Scott Horton and Dinesh D'Souza dissect the US-Iran war, arguing neocon agendas since the 1953 coup and 1983 Beirut bombing provoked Iranian retaliation. They claim Trump's strikes failed to coerce Tehran, destroyed American bases, and incentivized a nuclear threshold strategy. While D'Souza defends Israel's actions as necessary against radical Islam, Horton asserts US aggression created the very threats it fears. Ultimately, the debate concludes that American dominance in the Persian Gulf has collapsed, leaving Iran stronger and the US strategically defeated by its own provocations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Welcome Scott Horton00:02:24
Meeting now.
All right, we are live.
What's up, guys?
Welcome to the stream.
Welcome to the stream.
I got a special guest in the house, the legend himself, Scott Horton.
Scott, welcome to the show, man.
I've been wanting to get you on for a while now.
I know we have a lot of mutual friends.
Obviously, this is a very important topic that we're going to discuss.
And I think you're going to be able to open up a lot of people's eyes.
But I'm familiar with your work and who you are.
Can you please introduce yourself real quick to the audience?
Sure.
Yeah.
First of all, thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
And I'm a Ron Paul, libertarian from Austin, Texas, with a focus on foreign policy, especially.
I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute and of the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom.
And you can find out more about that at thefactsaboutiran.com.
That's some excerpts from the Academy course material with an emphasis on Iran issues there, thefactsaboutiran.com.
And then I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
I host the Scott Horton show.
I've done 6,200 interviews since 23 years ago.
Right around, what's the date?
23 years ago today, basically, right?
And Scott, can you turn your mic up just a little bit?
I want the people to be able to hear you.
They're saying you're coming in a bit low.
But if you could turn it up.
That's strange.
Okay.
Yep.
You sure I'm not up in the red now?
No, you're good because I'm adjusting it on OBS on my side.
But chat, give me ones if you guys can hear Scott now.
Do a quick check.
Here's my normal complaint volume, it's right around here.
Okay.
I'll try not to mumble too much.
Okay.
And look, I'm just a skater.
I hate the government and I'm.
I co host a show with Daryl Cooper, by the way, on Friday night called Provoked.
Nice.
And then, yeah, I've done the Scott Horton show, it's my interview show where I've done 6,000 interviews since 2003, I guess is what I was going to say.
And then I think that's everything.
Oh, and I wrote these books Provoked is about the American Empire in Eastern Europe and the war in Ukraine.
And then Enough Already is the one on the Middle East that basically takes you from Jimmy Carter through Donald Trump's first term on the terror wars.
Yeah, and I'm a big supporter of both those books.
You know, I think you bring a different and very fresh perspective in a very neocon driven foreign policy country.
Middle East History00:14:49
But yeah, if you could kind of just take us through the Middle East, our foreign policy, how did we get here in the middle of a war with a huge country like Iran with 90 million people that has obviously a very sophisticated ballistic missile and drone program?
How did we get here?
All right.
Well, I mean, it depends on how far you want to zoom in or out on it.
But I guess I could try to do like the fast ish version of this America became really the world empire after the Second World War.
And the communists got like a third of the world, and America got two thirds.
And then, so then the whole point has been to maintain this dominant position in Western Europe, in the Middle East, in Eastern Asia, and particularly to keep the commies out, but now keep everybody out.
And just make sure that America is dominant in the days since the end of the Cold War.
So that's the overall posture of America we will have the dominant military power on earth and no one will really be able to stand in our way.
And if they declare their independence from us, they're essentially declaring themselves a threat to us.
And it's, you know, they call it collective security.
Anyway, so one of the early major moves in the Cold War was a coup d'etat against the prime minister of Iran when he tried to.
Nationalized the oil resources there, and they're afraid he was going to tilt too far toward the commies.
I know people are trying to revise this history, they're revising the revisionist history nowadays.
They like to say, Oh, you're denying the agency of the people involved.
No, I'm pointing out that the agency, the CIA, was over there paying them millions of dollars, paying communists and Islamists to riot in the streets and destabilize the country, buying up all of the media in Iran to agitate against the regime.
Passing out millions of dollars to the actual individuals involved in the government and the military who did the coup and they orchestrated the whole dang thing.
Um, sounds familiar.
Doesn't mean that they possessed the souls of all the Iranians also involved in the plot, it just means that, yeah, there's such a thing as covert action, and that was what happened.
Um, they made the marginal difference, which is where the action is, as Ray S. Klein, the director of operations at the time, said, the director of.
The director of operations said at the time.
Anyway, so that was a coup of 53.
And what they did was they essentially reinstalled the previous British sock puppet monarch, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who himself was really the son.
They always act like he was the first, he was the son who the British had installed.
And America reinstalled him and kept him very well for 25 years.
But the problem was he was a dictator, essentially like a right wing fascist dictator.
His secret police were trained by the Americans and the Israelis and engaged in widespread torture and all that.
Now, people will spin that as.
Well, he's torturing reactionary and regressive forces when he was a modernizer like Ataturk and just wanted to build shopping malls and turn Tehran into a Western country and all that, and try to phrase it as some kind of benevolent dictatorship.
But it was a dictatorship and they used brutal tactics to stay in power.
And then his regime started falling apart at the end of the 1970s.
And in fact, they had spent extra money on American weapons in the 1970s after Vietnam.
Nixon really pushed them.
To increase weapons purchases from America to keep the military industrial complex happy, which helped to make his government even less popular than it already was.
And then in 79 or late 78, a revolution broke out over there.
And the Americans knew secretly that the Shah was sick with cancer and was dying.
And so that was part of the reason why Carter gave up on him.
Because what was the point of massacring all the people in the street to prop up a government that the guy was going to die anyway?
And they had no natural successor to him in power anyway.
And then get this.
See, by the way, it's not the slow version.
This is not the fast version.
I promise.
Take your time because people need to know this.
So don't worry.
I've gone over some of this stuff already with my audience, but it's fantastic that we're going through this just so they understand.
Take your time.
Cool.
Okay.
So this is 79.
I'm three at the time.
This is all going on.
And what happens is the State Department, the CIA, they tell Jimmy Carter that, you know what, we should go ahead and let the Ayatollah Khomeini come home from exile in Paris, France, and inherit the revolution.
And the reason why is because we know this guy.
He actually was part of a group of religious clerics who agitated against Mossadegh back in 53.
And so.
We can work with him.
It'll be fine.
They even compared him to Mahatma Gandhi.
So I didn't know that Khomeini's people also were involved in maybe not directly with Operation Ajax, but they also didn't like Mossadegh being in either.
Yeah, and I don't think he was the leader at the time.
I think he was part of a group that was led by his mentor.
You know, this is 25 years previously when he was a lower ranking guy, but he was part of that group of clerics who, yes, have been used in Ajax against Mossadegh then.
And that was part of the reason why the State Department and the CIA looked favorably on him in 79 as an alternative.
And so I even remember as a kid wondering, well, why would the French put the guy on the plane and send him home?
Aren't they our friends?
And the answer was yes, of course, it was because the Americans told them to do it.
And then, of course, they ended up regretting it.
But it's really important that people mistakenly conflate the Iranian revolution with the hostage crisis.
But I think it's really important to point out that there was actually about nine months in between the two.
The revolution was complete by the end of February of 79.
And America spent the year of 79 warning the new regime about threats from the Soviet Union and threats from Iraq, which had just been taken over by Saddam Hussein in a bloody coup that same year.
And so, America was trying to get along with the Iranians.
The Israelis certainly stayed in bed with the Iranians after that.
They weren't worried about the revolution.
And the revolutionary government more or less kept the same intelligence services just firmly under their control, but they didn't just completely disband the previous intelligence services.
So, they kept their relationship with the Israelis and with the Americans for a time.
But then, what happened was David Rockefeller, the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a very important billionaire of that time, he convinced Jimmy Carter.
To allow the Shah into the United States for cancer treatment.
And that was taken in Iran as a signal that America was going to nurse him back to health and then do another coup d'etat and reinstall him in power again and cancel their revolution.
And so that was what caused the riot.
And the riot was originally, I believe, led by leftists, not the Shiite Persians when they did the thing.
But then the Ayatollah blessed it and whatever.
They held the hostages to turn this terrible crisis.
They started burning the American flag and calling us the great Satan and all this stuff.
But that's all that your dad remembers about it.
You know what I mean?
That's all that people remember about what happened at that time was oh, they hate us, they call us Satan, they burn our flag and chant death to America and all that.
But that was after 25 years of propping up a sock puppet dictator that we had helped install in power and then sending a signal accidentally that we were going to do the same thing again.
And then, but then it was even worse because they launched a rescue operation called Operation Eagle Claw that was a massive failure.
And a helicopter crashed into a plane out at the meeting spot in the desert and the rendezvous point or whatever.
And then I believe eight people died and they had to leave some planes and helicopters behind.
And it was this catastrophe.
And so Carter was completely humiliated and embarrassed.
He's already kind of a weak and a gentle sort of a person.
So here he is trying to be alpha monkey of the society.
And he's got like these martial absolute failures.
On his watch.
He looks like a fool.
So then in 1980, in the just very soon after, in January of 1980, in the State of the Union address, he announces the Carter Doctrine, which says that now the Persian Gulf is an American lake.
And he started building up American military forces in the Middle East.
And it was really a threat to the Soviets not to invade Iran and try to dominate the Persian Gulf.
America under Carter in that same year, 79, had actually started backing the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
The local holy warriors, in order to try to provoke the Soviets into invading.
And they eventually did in December of 79.
So then, like, you know, right during the time of Operation Eagle Claw and all that failure.
So Carter is looking at the Soviet Union just moved into Afghanistan.
Well, they could move into Iran too and threaten the Gulf.
And in fact, I only recently learned that they admitted, the Americans admitted they were lying about believing that the Russians might do that.
But at the time, they were using that as an excuse to then announce this buildup in the Gulf.
And another major facet of that, crucially, was then America turned around.
Instead of warning Iran about threats from Saddam Hussein, Jimmy Carter gave the green light to Saddam Hussein, the new dictator of Iraq, who was absolutely every bit the monster that anybody ever said he was.
There's no need to embellish that or deny that he was exactly a socialist, fascist, murderous monster of a minority ruling dictatorship over the country.
And he was a brutal dictator and launched this horrific war.
Against Iran to try to destroy the Iranian revolution.
Now, picture the map of the Middle East in your head, real quick, because this part's important, okay?
Iraq, as I said, was a minority dictatorship under Saddam.
He was a Sunni, a secular Sunni, again, like a commie fascist type, nationalist type, olive green, you know, black beret on his head kind of guy, right?
And he had Christians and Kurds and Shiites in his government, but it was dominated by the Sunni Arabs.
They're 20% of the population.
The Shiite Arabs were 60% of the population of the country, super majority.
And then the Kurds in the north, they're Sunnis, but they're Kurds, not Arabs.
So there's a division there.
And they were on the outs, more aligned with the Shiites than with the Sunni Arab minority that ruled the place.
So now look at it from Saddam Hussein's point of view.
You're now the minority Sunni dictator of Iraq sitting in Baghdad.
And everybody to the east, all the way to Tehran and down to Iran and down to Kuwait, they're all the supermajority Shiite population of the country.
So now the danger is that these Iraqi Shiites are going to choose their Iranian, or pardon me, their Shiite religious sect over their national and ethnic sect as Iraqis and Arabs.
And they're going to side with the revolution.
And in fact, there were major religious leaders in Iraq who went and joined with Iran.
In the revolution, and sought explicitly to import it into Iraq.
So he was right to be worried about that.
There was at least some danger of that.
And so then his reaction, Saddam Hussein, that is, his reaction was to conscript all those Shiite Iraqis and send them to war against Iran instead.
He would use them as a threat against Iran instead to nullify the threat against himself.
And that was what kicked off the Iran Iraq war.
That was his reason for doing it.
But he asked permission, got the green light from the United States to go ahead.
And then from Jimmy Carter, and then all the way through Ronald Reagan, America backed Saddam Hussein in the Iran Iraq War of the 1980s.
It lasted the whole 1980s long.
That whole era of Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper and Hawk and Hosoy and all of that that happened, and that war was going on that whole time.
And including America gave Saddam Hussein the money to buy chemical precursors from the Germans and the French to make chemical weapons and gave him the satellite intelligence that he needed to target Iranians in the field with.
Even Sarin and Tabin nerve gas, as well as mustard and other gases, and targeted Iranian cities with them as well.
So we gave him the WMDs.
That's right.
So we gave him the WMDs.
That's right.
In fact, if anyone listening to this would like to read all about that, it's very important.
Just type in fff.org in your search bar, but then also add who gave Saddam his WMDs.
And you will find a list.
And I updated the, is my friend Jacob Hornberger's website.
But I updated all of those links for him recently and made sure that all those links still work from this great collection of articles that he got about American support.
And again, it's fff.org.
That's the Future Freedom Foundation.
Where did Saddam get his weapons of mass destruction?
There's a ton of stuff there.
And really reliable stuff.
So, anyway, and they also sold weapons to Iran during that time as part of Iran Contra.
And when they did that, and that was the point of that was to get our hostages out of Lebanon, was to and out of.
Oh, yeah, because all the ones in Iran had already been released.
But this was the Iran Contra deal, right?
In Lebanon.
I'm sorry?
You're talking about the Iran Contra deal with that.
Yes.
Yeah.
And so they were selling missiles to Iran in order to also.
Then get the hostages released, who were to make it easier in the negotiations to get the hostages released, which I'm not sure even worked at all.
And then they took the extra money.
The reason it's called the Iran Contras is because they took the extra profits from the arms sales and funneled that to the Contras in Nicaragua, who were fighting to overthrow the commie Sandinista government there.
And that was what ended up blowing up into the giant scandals, how it broke out.
But anyway, by the way, when they are sending the missiles to Iran, it was really the Israelis who were sending them the missiles.
And then America was paying them back with more missiles.
The Israelis were the cutout because crucially, here the Israelis kept their relationship with Iran the whole time.
That hostage crisis didn't affect them.
They were still friends and had a covert relationship.
Now, publicly, they denounced each other, but privately, the Israelis were selling missiles to Iran most of the 1980s long and kept this relationship going.
That didn't really change until 1993, but don't let me get too far ahead of the story.
So America, one, America supported the coup and the fascists in 53 that led to the revolution of 79, which they initially supported and then wished they didn't.
Israel Iran Relations00:16:05
Oh boy.
So then they supported Saddam Hussein in his invasion and his eight year long war against Iran.
Now, at the end of that war, it was basically a ceasefire and a stalemate, and they just stopped it, and the border remained unchanged after all of that.
But at the end of the war, Saddam Hussein was bankrupt and he owed billions of dollars to Kuwait.
UAE and Saudi Arabia.
And oil was trading at $12 a barrel at the time.
So he couldn't rebuild his country and he couldn't repay his debts.
And on top of that, the Kuwaitis were slant drilling or at least overproducing from shared oil wells on the Iraq Kuwait border and the Rumelia oil field there.
And so, and I think this was not a big conspiracy.
I think this was just a cock up, like stupid left hand, right hand, know what they're doing kind of thing.
Because what happened was, is CIA and CENTCOM were telling The Kuwaitis to be intransigent towards Saddam Hussein and demand, you know, call in their loans and make all their demands and be insulting about it.
The State Department was telling Saddam Hussein, you don't have to take that guff from them.
If I were you, I'd break their legs.
What are you waiting for?
I'm paraphrasing, but basically.
And then, but at the Defense Department, Dick Cheney was then the Secretary of Defense.
We're talking about Bush senior now, 1990.
And his deputy was Paul Wolfowitz, was Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy.
And he was paranoid about Iraq and did not want this to happen.
And they sent a strongly worded letter to Saddam, or they had Bush Sr. write one, but then it turned out it wasn't worded strongly enough.
And they were afraid it would also be, it would look like a green light or a yellow light, just like the State Department had given him.
So they tried to send a second letter, but it was too late.
And so Saddam went ahead and invaded Kuwait.
And then while he was at it, it was really easy.
So he didn't just take the northern oil fields, he conquered the whole country.
And like two days ago.
I'm sorry?
No, he did it in like 24 hours.
It was actually nuts how fast he took it over.
Yep.
And so marched all the way to see.
Hell, I can see it from here.
Why stop now?
Right.
So, and then April Glaspie, the American ambassador, even admitted to the New York Times, she said, well, we didn't think he was going to take the whole country.
They're giving him a green light to take just the northern oil fields.
And then he got carried away.
But really, it was the British who insisted we intervene.
And once Margaret Thatcher called out H.W. Bush, then he felt like he had to go to war.
And so he did and refused to negotiate Iraq's exit in good faith, which he could have.
And then they launched Iraq War I, crucially.
Operation Desert Storm, Operation Yellow Ribbon, Operation Country Music Song just produced and put out to tell you how great this is.
We beat the Vietnam Syndrome.
We launched this hugely successful war.
We bombed them for four weeks and we invaded for 100 hours.
And that was the end of that.
Boy, we whooped them good.
Everybody felt so good about the great war.
It's that it wasn't so short and sweet, was it?
Because we've been bombing Iraq for 35 years since then.
Yeah.
No exaggeration, literally.
And the reason why is because just like with all of these things, each crisis then becomes the cause of the next crisis and the excuse for the next intervention, which causes the next.
Crisis and the next crisis, and the excuse for the next intervention.
And so Because we helped Saddam go so far into debt with these Gulf states, we helped cause Iraq War I.
And then because we caused Iraq War I, then we also encouraged the Shiite uprising.
Bush Sr.'s government encouraged the Shiites and the Kurds to rise up against Saddam Hussein.
But remember, the reason he launched the Iran Iraq War, the war before last, was because he was worried about the Iraqi Shiites allying with Iran and turning on him.
Well, now America was helping the Iraqi Shiites do just that.
But the problem is, these were the Reaganites, right?
This was Reagan's third term under Bush Sr., and these were all the same men who worked for him, including Bush Sr., who had been his vice president.
So these guys looked at it and they went, Oh, no, we literally just spent eight years supporting Saddam's war to contain the Iranian revolution.
Now we are literally the ones importing it into Iraq.
And there were, in fact, Iraqis who had chosen Iran's side 10 years before, were now coming across the border to lead the insurrection.
And so that was why, even though George Bush Sr. encouraged the Shiites and the Kurds to rise up, he then allowed Saddam Hussein to keep his tanks and helicopters and crush the revolt and killed like 100,000 people to do it.
And so this is like the Bay of Pigs of Cuba, right?
This huge betrayal.
We sent all these people in just to be slaughtered without the support, which we shouldn't have done in the first place.
But anyway, I'm not saying support them.
I'm saying don't promise them.
So we were playing both sides essentially.
Like we were helping, obviously, Saddam Hussein, but at the same time, we were also, you know, Helping the Iranians in other roundabout ways.
And so at this point, America was in this position where, first of all, they had this excuse to stay in Saudi Arabia, it was to protect the Shiites there, right?
And then also the Israelis were upset.
And now we had beaten up on Iraq enough that they weren't really as strong as they were before to balance against Iran.
So then the Israelis in the new Bill Clinton administration in the early 1990s, in 1993, in fact, in his first year in power, they insisted, they now changed their strategy and said, we want to be enemies with Iran and we demand you be enemies with Iran too,
and that you stay in Saudi Arabia in order to balance and blockade, well, blockade Iraq and put balance against Iran and Iraq both from these permanent bases in Saudi Arabia using the excuse of protecting the Iraqi Shia and Kurds.
From Saddam Hussein.
This was what they called dual containment.
And it was a policy born in Tel Aviv.
And this was the leading cause of motivating the Mujahideen that they had supported in the Afghan war.
And I don't mean the Afghans, but the international Arab Islamic brigades who had gone to fight in the Afghan war.
That's what turned them against the United States.
And just leaving all trutherism aside for the sake of this conversation, Bill Clinton did support the bin Ladenites in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, even as they were already attacking us all through the 1990s.
Trying to provoke America into launching a cataclysmic war in the Middle East, which they ended up succeeding in doing.
And it was American combat forces stationed in Saudi Arabia was the number one issue.
And they were there to bomb Iraq and blockade Iraq, the number two issue.
And then right there, tied in third place, was American support for Israel and their cruelty against the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
And as Michael Scheuer from the former CIA bin Laden unit chief had pointed out, that all of Osama bin Laden's recruitment shtick focused on specific American foreign policies, like support for Israel, support for dictatorships, bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi, this holy Arabian Peninsula, and all these things.
And then that was how he recruited people to join the war against the United States, it was based on these issues.
And to focus back on Israel again for a second here, it was Yitzhak Rabin, the labor leader in the early 1990s, who Did Oslo.
He was the one who shook hands with Arafat on the White House lawn.
He went to Oslo and they started on the peace process for a two state solution.
Now, don't be naive, and I'm not naive.
They weren't looking for a real state, but it was going to be something a hell of a lot better than the occupation the Palestinians have suffered ever since then, that's for sure.
And Rabin's point was he wanted to make friends with the local Sunni Arab states and demonize other states on the outskirts.
This was the reversal of the so called periphery doctrine.
Where they said, we want to support Turkey, Iran, and Ethiopia to divide Syria, Iraq, and Egypt's attentions, right?
And they said, Rabin said, no, we don't want to do that.
We want to deal with the Arabs, but we got to deal with the Palestinians first.
But look, Iran.
And that was his way of dealing with the politics of trying to compromise with the Palestinians.
But then a Likudnik, a Netanyahu fan, shot Rabin in the back in 1995.
And his sidekick, Shimon Peres, took over shortly after that.
And part of proving what a tough guy he was is he did the same thing about demonizing Iran.
And as part of that, he invaded Lebanon in Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996.
And this is crucial because the lead September 11th hijacker, Mohammed Atta, and his buddy, Ramzi bin Al Sheeb, they were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany at the time.
And when Shimon Peres invaded Lebanon, they signed their last will and testament, which all their family and friends said essentially was like a symbolic thing, saying that they were joining the jihad, willing to sacrifice themselves in war against Israel.
And then what happened was They bombed a school in one school, right?
If I'm not mistaken, in Lebanon during this operation.
I'm sorry?
They bombed a school in Lebanon, if I'm not mistaken, right?
I'm about to say.
So, what happened was a couple of days later, after they signed their will, the Israelis attacked.
It was a UN shelter and they killed 106 women and children.
And get this it was actually Naftali Bennett, the past and probably future prime minister of Israel.
He was the artillery officer who called in the strike that killed 106 women and children at Kana.
And we call it the first Kana massacre now because there was a second one in 1996 and there was another one just the other day.
This is the land where Jesus is said to have walked on water.
That is the area there.
And in 1996, when they killed these people, when bin Laden put out his first declaration of war a few months later, he went on and on about the Khanna massacre, right in the first part of it.
And this is what convinced Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin Al Sheeb to join Al Qaeda.
And so, in other words, you have Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany.
Volunteer for a Saudi sheikh hiding out in Afghanistan to kill Americans to get revenge for what Israel's doing in Lebanon.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's kind of the letter to America that you're talking about.
And I remember back in the day, they censored it and we couldn't, you know, actually read it.
But yeah, the Sana'a killings, you know, being in the Middle East in general, protecting the royal family, obviously, all the things that were going on in the world.
Well, that letter came out in 2002, but even more instructive is his original declaration of war from 96.
And then the second one is from 98, it's much shorter.
But yeah, the first one is actually called Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
It's not subtle, right?
And it ain't about your freedom and R rated movies.
I mean, this is what it was about American foreign policy.
And on top of that, look, this was their motivation, but their strategy was to get America to overreact, to give an American president an excuse to exploit and start a war and invade Afghanistan so they could replicate what we had helped them do to the Soviet Union in.
The 1980s.
And people got very confused about that because the government said the Taliban did it because they hate our freedom.
And obviously, that's a bunch of crap.
But bin Laden was an engineer.
And again, Ramzi Ben Al Sheed and Mohammed Atta were engineers.
Ayman al Zawahiri was a surgeon from Cairo.
They were not Taliban illiterate, you know, redneck hillbillies from Pashtunistan.
They were citizens of the world, you know, more highly educated than us.
And they were first in international politics and they knew exactly what they were doing.
So I know people get upset about when I say that stuff, but that's the reality of all of that.
No, it's true.
But Bin Laden's family were billionaires.
I'm sorry?
No, I said, no, I said you're 100% right.
People don't realize, like, Osama bin Laden, for example, his family were billionaires.
Like, they, you know, built all the infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.
Like, these aren't just like cave dwelling idiots.
Yeah, exactly.
And when your government is telling you that the Taliban did it, a bunch of guys from Nangahar province did this because they hate that you have a Bill of Rights or something.
I mean, you have good reason to not believe that.
You know what I mean?
So, so fair enough to the skeptics there.
But anyway, Um, and as I said, yes, America, Britain, and Saudi continue to support these guys all through the 90s, even though they were attacking us, they didn't care.
That's the other guy's job to worry about that.
Their job is supporting these guys as long as they're killing Serbs or Russians or Shiites or whatever it is.
Um, then that's fine.
So, uh, that was the way that they looked at it.
Um, as they would say, then terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower, but then so this, then we pick up our story back after September 11th again, and now Bush goes to Iraq.
Importantly, a major obviously Bush Jr. himself had his own reasons for doing that war.
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld theirs.
But a huge part of what went on there was the role of the neoconservatives.
And most crucially, in telling the president of the United States, you're right, you're smart, this is what we should do.
We gamed it all out.
And our friend Ahmed Chalabi says it's going to be great, and all of this stuff that Bush believed because he's stupid.
And so, you know, the fact that he wanted to do it.
Was one thing.
The fact that he was able to find six think tanks full of Lakuteniks to tell him that this is going to work great, that's what made the difference and made the war happen.
You know, there was a New York Times full page ad that had like 175 or 200 or whatever it was academic experts warning against the war.
But that didn't matter, right?
Mearsheimer and Walt were on there, and that didn't matter.
It was the think tankers who got it done, and the think tankers, it wasn't the Council on Foreign Relations.
It was the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Project for a New American Century, Center for Security Policy.
It was the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
It was the Likud, the neoconservative movement, essentially the vanguard of the Israel lobby in the United States, and particularly close, not even just to Ariel Sharon, but they're both members of the same party, but particularly close to Benjamin Netanyahu.
And where Sharon was actually the prime minister at the time, they were still more Iraq hawks.
In agreement with the American president and with the then past and future Prime Minister Netanyahu.
And a big part of their thinking was based on I'm sure you're very well aware of this, and your audience is, you know, various degrees of familiar with this.
It's called the clean break.
And what it is, is just try to put this in a nutshell here, which always again is the kiss of death.
But it's David Wormser wrote this for Richard Pearl.
But he's the big brainchild behind things, he's so damn smart still.
It's amazing.
And what happened was, Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi Shiite exile, blew all this smoke up David Wormser's ass about how if America would get rid of Saddam or even Israel, we figure out how to do a coup somehow and get rid of Saddam Hussein.
They weren't even really proposing invasion in the Clean Break Memo itself, but whatever, it's still the same thinking behind it.
Clean Break Policy00:14:55
When he worked for Dick Cheney in the run up to the war, and he and Wolfowitz and Pearl, this was their consensus of how this is going to work.
No question about that.
And so here's how they thought it would work.
First, the idea was they would put in a Hashemite king, a cousin of the king of Jordan, and that then his magical bloodline would force all the Shiites into enslavement and hypnosis, and they would just obey him and do whatever he said.
And then he would use his, even though the Hashemites are Sunni kings, that these Shiites, they so revere anyone who claims to have the blood of the prophet that they'll just totally be enslaved to you and do whatever you will.
And then the new Sunni king will be able to tell the Shiite religious clerics in Najaf, down in southern Iraq.
That is Ayatollah Sistani and his friends, to tell Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to stop being friends with Iran and start making nice with Israel.
And that the new Sunni led supermajority Shiite Iraq would be friends with Israel and would be a great block against Iranian power in the region.
From Israel's point of view, the threat was Hezbollah in their north, the Shiite sort of mini state there, that grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon.
The 1980s, that they are armed by Iran by way of Syria.
But instead of saying we need to take out Syria or Iran, both of which seemed impossible at that time, they said, well, maybe we can get rid of Saddam and get America to get rid of Saddam.
And then.
So Saddam was a bigger threat to them first.
Well, before Iran.
Only because they're stupid, right?
Like, so they're evil.
They're cruel, evil, like premeditated psychopathic murderers.
Don't let me, like, acquit them, but they are dumb and wrong, right?
So, what they're saying is first, it'll be this Hashemite king will have this magic spell over the Shiite supermajority.
Then, you know, it's the Americans that got to get to do it.
And it's Bush's democratic revolution and all this.
So, they're not going to be able to put in a monarch.
And in fact, the king.
King Hussein died and King Abdullah took over, who I believe was his son, was King Abdullah, or maybe that was the cousin or whatever.
But anyway, they didn't have anybody available to be the sock puppet Hashemite king of Iraq anyway.
And Wolfowitz and all them are pushing this stuff about we're doing these regime changes to remake these societies into democratic, you know, model democracies.
They'll get along with us because they'll be so democratic and wonderful, and the wonderful populations will all want to get along with us, and it'll all be so great, was how they're selling it.
So they decided instead of A Hashemite king, they would end up putting Ahmed Chalabi, the same guy who convinced David Wormser of all this nonsense, they'll just put him in charge and he'll be able to run the place.
Well, it turned out once they launched the war, guess what?
It wasn't easy.
Just like there were no nukes, also, we don't completely pwn the will and intention of every man on the ground and what all they want to do.
And it turns out that Chalabi had very little influence.
His family had helped bankroll the upkeeping of one Shiite shrine in Najaf.
So he had like a little bit of political capital and he ended up with a cushy job at the oil ministry.
But he was never going to be in charge of the country.
And who ended up taking over the country?
Remember, Saddam invaded Iran because he was afraid that the Iraqi Shiites were going to join up with the Iranians, right?
Then in 1991, after the first Iraq war, that started to happen again with the Shiite uprising that Bush senior encouraged.
But then he realized, oops, the Iraqis who side with Iran are going to take over.
So he called it off and let Saddam crush them, which became the excuse to stay, which caused the terrorism war against us and all that.
And then now, what happens in 2003?
On the advice of the neoconservatives representing Netanyahu and the Likud, and Sharon by that time, of course, was totally on board for this and helped, despite people who try to argue about that.
They're totally wrong.
He totally was helping liaise into war at that point.
And then, what did W. Bush do?
Those same Iraqi Shiites who chose Iran siding in the Iranian revolution, W. Bush took them to power.
And so, in 2003, the war that we know of as Iraq War II, from 2003 through 2008, In 2011, that was essentially America falling for Chalabi's lies and waging a war on behalf of the Shiites, all right, but they're not under America's magic spell.
They're not under the magic spell of the Hashemite kings.
They're not under the magic spell of America's sock puppet Chalabi.
In fact, they are loyal to the Ayatollah, who's kept them well for the last 20 years before that and who now put them in power.
And so the leading groups that took over Iraq were the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
And the Dawah Party in alliance with Muqtada al Sadr.
And these were the guys that they fought the whole war for.
And this is crucial because this is really the only way to understand American foreign policy from Barack Obama all the way through right now, and even before Obama, they really screwed up in Iraq.
It wasn't just that it was morally wrong to start a war based on lies, it was that they fucked up everything.
It was what in soccer you call an own goal, right?
Where you're running the wrong way, Jose, and then, oh man, he, right?
So this is what happened.
Now, look, the Bin Ladenites were not from Iran, Iraq, or Syria.
The guy, our hijackers that hit our towers, they're not from Iran, Iraq, or Syria.
They were from our allied states, mostly Saudi and Egypt.
They hated us because we supported their governments, not because they were from our enemy states.
So, but our America's system of power in the region is our alliances of the Sunni kings.
It's the Shiites who were against it, it's the Shiite revolution in Iran that declared independence from us, right?
So, America is putting Baghdad on Tehran's side of the ledger.
So, then everything that they've done since then is somehow trying to make up for that.
And most especially Barack Obama's dirty war in Syria, where he supported the bin Ladenites, again, the radical Sunni Salafi edge, the Wahhabi edge of fundamentalist revolutionary Islam, fighting against us, as who, no, fighting for them, our enemies, the American people's enemies, as long as they're fighting against the Shiites.
And in the case of The Baathist regime in Damascus, Syria, the Assad family, they're Alawites.
And that's like sort of kind of a breakoff group of the Shiites and very close with the Shiites and allies with Iran.
And so, unlike Saddam Hussein's Baathist party, it was more Shiite friendly than Sunni.
And so, they were willing to back bin Laden Nighthead Chopper suicide bombers despite September 11th, despite the fact that they were the primary enemy in Iraq War II as the worst part of the Sunni insurgency fighting against the Americans there.
Obama went ahead and took their side.
Why?
Because they're trying to limit Shiite influence.
They're trying to limit Hezbollah.
They're trying to limit Iran.
And in fact, they ended up building the caliphate.
The ISIS caliphate was the result of Obama trying to spite the Shiites because we're mad at them because Bush fought Iraq War II for them.
But then once it blew up into the caliphate, then they went, ah, shit, it wasn't supposed to be that bad.
They were supposed to hit Damascus and get rid of Assad, they weren't supposed to conquer all of Western Iraq.
Ah, crap.
So then they launched Iraq War III.
Where they put America back on the side of the Iraqi Shiites, back on the side of the Iranians in order to destroy the caliphate, putting Iran up a peg again in two major Iraq wars in a row that they're fighting for people that they hate and wish they hadn't backed.
And so, from the point of view of Tel Aviv, everything that they helped convince America to do ends up only making the Iranian Hezbollah axis.
More powerful and more dangerous to Israel.
Clean break, nothing.
They were supposed to get total regional dominance out of the clean break.
And instead, Iran got regional dominance out of the clean break.
And in fact, they even got the Houthis in power in the capital city in Yemen when Iran didn't even want that.
Iran told the Houthis not to do it, and the Houthis went ahead and did it anyway.
And so, Iran got another state under their control, or not really under their control, but a close alliance with another country in the region.
Pretty much a direct, if maybe an indirect, result of Iraq War II as well.
So, in other words, W. Bush and Barack Obama.
What they did in the first two presidencies of this century was try desperately to spite Iran and screw Iran over.
And in both cases, they severely empowered them and put the Israelis in a position.
Oh, and I should have not left out in 2006, in the middle of the Iraq War, the Israelis tried to invade southern Lebanon and beat Hezbollah, and they got beaten back.
They got destroyed and kicked out.
And that helped to motivate.
The policy wasn't even just Obama's before Obama ever came to town that Bush started tilting back toward the Sunnis and the policy they called the redirection.
There's a great article by Seymour Hirsch about it in the New Yorker from March 2007 that says that look, oops, we empowered Iran.
So now we got to tilt back toward the Sunnis.
But yeah, that does mean the suicide bomber guys.
But oh well.
And that was the policy.
And so I have something for you, too, quick, Scott, because I really love it.
And I think that the chat's loving it.
We're going through a lot of history here.
Because that way everyone can understand how we got here in the first place.
But real fast, and then you could continue on.
There's two things that I really wanted to address that we kind of went over real quick in the timeline the barrack bombings in Lebanon in the early 80s, and the barrack bombings, and then the IEDs.
These two things have been huge justifications from Pete Hegseth and Trump to justify the current war we're in.
Can you explain that to the people, these two myths?
It's so funny.
You know, the people who accuse me of denying the agency of all the people on the ground who do what the CIA pays them to do are the same people who assign all agency for the Beirut bombing to Tehran and not to the local militia in southern Lebanon that actually did the attack.
Isn't that interesting how that works?
I would blame Iran too, to a degree, if it was, and I guess I believe it was an Iranian supported militia that did that attack.
I don't know that Iran ordered the thing.
Maybe they did.
And they did kill 243 Marines.
It was a hell of a thing.
It was not justifiable in any way, although it was a military target.
It wasn't explicitly terrorism.
I mean, they were Marines, but they were sleeping in their barracks.
It's kind of a nasty sneak attack there.
But it was direct retaliation for the Reagan administration intervening on behalf of Israel there and shelling neighborhoods more or less at random.
I don't know who was calling the shots there.
They were supposed to be hitting.
A Shiite Hezbollah neighborhood, but they started bombing all kinds of people and causing all kinds of havoc in Beirut at the time.
And there's even a story where later some hijackers took over a plane and they started going up and down the aisles looking for Americans and shouting, New Jersey, New Jersey.
And you can even read about this in the New York Times.
They have a quote from one of the Americans who survived the hijacking.
And she said, They kept shouting, New Jersey, New Jersey.
But what do they have against New Jersey?
What did we ever do to them?
But the thing is, that's the name of the battleship that Reagan had been bombing Beirut with, right?
This is blowback, right?
When the American people don't understand, no one will tell them why these things are happening to them, right?
But anyway, there's a major wrinkle in that story, which is that the Israelis knew it was going to happen and they refused to warn the United States about it.
And there's a very important book, which this is actually the only damn thing I remember out of there.
I need to reread this thing.
It's the only anecdote I've cited enough over the years.
The rest of the memories of it have kind of washed away.
And I actually reread this not too long ago to make sure my bookmark's still in it.
But it's Victor Ostrovsky, and the book is called By Way of Deception.
He's a former Mossad officer, and that's the slogan of Mossad By Way of Deception, Thou Shalt Do War.
And he explains that they said, Hey, that's what the Americans get for sticking their big nose in, which was funny because I think it was the official Israeli policy to ask Reagan to intervene.
But I guess these guys in Israeli intelligence didn't feel that way about it.
And they sat there and watched as this group built a truck bomb that was big enough that there could only be two or three targets on a very short list that must be the intended target here.
And the American Marine barracks down the end of some runway at the airport, or the end of one tarmac or the other down at the airport, was one of the obvious targets for it.
And all they had to do was pass on a little bit of intelligence that, hey, look out, man, they're making a big truck bomb and they might be headed your way.
And they did not do that.
And they sat there and allowed that to happen without warning.
And, question, we were there because Israel invaded in 1982.
This leads to the creation of Hezbollah.
And the United States is there, too.
Did we invade to kind of help with some peacekeeping between what was going on with the invasion of Lebanon by the Israelis?
Because, from what I understand, they didn't like that we were there in the first place.
That's why they attacked us, because we were there to do some type of peacekeeping, if I'm not mistaken.
I don't know enough about it anymore.
I have to go back.
I haven't read about this in so long.
As far as the background to the whole mission and what their supposed goals were at the time, I think it was always kind of jumbled.
In fact, there's even an anecdote where George Shultz, who usually is considered the more responsible one, Reagan's Secretary of State, talked him into this.
And then after he already gave the order or absolutely shook hands with Shultz on the deal or whatever, he informed the Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, who pitched a fit.
And so, what the hell are you talking about?
You didn't ask me first.
Sadr Faction Conflict00:15:02
Are you kidding?
And then went ahead and it was kind of too late to change his mind at that point for whatever reason or something.
So, the big thing is that Israel had prior intelligence that they were absolutely more than likely going to blow up this barrack and they never passed it on to us and they allowed it to happen.
I'm assuming probably to create aggression so that the United States would be involved in the conflict.
Possibly, or just they didn't care.
I mean, they may have just as easily assumed that Reagan would change his mind and get the hell out of there.
I don't know that.
For sure.
The reason.
You know, hawks often cite this as an example that I, and I guess bin Laden did cite this as see if you hit the Americans hard enough, they'll run.
But I believe that actually bin Laden was taunting the United States when he would say that because what he's trying to do was get them to quadruple down.
Like if it was that easy to get us to leave, that'd be one thing.
But like, for example, hitting us on September 11th, there's no president that's going to turn tail and run after September 11th.
They're going to go rain holy hell on somebody first.
And that was what bin Laden was counting on was an overreaction.
Not on replicating Reagan's retreat.
But the war party really seized on that.
They also seized on Bill Clinton's withdrawal from Somalia, as Bin Laden saying, and as he did on one occasion, see how easy it is to get them to run away.
You just kill a few of their guys and they'll pick up and leave.
But again, I think he was taunting him because Bin Laden also said that it was his guys that did the Black Hawk down shoot down in Somalia and that he complained.
He wanted Bill Clinton to invade.
He wanted to fight, quote, a war of attrition then and there.
He wanted to replicate.
The Afghan war against the Soviet Union in Somalia against the United States in 93.
And he's angry that Bill Clinton pulled out instead of doubling down after Black Hawk down.
And so, go ahead.
Go ahead.
No, I was going to say because Hegseth and Trump still to this day, right?
And I'm sure you've seen their press conferences, they use the Berk bombing.
And your response to that is hey, we don't know if that order actually came from Tehran.
You're just kind of loosely linking it to justify a conflict.
Would that be fair?
Is your position on it?
Because they still use that to this day.
Here's my thing, Myron.
Here's my thing, man.
Responsibility is a quality, not a quantity.
So you can divvy it up however you want, right?
The guy who drove the truck, he's the one who's 100% responsible, just like the guys who sent him all the way up the chain.
And if that chain goes to the Ayatollah Khomeini, then screw him too, man.
I'm not Iran's lawyer here.
I don't give a damn about that.
And I guess.
I've never seen it challenged that Iran supported the militia that did that, which I guess my best understanding was sort of proto Hezbollah.
It wasn't exactly Hezbollah yet, but it was like, or it was a closely aligned group that ended up being one of those kinds of things.
Now that you mention it, it was, I forget the name of the organization, but it was like, almost like a precursor to Hezbollah because some of them ended up becoming Hezbollah later on.
And then the other thing they used.
I was told one, you know, Pat Buchanan said that it was the Amal militia.
And then someone else said that that was not right, that it was some other group, you know, I don't know.
But so the thing is, I really, it annoys the crap out of me when the war party hides behind this excuse that all of their intervention doesn't count for anything because the local people, wherever they are, they all have agency.
And by this word, they mean I don't know what, that everyone has total free will regardless of all circumstances or what?
Your revolution's going to work a lot better or a lot worse, depending on the circumstance, if the CIA intervenes on your behalf.
Come on, man.
There's such a thing as covert action.
There's such a thing as American andor other countries' policies having an effect.
For example, Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan to bog down the Soviet Union and help bankrupt then, which actually helped and ended up helping destroy the Soviet Union, quite frankly.
It was obviously one of the straws that broke the camel's back on the entire damn commie empire.
And so, you know, and would anyone deny the agency of the holy warriors?
Who took all Rambo 3's money to kill commies in that war?
No, they all pulled those triggers.
They all killed those commies.
And also, the CIA helped them do it, along with the Brits and the Saudis, and everybody knows it.
And Hillary Clinton and Ronald Reagan took credit for it.
Okay.
So, agency, shm agency, man, what happens is, of course, when there's a coup, it's not like they put in some white guy from Alabama in the palace chair.
It's always.
To help one local faction defeat another local faction because we like this faction better, right?
At all times, the men in charge are over 18 years old and responsible for all of their own actions.
Also, so are the CIA men who hire them and the State Department, you know, weenies who write up the blueprint on what we're trying to accomplish here and all of these things.
So I think it bothers me when people try to invoke that kind of excuse for American intervention.
And so I would say, okay, well, fine, fair is fair.
If Iran supported this group that bombed the barracks, well, then screw them for that.
But I also got to point out to you that that was in 1983 when I was seven in second grade, eagerly awaiting the debut of the Return of the Jedi, and that Ronald Reagan sold them missiles the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that, okay?
And so Ronald Reagan didn't bomb Tehran over it.
They were pissed off.
He actually withdrew from Lebanon over it, as I said earlier, but he did not say that this is.
Acosta's belly to launch a war, and he didn't.
So, your position is more like it's really bad foreign policy that led to that barrack attack versus these guys just coming out of nowhere saying, let's just kill these Americans.
That's right.
And look, it's no apology for the guys who did it.
Yeah.
It is to say, however, like, yeah, you should be very careful where you station your combat forces because then they will be quote unquote legitimate targets in the other guys' eyes for sure.
They should not have been there.
And Reagan, it's actually important that he wrote in his diary that his biggest regret was putting them there in the first place.
Place.
And he never should have done it.
He never could understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.
He shouldn't have anything to do with it.
And as long as I'm on this tangent, I'll tell you Ron Paul, in his great book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom, which I named my Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom after that book, A Foreign Policy of Freedom.
It's a collection of his speeches.
And Ron Paul was in Congress back in the 70s and 80s, dude, before he went back to being a doctor and then came back to Congress in the 90s.
And so there are speeches that he gave from the House floor in the 1980s.
And I swear it's like this.
He says, Reagan, don't put the Marines in Lebanon.
It's a terrible mistake.
You don't want to do this.
Don't do it.
Then the next speech is, Mr. Reagan, get our guys out of Lebanon before it's too late.
We should not be there.
We should not be intervening.
You got to get our guys out of there.
Something bad is going to happen.
And then the next one is, see, something bad happened.
All our guys got bombed.
I told you we should not be there.
It's time to get out of Lebanon.
And then the next speech is, congratulations, Mr. Reagan.
You finally did the right thing after losing 200 and something guys that you didn't need to lose.
But at least finally you're doing the right thing now and listening to reason now.
Real quick, how much time do you have?
Because I know that.
Oh, yeah, we are over, but let's keep going for just a minute here.
We got some time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because I think all this history is super important for the people.
I just want to make sure that I don't hold you over time.
No, you're my last guy of the day, so I'm going to get away with it here for a bit.
Perfect.
Okay, awesome, awesome.
Because I also want to get into the war right now, too.
But history is super important.
I don't want to disturb you as you go through it.
Go ahead.
Yeah, it's all right.
And for people who get lost in all this, rewind it, man.
Plenty, it'll be here for you.
Um, but um, that's why I don't want to interrupt.
Let's talk about the IEDs in Iraq War II.
Okay, so first of all, an IED just means improvised explosive device.
Now, again, as I said, America fought that war for the Shiites against the Sunnis, and the majority of our enemies in that thing were what we would call broadly the Sunni based insurgency.
Uh, that's a bit of an oversimplification, but that was basically what it was the 20% minority that were losing their privileged position to the supermajority who happen to live where all the oil is.
So, the guys who used to be in charge are really on the outs.
They're losing all their power and therefore their patronage.
And so they fought like hell to hang on to what they had.
And it was a losing battle they lost anyway, because the Shiites were the supermajority.
Plus, they had the American Army and Marines on their side.
And so the Sunnis lost, but they killed 4,000 of our guys doing so.
And when we talk about Al Qaeda in Iraq, they would have been in the vanguard of that Sunni based insurgency.
Think of just West Iraq, is what we're talking about.
Mosul in the north.
Fallujah, just 20 miles west of Baghdad, and that whole Ambar triangle to Crete, Samara, Ramadi is mixed, but mostly Sunni.
We're talking about, you know, west and northwest Iraq is predominantly Sunni territory there.
Now, there's an exception in this.
I'm sorry?
No, no, I was saying IEDs as well.
Yeah, IEDs.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm not lost.
I'm just trying to figure out where I want to start up again.
So take your time.
There's an exception to what I just said.
That's like the general way to understand the war, okay?
But here's the big wrinkle in that.
The biggest wrinkle in this is.
The biggest wrinkle in this is.
Shiites versus Shiites, basically, is what Iraq war two now at this point, right?
Yeah.
And we're on the Shiite side.
Right, we're on the Shiite side and wish we weren't, but we are anyway, is basically the George W. Bush outlook on the thing.
It was supposed to give us dominance over the Shiites, but instead we're just putting Iran's best friends in power.
Now, the thing is, so there's a solution to that, according to Dick Cheney and his buddies at the time in the vice president's office, which is let's spread the war to Iran.
If we get a regime change in Iran, then we don't have to feel bad about giving Iran dominance in Iraq.
So we'll just solve this problem right now.
But the military warned W. Bush that they don't want to do it.
In January of 2007, they told him Iran can hit back too hard and it won't be like fighting Iraq.
We won't have escalation dominance in the war and they will be able to give us enough grief and our troops in Iraq will be at risk because they're embedded with Shiite forces.
Our bases in the region will be at risk.
Don't make us do it, Mr. President.
And so George Bush told them, okay, fine, we'll do the surge in Iraq, but not the Iran war.
However, that whole spring, the first, let's say Eden first, Half of 2007, when they launched the surge in Iraq, they launched a massive public relations campaign to get us into a war with Iran.
And here's where they said that an improvised explosive device, when it's in the hands of a Shiite, is an Iranian bomb.
And then they attacked one third of the United Shiite Iraqi alliance that we were fighting the war for.
They turned around.
And they attacked Muqtada al Sadr and his Mahdi army.
Now, it's a bit complicated here, but again, to zoom out a bit Sunnis in the West, Shiites in the Southeast, Shiites are the supermajority.
We're helping them take over the capital.
But the Shiite side is made of these three major factions Skiri, that's the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Dawah, and Sadr and his men.
Now, Sadr, Sadr, and what was the other one?
I'm sorry, Sadr.
Sadr.
Okay, these are the three big factions of the Shiites that we're fighting alongside against the Sunnis in Iraq, too.
That's right.
Now, here's the thing about it, though.
Skiri and Dawah had been living in Iran for 20 years and were very close to Iran.
Sadr was not.
Sadr had stayed in Iraq.
And Sadr was actually the least Iranian tied of all of the Shiite groups at that time.
But the Americans hated him because he was a nationalist.
And so he actually wanted to limit Iranian influence, but he also wanted to limit American influence.
And so the Americans preferred the Iranian backed guys who would allow them to stay and help them win their war.
Than the guy who was least backed by Iran, who wanted them to go ahead and get the hell out and maybe even make an alliance with the Sunnis and build a nationalist type government.
So we were more alongside, so we're fighting alongside the Shiites, three factions Skiri, Dawa, Sadr.
The problem with Sadr, he was more of a nationalist, so he had issues with not just Iran, but also us.
So we were aligning ourselves more with the Dawa and Skiri guys.
Even though they were the ones who were closer to Iran.
Gotcha.
Exactly.
Super important.
Okay.
Right.
And then the lie was that no, Sadr is the one who's closest to Iran.
And that's the only reason he's resisting us, is because the Iranians have made him fight our guys, which is just total crap, dude.
I'm telling you at the time, America attacked them.
David Petraeus attacked them.
And what the whole point was to build up this public relations campaign that when they resist, that every time the Shiites set off a bomb, now it's not an IED, an improvised explosive device, which could just be an old artillery shell made into a homemade kind of landmine.
Set on the side of the road that now these Shiite IEDs are all from Iran, and the way that you can tell, according to this propaganda campaign, is because they have a copper disc and a shaped charge that so that when the explosive detonates, that disc becomes a slug basically.
Um, that like the disc goes over the top of the thing, the explosion hits it in the middle, and so the copper disc kind of folds around the explosion, but then also gets superheated and turns into molten metal as it's flying toward your.
The underside of your tank and cuts right through it.
It was invented in World War II, apparently.
But the Iraqi Shiites learned it from Lebanese Hezbollah and they didn't learn it from Iran either.
They learned it from the IRA in Ireland.
Let me make sure I have this.
Okay, so because this is just so I make sure I have this.
Skiri, Dawah, Sadr, three sides fighting alongside the United States in Iraq, two in 2003.
Debunking War Lies00:07:06
Sadr did not like the United States andor Iran because he was an Iraqi nationalist.
But Skiri and Dawah were more alongside Iran.
So we took more of their side.
And then you're saying that they did manufacture IEDs, all three of these Shiite groups, but they didn't get it from Iran.
Rather, they got it from Hezbollah, who learned from.
Not all three of them, just solder.
Okay, so only solder.
Solder's the one they're attacking kind of on behalf of the other two.
Okay, and he was the one that made the IEDs.
Yes.
So they're marginalizing the nationalist on behalf of the more Iranian tied guys.
Because the more Iranian tied guys will allow us to stay, and the nationalist wants to kick us out.
So they're demonizing him as being the one who's closest to Iran when actually he's not the closest.
He's the least close to Iran.
Now, and then real quick, just to make sure I have this right.
So Sadr, you're saying, was not, but he's the one that gets pinned with the IEDs, if I'm not mistaken, even though the IEDs he was using, you're saying the original concept came from the IRA.
Yes, and I'm saying that his guys absolutely did use these bombs against our guys.
But my point is, those bombs were made in Iraq by Iraqis, proven over and over and over again by Shiite, Arab, Iraqis, not Iran.
And you'll get conflicting reports and rumors.
And I have people like contact me on Twitter and go, no way, bro, trust me, I was there and they at least helped them some one time or something.
But the reality is that they didn't need to.
I had a guy actually sent me a message and criticized me and said that, well, Iran did too back the Mahdi army, Sadr's group.
Well, I never denied that Iran backed them, especially after America started attacking them.
Hell, Muqtad al Sadr fled to Iran to survive and got a higher religious rank while he was there.
So he's closer to Iran now than he ever was before.
But that was a self fulfilling thing on the part of the Americans.
It was a big propaganda campaign to pretend that essentially the reason he was resisting us.
Was because Iran put him up to it.
When no, man, he was resisting us because our side, David Petraeus, attacked him.
And then Iran helped him defend himself and his group, essentially.
And the whole thing, the whole point of it was to build up this pressure campaign on W. Bush to force him or pressure him to launch a war against IRGC targets.
That's the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, their special operations teams inside Iran in order to touch off the war.
And in fact, it was funny at the time because we joked about it at the time that they totally dropped all their nonsense about Iran's secret illicit nuclear weapons program for like a year.
They just totally forgot about it.
You know how you forget about a lie because it's not even true.
So you forget what it even was.
They just forgot about that crap for like a year to push the EFP hoax instead, the explosively foreign penetrators.
And again, I'm not denying, and there are guys probably who fought in that war listening to this, I'm not denying that Muqtad al Sadr and his Mahdi army fought like dogs.
And I'm not denying that Iran supported them.
I am denying.
That Iran supplied all those EFPs.
I can prove that that's not true.
And I see in my book numerous sources demonstrating the fact that these things were being made in machine shops by Iraqi Shiites for use against American forces, who again were only even put in that situation because David Petraeus betrayed them.
And that's super important because that is what, and the reason why I wanted to harp on those two things the barrack bombing and the IFPs or IEDs.
The reason why I wanted to hone in on those two facts is because these are the two facts that Hegseth and Trump constantly refer back to to justify their current war that we're at now.
So, and I just want to make sure I get this because this is very complex.
I really appreciate you explaining this to us, Scott.
And by the way, this is all in my book, Enough Already.
And in fact, if you go to my sub stack or just search my Scott Horton show, all one word, and then Iraq chapter or something, because I published the whole chapter from Enough Already about Iraq War II on my sub stack.
And so, and in fact, oh, search this.
If you want to read about this, here's what you search soda straws and EFPs.
That is EFPS.
Soda straws and EFPs.
And that tells you the story of the EFP hoax there.
So, okay.
So I'll go through this one more time and then we'll go to the war.
So Skiri, Dawa, Sadr were fighting alongside the United States.
Sadr was more nationalist.
And so we ended up aligning more with the Skiri and Dawa.
And Sadr did use IEDs or IFPs.
We're fighting him.
What we're saying is that these IFPs, IEDs were not EFPs, excuse me.
They were not manufactured.
They're not manufactured in Iran.
Rather, they were manufactured in Iraq.
And the design came from the IRA and Hezbollah versus coming from Tehran, as people try to claim now to justify the current war.
Because Hegseth and Trump use this every single time they talk about why we're attacking.
Yeah.
And on top of that, the origin of the lie.
Was a propaganda campaign by the vice president's office, David Petraeus, and Michael Gordon of the New York Times, who's now at the Wall Street Journal.
They were the ones who were pushing this lie.
And, you know, as I cite in the book, I got military officers who, you know, absolutely verify what I'm saying.
Petraeus, and who was the other guy?
One more time.
That was the lie?
Vice President Cheney and General David Petraeus, who was in charge of the war at that time.
Oh, and Michael Gordon of the New York Times, which he was the co author with Judith Miller of all those articles about Saddam seeks A bomb parts in the run up to the war.
And she got cashiered right the hell out of there.
She's like in the Newsmax ghetto, and this guy gets promoted.
He got to stay at the New York Times all these years and then went to the Wall Street Journal.
So we covered a lot of the history, and thank you for that, Scott.
And then we went to Iraq War one, two, three.
Now I guess that can kind of take us to the conflict now.
Now that we've kind of cleared up the whole IFP things, because that it's crazy how they still push that propaganda.
So we bombed them on the 28th, right?
And the war's been going on.
I think, you know, we can both probably agree that Trump thought this thing was going to be a lot faster and shorter, almost like a Venezuela, and it's gone on way longer than he expected.
I'll kind of just leave it open to you so you can talk about the current conflict, how we got here, the nuclear discussions as far as like, you know, us trying to, you know, they can't have a nuclear weapon, whatever.
I'll just leave it open ended to you and you kind of go through this new conflict.
Yeah, okay.
So the first thing is, I guess, to debunk the lies of the motivations for the war, the excuses for the war.
Nuclear Weapons States00:11:38
The first is the nuclear program.
The second would be their support for regional terrorist groups.
And what the hell?
I'll think of the rest in a minute.
Yeah, they always use their biggest background terror, debt to America, the Barrett bombings.
We go through all the chants that get us so upset.
So look, the nuclear program is like this, man.
They developed it during W. Bush.
They really got it up and going in his second term.
Bush 1 or Bush 2?
And so, what it was is this civilian nuclear program.
And was it Bush 1 or Bush 2 though when they developed it?
Oh, Junior, no.
W. Bush.
Early 2000s.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, they had a nuclear program, a fledgling nuclear program of a different description before even built by the United States back in the 70s.
Their medical isotope reactor in Tehran, for example, but they didn't have a domestic uranium enrichment system.
Now, let's steel man this thing for a minute and just Pretend to hate Iran for a minute, but not be liars.
Okay.
So, if we're totally skeptical of their motives and intentions here, Myron, then you can look at the nonproliferation treaty's protection of their right to a civilian nuclear enrichment program as a huge loophole.
It allows them to master the fuel cycle, it allows them to perfect the mechanical processes.
Necessary to convert uranium metal to gas, to uranium hexafluoride gas, and then enrich it up to whatever percent they want in their uranium cascades, which are these giant collections of aluminum tube centrifuges where the gas passes from one centrifuge to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, down this cascade, is what they call it, as it gets higher and higher enriched, the percentage of 235, which is the sweet stuff.
And you're saying them being on the NPT allowed them to learn and master this.
Process which allows you to enrich at the 90% weapons grade by being a well known.
No, so it allows them to master the ability to enrich to any percent that's what I meant.
Yeah, right now they have never enriched up to weapons grade, yeah, but they could, right?
So now, and that's from being an NPT, right?
Just so I may, this is for them being an NPT, okay, non proliferation treaty, right?
Okay, so let me explain that real quick for the nuclear weapons states, for the nuclear weapons states who signed the NPT.
Which is all of them except, well, North Korea, India, Pakistan, and Israel.
But the rest are all members of the NPT.
And we promise that, oh, one day we'll get rid of our nukes, which is BS.
But more importantly, we promise not to proliferate nuclear weapons to our allies or anybody else.
And then the non nuclear weapon states promise never to get them, and not by hook or by crook or by making them or whatever.
Now, they could withdraw from the treaty and make them.
Any nation can.
But as members of the treaty, they promise not to.
And they also agree.
To have a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, which means that you have essentially international nuclear inspectors and cops standing around with seals and cameras and scales, verifying that all the nuclear material is where it's supposed to be and is not being diverted to any military or other special purpose.
So, Iran has had, as a member of the NPT, a safeguards agreement, and they had IAE inspectors continue to verify the non diversion of nuclear material to any military or other special purpose.
Over and over again, especially under Mohammed al-Baradai, but even after that, under Yukia Amano was his name, and these other guys who came later who are more conciliatory to American aims and accusations here.
They all still have to admit there is no nuclear weapons program there.
They're not making nuclear weapons.
What they were doing, which they never said this, okay?
But again, I'm trying to steel man this argument and say, from the point of view of someone who's a hawk but not a liar, let's look at this.
You know, in the most kind of way that we can.
We're going to take the neocon angle.
We're going to take the neocon angle so people understand.
Right.
So, what they did was they got themselves in the position where they could break out, as they call it, and try to make a nuke.
So, that is, they've mastered the fuel cycle, basically, is the point.
To the Israelis, this is absolutely intolerable.
This is no different than them having a nuclear weapon.
So, the Israeli position to the Americans has been get in there and bomb them.
And the American position has been no, we're not going to get in there and bomb them over their civilian program.
Bush de facto accepted enrichment.
Obama officially accepted enrichment.
Which they have the right to do, right?
Because they're signatures of that already.
They have already the right to do.
It's under the NPT.
But see, the Israeli demand is that they don't.
So the Americans are saying, okay, I'll tell you what.
Don't break out and try to make a nuke.
If you do, I will bomb you.
Okay.
The Israelis want me to bomb you now.
No.
But if you try to make a nuke, then I will.
I'll bomb you before you finish.
So don't.
Then the Iranian response was, We're not making nukes, so don't you bomb us.
And then implicitly, they never said this, but again, we're being hawks here.
Implicitly, they're saying, If you bomb us, well, then we might, because you know we know how to make weapons grade uranium if we so choose to.
So don't put us in that position, all right?
That was what they were doing.
That was the form of the standoff, okay?
But then last June, Netanyahu convinced Trump and they called the Iranians bluff and they launched an aggressive war and they bombed their nuclear program.
Well, two major results of that.
The first one is they really did set the program back.
I don't know if you can say obliterated, but they really put them back years and years and years.
They basically buried the Natanz and Fordo facilities deep and they completely destroyed the conversion facility at Isfahan, which is crucial for that's how you take the metal.
And turn it into uranium hexafluoride gas, which you need to put it in the centrifuges and enrich it, then you got to be able to turn it back into a metal again.
And so you can't do that without your conversion facility.
So they really have been put, if not back to square one, to square two or three or something.
They really got their asses kicked last June, after all.
America has the power to put bunker busters on targets, man.
And now remember their symbolic retaliation was 14 bombs and deliberately missed and warned ahead of time, please shoot them down.
A symbolic response only against the United States.
They hit Israel.
But they didn't dare hit the United States.
The old Ayatollah did not want to get into a war with America over this stuff.
He was telegraphing, do not want to fight.
Good question for you.
I've heard from people, I think John Kirikow mentioned this, that the reason why we got involved in the 12 day war and bombed their nuclear facilities is because Netanyahu and the Israeli government were threatening to use nuclear bombs against Iran because they were getting pummeled so bad during the 12 day war by their ballistic missiles.
Have you heard that as well?
Or do you agree with that?
Or do you not agree with that?
No, I don't know that that's true.
Okay.
I don't know that it ain't, but I'm not like disputing it, but I can't verify.
You haven't heard it.
Okay.
No worries.
So, okay.
So we bombed their nuclear capabilities during the 12 days.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Yeah.
So now it's funny, man.
You know, you could bet and you'd be right.
You can find the article, it's in Time Magazine that came out a week or two weeks ago, and it's about Trump seeks off ramps.
From the Iran war, something like that.
You probably pull it up.
And it's definitely in time.
And in that article, Netanyahu tells Trump after the war last June that, uh oh, guess what, Donald?
Now they're more likely than ever to go ahead and try to make a nuke.
What?
Then he says, so he says, you, so we got to finish the job.
It's not complete without regime change.
And hell, now that we bombed them, now they're more likely to make a nuke than ever before.
So we got to start again.
I just closed the door.
Go ahead.
You can keep going.
Sure.
And then, after this war started, he did the same thing.
Again, essentially conceding that they weren't making nukes before.
But now they're going to.
Now we put them in such a position that now they really have no choice.
So now we got to really finish the job, whatever it takes to achieve a full regime change and have our way there.
To prevent the consequences that were the fake accusation that could now come true.
And so, you know, it's no surprise, but that's exactly how they do it.
And I think this is a great explanation for how this war happened in just the last few months here.
It was that the Israelis lied, not just us into war, they lied Donald Trump into war.
And again, Myron, for the love of God, man, don't let me deny the agency.
Of the most powerful person, the most powerful single individual on the face of the planet Earth, maybe ever.
Okay, but the Israelis filled his head with shit and he believed it because he's stupid.
And then he made bad decisions based on those lies that they manipulated him into believing.
By all means, the President of the United States is over 18 and is responsible for his own actions.
And if he's gonna bend over and let the Israelis rape him in his brain hole, then he is responsible for that.
I'm not denying that, but I am saying to you, That it was not the Council on Foreign Relations that caused this war.
It was not the Pentagon Joint Staff of Strategic Planners who caused this war.
It was the fucking Likud, man.
It was Benjamin Netanyahu and his agents.
The guy Mark Dubowitz and his buddies at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Lindsey Graham, Alan Dershowitz, and very few people who are very close to Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud.
Uh, oh, Mark Levin, of course, pressured Donald Trump into doing this, and Joe Kent laid it out perfectly.
Now, you know, there's the Marco Rubio thing that said, Well, they were going to start the war and drag us into it.
Mike Johnson also seemed to confirm that.
I'm dubious about that.
I don't really believe that they would, that Netanyahu would, I guess he might blackmail Trump, but I don't think that he would blackmail Trump, and I don't think he would need to blackmail Trump.
I don't think that's what's going on here.
I know some people say that Tucker says he's enslaved to Netanyahu, and after all.
Donald Trump is a sinner, man.
Might he have crossed a line where he could have got compromised?
Yeah, sure.
But I don't think that that's what's going on here.
I think what happened was Netanyahu just essentially flattered him into believing that one, you can do this.
Netanyahu Blackmail00:15:18
And two, everybody else is actually a big wimp for not doing this before.
Yeah.
And that this is going to be your greatest achievement.
That these people call us the great Satan.
They're determined to destroy us, they're determined to do whatever they can to hurt us.
And nobody else was man enough to finally solve this problem for the world until you came along, Big Donald.
You just went in Venezuela.
Like you can do this too, you know?
Yes.
In Venezuela, you're absolutely correct to identify this.
And I'm sure you did, but I did.
And a lot of other people said, Right after Venezuela was so easy that, oh no, because now Donald Trump is going to be so high on how well that worked that he's going to essentially consider the Delta Force and then, therefore, i.e., the whole Pentagon to be essentially magic and be able to accomplish whatever his whim.
I mean, the Delta Force is his private army.
And you got to admit, it was quite something that they could get the president and his first lady and nab them right out of their beds like an Afghan night raid.
In the head of state in Venezuela and get away with that.
So then, but boy, did Donald Trump get coked up on imperial hubris there, right?
Like, this is, he was strutting worse than Dick Cheney.
He was so sure of himself after Venezuela.
You'd have had to, I don't know what, to stop him from going to Iran after that.
You know what I mean?
He just got too convinced.
And after all, like, there's a big mistake that people make.
It happens all the time.
It's all happened through American history, particularly Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, during Kennedy and Johnson, was famous for this, right?
Was mistaking all these quantities on a page, all these tactical and operational so called successes for a strategic success.
I mean, it sounds kind of silly now because you know the outcome.
It's weird.
But think about all that you've heard about from Vietnam that we're going to break their back.
We're going to break them.
They at some point will cry, stop.
Right.
But like, no, that's not true.
Yes, it is true.
You can bomb them.
No, it's not true that Ho Chi Minh will give in to you.
He will not either, and nor will his people.
And so you can kill even 3 million of them, and that will not break their back.
You will have to admit that you were stupid and wrong and lost and leave.
And that is the ultimate reality.
But it's the same thing here.
You hear it from Pete Hegseth and his people constantly.
We bombed X thousand of this, and we bombed X. Thousand of that and why thousand of this, and nobody could stop the big green machine.
Man, we have ultimate power, but any junior high school kid ought to be able to tell you that.
Well, wait a minute now, tactics and operations are two things, and strategy is something else.
And being able to achieve your strategic goals you know, in other words, a political outcome that you desired is there are other things that matter besides simple firepower.
And we saw this also with Iraq War II.
If you said in 2003, this war is not going to go well, people would get so outraged and say, How can you doubt the strength of the US Army?
And it's like, Well, I don't think anybody does doubt the strength of the US Army.
You know what I mean?
Maybe some people even overestimate it.
I don't think anyone underestimates it, but you understand that strength.
Don't count for much when you're sending guys out on patrol in aluminum Humvees getting blown up with homemade lamb mines, right?
We're not talking about meeting the Wehrmacht in the field.
We're talking about trying to pacify a civilian based insurgency of sneak attackers fighting for their own territory on their own territory.
Strength, nothing, right?
They're just blowing smoke.
It has nothing to do with it.
And we ended up losing that.
Well, we ended up helping the supermajority crush their enemies, if that counts as a As a tactical win, but strategically, again, we fought that whole war for Iran.
We fought that whole war for the people that we hated the most.
I mean, the whole, not we, the US government hated the most.
The American people's enemies are the Bin Ladenites, not the Shiites.
Yeah.
But anyway, you know what I mean.
So I think that's the same thing that's happening here.
Donald Trump got sold this idea of just power and unstoppable strength, and then believed that he could get what he wanted simply by ordering that things explode.
And then he came to find out the hard way that, like, no, that's not true.
This is a giant nation of 100 million people with two giant mountain ranges, and they've had 30 years to build mid range missiles.
And now, what are you going to do?
And ultimately, as you know, we're talking about this during the ceasefire, which I really pray holds.
I know a lot of people think that they're just biding their time to escalate.
But maybe not.
But I really hope that the ceasefire holds.
But as we're recording this during the ceasefire, America has, and this is like George W. Bush, Iraq War II level strategic catastrophe.
Not only did they not destroy the nuclear program, they did not coerce Iran into forsaking all of their regional allies, like the Iraqi militias, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen.
They have not convinced them to do that, or Hamas, even for that matter.
They're not renouncing their support for Hamas, although they don't.
Give them that much support, but whatever.
That strategic goal has not been achieved.
Their missile force has been degraded, but whatever.
By a couple of years, they still have, by all accounts, tens of thousands of missiles left.
They could go right back to war right now and fight for the rest of the year.
As far as anyone can tell here, they're not in danger.
All those claims of Donald Trump that we've decimated their entire missile force and all that is total hogwash.
It's not true at all.
Nobody believes it.
Yeah, I think a recent report came out saying, like, we.
Hegseth and Trump say 90%.
Then, you know, some other reports came out from the intelligence saying about 50%.
I mean, we've only degraded maybe half of it.
They said, I remember on day two of the war, they were like, oh, yeah, we destroyed 90% of the launchers, yet they're still hitting it.
Let me ask you this, then, Scott, with this conflict.
Wait, one more thing real quickly before, just to wrap up that thought, is on the other side of America failing to achieve their strategic goals here, they have a massive strategic defeat in the loss of all our bases in the Middle East.
Just as I warned, and I found an article where I warned about this back in August of 2005.
That the entire Persian Gulf is up for grabs in the event of a war with Iran.
They could close the Strait of Hormuz and end all Saudi oil shipments to the world and drive the price of oil up to $200 a barrel.
I wrote that 21 years ago, dude, at antiwar.com about what they can do there.
And they have proven that.
And they have essentially called America's entire bluff on our military empire in the Middle East.
Now, we still got H bombs, and nobody better ever attack us.
And in fact, nobody better ever attack England or else we'll H bomb you, I guess.
But can we defend?
Even our own bases, much less your country, with conventional power?
Apparently not.
Apparently, enough mid range missiles and drones are enough to keep the mighty American superpower at bay.
I mean, we can't even pull our star destroyers into orbit offshore there.
I mean, our aircraft carriers are 500 and 1,000 miles away over horizon after horizon after horizon to prevent from getting hit by Iranian forces.
We got to launch our F 18s and refuel them twice to get them to Iran.
I mean, our bluff has been called.
Justin Logan at Cato said, What good is a military base that you can't wage a war from?
The answer is no good.
So, this whole mythology from Carter Doctrine in 1980 all the way through that.
The Persian Gulf is an American lake.
It belongs to us.
Nobody ever better try to dominate it or we'll treat it like an attack on the United States of America.
Our military bases in Iraq, in Kuwait, in Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi, UAE, and Oman guarantee the sea lanes and guarantee the Persian Gulf.
All that's over now.
All that bluff has been called because Donald Trump let Benjamin Netanyahu talk him into this.
Now, I'm with Ron Paul.
I said we need to pull all our guys out of those bases and close them all down anyway.
But we should have listened to Ron Paul and done it deliberately instead of having to do it in a humiliating defeat at the hands of a second rate power here.
But let me tell you, like, those results are going to stick, Myron.
The Persian Gulf is called the Persian Gulf for a reason.
And that whole bluff of American supremacy there is over now.
And it is the ball is entirely in Iran's court to decide how they want to deal with their neighbors and everybody going forward here.
But those shots will not be called in Washington now.
Now, when it comes to the nuclear program, I've always said, you know, that I look at Iran more as like a nuclear.
You know, threshold head state where they kind of maintain it for deterrence purposes.
But Trump and Hegseth always, oh, they're never going to get a nuclear bomb.
We're not going to let them get a nuclear bomb, blah, blah, blah.
What would you say to the, you know, the MAGA Tards, I call them nowadays, that are saying they're going to get a bomb.
They're going to get a bomb.
They're weeks away.
I think Trump said like a week or two ago that, you know, they were three months away from a bomb, even though Midnight Hammer was supposed to have set them back years.
What's your response to these people that always talk about Iran getting a nuclear bomb and not being rational and everything else like that?
Well, through their idiocy, they may prove themselves right now in the worst self fulfilling prophecy kind of way.
As I was saying before, like in that Time Magazine article, Netanyahu told Trump, now that we attacked them last June, now that we attacked them, now they're going to break out and get a nuke.
And then he told them the same thing after this war, where they weren't making a nuke.
Netanyahu goes, now they're going to make a nuke.
So you have to follow through.
You have to prevent this from happening.
The thing that you and I just incentivized them to do more than ever before.
So, you know, if you ask Robert Pape from the University of Chicago, he's like, it's purely academic.
They 100% are guaranteed to race to an atomic bomb now because their latent nuclear deterrent, their threshold nuclear deterrent was not deterrent enough.
Remember, as I described that standoff, don't bomb me and I won't make a nuke.
Bomb me and I might.
Well, now Trump has called their bluff.
Now, at the same time, you got to admit, though, he really set their program way back, too.
So, if they are going to break out and make a nuke, It's going to be much more difficult than it would have been.
And it'll have to be, they'll have to get away with it in secret because he's already, he's going to be there for another three years, apparently.
And he's already proven he's willing to bomb them.
So if he thinks three years.
Yeah, if he thinks that they're starting again, he'll just bomb them again.
You know what I mean?
They have not attempted to reopen Forda or Isfahan or Natanz since the war last June.
And so now, if there's any kernel whatsoever of truth to this accusation that these people are clinging to to extrapolate from, it's that they did enrich up to 60%.
As Marco Rubio says, the only countries that enrich up to 60% have nuclear weapons.
But that doesn't mean anything.
You're not making nuclear weapons out of 60%.
It is technically possible, but no one's ever done it.
And it would have to be a huge, unwieldy, and extremely complicated device.
And there's virtually no chance they're going to do that.
Whenever anybody makes a nuclear bomb, other than Hiroshima was 80 something percent, low 80s, but virtually any other uranium bomb is above 90% uranium 235 in order to be able to get a good bang out of the dang thing.
And they have never enriched up to weapons grade.
And it's.
You think that was more of a bargaining chip?
That's right.
It was used more as like a bargaining chip.
And I've seen you talk about this on other shows how enriching to the 60% was more of a strategic thing to trade that away.
To lift the sanctions rather than racing towards a bomb, even though now they're going to probably race towards a bomb because of our aggression.
Although I'm not convinced of that, but they're much more likely to, that's for sure.
But yes, the 60% absolutely was a bargaining chip for negotiations.
They were saying, oh, you don't like it when we enrich up to 3.6%, and you don't like it when we enrich up to 20%.
Let's see how you like it when we enrich up to 60%.
Are you guys ready to come back to the table or what?
That was what it was all about a bargaining chip in order to give up.
And then the idea was you just give the stuff to the Russians, or you have Russian engineers come, and then you dilute it back down again.
You add more uranium 238.
To the mix and the cascades, and you dilute it back down to usable fuel for your reactor.
This is like the opposite of enrichment.
So, you can actually dilute the gas.
Yeah, you can dilute it from the uranium hexafluoride gas.
Yeah.
So, let me ask you this.
That was the whole idea.
And then, by the way, just like I quoted Marco Rubio there, all the rest of these kooks address it in that same way, right?
They go, oh, well, why do you think they got 60%?
What do you, oh, 60% something, something.
They can't form a declarative statement.
Around what is Iran doing with this 60%?
Why are they enriching or why did they enrich to 60%?
What do they say about it at the time?
What are the implications?
What are the weapons implications that any of this stuff?
They all just go, oh, 60 something, 60, 60, 67, blah, blah, blah.
Like it's just some slogan.
In fact, they never explain it because if they explain it, then you have to understand that, yeah, no, clearly this is simply diplomatic language that they're saying, look, man, I'm trying to make you nervous.
There's one easy way to solve this.
Just come back to the table.
And we'll give you our assurances again.
And they're saying this now, and I'm not quoting them in the sense of like, oh, we have to believe them now or whatever.
But what they're saying is, listen, man, we have the right to enrich uranium.
We're an independent nation.
You have no right to tell us we can't.
We have our own domestic mines, and we're going to continue to enrich uranium, and you can't stop us.
You say you have concerns.
Well, let us address your concerns then.
And that has been their position.
And by the way, they were not making nukes this whole time.
They would have at least.
Some by now.
They were not.
They never made the decision to break out and make that nuke that, you know, Trump now claims, oh, they were two weeks away.
Give me a break.
They were not either.
That uranium, whatever they have in these casks, is buried in the ground.
It's either in metal or in gaseous form.
It's not in any processing facility where it can be enriched to a higher percentage.
There is no conversion facility to turn any gas back to metal.
And then plus all of the effort that it would take to actually machine a warhead and all and the explosives required and all of this.
Isfahan Raid Facts00:02:29
There's just nothing like that going on there.
They are purely blowing smoke when it comes to the recent Iranian nuclear threat.
They did.
More or less, obliterate the program last June.
And if they did break out to make a nuke now, I don't know how long it would take them, but it would be a while.
Okay.
That's what I was going to ask you as well as.
They absolutely have gotten away with a completely secret facility that nobody knows about.
There is a facility at Pickaxe Mountain, which they seem to be looking at trying to turn into a new enrichment facility, but that doesn't count.
That doesn't, you know, we know what that is already.
What about the Isfahan raid?
Weapons program there.
What do you think about the Isfahan raid that we tried, where, you know, we ended up.
Making it into a return, sorry, a rescue mission.
What are your thoughts on that?
I don't know enough about that, honestly.
Okay.
I don't know enough about whose version.
I don't believe that that was all about the uranium because I think it would have taken a lot more guys to try to do that.
And for force protection, I mean, I'm no military strategist, but like on the basic level, any real effort to track down the uranium in Iran on a significant basis to get the, I forgot the number.
I don't want to tell you the wrong number of the kilograms of stuff that they have.
Most of it, I believe, is gas or something.
And it's like two to 400 kilos, I think, is what they got.
What about this guy?
To get all that out of there would require a lot of guys, a lot of earth moving equipment, planes full of it.
Think of it like top tier special operations in the middle doing the hunt, and then lower tier special operations, and even maybe regular infantry standing around the perimeter.
It's just totally imagination prohibitive.
You can't do an operation big enough to get the uranium.
And then also get the hell out of there again.
And Isfahan is a major city, an ancient major city where they're bombing all the historical treasures and everything, by the way.
But I mean, never even mind their million man army.
Probably just the men of the town with their pitchforks and axes would be enough that the Americans would have to get the hell out of there, man.
It just seems totally impossible.
It sounds to me like a Hollywood movie where only two guys survive at the end.
Yeah.
And that's what a lot of people suspect that they're in the process of building a FARP and getting a bunch of these people here.
That's why they had MC 130s and everything.
But I'll skip over that.
What would your response be to the people that say, oh, well, they chant death to America in Israel?
American Strategic Defeat00:14:59
What would your response be to that?
Boo hoo for your tiny homo little feelings, maybe?
Like, give me a break, dude.
And they chant that, like, yes, some of them do sometimes or whatever.
And in fact, this is important.
It sounds maybe like I'm making excuses, but it really is true that, like, I come to learn about this and people have written about this.
Do we cuss on this show?
Yeah, yeah, no, you can't.
You're good.
Of course.
So, death to this and that just means fuck this or fuck that in Iranian.
It's just an idiom, which just means I don't like this thing.
I stub my toe on the curb.
I say death to the curb.
The guy who, there's an article about this called Death to Traffic.
The guy's in a taxi cab and he's sitting in the backseat, and the cab driver says death to traffic because it just means fuck this shit, right?
It doesn't mean I didn't know I'm going to kill every last one of you, you know?
So, that's like, so, okay.
So, within their language, Like, that is okay.
When they, the way that when you say death to something, it's our equivalent of saying, fuck this.
Right.
I didn't know that.
Okay.
And by the way, just think about all the genocidal language Americans use against Iran.
Like, big deal, dude.
Sticks and stones will break my bones.
You know, names will never hurt me.
I got to tell you, I have never sweated one drop in my life over Iran chanting death to America, dude.
Yeah.
You know, it's, and part of that is because it's been America at war with them for 72 years.
Not them at war with us for 43.
Yeah, our intervention has kind of created that animosity.
47, I guess, is the slogan.
Let me ask you this then, Scott.
So, like, Who's winning this war and why?
I think they already won it.
Okay.
Because America went in there with goals that they completely and totally failed to achieve.
And the Iranians are coming out much stronger strategically in terms of their dominance over the Gulf.
So this is a W. Bush level strategic suicide for the American empire.
Absolute idiot mistake.
So we're in the middle of the ceasefire.
Like you said before, you know, you wanted to go longer, which I hope it does too.
What do you think comes next after this?
Do you think a ground assault is.
Is possible or probable.
I know Trump's mobilized even more resources into the region.
You know, people are getting orders that they're going to get deployed.
You know, even as much as Trump says that this is going to be quick and we're going to be done with this, everything else shows otherwise with the mobilization of all these assets.
What are your thoughts?
I don't know, man.
I mean, the absurdity of the thing should be the end of the argument, right?
It makes no sense to do this.
You're not going to be able to get in there and get the uranium in any kind of Hollywood movie fashion that you could support, that you would believe in.
You can't send in the Marines to reopen the Strait with force.
I mean, somebody's got to be able to explain to him what can't work here.
And in fact, doesn't it already seem like he gave up?
On, I know what you're saying is true about the recent buildup of forces moving there and all that, but otherwise it seemed like he already backed down from that.
That we're really, and especially, you know, think about all of the announcements.
We're moving a bunch of Marines from East Asia to go to the Persian Gulf now.
Iran, get ready.
Yeah.
We're coming.
In case anyone wants to set up any booby traps near your casks of uranium that you buried, now's the time.
Like, What it's just, it makes no sense.
It makes no sense that they would do it.
It's just too damned crazy to believe.
And so for now, I don't.
For now, I think that Trump is licked and he knows it and he's got to find his escape hatch here.
He's got a ceasefire.
He'd be the worst damn fool to undo the escape hatch that he has successfully been able to create for himself here with this ceasefire.
So may you know, whatever you know, prayers go through and get him to tell Vance to.
Bring this thing home somehow, man.
We'll accept some enrichment, whatever it takes to call this thing off.
Yeah.
And I think the big hangup is two main things number one, Lebanon not being put into the ceasefire.
And then, second, from what I understand, the U.S. still, for some odd reason, says no enrichment, as if we have the leverage to even tell them that at this point.
And yeah, there's still signatories.
I'm looking right now.
There's still signatories of the NPT, which means by international law, they can enrich.
We can't tell them no.
And isn't it kind of hypocritical that?
Israel's not a member of the NPT, trying to tell them that they can't have nuclear weapons.
Isn't that nuts?
It is.
The whole thing is completely crazy.
I mean, they stole weapons grade uranium from the United States in order to make their nukes in the first place.
The whole thing is crazy.
And their doctrine is just absolutely contrary to American national interests.
Again, they got us on the side of the Bin Ladenites against Hezbollah, but it wasn't them that knocked our towers down.
It's just completely crazy.
That's why I'm always talking this Sunni Shiite stuff.
I want people to understand who are the shirts and the skins in the fight so that you can see.
They try to say there's no daylight, there's no discrepancy between Israel's interests and ours, but they couldn't be more diametrically opposed.
In fact, what we, the American people, want and need is an end of bin Ladenite terrorism at all costs, andor at least not do anything ever or tolerate any other country, especially any ally of ours, doing anything to support bin Ladenite type terrorists.
And then otherwise, all we want is peace and stability so that everybody can trade and get along.
You know, people always invoke the Monroe Doctrine, but read James Monroe's speech.
From 200 years ago.
What it says is, you stay out of our hemisphere and we promise to stay out of yours.
And we will accept, as he puts it, he says, we will accept the government of all nations of the old world as de facto legitimate.
Whether they are or not is somebody else's problem, but it ain't ours.
Let me ask you this, Scott.
How much more time I got with you?
And I appreciate you.
I really need to go here after this.
Okay.
Let's say you got a job tomorrow as Trump's advisor.
What would you tell him to get us out of this thing while still somehow saving face?
Because I think Trump is staying in this conflict longer because he's trying to find some political off-ram that doesn't make him look weak.
And it doesn't seem as though the Iranians are going to be as open to negotiate as they were before.
What would you tell him?
That's right.
Look, I would tell him just come home, man.
Forget the deal.
Pull out America's sticking points.
We got 15 demands, they've got 10.
I don't think JD Vance is man enough to see it through, man.
I don't think it's really even possible, quite frankly, for Trump to climb down as far as the Iranians are demanding he climb down or vice versa.
So I think the best thing to do, and this is something about Trump that is horrible, but it's also maybe his greatest strength, is that he can go from demanding unconditional surrender one day to unconditionally surrendering the next.
And nobody cares.
And he doesn't care.
You know what I mean?
Like he said when he announced the ceasefire, he goes, We're going to take Iran's 10 point plan as a basis to start negotiating.
That was like, okay, dude.
Fine with me, man.
Anybody says taco, like he's chickening out around you, you smack him in the mouth.
Y'all shut up, man.
He needs to be encouraged to do this.
It was wrong for him to start, and it is right for him to stop.
And, you know, anything he does to call it short now needs to absolutely, absolutely be encouraged.
And we should, you know, Especially, you know, when Democrat types try to call him weak for giving in too early or some kind of thing like that, they need to be shouted down into oblivion, which, by the way, that did happen.
The horrific and horrible Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut started making fun of Trump for backing down and being wimpy and stuff.
And a bunch of leftists and liberals and progressives ruthlessly attacked him for it.
And then he backed down and said, Oh, no, you misunderstood me.
That's not even what I meant and whatever, which it absolutely is, too.
And they just, Told him, like, look, we are not going to tolerate that from you, son of a bitch.
You understand.
And he said, okay, okay, you guys are right, is what really happened there.
So it's important to keep that kind of pressure up.
My last question is obviously, right now, we're in the middle of a blockade, right?
Trying to create some financial or economic strife on Iran.
What are your thoughts on the blockade?
Bad idea, good idea?
What happens next?
Well, yeah, no, it's terrible and stupid.
And they're just going to end up giving up and quitting, thank goodness, at some point.
I mean, they're not even truly enforcing it now.
They're trying to, and they're Claiming that they're enforcing it, but there are ships that are getting through.
And I just think, you know, and Trump has announced that Vance is going back over there to deal with them.
So I can, I guess, try to be hopeful about that.
I think we're going to stick around.
I think it's in everyone's interest to reopen the thing.
The question is just going to be how much money does Iran make off of it from now on, you know?
Yeah.
No, but Scott, where can the people find you, man?
I'd appreciate you hanging out with us a little bit longer.
And thank you for all the history.
I think people learned a bunch here.
Where can the people find you?
And what are some new projects you got coming up, if any?
Well, what I really want to do is restart my interview show.
I have way too many jobs.
I always take on these gigantic projects that I have to finish knocking out.
But ultimately, I want to get back to being a daily interview show like before.
And that's the Scott Horton show.
Again, 6,000 interviews going back to 2003.
If you want to catch up on this stuff, that's how I know it all is from all the guys I asked about it.
And then the Scott Horton Academy is where you get the deep dive on all this stuff, the long form thing, as Tom Woods says, it's Scott Horton slowed down so that you can catch up.
And get everybody on the same page of understanding all this stuff.
So we're all just bulletproof against the war propaganda and don't have to put up with this stuff anymore.
And in fact, specifically on the issue of Iran, go to thefactsaboutiran.com.
And then otherwise, check me out on Amazon and at the Libertarian Institute and antiwar.com.
And guys, I got all his links pinned at the top of the description.
I got scothorn.org and I also got thefactsaboutiran.com.
So make sure.
And also, guys, go get his book Provoked.
I'd love to talk to you about Russia, Ukraine on the next one because I think.
That's something else that's like, you know, severely misunderstood by many Americans.
Today we kept the Middle East, but, you know, we can set up for the next one.
But no, Scott, thank you so much, man.
You're a wealth of information.
It's always, you know, fun listening to you speak about this stuff and then having you on the show has been great.
So thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you very much for having me.
Appreciate it.
All right, brother.
You be safe.
Take it easy.
All right.
W. Scott, guys.
W. Scott.
W. Scott.
Hope you guys.
Like that one.
As you guys can see, there's a reason why I wanted him on the show.
He's brilliant.
You know, the guy's probably forgotten more than 99% of the people know in the White House.
And I just wanted you guys to get that knowledge, man.
W. Scott Horton.
Definitely go pick up his stuff, guys.
Definitely go pick his stuff.
Pick up his stuff.
I'll read some of the chats.
And I apologize, guys, that I didn't read some of your chats or gifted subs and everything else like that.
I wanted to, we were, we were.
Short for time.
He won a little bit longer.
We're supposed to end at like 7 30, but he gave us an extra hour.
So, W. Scott.
And I'm going to try to bring more high IQ guests like that for you guys on here.
Oh, shit.
Hold on.
And I think we're going to debate Dinesh Souza here soon, guys.
I'll coordinate that here in a second.
So, we got a banger show today.
So, let me go through the kick feed real quick.
So, Red Pill Clippers, thank you for the five gifted.
You actually gave six gifted.
Hard Art, thank you for the three gifted.
And let's see here 404U, Gnome12, Jesus Christ is King1228, Late Hours, DLO, shout out to all you guys.
Appreciate you, Ninja, so much.
Giannis193, CCSGO.
Shout out to all you guys, man.
Appreciate you, ninjas.
And then let's go ahead into the OSS.
Spinning says, Bro, Mar, tell my friend that those G pictures on Twitter don't mean shit.
He's trying to discredit you and clown me for watching you.
I told him, obviously, or not.
Yeah, he's an idiot, dude.
He's an idiot.
Like, I mean, I've already explained those photos a million times.
I was on a training trip.
My teammates broke into my room in the morning and fucking jumped on top of me playing the fucking music and flicking the lights and waking my ass up because we had practice at 5 o'clock in the morning.
And, you know, it is what it is.
If you guys actually, you know, it's called being a D1 athlete or in the military.
People are stupid.
Yo, Amara Gaines, I'm the Army.
I'm the Army, and I had a VIP come from my brigade down to my unit.
We are working this week with him and discuss some inside info.
Please don't expose me.
Okay.
The reason we're fighting Iran is because China gets almost all their oil from Iran, and we're fighting Iran to control the oil that China makes, which makes up 80% of how much they get from Iran.
No, they don't get 80% of their oil from Iran, they get it from other places.
But I see what you're saying, though.
It is a way to weaken China.
Myron, why do I just want to leave my girlfriend when I think about her past, even though it's not that crazy virgin?
I mean, dude, if she's a 304, get out of there, bro.
You know, trust in your gut.
If your chick is a 304, like, it's in your best interest to get out of there.
Nebraska police felony shot a woman who slashed a toddler after leading the assault of Walmart at knife point and alleged kidnapping.
Interesting, interesting.
That's crazy.
Let me see here, chat.
So, we're going to go ahead.
I'm going to coordinate with Sean here in a second to do this thing.
With me chat.
We're going to talk about the Iraq, sorry, the Iran war.
So let's see here.
Trump Tax Changes00:02:57
Oh, looks like Trump is doing a dress in the country right now on taxes, tax week.
Maximus W interview with Scott.
He had me taking notes.
Also, for anyone, his website is factsaboutiran.com.
Exactly.
I put that below.
Random question.
If you were going to pick a religion, which one would it be?
I grew up Muslim, bro.
Won't denounce the religion.
Let's see what Trump's yapping about over here.
I think he's here with Scott Besant.
For those of you who have children born during President Trump's Term Treasury will see, and I'm going to coordinate the Dinesh Souza debate here on the side for you guys as we watch this.
Um, leave that account with a thousand dollars for those of you with children under 18.
You can add to those accounts.
Great philanthropists like Michael Susan Dell are adding to that.
The and the other thing, too, is I want to remind everyone change your withholding if you're getting a big tax return or big tax refund this year, it's because you didn't change your withholding last year.
If you go, you change your withholding now, you'll get an automatic raise in your real income.
Your weekly, monthly income will go up right here, right now.
And I just want to thank President Trump for championing this program because I can tell you some of the more traditional Republicans on economics didn't want this to be part of the program.
President Trump fought for this the whole way, and this is why we have a new program.
Bigger Republican Party is because of policies like this.
So, thank you all.
Thank you.
Thank you, Scott.
Before I introduce you, I just want to say two things that seem to be very important.
So, right now in this country, we have more people working than at any time in the history of our country.
Think of that.
And also, that's pretty good.
And you know, while in Europe and a lot of other places, they're looking for oil, they're looking for gas, they want gasoline.
They're having a hard time.
We have a lot.
So, at this moment, right now, we have more oil production than Russia and Saudi Arabia by far.
Russia and Saudi Arabia put together, if you add them up together, and by next year it will be double that amount.
So it's pretty amazing.
Those two facts.
More people working than ever before.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Officer Cruz Littlefield, please.
Mr. President, thank you so much and welcome to Las Vegas.
My name is Cruz Littlefield.
I'm a local police officer and a Las Vegas native.
I have a deep appreciation for the city and have made it my calling to now protect and serve those who also call it home.
With the passage of the great, big, beautiful bill, my wife and I have benefited from the elimination of taxes on overtime, allowing us to stretch every dollar in an increasingly expensive world.
Las Vegas Police Interview00:09:21
With less financial stress, I'm able to be a better and effective asset to my community and more present with my family.
We also just welcomed our newborn baby girl a week ago and And have already contacted our CPA to make sure that the Trump account gets started and set up.
That's good.
That's great.
Thanks to you, we're now securing her a better financial future than we were ever given as kids.
Mr. President, thank you for your time.
And thank you for your continued effort to support the American people, especially here in Las Vegas.
I have family and friends.
This is my brother.
Oh, good.
But I have family and friends in Las Vegas who are barbers, small business owners, bartenders, and first responders.
For them, it is a step towards a stronger and safer community.
So, thank you.
That's great.
Thank you, Chris.
Good job.
Good job.
The co founder and CEO of a local nonprofit doing really well called Power to Parent, Erin Phillips.
I'm right here, actually.
Hi.
I'm Erin Phillips.
It's an honor to be here as a mom and a founder of this nonprofit organization.
We believe that empowered parents protect kids, and so everything we do flows out of that idea.
And as a mom of five, this is deeply personal to me.
It's not just something that I talk about regularly.
We've seen so many families, especially in our community, that feel outmatched by systems.
And so, what we do is we try to empower them to advocate for themselves through policy and really just help with their children's education in general and any issue that is a parental rights issue.
So, that's what we do.
And I just want to thank you for what you've done in regards to protecting women's sports.
We know that.
LOL.
Protect women's sports.
We're really protecting the opportunities that our daughters have.
And I have daughters myself.
And so that's really, it's so important.
And so many girls have already been hurt.
So thank you for what you've done on that level.
And then, you know, it also helps them know that they're worth protecting and that they matter.
And I think that's something that we haven't shown.
Now, with that said, he banned, you know, LGBT people, you know, the alphabet people from playing in women's sports, which I think is a W, because it's not fair for them to, you know, compete against men.
Because I do think, guys, Sports for women at an early age is good, keeps them from being 304s.
But obviously, professional is a joke.
Our girls prior to this.
Yeah.
One more thing that I just really want to highlight is the Federal Tax Credit Scholarship.
And I just need you to know that this is a game changer for families who feel stuck.
I think oftentimes we have these families that I already mentioned that they feel outmatched by systems and they are stuck in a system that is not working for their child.
And so, what this scholarship does is it expands education freedom and it gives parents the power to choose the right education for their children.
And families that we serve in our community, it means hope.
It means access.
It means a future for their children that they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford.
And we are already planning, preparing to help families access this money here in Nevada.
So thank you for that.
And lastly, I just want to say that I'm grateful for your leadership because you recognize the critical role that families play.
So thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
Great job.
Thank you.
Thank you, Aaron.
Thank you, Jeff.
Thank you very much.
Bartender and makeup artist Erica Cassell.
Hi, President Trump.
I'm a makeup artist and a bartender here in Las Vegas.
I just wanted to say thank you for all you've done for us.
I know as a bartender, the no tax on tips is amazing, especially.
I'm going to start crying, guys.
I expect you, mom.
It's great for my daughter.
Speaking of women, guys, don't forget to get my book, Why I'm Deserve Even Less.
We're waiting on Amazon to bring us back, okay, here.
But do me a favor, guys.
Okay, we were at 4.7 yesterday.
We're at 4.8 now, guys.
Do me a favor, pick up the book.
It's only, you know, the Kindle version is 9 11.
You want to support me, guys?
Pick up the book.
Every one of you guys at OSS, watching our cake, YouTube, et cetera, pick up the book, okay?
And leave a review, guys.
I got some losers that came in, right?
Because this book was like a number one bestseller.
But then obviously my paperback version got taken off Amazon, messed up with the numbers.
So hopefully we'll get it back in a few days.
But if you guys pick up the Kindle version, or you can get the hardcover, the hardcover looks pretty good, as you guys can see behind me here.
Pretty high quality, right?
Looks pretty damn good, right?
If you go ahead and you get it, the hardcover, 30 bucks, but it looks pretty good, nice and clean.
Or just get the Kindle version, as you guys can see right here, because the Kindle version is only less than $10, and it's a great way to support.
And to be honest, what I really want, right?
I don't even care about the money.
I just want you guys to leave a review.
That's the main thing.
So if you guys rock with me, click that button, get it on Kindle, and then leave a five star review.
I'd really appreciate that.
That helps so much with everything.
So, yeah, man, I got freaking losers that came in and left low reviews because they're haters.
Because you guys remember the Netflix documentary came out, fucking dorks.
As well, the Trump accounts are also amazing.
So, thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
Good.
Well, you enjoy it and good luck.
Good job.
Thank you, guys.
And a longtime culinary worker, great person, Nicole Williams.
Thank you.
Thank you, Nicole.
Hello, Mr. President.
I am a longtime bartender on the Las Vegas Strip, and I first heard the idea of no tax on tips mentioned to me by my friend Alita, who helped manage her campaign in Nevada.
And she's amazing.
She mentioned it to me, and I started thinking about what an awesome idea it was because in Nevada we have what is called a tip compliance.
That's where the IRS comes in and they say, You're going to make this amount of tips in an hour.
We're going to tax you on that.
Even if you don't make that amount of tips, you're going to get taxed on it.
So I thought that would be an incredible opportunity to keep some more cash in my pocket.
So then she reached out and I actually spoke at an event for you for No Tax on Tips.
I spoke with you the day that Robert Kenny.
The greatest hospitality employees in the world here in Las Vegas.
Absolutely.
And I don't know what's going on.
What the hell?
Massive rallies here in Nevada was actually at Sunset Park, just south of here.
And you made this no tax on tips pledge.
And everybody heard it for the first time.
And people were just excited.
And as Nicole mentioned, it wasn't just a pledge, but you did it.
So on behalf of all the hospitality workers here in Las Vegas and Nevada, thank you for putting more money in the pockets of our families.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And just one other thing.
I'm a former captain with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
I know how much overtime these police officers work and how much overtime a lot of employees work.
And for you to make that pledge and come through and no taxes on overtime, again, thank you very much for putting money in the pockets of our families.
God bless you, love.
Thank you, Savage.
So, I just want to say this is a special state.
It's a special place.
We've done so well here.
I have so many friends here.
It was great before I ran for politics, ran for office, and right up till this moment.
And even this event, there's a lot of love.
It's just such love.
And, you know, those three things, but especially here, but really here, it's all three.
It's overtime, right?
And it's you take a look at the tips.
The tips are, I don't even know which is the biggest.
You could probably take a poll.
And it's social security, no tax on social security.
Who would think?
And when I did it, it was a pretty big number.
Let me, could I ask you?
All right, let's jump on to Twitter space real quick, guys.
Actually, give in to the powers that be to save themselves and their family.
That's just human nature.
So I don't mean it as being disrespectful.
And they could be dead.
Maybe these people were not going along with the plan that was at the top.
But just like with Maduro.
You're wrong.
You're wrong.
Just stop it.
Just stop it, please.
I want to thank Beatrice and Suleiman for all the time they put and to go through all of this.
I have no patience for this.
He actually died for his belief.
He actually, they asked him to go to bunker.
Social Security Tips00:07:01
He said, no.
Can you take all day?
Evil Johan, thank you so much for the gifted sub just now.
I see that.
I appreciate you.
Let me read some of these other chats because a woman is talking.
Trump really be giving 1,000, especially, honestly.
1000 is kind of nothing nowadays.
Everything is expensive.
Yeah, it is kind of expensive.
Now, my friend sent me the pictures of that fat guy.
I told him that's what we used to all do in school, et cetera.
But he said you were a grown ass man at the time.
Yeah, people are stupid, bro.
I was in my 20s.
So, you know, people are retarded.
But yeah, Los Bollos is a moron, dude.
He's a fucking retard.
And, bro, your friend is probably a blue pill normie.
Like, you know what I mean?
Let's be honest here.
I don't know how people could listen to women over Scott Hart.
Yeah, I know, dude.
It's fucking crazy.
So I'm telling you, dude, most of these people are low IQ, man.
I'm Marnie that?
Yeah, what's up, man?
Sorry, I just, I'm on stream.
I had myself muted.
What's up, everybody?
Yeah, doing good.
How are you?
Good, good, good, man.
Just getting ready here.
I think I'm going to go debate Dinesh Sunza here very soon on the Iran war.
So getting ready for that.
Nice.
So, but yeah.
What's up with you guys?
What's the latest as far as today goes?
The blockade is still failing or what's going on?
Yeah, blockade is kind of not much is happening there.
There's still ships coming in and out.
In terms of Lebanon, the ceasefire started three hours ago.
Oh, with Lebanon officially now?
Yeah, yeah, officially started.
We've not seen really any bombing since then.
So it shows Iran caused the ceasefire there.
What else?
Via Pakistan, right?
Sorry?
Because I know the Pakistani delegation came yesterday.
Yeah, exactly.
So this seems like Iran demanded that this happen before they basically talk about any kind of ceasefire talks.
And they said they want the Israelis to confirm it before that happens.
And quite clearly, they have done that.
So that's quite good.
Yeah.
No, I saw that.
I saw that the head of parliament basically said, hey, look, if you guys don't, you know, If you don't do the ceasefire, we can't talk unless a ceasefire in Lebanon is effectuated immediately, effectuated.
So that makes sense.
Exactly.
And they've made that happen.
And why that's interesting is, so there's a few interesting points.
So, first of all, why that's interesting, because now it demonstrates that the Lebanese government is a complete failure, because Israel has been bombing them for like two years, even after this ceasefire.
And the only way that there was an opportunity to actually have a day without.
The Israelis bombing them was by a forced resistance by Iran, Hezbollah joining this war, and now they do have peace in the country for 10 days at least, where there won't actually be any bombing.
So, major W for Hezbollah, major W for Iran, ceasefire happened.
And in terms of the second point about Lebanon, is if you remember Ben Jabil, the Israelis were trying to take it, and that obviously completely failed, hence why they agreed to the ceasefire as well today.
No, I believe it.
So that's kind of the latest news on that.
That's good to hear.
Myron, did you hear about the aircraft carrier run real short on food and all?
Which one?
The Lincoln?
Abraham Lincoln.
Really?
I don't know if Andy's there.
Yeah.
Is it okay, Suli, if I can ask about that real quick?
Yeah, go for it.
Okay.
Myron, Andy said he posted.
I guess May's posted it.
It's in.
Suleiman has it up there.
Tripoli are running into severe ration problems, our food problems.
So they're rationing their meals.
And I was just saying that's going to be very significant, of course, for obvious reasons.
And yeah, I don't know if you heard about that.
Is the Ford still out of commission, right?
Still getting repairs for the dryer fire?
And I say that with air quotes.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, the dryer fire.
Yeah, I like that.
Yeah.
No, apparently it's been repaired, and I don't have the latest and exactly its position.
But it is still in theater somewhere.
One thing about U.S. Naval Forces afloat, they try to keep that under really close wraps, but with satellite imagery, et cetera, et cetera, we still see a lot more than we used to.
But no, it's still operational to some extent.
And even if it isn't the Ford or the Abraham Lincoln that's having that food issue for rations, that's got to be affecting also the other forces afloat because.
Those forces afloat get their AFS, that's the auxiliary fast forward supply ships, and there's got to be something going on there.
But to have three battle groups deployed without the surge I saw in Desert Storm tells me that logistics is going to be more and more of an issue as we go into this.
Yeah, no, I'm talking, I believe that.
Yeah, brother, go ahead.
No, no, no, I was going to say, no, I believe that because obviously, you know, your resources and access to food and everything else like that and the supply lines.
Dictate how long you can be in a conflict.
So, yeah, that's a big development.
The fact that they're running out of food means they can't stay there much longer.
And we already know that these aircraft carriers have already been kind of tapped out because they weren't used in other missions prior to this and they kind of just got pulled to the region last minute.
So, I remember with the Ford, for example, they had toilet issues.
It took them 45 minutes to use the bathroom.
Lines were out the woozai.
And this all affects morale, obviously.
It's already bad enough we're getting into a A very unpopular war, you know, to go ahead and say where it's like service members can't even use the bathroom, that's just like, you know, now it's really bad.
That's a killer for morale.
Oh, yeah.
We were on an extended deployment once on a submarine op, and we got down to severe, limited rations, and it came down to flour and water.
I won't go into the details.
And man, oh, man, oh, man, it gets hairy.
But that's a very, very tight, tight, small group of 120 men, highly involved in it.
In the game here, where you get a massive carry with 5,000 people, the chain of command and everything like this, this is going to be a major deal.
Soldier Morale Issues00:03:02
I'm watching very carefully.
Yeah, no, I agree.
It's definitely a morale killer.
It's an absolute morale killer.
And I think, honestly, the same thing happened there.
They probably got happy when they got hit with that Iranian drone or whatever they got hit with because no one believes that they got hit.
It was a dryer fire.
Like, seriously?
Come on, Myron.
It was a dryer fire, brother.
Shut down.
Come on, bro.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah, and hey, best of luck taking on the Suez there, man.
You're one of the big guns there, man.
You can do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, looking forward to that.
Yeah, I'm going to jump on right now in their thing because we got to get ready.
But no, it's always good to chop it up with you guys.
Appreciate it.
And Saliman, thank you for the other stuff behind the scenes that we're discussing too.
Thank you for that, bro.
Yeah, no worries.
No worries.
It's a part of the business, man.
When you're controversial like me, it's a part of the business.
So I don't mind it all, man.
Thank you, brother.
There's going to be certain people who are not willing to get on the platform together, isn't it?
Yeah, it's all good.
All right, man.
Take it easy.
We've got Riyad here.
Riyad, thanks for joining us.
I hope you do.
Shit, my brother's joined.
Okay.
Let me Let me get in here chat.
I'm getting ready right now.
Share with me real quick chat.
Here, I won't use my laptop.
Bear with me, chat.
Using this other software.
What the hell?
Okay.
What's up, Dinesh?
Can you hear me?
Are you on Chrome?
It says to use Chrome on ChatGPT.
I don't know if that matters.
Hey, Chad, don't worry.
I'm here.
I'm just adjusting some stuff.
Okay.
Yeah, it's saying native app or Chrome.
Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, can you hear me, Meyer?
Yeah, I can hear you.
I can see Dinesh as well.
I'm live on stream right now as we speak, guys.
So I'm live on stream.
I'm going to share my screen real fast.
Cool.
Okay.
Audio Connection Check00:04:04
Okay.
Hey, chat, are you guys getting in the audio good on my end, chat?
Are you guys good?
And Dinesh, can you talk in your mic real quick so I can make sure my audio is good?
Oh, yeah.
Hey, testing one, two, three, four.
Testing one, two, three, four.
How does that sound?
Give me ones, guys, in chat if you guys can hear everything.
Give me ones.
You guys can hear me and Dinesh and Sean Kelly.
Sean Kelly is going to be hosting this discussion, guys.
So, all right.
They can all hear each other.
So I think we're good.
Yeah, they can hear on your end too.
It's just, yeah, because you know, different multiple things.
But yeah, they can hear us.
Yeah, Dinesh can hear me.
Dinesh, can you hear me?
Yep.
I'll hear you both.
Yeah, they can both hear me.
Yeah, I think we're good.
Can you guys see me too?
I cannot see you though, no.
Oh, they can't see me.
Yeah, I actually cannot see anybody.
My screen is blank.
Okay.
Oh, Dinesh can't see anyone.
He can't see Myron either.
Dinesh, is your producer by you?
He's not here, but you guys have his contact.
You can call him.
I think he's also in touch with your.
So I think they're all trying to.
He'll probably know how to get Myron on your screen.
Oh, this is improving.
Yeah, here we go.
I see myself, and I think I see both of you now.
Yeah, on my end, it does like this it's like a long bar.
Is there a way for me to make this like not?
Okay, there we go.
That's probably better right there.
Are we going to get this thing going here soon?
I'll be right back, guys.
Yeah, do you there?
Yeah, Dinesh can see in Heroes now.
Yeah, I now see the studio.
Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
That's totally fine.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's totally fine.
Yeah, that's no problem.
Okay.
Yeah, sounds good.
Okay, bye.
Okay, they're restarting it one more time, guys.
Just rejoin the same link.
Sean, you hear me?
Hang on, you guys are really.
Guys, can you turn up the volume on your side so I can hear better?
Meaning, Sean is really soft.
I don't hear his voice, at least as of now, I don't hear it normal.
All right.
Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, Myron, I hear you.
You seem fine.
For some reason, Sean is very, I'm hearing him very.
Do you hear Sean?
No, I don't hear him right now.
Screen Layout Fixes00:02:56
I can hear his voice, but through an echo.
His mic might be muted.
He can hear me through an echo.
Okay, now I hear you.
Now I hear you, Sean.
Hey, Sean, you're fine.
We hear you now.
Oh, now we can.
No echo now, right?
Sean, how do I do it where it doesn't make it so narrow and long?
Is there a way for me to make it more widescreen?
The camera?
Is there a way to make it widescreen for Myron?
Because I've never used Riverside before.
Vertical angles.
They said you could change it on your computer, Myron.
How do I do that?
You said this.
I'm on desktop, I think.
Yeah, I'm on desktop.
Yeah.
So, like, do I go.
Visual effects, mute, no.
Pen, no.
I had it right before, but I don't know what happened.
It just switched back.
Put your mouse on any of the photos of us, and there's two arrows pointing outwards.
He said, Hmm, does that work?
No, it just shows pin, visual effects, mute.
Let's you put the title.
Try the top right of either me or Dinesh, our rectangles should be two arrows.
Try this because I see your arrows on my screen when we hover the top right.
It might be because you're the host and we might not have access.
Layout.
Look for layout in the bottom left.
I see raise, react, speaker, cam, mic, people, chat, nothing with layout.
He doesn't see layout.
Might be because I'm a guest.
You might have to do it on your end, maybe.
I don't know.
If not, it's fine.
Presentation, maybe?
Or no.
Yeah, the box with the arrow.
Oh, no.
Nah, that one looks bad.
So, you.
Oh, God.
There's no way to hide me.
He wants to see Dinesh, I think.
No, I can see Dinesh.
It's just that it's coming all vertical versus horizontal because it's like a weird split screen or whatever.
Does anyone in your chat know how to fix it?
Debate Topic Intro00:04:53
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
You can't see anything on our end.
Yeah.
Dinesh, is it also narrow on your side too?
Like where it's just like vertical versus horizontal?
No, mine's completely different because I'm in my home studio.
So I'm just sitting at a desk and looking at you through a screen.
I don't have any computer in front of me.
Gotcha.
Someone else is running it behind.
Okay.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Yeah, exactly.
Someone's running it behind the scenes for you.
Okay.
Yeah, I've never used this program before.
I've always used Extreme Yard or Zoom.
I think I fixed it.
Okay.
You got it?
I think so.
Yeah.
Perfect.
Oh, okay.
That's.
Okay.
Yeah, I think we got it.
Let me know when you guys are ready and I'll start the intro.
I'm ready.
Yeah, I think I'm good on my end too, man.
Let me put my stuff on mute and yeah.
Okay.
They're ready to go, guys, whenever you are.
I'm live on my end too, Sean.
I'm broadcasting everywhere.
I'm on YouTube, Rumble, Kick.
He's already streaming it.
Is Dinesh streaming it?
Okay.
Dinesh, if you want to stream it on your end, bro, you're welcome.
I mean, you know, we can wait for you if you want to.
Yeah, they're working on it with Dinesh's team right now.
Okay.
Yeah, we can sit tight.
Cool.
No worries.
Here, I'll mute myself real quick and talk to my chat, but I'm still here.
No worries.
All right.
All right.
Let's see here.
Okay.
Tonic says, Martin, on behalf of the Beaners, you're invited to the carne asada.
Thank you, Tonic.
Burrow says, don't pull any punches, just hit hard and fast.
No worries.
Champ says, check this video.
I have a dad giving his son discipline for stealing good.
Joke.
It gives a one.
Thank you.
David Singer arrested for today.
We'll cover that later today.
I just saw that news just got breaking.
You ever hear, you ever planning to have Larry C also back on in the future?
Yeah, I definitely will.
I definitely will chat.
Okay.
Okay.
Two minutes, guys.
We're just trying to get Dinesh's live stream up.
Yeah, yeah.
No worries, dude.
Ryan Pickles
says, Myron versus Tapjeet.
Appreciate you guys, man.
You guys are hilarious.
And, guys, I will tell you guys this right now.
In the middle of the broadcast, I probably will cut YouTube and go to kick only.
So, get ready probably in about 30 minutes or so.
We'll send you a Trello link.
And Chad, just so you guys know, our topic is the debate topic.
Winning or Losing00:04:45
Got it fixed.
The debate is going to be chat.
Okay.
Trumping around.
Is he doing the right thing?
Is he winning or losing?
That is going to be the topic of this debate, chat.
So, for those of you guys who are just joining in, it is, is Trumping around?
Is he doing the right thing, winning or losing?
That is the topic, my friends.
Let's see.
Thank you.
I'm pushing some computers.
I remember the car in the blue flag.
The date's wrong on his live stream.
It says April 16th, 146.
Hey, Sean, for some weird reason, now I got you twice on my screen.
Let me fix that.
Myron said he has me twice.
There we go.
Gotcha.
Sorry, we're just fixing Dinesh's live stream.
No, no, no.
You're good.
You're good, man.
I think for the first time, I'm not the one with the technical problems holding us up.
It's always me, bro.
It's always me.
So I welcome this.
I welcome this.
Everyone makes fun of me because I'm always the one that can't figure out Discord and stuff.
You know what I mean?
All right.
I think we just got it.
Are we good, guys?
And if you could turn up your mic on your side, Sean, and then Dinesh, can you do a quick sound check for me one more time?
Oh, yeah.
Hey, testing one, two, three, four.
Okay, so I can hear you nice and clear.
Chat, give me ones if you guys can hear Dinesh well.
And then, if you could turn yours up, Sean, exactly.
Just a little bit.
He said mine's a little soft.
Mic test one, two, one, two.
That's better.
I can hear you now.
Yeah, we hear you.
Okay.
They said it's good now.
Okay, let me just make sure we're live on Dinesh.
Sorry for the delays, guys.
That's on me.
It's not working.
It's not going to his stream.
Okay.
So they're resending his stream key right now, and then we're just going to put that in.
Okay.
They're resending his stream key, Myron.
Can you give us another one?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No problem, man.
No problem.
612.
We can get ready in three minutes.
Okay.
It's better to get it all across the board.
So, all good, man.
Can I pay extra to do another 15?
You want to do the whole hour?
Yeah.
Okay.
Shout out to Vanessa.
Appreciate you for the gifted sub three minutes ago.
Joke says it's Dinesh Indian.
Yes, he is.
Shout out to OSS.
Mine's about to cook.
FNF last night had me dying.
This is Sean from Uncensored America?
No, this is Sean Kelly.
Not Sean from Uncensored America.
Yeah, up on YouTube.
Yeah, I'm up everywhere.
Myron, are you live on YouTube?
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, I'm up everywhere.
I'm up on YouTube, Kick, Rumble, everywhere.
Sorry, I messed up.
Yeah, I'm up.
Because I was streaming before this.
Okay.
No, they're just trying to figure out the best way to stream it.
David Burke Arrested00:03:10
So maybe he can mirror Myron's son.
Yeah, he's free to steal my feet if he wants.
I don't mind.
Might be a little delayed, though.
I think I'm on kick.
Kick has the best latency.
Okay.
Which is the closest.
Let me see.
Tice is on the phone with his producer right now.
I'll just mute myself here.
So, yeah, chat.
While we wait for this, yes, breaking news David was arrested for murder.
We're going live, everybody.
Okay, it's working.
Okay, never mind.
All right, bad.
Let's go back then.
Yeah, so David, the singer, guys, as y'all know, he literally just got picked up, it looks like.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm frozen.
42 minutes ago, a singer arrested a connection with the murder of teen Celeste Rivas Hernandez.
So they just got him, guys.
Breaking news over the last hour or so.
I mean, we knew this was coming.
As soon as they found that body in the Tesla, bro, I was like, yeah, it's a wrap for this guy, bro.
We knew he was cooked.
So he's been arrested in connection with the murder of a teenager who decomposing body was found in the trunk of a Tesla register to this singer, police said Thursday.
His legal name is David Burke, being held without bail, officials said.
And she died in September 2025, 14 year old Celeste Rivas.
Yeah, I can hear you.
You're coming in low right now, though, Sean.
And your screen froze.
But my screen's froze.
But yeah, bro is cooked.
Chat.
Bro is definitely cooked.
Is Trump still yapping?
Okay, nah, it's over.
Breaking news and arrest in the case of Celeste Rivas, the teen girl found in the trunk of a rapper's car.
An assignment editor, Mike Rogers, is at the desk working the story.
You've got late information from LAPD, Mike.
Yeah, all of this still coming in here to the newsroom and to the desk.
But what we can tell you right now is that the rapper David, whose name is David Burke, has been arrested for the murder of Celeste Rivas.
That's according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
There is Celeste Rivas.
You remember, this is a case that has grabbed headlines.
She was a minor, only like 14, 15.
Now, with that said, I think David is like 18 or 19.
So like they're like somewhat similar in age, but still an L.
I can hear you, but you're low.
Yeah, Sean, you're very soft.
Still coming in low.
Still low.
Yo, yo, yo, yo.
Celeste Rivas Murder00:13:16
Still low.
Mike test 1212.
Still low.
Still low.
However, you had it before was good.
They said, however, we had it before.
For audio wise, at least.
Oh, you didn't change anything?
Jesus.
Are they using OBS?
Are you on OBS?
Kyla?
Are you using OBS?
No, they're not.
Maybe up your microphone on the website.
Is there a way to increase the volume on the site?
He said.
Actually, you know what?
I think I found a way to do it on mine.
Go ahead and talk again, Sean.
I'm maxed out on mine.
You're maxed out on yours?
Sean, I hear you.
I think you're okay.
I mean, you're just moderating, so I think we're fine.
I can hear you.
Okay.
Yeah, we're okay.
Yeah.
We'll make it work.
I'll just talk louder than normal.
Yeah, talk louder than normal.
And I even bumped up the audio on my side a little bit.
So.
Okay.
You guys ready?
We're ready.
All right.
Yeah, we're good, guys.
Can we start this?
Oh, it already started?
All right.
All right, guys, here for a debate today, we got Dinesh and Myron.
The prompt is Is Trump doing the right thing?
Is he winning or losing the war?
We're going to do five minute openings, 40 minutes back and forth, and then five minute closings.
We're going to start with Myron's five minute opening.
Myron, whenever you start talking, I'll start the timer.
Okay.
So, yeah.
So, um, This war is a catastrophe in every angle.
I think that we're losing this conflict from multiple different angles.
I think we're losing it diplomatically.
I think we're losing it economically.
We're losing it militarily to a degree, even though we are still pummeling Iran with our superior fighting power.
But we're also losing basically our footing in the region.
And then lastly, politically, obviously, this war, and I'll kind of go through.
So, first, when I say diplomatically, we are hurting our partners in the Gulf.
Who we just literally did strategic alliances with for more investments.
We had a duty to protect them and support them, and we've put them in harm's way and affected our own credibility in the region.
Partners that have been alongside us for a very long time, including members of NATO, have distanced themselves from this reckless foreign policy.
Economically, we're literally experiencing one of the worst energy crises we've ever experienced since the 1970s andor during the Russia Ukraine war when it first kicked off in 2022.
Many different economists and energy experts agree to this.
Militarily, we are destroying Iran and their Navy and Air Force, et cetera.
But that's not really the root cause of the problem here.
It's the ballistic missile program, which is what's actually doing the majority of their damage in their drones.
And we see that they absolutely still have the capabilities to launch missiles and drones, despite the fact that people at the Pentagon say we took out 90% of their ability to attack, which I think is ridiculous and not true.
And that's actually been corrected recently by intelligence agencies saying that, look, it's somewhere maybe around 50% that we've destroyed at this point.
And then lastly, and we could go into more later, but this is just my opening here.
And then lastly, politically, Trump campaigned on no new wars.
And the fact that he has gone back on that promise and got us into another conflict with a fairly formidable power has created a lot of issues for us alongside all the other issues that I've stated before.
So this goes against what he campaigned against.
It goes against what a lot of us voted for.
One of the main reasons I voted for Trump was foreign policy and not getting us into wars, ending the Russia Ukraine conflict.
Not getting involved with Iran, not creating more Middle Eastern wars like we did with Iraq.
We've seen that that was a monumental failure.
And quite frankly, he's betrayed his base and it's, you know, that voted for him for the anti war perspective.
So these are the reasons why I think this war has been a catastrophe and a strategic failure in many different ways, despite the fact that we might still be winning it militarily in some limited perspective.
You still have 220, Myron.
Do you want to end it there or keep going?
No, because I just wanted to kind of overview my different views of why we're losing this thing and then, you know, And then we can expand later on based on whatever Dinesh wants to go into.
Okay.
When you start Dinesh, I'll start the timer.
All right, Sean, thanks for having us.
Really appreciate the chance to have this conversation and participate in this debate.
I'm in a little bit of a funny position because I have a defense of Trump and a defense of what he's doing in Iran, but it happens not to be Trump's own defense.
In other words, I want to argue that it's very common on the left and the right among people who don't like Trump, but even people who like Trump, to try to understand him in some kind of ideological framework.
Like Trump campaigned on being Sort of an isolationist.
He said, We're not going to get involved abroad.
And I want to argue that Trump is not fundamentally an ideological guy at all.
He is a transactional guy.
If you want to think of how Trump thinks, he thinks like the Chinese.
When the Chinese go to Africa, they don't say, We're going to help you create democracy.
They say, Hey, listen, we'll give you some money to build a port, and we want to have some leverage over your economy, and we want to have part ownership of that port.
And so the Chinese are building their leverage that way.
Let's remember that a lot of people who voted for Trump voted for a businessman.
They said, We don't want a politician.
We've heard the normal political talk, a lot of it fundamentally dishonest.
Let's bring in a guy who's transactional, who knows how to run things.
In fact, we're going to bring in not just any kind of businessman, we're going to bring in like a real estate guy.
And that's, in fact, what happened.
And so Trump, I would argue, is sort of the world's first, certainly America's first, real estate president, by which I mean he's protecting the property values.
Of course, the home values, of course, the people, also the assets of the United States.
And he views the world through that framework.
I think it's important to understand Trump before we defend Trump, before I attempt to make a defense of Trump.
So, in my opening statement, I'm going to make no defense.
I'm just sort of laying out how Trump, I think, views the Middle East, how he views Iran.
Essentially, Trump is trying to create a peaceful, prosperous framework for the Middle East.
Even when Trump looks at Gaza, he's like, hey, listen, I'm a real estate guy, this is a bunch of rubble.
Why can't we have buildings, coffee shops, maybe a Trump tower, people going to work every day instead of all this death cult?
Instead of we love death more than life, Trump looks at the Middle East and he sees many Muslim countries that want to trade, that want to do business, that want to sell oil, that want to do AI, that want to build robotics.
And here you've got this death cult in Iran and it's been going for 50 years.
And it's all about debt to America and we want to get nuclear weapons and we want global jihad.
And basically, I think Trump's view is these are arsonists.
In a real estate neighborhood, and they need to be stopped.
So I think that is the fundamental motivation of Trump in this situation.
I'll make my defense of it later.
Here I'm merely giving a description, a brief description, of how I think Trump sees the region and indeed the world.
Was three minutes.
You want to call it there, Dinesh?
I'm fine for right now.
Yes.
Okay.
So we'll move into timed responses now.
Myron, you want to start off five minutes?
Yeah.
So first, Dinesh mentioned that Trump is a transactional president like the Chinese.
I disagree with that.
The Chinese don't start wars.
They don't back genocides.
They don't give Israel support or other countries support to drop bombs on babies.
So I disagree with that.
The Chinese are far more pragmatic and anti war than Trump is.
Also, the Chinese are not controlled by the Israel lobby like Trump is.
As far as Trump having peaceful ideas in the Middle East, I disagree with that.
And the reason why is because he's backed Israel's campaign all across the Middle East to bomb all their neighbors and attack, despite the fact that he said that he wanted to bring some type of peace to the Middle East.
And it's Trump's own policies, honestly, that have created a lot of the problems.
He recognized the embassy and moved the capital to Jerusalem.
He.
Broker the Abraham Accords, which the Abraham Accords was a large reason why Hamas invaded on October 7th because they were basically trying to get.
Well, Netanyahu, for a very long time, has been trying to get around the Palestine question.
And one of the ways that he was doing that was through the Abraham Accords, trying to get these Muslim countries to recognize Israel as a sovereign country or recognize them diplomatically.
And Saudi Arabia was flooding with potentially joining the Abraham Accords.
And this is actually what led to a part of the reason of what led to the Hamas attack because they understood that if Saudi Arabia was to join the Abraham Accords, this is create.
Lots of problems for them, and they never be able to get the sovereignty that they're fighting for.
Also, I think it's important to note, besides that, that you said you also mentioned the death to America argument and radical Islam.
Now, you know, when they say death to America, that's more of like a, and I had just had a discussion with Scott Horn about this.
Death to America is more like fuck America and fuck Israel, right?
It's like if you stub your toe, as he famously says, you're going to say, oh my God.
That's at this corner over here that hit my foot.
So it's more of a phrase rather than a political ideology.
And I mean, let's be honest here.
We've been interfering in their affairs since the 1950s with the Operation Ajax in 1953, where we overthrew their democratically elected leader, Mossadegh, which led to the revolution that put these people into power in the first place.
We tried to nationalize, he tried to, Mossadegh tried to nationalize the oil.
We couldn't allow that.
We stepped in with the Brits, MI5.
As well as Mossad.
And we basically got him out of power so that we can maintain control.
And then we put the Shah to power.
And that Shah ended up getting overthrown because he didn't have the best interests of his country.
And then you also mentioned, Dinesh, radical Islam.
I would argue that we have radical Jews that run America and Israel.
If you look at people like Netanyahu and the Likud party, Netanyahu is probably the most sane of these individuals.
But let's not forget the fact that another reason why Hamas attacked on October 7th was because there are lots of radical Jews in Israel that want to destroy the Luxa Mosque.
And by destroying the Luxa Mosque with their five red cows, et cetera, that is going to bring about the Antichrist andor their Messiah.
So I find it interesting how people say all the time that these guys are radical Islamists, these guys are evil, blah, blah, blah, when in reality, it is the Israelis and the Jewish lobby and the Temple Institute who are the ones that are pushing for a religious prophecy that's going to bring about the end of the world.
So it's incredible how we push this propaganda in the West when it is the Israelis that are pushing a lot of the radical religion, religious ideology to justify. their warfare all across the Middle East.
That was three minutes 35.
Are you done, Myron?
And then there was one other thing.
Dinesh, you mentioned something about peace in the Middle East.
Oh, another thing.
Trump and Marco Rubio have been giving even more money than the Biden administration when it comes to peace.
I would argue he's done less for peace than Biden because he gave them the 2,000 pound bombs.
He allowed them to continue the war, didn't put any type of barriers on them in Gaza.
Yes, he was able to negotiate some type of peace as he came into the office, but I think that was more diplomatic posturing because.
As soon as that ceasefire ended in March or so, about 2025, and the starvation really started to hit, he didn't really do much to support the Palestinians.
And until we solve the Palestine question, we're never going to have peace in the Middle East.
And enabling and supporting the Israelis is only going to make things worse in this regard.
Until we solve the Palestine question, we're never going to have peace.
And Trump's Abraham Accords and his catastrophic pulling out of the JCPOA and labeling the IRGC as a terrorist organization alongside Mike Pompeo has also led to a lot of the problems that we have as well.
So, I'll kind of just land it there, though.
I'm probably close to time, right?
15 seconds left.
Okay, I'll end it there then.
Dinesh?
I think, in order to get a grasp of this, and there's a lot of detail here, and I'm happy to go into really all of it, but I want to stay initially, at least on the big picture, a little bit, because radical Islam comes out of the deserts of Arabia in the seventh century.
It is extremely violent, it takes basically the whole of the Middle East, most of which, by the way, was Christian, by force.
Islamic armies move north into Europe, they move east into Asia, they move south into Africa.
They create multiple Islamic empires, many times four to five empires at the same time.
The Umayyad, the Abbasid, the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, the Mughal Empire in India, obviously ultimately the Ottoman Empire in Turkey.
The crisis of Islam comes when the Ottoman Empire collapses because it's the last caliphate.
Israeli Aggression Claims00:15:16
And you'll notice that the Muslim Brotherhood is formed right after that, 1928.
That's when Hassan Albana, an Egyptian school teacher, forms what is now the most powerful organization of radical Islam in the world.
Notice that nothing is going on in Israel.
The Jews don't have a state.
Israel is not even going to be founded for another 20 years.
This is long before World War II.
And so radical Islam is already mobilizing to sort of restore its lost glory starting in the 1920s.
Now, let's fast forward to Iran.
I want to talk for a moment about what Myron talked about in the 1950s.
First of all, Mohammed Mosaddegh was not democratically elected.
The Iranian people did not vote for him.
He didn't get any kind of majority.
He was selected by the Majlis, by the parliament.
He was ultimately appointed by the Shah.
So, this is how Mosaddegh came to power.
Now, true, when he came to power, he sort of changed his stripes, he declared himself a socialist.
He essentially suspended the very parliament that had named him, and so he was an autocrat.
Yes, the US and the CIA and the British intelligence agencies did push him out.
That's true.
But let's say the Iranian Revolution did not immediately follow that at all.
That was 1953.
We have to go all the way now to 1979 when Jimmy Carter came to power.
Jimmy Carter was sort of a human rights guy, and Jimmy Carter said, Listen, the Shah has a secret police, he's an autocrat.
I'm going to pull the Persian rug out from under him.
And we did.
We ultimately forced the Shah to abdicate, which he did.
This strengthened the hand of the mullahs.
They were also, by the way, being helped by France.
And when Khomeini came in, he didn't say one word about Israel.
He came in on a revolutionary ideology, a global revolutionary ideology, outlined in hundreds of his sermons, outlined in a book that I have that's a collection of his sermons.
And it's very clear that he says, Ultimately, what he's saying is radical Islam has finally got a hold of a major state.
This is what we've always wanted.
We have been ragtag groups of activists and terrorists and this and that, but Iran is an important country, undeniably.
We have it, and we're going to use it as a beachhead for global jihad.
And that is, in fact, so this is declared out of Iran from the beginning.
It's not just some kind of leftist slogan that they learned at Columbia, sort of like hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.
This is the sort of founding charter of Iran.
They take our hostages, they bomb the Beirut embassy in 1982, so the hostility begins really early on.
Israel is a part of it, but Israel is only a part of it because Israel is in that neighborhood.
And I would argue that really the basis for America's alliance with Israel, I mean, it's absolutely laughable that a country of 10 million, Israel, can somehow control a country of 350 million that is bigger, richer, and stronger, and has tentacles all over the world.
It makes no sense to say that Lithuania can control the Soviet Union, and it's equally absurd to somehow think that 10 million Jews can control the entire United States.
The reason the United States is allied with Israel is really simple.
The Israelis are living in that bad neighborhood.
They understand the various species of terrorists and thugs and bad guys in that neighborhood.
It's kind of like if I have a friend who lives downtown in Houston, he knows which streets not to go down, he knows which alleys he should avoid.
He knows when to look over his shoulder.
He knows what to do if somebody comes up right from the side of him and tells him to open his car door.
If I live in the suburbs, I might not have as good an experience of all that.
So the bottom line of it is Israel is a very valuable ally to have in that neighborhood because the truth of it is Israel knows how to fight radical Islam 20 times better than the United States.
Time perfect.
Myron, five minutes.
Yeah, so just to go here.
So, number one, Mossadegh was democratically elected by the Majis in the parliament.
He had been elected multiple times in the parliament, so he was democratically elected.
Next, when it comes to radical Islam, because I understand that Dinesh is a big critic of radical Islam.
Look, I don't have a problem with being critical of radical Islam, but I just find it interesting how we're so quick to point out radical Islam, but we never talk about radical Judaism.
You know, let's go ahead and compare it.
A lot of people like to say that the Iranian regime is, you know, reckless, crazy, religious zealots that want to kill and end the world or whatever, right?
Well, let's go ahead and go through this.
So, on October 7th, roughly 1,200 people were killed.
400 of them were military.
So, that leaves us with about 800 people.
Those military individuals are fair game under international law, unfortunately.
Obviously, the loss of life is always horrible, but let's be very candid here.
They're fair targets for Hamas, right?
That leaves us with about 800 people after that, right?
800 people were killed.
And we don't even know who from them were, you know, IDF, off duty, reserve.
And we also know that the Hannibal Directive was activated on that day, which is basically the Extermination of their own people when there's a conflict going on, for you know, to avoid having hostages.
But let's go ahead and be charitable here.
And let's say that, um, 800 were killed and it was all by Hamas.
We let's just say the 400 enemy combatants that's fine, they're IDF.
Let's say the 800 were all completely innocent people, etc.
Well, how did Israel respond to that?
They responded by invading andor bombing seven different countries all across the region.
They conducted a genocide that we all witnessed in 1080p.
They led to the blockade and the starvation of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
When this is all said and done, we're probably going to have somewhere between 100,000.
To 500, 300 to 500,000.
Who knows?
But it's going to be hundreds of thousands dead by the time we go through the rubble and actually calculate all the people that were killed.
It was systemic bombing for many years in Gaza.
Now, let's compare that to the Iranian response.
Their attack during this 12 day war, what do they do?
They bomb Israel back, they hit them back with missiles and show their ballistic missile capabilities and their drones.
And then when the United States came in and bombed them and destroyed all their nuclear bases, how did they respond?
With a symbolic strike back where they told the United States that they were going to do it and they hit the LUD base.
And they let them know beforehand.
So I would argue that the Iranians are a far more measured and responsible government than the Israelis are.
The problem with the Israelis is that the Israelis are able to do whatever they want to do because they know that they have the United States backing them.
They're not a good ally of ours because they drag us into wars, just like they did now with this catastrophic strategic failure of a quagmire that we're in in Iran.
Marco Rubio admitted this.
Hey, if we had to get involved in this conflict because we knew the Israelis were going to attack, an attack on the Israelis was going to be an attack by the Israelis would be looked at as an attack by the United States.
And we had to get involved there so that we can kind of hedge the damage that might come our way.
And that dragged us into the current conflict that we're in.
So I would argue that Israel is a huge liability.
They're reckless, they're a rogue state.
They are the real terrorists.
It's not necessarily the Iranian regime.
Now, let me be clear here I'm not saying that the regime doesn't do evil things and they don't kill people.
I'm not saying that.
But I do find it incredible that they have the nerve to sit there and say that these guys are terrorists and that these guys aren't responsible, not measured, and shouldn't have a nuclear weapon.
When in reality, Israel has a nuclear weapon, Israel's not a part of the NPT.
Israel got their nuclear weapon illegally.
Israel just got done doing a genocide.
Israel literally is trying to build a temple mount with radical Jews to destroy a mosque.
No one ever points to the radical Judaism that runs this country because, as much as we want to complain about radical Islam, which I agree with you, Dinesh, can be a problem, let's be honest here.
Do radical Islamists control America?
No, but radical Jews do because these Jews support the Temple Institute and radical Zionists as well, which has led to a lot of problems that we have in the Middle East.
So, if we're going to talk about religious zealots that are creating issues, Let's talk about radical Judaism, but no one wants to have that conversation.
One minute left, Myron.
Do you want it?
Okay, so since I got another minute, I'll talk about how, like, for example, Ben Gavir was celebrating, you know, passing a law to hang Palestinians, which is the first law put in place, by the way, to exterminate a group of people based on their race.
And that assumes that Israel actually has some type of fair process and do fair process.
And they don't.
I mean, this is a group of people that complained and got mad when someone got raped, a Palestinian prisoner got raped at a tenement, and the people that did it got arrested.
And they literally took to the streets and said, We have the right to rape.
We have the right to rape.
We have the right to rape.
This is a group of people that are far worse than the Iranians, but Western media never covers this.
They never talk about all the crazy stuff that goes on over there and all the people that are being held without charge.
20 seconds.
I can end it there.
Okay.
Dinesh?
Well, I got to start out with what I think is one point that Myron makes that borders on the, on the conical.
And that is the idea that Iran's reaction was measured due to moral restraint.
No, Iran's reaction was measured because they had no other reaction to do.
It's kind of like saying if I step into the ring and I get so badly pummeled that I'm flat on the ground and therefore I'm flailing from the ground.
You can't say, oh, look at that guy.
He's being so restrained.
He's only flailing from the ground.
The truth of it is, he can't get up.
That's why he's flailing from the ground.
If he could get up, if Iran had vastly greater capacities, military capacities of an active Navy and active Air Force, you don't think that they would be completely strafing and bombing Israel?
You don't think that they'd be sending jets to hit U.S. bases?
You don't think that they would try to activate, for example, their connections in Venezuela to try to hit Miami?
They would be doing all of these things.
The reason they can't do it is they're like the guy in Monty Python who's lost his arms and his legs.
So, their restraint is fake.
It's not restraint, it's actually genuine weakness that has been imposed on them on the losing side of a military campaign.
And even Myron admitted that they are losing this militarily.
Now, Turning to Israel in a kind of fundamental way, I want to go to the root of the matter by saying quite simply that, first of all, the Palestinians are not native to Gaza.
If you go back to ancient times, the Jews were in Israel, but the people who were in Gaza were what the Bible calls the Philistines.
And the Philistines are actually Europeans.
These are people from Greece.
They came from places like Cyprus and they occupied Gaza.
So the Palestinians are not native to Gaza.
That's not, quote, their land.
It's certainly not their land going back.
To ancient times.
They are not the original inhabitants of that land at all.
Nevertheless, Israel said, all right, everyone keeps talking about a two state solution.
Well, let's have one.
Why don't we let the people in Gaza choose their own government?
And in the early 2000s, they elected Hamas.
And Hamas, being elected by the people, became the legitimate representative of Gaza.
Now, I admit that they didn't have subsequent elections putting their legitimacy in question, but the truth of it is they had built deep roots in Gaza.
And so when the October 7 attacks occurred, and I think, you know, Myron has done a lot to try to minimize those things.
The simple truth of it is when somebody else attacks you first in this way, you are not bound by any rules of so called proportionality.
It's sort of like saying if someone does a home invasion on me, let's just say rapes my wife, kills my kids, and then he runs off and he's got nine kids of his own, he jumps in a car, he's trying to make a getaway, and he goes, hey, listen.
I want to make sure that your response is proportional to what I did.
I want to make sure that you don't do anything to me that's worse than what I did to you unprovoked.
So, the truth of it is, in every example of warfare that I'm familiar with, Pearl Harbor comes to mind.
I understand, if I recall correctly, there were something like 2,000 U.S. casualties in Pearl Harbor.
Very low levels of casualties.
In fact, who could argue that Pearl Harbor was a military target?
And yet, the United States goes to war with Japan.
In fact, not only that, declares war also, begins not.
Not only on the Pacific front, but also on the European front, levels essentially the nation of Japan with ultimately two atomic bombs.
And so, if you try to measure the original provocation and the U.S. response, I would argue the U.S. response was disproportionate, but Japan started it, and the United States had every right to finish it.
Now, no one can deny that October 7th was not merely a Hamas operation, it was an operation that was cooked up.
Yes, it involved the Hamas guys, but many of the Hamas guys were in Qatar.
Iran was involved, Turkey was involved, the Sudan was involved.
This was a carefully planned operation over a long period of time.
And so Israel has every right to say that we are striking back not just against the operatives from Gaza who launched the immediate attack, but we have every right to strike back at the planners of October 7th.
Will Iran publicly deny that it was involved in the planning of October 7th?
No.
The mullahs take credit for it.
They're very proud of it.
They see it as part of the global Islamic jihad that they're part of.
And so, again, I would argue that Israel has every right to respond in the way that it did.
And a kind of Myron headcount of what Hamas did doesn't impose limitations on what Israel can do to immobilize the future threat posed by Hamas.
Myron?
Yeah.
So you said that they're not restrained because they can't get up.
That's actually false because during the 12 day war, they absolutely demolished Israel.
It's just that Israel had very strong censorship policies in place so that people would not be able to record all of the damage.
And it was actually the Israelis that asked for a ceasefire from Trump and why we got involved in the first place because they were running out of interceptors and they would not be able to continue to sustain the damage that they were sustaining.
And keep in mind, that was the first time that Iran directly attacked them in that manner so significantly since.
Also, I think it's important to say that, you know, when you said fake restraint or whatever, the thing is that they were restrained because, let's be honest, the Israelis had done many different things to agitate.
They bombed their embassy in Damascus, they assassinated Ishmael Haneya in Iran.
I mean, bombing an embassy as an act of war, and they did not respond as heavily as they could have.
If the Iranians wanted, they could launch all their missiles and absolutely level Israel in Tel Aviv, but they're not doing that.
So I would argue that they are being restrained because they do have the capability of actually destroying Israel.
Especially when it comes to their ability to launch ballistic missiles that go against the Iron Dome.
And they don't have enough interceptors to deal with their capabilities.
Iranian Restraint00:07:56
Also, you mentioned that proportionality doesn't matter.
Well, it actually does because that goes to show the restraint of said country.
I find it interesting how they lost pretty much identical numbers.
On October 7th, the Israelis lost somewhere, we'll say, to be simple, 1,000.
And during the 12 day war, the Iranians lost 1,000.
Well, one responded by conducting a genocide and bombing all their neighbors and invading other countries, the other one responded by bombing Israel.
Not bombing everybody else and then doing a ceasefire after, and then even responding to the United States after we bombed them with a symbolic strike where they didn't kill anyone.
And they gave a notification before they did so.
So, as much as people want to say that the mullahs aren't as restrained or as pragmatic, et cetera, I would argue that they absolutely are and far more than the Israelis.
And that's because I agree with you on this.
They understand that they don't have the backing of the United States like the Israelis do.
So, it is the backing of the United States which allows the Israelis to behave the way that they do.
And then not exercise proportionality.
And this is why the entire international community has been condemning Israel and they've lost so much support because it's not just me that's saying this.
The whole world saw how they reacted after October 7th.
So, proportionality is absolutely important to see the measuredness and the rationale of a government when they're retaliating in a war.
Getting attacked on October 7th and losing 1,000 people does not justify genocide.
And when Iran lost the same exact amount of people when they were attacked, on top of all the other escalations that the Israelis have done, That I mentioned before, whether it's assassinating a diplomat, assassinating a political figure in their country and causing great embarrassment, bombing the embassy in Damascus, doing all the false flags that they do, assassinating nuclear scientists, killing generals, all this other stuff.
The Iranians, I would argue, have been far more measured given the fact that Israel's been attacking them for a very long time.
What else here?
Two minutes left.
Two minutes left.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that's.
I think if we're going to talk about proportionality, it's definitely a required thing to talk about.
And you're saying it doesn't matter.
I think it absolutely does matter because when the Israelis act as reckless as they do, we end up footing the bill for a lot of their problems.
We end up looking like the idiots, backing them, running security for them at the UN, funding their bullshit.
And that obviously undermines our position in the region and makes it harder for other countries in the region to want to work with us.
And we're losing some of that influence right now, as a matter of fact, because what we've effectively demonstrated is that.
As these Gulf states are getting bombed, where are we putting our priorities?
We're putting our priorities in protecting Israel.
Hell, even our bases got demolished.
And the Iranians could have done this a while ago.
They could have demolished our bases, and it took us attacking them directly, killing their supreme leader, and initiating an all out war while we're in the middle of peace talks, by the way, for them to finally say, you know what, enough is enough.
Then they closed the Strait of Hamas.
They destroyed all of our bases in the region for the most part.
They're attacking Israel back.
They could have done this a long time ago, but they didn't.
So I would argue they've been acting way more rational and measured than the Israelis.
40 seconds.
You want it, Mine?
We can end it there.
Okay.
It's a Nesh.
When Myron first brought up this issue of Iran's moral restraint, I thought he was using it just as a kind of throwaway line, but he's dug in on it so much that I think it deserves to be scrutinized and perhaps even mocked a little bit because.
Look, Iran, I admit.
Has built up a tremendous force, not just in Iran, but not just in the region of the Middle East with surrogates like Hezbollah, but also projected its power beyond the Middle East.
Iran has had a very powerful presence.
My wife is Venezuelan, powerful presence in Venezuela.
Iranians in the Venezuelan parliament, military material coming into the Venezuelan airports from Iran on a daily basis on a private terminal.
All of this has been going on now for years.
So Iran was trying to create a beachhead.
On the Americas, where it could project its power not just in South America, but of course, you're now a couple of thousand miles from Miami.
So, this is a very aggressive, powerful society with 90 million people, as I mentioned earlier.
Second, Iran has shown the ability to have unbelievably bloodthirsty wars that impose hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Think back, for example, one of the memorable experiences politically for me was just watching the absolute carnage of the Iran Iraq War.
Remember the Iran Iraq War?
You just have mass slaughter going on on both sides, hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides, essentially the two countries bleeding each other into the ground.
So, the idea that somehow Iran is this kind of rational, measured guy, that, you know, even though they're taking a tremendous beating, hey, we have no army, hey, we have no air force, hey, we've got no navy, but guess what?
We're not going to strike back.
And we're not going to strike back, not because we can't, not because little Israel with 10 million people is kicking our butts, not because This little country that is the size of New Jersey has been able to pistol whip the Arab countries of the Middle East, including Iran, going back to the 48 war, the 67 war, the 73 war.
I mean, it's a major embarrassment.
And it's a major embarrassment now that Israel in 12 days can basically put Iran.
On its knees.
So I think it's very tempting for a guy like Myron.
It's very hard for him to accept that a powerful country like Iran is getting this kind of a horse whipping from Israel, which he obviously hates.
And so he's like, listen, it's got to be that the Iranians have these like secret powers that nobody's aware of that they could use.
Oh, sure, they could level Tel Aviv tomorrow.
They could level Jerusalem the next day.
They could level the Hadzor the day after that.
They're just not doing it because they're super nice guys.
I mean, to me, this is just laughable.
It's absurd.
Any country that has been pummeled in the way that Iran has is going to use what it can.
Now, I think Iran has been trying to do that.
They were able to get one missile off to Diego Garcia, but guess what?
I don't know if it even killed a couple of cows.
It certainly didn't kill anybody.
It was disarmed.
And while they have had some strikes in Israel, the damage has been almost comically minimal.
And I say this because, see, normally when powerful countries fight, you actually have serious damage on both sides.
I mean, I think of the civil war.
You know, the Northern armies lose 3,000, Robert E. Lee loses 1,500, and it's a great victory for Robert E. Lee.
Man, he only lost 1,500.
He lost only half the number of people that the Union army did, and so he's a genius.
He's a military strategic genius.
In this case, you can almost count on like two hands the number of casualties on the American Israeli side, and the Iranian casualties are much greater, and the damage to Iran is huge.
So, an immensely powerful country has been leveled.
By the combined operations, highly successful military operations.
And look, at the end of the day, you can say, you know, we're losing diplomatically, you know, we're losing reputationally, we're losing blah, blah, blah.
At the end of the day, the guy who wins the war always wins everything else in the end.
I mean, there was a lot of Southern propaganda against Lincoln, but when Lincoln won the war and the country was unified, that was it.
And the Republican Party then ruled the United States for the next 50 years.
So if we get a peaceful, prosperous, pro American Iran out of this, It's going to be great news for the Iranian people.
Great news for the region.
Great news for UAE and Bahrain and Oman and Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
All these Muslim countries are going to be cheering, not to mention Israel.
And it's also great news for the United States.
Okay, Myron.
Ending The Stream00:01:36
Okay, hold on one sec.
I'm just writing down some of this stuff.
We got 25 minutes left, guys.
Okay, no worries.
And I'm going to, you know what?
I'm going to, yo, Ma, do me a favor, guys.
I'm going to end my YouTube stream.
Come on over to kick everybody.
Everybody, come on over to kick.
I'm going to end the YouTube stream here.
Just give me one sec.
And then, Dinesh, the last part you were saying there with you're saying that we're going to get a democratic Iran because of this?
No, no, I'm saying if we get a regime change, which I support, I hope we do get one, and the mullahs are out, I don't know exactly what will come in its place.
It might be a constitutional monarchy.
Maybe the Shah's son will come back.
I don't know, but it's going to be better than what's there now.
Okay.
I just want to make sure I have everything right.
Do you guys want to keep doing the timed responses or do you want to switch it to open dialogue?
We could do one or two more rounds of this and we could do open dialogue.
I'm cool with that.
Okay.
I'm just making sure I have Dinesh's argument here.
Yeah, Sean, I like the timing only because this way we just don't interrupt each other.
You know, Sean has his own.
I mean, Myron has his time.
I have my time.
And so it's actually very cool.
We each get to lay out our point and then stop within the five minutes whenever we want.
Okay.
Yeah, I'm cool with that.
Yeah, that's why I suggested the time rounds from the beginning.
It just makes it easier.
All right, guys, come on over.
I'm going to end the kick stream right now.
Sorry, guys.
I'm just for the quick little.
Thing here.
I'm streaming everywhere, so I'm just going to make sure I have, again, the hell off YouTube.