Dave Smith and Scott Horton dissect David Wormser's interview, exposing the "Clean Break" memo as a blueprint for toppling Saddam Hussein to secure Israeli dominance rather than combat WMDs. They detail how neocons like Wolfowitz and Feith manufactured false intelligence regarding Al-Qaeda ties to justify a war driven by Zionist strategic interests, costing trillions and millions of lives. Ultimately, the hosts argue that admitting Israel's role is essential to understanding the conflict, challenging Wormser's vague defenses while promoting the Scott Horton Academy for further historical analysis. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Merry Christmas and Welcome00:05:11
Oh, ho, ho, Merry Christmas, everybody.
Welcome to a very special episode of Part of the Problem.
Thank you so much for joining.
I do, we are, of course, well, what is it?
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.
So many of you might listen to this over Christmas, or you're probably getting ready for it right now.
Hope everybody has a great Christmas.
This is, we're doing something a little bit different for this episode.
Of course, I have the great Scott Horton here with me.
This will be our last podcast of 2025.
And we've had some good ones.
Another good year of podcasting.
Well, I assume, I guess it's possible that some emergency happens in the next few days and we jump on another podcast together, but probably this will be our last one for the year.
And we've got something here that me and Scott had been talking about doing this episode for a few weeks.
It's a little bit of a strange situation.
It's a little surreal.
I know it's weird these days being Scott Horton.
It's weird these days being me.
But so let me just, I'm going to try real quick just to set this up because probably most people in the audience kind of know at least who the players here are and what the background is.
But we also got like a bunch of new people who listened to the show over the last year and it's grown.
And so just for those people who don't know, I just kind of want to catch you up here.
So as a lot of you know, I don't want to bore you guys who do know, but like, so I've been a libertarian now for almost 20 years.
I was first introduced to libertarianism in 2007.
I guess I would really, I started reading about it and obsessing over it that year.
I think it was like 2008.
I was converted.
And then maybe a few years after that, maybe 2011, 2012, I think I found Scott Horton from the Tom Woods show was my first introduction.
And then I found antiwar.com and, you know, got into that whole scene.
And basically, you know, from that point on, I've been like, yo, this Scott Horton guy is the most incredible foreign policy guy in the country.
I've been an evangelical of Hortonian since then.
And me and Scott became friends about 10 years ago, something like that, 2016 or something.
And then, you know, over the last 10 years, both of our shows have grown and our names have grown.
And Scott's, of course, now coming off of a huge year.
He just put out Provoked, which is his most successful book to date.
And he's done big shows with Tucker Carlson and Lex Friedman and Tim Poole.
And so anyway, somehow over these years, Scott has kind of taken off in popularity.
I have somehow, through weird circumstance, found myself as like America's leading Hortonian or something like that, the leading face of spreading Hortonian foreign policy.
And so anyway, one of the things that from the very beginning, you know, when I first became a libertarian, I was very motivated by the anti-war cause.
I was already anti-war before I was a libertarian.
I just wasn't that good at it.
I just got better over time.
And, you know, part of this is my age, 9-11 and the terror wars were like my coming of age story.
This was the big thing that was happening as I was a young boy becoming a man.
And the more I got interested in libertarianism, the more I just understood why war and peace is always the most important issue in any society.
And it's not for very obvious libertarian reasons, but just to name the two big ones real quick.
And the reason why I focus so much on war, the reason why Scott focuses so much on war is because, well, basically there's two reasons.
Number one, first and foremost, objectively, it's the most evil thing that governments do.
There's, there's, you know, libertarians don't much like government programs, but there is no government program that robs people of life and liberty and property and just basic human decency and creates more horror scenarios than mass murder campaigns backed up by governments with taxing power and money printing power.
And, you know, so just the sheer humanitarian, you know, cost of the whole thing.
And then number two, as Murray Rothbard had written in the 1950s, that the more you study libertarianism, the more you realize that war and peace is the central question of this libertarian business, is that war is the health of the state.
And nothing is a bigger indicator of our own citizens' relationship with our government and the nature of our government than war.
Now, war is by its very definition an emergency where government gains emergency powers.
There's never been one war in the history of the world where government didn't also say, we're going to need some more power than we previously had in order to fight this war.
And the examples of this are endless.
So anyway, I had been against the neocons and the Bush administration before I became a libertarian, but I had never really understood it until I found guys like Ron Paul, Scott Horton, Tom Woods, Justin Raimondo, and people in the anti-war libertarian kind of camp.
Unconditional Commitment to Rights00:15:38
Now, one of the guys who me and you have really been pointing to for many years is a guy named David Wormser.
He is the author of the Clean Break memo and Coping with Crumbling States, who's a very influential neoconservative.
And this is somebody who you've talked about a lot, who I've talked about a lot.
And recently, just a few weeks ago, he sat down for an interview essentially to respond to us.
It was framed as like responding to me, but again, I'm a Hortonian here, so it's responding to both of us.
And okay, anyway, I just want to give all this background because the first thing I got to say about this, and I'm sorry, I'll shut up and let you talk here, Scott, but there's just something surreal about the situation, just on a personal human level.
It's very weird from where we were 20 years ago to even think that we'd be in an environment here where David Wormser himself is sitting down to respond to us and nobody cares.
Nobody cares.
I think the interview has like a few thousand views.
It has not made, I don't think I got like maybe three tweets came my way about this.
So me and you were talking on the phone here and we're like, well, dude, like we could almost just big dog this and ignore it.
No one cares.
No one's demanding.
This isn't like the Christmas episode I'm doing because I want to get big numbers.
I could just do an episode talking about Candace Owens or something like that and do way better numbers than this because it's so inside baseball.
But then at the same time, we're like, well, God, I mean, we can't not respond to this.
So I guess at some point, and it seemed like a good Christmas episode for kind of our people in our camp to like, this will be fun for you guys.
But so what we're going to do here is we got a whole bunch of David Wormser talking, responding to us, and we're going to sit here and go through this.
But I guess the first thing I would say, Scott, is, isn't it just a little bit surreal to even be in this situation where David Wormser, you know, if you went back 20 years ago or 20 plus years ago, here's a guy who like really had control over serious levers of government power.
Me and you are just nobody dissidents out here.
And now we're in the situation where we're actually platforming him in a sense.
So I don't know.
I just find this to be very amusing.
Yeah.
Well, look, I am under no illusions about how big and famous and influential I am.
The real story here is what a loser David Wormser is and how far he has fallen.
And also, Merry Christmas.
I'm going to take off my ridiculous hat now.
I just had to say it's not that ridiculous.
My beloved auntie made it for me.
It's very nice.
That's very sweet.
On top of this other head, it looks kind of silly though.
But anyway, thanks for having me.
And yes, I am, I think, probably other than Jim Loeb, although Jim Loeb is pretty retired now and this kind of thing, but I'm probably the guy who blames Wormser the most for Rock War II because most people blame Pearl, but those two guys were a joint at the hip.
And where Pearl was the mentor and Worms are his underling, according to all good reporting that I've seen.
Worms are actually wrote The Clean Break, wrote Coping with Crumbling States, wrote Tyranny's Ally, which Pearl wrote the forward to, but Tyranny's Ally is the book length or kind of monograph length version of the same argument.
And then so, um, and look, there's a reason, and this goes to right what you were saying.
There's a reason the libertarians are the best on the warfare state and the best on the neocon on the neoconservative movement.
And that is this is all based in vendetta and hatred against our enemies, the neoconservatives.
We are the heirs of Marie Ann Rothbard and Justin Raimondo.
And so that's why we do what we do because we hate these people and they should be destroyed.
Yeah.
And we want other people to agree with us about how destroyed they should be.
Yeah.
Well, it's the thing about it is, right, is that there's this personal element to it because the neocons and broader, just the broader kind of conservatism ink of the day really did everything they could to ruin the lives of all of our heroes and spit on them.
I quite literally spit on their graves.
I mean, like William F. Buckley wrote a scathing obituary of Murray Rothbard immediately after his death, just like they were.
So yes, we have a personal grudge, but then they also hijacked American foreign policy and ruined the 21st century.
And so we hate them for personal reasons and for patriotic reasons.
And so yeah, it's an all that mixed together forms our anger at these guys.
I will say, let's, we're going to start.
We're going to jump into some of this right now.
I will just say this.
I know you were talking about this when we started, but he will remain nameless.
But I had a buddy of mine who listened to this podcast and he goes, you know, I listened to the podcast and I don't really follow this stuff that well or read this, but it's like, it seemed like the whole theme of the podcast was Dave Smith's wrong about all of this.
And then the guy would go answer and be like, that sounds like he's saying exactly what Dave said, just in different language.
But like, anyway, so I was actually, this was at the very beginning.
I know all about Wormser and the history of Iraq War II and all that, but I've not seen this interview.
I did see, I did see about half of an interview he did with a different guy on a different subject where he said a lot of interesting things that I wish I had jotted down, but what the hell?
The book's already published, so I don't care.
Anyway, go ahead.
But yes, that's right.
We should mention that that Scott is going in fresh here.
I have watched this.
Scott is not.
I found this opening part to just be just really fun.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Um, okay, so just to set this up here, uh, they basically they play a clip of me making arguments that I'm sure you're all very familiar with.
And essentially, the argument that I'm making is that the uh that John Mearsheimer is correct to consider the neocons a core constituency of the Israel lobby.
That's the most reasonable way to lens to view them, and that the neoconservatives um were a necessary part of the war effort in order for the war to happen.
That this was a largely neoconservative project, the war in Iraq, um, that there were other people who wanted to fight it too, but it doesn't get fought without the neoconservatives.
So, this is essentially my argument.
And here is David Wormser himself responding directly to the idea that he is a part of the Israel lobby, and that is what got us into the war in Iraq.
Here's David Worms.
First of all, we are not unconditionally committed to Israel, we're unconditionally committed to advancing American interests, which we believe are advanced by a strong Israeli-American relationship.
Israel represents values, so it's not another country, it's not like Zimbabwe or Thailand, it is the cradle of Western civilization.
It matters to us that the cradle of Western civilization is part of Western civilization because ultimately, the United States needs a grounding.
The whole it's a story what happened ever since the three pillars: there's Jerusalem, there's Athens, and there's Rome.
And you can't uphold the foundations of that civilization that emerged from Plato to NATO or from Abraham to now.
If you remove those pillars, then you become sort of without guardrails, without anything.
And then you go to certain areas that we've seen over the last century, bad places.
It really grounds us.
If you're within the structure of Western civilization, it does begin to balance.
Okay, just pause it right here, Natalie.
I'm sorry.
Dave, this is his response to a clip of you.
Zionism has a lot to do with why we fought the Iraq war.
This is the response to the criticism that you guys were all part of the Israel lobby and that this war was fought on behalf of Israel.
And so he brings them in.
And the first thing they're saying is, here's, sir, here's the guy himself.
He's going to slap down this nonsense.
And the first thing he says is this.
Just I could not believe this, Scott, as I'm watching it the first time.
I just, I'm going to turn this right over to you.
But, dude, just first of all, there is no, I mean, look, obviously, and I think this is what my buddy was referring to with this first sentence here, where he goes, it's not, Dave says we unconditionally support Israel.
We're not unconditionally committed to Israel.
We're unconditionally committed to U.S. interests, which are Israeli's interests because they're the cradle of Western civilization.
Dude, you're saying the same thing, man.
You are saying the exact same thing.
It's like me being like, oh, dude, you're not, you're never going to be a good husband because you're too interested in cheating on your wife.
And you're like, no, I am totally committed to my marriage, which I think is benefited if I cheat on the side.
And I thought, yeah, you're saying the same thing, dude.
Like, what are you talking about here?
And then all of this is just, I mean, Scott, the empty religiosity nothingness of all of this.
It's the cradle in Greece and Rome.
And, you know, if you're untethered from that, you go into bad things happen.
Like, what?
Does anyone think that if we're talking about, if we're talking about today, the sovereign debt crisis in Greece, that that has anything to do with ancient Athens and our attachment to all that is democracy and Western civilization?
I mean, like, what does any of this mean, dude?
Yeah, I'll let that one slide because I hope he's a little more specific about the clean break going forward here.
I guess I could add here that in that other interview that I saw of him, which I hope this comes up in here a bit, you know, as we go forward, but is maybe worth mentioning here for the people, especially the young who just aren't as familiar, that in the other interview, he very much agrees with the entire differentiation of the factions inside the government and very clearly and distinctly agrees that, yeah, there's us, the neocons,
and we were against and in that separate faction against Colin Powell and his guy, Dick Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice and her guys, Robert Blackwell, Philip Zelikow, and Robert Zolick.
And those guys were all from the Brent Scowcroft Moore Council on Foreign Relations Realist School.
And the neocons were the neocons.
What Colin Powell told Bob Woodward in the Washington Post was a separate government set up by Dick Cheney and the boys from the think tanks, meaning the Israel lobby, the neoconservative movement.
These are the guys and Wormser absolutely agreed with, for example, mine or Mearsheimer's framing or Colin Powell's framing of the entire situation.
That's exactly what it was.
All right.
And what do you even want?
So it's like, it gets into a thing where you're almost like, is the whole battle here semantics then?
Like, okay, so how about this?
How about I don't call it the Israel lobby anymore.
I call it the group of people who believe Israel is the cradle of Western civilization and must be supported at all times.
It is always in America's interest to support it.
Like, okay, so you guys, so then the group, what you just said, David Wormser, that's what, that's who I'm blaming.
Those people.
What are we talking about here?
Trotsky-Strauss and the neocons.
As Justin put it.
Go ahead.
All right, let's keep playing.
Ultimately, to that.
For example, where do we get, you know, we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.
Those rights ultimately emerge at Mount Moriah with the near sacrifice of Isaac, when it was established that the human life of Isaac, even remember, you have to understand in society of the Middle East, Peter Abraham, parents who didn't like their children, who didn't have a child that they wished, a girl if they wanted a boy, a boy if they wanted a girl, they could kill them.
It was very tribe.
It was very dangerous in that sense.
This established that human life is inalienable.
It's given by God, taken by God, and not by other men.
And that is the foundation of Western society.
Then you go to Mount Sinai.
At Mount Sinai, it's when you took a tribal structure, 12 tribes, and through a constitution, the Torah, you forged the first modern nation.
So both the concept of community and nation, individual rights, all emerge from the foundations of the Bible in that sense, from a cultural point of view, if not a religious point of view.
By the way, it's something that keeps bubbling through up until this age.
Dostoevsky, when he wrote a book called The Devils or Vesti, he wrote how he really described Lenin, except it was 50 years ago.
Let's just pause it for a second.
I'm just sorry.
It does feel like someone should just interrupt and go, sir, the question was, are you a part of the Israel lobby who lied us into war?
I'm sorry, you're off on Dostoevsky here.
Like you're just kind of, and also, look, I'm not even, I'm not here to attack the Torah or Judaism or whoever wants to make their arguments about what was the origin of Western civilization.
We could sit here for fucking, and actually, like, it's a really interesting conversation.
We could sit for 20 hours and talk about where, like, where the real understanding of property rights or individual justice came from.
But like, if you want to take this Old Testament Torah, Judeo-Christian overarching worldview, there is an argument for some of that.
Has nothing to do with what we're talking about, absolutely nothing to do with any of that, and nobody thinks like I don't know.
Like, this is on the level, uh, Scott.
If you started talking about like, um, the uh, I don't know, the attack on our uh, we had a couple soldiers killed in uh Syria a few days ago, and I started talking to you about like ancient sumar and what that cultural impact.
By the way, I think that's where to the best of our knowledge, where we got mathematics from, where we got the concept of like um uh medicine, the concept of mathematics, astronomy, like so many things go back to ancient Sumar, which I think was either Iraq or Syria, something like that.
But if you were like talking about the government of that today, and I just started making this one-to-one connection, you'd be like, Dave, I'm sorry, dude.
Like, did someone slip acid in your coffee this morning?
Like, what are you talking about?
This has nothing to do with anything.
Or are you just avoiding the question?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, like what the fuck.
So, now, listen, I mean, this is, I guess, my fault or yours that we should have had some time stamps here to get to the meat of this thing.
You want to kind of try to page ahead and see if we can get to where he finally does say anything of substance because I want to hear about the clean break and stuff, right?
He does, he does get asked, he does get asked more specifically about the clean break.
The Fault in the Iraq War00:14:05
Yeah, let's let's skip forward like uh a couple minutes here and see where we are without the air defense structures that Israel had with lots of uh Saudis and others killed, and maybe American servicemen all over the place in Iraq.
Uh, and and then in the end, hopefully, we would have achieved what the Israelis achieved, and that that then tells you right there that the Israelis essentially saved us an awful lot of work, an awful lot of risk, and potentially an awful lot of damage to ourselves.
And that's a that's a good example.
The other thing is, nobody's really looking at what Israel did.
I mean, it did to Hezbollah, it essentially wasn't just decapitation, somehow they got into the command structure and took over.
We can argue about the Gaza War, but let's find him talking about Iraq and the 90s and 2000s here.
We can it should be, it should be coming up pretty soon, I think.
Period, which I was working for.
They grew up in the shadow of World War II.
They knew what that argument, oh, it's over there, it's not our problem.
They knew where that leads.
They wound up having to fight not one, but two great wars: the World War II and the Cold War, precisely because over there came over here.
Man, the guy asked there matters really, man.
What's also the interview that I saw?
The guy was asking him substantive things, and he was responding to those.
Yeah, this is all over the place.
Yeah, but he does come back soon to the clean break.
So, you'll get your chance to get into all this stuff here.
Let him, let him go for a little bit.
Very impatient guy with these neocons.
Go ahead.
I fully appreciate how much the strategic architecture of the world is anchored to American power.
That's right.
And that their way of life is anchored to that strategic architecture.
They will not have the sort of freedoms, the sort of well, wellness and well-being, wealth, all these things that we take for granted.
The idea that you can just get on a plane and you can fly to Japan.
These things are very much anchored to a world that American power built fighting the Cold War and fighting World War II.
And that's what's threatened if America withdraws from the world.
But right now, we know the cost.
The cost was very painful and obvious in a place like Iraq.
It is a just pause.
It's not an option.
And I think we're going to get into some more interesting substantive stuff here, but it is just worth pointing out that like this is, it is amazing how much these war hawks always rely on these wild assertions that like it becomes super, super vague.
You know, like the more specific you get, like where you're like, hey, you made this claim about Iraq.
That was a lie.
You destroyed the place.
A million people are killed.
9 million people are displaced.
30,000 of our boys committed suicide in the wake of the thing and it cost trillions of dollars.
And then they go, American might is why you can drink a coffee in the morning.
Yeah.
And take an airplane to Japan and back.
I mean, you just, Scott, you just rely on the fact that, you know, if you get a strep throat, you could go get a moxicillin, man, and be better in a few days.
Like, what?
Are you?
I'm sorry, son.
You're going to have to make that connection a little bit clear and actually put an argument before what, like, your argument is if we hadn't thought World War II or the Cold War airplanes wouldn't exist.
What?
What the fuck are you talking about here?
Anyway, let's just keep playing.
Just so you see, the neocons always like in very softball interviews, they're always able to convince some percentage of people that they're smart and they're saying intelligent things.
It's always just vague nothingness.
Hey, man, on that document that I sent you that had the questions, aren't there timestamps in there?
You know what?
Let me take a look at that real quick.
Sorry, guys.
I did this.
I will take responsibility for this one because I did.
I thought this was a little bit more terrible interview, but that's not your fault.
Well, that part isn't my fault.
Other aspects might be.
Oh, hold on.
Yeah.
Not having the timestamps ready might be one.
Yeah, that might be on me.
Especially when you get so bad at this.
You know what I mean?
All right.
Well, look, while you're looking for time stamps, I'll just explain real quick that the point of the clean break is what Worms are called the Jordan option or the Hashemite option for Iraq, which said that, oh, no, we're worried that Syria and Iran might gang up and take over Iraq.
So we want to gang up with Jordan and Turkey and especially Jordan and take over Iraq instead.
And the magical, ridiculous, wrong thinking in there was that if the Jordanians had dominance in Iraq, that the Iraqi Shiite supermajority would do what they said.
And for fanciful reasons of the Hashemite king's supposed, you know, hypnotic power over the Iraqi Shiites.
But that was a scam and peddled to them by Iraqi exiles.
And the neocons are as stupid as they are evil.
And they bought it and they believed in it.
And that was the policy they went with.
Now, eventually they switched out the Hashemite king, who they didn't have because the king of Jordan had died and his son came in and wasn't into it, whatever.
That part became untenable.
And it was all in the name of democracy.
So now you're going to install a monarchy and stuff.
So they decided the guy who was peddling them that the same lies that this would work, Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the exiles, they just put him in power.
And then he would make sure that the Iraqi Shiites.
What was his group called?
The Free Iraqi Congress or something like that?
The Iraqi National Congress.
The Iraqi National Congress.
Right, right.
Because that was the same guys who, you know, furnished many of the lies about the warehouses full of chemical and biological weapons, about the anthrax program, biological weapons, laboratories, ongoing nuclear program, all of that stuff was coming from them.
And so that was a huge part of it.
And the neocons essentially were suckers for this guy, Chalabi's lies about how the new super majority Shiite Iraq after Saddam would be their cat's paw.
And which of course did not work out at all.
But that was the thinking behind the clean break, if you read it.
Okay.
And it's silly.
If you look at a map of the Middle East in your head or on a page, you'll think, well, that doesn't make much sense.
Why would you want to get rid of Sunni Saddam if your worry is that Iran arms Hezbollah by way of Syria?
Seems like Saddam is a roadblock in the Ayatollah's agenda there.
You would be right, and Wormser would be a fool.
But anyway, please do go ahead there.
Okay, perfect.
Now, by the way, I should, and that was great and very important for people to understand.
But I did find, yes, your guy.
I'm sorry, your guy did send me the timestamps here.
I was confused about this, so don't worry.
This will go a lot smoother going forward here.
Now, Natalie, what time are we at here in the video?
Like, what time were we just watching from?
We were at 13:24.
Okay, so actually, he's already been asked about the clean break here.
Um, he's never answered at all.
No, no, no, no, but he's gonna um get into it uh because he gets he gets asked about it again.
So, um, you know what?
Let's just let's play from here.
I think he's about to get into some stuff, but if not, I got more time stamps there now.
Do things like that.
Now, I'm not saying that necessarily was the right thing to do or not the right way to do it, maybe.
But the idea that you can just ignore these threats, uh, we will find how quickly our youth will have to pay the price of that.
That's another issue about strategic importance.
After World War II, we sat down and we wrote a document called NSC 68, 1948, which outlined our strategy in the world.
And it started with: there are several critical industrial areas of the world that if they fall to the Soviet Union, we can't defend ourselves properly.
Steel production, et cetera, industrial production.
If you update that, high-tech centers are the new roar land, the new Japan industrial infrastructure, et cetera.
And Israel is at the epicenter.
I mean, it has as many patents as Europe.
I mean, in other words, if you're out to construct a new NSC 68, the industrial capacity of Israel in terms of innovation and high-tech culture is a critical American value in and of itself.
After Oslo, but you had pretty major conflict on the border of Lebanon, and you had the first of really serious waves of terrorism and even kidnapping in 95-96 in Israel as a result of Oslo.
Right.
It wasn't even through a military intervention by us.
It was the idea that you would build an exile army that would do it itself.
Namely, Iraqis would fight to liberate Iraq.
You know, if you take the context of this, the first thing is, what can people in the region do to get things done for themselves and that help our strategic interests?
The clean break is the inversion of what it's portrayed.
It's portrayed as a master plan to finagle the United States to fight everybody's wars in the region, whether it's Israel's wars or Ahmed Chalabi, who was this Iraqi guy who led an Iraqi opposition, the Iraqi National Congress, which was in northern Iraq.
He turned out to be a shady character.
Yeah, I mean, he's a complex character, but we can get into that.
But the bottom line is, don't worry about it.
All right, let's pause it right here for a second.
Let's pause it right here.
Sorry.
All right.
No, so I did my best to because I don't really wish to engage with the host of this, but whatever.
Okay, he made an appearance.
But so this, this, okay, so I want to almost like go out of my way to be as fair as I can here, as charitable as possible to David Wormsar, because there might be a kernel of truth to some one point that he made there.
But I do.
Well, I want to, I think there's, I was blown away.
The part where he starts going into here, which we're about to play about Chalabi, well, he's complicated.
Like, whoa, oh, he still defends this crazy, which is wild.
But I think, you know, I think in a way there, you kind of got ahead of this and almost gave part of this response just now when we were trying to find this time stamp.
But so if David Worms are, if he's saying that, hey, look, I bring up, let's say, when I go on Rogan or Tucker or a lot of these shows, and I'll bring up the clean break and I'll go, look, everybody can go read the clean break for themselves.
And what was it all about?
They were saying, well, here's the thing.
We need a break from the peace process from Oslo.
As you can see here, he's blaming Oslo with all of the problems that are in the region as a result of it, which is, you know, not correct, but whatever.
But so he's, but we got to get rid of Oslo.
The whole idea of Oslo was this land for peace nonsense where you will give the Palestinians their land and then they'll promise to be peaceful with us.
Get away from that.
And instead, what we got to not give them land.
And instead, we got to focus on the surrounding states that are problems, that are problems for the Israelis because they back up the Palestinians or whatever.
And now, obviously, this, as you just laid out, this whole plan that was sold to them by Chalabe, that you could install a Hashemite and the Shiites of Iraq would have to listen to them.
And then they would tell the other Shiits to knock it off and not be friends with Hezbollah or whatever, this whole plan, like, okay, it is maybe true that when I say it like that on those shows, what people might be inferring from that is like, oh, so you're saying that the plan was what it became in a sense, that like America would intervene and fight these wars or something.
But like, okay, it's true what David Worms are saying, that like that part wasn't written in the clean break.
That's not right.
Okay, fair enough.
But the point, Scott, is obviously that, like, yeah, but the war in Iraq ended up happening.
And when it ended up happening, it was America who went in and fought it.
It was our country who had to pay for it.
And by, and it was led by the same guys under the same belief as the clean break strategy.
Like this was the nugget of the whole thing.
And this was the thinking in Washington.
Yeah, look, and I urge people to read.
They're both available at scotthorton.org and you can find them other places too, but you can read A Clean Break and Coping with Crumbling States.
And it's in coping, I believe, where he says, maybe even, yeah, it's in coping, where he recognizes that there would be a contest for influence over the Iraqi Shia.
And if the Iranians won it, it would be bad times and that the Iraqi Sunnis are afraid that they would be subject to retribution after losing the power and being an ethnic minority there and all that, or sectarian minority there, and all of that.
So he, they actually acknowledge the danger and then they go ahead and do it anyway.
And the thing of it is, just like as you said in your introduction there, the Mearsheimer-Walt case in the Israel lobby and American foreign policy is, yeah, of course W. Bush was driving.
But the thing is, Wolfowitz was in the back seat going, trust me, you're doing the right thing here, boss.
Me and my friends, we all game this out and we know that you're smart and this is what we want to do.
So instead of saying, uh-oh, you know, this whole thing about the Iraqi Shiite supermajority is going to be under the command of Ayatollah Sistani in alliance with the Ayatollah Khamenei.
This whole thing is going to blow up in our goddamn face.
We should not do this.
Instead, they were saying, no, no, no.
Trust us.
Chalabi says that the Iraqi Shiites will be compliant.
They'll be allies with Israel.
They'll force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran.
They will break the chain of Iranian arms to Hezbollah through Syria, which was already broken by Saddam, but anyway, and they believe this pile of lies.
Wolfowitz's Secret Strategy00:11:19
That was what it was.
And so if they had been, if all of Cheney's eggheads had told W. Bush, you know, sir, we really want to do this, but remember how your father abandoned the Shiite uprising in 1991 and let Saddam kill them all?
Well, that's because Iran would have taken over the country, see?
And the same thing is true here.
If we do this now, Iran is going to take Baghdad and you're going to be the Ayatollah's partner in this crime.
They didn't do that.
They said, it's going to be great, boss.
We got to do it.
We got to go all the way to Baghdad.
Then we will be there and we will tell them all what to do.
And it'll all work out just like in our dreams, just like Chalabi promised.
And they'll build an oil pipeline to Haifa.
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Yeah, dude.
Like I say, one of the things that was really revealing to me, like I, that I learned about watching this David Wormser interview, or at least I believe, you know, making guesses on what's really in someone's heart or something like that.
But I remember, and this was up until it up until after the first time I read Enough Already.
It might have been like an advanced copy of Enough Already, but it was a physical copy, not reading it on a PDF that you sent me.
Like you had had the book out.
And I remember, and I've had many conversations with you on the phone about this and probably on podcast too.
It was the one Hortonian piece that always really like threw me for a loop was I was always like, Scott, you always write it as if these neocons really believed Chalabe, but that can't be right.
Like it just could, it would just never made sense to me.
I was always like, dude, obvious anyone would know that fucking Iran was going to gain influence if you overthrew Saddam Hussein.
No one could possibly have believed that like even what you're saying there, like in the, even if he admitted in coping with crumbling states that like, well, there is a chance it could be this other.
No one would even think that your thing is like a 1% at best chance.
And the overwhelming odds are just like, no, if you install the Shiite majority, they will be more friendly to their Shiite neighbors than the Sunnis who hated their guts would be.
And I guess on some level, I was always like, I think they were just looking for someone to say this.
And they found a guy who could say it.
And that was their justification for the war.
And they figured we'd topple Iran next anyway.
So it doesn't really matter anyway.
And I guess it just took me a while to almost appreciate that.
Like, no, I think David Wormser really did believe him.
And part of that is just maybe the human psychology of it.
Like, you know, governments, you, you, they end up looking for somebody to tell them what they already want to hear.
But that doesn't mean they can't be convinced by that person who's telling them what they wanted to hear.
One of my first articles I wrote for anti-war.com was after the Downing Street memo came out.
And it was called, I'm here for my bill of goods.
Right.
Like in that saying, like somebody sold somebody a bill of goods.
Right.
It was like, yeah, that's why I'm here.
If you got to torture it out of some guy, tell me some sweet lies I need to tell these other people so we can do our evil thing we want to do.
That was the entire program.
And let me just say real quick, because I have it right in front of me here.
I have just a few choice quotes.
It's the only thing I'm going to read to y'all today.
But this is from Mark Zell.
And you can follow him on Twitter.
You can follow Wormser on Twitter too.
This is from Mark Zell, who was Douglas Fyth's law partner.
And Fyth was one of the other signers of the Clean Break with Clean Break.
Pearl and Wormser.
And he says, Ahmed Chalabi is a treacherous, spineless turncoat.
He had one set of friends before he was in power, and now he's got another.
And then, and by the way, so Zell is an attorney in Jerusalem who represents settlers on the West Bank.
That's Doug Feist's law partner there.
He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel and would allow Israeli companies to do business there.
He said the new Iraqi government would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul to Haifa.
But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of these.
And he goes on complaining.
I have one more thing here.
So this quote is not Zell.
This is from, again, let me say this.
Sorry, I need a disclaimer here.
The guy that wrote this article, his name is John Desard, and he's a serious journalist from the Financial Times.
I admit, yes, it's true.
This article appears at salon.com.
However, it is not, it was not then what it is now.
It was basically just like slate.
It was like center left liberal stuff and they printed actual journalism.
Now I know it's the wokest, silliest thing or whatever.
This was a decade before they went insane.
Yeah.
Literally from 21 years ago.
Okay.
And it's a solid piece and John Desard is a solid guy.
Okay.
So don't let the URL give you the cooties and freak out.
Okay.
But now, so here's the thing.
Here he is.
Oh, I'm sorry.
He quotes here the Jerusalem Post speculating that Chalabi was just scamming the neocons two weeks before the war was launched.
I had missed that one.
I like that.
But then, so check this out.
This is John Desard writing.
Okay.
He says, Chalabi's Arab admirers say they knew he'd never make good on his promises to be allies with Israel.
Quote, now this is Desard quoting another guy.
I was worried that he was going to do business with the Zionists, confesses Maud Assad, the managing director of a bank in Jordan, one of his business partners.
Quote, he told me not to worry that he just needed the Jews in order to get what he wanted from Washington and that he would turn on them after that.
End quote.
There you go.
So that's how stupid David Wormser is, is he got screwed by the Ayatollah comedy right in the face.
In fact, just to make sure Chalabi was literally fucking Harold Rode, but hey.
Well, and also, by the way, Chalabi also, I believe, was one of Judith Miller's main sources in the New York Times as she was writing the articles to sell the whole thing to.
Right, right.
And Michael Gordon.
And so just so people are keeping up here, because I don't want people to get lost if some of you are.
So Chalabi is an Iraqi, what's the word I'm looking for?
He's kicked out of the country, exile, sorry.
So he's an Iraqi exile who had real beef with Saddam Hussein for many, many years.
And so what Wormser is saying here where he's like, no, no, no, look, the clean break wasn't a call for America to go overthrow these countries on behalf of Israel.
The idea was that, you know, whatever, people in DC and people in Tel Aviv would work together to help Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein, right?
Meaning Chalabi and his buddies, right?
And then they abandoned that policy, but it's, of course, this exact same thinking behind the war itself.
Exactly.
And so the point here is that they're sitting here and saying, oh, no, it wasn't that the clean break was a strategy for the U.S. to fight all these wars.
And no, it's not that we're the Israel lobby.
We just recognize Israel is the cradle of Western civilization and the greatest thing ever.
And we always have to work with them.
And here was the plan.
And here's how it could have worked.
But the point we're making here is that, like, look, we get it in the same way that the government finds an intellectual who says, I have an argument that the government needs more power.
And then they go, we're very persuaded by this intellectual's argument.
Like, come here, you know, but it's just they need.
So he found an exile who would tell him what he wanted to hear.
And then, yes, ultimately then after 9-11, they used this same framework while engaging.
But why is it, like, whittle this down.
Why is it that we use this framework after 9-11?
Why is it that you wrote the clean break to begin with?
Why is it that you wanted to listen to Chalabi?
Why is it that you even cared about an exile?
It's, oh yeah, because it was good for Israel.
That's why the clean break was written to Benjamin Netanyahu.
What is this?
This isn't rocket science.
You wrote it to the prime minister of Israel when he first came into power, the one who's now the longest serving prime minister in Israeli history.
Well, this was his first year of coming into power.
And this is what you wrote to him.
You care about this because of Israeli goals.
Like, that's the whole point here.
And so anyway, he's just not touching any of that, which is really what you're saying.
And it goes back to America.
So that's your point.
And just really quick, I'm sorry.
It goes back to his first answer that, look, America's interests and Israel's interests are the exact same thing.
So I don't even know what you're talking about, Dave.
What's the difference at all?
But just imagine, I mean, dude, look, I'm sorry.
It's just, it's hard to not keep ranting on this, but just to, so everybody's like clear on the point here.
So what Scott, the quote Scott's reading from, yes, those aren't quotes from David Wormser.
They're quotes from the law partner of his close associate.
All right, fine.
Like, but at this point, like the point is that that guy's just saying the quiet part out loud.
That like, yeah, the whole reason we wanted to buy what Chalabi was saying, the whole reason we wanted to believe in this whole thing is because then they'd do business with Israel.
Then this would, this is the clean break strategy.
Yes, that's the whole point.
You wrote this shit down, motherfucker.
It's not like I'm sitting here and arguing that you said something that you did.
It's even your, you published it.
We can all read it.
It's still on the internet.
You're talking about the document right now.
You want it because you didn't want to have to do a two-state solution as the entire world and the Israeli government had already capitulated to, at least verbally, that we got to give these Palestinians a state at some point.
And you were like, no, we don't want to do that.
But how the hell do you not do that?
Well, the only way to not do that is to try to overthrow all of the regimes in the region who are a threat to Israel.
And ultimately, when it came to fruition, that meant the U.S. doing it.
You know, like, if they want to, if they want to really argue on the point, which this is where I was saying, I think they have a kernel of truth to, that like, hey, Dave, we didn't explicitly say that the plan here was for the U.S. to sacrifice their blood and treasure and for them to do all the heavy lifting.
But at the same time, man, this just reminds me of like the 12-day war all over again, where people go, well, what's the problem if Israel wanted to do this without America?
Well, that's not the world we're living in, dude.
They're not doing this without America.
Because guess what?
They can't.
Because like, if Israel tried to do the 12-day war without America, well, first off, they don't have those bunker busters, so they don't get to do those attacks.
And second off, what do those rocket responses look like?
What do those missile responses look like without America defending Israel?
Oh, it's a whole different thing now, isn't it?
Neocon Network Takes Over00:02:59
And so like, anyway, real quick, that it ain't just worms are in Pearl, right?
There is about a dozen or 20 of these guys inside the W. Bush government at the deputy and undersecretary level and all of that.
So you had, you know, Libby and Hannah and that's John Scooter Libby, John Hanna, Robert Joseph in Eric Edelman in the vice president's office.
You had Elliot Abrams on the National Security Council.
Karen Katowski said when Abrams got the job on the NSC, all the boys in the Pentagon were whooping and hollering, we got him in, we got him in.
And then you had on the defense policy board at the Pentagon, you had Pearl, Gene Kirkpatrick, Kenneth Edelman, James Woolsey, and all of those guys.
And then, of course, Paul Wolfowitz was deputy secretary of defense.
Under him was Douglas Fythe as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and Stephen Cambone, Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, all neoconservatives.
And then under Fife was Abram Shulski and Bill Loody, neoconservatives who ran the Office of Special Plans with Michael Makofsky and Michael Ledine and Michael Rubin and all not all name Michael, but many other neoconservatives.
And then across the hall was the policy counterterrorism evaluation group, which was set up by Wormser with Michael Malouf.
And their main job was coming up with lies about Saddam Hussein's ties to Al-Qaeda, including and especially that Mohammed Atat met with Abu Ani, the deputy foreign minister of Iraq in Prague in the Czech Republic.
And according at least to the original version by Israeli intelligence in the build, Dave, and you can still read this to this day in the Los Angeles Times, gave him a flask of anthrax too, right?
When the Iraqis, you know, meeting with the head hijacker of September 11th, supposedly, that was one of their main talking points that Wormser and Malouf at the P Teg had pushed.
And so these were the neoconservations.
Which was completely made up, to be clear.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Literally none of it happened at all.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that.
So, and then Wormser went from the Pentagon to state where he worked with John Bolton to keep the leash on Dick Armitage and Colin Powell.
And then he went to work in the vice president's office.
So Wormser was, oh, and he also put Harold Rode in charge of the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon as well.
And so, and where he kicked all the Arabists out and all that kind of thing.
So this was the Neocon network.
This was the separate government.
This is why Seymour Hirsch was able to say, oh, come on, it was a coup.
Nine people took over the government.
Or Thomas L. Friedman, who is a pro-war Zionist, but not a neoconservative.
He had said in an interview with Haaretz that like this war was the project of, I think he said, 15 guys and they all live within, they're all or all their offices are within a mile and a half of here in Washington, D.C.
This was their project.
They had wanted to go to Iraq for a long time.
They took advantage of September 11 and they got away with it.
Becoming a Regional Power00:06:57
And they're the ones who did it all right.
And like, yeah, what can you say?
These are the guys.
Even Colin Powell says, and he did their dirty work.
We all know he went to the UN and told their lies.
But still, that was what was going on here.
No question.
It does feel a lot like that interview that Hadley on the NSC.
Sorry.
Yeah.
It feels a lot like that interview where Fauci said in like 2023 that he never recommended to lock anything down.
And you're like, dude, you know what I mean?
Khalilzad on the NSC as well.
Sorry, now I'm done.
Right, right, right.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, here, let's keep playing.
Let's keep playing some more Wormser because I think he's getting into more chalaby talk here.
Which is how can we get people in the region finally to do things in order to relieve us of having to do it ourselves?
Israel was a particular frustration for us because we knew that Israel, as an American, we understood Israel was beginning to enter a period where it was becoming a regional power.
And the Israelis were still stuck in a sort of a diaspora mindset, which is everything is just good enough.
Everything is, you know, we just protect ourselves.
We secure ourselves, et cetera.
They weren't thinking in terms of what they had become.
They were still thinking the way they thought in 1948, which is let's just plant ourselves, get ourselves settled.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's pause it for a second.
Cause like, I mean, look, dude, it's just so, such a twisted way to do it.
It goes, yeah, the Israelis had this fucking mentality at the time that like, I don't know, maybe we should just make a deal and have a two-state solution and like we could just kind of be protected.
Like we're more than capable of being in a situation here where we can protect ourselves.
Thinking about where Israel was in the early 1990s, the mid-1990s.
And we're more than, I mean, we're a nuclear armed country.
We have the most powerful military in the region.
Like maybe we don't need to permanently occupy our neighbors and we're either and then he's going, nah, nah, nah, dude.
You guys got all the wrong mentality here.
You see, you're a power.
And what does that mean?
You're a power.
That means you can abuse other people.
You don't have to stop doing that and just worry about protecting yourself.
I mean, he's just saying that in different words.
I don't know.
As you mentioned, this clean break strategy was written for incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu in 96, when right after Netanyahu fan had murdered Rabin and then the kind of short-term caretaker presidency of Shimon Perez after that.
And so the two-state solution was dead.
Oslo was dead then.
And of course, Netanyahu was a very willing recipient of this message from Wormser that you don't have to do this Rabin stuff, especially now that Rabin's dead and gone and you're the guy in there.
And we all know from the history of the rest of the 1990s that Netanyahu was absolutely opposed to a two-state solution, did everything he could to sabotage it, is caught on film on he thought the camera was off and on a secret recording admits how he used and abused and lied to Bill Clinton and pretended he was going along with the deal when in fact, Area C is two-thirds of the whole West Bank, jerk.
I won, you lose.
That's no, that's exactly right.
And that's worth it for anyone if you haven't seen that to go read.
All you got to do is like a secret recording of Netanyahu.
It's all over the place.
And I think, you know, one of the other things that really should be stressed there, because I think sometimes when you say a Netanyahu fan killed Yitzhak Rabin, it almost sounds like, oh, oh, so what are you saying?
Like he's guilty just because someone who likes him, but like, just to be clear here, make of this what you will.
To this day, Yitzhak Rabin's wife blames Benjamin Netanyahu for the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.
He was, you know, like we may think here that like, you know, political rhetoric is out of control or something like that.
Dude, they were holding marches.
I was shocked when I first saw this.
They were holding marches.
Benjamin Netanyahu was basically Benjamin Netanyahu and the right-wingers in Israel were furious with Yitzhak Rabin because he had agreed to the Oslo Accords and he had finally said, like, okay, we got a promise to give the Palestinians a state.
You know, at this point, again, this is the early 1990s.
The occupation's been going on since 1967.
It was already pretty long.
He was like, dude, we got to let go of this.
Like, this is going to, it's just too much.
And not in quite as much of a hippie-ish way as people would think, more in a nationalist, like, this is costing us too much.
And I don't think he ever did a half-assed way, too.
It wasn't a real state.
No, it wasn't a hell of a lot better than what anyone had in mind since then, as all of us.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yes, that's exactly right.
But so Benjamin Netanyahu, in leading these vicious, like anti-Izak Rabin protests, they carried around a casket with Yitzhak Rabin's name on it.
Like they carried around his casket while he's still alive, like as some type of gesture of like, dude, like, you know, I don't know, walking right up to the line of incitement to violence.
There was like all types of crazy shit like that.
And then, yes, then a Benjamin Netanyahu fan murdered the Jewish prime minister of Israel for the crime of wanting to make peace with the Palestinians, of publicly saying that he wanted to take their boot off their neck.
So, anyways, just to watch Worms or paint this, you know, in his light is truly sickening.
But here, let's keep playing because I think there'll be something of substance coming up.
They had moved from survival to a regional power and they didn't realize it.
And the whole point of this thing was to tell the Israelis: no, you're becoming a regional power.
Hashemite Theory Disaster00:15:11
That makes you far more useful for the United States than all these other.
I mean, we talked about the cultural foundations.
Israel always in the 80s said, I mean, 70s and 80s said, oh, we're the unsinkable aircraft carrier of the United States.
You know, in all honesty, and that Israel is important for the truth is, Israel could have disappeared in the 70s.
It would have been a human tragedy, but it wouldn't have been a strategic disaster for the United States.
It would have helped the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
Very true.
But in the 50s and so, it wasn't so clear.
By the 80s, Israel had become such a strategic powerhouse 90, such a powerhouse already, but it didn't realize it.
And it had great assets that could contribute to the overall Western defense in the region and Western interests.
So this letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, who had just been elected the week before, that was the purpose of writing this, is to say, look, you've lived in America.
You're very American.
You get us.
Now think like us.
Be an American.
Don't, you know, think like part of the Western alliance.
This is what you can do.
Think about shaping, shape your universe.
Shape your universe.
Shape your environment that helps all of us.
And then Iraq, the whole Hashemite thing you described, remember, Shiites believe they descend, their leader descends from the bloodline of the prophet.
They don't have.
Oh, man, no, In Sunni Islam, there's caliphs who, you know, go this way, that way, all sorts of different directions, but they're not the bloodline of the prophet.
Shiites were the bloodline of the prophet.
They come from Ali, who was the nephew of the prophet, and direct son-san dynasty.
And then the last one sort of occulted disappeared, but we'll come back in their view.
That means Shiites venerate any descendant of the prophet.
The Hashemites are the family of the prophet.
That's why the British and Lady Gertrude Bell was so intent on helping the Hashemites take over Iraq in 1922, because she understood the Shiites, which were a headache already back then for the British.
The Shiites would have to venerate him.
They would have to accept him as their leader.
Can you?
Okay, so Paul.
So I'm sorry, go ahead.
Maybe this, this really might be my ignorance speaking here.
Okay.
But if this is correct, if what David Wormser is saying is correct, then why the need to install a Hashemite in Iraq at all?
Why can't like the king of Jordan just say, hey, knock it off?
If you're saying that this is a religious obligation that they have, then why would that be changed by matters of mere politics?
Like, why can't the Hashemite king just command the Shiites of Iraq?
to be friends with Israel.
Right.
Why can't King Abdullah right now just say, Iraqi Shiites, make me your king?
And then be the king of Jordan and Iraq right this minute.
Not why we drive Iran's friends out of power and take over back.
Why did we have to overthrow Bashar al-Assad?
Why couldn't he have just said, hey, stop.
You stop being nice to Hezbollah now.
Like, why?
None of this makes any sense at all.
And yes, like, it's amazing, dude.
20 plus years later, he's still defending this shit.
Yeah.
So here's the thing about it.
Yeah, he's completely wrong, of course, right?
When the Hashemites, essentially, they're from the Arabian Peninsula, but the Al-Saud family won out and the British installed them in Arabia.
And then they put the Hashemites in Jordan and Iraq.
And the Hashemites, you know, had power there for, you know, backed by British force for about 30 years, but they were overthrown mostly by the Shiites.
And overall, the Iraqi Shiites had a religious edict, a fatwa, against any cooperation with the Hashemite king.
And in fact, Chalabi's family was one of the few Shiite families that violated that fatwa and worked with the Hashemites anyway.
So you could see how he had a narrative to sell to David Wormser later.
But just on the bold face of it, as anyone could tell you on an eighth grade level, the Hashemites are Sunnis.
And there's nothing in the Shiite faith that says anyone who claims to have the blood of the prophet, whether they went off with the founders of the Shiite faction back in the 1300s or whatever it was, that the Sunnis would be able to control them.
Sorry, I lost my train.
Anyway, one thing that that was never the case in history.
And then, as you were trying to say there before I crudely interrupted you, was, well, how did it work out this time around?
Right?
They did the clean break.
They invaded and toppled the country.
Chalabi was a treacherous, spineless turncoat, according to their guys.
And Jordan has no influence in Iraq and never had influence through all of Iraq War II.
And look, when I say that he warned in coping about the dangers of pro-Iranian Shiites taking power, he names the Hakim family and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
He calls them Sari, the Supreme Association or whatever.
Same thing.
Well, these are the guys who were the Ayatollah of Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei's cat's paws.
They were the ones who had chosen Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq war and had lived in Iran for 20 years.
They were the ones who had come, their Bada Brigade were the ones who had begun to lead the Shiite uprising of 91, causing Bush Sr. to betray it.
And these are the guys who took power in the war.
So here, this guy was Cheney's Middle East advisor through 2008.
I don't think he left the government.
Maybe he left in like 07 or something, but he was in the government.
He was not when some of the neocons were fired.
Wormser was not.
So he sat there and he watched the same Iraq War II that you and I watched, where it was Skiri and Dawah and in third place, Moktada al-Sadr who won.
Not any Shiites loyal to the Hashemite royalty in Jordan.
Has anyone listening to this or watching this ever heard of Jordan dominance in Iraq since 2003?
Even in a remark by anyone ever in any context.
No.
And then so here he is in 2025 going, yeah, see?
No, I still believe exactly what I was told, obviously falsely in 1996 and the entire history of Iraq War II and hell, for that matter, Iraq War III in the meantime, notwithstanding.
Who won Iraq War III?
When Obama built the caliphate in Syria, it was the Iranian Quds force that came across the border to lead the Iraqi Shiite militias with American planes flying as their air power as they liberated Tikrit, Saddam's hometown from the bin Ladenite Caliphate.
You know, so many of the neocons, like the first generation, the first generation of neocons.
So like the, you know, the Irving Crystal and Norman Podhoritz and those guys were Norman Podhoritz.
He just died last week, Dave.
Oh, did he?
Really?
His son blocked me on Twitter after talking a lot of shit.
And then I ratioed him up real nice.
Yeah, that wasn't cool.
All I did was cite him saying we should kill every last fighting aged Sunni male in Iraq and then the war will be one for the Shiites.
Norman Podhoritz's son John thought would be great.
We'll just give Skiri and Bodder and Dawa a total victory.
That'll show them.
Well, I know a lot of those older, the first generation guys were communists when they were younger.
They were like Trotskyite guys.
And I don't know about what worms are, but there is something very interesting.
And I know I've talked about this for many years.
I'm sure you've made similar points that there is something like about the communist mind that it's almost like, oh, you, man, you could still really see a lot of traces of that in the neoconservatives, even after they're supposedly not communists anymore.
But there is just something to me about listening to David Wormser here, where there's something, the profound sickness in believing in a theory, putting it into practice, watching utter disaster on like a biblical level unfold from it.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, I mean, I don't know how to say it.
You can't exaggerate it.
I'm just looking for words powerful enough.
You're talking about a million people getting slaughtered and 9 million people being displaced and tens of millions of people having lost loved ones and watched family members get horrifically injured and like an ungodly level of human suffering was inflicted from your policy.
And then your takeaway from that to be, no, the theory was still right.
Let's run that again.
The theory was still right.
I've learned nothing.
Then that did not make me go.
Yeah.
And but to see that that level of disaster was inflicted and not go.
And by the way, just to be very clear here, because I know sometimes the theory bros get mad at me.
I am not making a consequentialist argument when I say that.
That's not, it's not a consequentialist argument.
The point Is that you know, the same way that libertarians go, it's really stupid when liberals will say communism works well on paper, but it doesn't work well in real life because we all know like that's stupid.
If it works on paper, then it would work in life, and that's what paper means is that it works in real life.
But the point is that if you build something and it's an utter disaster in reality, then you go, I got something wrong in the theory.
The point isn't that because the consequence, you don't do it.
The point is that obviously your theory is wrong, and this theory is so obviously wrong.
Like, it's just it is wild that this, and then by the way, imagine you know, all of these people the podcast that this is being hosted on, and all of these Zionists are all talking all day.
You know, Ben Shapiro's speech the other day about how you must call out the offense of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson platformed Nick Fuentes.
And like, let's just say, let's stipulate for the record.
Let's say Candace is wrong about every conspiracy about Charlie Kirk, and Nick Fuentes is a horrible, hateful, anti-Semite bigot, right?
Like, all of let's say, for the sake of argument, all of that's true.
How is this what David Worms are doing right now not infinitely more offensive than anything they've ever said?
Like, the dude who has actually had power implemented a policy, which was a war that led to this level of humanism.
And he's still saying he got the theory right when it was completely disproven.
And it's just insane.
And, you know, like if his theory had been proven right, but this is what it took to achieve it, but we had a very, very friendly Iraqi regime in there or whatever.
Still, he would have to mention that, right?
Look, it was a very steep cost.
It was a horrible civil war.
A lot of people got their corpses stacked like Gord would, and you know, and their bodies found and picked up by the corpse trucks in the morning through this horrible civil war where we fought on our enemy's side and all of this.
Nah, you know, nope, just yeah, no, I'm still right.
In fact, I'm I want to hear the rest of that.
He goes on to say, like, yeah, see, I, and I was like, he was Sunni, he wasn't Shiite.
So you really began to weld together the parts of Iraq into some sort of at least loose confederation.
And so the Hashemites ruled Iraq from 22 to 1958.
It wasn't a pie in the sky dream of doing something weird.
It was resurrecting what happened before this wave of revolutionary radical thought possessed the Middle East and destroyed country after country, whether it was Egypt or whether it was Syria or whether Iraq.
And so the idea was, let's go back to 58, let's start over.
It wasn't pie in the sky.
By the way, in Clean Break, I also called for the cutting off of aid to Israel.
People seem to forget that.
I didn't just financial aid, not civilian, because not military.
Here, let's pause it for a second here.
Yeah, this is the thing that they go off of.
Again, this part, we're going to skip through this because it's just very boring, but it's like their big, yes, look, dude.
The clean break, it is true.
The clean break had a few little nuggets of good ideas in there.
Which he says is just to suck up to the Congress.
So that the U.S. Republican-controlled Congress will say, oh, he says free market zoning things a little bit.
That's No, it's when it's when Dick Cheney goes, we should cut the top marginal rates from 39% to 35% because that'll actually increase revenue and then we'll have more money for the wars.
It's like it's that neocon type of logic where they believed in just a time they understood enough that like, yeah, the free market is kind of the engine of wealth and we need that in order to keep buying bombs to go drop on people.
So like, we'll keep, so like, yes, he is correct about lowering rates will create more revenue or will create more, you know, economic growth or something like that.
It's like, okay, there, and yes, to, if we're completely fair here, in the clean break, it does say not that we should cut off all support to Israel, but that we shouldn't give them the few billion dollars a year and that they should cut back on some of their social welfare programs so that they have a little bit more of a capitalist country so that they have a higher GDP.
So they don't really need the $3 billion a year, but we'll still give them all types of diplomatic and military and protection.
Yeah, no, I mean, they say explicitly, he says explicitly in there, he wants to cut civilian aid, not military aid.
Okay, $2.8 billion a year.
Oh, no, that is to be untouched.
It goes without saying.
They just wanted to cut a little bit of the aid that was going directly to the civilian government so that they could say they're making cuts, just as you're saying.
And then the same thing you heard him mention a little bit previously out of context, but this is in the clean break too, that Israel needs to get on board the missile defense train because Congress likes to hear that because Congress is bribed by the missile defense corporations.
And so anything along, you know, what Lockheed likes is what they like.
And so this is something we want to do.
Again, just for the purposes of getting on Congress's good side, not much, much like cutting taxes in order to get more revenue to fight wars.
It's like they want to do maybe a little bit of the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
And by the way, their economy was very commie at that time.
So they really needed some free market reforms.
And I think Netanyahu actually did embark on some of them.
Although, as you know, the vast majority of the land in Israel is owned by the Israeli national government.
Yeah, it's like a very socialist country.
So like, but anyway, so there were some parts of the clean break where he's like, we should cut down on this, the Israeli socialism a little bit or something like that.
And it's like, yeah, okay.
And that people will almost be like, oh, interesting that Dave and Scott always omit that when they talk about the clean break.
Separate Investigation Results00:04:06
And you're like, yeah, it's just not relevant to any of the points that we're making.
I don't know what like, oh, okay.
Yeah, there's this other thing in there that I guess all things being considered is slightly better economics than socialism or something like that.
Like, okay, I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to mean.
Let's jump ahead here a little bit because I wanted, I want to make sure I get to this part before we wrap up.
And you know what?
There's some more good stuff.
Maybe we could even go back and cut for the archive version some of the Dostkievsky kind of tangent at the beginning and stick with a little more of the substantive stuff that comes up later.
If it's in there, I don't know.
Okay.
Let me let's can we go to Natalie?
Let's go to 34 minutes and 55 seconds.
And this is, I think, another question about the clean break and APAC.
Failure in the Middle East.
We couldn't anymore live with this internal failure because it wasn't containable anymore.
It was coming to haunt us.
And by the way, we're not out of those woods yet.
No, I think now we're actually entering the woods even more thickly.
There's two things about APAC.
One is I think APAC is strongest when it aligns with what the administration was going to do anyway.
And they didn't really stack up very many victories where they really stood against the administration.
A few years before, there was the famous F-15 sales to Saudi Arabia, the AWACAC to Saudi Arabia, and the conformal fuel tanks for the F-15s in Saudi Arabia, all of which APAC bitterly opposed, fought a real nuclear war against.
And they lost on every one of them against a fairly friendly administration to Israel.
So it was the Ford administration and afterwards the Reagan administration and so forth.
So, yeah, the second thing that's a fallacy here is AIPAC hated the neocons.
They hated us.
They lobbied vehemently to keep me from entering the government.
Originally, the idea was that I would become the senior director in the NSC for the Middle East.
But they put up such a fight that Steve Hadley and Condoleezza Rice didn't want to have me.
So John Bolton pulled me into state and then the vice president over the White House.
They hated the crowd of Jews that went in.
They had no interactions with us.
Well, we were the children of the golden age of America.
All right, here, let's pause it.
Hold on, pause it here, Natalie.
And then the next one I want you to pull up is 51 minutes and 19 seconds, but go ahead, Scott.
Oh, that's very interesting to know that there was that kind of faction fight between Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman and the leaders of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Pearl and his friends at that time.
I didn't know that, but whatever, man.
APAC still towed the line for the war the entire time from at least September 11th on.
And they bragged about it.
They put it in their briefing book to have all their lobbyists when they go to Congress to demand action against Saddam Hussein.
He's going to work with Osama bin Laden to attack us with weapons of mass destruction and the entire line.
And so they absolutely pushed it.
And all that documentation is in Walton Mearsheimer's essay and book.
But the essay, you can read it at antiwar.com, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy.
And it's really worth reading the full book.
It's an excellent, excellent book.
And by the way, you know, you had a guy named Larry Franklin who worked for Douglas Fife in the Office of Special Plans, who later was indicted and prosecuted.
And yeah, in fact, pleaded guilty in the end, I think, or maybe he was just convicted by a jury for giving top secret discussions of Conaleezer Rice and President Bush about Iran policy to Stephen Rosen at APAC and got busted by the FBI.
And it was a big investigation.
And the FBI ended up investigating Wolfowitz and Pearl and Fyth and others at the DOD.
Excellent Book on Lobbyism00:02:21
There was a separate investigation over somebody told Chalabe that they'd broken Iran's codes and Chalabi told Iran that.
And so there was a separate investigation on that.
But it was, there's an article by Robert Dreyfus called More Missing Intelligence.
But when you go to the nation and yeah, whatever, he's a liberal, but I don't care.
Take that article at the nation and then, but put it, you got to go to the Wayback Machine because at the nation right now, the article's broken and it only has the first little part of it.
But if you go put that URL in the Wayback Machine and look at an old version of it, it has the whole thing in there where Dreyfus talks about all of that.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Okay, interesting.
All right, let's keep playing because there's just one more line that I really want to make sure we get to.
Let's keep playing.
I believe it's coming up here.
Final Words on Arafat00:15:46
Well, let me start with the Iraq question.
I think given everything we knew then, and by the way, the Israelis, their intelligence did not, they did not believe there was major weapons of mass destruction programs.
They had the same assessment we had more generally, that if given the chance, Saddam broke out, then he would resurrect his weapons of mass destruction programs.
He was a man who wasn't going to stay contained.
And he had a history of every four or five years launching major wars or killing quarter million people if he couldn't launch a major war.
And he did.
He killed half a million people, quarter million in the north, or half a million in the north, quarter million in the south in the decade before we went in.
So there was a sense, we can't live with this guy.
You turn your back on him.
It's a wounded cobra, but a cobra will kill you, even if it's wounded.
And so I still think to this day, it needed to be done, but it did not need to be done the way it was done.
I still, as I thought back then, this should be done by organizing a force of Iraqis.
We had northern Iraq was free.
You could have organized this force there.
You could have trained an army.
We could have given some assistance, but this really Iraq should be liberated by Iraq.
And it's the same thing with Iran.
I think at the end of the day, the West, Israel can give Iranians a chance with a weakened regime, but Iranians have to liberate Israel.
Yes.
Not America.
You know, we, I think we would remember if he tried to stop them, Dave.
Oh, yeah, no, we shouldn't have done it the way we did it.
Who's we?
Oh, we, literally him and his friends who did it, not we in the general like where Americans accidentally take credit for a responsibility for their government's inappropriate behavior.
But no, literally, he and his friends did this.
And he's not sorry.
He's, he just acts like it was had nothing to do with him and was completely out of his control.
And I'm sorry, because as long as I mention, and I did trail off on that train of thought, I'm sorry, I don't know what the hell I meant to say there about more missing intelligence by Robert Dreyfus, but let me say this about it.
It's an extremely important article because it has in here that Ariel Sharon created a rump unit inside the prime minister's office in Israel to manufacture fake intelligence in English to stove pipe up into the American intelligence stream.
And Julian Borger has an article in the Guardian called The Spies Who Pushed for War that says the same thing.
And also it's in James Bamford's book, A Pretext for War.
But these guys and Karen Katowski, the whistleblower, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, who witnessed all this, she talked about Israeli generals marching around the Pentagon like they own the place, bursting into Douglas Feis' office, not being required to sign in and all of this kind of thing.
And now we should mention this, Dave, because it's important, man, sometimes that the dissenters will bring up that Sharon wanted Bush to go to Tehran first.
Right.
Not Baghdad.
That's correct.
In fact, it was Netanyahu who was the Iraq hawk and Sharon was more of an Iran hawk.
However, W. Bush was an Iraq hawk and the neoconservatives, and this may have something to do with the APAC split there.
I'm not sure, but the former editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, J.J. Goldberg, wrote this great article one time where he makes sure to blame W. Bush and Dick Cheney for doing this.
It's their responsibility.
But still, he goes in and describes how Netanyahu was closer to the neoconservatives in America.
And so there was the confluence of interests there.
And then Sharon ended up just getting on board and saying, okay, fine, we'll go to Iraq.
But as I'm sure you remember and people can find this, Sharon made this demand.
And then John Bolton echoed him and promised that, yes, we swear, Mr. Sharon, we will go to Tehran and Damascus next.
You can't just overthrow Saddam, but leave the Ayatollah Khamenei and his guys in power in Tehran, or they're just going to own Baghdad, dummy, was Sharon's position.
But then he's like, well, if you're doing it anyway, I'll help you do it.
But then you got to promise me you're going to do something about the Iranians.
But see, this is where we get back to David Wormser and what his interrogator does not know here.
What Wormser had promised, the quote in Tyranny's Ally is a new free Shiite Iraq will be a nightmare for Iran.
As he's sort of saying here, it's up to the Iranian people to overthrow it.
He thought the Iranian people will be so inspired by the regime change in Iraq that they would rise up and overthrow the Ayatollah then.
Well, that was 20, almost three years ago, Dave.
Yeah.
Now, it's, and it's also, you know, worth mentioning, right, because people like to point out this, like Sharon, you know, wanted to do Iran first.
And like, if you want to say, as I've heard some say, look, even the fact that they'll kind of make the argument that, well, okay, the fact that Sharon got on board with the plan, well, that kind of sounds more like the U.S. is bullying Israel around than Israel is bullying the U.S. around.
Yeah, he got on board with George W. Bush because like who was going to go against him at that time or whatever.
But that kind of omits the fact that obviously, as you mentioned, you got Benjamin Netanyahu, who goes on to be the longest serving prime minister, who he's not, Benjamin Netanyahu wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and then testified before Congress right ahead of the vote on the authorization of the use of military force in Iraq.
So it's clearly not just trying his best to influence America, both the American people and the American Congress to support this policy of the war in Iraq.
Ehud Barak wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, which was almost identical.
It almost could have been copied and pasted from Benjamin Netanyahu's op-ed, where it literally said, Saddam is the biggest threat.
He's working on weapons of mass destruction.
Positive reverberations will sweep through the region.
And also Perez, the former Israeli prime minister who was mentioned earlier, who took over from Itak Rabin, he wrote an op-ed in, I think it was in the Washington Post that he wrote an op-ed, which again was the exact same.
So you have like a long line of Israeli prime ministers publicly coming out attempting to move the American people toward this war.
Like, again, call that whatever the hell you want to call it, but we're going to talk about it.
Right.
And you also have very importantly, the neoconservatives completely controlled the National Review led by Jonah Goldberg and then with Michael Ladine and the rest of those kooks.
And then Bill Kristol ran the Weekly Standard and all these guys were the regulars on Fox News constantly.
And then they also controlled the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post and had a total lock.
Kruthammer and Krauthammer and Bill Kristol, David Brooks.
Um, Fred Hyatt and all of these kooks up and down, all of those um uh, all of the major newspapers editorial pages, and then, of course, with the liberal NEW YORK Times, supposedly with the Israeli agents uh, Judith Miller and Michael Gordon writing all their lies about Saddam's quest to seek atom bomb components, and all of that um.
And then, of course and let me just mention because um, as long as we're at, I jotted them down yeah, the American Enterprise Institute AND Heritage had been completely taken over by the neocons.
Then they also had the Washington Institute FOR NEAR EAST Policy, the Project FOR NEW American Century, the Jewish Institute FOR National Security Affairs and the Center FOR Security Policy.
This was really the?
Um, you know, the Black Hole right, the center of gravity of the Neoconservative movement in the think tanks at that time.
Um, and then uh oh sometimes, for some reason, I always leave out Max Boot.
I hate Max Boot and I don't know if he was ever Commi, but he's basically one of them anyway.
And um, and of course um, Brett Stevens at the NEW YORK Times um, rule Marker of the Jerusalem POST yeah, formerly editor of the Jerusalem POST, that's right.
Uh, rural Mark Garek was another one, and Victor Davis Hansen.
People like revere this guy as some kind of smart guy because he said, oh yeah, you know this Iraq thing, this is just like the Peloponnesian War, because I wrote about that once and everything is just like that once, and so that's why we got to do this war.
Absolute idiot.
I don't know how anyone respects that guy at all.
I mean listen, he's any of them at that time.
He's.
He's Look, Richard or sorry, excuse me, Victor Davis Hansen is probably the smartest in that group and he but look man again, he just got everything so catastrophically wrong during the terror wars, just like the rest of them, and so, at the very least, like it's like I don't know dude, you just you got to wear that a little bit more.
Like like I was saying before, I mean it's, it's the communist mindset, this like you got to break a few eggs to make an omelet the omelette which never ends up coming that you just you can't get the war in Iraq this wrong, and then, of course, also get Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and Somalia and Yemen and all the rest of them, all completely so catastrophically wrong, and then just like act as if nothing happened and get right back to denouncing others for their wild conspiracy theories.
Now let me tell you about how Chalabi was really right, Scott.
It's like, what are you talking about, dude?
This is just too crazy.
Anyway here Natalie, I want you to play because because I do got to wrap up soon, play the, the one I just sent you the, the clip with a timestamp.
Start from there, because we got to get this one, because this is really to me, was the comment of the entire interview.
So let's let Whimser go for a second, because it's coming up here.
The world pivots to a different direction.
Absolutely.
Look, he was the last vestige of Arab nationalism.
He was trying to resurrect it.
We had faced 30 years, 40 years of a pro-Soviet Arab nationalist wave that claimed Lebanon, claimed Syria, claimed Iraq, claimed Libya, claimed Algeria, claimed a whole bunch of countries.
We were afraid that if you let this genie back out of the bottle, it undoes the Cold War in the Middle East.
It undoes our victory.
And we needed to challenge that and shut it down.
Also, in terms of Israel, we wanted the Yaser Arafat not to have the cavalry over the horizon in the form of Saddam to use whatever he was giving to wage war.
So does that not concede the entire argument?
I mean, look, I don't even understand exactly what he's saying here, but Scott, try to, again, the whole purpose of this interview was come in here and say, hey, this wacky Dave Smith guy is saying you're part of the Israel lobby who fought this war for Israel.
And he's like, dude, that's insane.
So Israel is the cradle of civilization and we always need to protect Israel.
And then he just lets this slip when they go, why were we fighting?
Because it's finally drilling down.
I'm like, but why did we care about overthrowing Saddam to begin with?
And he goes, well, look, here's the big picture, Scott.
Arab nationalism was viewed as a major threat.
And why is that?
Well, because that could have made Yitzhak Rabin feel like he had this backup that was still coming.
That could have like given him a hint of like, nah, dude, time's on your side.
There are these Arabs.
Yes, I'm sorry, Arafat.
I'm sorry.
I say Rabin.
I meant that Yasser Arafat would have maybe felt like, hey, there's this movement of Arabs identifying as Arabs who are not tethered to the U.S. Empire, who are like out there who may have your back in this fight and they may one day be a real problem for that.
Like, whoa, what?
You just admitted that and didn't think that was a big deal.
I'm sorry, dude.
That's the whole argument right there.
You literally just admitted that a major consideration for why you, the neoconservatives, wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein was that the Israel-Palestine conflict might be helped from our point of view by it.
Sorry, dude.
That's the whole Merry Christmas, everybody.
That's your Christmas present from part of the problem.
David Wormser admits it in his whole words.
The entire, I couldn't believe this.
The entire interview, which was an exercise in refuting Hortonianism, just conceded the whole thing right there.
Hey, I got a red bow.
I got a red bow for the present here.
Well, the West and its local friends must engage Islamist fundamentalism with better associates than the Baathists.
So I don't care if you're worried about bin Ladenite terrorism.
Saddam Hussein is, you know, with a clean-shaven chin and the French beret and olive green uniform.
Why?
You don't want to ally like that against the guy with the long beard and the robe and the suicide bombers because he'd be too effective, I guess.
Well, look, I mean, I'll end almost unsaying.
This will be my final comment and then you could get your final one and we'll wrap up.
But there's a lot of things that are kind of exposed here.
Look, one of them, just think about it in the present day, right?
It would kind of, I could kind of understand where some people who are on the fence maybe haven't done all the deep reading and stuff, they go, I don't know.
I mean, you guys were kind of making a big deal out of Israel and Israel's role in all of this, but like it's on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
It's the U.S. government.
Israel's this tiny country, like whatever.
But like almost maybe you've thought that about us for many years.
Have you been paying attention the last two years?
Have you noticed how like every single war hawk in this goddamn country, all the ones who supported Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Syria and Somalia and Yemen and Ukraine and all the ones who support all of the wars, they get a little weird when the topic of Israel is brought up, huh?
It seems like it becomes the thing that they care about more than anything else.
And that's pretty clear.
Okay, well, that's interesting and that's worth.
talking about and examining.
And David Wormser is proving it for you guys right here.
And look, like the other thing that you notice is that in this very emotional, because it's purely, like, even when you say all that stuff about Israel being the cradle of civilization, like even if you believe that about ancient Israeli society, it has nothing to do with the modern government.
There's nothing to do with the modern conflict.
This is a religious view.
It's an emotional view.
And one of the problems with being emotional is you get irrational.
You tend to believe things that aren't true.
Now, look, it is insane to think that Saddam Hussein posed some legitimate threat to the state of Israel.
It's insane to think that this was like even the actual argument he's making that Yasser Arafat would have felt some Scott.
I mean, we're talking about, we're not talking about 1979.
We're talking about 2002, 2003, like the defeated, humiliated Saddam Hussein, who didn't even have control of his own country.
Like Yasser Arafat was looking over at him going, yeah, me and that guy, we could take out the Israelis and the Americans.
It's just, it's totally ridiculous.
But of course, it's not a logical belief.
It's an emotional belief.
But what is the emotion here?
The emotion is to protect Israel.
And that's everything else is like a rationalization, given an emotional, illogical one, but it's a rationalization to get back to that emotional starting point, which was we got to protect Israel.
Yep.
Debate Bases in Saudi Arabia00:05:45
David Wormser admits it.
Final word to you, Scott.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a great quote from Philip Zelikow again, Connolly Zaris guy, more famous for being the principal author of the 9-11 Commission report.
But he said, I'll tell you what this war is really about.
And it's something that they don't really talk about very much, but it's Israel.
And that they don't really focus on that because quite frankly, it's not a very popular sell.
And so instead, we've made it about weapons of mass destruction and the rest.
Paul Wolfowitz also gave a famous interview to Vanity Fair where he said, well, we settled on weapons of mass destruction for bureaucratic reasons when, you know, the reality is we want to do this for all these others and including Israel and including the absolute harebrained idiocy that, you know, how one of the main, really the top reason that Al-Qaeda turned against the United States was our bases in Saudi Arabia that we're using to bomb and blockade Iraq?
Well, according to Wolfowitz, that's why we have to invade Iraq.
So we can get those bases out of Saudi Arabia and move them to Iraq.
And then it'll be fine.
And of course, you know, we're having this conversation 150,000 suicide bombings later, Dave.
But mostly over there, right?
If you don't count, you know, like I saw old IPatch McCain arguing with you on Twitter that he stopped any more September 11th, except for that underpants bombing over Detroit that almost brought the plane down over Detroit.
And except for Boston and San Bernardino and Orlando and, you know, all the other terrorist attacks, the Boston bombing, if I say Boston, all the absolute horrific attacks that actually have happened in this country since then because of these wars and all based on these lies.
And I'm really glad, you know, right after this, what time is it?
Here in just a few minutes, in 20 minutes, I'm going to interview Phil Turney, survivor of the USS Liberty attack again, who the Israelis tried to murder in 1967, along with they successfully killed 34 sailors and attempted to sink the USS Liberty.
And that's back in the news because Ben Shapiro wants to fight about it.
All right, then let's fight about it.
And as you said, boy, after looking at the last two years, looking at how Israel swoops in and buys TikTok and CBS and CNN and Paramount, just so that they can cram all this Zionist crap down your throat.
And it couldn't be more obvious in broad daylight.
They call the censor us all and all these things that like, ah, maybe it is a good time to revisit what is the neoconservative movement and why do they love the liquids so much?
And why did they lie us into Iraq War II and destroy the Middle East and get the entire, not just new decade and new century, but the entire third millennium off on the wrong foot.
What is it about David Wormser and those neocons?
And then that's the answer.
Everybody knows it.
You see it right in front of your face.
Greater Israel and their necessity of enslaving the American people to accomplish their goals for them that they can't possibly accomplish themselves.
Simple as that.
Well said.
Well, look, let's end this with first.
I'll just issue the challenge on your behalf.
I'll speak for you, Scott.
But hey, David Wormser, since you want to come around and kind of do these shows and try to correct the record, because I guess, you know, these days we got a lot more of a big megaphone than you have.
Why don't we set it up?
Why don't we do a Scott Horton versus David Wormser debate on this?
And you can bring all your stuff about how Israel is the cradle of Western civilization.
And we'll see how that does up against some pushback.
I think I would love to see it.
That'd be a Bill Crystal round too.
And I can guarantee you that our good friend Gene Epstein at the Soho Forum would be happy to host that in a very serious and professional atmosphere and all that.
I'm willing to do a zero hedge debate too, whatever's on your mind.
But if we want to do it right, I'll fly to New York and whoop them real good in front of everybody.
And not for nothing, Gene Epstein pays handsome fees for doing the thing too.
So like, but absolutely, we could, we could make that happen if David Wormser wants to.
That being said, Scott, thank you so much.
Merry Christmas to you and yours.
Tell people again about the brand new Academy that just launched.
And I know the new Cold War course is up there, or at least part of it's up there NASA.
Tell people all about the Scott Horton Academy and how they can go sign up for that.
Yeah.
Well, so everything is YouTube shorts nowadays.
I'm addicted to them too, but this is the long form.
My Middle East course is 30 hours long, 25, 26 hours long.
And part one, the first half of my new Cold War course is also 30 hours.
There's also great courses by Ramsey Barud on Israel-Palestine, Bill Bupert on how we lost every war since 1945, James Bovard on COVID and Waco and drug wars and TSA and 40 years of badass investigative journalism there.
I got Adam Francisco, a Lutheran scholar from Concordia University, debunking Christian Zionism.
And very soon, we're going to be adding C.J. Kilmer on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person who ever lived.
Bob Murphy on the Great Depression and the New Deal.
We're going to have something or another, I'm not sure yet, by Daryl Cooper and lots of great stuff.
So everybody go to scotthortonacademy.com and use promo code Christmas20 and you'll save 20%.
Or if you are going to buy a lifetime subscription, especially use scotthortonacademy.com slash P-O-T-P.
And that way you'll get 20% off the same 20% off a lifetime subscription or 10% off on an annual subscription there.
But use Christmas20 on the annual and you'll get the 20% off.
And it's been a huge success so far.
I've got nothing but positive feedback.
I busted my ass on it this whole last year to get this thing done for you.
And I really hope that everybody gets something out of it.