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Dec. 12, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
30:02
How Washington Provoked the New Cold War, with guest Scott Horton

Libertarian Institute director and longtime Antiwar.com editorial director Scott Horton joins today's Liberty Report to discuss his new book on how it was the US, not Russia, that started the new Cold War.

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Time Text
Scott Welcome to the Program 00:02:45
Hello, everybody.
Thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Very good.
And we do have a special guest today.
We've known him for a long time.
He's been in the studio.
He's been on our program.
And, you know, I think early on in some of the presidential races, I think he paid a little bit of attention to what we were doing there.
So he's a friend.
He's been a friend for a good while now.
And he's a friend of Liberty.
And a lot of people know him.
And his name is Scott Horton.
And Scott, welcome to our program.
We're delighted you're with us today.
Thank you so much for having me, Dr. Paul.
It's an honor to be with you.
Well, good.
There's going to be lots to talk about, but we'll have to do the best we can in our 30 minutes that we have.
But this is, it is important because you are an expert and people recognize that you are.
And foreign policy is the thing that we work on the most.
And right now, there's a little bit of activity.
I think your country is called Syria or something like that.
No, it's not a country anymore.
It's been a long time since it was a country.
But the area is called Syria.
It's there.
And quite frankly, you know, it gets a little confusing for me.
And Daniel is an expert.
And I go to him, I say, Daniel, what group is this?
And what group is this?
And who is this?
And whose side are we on?
And hopefully we can sort this out because, you know, it's easier for me to look at it, Scott, because when I look at it, I thought, well, what I want to know is how we're involved.
You know, what stays involved?
Is it our money, our kids?
And are we aggravating thing?
And, you know, and I narrow that in.
So I'm very interested in finding out what you think about our involvement there because that's the name of the game.
The world, we're not going to change the world.
We might influence the world.
But overall, you know, things march on.
But once again, Scott, welcome to the program.
Well, thank you very much again, Dr. Paul.
And I think, you know, I mean, obviously, as everyone knows, I've been inspired by your work these many years.
And as you instructed us years ago, that the same economics that apply to government programs and government action here domestically in our domestic empire, as Keith Knight calls it, that same stuff applies.
The same thinking applies overseas.
And so just like with any other government agency, say, for example, the central bank, the more they create problems, the more work they have to do.
Iraq War 3.0 00:12:05
And as the soldiers in Vietnam called it, the self-licking ice cream cone.
That's what they called the Pentagon.
And so in my books, my previous book, Enough Already, is about the terror wars.
And I start with Jimmy Carter and I show how it's just a long train of bad decisions and mistakes and how they all lead one to the other, to the other.
And, you know, I think if there's an advantage to it, if there's something unique about Enough Already, it's, I hope, to be, that I'm able to show regular folks about the Sunni-Shia wars over there and not the differences in the religion because that's not what they're fighting about.
It's about power.
And essentially, it's America's Sunni axis versus Iran's Shiite axis.
However, Dr. Paul, in that Iraq War II that you tried to stop back in 2003, but they refused to listen to you, which I remember so well, what they ended up doing, that whole horror show, as people remember 2003 through 8, 11, that essentially was a war that America fought for Iran, America's government's strategic rivals in the region.
They put Iran's best friends in power there.
Now, the thinking was that they would have dominance over the Shiite population, and then they would use that dominance over the Iraqi Shiites to lord it over Iran, to lord it over Hezbollah and Syria.
Well, none of that worked out.
The neocons are as dumb as they are conniving and premeditated in their murder plans.
And so they blew it.
They ruined everything and they put Iran's best friends in power there to the detriment of America and its Sunni alliance.
And of course, including Israel there, but Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and all the Gulf states, that's the American empire there.
So then in the W. Bush years, before Obama ever even came to town, they had a policy called the redirection, where they said, oh, they admitted that they had messed up, essentially.
And they said, but to correct that, now we got to tilt back towards Al-Qaeda because Saudi Arabia doesn't have a real land army.
We're their land army, right?
Like we saw in the Iraq War I back in 1991.
But if they want to invade Syria and Obama wasn't willing to invade Syria for them, so who do they send?
Prince Ben Arbin Sultan emptied his prisons and sent a bunch of jihadi suicide bomber crazies.
The same men who had been America's enemies in the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War II, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda in Iraq, they became the heroes back from 2011 through 17, really, working for the Democrats and America's allies over there until Trump finally called off support for them in the summer of 17.
So now here we are a decade later replaying the same scheme where because especially Israel and our other Sunni allies in the region resent the increase in Shiite Iranian power in the region that Bush Jr. had caused, W. Bush had caused, that they've been determined to try to at least, if we gave them Baghdad, we got to take Damascus away from them, even if that means supporting a bunch of al-Qaeda terrorists to take the place over, which has finally succeeded now.
Okay, I want Daniel to say hello to you this morning, Scott.
Dan, are you there with us?
I am, Scott.
Fascinating summary.
You know, I think it's absolutely right.
I mean, you know, in the context of what you're saying, this is basically Iraq War 3.0.
It almost sounds like.
You know, we did 91, we did 02 and 3, and we're back.
This would be four because three was the ISIS war when Obama got and then he had to blow it up again in 2014 through 17.
So now we're on four, maybe four and a half.
I'm just talking to you.
We want to get to your book, but I just, I can't resist one question about your summary.
And I thought it was excellent.
But I do wonder about the neocons.
Do you think they consciously installed Shia power in Iraq after the war?
Or was that waiting in the wings and they just blew stuff up?
And in the shambles, the Shia were better organized.
They certainly had a large proportion of the population, the majority.
Do you think they sort of took advantage of the chaos that, I mean, the neocons are great at blowing things up.
They're not so great at putting things back together.
What kind of a proportion do you think that was by design or just by virtue of them blowing the thing up?
That's a great question.
So, you know, the original clean break plan had it that they would have a Hashemite king, the cousin of the king of Jordan, would come and rule.
And because of the magic of the Muhammad's blood in his veins, the Shiites would obey him, even though he's a Sunni and a Western puppet, which was a ridiculous pipe dream.
And then I guess the king of who the king of Jordan died and was replaced and all that was in flux.
So in the plan, they changed it to Ahmed Chalabi.
And he was the Iraqi exile who was supported by Iran, who was basically shining the neocons on and, you know, telling them what they needed to hear about how America and its friends in Jordan and Turkey especially would be dominant in Iraq and the Iraqi Shiites would be compliant.
Now, the thing is, once they invaded, W. Bush, I don't know, under Connolly Zerice's advice or Powell's maybe, said, you know, we don't really like this guy, Chalabi.
We're not going to just seat him in power.
Instead, we're going to try to set up this caucus system where we handpick people from different groups and whatever.
But then, as you may recall, what happened was in January of 2004, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said, if you believe in God, I want you to go outside and demand one man, one vote, democratic elections.
So every Shiite in all of Iraq did it.
They're the 60% supermajority, went outside and said, hey, Bush, you want to start this war all over again against the people you just fought it for?
And Bush, of course, blinked and said, of course not.
And so then it was the Shiites who wrote the constitution that summer and fall.
And they were the ones who won the absolute supermajority in the parliament in the purple-fingered elections of January 2005.
And it's been essentially an Iranian sock puppetry ever since.
And that's, again, why Obama tried to overthrow Assad in Syria was because they couldn't reverse Iraq War II in Baghdad.
They had cleansed all of Baghdad of Sunnis, and it was just a catastrophe.
So they couldn't undo Iraq.
So they tried to get a consolation prize in Damascus.
But then that resulted in the caliphate, where ISIS, instead of going west and sacking Damascus, they went east and sacked Mosul, right?
And the rest of Western Iraq and created the caliphate under Baghdadi.
And so then Obama, that was so embarrassing.
They had to go and explode it again.
Again, fighting for the Iraqi Shiites and the Iranians.
They wish they hadn't fought Iraq War II for.
That's who they helped to blow up the caliphate back in 14 through 17, which led to the status quo where al-Qaeda was holed up in the Idlib province, waiting for their chance, which now they've taken.
Scott, I want to ask you a question that's a little more generalized.
That mess we have over there, you know, and keep him up with it.
This is the job for all of us, especially when you get mixed up and listen to some of the ordinary news out there because you have to blank that out.
But with this mess going on and with your analysis, what is the best we can come out with here?
Because we can say, well, we can take a statement here from Trump and he doesn't like war.
He's going to stop wars.
And then we also know that we're involved.
You know, my first comment when this thing broke out a week or two ago, I said, Daniel, I said, where's the CIA?
Where's the CIA?
Where are the special forces?
So we do become cynical, but cynical in a way that we may be thinking in the correct way.
But can you figure out, see if you can give me any way where things could turn and the world would be better off or is this downhill all the way?
Well, Dr. Paul, I really regret to say that I'm so pessimistic about the current situation, the fact that they were able to just seize power in Damascus this way.
All the Shiite and for that matter, the secular Sunnis, you know, who don't want to go along with the new bin Ladenite regime, but also all the Marianite, and I'm sorry, I always forget off the top of my head the different, there's four or five major different kinds of Christians that live in Syria and, of course, have since ancient times, who are all in danger, the Alawites as well.
I mean, this is essentially the ISIS Caliphate again.
And if we remember what happened last time, Obama had to go, like I was just saying, Obama had to go and blow it back up again.
Having Baghdadi up there on the balcony at the mosque, across between bin Laden and Mussolini, declaring the caliphate and himself the divinely ordained dictator of it all, that was just way too much to handle.
So they had to go and blow it up.
Now, this guy that they put in power here, Jolani, is clearly much more of a direct Western sock puppet.
But still, all of his men are essentially just Junior bin Ladens.
That's who they are: extremely radical Salafi type and very political-based Islamist terrorists.
Basically, the same guys that we fought in Iraq War II who flocked to Iraq to fight us in Iraq War II from all over the world.
The same guys again.
And so, and I'll tell you this too, sir, that the last time this happened, when they seized Mosul in the summer of 14, I, for example, went on the Tom Woods show and I said, okay, well, this is very bad.
However, they're surrounded by enemies.
They're surrounded by rump, Shiite Iraq.
They're surrounded by Saudi, who, of course, like them, but don't want them crossing the line.
They've got the king of Jordan.
And of course, they have the Baathists in Syria under the protection of Iran and Russia.
And so their days are numbered.
And they're crazy.
They're like, you know, Patrick Coburn called them the Islamist Khmer Rouge.
Like they're complete madmen, the ISIS types.
And so they can't run a state.
They can't exist as a country in the modern world, in the modern world, really.
And they're surrounded by enemies.
So their time is up.
So I advise Tom Woods.
I says, we could just get out of there now and it'll take care of itself anyway.
In this case, I'm not so sure that's true because in this case, they're not surrounded by enemies.
In this case, they're supported by Israel and they're supported by Turkey.
And they have Lebanon on their left coast, but Hezbollah will be lucky if they could keep them out, much less Hezbollah be able to force them out.
And the Iraqi Shia are on the whole other side.
They're in eastern Iraq.
They're not coming.
And so America is going back to war in Syria is what's going to happen.
It's going to be a full-scale war, just like the ISIS war again is within months, right, Dan?
I mean, what am I missing?
Yeah, I know it's really funny, Scott, you know, remembering the remembering the war on terrorists just seems so recent.
But remember, the neocons were screaming about Sharia law.
We've got to take them on.
They're going to put in Sharia law in America.
And you probably saw the video, the new justice minister in Syria, he declared Sharia law.
He's removing all female judges.
He's telling women to go back in the home.
The guy looks like something out of central casting.
And that's not even to say the new prime minister, Al-Bashir, who was literally the guy that was running the Iglib province.
The guy died in the war terrorist.
He's not even blow-dried like Jolani.
Jalani's got an extreme, extremist makeover.
So he actually looks fairly chic.
This guy does not have any of that.
It's just amazing.
And you see someone like, I was just looking at a post on X by this guy from the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, which, as you know, is a super pro-Israel neocon think tank.
And he was celebrating the Israeli airstrikes in Syria against the weapons because he said, we can't let these weapons get into the hands of the jihadists.
And I'm thinking, but hold on, we're the ones behind the jihadists.
NATO's Cold War Choices 00:10:25
What are we talking about?
And he's also applying that they were safe in the hands of Assad, essentially.
He wasn't using them, right?
And by the way, I have a fun anecdote for you here.
I knew this because it was such a catchy phrase at the time.
And I had a buddy of mine go and look it up.
19 years ago in September of 2005, Lou Rockwell told me on my radio show, our friend Lou Rockwell from the Mises Institute said, well, Scott, now the neocons, they want to target Syria.
You know, Syria, the last place in the Middle East where you can get a drink, where crazy Islamists are not in charge.
Here we are.
Yeah.
Well, Scott, we should probably start talking about your new book because there's so much in the breaking events and we could probably spend an hour or so.
But we were here to tell people about your new book.
And I think we have a JPEG somewhere we can put.
There we go.
Provoked.
And it's the subtitle, How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.
And it's probably better than I'm not holding it.
It is a substantial piece of work, Scott.
I mean, this is an impressive book.
I mean, you can absolutely literally work out with it.
But I'll tell you what, jokes aside, looking through it, I love the way you did it.
I love the chronology.
You go from George Herbert Walker Bush all the way to Biden.
People that may have not been familiar with this book coming out, which is actually just a couple of weeks ago, if you don't mind, maybe just take a few minutes and tell us, tell the audience about the book, which we have a link, by the way, in the description for people to buy it on Amazon.
So go ahead, Scott.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Appreciate that.
Yeah, of course, you're both in it.
Dr. Paul's wisdom going back to the 1900s, as the kids call it now.
And of course, your expert analysis on interventions in Belarus and other places in Eastern Europe throughout, Dan, as well.
You guys are both a big part of how I know lots of things that I know, as I am happy to say.
But the book essentially tells a story of how at the end of the last Cold War, the question was, what are we going to do?
Now, Dr. Paul and Pat Buchanan and others said, come home.
With the Soviet Union gone, we definitely don't need NATO now.
And so now let's just be a normal country in a normal time, as Gene Kirkpatrick said, a limited republic and not an empire.
And there was a whole paleoconservative movement.
And of course, many liberals and progressives said, okay, let's cash our peace dividend and not rule the world.
We don't need to.
But there was the War Party in Washington, led by the neoconservatives, but certainly not exclusively them, who refused to essentially go and get real jobs, right?
They were professional warmongers.
And so they kept their think tanks and they kept their arms manufacturing firms going.
And they kept the machine going and they looked for excuses to expand.
And of course, you know, I think people are much more familiar because of Iraq War II and the aftermath and Syria and the rest with the disasters in the Middle East.
It was, of course, the very same people who pushed the American empire into Eastern Europe.
And the thing about that is, really, and this is why the book is like this.
It's so long.
I got carried away, I admit, and I couldn't think of a thing to leave out.
So it's all in there and it's massive.
But essentially, what it's so thick with is not just, of course, you know, our heroes like Dr. Paul and Pat Buchanan and others who were so great on everything, but people at the Council of Foreign Relations, for example, the centrist foreign policy establishment, the State Department, the Defense Department, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense sometimes, they're the ones saying we shouldn't be doing this.
The ambassador to Moscow and his whole team are saying we should not be doing this.
And even the hawkish leaders of the NATO expansionist movement, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger, when they pushed for NATO expansion, they still would build in caveats like, well, of course, we have to come up with a special status for Ukraine because taking them away, putting them in a dispute between us and Russia is sure to end in tragedy.
We don't want that.
So they had a model, of course.
In the last Cold War, there was Austria, which was neutral and Finland as well.
They stayed out of the Cold War.
They didn't accept troops from either side.
They didn't join NATO or the Warsaw Pact.
And they kept their neutrality and they weren't invaded and occupied.
And it worked.
And they've said, they always called it that, the Austria model.
I mean, you can find a hundred different, you know, again, centrist, credentialed, White House employed wonks giving this type of advice all along and giving advice.
And then, of course, there's the stories of the color coded revolutions and missile defense and the rest of the provocations.
But essentially, the book is called Provoked.
It's not called Justified.
Like you guys, I'm a Texan and a patriot and I don't care at all about Russia or their interests.
This book is about what's good for the United States of America.
And I'm not saying that America gave them no choice, but I am saying America put the Russians in the position where their thinking was we're either going to have to do this now or later when it's more difficult.
We might as well go now, which is essentially correct.
And I think they did have options.
They didn't have to go this far.
And it's going to hurt Russia.
It's a pyrrhic victory for them in the end, in many ways, I think.
But still, it's 49% America's fault, the American government's fault for putting them in that position.
A lot of people know where you stand now and all your efforts here in the last several years or decades.
I'm always interested in how people arrived at that point.
And I know you well from recent history.
And you and I have known each other and we've worked together.
But can you remember when you weren't a libertarian?
Can you remember when you started thinking this way?
I'm always interested in how it got started.
And was there any one person that changed your mind on things?
Do you remember when you weren't a libertarian?
Yes.
Well, let's see.
So if I go back to ninth grade, I supported Iraq War I for very 15-year-old reasons.
You know, I like explosions and F-15s and excitement and things, right?
And frankly, indulging in the bloodlust.
If the President of the United States says that this is moral to engage in this mass violence, then it's cool to do.
Everybody is in on it.
All my teachers at school agree.
My parents were good on the war, but I just thought it was fun and I didn't care about the Iraqis at all.
That was in 1991.
I was 15 years old.
And then, and I, by the way, I was first before this, I was raised on Star Wars, which is all, you know, things were great when it was the Republic before the dark times, before the empire.
And that was my original civics lessons in life is the emperor has dissolved the Senate in the name of the emergency and this kind of thing.
So that was first.
But then a year after Iraq War I, I saw Jamming in New York by George Carlin, his great bit.
And he, I won't describe the bit for you here on your family show, Dr. Paul, but he completely castigates Iraq War I and he ridicules the audience for going along with it and believing in it.
And they love him for it.
And there's just no question that regardless, no, it doesn't matter what you think.
George Carlin is wiser than you.
He knows better.
And what he just said is right.
You're fools to fall for this stuff, to believe in these guys.
And that to me is a great, you know, pardon me for the expression, an inoculation against feeling the pressure to believe in this stuff.
And then, of course, then Bill Clinton came to power and he was pure scum and he burned Waco within, what, 10 weeks of being in power.
And I knew, and I was kind of a New World Order guy, like a John Birch, a New American magazine reader type.
It's probably one of the first places I read about you, Dr. Paul.
And, you know, their whole thing is essentially that empire is a plot against America, whether it's deliberate or not.
This is really the only way to destroy America is this massive resource-filled, prosperous, free nation, is to overextend it in an empire.
It's like this is how a republic blows its brains out is by trying to take on too much responsibility elsewhere around the world.
And after all, we're the middle part of North America.
And so how could we do it?
And I credit to Bill Hicks as well, who another comedian who just said, listen, there is no threat to us.
It's a lie.
You don't have to believe it.
Just in that absolute frank language.
And then I'm not sucking up to you.
It's just true, sir.
In 1997, Dr. Paul came back to Congress.
And I saw, I think I've told you this story before.
My Giuliani moment with Dr. Paul was 10 years before everybody else's.
Everybody else's was 2007.
Mine was 1997.
And I was just sitting alone late watching C-SPAN because I'm a nerd.
And there's Dr. Paul speaking to an empty House of Representatives.
And you were telling the stand-in, Mr. Speaker, I have here these new stories from the British papers about how America was still selling precursors for chemical weapons to Iraq right up until the time they invaded Kuwait.
What's up with that?
And I was like, oh, my God, I can't believe anyone would say that in Congress.
And then, and you're talking about President Bush, the Republican, and at the bottom of the screen, it says our Texas.
And I went, oh, no way.
And then shortly after that, I had read about you in the New American, which I was a big fan of, which was, of course, edited by my hero and my good friend and late founding partner of the Libertarian Institute with me, William Norman Grigg.
And so what's funny, Dr. Paul, in a way, is the first chapter or two of that book, Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton.
In a way, it's me grappling with how wrong I was about the New World Order then, because I really believed that the New World Order meant America was determined to bring Russia into NATO and that we would have this one world kind of white army of the North to team up against China and or Islamic South Asia and whoever, because that was the grand design of the conspiracy to build up the UN as the world government.
And then what happened was Iraq War II came and it was clear that Dick Cheney is not a one worlder and that model is wrong.
Why Writers Struggle 00:04:41
And that's not what's happening here.
This is a new conservative plan and this whole other agenda.
And so, and then now I've gone back and reread the history of the 90s and I can see the plan always was to freeze the Russians out.
It was never to bring them in.
It was always to expand NATO at their expense and to create this self-fulfilling prophecy of a conflict with Scott.
We're getting near the end, but Daniel, do you want to finish off?
Do you have another question before we close shop here?
Sure, I do have one more.
I have a bunch of other ones that I want to ask, including something about Carl Gershman, but that'll have to wait for another time.
I want to ask you something a little more simple.
And I'm going to say, Scott, if you want to pass on this, I've got several other things I can ask.
So I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable.
But if you feel like answering it, it's a genuine, genuine question, especially as someone who's not written anything near as heavy as this wonderful piece of work.
How do you write?
Oh, I'll tell you, I'm really not a writer, right?
I'm a radio host.
This is my talent, Dan, is remembering footnotes.
So this book essentially represents a giant pile of note cards that I have done my very, very best to put in order for you, essentially, right?
To drag and drop all these facts into what I think is the most presentable kind of chronological explanation of it.
And then I'm just filling in the gaps with a little bit of prose to try to get you from one paragraph to the next.
The book initially was 1400 pages before I spent a month going through and cutting down almost every last block quote out.
I think there are four or five block quotes in the whole book now.
I had to just wage a war against those things to cut them down just for the, to save the space.
And then I also am obsessive about footnotes.
And especially in this story, I know the burden of proof is on me.
And so if I'm going to write a book about how everyone in charge was wrong for 40 years, then, and they admit it, then I better demonstrate that very well so that I'm not asking anyone to trust me.
So I'm not recommending that anyone else should write this way.
I'm very jealous of people who are actually talented writers and have paragraphs after paragraphs of things to say, like actual analysis and thoughtfulness.
I don't have too much of that.
I'm basically just trying to hold your hand through the story to explain to you who these people are and what's going on as these events unfold.
And I was told by a guy who was a little bit adversarial, by the way, Noam something or other from the comedy seller in New York.
I had a little interview type debate with him last night, and he said it was very readable.
It was surprisingly readable for something that's this factually based.
It doesn't read too much like your professor wrote it.
It's me.
So sorry.
Hope you like it.
This has been great and very entertaining, but I did learn and I know a little bit more about you and that's nice.
But we will continue the battle and you've been in it for a long time.
I think you said at 19 or so.
So you were well on your way at an early age.
So we're delighted that you're on the program today.
Can you remind all our viewers exactly where they can find you?
Do you have a web page and do you do any posting?
How can they follow what you're doing?
Of course, going to Google, they can, and Amazon, they can get your book.
That's one thing they could do.
Yes, sir.
Thank you.
So, first of all, I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute.
I'm very proud to say we have an excellent team of writers and podcasters, show hosts, and really brilliant thinkers and analysts.
We, of course, specialize in foreign policy.
We're sort of cousins and overlapping staff with anti-war.com, of course, and best friends of the Ron Paul Institute as well.
And then also, of course, I'm the editorial director of anti-war.com and I host the Scott Horton Show.
And all those archives, I got 6,000 interviews going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com/slash Scott Horton Show.
And actually, I think it's all on Rumble and all the different video sites as well.
Well, that's great.
It sounds like you're very busy and you're going to remain very busy.
And you've been doing a great job ever since I've known you.
And so I want to congratulate you on your new book.
But I do want to thank our viewers for tuning in today.
And hopefully you will pass this message on because I do believe that this will be a very good program for a lot of people to watch.
But Scott, thank you very much for being with us today.
And again, a thank you to our viewers.
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