Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Iran Did Everything W/ Scott Horton
Aired: 2019-09-19
Duration: 01:50:01


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[00:01:30]  All right, let's start the show.
[00:01:33]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:01:35]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:01:37]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:01:41]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:01:47]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:01:51]  You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
[00:01:55]  Here's your host, James Smith.
[00:01:58]  Hey, what's up, everybody?
[00:02:00]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:02:03]  It's our Wednesday one-on-one series continued.
[00:02:08]  Quick announcement before we start the show.
[00:02:10]  I just wanted to let people know I have been told that my Soho Forum debate will be out on YouTube on Friday.
[00:02:17]  So check for that on Friday.
[00:02:19]  And I also just recorded earlier today an episode of Free Man Beyond the Wall with the great Mance Raider, Pete Raymond, whatever name he's going with today.
[00:02:32]  By the time it comes out, he'll have a new name.
[00:02:34]  But we recorded and we discussed the debate there.
[00:02:38]  So anyway, all that stuff will be out on Friday.
[00:02:42]  Should be, at least.
[00:02:43]  So look for that online.
[00:02:45]  If it's not, don't be angry at me.
[00:02:46]  I've been told that it'll be out on Friday, but I have no control of any of those things.
[00:02:49]  However, for today's show, we have returning to the show, my favorite person to talk to, my favorite guest to have on the show.
[00:02:57]  He is my guru on matters of foreign policy and really all things political and philosophical.
[00:03:05]  And he's somebody who I feel like I should have to climb a very tall mountain to get five minutes to talk to and then give me some wisdom.
[00:03:13]  But it's a lot easier than that.
[00:03:15]  I just have to have him on the podcast or give him a call.
[00:03:18]  He is, of course, the incredible, the slayer of neocons.
[00:03:22]  I just want to give you like 10 Apollo Creed type nicknames.
[00:03:25]  Anyway, everybody, you know him by now.
[00:03:27]  You love him.
[00:03:28]  The author of Fool's Eren, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, the great Scott Horton is back with us.
[00:03:34]  How are you, sir?
[00:03:35]  I'm doing good, Dave.
[00:03:36]  Thanks for having me now.
[00:03:37]  Of course, dude.
[00:03:38]  Always a pleasure.
[00:03:38]  And I'm real excited.
[00:03:40]  You got this new book that's out, which is The Great Ron Paul.
[00:03:44]  You just sent me a copy of it.
[00:03:46]  I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I'm very excited.
[00:03:48]  The great Ron Paul.
[00:03:49]  Oh, that's an awesome looking cover, man.
[00:03:52]  Yeah, isn't that great?
[00:03:53]  Yeah, I got to get a hard copy of that.
[00:03:55]  That's got to be a good thing.
[00:03:56]  The lady Sarah, my friend Roman's wife, did this great pencil sketch of Ron.
[00:04:00]  Isn't that wonderful?
[00:04:01]  Yeah, that's amazing.
[00:04:02]  So it is a transcript of all of your many interviews with Ron Paul over the years on the Scott Horton show.
[00:04:09]  It was a really great idea to put that all together.
[00:04:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:04:11]  And it's cool because it, you know, the interesting thing about your interviews with Ron Paul, there's always like, you know, what's going on at the time, but then there's these kind of consistent things that are through lines throughout all of them.
[00:04:23]  And it's just, it's a, it's a great piece.
[00:04:25]  It was a great idea.

=== Houthis vs Saudi Arabia (14:58) ===

[00:04:26]  So make sure you guys go check that out.
[00:04:27]  Where can they, uh, where can people grab that?
[00:04:29]  Amazon.com and of course at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
[00:04:34]  Yeah.
[00:04:35]  Then by the way, you guys, if you don't go there, go check out the work at libertarianinstitute.com or excuse me, libertarianinstitute.org.
[00:04:42]  It's just a phenomenal site.
[00:04:43]  Every single day I go there and I go to antiwar.com.
[00:04:46]  If you want to know what's really going on in the world, the important issues, there's two websites that should be on your daily internet journey.
[00:04:54]  So make sure you go check those out.
[00:04:56]  Of course.
[00:04:57]  Well, absolutely.
[00:04:58]  And it's, you know, it's one of the ways, you know, going to antiwar.com is part of the reason when people see me on these cable news shows kicking all these all these guys' asses.
[00:05:09]  It's really, you don't really need that much more than to just go to antiwar.com.
[00:05:14]  They're going to give you all the articles about everything that's going on.
[00:05:17]  They break it down by the region.
[00:05:19]  So if there's any one region that you want to just know, okay, what's going on in Syria right now?
[00:05:22]  What's going on in Yemen, Saudi Arabia right now?
[00:05:24]  You can figure all that stuff out.
[00:05:26]  And you're going to get the honest, you're going to get the honest facts on the ground as we know them.
[00:05:31]  Unlike when you go to places like CNN.com or something, where it's really just a joke.
[00:05:37]  I was actually, I was making fun of it just yesterday with Kennedy off air.
[00:05:41]  I was on her show and we were talking about the attack on the Saudi oil base or oil field.
[00:05:47]  And, you know, we were talking about it off air and we're like looking at this CNN article.
[00:05:50]  And it's really funny that they break it down and they're like, what we know, Iran did it.
[00:05:56]  Because the intelligence community has said with a high degree of certainty that Iran did it.
[00:06:01]  And of course, whenever the intelligence community knows something with a high degree of certainty, well, then, I mean, there's no more questions need to be asked.
[00:06:08]  I'll say, number one, I love the term comedically.
[00:06:11]  I love the term intelligence community.
[00:06:14]  It kind of makes it sound like they're all watering each other's plants and they're living in huts and like singing songs over a campfire at night.
[00:06:20]  You know, it sounds a lot better than saying our unelected spies and killers.
[00:06:26]  Just intelligence community sounds a lot nicer, but why don't we start with this?
[00:06:30]  Because this is correct me if I get something wrong in this, but there was an attack on a soil on a Saudi oil field, a significant attack that really did some damage.
[00:06:42]  And the Iranians are like, we absolutely didn't do this.
[00:06:46]  The Houthis are insisting that they did it and that more will come, which seems to make more sense to me.
[00:06:54]  Vice President Pence and Pompeo said, I think about three minutes after the attack, we know for sure that Iran did it.
[00:07:00]  Now the intelligence community is coming out and saying that Iran did it.
[00:07:04]  Just before we even get into anything else, what do you think happened here with this attack?
[00:07:09]  What do we know right now?
[00:07:11]  Well, I think the most obvious thing is what you said, that the Houthis themselves did it.
[00:07:15]  And they've been launching drone attacks with more and more sophistication against Saudi Arabia, as well as missile attacks over the past year and a half or so.
[00:07:24]  And just last month, in August, they had launched a drone attack that was hundreds of miles deep into Saudi Arabia.
[00:07:31]  But even then, it doesn't have to necessarily be launched from Yemen.
[00:07:35]  They could, you know, sneak across the border or they could have allies in Saudi Arabia or, you know, who knows exactly what.
[00:07:43]  I mean, I think the real thing is we don't know who did it.
[00:07:46]  The fact that CNN says we know because that's what the U.S. government says.
[00:07:50]  It shouldn't impress anybody at this point, no matter what so-called side you're on here or what your bias is.
[00:07:57]  Even if you hate Iran, the fact that CNN says that ought to make you suspicious, you know, in the first place.
[00:08:06]  And, you know, the first statement that I saw from Pompeo was, there's no evidence that it came from Yemen.
[00:08:12]  Which means by default, it must have been the Iranians, whether from Iran.
[00:08:16]  Now they're saying from Iran.
[00:08:17]  At first, they were saying from bases in Iraq.
[00:08:20]  Well, how does Iran have bases in Iraq?
[00:08:22]  Does anybody remember anything happening in Iraq in the last, say, 20 years or so, where Iran got to gain in power and influence?
[00:08:29]  Wait a minute.
[00:08:30]  That's the side America's still on in Iraq.
[00:08:33]  Anyway, so is that what they're saying?
[00:08:36]  That right under the nose of special operations forces, these Iran-backed Iraqi militias are launching these attacks.
[00:08:43]  Well, they just say it's Iran.
[00:08:45]  I mean, it's just Iran.
[00:08:47]  Like there seems when convenient, there's no separating the Shiites in Iraq from Iran.
[00:08:54]  So if a Shiite in Iraq does anything, we can basically blame that on Iran, even though, of course, it's a majority Shiite country.
[00:09:02]  And if we do anything to prop up the Shiites in Iraq, they're like, oh, what are you talking about?
[00:09:07]  We're not supporting Iran.
[00:09:08]  This is crazy.
[00:09:09]  So it's a very convenient kind of labeling of when exactly that gets to be considered Iran and when it doesn't and just happens to fall right in line to the war that we know that they've already wanted for a long time.
[00:09:25]  We've been talking about this since me and you have known each other.
[00:09:28]  There's always another incident where they're trying to gin up hostilities with Iran.
[00:09:33]  Of course, there's been several in the last year alone.
[00:09:37]  However, this one seems to be a little bit more of a substantial, you know, even more so than those ships.
[00:09:47]  This one seems to be something where they actually did some damage to Saudi oil.
[00:09:53]  And there's something interesting about that in itself where, oh, oh, Saudi oil is threatened.
[00:09:58]  Now we really got to get serious.
[00:10:00]  And Donald Trump, I believe just yesterday, or it might have even been earlier today, announced harsher sanctions on Iran.
[00:10:07]  He's, you know, Donald Trump's talking with a lot of bluster about what our military could do.
[00:10:13]  By the way, that's another thing that I love is that they always, it even came up yesterday on the panel when I was on Kennedy's show, which God, by the way, God bless Kennedy.
[00:10:21]  She is great on this issue.
[00:10:22]  She was great on it.
[00:10:23]  She's like, I want to see some actual evidence that Iran did this.
[00:10:26]  She's really, really good on the U.S.-Saudi relationship and she's really good on the conflict in Yemen.
[00:10:32]  And she's like, why is it that we're supposed to support Saudi Arabia?
[00:10:37]  Here's a funny thing.
[00:10:38]  And I made this point on her show last night.
[00:10:40]  Guys like me and you, we reject the whole interventionist foreign policy empire model.
[00:10:47]  I mean, the whole philosophy of it and not just every individual act, but the whole philosophy we reject.
[00:10:52]  Like this is this is ridiculous, the idea that we're supposed to run the whole world.
[00:10:56]  And if anybody does anything wrong, we're supposed to start a war and all of this stuff.
[00:11:00]  But even if you accepted it, even if you accepted the world police empire, George W. Bush mentality, there is a better argument that we should intervene against Saudi Arabia than there is that we should intervene against Iran.
[00:11:16]  I mean, you could, if you're using 9-11 attacks as the whole foundational bedrock for why we're involved in these wars, there is a better argument that actually says we should intervene on the side of the Houthis against Saudi Arabia, who's basically allied along with al-Qaeda in Yemen, and we should go and attack them.
[00:11:35]  And yet there's nobody even entertains that idea.
[00:11:38]  Yeah.
[00:11:39]  Well, in fact, the U.S. was allied with the Houthis.
[00:11:44]  And as the Wall Street Journal reported in January of 2015, as they were taking over the capital city over at Central Command, the idea was great.
[00:11:53]  These guys hate Al-Qaeda.
[00:11:55]  And then the deputy secretary, pardon me, the deputy secretary of defense for intelligence gave a presentation at the Atlantic Council where he explained in detail how they're passing intelligence to the Houthis for use in targeting Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
[00:12:12]  It was only two months later that Barack Obama stabbed them in the back and took Al-Qaeda's side against them.
[00:12:18]  So, no, I wouldn't recommend intervening on the side of the Houthis.
[00:12:23]  But as you're saying, all other things being equal, assuming the right and the power of the U.S. government to go around allying with who they want in order to kill the enemies of the American people, then yes, America's natural allies against our Al-Qaeda enemies would be Iran and the so-called Shiite crescent, which includes the Houthis, Hezbollah, and Syria, Iran,
[00:12:47]  and now the government in Baghdad that George Bush ensconced in power there in the war of 2003 through eight, which put in Iran's pets in Skiri and Dawa in power there.
[00:12:57]  Yeah, these are the natural, in fact, this is what has empowered al-Qaeda in the region in the first place, but these are the enemies of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
[00:13:06]  No, of course, I'm not in any way advocating a war with Saudi Arabia.
[00:13:10]  I just think it's kind of funny that by all of the justifications, I mean, you could run through every one of them.
[00:13:15]  I mean, I suppose the whole nuclear thing that was bullshit in Iraq is bullshit in Iran would be bullshit too.
[00:13:22]  But you, I'm sure, could make up something or, you know, like the Saudis have talked about like potentially developing a nuclear weapon.
[00:13:29]  You could say, look at the, remember when they used to say like, well, Saddam gassed his own people.
[00:13:33]  You go, well, look at what the Saudis are doing to the people of Yemen.
[00:13:36]  And then if you were just to talk, remember when all the other things failed and they were just like, well, I mean, he was a brutal dictator.
[00:13:42]  I mean, look what he did to his own people.
[00:13:44]  It was like the last straw.
[00:13:44]  I was like, well, I mean, we at least liberated the people.
[00:13:47]  You could certainly make that argument about Saudi Arabia more effectively than you could make it about Saddam in Iraq.
[00:13:52]  By the way, Saddam was pretty shitty to his own people.
[00:13:56]  No denying that.
[00:13:57]  It was just a lot better than having a million people killed and handing the country over to like ISIS for a few months, or at least parts of the country.
[00:14:04]  So I'm just saying, it's just, it's kind of funny in a dark sick way that you could, by their own dumb logic, you could make just as strong an argument that we should be on the other side.
[00:14:14]  In fact, a stronger argument, because truthfully speaking, America and Europe have never been attacked by these radical Shiite Muslims.
[00:14:25]  It's always been the radical Sunnis who have actually caused the problem.
[00:14:29]  Now, of course, as you've pointed out many times, and you're absolutely right, a better solution would probably just be to stop arming the radical Sunni terrorists, jihadists, and to stop, you know, poking the bear by killing people and starving people with sanctions.
[00:14:46]  That would be a better solution.
[00:14:48]  But the whole thing is, it's really like it's almost comical to watch them try to pull together, put together like a justification for war on behalf of al-Qaeda and Saudi Arabia.
[00:14:59]  Right.
[00:15:00]  Well, see, you have to go back and remember, Dave, that the reason al-Qaeda hated us was because we were too close of friends with their governments.
[00:15:08]  They were not from Iran, Iraq, or Syria.
[00:15:10]  They were all almost entirely from Saudi and Egypt.
[00:15:14]  And then with some stragglers, I don't just mean the hijackers, but I mean the organization itself.
[00:15:19]  And the reason that they hated the U.S. and wanted to target the far enemy, as they called it, was because they figured there's no point trying to overthrow their local governments and try to establish their caliphate now when the USA will come and bomb them off the face of the earth.
[00:15:34]  And so instead, attack the U.S., provoke them into overreacting, bog them down, bleed them to bankruptcy, force them out the long way and the hard way, as Soviet style, so that the U.S. Empire completely breaks and withdraws.
[00:15:48]  And only then can they try to create their caliphate.
[00:15:51]  And in fact, when Baghdadi broke off from al-Qaeda and created the Islamic State in eastern Syria and Western Iraq for three years with the help of Saudi Arabia, as Prince Turkey al-Faisal said to John Kerry, hey, our support for Daesh, that's ISIS, our support for Daesh is our response to your support for the Dawah, meaning George Bush's war for the Shiites in Iraq.
[00:16:15]  And when they did that and created that caliphate, what happened?
[00:16:18]  America allied with those Shiites again and bombed them off the face of the earth, just proving al-Qaeda right, that you can't try to have your local revolution until you get rid of the Americans first.
[00:16:29]  And so, you know, that's actually a huge incentive for them to go back to adopting the far enemy policy of targeting the United States and trying to force us to double down with more invasions.
[00:16:41]  And hey, if they could provoke us, they could give our government an excuse to attack the Shiite Ayatollah and the mullahs of Iran and turn all of Persia into a sectarian warfare nightmare escape like what America has done in Iraq and Syria, there's nothing our government could do better for Al-Qaeda.
[00:17:01]  And so, you know, that's where we're at here.
[00:17:04]  You know, as I like to try to say and try to explain, you know, in a nutshell here, George Bush's Iraq War II gave the east and the south and the capital city to the Shia in alliance with Iran and gave the western half to al-Qaeda, at least until the local tribes marginalized them pretty much completely out of business in the so-called awakening of 07 and all that.
[00:17:26]  But because Bush had done so much to empower the Shia, he owed the Saudi.
[00:17:31]  Oh, and see, don't let me forget, I was going to say, during Iraq War II, when America was on the side of the Shiites, fighting to overthrow the Sunni dictatorship and cleanse the capital city of Sunnis, our allies, the Saudi kingdom, they were bankrolling the Sunni-based insurgency, including Al-Qaeda in Iraq, what became ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq, and later ISIS.
[00:17:55]  These were the guys who were bankrolled by our friends, the Saudis, to resist the American soldiers, that is, suicide bomb them to death, and as well as Shiite civilians and, you know, doing their part in provoking the horrible civil war that killed a million people over there.
[00:18:11]  So America on the side of the Shia.
[00:18:13]  In the king of Saudi Arabia's eyes, inexplicably, it's in the WikiLeaks.
[00:18:19]  He says, why did you guys do this?
[00:18:22]  It used to be us and you and Saddam against Iran.
[00:18:27]  Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.
[00:18:31]  And that was when Dick Cheney said, listen, I'm really sorry.
[00:18:34]  We'll make it up to you.
[00:18:35]  And that's when they launched the redirection.
[00:18:37]  Now we're going to go ahead and back the same Saudi king who's just been financing the Al-Qaeda terrorists against our guys.
[00:18:44]  We are now going to back those al-Qaeda terrorists.
[00:18:46]  But in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iran, everywhere but Iraq, where we were paying the tribes to marginalize the jihadists.
[00:18:54]  But in Iran, they're backing this group, Jandala, the Americans and the Israelis both, who they kidnapped at one, and they did suicide bombings and all kinds of stuff.
[00:19:04]  But at one point, they kidnapped a bus full of Iranian generals and cut all their heads off, 12 of them or something.
[00:19:10]  Can you imagine if Iran had sponsored a group of terrorists who had kidnapped a school bus full of American generals on some field trip somewhere and cut all their heads off?
[00:19:19]  I mean, America would nuke Iran off the face of the earth is what happened if that had happened, right?

=== Iran Backing Terror Groups (17:56) ===

[00:19:24]  But for America to back bin Ladenite terrorists against them, perfectly fine.
[00:19:30]  Business is business over there.
[00:19:32]  All right, guys, let's take a second and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is monday.com.
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[00:21:01]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:21:03]  So what do you think?
[00:21:04]  And when you talk about the redirect, which, by the way, there's a great New York Times article on this.
[00:21:11]  And when I say great, I mean that kind of, you know, facetiously, but it kind of exposes the whole thing.
[00:21:16]  Or I think it was in 2007 when they first talked about it.
[00:21:19]  Yeah, 2007.
[00:21:20]  And I mean, they break down this whole thing.
[00:21:22]  And you don't have to take it from Scott Horton's mouth.
[00:21:25]  You can actually find, you can go look up, this is an easy YouTube search.
[00:21:29]  You can find both John Kerry talking about this and talking about the rise of ISIS in Syria and how, oh, you know, we thought it would help put pressure on Assad and it kind of got away from us.
[00:21:41]  And you can actually hear Joe Biden, good old Joe Biden, the frontrunner for the Democrats right now.
[00:21:48]  We'll see for how much longer, but the frontrunner for the Democrats right now confessing the whole thing.
[00:21:54]  So, I mean, you don't have necessarily Obama on tape talking about ISIS, but you got his Secretary of State and his VP telling you exactly what happened in Syria.
[00:22:03]  But I wonder what is the state of the redirect right now?
[00:22:07]  Because it does seem like Donald Trump at least slowed it down in Syria.
[00:22:12]  He ended the CIA program to arm the anti-Assad rebels.
[00:22:17]  And coincidentally, ISIS started to lose all of their territory very shortly after that.
[00:22:22]  I'm not saying that's 100% the reason because I know Russia was involved and Assad is involved and other people too.
[00:22:28]  But it did seem like once that program ended, Syria settled down quite a bit.
[00:22:33]  But Donald Trump, you know, a lot of times I almost speak too broadly and I'll say, you know, Donald Trump seems to have some pretty good instincts on foreign policy, but he always bails on them.
[00:22:44]  So he'll talk about, you know, removing troops from Syria.
[00:22:48]  He'll talk about working out a peace deal in Afghanistan, which I want to get to later.
[00:22:53]  But then, you know, whatever, for whatever reason, whether the swamp, you know, Donald Trump isn't draining the swamp.
[00:22:59]  The swamp is covering Donald Trump and he goes there.
[00:23:01]  But truthfully speaking, Donald Trump doesn't always have great instincts.
[00:23:04]  And it seems that with Saudi Arabia, with Iran, and with Israel, his instincts are terrible.
[00:23:11]  And all of his instincts seem to be pushing in the exact wrong direction.
[00:23:16]  Yeah.
[00:23:16]  Well, you know, I mean, part of the thing is that back when he was good on this stuff during the campaign, he had as his advisor, Mike Flynn.
[00:23:24]  And as I'm sure you remember, Dave, that Mike Flynn, when he was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, they put out that report warning that America and their allies' support for the jihadists in Syria was leading to the creation of an Islamist emirate,
[00:23:43]  as he called it, in eastern Syria that posed the danger of spreading into Western Iraq and conquering Western Iraq and creating a caliphate and this whole thing, which is the goal of our allies here, and which is why we should be backing off essentially.
[00:24:01]  And anyone can Google that.
[00:24:02]  Mike Flynn, Syria, DIA memo 2012.
[00:24:05]  And there it is.
[00:24:07]  And so he was the one saying to Trump, and Trump essentially got this.
[00:24:13]  It's not that complicated, right?
[00:24:15]  That look here, Trump, you know, the secular government is fighting al-Qaeda there.
[00:24:20]  And yes, they're in alliance with Iran and Syria and Russia, but what the hell?
[00:24:24]  They're fighting Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
[00:24:28]  And so you're Donald Trump.
[00:24:29]  And so you don't care about that, dude.
[00:24:31]  You're perfectly happy to see Iran and Hezbollah and Syria and Russia kill ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
[00:24:37]  Probably should be us, but as long as it's them, what the hell?
[00:24:41]  Meanwhile, the Democrats want us to take Al-Qaeda's side and overthrow Damascus and put Ayman al-Zawahiri or his deputy, Abu Muhammad al-Julani on the throne in Damascus.
[00:24:53]  So we don't want that.
[00:24:55]  So Trump got it.
[00:24:57]  And so went out and denounced Hillary's Syria policy and said, look, we should be fighting the Islamic State, not for them.
[00:25:04]  We should be fighting against the bin Ladenites there, not on their behalf against these other guys.
[00:25:09]  And he even said explicitly at a couple of times, what the hell?
[00:25:12]  If Iran wants to kill ISIS in Syria, go right ahead.
[00:25:16]  He said that, you know, words very close to that.
[00:25:20]  So as long as he had Mike Flynn there to explain all this stuff to him all the time and reinforce that, then he was okay.
[00:25:26]  But without that, he doesn't have anyone.
[00:25:28]  And the whole consensus in DC and including in this White House is that, of course, Assad is the worst of all the bad guys in Syria because as Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren explained, Assad is allied with Iran.
[00:25:44]  And so it doesn't matter that it wasn't Iran and Syria and Hezbollah that knocked our towers down.
[00:25:52]  That actually essentially has nothing to do with it.
[00:25:55]  If you pay attention to our foreign policy consensus in DC, they've done nothing but wage wars against a lot of people who didn't do it ever since that attack.
[00:26:06]  They started by essentially letting bin Laden go.
[00:26:09]  I think it's unprovable that they definitely chose to let him go, but sure looks like it.
[00:26:15]  And then as soon as they did, they said, oh, no, Osama's out there and Saddam could give him chemical weapons and he could nuke you in your jammies in the middle of the night and nobody knows what.
[00:26:26]  And then they've done nothing but target secular dictatorships, essentially.
[00:26:30]  Saddam, Saleh, Gaddafi, you know, I guess, you know, never mind Egypt for the minute, but Assad in Egypt, they actually had a peaceful revolution where very moderate conservative Islamists in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood stood for election and won.
[00:26:52]  And then in this case, the Saudis and the Americans backed the secular dictators' coup d'état against them to overthrow him.
[00:27:00]  Which was the funniest because Obama celebrated it as it was happening.
[00:27:04]  Like Obama, you know, was Obama continued with the policy of propping up Mubarak just like everyone before him had was like 40 years or something like that.
[00:27:11]  We were sending him the, not 40 years, but it was 30 years.
[00:27:15]  We were sending him, you know, billions of dollars, backing them up.
[00:27:18]  And then as the uprising came, you know, Obama did his, well, I think I believe in democracy and these people are good.
[00:27:24]  And then they're like, oh, but you believe in democracy.
[00:27:26]  They just voted in the Muslim Brotherhood.
[00:27:27]  And they were like, oh, you got it wrong.
[00:27:29]  All right.
[00:27:30]  And they just went right back in and took them out.
[00:27:33]  And then a year and a half later, the military overthrew the government and reinstalled, you know, the next Mubarak, this guy Fatah al-Sisi.
[00:27:40]  And John Kerry, then the Secretary of State, said, well, that's the reinstitution of democracy in Egypt.
[00:27:47]  The military coup overthrowing that.
[00:27:49]  And I mean, in fact, if Islamists are ever to have political power at all, if the middle part of North America is ever to tolerate Islamists coming to political power in some other people's country somewhere, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood are pretty decent model for it.
[00:28:09]  They're essentially, unlike the Syria Muslim Brotherhood, who would be happy to set off a suicide bomb for you.
[00:28:15]  In Egypt, they're a bunch of rich old men, you know, essentially doctors and lawyers and property owners, not necessarily tied to the military establishment, but they're essentially, at least they were, rich and old and moderate.
[00:28:31]  They stood for election.
[00:28:32]  They didn't try to seize power.
[00:28:34]  They stood for election for the parliament, for the presidency and all that kind of thing.
[00:28:38]  And just like the elections in Algeria in 1993 or in Gaza in 2006, the Americans say, oh, you voted for the religious party, you lose.
[00:28:49]  The only place where they're allowed to get away with this at all is in Qatar, and that's because they host a giant American airbase there.
[00:28:55]  And they have Muslim Brotherhood in their parliament there.
[00:28:58]  And it's funny because, you know, sorry, we're supposed to be getting back to Yemen probably here.
[00:29:02]  It's a funny dynamic where the alliance of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates in their war against the Houthi government in Yemen includes Saudi support for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Al-Islah party, where they hate the Muslim Brotherhood everywhere else.
[00:29:19]  They like Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but hate the Muslim Brotherhood.
[00:29:24]  Mostly, right, not because of their Islamist extremism, so-called, but because they set the model that you can run for election, that you can participate in Western-style democracy.
[00:29:34]  And, you know, on that basis, that's why al-Qaeda types have always denounced them ever since, you know, they split off since, you know, Ayman al-Zawahiri and his group split off and created Egyptian Islamic Jihad or joined Egyptian Islamic Jihad when they quit the Muslim Brotherhood back in the early 1980s.
[00:29:54]  That's what they hate about them.
[00:29:55]  But anyway, so in Yemen, the Saudis back the Muslim Brotherhood, which is called the Al-Islah Party.
[00:30:02]  And they're the only group essentially in the country that supports Hadi, the president, the so-called president that Saudi is failing to reinstall on the throne there.
[00:30:12]  While in this case, the United Arab Emirates has been much closer to the Al-Qaeda guys.
[00:30:18]  In either case, America backs them both.
[00:30:20]  But I don't know if you've heard the news about this, but the Saudis and the UAE, even though they get along at the top level back in their capital cities, they've been fighting on the ground in Yemen because the UAE is allied not just with Al-Qaeda, but they're also allied with the Southern socialist secessionists.
[00:30:38]  And the Southern socialist secessionists, I don't guess they prefer the Houthis, but they hate Hadi and they don't want to support the Muslim Brotherhood or Hadi and the attempt to put him back on the throne there.
[00:30:50]  And as the UAE is withdrawing their forces out of the country, they're essentially turning more power over to the Southern socialist secessionists over the dead body and against the wishes of the Saudis.
[00:31:02]  And so you even had the Saudis attacking the UAE's puppets and the UAE attacking the Saudis puppets as they're all supposedly fighting the supposed Iran puppets, the Houthis, who aren't even really the puppets of Iran in the first place.
[00:31:18]  Right.
[00:31:18]  So that also seems, I mean, so it basically the dynamic is, at least in the, in the Washington corporate press, that any, anybody, anything that the Houthis do, anything that Hezbollah does is all basically, that's Iran did that.
[00:31:35]  They're just pulling the strings and these guys just work for Iran.
[00:31:39]  What is the, what, like, how much truth is there to that?
[00:31:43]  That Iran, I mean, I know that there have been some Iranian groups that have contributed money to Hezbollah before.
[00:31:49]  I mean, look, I'm not, I don't think that's a slam dunk of anything.
[00:31:53]  I mean, look at who, you know, the Saudis have sent aid and comfort to.
[00:31:58]  Look at who we've sent money and weapons to.
[00:32:01]  But what is the true, like, what is the real answer, at least best we know, of the relationship between Iran and the Houthis?
[00:32:10]  Well, first of all, in Hezbollah, I think it is fair to say that Hezbollah is like Iran's 51st state.
[00:32:16]  I mean, they sort of came about in response to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon right at the time of the Iranian revolution, too.
[00:32:25]  And so they were feeling that Shiite revolutionary power as they were kind of rising up.
[00:32:30]  And they forged a very strong relationship with Iran since then.
[00:32:34]  Now, you know, Nasrallah, their leader, I don't think he's just anybody's cat's paw necessarily.
[00:32:39]  Like he just takes orders.
[00:32:41]  But, you know, then again, an American governor is not a direct servant of the American president either.
[00:32:46]  But nobody's going to deny they're in cahoots.
[00:32:49]  You know what I mean?
[00:32:49]  They're part of the same system.
[00:32:53]  And so I think, you know, when it comes to Hezbollah, I don't know exactly how much influence or even what they have to disagree about in terms of policy and all that.
[00:33:03]  You know, I probably should learn more about that.
[00:33:05]  But I would essentially default toward the idea that, yeah, Iran has plenty of influence over Hezbollah and not just money, but in weapons and training and all kinds of stuff.
[00:33:18]  Now, with the Houthis, and a co-religionist sort of a way too.
[00:33:22]  Now, with the Houthis, it's just very different.
[00:33:26]  And I think almost all of the reporting that I've seen or claims, I guess I should say, of Iranian support for the Houthis is all very vague.
[00:33:37]  Or when it is specific, it's been completely debunked.
[00:33:41]  And there are, for example, there are two or three ships who've been seized that, you know, they made a big deal about, oh, see, Iran is sending weapons to the Houthis.
[00:33:49]  But in one case, it was pretty clear that the weapons were going from Yemen to Somalia.
[00:33:55]  They're so filthy with weapons in Yemen right now, they're still exporting them in the middle of a war.
[00:34:01]  And then the other one was, I think Gareth Porter, of course, is the great debunker on this.
[00:34:07]  I'm pretty sure that the other one, yeah, they seized a ship, but there were no weapons on it, or it wasn't going to Yemen, this kind of thing.
[00:34:14]  There was enough for them to try to make a story out of, but there was no real story there.
[00:34:18]  And then, of course, remember Nikki Haley did the big presentation at the United Nations where she showed this, the wreckage of this big missile that had been fired by the Houthis that hit, I forget if I think this was one that had hit the airport in Riyadh or somewhere near Riyadh.
[00:34:34]  And she said, see, this is an Iranian missile.
[00:34:36]  The Iranians must have given them the missile.
[00:34:39]  And Scott Ritter, the weapons expert, wrote a big article about the American Conservative about how, no, that's a North Korean missile.
[00:34:47]  And the Iranians and the Yemenis both bought North Korean missiles right around the same time.
[00:34:51]  And you can tell that, you know, this one did not come from Iran because the Iranians, they modify their North Korean missiles thus way.
[00:35:00]  And this missile has not been modified as such.
[00:35:02]  And so looks to be, you know, of North Korean design without the Iranian influence on it whatsoever.
[00:35:09]  And then, of course, there's the whole question of how the Iranians are supposed to get any weapons into Yemen when the country's under a blockade.
[00:35:18]  And if you look at where Yemen is, it's the southwest corner of the Arabian Peninsula there.
[00:35:25]  And so, you know, Iran is not smuggling weapons through the Saudi desert.
[00:35:31]  Highly doubtful they're going through neutral Oman, which likes that they get along with everybody and don't have many problems with anyone there.
[00:35:40]  And so the only other options are the air.
[00:35:44]  Well, their airport is closed in Sana'a and the sea, which is completely blockaded by the Saudi and American Navy for the last four and a half years.
[00:35:56]  So how are the Iranians supposed to be getting all of these weapons to the Houthis by email attachment or something?
[00:36:02]  And then, so I think the reality is, though, that they have been sending them money by way of email attachment or, you know, wiring it to them.
[00:36:10]  I'm sure they've supported them.
[00:36:11]  I mean, essentially, the Americans are handing the Iranians another victory here on a golden platter, just like in Iraq, just like in Syria, where we gave them, gave, you know, Syria a reason to need Iran, where they were allies.
[00:36:25]  Now they're completely dependent on Iran for defense against the bin Ladenites there.
[00:36:31]  And so here, America and its allies are giving Iran credit for every one of the Houthis victories that Iran doesn't really deserve the credit for.
[00:36:40]  But you can see why from their point of view, they're like, okay, we'll take it.
[00:36:44]  And it helps us a lot and hurts us none to help the Houthis along here.
[00:36:50]  So, you know, there's a Yemen expert that I email back and forth with from time to time named Michael Horton, who's no relation to me and who's a real Yemen expert and writes for the American Conservative magazine.
[00:37:02]  And he's told me that, yes, he is convinced that there has been some very low-level material support, but essentially not enough to justify any of the accusations that the Houthis are really just armed up by Iran, are part of the Iranian Crescent Alliance and all of this.

=== America Overestimates Iranian Aid (05:58) ===

[00:37:21]  You know, they did not partake in the Iranian revolution the same way that Hezbollah did.
[00:37:26]  You know, they are nominally Shiites, the Zaydi Shiites, but they're actually much closer to their Sunni cousins and pray right next to them and everything and always have there in Yemen.
[00:37:40]  And it's a very different sort of kind of a breakoff of Shiism from that practiced by the ruling regime in Iran, who are so-called 12ers, who, you know, instead of Jesus, it's the 12th Imam who comes back at the end of the world and that kind of thing as the Messiah.
[00:37:56]  So, but the Zaydis are of a different tradition and they don't share, you know, it's not like they've been close to Iran all the time that just because, aha, see Shiite, and that's all you need to know.
[00:38:08]  In fact, there's no real long-term relationship going way There.
[00:38:14]  And there's no real reason to believe that whatever the Houthis are doing is simply at Iran's behest.
[00:38:21]  But you can see now how, Dave, if America handed Baghdad and all of south and eastern Iraq to Iran and their friends, if America's mission to support Al-Qaeda, America and its allies, mission to support Al-Qaeda, jihadists, and Syria has only backfired and empowered and increased Iran's position and influence there, has only helped create a battlefield for Hezbollah to train on in southern Lebanon, empowering them further,
[00:38:48]  giving Iran the ability to work more closely with Hezbollah while they're there in Syria fighting al-Qaeda together and giving them this victory in Yemen where the Houthis still, after four and a half years, rule the capital city.
[00:39:01]  And according to the Americans, all credit is due to Iran for the effort that, from the point of view of the American Hawks, they don't know what to do except pull out a gun and shoot themselves in the foot some more.
[00:39:14]  They don't know what to do except throw a tempered tantrum and do something crazy.
[00:39:19]  Do you see the reason you mentioned before about how Trump announced some new sanctions?
[00:39:24]  That's because we can't go to war with them, Dave.
[00:39:26]  That's why we invaded Iraq.
[00:39:27]  Remember the clean break?
[00:39:29]  We're going to weaken Iran by getting rid of Saddam Hussein.
[00:39:32]  Okay, that's stupid, but don't lose the motive.
[00:39:34]  They thought they were going to weaken Iran.
[00:39:36]  Why do they do Syria?
[00:39:38]  Jeffrey Goldberg says, hey, Obama, don't you think it would help weaken Iran if we got rid of Assad in Syria?
[00:39:43]  And Obama says, that's right.
[00:39:44]  That's what we're doing here.
[00:39:46]  So all of this stuff is supposed to somehow weaken Iran.
[00:39:50]  And the reason why is because we can't attack Iran.
[00:39:52]  It's too big.
[00:39:54]  They have too much of an ability to fight back.
[00:39:56]  You know, Iraq had been through the Iran-Iraq war, then Iraq War I, then Iraq War I and a half.
[00:40:02]  George Bush came knocking for Iraq War II.
[00:40:04]  They couldn't do anything.
[00:40:05]  They could barely resist for two weeks before Baghdad fell.
[00:40:08]  They had no ability to hit back against American forces in any real way whatsoever.
[00:40:12]  But Iran is not like that.
[00:40:14]  Now, of course, in a real war, America could take Iran.
[00:40:18]  You know, they spend, you know, a tenth of a percent or something of what America spends on its military.
[00:40:26]  They have a couple of battleships and some fiberglass speedboats for a navy.
[00:40:29]  They have F-4s and F-14s that Richard Nixon sold them for their Air Force and, you know, no spare parts.
[00:40:36]  And America could take them.
[00:40:38]  But America and its allies have vulnerable forces and resources in the region that they just cannot protect.
[00:40:47]  There are thousands, I don't know, tens of thousands of Americans stationed in Kuwait.
[00:40:51]  Thousands, again, embedded with Shiite Iraqi army and militia men fighting Iraq War III and a half against ISIS right now in Iraq.
[00:41:00]  There are thousands of men, still, you know, more than 10,000, 15,000 stationed in Afghanistan at the Bagram Air Base and other bases that are well within range of Iranian missiles.
[00:41:11]  And then, of course, the Fifth Fleet is stationed at Bahrain.
[00:41:14]  The U.S. Air Force is at Qatar.
[00:41:16]  And we got, you know, oil resources and financial resources and water desalinization plants and whatever, easy targets all up and down the west coast of the Persian Gulf.
[00:41:30]  And so, you know, the American military, they don't want to fight a war unless they have what they call escalation dominance, which means that they believe that they will control every single stage of the fight and that the other side will be essentially helpless before our might.
[00:41:44]  And that without that, if they're in a fight where they think that the other side will be able to hit back and get some work done, they would rather not do it.
[00:41:53]  You can give them Iraq after Iraq after Iraq to invade just fine.
[00:41:57]  You know, send some, you know, special operations guys to hunt down some tribesmen wherever you got.
[00:42:03]  but take on a group that can actually hit back and hurt our Navy and hurt our Air Force and kill thousands of our infantrymen and maybe billions of dollars worth of investments and resources on the Arabian Peninsula.
[00:42:17]  Forget about it.
[00:42:17]  They can't do it.
[00:42:18]  That's why they're so pissed and screaming men stomping their feet and doing all this stupid stuff all the time.
[00:42:24]  They're mad about Iran, but they can't do a thing about it.
[00:42:27]  Yeah, it's really like we really are the U.S. military really has become bullies.
[00:42:32]  I mean, it's like, when was the last time they actually, and we've had so many wars, like since the Cold War, so many, huh?
[00:42:40]  Yeah, don't tempt them.
[00:42:42]  Oh, no, I'm not.
[00:42:43]  I'm not trying to.
[00:42:44]  Yeah, he's right.
[00:42:45]  We gotta go.
[00:42:46]  But when was the last time they took on someone tough who would actually pose a fight for them?
[00:42:51]  I mean, it seems like it is like, yeah, I mean, that's it.
[00:42:55]  It's World War II is the end of it.
[00:42:57]  I mean, look, like, I guess you could already.
[00:42:59]  And they never pose a threat to the West Coast, not really.
[00:43:02]  Right.
[00:43:02]  They're just trying to keep us out of their empire in the East.
[00:43:04]  Right.
[00:43:05]  Right.
[00:43:06]  And, you know, obviously, like, the wars, the war in Europe and the war in Asia and World War II, I mean, those were difficult wars where you were actually fighting formidable opponents.
[00:43:14]  And I'm not advocating we do that again.
[00:43:16]  Those were incredibly bloody wars for that reason.

=== Bluechew Chewable Promo (02:51) ===

[00:43:19]  Dave, you know, Richard Pryor in 1986 had a bit where he says, hey, oh, you know the one?
[00:43:26]  Uh-huh.
[00:43:27]  Did I already tell you this?
[00:43:28]  I think me and you have talked about this before.
[00:43:31]  No, but you can, no, I think we've talked about it before, but you can find it on YouTube where he's like, I thought we were these big, bad motherfuckers.
[00:43:38]  We beat the Nazis.
[00:43:39]  We beat the Soviets.
[00:43:41]  Yeah.
[00:43:42]  And then he goes, why are we bombing Libya?
[00:43:44]  Aren't they some small little weak country?
[00:43:46]  Does that sound right to you?
[00:43:48]  And then there's not even a joke.
[00:43:49]  He doesn't even tell a joke.
[00:43:50]  He just goes back to the routine after that.
[00:43:52]  Dude, Jon Stewart had a bit about this like years before he became the daily show guy.
[00:43:58]  John Stewart was just in his stand-up act where he had a bit.
[00:44:01]  It was about the first Persian Gulf War in Iraq.
[00:44:03]  And he was like, this is like, he goes, this is Mike Tyson in his prime fighting like the 135th ranked fighter in the world.
[00:44:10]  Like, what is this?
[00:44:11]  Can't someone else handle this fight for us?
[00:44:14]  Like, why are they coming up to us?
[00:44:15]  And it was, he did it far better than I'm doing right now, but he had a really funny bit about that because it is kind of absurd.
[00:44:21]  The idea that why would we need to launch this fight against someone who clearly couldn't on their best day even scratch us?
[00:44:28]  So what's the threat here?
[00:44:31]  Even better than that.
[00:44:33]  What if at the end of the Cold War, someone had told you, all right, now we're going to start bombing Iraq and we're not going to stop for 30 years.
[00:44:42]  Yeah.
[00:44:42]  Now that the Soviet Union's out of the way, it's the Iraqis.
[00:44:46]  And not only are we going to bomb them, we're going to start bombing them and we're going to never stop bombing them.
[00:44:51]  Yeah.
[00:44:52]  From now on.
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[00:46:02]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:46:04]  Every president since George H.W. Bush has been bombing Iraq.

=== Endless Iraq Bombing Cycle (16:00) ===

[00:46:11]  It's just bombing right now.
[00:46:12]  We do.
[00:46:13]  Yeah.
[00:46:13]  Just kind of our thing, bombing Iraq.
[00:46:17]  And for what?
[00:46:18]  You know, and then it's really quite something to watch.
[00:46:22]  It's like you couldn't even believe it.
[00:46:23]  It's like we live in this cartoonish world where they'll always find a justification.
[00:46:29]  But it does seem like there's something.
[00:46:32]  You know, what do you think?
[00:46:35]  I mean, look, the situation in Yemen, I know you've been talking about it for years and years now.
[00:46:40]  It's been, it was, it's not just you.
[00:46:42]  I mean, the United Nations declared it, I believe last year, said this is the number one humanitarian crisis in the world.
[00:46:47]  There was, I don't remember, it was almost two years ago when they said there was a million cases of cholera.
[00:46:53]  I don't know what the number is going to be there.
[00:46:55]  I don't think there's any type of real estimate of the amount of people who have died there yet.
[00:47:03]  I mean, when this whole thing is all over, we'll figure out what it is.
[00:47:07]  And it's going to be a devastating, incredibly high number.
[00:47:12]  So the people of Yemen have really suffered.
[00:47:15]  I mean, and of course, you can, you know, you can see some of the images that have come out of there.
[00:47:20]  I mean, you know, like the worst thing in the world that you get.
[00:47:22]  I've mentioned this before on the show, but there was a segment that we did on our show where me and you were talking on this show about Yemen and somebody cut together like a YouTube clip of it with images of like starving babies.
[00:47:36]  I couldn't get through watching the YouTube video.
[00:47:38]  Like it's literally, it makes you sick to your stomach to actually watch it.
[00:47:41]  And I do a show talking about this.
[00:47:44]  But just to actually see children who are skin wrapped around bone.
[00:47:50]  I mean, it's like really, uh-uh.
[00:47:51]  You'd see kids the age where they should still have baby chubbiness on them and it's just like tight wrapped around their rib cage.
[00:47:59]  It's it's sickening.
[00:48:00]  But that's been going on for quite a while now.
[00:48:03]  And it does seem like there's something kind of crazy to what you were saying that despite all of this, it still seems like the Houthis are hanging on and fighting back.
[00:48:12]  And what does this mean if the Saudis end up losing this war when it's all said and done?
[00:48:18]  Like, what's the next stage after that?
[00:48:22]  Well, yeah, so that's what I'm really worried about, right?
[00:48:24]  It's because that's what they're up against right now is that they need to just sue for peace and call this whole thing off, but they're not going to be willing to do that.
[00:48:33]  And it'd probably be easier to convince Donald Trump to join the war full scale and send in the U.S. Air Force and send in special operations teams and whoop these Houthis once and for all is how they'd sell it.
[00:48:46]  Because otherwise, what are they going to do?
[00:48:50]  Concede Southwest Arabia to Yemen, I mean, to Iran is the way that they're going to portray it, right?
[00:49:00]  So, and what are they going to do?
[00:49:02]  And, you know, right when the war started, the Houthis were ready to deal.
[00:49:06]  They didn't necessarily really want to rule the whole country.
[00:49:09]  Their area is far in the north, up in the Sada province.
[00:49:13]  And they were willing to negotiate back then.
[00:49:16]  And, you know, in fact, it was one of the ironies of the war was when the previous president took his army with him and went and joined up with the Houthis, who he had attacked.
[00:49:28]  Saleh had attacked them over and over again, which had only failed and only empowered them.
[00:49:33]  Well, it turned out he was a Zaidi, if not a Houthi.
[00:49:37]  And so he decided to take his army with him and join up with them and help overthrow and take over the capital city.
[00:49:44]  Well, in December 2018, or was it 17 now?
[00:49:49]  Time flies so fast.
[00:49:50]  I think it was just last December.
[00:49:54]  He tried to stab the Houthis in the back and make a deal with the Saudis.
[00:49:58]  And I had kind of been joking that, look, America and Saudi got along with Saleh all these years.
[00:50:05]  Now he's got an alliance with the Houthis.
[00:50:08]  So why can't we just compromise and put Saleh back on the throne then?
[00:50:14]  I mean, or his son or his padna or somebody.
[00:50:18]  If both sides, if this side was willing to deal with him all those years and this side is dealing with him right now, maybe we could call an end to the war.
[00:50:27]  It's not a perfect solution, reinstall that dictator, but if it means an end of this war.
[00:50:33]  And then I don't know if Hadi heard part of the show that week or what, because, I mean, not Hadi, Saleh.
[00:50:40]  He went and instead of saying to the Houthis, hey, guys, how about we reach out to the Saudis on this basis?
[00:50:47]  He tried to do it behind their back.
[00:50:49]  And I think the Saudis had actually made the deal, agreed to the deal, but the Houthis got to him first and killed him.
[00:50:56]  And so.
[00:50:56]  So that was maybe one outside shot at a peaceful resolution that went down the tubes.
[00:51:05]  That's depressing.
[00:51:07]  You know, in answering your question, yeah, if Saudi backs down now, then according to the public relations guys, then Iran won.
[00:51:14]  And that is intolerable.
[00:51:16]  And by the way, to your point before, it's again, I mean, it's like sometimes you'll say these things.
[00:51:22]  And I still, you know, like I remember when I first got in the liberty world.
[00:51:29]  And I remember listening to Ron Paul in like 2007, 2008 describe how the Federal Reserve worked.
[00:51:36]  And I remember thinking to myself, there's no way that's right.
[00:51:39]  Let me look into this because there's no, people would be outraged about this if it was really just this secret cabal of banksters that were like enriching their friends.
[00:51:49]  And then you go look into it and you're like, holy shit, this is exactly how it works and nobody's talking about it.
[00:51:55]  And I imagine there might be some people who listen to you who kind of have a feeling like this can't be exactly how it's working.
[00:52:02]  I encourage all of you, go look into it.
[00:52:04]  It's worse.
[00:52:05]  It's worse than what Scott's saying.
[00:52:07]  And what you were saying before about how the whole war in Iraq, the motives were really to go get Iran, the whole war in Syria, the motives were really to weaken Iran.
[00:52:15]  I'm telling you, you don't have to take it from Scott Horton's mouth.
[00:52:18]  Like I said before with John Kerry and Joe Biden, go listen, anytime one of these neocons are pressed, they're like two questions away from admitting themselves that this is all about Iran.
[00:52:30]  They'll tell you right away, it's not a coins that George W. Bush administration put Iran on the list, right?
[00:52:36]  But when right before we went into the war in Iraq, they were like, it's Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
[00:52:40]  You know, everybody who had nothing to do with 9-11.
[00:52:43]  In fact, one group, the North Koreans, who just have nothing to do with anything and two countries.
[00:52:50]  Go ahead.
[00:52:51]  Yeah, they only included North Korea just so it wouldn't be Syria so that it wasn't obvious that they were getting their talk points from Ariel Sharon's office.
[00:52:59]  Well, that's the other thing.
[00:53:00]  Yeah, I mean, North Korea.
[00:53:01]  Did I say Syria?
[00:53:02]  I meant North Korea.
[00:53:03]  Yeah, you know.
[00:53:04]  And then, of course, never really.
[00:53:06]  Right.
[00:53:06]  It never really did anything.
[00:53:08]  I mean, sanctions, but never really did anything about the North Koreans.
[00:53:11]  However, anyway, you know what?
[00:53:13]  Let me I want to switch gears here because I do want to talk about what was going on in Afghanistan, the deal that fell through.
[00:53:21]  This was a big story.
[00:53:22]  I mean, you wrote a book on Afghanistan.
[00:53:24]  You know a lot about, I mean, you know a lot about all these subjects, but particularly in Afghanistan.
[00:53:29]  If you haven't, by the way, you need to read or listen to your choice, Fool's Eren, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
[00:53:36]  It's a masterpiece.
[00:53:37]  And so it did.
[00:53:39]  Now, you were somewhat optimistic through the last year as I was talking to you.
[00:53:45]  And whenever you're optimistic, it's meaningful to me because it's pretty rare in these conflicts that you go, oh, this one might be going in the right direction.
[00:53:53]  But you thought that Donald Trump was actually making a genuine effort to negotiate a peace in Afghanistan.
[00:53:59]  I thought after hearing you say that and thinking it through, you go, you know what?
[00:54:02]  This would be a great, this plays right into Donald Trump's Trumpian hand.
[00:54:09]  He's got a reelection coming up.
[00:54:11]  He can say, I ended the longest war in American history.
[00:54:15]  It did look like he had told people, I want to work out a deal here.
[00:54:19]  He had a plan to meet with some Taliban leaders and to try to work out some type of deal.
[00:54:27]  Then there was some type of attack.
[00:54:29]  He called off the meeting.
[00:54:30]  There were all these people.
[00:54:32]  By the way, just very quickly, and we don't even have to get into it.
[00:54:35]  What an idiot this Justin Amash, man.
[00:54:38]  What an idiot he was.
[00:54:39]  He taunts Donald Trump for planning to meet with the Taliban on the week of the 9-11 anniversary.
[00:54:45]  Is it because that's what's important here?
[00:54:47]  I said, Justin Amash, by the way, it wasn't even on 9-11.
[00:54:51]  It was just the same week of 9-11.
[00:54:53]  Like I said this on my last podcast that Justin Amash is treating 9-11 like a 19-year-old chick's birthday.
[00:55:00]  They just get a full week of it.
[00:55:02]  So you can't like, you know, like, oh, okay.
[00:55:04]  Yes, this is the hill to die on, Mr. Anti-war libertarian.
[00:55:07]  Anyway, this whole thing gets called off.
[00:55:10]  It seems to result in John Bolton being out, which anytime that happens is a good thing.
[00:55:15]  I'm kind of inserting that it results in that, but it did seem very closely timed.
[00:55:20]  And John Bolton, it seemed like Bolton and Pompeo were arguing a little bit, who, by the way, have always not, I think, gotten along great, even though they're both blood-soaked monsters.
[00:55:29]  But what do you like?
[00:55:32]  What happened here?
[00:55:32]  The best we know of it with the peace deal falling through with John Bolton, any of that stuff that you want to talk about, take it away.
[00:55:39]  All right.
[00:55:39]  Well, I hope when I was optimistic before, I mean, I know that the case that I made was the fact is that Trump has appointed Zalmay Khalilzad, who's a very powerful neoconservative who studied under Leo Strauss and helped write the defense plan and guidance and was the ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq and is extremely influential and, you know, close buddies with Wolfowitz and all those guys.
[00:56:03]  So the fact that he hired Khalilzad and that he put Khalilzad directly working for him as a special representative kind of thing rather than working for the Secretary of State meant, and the fact that Khalilzad pursued the writ for what, a good year and a half or something, was, you know, real indication that Trump wanted to see this thing through.
[00:56:26]  I hope I also mentioned, though, that the military was absolutely opposed.
[00:56:32]  And, you know, the current and previous commander of Central Command and the current and previous commander of the Afghan war, general in charge of the Afghan war, all four of those men have outright just denounced this and said, we're not leaving.
[00:56:47]  Oh, no, the security situation would not allow for a withdrawal anytime soon.
[00:56:51]  Trust me.
[00:56:53]  And they're all saying stuff like that, you know, some of them in a little more harsh terms than that.
[00:56:58]  And essentially, they're just insubordinate.
[00:57:00]  And their idea is they're holding on to that Bagram air base no matter what, and maybe other bases too, but that's the big one.
[00:57:08]  And they just can't imagine turning that thing over to the Taliban.
[00:57:12]  They're just not going to do it if they have to wait out Donald Trump.
[00:57:15]  So I don't know exactly who read him the riot act and, you know, exactly what happened on the inside of the thing, but there was a suicide bombing that killed an American soldier.
[00:57:26]  And Trump then seized on that and said, I can't believe that you guys would do, you know, keep attacking right as we're finalizing the deal here.
[00:57:33]  And in fact, he criticized them for committing acts of violence in order to improve their position of strength while negotiating.
[00:57:39]  Well, I'm sorry, but that's been American policy in Afghanistan all this time in the Obama surge and the current one is to improve.
[00:57:49]  As they say over and over again, there is no military solution.
[00:57:52]  There must be a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.
[00:57:56]  So what's the point of carpet bombing them all the time?
[00:57:59]  It's to try to improve our strategic position and give us a little bit better position of strength from which to negotiate.
[00:58:07]  And from the airstrikes in the last year, it's been as deadly a war as any year of the war so far, including at the height of Obama's surge in 2010 and 11.
[00:58:18]  And, you know, tens of thousands of people are dying over there because America's trying to get a position of strength.
[00:58:24]  Donald Trump says this is, you know, crazy, insane terrorism.
[00:58:27]  He's right, but it's only when the other side does it.
[00:58:30]  But he seized on that and they say the deal is off.
[00:58:33]  Forget it.
[00:58:34]  Now, I don't know what was going on with Camp David.
[00:58:36]  If he really was going to bring the Taliban and the president of Afghanistan to Camp David, I mean, I would be amazed by that.
[00:58:45]  I actually don't really believe it.
[00:58:46]  In fact, I saw one report where the locals in the town that's right there adjacent to the site were saying, nah, they always, there's always helicopters and cops everywhere and all kinds of stuff when they're preparing, when they're preparing for a Camp David thing, even a top secret thing.
[00:59:00]  We here in the town know, but there was no indication that anything was going on like that.
[00:59:05]  So that may have just been talk after the fact.
[00:59:08]  I'm not really sure.
[00:59:09]  They say that Bolton was fired.
[00:59:11]  You know, some reports say he was fired over that, that they got a big shouting match.
[00:59:15]  You cannot bring the Taliban to Camp David, which is actually, I think I agree with that.
[00:59:20]  I mean, I don't really care, but it seems like it was unnecessary.
[00:59:23]  I guess the idea was that Trump would say to the president of Afghanistan, hey, I'm leaving.
[00:59:32]  And so you have to negotiate.
[00:59:35]  And I mean it.
[00:59:36]  And here I am.
[00:59:37]  And I'm saying to Mr. Taliban, too, I expect you to negotiate in good faith with these guys and not just finish the civil war after we leave.
[00:59:45]  Because I think he knows America won't have any leverage against either side at that point or any side at that point.
[00:59:52]  So he's just trying to really impress them with a big stern lecture that I hope you boys can work this out.
[00:59:58]  I mean, to his credit, he took peace, you know, a real deal between the Taliban and the Afghan government off the table as part of the, you know, requirements.
[01:00:08]  It's fourth on the list and everyone knows it's not even really on the list.
[01:00:13]  You know, the only deal was they got a promise not to let al-Qaeda and ISIS, you know, have safe haven there.
[01:00:18]  And otherwise, that's it.
[01:00:20]  And then we really hope that they make a deal with the Kabul government.
[01:00:24]  And, you know, it should be said to the entire American media establishment, which is obviously, you know, you go through so many of these.
[01:00:32]  You can just see how it works, how closely the media personalities are tied right at the hip with the intelligence and the military establishment where, you know, what's the word in the wind?
[01:00:45]  Are we against this or are we for this?
[01:00:47]  We're against it.
[01:00:48]  Everybody knows this is the most reckless thing that Donald Trump could do.
[01:00:52]  After 18 years, we can't withdraw too precipitously and all this kind of stuff.
[01:00:58]  And they just pile on and pile on.
[01:00:59]  This is so irresponsible.
[01:01:01]  How can he do this?
[01:01:01]  How can he think that this is the right thing to do?
[01:01:05]  And then after he canceled, I don't know if you saw this, but yesterday's headlines, another American Green Beret died fighting supposed Islamic State fighters there, or I forget, maybe it was in a firefight with Taliban fighters.
[01:01:18]  And they said, oh, another American soldier killed in Afghanistan after Trump cancels peace deal.
[01:01:26]  And it's like, man, these are the same guys.
[01:01:29]  That's the CNN headline, the NBC headline.
[01:01:32]  These are the same guys who said it was treason if Donald Trump stops getting Americans killed over there for nothing just a week ago.
[01:01:40]  Yeah.
[01:01:41]  Well, he ditches the deal.
[01:01:44]  Americans die.
[01:01:45]  And they go, can you believe this guy?
[01:01:48]  No, that's right.
[01:01:49]  And it's, it's, that, that's the, the, um, the, the really tragic thing.
[01:01:54]  And the thing that's very difficult to combat is that nobody, and I know you've you've been very clear about this for a long time, is that it's never been your position that, like, hey, if we pulled out tomorrow, everything's going to be perfect and everything will be wonderful.
[01:02:08]  It's quite possibly going to be very bloody and very evil.

=== Vietnam Withdrawal Bloodbath (07:20) ===

[01:02:11]  I mean, look when we pulled out of uh Vietnam, it was a goddamn bloodbath after we got out of there.
[01:02:16]  It was a bloodbath while we were there, but it was also a bloodbath after we got out of there.
[01:02:19]  I mean, that's kind of the nature of some of these situations.
[01:02:21]  You know, you like really, uh, uh, you know, you go into and provoke a civil war and you leave, and it's not like everybody's just friends after that.
[01:02:30]  Like, there's, you know, however, when you stay in these conflicts forever, uh, you know, it's like you can have all of these disastrous effects, but you could already see, I mean, he never ended up pulling out, but I could already see it when Trump was talking about pulling out of Syria.
[01:02:44]  And I was like, I know what's going to happen.
[01:02:46]  There's just, there's going to be some attack in a few months.
[01:02:48]  And I can just see the press already being like, look what Donald Trump did by pulling out.
[01:02:53]  I mean, you saw it when Obama pulled some troops out of Iraq, how much he got hammered for that forever.
[01:02:59]  He's still getting hammered for that by idiot Republicans.
[01:03:02]  Their talking point is that, well, you pulled the troops out of Iraq.
[01:03:04]  We can't ever make a mistake like that again.
[01:03:06]  But there's something particularly in Afghanistan.
[01:03:09]  You know, it's one thing when they try to say in Syria, what have we really been involved in Syria since like, I mean, officially they'll say 2013, but it was really more like 2011, 2012.
[01:03:20]  But, you know, they'll go, ah, we still got, you know, like this, ISIS still controls this one area or something like that.
[01:03:25]  You know, we got one more little thing to do.
[01:03:27]  We're almost done.
[01:03:28]  But in Afghanistan, I mean, give me a fucking break.
[01:03:31]  We still got something else that we got to do.
[01:03:34]  This, this war is almost able to go to a bar and drink.
[01:03:38]  This war is the longest war that we have ever had.
[01:03:42]  And we're trying to get it done.
[01:03:44]  We had 100,000 troops in there at one point.
[01:03:47]  The Soviets have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of troops in there at some point.
[01:03:50]  Are you telling me we couldn't get it done then?
[01:03:52]  They couldn't get it done now.
[01:03:53]  But what?
[01:03:53]  We're like, we got to train two more goat herders on how to shoot a fucking AK-47 away from really figuring this thing out.
[01:04:02]  I mean, it's like, if we can't, if Donald Trump, a president who ran on ending these wars, can't pull out of this one, what goddamn hope is there?
[01:04:11]  Yeah.
[01:04:12]  Well, I mean, you turn that around too, where you go, look, actually, in Syria, there really is the Islamic state is destroyed.
[01:04:20]  And as far as you know, local Sunnis with rifles, you'll never be rid of all of them.
[01:04:25]  But essentially, allowing Assad to go ahead and make his bargain with the Kurds and reoccupy all of eastern Syria and recreate the state monopoly gun force there.
[01:04:39]  That's all you need.
[01:04:40]  And the Islamic State Al-Qaeda problem there is gone.
[01:04:43]  I mean, the real problem left in Syria now is in the Idlib province, which is, you know, mostly America's former al-Qaeda mercenary types who were holed up there, you know, surrounded by the Syrians with protection from the Turks and the Syrians with the Russian air support there.
[01:05:00]  But essentially, there's a pretty handy narrative that actually we beat the Islamic State.
[01:05:07]  I read a quote from Mattis the other day saying, oh, no, I have to resign because you'll have to find some other Secretary of Defense to lose to ISIS.
[01:05:18]  Well, it's just ridiculous.
[01:05:19]  America had already liberated with the help of the Shiite militias of Iraq, every city in Western Iraq, and including Raqqa and Deir Azor and all of eastern Syria.
[01:05:29]  There is no Islamic state left at all.
[01:05:32]  What Mattis was really talking about and what the rest of the defense establishment are really talking about, if you listen, as you said before, if you just let these guys keep yammering for a minute, they'll say, well, Iran threatens Israel from Syria.
[01:05:46]  And so that's why we have to stay.
[01:05:48]  not the Islamic State, but everything America did empowered Iran.
[01:05:52]  And so now we have to stay to protect our friend Israel from Iran that we've empowered.
[01:05:57]  And that's why they're really there.
[01:05:59]  And so, but forget all that.
[01:06:01]  If Trump, the president, wanted to stick to the point and go, look, we defeated ISIS.
[01:06:05]  Now we can go.
[01:06:05]  He's got a real victory he can point to.
[01:06:08]  In Afghanistan, no.
[01:06:10]  In Afghanistan, when America leaves, it's going to be a wreck.
[01:06:13]  I mean, I guess I could say that.
[01:06:15]  It would make sense, Dave, for the Taliban to essentially call time out if America left right now for them to say, okay, fine, we rule all the land we've already taken.
[01:06:25]  Essentially all of Pashtunistan, the south and the east of the country.
[01:06:29]  And in the rest of the country, you guys leave us alone and we'll leave you alone and we'll work out a peace deal with significant amounts of autonomy for everyone.
[01:06:39]  You guys go ahead and hold on to the capital city.
[01:06:41]  I mean, if I'm the Taliban, why the hell do I want to conquer the capital city?
[01:06:46]  Just like going to have another few years of fighting and tens of thousands of people dead and a population that is largely not Pashtun, screaming and fighting under my heel.
[01:06:56]  What's the point?
[01:06:57]  They already got Pashtunistan.
[01:07:00]  They ought to just hold on to Pashtunistan and consider themselves lucky.
[01:07:05]  But I'm not counting on that.
[01:07:07]  I don't think that they'll do that.
[01:07:08]  I think that, you know, what they'll do is they'll push their luck.
[01:07:11]  That's what everybody does.
[01:07:13]  And so, you know, I'm not predicting the best.
[01:07:15]  However, though, as Matthew Ho points out, when the Taliban took the capital city back in 1996, that was with American, Saudi, and Pakistani support.
[01:07:28]  Presumably, in this case, they would not have that.
[01:07:32]  Presumably, America could at least try to rein in their Saudi and Pakistani allies and let the Pakistanis know you can keep the Taliban in play in Afghanistan, but you can't help them take the capital city.
[01:07:44]  Can't we get a good handshake on that?
[01:07:46]  That seems fair enough.
[01:07:47]  You know, Bill Clinton's policy was he wanted to see the Taliban take the entire country.
[01:07:53]  No peace deal.
[01:07:54]  We want a total victory for the Taliban.
[01:07:56]  That way they can secure our oil pipeline from Turkmenistan to the port of Karachi.
[01:08:01]  But those days are over, man.
[01:08:03]  Nobody's fantasizing about an oil pipeline running through Afghanistan now.
[01:08:07]  The security situation ain't going to allow for it for the next 300 years.
[01:08:11]  So forget it.
[01:08:12]  You know, they don't need that.
[01:08:13]  There's no strategic reason for any outside power to support the Taliban to that extent.
[01:08:19]  So it's possible that if America was to leave and leave the local states in the region who have their stake in Afghanistan and the different factions inside Afghanistan to try to work things out, they're the ones who have the best chance to anyway.
[01:08:36]  You know, I wouldn't write off the possibility entirely, but I sure wouldn't count on it either.
[01:08:41]  Yeah, it's funny because, you know, one of the things you do in the book is like you kind of go through everything that went wrong in Afghanistan and you'll point out that even after making this mistake, we could have done this.
[01:08:53]  And then even after going in here, we could have done that.
[01:08:55]  Like even if we needed the special ops war at the very beginning, okay, then we didn't need to send in the military.
[01:09:01]  And even if we sent in the military, it didn't need to be a regime change.
[01:09:03]  And even if it was a regime change.
[01:09:05]  And I just think back to the fact that probably the last, because you know, Rand Paul was saying like, well, declare victory and come home, which basically, I know Rand Paul knows.
[01:09:14]  He's like, yeah, there's no fucking victory, but let's just pretend, you know, like that the Taliban hasn't completely beaten us and that, sure, whatever.
[01:09:21]  But really, the last time that it could have been an easy sell, an easy sell that we had victory was after Obama got Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

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[01:09:37]  Done and done.
[01:09:39]  But Obama was already either compromised or just never really had any intention to pull out at that point.
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=== Ilan Omar Political Loyalty (15:23) ===

[01:11:38]  So just more specifically about John Bolton, I know a lot of people in my circle, in my circles, in your circles, were basically, you know, very pleased that John Bolton was out.
[01:11:51]  Although, of course, it's almost impossible for people to not, you know, say, like, what the fuck is wrong with Trump that he ever hired this guy to begin with?
[01:11:59]  It really is pretty, it's really something when you see, you know, the how much democracy is an illusion in America, where you have this, you know, 2016 Republican primary.
[01:12:14]  You had people, you had Lindsey Graham and Jeb Bush and people like this run for president.
[01:12:21]  And I don't think they got half of 1% of the vote between them.
[01:12:26]  And then you have Donald Trump say they lied us into war in Iraq and win in South Carolina the next day.
[01:12:33]  And somehow John Bolton still becomes the national security advisor.
[01:12:37]  Like somehow, no matter what happens, you still Tom Wood's law, no matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
[01:12:46]  And it comes true.
[01:12:48]  And so I don't know, like, you know, how this guy was in there.
[01:12:51]  I know Sheldon Adel said there's some stuff that went back.
[01:12:56]  Okay, so explain that.
[01:12:59]  John Bolton called Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Sheldon Adelson's cell phone and says, hey, yeah, so Sheldon wanted me to call and talk to you about something.
[01:13:10]  Like, yeah, that was pretty much, you know, whether it was Trump saying, okay, great.
[01:13:17]  If that's what Sheldon wants, that's what Sheldon gets.
[01:13:19]  Or whether that was him kind of, you know, knuckling under and doing what he's got to do.
[01:13:25]  Because see, remember, Donald Trump said, I'm so rich, I'm not dependent on anyone.
[01:13:29]  I can just finance my own election.
[01:13:31]  Hillary Clinton, she's the slave of whoever donates to her super PAC, but not me.
[01:13:36]  But then somebody came to him and said, yeah, but somebody's got to still bankroll the Republicans in their races for Congress, for the House and the Senate.
[01:13:44]  Who's going to pay for that?
[01:13:46]  And Sheldon Adelson said, I'll give you $100 million.
[01:13:49]  In fact, I'll give you $100 million in two years too.
[01:13:52]  And they said, okay.
[01:13:54]  And so there you go.
[01:13:57]  It's about as simple as that.
[01:13:58]  He gets the national security advisor he wants.
[01:14:00]  And I don't know if he has influence over the new guy, Robert O'Brien is the guy's name, but he's a George W. Bush hawk who wrote a book about America's, the sleeping giant.
[01:14:09]  He wrote a book called The Sleeping Giant about America's withdrawal from the world and how it needed to be reversed.
[01:14:17]  And so, you know, hopefully he's got, you know, less ability to carry out a negative policy.
[01:14:25]  I sort of feel the same way about Gantz in Israel, that he's not really any better than Netanyahu.
[01:14:31]  But fortunately, he's much less of a politician than Netanyahu, who actually is a quite capable human, regardless of what else you think of him.
[01:14:42]  He gets work done and has an incredible amount of influence over American policy, over the Congress and whatever.
[01:14:50]  Gantz, he's a former general, which probably makes him more of a mellow guy and more of a professional rather than a raving loon, although he is pretty horrible.
[01:15:02]  But that's what I'm counting on is him being just essentially, hopefully a less effective prime minister like Ehud Olmert or somebody like that, who, you know, can you imagine if it had been Netanyahu and George W. Bush as the dynamic duo that whole time?
[01:15:16]  Bush had Olmert.
[01:15:17]  Olmert came to Bush and was like, can we bomb Iran, please?
[01:15:20]  And Bush was like, no, forget it.
[01:15:22]  But if that had been Netanyahu back then, in fact, this is one reason, as much as I hate Barack Obama, I still always felt sorry for him that a month after six weeks after he was sworn into the presidency, Netanyahu became the prime minister of Israel again, which must have just been like, man, first I get the Great Recession, then I get Benjamin Netanyahu.
[01:15:47]  Way to be a president.
[01:15:49]  He got a rough.
[01:15:50]  Yeah.
[01:15:51]  And look, you got to say, with a lot of these presidents, I mean, I feel that way with Donald Trump too.
[01:15:55]  I mean, even when you're talking about this thing with Sheldon Adelson, where it's like, okay, well, you said you didn't need any of this money, but now, you know, like the whole Republican Party has to be bankrolled.
[01:16:04]  You go, and by the way, you know, the Democratic Party, they're already bankrolled and their mission is to put your family in jail.
[01:16:12]  Like they're not fucking around with you right now.
[01:16:14]  Like they're really coming for you.
[01:16:16]  So what do you want to do here?
[01:16:17]  You want to get some votes on your side?
[01:16:19]  Or do you want to watch every single measure you have fail and maybe go to prison for the rest of your life for something you didn't do?
[01:16:24]  Or just watch your son go to prison for some bullshit because the FBI got him, you know, like whatever, misremembering a fact or something like that.
[01:16:31]  So it is, look, they do, they box these guys in.
[01:16:34]  It's an interesting thing.
[01:16:36]  Well, it's easy for Trump too because he don't care, man.
[01:16:39]  You know, people, Donald Trump uttered one time some, you know, half a slogan about, well, we could have, we could be fair in Palestine and try to work out some kind of deal.
[01:16:49]  And the neocons panicked.
[01:16:50]  Oh my God, he's an anti-Semite.
[01:16:52]  He's going to take the side of the Palestinians.
[01:16:54]  They're going to push all the Jews into the sea.
[01:16:57]  It's like, look, dude, Donald Trump might be racist against Jews, okay?
[01:17:01]  But if he is, then he's 10 times as racist against Arabs.
[01:17:07]  No incentive in the world to take the side of the Palestinians unless he really just cares about them.
[01:17:16]  Now, that's the end of that.
[01:17:19]  For any of these neocons to think that Donald Trump was going to be anything but an absolute, you know, slave devotionally to Israel and their agenda, they're crazy.
[01:17:32]  But look, what Donald Trump said, what Donald Trump said was basically like something along the lines of, you know, like, well, there's, there's two sides in the conflict and we have to think about both sides, which to a neocon or a Zionist.
[01:17:48]  Yes, I said, to a neocon or a Zionist, but I repeat myself.
[01:17:52]  That is basically saying we should shove all the Jews in the oven.
[01:17:56]  Like there's nothing.
[01:17:57]  If you even go, like, if you go, hey, you know, maybe Israel kind of has something to answer for too.
[01:18:04]  You might as well be saying, I think another 6 million should die.
[01:18:07]  Like the reaction that they have, but I'll tell you, that was actually the first time I ever really started taking Donald Trump seriously.
[01:18:14]  And he had already been like number one in the polls for a while.
[01:18:17]  But in my mind, I was like, this guy's going to fucking tank.
[01:18:21]  Like he's going to be a much more, a much longer version of Herman Cain, and he's kind of a joke.
[01:18:26]  No way he actually gets going.
[01:18:27]  But it was when he went to APEC.
[01:18:30]  And this was a couple weeks after he had said that.
[01:18:32]  And I was like, man, he's going to go speak to APEC.
[01:18:35]  And these guys, I mean, he's said the cardinal sin, which is basically the cardinal sin about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to say there's two sides to this story.
[01:18:46]  That's it.
[01:18:46]  You're not allowed to say that.
[01:18:48]  You have to have the Ben Shapiro, the Prager, Dennis Prager take, which is this is their understanding of the situation is one side wants peace and the other side are a bunch of mud people who just want to kill everybody.
[01:19:03]  That's the that has to be how you sum up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
[01:19:07]  Anything outside of that and you're basically evil.
[01:19:10]  So he said you know, like kind of there's two sides.
[01:19:12]  So I was like man, APEC is gonna boo the shit out of him.
[01:19:15]  And he got up there and the first thing he said was, you know his, he goes.
[01:19:19]  Uh, Barack Obama made a deal in Iran.
[01:19:22]  It was the worst deal in the history of deals.
[01:19:26]  And they started standing up and over and I was like, oh shit, Donald Trump isn't just moving Miller, light popping, NASCAR rednecks, he's actually able to go to APEC and get some of these motherfuckers on board with the program.
[01:19:41]  And I was like he's a real threat, like this guy might actually be for real and um, but but of course, like the thing, like that we did the Tom Woods law, the Scott Horton law, like presidents always keep their worst promises and bail on their best promises.
[01:19:55]  It's like once you get in there, he it turns out.
[01:19:58]  It's like you can say, and and I have said before oh, it seems like Trump has some good impulses, or oh let's, let's grade him on a Bush Obama curve.
[01:20:07]  Well, he hasn't started any new horrific wars.
[01:20:10]  I mean you, you can say all this and I'm not.
[01:20:11]  I don't think there's nothing to those points.
[01:20:13]  There's something there, but what is he in effect?
[01:20:16]  What has he done?
[01:20:18]  He's been the biggest Pro-Israel president you could possibly be, and you know we were talking before about how Saudi Arabia didn't, really didn't, want the war in Iraq, and you know Saudi Arabia maybe didn't like this move or that move, but you know what?
[01:20:31]  Who, who loved every one of them was Israel.
[01:20:34]  We always seem to fight whatever wars they want to fight, and that's like the third rail that you're never allowed to talk about in in American politics.
[01:20:41]  That's the thing, even when that idiot Ilhan Omar, who's like, I don't know, she's like cheating on taxes and fucking her brother or something, but no one seems to really have a major problem with that.
[01:20:52]  No one really has a major problem when she's like, hey, I want to undo the entire, you know, like, I'm basically like, you know, want to undo the entire American economy or whatever else.
[01:21:00]  But then she's like, and, you know, Israel's pretty fucked up.
[01:21:02]  And they're like, too far.
[01:21:04]  You are not allowed to say that in American politics.
[01:21:07]  It's, I don't know how we ever get past that.
[01:21:10]  Well, you know, I mean, I think this is one of the benefits of Donald Trump being in the position that he's in here and playing the politics that the way he's playing it, because, you know, it's finally true that the left part of the Democratic Party is really getting better and better on this and more and more insistent that something change.
[01:21:29]  For a long time, there was a successful illusion that there's going to be a two-state solution.
[01:21:35]  At some point, the Israelis are going to let the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip go.
[01:21:41]  And so the Palestinians at some point here relatively soon will have independence.
[01:21:47]  And that's good enough for American liberal Jewish Zionists.
[01:21:51]  But the problem is, is nobody believes that anymore.
[01:21:53]  Now it's too clear that the reality is Israel annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem back in 1967, Gaza II, back in 67.
[01:22:05]  It's not occupied territory.
[01:22:07]  It is Israel.
[01:22:08]  They expanded into the West Bank and they took it back then, which means then that fully, you know, 45 something percent of the people under Israeli rule have no political rights whatsoever.
[01:22:25]  It's an apartheid state.
[01:22:27]  And that is just too close to home to everything that American Jews are opposed to.
[01:22:32]  American Jews are liberals by super duper majorities, 85, 90%.
[01:22:38]  I mean, they, you know, did a significant part of taking the lead in the civil rights movement on behalf of blacks and others back in the 1950s and 60s.
[01:22:50]  You know, and the idea that this, that they're going to go ahead and just sit there and say, well, apartheid's bad in Mississippi and apartheid's bad in South Africa, but I guess we just have to learn to live with it in Israel and Palestine is really tough for them.
[01:23:08]  And so the, you know, the entire left half of the Democratic Party is getting more and more radically against Zionism.
[01:23:16]  And that includes a lot of Jews too.
[01:23:19]  Well, so Donald Trump is, because he's so uncouth, right?
[01:23:23]  He just goes off.
[01:23:24]  It's the kind of thing no other politician in his position would probably do it the way he does it.
[01:23:28]  But he just comes out and goes, wow, the Democratic Party hates Jews.
[01:23:32]  I can't believe how much they hate Jews.
[01:23:35]  Boy, any Jew who would vote for a Democrat is a traitor to Israel.
[01:23:39]  Where's your loyalty to Israel, American Jews, who better start voting Republican?
[01:23:44]  And then this just causes this total uproar because the premise, as you said, the premise is that anybody says a word for the Palestinians, that's taken as incitement to genocide against all the Jewish Israelis.
[01:23:59]  So it's like, how dare you imply that a Palestinian has a right that a Jew is to respect?
[01:24:05]  You know, what are you talking about?
[01:24:06]  That's great.
[01:24:07]  So it creates the reaction on that side against people like, as you say, Ilan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and all these others.
[01:24:15]  And it's totally in Trump's interest to portray these three, these four women, the squad, as the leaders of the Democratic Party, not Nancy Pelosi, right?
[01:24:25]  But these four women make the great lightning rod for the right.
[01:24:30]  Then they help radicalize all the politics inside the Democratic Party.
[01:24:34]  And of course, it's the left who do all the litmus tests and everything.
[01:24:39]  Well, as well as the Israel lobby does, I guess, anyway.
[01:24:42]  And so they have a huge fight now brewing inside the Democratic Party.
[01:24:46]  You have Trump loudly insisting that any Jewish Zionists have to now abandon the Democrats and join the Republican Party to fulfill their loyalty to Israel that he doesn't know he's not supposed to say that.
[01:25:00]  You know, Israeli or American Zionist Jews may demand Zionism from other American Zionist Jews, but no non-Jew is allowed to say that any American Zionist Jews actually are Zionists or that their Zionist loyalty to a foreign country when that is what it means, right?
[01:25:23]  That's their dedication to the success of this foreign state.
[01:25:28]  Isn't it a crazy thing?
[01:25:30]  But where there's this relationship between America and Israel that's unlike any other relationship between any other country?
[01:25:36]  And we have lots of other allies and lots of other countries we support, but you could never imagine anybody saying like that Italian Americans need to show loyalty to Italy.
[01:25:52]  Like you'd be like, wait, what?
[01:25:54]  That's like the antithesis of what Americanism is all about.
[01:25:58]  The whole point is like, no, you don't have loyalty to your old country.
[01:26:01]  The whole thing is like, no, Italian Americans served in World War II and fought against their old country and German into lesser numbers, but German Americans fought in World War II against Germany.
[01:26:11]  Like that's the idea that your loyalty is right here to the Bill of Rights and all that.
[01:26:16]  The problem is just that in the same way, the problem with Alex Jones being right about all of these wars is that then people go, oh yeah, what are you fucking Alex Jones?
[01:26:27]  You think these wars are all crazy?
[01:26:28]  And he's so easy to dismiss for 25 other reasons.
[01:26:32]  And the problem is that Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Casio-Cortez, it's like it's very easy for people to go, oh yeah, but these, they're like a bunch of idiots who want to basically destroy the economy and implement socialism and everything's about basically, which is true to some degree, not so much for Ilhan Omar, but like for AOC and not Rashida Tlaib, but for some of the other ones.
[01:26:53]  But they're basically just like, well, you just side against white people in any struggle.
[01:26:58]  So that's why you're for the Palestinians over the Jews, which is kind of true.

=== Elizabeth Warren Native Claims (05:24) ===

[01:27:02]  They just happen to be right, you know, in this one.
[01:27:05]  But, you know, it's like, so it's, it does, because those, those chicks, the reason Donald Trump's picking on him is because they poll at like 17% nationally.
[01:27:14]  Like there, nobody likes those guys outside of their districts that they can win, which is the whole, you know, that's all of how Congress is run anyway.
[01:27:21]  Hey, look, we are, we're running up against the end of time here, but I want to ask you, because we always spend these episodes talking about, you know, wars and foreign policy, but I always think you have a lot of really interesting insights about domestic policy as well.
[01:27:36]  So I'm curious where you think we talked a little bit about the presidential election, but it was like six months ago or something like that.
[01:27:42]  So what do you think now?
[01:27:43]  I've been saying for a long time, I don't think there's any way Joe Biden gets out of this with the nominee, but with the nomination, but he's still leading in the polls.
[01:27:52]  Bernie Sanders just seems like an old man who's just trying to write another book.
[01:27:55]  More and more, I'm actually thinking Elizabeth Warren might come away with this thing, even though she's a fake Native American and Donald Trump will bash her over that for the rest of eternity.
[01:28:05]  But what do you think?
[01:28:06]  What do you think of like the Democratic field?
[01:28:09]  Yeah, no, I'm with you.
[01:28:11]  Honestly, you got to just go through the process of elimination.
[01:28:15]  Kamala Harris and Corey Booker and these people are just losers.
[01:28:19]  There's no way they're going anywhere.
[01:28:21]  Joe Biden, I agree with you.
[01:28:22]  He's not going to last.
[01:28:23]  He just has way too many problems.
[01:28:25]  I didn't know this, but I just found this out the other day that were he to be elected president, he would be older on the day he's sworn in than Ronald Reagan was on the day he left office.
[01:28:36]  Is that true?
[01:28:37]  Wow.
[01:28:38]  Is that true?
[01:28:39]  Holy shit.
[01:28:40]  So just, yeah.
[01:28:42]  And you know what?
[01:28:42]  There are some when Ron Paul was 75, he was still all right, man, but not all 75-year-olds are still all right, man.
[01:28:49]  Yeah.
[01:28:49]  You know what I mean?
[01:28:50]  Some of them start losing it right around there a little bit.
[01:28:53]  This guy ain't gonna make it, man.
[01:28:55]  There's no way.
[01:28:56]  And then, you know, the rest of them are all just disqualified for their other reasons.
[01:29:03]  And I think you're probably right that it's gonna be Warren.
[01:29:06]  And yet.
[01:29:07]  I mean, the thing is, it sounds like it's just petty and stupid because it's not a big policy thing.
[01:29:11]  It's just kind of like a personal thing or whatever.
[01:29:13]  But seriously, like if your friend Billy went around telling everyone that he was an Indian his whole life, you would kick his ass all the time.
[01:29:22]  You would everywhere y'all went.
[01:29:24]  You'd be like, yeah, my friend Billy, the fake Indian.
[01:29:27]  And it would be the most ridiculous and hateful and despicable thing about him.
[01:29:31]  And everyone would make fun of him and call him a loser and a scumbag for pretending to be a goddamn Indian.
[01:29:36]  And so that really is a thing.
[01:29:38]  You know what I mean?
[01:29:39]  And she, you know, she didn't just fake her life as an Indian.
[01:29:43]  She faked her whole career as an Indian and like wore that identity.
[01:29:48]  Who, me?
[01:29:48]  Oh, I'm an Indian, you know, big time, like wouldn't let it go.
[01:29:52]  Told everyone to prison kind of.
[01:29:54]  She wrote an Indian cookbook.
[01:29:57]  No, it's, it's, dude, it's insane what she did.
[01:30:01]  You know, I read this thing too in the Huffington Post by an actual Indian that was saying, let me tell you about Elizabeth Warren's family, all right?
[01:30:08]  They came to Oklahoma when it was the last Indian territory, when they finally opened it up to the whites to ethnically cleanse the very last real Indian land in the country and force them even further west out of the deserts of Arizona and all this.
[01:30:22]  Her family were some of the white settlers who came and stole that Indian land and settled it.
[01:30:27]  And then I think it was her grandmother or her great-grandmother had written a book, or great grandfather, I guess, had written a book called Living Among the Indians that was all about what it was like to be a white person living around all these Indians and stuff.
[01:30:41]  Well, and then the next generation, it was the grandma, I guess, just started calling herself an Indian and telling everyone she was an Indian.
[01:30:48]  So I actually almost kind of believe Elizabeth Warren that she was told this from the time she was a little girl and believed it because of her stupid lying grandmother.
[01:30:56]  I don't know at what point she realized that it wasn't true, but she sure don't look very Indian to me.
[01:31:02]  She's like, oh, I got high cheekbones.
[01:31:04]  Yeah, really, huh?
[01:31:06]  Okay, pale face.
[01:31:08]  Yeah.
[01:31:08]  You know, a couple of generations removed from the Cherokee or whatever.
[01:31:12]  I'm not buying it.
[01:31:14]  But anyway, no, and aside from that, which I do think is an important thing and people, and look, by say like me or your worldview, we'd go, look, race isn't really very important to us.
[01:31:32]  Race should be a quality about you that isn't really something we think about a lot.
[01:31:37]  You judge somebody as an individual about their own mind, their work, their views, their beliefs, things like that.
[01:31:43]  Like we don't really think.
[01:31:44]  But if you're Elizabeth Warren and your position is that affirmative action is this necessary program and it's so important, the fact that you gained affirmative action really does cut at the knees of your own belief system.
[01:31:58]  So there's a problem there.
[01:32:00]  There's also a problem with the fact that Donald Trump will hit her about that every single day all the way there.
[01:32:05]  But even getting past that, if she does come out of this thing, it's only because she won by, you know, like she won because what was the term that I'm looking at, by process of elimination.
[01:32:16]  She won.
[01:32:17]  I mean, Elizabeth Warren is horrible.
[01:32:20]  You listen to her give a speech.
[01:32:21]  You listen to the way she acts.
[01:32:22]  I mean, it's a cringe fest.
[01:32:24]  She's terrible.
[01:32:25]  Yeah, it's like Tommy Cain in a way, right?

=== Tulsi Gabbard Civilizational War (14:52) ===

[01:32:27]  Where all these guys are disqualified, right?
[01:32:29]  Tom Tancredo hates Mexicans too much.
[01:32:32]  Duncan Hunter hates China too much.
[01:32:34]  Ron Paul hates war too much.
[01:32:35]  Mitt Romney's a Mormon.
[01:32:37]  Rudy Giuliani.
[01:32:38]  Rudy Giuliani was pro-choice and all these things.
[01:32:41]  Like everybody had a thing.
[01:32:43]  Yeah, all that stuff.
[01:32:44]  So, yeah, I mean, and so that essentially you're left with John McCain, the centrist, moderate, liberal war hero that everybody hates, but there's what else are you going to do?
[01:32:52]  And same kind of thing here.
[01:32:53]  And you know what?
[01:32:54]  And this discussion wouldn't be complete if we don't point the finger at Tulsi Gabbard.
[01:32:58]  She could be doing great right now.
[01:33:00]  And the reason she's not killing it is because she's half-assing it.
[01:33:03]  She says the best anti-war stuff, but then she hedges every single time and says some pro-war stuff.
[01:33:09]  You know, she says, we shouldn't be doing these regime changes, but we ought to be fighting al-Qaeda to the ends of the earth.
[01:33:14]  She put out a video saying, you know, it's radical Islam and the belief in Wahhabism that must be eradicated from the earth.
[01:33:23]  Oh, okay.
[01:33:24]  So we're going to have a civilizational war from now on.
[01:33:27]  She says in this, in this video she put out on Twitter, she goes, look, there's Al-Qaeda in Idlib province in Syria.
[01:33:34]  There's Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
[01:33:36]  There's Al-Qaeda in, you know, al-Shabaab in Somalia, which is pretty much a stretch, but okay.
[01:33:42]  There's Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa.
[01:33:45]  And then she says, there are hundreds of these groups.
[01:33:49]  Well, what the hell?
[01:33:50]  She just named four and a half.
[01:33:53]  And then she goes, there are hundreds of these groups and we must fight them and crush them and destroy them and blah, So in other words, she's Rand Paul saying, yeah, we ought to guarantee an independent Kurdistan or just whatever, you know, whatever terribly flawed message, right, is getting thrown in to the good stuff.
[01:34:12]  And just look at the parable of Ron and Rand.
[01:34:15]  Ron said, just come home.
[01:34:17]  We just marched in.
[01:34:18]  We can just come home.
[01:34:19]  Nope.
[01:34:19]  Actually, they didn't start it.
[01:34:21]  We started it.
[01:34:22]  And so, yeah, we can just come home.
[01:34:24]  And now, no, he didn't win, but he created the Ron Paul revolution and he changed the world forever.
[01:34:30]  Did a lot more.
[01:34:30]  Random Rand did.
[01:34:32]  Yeah.
[01:34:32]  And Rand ran on, look at me, I'm Jeb Bush.
[01:34:36]  You know, look at me.
[01:34:37]  I'm the centrist liberal Republican rhino and I'm for everything and against everything.
[01:34:43]  And what do you want me to say?
[01:34:45]  And yeah, I just met with Sheldon Adelson and he told me what my new Middle East policy is.
[01:34:50]  And everyone went, you're Ron Paul's son?
[01:34:52]  What the hell?
[01:34:53]  And then he was gone, you know, and Tulsi Gabbard is doing the Rand Paul thing.
[01:34:58]  She doesn't have the courage in her convictions, man.
[01:35:00]  It's amazing that people don't see it.
[01:35:02]  And I remember talking with you about this back in the Rand Paul days, but it's almost like Rand Paul had.
[01:35:08]  Look, I don't even know that this was exactly his plan, but it almost came off like he had this plan where he was like, well, look, I'm inheriting the Ron Paul movement, but what I'm going to do is then go and cozy up to the establishment, get some of this neocon money, moderate a little bit, and then I'll have the establishment and the Ron Paul movement, and I'll have all this force in one.
[01:35:30]  And he went and cozied up to the establishment and said, hey, we should arm the Kurds and we should pull out of the Iran deal and blah, blah, blah.
[01:35:36]  See, I'll be reasonable.
[01:35:37]  And they went, yeah, but your last name's Paul.
[01:35:41]  We don't trust you.
[01:35:42]  We know who you really are inside.
[01:35:44]  We've seen the old interviews on you.
[01:35:46]  We know who you are.
[01:35:47]  We're not giving you shit.
[01:35:48]  And then he went, all right, well, at least I still got these guys, guys.
[01:35:53]  And it was everyone was gone because you don't, inheriting the Ron Paul movement wasn't just a given.
[01:35:58]  The whole reason there was a Ron Paul movement was because he was principled and true.
[01:36:02]  And as soon as you started compromising, what's the point?
[01:36:04]  What's the point of you?
[01:36:06]  And for Tulsi Gabbard to not know better, to be like, yeah, there's all of these al-Qaeda groups out there.
[01:36:11]  It's like, yeah, Tulsi, are there more or less than there were when we started this war on terror?
[01:36:17]  You tell me.
[01:36:18]  You know.
[01:36:20]  Hold on, you, you cut out.
[01:36:23]  Ah, my bad.
[01:36:24]  Sorry, I turned my mic off.
[01:36:26]  No, go ahead.
[01:36:27]  Yeah, no, she, so she's like 85% good, right?
[01:36:30]  She agrees with that.
[01:36:31]  She goes, no, look, Dave, I mean, man, that Iraq War II that I was in never should have done that.
[01:36:35]  And regime change in Yemen and in Libya and in Syria has got us no, no good at all.
[01:36:40]  It's only made matters worse.
[01:36:41]  And so she's against the bait and switch.
[01:36:44]  And she's, you know, really against the bait and switch when it goes completely upside down, like in Syria, where our government actually has us on the side of Al-Qaeda, same as Yemen and Libya, for that matter.
[01:36:55]  They actually have us back in the Al-Qaeda guys because of their regional adversaries that they hate more than our enemies.
[01:37:01]  So she's good on all that.
[01:37:02]  But, you know, like we talked about, Obama's policy in Syria, for that matter, his policy in Yemen, that Trump has continued, is absolutely batshit crazy.
[01:37:11]  It's completely crazy.
[01:37:12]  It's treasonous.
[01:37:14]  It's the worst thing you couldn't make up shit worse for these guys to do.
[01:37:18]  And so for her to be good on that is like, all right, good.
[01:37:21]  I'm glad that you are, but it's still only one gold star, not four, you know, just because she can tell the difference between the shirts and the skins.
[01:37:30]  And she says, listen, we should definitely not be backing the guys that knocked our towers down.
[01:37:35]  Okay, that's good, but that doesn't go nearly as far.
[01:37:39]  And even going that and against regime change, against, you know, secular dictators, that's all fine, but it doesn't go far enough because then not only does she say, well, we still need, see, if she even said, well, we still might need to do some few strikes on the way out of Yemen against AQAP and maybe we got another year or so to wrap up in Libya or something.
[01:38:01]  I'd at least hear her out.
[01:38:02]  I don't really believe in that.
[01:38:03]  You know what I mean?
[01:38:03]  I'm against that, but that would be better.
[01:38:06]  But instead, she's getting more and more expansive, right?
[01:38:09]  She's saying, no more bait and switch, no more secular dictators, no more back in al-Qaeda.
[01:38:13]  But anywhere there's a Sunni with a rifle, we're going to war and staying there.
[01:38:17]  Well, that's a loophole big enough for Bush and Obama to drive 10 wars through.
[01:38:21]  So that's why it has to be the just forget it.
[01:38:24]  Just call it off, man.
[01:38:26]  This isn't working.
[01:38:26]  By the way, did you hear that?
[01:38:29]  Did you hear Pete Budigej, who by the way, by the way, who we've affectionately called Mayor Pete Butt stuff on the show several times, but he's he said, which by the way, I mean, if you don't want me to make fun of you, stop talking about being so biblical and how you're the candidate of the Bible.
[01:38:47]  And he gave this whole speech about how not believing in climate change is a sin according to the Bible.
[01:38:54]  And you're like, dude, are you going to make me, are you going to make me say it?
[01:38:57]  Like, am I the asshole here?
[01:38:58]  You're a gay dude.
[01:38:59]  Stop telling me what's a sin in the Bible and using that as your authority.
[01:39:03]  But anyway, that all being aside, but he gave his little anti-war speech, you know, and he's a military guy.
[01:39:09]  And his speech was basically like, you know, these wars have been going on for too long and we're against the forever wars and these wars can't continue so long.
[01:39:16]  And that's why we have to, he said he would have a sunset clause written in that any war you start has to be ended within three years.
[01:39:27]  And you're like, oh, fantastic.
[01:39:29]  Oh, wonderful.
[01:39:30]  I'm sure we won't just get the start of the war and then have that sunset, you know, it's like, just like Obama was going to end all of these wars in what was it, 16 months?
[01:39:40]  Has it been 16 months since Obama got elected in 2008 yet?
[01:39:43]  It's weird because these wars are still going.
[01:39:45]  It's like all this shit.
[01:39:46]  If you leave, listen, give the neocons credit where they deserve it.
[01:39:50]  If you leave a pin size hole in your plan to end these wars, they will, as you said, they will drive 10 wars through that.
[01:39:58]  So don't give me any of this bullshit about how we can start a war, but we can't do this.
[01:40:02]  You go like, look, Ron Paul's, he even left a little bit of a pin, but Ron Paul's pin was, hey, you want to have a war?
[01:40:09]  Let Congress declare it.
[01:40:10]  Let the American people decide on it.
[01:40:12]  It should only be a just war when we were actually attacked by somebody.
[01:40:16]  Even that maybe isn't perfect, but God damn, it's like, it's almost a little bit more frustrating because you don't get to even argue with them on a fair playing field.
[01:40:26]  It would be one thing if one of the candidates said, hey, we got to stay in Afghanistan.
[01:40:31]  And then you can be like, hey, look, here's my book.
[01:40:34]  Here's all the arguments against it.
[01:40:35]  That's it.
[01:40:36]  But instead, you have people like Kamala Harris go, no, listen, I agree.
[01:40:39]  We have to get out of Afghanistan.
[01:40:40]  You're absolutely right.
[01:40:41]  We have to get out.
[01:40:42]  But we have to do it in a responsible way that doesn't put the troops in danger and make sure that the military is trained up and blah, And then 17 other little things that are basically saying, so we're going to stay indefinitely.
[01:40:53]  So at least just have the balls to say, I think we should stay indefinitely, but no one will make that argument.
[01:40:58]  So anyway, the whole thing is very frustrating.
[01:41:01]  And of course, you know, again, you got to go back to Ron Paul.
[01:41:04]  Ron Paul would go, look, man, America is supposed to be a constitutional republic.
[01:41:08]  Just because we can afford a world empire doesn't mean we're supposed to have one.
[01:41:13]  And in fact, it turns out that world empire is what's breaking our bank, which it turns out is what the terrorists had in mind for us all along, that we would blow our own brains out trying, you know, chasing them down to the ends of the earth from now on.
[01:41:26]  And so just forget it.
[01:41:28]  And, you know, it's fun, too, if you do the counterfactual.
[01:41:31]  What if Ron Paul had won the election in 1988?
[01:41:33]  He ran.
[01:41:33]  He was the Libertarian Party candidate for president.
[01:41:36]  And what if it had been Ron Paul had overseen the disillusion of the Soviet Union and America's response to that?
[01:41:42]  Bringing all our troops home from Asia, all our troops home from Europe, all our troops home from the Middle East.
[01:41:48]  Wolfowitz would have never been the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy under Dick Cheney because Dick Cheney wouldn't have been the Secretary of Defense.
[01:41:56]  And we'd have never had the planning guidance.
[01:41:59]  We'd have never had any of that.
[01:42:01]  And in fact, never even mind Ron, what if it had just been Gary Hart hadn't got caught cheating with that hoe?
[01:42:08]  He would have been the president and we would have never gone to Iraq and none of the Iraq war one, two, three, and three and a half now we're working on would have ever happened.
[01:42:17]  And things would have been so much different.
[01:42:19]  That's the thing I like to bring up just occasional counterfactuals here.
[01:42:22]  What about if George W. Bush had just not hired Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz?
[01:42:28]  What if he had instead just had Colin Powell as his primary foreign policy counselor?
[01:42:34]  We would have gone to Afghanistan, but that would have been it.
[01:42:37]  You know, so never mind if Al Gore had won, even if it had just been W. Bush, but with Colin Powell as his chief counselor, none of this would ever happen.
[01:42:48]  The actual war against Al-Qaeda would have been over in very early 2002.
[01:42:53]  Yeah.
[01:42:54]  And that actually that's an interesting counterfactual because honestly, that might have been a lot better than Al Gore winning because really the Clinton administration was very hawkish on Iraq.
[01:43:04]  I mean, they were bombing the crap out of Iraq, always kind of declaring these.
[01:43:07]  Had Joe Lieberman as VP.
[01:43:09]  Right.
[01:43:09]  That's right.
[01:43:10]  And had Joe Lieberman as VP.
[01:43:11]  So it might have been just as bad with him.
[01:43:13]  But perhaps if George Bush hadn't been succored by the neocons, and it did seem to me that he kind of recognized that by the end of his administration.
[01:43:25]  I think looking back at it, certainly, I mean, you never hear George W. Bush, I mean, he doesn't come out and like say, hey, I'm a terrible president.
[01:43:31]  I deserve to rot in hell.
[01:43:33]  But he certainly doesn't ever come out and like throw his support behind any of these wars anymore.
[01:43:38]  Like he basically is like, I want to go away and paint apples and like not then puppies and never think about this stuff again.
[01:43:46]  And even no, I mean, I think that's his repentance is like making friends with these soldiers and painting portraits of them and he'll never admit that he was wrong.
[01:43:56]  No, I don't think so.
[01:43:57]  And it did seem like his father, who I am, you know, no fan of, but even his father was kind of resentful against some of the neocons who really kind of like tanked his son's administration.
[01:44:08]  And I think, you know, I wonder sometimes some of these things will probably never know, but I wonder what the, you know, the dynamic between all of them, you know, was and what he thought.
[01:44:18]  Well, I mean, senior tried to stop the war.
[01:44:20]  Senior, you know, Brent Scowcroft, you can read it.
[01:44:22]  It's in the Wall Street Journal from October of 2002.
[01:44:26]  Brent Scowcroft, who was George Bush Sr.'s best friend and former national security advisor and co-author of his memoirs, wrote an essay in the Wall Street Journal called Don't Attack Saddam.
[01:44:38]  And it was about all the consequences that were going to come to and why you should not do this.
[01:44:42]  And that was clearly done at the behest of the father trying to get around Dick Cheney and the neocons and failing to do so.
[01:44:50]  And I think, you know, James Baker.
[01:44:54]  It's actually Sidney Blumenthal.
[01:44:56]  I don't know how trustworthy this source is, but I love the anecdote that when Bush gave his 48-hour speech, that James Baker turned to Edward DeGerian or Gregory DeGerian, I forget which, and said, I told him not to do that.
[01:45:11]  And that was, you know, the father's men essentially trying to stop Jude.
[01:45:14]  This is when he said, when he said that Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to him and his sons to turn themselves in, that whole thing.
[01:45:22]  Or to leave.
[01:45:23]  Yeah, to leave the country.
[01:45:23]  In fact, if you go back, look carefully at that speech and the language is clear.
[01:45:27]  You have 48 hours to leave the country before American troops arrive.
[01:45:32]  In other words, even if you get on a plane to Cairo right now, we are still going to invade, which just goes to show, because geez, man, I thought you said the whole thing was just about how Saddam and his sons just were too dangerous to be kept in power there and we could not negotiate with them.
[01:45:49]  But if they were to leave town and the next Baathist general Mustache in line announces that he's the new dictator, well, geez, you're not going to open up talks with him?
[01:45:59]  Maybe we could invade without the army.
[01:46:01]  Maybe our cops and spies could just walk right in and inspect wherever they want, looking for them warehouses full of VX.
[01:46:09]  But nope, the deal was right there written in the thing.
[01:46:12]  Even if you go into exile, we're still invading the day after tomorrow.
[01:46:17]  Do you remember?
[01:46:18]  Do you remember Saddam Hussein's response to George W. Bush?
[01:46:22]  I remember thinking, and this was a romance novel.
[01:46:26]  Dude, this was before I was, I was not a libertarian.
[01:46:30]  This is before I found Ron Paul.
[01:46:32]  I think I was even kind of like still kind of shell-shocked from 9-11.
[01:46:35]  And I was like, well, maybe we got to go get these motherfuckers.
[01:46:37]  I don't know.
[01:46:38]  Like, I was really ignorant at the time, but Saddam Hussein's response was, I remember thinking, wow, that was badass.
[01:46:46]  And then I felt a little guilty because it was like, oh, I don't want to be like rooting against my country.
[01:46:50]  But Saddam Hussein said, George W. Bush, you have 48 hours to turn out to leave the United States of America.
[01:46:57]  He basically just responded right back to him.
[01:46:59]  He goes, now, you know what?
[01:47:00]  Actually, you have 48 hours to leave.
[01:47:02]  And then that almost made you realize how absurd it was, like how absurd a claim it is to just say to some other leader of a country.
[01:47:08]  And then he said, we will fight this war and we will win this war.
[01:47:11]  And I was like, God damn, that is kind of badass, but you are wrong.
[01:47:15]  You are not going to win this war.
[01:47:18]  But that was fucking anyway.

=== Ron Paul Book Wrap Up (02:41) ===

[01:47:19]  Listen, we do, I'm over time and we got another show coming in.
[01:47:22]  But Scott, every time you come here, it's always a thrill.
[01:47:26]  So I always love talking to you.
[01:47:29]  The new book, The Great Ron Paul, The Scott Horton Show interviews.
[01:47:35]  I'm very excited to get Kraken on it.
[01:47:37]  I've listened to so many of these interviews, but it'll be fun to like read through them all again.
[01:47:41]  And of course, you always have a bunch of stuff going on over at the Libertarian Institute.org, anti-war.com.
[01:47:48]  Of course, if you haven't already, you got to get Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, also available on audiobook.
[01:47:55]  And anything else that you want to plug before we get out of here?
[01:47:58]  Yeah, man.
[01:47:59]  Hey, everybody in Dave's audience, sign up for my podcast feed at scotthorton.org.
[01:48:04]  I got 5,000-something interviews going back to 2003 for you there.
[01:48:09]  Yeah, make sure.
[01:48:10]  I mean, if you really want to know, if you want to make yourself an expert in all matters of war and peace and everything that's going on in all these conflicts, that's the place to go to the Scott Horton show.
[01:48:21]  You know, you, you, Like I say almost every time you're on, I know a lot of people, it seems daunting at first if you don't know all the ins and outs of it.
[01:48:31]  But believe me, before you know it, you're going to figure this stuff out.
[01:48:33]  Just take the 10-episode challenge.
[01:48:36]  Go listen to 10 episodes of the Scott Horton show.
[01:48:39]  And by the time you get through the 10 episodes, you're going to start understanding what's going on.
[01:48:43]  I've heard this back from person after person.
[01:48:45]  They're like, oh, at first it was so daunting.
[01:48:46]  I didn't know what was going on.
[01:48:48]  And then by the time you hit like your eighth, ninth episode, you're like, oh, okay, I know those guys.
[01:48:52]  And that's the guys from here.
[01:48:53]  And now, and then you start to understand how it all comes together.
[01:48:56]  And it's really, it's better than any movie that you've ever seen in your life.
[01:49:02]  Like the stories are so fascinating and so crazy.
[01:49:05]  And there's so many villains and very few heroes, but a lot of villains.
[01:49:09]  And it's really, and it's all real.
[01:49:11]  So it's just very compelling, very interesting stuff.
[01:49:13]  And Scott's interviewed some, you know, like all the best experts on the stuff.
[01:49:17]  So anyway, thank you so much, Scott, for coming on.
[01:49:19]  Of course, we're all crazy excited for your debate, which is like nine months away.
[01:49:25]  So I don't want to, we'll have you on several more times before that happens.
[01:49:28]  But hopefully everything works out with that and old Crystal doesn't pull out of this one.
[01:49:33]  But the idea of you and Bill Crystal squaring off is something we're all very excited about.
[01:49:38]  So we'll have you on several times before then, but I can't wait till you're in New York and we hang out and go to do this debate thing.
[01:49:45]  Should be a lot of fun.
[01:49:47]  Can't wait.
[01:49:47]  See you then.
[01:49:48]  All right, brother.
[01:49:49]  Be good, man.
[01:49:49]  All right, guys.
[01:49:50]  Thanks for listening.
[01:49:51]  Don't forget to go to merchpump.com.
[01:49:53]  We got some new merch up there.
[01:49:55]  Yeah.
[01:49:56]  So go check that out.
[01:49:57]  And we will be back on Friday with a brand new episode.
[01:50:01]  Peace.