Dave Smith and Coleman Hughes dissect the "Seven Countries in Five Years" plan allegedly seen by General Wesley Clark, detailing how US and Israeli neoconservatives targeted Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. Smith critiques the US-Israel alliance's foreign aid and UN vetoes while exposing a 2001 CIA meeting where George Tenet discussed invading Iran. The host argues that despite claims by critics like John Mearsheimer, the execution of these regime changes validates the memo's existence, suggesting deep Israeli influence through figures like David Wurmser and Ahmed Chalabi. Ultimately, this analysis implies that US institutions have embraced racialism and lied about major crises to maintain a strategy of global destabilization. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Turning Three and Fort Worth00:08:27
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
I'm rolling solo for this episode, but we got a good one for you.
A lot, a lot to talk about today.
Thank you, first, I should say, to everybody who came out in Dallas and Fort Worth last weekend.
There were some great shows, and it was the first, this was the first time I'd been on the road doing comedy shows again since the Charlie Kirk assassination and all of that.
And, you know, it was a weird few weeks there.
And as I talked about openly on the show, I was very affected by the whole thing, as I think most of you were as well.
And it was just, it was great to get back out and do some fun comedy shows.
I love those clubs, the hyenas in Fort Worth and Dallas, especially that one in Fort Worth.
But they're both just excellent clubs.
If you're in the area, make sure you get out to support them.
And I should let you know that this weekend, I will be out with Robbie the Fire Bernstein at the House of Comedy in Detroit.
Please come out to those shows.
Really looking forward to that.
Another great club that I really love out there in Detroit.
So comicdave Smith.com is the website, and that's where you can get tickets.
Okay, so for a few interesting things have been happening in my world, and they kind of all come together for an interesting podcast today.
Oh, wait, sorry, I forgot.
The last thing I wanted to say, and then I promise we're getting right into it, is that tomorrow, I have a huge episode for you guys, a huge episode that I think you guys are really going to enjoy.
We are recording it tomorrow, probably will be released on Wednesday.
So the schedule might be a little bit messed up this week, but you're going to get more content and a particularly big episode that we're recording tomorrow.
So look forward for that, even though I'm being vague and mysterious.
You'll find out soon enough.
Okay, so there's a few things are going on that are all very interrelated, at least in my mind.
And so I thought it kind of made for a good, some good things to talk about for today's show.
So first of all, tomorrow, of course, is October 7th.
It's the three-year anniversary of the horrible terrorist attack in Israel.
And in many ways, the three-year anniversary, or maybe three years minus a day, anniversary of the beginning of the destruction of Gaza.
So that's kind of in the background.
This catastrophe is turning three years old.
Well, I mean, you know, you could argue the catastrophe is a lot older than that, but this iteration of it, at least, is turning three years old tomorrow.
And there was a very, very interesting turn of events over the weekend in terms of this peace plan, which I guess we don't exactly have a peace plan yet or a ceasefire or anything like that.
But there was a very interesting turn of events that I must admit surprised me a bit.
And so we could kind of get into that.
Now, at the same time, this the podcast that I did with Coleman Hughes came out over the weekend as well.
And that's received an interesting response.
And they all kind of are very interrelated in a way.
They're kind of all these different things on the same topic.
And so I thought I would talk about this for a little bit.
Now, the reaction to the Coleman Hughes podcast has been rather amusing for me.
There is essentially, and I don't mean to suggest any coordination.
I mean, who knows?
But I don't think it's even necessary for this.
But essentially, Every Zionist cheerleader has been jumping on the bandwagon of here we go, Coleman, finally, someone eviscerates Dave Smith.
I shared the podcast when it first came out.
I also promoted it on this podcast.
I'm quite happy for any of you guys to go watch it.
I think if you do, you will find that their characterization of it is not entirely accurate.
But you know what?
Coleman treated me with nothing but respect on the podcast.
And as you guys know, my rule of thumb is if you treat me with respect, I treat you with respect too.
So I have nothing negative to say about the guy.
He interviewed me.
He gave me a tough interview.
He's a very smart guy.
He gave a lot of pushback.
Ultimately, I found his case to be, you know, not compelling.
But you make up your own mind.
What's more important than that is kind of who's right and who's wrong.
But what's interesting to me has been the response.
So one of the things I noticed is that almost all of the Zionist cheerleaders, the big Israeli defenders who have been saying I got eviscerated in this thing, also said I got eviscerated by Douglas Murray and Dennis Prager and all these other ones.
It's just that overwhelmingly people who watch it do not get that impression.
That's, you know, what happened when I debated Douglas Murray was that the numbers on it were just so huge.
You know, I think the thing is up to like 5 million views on YouTube.
It got millions and millions of views more on Spotify.
And then like the amount of clips and shares on social media, I mean, it's just the numbers were huge.
The biggest thing I've ever been a part of by far.
Like not even close.
I've done some pretty big shows.
That one was by far the biggest.
Now, with Coleman Hughes, I think last I checked, there were like 200,000 views on the thing.
Again, not too shabby, but it's not like the Douglas Murray thing was.
And so what happened was all of the exact same people who were saying, I got crushed by Coleman Hughes were also saying I got crushed by Douglas Murray.
It's just that the numbers of people who actually saw the thing were so large that they were just kind of drowned out by all the people being like, yep, Douglas Murray just be clowned himself.
Now, I should, this is not a one-to-one comparison.
I should be clear.
Undeniably, Coleman Hughes did a much better job than Douglas Murray, but that's a pretty low bar.
I think essentially what happened here is that like for the first time, you know, and I don't know if you could call this a debate exactly.
Coleman was interviewing me.
It was his show.
He was interviewing me and dictating what he wanted to talk about.
Forgive me, I would call it an interview with a lot of pushback.
But regardless, essentially what happened is I've been doing all these debates.
And this time, I guess you would say, I didn't end up with a scalp.
And so they'll say, you got destroyed or something like that.
But there have been, you know, there have been some specific responses that I kind of wanted to go over on the show today, because it is, once again, almost as if, you know, it's, as I've said over the last three years now, it's just, it's been kind of fascinating to watch how badly the Israel supporters are losing this debate.
And the PR battle is just, I mean, it couldn't have gone any worse for them.
And part of it is that they just can't, you know, like they're all so excited to talk about these topics.
And as you're going to see in the show today, it's like, okay, guys, let's talk about these topics and see if you think this is really the winning position for you.
But we'll get into that.
But I also just think as, you know, as I had been seeing this reaction, that the story that unfolded this weekend really goes to the heart of exactly why it's just kind of impossible for these guys to convince people that they're not seeing what they're seeing in front of their eyes.
It has almost reached the levels.
Nothing is quite there, but it has almost reached the levels of the everything's fine with Joe Biden propaganda, where you could just visibly, you can watch Joe Biden shitting his pants and then listen to, you know, CNN telling you that behind closed doors, he's sharp as a tech.
And it's just too, you just can't deny to people what they see.
And so look, I mean, look, there's basically two reasons that support for Israel has been evaporating, particularly amongst young people who don't consume the controlled corporate media and are therefore exposed to more points of view of people pointing out the obvious corruption.
The Cost of Foreign Aid00:03:49
But the two main reasons why Israel has had such a disastrous PR campaign is first and foremost, just that what they're doing to the Palestinians is so clearly horrible and inexcusable and indefensible.
That's like the first and foremost thing.
And number two, right behind that, is that the relationship between Israel and the United States of America is so unique and so incredibly and obviously against America's interest.
And that it just, it is like just, it almost requires secrecy in order for it to continue because once it's out in the light, you just kind of can't deny this is so bizarre.
I mean, the relationship between the United States and Israel is truly unlike any other relationship between two states.
And it's unlike Israel isn't just, say, a close ally of the United States of America, is our closest by far.
They receive more foreign aid than any other country.
They've gotten over the years, I think it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars in direct foreign aid.
They have less restrictions on that foreign aid than almost anybody else.
Like there's requirements of how much of the money must be spent on with, you know, like you have to buy U.S. made weapons with that money.
You know, the military industrial complex has to get its hands on it.
And Israel has a lower requirement for that.
They're allowed to invest more in their own defense.
They don't have to be as accountable with the money.
And therefore, it's, you know, money is very fungible.
It's easy for their money to the money we give them to fund things that are against U.S. interests and that Americans, the American government even does not support, like continued settlement building in the West Bank, something that almost every U.S. president has opposed.
They just keep doing it and they keep getting the money.
Also, we give them a ton of intelligence support, logistical support.
We defend the country whenever it's attacked, when people shoot missiles at them.
We're the ones there to defend and protect them.
We also bribe off the surrounding Arab countries to be friends with Israel.
We also give Egypt a ton of foreign aid and Jordan a ton of foreign aid and we prop up the Saudis.
There's just so much that we do, including vetoing every resolution.
I think it's 40 or 50 different UN resolutions that the U.S. has vetoed that were condemning Israeli treatment of the Palestinians or Israeli violation of international law or something.
There simply is no other country that we do this for.
It's undeniable.
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Hamas Counterproposal Bluff00:09:19
Like, this is just objective.
You cannot list me another country that we do all of those things for.
And then, of course, there are, let's just say, the dynamics of, you know, wars that were lobbied into, and then, you know, people who, I mean, essentially, and this is true in both major political parties.
I mean, you may get the occasional Congresswoman or a Congressman who's a little critical of Israel.
And like when I say that, like maybe there's five total, but it's not a coincidence that in order to get, in order to win the presidency, in order to become the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense or the National Security Advisor or the Director of National Intelligence or all of those things, every last one of them always has to at least vocally support Israel.
And that's kind of hard to ignore.
Now, what happened this weekend that did throw me for a loop?
And this is one of the things about having President Trump.
And at times it's the worst thing about him.
And at times, it's the best thing about him.
But he does, sometimes he says things that you wouldn't have predicted.
So essentially, as we kind of covered on the show last week, there was a peace deal that Donald Trump has been pushing.
Donald Trump was able to get, I think, all of the surrounding Arab countries on board with the plan.
Netanyahu was then able to get, as was widely reported, was able to get several changes made to the agreement.
Donald Trump, this is kind of how it always goes.
Donald Trump then presents the new agreement and says, look, I got Netanyahu on board and I got all the Arab leaders on board.
That's not exactly true because there's this new plan.
Now he says that Hamas has until Sunday to agree to this or all hell will reign loose on Gaza.
As if what's happened over the last three years hasn't been enough hell or what's happened over the last 60 years hasn't been enough hell.
But that's what Donald Trump said.
Now, this was Sunday.
I think it was 8 p.m., I believe he gave him the tie.
I can't remember what time zone that was in.
I'm assuming Eastern.
But I think he gave him till 8 p.m. yesterday as we record this.
It's now the next day.
Now, what happened that was interesting over the weekend is that Hamas or late last week and then over the weekend is that Hamas did not accept the deal, but they offered a counter.
Now, this is what surprised me.
I was pretty sure that once they didn't accept the deal, then both Donald Trump and Netanyahu in lockstep would say, hey, that's it.
That was your truck.
You could have accepted the deal.
We were very clear.
Either you accept the deal or you don't.
Now we're in don't territory.
But Hamas countered with something.
Look, you don't have to trust Hamas or like Hamas or believe that Hamas will follow its word.
I guess that's another way of saying trust.
You don't have to do any of that.
But I think almost everyone could admit that what Hamas countered with was not that bad.
I mean, especially if your priority is the Israeli hostages in Gaza.
They offered to immediately turn over all of the hostages, including the remains of the dead ones, and turn over power to, but their thing was that they'll only turn over power to a group of Palestinians, not to Israelis, and that it was contingent on an Israeli withdrawal.
Now, one of the things that's very interesting about this is that this counter proposal, which, you know, I mean, I'm sure Hamas thought of this.
You know, they also know that they're playing a propaganda campaign, as do all parties involved.
But what was clever, let's say, about the Hamas counterproposal was that it really does, at least to some degree, expose what a huge percentage of the pro-Israeli argument has been here, in a sense, or at least it attempts to call their bluff, if that makes sense.
Because what almost every Israeli defender has been saying when they argue in English, you know what I'm saying?
I'm not talking about like what Smotrich is saying in the Knesset or something like that.
Like what they're talking, they're like, we want to ethnically cleanse and take the whole strip and greater Israel and all this stuff.
But when Benjamin Netanyahu is speaking in English, not Hebrew, or when any of the people who I'm debating on Piers Morgan or any of these other shows, what they say is that, look, Israel doesn't want to be in Gaza.
Israel doesn't want to kill all of these innocent civilians.
All we care about is eliminating Hamas and retrieving our hostages.
And as we've talked about many times over the last few years, those are two very different goals that at times, you know, would require different strategies.
But those have been the two goals stated by Netanyahu, his war cabinet, and every Israeli defender.
And so Hamas has essentially conceded both of those.
They've given him, okay, you can have all your hostages back immediately and Hamas is out of power, but you've got to leave Gaza.
So it really does, in a sense, call their bluff to say like, hey, which one do you, what do you actually value here?
Now we can really find out, like, do you actually just want to stay in Gaza or were you telling the truth?
In a sense, it's a test.
Who was telling the truth?
Benjamin Netanyahu in English or Benjamin Netanyahu in Hebrew.
So anyway, what I assumed would happen when I first read that Hamas made this counter, you know, I just got a sinking feeling in my stomach.
And I was like, shit, they're never even going to respond to this.
You know, they're just going to say, they're just going to say, hey, they didn't accept the deal.
More bombs are a dropping.
But that's not what happened.
And that's what Donald Trump will do for you sometimes.
It's not every now and then Donald Trump is incapable of not saying what he's just thinking.
And so he blurts it out.
Now, the other thing about Donald Trump is that he blurts a ton of things out.
It doesn't necessarily mean anything when he blurts one out.
So that's also a thing to keep in mind.
But Donald Trump's response to that was, great.
Hamas is ready to make peace.
And I think this is for many different reasons, but obviously, the obvious reason here is that this is just so clearly not in Donald Trump's interest to continue on every level.
This is a major problem dividing his supporters against each other.
It is, as Tucker Carlson talked about in his recent podcast with Jeffrey Sachs, but even in his monologue before Jeffrey Sachs came on.
The Israel, however you feel about it, and whether you feel like it should or shouldn't, the fact is that the Israel debate is just dominating the political conversation.
It has been for three years, but as of late, more so than ever.
And Donald Trump has his, as we've talked about many times on the show, he's got his major, you know, commentators, influencers, pundits, you know, the guys, these are not small figures, the major ones all turning on this stuff.
And it's a big issue.
It's a major, major issue for Donald Trump right now.
And so, of course, if you could put all of that away and also be seen as the guy who negotiated the peace, politically speaking, that is so preferable to being in the situation that we're in right now.
And so what Donald Trump did is he came out on Friday and he said, great, we love it.
Hamas is ready for peace.
And then he went a step further and he said, Israel must stop the bombing of Gaza immediately.
And he posted this on a truth social.
Now, I say all of that to say this, okay?
Or actually, I suppose I should add that Israel did not stop attacking Gaza.
Now, they are claiming that they've slowed down on some of the aerial strikes, but they killed a bunch of people in Gaza over the weekend.
They have not stopped attacking Gaza.
And then over this weekend, you know, Israeli leaders were making multiple statements about how there's no ceasefire in place, essentially saying, like, hey, look, we don't have a written ceasefire here.
We have a right to continue this war.
We have not made an agreement.
So, you know, not very blatantly saying it, but the, I mean, it's not requiring too much reading between the lines to go.
They're saying, hey, we don't have a ceasefire in place.
Now, this is what I mean about the relationship between the U.S. and Israel.
Now, while it is technically true that Israel does not have a ceasefire in place with signatures from all of the parties involved, the fact is that the commander in chief of the United States of America said Israel must stop bombing Gaza.
And Israel continued to attack Gaza.
And I think much more importantly than that, I think this is really where we get to the heart of the matter.
I think almost everybody involved knows, right?
So if you list all the things that I said at the beginning that the U.S. does to support Israel, okay, think about all those things.
Almost everybody involved knows that if Israel, if today, which is very possibly might happen, if today Israel just launched another major aerial offensive on Gaza, just started bombing the crap out of them.
Like let's say they did what they did in Iran after Donald Trump.
You remember in Iran when Donald Trump said he wanted to move toward a ceasefire and then Israel attacked and then even Donald Trump said they don't know what they're fucking doing.
Media Trust and Therapists00:05:07
Like this is crazy.
Almost everybody knows, if they're being honest, I'd say everybody knows that even if Israel went and launched a major aerial offensive against Gaza today, none of that support would change.
None of that would change.
And I am sorry, but that is a problem.
And nobody who wishes to retain credibility, who wants to tell the truth, can pretend that that's not a problem.
You're telling me we give unconditional, extensive support to a country in the Middle East.
And even if our commander in chief says you must stop this, they still continue to receive that support.
I'm sorry, but that is enough to be indefensible for anybody who believes in American sovereignty.
It doesn't matter if you're liberal or conservative, left or right, libertarian or authoritarian, if you believe in the United States of America as a sovereign country, then it is crazy that you would say our duly elected commander in chief, like he is in charge of this executive branch of the government, which props up this other country.
And yet, no matter what the will of our elected government is, they will continue to support them no matter what they do, even if they do things that are directly against U.S. interests.
That is just indefensible.
And you are simply not going to be able to convince people that that is okay.
I don't see how you can.
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And I will say, look, if you take that element and you also add in the fact that the government has lied, the government and the media has lied to the American people about every major crisis of the 21st century and been caught doing it.
Every one of them.
You name the major crises as we do on the show.
That's what this show is.
The show might as well be titled, How the Government and the Media Are Lying to You About the Current Crisis.
And our track record is unblemished.
All of them.
They've lied through their teeth about all of them and not gotten it wrong, lied.
And the American people have woken up to that.
And so you have this crazy relationship.
You have the fact that everybody knows that the media and the government are not to be trusted.
And that leads to people going to some wild conspiracies about it.
But that's not what even, that's not what we're suggesting.
We're suggesting we just take a look at this relationship.
And if there's something conspiratorial about it, then we should notice that.
And if there's not, there's not.
The relationship still makes no sense.
What they're doing to the Palestinians is still indefensible.
I would also throw in maybe one other element, which is that, which I think sometimes for people my age and older is a little bit tough to appreciate, but like for young people, it's a bit different.
But you should, you could also add that over the last 15 years, every single institution in the country, including those that I've mentioned, the government and the media, but also Hollywood and corporate America, and probably maybe most importantly, academia, have all overtly embraced racialism and have been cramming that down young people's throats for at least 15 years.
I mean, they embraced it before then, but really overtly embraced it over the last 15 years.
And so you've got a situation where there is this crazy relationship.
There are obviously special interests that influence this relationship.
The government and the media lie to the American people about it.
And all of the institutions have gone racialist over the last few years.
And so what you're seeing is a reaction against that that oftentimes is conspiratorial and racialist in nature.
And I think the most important thing for us to do is just try to focus on what's actually right here.
Toppling Seven Countries00:09:35
Okay.
So on that topic, I'll get to some of the pushback that I've received since the Coleman Hughes interview aired.
And as I've said before, what's kind of amusing to me about it and genuinely kind of fascinating is that I just can't believe these guys want to have the fight on this ground.
But okay, let's do it.
So it seems to me that what I've seen, most of the people giving pushback over, has been the level of Israeli influence in the war in Iraq, the clean break memo, and the Wesley Clark stuff, which is stuff that I like to talk about all the time.
So it's kind of like, okay, let's, I'm quite happy to keep talking about this stuff.
There was a clip about me that was going around out there.
So I figured, why not play it on the show and then respond to it directly?
The clip was posted.
And, you know, this is part of the reason and why I brought up the dynamic with how many views the Douglas Murray debate got.
You know, and I was just making the point that people who were trying to spin it one way were just outmatched because so many people had seen the thing.
It was almost like everyone who pays attention to this world had already seen the thing.
So what are you going to do?
Tell them something they saw didn't happen.
Well, in this case, you know, this tweet, this clip has gotten like almost 900,000 views as of the time I'm playing this.
And so this is kind of why I thought it was worth playing and responding to because actually more people have seen this than seen the actual thing.
So anyway, we'll get into it a little bit here.
Now, this was posted by an account that goes by Milk Bar TV is what the show is, I guess.
Nathan Livingstone, I hope I'm saying that correctly, who had said he was a former fan of mine who had turned against me, I guess, over this and other related things.
But here he put together this clip.
So here, let's play it and then I will respond to some of the things that he is saying here.
We also have a four-star general who's on record saying that he saw these plans, that they were going to overthrow all of these governments.
But why is it then that I got four-star general Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander of the NATO forces?
Why is it that he told me that he saw the plans?
We know this because the four-star general Wesley Clark himself said that he was out of power at the time, but he went to the Pentagon and he said that he saw plans.
How come I have four-star general Wesley Clark telling me 10 years prior that we had already made the plan?
This has been confirmed by four-star general Wesley Clark that we were going to topple seven countries in five years.
Wesley Clark is a four-star general.
He was head of NATO and he told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now that he saw in late 2001, what has become known as the five seven wars in five years, that the plan from the neocons in the government was that we were going to overthrow all these governments in the region in the next five years.
Let's talk about this Wesley Clark memo that he never saw.
Okay.
So four-star general Wesley Clarke never saw it?
Yeah, he says so in the C-SPAN interview.
You don't remember this?
He's talking about it.
He says he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meeting the Secretary of Defense office today.
And he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years.
I said, is it classified?
He said, yes, sir.
I said, well, don't show it to me.
Rumsfeld, whose sometimes abrasive approach often alienated other cabinet members, produced 20 to 60 snowflakes, these memos, snowflakes a day, 20 to 60 a day.
Regularly poured out his thoughts in writing as the basis for developing policy.
Every once in a while, one of these ranting Rumsfeld notes to Condi would come.
You could almost hear the eye roll.
Like, this dude Rumsfeld is drowning us in his little thoughts and his stupid memos.
Do you have any evidence that this memo was actually important as opposed to one snowflake in a shifting strategy of 60,000?
The fact is that much of what he said came true.
And that's what makes it interesting.
How we're going to take out seven countries in five years.
And that this was part of a strategy to overthrow seven governments in five years.
And all of them except one have been done.
It's literally he names seven countries and there's one to go.
And that one, by the way, happens to be the one that Donald Trump is flirting with a war with right now, Iran.
All the rest of the stuff happened.
Starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
Three of the countries on the out of seven, almost half the countries have not done regime change, let alone within five years, let alone in the specific order prescribed by the memo.
And not to mention, we did do regime change in countries not on the memo at all, like Liberia.
So there's actually no variable from the memo that actually matches our foreign policy.
Coleman, my argument here isn't that, again, I'm not saying that memo came to life and exactly what was written down on that has happened.
Of course, there were more memos.
Of course, there were more decisions that were edited afterward.
I'm saying that a four-star general said the decision had been made, that he had sources based on the defense department.
His sources, the Defense Department.
Who's basing it on what?
The memo.
There might be lots of memos that go out every day, but a memo that says we're going to fight, we're going to topple seven countries in the next five years, a pretty big memo.
That's not just one of the regular memoirs.
Any evidence it was a big memo.
Your only evidence is the guy who never read it.
You realize how ridiculous this is.
You couldn't, if you were a historian writing a book, you'd have to cut this out of the book because you're relying on the hearsay of someone that never even read the document, much less you or I have never read the document.
And we know that they were writing 60 documents a day that Condoleezza Rice was putting in the trash.
It's a ridiculously low bar of evidence you'd have to have to consider this memo and everything implied by it important.
I mean, I don't know how else to say this, dude.
This just feels so nutty to me.
I guess we'll just leave this up to people.
And I'm not a historian writing a book.
I'm a guy talking about these issues to the American people.
So I don't know.
You can decide whether you find that to be a pretty interesting story or not.
All right.
So there is the devastating takedown of me.
I mean, look, I will say it's incredibly dishonestly edited, but you may notice even in the thing that like everybody seems to be speaking uninterrupted.
And then in my part, it seems to be cutting all over the place.
But I guess the big gotcha that they're saying here is, look, here's Dave talking about this thing all the time and really pointing to like, look, this means something.
Here's Coleman saying it doesn't.
And then at the end, they have that line of me, which again, if you watch the whole thing uninterrupted, this was after we had gone back and forth like seven times.
And I'm just getting like frustrated with it that I went, well, I'm not a historian and blah, blah, blah.
This is, I'm a guy talking and I think I'm making a good point.
Now, look, if you want to get be very pedantic or nidpicky, which is, I think, what you really need to rely on to even make this argument.
Yeah, that was a bad line.
I shouldn't have said that.
But, you know, in a three and a half hour conversation, you're going to have one thing that's like, I probably should, the point I probably should have responded with is like, yes, absolutely that could be included in a historian's book.
It's the testimony of a four-star general.
Of course, someone could include that in there.
But let's, regardless, okay, I should have said something a little bit better in that one line, but I am fascinated with the idea that this is the fight you guys want to have.
And so, okay, let's have it.
I think this is reasonable.
I will go through the points that were made in this tweet here.
But I think like, let's just to be completely fair here, instead of, you know, playing, because there's what you do with this editing here, right, is they only play the part of the clip where General Wesley Clark is saying, I said, wait, don't show that to me.
You know, they're playing that part.
And even of the clip with Coleman, they play the part where I go, wait, he hadn't seen the memo.
And then he goes, yeah, the C-SPAN interview.
And then the next thing I said was, oh, the Democracy Now interview with Amy Goodman.
Like they cut that out, of course, because this is just the moment where I was like, wait, what are you referring to?
Of course, they'll keep that in and not keep in kind of the more interesting stuff.
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Wolfowitz Memo Secrets00:14:14
All right, let's get back into the show.
But so let's, for the sake of fairness, let's play the whole thing here.
So, what I want to do right here, okay, is I want to play Wesley Clark's comments on democracy now.
And then I want to play his comments when he was asked about this on Piers Morgan a few months ago, more recently.
So, we're going to play the clip.
And then the next clip from Piers Morgan is Piers Morgan playing this clip and General Wesley Clark responding to it and giving his thoughts.
So, I want you guys to listen to this, and then we will talk about whether or not what's being said here is highly relevant.
Let's play the clips about 10 days after 9-11.
I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me.
And one of the generals called me and he said, Sir, you got to come in.
You got to come in and talk to me a second.
I said, Well, you're too busy.
He said, No, no, he says, We've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq.
This was on or about the 20th of September.
I said, We're going to war with Iraq.
Why?
He said, I don't know.
He said, I guess they don't know what else to do.
So I said, Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to Al-Qaeda?
He said, No, no, he says, There's nothing new that way.
They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.
And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
So I came back to see him a few weeks later.
And by that time, we were bombing in Afghanistan.
I said, Are we still going to war with Iraq?
And he said, Oh, it's worse than that.
He said, He reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper.
He said, I just, he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meaning the Secretary of Defense office today.
And he said, This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
Okay, so this was the original comment by General Wesley Clark.
This was the original interview.
I believe this was in 2007, that he, but he's talking about 2001 and how quickly the decision to go to that we were going to overthrow Saddam Hussein was made.
And then when he came back a few months later, how the same general told him that the decision had been made to overthrow seven countries in the Middle East in the next five years.
We'll get into this, but let's also in here for to have even more context, let's listen to what Wesley Clark said when that exact clip was played for him.
And he was asked, what was he saying during that time on Piers Morgan from just a few months ago?
Let's play that clip.
In five years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
Now, General Clark, aside from the fact that you have aged extremely well since that clip, given we're 22 years later.
So congratulations on your gene pool.
When you hear yourself talking then, I mean, you sound almost incredulous about what you were learning there.
What do you feel about it?
Actually, you know when it started, Piers, is 1991.
I went in to see Secretary Under Secretary Wolfowitz in May of 91.
He told me, I said, you've got to be proud of how the troops have done in the Gulf War, right?
He said, yeah, but President Bush said they're going to get rid of Saddam.
He said, I don't think that's going to happen.
He said, but we've got maybe five to 10 years to get rid of all these old Soviet surrogate countries, governments like Iraq and Syria and Libya and so forth before the next great superpower comes along.
I said, five to ten years where we're going to attack them.
And he said, well, and I said, who's the next superpower?
Is it China?
He said, well, and then he sort of faded off like it's a Friday afternoon.
I don't want to think about it anymore.
But they actually put together a plan.
They took it apparently to Brince Cocroft, who was George H. Bush's national security advisor.
And General Skoecroft said, let's hold on this until after the election.
The election didn't work out for them.
They left.
I came into the Pentagon in the spring of 94.
They said, what's the national security strategy?
I said, I don't know, but what about the stuff that Wolfowitz was proposing?
Nobody'd ever heard of it.
It got resurrected in a study that was paid for by the Israelis, Richard Pearl.
And that's the study that said that if you want to protect Israel and you want Israel to succeed and have peace negotiations work, then you've got to get rid of the states that are surrounding on the periphery that are preventing Yahweh from making.
Okay.
So just to be clear, when explaining this, not only does Wesley Clark not say, oh, yeah, well, you know, I never saw the memo or something like this.
He goes, oh, no, no, no, no.
I had seen these plans from 10 years earlier and that basically this was what the neocons in the George H.W. Bush administration wanted.
And they were very upset that he didn't go all the way and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
He goes, then they lost the election to Clinton.
And then the, you know, the plan kind of died there because they weren't in power anymore.
And in his words, it was reincarnated by a study paid for by the Israelis saying that if you want to protect Israel, this is the way to do it.
Okay.
So just to be very clear.
Now, anybody, a starting point here, and this is probably maybe why the reason why I didn't prosecute this case as well as perhaps I could have is that this just seems to be so obvious on its face to me.
And you could see that me in the clip there just say it, like, who's looking at this and saying, this isn't crazy.
But look, let's take a look here at what actually happened, right?
Because there's a list of seven countries here that General Wesley Clark is saying we are supposed to overthrow in the next five years.
Okay.
So the countries, the countries that he listed off are Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and excuse me, Iran.
Okay.
So now, if you look at this list of countries, okay, because like what Coleman and these other guys are kind of hanging on to is here is like, yeah, but we didn't get regime change in seven countries in five years.
So essentially, Dave, you're telling me that why this is so important is that it ended up coming true.
He ended up being right.
But look, it didn't come true.
So let's examine that for a second.
Okay.
Let's go through the countries.
Let's go through subsequently what happened with U.S. and Israeli foreign policy.
Now, on the list of countries that the seven countries, just to be clear here, the United States of America or Israel or both have attacked every country with the possible exception of Sudan.
Now, I will say here, Sudan is the country that I know the least about in terms of this stuff.
Like, I know that, you know, like I've just read a lot more about the other six countries than I have about Sudan.
So, you know, do your own research of this or look into it or say what you want.
But I also do know that the guy died.
Like, the guy who they wanted to overthrow Bashir.
Am I getting that right?
I want to say, hold on.
Omar Bashir, I want to say.
Let me double check that here, guys.
Yes, Omar al-Bashir.
He was the leader in Sudan who died.
And they like southern Sudan did break off of Sudan and then they had their whole civil war there or whatever.
But like not enough history about Sudan there.
And I don't exactly, you know, I was trying to, I was looking up a little bit of it this morning and I started like, you know, looking up, I forget exactly what I, what I was searching, but I was searching something about like, you know, the Sudan civil war or something like that.
And like the number one or number two hit on Google.
Let me see if I could actually pull this up here because it was just, I don't know, I did just find this funny.
But again, just to be clear here, I'm maintaining I really don't know enough about Sudan to speak about it with too much authority, but I did want to, this was just a funny note to me.
Let me see if I can find this.
I thought I had it here in my history somewhere.
Maybe not.
But it was like the number two hit on Google, I believe, was a George Soros.
It was a George Soros operation saying something about how important breaking up Sudan was or something like that.
So like, I don't know the exact level of what like US Israeli slash Western, you know, meddling was in South Sudan splitting off there, but let's just say, okay, that one maybe didn't exactly come true.
The other six, every single one of them has been attacked by the United States of America or Israel or both.
Let's go through them real quick.
Afghanistan and Iraq, obviously, right?
Two of the longest wars in American history.
I guess you could say, conventionally speaking, the two longest wars in American history, 20-year regime change projects in both of those countries.
Libya, overthrown by the United States of America.
Syria, both Israel and the United States and Saudi Arabia and Turkey all funded a giant regime change effort there for years and years and years.
Starting in 2011, started pouring billions of dollars into the country, all types of CIA forces in there, like an absolute civil war started by Washington, D.C., started by the CIA.
I just finished reading Creative Chaos, which is the latest book published by the Libertarian Institute.
Just phenomenal book all about how the CIA started the war.
And it's all about like the kind of early phases in the war.
And of course, this ultimately led years later to the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.
So we got Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya all had regime change wars there.
Let's check in on Somalia.
Well, of course, we just had Dave DeCamp, who was on the show a few weeks ago, breaking down how this has been.
We've set the record for the most strikes in a year in Somalia this year.
Now, it's not a conventional boots on the ground war in the same way that Iraq or Afghanistan was.
And so it's not like really thought of as America's longest war.
It wasn't, we didn't send tens of thousands of boots to go occupy the country.
It's been more of a CIA JSOC special forces kind of war.
But if you call that a war, which we would call if anyone else did it to us, it is actually the longest war in American history and still going on there.
What was the other one?
Who have we not hit?
Yeah, we did Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, did Sudan and Iran.
Hmm, what's been going on with Iran?
Well, of course, Iran has been threatened to high holy hell over, you know, since 9-11.
And of course, Israel and the United States of America did fight, albeit brief war there over the last year.
And as I've talked about many times, I've mentioned with Coleman, Israel was bombing, was bombing all types of regime targets after Trump dropped the bunker busters.
And they were calling Iranian generals and threatening their families.
They were clearly attempting to lure America into a regime change, which by the way, they're not done with.
In their own words, they're still saber rattling about the next strike on Iran.
And so I'm sorry, like just on the very face of it here, like, I don't know, they're trying to make it out like I'm walking away from this point or something.
You have a four-star general telling you explicitly that he had seen these plans for years.
Not just that there was one memo, that the memo isn't even the point.
The point is that he said a general confirmed that the decision had already been made.
And yes, we went on to do that or attempt to do that in just about all of the countries listed.
I'm sorry.
What honest person does not find this to be relevant and interesting information?
What is the argument here you guys are making?
So let's refer here.
So in the tweet that, sorry, let me pull that one back up.
In the tweet that, what was his name again that Nathan here wrote, he says, okay, Dave keeps saying all this stuff or whatever.
He goes, except as Coleman Hughes brilliantly showed in their debate, one, Clark never even saw the memo.
Like this is what they're harping on.
This is how pedantic they're trying to be that during, like, honestly, guys, I just tell me what you think of this.
That yes, Wesley Clark does say, hey, tried to show it to me.
And I was kind of like, eh, I don't know.
And it's not exactly, it's not exactly clear what he saw or didn't see on the memo, but that's not really the point.
Now, is it?
I mean, it seemed like the way Wesley Clark was saying it was almost like, like, hey, I don't want to get you in trouble.
Cause yes, is that classified?
And then goes, hey, I don't want to get you in trouble.
Now, I don't exactly understand because Wesley Clark almost certainly would have had top secret security clearance at the time.
So I don't see why it would have been getting him in trouble to show it to him.
But nonetheless, that seemed to be what he was saying.
But that's really not the point.
Now, is it?
Whether he saw the memo is completely irrelevant.
He's claiming he's seen these plans laid out for years.
The point is that we went on to do so much of it.
And you could downplay it like Coleman sitting there saying like, well, half the countries didn't have regime changes.
Okay, the U.S. and Israel or Israel, sometimes and Israel, has attacked six out of the seven countries.
And one of them stopped kind of being a problem because the leader died and there was a civil war.
Seems pretty relevant to me.
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Proving the Iran Plan00:08:09
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Now, the second point here in the tweet is Rumsfeld would send 20 to 60 of these memos a day.
They weren't taken seriously.
Okay, but the one that laid out that we were going to attack seven countries in five years, and then we went on to pretty much do it, that seems to be a really relevant memo.
Like, I don't care how many he sent a day, let's talk about that one.
This is on the level of me saying, like, um, we got a confession from the murderer, and you go, Yeah, but he said like a thousand things that day.
It's like, okay, well, I'm really focused on this one.
Number three, in fact, for half of those countries on the list, this never even happened.
Sorry, we just went through the countries on the list, and that doesn't like it doesn't prove anything.
I'm sorry, no, it either did happen or was attempted in all of these countries.
And the fact that it, again, the fact that if it didn't happen precisely the way Wesley Clark said or in the timeframe, that doesn't make this any less relevant and interesting.
Then the next one, um, and for other countries not on the list, there were regime changes.
Well, that means nothing, that means absolutely nothing.
The fact that we also fought other conflicts doesn't prove wrong that this was the thinking in Washington at that time.
Now, does it?
Or does it prove that the does it prove that this means like it just because we went and attacked other countries also, like take for example, Yemen?
Okay, Yemen wasn't on that list, but we did you know launch a huge drone bomb campaign there for many years, starting in 2009.
And then starting in 2015, we backed the Saudi invasion and really helped them.
I mean, our Navy was doing the blockading, and our air force was refueling the Saudi fighter jets.
So it was really like an America-Saudi war in Yemen.
And that wasn't because of Israel, and it wasn't because of the seven countries in five years.
It wasn't any of that stuff.
It was essentially to placate the Saudis.
The Saudis were real pissed about the war in Iraq, and they were real pissed about the deal in Iran, and they're also an important trading partner.
And so, yeah, there are other things too.
The world is complicated, and there's lots of different factors, but that's just a complete non-point.
The point is that we got a four-star general telling us that these plans were laid out, and then they were in large part carried out.
Now, I would just, again, the other aspect here is that this is like you have Wesley Clark here saying that this was brought back to life by a study funded by the Israelis.
That the best way to protect Israel is this.
Okay, well, who were the neoconservatives who were in power?
Who are the people who he's talking about made this plan?
Oh, yeah, it's the same people who wrote the clean break memo.
It is totally consistent, not just with what Wesley Clark is saying, what they wrote in their own words.
And so, Coleman would try to, you know, jump on these things like, yeah, but the clean break memo says that the Hashemite king would be installed in Iraq.
And it's like, yeah, but then that guy died.
They still kept pushing forward with the plans to invade Iraq.
I'm sorry.
Like it is relevant, like in the same way that it's relevant if a murderer was planning the murder for many years.
It's relevant that they were planning the war for many years.
I also, I'll just add in this because look, I'll say if anybody, um, if anybody is interested in learning more about this or actually trying to understand this stuff, and this is, look, there, some reading is required in order to do that, but I would say I reposted today on Twitter and I'll put in the show notes for this one of the best threads that Scott Horton put together over on Twitter.
If you want to find it, it's up on my Twitter right now.
It starts with Phenomenal Thread by the great Scott Horton.
And the thread is called How the Neoconservatives Lied Us Into War with Iraq 20 Years Ago, a thread of the very best articles.
And it's got about 20, 25 of the absolute best articles you could read on this.
And my, and okay, one of the articles there is The Israel Lobby by Walt and John Mearsheimer.
And so I would, with the caveat, because they wrote this article and then they ultimately wrote a book with the same title.
So I'd add that book in there.
So I got one book and about 20 to 25 articles.
If you want to read them, I'm just saying this is the challenge to any honest person.
Read all of them and come back to me and try to argue.
Try to argue that the case is not just overwhelming, overwhelming that the neoconservatives, in large part on behalf of Israel, were pushing for this war.
And there's, I mean, it's just very hard to deny.
Now, as far as the other thing that they seem to be harping on here is that, well, it didn't happen exactly as Wesley Clark said it would happen, right?
Like it didn't happen in five years.
But I think one of the things that you have to keep in mind here is that this was during 2001.
And of course, the thinking back then was that we were, you know, this was going to be a cakewalk.
And so, okay, this is, here's one, man, I always say his name wrong.
So I just apologize in advance.
But the former CIA whistleblower, Kiriku, something like that, John Kiriko, here he is.
I know I'm saying that wrong.
I apologize for butchering your name.
Here's, let's play that clip, Natalie, of him real quick, because it's one more guy who was there, and everything really seems to fall into place.
So one more.
So George asked me to be the note-taker in this meeting, George Tennett, the director of the CIA.
It was Cheney, Connie Rice, Colin Powell, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
George is at the head of a conference room table and I'm sitting directly behind his right shoulder and everybody else is on a TV screen.
And then the general says, if all goes as planned, we can be in Tehran by August.
George is sitting there and then he leans forward and turns off his microphone and he says, did he say Baghdad or did he say Tehran?
And I said, he said Tehran.
And George says, have these people lost their minds?
And then he turns the microphone back on and just sits.
The meeting ends.
I go back to the deputy director's office and I said, did you know we were going to invade Iran?
And he goes, ooh, are they still talking about that?
So there you go.
So this is why, this is what is overwhelmingly seems to be the most like the most obvious reasoning as to why they said five years is because this was 2001 and they still believed Iraq was going to be a cakewalk and that they would move that they would be in Tehran by the next year.
That was the goal, that they were going to be able to finish this all off.
Now, again, you might notice that in Wesley Clark's memo, it says five years and culminating in Iran.
John Kiriaku is saying he saw people saying maybe next year we could be in Iran.
Again, this is, we're going toward the thinking in Washington, but that's a pretty big deal here, man.
Like, there's just, I just see no way to get around this.
French Lobby Claims00:07:32
Now, one of the, I think, where the, where the core of this seems to come down, like at one point during the debate, Coleman was saying, you know, John Mearsheimer argues that it's the, it's, it's the Israel lobby, but I'm just not buying it.
I mean, look at the money that APAC spent.
There were other lobbies that spent more than them.
You're telling me you could get seven wars for this amount of money.
But of course, nobody really is making that claim, including John Mearsheimer, who he says he's unconvinced by, but it doesn't seem like he's really grappled with the arguments.
I think that, look, when John Mearsheimer defines the Israel lobby, he is describing a loosely connected group of people who are advocating for pro-Israeli policies.
And he makes the neoconservatives like one of the most important parts, certainly with the war in Iraq, the most important part of the neoconservative, you know, one of the most important parts of the Israel lobby.
And look, again, maybe this is pedantic.
You could sit here and argue about like, should you consider the neocons part of the Israel lobby or not?
Okay.
I'll say it like this.
No matter what you want to call them, no matter what you want to call them, here's the dynamic.
Okay.
Let's say there were a bunch of people, call them the neoconservatives, okay, who were all on record as saying that they were deeply committed to France.
That France held a special place in their heart and that American interests and French interests were always one, and that it was important that they have the closest relationship out of any two countries.
And it's important that we give France billions of dollars every year.
And it's important that we always veto resolutions against them at the UN because like all of Europe hates their guts, but we got to come in there and make sure that we take care of them.
And we, no matter how much they mistreat their neighbors, we will always defend them.
Okay.
And of this group of neoconservatives, let's say like the vast majority of them were of French descent themselves.
And then the minority who weren't of French descent, they weren't French themselves or didn't have parents or grandparents who were from France, but they did have a fundamentalist religious view that Jesus Christ would only come and save all of their souls if we supported France in everything that they do.
Okay.
And then let's say that all of these people who eat the French ones themselves, who had in their own words, I mean, they wrote memos to the prime minister of France telling him that we think you ought to overthrow the surrounding countries around you for your survival.
And then years later, they were saying, oh, we want to overthrow them for other reasons, but it was, but the whole time they were openly, explicitly loyal to France, would never depart from that.
And then the prime minister of France came over, or not at the time, the prime minister of France, but the longest serving prime minister in French history came over and testified before Congress that we ought to overthrow all of these other countries in his region.
And then eventually an administration staffed almost entirely with these neoconservative French supporters.
They got us to go to war with France's neighbor, one of their biggest rivals, and overthrow them.
Would it be reasonable to say that France had nothing to do with that war?
Call it the French lobby, call it the Israeli lobby, call it whatever you want to.
Would you sit there in that scenario and say, oh, if you even bring up French influence, then you're an anti-Frankite.
Then you're a wild conspiracy theorist.
Is that even kind of reasonable?
Who in the world is persuaded by this argument?
Obviously, by their own admission, the neoconservatives were hugely influential in getting the war in Iraq.
And obviously, they are undeniably connected to Israel on many different levels.
And again, if you want to sit here and say that a four-star general giving away the whole game doesn't mean anything, good luck with that fight.
I will gladly, we can meet right there on that turf and let's debate this all out.
Again, just to be clear to anybody, and I'll share this all with you.
Take the challenge.
One book and 20 articles or something like that.
It's a bit, it's a bit of reading, but I'm sorry, reading is required in order to really understand this.
But anyone get through all that and then tell me you have an actual argument for how this wasn't all up and down.
And let me just tell you, some of the articles in there are so goddamn great.
It's like one of the best threads you'll ever read through.
And I know it might seem a little daunting if I'm throwing a book and 20 articles at you, but like just start with the first couple articles.
Just start reading them because it is a fascinating bit of history.
But so, listen, man, I don't really know what to say after this, but I am sorry.
I've seen all these Zionist accounts go, that's it.
Dave's done.
It's all over.
I don't think so, guys.
And in fact, I'll go out on a limb and say, I welcome this to be the topic of conversation.
Let's get much, much deeper into all of this.
Let's go through all these articles together, shall we, guys?
Let's listen to what David Wormser, the author of the Clean Break memo, who went over to the Pentagon and started pumping out all types of just ridiculous propaganda to sell the war in Iraq.
Let's go through all of it.
Let's look at the propaganda that was coming out of Tel Aviv.
Let's listen.
Listen, man, let's look at Chalabi and what they all said about him after that he betrayed them.
We got David Wormser, his partner, was on record just say it.
We go, he promised us he would get in there and do good things for Israel.
And then he lied.
Kind of admitting it, right?
Kind of admitting that that was a huge part of what the whole thing was.
But if anybody wants to, honestly, just the Israel lobby, just that one book, if anyone wants to read that and then try to come back and say that, what, Israel had nothing to do with the war?
You know, this, I'll say this, and I'll say this as the final point, and then we'll wrap up.
You know, the point was made in that tweet that, hey, look, this doesn't mean anything because we also attacked other countries.
Like, such a weird thing to say.
It's as if you had a guy who was plotting the murder of 10 people.
And then I go, look, he went and killed these people and he had been plotting this for years.
And then you went, ah, that's nothing because he also killed other people.
Like, what?
Okay.
Yes.
If there is anybody out there, look, the war in Afghanistan didn't have much to do with Israel.
As I said, the war in Yemen didn't have much to do with Israel.
And there's been other wars as well that didn't have that much to do with Israel.
So anybody saying that like everything is controlled by Israel or everything is, you know, like that's, of course, that's ridiculous, but that's not the claim we're making.
But if the claim you're making is that Israel was not a huge player in the war in Iraq, let's have that fight forever.