Scott Horton critiques the lack of substantive criticism for his book Provoked, arguing critics conflate the U.S. government with its people while ignoring Clinton-era unauthorized actions. He exposes Western propaganda rehabilitating Jolani and Al-Qaeda to break the "Shiite crescent," linking ISIS's rise to the Iraq invasion's de-Sunnification of Baghdad. Horton further challenges Jeffrey Sachs' claim that the U.S. outsourced foreign policy to Israel, distinguishing this critique from anti-Semitism by targeting neoconservatives. The discussion concludes by contrasting moral relativism with equivalence, noting how Putin invoked precedents set by American presidents to justify his invasion of Ukraine. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Blaming America First00:08:09
What's up, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am very happy, as I always am, to be joined by the great Scott Horton.
Scott has been everywhere lately promoting his wonderful new book, Provoked.
It's been very cool to see you kind of getting your flowers over this book.
I kind of knew this was going to be one that was going to make a big impact.
And it's been cool to see you doing debates and on all of these shows.
How's it been so far?
Since last we talked, I think the book had just come out, but how have you been enjoying the book tour so far?
Well, I can't get any other work done because I'm just doing nothing but interviews, but whatever.
I worked for no money for two and a half years.
So now I got to sell the thing.
So I'm doing a lot of that.
I know everybody's really anxious for the audio book to come out.
I have recorded the H.W. Bush chapter and about a third, I guess, of Bill Clinton.
So those sections should be getting mastered and posted on my sub stack, which is scotthortonshow.com sometime soon, I hope.
I need to talk to my guy and catch up.
And then I have tried to block out some time this weekend, I think like Thursday through Sunday.
I'm going to try to knock out as much of the audio book as I possibly can.
That's going to be a substack series before it's on Audible because it's going to be like 45 hours long or something.
I don't know.
So, but that's happening.
So I know a lot of people really prefer the audio version.
It is coming.
But yeah, I don't know, man.
I sold quite a few.
It's done much better than my previous books.
That's for sure.
And I've been getting on shows like outside of the libertarian movement, but left-wing and right-wing shows as well, trying to get the book out there for people.
And you know what?
People seem really receptive of it.
And I haven't heard any sound criticism yet.
Just a bunch of Russian talking points, talking points.
And, you know, like if you look on Amazon, they're all really great reviews at set.
All of the one-star reviews, you can tell none of them have read the book at all.
They don't cite anything in there.
One guy says, well, it was good at first, but then he starts saying talking points, right?
Like, give me a break, dude.
He goes, I checked it out from the library.
This book isn't available in any library in America, dude.
And there's, you know, they say verified purchase under the comments, right?
None of the one-star reviews have a verified purchase under their name.
They're all clearly just angry trolls from Twitter who came to lie, but none of them even, you know, it's so lazy.
Seems like they could just buy the Kindle and quote something, you know, but nope.
Yeah.
Well, I said it to you the last time you were on the show, and it's been just more kind of proven true because you've been doing more and more of these appearances.
But it is kind of amazing to me where it's like, there seem, it seems like, yeah, there just is no counter argument that's really out there.
There's basically two different things that you will encounter.
This is what I've found to be true also as it relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
But over the last, you know, few years talking a lot about Ukraine and then over the last year talking a lot about Israel.
It's like either one of two things.
Either they will give you some BS version of history, which if you know anything about it, you're already like, yeah, but you're leaving out so much, you know, the information here or you, or you're just making a claim about history that's not true and whatever.
It's either that or it's just, you know, what I get on Twitter every day, the laziest, sloppiest.
Oh, you're repeating Russian propaganda.
Oh, you just love terrorism.
You just love jihadists.
And that's why you're critical of Israel.
And it is after a while almost a little bit flabbergasting.
Like you're just like, that's all.
That's all you got?
Really?
Like, who could be persuaded by that?
Who would look at that and go like, ah, you know, I did, I did just read Scott's book, but I don't know.
This guy says it's all Putin propaganda.
So I guess I'm on this guy's side now.
Or like, does anybody just watch, I just listened to Dave do a debate on Israel, but then I don't know, this guy on the internet said he loves terrorists.
So I guess that, so you're like, who does this going to work on?
It seems so like, it's like watching the Kamala Harris campaign.
Like, is this really what you guys are going with?
This is it?
All right.
The same thing for all of Ukraine's PR efforts, or at least the pro-war side, all their PR efforts on Twitter this whole time have been to just immediately curse out anyone who disagrees with them at all.
When the whole dynamic here is we're the Americans and we're the ones supporting everything that's going on there, you might say like, but Dave, don't you know that Putin actually really is bad because of this thing?
And that should change your mind to agree with me.
Instead, it's like burn in hell, Smith, from the first encounter.
It's like, how is this supposed to, you know, help solidify support for Ukraine when you're telling at least half the American people to absolutely, we should all burn in hell for our refusal to support Ukraine burning in hell.
Like, I don't know.
Maybe we just don't.
And probably most of them are Americans and they just think that's how to win a Twitter fight always is to just come turned up to 11.
But I don't know.
It doesn't seem to be creating more sympathy from for Ukraine that I can tell, you know?
Yeah, no, 100%.
And, you know, I was, I got into a Twitter back and forth this morning with a guy who was, he was young.
He's like 22 years old.
And he, I guess, just graduated college.
And he was, he was arguing with me over the Jeffrey Sachs Tucker interview, which I want to get your take on in a sec.
But so he's arguing with me.
And I was trying to, as I tend to do, especially like if you're 22 years old, typically I just have a little bit more sympathy for anybody making a bad argument.
You know, man, I'm lucky Twitter didn't exist when I was 22 because I would have been the, I would have been the type to try to like win arguments on Twitter too.
And I wouldn't have known what I was saying.
And it'd be embarrassing in hindsight.
So like, I kind of, but so I was trying to be fairly kind.
And he said at one point, he goes, and he might mean this, I think, genuinely in his 22-year-old mind, but he just goes, why is it that guys like you and Jeffree Sachs never seem to get nearly as exercised about Vladimir Putin doing something wrong as you do about when the U.S. does it wrong?
The example he used, he goes, where's your outrage about the military bases that Vladimir Putin has in Syria or something like that?
And, you know, I was trying to almost explain to him because I do think there are some number of people who will look at that and go like, yeah, it does seem like, you know, this is, you're the blame America first crowd.
Like you're always on that side.
And I tried to explain to him, I was like, well, listen, there's an obvious reason for this.
It's because we're all Americans and America is the most powerful government in the history of the world.
He said something in the comment, like, well, why don't you care about, you know, Putin's expansionism, whatever exactly he means by that.
And I go, well, because no matter how you slice it, U.S. expansion dwarfs the Russian Federation's expansion.
And also, I'm an American.
And also the forever wars have degraded my country tremendously, like profoundly.
And so I do think sometimes almost that's what gets people tripped up.
It's like, yeah, but everything I hear, it's the social psychology of like, but I just keep hearing you say America bad, but that doesn't make me feel very comfortable.
What makes me feel comfortable is you saying other people are bad.
Yeah, these Durkhead Durkistan guys, they're bad, you know?
So I do think that almost needs to be reminded to people sometimes that it's like, this is not, you know, the way I always say it is I go, look, everybody, we all accept that the war in Iraq was wrong and that we were lied into it and it was a disaster.
Everyone accepts that now.
The Forever Wars Lie00:06:59
That doesn't mean I'm saying I'd rather live under Saddam Hussein in Iraq than I would under George W. Bush in America.
That doesn't mean I'm saying I think the people and the music and the culture of Iraq is way better than America's.
You know what I'm saying?
Like none of this logically follows.
It's just that in the conflict of the war in Iraq, the second war in Iraq under W. Bush, clearly the U.S. was the bad guys.
They were the aggressors.
You know, like it's just, I think this should be, when you have a fully formed brain, fairly easy to accept.
Well, and look, I mean, just because somebody won an election to be the president doesn't mean that they are, you know, the ultimate representative of the American people.
Like, you know, Bill Clinton is our Uber congressman and we have all like given our assent to him to be our divine king for a while or something.
In fact, no, the guy was a felon who should have been in prison before he was ever sworn into the presidency.
You know, I think a lot of us now, I've never interacted with her really.
I should, but I've known her story, you know, back when the rest of the major media was covering it up.
Only the Wall Street Journal would tell the story of Juanita Broderick, who Bill Clinton had savagely raped and punched in the face and bitten on the face while he raped her and then mocked her as he, when he left the room.
And she told this story so credibly, so consistently.
She tried to like cover it up and bear.
She wasn't trying to get publicity out of it.
It was only when it was dragged out of her.
In fact, I'll tell you as long as I'm ranting about it.
She lied to the same grand jury, the Paula Jones civil lawsuit grand jury that Bill Clinton had lied to and said that, no, I don't know what you're talking about.
It never happened, whatever.
But then it went to the federal grand jury under the special prosecutor.
And Juanita Broderick's son was a lawyer.
And he told her, Mom, you can't lie to a federal grand jury.
Civil lawsuit is one thing.
Federal grand jury, it doesn't matter what the subject is, doesn't matter that you're the victim and you're talking about somebody else.
You cannot lie in any way.
And so, and she couldn't plead the fifth because there was, she hadn't done anything wrong to cover up.
So she went in there and told the truth.
And that was the only time it came out.
And then when she sued, she sued for $1.
I don't even think it was for $1.
It was just for her FBI file.
That was all she sued for was her FBI file.
And she's known as a tennis nut on Twitter now and is, of course, a Republican activist now.
And, you know, Bill Clinton's lawyer goes, any claim that Bill Clinton raped Juanita Broderick in this hotel on this day in 1978 is false.
I was like, well, wait, which part of it?
Are you saying because she still was going by her maiden name, Hickey, at the time?
She wasn't Juanita Broderick yet when he savagely bit her on the face while he raped her.
Anyway, what I'm really trying to say here, Dave, is that when Bill Clinton burned Waco, that wasn't America burning Waco.
That was Bill Clinton and the national government, the army and the FBI burning Waco is what that was.
And when Bill Clinton bombed Bosnia or, well, and bombed Serbia and, you know, twice in 1995, well, in 94, 95, and then again in 99, that wasn't America doing that.
That was Bill Clinton.
In fact, he had no authority whatsoever.
The Congress didn't authorize that.
Never mind, declare war.
It wasn't even authorized at all.
He just does whatever he wants.
How is that America?
And so this is an elementary mistake, right?
To say this is blaming America.
America's a place with a bunch of people living on top of it.
It's, you know, also sort of happens to be the name of the government, but not really.
And as libertarians, of course, we like to discriminate and point out the discrepancy there.
Of course, the government poses as the country, calls itself the country, you know, but that doesn't mean we have to accept that.
And as long as it's Bill Clinton, same difference when you're talking about W. Bush or Barack Obama, for that matter, Donald Trump or anybody else up there, Joe Biden, for Christ's sake.
You just think Joe Biden's America.
I mean, just because the money interests of Delaware decided they wanted him to be their senator back in 1973 and they kept him there doesn't really mean anything.
It doesn't really reflect on the rest of us at all.
You think, look at Lindsey Graham.
You think Lindsey Graham sits in the U.S. Senate, America's House of Lords, because that's what the people of the United States of America want?
No, somebody has done this to us, right?
Like we're victims, you know, or innocent bystanders at best in the selection of Lindsey Graham to be our overlord.
And if you stop and think about it, if anybody stops and thinks about this stuff for a minute, of course, it's obvious and all these kind of claims fall apart.
And yeah, like you're saying, and there's a great Noam Chomsky quote, and I'm sure you can find some right-winger quotes like this too.
Then, yeah, of course I'm criticizing my own government.
I live here.
These are the people that I'm ostensibly responsible for.
At the very least, I got to suffer the consequences of the decisions they make.
But then if this is anything like a democratic republic in any way where the people have sovereignty in any way, then yeah, the grown-ups are supposed to shout about it when the government is lying and stealing and murdering people and causing terrorists to kamikaze into our towers.
Yeah, I think in the Noam Chomsky quote that you're referencing, he said something, which I always thought was really, a really great example, where he was like, imagine if you were like a very high-ranking, like a Soviet in the Soviet government in the time that Stalin's committing his worst crimes.
And all you can go on about, which is what they used to do, is the human rights violations of the Americans.
They used to love to do this under Stalin's Soviet Union.
That is the, oh my God, look at they have segregation in the South.
They mistreat black people.
They started this conflict or that conflict.
Look how awful the Americans are.
Can't you just look at that and be like, okay, but wouldn't it be a little bit more valuable use of your time to point out that you are working for Joseph Stalin?
You know what I mean?
And so obviously it's very convenient that this is where your moral outrage goes to.
And likewise, it's just, it's so hard for me to sit around, you know, on a panel with some, you know, Piers Morgan or someone like that, just going off on all the crimes of Vladimir Putin and how awful he is.
And you're kind of like, oh, all right, but, you know, I am a citizen and a non-voluntary taxpayer of the world empire, the most war-hungry country in the world.
Maybe Israel gives us a run for our money, but they only do it because we give them a money for their run.
So we only do it because they demand that we do it for a long time.
Iraq War Propaganda00:13:22
Well, okay.
But anyway, yeah, it is.
It's hard to just be like, obviously, I think as an American, your role would be to criticize the American government first because they do claim to represent us and they force us to fund their operations.
And then on top of that, they're also just the most powerful world empire, the most powerful government that's ever existed.
And so they can do a lot more bad than other people could.
You know, it's like when people say like, oh, you know, Vladimir Putin wants the entire world to be speaking Russian or something like that, which of course he's never said, but you go, yeah, well, he doesn't have the power to do that.
He doesn't even have the power to take Kiev, evidently.
So, okay, let's deal with who actually has the power and the desire rather than just some abstract claim that they have the desire.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, I do, I want to talk to you a little bit about because there were certain areas of the book that I wanted to get into, but I kind of feel it would be a crime against humanity to have you here and not talk about Syria a bit, because this is obviously a part, a substantial part of the story of your new book.
And it's a huge, huge part of the book that you wrote previously to that enough already, which I do think I highly recommend everybody.
If you haven't read enough already, make sure to buy it and read it.
The book is phenomenal.
It's every bit as great as Provoked.
I mean, it's just perfect Hortonian storytelling and giving real history.
But even if you have read the book, it's worth going back and rereading the Syria chapter just to have a little bit of background.
So you're kind of up to speed of like, where were we right before the Assad regime just fell?
But I have not talked to you on air since this happened.
So what are your thoughts on Assad fleeing, the regime change finally coming to fruition, and the Western media celebrating and even, as we played on the last episode here,
we were going all over this CNN hoax story about the freed prisoner, but even participating in what is essentially an al-Qaeda propaganda campaign to rehabilitate the image of these al-Qaeda in Iraq fighters who are now in Syria and to kind of, I don't know, celebrate, like, isn't this wonderful that Bashar al-Assad has fallen and al-Qaeda is in Damascus?
It's pretty wild to watch.
I know, man.
I don't want to make like a bunch of wild predictions because I really just don't know what is going to happen.
But I think it's clear that even now, Syria really doesn't exist anymore.
I don't know what they're going to call whatever part of it al-Qaeda comes to rule, but America is in alliance with the Kurds in the east, in the Northeast, with the YPG Kurds and cannot leave because the Turks would very much like to cleanse and kill and remove them.
And now, I don't know if Trump has a different relationship with Erdogan that he could prevent that with language rather than actual boots on the ground.
I'm not so sure.
But that's a huge disincentive for the Americans leaving.
On the other hand, they have broken the Shiite crescent.
Iran can no longer use Syria to transport weapons to Hezbollah and Syria itself, the Alawite regime there that was allied with Iran.
So this was the whole point, as David Wormser put it in 1996, why we need to expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria is to break this chain of Shiite power.
And so that much is done.
So why do we need Americans at the Al-Tamf base to sit on that highway to prevent the weapons coming in?
I don't know if we need that anymore, even according to the empire's own perspective on that.
There's protecting the Kurds and they're keeping the oil and the wheat out of the hands of the Assad regime.
I don't know if they're going to turn those resources right over to Al-Qaeda now.
Of course, the Israelis are carving out a chunk.
They've taken Mount Hernan and area up to and surrounding it and stopped about, I think they said 20 kilometers from Damascus.
So what's that?
About 15 miles or something from the capital.
They got settlers already coming in and saying, come on, let's colonize this land.
It's manifest destiny, baby.
Let's do it.
Raring to go.
It's amazing to see, you know, civilians, you know, coming in, talking about, all right, put a stake in the ground right there.
This is ours now.
Raises questions about it's amazing how quick they move to do that.
Netanyahu made a speech the day that Bashar al-Assad fled, or maybe it was the next day, just saying like, oh, we're taking this land.
We're moving further.
You're like, oh, you don't have to let this thing cool off for a week.
You get to just move in right away.
It's like, oh, I think I'm starting to see why we were supposed to hate Bashar al-Assad so much.
There you go.
And in fact, you know, Netanyahu and Joe Biden both gave speeches taking credit for Al-Qaeda's victory and saying, yeah, it was because, you know, various parts of their speeches, you know, from Biden's point of view, keeping the Russians bogged down in Ukraine and giving license to Israel to hit Syria and Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria and in Lebanon as much as they please, et cetera, et cetera.
And then Netanyahu himself said, yeah, that's right.
You know, we were doing all this damage to their forces in the lead up to this, softening up all these targets for them.
And then, and that was the true history of what happened.
And then, so who took over?
I think it's worth delving into this a bit, Dave, that what we're talking about here for people is, you know, maybe too young because we're, you know, living far in the future now.
But you go back 20 years ago when America invaded in Iraq War II.
What happened was, as I am often want to detail, America took the Shiite revolution to Baghdad.
They didn't just kick out Saddam and debotify the government.
They de-Sunnified it is what they did.
They kicked all the Sunnis out of Baghdad in a horrific sectarian cleansing campaign.
And they gave the capital city and control over the nation state to the Shiite supermajority that had been previously oppressed by the Sunnis.
Well, that drove the Sunni population and especially the powerful sheikhs who were losing their status and protection of the national government, pushed them into the arms.
Well, first of all, pushed them to insurgency.
And then secondly, into the arms of the crazies, the bin Ladenites, who came from all around.
You had the previous bin Ladenite movement that America had helped to support in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, and who are now coming.
And you had a whole new generation of terrorists come from Saudi Arabia, from Libya, from Syria, Iraq.
There's a study, a pair of studies in 2005 by the Saudis and the Israelis.
So this is a whole new generation of fighters coming.
The guys who fought in Afghanistan were essentially the travel agents sending the youth to fight a whole new generation of bin Ladenite fighters to go to Iraq.
So this became known as al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And the most prominent leader was a guy named Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, who people should know it's very important, had previously told bin Laden, no, I don't want to join your group.
I want to kill the king of Jordan, not Americans.
So that's my thing.
And then also he'd been wanted by Saddam Hussein.
But the war party made up these lies.
Older listeners will remember the story that Saddam Hussein gave Zarkawi treatment in the hospital and a wooden peg leg.
after he'd been wounded in Afghanistan.
And this was supposedly the connection between Zarkawi and Saddam Hussein.
Well, that was a damn lie.
And Colin Powell, he knew he was lying when he went to the UN in January of 2003.
And he said, let me tell you something.
There's this guy, Zarkawi, and he's al-Qaeda.
No, he had told Bin Laden, no, I don't want to fight with you.
I want to do my own thing.
So he's still bin Ladenite in a way by politics and religious fervor and sectarian discrepancy and whatever, but he wasn't part of the movement, which was the claim.
And then Colin Powell said, and you know what, Dave, too?
He's in Iraq.
And of course, he was being overly broad and general in his statement when he said that, knowing that most Americans don't understand that Saddam Hussein only controlled about four or five cities and not at all his own country at the time.
And in fact, Zarkowi was safe up in Kurdistan.
And I'm finding out more about this, but apparently he was under the explicit protection of the American friend, Barzani, at the time.
I don't know exactly why, but I do know, and it's widely reported by more sources than you would think.
There's so much good journalism.
And I'm not sure who to give the most credit to first or what for this, but people can find a ton on this, where the military, and I guess maybe even the CIA, wanted to kill this guy before the war.
They knew that he was a danger.
And George Bush wouldn't let them do it.
And they begged over and over and over on all different occasions for permission to kill him.
And Bush wouldn't let him do it because they needed the talking point.
This was the pretend connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
They needed Zarkawi to still be alive.
It's kind of like having bin Laden and Tora Bora pinned down there and allowing him to escape into Pakistan because you don't get your bonus war without that.
That's right.
So yeah, if America had already killed Bin Laden and already killed Zarkawi, then why do we got to kill Saddam?
He doesn't have anybody to give chemical weapons to anymore.
By the way, just for people who might be a little bit younger, but it just, it can't be overstated that this was what the entire Iraq war propaganda campaign relied on because it wasn't just like, oh my God, Saddam Hussein has these weapons.
It was that he has these weapons and he's involved with al-Qaeda.
He's going to pass them off to Al-Qaeda and then the mushroom cloud will be over Kansas or whatever.
You know, as ridiculous as that sounds now, immediately after 9-11, this was something that really, it was effective propaganda.
This moved people to be like, oh, all right, well, we can't, we can't deal with that reality.
So we have to go invade.
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Right.
So then when they do invade, and as I say, they took the Shiite side in the civil war.
And that pushed the Sunnis to insurgency and into the arms, of course, so the worst, the bin Ladenite kooks who traveled from all around, sprung from Saudi prisons and wherever to fight against the Americans in this horrible war.
And so out of the 4,500 American soldiers that were killed in the war, and that's soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen and guardsmen and whatever, is right around 4,500.
4,000 of those guys died fighting the Sunni insurgency, the worst part of which was Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The other 500 were killed by Iraqi Shia.
Fighting the Sunni Insurgency00:15:41
They always lie and say that Iran killed them, but that's a lie, a separate story for another day.
But hang on.
So these were the guys who killed so many of our guys, the suicide bombers and the roadside bombers of Iraq War II.
That was essentially who our guys were fighting there.
Then what happened was because they wished they hadn't put the Shiites in power in Baghdad, who after all are allied with Iran.
And instead of being compliant with American wishes and telling Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and telling Syria to stop being friends with Iran and the rest, instead, it just empowered Iran.
And so they couldn't do, they couldn't reverse the civil war in Baghdad and they couldn't launch a regime change war in Tehran because that's just biting off way more than the Pentagon's willing to even try to chew there.
So what do we got?
Well, we do our consolation prize in Damascus.
And so that was why they went after Bashar al-Assad in Damascus beginning in 2011 when the Arab Spring broke out.
And that's, and then it was literally Al-Qaeda in Iraq that crossed the border into Syria and became Al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria, otherwise known as Jabbat al-Nusra.
Well, that's the group that we have now.
Their leader, Jolani, is the guy who was sent by Baghdadi, who was the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, to go and create the Syrian branch.
And that's exactly what he went and did.
Now, in 2013, the Iraqi-dominated faction of Al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria split away from the Syrian-dominated faction of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria.
So Jolani was focused more in the west of the country and focused on fighting Assad and his army in Damascus, whereas Baghdadi decided he would consolidate control over eastern Syria by the spring of 2013.
And then one year later, rolled into western Iraq.
Everybody remembers the iconic picture of the long line of Toyota Helix pickup trucks with their headlights on and full of, you know, with their beds full of jihadis rolling into Mosul.
And so that was what that was the caliphate.
So Bush's war that turned all of western Iraq into sort of lawless, ungoverned, wide open jihadi stand.
And then Obama's war to support them in Syria led then to the rise of the caliphate that had conquered all of eastern Syria and western Iraq.
Then Obama had to launch Iraq War III to blow it back up again because having Baghdadi up there like bin Laden himself on the balcony declaring a dictatorship and all that was too much.
So that was Iraq War III that Obama started in 2014 and Trump finished in his first year in office in 2017.
It's basically done by the end of 2017, a little bit into 18.
But so Baghdadi was the one who just lines up 1700.
Well, in fact, he had them laying down on a basketball court and machine gun 1,700 Iraqi Air Force cadets.
There is other footage of him taking, you know, his, his captives, lining up, just shooting them in the head and dropping their bodies in the river.
And so it was an absolute horror show when people talk about, you know, they blame this on Hamas.
This is ISIS.
This is America's guys.
America and Turkey and Saudi skies in Iraq are the ones throwing gay men off the roofs and all of this just crazy stuff.
The great Middle Eastern reporter Patrick Coburn called them sort of like an Islamist Khmer Rouge.
That's Pol Pot and his commies that took over Cambodia in the late 70s and were known as like the maddest madmen who ever controlled the state, right?
Lord of the Flies on PCP, out of control, communist auto genocide, they call it.
The government killed two, three million of their own people in the thing.
And I don't mean starved them.
I mean murdered them all.
Just crazy.
And so that's how ISIS was.
And I say all that, Dave, to say that Jolani has been to finishing school, right?
He is now under the public relations tutelage of the United States and Turkey.
And it was a few years ago now, three, four, five years ago, God, that Martin Smith from Frontline.
We may have even talked about this on your show then.
Yeah.
Yeah, Martin Smith from Frontline tried to, that's PBS documentary foreign policy type thing, you know, serious documentary program.
Did a whole thing to rehabilitate the guy.
I think we were joking at the time.
They must have been listening to my show because I used to say, you see how this guy has a long beard and a turban and looks just like Osama bin Laden and sends fleets of suicide bombers and head choppers out to do suicide bombings and head choppings.
And you see how this other guy wears a three-piece suit and shaves his chin every morning and yes, controls a murderous army, but is quite literally a secular dictator who protects all the ethnic and religious minorities in the region.
You see how one is different from the other?
You see how the beard is one thing and the mustache is another?
Like you should have been able to tell the difference between Osama and Saddam back in the last war.
Well, this is who we're talking about when we're talking about Bashar al-Assad.
And yes, a three-piece suit is a reason enough to prefer Bashar al-Assad to Mohammed Abu al-Jalani, right?
So then what do they do?
They dressed him up in a three-piece suit with the vest and everything.
And they put him on frontline going, look at me.
I'm wearing a three-piece suit.
They didn't shave his chin, but he goes, look at me.
I'm a sophisticated Western Democrat now.
And so his men are not, as far as I know, for certain, are not doing head shoppings right now.
They didn't use suicide bombings in this offensive.
They didn't need to.
They certainly did in the last war, but they have obviously been instructed to dial down the lunacy if you want to hold on to the power.
And so, because look, in this the whole root of al-Qaeda's war against the United States, as long as America's here to blow up their caliphate, ain't no point in building one.
There ain't no point in even trying to overthrow your local king if America's going to come and back him up.
Or if you succeed, they're going to come and blow up your caliphate anyway.
That's the whole discrepancy in the fight over whether we should target the near enemy or the far enemy.
And Zawahiri and bin Laden and their other leaders of their movement decided we got to target the Americans first.
We got to get them angry like a bull to chase after the red scarf into Afghanistan so we can bog them down, lead them to bankruptcy and force them out the hard way.
Unfortunately, Trump and Biden learned their lesson.
And well, unfortunately for them, I mean, in their narrative, Trump and Biden learned the lesson, got out of Afghanistan before total bankruptcy hit us.
So the getting is still good there.
And so the, and then, but what happened with Iraq War III, Dave?
They built the caliphate for the forum, but then they blew it up again.
So if you were like in Al-Qaeda doing the near enemy-far enemy argument, looks like the far enemy argument is winning.
As long as we build a caliphate, there's no point in doing it because the Americans will come blow it back up again.
Unless we work hand in glove with the U.S. and Turkey and Israel to do it.
And we have their full permission and we dial down the head choppings and suicide bombings a little bit.
And then we get to have what we want because Israel, especially, but also America and Turkey are more than happy to break the back of Shiite power in the region and this Alawite government and its alliance with Iran and Hezbollah.
So for them, the price is worth it to put these guys in power.
Now, my thing is this.
And first of all, Jolani is an, he fought against Americans in Iraq War II.
So that should be the end of the argument, right?
This is high treason for America to support this group at all, regardless of what public relations, you know, PowerPoint series that they had to sit through or whatever.
They still are loyal to or, you know, they never renounced.
They said that people said they renounced Al-Qaeda.
They just distanced themselves from Al-Qaeda.
They never like truly renounced their oath to that movement.
And these are the guys who knocked down the towers.
I just want to say, because I made this point on my last episode, and I should make it with you here too.
So I was bringing up your debate with Kathy Young, which I did say is maybe the most one-sided debate I've ever seen.
There's been some pretty one-sided one.
You had a pretty one-sided one with Bill Kristol, too, but it was pretty funny that in the final vote, she only got the guy she came with.
That's just pretty hilarious.
And she just did a terrible job.
She doesn't, you know, she's awful.
But there was the moment that I think most people remember as kind of the funniest moment of that debate was when she said like, you know, she said something in the portion where you guys get to go back and forth.
And she goes like, you know, we don't have to get into the Azov Battalion.
We can save that for another time or something.
And you were like, of course you don't want to get into it.
And you asked her how much they love Adolf Hitler on a scale of one to 10 and then gave her the answer, which was 10.
But there was this moment where she goes, well, yes, you know, in her Eastern European accent or whatever, she goes, yes, they started as a neo-Nazi, as a Nazi organization, but they've evolved from there.
And it's just, it's amazing that I said it's almost as if like, I think the example I gave on the show yesterday was like, if imagine talking about like the Ku Klux Klan this way, which by the way, like, I don't know, I haven't heard anything about Ku Klux Klan violence in a long time.
I don't really think it's a violent group anymore.
But if anyone, if you ever told me like, oh, this guy joined the Klan and I went, yeah, yeah, but you're thinking like the old Klan, you'd be like, wait a minute.
I'm sorry, dude.
You're still joining the Ku Klux Klan.
And this is the Klan, a pretty awful organization historically.
But I mean, we're talking about Nazis and in this case, Al-Qaeda.
And yet somehow you can attempt to do a rehabilitation campaign on these groups.
I mean, it is, it's so fun.
It's, you know, one of the things that it really does expose the Warhawks so much because it's like, wait, but these are the groups that you rely on to justify every goddamn war.
Every war, it's just because, oh, you're weak.
You're, you know, Scott Horton, you're Neville Chamberlain and you just want appeasement, but I'm really tough and I recognize that everyone's a Nazi or everyone's Al-Qaeda.
And yet you will sit here and actually, you can't make this shit up, that you will run cover and work to rehabilitate the image of both Nazis and Al-Qaeda.
It's just unbelievable.
Yeah.
Look, we're still at war in Somalia in the name of Al-Qaeda.
We stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years in the name of Al-Qaeda.
Launch an aggressive war against Iraq in the name of Al-Qaeda.
But support them in Libya, support them and wage horrific drone wars, literally, honestly, against Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Pakistan for a minute before turning right around, finishing the job mostly in Pakistan, but then turning right around and backing Al-Qaeda again in Yemen.
And I should also remind people, by the way, again, because I know we do have a lot of young people who listen to this show, and I, you know, I'm not a young person anymore, and so I do kind of forget like this is to me, this is all like very recent history, but I guess, you know, it's it's multiple decades, um, or at least it's been going on for over 20 years.
But the, I cannot stress enough, the entire justification for the war in Afghanistan, because if people, again, Scott also wrote a book about Afghanistan called Fool's Errand, also a highly recommend, really great read.
And really, if you read these three books, by the way, if you get, if there's nothing else and you're interested in American foreign policy, read Fool's Eren enough already and provoked, and you are going to have a huge comparative advantage to almost anyone you're talking to this stuff about.
But this, okay, in Afghanistan, it's by the end of 2001, right?
So September 11th, the towers come down almost immediately, the special ops missions start in Afghanistan.
The Al-Qaeda camps are blasted very, very quickly.
By the end of the year, there's basically no more like real al-Qaeda camps left in Afghanistan.
But the justification for why we had to embark on a regime change war against the Taliban was that, well, listen, because if you think about it logically, it's kind of like going after a landlord because someone you rented an apartment to committed a murder.
Typically, we don't really blame the landlord for renting the apartment to them, especially as you detail in the book when afterward the landlord was willing to talk and negotiate and figure out how to extradite the wanted party.
But the justification was like, nope, they rented to Al-Qaeda once, which means they could rent to them again in the future.
And we simply cannot allow Afghanistan to be a country where Al-Qaeda could plot the next 9-11.
Now, forget the fact that lots of 9-11 was not planned in Afghanistan.
But if you just take this logic, and yet now we can give them Syria, we can hand them their own country.
I thought this whole thing was predicated on the justification that they can't be given a safe haven.
What, like, they can't plan attacks in Syria?
Or is it because Jolani is saying nice things about Israel or putting on a suit?
Now we don't have to have the concern that they could, like, magically in Syria, they can't plan attacks, but only in Afghanistan they could.
I mean, look, let's pretend that they're right.
That no, we've tamed Abu Muhammad al-Jalani.
Right.
He's the sweetest little al-Qaeda guy that you could ever have take over a state for you.
If that's really true, then one of his men will soon kill him and replace him, right?
Like, come on, you really just get on the phone and take orders from the Israelis every day, dude?
That's what his people are just going to be perfectly happy with that.
Um, now, look, America, Israel, and Turkey helped them defeat their immediate enemies.
But now what?
Like, anybody really thinks everything's going to be fine?
All the different kinds of Christians, all the Shiites and all the Alawites, they're all going to be safe.
It's going to be a diverse, multi-ethnic, wonderful new Islamist al-Qaeda state there.
You know, they've ruled in the Idlib province for the last 10 years, but that's a pretty homogeneous area and a rural area.
It's not the same as ruling Aleppo and Hama and Homs and Damascus.
Right.
And Latakia and all the areas, especially in the western part of the country where you have more Shiites and Christians.
I don't know that they're just going to go around cutting everybody's heads off for refusing to convert and all that, but it's not going to be pretty.
At the very least, it's going to be Libya style ongoing strife and civil war for the long term.
And again, America's going to stay in the East.
And look, I think, honestly, if Dave, if, you know, on the scale of from what bin Laden on one side to Baghdadi on the other, Zarkowi is on there somewhere.
Martin Indik and Israel00:15:08
Like Jolani is maybe on like the maybe he's the nicest of those four al-Qaeda character, you know, leaders there.
Maybe he's the least worst of all of them.
But this is a continuum on the far revolutionary, Salafi, crazy spectrum of Islamic revolutionary thought, right?
I mean, these guys are, um, they are not Democrats, nothing like it.
And so if, if he is not going to meet out the ultraviolence, he'll probably be replaced by somebody who will.
I mean, you look at, again, the, just to go back 10 years to ISIS.
And again, when Baghdadi broke away, he was by doctrine, specifically meant to be much worse and was like so chauvinist against the Shiites.
The only good Shiite is a dead Shiite, this kind of thing.
I don't think Jolani is necessarily, maybe he never was that ideological, but he did kill Americans in Fallujah, or at least claim to, you know, fought against Americans in Iraq War II.
And his men committed all kinds of atrocities during the war 10 years ago.
Like I say, all this stuff about softening him up, he was already the devil.
The fact that Baghdadi was even worse than him, they used that to try to rehabilitate him back then, but it didn't really work because he was obviously so plainly also a bin Ladenite marauder.
You know, it's really much more in the meantime, since they've been sort of camped out in the Idlib province that they've really embarked on this further rehabilitation campaign to try to get Western audiences to accept him.
Man, you should see the thing in the New York Times.
It's the most absurd thing.
They're like, well, they're not chopping people's hands off for smoking cigarettes in public.
So that's pretty progressive.
There you go.
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Well, it is, so Jeffree Sachs was on Tucker Carlson's show yesterday.
Stealing my thunder.
Stealing, it certainly, certainly a little bit, but he, it seems to be somewhere, you know, not quite, maybe not quite the outrage storm that our buddy Daryl created by daring to question whether the biggest bloodbath in human history was a perfectly great thing and everybody on our side did everything right, you know?
But there, so one of the things Jeffree Sachs said, which I have, I have seen characterized on Twitter as vile anti-Semitism.
Jeffrey Sachs clearly hates Jewish people.
I know it's too, it's all just too ridiculous.
But he said, and I will say, you know, when he said it, I did, obviously I loved it, but I was like, oh, he really just said that.
But he just goes, he goes, you know, the U.S. decided to outsource their foreign policy to Israel.
And it's been an utter disaster for not just the United States of America, but every single wear that this conflict has touched.
And then he went into the long history of the, you know, the last, what is it, 13 years in Syria, right?
13?
I'm not going to map.
When he went back to the clean break, this is going back to what Netanyahu wanted ever since the mid-1990s.
By the way, what a kind of wild admission.
I don't know if it's an admission exactly because when you were debating General Wesley Clark, it seemed like he was, I remember I said to you on the phone afterward, it seemed like you were debating like a screen door in the wind.
Like it's just kind of like, would you hold still so I can kick you open?
Like, where are you even going here?
But he did at one point just say, you know, you brought up the fact that he's most famous for this seven countries in five years quote.
And hey, remember that?
And he goes, oh, no, no, no.
This goes back to the early 90s.
He's like, no, no, no, no.
Wolfowitz had this plan long before that.
So I don't exactly even myself know where the origin of the kind of clean break seven countries in five years strategy came from.
However, it's been here for quite a long time.
And it's anyway, there's really something to kind of see.
But there is like a kind of fundamental dynamic here where obviously I understand where people don't like the way it sounds when you say, hey, we outsourced our foreign policy to Israel.
And the response is, oh, you're blaming the Jews or something like that.
Even though it's not, this is not a comment on Barry the dentist on the upper west side of Manhattan.
This is a comment on the neoconservatives and the Likud Party.
It's fairly specific.
But there's this great quote, which you have in, it's in enough already.
I'm blanking on the name of the guy and his position, but it's the Israeli.
It's on video if anybody, we played it before on the show, but where, and I'm sure you'll remember this because you have it in your book, but where the Israeli guy was saying that they will treat wounded al-Qaeda guys, but they won't treat wounded Hezbollah fighters.
Do you remember who was?
It was.
I think it's Efraim Halevi.
Yeah.
It's an interview with Netty Hassan on Al Jazeera.
Yes.
And so he's basically saying that they were talking about how like on the battlefield, if al-Qaeda members are wounded, they will give them medical attention.
Hezbollah, on the other hand, they will not.
And he goes, well, why not?
And he goes, well, Al-Qaeda are not our enemies.
Hezbollah is our enemy.
We're involved in a conflict with Hezbollah, but not with Al-Qaeda.
And then he's kind of like, whoa, I mean, but that's crazy because there are our enemies.
And the whole reason we're in this war on terrorism is because of that.
But I will say to almost perhaps if Israel was not just a fat welfare mom for the United States of America, like if they were self-sufficient, I could almost accept that.
They go, hey, I think it's kind of, listen, after all, we're not, at least in that clip, he's talking about giving medical treatment.
I'm kind of of the belief that you give medical treatment to everybody, even horrific mass murderers.
Like I don't, you know what I mean?
Like, I think if you're serving a life sentence in prison, we still give you medical treatment because that's kind of the way civilized people do things.
Regardless, it's like, I think to get at the point that Jeffrey Sachs was making, it's just like, why is it that Israel's allowed to have that opinion?
And yet, then why can't we say the exact same thing and go, okay, but our enemy is Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda is the enemy of the American people and Hezbollah is not.
And Bashar al-Assad is not.
So I think like what Jeffrey Sachs is, or what is some evidence to point that his assertion is correct is that we, we are somehow, through many different forces, in a political situation where we are not allowed to think in our own national interest in the way that Israel is about these conflicts.
Like they can sit there and just say, hey, look, we got two guys here, right?
We have Bashar al-Assad and we have Al-Qaeda.
Well, Bashar al-Assad's our enemy because he allows the transfer of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah.
But Al-Qaeda is not our enemy.
Why on earth can't the Americans be allowed to do the same thing and just say, well, quite the opposite for us.
For us, Bashar al-Assad never hit any towers in Manhattan and neither did Hezbollah.
That's the core Israel out of southern Lebanon.
Yeah, look, that's all we're talking about is America's interests and Israel's interests are separate and different.
And you can't get more blatant than what you're talking about right here.
Their enemies are the Shiites.
Ours are the Sunnis and the radical vanguard edge of America's own Sunni terrorist mercenary army that in fact, if we would just tell our allies to stop backing them, we'd probably dry up and blow away mostly if America and our friends would quit taking their side in these things and doing things that also motivate people to turn against us.
But it wasn't, as you say, quite correctly, it was not Iran or Syria's Assad Baathist regime or Hezbollah in Lebanon that knocked our towers down.
That was the bin Ladenites that did that.
And then, so what do the neoconservatives do?
It's the same thing they've been doing for 25 years, Dave.
Michael LeDeen would go, yeah, dude, we have to take on the terror masters in Tehran.
Well, what do you mean, the terror masters?
They go, well, don't you know?
Iran is the world's greatest state sponsor of terrorism.
Hmm, that's a little vague.
How come you didn't say they're the world's greatest state sponsor of al-Qaeda?
Oh, it's because Al-Qaeda suicide bombs Iranian Shiites to death, chops their heads off.
Oh, I get it.
They're the enemies of our enemies.
So instead, you come up with this crap about terror masters and greatest state sponsor of something or other when what you're really talking about is they back Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Okay.
Yes.
Well, then backing Hamas makes them equally as guilty as Benjamin Netanyahu.
So I don't want to hear another word about that and backing Hezbollah.
It wasn't even Hezbollah.
It was sort of proto-pre-Hezboll that blew up the American Marine barracks in 1983, where Reagan acknowledged he shouldn't have put them in the first place.
But also that same day, Israel knew it was going to happen and refused to warn their American best friends and benefactors in the whole world that it was going to happen.
And anyone can read this in the book by way of deception by Viktor Ostrovsky.
That's named after the way that the Israelis make you think everything that you think about Israel is by lying to you because they're liars because they have to be because they're guilty of theft and mass murder all the time.
And so they have to lie to make themselves look better.
So by way of deception is the name of the book.
It's by a former Mossad agent named Victor Ostrovsky.
And he talks about how the Mossad guys said to each other, he was there, and they said, ah, that's what the Americans get for sticking their nose into our business in Lebanon.
Let them get bombed as the American Marines were killed 240 of them.
So if we still have to hate Hezbollah for that, then I still get to hate Israel for that.
They might as well have helped Hezbollah do it then.
Same damn difference.
What would the Israelis say if America knew that somebody's going to truck bomb and kill 241 of their IDF?
And we kept that secret from them.
They'd do a regime change in Washington, D.C. and put the other party in power at the next election is what they would do.
They'd start an extra war and make sure we lose it just to rub our nose in it if we dare do that to them.
So yeah, the Shiites didn't do anything else.
You know what?
Zbidnubrzinski was the national security advisor at the time of the Iranian Revolution.
And so if anyone was humiliated by the rise of the Ayatollah, the seizing of the hostages and all of that, it was him.
He's the one who helped advise Carter that you better announce the Carter doctrine to save face after this absolute humiliation, his personal humiliation.
But hey, by 1993, he was taking money from, I think it was ConocoPhillips to advise that America ought to build a pipeline from Azerbaijan, from Baku, Azerbaijan, where they're tapping into the Caspian Basin oil there and ship it across Iran to a terminal in the Persian Gulf.
And this would be a good way to begin to bring Iran back in from the cold and normalize relations with Iran, said Zbignubrzinski.
And who vetoed it, Dave?
Israel vetoed it.
Bill Clinton stupidly said that he wanted to bring Saddam Hussein back in from the cold and normalize relations with Iraq.
And I'm not saying that was the wrong thing to do.
I'm saying he was stupid to say that out loud because as soon as he said that out loud, the Israelis and the Kuwaitis began mobilizing to prevent it.
And everyone's familiar with the fake alleged assassination attempt against George H.W. Bush in Kuwait by truck bomb.
Everyone's heard that a million times.
George Bush Jr. saying, oh, he tried to kill my dad and all this stuff.
Never happened.
The whole thing was fake.
Seymour Hirsch debunked it in the New Yorker magazine.
It was just a whiskey smuggling ring.
In fact, if you search my name and whiskey smuggling ring and assassination of Bush Sr. or something or other like that on Twitter, but you can find where I posted screenshots of that entire New Yorker article from the archives for you there.
Well, in George W. Bush's defense, it not being true doesn't mean he didn't believe it was.
Oh, that's true.
Yeah, I think he had no idea.
I'm sure he doesn't.
He has no idea who Seymour Hirsch even is.
But so that was fake.
But when it came out, see, Clinton had been under pressure.
This is in the first, you know, like 100 days, early 93, and not long after the Waco massacre.
And Martin Indik, who had been an advisor to Yitzhak Shamir from the Likud Party, the former prime minister of Israel.
Former terrorists before that.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe not just before that, but yes, during that.
Yeah, and during that too, probably.
Yeah.
And the guy who intervened to help get Bush Sr. unseated for Bill Clinton in the first place.
But Indic had a policy called dual containment, and Bill Clinton was holding off.
Bill Clinton still thought that he could try to bring Saddam Hussein back in from the cold to balance against Iran because after all, he used to work for Ronald Reagan until he crossed H.W. Bush and got smacked down.
But that doesn't mean that we have to keep him on the outs forever.
But the Israelis said, yes, you do.
And Martin Indik on Israel's behalf said, listen.
America, partially at Israel's behest, beat up Iraq's army so badly in Iraq War I in Desert Storm in 91 that now Saddam is not powerful enough to balance against Iran.
So now America must stay in Saudi Arabia to balance against Iran and Iraq.
And that's the dual containment policy.
Aging Research and Qualia00:03:01
And that then became the number one motive for Reagan and Bush and Bill Clinton's mercenaries, al-Qaeda, to turn against the United States of America, staying in Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq.
After the failed Shiite uprising of the Bush senior years and then the status quo that Bill Clinton inherited, he was trying to resolve it.
Instead, he stayed.
He inaugurated the, after the fake assassination attempt against Bush Sr., Martin Indik gave a speech where at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the spinoff of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, inaugurating the dual containment policy that got our towers knocked down.
About as simple as that.
And it was all for Israel.
The other, the number two thing on Al-Qaeda's list for motives to attack the United States was support for Israel and their mass murders of women and children in Palestine and Lebanon.
So number one on the list was an American policy in Saudi Arabia and Iraq that was insisted upon by Israel and Iran.
That was insisted upon by Israel.
And then the second thing was just supporting Israel itself, literally, and not just being a nice Jewish boy minding his own business, but constantly murdering people and stealing people's property.
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Yeah.
Defining Terrorism Accurately00:09:12
It seems like that has the pesky little habit of pissing a lot of people off when you do that.
You know, as I've mentioned a bunch on the show, but it is the claim that Iran is the global leader in sponsoring terrorism is one that is so you hear this a lot.
I remember, I mean, Carl Rove used to go on Fox News and say this all the time.
Iran is the number one supporter of terrorism.
And you know that when he was saying it, he was just counting on everybody's Fox News watching dad to not know, just counting on you to not know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite and not even ever ask that question.
And obviously what you're supposed to think of in your head is 9-11, that you're supposed to think like, oh, these guys are funding the terrorists.
I do, Ben Dominic, I debated him on this topic, Megan McCain's husband there, and he made this claim.
And I just followed it up by asking what evidence there is of that.
You're like, where's the point to this to me?
Like, actually show me where there's a, like, I'm not even saying it's not, if you want to call Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist organizations, okay, you could say, sure, fine.
I'm not going to argue with you on that.
But like, show me the actual study that said, like, went over like U.S. money that goes toward terrorism, Saudi money that goes toward terrorism.
Like, even forget the Shins, the, the shirts versus the skins or whatever.
Like, where, and he had nothing.
He was just like, well, this has been reported and lots of, and you're like, oh, okay.
Anyway, I'm just, it's just this claim that gets made.
But of course, I do think that the ultimate point for libertarian non-interventionists like us is like, it's what Noam Chomsky said back in the day, which I always thought was, he said it very well, that he goes, what is really the definition of terrorism?
Well, it's terrorism when they do it.
And it's counterterrorism when we do it.
And that essentially is, you know, like if you want to like trying to make some type of moral distinction between the evils of terrorism and what Israel's doing to Gaza right now is the only difference is that they're doing it from a government and one of the governments that is allied with our government.
That's the essential difference there.
I mean, it's like, you know, it's what is even like the Webster's definition of terrorism, like acts of violence to encourage a political change or something like that.
And nope, okay, that seems to pretty clearly fit the definition.
So, you know, the, again, I don't think it's not like blame America first here.
I think what you really are arguing in this book, and I think what is kind of the through line throughout all of your work and throughout all of my commentary as well, is that it's just like, look, if we're going to be in the business of morally condemning people, fine.
But let's just have one standard and apply it to everybody.
You know, this is what the Zionists say, oh, you're, you're, what's the term?
Moral equivalence.
Moral equivalency.
Yeah.
When, first of all, it's like.
Yeah, exactly.
Moral equivalent.
That's exactly what I'm saying, dude.
You're morally equivalent to a bunch of suicide bombing head chopping scum.
Right.
That's what I meant to say.
You heard me.
Well, it's also like, it's like, well, I didn't, I mean, I never said it was equivalent.
I think it's actually much worse.
Like, I don't know.
Like, there's, there's, my whole point is that it's not equivalent, actually, that you've killed far more people, but it's wrong for the same reasons.
You know, it's like, and so, yeah, that's the, it's, it's funny because I've heard people even use this, the, this line of attack.
Well, they say moral equivalency.
And then sometimes they'll, they'll accuse me of moral relativism.
And I'm like, I really don't think you understand what these terms mean.
What I'm, what I'm saying is the opposite of moral relativism.
Is you who is implying, who is embracing this moral relativism as if it's somehow different in character.
I've always been fascinated by that.
Right-wingers have always done this since the 1990s.
This was the thing I used to listen to them say on talk radio all the time: the liberals they insist on moral relativism about everything.
And then, as soon as someone says Israel, they go, You claim there's moral equivalence.
And that if somebody on this side does the exact same thing as somebody on that side, then somehow it's the same thing.
That's crazy, huh?
It's the very same people, even sometimes in the very same conversation.
You know, and a lot of these objections they almost roll into each other because the other one that I get all the time is when people will say this whataboutism thing, like if someone brings up the crimes of Vladimir Putin and you bring up the crimes of the U.S. government, oh, that's what aboutism or something like that.
But there is, it's like the example I try to give, it's like, hey, so, so me and you are libertarians, right?
So we hate taxes.
We oppose taxes.
Now, let's just say hypothetically, every country in the world had a 90% tax rate, except one country that had a 10% tax rate.
And then somebody was like criticizing that country and going, well, don't you hate them, Dave?
You're against taxes and they have a 10% tax rate here.
And I go, well, I mean, yeah, but everyone else has a 90 and they only have 10.
So that, and they'd go, what about is?
And you're like, well, no, I mean, I'm just saying, put this into context here.
That's all.
So again, I think a lot of the criticisms, like even when Piers Morgan or whatever Zionists or someone will say, you know, hey, look at all the crimes of Vladimir Putin.
He's arrested journalists.
He's done this.
He's killed innocent people.
He's an authoritarian.
Look at these awful crimes that Hama.
It's like, yeah, we're not really arguing with that.
We agree.
That stuff's all wrong.
The question is like, it's more like, but why are you being a moral relativist about this?
Like, why if we're going to, if the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Vladimir Putin is all the worst things he's ever done, fair.
Okay.
Why does that not also apply to George W. Bush?
Why does that not also apply to Barack Obama?
Why is it when they come up, the first thing I shouldn't bring up is the hundreds of thousands to millions of innocent people who got slaughtered directly because of their foreign policy?
Let's just have one standard and apply it to everybody.
That seems reasonable to me.
Yep.
And look, there must be, I'm not thinking of great examples, but there must be examples of what about is where that's a real thing where it's essentially just a cheap attempt to change the subject, right?
Where it's like refusing to allow somebody to score their point in the argument by changing the subject to something else that somebody else did, when really that's sort of a red herring and doesn't really affect the argument itself, where you can make a real good argument that America's in no position to enforce the world law when America does nothing but break it and continue to set precedents by which other countries break it too.
I mean, it's, I think, a really highly important thing, not just a symbolic thing, but an important thing that when Vladimir Putin declared war in Ukraine, he invoked W. Bush's, first of all, Bill Clinton's separation of Kosovo from Serbia in the name of an ethnic conflict there.
He invoked W. Bush's claims of weapons of mass destruction since Zelensky had talked about canceling the Budapest memorandum.
And then he invoked Barack Obama in Libya.
And so, oh, in fact, it turns out I have a responsibility to protect.
I have to intervene, even to violate national government sovereign borders in order to prevent a humanitarian crisis from breaking out against this helpless minority, whatever.
And so he was invoking three different presidents in a row, breaking the law to do whatever they wanted for what they saw as America or more aptly, Israel's national interests.
And then he said, okay, well, I guess I can do exactly the same as you.
And it was the precedent used to be the law supposedly said you have to have an agreement on the UN Security Council to start a war because all the victors of World War II sit there.
And the fact that China and Russia are on it is means it's a balance against the West.
And the fact that Britain, France, and the United States are on it is a balance against the East, that they don't get to just start wars and do whatever they want without some kind of consensus being made that this is what has to happen.
And so that was why Bill Clinton just went around it in Serbia and why Bush just went around it in Iraq and why Obama just went.
Well, he didn't go 100% around it in Libya.
He just lied to the Russians to get them to abstain and promised it was just a no-fly zone and then launched a full-scale nine-month-long regime change war.
It's almost, it's almost like the international rules-based order is just a smokescreen for American empire.
That's right.
But that's it.
Okay, listen, I got to wrap there.
Of course, once again, I did not talk to you about any of the things that I planned and wanted to talk to you about.
So we'll do this.
We'll do this again soon.
Wrap Up and Next Time00:01:17
No, it's not.
Once I start talking about the clean break, you know how I am.
Well, listen, you guys, you got to pick up a copy of Provoked.
Provokedbook.com is the site that you can go to to get it.
Is that the best place to get it or does it help you more if people get it from Amazon?
Yeah, that'll forge onto my website.
And then, yeah, that link will give me an extra little boost there if you buy it from the link at scotthorton.org there.
And of course, anti-war.com, thelibertarian institute.org.
Where else can people go to follow your great work?
Well, I'm on all the podcatchers and video sites, the Scott Horton show, and I'm on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
All right.
Brother, always great talking to you, man.
And I'm going to say, I promise next time we'll set up another one in the next week or so.
I promise we're going to talk shock therapy and color-coded revolutions, barring the world not doing something crazy in between now and then when I have to just talk to you about that.
So hopefully everyone can just stay a little bit stable in these foreign conflicts so we can get into the history of those two things because I really want to talk about that.
That never works, by the way, where the world holds on for you so you can catch up real quick.