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May 8, 2019 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:07
Pretext For War - Pompeo Pushes Iran To Quit Nuclear Deal

Pompeo and Bolton are hoping that one of two false pretexts will push Trump to war on Iran. First the bogus intel report from Israel that Iran was poised to attack and second the disinformation that Iran is pulling out of the JCPOA treaty. Will the neocons hoodwink Trump into another US war based on lies?

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Iran Exits the Deal 00:14:24
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
Doing well.
Let's try to stop a war.
It looks like it's getting closer and closer to.
And the hot spot for the morning is that conflict, proposed conflict against the Iranians.
And it looks like if you want to say, well, who's stirring up this trouble?
Why is there going to be a conflict?
The tragedy is, is we can't exonerate the United States government.
I do the American people.
I don't think the American people say, oh, yeah, that's why we need this war.
But most of them aren't paying any attention.
But our leaders are, and it's getting hot and heavy.
Not only have we compared it to some degree with the build-up in Iraq against for that invasion, but others are doing this now too and say it's exactly the same.
And they have to have a pretext for it.
I mean, they talk about how bad the Iranians are.
They're the chief terrorists of the whole world, and therefore it's their fault so we have to deal with them.
But there's a lot of weaponry moving in that direction, you know, troops and warships and bombers, and the conversation is getting pretty tough too.
But it's all, you know, deals with our policies, which we're the driving force in a negative way.
Once we decided that, or Trump decided that that treaty, this agreement, that the Iranians would back off on any nuclear bomb development, which seems like it should be a good position to the world.
That's certainly the position I've had.
You know, we worked out some things with the Soviets, and Reagan did that, even when there were a lot more bombs involved.
It was still worthwhile talking about de-escalation.
But right now, it's escalation because you can't trust the Iranians, so we are told.
But, you know, it started with Trump saying this treaty isn't good.
It's a bad deal for us.
It helps the Iranians too much, where he has nothing to verify that.
But he's also been prodded by a couple allies, so-called allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
They want him to do this, and they're very unified on this.
So they're looking for excuses.
So it was a bad treaty, bad accord.
So we're getting out of it.
And then all of a sudden, we decide that, or Trump decides that their Revolutionary Guard, they're a bunch of terrorists, you know, and that has stirred up trouble.
So they were making all these excuses, but it's the movement of the troops, I think, has, and the language being used now has gotten the attention here in the last 24, 48 hours.
And they look like they're very serious.
The headlines aren't too good.
Here's one.
Trump and Bolton are putting war with Iran on a hair trigger.
And that, of course, is what we've been concerned about.
Sometimes hair triggers aren't always deliberately pulled, a hair trigger.
Sometimes you make a mistake.
And that's what I'm hoping doesn't happen.
But then there's these accusations about the treaty.
They're trying to put the blame at the Iranians aren't following the treaty, which I know you've studied this carefully.
And there's a little bit of fiction when it comes to whether or not they have been honorable in following the accords.
Yeah, and you know, the neocons are great at false pretexts.
The entire Iraq war was based on false pretexts that the neocons created out of thin air.
And we know this from people like Karen Kutowski, who was in the Pentagon watching them create the false pretexts.
And it was directly people like Bolton and Eliot Abrams and the others who were creating these lies.
And so what they're doing with Iran, they want their war, they're desperate for it.
They're creating two false pretexts.
The first one is, and we heard it, we talked about this on the show Monday, that Bolton started warning, we've got some intelligence suggesting that Iran is about to attack the U.S. or its allies in the region.
And it turns out that afternoon, according to Israeli news sources, that that info was handed them by the Israelis, that great intel, and the Israelis who want nothing more than a U.S. attack on Iran, so I think you'd have to treat it that way.
They also gave us a lot of good intel on Iraq.
Likewise, Bolton's sudden announcement that we're moving the carrier group.
We've got to move them, we've got to address this.
That was old hat, it turns out.
That was from April.
And the second pretext, which we'll talk a little bit more, and you touched on it, and that's our title too, trying to get them to push them to quit that deal because they know that the compliant media, just like they were compliant in the Iraq war, the compliant media, and they're already doing it.
CNN is already doing it.
Iran's getting out of the deal.
Iran's getting out of the deal.
That will be the refrain that all the talking heads will say, and the Americans will say, well, we've got to attack.
We're getting out of the deal.
And we've talked about this as well: that the position that our government takes is that there just won't be a little sanction here and there.
These are severe, the worst thing in the world.
We're going to destroy the economy, destroy the people in that country so that they turn against their leader, which is a bunch of nonsense.
And they say, zero exports.
And that's sort of been the economic bottom line right now.
And that's when, when should a government finally stand up?
As dangerous as it is, I mean, the odds are just overwhelmingly militarily opposed to Iran.
When you think of the weapons that we have, and we have them circled by nuclear weapons, but they're trying to precipitate it, like you say, the Iranis to do something.
Of course, the Iranians now are saying, look, if you do this and we're down to zero and we can't survive, we just might end up participating in not having you go through the Straits of Hamuz.
And that's it.
That's this issue.
And then somebody will shoot somebody and some ship will be sunk.
Who knows where?
But they're looking for that event.
They're looking for that.
Disgustingly, the neocons talked about a Pearl Harbor event.
And unfortunately, they used one too.
They want big events.
They want to galvanize the American people because right now the American people aren't paying any attention.
They're not nearly as knowledgeable what's going on now with the Iranians as they finally became knowledgeable before Iraq.
Because in Iraq, they were indifferent to it until after about a year of that propaganda.
They find, oh, yeah, we have to go after him because he's part of the 9-11, you know, that big event.
So that is a tragedy.
They're keeping working on it.
It's always working on that pretext.
And it's such an evil position.
There is no desire, any gold to give one inch.
And what is hard to understand is that they don't seem to take into consideration how dangerous this is.
You know, oh, yeah, we get in these wars and then they last 18 or 19 years.
Well, maybe we're spending too much money.
And they still don't weigh the real cost of human tragedy.
You know, well, it's getting a little expensive.
We're getting tired of this.
But no, let's start another one.
So the neocons don't deserve a position in our government in the position of policy.
And they are very, very powerful.
You know, they're connected, you know, are part of the media.
They're part of the Republican Party, the Democrat Party.
They're part of the establishment, the real bureaucratic establishment in the CIA and the FBI and even the politicians who might have a desire to clean it up.
It is pervasive.
And right now, they're in charge of the foreign policy.
Yeah, there's no question.
And you mentioned early in your segment here about sanctions and about paying.
And we have actually a graphic that, I mean, this displays it better than anything.
If we get this up on the screen and have a look at what's happened, this is from the Central Bank of Iran and the IMF put out by the BBC.
And you can see here when it says nuclear deal implemented, sanctions lifted in 2016.
Look at that big, huge blue line.
A lot of GDP growth for Iran.
Things started doing well.
Also, a lot of growth for Europe, by the way.
And then look over toward the right-hand side.
U.S. sanctions reinstated.
Just a punch in the gut to the Iranian economy, putting him in a crisis mode.
Can you imagine if something happened like that to the U.S., if the Chinese directly did something to just put our economy in a tailspin, we'd be ready for war.
But we can use a perfect analogy with Venezuela.
They had a lousy economy.
They weren't doing well and they had their real problems and they needed to deal with them.
But a couple years ago, we put on the sanctions and pings just crashed there.
And then they say, see, it's all that guy's fault.
But yeah, there was the fault of a bad economic policy.
But if we have a downturn or when we have a downturn, they can't say, well, it's all Trump's fault, all Obama's fault.
It's the fault of policies, long-term policy.
So the conditions, whether it was in Iran or in Venezuela, it's these sanctions that do have an effect.
It isn't so easy to get around them.
That's why just rooting for the underdog means, you know, why can't they have an alternative route?
But right now it doesn't look like they're likely to get an easy alternative route, mainly because those allies that we've been defending for 50 years in Europe, they're not much interested in doing it.
They're interested in penalizing the Iranians and kowtowing to the United States government and to our bureaucracy because we take care of them.
Yeah, it's a lot of cowardice on the part of the Europeans because they announced, oh, you know, we'll put a mechanism in place where we can continue the trade so we can stay in the deal, even though the Americans are out.
They've been dragging their feet.
They've introduced some system that doesn't work very well.
But the Europeans, anyone who stays in the deal is obligated by the deal to give some relief to Iran if they suffer penalties from someone out of the deal.
And this is one of the other reasons, the pretext that we are talking about, is that Iran announced today, actually, that it's going to take a couple of moves in the deal.
One of them is going to keep some of this enriched uranium that it was obligated to sell beforehand and keep some of the heavy water.
That's the first stage.
And then they told the Europeans, okay, now you've got 60 days before you do the second stage.
If you don't do anything to give us the relief you're obligated by the deal to give us, then we're going to go ahead and we're going to enrich on our own up to medical grade.
Not weapons grade, but to medical grade.
So it's kind of an incrementalism by saying, listen, we need some relief.
And within the deal, we can talk about it later, there is sections in the deal providing for this exact thing for Iran to do if someone else is in violation.
And it's being described, oh, they're pulling out, they're pulling out a deal, it's their fault.
Another pretext.
That's why we have to get them because they're not following it.
But if you look at it, it's our government that's lecturing to them.
Well, if they drop out, that is the ultimate crime.
Well, we dropped out a year ago.
They have no qualms about doing that.
But no, the thing that they're threatening to drop out of was the things that they voluntarily agreed to do.
And there was some of that going on with the Iraqi deal, too.
Things that they agreed over and above any other written agreement.
But it's a matter of propagandizing.
And when a CIA agent does it, he admits you've got to lie, you know, to get your way.
And this is what happens.
But it's pretty serious business.
And right now, some people believe it's a potter keg.
Now, I've been sort of keeping an eye on the markets to see if they totally agree that it's a power keg for the next day or two.
Well, for the next day or two, it doesn't look like it is.
But that can change before we finish our program sometimes.
But because it's uncertain.
It's uncertain for our analysis.
It's uncertain probably for our administration of what's going to happen.
So I'm sure the markets are uncertain which way to go.
But most of the time, you know, when things are imminent, you know, the markets will respond to it and oil prices will go up and that sort of thing.
It'll be something to watch.
You know, I spent some time this morning going through as much of the mainstream media as I could look at from BBC, ABC News, CNN, everywhere I could see, to see if there was an explanation as to what exactly Iran announced it was doing today.
Nothing.
The only thing was they're pulling out of the deal.
And it went to our old friends at Moon of Alabama, who thankfully do some deeper analysis to point out that this is completely within paragraphs 26 and 37 of the JCPOA deal.
And that is that Iran is within its rights.
Paragraph 26 said Iran will treat, this is part of the deal that they all agreed on, including the U.S. Iran will treat reintroduction or reimposition of sanctions as grounds to cease performing its commitments under the deal in whole or in part.
And in paragraph 37, which was the dispute resolution mechanism, called for the U.N. Security Council to get involved.
And of course, we have a veto over that, but it also says Iran states if sanctions are reimposed in whole or in part, Iran will treat this as grounds to cease performing its commitments.
So this is built into the agreement that if you do this to us, then we are completely within our rights to start pulling back.
Now, as a show of good faith, they haven't done that for a whole year.
They've said, okay, Europeans, we're going to hold back.
We don't want to stir up the waters, but you're going to have to give us some relief on this.
The Europeans have dragged their heels because they're afraid of Washington, and now it's time to put up or shut up.
Young People Suffer Most 00:04:51
You know, when they talk about the sanctions, it's always, well, we're going to not let them have weapons and energy, and we're going to punish the people, the rich people and the bankers and a few politicians.
But the whole thing is, is, overall, when these countries are attacked like this by our sanctions, the group that probably suffers the most are young people, poor people, people who need medications.
That was true.
Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people died in Iraq with our bombing and our sanctions.
And that, of course, is, you know, and I admit how bad Venezuela has been, but it was made much worse.
And a lot more children die.
And they figure, well, this will, I'm sure this is what they calculate.
They say, well, if the American people hear this, we just blame the current leader, and therefore they will support the military overthrow because the children are suffering.
And I wouldn't put it past them that they reason in that direction.
Well, if the children die, then this is going to put pressure and sympathies on the American people, you know, because they'll say, look, the children, I remember how they, leading up to the Iraq war, how they were, Saddam was taking babies out of incubators and letting them die, and it was all a flat-out lie.
You know, this is the whole thing.
So the children do suffer, but that usually, they never put sanctions on the children.
Yeah.
They always put sanctions on some controversial person or somebody that's made a lot of money or he's a politician, something like that.
But you're right, though, that's crazy.
You know, there's a bad guy over there doing bad things.
So we're going to do even worse things to the people.
But the other thing that we haven't touched on yet, what I think is sort of important and fits, it's one of the puzzles that fit into this important piece that may well come together in the next few days.
We don't know.
But Pompeo was supposed to go hang out with Angela Merkel in Germany and have a meeting with her.
At the last minute, he says, no, I can't make it.
And nobody knew what was happening.
The journalists on the plane with him, they didn't know where they were going.
So he lands in cover of darkness in Iraq.
16 years after we liberated, they can't even, as Trump said earlier this month, we can't even land with the lights on.
So that's a great success.
He landed in darkness.
He stayed less than two hours.
He met with the Iraqi president and prime minister and told them about an increased threat stream and claimed that there were imminent plans for Iran to attack.
So what was he doing there?
He was passing on what I suspect is bogus Israeli information to try to stir up the Iraqi government.
And maybe even Bob Wenzel speculated, I think today about this, maybe even try to get some rights, some landing rights or some rights to do some staging against Iran from Iraq.
You know, this may be one of the biggest meetings that he's having because we sort of know where the Europeans stand and our other allies and Israel and Saudi Arabia and all where they stand.
But Iraq, the country we liberated and turned them into a Western democracy, are now more aligned with the Iranians.
So that might be the real question because he's probably in some ways covering it, maybe threatening them too.
Look, you don't mess around.
If we're going in there, you're not going to mess around and this is what we're going to do.
But why would they trust us on that?
Now, they're ones that might be, you know, out front and breaking with our policy.
And they haven't already spoken out.
I mean, I don't think they exactly like us being that they're owned by us.
But I think that's probably their concern.
But I bet you it's still going to be a concern because if they start this, you know, military approach to Iran, I don't think they're going to get a lot of sympathy from the Iraqi people.
You know, there's a few Shia in Iraq, too, you know.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you can only imagine Pompeo is not going to be, is not a great diplomat.
You know, even Kim Jong-un says, don't send this guy over.
We can't stand him.
Nobody can stand him.
You can imagine what he's like when he gets over there.
But it's Iraq that stands to lose the most if the U.S. invades Iran, because it's a very important trading partner.
They share to a degree a religion.
The majority in Iraq is Shia.
And they share close ties, historic ties, what have you.
So if the U.S. overthrows the Iranian government and puts this crazy cult, the MEK, in charge, Bolton was paid $40,000 for one speech to this crazy cult, the MEK.
If they put them in power, that is going to be just a disaster for Iraq.
So I don't see how Iraq can go along with even Pompeo's fisticuffs.
No, there's going to be a big war before that's going to happen.
They're not going to put up with that.
Engagement vs. Isolationism Conference 00:01:39
And I think they're well aware of that.
And it'd be interesting to have been able to sit in on the conversation The US and the Iraqis, because I bet you are plenty of threats.
Absolutely.
Well, we're watching this closely, and we'll be making an announcement about our annual Washington conference in the next day or so.
It will be in August, toward the end of August.
I'll let you know that.
But we're going to send out the announcement very soon.
But this is what we're going to be talking about.
Our theme, generally speaking, is going to be engagement versus isolationism.
So it's going to be an exciting, exciting conference.
Watch this space, and we'll let you know as soon as we can.
Very good.
And one thing we will attempt to do and will do is explain the word isolationism because it's a misused term.
And some people get blamed for being these terrible, terrible isolationists, and they're really on the side of non-intervention.
And they're very much involved in promoting international trade and diplomatic relations with everybody in friendship.
Quite a bit different, so there will be some good speakers there.
And we certainly cannot avoid thinking about our history and how it was started and some of the beliefs of the founders.
But right now, that is of less interest to most people.
The main interest right now is the so-called diplomacy, which is totally controlled by the neocons, and the dangers that they have created for us.
And for us, I mean, for the American people and for our system and for the cause of liberty.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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