Scott Horton and Robbie dissect the U.S.-backed Yemen war, arguing that American logistics sustain a Saudi campaign causing over a million deaths since 2015. They trace roots to Mohammed bin Salman's geopolitical maneuvering against Iran and critique IMF policies that exacerbated famine. While noting the Houthis aren't Iranian puppets, they condemn the blockade targeting civilian infrastructure. Horton asserts President Biden can unilaterally end the conflict by cutting F-15 support, urging listeners to call 833-Stop-War. The episode also identifies Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney as deep state architects prioritizing imperial interests over morality, concluding that immediate leverage could halt this humanitarian catastrophe. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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War Powers Resolution Action00:14:41
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
Hello there.
Welcome to an episode of the Part of the Problem podcast with guest host me filling in for Dave Smith doing an episode live from Porkfest with Scott Horden.
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Let's get into the live episode from Porkfest.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
What is up, everybody?
Welcome back to the Run Your Mouth podcast live from Porkfest.
We are here at this is where the Shell people actually live.
This is year long.
This is the actual spot.
And welcoming to the show for the first time, Scott.
This is very exciting to have you on.
I'm happy to be here with you, man.
I love your show.
So I'm stoked to be part of it with you.
I'm shocked every time you tell me that.
No, man, I listen to it all the time.
That's fucking awesome.
Well, it's an honor to have you on.
And what caught my eye this morning, or it was yesterday, and I was like, I got to hop right on this, was you had messaged me.
The LP actually sent me an email.
The LP actually put even out the post, but you guys have a serious initiative going for trying to make a dent in the problem in Yemen.
These guys are actually applauding Yemen, which is weird.
But why don't we start off with what specifically the initiative is?
Because I'm sure a lot of people aren't aware of it.
And let's make a push.
Sure.
Okay, so premise one here is the war is really, really bad, and America is responsible for it, even though they call it the Saudi war, et cetera.
It's our war in many ways, and it's a really bad one.
It's bad as a record too, even though it's not in the headlines.
We don't have our troops doing the ground fighting in it.
The second point is after seven years, the Saudis, first of all, have reached a ceasefire.
We're now in month three of a very real ceasefire.
Airstrikes have stopped.
They reopened the airport to a limited degree.
It ceased the blockade at the major ports and this kind of thing.
And also, the Saudis have dropped their major goal of the war, which was to reinstall the last dictator, Mansur Hadi.
That's off the table.
So that's a major climb down from them.
So that goes to show that this is not just some little old ceasefire thing, maybe, and then the war goes on forever, but at least there's a real opportunity here for real peace.
So then that brings us to the new resolution.
And the resolution is HJ Res 87, and it was introduced by this guy, DeFazio, from, I don't know where.
But anyway, it's got Republicans led by Thomas Massey, but a few others, a handful of Republicans, as well as, well, it's, I don't know the exact breakdown.
There's a total of 80-something co-sponsors as of right now.
And they passed the war powers resolution before, but Donald Trump vetoed it.
Hopefully, it seems like it'd be less likely to be vetoed by Biden when it's, you know, his party controls both houses.
But, you know, obviously, and people are thinking that, you know, they could just cut off the funding, but they won't do that.
But they can do this.
And then so it just happens, it coincides that the libertarians took over the libertarian party a week before they introduced this.
This is pure sales of me.
I want to start with the pitch and let people know the call to action of what specifically they can do.
And then we'll start breaking down the elements.
Yeah, so that's where I'm at right now.
So because it just is a coincidence that this resolution got introduced right at the time we took over the party, it seemed like a good idea that we'll make this our first major new initiative is getting behind this.
And I had actually promised the Yemen activists, hey, at the end of the month, me and my faction are going to take over the LP and then we're going to help you guys.
So I was like, man, I sure hope that works.
But that's putting our money where our mouth is on the most important issue of, hey, we've taken over this platform and we're going to actually take tangible action at ending wars.
And we're going to break down why this one is so tragic.
But specifically, we've taken over the party.
We've actually got, it seems like we've already got control over the social media.
And the posts that I'm seeing from it are already incredible.
They're on brand.
They're the type of thing that we want to see.
But this is the first time we're seeing from the LP a specific, hey, here's a tangible action that we can take that can potentially make an aggressive step towards people not dying in Yemen, actually resolving a war.
And so the call to action is you want people, it's essentially calling into your local Senate to basically let them know that you want them to support this specific.
Yeah.
And I'm sorry, because I'm always lecture first and not good at the call to action.
No, no, and that's why it's your show and you're good at that.
Yeah, no, look, I mean, what it is, it's actually really simple.
It's just call your congressman.
And it sounds stupid, but the thing is I know enough of these activists, not that I go to DC, but I know enough of these activists who spend time up there that it really matters whether the phone is ringing or not on whether they're going to support something like this.
And so what it is, is there's a number set up by a nonprofit.
It's 833 Stop War.
And in fact, people can go to 833stopwar.com and they have a couple of little talking points for you there so you can at least have something to say.
And then they just ask you to put in your zip code and it connects you right to your congressman.
So call them during business hours and talk to the staffers.
And in fact, so I was on a call with the Yemen activists, a Zoom call thing last week.
And one of them was a House staffer and said, or no, I guess one of them had just gotten off the phone with the House staffers.
And the staffers have been on there before.
One of them had just gotten off the phone with the House staffer.
The House staffer was saying, tell people, please call, because they are convinced.
They're on our side and they're trying to get the congressman they work for to vote right.
But they need to be able to tell him that the phone won't damn stop ringing.
So I think we really better give in on this one, boss, kind of thing.
So that's literally the staff of the congressmen are saying, please call.
Get people to call.
So my thing from the very beginning was, here we got this LP.
We got, what, 20,000 members off the bat on top of, you know, the rest of the movement.
And so what if the LP, the national LP, now takes the lead on this?
And this is the first major thing that we all do together at the same time.
Everybody's not going to be an anti-Yemen war activist from now on, but we don't need you to be.
The point is if we can all work together on this for like two weeks, be hardcore on Yemen for a couple of weeks, get your friends and your coworkers and your mom and your dad.
And that sounds trite, but seriously, every person who is part of the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party who has the slightest interest in this and wants to work on this, that's tens of thousands of people.
And then if we can all get five of our husbands and wives and cousins and moms and dads and next door neighbors and coworkers to do this, then that's a huge multiplier effect there.
And at that time, now you're talking about essentially it's a storm down there on Capitol Hill where it really is a problem all day long with this Yemen stuff.
Man, the emails keep coming.
The calls keep coming.
And apparently we're going to have to co-sponsor this thing and get behind this.
And then they have their leaders in the Democratic and Republican Party to go into the full.
So if it's a Republican who says, all right, I'm ready to take an America first position on this.
All I got to do is go talk to Thomas Massey.
Here's your leader on this in the Republican Party who's already got the talking points together and his argument straight for why this is the right thing to do.
So then that's the thing.
And this week is, you know, we're out here, you know, celebrating on a holiday at Porkfest, but out there in the real world, it's a business week.
And the congressmen are going to work all week long this week.
And it was a short week because Monday was a holiday.
So then starting Tuesday was the big week of action.
There's all different activist groups, anti-war activist groups who are pushing this all at the same time.
And if you just Google around, you can find it where they're hosting seminars where they're explaining the situation so that you know what to say.
When does this actually get voted on?
Like, what's the name of the?
We don't know yet.
No, we don't know yet.
It's not been scheduled.
What's the name of the bill?
It's the war powers resolution.
And this is the one that was passed by the Congress by supermajorities over Nixon's veto in 1973.
It's the one that says that if a president starts an unconstitutional war, at least after 60 days, Congress can make him stop it and invoke that it's their war powers.
So that includes like what Obama was doing with droning?
Would that be considered a war action?
No, because that was under the claim to be under the authorization to use military force afterwards.
So how would this bill?
So this is not the war against al-Qaeda.
Now, in the war against AQAP, that was authorized by law.
This is totally unauthorized in any way because this is the war for AQAP against their enemies, the Houthis.
And you can't want that into the war on terrorism.
It's the other side of the war.
Right, but since our military is not actually on the ground there and we haven't declared war, so I guess you can get into what the worst we've done, which from what I understand is essentially we've been providing gear, supplies, fueling, and all sorts of activities for Saudi Arabia.
But just to play devil's advocate, couldn't you argue there's no way to define what we're doing as being at war with Yemen?
I don't think so.
And I'm not the lawyer, Scott Horton.
That's the other guy.
But the thing is, our men, our civilians and military intelligence contractors and government employees are helping with all of the maintenance and all of the logistics and the intelligence, picking targets and all this.
So they are completely involved in it.
In fact, you can read it in Reuters and read it in the New York Times that under the Obama government and under the Trump government, there were lawyers in the State Department that wrote memos to the boss saying we're really concerned that we could all go to prison for war crimes because what we're doing in Yemen makes us co-belligerents in the war under international law, and we ought to think really carefully about what we're doing.
And then those memos were put in drawers.
And of course, anyone in this room knows that that's a joke, that there's any accountability whatsoever on that level, that they would really be in danger of prosecution.
But the point is that's just their guilty conscience talking because it just goes to show that they know what they're doing is wrong and is illegal.
All right.
So to summarize the initiative and then we can start breaking down some of the specifics in terms of the real horrors that have been taking place in Yemen.
So the name of the act again, once more?
HJ Res 87, the War Powers Resolution.
Okay, so we got the War Powers Resolution.
It will be in the Senate in a couple of weeks, I guess.
It says that after 60 days, if the president takes us into a war not declared by Congress, it can be reviewed by Congress.
Well, that's the original resolution.
So this would be invoking that, and it's more specific.
It says no Maintenance, no resupply, no more bombs, no more planes, no more tires for jet fighters.
Which would affect the end.
And it would end.
And it would end the situation in Yemen.
And so the pitch to all the libertarians out here, which you guys all are, it's twofold.
One, we can tangibly end what's going on in Yemen.
And two, we could kickstart having taken over the Libertarian Party and showcase, look, we're getting things done.
This is why this was important.
Yeah, absolutely.
And by the way, let me say this real quick, too.
You got to follow the Horton rule.
And I didn't name it that Michael Bolden name before, but it is what it is.
And I just learned this from driving a cab for a long time: that you got to meet people where they are.
And if somebody's a right-winger, there's no point in attacking them from the left, or at least in a way that they feel like they're being attacked from the left.
That's just not going to work.
It's going to have anything hard in their position.
And the same thing on the other side.
So what's better, and this is something unique about libertarians, is without moving an inch for anyone to impress them, just as being hardcore plumb-line libertarians, we're better than right-wingers on the things that they're good on.
And we're better than left-wingers on the things that they're good on.
So we don't have to contradict ourselves and we don't have to like pander to impress them or something like that.
We just meet them where they are and explain from their point of view why they need to change their opinion on this one thing we're trying to get them to change their opinion on.
And so like, for example, if you live in a Republican district, you don't want to call in and cry that like you're a hippie and you want world peace to break out because that ain't gonna work.
You just you want to talk to them in the way that they need to be talked to, which is we're tired of being the policemen of the world.
We're on the wrong side of this war.
We're actually fighting for Al-Qaeda, not against them.
It's, you know, that traitor Barack Obama that got us into this mess and Joe Biden continuing it and never mind who was continuing it for four years in the middle there.
But we want America first.
We're tired of this and speak in their language.
And then if you're a Democrat, if you live in a Democratic district, then you call and you go, listen, the president said he wants to end this war.
But of course, there's all this political pressure on him to keep it going.
So he needs our support and he needs his Democrats in the Congress to have his back and insist that his policy be followed and we end this war.
We need to make it easy for him to do what he said he wants to do.
And then that way you're not asking them to challenge their president.
You're asking them to support their president.
And there will be another, never be another opportunity to support Biden.
I mean, find another topic that you would possibly be like, yeah, I agree with that guy.
Seriously.
And he's not even going to be alive for that much longer.
So you might as well.
And he didn't mean it when he said it, but that is what he said.
Yeah, but it's so much more fun when you can call them on their bluff, like what happened with John Kerry in Syria when he, what was that when he said that we wouldn't go invade if they got rid of all their chemical weapons?
Starving the Enemy Through Imports00:04:03
They're like, sure, we'll get rid of them.
All right, so let's break down, let's start with this, the actual cost of the war.
And what I mean by that is specifically the moral atrocities that have taken place in Yemen.
Obviously, this has not been widely reported in the news.
So why don't you actually break down for us, let's start with what is the tragedy of this situation that we've been involved in?
Okay, well, first of all, it's the poorest country in the Middle East already.
And they had a little bit of oil, but their dictators stole all the money.
It was a very poor country.
And then, as I learned from this economist, Martha Mundi from the London School of Economics, the IMF and the World Bank had essentially gangsterized them.
And, you know, who knows their intentions?
It's not all gangsterism with them, just a lot of the time.
But they did essentially convince, and it is central planning too, right?
It's not free market, except in the broadest sense.
They convinced the government to change their policy to stop growing sorghum and millet and all these other grains that they grew for sustenance for their population.
Instead, switch to growing more coffee and cotton for export.
And then the idea is: welcome to the new world order, man.
It's global capitalism.
And as I was saying in my speech earlier, sorry for being redundant, but I don't think they said this.
It's my cliche I'm repeating myself about.
You'll be eating Florida oranges and Brazilian steaks.
And so just sell your coffee and your cotton.
Was there any actual math behind that, that the exports.
Oh, who knows?
I don't know.
But they were very dependent on...
you know, importing food, and I don't know if they, if the question is, were they really making enough off of cotton and coffee to pay for all of that?
I really don't know, but I, you know they some rich guy at the IMF was like, I really like Ethiopian coffee and it's too expensive.
So let's just convince them to switch from.
What were they eating?
Millet and sorghum, and I don't know what the other crops were other than that.
I have to go back and look at it's.
Martha Mundy wrote this thing for Tufts University, all about this, and I interviewed her about it twice different aspects of the thing, and she's the real expert on that.
So, but the point being was that they were already dependent on foreign imports not necessarily charity, but foreign imports for 80% of their food needs.
So then, and that's great whatever, I guess, comparative advantage in the marketplace and all of that Ricardo, until the U.S. NAVY comes and pulls a Star Destroyer into orbit and puts your plan under blockade.
Now you're completely screwed.
And which is where they've been, and from the very beginning.
From the very beginning, March 2015, when Obama actually blocked the ports, it wasn't even Saudi Arabia that blocked him.
Well, it's the U.S. NAVY rules the Seven Seas.
There are a couple of Saudi boats, but it's essentially the Americans who are doing the thing, who are enforcing the blockade, and I have first-hand testimony.
Let me just finish that one thought was, as soon as they did this, all of the human rights organizations on the planet, all of them, just screamed at the highest pitch, you can't do this, you absolutely.
Just, these people are so poor and they're already so dependent on foreign imports, they're gonna lay down and die.
They're just gonna starve, and they tried to from the very, very beginning.
And then, that's true, that's exactly what they're doing.
And so what's the level of starvation been?
Well, so nobody knows exactly for sure.
I mean that there are very conservative estimates that have them at right around half a million, but I guarantee it's double that dude.
I guarantee it is, and they've been.
They undercounted from the very beginning and there's just no way to count most of the, the deaths in the country.
It's a very poor country, it doesn't have and, especially in a state of war, they just don't have the record keeping.
So, in the most satisfying, but at the end of this thing they'll.
What they'll do is they'll calculate the excess death rate and they'll say, this is what the death rate was before and this is what the death rate is during the war, and then this is the death rate after the war, when markets are back open again, and then they'll compare, and then they'll calculate and I promise you it's going to be more than a million dead civilians in this thing, and and including these massive cholera outbreaks and diphtheria.
Drones and Death Rates in Yemen00:02:21
And then, and because from the start of the war the Saudis, and and again it's the Americans who are behind this.
We're the empire and they're the client state, but it's a deniable leading from behind, Diffusion of responsibility type operation.
They claim it's the Saudi-led and it's Saudi princes flying those American-built F-15s, dropping American-built on the people that are, at least for the first few years, until it became so controversial.
Once they passed the War Powers Act the last time, I was one thing they did was they insisted on Boeing just selling the refueling tankers to the Saudis they can refuel themselves so we don't have to do it for them anymore.
So we just trained them to do it.
Kind of like what we're doing in Ukraine now with drones.
Yeah, exactly.
All the military gear.
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Let's get back into this episode with Scott Horton.
So from the very beginning, they targeted, outright targeted.
And I got to tell you, there's been devastation in the wars, especially Iraq War II and Libya and the dirty war in Syria and, of course, Afghanistan, and hundreds of thousands, probably a million civilians have been killed in all of that and all the civil wars and strife caused by all that.
But I don't think, not to equip them in any way.
But I just don't think it's true that the Americans in these wars, unlike Iraq War I, I don't think they deliberately targeted the civilian infrastructure like this.
But in Yemen, they just went straight after the waterworks, after the electricity plant, after the sewage, after the garbage.
Targeting Farms and Waterworks00:15:46
Saudi Arabia has been bombing that.
That's right.
And Saudi and UAE isn't that usually considered a war crime.
It's absolutely against all of the Geneva Conventions, every bit of it.
And this goes to Martha Mundi's study, where they go and they target the farms.
They target the grain silos, the flocks of sheep in the fields, and the horses in their stables, and the fishermen's boats, and just everything.
They target the country.
So trying to starve the country.
I mean, they're literally food processing plants, and they're trying to starve the civilian population into submission.
Exactly.
All right, snow.
Total barbarianism.
On paper, if we're sitting down with Prince of Saudi Arabia, which this guy kind of looks like, so he's actually, you're the right.
Like he dressed up like a wizard for Halloween or something.
So he's sitting here.
He's sitting here and we're like, what's the agenda?
What's he going to tell us?
What is the reason why they're starving the Yemeni people?
What does he think he's trying to accomplish?
Yeah, I mean, the excuse is that the Houthis are Shiites, and so that means they're the slaves of the Ayatollah in Iran and they're going to create an Iranian beachhead in Yemen and all this, which is just bullshit.
I mean, what can you say, dude?
It's just, it's a hollow excuse.
I mean, the real reason that they started this thing was because, and as the Obama people admitted, was in 2015, in the spring of 2015, was right when the Obama government was negotiating the Iran nuclear deal.
And this was considered a threat by Saudi, which sounds crazy, right?
Because if we're locking down Iran's civilian nuclear program, more locked down than ever before, and pouring concrete into their reactor, well, yeah, they don't want America to normalize relations with Iran at all.
And you have to understand the whole thing about the Iranian bomb was always a hoax in the first place.
It was always an excuse to keep up a cold war against them.
So they were afraid.
And this is, by the way, a completely unreasonable fear on the part of the Saudis that America was going to tilt back toward the Persians like the old days.
I mean, if you guys remember politics in the Obama years, this was every last cent of political capital he had to get that Iran deal done.
And it was simply to take the threat of war off the table, the threat of war over their civilian program that wasn't even making bombs anyway.
But this helped to...
Essentially, the whole purpose of the deal was simply to kill the narrative, the fake narrative, that Iran was even making nukes.
Now there's no way you can pretend with that lie because they're just so inspected and locked down.
Nobody believes that.
How much of a change does it make to the oil market if Iran's actually able to just sell oil to the U.S.?
Does that really?
Not much.
In terms of like dollar per barrel or whatever?
I don't know, but some.
What it is, what matters about it is it's revenue for the Iranian state, you know, and overall for the Iranian economy, which is meant to be, you know, kept with a boot on their neck.
You know, but so.
So in other words, Saudi Arabia and Israel both kind of want this storyline of Iran's trying to get a nuke.
They want to keep that going.
They want to keep the, hey, they're funding terrorism in the region going so that basically they will be outside of world trade, enemy of the U.S. That's kind of the bigger picture.
And permanent Cold War.
Exactly right.
I mean, think about it.
Why would Israel and Saudi Arabia be against a deal that just adds all these additional conditions to the IAEA protection regime?
They don't want peace.
They would rather have this state of, you know, near conflict anyway.
So anyway, and I don't know, maybe they really were concerned that this meant that Obama was really going to start tilting back toward the Shiites or whatever, which was just completely crazy.
That was not a problem.
When they say Obama was Muslim, was he a Shiite or Shin?
I think he would have been supposedly a Sufi then, right?
Like if he was from East Africa, I think he probably would not be a Wahhabist or anything like that.
Maybe on the Sunni side, though, not Shiite.
But anyway, that's a good question.
So you were...
As long as we're making up shit, what shit are we making up about this guy?
All right, so just to refocus.
So Saudi Arabia, as Obama's working out his stuff with Iran, the nuclear deal happens.
Oh, there's one more thing.
Mohammed bin Salman is the 29-year-old brand new defense minister.
Okay.
And he's a brand new deputy crown prince.
So when he launches this war, you know, it's straight out of public choice theory, right?
That he did this for his own political interests inside the Saudi royal family.
And in that state of emergency at the height of the launch of the war, he rounded up all his enemies in the Saudi royal family, stole all their money, put them in prison, including the crown prince, his cousin, Mohammed bin Nayef, who he locked up in a cell in some dungeon somewhere and took his place.
And now he's crown prince bonesaw, who Biden's on his way over there to kiss his royal hand and beg him to increase the government.
So he consolidated power.
How did the war help him consolidate power?
Just as, you know, make the way that Donald Rumsfeld gained in stature inside the government when he was in the middle of attacking Iraq.
He's a leader at war and the defense ministry and all that, so it increases political capital inside.
And it worked.
It absolutely worked.
And he's now the crown prince and the de facto king.
His father's a senile old man, and he's now in the position to replace him.
So it totally worked as far as that goes.
And the Obama people told the New York Times, they said, we know that this war will be long, bloody, and indecisive, but we have to do it to placate the Saudis because they're so mad at us over the nuclear deal.
And so in other words, by saying long, bloody, and indecisive, what they mean is we're going to mass murder hundreds of thousands of people to death.
We're going to explode them, tear them limb from limb.
And we don't even fucking know what victory is supposed to look like.
Indecisive means we don't know what we're actually even trying to do here.
Like, it would be nice maybe if we could rouse the Houthis out of power in Sana'a.
It's like if we were working with it.
It sure hasn't worked.
It's like in World War II, if we were working with the Germans against the Russians theoretically, and someone said, well, you're going to tell him to close Auschwitz.
And it's like, no, we got to placate Hitler.
We're working with Hitler, so he's got to, if that's what he's got to do, we've got to play like that.
That's not a bad comparison, Robbie.
Seriously, I mean, the UAE and the AP has done great reporting on the UAE forces.
They're torturing people to death, roasting them all.
Yeah, the idea of placate.
We're going to accept evil.
We're just going to go, hey, it's okay because we got to placate this partner.
Okay, so we've got Saudi Arabia is, but what is the actual because you said that they've even walked back from trying to flip, I guess, the king of Yemen or whoever's in charge.
The El Presidente that they were trying to reinstall in power, yeah.
Because they basically wanted their own like puppet space, puppet state in Yemen.
So they wanted to go back to the power.
Well, let's go back.
Let's go back.
And I'll do it fast, though.
Right.
Okay, 2009, Obama comes into power.
He sends the CIA to launch the drone war against Al-Qaeda.
That's mostly in the south of the country.
This is totally counterproductive and stupid and horrible.
It just grows al-Qaeda bigger and bigger.
And the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, resigned over it in disgust, if you could believe that, because of how unfair the fight it is.
You know, world record for hiding behind the entire circumference of the earth, diameter of the earth, fighting somebody with a robot.
So, but then in order to wage that CIA drone war, Obama bribed the dictator, Abdullah Saleh, to let him do it by giving him a bunch of money and guns.
So Saleh took the money and guns, and he went and he attacked his enemies, the Houthis, a group of Zaidi Shiites in the north of the country from the Sauda province right there near the Saudi border.
Okay.
Now, it's complicated, but I'll skip the complicated for brevity's sake.
The Houthis defeated Saleh's forces five times.
Every time he attacked them, it was counterproductive, and they grew more and more in strength every time.
Then Chelsea Manning leaks the State Department cables.
The Arab Spring breaks out in Tunisia and in Egypt.
And then after that, the whole Middle East says, wow, you can do that?
Blam.
Day of rage protests everywhere.
And as we know famously, America and Saudi hijacked the Arab Spring in Libya and Syria to absolutely tragic consequences and crushed it brutally in Bahrain and in Saudi.
But in Yemen, what happened was all factions came together and said, we peacefully and said, really emulating the Egyptian model and said, we want rid of this guy, Saleh.
And that didn't work.
And so people tried to kill him.
And on the second time, it was a bombing, and he was wounded.
And he had to go to Saudi Arabia to convalesce.
So while he's in Saudi, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State at the time, swoops in and works with Saudi to essentially thwart the will of the people of Yemen who are about to have their way and create a new constitutional system and compromise on their own terms.
Instead, nope, we're going to stick with the last guy's vice president, this guy, Hadi.
Well, Saleh comes home, but he goes away mad.
He doesn't just retire.
He takes about two-thirds of his army with him.
And he goes north and joins forces with his old enemies, the Houthis, that he'd just been fighting, that defeated him.
Turns out he's a Zaidi Shiite like them.
Just not a member of the Houthi organization, but whatever, man, close enough.
So he brings two-thirds of his army with him, goes and joins forces with the Houthis in the north.
Then, Essentially, the new dictatorship under Hadi, he holds a bogus election with one man, one face, one oval on the ballot to fill in.
Which you can look this up.
If anybody just types in Hadi election 2012 in Google Images, you'll see the ballot with one man, one name, one oval to fill in.
And of course, he won the election in a landslide.
And Hillary Clinton declared this the advent of Yemeni democracy, which is beautiful.
And so, but what happened was Hadi had all of Saleh's, yeah, all of Saleh's dictatorial power and will to power, but he didn't really have the authority to carry it out.
You know, Saleh had 30 years of compromises to achieve his position.
So Hadi refused to stand for any real election again.
He was supposed to hold a new election in two years, and he didn't.
And he cut the gasoline ration and he raised taxes and he did this new federalism program that was going to cut the Houthis off from the Red Sea.
Essentially, he's going to draw state lines between soft borders of regions in the country.
And so the Houthis, that was the final straw for them.
And they marched down on at the end of 2014 and they rouseed him out of Sana'a, the capital, chased him down to the port city of Aden, and then they followed him down there.
Saudi Arabia doesn't like Houthis.
So Saudis pissed off that these Houthis came and rousted their guy out of power.
And again, their excuse is because they're friends with Iran.
But Houthis actually aligned with Iran.
That's exactly bullshit.
Exactly what I was about to say was, and Barack Obama admitted this on video, and I think it was the interview with Thomas Friedman his last year in office of the New York Times.
I'd have to go back, but I know I've seen the video.
I've seen the words come right out of his mouth that, yeah, you know, in fact, it's true that the Iranians warned the Houthis not to sack the capital city because they said they knew this is going to drive the Saudis nuts and the Saudis will launch a war.
For God's sake, don't do it.
And the Houthis didn't listen to him and took the capital anyway.
Then, so this goes to show that they have a relationship with Iran, but it doesn't mean that they're their slaves or their cat's paws.
In fact, this expert from the Netherlands that I interviewed on the show named Just Hilterman wrote a piece for foreign policy called The Houthis are not Hezbollah.
And his point in there was that Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is sort of like Iran's 51st state.
And Nasrallah, while being something like an independent governor, is a governor of an Iranian sort of puppetry kind of deal.
And that's just not the case with the Houthis and their relationship.
It's just a different thing.
And the war party can try to pretend that because it's their narrative, but doesn't really make it true.
And in fact, Rob, just to finish up this point, is that the Iranians did not invite the head Houthi to come to Tehran and did not come and recognize them as the official government of Yemen until 2019.
So fully four and a half years into the war, the summer of 2019.
So they were very reluctant to stick their neck out far for the Houthis at all.
And frankly, the place is under blockade.
So they have no ability to smuggle them anything but AKs or whatever.
And Yemen is already completely lousy with weapons anyway.
They're actually still exporting weapons in the middle of a war.
They're still selling weapons to Somalia for their war.
So just any Iranian support is very limited and embellished for argument's sake.
So we say Saudi Arabia, it's propaganda that they're saying that, hey, listen, Iran's going to end up with a stronghold here and it's going to end up influencing the entire region.
So that's the propaganda.
So what's the actual agenda of Saudi Arabia?
Is it that, you know, they want to show, hey, we're mighty in this region, so don't, you know, if you're Houthis or anyone else, don't be trying to take over your governments.
Mixed in with you got a new young kid becoming king, and he's like, I'm going to show that I'm ruthless to kind of solidify my power.
That's basically, so if you're putting a rational perspective on terms of what Saudi Arabia is looking to do, because I don't think they just want to torture random people for thrills.
I don't think it's, you know what I mean?
Like, there must be something that's not.
But you hit it right the first time.
They don't want to have any state on the Arabian Peninsula that's not compliant with their wishes.
They're the dominant force there.
And, you know, that's not the same as dominating the whole region.
Of course, W. Bush gave Iraq to Iran, so that was kind of a big deal.
But in terms of the Arabian Peninsula, it's just a matter of having somebody independent from them.
And, you know, traditionally, the way I hear it anyway, I'm not an expert on this aspect of it, but from what I had read, the Saudis traditionally had just paid the Houthis to behave, basically, you know, and that was it.
And in fact, the Houthis came together as a force when the Saudis had tried to support a bunch of Wahhabist, you know, extremist radical Sunniism there in northern Yemen against them.
And they rallied together and created this group to fight them off.
That was back, I guess, in the 70s or whatever, was their origin in the first place.
But, you know, one thing I skipped was that once they seized power, they were not, they didn't think for a minute that they were going to be able to just lord this Shiite dictatorship over the whole country or something like that.
They immediately set about to compromise with all the different factions.
And they had cooperation from all these different factions who were trying to figure out a way to proceed.
So you have down in the port city of Aden, it's dominated by what's called the Southern Transitional Council, who are socialists and separatists.
They used to have their own independent state in the days of the Soviet Union.
Asale was the one who had consolidated the state back in the early 1990s.
And then you had the Muslim Brotherhood out in Marib, and you had, you know, whatever, other dissident factions inside the capital city of Sana'a.
And they were all willing to work together.
Al-Qaeda Benefits from the War00:06:36
And I swear, this is, you know, documented truth.
I got it in the book enough already about how they wanted to create a bicameral legislature with an upper house of the men from the different leading factions and then a lower house to represent the interests of women and the youth, they said.
And they had people from all over the country ready and willing to do all this.
They were working on it when the bombs started falling.
And one thing that we left out here, which is extremely important to this story, especially considering America's point of view here, is that you'll hear all the time about, oh, al-Qaeda linked forces here, there, right?
And you can mostly write that off.
Like, oh, it's a Sunni with a rifle.
So I guess that must be Osama bin Laden or whatever.
It's not really true a lot of the time.
But in this case, it is.
And these guys are the guys that bombed the USS Cole.
And they helped coordinate the September 11th attack in 2001.
They tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.
They tried to blow up planes with bomb plots in the early 2010s.
And they did, I think it's three out of the four major massacres in France, including one in Brussels, and then the other three in France, including the Charlie Hebdo attack and the Eagles of Death Metal concert.
And then there was the in Nice, France, where the guy drove the truck down the pathway and killed all the people on the pedestrian walkway.
And these are AQAP attacks in the West.
So when the Houthis first took over the capital city of Sana'a at the end of 2014 and 15, our current Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, was then a four-star general, the commander of central command.
And he was like, great.
Hey, Houthis, you guys like killing Al-Qaeda guys, right?
And the Houthis said, yeah, we do.
Because, of course, to the Al-Qaeda guys, the only good Shiite is a dead Shiite.
So this is literally defensive violence on the part of the Houthis.
They got to eradicate these Al-Qaeda guys.
And so, let me add them.
So Lloyd Austin starts giving them intelligence to use.
And we got great reporting on this from the Wall Street Journal and from Almonitor, which to some of you might be a little bit more obscure of a site, but it's a legit news site.
And the story was written by Barbara Slavin, who for years was at UPI and other things.
She's a great reporter.
I know her very well.
She's a mainstream reporter, not any kind of alternative news whatsoever.
She was at the Atlantic Council, the most, other than the Council on Foreign Relations, right?
Like tied for first place with most prestigious official liberal establishment think tank on the East Coast.
And Michael Vickers was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and came and gave a big briefing.
And that was one of the things he mentioned.
And she was wise enough to understand that, hey, this sounds important and asked him a bunch of follow-up questions and got a bunch of follow-up questions.
And I'm pretty sure, I can't remember if it was her, I think it was the Wall Street Journal that also followed up and had statements from the Houthis in Yemen too, saying, yes, it's true.
We're getting intelligence from the Americans and we're using it to kill Al-Qaeda guys with.
So this went on from like January 2015 through March 2015.
And then Barack Obama switched sides in the war and took Al-Qaeda's side.
And so when Saudi launched their war and UAE launched their war, AQAP took full advantage of this.
The first thing they did was seize the city of Mukalla and then they seized the seven or eight or ten different smaller towns on the southern coast, including all their tax bases, including military bases and their weapons magazines.
And they were just filthy, stinking rich.
They were making billions or hundreds of millions of dollars off of taxation from the ports and all this.
And this went on for years until in, I'm going to say 2018 or 19, it might have been 18, about three years into the war, this became such a public relations nightmare that Al-Qaeda is benefiting so much from this war that the Americans got on the UAE's case and said, you have to do something about this.
So the UAE went in there and wiped them out.
No, I mean, the UAE went in there and hired them all, brought them into their militia.
And they're now called the Giants Brigade.
And they've been fighting as mercenaries for the UAE ever since.
And so we literally got good jobs out of it.
Al-Qaeda got great jobs out of this thing.
And as there's this guy.
The Team Towers was their resume to show that they could get shit done.
That's exactly.
And then America's like, you know what?
I'll invest in this operation.
You know, you could have been a very high-level, you know, G-something federal employee, I think.
You got the right mindset, Rob.
All right, so to button up Yemen here, so foreign policy, it makes zero sense whatsoever.
They're not working with Yemen.
Saudi Arabia is in there.
They're killing people needlessly, and we're supporting them.
So the last piece of the puzzle before we pitch once again how people can help end this is specifically the support that we've given to Saudi Arabia and why we're at fault.
Why it is that we could, you know, if America just said no, it would be over.
Yeah.
Well, it's right there in the resolution.
The resolution says no more maintenance, no more resupply, no more new planes, no more spare parts.
And it specifies any spare parts for their planes, including new tires for their F-15s.
And so that's it.
It just shuts down the war effort.
You can't do it.
No more logistics, no more maintenance.
All it's specified in the language of the And I want to add to this because I heard you gave a speech on this in Connecticut, which sadly wasn't taped because it was incredible and it was like two hours on this topic.
But one of the points you made was that we have enough leverage on Saudi Arabia that essentially if we just called them and said no, it was over.
That's right.
And we've chosen not to do that.
So I'll hand it back to you so you can kind of put it down.
I think that's right.
I mean, it's true that Biden is a very weak force and they can blow him off to a degree.
But the thing is, and you saw this on Afghanistan too: if the president of the United States puts his foot down and says, You heard me, goddamn it, that's it.
And if Admiral and General and CIA man don't like it, they're fucking fired.
And, you know, there was, I need to learn more about this, but somebody told me an anecdote one time of a bunch of generals told FDR, We're not going back to Europe.
And he goes, You're fired, I'm the president of the United States, and all of you now no longer have jobs.
Leverage Over Saudi Arabia00:03:07
Beat it.
We are too going back to Europe.
Find me 10 people that want to go back into Europe.
So if Barack Obama can just give a speech from Brazil and say, by the way, we're launching a war against Yemen, I mean, against Libya today.
And if in the case of Yemen, he can simply send some State Department lick spittle named Bernadette Meehan, who's the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs or something, to come out and say, oh, by the way, we're starting support for Saudi Arabia's war against Yemen today.
If they can declare war that easily, then the President of the United States can end it by telling the Saudi king, listen, you have to do business with us for a long time, and I'm going to count to three, and then I'm going to get mad.
The war is over.
I'm putting my foot down.
Ask your guys what that means when a president says that.
I really, really mean it.
And I'm calling Mohammed bin Zayed in UAE next.
And my orders stand, and the war is over tomorrow.
It'd be over.
That's it.
And he could also order all the Americans out of there.
And the only reason even the private contractors and mercenaries are operating under U.S. government license to do so, they're not allowed to participate in other governments' foreign policies without federal approval in that sense.
So he could call all that off.
Okay.
Got it.
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Kissinger and Neoconservative Vision00:14:55
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All right, let's get into the home stretch of the show with Scott Horton.
All right, so I want to cover one more topic.
I think we're going to do about another 20 minutes here, if you're comfortable for it.
I want to go through some of the biggest villains of the deep state.
So if I look at the U.S. and foreign policy, I think that we do have a deep state.
It's guys like Henry Kissinger.
There's people behind the scenes.
They're pushing these policies even more than necessarily the presidents are married to it.
Maybe Kissinger is a good starting point.
Maybe there's other people I'm unaware of that are the bigger players.
But let's go top five villains of the deep state.
Top five villains.
Well, I mean, I'm afraid Henry Kissinger is one of the more reasonable ones this season.
Oh, yeah, because even he's like, hey, that's right.
Yeah, he knows a bit more about it than these amateurs and is rightfully concerned about what's going on there.
But yeah, no, he is clearly a monster.
It's Kissinger's play that he's so tied in with the military-industrial complex, he's like, just keep picking on weak countries.
And even if we lose people, at least we're keeping that thing going.
But he looks at the Russia situation.
He's like, you're going to have a real loss here.
Like, is it that nefarious?
Well, I mean, look, all of these guys are full of self-justifications and rationalizations.
But very few of them are saying, like, he, he, he, I'm just going to get away with as much evil as possible.
I mean, Kissinger, to understand who he is, is he's essentially Nelson Rockefeller's guy, his foreign policy advisor, who Nelson Rockefeller recruited from Harvard.
And he's, you know, one of the latter day architects of the Rockefeller World Empire, as Murray Rothbard called it.
It was really he and his brother Nelson and his brother David who were the primary drivers of the architecture of the American world order after World War II to a great degree.
And including Nelson, was instrumental in writing up the UN Charter and everything.
So what was Rockefeller's vision that he was recruiting Senator Bush?
I mean, it's what we hear them call all the time the liberal rules-based international order, which is the CFR euphemism for America's world empire.
But it is, you can see how this is built in to it in practice to a degree, but especially in the narrative and the propaganda that this is the first truly selfless empire in world history.
And that when we defeat our enemies, then we rebuild them and befriend them.
And because we're such nice guys.
And every time anybody else is the strongest world power, they're just strong men and they just kill and they just steal, unlike us who are just trying to enforce this kind of global world law.
So that is the excuse that Kissinger and his ilk have used for generations.
He doesn't use that excuse.
He's there with the real politic, which would suggest to me that he's got some sort of a vision of empire for survival.
And to break down my, what I understand real politics to be is he makes a distinction between the morality of individuals and the morality of countries, that essentially, while I can't go kill someone, countries have a different morality where if it benefits the country, it's actually mortal for them to go do what for an individual would be immortal.
But he does seem to have a philosophy that there is a, it's dog eat dog.
We're on Team America.
And so therefore, whatever's in the American interest, even if it's evil, it would then be moral for it to go pursue.
That's my understanding of real politics.
Well, I think that's right.
I mean, but that's the same thing as saying a rules-based world order for them.
And then, but of course, we're the cops, so we've got to be able to break the law to enforce the law.
You know what I mean?
So it's very self-serving.
But what is Kissinger's vision in terms, like, is it, you know, is it like, I mean, his vision is not throw out the UN Charter and just have dog eat dog.
I mean, his vision is essentially the Rockefeller World Order is the United Nations as a very pseudo sort of a world federalism in a way where, you know, essentially the dominant powers can, and the lesser ones can work out most of their conflicts without killing each other over it first.
I think the real politic thing is, you know, coming from him is not necessarily a prescription, right?
It's just an admission of reality that powerful states are only going to bend to anybody else's opinions, you know, so much.
They're going to do what they're going to do.
So then the question is how to deal with that?
How to corral them all?
How do you get, you know, China and Russia and India and whoever to obey the so-called rules to keep them all out of conflict.
So I'm not taking their side.
I'm just saying it's the American Empire has probably got like the most developed public relations of any empire before.
And the British were very good at self-serving narratives too about who they got to kill and why.
We're just trying to bring civilization to these poor darkened people, you know, and that kind of stuff.
So there's a lot of that, you know, in the American empire and in the American tradition.
Going back, I mean, look at the war against the Indians is built on a lot of claims of doing them right, civilizing them and all that.
Same thing with the Philippines.
You know, 120 years ago or 125 years ago when they invaded the Philippines, they were already had been converted to Catholicism by the Spanish.
But we're going to go and convert them to Christianity anyway.
That was the excuse.
We're going to bring them Christianity.
So, you know, there's always a lot of that baked in.
But so, sorry, because I'm off on a tangent.
I mean, the point is, you know, Kissinger can be absolutely, you know, exceptionally cruel.
And as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, I mean, his crimes are just absolutely legion.
He should have been, you know, imprisoned decades ago.
And I'll tell you the worst one is in 1968, Lyndon Johnson was negotiating a peace with North Vietnam.
And Kissinger and Nixon sent a lady named Anna Chenault to go and squeal on him to the South Vietnamese, who then raised holy hell and ruined the deal.
And there's audio even of Lyndon Johnson saying to a senator on the phone, a Republican senator, friend of his, that this is treason.
They ought not to be doing that.
And the senator says, you're right, Mr. President.
I don't know what to tell you, man.
They did it.
And that was it.
They prolonged the war.
And Nixon was running on, I have a secret plan to end the war.
And then he prolonged it for another three years before he finally did end it.
But he expanded it to Laos and Cambodia and killed another couple of million people in the meantime.
All right.
So we got Kissinger.
He's putting up numbers.
He's in our top five.
Dick Cheney.
Okay.
Dick Cheney is the author of the terror war.
Dick Cheney hired the neoconservatives.
And the neoconservatives, essentially, are where the Israel lobby meets the military-industrial complex, right?
The oilmen and the bankers, they had the Council on Foreign Relations, right?
But the arms dealers, they needed their own eggheads to justify their policies.
So they hired the Israel lobby.
And these guys are great at writing studies, you know?
So that was, you know, the cross.
That was how the relationship was built.
And in fact, I used to know a guy named Jude Winiske, who was an ex-neoconservative.
So he had been a commie and then became a right-wing Reaganite and then became more of a libertarian and an ex-hawk.
But he told me that, yes, I'm sorry, actually.
I'm the one who introduced Dick Cheney to Richard Pearl in 1976 or whatever it was.
And so this is a huge deal.
There's that alliance between the neoconservatives, who essentially are the vanguard of the Israel lobby, or they're really the Israeli government's fifth column in the United States.
Many of them anyway act that way.
They made this alliance with the military industrial complex, which, you know, Dick Cheney's wife, Lynn, was on their board of directors.
And so many of the neocons had direct relations with Lockheed.
Oh, did I say Lockheed?
She was on Lockheed's board of directors.
And so many of them had relations directly with Lockheed.
And so Iraq War II was their big project.
This is going to be a big test case for the neoconservatives' vision for how to reorder the Middle East.
And it's going to be Donald Rumsfeld's big test case for the reorganization of the military, emphasizing the Air Force and special operations at the expense of the infantry.
I don't think it would work, though.
Like, we're listening.
The idea, the idea essentially was.
Well, what are you saying?
The U.S. Army can't do anything?
No, I'm saying the answer is yeah.
No, they can break stuff.
Can they do anything?
No.
Like, not at all.
I think the neoconservatives wanted to keep a standing army there indefinitely.
I don't think they ever really wanted to leave Iraq.
That's why they were kind of like, every time someone said we're going to leave Iraq, they kept saying it's a little too soon.
It's a little too soon.
I think they had a vision of kind of a standing army in Iraq indefinitely.
Well, see, the thing is, their original plans fell apart immediately.
So then I was like, well, now what are we going to do?
And it was, well, we'll try to fight for the groups that are most compliant with our goals.
And essentially, from the beginning, they're fighting.
Well, you want to talk about this?
Go for it.
Okay.
This sounds completely stupid.
Okay.
But it is stupid.
In 1996, Richard Pearl and David Wormser, Wormser was the primary author.
And Richard Pearl and Douglas Fife wrote a policy paper for Likud in Israel called, and this is right when Benjamin Netanyahu was becoming prime minister the first time in 96.
And it's called A Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
And there's a companion piece called Coping with Crumbling States, something strategy for the Levant.
And then there's a book, which is the follow-up, it's the same damn thing in book form, called Tyranny's Ally, America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein.
Now, they're not exactly calling for an invasion and a war.
They're calling for some kind of coup to happen, but they're a little vague on that.
But the point is, Hussein absolutely must go.
But then here's the theory.
Once we get, and everybody picture the Middle East in your head when I say this, okay?
Once we get rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, then the king of Jordan will take over Iraq.
And that's the Hashemite family.
And he will become the king of Iraq.
And the Sunnis will do whatever he says because, I don't know, it should work that way.
Am I retarded or is Jordan on the other side of Israel?
Jordan is between Iraq and Israel.
Oh, I am retarded.
Okay.
Yeah, you're retarded.
Thank you.
You spent two whole years in that country, dude.
Yeah, man.
You're looking at the map inside out, man.
Trying.
No, so then, and now you're saying, yeah, but isn't Iraq a super majority Shiite Arab country, Scott Horton, with the population like 60-something percent supermajority?
Yeah, well, near supermajority.
And the answer is yes.
But they have an answer to that, which is don't worry.
The Shiites just love to bend over and take orders from anyone who claims to have the blood of the prophet in their veins.
And so since the Hashemites claim to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad, the Shiites will all bend over and do whatever they're told.
And then this is actually our goal.
Not just, don't worry, this is going to make it easy.
This is the purpose.
Because what we're going to do is, once our Hashemite king lords it over the Shiites, we're going to have him tell the Shiite clergy in Najav to tell Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to stop being friends with Iran and instead be friends with Israel and Turkey and Jordan.
All right, I got it.
Which is completely stupid and crazy.
And from the moment that they did the war, all that happened was Iran's friends took over the government.
And America fought for Iran's friends that whole time.
All right.
I promise I'm going to wrap this thing up so you guys can go party.
It's Pork Fest.
I get it.
ADD question, though.
How has Israel been the one that's so successful at overtaking our government?
Like, of all the countries out there, how did they do such a good job of infiltrating and actually getting people into these positions and like radically changing what our foreign policy is?
Is a massage just that good?
I think it's, look, I think, honestly, it's dedication and money more than anything else.
And there's a lot of dirty tricks.
Yes.
I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu himself is implicated in stealing nuclear triggers from the United States and his associates.
You know, you watch these movies are produced by Arnon Milchan at the end.
That's a guy who stole a bunch of weapons-grade uranium from Pennsylvania for Israel's nuclear weapons program.
And they get away with a ton of stuff.
But the vast majority of it is perfecting the game of democracy.
It's just what we're talking about with how can we mobilize the people that we have against this war in Yemen.
Well, they've got this perfected, and they don't have 20 or 30,000 people.
They got 200,000 or 300,000 people.
And when they send out their mass emails, and when they call their telephone trees, and when they mobilize and say, we don't like this congressman anymore, man, he is on the we don't like you anymore list permanently until he's taken off again.
And in other words, it's just very well organized and they get business done.
And congressmen learn immediately that if you will parrot Israeli talking points, APAC talking points, you will be paid, you will be fine, and your opponent will be screwed.
And they also learn that if you don't do that, you are screwed.
And your primary opponent is going to get funded.
And then if you beat him anyway, your general opponent is going to be funded against you.
And if you win anyway, then we'll see you in two years, pal.
And they never forget and never forgive and never get over it.
And they do the work.
Whoever's in charge of that XL sheet does an effective job.
I tell you, Steve Rosen told Jeffrey Goldberg back in 2004 or so.
He said, you see this napkin?
They're at the bar.
See this napkin?
By this time tomorrow, I could have 77 senators' signatures on that thing.
All right.
So we've got Kissinger.
We've got Cheney.
Those are kind of the obvious ones.
Nuclear Weapons and Forgotten Rivals00:04:18
So who are the ones that we would never, that we would be less aware of?
Okay, well, I like this one is Bruce Jackson from Lockheed.
He's the guy who founded the Committee for NATO Expansion in the 1990s and then the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.
He's an executive vice president from Lockheed Martin.
And then he financed all the neocons think tanks.
He helped bankroll the Weekly Standard, Bill Crystal's magazine.
And so he's getting expert policy to basically create a reason to sell his products.
That's exactly right.
And his products being F-16s, which cost millions of dollars each, and he's been hugely influential in pushing all this stuff for all these years.
We got two more spots in our top five.
Man, I wish I had to.
Bush Sr.'s got to make this list.
Hey, look, a whole hell of a lot of this is Bush Sr.'s fault for getting us into Iraq War I.
And, like, frankly, you know, the way he handled the fall of the Soviet Union, he gets an A, not an A plus, because he actually tried to hold the damn thing up a little bit as it was falling down.
He was afraid of what would happen in Ukraine if they were granted independence from Russia.
But, and he did abolish something like 50,000 nuclear weapons from America's arsenals and comparable amount of reduction on the other side with the treaties that he signed with the Soviets and then the Russians on his way out.
So that's pretty heroic, you got to admit.
But at the same time, you know, as vice president, he essentially ran, like what we know of Iran-Contra, like all the stuff about the CIA angle on that is really the cover story, the limited hangout.
It was really, you know, parts of the Navy and Special Operations Command inside the military who were working directly for the vice president.
And they learned, this is a big part of Cheney's, you know, trouble, our trouble with Cheney later, was they learned in the Reagan years that if you do all this stuff out of the vice president's office, nobody can stop you.
In fact, you guys remember from Al Gore the phrase he said, well, when he was criticized for his fundraising stuff, he said, well, there's no controlling legal authority, meaning there is no cop in charge of the vice president.
So screw you.
Which people took that really badly.
They were like, well, fuck you.
What are you saying?
You could just break the law, you know, which is what he was saying.
But that was true.
If you're the vice president, you can break the law.
And you can have secret operations run with different intelligence agencies and military agencies off the book and totally get away with it, which is exactly what he did.
And there's a hell of a lot of dead civilians in Latin America to prove it, too.
All right.
I got a great idea.
You ready for this?
We're going to tease.
Next episode with Scott Horden, which will be down the line, you'll find out the number one villain of the deep state.
I know that we probably already named Rubber Wobbler.
We'll leave it.
We're going to tease.
Let's think of something.
Number one villain of the deep state.
It's going to turn out to be Hitler.
He worked here all along.
But before we call an episode, I know you got a new book that you're working on.
There you go.
I know you got a new book coming out, so why don't you plug one?
I don't know when it's actually being released, but I see it's already in your little Twitter handle.
Yeah.
You know, I wanted it to come out today, but there are a couple little setbacks on the final formatting of the thing.
I got to work on a couple of things.
So, and now that I'm out here traveling, Porkfest, and all this stuff, I think I'm just going to kick the can down the road.
No, plug it.
Hotter than the sun, though.
Hotter than the sun.
Yeah, I wanted it to come out today, but it's going to be a week, I think.
It's called Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
And then what it is, is it's interviews that I did over the years with different experts on all different aspects of nuclear weapons.
It's just like Fool's Eren is not just timed in the war in Afghanistan.
It's all about the war in Afghanistan.
Same kind of thing here.
This is all about nuclear weapons.
So the whole first section is all about the threat of nuclear war and the overall nuclear arsenals of the world, the threat of war with Russia, the threat of war with China between India and Pakistan, a couple things like that.
Then the second section is all about the nuclear industrial complex and what a racket it is.
Just like we were talking about with jet fighters, it's the same thing with H-bombs.
Senator, I got to get rid of these H-bombs.
What are we going to do?
You know, Coke and whores and steak dinners until you buy enough H-bombs to make my quota this quarter.
The Nuclear Industrial Complex Racket00:02:01
It really is like that.
And the lobbying to get rid of these, the whole thing is just bananas.
And then there's the whole section on the rogue states.
So that's North Korea.
Wait, do you have actually have a chapter called Coke and Horrors?
I should.
Yeah, you should relabel it.
That's a fun chapter.
Actually, there was a reference to Coke and Harry.
Can I read that?
Can I be the guy who reads it for the audiobook?
Sure.
And you know what?
I know where you could get a job in D.C. peddling Coke and Horseshoe.
Oh, be the Coke and Horrors guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's how they do it.
That's really how they do it.
It's like, how many inches thick you want this steak?
How big do you want the titties on these horses?
And how pure do you want this cocaine?
And we can do this together.
And the more Republican they are, the more drugs they abuse.
I learned that from being a cab driver.
The only people who ever did cocaine in my cab was judges twice.
Wow.
Actually, there was one guy in the Navy smoking crack back there.
What the hell are you doing?
You know what's so funny?
Government employees.
What's funny to me about adults that do blow is like, I'm a comedian, and on paper, I should be living a rock and I don't even touch Coke.
It's not like I've never done Coke.
You probably should.
It's just like, it's too much.
Like, even I.
So it's funny, like, I don't understand people that have like the actually important jobs, the way that they seem to get away with partying.
They're the same as everybody else, dude.
It just helps them stay up later so they can drink more.
Yeah.
That's all it is.
I mean, that's what Coke was invented for.
Yeah, it's like bring your drunk down a little so then you can bring it back up again.
It's like a seesaw.
There you go.
Yeah.
All right.
And then lastly, of course, thank you to the Free State Project and the Shell for hosting us and putting on this incredible event and letting us be.
I mean, there aren't too many places we can get an audience to have a conversation like this at 11 o'clock.
And then obviously, like we were talking about with the Yemen, please let your friends know to call.