importantly, right on the confirmation bias trick again, it's Gene Kirkpatrick, right?
Not Susan Saranin, it's Gene Kirkpatrick who wrote this piece in the national interest called A Normal Country in a Normal Time.
The only place you can find it is on my website, scotthorton dot org slash fair use.
And I won't tell you where I got it.
And it's, and don't ever sue me, national interest.
I love you guys.
And the thing is, yeah.
So it's, it's in there somewhere.
You have to page down.
I'm not, oh, there it is right there.
Normal country in a normal time, March.
Oh, that's the date I published it, fall 1990, a normal country in a normal time.
You published it on March 23, 2022.
It's by Gene Kirkpatrick, the national interest fall 1990.
It's the first time since 1939 that there has been an opportunity for Americans to consider what we might do in a world less constrained by political and military competition with a dangerous adversary.
I'm pleased that the national interest.
has provided a forum for this discussion and it goes on.
American purposes are mainly domestic.
Our purpose in the world are merely human, not transcendent.
To be legitimate, the American government's purpose must be ratified by popular majorities.
Here's what she says in here.
She says we should eschew the burdens of superpower status.
She sounds like George Washington.
She's saying, Okay, the Commis are gone, the Cold War is over, the emergency is over.
So now we can go back to being what we were supposed to be, what we used to be before that we put on hold because we had to wage the Cold War.
Now we can have a real return to normality, meaning twenty eight, right?
Before the permanent world empire was built for the purposes of destroying the Nazis and then containing the Communists.
So she was very anti communist and neo conservative perspective.
She had a significant role in the Reagan administration.
And then after she's evolved and said we need to let go.
That's right.
So in other words, she is here, she's along with Pat Buchanan.
Now, for people who are not familiar, Pat Buchanan, he's a Cat speech writer and Reagan's speech writer.
To this day, he's retired.
Sweet old guy.
No, but he's lifelong Cold Warrior and doesn't regret it.
The Communist threat absolutely had to be contained.
Vietnam had to be done.
He's a wonderful guy.
He really is.
And he's written just a grip of great books.
I mean, I don't know, eight or ten of them.
So there's an evolution here.
There's some of the folks really saw Russia and the Soviet Union as a major threat.
Oh yeah.
And then they've evolved saying, okay, now that the Cold War's over, we need to calm down and see Pat as the person who's going to be the one.
And see, Pat is the perfect avatar for this.
Him and his buddies, you know, Scott McConnell and Jude Winiskey, Winiskey himself had been a former neoconservative, but there's this whole group of paleoconservatives who nobody can question their patriotism.
This is Ronald Reagan's guy.
This is the guy that puts words in Ronald Reagan's mouth, right?
And he's saying, okay, you guys promised the empire was a defensive measure, right?
We don't want an empire.
Chalmers Johnson is another one.
Chalmers Johnson was a professor at USC who was a hardcore ardent cold warrior.
You're familiar with him, I'm sure he wrote the book Blowback, and then Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis are the trilogy that he wrote about the American Empire then.
And he was adamantly cold warrior until the Soviets were gone and then the empire continued to expand.
And then he went, wait a minute now.
I taught a generation of students that we were holding the tide back.
What's all this about we're the tide now?
That's not right.
And in fact, I like to cite this because it's just so astonishing to people that William F. Buckley, one of the major not that he was a neoconservative, he wasn't, but he was one of their main godfathers, basically, the founding editor of the National Review.
He wrote an article in nineteen fifty two in Commonwealth magazine.ine.
Again, you can find this at scotthorton dot org slash fair use.
It's called The Party in the Deep Blue Sea.
It's about the Republican Party, I guess is what it means.
Party in the Deep Blue Sea.
And in there, he says, we must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores for the duration of the emergency, even with Truman at the reins of it all.
Because of the need to face down the Soviet threat and you need a powerful domestic empire that's capable of forcing the American people to enforce a world empire to contain the threat of Stalinist Soviet communism.
That's horrible, right?
Yes.
Totalitarian bureaucracy.
The same one we still got.
And see, Pat said, okay, look, I was buying it when the enemy was in Moscow.
But now that there's no enemy in Moscow and world communism, the threat of world revolution is dead and gone.
Well, I don't want to hear it about why we have to suffer this anymore.
We're supposed to be, and then again, this is why I cite Gene Kirkpatrick.
I could just cite Ron Paul to you all day long here, right?
But everybody knows that Ron Paul is good on everything.
The point is here is these are people who are very hawkish when they feel like it needs to be.
You might even your readers might, or your listeners, viewers might think that Ron Paul is just too biased for peace.
Well, Pat ain't, okay?
Pat is willing to fight, but not if there's not a good reason to.
And that's the big qualification.
Why would a guy like Pat be anti war?
We know he's not a hippie.
There must be another explanation, and the other explanation is he is learned.
He knows more about this than you, and he knows why you shouldn't do this because this is what's going to happen if you do.
And that's the kind of guy he is, and that's why he and his paleoconservative friends.
said, okay, enough, we want to come home.
And so Jean Kirkpatrick, she didn't really join with the paleocons, but she was certainly aligning with him on this issue at this time that now's our chance to go back to being a limited constitutional republic with a free economy and a usually successful commercial republic, I believe she says in the piece, and which had a typo because it said unusually, but she couldn't have meant that.
Go ahead.
I don't know.
I think I lean towards Ron Paul a little bit.
I don't think totalitarian bureaucracy is justified ever.
I mean, you can come up with a really extreme case.
But really, you're going to get into trouble.
This is why the Birchers turned against the Cold War during Vietnam.
Robert Welch, I mean, you can't get more anti-communists than that guy, the leader of the Birch Society.
But he goes, Wait a minute, why are we turning our country into a communist country in the name of containing communism over there?
And he was being very liberal with the use of the word there, but meaning why are we building a total state here when that's everything that we're trying to oppose in Vietnam, but we're building it here at home is crazy.
We need to save this money.
We need to build our country and lead the world by example, not by force.
It was the obvious thing.
It was that obvious to Robert Welch and Ron Paul.
during the Cold War.
Then after the Cold War, you gotta make up a bunch of crap about Saddam Hussein as Hitler and he's killing all the babies in their incubators and these kinds of Belgian babies on bayonets and related hoaxes to keep the thing going.
Because again, as Richard Pryor said, that doesn't make any sense to me, right?
Like if it doesn't just sound right to your average guy, you tell me we had to face down Hitler, all right.
We had to face down Stalin and Mal, that makes sense.
We gotta bomb Gaddafi?
There's not a better way that we USA number one can handle that.
You know, same kind of thing going forward here.
And this is why, you know, these and I like to emphasize this so much is that in the aftermath of Vietnam, people think that, oh, peace is just hippies and leftists and anti-Americans of one stripe or another, people who are just not good in a fight anyway.
So what do they know about security, right?
Jack Nicholson, I stand on that wall, even think about what a joke that was.
He was down in Guantanamo Bay keeping Castro away for me.
Yeah, thanks a lot, dude.
I can't handle that truth.
Whatever you're burying down there.
A lot of torture later, but anyway.
So you're saying like it's really people that were hawks for a time woke up.
That's right.
The reality of the ridiculousness, the absurdity.
of what a totalitarian bureaucracy does is it expands and creates momentum and then you're now.
become the thing you were fighting.
Right.
But Francis Fukuyama knew better.
He said, no, it's the end of history and America has proven that more or less democracy and more or less free market capitalism as like Bill Clinton would define them or something of that era, that that's the future of mankind.
We proved it.
They tried every other way of having a modern, successful society and this is the one and only way to do that.
And not only that then, but that's obviously America's mandate and all his neokonservative friends took it as Amer America's mandate that we're going to force the world to accept our ways in that same way.
Of course, the British justify their obviously very self-interested empire in the very same way that we're going to teach you to have a separate independent judiciary at any cost, right?
And it's all, you know, I hate to say it, but the white man's burden type of argument that, and they say this to this day.
Look, if it wasn't us, it would be the Russians.
If it wasn't us, it would be the Chinese.
If it wasn't us, it would be somebody else and it would be worse.
And so that's it.
And so it is our responsibility.
We're the most mature and adult and responsible stewards of global power.
And so it has to be us to do this.
And that was what it said in the defense planning guidance.
And now it's true that Bush lost that election and the Clintonites came in, but as Paul Wolfowitz bragged, again in the national interest, by the end of the decade, that they all adopted the Wolfowitz doctrine anyway, that, you know, like, for example, Bill Clinton going right around NATO to do the war in Kosovo in 1999, because he wanted to, and Russia had a veto on the UN Security Council, and so, well, forget that.
We just go around that.
That's straight out of the Wolfowitz doctrine, right?
That it's what matters, what's good for us and our predominance of power in those regions of the world is what matters the most.
And these other considerations will have to take a back seat to make sure that we can be the guarantorsors of our world order, regardless of what the treaties everybody signed up for say.
And so that really is what they call the Wolfowitz doctrine.
It's not just, hey, let's go to Iraq for Israel, although that's a huge part of it, but it's let's America, our military power is always beneficial compared to the alternative.
And so we should be the ones to guarantee the peace or the war.
But in our case, if it's war, it's only because the alternative was worse, we promise.
And so that's the doctrine.
And there is an ideology of American Empire here.
I don't want to dismiss the corruption.
It's a huge part.
I mean, if hopefully we have time later and talk really about the new Cold War with Russia, we can talk a lot about the role that Lockheed and the other military industrial complex firms played in pushing all these policies forward.
It is true with Iraq too.
The Committee on the Liberation of Iraq was sponsored by Bruce Jackson from Lockheed Martin, and he also financed the project for a new American century of Bill Crystal and Robert Kagan.
He financed the weekly Standard magazine and the agenda was like, let's sell NATO planes in Europe and let's push for war in the Middle East.
And so there's a lot of self-interested reasons there.
But I think overall, like you got to take these people at their word when they say., we know we're heroes.
We know we're doing the right thing.
We know everybody's better off without us.
We know that.
We have to.
This is our morality based foreign policy.
We just can't allow that bad thing to happen any longer.
We have to do something worse to stop it.
And this kind of thing is very like you could tie it back to like whatever.
I'm not this smart to talk all about the influence of the pilgrims and their glorious mission in ancient Massachusetts to create the new city on the hill to be like the new Zion and ultimately determine the fate of mankind.
But there's a lot of Yankee busy bodyhood that is built into this.
And of course, the Scots Irish like to get drunk and get into fist fights for fun.
And I take responsibility for that.
It's a bit of my background too.
I'm not being a racist bigot, but like, that's part of our culture, is like being a tough guy and being able to get into a brawl and win one or even suffer a defeat and not cry about it.
You know what I mean?
And like, yeah, some of that, which is the dual, it's the double edged sword of human nature is the Scots Irish.
I mean, they're so, and I had a great conversation with Sagar and Jetty about this, are so foundational to the individualism that makes America great.
But then you get into trouble when you start to believe you're telling them there's a bad guy out there.
Yeah.
And you start and then you have the biggest military in the world and there's Lockheed Martin's military industrial complex and now you think you're better than everybody and now you're creating wars all over the place.
Yeah.
Creating enemies all over the place.
And see, of course, there's partyism is all built into this.
Is everyone supports their guy because the other guy is we can't let them win so we can't undermine even when we disagree with our own guy, we can't undermine him or we're helping the other guys are going to get him in the mid mid midterm or they'll get him in the next election.
So people close ranks around things they even disagree with just because they consider, again, the alternative worst.
That's even from the point of view of voters, a lot of times that like, you know, even Murray Rothbard endorsed George HW Bush, who had just done the Iraq war, because Rothbard's like, well, at least he hates Yitzhak Shamir, and at least he's not bringing Hillary Clinton and the leftist cultural revolution with him, right?
So, well, just, you know, people got to make these choices and make their comparisons of, you know, what they favor or what they value at any given time and make those compromises, you know?
And that's why you said antiwar dot com is nonpartisan, right?
That's right.
Yeah, we're reaching out to everybody.
We're here to inform everybody.
Again, as I was mentioned during the short break there, that Hawks read our website too.
If you want really the best briefing of what's going on in the country, like we do hear from them from time to time that, like, I gotta admit, those guys really do have the most comprehensive coverage of the stuff I'm interested in, even if from their point of view, the wrong point of view.
If, uh, before going to Iraq war two, I, if it's okay, take a brief aside, uh, since you mentioned it, we did an Iran debate a few weeks ago.
Yes.
Uh, where about, actually, twenty minutes was cut toward the end where it went a bit off the rails.
And, uh, you agreed with the description that I wrote on X. I hope it's cool if I read it.
I try hard to avoid editing.
That's why I do four, five, six, seven, eight hour podcasts.
I wonder how long we go today.
The part I cut in the Iran debate was where it went off the rails after four hours, not content wise, but tone wise, mockery, interruption, et cetera.
Both had very little sleep the night before and were tired and not their best selves, as they both said.
I cut not because of the content, but the style.
I try.
I try all I can to avoid having that kind of drama in the podcasts.
Instead, I thought the first four hours had a lot of strong rants, which it did, and you're continuing the rants very well today.
I'm enjoying it.
So you wanted to echo that description.
And that the edit made sense.
Maybe you can speak to that.
And then also, can you please, it would be great now that you're fresh full of doctor Pepper, say anything and everything you would like to say that went unresponded to, maybe that's left to be said.
Thank you.
Yes.
So first of all, I'll take my responsibility for that part.
I literally had a long drive and a long flight and four hours sleep and no food in my stomach at all.
And I quite honestly, absolutely despise Mark Dubowitz and I have for a very long time.
And so it was I I really had thought about this beforehand.
I really should have rejected your terms at the beginning where we're all friends here having a friendly discussion.
I had already kind of rehearsed in my mind what I wanted to say to you was actually no, right?
This is just business.
I wish you would.
And I know that I really do regret that and I'm sorry to you personally for that because I what I should have said was this is just business.
What's going to happen here is he's going to lie the whole time because he has to.
And so then I'm going to spend all of my time telling you why what he just said isn't actually true and how you can go verify that for yourself, et cetera, which is what ended up happening.
But it made it much more acrimonious because it was like, and for you it was more frustrating because you're trying to hold things in the conception that you had it where we're all just going to be friends here when that just was never going to really happen.
And part of that is look, I'm just I'm Luke from Empire.
I'm not quite all the way grown up Return of the Jedi, Skywalker here, myself.
So I get angry and say angry things.
So as far as how bad it went, I take my responsibility for my part of that, except the reality was it was just because I was up against a horrible foreign agent lying his ass off trying to get my fellow Americans killed and their dollars wasted.
And I got a problem with that.
And now on the edit though, this is where we had a problem.
And I do accept from you that this part was inadvertent.
I know that you didn't mean to do it this way.
What happened was there were two instances of him saying, Oh, Scott Horton thinks the Jews control everything and dictate everything and blah blah, which I never said at all, and he said twice.
And yet, my response was completely deleted, but him saying that against me was still in there.
And I thought like on one hand, it's completely silly and stupid, but on the other hand, that's also like a pretty ruthless and horrible thing to try to do to somebody, not you, him, to try to put those words in my mouth and say, All those facts that you just heard for four hours, nah, this guy just hates Jewsws.
So if you're on my side, you don't have to listen to him.
You don't have to believe him, anything like this.
And then our discussion about that's not true, dude.
Just because I was talking about the neoconservatives doesn't mean I was talking about the Jews.
Because, for example, Jenkirk Patrick and Jim Woolsey are Presbyterians and Michael Novak and, oh, what's his name are Catholics and Francis Fukuyama, I guess, is a Buddhist and Zame Khalilzad is a Muslim.
And so I didn't say the Jews at all, did I?
I was talking about this and that.
And my very good response to that went to the cutting room floor.
And so I thought, I was going to come back sooner.
And so I apologize for kind of putting you on blast in that interview where I mentioned it, but I was waiting to hear back from you where we're going to make up for that by doing this interview.
And so I was like, yeah, I'm kind of disappointed.
Now it's nearly August and I hadn't heard from the dude and I thought we were going to do that.
And so and because it is important that and it goes to my overall point that I'm trying to make here is obviously the American Empire is very much against the interests of the American people, but also and most especially our support for Israel, the great albatross around our neck.
You know, what they do are millstone.
is maybe better, right?
Albatross was a symbol of good luck before you shot it down.
But Israel's interests are vastly different than America's interests.
And people try to lie even to themselves and say that that's not true.
But they are very different.
For example, when Israel killed those women and children in Kana in 1996, that's what brought our towers down, right?
So this is something very important that we have to grapple with as a country that we're not just talking about Israel being a nice Jewish boy mining its own business over there, kind of like in some cliché or narrative.
We're talking about an absolutely ruthless state that is in the process of trying to get rid of millions of people they wish they hadn't kidnapped back in 1967.
And we can do a whole bit on that, but they are putting themselves in a very difficult position.
And so they need our help to a very great degree.
Now, from all that we discussed here today, does it sound like I'm saying the Israelis and their lobby are behind every single thing in American policy and what we're doing here?
Like, that's not all what I'm talking about.
So Big New Brzezinski is not the Israel lobby at all.
He's Rockefeller's guy.
And that's a separate group of guys, right?
And so go ahead.
Just a, I'm really sorry for missing.
the two mentions that you're referring to.
You know, people can search in the transcript the word Jew.
It appears, I guess, a couple of times, and that's what you're referring to.
Your back and forth argument actually came about fifteen minutes after that moment because you kind of were patiently waiting.
Well, I had to get back to it kind of.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's no disrespect meant, and I really apologize if there's any, uh, hurt or anything like that clause.
And it's true that the thing did really turn into an argument at that point.
I mean, you called Jim Loeb of all people a vicious antisemite, which is just completely hilarious considering how Jewish Jim Loeb is, and what an extraordinarily sweet and kind and dignified.
and kind and decent gentleman he is.
It's the most ridiculous thing in the world.
When we were on the curb outside arguing, he said JJ Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward also is a vicious antisemite because he wrote something that explained the difference between Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon's positions on Iraq and Iran.
In other words, Mark Dubious or Mark Dubowitz is very dubious.
He is not a serious man.
He's in a sense not really a man as much as just a foreign agent representing a position on behalf of a foreign power.
And as I said in that debate, do you think, and I mean this honestly for anyone listening, you don't have to answer, but does anyone think that Mark Dubowitz really regrets that Americans died on September 11 because of what Israel was doing.
He would hide behind, no, they hate us because we're free.
No, maybe he'd say they were mad about our presence in Saudi Arabia, but he would never say, yeah, but that's because Martin Indick said so and that's because and the Khanna massacre helped motivated.
Mohammed Ata had just elied that point just like all Israeli lobbyists would.
How could they justify?
You know, I wish I knew the animosity you have for Mark, because I was part of my I'm not very good at this, the moderator thing, but I was very confused by the animosity.
in the room.
Well, it's the dishonesty too.
Even if I just met him that day, like everything out of his mouth was some kind of twisted fact.
Like, yes, there was a Kobar Tower attack, but you're going to blame that on the Ayatollah when it was bin Laden that did that.
And we all know that that's true.
So don't sit here and try to give me some pro-Israel, you know, my truth, there's only the truth and Mark Dubowitz is not associated with it.
He has an agenda.
And but you're right that I should have made that clear that what this is, is this is a foreign lobbyist trying to get America to serve a foreign nation.
And I am the guy from America and antiwar dot com trying to fend him off.
And look, and I I accept to that.
I ain't so mature for a 49 year old, whatever.
48 then.
I was a I was a very immature 48 at the time, but I lose my temper very quickly when people lie.
I just can't stand it.
I just don't have time to listen to people being willfully dishonest to me or in front of me, you know?
Yeah, and I'm glad we got a chance to clear that up.
We're going to go hard and and for as long as needed.
Great.
And yeah, I no hard feelings at all, man.
I'm glad we worked it out to do we do we go to rock war to first?
Well, let's do wait, let's stay on Bill Clinton in the nineties for a minute.
Because, you know, we're talkingking about the neocons got brought up in the sense that they did help to encourage Iraq War 1, although I don't think they were the real, you know, kingpins behind it or whatever in the way that they were in Iraq War 2.
And then the doctrine of global dominance that Wolfowitz developed, you know, in 1992 that became more or less the standard for foreign policy thought and through the 90s.
And then, but during the Clinton years, it's really important to mention that Bill Clinton backed the Mudjahideen, even though they were already attacking us in the United States and American targets overseas.
Bill Clinton kept backing them in Bosnia, Kosovo and in Chechnya, and to a greater degree than I understood.
Now, mostly this means working with the Saudis and the Brits to support them, and including bin Laden himself was seen by at least four credible journalists in Isitbegovic's office, the president of Bosnia in Sarajevo in 1994.
And his men fought there, and Bill Clinton knew it, and Richard Holbrooke said, We could have never won without their help, and all these kinds of things.
I got all the sources in the latest book Provoked.
I go into much further detail about this, even than in the Terror War book enough already.
And the same was true in Chechnya too.
And essentially, and as we've seen, And you know this from just your own recent memory, right?
That as we've seen in Syria as well, that as long as the bin Ladenites are killing Serbs or Russians or Shiites, then it's cool.
And that's what America and Britain and Saudi Arabia used them for.
And so even though their first attack in the United States was Rabbi Kahane in 1990, the leader of the Koch party, who is a very right wing Israeli rabbi who advocated for the extermination or expulsion of all Palestinians from all of historic Palestine.
And his party had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being fascist and was banned from Israeli politics.
He was a radical rabbi lived in New York, I believe, and he was assassinated in 1990 by a guy who was part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Now this is that was their first hit.
In 1992 they hit us at a hotel in Aden, Yemen.
Then in 1993 they did the first World Trade Center attack.
Now it's worth dwelling on this one for a second because Bill Clinton had just been president for a month and a week.
It was the end of February, 26 February 1993.
And the truck bomb, they parked it in the wrong place.
It could have toppled one tower over into the other.
It could have just that truck bomb without another one.
If they had put it in the wrong place, it could have toppled one tower over into the other at five o'clock in the afternoon.
Right, and so and then from there into more and more towers, who knows?
Like there could have been tens and tens and tens of thousands of people killed, and it almost worked.
And the thing is about that a couple of things.
First of all, the CIA had allowed these guys into the country when INS wanted to keep them out because they said, We know these guys, they're our friends from the Afghan war, we don't mind them, and let them in, so they're all living in Brooklyn.
I mean dangerous terrorists.
Then the second thing was that the FBI had a walk in informant, a guy named Imad Salem, who was an Egyptian Army intelligence officer or former one.
And he had been recruited by them and he allowed them to recruit him to be the bomb maker.
You can trust me, I'm a military guy.
I can make the bomb, he said.
Then he went to the FBI, said, I've been recruited by some terrorists to make a bomb.
And there were two agents who believed him, Floyd and Antisef, Nancy Floyd and John Antisef, where the agents work in the case.
And the plan was they were going to use him to use an inert powder, make a fake bomb, and it'd be a perfect sting.
But the thing is their boss was a guy named Carson Dunbar, and he would not, he in fact demanded they cut his pay, the informants' pay from $500 to $300 a week and demanded he wear a wire on the floor of the mosque where he, you know, while he's standing, he's sleeping on the floor of the mosque with these guys.
He can't wear a wire, right?
So he ends up bugging out and says, I think the FBI's on me and bugs out.
Then they brought in Ramsey Youssef, the guy who built the bomb, the real bomb, the real terrorist who came in.
And, uh, again, almost top of one tower over the end of the other.
Problem is a couple of things.
Only six people died.
That's a lot of people.
If you're one of the six or the survivors of the six, right?
I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying in the imagination of the American people.
It was kind of.
Kind of just not that big of a deal and New York City's pretty far from here and just people were not feeling it nearly as much as say for example both of them collapsing with three thousand people inside still, right?
So then also two days later the ATF raided the Branch Davidians and thus began a six weeks long siege of this religious group 100 miles up the road from here who ultimately the FBI and the Army Delta Force massacred on april 1993.
So the American people's attention was just completely diverted and Clinton's too.
This is his whole first hundred days is all bogged down in Waco and this kind of thing.
So and who wants to learn a bunch of Arab names and all of this stuff, it just to the FBI agents, they didn't do a very good job of following up and preventing this same group from carrying out things.
Now they had, I think, I don't really know enough about this.
I need to go back and reread about the Holland Tunnels plot, the UN building and all that.
I think that was the setup where they were trying to get the rest of these guys into staying basically on that part of the plot.
But in 1995, The bin Ladenites attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard.
And in 1996, they blew up the Kobar towers in, um, Dahran, Saudi Arabia.
And that was a truck bombing that killed nineteen.
American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq and that was who was the target but then what happened was the Saudi kingdom in alliance with the corrupt criminal Louis Free of course the director of the federal intelligence agency federal Bureau of Investigation they who were in charge not CIA they had the the mandate to treat all these al-Qaeda attacks as crimes as they are crimes under federal code.
So it was FBI took the lead at that time.
And Louis Free wanted to believe the story that somehow it was Iranian backed Shiite Saudi Hezbollah that had done the attack because, of course, the Saudi monarchy hates their Shiite majority and they just happen to live right on top of where all the oil is and they didn't want to blame it on bin Laden who was, you know, adjacent to the royal family and who they wanted to take care of themselves, et cetera.
And so they blamed it on Iran.
But it was bin Laden who did it and the FBI agent in charge, John O'Neill, knew that it was them who did it.
His enemy, Michael Scheuer from the CIA, also knew that it was bin Laden who did it and bin Laden himself bragged about it to Abdel Bhari Atwan, the editor of All Could.
of Al Quds Al Arabi in London and named the names of the martyrs and celebrated them and said that's exactly right.
Are you listening now and all these things about it?
It was Al Qaeda that did that.
Then in 1998 they hit the African embassies and in 2000 they hit the USS Cole.
They had bailed on an attack against the USS The Sullivan's.
The dinghy sank and then they hit the Cole killed seventeen sailors in Aden in 2000.
So this is these attacks are building up and these are building up and building up in the run up to September 11.
And in the whole time they're saying exactly why they're doing this.
So we know their motive., and they're also saying their strategy.
Their strategy is to provoke us into invading Afghanistan.
They're going to replicate.
They're going to give us our own Afghanistan the way we gave the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan.
And bin Laden said repeatedly, the point was to provoke us into overreacting, to bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy, break our empire on the rocks of Afghanistan the same way we had helped them do to the USSR.
And so then W. Bush, when he was elected, his son of bin Laden.'s son gave an interview to Rolling Stone in 2010 where he says, I was in Afghanistan with my father, and when Bush was elected in 2000, my father was so happy.
He said, This is the kind of president he needs, one who will attack and spend money and break the country.
He said, This is in 2010, so bin Laden is still alive.
He says, Bill Clinton sent missiles after my father and didn't get him.
But now you've spent ten years in Afghanistan and you still haven't got him.
America used to be smart, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf.
Okay?
So that was the strategy was to get America to kill itself, to get us to strap on the suicide vest.
Get the irony of the whole thing?
How is a group of 400 bandits hiding out in Nangahar province supposed to bring down the empire?
The answer is you give the empire an excuse to exploit.
It's not that George Bush is stupid and innocent, it's that he's stupid and guilty, right?
You know, it's not that bin Laden thought, oh, here's a guy who's such a super patriot that he'll go the extra mile.
He looked at Bush, said, Here's a guy who's a corrupt, evil, narrow minded, short sighted idiot of a criminal who will exploit a crisis to the nth degree if I give him one.
And that's what I'm trying to do, and which, by the way, consider the collectivism of Osama bin Laden, who considers that there's no limit apparently on the number of Afghans that he can get killed in his plan here when he ain't from there, right?
He's trying to provoke a war with a superpower against a regime that's allowed him to stay and against a people who did nothing to him or to us.
Right, a people hate that, but some people.
Some people, millions of people who did nothing to us whatsoever.
And he put them in our crosshairs on what?
The idea, well, God will sort them out.
They'll go to paradise if they believe well.
And so who cares about them?
And which was something that was a big problem with Mullah Omar, where Mullah Omar, despite the narrative, actually hated and feared Osama bin Laden and wanted to get rid of him and was trying to negotiate to get rid of him because, as Marie Rothbard says, a radical becomes a conservative the day he captures the capital city.
Right.
And so Mullah Omar didn't want a world revolution like, you know, Osama bin Lennon.
Right.
He wasn't interested in that.
He was interested in holding down Afghanistan.
He had already won most of the country.
He hadn't finished winning itning at all yet.
And he wasn't trying to get into a fight with America, which Bill Clinton had supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996, had encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to encourage the Taliban to go all the way to Kabul.
And in fact, wanted them not even settle with the Northern Alliance, wanted to see a'right' victory' against the Northern Alliance because they wanted the Taliban to have total control, a monopoly on the entire state, so they could build a oil pipeline from Tajikistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan.
Now they abandoned this project after 1998, after the embassy bombings of 1998.
People sometimes say that's why Bush invaded in 1901 or whatever.
No, that wasn't it.
But that is why Bill Clinton supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996 in the first place.
They said, well, we figured there will be an Amir and no parliament and lots of Sharia law.
We can live with that.
That was the Bill Clinton administration, what they said about that.
Right?
So Ahmed Rashid's book, The Taliban has all that stuff in it.
And I quote him at length in my books.
And so what was the point of that?
Screwing the Russians, figuring out a way to get hydrocarbons out of the Caspian basin without having to go through Russia or Iran.
And so that was part of that whole game, which we'll have to talk about later in the Cold War segment here.
But that's part where these stories overlap a bit.
Now, so it's important to bring up too that during this time, the cliche in the Pentagon among the joint staff who are the most important policy planners for the Pentagon.
They had a cliche that said, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower, right?
What are they going to do?
They're going to set off a truck bomb here or there.
They're going to kill a few hundred people here or there.
Look at the African embassies.
It's mostly Africans who died.
And so I don't think that they thought that losing a couple of towers full of a coupleple of thousand people would be a small price to pay.
I think they were not imagining that level of consequence.
But after all, they did have to hijack our airlines to have something to crash into anything.
We are talking about a stateless group of essentially penniless bandits, right, who have millions of dollars, not billions, much less trillions, right?
These are these were criminals, right?
Outlaws, terrorists.
So they had no ability to truly bring us down.
They had to, and of course the analogy to Pearl Harbor is perfect because three thousand people died in a sneak attack.
What more do you need to know?
And I kind of like to harp on this, not that I ever really like studied psychology more than a couple semesters in junior college, but it seems probably meaningful, right?
That in the images, the planes literally come out of the clear blue sky.
Right?
And so, geez, I guess I don't know what's behind this, someone explain it.
It's just like tabula rasa, man, go ahead and let me know what I'm supposed to think about this.
I'm shocked and I'm completely surprised.
Said, you know, of course people who knew a lot about this were very worried about it, of course, but for the average American, and this was the meaning of the term blowback, by the way.
As Chalmers Johnson explained, and it was coined in Donald Wilbur, who is a CIA historian, in his after action report against about the coup in Iran.
He said, we CIA officers are going to have to be very careful about blowback coming down the line from operations like this.
And then as Johnson explained, what it really meant was not just consequences, because you can just have a funny term for consequences, but blowback meant the long term consequences of secret foreign policies.
So that when they come due, the American people don't understand what it means.
Why are the Iranians burning our flag?
Why are the bin Ladenites crashing into our towers?
Somebody tell us because we don't know.
And when the answer is, well, it's actually all our fault then the security force, our national government, will not tell us that.
In fact, they'll make up a lie and say, Islam makes them hate us because we love our mamas and Jesus so much.
And then people go, Oh man, what a terrible psychopathic.
I didn't realize Islam was that bad of a religion.
We better have to fight all of them now if that's what it does to you.
It's radical Islam.
See, once you believe in Islam hard enough, it turns you into a suicide bomber and makes you hate North Americans.
There is no other cause and effect that you guys need to be aware of.
And people might not remember this, but boy, they pushed it that fall that the Taliban hadaliban, the Taliban was Al Qaeda.
You mean 2001?
Yeah, yeah.
That they were Taliban and they were an Al Qaeda and then they conflated them together so powerfully that then this became a reason why people were just so doubtful about the entire narrative because they're going, what do you mean a bunch of cavemen from the town of Bedrock out there in Kandahar province did this to us because they don't like that we have a bill of rights?
Like that obviously is not true.
So what is the truth?
And then people come up with endless answers other than the obvious one, which is America has a really bad Middle East policy and Israel is a real big part of that.
That's the answer is blowback.
Again, Egyptians volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel is doing to the Lebanese.
It's a little bit complicated, but not that complicated if you want to be honest.
But at the end, what is it?
It's all George Bush's father's and Bill Clinton's fault, right?
And so what are they going to do?
I remember being, I was sitting in Chicago when nine hundred eleven happened.
I remember being really confused in the months after, in the hours and the days and the months after with all the narratives that were coming out.
It didn't quite make sense.
A lot of the things, it almost felt like they're improvising with different stories that will convince the American people.
And I remember being extremely confused.
Iraq.
Yeah.
Saddam Hussein.
Here's they're trying to see who can we create the evil guy out of Al-Qaeda, Taliban.
And then they just ran with it.
Can you can you just can you break that down what the different lies that end up sticking that were used to mislead us into the war.
Yeah.
Well, so on Afghanistan, it's clear that the CIA and Connolly Zarice.
And we know this not that Bob Woodward is really trustworthy, but he published supposedly verbatim transcripts from the National Security Council meetings in his book Bush at War.
And so we know from those National Security Council meetings that Connolly Zarice and the CIA were advising that we try our best to divide the Taliban from Al Qaeda.
And let the Taliban know we don't have a fight with you.
We're just after these Arabs that hit us.
In fact, it's very important.
The Taliban tried to warn us that the attack was coming and were essentially turned away.
They warned the UN in Pakistan and they sent a guy to the United States and he was denied.
a meeting at State Department at all and went home.
And they only knew it was true because of that an attack was coming because they had learned it from a Tajik jihadist or a, I believe a Tajik who was one of their informants basically told them bin Laden didn't tell Mullah Omar in the summer of 2001.
Mullah Omar had told Arnaud Debargrav from the Washington Times.
He said, bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat.
I can neither swallow him nor spit him out.
And Milton Bearden, who had helped run the CIA covert war in the 1980s, told the Washington Post, We've been negotiating with Mullah Omar over bin Laden since 1998., after the Africa Embassy attack, Omar said, I gotta get rid of this guy.
And he ordered bin Laden, Don't do any more attacks against the United States.
And bin Laden had promised him that he wouldn't and then kept attacking anyway.
And so Mullah Omar, this is the dictator of the Taliban ruling regime in Afghanistan.
Milton Bearden said that the Taliban would tell the CIA, Oh, bin Laden?
Geez, you know, we lost track of him today.
He's out Falconing in the countryside somewhere.
We don't know where he is.
And then the Americans would pound their fists on the table and say, We said hand him over.
when that's what he just said was go ahead and kill him.
He's outside of our protection right now.
And if you were to murder him, it would not be our fault.
Take your best drone strike.
Take the best hint.
That's Milton Bearden talking about.
That's where I got this from, okay?
The Taliban hated this dude.
He was nothing but trouble and they wanted to get rid of him.
And remember what Bush said, no negotiations hand him over.
They said, well, come on, give us some evidence and we'll hold a whole proceeding here.
And Bush said, no way, give him over.
And Colin Powell at one point said, well, we will come up with evidence.
We will accuse him of this.
We'll show you.
And then they're like, no, no evidence.
The Taliban said, well, tell you what, let us give him over to any Muslim country in the world, which of course you know could be Malaysia or Indonesia or Jordan or Egypt who are going to do exactly what they're told by the United States.
He's going to land on the tarmac and he's going to go straight to Virginia.
Give me a break, right?
Nope, not good enough.
Then he started bombing on December the 8th and the Taliban said, okay, we have no more conditions.
We're willing to give him up if you'll just stop the bombing.
Bush said, too little, too late, no, and kept the war going then.
Why?
The Occam's Razor answers, you can't read the guy's mind.
There's so much circumstantial evidence about the thinking at the time.
And this was going to what I was saying about.
CIA and Rice said we should just bomb Al Qaeda and not the Taliban.
Donald Rumsfeld overruled them.
Said no, we need to take the fight to the Taliban.
We need to keep the Afghan war going on because we want the American people to understand.
He actually proposed that we should bomb Baghdad now so that the American people understand the war on terrorism is not over if we kill bin Laden and it ain't lost if we don't.
The war is much bigger than him and is going to take place over a vast space and a vast period of time and we want the American people to know that.
that this is not ending anytime soon.
We're going to Baghdad.
It's going to take a while to build up the force in Kuwait and they hoped Turkey, which didn't work out, but in order to go.
And so if we kill bin Laden now, or even if we do, we want to make sure the American people know that the war is not over yet.
And I believe, and I make the case in both books and probably better in the second one, fools are enough already that they let bin Laden go.
The CIA and the Delta Force on the ground were begging for reinforcements and reinforcements were available.
There were tens of thousands of rangers or at least what, ten thousand rangers or something at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul.
The Green Berets were fighting the Taliban up in Mazari Sharif.
The seventy fifth Airborne Rangers, who are top tier special operations forces considered right with Delta and Navy SEALs, were available in Kandahar province and General Mattis was there with ten thousand marching marines and he could have told them ten hoot go now and they had helicopters but even then they were like forty miles away.
Yeah, it's mountains.
So what?
Right.
And they were not allowed to go and seal the border and the CIA and the Delta Force are like, man, we got them cornered on three sides.
The fourth side is the Pakistani border.
They're going to get away.
We need more men.
And the military, they did a congressional investigation.
They just said they had a plan.
It's called block and sweep.
Make sure you get everybody in between here and here, right?
And that's exactly how you do it.
And the Delta Force guys and the CIA guys, namely Thomas Greer, aka Dalton Fury in his book Kill Bin Laden, and Gary Burnson in his book Jawbreaker talk about how they just could not understand why they could not get the support that they wanted.
And Burnson talks about how his.
his boss at CIA went and laid out the desk in the map on the desk, and Ron Susskin writes about this too, that they showed Bush the map and said, We need more men for this.
And they were denied the men that they needed.
And then what?
And think about this, your whole life ever since then, talk about confusing narratives from that time.
How about this one, dude?
How about as soon as bin Laden and his friends crossed the border into Pakistan on december seventeenth, Delta Force is not allowed to chase them.
Why?
They always say the same thing.
I bet you, dude, like a Lexus Nexus thing from back then and find how many times they use a term bin Laden and his men slipped across the border.
And then once that happened, it's like they jumped into hyperspace and got away.
Once that happened, they crossed the semipermeable membrane that only terrorists can cross, but that the Delta Force top tier army special operations forces cannot cross into a friendly allied country of ours, Pakistan, and where we know from Robert Grenier,
the CIA station chief in Islamabad in his book eighty eight days to Kandahar, he had already made arrangements with the Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps that we expect the bin Ladenites to come fleeing across the border and we expect Americans to be hot on their tail in pursuit, and so they set up deconflict so that the Pakistanis.
would not accidentally kill the Americans because they were expected to come.
They were not allowed to cross the border and give chase.
And Dalton Fury is, man, this is amazing too.
And maybe someone in your audience can find the full thing.
But I went on a deep dive trying to find the full 60 minutes episode with Dalton Fury, and I can only find severely edited ones.
But his name is Thomas Greer is his real name.
And he's wearing a disguise and everything.
And he does a thing with Scott Pelley.
And man, they edit it because the important part that I'm looking for is where he says we had all these plans to follow them into Pakistan.
We have Chinook helicopters.
We were going to go over them and then meet them coming back the other way.
We were going to drop landmines and there were only three valleys out of there that they could have taken.
We were going to drop mines that was going to slow them down.
So they knew exactly how to kill bin Laden.
And they were told to stand up.
And they were not allowed by Donald Rumsfeld and the military to go further.
And even we have W. Bush and Dick Cheney both implicated in this too in that Suskin book where they and Bernson, I believe, talks about this in his book too, where Thomas Greer is the guy who wrote Kill Bin Laden and was on Sixty Minutes.
He was the Lieutenant Colonel in the Delta Force in charge there.
And then Gary Bernson was the guy on the scene who wrote the book, Jawbreaker.
And then his boss was Henry.
Crumpton, and he was the guy who had laid the map out on Bush's desk and said we need more men, and was denied by Bush himself.
So it might be nice to blame just Rumsfeld, but it was the president himself who refused to commit the forces necessary to get bin Laden in.
And it is just a circumstantial case.
I don't have a direct quote of any of these people saying this, but it seems pretty clear to me that they decided that they would prefer that bin Laden go so that like in the book 1984 they would have Emmanuel Goldstein, the enemy, the wrecker, the saboteur out there, the danger, who could still kill you.
He's not gone yet.
W. Bush used to love to say, imagine Saddam Hussein.
Giving bin Laden's hijackers chemical weapons.
Imagine September eleventh, only this time, armed by Saddam Hussein.
Well, bin Laden's already dead, and the American people by and large believe that that's what you get for messing with us, pal.
We win, you lose, and it's over by Christmas.
Well, then how the hell are we going to go to Baghdad?
It's going to take us a year and a half to build up the forces and to make people's mom and dad scared enough to think that we need to do this.
We have a massive propaganda campaign to wage here.
And here's where we get right back into the neoconservatives again in March of 2002, Justin Romondo wrote a piece at antiwar dot com and it's called Our hijacked foreign policy.
Neocons take Washington.
Baghdad is next.
And Justin was a brilliant genius and because he was a libertarian, he had a long time ideological axe to grind and personal enemy relationship with these neocons.
You know, us libertarians, we really are their polar opposite on so many things.
And he called it the Axis of Crystal there, the little Lenin of the neoconservative movement.
And he's here citing benevolent global hegemony is the actual quote.
He kind of got that little wrong.
It's Bill Crystal and Robert Kagan wrote this article in Foreign Affairs in 1996 toward a neo-Reaganite foreign policy where they say we have to have benevolent global hegemony.
And that's what he's talking about there and he's talking about the few people.
And I have to tell you, man, I was really interested in foreign policy, politics and all these things for many years leading up to this.
But if you just asked me, what is a Republican?
I would have said, Houston, right?
James Baker the third, right?
Dark Lord of the Sith, lawyer for Exxon.
That's what conservatism is, is big business, right?
Right, it's, you know, I don't know what else.
What?
I knew who Bill Crystal was, but I didn't know who he was, right?
I knew there was the weekly standard.
I knew they were crazy after Saddam Hussein.
I didn't know why and I didn't look enough into it leading up to them.
It's so interesting to, uh, sorry to interrupt, but sure.
So the lens of this analysis in 2002.
I need to go back and read some of this.
You need to go back and read all of Justin from 1999 all the way through.
Through the whole.
Get yourself a rainy day.
You can stop about halfway through Obama, probably.
But man, at this time, he was the most important writer for America.
As neglected as he was, there was nobody better at what was happening to this country at that time.
Even from just a brief glance, I could see the cutting wit and the brilliance and the humor.
Oh, yeah.
He was a big gay Pat Buchanan.
He's big gay Archie Bunker from San Francisco, right?
He was a right winger and a paleo libertarian, but like Buchananite leaning.
He gave Pat Buchanan's nomination speech for the Reform Party in 1999.
And he is a right wing libertarian, but he is what he is.
He's at where he's at.
And so it sounds kind of ironical or whatever.
Why would a gay guy like Pat Buchanan so much?
And it's because Pat Buchanan at that time, his reputation was very much the culture war and very much like gay people should still stay in the closet and things like that.
And so Justin was like, I don't care about that.
What matters is the world empire.
And then even here, he's a right winger too.
It's not that he's a liberal and he found a right winger that he likes.
It's that Patrick Buchanan is like a perfect kindred spirit, even though you might think not.
But Justin was from Queens and he was from that era, you know, raised in the 1950s and 1960s.
He was a crusty old paleocon in his way.
And that was why he was so good.
And when I first started reading him, I remember saying even to my friends, how does this guy know?
all this stuff?
It's just unbelievable how plugged in he is.
He lives out in San Francisco, but he knows everything happening at every important think tank in Washington and he knows the difference between them all.
He knows who all these guys are and what their role is and who is whose mentor and student and all these things in a way is just unbelievable and he had the neocons number, man.
And yes, Iraq War 2 was their war and it was mostly for Israel.
I'm severely distracted by how hilarious his writing is.
Go ahead.
I'm glancing at him.
No, sorry, sorry.
I won't.
It'll be a canyon hole that we'll go into, but he goes hard against the neoconservative.
Oh, so bad.
Look, his first article was about the Kosovo war in 1999, and he goes after the neoconservatives right then and there from the very get-go.
He used to love to quote this guy, I believe David Tall in the weekly standard said about Slobodan Milosevic that he better do what we say or he knows we'll kick their skulls in.
And he's like, yeah, this is who the neoconservatives are, dude.
They're barbarians, essentially Bill Crystal's men.
Quick pause, sir.
I'm sorry, I need another bathroom break, and then maybe you can get back to military-industrial complex.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, so before we get too far into Iraq War 2 and the neoconservatives, we need to.
decide whether we want to talk about the Afghanistan war now or whether we want to come back and talk more about Afghanistan later or maybe not even at all or whatever.
You got to make that call because there's plenty to talk about there.
That was a hugely important thing.
On the other hand, of course, and this is the same dilemma I faced when I was writing enough already, it's like, how much can I tell you about Afghanistan before I gotta bring it to Iraq, which is the heart of the story that everybody's so interested in where most of the action takes place.
It's on the other side of Iran from Afghanistan and Afghanistan remained on the margin throughout the whole thing, even though it's in itself, it was its own huge thing.
So, but I leave that to you to like how far you want to get into that and when.
I think Iraq specifically is the deepest, the most thorough case study of the military industrial complex and the abuse of power.
So let's do as much as we can explore that.
Let's do it.
I think it was really insightful.
We described that right there in Afghanistan.
We could have gotten bin Laden.
There's a lot of places where this did not have to go as long as it did.
And that was that highlights one clear moment.
Yeah.
But that was a real tragedy.
It really is.
They could have negotiated it and they could have killed him.
And the whole thing really could have been over by C Christmas.
And by the way, Gary Burnson said that.
He said that to the reporter Michael Hirsch in 2016.
He said, It's really sad when you think about how this thing could have been over by Christmas.
So that ain't just me.
That's them.
That's him.
That's the guy who was the second CIA officer on scene in charge who wrote, and you read his book.
You know how editors do this sometimes when a CIA guy writes a book, they'll leave the redaction marks in the big black boxes because it's like good salesmanship to do that, right?
So when you read Gary Burnson's book, he goes, and there I was, and me and my fellow CIA officers were talking about how frustrated we were that we could not understand why they wouldn't give us the reinforcements while he's getting away and then the next four sentences are blacked out.
It's like, you know?
And then, and the same thing for Dalton Fury, Thomas Greer.
So how do we get to Iraq?
Let's do Iraq.
Here's where we're going to start Iraq.
First of all, Wolfowitz and all of them wanted to go all the way to Baghdad in 1991, and Senior told them no and stopped short of that.
Also, let Saddam crush the Iraqi, the Shiite and Kurdish uprising.
Then, of course, we have the status quo of Bill Clinton's containment policy, dual containment policy from Iraq, from Saudi Arabia, against Iraq and Iran through the 1990s, sanctions, no-fly zone bombings, and all of that.
So, and, and, by the way, there were two failed CIA coups in 1995 and 1996 against Saddam.
One of them was the one that got Robert Baer in so much trouble because he was working with Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, to try to throw Saddam, and it all went to hell because Chalabi was basically selling them, Chalabi was basically making a bunch of promises to them about how it would go.
That, of course, did not work out at all.
And so this is where the CIA first put their burn notice on him.
So Ahmed Chalabi is this important Iraqi exile.
He was a banker in Jordan who then fled the country because he was wanted selling the CIA on all of his promises about what he could do in Iraq and then he was not coming through.
And so that's sort of a minor part of the story.
But then in nineteen ninety six, David Wormser, who's an important neoconservative in alliance with the more important neoconservative Richard Pearl, and also Douglas Fife, their fellow traveler, and I think there were two more people signed it.
It may have been Charles Fairbanks Jr. and one other guy signed it too, I think.
It was really Wormser and Pearl talking, okay?
And it's called a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
Oh man, you know what?
Hell, as long as we're doing this, we want to do this, right?
Hell yeah.
So we want to talk about Iraq War 2 less.
What we have to do is let's go back to the early nineties and Yitzhak Rabin.
Now, Israel had a strategy, as I said, being friends with Iran.
At the same time, they're friends with Turkey and friends with Ethiopia.
Why?
This was called the strategy of the periphery in Israel.
It meant, if you picture the map, okay, from Israel's perspective, we're going to support Turkey to divide Syria's attention.
We want to support Iran to divide Iraq's attention.
And we want to support Ethiopia to divide Egypt's attention.
Does that make sense geographically speaking?
Yes.
So Rabin says, no, we're going to turn that up and down.
And what we're going to do instead is we're going to negotiate with the Arabs, the closer states, and we're going to even make a deal with Yasser Arafat.
And this is the Oslo peace process that Rabin started.
Now, they were not really going to give them an independent state.
They were going to give them something like a shinya on pseudo sort of independent state, which actually probably would have been the best solution, right?
Would be you have your local police forces, but we are in one country together, kind of a thing.
There are lots of states that have kind of complicated arrangements like that and pull it off.
But anyway, this was Rabin's plan.
But then a Netanyahu fan murdered him in 1995.
This was when Shimon Perez took over.
Now Shimon Perez had been the president.
He's now promoted to prime minister and he continues the same policy.
This is why, oh, I'm sorry.
I should have mentioned in the reversal of the periphery doctrine and negotiating with the Arabs, part of that was now turning on Iran and demonizing Iran because just for domestic political reasons in Israel.
They Rabin had to be tough against somebody.
So now it's Iran that's the problem, and that's why we need to negotiate with the Arabs even.
Right.
So he makes that change in 1993.
In fact, there's a funny anecdote in Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi again, where the Clinton people were surprised and even laughed because what do you mean you hate Iran now?
Last week you were demanding that we like Iran along with you.
Now you've changed your mind, but what happened?
And all that happened was Israel changed their mind.
They just had a different policy now.
It wasn't any particular thing that Iran had done at that point to cross their line.
And so they just decided that this was important to do now.
And so somebody's got to be the enemy.
So now the enemy is going to be Shiite fundamentalist Islam revolutionary Iranian threat.
And in fact, as one of one important Israeli strategist told Parsi, we needed a new glue for the alliance with the United States.
Now that we don't have the Soviet Union anymore, why does America need us?
And the answer is radical Islam.
And of course that's great because you could be anybody as long as you're Muslim.
You can be called radical Islam.
And it doesn't matter how radical or which sect or whose side you're on or anything, right?
You could just do anything with that, right?
For you apply that to Palestinians or anybody else.
So that's a great one, like for propaganda wise from the Israeli point of view.
And so then when Shimon Perez took over after Abin was assassinated, he launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, reinvading Lebanon as part of that same doctrine.
See, we're going after the Shiites now.
And that was, again, the operation that motivated the lead hijacker of September 11th to join the jihad against us right there.
That was why he did that was part of that same strategy, right?
But then Shimon Perez's rule was short-lived and Benjamin Netanyahu first came in and became the Prime Minister of Israel for the first time in 1996.
Okay.
Now David Wormser and Richard Pearl write this study for him.
It's called A Clean Break, a New Strategy for Securing the Realm.
Again, you can find that at scotthorton dot org slash fair use.
And in fact, I'm sure there are archive dot org versions of it.
You can find it was the this Israeli think tank published it.
It wasn't an American think tank.
It was the Israeli Center for Strategic Study or something like that posted it there.
Yes, it's posted at scotthorton dot org slash fair use.
A Clean Break, a New Strategy of Securing the Realm by David Wormser, 1996.
And the companion piece, as it says there, is called Coping with crumbling states.
Coping with crumbling states, a Western and Israeli balance of power strategy for the Levant by David Warren in 1996.
And both of these, well, certainly the first one is officially signed off on by Richard Pearl, and then I should have hot links on those.
I'm not sure why I don't, but there are three related articles here by Loewenberg, Warren and Pearl promoting the same agenda in the newspapers there in the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Okay.
And they're called The Ultimate Peace Process Prize, Justice Saddam's Powers Under Saddam.
power is under assault, balance of power, all three pieces.
Yeah.
And now there's even a book.
It's called Tyranny's Ally by David Wormser with a forward by Richard Pearl.
They all say the same thing, okay?
What they say is that we're Israeli agents and Ahmed Jalabi sold us a bunch of crap and we bought it.
And it's this magic theory about how overthrowing Saddam is going to be good for Israel.
Now, oh, don't let me leave out that as part of Israel's secret relationship with Iran through the nineteen A's or their Their friendship continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s.
They had a secret oil pipeline from the port of Akaba, which I never say that right.
I forget how to pronounce it right, but we're talking about the Sinai Peninsula in the Red Sea.
Now, on the western side of the Sinai Peninsula is the Suez Canal and the gate to the Mediterranean Sea.
On the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula is the port of Akaba.
And there was a secret oil pipeline that was run by Mark Rich's company, the guy that Bill Clinton pardoned on his last day in office, who is this corrupt financier and oil industry guy.
And he, his company, had this secret pipeline where Iranian ships would come and drop off oil, and it would then go through this pipeline to Israel, right?
Well, once Rabin turned on Iran when he turned the periphery strategy upside down, then the Iranians quit sending oil.
In fact, it may not have been till 1995 that they quit sending oil because Treaty of Parsi explains that Iran didn't start backing Hamas until 1995, or at least maybe they had given them a little bit of something.
They had given them very little until then.
And so it was provocations by Rabin against Iran had finally after a year and a half of this or more.
I think it was 1993.
I think it wasn't until 1995 that Iran finally said, fine, then if you guys are going to be that way and stop shipping the oil in.
So now this becomes a major interest of the neoconservatives and the Likud party.
And Ahmed Chalabi understands very quickly that this is what these guys want to hear is that if America will put him and his friends in power in Iraq, they'll be friends with Israel.
Now in the original clean break, they say they want to use the cousin of the king of Jordan and they're going to put a Hashemite kingdom in there, Lex, to rule Iraq.
Now the magic theory here.
is that let's do a very, very elementary divide of the Sunnis and the Shiites here history lesson.
Okay, the Shiites went off with Muhammad's family after he died.
The Sunnis picked their own imams, right?
So there's like kind of one hierarchy.
It's a very, very, very inappt but very crude comparison between the Protestants and the Catholics.
There's one Shiite church basically, right, under the Ayatollahs and their system and they their inherited power through the bloodline and all of that.
On the Sunni side, they pick their own ministers, right?
Like the Protestants, they have their own and do their, there are many more sects and different kinds of Sunnis and that sort of deal.
If that makes sense on the most basic level here, okay.
So not that I'm saying the Shiites claim to be priests or anything like more analogous with the Catholic Church.
I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying there's this order of Ayatollahs, the same way there are of the Cardinals and whatever, if you understand.
So the deal is this.
Yes, the Shiites do revere their clergy leadership who are descended from Muhammad and evidently can prove it.
I don't know, apparently, right?
And wear their black turbans and that means they share his bloodline and all that, okay?
Well, the Hashemites also declare themselves to be his descendants, whether that's true ore or not, whatever, fine, take it for face granted, and it is, but they're Sunnis.
So the thing is about the Shiites revering people with the blood of the Prophet, their Shiite clergy, it doesn't mean that they consider them to be infallible dictators whose will is their law and all of these things.
Like even the Pope says some things are my opinion, some things I'm speaking for the Lord, but sometimes I'm just saying I think this is how it should be your way.
You know what I mean?
So the Ayatollahs do not exercise like a spellbinding power over these people through mysticism and like irrational demands of religious fealty to their every order or whatever, right?
Like there's a much more consensual relationship than that or whatever.
You know what I mean?
It's not completely top-down sort of thing like that.
And like where they have this magic spell of their bloodline then is like axis hypnosis or whatever or demands total obedience.
That's just never been the implication of the thing.
So Chalabi's just telling these guys whatever they need to hear, that if we put a Hashemite king in there, then he will be able to tell the Shiite clergy that they better stop tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran.
And then Hezbollah will be friends with Israel.
And then the Israelis can finish stealing Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah causing them problems on their northern flank.
That's the clean break.
Now, here's the thing about this, ma'am.
Picture the region in your head a little bit or pull up the map again if you need to.
You got, here's David Wormser's argument, okay?
He's saying Iran backs Hezbollah in southern Lebanon by way of Syria.
So what we want to do is.
get rid of Saddam Hussein, the secular Sunni, who is the roadblock to all this, right?
Huh?
Well, again, magic wish, what's going to happen is our Sunni king will just enslave the will of the Shiite supermajority, and they'll be our cat's paws and do whatever we want, and we'll lord them over Iran.
David Worms said, Chalabi assures us that a democratic Shiite Iraq will be a nightmare for Iran.
Because the Iranians will want to live like the Iraqis in their wonderful, new, awesome, supermajority Shiite democracy.
And so under the rule of their benevolent king or however, because they end up changing it a little bit, I guess, and emphasizing the democracy part more later.
But still, it would be a nightmare for Iran.
Because what happened was, I think the king of Jordan died and was replaced.
And they said, OK, forget that.
We'll just put Chalabi in power himself.
He'll be the guy that we put in.
Now, they also promised, Chalabi promised the neoconservatives, we'll build an oil pipeline from northern Iraq to Haifa, Israel, to make up for the pipeline that they just lost.
lost with the Iranians Netanyahu bought this and David Wormser and Richard Pearl bought this and this is one of the reasons one of the major reasons that 4,500 Americans and a million Iraqis died in Iraq War 2 was so Israel could save a nickel a barrel on Iraqi oil because their own policies had cost them their access to Iranian oil and so they were paying this extra premium after losing that
source.
And this oil pipeline to Haifa was a big deal and you'll want to pull this up because you'll want to read it later and laugh and weep.
It's called How Ahmed Chalibi Conned the Neocons.
Okay, now for your audience they need to know disclaimer.
A long time ago, salon dot com did journalism.
I know, it sounds absurd, and you probably don't believe me, even though I know you kind of like me and trust me, but this guy, John Desart, is from the Financial Times.
He is a solid guy.
I have a very brief acquaintance with him emailing back and forth, and he is no slouch, and this is not some woke, ridiculous propaganda.
This article is very good stuff.
Go ahead.
May fourth, two thousand four, John Desart, How Ahmed, Chalabi, Khan, the Neokhans.
The Hawks who launched the Iraq War believed the deal making exile when he promised to build a secular democracy with close ties to Israel.
deal is dead.
He's closing up to Iran, and his patrons look like they're on the way out.
Yeah, so in this article, man, it's brutal.
In there he quotes Douglas Fife.
Douglas Fife was again the third signatory on the clean break, although I believe he now disowns it and says, Well, I never agreed with that part and this kind of thing, but whatever.
And he helped run the he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy in the first Bush term and ran the office of special plans with Abram Schulski that lied us into war using lies funneled into the intelligence stream by Ahmed Chalibi.
It's a huge part of how they lied us into war.
I'm kind of skipping ahead.
I'm going to come back to that in a minute, okay?
But in this article, they quote Douglas Fight's law partner, Mark Zell, and people might follow him on Twitter.
The guy's a riot, dude, and meaning he's completely insane and a lot of fun if you're into insane Zionist warhawk genocidal lunatics.
But anyway, so he has these quotes in here, okay?
And like, this is not me talking.
I'm very careful with my words.
I'm a libertarian.
I'm an individualist.
I'm not a collectivist.
And I don't go around categorizing people by their religion and ethnicity and all this crap.
I just don't.
I want to raise that way.
It's just it is what it is.
This is Dazard talking to Chalalibi's friends, okay?
I'm quoting a guy, quoting a guy, quoting a guy, okay?
Forgive me.
I said to Ahmed, what are you doing running around with all these Jews?
And he said, I just need them until I can get my war.
And then I'm going to stab him in the back and we're going to get what we want.
So in other words, Richard Pearl is as stupid as he is evil.
And David Wormser and Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz and the Neoconservative Group, Douglas Fife, Scooter Libby, Hadley and Joe.
and Joseph and Edelman and All of these guys who lied rode, um, did I say Hannah and Edelman and Abrams, Schulski, that's what these idiots believed.
These are all neocons?
These are the neocons in the W. Bush administration, in the Vice President's office, in the State Department, in the Defense Department that lied us into war.
Colin Powell called them the Jinsa crowd.
Jinsa is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which at that time I believe was run by David Worms or he was one of the most powerful guys there.
And they were part and parcel with the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for a New American Century, the Center for Security Policy, and the other of the major neoconservative think tanks that pushed for that war at that time.
And they had power, that influence.
They had all the power and influence they needed because they got it from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
And what Powell said was this was a separate government inside the government that was run like a cell that was run by Dick Cheney.
Wormser was known as Cheney's agent, his plant at state, where his job he and John Bolton who is not a neoconservative because he's never any kind of leftist.
He's just a conservative nationalist type, but one of their fellow travelers, very close with them.
Bolton and Wormser's job was preventing Powell and Armitage, his guy, from preventing the war to keep a leash on them in whatever ways that they could obstruct their efforts.
And then, so in the vice president's office, he had Scooter Libby and Eric Edelman and Elliott Abrams.
No, no, pardon me.
Elliott Abrams was on the National Security Council with Zalmay Khalilzad, the same guy who was the primary author of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance along with Libby.
And Stephen Hadley, who was the Deputy National Security Advisor.
Then you had in the Defense Policy Board, you had Jean Kirkpatrick, who again was from the Social Democrats USA and the Young People's Socialist League before she converted to commentary magazine and Reaganism, making her a classical definition, oh, and as a hardcore sionist, of course, a classical definition neoconservative, along with Kenneth Adelman and Richard Pearl was the chair of the Defense Policy Board, which is a very important position in the Advisory Board.
And he was really the power behind the scenes, major ring leader of the group there.
Then Newt Gingrich was another fellow traveller, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Republican, who you could consider him sort of like John Bolton in a way where he's like more or less one of them, but not exactly.
But for example, you may have heard the stories about how Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby made fourteen trips to CIA headquarters to beat them over the head and say we need more against Iraq, come up with it.
And they wouldn't come up with it enough.
Well, Newt Gingrich did the same thing, went to CIA headquarters over and over and over again, saying, give us the goods.
We don't have enough.
We need more.
That's really dark.
Yeah.
So then under Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense was Douglas Fyth, who was Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, and under him was Abram Schulski and Schulski was a guy who ran the Office of Special Plans, which sounds innocuous enough, but this was the core of the neoconservative plot to launder lies from Ahmed Chalibi's exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress, into the intelligence stream, along with whatever they could dig out of the CIA's trash that the CIA had decided already to ignore.
And they had Michael Rubin and Michael Ledin and a whole group of I used to know all of their names, the guys at the Office of Special Plans, there's six or eight of them.
And across the hall was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which was led by David Wormser.
Again, he's traveling around.
He's vice president's office.
He's state.
He's defense wherever they need him.
And that's Wormser and a guy named Michael Malouf.
And their job was to dig through the CIA's trash and the exiles' lies and try to come up with anything to connect Saddam to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
And these guys all had this agenda and man, it was Zionism is at the core of it all.
And there's really just no denying that.
And in many cases, they admitted it.
And there are very authoritative sources on this.
For example, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times was for a very long time a reporter and is now, of course, the famous columnistist wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat.
Bill Clinton said he's the most important public intellectual in America.
He's is a somewhat conservative Jewish Sionist, New York Times writer and Iraq War supporter.
Okay, but he gave an interview to He's not a neoconservative and not really a fellow traveler of theirs.
He's a guy who just lives in the same world as them.
But he knows a hell of a lot.
He's extremely plugged in.
Okay?
For people who don't know, look him up.
Okay?
Thomas L. Friedman.
Thomas L. Friedman gave an interview to Harretz where he goes, let me tell you something.
Okay?
There's nine guys within a mile of here and they're the ones who did it.
I'm sorry, I'm getting the quote wrong.
I think the nine guys was Seymour Hirsch said it was nine guys.
But Friedman said something very close to that to Haretz, that it was the neoconservatives.
It was a very small group of guys.
This was their war.
They plotted it, they planned it, they made the advertising push to make it acceptable.
It was their war and they got it.
That's what it was.
Philip Zelicow, who is not a neoconservative, he was more of a council on foreign relations type with Connolly Rice and Robert Blackwell and some of those other guys who are not part of the neoconservative set in the same government.
Zelekow, you might remember, was the principal author of the nine hundred eleven commission report.
A lot of people don't like him for that for whatever reasons, good and bad probably.
But Zelekow said, let me tell you something, okay, about the motivation for the Iraq war, and this is not something that you'll hear very much, okay, but Saddam Hussein paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Saddam Hussein would pay any family who lost anybody in to Israeli violence, no matter what, or on no matter what.
So that meant if the Israelis bulldozed some old lady in her home and murdered her, then Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to her survivors.
But it also meant if some guy went and did a suicide attack and blow up a pizzeria full of kids on a Friday night, Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to his survivors too.
So this was quite clearly incentivizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, right?
So that is a real security problem for Israel.
And as Philip Zelicow said, this was a real hard, motivating factor for the neoconservatives to want to launch this war.
So how does the military delta complex now start stepping in?
into this whole picture.
Great place for this question.
So Andrew Coburn is a great author.
His brother Patrick Coburn, I mentioned previously, is the most important, or at least in our era, has been the most important Western journalist, especially in Iraq, I would argue.
Alexander Coburn is the leftist agitator, founder of Counterpunch, who died of cancer years ago.
And Andrew is the author who writes the books.
And his wife, Leslie Coburn, wrote the great book, Out of Control, about the Iran-Contra scandal.
And then Andrew wrote Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy, and Kill Chain about the terror war, especially the drone wars and all that stuff.
Brilliant guy.
So he told me years ago, he goes, listen, here's the best way to understand the neoconservative movement.
They're the cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex.
Right?
So we already have banking and oil, and banking and oil already has the Council on Foreign Relations since the end of the First World War.
That's their center of gravity.
Right?
Well, the neocons weren't all that welcome there.
Right?
So they said, well screw you guys.
We'll make our own think tanks.
And they made their alliance with the military industrial complex who had a lot of money at stake.
But not so many eggheads to write the studies about why their products needed to be purchased by their captive audience, the Pentagon.
So this is where the neoconservatives come in very handy to the military industrial complex.
And of course, what's the center of America's relationship with Israel?
Military support and security guarantees, right?
That's what it all comes down to is America guaranteeing Israel's security militarily.
So how do we do that?
We do that by making Lockheed rich, making Israel armed.
And so you have this perfect alliance between these factions.
So in the 1980s, it was.
It was really with this money, it's how they took over and the organization It provided was how they took over the Olin and Mellon and Scaif foundations.
They took over the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage.
Then they created their own forest of all the new ones.
Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
I think the Committee on the Present Danger was previous to this, but I guess they recreated the Committee on the Present Danger.
They had PNAC and the Center for Security Policy.
Again, that's Frank Gaffney and his guys and whatever, the handful of others there that helped to boost that whole and created that echo chamber.
And of course, along very important with, again, the weekly Standard magazine and Bruce Jackson from Lockheed is really the exemplar of this because he came in in the 1990s and he put up all the money for the Committee on NATO expansion and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
And they focused mostly on humanitarian excuses for going in and helping the Iraqi people.
But they were working hand in glove with Bill Crystal as, you know, one of the agents of the Axis of Crystal, as Justin called it, the guys lying us into war with the Weekly Standard leading the charge and Jonah Goldberg and the National Review right behind him, doing everything they could to push us into that war.
Michael Ledean would write and Jonah Goldberg would publish over and over and over again, Michael Ledean demanding, bastard, please., we have to keep going to the rest of the terror masters, especially Tehran as soon as possible, as Jonah Goldberg wrote, Baghdad Delenda Est, meaning must be destroyed, right, like Carthage must be destroyed.
And Baghdad Delenda Est Part two, where he says, It's the Ledin doctrine, he approvingly quotes, The Ledin doctrine is that America, every ten years or so, we have to take some small country and throw them up against the wall just to show the world that we mean business.
That's conservatism in the hands of these essentially bastard children of Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army.
Right, and Justin, when you read, when you get into Justin Romondo and you read Trotsky, Strauss and the Neocons and all this, you can see where he's talking about.
There were arguments in the pages of the National Review about Trotsky and his legacy from some of these neocons at that time, and Justin talks about like, how baffled must the readership of the National Review be right now?
These are your leaders.
They're Trotskyites.
This is who controls the Republican Party and American foreign policy.
The world won't be safe till the revolution is complete.
And by the way, we got to start with all Israel's enemies first.
It's nuts.
So underpinning this kind of ever growing bureaucracy that's connected to the military industrial complex is this kind of collectivism thinking.
And money.
You know, it's a connected market.
So much money.
And as I show, we'll talk about this more in the Cold War section when we get to it later, but it was a real crisis at the end of the Cold War for the military industrial complex.
And they were open about it.
Like what's going to happen to us now?
Lockheed tried to get into administering welfare payments and stuff.
They're like they're not a free market operation.
They're a government connected regime.
But they try to pivot, you're saying?
Yeah, they're trying to figure out, yeah, what are we going to do in the world, right?
And then, but the idea is clear that, look, if we control the think tanks and the think tanks decide the policy, then that we can decide what kind of weapons we need to develop to have for sale.
So are we building jungle gear or are we building desert gear?
What kind of tanks?
What kind of helicopters?
If we set the policy, then we get to save money by developing the, by making good guesses about what kind of weapons the Pentagon is going to need, because we're the ones deciding.
It's so I just remembered a great footnote for this., you guys will love it.
Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels by Richard Cummings.
And it's on my site, again, scotthorton dot org slash fair use, and you can also find it on CorpWatch as well.
It was originally written for playboy dot com.
And I interviewed the guy, but it was one of the first interviews I did when I started the show full time in January of 2007, and he says, guess what?
All those neocons who are such Lacudnicks, and who are pounding around with Netanyahu and talking about oil pipelines to Haifa, they're all on Lockheed's payroll.
The only one who wasn't was Hadley, but Hadley worked for a law firm that had represented them.
But the rest of them had had or not all the rest of them, many of them, And I don't just mean the think tank guys, but like the guys in the W. Bush administration had some direct connection to Lockheed, including Dick Cheney's wife sat on the board of directors.
Not that he's a neoconservative, you understand, but can you actually speak to that?
I'm sorry to zoom out again on human nature.
No, you should.
Do you think?
So I should actually mention I don't know much about Lockheed, but to the degree I've interacted with folks that are Lockheed, who are engineers, and it's, there's some incredible engineering that's going on there.
Sure.
And I wonder, like, do they all believe in what they're doing?
They have a narrower problem set that they're solving.
It's no different than a soldier.
I mean, if you ask them, I know what they'll tell you.
That ain't my job.
My job is making sure this gizmo works.
But does anyone at any place in Lockheed think like it is their job to think about the big picture ethics of Hulfis?
Yes, but their customer is the US government.
And the US government is a democracy that represents the will of the consensus of the majority adult population of this great free land.
And so always outsourcing ethics.
Yes, and listen, I got to tell you, man, this is so important, so glad that you mentioned this because you do.
You do have, in fact, like direct quotes from, for example, Raytheon is one coming straight to mind, where they say, listen, I mean, these policies are decided by the government.
Our job is to make sure that they have what they need, and that's to be decided by other people, right?
But then, no, Raytheon will directly intervene in policy to make sure that the policy is what they want.
For example, Barack Obama started a genocidal war against the people of Yemen in twenty fifteen, which Donald Trump continued.
I'm jumping way ahead in our narrative here, but the House, and only because of peace activists.
There's no Houthi lobby in America, believe me.
It was only Quakers and hippies and libertarians said please stop this and got Congress to pass a war powers resolution twice to try to force Trump to end the war, but they passed the wimpy kind that he's allowed to veto instead of the other kind that he can't, and so he vetoed it twice, but then guess what?
Pete Navarro, his trade representative, we're talking Trump one term here, Pete Navarro, his trade representative told the New York Times that the reason that they kept the war going and vetoed and refused to end the war was to pay Raytheon because Raytheon wanted the Yemen war because it was making them a bunch of money.
And the Trump people, since they had done these tariffs that were frustrating big manufacturing firms in America, they said, we have to find a way to put, talk about collectivism, we have to find a way to put manufacturing on welfare.
So what we'll do is we'll commit genocide against the people of Yemen, because that's what Saudi Arabia and the AAE want, not because of anything that has anything to do with America's national interest.
The Houthis were helping us kill Al Qaeda guys a month before that.
But we're going to do this for them and because industry wants free money, because they're mad that we put these tariffs on China and disrupted.
some of their supplies and whatever.
So they're going to put this one big company on the dole and that's going to make somehow all of manufacturing in America happy.
That was their reasoning for doing it because Raytheon was demanding it.
And then Raytheon will turn right around and go, Hey, listen, Lex, don't come crying to me.
It was the democratically elected people of this country who demanded that we make these wares to provide your security pal.
I don't know what you want to say.
They pretend that they're not dealing with the devil, but they are.
Somehow they know it, somewhere they know it.
Somewhere this department knows that that's that department's job.
Like we do hire lobbyists to advocate for policies, don't we?
Yeah, of course, we do.
But it's very uncomfortable to think about that, so they You know what gets me, man, is this is how the H bomb lobby works too.
It's no different.
Honeywell makes in Lockheed, they make hydrogen bombs, and they will send a salesman to Capitol Hill talking about Senator, Senator, let me tell you, I gotta get rid of some H bombs here.
What kind of deal can I cut?
What do I gotta do to get this H bomb in your driveway by tonight?
They are like supply side.
You might have some you probably didn't think.
it all the way through, right?
But somewhere in the back of your mind is this Like half articulated fantasy that nuclear weapons are a demand side business in this country where the military comes to the Congress and says we need exactly this many and then the Congress says to industry we need exactly this many.
What do you mean the industry is trying to push H bombs because of their awesome profit margins?
And that we run the H bomb supply business the same way you would expect with M four rifles or combat boots?
Yep, that's exactly right.
And that's exactly what's meant by the military industrial complex.
So there's a real strong case to be made that it's a supply side.
War is a supply side entity.
In our era, it sure as hell is, isn't it?
It's the era of the phony wars, man.
What do I gotta do to put this war in your driveway today, Lex?
I tell you that they hate Islam, that the Islam's hate your religion, they hate your mama, they hate freedom, they did this.
Did I ever tell you about the Beirut bombing in nineteen eighty?
What do I gotta do to get you mad enough to do this with me?
Right?
That's why it's a constant bombardment of propaganda.
They don't have a real case to make.
They gotta try to scare you and lie to you.
And that's from their perspective, from the industry perspective, the Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen wars are a success, eight trillion dollars.
It's the self-liking ice cream cone.
It's the military industrial complex.
Hey, you know what, don't criticize it, Lex.
It's called now the Defense Industrial Base.
And if you ask the Democrats, they'll tell you it's the number one, best and most important reason for the Ukraine war is because it's a good subsidy for our defense industrial base.
They ran out of arguments and they settled on that.
And they didn't know how absolutely demonic they sounded.
that's why we want to have a war is just literally like in your crazy conspiracy theory, you're crazy when you say it and you call it the MIC.
But now it's the defense industrial base and it's awesome.
It's spectacular and you better get on board for it.
It's the best reason to have these wars in fact, and we're not embarrassed to tell you.
You can go read it in Politico.
I don't know what else to say.
This is straight out of the Democrats' mouths on the last war in the last presidential term there.
How do the American people fight this?
Well, the first thing would be to get used to the idea that they're lying to you next time too, right?
They've done nothing but take advantage this whole time.
There's no reason to give your government the benefit of the doubt that they care what's true or that they want you to understand the truth.
That's not what they're about.
They're trying to get you.
I mean, just think about how they operate.
Always, they're trying to get you upset so that then you'll let them do something, right?
Like I'm detecting a pattern here.
And it doesn't mean that everything is a false flag or anything like that, but it's just they do nothing but create crises and then exploit them.
It's a monopoly on security services.
So when George W. Bush is on the job for eight months before september eleventh, his approval rating goes up to ninety percent.
Because we can't fire the national government and replace it with another one.
We're not having another election for another three years, and so this is the security force we got, and so we better support it because what we're trying to send a signal to the world that you better know that we're all one for all and you better not mess with us or whatever, but what are we really doing?
We're telling George Bush that he has a mandate to do anything he thinks he can get away with, and that we do nothing but support him after the greatest failure of any president in all of American history for that to be allowed to happen on his watch and when we all know of course that they knew it was coming and that at least parts of the CIA were warning and trying desperately to get the White House to pay attention to the fact that this attack was coming and that Bush refused to pay attention,
I think because he didn't want to be distracted with going after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan when he was trying to go to Iraq.
And which is another important point to bring up back to the debate with Dubowitz there, where oh, the Jews this, the Jews that, and the neoconservatives and whatever.
Well, to be perfectly clear as everyone knows, George W. Bush is a Methodist, right?
son of episcopalian wasps from Connecticut.
And Dick Cheney is some kind of redneck from out in Wyoming.
And I mean that in a complimentary way.
Yeah, no, I appreciate working class folk.
I've done plenty of that kind of work myself.
But he liked climbing electric poles and stuff like that.
He's from out west and is a cowboy and a conservative and a right winger and a nationalist and a tough guy.
That's his problem.
Donald Rumsfeld was previously the Secretary of Defense and had his own plans for there was this whole debate back during that era of the transformation of the military.
Everybody knows now that the Soviet Union's gone and it's the whole new order..
What order is it?
And what should the military look like?
What sort of weapon system should we focus on?
This and that.
And Rumsfeld had his own ideas.
Like generically speaking, he wanted to stick it to big army and give their money to the Air Force and the Special Operations Forces instead.
Again, the Lockheed promo video, where what we do is we send in special operations forces and air power to whoop anybody in a few weeks and then move on to the next one.
We don't want to stay light and fast and not get bogged down.
That was one of their excuses for letting bin Laden go.
Well, we didn't want to get bogged down.
Oh, what?
Killing bin Laden and Zawhari, the two most important.
guys that you could possibly target in the thing who were both there, you know, come on, but that was part of their excuse, light and fast, keep it going.
W. Bush, I think, wanted to prove he was tougher than his father.
In a sense, probably wanted to avenge his father and from the fake assassination plot, but also the humiliation, again, Bill Hicks was so wise about this that the humiliation of HW Bush being voted out of office while Saddam Hussein was still in the chair.
And he says they had to wait a couple of days for Saddam Hussein to quit laughing to get his quote.
And then he goes, We have nothing against America.
We just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down.
the road like a soccer ball.
And then Bill goes, wow, me and Saddam Hussein, we're like this.
Who would have thought it?
So some of it is personal too, right?
And in fact, Crystal said, I remember seeing Crystal on TV say, well, of course, and see, wait, wait, before Crystal, I said this to my math teacher in eleventh grade, was you Scott Horton?
Yes, into your math teacher in 1994, when the day that they announced or the next day after they announced that W. Bush was also going to run for governor just like his brother Jeb is running for governor in Florida.
I said to my math teacher, oh, you see what I'mre doing?
I was seventeen.
I said, you see what they're doing?
They're making sure that one or the other, at least, of these guys will be a second term governor in the year two thousand.
Then they can run for president and go back to Iraq, which means the Democrats are going to, I mean, which means the Republicans are going to run a weakling in 96 and throw the election for Bill and let him win again so that they can run a fresh Bush in two thousand.
Nailed that dude.
And why?
Because of the humiliation.
That was my high school thinking at the time.
Because of the humiliation that Saddam's still there but Bush is gone.
Bush lost after only one term.
And then so that's got to be avenged, and that's clearly what they're doing here.
And then Bill Crystal said the same thing.
Now Bill Crystal is bullying W. Bush, right?
Bill Crystal ain't me, he's him up there, and he's saying, Well, I just can't imagine that W. Bush would risk being unelected after only one term with Saddam Hussein still in charge over there.
So I think that it's just an obvious matter of course that he will have to invade Iraq in his first term, and I encourage that and think it's great and he should.
And I saw Crystal say that probably during the campaign before he was elected president, somewhere around there.
And again, I wasn't quite sure who Crystal was, and I certainly didn't know who his father was in the neoconservative movement yet, but I knew that this is the guy from the weekly standard that's always on about Saddam Hussein.
And so that was the way that he was trying to frame it to W. Bush himself, that of course you can't take the risk of running for reelection in'O four with Saddam Hussein still sitting there.
What if you lost just like your dad?
Your family could never live that down.
Saddam still in the chair after two Bushes got unelected after only one term?
Perish the thought.
It makes me realize that when you're in the seat of the president, it takes real courage to basically resist the military industrial complex.
I mean, W. Bush had no courage or insight or depth or humanity.
And so there's something about our political system that doesn't make it easy for truly courageous singular figures to win the presidency, right?
And you'd probably be terrified of them if they did.
You know what I mean?
Because you got people like that.
They're going to use that courage.
And again, this is sort of the irony of the neoconservatives, as they say, you know, Henry Kissinger's a monster.
His amoral foreign policy that says, well, if the Indonesians feel like killing.
all the Timorese, I guess they have to or whatever, that not like us, we're a morality based foreign policy.
That's why we have to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein is so immoral and we have to go and bring light and goodness to the world by doing the right thing, by starting another war.
And so that's right, those are your two choices.
You have amoral and immoral in the name of morality, you know, and using that excuse.
And as they would always put it, the Straussians, because he was one of the former Troskiites that then a lot of these guys studied under.
And he would say, Oh no, we're all philosopher kings, see.
And unlike Lockean or Jeffersonian type American principles, our principles are that elites, you know, like David Wormser and Richard Pearl, who are so smart that only they can understand the real truth and the subtext of the truth, and everybody else is some idiot who has to be lied to with noble lies by their philosopher kings because they won't do the right thing for the right reasons.
They have to be told false reasons to make them do the right thing and all these things.
And they got to justify all their lies by wrapping it up in all those justifications that they know what they're doing.
When of course these people are just clowns., dude.
There's no difference.
And I know, look, at the time I was driving a taxi in this town, on this, up and down this street, okay?
And the average idiot around here knew better than all of this, right?
And it wasn't because they had special knowledge, but they just knew, you don't start a war.
God knows what could happen.
You have no idea, dude, how many just regular people told me, I don't think Saddam Hussein is friends with Osama bin Laden.
You know?
Yeah, there's a deep wisdom in that common sense.
That's what makes America great is, uh, for the longest time the people had power.
Yeah.
And so to the degree that the people have power and that wisdom can speak through its representatives, then we'll be all right.
But the more the bureaucracy grows, the more the military industrial complex gains power, then that common sense wisdom of the people is silenced.
Well, and I like telling this story too.
So I'll go ahead and write on the guide to YouTube.
I had a guy in my cab who is like a mister Fancy Pants man about town.
I dropped him off at some very swanky bachelor pad apartments off of South Mopak there.
He was a real nice guy.
We had a long conversation because I wouldn't let the poorest OB go.
And I'm beating him over the head and I'm telling him, damn it, I swear to God that this is true, okay?
George W. Bush, Connolly Zarice, Colin Powell, George Tennett, none of them have said that Saddam did 911.
Now Dick Cheney did, but he's a damn liar, but there's a real important reason why Bush and Powell are not saying that.
Okay?
They're perfectly happy to leave you with that impression that that must be what they were trying to imply, and that's what you thought you heard them say, but you didn't.
And you promise me you go inside and you Google, you look hard, you will not find them directly saying that.
And he says to me, ah, but come on, man, I mean, if Saddam Hussein didn't do 911, then why are we attacking him then?
Right?
Which is a good question, but to him the answer was built into the thing that actually the cab driver couldn't possibly be right because the people in Washington would not lead me to believe that this has anything at all to do with avenging that innocent dead Americans slaughtered on September 11, airplanes full of little kids on their way on vacation.
That what do you mean this has nothing to do with that?
What's more likely your cab driver knows better or that no, you are right to disbelieve and believe in authority that swears that they're doing this to protect you from the enemy that attacked you.
And so that's the kind of cognitive dissonance that is always baked into these kinds of things.
It's the same thing with Israel now.
Well, this is the most barbaric society on the planet, how come we're their best friends?
Yeah, again, a very good question, but it's not answered by they must not be.
They must be really great.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be, which is what the cognitive dissonance would try to have you explain to yourself, I guess.
Yeah, by the way, the everyday people, like, just like we said, often have a deep wisdom that the government lacks, and more than almost any other career, I think, cab drivers really have that wisdom.
I don't know what it is about cab drivers, but they really get it because they get to talk to a lot of people.
They get to think through a lot of it.
You get to like think through it.
Hey, I think all the time about, I mean, there's a lot of cabarets I don't remember, but there are a few that I do where it was I got something wrong and the guy goes, Nah, nah, nah, it's not like that, it's like this and he was right and I was wrong and I went, Ah, you know, I really picked up something there.
You know what I mean?
Like one of the good ones I said I was kind of a New World Order cook back then and one of the good ones I still remember where I was on Mopac where the guy said to me that like, listen man, it's not conspiracy, it's just politics, okay?
It's the game over who controls the power.
You don't need secret societies, you just need oak tables, man.
This is business and that's how it goes.
And if you can click with you..
Even, yeah, and even the most conspiratory type thing, if you just leave out the secret society crap and just focus on Lockheed and the Israel lobby and the Republican Party and oil interests and whatever where all these things come together, it's all very clear.
You know what I mean?
And you don't have to be a Chomskyite leftist to see it that way at all.
Like, I'm a libertarian and we're pure free market types, which means we find it morally criminal for any company to get a government contract for anything, right?
Like, we don't want any public-private partnerships of any kind.
When we say privatization, we don't mean government contracts.
We mean privatization, get government out of it and let free people figure it out.
Any corporation on welfare deserves to be destroyed to a libertarian.
So it's you don't have to like identify somehow as like, well, only an anarcho syndicalist in the Chomskyite mold would think that we have this problem with these crony corporations.
No, indeed we do.
And in fact, again, not again, but go back.
Who coined the term military industrial complex?
It was Dwight David Eisenhower, the five-star army general who was the commander of all United Nations forces in Europe in World War II and then came home and was the two term Republican president of the United States of America, who is the one who did the coup in fifty three in Iran, who's the one who built as many nuclear missiles as he possibly could, but why?
To try to hold the army at bay.
Eisenhower said, God help the next president of this country who doesn't have the experience with the army that I do, to try to keep these men from their demands where they were constantly demanding more divisions, more divisions, more divisions, and he said, No, I'm going to build more missiles instead.
You guys get away from me, and only he had the power to do it at the time.
I'm not taking a stance on this, but it's widely believed that these same forces blew the head off of his successor for getting in their way, which is at least possible if not likely, right?
That was what happened in Dallas.
But by these forces, and we don't really know the full meaning the military and the intelligence agencies, right?
As was the idea.
It's like a network of people that sure work together.
The Black Access Program, Special Access Program in the military is Fletcher Prouty and them.
Their argument about the thing, which whatever, whether that's true or not, it's believable enough because, and what Eisenhower said that on his last day in office.
Sorry, Charlie, I did the best I could.
Maybe this is half my fault.
Good luck to you.
And then I quit and was out the door.
And then, but have we ever had a major reckoning since then?
Where what?
Oh, after Vietnam and Nixon was impeached, that was when we destroyed the military industrial complex?
No.
Right?
That never happened.
After the end of the Cold War, is that what happened?
No.
We went to Bosnia and then we went to Iraq.
We went to Bosnia and stayed in the Middle East and expanded wherever we can.
As in how our speeches are haunting.
Yeah, there's the other one is the Cross of Iron speech where he calculates the cost of battleships compared to schools and grocery stores and things.
It's not all public goods or, you know, so called public goods like public schools, but he talks about like private investment and the comparisons that every bit of money that we spend on this is wealth that comes from the American people that the government then denies us, takes from us and destroys.
Like, if you ever read 1984 in the part I read it many times, of course.
And there's a part of the book where Winston Smith is being brought under the wing of his future torture, O'Brien, and O'Brien gives him the manual for how we do it, right?
And he holds up in his bedroom and reads the book How We Do It.
And it says in there that, listen, we keep them in a permanent state of war at all times to keep them on edge, to keep them insecure, to take any excess wealth that the people would otherwise spend improving their own lives and we sink it into the ocean in the form of the floating fortress or we blast it off into space in the form of these missiles and rockets that we're building so that the people can't have it.
So that we cannot build up our society to protect our own needs and interests.
Now of course anyone leaning left listening to this would prefer that the government spend this money on public school and health care and infrastructure.
Anybody right leaning listening to this says that's my money, stop printing money and inflating the money supply, stop taxing me, leave me alone.
Me and my buddies will invest in private businesses and we will produce.
the wealth society needs.
Fine.
What we all have to agree is that this has to come to an end where we let them take trillions and trillions of our dollars.
What they can't tax, they borrow.
And what they can't borrow, they inflate.
And with the inflation, this is the absolute crisis of confidence.
And again, Bin Laden invited our government to do this self inflicted wound, meaning really our government wounding all of us.
And this is the absolute crisis of our era is price inflation.
This is why people can't pay the rent.
This is why they can't afford to feed their family.
This is why they are forced broke.
It's why young men and women can't start families and buy homes.
It's because of price inflation, which is the result of monetary expansion.
The expansion, especially of bank credit, although in our very current era, because of Donald Trump and Joe Biden's massive stimulus bills that they signed during COVID, you can trace that back to wars.
And it's almost entirely like, well, big government overall relies on inflationary money.
But then, yes, this is a massive part of our budget is the annual militarism for the global empire.
And so like to turn it around, Jonah Goldberg from the National Review, mister Ledine Doctor, he says, well, we can't have a gold standard because what if there's a war, right?
But then that's Ron Paul's point.
That's why we should have a gold standard.
So Jonah Goldberg can't have a war, right?
Because they have to print the money.
If they had to raise your taxes to go stop ToJo, maybe even then they had to print money and borrow money.
But people sure as hell took Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan seriously enough to fight and they still had to conscript millions of people to do it.
But whatever, at least you got a credible threat there.
But you're going to tell the American people., hey, we're going to have to raise everybody's income tax in every bracket by six percent so that we can launch an aggressive war against Iraq so that Israel can save a nickel a barrel, hopefully if they can get their silly pipeline they want built.
American people say, hell no.
When they print the money, remember this, George Bush sent people, anyone who paid income taxes, got a refund check of an extra three or four hundred dollars depending on your bracket in two thousand three and four.
This was meant to look like, well, I infer this.
It was meant to look like your dividend.
It was meant to fool you into thinking that the Iraq war is profitable, that America is making money from this, like in the cliché that you would hear from people in the neighborhood.
Well, war is good for the economy.
And look, we're all directly benefiting from this apparently.
We all get an extra $300 or $400.
But of course, they just printed that money.
And all that inflation during the W. Bush years is what led to the giant housing bubble and the crash of AWAY and the absolute decimation that came after that.
And then what Obama did?
He came and printed even more money, built up an even bigger bubble to try to deal with that.
Then, of course, the COVID lockdowns essentially played the role of high interest rates and just crushing the economy and forcing a massive recession on people.
But then what did they do?
They didn't just have the Fed, like, lower interest rates.
and lower reserve ratios so that they could expand money even more.
They literally just mailed everyone checks of brand new money from the Treasury, all brand new money.
And by some measures, they created two thirds of all US dollars that were ever created were created since 2020.
And so that's Trump's fault and Biden's fault for doing those giant monetary expansion acts, that's what has led to the giant inflationary crisis today as these absolutely incompetent managers of our economy.
And this is the thing where if people aren't libertarians at all, if people lean any degree left or right from me and from Austrian school libertarian things, it's totally fine.
Disagree with me on whatever you want.
warfare, welfare, anything.
But it's just true, man, it's just true.
The Austrians are correct about the cause of the business cycle, the boom and bust.
Now, of course, if the frost wipes out all the oranges, then that's going to cause disruptions in that one market or whatever.
But what caused what Ludwig von Mises called the cluster of errors, where all these businessmen are making all these bad bets all at the same time that then leads to these terrible crashes and resets and corrections?
And the answer is it's inflationary money and artificially low interest rates because what it does is it's manipulating the price of money, artificially valuing money with government control and leading producers to follow false price signals and to mistakenly believe that there are more resources available in the economy for use than there really are.
If you had free market interest rates, then the more capital you use to invest, the more it costs to borrow more capital, right?
And when savings are low and capital is low to invest in new things, then interest rates would naturally go up.
But when the Federal Reserve Bank holds interest rates low.
And if the prices are low, then that doesn't happen.
And so you have, especially in the higher order goods, like mining and quarries and machine tools and the kinds of things that are then used to sell the other businesses to make other things and these kinds of things, they make long term farmers or other ones, they make long term loans at artificially low interest rates that then they end up getting screwed later because they're not able to produce to keep up when the crash comes.
Now, let's say you own a quarry and you're an Austrian school guy and you see what's going on here.
Well, Alan Greenspan's just printing a bunch of money.
And so all my competitors are hiring new workforces and they're buying new machine tools and they're getting way ahead of me in their productive capacity.
But I know that they're screwed because they're going deep into debt for all this stuff and the music's going to stop.
However, if I don't, if you, the quarry owner, if you don't play the same game, you're also going to lose sooner than them.
You're going to lose before they have a chance to get screwed.
So even if you know better, you still have to expand beyond what you really know that you can do.
So like one example that Austrians like to use, I think is like if the circus comes to town for a month or whatever and the local.
dairy queen is really busy, and then the guy builds a giant extension on the thing, thinking that, like, this is how it's going to be now.
But no, this is just temporary.
This is a boom followed by a bust, right?
Well, so this is the artificial value of those customers in that time induced by the traveling circus.
But in our case, we're talking about money artificially inflating the value of certain firms and certain banks, investments and these kinds of things.
This is what leads to the cluster of errors that leads to the collapses.
And people can read, of course, the brilliant Ludwig von Mises in his theory of money and credit from 100 years ago.
Then of course there's Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money and the Case Against the Fed.
And then there's all of the brilliant guys of the Austrian school, especially Robert Murphy and Tom Woods and all the guys at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
And imperialism and militarism are at the heart of this.
David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's former budget advisor, calls this the great deformation.
He says all these little bubbles like 87 and 92 and 99 and 08, these are the little bubbles on top of the big bubble of America's overall inflationary monetary policy since the end of the Second World War in order to make the militarism seem artificially cheap, to make it seem more.
Imagine how deceived people would have to be to think that war is good for the economy because they notice the Russian spending and the immediate stimulative effect when this is the difference between the seen and the unseen.
Where's all that wealth coming from?
And now where's it going?
It's going to make tools of death and destruction, net losses in property values all the way around.
In a lot of times goods that can never be reused again.
The plane can fly again, but the bomb shirt can't.
F thirty five's fall out of the sky all the time in the headlines again today.
And so this is all a net loss in terms of all of this capacity being directed into militarism and then going away.
But people get fooled into thinking that this is what's good and this is what's necessary.
And of course, Lockheed does things and the rest of them, Boeing and the rest, they have explicit, um, gerrymandering type policies where they will have one small part of every weapons system made in as many factories as possible across the country.
So that if Congress ever wants to roll back anything, they will have an army of lobbyists to threaten them that we're talking about six hundred jobs in your district, Congressman.
Is that what you're willing to do?
And then they all just snap right into line.
You know, again, what they say, hey, we're just supplying the weapons that the Congress demands.
No, they're not.
They're rigging the whole game, so we have no choice but to give in to them, essentially.
If I can just take an aside, you mentioned you used to be a cab driver.
I would love to understand the story of somebody that was a cab driver that eventually became one of the most prolific libertarians anti-war intellects of the modern era.
Who are you?
I'm a, I mean, look at this.
The number of citations here breaks seven thousand.
Seven thousand.
Look, I mean, how?
And why were you driving a cab?
And what, how did you come to be this person?
Well, I mean, I'm a skateboarder type and just anti government type.
Like I say, I learned about Ronald Reagan being a dope pusher when I was a child.
Bill Clinton burned the Branch Davidians to death in front of my eyes and called it a suicide when I was sixteen.
Covered up the Oklahoma bombing, blamed it on one guy two years later.
They still, they're no longer getting away with that.
There's a brand new book called Blowback, and I haven't read it yet, but I know the fact checker, and I know that it's right that McVeigh had friends.
They were undercover FBI informants, at least two of them, Roger Moore and Andre Strassmeier, were agent-provocateurs and they covered it up because it was their own guys who did it.
I'm not saying the government did it on purpose, but I'm saying the FBI was essentially a sting that they were meant to stop it and they didn't stop it and they covered that up and they got the whole media to go along with that.
And then, you know, as a big fan, like, see, it's kind of funny, but I'm kind of angry at them, so I'll put them on blast anyway.
I don't care.
When I was young, I read Reason magazine and I thought, I hate these guys.
That's what a libertarian is, that they think their job is.
debunking Gulf War illness.
They think their job is debunking the number of Iraqis starving to death under Bill Clinton's sanctions.
And they don't give a damn about the Branch Davidians.
They don't give a damn about anything of this, right?
I don't know what they're good for, lower taxes and maybe guns, not that they're doing anything important about it.
And so I shied away from the libertarian movement for a long time because that's what I thought the libertarian movement was.
And I would rather pile around with a bunch of right-wing militia guys because at least they care about the Branch Davidians.
And there was in Austin at that time, there was kind of a thriving what they called the Patriot.
Movement, which is like the civilian side of the militia movement, basically.
And it's all like, yeah, right wing conspiracy guys who were right about everything then about who started that fire in Waco, about who helped blow up Oklahoma City, about the sanctions in Iraq killing kids, about the Gulf War illness that they were covering up illness says, I should say, that they were covering up and saying, Oh, drink a beer, chin up and don't be a wimp.
And all this, these guys were dying of cancers and other diseases that they got from what the Pentagon did to them and exposed them to in Iraq War one.
And so, you know, the the the the conspiracy cooks were batting a hundred, batting a thousand.
What are I'm not a baseball guy, I'm a skateboarder.
They're batting a thousand.
Yeah.
You know, during that era, they're they're really right about a lot of things, and I would have rather hung around them, even though I wasn't culturally right wing like them.
But William Norman Grigg at the New American Magazine was really great.
And of course Ron Paul came back to Congress in'97.
Was Ron Paul the person that kind of convinced you that libertarianism could be a powerful movement?
Yes.
Ron Paul convinced me of a lot of things, man.
He's really been a North Star to me this whole time, ever since then.
I was so excited from the, I'll tell you, the first time I ever saw Ron Paul was ten years before everyone else got their big Giuliani moment when Ron whooped Rudy Giuliani in that debate in March, excuse me, May of 2007 where they fought over the motivation of Osama bin Laden to attack us on 911.
Ron said it's because we're bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia for ten years.
Everybody knows that.
And Giuliani flipped his lid and Ron was of course heroic and right.
But my Giuliani moment was a decade before.
I saw Ron in the middle of night on CSPAM, Dr. Paul on CSPAM, the middle of night speaking to an empty Congress.
Except whoever was filling in in the speaker chair.
Mr. Speaker, I have here in my hands reports from the British press today about how George Bush was selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein leading right up to the invasion of Kuwait.
What's up with that?
And now we still have all these sanctions.
and doing all these things and we're so responsible for this guy's evil in the first place after we had backed him all that time and all these things.
And this is not wise foreign policy, Mr. Speaker.
We ought to come home.
And I'm like, wow, that any congressman would say anything that honest on the record inside the Capitol building like that, I couldn't believe it.
And I looked at the bottom of the screen.
It says Ron Paul R Texas.
And I'm like, no way, because, you know, Bush Sr. himself is nominally from here, right?
He's from Connecticut, really, but he made his fortune here in oil and lived here for a very long time.
And, you know, he's raised his family in West Texas for most of the time and that kind of thing.
So he's an extremely important guy in Texas politics.
So for this congressman to dare to say that, he's essentially accusing Bush of treason.
Okay, this is I'm interested in this guy.
And then I'm reading the new American magazine, which is the John Berchers magazine, they have a very bad rap as racists and stuff, which is totally not true.
They're conspiratorial and I don't agree with them on everything and they're more conservative than me.
They're good people.
They're George Washington's constitution guys and mostly Protestant and Catholic Christians and American patriotic folk.
They're good people.
And the editor of their magazine at that time was the great William Norman Grigg.
And he would run Ron Paul stuff constantly.
He would cover Ron.
And then I used to be a pirate radio guy.
So I had I would call his weekly update.
I don't know if he still does this.
It was 888 322 1414.
And then I would just play the Ron Paul weekly update and put that over the air.
And it was always just killer stuff, dude.
Financial, you know, monetary policy and boom and bust and the evils of war.
I would drive around in my taxi and I would have printed out Ron Paul's speeches.
And there was one that was called A Republic if you can keep it.
And then, which is the famous Benjamin Franklin quote to The Baker.
And I'm going to quote to the Baker Lady about what do we have, a monarchy or a republic, a republic if you can keep it.
And then the sequel was called, I'm sorry, mister Franklin, we're all democrats now.
And it was just so good.
And I and I would give this to people in the cab.
Hey, did you know there's one good congressman?
One and he's not good.
He's better than Thomas Jefferson.
Read this and read this and read this.
And this is the light and the way.
And the thing is, all I'm selling you is a peaceful foreign policy.
I'm not saying like or well and freedom overall as this is what Ron Paul emphasizes.
If you if he's asking for your trust or your faith in anything, it's just that you trust in freedom that it does.
work.
That's why we have all this stuff is because of liberty in the first place.
And so you can count on that, you know.
But otherwise, he's not selling you anything.
He delivered like a third of the population of his district when he was a baby doctor, right?
He's not going anywhere.
He didn't have, he wasn't soliciting donations.
He wasn't asking you to join his cult or his sect of Protestant Christianity.
He was just saying, we don't have to do this stuff.
We don't have to believe in this.
They say these things, but geez, that doesn't seem right.
Because what about this thing?
And he's just so wise and so good.
And his, his aides, by the way, his, his right hand men all that time were a also really great guys too, especially Jeff Dyson.
Danny McAdams has been his right hand and his great, you know, advisor all this time.
And another just really good human being.
Yeah.
Well, he is.
And he's a doctor, not a lawyer.
He delivered four thousand babies.
And, you know, I met his sister-in-law who married his older brother Wayne.
And she says to me, Yeah, well, when you guys say that Ron Paul delivered four thousand babies, well, I did too, because I'm his head nurse and I delivered everyone on myself, too, along with him and all that thing.
So I wish that's where he comes from.
He's a decent, sweet old country doctor.
He's married to his high school sweetheart since her sweet sixteen party.
Okay, no scandals, not a hint of it.
He's got, I don't know, 150 grandchildren or whatever it is.
It's the American dream.
It's perfect, dude.
And nobody's got nothing on him.
Right?
He's just he's the best.
I wish we lived in a country where a guy like that can have a chance of being president.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
It could have been, dude.
Listen, the Republicans of the United States of America nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney instead of him.
You explained that to me when we got George Washington himself only without the slaves and without the bloody hands.
The only vet in the race, but he was a doctor in the Air Force.
The only one he got up on stage and quoted Jesus and they booed him.
He's the guy that's supposed to be president.
That's, I mean, you say George Washington, one of the greatest Americans ever.
That's the guy.
That's the guy, dude.
Could have been.
Hey, and if you doubt me, just go to antiwar dot com slash Paul and read the last thirty years of everything he's had to say about everything.
What can I tell you, man?
But the aspect, the rigor, you talked about the motivation.
Like, well, you just said, okay, like, how the hell did you do this?
Okay, I could think of an answer to that, which is that, like, unlike all your, your Harvard professors and all of this stuff, like, the burden of proof is really on me, right?
Like this is because I'm just a skater, a cab driver from Austin who didn't go to your fancy pants college.
I don't have, there's no reason that you're supposed to defer to me.
And that book is about how everyone's wrong except me.
So if I'm going to tell you that, then I better be able to really demonstrate it and I want you to go, Oh yeah, well, but what about that coup in Montenegro in 2016?
Well, turn the page.
I got a whole section on that.
I didn't leave out anything and I wrote it in that kind of defensive posture.
People are going to not like this.
They're going to say, I don't know what I'm talking about.
Now, when I wrote enough already, the war was over.
Enough already came out in January 21 and I was in a race to get it done because Joe Biden's going to be inaugurated on January 20 and the era's over.
The Bush Obama era capstoned with Trump won is just at an end on January and after all it's the true beginning of the decade is January 21, right?
And so I knew that this book has to come out now, but this is really about the terror wars that are over mostly, not that we're completely done in the Middle East, you understand, but like that's a bit after the fact.
This is written, provoked is written in the middle of the war.
Yeah.
And I'm trying to change people's mind and really get them not just to regret the stupid things they believed in a minute ago, but to change their mind and get on board and let's see if we can bring this thing to a more reasonable conclusion sooner than later and get it done.
It would be like if I wrote enough already in 2005 or 2006.
And so I knew I wanted it to be as bulletproof as it just possibly can be because I don't have argumentation from authority.
I don't have like, oh yeah, I'm from here and I can tell you that.
I'm a reporter.
I'm a I'm a linguist and I've read ten thousand Russian newspapers going back to whatever, whatever.
I don't have any of those things.
What I do have is I've been working for antiwar.
com this whole time.
I've done six thousand interviews with the best experts.
We covered the Orange Revolution when it happened.
We covered the Maidan Revolution when it happened and everything in between and all of these things.
So just like with the book about Afghanistan and the book about the Middle East, I was already ready to write the book before I started writing it.
I already know the whole story.
Obviously, I had to do a lot of research and fill in a lot of information and correct myself on things I had wrong or oversimplified or whatever and learned a lot while I was writing it.
But I already knew the story overall because I've been working on it for a very long time.
What are the main things that Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden did?
did to cause the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine.
I already know those things.
I already have the bullet points.
That book started as a speech I gave in 2020.
Um, in fact, it was Leap Day 2020, Carol Paul's birthday, um, and the day that Donald Trump signed the peace deal with the Taliban to get us out of Afghanistan.
I gave a speech to the Libertarian Party of King County, um, in Seattle, Washington called The Cold, the new Cold War with Russia is all America's fault.
And that's, that's published at antiwar dot com.
And then two years later, I spent, I stayed up all night doubling the length of the speech and gave it again.
And this is, it's a four hour speech I gave in Utah on, I think, March 2, 2022.
right after the war started, explaining all the same stuff.
And then that became the nucleus of that book, basically.
And then it's just a matter of filling it out.
And sorry to ask a still detailed question, but this is a gigantic book, extremely detailed, extremely well cited.
What's your writing process like?
What how do you go through it?
So it started as a speech and now you have this manifesto, this tome.
Yeah.
Well, as you can see, the chapters are just HW Bush, Clinton, W Bush, Obama.
And, and, you know, when you, if you ever get the chance to read the thing, you'll see that it, this is really just a giant collection of citations.
I don't do too much writing in the book.
I'm much unlike Justin Romondo.
I'm really not that smart and have a lot to say.
I'm great on names and dates and I hold a grudge real well.
But Justin could write a thousand words just of like wisdom and understanding and opinions about things that I'm just not really like that.
So this book in a way is seven thousand note cards arranged by your maestro here to be hopefully to tell the story in a way that everybody can understand.
And you know, whatever, there's prose in there.
I'm w marshalling evidence is the point of the whole thing.
That this is what these guys did, here's what the war party says, and I don't straw man my arguments.
I link when I say seven thousand citations, a third of them are to the bad guys, and this is their point of view, and I'm telling you, here's what they admit that they're lying, you know, that's basically how it's written.
And I cite very little Ron Paul and very little Pat Buchanan in there, because as much as I revere them, I don't need them.
I can quote the apparatchics in charge themselves explaining how stupid the things that they are doing are and then show why they did them anyway and all the consequences and whatever.
So I don't need to cite the good guys.
I can cite the involved.
So basically going to the primary sources versus citing the quote unquote experts.
Yeah.
And just spending a hell of a lot of time going through the archives and I'm an obsessive type, like I there are absolutely times where I spent four days hunting one footnote that I know exists and I want to make this claim and I can't make it without my citation.
I'm going to find this thing.
And I have gone to the ends of the earth in some cases for these, especially like about the Balkan Wars and stuff.
Some of those articles are so hard to hunt down.
But then, you know, I'm reading all of these books and then all those books got all their own citations.
And a lot of, you know, I learned this a long time ago, but this was reinforced in this book.
And this is no slam against them.
It's just against everybody.
It's a lot of times the people that I agree with are wrong and they will cite something and then I go and read that something and it does not say what they said it says.
And I can see why they misunderstood it even, that they're not lying and not exaggerating.
But that's not really the implication there.
It's really something different.
So I double, triple, quadruple check every goddamn thing I can until I'm like, I'm terrified of being caught out being wrong on a fact and i have um the book is 477 000 words and i it's if if it was six by nine and if the font was regular size it would be 1200 pages long that's how long the book is um and it's but it's not well first of all a major portion of that is like literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of that is footnotes although
i keep them all at the bottom of the page where you can see them and damn anyone who doesn't do that that's exactly how a book like this should be um but then so a lot of that space really is citations but then also um i don't dwell too long on any one topic.
I don't think the only two exceptions to that are in when we talk about the NATO promises against expansion and the Nazis in Ukraine, because these, I believe, are the two most controversial subjects or, you know, stances or whatever in the book.
And so I go absolutely to the ends of there to beat the dead horse all the way to death to prove the absolute fact of the position that I'm taking there.
And then there's still probably a lot of overkill on a lot of things.
But as far as the writing goes, when I mentioned the Montenegro coup of 2016, it's just a short little thing.
It's called the Vaudeville coup and it's kind of funny and it's a little mysteriousious.
And then the different poisonings by the Russians or at least alleged ones I have, you know, Litvinenko and the Scripples and whoever.
And I just I was thinking it from the point of view of my accusers.
Like, oh yeah, well, what about this?
Well, what about this?
Well, what about that?
I bet you left that out and like, no, I didn't, dude.
I have it all in there, and I tried to write it in a way to satisfy my worst critics as best as I could, as the Declaration of Independence says, with a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.
Like, so I should assume that you don't agree with me and in good faith.
And so how in the hell am I going to fix that?
Like I'm going to have to make you accept that I'm not lying.
I have to accept that I'm not lying to you when I put these things together.
If when you read that you feel like I'm trying to get away with something, you're going to put it down.
So I didn't write it for you to put it down.
I think I wrote a thousand page book for you to put it down.
I want you to get through all the way to the end going, God dang, man, I didn't really realize it was as bad as all of that.
So to convince the critics.
That's what it is for.
As opposed to enough already, which I really wrote enough already for my people, my fans, to give to their brother in law and their dad and whoever.
It's a little bit after the fact.
As I said, I was in a real rush to get it done, so I don't have the citations.
I do have the citations in Fool's Earn about Afghanistan.
And actually, we're working on now, me and one of my guys at the Institute, we're working on putting the footnotes back into enough already.
And doing like the Ultimate Scholar Edition with the overkill on the citations there.
But I actually, I had footnotes on most of it.
I turned them off and I just raced to the end because I was out of money and I was out of time.
I just had to go.
And so friends of mine rationalize it like, well, I think Bill O'Reilly has footnotes in his books.
You know, get that thing out there, man.
And so I did.
But I did try to write it in a way where I either cite my citations in the prose or at least I wrote it in a way where it's a very specific claim.
On November 9th, they held a meeting and these five people were there and this is what they decided.
So you can go and Google that.
You know what I mean?
It's not, it should be specific enough that people can double check me.
But then, yeah, so why I'm like this?
I'm just a Ron Paul guy and I can't stand being lied to and I can't stand all this violence and I want to live in a free society and the empire's ruining it.
And then, and then, so why do I write?
Why am I like that meticulous about it all is I don't want to be caught being wrong.
I'll tell you one funny story and then we'll stop.
One time I lost an argument about Waco.
It was these three people in my cab and the one of them was this real gu jerk, and the other two were on his side because it was his friends, and I was arguing with him about everything, but the thing was he was like the son of a federal cop, and he knew their side of the story like down pat.
He really knew his stuff, and so even though I was right and he was wrong, he won.
And they got out of the car going, screw you, Branch Civilian boy and whatever, and oh man, that never happened to me again, you know why?
Because I read like six books about Waco.
I already knew more than enough about it, and then I decided that, yeah, no, actually no one's going to ever beat me in an argument about that ever again.
So you can have really thorough articulate the evidence for your claims.
And you're just like me too, dude.
When you read a 300-page book, it takes, well, like if you want to read this thing, it's not like a chore, but like, oh, I want to read that.
You've done it in a day and a half or two.
Like, it's easy to do.
Once you set that precedent a few times, it's pretty easy to read a thing and jot down some notes and learn something from it and then teach it to someone else and whatever.
Well, yeah.
Listen, welcome to adulthood.
That's what we do.
So like, that's all it is.
It's just, that's my only job is compiling reasons to resent these liars and why to know better than all their false promises.
Yeah.
Yeah, but also be able to articulate it.
And see also I'm a talk radio guy, man.
I grew up in the radio of Rush Limbaugh.
I'm driving for a living in the era of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and all the local guys.
And I mean, I'll go ahead and say this on the record too.
The local hosts on KLBJ AM in Austin all suck and always have.
All of them since Raleigh James in 1996, Love Her, everybody since then.
I mean, I don't know who listens to KLBJ AM at all.
How they even stay in business at all.
Their hosts suck.
The content of their words or the actual raw skill of how they talk and what they talk.
All of it.
And mostly how stupid and wrong and horrible they are about everything.
But also just how meaningless their drivell is, right?
You'd be in the middle of the world's worst crisis and they're like the liberals are trying to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance.
It's like, dude, I would prefer that you just shoot me in the face to listen to this for the love of God, please.
But anyway, but I love the potential there.
And in that era before the internet was what it is today, this is the real town square where you can have a host who knows something, you can have a guest who knows something, and you can have callers who know a lot more than you think they would, dude.
And I remember listening to them talk about like the Texas Homesteading Act that said you weren't allowed to take out a second mortgage on your house and whatever because it was to protect the little ladies and they were debating over whether they should have that law or not.
And I remember thinking, wow, all these people know so much about this topic that I've never heard of before.
And all of these callers are just so deep on their knowledge of what they know.
And whether on that issue or so many other things, the first real time I heard real AM radio in Austin, I was sixteen, I was wait, nah, I might have been old, I might have been eighteen.
No, no, I was sixteen.
It was, yeah, it was the same year that the Davidians were killed.
I was driving my first car down one hundred eighty three.
And I said, you know, I've lived in Austin my whole life, and I've never listened to the AM band.
I wonder what it is.
And the first thing I hit was KOJ AM and it was Johnny.
Walker, the great Johnny Walker, the FM rock and roll DJ was sub-hosting.
And his whole thing, he was a great guy, by the way, Rip Johnny Walker.
But he goes, look, I don't know anything.
I'm literally just hosting this show.
The guest is this guy, a surviving Branch Davidian, and we're taking your calls.
And this hit me like, what?
There's even a Branch Davidian alive and they have a point of view and you can hear it and he's live right now and he's talking and people can call in and they can, what?
Because in my world that I lived in, what you know about.
the branch of idiots is what you read in Austin American Statesman or what you're told by Ted Coppel and Dan rather, and that's all you get.
What do you mean?
I can interact with one.
Yeah.
And then the callers are brilliant.
The callers know all they're not cooks.
They know exactly what they're talking about and they'll be like, I'll tell you what happened was on march the 19th, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, okay.
So this is why I'm like this.
This is talk radio to me is it's like if you believe in the idea of like any kind of like so called popular government, like if we have to settle for any sort of statism at all.
You want the people to be able to have one big ass conversation with each other, right?
That's why your show is so important.
You get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views and listeners, maybe millions if you include all the podcasts.
And so for a guy like me, it's like, yeah, it's a chance to talk to a whole bunch of people to get a bunch of people having the same conversation together instead of everybody just all spread out having their own little separate arguments and not interacting with each other.
So for me, that was the brilliance of talk radio.
And then where Rush Limbaugh and Gigord Liddy were all polished and had their little programs, the guys on 550 AM in San Antonio, especially Carl Wigglesworth was my favorite, but him and all those guys, even really Ricky Ware who was the John Hageyite lunatic, but he was still such a sweet guy.
And their talk radio, their version of talk radio was, all right, it's Carl Woodsworth show everybody.
We're talking about Bill Clinton selling cocaine down there with Dan Lasseter in Mean, Arkansas.
And we got Terry Reed on the phone, tell us about your book, Compromise, Clinton Bush and the CIA, Terry.
But everybody's kicking back.
Yeah.
Everybody's got this front porch attitude.
And they got all the time in the world.
We're here every day for three hours a day.
Ain't no thing.
We're talking about and they're just the nicest guys come back from commercial and go, it's Carl.
We're talking with Terry about the thing.
And no bumper music, no fanfare, no last name.
You just jumped in the middle of a conversation, tune in, figure it out.
And it's just beautiful, it's perfect.
And then I modeled myself and the way I do my show on, beginning on Free Radio Austin in'98,'99, and then on Chaos Radio Austin from 2002 through 2010, I guess I was on Chaos, although it wasn't, yeah, it was 2010 before they seized our last transmitter from Chaos, wasn't it?
I think it was.
So yeah, over time.
I did Chaos for like, yeah, a long time.
And then, so that was my whole attitude was, look, I am a regular guy.
I'm not gonna bake that.
I didn't go to college.
I dropped out of ACC.
And my message ain't boring for elite policymakers.
My message is for my peers.
And look what they're doing.
That's it.
And this is why, you know, the Rothbardian style of libertarian populism really appealed to me is because that's who it's geared to.
The Cato Institute wants an audience with the Senate, the Mises Institute and the Libertarian Institute and antiwar dot com.
We want an audience with the population of this country, right?
That's who we're trying to talk to.
That's who we are.
That's where we come from.
We're not Washington, DC folks.
We're from out here.
or we're speaking in the third person about them, you know, rather trying to be part of the regime.
I just want to say briefly that you said the people that call in are usually brilliant.
And that's the experience I've had.
I've recorded a few conversations just on the street.
Like I went to the West Bank and I interviewed a bunch of people on the street.
And I really want to do that a lot more because I didn't meet a single person who's not brilliant in their own way.
It's like, it's remarkable.
It's remarkable the brilliance that comes from people.
You ever listen to sports radio?
Not as much as I probably should.
Yeah.
Well, look, you know what?
i don't know if this counts anymore but i spent a little bit of time in denver listening to sports radio in denver these people are fanatics man but the point being that You know, Jimmy, the air conditioner repair man is smarter than you dude.
Yeah.
And he knows everything that every baseball team ever achieved and when and who and everyone on the teams, all their stats, all their everything and why it mattered and it mattered a lot to them and the level of expertise there is no different than in your highest applied sciences or history or anything else.
You know what I mean?
It all just depends on what you're interested in and what you want to know that much about.
And this is Noam Chomsky's thing that he talked about where, look, if you're a primate that's intelligent enough to speak, then you are a genius, right?
Then you are an absolute miracle, unbelievable, impossible, you know, circumstance, situation of your very existence.
And so we all ought to be taken like at that very level, you know what I mean?
Like no matter who you're dealing with, there's something special in there, you know?
And usually it comes with humility because people with PhDs and Harvard and so on, they usually have this over inflated ego that comes from authority.
But sports radio, people on the street, everyday folks, they don't have that.
And so they could just speak their expertise without the ego.
Yeah.
Well, and that's my thing too, is I don't have anything to sell you other than, I mean, my coffee sponsor and whatever, but like my sincerity is like all I got.
I don't have any other argument from authority that I can invoke other than people listen to me, they know I'm not lying and they can tell what my biases are.
I wear them absolutely on my sleeve.
You know what I mean is every day I only try to quantify whether I hate Bill Clinton or George W. Bush more.
And it's and that's where I'm coming from and everybody understands that and they know that I never deliberately try to make them think one thing thing instead of another.
And if I did, they would obviously catch on to that and then I would be completely ruined and have to just go get a job delivering auto parts or something, and which would be fine.
In fact, I like delivering auto parts.
I've had that job before.
Although I'd rather drive at night if I got to drive.
I'd rather, I guess, drive an Uber at night, but if you still have energy.
Oh, I'm not even halfway done.
What about you?
I've got all the energy in the world.
Maybe a quick toilet.
A good place to pick up our story here would be John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's book.
We've talked about Mearsheimer and Walt earlier.
Now, their book is called The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy.
It came out in 2007.
It started out as an essay that They wrote first for the Atlantic Monthly that commissioned the story and then refused to run it.
And they ended up running it in the London Review of Books.
We also ran it at antiwar dot com.
People can find it there.
It's called the Israel lobby and American foreign policy.
It's a fantastic article.
And then they made it into a book.
And now these guys are again the co deans basically of the Realist School of Foreign Policy.
One from the University of Chicago, the other from Harvard, both highly respected.
Neither of them haters or ideologues or any of these things.
They were ruthlessly attacked as anti Semites for this, which is completely preposterous.
And what they did though was say that look., man, Israel's interests are very different than ours, and that's why they spend so much money and effort lobbying in the United States to try to obfuscate that fact that what's good for them ain't necessarily good for us at all.
Well, they have to make sure it's at least good for the people in charge here, if not for the country itself, and that's their object.
And as Walt Meersheimer say in the essay and in the book, that you can't blame the whole Iraq war on them.
George W. Bush was the one sitting in the chair behind that desk calling that shot.
He could have changed his mind at the very last moment.
It was on him.
And now it's the Congress's responsibility, but they pass that responsibility to him with their unconstitutional authorization that they passed in October of 2002.
But like ultimately who pulled that trigger, George W. Bush did and in conspiracy with his vice president and his secretary of defense and the rest of them, so the neocons, yes, they were the deputy secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense for policy and the staff in the vice president's office,
the staff of the National Security Council, they were there operating really, as I said, as that as Colin Powell called it that separate government and operating mostly for Benjamin Netanyahu's goals.
This is part of what we argued about me and Mark Dubowitz on your show last time was he insisted somewhat partially correctly here that Ariel Sharon wanted Bush to hit Iran, not Iraq, and Ariel Sharon, not Netanyahu, was the prime minister.
And that was the occasion of him accusing JJ Goldberg of being an antisemite because he had written in the Jewish Daily Forward about how Netanyahu wants to hit Iraq.
Sharon would rather hit Iran.
JJ Goldberg, as long as I'm citing him, let me tell you, he says in there very clearly that he is not saying that the neocons bear even the lion's share of the responsibility for the war.
Of course he blames George W. Bush for launching the war, and of course he is not peddling in some anti Semitic conspiracy theory in the pages of the foreword for God's sake, right?
He is extremely conservative in his statements and in his accusations, but what he's saying is that the Lakudniks in America are closer to Netanyahu than Sharon.
And of course George W. Bush wants to go to Iraraq.
He wants to go to Baghdad, not Tehran.
And so it and Wolfowitz, of course, always especially was an Iraq hawk.
And so the confluence of interests here was to go to Iraq.
Now Sharon was smart enough to see that Iran, you know, the clean break wasn't him, that was Netanyahu and his buddies.
Sharon, I think, was skeptical about what's going to happen when we overthrow Saddam Hussein and the Shiites take over.
And this is where he tried to insist, and John Bolton did echo him in this and promise him that yes, and then we'll go to Iran and Syria and Lebanon and everywhere else next, because we can't just get rid of Saddam.
And that's going to change the balance of power in a way that's going to benefit Iran in a way that Sharon did not prefer.
However, Sharon absolutely did go along with the program and helped lie us into war.
And he had his own office of special plans that he created in the Prime Minister's office in Israel, where they manufactured fake intelligence in English to stove pipe into the intelligence stream to help lie us into war.
And here's three authoritative sources on that.
Julian Borger in The Guardian, The Spies Who Pushed for War.
And it's not the spies, it's the neoconservatives is who he's talking about, not CIA.
officers.
The Spies Who Pushed for War by Julian Borger.
Then there's More Missing Intelligence by Robert Dreyfuss in the Nation.
Then is A Pretext for War.
911 Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies by James Bamford.
The Great Book by the Great James Bamford, the guy that wrote The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory about the National Security Agency.
Best author on NSA.
Pretext for War focuses on the Neocons and the CIA and how the Neocons led us into war for Netanyahu and Israel.
I don't remember.
Oh, and the whole first part is about 911 and how 911 happened and how the government failed to stop it.
And then The Shadow Factory is really insightful onightful on those lines because we often hear about the in-fighting between the FBI and the CIA, but the NSA also hoarded all their information and would not share with the FBI or CIA.
And the CIA at one point, and Michael Scheuer also tells the story, the CIA had to create their own listening station on Madagascar to try to spy on Al Qaeda hiding out in Yemen, the switchboard house in Yemen, because the NSA would not give them the intercepts.
They had to get their own, but they could only get half the conversation and not the other half talking to the terrorists in Afghanistan.
And as Scheuer put it to me on my show, I don't know, fifteen years ago or something, he said, yeah, because George Tennant didn't have the moral courage to just walk down there and demand the damn intercepts.
Because at that time, the head of the CIA was also the director of central intelligence, which meant the boss like the DNI is supposed to be over all the other intelligence agencies.
So George Tennett had the authority to command NSA to do what he said.
He didn't have to ask nicely.
But according to Scheuer, he didn't have the courage to just go down there and say, give me the damn intercepts.
Why not?
Scumbag.
You know, he came from staff in the Senate, I think, just wanted to please the real spies, you know, like he was kind of the new kind, didn't really fit in and was trying to like be cool or whatever.
I don't know.
Who knows?
These people.
But so importantly.
Importantly, you know, the Ariel Sharon government did help to push this thing, even though Dubowitz is right that Sharon first said, No, Bush, you should go to Tehran first, because that was his problem.
It was, I guess, I don't know if I'd have to go back and see if anyone ever wrote about this, but I never saw like Sharon's opinion of the clean break, but it's easy to see how anyone could see through how stupid the plan was.
We're going to weaken the Shiites by getting rid of the most powerful Sunnis standing in their way.
That's pretty dumb, right?
And especially if you really know about, for example, the history of the Iran-Iraq war, the history of the post-Iraq war one Shiite uprising.
You might have real reason to worry.
Justin Romando at antiwar dot com wrote in two thousand two, he said, Hey, look everybody, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the CIA tried to give the money and they said, Piss off, we don't need you.
We got Iran.
And Justin said, Better watch out.
Here's who's coming to power when we invade Iraq a year from now.
And then that's exactly what happened is the again, the Bada Brigade was the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
And that was exactly who George W. Bush took all the way to power in Baghdad.
So for the guys who fought in that war who are listening to this, who still don't know why they they fought in that war.
Ultimately, they fought on the Shiite side of a massive civil war against the minority Sunni ruling regime and to replace them with a new, essentially Islamist theocracy, sort of pseudo-republic like in Iran, and that that's what it was for.
It's not for freedom, it was for one faction over the other, and in this case it was the Shiites.
And then, of course, the most powerful fact it's worth explaining, not of course, that the most powerful Shiite groups that came together to form the new Iraqi government was the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Skiri, which is now called ISKI because we won their revolution for them, so now it's just the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
The Dawah Party and Muktah al Sadr and his Mahdi army.
Now, Dawah and Skiri had been living in Iran and they were kind of more higher class types, whereas Muktah al Sadr is like the son of important guys, it was much more like a street ruffian type, and the ghetto, the Shiite ghetto in eastern Baghdad was called Saddam City.
As soon as America invaded, they renamed it Sadr City after his father, but he inherited a lot of that street credibility as like the most legitimate of the Shiite leaders on the ground there.
So these three groups, under the guidance of the Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani who lived down in Najaf.
Under his leadership or guidance or whatever, they formed what was called the United Iraqi Alliance.
That was the group that wrote the constitution in the fall of 2004.
That was the group that won the elections, the big purple fingered elections of 2005, and that's what started the real civil war started after that.
Now there was already a predominantly Sunni based insurgency at that time.
It was not exclusively Sunni.
It started out much more nationalist and mixed, but very quickly, it was the Sunni tribal leaders and former Ba'athist and military leaders realizing that they have everything to lose now.
and that they have the super majority of the country backed by the United States is now taking power.
And then so this pushed the Sunnis into the arms, the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the bin Ladenites who were coming from all over the place just like it was Afghanistan or Bosnia or Chechnya again or Kosovo coming to all chip in to fight the holy jihad this time against us instead of with our help, although still backed by our friends the Saudis.
And they came in there and America and the Shiites pushed the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the bin Ladenites and backed.
In fact, I'll tell you an anecdote about how that happened.
And so much of this is tied up in what's happening in Israel at this time as well.
In January of 2004, Sheikh Yassin, who was the founder of Hamas, which was a break-off of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was originally like a charitable type organization that ended up growing into this militia with the aid and comfort of the Israelis.
And there's some really great articles that you might like to peruse about this, including by Richard Sale in UPI.
If you just type in Richard Sale UPI Hamas, I'm sure it'll just come straight up there.
Israel gave major aid to Hamas.
This is an in-depth study.
It's based on CIA as well as Shinbet and Mossad sources.
Richard Sale, if people aren't familiar, UPI is the news agency most closely tied to the Washington Times, which would be the Reaganite conservative newspaper in Washington.
It's funny because it's the Washington Post and the New York Times of the Liberal Papers, and the New York Post and the Washington Times of the Conservative Papers, if you got that right.
So basically this.
Basically, this article details how Tel Aviv, Israel, gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of many years.
And the purpose was to build them up to divide and conquer the Palestinians, to create a religious right wing alternative to the secular nationalist sort of pseudo Kami PLO under Yasser Arafat.
They wanted to divide and conquer the Palestinians.
And so what they would do is they would directly finance Hamas while at the same time arresting all of their competitors and holding them in prison, disarming them, weakening them while bolstering the Hamas government.
So they did not create Hamas, but they did very deliberately bolster its rise.
Now, Hezbollah is a different story where Hezbollah just really grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon in 1982 without any direct support from them in that sense.
Although maybe I don't know enough about that, but certainly in this case with the mass that's true.
And you can also read Andrew Higgins in the Wall Street Journal wrote a great piece along the same lines.
I'm going to pull that up for us now.
How was your help to spawn Hamas?
Andrew Higgins, 2009.
So I can also recommend Robert Dreyfus' book Devil's Game How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam Masterpiece also again Treat a Parsi's Treacherous Alliance cannot recommend that book highly enough.
That thing might go into its third printing just because of me.
I'm telling you everybody's got to read that book and then Obstacle to Peace by Libertarian Institute Fellow Jeremy R. Hammond wrote a masterpiece about Israel and Palestine and the fight over the occupied territories and America's role in making it all worse and the rest.
Fantastic book goes in deep study about this.
Now back to our anecdote in january two thousand four.
Old Sheikh Yassin with his big Santa Claus beard and his wheelchair says, I give up, I give in.
We need to go ahead and negotiate with the Israelis and settle for our measly stinking twenty two percent of historic Palestine just as Arafat had done in nineteen eighty eight.
Two months later, the Israelis killed him in a missile strike, just so they could lie to you, Lex, and say we have no partner for peace.
Somehow a missile blew up his car.
They're the ones who killed him, and when they killed him, in March of two thousand four, that's what touched off the riot in Fallujah, where the four Blackwater guards were murdered and burned and their bodies hanged.
from the bridge outside of town.
And they had a giant prayer dark mail the great war journalist was there and saw.
They had pictures of Yasin in their windshields, they called themselves the Al Yasin Brigades, and it was this impromptu protest against Israel's murder of the leader of Hamas.
And that's what caused that riot that killed those black water guards, and then George W. Bush sent General James Madison there with his marines, including now a couple of friends of mine, who had to go in there and bite that thing and declared the thing a free fire zone like Vietnam and killed hundreds, if not thousands of innocent civilians in the first Battle of Fallujah.
which they claim that Zarkawi, the bin Ladenite who wasn't even really a bin Ladenite yet, he didn't declare his loyalty to bin Laden until the end of 2004, a year and a half into the war.
But they pretended, so six months later, but they pretended that he was already tied to bin Laden.
He was one of the lies in Colin Powell's UN speech that there's this guy named Zarkawi and he's tied to bin Laden and he's tied to Saddam.
Well, he wasn't tied to bin Laden.
He had told bin Laden, no, I don't want to join your group.
And he wasn't tied to Saddam, unlike the lies of Ahmed Chalibi and the exiles.
He was not operated on by Saddam Hussein and given a peg leg in the Baghdad hospital.
That was a hoax perpetrated by the Weekly Standard and the Neoconservative.
set to tie those two together.
In fact, he wasn't tied to either.
And then only after the war, and America made him famous and claimed that he was a bin Ladenite, did Zarkawi raise in stature?
Zarkawi was more apocalyptic and revolutionary and even nihilistic and destructive than bin Laden's doctrines ever were.
And he was notoriously sectarian against the Shiites, where bin Laden, you know, I don't think, and I have not read everything the guy ever wrote, but I have read a lot of his stuff.
And I never saw where he really seems to focus on problems against the Shiites.
Again, Muhammad.
And Mohammed Ata and Ramsay bin Alshib, they were mad because of Shimon Perez and Naptali Bennett killing Shiite Palestinians in Lebanon.
The fact that they were Shiites didn't make them less valuable as far as wanting to avenge their deaths as far as that goes.
Zarkawi, on the other hand, thought, no, the only good Shiite is a dead Shiite.
God says so, and this kind of like crave bring on the apocalypse kind of deal and went for, you know, madness, suicide bombing Shiite pilgrims and doing like just absolute atrocities against civilians, which, of course, like the guy may be good at making bom math because there's just way too many Shiites.
And so by boycotting the election, refusing to participate in the new order, which they got the American superpower occupying the country with three hundred thousand troops, or at that point maybe two hundred thousand, but still, and in alliance with the super majority, those Sunni chiefs should have figured out a way to deal.
Saying no way, let's fight was a huge mistake from them.
And then entering into alliance with the bin Ladenites only made it worse because, and this is it is directly because of Israel killing Yasin., and then the Battle of Fallujah that helped drive a bunch of refugees out of Fallujah who then went to Baghdad who drove people out of their areas.
And then you had a lot of tit for tat back and forth as refugees from the different cities are being cleansed out.
So in the predominantly Shiite cities they're kicking all the Sunnis out, and in the predominantly Shiite Sunni areas they're kicking all the Shiites out, and people are being displaced.
And Dar Jamael, I swear I looked and looked, and maybe I still could find it somewhere.
I think the last time I tried to find it, I couldn't find it anymore, but it was Dar Jamael had this most brilliant article where he traced the cause and effect through the wars from the beginning of the.
The war began in 2003, of course, but like the real worsening of the insurgency in 2004 and the chain of events from this city to this city to this city where these different refugees are displacing other people and causing these worst consequences to go through and where more and more than the Sunnis,
especially are being cleansed from Baghdad and they're being pushed into the arms of the bin Ladenites again all touched off by Israel assassinating their own pseudo sock puppet you know terrorist front man excuse for an imperialist policy that they had supported when he was finally ready to completely capitulate to them they killed him so he couldn't And that was what caused all this problem for America,
or you know, not caused, but contributed significantly to the problems during the war.
Also during that same time, this was the first time that Mokta al Sadr and his Mahdi army fought against the Americans.
And he even sent Shiites and pickup trucks to Fallujah to go help in the name of Iraqi nationalism to help the Sunnis at that time.
And they had a whole separate little war with him in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad at that time, which was a real problem because, as I said, Sadr had so much street credibility there among the people.
And where to this day he is still.
one of the most powerful, one of the most important and powerful kingmakers in Shiite politics in that country right now.
And so they were, you know, essentially blowing up and sabotaging their own ability to use diplomacy to work with this guy.
And he became the most intransigent part of the Sunni insurgency.
There's so many different parts of this, but one of the things that's really important, I think, to talk about is that David Petraeus, his first job was up in Mosul trying to train up a militia to be our guys.
And they just took the money and guns and joined the insurgency against us.
It was an absolute catastrophe.
He gave them a bunch of weapons and money and then was humiliated and spit right the hell out of there.
His next job right after empowering the Sunni insurgency up in Mosul was to go to Baghdad and to turn the Bada brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council.
The same guys whom Saddam feared in 1980, which is why he started the war, the same guys whom George HW Bush feared in 1991, which is why he betrayed their uprising, the same guys that W. Bush is now taking all the way to Baghdad.
David Petraeus is now in charge of building them into the Iraqi army.
And that's who is going around torturing everybody to death.
And I don't know if you saw the movie.
The movie American Sniper about Chris Kyle directed by Clint Eastwood, and I'm a real big fan of Clint Eastwood.
I'm really disappointed in this fact is really bad.
What he did in that movie was he portrayed the Sunni insurgents torturing people to death with power drills and portrayed Chris Kyle saving them, but that's not true.
It was America's guys, the Bada Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council.
They were the ones torturing people to death with power drills.
Through the shoulder, through the heart, through the eyeball, through the ear, through the temple.
So at that time, the America was supporting the Bada Brigade.
At that time, America is building the Bada Brigade into the Iraqi army as we know it today.
And David Petraeus, this is where we have what's called the El Salvador option, which what does that sound like?
Paying right wing deswas to go around killing commis in the case of El Salvador, preventing it from becoming a Nicaragua, right?
In the nineteen eighties, it was John Negroponte who had worked for Ronald Reagan in El Salvador as the ambassador then on this covert action, killing all these people, who was then brought in to be ambassador to run what they call the El Salvador option of empowering the Shiite militias to finally finish crushing the Sunni insurgency, which of course they absolutely failed to do.
They simply radicalized them and made it that much worse and worse and worse.
And this was all on David Petreus.
He was the one in charge of this thing.
So that made the civil war just absolutely horrific through two thousand five, six, and then coming into seven.
Now in those six, James Baker says, We got to get out of there.
Old Guard brought in to say we need to figure out a way out.
That's embarrassing for Bush.
Bush decides no, he wants to double down instead.
He's going to do the surge at David Petreus' recommendation.
He fired Rumsfeld, who now wanted out.
Said, I told you light and fast.
Let's get out.
He said, We got to take the training wheels off.
Let the Iraqi democracy figure out a way to work on its own without us now, which was, you know what?
Hell, take it, right?
Cut and run.
This ain't working.
And he's really right.
They're like, if they're going to figure this out, for good or for ill, through blood or through handshakes and bribes or what, it has to be up to them ultimately.
And so yeah, so what did Bush do?
Kick him right out the door.
It's the first time he said something reasonable, and he brought in Robert Gates, who's supposed to be like an old James Baker type, his father's guy who had been the head of the CIA, whose fault it was that the CIA didn't know that the Soviet Union was falling apart, right?
Because they were too busy pretending that the Soviet Union was twelve feet tall at the time, same guy.
Bush Jr. brings him in, and he oversees the search.
That's the surge, and this is where they did the massive escalation in the beginning of 2007.
And it's funny because they dropped all the propaganda about Iran's nuclear program for a little bit because they had a new line.
And the new line was that whenever a Shiite sets off a bomb in Iraq, it's an Iranian bomb.
And this is where you and your audience have heard a hundred times, a thousand, that Iran killed six hundred of our guys in Iraq.
That's what they say.
Well, here's the truth of that.
It was five hundred guys, not six, and it wasn't Iran.
Those bombs, they were a new and improved kind of IED Improvised Explosive Device.
Our guys call them explosively formed penetrators, EFPs, and they were shape charged and they had a copper core.
And that copper core, when the explosive went off, would melt, and that molten copper would then slice right through armor.
And that was what made it the new and improved bomb.
Now, the propaganda at the time was, even though it was David Petraeus who at this time decided to attack Mukta Al Sadr, in the name of claiming that he was an Iranian agent.
In fact, Mukta Al Sadr, I think I talked about this a little bit on a tangent I shouldn't have taken on the last time I was here.
But Todd Al Soder was the least Iranian puppet of the major Shiite faction leaders because where Dawah and Skiri hadn't lived in Iran for twenty years at this point, he hadn't, he'd stayed.
And he was insisting that Iran and the United States butt out and leave Iraq to Iraqis.
So you see the problem there.
Even though he wants Iran to leave and wants to limit their influence, he also wants to limit ours.
The Bush administration's idea is no, we're going to bet that the government of Iraq, mostly made of Dawah and Skiri, that they will need our money.
and our weapons more than they need Iran next door.
So if we stick it out and even compromise repeatedly with Iran on who should be the Prime Minister, like Ibrahim Jafari and Nuri Al Maliki from the Dawa party, and we come to this is the only time we talk to Iran at all, it's sort of secretly, quietly agreeing on who the Iraqi Prime Minister should be as we're doing this, right?
So Mataud al Sadr, even though he is trying to limit Iranian authority, he also wants to limit ours.
So the Americans decide they want to target him.
So it wasn't Sauter that picked that fight.
It was David Petraeus in the service of Dick Cheney working to try and with in conspiracy with Michael Gordon of the New York Times to try to lie the American people into war with Iran then in the name of these bombs.
And they made a massive propaganda campaign in the spring of 2007.
Every time a bomb goes off in Shiite territory, that was Iran that did it, they claimed over and over.
So the point is, and the problem is, and I cite in the book by names of the journalists their affiliations at least eight or ten different American and other foreign reporters there.
Nobody with a, you know, Iranian dog in the hunt.
I'm not citing press TV here.
I'm citing the New York Times.
Michael Gordon.
He's now at the Wall Street Journal, but he was at the New York Times.
He's the guy who bylined with Judy Miller every story where they lied that Saddam Hussein is seeking a bomb parts and Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons and wants germs and chemicals and all these things.
Judy Miller took the rap for the whole media, but her coauthor, Michael Gordon, lived to still lie to us today in the Wall Street Journal, but he was the one in charge of this.
This essentially just this conspiracy.
to lie the American people into war through the pages of the New York Times.
But I show that his colleague Alyssa Rubin proved that he's a damned liar because she was there with soldiers, printed it in his same newspaper.
She was there with American soldiers when they found an EFP factory in Soder City.
I'm pretty sure, but there was a bunch, wherever it was, it was in Shiite territory in Iraq, and it was Iraqis working in a machine shop making these bombs.
And now they go, okay, well, but the parts all came from Iran.
Oh yeah, no, they had it.
The Iranians thought, you know what we'll do?
We'll ship the parts into Iraq for them to make bombs out of instead of just sending them bombs.
Like whatever, man.
It was obviously just a bunch of propaganda.
And I cite in there, the Christian Science Monitor was there when they did Operation Eagle Claw, found another factory making EFPs.
And then I cite also Wired Magazine, the brilliant Andrew Coburn, and a bunch of other great sources that just showed these bombs were made in Iraq by Iraqis.
I don't care what you say, and I just proved this over and over again on the blog at antiwar dot com in 2007, over and over again.
So if in fact, if you just search my name antiwar dot com, especially if you search antiwar dot com slash blog and EFPs, you'll get a bunch of hits because we went over this all at the time.
Making me feel extra old right now.
Yeah, that's that was eighty years or so.
Holy shit.
EFPs are made in Iraq by Iraqis.
Scott Horden, August 12, 2007.
And there's a bunch of them.
That's just one of many that I did at the, you know, during that era.
And again, citing solid proof for those who listen to and to our radio.
You know, I refute this lie every single day.
Citing Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor.
Operation Black Eagle.
I'm sorry I got the name of the Eagle thing wrong.
I said Eagle Claw, didn't I?
Operation Black Eagle was where the Christian Science Monitor was tagging along.
But there's a bunch of these And so now Dubowitz said, Oh yeah, well, Iran taught him how to do it then.
No, Gareth Porter showed that it was the IRA, the Irish Republican Army that taught Lebanese Hezbollah, and it was Lebanese Hezbollah that taught the Shiite Iraqis how to do it.
So when I said it was Lebanese Hezbollah, Dubowitz goes, Aha, Iran.
Nope, they got it from the Irish.
So sorry, Charlie, nice little propaganda campaign you got there, but then what happened was they did a big press conference where they laid out all the EFP bombs.
And the reporters started milling around and they go, well, that's funny.
That one says made in Hadith on it, which is a city in Iraq.
And that one says made in UAE and all this.
And then so what do we have here?
Do we have any evidence that any of this stuff came from Iran?
No.
And then what did they do, Lex?
They canceled the press conference, closed it down, embarrassed, and Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor himself admitted, we didn't have the proof that we needed to make the case.
Just promising, oh, we're going to prove it, we're going to prove it, we're going to prove it and kicking that can down the road for months.
Until I think it must have been May or June when they finally did this press conference that fell apart and started to back down.
Was that the major justification for the escalation?
It was not the justification for the escalation of the surge overall.
The escalation, the rationalization there was we're going to send an extra thirty or forty thousand troops to Baghdad, we're going to secure the capital city.
And once we have peace in the capital city, the peace of desolation where we kill every last Sunni who resists by putting a power drill through his eyeball, then we'll be able to negotiate peacefully in the setting of our new democratic republic that we've built here.
That was the justification there and at the same time, David Petreus, and this is the only victory that David Petreus ever won in his entire stupid stinkin' failure of a pathetic lying life, and that is when he convinced George W. Bush to surrender to the SUNY insurgency.
mister President, you're not going to defeat the SUNY insurgency.
Read me loud and clear.
All this victory you've been promising all these years, all the people that you've killed trying to bring it, sending the desert ox, Ray Odierno in there to kill every last living fighting aged male in the Ambar province.
We've lost, mister President, and so what we're going to do is.
is we're going to bribe the Sunni insurgency right now.
They've they've well, okay, I overstated that.
We didn't lost.
We didn't lose.
We failed to beat them.
But they did lose much territory to the Shiites.
So they were licking their wounds at that time.
The Sunni insurgency, the Iraqi Sunnis had too many enemies.
They were fighting the Shiites, they were fighting the Americans, and they had to deal with the bin Ladenites, and they hated the bin Ladenites.
They didn't want to live like Saudis and a bunch of Egyptian weirdo suicide bombers trying to outlaw women from buying cucumbers at the market because it's some kind of sexual innuendo and what are these people like?
Get these people out of my face.
And I show in the book, there are plenty of reporting about about this that beginning at least in early 2005, it was the local Sunni population.
This is two years before David Petraeus runs to try to get to the head of this parade.
Two years previously in the beginning of 2005 was when the local Sunnis started killing the bin Ladenites themselves and saying, you can't tell us what to do.
You're more harm than good.
You're making our insurgency into a counterproductive war by killing all these Shiite civilians and generating all new support for our crushing at their hands and all of that.
They were isolating and killing these guys off.
And you got to figure, dude, I mean, this is like a magic wish come true, okay?
George W. Bush comes and he turns all of western Iraq, right?
Fallujah to Crete, much of Ramadi and obviously Mosul into bin Ladenistan, into Jihadi University, bigger and better and worse than Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya.
This is all those combined.
And it's in western Iraq, right on the border of the Levant in Mesopotamia, not Nangar province out there in no man's land between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This is what made America, as Michael Shaw said, bin Laden's only indispensable ally.
Right?
That you could do like a reverse nine hundred eleven truthers where all the Americans are actually al Qaeda agents all this time because all they're doing is exactly what bin Laden wants them to do.
Michael Shaw said that, oh, of course, Afghanistan was the plan.
But Iraq, that was the hoped for but unexpected gift to bin Laden.
Bin Laden said on the eve of the invasion, rise up Iraqis, kill the socialist infidel.
the devil, Saddam Hussein, and then resist the Americans when they arrive.
Okay?
One guy's got a beret and a mustache.
The other guy's got a beard and is all wearing a funny robe like Obi Wan Kenobi.
And they clearly are extremely different men with extremely different sets of priorities, right?
Couldn't be more different.
And of course, Saddam Hussein was terrified of Osama bin Laden and had no connection to his regime whatsoever.
And in fact, we know now that he had kicked himself upstairs and was semi retired writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion.
That's how determined Saddam Hussein was to attack inside the United States to parafrase the CIA warning George Bush about Al Qaeda on august 6, 2001.
When he told Michael Morell, his briefer, the guy who later helped frame Donald Trump for treason with Russia and everything, he told Michael Morell, Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, you've covered your ass.
Can you clarify Saddam Hussein was writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion?
Yes, I'm afraid.
Is that real?
Yes.
That's real.
Yes.
It meant no harm to us at all.
What they could have done, let me ask you to stretch your engineer's imagination here to like wild metaphysical type concepts outside of your usual reach, you know, you're maybe more of a right brain guy or something, but like trip out, Lex Friedman.
The Secretary of State was Colin Powell, the four star general, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
You think he might have been tough enough to just send over there and tell Saddam Hussein, here's the riot act.
I'm going to read it to you, and then you're going to sign on the dotted line, buddy boy.
And if you think that Colin Powell wasn't man enough for that, don't you think that mean old Donald Rumsfeld, his old friend from nineteen eighty three when Ronald Reagan sent him to be special?
emissary over there when he offered Saddam Hussein support for his military campaign against Iran and brow beat him and tried to get him to build a pipeline to the port of Akaaba for Israel.
That's what that famous picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein, that's what that meeting was about.
One, we'll give you weapons to.
We want you to build a pipeline for the Israelis.
You think he could have sent gruff old Donald Rumsfeld over there to tell Saddam Hussein one thing.
Your job is keeping bin Ladenites down.
Read me?
Okay, we have a new priority in our foreign policy in the Middle East.
We don't want anyone to be friends with Osama bin Laden or his men.
That sound reasonable to you?
And then Saddam Hussein, of course, would have said, Of course.
And in fact, Saddam Hussein, and you can read this only months later into the war, maybe a year into the war, James Risen wrote it in the New York Times, that Saddam Hussein sent an emissary to meet with Richard Pearl in London and surrender to him and say, If this is about democracy, we'll hold elections.
If this is about Israel, we'll stop funding Hamas.
If this is about oil, we'll give you the mineral rights.
If this is about weapons of mass destruction, you can send your army and FBI., wherever you want to look.
I give up, please, don't kill me.
And Richard Pearl told the emissary, you tell them we'll see him in Baghdad.
They refused, and Seymour Hersch had another story just like that, where Hussein sent a Lebanese businessman to again surrender to say we're willing to negotiate on any and every term that you could possibly name for us, and America refused, and went to war anyway.
By the way, when they did in two thousand three, first of all, in two thousand one, they held a million man candlelight vigil in Tehran on september twelfth.
on September 12.
And the Ayatollah said, Now's our chance to make friends with the United States.
They hate Saddam Hussein and they hate the Taliban.
Great.
Us too.
So they said, Now's our chance to again try to reach out to the United States.
Did I skip and forget to mention that in 1993, oh, this was going to be part of our Cold War story, but it overlaps.
In 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the right wing sort of hawkish, realist national security advisor for Jimmy Carter, and Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger's right hand and was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, they both wanted to build oil pipelines across Iran to the Persian Gulf,
one, to make money and for American companies, but also two, to bring in Iran from the cold and open up an opportunity to normalize relations between our country and their country.
The oil business is a great way to do that.
Later in the nineteen nineties, the CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, said the same thing that Bill Clinton's sanctions are irresponsible.
We should lift the sanctions against Iran and we should do business with Iran because after all, God didn't see fit to leave all the oil under wonderful western allied democracies.
And so we have to deal with who we have to deal with.
with who we have to deal with.
And that was in the interests of his company and quite frankly, it was in the interests of the United States of America at the time.
Cause a little mini scandal because one of the times that Cheney repeated himself in these criticisms was in Australia.
And that's supposed to be a cardinal sin to criticize your own country from the soil of another country.
And he had been the former Secretary of Defense.
So that was a kind of a, you know, social, you know, error or whatever that got him a little more controversy about those statements than probably they would have got any, probably more attention than they would have got otherwise for the substance of them.
But so we had every opportunity to deal with Iran in the 1990s.
And then let's guess why Clinton didn't do that.
It was because the Israel lobby said no.
That was in the Washington Post.
They did this great series, Dan Ottaway and Dan Morgan, I think.
Well, whatever.
Morgan Ottaway, I forget their first names.
They did a multipart series all about the oil policy of the Caspian basin.
And it was APAC and the Israel lobby that said, no, you cannot normalize relations with Iran veto.
And so Brzezinski and Haig backed down from their plans and the companies that they were representing in doing that and went the other way.
And the Cold War with Iran remained all through the rest of the century.
Again, wage from bases in Saudi Arabia getting our towers knocked down.
Now it's the new era.
We go to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Iran says we'll do everything we can to help you with that.
Then you guys want to get rid of Saddam Hussein?
Not only will we help you with that, guess what?
Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress' headquarters was in Tehran.
Guess who sponsored the Iraqi Shiite exile to tell the neoconservatives that the new Shiite supermajority regime will build a oil pipeline to Haifa and tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and be nice to Israel.
And so they said we have these common interests.
And yet there was a terrorist attack in 2004 and the neocons just lied inside Saudi Arabia and the neocons lied and said bin Laden and his men had planned it from inside Iran, which was a total lie, had nothing to do with Iran.
But that was enough for idiot W. Bush, who doesn't know anything, to go along with, oh, okay then.
And so now Iran is back on the enemy side of the ledger of the war on terror, where of course they have no alliance with bin Laden.
The only time they backed bin Laden was as a favor to Bill Clinton in Bosnia in the nineteen nineties.
And so they had no love for the bin Ladenites whatsoever.
However, and despite all the lies, bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, not in Iran.
And the bin Ladenites who did make it to Iran were under house arrest.
And the Iranians were trying to negotiate with the Americans to hand them over or at least hand them over to their home countries wherever they were from.
And they were offering to negotiate what was then called they submitted this through the Swiss ambassador in the spring of 03, either right before the war or right after the war.
I think it must have been right after the invasion of Iraq.
It was called the golden offer.
And not only did Bush and his men reject it, but they even gave, I think, John Bolton.
gave a big dressing down to the Swiss ambassador for daring to even bring the proposal to them.
And again, it just like with Saddam Hussein, the ayatollah was showing his willingness to negotiate essentially anything of controversy, including support for Hamas and Hezbollah, including their nuclear program, which at that point was just, you could barely even call it nascent at all.
They had not begun spinning a single centrifuge at that point, and they wanted to negotiate over these bin Ladenites if we would exchange them for members of the MEK, the Mujahideen E. Culc, communist terrorist cult, which was like some.
some Jonestown total Kukurie type of a cult that level of Kukurie, like Heaven's Gate, you know, just comet chasing lunatics.
And they had helped with the Iranian revolution, but then they had betrayed it and had been kicked out of Iran by the Ayatollah, but then they went to work for Saddam Hussein.
They helped Saddam Hussein during the Shiite and Kurdish uprising in 1991.
They helped crush the Kurds with their tanks in that as special agents of Saddam during that.
And then the US inherited them when we invaded Iraq in 2003 and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld took control of them.
Again, the MEK, they're called the Mujadini Kalk.
And the Iranians are saying, look, let's trade.
We got bin Ladenites, including bin Laden's son and including this guy, Hamza, who is an extremely dangerous Al Qaeda terrorist.
And we could have traded them, but the American, the neoconservatives, and I guess, you know, Rumsfeld and Cheney themselves said, no, we want, we would rather keep the MEK so that we can use them for operations inside Iran, which they did.
And in fact, my now wife wrote a story breaking that story for Ross story back then that Rumsfeld was using the MEK for intelligence inside Iran.
And a lot of times., usually working as cutouts for the Israelis nowadays, you will hear rumors about Iran that come from the MEK.
Now, sometimes it's true.
It's also known as the NCRI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran as their front.
And they'll, in fact, right before the current war in the last few months, like in June, probably in May, they put out a picture of some buildings and said, this is a secret Iranian nuclear weapons site.
We just found it.
Of course, it was total propaganda.
They do that all the time.
At one point, they put out a stock photo of a vault door from a vault door.
door from a vault door company or a vault company.
And they said, Behind this vault door, that's where the secret nuclear weapons program is.
And they do that kind of thing all the time.
And so America kept the MEK when they could have traded them with the Iranians.
So just one more thing about that is on the NSC were two people who are now a married couple, Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.
And I've interviewed both of them at length and they had talked all about how willing the Iranians were to negotiate with the Americans on essentially anything at that time and how essentially the Bush administration just refused to work for them.
And now think about, you know, we're fighting for them in Afghanistan putting in power a coalition government that includes the Hazaras who are Shiites and friends with Iran.
And in Iraq, we're putting their sock puppets from Dawa and Skiri in power.
We fought an eight-year civil war for Iran's guys, but refused to talk to them the whole time, refused to negotiate with them in good faith when George Bush is the Ayatollah's errand boy in this thing and refuses to acknowledge it, likes to pretend he's the emperor of the world or whatever, when he's serving their interests and putting their guys in power.
And so that's why at the end of his presidency, they made him sign the deal to get out by the end of 2011.
And he said, well, can I have 64 bases?
And they said, no.
And I was, well, can I have 24 bases?
And they said, no.
Can I have any bases?
And Nurial Maliki said, well, let me go talk to the guys.
I'm not real sure.
Sorry, I talked to the guys.
They said, beat it, scum.
Don't let the door hitch in the ass on the way out.
Didn't even say thank you for fighting a gigantic eight-year civil war for them to exterminate their Sunni enemies and put them in power.
It's got them in power there.
And so that was the sofa that Bush had to agree to in his last year in office in 2008 was that we had to withdraw because he had fought the war for his adversaries, not our enemies, but America's regional rivals in the Middle East, the Iranians and their Shiite Axis, now including Baghdad, and also, of course, then, Damascus and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
This is when the King of Jordan coined the term, the Shiite Crescent.
It was America who made it.
And in fact, in January of 2006, The Sunni King of Saudi Arabia would have been King Abdullah, read the Riot Act as Al-May Khalilzad.
And said, listen, this is in the WikiLeaks.
He said, listen, it was always us and you and Saddam against Iran.
Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
So what are you going to do about it?
And Khalilzad says, I know, Your Royal Majesty, I'm so sorry about that.
We're going to do everything that we can to try to fix it.
This is the birth of the policy called the Redirection, where America under Bush, before Obama ever came to town, where Bush accepted that he had screwed up, that he had scored like in soccer, an own goal for the other side of the ledger, the Shiite crescent dominated by Tehran, and that now he had to make up for that by tilting toward the Sunnis.
It would be nice to sort of linger and understand to what degree is the Iranian regime and the Ayatollah are good and bad for the Iranian people?
And then to what degree could they, just so we sort of clarify that, And to what degree could they have been actual good collaborators with the United States in fighting bin Ladenites?
Yeah, good questions.
I would not ally with anybody to kill anybody.
At the time of September 11th, there were only four hundred bin Ladenites hiding out in Afghanistan.
Any of the rest of their associates around the Middle East could be arrested by police forces.
Again, we could have negotiated over them in the first place, and again the CIA and Delta Force could have finished annihilating bin Laden, Zawahiri, and their few hundred men in the White Mountains in Nangar province at the Lionsden hideout in December of two thousand one.
There's your whole actual terror war.
So do we really need Iran to help us other than what hand over a few prisoners that they had captured who were trying to hide out in their country that they had put on house arrest.
Yeah, but that's all the help we needed, right?
We didn't have to have a new alliance with them and we didn't have to try to pretend that the Ayatollah is a saint or that his republic is a republic at all, right?
If it's a republic, then how come he's the supreme leader since 1989, doesn't sound like a republic to me.
But at the same time, you want to talk about flawed republics.
We're sitting in one.
And so, you know, in this case lying us into aggressive war after aggressive war, you can't say the same for him unless you want to, again, blame him for sending Ahmed Chalibi to lie to Richard Pearl to lie to George W. Bush, you know, and so we can, and in fact, I'm skipping ahead, but in Iraq War three, we fought with them again against the bin Ladenite Caliphate.
And so here we fought really three wars for Iran, against the Taliban and against Sunni Saddam and against Baghdadi, the bin Ladenite Caliph in fourteen through seventeen there.
So why do we hate him, Lex?
So much if we keep biting wars for them.
You know, like I used to joke with Patrick Coburn that like, man, they better sign this nuclear deal with Obama.
They owe us a favor.
After all that we've done for them lately, you know, despite all of the hatred and vitriol, when you listen to the Lakudniks, what you end up doing is empowering the Ayatollah and his men.
Well, what do you think about the attack of the United States on Iran that, as I mentioned, had me so nervous there would be another escalation into another forever war?
Yeah.
What do you think about that situation?
Wait, let's hold that because let's do Syria first and the redirection, then we'll do the Iran war, okay?
Can you talk about the redirection?
Okay, so the redirection was from the policy was really, I think, invented in late 2005 and then sort of discussed and implemented in beginning in 2006.
And the article is called The Redirection by Seymour Hirsch in the New Yorker magazine.
So Hirsch, pardon me.
Yes, Hirsch has an incredible series from this whole year long.
It includes the coming wars, preparing the battlefield, the redirection, and I forget the fourth one, maybe the fifth one.
Had a bunch of great ones this time.
So I might be combining these articles a little bit here, but it's along the same lines.
Here's what you need to understand about the redirection, okay?
Oops, we screwed up and we fought Iraq War two for the Shiites.
Now to make up for that, we're tilting back toward the Sunnis, but what does that mean?
It means we're tilting back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber brigades.
Saudis don't have an army.
We don't trust them with one, probably.
We're their army for the most part.
And so how are we going to make it up to the Israelis that we took their stupid idiot advice and launched this war but empowered their regional rivals?
And how are we going to make it up to the Saudis who tried to warn us for the most part, I think, against it, but we ignored their advice and did it anyway and empowered their regional rivals, the Iranians?
And so how are we going to fix this??
And how are we going to fix this is since we put Tehran up two pegs in Baghdad, we're going to take them down a peg in Damascus.
And so they started in Lebanon backing a group called Fatah al-Islam, bin Ladenite, suicide bomber, head chopper, lunatic, terrorist to fight against Hezbollah.
In Syria, Elizabeth Cheney, who was then working in the State Department, later known as Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney's daughter, she had the job of working with the Muslim Brotherhood to create the first major government in exile to.
And I gotta tell you, man, we used to joke on my show going back to, I think, 2004 or 2005 would have been probably the first time that I had asked Eric Morgelees, hey Eric, if they do, because Eric Morgelees was there, just like Patrick Coburn, he was there when Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, had crushed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1984, or was it 1982?
And he crushed them and he killed like 20,000 people in this horrific thing to crush the Muslim Brotherhood.
Morgelees was there, knew all about it, told me that story.
And I says to him, I say, well, if the neocons get their way and they throw Bashar al-Assad, then what organized force is there in the country after the Baathists that could possibly take over other than maybe the Muslim Brotherhood, if you're lucky?
And Marley says, yeah, exactly.
Or it could be the bin Ladenites could take over.
Now back to David Wormser in a clean break and coping with crumbling states, in coping with crumbling states, Wormser says, we have to expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria.
Expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria so that we will control the outcome which will be more to our liking.
And he says, and he's acknowledging bin Ladenite terrorism is what he's referring to here with the recent history at the time he's writing this in 96.
And he's saying, now, there's a lot of talk about the dangers of fundamentalism, meaning, okay, we're going to get rid of these secular Baathist regimes.
There are fundamentalist terrorist wackos running around right now.
He acknowledges that and he says, but America will just have to find better allies against fundamentalism than the Baathists.
So now maybe some idiot could write that as policy advice for the Likud in 1996.
maybe before the Kobar Towers, but then they kill our airmen at Kobar Towers.
And then they bomb the embassies, and then they bomb the coal.
And then they hit us on september eleventh, and then they lead as the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed four thousand of our guys in Iraq War two.
And now you're telling me that we still better find better allies against the bin Ladenites than the Bauthas?
That Bashar al Assad is worse than Osama bin Laden?
Yes, that's what they're tell telling you, because Assad is friends with the Ayatollah, and Assad helps the Ayatollah arm Hezbollah, and Israel as per the clean break.
What's the clean break?
It's a clean break from Oslo.
Forget Rabin and Perez.
We are going to steal all that's left of the West Bank and Gaza Strip sooner or later.
But we don't want to have to worry about Hezbollah on our northern flank.
We need to neutralize them somehow.
So Syria, Worms or wrote, was the keystone in that arc of Iranian power, which was true, but of course he was the one who added Saddam Hussein to that same arc.
Now they're saying, Oops, we have to fix this.
And it was the neoconservatives, Elliot Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad who came to W. Bush and said, Sir, we really screwed up here.
We have to turn this thing around now.
And Bush understood.
And what's funny, you read the article and it's all Connolly Rice and her people trying to explain that, oh, you know what?
It's not really about Sunnis and Shiites, Lex.
It's about moderates and extremists.
And the Baathists are the extremists in this, you're saying, right?
The multi ethnic secular dictatorship in Syria, the last country in the Middle East where you can get a drink.
Those are the extremists and we got to support the bin Ladenite insurgency against them.
Now, this is the reason that Barack Obama supported Al Qaeda in Syria.
It's not because he was a secret Muslim terrorist with an allegiance to bin Laden's goals.
It's that he was a secret George W. Bush with an allegiance to the American foreign policy establishment's goals, including the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby in this country, Likud interests in this country at that time.
You know, in Iraq War two, for the average person, they'd have had to read Mirscheimer in zero seven to know or read Justin Romando at antiwar dot com to even know what is a Neocon?
What's the difference between them and the rest of the Republicans?
And what do they have against Iraq so bad?
And what is that agenda about?
And what does it have to do with the Lakud party in Israel?
You didn't think that.
If you ask, you know, like Dave Chappelle and his skit, it's all like he tried to kill my daddy kind of stuff, right?
Because people just don't know this deeper layer to it.
Well, in Syria, it was just as obvious as it could be.
The war party in America is the Israel lobby, right?
It is all sionists led by the Lakutniks and the neoconservatives, but on the so called liberal side too, people like Jamie Rubin, who had worked for Bill Clinton, wrote a giant thing in first it was a secret memo that he wrote to Hillary Clinton, and they later published it as an essay in Foreign Policy Magazine.
You can pull it up right now if you want.
Jamie Rubin, I'm pretty sure it's 2011.
If it's 12, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure it's 11 in Foreign Policy Magazine.
And I don't know, type in Syria, Assad, and Israel.
The reason we have to do this is for Israel, the real reason to intervene in Syria.
There was a funny anecdote about this one too, Lex, because I just happened to be screwing around on Twitter that morning that Assange published the State Department cables, maybe it was that morning or soon after that.
And I'm virtually certain it was David Rothkopp who was then the editor of Foreign Policy.
And I can't remember who else, one of his right hand men at foreignpolicy dot com, the journal of, well, it's the journal, the Foreign Policy Journal.
I forgot if there's a specific think tank.
behind them.
Anyway.
And they freaked out and they attacked Julian Assange and they said, Aha, we caught WikiLeaks posting a fake document.
Because this is not a State Department document.
This is an article that we ran at Foreign Policy and you, you obviously copied and pasted it and are running it at WikiLeaks.
And not only that, but you've changed it.
And then Assange says, No, you cooks.
This is a memo that somebody wrote to Hillary Clinton.
And apparently it was Jamie Rubin who wrote it and then he submitted the same essay to you to run at Foreign Policy.
And the article is about Madam Secretary, we got to support bin Ladenite head choppers, suicide bombers in the greatest act of treason that you could possibly imagine because Israel matters more than the United States of America and the three thousand killed on september eleventh.
That's why I'm paraphrasing roughly.
The real reason to intervene in Syria, cutting Iran's link to the Mediterranean Sea is a strategic price worth the risk.
And why?
Because Israel's foreign policy interests, not those of the United States of America.
Now what's the true history of that war?
They called it an uprising.
They called it a revolution.
We're skipping Libya here, but they supported the bin Ladenites in Libya.
Then this was Hillary Clinton's bank shot to take the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar Al Sharia, the same guys that did the Benghazi attack of september eleventh, twenty twelve, and send them on to Syria for the next jihad.
Now in Libya, Gaddafi wasn't a Shiite, and this wasn't about that, although the Israelis did hate him and want him gone.
But in Syria, it was all about this redirection policy and continuing the redirection policy of trying to weaken Assad as essentially a consolation prize after America screwed up so bad by putting the Shiites in power in Baghdad.
And so this is why we have to do this.
And there was a whole chorus around that time.
And if you remember the first major fake sarin attack of august twenty thirteen in Ghouta, which the war party tried to claim that Assad did it in order to launch a war there, and they were trying to get us to do it at that time.
You know, first of all, Barack Obama is the commander in chief at this point.
It's not the same as George W. Bush.
And, you know, escalating the Afghan war that was already going on and we have to win it, and that's the consensus or whatever, that's kind of one thing.
But Obama wants to start a new war in Syria now.
The American right said, I don't think so.
And in fact, on this point, all hail Stephen Bannon, because it was Bannon and Breitbart that led the campaign that said at that time.
Breitbart was an incredible, like, much more important, I think than it probably is now.
But whatever, I don't, I don't know how to measure that.
But at that time, they were extremely influential and they led the charge.
We do not want to fight this war.
And you might remember this, Lex, you had army soldiers and marines and navy sailors would be holding up pieces of paper in still shots and in short video clips that said, I didn't join the Marines to fight a civil war for Al Qaedaeda in Syria.
Remember that?
And those were going viral, a bunch of them.
was this 13?
This is August of 13.
And at this point, Barack Obama reaches out to APAC and the Israel lobby and asks them to please do everything you can to push this.
Now, I have to say, I don't know what was going on there, but I actually thought that he was being kind of sarcastic there.
At that point, there was nobody pushing for war with Syria except the Israel lobby.
And Obama seemed to be saying, Hey guys, if you want this, you need to really stick your neck out for it.
But the thing is, they stuck their neck out.
It's almost like, remember in that Will Ferrell movie where he goes to college and he's running naked down the street and he thinks everybody's behind him, but he's just wasted.
Old school.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like that.
They're like, come on, everybody, we're going to Syria.
Running drunk down the street and then they look and nobody else is coming with him.
It's just the Israel lobby.
It's just as plain as day.
Whose interest is this in?
Nobody else cares.
Nobody else wants to do this.
Nobody else believes the lies that, oh, the day that the chemical weapons inspectors arrive, I saw a gast a bunch of people, huh?
Give me a break, dude.
This whole thing is so stupid.
And then so they couldn't do it.
The Israel lobby basically failed.
And then importantly, this is the one good thing I'll ever say in my life about James Clapper.
And by the way, this was a secret.
They didn't tell us this.
We only found out this later from Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, Kamasar Goldberg, the former prison guard and ruthless abuser of Palestinian captives.
He wrote in the Atlantic that James Clapper told Barack Obama, it's not a slam dunk that Bashar al-Assad was behind the gas attack.
And Dempsey, who was then the chairman, admiral, was it general or admiral?
General Dempsey, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also gave a public statement who said, I don't know why we have to do this right now.
And so at that point, his own staff was telling him, Mr. President, like, hey, if anybody asks me, I'm going to tell them that I told you that I can't even prove that this is true.
Yeah, James Clapper was the director of National Intelligence DNI from August 2010 to 2017, acting as the principal intelligence advisor to President Barack Obama and overseeing all U.S. intelligence agencies.
He also is the guy who planned Operation Storm, where they cleansed the Regina in Eastern Slavonia in 1995 of Croatian Serbs.
He's also the guy who lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and he could prove it for from the satellite pictures.
He's also the guy that lied that Vladimir Putin helped Saddam Hussein move those chemical weapons to Syria is why we can't find them.
He's also the guy that lied that the NSA is not all up in your phone seizing all of your data, which is what motivated the hero Edward Snowden to leak and tell the truth.
And he's also the guy that lied that Donald Trump was a blackmailed suborn agent of Vladimir Putin, who helped usurp Hillary Clinton's rightful throne in a coup d'etat and take over this country.
And of course, he's a paid analyst at CNN.
If I give him life in prison, I'm going to really regret it a lot.
He deserves to suffer horribly.
But you did say a positive thing about him.
I did say a positive thing about him, which was he told Barack Obama, I'm not going to vouch for this chemical weapons lie here, buddy.
No slam dunk.
And that was a reference to George Tennett telling George Bush, It's a slam dunk, sir.
Ain't no one else want to know what's funny about that?
Is it George Tennett said, Oh, that's not fair.
They're throwing me under the bus.
I didn't say that Iraq's possession of chemical weapons was a slam dunk.
What I said was, you can convince the American people with this story.
That's the slam dunk.
In other words, I wasn't lying.
I was saying, mister President, you'll be able to get away with this lie.
That's George Tennant's defense of that statement.
Anyway, so Clapper was saying, well, this ain't a slam dunk.
I won't stand by it.
By the way, as long as we're talking about Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, it may be the same article.
If you type in James Clapper and slam dunk in Syria there, let me see if I got this right.
The Obama doctrine.
That's the article.
Okay, not a slam dunk.
Okay, I'm glad we clarified this.
It's called As President, I Don't Bluff.
It's another interview of Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg.
And, um, in this article is where Jeffrey Goldberg, well, I'll tell you what.
No, no, no, get the this is just the politico do the Atlantic.
Yeah.
Obama to Iran and Israel as President of the United States.
I don't bluff by Jeffrey Goldberg, March 2, 2012.
Okay, just so people understand, the headline there is he is telling Jeffrey Goldberg to please tell the Israelis that they can trust me, that you trust me, that I promise that I really, really, really, really, really mean it, that if the Ayatollah breaks out for a nuclear bomb, I will go to war.
I will not let him get one.
Jeffrey, please tell them I'm not lying about this.
Okay, that's what where that comes from.
That's what he's doing there.
But now, will they show you the whole thing or you're paywalled here?
Maybe if you put it in archive.is, can you copy and paste that and put it in archive.is?
Oh, you gotta just sign in.
So now see if you can control F for classified or clearance.
Can we talk about Syria as a strategic issue, talk about it as a humanitarian issue as well?
But it would seem to me that one way to weaken and further isolate Iran is to remove or help remove Iran's only Arab ally, Obama.
Absolutely.
Okay, this is why we want to weaken Syria is a easier way to weaken Iran.
And as they continue to talk about here, he's saying that we are intervening there and this is a way to weaken Iran in this way.
And then Goldberg says, Is there anything you could do to move it faster?
And Obama on a less funny version of the joke about I could tell you but I'd have to kill you, he says, Well, nothing that I can tell you because your classified clearance isn't good enough.
In other words.
And check my date on this again.
Was it twelve or eleven?
I forget.
No, no, this would have been twelve.
This is twelve.
Yeah, march twelve.
And so he's saying, It's already on, Jeffrey.
We're doing it, buddy.
What's he doing?
He's working with Britain and France, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to back Osama bin Laden's suicide bomber brigades.
In fact, worse, Abu Musab al Zarqawi's suicide bomber brigades.
Remember we talked about how the local Iraqi Sunnis had turned against Al Qaeda.
It wasn't America and the Shiites that defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq.
It was the local Iraqi Sunnis that did so and they're the ones even who turned in Zarkawi to the Americans to kill.
I know the interrogator I interviewed, the interrogator who without torture, but by being a nice guy, got the information.
Tell us where Zarkawi is, we'll get him and the guy told him and they got him.
This is in the summer of two thousand six they killed him and at that time Al Qaeda in Iraq then renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq and we all got a good chuckle out of it because you guys don't control a single county anywhere in Iraq.
There is no state.
But at the same time we said, Aha though, look at what they're talking about.
Bin Laden's policy always was.
There's no point in creating a caliphate as long as the American Empire is here to erase it again.
So we fight the far enemy.
We fight a long term strategy to bog the empire down, bleed them to bankruptcy, force them all the way out.
Only then can we have our perfect Islamic State we want to create.
Zarkawi says, no, I want that now.
This was his doctrine.
And they called their group Islamic State of Iraq just about, I forget it was just before he died.
I believe it was just after he died they started calling themselves that.
But very clearly, you know, betraying their intentions if they were to have.
the ability to take over anything, that's their goal.
And they have this level of ambition.
Now, it's very important to note that in Iraq War 2, when I say America fought that war as a civil war for the Shiite side against the Sunnis, they didn't want the whole country.
They only wanted Shiistan.
They only wanted the land, basically, from Baghdad over to Iran and down to Kuwait, down to Najaf, right, down to the Saudi border.
They didn't so much worry about the Sunni Iraqis of Fallujah and Tikrit and Mosul.
Let them burn in the sun, man screw them.
Ooh, I should have said.
This was a big part of why the Sunnis fought so hard in the first place.
It was because remember they're losing control of the national government.
Well, all the oil is down in the south near Basra and it's up in the north near Kirkuk, where it's going to be controlled either by the Shiites or by the Kurds.
Now by the Shiites.
And so what does that mean for the Sunnis?
They have some oil, but it's virtually all undeveloped oil and much less of it in the predominantly Sunni areas of the country.
So when they lose control of the national government, they lose control over all the spoils, right?
And so they get nothing.
And so the Shiites' idea is, by the Shiites, I mean the Supreme Islamic Council of the Abdullah Zizal Hakim, the Dawah party of Nurya Maliki and their murderous forces.
Their idea, they're just as chauvinistic as the bin Ladenites.
Screw you guys, man.
You can just burn in the sun.
We'll do nothing for you.
We got nothing for you.
But what did that mean in practice?
And again, the heroic Patrick Coburn.
It meant that all western Iraq was wide open.
No man's land, no consolidated political authority anywhere.
Ongoing low level Sunni insurgency led by bin Ladenites.
Even when the Americans leave by the end of twenty eleven, they still leave a few.
CIA guys and drones there.
And as we joked on the show in real time, Lex, me and Jason Ditz from antiwar dot com would joke that we're still doing drone strikes in Iraq after the withdrawal, but we still got spies there and we're still doing drone strikes.
Why?
Not that we're killing the bin Ladenites, we're aiming at their heels because we're trying to chase them west into Syria where they're heroes.
In Syria, they're the moderate rebels.
In Syria, they're just trying to fight for freedom against the forces of evil Baathist tyranny.
These are bin Laden's guys.
These are Zarqawi's guys.
It's bin Laden's agent in his main agent in.
Iraq was a guy named Abu Muhammad Al Jolani.
And then later, you know, his boss was this guy, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, who was apparently the second leader after Zarqawi.
Some say that the first leader after Zarqawi was actually made up, that there was no leader and they just kind of put this persona out there.
Well, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi sure existed.
These guys had been locked up in Kamp Bukka together and had kind of reorganized Al Qaeda in Iraq.
And when America left they sprung them all loose.
They're ready to go.
So Baghdadi tells Jolani, go you know as Al-Shara, the self-appointed president of Syria right now.
That's Abu Muhammad al-Jalani.
Let's he join the jihad because he was inspired by September 11.
He told Frontline that you damn right he fought and killed Americans in Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq War II.
Then he went to Syria to help lead the so-called uprising, revolution, civil war.
In Syria, no.
Again, we have from 2011 that Prince Bandar bin Sultan was emptying Saudi jails and sending all the jihadists off to Syria to fight.
And they were on the record.
I have the quotes where they say, It's it's is it Bandar?
Bandar says we're sick and tired of the Shiites and they're going to find out whatever I forgot the exact it's in there.
And then the other quote was from a guy named Prince Turkey who said, Dash, that is ISIS, that is Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Dash is our answer to your support for the Dawah.
Get it?
Why does Saudi Arabia in conspiracy with?
With Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, Ressa Bedouin and all these guys, why are they backing the bin Ladenites in Syria?
Because we put the Dawah party in power in Baghdad.
This is their answer to that.
So this is again the redirection.
We empowered the Shiites so much, now we got to move to limit them again, mostly because that's what our allies want so badly, especially the Israelis and the Saudis.
And so from 2011, we knew this is not a revolution.
This is not an uprising.
I don't care if there's footage of protesters on TV or even if Bashar al-Assad's forces are shooting them, which they were.
I would note, although it's proven by Shermeen Al-Narwani and the great journalist William Van Wagen and whose book on Syria I'm going to publish any day now at the Libertarian Institute, who's written these massive long-form studies on the origins of the Syria War for the Libertarian Institute and shows how yes, you have peaceful protests, but then the bin Ladenites would be there and would snipe cops.
Of course, for the direct purpose of provoking a reaction.
It's exactly how they started the Kosovo War.
They'd assassinate police officers, forcing the military to intervene to radicalize and increase the whole situation.
It was the same thing that they were doing there as how they got the whole thing started.
And again, it's literally Al Qaeda in Iraq, thus taking the lead at that time.
Now, remember hours ago when we talked about truth, falsity, and our position?
Well, our position was we're supporting moderate rebels.
We're not supporting bin Ladenites.
And in fact, the bin Ladenites, if they're not backed by Assad just to make the protesters look bad, then at least they're only benefiting because we just won't give enough support to the moderate.
That was our position, but that was not true.
From the very beginning it was clear, these guys are lunatics, man.
There was a boy in 2013, a boy had a fruit stand, and one of the Bin Ladenites, or just some guy, said, Hey, give me a discount on this orange.
And the kid said, thirteen-year-old boy, I believe.
He said, I'm sorry, I can't give discounts.
I wouldn't even give a discount to Muhammad himself.
And a bin Ladenite standing within earshot said, What did you just say?
Boom, and shot the 13-year-old boy right in the face to death.
That's one of the moderate rebels.
That's the moderate rebels.
And what were the moderate rebels all the time?
Those who were quote unquote moderate, the free Syrian army, the guys with shorter beards who would come and talk to the Americans, who would, who there's famous pictures of them in tents that say USAID on them.
And their job was just receiving the money and the guns and delivering to the bin Ladenites.
Just like with the war in Afghanistan in the 80s or something.
You know, Bandar can empty his jails and whatever, but for the most part, like these guys are volunteers.
There's not an organized state army on the ground that's like conscripted them and controls them to that degree.
So who's out there fighting?
The guys who're fighting are the ones who don't mind dying.
The ones who are absolutely the most committed to this revolution, and we know who they are.
They're bin Laden and Zawhari and Zarkawi's guys.
Al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria, going at that time by the name Jabat al Nusra, which I'm told roughly translates from Association of Assistants or Helpers.
And then they're Al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria, the same guys that were the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War 2 are now the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency in Syria.
And while there's just one line on a map between them, we're still on the side of the Shiites in Iraq, but we're on the side of the Sunnis in Syria.
Now, this goes on for two years, and you have bin Ladenites from all over the place, including Chechens and Chinese Uighurs and people from all over everywhere coming to join the Jihad, just like in Iraq War 2, Egyptians and Libyans and whoever coming to join the thing.
And by the late spring, early summer of 2013, you now have a split.
between Baghdadi, who's now also come to Syria, sorry from your point of view, this way, and his Syria, and now Baghdadi and Jalani, the leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, split.
And it's a fight over control and over really over oil wealth and who controls the their gangster spoils or bunch of terrorists, but also over doctrine too.
Baghdadi is more like a Zarqawiyite.
And Baghdadi is saying, I want my caliphate now against the advice of Ayman al Zawahiri, who is now the surviving leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq after bin Laden was killed in May of 2011.
Zawari is the one who said no, we should fight the far enemy.
Don't create a state now because you won't be able to hold on to it.
Just keep fighting.
And he sent an emissary who had been an original veteran of the Afghan war named Al-Suri to come and negotiate between Baghdadi and Jalani.
Baghdadi killed the guy and declared a state in eastern Syria.
Now at this time, Assad has to pull his forces back from the east and consolidate all the population centers other than Raqqa.
All the other big population centers are in the west of the country.
And he has to try to protect these areas.
And so he ends up being forced to leave eastern Syria basically wide open.
So by June of 2013, Baghdadi splits from Jolani and creates ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or Iraq and the Levant or whatever they called it in Arabic.
The acronym is pronounced DASH, DAESH, ESH.
And so when we say ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, the Caliphate or DASH, that's all the same thing.
that Al Qaeda in Iraq went to Syria consolidated Eastern Syria.
Now that's in June of 13.
Six months later they hoist the black flag over Fallujah and at antiwar dot com we're freaking out and I've been saying on my show this whole time, Western Iraq is wide open.
Patrick Coburn says Western Iraq is wide open.
Red alert man.
This is a problem here.
We're backing these guys.
There's nobody seems to think about the next stage of this conflict.
I remember even Michael Scheuer said on my show, I think the big problem right now is Boko Haram and I'm like, excuse me.
We're backing the bin Ladenite Caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq is wide open for the taking.
And you can go back and check my archives from especially the first half of twenty fourteen, where I'm interviewing even the despicable Jonathan Landay and all kinds of anyone that I know who knows anything about the bin Ladenites.
I'm interviewing them mostly so I can browbeat them and tell them, eye on the ball, everybody, this is what matters, right?
This is the most important crisis that could possibly be going on.
And we know now that from Seymour Hearst, there's an article called Military to Military in the London Review of Books about how Mike Flynn was heroically insubordinate and was giving secret intelligence to the Germans to give to Assad to use to kill the bin Ladenites, to kill the CIA's terrorists on the ground there, and that's what got him fired from the DIA.
And now Mike Flynn is an Iran hawk.
He hates the Ayatollah and the Shiites, and that whole thing is absolutely pro Israel Zionist guy, one hundred percent.
But his point of view was, well, let's just bomb Teheran.
Just because I hate the Shiites doesn't mean I'm a Shiites doesn't mean I want to back Osama bin Laden's suicide bomber head chopper brigades against their friend in Syria.
What the hell is this?
It's crazy.
Same thing for Tulsi Gabbard, by the way.
The most controversial thing about this woman, supposedly, her entire career somehow, she was a toady of Assad is what Bari Weiss told Joe Rogan.
And he asked her, What's a toady?
And she said, I don't know.
And he said, How do you spell it?
And she said with a Y and had no idea even to spell the word that she was trying to smear Tulsi Gabbard as some kind of agent of Bashar al Assad.
Tulsi Gabbard, who at that time was a major later promoted to captain in the Army National Guard, who I believe only left the National Guard to become Director of National Intelligence.
This American military officer, right?
Oh yeah, I'm so sure she's such a traitor to this country.
Give me a break.
They keep promoting her.
She may even still be in the National Guard.
I'm not sure how that works when you're the DNI, but anyway, Tulsi Gabber never said that Bashar Assad is a good man.
She never said he's a hero.
She never said America should ally with him.
She never said anything like that.
What she said was Assad is less worse than his enemies.
America is backing Al Qaeda.
Now, if you know anything about Tulsi Gabbard, she has never been, is not, and has never been against the war on terrorism.
In fact, when she was running for president, she put out statements defining Al Qaeda so broadly she said hundreds of groups are linked to Al Qaeda in the world and that she's willing to fight them.
Okay, she is a over the line to unreason hawk on killing bin Ladenites, okay?
But she and by the way, why, Lex?
Because she fought in Iraq War two, not fought, but she was in Iraq War two in a medical unit at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad for like a year.
and I've never heard her talk about this part of it, but it is clear there's no question it's impossible otherwise.
She saw our guys screaming and dying in front of her right over and over and over again.
Okay, so that's why she has that gray streak in her hair like Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street.
It's because of that.
So now the Democrats are saying, forget what you know about the shirts and skins lady.
We're on the skins side now.
We like Al Qaeda now.
Now, Lex, like quite frankly, like every other idiot in Washington DC apparently could not have told you the difference.
But Tulsi Gabbard could.
Tulsi Gabbard knew who was who, and she knew that Assad's enemies are Al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria, and you couldn't have tortured her into switching sides in that war, right?
It doesn't mean that she's soft on Iran, but it means that she wants bin Ladenites dead, dead, dead, and she's supposed to be siding with them now, and we're all supposed to be encouraging them to overthrow this secular dictator who protects and backs the Christians, the Shiites, the Druze, and even, and someone argued with me the other day in a YouTube comment somewhere I saw about because I had said the majority of Sunnis backed him too.
I think that's true.
And certainly it was true of the middle class in Aleppo.
And it was certainly the fact that the Syrian Arab army was always majority Sunni Arab serving that secular government.
Just because they were Sunni didn't mean that they were Bin Ladenites, these, you know, crazy, Takfiri, Salafi, whatever, ideology.
And especially I call them Bin Ladenites because it's not just that they're Salafis, because there are innumerable, I don't know, hundreds of thousands or millions even of Salafis.
and Wahhabis in this world who are quietists.
They don't have politics.
Their politics are your king is your king because God made it that way.
You're not questioning that, are you?
I didn't think so.
We used to have that tradition in the West, the divine right of kings and that kind of thing.
If you're a good Muslim to a great many Muslim people, never mind their leadership, but I mean people out in the world, and it depends on the sect and the region and everything.
But the super majority of them quite apparently are quietists.
Their job is not to question the civil authority.
Their job is to do what civil authority says.
That's how most people feel about their governments anyway, right?
For what's the bin Laden's problem was he was political and he had these political goals for this earthly realm where we exist today.
And so he really was Loretta Napoleone, the great Italian journalist, compared him very much to like a Leninist, where he's trying to overthrow this world and have things the way that he wants it to be in a way that even, again, radical and fundamentalist Muslims usually don't believe in.
And usually, in fact, the studies have shown it's amateurs who are actually kind of new at Islam.
and don't know that much about it, who tend to be the more fanatical and the more violent, whereas people who actually know more about it will say, ah, actually, as Muhammad says, you better not do that and that kind of thing, right?
And I cite all the studies in Fools Aaron.
I have the footnotes in Fools Aaron showing that directly, and including some of the 911 hijackers, including the bulk of the fighters for the Islamic State Caliphate.
They're just regular Iraqis who are conscripted and thinking fighting for ISIS, but that didn't make them even necessarily that political, much less motivated by simply theology to behave in these ways.
You know what I mean?
Sure.
If just briefly, because you brought Tulsi up, Why do you think I had a chance to have multiple conversations with her?
Why do you think she was smeared so much on this topic and other topics?
Why does she piss off?
The first thing was this.
She absolutely just knew better and was immovable like Stonewall Jackson on this issue, you're not going to be able to convince her.
These are moderate rebels.
Those lies don't work here.
So now that put her severely on the outside of the consensus and with authority, she actually knew what she was talking about.
That was her problem and that was their problem with her.
They couldn't fix that.
And then of course she, she, even though they loved her, oh man, they groomed her.
People forget when she first came in, she's pretty, she's intelligent, she's in the military, she fought in Iraq or, you know, is a quote unquote combat vet because even though she wasn't pulling triggers there, she was shelled while at Camp Balad, so she's earned her stripes as an official combat veteran in that sense.
And she's a woman and she's a Democrat and this is everything that they wanted.
But then she endorsed Bernie Sanders.
Oh yeah.
And then they went for full jihad and never forgive her for that.
And so that was her.
Hillary Clinton went after her, is that what happened?
Yeah.
And Hillary Clinton tried to smear her with Russia Gate.
The pathetic, uh, sick, dying windbag Robert Windham from NBC News tried to smear her as well as he tried to smear my colleague and editor and friend, Hunter Dorensis, as part of the Russia Gate hoax with his absolutely ludicrous reporting.
Have you ever heard of anything that Robert Windham ever reported in your life?
Can you think of anything where you go, Oh, Robert Windham, he's the guy that did this.
No, he will only be known when he dies, which will be soon as a disgrace to humanity and to his profession for his disgusting and despicable lies against Tulsi Gabbard, against Jill Stein and against Hunter Dorensis may he burn in hell.
So anyway, and his entire NBC news organization too.
And that's why they hated her, because she told the truth.
Yeah, it's sad.
It's sad that people like that, like we talked about this with Ron Paul, just different, obviously, different humans, different walks of life and so on.
But there's like, there's certain people that just have this authenticity and agree with them or disagree.
It's like, this is like a strong, this is a really interesting person.
And actually for a long time Bernie Sanders was that also.
And it's like, and there's something about the system that wants to destroy those kinds of folks or at least suffocate the authenticity in that person.
Yeah.
And to make them conform.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't I wouldn't give him as much credit as the two of them, but but Ron is in a class by himself, of course.
I guess you could say that they're comparable because I disagree with her and pretty severely enough on enough things that where but on the other hand, I think Bernie Sanders is sometimes disingenuous in a way that I don't find her to be without getting too far into that.
But anyway, you're right though that you know, you can see the people who are outside the norm usually and are treated as the outcasts up there.
If they're anywhere near the halls of power up there, they're the ones usually who are telling the truth about things and are getting things right.
Okay, so so now let's fast forward now.
So yes.
January of 14, they hoist the black flag over Fallujah.
And we at antiwar.com, et cetera, are freaking out over this.
Oh, and I was going to say about Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn was the head of the DIA that put out a report, a secret report that's now published.
Judicial Watch got it, and the great Brad Hoff wrote about it at his great blog, Levant Report.
People can find it.
And what happened was...
Their goal is to create a Salafist principality in East.
in eastern Syria and there's a real danger that this could blow back into western Iraq and Al-Qaeda in Iraq could return to their old haunts in Mosul and Ramadi.
He warned that in the summer of 2012.
Okay, then they just short of a year later, they consolidate a state in eastern Syria, just as he said, just as I said.
Again, you can check the records.
All 6,100 and something of my interviews are at scottwharton.org, if anyone ever wants to see whether I was good on this back when I claimed I was.
And Obama, this is Vanity Fair magazine, and he tells him, listen, just because the junior varsity puts on a Kobe Bryant jersey doesn't make them the Lakers.
Right?
So this idiot, I'm sorry, excuse me for a moment, but don't you like to somehow take the slightest comfort in the fact that like at least Barack Obama can read?
At least he's like the slightest bit maybe interested in what he's doing compared to W. Bush or Trump who are clearly just winging it and W. Bush just forget.
it.
Bill Clinton, of course, they would say he would know more about any subject than his briefers, and they better be on topic because he read six books about it, and he's a horrible child killer, but that's still true about him, that he's a brilliant guy or at least a brilliant consumer of data and in trying to form his policies, he wanted to be in charge and know as much as he could.
How could Barack Obama Alex not know who Al Qaeda in Iraq is?
How could he think that ISIS is the junior varsity?
These guys are the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed four thousand out of the four thousand five hundred of our guys that died in Iraq War two.
These are the Zarkawiites.
They're worse than bin Laden.
They are Patrick Coburn said they're the Islamist Khmer Rouge.
Right, like Pol Pot and the Communists, the most insane lunatics to ever be armed with weapons before.
Right?
Nutcases.
Berserkers.
This is the junior varsity, the suicide bomber brigade, the most dangerous one that's ever been created in history.
And six months later, they rolled right into Mosul, and this is the picture you still see have in your head of that long train of Toyota Helix pickup trucks rolling into Mosul with their headlights on and all the jihadis in the back of the trucks with their rifles.
And just as Patrick Coburn and I had predicted, the Shiite Iraqi army that had hardly any interest whatsoever in ruling Mosul or Tikrete or Fallujah turned tail and ran.
And the Islamic State Caliphate then conquered all of western Iraq.
From 2014, they took Mosul, Tikrete.
It took them a little while, but they took Ramadi in 2015.
They took Fallujah right away and they created in an area to landmass the size of Great Britain with a standing army of its highest about two hundred fifty to three hundred thousand men if you take if you look at their troop strength in various places during that time and then what did Obama do?
This is in oh man you know what we should watch this clip dude let's pipe this in here speaking of Jonah Goldberg let's pipe in orin orin orin sunnies and it's gonna come right up as your first YouTube link it's gonna automatically launch right there there it is right there sunnies versus shiites and the lesser of two evils and I actually met the guy who asked the question here came up to me at a thing and said, Hey, I'm the guy that asked the question at that thing.
So kudos to you, buddy.
Thank you.
Lex Freeman, let's watch this clip and trip out.
It doesn't stay in there for another couple more weeks.
What do you think your country's doing in order to protect your interests?
Pause one sec, did I mention now, this is in the middle of June, twenty fourteen.
Okay, they sacked Mosul and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi got up there at the Mosul Grand Mosque like a cross between Benito Mussolini and Osama bin Laden and declared himself the divine.
The divinely appointed Caliph Ibrahim, ruler of the Islamic State Caliphate.
This is two weeks later.
Okay, hit the button.
How are you working in line with other partners?
All right, now keep in mind I don't speak for the government anymore, I'm speaking for me.
Not true.
Wait, pause it again.
He gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post where he said these exactly the same things while he was still Netanyahu's ambassador to the United States.
And this is treason.
This man was born in the United States of America.
Okay, go ahead.
And what I'm going to say is harsh and perhaps a little edgy.
But if we have to choose the lesser of evil here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites.
For the reason you're not speaking for me.
Okay.
It's a lesser evil.
It's a evil, believe me.
It's a terrible evil.
Again, they've just taken out 700 to 800 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field.
But who are they fighting against?
They're fighting against the proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria.
You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets.
The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities.
So from Israel's perspective, if there's going to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.
And I again, I'm speaking entirely for myself.
No, he just said from Israel's perspective from the Netanyahu regime's perspective is exactly what he meant, and it's fine because we have plenty of Mossad and military officers echoing those exact same statements.
Even Thomas L. Friedman says we shouldn't defeat the Islamic State yet, they're taxing the Shiites.
Okay, there's no question of what he meant there, and by the way, is he talking about the mythical moderates, the free Syrian army?
No, he's not.
How do we know that?
Because he did just say Sunnis, but he also said, We just saw them take seventeen hundred Iraqi, he says soldiers, but it was Air Force cadets at Camp Spicher, and massacred them.
In the field, Iraqi, Shiites, that was ISIS that did that just a week ago when he's saying this.
He's not talking about the mythical moderates.
He's saying the Sunni evil, let the Sunni evil prevail.
He's talking about Baghdadi's bin Ladenite Caliphate.
Because and what are his two excuses?
That Assad is responsible for every single death in the war when all he's doing is defending his state from foreign invasion by foreign backed, superpower backed, bin Ladenite suicide bomber.
He just said suicide bomber.
Mercenaries.
Right, but no, Assad's responsible for every single one of the deaths, and then he lies again.
outright and says, and Iran has military nuclear technology, implying that somehow the Ayatollah has a bomb and he's going to give one to Assad or to Hezbollah.
And so that's why we need to back Al Qaeda in Syria, both of which are, of course, complete and total hoaxes.
And again he admitted in the middle of that after lying and saying he's only speaking for himself, he accidentally said from Israel's perspective.
He also said the same thing again in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, either right before he left or right after he left, being the ambassador, said the exact same thing.
clearly reflecting Benjamin Netanyahu's view here.
There's no question about that.
And I have in enough already, I have an entire section called Israel's role that showed how they were giving direct aid and comfort to the bin Ladenites by way of the Golan Heights.
And there was even at one point, quite famously, there was an attack by local Druze on the Golan Heights, kidnapped prisoners of the Israelis, basically, who attacked an Israeli ambulance that was shipping bin Ladenites back to the front because the bin Ladenites had been killing Syrian Druze, their brethren.
And so they attacked this ambulance and it became kind of a controversy.
It also was a controversy when ISIS, not even Nusra or Jishal Islam or Aral Al-Sham or one of these other groups, actually ISIS accidentally hit Israel with a rocket and immediately apologized.
Very sorry about that.
We like you guys.
No offense.
Forget that.
You can read, let's look at this as long as we're on this.
I'm having so much fun.
Type in foreign affairs and accepting Al Qaeda.
There you go, the enemy of the United States enemy.
And just in case you're confused with a nice.
pig picture of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri on the top.
And the article is about how we're supposed to hate the Shiites more now.
Because that's what our allies want.
Regardless of who killed all those Americans in New York City.
They ran another one.
Type it in The Good and Bad of Arar al Sham.
This is from Brookings The Good and Bad of Syria's Arar al Sham.
Yep, it's by that traitor, Michael Duran.
And Clint Watts.
Who's Clint Watts?
He's the guy., the former FBI agent who was behind Hamilton's 68 that lied and said that you and all your friends are Russian bots and that you ought to be censored right off of Twitter.
That's who Clint Watts is.
He's a damned liar and he later admitted to Buzzfeed, Oh, I don't really know about that whole bot thing.
He was the guy who did it working for Bill Crystal.
They created the alliance for securing democracy and it was Clint Watts who lied that whole and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories claiming that Russian bots were behind it every time anything good ever happened on Twitter during that era.
That's who Clint Watts is.
And then they say, What did you click the thing pitch up just a sec?
What's the by line here?
The good and bad of Arar al Sham?
Oh, they deleted it in the foreign affairs version.ion, the subhead is An Al Qaeda linked group worth defending.
Yeah, I mean, it also says the Al Qaeda of yesterday is gone, so it's changing the story.
They're good guys now, man.
They kill Shiites for us now.
Yeah.
They killed Serbs for us.
We really liked it when they were helping kick in Serb skulls.
Well, just to wrap that up, Obama launched a war.
He waited a couple of months to try to push out Maliki, and then he launched Iraq War three to destroy the Caliphate again.
In this time, in this case directly on the side of the Iranians, he had Iranians on the ground, Quds Force on the ground.
running the Iraqi Shiite militias fighting for Tikrit, liberating Tikrit from the bin Ladenites with America flying air cover for them.
At this time, John McCain complained, We're flying as Iran's Air Force in Iraq, but we're flying as Iran's Air Force against the bin Ladenite Caliphate that McCain had helped build up to spite Iran for accepting our Christmas gift of fighting Iraq War two for them.
So it was all John McCain's fault when he complained that.
And then there's a guy named Michael Horton, no relation to me, but who is from the Jamestown Foundation and a terrorism expert says, yeah, John McCain complains that we're flying as Iran's We're flying as Iran's Air Force in Iraq.
Well, we're flying as Al Qaeda's Air Force in Yemen because this was at the time that Obama changed sides in the Yemen war, where America was giving intelligence to the Houthis.
Wall Street Journal, January 2012, uh, 2015, and Al Monitor by Barbara Slavin from the Atlantic Council, uh, January 2015, America's passing intelligence.
Lloyd Austin, Obama's, I mean, pardon me, Biden's later Secretary of Defense was the head of central command.
He's passing intelligence to the Shiite Houthis to use to kill Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Our enemies, the ones who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009 with the underpants bomb, the guys who did the horrific attacks in Nice and in Paris, France, the Charlie Hebdo and the Eagles of Death Metal concert.
They attacked a kosher grocery store in France and a Jewish museum in Brussels.
This was the first, I think, ISIS in Syria attack was at a Holocaust museum in Brussels.
So that blowback was coming all the way right way.
But anyway, AQAP in Yemen, they were like real ass Al Qaeda guys and they were coming for us.
They weren't just like, oh, Al Shabaab in Syria, right?
Right, these guys were real enemies and Obama's will turn right around.
And because the new deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, wanted a promotion.
He was the defense minister, he's a brand new, 29 years old defense minister and deputy crown prince, he wants to make a political move.
So he launches a war in Yemen against the new Houthi regime with Obama's support so that he can use that as a power play inside the royal family.
This is when he arrests the crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef and Talal and all of those Saudi billionaires that got marginalized and arrested and their all their property stolen at that time in a big move by MBS to make himself crown prince and de facto king, which he is right now.
And he did that in alliance with Mohammed Ben Zayed from the UAE, and they convinced Obama to do it, and it was an absolutely genocidal war against the civilian population of Yemen that whole time.
I'd hate to leave that out.
I guess we have to skip Somalia for let me say about Somalia real quick.
It's the longest war in American history.
George W. Bush sent JSOC there in December and CIA in December of zero one, and they never left.
We've been killing people in Somalia ever since then.
thing that they did was they took the bad guy warlord from Blackhawk down in 1993 and they tried to put his son in power.
They built up his son.
You bring us the scalps of jihadists.
And get this, according to the CIA talking to the Washington Post, this is their version.
There were three.
Not thirteen, not thirty, not three thousand, not three, nothing, three Al Qaeda members, suspects wanted for questioning by the FBI for their potential involvement in the USS Cole attack and the Africa Embassies attack.
That was the excuse for this intervention, the potential that there were three bin Ladenites in Somalia.
So America started backing the warlords against them, more people started and whoever their other enemies were, right, whatever they want to do.
The more that they fight, the more they keep coming back to the CIA and saying, Oh man, you wouldn't believe how many enemies there are out there.
And they make matters worse and worse, and this is at a time where people mock libertarians for noticing that without a government, Somalia was thriving.
They had come from communism, then they had a civil war of fifty warlords versus each other, but everyone was spent and nobody won.
And so they had essentially a stateless country, but it was more or less at peace and no one was powerful.
enough to gangsterize everybody else, and so the ports at Kismayo and Mogadishu were open with no tariffs, and they had massive trade, and one of the best ways to measure economic growth at that time was in the expansion of the cell phone industry, which was more extensive in Somalia at that time than any other place in Eastern Africa.
And this was under de facto accidental libertarian capitalist anarchism, right?
With no one in charge, and libertarians noticed that, and to this day, freaks and cooks and especially liberal democrats like to say, Oh, if you like freedom so much, why don't you move to Somalia?
Well, excuse me, but George W. Bush, you know, freedom himself, has been destroying Somalia with the power of the most powerful regime in the history of the solar system this whole time since then.
So only an American who knows nothing about America's responsibility for destroying that society could possibly be ignorant and idiot enough to blame libertarianism and freedom and liberty and capitalism and free trade among property owners for what ails Somalia?
USA, the regime is what.
Is what ruined Somalia, our military, our CIA.
And so by two thousand five, they formed their own little pseudo government in response to American intervention and aggression called the Islamic Courts Union.
W. Bush then hired the Ethiopians to invade to crush them, their historical Christian enemies against this Muslim society, and hired Ethiopia to invade and they did complete with mass rapes and torture and want and murder and just absolute war crimes.
And that was what led to the rise of Al Shabaab means the youth, or I've been told more accurately, the boys.
And under the Islamic Courts Union, it was a group of thirteen different groupings that came together.
That's why it's a union.
But who was in charge?
The elders, the uncles, the imams, the grandfathers, the old men of the village were the ones who were in charge of dispute resolution going on, right?
But now, once George Bush had Ethiopia invade, Christmas time 2006, well, guess who leads the insurgency?
The boys.
And that's why we've been fighting Al Shabaab in Somalia since 2006, because George W. Bush invented them.
with his horrific satanic, demonic, murderous war that he waged there from two thousand one through two thousand six.
Then self licking ice cream cone, oh look, we have a terrorist enemy we have to fight.
In twenty twelve, America kicked them out of Kismayo, or the Kenyans did with American support kicked them out of the port city of Kismayo where they had a black market charcoal operation going financing their efforts.
And when they did that, it was only then that they turned to the Saudis and accepted a sack of gold coins to declare themselves Al Qaeda.
twenty twelve eleven years after George Bush came to Samara.
He succeeded.
He and his successor Obama succeeded in turning them into bin Ladenites.
Only then the Americans killed the worst leader of the bin Ladenite faction, a guy named Goudain.
They killed him in 2012 or 2013.
Oh, I should have mentioned that the guys they overthrew in Bush's last year in power, Connolly Rice made a deal with them that they can actually be the government of Somalia after all.
Never mind our giant war against your Islamic Court's Union.
You can be the president, a guy named Sharif.
You can be the president after all, but it has to be in the form of our transitional federal government that we've built for you.
So once those guys, their original enemies that they waged this whole war to thwart.
once they went ahead and accepted them and empowered them.
Al Shabaab said, You guys are traitors and sellouts and kept fighting.
And by the way, Obama murdered men, women and children with drones.
He had our nuclear submarines firing cruise missiles at thatched huts full of women and their daughters.
Okay.
That's what Barack Obama did.
He made that thing nothing but worse and worse and worse the whole time he was in there.
When Donald Trump came in, this is according to James Mattis.
He complained to James Mattis, his Secretary of Defense, and said, I want out of Somalia.
Why are we in Somalia?
Where is Somalia?
What do I care about Somalia?
Get me out of there.
And Mattis said two things.
One, we're trying to prevent a Times Square attack type attack.
Well, the thing about that is the Times Square attack was committed by a Pakistani American named Faisal Shahzad who was living the dream, man.
He had an advanced degree.
He had a nice house and a wife and a kid and a car and was doing fine.
And then he went home to Pakistan on vacation and he saw the results of one of Barack Obama's drone strikes that killed a family there.
And he volunteered to sign up for the Pakistani Taliban.
that had never done anything to us.
They had not targeted us at all.
This is the first time that they did.
They recruited him, taught him how to make a bomb, and then he went to Times Square and tried to kill a bunch of innocent people on, I think it was a Friday night or a Thursday night there on a and luckily his bomb was just a dud and didn't kill people.
So James Mattis is causing Times Square attacks.
He's not preventing them.
And then secondly, again, this is Mattis told the Post that he told Trump, you have no choice.
And that Trump said, okay.
And then not only that because this was his policy was, you know the myth that America only lost Vietnam because Lyndon Johnson tied one arm behind the military's back and wouldn't let the generals do the job because he's pouring over the maps all day and a penny pinching and micromanaging the war effort.
That's been a big myth, HW Bush said.
I ain't doing that.
General Schwarzkopf, you do what you gotta do.
I'm not right.
Donald Trump said the same thing.
Nobody's ever going to accuse me of micromanaging the military and preventing them from accomplishing their goals.
So to that end, from the moment he took power in seventeen, he devolved decision making authority as low down the chain of command as he possibly could, cut out all of Obama's lawyers and whatever who were in the way and second guessing.
And so he devolved command responsibility.
Oh, and then he also changed the rules of engagement to recategorize these sort of pseudo war zones like Somalia and Yemen into full scale active war zones where now the rules are less.
And essentially he told James Mattis, you do everything that you can and want to do within the law.
That's it.
You go as far as you possibly can on everything.
He empowered the military.
He empowered the military greatly, especially when it came to fighting bin Ladenites.
I don't ever want to hear somebody say that I didn't kill enough.
I said James Mattis, you do whatever you gotta do in Somalia.
If they couldn't make it work, it still ain't my fault, right?
That was the way that he played it.
That was the way he did the same thing in Afghanistan.
He wanted out of Afghanistan from the moment he came in.
Instead, he escalated the war for four years while he was negotiating with the Taliban, killed another couple of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, even in a massive air and drone war, especially in Nangahar and in Helmand for, you know, almost his entire four years in power during that.
Can we take that tangent and talk about his second term, how that changed?
and first maybe a bath break.
Yeah, sure.
All right, we absolutely today must talk about Israel, Palestine and the Iran war.
But right before that, can we wrap up Somalia and Iraq War three?
Right.
So yeah, get those out of the way real quick.
Just to say about Somalia, it's been the status quo.
I have no new information for you other than it's been the sock puppet government failing to quell the Al Shabaab-based insurgency this whole time.
Bush bombed them, then Obama for eight each.
Then Trump for four, then Biden for four, and now Trump in his second term now has vastly increased the strikes.
His counterterterrorism guy Sebastian Gorka, who's an an idiot and a hawk and couldn't tell you the difference between this or that, but he knows he wants to kill them all.
And he's one of those, you know, Fox News blow hard, no nothing idiots that Trump has hired and put in charge over there.
And he's massively escalated the war against Al Shabaab.
But of course that means blasting men, women and children to tiny pieces with high explosives and that kind of thing.
And in fact at one point Trump even sent regular troops there for training and then pulled them back out again, I believe in his first term.
But this is something that Dave de Camp does a really good job of covering this every day at antiwar dot com dot The ongoing war.
It literally is America's longest war is against Somalia since December 2001 without stopping.
And then on Iraq War 3, again, Obama finally launched it after using the pressure and the threat of ISIS to force Maliki out temporarily.
He's still not all the way gone.
They replaced him with a guy named Almadi who was from the Supreme Islamic Council, so again, take your pick, Dawa or Scary.
And then he launched the war in 2014.
It was a brutal war, special operations forces on the ground mostly guiding air power to targets.
They absolutely just decimated the cities that they liberated including Tikrit, Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah, especially Mosul, killed, you know, another many tens of thousands of people to destroy the caliphate that they had built.
And when I say Iraq War 3, that includes Eastern Syria as well because they ended up going to Raqqa, which was the capital.
We call it Eastern Syria.
It's really sort of north central Syria, but it's relatively east.
And that where most of the rest of the east is empty desert out there.
Can you actually break down Iraq War 1, 2, 3, 3, 5?
Exactly where you're dealing with those?
So Iraq War 1 is Operation Yellow Ribbon Desert Storm, the First Gulf War, 1991, January through February 1991.
Iraq War 1.5 is from the end of that all the way through W. Bush.
That's Bill Clinton bombing them on average every other day for eight years straight.
That's Iraq War 1.5.
Then W. Bush comes in and he and the neoconservatives lie us into Iraq War 2.
And that's the war that we fought through 2008 slash 11.
The worst of the fighting was over by the end of 2008.
We'd won the war for our adversaries by then and then stayed and finally left by the end of 2011.
Then we're gone for about two years, although, as I said, CIA was still doing drone strikes there, so we really hadn't stopped bombing Iraq that whole time.
And then they build up the caliphate and launch Iraq War 3 in August of 2014, which ends at the end, essentially, of Trump's first year in power, 2017, maybe into the beginning of 2018 is when they wrap up Iraq War 3.
And now is what I would call Iraq War 3.5, which is America again embedded with the Shiite army, hunting down and killing the last of the bin Ladenite Sunni insurgency, which still pops its head up from time to time here and there.
But of course, it puts us, our guys, right in range of Shiite militias that operate sometimes independently and sometimes under the control, although maybe deniable control of Iran and groups like Khatib al-Hezballah, which is very closely linked to the Bada Brigade.
I say al, it's just Khatib Hezballah.
But they're very similar to the Bada Brigade, essentially adjuncts of the official army.
Shiite militias, they call them the PMUs, the popular mobilization units that once ISIS.
came to western Iraq, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called on all Shiites to rise up and defend the new Iraqi Shiist stand from them and all that.
So that's where the PMUs really came into existence.
And then, of course, they have their own incentive structures going on and are probably pretty close in relative power to the official Iraqi army itself at this point and are very much under, I don't know, complete control, but are very close to the Iranian Quds Force, Revolutionary Guard.
So I think you would say that Iraq War 3.5 is what continues to this day.
The worry is that it will turn into Iraq War 4 and we're going to end up turning around again and fighting against the Shiites that we fought in Iraq War 2 and 3 for in connection to what's going on in alliance with Israel against Iran and their friends.
Right.
That's the danger.
That's what if we get to Iraq War 4, it would be that.
We started talking about Iran and then you went to Somalia because we had to cover Somalia.
And then I guess because we're both just focused and a little bit exhausted, forgot to talk about Iran.
So Scott, one of the amazing things about you is that you said, why don't we just continue today?
And you came back.
Let's do this.
Let's talk about the war in Iran.
Yeah.
What's the right way to punch it in?
Well, punch it in.
Yeah.
So here's the question that you asked me that I never answered, which was, well, so what is with Israel's hyper focus on Iran then anyway, like this obsession at this point?
So as we talked about, it's kind of a distraction for Rabin in the first place.
And then, you know, the Likud took Rabin's same demonization of Iran, but without the compromise with the Palestinians' part, right?
And that was the Netanyahu doctrine.
And I always thought, well, not always, but, you know, it was an issue that potentially, it seemed to make more sensese for Netanyahu to not really seek regime change in Iran to hawk it up against him.
You know, at all times keep tensions high.
But isn't Iran the basis of trying to rally all the Gulf states to come and be partners with Israel now that, like, come on, we have to have a united front against the Persians, especially since Netanyahu's men in America convinced George W. Bush to go to Baghdad and put Iran's best friends in power there.
And in fact, we didn't talk all about the mechanics of the thing, but we did talk a little bit about the Yemen war.
It was blowback from Obama's CIA anti Al Qaeda war that.
that through a few complicated steps, as I outlined in the book, led to the rise of the Houthis coming and taking over the HUR Shiite group from the north of Yemen, coming and taking over the capital city of Sanaa in 2015.
As I said, America was backing them for a little while against Al Qaeda before Obama stabbed them in the back and took Saudi and Al Qaeda side against the Houthis.
But this is another example of the increase, supposedly, of Iranian power, although the Houthis are not nearly as close to Iran as, say, for example, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, who you could, I think, fairly characterize as Iran's 51st state, right?
Where in the case of the Houthis in Yemen, that's pretty exaggerated most of the time and they were under total blockade.
So all the propaganda about Iran shipping them all these weapons was exaggerated.
But anyway, so the Iranian Shiite Crescent has been empowered by American foreign policy.
And by the way, until last December we talked about the caliphate and the war with Iran against the caliphate, right, Iraq War 3 to destroy it again.
But then in Syria, that left Assad far more dependent on Iran than ever before and more dependent on Hezbollah than ever before.
So you could barely characterize the dirty war of the Obama years in Syria as having fully backfired and not really accomplished anything that is up until last November, December when Al Qaeda broke out of the Idlib province and sacked Damascus.
That was a major score for the Sunni side against the Shiites.
By the Sunni side, I mean America and Al Qaeda and Israel and Turkey and Saudi and friends, right?
So as I say, it made sense for Netanyahu to have an enemy in Iran to rally the Sunni Arab states against.
On the other hand, hey man, getting rid of the Palestinians from the point of view of Likud here.
We're getting rid of the Palestinians at least of the Gaza Strip.
West Bank is next.
We got Hezbollah completely crippled their charismatic leader Nasrallah dead.
We got Assad overthrown and replaced by friendly bin Ladenites in Syria.
Of course, the Shiites still control Baghdad, there is no reversal in that, but Israel is essentially, you know, winning in many ways in the war over there, at least in the short term.
And so just like I was saying about Netanyahu's speech before the UN, that this is the new Middle East, basically I won.
The Netanyahu doctrine is we get everything we want and without compromising with the Palestinians.
And then the last major enemy player on the board is Iran.
And apparently they thought, you know what?
Like having an incentive for these Sunni kings to be friends of ours is one thing, but actually just going ahead and getting rid of them and turning Iran into something like the chaos in Syria where there's no central state in Iran anymore at all and it's all just Baluchi jihadis blowing up suicide bombs and Kurdish leftists and whatever going on tearing the country apart is like the Oded Yinan plan, which I guess I'll explain that.
It's really funny, man.
If you read this, it's so ridiculous.
It's ODED YINON.
Oded Yinan.
There you go, Yan Plan.
So what it is The Yan Plan is an article published in february nineteen eighty two in the Hebrew journal Kivunim entitled A Strategy for Israel in the nineteen eighties.
This article was penned by Odid Yan, reputedly a former advisor of Aryan Sharon, a former senior official with the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
So here's what the thing says.
It says, Oh no, the Soviet communists are sure to finish conquering the entire world real soon.
And poor little Israel will stand alone against the one world communist state.
which of course is exactly how it worked out, right?
So the Soviets were gone by the end of the decade.
They didn't exist at all anymore.
But that's like premise one.
The Soviets are going to conquer everything and poor little Israel is going to be all alone.
So the only way we can secure our existence now will be to smash every Arab state into warring tribes where the worst armed enemy we have is a cook shaking a rifle over his head, right?
And warring tribes by religious and whatever ethnic sectarian divisions that they can help to engineer to keep everyone else just completely divided and weak.
There's no point in being friends with anyone.
Let's just be much more powerful than everyone because that's the darkness of the world we face now, even though the premise is false that, you know, still was the policy along the lines of the clean break too, where it's a peace through overwhelming strength rather than friendly and decent relations with the neighboring states.
So anyway, like what's going on in Syria now is like, is there even really any such thing as Syria now?
The Turks have a big, you know, chunk in the north.
The Israelis are already taking a major chunk in the south, including Mount Herman or Hernan.
How I say it wrong right outside of Damascus.
And then you got bin Laden.ites, like what kind of real state can they make there?
It's going to be, you know, this guy Jolani has been to CIA finishing school, right?
He clearly is under control of the Turks to a degree and has stopped chopping off heads and doing suicide attacks and bad public relations like that.
But there's still a bunch of bin Ladenite coup.
If he's really that tame, his own men are getting rid of him soon enough anyway.
So.
So you see like, you know, in far eastern, northeastern Syria, you have the Kurds under the protection, sort of kind of of the Americans.
but then so are their enemies, the Turks.
Uh, and then you have, you know, the, the, There's fighting between the jihadists and the Druze where people are being lined up and shot and all this.
So in other words, like there is no Syria, which is perfectly good with Israel, right?
That like if they could do the same thing, I guess Jordan and Egypt, Egypt are tame enough, but they if they could just wreck every state in the region, I think, well, that would be according to the Odead Yinan plan.
And I think that may have been their plan for Iran.
Now, Lex, they tweet out pictures and I forget, I'm sorry, which official it was.
If it was the defense minister, I think it was the defense minister of Israel tweet out a picture of him with the son of the Shahrez Apalavi or the grandson of the older Shahrez Apalavi, uh, senior there as though like the plan was we're going to parachute this guy in when we launch this war.
It's going to be a regime change war.
And the Washington Post had a piece that said the Israelis sent messages to all the leading generals and told them, if you don't rise up and throw the Ayatollah right now, we're going to kill your families.
And then they're hitting all these regime targets including police stations and all this kind of stuff, command and control systems in the military, where the idea apparently was they hoped to get a regime change.
They hoped that it would be enough to weaken the government and that some force would come to power, which shows that probably they're delusional and listening to Kuk's, you know, telling them that things like parachuting a monarch back into Persia could possibly work to be a full scale regime change.
They knew, we know that they knew, of course, that they would need America to finish the war against the nuclear program, which they actually didn't, but at least it would take America to hit Natanz and Fordo, these deeply buried nuclear centrifuge facilities.
So whether they really hoped that they could get the United States to go all the way and follow through with a regime change, hunt down and kill the Ayatollah.
I mean, there was a news story that Donald Trump told the Israelis, don't kill the Ayatollah.
Like we all know where he is, but don't do it.
They claimed that.
I don't know that that's true, but that was one of the stories that they put out anyway was that America had made his explicit choice to preserve the regime.
Although if you just kill the Ayatollah, that doesn't necessarily destroy the government, right?
Somebody killed our president.
That doesn't mean the whole government falls, right?
The Congress is still going to convene and they're going to whatever, have a new guy, whatever.
Well, didn't Trump explicitly post don't kill the Ayatollah?
I think he said threatened him, but I think they also put out a story saying that he told the Israelis not to kill him.
But I think both things are right there.
So, but then the point being that to get a real regime change in Tehran means a real war in Iran and air dominance is one thing, but boots on the ground standing around in Tehran telling Mullahs that they cannot convene anymore or whatever is a whole different ball game, right?
And it's a thing that for all the talk of war with Iran over all of these, you know, last two decades at least, nobody's talked about we're going to send in some kind of occupation force or do anything like that.
But so that's that's always been a big part part of the argument against the war is that you start the war, you don't really have a way to finish it, right?
Because facts as we've already seen that contrary to Trump's claims, they did not completely obliterate their centrifuge capacity.
Now they seem to have inflicted some pretty heavy damage on Fordo and or Natanz, although there are conflicting reports and some say that Natanz was less damaged than might have been.
They did destroy importantly the conversion facility at Isfahan.
That's where you can take uranium metal after you refine the ore, then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas.
That's what you spin in the centrifuge cascades, then you convert it back into metal.
So without that facility, you either have a bunch of gas or you have a bunch of metal that you can't enrich to another state, you know, to a higher state.
So, um, what do you think?
Or if you have a bunch of gas, you can't convert it back into metal.
So without that facility, they have a setback, but I don't think all their, all their facilities are destroyed and they've already announced that they're not and that they still reserve the right to enrich uranium and that they're going to and that they're not even going to talk with us anymore until we recognize their right to enrich uranium, although they do.
And I'm not saying that this is true.
I don't know that this is true, but I'm saying it is true that they've said this.
That they are still bound by the Ayatollah's fatwa of 2003 that bans, you know, reiterating the previous Ayatollah's fatwa that bans the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
So they're declaring that they haven't broken out to a nuclear, are calling their bluff, which again, it was always an implied bluff.
They never explicitly said, Don't you bomb us or we'll make nuclear, but that seemed to be the implied threat.
They're a threshold state.
They have a latent deterrent.
Well, what happens if you bomb them?
Well, now we'll make nuclear was always the implied threat.
Well, now they're saying, No.
And that could be that just because America inflicted so much damage on their thing that they, it's going to take them a while to get up and running enough to even make a credible breakout.
I don't know.
It could also be that the ayatollah has just said no, the principle of our sovereign right to enrich uranium and have a nuclear program for peaceful purposes is the only thing that we're insisting on.
And we really, just like we always said, don't want nukes anyway.
And but now that Trump, one more thing, now that Trump has accepted Netanyahu's definition of any nuclear program is a nuclear weapons program, well then if they keep enriching, then we keep bombing and Trump has explicitly threatened that, right?
So we're just on this ladder.
They're not going to give up enrichment and Trump is apparently so far.
So far, never going to back down on enrichment, which W. Bush and Obama had done.
Like, ah, what are you going to do?
They're never going to give up enrichment.
If we're going to be reasonable and get a deal, we are going to have to recognize their right to enrich, which is actually in the nonproliferation treaty, there, you know, which they have signed, which is America's treaty.
Do you think the world is a more dangerous place if Iran gets a nuclear weapon?
Yeah.
I don't want anybody to have nuclear.
I hate to see the proliferation.
I mean, in a way, nuclear weapons seem to make states more responsible a lot of times, but you can't really count on that, right?
You can say, Yeah, they keep the peace.
They do keep the peace.
Major powers don't want to fight with with hydrogen bombs?
Come on, it's insane.
It's beyond insane.
It's unthinkable.
On the other hand, it's a great bluff until it fails.
And if it fails, then you're talking about devastation beyond imagination.
Is it surprising to you, sorry to once again zoom out on human nature, that the mutually shared destruction has worked up to this point seemingly effectively?
It's just a blink of an eye, right?
Hey, the Soviets got nuclear in 1946.
Yeah.
So meaning in the full arc of human history, it's a blink of an eye.
That's right.
Yeah, there's no, there's no, like, real base of statistics to measure from, right it's been a few decades.
Think about it like this.
If I say to you, look man, here's how international security is going to work for the next 275 years.
Okay.
All the major powers are going to have hydrogen bombs and they're all going to hold them at each other's capital cities heads in a Mexican standoff permanently and it's going to be great and that's how we're going to go forward for the next, I don't know, ten generations.
No, that it couldn't possibly work, could it?
We're all going to die at some point if that's the setup and I'm not advocating for a global state here.
I'm perfectly against that better than anyone, but I'm just saying there's got to be a better way.
than the permanent H-bomb Mexican standoff.
And I'm not advocating for unilateral disarmament and surrender, but I am advocating for multilateral disarmament.
And Ronald Reagan thought we could.
Not Walter Mondale.
Ronald Reagan went to Rykovic in 1986 and he was a hair away from making a deal with Mikhail Gorbatchov.
This is three years before the wall fell in Berlin.
Okay.
They didn't know that the Soviet Union was about to cease.
And hell, the Soviet Union didn't cease to exist again until the end of 1991.
They didn't know.
Ronald Reagan didn't know this was the end of the Soviet Union.
He knew it was the end of the Cold War.
Him and Gorbachev were in the Cold War.
And Reagan believed at that point, to some degree or another, I can't speak exactly, but they reportedly believed he was on a mission from God, that he had the destiny granted to him, mandated to him to abolish nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.
And he was a hair away from making that deal with Mikhail Gorbachev.
And the tragedy of it is that the deal fell apart because of the completely fantastic and ridiculous promise of the Star Wars shield program, where they were going to have lasers and.
in space to shoot down all incoming ICBMs and all this.
And we're talking 1986 technology, right?
This is a joke.
There's no way in the world they're going to do that.
It would have cost, you know, however many trillions we didn't have and never worked anyway.
And Reagan said, Well, I promised the American people that I would build one.
But the whole thing is, man, if we're getting rid of all the nuclear missiles, then you don't need one anyway, so it's okay.
And then by the way, they were not counting on a magic wish to implement it either.
The plan always was going to be America and the Soviet Union would try to get our nuclear stockpiles down to roughly rough parity with the other nuclear weapon states.
At that time, France, Britain, Israel, and China, India and Pakistan didn't have nukes yet.
South Africa only had a few before they gave them up.
And then once we got down to about two or three hundred each.
Then we see if we get down to 100 each.
Then we see if we get down to 50 each.
Then we see if we can get down to 10, right?
So it was not like, oh, Ronald Reagan turned into Jane Fonda, the commy hippie sellout trader who wanted to just give away the store to the enemy and all of a sudden became, you know, a naive believer in like fantasies coming true.
It was all like a hard headed realism that these machines are too dangerous to let politicians hold on to them over the long term.
It's the same conclusion that William Perry and Henry Kissinger too at the end of their lives.
They formed a group called Global Zero.
George Schultz as well, Reagan's Secretary of State formed a group called Global Zero about saying we have to got to get rid of these weapons.
And William Perry had been Clinton's secret Secretary of Defense who had opposed NATO expansion almost resigned over it and should have.
But he wrote a book about My Life at the Nuclear Brink.
And he wrote about like, you just don't understand about these machines, okay?
Right?
Talking about a hydrogen bomb?
Like you just can't imagine what it would be like to have Dallas wiped off the face of the earth, that level of devastation, and what that would mean for the survivors and the rest, and having all of our cities wiped off the face of the earth in an afternoon like that, everything our ancestors have built for three thousand years destroyed over nothing could possibly be worth it.
Nothing could be.
There's so many difficult questions here.
is stable and smart enough to deal with the situation where somebody drops one nuclear weapon.
I don't.
That's the worry, right?
And from all the war games, once the nukes start going off, they keep going off.
We can't let them nuke us without nuking them back.
We have to do something, sir.
And then it just keeps going and going.
The Americans claimed that the Russians, and I don't know the truth of this, could be true, that the Russians have a doctrine of escalate to de-escalate.
I think they denied it, but in other words, they'll go ahead and drop a nuke first and say, see, that's how angry we are.
You guys better back down.
And the Americans immediately ran a war game and publicly leaked it and said, if the Russians ever try to do that escalate to de-escalate stuff, no, we will nuke Belarus.
And we'll say, Oh no, we're the ones who are loco.
Don't you mess with us.
We are escalating to de-escalate.
Now you back down.
So you see, then we all die by seven thirty, right?
Is there a number, again, a difficult question.
Is there a number of warheads that's low enough to where, because you said, bring it down from one hundred to fifty to ten?
I don't know.
I did have a fun conversation with Tom Eliel Goldstein, who's this brilliant all kinds of nuclear war planner and defense analyst he used to be at the Naval War College.
And I was saying, but come on, Lila, like, what if we just got them down to like a few low kiloton type bombs or whatever?
And he's going, yeah, no, we don't want to do that because that makes them really much more thinkable and usable.
What you want to do is have at least a certain minimum number of multi megaton city killer bombs so that the capital cities remain in jeopardy because that is the counterincentive to the politicians going that far.
You need, forget the tactical.
You need the strategic nukes to prevent war, right?
And so all that makes sense if you're a certain kind of egghead, but I'm just saying, man, I don't know.
Even the bombs that they hit Japan with are nothing compared to the super, as they called it then, the hydrogen fusion bombs, where you're talking high kilotons or low megatons.
I was wondering if you can comment on some of the interesting interviews that there are in Hotter Than the Sun, another one of your books, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
It is a book by Scott Horton that features over a decade of interviews with a wide array of experts on this very topic, on the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, the nuclear arms industrial complex, and the history, politics, and future risks surrounding nuclear.
proliferation.
Yeah.
Is there any some interesting interviews you remember, like insights?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the funny story about that is a friend of mine just came to me and goes, look what I did.
And he sends me a PDF of transcripts of all these interviews I've done about nuclear weapons over 20 years.
I didn't even ask him to do it or anything.
He just came to me.
Yeah.
And then so I was like, okay, well, I'm going to delete a couple of these and I want to add a couple more.
And then we just kind of shaped it.
I stopped writing provoked for a minute to get this out in 2022.
But when you like look that as a piece of work, the transcripts.
Interesting.
Because sometimes it's like you might be so busy thinking about the current thing and looking into the future that you forget to look back at all the conversations you've had on this particular topic and to start to extract some deeper wisdom from it, you know?
Well, the title of the book, I, you know, I had already done my first two books are Time to End the War in Afghanistan and Time to End the War on Terrorism.
So this one's called Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which I think really puts people off.
It makes it sound like, oh, just, you know, um, unilateral surrender to the ChiComms or whatever kind of thing, you know?
Um, but that's not really what the book is about, right?
The book is essentially about all aspects of nuclear weapons, America and Russia's nuclear arsenals, past and present, North Korea, Israel, Iran, India and Pakistan, and, you know, all their different nuclear weapons programs.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, all of the anti nuclear activists including like the nuns who break into naval bases and bang on ICBMs with a hammer and then go to prison for ten years.
And there's a whole like very proud tradition of essentially like socialists, like the Catholic workers, the Berrigan family, you probably heard of Father Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan, and I forgot his brother's name.
And Frida is his daughter and McAllister is his wife, the nun.
And these guys, they go to prison all the time, Daniel and Philip, that's right.
They're peace activists, you know.
Frida is their daughter.
She's a great one.
And so I have, you know, all that kind of stuff.
As I say, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, why North Korea's nuclear weapons program is all George W. Bush's fault, which you don't want me on that topic probably.
Although I could do it pretty quick, but we should do Iran first at least before we forget.
I mean, on Iran and in general.
Yeah.
What are the things in the American toolkit that should be used to minimize the chance that states like Iran get a nuclear weapon in the near future?
Rochmont.
Let's send whoever.
is the Secretary of State, oh God, Marco Rubio, send somebody over there and just be cool.
Diplomacy.
Yeah.
We got, look, as I said before, Zabin Brzezinski and Alexander Haig, they wanted to normalize relations with Iran in 1993.
He said, we didn't do business with these people.
Dick Cheney said, we do business with these people.
You know, it's just the attitude.
All you have to say is like, this is the USA.
We're number one.
I ain't afraid of no Ayatollah.
Like, we have all the power.
So you're telling me, even though we have all the power, we hold all the cards.
There's nothing we can do to work it out with these people.
Come on.
We still hold a grudge over because they supported the groups that did the Beirut attack in nineteen eighty three.
Get out of here.
Ronald Reagan was selling the missiles a year or two years after that through the Israelis.
So come on.
You know, you can't, you're not allowed to look, we helped Saddam Hussein gas their cities.
Our aircraft carriers shot down one of their civilian airliners with almost three hundred people on board.
So should they forgive us for that?
And so that we can move forward?
Yes, they should.
That was a stupid thing that some idiots did, but that was a long time ago.
We have to live on this planet together, so what are we going to do?
You put those things behind us and you move on.
This is business, man.
And so that's what you do.
You just ignore the Israel lobby and you just put Trump on a plane to Tehran.
Look here, Ayatollah.
I was talking with my guys and we figured out this is what we could probably agree on and here the issues are still outstanding and let's figure it out.
And by the way, this is how Nixon and Kissinger did Mao.
They went over there and they agreed to be friends first.
Then they worked on all the stipulations.
And we should say, so the idea here is basically to talk to everyone but trust no one.
That's right.
And so when we say friends, we mean basic.
courtesy and diplomacy.
Exactly right.
But don't, it doesn't mean you trust the person.
That's right.
Think about the phrase, Ronald Reagan's phrase trust but verify.
Well, what does that mean?
Don't trust.
It means nothing.
It means don't trust.
It means be polite and verify.
That's what it means, right?
It means pretend like you're trusting because that's how you get along in the world, but what, but you verify.
You send your inspectors to make sure that's all.
And you have an agreement to do so and it's fine.
And so, and quite honestly, like, look man, the Ayatollah, if he wanted to secretly try to break out and enrich up to weapons great and make a nuclear weapon, he could have.
You know, I'm sure you've heard this propaganda numerous places on TV.
Um, Marco Rubio said this numerous times.
Um, Mike Baker is a regular podcast guest around here somewhere and was saying this kind of thing, uh, a week ago or so that look, Iran had 60% enriched uranium.
Get it?
Like that's on its way to weapons grade that would be easier to enrich to weapons grade.
But this, you see, there's they don't go anywhere with it.
It's all just a non-secret.
It doesn't mean anything.
Marco Rubio goes, the only countries with 60% enriched uranium 235 are countries with nuclear weapons.
You see how that doesn't mean anything?
You can't make a nuclear weapon with 60% enriched uranium.
So what was the point of them making 60% enriched uranium?
It was so they had leverage in the negotiations that they were in the middle in so they could negotiate it away.
They did the same thing in the Obama years when they were working on getting into the JCPOA.
And it was America that broke the deal, not them.
And then it says in the deal that if America starts breaking the deal, then Iran can stop abiding by some of the stipulations in it without actually leaving the deal and without being in violation of the deal.
They'd just be stop abiding by some of the stipulations.
Then in December of 2020, the Israelis killed the top nuclear.
scientist over there, Fakhrasada in a machine gun ambush thing.
And then in April of 2021, they did a sabotage attack at Natanz, which they took credit for.
Okay.
And it was in reaction to that was when the Iranians started enriching up to sixty percent.
Now at this point in the story, Mike Baker goes, this is something, something, yada, yada, yada, and can't finish the statement.
What does it mean that they have sixty percent uranium?
What are they doing with it?
Yes, it's true that if they turned it back into a gas and enriched it all the way up to ninety percent, then they would have enriched your, you know, weapons grade uranium, but they're not doing that and they weren't doing that.
And so why try to frame it as a dangerous threat?
The only reason they were enriching it up is because of course it is closer to weapons grade.
They're demonstrating that like, hey guys, you keep assassinating our guys and sabotaging our plants.
We keep it's counterproductive for you, isn't it?
We keep enriching to a higher and higher degree.
If you want us to stop doing that, you need to engage in diplomacy instead of murder and sabotage.
That was the message that they're sending.
And then of course, they're just going to ship all the uranium to Russia or to France, probably I guess the Russians, to d a lower grade to burn in their civilian reactor.
And so they're this whole time, they have not broken out to make a nuclear weapon.
Now, the North Koreans did.
George Bush, well, I'll tell you real quick, it was a quick little thing.
In 2002, George Bush put him in the Axis.
Well, first of all, Bill Clinton had an agreement with them.
It's called the agreed framework of 1994 that said that if you leave your heavy water reactor off at Yongbyeong, that the Soviets had built for them, you leave it off, we will build you two light water reactors that cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium as waste, and we'll give you a bunch of fuel oil and a bunch of welfare.
If you stay in the NPT, don't enrich to they didn't have an enrichment program at all.
Stay in the NPT, keep the inspectors in the country, leave your reactor off and we'll do these things for you.
Now, America never lived up to their end of the deal.
Newt Gingrich wouldn't let Bill Clinton live up to his end of the deal in the 90s.
It was actually Donald Rumsfeld's company that got the contract to build the lightwater reactors and never delivered them.
And then they delivered some of the fuel oil, but very little of it.
But still, the North Koreans stayed in their side of the deal until W. Bush came to town and W. Bush, first of all, put them in the axis of evil.
And then in the fall of 2002, John Bolton accused them of admitting, supposedly, although not on camera or on audio anywhere, but supposedly a guy admitted at a cocktail party that they had a secret uranium enrichment program.
Well, if they did, that's not necessarily a violation of the NPT or their safeguards agreement or of the agreed framework.
Again, a civilian enrichment program is protected under the NPT as long as you're not making weapons out of it in violation of the deal, right?
So even if they were doing that, that's a cause to sit back down at a table.
That's not a cause to break the deal.
But what did Bush do?
Him and Bolton, they tore up the agreed framework, officially announced that it's dead.
Then they announced something called the Proliferation Security Initiative, which was their claim to have the right to seize any North Korean ship on the high seas in order to prevent proliferation, which is nothing in international law allowing that, but they just claimed it unilaterally.
And then in December of 2002, they put them in the nuclear POS to review on the short list for a potential nuclear first strike.
And it was only then that Kim Jong Il said fine screw you guys and announced he was going to withdraw from the treaty, throw the inspectors out of the country and they started making nuclear weapons.
Now you might ask, what the hell were they doing?
And I think the answer is they thought they would have a chance to go to war with North Korea before they were able to complete their bombs.
Problem is, Iraq didn't go like Ahmed Chalabi promised it would go.
And so they were in no position whatsoever to go to North Korea.
So they forced them out of the deal, pushed Bush to nukes.
That was the last article that the great Gordon Prather wrote for us at Antiwar.com.
It was called How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes.
And it tells this whole story.
Rest in peace, my friend Gordon.
He was a great one, man.
How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes by Gordon Prather.
the ayatollah said lo no man hands up don't shoot here's my books yes I'm enriching uranium and I know you don't want me to he bought some material some equipment to do it off the black market but only because Bill Clinton denied the Chinese the right to just sell them a light water reactor prevented them from doing so when that would have been fine.
If you just let the Chinese sell them a light water reactor, they would have never had a heavy water one, you know?
Well, in fact, one more thing about North Korea.
Donald Trump proved that diplomacy works.
He completely broke the ice with Kim the last time he was president.
It was John Bolton that sabotaged the thing.
He brought John Bolton with him to, I forgot if it was Vietnam or Singapore, which meeting it was where Bolton sabotaged the thing.
And the second meeting, he literally sent Bolton to Outer Mongolia to keep him out of the way, but it wasn't enough.
But if he had let Stephen Begun, he was the guy who said, hey, we could take.
denuclearization off the table first and just work on normalization first and denuclearization later.
That was always obviously the poison pill of the Bush and Obama people.
First give up all your nuclear weapons, then we'll begin to talk to you.
Yeah, right.
And so Stephen Began, who worked for Trump, was saying, no, we don't have to do it like that, we can work with them, he gave a speech like that.
But then if you look at the pictures, Began's in the chair in the back by the wall and doesn't get to sit at the table saying nothing or he's down further on the table, whatever it was, and didn't get to have his say.
And so it was Bolton helped.
It was the same guy, John Bolton, who Sheldon Adelson chose to be Donald Trump's national security advisor.
I was the one who ruined that.
But anyway, on Iran, me and every other don't bomb Iran activist in America for two decades have been saying, if we attack them, then they're more likely to break out and make a nuke.
So I have to stand on that, that yes, they're now more likely to break out and make a nuke than they were before because of the completely foreseeable fact that we can't pursue a regime change.
We're only incentivizing them to arm themselves up worse.
So now we're counting on like the cool patient wisdom of the Ayatollah Khamenei to not be that crazy when the whole point supposedly of this is that he's so crazy that you can't trust him with any nuclear technology at all, right?
You can't trust him with the ability to enrich uranium up to weapons grade, whether he is or not.
But now we have to just rely on him and hope he doesn't, because now he could.
He just dig a deeper hole under a bigger mountain and try again.
Do you think Trump should travel to Iran?
I do.
I absolutely think that Donald Trump could go straight to Tehran and then Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang and come home and be Trump the Great.
Said before, I'll say it again.
And even with the Russia situation, we talked about before, but I don't want to spoil it, but very difficult to solve.
That's right.
We're punching this in, everybody.
But it's very difficult to solve.
It's funny.
But there's got to be a way.
And even if that's the hardest one, I think we could absolutely put away our problems with Iran and North Korea.
No question.
I don't really know exactly what we have outstanding with China other than the potential of conflict over Taiwan.
They're not really threatening our allies in Korea, Japan or Australia or anybody else.
I don't really worry about that.
That's not been their history.
They got their own problems.
It's a very poor country in the West and all that.
So I'm not so worried about the rise of China, some are, but to go in and do diplomacy.
Go in and do diplomacy.
And that's Trump's whole thing.
And look, you know, they say only Nixon can go to China.
Well, why is that?
Because if a Democrat did it, Nixon would call him a communist, right?
Like he can't.
It would be Nixon just to stop it.
But if Nixon goes, well, you know, it's not that he's a communist.
Here he's shaking hands with Mao Zedong.
Why would Henry, I mean, why, yeah, why would Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon of all people shake hands with Mao?
They did because they're smart, right?
Not because they're communists, but because they were doing what they thought was a wise move to benefit America's national interests at the expense of the Soviet Union.
And if that means shaking the bloodiest hand in the history of the world, then business isn't going to work.
Business is business, right?
Same thing as Ronald Reagan can end the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Imagine if Mondale had won in'84 and it was Walter Mondale that was trying to negotiate the end of the Cold War in front of the Republicans.
You could imagine it going terribly, right, in a way totally different than having Reagan and his successor Bush handling it from the GOP side.
And then same thing here, man.
If Donald Trump just gets up there and goes, as he always does, right, I'm the tallest, richest, most handsome, most successful diplomat in the history of the world.
Watch me and then go out.
and make that the standard.
Being a good diplomat is the measure of a man.
I say so.
And then go out there and act that way.
Then it is what he says it is.
Right?
What the hell?
And do the thing where you meet and then you pull him in with that handshake.
You got that handshake.
You got to appreciate the fact that the Republicans probably still, even though there's obviously a lot of resentment and a lot of bad feelings over all these years, but it comes down to it.
A Republican president really says, Come on, everybody.
We gotta go fight them radical Islam.
He could probably get a lot of Republicans to go ahead.
Oh man, terrorism's a problem again.
Remember Islam from before with the thing?
And like, yeah.
Yeah, and go along with that.
I think they could.
And I think Donald Trump could simply just run on I kill Muslims dead and I'm a big tough right winger, but he doesn't.
He runs on I'm the peace president.
I'm the one who's trying to solve all this.
I'm the one who's going to make all this go away for you.
He knows that's what we want to hear and I think it's his basic bias, except of course he has, you know, Israel, the devil on his shoulder making him or, you know, strongly influencing him to choose the wrong thing a hell of a lot of time.
But I think that's his basic instinct is to want to do that kind of stuff, you know?
I don't think I've heard a politician talk about peace as much as him.
Like legitimately, I mean, yeah, it's grounded in ego and narcissism and so on, that I'm the best deal maker in the world.
Sure.
But fine.
Yeah, let him have it.
Yeah.
Call it victory.
I don't care.
Call it whatever you want, dude.
What it means to be a man is to go into the fire and make the best deals in the world.
That's right.
Yeah.
Fuck yeah.
That's America.
That should be Yeah.
Because America is a gigantic stick and gigantic carrot.
Yeah.
Fucking use it.
Yeah.
And especially the carrot thing.
That's my thing with North Korea.
It's like, we have everything to give and nothing to lose.
Like even when I describe the Bill Clinton deal, we give them some fuel oil and some welfare.
You know what?
Like, I'm a libertarian.
I'm against all taxation.
But all other things being equal, what's it to you, Lex?
We pay them a little bit of welfare to keep them from turning their heavy water reactor back on and harvesting plutonium out of the SOB, okay?
Now they're sitting on a couple of dozen nukes, and it's all America's fault.
So you know, could have tried harder and better and not hire John Bolton to help.
You know what I mean?
These are decisions that men made they could have gone the other way, and they still could.
You know, if you remember when Trump first came in, he was saying a lot of really cool stuff about, yeah, I'm gonna I want to sign a big new nuke treaty.
I want to slash the military budget.
I want to have a new treaty with Russia and China where we all slash our military military budgets.
He said, I don't want to pivot from the Middle East to great power competition.
I want to get along with everyone.
Let's all just get along and make money for the rest of the century.
Yeah, dude, that is the lack of special interests talking, right?
That's what Trump thinks before everybody gets to get in there and have their say about, no, sir, we have to do this, that and the other thing.
But why have major power competition at all?
Why have anything of this stuff?
Maybe we can just be a world of people owning property and exchanging it freely to, you know, uh, uh, greater enhance our standard of living, you know?
I wonder if you can comment, I forget if we already did, about the treatment of the Iranian people by the Iranian regime.
Oh, yeah.
Yes, you did start to ask that.
And I, I, and this is where we went to some.
That's a good question.
Yeah, that is a good question.
But hold on, let's do some of my real quick.
Yeah, opening up America's Christmas gifts right they keep accepting I mean if you want to blame them for sending Chalabi to light a pearl you can
but I mean essentially they stay home and let America do their dirty work for them you know we fought three wars for them two Iraq wars in Afghanistan and and hell helped empower their friends in Iran in Yemen accidentally you know in in reaction form but still and so You know, they're not the aggressive power that they're portrayed to be oftentimes.
You know, even again, look at this current war where they fired all.
these rockets at an empty corner of a base.
Again in Qatar, they called Donald Trump beforehand and let him know the rockets are coming.
They fired exactly as many rockets as bombs America dropped 14.
And remember Trump tweeted, thanks for the heads up that you're shooting the rockets so we can shoot them all down.
In other words, even after America hit them with our biggest conventional bombs, they still struck back only in a symbolic way, an absolute signal.
They did not want to tangle with the USA at all.
And this is after Trump warned them to evacuate Tehran, right?
Which could have been a threat of a nuclear strike or at least a carpet bombing campaign or at least a very heavy bombing campaign against government targets.
You know, civiliansan government and military government targets in the country, in the city that, you know, is a pretty major threat.
And the Ayatollah still is like, come on, man, I want to fight you.
And shoots his 14 little measly missiles as essentially a show only.
And so we're relying on that.
This thing could have escalated, right?
This war that Israel's dragging us into, it could, what if they had shot five thousand missiles at our bases in the Gulf?
We'd be in the middle of a ugly as hell war right now.
They'd have had to quote unquote had.
They'd have talked themselves into probably sending in ground troops to complete the regime change once it gets that bad.
So that is a risk that they.
were taken.
And thank goodness that cooler heads prevail, but it's kind of nuts that America has to rely on the supposedly mad molas to be cool while we're bombing them, right?
In a way where if they escalate at all, we could escalate and the thing could get way out of control very quickly, with America attempting to occupy a land three or four times the size of Iraq with mountains and four times the population and the rest.
I was really worried.
I think we got lucky, and I was really worried that this would be another forever war.
It ain't over yet, man.
That's the problem.
Is they just they didn't solve it.
They could have solved it at the table.
They probably still could, but they just go to Ayatollah, just speak with Ayatollah.
But you know, like I talked with Trita Parsi, and he's a great expert on this and has been preaching more or less the dove side of the case here for a very long time.
He told me on the show the other day, he's like, I fully expect them to break out and make a nuke now.
Hell, they kicked the inspectors out.
Israel and America just gave them cause to kick the inspectors out of the country.
They think the inspectors were spies, passed intelligence to the planners for the war.
So they kicked the inspectors out.
So now we lost track at every of every last atom.
We had it where I could sit here and tell you, man.
The IAEA for all their complaints about, oh, we found this little thing, we found that little thing, explain this, explain that, for all of their little nitpicking, they always continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material in Iran to any new, any military or other special purpose, meaning they knew where it all was.
They had their scales, they had their sensors, they had their seals and their cameras, and they knew this much uranium is here today, it's there tomorrow and whatever, they tracked it all around and they could verify the non-diversion.
That's the IAEA's job.
Now that chain of evidence is broken.
Now, like, we don't know know exactly what they're enriching.
We don't know how much exactly they've been able to convert and where they diverted it to and whatever and what is happening now essentially under cover of darkness.
So if they invite the inspectors back in and say, see our civilian program, at that point, they very well could have a secret parallel weapons program that we don't know about.
Now, that has not been the case this whole time.
It very well could be the case going forward from the summer of 2024.
So from this point on, you still think carrot is more effective than steak.
So diplomacy versus threatening and military action.
So here, diplomacy is the only way out.
Yeah, well, especially considering, like, I'm not saying that's like the magic trick of all foreign policy or whatever, although I'm just a non interventionist anyway, but I'm just saying as far as like solving this problem, the Ayatollah wasn't making nukes.
There wasn't an emergency that we had to preempt.
So yeah, of course diplomacy is the answer when he's sitting there saying, look, man, I have a civilian program, and that's going to have to be good enough for you.
Of course.
Violence and threats are what has made it far more likely that they're now going to make nukes.
Because the Israelis say for them to have nuclear technology at all is equivalent to them having an advanced weapons program, which is just really not true.
And again, it's a problem that we can't solve for them.
Without committing to a serious war effort that no war planners have talked about in this whole time.
But again, that's the unreality of the whole thing.
You can't solve it from the air, so don't start it.
You're going to make matters worse, but you can't fix it with a B two.
Even if you kill the Ayatollah and ten of his best guys, you still didn't overthrow the government there.
They got twenty more guys.
What are you talking about?
They just make a new guy the Ayatollah.
They'd pull the old president out of retirement and put him up there.
You know, so if you're insisting on regime change, it's going to take the Third Infantry Division.
Anybody signing up for that.
And the thing I really, really deeply worry about is something you spoke about, which is the, God forbid, the possibility of a bin Ladenite type character doing a terrorist attack in the United States.
And then the machinery, the military industrial complex creating propaganda that says Iran somehow connecting Iran to it.
And now we have to invade Iran.
We, the American people, have to put feet on the ground and regime change.
And all of a sudden, but I think the American people, I mean, the wars in the Middle East have really taught the lesson, like, no.
Depends on how quick it's forced on them, right, at this point.
See, it took Bush a year and a half to lie us into a war with Iraq.
Obama just goes, Yeah, we're going to war in Libya.
And I was like, Okay, whatever.
Right.
But war with Iran is another.
I mean, Trump too.
Trump didn't even light us into it.
Right.
His own government was saying they're not making nuclear.
And he goes, I don't care what they say.
I'm going to do it anyway.
Israel says they are.
And they just did.
They barely even light us into it.
They just did anyway.
And then they go, Well, see that was over.
Short and sweet.
Time for peace.
And then they call time out.
But again, it's not over yet.
And then we got lucky because Iran did not respond.
Yeah, exactly.
By escalating.
And Trump claimed that he completely obliterated their program and total victory, which is not true.
So where are we now?
We're at the second half, you know?
I mean, I was really worried because Iran was essentially humiliated.
And when states like that, especially regimes like Iran's is humiliated, they don't usually like to be kind of calm and de-escalate.
In fact, especially if it's true that they're so fragile in their power, right, that this would make them even more desperate to show how tough they are.
That's how you create terrorists.
In fact, the headline today is Iran demands full reparations for the war before talks.
In other words, just exactly what you said.
Give us our pride and then we'll talk to you.
Recognize enrichment and then we'll talk to you.
In other words, we're going nowhere with talks right now until Donald Trump climbs way down on the ladder.
And by the way, in diplomacy in general, on a basic human level, letting people have their pride, not humiliating them is essential.
You know, doing things like labeling somebody as the axis of evil.
You're signaling to your own people, maybe, but you're humiliating.
You're deeply disrespecting the other side.
Sometimes you have to like soften the communication in order to achieve not trying.
Not trusting anyone but in order to achieve ends.
Right.
And that was their whole point was to escalate conflict, right?
And also think about the lie you talk about signaling to the Americans.
How's this for a lie?
That Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah and Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong Il are all in a big alliance against you to kill you, right?
So Saddam and the Ayatollah both hate each other more than any two men in the world.
The Ayatollah probably doesn't think too much about Osama, but Saddam Hussein's clearly terrified of him.
And none of them had a damn thing to do with Iran, it's with, pardon me, with North Korea, except that North Korea had shipped some missiles to Iran back in the day, but they had no tight alliance at that time and their mid range missiles not that big of a deal anyway.
So access, nothing but the point was these were all people we want to pick a fight with basically.
What do you think?
Do we cover Iran?
I think we got it.
I think we got it.
I forgot and I wanted to thank you for signing all the books that you gave me with Lex for peace.
I think that's a beautiful way to sign it and a beautiful goal to live by.
Hope you like it, man.
All right, brother.
And back to now yesterday again more.
Now let's go back to Iran and their nuclear program and the recent war in a minute.
but you want to do Israel Palestine.
Okay, so it's a huge long complicated story.
I really highly recommend Darryl Cooper's podcast Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem.
I know people say a lot of terrible things about Darryl Cooper, but none of them are true.
He's my partner on my podcast Provoked, our new show.
And the guy's a total sweetheart, man.
He's not a hater of anyone, and he's not a Holocaust denier.
What happened was people misunderstood him when he was on the Tucker Carlson show that day.
In fact, he was making the opposite point of what people think.
They thought that he was saying the Holocaust was just that the Nazis didn't have a good plan to feed all their prisoners.
That's not what he was saying.
What he was saying was that even if you were a Holocaust denier, you could not deny the fact that the Nazis were taking possession of millions of people that they had no plan to care for, and that yes, in fact, a great many of them were starved to death and shot in this thing, and that if you were the worst, even you would have to admit that's what he was saying.
But what happened was a minute ago he had just said he thought Churchill was worse than Hitler and it was kind of tongue and cheek, but he was saying for various reasons that Churchill was the real villain of the war.
A case to be made for the role that Churchill played in escalating that whole thing, but that aside, when they heard him say the thing about the feeding in the eastern in Eastern Europe and the care for the prisoners, they misunderstood.
And they thought that what he was doing is just spinning for the Third Reich at this point or whatever, when that was absolutely not the case whatsoever, dude.
He's a really great guy.
And if, and in fact, I'd ask anybody, listen to even just the very first section of fear and loathing in the New Jerusalem.
He demands that you put yourself, if you're going to listen to him, he doesn't just tell it as objectively as he can.
He demands subjectivity from you.
and that you, the listener, put yourself in the shoes of the people that we're talking about here.
Imagine if this was you, and the first thing that he describes, it sounds like a bunch of Israeli settlers coming to murder some Palestinians on the West Bank.
But then you realize that no, he's talking about Russians doing pogroms against Jews in Russia and the dawn of the Zionist movement in the early twentieth century, late eighteenth century and into the twentieth century.
Then he's talking about their victimhood and why they were so motivated to create this movement and get the hell out of there.
It was the era of nationalism, but they had no place for the state of their own, so they wanted to move somewhere else and do it.
tells it from their point of view as much as he possibly can.
There's just no hatred or prejudice against Jews in there at all.
And it bothers me.
Liars don't really bother me.
They just make for a good foil.
But it bothers me that good people would misunderstand and believe lies and think the worst of the guy.
Because I think his 25 hour long podcast, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, leads up to the creation of the state.
That's where it ends.
It's the whole backstory to the creation of the thing.
And it's just brilliant, man.
It is.
It's so good.
But in any case, so look, the story is there was this radical Jewish nationalist movement called Zionism from Eastern Europe, where they wanted to find a homeland.
They thought maybe they'd go to Argentina or Madagascar and they settled on Palestine for obvious historical reasons and all of that kind of thing.
And the movement only had so much, uh, Jews at the time, the majority of religious and reformed Jews in the United States and in Europe.
Um, I don't know how many reformed Jews there were in Europe at that time.
In the United States it was a big movement, but they mostly were against it.
The consensus was against it for a variety of reasons.
Then of course, after the Second World War, it really took off and the argument was made that the Jews of Europe needed somewhere else to go after the Holocaust.
And so that was what led to a push by the Western powers to transport many more of them to Palestine and to help them to create the state there.
Now, obviously, there's only so much we can cover here, but to try from my point of view, I think, to try to narrow in on what is crucial to understand about the thing is that in nineteen forty eight, They launched what was called the Nakba by the Palestinians, the catastrophe.
And this is when they were all cleansed off of what's now what we call Israel proper, that is less the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
But they went as far as West Jerusalem.
And when they created the state, they cleansed that territory through terror and murder and rape and pillage.
And mostly through terror, they forced all those people out of their homes.
And when we say 750,000 people...
X we're talking about the population of greater Austin Texas right including Pflugerville and Round Rock and maybe Buda okay We're talking about a lot of people who are forced off of their property and into what then the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and then refugee camps elsewhere in Kuwait and in Lebanon and Syria and the rest.
Now when they did that, all morality aside, just strictly like, let's say descriptive, not normative, right?
That like in this sense, it worked.
In the aftermath, the Sionists had created an eighty-twenty super duper Jewish majority.
So they could call themselves a Jewish democracy and have a lot of the trappings of democracy and ingratiate themselves with the West or try to on that basis.
And there's some truth to it, of course.
But you know, and by the way, let me recommend to you and to your listeners, but I really hope you that you read this.
I'll bring you one.
I should have brought you one today.
I didn't think of it.
I have a stack of them at my house.
It's called Coming to Palestine by my colleague Sheldon Richman.
And he is the co-founder with me of the Libertarian Institute and a brilliant and longtime libertarian writer and activist.
And he was, of course, raised Jewish and Sionist.
in the United States in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
And this is a collection of essays that he wrote over probably 30 years or something.
And it's just about how he learned the truth about all this and how that's why he ain't a Zionist no more.
Man, what do you mean the Dariocene massacre, which is like the Meli massacre, right?
This horror show.
I never heard of that.
They told me it was a land without people for a people without land.
That kind of sounds scary, doesn't it?
The eastern Mediterranean shore was devoid of life.
That's, I don't know.
So that was a lie, right?
In fact, I mentioned Eric Margolis, my friend, the journalist.ist.
His mother was sort of a Lois Lane character, an independent journalist of her own, who went tramping around the tramps and around the region after World War two, interviewing sultans and kings and potentates and whatever, and she reported on the horrific conditions of the poor Palestinian refugees, the Muslims and Christians, who had been cleansed from their land and forced into the West Bank.
And they threatened to murder her and they threatened to murder my friend, little baby Eric Margoles if she would dare to continue to tell the truth.
The Palestinian people's existence was a wild conspiracy theory by cooks.
Only cooks believe there's Palestinians.
This was a land without people for a people without land.
What a coincidence and what good fortune that they could come and just make an empty desert bloom at a cost to nobody and a cost of nobody's conscience here.
And that was, of course, you know, people who really knew a lot about things would have known better than that, I guess.
But that was essentially the mythology that the American people were told by popular culture and particularly in Hollywood movies in the way that they did the movie of Exodus and all of those things in pushing this mythology.
Now, the thing about that is, oh, and I was going to say about Sheldon's book, Sheldon points out that the Israelis Goldemir made a secret deal with the King of Jordan, that he would take the West Bank, and Israel would not fight him over it.
They would encourage him and even to help him to take the West Bank.
Why?
To preclude the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state on what was left of Palestine.
They wanted it all, at least someday, if they can't have it all now, they can at least prevent the Palestinians from making their own state out of it.
If we got to take it from the other side, of the Jordan River later, that's easier.
So they did that deliberately on purpose to screw the Palestinians out of their own independent state from the first place.
Okay, but now here's getting to the meat of the thing.
Go ahead.
If I may just read a little bit more about the book that it's a collection of essays written over thirty years that critically examines the history of the Israelis dispossession of Palestinians and challenges the mainstream narrative often presented in the United States regarding Israel's founding.
Richmond, a noted libertarian author, argues for reason, freedom, peace, and toleration with respect to both Palestinians and Israelis.
Turning conventional stories regarding the region on their head.
In this volume, Richmond meticulously documents historical events and policies that led to the displacement and suffering of Palestinian people, emphasizing their rights as individual human beings and the injustices suffered when they were made refugees, dispossessed or killed.
This book is recognized for being forthright and honest in its depiction of the conflict, drawing on well documented data and offering a perspective that is often absent from mainstream discourse.
Absolutely right.
And Sheldon, again, just like if we were talking about Mirchimer and these guys or doctor Paul, he's a saint., right?
Nobody's got nothing on Sheldon, man.
He is an exceptionally decent man, and there's nothing that nobody can do about it, right?
So what's his motive here?
His motive here is decency.
His motive here is, and he tells the story of his grandfather, they would always say, Next year in Jerusalem, and his grandfather would say, Next year in Philadelphia, because he hated Zionism, and he would say, I'm quoting a quote of a quote of a Jewish guy quoting his Jewish grandfather, okay, say the Jews are responsible for all the problems over there, not the Palestinians.
He says that he always regretted that he never had a chance to really ask him what he meant by that and really talk with him about that.
He was too young and didn't ever get around to it.
But that his extremely Jewish grandfather who helped raise him in Philadelphia had nothing but contempt for the Sionist project.
And he shows how most religious and again reformed Jews were against it.
So it's going to cause Jews to divide their loyalties.
It's going to cause Jews to be falsely accused of dividing their loyalties.
It's going to cause nothing but endless disruptions in the Middle East and problems for the United States of America, which is actually their country.
I mean, think how insane it is.
to call American Jews the Israeli diaspora when they're not from Israel.
Israel was created in nineteen forty eight.
American Jews came here in the eighteenth century, man, what the hell?
And in the nineteenth, I might say, century, in the eighteen hundreds, and in the nineteen hundreds is when millions of Jews came to the United States, right?
How in the world are they the diaspora from Israel that came into existence after America became their promised land?
You know, and so this was a big part of why there was so much resistance among Jewish communities against the creation of the Israeli state in the first place and Sheldon goes into that in great depth.
It's just a fantastic book.
It's a little bit of book.
I mean, everyone get right through it.
It's but it's really worth your time.
So where I'm going with this is the 1967 war and what happened in 1967 is that Israel took possession of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and all the Palestinians on it.
Now they cleansed another two hundred fifty thousand Palestinians.
They expanded their border a little bit in the West Bank and cleansed about another quarter of a million Palestinians off of their territory at that time.
That usually goes unnoted.
But the thing is, is they quite literally, man, they de facto annexed.
I heard a report on my way here today.
I was listening to Dave Decamp's anti war news and he was saying Israel is threatening to annex Gaza.
Well, Israel Gooden stole Gaza in nineteen sixty seven and all the people on it too, and the West Bank too and East Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, as well as the Golan Heights that they stole from the Syrians.
Those poor Druze and their occupation usually gets much less mention, but they were kidnapped along with the Palestinians as well.
And the thing is about it is that they wanted that land.
They didn't want the people, but they couldn't just get rid of them all.
They had cleansed their seven hundred fifty thousand.
to create the Israeli state, they couldn't push the rest of them the rest of the way into Jordan.
Now they have, I don't know what the number was exactly then or I forget what it was then.
We're now talking about almost six million Palestinians on the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and including the one fifth of the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, who don't live under occupation, but as sort of second class citizens of Israel like under Jim Crow type situation, where they're not allowed to intermarry, they're not allowed to live wherever they want around Jewish communities that don't want them.
And with only one slight exception, the tradition has always been that they can have a political party in the Knesset, but no group of parties would form a majority with them.
In other words, any group of Israeli Jewish parties would rather let the other guys form a coalition than form a coalition with the Arabs.
And that only changed one time in our very recent history here, I believe during Donald Trump's first term or maybe early Biden when Yar Lapid needed to ally temporarily with Arabs.
It was the one time they've ever broken that tradition.
So anyway, I'm off on a tangent, but there are, as I said before, it's eight one fifth of the population of Israel proper, whatever, green line Israel, sixty seven borders Israel are Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians.
So you combine their population with the occupied population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, now you're talking about fifty fifty.
Only the Israeli Jews have all the power and the Palestinian Muslims and Christians have none, and in the occupied territories, they live as utter slaves as though under communism, under not just martial law, but foreign government occupation military law.
In other words, and by the Israelis no law at all.
We're talking children brought before military courts in a foreign language and sentenced to dungeons without any process, we are talking about totalitarian slavery, like under the NKVD and the USSR.
They are not free and Israel is not a democracy when half the people under the control of their state have no rights at all, no civil liberties, no civil rights as far as like participation in governmental process, no taxation without representation, they have no representation whatsoever.
Okay?
And the thing is about it is what makes them not slaves is the Israelis don't want them, right?
They're certainly depriving them of all of their rights and humiliating them every chance they get, stealing all their water resources, murdering them, pillaging them, stealing their territory a little bit at a time and working toward a day when they can finish the job and just take it all.
And what's really messed up, man, is that they don't even really want the Gaza Strip that bad.
I mean, sure they do.
What they really want is the West Bank, as their religious zealots call it Judea and Samaria, and that they have a leftover religious edict from three thousand years ago that says that you say whatever you want about the Palestinians and their natural property rights under lock in theory and the Western conception of how one comes to own a thing and they will say,
no, we have supernatural property rights that says that we get to come and kill you and move into your house and do whatever we want and recognize no rights of the Palestinians.
It's like justice Taney or Tani saying that the black men have no rights that a white man is bound to respect.
Right?
And Dred Scott, that's the way that they treat the Palestinians.
They call them grasshoppers, right?
Not even mammals.
They're just insects to be eradicated because the Israelis covet their property.
It's as simple as that.
They want to covet it., so they kill, so they can steal.
And that's it.
And then they'll come up with every lie in the world to try to justify it all.
Now David Ben Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel, said, give it back, give it up, let them have it.
Yeah, we want the land, but we don't want all these people.
What are we going to do with them all?
Like, what's the end game here when we're taking possession of millions of people that we hate and don't want in our country?
And so it's not worth it to do this.
That's Ben Gurion, the founding guy said that.
And they told him, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know what we're doing.
And you're probably familiar with this woman, Daniella Weiss.
You'll see her in various documentaries and so forth.
She's the insane zealot saying we must occupy and settle all of Gaza and all of the West Bank.
And so she, there's a great new documentary called The Settlers.
I forget, I never saw part one of it, but the sequel it just came out is called The Settlers.
It's really good and includes extensive interviews with her.
And there was a statement that she made recently in the last two years, where or a video that came out that someone, some journalist had revealed this video, I guess, of her in the 1970s, explaining, or maybe as her in more recent times just talking about the nineteen seventies.
Forgive me, but people can find this, I'm sure.
And what she's saying is from the moment they took over the West Bank, she worked with Ariel Sharon to create an archipelago of settlements across the West Bank in a way to preclude the possibility of a Palestinian state as fast as they possibly could.
That was absolutely their first object is we've got to bisect them here and bisect them there so that they can never have a state of their own.
And that was their goal this whole time, this radical settler movement.
Now in you know, we talked aboutked about the clean break when Netanyahu came in, the clean break.
Again, it's a clean break from Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Perez's attempt to negotiate with the Arab states and the Palestinians.
And, of course, Netanyahu, if you're not familiar with this, we should maybe play this as long as we're taking our time here, Lex.
Let's see if we can find secret video of Netanyahu.
This is it.
This is it.
Yeah.
So you just mute that and just read the, read the caption there.
So let me set this up.
Netanyahu in this, in this video, he is no longer the Prime Minister.
He's at a settler's house in the living room.
He tells the boy, turn off the video camera.
And the boy either fails to turn it off or he deliberately turns it back on again.
It's a bit unclear.
But the video keeps rolling and Netanyahu keeps blabbling.
And he's saying, What you do is you just beat these Palestinians, you just hurt them and cripple them and kill them and weaken them and let them know that they'll never win and we'll crush them and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And she says, Ah, geez, BB, but aren't you going to drive the world crazy and make them mad, especially America?
And Netanyahu then ridicule us and says, Let me tell you something about America, okay.
America is a thing that is easily moved.
Eighty percent of them support us.
It's absurd.
I'm not afraid of Bill Clinton.
Let me tell you what I did to Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton said, Yada, yada, area C. I said, No problem, Bill, but then you know what I did?
I made it where Area C is this huge military area, two thirds of the West Bank.
Haha, sexually assaulted old Bill right in the face and got away with murder, and not because his spies were blackmailing Bill Clinton, tapping his phone, and all the sex capades.
They used that blackmail to try to get him to pardon Jonathan Pollard.
That's different.
They were doing that.
But Netanyahu here is mocking Bill Clinton and he's mocking the American people for being essentially a bunch of grasshoppers that he can do whatever he wants with us, including lie our fathers into sending their sons to die in his wars.
If I may just comment, one of the things that troubles me a lot in these the geopolitical aspect of this is when the Prime Minister of Israel shows so much disrespect towards the President of my country.
Oh, he never had any respect at all.
Don't let me sound sympathetic to old Bill Clinton, the child killer here when I say this, but I can almost sympathize with him when they say after his first meeting with Netanyahu in nineteen ninety six, after half an hour, he came out and said, Who the F does this guy think he is?
Oh my God, who's the superpower and who's the client state?
Like he was out of breath, exasperate, just stunned.
Why is he able to talk like this to the GNSS president?
I have no idea.
He blackmailed Bill.
He told Bill Clinton, you better let Jonathan Pollard out because I have you on tape with Monica Lewinsky, pal.
And Bill Clinton was going to do it except that George.
Tennet said he would resign and that many leaders of the CIA would resign in protest if he did it.
Jonathan Pollard was the one of the most destructive spies in American history who was spying for Israel and they were turning over everything that he stole.
I mean, rooms full to the Soviet Union.
But it's not just Clinton, like he shows even just let's just take it to today.
Benjamin Netanyahu seems to show a lot of continued disrespect towards Donald Trump.
Like this is the Donald Trump is the president of the most powerful country.
And the best friend he ever had moved the moved the embassy to Jerusalem recognized Israel's seizure of the Golan Heights, wrangled these phony Abraham Accords, which we're about to describe here in a minute, did all of this for him.
Only barely talked him out of annexation, but said, We'll get to it though, buddy, it's cool.
Just wait on full annexation of the West Bank last time around.
Clearly it's the agenda this time.
Clearly Trump's wrapped around his little finger, and still he has nothing but contempt.
And I wish that someone would tell Trump, listen, Pal, you might as well be a Palestinian to this guy.
He doesn't care about you at all.
He doesn't care about our country at all.
Back to my question about Mark Dubowitz, my hypothetical here, which goes for all pro Israel factors.tions in the United States.
You think Benjamin Netanyahu cares that three thousand Americans died on september eleventh because Mohammed Ata was taking revenge for what Israel had done in Lebanon?
No, and you know how I know that, Lex?
He told the New York Times, they didn't overhear this and report it, he said to the New York Times in an interview on september eleventh, it's very good.
You want to pull that up?
September twelfth, two thousand one, New York Times, Netanyahu, very good.
That's how much respect Benjamin Netanyahu has for the enlistment age sons of the United States of America and the dead civilians on those planes and in those towers.
New York Times, that's it.
A day of terror the Israelis spilled blood is seen as bond that draws two nations closer.
Asked tonight what the attack meant for the relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, It's very good.
Then he edited himself, well, it's not very good.
good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.
He predicted that the attack would quote strengthen the bond between our two peoples because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.
Amen, and listen, on September eleventh, Donald Trump says that there were Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the attack.
There was somebody in New Jersey celebrating the attack.
They were Israeli Mossad officers, and they were arrested, and they told the arresting officers, the problem isn't us, the problem is the Palestinians.
The FBI released the pictures and they're holding lighters up as if they're the ones burning the tower down and they're all laughing and celebrating.
Justin Romondo called them the high fivers.
The FBI arrested them and held them for months.
Carl Cameron of Fox News did a four-part investigative series, quoting FBI agents as saying they had to have known what was happening.
Mossad was in the United States following the hijackers around, and they only gave the barest of warnings that August.
They did not tell everything that they knew about the September eleventh attack, and then it hit and Netanyahu said it's very good.
And then his fifth column.
lied us into war with Iraq.
And he never got his pipeline to Haifa, by the way, but he did make a deal with the Kurds to ship the oil out of there through Syria to Israel.
So they got their nickel a barrel discount at the cost of ten trillion dollars of our wealth and the ruining of the entire beginning of the third millennium, pardon me.
But it just didn't have to be this way.
It just did not at all.
Is it worthwhile here before talking about Gaza to draw a distinction between the Israeli government and the Israeli people?
Of course.
Just like we can draw the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people.
Yes, absolutely.
Although I would say that by the Israelis' argument about popular sovereignty and popular consent among the Palestinians for Hamas, they are far more implicated in the actions of their government.
There's virtually unanimous political consent for Israel's government's actions in that country.
Their political spectrum is from Dick Cheney to Hitler, with Dick Cheney being the leftist progressive.
They are a national socialist regime at war under a theory that they are a master race ruling over the Unter mention.
It is a barbarian society.
And does that implicate every last Israeli individual civilian human being?
Of course not, Lex.
A bunch of the people who were killed at that rave, they were actually there at a peace function.
They were trying to figure out a way to help the people of the Gaza Strip and even to someday recognize their independence and freedom and do something for them.
Those people got caught up and murdered by Hamas that day, right?
There are not just liberals and leftists., but libertarians and different.
There are plenty of army veterans and whatever.
You want to go like the overall percentages.
There is a resounding consensus for this type of policy in that country, reminiscent of America circa two thousand two in a way that we do not have after October 7th.
Even more so.
No, even before that.
Even before that.
You know, the Palestinians are considered to be the barbarians.
They are the enemy.
They are the Goyem.
They are the.
The obstacle to what the Palestinian, what the Israeli government and the ideal is for the country to have.
Wouldn't it just be better if we could get rid of them all?
And that is the consensus and just get rid of them all one way or the other.
And I think that, you know, whatever, I'm not saying as Madeline Albright would say, the people of Iraq are all responsible for Saddam Hussein and I'll starve them all and grind their bones to make my bread as long as they won't overthrow Saddam for me, which is the same thing Osama bin Laden said, which is the American people are responsible for the actions of our government.
After all, you're a democracy, aren''t you?
And you pay your taxes, he said.
And so that was why he said it was okay to kill us.
I would never agree with Madeleine Albright or Osama bin Laden about why it's okay to kill innocent civilians at all.
I'm as diametrically opposed to their philosophy as I could possibly be.
And that goes for absolutely when Palestinians kill innocent Israeli civilians.
And if people say, well, they're settlers and colonists and all this too.
Fine.
If they're not holding a gun and they're not a combatant, then they're not holding a gun and they're not a combatant.
That's it.
That's, you know, I don't know what the Geneva Convention says.
That's what the Horton Convention says.
I don't care about anything of of that, you know.
And especially when it's children.
Yeah.
And so even if the population of the United States, say the population of Texas, broadly in, well, in you could measure the polls go back, I bet you it's better than 85 percent of Texans supported George Bush's invasion of Iraq.
Does that mean any of them deserve to be killed because they supported his evil premeditated plot to kill people?
No.
That's politics.
That's government.
That's the individual men who pulled the decisions, the individual men who told the lies to convince the hapless to go along, they're responsible.
People cheerled for it, let's just concede much less so, okay?
You know, if the people of America said absolutely not, well, that would have been better.
And ultimately it was up to us.
If we could get enough of us to be good on it all at once, like we talked about with Syria and stopping the war in 2013, they just couldn't get past the population that wouldn't budge.
We should say that in such dire situations, the propaganda machine turns on in every individual nation.
And so it's actually very difficult to be a citizen that can see the reality of the world clearly because you're swimming inming in information that is very constrained to a particular kind of narrative.
And this is true for every single nation in war.
And have you ever seen the documentary, Defamation?
It's really great.
It's made by an Israeli Jew who goes out in search of anti Semitism.
And the worst anti Semite in the whole movie is his grandmother on the West Bank.
I'm not going to quote her because she's a vicious anti Semite.
But the thing is, he goes traveling all over the world trying to find anyone who hates Jews for being Jews.
And he has no such luck.
And he goes and hangs out with Abe Boxman at the Anti Defamation League.
And he goes on a field trip to Auschwitz with some Israeli kids.
But at the beginning of the documentary, he shows how the propaganda campaign against the Israeli people by their government is essentially like America two thousand two forever with no let up.
It's show of this, show of that always, and they really tell the people, they really do raise them to believe that every non Jew in the world wakes up in the morning with only one goal to kill all the Jews.
And that's all anyone else cares about or thinks about.
They're all looking for the first opportunity.
And aren't you glad that Is Israel's here to protect you?
Otherwise, it would be another Holocaust immediately tomorrow.
Right.
That wasn't the result of the most insane, fanatical, cranked out lunatics to ever seize power in a major industrial nation.
No.
That's what all of humanity wants to do to us and would do at any moment if they could.
That's what they're told all day, every day, and to a great extent, then believe it.
And so then it's like an antifragile belief.
Darrell Cooper was talking about this on our show the other day that the more people say, my God., Israel, what they're doing is so wrong and I disapprove and I don't like them anymore.
The more they say, see, right, he compared them to the Branch of Idiots, right?
When when people turn against us, it's just like we predicted they would.
You see what they're doing?
It's just like before.
And so there's no room in there to say, hey, wait a minute, maybe we really are going too far here.
If all our friends are telling us that we're doing the wrong thing, what the hell?
No.
You know how the anti Semites are.
That's all they do is that's all they want to do is and that's all they think about all day long is how they can harm us.
And so under that state of paranoid siege, then you shouldn't be too surprised that people are willing to then go to the utmost lengths to destroy their enemies, you know, when they can.
And of course, Hamas did a very good job on October 7th of playing into that script.
But now we're taking our time here today.
So before we get to that, let's talk about Erosharon one more minute here because I should mention briefly that this defamation movie looks excellent.
Oh, it's so good.
Israeli director and a lot of the Israeli press are praising it.
It looks fascinating.
Of course, this is 2009.9, it would be interesting to see how that evolves with social media and all that kind of stuff.
But it's actually, it's fascinating when you confront the reality.
And how discomfortable the.
There's a how uncomfortable people are When confronted with the fact that actually nobody hates you at all.
And then it's like, they feel so uncomfortable at one point when they go, he goes on the field trip to Auschwitz with these high school kids and they meet this old man and he's like, Hi, who are you?
And they're like, We're kids from Israel.
We came to see Auschwitz.
He's like, That's interesting.
Why are you doing that?
And they're like, Well, it's part of our history and the thing that we're doing.
He's like, Okay.
And then the next day on that at one point they're walking through this.
beautiful green field, this like puffy clouds and blue skies and chirping birds and the Holocaust is long over now in Poland.
And so they're just it's a beautiful scene and they have a Mossad bodyguard there to protect them from the antisemites who are going to jump out of the woods and holocaust them all if he wasn't there to protect them.
And then the next day, the guy says to them, So how was your trip to Poland?
How have you liked it and everything?
And the one girl starts explaining, yeah, this old man, he came up to us and attacked us and called us Jew donkeys and all these things.
And he says, No, he didn't.
I have it on film.
I'll show it to you right here.
He said, Hi, who are you and what are you doing here?
Oh, that's interesting.
Why are you doing that?
That's what he said.
But the thing is, they came all this way after being told that everybody's trying to murder them.
They're in the land of the Holocaust, and there is no Holocaust going along anywhere.
That was at that time seventy years before.
And they don't need a Mossad bodyguard at all.
In fact, they don't even need Stanley Smith's security there at all.
Just their teacher would be fine.
And no one there is anti Semitic, and no one there means them any harm at all.
And these high school students then have a hard time coping with that and trying to figure out what this weird world is that they're living in where it can't be that they were lied to.
It's got to be that guy must have said something hateful to us under his breath.
I'm pretty sure he did.
Didn't he say something about how we're donkeys or something?
Right?
And they just have to come up with this in their own mind to rationalize the danger that they've been told by people that they trust that they're in when in fact they're not.
Right?
And when in fact when they are, it's the direct result of American wars like scaring a bunch of refugees into Europe and then killing even more people and then they commit terrorist attacks, things like that, which is again all Israeli foreign policy that's getting them killed.
But now anti Semitism is good for Israel and they know it.
Benjamin Netanyahu is as cynical as can be about this if you remember when there was one of these attacks, I believe at the kosher grocery store in Paris.
Netanyahu came to France and he said, That's right, French Jews, you'll never be French, your Jews, come home to Israel.
And they said, Damn you, screw you and get out.
We are too French, and how dare you come here to this country and tell everybody else that we really we're your fifth column and not patriotic members of our civil society, civic society that we are in fact part of it and have lived here for centuries.
Screw you, dude, but that's good for him.
He likes it when people hate Jews overseas because it's good for driving Jews overseas to move to Israel.
And that's what's good for Israel and that's the only thing he cares about.
Again, september eleventh, oh man, this is great is the only way that he can see it.
What he always wanted.
And just like the high fibers.
Oh good.
The Palestinians are the problem.
Now we can get you to do what we want.
Can we go to Oh yeah, we got to do Errol Sharon two thousand five real quick.
Errol Sharon disengages from the Gaza Strip.
Now why'd he do that?
Well, there's two major reasons, okay?
The first one is and you could pull this up if you want to at Scott Horton dot org slash fair use, it's the guy's name is Arnon Soffer with two F's Arnon Soffer and then type in kill and kill.
That should bring it up.
There you go.
An interview with him from, as I say it here, the year is two thousand four.
It is the year before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon disengages from Gaza, two years before Hamas wins a plurality in the election George W. Bush forced them to hold.
Three years before Elliot Abrams failed coup, which led to Hamas kicking the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza and seizing so called control under the strip, of the strip under Israeli overlordship, of course, and the institution of the full scale siege and the beginning of the mowing the grass campaigns, which began in two thousand eight.
Sharon's advisor, Arnon Soffer, explained to the Jerusalem Post that the problem is the Palestinian Muslims and Christians are having too many babies.
The Israelis don't want to let them have a state, but they do want to kick them quote out of Israel, at least virtually or figuratively by so called disengaging with them so as to reduce the number of Palestinians officially occupied by Israel by a couple million people.
Does that make sense?
So this guy is a demographer from Tel Aviv University.
He comes to Ariel Sharon and says, mister Prime Minister, you got to look at my mathematics here.
We have a problem.
There are too many Palestinians and they are out reproducing us.
We are approaching a fifty fifty split or worse where we are going to be a literal dictionary definition apartheid state of a minority ruling the majority under this iron fist.
And that could be very untenable for the future of the state and our support from the rest of the western states, et cetera.
So to solve this problem, what we want to do is just figuratively kick the Gazans out of Israel.
Even though Israel stole the Gaza Strip in sixty seven and they never did literally disengage, they just put the thing under siege.
If you listen to pro-Israel, you know, propagandists now, they'll say, well, we gave them a Palestinian state.
We gave them full independence with the disengagement of 2005 and all we got in return is rockets, but that's not true.
It was the Israelis that broke the ceasefire originally, just as they always did ever since that time until October 7 of 2023.
They broke the ceasefires every single time and then it was W. Bush who forced them to hold the election where Hamas won again a plurality, not a majority in any single district anywhere in Palestine.
Did they win a majority of the popular vote?
Then they formed a coalition government, which W. Bush then secretly conspired.
And it's funny to read the article is called The Gaza Bombshell by David Rose and Vanity Fair.
And in that article, David Wormser throws Elliot Abrams under the bus for this and says this was an idiotic scheme to help Fatah overthrow Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which led to Hamas kicking their ass and pushing them out instead, and Hamas then having more control over the Gaza Strip, which is what I think the Likud guys probably wanted.
And because so first of all, now again, I'll get right back to that in a second, but softer again.
This article is from the Jerusalem Post where he gives an interview to a lady named Sarah something and he explains the whole thing.
Now I found this, I forgot where I got it from, but it was, I found on the Jerusalem Post where it used to be, like the URL is still there, but, and you can see where other people have linked to it in the past, but now that URL is dead and that kind of thing.
But if you search the Jerusalem Post website carefully for her name and his name, you will find other articles about it where they refer back to this and refer back to the most explosive quotes out of it, et cetera.
So this is verified and definitely a real interview, even though I don't believe you can find the whole thing at the Jerusalem Post anymore, but that's where it comes from.
So, by the way, and yes, go ahead.
You've mentioned many times scotthorton dot org slash fair use.
So you're almost like creating an archive of important documents that if they were to be erased from the internet, they're here to be found.
Right.
As the stuff that's like most important, especially if I need it and I need to link to it, and I think, you know, whoever has it now is going to be unreliable in the near future.
LinkRot is a real thing, is a real problem.
And so, yeah, on things like this, where it's like, I can only find it in a pretty obscure place, I'll go ahead and reprint it here so if that obscure place goes away, it will still exist.
Because man, I mean, I really am shocked and surprised and dismayed how many times you'll have crucial information that there's only one version of it anywhere online and it could go away any day.
You know what I mean?
Like there's a lot of things like that stress me out.
So I try to do stuff like this.
So now, so he says, listen, this is what we have to do.
We have to disengage from Gaza so that, just as a ruse, right?
As an optical illusion, we're going to make it seem as though we're kicking the Palestinians of Gaza out of Israeli control and jurisdiction.
That way you can't say it's an apartheid state anymore.
Now we're back more to majority rules over the minority, of course, ruthlessly, but still, it's less worse than having a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Christian majority.
That would be less tenable, right, was the idea.
So he told Sharon this and said, You've got to do this, and this is why.
He explains this to Sarah, what's her name?
At, oh, it was even called one on one.
It's the demography stupid was the original title of the thing.
And he tells her, this is what we got to do.
We've got we'll have to put them under siege, of course, and lock them in this cage like animals, basically.
And she says, well, what do we expect the Palestinians to do, right?
They're going to freak out and fight.
And he goes, yeah, of course they are.
But then we will just have to kill and kill and kill.
We will have to just bomb them and bomb them and bomb them and bomb them to just keep them weak and keep them from being able to resist.
That's it.
That's where that comes from.
Ariel Sharon's advisor, Arnon Sauffer by Ruthie Bloom.
I'm sorry I said her name wrong.
I thought it was Sarah something.
It's Ruthie Bloom.
And that's what he explains.
We will just have to kill and kill.
Now, another important Ariel Sharon advisor was a guy named Dov Weisglass, and he explained to Haretz that the whole point of the disengagement from Gaza is to put the peace process in formaldehyde, again, dividing and conquering the Palestinians.
We leave Hamas at least ascendant at that time in Gaza.
Then he says, we We have from the Congress a no one to talk to certificate that says we have no one to talk to.
And it says we'll have no one to talk to until Gaza is Norway.
See you then and shalom.
Okay, so for Ben Shapiro and his miner birds and mindless parroting puppets out there who believe him when he lies that this was the gifting to the Palestinians of independence.
What it was was it was a Likud scheme to divide and conquer and destroy the Palestinian people so that one day the Israelis could take the last of their property from them.
And then when they put them under siege, you know what they said, Lex?
They said, the people of the Gaza Strip are hungry, but not starving.
And I wonder if that rings a bell in your mind where you've heard that before.
That's what Walter Durante wrote in the New York Times about the Holodomor in the same article where he said, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
They're hungry, but not starving, said Walter Durante and Ariel Sharon's men as they inflicted a hol whole demor on the people of the Gaza Strip.
That's again, you know, for the cognitive dissonance, they're like, well, why are we doing this then?
Again, it's the lobby, it's the compromise of the American political system.
But if your dissonance is telling you it can't be that bad, your dissonance is wrong.
Yes, it can too.
That's exactly how they are.
And because Americans, we're Westerners.
We have a different tradition.
I mean, we were all, even in government school, they teach us that every man is born equal, not in every way, but in terms of our rights that we possess to own our own life and control.
You know what?
Meyer Kahane, that rabbi that was Al Qaeda's first target in New York City in 1990 in the United States, he gave an interview to Mike Wallace in the late 1970s where he complains that American Jews believe in all this Thomas Jefferson crap.
Well, we don't.
It's us versus our enemies, and we will destroy them.
Now that was considered fascism by the Israeli Supreme Court then.
That is the Likud Party doctrine now.
Every Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian must go.
must be killed and or forcibly removed from the last of the 22% of measly stink and what's left of historic Palestine there.
I think what's happening in Gaza is absolutely horrific.
And I think the U.S. government should not be supporting that in any way.
So how can we end it?
So on October 7th, let's rewind from October 7th.
Why do we do the Abraham Accords under Trump's first term?
We did the Abraham Accords because Saudi Arabia, especially and the other Sunni Arab kingdoms had always promised that they would refuse to officially normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians got a deal, either an independent state of their own or equal rights and citizenship in a single state.
Now, what Jared Kushner figured out was, well, we can just print money, so what's your price?
And so what he did was he bought F sixteen's for Bahrain, F thirty five's for UAE, debt forgiveness for Sudan, and they made a deal with Morocco that they would recognize Morocco's illegal invasion and seizure of the northern half of the nation of Western Sahara.
And then that would be essentially these countries' bribes to normalize relations with Israel and they were working on Saudi Arabia.
Now, on september twenty second, twenty twenty three, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech before the UN General Assembly.
He know like he likes to do with his visual aids.
This time he held up a map of the Middle East, the big red arrow across from Israel to the Sunni Arab states of the Gulf.
He said, This is the new Middle East.
Well, that was an inside joke.
He was mocking Shimon Perezz said we got to deal with Arafat and the PLO Fatah and deal with a pseudo Palestinian state at least, then we can make peace with the Sunni Arab states and have a new Middle East.
So Netanyahu is up there crowing that under the Netanyahu doctrine, he got the new Middle East without giving in to the Palestinians in any way.
Now of course he frames it like, Oh, the Palestinians have been holding peace hostage when what he's really saying to them is, Y'all are screwed now, boy, ain't nobody coming for you.
I got you.
You never get in a state of your own and independence.
and you're never getting citizenship, you're going to live in those concentration camps of yours until you're dead and we're done taking them from you.
I win, you lose.
That was his speech of september twenty second, two thousand three.
Two weeks later, Hamas broke out of their pen and launched the October seventh attack.
And they did kill probably a thousand people as the Israelis killed at least dozens, perhaps more than a hundred of their own people by invoking the Hannibal Directive.
Now you might remember the story of an Israeli soldier named I think it's Isencott, who had been captured by Hamas and taken into the Gaza Strip back years ago.
And the Israelis ended up having to negotiate and release 1000 Palestinian captives, not prisoners, because the Israelis hold them without trial, without any process whatsoever.
They just kidnap them and hold them.
So they're hostages to these Palestinians.
But they had to release 1000 Palestinian hostages to get their one Israeli hostage back.
And they said, never again are we going to do that.
So they invented a new doctrine which says if one of their soldiers or two of their soldiers is getting successfully captured by Hamas and taken back into the Strip, that they'll kill their own soldiers as well as the captors in order to prevent that from happening.
They called that the Hannibal Directive.
Well, on October the seventh, and this is all from, first of all, very astute American observers like Max Blumenthal, Abu Al, sorry, Ali Abu Nima and Brad Pierce at the Wayward Rabbler.
They all immediately noticed this, but then it was double extra triple super verified by the Israeli press, Haretz, YNET, the Jerusalem Post.
That's all you need to show that they introduced what they called, and I think they probably made this up on the fly, Mass Hannibal, which means not just kill a soldier, but eat.
But even if it's a little old lady who's been kidnapped and is in the back of a car on the way, any car on their way back to the Gaza Strip, they bombed.
They also used a tank to hit and kill a house full of at least nine civilians in one case in one of the kibbutzis.
Now, I'm not playing down what Hamas did there.
I am pointing out what Israel did.
And this is a big part of why they had to embellish what Hamas did.
Because look at these houses are blown up.
What happened here?
Hamas only had grenades.
This is much more destruction than that.
All the cars at the rave that were destroyed.
They were destroyed by helicopter fire, not by Hamas.
How could Hamas have destroyed all those cars?
They didn't have the ability to do that.
And now, I'm not saying who all was in those cars when they were blasted at the rave or what all, every little thing that happened there.
But it's clear that Israel waged a bunch of the destruction on their own people and deliberately so.
And there's video testimony of this girl talking about they're shooting a house and her officers telling her to keep shooting and all these things.
I think she's even saying she defied one of these orders at one point and said she didn't want to keep doing it because it didn't seem like it made sense to her and that kind of thing.
And so this is part of why they embellished what Hamas did.
But of course, then they also wanted to do the Belgian babies on bayonets.
That's from the First World War.
All the lurid stories of the Hun's atrocities against the Belgians and why we have to go and stop them.
And again, the Saddam Hussein and the Kuwaiti babies thrown out of their incubators.
These are the kinds of atrocities that jerk, that jerk tears.
These are the kinds of atrocities that get people to change their mind and support a thing that they otherwise wouldn't.
And when in fact, Hamas did kill unarmed women and children and particularly I don't know how many children, but at least a few and many, many unarmed sol civilians, many, many women.
And so their atrocities were already scarlet.
They already were absolutely guilty of war crimes and what they had done that day.
And in fact, it was so bad that people think I don't know, ma'am.
I'm not taking a stance on this.
But I tend to doubt it, I guess, would be my stance.
And I have simpler explanations.
But there are people who think that Netanyahu let the attack happen because he wanted that kind of horror show to be inflicted on his own people so that he could get away with doing what he's doing now.
Because why?
Because what Hamas did is what's letting him get get away with what he's doing now?
He gave them this excuse just like bin Laden gave George Bush one, only Israel is going to be wrecked here.
This is not working out for Hamas the way they hope.
And I think their primary objective really was to take captives so they'd have them to trade for their own captives back, for their own hostages to get back.
But they went way too far.
They killed way too many innocent people and then gave the Israelis the writ.
Now as far as the attack being successful, it's worth pointing out.
We call it October 7 because it was over by supper time.
Okay?
It wasn't the second week of October.
It wasn't the autumn of twenty three.
It was one day that these captives were out were able to break out of their concentration camp and commit some atrocities, right?
This is not the nation next door, again, contra Ben Shapiro's explicit lies that when he says, Well, what would we do if Mexico was shooting rockets across the Rio Grande into Texas?
Well, Mexico is the name of the national government in Mexico City and its armed military force.
If they were firing rockets across the border into Texas, well, We would have some negotiation to do, wouldn't we?
Okay?
Or worse.
What we're talking about here is not Mexico, we're talking about an Indian reservation.
We're talking about people who were already conquered and captured in nineteen sixty seven, who've been living under the totalitarian control of this foreign occupying army ever since then.
We're talking about the closer equivalent would be Nelson Rockefeller sending the National Guard to put down the riot in Attica prison, and killing all the guards along with the prisoners.
This would be, imagine, maybe in earlier time, an Indian reservation where they break out and they commit some atrocities, scalp some Anglo, uh, heads, and then what do we do?
We go in there and bomb and kill a hundred thousand of them?
Or if, again, because this is Israeli territory, okay?
De jure, no, de facto, absolutely.
This is a ghetto.
So what about if the Trump government decided to build a wall around South Chicago and say, we can't tolerate the violence of the blacks of South Chicago any more.
Everybody knows that's one of the highest crime rates in the country.
We're just going to bomb them.
Because occasionally they break out of the black part of town and hurt other people too.
So we're going to enclose their ghetto in giant concrete and razor wire walls, and then we're going to bomb them all to death.
That's what Israel is doing.
Fish in a barrel, a canned hunt.
You understand?
Like a father abusing his son.
A helpless captive.
Right?
A guard beating an inmate.
Jeffrey Goldberg torturing some poor Palestinian in his cell.
Not a sovereign nation defending itself from attack from another sovereign nation of any kind.
And Americans don't understand this because they're called Palestinians.
And so aren't they from a country called Palestine?
Everybody's got a country, right?
But no, Israel's on top of Palestine, so no, they don't have a Palestine.
They don't have a country, they don't have a government.
If Fatah, the PA on the West Bank, if they are trustees in an Israeli open air prison, then Hamas is just the strongest gang.
They're the Cripts or the Bloods or the Latin Kings or the Aryan nations have taken over the prison in the Gaza Strip.
They're not the duly elected government of the people of Palestine.
When George W. Bush forced those people to hold that election in 2005, the majority of the population of Gaza were children, were minors, at least under 18, okay?
Could not vote.
The majority of them were minors.
That was in 2005, the last time they got a chance to vote.
Guess what?
The majority of them are minors still to this day.
They have popular sovereignty behind Hamas and bear collective responsibility for Hamas' crimes when, as we mentioned a previous era, it was Israel that helped to install the Israeli state.
Install Hamas in power in the Gaza Strip in first place, help their rise their botched coup.
Well, they did the disengagement to empower them again.
No one to talk to certificate bragging about it.
Then they did the botched coup, which maybe was deliberately botched or I don't know exactly what happened there, but that ended with Hamas in charge of the entire Gaza Strip.
And then we have, as we know, and people can, you might want to pull this up if you want to and show them.
It's by me and one of my guys, Connor Freeman is his name.
And the article is called Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired.
Yeah, right there.
Second one.
I'll tell you a funny story.
I did the Pierce Morgan show the other day.
I debated Wesley Clark on Ukraine again.
But while I was on hold, Pierce Morgan was whooping the Israeli ambassador.
And I'm not sure if it was the ambassador to Britain or the ambassador to the United States.
But he was going after him so hard.
And at one point it was so funny, you could see his face twist a little bit because the guy realized what he said after he said it, that like, oops, this undermines the narrative a little bit.
But the ambassador railed to Pierce Morgan.
Nobody elected Hamas.
They're not the legitimate power there, which is, yeah, that's right.
He's railing against Hamas, right?
But what's he just did?
What did he just do?
truth and acquitted the Palestinian people of responsibility for Hamas.
And then what a Pierce Morgan do heroically told the truth, that you know who did support Hamas Benjamin Netanyahu and the Lakud.
Oh, check that out.
You know who you get to kill?
Anybody who's near somebody who years ago supposedly may have voted for Hamas to win a plurality.
Well, you know who really voted for Hamas?
Benjamin Netanyahu did.
So who gets the death penalty now?
They're willing to kill twenty thousand children or more so far, burying little babies.
Imagine a little five year old baby buried alive in rubble and has to starve to death for five days in there.
That's what Benjamin Netanyahu, the actual owner, controller, creator of Hamas, boister of Hamas onto the hapless, helpless Palestinian people.
They supposedly have popular sovereignty and chose Hamas.
Netanyahu chose Hamas for them.
And he said over and over, we control the height of the flame.
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.
must support Hamas in Gaza so that we can keep the Palestinians divided and so that we can continue to tell American again, we're talking about Netanyahu here, so American idiots, absurd fools, that we have no partner for peace because we keep the terrorists in charge in Gaza.
And you know what's funny about this?
Netanyahu has been quoted repeatedly saying we control the height of the flame.
Three different people said he said that to a group of Likud ministers.
And then he denied it and his friends denied it and said he never said that.
Even though we got all his buddies here bragging about how smart he is for doing it that way, etc.
But anyway, there's a new documentary called the BB Files.
It's all the footage is Shinbet National Police Interrogation Videos of Benjamin Netanyahu and his disgusting wife Sarah and all of their friends, and including Sheldon Adelson and Miriam Adelson who gave Donald Trump six hundred million dollars to do whatever Israel says.
And they're all interrogated in there because Sarah Netanyahu is a beast who demands that all of their friends give her jewelry and champagne and cars and what I don't know cars, all kinds of fancy things, and this is illegal in Israel.
This is absolutely against the letter of the law.
They are not allowed to accept these gifts from wealthy people in this way.
They're totally compromised.
He is a guilty felon a hundred percent.
There's probably a huge part of why he's keeping the war going as long as he can, because they won't put him in prison as long as he's keeping the war going.
But here's my point.
On video, Xinbet asks.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, why do you support Hamas in Gaza?
Why are you leaning on Qatar to give them billions of dollars?
And Netanyahu says, This is how we keep the Palestinians divided, but we control the height of the flame.
On video to the cops.
Okay?
So that means also that everyone who said that that quote was a lie is either a liar or a damned fool.
Okay, I just had to make that point because that's important.
But this is absolutely true, okay?
They say the Palestinians are responsible for Hamas.
No, Benjamin Netanyahu is responsible for Hamas.
Benjamin Netanyahu owns the entire chessboard.
Benjamin Netanyahu is backed by the unlimited budget and military power of the global superpower and all of his myriad civilian and military intelligence services.
Hamas and the Palestinians are pawns on his board.
That's the fact.
And if it's okay to kill Palestinians because they are nearby Hamas, then it's okay to kill Benjamin Netanyahu because he is literally not figuratively, their greatest ally, and in a direct sense, not like, Oh, America is Osama bin Laden's indispensable ally.
I mean, literally he sent Mossad to Qatar to demand that they give more money to Hamas over and over and over again, and his own men rated him out for it.
Okay?
That's treason.
He's the one who should hang from the end of a rope, not the people of the Gaza Strip, who have been killed, probably a hundred thousand of them have been killed now, including torn to shreds, including they bomb their tents, they bury them alive.
And they quite literally herd them in to narrow yards after starving them almost to death and bring them in to a narrow area, then they open the gate all at once.
They don't bring them in through some kind of checkpoint.
They make them, they just open the gate and so that the people rush in a mad mob rush to grab whatever food they can, and then these people are literally starving.
So the spirit of friendship and cooperation falls aside, and now I will stab you so that I can feed my kid today, dude.
It's the hunger games out there or worse, whatever analogy that you have to Soviet communism is it's the equivalent, it's the moral equivalent of Soviet communism is what it is, Lex.
It's the worst thing in the world.
It's the most barbarian regime in the world, far worse than the Chikoms.
I mean, they have to lie their ass off to try to pretend that Beijing treats the Uyghurs this way.
Give me a break.
The Uyghurs are kings compared to what's happening to the Palestinians right now.
And the only thing that makes Israel the second worst government in the world is the United States of America has the power to do this, to help them do this to the Palestiniansans, but also do it to the Iraqis and the Syrians and the Yemenis and whoever else Israel says as well.
But this is pure barbarism.
And I strongly urge, I know that you've seen it.
I strongly urge your audience to go watch this interview of this man Anthony Aguilera, who is a special forces guy that's above the Rangers but below Delta, but that's second tier special operations, Army special operations forces, the Green Berets.
Been fighting in the Terror Wars all these years, fought in Iraq.
I don't know how old the guy is if he fought in Iraq War two.
He certainly fought in Iraq War three and in Afghanistan.
and had been deployed twelve times, Tucker said, including to the Stans in Central Asia and Vietnam.
I don't know who he's killing in Vietnam.
Maybe just training there.
I don't know.
He also did an interview on Breaking Points with Sager and Crystal.
Yeah.
I'm glad you mentioned that.
So the story is that they demonized UNRWA, which was the UN Refugee Relief Agency.
What refugees?
Well, eighty percent of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees from what we call Israel proper.
Israeli Jews stole that land from them.
That's their land.
That's why they live in Gaza.
They're not from Gaza.
Eighty percent of them are not from Gaza, or they are, but their parents and grandparents and great grandparents were not.
They are refugees there.
So ever since then, UNRWA has been there to provide humanitarian relief for these poor people who've been cut off from their country on the other side of the razor wire.
And so UNRWA was in charge of distributing the aid, but then they lied, of course, as ridiculous propaganda that UNRWA had been involved in the October 7 attack.
And there may have been one guy who had worked for them before who said something or maybe even participated to some small degree, but it's a ridiculous charge against the entire organization.
And as this guy Aguilera explains, they had, I believe, I can't remember the number.
Was it?
Do you remember if he said they had 40 sites around the country?
I believe he said they had 40 sites around the strip where they were delivering aid to people.
When they closed that down, the Israelis replaced it with this new humanitarian relief foundation or global humanitarian foundation, I think it's called GHF, right?
And they only have four stations and three of them are near the Egyptian border.
And only one of them is what they call the in what they call the Narezim corridor, I believe it's pronounced.
That's like halfway through the strip.
The people of the north have nothing.
There's no aid coming into the people.
of the north at all.
They're starving to death up there.
And he says there's only these four places.
And then here's what we're talking about, Lex, when we're talking about killing the starving people as they line up for aid.
What it is, and this has been explained in Haretz, by the way, they have senior officials and army people talking to Haretz about this.
This is the most important liberal daily in Israel, the Israeli New York Times basically has firsthand reporting from enlisted and officers, perpetrators saying that yes, it's true we do this.
Okay.
Then Aguilera tells the story the best and has some video and shows.
What it is is this.
They open the food place early in the morning for this riot where everybody's supposed to come and rush and grab the food.
So people come walking and they force them to walk through war zones to get to the places where there's firing going on anyway.
Force them to walk for, I don't know how many miles this is, 12 kilometers.
So 10 miles, which is a hell of a walk, man.
I don't know, eight miles.
It's still an incredible long walk for poor, hungry, starving people.
They get all the way there.
And then, but from the IDS point of view, they're supposed to go this way and then they're supposed to go that way.
They're supposed to go over this hill and then come around this way and then you line up at the thing, but there's no signs anywhere and there's no little metal barricades like a black sabbath show or something for people to follow.
So how do they direct the Palestinians' foot traffic?
With machine guns, with artillery and tank rounds.
There's an invisible line, you'll know you cross it when I blow your head off.
And when the mob of Palestinians coming down for their food, when they can see that people on the edges of the crowd are being shot and killed, they know that, oh, I guess that's where the line is.
That's how they're supposed to know where the invisible lines are drawn.
Aguilera said he asked him why you just put up a sign that says go this way and they go nah that's too expensive.
So instead they shoot at them not just with fully automatic rifles but with artillery and with tank rounds and they blast them to hell man in the name of crowd control.
And he says they say oh no we're just shooting over their heads and shooting at their feet and shooting behind them to direct them.
You imagine directing civilian traffic that way with machine gun fire.
So what happens is they all die.
He says they're coming down this thing.
They're shooting over the heads of these guys but behind them is a whole is a hillside where people are coming down there.
So then when the sun finishes coming up, there's just roses, just dead bodies everywhere.
And then he says the Israelis go, oh, Hamas did it.
Come on, man.
Like, yeah, you know, would be Hamas in Bosnia did some false flag attacks in nineteen ninety five.
That's not what's happening here, okay?
These people are being slaughtered.
Starving people are being brought in and masqueraded.
As Tucker Carlson rightly said, men were hanged to death from the neck for this at Nuremberg murdering prisoners.
This is if you see Schindler's list.
There's a scene in there which I don't even know if this really happened or not probably did.
What the hell?
Or if this is just Spielberg shows one of the concentration camp guards shooting the Jews for target practice.
That's what they do.
There's numerous reports coming in just in the last couple of weeks that there has clearly been.
Well, I don't know.
I shouldn't say numerous.
I saw that there's an is a British doctor saying this.
And then there was someone who said that he confirmed it.
Although I wasn't sure how serious he was or not.
I shouldn't take that.
But it seemed like a very credible report in the first place.
And in fact, the British doctor is at least claiming that he's passing on reports for other doctors.
And what are they seeing?
They're seeing Palestinian children who all have the same signature type of wound to the same body part.
One day they're all shot in the genitals, children.
The next day they're all shot in the elbow.
The next day they're all shot in the knee or in the heart.
And what's happening here is the Israelis are shooting them for fun, for target practice, just like the Nazis in Schindler's list killing the little girl in the red coat.
That's what they're doing.
They're burying them alive.
They're starving them to death and then forcing them into mobs and then machine gunning them.
if this was a movie, you'd say it was too over the top, it's too fake, it can't be true.
If it was, if anybody leaned left and they heard this about the communists, they'd say, no, it's right-wing propaganda.
Like, no, dude, this is how they are.
This is exactly how they are.
And it's exactly how they treat the Palestinians.
They do not recognize their humanity.
They are N-words.
They are gooks.
They are goyem.
Grasshoppers.
And that means it's okay to kill them.
All of them.
The Prime Minister gave a speech to the officer corps where he said the enemy is Amalek out of a three thousand year old Bible story where Jehovah supposedly told the ancient Hebrews to wipe out a tribe called the Amalek and kill every last man, woman, and child, and baby, and oxen, and wipe them off the face of the earth.
Now, Alex, nobody thinks that God whispered to Benjamin Netanyahu and said the Palestinians are Amalek.
Right, this is just a bunch of crap, even if you believe every single word of the Bible as the literal inspired word of God from back then, that ain't got a thing to do with this now other than a cynical, lying, thieving murderer invoking a god who says it's okay to kill children, that you must, that you are commanded to kill them all.
And this was his orders to the officer corps, and then I got to read Liz Wolf in Reason magazine every morning telling me that Israel's goal is fighting Hamas.
Benjamin Netanyahu said in May we are destroying all of their homes so they have nowhere to go back to so that we can force them all to leave.
And I got to read Liz Wolf in Reason magazine telling me that Lakud means well and they're just trying to protect themselves from armed terrorists when they are explicitly and deliberately slaughtering children, shooting toddlers in the head, shooting pregnant women in the stomach, bombing.
Bombing refugees' tents with two thousand pound bombs.
It is a genocide.
They it's not and that doesn't just mean a giant massacre, and it doesn't just mean ethnic cleansing.
They are attempting to destroy the Palestinian people as Palestinian people.
They have bombed all of their universities and schools, all of their government offices that have any records of land ownership or family histories.
They bombed every last hospital in this strip, Lex.
Remember when we argued about whether or not they bombed the parking lot that one time at the start of the war?
They destroyed them all.
You want to talk about babies in incubators?
There is a hospital in the Gaza Strip.
This is an absolute guaranteed verified fact.
If you want to stop and pause and look it up, we can do that.
Otherwise, you know, your audience can surely find this.
These Palestinian doctors were threatened and told, We are going to absolutely kill every single last one of you if you don't get out of that hospital right now.
And they refused to leave and said, We are protecting a NICU full of premature babies in their incubators and we will not leave them.
And the Israelis said, You have to leave or we're going to blow the place up.
But if you do leave, we promise.
that we will take possession of these premature babies and protect them.
And then you know what they did?
They left them in their incubators to die.
All of them.
And the media went in there and found a room full of corpses.
So under George HW Bush's theory, America has to launch a war against Israel now and carpet bomb Tel Aviv, because this is proof of Israel's intent to systematically dismantle Palestine.
That was the excuse for Iraq War 1, and it was a lie.
This is true.
It's true.
And Lex, they like it.
They think it's funny.
They don't give a damn.
They don't give a damn to kill a premature baby.
That premature baby was going to grow up to be a Palestinian one day.
Knits make lice.
Kill them all.
That's the doctrine.
Again, Haretz, there are free fire zones.
If anyone is between here and here, you just kill them.
There's no sign that says this is a free fire zone.
If it's an eleven year old boy walking with his little sister, you shoot and kill them both.
Kill anything that moves just like America in Vietnam.
Just like James Madison Fallujah.
Worse, worse, and in fact as aggregate.
Because as Aguilera says, he goes, man, I've been all over the terror wars.
I've never seen anything like this.
He told the BBC, he said, What's it like?
It's like Terminator two.
Remember Terminator two where it's after the H bombs have hit Los Angeles.
That's what it's like.
Right, an absolute horror show, and man, it's America's fault.
No less than the Yemeni War was the American Saudi War.
This is the American Israeli genocide.
It's not a war, it's a slaughter, it's a canned hunt against a helpless captive, you know, a prisoner population.
And just like happened on september eleventh, just like happened to that couple that were assassinated outside of the Israeli embassy, just like what happened with the guy attacked with the makeshift flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado.
And I can't prove this yet, but you mark my words and we'll see whether I'm right, that the guy that attacked New Orleans on New Year's Day drove his truck down Bourbon Street, killed twelve people, and injured another few dozen.
And then we're very lucky in the sense that when he finally crashed, he crashed into a backhoe or a bulldozer at the end of Bourbon Street, and there just happened to be a group of six cops, I think it was standing right there.
So when he crashed and he got out of his truck with his gun, they blew him away.
Otherwise, he could have killed many, many more people.
Who was he?
He was an American army veteran who had converted to Islam and signed up with the Islamic State.
And what are the chances, Lex?
That on New Year's Eve, twenty twenty four, that this man is motivated to do this for any other reason than American support for Israel and the Gaza Strip.
There's a ninety nine percent chance that that was what he was ranting about to his parents in his video messages that he recorded on his way from Houston to New Orleans.
Just the same as Omar Mateen complaining about Obama killing the women and children in Syria in the nightclub massacre of I'm sorry what year two thousand I'm sorry the Orlando Pulse massacre.
This is blowback from American foreign policy and again not for being a good friend to a good friend but for being a loyal ally to a state that doesn't give a damn about us that celebrates when September 11th happens to us because it means that we will now be easier to manipulate and put into the service of carrying out their foreign policy goals that spend our treasure that kill our men that empower their enemies requiring us to do even more to fight.
for them and against them back and forth over and over for decades.
And all we get out of it is confiscated wealth and dead civilians.
And I'm terrified quite honestly.
I know a lot of people who kind of downplay this.
I am legitimately terrified of bin Ladenite terrorism.
I ain't afraid of the Shiites.
I don't think the Ayatollah wants to fight us.
And I don't think Hezbollah is going to do nothing to the United States of America without his say so, and he ain't given it.
It's the bin Ladenites who tried to knock our towers down in ninety three.
in 1993 and who did in 2001 killing thousands of our people.
And they're still here.
They did San Bernardino.
They had a failed attack on the subway in New York.
They had a failed attack on a marathon in New York and New Jersey.
They had a successful attack in Boston at Fort Hood in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pensacola, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas.
These are all in our era post September 11 terrorist attacks against our people because of our government serving Israel's interests primarily in the Middle East.
So there's a strong case to be made that what's happening in Gaza is going to lead to The growth of the increased number of bin Ladenites in the world.
And dead American civilians as a result of that.
So basically it makes the United States less safe.
Absolutely.
And zooming up on the broader world, it makes the whole world less safe, including Israel.
That's right.
It's the most cynical thing, man.
You know, like there's an interview you probably read this before.
A lot of people are familiar with this.
Sabine Brzezinski was interviewed by a French magazine in 1998.
Noel Lwell Observator or some kind of thing.
I don't speak French, man.
And they interviewed him and they said, this is in 1998.
now, so this is after the Taliban have come to power.
I think it's before the embassy attack, but it's after Kobar, and it's after the first World Trade Center bombing and the National Guard attack of'95 in Saudi.
And the reporter asks him, Hey man, so all our support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the eighties, that was your brilliant idea, is going to help lead to the rise of all this terrorism.
So what do you think about that?
He says, Are you kidding me?
What's a couple of stirred up Muslims versus the liberation of Eastern Europe and the destruction of Soviet communism.
We know what we're doing, and he says in that same interview that we were not necessarily I love the way he says this.
You could apply this exactly to the Ukraine war.
We were not trying to provoke them into invading Afghanistan, but we were knowingly increasing the probability that they would, which is of course the exact same thing.
And so, you know, that's the attitude.
Again, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower.
If you get to be the superpower, that's how they look at us.
Some people partying on Bourbon Street, on New Orleans, like to you, you might say, That is a sacrifice I'm not willing to pay.
Who could be more innocent than people partying on Bourbon Street?
What could be more American than having fun with your friends and family on New Year's Eve?
Why should they have to be crucified for Israel's sins?
It makes no sense at all for the American people to have to put up with this, but where you would say no, enough, intolerable, they would say, Who cares?
A few expendable civilians.
They might as well be Afghans.
They might as well be Palestinians, the people of New Orleans.
George Bush doesn't care about them, nor does Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Donald Trump for that matter.
The next time there's a terrorist attack, you and I already know what's going to happen.
They're going to blame it on fundamentalist radical Islam, which makes evil people hate good people and want to kill us.
Now we have no choice but to do whatever what do you want us to do next?
BB Whatever he said is whatever we have to do next the next time that we have to pay the price for what Israel did the last time.
And I'm sick and I'm tired of it.
I think there's a really big, deeper human nature point that you've spoken to over the last several hours, which is trying to defeat terror with military force.
Over the past 30 years, we have learned the lesson that that only creates more terror.
Yeah.
And which they don't mind again, because it just gives them more to do.
And because again, the bin Ladenites are over there, not over here, and they like killing Serbs and Russians and Shiites.
And so that's all cool.
But also with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, I'm glad you mentioned that.
Guess what?
The LET, which are the bin Ladenites of Pakistan.
There's a journalist named Steve Kahl who wrote Ghost Wars about Afghanistan and he wrote Directorate S about the Pakistani ISI, their secret intelligence service who backed the Taliban and backed the bin Ladenites.
Well, the LET, Laszkar Etaiba was one of their groups and they seized, according to Steve Kahl, they seized control of an Indian ship for a time before Special Operations troops were able to go in there and kill them all off.
Well, that ship had nuclear weapons on board.
Apparently the jihadists didn't know that.
They probably would not have been able to access them or know how to use them, but still bin Ladenite jihadists seized control of a ship that had atomic bombs on it.
That is not nothing, right?
It's just like bin Ladenites almost toppled one tower over into the other.
Let's start paying attention now instead of later, which by the way, Ramsay bin Alshib before he fled, he wrote letters to all the New York papers saying he bombed the World Trade Center as revenge for American support for Israel and bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi, just as his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would say you years later after doing September 11th.
It's always about Israel, dude.
Always was.
Again, even the dual containment was always about Israel.
See, it's Akshamira's guy that said we had to stay in Saudi Arabia.
So, you know, I know Dubowitz is watching this right now and saying, see, see, he's blaming it all on the Jews, but that's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that Israel, which calls itself the Jewish state and happens to be run by Jewish men, and that's what their thing is, that they have interests that are very different from ours, and that their lobbyists and their, as Justin would call it, their amen corner in the United States has their interests at heart and those interests are opposite to ours.
As Justin, I know would hasten to point out that the majority of American Jews opposed Iraq War 2.
And you might say, well, yeah, but that's because they're liberal democrats.
Okay, fine.
Well, they're not Ariel Sharon's men, are they?
More American Jews per capita opposed Iraq War 2 than any other ethnic or religious group as they divided it up in the polls at that time.
Right?
So it's clearly not the lie that Mark Dubowitz would try to put in my mouth in order to discredit what I'm saying.
But what I am saying is some pro pretty ugly true things about the role of the Israel lobby in the United States.
And again, just as Mir Scheimer says, they have to work this hard.
They have to spend this much money and they have to go around calling everybody a Nazi because that's what it takes to get Israel to keep doing what Israel wants.
The US has different interests that we would pursue otherwise.
And so it takes this extraordinary effort to bend our empire to their will and including, yes, even supporting the empire itself because as Irving Crystal and Norman Podhoritz, probably the two most important neoconservative leaders of that generation, both said in the 1970s that this is their words.
I'm not saying this and I'm not saying people took their advice.
I'm saying this is what these two neoconuts said was this is I'm virtually certain this is the Podhoritz quote is Jews don't like large defense budgets, but we need to support them because we have to make sure that under whatever excuse we keep America engaged in the world so that it is available to help Israel.
And this is a big part of why they're China Hawks, why they're Russia Hawks, why they're anything Hawks, why they're Venezuela Hawks, because to them, the greatest, this is what Bret Stevens said in the New York Times, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, who's now regular writer at the New York Times.
He said the very same thing about keeping America available to protect Israel.
And then he says in the same article, but it's totally an antisemitic canard that anyone who supports Israel and supports these wars does so at America's expense or in any way contrary to America's interests.
But then he's the one who's saying, that's what we have to do, is bend America to Israel's interests.
There couldn't be anything more anti-American than that.
And I would encourage people to read George Washington's farewell address.
The guy was a brilliant genius and he wrote the thing himself, and it's probably four or five thousand words on foreign policy, where he says that we should always eschew entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world because we'll form unnatural, passionate attachments to the interests of these other nations.
And then that will divide the people here.
It'll lead to all kinds of acrimony and accusations, and eventually you'll have the partisans of foreign nations in charge.
And they will denounce as unpatriotic the Americans who don't want to share their allegiance with another power.
And all of these things, you couldn't have a 21st century author write it any more eloquently or convincingly than George Washington himself in his farewell.
What a truly great man George Washington was.
He had his flaws, but yeah.
Well, yes, yes.
Jefferson too, all of them, yeah.
But I'm grateful for this country and these men that founded the country on these set of principles that revolutionized human history.
Absolutely right.
And we have to make sure we carry the flag of those ideas forward.
I absolutely think that and this is why I'm a libertarian.
For me, libertarianism is real American distilled.
For me, the Declaration of Independence, that is the North Star.
Everyone's born free and I don't even have to prove it to you because I'm armed and I'm telling you, dude, I'm not giving up.
You understand?
Yeah.
That's what it says.
Me too.
It's self evident to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't have an argument.
I'm just saying.
And, and that's the American creed.
Yeah.
And, and that's what I believe in.
I believe that essentially all of liberalism and conservatism and socialism are all deviations from the true American way, which is liberty and property.
And that's what it right to determine their own destiny, that is what it's all about.
And if we lived that, I mean, imagine being afraid, Germany and Japan are going to rise back up again.
This whole time, we never needed to do any of this.
All we had to do was be free.
We could have done, as Gene Kirkpatrick said, abandoned the entire empire, been a normal country in a normal time, this whole time stayed out of all the world's conflicts, perfected our republic to the best of our ability, made political and individual liberty our highest political goal, and shown the world how it's done.
bills of rights ain't good enough, not like ours is.
Y'all's independent judiciaries aren't independent enough, not like ours.
Y'all's rule of law is too subject to the will of men.
You need to really encode this thing and follow it like in the deal, right?
We could I one time humiliated Neil Ferguson's wife, Hirsa Ali, if you know her, she's the atheist ex Muslim little pet mascot of the war party there that they traips around and have her demonize Muslims and whatever, and I humiliated her in a debate in front of a bunch of people at a freedom fest in Las Vegas.
And it was funny because at the end of the debate, the host of the debate said to me that, wow, you made her case better than she did, and then you destroyed it.
And my case that I was making was about that there are real problems in the Muslim world, like, for example, the worst thing probably is the female genital mutilation, female circumcision, they call it in Eastern Africa, and in Kurdistan is where that seems to be the worst places where those traditions are still continued to this day.
And then you have, of course, the brutality and the corruption of the dictatorships of North Africa and of the Gulf.
You have just the absolute widespread accepted custom of child abuse among the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially Afghanistan.
I don't know as much about in Pakistan.
You have, of course, the absolute tyranny over women in almost all of these countries where they're made to wear the hijab or the veil or even a burqa, whether they want to or not, and these kinds of things.
Whatever.
We could go on and on here, Lex, about the imperfections of these countries.
But guess what?
You know, it's the worst thing about Somalia and Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
America is the worst thing about all those countries, the violence that our country has brought to them, the absolute destruction, the wholesale, wanton and cruel violence against populations that never did anything to us.
Not one of these groups had the slightest thing to do with September 11th, unless you want to say that Omar should have just slit bin Laden's throat in 1999.
I guess I'd agree with you about that.
You know, the Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq and Syria, none of them had anything to do with September 11.
There wasn't a single Iraqi Syrian or Iranian on those planes or behind anything of that at all.
Obviously, the only reason they put North Korea in the Axis of evil is because if they put Syria in it, it would wait a minute.
This speech was written in Tel Aviv, dude.
What does this have to do with Osama bin Laden who killed our guys who Bush has already let get away?
Oh, you want to do something?
Let's end with this for this part of our section before we move on to the Cold War to show just how much our government cares about the American people's interests here.
See if you can find George Bush from March 2002.
And the quote would be, I'm truly not concerned about him, bin Laden.
During a White House news conference on March 13, 2002, President George W. Bush stated concerning Osama bin Laden that he was not truly concerned about him.
That's a quote.
This statement generated controversy, particularly when Senator John Kerry brought it up during a presidential debate in 2004.
Well, and screw John Kerry, this thing got nothing to do with sticking up for him.
And, you know, in my book, I quote the entire statement here because I would not want anyone to mistakenly believe that I quoted any of this out of context.
It's one of those things we're like, nope, let's go ahead and see everything that he has to say.
And to our benefit, George W. Bush is only so smart and only so good at getting away with this.
He would like he clearly has had conversations with his staff about how we're work we have to change the subject really from Osama to Saddam.
And it's a little clumsy and a little difficult to do, but we're going to have to kind of figure out how to do that.
And so this is W. Bush sort of taking a stab at it, except that he's just not up to the task, right?
So he can only be as smooth as he is in trying to make these statements, and I would argue it does not work out too well for him, but it makes it, I think, very clear to us.
Just frankly, like how much contempt they have for us, you know, George W. Bush, it really meant a lot to people, Lex, when he climbed up on that fire truck, and he said, I hear you, and we all hear you, and the rest of the world will hear you soon.
People really were like, man, we need a leader, and we got one.
Can you imagine Bill Clinton?
Being even pretend macho enough to act like that.
When America needed a man, there was W. Bush, right?
And people believed so hard in him after that.
And then he ruthlessly exploited their goodwill and their faith in him in order to manipulate them and lie to them to use their sons to go to a war for his own reasons that he knew had nothing to do with protecting us from terrorism.
In fact, again, W. Bush is so bad at this.
He told Katie Curick on CBS News.
One of the hardest parts of my job is connecting Iraq to the war on terrorism.
Because he, right, that's all he can do.
He sputtered.
Oops, was I supposed to say it like that?
I guess probably not, right?
Because what's he saying?
He knows it is the most difficult part of his job is trying to figure out how to get people to believe that this aggressive war has anything to do with defending ourselves from that other thing that happened that one time, you know?
When he clearly was just obscuring and.
Mr. President, in your speeches now, you rarely talk or mention Usama bin Laden.
Why is that?
Wait, wait, hit pause for a second.
Forgive me for stipulating, this is six months after the September 11 attack.
Okay, sorry, go ahead.
also information for a lot yes we find out well and i know the man's on the run if he's alive at all and uh...
i uh...
we hadn't heard from him in a long time.
And the idea of focusing on one person is Terror is bigger than one person.
And he's just, he's a person who's now been marginalized.
His network is, his host government has been destroyed.
He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match.
He is, you know, as I mentioned in my speeches, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who's willing to commit youngsters to their death and he himself tries to hide if in fact he's hiding ating at all.
So I don't know where he is.
You know, I just don't spend that much time on him.
I'll be honest with you.
I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well supplied, that the strategy is clear, that the coalition is strong, that when we find enemy bunched up like we did in Sharikote Mountains, that the military has all the supporters that needs to go in and do the job which they did.
And there will be other battles in Afghanistan.
There's going to be other struggles like Sharikote, and I'm just as confident about the outcome of those future battles as I was about Sherry Coat.
Our soldiers are performing brilliantly.
We're tough.
We're strong.
They're well equipped.
We have a good strategy.
We are showing the world we know how to fight a guerrilla war with conventional means.
Is that even if a threat that the modern code won't truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?
Well, as I say, we hadn't heard much from him.
And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure.
And, you know, again, I don't know where he is.
I repeat what I said.
I truly am not that concerned about him.
I know he is on the run.
I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country.
Yeah.
And then, of course, we know and we've talked about the events that followed.
Yeah.
I gotta say again, I guess just to finish this segment up, to reiterate, I think our highest priority really, and in fact, as much as I like seeing Tulsi Gabbard persecute the Russia Gate felons.
who framed President Trump for treason and deserve to be banished with their families from North America forever.
I really wish that Tulsi Gabbard actually only had.
one priority in the entire world, which is protecting us from bin Ladenite terrorism.
I'm serious about that.
These guys are coming back here.
And now it's true, I should stipulate again.
Israel loves Al Qaeda and ISIS.
As long as they're killing Shiites, they've got a pretty good relationship with Al Qaeda in Syria now.
Last December, Abu Muhammad al Jalani, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, broke out of his pen and sacked Damascus with the help of Turkey and Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu went to the border, gave a press conference, and took credit for it himself, okay?
And Ben Shapiro got on there and said, Yeah, it's Al Qaeda taking over, but that's good.
because at least they're pushing the Shiites out.
This is somehow the leader of American conservatism.
You tell me how that worked.
But yeah, anyway, so right now, overall, Israel has very close relationship with Al Qaeda, but then again, so did Bill Clinton, and they still attacked us, right?
Just because we're supporting them here doesn't mean they won't attack us there.
And we're still motivating them to come at the United States.
And especially when you're talking like lone wolf cooks where it can be just one jerk with a rifle can do a hell of a lot of damage whether anybody on the internet even recruited him to do it or not.
And especially with real ability to recruit there.
And again, just like always, man, just like with the FBI entrapments, there's almost three hundred, more than three hundred FBI entrapments on terrorism charges.
Trevor Aronson is the greatest journalist on that question.
He wrote a book called The Terror Factory about the FBI, and every time they trap some idiot into a bin Ladenite plot, what do they tell him?
Don't you hate freedom?
No, they tell him, isn't it impossible to tolerate the violence that George Bush, slash Barack Obama, slash Donald Trump, slash Joe Biden are bringing to the people of the Middle East, and don't you want to do something about it?
Here's ten thousand dollars.
Say you love Osama into the microphone, kid.
And he goes, Yeah, I'm really angry about American foreign policy.
I love Osama, give me twenty thousand dollars, and off to the penitentiary he goes.
And that's how they get him every time they cite American foreign policy.
Do you think that there's a six figure salary paid FBI informant in this country anywhere that's going to try to recruit a terrorist by citing freedom?
You know what's really bad about Americans is they let three or four million Muslims live here and go to whatever mosque they want and don't bother them at all.
And it's fine.
Ooh, that enrages us.
Oh, we hate that America for all their freedom of religion where a tiny Muslim minority is able to practice in peace and security.
That ain't it.
That's not how an FBI informant recruits a dupe into a plot.
They cite American foreign policy one hundred percent of the time.
So the FBI knows same thing that I know, same thing that the FBI testified to the nine hundred eleven commission, I think they identify with the Palestinian issue.
And I think that's why they're taking revenge against the United States of America.
And so what do we get from Israel on all this?
Like maybe we need to invite Dubowitz back in here so he can tell us what is one thing that Israel has ever done for us?
They helped Obama back Al Qaeda in Syria, but that was Obama helping them back Al Qaeda in Syria.
They helped Ronald Reagan sell missiles to the Ayatollah when he was back in Saddam at the very same time.
I guess we owe him big for that.
Otherwise, they steal our secrets and sell them to the Soviets or to the Chinese, including like the Chinese supersonic sea skimming missiles.
They got those from American designs pilfered by the Israelis.
Jeff Stein from spy talk when he's not being an insane Russia gate lunatic.
Poor Jeff, I used to respect him, but Jeff Stein reported numerous times that the FBI and CIA do a report.
Actually, they made them stop doing this report because every year they said that after Russia and China, Israel is the worst country that spies on the United States of America and is the greatest security threat for the counterintelligence agents in the United States trying to hold them at bay.
Russia and China and Israel are the countries that spy on us the most, again, including Bill Clinton, and they try to blackmail him with their information about Bill Clinton cheating on his wife.
They're just a security threat to the United States of America.
I'd buy anybody to make a coherent argument that's not based on just pure lies and sophistry.
Quick bath and break once more.
And then let's do that Cold War man.
I'm having fun.
So like we talked about, provoked your book on Cold War two point zero.
How Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine.
So can you lay out the history and the mechanism of how this went down?
Yes.
The book is divided by presidents.
Those are the chapters.
And then I go through, I start with HW Bush.
We have a few flashbacks to the fall of the Soviet Union or earlier days of the Cold War in the Reagan years.
But basically, we start with the end of the last Cold War and the overthrow of the Soviet Union by the Russian government led by Boris Yeltsin at that time at the end of 1991.
Red Flag came down on Christmas Day 1991.
Never forget it.
And people can watch that on YouTube.
There's a great TED coppel special about it.
ABC News, really good thing.
So that was the end of Soviet communism.
And then the question was, well, now what?
And the answer was America's got to stay.
If America leaves, and by the way, the Soviets, I think, and Jeffrey Sachs said this the other day on Pierce Morgan, I think, no, no, no.
Yeah, I think that's right.
That the Soviets actually agreed with that, that as James Baker put it in his discussions with Gorbachev, he's like, hey, would you prefer an independent potentially nuclear armed Germany with its own?
foreign policy or wouldn't you prefer that we stay in Germany.
And the Soviets said, actually, we like you guys better than the Germans.
So yes, we would even agree with that.
Now, the purpose of NATO in the first place, according to his first general secretary, Lord Ismay, the Brit, was to keep the Soviets out, sorry, the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Soviets out.
So you can replace the Soviets with the Russians, right?
But then, so the idea is we're not leaving.
Again, this is the era of the defense planning guidance.
America will dominate the planet.
You can call it empire.
You can call it dominance or primacy.
Zubinobrasinski liked to call it.
Crystal and Kagan called it benevolent global hegemony.
This is the unipolar moment of Charles Krauthammer.
And in fact, in his rejoinder to Gene Kirkpatrick, he said, we should stop at nothing short of global domination.
And so this was the idea.
And in the defense planning guidance, just as in the famous study by the Project for New American Century, Bill Crystal and Robert Kagan's group that was called Rebuilding America's Defenses that came out in nineteen ninety eight.
And by the way, you can find, I'm pretty sure you can find both at scotthorton dot org slash fair use.
The Defense Plan and Guidance for nineteen ninety four, again written in nineteen ninety two, and there are two different versions of it.
They made him rewrite it, but it's essentially the same thing.
And then the project for new American centuries rebuilding America's defenses.
And these are basic neocon doctrine for the end of the twentieth century.
And where they say, hey, we have to stay in the Middle East to contain Saddam Hussein first and foremost, Freed Zechariah said in the nineties, Saddam Hussein is our lynch pit in the Middle East.
If he did not exist, we would have to invent him, get it as an enemy to have.
So we have an excuse to stay.
So we have to expand in the Middle East, and this is the whole story as we've told so far here, but then also we have to expand NATO.
That's the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, America's military alliance with Britain, France, and the other Western democracies, including Western Germany, and now Germany and the rest as we've incorporated more and more in Eastern Europe as well.
Our military alliance, we have to expand it into Eastern Europe.
And there's a huge question at the time about like the obvious thing was after our great peaceful victory here, I mean, for people who are too young for this and don't understand or something, like if you were to ever believe in magic or God or miracles or something like that kind of a thing,
the Soviet Union essentially just fell away in peaceful revolutions and simple withdrawals in almost every case.
Now the dictator in Romania and his wife were put up against the wall and machine gunned to death.
Civil war broke out in Tajikistan, I think, and there was fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan and it was not perfect but man on the sliding scale of grading things on a curve flex it was perfect man it was you could not have had magic wishes come true in a way to make the Soviet Union just dissolve away the way they did that kind of peaceful victory was the kind of thing where I was like how best in
deep senses of that term to take advantage of this we really have a huge responsibility for how we act now and so one of the things that occurred to them immediately was as so many of them put it Them being the foreign policy establishment and including the administration.
Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton too, we don't want to move the dividing lines in Europe further east.
We want to erase them completely.
We want a Europe that's whole and free.
Does that or does that not include the Russians?
But at first, the message was yes, it does.
And George Bush Sr. said, We want to have a single zone of peace from Vancouver to Vladivostok, meaning the entire Northern Hemisphere.
Now, this is why I was such a New World Order cook in the 1990s, because there were enough threads of things like this where part one side of the argument was essentially that yes, we should bring Russia into NATO too.
Now, what's that to me in my mind that fit in with G. Edward Griffin's John Bercher Grand Design conspiracy where you take the two enemies, move them together and they're going to form basically like a single white world army of the north to then lord it against Islamic South Asia and or China.
But it would essentially be the single one world army of the one world government under the United Nations.
in this new alliance between the United States and Russia.
But that was not true at all.
That was not right.
And the woolly headed one worlders like Strobe Talbot, that's his own word for himself, that idea that we're going to really befriend Russia and bring them in from the cold all the way with us was never really on the table for discussion.
It was dismissed essentially immediately.
And so like in 1997, when Bill Clinton is throwing them scraps and giving them the NATO Russia Council, I'm going, oh my God, look, they're doing it.
They're building the NATO Russia Council when in fact he's given him the stiff arm and treating him like crap.
But I was a kid and I didn't have the internet back then and it was different times.
But so in fact, in a way, chapter one and two of that book are me grappling with what was really going on at that time when I thought it was something else back then, where I really thought that they were trying to build this world of federalism with Russia and then come to find out that this is Dick Cheney's world, not Al Gore's.
If that's if that's does that make sense?
Right?
That like this liberal nambi pambi baby blue UN flag internationalism, that's just cover for the brute force of American hegemony over the world.
And of course, you got to get the liberals on board.
So you tell them a bunch of nambi pambi stuff to get them on board, because they like that kind of thing.
That, oh, look, it's all humanitarianism and we're passing out food or, you know, it's world federalism.
It's multilateralism and all of these like little buzzwords that make them feel good about what we're really doing is seeking essentially a Pax Americana over the world.
And so that was what was going on.
Now, obviously, if instead of erasing dividing lines, we're just moving them further east, was that mean?
It means we stop at Russia.
You got to ask yourself, how does that look from Russia?'s side?
And how it looks from Russia's side is an explicitly anti Russian military alliance encroaching steadily toward their borders and obviously regards that as a threat.
And when I say obviously, I mean the George HW Bush administration understood that that would be a result of NATO expansion.
That's why they lied and said what we're going to do is we're going to empower what was then called the CSCE, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is now called the OSCE for organization.
We're going to empower them and we're going to have a security partnership.
And so what's going to happen is NATO is going to become irrelevant.
We're going to marginalize.
NATO is essentially going to become a political organization.
So even if it expands, it doesn't really matter because what we're really talking about is something that's sort of like the EU plus the United States.
But it's going to be relegated to a political organization.
And it's going to be replaced by the CSCE because who needs an alliance?
There's no enemy.
And we want to be partners with you.
And since Russia and all the middle states.
in central and eastern Europe and far eastern Europe, if you want to call it that, right?
The Baltics and Ukraine and Belarus are all members of the CSCE already since the Helsinki Accords of nineteen seventy five.
Well, then cool.
Presto, everybody's neutrality is baked in, and we're all in it together.
But they were lying, man, they never meant to do that.
The plan always was to expand NATO, of course, to keep it a military alliance and to keep it the center of American power in Europe, and to use the CSCE, and then later the Clinton administration's version of this same scam was called the Partnership for Peace.
Where Warren Christopher knowingly, the Secretary of State knowingly lied directly to Gorbatchov's face and tried to make him believe that we're doing the partnership for peace instead of NATO expansion and or again reiterating that NATO is just going to be this political thing and it's not we're not really doing much with it anyway right now at all when they knew that wasn't true they had already decided that they were going to expand NATO for certain the decision had been made like in stone by then and they were shining them on
and trying to get them to go along with their further agendas as much as they could get away with as long as they could get away with it before breaking the bad news to them that actually we are expanding NATO after all because man they knew that this is going to destroyy Yeltsin.
This is going to cause such pressure against him.
In fact, when Clinton gave his speech announcing that he had been lying and that he really does mean to expand NATO in 1994, Yeltsin freaked out because he misunderstood that Bill Clinton was saying that we're going to start doing it next year in 1995, which was Clinton had promised him that they definitely would not do that.
Yeltsin had to stand for reelection in 1996, and this would absolutely destroy him, and they all knew it, Lex was at me.
That means that every pro American moderate English speaking liberal in Moscow would be implicated, right?
That they said we were cool and we're doing what we promised we wouldn't.
While they were telling everybody else, don't worry about the Americans, we can trust them, it's all good and this and that, right?
So they knew this was going to destroy Yeltsin politically, so they promised that no, Boris, no, no, no, man, don't worry.
We're not going to do it until after you're safely re elected in ninety six.
They absolutely understood all of them understood the depth of how destructive that would be to him because of how the entire consensus inside Russia at that time and their entire, you know, political and foreign policy establishment was absolutely opposed to NATO expansion and were, of course, terrified by it.
And this is all before Putin or W. Bush ever came to town.
This is just HW Bush and Bill Clinton years and dealing with Mikhail Gorbatchov and then Boris Yeltsin in all of this.
And I give credit to Joshua Schifrinsen as the great academic.
I believe he's now at Cato.
He was at Texas A and M University and I'm not sure where el else he has written, but he wrote a bunch of great journal articles that I learned a hell of a lot from and cite in my book where he shows explicitly it's beyond argument that they knew that they were lying.
They were planning one thing and they were doing something else.
And he's very polite and says that they were knowingly misleading, I think.
But I call them damn liars and it's pretty clear that they were.
And so that's a huge part of it just to get us started off here in the nineties.
What are we going to do?
Oh, and I'm sorry.
Yes, we're going to expand NATO.
But first, it's important to.
to emphasize that yes, in fact, they did promise not to.
And people keep trying to debunk this, but they can't.
I have rebunked it and they cannot at all challenge the facts as I marshal in my book.
And it's overkill.
This is one of the two sections where I have probably far more than I need to demonstrate my case because I tried to simply on, I think I already said this earlier in our view, I'm sorry, on the case of the promises against NATO expansion and on the subject of the Ukrainian Nazis,
I went for absolute overkill on the citation and the development of the idea and the story and the proof and what it all means because I feel like those are the two most controversial stances that I'm taking in the book as being factually true.
And I want the skeptical reader to say, oh boy, I didn't really realize it was like that when they're done.
So to be clear on the NATO expansion, saying that there was clear indication made official that NATO promises made by the United States that NATO will not expand.
And not just promises, but it was an agreement that we promise not to expand the NATO alliance if you'll allow the reunification of Germany.
And that was what convinced Gorbachev to say, okay, fine, we'll agree to withdraw and allow Germany to reunify under NATO.
And then the deal is, and as I show in the book, it's not just that James Baker said this one time on February the ninth, 1990.
He said it six times on February the ninth, 1990.
And on many other, in fact, on that same day, Robert Gates, who was then the deputy secretary of, pardon me, the deputy director of the CIA, told the same thing to the director of the KGB in a meeting on that same day in Moscow and then the German foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher said this over and over and over again,
including in public at public press conferences right in front of James Baker, who only nodded an assent and never said anything against it, that we promise not only not to expand NATO, but that includes in because here's the rub and this is what makes it a little complicated and maybe people's eyes glaze over or the War Party tries to say this is all anybody ever meant by that was Baker said in a weird way that if you allow Germany to reunite,
we won't spread NATO one inch inside Germany.
That's where the phrase not one inch comes from.
Well, that doesn't make any sense.
It's not like the East German government is going to be the government of the new Germany, right?
Bonn is going to move to Berlin, and West Germany is going to be the regime that rules the new pre united Germany, right?
No question about that.
So how is it that only the western half of the country is in NATO?
That doesn't make sense.
So then they had to walk back and go, okay, well, you know what we'll do though is yes, obviously, the whole country will be in NATO, but we promise not to move any substantial military forces into the then GDR East Germany.
That was short for German Democratic Republic, which was Kami enslaved East Germany.
We promise not to move our forces in there or nuclear weapons into the eastern part.
So they're still respecting the promise.
They're kind of revising it because they have to because the first in the first sense, the promise doesn't actually make rational sense, right?
You can't really bring, you can't reunite Germany but only leave the first half inside the military alliance.
Okay.
But they said, okay., but we're not going to build new bases and station forces further east and we're not going to put nuclear weapons there.
Okay, so they're still respecting that promise.
And that part ended up in the final Washington treaty, final treaty that they signed.
Now, Hans Dietrich Gentry made the most of this, but so did the Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
And this is the part of Mary Elise Surat wrote a whole book about this called Not One Inch.
And she has a whole hell of a lot on this as her and Schifferinson are probably the two best on it, although I think he's probably got the edge.
But she shows where.
Helmut Cole went and met with Gorbachev and he knew that HW Bush wanted to reconsider this and thought that Baker was being too conciliatory.
But Helmut Cole went ahead and stuck with the day before yesterday's interpretation or was it just yesterday's interpretation instead of the new one because he knew that that's what he wanted Gorbachev to hear, that this is how it's going to be.
And it was based on that promise from Helmut Cole that Gorbachev said, okay, fine, you can do it.
And Helmut Cole said, can I quote you on that right now?
And he goes, yeah.
And Helmut Cole went right outside and held a press conference.
So Gorbachev just said that Germany can reunite.
Blam, got it.
Now, was that in a treaty?
Like right there, it was just a spoken word, but they moved to reunite right then based on it.
The treaty came later, right?
So the same kind of thing here.
They try to argue that words don't mean things only when it's a treaty ratified by the Senate, but that's not true.
And Schifferson especially goes through and shows some examples, and there are plenty of others, but you have the entire arrangement around West Berlin, for example, which your younger viewers may not know that West Berlin, the western half of Berlin, was a free city wholly within Communist East Germany was still occupied by the US as a remnant of the Second World War, And so it was a very complicated situation there.
But America's entire arrangement with the Soviets about how to treat West Berlin, checkpoint Charlie and all these things was purely handshake agreements.
They had no treaty at all.
And Roosevelt, in fact, when he was still alive, they were already working on this and said that the agreement that we were already working out over Vienna, Austria should also apply to Berlin, and he did not want it on a piece of paper because he wanted it specifically for a trust building measure.
And if we don't put it in writing and both sides just have to live up to it based on what's the right thing to do in the circumstance, then that'll help build our relationship for the better.
And that's really because Roosevelt was a Stalinist communist dictator himself, but don't get me off on that tangent.
But anyway, speaking of one world communism, but so there was no formal arrangement over West Berlin.
Then same thing when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon split Mao Zeitong off from the Soviet Union in the Cold War and made them really our allies in the war.
We didn't have a war guarantee, but we had a deep relationship that they crafted at that time, all handshake deals., nothing official, no treaties, was how they handled it.
When in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev secretly with his brother, the Attorney General, over the heads of and around the CIA and the State Department, and made a secret deal with Khrushchev that if you get your missiles out of Cuba, we will remove our midrange missiles from Turkey.
And they didn't even say this, but just implicitly also Italy, where we had stationed these same Jupiter midrange missiles.
And we promised never to invade Cuba again.
That informal secret deal that wasn't revealed until the end of the Cold War.
They said at the time, yeah, Jack Kenney just faced him down.
No, we made this secret deal and it held and it has held this whole time.
They kept the missiles.
They've never put missiles back in Turkey.
We do have air dropped and hydrogen bombs and airplanes stationed at the Inserlift base there.
But we have not stationed missiles in Turkey ever since or in Italy ever since then and lived up to that deal nor have we invaded Cuba, although they did try to murder Castro more times after that, but we haven't invited so that was an informal deal.
It was not only a handshake deal, it was a secret and completely deniable.
And yet they abided by it anyway because sometimes you got to do that.
And that's the way these things go.
When it comes to this, you have Peter Baker in the New York Times saying, nah, come on, if it's not in a treaty, then it's not anything at all, but that's not true.
As Ted Snyder said, this wasn't just a promise, this was an agreement.
We promise not to expand NATO, okay?
Can we reunite now?
Yes, you can.
Shake on it.
That's a deal.
And the Americans lied and broke it, and they knew they're lying and breaking it.
And when the Russians started complaining to the Clinton people, Warren Christopher launched an internal investigation at the State Department to find out if it was true or not.
And they decided it was true, but that, oh, well, screw them.
We're going to go ahead anyway.
Can we, if it's okay, fast forward, as you said, your book is called Provoke not Justify.
I should say for me, maybe you can speak from your perspective that the reason the war in Ukraine in 2022 started was because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
And then you could backtrack like what why what he did was he escalated the war in Ukraine by about a hundred thousand percent, right?
But the war had been going on for a very long time, right?
And that's very important.
You know, it's not just the backstory, but it really is the start of the war was when John Brennan came to town on april the twelfth and thirteenth of twenty fourteen and demanded that the acting president Turchnyov launch the war.
And he did on the fourteenth.
It was all John Brennan's fault like a lot of things.
A drastic escalation.
was committed by Vladimir Putin.
Absolutely right.
And there's when we look at responsibility and we talk about warmongers and we talk about the military industrial complex, That's I think it's really important to explore from an American perspective.
When you look at the region and who started that escalation, you have to put the chief responsibility on Vladimir Putin.
Of course.
The guys are gangsters.
How did he get a job in the first place?
He was part of the Yeltsin family and he had been the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg where he worked for a criminal named Sobchak who is part of the Yeltstsin family and we say family like the Italian mob in New York families.
That's exactly in the exact same meaning of that term.
That's what they called it at the time.
And that was where he came from in the first place.
And his first job really was protecting all the Yeltsin and his guys and getting them out of the country with all their money safely and then, you know, taking control of the thing.
So we're ahead of the story a little bit, but the guys in SOB, you know, people say, oh, he's a KGB and he's a communist.
Well, he's not a communist.
He sided with the reformers against the coup plotters in August of 1991 when it counted, right?
And also he wasn't a spy, he was a clerk.
Like he was, you know, he was a colonel, but like I've never seen anything that said he's out slitting throats and bribing people and blackmailing people and turning spies.
He was operations guy back at headquarters.
I know a lady named Susan Tennyson.
You ever heard of her?
She's an American who was doing outreach to the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties, spent her whole lifetime.
I think she's still alive, little old lady, sweet old lady, spent her whole lifetime trying to make friends with Russia.
And she talked, she told me the story about meeting Putin when he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and how he wouldn't take a bribe.
He just wanted to get the job done.
Whatever the job was, she needed some bureaucratic hurdles taken.
He said, Well, check this box and sign here and thank you very much and didn't want her money, which she thought was a really big deal at the time.
That wow, like this guy has a sense of honor and duty and doing his job in a way that nobody else here does.
Everybody else here is a Mexican cop going kicked out.
You know what I mean?
Everybody.
And where he wasn't.
So now, I'm not saying that that makes him a moral guy or whatever, but I'm saying that makes him very much like a business is business sort of a dude who has his priorities like in that way.
He's a head of state and a powerful state, and you have to be in practice a psychopath to run a country like that.
That goes for Obama and the rest of them too, man.
All of these guys, it's a psychopathic job to kill people, especially in the kind of large numbers, especially that the Americans do, but Putin's been responsible for a bit of violence of his self up until even this time.
And I don't think anybody underestimates.
I don't you know, there's some people, I guess, who kind of they're so anti American empire they start seeing maybe too sympathetic instead of just empathetic with the other side right and sort of maybe rationalize a bit of the Russian point of view or whatever in a way that doesn't appeal to me.
i don't i don't think you have to like honestly i don't see anything well i i have in the book it's a bill hicks quote there's options he's talking about pro-life people ought to be blocking cemeteries and preventing funerals but he says there's options so i just like little tiny little easter eggs like that putin could have done other things like for example he could have um again like in 2018 demanded
only this this time really seriously and loudly and with the world paying close attention in a way that they weren't in 18 that I want baby blue helmet UN peacekeepers from a third non-interested country to go stand on the border of the gray zone in the Donbass on what's supposed to be the ceasefire line in eastern Ukraine.
And I demand it and I'm serious and I'm going to come up with ways to force you all to give into this.
In other words, to to ratchet up the tension, not to start the war, but to find a creative way to force the West to implement the Minsk II deal that the West signed along with Ukraine and Russia in twenty fifteen, and that Obama rubber stamped and that the UN Security Council rubber stamped and that America and Kiev had always refused to implement.
He also and maybe as part of enforcing that, he could have vowed to obstruct all UN Security Council business.
He's got veto power.
He can vote no on anything and just grind the UN Security Council to a halt.
That's a hell of a lever of pressure.
He could have also cut off all gas to Western Europe through the Nord Stream.
He had already shut off Nord Stream one.
I forgot exactly the offense that caused him to do that.
It's in the book.
But he had already shut down Nord Stream one, he could have shut down Nord Stream two, and he could have shut off all the gas pipelines running through Ukraine as well.
This is in the winter of twenty one we're talking about, in November, December twenty one, into January, February twenty two.
It's cold as hell.
Europe is up at Canada type latitudes, man, where it's cold in the winter up there.
And he could have played hardball like that, and as I complain in the book as well, he also could have been just not so damn coy about the thing, and where he kept denying that he was going to invade, and saying, Well, this is very coercive diplomacy, essentially, but like, come on, just give in., which I think he did offer treaties.
And this is we're jumping way ahead in the story.
I think Biden could have negotiated his way out of it if he'd been trying to.
I think he was not trying to.
So when Biden was president, you were saying that he did not do enough to negotiate in good faith.
In fact, this is why I thought there wouldn't be a war.
It's not because I didn't think Putin had it in him.
I'd been warning for years.
He had been warning for years and I noticed.
He had told an Italian diplomat in 2014, you know, I could be in Kiev in two weeks.
And so this was always the threat that this could get, you know, much worse.
But I thought it wouldn't happen because William Burns, who is the author of the Niet means Niet memo, and was, I don't know if he was ever CIA, but he was stationed in the embassy over there since the 1990s, had been Bush's ambassador to Russia, and was like, if there's one guy who can work this out with Sergei Lavrov, it's William Burns.
And I idiotically thought, and God, how stupid could I have been that I thought that, of course, William Burns' mandate from Biden will be see us through this.
Prevent this war from happening and I knew the war was preventable because the issues on the table were not just some front, some excuse.
The issues on the table were deadly serious issues of NATO expansion, the potential for missile emplacements in Ukraine, especially after Trump tore up the intermediate nuclear forces treaty of nineteen eighty seven, which would have made it legal for America to station nuclear missiles in Europe again, and in the ongoing war in the Donbass.
mandate to figure this out, dude, then he could have and I know that he could have and I know that they didn't try to do that.
They never negotiated either of those proposed treaties.
One was for the US, one was for NATO and they were reasonable and like I have in the book, not just Chas Freeman, the brilliant genius, you know, career diplomat who went to China with Nixon and was the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and all these things who told me personally that like absolutely this is a reasonable treaty to negotiate.
Am I saying we should sign on the dotted line?
Hell no, we don't do that for anyone.
But is this reasonable to sit at a table and negotiate?
Absolutely.
And I show in the book, Joe Biden administration, White House officials, possibly State Department, but at least high level officials, NSC and or state told the Post and the Times that we think these are reasonable treaties and that they should be negotiated, but then they did not do that.
They refused to negotiate those treaties.
They refused to negotiate NATO expansion.
They refused to negotiate the emplacement of missiles as a potential emplacement of missiles in Ukraine, and they refused to implement Minsk two or do anything to end the civil war and in fact help to increase it.
According to the OSCE, Kiev was escalating artillery attacks on the other side of the line into the third week of February of 2022.
And so listen, there's a quote in there of Putin where he says, you know, I think they're trying to provoke me into invading.
That's not the exact quote, forgive me, but he acknowledges that this could be a trap, but I really don't know what else to do.
And quite frankly, I think that's right, Lex, and I think, and my excuse is, is I was too damn busy recording the audiobook of the last war enough already in the Middle East.
I'm one of those generals always behind.
And so I was outsourcing too much of my primary reading to my opinion pieces that I was reading from smart people and people that I was interviewing at the time.
But I wasn't reading just enough of, hate to say it, but just the Post of the Times and the Journal.
That's who the US government talks to, so you gotta read the Post of the Times and the Journal.
And if you read the Post of the Times and the Journal very carefully, and a lot of the rest of the media too, from the era of especially December of 2021 and into January and February of 2022, you'll find a lot of references to Afghanistan.
Not our recent absolutely humiliating, disgraceful failure and ultimate withdrawal after twenty years just three months before in the end of the summer of 2021.
Just three months later, they had the word Afghanistan in their mouths.
We want to replicate the Afghan war.
You know, Rambo 3, what we did to the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Not our Afghan war, their Afghan war.
But we're going to do it this time with the Ukrainian Nazi right as the mudjahideen.
And we're going to lure the Russians in, bog them down.
and bleed them to bankruptcy, inflict on them a strategic defeat.
Niall Ferguson, whose wife I humiliated in front of all those people in Las Vegas at that time, he wrote an article in Bloomberg News where he says, look, everybody who's anybody in Washington and London knows that the policy is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.
We're not trying to dissuade them from invading.
And you could just see where right after the start of the war somebody asked Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, man, what are we doing to negotiate an end of this thing?
I mean, you would just think that the consensus.
of all eight billion of us would be you can't have a hot war on Russia's southern western border.
This could go nuclear.
We have to cease fire immediately.
General strike, call it off.
Somebody go to Geneva and figure this out.
That's what everybody thought was happening.
And so the reporters asked Ned Price, man, what are we doing to do the thing to end the thing?
And Ned Price goes, Well, you know, there are larger principles at stake here about independence and sovereignty and the right of a nation to direct its gaze in whichever direction that it wishes to direct its gaze.
In other words, this is sticking with what they call the open door policy, which says that any country that wants to join NATO can join NATO if we say so, and no third country can say otherwise, and no third country's security interests will be taken into account.
And you see how they do this in committee.
They go, well, Zimbabwe at the table here think that Russia ought to have veto power over who we allow into our military alliance?
And of course nobody raises their hand when you put it that way.
So then that's it.
We dismiss that forever.
Now we have an open door.
Now, of course, there is no door.
No door is just jargon.
It's just meaningless garbage, basically thought up by a bunch of bureaucrats.
They could change it just as easy.
But instead they say, no, especially when the Russians, and this is pointed out by Stephen Walt and by Samuel Cherup at Rand pointed out that, yeah, it's hard because once the Russians are demanding that we do these reasonable things, well, now doing them seems unreasonable because we don't want to give in to their demands.
And so, like, no, we and man, this is the worst Joe Biden and Joe Biden has always been the worst.st since 1973, but this is him as absolute, most dim witted.
So he can't really think hard about any of these things.
He mostly would just speak in historical analogies about World War two.
He's Churchill facing down Hitler.
And so you're going to talk him out of that?
You're going to tell him that he ought to be Neville Chamberlain and appease Hitler at Munich?
Of course not.
You know what you gotta do to a bully?
You gotta punch him in the nose.
And I'm sure you must have heard this a hundred times in the lead up to this war.
They'd all say this.
All these dorks would talk about, yeah, you know how you face down a bully?
You punch him in the nose.
Well, how would they know?
They never punched a bully in the nose before, right?
They're dorks, and they now have all this power and think that they know what they're doing and the best thing they can do is relive their third grade trauma.
A getting bullied by me?
And my friends on the playground?
You know, and they get to pretend like what they're the star of the baseball team that came and stuck up for the bullied kid?
No, no, they're not.
That's their little fantasy that they're playing out, and they would say things like that over and over again.
It's Chamberlain at Munich and the bully on the playground.
But nobody can just talk about what about the ongoing war in the Donbass?
Can we get off of your analogies?
I got into an argument again.
For the third time, I debated General Wesley Clark about Ukraine on the Piers Morgan show.
And again, he immediately retreats to World War two fantasies.
Well, that's like saying that Stalin should have given in to Hitler and there and there and there because he can't talk about the war.
They're losing Provost right now.
The war is getting worse and worse for Ukraine all the time.
So he has to say, uh uh, you know what?
The Ukrainians believe hard and you just need to believe hard like them.
That's the level of argument that I got out of General Wesley Clark, the former four-star general, supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, who served Bill Clinton launching the aggressive war against Kosovo based on lies in 1999, based on a false claim that the Serbs had murdered 100,000 Kosovar Albanians.
When that was a lie and they're fighting for bin Laden, a bunch of heroin dealers and organ smugglers and bin Ladenite terrorists in that war of treason.
But anyway, that's General Wesley Clark for you.
But that's basically all they got.
It's a bunch of believe hard and a bunch of World War II metaphors and playground metaphors because they can't talk about the actual war themselves.
To be clear, if I may comment., you're referring to Americans or maybe Europeans.
Well, and the foreign policy establishment got it right.
I do want to say that Ukrainians, people in Ukraine, and I know many of them are true heroes and they're fighting for their country.
And whether the geopolitics of it makes any sense, it doesn't take away from the human beings defending their land.
And in an absolute hellish worst scape, man.
I mean, it's World War 1 plus drones, right?
Muddy trenches and tank rounds and artillery, airdrop dumb bombs.
Telegrams and drones hunting you.
It's an absolute nightmare out there, man.
Anybody with telegrams is going, Jesus Christ looking through the thing.
You know, it's not quite as bad as Gaza, because it and look, they're conscripts, so it's very unfair, but in essence they're wearing green and are fair game out there fighting on the field.
Most of the civilians have been able to flee.
The civilian deaths are counted in the single thousands, I believe, low thousands, which is absolutely horrific for those people, but at least that's like the silver lining is that it's essentially combatants fighting, but it's still absolute horse show.
And you're right that look, you know, I can't deny the bravery of anybody out there risking their balls for, you know, any of this stuff.
But the thing is there are different wars going on, right?
There's a war between the United States and Russia going on with a proxy war.
Hell, there's a war with America and China going on with using Ukraine and Russia as our proxies.
Then there's America and Russia using their proxies in Ukraine.
Then you have Ukraine, you know, Kiev versus Moscow.
But then you also have Lviv versus Donetsk, right?
And these nationalists from out west trying to force their version of what Ukraine is supposed to be on the people of the East who, of course, are ethnically and culturally Russian.
And I'm not saying that means everyone who is so wants to join the Russian Federation, but I'm just saying there's a severe cultural war going on for dominance in the country.
And all of these wars are planning out at the same time.
But then, so anyone who says, hey, I'm defending my land, my neighborhood, my community, give me a rifle and I'll go do brave things, like, hey, that's what it is.
Overall, what's really happened here is the United States of America has got their weak friend in a fight with their stronger, tougher neighbor when we had no ability or intention whatsoever to bail them out of it.
When they said we're going to give you all the weapons it needs, as much as it takes, as long as it takes, they knew they were lying.
Even Kamala Harris can tell you, Russia is a bigger country.
By the way, that's a real quote.
I don't know if you know that, but she sounded like she's talking to a four year old, and I'm sure she was simply parroting her own advisors from what they told her.
Not even what they told her to say, but what they told her.
Ukraine is a country in Europe.
Russia is a bigger country in Europe.
Russia is has invaded Ukraine, and that's bad and we are against it.
When I heard that, I thought it was fake, or I thought, come on, she was talking to elementary school kids and you guys are taking out of context.
No, she said that on the Black Eye Morning Show on the radio in Chicago, and they looked at her like, Lady, we know that Russia and Ukraine are in Europe.
We know that Russia's a bigger country than all other countries.
Tell us something that we don't know.
And she didn't know anything that they didn't know, so she could not tell them.
that Russia is bigger than Ukraine.
She might have been able to extrapolate that they have a hell of a lot more available fighting aged males to complete this war than Ukraine, and they always will, and there's nothing anybody can do about it, other than if Joe Biden would be willing to send the United States Army in there to fight them.
Even the Germans and the French and the British and the Poles combined couldn't do it without America to help them do it.
Without America to run the whole thing for them anyway.
If you wanted to really whoop the Russians and drive them out of the Donbass and Zabroja and Gerson and Crimea, you need to send in the Marines.
You need to send in the Air Force and the Navy.
And we're not going to do that, Lex.
And Joe Biden said explicitly, we're not doing that.
That's World War III.
We'll give the Ukrainians everything they need to fight.
As you said, zoom all the way in, here's some hero making the ultimate sacrifice.
Zoom all the way out.
Here's some damned fool using these people as cannon bodder on some fool's errand.
They can't possibly win to deliver a strategic defeat against the Russians that they have completely failed to deliver.ed a strategic victory to China by kicking, front kick, straight in the chest, Russia right out of Europe and into the arms of the Chinese.
When, of course, Russia is the eastern frontier of European civilization, and we're doing everything we can to change that.
Joe Biden himself said no Russian leader in all history has ever thrown in as hard with the West as Vladimir Putin.
It's Joe Biden himself who kicked him right back out again.
That Donald Trump more than any recent president wanted to make peace.
Yeah.
There's a strong will for peace.
Why do you think he has not been successful?
Yeah.
Okay.
Let me just emphasize here.
We're skipping a lot to the end and I know it's late, so it's okay.
But there are a lot of other things beside NATO expansion, including tearing up the treaties, installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Romania and Poland, but that are fired from dual use launchers, the Mk 41 or Mark 41 missile launcher that can also hold Tomahawk cruise missiles and while all the while refusing an inspection regime.
There's also, of course, overthrowing the government twice in ten years in Ukraine.
All the other color coder revolutions in Georgia and in Kyrgyzstan and the rest.
And, of course, support for the Maidan revolution of 14 and the war that broke out after that.
And as I said, I I beat essentially every topic that I could think of outstanding between America and Ukraine that's happened this entire time.
I do not spin for the Russians the whole time.
I accuse them of plenty of things in there that they actually did.
And I defend the truth from false accusations rather than defending the Russians, because screw them, and they don't need my help.
And this book is not for them.
It's for us.
But I tried not to leave out anything I mentioned sort of as the epitome, the Montenegro weird phony coup of 16, but we tried to overthrow the government of Belarus three times, 01, 05 and 20.
We've been messing around a lot in building up this Cold War.
That's why that book is so long, because it is 475,000 words, and I don't think wasted.
And that does include the footnotes, which by the way, like when I took the URLs out and the footnotes are font size nine, I believe.
When I took the URLs out, that saved me seventy seven pages.
That's how many articles are in there.
But if people go to scotthorton dot org slash provoked slash notes, I have a PDF file there of all the notes with their links.
I only took the links out at the very last moment.
So there's a PDF file where you can take anything in here and I'll have a working link to it at scotthorton dot org slash provoked slash notes and people can download the whole PDF of the whole thing and it's three hundred seventy five pages of notes in regular font.
How would you recommend one where, so I've read parts of this that jumped around, unless my mental health goes to complete shit, I hope to travel back to Ukraine and to Russia to interview the key figures there.
And you said that I should definitely read the entirety of the book.
And look, I think it's written to be a page turner all the way through, and I am outraged and the book is written from this point.
of view and it's engaging enough and as I say it's so long because there's so many subtopics I do not belabor and beat the dead horse and force you to read a bunch about things that you're not interested anymore.
We do the Nenko chapter, then it's over.
We do the Belarus chapter, then we're done and move on to the next subject as fast as I can take you through it.
It's the same way I wrote the previous books too.
This is what I need to tell you before I let you off the hook and change the channel, right?
Just like in enough already I gave you four pages on Somalia.
I know you're not going to read six.
You might not get to Libya if I try to make you read six on Somalia.
So I only gave you four.
You know what I mean?
I wrote it that way in the first place.
First place, I think I proved my point and I give you, you know, the ability to find the proof for yourself to track these things down further.
If I say these people essentially made this claim in this piece, you can track that down and double check and see if I'm lying or not or see if I understood right or whatever as you go through there.
People will falsely assume that I don't have Ukrainian and Russian sources in there, but I do.
But the thing is I just I don't use Cyrillic at all because nobody can read that.
So I use Google Translate on the titles.
So a lot of times you don't realize that it's, you know, unless you look closely, you won't't realize that these are there are plenty of foreign sources that I cite in there, but I just give them their English headlines through Google Translate or whatever so that people know what they're looking at.
But again, I have the links and even the links to the translated versions of the stories and all of that.
But I'm not dodging your question about Trump, by the way, I do want to talk about that, but I wanted to make it clear that I'm not just saying Bill Clinton expanded NATO in the 90s.
W. Bush did too in the 2000s.
Obama did too in the 2010s.
And Trump did too.
Brought Montenegro and Northern Macedonia into NATO.
There's the color code of revolutions and the missiles and all of these things.
And so It all came to a head essentially in the Biden years.
It could have, Trump, I think, could have solved it if they hadn't framed him for Russia Gate.
By the way, I have 75 pages on Russia Gate in there.
It's the most thorough takedown of Russia Gate.
I think you can find anywhere.
Although I don't take credit.
I give credit to the great Russia Gate journalists who absolutely destroyed those lies.
People like Paul Sperry and Matt Taibe, Aaron Matei and Robert Perry for that matter before he died.
Gareth Porter, of course, and so many others who did such great work on Russia Gate.
It's just absolute one hair away from.
just blowing the guy's head off in Dallas.
I don't know what's the difference.
It's unbelievable to have the CIA and the FBI come at the president of the United States this way, come at a major party candidate for president this way, and then the president elect, and then the sitting president of the United States, something about trying to overthrow him with the twenty fifth Amendment, hire a special counsel to pretend to investigate him for another two years.
These people should have all of their property confiscated.
They and their family should be exiled from the United States forever.
Everyone involved in that plot, everyone involved at Perkins Couille, everybody involved at the Georgia Tech team, everybody involved in Glenn Simpsonpson and his Fusion GPS, everyone at the FBI and CIA and NSA and any of the government agencies that went along with that plot ought to be kicked out of the United States forever and their grandchildren.
As you write, it was the CIA and FBI as well as the Clinton campaign and their agents that did this to Trump, the front runner for major party candidates for the US president, later the Republican nominee, president elect and eventually sitting chief executive.
None of it was true.
And you go on.
And more of that's coming out all the time about just how not true it was and just how not true they already knew it was.
It was and I have so much in there and I beg your audience to read the Durham report.
There are new, uh, newly declassified, uh, appendixes to it that are just being released as we record this one came out yesterday.
Um, and so we're going to get much, much more about the origins of Russia get here, but Lex, the, at the bottom line, they go, okay, after it all falls away, still Russia hacked the DNC and gave it to WikiLeaks.
No, uh, that's a lie.
And it was CrowdStrike that made up that lie in combination with the Georgia Tech team and DARPA at the Pentagon.
I have trouble keeping track of exactly it all.
People should follow Undead FOIA on Substack.
He's brilliant, anonymous guy, brilliant analyst of this stuff.
The core allegation there.
There's no proof of that whatsoever.
And now we know for a fact.
We just found this out.
Read Aaron Mate at Real Clear Investigations.
We know for a fact now that the FBI and the NSA gave no, pardon me, the CIA and NSA.
Is it FBI and NSA?
FBI and NSA gave it only low to moderate competence.
In other words, none of this information came from the National Security Agency.
They're the ones who would really know.
And the CIA and the FBI had both already debunked this stuff before they started to pretend to believe it again.
And part of it is because of compartmentalization inside the agencies.
These analysts are in charge of looking at this, these analysts are in charge of looking at that, but Brennan and Comey are in charge of ignoring all of the disputing information and cherry picking out all the rest to try to make it look true.
And man, what a fraud.
I mean, we are talking on the level of the branch Davidians killed themselves, on the level of Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons to murder you with.
Bashar Al Assad woke up one morning and decided to murder the entire population of his country.
So it's a good thing that USA and Al Qaeda are here to protect the poor population of Syria from his wrath.
And it's on that level of lie.
It is unbelievable what they did to him.
And you know, I have so many problems with Donald Trump, but man, I hate his enemies and I would love to see him ruthlessly, lawlessly persecute these people.
They deserve to suffer for what they did to him and to this country, putting us through that.
Think of how many women bankrupted their husbands with therapy bills because they were that convinced that the Russians had done.
a coup d'etat and installed the Nazi fascist white supremacists to overthrow us, they heard it on national public radio.
They're freaking out, man.
I mean, you could come up if you wanted to, you could have a conspiracy theory where it was the drug companies that did this just to sell more Zoloft to these people.
They drove them up the wall.
Like, see, Lex, the problem is you know better, dude, but pretend for a minute that you're one of these idiot women that listens to Mara Lyasen on national public radio, and she says the Russians did a coup and put a maturing candidate in power, usurped Hillary Clinton's rightful throne, and he hates all the blacks and the trans he's going to murder them all and start and he's and you know attack Canada.
or whatever.
They were terrified.
They were terrified.
It's no less cynical than what W. Bush did when he said, Oh yeah, be afraid, be very afraid.
You won't be safe until a year and a half from now when I get to invade Iraq.
You know how many people on the edge of sanity went over?
People did, I know for a fact people did.
I know stories of people who were driven crazy by that stress.
Of believing that every Arab they see is a murderer terrorist trying to kill them.
People believe in that.
People think that their leaders wouldn't lie to them, Willie Nelson said.
They wouldn't lie to me, not on my own damn TV.
The ones you love the most, you're a Republican?
It's the Republicans that are lying to you.
You're a Democrat, you have no idea how much they despise you.
They lie right to your face, and they think it's funny when you believe it.
They enjoy your terror because your fear and upset makes it easier for them to do wrong.
That's what it's about.
That's what it's all about.
Why'd they do this to Trump?
Because he said he wanted to get along with Russia.
He wasn't gonna give em our nuclear codes.
He even said, Legs, I'm doing this because I talked to Henry Kissinger.
said, Wow, you're the tallest, smartest, most handsome, wealthiest, successful person I've ever met, and you have a very smart Russia policy, which is to split Russia away from China.
Is that because they have a blackmail P tape of Donald Trump and his prostitutes?
No, it's what Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller's man wanted.
The grand Republican, grand strategist of American foreign policy, for he only died a few years ago, right?
And he was still writing books.
I mean, they were still turning to him for advice for decades this guy since the nineteen seventy, since before I was born, Henry Kissinger, the most important counselor to Richard Nixon about what are we going to do about the Soviet Union and China?
He told Trump, yes, Trump, I agree with you.
That's what we should do.
We should do what it takes to befriend Russia so that we can contain China.
Now, I'm not a China hawk, but whatever, man, that's the point.
And there's another major point here to mention too, which as I was saying before, in this book, I don't quote a whole lot of Buchanan and Paul.
I give them the credit that they deserve, but I make a special point to constantly quote Kissinger.
and Brzinski and their contemporaries, where they admit these are the vanguard of the NATO expanders.
And Brzinski especially was an anti Russian hawk.
He's the son of Polish aristocrats and fierce anti communist and anti Russian even still to after.
And they all said, We have to come up with a special status for Ukraine because it's so closely intertwined with Russia, dating back hundreds of years and to even the foundation of Russian civilization began in Kiev before traveling, moving.
to the center of gravity to Moscow later.
And yes, Kissinger said, Ukraine's been part of Russia for 300 years.
And this is not just some deal where we just get to do what we want.
We have to take into account how deeply complicated this is and how deeply riven Ukrainian society is, especially on who do we want to run with.
And they said, so what we have to do is we have to create a special status for Ukraine, just like we had for Austria and Finland in the old Cold War, where Austria and Finland were not members of the Warsaw Pact, nor were they members.
of NATO and they did not have troops.
Well, they did have Soviet troops still occupied Austria for a while.
They finally didn't, I don't think they withdrew until the 50s, but they eventually did withdraw.
But they were not members.
They were not forced to be made members of the Warsaw Pact like all the rest of the Eastern European states were.
They had no choice but to join with sock puppet communist dictatorships run out of the Kremlin and everything.
And so, but Austria and Finland had this neutral status in the last Cold War.
And they said, well, that's what we want to do again.
That's what we need to do for Ukraine.
That's again Kissinger and Brzezinski, who were not neoconservatives, but were very hawkish on NATO expansion and on Russia and on Ukraine.
And on NATO expansion being for the purposes of containing Russia, no fooling about it.
But in this case, man, if we try to take Ukraine away, the Russians are going to break it, because in fact, it ain't going anywhere.
It's stuck next to Russia.
This is another thing that Obama explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, that, well, Jeffrey Goldberg, Russia's always going to have escalation dominance in Ukraine, because it's right there, and it means a lot more to them than it does to us.
They are willing to go much further than we are.
And then he says to Goldberg, he challenges him.
And he says this is after Obama's coup has put whatever transition of power has led to the loss of Crimea.
And he says, Jeffrey Goldberg, you tell me, who in Washington says that we ought to put American boys on the ground to secure the independence of the Donbass from Russia?
Can you name me somebody's ready to do that right now?
No, of course not.
So the rest of Washington piped down.
Right?
You keep saying we're not doing enough, but there's nothing we can do that won't get NATO into a war with the Russian Federation.
And as even Robert Kagan, I'm ruining the end of the book now, even Robert Kagan said, You know what?
It actually doesn't matter to the United States who runs Ukraine.
The northern coast of the Black Sea, that's so far beyond our jurisdiction, and this is Kagan's words, not mine, Lex.
He and I don't agree with him about this at all.
But he says, You understand his context what he means here.
He says, The Soviet Union dominated Ukraine the whole time after World War two, and we think of those as the good old days.
Now I do not.
I know people who are enslaved by the communists in Ukraine in those good old days, there's nothing good about them at all.
Okay, but what he was saying was America never had a problem with the Russian dominance in Ukraine.
We always called it the Ukraine.
And we always pronounced it Kiev.
And what are you talking about?
That we're willing to go to the map for the Donbass?
No, dude, it makes no sense.
And the map is H bombs burning hotter than the sun.
So we cannot fight them.
And certainly not over this.
They're rolling on Berlin, call me.
They're rolling on London.
They're going to nuke London.
Man, I'd hate to see the world end that way, but maybe we would have to.
fight for the Brits.
Lex, I'm really more of a continental defense kind of guy myself, to tell you the truth.
But that's not what we're talking about here.
We're talking about Czechoslovakia, that with now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, that's Central Europe.
When we, or maybe the Czech Republic is Slovakia, that's Eastern Europe.
Bulgaria, Romania, that's Eastern Europe.
Ukraine is East of Eastern Europe.
Right?
Brent Skokov said, We only wanted to liberate Eastern Europe, not Ukraine.
Okay, this is too far away.
It's not our concern, and it's not to say that, oh yeah, no, it's fine for Russia to invade and kill and dominate this place with violence, because hey, that's their sphere of influence.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying it was suicidal madness for them to go along with America's push, for them to join our military alliance.
That's as much respecting of Russia's sphere of influence as they needed to do, was not mess with that.
That's what got them in trouble.
That's what made the Russians say.
say, look, it's either sooner or later.
It might as well be now.
The longer we wait, the more the Americans build up their forces and we're going to end up having to fight them anyway.
They were making them a de facto member of NATO with what they called interoperability, normalizing their military forces with ours as much as possible, making them a de facto auxiliary of the NATO alliance so that if NATO ever fought the Russian Federation, just like Germany and Lithuania and Hungary and Poland and the rest, the Ukrainian army would be one other auxiliary army fighting under United American NATO command.
That's what we were doing with them without the Article V war guarantee that we promised to come protect you, but still normalizing and integrating their military force with ours is one standard thing, constantly training with them, changing their equipment, changing their command and control structure, everything to mirror NATO standards.
And so it was a legitimate threat.
Putin said in his speech when he declared war, he said, if the Americans put Tomahawk cruise missiles in Kharkiv, they'll have a flight time to Moscow at 25 minutes.
If they put ballistic missiles in Kharkiv, they could get here in 10.
They're new nuclear ballistic missiles that they're making.
after they have torn up the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of nineteen eighty seven.
And if they put hypersonics there, they could hit Moscow in five minutes.
He said it's like a knife to the throat.
Now, you don't have to sympathize with the Russians at all.
You could hate them and want the Chinese to kill them all for you.
I don't know.
But you have to admit that these are serious and credible security concerns.
This is not a bunch of bluster and a bunch of bluffing and a bunch of ideological, you know, garbage or propaganda.
And it's not the nationalist theories of some romantic swept away by visions of a lost glorious past that he wants to regain and all these things as everyone says.
As I said to Pierce Morgan the day before yesterday, that's the weapons of mass destruction of this war is that Putin woke up and started this war because of what an aggressor he is.
And that there's no backstory that anybody needs to know about how America put Ukraine in the position of getting their ass by their bigger next door neighbor in this way.
That's the lie under the whole thing.
The same way that Clinton lied us into Kosovo with the hundred thousand dead Kosovars, Bush with his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Obama with his impending genocide in Benghazi and Libya.
Give me a break.
All of these lies.
That's the lie of this one.
Unprovoked attack, unprovoked attack.
It's like white separatist Randy Weaver.
You have to say that.
You can't just say Randy Weaver.
You can't say Randy Weaver, survivor of a boy and a dog and a woman, his wife who were slaughtered by federal agents.
No, you have to call him white separatist Randy Weaver.
Well, Russia's attack has to be unprovoked attack..
And that works on people.
Somehow people don't just rebel against that and say, Wait a minute, are you calling me stupid or something?
Why would you mandate that we call it that in such a way if you weren't lying and covering up for the fact that you provoked it and you know you did, which is clearly the case.
That's why they called it that.
You know, you could call it an unprovoked attack sometimes.
They called it an unprovoked attack a hundred thousand times because the public relations firms decided that this is the lie and this is the best way to stick it to the American people.
It's absurd how easily moved the Americans are.
Just give us some lies.
And by the way, our Zionist friend would say that I just blame the Israelis for everything.
Well, the only role that the Israelis play in my book is Naptali Bennett, the guy who caused the September eleventh attack, tried to end the war, tried to negotiate in good faith and do shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia and tried to stop the war right after it started in the spring of twenty twenty two.
And that's all I have to say about the Israelis' role in any of this part other than it was their pit pet column, the neoconservatives in America, who really got our policy off this way in the first place, and Robert Kagan's disgusting wife Victoria Nuland, who really was the ring leader behind the overthrow of 2014, which was even what Carl Gershman, the head of the NED, called the overthrow of the government there that they did.
What can Trump do to help bring peace in Ukraine?
As I mentioned, that he legitimately from every interaction I've had, from everything I understand, he legitimately wanted to make a decision.
I agree.
I think he's totally sincere about it too.
But why was he not successful??
What are your thoughts on that?
I don't have an answer to the second one.
I don't know what the hell he's going to do.
I'll tell you what.
The backstory here is that in September of twenty two, the weekend of September eleventh, in fact, of twenty two, Ukraine had their best few days.
They had a brilliant feint where they started building up forces in Kherson and they convinced the Russians to move forces to Kherson.
Then they made a huge move in Kharkiv and forced all the Russians out of Kharkiv and back into Luhansk.
Then they also hid them in Kherson down at the river and kicked them back across the river.
And so maintained that one third of Kherson on the right bank, I guess I'd call it the right.
Yeah, they were extremely successful in those offensives at that time.
Probably the most, the biggest success, arguably the biggest success of the war.
Absolutely.
And it's been all downhill from there.
And the worst thing probably of all is that Putin said, Oh, yeah, well, I hereby annex Zaporizhzhia and Kherson too.
These are the two provinces between the Donbass and the Crimea.
And he hadn't claimed them yet.
Now this is the so-called land bridge.
Importantly, the Ukrainians gave him a real motive to do this because they had cut off the fresh water.
There was a canal from the Dnieper River down to Crimea, and to collectively punish the people of Crimea, they cut off the water resources there, which they still had enough for drinking water, but they did not have enough for any agriculture or anything else, and it really hurt them a lot.
So they already had their pretext there to take that territory so they could reopen that channel of fresh water to Crimea.
And then he was just angry.
His men were humiliated on the ground there, and he said, Oh yeah., well, I hear by annex two more oblasts then.
Then they passed a law in the Doom and he signed it.
Right, and I guess it's two houses.
He signed a law that said, We've now redrawn the Russian border here.
Okay, but now if you look at how they're fighting the war, and I'm not a military expert on this, but I know some, and for example, Colonel Douglas McGregor and Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis, I think Davis is the one I trust the best.
Can I ask for his point of view on that?
Sure.
Just to give a shout out to Daniel L. Davis that you mentioned.
Excellent podcast, somebody that I've had a bunch of conversations with private.
Privately, he's a sweetheart.
Oh, he's a wonderful man.
First of all, his backstory is a fascinating one, but also, uh, he's extremely knowledgeable on the very nuanced details of all aspects of military operations.
Absolutely does.
As I mentioned an eon ago when we began this interview that in Iraq War one, it was Colonel McGregor with McMaster and Davis under him that did the battle of 73 Easting against the Iraqi army and what the Soviet tanks possesses is where they both, all three come from.
McMaster sold his soul to Satan, and McGregor and Davis have been good guy, well, at least since the Iraq War II.
Now, I don't know if you know this about Danny Davis, I guess you probably do, but your audience doesn't, that he was the heroic whistleblower of the Afghan War in twenty twelve.
Do you know that story?
So in two thousand nine, there was a former Marine captain turned State Department employee named Matthew Hoe, and he warned Obama not to do the search.
And his boss, the ambassador, Ikenberry, He had been the general in charge of the war previously, and Ikenberry backed up Ho and said, Don't do the surge.
That's all Obama needed to hide behind was Ikenberry and Ho, and he could have said no, and instead he gave in and he ordered the escalation.
He had already sent forty thousand troops, then he announced he's sending thirty thousand more for a total of seventy thousand additional troops, the giant, horrific, failed Afghan surge of two thousand nine through twelve.
And then at the end, Davis was the whistleblower, who broke ranks, testified before the Senate, and published an article in the Armed Forces Journal saying that David Petraeus is a liar and that America has not achieved what Petrace called success because he wouldn't dare call it victory in the war in Afghanistan.
And that here's the real truth.
And here's how Davis knew is he had a special job, which was arming and equipping all the guys all around the country, whatever they needed.
His job was to go and give them whatever equipment.
So that gave him a special insight into the war because he was going to all areas of the country and seeing the guys everywhere that they were.
And he said the same thing that Matthew Ho said.
So these boys are getting killed for this.
And as Ho had pointed out, like, how am I supposed to write a letter home to home to this guy's wife.
I said he died a good death when I know it's not true.
And the same thing with Davis.
Like these guys, you know how military guys are.
They talk about these are my men.
They're mine.
You know?
And so what do you do when they're dying for nothing?
And so Davis said enough of this and came home and did what he could, told the truth to end the war.
And he's a great American patriot.
And he, you're right.
He's a brilliant genius too.
And he's a brilliant war analyst on all the wars, particularly Ukraine right now.
That's his show is Daniel Davis Deep Dive.
Yeah.
I highly recommend people listen to.
to DDD Danielle Davis Deep Dive.
It's on YouTube.
It's on all the podcast platforms.
He served for 21 years in the army with four combat deployments.
And he's got stars and things too, man.
Yeah.
But the most rogue thing he ever did was quit and tell the truth.
But anyway, I trust his analysis of the war better than anybody else.
There's another guy I really like named Willie OAM.
His name is Matt Williams.
He's an Australian veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
You'd really like him.
He's a brilliant war analyst.
He looks at the maps every day and analyzes day by day by day.
Oh, see, there's where he interviewed me.
He's a wonderful guy.
I'm afraid he's got cancer right now, but he's hanging in there and he's just a brilliant analyst of the war.
You'd really like him.
And he goes day by day by day, he shows who's taken how much land.
That's why I could only shake my head at Wesley Clark the other day that I'm going, listen, the Russians are ascending on the battlefield, dude.
There's no reversing this.
Believe harder.
Come on, man.
And he acts like, what are you talking about, Horton?
The Russians aren't winning.
It's like, yeah, they are, dude., they are.
Danny Davis and Willie O. M. They're not wrong about that.
You know, these reports, it depends, I guess, on who you're reading, and I do see some kind of wishful thinking from people from time to time, but no, Lord, they are losing, Provost is about to fall.
They move, they have virtually a hundred percent of Luhansk, they are making major gains in Donetsk, and they're making moves in Dnipro Provost, which is the big, I can never say it right, but that's as good as I could ever get.
The oblast between the river and the Donbass there.
And of course there's Sumi and Kharkiv in the north, and all of this is still in danger of being taken.
Oh, and I'm sorry because I never really answered your question right about Trump.
Trump's problem is, Lex, that he got just elected and inaugurated at the wrong time for his second term here.
And the Russians, they annex those territories, but they don't control them.
Daniel Davis, our tangent here, he explains that the strategy in the war is to fight a war of attrition, to grind up Ukrainian forces with artillery and airdrop bombs and move slowly to preserve Russian soldiers' lives and make the other guys die more.
Now, typically, and this is in some specialized stuff out of my view, but it's like they say that like, if you'll lose three, three, it's three to one, uh, a disadvantage for the advancing army on a defensive position or whatever.
That doesn't hold in all cases, and I think I may even have said that wrong.
Somebody tried to correct me on that recently, but like it's not exactly that way, but the thing is, it's more dangerous obviously to move on a defensive position than to remain in one, like all other things being equal, I guess.
But then they just have way more.
Way more artillery and way more time, and they can just move very slowly and make sure that actually the defenders die at a much higher rate than they do.
And they're not running out of artillery and they're not running out of men.
They've not even launched a full scale mobilization for the war.
People know that they're winning and so they're volunteering to go and get some.
And they can afford their economy is not crushed.
And so they can afford to pay bonuses and have people sign up.
And while meanwhile, Ukraine's on a conscript army that's had at least tens and some reports say more than a hundred thousand.
of deserters flee the front lines, refuse to fight.
There's been at least hundreds of people have drowned to death in the Dniester River on the border with Moldova trying to escape.
People oppress gangs, riding around in vans, beating people up and kidnapping them and throwing them in the back of the van and taking them off to the front to be killed in a few hours.
It's a horror show over there, man.
And then I don't know if Ukraine is going to survive because see, and this is part of my argument, and I said this in my four hour speech right after the war began that and I was assuming then as a lot of people did that the Russians were going to have a lot more lot more success a lot sooner and that the Ukrainian military would essentially be smashed and they'd be fighting an insurgency here, which is what that was plan B. Plan A was to warn them, don't do it.
Plan B was we're going to back the mujahideen.
In other words, the Nazis, right sector and Azov and whatever because the military will be smashed and Russia will dominate the entire east of the country, at least was the presumption going in by the American side.
So we're now on like plan C was actually better than plan B, right?
They skipped a step in wanting to back an insurgency.
The state army has been able to hold.
We're recording this recording this thing three and a half years into the war and the state army still exists.
They've still been able to pour arms in there all this time and keep the thing going for now.
But as I predicted in that speech, I said, you know, this could be a real pyrrhic victory for the Russians and Russia's government is a government program and all they do is fail upwards in their self-licking ice cream going fashion.
That's not a speciality about Americans.
That's a speciality about the economics of government monopolies on security forces, right?
And so think about the map.
for a minute.
Putin just went in there and drew a line around all the pro Russians.
Not that everyone who's an ethnic Russian and a Russian speaker in Ukraine wanted to join the Russian Federation, but I'm sure you've seen the election result maps where it goes from dark blue to dark red and a real kind of gray scale fade in between there, where when you get all the way in Donetsk and Luhansk, you have people who are, you know, have a lot of intermarriages and mixed families across the borders and very much consider themselves to be Russians, even living inside Ukraine.
And I read a study of Ukrainian nationalism that was about how the only Ukrainian nationalists are the Nazis out west, most Ukrainians really identify with their city more or their region more than really considering themselves overall Ukrainian patriots in that larger nationalist sense, according to some pretty in-depth surveys about all that they had done in the past.
And so, but anyway, in other words, I'm not trying to oversimplify it and say, oh, yeah, everybody in Donetsk was just begging for Russia to invade or whatever.
Some of them were.
Some of them, of course, were not.
But anyway, by drawing the line where he has now, he's now taken everyone who.
could even be potentially pro-Russia out of Ukraine permanently.
So it used to be that the people who leaned more or less, people always said Yanukovych was Putin's puppet or whatever, it's not actually true, separate tangent, but the more or less Russian leaning guys from the parties in the east, they would win.
That's why America had to overthrow the government there twice in ten years in the Orange Revolution and the Maidan Revolution.
Well, that's never going to happen again.
All of those people are never going to vote in a Ukrainian election again.
And who's going to be dominant if they ever do hold elections?
It's probably going to be somebody to the right of Zelensky that wins.
Remember Zelensky was brought in because he was Jewish., meant he wasn't ethnically Russian, he wasn't ethnically Ukrainian or like culturally whatever, the sectarian Lee with those he was kind of a third choice.
And he was from Harkiv, so he wasn't from all the way in the Donbass, right?
But he's still a Russian speaker and ran on peace.
That was supposed to be his charm, right?
Well, those days are over.
So who's going to win now?
My biggest fears is going to be Andrey Boletsky, who's the leader of the Azov Battalion, which is now known as the Third Army Corps.
It went from the Azov Battalion to the Azov Regiment to the Third Separate Infantry Division.
Now it's the Third Army Corps.
And Boletsky is the guy, the famous quote I'm sure you've heard about leading the white race against the Semite led Untermention.
That's him.
And I quote at length that whole speech which I found on archive dot org, you know, the official Azov Battalion website is down, but you can find the Wayback Machine version of it.
That whole speech is absolute insane Hitlerian lunacy about Aryan values and the nation of Ukraine is a single living organism and every egg and every sperm belongs to the state for the greater glory of the Ukrainian Empire.
And just yeah, that's Nazism, all right.
That's exactly what that is.
There's no mistaking it for any other thing.
And these are the proud grandsons of the Galician SS and, you know, Stepan Bandera and the UPA and OUN who had before the UPA was OUN who had served the Nazis in the Holocaust and the Second World War.
And these are their proud grandsons and legacies.
And this guy, Beletsky, is from what's called the Patriot of Ukraine, which is a group out of Harkiv that was, again, descended from these Nazis.
And he's, he and his illk are very likely to be the leaders of the new Ukraine.
And so how is Russia supposed to deal with that now?
Well, now we got to go to Odessa so at least we can take that great and important port city from them.
And geez, now we can see Transnistria from here.
You know that little strip of land that Russia controls on the Moldovan side of the river on the Moldovan-Ukrainian border?
That's Russian controlled land, a frozen conflict since the end of the Soviet Union.
Well, man, from Crimea we can see Odessa and from Odessa we can see Transnistria, and we can really punish those Ukrainians by completely cutting them off from the Black Sea, and then still you have a frozen conflict with a bunch of right-wing radical severely anti-Russian grudge holding national socialists.
And so now what is anybody going to do with them?
You know, that's who the new Ukrainian government is going to be dominated by, his people who are far to the right of conservative men.
And then what?
And then so now put yourself in Putin's point of view.
Again, this is a government program.
Gets worse and worse and worse.
Well, the next option is now that you've created, I'm assuming some things, but still, you created a radical right-wing rump state of Ukraine.
that is going to constantly be a disruption.
Well, what you do is you finish cleansing them into Poland and Romania.
You just kick them all the way out and reabsorb the entire place.
That is the obvious solution from the Russian point of view, and that's how they fight their wars.
They just move very slowly with artillery and wipe out everything in their path until they own it.
That's the mess that America has gotten Ukraine in.
I don't see how this ends anytime soon or anytime that really, you know, again, from the Russian point of view, let's say they take those four oblasts.
Well, look at all the people in Dniproprovsk and all the people in Sumi and Kharkiv who are Russian speakers, who, of course, the Russian government is going to say need our protection, especially now that they're a smaller minority in the country than before.
When their side will never win an election again, a national election again, Well, we're going to have to go all the way to the river now.
Right?
It only makes sense, man.
It's a government program.
It's a disaster.
And it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse.
I really hope the next leader of Ukraine is not a right wing extremist as you're suggesting.
Yeah, me too.
And I think the bigger picture here is, as we've been talking about for many hours, that it's the politicians and the bureaucrats that wage the war and it's regular people that pay the price of it.
That's right.
As Ozzy Osbourne said, right?
They leave that all to the poor.
Rest in peace, by the way, Ozzy Osbourne.
Yeah, man.
I think this whole conversation was a really deep, eloquent case against the war in all parts of the world, and especially to the degree United States is involved.
And your whole life's work has too been this incredible case against war.
with antiwar.com with the libertarian institute with all the work you've done and so In this goal, I'm very much with you, 100%.
I'm really glad that you're doing the work you're doing.
So thank you for fighting the good fight.
Thank you very much, Lexi.
As long as you're here, I'll say one more thing, which is, if you've ever heard of the great libertarian, Tom Woods from the Mises Institute and the Libertarian Institute, he has something called Liberty Classroom, where it's him and his professor friends telling you the truth about the things that they were supposed to teach you in school but didn't.
Well, he built me my own Liberty Classroom.
It's called the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom.
And if anybody got all the way through this podcast this far, they might be interested to know.
We plan on going live.
Um, next month and it's two huge courses on the Middle East and the Cold War with Russia by me.
And then I also have the great James Bovard, the most successful and important libertarian journalist in world history, uh, current writer for the New York Post and fellow at the Institute, uh, great author, brilliant man, is going to be doing a course on his entire career of investigative journalism.
And then we have Ramsey Baroud is going to do the story of Israel Palestine, the great Palestinian refugee in exile, writer of the Palestine Chronicle and a regular writer with us, a regular contributor at antiwar.com, good friend of mine, wonderful man.
Then we also have William Bupert on how he's an army infantry officer and expert on debunking the bankrupt counterinsurgency doctrine of David Petreus and James Mattis.
They call it coin in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He debunks all that and is from the Chasing Ghosts podcast.
And he's going to do a course on how America lost every war since 1945.
And then the great historian, Dangerous History, CJ Kilmer, is going to be doing a course on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person who ever lived because of course he is the father of Lenin and Stalin, Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and World War II and for that matter the American Empire to contain communism after it was all over too.
And so it's going to be a hell of a thing man and we got a bunch of great guys doing really great work to put this thing together.
So that's at scotthortonacademy dot com and it will go live in September.
I'm really hoping in August, maybe not.
So you can watch first of all this awesome video by Dan Smotz who's the most talented video editor in the world, but then also just enter your email address, then you'll be the first to know when we go live and launch the Scott Horton Academy.
Scott, thank you, brother.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Scott Horton.
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, let me leave you once again with the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, spoken in nineteen fifty three.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft.
from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this, a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
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