Scott Horton details the $8 trillion cost of post-9/11 wars, arguing that U.S. interventionism stems from a military-industrial complex prioritizing profit over national interest since the Nixon era. He exposes how covert support for mujahideen and Saddam Hussein fueled regional instability, while neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz manipulated intelligence to justify Iraq War II for oil pipelines and geopolitical dominance. Horton contends that policies such as NATO expansion provoked Russia, and that diplomatic solutions regarding Iran and nuclear proliferation were systematically sabotaged by intelligence agencies and the Israel lobby, ultimately causing unnecessary human suffering and economic collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
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A Wake-Up Call for Americans00:05:03
The following is a conversation with Scott Horton.
He's the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of ntwar.com, co-host of Provoked, and host of the Scott Horton show, on which he has done over 6,000 interviews since 2003.
He's the author of Provoked, Enough Already, and other books and articles that have, over the past three decades, criticized U.S. 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 costs of these wars.
The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen led to an estimated 900,000 to 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths.
And the cost in terms of dollars was $8 trillion, with $2.2 trillion on Afghanistan and $2.9 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 misled into this war on terror that was so costly in so many ways?
Yeah, 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, it was, Lex, I'm telling you, it's at least five years ago.
God, it's the future.
Now, this may have been seven, eight years ago that they did a study that determined that 30,000 American servicemen have blown their own brains out since then.
Well, one way or the other, deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it 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.
And you know what, too?
Like, you would have guessed this probably, right?
You probably know more about this subject than me because the New York Times headline, I think, yesterday was, oh my God, look at, or maybe it's the Wall Street Journal, look at this insane list of the kinds of drugs that all these depressed soldiers get put on.
Here's 15 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 healthcare 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 prosthetic limbs for amputees, whether they lost their limb in war or otherwise.
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.
Military Massacre's Legacy00:02:57
So that does not count.
You know what I'm talking 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's 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 Alex, that's a kiss of death every time I say that.
Please go the slow version.
Okay, so the slow version is 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 53.
So now this is in the early 70s, 20 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-4s and F-14s.
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 turning on him before the revolution, but I know that by the time of the revolution in 1979, he was sick with cancer and very sick.
And the Americans secretly knew that.
CIA knew that, you know, but it was not public knowledge.
It was whatever, stage four or 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's going to be a change of leadership.
When we say revolution here, we mean mobs in the street 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 is massacre all those people.
That'll shut them up.
Or like, you know what I mean?
They were 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 instability and destruction in the world?
Bureaucrats' Interest Over National Need00:03:36
And then you use that to then justify invading 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's 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 to 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 are multiple military officers, like not too, too high, but like high enough to be quoted by the news saying, well, now that that's 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.
Pentagon Papers Revelations00:09:17
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 to limit your influence 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 Daniel Ellsberg talks about: 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 who you listen to.
And I'll tell you a great example of this from my own experience: 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 of this stuff more and better than all of y'all.
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 even 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 does not 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 speak to more to Daniel Ellsberg.
So the importance of somebody like that.
So it sounds like if we think about the machinery of how this happens, it feels like heroic whistleblowers are essential to this process.
To 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 importance of him?
Oh, yeah.
He's an absolutely brilliant guy.
I'm proud to say I was a friend, you know, for 10, 15 years there.
I don't know, quite a while.
So he endorsed my first two books.
I'm very proud to say.
And he did not 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 planner.
That was his second book, 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 it matters the 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 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 to even get the war plan from the Pentagon.
And they finally got the war plan from the Pentagon.
And it said, 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 included 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 Chikoms.
So we're going to kill all them too.
And that was the thinking in the thing.
And 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 Pentagon.
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 earlier.
He's deputy undersecretary of state for whatever it was.
I can't remember if it's 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's reading, oh, never mind, that was a mistake.
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 in verse, but I trust Gareth.
He's great.
And he says it actually was McNamara lied to LBJ when they knew that it was a mistake.
And the same thing happened again and again.
You take little pieces 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 RAN, that he had full top seeker 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 Ravel 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 did not 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.
And that never occurred to us.
You know, like, come on.
You know, as Chomsky said, come on, America invaded South Vietnam.
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 Zoom and 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 is got to be somebody else's problem.
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.
President Carter's Finding00:15:40
He's just going to retire first and make it Nixon's problem, right?
Same as George W. Bush said, oh, the end of Iraq, well, that'll 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 arguing for the opposite, but I'm just saying the reality is you have such short terms of office, you have a 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 Paul Peteen 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?
So what we 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 war, you're not going to start it.
Yep.
Right.
So how do we go from the CIA, 1979, the Shah, Ayatollah, Nixon?
What is the thread that now starts inching towards the 90s and towards 9-11 in Iraq?
I know there's so much, but we're going to do it, man.
So here's what happens.
America goes ahead and allows Ayatollah to 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, Mr. Ayatollah?
Right.
Which USA is just completely aiding and abetting, right?
These are shots they called and made happen, right?
And they sent him home to inherit the thing.
And then they did work with him.
People forget, man.
And I was just very young at that time.
But I, you know, was raised kind of in the atmosphere of all of 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's got a huge stadium of guys, and he just starts calling names.
And everybody whose name he calls has to go out back 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 train 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?
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 life 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.
Takes another 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'd 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?
The absurdity of this is a situation.
Well, I'm skipping ahead a 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 look out for Saddam Hussein and his intentions.
And we're going to get back to that in one 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 Zbidnibrzinsky'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.org slash fair use if you want to look at it.
It's from you want to go ahead and pull it up.
Okay, if you allow me to read President Jimmy Carter's July 3rd, 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 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 Margolis, and I got this also from reading Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident, that 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 commi-sak 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, 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.
We're going to get back to why it's 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?
And who really cares if Vietnam goes commie?
We do business with them now.
And so people weren't into it anymore.
So this is where Zbign Brzezinski 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 overexpansion.
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-win, 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 in doing 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 Brzezinski, you'll see where, and he later misparaphrases this a little bit.
He's kind of cute, Brzezinski.
National Security Advisors, 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 will 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 in that context here in writing, we see.
And it's from Robert Gates's first memoir, 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 is 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 invading Afghanistan.
Now we're worried that they're too expansionists 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.
Forgive me for the, it's hard to stay in line here.
The hostage crisis breaks out in November 79 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 explain whether it really was the IRGC that took the lead in that or whether it was the students who did 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 he explained them.
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 it justifies them doing anything sinful or criminal, but I'm just saying they also had reasons for reacting the way that they reacted.
America had launched a coup in 53 from that same embassy.
And by saying that they were going to cure the Shah's cancer, 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.
And I'm like, 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 up in disaster where the planes and the helicopters crashed into each 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 weren't 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 300 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 state.
He absolutely specialized in Iraq, Afghanistan, exposing the entire fraud of David Petraeus and his career.
He wrote the book, Manufactured Crisis on the Iranian Nuclear Program, that is by none, the very best book on that.
You're absolutely right.
Vietnam, Cambodia, Syria, Iran, and the war on terror, all the 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.
Fair 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 did 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?
Balancing Powers: Sectarian Mix00:02:08
And then they're 60% of the population, super majority.
In the north, you have the Kurds who are Sunnis, but they're Kurds of separate ethnicity than the Arabs.
And then you have the Sunni Arabs who are another 20%.
Well, Saddam Hussein was a secular Sunni Arab leading essentially like on the Simpsons, the Kami Nazis, the Baath Party, who are like sort of both a little, just a fascist state, essentially, right?
With Arab characteristics or whatever.
And, but, and, and not an entirely sectarian one.
He had Christians and Kurds and Shiites in his government and things like that.
It was not, 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 I, 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 1980s, as the United States almost entirely backed Saddam Hussein, except for when they backed the Ayatollah, remember Iran-Contra.
Iran-Contra Scandal00:05:57
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-1980s, 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 Sandinistas government in Nicaragua, despite Congress explicitly prohibiting such funding.
And this is, of course, supposedly a side story, but a huge part of 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 calling us conspiracy kooks and all this.
The movie's about a guy named Barry Seale, 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 Arkansas, where he was read in on this and the operation was run out of the vice president's office, George H.W. 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 Contras.
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 then they completely destroyed the heroic Gary Webb for exposing this.
And they didn't murder him, but they drove him to suicide.
And, you know, 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'd signed his house over to his wife and somebody stole his motorcycle and he was like at the at the end, but they had run him out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News.
They first ran him to the Hollywood beat and then he eventually he just quit and went to become an investigator for the California state legislator.
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 mouth either way for doing the right thing.
But anyway, 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.
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 and drugs.
And so there are people who 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, 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 he has been a huge influence on me, you know, 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.
Where Did Iraq Get Its WMD?00:05:46
Well, yeah, let's go back to it, Ron, 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 there are 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 till 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 just 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 thread will continue, what role does Israel have to play 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 switching gears on the Ayatollah until Rabin in 1993.
So hold that thought.
So the war is still going on.
We have to mention the chemical weapons too.
Yes.
America bought them.
Taxpayers bought them.
There's 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 is a whole thing to do.
And 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 extensively against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians, most notably in the 1988 Halabja attack that killed an estimated 5,000 people and injured 20,000 more.
There is substantial documentation that Western governments, especially the U.S. 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 one would be Shane Harris, who's now at the Washington Post, you know, very official national security beat reporter.
He wrote a piece about this at foreignpolicy.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 ffff.org.
And 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.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 of 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 Harnberger.
The title is Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction on FFF.org that people should check out.
And then, oh, there's the Shane Harris and Matthew M.A.I.D.
CIA files prove America helped Saddam as he gassed Iran.
The U.S. 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 alive from the post.
Got that?
Okay, good to know.
That's how truth works.
Good.
Of course.
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 too.
Remember Harris from The Post?
You 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 in Las Vegas with Bill Murray.
What?
Really?
Where the Buffalo Roams.
I promise you we'll have a good time.
And there's a joke in there about I'm Harris from The Post.
He's pretending 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 got 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.
I love the buffalo realm.
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 Hussein.
Saddam Hussein.
So, okay, the war finally comes to an end in 1989.
And at the same time, the Soviets are withdrawing in Afghanistan.
We're getting back to them in a minute.
But 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 UAE, who 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.
Shared Oil Wells Dispute00:05:43
And so, and also at this time, 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 overproducing from shared oil wells that straddled the border.
And when you have a contract that where your property and my property put 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 debts.
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 was no 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 Glaspie and through Margaret Weiler and John Kelly, were sending signals that actually go ahead.
We don't really care.
And we just celebrated April Glaspie Day the other day we do every year, July 25th, 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 foreignpolicy.com, he said, now listen, in diplomatic language, you know, these things are, you know, mathematical formulas.
You got to be very careful how you say these things.
Saddam Hussein wasn't anticipating a war.
He knew he's going to roll right into Kuwait.
They couldn't stop him.
He was counting on a coup de main.
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 flashing yellow light, if not a green light, to go right ahead.
And we know that, again, John Kelly and Margaret Tutweiler also made statements essentially downplaying American concerns about what was happening.
I should give a quick shout out since your mention of Stephen Walt.
I had a few email exchanges with him.
He's a co-author 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 them, 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, you know, Henry Kissinger, Real Politique, only without the bloody hands and the, you know, the hawkish instinct.
They're, you know, 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 oppose 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 exchanged a lot of emails, and he's a sweetheart.
Yeah, he's a great guy.
I email back and forth with him too.
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.
Well, he's just a good human being.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, like a real deep compassion.
And sometimes when you cover these topics and you just like you said, you realize the adult's 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 got.
That's the only reason you could call him that is because you got no other thing to say, you know?
Yeah.
A real heart of gold.
This is a really special game.
Anyway, sorry.
Yeah, yeah, no problem.
So Iraq War I. So America gives like a flashing 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 was talking about the left hand and 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.
Wimp President's Dilemma00:08:13
So he was always in 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?
If you go back in time, that's how it worked.
He was Pentagon's 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 Cheney 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, Bub.
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 corrected.
So yeah, he's Secretary of Defense at that time.
So he 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 who 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 H.W. 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 and whatever.
Sorry if this is a distracting question, but when we talk about the birth and the evolution of the neocon 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 I, 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 I, as I call it.
I'm trying to get that to catch on because we're Iraq War three and a half or four now.
So like going to have to keep these things straight somehow.
But some of the same characters that were responsible for Iraq War II.
That's right.
Because of course Clinton's in there for a while, but then it's President Bush's son as the next president.
He brings Cheney and Powell with him and then all this other stuff.
But hold your horses and 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 and from a smaller, weaker country.
And so what's he going to do now?
And that's 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 president.
It was a cover newsweek, wimp president.
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-Jabber, had investments in British debt.
But what do I care about that, Lex Friedman?
Not one 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.
They're not going to invade Saudi.
We're warning them.
They better not invade Saudi.
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 10 different sources from the summer of 1990 through January 91, where the Americans refused.
The Bush administration in Washington, D.C. refused time after 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-piece battle.
Now we're going to go in there and we're going to rock them.
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 got to give them one that we can do.
That'll be short, that'll be sweet, that'll be fun, that'll be easy.
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, remaking the world and 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 I to this day, people still think of it as like short and sweet.
And we use all this space age technology and we whooped them good, right?
And Colonel McGregor and Daniel Davis and General McMaster, then 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 of these things that were so much fun for them, such a big deal for them at that time that they wanted to,
again, for our nation's overall long-term interests or what was good for them, their donors, their benefactors, and 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 Anfal campaign, 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.
Next thing you know, he's going to take over all of the Middle East resources.
He's going 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.
It was a 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 patrols near the border or whatever.
Cuts and Covert Relationships00:11:43
There's nothing like armored divisions preparing to expand the war into Saudi Arabia.
They knew they were lying about that.
And in fact, the St. Petersburg, Florida Times published that like a week and a half before the invasion.
And AP, Reuters, CS, 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 incubators 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 turned 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 100% hoax.
0% 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 invasion.
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.
Seems weird.
So people needed a real reason to go.
And that was atom bombs.
And so people forget this now because Iraq War II takes the place in their memory, right?
But in Iraq War I, 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 I. 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 an 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 I, 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 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 claimed, like confirmation bias, again, 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 Iraq War I, 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.
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 an 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 turntail 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 someday.
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 too, telling 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 of these chances.
And there were reports in Newsday and the New York Times and whatever 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, oil prices fall because they think there's a peace deal.
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 martial 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, again, I borrowed this from Chomsky, but I found two original citations for it.
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's fair.
Because, man, what if we stopped holding the world together?
Boy, they would all just fall apart.
So it's just clamoring for power.
It'd 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 back up and take back over the world again.
Really?
Yeah.
And before the war on terrorism, they tried for a while.
They made Harrison Ford movies out of it to try to build up the war against the Mexican drug cartels and the Peruvian drug cartels because we got to have somebody to fight in the 90s while we're trying to get something else going on here, basically, you know, that they don't want to have to get a job.
And yet, like Bush Sr., you've got to give him credit for this.
He absolutely slashed military spending, slashed the bomber fleets, slashed the military, slash 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 an H.W. Bush guy.
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 on these treaties to bring the global stockpile down from approximately 70,000 down to where we have about 7,000 each, which is way more than enough to do you.
But when the Soviets had 40,000 and we had 30, 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 Gorbachev 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 got to 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.
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 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, A Treacherous Alliance, which if you haven't read that, you'll absolutely love it.
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 U.S., 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 is just a masterpiece.
But 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 89, 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.
Al-Qaeda's Grievance Against the U.S.00:15:36
That was really cover for the extent of their covert relationship that was still ongoing at that time.
And so now it in, we got to put this off one second.
I'm sorry, 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 everybody, crushing the Shiite uprising.
And that's what's going on in the background.
So people remember that movie, that'll be probably the most they ever learned about the crushed Shiite uprising of 1991.
That's fair.
You know, that's how it is.
They didn't make that big of a deal out of it at the time because it was a horrible Bay of 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 saying, now's everybody's chance to rise up and overthrow this guy.
But then they changed their mind.
And the reason they changed their mind was, remember when I said in 1980, 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 10 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, B-A-D-R.
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 Abdul 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 100,000 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.
Somebody put this on archive.org before it's gone forever, man.
And it's great because they talk about everything except Iraq War II.
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, as 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, which is, 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 1980s, 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, especially from Arab lands, to go to Afghanistan to fight on the side of the Mujahideen against the Soviets.
And this included Egyptian Islamic Jihad and what was called then the Azam group, which was the main group that was controlled by the Saudi intelligence services during the 1980s.
And that was a thing that the United States wanted.
Yes.
So Zabini Brzinsky was trying to bait Russia into invading Soviet Union, into invading Afghanistan.
And then they wanted to extend the war.
So America had a deal with Saudi Arabia.
We would match them dollar for dollar.
We would work with their intelligence services and the Pakistanis to support local Mujahideen like Gubal Dean Hekmatjar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who later became America's enemies in our Afghan war.
But then, and various other Pashtun warlords of different descriptions.
So, U.S. 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 U.S. 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 US.
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 anybody 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 Osama bin Lad was outraged that the king had allowed the United States to liberate Kuwait instead of him and his men, which they have a bunch of mountains to hide out in Kuwait, but he wanted to try it to kick Saddam out.
And then he was just driven crazy by the fact that the king allowed white Christian combat forces to come and occupy this holy land.
It's not just their country, but their holy 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.
I guess they all do.
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 they're jihadists from all over the place.
You know, Egyptians and Saudis and Syrians and, you know, Azam himself was Palestinian, raised in a refugee camp in Kuwait.
But yet all these different people.
And then so bin Laden's genius 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 overthrow 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 is the 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 where America for the bad guys.
And this is such an important thing.
There's this great book by Michael Scheuer, who was the former chief of the CIS 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, which I'm very, very opposed to Russia 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.
Imperial Hubris, why the West is losing the war on terror.
Abai Michael Schur.
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 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's really trying to, but that only inspires so much resentment, you know, and conservatives don't like libertineism, 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 can be.
But what does that sound like to the poor person in those countries?
Money's 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, well, whatever.
The timeline jumps around here a bit, but major case in point is in 1996 when Israel under Shimon Perez re-invaded 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 106 women and children in Khanna.
That's QANA in 1996.
Naftani Bennett, while serving as an Israeli army officer in 1996, 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 Khanna.
Bennett radioed for artillery support, so on, so on, so on, killing 106 people and injured many others.
In a UN shelter.
This humanitarian tragedy is widely known as the Khanum Massacre.
So when Shimon Perez launched that war, Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11th plotters in the United States, pilot of Flight 11, I believe, he and his buddy Ramzi bin al-Shib, they were Egyptian 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 that 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 our, 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 Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib, they read that declaration of war, and that was when they decided to join al-Qaeda.
It 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 90s here, but literally on September 11th, 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.
106 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 H.W. Bush with a truck bomb assassination attempt in Kuwait in 1993.
Whiskey Smuggling Ring00:02:39
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 Indik, 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 Indik 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, WINEP, which was directly a spin-off of APAC.
AIPAC 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 neocon think tanks, but this one was literally created by the Israel lobby in the United States.
And then he became an advisor to Bill Clinton, and he was insisting on this policy of essentially continuing the H.W. 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 then force 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, Indic, 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 I, 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.
The New World Order Conspiracy00:15:16
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 incubators?
It was her father was the one who spun up this story.
So in other words, the same guy who spun up that story.
It was the same guy who spun up this story about the assassination attempt against Bush Sr., which everybody still believes, and which I'm sure Bush Jr. believed at the time that he launched that war, probably.
Was he read Seymour Hirsch?
He doesn't know.
And it was just conventional wisdom.
And I was still just a teenager in the 1990s, 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 Hirsch 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?
The main thing is speak up.
I think the most important thing is read anti-war.com every day for a long period of time in a row, and you will have a very good handle on what the hell is going on in the world.
It was founded by Eric Garrison, Justin Raimondo, who are both a couple of libertarians.
Raimondo was a student of Murray Rothbard's, or at least one of his mentees, you know, learned a lot from air of his foreign policy thought.
Murray and Rothbard, the best libertarian.
And so that's where we come from is that tradition and, you know, Ron Paulian, non-interventionist types.
But the news is, 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 DeCamp and Kyle Anz alone who get the lion's share of the credit for the actual work that goes into the site every day.
And they list to every single war in the world.
Everything, every day.
We have our top news.
We have a frontline 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, of course, as well, the greatest American ever.
Ron Paul is amazing.
And you give love and respect to Ron Paul all the time.
He absolutely deserved it.
We spoke of heroes.
He's one of the legends.
That's how I knew anti-war.com was for me the first day I laid eyes on it.
My friend said, look, they run Ron Paul.
And I went, I like these guys.
Can we take a quick pause for Beth and Break?
Sure.
So before we get too far into Bill Clinton, I should say, because I did say these words, the New World Order thing, that was a very popular conspiracy theory in the 90s 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 kook in the 1990s, but I was a kid.
It's fine.
I grew out of it.
But 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 like 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 50 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 is 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, you know, not just the United States, but all of their allies lined up against them and feel that much, you know, more threatened, namely, of course, Russia and China, the other major, you know, potential adversaries and nuclear weapons 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 varied 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 neocons here, too, before we get too far into Bill Clinton, is in 1992, a year after the end of Iraq War I, 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 caused a huge upset.
It was leaked 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.
Like 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 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 Schachtman, 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 Bazalmei Khalilzad and Francis Fukuyama and others who are of other, you know, different, you know, cultural inheritances, 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 that had gotten Reagan's attention in the first place, saying that it's 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 commies 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 100 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 2013 that we should allow the Muslim Brotherhood to rule in Egypt because they won fair and square parliament and the presidency just barely.
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 him myself right now.
Are you crazy?
He's got an H-bomb going off over his head.
Is anybody 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 Podhorts 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 like American interest-oriented type.
And she would even rail against the UN itself in almost a Bercher 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 at the end of the Cold War, a year before the Soviet Union was even gone, in the fall of 1990.
And so she must have written this in the summer of 1990.
This is a year before the failed commie coup and the final unraveling where the Russians overthrew the last of the Soviet Union government at that time at the end of 91.
It's a year before that.
And she, importantly, right on the confirmation bias trick again, it's Gene Kirkpatrick, right?
Not Susan Saranon.
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.org slash fair use.
And I won't tell you where I got.
And it's, and don't ever sue me, national interest.
I love you guys.
And the thing is, 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 23rd, 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 commies 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 normalcy, meaning 28, right?
Before the permanent world empire was built for the purposes of destroying the Nazis and then containing the commie.
So she was very anti-communist and neoconservative perspective.
She had a significant role in the Reagan administration.
And then after she've evolved and saying we need to let go.
That's right.
In other words, she is here.
She's lying with Pat Buchanan.
Now, for people who aren't familiar with Pat Buchanan, he's a Catholic paleoconservative.
He was Nixon's speechwriter and Reagan's speechwriter.
To this day, he's retired, sweet old guy now, but he's lifelong Cold Warrior and doesn't regret it.
The commie 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 who really saw Russia and the Soviet Union as a major threat.
Oh, yeah.
And then they've evolved saying, okay, God that the Cold War is over.
We need to calm down.
And see, Pat is the perfect avatar for this.
Him and his buddies, you know, Scott McConnell and Jude Waniski.
Winiski 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 or 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.
No, 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 1952 in Commonweal magazine.
Again, you can find this at scotthorton.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?
Yeah.
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, 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.
Why We Can't Undermine America's Mandate00:09:11
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 paleo-conservative friends said, okay, enough.
We want to come home.
And so Jean Kirkpatrick, she didn't really join with the paleo cons, but she was certainly aligned 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 Berchers 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 Burch 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.
If it was that obvious to Robert Welch and to Ron Paul during the Cold War, then after the Cold War, you got to 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 Mao.
That makes sense.
We got to 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 no 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 is down in Guantanamo Bay.
Keeping Castro at bay 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 neocon friends took it as America's mandate that we're going to force the world to accept our ways in that same way.
Of course, the British justified 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 the, 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'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 guarantors 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's 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 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, you know, 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 busybodyhood that is built into this.
And of course, the Scotch-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 in 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 is the dual, it's a 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 a bad guy out there.
And you start and then you have the biggest military in the world, and there's Lockheed Martin as the military industrial complex.
And now you think you're better than everybody.
And now you're creating wars all over the place.
Yep.
Creating enemies all over the place.
And see, of course, there's partisanship is all built into this.
Everybody 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 midterm so 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 H.W. 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, 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 anti-war.com is nonpartisan, right?
That's right.
Yeah, we're reaching out to everybody.
We're here to inform everybody.
Again, as I was mentioning during the short break there, that Hawks read our website too.
Because 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 got to 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.
Before we go to Iraq War II, if it's okay, take a brief aside.
Since you mentioned it, we did an Iran debate a few weeks ago.
Four Hours Of Rants00:11:21
Yes.
Where about actually 20 minutes was cut toward the end where it went a bit off the rails.
And 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 podcast.
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 all I can to avoid having that kind of drama on the podcast.
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 the description and that the edit made sense.
Maybe can you speak to that?
And then also, can you please, it'd be great now that you're fresh, full of Dr. Pepper, say anything and everything you would like to say that went unresponded to, maybe, that is 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 whatsoever.
And I quite honestly absolutely despise Mark Dubowitz, and I have for a very long time.
And so it was, I almost, 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.
Like this is just business.
And I know that I really do regret that.
And I'm sorry to you personally for that because 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 last.
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, 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 Jews.
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, Jen Kirkpatrick 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, well, that was kind of lame.
And then 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've 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 or 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 Khanna 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 minding its own business over there, kind of like in some cliche 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 put 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 this 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 at all what I'm talking about.
Zbigniew 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 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 15 minutes after that moment because you kind of were patiently.
I mean, I had to get back to it kind of thing.
Yeah.
And, you know, there's no disrespect, man.
And I really apologize if there's any hurt or anything like that clause.
And it's true that the thing did really turn into an argument at that point.
I mean, he called Jim Loeb, of all people, a vicious anti-Semite, which is just completely hilarious considering how Jewish Jim Loeb is and what an extraordinarily sweet 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 J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward also is a vicious anti-Semite because he wrote something that explained the difference between Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon's positions on Iraq and Iran.
In other words, 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 11th 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 Indik said so.
And that's because, and the Khanna massacre helped motivated Mohammed Atta.
He just lied that point, just like all Israel lobbyists would.
How could they justify?
You know, I wish I knew the animosity you have for Mark Dewitz 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, and 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 anti-war.com trying to fend him off.
And look, and I, I, I accept too that I ain't so mature for a 49-year-old, whatever.
48 then.
I was, 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 for as long as needed.
Great.
And yeah, no hard feelings at all, man.
I'm glad we worked it out too.
Do we go to Iraq War Tuesday?
First?
Well, let's see.
Wait, let's stay on Bill Clinton in the 90s for a minute because, you know, we're talking about the neocons got brought up in the sense that they did help to encourage Iraq War I, 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 II.
And then the doctrine of global dominance that Wolfowitz developed, you know, in 92 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 Mujahideen, 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 Izit Begovich's office, the president of Bosnia in Sarajevo in 1994.
And his men fought there, and Bill Clinton knew it.
And Richard Holbrook 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 Shihites, then it's cool.
And that's what America and Britain and Saudi use 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's a very right-wing Israeli rabbi who advocated for the extermination or expulsion of all Palestinians from all of historic Palestine.
The First World Trade Center Bombing00:04:00
And his party had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being fascist and was banned from Israeli politics.
But 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.
And in 92, they hit us at a hotel in Aden, Yemen.
Then in 93, they did the first World Trade Center attack.
Now, we're 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, February 26, 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 and 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 Antiseth, Nancy Floyd and John Antiseth, 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 staying, 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 is onto 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 again, almost toppled 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 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 3,000 people inside still, right?
So then also two days later, the ATF raided the branch of Idiots 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 the 19th, 93.
So the American people's attention was just completely diverted and Clinton's too.
This is his whole first hundred days.
It's 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 in a sting, basically, on that part of the plot.
But in 1995, the bin Ladenites attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard.
Bin Laden's Provocation Strategy00:07:22
And in 1996, they blew up the Khobar Towers in Dharan, Saudi Arabia.
And that was a truck bombing that killed 19 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 mandate to treat all these al-Qaeda attacks as crimes as they are crimes under federal code.
So his 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, etc.
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 Bari Atwan, the editor 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 of 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 failed on an attack against the USS, the Sullivans.
The dinghy sank.
And then they hit the coal, killed 17 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 11th.
And then 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, lead 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, 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's still alive.
He says, Bill Clinton sent missiles after my father and didn't get him.
But now you spent 10 years in Afghanistan and you still haven't gotten 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.
And 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 that 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 the superpower against a regime that's allowed him to stay and against a people who did nothing to him or to us, right?
People hate that, but 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 rid of him and was trying to negotiate to get rid of him because as Murray 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 Lenin, right?
He wasn't interested in that.
He was interested in holding down Afghanistan.
He'd already won most of the country.
He hadn't finished winning it all yet.
And he wasn't trying to get in 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 to not even settle with the Northern Alliance, wanted to see an outright victory against the Northern Alliance because they wanted the Taliban to have total control, a monopoly on the entire state, so they could build an oil pipeline from Tajikistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan.
Now, they abandoned this project after 98, after the embassy bombings of 98.
People sometimes say that's why Bush invaded in 01 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 emir and no parliament and lots of Sharia law.
We can live with that.
That was the Bill Clinton administration.
It's what they said about that, right?
So in 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 that 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 cliché 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 was mostly Africans who died.
Taliban And Al-Qaeda Claims00:14:42
And so I don't think that they thought that losing a couple of towers full of a couple of thousand people would be a small price to pay.
I think they weren't not imagining that level of consequence.
But after all, they did have to hijack our airliners 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 3,000 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 of 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 is the meaning of the term blowback, by the way, as Chalmers Johnson explained, and it was coined in Donald Wilber, who is a CIA historian, in his after-action report against about the coup in Iran.
He said, 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.
It 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, did they push it that fall that the Taliban had done it?
Al-Qaeda was the Taliban.
The Taliban was Al-Qaeda.
You mean 2001?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That they were Taliban and there 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 9-11 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 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 Zeris, 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 Zeris 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 meeting at the State Department at all and went home.
And they only knew it was true because that an attack was coming because they had learned it from a Tajik jihadis or 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 Debargrave 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 COVID war in the 1980s, told the Washington Post, we've been negotiating with Mullah Omar over bin Laden since 98.
After the Africa embassy attack, Omar said, I got to get rid of this guy.
And he ordered bin Laden, don't you 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 fist 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 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 proceeding here.
And Bush said, no way, give him over.
And Coleman at one point said, well, we will come up with evidence.
We will accuse him of this.
And then they're like, nope, 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, it 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 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, Fool's Aaron 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, 10,000 Rangers or something at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul.
The Green Berets were fighting the Taliban up in Mazari Sharif.
The 75th 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 10,000 marching Marines.
And he could have told them, 10 hoot, go now.
And they had helicopters, but even then, they were like 40 miles away.
Yeah, it's mountains.
So what?
Right?
And they were not allowed to go and to 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.
And 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 Berntson in his book, Jawbreaker, talk about how they just could not understand why they could not get the support that they wanted.
And Bernson talks about how 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 the 17th, Delta Force is not allowed to chase them?
Why?
They always say the same thing.
I bet you do like a LexisNexis thing from back then and find how many times they use the 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 semi-permeable 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 Gurney, the CIA station chief in Islamabad in his book, 88 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 deconfliction 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 Furious, 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 are 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 in 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 60 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 onto Bush's desk and said, we need more men.
It 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.
And it is just a circumstantial, 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 11th, 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?
That'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 Ramondo wrote a piece at antiwar.com and it's called Our Hijacked Foreign Policy.
Neocons take Washington.
Baghdad is next.
A Libertarian Take on Neocons00:03:48
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 a 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's a Republican, I would have said Houston, right?
James Baker III, right?
Dark Lord of the Sith, lawyer for Exxon.
That's what conservatism is, is big business, right?
I don't know what else.
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 then.
It's so interesting to sorry to interrupt, but sort of 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 thing.
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 glasses, I could see the cutting wit and the brilliance and the humor.
You know what he was?
He was a big gay Pat Buchanan.
He's a 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's 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 the 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 60s.
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.
And 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 of these things in a way is just unbelievable.
And he had the neocons number, man.
And yes, Iraq War II was their war.
And it was mostly for Israel.
I'm severely distracted by how hilarious his writing is.
Could Have, Should Have00:03:48
Go ahead.
No, sorry.
Sorry.
I won't.
It'll be a rabbit hole that we'll go into.
But he goes hard against the neoconservatives.
Oh, so bad.
And 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 Sloboda 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 bath and break.
And then maybe you can get back to military industrial complex.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
So before we get too far into Iraq War II 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 got to bring you 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 as much as we can explore that, that's great.
I think it was really insightful when you described that right there in Afghanistan who 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 highlights one clear moment.
Yeah.
But that's a real tragedy.
It really is.
They could have negotiated and they could have killed them.
And the whole thing really could have been over by Christmas.
And by the way, Gary Bernson said that.
He said that to the reporter Michael Hirsch in 2016.
He said, it's really sad when you think about it, how this thing could have all 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 Bernson'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 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 them wanted to go all the way to Baghdad in 1990, one, and Senior told them no and stopped short of that.
Also let Saddam crush the Iraqi up 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 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 overthrow Saddam and it all went to hell because Chalabi was basically selling them.
Chalabi's Promises Falter00:13:39
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 for embezzling money.
And here he was 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 1996, David Wormser, who's an important neoconservative in alliance with the more important neoconservative, Richard Pearl, and also Douglas Fythe, 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 won't do this, right?
Hell yeah.
So we want to talk about Iraq War II, Lex.
What we got to do is let's go back to the early 1990s 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 want 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 upside 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 weren't really going to give them an independent state.
They were going to give them something like a Shiny'an, pseudo sort of kind 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.
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, 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.
And in fact, there's a funny anecdote and 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 is 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 important Israeli strategist told Parsi, we needed 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 Rabin 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 Netyahu 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.org slash fair use.
And in fact, I'm sure there are archive.org versions of it.
You can find it.
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.
Yeah, it's posted on scotthorton.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 Warrens 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, Wormser, 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 Power is Under Assault, Balance of Power, all three pieces.
And now there's even a book.
It's called Tyranny's Ally by David Wormser with a foreword 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 1980s or their friendship continuing through the 1980s and into the 1990s, they had a secret oil pipeline from the port of Acaba, which I never say that right.
I forget how to pronounce it right, but it's 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 there.
Okay.
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 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 until 95 that they quit sending the oil because Trita Parsi explains that Iran didn't start backing Hamas until 95, or at least maybe they had given them a little bit or 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 believe, if I'm remembering it right.
I don't think it was in 93.
I don't, I think it wasn't until 95 that Iran finally said, fine then, if you guys are going to be that way and stopped shipping the oil in.
So now this becomes a major interest of the neoconservatives and the Likud party.
And Ahmed Chalambi 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 their legs 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 inept, but very crude comparison between the Protestants and the Catholics.
There's one Shiite church, basically, right, under the Ayatollahs and their system, and 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 that they share his bloodline and all that.
Okay.
Well, the Hashemites also declare themselves to be his descendants, whether that's true 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 spell binding 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 acts as 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 being friends with Iran and that they better 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, man.
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's 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 Wormser 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, okay, 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 will build an oil pipeline from northern Iraq to Haifa Israel to make up for the pipeline that they just 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 II was so Israel could save a nickel a barrel on Iraqi oil because their own policies had cost them their access to Iranian oil.
Nine Guys and the Office State00:15:23
And so they were paying this extra premium after losing that source.
And this oil pipeline, the 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 Chalabi Conned the Neocons.
Okay, now, for your audience, they need to know, disclaimer, a long time ago, Salon.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 Desard, 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 4th, 2004.
John Desard, how Ahmed Chalabi conned the neocons.
The Hawks who launched the Iraq war believed the dealmaking exile when he promised to build a secular democracy with close ties to Israel.
Now the 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 Fythe.
Douglas Fythe 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 Shulski that lied us into war using lies funneled into the intelligence stream by Ahmed Chalabi.
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 Fythe'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.
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 Desard talking to Chalabi'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 them 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 Joseph and Edelman and all of these guys who lied rode Dysay Hannah and Edelman and Abrams Sholsky.
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 Wormser.
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.
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, you had Scooter Libby and Eric Edelman and Elliot Abrams.
No, no, pardon me.
Elliot Abrams was on the National Security Council with Zalmi Khalilzad, the same guy who was the primary author of the 1992 defense plan and guidance, along with Libby.
And Stephen Hadley, who was the deputy national security advisor.
Then you had on 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, and as a hardcore Zionist, of course, a classical definition neoconservative, along with Kenneth Edelman.
And Richard Pearl was the chair of the Defense Policy Board, which is a very important position advisory board.
And he was really the power behind the scenes, major ringleader of the group there.
Then Newt Gingrich was another fellow traveler, 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 14 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 Fife, who was deputy secretary of defense for policy.
And under him was Abram Shulski.
And Shulski was the 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 Chalabi'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 Ledeen 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 is for a very long time a reporter and is now, of course, the famous columnist, 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 is a somewhat conservative Jewish Zionist, New York Times writer, and Iraq war supporter.
Okay.
But he gave an interview.
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 Haaretz, 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 Hurst said it was nine guys.
But Friedman said something very close to that to Haaretz, that it was the neoconservatives.
It was this 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 Zelikow, 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.
Zelikow, you might remember, was the principal author of the 9-11 Commission report.
A lot of people don't like him for that for whatever reasons, good and bad, probably.
But Zelikow 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 blew up a pizzeria full of kids on a Friday night, Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to his survivors too.
So this is quite clearly incentivizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, right?
So that is a real security problem for Israel.
And as Philip Zelikow said, this was a real hard-motivating factor for the neoconservatives to want to launch this war.
So how does the military industrial complex now start stepping 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: 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 really with this money is how they took over and the organization it provided was how they took over the Olin and Mellon and Scafe 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 the, 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 importantly 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 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 Ladine would write and Jonah Goldberg would publish over and over and over again, Michael Ladine 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 De Lenda Est, meaning must be destroyed, right?
Like Carthage must be destroyed.
And Baghdad De Lenda Est Part 2, where he says it's the Ladin doctrine.
He approvingly quotes, the Ladin doctrine is that America, every 10 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 Raimondo 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 Trotsky's.
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, you know, as I show, we'll talk about this more in the Cold War section when we get to it later, but there's 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?
Government-Connected Regime00:02:20
Lockheed tried to get in to administering welfare payments and stuff.
They're like, they are not a free market operation.
They're a government-connected regime.
Are they trying 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 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.
Your guys will love it.
Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels by Richard Cummings.
And it's at my site, againscotthorton.org slash fair use.
And you can also find it at Corp Watch as well.
It was originally written for Playboy.com.
And I interviewed the guy about 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 lacudniks and who are piling 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, but many of, 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.
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 there's some incredible engineering that's going on there.
Sure.
And I wonder, like, do they all believe in what they're doing?
Supply Side Fantasies00:07:22
They have a narrower problem set that they're solving.
It's just 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 Hoofus?
Yes, but their customers, the U.S. government, and the U.S. 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.
Yes.
And listen, I got to tell you, man, this is so important.
I'm so glad that you mentioned this because 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 2015, 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.
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 and UAE want, not because of anything that has anything to do with America's national interests.
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.
And 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.
And they pretend that they're not dealing with the devil, but they are.
And 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 got to get rid of some H-bombs here.
What kind of deal can I cut?
What do I got to 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 M4 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 got to do to put this war in your driveway today, Lex?
I tell you that they hate Islam.
That the Islams hate your religion.
They hate your mama.
They hate freedom.
They did this.
Did I ever tell you about the Beirut bombing in 1980?
What do I got to 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 got to 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.
$8 trillion.
It's the self-licking ice cream cone.
It's the military-industrial complex.
Hey, you know what?
Don't you 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 settle on that.
And they did not know how absolutely demonic they sounded.
That 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 11th, his approval rating goes up to 90% because we can't fire the national government and replace it with another one.
Unelected One's Mandate00:06:19
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, 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?
He's the 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 like climbed 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, we 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 bowed down.
Oh, what?
Killing bin Laden and Zawahiri, the two most important guys that you could possibly target in the thing who are 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 H.W. 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 gut 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 thunk it?
So some of it is personal too, right?
And in fact, Crystal said, I remember seeing Crystal on TV say, well, and see, wait, wait, before Crystal, I said this to my math teacher in 11th grade.
Was you, Scott Hordon?
Yes.
Into your mouth.
In 1994, when the day that they announced, or the next day after they announced that W. Bush was going to also run for governor, just like his brother Jeb is running for governor in Florida.
I said to my math teacher, oh, you see what they're doing.
I was 17.
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 2000.
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 2000.
Nailed it, 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 even elected president, somewhere around there.
And again, I wasn't quite sure who Crystal was.
And I surely 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 re-election in 04 with Saddam Hussein still sitting there.
What if you lost just like your dad?
Your family could never lift that down.
Saddam's 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.
And 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?
Morality-Based Foreign Policy00:06:01
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.
Again, this is sort of the irony of the neoconservatives is 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 Trotskyites 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.
There's no different.
And I know, look, at the time I was driving a cab 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 had 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.
Of course.
And that's what makes America great is for the longest time the people had power.
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 and 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 guy to YouTube.
I had a guy in my cab who was like a Mr. FansPants man about town.
I dropped him off at some very swanky bachelor pat apartments off of South Mopac there.
He was a real nice guy.
And we had a long conversation because I wouldn't let the poor SOB 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, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tennant, none of them have said that Saddam did 9-11.
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 9-11, 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 the innocent dead Americans slaughtered on September 11th, 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, if this is the most barbarian 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 cab rise I don't remember, but there are a few that I do where it was, I got something wrong.
And the guy goes, no, no, no, 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 goals, 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 ain't 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.
It's this is business.
And that's how it goes.
And if you take a click with you, even, yeah, and even the most conspiratorial 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.
Believable Eisenhower Warning00:02:48
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 want no 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 53 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.
You know, which is at least possible, if not likely, right?
That that was what happened in Dallas.
But by these force, and we don't really know the full meaning the military and the intelligence agencies, right?
Is was the idea.
It's like a network of people that sure work together.
Yeah.
The black access program, special access program in the military, Fletcher Proudy 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 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.
Stop Printing Money00:10:47
We went to Bosnia and stay in the Middle East and expand wherever we can.
Asn't Howard's 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 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 to us, takes from us, and destroys.
Like, if you ever read 1984 in the past, I read it many times, of course.
And there's part of the book where Winston Smith is being brought under the wing of his future torturer, O'Brien, and O'Brien gives him the manual for how we do it, right?
And he holes 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 healthcare and infrastructure.
Anyone 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 all 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.
Again, bin Laden invited our government to do this, quote, self-inflicted wound, meaning really our government wounding all of us.
And this is the absolute crisis of our era: price inflation.
It's why people can't pay the rent.
It's why they can't afford to feed their family.
It's why they're forced to send their children to government school like a German or a Russian.
It's why they are 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, Mr. Ladine Doctrine, 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 6% 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.
But when they print the money, remember this, George Bush sent people, anyone who paid income taxes, got a refund check of an extra $300 or $400, depending on your bracket, in 2003 and 4.
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 off of this.
Like in the cliche 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 08 and the absolute decimation that came after that.
And then what Obama do 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 in just crushing the economy and forcing a massive recession on people.
But then what they do, they didn't just have the Fed lower interest rates and lower reserve ratios so that they could expand money even more.
They literally just mailed everybody checks of brand new money from the treasury, all brand new money.
And by some measures, they create two-thirds of all U.S. 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 is 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, 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 business to businesses to make other things and these kind of things, they make long-term farmers or another 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 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 onto 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 kind of things.
This is what leads to the cluster of errors that leads to the collapses.
And people can read the, 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.
And, you know, in a lot of times, goods that can never be reused.
Again, the plane can fly again, but the bomb shirt can't.
F-35s 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 too, Boeing and the rest, they have explicit gerrymandering type policies where they will have one small part of every weapon system made in as many factories as possible all 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 600 jobs in your district, Congressman.
Cab Driver to Libertarian00:03:00
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 Ron Grand Documentary.
I mean, look at this.
Look at this, right?
The number of citations here breaks 7,000.
7,000.
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 I'm 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 16, covered up the Oklahoma bombing, blamed it on one guy two years later, which they're still, they're no longer getting away with that.
There's a brand new book out called Blowback, and I haven't read it yet, but I know the fact checker and I know that it's right.
That McVay had friends, they were undercover FBI informants.
At least two of them, Roger Moore and Andre Strassmeyer, 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 cover that up and they got the whole media to go along with that.
And then, you know, I was a big fan of 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 any 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 pow 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's kind of a thriving, what they call 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 are 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, illnesses, I should say, that they were covering up and saying, oh, drink a beer, chin up, and don't be a wimp.
Ron Paul's Influence00:06:25
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 I. And so, you know, the Neo, the, the, the conspiracy kooks were batting 100, batting 1,000.
I'm not a baseball guy.
I'm a skateboarder.
They're batting 1,000.
Yeah.
You know, during that era, 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 a great.
And of course, Ron Paul came back to Congress in 97.
Was Ron Paul the person that sort 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 10 years before everybody else got their big Giuliani moment when Ron Rudy Giuliani in that debate in March, pardon me, May of 2007, where they fought over the motivation of Osama bin Laden to attack us on 9-11.
Ron said it's because we were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi for 10 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 the night on C-SPAM, Dr. Paul, on C-SPAN, the middle of the 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, and 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, has raised his family in West Texas for much 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.
I'm interested in this guy.
And then I'm reading the new American magazine, which is the John Burcher's magazine.
They have a very bad rap as racist 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 out 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 to my cab and I would have printed out Ron Paul 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 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, Mr. Franklin.
We are all Democrats now.
And it was just so good.
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, 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 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.
Cause what about this thing?
And he's just so wise and so good.
And his aides, by the way, his right-hand men all that time were also really great guys too, especially Jeff Deist and Danny McAdams have been his right-hand man and his great advisor this whole time.
And another just really good human being.
Yeah.
Well, he is.
And he's a doctor, not a lawyer.
He delivered 4,000 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 4,000 babies, well, I did too, because I'm his head nurse and I delivered everyone on myself too, along with him and all of that thing.
So 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 16 party.
Okay.
No scandals, not a hint of it.
He's got, I don't know, 150 grandchildren or whatever he is.
This is the American dream.
It's perfect.
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.
Citations and Defenses00:12:27
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.com slash Paul and read the last 30 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.
Okay, how the hell did you do this?
Okay, I could think of an answer to that, which is that unlike all your Harvard professors and all of this stuff, like the burden of proof is really on me, right?
Like it's because I'm just a skater 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 everybody'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 nothing.
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 capstone with Trump 1 is just at an end.
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'd be like if I wrote enough already in 2005 or six.
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 linguist and I've read 10,000 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 anti-war.com this whole time.
I've done 6,000 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 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.
In fact, it was leap day 2020, Carol Paul's birthday, 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 in Seattle, Washington called The New Cold War with Russia is All America's Fault.
And that's published at antiwar.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 the 2nd, 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 silly detailed question, but this is a gigantic book, extremely detailed, extremely well cited.
What's your writing process like?
How do you go through it?
So it started a speech and now you have this manifesto, this tome.
Yeah, well, as you can see, the chapters are just H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama.
And, you know, if you ever get the chance to read the thing, you'll see that this is really just a giant collection of citations.
I don't do too much writing in the book.
Much unlike Justin Raimondo.
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 7,000 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 pros in there.
I'm writing to you, but I'm mostly I'm marshaling 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 strawman my arguments.
I link when I say 7,000 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, 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 am an obsessive type where 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 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 goddang thing I can until I'm like, I'm terrified of being caught out being wrong on a fact.
And I have the book is 477,000 words.
And if it was six by nine and if the font was regular size, it would be 1,200 pages long.
That's how long the book is.
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.
But then, so a lot of that space really is citations.
But then also, 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 stances or whatever in the book.
And so I go absolutely to the ends of the 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 like 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 mysterious.
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.
That 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 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've 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's 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 Era and 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 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 the 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.
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 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.
And 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 Davidian 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 thoroughly articulate the evidence for your claims.
And you're just like me too, dude.
When you read a 300-page book, it tastes well.
Like, if you want to read this thing, it's not like a chore, but like, oh, I want to read that.
You're done 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 somebody else and whatever.
Well, yeah, listen, welcome to adulthood or whatever.
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, 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.
Callers Know Something00:05:45
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 awards are at 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 like meaningless their drivel 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.
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 16.
I was, wait, no, I might have been all, I might have been 18.
No, no, I would have, I was 16.
It was, it was, yeah, it was the same year that the Davidians were killed.
I was driving my first car down 183.
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 KLBJ 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 Davidians is what you read in the 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 kooks.
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 listens, 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 to me, that was the brilliance of talk radio.
And then where Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy were all polished and had their little programs, the guys on 5.50 a.m. in San Antonio, especially Carl Wigglesworth was my favorite.
But him and all those guys, even Ricky Ware, who was the John Hageite lunatic, but he was still such a sweet guy.
And their talk radio, their version of talk radio was, all right, Carl Woodsworth show, everybody.
We're talking about Bill Clinton selling cocaine down there with Dan Lasseter in me in Arkansas.
And we got Terry Reid 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 in the way I do my show on beginning on Free Radio Austin in 98 and 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 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 ain't got to fake that.
I didn't go to college.
I dropped out of ACC.
And my message ain't for elite policymakers.
My message is for my peers.
Look at what they're doing.
That's it.
And this is why the, you know, the Rothbardian style of libertarian populism really always appealed to me is because that's who it's geared toward.
The Cato Institute wants an audience with the Senate.
The Mises Institute and the Libertarian Institute and anti-war.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.
People on the Street Expertise00:02:54
That's where we come from.
We're not Washington, D.C. folk.
We're from out here and 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?
Well, I don't know if this counts anymore, but I spent a little bit of time in Denver listening to sports radio in Denver.
And these people are fanatics, man.
But the point being that, you know, Jimmy, the air conditioner repairman, is smarter than you, dude.
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 any other thing.
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.
Yeah.
And usually it comes with humility because people with PhDs and Harvard and so on, they usually have this overinflated 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 nothing 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 listening 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?
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.
Sharon's Skepticism00:07:50
And everybody understands that.
And they know that I never deliberately try to make them think one thing instead of another.
And if I did, they would obviously catch on to that.
And then I'd be completely ruined and have to just go get a job delivering auto parts or something, 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 rather, I guess, drive a Uber at night.
But if you still have energy.
Oh, I'm not even halfway done.
What about you?
Got all the energy in the world.
Maybe a quick bathroom.
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 previously.
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.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 Mearsheimer says in the essay and in the book, 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, you know, 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 J.J. Goldberg of being an anti-Semite because he had written in the Jewish Daily Forward about how Netanyahu wants to hit Iraq.
Sharon would rather hit Iran.
And J.J. 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's not peddling in some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in the pages of the forward, for God's sake, right?
He's 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 Iraq.
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 help 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 Dreyfus in the nation.
Then is a pretext for war.
9-11, 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 the NSA.
Pretext for War focuses on the neocons and the CIA and how the neocons lied us into war for Netanyahu and Israel.
I don't remember.
Oh, and the whole first part is about 9-11 and how 9-11 happened and how the government failed to stop it.
And then the shadow factory is really insightful on those lines because we often hear about the infighting 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, 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, 15 years ago or something, he said, yeah, because George Tenet 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 Tenet 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.
And I don't know.
Who knows?
These people.
But so 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 anybody 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.
Supreme Council's Rise00:02:56
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 I Shiite uprising, you might have real reason to worry.
Justin Rawmondo at antiwar.com wrote in 2002, he said, hey, look, everybody, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the CIA tried to give them 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, 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 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 Muqtada 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 Muqtad 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 kicked off 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 Baathist 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.
Sunnis Into Bin Ladenites' Arms00:12:58
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 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 breakoff 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 are 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 are the liberal papers and the New York Post and the Washington Times are the conservative papers, if you got that right.
So 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 finance, 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 82 without any direct support from them in that sense.
Although maybe I don't know enough about that.
But certainly in this case with Damascus, 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, huh?
How Israel helped to spawn Hamas, Andrew Higgins, 2009.
So I can also recommend Robert Dreyfus's book, Devil's Game, How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, masterpiece.
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 a 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 of 2004, 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 22% of historic Palestine, just as Arafat had done in 1988.
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.
And they're the ones who killed him.
And when they killed him in March of 2004, 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 Dar Jamael, the great war journalist, was there and saw they had pictures of Yassin in their windshields.
They called themselves the Al-Yassin 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 Blackwater 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 fight 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 Zarqawi, 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 Chalabi 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.
And Zarkawi was like 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 in, 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 Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib, they were mad because of Shimon Perez and Naftali 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 bomb vests, but he's not good at 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 300,000 troops, or at that point, maybe 200,000, but still.
And in alliance with the supermajority, 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 Yassin 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 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, you know, the war began in 03, of course, but like the real worsening of the insurgency in 04 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 we're more and more than the Sunnis, especially being cleansed from Baghdad.
And they're being pushed into the arms of the bin Ladenites.
All touched off by Israel assassinating their own pseudo-SOC puppet, you know, terrorist frontman 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 Muqtada 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 is 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 empowering, 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 kicked 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 who Saddam feared in 1980, which is why he started the war.
The same guys who George H.W. Bush feared in 1991, which is why he betrayed their uprising.
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 American Sniper about Chris Kyle directed by Clint Eastwood.
And I'm a real big Clint Eastwood fan.
I'm really disappointed in this fact.
It's 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, 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 destroys to go around killing commies in the case of El Salvador, preventing it from becoming a Nicaragua, right?
In the 1980s, 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 Petraeus.
He was the one in charge of this thing.
So that made the civil war just absolutely horrific through 2005, 2006.
And then coming into seven, now in 06, 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 Petraeus' 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?
Waging War on Iraq00:07:50
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 12 feet tall at the time.
Same guy.
Bush Jr. brings him in and he oversees the surge.
And this is where they do 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 600 of our guys in Iraq.
That's what they say.
Well, here's the truth of that.
It was 500 guys, not six, and it wasn't Iran.
Those bombs, they were a new and improved kind of IED, improvised explosive device.
Our guys called 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 Muqtada al-Sadr in the name of claiming that he was an Iranian agent.
In fact, Muqtada 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.
Muqtad al-Sadr was the least Iranian puppet of the major Shiite faction leaders because where Dawah and Skiri had lived in Iran for 20 years at this point, he hadn't.
He 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 Nouri al-Maliki from the Dawah Party, and we come to, this is the only time we talk to Iran at all, is sort of secretly, quietly agreeing on who the Iraqi prime minister should be as we're doing this, right?
So Muqtad 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 Sadr 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 and their affiliations, at least eight or ten different American and other foreign reporters there.
Nobody with a Iranian dog in the, 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 co-author, Michael Gordon, lived to still lie to us to this day in the Wall Street Journal, but he was the one in charge of 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 Sadder City.
I'm pretty sure that 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 prove this over and over again on the blog at antiwar.com in 2007, over and over and over again.
So, if in fact, if you just search my name, antiwar.com, especially if you search antiwar.com/slash blog and EFPs, you will get a bunch of hits because we went over this all at the time.
Making me feel extra old right now.
Yeah, that's 18 years or so ago.
Holy shit.
EFPs are made in Iraq by Iraqis.
Scott Horden, August 12th, 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 N2O 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, Dubawitz 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 parts.
And the reporters started milling around and they go, well, that's funny.
That one says made in Haditha 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.
Inside Iran Negotiations00:15:43
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 rationalization there was we are going to send an extra 30 or 40,000 troops to Baghdad.
We are 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 Petraeus, and this is the only victory that David Petraeus ever won in his entire stupid, stinking failure of a pathetic, lying life.
And that is when he convinced George W. Bush to surrender to the Sunni insurgency.
Mr. President, you're not going to defeat the Sunni 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 age male in the Ambar province.
We've lost, Mr. President.
And so what we're going to do is we're going to bribe the Sunni insurgency.
Right now, they have, well, okay, I overstay that.
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're 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 whatever.
These people are like, get these people out of my face.
And I show in the book, there are plenty of reporting about plenty.
There was plenty of reporting 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 05, was when the local Sunnis started killing the bin Ladenites themselves and saying, you can't tell us what to do.
You're more harmed 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.
So 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 Schauer said, bin Laden's only indispensable ally, right?
That you could do like a reverse 9-11 trutherism 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 Schauer said that, 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, 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 paraphrase the CIA warning George Bush about Al-Qaeda on August the 6th, 2001, when he told Michael Morrell, his briefer, the guy who later helped frame Donald Trump for treason with Russia and everything.
He told Michael Morrell, 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.
No harm to us whatsoever.
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 1983, when Ronald Reagan sent him to be special emissary over there, when he offered Saddam Hussein support for his military campaign against Iran and browbeat him and tried to get him to build a pipeline to the port of Acaba 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.
Two, 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 them in Baghdad.
They refuse.
And Seymour Hirsch 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 2003, first of all, in 2001, they held a million-man candlelight vigil in Tehran on September the 12th.
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, Zbign Brzezinski, the right-wing sort of hawkish realist national security advisor for Jimmy Carter, and Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger's right-hand man 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 1990s, 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.
And that was in the interest of his company and quite frankly, it was in the interest of the United States of America at the time.
Caused 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 Lex, guess why Clinton didn't do that?
It was because the Israel lobby said no.
And that was in the Washington Post.
They did this great series, Dan Ottaway and Dan Morgan, I think.
Well, whatever, Morgan and Ottaway, I forget their first names.
They did a multi-part series all about the oil politics of the Caspian Basin.
And it was AIPAC 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, waged from basis in Saudi, getting our towers knocked down.
Now it's the new era.
We go to war with the Taliban and Afghanistan.
Iran says we'll do anything that 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's headquarters was in Tehran.
Guess who sponsored the Iraqi Shiite exile to tell the neoconservatives that the new Shiite supermajority regime will build an 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.
It was 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.
It 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 1990s.
And so they had no love for the bin Ladenites whatsoever.
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 spitting 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-Kalk communist terrorist cult, which is like some Jonestown total kukeri type of a cult that that level of kukeri, 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 U.S. 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 Mujahideen-e-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 was 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 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 all, 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.
And 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 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 were now a married couple, Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.
And I've interviewed both of them at length and they have 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.
Syria's Complex Rivals00:15:31
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 Dawah 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.