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Ep. 6222 - @joekent16jan19 on How Israel Drove Trump Towards an Unnecessary War with Iran - 3/19/26 https://t.co/zcla4ciZsR

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Scott Horton introduces Joe Kent, formerly of the 75th Rangers and then the CIA’s Special Activities Division, who fought in the terror wars and later headed the Counterterrorism Center before resigning from the Trump administration over the war in Iran. Kent describes his background and why he came on the show, noting that he resigned over policy rather than personal animus, and emphasizes that his focus is on Iran policy and its intersection with Israeli interests. Kent asserts that the war with Iran was largely driven by the Israeli agenda and timeline. He points to statements from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the President, and the Speaker of the House claiming the attack was launched because they knew Israel would attack as well, arguing that this indicates Israel was driving U.S. policy and that the United States should not be bound to an Israeli timeline or to an outcome that serves Israeli objectives. He recounts his time at NCTC and in the White House, describing an ecosystem that included media figures, think tanks, and high-ranking Israeli officials, which he says influenced U.S. policy and reduced the president’s decision-making space, particularly concerning Iran’s red lines on enrichment. Kent explains his concern that the push for a hard line against Iran’s enrichment was an Israeli-led framing that equated any enrichment with a nuclear weapons program. He describes an alleged “Goldilocks methodology” by which Iran could enrich but not weaponize, a position the Israelis reportedly used to rally U.S. policymakers toward war. He argues that the Israelis wanted to remove any space for a negotiated deal and sought regime change, leveraging the U.S. military to accomplish that goal. He emphasizes that the war was not the first option and that a more pragmatic, slower approach could have yielded a deal if U.S. policymakers allowed it. In discussing the question of who was pressuring whom, Kent says the Israelis were trying to force a scenario where Iran’s red line would be seen as unacceptable, thereby pushing the United States toward war. He notes that Trump’s willingness to negotiate existed but was constrained by Israeli pressure and media echo chambers, and that the war’s timing undermined any potential for a peaceful settlement. He asserts that, if the president had space to negotiate, a deal might have been possible, but the Israelis’ push to force conflict narrowed that space. Kent also addresses the question of how the war affected American strategic interests, arguing that the United States should restrain Israel and align policy with broader American interests in the region, rather than facilitate regime change or allow broader chaos. He contends that an ongoing U.S.-Israel alignment over militarized actions in the Middle East risks destabilizing the region, jeopardizing energy security, and undermining U.S. partners in the Gulf and Europe. Regarding the Iraq war and Iran, Kent asserts that the Israeli lobby pressured for war in 2002-2003 and had broader influence in Syria and elsewhere, but he also acknowledges the complex mix of neoconservatives and various factions. He describes how, after the Iraq war, Iranian-backed Shiite militias and U.S. policy intersected with Iranian influence and regional dynamics, noting that many Iraqi Shias fought against Iran while others aligned with Tehran, and asserting that mishandling these dynamics contributed to instability. Kent discusses the handling of Iranian EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) and argues that Iran shaped many of the tactics, while local Iraqi groups adapted them. He emphasizes that the broader narrative around Iranian responsibility for attacks in Iraq should be tempered by on-the-ground complexities, including Iraqi dynamics and the role of other actors like Lebanese Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. The conversation turns to the question of whether there were Iranian assassination plots against President Trump, with Kent acknowledging a real threat after Soleimani’s killing but emphasizing that the most serious plan was not clearly linked to a large-scale operation; rather, one individual, Asif Mershand, was recruited by Iran and monitored by the FBI. Kent cautions that allegations of broader Iranian plots should be scrutinized, and he notes ongoing questions about linkage and DHS investigations. Throughout, Kent reiterates his core conclusion: the essential policy misstep was allowing Israeli leadership to drive U.S. policy on Iran, and a successful path forward would require restraining Israel and pursuing a negotiated deal with Iran under conditions that preserve American strategic interests, with a clear off-ramp and space for diplomacy. He endorses the notion that President Trump could secure a deal if given the political room to reset the dynamic with Israel and to recalibrate U.S. commitments in the region.
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Speaker 0: You ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in Speaker 1: this country? Speaker 2: It's the baby's eye. Speaker 1: Is. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. Speaker 2: This is the Scott Horton show. Libertarian foreign policy mostly. Speaker 0: When the president does it, that means that it is not a liberty. Speaker 2: We're gonna take out seven countries five years. Speaker 1: Know what the they're doing. Speaker 2: Negotiate now. End this war. And now here's your host, Scott Horton. Alright, you guys. Introducing Joe Kent, formerly of the seventy fifth rangers and then, CIA special activities division or special activity center, I guess they renamed it paramilitary. He fought in the terror wars. And then most recently, he was the head of the counterterrorism center and famously resigned from the Trump administration, over, principled objection to the war in Iran. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing, sir? Speaker 1: Doing great, Scott. Thanks for having me. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Happy to, have you here. And I'm sorry to do this to you, but we might as well because it is obviously crucial. And since we're apparently living in the 1930s, we need your opinion on the rise of national socialism in Germany and the avowed antisemitism of the new Fuhrer over there and whether you think we should take the Soviet Union side against them, and whether you agree with their stance on Jews and things like that, please. Speaker 1: I'd prefer to keep to what I know, the war in Iran. But, yeah, the your your sense of humor is not lost. Mean, it we it does feel like we're we're living in those times once again. Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, look, I know your oath was to the US constitution and you more closely resemble the kind of guys who fought against Nazi Germany in the second World War, but they're Samiranya, so I figured I'd give you a chance at least to, crack a smile if not defend yourself from the onslaught here. All right. I also am not an anti Semite. Apparently, have other motives for your criticisms of American policy, even so badly that you would resign over them other than a hatred of some religious ethnic type group. So why don't you explain what it was that's so important, so objectionable about this war with Iran that you really thought it was worth resigning over? Speaker 1: Yeah. So look, my my bottom line is that I I believe that this war, especially the the the timing of it, was largely driven by the Israelis agenda and the Israelis timeline. And we were forced to react, plunging us into this conflict. Now, there's been a lot of debate over whether there was an imminent threat or not. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the President, the Speaker of the House, they've all come out and said that we launched this attack because we knew that the Israelis were going to attack as well. And so I think that tells you pretty much most of what you need to know, that the Israelis were the ones in the driver's seat. And I just think that is completely an irresponsible way for us to conduct ourselves as far as foreign policy goes. We provide Israel everything that they need, or I would say the majority of what they need to defend themselves, but also to go on the offense. And so if we're going to provide them with this level of support, then they need to adhere to our timelines and they need to adhere to our strategic objectives, or they need to be comfortable with going it alone. And if an attack is imminent because of an action a so called ally is taking, then I think we really need to reassess what that relationship truly is. In my time at NCTC and the White House at this capacity, I just saw an ecosystem that was created around President Trump between influential members of the media, such as, you know, Mark Levin, DuBois, think tanks like FDD, Wall Street Journal editorial pages, etcetera, but then also high ranking Israeli officials and then some advocates, donors, etcetera, that created an ecosystem around president Trump that told him that, you know, you you said that you you president Trump said that Iran could never have a nuclear weapon, but if they can enrich uranium, then they're going to be able to have a nuclear weapon. All president Trump had ever said was Iran can't have a nuclear weapon, and I think most people agree with that. I agree with it. And actually, the former Ayatollah, before he was killed, he agreed with that too and strictly enforced a red line with his own own government, his own military, but they weren't allowed to actually enrich and develop a nuclear weapon. They could enrich, but they couldn't develop a nuclear weapon. So the Israelis came in using their official back channels or unofficial channels, and then also the media to create an artificial red line and say that there could be no enrichment. And that was basically wandered into official US policy that took away the president's decision making space. And so my issue was that accurate information wasn't being given to the president. The Israelis were largely in the driver's seat of driving our policies. And I and I think this is a disservice, not just the American people, but also the president Trump. President Trump is a fantastic negotiator. I think if given the space, he could come up with a deal. I didn't I don't believe that war was his first option. So for all those reasons, I tried from the inside for as long as I could to advocate, slow these things down, to give the president more time to make a decision. And until, you know, essentially, know, we're boxed out myself and others who are advocating for a more pragmatic approach were boxed out. And I felt like, number one, I couldn't be a part of this as someone who said that I would not allow the next generation to go off into war. It was a pledge I made to myself probably on my third or fourth deployment overseas. But then also, I felt that this was probably one of the better ways to be able to communicate to the president that he doesn't have to continue down this path. Sorry. Know it was a long answer. Speaker 2: No. That's good. Long answers are good. Okay. So the headline is blames Israel lobby. And here you're saying specifically what you mean by that is they're reframing the question of Iran's nuclear program in such a way in Trump's mind as him as their primary audience here to essentially drive all the nuance out of what uranium enrichment program is for and can be used for and essentially get him to adopt the Israeli line. For them to have enrichment at all is the same thing as them having a nuclear weapons program and even a very advanced one that must be stopped right now. It was that framing being successful essentially over him is really what you're referring to when you say that he was pushed into this by the Israel mob. Is that correct? Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly. That's right. I mean, president Trump said Iran can't have a nuclear weapon. I think most people agree with that. And again, the Ayatollah, the former Ayatollah anyways, at least agreed with that. And so that was very dangerous for the Israelis because that leveling of of the playing field essentially brought both president Trump and the Iranians to the negotiating table. The Israelis feared president Trump being able to get a deal which could lead to some form of normalization with the Iranians. The the Israelis have been very upfront. I really frankly don't think the Israelis cared that much about Iran's nuclear weapons. What I think they care about or not necessarily nuclear weapons, their enrichment. What I think the Israelis care about is regime change. And so they wanted to push this war as fast as they could. And so they came up with this talking point that zero enrichment was the starting point, knowing that that was a nonstarter for the Iranians because the Iranians were smart. They knew if they completely got rid of any kind of enrichment that they would end up like Qaddafi and Libya. And I knew if they had the BS and say that they had a nuclear weapon, they'd end up like Saddam and Iraq. So, they essentially have what I call the Goldilocks methodology where they just said, Hey, we could, we have enough material here and the capability where we could develop a nuclear weapon, but we're not developing a nuclear weapon. So, therefore, you can't just come push us around, but also you can't justify coming in because we have a nuclear weapon. And again, the Israelis wanted to take away any ability from their new negotiation because they wanted this regime change more that they can't do on their own. They need the might of the US military. Speaker 2: And of course, Trump called that bluff against their latent deterrent last June. I think, you you can confirm this, I guess, from your former position here, but even from the open source material here, he very much did obliterate their program, took Natanz and Fordo and Isfahan virtually completely offline. Maybe they have a secret enrichment program somewhere, but probably not. Doesn't look like any of that. So he called their bluff on that latent deterrent. So much good it did them after all that time, at least. But now so let me ask you about the statements by Marco Rubio and others that the Israelis were threatening. We're gonna start this war, and we know that it's gonna lead to Iranian attacks against American interests and drag you in. So you might as well start the war with us, this kind of thing. And in a way, in a word, blackmailed America into launching the war. Is that your information as well? Speaker 1: I mean, Marco Rubio and, again, Marco Rubio and the president and even speaker house, I think others have now come out and said, well, we knew the Israelis were gonna go. So we had to go. And so I I think the question for every American, especially me in my former position was like, well, who's in charge here? This is this is going to have massive consequences for The United States Of America. We knew what what the Iranians were gonna do. We knew where their missiles were pointed. We basically knew what their contingency plans were. They were gonna target bases in the region. Many of us have been advocating for years to limit our footprint in the SyntCOM region just for this very reason, because it gave the Iranians more leverage. We also knew, and I think the US government has known for years that the Iranians would try to shut down the Straits Of Hormuz to impose economic costs. So my whole point was that if we're going to do this war, we cannot let the Israelis drive our timeline. We can't have our hands forced into this because the stakes are just so Speaker 2: high. Mhmm. Alright. This episode of the Scott Horton show brought to you by the books I wrote. You can see them behind me there. Enough Already, Pool's Errand, and then Enough Already, and Provoked. And then, of course, one might have fallen down there, but I got, Ron Paul, the great Ron Paul, Scott Horton Show interviews, and Hotter Than the Sun. See that one back there? Over there that way. Hotter than the sun, time to abolish nuclear weapons. That's all interviews I did all about nukes. And really great stuff. And I bust my ass on these things. And, you know, I've gotten a really great reception on all of them. They were all been endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg endorsed two of the three I wrote. He would have endorsed the third one, know, but he died too soon, unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that provoked is the definitive account. In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Mate said about it too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. Maybe check that out. So I'm interested in this, and don't get me wrong because obviously I agree with you that the Israelis definitely did browbeat Trump into doing this, but it seems to me like they just got agreement from him to do this, specifically Netanyahu, the prime minister himself. And, I don't know if you saw this, but there's this interesting article, at Politico. This is from the day before the war on Thursday. It says, the White House officials believed the politics were a lot better if Israel strikes Iran first. And this was essentially the idea was an agreement between the Americans and the Israelis to have Israel hit Iran first in order to force Iran to hit America so that they could tell the American people, See, well, they hit us and gave us no choice but to do this. Apparently, they decided not to do that. This is very reminiscent, actually, of the David Wormser plan in 2007, where he and Cheney wanted to get the Ehud Olmert government to attack Iran and force Iran to hit American interests in The Gulf as an end run around W. Bush, to force him to do it. In this case, it's Trump and his guys trying to do an end run around us apparently, or at least that was the idea. But my point being that even though they didn't implement this plan, it seems to put the lie to the idea that Netanyahu is like the snarling pit bull that Trump could not hold onto his leash rather than they bumped fists and decided to do this together. Speaker 1: You know, from my perspective, there was just a lot of bad information coming from the Israeli side, particularly around that enrichment issue. Really just kind of convoluting the idea of zero enrichment and then nukes as I described. And and then I think as the Israelis got more and more nervous that President Trump may strike a deal again, he was deploying more diplomats. From my vantage point, the Israelis just decided to really force our hand and say, we're going to go do this. And, you know, it's gonna happen next year, going to be attacked. And and to me, that is just, you know, that that was a red line for me. And I said, hey. I I can't be a part of this. Speaker 2: Right now, I'm sorry to keep confronting you with, like, the silly stuff, but, obviously, you're a senior official who's resigned over a war. I mean, it's a huge thing. The attacks against you kind of are relentless. And you had mentioned, I believe it was in your resignation, statement, but definitely you addressed this a bit in your Tucker Carlson interview that there was an important role played by the Israel lobby in getting us into the Iraq war and into Obama's war in Syria as well, which obviously you have a lot of firsthand experience. I I know I read that you were deployed 11 times. I interviewed you a few years ago. Forgive me. I forget if you had gone to Afghanistan as well, but I know you spent a lot of time in Iraq and Syria. Right? And so, again, they want to say, Well, this is an antisemitic blood libel from the Middle Ages or something. And so I just thought, maybe you have an actual explanation for what you meant by that. Speaker 1: Certainly. I mean, in the lead up to the the 2002 declaration or basically the 2002 portion while while it was being publicly debated whether or not we should go to war of Iraq while the Iraq war were being sold to the American people. The the Israeli lobby led by Benjamin Netanyahu at the time, who I believe, off top of my head was their their finance manager, was over here in America heavily campaigning for us to go after Saddam Hussein, saying that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The Israeli lobby, APAC had, you know, this these talking points in all of their different briefing books. So they were pressuring members of the house, members of the senate to support the war against Iraq. The Israelis had a lot of interest in Iraq. They obviously thought Saddam was a threat, but they were also concerned with being able to get some of the Iraqi oil for their own uses and their own interests. But also, they viewed Iraq as a staging point for Syria and moreover for Iran. I mean, the Israelis have been very, very, I think, straightforward on what they view as a threat, and they basically view the the vast majority of the countries that surround them as a threat, some more so than others, but Syria, Iraq, and Iran were top of their list for quite some time. So they and then also, of course, they didn't do it alone. It wasn't all it wasn't just the Israeli lobby. They had a lot of, you know, fellow travelers with men who were neoconservative. There's a lot of bleed over there. But the neoconservative movement, as as you know, and I think most of your viewers know, they helped really sell the war to the American people and then ultimately to the Bush administration that launched us into Iraq. We basically screwed up Iraq so much that we we kinda handed the keys to the kingdom over to the the Shia majority, but not just the Shia majority, in particular, the best organized guys were the Badakhore, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who these guys had fought on the Iranian side of the Iraq Iran war. So they were loyal to Tehran because of our own ignorance and then a lot of other lobbying by outside groups. These guys basically took power in Iraq. And so by the time we were leaving Iraq in 2011, it was evident that we had basically handed over Baghdad to the Iranians. And so the Israeli lobby said, hey, this is this is a major problem because now we basically have a Iranian super highway, a land bridge that goes from Iran all the way into Syria through through Iraq. This this directly supports Hezbollah's efforts against Israel, so it was a major problem. And so we had basically tipped the the the balance of power in the region over to the Shiites. So then the dirty war in Syria was launched because Hafiz Assad and Bashir Al Assad had always been longtime friends with the Iranians, supported the Iranians, helped support Hezbollah and Hamas from Syria. And so who who do we rely on as our proxies inside of Syria? Well, it was by and large the Sunnis and the most radical elements of the Sunnis. There was the free Syrian army and there were some so called moderates, but the guys who were out there and really aggressive against the Assad regime were members of Al Qaeda and then eventually members of ISIS. ISIS got so out of control that we eventually had to go back into Iraq, back into Syria, largely re empower a lot of the same Shiite militias that we are trying to take power away from in order to to take out the ISIS caliphate. That's where I lost my late wife who was fighting the ISIS caliphate in in in 2018. But this is how really the the goals of the Israeli government have driven a lot of our foreign policy in The Middle East. And so at the end of the day, I I I really think it's time for Americans to reflect on what are our vital national security interests in the region and truly is the relationship that we have right now with this hyper aggressive lacud driven government inside Israel. Is that is that worth it to us? Because now here we are, we're we're diving headlong into another war, and this may be the con most consequential war in The Middle East that we fought in quite some time, is it truly worth it? I think if these facts are laid out to President Trump, and we have the ability for an off ramp, we have the ability for negotiations, I think President Trump can get us out of this, but I think it's time for us to have these hard discussions, these hard conversations right now, be truly objective about what our relationship is with Israel and what the American interests in the region truly are. Speaker 2: A point of clarification here. I believe it was in the Tucker Carlson interview. I saw actually someone quote you critically here, but I thought maybe they misunderstood you, but I wanted to get a little clarification. At one point recently here, you had said that you had bought with Iranian backed groups, in the region. I think it was a little vague. So then I wondered, did that mean that you were part of the surge in 2007 against Sadr's forces, in Iraq war two or in the aftermath of Iraq War III against the caliphate? I know that there are Iranian backed militias that hit guys, but I think you were out of the service by then. So, I was wondering if you could clarify that, because I saw someone say, Oh, this guy's saying that Al Qaeda and ISIS are backed by Iran, but I Speaker 1: know you're not saying that. No, no. So I first deployed to Iraq in 2003. I missed the actual invasion. I was still in the special forces qualifications course. Got to Baghdad in the summer of 'three. And then I was in the special forces group as a Green Beret. And so basically every year from 'three until 2011, I would be in Iraq for anywhere between six to eight months at a at a given time. So I fought against the the Iranian backed militias of all bearing stripes, at Sadr's militia, Sabahat, Ketab al Hezbollah, beginning in really 2004 in Najah. And that's where we saw the Iranians come in heavily and support them, members of the good sports, fought them heavily in Sadr City. I was there in the surge. Yeah, pretty much throughout the country. Spent my time divided between fighting and and hunting the Iranian backed Shia militias, but then also the the Al Qaeda guys. Went back after the the ISIS caliphate took over and fought between I was in in Baghdad for a little bit, but then mostly up in Kirkuk, Mosul, that area, a little bit into Syria. So when I say I fought with, I guess you could take that either way at the time in counter ISIS fight, we essentially were acting as the the air force and and our ground shock troops were the Shia militias because at the time we had a common enemy. As that fight wound down, I was out of the service, but then my wife was killed in 2019. I left I left the the CIA that I had transitioned to after I retired from the military in '18. But that's when the Shia militias turned against our our forces, and president Trump ultimately decided to retaliate by killing Kasim Solmani. Speaker 2: Alright. So as I said, we've talked before, but it's been a few years, and I don't remember. We might have even had an argument about this or I don't don't know, but I wanna bring it up because it is crucial. A major talking point against Iran is that they killed 600 of our guys in Iraq war two. And now clearly there was some Iranian support for Sadr. But then again, as you already described, the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa party were much closer to Iran even than Soder was, and it was really America's attacks against Soder that drove him into Iran and drove him closer to Iran. But a huge part of this whole narrative then, especially at the hands of David Petraeus and Dick Cheney and Michael Gordon, then of the New York Times, now the Wall Street Journal, was that Iran was responsible for every copper core EFP roadside bomb placed by any Shiite militiamen, especially in the first half of the year 2007. And as I show in my book, and I actually have them all here if you really wanna squabble, I have report after report after report after report of these machine shops being found by American soldiers in Iraq and these bombs being made by Iraqi Shiites for use against The United States, as opposed to the myth that every single one of these things somehow were all part of an Iranian plot. And, really, it was Petraeus who had attacked Sauder rather than the other way around, in 2007. Anyway, I wondered if you wanted to comment on that because it is a real crucial talking point equivalent to essentially in the narrative equivalent to the favorite bombing of nineteen eighty three and the hostage crisis or one of these things that proves that Iran is America's eternal enemy. Speaker 1: I think I'll kinda meet you halfway. So I I was over there, and I worked heavily on a on a small task force going after the EFP threat. So the the idea of an EFP, it's it's not incredibly advanced. The Iranians just did a very the goods force just did a a very good job of finding ways to manufacture them and employ them against our Up Armor technology and to beat our jammers. And then also to to punch through our armor. The the Kutz force were kinda like my counterpart as a Green Beret. They were very good at training training, manning, and equipping. And then what we what we would say is Green Berets is work yourself out of the job, train your proxy force so that in short order, they don't need you there anymore. And that's essentially what happened with the EFPs. So the initial EFPs that we found, they were being constructed inside of Iran. I know exactly what you're talking about with the copper plating. Because we did run ourselves in circles looking for, like, where the Iranians were storing all this mythical copper and, like, were they smuggling the copper across the border? I think that was something of chasing ghosts because really what the good sports did was they they may have manufactured I I'm I'm confident they manufactured the first run of the EFPs inside of Iran and they probably tested them there as well, but they were able to take that technology because it's pretty rudimentary and then show Iraqis how they could basically build them in Iraqi machine shops, local machine shops in Southern Iraq and Sodder City, etcetera. But largely, the the the TTP, the tactic of the EFP did come from the Iranians. As for the back and forth relationship that we have with Sodder, I think that if we would have been more deliberate about engaging with Sodder, especially after, I've drawn a blank on the Imam, I think Imam, the Imam Kohi, somebody can check me, it's been a while since I thought of this, after he was killed when he returned from Iran. I think we could have made much more progress in kind of making an alliance with the more nationalistic Iraqi she is, which is what Saddar represented as opposed to, like you said, the Syria and the Dalla branch that were much more beholden to Iran. But yeah, but I do agree that Iran was responsible for, I'd say 600. I mean, I'm not sure exactly where they got that number from, but they were responsible for hundreds of casualties against American forces. Now, again, should we have been there in the first place? Absolutely not. Speaker 2: What happens is the narrative is basically push where you're supposed to just believe that every Shiite militia man was an Iranian rather than an Iraqi Arab Shiite fighting under an Iraqi Arab Shiite militia. And, you know, as Gareth Porter showed, and, maybe I'll follow-up with you and and show you this. And Gareth Porter found where it was actually that they had learned it from, and I don't know exactly what you're, referring to. Maybe you have effects on this, that you could back it up. But Gareth showed where they learned it from Lebanese Hezbollah, not from Iran, and that Lebanese Hezbollah got it from the IRA, not from Iran. And that that was kind of the origin of the technology of how again, they're pretty simple bomb, but it's you have to hear the idea somewhere first to put the copper plate here, you know, on the shaped charge here kind of thing. And so apparently that was where it came from according to Garrett's great journalism back then. But, and then I did kind of flash on the screen there a few different examples of these news stories. In fact, I'll go ahead and show you this one because the the main ringleader in the media at the time, again, was Michael Gordon. He was the same guy who was the byline on every Judith Miller hoax story about the nuclear program in the New York Times and the run up to the war. Same guy. Yet here is his co journalist from the New York Times, Alyssa Rubin, writing in the same paper. You see the day, 04/07/2007, right during the same time frame. And down here, she talks about how they found I should've had it all highlighted. But here they go. They recovered an assembly area for powerful roadside bombs known as explosively foreign penetrators, the statement said. In other words, the military told the New York Times that. So then, in other words, when they weren't pushing the Michael Gordon, David Petraeus, Dick Cheney narrative there, they kept having to admit that they kept stumbling across these machine shops. You may be right that the idea came from Persia, but it sure seemed like what they were doing was trying their very best to conflate Sodder with the Ayatollah Khomeini in order to justify strikes inside Iran, which Bush ultimately refused to do. Speaker 1: I agree with you on that. Yeah. There there I mean, the whole time I was in Iraq, that was that was especially, I'd say the surge years and on, it was that the Iranians were the main threat and basically we needed to take the fight to them. So, that that that that line of thinking was very much at play. And and I think it's something that we always missed or we never really factored in was that Iraq and Iran had fought a bitter bitter war against each other and the majority of Iraq was Shias. So the majority of Shias picked up a rifle whether they wanted to or not, and they fought against the Iranians. And that was something that we never really wrapped our heads fully around, that there wasn't a of nationalistic Iraqis who were not sympathetic with the Iranians until they had a horrible experience with foreigners coming out and invaded their country and and us trying to impose our will on them. So again, like we never should have been there in the first place. We continued to get it wrong. And again, this is why I think a lot of our actions right now are completely and totally counterproductive. If we ever wanted to stabilize Iraq after we toppled Saddam, we immediately should have been working with guys like Sadr. We should have been working with the nationalistic Shias and not played into the hands of the Iranians, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ayatollahs. Much like right now, if our goal is to get rid of the Ayatollahs and the IRGC, the last thing we should be doing is killing off the Ayatollah, especially because that was the Ayatollah that had a prohibition on developing a nuclear weapon, but also because it's creating a rally around the flag type of scenario now, where you have Persian, Iranians who may have been out in the streets a month ago complaining about the cost of living and ready to overthrow their government from the ground up. And that might take a longer time, but at least would have been organic. Whereas now, now that we've killed off the supreme leader, we're starting to kill off all the moderates, the hardliners case is being vindicated, the Iranian people are now digging in because they're prideful people like most people are, like I would be, like probably you would be. And we're moving even further away from anything that would resemble like an organic regime change inside of Iran. So really just basically eliminating any kind of option that we would have other than the war option. Speaker 2: Mhmm. Hey, guys. You know I have another podcast now. Right? Yeah. Me and the great American historian Daryl Cooper that is Martyr Maid. He's my cohost, and we host a show every Friday night. We might be switching to two days a week here sometime soon. But for right now, we're doing Friday nights live at 08:00 eastern time on the YouTubes. Check out our Twitter handle, provoked show. Okay. I have a couple of questions about that. Just how organic was that? Because it seemed like there was a big protest, but then all of a sudden you had armed teams of guys burning mosques and sacking police stations and causing that fight. And then I have a second question about that, which is that, I wonder if you agree with this, that it seems that the purpose of embellishing the casualty count on the part of the uprising, whether protesters or armed fighters or whoever all it was exactly, which must have been apparently like 3,000 or 4,000, something like that on both sides, including the cops and all that. But then they embellished that up to 30,040. I'd like to know, well, your opinion on that. That's my assertion, that they embellished it far beyond reason. Obviously, the purpose of that was as war propaganda to get people to say, This is unacceptable an atrocity on the level of the ANTHALL campaign or something. Have to go in there and do something about it. Then it also seems like it must have had a perverse effect on Donald Trump because that story could be interpreted to mean that the Iranian regime had to kill 30 to 50,000 people to get the other hundreds of thousands of them to finally quit and go home, or else surely they would have been overthrown any minute when that's just completely ridiculous. And if it was only 3,000 killed and they were the vanguard of a protest movement that made up, you know, whatever, a few tens of thousands of people, then that would not indicate that the Iranian regime is so brittle and is ready to fall. But if you really believe that they had to kill 30 to 50,000 people in some, like, battle of the Somme sized massacre in order to cling to power in January, then you might have believed Netanyahu that you can just, you know, give them a flick and they'll fall right over by the February. Speaker 1: I mean, in more of the first casualty is always the truth. I'm always skeptical of like any kind of numbers coming out of a conflict zone. From my former vantage point, it was hard to know which number was accurate. I share your skepticism in the larger numbers. But what I do know from my past experience and just pattern recognition, anytime we launch a war, even if it sounds like it's under noble auspices, like we did in Libya with the responsibility to protect doctrine that the Clintons and Samantha Power were so fond of saying, hey, we have to go in with military force to topple this regime to save the people. It sounds noble, but it always ends up in the same catastrophe, that regime change driven by the Americans results in. So, look, I was very skeptical at the time, but we need to go in and save the protest movement. I was always of the mindset that look at this protest movement is going to be real and they're truly gonna drive this current regime from power. They've gotta do it on their own for it to actually have any for it to really resonate and and be a real lasting thing. If we wanna make sure that that the protest movement fails as we go in there and we say, hey. We're we're the Americans. We're here to back the protesters against the government. That just does not work for us, especially in The Middle East. Speaker 2: Okay. Now, can you tell us what's your best assessment of the state of the negotiations before the war and whether they really could have been successful? Speaker 1: I think the most the the biggest chance that we had was before the twelve day war and before midnight hammer. I I personally believe that, you know, Steve Witkoff and and the folks working with him and then the army, his Iranian counterparts, I I think they were close to a deal. That's just my opinion. I I wasn't involved in the deal making. I don't wanna portray it as that. My my opinion of that, though, was that those talks were going very well. They're continuing to meet. There were discussions on they're having real discussions on enrichment. And, again, this is where the idea that no enrichment was our red line, that's where I saw the echo chamber that I alluded to in my resignation letter. That's where I really saw that go to work between members of media and then Israeli officials coming in and basically saying, No, no, but you said, you know, no enrichment, which is completely and total nonsense. So, I think there was a potential for a deal there. Obviously, the twelve day war Midnight Hammer set back the potential of the deal, but the Iranians are very, very calculated. And when they retaliated for Operation Midnight Hammer, they did it in a very, very calculated way. They they shot back an equal number of missiles that we dropped as bombs. And so that signaled to us that, hey. They were still interested in actually cutting a deal. And, this is what the Israelis feared because they knew that president Trump and his negotiating team probably could get a deal because you had the Iranians willing to go back to the table holding their self imposed prohibition on developing a nuclear weapon and just say, hey. Like, we just wanna have a conversation about enrichment. When when we were having a conversation about enrichment, I think there was a real potential for a deal there. And that's why we had the Israelis come in full court press with the echo chamber and say, no. No. We have to go now. They're gonna develop a nuclear weapon. They're developing ballistic vessels that could breach America. Were They just throwing anything at the wall to see what would stick and then to force our hand to say, Hey, we're gonna go right now. And if we go, they're gonna hit you guys back. So, that's where I saw a lot of the negotiating space get taken away and kill any potential for a deal. But Scott, I think right now, there is a potential still for a deal, and I think only Donald Trump can do it. I I think he's gotta address the Israeli issue first and foremost and and demand and force them to stop going on the offense. I know he sent out a a true social last night saying just that, to stop bombing the energy sector. My opinion, my advice to him, if if you would take it, is that, look, we we have enough data on how the Israelis behave. If you tell them that they're they need to stop bombing this target or that target, they might back off for a week or so, but they're not gonna list you. You have to take away their ability to do that. You have to take away some feature of their defense system to say, hey, look, we're gonna take away a feature of your defense system, and we're not gonna support you while you're on the offense. If you go completely back on the defense, we will support you. But until we take something away from the Israelis, they will not listen to us. If president Trump addresses that first, that will give him the space to reach a deal. And we already we already saw him today through his commerce secretary talking about lifting the sanctions on some of the Iranian oil that's already on the water. And so I think we I pray that we're actually moving in that direction, but I think the timing is crucial. I think we have a lot of potential right now to get that deal. Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, politically, that would be a huge plund down for him to have Speaker 1: to Speaker 2: overtly restrain the Israelis as part of probably even an official negotiation with Iran. I mean, I agree with you that he should seek peace at almost any cost anyway, but politically speaking, what you're really saying is, boy, did he already jump into the deep end of this ocean and, you know, where he cannot touch the bottom. And how is he gonna get himself out of this thing without something like that where he's implicitly saying, boy, we just shouldn't have done that or whatever. Call it victory now. But if Israel's still in a position to force the war to continue on and they're willing to without him absolutely putting his foot down, then that really goes to show that the best he can do, the best he is doing is calling time out rather than actually achieving any kind of success, much less victory, like David Petraeus would say. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, the fundamental issue is restraining Israel. And until we do that, we may be able to buy some time, but we'll be right back in the same situation all over again. So that's why I say we have to actually be pretty forceful with them. And just say, Look, we're paying for the majority of your defense, We will not pay for you to go on offense. We have a different strategic goal than than they do. Like, right now, we share some tactical objectives. Like, we've said that we wanna take down their ballistics, they got their navy, etcetera, and the the Iranians or or the Israelis are on orbit that. But beyond that, that's where our interests go in completely divergent paths. The Israelis want full regime change, the Israelis have a very high tolerance for chaos. Like they're completely okay destroying that whole system over there and having a chaotic situation where the Strait support moves is still in jeopardy, where potentially there's mass migration, where you have different fractionalizations within inside of Iran that desalizes the region, but poses less of a threat to Israel. The Israelis are fine with that. We are not. That would be absolutely catastrophic for us, for our partners, our allies in in the the GCC states, potentially even in Europe, and then also for the world energy trade. So the stakes are are very, very high from our strategic objective standpoint. And so to let the Israelis continue to essentially call the shots and drive the ferocity and the strategic objectives of the battle, that is not doing any service for the American people. And I think as soon as president Trump can can realize that and use his force that only president Trump has to restrain the to to restrain the Israelis, we're gonna be we're gonna continue to be in this cycle. Speaker 2: Now do you think that plan A was to parachute the monarch Reza Pahlavi, the grandson in there, or it was really the Israeli goal was just convince Trump to get it started, and the plan is destroy Persia. Speaker 1: The Israelis were big fans of throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. So think at some point in time, probably briefed like the Monarch Sun or the MEK or the Kurds or etcetera, etcetera. But really at the end of the day, the Israeli goal was to get in there and hammer the regime, kill the supreme leader. And killing the supreme leader, I think was twofold. I mean, basically, killed the guy that was restrained in nuclear program. And so now there's a more compelling case to make that, hey, look, hey, if they have anything that even resembles any kind of enrichment or any nuclear, you know, component, they're gonna make a bomb because actually probably now they will because we killed the one restrainer. Actually, we killed several of the restrainers. I say we, I mean, between us and the Israelis, we will all be blamed for it. But really, the the entire Israeli goal was just to launch this to topple the regime at any cost because they know the time is short. They know that they're losing a lot of support on both sides of the aisle in in America. And so for them, timing was was of the essence, and they basically work out the details later. Get us get us deeply entrenched in this thing as fast as they can. And after that, they basically met their main strategic objective. Everything else is just a matter of getting us to stay committed to the fight. Speaker 2: Yeah. Hey, guys. Scott here from Moon Doze Artisan Coffees. It's the Scott Horton show flavored coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good. All you do is go to scotthorton.org/coffee, and it'll forward you on there to Moondo's Artisan Coffees. Get it? They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course. And so they're Moondo's, and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton show coffee is the number one best selling coffee at Moondos Artisan Coffees right now. Just go again to scotthorton.org/coffee. All right. So I want to get back to the state of the war over there in a minute, but I have to tell you, I've been thinking about you a bit for the last year or so here, knowing that you're up there running the counter terrorism center at a time where I am completely paranoid to the point where I need to take pills or something about the danger of Bin Laden night blowback terrorism in this country. Yes, I know you know, we all know that the Bin Ladenite factions over all these Wahhabi Salafi factions most often work for The United States, Britain, and Saudi Arabia, going around being mercenaries, killing people, and taking over Syria, and fighting in Bosnia and Chechnya and wherever Bill Clinton or Joe Biden need them, Republicans too. But also, these are the guys who kill Americans. When Al Qaeda turned against The United States in the 1990s, I know a lot of people think that that was all puppetry and an inside job kind of thing, but I don't think so. I think Bill Clinton was backing them here while they're backing them there while they're attacking us here and continued to do that. Their primary motivating factor for attacking The United States was support for Israel and Israel's mandated policy, of course, of dual containment from the bases in Saudi Arabia. So then after the two years of war plus in the Gaza Strip and the horrific slaughter of, 70,000 plus people in that war, it seems like Americans must be, you know, greatly susceptible to this kind of terrorism. And then now add on top of that, the Shiites who, you know, Trump and, I guess, Israel assassinated not just their political leader, but their one of their highest ranking religious leaders in the world in the Ayatollah economy. And I know Sistani so far has not issued a fatwa against us all. If people think of like the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, where they said kill this author, well, what did they did not do then was do that to all of us. There was just that one guy. Right? But they could do that. Sistani could say, All true believers fight, and we would have a whole new fight on our hands. Can you please address Don't get yourself thrown in prison for telling me secrets or anything, but tell me about how justified is my paranoia about Bin Ladenite terrorism in this country right now. And then also, please add on top of that, any worries about Shiite terrorism in this country. There kinda oftentimes in right wing media rumors about Hezbollah sleeper cells and that kind of thing, but that's not impossible. So I don't know. You tell me. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot there. I I would say you're right. The the Bin Ladenite selfie Wahhabists, Unfortunately, because we're so consumed right now with this war in Iran, there's several places where where they are predominantly, I would say, in in Yemen. Also, what's taking place in Syria needs to be monitored, but we're not paying as much attention to those areas as we should be. And we have active Al Qaeda cells, active Al Qaeda organizations there that are very threatening and they exist solely, especially in Yemen, AQAK exists solely to attack the homeland. And they don't do that by infiltrating covert cells anymore. That took to my knowledge. What they do is they reach out and they inspire. I'm a walk you as Inspire Magazine, but they're using social media as a way to reach out and to inspire people. The majority of the terror attacks that we had last year, they were not done by someone who had traveled overseas and then come here to attack us in some sort of a sleeper cell. They were inspired to action. Most of them cited what was taking place in Gaza because a lot of the propaganda coming out of Gaza, a lot of the media coming out of Gaza was just so graphic and inspired people to action. They actually cited that in their manifestos or the last wills, whatever you wanna call them. So that is very concerning. And that combined with the wide open border that we had under the previous administration, we frankly just don't know who came into our country. Over the last four years, I publicly testified that we had identified a potential 18,000 known suspected terrorists who had gained access to the country. Basically, the further we dug into the books of what took place with immigration over the last four years, I realized, like, the less we knew, there just wasn't any accurate data. There was limited amounts. I shouldn't say there was any, there was limited amounts of accurate data. But that wide open border just presents such a potential for actual radicals to infiltrate our country and then at the time and place they're choosing to carry out attacks. But then in terms of blowback terrorism, I think we've already started to see it in the last two weeks. We've had had several had several terror attacks here at home that they appear right now to have been inspired by what was taking place in Iran. As you indicated, we took out an Iranian Shia cleric, Ayatollah. For many, he was the number one. He was eventually, he was essentially their version of the Pope. We took him out. The Israelis killed him. President Trump said that, Hey, we were a part of doing that as well. So I think there is a high potential for blowback terrorism. And again, while most of our resources are focused right now on the fight in the Persian Gulf and against Iran and in that region, we are kind of taking our eye off the ball on the threats to the homeland that we should be focused on. So, there is a lot to be concerned with there. Think we've got our work cut out for us here at the homeland. I think that's where our focus should be, not on picking new fights overseas. And I think your overall point, I've heard you make this many, many times, I think it's very accurate, just the amount of blowback terror that we receive because of our support for the State of Israel. That's gotta be addressed as well too. And at the end of the day, it's not really about any love or affinity for anyone. It's like, hey, is this relationship worth it at the end of the day? Are we getting more than we're having to pay a cost for? I I think that's worth discussing. Speaker 2: Yeah. On the first day of the war, a terrorist went and killed three innocent people drinking at the bar in my hometown in Austin, Texas. Wounded 15 more. And he just happened to pick a spot where there's cops everywhere. So they were able to corner him. But you know better than me as a former special operator and whatever, but any man could tell you that'd be really easy for any man to kill a lot of people if he's willing to die trying. There's this entire nation from Bangor to Bangor is, there is a lot of soft targets of innocent civilians standing around everywhere. The only way to protect us from terrorism is to not do this kind of thing over there and not motivate. And I'm not saying, yes, we should have open borders. We certainly should not be bringing these people into our country, potential terrorists into our country. The guy that attacked the synagogue the other day, they say that he was brothers with a Hezbollah guy. I don't know if that's really true, but if that is true, he should have never been allowed in the country in the first place. And they absolutely, as Ron Paul said, if they ignored the danger, then they're putting the people of this country in peril. They think they can just go around, do this stuff, and that there won't be consequences because there absolutely will too. And now I'm sorry. I know you gotta go, and I'm almost up at the, time wall here too, but I have to ask you really quick about these alleged Iranian assassination attempts against Donald Trump. And my friend Ken Silva is a great reporter, and he's already shown that these are complete nonsense. But then again, that was your job up there. So can you tell us whether it's really true that the Ayatollah put out a hit on Donald Trump leading up to this war? Speaker 1: After president Trump killed Qasem Soleimani, the Iranians were pretty vocal that that that they wanted to have vengeance for for president Trump killing Qasem Soleimani. So there was a legitimate threat. Now in terms of how much resources the Iranians put behind it, that's up for debate. So far, all we found is that the trial that of Asif Mershant that Sohla covered, I think he did a great job of covering it. So Asaf Mershant was recruited by the the Iranians, came over to America. We learned about it ahead of time. So by the time he even got into America, the FBI basically put him under surveillance and was able to have a confidential human source go befriend him. And so as Mershant was planning this assassination against president Trump kind of in a a kinda clownish way, but still still still have to take it seriously. He was planning it under the FBI's control, essentially. I think that that should be looked at, that that trial's done. Ken Silva's done a good job of covering it. Mershott was arrested just two days before the assassination attempt in Butler. And according to the FBI, the two events aren't linked. Again, as I discussed last night on Tucker show, there's still a lot of unanswered questions. If we've done our due diligence to truly see if there was any linkage between what Mershant had cooking and then also Thomas Crooks and everything that took place there. The DHS IG has been blocked from investigating what's taking place in Butler. So I think there's still a lot more a lot more work to do there, lot of unanswered questions. But that was about the most serious threat against the president's life that I had seen. But there was a very real, the Iranians did threaten to kill president Trump. That was real. The Iranians did seek to avenge Qasem Somalia. Qasem Somalia was a hero to the Iranian regime and also to a lot of the Iranian people. So that part was real. Again, the amount of resources they dedicated to it is kinda unknown. So far, we can put our finger on is Mershant. Speaker 2: And even the threat, it was not. Was it equivalent to like the Fatwa against Rushdie? Speaker 1: I don't believe there was ever a Fatwa. I'd have to go back and check. I'm sure someone can research that, but to my knowledge, there was not a Fatwa. There was lots of I had just kinda Internet smack talking about they were gonna kill him, but, I mean, they did recruit a guy and send him over here. So I think you have to take those threats very, very seriously because the Iranians have tried to kill they tried to kill the Saudi ambassador in Georgetown before, and that was a pretty serious plot that they had. Yeah. That one Speaker 2: was fake too. Speaker 1: I think that was fake too. Speaker 2: I think we all got to look real close at Ken Silva's. First of all, on the recent story here on the timeline of who was recruited by who, when, and who started telling what to which informants and all that, we should be really skeptical. And then now the one against the ambassador in the Obama years, that was fake. The guy was the absent minded car salesman from Corpus Christi who couldn't find his Speaker 1: car Speaker 2: keys and was caught on a phone call with Hisbala drug dealers, and they just embellished it into this plot. When that ambassador wasn't even a member of the royal family, he was some kind of lackey. There's no real point in them. And then supposing he this guy was gonna blow up a restaurant or whatever. I think the whole thing fell apart once Gareth Borders started looking at it as many of these stories often do. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been a while since I've been looking at that one. So I'll take your word for it. I bet it's been a minute. Speaker 2: Yeah. Alright. Well, listen. Thank you. Congratulations. And thank you for doing the right thing and standing on principle and resigning over this war. I'm sorry, I didn't get a chance to, to ask you about the choice to stay and make it less worse or go ahead and stand on principle. I know it was a difficult one for you, and you're gonna face a lot of heat even, going forward here. But, you obviously did the right thing, and I really appreciate it. Appreciate your time in the show, Joe. Speaker 1: Absolutely, Scott. Thank you so much. Speaker 3: The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc, Moondo's Artisan Coffee, Tom Wood's Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, fool's errand, enough already, and my latest provoked, how Washington started the new cold war with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at scotthorton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of provoked at scotthortonshow.com and patreon.com/scotthortonshow. Bumpers by Josh Langford music, intro and outro videos by Dissident Media, audio mastering by Podsworth Media. See y'all next time.
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Posted - August 5, 2025 at 6:16 PM
Saved - August 6, 2025 at 12:25 PM
reSee.it AI Summary
I have come across numerous perspectives from military leaders and officials who opposed the use of atomic bombs on Japan during World War II. Many believed Japan was already on the verge of surrender and that the bombings were unnecessary and inhumane. Figures like General Eisenhower and Admiral Nimitz expressed that Japan's defeat was imminent without the bomb. Others, including General MacArthur and Admiral Leahy, criticized the moral implications of using such a devastating weapon. There was a consensus that a demonstration of the bomb could have sufficed, and that the decision to drop it was strategically and ethically flawed.

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

Who Opposed Nuking Japan? “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” —Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower “In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. … The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.” —Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower “The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.” —Herbert Hoover “[T]he Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945 … up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; … [I]f such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the bombs.” —Herber Hoover “I told [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.” —Herbert Hoover “MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” —Norman Cousins “General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster. I had a long talk with him today, necessitated by the impending trip to Okinawa. He wants time to think the thing out, so he has postponed the trip to some future date to be decided later.” —Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s pilot, Weldon E. Rhoades “[General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants…MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off…” —Richard Nixon “The Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and the Swiss. And that suggestion of giving a warning of the atomic bomb was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted. In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb.” —Under Secretary of the Navy, Ralph Bird “The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.” —General “Hap” Arnold “[Gen.] Arnold’s view was that the dropping of the atomic bomb was totally unnecessary. He said he knew the Japanese wanted peace. There were political implications in the decision, and Arnold did not feel it was the military’s job to question them. … [Arnold’s view was]: when the question comes up of whether we use the atomic bomb or not, my view is that the Air Force will not oppose the use of the bomb, and they will deliver it effectively if the Commander-in-Chief decides to use it. But it is not necessary to use it in order to conquer the Japanese without the necessity of a land invasion.” —General Ira Eaker, Deputy Commander of U.S. Army Air Forces “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” — Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet “The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war.” Adm. Nimitz “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons … The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.” —Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman “Truman told me it was agreed they would use it, after military men’s statements that it would save many, many American lives, by shortening the war, only to hit military objectives. Of course, then they went ahead and killed as many women and children as they could, which was just what they wanted all the time.” —Adm. Leahy “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb. … The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” — Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command “[LeMay said] if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” —Robert MacNamara “The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment … It was a mistake to ever drop it … [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.” — Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr. “I concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945. Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands scheduled for 1 November 1945 would have been necessary.” —Paul Nitze, director and then Vice Chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey “[E]ven without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” —U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946 “Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia. Washington decided it was time to use the A-bomb. I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds.” —Ellis Zacharias Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence “When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs. Many other high-level military officers concurred.” —Brigadier General Carter Clarke, the Military Intelligence officer in charge of preparing summaries of intercepted Japanese cables for President Truman and his advisors “The commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King, stated that the naval blockade and prior bombing of Japan in March of 1945, had rendered the Japanese helpless and that the use of the atomic bomb was both unnecessary and immoral. —Carter Clarke “I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used… the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate… My proposal… was that the weapon should be demonstrated over… a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo… Would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will… Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation… It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would find its way into the armaments of the world.” —Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy Lewis Strauss “In the light of available evidence I myself and others felt that if such a categorical statement about the retention of the dynasty had been issued in May 1945, the surrender-minded elements in the Japanese government might well have been afforded by such a statement a valid reason and the necessary strength to come to an early clear cut decision. If surrender could have been brought about in May 1945, or even in June, or July, before the entrance of Soviet Russia into the Pacific war and the use of the atomic bomb, the world would have been the gainer.” —Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew And for what it’s worth, then-Army Chief George Marshall wanted only to hit military facilities with it, not cities. “It will not be long before we are reduced to savagery. We are the barbarians within our own empire.” —Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind “This doctrine of progress is a most interesting instance of the blind and foolish confidence of Americans in the God Progress. … Thus far, apparently, it has been progress toward annihilation, an end to be accomplished, perhaps, by the improved atomic bomb? We have dealt more death and destruction in the space of ten years than the men of the Middle Ages, with their Devil, were able to accomplish in a thousand.” —Russell Kirk “The atomic bomb was a final blow to the code of humanity. I cannot help thinking that we will suffer retribution for this. For a long time to come I believe my chief interest is going to be the restoration of civilization, of the distinctions that make life intelligible.” —Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences

scotthortonshow
Posted - July 3, 2025 at 5:50 PM
Saved - July 4, 2025 at 3:25 PM

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

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@TuckerCarlson - Tucker Carlson

How did we wind up at war with Iran? Scott Horton explains. (0:00) The History of Why Iran Is Such a Global Focal Point (11:16) The Jimmy Carter Doctrine (22:29) The Brutality of the Iraq/Iran War (29:40) The First Iraq War Was a Massive Mistake (41:32) Bill Clinton’s Fatal Mistake That Drove America Into the Middle East (47:44) The Truth About Osama bin Laden’s Motives (50:08) What You Don’t Know About the 1990s Terror Attacks (1:02:15) The History of the Israel/Iran Relationship (1:09:50) Why Osama bin Laden Was Happy When George Bush Was Elected (1:14:53) Why Is There So Much Persecution of Christians in the World? (1:16:22) Scott Horton’s Partnership With Darryl Cooper (1:24:13) Foreknowledge of 9-11 (1:31:02) The Real Meaning of the Word “Neocon” (1:38:47) Israel’s Clean Break Strategy (1:46:46) The Oil Pipeline Between Iraq and Israel and Why Israel Cut It Off (2:01:50) Barack Obama’s Role in Stoking Foreign Wars (2:10:36) Corporate Media’s Sudden Pivot on Assad (2:14:43) How Obama Paved the Way for Islamic Rule of Syria (2:23:11) The Truth About Iran’s Nuclear Program (2:33:32) How Effective Was Trump’s Bombing Campaign on Iran? (2:43:46) What Happens if There Is Regime Change in Iran? (2:50:18) Is Horton Hopeful for America’s Future? Includes paid partnerships.

Video Transcript AI Summary
Scott Horton discusses the history of US-Iran relations, starting with the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh and the reinstallation of the Shah. This action led to blowback, exemplified by the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Nixon pressured the Shah to buy US weapons, undermining his rule. The US initially tried working with Khomeini but then soured after the hostage crisis, triggered by the Shah's admission into the US for cancer treatment at Rockefeller's request. The Carter Doctrine declared the Persian Gulf an American lake. Brzezinski sought to bait the Soviets into Afghanistan, leading to the Carter Doctrine to deter Soviet expansion into Iran, though he later admitted the Soviet threat to Iran was overstated. The US supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, enabling his use of chemical weapons against Iranians. The US supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, leading to the rise of Al Qaeda. The US gave Saddam a green light to invade Kuwait, then intervened to protect Saudi Arabia. The Clinton administration adopted a dual containment policy against Iraq and Iran, further fueling Al Qaeda's animosity. Bin Laden cited US support for Israel and bases in Saudi Arabia as key grievances. The US supported Al Qaeda in Chechnya and Bosnia, even as they attacked the US. Neoconservatives, many with Trotskyist backgrounds, advocated for war with Iraq to benefit Israel, aiming to rebuild an oil pipeline to Haifa. The US supported Al Qaeda-linked groups in Libya and Syria, leading to the rise of ISIS. Obama took Al Qaeda's side in Libya and then moved Gaddafi's arms to Al Qaeda in Syria. The US has been fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
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Full Transcript
Speaker 0: Scott Horton, thank you. So we appear to be in the middle of a war with Iran. It's on pause, thank heaven, at the moment, but we are in some sort of conflict with Iran. And whatever you think of that, I think it's important to know how we got here, and that is that context is wholly missing from most coverage. I mean, is crazy. It's little bit like assessing a marriage the day the divorce is filed. Like, you can take a side or not, but there's a story there. And the question is where do you get the story? And Wikipedia is not a reliable narrator. Know it's full of historians. You're someone I think I consider honest and well informed. You've written a book on it enough already. But most important from my perspective is that if you make a mistake, you will admit it. If you were wrong, you will admit it immediately and apologize. And for me, that's the acid test. Like, is a person honest? I don't know. Does he admit fault? And you do. So people can assess what they think of the story you're about to tell. This is not a conversation for everyone. This is a conversation for people who are interested in knowing the backstory, how we got here. And so with that, I will just ask you to start wherever you think the story begins. How did we get into a war with Iran? Speaker 1: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here, Tucker. It's truly an honor to be here with you. The story begins as I think a lot of people know back in 1953 with the coup against Mohammed Mosaddegh, who was the democratically elected prime minister of the country, and the reinstallation of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who was the monarch and the son of the previous dictator. And there's actually a really great CIA history of that, declassified history of that by a guy named Donald Wilbur, where this is where they coined the phrase blowback. And he says, agents should be aware of the danger of blowback coming down the line when we do projects like this. And so then in CI This Speaker 0: is an internal history written by CIA for CIA? Speaker 1: Right. And later published by James Rison at the New York Times. And so as there's a former CIA analyst named Chalmers Johnson, who turned a great opponent of empire in his later years after the cold war. But he explained he had been a professor at USC and a contract analyst for CIA. And he explained that blowback really meant not just consequences, but it meant the long term consequences of secret foreign policies. So when they come due, the American public at large is unaware of the true causes and are then left open or susceptible to misleading interpretations Exactly. Of what's happening. So then the Iranian revolution in 1979 is the perfect example of that. If you ask people of that generation who were around then, all they remember is Iranians chanting death to America and burning American flags. Exactly. These people hate us. I knew a guy I just met a guy one day who explained, well, the Bin Ladenites, they have all these complicated reasons for hating us. But the Iranians, they just hate us because I remember them burning our flag. Yes. Speaker 0: I do too. Do too. It was infuriating. Speaker 1: Right. That's setting. But that's the beginning of the story for most people there even if they go back. But that was actually twenty six years after America had installed the dictator to rule over those people. And in fact, when Nixon started getting us out of Vietnam, he realized he needed to bribe the military industrial complex in another way. And so he started putting pressure on the shah to increase weapons purchases from The United States, which he really couldn't afford and helped to undermine his rule. This is where the Iranians got their f fours and f fourteens from, was from Nixon and Ford during that time. And then there's a famous clip Speaker 0: His military spending, of course, was in decline as we withdrew from Vietnam. Speaker 1: Right. And so they needed to keep the big companies on the dole. Right? Keep them happy. And so the the military industrial complex firms. And so this is one of the ways that they did it, but the shah couldn't really afford it, and it really helped to undermine his rule in the country, which is a very poor country. And he's buying all this first world military equipment on the taxpayer's dime there. And there's a clip of Jimmy Carter toasting the shaw at his birthday and calling him your majesty and saying, the stability of your country is a testament to your people's love for your rule over them. And people can find that on YouTube. And this is just months before the revolution breaks out. And what had happened with the revolution was that the shah's rule was weakened because he had cancer, and he had to leave the country anyway to try to get cancer treatment. And the revolution was breaking out all over the country, and it was a real popular revolution. And now I remembered this, and I actually remembered it wrong. I thought I remembered Ayatollah walking up the stairs. I couldn't find that footage. But I did find footage of the Ayatollah on the plane on the way back to Iran from Paris, France. Speaker 0: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: And he's being interviewed by Peter Jennings Yeah. Who's asking him, so how do you feel about your triumphant return to Iran right now and this kind of thing? Well, I remember even as a kid wondering, but aren't the French our friends? And why would they send the Ayatollah back to Iran to inherit this deadly anti American revolution if that wasn't what America wanted? But the answer is that is what America wanted. The CIA and the State Department had advised Jimmy Carter that we know this guy. Khomeini, he's not so bad. He was part of a Shiite group that we helped to agitate against Mohammed Mosaddegh back in '53. We can work with him. And a state department guy named William Sullivan, I believe he was the ambassador, William Sullivan compared him to Mahatma Gandhi. And so I Speaker 0: remember this. And in fact, I remember one of the hostages, a state department guy, a CIA guy, but who spent four forty four days in the embassy when he got out saying, wow, I miscalled that one. Because I think it was a pretty conventional view that the Ayatollah was more reasonable than he turned out to be. Speaker 1: Well, and the thing is too though, is everybody conflates the whole revolution into one big scene with the especially the hostage crisis is what everyone remembers in their pocket imagination. Right? But the revolution was successful by February 1979. America spent the rest of the year between then and November trying to work with the ayatollah's new government and warning him about threats from Saddam Hussein who had just who was a former CIA asset and who had just taken over Iraq in a bloody coup against his predecessor Al Baqar that same year. And people can find video of that coup, by the way, where Saddam takes over and orders all his enemies taken out back and shot in the middle of the thing. It's crazy footage. And they were warning the Ayatollah's new regime about threats from Saddam and threats from the USSR and the potential that the Soviet Union would invade Iran throughout that year. But then what happened was that in November, David Rockefeller, who was the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the president of the council on foreign relations, an extremely influential guy, sort of the George Soros of his day, very politically influential billionaire type. He intervened with Carter and asked Carter to let the shah into The United States for cancer treatment. And that was what caused the riot because the signal was sent that at least they interpreted it that to mean America was going to nurse the shah backed health and then reinstall him in power in a counter revolution. And so that was when and it very well may have been the IRGC and the revolutionary guard corps that that started the riot. They say it was spontaneous student uprising thing. Who knows? But that was when they sacked the embassy and seized the hosages. Obviously, not justifying that, but it's just that was obviously the CIA station in the country is in the embassy. That was where they had waged the counter revolution of fifty three, the coup d'etat fifty three to reinstall the shaw then. And that was what led to the sacking of the embassy. Speaker 0: Fascinating. Speaker 1: Why? So that wasn't till November of seventy nine. Speaker 0: So from February to November, we were in contact with the Ayatollah, the US government was in What what do we know what David Rockefeller's motive would be? Speaker 1: I think it's the Shah was his friend and he was dying. And they were he's just like Straightforward. Yeah. I believe I believe that was the whole of it. Speaker 0: He was in Mexico, I think, before he came to United States. Speaker 1: And so then that was what touched off the crisis. Then there was operation Eagle Claw where they sent in, you know, primordial JSOC, right, to go, and that was a catastrophe where the they were actually leaving. There are enough planes and helicopters have broken down in the desert where they were gonna turn around and leave. But then on turning around and leaving, one of the helicopters crashed into one of the planes. I'm sorry, forget the number of people who were killed, but a few few guys were killed. Yes. And it was a total embarrassment and a disaster. So then in reaction to that, Carter came in and in his state of the union address in 1980, he announced the Carter doctrine. This was a big new Brzezinski's doctrine really, that said that now the entire Persian Gulf is an American lake. And we essentially are giving a war guarantee to Iran that we just lost control of. But saying essentially warning that no power read the USSR better consider rolling into the Persian Gulf and trying to establish dominance there. We'll establish it first. And now let me stop for a second because I really should have talked about Afghanistan at the same time. The Soviets Speaker 0: Same year. Speaker 1: The same year, 1979, the Soviets had a problem with their sock puppet dictator, Hapizullah Amin. He was basically no good at at being a dictator and the country was falling apart. And so in July of seventy nine, at Brzezinski's insistence, Carter signed a finding authorizing the CIA to begin support for the mujahideen there. It was not all that much at first, but it was working with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The Soviets did invade in '79, and I don't actually have any direct causation there that they invaded because of the American intervention, but that is why America was trying to intervene there. Walter Slocum and Zabinubrzynski had this Slocum was a defense department official, a civilian official. Their idea was Vietnam was so bad for us. This it the word itself wasn't even a country anymore. It was a terrible stupid thing that you shouldn't have done that cost too much money and disrupted the society back home in so many ways. It was a disaster, a quagmire for our society as well as the army there. So let's not do that anymore. We had the Vietnam syndrome. The American people said we don't wanna do that. Right. So if the American people don't have the appetite to contain communism anymore, what if we bait them into over expansion? Speaker 0: Now we don't want them Speaker 1: to roll into West Germany, but the Afghans, they're essentially expendable. If we can get to the Soviets to expand their commitments in Africa and in Latin America, good. Because they can't afford it. We know they can. And this is like part of the overall brinksmanship of that era. So this policy was started by Jimmy Carter. And when the Soviets did invade, Eric Margulies, who's a great war reporter who was around then, and Andrey Sokharov, who's the Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident, I quote in the book both of them saying they don't think that American intervention is what caused the Soviets to intervene. But doesn't matter because that's still what the Americans were trying to do was in Brzezinski's words, give the Soviets their own Vietnam. And that was July 3. I guess tomorrow will be the anniversary. 07/03/1979 was that finding, and you can find it at scotthorton.org/fairuse. I have the finding there. And and then when they invaded in December, Brzezinski did say this could give the Soviets their own Vietnam. In December, he wrote that in his memo there and said, but, you know, causes challenges for us too, including Soviet threats to invade Iran. So that's where the Carter doctrine comes from is, we're trying to get the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. Then when they did well, we, Brzezinski, was trying to get them to invade Afghanistan. Then when they did, he said, oh, no. Now they might come to Iran. So now we gotta announce this Carter doctrine in The Gulf to warn the Soviets they better not come. And now this is a recent development to me. My friend Gareth Porter found great journalist and historian found a document in the state department declassified records, where just two weeks after Carter's speech, Brzezinski admitted in a private meeting with Warren Christopher was there, and they were meeting with the Saudi foreign minister. And Brzezinski admitted that we don't really believe that there's a Soviet threat to Iran. We're basically just saying that. But Interesting. Speaker 0: So that was Why why was he just saying that? Speaker 1: To justify the buildup, to justify the assertion of American dominance on the in the Speaker 0: May may I ask you to go back Yeah. Twenty six years to Mosaddegh. So the convention, to the extent that people follow this, the coup was arranged by Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, Kermit, CIA officer in Tehran. This is the popular understanding. And the motive was Mossadegh's insistence that Iran get a bigger slice of its own oil money. Speaker 1: That was it. And then Is Speaker 0: John so that's true? Speaker 1: Yeah. And then John Foster and Alan Dulles, who are brothers. Alan was the director of central intelligence and John Foster was the secretary of state. They said, see, he's a commie, which he wasn't trying to ally with the Soviet Union, but they were, you know and people always say that he was trying to completely nationalize Iranian oil. I think that's an overstatement. I really should go back and research that better, but I know a guy who's a great energy reporter who says, really, he was just asking for a greater percentage. They use that as an excuse and see the Americans wanted to edge the British out to take the opportunity to get American dominance over Iranian oil instead of them. And so they use the excuse that, oh, Mosaddegh, he's a pinko if not a red, and so we gotta get rid of him. Speaker 0: You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food. Our food supply is rotten. It didn't used to be this way. Take chips for example. You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out of bed the next day, and the change of course is chemicals. There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body, seed oils for example. Now even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat, totally passive and out of it. But there is a better way. It's called masa chips. They're delicious. Got a whole garage full of them. They're healthy. They taste great. And they have three simple ingredients, corn, salt, and a 100% grass fed beef tallow. No garbage, no seed oils. What a relief, and you feel the difference when you eat them as we often do. Snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy at convenience stores. You feel satisfied, light, energetic, not sluggish. Tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips. It's endorsed by people who understand health. It's well worth a try. Go to masa, masachips.com/tucker. Use the code Tucker for 25% off your first order. That's masachips.com Tucker. Code Tucker for 25% off your first order. Highly recommended. And was the I mean, do we have any way of knowing how popular or unpopular the shah was during the twenty six years he was in power? Speaker 1: I know that he had a brutal secret police force that was trained by the Israelis that was in charge of keeping him in power. But, you know, all regimes maintain their power through fear, at least fear of if wasn't us, it would be somebody else who's worse. Right? So I think it's very likely that he had probably support in the big cities and less so out in the countryside. Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 1: Right? If you look at like Iranian election results these days out in the countryside, people are much more religious and much more conservative and tend to reject the kind of modernity that the Shah represented and his absolute rule too. I mean, who in the world is comfortable calling anybody your highness and your majesty and all this stuff? That's so bananas and archaic to me. Insane. I don't know. Maybe some people really do like that, but Speaker 0: Many do, the evidence suggests. Speaker 1: I guess so. But now here's another big part of the Carter doctrine, was given the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in the spring of nineteen eighty. Now we know this because Robert Perry found the document where Alexander Haig, when he became secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, he went and did a tour of the Middle East and he met with then Prince Fod, later King Fod. And prince Fad told him that, yep, I'm the one who gave the green light to Jimmy Carter on behalf I mean, to Saddam Hussein on behalf of Jimmy Carter to invade Iran. So now, why would Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran? Well, so everybody picture a map of Iraq here. All the land from Baghdad down to Kuwait and East to Iran is predominantly Shiite Arab territory. They're the 60% supermajority population of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Arab sitting on a secular dictatorship Yes. Run the most and he had Christians and Kurds and others inside his government, but it's essentially monopoly minority Sunni regime. And then lording it also over the Kurds in the North who are Sunnis, but not Arabs. They're their own ethnicity. And so they were essentially on the outs along with the Shiites. So when the Iranian revolution is successful next door, it's not just a revolution. It's a religious fundamentalist revolution, and the Mullahs and the Ayatollah Khomeini take over the country. So Saddam Hussein is afraid that his super majority Shiite population are now going to choose their religious sect. And after all, Shiite Islam was born in Iraq and then traveled into Iran from there. He's afraid they're going to Wait. Speaker 0: Shiite Islam was born in Iraq? Speaker 1: Yes. This is where the split happened after Mohammed died. Right. There was a split where the Sunnis decided that they would just go by consensus and choose their own ministers and Imams basically were Speaker 0: Right. And the Shiites went with The Shiites. Son-in-law. Speaker 1: That's right. The son-in-law. Speaker 0: That was Iraq that happened in? Speaker 1: Well, that's where the big battle of Karbala was and all that stuff going back. Speaker 0: So My ignorance astounds me. Speaker 1: It's okay. I know that. But but so yeah. And like the main holy site holy sites are in Najaf and Yes. And in, I guess, Eastern Baghdad Yeah. And Samarra. Speaker 0: Been there, but I didn't get I didn't get the significance. Speaker 1: So but so Saddam Hussein, minority Sunni, secular Saddam Hussein is afraid that his super majority Shiite population is going to choose their religious sect as Shiites over their national sect as Iraqis and their ethnic sect as Arabs, and they're going to join up with the Shiite revolution and march all the way to Baghdad and overthrow him. So and in fact, some Iraqis, Shiite factions were leaving to go to Iran and to join up with Iran and to try to encourage revolution in Iraq. So he had reason to fear. So what he did was he conscripted all those Shiites and sent them to war instead. He asked Jimmy Carter for permission and support, and Jimmy Carter gave it to him, and he launched the war to try to overthrow the Ayatollah. Speaker 0: This was right around the time that the Grand Mosque in Mecca was taken over as well. Speaker 1: That was in '79. Right. Speaker 0: Right. So there was this sense that, I mean, just to kind of defend everyone involved, I guess, on all sides, there was a sense that there's an Islamic revolution that could spread throughout the Islamic world Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 0: And destabilize every regime with a majority Muslim population. People were scared shitless. Speaker 1: Yep. And in fact, that same crisis at the mosque in Mecca was part of the reason that the Saudis and the CIA and the Pakistanis were together to take all these kooks and ship them off to Afghanistan to go help the local mujahideen to fight against the Soviet Union. Better they go off and get killed there or do the Lord's work killing godless communists there than have them still in Saudi and in The Middle East in The Gulf causing trouble. Right? All these stories are playing out simultaneously. Speaker 0: I know that to this day, the takeover of the mosque in Mecca is a is a raw subject in in Saudi. Speaker 1: Yeah. You could see their reason for fear there. You had a credible enough yeah. Like gain this the popular consent of the people to replace their rule with religious rule, like real religious rule rather than these princelings on top, the Saudi family and Solomon family and all that on top. Speaker 0: Oh, yeah. Well, it's the seat of the religion, that city. I mean, the yeah. Sorry to interrupt. No. So interesting. Okay. I just think it's important to think through, like, what were people thinking given the time and place in which they lived. Right. Speaker 1: Yeah. So yeah. So in other words, Saddam Hussein had real reason to fear I think that's right. Speaker 0: I'm not, you know, defending Saddam or the CIA or the Ayatollah Khomeini, but I mean, like, they're, like, as we all are, products of the moment. Right. Speaker 1: And so yeah. Just it's an explanation for what was going on. Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 1: Why he did what he did. That's right. So now America and and Ronald Reagan picks up where Carter left off essentially with all this unbroken and on the Afghan policy on and on Iraq. So in Iraq, they supported him for essentially the entire eight years of the Reagan years. And the war didn't end till '89 in a settlement. It was and and by the way, you know, Randolph Boren said, war is the health of the state, asterisk, unless you lose. Right? Completely. But otherwise, Saddam Hussein's assault on Iran helped solidify support for the Ayatollah's rule, which was actually quite shaky at that time. But people rallied around the new regime because, hey, we're all Shiite fundamentalists now if that's who is in charge of the government that's defending them. Same thing happened in Yemen more recently. I know a guy, a reporter in Yemen who told me, well, we're all Houthis now. I mean, which he's not. Right? The Houthis are a sect of Shiites from up in the Sadda Province. But they're the ones in charge and you're attacking us, so now we're all with them. Same way Americans rallied around w Bush or whatever. Right? Speaker 0: Routed around Trump when he was shot. Right. Exactly. Elon Musk endorsed him that night. Right. No. There's a of course, it's a very familiar human psychology, and it's understandable. I don't judge it at Speaker 1: So that's what that's what saved the Ayatollah's regime, which may have toppled. Right? It was very unchanging. Speaker 0: So let me ask you that war, the Iran Iraq war, which began at the very, I think at the very, the at the top of the Gulf, the marshy area there, that has reputation as one of the most brutal wars of the century. Is that true? Speaker 1: Yes. My understanding was, in fact, I don't know if you're familiar with a guy named the war nerd, Gary Brecher. He did a really great essay about the Iran Iraq war. That's the best thing I ever read about it, where he just compares it to World War one, kinda like what you're seeing in Ukraine now, just brutal trench warfare, tank, and artillery. And then to the war nerd, it's all very interesting because there's the navies are involved, and the armies are involved, and the air forces are involved, and there's unconventional weapons. And and America was America that paid for German chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein that they provided to Saddam Hussein that he used not just mustard gas, but including sarin and tape and nerve gas that they used to target Iranians in the field. We know that. For certain. And we know that they supply them with satellite intelligence to use to target. Speaker 0: Government made it possible for Saddam to use chemical weapons against the Iranians. Speaker 1: That's right. Speaker 0: So the US dollar is not the bulwark it has been for our lifetimes. It's actually getting weaker. It's depressing, but it's true. Decades of Washington money printing, the misbehavior of the Fed has devalued the US dollar to a point that you couldn't have imagined thirty years ago. Bad decisions in Washington are making you poorer, and it should make you a little nervous. Makes us a little nervous. The entire system is just backed by trust in the government, but what if no one trusts the government? So one of the results of of this is that a lot of people want to invest some of their money outside the dollar system and some in crypto. They don't know where to start though, and that's where iTrustCapital comes in. Their platform makes the crypto game easier, safer, and smarter. You can use it to pair the long term tax benefits of a retirement account with the freedom to invest in digital assets. So there are potential big upsides here. They also offer secure nonretirement crypto accounts. ITrustCapital uses a closed loop security system. So if someone gets your login, they can't send your crypto to an external wallet. And if you ever need help, there's someone right there to talk to, a real person in The United States, an expert at your service. It's complicated, crypto. It can be. This makes it simple. It's easy to set up an account. You can do it in minutes. You can start investing today. Click the link below or visit itrustcapital.com/tucker. Use the promo code Tucker for an additional funding bonus. So I've heard that. It's that's so crazy. It's like it's like Fauci's work with the Chinese to develop, you know, a global pandemic. It's like Speaker 1: You know, I'll tell you what, there's there's a many great footnotes about this, but one real great one is by Shane Harris, who's now at the Washington Post, a very official national security beat reporter, did a big special on this at foreignpolicy.com, the establishment journal who is forgive me. I'm forgetting the name of the essay. It was by Shane Harris in foreign policy back ten years ago or something about where did Saddam get all his chemical weapons. Speaker 0: But that's just absolutely crazy since chemical weapons were part of a big part of the justification for invading Iraq in 02/2003. Speaker 1: That's right. Well, we'll get there in just a minute. Speaker 0: No. But I know, but it's just like, so I have heard that, oh, The US paid for the chemical weapons that Saddam used against the Iranians and the Kurds. Speaker 1: And they even spun it for him when he used them against the Kurds. They blamed it on Iran. The DIA did a big report blaming it on Iran when Saddam gassed Halabja, which, you know, was in Colin Powell's speech of why we have to attack them. And I was like, back then, y'all covered for him. I mean, Colin Powell was Reagan's national security adviser. Right? He was in the administration at the time when they blamed that on Iran. So crazy. It is. And and just to Speaker 0: just to linger for one Yeah. One moment. We know that's true. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. There's in fact, at at f f f dot org, the future freedom foundation Speaker 0: Mhmm. Speaker 1: There's a article by Jacob Hornberger that I believe is called where did Saddam get his WMD? And he has links to, like, 10 very thorough sources all about this. There's no question about it. They admitted over and over. Post Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, whatever. Speaker 0: Crazy. And then, you know, twenty years later, we're invading Iraq because he might have chemical weapons. Speaker 1: Right. And it turned out mentions this? Yeah. And it turned out years later, the only ones that they ever found in the country were from the eighties, Stuff that America had helped them purchase from the Europeans then was the only stuff that anyone ever found. And that was why they covered it up was because this is stuff that Ronald Reagan and George Bush's father had helped supply them. And so we don't really wanna emphasize that so much when the claim had been that there was an ongoing program to develop this stuff circa early two thousands, which of course couldn't have been further from the truth. But now so the same time that the Iran Iraq horrific bloodbath is going on in the Iran Iraq war, America supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan, and this included, as we were just talking about, the Arab Afghan army, the international Islamist brigades or Islamic brigades. And these were mostly Arabs, but included Americans and Chechens and Filipinos and people from all over the place went and traveled to Afghanistan to fight, to essentially bolster the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union. Speaker 0: I knew people in who did that. Speaker 1: Yes. And when I was a kid, this was an open secret. They made Rambo three about it. In fact, the the hero in Rambo three, Rambo's mentor, colonel Trotman, tells the Soviet KGB interrogator, we already had our Vietnam. Now you're gonna have yours. That's built into the story. That's why we're helping to do this to them is to break them. And which, by the way, I think worked. Right? I I don't really think it's disputable that the Afghan war was one of the straws that broke The US Without without ours back. Speaker 0: It was their Vietnam actually in the end. Yep. And and just to bolster what you're saying, in July of nineteen eighty six, I went with my dad to a cocktail reception in the US Senate for these guys, for the Mahajiddin and their American supporters who had gone over there wearing their headgear fighting this. I mean, it was totally out in the open. This was not a secret at all. Speaker 1: Yep. And so Yep. And then the warlords that America backed their favorite warlords were Gubaldin Hekmatyar and Jalaladin Haqqani. I remember. Two of the worst throat slitting murderous warlords in the country and and ended up becoming America's enemies in our Afghan war later on. But so this is also the birth of what became Al Qaeda. You had a guy named Abdullah Azam, who was a Palestinian refugee raised in Kuwait, who was the leader of this Islamist group that Bin Laden ended up taking over. And then the other kind of half of Al Qaeda was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was led by the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ayman al Zawahiri. Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 1: And they had all been, you know, buddies together in Afghanistan. And so then alright. Now let's switch back to the other side of Iran again. So then we get to Iraq war one, desert storm Nineteen ninety. Operation Yellow Ribbon. Right? So what's going on here is the Iraqis have just fought a war on behalf of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia basically to contain the Iranian revolution. Now Saddam owes them billions in war debts, but he can't pay them because oil's trading at, I think, $12 a barrel. He can't rebuild his country and he can't pay off his war debts, and they're calling in their loans and they're being real hard asses about it. And so he's threatening essentially through body language, he's moving his troops toward the Kuwaiti border and threatening to solve it the hard way. Now I do not believe that this was on purpose. As I as I explained in the book, the best I can tell this is a lot of left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, too many government departments, too many different people calling shots in different places. There's no real one mind running the government. Right? It's a bunch of different guys and different fiefdoms. So in this case, CENTCOM and CIA were telling which brand new CENTCOM, which is just being established. We're we're telling the Kuwaitis that you don't have to take that stuff from Saddam Hussein, tell him to go to hell, basically. The state department led by James Baker and not just April Glasby in the meeting on July 25, but also a statement by Margaret Tutwiler and another by Speaker 0: Debbie Jim Baker's assistant spokeswoman. Speaker 1: Yes. And then I'm sorry. Forget the other guy's name, but it was it was the ambassador, April Glasby, Margaret Tutwiler, this other guy in testimony before the conquerors had all three essentially given a green light to Saddam Hussein or worse like a flashing yellow light to go ahead and proceed. As Glasby told him, I used to be the ambassador to Kuwait and it was the same thing then. This is not our concern. Your border dispute with Kuwait is not our concern. She said, we don't wanna see a war here, but he's saying when I'm planning a war, he's planning a role right in there, right, could take Kuwait in a day and he did. And so it seemed like what she was saying was, we won't attack you if you attack. And Stephen Walt wrote at foreignpolicy.com. He has a blog there where he addressed the Glasby memo because we always had the Iraqis version of it. But then thanks to Manning and Assange, we finally got our hands on the state department's version of the same document. And so Stephen Walt gave a thorough treatment on. Boy, sure looks like a flashing yellow light to me. Now, the same time though, secretary of defense Dick Cheney and deputy secretary of defense for policy, Paul Wolffowitz, were alarmed. And they wanted to warn Saddam Hussein not to do it. And they made a statement telling him not to do it, but then Pete Williams, who later became the NBC reporter, he was the spokesman for the Pentagon, and he walked back their warning and made it seem like actually maybe you can go ahead. And I don't know if that was deliberate or just incompetence on his part. But then so they tried Cheney and Wolffowitz got George Bush to send a letter, but the letter was too softly worded. So they were like, no. We need to send another letter with a more stern warning so Hussein really gets the message. But by then, it was too late and the troops rolled across the border. So they really, in essence, like figuratively, in the end, they trapped him into it. They basically encouraged the Kuwaitis to give him the stiff arm. Right? And encouraged him to go ahead and get his revenge and take the northern oil fields. And then their warnings, actually, when they changed their mind and tried to get him to stop, were not enough to dissuade them. And April Glasby, the American ambassador to Kuwait, told the New York Times, we didn't think he was gonna take the whole country. He was supposed to just take the northern oil fields, but instead he went too far and took the whole country. But then Colin Powell was the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff at the time, and I believe he was the one who chaired the National Security Council meeting where they all decided they're just gonna draw the line at Saudi Arabia. They're not even gonna threaten to attack Iraq over Kuwait. We don't like it, but we're prepared to accept it. And that held for three days until Margaret Thatcher came to town. And Margaret Thatcher essentially called Bush a wimp and said, don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush. And that became a big scandal because she's a woman and she's calling out his manhood and he had already been called a wimp president. That was like the cover news week, it's a famous Bill Hicks joke. Cover news week, wimp president. And he had to somehow get over that. So that was when he said, oh, this will not stand and all that. Well, the British had investments in Kuwaiti oil and the Kuwaitis had investments in British debt, but what's that got to do with you and me, Tucker Carlson? I mean, we declared independence from the British empire a long time ago, I heard. Speaker 0: So Speaker 1: yeah. But no. And so they went to run this errand essentially for the Brits to reinstall. And I remember, and I was very interested in this. I was ninth grade at the time, very interested in the war. I don't remember the words his royal highness king Al Jabber being mentioned once on the news that that was what the war was for, to reinstall king Al Jabber to his throne. Right? Like most I don't even remember hearing that name a single time during all that. We just must protect the poor Kuwaitis, and of course, they lied. They pretended that Saddam was lining up his tanks on the Saudi border and was prepared to invade Saudi Arabia, which was a total hoax, never happened. And the Saint Petersburg, Florida times got Soviet satellite pictures that showed nothing but empty desert out there. And I've known guys who were stationed there said, yeah, they came and tested the board a little bit and left, but there never was mechanized divisions lined up prepared to invade on Riyadh. All they had to do was warn Hussein, you better not go to Riyadh, pal. Are you gonna deal with us? He wasn't ever gonna go. And then they lied about the atrocities and the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to The United States lied before the congress and said that she was a nurse at the hospital in Kuwait City and saw Iraqi soldiers dump premature babies out of the incubators and leave them on the cold floor to die, she said, and steal their incubators. And George Bush and the PR people repeated this senior that is and the PR people repeated this numerous times as example why we absolutely had to intervene for humanitarian reasons to save the poor Kuwaiti's. Total hoax. She was not a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion. It was all just a made up lie, but it was good enough to create the moral outrage in the country to get people to support the war. Now the reason I dwell on this is because mostly people look at Iraq war one as this huge success. It's a hundred hour land war. They we got to showcase all our laser guided munitions flying down chimneys and in windows and all of this, like, brand new space age twenty first century technology. And and it was just short and sweet. We lost less than a 100 guys or less than 200 guys depending on how you count them from various accidents and whatever. And so it was just known as it was just wonderful at the time. It was operation yellow ribbon. And George Bush senior said, by God, we kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all. We're back, baby. Now we can have wars again. And and in fact, Brent Scowcroft did say specifically that this was one of the reasons that they wanted to have the war, was to beat Vietnam syndrome, to give the American people a cheap and quick and easy win on the Powell doctrine, in and out, kick their butt, and and get out of there quickly, and call it a victory, and get the American people to mix their patriotism with militarism again like the good old days. And it worked as explicitly one of their goals. And yet there's a huge rub, a big wrinkle in the story, which is the Shiite and Kurdish uprising that took place about six weeks later after the end of the war. Bush senior personally in a radio message over voice of America and air force dropped leaflets over the Shiite army divisions in the south of the country, which America occupied the entire South Of Iraq in the aftermath of the war. And they encouraged all of these Shiites to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. And they did. They took him up on it. People in your audience, I know you're not a big electronic media guy, but people in your audience may have seen the movie Three Kings with Ice Cube and Marky Mark and George Clooney. And in that movie, the setting it's a gold heist movie, but the setting is they're occupying Southern Iraq in the aftermath of the war. And all around them, the Iraqi army is putting down the Shiite insurrection, crushing the insurrection and killing all these poor people and driving the refugees into Iran. So that's kind of a touchstone for people if that's probably the best way they would ever remember that such a thing ever happened is that movie popularized it a little bit. But so what happened was they were on their way to Baghdad, but George Bush and his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, secretary of state Baker, secretary of defense Cheney, they changed their mind. They left the Shiites high and dry, they let Saddam Hussein keep his helicopters and tanks to crush the revolution. Why? It was because remember when I said when the Iranian revolution happened, some of these Iraqi Shiites went to Iran and sided with the Iranians and wanted to import the revolution into Iraq. And that was why Saddam conscripted them all to fight the war. Right? Because that was what he was afraid of. Well, they started coming back across the border from Iran, namely the Badah Brigade, which was the arm militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was a group of Iraqis tied very closely to the Dawah party who were supported by Iran and had been living in Iran for the last ten years and had fought on Iran's side in the Iran Iraq war. Now they're coming across the border to lead the revolution. So this is the Bush senior administration. These are all the Reaganites. Right? This is George Ronald Reagan's vice president and all of his men. Dick Cheney was the only new guy. He had come from the house. All of the rest of them had been Reagan administration officials. So they're all saying to themselves, oh my god. We just spent ten years, nine years, supporting Saddam Hussein's war against Iran to contain the Iranian revolution. Now we're importing it. We're gonna be the ones to put it in power Speaker 0: in Speaker 1: Baghdad. Oops. So they called it off, and they let Saddam Hussein massacre a 100,000 people or so in order to crush that insurrection and stay in power. Oof. Speaker 0: Well, here's a story you probably haven't heard a lot about. The Chinese mafia is exploiting rural America to create a drug empire. This is not available on cable news. The network's not telling you about this, but it's totally real. Communist affiliated drug gangs destroying parts of The United States, the parts that Washington ignores, to sell drugs, laundering money, and building a black market network inside this country's most beautiful but least served areas. We've got a brand new documentary on this. It's called High Crimes, The Chinese Mafia Takeover of Rural America. It's available now on tuckercarlson.com. It's excellent. The purchase of churches and schools to aid the operation, the jerry rigging of power boxes to steal electricity, foreign pesticides, collusion with the Mexican cartels. It's it's unbelievable. By the way, one of the drug houses is like walking distance from my house. I didn't know that. It's a layered and fascinating story. Head to tuckercarlson.com to watch now. We think you'll love it. Speaker 1: That then became the excuse of why we have to stay at our new basis in Saudi Arabia, because we have to contain Saddam Hussein. The pretension was that, what, he's gonna murder every last Shiite in the country until they're all dead? No. I mean, the insurrection was over, but the pretension was we have to protect the Shiites by and the Kurds in the North by having these no fly zones and by maintaining the blockade against Iraq. And so that be that was the principal excuse for the Bush administration to stay. Now the Clinton administration comes in and by the way, if I ever say anything that sounds like I'm saying anything positive about a president in this, it's probably a misunderstanding. I've convinced Bill Clinton and George w Bush both, for example, are the worst presidents we've ever had, and personally, I despise them. So I don't don't anyone take me wrong like I'm saying anything nice about the guy who burned all the branches of idioms, babies to death. Noted. So but Bill Clinton, idiotically, had said, maybe we can get along with Iraq and bring them back in from the cold. I forgot his exact words, poor paraphrase. But he had indicated maybe we can normalize relations with Iraq. Well, that set a few different groups into a panic, namely the Kuwaitis. And I'm sure you're familiar with the allegations, at least, that Saddam Hussein tried to kill George h w Bush with a truck bomb attack in Kuwait in 1993. Well, that was a damn lie, and it was invented by the father of the girl who told the Kuwait the incubator's hoax. It was the same guy whose daughter did that, was the same guy who invented the assassination of Bush senior hoax, which almost everybody still believes. They've never heard it contradicted. But in fact, Seymour Hirsch wrote a piece in the New Yorker completely debunking it before the end of the year called case not closed. And it's about how it was just a whiskey smuggling ring, and they just embellished it into this murder plot against Bush senior, which is never any such thing. It's probably part of the reason that we had the war of o three was that w Bush believed that that story was true. And I think probably, know, to this day, almost everybody seems to still believe that, but it wasn't true. But it was it was on the occasion of that hoax that Bill Clinton went ahead and gave in to his new foreign policy aid, a guy named Martin Indick, who had been Yitzhak Shamir's guy, who was the former terrorist and Laguud party prime minister of Israel, who Bush senior had tangled with. Speaker 0: And I don't think Martin Indick was Americanized. I remember he was Australian. Speaker 1: Right. An Australian and then had lived in Israel and was an adviser to the lagoon. Speaker 0: So what is he doing in our government? Speaker 1: Good question. So he he's also the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which you'll see their guys quoted all the time as just bland middle of the road experts on everything Middle East, when it was literally founded by a Likud guy as a spin off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who put up the money for it. It was and that's not true of all neocon think tanks. It is the case with WINNEP. There's a direct spin off of APAC, and it was at WINNEP where Indick went and gave his speech inaugurating what was called the dual containment policy. And that dual containment policy was born in Israel. And the idea was where Bill Clinton is saying, hey, maybe we can normalize with Iraq, maybe we can normalize with Iran. In fact, this is a good place to mention that Svenia Brzezinski who had all this egg on his face from the Iranian revolution. Now it's 1993, and he's saying we ought to try to get along with Iran. We ought to bring them in from the cold, and we could build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan through Iran and to the Persian Gulf as a way that we can make money together and begin to warm up relations. And so instead of having a cold war against Iraq and Iran, we can go ahead and normalize relations with both. And in fact, Alexander Haig, who had been Reagan's secretary of state, as previously mentioned, found the green light memo there, or wrote the green light memo that Robert Perry found. He also agreed with Brzezinski. And this is first year of Bill Clinton. And now we can normal begin to normalize relations with Iran. We ought to build oil pipelines across Iran, and we have those interests in common. You might even remember Dick Cheney caused a minor stir. He was the chairman of Halliburton, and in 1997 and '98, he gave repeated statements condemning Bill Clinton sanctions and saying we should get along with Iran. And because after all, God didn't see fit to only put oil under the ground of countries with western democracies, but we have to do business with them anyway and we can. Who's afraid of the Ayatollah anyway? We're The USA. Right? We can mess with us. That's what Dick Cheney said and it caused a little scandal because he said it in Australia in 1998. He he said it numerous times, but in '98, he said it in Australia, and that's a big sin to criticize your country from foreign soil. Right? So it was like a little bit of a scandal. But what was he saying? He was saying we can be reasonable and deal with these guys. But but anyway, in the early nineties, this was a position of Brzezinski and Haig and others that now we can try to get along. But it was the Israelis who said no. They vetoed it and insisted on this dual containment policy. Iraq, because we just beat them up so bad in Iraq war one, they're too weak to balance against Iran. So America has to stay in Saudi to balance against them both. This then, Tucker, is a main reason why the Arab Afghan mujahideen that we had built up to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan then turned against The United States. Bin Laden wanted to use his men to repel Iraqis from Kuwait and to protect the Saudi Kingdom and was outraged that the king gave in and let a bunch of white Christian forces from across the ocean come and defend Saudi instead. And then not only that, but they broke their promise. It's so funny. Bill Crystal one time interviewed Dick Cheney for two hour Bill Crystal has a podcast. Interviewed him for, like, two hours, and they talked about everything under the sun except a rap word too. They just didn't mention it at all. But Speaker 0: but Is that is that true? Speaker 1: It's true. It's so funny. It's Can't Speaker 0: believe you listen to the whole Speaker 1: Bill Crystal. Well, you can watch it on double speed. You know? I debated Bill Crystal once if you haven't seen that. It's a lot of fun. But Cheney tells Kristol that it was him, not Baker. Secretary of defense Cheney promised the king, as soon as the war is over, we'll leave. And it was on that condition that he allowed America to come to defend the Saudi Kingdom in Iraq war one in the first place. Then as soon as it was over, they found this reason to stay. We gotta protect the Shiites, and then later under Bill Clinton, you know, adopting the same policy, the sanctions stay until Saddam is gone. And instead of normalizing relations with Iraq and Iran, we're now gonna keep cold war against them both through the end of the century. And again, this is what really was responsible for turning Al Qaeda against The United States. Speaker 0: Well, I mean, Osama bin Laden said that in his now suppressed letter. By the way, reading what someone you despise rights is not an endorsement of that person. Right. Of course, but it's essential. Mean Speaker 1: And that letter, by the way, that was only written in 02/2002, and there's crucial information in there. But more important to me would be his declarations of war from 1996 and 1998 Speaker 0: Well, actually can Speaker 1: be a real time. Speaker 0: There's another letter that was found by a Wall Street Journal reporter on Osama's laptop in Oh, yeah. The heart. Speaker 1: Uh-huh. That's in there. Speaker 0: It's an amazing amazingly interesting document. And he's like, I'm watching this on TV, I guess I did this, and here's why I did it. And American sport for Israel is the number one reason, obviously. But also on the list is you've got bases in Saudi, which is where Mecca and Medina are. Like, what are you doing? Speaker 1: Right. And it's by the way, for people interested in this, can read all about it. Guy's name is Alan Cullison. It's the Wall Street Journal reporter, and he wrote a huge write up about this in the Atlantic, which I quoted my previous book is called fool's errand. All about Afghanistan. Story. The guy Speaker 0: Yeah. Like, loses his laptop charger. Speaker 1: And it's a letter to Mullah Omar is what it is. And what he's yeah. And so what he's saying is, listen, I know I got you in a lot of trouble here. Okay? But bear with me because either we're gonna whoop them good and they're gonna turn and flee, in which case they'll be humiliated and their power will be destroyed, or we'll bog them down and we'll plead them to bankruptcy over ten years the same way we did the Soviet Union, and then they'll leave, in which case they'll be humiliated and their power weakened. And so that's the that's the game we're playing. So sorry for getting the end of this, but that's why I did it. Please Speaker 0: don't You Speaker 1: know, it would Speaker 0: have been nice to have a conversation about that, again, not as an endorsement of Osama bin Laden or the atrocities of nineeleven, but just because it's important to know what your adversaries are thinking. And I try to bring this up in 2002 when the journal finally printed it, I think it was a year lag. The FBI grabbed the laptop, the reporter had a copy on a thumb drive, if I'm recalling this right. It finally comes out and I read it on the air, and just because, hey, this is interesting. I was at CNN, and boy, man, they called me a Nazi, you know? What? I'm pretty anti Nazi just for the record. But I just thought that was, like, totally suppressed. Yeah. But that turned out to be prescient because it did bankrupt us actually. Speaker 1: Yeah. And so now let's go back to the beginning of the terror wars here in the nineties. So we have well, first of all, let's just go through the list of the attacks. They started attacks in 1990. They killed rabbi Kahane in New York City in an assassination. It was a guy named Noser, I believe was the hitman, but this was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, essentially the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman's guys. So proto Al Qaeda, like half of what became Al Qaeda later. Speaker 0: So they and we know that they did Oh, yeah. Al Qaeda, the precursor to Al Qaeda murdered Khan. Speaker 1: Right. Now he was a a radical rabbi who advocated the entire expulsion of the entire Arab population just so people know who he was. That was their motive. He he was his party, the Koch party had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being, quote, fascist. Speaker 0: Yes. Were genocidal. Openly genocidal. But she can't assassinate people. Speaker 1: No. No. Yeah. Speaker 0: Of course. Soil. Speaker 1: Yeah. Mean So that that was what happened. Then the same essentially group Did yeah. Speaker 0: Yeah. Did people I mean, I remember when he was murdered Mhmm. Outside his speech, I think, in New York City. Was it widely known at the time that that that it was this these radical Muslims just did it? Speaker 1: So I'd have to go back, but my understanding is essentially the FBI did a terrible job on all these domestic terrorism cases in the nineteen nineties where essentially they had enough information. I forget if they had enough information to stop that one or just from their investigation of that, they should have known enough to wrap all these guys up and prevent the World Trade Center bombing of nineteen ninety three and any of the rest of this stuff. But because each time they were trying to cover up what a bad job they'd done last time, they failed to pursue the leads to prevent the next one. And there's a book called a thousand years for revenge by a journalist named Peter Lance, where he really goes through the FBI's failings all through the nineties as tracing these these terrorists inside, especially in New York City during that time. And so then they're attacking us here and overseas all during that time. So they hit us in 1992 at the Radisson Hotel in Aden, Yemen. Then in '93 was the first World Trade Center attack, which, you know, context is important here. Bill Clinton had only been the president for a month and a week, and then two days later, the ATF attacked the branch of Indians. So all attention went to Waco and away from the World Trade Center. Six people had died, which was tragic, but it was over essentially. And it was a bunch of complicated Arab names and stuff and just the news wasn't particularly interested in it, and it did not really capture the attention of the country the way it could have and should have if they hadn't had launched their horrible siege of the branch of Indians just two days later. So it I mean, what would they do? They they set off a truck bomb in the basement of one tower. They're trying to topple it over into the other tower and knock them both over. They coulda it's like four in the afternoon. They coulda killed twenty, thirty thousand people or something. Speaker 0: At least. Speaker 1: And so instead of letting that take a hold of their imagination, they're like, oh my god, we just barely missed that by the skin of our teeth, and we better figure out what to do about this. They essentially blew it off like everybody else did and did, you know, assign the FBI to it, but on a basically low lower level than than should have been their absolute top priority at that time. New York FBI was more interested in John Gotti and whatever other stuff they were doing then. Absurd. Absurd. And then there was the guy and I don't know if this guy was directly tied to the Bin Laden nights or not, but he shot up the left turn lanes at CIA headquarters in 1993. Speaker 0: We'll never forget. Speaker 1: And and he was later it was the the headline, actually, footnote in fool's errand is prosecutors say it was revenge for support for Israel and bases in Saudi Arabia or the or the bombing of Iraq. Same thing. He was a Pakistani. Yeah. And then in '95, they attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard and and also was the Bojinka plot was busted in The Philippines. So in the first World Trade Center bombing, the FBI could have stopped it. They had a walk in informant named Ahmad Salem, who was an Egyptian army intelligence officer, and he had volunteered to make the bomb. So he was gonna make a fake bomb, and it was gonna be a great sting. And the agents working the case, Nancy Floyd and John Anticeff were doing their jobs, but their boss Carson Bun Dunbar was his name, wouldn't do his job and provide them with the authority that they needed and the money that they needed to keep their informant working. And he was insisting the guy wear a wire, and he's like, look, I'm sleeping in my pajamas on the floor of the mosque with these guys. I'm not wearing a wire, you know. So he ended up bugging out and telling the bad guys, look, I think the FBI is onto me and left. Well, then they brought in Ramzi Youssef who cooked the real truck bomb that almost succeeded in topping one tower over into the other. He then wrote letters to all the New York papers saying it was all revenge for American bases and bombing bases in Saudi to bomb Iraq and support for Israel. And then he got on a plane to The Philippines and got out of got out of town. They didn't know where he went. And then in '95, Philippine police busted him because two of his buddies, Wale Khan, Amin Shah, and Abdul Hakim Marad, they had started a fire at their apartment. They're messing with explosives and they got busted. And Youssef got away, but the other two got caught and they got Youssef's laptop. And on the laptop was what's now commonly referred to as the Bojinka plot, which include a plan to kill Bill Clinton and the pope when they visited The Philippines, a plan to time bomb 12 airliners over the Pacific with Casio watch time bombs, and then the planes operation. A plan to hijack 10 planes and crash them into major landmarks in The United States. And then at the end, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I guess was supposed to get on the microphone and demand an end to the Israeli occupation, supposed to be the plan there. So and they got busted on all this, and Youssef fled to Pakistan where he was later caught he's now doing life in Florence, Colorado. But so that was that was another huge one. Then '96, they did the Kobar Towers Yeah. In Saudi. Now this is 19 American airmen were killed. And to this day, including my debate with Mark Dubowitz last week on the Lex Friedman podcast, they blame Iranian backed Saudi Hezbollah for doing that attack, which makes no sense. The Iranians had no motive to do it whatsoever. You notice Bill Clinton didn't bomb Tehran over it or anything like that, And we know who did it. It was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin Ramzi bin al Sheeves no. Pardon me. Ramzi Youssef's uncle, his Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were the ones who did it, and we know that from the chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, has told me that personally. Plus Osama Bin Laden himself took credit for it to the British journalist, Abdelbari Atwan, in his book, the secret history of Al Qaeda and in articles that he wrote for the Guardian. You can read all about that. And said, yeah, these are our guys and they're our heroes and our martyrs and whatever, and took total credit for it. Well, what was the target? The target was American airmen. It was 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq. And you might remember, I remember at the time because I used to love listening to the g Gordon Liddy show that the biggest scandal about it was a lady had yelled at Bill Clinton at a campaign rally, you suck, because he hadn't provided good enough security for these guys. They're sleeping in the towers. They ought to have guys with belt fed machine guns out front to prevent a truck from creeping up on them like that. We'd had the same kind of attack in Beirut in 1983, and so how could this happen? Right? So the lady yelled, you suck at Bill Clinton, and he had the secret service arrest her and hold her for two days. And that was the only scandal. The scandal wasn't why would a bunch of right wing religious kooks in Saudi Arabia blow up our airmen? Is it because they're bombing Iraqis from bases where their white Christian combat forces don't really belong at all in the land of not just their country, but their holy land, the birthplace of their religion where Mecca and Medina, where Mohammed is from and founded the religion of Islam. And so, boy, are we pushing our luck here or what? And we didn't have that conversation because they blamed it on Iran. And and they were lying their asses off to do so. Speaker 0: Why did they blame it on Iran? Speaker 1: Because that was what the Saudi kingdom wanted, basically. I don't know if there was much well, Mark Dubowitz sure likes that version of the story, so it could be that the Israel lobby had their own interest in pushing that part of the story. But But the Saudis wanted that. The Saudis wanted to, yeah, deflect blame from Bin Laden. And there's a a documentary about John O'Neill, who had been the head of the counterterrorism unit for the FBI in New York, and it's called the man who knew. It was on PBS frontline. I think frontline, but it was the man who Speaker 0: who was killed. Speaker 1: He he died on September 11. And there's a story about he told Louis Free, who was at that time the head of the FBI on a that they had both been to Saudi to investigate. And Louis Free was buying the story that Iran did it. And John O'Neill told him, come on, boss. The Saudis, they're just blowing smoke up your ass. And then according to the story, Louis Free got very offended that John O'Neill had dared to use the a word in front of him. And so, like, put him in the doghouse and refused to listen to him after that and went along with the story essentially. So it it really helped to to blunt an important lesson that the American populace and even the Clinton administration itself might have learned, which is, you know, we could have Tom Cruise just bomb Iraq from aircraft carriers in The Gulf. Do we have to have combat forces stationed on Saudi soil? Really? You know? And that conversation was not had. Then they hit the Africa embassies in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, Nairobi, Kenya in '98, in the summer ninety eight. And then there was in February, there was an attempted attack on the USS, the Sullivans, but the dinghy sank. And then they did get lucky oh, I'm sorry. I skipped at the end of ninety nine. They an alert border patrol officer busted a bin Ladenite at the border of Washington state in British Columbia, and he had explosives and a map to LAX and a book of bin Laden sayings or whatever in his trunk and got caught. So that was one thwarted. Then 2000 was the failed attack on the Sullivans, and then the successful attack on the USS Cole. Speaker 0: And So one thing that every terror attack that you've listed has in common is they were all perpetrated by Sunnis by Sunnis, by Sunni radicals, not by Iranians or Iranian backed proxies. Speaker 1: Right. And see what's interesting here is well, a couple of things. So first of all so that was first of all. Those are the attacks. Second of all, their real motive, as they said over and over again, was they thought America was already at war with them by hosting the bases in Saudi Arabia, by bombing Iraq from them, by supporting all the Arab dictators the region, particularly king of Saudi and the el presidente of Egypt, Mubarak, and support for Israel and their merciless persecution of the Palestinians and the Lebanese. And so as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit put it, the Ayatollah spent the eighties railing against American culture and nobody really cared. There's plenty to complain about American libertine culture if you're a conservative Islamist somewhere. But is that enough to get suicide bombers to do kamikaze attacks? Forget it. Right? Bin Laden, on the other hand, pointed at these concrete American foreign policies and the way that they negatively affected Muslims as his recruitment shtick, and it worked. So for one very important example, Muhammad Ata and Ramzi bin Alsheb, who bin Alsheb is still in Guantanamo to this day, but Muhammad Ata was the lead hijacker on September 11. They were studying they were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany. And when Shimon Peres launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, they decided to fill out their last will and testament as like a symbol that they're joining the army to fight against The United States. Speaker 0: And what was operation grapes of wrath? Speaker 1: This was in the invasion of Southern Lebanon, which actually I left this out. I guess I should skip back here. Forgive me. When the Clintonites came into power, I did yeah. This this belongs here. I I it belonged earlier maybe, but whatever. After the Iranian revolution, the Israeli stayed friends with Iran. And you might remember during Iran Contra when the Reaganites skipped Speaker 0: With the Ayatollah in charge? Speaker 1: With the Ayatollah in charge. The mean old Ayatollah with the dark circles around his eyes. Speaker 0: That one. Yeah. He was on every dartboard in my neighborhood. Yeah. Bet. In 1980. Yeah. Speaker 1: So but the Israeli state friends with so you might remember during Iran Contra when the Reaganites sold missiles to Iran when they switched sides in the war temporarily in the Iran Iraq war. They used the Israelis as cutouts to do it. You give them your tow missiles, and we'll give you more to repay you, basically. And they had this relationship that they maintained through the nineteen early nineteen nineties. And it was in 1993 that Yitzhak Rabin decided to turn Israeli foreign policy upside down. They had what had been called the strategy of the periphery, which meant they wanted to focus on their alliance with Turkey in the North to divide Syria's attention. They wanted to back Iran in their East to divide Iraq's attention. They wanted to support Ethiopia in their South to divide Egypt's attention. Does that make sense? But then Rabin said, no. We're gonna turn this around now. And what we're gonna do is we wanna negotiate with the Palestinians, with Arafat, and create not a real Palestinian state, but sort of a pseudo Palestinian state. Best thing that they had on offer, you know, going for sure. And in doing so, then we'll put aside the last major issue. We can negotiate with the closer Arab states. They already had their peace treaty with Egypt, but they can now make their peace deal with Jordan, which they did complete in 1994, and and negotiate with the the Gulf states as well. But part of that being negotiate with the Palestinians, because the Gulf states, especially, had always promised they would never normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians either got an independent state or citizenship in a single state. And so what Rabin wanted to do then was he decided to begin to demonize the Iranians as like just politics, right, to keep the right off his back while he's negotiating with Arafat, he's gonna say, yeah, but look at those bad guys over there, essentially, and demonize Iranians as part of that policy. So it's Israel that turned on Iran first and for no particular thing that Iran had done to them. They had kept Iran out of the Madrid peace conference, which was like an insult, but it was not that big of a deal. And as I believe Trita Parsi shows in his book, Treacherous Alliance and Gareth Porter and his book, Manufactured Crisis, it was the the Iranians only turned on the Israelis after the Israelis had turned on them. And in fact, Trita Parsi in his book talks about how when the Israelis announced, hey, we hate Iran now and we want you to hate Iran now, The Clintonites all started laughing because they were like, what? You loved Iran and wanted us to be friends with Iran last week. Now you've changed your mind? Like, why? And so it just had caught them by surprise. Speaker 0: What was the relationship pre '93 between Israel and Iran? Well Was there a commercial relationship? Speaker 1: Mostly, yeah, weapons and oil. So as Trita shows, the Ayatollah would be raging. I'm gonna destroy Israel. That day, he would be taking a shipment of missiles from Israel. Right? And so all that bluster was cover for their covert relationship. Speaker 0: Just to, again, to linger on a point Yeah. Because it's surprising to hear it. Israel was supplying Iran with weapons as late as the nineteen nineties? Speaker 1: Yes. Confirmed. Yeah. Getting along with them all the way up until the very beginning of Speaker 0: Bill Clinton. But not just getting along with, but sending them weapons. Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I'm not sure when the last weapon shipment took place, but But certainly through the Iran Iraq war, Israel was backing Iran. And this was a cynical thing by the Reaganites too, that they would give permission to the Israelis to increase support for Iran, and then they would switch and increase support for Iraq and play them back and forth against each other like that through the war. That's pretty dishonorable. Yeah. It's pretty dishonorable indeed. But it also goes to show though that, like, all this crap about, oh, fundamentalist Shiite Islam. Well, I don't know. The Likud got along with the Ayatollah just fine Or maybe not just fine, but they kept their relationship all through the nineties, and it was the Israelis who decided to turn on them over, you know, politics that were closer to home that really weren't about Iran as much as they needed a bad guy to point their finger at while changing the policy and negotiating with the Palestinians. But then, of course, a Benjamin Netanyahu fan assassinated Rabin in '95. And it was his successor, Shimon Peres, as part of this same strategy though who launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996. Now, as I said, Muhammad Ata and Ramzi bin Alsheb filled out their last will and testament when they when that began. Speaker 0: And Because they were upset. Speaker 1: Because they were upset. And and by the way, their side, it's Lebanese Shiites who are being killed here, but there's the same difference to them. They've still felt shared solidarity with the victims there that they wanted to avenge. And then it was in that summer of ninety six was when bin Laden put out his first declaration of war. Get this. It's called declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places. Pretty subtle. Right? Yeah. So and then in the beginning of the thing, it starts out with a whole rant about not just scrapes wrath, but the Qana massacre. It's now known as the first Qana massacre because they did it again in 02/2006. But in 1996, it was actually Naftali Bennett, The, you know, future prime minister of Israel was the artillery officer who called in a strike on a United Nations shelter and killed a 106 women and children. And bin Laden went off about that in his declaration of war against The United States in 1996. So we'll never forget the severed heads and arms and legs of the children in Kana. And when Ramzi bin Al Sheba and Muhammad Ata read that, that was when they decided to join the war. So here are Egyptian engineering students in Hamburg, Germany, volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel's doing in Lebanon, which, Tucker, is why they told you that the Taliban did it because they hate our freedom. Because they didn't wanna get into why these Saudis and Egyptians did it. It's because they hate our foreign policy. The Taliban, most of them have probably never even heard of the new world and had no grudge against us at all. In fact, their government had tried to warn The United States of an impending Al Qaeda attack, and and their leader, Mullah Omar, had been trying to negotiate bin Laden away since 1998 after the Africa embassy bombings. And it was even the the CIA officer Milton Bearden, who ran the or helped to run the Afghan operation in the nineteen eighties, who told the Washington Post the Taliban were trying to give this guy up. They would say, jeez, he's out falconing. We don't know where he is. Meaning, he's outside of our protection. And if you guys were to kill him, it wouldn't be our fault. And then the Americans would say, we said hand him over and just refuse to listen to that's what they're doing is handing him over. You know? Mullah Omar told oh, I bet you know, Arnaud de Borgrev from the Washington Times. Interviewed him. I knew him well. Yeah. So Arnaud de Borgrev interviewed Mullah Omar in the February in Pakistan, and he said, listen, Bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat. I can neither swallow him nor spit him out. So you gotta help me, you know, or you Americans need to help me find a way to get rid of this guy, essentially. There's no love lost between those two. But they lied and they pretended that it was the Taliban who had attacked us. So they didn't wanna get into who were these mujahideen. So now one more thing. So first, we did all their attacks and their motives. Now their strategy was to bait us into invading Afghanistan. And this is, as we talked about, the letter between Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. So we're trying to get the Americans to invade Afghanistan, and then we'll do to them the same thing that we did to the Soviets. Same thing we had helped them do to the Soviets. So that was the strategy. That was why they tried to knock down the World Trade Center in '93. That was why they hit the Khobar Towers. They didn't think we're gonna run away crying. They were trying to get us to double and triple down, to invade, to spend money. It's asymmetric war. It's a a group of a couple of 100 bandits against the global empire. How do you get how did they beat us? They get us to beat ourselves. They get as and and this is what's poetically beautiful and horrible here is that bin Laden's son, Omar, gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine in 2010 where he explains he says, when Bush was elected, my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs, one who will attack and spend money and break the country. He says, Bill Clinton fired missiles at my father and didn't get him, but now you've been this is in 02/2010. Now you've been in Afghanistan for ten years and you still don't have him. America then was very smart, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf. So the point being not that George Bush's stupidity makes him innocent, it's that George Bush's stupidity and cruelty and corruption made him the perfect mark for a guy like Bin Laden. This wimp with the cowboy hat, pretending he's a tough guy, is going to be very easy to provoke into doing what he wants. Right? To get away with bloody murder on his end, which is what the Al Qaeda guys wanted for our side to do, was to and look at our national debt, you might say it has worked some. Speaker 0: They're preying upon national character weakness or tick that Americans have that I have, which is you assume all foreigners are kind of dumb. Yeah. And, you know, it's a pretty sophisticated trap that they laid. Yep. You know, it's not higher math or anything, but it's like they're they're they were thoughtful Mhmm. In their attempt to destroy The United States, and we didn't give them credit for thinking. Yep. Through anything that they did. I didn't anyway. Speaker 1: And I gotta tell you, man, there's a huge rub here too, which is one of the major reasons they were allowed, and I mean that in the generalist sense of the term allowed, to get away with all these attacks against The United States in this way was because Bill Clinton's government was still supporting them. Took them from Afghanistan to Bosnia, then to Kosovo, and then on to Chechnya. And all through the nineteen nineties, and I have a bit on this in enough already, but I found much more in my latest book provoked because a lot of it has to do with the wars in the Balkans, of course, and wars against the Russians. And so it makes sense to me in a a moral strategic sense why America would support Bin Laden types and fundamentalist is Muslims against the Soviet Union. But once the Soviet Union is gone, seems like leftists are gonna be more reasonable people than Islamist fundamentalists for dealing with and when there's no Soviet threat to keep at bay any longer. Speaker 0: I never understood the the hatred for the for the Baathists. I mean, they seemed, like, pretty reasonable actually. Guys. Well well, there's that. But also, if it's a choice between Assad and Jelani, I don't and I know that, you know, Israel likes Jelani, so we're all supposed to like him. And as he murders Christians and Alawites, it's like, oh, no. He's great. We're dropping our sanctions. He's great. He's great. But it just seems like, you know, the kind of center left atheist ophthalmologist from London is probably gonna be a better negotiating partner than the guy who thinks he's getting the virgins. Right? Speaker 1: Yeah. Seriously. Speaker 0: I mean, am missing something? Speaker 1: Yes. Well, the Bin Ladenites, they might not be reasonable, but they're not the Shiites. So that's what matters to the Israelis. Speaker 0: So that's thing. It's like this modern And they're not Russians. Yeah. Iran. Speaker 1: And about Russia too. I mean, why why were they so determined to fight the war on the side of the Muslims in Bosnia? It was to essentially establish American dominance, to reestablish American dominance in Europe. Speaker 0: To put a NATO base in Kosovo. No. I know. Speaker 1: And at the expense of the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs and Russia's friends, the Serbs. Speaker 0: Well, as always, we take this we, you know, we wind up abetting the murder of Christians. Like, that's not an accident from dropping the atomic bomb on a Catholic church in Nagasaki through the Balkans, through what's happening in Syria, through what's happening in the West Bank. Like, we're always against the Christians, and I I know you probably disagree. I don't think you're a rabid Christian or anything, but from my perspective, none of that's an accident. Speaker 1: It sure seems to be the regular effect. I mean, at the very least, they don't care what's gonna happen to the Christians when they do these They Speaker 0: certainly don't. The world's only nonviolent religion, and, you know, they're the ones who wind up killed, like, and then you have to like it, and you're a Nazi if you don't like it or something. It's like, I'm not playing along anymore. Speaker 1: And the cynicism with which, like, hey, You know what we should do to prevent the Russians from reopening this old Soviet oil pipeline through the Caucasus Mountains? Let's support a bunch of Bin Ladenite suicide bombers against them. Speaker 0: Exactly right. Speaker 1: And this is years after the Soviet Union is dead and gone. We have no reason in the world to prefer such a narrow and shortsighted and parochial type policy to our overall the the overall health of our relationship with Moscow. It's insane. Speaker 0: I agree. And and as you alluded a moment ago, you've just written a, like, a door stopper on this, which I think is the definitive book on the question of the Balkans and our many wars against Russia, etcetera, called provoked, and we just don't have time. I mean, that that's like a five hour conversation. Speaker 1: That's another interview there. Speaker 0: Are you doing that? I know just parenthetically here, but are you doing that with with Daryl Cooper? Speaker 1: Well, so that's our new show. Now the book actually he was going to be my coauthor on the book, but I just ran way out too far ahead, and he couldn't catch up. So and and he's got this great podcast, and as you know, he's the most important historian in America. Speaker 0: I think that. Speaker 1: And I I absolutely agree with you. So we just launched a brand new podcast together, and he named it provoked. I wouldn't have, but he named it after the book. But I'm really excited Speaker 0: about that. And is it on America's policy toward Russia? Speaker 1: Well, the show we we will be touching on that for sure. Speaker 0: Yeah. Well, did you pause before partnering with someone who's so reviled on Twitter? Speaker 1: No. I love Darrell Cooper. I do too. We've been friends for years. And in fact, I'm glad as long as we're talking about this now, I'll go ahead and say, there are people who got this wrong in good faith and many more probably who got it wrong in bad faith. And it's a tiny bit Darrell's fault in that he was kinda off on a tangent and didn't completely say everything that he was trying to explain. But the bottom line basically is people really misunderstood him. Some people in in good faith misunderstood him as somehow minimizing the Holocaust when what he was actually saying in that episode was even if you were one who would try to minimize the holocaust, even not you, but even if one were Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 1: Even that person would have to admit that when the Nazis took possession of all of these people, they had no plan to feed them and take care of them. Yeah. He wasn't saying that was the extent of the Holocaust. He was saying the worst kind of pro Hitlerite, like, spinning for the Germans there, even they would have to concede. And his point wasn't even about the world war. His point was actually the Israelis responsibility for feeding the people of Gaza who are not in a neighboring nation, but are a captive population on the Indian reservation there. And they so they have the responsibility to keep them alive Speaker 0: as such. It was the propaganda campaign that I, you know, I spent my life around propaganda campaigns. Participated in a few, to my great discredit, but I've never really seen anything like what they do with Daryl And they're mad at Daryl Cooper for a bunch of different reasons, questioning the the thematic orthodoxy of the second world war. He's never called into question whether Hitler murdered Jews. I mean, of course, Hitler murdered Jews. Like, what? Yep. That's he's not a holocaust denier or whatever that is. He is a guy who's trying to understand with precision and honesty what led to World War two and what it has meant for the world Yeah. Over the past eighty years. Speaker 1: And, look, have you ever read Pappy Cannon's book, Church ill, Hitler, and the Odyssey? Speaker 0: And I there when they tried to basically send Pat into exile and destroy his life and called him a Nazi, which he it's Speaker 1: completely crazy. You read that book and you get the idea. Remember when they said that George w Bush was the Winston Churchill of the twenty first century? Yeah. I think that's probably right. That Winston Churchill was the George w Bush of the twentieth century. Speaker 0: Yeah. Go ahead and apologize for Gallipoli, then get back to me on whether you get to run a country during another war. Yeah. I would say so whatever. Anyway, but the Darrell Cooper thing is and then add to that, and this is relevant to me as a as a human being. Darrell Cooper is just a wonderful and humane person. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 0: That's the other thing. So even if like, I don't think his ideas are dangerous or naughty or antisemitic or hateful. They're nothing like that. I mean, that's just a lie. But even but it it is like his ideas aside, he is just a humane person Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 0: Who feels sad over the death of anybody. Right. Friend or foe as we all should. Speaker 1: And by the way, that campaign didn't hurt him. Right? Every friend of his I know. Took his side Speaker 0: I know. You're right. Speaker 1: And had Speaker 0: his back. Speaker 1: You're right. And and Substack said, hey. We got you, dude. You're not going anywhere. And and his his podcast went way up on the charts. Absolutely. And probably, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands more people have heard mister Humane explain. Speaker 0: It's easy to get my goat. Obviously, I'm falling for it. Sure. Right. Well, look. Who cares? Speaker 1: I mean, they they use his appearance on your show to try to destroy him, but, like, yeah. No. It just didn't work. And then in in our first episode that we recorded last week, we're gonna do our second episode tomorrow. But in the first episode of our show is at provoked.show, by the way, if people wanna look that up. I just interviewed him about him for the the whole first show is all we talked about was, like, his basis for doing these inner doing these history podcasts and all the research that he's put into it and whatever. And he's just the most decent guy in the world. Speaker 0: Yeah. Total Speaker 1: stoic. He doesn't get angry about anything. He's like Speaker 0: Oh, I know. Speaker 1: The most gentle guy. And and, like, there's just no way in the world that Speaker 0: any of that stuff can stick. Committed to accuracy and honesty as I think you are. And if he gets again, that's the test. Someone honest? I don't know. Is he willing to admit when he's wrong? That is that that's my test. I don't know a better test. I think it's better than a lie detector test. Are you willing to say in public, I screwed this up, and, you know, I was wrong, or, you know, I or whatever. To admit fault Yeah. Is is the measure. And he, unlike any mainstream, quote, historian, the Wikipedia historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin or whoever these absurd figures they trot out Yeah. Speaker 1: Whatever wrote. Exactly. Speaker 0: But they're all like that. Michael Beschloss. Can you imagine? He's just a liar. Speaker 1: And that was what got them so upset is you said this is the most important historian in America, which is, like, obviously, your opinion and mine, but in a way, it's quantifiably the case. Right? That he's teaching history to a hell of a lot more people than any of these kooks at Harvard and Yale, and they're they have reason to be jealous. Right? The narrative is outside of their control. Speaker 0: Well, that's totally right. They thought that Morning Joe had a monopoly on history. And, you know, I'm not against Morning Joe. I mean, first of all, well, I'm against monopolies in general. I'm certainly against monopolies on ideas and interpretations of the past. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 0: I'm against the gatekeeping of facts. I'm against lying. And they they really, for like seventy years, had that. Yep. You have to believe this. Speaker 1: And they're in a panic now because no, we don't either, not anymore. Unbelievable. Speaker 0: Yeah. I mean, the the fact that in a lot of the world, actually, it is a crime. Certain opinions are a crime. No. I probably don't even share those opinions. It doesn't but it doesn't matter. It's like no opinion should ever be a crime. Speaker 1: Yeah. Especially in the Western world. Speaker 0: It's insane. You're not Speaker 1: man enough to stand up for your own scale? I mean, and Speaker 0: just like the name calling and the refusal to engage with facts, refusal to make a legitimate rational argument, it's it's a threat to to all of us, actually, because it's a threat to reason and decency and, like, civil discourse. And Speaker 1: And the censors were really winning there for a while, but they're not anymore. No. They're not. And gotta give credit to Elon Musk for that, for saving x, you know, Twitter. Speaker 0: I give he's in my daily prayers, Speaker 1: and I just hope It's an important thing. Speaker 0: I hope that you know, if there are I pray there aren't, but if there are acts of violence in The United States, whether they're real or they're false flags, there have been so many of those, where people are murdered, someone else is blamed for it for political effect. I, again, I pray that doesn't happen. I hate all violence. However, if it does, it will instantly be used as a pretext to shut down free speech on social media instantly, I fear that that's Yeah. Me too. Sorry. Wow, did we get far afield? No, that's Last thing I say, for anyone who's interested in the topic of the war that we have been fighting for three years, three and a half years against Russia, why are we doing that? What do we hope to achieve? Where does that come from? It seems like kind of out of the blue. I think you've written the definitive book on that called provoked, and I would just wanna recommend it to our audience. Speaker 1: Thank you very much for that. I appreciate that. Speaker 0: So but anyway, back to back to Iran. Yeah. I'm sorry. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. So yeah. We're I I swear we're gonna make this Al Qaeda centric conversation, Iran centric again here in a moment. One last thing though about Bill Clinton's treason in supporting Al Qaeda in Chechnya is that you might remember Colleen Rally. She was Yes. Time Magazine person of the year in 2002 because she was the lawyer for the FBI office in Minneapolis, Minnesota who could have stopped September 11, her and her team. Because what happened was there's a guy named Zacharias Musawi. They said he was the twentieth hijacker. I said, I don't think that's right. I think Katani was the twentieth hijacker, and this guy was for a different mission later, but whatever. Point is, he's the guy who famously wanted to learn how to fly a jumbo jet, but wasn't so interested in how to take off or land. Right. And the guy at the flight school went ahead over his boss's wishes and called the FBI and said, I'm really worried about this guy. And the FBI office out in Minneapolis, they did their job immediately, and one of their guys even speculated. This guy says he wants to learn how to fly, like, he's somehow he's particularly interested in the route from Heathrow to JFK. I think he might wanna crash into the World Trade Center. So they went to FBI headquarters in Washington, and they were denied, no. You cannot even ask the FISA court for a foreign intelligence surveillance act warrant to search this guy's stuff. And the reason why is because even though in Minneapolis, they had contacted the European intelligence agencies, and the French reported back, oh, we know this guy. Him and his brother both are Chechen terrorists. They fought in the war in Chechnya and are recruiters for the Bin Ladenites in Chechnya, led by Khatab and Basiev, both of whom were Bin Ladenites, both of whom were directly tied to Bin Laden, both of whom would travel to Afghanistan numerous times. People might even remember that there was a detachment of Chechens fighting with the Taliban against the northern alliance at the time that our war started in 2001 because Bin Laden had assigned them to what was called the o five five brigade to go and help the Taliban to fight against the northern alliance. So that's what they were doing there is there's this they absolutely were Bin Ladenite terrorists in in the exact Al Qaeda sense that you would think of them in any other place in Chechnya. But FBI headquarters said, we like the terrorists in Chechnya. They're not terrorists. They're freedom fighters. Speaker 0: Because they're fighting Putin. Speaker 1: Because they're fighting Putin. And so we're not against them. We're for them. And so, no, you can't have your FISA warrant. Now FISA warrant is unlike a Fourth Amendment warrant. Fourth Amendment, they have to have probable cause, particularly describing the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized to find evidence of a crime. They have to be able to convince the judge that it's more likely than not they're gonna find evidence of this crime there. Well, for a FISA warrant, nothing like that. For a FISA warrant, all they need is a reasonable belief, which is nothing, that a person is either an agent of a foreign power or of a foreign terrorist group. Speaker 0: I've been surveilled under a FISA warrant, Speaker 1: so I'm very aware. I have too. Antiwar.com got surveilled in the same illegal way. And and so, yeah, they can get they can get a FISA warrant for you and me, Tucker, but not for Exactly. Exactly. Moussawi. So even on September 11, they said, now can we have our warrant? And and now can we talk to the judge? And they still were told no by FBI headquarters. And it wasn't till later that night that the the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, said, I wonder if this has anything to do with that Minneapolis thing. Then they went to the court, got the warrant, they searched the guy's house, they found papers that had been in his pockets and at his house directly connecting them to the hijackers in Florida. They could have wrapped up, completely rolled up, and prevented the September if they'd just been allowed to do their job, and they weren't because why? Because Bill Clinton was committing high treason, supporting the same Bin Ladenites who had already attacked our towers, who had already killed our guys in Saudi Arabia, who'd already blown up our embassies, already attacked our battleship. And they said, well, whatever. We like these guys when they're killing Russians. And the same thing in February, Delta Force, that's top tier army special operations forces, Delta Force had been training KLA terrorists, Bin Ladenite terrorists in Kosovo, who then invaded Macedonia in an attempt to create a greater Kosovo. Yeah. And they were wrapped up by Macedonian troops Kill more Christians. And ferried out of the country by the Americans. And this is just one month before the September. And I know a lot of people just think that these guys are totally controlled by The United States, but my point of view is that, no. What happened is they're essentially motivating them to attack The United States in one place while supporting them in other places. And rather than buying their loyalty, they're just blinding themselves to the danger. And so they kept attacking us and attacking us and attacking us, which was very convenient to notice when you're trying to still support them. And so even though you had people like Michael Shroyer at the CIA's Bin Laden unit, who I think is sincere, all he wanted to do in life was kill Al Qaeda guys. And, you know, they had the rendition program that was in Clinton. That was before Bush. You might be familiar with the statement by Robert Baer, the former CIA officer. He said, if you want an interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want them to disappear forever, you send them to Egypt. And he was talking about the Clinton years. So they were wrapping up guys who they considered to be the most dangerous Al Qaeda terrorists and and sending them back home to be taken out and shot. So that was going on during that time. And in fact, there's a huge and hilarious and important and tragic and crazy clip of Michael Scheuer. Again, the CIA's the chief of the CIA's bin Laden Speaker 0: I know him. Speaker 1: Yeah. Testifying before the house. And the congressman asked him about a statement that he had made about John O'Neill, the head of the FBI counterterrorism unit in New York. And he said, the only thing good that happened to America on November is that that tower came down on John O'Neill's head. Because that was how bad the CIA and FBI hated each other in their fight over the intelligence Speaker 0: no longer does television. Speaker 1: This is why Shroyer no longer does he went a little nutty in later years. Yeah. His book Imperial Hubris is bar none the best book on terror wars in that era. Speaker 0: I haven't seen him in many, many years. But he was I think he was like he's now a banned person for some reason. I can't remember why. Speaker 1: He started saying we ought to help the Sunnis and Shiites all kill each other till they're all dead. And, like, I think when when they did the Russiagate hoax, he said it's time for civil war. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. A little Speaker 0: less moderate. Yeah. I would say. Speaker 1: I get a little carried away. But so so that's the importance of of the Bin Ladenite trees in there. And so now here's where Ron kicks back into the story. Because, of course, September 11 and Al Qaeda's war is the excuse for America to go back to the Middle East in full scale once, you know, W Bush is sworn in. But so here's where we get to the neoconservatives. Who's a neocon and what's a neocon? Well, Tucker, everybody always says that everybody who's a hawk is a neocon. That guy's a neocon and that guy's a neocon. But as you know, that's not true. Neoconservative is a biographical designation, and it applies to, I don't know, a 100 guys in the world, something like that, would you say? And they're called neoconservatives, not because they're conservatives nowadays, but because they literally had been leftists who moved to the right and were new conservatives. And so there's it's kind of a complicated history, but essentially, of them were Trotskyites and had become kind of cold war democrats, and then eventually Reaganites, and then the second and third generation Speaker 0: More precisely, most of them seem to have gone to City College of New York. Speaker 1: Yeah. There's a bunch of them Speaker 0: In the thirties and forties. Speaker 1: And people can watch on YouTube. There's a documentary called arguing the world, which is a PBS documentary about Irving Kristol and Nathan Glaser and and all those guys. Speaker 0: Daniel Bell and Speaker 1: And and Irving Howe. Yep. Right. Speaker 0: Or Norman Pajaritz, misjector. Speaker 1: Yep. And so then there's a guy named Max Schachtman, who was an important Trotskyite, and then there he had he was major wheel in the young people's socialist league, young people socialist league, which included Jean Kirkpatrick, Joshua Moravchik, and Elliot Abrams. Then you had, you know, the national review where William f Buckley had, you know, essentially all the real old right wingers were against the cold war Oh, yeah. They said, you know, why create this giant com pseudo communist government here just to keep them away over there when we ought to just work on keeping our country free here. You know? So all those people got pushed out and luckily Not Speaker 0: just pushed out, but maligned. Yeah. Attacked Nazis as hate or when, you know yeah. Speaker 1: And replaced by a bunch of ex communists. But see, because they were Trotskyites and Americans, they hated Stalin and the Soviet Union. And this is post World War two, so they became the leaders of the Cold War in America, and all the real conservatives had to sit out while a bunch of ex communists took their role. Speaker 0: It's funny the damage that I mean, National View is a joke now. No one I don't even know if it exists actually, but in some theoretical sense, maybe it does, but it doesn't really exist anymore. But the damage that National Review did to the country kind of it's hard to overstate. Yeah. In a very insidious way. Absolutely. Took out all the the clear thinkers, the honest people, the people who really love their country, all exiled. Speaker 1: Replaced with Jonah Goldberg. Speaker 0: No. No. Like, Speaker 1: literally in Speaker 0: which Lowry and these other, like, really weird weird people you wouldn't ask advice from on any topic ever. Yep. Like, just non not wise, unhappy, controlled by god knows whom. You know what I mean? Like, but but and Speaker 1: that's fine. They're miserable bunch Speaker 0: of people in the world, but to take out the strong people is unforgivable. Yeah. And that's what they did. Speaker 1: Right. And then so Leon Wollstetter and Leo Strauss were both also who taught at the University of Chicago. Yep. And Pearl and Libby and Fife and Wolfowitz and a bunch of those guys had studied under him and then went them and then went and worked for Scoop Jackson, who was kind of a cold war democrat, right wing democrat from Washington State. They called him the oh, sorry. Yeah. Senator. They called him the senator from Boeing. Yep. And and then, you know, they made their break with the new left in the late sixties over Vietnam and over civil rights and stuff like that and started moving to the right. And then this is essentially the core of the war party in The United States Of America. The great journalist Andrew Coburn says, this is they're the cross between the Israel Lobby and the military industrial complex. So, like, oil and banking already had the council on foreign relations, basically. These guys were not so much invited in there. That was more like blue blood wasps in that era and stuff. So they made their alliance with the military industrial complex, said, we need money. You guys need egg need egg heads, right, to write your studies and justify your policies and your arms sales. So that was kinda where that mob marriage was born. And so this is how the the neocons ended up creating this whole kind of forest of think tanks of their own. I mentioned the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but they also had like the committee on the present danger and the committee on the free world and the Center for Security Policy, the Project for a New American Century, they had taken over at Heritage and AEI Hudson. And Hudson. Right? They had made their alliance with the Olin and Scathe foundations. And so they were able to just take the poll position in in leading conservative thought in in the magazines and and on TV and in the newspaper editorials and all that, The Weekly Standard, of course, as you know, in the national review. We had two big flash flagships. And, yeah, these were your guys back then. And so these were the guys who took us to war. They are the vanguard of the war party, and they're, in many cases, directly tied to Israel. And now I I don't wanna get you in unfair trouble. I'm perfectly happy to get you in trouble that you deserve or Yes. We want to get in to get together. But I don't want anyone to misunderstand me and especially not on your show. I am not antisemitic, and I'm not saying anything antisemitic about these guys. The neoconservative movement was a largely Jewish movement, is a largely Jewish movement because, hey, Trotskyism was only ever really popular in Brooklyn. Right? There's just not too many people who were ever whoever were part of these radical politics. And but there are Presbyterians, Jean Kirkpatrick and James Woolsey are two prominent Presbyterian Christians who are part of it. And it was funny because Mark Dubowitz from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tried to argue with me about whether Jean Kirkpatrick was a neocon or not because she supported dictatorships as long as they were right wing ones instead of supporting democracy uber alis. But ISIS, well, she comes from the young people socialist league with Max Shockman and Joshua Moravczyk and Elliot Abrams, and then moved to the right and became a Reaganite with the rest of them, wrote for Commentary Magazine with Pod Horitz and all of the guys. She's a neocon, and I have all the sources. I I linked to a bunch of great sources in my book about that. And, of course, there's differences of opinion among the neoconservatives. When the Muslim Brotherhood won elections in Egypt in 02/2012, Robert Kagan said, hey. We've been spouting nonstop about democracy this whole time. These guys won fair and square. We should give them a chance. And after all, they weren't really suicide bomber types in Egypt at that time. They're a bunch of old guys, conservative old guys. And he said, yeah, they're conservative Islamists, but let's see. Well, old Frank Gaffney at the center for security policy about blew his top. Absolutely not. We should not do I don't care if they won with 99%. We don't let the Muslim Brotherhood take power. Right? So there are differences of opinion within the neoconservative movement, which is fine. But Jean Kirkpatrick clearly was one of them. And there are Catholics who are part of the movement as well. Michael Novak was a prominent one, and I'm sorry, there's quite a few others that are escaping my attention. There there are a few other Catholics. Speaker 0: National Review, I think, is heavily Catholic, and they I mean, you would I don't know Speaker 1: how many of them were ever leftists. Of course. Speaker 0: This is a strict definition. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're being straight here. So, like, John Bolton, for example, is not a neoconservative. He's very close with them, but he's just a Goldwater guy. He's always been a right wing nationalist, conservative, Republican, and never had that move from the left to the right. So he's obviously very close with them, but not a card carrying member kind of a thing. That's the way I like to distinguish the thing. So now this brings us to the clean break. So David Wormser and Douglas Fife and Richard Pearl well, I should put them in the other. David Wormser is the principal author. Richard Pearl is really the ringleader and his mentor and coauthor. And then Douglas Fife was their fellow traveler who also signed on, Although I think later he repudiated this document and said he didn't agree with it, but whatever. The document is called a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm. And it's written by Wormser for Netanyahu when he comes becomes prime minister in 1996. He replaces Shimon Peres. Now he comes in, he also is into demonizing Iran, although he hates Iraq more, I think. But he doesn't wanna negotiate with the Palestinians. He's with the Likud. They don't get a two state solution. He's going to now demonize Iran and Iraq, not as a way to kinda get away with dealing with the Palestinians like Rabin was trying to do, but as an excuse to never deal with the Palestinians. You want me to deal with the Palestinians? Well, what about Iran? Becomes the Netanyahu doctrine. And so he wants nothing to do with Oslo in a two state solution. So worms are rice. This is what the clean break is. It's a clean break from Oslo and a two state solution for the Palestinians. And it says, what we're gonna do instead of making nice with the Arab states, we're gonna have peace through strength, and we're gonna be the dominant power in the region by far, and then no one's gonna mess with us and we'll have peace that way. And what he says is the major threat to Israel is if they wanna continue colonizing Palestine, what's left of it? They have to worry about Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Southern Lebanon on their northern flank, which grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon in the early nineteen eighties. Speaker 0: '82. Speaker 1: '82. Right. And so they say, the problem is Iran backs Hezbollah through Syria. So what we wanna do is focus on getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which is crazy. And for anyone listening to this who immediately thinks, wait, that doesn't make sense. You're right. That doesn't make sense. It only makes sense in, like, a weird Rube Goldberg contraption sort of a way. What had been the lie that they believed had been sold to them by an Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite, who was an embezzler, a a bank convicted bank fraudster from Jordan and a criminal. And he had convinced them that if you put the cousin of the king of Jordan, who's a Sunni, but a Hashemite and claims the blood of the prophet, if you put him in power in Baghdad, then all the Shiites will all line up to obey and do whatever he says because he has the magic blood of the prophet, which they all revere. Well, that's completely crazy and stupid and wrong. When the British had installed the Hashemite king in the twenties, the Shiites had a fatwa against cooperating with him in any way, which is why his king his kingdom didn't last through the twenties. It fell. And, yes, as we talked about before, this is part of the split that the Shiites went with the with Mohammed's family. But that doesn't mean that they revere anyone with the blood of the prophet as like a magical lord over them with total power to decide every question for them or anything like that. This is completely overstated by Ahmed Chalabi that this Hashemite king would be able to say, oh, I have royal blood and you all have to, you know, fall under my spell now. It was nonsense. But then it didn't matter because I I believe what happened was the king of Jordan died and his cousin replaced him, and then there was nobody to put in there. So then they changed the plan to Chalabi himself would be the guy. But the whole promise was and this is in a clean break, and the companion piece is called coping with crumbling states. And the third one is a book. It's called tyranny's ally, America's failure to remove Saddam Hussein, written by Wormzer with a forward by Pearl. And they all basically say the same thing. It's all of this smoke that that Ahmad Chalebi is blowing about how if we get rid of Saddam, Jordan and Turkey will be dominant in Iraq. And then we'll make the Iraqi Shiite clergy who are the highest ranking clergy, like the Ayatollah Sistani, for example, down in Najaf, will make them make Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran or, yeah, stop being friends with Iran and be friends with Israel instead. This is completely nuts. But this is what they thought would happen. And so then Speaker 0: Did it happen? Speaker 1: No. Because what happened was once they lied us into Iraq, and it was Ahmad Chalabi and his exiles who helped provide a lot of the lies about the weapons of mass destruction, and it was the neoconservatives in the government. They created what Colin Powell called a separate government. He was the secretary of state. He called it a separate government run by the Ginsa crowd, which met David Wormser and Richard Pearl and their friends. Speaker 0: What does Ginsa mean? Speaker 1: The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. It's now of America, but it's the same group. They're the ones who send American cops to be trained by Shin Bet ruthless occupation forces in Palestine and come back and treat Americans like that. That's one of their major roles. But it was David Wormser and his friends were the men from Ginsar. The Ginsar crowd was what Powell called them. They created a separate government. Again, Powell's words working under Dick Cheney, and there was Hannah and Libby and Joseph were in and and Elliot Abram no. No. No. Eric Edelman were in the vice president's office, Dick Cheney's office. Speaker 0: Then Victoria Newland as well. Speaker 1: Victoria Newland, Robert Kagan's wife. Exactly. And then on the national security council was Robert Hadley, Probably Stephen Hadley, Robert Joseph, I think moved from the vice president's office to National Security Council, and Zalmay Khalilzad, who's their pet Muslim, were on the National Security Council. Then at state, you had David and John Bolton, who again was not exactly a neocon, but was clearly part of this group with Cheney. And their role was to keep a leash on Powell and his right hand man, Dick Armitage, and prevent them from doing too much to obstruct the war. And then at defense, you had on the defense policy board, Richard Pearl, Kenneth Adelman, Jean Kirkpatrick, and Newt Gingrich, again, a fellow traveler, not exactly one of them, but he also, like Libby and Cheney, went to CIA quarters over and over again to berate them and force them to try to come up with more intelligence against Iraq. Played a major role in that. And then you had deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, and then under him, deputy secretary of defense for policy Douglas Fife, and then under him, Abram Shulsky, who ran the office of special plans. And this is we know all about this especially because of the heroic air force lieutenant colonel whistleblower Karen Kotowski told this story numerous times, but and there's a lot. There's in fact, if you search my name in 28 articles about how the neoconservatives lied us into war, it's actually up to 30 or 35 or something now. Got all of these all of the best articles about the neoconservatives in the office of special plans. And they focused on digging through the CIA's trash and laundering lies from the exiles to come up with the weapons of mass destruction narrative. Across the hall was the policy counterterrorism evaluation group, and that was run by Wormser and a guy named Michael Malouf. And they were in charge of coming up with lies about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda. And there's a guy named Harold Road who worked in the office of Net Assessment, which is like the internal Pentagon think tank, and his job was firing all the Arabists who actually knew anything about The Middle East from there and replacing them all with guys from the think tanks. And so they did like yes. It's true. Bush and Cheney sorta won that election and but they staffed the government in a way that very few, you know, political victors on that level have the ability to do what Dick Cheney did, which was to put his very best guys, most loyal guys from this neoconservative faction in all the most important places in the government to push us into that war. Speaker 0: And the purpose of that war was to neutralize Iran, actually. Speaker 1: That's right. Speaker 0: Again, I just wanna ask you to pause. So there was a promise from the neocons or parts of the US government that there would be an oil pipeline after Saddam built from Mosul Kirchuk, Northern Iraq to the Port Of Haifa in Israel? Speaker 1: Right. And this had been a pipeline under the British in the twenties, and they wanted to reopen it or rebuild the thing. And part of the deal was that when, you know, Israel stayed friends with Iran as we established all the way through the nineteen eighties, and they had a secret pipeline at the Port Of Aqaba, which is you know, they call it the Sinai Peninsula because it sticks out into the Red Sea there. Well, the right side of the Sinai, that's Aqaba, is that port there. And the Iranians had a secret pipeline that was, I guess, was operated by Mark Rich. I don't know exactly who originally had built it. Mark Rich. Mark Rich, the Speaker 0: Are you making this up? Speaker 1: Same guy. And so there was this secret oil pipeline where the the Iranians would drive their tankers up and unload oil and ship it to Israel. But then when Rabin turned on Iran in '93, the Iranians cut that oil supply off. So, like, in a large sense, America's Iraq War two was part of that was so that they could rebuild this pipeline to make up for that loss. Fact, when Donald Rumsfeld the famous meeting of Donald Rumsfeld with the video and the still shot of him shaking hands with Saddam Hussein when he was Reagan's special emissary in 1983, a huge part of that meeting was him badgering Hussein to build a pipeline to the Port Of Aqaba that would then have a separate spur that would go directly to Israel. Speaker 0: So when people say it was a war for oil, there's some truth in that, but it wasn't oil for us. Speaker 1: That's right. And Is this real? Yeah. And when I Speaker 0: But why do we care how much Israel pays for oil? Like, what does that have to with us? Speaker 1: Oh, Tucker, I don't care. But David Wormser and them are essentially lacud guys. I mean, Douglas Feis law partner, Mark Zell, who's a riot if you follow him on Twitter these days, he's he represents settlers on the West Bank. I mean, these guys are very close to The States. Yeah. Exactly. Speaker 0: That was a sincere question. I guess there's no answer. Speaker 1: Right. Nothing. That's it. Just the lobby and and their control inside America. So when I wrote that book, a guy named Gary Vogler contacted me, and he was the American viceroy over Iraqi oil during that war. And he wrote a review of enough already on Amazon that says, hey. Let me tell you. This is the only book that gets it right. This is what really happened and what that war was really about. How do I know? Because I was the oil minister. I was in charge. And he I published his book at the Libertarian Institute. We published his book. It's called Israel, winner of the two thousand three Iraq oil war by Gary Vogler, where he explains that this is exactly right and how Michael Malouf, the same guy from the policy counterterrorism evaluation group, was on the phone with him bugging him about the pipeline. And and he talks all about it. And and I I wouldn't wanna go into too much detail about what he explains in there and how it all worked, but he was like front row to seeing the role that the promises of that pipeline played in the neocon's thinking. And Netanyahu bought it as well. And Netanyahu mentioned it in a speech that he gave, I believe, in England. Or was it at Ginsa? No. No. It was Choloby gave a speech at Ginsa. But Netanyahu mentioned it, I believe, in England one time that, yeah, and they promised they're gonna rebuild the oil pipeline to Haifa. So this is a huge part of the neoclassical Speaker 0: scoffing at the idea it was a war for oil because I couldn't see how Iraqi oil would benefit The United States. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 0: So I was like, how could it be a war for oil? And on the left was all, war for oil, no blood for oil, no blood for oil. But I guess I'm not deranged enough even to imagine it could be a war for oil for somebody else. Speaker 1: Right? I know. It's completely absurd, and it's completely real. I mean, people can check me. I have, you know, you know, plenty of notes on that and including I'm pretty sure it was the Jerusalem Post that reported on Netanyahu's speech, but this is all very findable and double checkable. You know? It's a huge part of their thinking. And again, I know it's crazy, but again, if we get rid of secular Sunni Saddam and empower the Shiite super majority, it'll be fine because actually either we will have a sock puppet Hashemite or we will have a sock puppet Shiite in charge to tell them what to do, and then they will tell Hezbollah to leave Israel alone. And that way, Israel can finish colonizing Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah on their northern flank. Speaker 0: So even if I thought that the purpose of foreign policy was to help a foreign country, which I don't, and even if I, you know, agree with all the objectives, which I don't think I do, But even if I did, I would say, that's not a very smart plan. And I remember having this exact conversation in Iraq in 02/2003. It's like, wait a second, if this is a majority Shiite country, if it becomes a democracy, it'll become a Shiite country. It'll be aligned in some basic way with Iran. How is that a win? And you're saying, of course, they knew that. At the time, I was like, don't they know? Don't they know? But they knew, and they thought that that would somehow be good for Israel. Speaker 1: Yeah. They thought that they would have dominance over the new order there, which, of course, they didn't. And by the way, when w Bush invaded in 02/2003, what did he do? He pick up he picked up exactly where his father had left off when he betrayed the Shiite uprising in 1991, And he took who? The Badah Brigade and the Dawah party, the supreme council for Islamic revolution, the Iraqi traders who had chosen Iran's side in the Iran Iraq war, who had led the uprising in '91 before Bush senior changed his mind and left them high and dry to be crushed. Now w Bush in o three takes them all the way to Baghdad. And so that's the history of Iraq War two. That bloody eight year horrible war that we fought over there was America fighting for the supermajority Shiite side for their strategic rivals in the region, Iran, in what they call in soccer an own goal, like this giant stupid mistake fought for the other side of the ledger based on the the idiocy and cruelty of these neocons who thought that they were smart and that they would get away with it. And that's what our guys thought there were. Somehow Speaker 0: help Israel to have a Shiite government in Iraq. Speaker 1: Right. Because we would have such control over the Shiites. They would force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. They would separate Syria and Iran, and they would it would be, Wormser said, a nightmare for Iran when they when the Iranian people see what a great new democratic Shiite Iraq looks like and how they could be living. It'll surely lead to the fall of the Ayatollah. Speaker 0: One of my theories for many, many years, and when people are always if you say anything like this, like, you're anti Israel, which I am not and never have been. But one thing I've noticed is that the people who presume to speak for Israel not only kind of shaft The United States, they don't care at all about The United States, obviously, but they also kind of shaft Israel. Like, they're not even good at they're not even good at serving the interests, their own interests, Speaker 1: or what they think of their own. Speaker 0: It's like wild. It's so interesting. Yep. I mean, I I I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that because I think a lot of there are actual, you know, anti Semites who are like, oh, the, you know, the Israel people are controlling everything. Okay. But I don't think it's helping Israel very much. It's definitely not helping us, which is my my concern. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 0: But it's just kinda funny that it's not helping Israel either. Speaker 1: Yeah. Of course. I mean, the the rabbinic doctrine made a lot more sense. That let's be friends with all our nearby neighboring states. We have a peace treaty with Egypt. We're working on one with Jordan, which they did get in '94. We That's what I try to Speaker 0: do with people who live near me. Yeah. I don't wanna be at war with them because Speaker 1: There was even a time in the w Bush years when the Israelis were talking with Assad and Kanalisa Rai stopped them. Speaker 0: She's really a sinister person. Speaker 1: Yeah. And, like, they were and the Israelis are were even negotiating over the Golan Heights or maybe sharing it or some kind of, you know, whatever thing, and she prevented them from making peace then. Speaker 0: She's the one who prevented Russia from joining NATO. Speaker 1: Well, yeah, a lot of things. Speaker 0: In in in 2000 when well, it's what Putin told me. When Putin said to Bush, would like to join NATO, and he's like, okay. And then Condie Rice, I guess 2001 Yeah. Jumps in and it's like, no. Speaker 1: Oh, okay. That's interesting. So I know that Colin Powell had put him off in July of o one. I'm not familiar with that anecdote, but I I mean, I'm just Sounds right. Speaker 0: Here I am taking Putin at his word again as a Russian stoop. Speaker 1: Russian talking point. Tucker Carlson. Speaker 0: I don't know. Speaker 1: I bet we can find it. I bet we can find it. No. I know that he asked to join NATO in February and that he was told, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, noncommittal. That was the tradition. Speaker 0: Well, he claims Bush Refused Speaker 1: to answer. Speaker 0: Was for it. I Yeah. I wasn't there. I can see Bush in it. Yeah. That's amazing. Speaker 1: Okay. So the next big step is the redirection because Elliot Abrams, the neocon, and Zalmik Alilzad, they realized how bad they screwed up here. And they come to Bush in o five and o six, and they say, listen, we've really empowered the Shiites and the Iranians at our own expense here. Our side of the ledger is the Sunni kings and Israel and Turkey. And so we have to fix this. And this is when they launched what's called the redirection. And this is a really important article by Seymour Hirsch from March 2007. And he had a whole series that year in the New Yorker, the coming wars, preparing the battlefield, and I always forget one other one. But the redirection is the most important one. This is where they say, man, we really screwed up by empowering the Shiites. Now we have to tilt back toward the Sunni kings. Except the Saudis don't have an army. So what do they really mean by that? They mean now it's time to tilt back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber head chopper enemies of The United States Of America. The fact that Al Qaeda in Iraq was the bleeding edge, the worst vanguard of the Sunni based insurgency resisting American and Shiite rule during that war. The fact that all the civilians they had killed and all the people at the Pentagon, all the people in those planes and the towers meant nothing. They said, now this is before Obama ever came to town. This is still w Bush. They said, we're gonna start backing Fatah al Islam in Lebanon, which was a Bin Ladenite group there to try to attack Hezbollah. We start backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. And by the way, this was Elizabeth Cheney who worked at the state department for George Bush, and she was the one who created the first Syrian National Council of the Syrian government in exile to try to replace Assad, which was chock full of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Speaker 0: And but big picture, we're doing this because why? Because Israel wants us to Speaker 1: And the Saudis do. So Khalil Zad goes to Saudi. This is in the WikiLeaks from beginning of o six. And the Saudi king says to Khalil Zad, it used to be us and you and Saddam against Iran. Now you have given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter. That was my take. Right. Just as an Speaker 0: observer, that's I'd never understood why would they do that. I never got it. Speaker 1: So that's the answer is this magical thinking that they would have through through a Hashemite king or through Chalabi that they would have this total control over the Shiites will and bend them to out. Speaker 0: If the Hashemite king thing works, then how come the Hashemites in Jordan are always on the edge? Speaker 1: Yeah. It doesn't. It it doesn't. And, of course, had no rule over Shiites at all. The idea that the Hashemites are gonna boss the the Shiites around and say, oh, I got magical blood that you have to obey is total nonsense. Right? No more than I'm the pope. It's just not right. It's and it's total, you know, the the the con that Chalabi was selling. And if you read A Clean Break, Coping the Crumbling States, Tyranny's Ally, Chalabi's in there over and over and over again. Our good friend, the Iraqi exile Chalabi assures us over and over again. Speaker 0: Whatever happened to him? Do you know? Speaker 1: He died. He ended up in charge of oil industry for a while, and then he died in, I'm gonna say, early Obama years. And in fact, I'll I'll urge your I won't do the direct quote and get you in too much trouble here, Tucker, but I'll urge people to go and read a great article by John Desard at salon.com. And for people not familiar, an eon ago, salon.com actually published real journalism. I know no one would think that now. It's such a woke rag, but they did actually publish real journalism back then. And John Desard is a serious guy. He's from the Financial Times, and I am briefly acquainted with him, and he's a serious journalist. The article is called how Chalebi conned the neocons. And in there, they quote Desard quotes a Lebanese businessman friend of Chalebi's. And he says, I asked Cholaby, what are you doing running around with these j words? And Cholaby said, I just need them to get America to launch the war. And then I promise I'll stab them in the back as soon as it's accomplished. Right? So he was using them and they were his fools. And there's a great quote Mark Zell I mentioned was Douglas Weiss law partner, and he says, oh, that chalopy, he's a treacherous spineless turncoat. He betrayed us. He promised us an oil pipeline to Haifa, and now he's running around with all these Iranians and has a whole different set of friends, and we'll never forgive him for his treachery and all that. So it's all just as plain as day in there as he was using David Wormser as a mark, Richard Pearl as like a pathetic sock puppet tool of his. And they thought that they were smart, but they were not. And Danielle Pletka also deserves a hell of a lot of blame and responsibility for this. She was Cholobey's main handler at the American Enterprise Institute And, you know, car carrying member of this neocon faction that pushed this stuff. So once they realized how bad they screwed up, they launched this redirection. They're back in Fatah Islam in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and the Iranian Kurds had a group called PJAC, which was whatever it's an acronym for, but it's essentially the Iranian Kurdish version of the PKK, which is the leftist insurgent Kurdish group in Turkey, which is only recently disarmed completely. And then their allies are the YPG in Syria and in but in Iran, they're called PJAK. And America was supporting them there, and they were also supporting a group of horrible Bin Ladenite suicide bomber headchopper maniacs called Jandala in Baluchistan, which is in Southeastern Iran, that region. And these guys were kidnapping and beheading officers and do army officers and doing truck bombings and all kinds of stuff. And so this is America under W Bush. Again, before Obama ever came to town, this is W Bush saying, oops. I screwed up and I put the Iranians best friends in power in Baghdad. There's only so much I can do about that. Speaker 0: At the request of neocons who then changed their mind and decide, oh, we screwed up. Yep. So then all American foreign policy has to pivot to backing the people who did nine eleven. Speaker 1: That's right. Back back to the bin Laden. Like yeah. So then Barack Obama comes Speaker 0: to to have sovereignty. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. No. We don't have that. It's it's somewhere, but it ain't here. So Barack Obama comes to town, and everybody thought, oh, this guy's a secret Muslim and all of this stuff, but that wasn't it. He's w Bush. That was what happened, was he was the centrist foreign policy establishment. He was Bill Clinton. It's all he ever was. And he came in, and he picked up right where w Bush left off. And when the it's actually interesting because he actually did assign I don't think there's any question about this. He assigned the CIA to find and kill Bin Ladenite, real Bin Ladenite terrorists in Yemen and in Pakistan. And in Pakistan, John Kiriakou told me, the former CIA officer, there were only 29 Al Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan. And they launched this horrific drone war, and they had to help the Pakistani government launch a even worse war against the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley and the federally administered tribal territories that killed, like, 80,000 people as a favor to let him do the drone war against less than 30 Al Qaeda guys in the country, which was somewhat successful, but it also just created more blowback in driving people away and back to where they were from, places like Libya. And he was also bombing them in in Yemen as well, which was totally counterproductive as I show in my Yemen chapter in the book. The the CIA and air force war against AQAP only grew them bigger and bigger the whole time and was counterproductive. But so that's like the first couple of years. And and, course, he escalated the war in Afghanistan even though there were no Arab terrorists left in Afghanistan at all by then. But then at the beginning of the Arab Spring, which breaks out in 02/2011, Obama takes Osama's side in Libya. And this is just as he's killing the guy. He's he he put down on February. Well, at that very moment, we got American planes flying sorties as air cover for the Libyan Islamic fighting group and Ansar al Sharia who are Al Qaeda in Libya. That's all they are. They're the they're the Libyan veterans of Al Qaeda in Iraq. They just got home from fighting with Zarqawi against our guys in Iraq war two. Now they wanna take on Qaddafi, and Barack Obama takes their side. Yeah. And that's because, of course, Gaddafi was on Israel's list for a long time, the list of seven countries that they wanted to get rid of. I did last December a debate with general Wesley Clark where he reconfirmed that that list of the seven countries in five years, that was Israel's list of countries they wanted overthrown. And Libya was on that list, and the Saudis and Qataris also hated him for, you know, making fun of them for wearing robes and calling them women wearing dresses and stuff, and they had screwed him on oil he had screwed them on oil deals and the same for the British. And I think Sarkozy in France, Gaddafi had helped bankroll his election campaign, and he wanted to cover that up. So he want that was his motive, was trying to take him out. Speaker 0: Gaddafi helped to bankroll Sarkozy's presidential campaign? Speaker 1: Yeah. And that was one of his big motives for wanting to launch the war. And then Speaker 0: Well, not a very grateful character, is he? Speaker 1: No. Not at Speaker 0: all. You pay for my election campaign, I'll send NATO in to kill you? Yeah. And what was NATO doing there anyway? That's not the North Atlantic. Speaker 1: Well, you know, it's Speaker 0: This isn't the NATO I was promised, the defensive alliance protecting the North Atlantic from the Soviets? Speaker 1: I know. Well, you know, help me figure out how Estonia and Lithuania belong in NATO either. As you said, that's another show. Speaker 0: So Al Qaeda in Libya, all of a sudden becomes an ally of Barack Obama? Speaker 1: Right. Well, Barack Obama becomes theirs. Becomes theirs. Yeah. And so that's the whole thing. It's just like with Bill Clinton, we might help them, but that doesn't buy their loyalty to us. Speaker 0: Noticed. Speaker 1: In fact, quoted in in my new book provoked, I quote Ali Sufan, the former FBI counterterrorism agent, where he quotes the Bin Ladenites complaining to Bin Laden himself. Why are you targeting The United States? They've been so good to us. They supported us in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, now here in Chechnya. And then he explained to them, well, you guys just don't understand. We have this larger agenda based around what's going on in Palestine and in Iraq and the rest of this. So some of them had been bribed, but the loyalty really did Speaker 0: not come through the Just to I I because I think it well, because he attacked my country. I think it's fair to ask, do you believe based on all the research you've done that his main motive was what's happening in Gaza, the West Bank? Speaker 1: It's right there. Yes. It's the main motive was, I believe, the bases in Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq. And then two on the list was support for the Israelis in Palestine and in Southern Lebanon, and then with support for the dictators of the region, pressure on them to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense. And as he put it, turning a blind eye to Russia and China and India and their wars against Muslims, which we know is not true, where America actually supported the Bin Ladenites and two of the three of those. But those were the grievances for real. And then so Obama takes Al Qaeda's side in Libya, and then on to what Hillary Clinton called her bank shot and move all the Mujahideen and Gaddafi's guns to Syria. And this is where they started the dirty war in Syria. And again, why? Because as David Wormser wrote back so many years ago, Syria is the keystone in the arc of Iranian power in the region. And since we just moved Baghdad to Iran's column, we just put Iraq put pardon me. We just put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad. Now we gotta take them down a peg in Damascus by getting rid of the Baathists there who are run by the Alawites who Speaker 0: are This is like Alpolism. Like, you you get drunk, then you feel terrible, so you have to get drunk again. Yeah. And it just gets worse. Speaker 1: It's a government program. It's unbelievable. Speaker 0: And just to restate, as I've said many times, but it can't be said enough, the Benghazi tragedy where a US ambassador and a number of American, well, CIA personnel were killed in Benghazi, Libya. The real point of that story, the reason they were there in the first place was moving Qaddafi's arms stockpiles to Al Qaeda linked groups Speaker 1: Absolutely. In Syria. Yep. And so we're just talking about mentioned the drone war in Pakistan. In July of twenty twelve, the CIA killed an Al Qaeda Libyan Al Qaeda guy named Sheikh Yahya Al Libi. His brother's the same guy that George Bush and Dick Cheney tortured into falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda and Sheikh Ibn Al Libi and who later Qaddafi murdered in his prison cell in a case of Arkanside, as they call it, supposed suicide, because Gaddafi was cooperative in the terror war. Speaker 0: Arkanside? Speaker 1: Yes. When a friend of Bill or Hillary dies under mysterious circumstances. You know what I mean? Sorry. Excuse me. They say he killed himself, but, boy, it seems like a weird angle. You know? Can't even Speaker 0: that he stuffed himself. He stuffed his own corpse into the trunk. Speaker 1: Yeah. And blew himself out the airlock. You know? Speaker 0: But Arkin side. Sorry. Right over my head. Speaker 1: Pardon me. I bring some of these things with me from the nineties. But so yeah. So now they killed Yaya Alibi, and then Zawahiri put out a podcast saying, hey. All good mujahideen in Libya. You know how the Americans are stationed right in the middle of your hornet's nest? Well, time to reach out and touch someone. And he put out that podcast in, like, August. Then on September 11, on the anniversary of the attack, they reached out and got us. Is our guy what was Christopher Stevens doing there? He was committing high treason on the orders of the president of The United States, not out of loyalty to Al Qaeda, but a loyalty to the Saudi king and to the Likud, that we hate the Shiites more because that's what these foreign client states of ours want. And so we're again, Hillary's bank shot. Her and Petraeus and Leon Panetta were working together. We take all these jihadis and all these weapons and ship them on to Syria for the war. So the war in Syria then was never a revolt. The war in Syria was not a revolution or an uprising. The war in Syria was a foreign invasion by American, Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and Qatari backed Al Qaeda mercenary terrorists. That's what it was. That was absolute treason and against. Why? Because Assad, the secular dictator, as you said, the ophthalmologist who wasn't even supposed to be dictator, his older brother died in a car wreck. He was an eyeball doctor in London when he was summoned to be the dictator of Syria that well, he's friends with Iran, and he helps Iran back Hezbollah. And so that's it. We gotta get rid of him. Speaker 0: It's just interesting. Okay. So that's a perspective, and whether the US government ought to be following orders from other countries is another question. But, you know, maybe you don't like Assad or or whatever, but the posture of the American media was just it was just crazy. In one day, it went from, you know, Assad's wife on the cover of Vogue to anyone who likes Assad is a bad American. Mhmm. Tulsi Gabbard got drummed out of the Democratic Party just for talking to the guy. She was never even pro Assad. Speaker 1: No. I'm glad you brought that up. So what was her problem? She had been stationed at Bilad Air Base during Iraq War two north of Baghdad at a medical unit. So I've never heard her talk about this, but it is fair to presume that she saw young guys screaming for their mama dying in front of her at that base. Why? Because they were fighting against the Sunnis, fighting against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Now it's two years later, we're in Syria, and they're saying, we're flipping sides. We support the shirts now against the skins. Well, that's could Tulsi Gabbard is like, no. Because she actually knows what she's talking about. Speaker 0: Well, that was her that was her, like, obsessive mission Right. Was to get us to stop funding Al Qaeda. Speaker 1: So she was always for the war on terrorism. She was just against the war for terrorism. Speaker 0: No. It's so it's so right. And, I mean, she's more hawkish than a lot of people I respect. She's not a dove. That's for sure. I mean, she's still in the US Army. That's right. So, like Yeah. Speaker 1: She wants bin Ladenites dead, not empowered. Well, that's Speaker 0: but what's so interesting is she's in the crosshairs now, and they're gonna try and know, the neocons are gonna try and take her down. I mean, they're trying now. It's it's really beyond belief. But Speaker 1: her her Speaker 0: point, so far as you know, you clearly follow this, was not, I love Assad. Speaker 1: No. Of course not. It never was that. It was that you guys are saying that these so called rebels are good guys, but they're not. I know them. They're But what Speaker 0: was Mod Nights? I mean, I'm not for Assad either. I'm totally agnostic on Assad. But, like, why does The US media take these positions at the order of whom? I don't know. Is there a meeting that I missed? Yeah. Where all of a sudden, one day, like, someone is acting in a way that, you know, somebody doesn't like, and everybody has to get on board with it. No one ever explains why. Assad, and then who's that? That I can't remember her name. The woman who runs the free press. Barry Weiss? Barry Weiss. All of a sudden, she's like, oh, Assad, he's bad. You know? Assad, You don't know anything about anything. Speaker 1: Yeah. She called famously on Joe Rogan show, she called Tulsi Gabbard and Assad toady. Well, exactly. And then Rogan says, what's a toady? And she says, I have no idea. Well, she And didn't know even how to spell it. And Speaker 0: Of course. And doesn't know anything about Assad other than you're supposed to hate him for some reason. Everyone doesn't hate him vehemently enough as a Nazi or something. I don't I don't really get it, but why obviously, Bareweiss is not a serious person, but there are serious people in the media who go along with this. Why? Speaker 1: I mean, I it it really is astounding to me. I think mostly it's they don't learn anything and keep it. You know what I mean? They're not reflecting on like, Tulsi Gabbard's going, but these are my enemies from a year and a half ago, or they don't remember a year and a half ago. They don't they don't know that. So, like, in Libya, before Syria even, it was responsibility to protect. They manufactured this ridiculous hoax that Qaddafi was about to exterminate every last man, woman, and child in the city of Benghazi. Barack Obama said, imagine the city of Charlotte being wiped off the face of the earth. Well, this is a complete hoax. At least Bill Clinton lied that a 100,000 people had already been killed in Kosovo. Barack Obama's just lying that hundreds of thousands are about to be killed, and this is the responsibility to protect. And even though anyone who's looking critically at the press at the time, especially the British press, but even the American press, knows these are Bin Ladenites. These are radical Sunni fighters who just got home from Iraq, and now we don't care about the war on terrorism at all anymore. Now we're doing a humanitarian mission for Bin Ladenites. Speaker 0: So how's the city of Benghazi, the ancient port city of Benghazi now? Speaker 1: Well, it's under the control of a former American sock puppet dictator named Haftar. The city the country of Libya no longer exists. It was only created after World War two, and it's now divided in three in a state of low level civil war. And the leader of Tripoli is actually a guy named Bel Hajj, who was a former Bin Ladenite terrorist, who was actually kidnapped and tortured by the CIA and the Brits and sued the Brits and won for their Wait. Speaker 0: So you're saying that we didn't successfully protect Benghazi? Speaker 1: Nope. Not at all. You used a total hoax to launch that war. But now so I know we're running short on time here, but so importantly, now the support bit Obama administration support for the Bin Ladenites in Syria led to the rise of the Islamic State. Now they had renamed Al Qaeda in Iraq the Islamic State of Iraq back in 2006 after they killed Sarkawi, but they had no state. They didn't even control a single county. It was a joke at the time. But now that Obama took their side in Syria, they ended up controlling all of Eastern Syria and consolidated a state by February right this time, February. Instead of going west and putting pressure on Assad, they just conquered the East of the country. Then six months later, they raised the black flag over Fallujah. And Barack Obama was asked about this by Vanity Fair magazine, and he said, listen. Just because the junior varsity team puts on a Kobe Bryant doesn't mean that they're in the majors or whatever. So in other words, he he's calling Al Qaeda in Iraq the junior varsity. Not real terrorists, not anybody we need to be worried about. Well, six months later, this is the famous footage that everybody's familiar with of the long line of Toyota Helix pickup trucks with their headlights on roll right into Mosul, full of jihadis, and sack Mosul. From there, they take over Samarra to Crete, Fallujah, and then about a year later, they took Ramadi. And so the Islamic State this was the creation of the Islamic State Caliphate. And the leader was this guy, Baghdadi, who was just Zarqawi's successor. He was the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and he had sent his deputy, Jahlani, to go and run what was called Jabot al Nusra in Syria, and then he split with Jahlani and created his state. And so here he's like a cross between Speaker 0: Whatever happened to Jelani? Speaker 1: Oh, well, Jelani's actually the president of Syria right now. Speaker 0: Wait a second, Scott. I don't believe that. Speaker 1: Yeah. So Jelani Speaker 0: so No. I'm I'm just joking, but it's like so Speaker 1: so America fights Iraq War three on the Shiite side again. Right? Because we built the caliphate despite the Shiites because we're mad at them that we fought Iraq War two for them. But now that we built the caliphate, and this guy's like a cross between Bin Laden and Mussolini up on the balcony at the mosque declaring himself the caliph Ibrahim and all this. This is too much. It's like Bin Laden himself owns a state now. We can't do that. So what do we do? We fight with the Shiites. The Iraqi Shiites we wish we hadn't fought Iraq War two for, all their Iranian backed Shiite militias. These are the guys who crushed the Islamic State. And in Tikrit, you literally had American airplanes flying air cover for the Iranian Quds force on the ground. And the Americans saying, well, it is the Quds Force, but at least they're helping us kill ISIS. And on the ground, the Quds Force guys saying, well, it is the Americans, but at least they're providing us good air cover as they're liberating Saddam Hussein's hometown from the Bin Ladenites. And so this is Iraq War three to beginning in August of twenty fourteen through the end of twenty seventeen, basically, Trump's first year was the destruction of the caliphate that Obama had built despite the Shiites for Bush giving them Baghdad. And and then, of course, spreading Bin Ladenite terrorism elsewhere throughout the world even worse. And so then this brings us back to Iran because that war ended with Russia in intervening in Syria and protecting the Assad regime and preventing America from completing his overthrow. So from the end of Obama, basically, through Trump's first term and through Biden's term, you had Jelani and Al Qaeda were hiding up in basically kept safe by the Turks up in the Idlib province, which is this rural province in Northwestern Syria. And in last November, early December of twenty four, they broke out of their pen in a big October 7 style attack, and they sacked Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus in fourteen days and or ten days, twelve days and took over the Speaker 0: country. December. Speaker 1: And, you know, our president said this is a a strong guy with a very strong past. Well, his strong past is murdering American soldiers, fighting and killing American soldiers in Mosul and Ramadi. Why would Iraq drop to Speaker 0: sanctions against him. Because that's Speaker 1: what Israel wants. Because Israel hates the Shiites more, and the Alawites were friends with the Shiites. And so they don't mind the Bin Ladenites. Even though the Bin Ladenites targeted us over Israel's crimes, they've never given Israel a problem directly. And in fact, one of the Israeli intelligence or military officials admitted to the press when he was asked, why do you guys give aid and comfort to Al Qaeda in the war? You give him medical treatment and all these things. And he said, well, you know, it's the humanitarian thing to do. And they said, well, do you give that same kind of support to Hezbollah when they're injured on the battlefield? And he goes, well, of course not. They're our enemies. And the reporter says, yeah. But Al Qaeda attacked The United States. Says, yeah. What's that got to do with us? So they're worried about their national interests, and our country somehow worried about their national interests instead of ours. So why in the world would any American prefer a bin Ladenite to Assad, a Baathist? Only because they hate the Shiites more. Only because they put Israel's interest before those of The United States. That's the one and only answer to that. Speaker 0: Yeah. And again, if you care about the Christian the ancient Christian population of Syria has been there two thousand years. Yeah. You know, they're being massacred now. Speaker 1: Yeah. My friend Brad Hoff I should have brought you this. I have extra copy of this. My friend Brad Hoff wrote a great book called Syria crucified, which is all stories of Syrian Christians going through the hell of Obama's dirty war there. And they're in danger right now. There was a suicide bombing by an Al Qaeda tied guy at a church in Syria three days ago. Speaker 0: I just don't understand. I do repeat myself at the age of 56, but I I don't I can't control it. Where are American churches lecturing us about those who bless Israel or whatever? Again, I'm not against Israel, but shouldn't American churches care about Syrian churches, about their brothers in Christ in Syria? And they they support a government that's like whose policies basically are are killing all the all the Christians in the whole region. Yep. That's just a fact. I mean, I Speaker 1: don't completely destroy the Christian the Chaldean Christian communities of Iraq. They don't exist anymore. They're gone. Speaker 0: Oh, I know. Speaker 1: They're scattered to the winds. And the the Marianites and the different kinds of Christians in Syria, you know, there there was a village in I don't I think they reconstituted the village later, but for years, there was a village where they speak Aramaic. Because when the last places in the world where they speak Aramaic and the Bin Ladenites took that town over and, you know, tyrannize those people for two or three years during the last war there, now they're in charge. They've been slaughtering Alawites and slaughtering Christians. Oh, I know. And it's it promises to get nothing but worse from here. Speaker 0: But where are the Christians in this country when the IDF rolls into an all Christian town in the West Bank? Speaker 1: They're in their Schofield Bible. It says Israel can do whatever they want. Speaker 0: Well, I mean, you know, whatever. I'm not I hate theological debates. I'm not qualified to have one, but I do think if you're a Christian and you see other Christians murdered, you can't take the side of the people who are making that possible. I just don't I mean, what you think Jesus is for that? Is that what you're saying to me? Speaker 1: Well, I think, you know, probably most Americans assume that, like, in in Israel Palestine, that the Christians are Israelis and that they're allies with the Israeli Jews against the evil Muslims. And they just don't know that that's not true. In fact They're persecuted. They're persecuted and occupied along Speaker 0: ask them. If you ask them, then all these liars in The United States will tell you, well, they're in Al Qaeda. They're in Al Qaeda, really? Yes. Some Christian priest in the West Bank is actually in Al Qaeda. Okay. Speaker 1: Right. So you wanna talk about Iran's nuclear program? Speaker 0: I do. Yeah. Let's let's roll through it. Speaker 1: This is a Speaker 0: nuclear program. Speaker 1: Yeah. So the Ayatollah w Bush puts Iran, Iraq, and North Korea in the axis of evil in 02/2002. And of all the preposterous lies, Saddam and the Ayatollah are allies when no two men in the world hate each other more than these two. Right? And they're allies with Osama bin Laden, who is no friend of the Ayatollah and who Saddam Hussein is obviously deathly afraid of and has nothing to do with whatsoever. And then Kim in North Korea, which he had sold some missiles to Iran, but they got no tight alliance. And I think it's pretty clear that the only reason that they put North Korea in there is because if they had said the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq, and Syria, you might have wondered whether the speech was written in Tel Aviv or not. So they went ahead and threw North Korea in there. That's a whole other interview. I like talking about that one too. But so Saddam Hussein's strategy is to say, here's my 12,000 page dossier on all the weapons I ever had. It's the same stuff his son-in-law Hussein Kamal had given up in 1995. There was nothing else to show. They knew by the end of ninety five he'd given up everything. Any weapons left in the country had been declared and had just been left there by the inspectors to rot in the sun. Shelf life expired anyway. They had no nuclear program or any of that stuff, but they just wasn't good enough. They were able to just buffalo us into that war no matter what. The North Koreans, they were bullied. I'll skip the details, but people can read how Bush pushed North Korea to nukes by Gordon Prather. It's the last article the great Gordon Prather wrote for us at anti war dot com. It's really great. Explains how they essentially bullied Kim into leaving the treaty and starting to make nukes, which you noticed we don't mess with North Korea anymore. No. Can't. The Ayatollah in Iran took a different tactic. In fact, I'll go ahead and throw in Libya. Gaddafi didn't have a nuclear program. He just had warehouses full of crates full of junk that he bought from the Pakistanis. He didn't have the men with the know how to build a nuclear program of any description anyway, but that was enough for him to trade away to Bush for normalization. It was seven years later that Barack Obama stabbed him in the back, started literally lynched him Speaker 0: to death. Stabbed him in the rectum, I think, Speaker 1: with a bayonet. And then shot him in the side of the head on the side of the road. But then the Ayatollah said, look, my books are open. I'm part of the nonproliferation treaty. I have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Hands up. Don't shoot. You have no costus belly here. And that has been essentially his strategy this whole time. Now they made facilities at Natanz and later at Fordo. The war party says that these were top secret facilities that were only revealed by Israel. That's not true. They did buy junk from AQ Khan, the Pakistani nuclear technology supplier distributor, but only because America wouldn't let them buy a light water reactor from China. Bill Clinton had just let the Chinese sell them a light water reactor, which cannot produce weapons fuel as waste, then everything would have been fine then. But they basically drove them to the black market where they got uranium enrichment equipment, and they started enriching uranium at Natanz in 2,005. Now they weren't in violation of the deal because the deal says you have to announce within six months before introducing nuclear material in any machines that you're going to do so, and they did that. And they have developed, quite frankly, a latent nuclear deterrent. So that makes them what they call a threshold state, the same as Brazil or Germany or Japan. Meaning, they've proven they've mastered the fuel cycle. They know how to enrich uranium. They could enrich up to weapons grade, but so let's not fight and we won't have to go that far. So that's essentially what they've had this whole time. The Americans the Washington DC during the w Bush years, they just lied that there's a secret parallel nuclear program that's really a nuclear weapons program that's going on there too. And the IAEA can't find it, but trust us, it's there. And they never explained it because they couldn't because they were lying. They just heavily implied it all the time. Secret, illicit nuclear weapons program as though the thing existed, which it never did. And we almost went to war over it a couple of times, but it was stopped in 2007 by the commander of CENTCOM, admiral Fallon, and then later the CIA and the n I the National Intelligence Council put out their NIE of November 2007 saying they have not decided to make nuclear weapons. Bush complained in his memoir, w Bush, that, well, how was I supposed to attack them? He said, oh, I'm so sorry, your highness, to the king of Saudi Arabia. I can't attack them because my own intelligence agencies say they're not making nukes. And if they don't have a military program, I can't do anything. So his hands were tied, he thought. And then this was essentially the status quo until Obama comes in and Netanyahu comes in right before Obama does. It comes back to power. And he starts threatening like he's going to attack Iran and drag us into it. At this point, Zabinda Brzezinski even said, if Netanyahu flies planes over Iraq to attack Iran, Obama should shoot them down over Iraq. So I know Robert Kennedy says Brzezinski was the founder of the neoconservative movement, but no. He was never a neocon, and they hated each other sometimes. They worked together on Russia issues. They he was a two state solution guy and definitely not a lacutnik and not on Iran, especially. But so Obama was, I think, really worried. A lot of people were really worried that Netanyahu was going to start the war in his first term and drag him into it. And so the way to prevent that was to create the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the John Kerry nuclear deal. Speaker 0: That was the point of Speaker 1: it. That was the point was we already have an NPT, and we already have a safeguards agreement, but essentially, everybody's pretending that they don't exist. The western media is following the Likud party line that there's essentially nothing stopping Iran from making a nuke right now if we don't hit them. So Obama said, fine. We'll just add another layer of deal on top of that. Speaker 0: So But the but the Iran deal was a way to keep Netanyahu from starting over with Iran and dragging us in. Speaker 1: Yes. Although Speaker 0: I feel like Speaker 1: we're watching bluffing. Don't I don't think Netanyahu really was going to do it back then. I think he did it here because he had Trump's permission. I'm not certain of that. I don't think I don't know if you know, but I don't know that it's really clear exactly. But I think at that time, he was really just bluffing and was trying to get Obama to to do something at least to roll back their program, if not completely eliminate it. But so what they did was the JCPOA, you know, Trump called it the worst deal that any men ever signed or whatever. It's just not really true. I mean, what it did was it severely rolled back their nuclear program. So they poured concrete in their Iraq, that's a r a k, their Iraq heavy water reactor. They severely restricted the number of centrifuges spinning at Natanz by two thirds, I believe it was. They turned the Fordo or the comm facility into a research only facility, no uranium production there. And then the deal is that they wanted to the American side wanted for Iran to export any stockpile of enriched nuclear material out of the country so that if they withdrew from the treaty and kicked the inspectors out of the country and started beating their chest and declared, now we're making a bomb, it would take them a year. This is what they call the breakout period. It would take them a year to have enough fissile material to make a single gun type nuke out of. And so they wanted to make it that difficult. So they would have to ship out all their uranium to France, and the French would turn it into fuel rods and ship it back, and they would burn that in their heavy water reactor. Now there's two routes to the nuclear bomb. Forget the h bomb for a minute. We're just talking about fission bombs, atom bombs. The plutonium route, like the Nagasaki bomb, was already precluded because even though their heavy water reactor produces plutonium waste, it's heavily polluted with other isotopes, and so you need a reprocessing facility to get all that out to make usable fuel. They don't have that reprocessing facility. The Russians had the right to come and get all their waste and take it back to Russia to be diluted down there. So there was no plutonium route to the bomb. Now the uranium route to the bomb is interesting because and this is something that you may have been referring to about, I make corrections when I'm wrong. I had overstated this on the Pierce Morgan show and on breaking points last week and two weeks ago, and so I I was trying to fix that with this statement, and and they did let me go back on breaking points to address it. That what I was what I had said wrongly was that you can't really make an implosion bomb that you could miniaturize out of uranium. That's not correct. You can. What you can't do is make a gun type nuke out of plutonium, and I had overstated that. But my point more or less still stands because my point was that if Iran broke out and raced to a bomb in that one year breakout capability, it's virtually like unanimous among the experts that if they wanted to to race and get a bomb as fast as they could, it would be a simple gun type nuke like the kind America dropped on Hiroshima, which is essentially a uranium slug fired into a uranium target, and it just causes a supercritical mass there. But to do that, it's too big to miniaturize and fit onto Iran's missiles in their nose cones or any of that. So if they had they raced to a nuke, they would have one that they could test in the desert, but they couldn't really deliver other than strapped to the back of a flatbed truck or like put it in an airliner or something Right. Which they couldn't get to Israel and they couldn't use it. If they were to even make an implosion bomb with uranium though, it would take years worth of testing and development to get the implosion system right to make it work. So they couldn't race toward a bomb if they wanted to make a bomb small enough to marry to a missile to be able to deliver to anyone. So in other words, even if they withdrew from the dreadie, kicked out the inspectors, and started making nukes, it's very likely that their first nuke or two would be simple undeliverable gun type nukes that would be not much more of a deterrent than their latent deterrent. So now Trump gets out of the deal in 2018 at Netanyahu's behest, and there were problems with the deal. It had sunset provisions in it that said, you know, after a certain period of time, you can increase your number of centrifuges again and these other things. Now I believe that if Trump had come in and told Netanyahu to pipe down in his first term, I mean, and had said to the Ayatollah, now listen. I don't like this deal. It was my predecessor's deal, and I wanna improve it. Let's get along. I'll take it at face value. I came into office with this agreement. Let's see if we can improve it. Let's see if we can get rid of some of these sunset provisions. Let's see if we can find a way to renegotiate the deal and make it better. He didn't do that. He just withdrew. And in consequence of that, it's actually part of the deal that Iran is allowed to stop abiding by some of restrictions in the deal and still stay within the deal if America breaks its agreement first. And and so they did. They started enriching after Israel murdered their top weapon scientist, Fakhrizada, or or pardon me, his top nuclear scientist. I don't know that he was a weapon scientist at all. Their top nuclear scientist in December of twenty, they started enriching up to 20% again, which is still legitimate. They need 20% enriched uranium two thirty five for their medical isotope reactors. But then in April, the Israelis did a sabotage mission at Natanz, and they bragged about it. They were the ones who did it. And in reaction to that, the Iranians then started enriching up to 60% uranium two thirty five. Now you need really above 90% to make an effective uranium atom bomb. It's technically possible to make one with above 80% enriched uranium two thirty five. Mark Dubowitz says you can make one with 60% enriched uranium two thirty five, but I don't think that's really right. But anyway. Speaker 0: What's the point of doing it then? Speaker 1: Typically, to 60%. Right. Good question. Because this is what you'll hear all the hawks say. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and all of them say over and over again that, oh, yeah. Well, what do they need the 60% for? To negotiate away. That was why. They're trying to get America back in the deal. If they had wanted to race toward weapons grade uranium, they could have just raced toward weapons grade uranium and enriched it up to 90%. They're going up to 60 because it makes them closer. It means their breakout time is shorter, and they're trying to put pressure on the Americans to get back into the deal, which we already had in which they are still officially a part of. And so that was why they were going up to 60%. Speaker 0: They're still officially a part of Speaker 1: it. They're still officially part because they signed the JCPOA with France and Britain, The United States, Russia, and China, all the members of the the permanent members of the UN Security Council. So they're still part of the JCPOA. It still is the law, basically. It's still the international law and their agreement. But as I said, there are there are subsections of the of the agreement itself that say that if America stops abiding by our part of it, they can stop abiding by some of the restrictions even while remaining inside the deal. So they were really just the the purpose of the 60% was to try to force America back to the table. And Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, was so disingenuous. I saw him give a statement on the Sunday morning news show last week where I guess, on this week, where he says, the only countries that have 60% uranium have nuclear weapons. No. Come on, man. That's just obfuscation. You know, if we're making nuclear weapons out of uranium, it's not at 60%, which all ours are plutonium bombs anyway. But he knows what he's doing when he says that. Right? He wants you to understand that Iran is racing toward a nuke without actually claiming that because he knows it's really not true. And and then there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the 60% was it was to negotiate away. But so now Trump gives them their deadline, they pass the deadline, and I'm not exactly certain what happens, but Israel starts the war. Donald Trump comes in, what, a week into it, ten days into it, and bombs Forto, Natanz, and Isfahan. Isfahan is where they have the conversion facility to transform uranium or and metal to gas and then back again. It has to be uranium hexafluoride gas is what they spin and enrich, and then they turn it back into metal. And they bond all three of those. And I don't know for certain the extent of the damage. Although I did read a report by David Albright, who's a nuclear weapons expert who talked about they got commercial satellite footage, and and he seemed to think that they had done significant damage to Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan, and all the important nuclear facilities there. So in other words, Donald j Trump called the Ayatollah's bluff. You say you have a latent nuclear deterrent, and I better not attack you or else then you might make one, which he never said that outright, but that was clearly the implication of the Iranian program. Alright. Well, I'm bombing your program. So now what are you gonna do? And, you know, their other bluff was that they would shoot their mid range missiles at our bases in the Gulf Region. In in Qatar, we have CENTCOM headquarters at all the all you did air base there, and our fifth fleet stationed at Bahrain. We have tens of thousands of army soldiers in Kuwait, and they were all essentially hostage to Iranian missiles. But when it came down to it, they didn't dare. They that was their bluff. We called their bluff, and they didn't dare. What'd do? They shot Trump dropped 14 bombs on them. They fired 14 missiles at Qatar, and they called him in advance and warned him, we're about to fire 14 missiles. Get ready to shoot them down. In other words, a purely symbolic retaliation against The United States. While they're still firing missiles at Tel Aviv, he didn't dare to hit American forces in The Gulf, not this time at least for probably out of fear of what Donald Trump would do. Now this is the same Ayatollah who they say can't wait to cause the apocalypse and nuke Israel even if every last Iranian gets nuked off the face of the earth. He doesn't care because he wants the end of the world, and yet he doesn't dare pick a fight with Donald Trump and telegraphs, I do not wanna fight you every chance that he gets with the American superpower. So now where does that leave us? Either I've been right for fifteen, twenty years warning that if we bomb them, that is the most likely thing to cause them to then now race for a nuke. Or Trump is right, and he has just degraded their program so severely that there's no point in even restarting it again. He's got the credible threat that he'll just start bombing it again if they try. And so his position seems to be I think he said, I don't need a new nuclear deal because there's no nuclear there. Now I'm not certain that's true, that he's completely decimated what they have. But it I guess, as as we're recording this, it very much remains to be seen what is the long term reaction of the Iranians, whether they are now going to weaponize their latent program. They've already kicked the all the inspectors out of the country. And and I saw this headline, and I don't know the entire story here, but a lower cleric, not the supreme leader, but a lower cleric has now issued a for president Trump like they did to Salman Rushdie order on his life, which I know a great journalist named Ken Silva who's really put the lie to and showed and debunked these kind of FBI hoaxes about these Iranian assassination plots against Trump. They're really not true. And Ken Silva is the guy's name. He's excellent reporter from headline USA. And the institute, we're gonna publish his book about the assassination attempts against Trump that he's working on now. And he's really debunked those, but I don't think there's really much debunk in this other than that this public statement came from a lower level cleric who I guess could be overridden by the Ayatollah if the Ayatollah would be so wise as to say, actually, we didn't mean that and try to find a way to move forward because a death threat against a very credible threat like that against the life of the president of United States is the kind of thing to absolutely solidify American support for even further war against their countries of his Of course. A huge error for Speaker 0: them to Who's the guy who issued it? Is it meaningful? Does it in any sense? Speaker 1: Yeah. Can it be walked back? Speaker 0: Yeah. Does he speak for the religious authorities of Iran or not? You know, I I don't know the answer, but I agree. That's nuts. Don't do that. Speaker 1: Yeah. And and look back to Brzezinski. He and Alexander Haig said in 1993, you know, we should normalize relations with Iran. We should build an oil pipeline across that country and get along with them. Thyatollah keeps preferring that modernists and reformers win the presidency. You know, Ahmadinejad was a big counter to that, but Raffinjani and Kutami and Yeah. And these other guys, Rouhani and these other presidents that we've had, they want to get along with The United States. I mean, Tucker, if you're the Ayatollah, what are you gonna do with a problem like The USA? We're the global empire armed to the teeth with h bombs, and we do nothing but dictate to them all day. And they do what they have to to survive, essentially. And this is why the Israelis and their partisans always have to resort to this propaganda about how, no, the Ayatollah wants the end times. He wants to force the twelfth Amam to come back and blow up the world and all of these things. So they essentially have to resort to those claims in order to, you know, obfuscate or to confuse the issue of just why wouldn't Iran's government act in their national interest as close as they can for their own short term survival, which is the obvious correct way and medium term survival, which is obviously the correct way to look at it. Speaker 0: Is Iran the last government on the list? Yes. So Speaker 1: is Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, meaning especially, you know, Hezbollah and Southern Lebanon. Speaker 0: Israelah. Speaker 1: Israelah is dead. Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, which they they we've been at war in Somalia since 02/2001. It's the longest war in American history. That's a whole other interview for you. And Sudan, at least the CIA broke off the south from the North, and they've had a regime change there. Luckily, we didn't go to war against Sudan. And and then last on the list was Iran. Speaker 0: So let's say there is regime change in Iran, and the point of this is not to stop their nuclear program. That's like absurd. The point is to change the government there by force. Let's say that happens, not a single one of the countries you just listed has been a success, I think we can say. You know, hasn't helped The United States, hasn't helped the people of that country, hasn't helped the region. It's crazier than it was twenty years ago by a lot. So what happens if Iran gets regime change? Speaker 1: Well, then Osama bin Laden throws a party in hell, first of all. Right? Again, doing the bin Laden night's dirty work there. You know, the Israelis were posting pictures then piling around with the Shah of Pahlavi's son saying we're just gonna parachute him in there, And his royal majesty will take over because that's the American way is installing royal monarchs over people. Speaker 0: I think he's in The US. Chalabi's not Chalabi. Sorry. Palavi. Same difference. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Is there like a groundswell of popular support for him to come back and establish a monarchy? Speaker 1: I doubt it. You know, they talk about putting the Mujahideeni cult in there too, which is this crazy communist terrorist cult. They kidnap people's children and, you know, force them to be celibate and all this, like, total heaven's gate cult type stuff was this group that had helped with the Iranian revolution, then they weren't went to work for Saddam Hussein, then and helped Saddam crush the Shiite revolution insurrection in '91. And then Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney took possession of them when America invaded Iraq and then turned them over to the Israelis who use them as Israeli or pardon me, as intelligence cutouts, usually to deliver false claims against Iran and their nuclear program. And they're now kept safe at an American base in Albania. And they have talked for years about somehow, like, believe in their own BS about how somehow they could use the MEK to do a regime change in Iran, that there would be some groundswell of support for them. I mean, we're talking, like, total kooks here. Speaker 0: What was the celibacy part? Speaker 1: Control. Speaker 0: So they demand celibacy from their followers? Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. And like any member has to raise their hand to speak like kindergarten. They kidnap their children and take them away to keep them under total control. It's a real sick call. Speaker 0: Emmy k, I mean, aren't there members of congress and various administration officials who are dealing with them? Speaker 1: Yep. And you take money from them and speak at their conferences and all of that. Actually? Oh, Speaker 0: Oh, yeah. Speaker 1: Including I really like Dana Rohrabacher, but he's one of them. And quite a few of those guys have been toeing the line for Speaker 0: the Is this the group that Pompeo was Speaker 1: connected with? I believe so. Yeah. And then most of the time, the the propaganda that they push are total hoaxes. I mean, just a few weeks ago, right, like one week before the bombing started, maybe two weeks, the NCRI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is their front group, put out a thing saying, hey. Look. Satellite pictures of this new base in Iran, which we swear is a nuclear weapons facility. And that went nowhere. It's just some Israeli propaganda that they funneled through this group, but then the CIA didn't vouch for that, and it wasn't one of the targets that was bombed in the recent campaign or anything. Speaker 0: This is like a wasteland of, like, deception and shifting alliances and broken promises and shattered dreams. I mean, like, everything you've said for the past two whatever hours it's been is so depressing and also confusing, but more than anything, utterly divorced from America's national interest. Speaker 1: None Speaker 0: of this has anything to do with what's happening in New York City. Right. Right. Or Eugene, Oregon or anywhere. And I just wondered, do you since you work on this full time, do you imagine a time in our lifetimes where the attention of the US government has drawn back to The United States? Some attempt is made to improve life here. Speaker 1: Or is it their dead bodies, I mean, figuratively speaking, that, like, yeah, it'll have to be a coalition of Americans who just will not stand for it anymore. And we're already at the point, Tucker, where they would much prefer to backbend Lodden night suicide bombers and fly predator and reaper drones around than send the third infantry division anywhere. They know we won't stand for it. Right? Iraq War two, I think, was the last gasp for these large scale Speaker 0: land invasions. Yeah. Speaker 1: We got the Vietnam syndrome again, and we don't wanna do that. I mean, there's a huge movement in this country now called defend the guard, which is led by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. They're trying to get the state law the state legislatures to pass laws forbidding the governor from transferring national guard troops to the president for foreign combat without an official declaration of war from the congress, which they know they'll never get. And these are guys who are just saying enough of this. We're not doing this anymore. And they saw their boys die over there for Speaker 0: The guard got screwed. Yeah. I saw it. I mean, people don't remember, but before 02/2001, really 02/2003, the National Guard wasn't a joke exactly, but people did make fun of it. Like weekend warriors, they're not really in the military. Speaker 1: They're like the secondary reserve. Speaker 0: Yeah. I mean, exactly. And then the next thing you know, like, they're fighting a real war. Yeah. And I don't think that they signed up for that. Speaker 1: Yep. No. They didn't. They clearly didn't. You joined the National Guard to sandbag rivers during floods Speaker 0: Totally. Speaker 1: And put out country in emergencies. Speaker 0: Yes. But then to get, you know, benefits and all that. I mean Yep. Whether that's a good system or not is another question, but that's that's the deal they signed. Speaker 1: That's right. Speaker 0: And the next thing you know, these guys from, like, every little town in America are, like, fighting a hot war in Iraq. I mean, I saw it. I was like, wow. The guardsmen are doing that? Speaker 1: Yep. And getting suicide bombed. Right? Going through the Oh, and dying. Of it. Speaker 0: Oh, for sure. Speaker 1: Rest of the guys. Yep. Speaker 0: Do you know what percentage of Americans killed in Iraq were guardsmen? No. I don't. It was not insignificant. Speaker 1: Yeah. No. It was it was plenty. It's 4,500 troops overall, marines and soldiers and airmen died, and then, you know, another couple of thousand contractors and then high tens of thousands. A couple Speaker 0: of thousand contractors? Yeah. Speaker 1: And many tens of thousands wounded. And there's a study at the cost of war project. This is now many years old, Tucker. This is five, six, seven years old or something. They did a study where they had determined that 30,000 veterans had killed themselves since Speaker 0: coming home. I know one. Yeah. No. I believe that completely. Speaker 1: Yeah. It's really messed up. Speaker 0: So just to close out the second half of my final question, you said I asked, you know, will our leaders ever turn their attention to, like, their actual job, which is in protecting and improving America? And you said over their dead bodies. But are you hopeful at all that changes Yeah. Speaker 1: Coming? Yeah. Look, I mean, I think my most important mission as director of the Libertarian Institute and editorial director of antiwar.com and all that is reaching out to the MAGA right, the America First right. You just you can't have a limited republic and a world empire. You can't have a constitutional government and a bill of rights and have your government be the most powerful force on the planet attempting to dominate the entire old world. There's just completely contrary forms of governmental systems to have. And, you know, we mentioned William f Buckley. Buckley wrote in 1952 in the common wheel magazine that because of the emergency of this Soviet Union, Americans must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores even with Truman at the reins of it all in order to wage the Cold War and prevent the Soviet Union from taking over the world. Well, Soviet Union is dead and gone. Right? It was the the red flag came down on Christmas day nineteen ninety one. And somehow we still must accept the totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores even with Obama or Biden at the reins of it all in order to what? To prevent the Ayatollah from threatening Israel? Well, that doesn't sound like the global threat of Soviet Stalinist communism to me. It sounds far dumbed down, especially when you're talking about a power that again we could have normalized relations with a long time ago if the Israelis hadn't stopped us from doing so. It's it's just intolerable. And look. And I think American right wingers know. Because conservative sons who went and died in these wars, liberals are no good enough fight anyway. They can monger war all they want, but does anybody think they're gonna go and fight? It's not. No. So if the American right you know, the Colin Powell doctrine said it was the wine Casper Weinberger Colin Powell doctrine said, the American people must be united behind any war before we launch it, And then we better know exactly what the exit strategy is, exactly what the stakes for victory are, so we can go in there and win Speaker 0: so attacked by the neo Speaker 1: Oh, they hated him for that. And then so w Bush said, forget the pal doctrine. You know what? We don't need America United. We just need the right. As long as the right is all hyped up on let's go and kick butt, then we can do what we want. But then Obama showed that when he tried to get the right to line up behind him and go to Syria in 2013 over that fake sarin attack in Gouda, They said no. In fact, there are soldiers these were memes that went around soldiers holding up signs that said, I didn't join the Marine Corps. I didn't join the army to fight I know marines are not soldiers. Troops holding up signs saying, I didn't join the army to fight a civil war for Al Qaeda in Syria. And they had to stop. And the American right was not willing to follow Barack Obama into battle. Same for Joe Biden. And I would say it should be the same thing here and no matter who the president is. This is the era of the phony wars. This is America's attempt to maintain a global hegemony that we should not have in the first place, which is essentially murder suicide to our own society anyway. Speaker 0: Can't maintain it anyway. And we can't. Even if it was a good idea, even if it was helping us, we've reached the the limits of our resources. Speaker 1: That's right. People are so afraid that China's gonna take over the world if we can't. But we have a $37,000,000,000,000 national debt, and we can't do it. If we can't afford it, they can't either. So we can have a multipolar world where we figure out you know, and Donald Trump himself said in his first few days in power here, he said, you know what? I don't wanna pivot from the Middle East to great power conflict. I don't wanna have conflict with anyone. We should be able to get along with Russia and with China and with the Middle Eastern powers and just have a century of prosperity ahead of us. That's America first. And I believe, Tucker, that Donald Trump could get on a plane and go to Tehran right now. He could go from there to Moscow to Beijing and then Pyongyang, and he could come home and be Trump the great and spend the rest of his term overseeing the retrenchment of American power and the building up of peace and prosperity here. Speaker 0: Yep. I it makes me sad to hear that. I of course, I strongly agree with that. That's why I campaigned for him. But, you know, there are people who don't want that in Washington. Speaker 1: Yeah. But you know what? That's what the people of the country want. I agree. That's who voted for him. Speaker 0: I agree. Speaker 1: You know, they say, well, there are these factions of war hawks who supported him too. That's true, and they have money. But who turned out to vote for him? The people who turned out to vote for him were the people who heard America first. Yeah. And that means defend America first. That doesn't mean be George Bush, the selfish jerk, and go around do whatever you want. It means leave the world to hell alone. Take care of our problems. Speaker 0: I couldn't agree more. Scott Horton, author of, among others, Time to End the War on Terrorism. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you, Tucker. I appreciate it.
scotthortonshow
Posted - November 8, 2023 at 2:44 PM
Saved - November 9, 2023 at 12:25 AM
reSee.it AI Summary
The terror wars have left many soldiers traumatized, but the USS Liberty veterans who were bombed by Israel in 1967 carry a different kind of pain. Their lives were shattered, haunted by nightmares and betrayal. This is what the US is enabling in Gaza. Ron Paul warned us about the consequences of our government's brutal actions. Now, with the antiwar left and an America First! antiwar right, we have a chance to unite against the American empire and its destructive interventions worldwide. It's time to prioritize our own people's well-being and end this cycle of violence.

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

I'm friends with quite a few guys who fought in the terror wars. Some of them saw and participated in some very hard fighting, killed people they wished they hadn't and saw their friends killed right next to them. But the only guys I know who have been bombed and strafed from above like what is happening to the Palestinians now, are my friends from the USS Liberty, also ruthlessly attacked by treacherous Israel back in 1967. 34 were killed 171 wounded. I've gotten to know a few of the Liberty vets, and will have Joe Meadors back on the show here soon to talk about it. But I can tell you that these men – trained fighting-aged males at the time – have carried such pain, trauma, shell shock, humiliation and betrayal with them all these years – 56 years. Some of them were nearly completely broken by it. Their lives were just ruined. They still have nightmares beyond the worst thing you could imagine. This is what the USA is helping the Israelis do to the civilians of Gaza now. As Ron Paul wisely warned us years ago. If the American people continue to allow our government, and its clients, to continue to rampage around the world, killing innocent people like this, in the most brutal ways, then we continue to allow it at our own peril. All these years since Camp Casey, we've wondered "Where's the antiwar left?" Now that they're back, rightwingers are afraid of getting a little antifa spilled on their shirt or something, and some are now forgetting about America First! in favor of supporting Israel's slaughter of Indians in their pen. How vicariously exciting. Nuts to that! With a solid America First! antiwar right and the return of the antiwar left from their long Dem-induced slumber, we have a chance to finally build a consensus against the American empire and war machine. It's wrong. We cannot afford it. It causes blowback terrorism against our people. It threatens our liberty and prosperity. Enough Already. It's time to end all American intervention in Europe, the Middle East, East Asia and Latin America too. As Jean Kirkpatrick once said – when she was decent for a minute between wars – let us eschew the burdens of Superpower status, stop killing people, and return to being a normal country in a normal time. #AmericaFirst!

scotthortonshow
Posted - October 14, 2023 at 11:12 AM
Saved - October 14, 2023 at 7:16 PM

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

People – especially those of you honest enough to admit to yourself you don't know the history – ask yourself why so many American and Israeli Jews stick up for the Palestinians? It's because it ain't right, dammit, that's all.

@AlissaShira - Rabbi Alissa Wise

History will ask: What did you do to stop the Israeli genocide of Palestinian people? Have an answer.

scotthortonshow
Posted - February 28, 2023 at 2:37 PM
Saved - February 28, 2023 at 9:38 PM
reSee.it AI Summary
30 years ago, the ATF raided the Branch Davidians church home on a gun warrant, killing 6 and losing 4 of their own. 51 days later, the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and Delta Force finished them off. Check out Waco The Rules of Engagement, Waco A New Revelation, The FLIR Project, When the Government Lied Waco's Infrared Deception, The Davidian Massacre by Carol Moore, and The Great Jim Bovard's archives for more information.

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

30 years ago today, the ATF raided the Branch Davidians' church/home on a bullshit gun warrant. They murdered 6 innocent people and lost 4 of their own to defensive fire. 51 days later Bill Clinton sent the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and Delta Force to finish them off.

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

Waco: The Rules of Engagement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ08dd6XKqc

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

Waco: A New Revelation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr9pQ1pIbiU

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

The FLIR Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOW6UbAVs8A

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

When the Government Lied: Waco’s Infrared Deception https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wacodeception

Watch When the Government Lied: Waco's Infrared Deception Online | Vimeo On Demand In this instructional video, engineer, author, and award-winning instructor Barbara G. Grant presents evidence to show that the flashes on the infrared videotape… vimeo.com

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

The Davidian Massacre by Carol Moore http://www.carolmoore.net/waco/TDM-index.html

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

The Great Jim Bovard’s archives https://www.google.com/search?q=site:jimbovard.com+waco&ie=UTF-8

🔎 site:jimbovard.com waco - Google Search google.com

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

So now you know.

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

@scotthortonshow - Scott Horton

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