Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Scott Horton.

00:00:02.040 | He's the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of ntawar.com, co-host of

00:00:09.080 | Provoked, and host of The Scott Horton Show, on which he has done over 6,000 interviews

00:00:15.340 | since 2003.

00:00:16.980 | He's the author of Provoked, Enough Already, and other books and articles that have, over

00:00:24.300 | the past three decades, criticized U.S. foreign policy, especially in regard to military

00:00:30.560 | interventionism and the military-industrial complex.

00:00:34.220 | This is the Lex Frutman Podcast.

00:00:36.860 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:00:40.000 | And now, dear friends, here's Scott Horton.

00:00:43.880 | I think one of the darkest and most disturbing chapters of modern American history is everything

00:00:50.360 | that happened around conducting the so-called wars on terror.

00:00:54.180 | I think, to me, it was a wake-up call.

00:00:57.000 | I think it was a wake-up call to a lot of Americans in understanding and seeing the military-industrial

00:01:02.440 | complex and seeing what the government's capacity is to mislead us into war and to continuously

00:01:12.120 | erode basic human freedoms.

00:01:13.640 | If I can, allow me to list some of the estimates from the Cost of War project from Brown University,

00:01:19.700 | just so we understand the cost of these wars.

00:01:22.600 | The post-9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen led to an estimated 900,000 to 940,000 direct deaths

00:01:32.280 | and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths.

00:01:36.880 | And the cost, in terms of dollars, was $8 trillion, with $2.2 trillion on Afghanistan and $2.9 trillion on Iraq and Syria.

00:01:47.700 | And the result on every front, as we'll talk about, I think it's fair to say, that it did not accomplish this purpose.

00:01:55.980 | And in fact, if we even just look at the human toll of the people of Afghanistan, I was also looking at the numbers before the war and after the war.

00:02:05.580 | percent of Afghans facing food insecurity went from 62% to 92%.

00:02:10.140 | Percent of children under five experiencing acute malnutrition went from 9% to 50%.

00:02:15.660 | Percent of Afghans living in poverty went from 80% to 97%.

00:02:20.240 | So it was extremely costly for Americans, and it was extremely costly for Afghans.

00:02:25.400 | As you do in your book enough already, can you lay out how the full history, the full context of how it is that the American people were misled into this war on terror

00:02:36.520 | that was so costly in so many ways?

00:02:38.780 | Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me again.

00:02:41.160 | It's great to be with you on the show.

00:02:42.580 | One important statistic that you could have mentioned from the cost of war project as well is 37 million people displaced from their homes, right?

00:02:51.580 | And the same group, it was, Lex, I'm telling you, it was at least five years ago.

00:02:57.700 | God, it's the future.

00:02:59.100 | Now, this may have been seven, eight years ago that they did a study that determined that 30,000 American servicemen had blown their own brains out since then.

00:03:07.400 | Well, one way or the other, deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it is.

00:03:12.160 | So, talk about the cost of war, that's far beyond, you know, the actual deaths in the war.

00:03:17.420 | We had about 4,500 in Iraq and about 2,500 in Afghanistan of just official airmen, marines, and soldiers on the ground killed, plus contractors and all that.

00:03:27.580 | So that's speaking not just to the things that could be measured, but you can just imagine the scale of suffering that's going on in the veterans' minds.

00:03:35.760 | Yeah.

00:03:36.120 | And you know what, too?

00:03:37.100 | Like, you would have guessed this probably, right?

00:03:39.520 | You probably know more about this subject than me.

00:03:41.520 | There's a New York Times headline, I think, yesterday was, oh my God, look at, or maybe it was the Wall Street Journal.

00:03:47.340 | Look at this insane list of the kinds of drugs that all these depressed soldiers get put on.

00:03:53.220 | Here's 15 different psychoactive drugs, all to temper the side effects of the others and whatever, where, you know, and then they say that this could lead to suicide.

00:04:04.360 | Because, of course, we know that, right?

00:04:05.780 | They even have to say that on TV sometimes that some of these drugs cause suicidal or homicidal obsessions and this kind of thing.

00:04:12.380 | We know that's one of the side effects.

00:04:13.880 | So some percentage of these guys might have made it if the government healthcare system hadn't helped them in the end is another bitter irony.

00:04:22.240 | You know, the whole thing is just, you know, you said we got nothing out of it.

00:04:26.500 | I said half in jest, but it is serious, but it's also, it shows by relief what a disaster this is.

00:04:32.000 | That the only thing we did get out of it, like literally, was advancements in prosthetic limbs for amputees.

00:04:41.500 | Whether they lost their limb in war or otherwise, if you want to boil it down, what did anyone get out of this?

00:04:47.580 | Other than, you know, some people got a dividend check from Lockheed or that kind of thing, but that's not to the benefit of the society whatsoever.

00:04:54.240 | So that does not count.

00:04:55.620 | You don't talk about what society got out of it, what America got out of it.

00:04:58.800 | We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before.

00:05:01.720 | That's it.

00:05:03.180 | I don't think there's any more clear illustrations of the complete failure of the military industrial complex.

00:05:07.860 | How did this begin?

00:05:09.400 | How do we get into this?

00:05:10.560 | Yeah, well, so I'll try to tell the somewhat fast version, although Alex has a kiss of death every time I say that.

00:05:16.400 | Please.

00:05:16.860 | We'll go through.

00:05:17.660 | Please go the slow version.

00:05:18.740 | Okay, so the slow version is, let's start with the end of Vietnam.

00:05:23.900 | Okay, so one major aspect of the end of Vietnam was that Richard Nixon felt like he had to bribe the military industrial complex some other way.

00:05:33.200 | And so one of the things that he did was he turned to the Shah of Reza Pahlavi in Iran and asked him to increase arms sales.

00:05:40.540 | You know, I guess I could go back.

00:05:41.640 | I think everybody knows that the CIA helped with the coup of 1953 to reinstall the Shah, who was the son of the last dictator and had already been in for a while, and they put him back in.

00:05:52.560 | And so now this is, and that was in 53.

00:05:55.980 | So now this is in the early 70s, 20 years later.

00:05:59.400 | And Nixon's saying, hey, you know, what would really help me would be if you would buy a bunch of fighter jets.

00:06:02.900 | So I think it's kind of notorious, right, that Iran still has F-4s and F-14s.

00:06:07.240 | Well, that's where they got him from, was the Nixon and Ford administration, this push to do that.

00:06:11.740 | And the Shah was apparently pretty obsessed with looking very first world with his very fancy first world army that he couldn't really afford.

00:06:18.440 | And it helped to destabilize his regime somewhat.

00:06:21.840 | And then I don't know the full extent of America turning on him before the revolution, but I know that by the time of the revolution in 1979, he was sick with cancer and very sick.

00:06:32.300 | And the Americans secretly knew that CIA knew that, you know, but it was not public knowledge that it was whatever stage four or whatever he was doomed.

00:06:39.660 | And so they knew the revolution was coming and they were trying to figure out how to handle it.

00:06:43.680 | And there was the revolution was coming anyway, and it wasn't just there's going to be a change of leadership.

00:06:47.800 | When we say revolution here, we mean mobs in the street demanding an end of the old regime in huge numbers, right?

00:06:53.340 | A very large scale popular revolution.

00:06:55.640 | And they're trying to figure out how to get the handle on it.

00:06:57.780 | Some of Carter's critics said what he should have done was have the military massacred all those people.

00:07:01.780 | That'll shut them up or like, you know what I mean?

00:07:03.460 | They're trying to figure out what to do.

00:07:04.680 | Well, the CIA and the State Department told Jimmy Carter, listen, this Ayatollah Khomeini, he's not so bad.

00:07:11.340 | We know this guy.

00:07:12.240 | He was part of a group of Shiite clergy who helped to agitate against Mosaddegh in 1953.

00:07:18.700 | And so we have at least some contact and we think that we can deal with him.

00:07:24.700 | Did they actually believe that?

00:07:25.840 | I think so.

00:07:27.420 | Is this incompetence or malevolence?

00:07:30.840 | Like, how does this whole process happen that you go into this process of regime change and keep installing people that are creating more and more instability and destruction in the world?

00:07:45.760 | And then you use that to then justify invading and starting wars.

00:07:50.420 | How does this happen?

00:07:51.940 | Well, there's a lot of things and the whole time we're in our discussion here, we'll be talking about a massive conspiracy of interests at play all the time.

00:07:58.940 | But this is and I've never read a bunch of books about this.

00:08:01.420 | I probably should at least interview these guys.

00:08:03.600 | You'd be interested in this if you don't already know the subject is public choice theory.

00:08:08.280 | It's kind of a branch of libertarian political economy studies that says that essentially one of its major aspects is that there really is no national interest the way you and I might think of it sitting here, hashing it out across the table.

00:08:20.980 | Because what becomes the national interest is the interest of the people in charge of making the decisions for the nation.

00:08:28.460 | And so they all ultimately are private choices, aren't they?

00:08:31.660 | And the national interest becomes subsumed by what's good for me now.

00:08:35.640 | And so telling all my bosses they're all wrong is not good for me now.

00:08:40.000 | And on the very basic level, you know, I've read quite a few books just from former insiders like Daniel Ellsberg and other people like that.

00:08:46.740 | Ellsberg tells a story of where he's the deputy undersecretary of state for making up nonsense or whatever it is or defense of the no, no state, I believe.

00:08:56.040 | And his whole job is making his boss look good, whether he agrees with him or not.

00:09:00.120 | And then the hope is that next year he'll be in his boss's position and his boss will move up one and then his job will be making his boss look good then.

00:09:07.180 | And he explains how the truth and reality just gets washed out of this, right?

00:09:12.520 | Another famous one or should be famous is my friend David Hardy, who wrote the best book about the Waco massacre.

00:09:18.900 | He's a great lawyer and he had been a former interior department cop.

00:09:23.020 | And he said, there's truth and there's falsity, right?

00:09:26.780 | That's the world we live in.

00:09:28.100 | But in government work, there's our position and our position takes place on an entirely different plane than truth and falsity.

00:09:38.100 | Our position is the thing a bunch of people in a room agreed that they would say and do as they can in committee, like come to a consensus.

00:09:47.740 | And then a lot of times, once those decisions are made, now to go back on that decision means that you are attempting to disgrace the people who led the decision making on that thing and say that they were wrong and they shouldn't have done the thing they did.

00:10:01.220 | Now they got to do this instead.

00:10:02.900 | And so you see just an absolute unwillingness to make change.

00:10:06.080 | And this is something that capitalism ultimately, like everybody's got ego problems, but ultimately the boss has to look at an accounting sheet and say, this isn't working.

00:10:15.720 | So I'm gonna have to swallow my pride or go out of business, right?

00:10:18.960 | In government, it's not like that.

00:10:20.320 | The worse they do, the better off they are.

00:10:22.460 | This is why it was the soldiers in Vietnam called the military itself, the army itself, the self-licking ice cream cone, because it means that they cause chaos, but then chaos is their job is to go and fix that.

00:10:34.540 | And so, you know, and if you're a government bureaucrat getting paid way above the market, then what do you want to do?

00:10:40.700 | Go get a job.

00:10:42.140 | A great example of this I cite in the book is at the end of the Afghan war, there are multiple military officers, like not too, too high, but like high enough to be quoted by the news saying, well, now that that's over, we're looking for other things to do.

00:10:56.580 | So we're going to pivot to Africa and go find some Islamists there because we are looking for ways to stay globally engaged because of course that's their interest to do.

00:11:06.320 | Whether that's good for Africa or good for the American people is just, it's kind of a separate question that they're not really dealing with.

00:11:12.620 | And so I think that's a huge part of it.

00:11:14.620 | I mean, one of the things was William Sullivan said that, well, Khomeini, he's like the Iranian Gandhi.

00:11:19.760 | Well, first of all, he's not a pacifist, but second of all, didn't Gandhi kick the British empire out of India?

00:11:26.980 | So what are you saying?

00:11:28.480 | You're deliberately putting in a guy who's going to limit your influence there and it's going to declare independence for you, from you.

00:11:34.720 | How are you going to handle that?

00:11:35.820 | Like, they don't seem to think this through.

00:11:37.800 | And I have to say, one of the great disappointments of growing up is you find out that the rest of the adults aren't so smart.

00:11:46.520 | They're just regular dudes like you.

00:11:48.040 | And I think a lot of times State Department people might have very advanced knowledge.

00:11:51.540 | It doesn't mean they have very advanced wisdom.

00:11:53.260 | You know, there's something else Daniel Ellsberg talks about is when you have access to classified information, then you don't pay any attention to anybody who doesn't.

00:12:03.120 | Because what do they know?

00:12:04.280 | You know, all these things that they couldn't possibly be taking into account.

00:12:07.480 | So you immediately close your circle of people who you listen to.

00:12:12.120 | And I'll tell you a great example of this from my own experience was I interviewed a CIA analyst, apparently a pretty important executive at one time in the terror war named Cynthia Storber.

00:12:22.320 | And I asked her, I forget if it was in the interview or not.

00:12:24.540 | I hope I'm not like speaking out of school.

00:12:26.480 | I believe it was in the interview that I asked her about.

00:12:29.400 | Well, I can't remember the exact context, but I asked her about, well, don't you read Patrick

00:12:33.140 | Coburn?

00:12:34.220 | And she goes, who's Patrick Coburn?

00:12:35.880 | And I go, who's Patrick Coburn?

00:12:38.440 | Patrick Coburn is the most important Anglo in Iraq.

00:12:43.100 | He's the one who understands all of this stuff more and better than all of y'all.

00:12:48.780 | And he writes in the independent.

00:12:50.240 | You can read it for free.

00:12:51.640 | Just register with your email address for God's sake, man.

00:12:54.600 | I can't believe.

00:12:55.580 | And she's like, who even is that?

00:12:58.120 | So a lack of basic curiosity, rigor of research, understanding the situation.

00:13:02.820 | And she could know a lot of secret things, but without understanding what he understands, she

00:13:07.840 | does not understand what she needs to know.

00:13:10.300 | I can promise you that much, you know?

00:13:12.580 | I think it's a basic lack of humility.

00:13:14.640 | The ego grows, the power grows.

00:13:16.320 | Then you, to self-preserve, to maintain power, you start deluding yourself in those closed rooms.

00:13:24.400 | You start shutting yourself off from the reality of the world.

00:13:27.240 | And then as your own delusion drifts, you're more incentivized to grow that delusion, incentivized

00:13:35.100 | to hide, to do secrecy.

00:13:36.660 | And then it just goes off.

00:13:38.420 | And that's why I was hoping you could speak more to Daniel Ellsberg.

00:13:43.800 | So the importance of somebody like that.

00:13:45.860 | So it sounds like, if we think about the machinery of how this happens, it feels like heroic whistleblowers

00:13:51.440 | are essential to this process.

00:13:52.700 | So if we talk about Snowden and Assange, and one of the OGs is Daniel Ellsberg, who, just

00:13:59.320 | reading here, was an American military analyst, economist, and renowned whistleblower, best

00:14:03.560 | known for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

00:14:06.120 | Can you tell me about who he was and the importance of him?

00:14:09.660 | Oh yeah, well, he's an absolutely brilliant guy.

00:14:12.460 | I'm proud to say I was a friend, you know, for 10, 15 years there.

00:14:16.700 | I don't know, quite a while.

00:14:18.220 | So he endorsed my first two books.

00:14:20.840 | I'm very proud to say, and he did not have a chance to read Provoked, unfortunately.

00:14:26.060 | But I know he would have liked it, because we were email buddies.

00:14:29.080 | And I know that he thought very much along the same lines as me and John Mearsheimer and others,

00:14:34.760 | you know, as people are probably familiar.

00:14:36.960 | I think we'll get more to that.

00:14:39.300 | But on that issue, he was great.

00:14:41.900 | But he was a brilliant genius, and he was a nuclear war planner.

00:14:47.440 | That was his second book, was called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

00:14:51.980 | And he had liberated a bunch of documents about nuclear war as well.

00:14:55.220 | But he had decided with his quote-unquote co-conspirator that they should just focus on Vietnam first.

00:15:01.340 | That's the thing that matters the most right now, and that was the Pentagon Papers.

00:15:05.080 | And then all the papers that he had hidden away, he gave them to his brother, and his brother lost them.

00:15:09.560 | And so then he decided later, you know what, I remember enough of this stuff that I can go ahead and just write it from memory.

00:15:14.360 | And he was so brilliant, dude.

00:15:15.900 | I mean, I don't know what his IQ was, but I know his father built the first assembly line for the atom bomb.

00:15:23.180 | And they asked him if he would do the same for the H-bomb, and he refused for moral reasons.

00:15:27.760 | So that was his background in the first place.

00:15:30.540 | And he's just such a great guy, man.

00:15:32.760 | So he's the person who was able to see the situation.

00:15:35.480 | Like you mentioned, like that room.

00:15:37.020 | And in that room, understand that there's some shit that's wrong that's going on here.

00:15:42.960 | Yeah.

00:15:43.240 | And to be able to speak up.

00:15:44.280 | And he was at Rand, right?

00:15:45.820 | His job was writing.

00:15:46.920 | And this was when Rand, I guess, was much more important and very closely tied to the Pentagon.

00:15:50.660 | And their whole thing was like writing up game theory, nuclear warfare plans.

00:15:54.460 | One of the things he did was he found out, and Jack Kennedy had to fight like mad.

00:16:00.160 | They had to go back and forth over and over and over to even get the war plan from the Pentagon.

00:16:04.320 | And they finally got the war plan from the Pentagon.

00:16:06.580 | And it said that if we have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China.

00:16:13.080 | So that would be, I don't know if that includes all the Warsaw Pact, but it includes all the republics and China.

00:16:17.920 | And the thinking was that if America and the Soviet Union destroy each other and Europe, well, we'll be damned if we're going to leave Earth to those dirty chi-coms.

00:16:29.200 | So we're going to kill all them too.

00:16:31.260 | And that was the thinking and the thing, and it was Ellsberg told Kennedy that, and Kennedy told Ellsberg to make sure and force the Pentagon to rewrite the plan and narrow that thing down.

00:16:41.360 | So that's part of the guy's background, where he comes from.

00:16:44.460 | I beg people to read.

00:16:45.500 | It's called Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and then also the Doomsday Machine.

00:16:51.420 | And by the way, his first book, Secrets, begins with his first day on the job.

00:16:56.020 | I was joking around earlier.

00:16:57.420 | He's deputy, undersecretary of state for whatever it was.

00:17:00.540 | I can't remember if it's state or defense.

00:17:02.520 | Maybe it was defense.

00:17:03.360 | It had to have been defense.

00:17:04.260 | Forgive me for before.

00:17:06.260 | And then the first thing that happens when he clocks in that day for his job is the thing starts coming across the teletype.

00:17:12.780 | Ships attacked in the Tonkin Gulf.

00:17:14.740 | And then he's reading, oh, never mind.

00:17:17.280 | That was a mistake.

00:17:17.940 | And then he sees the president run with it anyway.

00:17:21.220 | And now the historian Gareth Porter says that actually McNamara lied to LBJ, and he can prove it.

00:17:28.180 | I can't cite all the chapter and verse, but I trust Gareth.

00:17:31.020 | He's great.

00:17:31.620 | And he says that actually it was McNamara lied to LBJ when they knew that it was a mistake.

00:17:36.300 | And the same thing happened again and again.

00:17:39.340 | You take a little piece of information and run with them in order to justify war.

00:17:45.200 | That's right.

00:17:45.500 | That's going to be a theme.

00:17:46.500 | Absolutely.

00:17:46.920 | What was important in the Pentagon Papers?

00:17:50.000 | What are some key ideas?

00:17:50.920 | Okay.

00:17:51.160 | So the Pentagon Papers, first of all, was, and he wrote this while he was working at RAN,

00:17:56.560 | that he had full top-secret clearance, and they were commissioned by Secretary of Defense McNamara.

00:18:01.560 | To write a real secret, top-secret history of the Vietnam War and the entire history of our involvement in Indochina since the end of the Second World War.

00:18:09.440 | And so that was what they did, was they wrote like eyes only for the Secretary of Defense type material.

00:18:14.960 | So it had everything in there.

00:18:16.400 | And Ellsberg was in charge of writing it, along with Leslie Gelb, who shut his mouth and went along and later became the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a good dog, right?

00:18:25.800 | But anyway, they were the ones who wrote it together.

00:18:28.240 | And Ellsberg was brave enough to liberate the thing, and he tried to leak it to the Senate over and over and over again.

00:18:33.220 | Mike Revell eventually started reading it into the record.

00:18:35.640 | And then finally, the New York Times got the courage to start publishing the thing.

00:18:41.960 | And it showed that they knew that they couldn't win all along.

00:18:44.600 | They knew that the South Vietnamese government could not stand, they did not have popular consent, that the insurgency in the South was not just based on support from the North, but their own indigenous revolution against what they see, you know, as intolerable for an intervention.

00:19:01.820 | And wanted to force this out.

00:19:03.780 | And it's funny, because McNamara later says that, I guess he didn't read the Pentagon paper, that, no, we were just sure that it was the capitalists versus the communists.

00:19:12.460 | Like all this stuff about they didn't want to be ruled over foreign white devils.

00:19:16.620 | And that never occurred to us, you know, like, come on.

00:19:19.500 | You know, as Chomsky said, come on, America invaded South Vietnam.

00:19:24.360 | The government that was inviting us to stay was the government that we put in there, or at least after we overthrew the one we didn't like, the one we put in there.

00:19:31.680 | No different than, as we're going to talk about, Hamid Karzai inviting us to please stay in Afghanistan.

00:19:37.660 | It's like, come on, who's zooming who here?

00:19:39.380 | But, so it showed, and that was the deal.

00:19:42.980 | And that was why it was such a big deal in how he made Nixon's enemies list and all these things, even though it didn't really expose Nixon, it exposed LBJ and the predecessors.

00:19:50.660 | But, um, it was a huge shock that they had been lying to us and lying to us and lying to us deliberately knowing that this is gotta be somebody else's problem, right?

00:20:02.600 | There's a phone call of LBJ saying to a Republican Senator friend of his that I can't be the first president to lose the war.

00:20:09.680 | So, right, he's just gonna retire for us and make it Nixon's problem, right?

00:20:12.660 | Same as George W. Bush said.

00:20:14.180 | Oh, the end of Iraq?

00:20:15.240 | Well, that'll just have to be up to other presidents to decide.

00:20:18.280 | Not my responsibility.

00:20:20.740 | All I did was do it.

00:20:23.840 | You know, and that's how they are.

00:20:25.160 | And they have, that's their, this is also part of the economics of democracy, too, where they have such, and I'm not arguing for the opposite, but I'm just saying the reality is you have such short terms of office, you have very high time preference, right?

00:20:37.880 | Instead of, like, working on long-term projects about what's the future of mankind gonna look like 100 years from now, you're looking at a much shorter time horizon, you know, including who's gonna finance your next election so that you'll have any say-so whatsoever.

00:20:52.740 | And as Yoda and Palpatine agree, that, like, all who have power are afraid to lose it, because what if the other guy had it instead?

00:21:00.000 | It would be worse.

00:21:00.820 | Everybody knows that, which is, of course, a huge part of the story of the American empire here, you know?

00:21:05.520 | Well, but fundamentally, that's cowardly, right?

00:21:08.600 | So what we want from leaders, from great leaders, is courage.

00:21:12.640 | And courage means making difficult decisions that are gonna make the world a better place long-term, the country, a better country long-term.

00:21:20.320 | And that means, if you start a war, that means understanding the full cost of that war and how it's gonna have to end.

00:21:27.900 | And then if you understand the full cost of war, you're not gonna start it.

00:21:31.080 | Yep.

00:21:31.820 | Right.

00:21:32.940 | So how does—how do we go from the CIA, 1979, the Shah, Ayatollah, Nixon?

00:21:39.980 | What is the thread that now starts inching towards the 90s and—

00:21:45.540 | Right.

00:21:45.960 | —towards 9-11 in Iraq?

00:21:48.880 | I know, there's so much, but we're gonna do it, man.

00:21:50.760 | So here's what happens.

00:21:52.760 | America goes ahead and allows Ayatollah to get on the plane in Paris, France, and go home.

00:21:57.400 | Now, I remember even as a kid saying, but aren't the French our friends when they had checked with us before doing that?

00:22:01.660 | In fact, I just recently found the clip of Peter Jennings interviewing him.

00:22:04.300 | And the smartest thing Peter Jennings can think of to say is, so how do you feel on your triumphant return, Mr. Ayatollah?

00:22:11.220 | Right, which USA is just completely aiding and abetting, right?

00:22:13.960 | These are shots they called and made happen, right?

00:22:16.620 | They sent him home to inherit the thing.

00:22:18.180 | And then they did work with him.

00:22:20.500 | People forget, man.

00:22:22.660 | And I was just very young at that time.

00:22:25.000 | But I, you know, was raised kind of in the atmosphere of all of this.

00:22:30.040 | And even back then, people conflated the revolution itself with the hostage crisis.

00:22:35.000 | As just one story, it all is spoken in one breath.

00:22:38.260 | But in fact, the revolution was in February of 1979.

00:22:41.700 | And the hostage crisis didn't break out until November.

00:22:44.100 | So what was happening in the meantime?

00:22:45.840 | Well, one of the things was, the Americans were warning the new Iranian regime about threats

00:22:53.000 | from the new dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had just overthrown the government in a bloody

00:22:58.080 | coup d'etat.

00:22:58.660 | No revolution there.

00:22:59.740 | And you can watch the video of this.

00:23:01.080 | Have you ever seen the video of Saddam's overthrowing Iraq?

00:23:03.160 | And he's got a huge stadium of guys.

00:23:06.360 | And he just starts calling names.

00:23:08.240 | And everybody whose name he calls has to go out back and get shot.

00:23:11.680 | Like, it's gnarly, man.

00:23:13.400 | I think that video is a dark study of human nature.

00:23:18.240 | It's terrifying.

00:23:19.560 | Oh, it is.

00:23:20.140 | It's ugly, man.

00:23:20.900 | Because everybody is afraid.

00:23:23.800 | And there's a disgusting face that Saddam Hussein has.

00:23:27.920 | Oh, I don't know.

00:23:28.360 | I don't know if there's a sadistic...

00:23:30.520 | Sure.

00:23:30.860 | He was a psychopath, man.

00:23:32.220 | No question.

00:23:32.760 | He was a brute of a dictator, right?

00:23:35.800 | There's a lot of El Presidentes in the world.

00:23:37.600 | Not all of them, like, train their sons to torture people from the time they're young and

00:23:41.620 | stuff.

00:23:42.160 | Oh, fuck.

00:23:43.140 | All the cowards in that room.

00:23:45.100 | But then you have to ask yourself, what would you do if you were in that room?

00:23:48.680 | Yeah.

00:23:49.100 | You've already been bested at that point.

00:23:50.800 | I mean, they could all rush the stage, but that ain't going to do them any good, you know?

00:23:53.580 | But before you...

00:23:54.860 | How did you get to that room?

00:23:56.480 | Yeah.

00:23:57.120 | And then that's why you have to give props to whistleblowers.

00:23:59.600 | You have to give props to people that stand up and risk their life in situations like that,

00:24:04.300 | which in those parts of the world is even harder than it is in the United States of America.

00:24:09.320 | And you know what?

00:24:09.980 | By the way, I usually forget to mention this when I tell this story.

00:24:13.680 | It takes another few seconds to mention that.

00:24:16.040 | Saddam Hussein had been groomed by the CIA since the 1950s, on and off.

00:24:20.380 | And he had been part of different dictator regimes on and off.

00:24:23.480 | He'd been in exile in Cairo for a little while and this kind of thing.

00:24:26.400 | And then in the 70s, leading up to the coup, I think it was really closer to the Soviet Union.

00:24:30.660 | And so we'll get to the, I guess I'll mention it now, the huge irony of the fact that in the

00:24:36.880 | Iran-Iraq war, it was America supporting Saddam Hussein and his Soviet military versus Iran,

00:24:45.560 | and it's American one, right?

00:24:47.880 | The absurdity of this is insane.

00:24:52.280 | Well, I'm skipping ahead a step, but I just like that part.

00:24:55.560 | But so, okay, so America supports the revolution in 79, in February.

00:25:00.020 | They're warning this guy, hey, you better look out for Saddam Hussein and his intentions.

00:25:04.820 | And we're going to get back to that in one moment here.

00:25:08.660 | And they were also warning him about the threat from the Soviet Union.

00:25:12.920 | Now, why is that?

00:25:14.180 | Well, that's because, skip over Iran, now we're talking about Afghanistan and Zbigniew Brzezinski's

00:25:22.380 | policy that let's support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to try to provoke Soviet intervention there.

00:25:29.180 | And so, there's a memo, people can find this at scotthorton.org slash bare use.

00:25:34.580 | If you want to look at it, it's from, you want to go ahead and pull it up?

00:25:41.140 | So, if you allow me to read, President Jimmy Carter's July 3rd, 1979 finding, in quotes, authorizing

00:25:47.660 | covert support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

00:25:51.380 | Secret sensitive.

00:25:53.400 | And the important part is, provide unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support

00:25:58.960 | to Afghan insurgents.

00:26:00.220 | This is, now, a finding is an order from a president to the CIA to do something.

00:26:04.980 | That's what a finding means.

00:26:06.220 | So, this is an order to CIA to do this.

00:26:08.940 | Now, on that order, they did start pouring in support to the Mujahideen.

00:26:13.240 | Now, I have to tell you that my best experts on this, like Eric Margulies, and I got this

00:26:18.420 | also from reading Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident, that they

00:26:23.220 | both said that it was an American support for the Mujahideen that really provoked the Russians

00:26:28.380 | into invading Afghanistan, because what it was, was the sock puppet dictator was a basket

00:26:33.560 | case, and he had created so many enemies that he just couldn't hold it together.

00:26:37.920 | So, the first thing the Soviets did when they invaded in December of 79 was take him out back

00:26:42.680 | and shoot him and replace him with a new guy.

00:26:44.620 | So, that was really the cause of the Soviet intervention there.

00:26:47.400 | They had a commie sock puppet regime.

00:26:49.180 | It was not one of the Soviet republics, right?

00:26:52.160 | But they had a sock puppet regime there, but they wanted to, you know, maintain it and it

00:26:59.580 | was falling apart.

00:27:00.280 | So, they rushed to intervene.

00:27:01.480 | However, Lex, the point still remains that the United States of America was trying to bait

00:27:06.500 | the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.

00:27:08.680 | We're going to get back to why it's so relevant to the Iran thing in just one second, but let's

00:27:12.560 | stop and talk about this for a second.

00:27:13.860 | Why would they do that?

00:27:15.320 | And they would do that also because of Vietnam.

00:27:18.000 | Because at the end of Vietnam, Americans had what the government considered to be a mental

00:27:22.380 | illness, Vietnam syndrome.

00:27:24.660 | That meant that Americans didn't want to do this anymore.

00:27:28.320 | Contain communism at this cost?

00:27:31.300 | And who really cares if Vietnam goes commie?

00:27:34.040 | We do business with them now.

00:27:36.380 | You know, and so people weren't into it anymore.

00:27:41.000 | So, this is where Zbigniew Brzezinski and his, he was national security advisor under Jimmy

00:27:46.140 | Carter.

00:27:46.360 | And his, I guess, counterpart at defense, a guy named Walter Slocum, they came up with this

00:27:53.800 | brilliant idea that what we'll do is we will bait the Soviets into overexpansion.

00:27:59.540 | Now, we don't want them to invade West Germany, but the Afghans are expendable.

00:28:04.260 | So, if we can bait the Soviets into Afghanistan and bog them down, we will be adding straw to

00:28:11.100 | the camel's back.

00:28:11.940 | This is a way to inflict because by then, think of it, the word Vietnam, that's not even the

00:28:16.980 | name of a country over there somewhere anymore.

00:28:18.640 | Vietnam at that time, that word means some horrible, stupid, no-win, quagmire thing that

00:28:24.260 | you shouldn't have done.

00:28:25.280 | You shot yourself in the foot and the leg and lost your friend Jimmy down the street

00:28:30.080 | and everything.

00:28:30.900 | And we don't want to do that, you know?

00:28:33.360 | That was what Vietnam meant to America, was like, God dang, what a mistake that was.

00:28:38.280 | So, now they're saying, let's do that to the Reds, okay?

00:28:41.680 | We'll bog them down, bleed them to bankruptcy, and force them out the hard way and hurt them

00:28:48.020 | in doing that.

00:28:48.540 | So, that's what they were trying to do.

00:28:49.620 | That was the wisdom behind the operation in the first place.

00:28:52.060 | And now, if you go, click back one to Brzezinski, you'll see where, and he later mis-paraphrases

00:28:57.940 | this a little bit.

00:28:58.860 | He's kind of cute, Brzezinski, but.

00:29:00.480 | National Security Advisors, big new Brzezinski's memo to President Carter on December 26, 1979,

00:29:06.080 | regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

00:29:09.180 | And the important part here, I mean, there's a lot, it's a bit, but if you go down, you will

00:29:13.600 | see where, oh, here, this could become a Soviet Vietnam, while it could become a Soviet Vietnam.

00:29:20.320 | In other words, see, they're already talking about it in that context here in writing, we

00:29:23.800 | see.

00:29:23.980 | And it's from Robert Gates's first memoir, by the way, where he says it was Brzezinski and

00:29:28.740 | Slocum.

00:29:29.140 | By the way, that's my source for that when I say that those two were the ones really innovating

00:29:33.140 | this policy.

00:29:33.840 | And he says, the initial effects of the invention are likely to be adverse for us for the following

00:29:40.000 | reasons.

00:29:40.840 | And then he says that it'll make the hawks talk about how we better do something about

00:29:46.720 | Iran.

00:29:47.180 | And he says this could bring us into a head to head confrontation with the Soviets.

00:29:51.400 | So this is very interesting, Lex, because, well, one, this is why America's passing intelligence

00:29:57.380 | to the Ayatollah about threats from the Soviets.

00:29:59.900 | We think that now that Iran is essentially destabilized because of the revolution, and

00:30:05.840 | we just deliberately, or at least we're trying to, and apparently succeeded in a sense in baiting

00:30:11.300 | them into invading Afghanistan.

00:30:12.640 | Now we're worried that they're too expansionist and that they're going to roll into Persia next,

00:30:16.940 | and then they'd be right on the Persian Gulf.

00:30:19.100 | And we can't have that.

00:30:20.640 | So that was when Jimmy Carter announced in his speech in 1980, the Carter Doctrine that

00:30:28.160 | said that the Persian Gulf is now an American lake, and we will take any move by any power,

00:30:33.080 | read the USSR, to move into the Persian Gulf as an attack on the United States itself, right?

00:30:38.800 | We're like bringing the Gulf, those waters into NATO, right?

00:30:42.800 | Giving a full war guarantee to keep the Soviets.

00:30:45.080 | And by the way, a regime, oh, I'm sorry.

00:30:47.600 | I'm skipping one.

00:30:48.200 | See, go back.

00:30:49.100 | Forgive me for the, it's hard to stay in line here.

00:30:52.680 | The hostage crisis breaks out in November 79, because David Rockefeller from, of course,

00:30:59.400 | Standard Oil of New Jersey, aka Hexon and Aramco and all those things, the chairman of the Chase

00:31:05.280 | Manhattan Bank at that time, he was very close with Jimmy Carter, and he convinced Carter to let

00:31:10.720 | the Shah into the United States for cancer treatment.

00:31:12.900 | That was what caused the riot at the embassy and the seizure of the hostages.

00:31:17.480 | Now, I don't know, and I'm sure there are books about this that I just haven't read yet, you

00:31:21.260 | know, kind of thing that explain whether it really was the IRGC that took the lead in that, or whether

00:31:25.820 | it was the students who did it or what.

00:31:27.220 | But obviously, the government held the hostages and kept the thing going, so they bear responsibility

00:31:32.040 | for that.

00:31:32.620 | But the point being that America had been trying to work with the Ayatollah up until then.

00:31:38.240 | The idea was not that, oh, Shiite fundamentalist Islam says that all white Christians from North

00:31:43.900 | America must lay down dead right now because that's their religious belief.

00:31:47.360 | Look at them ranting, we're the great Satan and burning our flag.

00:31:50.760 | And then, so when so many people, when the story begins with their calling us great Satan and burning

00:31:56.460 | our flag, then, well, they just hate us.

00:32:00.100 | And so we're just going to have to do something about that.

00:32:02.280 | And, you know, I, I remember meeting a guy one time who said, listen, Al Qaeda hates us for all

00:32:07.700 | these complicated reasons.

00:32:08.780 | And he explained them.

00:32:09.600 | And then he goes, but not Iran.

00:32:11.060 | They just hate us.

00:32:12.000 | I remember when I was a boy, they were burning our flag and calling us Satan.

00:32:15.660 | So it's like, yeah, but well, they had a reason to not that justifies them doing anything sinful

00:32:20.660 | or criminal, but I'm just saying they also had reasons for reacting the way that they reacted.

00:32:25.720 | America had launched a coup in 53 from that same embassy.

00:32:29.100 | And by saying that they were going to cure the Shah's cancer seemed to be an indication to them

00:32:34.840 | that we were going to try to reinstall them in power and cancel their revolution.

00:32:38.040 | And so they were preempting that again, not a justification for everything that happened

00:32:41.880 | there or whatever, but just to tell the whole story in a way that I've told that story

00:32:44.680 | people, I never knew that.

00:32:46.360 | I always thought that it all happened in one big show, you know, and never do they admit

00:32:51.280 | unless sometimes the Republicans accuse Carter of this, they'll tell the part about that Carter

00:32:56.180 | was so naive as to send the Ayatollah home.

00:32:58.480 | Although that's usually always left out.

00:33:00.600 | But so now he announces the Carter doctrine, giving a war guarantee to Iran that he now officially

00:33:09.460 | hates and is holding our hostages and completely humiliating him.

00:33:13.400 | Right.

00:33:13.660 | And there's Operation Eagle Claw, where they sent forces into Iran.

00:33:18.580 | And that was a it was supposed to be a rescue mission that ended up in disaster where the

00:33:22.900 | planes and the helicopters crashed into each other.

00:33:24.960 | They were already leaving anyway, because it was going to be botched.

00:33:27.960 | And then they crashed on the way out.

00:33:29.600 | So that was a big humiliation for Carter as well.

00:33:32.140 | And then, oh, and I should also tell you that Gareth just found this is a classified document

00:33:41.840 | that he only found in the State Department records that show that just after the Carter doctrine

00:33:46.400 | speech, Brzezinski in a private meeting with the Saudi foreign minister and also with his deputy,

00:33:50.660 | Warren Christopher, who was later Clinton's secretary of defense, he admitted that we don't think there's really a Soviet threat to Iran.

00:33:56.300 | Brzezinski himself admitted that.

00:33:58.840 | So the pretext for the Carter doctrine was fake.

00:34:01.960 | And he admitted himself that they weren't really afraid of that, even though they were pretending to be afraid of that as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that they were trying to provoke.

00:34:10.920 | And we should also give a shout out to Gareth Porter.

00:34:13.260 | He has written about the Vietnam War, books including Perils of Dominance and Balance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.

00:34:22.040 | And I have to say, I believe that he is the most important journalist of the war on terrorism era.

00:34:27.520 | I call him Gareth the Great.

00:34:28.740 | He's a good friend of mine.

00:34:29.520 | I've interviewed him 300-something times on my show about essentially everything he's written since 2007.

00:34:34.840 | He is the best of the best of the best.

00:34:37.020 | It's not just the war in Vietnam.

00:34:38.220 | He writes also about the continued...

00:34:40.840 | Absolutely specialized in Iraq, Afghanistan, exposing the entire fraud of David Petraeus and his career.

00:34:46.940 | He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis on the Iranian Nuclear Program.

00:34:50.360 | That is, bar none, the very best book on that.

00:34:53.480 | You have to say Vietnam, Cambodia, Syria, Iran, and the war on terror.

00:34:59.000 | All the things he's written extensively about.

00:35:00.860 | Gareth Porter the Great, man.

00:35:02.680 | Absolutely.

00:35:03.200 | The Great.

00:35:03.600 | I learned so much from him I couldn't begin to explain.

00:35:06.400 | Fair enough.

00:35:07.000 | So the story continues.

00:35:08.520 | Yes.

00:35:09.220 | Carter.

00:35:10.760 | Another aspect of the Carter Doctrine was that Carter gave the green light to Saddam Hussein

00:35:16.740 | to invade Iran.

00:35:20.180 | Now, first thing is, why does Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran?

00:35:24.140 | It ain't just because he likes doing what Jimmy Carter says.

00:35:26.220 | He had his own reasons.

00:35:27.060 | Now, picture your map of Iraq.

00:35:29.640 | I know you got one in your head there.

00:35:32.280 | Everything from Baghdad over east to Iran and down to Kuwait.

00:35:37.340 | That is what you could call Shiistan, predominantly Shiite Iraq, right?

00:35:42.260 | And then, they're 60% of the population, supermajority.

00:35:45.720 | In the north, you have the Kurds who are Sunnis, but they're Kurds of separate ethnicity than the Arabs.

00:35:50.900 | And then you have the Sunni Arabs who are another 20%.

00:35:53.780 | Well, Saddam Hussein was a secular Sunni Arab, leading essentially like on the Simpsons, the commie Nazis, the Ba'ath party, who are like sort of both.

00:36:03.320 | A little, just a fascist state, essentially, right?

00:36:06.180 | With Arab characteristics or whatever.

00:36:08.340 | And, but, and not an entirely sectarian one.

00:36:13.500 | He had Christians and Kurds and Shiites in his government and things like that.

00:36:17.400 | It was not, you know, like just a caricature or whatever.

00:36:20.640 | It was a balance of power act.

00:36:22.240 | But after the Iranian revolution, Saddam had real reason to fear that the Shiite revolution was going to spread to Iraq.

00:36:30.140 | And that Iraqi Shiites, at least the armed and convinced ones, would choose their religious sect and their alliance with Iran on that basis over their national and ethnic sect as Iraqis and Arabs, right?

00:36:45.840 | Separate from the Persians.

00:36:46.900 | So, and he had real reason to believe that, including that members of the Dawa party and people loyal to the Hakim family were Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim and his people.

00:36:57.900 | They left to go to Iran and they chose Iran's side in the war.

00:37:02.120 | So Saddam Hussein's solution to that was to conscript all these people and force them into his army and march them east against Iran and use them in that way.

00:37:12.200 | And this led to an absolutely brutal World War I, maybe Russia, Ukraine style trench warfare, tanks, artillery, and there's planes and ships.

00:37:22.060 | And it was a hell of a war for nine years all through the 1980s as the United States almost entirely backed Saddam Hussein.

00:37:30.340 | Except for when they backed the Ayatollah, remember Iran-Contra.

00:37:36.060 | And during Iran-Contra, what did they do?

00:37:38.680 | They went to the Israelis and they said, hey, you're still friends with the government in Iran.

00:37:44.960 | You guys don't mind the Ayatollah one bit and have maintained your friendship there.

00:37:48.700 | We want to sell them some missiles and try to get the hostages out and then take the rest of the proceeds from the missiles and give them to the Contras in Nicaragua.

00:37:57.780 | And this is what became the great Iran-Contra scandal.

00:38:00.520 | And so we should also say, and you highlight the importance of understanding Iran-Contra.

00:38:04.840 | So this here reading, a major political scandal in the United States during the mid-1980s, senior officials in President Ronald Reagan's administration facilitated the secret sale of arms to Iran,

00:38:15.980 | which was under an arms embargo with the proceeds being used to find Contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua,

00:38:26.500 | despite Congress explicitly prohibiting such funding.

00:38:28.920 | And this is, of course, supposedly a side story, but a huge part of the side story is it absolutely was true,

00:38:35.200 | as the great Gary Webb reported in the Dark Alliance series and in his great book, Dark Alliance,

00:38:39.780 | that and many other great journalists as well, that the CIA had a massive operation to bring cocaine into the United States by the truckload and plane load

00:38:49.920 | to sell it to poor Americans, blacks, especially in L.A.

00:38:53.440 | But also, yes, it's true, they even made a Tom Cruise movie after years of calling us conspiracy kooks and all this.

00:38:59.220 | The movie's about a guy named Barry Seal, whose job it was to fly guns and money down there and cocaine up here for the Congress, for the CIA,

00:39:09.720 | and into Bill Clinton's Arkansas, where he was read in on this and the operation was run out of the vice president's office, George H.W. Bush.

00:39:16.560 | And that much is true.

00:39:18.160 | And the same they had that I know less about, but they had this is where all the cocaine from Miami Vice was coming into Florida in the same way.

00:39:25.840 | And this is where the crack epidemic came from in South L.A. and throughout the country, really, in many places.

00:39:32.620 | And they just don't give a damn about us, man.

00:39:35.220 | Congress said you can't have any money to fund the Contras.

00:39:38.060 | And they said, yeah, but we want to anyway.

00:39:39.600 | So this is how they did it.

00:39:41.380 | So the CIA would help orchestrate this kind of transport of drugs.

00:39:46.080 | Absolutely right.

00:39:47.540 | And then they completely destroyed the heroic Gary Webb for exposing this.

00:39:51.160 | And they didn't murder him, but they drove him to suicide.

00:39:53.300 | And, you know, his good friend, Robert Perry, the great journalist, verified that, no, it really was a suicide.

00:39:58.920 | People thought it was suspicious because he shot himself twice.

00:40:01.360 | But that does happen sometimes where people flinch on the first one.

00:40:04.700 | But it was his father's gun and he was totally depressed and he had signed his house over to his wife and somebody stole his motorcycle.

00:40:10.900 | And he was like at the end.

00:40:13.240 | But they had run him out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News.

00:40:15.800 | They first ran him to the Hollywood beat and then eventually he just quit and went to become an investigator for the California state legislator.

00:40:22.320 | So the CIA doesn't have to kill you directly.

00:40:23.960 | They can psychologically destroy you.

00:40:25.400 | That's right.

00:40:25.720 | Yeah.

00:40:25.900 | They put the gun in his mouth either way for doing the right thing.

00:40:29.640 | But anyway, and didn't get any facts wrong.

00:40:32.020 | The only thing that anyone had to attack him on was like the graphics editor put like a phrase out of context big on the page or something in the newspaper.

00:40:40.480 | You know what I mean?

00:40:41.260 | It was like something silly that made it sound like he was saying the purpose of the mission was to destroy.

00:40:45.780 | the black community when he never said that.

00:40:48.140 | What he said was they didn't give a damn about those people.

00:40:51.020 | I don't even know if he addressed that.

00:40:52.440 | Right.

00:40:52.900 | But he certainly wasn't saying that was what it was about.

00:40:55.040 | It was about funding the Contras.

00:40:57.000 | But anyway, so they found their separate ways of doing it.

00:40:59.600 | And this is one of the things that made me like this is I don't even have any idea where I first learned this, but I knew this while Reagan was still in office, or at least by the time Bush senior was in office, when I was still just like maybe a freshman in high school or younger than that.

00:41:11.640 | And I knew that Ronald Reagan was a dope pusher, the same guy with the just say no, and the same guy with the massively increased penalties for people engaging in just simply the possession, much less the sale and trade and drugs.

00:41:23.040 | And so their people went to prison for decades for life, essentially, and literally for just possession of the same drugs that the government was bringing in.

00:41:31.380 | And so how are you ever going to believe in a security force like that?

00:41:34.440 | Again, I never have.

00:41:35.860 | I don't know why you'd even need to see a Waco massacre or any other or an Iraq war or any other thing to detest these people.

00:41:41.620 | That's who they are.

00:41:42.700 | You know, I had this, um, it's the only part I really remember about it, but, uh, there's this great film producer named Kevin Booth.

00:41:49.460 | He was Bill Hicks, his best friend and producer.

00:41:51.220 | And he did a documentary about the drug war where they show this guy and he goes, oh, they're all in prison and they're filming him through the gate and they're all yelling and whatever.

00:42:02.020 | You can't really make out much.

00:42:03.280 | Right.

00:42:03.480 | They're all like yelling over each other.

00:42:05.380 | And one guy finally like makes everybody be quiet.

00:42:07.340 | And he looks at the camera and he goes, listen, I'm doing 35 years.

00:42:10.420 | Cause I had a few rocks in my pocket.

00:42:11.980 | Does that sound right to you?

00:42:13.740 | I was like, dude, it was Ronald Reagan's cocaine in his pocket.

00:42:19.540 | Like that guarantees a full pardon, man.

00:42:22.480 | Right.

00:42:23.220 | What are we talking about?

00:42:24.040 | That's not fair.

00:42:25.040 | It's a dark aspect of human nature that the people that try to, if we talk about drugs to ban drugs and really anyone who tries to ban a thing.

00:42:35.080 | Are often secretly participating in doing that thing bootleggers and Baptist, you know, just on a small tangent.

00:42:43.340 | Sure.

00:42:43.620 | Have you ever since you're Texan?

00:42:45.080 | Have you ever met Bill Hicks?

00:42:46.680 | No, man.

00:42:47.280 | I learned about Bill Hicks like a month after he died.

00:42:49.940 | And so they started playing insane man on the access channel all the time.

00:42:53.960 | And I was like, oh my God, who's this guy?

00:42:55.400 | And then they're like, oh, he just died.

00:42:56.640 | But he has been a huge influence on me, you know, in a lot of ways.

00:43:03.360 | So I'm very much a Hicksian.

00:43:04.960 | I apologize for that.

00:43:06.280 | It's good to do a shout out.

00:43:07.620 | Back to the drug war.

00:43:08.860 | And that involvement from Carter and on and Reagan and Iran.

00:43:15.180 | Well, yeah, let's go back to Iran because the cocaine is really tied up in the Contra end of the scandal.

00:43:19.980 | Point being America's back in Saddam, except when they're helping Israel back Iran and by selling them these missiles.

00:43:27.260 | And they're even I don't have my footnote anymore, but it's findable, I'm sure, where they did talk about, you know, what we do is we support one side till they start getting ahead a little bit.

00:43:36.180 | Then we support the other side a little bit more and go or we authorize the Israelis to increase support for Iran and play them back and forth against each other.

00:43:42.740 | So that's just not just, you know, offshore balancing in peacetime.

00:43:46.160 | That's balancing in wartime, encouraging them to keep killing each other, which is some pretty horrific policy to do.

00:43:52.740 | Could you also comment during this stage and this thread will continue?

00:43:56.200 | What role does Israel have to play in this in this part of the story with Iran?

00:44:00.280 | I don't know.

00:44:01.600 | Yeah, I don't know much about what they were saying about America's Iraq policy during that time.

00:44:06.820 | But I know that they were still friends with the Ayatollah and we're not going to get to them switching gears on the Ayatollah until Rabin in 1993.

00:44:14.260 | So hold that thought.

00:44:15.960 | So the war is still going on.

00:44:17.880 | We have to mention the chemical weapons, too.

00:44:19.620 | Yes.

00:44:20.100 | America bought them.

00:44:20.980 | Taxpayers bought them.

00:44:22.140 | There's a huge Iraq gate scandal, it was called, where people were put on trial for the money.

00:44:27.120 | But then their defense was, but the government made me do it.

00:44:29.900 | What are you talking about?

00:44:30.660 | This was a whole thing to do.

00:44:32.760 | And they were, it was German chemical weapons, I believe, and maybe some French, but that were bought with supposed agricultural loans from the United States to Iraq.

00:44:42.180 | And they had a sophisticated biological weapons program, too, with anthrax and the rest.

00:44:47.300 | And the Americans sent them the precursors for the germs that he would need.

00:44:50.140 | During the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime used chemical weapons extensively against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians, most notably in the 1988 Halabja attack that killed an estimated 5,000 people and injured 20,000 more.

00:45:06.240 | There is substantial documentation that Western governments, especially the U.S. and some of its allies, provided Iraq would do a use technology, intelligence, and materials, which facilitated Iraq's chemical weapons program.

00:45:19.720 | Let me drop two good footnotes for your people here.

00:45:22.600 | The first one would be Shane Harris, who's now at the Washington Post, you know, very official national security beat reporter.

00:45:28.760 | He wrote a piece about this at foreignpolicy.com a few years back where he goes into extensive detail.

00:45:35.820 | So as far as like authoritative sources, there you go.

00:45:39.020 | Okay.

00:45:39.400 | Nothing conspiratorial about this narrative at all.

00:45:42.280 | But then you want to do a deeper dive onto it, then go to FFF.org.

00:45:46.780 | And it's, this is the Future Freedom Foundation.

00:45:49.500 | And there they have a page and I'm sorry, I always get the headline wrong, but it's something like where did Saddam get his WMDs or where did Saddam get his chemical weapons?

00:45:59.520 | You know what you can do, you can go site colon FFF.org.

00:46:03.440 | And then that way you search just that site and then you can do chemical weapons, Iraq, and I bet you'll find it.

00:46:08.900 | Yeah, right there.

00:46:11.400 | Where did Iraq get its weapons of mass destruction?

00:46:13.720 | And I had mentioned this, I guess, on the Tucker show.

00:46:17.260 | And so I actually talked with Hornberger and I went back and I found and I made sure that all of those links are up to date and work for each of those stories.

00:46:24.520 | So people can go through and take a very close look at, those are just articles, never mind all the books about it and stuff, which there are plenty.

00:46:32.060 | So this is a set of links assembled by Jacob Hornberger.

00:46:37.900 | The title is Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction on FFF.org that people should check out.

00:46:43.660 | And then, oh, there's the Shane Harris and Matthew M.A. CIA files prove America helped Saddam as he gassed Iran.

00:46:51.200 | The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history and still gave him a hand.

00:46:58.500 | And now by the official rules of confirmation bias, when Shane Harris admits something that I'm accusing, that means it's definitely true.

00:47:06.080 | If I ever disagree with him, well, he's a liar from The Post.

00:47:08.820 | Got that?

00:47:09.420 | Okay, good to know that's how truth works.

00:47:13.040 | Good.

00:47:13.260 | Of course.

00:47:16.940 | There's your authoritative source, everybody.

00:47:19.000 | Shane Harris from The Post.

00:47:20.500 | All right.

00:47:21.020 | And that's a special inside joke for fans of Where the Buffalo Roams, too.

00:47:25.920 | Remember Harris from The Post?

00:47:27.100 | You ever seen that?

00:47:27.720 | Mm-mm.

00:47:28.040 | It's the original Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Bill Murray.

00:47:30.860 | I didn't realize there was the original Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Bill Murray.

00:47:34.640 | What?

00:47:34.920 | Really?

00:47:36.040 | Where the Buffalo Roams.

00:47:37.180 | I promise you will have a good time.

00:47:39.000 | And there's a joke in there about, I'm Harris from The Post.

00:47:41.440 | He's pretending to be Harris from The Post, and he's hanging out in the bathroom with Richard Nixon.

00:47:44.780 | And I forgot the conversation.

00:47:47.780 | It's funny as hell, though.

00:47:48.660 | Similar type of wild journey of Fear and Loathing.

00:47:51.860 | Oh, yeah.

00:47:52.560 | Yeah.

00:47:53.060 | I got to admit, I don't remember the story that well.

00:47:55.060 | It's very different than Fear and Loathing, but it's also very good.

00:47:57.580 | Well, I know what I'm doing tonight.

00:47:58.600 | Okay, cool.

00:47:59.180 | Where the Buffalo Roams.

00:48:02.240 | It's good.

00:48:02.620 | Everyone will like it.

00:48:03.400 | I promise.

00:48:03.760 | Okay.

00:48:04.140 | Underrated Bill Murray.

00:48:05.380 | He's forever underrated, actually.

00:48:07.200 | Genius actor.

00:48:08.560 | Okay, and so back to chemical weapons and Saddam Hussein.

00:48:13.640 | So, okay, the war finally comes to an end in 1989.

00:48:17.780 | And at the same time, the Soviets are withdrawing in Afghanistan.

00:48:22.880 | We're going to get back to them in a minute.

00:48:24.260 | But the war comes to an end.

00:48:27.640 | And for the next couple of years, Saddam Hussein is in a struggle over war debts with his creditors,

00:48:34.900 | Kuwait, Saudi, and UAE, who are demanding all their money back.

00:48:38.420 | That they gave him for the war.

00:48:40.040 | They loaned him for the war.

00:48:41.360 | Now, of course, he feels like he fought that war partially in their defense.

00:48:46.280 | And so, and also at this time, oil is trading at $12 a barrel.

00:48:50.900 | So he has no ability to repay them, rebuild his country, or do any kind of thing.

00:48:56.820 | And they're completely putting the screws to him.

00:48:58.700 | And on top of that, this is disputed whether they were literally the Kuwaitis literally slant drilling under the border or whether it's really, that's kind of shorthand, I think, usually for they were overproducing from shared oil wells that straddled the border.

00:49:12.820 | And when you have a contract that where your property and my property put up next to each other and we got mineral rights, but we have a shared oil well down there, then we have a quota, how much we pump.

00:49:22.420 | And you're not allowed to cheat and pump more out of our shared well than me in any given month or whatever, as per the contract.

00:49:28.880 | That's kind of how that thing works.

00:49:30.200 | So in this case, it's the same thing over an international border.

00:49:33.300 | And the Kuwaitis, at least they're also accused, and I know less about this, but they're accused also of using slant drilling techniques that they've been taught by Americans to drill that way and steal Iraqi oil, you know, from the margin.

00:49:46.780 | So Hussein's pissed about this at the same time they're putting the screws to him over calling in their war debts.

00:49:53.460 | Now, I don't believe that this was a deliberate trap, but in effect it was.

00:50:01.060 | I think what happened was it was a matter of, you know, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing.

00:50:05.640 | There was no real unified policy that had been sent down from on high how to handle this, evidently.

00:50:11.220 | And so the CIA and CENTCOM were encouraging, which had been created as part of the Carter Doctrine, were encouraging Kuwait to be intransigent against Saddam and tell him to go to hell.

00:50:22.080 | Well, at the State Department, James A. Baker, through Ambassador Glaspy and through Margaret Tutwiler and John Kelly, were sending signals that actually go ahead, we don't really care.

00:50:33.560 | And we just celebrated April Glaspy Day the other day, we do every year, July 25th, where she told Saddam Hussein, listen, it's the same thing as when I was the ambassador to Kuwait.

00:50:43.180 | The Iraq issue and your border dispute is not associated with America, and we have no position on this.

00:50:50.000 | You're going to have to settle it.

00:50:51.020 | And now we always had the Iraqi version of that story published in The New York Times.

00:50:55.460 | But then we got from Manning and Assange, we got the State Department's version of that document.

00:51:00.500 | And so it's a little less explicit as far as how it makes the Americans look, but it's essentially the same.

00:51:08.320 | And in there she says, now listen, George Bush wanted me to emphasize to you that he does not want a war in the Gulf.

00:51:15.120 | And so Stephen Walt from Harvard University at foreignpolicy.com, he said, now listen, in diplomatic language, you know, these things are, are, you know, mathematical formulas.

00:51:27.200 | You've got to be very careful how you say these things.

00:51:29.060 | Saddam Hussein wasn't anticipating a war.

00:51:32.360 | He knew he's going to roll right into Kuwait.

00:51:34.360 | They couldn't stop him.

00:51:35.360 | He was counting on a coup de main.

00:51:37.060 | So when she says the president doesn't want a war, it sounds like she's saying the president won't go to war with you if you do this.

00:51:45.320 | And that he very well could have read it that way.

00:51:47.900 | And that was at the very least a flashing yellow light, if not a green light to go right ahead.

00:51:53.220 | We know that, um, again, John Kelly and Margaret Tuttweiler also made statements, essentially plan, downplaying American concerns about what was happening.

00:52:02.420 | I should give a quick shout out since you mentioned him, Stephen Walt.

00:52:05.340 | I had a few email exchanges with him.

00:52:08.000 | He's a coauthor, uh, with John Mearsheimer on one of his books.

00:52:12.100 | He's a prominent, just reading here, prominent American political scientist and currently professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

00:52:21.160 | He's the best of them, man.

00:52:22.640 | He's Mearsheimer's partner in a lot of things.

00:52:24.160 | They're basically considered like the co-deans of the realist school of foreign policy in America.

00:52:28.060 | So they're like, you know, Henry Kissinger, realpolitik, only without the bloody hands and the, you know, the hawkish instinct.

00:52:36.520 | They're, you know, I think both would be relative hawks on China compared to me, for example.

00:52:41.560 | They're not libertarian, non-interventionists, but they're very skeptical of a lot of this misuse.

00:52:48.060 | You know, both of them opposed the Iraq war, for example, in the first place and that kind of thing.

00:52:52.060 | If I may, uh, I can never sing enough praises to John Mearsheimer.

00:52:55.580 | Of course, his work is very important.

00:52:57.260 | Uh, he's fearless as an, as an academic, as a writer, as a historian, but also as a human being, I got a chance to know him.

00:53:04.760 | Uh, we had dinner, we had many conversations.

00:53:06.740 | We've exchanged a lot of emails and he's a sweetheart.

00:53:08.960 | Yeah, he's a great guy.

00:53:10.000 | I email back and forth to him too.

00:53:11.540 | I'm trying to get him on next week, but, and he just killed it on Tucker the other day too.

00:53:15.180 | He was fantastic on there.

00:53:16.500 | He's such a great example, you know?

00:53:18.960 | Well, it's just a good human being.

00:53:21.040 | Yeah.

00:53:21.440 | Yeah.

00:53:22.340 | Well, like a real deep compassion.

00:53:23.940 | Yeah.

00:53:24.360 | And sometimes when you cover these topics and you, just like you said, you realize the adults in the room.

00:53:29.460 | Yeah.

00:53:30.060 | And people call him some kind of hater and it's like, come on, that's cause that's all you got.

00:53:34.700 | That's the only reason you can call him that is cause you got no other thing to say, you know?

00:53:39.360 | Yeah.

00:53:39.660 | A real heart of gold.

00:53:40.720 | Yeah.

00:53:40.940 | Like this is a really special guy.

00:53:42.020 | Anyway, sorry.

00:53:42.720 | Yeah.

00:53:43.020 | Yeah.

00:53:43.120 | No problem.

00:53:43.480 | So, um, Iraq war one.

00:53:46.760 | So America gives like a flash and yellow light to Saddam Hussein, their client that to go ahead and take back the Northern oil fields.

00:53:56.900 | And, oh, I left out one piece was, we're not talking about the left hand and the right hand.

00:54:01.380 | Wolfowitz worked for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon at that time.

00:54:04.900 | And he was always an Iraq hawk.

00:54:06.680 | And he had warned, maybe not knowing that the CIA or that Carter was encouraging it explicitly, but, um, uh, he had warned that Saddam was going to attack Iran back in 1980.

00:54:18.260 | So he was always an Iraq hawk and he was very worried that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait.

00:54:23.060 | And he convinced Dick Cheney that we should make a statement telling Saddam not to do it.

00:54:27.340 | But then, um, oh, I'm going to think of his name in just one moment.

00:54:31.960 | Pete Williams, who later became the NBC news reporter.

00:54:35.440 | He was the Pentagon spokesman at that time.

00:54:37.540 | Isn't that funny how that works?

00:54:38.560 | Uh, if you go back in time, that's how it worked.

00:54:41.140 | Um, he was Pentagon spokesman.

00:54:43.260 | He made a statement where he seemed to walk back their warning, which was probably just incompetence, right?

00:54:48.300 | He didn't know exactly what he was doing, but the way that he phrased it was softer than the way they had phrased it.

00:54:52.080 | So then they were like, oh man.

00:54:53.640 | And they tried to get George Bush to write a letter.

00:54:56.180 | I believe it was like this, that Bush sent a letter, but then they thought, I believe Cheney and Wolfowitz thought it's too conciliatory.

00:55:05.280 | It's not clear enough that we're saying, don't you do it.

00:55:08.460 | So send another letter, but by then it was too late and Hussein went ahead and rolled in.

00:55:13.280 | So this is from all very elite accounts of the story from the insides, you know, these different books and whatever I read and all that, um, this version of the story.

00:55:22.620 | And then you can see if you check the timeline where for the first few days, they weren't threatening to do anything about it.

00:55:27.880 | Colin Powell chaired the national security council meeting.

00:55:30.100 | He was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and they announced the first day.

00:55:33.700 | Well, they better just not move on Saudi Arabia.

00:55:36.160 | You roll into Riyadh, you got trouble with us, Bob, but they were essentially prepared to accept the invasion of Kuwait.

00:55:43.060 | It's crazy that Cheney was involved with all of this because then the story continues.

00:55:47.800 | So yeah, he's, he's secretary of defense at that time.

00:55:50.620 | So, um, he, um, and he was the only one in the government at that time who was not from the Reagan.

00:55:59.440 | Administration, he had been in the Congress.

00:56:02.320 | All of the rest of these guys were Reagan's guys.

00:56:05.080 | The vice president was now the president.

00:56:07.100 | Colin Powell had been national security advisor for Reagan.

00:56:10.340 | He's now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

00:56:12.100 | And then you have James Baker was treasury secretary is now secretary of state.

00:56:16.160 | Like this is Brent Scowcroft.

00:56:18.200 | I forgot.

00:56:18.580 | Maybe he was deputy national security advisor under Reagan.

00:56:21.220 | Now he's national security advisor under H.W. Bush.

00:56:24.140 | So this is the third Reagan term without Reagan basically is, and Cheney would have been the newer guy.

00:56:29.260 | And tended to be more hawkish.

00:56:30.820 | And in this case, it was like hawkish trying to stop the war from breaking out in the first place.

00:56:34.980 | In that sense was more concerned about the, the danger of the thing or whatever.

00:56:39.300 | Sorry if this is a distracting question, but can we talk about the, the birth and the evolution of the neocon movement?

00:56:45.000 | How does it connect to this?

00:56:46.020 | Yeah.

00:56:46.400 | We can mention here that, you know, there are, when I go through and look like who were all the worst hawks on Iraq war one, many of them were the neoconservatives.

00:56:54.260 | So we probably shouldn't get into that whole like biography of a movement here or whatever, but they certainly were very much in support of this intervention in desert storm or Iraq war one, as I call it.

00:57:04.140 | I'm trying to get that to catch on because we're a rock war three and a half or four now.

00:57:07.560 | So like going to have to keep these things straight somehow, but some of the same characters that were responsible for Iraq war two.

00:57:14.540 | That's right, because of course Clinton's in there for a while, but then it's president Bush's son is the next president.

00:57:19.200 | He brings Cheney and Powell with him and then all this other stuff, but hold your words and be patient.

00:57:25.060 | So what happens is Margaret Thatcher comes to town and she gives, this is her people's term for it.

00:57:32.920 | She gives Bush senior a backbone transplant and she says to him, don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush.

00:57:41.200 | In other words, calling out his manhood and she's a woman.

00:57:44.500 | So, and from a smaller, weaker country.

00:57:46.520 | And so what's he going to do now?

00:57:48.380 | And that's when he says, yeah, this will not stand just out of his own personal embarrassment.

00:57:52.820 | Speaking of Bill Hicks, this was a Bill Hicks joke that this was the wimp president.

00:57:56.980 | It was a cover news week, wimp president.

00:57:58.800 | And apparently that's stuck in this guy's crawl a little bit.

00:58:01.020 | I'll show you who's a wimp.

00:58:02.140 | And he had to go and really feel like he had to do something about that.

00:58:05.280 | And when Margaret Thatcher called him out, instead of being prudent, as he would say, and patient and conservative, he went, no, I'm tougher than you, lady.

00:58:14.760 | I'll show you how tough I am.

00:58:16.180 | I'll do a big, tough thing.

00:58:17.220 | But meanwhile, what did America care about Kuwait?

00:58:19.880 | They had, Britain had interests in Kuwaiti oil and the Kuwaiti royal family, his highness, Al Jabber, had investments in British debt.

00:58:30.680 | But what do I care about that?

00:58:32.120 | Lex Friedman, not one bit.

00:58:33.280 | You know what I mean?

00:58:33.920 | But that was a big part of how the war started.

00:58:36.280 | So after the first three days, they said, we're not going, it's, we're going to, they're not going to invade Saudi.

00:58:40.820 | We're warning them.

00:58:41.480 | They better not invade Saudi or whatever.

00:58:43.020 | And it was after that, that they decided, okay, now we are going.

00:58:46.980 | And then once they decided that, they refused to negotiate in good faith for the rest of the time.

00:58:51.720 | And Noam Chomsky did the best of documenting this.

00:58:54.060 | But what did he document?

00:58:54.880 | He documented like 10 different sources from the summer of 1990 through January 91, where the Americans refused, the Bush administration in Washington, D.C., refused time after time after time after time after time after time to negotiate in good faith with Saddam to get him out of there peacefully.

00:59:12.260 | Because once the gauntlet was thrown down, now we have a big set piece battle.

00:59:17.340 | Now we're going to go in there and we're going to rock them.

00:59:19.700 | And I have the quote from Brent Scowcroft in there.

00:59:22.780 | This was long an accusation from some liberal types that you might dismiss, but it is true.

00:59:27.020 | It was literally an explicitly stated part of their thinking was, we have to defeat Vietnam syndrome.

00:59:37.020 | The reluctance of the American people to do things like this.

00:59:40.740 | We've got to give them one that we can do.

00:59:42.840 | That'll be short.

00:59:43.980 | That'll be sweet.

00:59:44.720 | That'll be fun.

00:59:45.520 | That'll be easy.

00:59:46.520 | That we can hold a big ass parade and be victorious again like the old days.

00:59:50.960 | Rebuild that martial spirit and make that normalcy in America.

00:59:55.600 | Not the post-Vietnam anti-militarist malaise that you remember from the 70s and 80s.

01:00:01.560 | Now it's time to get back to work, remaking the world, and give the American people something to believe in again.

01:00:08.120 | And Bush Sr. then, after the fact, said, by God, we kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.

01:00:14.780 | This is a huge part of it.

01:00:16.340 | And if you think about Iraq World War I to this day, people still think of it as like short and sweet.

01:00:21.020 | And we use all this space age technology and we whooped them good, right?

01:00:26.040 | And Colonel McGregor and Daniel Davis and General McMaster, then of lower rank, they went in there and won the big tank battle of 73 Easting.

01:00:34.160 | And showed the superiority of American tanks versus Soviet tanks and all of these things that were so much fun for them.

01:00:40.400 | Such a big deal for them at that time that they wanted to do again for our nation's overall long-term interests.

01:00:47.520 | Or what was good for them, their donors, their benefactors, and the, the, the, essentially the psychological warfare campaign that they wanted to wage against the American people.

01:00:59.900 | That this is what we're here for, we go and rescue helpless little countries like his Royal Highness Al-Jabber's monarchy in Kuwait.

01:01:09.380 | So we can reinstall the monarchy because everybody knows how much superior they are to fascist dictatorships like the Iraqis have.

01:01:15.780 | That we've supported for the last decade, by the way, including helping him gas people.

01:01:21.320 | Not just while he gassed people, while he's gassing his own people, supposedly the Kurds and the Anfal campaign and the, along with the Iranians and the rest.

01:01:30.940 | Um, but now he's Hitler, now he's going to roll on Saudi's going to take over the next thing, you know, he's going to take over all of the Middle East resources.

01:01:39.460 | He's going to build up a thousand year Reich and roll on Paris.

01:01:42.820 | Huh?

01:01:44.500 | Saddam Hussein is.

01:01:46.180 | And that was the way that they put it.

01:01:48.580 | And they absolutely lied us into war.

01:01:50.380 | They claimed that he had lined up his massive armored tank divisions on the Saudi border and was preparing to roll on Riyadh.

01:01:57.300 | And that was a lie.

01:01:58.240 | It was the St. Petersburg, Florida Times, uh, hired a Soviet company to, or maybe the Soviet government to provide the satellite photos and show that there's nothing but empty desert out there.

01:02:10.400 | You know, they'd send a couple of patrols near the border, whatever, there's nothing like armored divisions preparing to expand the war into Saudi Arabia.

01:02:16.420 | They knew they were lying about that.

01:02:17.840 | And in fact, the St. Petersburg, Florida Times published that like a week and a half before the invasion and AP Reuters, CS, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, whatever, all refused to run it and just buried it.

01:02:34.860 | Then the other thing was a major part of this was, it's amazing.

01:02:39.460 | It sounds so silly now after everything going on.

01:02:41.760 | Uh, and that's gone on since then, but it was a huge deal.

01:02:45.180 | They did the Iraqi incubators hoax where they brought in a girl who claimed to be a nurse, who said that she was in the hospital in Kuwait city.

01:02:54.720 | When the Iraqi soldiers came in there, stole the incubators, threw the babies out of the incubators onto the cold floor to die.

01:03:02.560 | And then ran off with the incubators, whether to just destroy them out of sadism or to bring them back to Baghdad.

01:03:10.220 | Cause they have a big incubator shorter in Baghdad.

01:03:13.040 | She didn't say, but it turns out she wasn't a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion.

01:03:17.600 | And she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and the thing was a 100% hoax, 0% of it ever happened, but amnesty international vouched for it and said it was true.

01:03:27.600 | And so that was all you needed.

01:03:28.940 | So George Bush repeatedly brought this up and said, see, this shows that Iraq was determined to systematically dismantle Iraq, that this isn't just an invasion.

01:03:38.720 | It's these horrible crimes against humanity and what would we do if they were doing it to us and, oh, we have to help the poor people.

01:03:45.840 | And they, that was a big part of what they used to beat people over the head about that war.

01:03:50.800 | And the other one was, and they learned this from the focus groups was we have to threaten the American people with nukes, that even with moral atrocities, like the incubator hoax going on, that Americans are still like, I don't know, you know, um, like Richard Pryor said in 1986,

01:04:06.720 | he had a bit where he stops joking and he just says, and it weird, like we stick on the Germans and the Soviets and now we're bombing Libya.

01:04:13.840 | Does that sound right?

01:04:15.280 | Like they can't fight back even like, it's just weird, seems weird.

01:04:19.520 | So people needed a real reason to go.

01:04:22.320 | And that was atom bombs.

01:04:23.840 | And the, and so people forget this now because Iraq war two takes the place in their memory.

01:04:28.960 | Right.

01:04:29.200 | But in Iraq war one, they also alleged repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons or very well could be.

01:04:35.760 | They did.

01:04:36.080 | And this was one of the reasons why we had to go.

01:04:38.240 | Now here's the screwed up part about that.

01:04:40.320 | They were lying, but they turned out to be telling the truth accidentally.

01:04:43.440 | Because in fact, what they found out in the aftermath of the war, when they occupied Southern Iraq was there was a bear, but a beginning of the beginnings of a nuclear weapons program there.

01:04:53.440 | Very, very early.

01:04:54.160 | We're talking 91, right?

01:04:55.520 | Early 91 at the end of Iraq war one.

01:04:58.160 | So what happened was people always cite the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981 and say what a great success it was.

01:05:04.720 | No, that was an IAEA safeguarded facility.

01:05:07.760 | That was not producing weapons grade anything of any kind.

01:05:11.360 | And when they bombed it, all they did was drive his program underground.

01:05:14.640 | Now it became a nuclear weapons program.

01:05:16.960 | And it was only a coincidence that America, after launching Iraq war one, found his secret program that the CIA had no idea about.

01:05:24.960 | And so this became a major consequence.

01:05:27.200 | And here's why.

01:05:28.160 | Because Dick Cheney would later cite this and go, well, if the CIA can't find it, that doesn't mean it's not there.

01:05:33.200 | Remember that one time?

01:05:34.720 | And so it became a big part of the Hawks talking points after that.

01:05:38.880 | If the CIA claim, like confirmation bias again, CIA agrees, then they're right.

01:05:43.440 | CIA disputes, then yeah, well, we don't have to listen to them, right?

01:05:46.800 | Even when they're the ones that they cite as the authoritative source for every positive claim they're making.

01:05:51.280 | So the playbook, even with Iraq war one, is you try to look for different stories, whether it's anecdotal stories with nurses or it's anecdotal or stories about nuclear weapons.

01:06:01.520 | You're trying to find a way to justify war.

01:06:04.960 | That's right.

01:06:05.360 | And the same playbook was applied in the second Iraq war.

01:06:09.760 | Yeah.

01:06:10.240 | And back to Noam Chomsky for one second about them refusing to accept Hussein's surrender.

01:06:14.800 | Was that by the end of the thing, like he had been demanding, come on, let me keep these

01:06:21.360 | uninhabited islands at the north of the Persian Gulf where I could make like an oil shipping facility there or something like that.

01:06:28.560 | You know, he dropped all those demands.

01:06:30.240 | Here were his final demands, right?

01:06:32.160 | He wasn't just going to turn tail for nothing.

01:06:33.920 | He had to save some face.

01:06:35.280 | So his final demands were promise that America will leave the Middle East and that Israel will leave the occupied territories.

01:06:44.000 | Someday.

01:06:44.560 | Right.

01:06:46.480 | In other words, nothing.

01:06:47.680 | He's demanding nothing.

01:06:49.200 | He's demanding, please let me keep the skin on my face only is the only face he's saving.

01:06:55.680 | Right.

01:06:56.640 | And they wouldn't give it to him because that would have stopped the war from happening.

01:07:01.040 | Lex.

01:07:01.760 | I'm sorry, man, but that's the history of how that happened.

01:07:04.080 | I mean, think about the relative power of the United States of America with the entire UN security

01:07:08.160 | council on board to tell in Iraq for six months, five months, you better give in.

01:07:16.560 | And they couldn't figure out a way to get him to give in, huh?

01:07:19.280 | Yeah, they could too.

01:07:20.560 | They didn't want him to give in.

01:07:21.920 | You know, they had all of these chances and there were reports in Newsday and the New York

01:07:26.240 | Times and whatever.

01:07:26.960 | And that had all the stories where he kept making all these offers and they would just reject them

01:07:32.240 | out of hand.

01:07:33.200 | In fact, Noam Chomsky talked about how it would be in the business press in England

01:07:37.280 | that, oh, look, um, oil prices fall because they think there's a peace deal.

01:07:44.320 | And, and the business press knows that this is happening.

01:07:48.160 | Oh, it looks like they're going to have a peace deal.

01:07:49.680 | And so the price of oil falls from the relaxed tension and then, nope.

01:07:53.200 | Right.

01:07:54.560 | And then they cancel the thing and they go on anyway.

01:07:56.960 | You mentioned the part, which I think is fascinating about defeating Vietnam syndrome

01:08:00.560 | and reinvigorating martial spirit.

01:08:02.560 | Can you just psychoanalyze the state department, CIA, people in government?

01:08:08.160 | Why did they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit?

01:08:12.240 | Is it money?

01:08:12.960 | Is it power?

01:08:14.480 | Is it just coming up with a narrative, age old narrative of nationalism is good.

01:08:23.360 | And one of the ways to achieve nationalism is to invade somebody.

01:08:27.120 | What is the motivation in a room, these folks sitting together?

01:08:30.480 | Why do they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit?

01:08:32.720 | Yeah.

01:08:32.720 | So they can enforce what they called the new world order, which was.

01:08:36.880 | Again, I borrowed this from Chomsky, but I found two original citations for it.

01:08:40.880 | As George Bush senior himself said, what we say goes.

01:08:44.560 | So this is what Biden and them call the liberal rules based international order of global governance.

01:08:50.480 | What it means is forget the UN charter, forget the UN security council.

01:08:54.000 | There's the US national security council and everybody's going to bow down and do what we say.

01:08:58.480 | It's our unipolar moment.

01:09:00.000 | As Charles Krauthammer put it in foreign affairs, and we're going to take full advantage of it.

01:09:04.480 | But don't worry, Lex.

01:09:05.600 | Again, as Bush senior said, the world trusts us with this power because they know that we are good

01:09:12.080 | people and we know what we're doing.

01:09:13.680 | And we only have their best interests at heart.

01:09:15.520 | We care about them so much.

01:09:16.960 | And so the world allows us to be the global police force to enforce the law and make sure everything's

01:09:23.280 | fair because man, what if we stopped holding the world together?

01:09:27.440 | Boy, they would all just fall apart.

01:09:29.280 | So it's just clamoring for power.

01:09:31.280 | It'd be Germany and Japan.

01:09:32.640 | I don't know if you remember this, but when the Soviet Union fell apart, we said, oh my God,

01:09:36.560 | Germany and Japan are going to rise back up and take back over the world again.

01:09:39.440 | Really?

01:09:40.160 | Yeah.

01:09:40.960 | The messaging.

01:09:42.080 | And before the, before the war on terrorism, they tried for a while, they made, you know,

01:09:46.000 | Harrison Ford movies out of it and never just try to build up the war against the Mexican drug cartels

01:09:50.960 | and the Peruvian drug cartels.

01:09:52.480 | Cause we gotta have somebody to fight in the nineties while we're trying to get something else

01:09:57.120 | going on here, basically, you know, um, that they don't want to have to get a job.

01:10:02.880 | And yet like Bush senior, you gotta give him credit for this.

01:10:05.920 | He absolutely slashed military spending, slashed the bomber fleets, slashed the military,

01:10:12.000 | slashed army divisions and, and, and ships and everything.

01:10:16.080 | We don't need an anti-Soviet military for a world without the Soviet Union.

01:10:21.680 | And he really cut it way, way back.

01:10:24.000 | And especially on nuclear weapons.

01:10:25.760 | In fact, I hate to say this because I never was a HW Bush guy.

01:10:30.560 | And I'm so critical of the, all of his Middle East policy and all these things.

01:10:34.560 | But in a way you could say he's the most heroic guy who ever lived in the sense of working with

01:10:39.280 | the Russians, the Soviets, and then the Russians on these treaties to bring the global stockpile

01:10:44.720 | down from approximately 70,000 down to where we have about 7,000 each, which is way more than enough

01:10:51.600 | to do you.

01:10:52.640 | But when the Soviets had 40,000 and we had 30, come on, somebody has got to do something.

01:10:58.400 | And Bush senior is the man who did something about it.

01:11:00.640 | And as I show in the book, he, well, we're skipping ahead of the other Cold War book here,

01:11:05.040 | but he did, um, make unilateral cuts because he didn't have time to do negotiations.

01:11:10.400 | So you said, made massive unilateral cuts in hopes that Gorbachev would respond in kind,

01:11:15.360 | or was it Yeltsin by then?

01:11:16.560 | And then I think it was Yeltsin by then.

01:11:18.080 | And then Yeltsin did respond in kind and made these drastic cuts on his own unilateral basis,

01:11:23.200 | just without even an agreement.

01:11:24.560 | But you know what?

01:11:25.120 | We'll get rid of our class of those same kinds of weapons too.

01:11:27.440 | So I got to give credit where it's due at, he handled the end of the Cold War.

01:11:32.480 | Um, you know, a lot better than he might have, I guess you could say, you know?

01:11:38.160 | Yeah.

01:11:38.400 | Anybody who's trying to decrease the number of nuclear weapons in the world is,

01:11:41.280 | it requires some degree of heroism to do that.

01:11:44.960 | Yeah.

01:11:45.280 | And he wasn't a neocon, right?

01:11:46.960 | He's an old waspy guy from the older establishment.

01:11:50.720 | And he called the neoconservatives, the crazies.

01:11:54.160 | And he had told general Scowcroft to keep the crazies in the basement.

01:11:58.160 | In other words, they're allowed to kill people down in Latin America,

01:12:01.600 | but you keep them away from middle East policy, right?

01:12:04.480 | They're not allowed to mess around with what we're doing over there.

01:12:07.280 | And I guess here's where let's start talking more about bringing Israel into

01:12:11.840 | our narrative here because, um, as I said, the Israelis had stayed friends with Iran

01:12:18.640 | through the Iran Iraq war.

01:12:19.920 | They had no problem with fundamentalist Shiite Islam then sold these guys weapons.

01:12:24.080 | In fact, treat a Parsi shows in his absolutely excellent book, uh, treacherous Alliance,

01:12:28.000 | which if you haven't read that, you'll absolutely love it.

01:12:30.000 | I'm so good.

01:12:31.200 | Um, you know, and pull that up.

01:12:32.560 | He's one of the co-founders of the Quincy Institute for International Statecraft.

01:12:37.680 | Treacherous Alliance, the secret dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States.

01:12:41.520 | It's by treat a Parsi.

01:12:43.280 | This work examines the complex, often contradictory relationship between Israel,

01:12:46.880 | Iran, and the U S countries whose alliances and rivalries

01:12:50.560 | have repeatedly shifted since the mid 20th century.

01:12:53.680 | Oh, it's just fascinating.

01:12:54.560 | Of course, the poor Iraqis are stuck in the middle of this thing

01:12:57.360 | is a big like subtext of the story, right?

01:13:00.480 | But what's so great about that book is it's all,

01:13:02.720 | there's no new cycle stuff in there anywhere.

01:13:04.640 | It's all told from the point of view of the highest level military strategists

01:13:07.840 | in all three countries.

01:13:09.360 | And it started out, I believe as his PhD and became this thing, but it is just a masterpiece.

01:13:14.080 | But, uh, anyway, he's the best guy to read about this and the way that all this transpired

01:13:19.680 | that essentially when the Ayatollah, the mean old Ayatollah Khomeini,

01:13:24.080 | who died in 89, uh, when he would be threatening the Israelis, they're like,

01:13:28.400 | Oh, we're going to destroy you one day or whatever.

01:13:30.480 | They would be shipping him missiles that day.

01:13:32.800 | Right.

01:13:34.160 | So this was this covert relationship that was going on behind the scenes, even when they were,

01:13:38.560 | you know, saying, uh, very malicious things about each other in public.

01:13:42.480 | That was really cover for the extent that of their covert relationship that was still ongoing at that

01:13:47.840 | time. And so now it in, uh, we got to put this off one second. I'm sorry. I left out.

01:13:54.560 | It's important to go back to the Shiite uprising of 1991, because in the aftermath of Iraq war one,

01:14:02.640 | Saddam Hussein, um, crushed the Shiite uprising, which George Bush senior had encouraged.

01:14:10.320 | And I'm not sure if you've ever seen the movie three Kings. I like to bring this up. It's kind

01:14:14.480 | of a touchstone for people. Cause a lot of people learn history just from movies, you know? So the

01:14:18.320 | movie is ice cube and Marky Mark and George Clooney and they're soldiers on a gold heist, but they're in

01:14:25.920 | Southern Iraq occupying Iraq in the aftermath of the first Iraq war. And in the background, Saddam Hussein's

01:14:32.000 | forces are murdering everybody, crushing the Shiite uprising. And that's what's going on in the

01:14:36.400 | background. So people remember that movie. That'd be probably the most they ever learned about the

01:14:40.080 | crushed Shiite uprising of 1991. That's fair. You know, that's how it is. Um, they didn't make that

01:14:45.360 | big of a deal out of it at the time because it was a horrible Bay of pigs type situation where America

01:14:50.160 | told them to do it. George Bush, his own voice on voice of America, encouraged them to rise up and

01:14:55.680 | finish Saddam Hussein. The air force dropped leaflets over, uh, predominantly Shiite army divisions and,

01:15:01.040 | and the rest of them, I guess too, and say, now's everybody's chance to rise up and overthrow this guy.

01:15:05.280 | But Lex, then they changed their mind. And the reason they changed their mind was remember when

01:15:09.840 | I said in 1980, why Saddam invaded Iran? Cause some Iraqis were choosing Iran's side in the war

01:15:16.880 | and he was afraid they all were and that the Iranian revolution was going to come for him.

01:15:21.360 | Right. So he conscripted the army and sent them to war against Iran instead. Well, now in the Shiite

01:15:26.560 | uprising, those very same Iraqis who've been living in Iran for 10 years and fought on Iran's side in

01:15:32.320 | the war. They're now coming across the border to lead the uprising. Does that make sense?

01:15:36.720 | Mm-hmm . Okay. This is namely and most importantly, the Bada Brigade, B-A-D-R. The Bada Brigade is the

01:15:42.400 | Militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is run by at that time, a guy named

01:15:48.400 | Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim, who's now dead, but he's a very important guy and he's going to come back up in our

01:15:53.360 | story here. Mm-hmm . So when the Bada Brigade started coming across the border was when George Bush,

01:15:59.840 | Brent Scowcroft and the boys all flinched and said, "Uh-oh, we," because again, this is the third

01:16:05.680 | Reagan term essentially, right? So we just spent a decade supporting Saddam to contain the Iranian

01:16:11.440 | revolution. Now we're the ones importing it into Iraq. That is a mistake. And so he called it off.

01:16:17.680 | He was more cautious and said, "Let's not do that." But the problem with that was 100,000 Kurds and Shiites

01:16:25.360 | were killed. But also that then became the excuse for America to stay in Saudi Arabia. They had promised

01:16:33.520 | the king, "You let us get rid of Saddam and drive him out of Kuwait." And we have this on Dick Cheney's

01:16:39.280 | word himself. It's so funny. There's a podcast that, uh, Bill Kristol's podcast. Do you know

01:16:44.880 | Bill Kristol has a podcast? And he, and he interviewed Dick Cheney. Somebody put this on archive.org before

01:16:51.040 | it's gone forever, man. And it's great because they talk about everything except Iraq War II.

01:16:56.960 | They don't say a word about it, either of them the whole time. So Dick Cheney explains in that

01:17:02.000 | interview to Bill Kristol that he was the one, never even mind James Baker, the secretary of state,

01:17:07.040 | as secretary of defense, he promised King Fahd of Saudi Arabia that we promise we'll leave as

01:17:12.800 | soon as the war is over. And now, uh, which is, uh, I really screwed this up, man. I'm sorry. When

01:17:19.440 | we talked about Afghanistan before, I should have dwelled a little longer on the fact that as we all

01:17:23.280 | know, when we talked about bogging them down into their own Vietnam, the Soviets in the 1980s,

01:17:28.080 | that America supported not just the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, but what became the international Islamic

01:17:35.280 | brigades meaning Arabs and other Muslims from all around the world, especially from Arab lands to

01:17:41.680 | go to Afghanistan, to bite on the side of the Mujahideen against the Soviets. And this included

01:17:47.200 | Egyptian Islamic Jihad and what was called then the Azzam group, which was the main group that was

01:17:52.400 | controlled by the Saudi intelligence services during the 1980s.

01:17:56.040 | And that was the thing that United States wanted.

01:17:58.280 | Yes. So Zbigniew Brzezinski was trying to bait Russia into invade Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan,

01:18:03.800 | and then they wanted to extend the war. So America had a deal with Saudi Arabia. We would match them

01:18:08.120 | dollar for dollar, and we would work with their intelligence services and the Pakistanis to support

01:18:13.800 | local Mujahideen, like Gulbaldin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who later became America's

01:18:19.320 | enemies in our Afghan war. But then, and various other Pashtun warlords of different descriptions.

01:18:25.960 | Wait, so U.S. is essentially helping train up these militia groups.

01:18:29.720 | Yes. And including bringing them to the United States and having our special forces train them

01:18:33.720 | in car bombs and sabotage and assassinations and everything. Yes. Full-scale U.S. support for

01:18:39.560 | building up the bin Ladenite movement, as long as they're killing Soviets.

01:18:42.520 | And those same people then come back and become the enemies of the United States.

01:18:45.800 | That's right. So when we talk about Al-Qaeda, what we're talking about is eventually the merger

01:18:50.200 | of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Azzam group. After Azzam was killed, and I don't think anybody

01:18:54.600 | really knows who killed him, Osama bin Laden took over his group. And Osama bin Laden,

01:18:59.160 | so then this is the main reason, and there are many, but this is the main reason that Al-Qaeda

01:19:07.880 | turned against the United States was that Osama bin Laden was outraged that the king had allowed the

01:19:13.160 | United States to liberate Kuwait instead of him and his men, which is not like they have a bunch

01:19:17.480 | of mountains to hide out in Kuwait, but he wanted to try it to kick Saddam out. And then he was just

01:19:24.680 | driven crazy by the fact that the king allowed white Christian combat forces to come and occupy

01:19:28.600 | the holy land. It's not just their country, but their holy land where Mecca, Medina, the birthplace

01:19:34.440 | of Muhammad and the birthplace of the religion of Islam are, and the two holy places bin Laden call

01:19:40.440 | them. I guess they all do. And that then we didn't leave. This is the ultimate outrage, right? And this is

01:19:48.040 | the main overriding reason for the bin Ladenite, well, at least for his jihad, which was really based on the

01:19:55.240 | idea of trying to get all the disparate groups from around the Middle East. These are more or less

01:20:01.080 | stateless groups. They're in some cases backed by Saudi, you know, more or less at different times,

01:20:05.160 | but they're jihadists from all over the place, you know, Egyptians and Saudis and Syrians and,

01:20:09.800 | you know, Azzam himself was Palestinian raised in a refugee camp in Kuwait. But you had all these

01:20:16.840 | different people. And then, so bin Laden's genius was to figure out the one thing we can agree on is

01:20:20.760 | let's attack the United States because America is at the root of all of our problems. And just like

01:20:26.120 | we had helped them to bog the, um, Soviets down in Afghanistan, they wanted to do the same thing to us.

01:20:34.200 | And so, um, this was the beginning really of Al Qaeda's war against the United States began

01:20:40.680 | at this time in reaction to the declaration of this new world order, the permanent, uh, stationing of

01:20:47.160 | troops in, uh, Saudi Arabia and what became the permanent, the unrelenting full global embargo,

01:20:53.880 | United Nations security council, full global sanctions regime against the Iraqi state, which

01:20:59.480 | led to at the very least 300,000 excess deaths. Although a UN study later embellished that and

01:21:05.480 | bin Laden would embellish the numbers even higher than that to 600,000 or a million, but whatever it

01:21:10.600 | was, uh, it was a ruthless economic war of collective punishment against the entire, uh, people of the

01:21:16.600 | country, even though they had their chance to overthrow them. USA encouraged it and then let Saddam keep

01:21:22.920 | his helicopters and tanks while we were standing right there and let him crush the insurrection.

01:21:28.520 | Now the Bush administration and later the Clinton administration's position was the sanctions stay

01:21:33.320 | until Saddam is gone, but he's still young and in pretty good health and no one in Iraq is in any

01:21:40.440 | position to do anything about this. So it's just, this is the policy that Clinton inherited from Bush and

01:21:47.160 | ended up keeping. - Can we go to, can you linger on bin Laden?

01:21:50.680 | - Sure. - So this gave enough

01:21:51.880 | fuel for bin Laden to construct a narrative where America-

01:21:56.760 | - That's right. - The bad guys.

01:21:58.040 | - And this is such an important thing. Uh, there's this great book, uh, by Michael

01:22:02.840 | Scheuer, who was the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit. It's called Imperial Hubris.

01:22:06.520 | And I will say that he went a bit crazy in later years and said really mean things like we ought to

01:22:11.560 | help all the Muslims kill each other. And we ought to have a civil war over Russiagate and which I'm very,

01:22:17.880 | very opposed to Russiagate Lex, but I wouldn't go that far. So he went a little nuts later on,

01:22:23.480 | but he's a very bright guy and a very honest guy for what it's worth. A very straightforward guy,

01:22:29.080 | I should say. I don't know if he's ever told a lie or what.

01:22:31.640 | - Imperial hubris, why the West is losing the war on terror by Michael Scheuer. And I should also say,

01:22:37.640 | echoing that statement that some of the smartest people I know are walking the line between genius

01:22:42.840 | and madness. - It happens. - And when you study the dark aspects of human nature and geopolitics,

01:22:49.160 | sometimes it's easy to lose yourself in the madness. - Yeah, it's totally true. Um,

01:22:53.720 | but so in this book, he makes it so clear. There are six overriding reasons that bin Laden cited for

01:23:01.400 | why the United States should be attacked. Okay. And he compared this directly to the Ayatollah Khomeini

01:23:07.400 | who would relentlessly criticize our culture and, you know, licentiousness and Hollywood R-ratedness and

01:23:15.320 | all of that kind of stuff as like the degenerate society, but he can't recruit people for a war over

01:23:22.040 | that. You know what I mean? Not that he's really trying to, but that only inspires, inspires so much

01:23:26.520 | resentment, you know, and conservatives don't like, um, libertine-ism, right? Like that's okay,

01:23:34.200 | but it only goes so far, right? Bin Laden on the other hand said they occupy the land of the two

01:23:40.280 | holy places. They help Israel kill Palestinians and Lebanese. They support the dictators, especially

01:23:48.440 | in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but around the Middle East. They put pressure on those dictators to keep

01:23:54.680 | oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense. Just think of all the times you've

01:23:59.800 | heard presidents say, I'm telling the Saudis, they better ramp up production and get the price of gas

01:24:03.480 | down for election day, right? As blatant as can be. But what does that sound like to the poor person in

01:24:08.200 | those countries? Not money supposed to go to them. Um, and then as Bin Laden would say, falsely turning a blind

01:24:14.920 | eye to Russia, India, Kazakhstan, and China in their persecution of Muslims. So they say they love us so much,

01:24:22.520 | but they don't really, cause they don't say anything when this group or that group are the ones killing us.

01:24:26.360 | So these were the things and look, let us stipulate Lex. Okay. That Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer.

01:24:33.400 | And by tradition, I don't take the word of mass murderers for meaning very much. And I don't expect

01:24:40.520 | you to. Okay. That's not the point. The point is, what did he say that got anybody to listen to him and

01:24:47.880 | do what he said? He wasn't in charge of a government. He had no coercive apparatus at all. His organization is

01:24:54.360 | purely volunteer, volunteer based. And he's asking people to blow themselves up over something important

01:25:01.160 | enough to blow yourself up for it. It's not virgins. It's we have a policy. I should stipulate virgins

01:25:09.080 | after you die. It was, we have a policy and we're trying to provoke a war with the United States of

01:25:14.840 | America and you're going to help us do it. Why? Because of these six reasons. That's why. And

01:25:20.920 | that was what worked to recruit people to attack the United States of America. Okay. Major important case

01:25:27.800 | in point and whatever, the timeline jumps around here a bit, but major case in point is in 1996,

01:25:35.720 | when Israel under Shimon Peres re-invaded Lebanon and what was called Operation Grapes of Wrath.

01:25:43.160 | And during that invasion, it's hard to believe this. Wait, don't Google yet. Search this part.

01:25:50.600 | It was Naftali Bennett, called in the artillery strike on a UN shelter and killed 106 women and

01:25:57.960 | children in Kana. That's Q-A-N-A in 1996. Naftali Bennett, while serving as an Israeli army

01:26:06.280 | officer in 1996, commanded a commando unit during Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon.

01:26:12.760 | During this operation, his troops came under mortar fire near the village of Kana. Bennett radioed for

01:26:19.000 | artillery support, so on, so on, so on, killing 106 people and injured many others. In a UN shelter.

01:26:26.360 | This humanitarian tragedy is widely known as the Kana massacre. So when Shimon Peres launched that war,

01:26:35.800 | Muhammad Atta, the ringleader of the September 11th plotters in the United States, pilot of Flight 11,

01:26:41.720 | I believe. He and his buddy, Ramzi bin al-Sheib, they were Egyptian engineering students studying in

01:26:47.640 | Hamburg, Germany. And when this invasion started, they both signed their last will and testament,

01:26:54.200 | which their friends and family and neighbors and whatever said was their expressed intent that like,

01:26:58.360 | they're joining the army. They're deciding, forget engineering. I want to join the Mujahideen and go

01:27:03.560 | fight the good fight somewhere, whatever. Then, just a couple of months later,

01:27:08.360 | bin Laden put out his first declaration of war against the United States. It's called Declaration

01:27:14.040 | of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. Pretty subtle, right? And then,

01:27:20.200 | on the first page, he goes on and on about the Kana massacre and says we'll never forget the severed

01:27:26.360 | heads and arms and legs of the babies and the children in Kana. He told Robert Fisk,

01:27:31.720 | I believe, how come your blood is blood, but our blood is water? Well, we'll see about that.

01:27:38.120 | That's a strong reminder that there's a cost to killing people.

01:27:43.000 | Oh yeah. So, what happened was, Muhammad Atta and Ramzi bin al-Sheib, they read that declaration of war,

01:27:48.760 | and that was when they decided to join Al-Qaeda. It was based on the Kana massacre that Israel had

01:27:53.720 | perpetrated in Lebanon. So, again, we're skipping ahead in the story. We're going to do the whole 90s

01:27:58.360 | here. But, literally, on September 11th, you had Egyptians volunteered for a Saudi sheik to slaughter

01:28:06.440 | Americans by the thousands as revenge for American support for Israel killing people in Lebanon.

01:28:12.840 | That, my friend, is why George Bush said the Taliban did it because they hate your freedom.

01:28:18.760 | Right? Because they couldn't tell you that. 106 people. It's a reminder that killing can cause

01:28:26.840 | immeasurable escalation. Trillions of dollars. Yep. All of it. Yep. And here's the other thing.

01:28:32.840 | Bill Clinton, I think, foolishly said something about how he would like to normalize relations with

01:28:42.120 | Iraq or at least look into it or something. And boy, he should not have said that because people

01:28:47.960 | got all upset and tried to figure out how to stop it, including the Kuwaitis. And what happened was,

01:28:53.560 | I know you're familiar with this. We all are. And virtually everyone gets this wrong.

01:28:58.600 | The myth that Saddam Hussein tried to murder George H.W. Bush with a truck bomb assassination

01:29:05.800 | in Kuwait in Kuwait in 1993. Total hoax debunked by Seymour Hersh by the end of the year in an article for

01:29:14.200 | The New Yorker called Case Not Closed. He shows it was just a whiskey smuggling ring that they embellished

01:29:20.600 | into this plot against Bush. And then it was Martin Indyk, who was Bill Clinton's advisor. Who was he?

01:29:28.280 | He was an Australian who'd been working for Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud party, uh, well, former terrorist,

01:29:35.400 | murderer, and then Likud party, prime minister of Israel. And Indyk had gone from there to go work

01:29:43.800 | in, uh, I don't know exactly the time off a year or so. Um, he stopped and went to work for Clinton.

01:29:50.600 | In the meantime, he founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, WNEP, which was directly a

01:29:57.000 | spinoff of AIPAC. AIPAC put up the money. That's the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,

01:30:01.080 | the heart of the Israel lobby. They put up the money for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,

01:30:06.280 | which you have heard that name a million times and you're going to continue to hear it because they

01:30:10.040 | are always cited as middle of the road scientific experts on American foreign policy when they were,

01:30:15.800 | and this is not the same about all neocon think tanks, but this one was literally created by the

01:30:20.600 | Israel lobby in the United States. And then he became an advisor to Bill Clinton. And he was

01:30:26.440 | insisting on this policy, essentially continuing the HW Bush policy of staying in Saudi Arabia in order

01:30:33.400 | to patrol the so-called no fly zones over Iraq, to keep Saddam Hussein from killing the Iraqis and

01:30:38.520 | enforce the blockade, which was enforced by world law anyway, right? Like there's some smuggling going

01:30:44.440 | on or whatever, but no nation state is violating the embargo against Iraq here. So it's completely

01:30:49.240 | unnecessary on both counts, but the Israelis, and this is Rabin's government, Yitzhak Rabin's government

01:30:55.720 | is, I guess, in agreement with this Likud guy, Indic on this. They're pushing for a policy that they

01:31:01.800 | called dual containment. And the point was that Iraq, now that we beat them up so bad in Iraq war one,

01:31:09.400 | desert storm, first Gulf war. Now they're not powerful enough to balance against Iran.

01:31:15.240 | So now America has to stay in Saudi Arabia to balance against them both.

01:31:19.720 | And Bill Clinton resisted this and resisted this until the big fake assassination attempt against

01:31:25.400 | Bush senior, which again, I don't have any reason to believe the Israelis were behind that. It was the

01:31:29.160 | Kuwaitis who rigged up. Oh, did I leave out that it was the girl who pretended that she saw the babies

01:31:34.520 | thrown out of their incubators? It was her father was the one who spun up this story.

01:31:39.560 | So in other words, the same guy spun up that story was the same guy spun up this story about

01:31:43.080 | the assassination attempt against Bush senior, which everybody still believes. And which I'm sure Bush

01:31:47.640 | junior believed at the time that he launched that war. Probably was he reads Seymour Hersh. He doesn't

01:31:51.800 | know. And, and it was just conventional wisdom. And I was still just a teenager in the 1990s,

01:31:57.160 | but I don't remember. Wow. That assassination against Bush thing was debunked. I don't remember that ever

01:32:02.280 | getting around. You know what I mean? I don't know who was reading Hirsch at that time. It was

01:32:06.040 | pre-internet times by a year, right? It just wasn't, it just wasn't a hot enough topic. You know what I

01:32:12.280 | mean? How do you fight those false narratives that, uh, the military industrial complex tries to produce

01:32:19.640 | in order to get us into war? Well, the main thing is speak up. I think the most, yeah, the most important

01:32:24.280 | thing is read antiwar.com every day for a long period of time in a row. And you will have a very good

01:32:29.240 | handle on what the hell is going on in the world. It was founded by Eric Garrison, Justin Raimondo,

01:32:33.480 | who are both a couple of libertarians. Raimondo was a student of Murray Rothbard's or at least one of

01:32:38.520 | his, um, mentees, you know, learned a lot from air of his foreign policy thought, Murray, Murray and

01:32:44.600 | Rothbard, the best libertarian. And so that's where we come from is that tradition. And, um, you know,

01:32:49.880 | Ron Paulian non-interventionist types. And, but the news is, and, and, but our opinion pieces come from all of the

01:32:56.120 | spectrum. As long as we're anti-war, we're not sectarians at all. So one issue thing. And really,

01:33:00.440 | we just do the hard news more than anything. We have a lot of great editorials as well,

01:33:04.200 | but it's Eric Garrison and Dave DeCamp and Kyle Anzalone who get the lion's share of the credit for

01:33:09.480 | the actual work that goes into the site every day. And that goes to every single war in the world.

01:33:13.720 | Everything, every day we have our top news. We have a frontline section. And then at the bottom,

01:33:17.640 | we have every region, uh, of the world where there's conflict breaking out. Trump sends two nuclear subs

01:33:24.200 | towards Russia. So obviously Russia. That's reassuring. God. And you see our spotlight

01:33:30.840 | article is by, uh, Bronco March Teach and he's a leftist, but we love him. He does absolutely

01:33:35.640 | fantastic work. It doesn't matter if you're left or right. That's right. And we're very close with

01:33:39.720 | the American conservative magazine. For example, Pat Buchanan is a good friend of ours and we ran his

01:33:43.880 | articles for many years. Ron Paul, of course, as well, the greatest American ever. Ron Paul's amazing.

01:33:50.520 | And you give love and respect to Ron Paul all the time. Uh, he absolutely deserves it.

01:33:54.600 | We spoke of heroes. He's one of the legends. That's how I knew anti-war.com was for me the

01:33:58.120 | first day I laid eyes on it. My friend said, look, they run Ron Paul. And I went, I like these guys.

01:34:03.080 | Can we take a quick pause for bathroom break? Sure. So before we get too far into Bill Clinton,

01:34:08.280 | I should say, cause I did say these words, I know the new world order thing, that was a very popular

01:34:13.160 | conspiracy theory in the nineties. And even before that, which was about building a one world government under the

01:34:17.960 | United nations and subsuming the United States under it and all that, that's not what I'm talking about.

01:34:23.160 | And I actually was a new world order kook in the 1990s, but I was a kid. It's fine. I grew out of it.

01:34:27.720 | But point being Bush senior did use that phrase repeatedly. And what he meant by it was,

01:34:33.320 | you know, in the guise of the United nations, baby blue flag and all of that for like PR purposes,

01:34:39.960 | more than the real agenda. He was saying American power is the guarantor of world peace and we will

01:34:48.840 | enforce it through war. Right. And that's the deal of it. Nobody's allowed to fight or we will intervene.

01:34:55.480 | Right. So it's just essentially it's, it's the, the irony, right? That any government powerful enough to

01:35:01.160 | keep the peace between the 50 States is powerful enough to try it for the rest of the world as they

01:35:07.240 | can, they do this. We're just extending our security umbrella. Everybody who joins up with us. It's

01:35:12.840 | guaranteed. Nobody's going to ever mess with you or else they'd have to mess with us, except for everyone

01:35:17.240 | on the outside who now are put in the position of having, you know, not just the United States, but all

01:35:24.360 | their allies lined up against them and feel that much, you know, more threatened. Namely, of course,

01:35:30.280 | Russia and China, the other major, uh, you know, potential adversaries and nuclear weapons states.

01:35:36.840 | And I think the lesson there is if you think you can run the world by threatening everybody with military

01:35:42.840 | power, considering all the very cultures and peoples and histories of the world, you're going to

01:35:48.840 | lock things up. You're going to create a lot of hate. You're going to create a lot of increased,

01:35:55.000 | uh, war, increased terrorism, increased threats to America versus decreased.

01:35:59.320 | Yeah. So more on the neocons here too, before we get too far into Bill Clinton is in 1992,

01:36:06.440 | a year after the end of Iraq war one under deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz,

01:36:13.080 | his deputies, Scooter Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad wrote what was called the defense planning guidance

01:36:19.160 | for 1994 for fiscal year, 1994. And it caused a huge upset. It was leaked to the New York times

01:36:24.840 | and it became a really big deal because what it said was America is essentially world police. We're

01:36:30.280 | not going to tolerate the rise of any near peer competitor against us in the world. Like we'll fight

01:36:35.560 | them before we allow them to get powerful enough to even be one. We will not let any nation or group of

01:36:41.880 | nations become powerful enough to ever even be able to think about challenging our military

01:36:46.920 | dominance on the planet. And of course we're doing all this in the interests of world peace. And that

01:36:51.320 | means that we have to have total military dominance in the Middle East. We have to expand NATO and have

01:36:58.040 | total military dominance in Eastern Europe. And of course we have to maintain our position with Japan

01:37:03.400 | and Korea and the rest in order to maintain total dominance in Asia as well. And this is what Charles

01:37:10.280 | Krauthammer called our unipolar moment again and said we should stop short of nothing less than total world

01:37:16.200 | domination. That was the quote. And at that time, Jean Kirkpatrick, who had been a neoconservative,

01:37:23.160 | she was a member of the Young People's Socialist League of the Social Democrats USA, which were the

01:37:28.840 | Trotskyites under Max Schachtman, who was Trotsky's most important guy in the United States. And this is

01:37:35.480 | something that Mark Dubowitz tried to deny and argue with me about whether she was a neoconservative or

01:37:41.000 | not. Well, she was like James Woolsey, a Presbyterian. Now, most neoconservatives are Jewish and/or Catholic,

01:37:49.160 | although you have Pazalme Khalilzad and Francis Fukuyama and others who are of other, you know,

01:37:55.640 | different, you know, cultural inheritances, you might say there. And so the defining characteristics,

01:38:05.160 | and he was saying, well, she didn't believe in democracy as the single most important thing in the

01:38:10.920 | whole world. And of course, she had written this article in the National Interest that had gotten Reagan's

01:38:17.080 | attention in the first place, saying that it's okay to support authoritarians as long as they're

01:38:23.000 | right-wingers and anti-communists, that anti-communism is more important than democracy.

01:38:27.880 | And so we should put, for example, we should support people like Somoza in Nicaragua and things like

01:38:33.160 | that in order to keep the commies at bay, that that's number one. And so some of the neocons disagreed

01:38:37.880 | with that. Dubowitz was trying to say that's what makes her not a neocon, but that's really not true.

01:38:42.760 | Because neocons, there's about a hundred of them or something, and they disagree about all kinds of

01:38:46.840 | things. They sure do work together on lots of things, but sure, they disagree on things.

01:38:50.600 | I'll give another example on democracy where Robert Kagan said in 2013 that we should allow the Muslim

01:38:56.840 | Brotherhood to rule in Egypt because they won fair and square, parliament and the presidency, just barely.

01:39:01.800 | They won in fair elections. And after all we've done in the name of democracy, don't we have to allow

01:39:07.160 | them to have a chance? Well, Frank Gaffney was like, are you kidding me? Like I'll go overthrow myself

01:39:13.160 | right now. Are you crazy? He's got an H-bomb going off over his head. Is anybody going to deny that Frank

01:39:18.680 | Gaffney is a neoconservative just because he differed with Robert Kagan on his order of importance in

01:39:23.880 | democracy in this or that instance? Give me a break. Gene Kirkpatrick came from the neoconservative left.

01:39:31.960 | She wrote for commentary magazine with Norman Podhortz and all the guys. And I don't mean,

01:39:36.760 | again, just a leftist. She was with the Trotskyites, Max Schottman and the Young People's Socialist

01:39:41.960 | League and the Social Democrats USA. So she's like a card-carrying neoconservative. This is what it means

01:39:46.920 | to be a neocon. And she wrote, and then she was Reagan's second ambassador to the United Nations,

01:39:53.000 | was widely respected by the Republicans as a conservative hawk and a very like American interest-oriented

01:39:59.480 | type. And she would even rail against the UN itself in almost a bircher sounding kind of way that

01:40:05.720 | appeals to me. Um, although she didn't really mean it, she was just mad that they would ever get in our

01:40:09.800 | way rather than that they really are a threat to our independence in any way. But the point is this,

01:40:14.680 | man, that I'm trying to get to is at the end of the Cold War, a year before the Soviet Union was even

01:40:20.600 | gone in the fall of 1990. And so she must've written this in the summer of 1990. This is a year before the

01:40:25.880 | failed commie coup and the final unraveling where the Russians overthrew the last of the Soviet Union

01:40:30.760 | government at that time, at the end of 91. It's a year before that. And she importantly, right on the

01:40:37.320 | confirmation bias trick again, it's Jean Kirkpatrick, right? Not Susan Sarandon. It's Jean Kirkpatrick who

01:40:44.920 | wrote this piece in the national interest called "A Normal Country in a Normal Time." The only place you can

01:40:51.240 | find it is on my website, scotthorton.org/fairuse. And I won't tell you where I got and it's, and

01:40:58.120 | don't ever sue me national interest. I love you guys. Um, and the thing is, so it's, it's in there

01:41:05.400 | somewhere. You have to page down on that. Oh, there it is right there. "Normal Country in a Normal Time."

01:41:09.240 | March. Uh, oh, that's the date I published it. Fall 1990.

01:41:12.680 | "A Normal Country in a Normal Time." You published it on March 23rd, 2022. It is by

01:41:17.560 | Jean Kirkpatrick, the national interest. Fall 1990. It's the first time since 1939 that there has been

01:41:23.720 | an opportunity for Americans to consider what we might do in a world less constrained by political

01:41:27.800 | and military competition with a dangerous adversary. I am pleased that the national interest has provided a

01:41:33.560 | forum for this discussion. And it goes on, "American purposes are mainly domestic. Our purpose in the world are

01:41:40.680 | merely human, not transcendent. To be legitimate, the American government's purpose must be ratified by

01:41:46.040 | popular majorities." Here's what she says in here. She says, "We should eschew the burdens of superpower

01:41:53.400 | status." She sounds like George Washington. She's saying, "Okay, the commies are gone. The Cold War is

01:42:00.760 | over. The emergency is over. So now we can go back to being what we were supposed to be, what we used to be

01:42:08.840 | before, that we put on hold because we had to wage the Cold War." Now we can have a real return to normalcy,

01:42:17.640 | meaning 28, right? Before the permanent world empire was built for the purposes of destroying the Nazis and then

01:42:27.320 | containing the commies.

01:42:28.200 | So she was very anti-communist and neoconservative perspective. She had a significant role in the

01:42:35.160 | Reagan administration. And then after she evolved in saying, "We need to let go."

01:42:40.360 | That's right. In other words, she is here. She's aligned with Pat Buchanan. Now for people who aren't

01:42:44.600 | familiar with Pat Buchanan, he's a Catholic paleo conservative. He was Nixon's speech writer and Reagan's

01:42:50.840 | speech writer. To this day, he's retired, sweet old guy now, but he's lifelong cold warrior and doesn't regret it.

01:42:57.880 | The commie threat absolutely had to be contained. Vietnam had to be done. He's a wonderful guy.

01:43:03.720 | He really is. And he's written just a grip of great books. I mean, I don't know, eight or 10 of them.

01:43:10.920 | So there's an evolution here. Some of the folks really saw Russia and the Soviet Union as a major

01:43:17.800 | threat. Oh yeah.

01:43:18.680 | And then they've evolved saying, "Okay, now that the Cold War is over, we need to calm down."

01:43:24.520 | Exactly.

01:43:24.520 | And see, Pat is the perfect avatar for this. Him and his buddies, you know, Scott McConnell and

01:43:30.840 | Jude Wyniski. Wyniski himself had been a former neoconservative. But there's this whole group of

01:43:36.520 | paleoconservatives who nobody can question their patriotism. This is Ronald Reagan's guy. This is the guy that puts words in Ronald Reagan's mouth. Right? And he's saying, "Okay, you guys promised."

01:43:49.480 | The empire was a defensive measure. Right? We don't want an empire. Chalmers Johnson is another one.

01:43:55.720 | Chalmers Johnson was a professor at USC who was a hardcore, ardent Cold Warrior. You're familiar with him.

01:44:03.000 | I'm sure he wrote the book "Blowback" and then "Sorrows of Empire" and "Nemesis" or the trilogy that he wrote about the American empire then.

01:44:10.200 | And he was adamantly Cold Warrior until the Soviets were gone and then the empire continued to expand.

01:44:18.680 | And then he went, "Wait a minute now. I taught a generation of students that we were holding the tide back.

01:44:25.960 | What's all this about we're the tide now? That's not right." And in fact, I like to cite this because

01:44:31.160 | it's just so astonishing to people that William F. Buckley, one of the major, not that he was a

01:44:35.800 | neoconservative, he wasn't, but he was one of their main godfathers basically. The founding editor of the

01:44:42.040 | National Review, he wrote an article in 1952 in Commonweal magazine. Again, you can find this at

01:44:48.120 | scotthorton.r/fairuse. It's called "The Party in the Deep Blue Sea." It's about the Republican Party,

01:44:55.000 | I guess is what it means. "Party in the Deep Blue Sea." And in there he says, "We must accept a totalitarian

01:45:02.440 | bureaucracy on our shores for the duration of the emergency, even with Truman at the reins of it all.

01:45:11.160 | Because of the need to face down the Soviet threat. And you need a powerful domestic empire

01:45:18.280 | that's capable of forcing the American people to enforce a world empire to contain the threat

01:45:24.840 | of Stalinist Soviet communism." That's horrible, right?

01:45:28.120 | Yes. A totalitarian bureaucracy. The same one we still got. And see, Pat said,

01:45:33.080 | "Okay, look, I was buying it when the enemy was in Moscow. But now that there's no enemy in Moscow

01:45:39.880 | and world communism, the threat of world revolution is dead and gone." Well, I don't want to hear it

01:45:46.520 | about why we have to suffer this anymore. We're supposed to be. And then again, this is why I cite

01:45:51.880 | Gene Kirkpatrick. I could just cite Ron Paul to you all day long here, right? But everybody knows that

01:45:57.320 | Ron Paul is good on everything. The point is here is these are people who are very hawkish when they feel

01:46:04.520 | like it needs to be. You might even, your readers might, or your listeners, viewers might think that

01:46:10.360 | Ron Paul is just too biased for peace. Well, Pat ain't, okay? Pat is willing to fight,

01:46:15.720 | but not if there's not a good reason to. And that's the big qualification. Why would a guy like Pat be

01:46:23.320 | anti-war? We know he's not a hippie. There must be another explanation. And the other explanation is,

01:46:28.440 | he is learned. He knows more about this than you. And he knows why you shouldn't do this because this

01:46:34.120 | is what's going to happen if you do. And that's the kind of guy he is. And that's why he and his

01:46:39.320 | paleo conservative friends said, okay, enough. We want to come home. And so Gene Kirkpatrick,

01:46:45.080 | she didn't really join with the paleo cons, but she was certainly aligned with him on this issue at this

01:46:49.880 | time that now's our chance to go back to being a limited constitutional republic with a free economy

01:46:57.800 | and a usually successful commercial republic. I believe she says in the piece, um, and which had

01:47:04.520 | a typo because it said unusually, but she couldn't have meant that. Go ahead.

01:47:07.960 | I don't know. I think I, I leaned towards Ron Paul a little bit. I don't think totalitarian

01:47:13.720 | bureaucracy is justified ever. Um, I mean, you can come up with a really extreme case, but really,

01:47:19.160 | you're going to get into trouble. This is why the Birchers turned against the cold war in this,

01:47:23.800 | during Vietnam, Robert Welch. I mean, you can't get more anti-communist than that guy,

01:47:28.280 | the leader of the birth society, but he goes, wait a minute, why are we turning our country

01:47:32.200 | into a communist country in the name of containing communism over there? And he was being very liberal

01:47:37.240 | with the use of the word there, but meaning why are we building a total state here when that's

01:47:42.360 | everything that we're trying to oppose in Vietnam, but we're building it here at home is crazy.

01:47:47.320 | We need to save this money. We need to build our country and lead the world by example,

01:47:51.560 | not by force. It was the obvious thing. And if it was that obvious to Robert Welch and to Ron Paul

01:47:57.000 | during the cold war, then after the cold war, you got to make up a bunch of crap about Saddam Hussein

01:48:04.680 | as Hitler, and he's killing all the babies in their incubators and these kinds of Belgian babies on

01:48:09.880 | bayonets and related hoaxes to keep the thing going. Because again, as Richard Pryor said,

01:48:15.880 | that doesn't make any sense to me, right? Like if it doesn't just sound right to your average guy,

01:48:22.120 | you tell me we had a face down Hitler. All right. We had a face down Stalin and Mao. That makes sense.

01:48:27.720 | We got to bomb Gaddafi. There's not a better way that we USA number one can handle that.

01:48:35.800 | You know, same kind of thing going forward here. And this is why, you know, these, and I like to

01:48:41.000 | emphasize this so much is that in the aftermath of Vietnam, people think that, oh, peace is just

01:48:46.280 | hippies and leftists and anti-Americans of one stripe or another people who are just no good in a fight

01:48:51.720 | anyway. So what do they know about security? Right? Jack Nicholson. I stand on that wall.

01:48:56.360 | Even think about what a joke that was. He was down in Guantanamo Bay,

01:48:59.400 | keeping Castro Bay for me. Yeah. Thanks a lot, dude. I can't handle that truth. Whatever you're

01:49:04.920 | burying down there. Um, a lot of torture later, but anyway, so you're saying like, it's really

01:49:10.200 | people that were hawks for a time woke up. That's the reality of the ridiculousness, the absurdity of a,

01:49:17.720 | what a totalitarian bureaucracy does is it expands and creates momentum. And then you're now

01:49:23.080 | become the thing you were fighting. Right. But Francis Fukuyama knew better. He said, no,

01:49:28.440 | it's the end of history. And America has proven that more or less democracy and more or less free

01:49:35.160 | market capitalism as like Bill Clinton would define them or something of that era, that that's the future

01:49:41.080 | of mankind. We proved it. They tried every other way of having a modern, successful society. And this

01:49:46.680 | is the one and only way to do that. And not only that then, but that's obviously America's mandate

01:49:52.920 | and all his neocon friends took it as America's mandate that we're going to force the world to

01:49:57.480 | accept our ways in that same way. Of course, the British justified their obviously very self-interested

01:50:02.440 | empire in the very same way that we're going to teach you to have a separate independent judiciary

01:50:08.040 | at any cost. Right. And it's all the, you know, I hate to say it, but the white man's burden type of

01:50:14.440 | argument that, and they say this to this day, look, if it wasn't us, it would be the Russians. If it

01:50:18.840 | wasn't us, it would be the Chinese. If it wasn't us, it would be somebody else and it would be worse.

01:50:22.040 | And so that's it. And so it is our responsibility. We're the most mature and adult and responsible

01:50:27.720 | stewards of global power. And so it has to be us to do this. And that was what it said in the defense

01:50:33.400 | planning guidance. And now it's true that Bush lost that election and the Clintonites came in,

01:50:37.400 | but as Paul Wolfowitz bragged again in the national interest by the end of the decade,

01:50:41.720 | that they all adopted the Wolfowitz doctrine anyway, that, you know, like for example,

01:50:47.240 | Bill Clinton going right around NATO to do the war in Kosovo in 1999, because he wanted to,

01:50:53.160 | and Russia had a veto on the UN security council. And so, well, forget that. We'll just go around that.

01:50:57.720 | That's straight out of the Wolfowitz doctrine, right? That it's what Matt, what's good for us and

01:51:02.040 | our predominance of power in those regions of the world is what matters the most.

01:51:06.680 | And these other considerations will have to take a backseat to make sure that we can be the guarantors

01:51:10.920 | of our world order, regardless of what the treaties everybody signed up for say. And so that really is

01:51:19.560 | what they call the Wolfowitz doctrine. It's not just, Hey, let's go to Iraq for Israel. Although that's a

01:51:23.880 | huge part of it, but it's less America, our military power is always beneficial compared to the alternative.

01:51:31.400 | And so we should be the ones to guarantee the peace or the war. But in, in our case, if it's war,

01:51:37.960 | it's only because the alternative was worse. We promise. And so that's the doctrine. And there is

01:51:44.200 | ideology of American empire here. I don't want to dismiss the corruption. It's a huge part. I mean,

01:51:49.640 | if, if hopefully we have time later and talk really about the new cold war with Russia,

01:51:53.560 | we can talk a lot about the role that Lockheed and the other military industrial complex firms played

01:51:58.840 | in pushing all these policies for it is true with Iraq to the committee on the liberation of Iraq

01:52:03.400 | was sponsored by Bruce Jackson from Lockheed Martin. And, and he also financed the project for

01:52:09.400 | new American century of Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. He financed the weekly standard magazine.

01:52:13.880 | And the agenda was like, let's sell NATO planes in Europe and let's push for war in the Middle East.

01:52:19.480 | And there's, so there's a lot of self-interested reasons there, but I think overall, like you got

01:52:24.200 | to take these people at their word when they say, we know we're heroes. We know we're doing the right

01:52:30.920 | thing. We know everybody's better off without us. We know that we have to, this is our morality-based

01:52:36.120 | foreign policy. We just can't allow that bad thing to happen any longer. We have to do something worse to

01:52:40.680 | stop it. And this kind of thing is very like, you could tie it back to like, whatever. I'm not this

01:52:46.280 | smart to talk all about the influence of, of the pilgrims and their glorious mission, you know,

01:52:53.960 | in ancient Massachusetts to create the new city on the hill, to, to be like the new Zion and,

01:53:00.680 | and ultimately determine the fate of mankind. But there's a lot of Yankee busy bodyhood that is built

01:53:07.240 | into this. And of course the Scotch Irish like to get drunk and get into fist fights for fun. And

01:53:12.360 | I take responsibility for that as a bit of my background too. I'm not being a racist bigot,

01:53:17.000 | but like, that's part of our culture is like being a tough guy and being able to get in a brawl and win

01:53:21.480 | one or even suffer a defeat and, and not cry about it. You know what I mean? And like,

01:53:26.440 | yeah, some of that was, I mean, it's the dual, it's a double-edged sword of human nature is the

01:53:30.920 | Scots Irish, I mean, they're so, and I had a great conversation with Sagar and Jetty about this,

01:53:35.080 | uh, are so foundational to the individualism that makes America great. But then you get into trouble

01:53:41.800 | when you start to believe you're. Tell them there's a bad guy out there.

01:53:45.160 | Yeah. And you, and you start, and then you have the biggest military in the world

01:53:49.720 | and there's Lockheed Martin is the military industrial complex. And now you think you're

01:53:52.680 | better than everybody. Now you're creating wars all over the place, creating enemies all over the place.

01:53:58.040 | And see, of course there's partisanship is all built into this is everybody supports

01:54:02.120 | their guy. Cause the other guy is you, we can't let them win. So we can't undermine,

01:54:06.360 | even when we disagree with our own guy, we can't undermine him or we're helping the other guys are

01:54:10.200 | going to bid him, get them in the midterms or they'll get them in the next election. So people

01:54:14.280 | close ranks around things they even disagree with just because they consider again, the alternative

01:54:19.640 | worse. That's even from the point of view of voters, a lot of times that like, you know,

01:54:23.320 | even Murray Rothbard endorsed George H W Bush who had just done the Iraq war because Rothbard's like,

01:54:29.640 | well, at least he hates Yitzhak Shamir. And at least he's not bringing Hillary Clinton and the leftist

01:54:36.040 | cultural revolution with him. Right. So, well, just, you know, uh, people got to make these choices and,

01:54:42.120 | and make their comparisons of, you know, what they favor or what they value at any given time and make

01:54:47.160 | those compromises, you know? And that's why you said antiwar.com is nonpartisan, right? That's right.

01:54:52.920 | Yeah. We're reaching out to everybody. We're here to inform everybody again. Uh, uh, as I was

01:54:57.320 | mentioned during the short break there, that Hawks read our website too, because if you want really

01:55:02.520 | the best briefing of what's going on in the country, like we do hear from them from time to time that like,

01:55:07.720 | I gotta admit those guys really do have the most comprehensive coverage of the stuff I'm interested in,

01:55:12.360 | even if from their point of view, the wrong point of view, if, uh, before we go to Iraq war two,

01:55:18.040 | sure. I, if it's okay to take a brief aside, uh, since you mentioned it, we did an Iran debate a few

01:55:24.040 | weeks ago. Yes. Uh, we're about actually 20 minutes was cut toward the end where it went a bit off the

01:55:30.920 | rails. And, uh, you agreed with the description that I wrote on X. I hope it's cool. If I read it,

01:55:37.640 | I try hard to avoid editing. That's why I do four or five, six, seven, eight hour podcasts. I wonder

01:55:44.600 | how long we go today. Uh, the part I cut in the Iran debate was where it went off the rails after four

01:55:50.680 | hours, not content wise, but tone wise, mockery, interruption, et cetera. Both had very little sleep

01:55:56.360 | the night before and were tired and not their best selves. As they both said, I cut not because of the

01:56:02.040 | content, but the style I try, I try all I can to avoid having that kind of drama in the podcast.

01:56:07.560 | Instead, I thought the first four hours had a lot of strong rants, which you did. And you're continuing

01:56:13.080 | the rants very well today. Uh, I'm enjoying it. Uh, so you wanted to echo that description and that the

01:56:19.160 | edit made sense. Uh, maybe can you speak to that? And then also, can you please, it'd be great now that

01:56:25.000 | you're a fresh full of Dr. Pepper say anything and everything you would like to say that went

01:56:30.200 | unresponded to maybe, uh, that is left to be said. Thank you. Yes. So first of all,

01:56:36.680 | I'll take my responsibility for that part. I literally had a long drive and a long flight

01:56:41.000 | and four hours sleep and no food in my stomach whatsoever. And I quite honestly, absolutely

01:56:47.160 | despise Mark Dubowitz and I have for a very long time. And so it was, I almost, I really had thought

01:56:55.080 | about this beforehand. I really should have rejected your terms at the beginning where we're all friends

01:56:59.080 | here, having a friendly discussion. I had already kind of rehearsed in my mind. What I wanted to say

01:57:02.600 | to you was actually, no, right. This is just business. And I know that I really do regret that.

01:57:08.440 | And, and I'm sorry to you personally for that. Cause I, what I should have said was, this is just

01:57:11.880 | business. What's going to happen here is he's going to lie the whole time because he has to. And so

01:57:16.520 | then I'm going to spend all of my time telling you why, what he just said, isn't actually true

01:57:20.840 | and how you can go verify that for yourself, et cetera, which is what ended up happening. But it

01:57:25.560 | made it much more acrimonious because it was like, and for you, it was more frustrating. Cause you're

01:57:30.040 | trying to hold things in the conception that you had it where we're all just going to be friends here

01:57:36.520 | when that just was never going to really last. And part of that is, look, I'm just, I'm Luke from

01:57:43.160 | empire. I'm not quite all the way grown up return of the Jedi Skywalker here myself. So I get angry

01:57:49.560 | and, and say angry things. So as far as how bad it went, I take my responsibility for my part of that.

01:57:56.760 | Except the reality was, it was just cause I was up against a horrible foreign agent lying his ass off

01:58:02.440 | trying to get my fellow Americans killed and their dollars wasted. So, and I got a problem with that.

01:58:07.240 | Um, and now on the edit though, this is where we had a problem. And I do accept from you that this

01:58:13.640 | part was inadvertent. I know that you didn't mean to do it this way. What happened was there were two

01:58:19.240 | instances of him saying, Oh, Scott Horton thinks the Jews control everything and dictate everything

01:58:24.840 | and blah, blah, blah, which I never said at all. And he said twice. And yet my response was completely

01:58:33.560 | deleted. But him saying that against me was still in there. And I thought like on one hand,

01:58:39.400 | it's completely silly and stupid, but on the other hand, that's also like a pretty ruthless and horrible

01:58:44.680 | thing to try to do to somebody, not you, him to try to put those words in my mouth and say all those

01:58:50.680 | facts that you just heard for four hours. Nah, this guy just hates Jews. So if you're on my side,

01:58:56.280 | you don't have to listen to him. You don't have to believe him anything like this. And then our discussion

01:59:00.520 | about that's not true, dude, just because I was talking about the neoconservatives doesn't

01:59:04.120 | mean I was talking about the Jews because for example, Jen Kirkpatrick and Jim Woolsey are

01:59:08.440 | Presbyterians and, and Michael Novak and, uh, oh, what's his name are Catholics. And Francis Fukuyama,

01:59:16.360 | I guess is a Buddhist and, and Zahme Khalilzad is a Muslim. And so I didn't say the Jews at all,

01:59:22.600 | did I? I was talking about this and that. And my very good response to that went to the cutting room floor.

01:59:29.320 | And so I thought, well, that was kind of lame. And then I thought I was going to come back sooner.

01:59:34.120 | And so I apologize for kind of putting you on blast in that interview where I mentioned it,

01:59:38.040 | but I was waiting to hear back from you where we're going to make up for that by doing this interview.

01:59:43.240 | And so I was like, yeah, I've kind of disappointed. Now it's, uh, nearly August and I hadn't heard from

01:59:48.120 | the dude and I thought we were going to do that. And so, and because it is important that it goes to my

01:59:54.280 | overall point that I'm trying to make here is obviously the American empire is very much against

01:59:59.320 | the interests of the American people, but also, and most especially our support for Israel, the great

02:00:05.960 | albatross around our neck, you know, what they do or millstone is maybe better, right? Albatross was a symbol

02:00:12.920 | of good luck before you shot it down. But Israel's interests are vastly different than America's

02:00:19.320 | interests. And people try to lie even to themselves and say that that's not true, but they are very

02:00:25.080 | different. For example, when Israel killed those women and children in Kana in 1996, that's what brought

02:00:32.120 | our towers down, right? So this is something very important that we have to grapple with as a country

02:00:38.840 | that we're not just talking about Israel being a nice Jewish boy, minding its own business over there.

02:00:43.560 | Kind of like in some cliche or narrative, we're talking about an absolutely ruthless state that is

02:00:48.840 | in the process of trying to get rid of millions of people. They wish they hadn't kidnapped back in 1967.

02:00:55.320 | And we can do a whole bit on that, but they are put themselves in a very difficult position.

02:01:00.040 | And so they need our help to a very great degree. Now, from all that we've discussed here today,

02:01:06.600 | does it sound like I'm saying the Israelis and their lobby are behind every single thing in American

02:01:10.760 | policy and what we're doing here? Like, that's not at all what I'm talking about. Zbigniew Brzezinski

02:01:14.840 | is not the Israel lobby at all. He's Rockefeller's guy. And that's a separate group of guys, right?

02:01:21.160 | Um, and so go ahead.

02:01:23.160 | Just, uh, um, I'm really sorry for missing

02:01:27.720 | the two mentions that you're referring to. You know, people can search in the transcript or Jew,

02:01:32.840 | it appears, I guess, a couple of times. And that's what you're referring to.

02:01:36.040 | Um, your back and forth argument actually came about 15 minutes after that moment

02:01:42.520 | because you kind of were patiently waiting. I had to get back to it kind of thing.

02:01:45.320 | Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there's no disrespect, man. And I really apologize if there's any,

02:01:49.160 | uh, hurt or any, anything like that cause. And it's true that the thing did really turn into

02:01:55.640 | an argument at that point. I mean, called Jim Loeb of all people, a vicious anti-Semite, which is just

02:02:00.520 | completely hilarious considering how Jewish Jim Loeb is and what an extraordinarily sweet and kind and

02:02:08.760 | decent gentleman. He is. This is the most ridiculous thing in the world. When we were on the curb outside

02:02:13.320 | arguing, he said, JJ Goldberg of the Jewish daily forward also is a vicious anti-Semite because he

02:02:21.000 | wrote something that explained the difference between Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon's positions

02:02:25.320 | on Iraq and Iran. In other words, Mark Dubious, Mark Dubowitz is very dubious. He is, uh, not a serious

02:02:31.800 | man. He's in a sense, not really a man as much as just a foreign agent representing a position on behalf

02:02:38.440 | of a foreign power. And as I said, in that debate, do you think, and I mean this, honestly,

02:02:42.600 | for anyone listening, you don't have to answer, but does anyone think that Mark Dubowitz really regrets

02:02:48.120 | that Americans died on September 11th because of what Israel was doing? He would hide behind,

02:02:55.400 | no, they hate us cause we're free. No, maybe he'd say they were mad about our presence in Saudi Arabia,

02:03:01.080 | but he would never say, yeah, but that's cause Martin Indyk said so. And that's because, and,

02:03:05.960 | and the Khanna massacre helped motivated Mohammed Atta. He just elide that point,

02:03:11.000 | just like all Israel lobbyists would, how could they justify, you know?

02:03:14.600 | I wish I knew the animosity you have from Mark Dubowitz. Cause I was part of my,

02:03:19.800 | I'm not very good at this, the moderator thing, but I was very confused by the animosity in the room.

02:03:25.000 | Well, and it's the dishonesty too. Even if I just met him that day,

02:03:27.800 | like everything out of his mouth was some kind of twisted fact. Like, yes, there was a Khobar tower

02:03:33.080 | attack, but you're going to blame that on the Ayatollah when it was Bin Laden that did that.

02:03:36.680 | And we all know that that's true. So don't sit here and try to give me some pro Israel,

02:03:41.800 | you know, my truth. There's only the truth. And Mark Dubowitz is not associated with it. He has an

02:03:47.800 | agenda. And, but you're right that I should have made that clear that what this is, is this is a

02:03:52.840 | foreign lobbyist trying to get America to serve a foreign nation. And I am the guy from America and

02:04:00.040 | Antiwar.com trying to fend him off. And look, and I, I, I accept too that I ain't so mature for a 49 year

02:04:09.320 | old, whatever 48. Then I was, I was a very immature 48 at the time, but I lose my temper very quickly

02:04:14.920 | when people lie. I just can't stand it. I just don't have time to listen to people being willfully

02:04:20.440 | dishonest to me or in front of me, you know? Yeah. And I'm glad we got a chance to clear that up.

02:04:25.320 | We're going to go hard and, and for as long as needed. Great. And yeah, I, no hard feelings at

02:04:31.240 | all, man. I'm glad we worked it out too. Do we, do we go to Iraq war two first?

02:04:35.800 | Well, let's see, wait, let's, let's stay on Bill Clinton in the nineties for a minute because

02:04:39.000 | you know, we're talking about the neocons got brought up in the, in the sense that they did

02:04:44.440 | help to encourage Iraq war one. Although I don't think there were the real, you know, kingpins

02:04:48.600 | behind it or whatever, in the way that they were in Iraq war two. Um, and then the doctrine of global

02:04:53.720 | dominance that Wolfowitz developed, you know, in 92, that became more or less the standard for foreign

02:04:59.160 | policy thought and through the nineties. Um, and then, but during the Clinton years, it's really

02:05:05.480 | important to mention that Bill Clinton backed the Mujahideen, even though they were already attacking us

02:05:12.040 | in the United States and American targets overseas. Bill Clinton kept backing them in Bosnia, Kosovo,

02:05:18.760 | and in Chechnya. And to a greater degree than I understood. Now, mostly this means working with

02:05:23.960 | the Saudis and the Brits to support them. And including bin Laden himself was seen by at least

02:05:29.800 | four credible journalists in Begovic's office, the president of Bosnia and Sarajevo in 1990, I guess,

02:05:37.800 | four. Um, and, and his men fought there and Bill Clinton knew it. And Richard Holbrook said we could

02:05:44.840 | have never won without their help and all these kinds of things. I've got all the sources in the

02:05:48.520 | latest book provoked. I go into much further detail about this, even then in the terror war book enough

02:05:53.560 | already. Um, and, and, and the same was true in Chechnya too. And essentially, and as we've seen,

02:05:59.800 | you know, this from just your own recent memory, right? That as we've seen

02:06:03.800 | in Syria as well, that as long as the bin Ladenites are killing Serbs or Russians or Shiites,

02:06:10.760 | then it's cool. And that's what America and Britain and Saudi use them for. And so even though their

02:06:18.280 | first attack in the United States was Rabbi Kahane in 1990, the leader of the Koch party, who's a very

02:06:24.280 | right wing Israeli rabbi who advocated for the extermination or expulsion of all Palestinians from

02:06:30.520 | all of historic Palestine and his party had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being fascist

02:06:36.440 | and was banned from Israeli politics. But he was a radical rabbi lived in New York, I believe. And he was

02:06:42.600 | assassinated in 1990 by a guy who was part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Now this is, that was their first hit.

02:06:47.800 | In 92, they hit us at a hotel in Aden, Yemen. Then in 93, they did the first world trade center attack.

02:06:54.840 | Now, as we're dwelling on this one for a second, because Bill Clinton had just been present for a

02:06:59.240 | month and a week. It was the end of February, February 26, 1993. And the truck bomb, they parked

02:07:05.960 | it in the wrong place. It could have toppled one tower over into the other. It could have just that

02:07:11.400 | truck bomb without another one. If they had put it in the wrong place, it could have toppled one tower over

02:07:17.480 | into the other at five o'clock in the afternoon. Right. And so, and then from there into more and

02:07:23.080 | more towers, who knows, like there could have been tens and tens and tens of thousands of people killed.

02:07:28.920 | And it almost worked. And the thing is about that, a couple of things. First of all, the CIA had allowed

02:07:34.600 | these guys into the country when INS wanted to keep them out because they said, we know these guys,

02:07:39.000 | they're our friends from the Afghan war. We don't mind them and let them in. So they're all living in

02:07:42.600 | Brooklyn and dangerous terrorists. Then the second thing was that the FBI had a walk-in informant,

02:07:49.960 | a guy named Imad Salem, who was an Egyptian army intelligence officer, former one. And he had been

02:07:56.840 | recruited by them and he allowed them to recruit him to be the bomb maker. You can trust me. I'm a

02:08:03.320 | military guy. I can make the bomb. He said, then he went to the FBI, said, I've been recruited by some

02:08:08.680 | terrorists to make a bomb. And there were two agents who believed him, Floyd, uh, and Anticef,

02:08:14.920 | Nancy Floyd and John Anticef, where the agents work in the case. And the plan was they were going to use

02:08:21.400 | him to use an inert powder, make a fake bomb. And it'd be a perfect sting. But the thing is, their boss

02:08:27.960 | was a guy named Carson Dunbar. And he would not, he, in fact, demanded they cut his pay, the informant's

02:08:33.000 | pay from 500 to $300 a week and demanded he wear a wire on the floor of the mosque where he, you know,

02:08:39.080 | while he's staying, he's sleeping on the floor of the mosque with these guys. He can't wear a wire,

02:08:42.600 | right? So he ends up bugging out and says, I think the FBI is onto me and bugs out. Then they brought in

02:08:47.960 | Ramsey Youssef, the guy who built the bomb, the real bomb, the real terrorist who came in. And, uh, again,

02:08:56.200 | almost toppled one tower over the end of the other. Problem is a couple of things. Only six people died.

02:09:02.120 | That's a lot of people. If you're one of the six or the survivors of the six, right? I'm not saying

02:09:06.120 | that, but I'm saying in the imagination of the American people, it was kind of just not that

02:09:11.960 | big of a deal. And New York city is pretty far from here. And just people were not feeling it nearly as

02:09:16.760 | much as say, for example, both of them collapsing with 3000 people inside still. Right. So then also two

02:09:24.120 | days later, the ATF raided the branch Davidians and thus began a six weeks long siege of this religious

02:09:30.280 | group, a hundred miles up the road from here, who ultimately the FBI and the army Delta force

02:09:35.080 | massacred, uh, on April the 19th, 93. So the American people's attention was just completely

02:09:40.600 | diverted and Clinton's too. This is his whole first hundred days. It's all bogged down in Waco and this

02:09:45.320 | kind of thing. So, and who wants to learn a bunch of Arab names and all of this stuff. It just to the FBI

02:09:52.280 | agents, they didn't do a very good job of falling up and, and, and preventing the same group from

02:09:58.360 | carrying out things. Now they had, I think I don't really know enough about this. I need to go back and

02:10:02.600 | reread about the Holland tunnels plot, the UN building and all that. I think that was the setup where they

02:10:06.920 | were trying to get the rest of these guys in a sting basically on that, that part of the plot. Um, but, um,

02:10:14.760 | in 1995, the bin Ladenites attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi national guard.

02:10:22.280 | And in 1996, they blew up the Khobar towers in, um, Dharan Saudi Arabia. And that was a truck bombing that

02:10:33.000 | killed 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq. And that was who was the target. But then

02:10:42.440 | what happened was the Saudi kingdom in alliance with the corrupt criminal Louis free, of course,

02:10:47.560 | the director of the federal intelligence agency, uh, federal Bureau of investigation. Um, they who

02:10:53.080 | were in charge, not CIA, they had the, the mandate to treat all these, uh, Al Qaeda taxes crimes as they

02:10:59.400 | are crimes under federal code. So it was FBI took the lead at that time. And Louis free wanted to believe

02:11:06.120 | the story that somehow it was Iranian backed Shiite Saudi Hezbollah that had done the attack because of

02:11:13.880 | course, the Saudi monarchy hates their Shiite majority. And they just happened to live right

02:11:17.240 | on top of where all the oil is. And they didn't want to blame it on bin Laden who was, you know,

02:11:22.280 | adjacent to the Royal family and who they wanted to take care of themselves, et cetera. And so they blamed

02:11:28.280 | it on Iran, but it was bin Laden who did it. And the FBI agent in charge, John O'Neill knew that it was

02:11:34.920 | them who did it. His enemy, Michael Scheuer from the CIA also knew that it was bin Laden who did it.

02:11:40.360 | And bin Laden himself bragged about it to, uh, uh, uh, Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of Al Quds al-Arabi in

02:11:47.720 | London and named the names of the martyrs and celebrated them and said, that's exactly right.

02:11:53.560 | Are you listening now? And all of these things about it, it was Al Qaeda that did that. Then in 1998,

02:11:59.080 | they hit the African embassies and in, um, 2000, they hit the USS Cole. They had bailed on an attack

02:12:06.200 | against the USS, the Sullivan's, uh, the dinghy sank, and then they hit the coal, killed 17 sailors

02:12:10.840 | and Aiden in 2000. So this is, uh, these attacks are building up and these are building up and building

02:12:16.360 | up in the run up to September 11th. And then the whole time they're saying exactly why they're doing

02:12:23.160 | this. So we know their motive and they're also saying their strategy, their strategy is to provoke

02:12:30.040 | us into invading Afghanistan. They're going to replicate. They're going to give us our own

02:12:35.720 | Afghanistan, the way we gave the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. And Bin Laden said repeatedly,

02:12:42.680 | the point was to provoke us into overreacting, to bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy, break our empire on

02:12:50.920 | the rocks of Afghanistan, the same way we had helped them do to the USSR. And so then W. Bush, when he was

02:12:59.640 | elected, his son, Bin Laden's son gave an interview to Rolling Stone in 2010, where he says, I was in

02:13:05.960 | Afghanistan with my father. And when Bush was elected in 2000, my father was so happy. He said, this is the

02:13:14.200 | kind of president he needs one who will attack and spend money and break the country. He said, this is in

02:13:22.440 | 2010. So Bin Laden's still alive. He says, Bill Clinton sent missiles after my father and didn't get him.

02:13:27.720 | But now you spent 10 years in Afghanistan and you still haven't gotten them. America used to be smart,

02:13:34.120 | not like the bull that runs after the red scarf. Okay. So that was the strategy was to get America to

02:13:44.120 | kill itself, to get us to strap on the suicide vest. Get the irony of the whole thing. How is a group of

02:13:53.240 | 400 bandits hiding out in Nangarhar province supposed to bring down the empire? The answer is you give the

02:14:02.200 | empire an excuse to exploit. It's not that George Bush is stupid and innocent. It's that he's stupid and

02:14:09.720 | guilty, right? You know, it's not that Bin Laden thought, oh, here's a guy who's such a super patriot

02:14:16.360 | that he'll go the extra mile. He looked at Bush said, here's a guy who's a corrupt, evil, narrow-minded,

02:14:23.160 | short-sighted idiot of a criminal who will exploit a crisis to the nth degree if I give him one.

02:14:30.280 | And that's what I'm trying to do. And which by the way, consider the collectivism of Osama Bin Laden,

02:14:37.800 | who considers that there's no limit apparently on the number of Afghans that he can get killed in his

02:14:43.720 | plan here when he ain't from there, right? He's trying to provoke a war with the superpower

02:14:48.760 | against a regime that's allowed him to stay and against a people who did nothing to him or to us,

02:14:53.720 | right? A people, I hate that, but some people, millions of people who did nothing to us whatsoever.

02:14:59.640 | And he put them in our crosshairs on what? The idea, well, God will sort them out. They'll go to

02:15:03.800 | paradise if they believe well. And so who cares about them? And which was something that was a big

02:15:08.680 | problem with Mullah Omar, where Mullah Omar, despite the narrative, actually hated and feared Osama

02:15:14.760 | Bin Laden and wanted rid of him and was trying to negotiate to get rid of him. Because as Murray

02:15:19.480 | Rothbard says, a radical becomes conservative the day he captures the capital city, right? And so Mullah

02:15:26.120 | Omar didn't want a world revolution like, you know, uh, Osama Bin Lenin, right? He wasn't interested in

02:15:33.400 | that he was interested in holding down Afghanistan. He'd already won most of the country. He hadn't

02:15:37.800 | finished winning it all yet. And he wasn't trying to get in a fight with America, which Bill Clinton

02:15:42.840 | had supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996, had encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to encourage

02:15:49.720 | the Taliban to go all the way to Kabul. And in fact, wanted them to not even settle with the Northern

02:15:55.480 | Alliance, wanted to see an outright victory against the Northern Alliance because they wanted the Taliban to

02:16:01.160 | have total control, a monopoly on the entire state so they could build an oil pipeline from Tajikistan

02:16:07.240 | across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Now they abandoned this project after 98, after the embassy bombings of 98.

02:16:13.800 | People sometimes say that's why Bush invaded in 01 or whatever. No, that wasn't it. But that is why Bill

02:16:20.520 | Clinton supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996 in the first place. And they said, well, we figured there

02:16:25.560 | will be an Amir and no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that. That was the

02:16:31.800 | Bill Clinton administration is what they said about that, right? So in Ahmed Rashid's book, the Taliban

02:16:36.600 | has all that stuff in it. And I quote him at length in my books. And so what was the point of that? Screwing

02:16:41.800 | the Russians, figuring out a way to get hydrocarbons out of the Caspian basin without having to go through

02:16:46.440 | Russia or Iran. And so that was part of that whole game, which we'll have to talk about that later in the Cold War

02:16:51.880 | segment here. Um, but that's part where these stories overlap a bit now. Um, so it's important

02:16:59.960 | to bring up to that during this time, the cliche in the Pentagon, among the joint staff who are the

02:17:07.000 | most important policy planners for the Pentagon, they had a cliche that said, terrorism is a small

02:17:13.960 | price to pay for being a superpower, right? What are they going to do? They're going to set off a truck

02:17:19.160 | bomb here or there. They're going to kill a few hundred people here or there. Look at the

02:17:22.360 | Africa embassies is mostly Africans who died. And so the, I don't think that they thought that losing

02:17:31.400 | a couple of towers full of a couple of thousand people would be a small price to pay. I think

02:17:35.560 | they weren't not imagining that level of consequence, but after all they did have to hijack our airliners to

02:17:43.080 | have something to crash into anything. We are talking about a stateless group of essentially

02:17:48.280 | penniless bandits, right? Who have millions of dollars, not billions, much less trillions,

02:17:53.160 | right? These are, these were criminals, right? Outlaws terrorists. So they had no ability to truly

02:18:01.640 | bring us down. They had to, and of course the analogy to Pearl Harbor is perfect because 3000 people died

02:18:07.880 | in a sneak attack. What more do you need to know? And I kind of like to harp on this. Not that I ever really

02:18:14.200 | like studied psychology more than a couple of semesters in junior college, but it seems probably

02:18:18.360 | meaningful, right? That in the images, the planes literally come out of the clear blue sky, right?

02:18:25.720 | And so, geez, I guess I don't know what's behind this. Someone explain it. It's just like tabula rasa,

02:18:32.680 | man, go ahead and let me know what I'm supposed to think about this. I'm shocked and I'm completely

02:18:38.120 | surprised said, you know, of course people knew a lot about this. We're very worried about it, of course,

02:18:43.480 | but for the average American, and this was the meaning of the term blowback, by the way, as Chalmers

02:18:48.600 | Johnson explained, and it was coined in Donald Wilbur, who was a CIA historian in his after action report

02:18:55.400 | about the coup in Iran. He said, well, CIA officers are going to have to be very careful about blowback

02:19:01.240 | coming down the line from operations like this. And then as Johnson explained, what it really meant was not just

02:19:07.080 | consequences because you can just have a funny term for consequences, but blowback meant the long-term

02:19:12.520 | consequences of secret foreign policies. So that when they come due, the American people don't understand

02:19:19.320 | what it means. Why are the Iranians burning our flag? Why are the Bin Ladenites crashing into our towers?

02:19:25.560 | Somebody tell us because we don't know. And when the answer is, well, it's actually all our fault,

02:19:30.920 | then the security force, our national government will not tell us that. In fact, they'll make up a lie and say,

02:19:36.280 | Islam makes them hate us because we love our mamas and Jesus so much. And then people go, oh man,

02:19:41.640 | what a terrible psychopathic. I didn't realize Islam was that bad of a religion. We better have to fight

02:19:47.240 | all of them now if that's what it does to you. It's radical Islam. See, once you believe in Islam hard

02:19:52.600 | enough, it turns you into a suicide bomber and makes you hate North Americans. There is no other cause and

02:19:58.280 | effect that you guys need to be aware of. And people might not remember this, but boy, did they push it

02:20:04.840 | that fall that the Taliban had done it. Al-Qaeda was the Taliban. The Taliban was Al-Qaeda.

02:20:11.800 | You mean 2001? Yeah. Yeah. That they were Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

02:20:16.520 | And they conflated them together so powerfully, but then this became a reason why people were just so

02:20:21.720 | doubtful about the entire narrative because they're going, what do you mean a bunch of cavemen

02:20:25.400 | from the town of Bedrock out there in Kandahar province? Did this to us because they don't like

02:20:31.800 | that we have a bill of rights? Like that obviously is not true. So what is the truth? And then people

02:20:37.880 | come up with endless answers other than the obvious one, which is America has a really bad Middle East

02:20:44.920 | policy and Israel is a real big part of that. That's the answer is blowback. Again, Egyptians

02:20:51.480 | volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel is doing to the Lebanese.

02:20:56.840 | It's a little bit complicated, but not that complicated if you want to be honest. But at the

02:21:01.800 | end, what is it? It's all George Bush's father's and Bill Clinton's fault, right? And so what are

02:21:08.600 | they going to do? I remember being, I was sitting in Chicago and 9/11 happened. I remember being

02:21:13.000 | really confused in the months after, in the hours and the days and the months after with all the

02:21:18.040 | narratives that were coming out. It didn't quite make sense. A lot of the things, it almost felt

02:21:23.480 | like they're improvising with different stories that will convince the American people. And I remember

02:21:29.160 | being extremely confused Iraq. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Saddam Hussein here, they're trying to see who can we

02:21:35.800 | create the evil guy out of Al-Qaeda, Taliban. And then they just ran with it. Can you, can you just,

02:21:46.840 | can you break that down? What the different lies that ended up sticking that were used to must lead

02:21:55.320 | us into the war? Yeah. Well, so on Afghanistan, it's clear that the CIA and Connelly's arise.

02:22:03.000 | And we know this, not that Bob Woodward is really trustworthy, but he published supposedly verbatim,

02:22:08.600 | verbatim transcripts from the National Security Council meetings in his book, Bush at War. And so we know from

02:22:15.400 | those National Security Council meetings that Connelly's arise in the CIA, we're advising that

02:22:19.720 | we try our best to divide the Taliban from Al-Qaeda and let the Taliban know we don't have a fight with

02:22:25.960 | you. We're just after these Arabs that hit us. In fact, it's very important. The Taliban tried to warn us

02:22:32.600 | that the attack was coming and were essentially turned away. They warned the UN in Pakistan and they sent a

02:22:38.280 | guy to the United States and he was denied a meeting at State Department at all and went home.

02:22:43.000 | And they only knew it was true because that an attack was coming because they had learned it

02:22:48.920 | from a Tajik jihadist or a, I believe a Tajik who was one of their informants basically told them,

02:22:54.840 | bin Laden didn't tell Mullah Omar. In the summer of 2001, Mullah Omar had told Arnaud Debargrave from the

02:23:01.880 | Washington Times, he said, "Bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat. I can neither swallow him nor spit

02:23:07.400 | him out." And Milton Bearden, who had helped run the CIA covert war in the 1980s, told the Washington Post,

02:23:13.160 | Post. We've been negotiating with Mullah Omar over bin Laden since '98. After the Africa embassy attack,

02:23:20.840 | Omar said, "I gotta get rid of this guy." And he ordered bin Laden, "Don't you do any more attacks

02:23:25.000 | against the United States." And bin Laden had promised him that he wouldn't and then kept attacking anyway.

02:23:29.160 | And, um, so Mullah Omar, this is the dictator of the Taliban ruling regime in, in, in Afghanistan.

02:23:38.760 | Uh, Milton Bearden said that the Taliban would tell the CIA, "Oh, bin Laden? Geez, you know,

02:23:46.200 | we lost track of him today. He's out falconing in the countryside somewhere. We don't know where he is."

02:23:50.760 | And then the Americans would pound their fist on the table and say, "We said, hand him over."

02:23:56.280 | When that's what he just said, was go ahead and kill him. He's outside of our protection right now.

02:24:02.200 | And if you were to murder him, it would not be our fault. Take your best drone strike. Take the best

02:24:08.360 | hint. That's Milton Bearden talking about. That's where I got this from. Okay. The Taliban hated

02:24:12.920 | this dude. He was nothing but trouble and they wanted rid of him. And remember what Bush said,

02:24:16.760 | no negotiations, hand him over. They said, well, come on, give us some evidence and we'll hold a

02:24:23.880 | proceeding here. And Bush said, no way, give them over. And Colin Powell at one point said, well,

02:24:28.760 | we will come up with evidence. We will accuse them of this. We'll show you. And then they're like, no,

02:24:32.280 | no evidence. Um, they, the Taliban said, well, tell you what, let us give them over to any Muslim country in

02:24:38.200 | the world, which of course, you know, it could be Malaysia or Indonesia or Jordan or Egypt who are

02:24:43.080 | going to do exactly what they're told by the United States. He's going to land on the tarmac and he's

02:24:47.240 | going to go straight to Virginia. Give me a break, right? Um, nope, not good enough. Then he started

02:24:55.320 | bombing on December the 8th and the Taliban said, okay, we have no more conditions. We're willing to

02:25:00.680 | give them up. If you'll just stop the bombing. Bush said, too little, too late. No. And kept the war going.

02:25:06.600 | And then why, why, why the Occam's razor answers. You can't read the guy's mind. There's so much

02:25:12.440 | circumstantial evidence about the thinking at the time. And this was going to what I was saying about

02:25:16.920 | CIA and rice said, we should just bomb Al Qaeda and not the Taliban. Donald Rumsfeld overruled them

02:25:21.880 | said, no, we need to take the bite to the Taliban. We need to keep the Afghan war going on because we

02:25:29.400 | want the American people to understand. He actually proposed that we should bomb Baghdad now so that the

02:25:35.800 | American people understand the war on terrorism is not over if we kill bin Laden and it ain't lost.

02:25:43.240 | If we don't, the war is much bigger than him. And it's going to take place over a vast space and a

02:25:49.640 | vast period of time. And we want the American people to know that this is not ending anytime soon. We're

02:25:57.720 | going to Baghdad. It's going to take a while to build up the force in Kuwait. And they hoped Turkey, which didn't

02:26:03.720 | work out, but in order to go. And so if we kill bin Laden now, or even if we do, we want to make sure

02:26:11.240 | the American people know that the war is not over yet. And I believe, and I make the case in both books

02:26:17.240 | and probably better in the second one, um, fool's Aaron and enough already that they let bin Laden go.

02:26:25.080 | The CIA and the Delta force on the ground were begging for reinforcements and reinforcements

02:26:30.360 | were available. There were tens of thousands of Rangers or at least what 10,000 Rangers or something

02:26:35.560 | at Bagram air base, North of Kabul. The green berets were fighting the Taliban up in Mazar-e-Sharif.

02:26:40.600 | The 75th airborne Rangers who are top tier special operations forces considered right with Delta and

02:26:46.600 | Navy SEALs were available in Kandahar province. And general Mattis was there with 10,000 marching Marines.

02:26:54.040 | And he could have told them 10 hoot go now. And they had helicopters, but even then they

02:26:59.960 | were like 40 miles away. Yeah. It's mountains. So what? Right. And they were not allowed to go

02:27:05.560 | and to seal the border. And the CIA and the Delta force are like, man, we got them cornered on three

02:27:10.360 | sides. The fourth side is the Pakistani border. They're going to get away. We need more men in the military.

02:27:17.720 | They did a congressional investigation. They just said they had a plan. It's called block and sweep.

02:27:21.800 | Make sure you get everybody in between here and here. Right. And that's exactly how you do it.

02:27:27.320 | And the Delta force guys and the CIA guys, uh, namely, uh, Thomas Greer, uh, AKA Dalton Fury in

02:27:33.880 | his book, kill bin Laden and Gary Bernson in his book, jawbreaker talk about how they just could not

02:27:40.920 | understand why they could not get the support that they wanted. And, um, and, um, Bernson talks about

02:27:48.440 | how his boss at CIA went and laid out the desk in, uh, the map and on the desk on Ron Susskind writes

02:27:54.760 | about this too, that they showed Bush the map and said, we need more men for this. And they were denied

02:28:01.880 | the men that they needed. And then what, and think about this your whole life ever since then talk about

02:28:05.720 | confusing narratives from that time. How about this one, dude? How about as soon as bin Laden and his

02:28:10.840 | friends crossed the border into Pakistan on December the 17th, Delta force is not allowed to chase them.

02:28:16.920 | Why? They always say the same thing. I bet you do like a Lexus nexus thing from back then and find

02:28:23.480 | how many times they use the term bin Laden and his men slipped across the border. And then once that happened,

02:28:30.920 | it's like they jumped into hyperspace and got away. Once that happened, they crossed the semi permeable

02:28:35.880 | membrane that only terrorists can cross, but that the Delta force top tier army, special operations

02:28:41.160 | forces cannot cross into a friendly allied country of ours, Pakistan. And where we know from Robert

02:28:48.680 | Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad and his book, 88 days to Kandahar, he had already made

02:28:55.240 | arrangements with the Pakistani army and frontier corps that we expect the bin Ladenites to come

02:29:00.520 | fleeing across the border. And we expect Americans to be hot on their tail in pursuit. And so they set

02:29:06.440 | up de-confliction so that the Pakistanis would not accidentally kill the Americans because they were

02:29:11.160 | expected to come. They were not allowed to cross the border and give chase. And Dalton Furious, man,

02:29:16.280 | this is amazing too. And maybe someone in your audience can find the full thing, but I went on a

02:29:22.200 | deep dive, trying to find the full 60 minutes episode with Dalton Fury. And I can only find severely

02:29:28.520 | edited ones, but his name is Thomas Greer is his real name. And he's wearing a disguise and everything.

02:29:34.360 | And he does a thing with Scott Pelley and man, they edit it because the important part that I'm looking

02:29:39.560 | for is where he says we had all these plans to follow them into Pakistan. We have Chinook helicopters. We were

02:29:46.520 | going to go over them and then meet them coming back the other way. We were going to drop landmines and

02:29:52.920 | there are only three valleys out of there that they could have taken. We were going to drop mines. That was

02:29:56.600 | going to slow them down. So they knew exactly how to kill the bin Laden and they were told to stand up.

02:30:00.440 | And they were not allowed by Donald Rumsfeld in the military to go further. And even we have W. Bush and Dick Cheney

02:30:06.520 | both implicate in this too, in that Susskind book where they, and Bernson, I believe it talks about

02:30:10.200 | this in his book too, where Thomas Greer is the guy who wrote killed bin Laden and was on 60 minutes.

02:30:15.320 | He was the Lieutenant Colonel in the Delta force in charge there. And then Gary Bernson was the guy on

02:30:22.280 | the scene who wrote the book Jawbreaker. And then his boss was Henry Crumpton. And he was the guy who had

02:30:27.960 | laid the map out onto Bush's desk and said, we need more men and was denied by Bush himself. So it might be

02:30:34.200 | nice to blame just Rumsfeld, but it was the president himself who refused to commit the

02:30:37.880 | forces necessary to get bin Laden. And it is just a circumstantial case. I don't have a direct quote

02:30:43.400 | of any of these people saying this, but it seems pretty clear to me that they decided that they

02:30:47.720 | would prefer that bin Laden go. So that like in the book 1984, they would have Emmanuel Goldstein,

02:30:53.000 | the enemy, the wrecker, the saboteur out there, the danger who could still kill you. He's not gone yet.

02:30:58.200 | W. Bush used to love to say, imagine Saddam Hussein giving bin Laden's hijackers chemical weapons.

02:31:07.240 | Imagine September 11th, only this time armed by Saddam Hussein. Well, bin Laden's already dead.

02:31:13.720 | And the American, the American people by and large believe that that's what you get for messing with us,

02:31:18.360 | pal. We win, you lose, and it's over by Christmas. Well, then how the hell are we going to go to Baghdad?

02:31:24.600 | I'm saying, take us a year and a half to build up the forces and to make people's mom and dad scared

02:31:31.160 | enough to think that we need to do this. We have a massive propaganda campaign to wage here.

02:31:36.040 | And here's where we get right back into the neoconservatives. Again, in March of 2002,

02:31:41.800 | Justin Raimondo wrote a piece at antiwar.com and it's called our hijacked foreign policy.

02:31:48.120 | Neocons take Washington. Baghdad is next. And Justin was a brilliant genius. And because he was a

02:31:56.600 | libertarian, he had a long time ideological axe to grind and personal enemy relationship with these

02:32:05.320 | neocons. You know, us libertarians, we really are their polar opposite on so many things. And he called

02:32:13.560 | it the axis of crystal there, the little Lenin of the neoconservative movement. And he he's here

02:32:20.760 | citing benevolent global hegemony is the actual quote. He kind of got that a little wrong. It's

02:32:25.080 | Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote this article in foreign affairs in 1996 toward a neo Reaganite

02:32:31.640 | foreign policy, where they say we have to have benevolent global hegemony. And that's what he's

02:32:35.960 | talking about there. And he's talking about the few people. And I have to tell you, man, I was really

02:32:40.200 | interested in foreign policy politics and all these things for many years leading up to this.

02:32:44.120 | But if you just asked me what's a Republican, I would have said Houston, right? James Baker,

02:32:48.200 | the third, right? Dark Lord of the Sith lawyer for Exxon. That's what conservatism is, is big business,

02:32:55.800 | right? It's, you know, I don't know what else, what I knew who Bill Kristol was, but I didn't know who

02:33:00.120 | he was. Right. I knew there was the weekly standard. I knew they were crazy after Saddam Hussein. I didn't

02:33:05.560 | know why, and I didn't look enough into it leading up to then. It's so interesting to,

02:33:10.840 | uh, sorry to interrupt, but sort of the lens of this analysis in 2020, to go back and read some of this.

02:33:17.960 | You need to go back and read all of Justin from 1999, all the way through, get yourself a rainy day.

02:33:25.800 | You can stop about halfway through Obama, probably. But man, at this time, he was the most important

02:33:32.360 | writer for America as neglected as he was. There was nobody better at what was happening to this

02:33:37.720 | country at that time. Even from just a brief glasses, I could see the cutting wit and the

02:33:42.520 | brilliance and the humor. You know what he was? He was a big gay,

02:33:45.720 | Pat Buchanan. He's big gay Archie Bunker from San Francisco, right? He was, he, he was a right winger

02:33:52.520 | and a paleo libertarian, but like Buchananite leaning. He gave Pat Buchanan's nomination speech

02:33:57.720 | for the reform party in 1999. And, and he's, you know, a right wing libertarian, but he is what he

02:34:06.280 | is. He's at where he's at. And so it sounds kind of ironical or whatever. Why would a gay guy like

02:34:10.920 | Pat Buchanan so much? And it's because Pat Buchanan at that time, his reputation was very much the

02:34:16.200 | culture war and very much like gay people should still stay in the closet and things like that.

02:34:21.000 | And so Justin was like, I don't care about that. What matters is the world empire. And then even here,

02:34:27.400 | he's a right winger too. It's not that he's a liberal and he found a, found a right winger that

02:34:32.120 | he likes. It's that Patrick Buchanan is like the perfect kindred spirit, even though you might think

02:34:37.320 | not, but Justin was from Queens and he was from that era, you know, raised in the 1950s and sixties.

02:34:43.800 | He was a crusty old paleo con in his way. And, um, and that was why he was so good. And when I first

02:34:50.680 | started reading him, I remember saying even to my friends, how does this guy know all this stuff?

02:34:55.800 | It's just unbelievable how plugged in he is. And he lives out in San Francisco, but he knows everything

02:35:00.520 | happening at every important think tank in Washington. And he knows the difference between

02:35:04.280 | them all. He knows who all these guys are and what their role is and who is whose mentor and student.

02:35:09.160 | And all of these things in a way is just unbelievable. And he had the neocons number,

02:35:14.760 | man. And yes, Iraq war two was their war. And it was mostly for Israel.

02:35:20.600 | I'm severely distracted by how, how hilarious his writing is.

02:35:24.360 | Uh, go ahead.

02:35:24.920 | I'm glancing. No, it's all right. It's all right. I won't, it'll be a rabbit hole that we're going,

02:35:28.680 | but he goes hard against the neoconservatives.

02:35:30.840 | Oh, so bad. And look, his first article was about the Kosovo war in 1999. And he goes after

02:35:36.360 | the neoconservatives right then and there from the very get go. He used to love to quote this guy.

02:35:41.720 | Um, uh, I believe David tall in the weekly standard said about slow, but on Milosevic that he better

02:35:49.320 | do what we say, or he knows we'll kick their skulls in. And he's like, yeah, this is who the neoconservatives

02:35:54.360 | are, dude. They're barbarians, essentially bill crystal's men quick pause. I'm sorry. I need another

02:36:00.200 | bathroom break. Uh, and then maybe you can get back to military industrial complex.

02:36:04.520 | Oh yeah. Okay. So before we get too far into Iraq war two and the neoconservatives,

02:36:09.720 | we need to decide whether we want to talk about the Afghanistan war now, or whether we want to come

02:36:14.680 | back and talk more about Afghanistan later, or maybe not even at all or whatever. You got to make that

02:36:19.640 | call. Cause there's plenty to talk about. There has a hugely important thing on the other hand,

02:36:24.200 | of course, and this is the same dilemma I faced when I was writing enough already. It's like, how much can I

02:36:29.480 | tell you about Afghanistan before I got to bring you to Iraq, which is the heart of the story that

02:36:34.920 | everybody's so interested in where most of the action takes place. It's on the other side of Iran

02:36:39.640 | from Afghanistan and Afghanistan remained on the margin throughout the whole thing, even though it's in

02:36:46.120 | itself, it was its own huge thing. So, but I leave that to you to like how far you want to get into that.

02:36:51.080 | And when I think Iraq specifically is a, is a, the deepest, the most thorough case study of the military

02:36:58.040 | industrial complex and the abuse of power. So as much as we can explore that, it's great. And I think it

02:37:03.160 | was really insightful. We described that right there in Afghanistan, uh, we could have gotten bin Laden.

02:37:12.120 | There's a lot of places where this did not have to go as long as it did. And that, that was, that highlights

02:37:19.240 | one clear moment. Yeah, it's a real tragedy. It really is. They could have negotiated and they

02:37:24.280 | could have killed them. And the whole thing really could have been over by Christmas. And by the way,

02:37:27.880 | Gary Burntzen said that he said that to the reporter, Michael Hirsch in 2016. He said,

02:37:32.920 | it's really sad when you think about it, how this thing could have all been over by Christmas.

02:37:36.760 | So that ain't just me. That's them. That's him. That's the guy who was the second CIA officer on scene,

02:37:44.520 | in charge who wrote, and you read his book. You know how editors do this sometimes when a CIA guy

02:37:48.920 | writes a book, they'll leave the redaction marks in the big black boxes because it's like good

02:37:54.040 | salesmanship to do that. Right. So when you read Gary Burntzen's book, he goes, and there I was,

02:38:00.040 | and me and my fellow CIA officers were talking about how frustrated we were that we could not understand

02:38:06.120 | why they wouldn't give us the reinforcements while he's getting away. And then the next four sentences

02:38:10.360 | are blacked out. It's like, you know, and then, and same thing for, for Dalton Fury, uh, Thomas Greer.

02:38:18.200 | So how do we get to Iraq? Let's do Iraq. Here's where we're going to start Iraq. First of all,

02:38:22.600 | Wolfowitz and all them wanted to go all the way to Baghdad in 1991 and senior told them, no,

02:38:28.440 | and stop short of that. Also let Saddam crush the Iraqi, uh, up the Shiite and Kurdish uprising.

02:38:35.480 | Then of course we have the status quo of Bill Clinton's containment policy, dual containment

02:38:39.560 | policy from Iraq, from Saudi Arabia against Iraq and Iran through the 1990s, sanctions,

02:38:44.600 | no fly zone bombings, and all of that. So in, and by the way, there are two failed CIA coups in 1995

02:38:51.480 | and 1996 against Saddam. Um, one of them was the one that got Robert Baer in so much trouble because he

02:38:57.240 | was working with Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile to try to overthrow Saddam. And it all went to hell

02:39:02.600 | because Chalabi was basically selling them. Uh, Chalabi was basically making a bunch of promises

02:39:09.240 | to them about how it would go. That of course did not work out at all. And so this is where the CIA

02:39:14.520 | first put their burn notice on him. So Ahmed Chalabi is this important Iraqi exile. He was a banker in

02:39:20.520 | Jordan who then fled the country because he was wanted for embezzling money. And here he was selling the CIA

02:39:28.120 | on all of his promises about what he could do in Iraq. And then he was not coming through.

02:39:33.400 | And so that's sort of a minor part of the story. But then in 1996, David Wormser, who's an important

02:39:41.480 | neoconservative, uh, in alliance with the more important neoconservative Richard Pearl and also

02:39:48.600 | Douglas Fythe, their fellow traveler. And I think there were two more people signed it. It may have been

02:39:53.880 | Charles Fairbanks Jr. And one other guy signed it too. I think, um, it was really Wormser and Pearl

02:39:59.960 | talking. Okay. And it's called a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm. Oh man, you know

02:40:07.400 | what hell, as long as we're doing this, we want to do this, right? Hell yeah. So we want to talk about

02:40:13.080 | Iraq War II, Lex. What we got to do is let's go back to the early 1990s and Yitzhak Rabin. Now, Israel

02:40:22.120 | had a strategy, as I said, being friends with Iran. At the same time, they're friends with Turkey and

02:40:27.720 | friends with Ethiopia. Why? This was called the strategy of the periphery in Israel. It meant, if you picture the

02:40:35.000 | map, okay, from Israel's perspective, we want to support Turkey to divide Syria's attention. We want

02:40:41.000 | to support Iran to divide Iraq's attention. And we want to support Ethiopia to divide Egypt's attention.

02:40:46.920 | Does that make sense? Geographically speaking? Yes.

02:40:49.720 | So Rabin says, nope, we're going to turn that upside down. And what we're going to do instead is we're

02:40:54.840 | going to negotiate with the Arabs, the closer states. And we're going to even make a deal with Yasser Arafat.

02:41:02.360 | And this is the Oslo peace process that Rabin started. Now, they weren't really going to give

02:41:07.720 | them an independent state. They were going to give them something like a shining on pseudo sort of kind

02:41:12.760 | of independent state, which actually probably would have been the best solution, right? Would be you have

02:41:17.400 | your local police forces, but we are in one country together kind of a thing. There are lots of states

02:41:22.760 | that are, have kind of complicated arrangements like that and pull it off. But anyway, this was Rabin's

02:41:30.200 | plan. But then a Netanyahu fan murdered him in 1995. This was when Shimon Perez took over. Now Shimon

02:41:38.920 | Perez had been the president. He's now promoted to prime minister and he continues the same policy.

02:41:44.520 | This is why, oh, I'm sorry, the, in the river, I should have mentioned in the reversal of the

02:41:49.240 | periphery doctrine and negotiating with the Arabs. Part of that was now turning on Iran and demonizing

02:41:56.280 | Iran because just for domestic political reasons in Israel, they were being had to be tough against

02:42:03.320 | somebody. So now it's Iran. That's the problem. And that's why we need to negotiate with the Arabs.

02:42:08.840 | Right. So, um, he makes that change in 1993. And in fact, there's a funny anecdote and treacherous

02:42:18.280 | alliance by Trita Parsi again, where the Clinton people were surprised and even laughed because

02:42:24.120 | what do you mean you hate Iran now? Last week, you were demanding that we like Iran along with you.

02:42:30.680 | Now you've changed your mind, but what happened? And all that happened was Israel changed their mind.

02:42:34.680 | They just had a different policy. Now it wasn't any particular thing that Iran had done at that

02:42:38.680 | point to cross their line. And so they just decided that this is important to do now. And so somebody's

02:42:45.640 | got to be the enemy. So now the enemy is going to be Shiite fundamentalist, Islam, revolutionary,

02:42:50.920 | Iranian, uh, threat. Um, and in fact, that's one, uh, one important Israeli strategist told Parsi,

02:42:57.880 | we needed new glue for the Alliance with the United States. Now that we don't have the Soviet Union

02:43:02.360 | anymore, why does America need us? And the answer is radical Islam. And of course that's great because

02:43:08.520 | you could be anybody, as long as you're Muslim, you can be called radical Islam. And it doesn't matter

02:43:14.120 | how radical or which sector, whose side you're on or anything, right? You could just do anything with

02:43:18.280 | that, right? For you apply that to Palestinians or anybody else. So that's a great one, like for

02:43:23.400 | propaganda wise, from the Israeli point of view. Um, and so then when Shimon Peres took over after

02:43:30.520 | Rabin was assassinated, he launched operation grapes of wrath, reinvading Lebanon as part of that same

02:43:36.200 | doctrine. See, we're going after the Shiites now. And that was again, the operation that motivated the

02:43:42.040 | lead hijacker of September 11th to join the jihad against us right there. Uh, that was why he did that

02:43:47.720 | was part of that same strategy, right? But then Shimon Peres's rule was short-lived and Benjamin Netanyahu

02:43:53.400 | first came in and became the prime minister of Israel for the first time in 1996. Okay.

02:43:58.040 | Now David Wormser and Richard Pearl write this study for him. It's called a clean break, a new

02:44:04.360 | strategy for securing the realm. Again, you can find that at scotthorton.org/fairuse. And in fact,

02:44:10.040 | I'm sure there are archive.org versions of it. You can find it was the, this Israeli think tank

02:44:15.160 | published it. It wasn't an American think tank. It was the Israeli center for strategic study or something

02:44:20.280 | like that. Um, posted it there. Um, yeah, it's posted on scotthorne.org/fairuse. A clean break,

02:44:27.560 | a new strategy of securing the realm by David Wormser, 1996. And the, the companion piece,

02:44:33.880 | as it says there is called coping with crumbling states, coping with crumbling states, a Western

02:44:39.320 | and Israeli balance of power strategy for the Levant by David Wormser, 1996. And both of these,

02:44:46.040 | well, certainly the first one is officially signed off on by Richard Pearl. And then I should have

02:44:52.360 | hot links on those. I'm not sure why I don't, but there are three related articles here by Loewenberg,

02:44:56.360 | Wormser, and, and Pearl promoting the same agenda in the newspapers there. Um,

02:45:01.880 | in the Washington times and the wall street journal. Okay. And they're called, uh, the ultimate peace

02:45:07.320 | process prize, justice, Saddam's power is under assault, balance of power, all three pieces. Yeah. And now

02:45:14.440 | there's even a book it's called tyranny's ally by David Wormser with a forward by Richard Pearl.

02:45:20.920 | They all say the same thing. Okay. What they say is that we're Israeli agents and Ahmed Jalabi

02:45:28.280 | sold us a bunch of crap and we bought it. And it's this magic theory about how overthrowing Saddam

02:45:37.080 | is going to be good for Israel. Now. Oh, don't let me leave out that as part of Israel's secret

02:45:45.480 | relationship with Iran through the 1980s or their friendship continuing through the 1980s and into

02:45:50.920 | the 1990s, they had a secret oil pipeline from the port of Aqaba, which I never say that right. I forget

02:45:57.240 | how to pronounce it right, but it's, we're talking about the Sinai peninsula and they're in the Red

02:46:01.560 | sea. Now on the Western side of the Sinai peninsula is the Suez canal and the gate to the Mediterranean

02:46:09.160 | sea on the Eastern side of the Sinai peninsula is the port of Aqaba there. Okay. And there was a secret

02:46:16.840 | oil pipeline that was run by Mark riches company. The guy that Bill Clinton pardoned on his last day in

02:46:21.560 | office who is this corrupt financier and oil industry guy. And he, his company had the secret pipeline

02:46:29.880 | where Iranian ships would come and drop off oil and it would then go through this pipeline to Israel,

02:46:35.000 | right? Well, once for being turned on Iran, when he turned the periphery strategy upside down,

02:46:41.640 | then the Iranians quit sending oil. In fact, it may not have been until 95 that they quit sending the oil

02:46:49.000 | because, um, Trita Parsi explains that Iran didn't start backing Hamas until 95, or at least maybe

02:46:58.120 | they had given them a little bit or something. It was, uh, they had given them very little until then.

02:47:02.200 | And so it was, it was provocations by Rabin against Iran had finally, after a year and a half of this or

02:47:08.600 | more, I believe if I'm remembering it, right. I don't think it was 93. I don't, I think it wasn't until 95

02:47:14.040 | that Iran finally said, fine. Then if you guys are going to be that way and stop shipping the oil in.

02:47:19.320 | So now this becomes a major interest of the neoconservatives and the Likud party.

02:47:23.640 | And Ahmed Chalabi understands very quickly that this is what these guys want to hear is that if

02:47:31.000 | America will put him and his friends in power in Iraq, they'll be friends with Israel. Now in the

02:47:37.000 | original clean break, they say they want to use the cousin of the King of Jordan, and they're going to

02:47:41.640 | put a Hashemite kingdom in their legs to rule Iraq. Now the magic theory here is that let's do a very,

02:47:49.240 | very elementary divide of the Sunnis and the Shiites here history lesson. Okay. The Shiites went off with

02:47:55.880 | Muhammad's family after he died. The Sunnis picked their own imams, right? So there's like kind of one

02:48:02.120 | hierarchy. It's a very, very, very inapt, but very crude comparison between the Protestants and the

02:48:08.600 | Catholics. There's one Shiite church basically right under the Ayatollahs and their system.

02:48:14.680 | Their inherited power through the bloodline and all of that on the Sunni side, they pick their own

02:48:19.320 | ministers, right? Like the Protestants, they have their own and do their, their many more sects and

02:48:24.200 | different kinds of Sunnis and that sort of deal. If that makes sense on the most basic level here. Okay.

02:48:28.920 | So, um, not that I'm saying the Shiites claim to be priests or anything like more analogous with the

02:48:35.400 | Catholic church. I'm not saying that I'm just saying there's this order of Ayatollahs the same way

02:48:39.640 | there are of the cardinals and whatever, if you understand. So the deal is this. Yes. The Shiites

02:48:46.600 | do revere their clergy leadership who are descended from Muhammad and evidently can prove it. I don't

02:48:52.920 | know, apparently. Right. And where are their black turbans? And that means that they share his bloodline

02:48:57.000 | and all that. Okay. Well, the Hashemites also declare themselves to be his descendants, whether that's

02:49:02.360 | true or not, whatever, fine. Take it for face granted. And it is, but they're Sunnis. So the thing is

02:49:08.760 | about the Shiites revering people with the blood of the prophet, their, their Shiite clergy. It doesn't

02:49:13.960 | mean that they consider them to be infallible dictators whose will is their law and all of these

02:49:19.960 | things. Like even the Pope says some things are my opinion, some things I'm speaking for the Lord,

02:49:24.520 | but sometimes I'm just saying, I think this is how it should be your way. You know what I mean? So,

02:49:28.360 | so the Ayatollahs do not exercise like a spell binding power over these people through mysticism and,

02:49:37.880 | and like irrational demands of religious fealty to their every order or whatever. Right. Like

02:49:44.280 | there's some much more consensual relationship than that or whatever. You know what I mean? It's not

02:49:49.400 | completely top-down sort of thing like that. And like where they have this magic spell of their bloodline

02:49:54.760 | then is like access hypnosis or whatever, or, or, or demands total obedience. That's just never been the

02:50:02.920 | implication of the thing. So Chalabi's just telling these guys, whatever they need to hear that if we

02:50:09.400 | put a Hashemite King in there, then he will be able to tell the Shiite clergy that they better stop being

02:50:17.000 | friends with Iran and that they better tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. And then Hezbollah will

02:50:24.200 | be friends with Israel. And then the Israelis can finish stealing Palestine without having to worry

02:50:31.400 | about Hezbollah causing them problems on their Northern flank. That's the clean break.

02:50:38.040 | Now here's the thing about this, man. Picture the region in your head a little bit, or pull up the map

02:50:43.720 | again, if you need to, you got, here's David Wormser's argument. Okay. He's saying Iran backs Hezbollah in

02:50:51.880 | Southern Lebanon by way of Syria. So what we want to do is get rid of Saddam Hussein, the secular Sunni,

02:51:01.720 | who's the roadblock to all this, right? Huh? Well, again, magic wish. What's going to happen is our

02:51:11.000 | Sunni King will just enslave the will of the Shiite super majority and they'll be our cat's paws and do

02:51:17.080 | whatever we want. And we'll Lord them over Iran. David Wormser said, Chalabi assures us that a democratic

02:51:24.680 | Shiite Iraq will be a nightmare for Iran because the Iranians will want to live like the Iraqis

02:51:31.880 | in their wonderful new, awesome super majority Shiite democracy. And so under the rule of their

02:51:37.560 | benevolent King or however, cause they ended up changing it a little bit, I guess, and emphasizing

02:51:41.720 | the democracy part more later, but still it would be a nightmare for Iran because what happened was,

02:51:46.520 | I think the King of Jordan died and was replaced. And they said, okay, forget that. We'll just put

02:51:50.360 | Chalabi in power himself. He'll be the guy that we put in now. Um, they also promised Chalabi promised

02:51:57.880 | the neoconservatives will build the oil pipeline from Northern Iraq to Haifa, Israel to make up for

02:52:04.840 | the pipeline that they just lost with the Iranians. Netanyahu bought this and David Wormser and Richard

02:52:11.560 | Pearl bought this. And this is one of the reasons, one of the major reasons that 4,500 Americans and

02:52:18.840 | a million Iraqis died in Iraq war II was so Israel could save a nickel, a barrel on Iraqi oil because

02:52:28.280 | their own policies had cost them their access to Iranian oil. And so they were paying this extra premium

02:52:34.440 | after losing that source. And this oil pipeline to Haifa was a big deal. And you'll want to pull this

02:52:41.240 | up. Cause you'll want to read it later and laugh and weep. It's called how Ahmed Chalabi conned the

02:52:47.480 | neocons. Okay. Now for your audience, they need to know disclaimer, a long time ago, salon.com did

02:52:56.520 | journalism. I know it sounds absurd and you probably don't believe me, even though I know you kind of

02:53:03.160 | like me and trust me, but this guy, John Dissart is from the financial times. He is a solid guy. I have a

02:53:09.400 | very brief acquaintance with him emailing back and forth and he is no slouch. And this is not some

02:53:15.080 | woke, ridiculous propaganda. This article is very good stuff. Go ahead.

02:53:18.680 | Yeah. So in this article, man, it's brutal. In there, he quotes Douglas Fythe. Douglas Fythe was,

02:53:26.200 | again, the third signatory on the clean break. Although I believe he now disowns it and says,

02:53:35.480 | well, I never agreed with that part in this kind of thing, but whatever.

02:53:37.880 | Yeah. So in this article, man, it's brutal. In there, he quotes Douglas Fythe. Douglas Fythe was,

02:53:48.200 | again, the third signatory on the clean break. Although I believe he now disowns it and says,

02:53:52.280 | well, I never agreed with that part in this kind of thing, but whatever. And he helped run the,

02:53:56.680 | he was the deputy secretary of defense for policy in the first Bush term and ran the office of special

02:54:01.800 | plans with Abram Shulsky that lied us into war using lies funneled into the intelligence stream

02:54:07.480 | by Ahmed Chalabi. It's a huge part of how they lied us into war. I'm kind of skipping ahead. I'm

02:54:11.320 | going to come back to that in a minute. Okay. But in this article, they quote Douglas Fythe's law partner,

02:54:17.320 | Mark Zell, and people might follow him on Twitter. The guy's a riot dude. And meaning he's completely

02:54:22.440 | insane and a lot of fun if you're into insane Zionist war hawk, genocidal lunatics. But anyway,

02:54:29.640 | so he has these quotes in here. Okay. And like, this is not me talking. I'm very careful with my

02:54:35.080 | words. I'm a libertarian. I'm an individualist. I'm not a collectivist. And I don't go around

02:54:39.720 | categorizing people by their religion and ethnicity and all this crap. I just don't,

02:54:43.640 | I want to raise that way. It was just, it is what it is. This is Dizard talking to Chalabi's friends.

02:54:49.640 | Okay. I'm quoting a guy, quoting a guy, quoting a guy. Okay. Forgive me. I said to Ahmed,

02:54:56.840 | what are you doing running around with all these Jews? And he said, I just need them until I can get

02:55:04.360 | my war. And then I'm going to stab them in the back and we're going to get what we want.

02:55:11.640 | So in other words, Richard Perle is as stupid as he is evil. And David Wormser and Richard Perle and

02:55:20.200 | Paul Wolfowitz and the neoconservative group, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, Hadley and Joseph and,

02:55:28.280 | and Edelman and all of these guys who lie road, um, Diasa Hannah and Edelman and, and, um, Abrams,

02:55:38.920 | Shulsky. That's what these idiots believed. These are all neocons. These are the neocons in the W

02:55:46.520 | Bush administration, in the vice president's office, in the state department, in the defense department

02:55:51.800 | that lied us into war. Colin Powell called them the Jinsa crowd. Jinsa is the Jewish Institute for

02:56:01.080 | National Security Affairs, which at that time I believe was run by David Wormser. He was one of

02:56:05.800 | the most powerful guys there. And they were part and parcel with the American Enterprise Institute,

02:56:11.960 | the project for a new American century, the center for security policy, and the other of the major

02:56:17.480 | neoconservative think tanks that pushed for that war at that time. And they had power, that influence,

02:56:22.840 | they had all the power and influence they needed because they got it from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

02:56:27.000 | And what Powell said was, this was a separate government inside the government that was run like a cell

02:56:35.480 | that was run by Dick Cheney. Wormser was known as Cheney's agent, his plant at state, where his job,

02:56:45.320 | he and John Bolton, who is not a neoconservative because he's never any kind of leftist. He's

02:56:49.160 | just a conservative nationalist type, but one of their fellow travelers, very close with them.

02:56:53.160 | Bolton and Wormser's job was preventing Powell and Armitage, his guy, from preventing the war to

02:57:00.040 | keep a leash on them in whatever ways that they could obstruct their efforts. And then,

02:57:04.600 | so in the vice president's office, you had Scooter Libby and Eric Edelman and Elliot Abrams. No,

02:57:11.720 | no, no, pardon me. Elliot Abrams was on the National Security Council with Zalmay Khalilzad, the same guy

02:57:15.640 | who was the primary author of the 1992 defense planning guidance, along with Libby. And Stephen Hadley,

02:57:24.440 | who was the deputy national security advisor. Then you had on the defense policy board, you had Jean

02:57:30.600 | Kirkpatrick, who again was from the Social Democrats USA and the Young People's Socialist League before

02:57:35.960 | she converted to commentary magazine and Reaganism, making her a classical definition. Oh, and as a

02:57:42.680 | hardcore Zionist, of course, a classical definition neoconservative, along with Kenneth Edelman. And Richard

02:57:48.360 | Pearl was the chair of the defense policy board, which is a very important position and advisory board.

02:57:53.080 | And he was really the power of behind the scenes majoring leader of the group there.

02:57:56.680 | Then Newt Gingrich was another fellow traveler, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives,

02:58:02.280 | Republican, who you could consider him sort of like John Bolton in a way where he's like

02:58:08.200 | more or less one of them, but not exactly. But for example, you may have heard the stories about how

02:58:13.560 | Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby made 14 trips to CIA headquarters to beat them over the head and say,

02:58:19.720 | we need more against Iraq, come up with it. And they wouldn't come up with it enough. Well,

02:58:24.520 | Newt Gingrich did the same thing, went to CIA headquarters over and over and over again,

02:58:28.280 | saying, give us the goods. We don't have enough. We need more.

02:58:30.600 | And that's really dark.

02:58:31.720 | Yeah. So then under Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense was Douglas Feith, who was deputy secretary

02:58:38.760 | of defense for policy. And under him was Abram Shulsky. And Shulsky was a guy who ran the office

02:58:43.960 | of special plans, which sounds innocuous enough. But this was the core of the neoconservative plot to

02:58:50.040 | launder lies from Ahmed Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi national Congress into the intelligence stream,

02:58:57.560 | along with whatever they could dig out of the CIA's trash that the CIA had decided already to ignore.

02:59:03.080 | And they worked, they had Michael Rubin and Michael Ledeen and a whole group of, I used to know all of

02:59:09.320 | their names. The guys at the office of special plans, there's six or eight of them. And across

02:59:13.160 | the hall was the policy counter-terrorism evaluation group, which was led by David Wormser. Again,

02:59:19.640 | he's traveling around, he's vice president's office, he's state, he's defense, wherever they need him.

02:59:24.200 | And that's Wormser and a guy named Michael Malouf. And their job was to dig through the CIA's trash and

02:59:29.640 | the exile's lies and try to come up with anything to connect Saddam to Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

02:59:34.760 | And these guys all had this agenda and man, it was, Zionism is at the core of it all. And there's

02:59:43.880 | really just no denying that. And in many cases they admitted it. And there are very authoritative sources

02:59:49.640 | on this. For example, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, for a very long time a reporter,

02:59:55.080 | and is now of course the famous columnist, wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat.

02:59:59.560 | Bill Clinton said he's the most important public intellectual in America. He is a somewhat

03:00:06.440 | conservative Jewish, Zionist, New York Times writer, and Iraq War supporter. But he gave an interview,

03:00:14.920 | he's not a neoconservative and not really a fellow traveler of theirs. He's a guy who

03:00:19.320 | just lives in the same world as them, but he knows a hell of a lot. He's extremely plugged in.

03:00:24.520 | Okay. For people who don't know, look him up. Okay. Thomas L. Friedman.

03:00:28.200 | Thomas L. Friedman gave an interview to Haaretz where he goes, let me tell you something. Okay.

03:00:33.480 | There's nine guys within a mile of here, and they're the ones who did it. I'm sorry,

03:00:38.680 | I'm getting the quote wrong. I think the nine guys was Seymour Hurst said it was nine guys.

03:00:43.560 | Um, but Friedman said something very close to that, to Haaretz, that it was the neoconservatives.

03:00:50.360 | It was this very small group of guys. This was their war. They plotted it. They planned it. They

03:00:57.400 | made the advertising push to make it acceptable. It was their war and they got it. That's what it was.

03:01:05.400 | Philip Zelikow, who was not a neoconservative, he was more of a council on foreign relations type

03:01:10.680 | with Condoleezza Rice and, um, Robert Blackwill and some of those other guys who were not part of the

03:01:16.280 | neoconservative set in the same government. Zelikow, you might remember was the principal

03:01:20.120 | author of the 9/11 commission report. A lot of people don't like him for that, for whatever reasons,

03:01:25.160 | good and bad, probably. Um, but Zelikow said, let me tell you something. Okay. About the motivation for the

03:01:31.640 | Iraq war. And this is not something that you'll hear very much. Okay. But Saddam Hussein paid the

03:01:38.040 | families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam Hussein would pay any family who lost anybody

03:01:44.760 | in to Israeli violence, no matter what, or on no matter what. So that meant if the Israelis bulldozed

03:01:53.080 | some old lady in her home and murdered her, then Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to her survivors.

03:01:58.520 | But it also meant if some guy went and did a suicide attack and blew up a pizzeria full of

03:02:02.600 | kids on a Friday night, Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to his survivors too. So this was quite

03:02:07.880 | clearly incentivizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, right? So that is a real security problem

03:02:18.040 | for Israel. And as Philip Zelikow said, this was a real hard, motivating factor for the neoconservatives

03:02:28.200 | to want to launch this war. So how does the military-industry complex now start stepping into this whole

03:02:33.480 | picture? Great place for this question. So Andrew Coburn is a great author. His brother, Patrick Coburn,

03:02:39.080 | I mentioned previously, is the most important, or at least in our era, has been the most important Western

03:02:43.560 | journalist, especially in Iraq, I would argue. Alexander Coburn is the leftist agitator,

03:02:52.200 | founder of Counterpunch, who died of cancer years ago. And Andrew is the author, who writes the books,

03:02:58.520 | and his wife Leslie Coburn wrote the great book Out of Control about the Iran-Contra scandal. And then

03:03:05.480 | Andrew wrote Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy, and Kill Chain about the

03:03:10.680 | terror wars, especially the drone wars and all that stuff. Brilliant guy. So he told me years ago, he

03:03:15.400 | goes, "Listen, here's the best way to understand the neoconservative movement. They're the cross between

03:03:20.680 | the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex." Right? So we already have banking and oil. And

03:03:28.360 | banking and oil already has the Council on Foreign Relations since the end of the First World War.

03:03:33.000 | However, that's their center of gravity. Right? Well, the neocons weren't all that welcome there.

03:03:39.400 | Right? So they said, "Well, screw you guys. We'll make our own think tanks." And they made their

03:03:44.280 | alliance with the military-industrial complex, who had a lot of money at stake, but not so many eggheads

03:03:50.200 | to write the studies about why their products needed to be purchased by their captive audience,

03:03:55.320 | the Pentagon. So this is where the neoconservatives come in very handy to the military-industrial complex.

03:04:01.560 | And of course, what's the center of America's relationship with Israel? Military support and

03:04:07.000 | security guarantees. Right? That's what it all comes down to, is America guaranteeing

03:04:12.600 | Israel's security militarily. So how do we do that? We do that by making Lockheed Ridge,

03:04:17.480 | making Israel armed. And so you have this perfect alliance between these factions. So in the 1980s,

03:04:25.640 | it was really with this money, it's how they took over and the organization it provided. It was how

03:04:30.920 | they took over the Olin and Mellon and Scaife foundations. They took over the American Enterprise

03:04:35.480 | Institute and Heritage. Then they created their own forest of all the new ones. Washington Institute for

03:04:41.000 | Near East Policy. I think the Committee on the Present Danger was previous to this, but I guess they recreated the

03:04:49.320 | Committee on the Present Danger. They had PNAC and the Center for Security Policy. Again,

03:04:54.680 | that's Frank Gaffney and his guys and whatever, the handful of others there that helped to boost that

03:05:00.440 | hole and created that echo chamber. And of course, along very importantly with, again, the Weekly Standard

03:05:05.240 | magazine. And Bruce Jackson from Lockheed is really the exemplar of this because he came in, in the 1990s,

03:05:11.560 | and he put up all the money for the Committee on NATO expansion and the Committee for the Liberation of

03:05:16.760 | Iraq. And they focused mostly on humanitarian excuses for going in and helping the Iraqi people,

03:05:22.600 | but they were working hand in glove with Bill Kristol as, you know, one of the agents of the axis of Kristol,

03:05:29.480 | as Justin called it. The guys lying us into war with the Weekly Standard leading the charge and Jonah Goldberg

03:05:35.240 | and the National Review right behind them, doing everything they could to push us into that war.

03:05:40.600 | Michael Ledeen would write and Jonah Goldberg would publish over and over and over again,

03:05:45.000 | Michael Ledeen demanding, "Faster, please. We have to keep going to the rest of the terror masters,

03:05:51.080 | especially Tehran, as soon as possible." As Jonah Goldberg wrote, "Baghdad dilenda est," meaning must be

03:05:57.320 | destroyed, right? Like Carthage must be destroyed. And "Baghdad dilenda est part two," where he says,

03:06:03.720 | "It's the Ledeen Doctrine," he approvingly quotes, "The Ledeen Doctrine is that America, every 10 years

03:06:10.200 | or so, we have to take some small country and throw them up against the wall just to show the world that

03:06:15.880 | we mean business." That's conservatism in the hands of these essentially bastard children of Leon Trotsky,

03:06:24.600 | the founder of the Red Army, right? And Justin, when you read, when you get into Justin Raimondo and you read

03:06:32.040 | Trotsky, Strauss and the neocons and all this, you can see where he's talking about, there were arguments

03:06:37.960 | in the pages of the National Review about Trotsky and his legacy from some of these neocons at that

03:06:43.160 | time. And Justin talks about like, how baffled must the readership of the National Review be right now?

03:06:48.920 | These are your leaders. They're Trotskyites. This is who controls the Republican Party and

03:06:57.000 | American foreign policy. The world won't be safe till the revolution is complete. And by the way,

03:07:03.480 | we got to start with all Israel's enemies first. It's nuts.

03:07:06.760 | So underpinning this kind of ever-growing bureaucracy that's connected to the military

03:07:11.880 | industrial complex is this kind of collectivism thinking.

03:07:14.520 | And money. You know, it's a captive market. It's so much money. And, you know, as I show,

03:07:19.480 | we'll talk about this more in the Cold War section when we get to it later, but it was a real crisis at

03:07:23.880 | the end of the Cold War for the military industrial complex. And they were open about it. Like, what's

03:07:29.880 | going to happen to us now? Lockheed tried to get in to administering welfare payments and stuff.

03:07:35.480 | They're like, they're, they are not a free market operation. They're a government connected

03:07:39.800 | regime. Are they trying to pivot, you're saying?

03:07:42.200 | Yeah. They're trying to figure out, yeah, what are we going to do in the world? Right. And then,

03:07:45.480 | but the idea is clear that, look, if we control the think tanks and the think tanks decide the policy,

03:07:50.920 | then we can decide what kind of weapons we need to develop to have for sale. So are we

03:07:58.040 | building jungle gear or are we building desert gear? What kind of tanks? What kind of helicopters?

03:08:03.800 | If we set the policy, then we get to save money by developing the, by making good guesses about what

03:08:12.680 | kind of weapons the Pentagon is going to need. Cause we're the ones deciding. It's so, I just

03:08:17.320 | remembered a great footnote for this. You guys will love it. Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels by

03:08:23.000 | Richard Cummings. And it's at my site again, scotthorton.org/bareuse. And you can also

03:08:27.880 | find it at Corp watch as well. It was originally written for playboy.com. And I interviewed the

03:08:31.960 | guy that was one of the first interviews I did when I started the show full time in January of 2007.

03:08:36.520 | And he says, guess what? All those neocons who were such Likudniks and who were palling around

03:08:44.360 | with Netanyahu and talking about oil pipelines to Haifa, they were all on Lockheed's payroll.

03:08:50.360 | The only one who wasn't was Hadley, but Hadley worked for a law firm that had represented them.

03:08:56.760 | But the rest of them had had, or not all the rest of them, many of, and I don't just mean the think

03:09:01.400 | tank guys, but like the guys in the W. Bush administration had some direct connection to

03:09:06.840 | Lockheed, including Dick Cheney's wife sat on the board of directors. Not that he's a neoconservative,

03:09:11.400 | you understand, but. Can you actually speak to that? I'm sorry to zoom out again on human nature.

03:09:16.120 | No, you should. Do you think,

03:09:17.640 | so I, I should actually mention, I don't know much about Lockheed, but to the degree I've interacted with

03:09:24.680 | folks that are Lockheed, who are engineers and it's, uh, there's some incredible engineering

03:09:30.760 | that's going on there. Sure. And I wonder, like, do they all believe

03:09:35.720 | in what they're doing? They have a narrower problem set that they're solving.

03:09:42.120 | It's just no different than a soldier. I mean, if you ask them, I know what they'll tell you. That ain't

03:09:47.880 | my job. My job is making sure this gizmo works. But does anyone at any place in Lockheed

03:09:54.360 | think like it is their job to think about the big picture ethics of all of this?

03:09:59.800 | Yes. But their customer is the U.S. government and the U.S. government is a democracy that represents

03:10:04.600 | the will of the consensus of the majority adult population of this great free land. And so.

03:10:10.040 | Always outsourcing their ethics. Yes. And listen, I got to tell you, man,

03:10:13.560 | this is so important. So glad that you mentioned this because you do have, in fact, like direct

03:10:19.560 | quotes from, for example, Raytheon is one coming straight to mind where they say, listen, I mean,

03:10:25.320 | these policies are decided by the government. Our job is to make sure that they have what they need

03:10:31.720 | and that's to be decided by other people. Right. But then no Raytheon will directly intervene in

03:10:38.120 | policy to make sure that the policy is what they want. For example, Barack Obama started a genocidal

03:10:43.720 | war against the people of Yemen in 2015, which Donald Trump continued. I'm jumping way ahead in our

03:10:49.640 | narrative here, but. The house and only because of peace activists, there's no Houthi lobby in America.

03:10:56.360 | Believe me, it was only Quakers and hippies and libertarians said, please stop this and got Congress

03:11:03.160 | to pass the war powers resolution twice to try to force Trump to end the war, but they passed the

03:11:08.680 | wimpy kind that he's allowed to veto instead of the other kind that he can't. And so he vetoed it twice,

03:11:13.960 | but then guess what? Pete Navarro, his trade representative, we're talking Trump one term here.

03:11:18.760 | Pete Navarro, his trade representative told the New York times that the reason that they kept the war going

03:11:25.320 | and vetoed and refused to end the war was to pay Raytheon because Raytheon wanted the Yemen war

03:11:31.800 | because it was making them a bunch of money. And the Trump people, since they had done these tariffs

03:11:36.120 | that were frustrating, big manufacturing firms in America, they said, we have to find a way to put,

03:11:41.480 | talk about collectivism. We have to find a way to put manufacturing on welfare. So what we'll do is

03:11:47.720 | we'll commit genocide against the people of Yemen, because that's what Saudi and UAE want, not because of

03:11:53.160 | anything that has anything to do with America's national interest. The Houthis were helping us

03:11:56.760 | kill Al Qaeda guys a month before that. But we're going to do this for them. And because industry

03:12:05.640 | wants free money, because they're mad that we put these tariffs on China and disrupted some of their

03:12:11.880 | supplies and whatever. So they're going to put this one big company on the dole, and that's going to make

03:12:17.080 | somehow all of manufacturing in America happy. And that was their reasoning for doing it because Raytheon

03:12:23.560 | was demanding it. And then Raytheon will turn right around and go, Hey, listen, Lex, don't come crying to

03:12:29.000 | me. It was the democratically elected people of this country who demanded that we make these wares to

03:12:35.000 | provide your security pal. I don't know what you want to say. And they, they pretend that they're not

03:12:39.480 | dealing with the devil, but they are. And somehow they know it somewhere. They know it somewhere. This

03:12:45.720 | department knows that that's that department's job. Like we do hire lobbyists to, to advocate for policies.

03:12:53.000 | Don't we? Yeah, of course we do, but it's very uncomfortable to think about that. So they, you know,

03:12:58.680 | what gets me, man, is this is how the H-bomb lobby works too. It's no different Honeywell makes in

03:13:03.800 | Lockheed. They make hydrogen bombs and they will send a salesman to Capitol Hill talking about Senator,

03:13:10.040 | Senator, let me tell you, I got to get rid of some H-bombs here. What kind of deal can I cut?

03:13:15.640 | What do I got to do to get this H-bomb in your driveway by tonight? They are like a supply side.

03:13:24.680 | You might have some, you probably didn't think it all the way through, right? But somewhere in

03:13:28.360 | the back of your mind is this like half articulated fantasy that nuclear weapons are a demand side

03:13:37.160 | business in this country where the military comes to the Congress and says, we need exactly this many.

03:13:42.840 | And then the Congress says to industry, we need exactly this many. What do you mean the industry is

03:13:48.520 | trying to push H-bombs because of their awesome profit margins and that we run the H-bomb supply

03:13:55.800 | business the same way you would expect with M4 rifles or combat boots. Yep. That's exactly right.

03:14:04.440 | And that's exactly what's meant by the military industrial complex. So there's a real strong case

03:14:08.200 | to be made that it's a supply side war is a supply side, uh, entity in our era. It's sure as hell is, isn't it?

03:14:19.720 | It's the era of the phony wars, man. What do I got to do to put this war in your driveway today, Lex?

03:14:25.480 | I tell you that they hate Islam. I tell you that the Islam's hate your religion and they hate your mama.

03:14:30.600 | They hate freedom. They did this. Did I ever tell you about the Beirut bombing in 1980? What do I got

03:14:35.560 | to do to get you mad enough to do this with me? Right? That's why it's a constant bombardment of

03:14:41.400 | propaganda. They don't have a real case to make. They got to try to scare you and lie to you.

03:14:45.880 | And that's from their perspective, from the industry perspective, the Afghanistan, Iraq,

03:14:50.840 | Syria, Pakistan, Yemen wars, our success, $8 trillion. It's the self licking ice cream cone. It's the

03:14:58.600 | military industrial complex. Hey, you know what? Don't you criticize it, Lex. It's called now the

03:15:03.560 | defense industrial base. And if you ask the Democrats, they'll tell you it's the number one best

03:15:08.680 | and most important reason for the Ukraine war is because it's a good subsidy for our, in our defense

03:15:17.160 | industrial base. They ran out of arguments and they settle on that. And they did not know how absolutely

03:15:23.560 | demonic they sounded that that's why we want to have a war is just literally like in your crazy

03:15:29.880 | conspiracy theory, you're crazy when you say it and you call it the MIC, but now it's the defense

03:15:36.120 | industrial base. And it's awesome. It's spectacular. And you better get on board for it. It's the best

03:15:41.640 | reason to have these wars. In fact, and we're not embarrassed to tell you, you can go read it in

03:15:45.720 | Politico. I don't know what else to say. This is straight out of the Democrats' mouths

03:15:50.280 | on the last war in the last presidential term. How do the American people fight this?

03:15:56.520 | Jeff Lerner: Well, the first thing would be to get used to the idea that they're lying to you next

03:16:02.760 | time too, right? They've done nothing but take advantage this whole time. There's no reason to

03:16:07.880 | give your government the benefit of the doubt that, that they care what's true or that they want you to

03:16:13.160 | understand the truth. That's not what they're about. They're trying to get you. I mean, just think

03:16:17.880 | about how they operate. Always. They're trying to get you upset so that then you'll let them do

03:16:24.200 | something, right? Like I'm detecting a pattern here. And it doesn't mean that everything is a false flag or

03:16:29.960 | anything like that, but it's just, they do nothing but create crises and then exploit them. It's a monopoly

03:16:36.120 | on security surfaces. So when George W. Bush is on the job for eight months before September 11th,

03:16:44.040 | his approval rating goes up to 90% because we can't fire the national government and replace it

03:16:51.160 | with another one. We're not having another election for another three years. And so this is the security

03:16:57.400 | force we got. And so we better support it because what we're trying to send a signal to the world that

03:17:01.960 | you better know that we're all one for all and you better not mess with us or whatever. But what are we

03:17:06.440 | really doing? We're telling George Bush that he has a mandate to do anything he thinks he can get away

03:17:10.520 | with and that we do nothing but support him after the greatest failure of any president in all of

03:17:15.960 | American history for that to be allowed to happen on his watch. And when we all know, of course, that they

03:17:21.000 | knew it was coming and that at least parts of the CIA were warning and trying desperately to get the

03:17:26.840 | White House to pay attention to the fact that this attack was coming and that Bush refused to pay

03:17:31.720 | attention. I think because he didn't want to be distracted with going after Osama bin Laden in

03:17:35.720 | Afghanistan when he was trying to go to Iraq. Which is another important point to bring up back to the

03:17:42.920 | debate with Dubowitz there where, oh, the Jews this, the Jews that, and the neoconservatives and whatever.

03:17:49.240 | Well, to be perfectly clear, as everyone knows, George W. Bush is a Methodist, right? He's the son of

03:17:56.200 | Episcopalian wasps from Connecticut and Dick Cheney is some kind of redneck from out in Wyoming. And I

03:18:04.680 | mean that in a complimentary way. Yeah, no, I appreciate working class folk. I've done plenty of that kind of

03:18:11.480 | work myself. Um, but he like climbed electric poles and stuff like that. He's, uh, from out west and as a

03:18:17.960 | cowboy and a conservative and a right winger and a nationalist and a tough guy. That's his problem.

03:18:22.600 | Donald Rumsfeld was previously the secretary of defense and had his own plans for, there was this

03:18:30.760 | whole debate back during that era of the transformation of the military. Everybody knows now that the Soviet

03:18:36.840 | Union's gone and it's the whole new order. What order is it? And what should the military look like?

03:18:42.360 | What sort of weapon systems should we focus on? This and that. And Rumsfeld had his own ideas.

03:18:47.720 | Like generically speaking, he wanted to stick it to big army and give their money to the air force

03:18:53.960 | and the special operations forces instead. Again, the Lockheed promo video, where what we do is we send

03:18:59.400 | his special operations forces and air power to whoop anybody in a few weeks and then move on to the next

03:19:05.000 | one. We don't, we want to stay light and fast and not get bogged down. That was one of their excuses for

03:19:10.600 | letting Bin Laden go. Well, we didn't want to get bowed down. Oh, what? Killing Bin Laden and Zawahiri,

03:19:16.040 | the two most important guys that you could possibly target in the thing who were both there. You know,

03:19:20.360 | come on. But that was part of their excuse. Light and fast. Keep it going. W. Bush, I think,

03:19:24.680 | wanted to prove he was tougher than his father. In a sense, probably wanted to avenge his father and from

03:19:30.200 | the fake assassination plot, but also the humiliation. Again, Bill Hicks was so wise about this, that the

03:19:37.480 | humiliation of H. W. Bush being voted out of office while Saddam Hussein was still in the chair.

03:19:43.960 | And he says they had to wait a couple of days for Saddam Hussein to quit gut laughing to get his quote.

03:19:49.000 | And then he goes, we have nothing against America. We just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head

03:19:54.520 | kicked down the road like a soccer ball. And then Bill goes, wow, me and Saddam Hussein,

03:19:59.880 | we're like this. Who would have thunk it? So some of it is personal too, right?

03:20:04.840 | And in fact, Crystal said, I remember seeing Crystal on TV say, well, of course, and see,

03:20:10.760 | wait, wait, before Crystal, I said this to my math teacher in 11th grade.

03:20:15.800 | Was you Scott Horton?

03:20:16.840 | Yes.

03:20:17.160 | To your math teacher?

03:20:19.160 | In 1994, when the day that they announced or the next day after they announced that W. Bush was

03:20:26.120 | going to also run for governor, just like his brother Jeb is running for governor in Florida.

03:20:30.520 | I said to my math teacher, oh, you see what they're doing?

03:20:33.880 | I was 17. I said, you see what they're doing? They're making sure that one or the other,

03:20:40.680 | at least of these guys will be a second term governor in the year 2000. Then they can run

03:20:46.840 | for president and go back to Iraq, which means the Democrats are going to, I mean,

03:20:51.640 | which means the Republicans are going to run a weakling in 96 and throw the election for Bill

03:20:55.640 | and let him win again so that they can run a fresh Bush in 2000. Nailed it, dude. And why?

03:21:02.680 | Because of the humiliation. That was my high school thinking at the time because of the humiliation

03:21:07.080 | that Saddam's still there, but Bush is gone. Bush lost after only one term. And then, so that's got

03:21:12.520 | to be avenged. And that's clearly what they're doing here. And then Bill Crystal said the same thing.

03:21:17.400 | Now, Bill Crystal is bullying W. Bush, right? Bill Crystal ain't me. He's him up there. And he's saying,

03:21:23.800 | well, I just can't imagine that W. Bush would risk being unelected after only one term with Saddam Hussein

03:21:32.600 | still in charge over there. So I think that it's just an obvious matter, of course, that he will have

03:21:38.680 | to invade Iraq in his first term. And I encourage that and think it's great. And he should. And I saw

03:21:45.560 | Crystal say that probably during the campaign, before he was even elected president, somewhere

03:21:50.760 | around there. And again, I wasn't quite sure who Crystal was, and I surely didn't know who his

03:21:54.680 | father was in the neoconservative movement yet. But I knew that this is the guy from the Weekly Standard

03:21:59.240 | that's always on about Saddam Hussein. And so that was the way that he was trying to frame it to W. Bush

03:22:06.200 | himself. That, of course, you can't take the risk of running for reelection in '04 with Saddam Hussein

03:22:15.240 | still sitting there. What have you lost, just like your dad? Your family could never live that down.

03:22:21.080 | Saddam still in the chair after two Bushes got unelected after only one term? Perish the thought.

03:22:26.600 | That makes me realize that when you're in the seat of the president, it takes real courage

03:22:31.640 | to basically resist the military-industry complex.

03:22:36.680 | I mean, W. Bush had no courage, or insight, or depth, or humanity.

03:22:42.120 | And so there's something about our political system that doesn't make it easy for truly courageous,

03:22:47.880 | singular figures to win the presidency, right?

03:22:50.120 | And you'd probably be terrified of them if they did, you know what I mean? Because you've got people

03:22:54.120 | like that, or they're going to use that courage. Again, this is sort of the irony of the neoconservatives,

03:23:00.360 | is they say, you know, Henry Kissinger's a monster. His amoral foreign policy that says, well,

03:23:06.040 | if the Indonesians feel like killing all the Timorese, I guess they have to, or whatever,

03:23:11.240 | that not like us, we're a morality-based foreign policy. That's why we have to invade Iraq, because

03:23:18.040 | Saddam Hussein is so immoral, and we have to go and bring light and goodness to the world by doing the

03:23:24.120 | right thing, by starting another war. And so that's, right, those are your two choices. You have amoral

03:23:30.680 | and immoral in the name of morality, you know, and using that excuse. And as they would always put it,

03:23:37.560 | the Straussians, because he was one of the former Trotskyites that then a lot of these guys studied

03:23:42.600 | under. And he would say, oh, no, we're all philosopher kings, see. And unlike Lockean or

03:23:48.200 | Jeffersonian-type American principles, our principles are that elites, you know, like David Wormser and

03:23:55.640 | Richard Perle, who are so smart that only they can understand the real truth and the subtext of the

03:24:03.640 | truth. And everybody else is some idiot who has to be lied to with noble lies by their philosopher kings,

03:24:10.840 | because they won't do the right thing for the right reasons. They have to be told false reasons to make

03:24:15.640 | them do the right thing, and all these things. And they got to justify all their lies by wrapping it up

03:24:20.520 | in all those justifications, that they know what they're doing. When, of course, these people are

03:24:23.960 | just clowns. There's no difference. And I know, look, at the time I was driving a cab in this town,

03:24:28.600 | on this up and down this street. Okay. And the average idiot around here knew better than all of

03:24:33.720 | this. Right. And it wasn't because they had special knowledge, but they just knew you don't start a war.

03:24:38.760 | God knows what could happen. You had no idea, dude, how many just regular people told me,

03:24:44.360 | I don't think Saddam Hussein is friends with Osama bin Laden. You know?

03:24:49.640 | Yeah. There's a deep wisdom in that common sense. Of course. And that's what makes America great is

03:24:54.200 | for the longest time, the people had power. And so to the degree that the people have power and

03:25:00.680 | that wisdom can speak through its representatives, then we'll be all right. But the more and more the

03:25:06.440 | bureaucracy grows, the more the military industrial complex gains power, then that common sense

03:25:11.560 | wisdom of the people is silenced. Well, and I like telling this story too.

03:25:16.440 | So I'll go ahead and write on the guy to YouTube. I had a guy in my cab who was like a Mr. Fancy

03:25:21.640 | Pants man about town. I dropped him off at some very swanky bachelor pad apartments off of South

03:25:26.280 | Mopac there. And he was a real nice guy. And we had a long conversation because I wouldn't let the

03:25:30.360 | porous OB go. And I'm beating him over the head and I'm telling him, damn it. I swear to God that this

03:25:36.120 | is true. Okay. George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tenet. None of them have said that

03:25:43.400 | Saddam did 9/11. Now Dick Cheney did, but he's a damn liar. But there's a real important reason

03:25:48.920 | why Bush and Powell are not saying that. Okay. They're perfectly happy to leave you with that

03:25:55.640 | impression that that must be what they were trying to imply. And that's what you thought you heard them

03:26:00.280 | say, but you didn't. And you promise me, you go inside and you Google, you look hard. You will not

03:26:05.240 | find them directly saying that. And he says to me, ah, but come on, man. I mean, if Saddam Hussein didn't

03:26:12.280 | do 9/11, then why are we attacking him then? Right. Which is a good question. But to him,

03:26:20.760 | the answer was built into the thing that actually the cab driver couldn't possibly be right. Because the

03:26:26.200 | people in Washington would not lead me to believe that this has anything at all to do with avenging

03:26:32.920 | the innocent dead Americans slaughtered on September 11th, airplanes full of little kids on their way on

03:26:38.120 | vacation. That what do you mean this has nothing to do with that? What's more likely your cab driver

03:26:43.160 | knows better or that? No, you are right to disbelieve and believe in authority that swears that they're doing

03:26:49.880 | this to protect you from the enemy that attacked you. And so that's the kind of cognitive dissonance that

03:26:55.880 | is always baked into these kinds of things. It's the same thing with Israel now. Well,

03:27:00.280 | if this is the most barbarian society on the planet, how come we're their best friends?

03:27:04.440 | Yeah. Again, a very good question, but it's not answered by they must not be, they must be really

03:27:11.080 | great. Otherwise we wouldn't be, which is what the cognitive dissonance would try to have you explain to

03:27:16.200 | yourself, I guess. Yeah. By the way, the everyday people like, just like we said, often have a deep

03:27:21.240 | wisdom that the government lacks. And more than almost any other career, I think cab drivers

03:27:28.120 | really have that wisdom. I don't know what it is about cab drivers, but they really get it because

03:27:33.800 | they get to talk to a lot of people. They get to think through a lot of it. You get to like think

03:27:37.240 | through it. Hey, I think all the time about, I mean, there's a lot of cab rides I don't remember,

03:27:41.720 | but there are a few that I do where it was, I got something wrong and the guy goes, no, no, no,

03:27:47.560 | it's not like that. It's like this. And he was right. And I was wrong. And I went, ah, you know,

03:27:51.080 | I really picked up something there. You know what I mean? Like one of the good ones, I said, I was kind

03:27:55.240 | of a new world order cook back then. And one of the good ones, I still remember where I was on Mopac,

03:28:00.200 | where the guy said to me that like, listen, man, it ain't conspiracy. It's just politics. Okay. It's the game

03:28:06.280 | over who controls the power. You don't need secret societies. You just need oak tables,

03:28:12.280 | man. It's this is business and that's how it goes. And if you take click with you even,

03:28:17.000 | yeah. And even the most conspirators type thing, if you just leave out the secret society crap

03:28:21.160 | and just focus on Lockheed and the Israel lobby and the Republican party and oil interests and whatever,

03:28:28.600 | where all these things come together, it's all very clear. You know what I mean? And you don't have

03:28:33.000 | to be a Chomskyite leftist to see it that way at all. Like I'm a libertarian and we're

03:28:37.320 | pure free market types, which means we find it morally criminal for any company to get a government

03:28:44.360 | contract for anything, right? Like we want no public private partnerships of any kind. When we say

03:28:50.360 | privatization, we don't mean government contracts. We mean privatization, get government out of it and let

03:28:57.160 | free people figure it out. Any corporation on welfare deserves to be destroyed to a libertarian. So it's,

03:29:03.800 | you don't have to like identify somehow as like, well, only an anarcho-syndicalist

03:29:08.440 | in the Chomskyite mold would think that we have this problem with these crony corporations. No, indeed

03:29:14.520 | we do. And in fact, again, not again, but go back. Who coined the term military industrial complex?

03:29:20.280 | It was Dwight David Eisenhower, the five-star army general who was the commander of all United

03:29:26.200 | Nations forces in Europe in World War II, and then came home and was the two term Republican president

03:29:31.960 | of the United States of America, who is the one who did the coup in 53 in Iran, who's the one who built

03:29:38.120 | as many nuclear missiles as he possibly could. But why? To try to hold the army at bay. Eisenhower said,

03:29:45.160 | God help the next president of this country who doesn't have the experience with the army that I do

03:29:50.760 | to try to keep these men from their demands where they were constantly demanding more divisions,

03:29:56.760 | more divisions, more divisions. And he said, no, I'm going to build more missiles instead.

03:30:00.280 | You guys get away from me. And only he had the power to do it at the time. I'm not taking a stance on

03:30:06.680 | this, but widely believed that these same forces blew the head off of his successor for getting in their

03:30:13.960 | way. Um, you know, which is at least possible, if not likely, right? That that was what happened in Dallas.

03:30:21.640 | By, by these force. And we don't really know the full, meaning the military and the intelligence agencies,

03:30:26.920 | right? Is, was the idea. It's like a network of people that sure work together. Yeah. The black access

03:30:32.920 | program, special access program in the military goes Fletcher Prouty and them, uh, their argument

03:30:38.360 | about the thing, which whatever, um, where that's true or not, it's believable enough because, and, and

03:30:45.080 | what Eisenhower said that on his last day in office, sorry, Charlie, I did the best I could. Maybe this is

03:30:51.240 | half my fault. Good luck to you. And then quit and was out the door. And then, but we, have we ever had a

03:30:56.520 | major reckoning since then where what, oh, after Vietnam and Nixon was impeached, that was when we

03:31:01.000 | destroyed the military industrial complex? No. Right. That, that never happened after the end of

03:31:05.960 | the cold war. Is that what happened? No, we went to Bosnia and then we went to Iraq. We went to Bosnia

03:31:10.520 | and stay in the middle east and expand wherever we can. As in how our speeches are haunting.

03:31:16.040 | Yeah. There's the other one is the cross of iron speech, where he calculates the cost of battleships

03:31:21.240 | compared to schools and grocery stores and things. It's not all public goods or, you know, so-called

03:31:25.000 | public goods, like public schools. But he talks about like private investment and the comparisons,

03:31:30.040 | that every bit of money that we spend on this is wealth that comes from the American people that

03:31:36.520 | the government then denies to us, takes from us and destroys. Lex, if you ever read "1984" in the

03:31:41.960 | part of the book- Have I read it many times, of course.

03:31:43.960 | And there's part of the book where Winston Smith is being brought under the wing of his future

03:31:50.360 | torturer, O'Brien. And O'Brien gives him the manual for how we do it, right? And he holds up in his

03:31:55.080 | bedroom and reads the book of how we do it. And it says in there that, listen, we keep them in a permanent

03:32:01.320 | state of war at all times, to keep them on edge, to keep them insecure, to take any excess wealth that the

03:32:06.360 | people would otherwise spend improving their own lives, and we sink it into the ocean in the form of

03:32:12.040 | the floating fortress, or we blast it off into space in the form of these missiles and rockets that we're

03:32:17.960 | building, so that the people can't have it. So that we cannot build up our society to protect our own needs

03:32:25.720 | and interests. Now, of course, anyone leaning left listening to this would prefer that the government

03:32:30.280 | spend this money on public school and healthcare and infrastructure. Anybody right-leaning listening to

03:32:35.880 | this says, "That's my money. Stop printing money and inflating the money supply. Stop taxing me. Leave

03:32:41.800 | me alone. Me and my buddies will invest in private businesses and we will produce the wealth society

03:32:47.640 | needs." Fine. What we all have to agree is that this has to all come to an end, where we let them take

03:32:54.360 | trillions and trillions of our dollars. What they can't tax, they borrow. And what they can't borrow, they inflate.

03:32:59.720 | And with the inflation, this is the absolute crisis of confidence. Again, bin Laden

03:33:05.400 | invited our government to do this "self-inflicted wound," meaning really our government wounding all

03:33:10.920 | of us. And this is the absolute crisis of our era, is price inflation. It's why people can't pay the rent.

03:33:17.720 | It's why they can't afford to feed their family. It's why they're forced to send their children to

03:33:21.720 | government school like a German or a Russian. It's why they are broke. It's why young men and women can't

03:33:28.760 | start families and buy homes. It's because of price inflation, which is the result of monetary expansion.

03:33:36.040 | The expansion, especially of bank credit, although in our very current era, because of Donald Trump and

03:33:41.800 | Joe Biden's massive stimulus bills that they signed during COVID. And you can trace that back to wars.

03:33:47.400 | And it's almost entirely like, well, big government overall relies on inflationary money. But then,

03:33:54.840 | yes, this is a massive part of our budget, is the annual militarism for the global empire. And so to

03:34:03.240 | turn it around, Jonah Goldberg from the National Review, Mr. Ledeen Doctrine says, "Well, we can't have a

03:34:08.280 | gold standard, because what if there's a war?" Right? But then that's Ron Paul's point. That's why we should

03:34:14.360 | have a gold standard so Jonah Goldberg can't have a war, right? Because they have to print the money.

03:34:20.040 | If they had to raise your taxes to go stop Tojo, maybe even then they had to print money and borrow

03:34:26.600 | money. But people sure as hell took Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan seriously enough to fight,

03:34:33.400 | and they still had to conscript millions of people to do it. But whatever, at least you got a credible

03:34:37.800 | threat there. But you're going to tell the American people, "Hey, we're going to have to raise everybody's

03:34:42.520 | income tax in every bracket by 6% so that we can launch an aggressive war against Iraq so that Israel

03:34:47.720 | can save a nickel a barrel, hopefully if they can get their silly pipeline they want built." And

03:34:52.680 | American people say, "Hell no." But when they print the money, remember this, George Bush sent people,

03:34:57.800 | anyone who paid income taxes, got a refund check of an extra $300 or $400, depending on your bracket,

03:35:05.480 | in 2003 and 2004. This was meant to look like, well, I infer this, it was meant to look like your dividend.

03:35:12.440 | It was meant to fool you into thinking that the Iraq war is profitable, that America is making money

03:35:19.480 | off of this. Like in the cliche that you would hear from people in the neighborhood, "Well, war is good

03:35:24.040 | for the economy." And look, we're all directly benefiting from this, apparently. We all get an extra

03:35:29.480 | $300 or $400. But of course, they just printed that money. And all that inflation during the W. Bush

03:35:33.640 | years is what led to the giant housing bubble and the crash of 08 and the absolute decimation that

03:35:38.840 | came after that. And then what Obama do, came and printed even more money, built up an even bigger

03:35:43.480 | bubble to try to deal with that. Then of course, the COVID lockdowns essentially played the role of

03:35:48.600 | high interest rates and just crushing the economy and forcing a massive recession on people. But then

03:35:53.000 | what'd they do? They didn't just have the Fed like lower interest rates and lower reserve ratios so that

03:35:59.800 | they could expand money even more. They literally just mailed everybody checks of brand new money from

03:36:05.640 | the treasury, all brand new money. And by some measures, they create two thirds of all U.S.

03:36:09.800 | dollars that were ever created were created since 2020. And so that's Trump's fault and Biden's fault

03:36:15.720 | for doing those giant monetary expansion acts. That's what has led to the giant inflationary crisis

03:36:21.880 | today as this absolutely incompetent managers of our economy. And this is the thing where

03:36:26.840 | if people aren't libertarians at all, if people lean any degree left or right from me and from Austrian

03:36:34.360 | school, libertarian things is totally fine. Disagree me on whatever you want, warfare, welfare, anything,

03:36:39.960 | but it's just true, man. It's just true. The Austrians are correct about the cause of the business cycle,

03:36:48.040 | the boom and bust. Now, of course, if the frost wipes out all the oranges, then that's going to

03:36:55.400 | cause disruptions in that one market or whatever. But what caused what Ludwig von Mises called the

03:37:00.760 | cluster of errors, where all these businessmen are making all these bad bets all at the same time,

03:37:08.360 | that then leads to these terrible crashes and resets and corrections.

03:37:12.040 | And the answer is it's inflationary money and artificially low interest rates, because what it

03:37:18.920 | does is it's manipulating the price of money, artificially valuing money with government control

03:37:25.320 | and leading producers to follow false price signals and to mistakenly believe that there are more resources

03:37:33.400 | available in the economy for use than there really are. If you had free market interest rates,

03:37:39.080 | then the more capital you use to invest, the more it costs to borrow more capital, right?

03:37:44.360 | And when savings are low and capital is low to invest in new things, then interest rates would

03:37:49.560 | naturally go up. But when the Federal Reserve Bank holds interest rates low, then that doesn't happen.

03:37:56.440 | And so you have especially in the higher order goods like mining and quarries and machine tools and the

03:38:05.160 | kinds of things that are then used to sell the other business to businesses to make other things and these

03:38:09.880 | kinds of things, they make long term farmers or in other words, they make long term loans at

03:38:14.920 | artificially low interest rates that then they end up getting screwed later because they're not able to

03:38:20.600 | to produce to keep up when the crash comes. Now, let's say you own a quarry and you're Austrian school

03:38:27.160 | guy and you see what's going on here. Well, I'm Greenspan's just printing a bunch of money.

03:38:31.160 | And so all my competitors are hiring new workforces and they're, they're buying new machine tools

03:38:37.640 | and they're getting way ahead of me in their productive capacity. But I know that they're screwed

03:38:42.840 | because they're going deep into debt for all this stuff and the music's going to stop. However,

03:38:47.800 | if I don't, if you, the quarry owner, if you don't play the same game, you're going to lose sooner

03:38:53.880 | than them. You're going to lose before they have a chance to get screwed. So even if you know better,

03:38:58.600 | you still have to expand beyond what you really know that you do. So like one example that Austrians

03:39:04.760 | like to use, I think is like, if the circus comes to town for a month or whatever, and this,

03:39:10.360 | the local dairy queen is really busy. And then the guy builds a giant extension onto the thing

03:39:15.720 | thinking that like, this is how it's going to be now, but no, this is just temporary. This is a boom

03:39:21.560 | followed by a bust, right? Well, so this is the, the artificial value of those customers in that time

03:39:27.160 | induced by the traveling circus. But in our case, we're talking about money artificially inflating the

03:39:34.040 | value of certain firms and certain banks, investments, and these kinds of things. This is what leads to the

03:39:39.720 | cluster of errors that leads to the collapses. And people can read the, of course, the brilliant

03:39:44.680 | Ludwig von Mises in his theory of money and credit from a hundred years ago. Then of course there's

03:39:50.120 | Murray Rothbard, what has government done to our money and the case against the Fed. And then there's

03:39:55.400 | all of the brilliant guys of the Austrian school, especially Robert Murphy and Tom Woods and all the

03:39:59.960 | guys at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And imperialism and militarism are at the heart of this. David Stockman,

03:40:07.000 | Ronald Reagan's former budget advisor calls this the great deformation. He says all these little bubbles

03:40:14.200 | like 87 and 92 and 99 and 08, these are the little bubbles on top of the big bubble of America's overall

03:40:22.440 | inflationary monetary policy since the end of the second world war in order to make the militarism seem

03:40:28.040 | artificially cheap to make it seem more. Imagine how deceived people would have to be to think that war

03:40:33.080 | is good for the economy because they notice the Russian spending and the immediate stimulative effect

03:40:38.920 | when this is the difference between the seen and the unseen. Where's all that wealth coming from?

03:40:43.560 | And now where's it going? It's going to make tools of death and destruction, net losses in property

03:40:49.400 | values all the way around in, you know, and a lot of times goods that can never be reused again. The

03:40:55.320 | plane can fly again, but the bomb shirt can't. F-35s fall out of the sky all the time in the headlines

03:41:00.440 | again today. Um, and so this is all a net loss, um, in terms of all of this capacity being directed into

03:41:09.320 | militarism and then, uh, going away. But people get fooled into thinking that this is what's good and this

03:41:15.080 | is what's necessary. And of course, Lockheed does things in the rest of them to Boeing and the rest.

03:41:18.600 | They have explicit, um,

03:41:21.240 | gerrymandering type policies where they will have one small part of every weapon system made in as

03:41:28.440 | many factories as possible all across the country. So that if Congress ever wants to roll back anything,

03:41:34.680 | they will have an army of lobbyists to threaten them that we're talking about 600 jobs in your

03:41:40.840 | district. Congressman, is that what you're willing to do? And then they all just snap

03:41:45.000 | right into line. You know, again, what they say, Hey, we're just supplying the weapons that the

03:41:49.640 | Congress demands. No, they're not. They're rigging the whole game. So we have no choice,

03:41:54.280 | but to give into them essentially. If I can just take an aside,

03:41:58.280 | you mentioned used to be a cab driver. I would love to understand the story of somebody that was a cab

03:42:06.760 | driver that eventually became one of the most prolific libertarians, anti-war intellects of the modern era.

03:42:14.920 | who are you? I'm a, I mean, look at this, look at this, right? The number of citations here breaks

03:42:24.200 | 7,000, 7,000. Look, I mean, how and why were you driving a cab and what, how did you come to be this,

03:42:33.240 | this person? Well, I mean, I'm a skateboarder type and I'm just anti-government type. Like I say, I,

03:42:39.400 | I learned about Ronald Reagan being a dope pusher when I was a child, Bill Clinton burned the Branch

03:42:44.200 | Davidians to death in front of my eyes and called it a suicide when I was 16, covered up the Oklahoma

03:42:49.800 | bombing, blamed it on one guy two years later, which there's still, they're no longer getting away with

03:42:54.840 | that. There's a brand new book out called Blowback and I haven't read it yet, but I know the fact checker

03:42:59.000 | and I know that it's right that McVeigh had friends. They were undercover FBI informants,

03:43:03.880 | at least two of them, Roger Moore and Andre Strassmeyer were agent provocateurs and they covered it up

03:43:10.680 | because it was their own guys who did it. I'm not saying the government did it on purpose. I'm saying

03:43:14.440 | the FBI, it was essentially a sting that they were meant to stop it and they didn't stop it and they

03:43:19.800 | cover that up and they got the whole media to go along with that. And then, you know, it's a big

03:43:23.800 | fan of like, see, it's kind of funny, but I'm kind of angry at them. So I'll put them on blast anyway.

03:43:31.240 | I don't care. When I was young, I read reason magazine and I thought, I hate these guys.

03:43:35.960 | That's what a libertarian is that they think their job is debunking Gulf war illness.

03:43:42.600 | They think their job is debunking the number of Iraqis starving to death under Bill Clinton's sanctions.

03:43:48.680 | And, and they don't give a damn about the branch Davidians. They don't give a damn about any of

03:43:54.840 | this, right? I don't know what they're good for lower taxes and maybe guns, not that they're doing

03:44:01.240 | anything important about it. And so I shied away from the libertarian movement for a long time,

03:44:07.400 | because that's what I thought the libertarian movement was. And I would rather pile around

03:44:11.240 | with a bunch of right-wing militia guys, because at least they care about the branch Davidians.

03:44:14.680 | And there was an, in Austin at that time, there was kind of a thriving,

03:44:17.880 | what they called the Patriot movement, which is like the civilian side of the militia movement,

03:44:21.560 | basically. And it's all like, yeah, right-wing conspiracy guys who are right about everything.

03:44:26.440 | Then about who started that fire in Waco, about who helped blow up Oklahoma city,

03:44:30.840 | about the sanctions in Iraq, killing kids about the Gulf war illness that they were covering up

03:44:35.720 | illnesses. I should say that they were covering up and saying, oh, drink a beer, chin up and don't be a

03:44:40.600 | wimp. And all this to these guys who were dying of cancers and other diseases that they got from

03:44:45.320 | what the Pentagon did to them and exposed them to in Iraq war one. And so, you know, the conspiracy kooks

03:44:53.320 | were batting a hundred, batting a thousand, whatever. I'm not a baseball guy, I'm a skateboarder.

03:44:57.480 | They're batting a thousand, you know, during that era, they're, they're really right about a lot of

03:45:03.160 | things. And I would have rather hung around them, even though I wasn't culturally right wing like them,

03:45:07.480 | but William Norman Grigg at the new American magazine was really a great. And of course, Ron Paul came back

03:45:12.440 | to Congress in 97.

03:45:13.640 | Was Ron Paul the, the person that sort of convinced you that libertarianism could be a powerful movement?

03:45:19.000 | Yes. Ron Paul convinced me of a lot of things, man. He's, he's really been a North star to me this whole

03:45:25.240 | time, ever since then. I was so excited from the, I'll tell you, the first time I ever saw Ron Paul

03:45:30.680 | was 10 years before everybody else got their big Giuliani moment. When Ron whooped Rudy Giuliani in

03:45:36.120 | that debate in March, pardon me, May of 2007, where they fought over the motivation of Osama bin

03:45:41.800 | Laden to attack us on nine 11. Ron says, cause we were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi for 10 years.

03:45:46.040 | Everybody knows that. And Giuliani flipped his lid and Ron was of course heroic and right. But my Giuliani

03:45:51.720 | moment was a decade before I saw Ron in the middle of the night on C-SPAN, Dr. Paul on C-SPAN,

03:45:58.760 | the middle of the night speaking to an empty Congress, uh, except whoever was filling in,

03:46:03.640 | in the speaker chair, Mr. Speaker, I have here in my hands reports from the British press today about how

03:46:08.440 | George Bush was selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein leading right up to the invasion of Kuwait.

03:46:13.080 | What's up with that? And now, and we still have all these sanctions and doing all these things.

03:46:17.560 | And we're so responsible for this guy's evil in the first place after we had backed him all that

03:46:22.440 | time and all these things. And this is not wise foreign policy, Mr. Speaker, we ought to come home.

03:46:27.960 | And I'm like, wow, that any Congressman would say anything that honest on the record inside the

03:46:34.680 | Capitol building like that. I couldn't believe it. And then I looked at the bottom of the screen and

03:46:38.680 | it says, Ron Paul R Texas. And I'm like, no way. Cause you know, Bush senior himself is nominally from

03:46:45.000 | here, right? He's from Connecticut really, but he made his fortune here in oil and lived here for a very

03:46:49.400 | long time. And you know, he's raised his family in West Texas for much of the time and that kind of thing.

03:46:54.680 | So he's extremely important guy in Texas politics. So for this Congressman to dare to say that he's

03:47:02.600 | essentially accusing Bush of treason. Um, okay. This is, I'm interested in this guy. And then I'm

03:47:10.440 | reading the new American magazine, which is the John Birchers magazine. They have a very bad rap as

03:47:14.280 | racist and stuff, which is totally not true. They're conspiratorial and I don't agree with them on

03:47:18.600 | everything. And they're more conservative than me. They're good people. They're George Washington's

03:47:22.360 | constitution guys and, and mostly Protestant and Catholic Christians and American patriotic folk.

03:47:28.200 | They're good people. And the editor of their magazine at that time was the great William Norman

03:47:33.400 | Grigg. And he would run Ron Paul stuff constantly. He would cover Ron. Um, and then I used to be a pirate

03:47:41.080 | radio guy. So I had, I would call his weekly update. I don't know if he still does this is 888-322-1414.

03:47:48.760 | And then I would just play the Ron Paul weekly update and put that out over the air. And it was

03:47:52.360 | always just killer stuff, dude, financial, you know, monetary policy and boom and bust. And, and the evils

03:47:57.800 | of war, I would drive around in my cab and I would have printed out Ron Paul speeches. And there was one

03:48:02.600 | that was called a Republic if you can keep it. And then, which is the famous, uh, Benjamin Franklin

03:48:09.960 | quote to the Baker lady about what do we have a monarchy or a public or a public, if you can keep it.

03:48:15.080 | And then the sequel was called, I'm sorry, Mr. Franklin, we are all Democrats now. And it was just so

03:48:21.400 | good. I, and I would give this to people in the cab. Hey, did you know, there's one good Congressman one,

03:48:26.040 | and he's not good. He's better than Thomas Jefferson. Read this and read this and read

03:48:31.560 | this. And this is the light and the way. And the thing is, is all I'm selling you is a peaceful

03:48:37.240 | foreign policy. I'm not saying like, or well, and, and freedom overall, as this is what Ron Paul

03:48:42.520 | emphasized. If you, if he's asking for your trust or your faith in anything, it's just that you trust

03:48:47.560 | in freedom, that it does work. It's why we have all this stuff is because of liberty in the first place.

03:48:53.720 | And so you can count on that, you know, but otherwise he's not selling anything. He delivered

03:48:59.960 | like a third of the population of his district when he was a baby doctor, right? He's not going anywhere.

03:49:04.680 | He didn't have, he wasn't soliciting donations. He wasn't asking you to join his cult or his

03:49:11.400 | sect of Protestant Christianity. He was just saying, we don't have to do this stuff. We don't have to

03:49:16.280 | believe in this. They say these things, but geez, that doesn't seem right. Cause what about this thing?

03:49:20.760 | And he's just so wise and so good. And, and his, his aides, by the way, his, his right-hand

03:49:25.800 | men all that time were also really great guys too, especially Jeff Diest and Daniel McAdams has been

03:49:31.320 | his right-hand man and his great, you know, advisor this whole time and another just really good human

03:49:37.240 | being. Yeah. Well, yes. And he's a doctor, not a lawyer. He delivered 4,000 babies. And, you know,

03:49:42.840 | I met his sister-in-law who married his older brother, Wayne. And, and she says to me, yeah,

03:49:47.560 | well, when you guys say that Ron Paul delivered 4,000 babies, well, I did too. Cause I'm his head

03:49:51.800 | nurse and I delivered every one of myself too, along with him and all of that thing. So that's where he

03:49:56.280 | comes from. He's a decent, sweet old country doctor. He's married to his high school sweetheart since her

03:50:02.120 | sweet 16 party. Okay. No scandals, not a hint of it. He's got, I don't know, 150 grandchildren or whatever

03:50:08.680 | he is. This is the American dream. It's perfect. And nobody's got nothing on him. Right. He's just,

03:50:13.560 | he's the best. I wish we lived in a country where a guy like that can have a chance of being president.

03:50:19.000 | Yeah. That's what I'm saying. It could have been dude. Listen, the Republicans of the United States

03:50:24.760 | of America nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney instead of him. You explain that to me when we

03:50:32.040 | got George Washington himself only without the slaves and without the bloody hands, the only vet in the race,

03:50:38.280 | but he was a doctor in the air force. The only one, he got up on stage and quoted Jesus and they booed him.

03:50:47.080 | He's the guy that's supposed to be president. That's, I mean, you say George Washington,

03:50:56.040 | one of the greatest Americans ever. That's the guy.

03:50:58.440 | That's the guy, dude. Could have been. Hey, and if you doubt me, just go to antiwar.com/Paul and read

03:51:03.960 | the last 30 years of everything he's had to say about everything. What can I tell you, man?

03:51:08.920 | Uh, but the, the aspect, the, the rigor, you talked about the motivation, like what you discovered,

03:51:15.240 | like how the hell did you do this? Okay. I could think of an answer to that, which is that

03:51:19.320 | like, unlike all your, your Harvard professors and all of this stuff, like the burden of proof is really

03:51:24.680 | on me, right? Like this, because I'm just like a skater cab driver from Austin who didn't go to your

03:51:29.800 | fancy pants college. I don't have, there's no reason that you're supposed to defer to me. And that

03:51:34.760 | book is about how everybody's wrong, except me. So if I'm going to tell you that, then I better

03:51:41.000 | be able to really demonstrate it. And I want you to go, oh yeah, well, but what about that coup in

03:51:46.840 | Montenegro in 2016? Well, turn the page. I got a whole section on that. I didn't leave out nothing.

03:51:51.800 | And I wrote it in that kind of defensive posture. People are going to not like this. They're going to

03:51:56.600 | say, I don't know what I'm talking about. Now, when I wrote enough already, the war was over.

03:52:01.080 | Enough already came out in January 21. And I was in a race to get it done because Joe

03:52:05.800 | Biden's going to be inaugurated on, on January 20. And the era's over the Bush Obama era. Capstone

03:52:15.320 | with Trump one is just at an end on J and after all, it's the true beginning of the decade is January 21.

03:52:22.520 | Right. And so I knew that this book has to come out now, but this is really about the terror wars

03:52:29.880 | that are over mostly not that were completely done in the Middle East. You understand, but like

03:52:35.000 | that's a bit after the fact this is written provoked is written in the middle of the war.

03:52:41.400 | Yeah. And I'm trying to change people's mind and really get them not just to regret the stupid

03:52:46.360 | things they believed in a minute ago, but to change their mind and get on board. And let's see if we can

03:52:50.760 | bring this thing to a more reasonable conclusion sooner than later and, and get it done. It'd be like,

03:52:56.600 | if I wrote enough already in 2005 or six. Um, and so I knew I wanted it to be as bulletproof as it just

03:53:03.880 | possibly can be because I don't have argumentation from authority. I don't have like, oh yeah, I'm from

03:53:09.640 | here. And I can tell you that I'm a reporter. I'm a, I'm a linguist and I've read 10,000 Russian

03:53:15.560 | newspapers going back to whatever, whatever. I don't have any of those things. What I do have is I've been

03:53:19.800 | working for anti-war.com this whole time. I've done 6,000 interviews with the best experts. We

03:53:24.440 | covered the orange revolution. When it happened, we covered the mind on revolution when it happened

03:53:29.000 | and everything in between and all of these things. So, um, just like with the book about Afghanistan

03:53:33.800 | and the book about the Middle East, I was already ready to write the book before I started writing it.

03:53:37.640 | I already know the whole story. Obviously I had to do a lot of research and fill in a lot of

03:53:40.840 | information and correct myself on things. I had wrong or oversimplified or whatever, and learned a

03:53:45.800 | lot while I was writing it, but I already knew the story overall. Cause I've been working on it

03:53:50.040 | for a very long time. What are the main things that Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden did

03:53:56.680 | to cause the new cold war with Russia and the war in Ukraine. I already know those things already have

03:54:01.400 | the bullet points. I, that book started as a speech I gave in 2020. Um, in fact, it was leap day, 2020,

03:54:08.200 | Carol Paul's birthday. Um, and the day that Donald Trump signed the peace deal with the Taliban to get

03:54:12.920 | us out of Afghanistan. I gave a speech to the libertarian party of King County, um, in Seattle,

03:54:18.520 | Washington called the cold, the new cold war with Russia is all America's fault. And that's,

03:54:23.960 | that's published at anti-war.com. And then two years later, I spent, I stayed up all night,

03:54:30.200 | doubling the length of the speech and gave it again. And this is, it's a four hour speech I gave in Utah

03:54:35.800 | on, I think, March the 2nd, 2022, right after the war started explaining all the same stuff.

03:54:42.680 | And then that became the nucleus of that book basically. And then it's just a matter of filling

03:54:46.840 | it out. And sorry to ask, uh, a silly detailed question, but this is a gigantic book, extremely

03:54:54.360 | detailed, extremely well cited. What's your writing process? Like what, how do you go through it? So you,

03:54:59.800 | it started a speech and now you have this, this manifesto, this tome.

03:55:04.360 | Yeah. Well, uh, as you can see, the chapters are just H W Bush, Clinton, W Bush, Obama. And, and

03:55:11.080 | you know, when you, if you ever get the chance to read the thing, you'll see that it, this is really

03:55:14.920 | just a giant collection of citations. I don't do too much writing in the book. Um, much unlike Justin

03:55:22.280 | Raimondo, I'm really not that smart and have a lot to say. I'm a great on names and dates and I

03:55:28.040 | hold a grudge real well, but Justin could write a thousand words just of like wisdom and understanding

03:55:35.240 | and opinions about things that I'm, I'm just not really like that. So this book in a way is 7,000

03:55:41.240 | note cards arranged by your maestro here to be, hopefully to tell the story in a way that everybody

03:55:49.080 | can understand and you know, whatever there's pros in there. I'm, I'm writing to you, but I'm,

03:55:52.760 | I'm mostly I'm marshalling evidence is the point of the whole thing that this is what these guys did.

03:56:01.160 | Here's what the war party says. And I don't straw man my arguments. I link, when I say 7,000 citations,

03:56:07.160 | a third of them are to the bad guys. And this is their point of view. And I'm telling you,

03:56:11.640 | here's what they admit that they're lying. You know, that's basically how it's written. And I cite

03:56:16.120 | very little Ron Paul and very little Pat Buchanan in there because as much as I revere them, I don't

03:56:21.640 | need them. I can quote the apparatchiks in charge themselves, explaining how stupid the things that

03:56:29.560 | they are doing are, and then show why they did them anyway and all the consequences and whatever.

03:56:35.400 | So I don't, I don't need to cite the good guys. I can cite the involved.

03:56:40.120 | So basically going to the primary sources versus citing the quote unquote experts.

03:56:44.120 | Yeah. And, and just spending a hell of a lot of time going through the archives. And I am an

03:56:49.480 | obsessive typer. Like I, there are absolutely times where I spent four days hunting one footnote that

03:56:54.920 | I know exists and I want to make this claim and I can't make it without my citation. I'm going to

03:56:59.720 | find this thing. And I have gone to the ends of the earth in some cases for these, especially like

03:57:04.760 | about the Balkan wars and stuff. Some of those articles are so hard to hunt down, but then I'm

03:57:10.520 | reading all these books and then all those books got all their own citations and a lot of, you know,

03:57:16.120 | I learned this a long time ago, but this was reinforced in this book. Um, and this is no slam

03:57:21.320 | against them. It's just against everybody. It's a lot of times the people that I agree with are wrong

03:57:26.760 | and they will cite something. And then I go and read that something. And it does not say what they said,

03:57:31.800 | it says, and I can see why they misunderstood it even that they're not lying and not exaggerating,

03:57:36.840 | but that's not really the implication there. It's really something different. So I double,

03:57:42.040 | triple, quadruple check every goddamn thing I can until I'm like, I I'm terrified of being caught out,

03:57:48.120 | being wrong on a fact. And I have, um, the book is 477,000 words. And I it's if, if it was six by nine,

03:57:57.640 | and if the font was regular size, it would be 1200 pages long. That's how long the book is. Um,

03:58:03.560 | and it's, but it's not, well, first of all, a major portion of that is like literally hundreds

03:58:08.840 | and hundreds of pages of that is footnotes. Although I keep them all at the bottom of the

03:58:11.880 | page where you can see them and damn anyone who doesn't do that. That's exactly how a book like this

03:58:16.520 | should be. Um, but then, so a lot of that space really is citations, but then also, um,

03:58:24.600 | I don't dwell too long on any one topic. I don't think the only two exceptions to that are

03:58:31.080 | in, um, when we talk about the NATO promises against expansion and the Nazis in Ukraine,

03:58:39.640 | because these I believe are the two most controversial subjects or, you know, stances or

03:58:45.480 | whatever in the book. And so I go absolutely to the ends of the, to beat the dead horse all the way to

03:58:50.280 | death to prove the absolute fact of the position that I'm taking there. Um, and then there's still

03:58:56.920 | probably a lot of overkill on a lot of things, but as far as like the writing goes, when I, I mentioned

03:59:00.920 | the Montenegro coup of 2016, it's just a short little thing. It's called the vaudeville coup and

03:59:06.920 | it's kind of funny and it's a little mysterious. And then the different poisonings by the Russians,

03:59:11.720 | or at least alleged ones I have, you know, Litvinenko and the Skripples and whoever. And I just,

03:59:17.240 | I was thinking it from the point of view of my accusers, like, oh yeah, well, what about this?

03:59:21.320 | Well, what about this? Well, what about that? I bet you left that out. And like, no, I didn't,

03:59:24.520 | dude, I have it all in there. And I tried to write it in a way to satisfy my worst critics as best as I

03:59:29.480 | could. The, as the declaration of independence says, with a decent respect to the opinions of mankind

03:59:35.480 | that like, so I should assume that you don't agree with me and in good faith.

03:59:41.560 | And so how in the hell am I going to fix that? Like, I'm going to have to make you accept that

03:59:46.360 | I'm not lying to you. When I put these things together. If, if, when you read that, you feel

03:59:50.920 | like I I'm trying to get away with something, you're going to put it down. And so I didn't write it for

03:59:56.520 | you to put it down. I think I wrote a thousand page book for you to put it down. I want you to get through

04:00:02.200 | all the way to the end going, God dang, man. I didn't really realize it was as bad as all of that.

04:00:07.560 | So you convinced the critics that's, that's what it is for as opposed to enough already,

04:00:11.800 | which I really wrote enough already for my people, my fans to give to their brother-in-law and their

04:00:17.720 | dad and whoever it's a little bit after the fact, as I said, I was in a real rush to get it done. So

04:00:21.880 | I don't have the citations. I do have the citations in fool's air and about Afghanistan. And actually

04:00:26.920 | we're working on now, me and one of my guys at the Institute, uh, we're working on putting the footnotes

04:00:32.200 | back into enough already and doing like the ultimate scholar edition with the overkill on

04:00:36.440 | the citations there. But I actually, I had footnotes on most of it. I turned them off

04:00:40.920 | and I just raced to the end because I was out of money and I was out of time and I just had to go.

04:00:45.880 | And so friends of mine rationalize it like, well, I think Bill O'Reilly has footnotes in his books,

04:00:52.360 | you know, get that thing out there, man. And so I did. And, but I did try to write it in a way where

04:00:56.840 | I either cite my citations in the pros, or at least I wrote it in a way where it's a very specific

04:01:02.120 | claim on November the 9th, they held a meeting and these five people were there and this is what they

04:01:06.440 | decided. So you can go and Google that. You know what I mean? It's not, it's, it should be specific

04:01:11.000 | enough that people can double check me, but, but then, yeah. So why I'm like this, um, I'm just a

04:01:15.880 | Ron Paul guy and I can't stand being lied to. And, and I can't stand all this violence and I want to

04:01:21.320 | live in a free society and the empire's ruining it. And then, and then, so why do I write? Why am I

04:01:26.680 | I like that meticulous about it all is it was, I don't want to be caught being wrong. I'll tell

04:01:31.720 | you one funny story and then we'll stop. One time I lost an argument about Waco.

04:01:37.080 | It was these three people in my cab and the one of them was this real jerk. And the other two were on

04:01:43.240 | his side cause it was his friends. And I was arguing with him about everything. But the thing was, he was

04:01:48.520 | like the son of a federal cop and he knew their side of the story, like down pat. He really knew his stuff.

04:01:56.520 | And so even though I was right and he was wrong, he won. And they got out of the car going,

04:02:03.320 | screw you, Branch Davidian boy and whatever. And oh man, that never happened to me again. You know why?

04:02:09.400 | Because I read like six books about Waco. I already knew more than enough about it. And then I decided

04:02:14.760 | that, yeah, no, actually no, one's going to ever beat me in an argument about that ever again.

04:02:19.000 | You can really thoroughly articulate the evidence for your claims.

04:02:23.640 | And you're just like me too, dude. When you read a 300 page book, it tasted well,

04:02:28.600 | like if you want to read this thing, it's not like a chore, but like, oh, I want to read that.

04:02:31.960 | You're done in a day and a half or two. Like it's easy to do. Once you set that precedent a few times,

04:02:37.640 | it's pretty easy to read a thing and jot down some notes and learn something from it and then

04:02:41.800 | teach it to somebody else and whatever. Well, yeah, listen, welcome to adulthood or whatever.

04:02:46.600 | That's what we do. So like, that's all it is. It's just, that's my only job is compiling reasons

04:02:51.320 | to resent these liars and why to know better than all their false promises.

04:02:55.880 | Yeah. But also be able to, uh, to articulate it.

04:02:59.160 | And see, also I'm a talk radio guy, man. And I grew up in the radio of Rush Limbaugh. I'm driving

04:03:02.920 | for a living in the era of Rush Limbaugh and G Gordon Liddy and all the local guys. And I mean,

04:03:06.840 | the, I'll go ahead and say this on the record too, the local hosts on KLBJ AM in Austin all suck and

04:03:14.520 | always have all of them since Raleigh James in 1996. Love her. Everybody since then. I mean,

04:03:20.520 | I don't know who listens to the KLBJ AM at all, how they even stay in business at all. Their hosts suck.

04:03:26.280 | The, the, the content of their awards are the actual raw skill of how they talk and what they talk and

04:03:31.240 | like all of it. And mostly how stupid and wrong and horrible they are about everything, but also just how

04:03:36.040 | like meaningless their drivel is right. You'd be in the middle of the world's worst crisis. And they're

04:03:40.920 | like, the liberals are trying to take God out of the pledge of allegiance. It's like, dude, I would

04:03:45.000 | prefer that you just shoot me in the face to listen to this for the love of God, please. But anyway,

04:03:50.360 | but I, I love the potential there. And in that era before the internet was what it is today,

04:03:56.840 | this is the real town square where you can have a host who knows something. You can have a guest who

04:04:02.200 | knows something and you can have callers who know a lot more than you think they would dude.

04:04:06.920 | And I remember listening to them talk about like the Texas homesteading act that said you weren't

04:04:11.320 | allowed to take out a second mortgage on your house and whatever, because it was to protect the little

04:04:14.760 | ladies and they were debating over whether they should have that law or not. And I remember thinking,

04:04:19.080 | wow, all these people know so much about this topic that I've never heard of before. And all of these

04:04:25.400 | callers are just so deep on their knowledge of what they know and whether on that issue or so many

04:04:30.600 | other things, the first real time I heard real AM radio in Austin, I was 16. I was wait, no, I might

04:04:36.840 | have been all, I might've been 18. No, no, I would have, I was 16. It was, it was, yeah, it was the same

04:04:41.560 | year that the Davidians were killed. I was driving my first car down 183. And I said, you know, I've lived

04:04:47.240 | in Austin my whole life and I've never listened to the AM band. I wonder what it is. And the first thing I

04:04:52.280 | hit was KLBJ AM and it was Johnny Walker, the great Johnny Walker, the FM, uh, rock and roll DJ was

04:05:00.200 | sub hosting and his whole thing. He was a great guy, by the way, ripped Johnny Walker. Um, but he goes,

04:05:06.840 | look, I don't know anything. I'm literally just hosting this show. The guest is this guy, a surviving

04:05:13.880 | branch Davidian, and we're taking your calls. And this hit me like, what? There's even a branch Davidian

04:05:21.480 | alive and they have a point of view and you can hear it and he's live right now. And he's talking

04:05:26.920 | and people can call in and they can, what? Because in my world that I lived in, what you know about the

04:05:33.000 | branch Davidians is what you read in the Austin American Statesman or what you're told by Ted Koppel

04:05:37.320 | and Dan Rather. And that's all you get. What do you mean? I can interact with one. Yeah. And then the

04:05:44.600 | callers are brilliant. The callers know all they're not kooks. They know exactly what they're talking about.

04:05:50.200 | And they'll be like, I'll tell you what happened was on March the 19th, blah, blah, blah. Oh, okay.

04:05:54.760 | So this is why I'm like this. This is talk radio to me is it's like, if you believe in the idea of like

04:06:03.800 | any kind of like so-called popular government, like if we have to settle for any sort of statism at all,

04:06:10.120 | you want the people to be able to have one big ass conversation with each other, right? That's why

04:06:15.480 | your show is so important because you get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views and

04:06:19.400 | listens, maybe millions if you include all the podcasts. And so for a guy like me, it's like,

04:06:23.720 | yeah, it's a chance to talk to a whole bunch of people to get a bunch of people having the same

04:06:28.760 | conversation together instead of everybody just all spread out, having their own little separate

04:06:33.080 | arguments and not interacting with each other. So to me, that was the brilliance of talk radio.

04:06:37.000 | And then where Rush Limbaugh and G Gordon Liddy were all polished and had their little programs,

04:06:42.360 | the guys on 5:50 AM in San Antonio, especially Carl Wigglesworth was my favorite, but him and all those

04:06:48.120 | guys, even Ricky Ware, who was the John Hagey lunatic, but he was still such a sweet guy.

04:06:53.400 | And their talk radio, their version of talk radio was, all right, it's the Carl Wigglesworth show,

04:07:00.200 | everybody. We're talking about Bill Clinton selling cocaine down there with Dan Lasseter and me in

04:07:04.280 | Arkansas. And we got Terry Reid on the phone. Tell us about your book, Compromise, Clinton,

04:07:09.400 | Bush and the CIA, Terry. But everybody's kicking back. Yeah. Everybody's got this front porch attitude.

04:07:16.840 | And they got all the time in the world. We're here every day for three hours a day. Ain't no

04:07:20.840 | thing we're talking about. And, and they're just the nicest guys come back from commercial and go,

04:07:25.560 | it's Carl. We're talking with Terry about the thing and no bumper music, no fanfare, no last name.

04:07:31.960 | You just dropped, jumped in the middle of a conversation, tune in, figure it out.

04:07:35.400 | And it's just beautiful. It's perfect. And then I modeled myself and the way I do my show

04:07:39.880 | on beginning on free radio, Austin in 98 and 99. And then on chaos radio, Austin from 2002 through 2010,

04:07:47.560 | I guess I was on chaos. Although it wasn't, yeah, it was 2010 before they seized our last

04:07:52.600 | transmitted from chaos. Wasn't it? I think it was. So yeah, I did chaos for like, yeah, a long time. And then,

04:07:59.640 | so that was my whole attitude was, look, I am a regular guy. I ain't got to fake that. I didn't

04:08:04.360 | go to college. I dropped out of ACC and my message ain't for elite policy makers. My message is for my

04:08:11.720 | peers and look at what they're doing. That's it. And, and this is why the, you know, the Rothbardian

04:08:16.600 | style of libertarian populism really always appealed to me is because that's who it's geared toward.

04:08:21.400 | The Cato Institute wants an audience with the Senate, the Mises Institute and the libertarian

04:08:26.840 | Institute and antiwar.com. We want an audience with the population of this country, right? That's who

04:08:32.680 | we're trying to talk to. That's who we are. That's where we come from. We're not Washington DC folk.

04:08:37.480 | We're from out here and our, we're speaking in the third person about them, you know,

04:08:43.160 | rather trying to be part of the regime. I just want to say briefly that the,

04:08:47.480 | you said the people that call in are usually brilliant. And that's the experience I've had.

04:08:51.160 | I've recorded a few conversations just on the street. Like I went to the West Bank and I interviewed

04:08:56.680 | a bunch of people on the street. And I really want to do that a lot more because I didn't meet a single

04:09:03.320 | person who's not brilliant in their own way. It's like, it's remarkable. It's remarkable the brilliance

04:09:09.000 | that comes from people. You ever listen to sports radio? Not, not as much as I probably should.

04:09:14.200 | Yeah. Well, look, you know what? Well, I don't know if this counts anymore,

04:09:16.680 | but I spent a little bit of time in Denver, listening to sports radio in Denver and these

04:09:20.600 | people are fanatics, man. But the point being that, you know, Jimmy, the air conditioner repairman

04:09:27.880 | is smarter than you, dude. And he knows everything that every baseball team ever achieved and when

04:09:34.680 | and who, and everyone on the teams, all their stats, all their, everything and why it mattered. And it

04:09:42.280 | mattered a lot to them. And the level of expertise there is no different than in your highest applied

04:09:49.560 | sciences or history or any other thing. You know what I mean? It all just depends on what you're

04:09:54.680 | interested in and what you want to know that much about. And this is Noam Chomsky thing that he talked

04:09:59.400 | about where, look, if you're a primate, that's intelligent enough to speak, then you are a genius,

04:10:05.880 | right? Then you are absolute miracle, unbelievable, impossible, you know, circumstance situation of your

04:10:17.240 | very existence. And so we all ought to be taken like at that very level. You know what I mean? Like,

04:10:23.480 | no matter who you're dealing with, there's something special in there. Yeah. And usually

04:10:27.560 | it comes with humility because people with PhDs and Harvard and so on, they usually have this

04:10:32.600 | overinflated ego that comes from authority, but sports radio, people on the street, everyday folks,

04:10:39.640 | they don't have that. And so they could just speak their expertise without the ego. Yeah.

04:10:44.040 | Well, and that's my thing too, is I don't have nothing to sell you other than, I mean, my coffee

04:10:49.240 | sponsor and whatever, but like my, my sincerity is like all I got. I don't have any other argument

04:10:54.520 | from authority that I can invoke other than people listen to me. They know I'm not lying

04:10:59.160 | and they can tell what my biases are. I wear them absolutely on my sleeve. You know what I mean?

04:11:04.520 | Is every day I only try to quantify whether I hate Bill Clinton or George W. Bush more.

04:11:11.400 | And it's, and that's where I'm coming from. And everybody understands that. And they know

04:11:16.200 | that I'd never deliberately try to make them think one thing instead of another. And if I did,

04:11:21.160 | they would obviously catch onto that. And then I'd be completely ruined and have to just go get a job

04:11:26.520 | delivering auto parts or something. And which would be fine. In fact, I like delivering auto parts. I've

04:11:31.320 | had that job before. Um, although I'd rather drive at night. If I got to drive, I rather, I guess,

04:11:36.360 | drive Uber at night, but if you still have energy, Oh, I'm not even halfway done. What about you?

04:11:42.040 | All right. God, all the energy in the world, maybe a quick bathroom break.

04:11:45.000 | Yeah. A good place to pick up our story here would be, uh, John Mearsheimer and Stephen

04:11:50.040 | Walt's book. We've talked about Mearsheimer and Walt previously. Now their book is called the Israel

04:11:54.280 | Lobby and American foreign policy. It came out in 2007. It started out as an essay that they wrote

04:12:00.600 | first for the Atlantic monthly that commissioned the story and then refused to run it. And they ended up

04:12:06.360 | running it in the London review of books. We also ran it at antiwar.com. People can find it there.

04:12:10.760 | It's called the Israel Lobby and American foreign policy. It's a fantastic article. And then they made

04:12:15.080 | it into a book. And now these guys are again, the code deans basically of the realist school of foreign

04:12:22.360 | policy. One from the university of Chicago, the other from Harvard, both highly respected, neither of them

04:12:29.480 | haters or ideologues or any of these things. They were ruthlessly attacked as anti-Semites for this,

04:12:35.000 | which is completely preposterous. And what they did though, was say that, look, man, Israel's interests

04:12:40.520 | are very different than ours. And that's why they spend so much money and effort lobbying in the United

04:12:47.400 | States to try to obfuscate that fact that what's good for them ain't necessarily good for us at all.

04:12:54.760 | Well, they have to make sure it's at least good for the people in charge here, if not for the country

04:12:59.960 | itself. And that's their object. And as Walton Mearsheimer say in the essay and in the book that

04:13:04.920 | you can't blame the whole Iraq war on them. George W. Bush was the one sitting in the chair behind that

04:13:10.680 | desk calling that shot. He could have changed his mind at the very last moment. It was on him.

04:13:16.920 | And now it's the Congress's responsibility, but they passed that responsibility to him with their

04:13:22.600 | unconstitutional authorization that they passed in October of 2002. But like ultimately who pulled

04:13:28.120 | that trigger? George W. Bush did and in conspiracy with his vice president and his secretary of defense

04:13:33.880 | and the rest of them. So the neocons, yes, they were the deputy secretary of defense and the deputy secretary

04:13:40.600 | of defense for policy and the, you know, staff in the vice president's office, the staff of the national

04:13:48.440 | security council. They were there operating really, as I said, as that as Colin Powell called it, that

04:13:54.760 | separate government and operating mostly for Benjamin Netanyahu's goals. Um, this is part of what we argued

04:14:02.920 | about, uh, me and Mark Dubowitz on your show last time was he insisted somewhat partially correctly

04:14:09.000 | here that Ariel Sharon wanted Bush to hit Iran, not Iraq. And Ariel Sharon, not Netanyahu was the prime

04:14:16.120 | minister. And that was the occasion of him accusing JJ Goldberg of being an anti-Semite, um, because he had

04:14:23.560 | written in the Jewish daily forward about how Netanyahu wants to hit Iraq. Sharon would rather hit Iran.

04:14:30.920 | And JJ Goldberg, as long as I'm citing him, let me tell you, he says in there very clearly that he is

04:14:38.840 | not saying that the neocons bear even the lion's share of the responsibility for the war. Of course,

04:14:46.680 | he blames George W. Bush for launching the war. And of course, he's not peddling in some anti-Semitic

04:14:52.760 | conspiracy theory and the pages of the forward for God's sake, right? He's, he's extremely conservative in

04:14:58.680 | his statements and in his accusations. But what he's saying is that the Likudniks in America are closer

04:15:05.720 | to Netanyahu than Sharon. And of course, George W. Bush wants to go to Iraq. He wants to go to Baghdad,

04:15:11.640 | not Tehran. And so it, and, and Wolfowitz of course, always, especially was an Iraq Hawk. And so

04:15:19.880 | the confluence of interest here was to go to Iraq. Now Sharon was smart enough to see that Iran, you know,

04:15:27.400 | the clean break wasn't him. That was Netanyahu and his buddies. Sharon, I think was skeptical about what's

04:15:32.680 | going to happen when we overthrow Saddam Hussein and the Shiites take over. And this is where he tried to

04:15:37.080 | insist. And John Bolton did echo him in this and promise him that yes. And then we'll go to Iran and Syria and

04:15:43.160 | Lebanon and everywhere else next, because we can't just get rid of Saddam. That's going to change the balance of

04:15:49.640 | power in a way that's going to benefit Iran in a way that Sharon did not prefer. However, Sharon absolutely did go

04:15:57.320 | along with the program and help lie us into war. And he had his own office of special plans that he

04:16:04.840 | created in the, the prime minister's office in Israel, where they manufactured fake intelligence

04:16:11.320 | in English to stove pipe into the intelligence stream to help lie us into war. And here's three

04:16:16.760 | authoritative sources on that. Julian Borger in the Guardian, the spies who pushed for war. And it's not

04:16:23.160 | the spies, it's the neoconservatives is who he's talking about, not CIA officers. The spies who pushed

04:16:28.680 | for war by Julian Borger. Then there's more missing intelligence by Robert Dreyfus in the nation. Then

04:16:35.080 | is a pretext for war. 9/11 Iraq and the abuse of America's intelligence agencies by James Bamford,

04:16:41.960 | the great book by the great James Bamford, the guy that wrote the puzzle palace and body of secrets

04:16:46.280 | and the shadow factory about the national security agency. Best author on the NSA. Pretext for war

04:16:52.760 | focuses on the neocons and the CIA and how the neocons lie to send a war for Netanyahu and Israel.

04:16:59.160 | I don't remember. Oh, and the whole first part is about 9/11 and how 9/11 happened and how the

04:17:05.000 | government failed to stop it. And then the shadow factor is really insightful on those lines, because

04:17:09.480 | we often hear about the infighting between the FBI and the CIA, but the NSA also hoarded all their

04:17:14.760 | information and would not share with the FBI or CIA. And the CIA at one point, and Michael Scheuer also tells

04:17:21.400 | the story CIA had to create their own listening station on Madagascar to try to spy on Al Qaeda hiding

04:17:26.680 | out in Yemen, the switchboard house in Yemen, because the NSA would not give them the intercepts. They had

04:17:31.320 | to get their own, but they could only get half the conversation and not the other half talking to the

04:17:35.480 | terrorists in Afghanistan. And as Scheuer put it to me on my show, I don't know, 15 years ago or something,

04:17:40.760 | he said, yeah, because George Tenet didn't have the moral courage to just walk down there and demand the

04:17:45.160 | damn intercepts. Because at that time, the head of the CIA was also the director of central intelligence,

04:17:49.960 | which meant the boss like the DNI is supposed to be over all the other intelligence agencies.

04:17:55.480 | So George Tenet had the authority to command NSA to do what he said. He didn't have to ask nicely,

04:18:01.720 | but according to Scheuer, he didn't have the courage to just go down there and say,

04:18:05.800 | give me the damn intercepts. Why not? Scumbag. You know, he came from staff in the Senate,

04:18:11.800 | and I think just wanted to please the real spies, you know, like he was kind of the new guy and didn't

04:18:15.560 | really fit in and was trying to like be cool or whatever. And I don't know, who knows these people.

04:18:22.200 | But, um, so importantly, you know, the Ariel Sharon government did help to push this thing,

04:18:29.160 | even though Dubowitz is right that Sharon first said, no, Bush, you should go to Tehran first,

04:18:34.200 | because that was his problem. It was, I guess, I don't know if I'd have to go back and see if

04:18:39.480 | anybody ever wrote about this, but I never saw like Sharon's opinion of the clean break,

04:18:43.880 | but it's easy to see how anyone could see through how stupid the plan was.

04:18:47.880 | We're going to weaken the Shiites by getting rid of the most powerful Sunnis standing in their way.

04:18:52.440 | That's pretty dumb, right? And especially if you really know about, for example, the history of the

04:18:57.640 | Iran-Iraq war, the history of the post Iraq war one Shiite uprising, you might have real reason to

04:19:03.640 | worry. Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com wrote in 2002. He said, Hey, look, everybody,

04:19:09.080 | the Supreme council for Islamic revolution in Iraq, the CIA tried to give them money and they said,

04:19:14.280 | piss off. We don't need you. We got Iran. And Justin said, better watch out. Here's who's coming

04:19:20.840 | to power when we invade Iraq a year from now. And then that's exactly what happened is the, again,

04:19:27.000 | the Bada brigade was the militia of the Supreme council for Islamic revolution in Iraq. And that was

04:19:32.200 | exactly who George W. Bush took all the way to power in Baghdad. So for the guys who fought in that war,

04:19:38.440 | who are listening to this, who still don't know why they fought in that war. Ultimately, they fought

04:19:43.480 | on the Shiite side of a massive civil war against the minority Sunni ruling regime and to replace them

04:19:49.640 | them with a new, essentially Islamist theocracy sort of pseudo Republic like in Iran. And that that's what

04:19:56.680 | it was for. It's not for freedom was for one faction over the other. And in this case, it was the Shiites.

04:20:00.920 | And then, of course, the most powerful fact is worth explaining, not of course, that the most

04:20:07.160 | powerful Shiite groups that came together to form the new Iraqi government was the Supreme Council for

04:20:14.200 | Islamic revolution in Iraq, Skiri, which is now called ISKI because we won their revolution for them. So now

04:20:20.200 | it's just the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. The Dawah party and Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army.

04:20:28.840 | Now, Dawah and Skiri have been living in Iran, and they were kind of more higher class types. Whereas

04:20:34.360 | Muqtada al-Sadr is like the son of important guys. It was much more like a street ruffian type. And the ghetto,

04:20:41.720 | the Shiite ghetto in eastern Baghdad was called Saddam City. As soon as America invaded, they renamed it

04:20:48.120 | Sadr City after his father. But he inherited a lot of that street credibility as like the most legitimate

04:20:56.360 | of the Shiite leaders on the ground there. So these three groups, under the guidance of the Ayatollah Ali

04:21:02.280 | al-Sistani who lived down in Najaf, under his leadership or guidance or whatever, they formed what was called

04:21:08.600 | the United Iraqi Alliance. That was the group that wrote the constitution in the fall of 2004.

04:21:14.360 | That was the group that won the elections, the big purple-fingered elections of 2005.

04:21:19.080 | And that's what kicked off the real civil war started after that. Now, there's already a predominantly

04:21:24.120 | Sunni-based insurgency at that time. Well, it was not exclusively Sunni. It started out much more

04:21:28.680 | nationalist and mixed. But very quickly, it was the Sunni tribal leaders and former Ba'athist and military

04:21:36.120 | leaders realizing that they have everything to lose now and that they have the super majority of the country

04:21:41.880 | backed by the United States is now taking power. And then, so this pushed the Sunnis into the arms,

04:21:49.560 | the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the Bin Ladenites who were coming from all over the place,

04:21:54.120 | just like it was Afghanistan or Bosnia or Chechnya again, or Kosovo, coming to all chip in to fight the

04:21:59.720 | Holy Jihad this time against us instead of with our help, although still backed by our friends,

04:22:04.200 | the Saudis. And they came in there and America and the Shiites pushed the Sunni insurgency into

04:22:13.080 | the arms of the Bin Ladenites. And in fact, I'll tell you an anecdote about how that happened.

04:22:22.280 | And so much of this is tied up in what's happening in Israel at this time as well.

04:22:25.960 | In January of 2004, Sheikh Yassin, who was the founder of Hamas, which was a break off of the

04:22:35.160 | Muslim Brotherhood. It was originally like a charitable type organization that ended up growing into this

04:22:40.280 | militia with the aid and comfort of the Israelis. And there's some really great articles that you might

04:22:47.240 | like to peruse about this, including by Richard Sale in UPI. If you just type in Richard Sale,

04:22:55.560 | UPI, Hamas, I'm sure it'll just come straight up there. Israel gave major aid to Hamas. This is an

04:23:01.400 | in-depth study. It's based on CIA as well as Shin Bet and Mossad sources. Richard Sale, if people aren't

04:23:10.600 | familiar, UPI is the news agency most closely tied to the Washington Times, which would be the Reagan

04:23:17.160 | ite conservative newspaper in Washington. It's funny because it's the Washington Post and the New

04:23:24.360 | York Times are the liberal papers and the New York Post and the Washington Times are the conservative

04:23:29.400 | papers, if you got that right. So basically this article details how Tel Aviv, Israel gave direct and

04:23:38.200 | indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of many years. And the purpose was to build them up

04:23:45.160 | to divide and conquer the Palestinians, to create a religious right-wing alternative to the secular,

04:23:51.000 | nationalist, sort of pseudo-commie PLO under Yasser Arafat. They wanted to divide and conquer the

04:23:58.040 | Palestinians. And so what they would do is they would finance, directly finance, Hamas while at the same

04:24:05.080 | time arresting all of their competitors and holding them in prison, disarming them, weakening them,

04:24:10.120 | while bolstering the Hamas government. So they did not create Hamas, but they did very deliberately

04:24:15.960 | bolster its rise. Now Hezbollah is a different story where Hezbollah just really grew up in reaction to

04:24:21.800 | their invasion of Lebanon in '82 without any direct support from them in that sense. Although maybe I

04:24:27.960 | don't know enough about that. But certainly in this case with Hamas, that's true. And you can also read

04:24:33.560 | Andrew Higgins in the Wall Street Journal, wrote a great piece along the same lines.

04:24:37.400 | I'm going to pull that up for us here. How is your help to spawn Hamas? Andrew Higgins, 2009.

04:24:46.280 | So I can also recommend Robert Dreyfuss' book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped to Unleash

04:24:52.760 | Fundamentalist Islam. Masterpiece. Also again, Trita Parsi's Treacherous Alliance. Cannot recommend that

04:24:58.840 | book highly enough. That thing might go into its third printing just because of me. I'm telling you,

04:25:03.240 | everybody's got to read that book. And then Obstacle to Peace by Libertarian Institute fellow

04:25:09.560 | Jeremy R. Hammond wrote a masterpiece about Israel and Palestine and the fight over the

04:25:14.440 | occupied territories and America's role in making it all worse than the rest. It's a fantastic book.

04:25:19.160 | It goes in deep study about this. Now, back to our anecdote. In January 2004,

04:25:26.600 | old Sheikh Yassin, with his big Santa Claus beard and his wheelchair, says, "I give up. I give in.

04:25:34.360 | We need to go ahead and negotiate with the Israelis and settle for our measly stinking 22% of historic

04:25:40.600 | Palestine, just as Arafat had done in 1988." Two months later, the Israelis killed him in a missile

04:25:47.160 | strike. Just so they could lie to you, Lex, and say, "We have no partner for peace." Somehow a missile blew

04:25:54.360 | up his car. And they're the ones who killed him. And when they killed him, in March of 2004,

04:26:00.200 | that's what touched off the riot in Fallujah, where the four Blackwater guards were murdered and burned,

04:26:06.600 | and their bodies hanged from the bridge outside of town. And they had a giant parade, Dar Jamel,

04:26:12.840 | the great war journalist, was there and saw. They had pictures of Yassin in their windshields. They

04:26:17.640 | called themselves the Al Yassin Brigades. And it was this impromptu protest against Israel's murder of

04:26:24.440 | the leader of Hamas. And that's what caused that riot. That killed those Blackwater guards,

04:26:29.640 | and then George W. Bush sent General James Madison there with his Marines, including now a couple of

04:26:34.840 | friends of mine, who had to go in there and bite that thing and declared the thing a free fire zone

04:26:40.120 | like Vietnam and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians in the first Battle of Fallujah,

04:26:45.800 | which they claimed that Zarqawi, the Bin Ladenite, who wasn't even really a Bin Ladenite yet,

04:26:50.760 | he didn't declare his loyalty to Bin Laden until the end of 2004, a year and a half into the war.

04:26:56.440 | But they pretended, so six months later, but they pretended that he was already tied to Bin Laden. He

04:27:01.400 | was one of the lies in Colin Powell's UN speech, that there's this guy named Zarqawi and he's tied

04:27:06.200 | to Bin Laden and he's tied to Saddam. Well, he wasn't tied to Bin Laden. He had told Bin Laden,

04:27:09.960 | "No, I don't want to join your group." And he wasn't tied to Saddam, unlike the lies of Ahmed Chalabi

04:27:15.160 | and the exiles. He was not operated on by Saddam Hussein and given a peg leg in the Baghdad hospital.

04:27:21.560 | That was a hoax perpetrated by the Weekly Standard and the neoconservative set to tie those two

04:27:27.080 | together. In fact, he wasn't tied to either. And then only after the war and America made him famous

04:27:33.640 | and claimed that he was Bin Ladenite, the Zarqawi race and stature. Zarqawi was more apocalyptic and

04:27:40.040 | revolutionary and even nihilistic and destructive than Bin Laden's doctrines ever were. And he was

04:27:47.160 | notoriously sectarian against the Shiites. Where Bin Laden, you know, I don't think, and I have not read

04:27:54.280 | everything the guy ever wrote, but I have read a lot of his stuff. And I never saw where he really

04:27:58.840 | seems to focus on problems against the Shiites. Again, Muhammad Atta and Ramzi bin Ashib, they were

04:28:05.480 | mad because of Shimon Peres and Naftali Bennett killing Shiite Palestinians in Lebanon. The fact that

04:28:13.000 | they were Shiites didn't make them less valuable as far as wanting to avenge their deaths, as far as that

04:28:18.760 | goes. Zarqawi, on the other hand, thought, "No, the only good Shiite is a dead Shiite. God says so."

04:28:24.040 | And this kind of like, "Kray, bring on the apocalypse" kind of deal and went for, you know,

04:28:28.840 | madness, suicide bombing Shiite pilgrims and doing like just absolute atrocities against civilians,

04:28:34.760 | which of course, like the guy may be good at making bomb vests, but he's not good at math

04:28:42.440 | because there's just way too many Shiites. And so by boycotting the election, refusing to participate

04:28:49.480 | in the new order, which they got the American superpower occupying the country with 300,

04:28:53.800 | thousand troops, or at that point, maybe 200,000, but still. And in alliance with the supermajority,

04:29:00.680 | those Sunni chiefs should have figured out a way to deal. Saying, "No way, let's fight" was a huge mistake

04:29:07.960 | from them. And then entering into alliance with the Bin Ladenites only made it worse because,

04:29:13.800 | and this is, it is directly because of Israel killing Yassin, and then the Battle of Fallujah,

04:29:20.200 | that helped drive a bunch of refugees out of Fallujah who then went to Baghdad who drove people out of

04:29:24.680 | their areas. And then you had a lot of tit and tit for tat back and forth as refugees from the

04:29:29.880 | different cities are being cleansed out. So in the predominantly Shiite cities, they're kicking all the

04:29:34.360 | Sunnis out. And in the predominantly Shiite Sunni areas, they're kicking all the Shiites out and people

04:29:38.760 | are being displaced. Dar Jamal, I swear, I looked and looked and maybe I still could find it somewhere,

04:29:44.040 | but I think the last time I tried to find it, I couldn't find it anymore. But it was Dar Jamal had

04:29:49.480 | this most brilliant article where he traced the cause and effect through the wars from the beginning

04:29:56.440 | of the, you know, the war began in '03, of course, but like the real worsening of the insurgency in '04

04:30:02.440 | and the chain of events from this city to this city to this city where these different refugees are displacing

04:30:07.880 | other people and causing these worst consequences to go through and were more and more than the Sunnis,

04:30:13.000 | especially being cleansed from Baghdad and they're being pushed into the arms of the Bin Ladenites.

04:30:18.040 | Again, all touched off by Israel assassinating their own pseudo sock puppet, you know, terrorist front man,

04:30:25.880 | excuse for an imperialist policy that they had supported. When he was finally ready to completely

04:30:34.200 | capitulate to them, they killed him. So he couldn't. And that was what caused all this problem for America,

04:30:41.320 | or, you know, not caused, but contributed significantly to the problems during the war.

04:30:46.360 | Also during that same time, this was the first time that Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army

04:30:51.400 | fought against the Americans. And he even sent Shiites in pickup trucks to Fallujah to go help

04:30:55.880 | in the name of Iraqi nationalism to help the Sunnis at that time. And they had a whole separate little

04:31:02.440 | war with him in Sadr city in Eastern Baghdad at that time, which is a real problem because

04:31:08.040 | as I said, Sadr had so much street credibility there among the people and where to this day,

04:31:16.200 | he is still one of the most empower, one of the most important and powerful kingmakers,

04:31:20.120 | uh, in Shiite politics in that country right now. And so they were, you know, essentially blowing up and

04:31:27.960 | sabotaging their own ability to use diplomacy to work with this guy. And he became the most

04:31:34.120 | intransigent part of the Sunni insurgency. There's so many different parts of this, but one of the

04:31:39.400 | things that's really important, I think, to talk about is that David Petraeus, his first job was up in

04:31:45.880 | Mosul trying to train up a militia to be our guys. And they just took the money and guns and joined the

04:31:50.920 | insurgency against us. It was an absolute catastrophe. He gave them a bunch of weapons and money and then

04:31:55.960 | was humiliated and kicked right the hell out of there. His next job, right after empowering the

04:32:02.040 | Sunni insurgency up in Mosul, was to go to Baghdad and to turn the Bada Brigade of the Supreme Islamic

04:32:07.880 | Council. The same guys who Saddam feared in 1980, which is why he started the war. The same guys who George H.W.

04:32:14.840 | Bush feared in 1991, which is why he betrayed their uprising. The same guys that W. Bush is now

04:32:21.000 | taking all the way to Baghdad. David Petraeus is now in charge of building them into the Iraqi army.

04:32:26.760 | And that's who was going around torturing everybody to death. And I don't know if you saw the movie

04:32:32.520 | American Sniper about Chris Kyle, directed by Clint Eastwood. And I'm a real big Clint Eastwood fan. I'm

04:32:37.720 | really disappointed in this fact. It was really bad what he did in that movie was he portrayed

04:32:43.480 | the Sunni insurgents torturing people to death with power drills and portrayed Chris Kyle saving them.

04:32:50.680 | But that's not true. It was America's guys, the Bada Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council. They were

04:32:58.040 | the ones torturing people to death with power drills through the shoulder, through the heart, through the

04:33:03.400 | eyeball, through the ear, through the temple. So at that time, America was supporting the Bada Brigade.

04:33:08.520 | At that time, America is building the Bada Brigade into the Iraqi army as we know it today.

04:33:13.640 | And David Petraeus, this is where we have what's called the El Salvador option, which what does that

04:33:20.200 | sound like? Paying right-wing destoas to go around killing commies in the case of El Salvador,

04:33:24.920 | preventing it from becoming a Nicaragua, right? In the 1980s, it was John Negroponte who had worked for

04:33:30.360 | Ronald Reagan in El Salvador as the ambassador then on this covert action, killing all these people who

04:33:35.720 | was then brought in to be ambassador to run what they call the El Salvador option of empowering the

04:33:41.000 | Shiite militias to finally finish crushing the Sunni insurgency, which of course they absolutely failed

04:33:46.360 | to do. They simply radicalized them and made it that much worse and worse and worse. And this was all on

04:33:51.400 | David Petraeus. He was the one in charge of this thing. So that made the civil war just absolutely

04:33:56.840 | horrific through 2005, six, and then coming into seven. Now in '06, James Baker says, we got to get

04:34:05.560 | out of there. Old guard brought in to say, we need to figure out a way out. That's embarrassing for Bush.

04:34:10.760 | Bush decides, no, he wants to double down instead. He's going to do the surge at David Petraeus's

04:34:15.400 | recommendation. He fired Rumsfeld, who now wanted out, said, I told you light and fast, let's get out. He said,

04:34:22.440 | we got to take the training wheels off. Let the Iraqi democracy figure out a way to work on its own

04:34:28.040 | without us now, which was, you know what? Hell, take it, right? Cut and run. This ain't working.

04:34:34.440 | And he's really right. They're like, if they're going to figure this out for good or for ill through blood

04:34:39.720 | or through handshakes and bribes or what, it has to be up to them ultimately. And so, yeah. So what did

04:34:45.400 | Bush do? Kick him right out the door. It's the first time he said something reasonable. And he brought in

04:34:49.480 | Robert Gates, who's supposed to be like an old James Baker type, his father's guy who had been

04:34:54.200 | the head of the CIA, whose fault it was that the CIA didn't know that the Soviet Union was falling apart,

04:34:59.560 | right? Because they were too busy pretending that the Soviet Union was 12 feet tall at the time.

04:35:03.400 | Same guy. Bush Jr. brings him in and he oversees the surge. And this is where they do the massive

04:35:09.640 | escalation in the beginning of 2007. And it's funny because they dropped all the propaganda about

04:35:15.000 | Iran's nuclear program for a little bit because they had a new line. And the new line was that

04:35:19.480 | whenever a Shiite sets off a bomb in Iraq, it's an Iranian bomb. And this is where you and your

04:35:25.720 | audience have heard a hundred times, a thousand, that Iran killed 600 of our guys in Iraq. That's

04:35:32.840 | what they say. Well, here's the truth of that. It was 500 guys, not six. And it wasn't Iran. Those bombs,

04:35:41.960 | they were a new and improved kind of IED improvised explosive device. Our guys call them explosively

04:35:50.680 | formed penetrators, EFPs, and they were shape charge and they had a copper core. And that copper core,

04:35:57.640 | when the explosive went off, would melt. And that molten copper would then slice right through armor.

04:36:05.160 | And that was what made it the new and improved bomb. Now, the propaganda at the time was, even though it

04:36:11.480 | was David Petraeus, who at this time decided to attack Muqtada al-Sadr in the name of claiming that

04:36:16.760 | he was an Iranian agent. In fact, Muqtada al-Sadr, I think I talked about this a little bit on a tangent

04:36:23.720 | I shouldn't have taken on the last time I was here. Muqtada al-Sadr was the least Iranian puppet of the

04:36:32.040 | major Shiite faction leaders. Because where Dawah and Skiri had lived in Iran for 20 years at this

04:36:37.480 | point, he hadn't, he'd stayed. And he was insisting that Iran and the United States butt out and leave

04:36:44.600 | Iraq to Iraqis. So you see the problem there. Even though he wants Iran to leave and wants to limit their

04:36:50.120 | influence, he also wants to limit ours. The Bush administration's idea is, no, we're going to bet

04:36:56.360 | that the government of Iraq, mostly made of Dawah and Skiri, that they will need our money and our

04:37:03.480 | weapons more than they need Iran next door. So if we stick it out and even compromise repeatedly with

04:37:12.360 | Iran on who should be the prime minister, like Ibrahim Jafari and Nuri al-Maliki from the Dawah party,

04:37:19.400 | and we come to, this is the only time we talk to Iran at all, is sort of secretly quietly agreeing

04:37:24.760 | on who the Iraqi prime minister should be as we're doing this, right? So Muqtada al-Sadr,

04:37:29.880 | even though he is trying to limit Iranian authority, he also wants to limit ours. So the Americans decide

04:37:36.840 | they want to target him. So it wasn't Sadr that picked that fight. It was David Petraeus in the service

04:37:42.840 | of Dick Cheney working to try and in conspiracy with Michael Gordon of the New York Times to try to lie

04:37:51.080 | the American people into war with Iran then in the name of these bombs. And they made a massive propaganda

04:37:56.760 | campaign in the spring of 2007. Every time a bomb goes off in Shiite territory, that was Iran that did

04:38:03.640 | it, they claimed, over and over. So the point is, and the problem is, and I cite in the book by names of

04:38:10.040 | the journalists and their affiliations, at least eight or ten different American and other foreign

04:38:19.880 | reporters there. Nobody with an Iranian dog. I'm not citing Press TV here. I'm citing the New York Times.

04:38:28.520 | Michael Gordon, he's now at the Wall Street Journal, but he was at the New York Times. He's the guy who

04:38:34.200 | bylined with Judy Miller every story where they lied that Saddam Hussein is seeking A-bomb parts and

04:38:40.200 | Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons and wants germs and chemicals and all these things. Judy Miller

04:38:45.080 | took the rap for the whole media. But her co-author, Michael Gordon, lived to still lie to us to this

04:38:50.040 | day in the Wall Street Journal, but he was the one in charge of this, essentially just this conspiracy to

04:38:56.920 | lie the American people into war through the pages of the New York Times. But I show that

04:39:00.920 | his colleague, Alyssa Rubin, proved that he's a damned liar because she was there with soldiers,

04:39:06.120 | printed it in his same newspaper. She was there with American soldiers when they found an EFP factory in

04:39:12.280 | Sadr City. I'm pretty sure that there was a bunch, wherever it was, it was in Shiite territory in Iraq.

04:39:18.520 | And it was Iraqis working in a machine shop making these bombs. And now they go, "Okay, well,

04:39:23.800 | but the parts all came from Iran." Oh yeah. No, they had it. The Iranians thought, "You know what we'll

04:39:29.240 | do? We'll ship the parts into Iraq for them to make bombs out of instead of just sending them bombs."

04:39:35.000 | Like whatever, man. It was obviously just a bunch of propaganda. And I cite in there,

04:39:39.080 | the Christian Science Monitor was there when they did Operation Eagle Claw, found another factory making EFPs.

04:39:45.000 | And then I cite also Wired Magazine, the brilliant Andrew Coburn, and a bunch of other great sources

04:39:50.680 | that just showed these bombs were made in Iraq by Iraqis. I don't care what you say. And I just proved

04:39:54.840 | this over and over again on the blog at antiwar.com in 2007, over and over and over again. So if,

04:40:00.280 | in fact, if you just search my name, antiwar.com, especially if you search antiwar.com/blog

04:40:05.640 | and EFPs, you will get a bunch of hits because we went over this all at the time, making me feel extra

04:40:12.440 | old right now. Yeah, that's... That was 18 years ago. Holy shit. Yeah. EFPs are made in Iraq by Iraqis.

04:40:20.840 | Scott Horton, August 12th, 2007. 2007. And there's a bunch of them. That's just one of

04:40:26.040 | many that I did at the, you know, during that era. And, um, again, citing solid proof for those who

04:40:34.760 | listen to antiwar radio. You know, I refute this lie every single day. Citing Reuters and this Christian

04:40:42.360 | Science Monitor. Operation Black Eagle. I'm sorry, I got the name of the Eagle thing wrong. I said Eagle

04:40:49.000 | Claw, didn't I? Operation Black Eagle was where the Christian Science Monitor was tagging along.

04:40:54.760 | But there's a bunch of these. Um, and so now Dubowitz said, oh yeah, well, Iran taught him how to do it.

04:41:04.760 | Then no, Gareth Porter showed that it was the IRA, the Irish Republican army that taught Lebanese Hezbollah.

04:41:12.440 | And it was Lebanese Hezbollah that taught the Shiite Iraqis how to do it. So when I said it was Lebanese

04:41:17.640 | Hezbollah, Dubowitz goes, aha, Iran. Nope. They got it from the Irish. So sorry, Charlie. Nice little

04:41:24.600 | propaganda campaign. You got there. But then what happened was they did a big press conference where

04:41:30.200 | they laid out all the EFP bombs, uh, and the parts and the reporters started milling around and they

04:41:36.360 | go, well, that's funny. That one says made in Haditha on it, which is a city in Iraq. And that one says

04:41:42.040 | made in UAE and all this. And then, so what do we have here? Do we have any evidence that any of this

04:41:47.320 | stuff came from Iran? No. And then what'd they do, Lex? They canceled the press conference,

04:41:53.240 | closed it down, embarrassed. And Stephen Hadley, the national security advisor himself admitted,

04:41:59.320 | we didn't have the proof that we needed to make the case. Just promising. Oh, we're going to prove it.

04:42:06.360 | We're going to prove it. We're going to prove it. And kicking that can down the road for months until I

04:42:10.760 | think it must've been May or June when they finally did this press conference that fell apart

04:42:15.960 | and started to back down. Was that the major justification for the escalation?

04:42:20.040 | It was not the justification for the escalation of the surge overall. The escalation, the rationalization

04:42:24.920 | there was, we are going to send an extra 30 or 40,000 troops to Baghdad. We are going to secure

04:42:30.600 | the capital city. And once we have peace in the capital city, the peace of desolation where we kill

04:42:35.720 | every last Sunni who resists by putting a power drill through his eyeball, then we'll be able to

04:42:42.920 | negotiate peacefully in the setting of our new democratic Republic that we've built here.

04:42:47.800 | That was the justification there. And at the same time, David Petraeus, and this is the only victory

04:42:53.240 | that David Petraeus ever won in his entire stupid stinking failure of a pathetic lying life. And that is

04:43:00.280 | when he convinced George W. Bush to surrender to the Sunni insurgency. "Mr. President,

04:43:05.480 | you're not going to defeat the Sunni insurgency. Read me loud and clear. All this victory you've been

04:43:10.680 | promising all these years, all the people that you've killed trying to bring it, sending the desert ox,

04:43:17.160 | Ray Odierno in there to kill every last living fighting age male in the Ambar province. We've lost,

04:43:24.200 | Mr. President. And so what we're going to do is we're going to bribe the Sunni insurgency. Right now,

04:43:29.560 | they've, they have, well, okay. I, I overstay that. We didn't lose. We failed to beat them,

04:43:36.680 | but they did lose much territory to the Shiites. So they were licking their wounds at that time.

04:43:42.920 | The Sunni insurgency, the Iraqi Sunnis had too many enemies. They were fighting the Shiites. They were

04:43:48.520 | fighting the Americans and they had to deal with the bin Ladenites and they hated the bin Ladenites.

04:43:52.600 | They didn't want to live like Saudis and a bunch of Egyptian weirdo suicide bombers trying to outlaw women

04:43:58.840 | for buying cucumbers at the market because it's, you know, some kind of sexual innuendo and where

04:44:03.880 | these people like get these people out of my face. And I show in the book that there are plenty of

04:44:08.040 | reporting about plenty. There was plenty of reporting about this, that beginning, at least in early 2005,

04:44:14.440 | it was the local Sunni population. This is two years before David Petraeus runs to try to get to the head

04:44:21.160 | of this parade. Two years previously in the beginning of '05 was when the local Sunnis started killing the

04:44:27.160 | bin Ladenites themselves and saying, you can't tell us what to do. You're more harm than good. You're

04:44:32.680 | making our insurgency into a counterproductive war by killing all these Shiite civilians and, and generating

04:44:40.440 | all new, uh, support for our crushing at their hands and all of that. So they were isolating and, and, and

04:44:48.680 | killing these guys off. And you got to figure, dude, I mean, this is like a magic wish come true.

04:44:53.720 | Okay. George W. Bush comes and he turns all of Western Iraq, right? Fallujah to Crete, um, much of

04:45:01.000 | Ramadi and, and obviously Mosul into bin Ladenistan, into jihadi university, bigger and better and worse

04:45:10.280 | than Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya. This is all those combined. And it's in Western Iraq, right on the,

04:45:19.320 | on the border of the Levant in Mesopotamia, not Nangar province out there in no man's land between Afghanistan

04:45:26.760 | and Pakistan. This is, this is what made America's Michael Shoyer said bin Laden's only indispensable ally,

04:45:34.680 | right? That you could do like a reverse 9/11 trutherism where all the Americans are actually Al Qaeda

04:45:40.920 | agents all this time, because all they're doing is exactly what bin Laden wants them to do.

04:45:45.800 | Michael Shoyer said that, Oh, of course, Afghanistan was the plan, but Iraq, that was the hoped for, but unexpected gift to

04:45:55.800 | bin Laden. Bin Laden said on the eve of the invasion, rise up Iraqis, kill the socialist infidel Saddam Hussein,

04:46:03.720 | and then resist the Americans when they arrive.

04:46:06.360 | Okay. One guy's got a beret and a mustache. The other guy's got a beard and is all wearing a funny

04:46:15.640 | robe like Obi-Wan Kenobi. And, and they clearly are extremely different men with extremely different sets of priorities, right?

04:46:24.280 | Couldn't be more different. And of course, Saddam Hussein was terrified of Osama bin Laden and had no

04:46:29.960 | connection to his regime whatsoever. And in fact, we know now that he had kicked himself upstairs and was

04:46:35.800 | semi-retired writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion is, uh, that's how determined Saddam Hussein

04:46:42.280 | was to attack inside the United States. To paraphrase the CIA warning George Bush about Al Qaeda on August the 6th,

04:46:49.480 | 2001, when he told Michael Morrell, his briefer, the guy who later helped frame Donald Trump for treason with

04:46:54.920 | Russia and everything. He told Michael Morrell, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've covered your ass.

04:46:59.880 | Uh, can you, uh, clarify, Saddam Hussein was writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion?

04:47:03.880 | Yes, I'm afraid so. Is that real?

04:47:05.160 | Yes.

04:47:05.560 | That's real.

04:47:06.280 | Yes.

04:47:06.600 | It meant no harm to us whatsoever. What they could have done. Let me, let me ask you to stretch your

04:47:13.400 | engineer's imagination here to like wild metaphysical type concepts, uh, outside of your usual reach. You know, you're

04:47:21.240 | maybe more of a right brain guy or something, but like trip out Lex Friedman. The secretary of state

04:47:28.200 | was Colin Powell, the four star general, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

04:47:33.560 | You think he might've been tough enough to just send over there and tell Saddam Hussein,

04:47:38.200 | here's the riot act. I'm going to read it to you. And then you're going to sign on the dotted line, buddy, boy.

04:47:44.760 | And, and if you think that Colin Powell wasn't man enough for that, don't you think that mean old, uh,

04:47:50.920 | Donald Rumsfeld, his old friend from 1983, when Ronald Reagan sent him to be special, uh, emissary

04:47:58.120 | over there, when he offered Saddam Hussein support for his military campaign against Iran and browbeat

04:48:05.160 | him and tried to get him to build a pipeline to the port of a Kaaba for Israel. That's what that famous

04:48:09.800 | picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein. That's what that meeting was about. One will give you

04:48:14.200 | weapons too. We want you to build a pipeline for the Israelis. Um, you think you could have sent

04:48:20.040 | gruff old Donald Rumsfeld over there to tell Saddam Hussein, one thing, your job is keeping bin ladenites

04:48:27.400 | down. Read me. Okay. We have a new priority in our foreign policy in the middle East. We don't want

04:48:35.880 | anyone to be friends with Osama bin Laden or his men. That sound reasonable to you. And then Saddam Hussein,

04:48:42.280 | of course, would have said, of course. And in fact, Saddam Hussein, and you can read this only

04:48:47.720 | months later into the war, maybe a year into the war, James Risen wrote it in the New York times

04:48:52.280 | that Saddam Hussein sent an emissary to meet with Richard Pearl in London and surrendered to him and

04:48:59.240 | say, if this is about democracy, we'll hold elections. If this is about Israel, we'll stop funding Hamas.

04:49:07.480 | If this is about oil, we'll give you the mineral rights. If this is about weapons of mass destruction,

04:49:12.680 | you can send your army and FBI wherever you want to look.

04:49:20.520 | I give up. Please don't kill me. And Richard Pearl told the emissary, you tell them we'll see him in

04:49:27.720 | Baghdad. They refuse. And Seymour Hersh had another story just like that, where Hussein sent a Lebanese

04:49:35.400 | businessman to again surrender to say, we're willing to negotiate on any and every term that you could

04:49:40.680 | possibly name for us. And America refused and went to war anyway. By the way, when they did in 2003,

04:49:47.400 | first of all, in 2001, they held a million man candlelight vigil in Tehran on September the 12th.

04:49:55.080 | And the Ayatollah said, now's our chance to make friends with the United States.

04:49:59.240 | They hate Saddam Hussein and they hate the Taliban. Great. Us too. So they said, now's our chance to again,

04:50:06.840 | try to reach out to the United States. Did I skip and forget to mention that in 1993,

04:50:12.360 | oh, this was going to be part of our cold war story, but it overlaps. In 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski,

04:50:19.160 | the right wing sort of hawkish, realist national security advisor for Jimmy Carter and Alexander Haig,

04:50:26.440 | who had been Kissinger's right-hand man and was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state. They both wanted to

04:50:31.880 | build oil pipelines across Iran to the Persian Gulf. One, to make money and for American companies,

04:50:38.200 | but also two, to bring in Iran from the cold and open up an opportunity to normalize relations between

04:50:46.360 | our country and their country. The oil business is a great way to do that. Later in the 1990s,

04:50:51.000 | the CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, said the same thing, that Bill Clinton's sanctions

04:50:58.120 | are irresponsible. We should lift the sanctions against Iran and we should do business with Iran

04:51:02.680 | because after all, God didn't see fit to leave all the oil under wonderful Western allied democracies.

04:51:09.080 | And so we have to deal with who we have to deal with. And that was in the interest of his company.

04:51:13.160 | And quite frankly, it was in the interest of the United States of America at the time.

04:51:16.360 | Caused a little mini scandal because one of the times that Cheney repeated himself in these

04:51:20.760 | criticisms was in Australia. And that's supposed to be a cardinal sin to criticize your own country

04:51:25.960 | from the soil of another country. And he had been the former secretary of defense. So that was a

04:51:30.520 | kind of a, you know, social, you know, error or whatever that got him a little more controversy

04:51:39.320 | about those statements than probably they would have got any, uh, probably more attention than

04:51:44.760 | they would have got otherwise for the substance of them. Um, but so we had every opportunity to deal

04:51:51.320 | with Iran in the 1990s. And then Lex, guess why Clinton didn't do that? It was because the Israel lobby

04:51:57.720 | said, no, that was in the Washington post. They did this great series, Dan Ottaway and Dan Morgan,

04:52:02.680 | I think, well, whatever Morgan, not away. I forget their first names. They did a multi-part series,

04:52:07.240 | all about the oil politics of the Caspian basin. And it was a pack and the Israel lobby that said,

04:52:12.360 | no, you can not normalize relations with Iran veto. And so Brzezinski and Haig backed down from their

04:52:18.520 | plans and the companies that they were representing in doing that and went the other way. And the cold

04:52:22.680 | war with Iran remained all through the rest of the century. Again, waged from basis in Saudi,

04:52:28.120 | getting our towers knocked down. Now it's the new era. We go to war with, uh, with the Taliban

04:52:33.960 | and Afghanistan, Iran says, we'll do anything that we can to help you with that. Then you guys want to

04:52:38.520 | get rid of Saddam Hussein. Not only will we help you with that. Guess what? Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi

04:52:43.880 | national Congress's headquarters was in Tehran. Guess who sponsored the Iraqi Shiite exile to tell the

04:52:54.680 | neoconservatives that the new Shiite super majority regime will build an oil pipeline to Haifa and tell

04:53:01.960 | Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and be nice to Israel. And so they said, we have these common

04:53:10.760 | interests. And yet there was a terrorist attack in 2004 and the neocons just lied inside Saudi Arabia.

04:53:16.280 | And the neocons lied and said, Bin Laden and his men had planned it from inside Iran,

04:53:20.040 | which was a total lie. It had nothing to do with Iran, but that was enough for idiot W. Bush who

04:53:24.840 | doesn't know anything to go along with. Oh, okay then. And so now Iran is back on the enemy side of

04:53:30.760 | the ledger of the war on terror, where of course they have no alliance with Bin Laden. The only time they

04:53:35.240 | backed Bin Laden was as a favor to Bill Clinton in Bosnia in 19, in the 1990s. And so, um, they had no love

04:53:44.680 | for the Bin Ladenites whatsoever. And despite all the lies, Bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, not in Iran.

04:53:50.360 | And the Bin Ladenites who did make it to Iran were under house arrest and the Iranians were trying to

04:53:55.800 | negotiate with the Americans to hand them over, or at least hand them over to their home countries,

04:54:02.360 | wherever they were from. And they were offering to negotiate what was then called, they, they submitted

04:54:09.560 | this through the Swiss ambassador in the spring of Oh three, either right before the war, right after

04:54:15.000 | the war. I think it must've been right after the invasion of Iraq. It was called the golden offer.

04:54:19.560 | And not only did Bush and his men reject it, but they even gave, I think John Bolton gave a big

04:54:25.560 | dressing down to the Swiss ambassador for daring to even bring the proposal to them. And again, it just

04:54:33.400 | like with Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah was showing his willingness to negotiate essentially anything of

04:54:38.040 | controversy, including support for Hamas and Hezbollah, including their nuclear program, which at that

04:54:43.880 | point was just, you could barely even call it nascent at all. Um, they had not begun spinning a single

04:54:49.800 | centrifuge at that point. And they wanted to negotiate over these Bin Ladenites. If we would exchange them for

04:54:56.120 | members of the M.E.K., the Mujahideen-e-Kulk, communist terrorist cult, which was like some

04:55:02.040 | Jonestown, total kookery type of a cult that, um, that level of kookery, like heaven's gate, you know,

04:55:10.840 | just comet chasing lunatics. And they had helped with the Iranian revolution, but then they had betrayed

04:55:17.560 | it and had been kicked out of Iran by the Ayatollah. But then they went to work for Saddam Hussein.

04:55:22.200 | They helped Saddam Hussein during the Shiite and Kurdish uprising in 1991. They helped crush the

04:55:28.120 | Kurds with their tanks in that as special agents of Saddam during that. And then they, and then the

04:55:34.200 | U.S. inherited them when we invaded Iraq in 2003 and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld took control of them.

04:55:40.760 | Again, the M.E.K., they're called the Mujahideen-e-Kulk. And the Iranians are saying, look, let's trade.

04:55:45.640 | We got Bin Ladenites, including Bin Laden's son, and including, uh, this guy Hamza, who was a

04:55:51.960 | extremely dangerous al-Qaeda terrorist. And we could have traded them, but the American,

04:55:57.800 | the neoconservatives, and I guess, you know, Rumsfeld and Cheney themselves said, no, we want,

04:56:03.160 | we would rather keep the M.E.K. so that we can use them for operations inside Iran, which they did.

04:56:08.360 | In fact, my now wife, uh, wrote a story, breaking that story for Ross story back then that Rumsfeld was

04:56:15.160 | using the M.E.K. for intelligence inside Iran. And a lot of times, usually working as cutouts for the

04:56:20.280 | Israelis nowadays, you will hear, um, rumors about Iran that come from the M.E.K.

04:56:26.120 | Now, sometimes it's true. It's also known as the N.C.R.I., the National Council for Resistance

04:56:30.280 | in Iran is their front. And they all, in fact, right before the current war in the last few months,

04:56:36.520 | like, uh, in June, probably in May, they put out a picture of some buildings and said, this is a

04:56:46.040 | secret Iranian nuclear weapons site. We just found it. And of course it was total propaganda. They do

04:56:51.080 | that all the time. At one point they put out a stock photo of a vault door from a vault door company

04:56:57.960 | or a vault company. And they said behind this vault door, that's where the secret nuclear weapons program

04:57:02.840 | is. And they do that kind of thing all the time. And so America kept the M.E.K. when they could have

04:57:07.000 | traded them with the Iranians. So just one more thing about that is on the NSC were two people who

04:57:15.000 | were now a married couple, Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. And I've interviewed both of them at

04:57:22.360 | length. And they had talked all about how willing the Iranians were to negotiate with the Americans on

04:57:28.200 | essentially anything at that time and how essentially the Bush administration just refused to work for

04:57:33.720 | them. And now think about, you know, we're fighting for them in Afghanistan, putting in power, a coalition

04:57:40.520 | government that includes the Hazaras who are Shiites and friends with Iran. And in Iraq, we're putting

04:57:45.880 | their sock puppets from Dawah and Skiri in power. We fought an eight year civil war for Iran's guys, but

04:57:52.440 | refused to talk to them the whole time. Refused to negotiate with them in good faith when George

04:57:58.040 | Bush is the Ayatollah's errand boy in this thing, and refuses to acknowledge it, likes to pretend he's

04:58:03.960 | the emperor of the world or whatever, when he's serving their interests and putting their guys in

04:58:08.920 | power. And so that's why in, at the end of his presidency, they made him sign the deal to get out by

04:58:16.360 | the end of 2011. And he said, well, can I have 64 bases? And they said, no. He goes, well, can I have 24

04:58:22.360 | bases? And they said, no. So can I have any bases? And Nuriel Maliki said, well, let me go

04:58:27.880 | talk to the guys. I'm not real sure. Sorry, I talked to the guys. They said, beat it, scum.

04:58:33.160 | Don't let the door hitch in the ass on the way out. Didn't even say thank you for fighting

04:58:37.640 | a gigantic eight year civil war for them to exterminate their Sunni enemies and put them

04:58:42.760 | in power, ensconce them in power there. And so that was the sofa that Bush had to agree to in

04:58:48.680 | his last year in office in 2008, was that we had to withdraw because he had fought the war for his

04:58:53.960 | adversaries, not our enemies, but America's regional rivals in the Middle East, the Iranians

04:59:00.840 | and their Shiite Axis, now including Baghdad. And also, of course, then Damascus and Hezbollah and

04:59:09.400 | Southern Lebanon. This is when the King of Jordan coined the term, the Shiite Crescent. It was America who

04:59:15.400 | made it. And in fact, in January of 2006, the Sunni king of Saudi Arabia, would have been King Abdullah,

04:59:28.440 | read the riot act to Zalmay Khalilzad and said, listen, this is in the WikiLeaks. He said, listen,

04:59:36.360 | it was always us and you and Saddam against Iran. Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.

04:59:45.480 | So what are you going to do about it? And Khalilzad says, oh, I know your Royal Majesty. I'm so sorry

04:59:52.520 | about that. We're going to do everything that we can to try to fix it. This is the birth of the policy

04:59:57.560 | called the redirection, where America under Bush before Obama ever came to town, where Bush accepted

05:00:04.360 | that he had screwed up, that he had scored like in soccer and own goal for the other side of the

05:00:10.360 | ledger, the Shiite Crescent dominated by Tehran. And that now he had to make up for that by tilting

05:00:16.920 | toward the Sunnis. You'd be nice to sort of linger and understand to what degree is the Iranian regime

05:00:25.080 | and the Ayatollah are good and bad for the Iranian people. And then to what degree could the,

05:00:33.480 | just so we sort of clarify that, uh, and to what degree could they have been

05:00:39.960 | actual good collaborators with the United States in fighting bin Ladenites?

05:00:46.040 | Yeah. Good questions. So I would not ally with anybody to kill anybody. The time of September 11th,

05:00:54.520 | there were only 400 bin Ladenites hiding out in Afghanistan, any of the rest of their associates

05:00:59.800 | around the middle East could be arrested by police forces. Yeah. Again, we could have negotiated over

05:01:05.560 | them in the first place. And again, the CIA and Delta force could have finished annihilating bin Laden,

05:01:10.600 | Zawahiri and their few hundred men in the white mountains in Nangarhar province at the lion's den hideout

05:01:18.520 | in December of 2001. There's your whole actual terror war. So do we really need Iran to help us other

05:01:25.080 | than what, hand over a few prisoners that they had captured who were trying to hide out in their country

05:01:29.320 | that they had put on house arrest? Yeah. But that's the, that's all the help we needed, right? We didn't

05:01:33.800 | have to have a new alliance with them and we didn't have to try to pretend that the Ayatollah is a saint or

05:01:40.040 | that his Republic is a Republic at all, right? Um, if it's a Republic, then how come he's the Supreme

05:01:47.240 | Leader since 1989? Doesn't sound like a Republic to me, but at the same time, you want to talk about

05:01:53.560 | flawed Republics were sitting in one. And so, um, you know, in this case, lying us into aggressive war

05:01:59.800 | after aggressive war, you can't say the same for him, unless you want to again, blame him for sending

05:02:05.080 | Ahmed Chalabi to lie to Richard Pearl to lie to George W. Bush. Um, you know, and so the, we can,

05:02:13.880 | and in fact, I'm skipping ahead, but in Iraq war three, we fought with them again against the bin Laden

05:02:19.080 | night Caliphate. And so here we fought really three wars for Iran against the Taliban and against

05:02:27.240 | Sunni Saddam and against Baghdadi, the bin Laden night Caliph, um, in 14 through 17 there.

05:02:35.080 | So why do we hate them Lex so much? We keep fighting wars for them. You know, like I used to joke with

05:02:40.760 | Patrick Coburn that like, man, they better sign this nuclear deal with Obama. They owe us a favor

05:02:47.000 | after all that we've done for them lately, you know, despite all of the hatred and vitriol,

05:02:52.440 | when you listen to the Likudniks, what you end up doing is empowering the Ayatollah and his men.

05:02:57.160 | Well, what do you think about the attack of the United States on Iran? That, as I mentioned,

05:03:03.880 | had me so nervous. There would be another escalation into another forever war.

05:03:08.040 | Yeah. What do you think about that situation?

05:03:09.960 | Wait, let's hold that. Cause let's do Syria first in the redirection. Then we'll do the Iran war. Okay.

05:03:13.720 | Can you talk about the redirection? Okay. So the redirection was from the policy

05:03:19.880 | was really, I think invented in late 05 and then sort of discussed and implemented in beginning in 2006.

05:03:26.600 | And the article is called the redirection by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker magazine.

05:03:32.680 | So Hersh, uh, pardon me. Yes. Hersh has an incredible series from this whole year long.

05:03:38.920 | It includes the coming wars, preparing the battlefield, the redirection. And I forget

05:03:43.960 | the fourth one, maybe the fifth one had a bunch of great ones this time. So I might be combining

05:03:48.680 | these articles a little bit here, but it's along the same lines. Here's what you need to understand

05:03:52.840 | about the redirection. Okay. Oops. We screwed up and we fought Iraq war two for the Shiites. Now to

05:04:00.440 | make up for that, we're tilting back toward the Sunnis. But what does that mean? That means we're

05:04:05.800 | tilting back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber brigades. Saudis don't have an army. We don't

05:04:11.240 | trust them with one probably. And we're their army for the most part. And so how are we going to make

05:04:18.120 | it up to the Israelis that we took their stupid idiot advice and launched this war, but empowered

05:04:26.680 | their regional rivals? And how are we going to make it up to the Saudis who tried to warn us for the most

05:04:31.720 | part, I think against it, but we ignored their advice and did it anyway, and empowered their regional

05:04:37.240 | rivals, the Iranians. And so how are we going to fix this? And how we're going to fix this is,

05:04:43.160 | since we put Tehran up two pegs in Baghdad, we're going to take them down a peg in Damascus. And so

05:04:50.360 | they started in Lebanon, backing a group called Fatah al-Islam, bin Ladenite, suicide bomber,

05:04:58.040 | head chopper, lunatic, terrorist to fight against Hezbollah. In Syria, Elizabeth Cheney, who was then

05:05:04.520 | working in the state department, later known as Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney's daughter, she had the job of

05:05:11.320 | working with the Muslim Brotherhood to create the first major government in exile to try to use to

05:05:20.120 | overthrow Bashar al-Assad. And I got to tell you, man, we used to joke on my show going back to, I think,

05:05:26.040 | 2004 or 2005 would have been probably the first time that I had asked Eric Margulies,

05:05:31.720 | hey, Eric, if they do, because Eric Margulies was there, just like Patrick Coburn, he was there when

05:05:37.080 | Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, had crushed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1984,

05:05:46.200 | or was it '82? And he crushed him and he killed like 20,000 people in this horrific thing to crush the

05:05:51.640 | Muslim Brotherhood. Margulies was there, knew all about it, told me that story. And I says to him, I says, well,

05:05:57.720 | if the neocons get their way and they overthrow Bashar al-Assad, then what organized force is there

05:06:03.960 | in the country after the Ba'athists that could possibly take over, other than maybe the Muslim

05:06:08.200 | Brotherhood, if you're lucky? And Margulies says, yeah, exactly, or it could be the Bin Ladenites

05:06:13.880 | could take over. Now back to David Wormser, in a clean break and coping with crumbling states.

05:06:19.160 | Wormser says, we have to expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria. Expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria so

05:06:31.560 | that we will control the outcome, which will be more to our liking. And he says, and he's acknowledging

05:06:37.240 | Bin Ladenite terrorism is what he's referring to here, with the recent history at the time he's writing this in '96.

05:06:44.040 | And he's saying, now, there's a lot of talk about the dangers of fundamentalism. Meaning,

05:06:50.040 | okay, we're going to get rid of these secular Ba'athist regimes. There are fundamentalist terrorist

05:06:56.520 | wackos running around right now. He acknowledges that. And he says, but America will just have to find

05:07:03.800 | better allies against fundamentalism than the Ba'athists. So, now maybe some idiot could write that

05:07:11.880 | as policy advice for the Likud in 1996, maybe before the Kobar Towers, but then they kill our airmen at

05:07:20.280 | Kobar Towers. And then they bomb the embassies. And then they bomb the coal. And then they hit us on

05:07:27.640 | September 11th. And then they lead as the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed 4,000 of our guys

05:07:36.680 | in Iraq War II. And now you're telling me that we still better find better allies against the Bin

05:07:45.000 | Ladenites than the Ba'athists? That Bashar al-Assad is worse than Osama bin Laden? Yes, that's what

05:07:53.960 | they're telling you. Because Assad is friends with the Ayatollah. And Assad helps the Ayatollah arm Hezbollah.

05:08:00.520 | And Israel, as per the clean break. What's the clean break? It's a clean break from Oslo. Forget Rabin and

05:08:07.800 | Perez. We are going to steal all that's left of the West Bank and Gaza Strip sooner or later.

05:08:15.800 | But we don't want to have to worry about Hezbollah on our northern flank. We need to neutralize them

05:08:21.000 | somehow. So Syria, Wormser wrote, was the keystone in that arc of Iranian power, which was true. But of

05:08:29.160 | course, he was the one who added Saddam Hussein to that same arc. Now they're saying, "Oops, we have to

05:08:35.960 | fix this." And it was the neoconservatives, Elliott Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad, who came to W. Bush

05:08:41.800 | and said, "Sir, we really screwed up here. We have to turn this thing around now." And Bush understood.

05:08:47.720 | Now it's funny, we read the article and it's all Condoleezza Rice and her people trying to explain

05:08:51.800 | that, "Oh, you know what? It's not really about Sunnis and Shiites, Lex. It's about moderates and

05:08:57.560 | extremists." And the Baathists are the extremists in this, you're saying, right? The multi-ethnic secular

05:09:08.840 | dictatorship in Syria, the last country in the Middle East where you can get a drink.

05:09:14.520 | Those are the extremists. And we got to support the Bin Ladenite insurgency against them. Now,

05:09:22.840 | this is the reason that Barack Obama supported Al-Qaeda in Syria. It's not because he was a secret

05:09:29.480 | Muslim terrorist with an allegiance to Bin Laden's goals. It's that he was a secret George W. Bush

05:09:35.800 | with allegiance to the American foreign policy establishment's goals, including the neoconservatives

05:09:42.680 | and the Israel lobby in this country, Likud interests in this country. And at that time, you know, in Iraq

05:09:49.000 | War II, for the average person, they'd have had to read Mearsheimer in '07 to know, or read Justin

05:09:57.240 | Raimondo@antiwar.com to even know what is a neocon? What's the difference between them and the rest of

05:10:05.240 | the Republicans? And what do they have against Iraq so bad? And what is that agenda about? And what does

05:10:11.880 | that have to do with the Likud party in Israel? You didn't think that. If you ask, you know, like Dave

05:10:17.240 | Chappelle and his skit, it's all like he tried to kill my daddy kind of stuff, right? Because people

05:10:21.960 | just don't know this deeper layer to it. Well, in Syria, it was just as obvious as it could be.

05:10:26.760 | The war party in America is the Israel lobby, right? It is all Zionists, led by the Likudniks and the

05:10:37.800 | neoconservatives. But on the so-called liberal side too, people like Jamie Rubin, who had worked

05:10:44.360 | for Bill Clinton, wrote a giant thing. First, it was a secret memo that he wrote to Hillary Clinton,

05:10:50.920 | and they later published it as an essay in Foreign Policy magazine. You can pull it up right now if you

05:10:55.480 | want. Jamie Rubin. I'm pretty sure it's 2011. If it's 12, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure it's 11

05:11:02.840 | in Foreign Policy magazine. And I don't know, type in Syria, Assad, and Israel. The reason we have to do

05:11:09.880 | this is for Israel, the real reason to intervene in Syria. There was a funny anecdote about this one too,

05:11:16.520 | Lex, because I just happened to be screwing around on Twitter that morning that Assange published the

05:11:24.840 | State Department cables. Maybe it was that morning or soon after that. And I'm virtually certain it was

05:11:32.680 | David Rothkopp, who was then the editor of Foreign Policy. And I can't remember who else, one of his right-hand

05:11:38.280 | men at foreignpolicy.com, the journal of, uh, it's a journal, the Foreign Policy Journal. I forgot if there's a

05:11:45.880 | specific think tank behind them. Anyway. And they freaked out, and they attacked Julian Assange,

05:11:53.000 | and they said, "Aha! We caught WikiLeaks posting a fake document!" Because this is not a State Department

05:11:59.960 | document. This is an article that we ran at Foreign Policy, and you, you obviously copied and pasted it,

05:12:07.000 | and are running it at WikiLeaks. And not only that, but you've changed it. And then Assange says, "No, you kooks.

05:12:14.040 | This is a memo that somebody wrote to Hillary Clinton. And apparently it was Jamie Rubin who

05:12:20.120 | wrote it. And then he submitted the same essay to you to run at Foreign Policy." That's what happened.

05:12:26.120 | And the article is about, "Madam Secretary, we gotta support Bin Ladenite headchoppers, suicide bombers,

05:12:32.120 | in the greatest act of treason that you could possibly imagine, because Israel matters more than the United

05:12:38.840 | States of America and the 3,000 killed on September 11th." That's why I'm paraphrasing roughly.

05:12:44.200 | The real reason to intervene in Syria, cutting Iran's link to the Mediterranean, sees a strategic

05:12:49.480 | price worth the risk. And why? Because Israel's foreign policy interests, not those of the United

05:12:56.120 | States of America. Now, what's the true history of that war? They called it an uprising. They called it a

05:13:01.480 | revolution. We're skipping Libya here, but they supported the Bin Ladenites in Libya. Then this

05:13:05.640 | was Hillary Clinton's bank shot to take the Libyan Islamic fighting group and Ansar al-Sharia, the same

05:13:10.520 | guys that did the Benghazi attack of September 11th, 2012, and send them on to Syria for the next jihad.

05:13:17.400 | Now, in Libya, Gaddafi wasn't a Shiite, and this wasn't about that, although the Israelis did hate him and

05:13:23.560 | want him gone. But in Syria, it was all about this redirection policy and continuing the redirection

05:13:30.360 | policy of trying to weaken Assad as essentially a consolation prize after America screwed up so bad

05:13:35.400 | by putting the Shiites in power in Baghdad. And so this is why we have to do this. And there was a

05:13:41.480 | whole chorus around that time. And if you remember the first major fake Seren attack of August, 2013,

05:13:49.480 | in Ghouta, which the war party tried to claim that Assad did it in order to launch a war there,

05:13:55.480 | and they were trying to get us to do it at that time. You know, first of all, Barack Obama is the

05:14:01.560 | commander in chief at this point. It's not the same as George W. Bush. And, you know, escalating the Afghan

05:14:08.440 | war that was already going on and we have to win it. And that's the consensus or whatever. That's kind of one

05:14:13.800 | thing. But Obama wants to start a new war in Syria now. The American right said, "I don't think so." And

05:14:20.680 | in fact, on this point, all hail Stephen Bannon, because it was Bannon and Breitbart that led the

05:14:27.800 | campaign that said at that time, Breitbart was an incredible, like much more important, I think,

05:14:32.120 | than it probably is now. But whatever, I don't, I don't know how to measure that. But at that time,

05:14:36.200 | they were extremely influential. And they led the charge, "We do not want to fight this war." And you

05:14:43.240 | might remember this, Lex. You had army soldiers and marines and navy sailors would be holding up pieces

05:14:49.400 | of paper in still shots and in short video clips that said, "I didn't join the marines to fight a

05:14:55.800 | civil war for al-Qaeda in Syria." Remember that? And those were going viral. It was a bunch of them.

05:15:00.280 | What was this, 13?

05:15:01.320 | This is August of 13. And at this point, Barack Obama reaches out to AIPAC and the Israel lobby

05:15:10.280 | and asks them to please do everything you can to push this. Now, I have to say, I don't know what

05:15:15.400 | was going on there, but I actually thought that he was being kind of sarcastic there. So at that point,

05:15:20.840 | there was nobody pushing for war with Syria except the Israel lobby. And Obama seemed to be saying,

05:15:27.560 | "Hey guys, if you want this, you need to really stick your neck out for it." But the thing is,

05:15:32.440 | they stuck their neck out. It's almost like a member in that Will Ferrell movie where he goes to college

05:15:39.400 | and he's running naked down the street and he thinks everybody's behind him, but he's just wasted.

05:15:43.960 | Old school.

05:15:44.520 | Old school.

05:15:44.520 | Yeah.

05:15:45.000 | Yeah. And it's like that. They're like, "Come on, everybody. We're going to Syria." Running drunk

05:15:49.560 | down the street. And then they look and nobody else is coming with them. It's just the Israel lobby.

05:15:53.640 | It's just as plain as day. Whose interest is this in?

05:15:56.760 | Nobody else cares. Nobody else wants to do this. Nobody else believes the lies that,

05:16:01.000 | "Oh, the day that the chemical weapons inspectors arrive, Assad gassed a bunch of people, huh? Give

05:16:05.720 | me a break, dude. This whole thing is so stupid." And then, so they couldn't do it. The Israel lobby

05:16:10.520 | basically failed. And then importantly, this is the one good thing I'll ever say in my life about James

05:16:17.080 | Clapper. And by the way, this was a secret. They didn't tell us this. We only found this out later from

05:16:22.600 | Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. Commissar Goldberg, the former prison guard and ruthless abuser of

05:16:30.280 | Palestinian captives. He wrote in The Atlantic that James Clapper told Barack Obama it's not a slam dunk

05:16:39.880 | that Bashar al-Assad was behind the gas attack. And Dempsey, who was then the Chairman, Admiral,

05:16:46.520 | was it General or Admiral? General Dempsey, who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

05:16:50.680 | also gave a public statement who said, "I don't know why we have to do this right now." And so at that

05:16:56.120 | point, his own staff was telling him, "Mr. President," like, "Hey, if anybody asks me,

05:17:00.600 | I'm going to tell them that I told you that I can't even prove that this is true."

05:17:04.200 | Yeah. James Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence, D&I, from August 2010 to 2017,

05:17:10.440 | acting as the Principal Intelligence Advisor to President Barack Obama and overseeing all U.S.

05:17:15.240 | intelligence agencies.

05:17:15.800 | He also is the guy who planned Operation Storm where they cleansed the Kragina and Eastern Slavonia

05:17:24.200 | in 1995 of Croatian Serbs. He's also the guy who lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass

05:17:31.640 | destruction and he could prove it from the satellite pictures. He's also the guy that lied that Vladimir

05:17:36.760 | Putin helped Saddam Hussein move those chemical weapons to Syria is why we can't find them. He's also

05:17:43.320 | the guy that lied that the NSA is not all up in your phone, seizing all of your data, which is what

05:17:49.720 | motivated the hero Edward Snowden to leak and tell the truth. And he's also the guy that lied that Donald

05:17:55.880 | Trump was a blackmailed suborn agent of Vladimir Putin who helped to usurp Hillary Clinton's rightful

05:18:03.000 | throne in a coup d'etat and take over this country. And of course, he's a paid analyst at CNN. And if

05:18:08.840 | Donald Trump doesn't give him life in prison, I'm going to really regret it a lot. He deserves

05:18:13.240 | to suffer horribly. But you did say a positive thing about I did say a positive thing about him,

05:18:18.360 | which was he told Barack Obama, I'm not going to vouch for this chemical weapons lie here, buddy.

05:18:23.000 | No slam dunk. And that was a reference to George Tenet telling George Bush,

05:18:26.520 | it's a slam dunk, sir. Ain't no one else want to know what's funny about that is that George Tenet said,

05:18:31.080 | oh, that's not fair. They're throwing me under the bus. I didn't say that Iraq's possession of chemical

05:18:36.680 | weapons was a slam dunk. What I said was, you can convince the American people with this story.

05:18:46.360 | That's the slam dunk. In other words, I wasn't lying. I was saying, Mr. President,

05:18:52.760 | you'll be able to get away with this lie. That's George Tenet's defense of that statement. Anyway,

05:18:58.920 | so Clapper was saying, well, this ain't a slam dunk. I won't stand by it. By the way,

05:19:03.560 | as long as we're talking about Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic, it may be the same article.

05:19:08.680 | If you type in James Clapper and slam dunk in Syria there, let me see if I got this right.

05:19:15.400 | The Obama doctrine. That's the article. Okay. Not a slam dunk. Okay. I'm glad we clarified this.

05:19:23.000 | It's a different article. The article is called As President, I Don't Bluff. It's another interview

05:19:30.440 | of Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg. And in this article is where Jeffrey Goldberg, well, I'll tell you what,

05:19:39.480 | no, no, no, get the, this is just the Politico. Do the Atlantic. Yeah.

05:19:42.360 | Obama to Iran and Israel as president of the United States. I don't bluff by Jeffrey Goldberg,

05:19:49.160 | March 2nd, 2012. Okay. Just so people understand the headline there is he is telling Jeffrey Goldberg

05:19:56.360 | to please tell the Israelis that they can trust me, that you trust me, that I promise that I really,

05:20:02.600 | really, really, really, really, really, really mean it. That if the Ayatollah breaks out for a nuclear

05:20:07.080 | bomb, I will go to war. I will not let him get one. Jeffrey, please tell them I'm not lying about this.

05:20:13.880 | Okay. That's what, where that comes from. That's what he's doing there. But now, will they show you the

05:20:18.520 | whole thing or you're paywalled here? Maybe if you put it in archive.is, can you copy and paste

05:20:23.400 | that and put it in archive.is? Oh, you got to just sign in. So now, see if you can control F

05:20:31.080 | for classified or clearance. Can we talk about Syria as a strategic issue? Talk about it as a

05:20:39.240 | humanitarian issue as well. But it would seem to me that one way to weaken and further isolate Iran

05:20:44.040 | is to remove or help remove Iran's only Arab ally, Obama. Absolutely. Okay. This is why we want to

05:20:52.840 | weaken Syria is a easier way to weaken Iran. And as they continue to talk about here, he's saying that

05:21:00.920 | we are intervening there. And this is a way to weaken Iran in this way. And then Goldberg says,

05:21:09.800 | is there anything you could do to move it faster? And Obama on a less funny version of the joke about,

05:21:15.480 | I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you. He says, well, nothing that I can tell you because

05:21:20.520 | your classified clearance isn't good enough. In other words, and check my date on this again,

05:21:25.560 | was it 12 or 11? I forget. No, no, this would have been 12. This is 12. Yeah. March 12. Um,

05:21:32.440 | and so he's saying it's already on Jeffrey. We're doing it, buddy. What's he doing? He's working

05:21:38.440 | with Britain and France, Turkey, Israel, Saudi, and Qatar to back Osama bin Laden's suicide bomber

05:21:45.880 | brigades. In fact, worse, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's suicide bomber brigades. Remember, we talked about how

05:21:53.640 | the local Iraqi Sunnis had turned on Al Qaeda. It wasn't America and the Shiites that defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq.

05:22:00.120 | It was the local Iraqi Sunnis that did so. And they're the ones even who turned in

05:22:04.600 | Zarqawi to the Americans to kill. I know the interrogator. I interviewed the interrogator

05:22:09.880 | who without torture, but by being a nice guy, got the information. Tell us where Zarqawi is. We'll get

05:22:17.080 | him. And the guy told him and they got him. This is in the summer of 2006. They killed him. And at that

05:22:21.800 | time, Al Qaeda in Iraq then renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq. And we all got a good chuckle out

05:22:27.800 | of it because you guys don't control a single county anywhere in Iraq. There is no state.

05:22:33.400 | But at the same time, we said, aha, though, look at what they're talking about. Bin Laden's policy

05:22:38.920 | always was just keep fighting. There's no point in creating a caliphate as long as the American empire

05:22:46.120 | is here to erase it again. So we fight the far enemy. We fight a long-term strategy to bog the empire down,

05:22:53.800 | bleed them to bankruptcy, force them all the way out. Only then can we have our perfect Islamic state we

05:23:00.520 | want to create. Zarqawi says, no, I want that now. This was his doctrine. And they called their group,

05:23:07.240 | Islamic State of Iraq, just about, I forget, it was just before he died. I believe it was just after he

05:23:12.680 | died they started calling themselves that. But very clearly, you know, betraying their intentions, if they

05:23:18.280 | were to have the ability to take over anything, that's their goal. And they have these, that level

05:23:24.120 | of ambition. Now, it's very important to note that in Iraq War II, when I say America fought that war as

05:23:30.360 | a civil war for the Shiite side against the Sunnis, they didn't want the whole country. They only wanted

05:23:38.360 | Shia-stan. They only wanted the land basically from Baghdad over to Iran and down to Kuwait,

05:23:44.200 | down to Najaf, right, down to the Saudi border. They didn't so much worry about the Sunni Iraqis

05:23:51.960 | of Fallujah and Tikrit and Mosul. Let them burn in the sun, man, screw them. Oh, I should have said,

05:23:59.880 | this was a big part of why the Sunnis fought so hard in the first place. It was because, remember,

05:24:04.760 | they're losing control of the national government. Well, all the oil is down in the south near Basra,

05:24:09.800 | and it's up in the north near Kirkuk, where it's going to be controlled either by the Shiites or by

05:24:14.200 | the Kurds, now by the Shiites. And so what does that mean for the Sunnis? They have some oil, but it's

05:24:20.520 | virtually all undeveloped oil and much less of it in the predominantly Sunni areas of the country. So when they

05:24:27.000 | lose control of the national government, they lose control over all the spoils, right? And so they get

05:24:32.760 | nothing. And so the Shiites idea is, by the Shiites, I mean the Supreme Islamic Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim,

05:24:40.440 | the Dawa party of Nuri al-Maliki and their murderous forces. Their idea, they're just as chauvinistic as

05:24:47.160 | the bin Ladenites. Screw you guys, man. You can just burn in the sun. We'll do nothing for you. We got nothing

05:24:53.080 | for you. But what did that mean in practice? And again, the heroic Patrick Coburn. It meant that all

05:24:59.960 | Western Iraq was wide open. No man's land. No consolidated political authority anywhere.

05:25:08.200 | Ongoing low-level Sunni insurgency led by bin Ladenites. Even when the Americans leave by the end

05:25:14.840 | of 2011, they still leave a few CIA guys and drones there. And as we joked on the show in real time,

05:25:21.560 | Lex, me and Jason Ditz from antiwar.com would joke that we're still doing drone strikes in Iraq after the

05:25:26.840 | withdrawal, but we still got spies there. We're still doing drone strikes. Why? Not that we're killing the bin Ladenites.

05:25:32.360 | We're aiming at their heels because we're trying to chase them west into Syria where they're heroes.

05:25:37.720 | In Syria, they're the moderate rebels. In Syria, they're just trying to fight for freedom against

05:25:43.400 | the forces of evil Baathist tyranny. These are Bin Laden's guys. These are Zarqawi's guys. It's Bin Laden's

05:25:50.280 | agent. His main agent in Iraq was a guy named Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. And then later, you know,

05:26:00.280 | his boss was this guy, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was apparently the second leader after Zarqawi.

05:26:07.960 | Some say that the first leader after Zarqawi was actually made up, that there was no leader,

05:26:13.240 | and they just sort of put this persona out there. Well, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sure existed. These guys

05:26:19.000 | had all been locked up in Kambuka together and had, you know, kind of reorganized Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

05:26:25.000 | And when America left, they sprung them all loose. They're ready to go. So Baghdadi tells Jolani,

05:26:30.680 | "Go to Syria." Jolani, you know as al-Shara, the self-appointed president of Syria right now.

05:26:37.080 | That's Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. Lex, he joined the jihad because he was inspired by September 11th.

05:26:42.920 | He told Frontline that you damn right he fought and killed Americans in Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq War

05:26:51.160 | too. Then he went to Syria to help lead the so-called uprising, revolution, civil war in Syria? No.

05:27:01.000 | Again, we have from 2011 that Prince Bandar bin Sultan was emptying Saudi jails and sending all

05:27:09.240 | the jihadists off to Syria to fight. And they were on the record. I have the quotes where they say,

05:27:15.960 | it's, it's, is it Bandar? Bandar says, we're sick and tired of the Shiites and they're going to find

05:27:22.280 | out whatever. I forgot the exact, it's in there. And then the other quote was from a guy named Prince

05:27:30.680 | Turkey who said, Dash, that is ISIS, that is Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Dash is our answer to your support for the

05:27:40.680 | Dawah. Get it? Why does, why does Saudi Arabia in conspiracy with Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu,

05:27:51.880 | Recep Erdogan and all these guys, why are they backing the bin Ladenites in Syria? Because we put

05:27:58.760 | the Dawah party in power in Baghdad. This is their answer to that. Where, so this is again, the redirection.

05:28:06.680 | We empowered the Shiites so much. Now we got to move to limit them again, mostly because that's

05:28:11.080 | what our allies want so badly, especially the Israelis and the Saudis. And so from 2011, we knew

05:28:19.080 | this is not a revolution. This is not an uprising. I don't care if there's footage of protesters on TV,

05:28:25.880 | or even if Bashar al-Assad's forces are shooting them, which they were. I would note, although it's

05:28:32.760 | proven by Shermeen al-Narwani and the great journalist William Van Wagenen, whose book on

05:28:37.240 | Syria I'm going to publish any day now at the Libertarian Institute, who's written these massive

05:28:43.160 | long-form studies on the origins of the Syria war for the Libertarian Institute and shows how,

05:28:50.280 | yes, you would have peaceful protests, but then the bin Ladenites would be there and would snipe cops,

05:28:56.600 | of course, for the direct purpose of provoking a reaction. It's exactly how they started the Kosovo

05:29:02.280 | war. They'd assassinate police officers, forcing the military to intervene, to radicalize and increase

05:29:08.440 | the whole situation. It was the same thing that they were doing there, and it's how they got the whole

05:29:13.080 | thing started. And again, it's literally al-Qaeda in Iraq that's taking the lead at that time.

05:29:17.880 | Now, remember hours ago when we talked about truth, falsity, and our position? Well, our position was,

05:29:28.200 | we're supporting moderate rebels. We're not supporting bin Ladenites. And in fact,

05:29:33.880 | the bin Ladenites, if they're not backed by Assad just to make the protesters look bad,

05:29:41.800 | then at least they're only benefiting because we just won't give enough support to the moderates.

05:29:47.160 | That was our position, but that was not true. From the very beginning, it was clear. These guys are

05:29:55.720 | lunatics, man. There was a boy in 2000, early 13, a boy had a, uh, fruit stand and one of the bin Ladenites

05:30:05.480 | or just some guy said, Hey, give me a discount on this orange. And the kid said, 13 year old boy,

05:30:12.920 | I believe. He said, I'm sorry. I can't give discounts. I wouldn't even give a discount to

05:30:22.200 | Muhammad himself. And bin Ladenites standing within earshot said, what did you just say? Boom. And shot

05:30:28.760 | the 13 year old boy right in the face to death. That's one of the moderate rebels. That's the moderate

05:30:33.080 | rebels. And, and what were the moderate rebels all the time? The ones who were quote unquote,

05:30:37.480 | moderate, the free Syrian army, the guys with shorter beards who would come and talk to the

05:30:42.120 | Americans who would, who they're famous pictures of them in tents that say USAID on them. And their job

05:30:48.840 | was just receiving the money and the guns and delivering to the bin Ladenites, just like with

05:30:53.960 | the war in Afghanistan in the eighties or something, you know, Bandar can empty his jails and whatever.

05:31:00.520 | But for the most part, like these guys are volunteers. There's not a organized state army

05:31:05.480 | on the ground. That's like conscripted them and controls them to that degree. So who's out there

05:31:10.360 | fighting? The guys who are fighting are the ones who don't mind dying. The ones who are absolutely the

05:31:15.640 | most committed to this revolution. And we know who they are. They're bin Laden and Zawahiri and Zarkawi's

05:31:22.360 | guys. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, going at that time by the name Jabhat al-Nusra, which I'm told roughly

05:31:31.800 | translates from association of assistance or helpers. And then their Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, the same

05:31:39.720 | guys that were the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, war two are now the vanguard of the Sunni

05:31:44.600 | insurgency in Syria. And while there's just one line on a map between them, we're still on the

05:31:50.040 | side of the Shiites in Iraq, but we're on the side of the Sunnis in Syria. Now, this goes on for two

05:31:55.800 | years. And you have bin Ladenites from all over the place, including Chechens and Chinese Uyghurs and

05:32:00.840 | people from all over everywhere coming to join the jihad, just like in Iraq war two Egyptians and

05:32:07.240 | Libyans and whoever come to join the thing. And by, um, the late spring, early summer of 2013,

05:32:17.080 | you now have a split between Baghdadi, who's now also come to Syria. Sorry, from your point of view this

05:32:24.600 | way in Syria. And now Baghdadi and Jolani, the leaders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria split.

05:32:31.800 | And it's a fight over control and over really over oil wealth and who controls the, their gangster

05:32:39.560 | spoils or a bunch of terrorists, but also over doctrine too. Baghdadi is more like a Zarqawiite

05:32:46.760 | and Baghdadi is saying, I want my caliphate now against the advice of Ayman al-Zawahiri,

05:32:53.800 | who is now the surviving leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq after bin Laden was killed in May of 2011.

05:32:59.800 | Zawahiri is the one who said, no, we should fight the far enemy. Don't create a state now

05:33:05.320 | because you won't be able to hold onto it. Just keep fighting. And he sent an emissary,

05:33:10.360 | who had been an original veteran of the Afghan war named al-Suri to come and negotiate between

05:33:17.960 | Baghdadi and Jolani. Baghdadi killed the guy and declared a state in East

05:33:23.640 | Eastern Syria. Now at this time, Assad has to pull his forces back from the East and consolidate.

05:33:31.480 | All the population centers, other than Raqqa, all the other big population centers are in the West of

05:33:36.200 | the country. Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus. He has to try to protect these areas. And so he ends up

05:33:43.240 | being forced to leave Eastern Syria basically wide open. So by June of 2013, Baghdadi splits from Jolani

05:33:52.600 | and creates ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or Iraq and the Levant, or whatever they called it. In

05:34:01.800 | Arabic, the acronym is pronounced Daesh, D-A-E-S-H, E-S-H. When we say ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, the Caliphate, or

05:34:15.160 | Daesh, that's all the same thing. That's Al-Qaeda in Iraq, went to Syria, consolidated Eastern Syria.

05:34:22.440 | Now, that's in June of 2013. Six months later, they hoist the black flag over Fallujah.

05:34:32.120 | And at antiwar.com, we're freaking out. And I've been saying on my show this whole time,

05:34:37.480 | Western Iraq is wide open. Patrick Coburn says Western Iraq is wide open. Red alert, man. This

05:34:45.240 | is a problem here. We're backing these guys. There's nobody seems to think about the next stage of this

05:34:50.360 | conflict. I remember even Michael Scheuer said on my show, I think the big problem right now is Boko

05:34:54.760 | Haram. And I'm like, excuse me, we're backing the Bin Ladenite caliphate in Eastern Syria and Western

05:35:01.800 | Iraq is wide open for the taking. And you can go back and check my archives from especially the first

05:35:08.200 | half of 2014, where I'm interviewing even the despicable Jonathan Landay and all kinds of anyone

05:35:14.840 | that I know who knows anything about the Bin Ladenites. I'm interviewing them mostly so I can browbeat

05:35:20.520 | them and tell them, eye on the ball, everybody. This is what matters, right? This is the most

05:35:25.000 | important crisis that could possibly be going on. And we know now that Mike Flynn was the head of

05:35:30.840 | the DIA at the time. And he, we know from Seymour Hearst, there's an article called Military to

05:35:36.120 | Military in the London Review of Books about how Mike Flynn was heroically insubordinate and was giving

05:35:43.320 | secret intelligence to the Germans to give to Assad to use to kill the Bin Ladenites, to kill the CIA's

05:35:49.480 | terrorists on the ground there. And that's what got him fired from the DIA. And now Mike Flynn is a Iran

05:35:56.120 | hawk. He hates the Ayatollah and the Shiites. And that whole thing is a absolutely pro-Israel

05:36:02.280 | Zionist guy, 100%. But his point of view was, well, let's just bomb Tehran. Just because I hate the Shiites

05:36:10.360 | doesn't mean I want to back Osama Bin Laden's suicide bomber head chopper brigades against their friend in

05:36:16.920 | Syria. What the hell is this? It's crazy. Same thing for Tulsi Gabbard, by the way. The most

05:36:22.200 | controversial thing about this woman, supposedly her entire career, somehow she was a toady of Assad is

05:36:28.200 | what Bari Weiss told Joe Rogan. And he asked her, what's a toady? And she said, I don't know. And he

05:36:34.440 | said, how do you spell it? And she said, with a Y and had no idea even to spell the word that she was

05:36:39.960 | trying to smear Tulsi Gabbard as some kind of agent of Bashar al-Assad. Tulsi Gabbard, who at that time

05:36:47.080 | was a major, later promoted to captain in the Army National Guard, who I believe only left the National

05:36:52.440 | Guard to become director of national intelligence. This American military officer, right? Oh yeah,

05:36:58.680 | I'm so sure she's such a traitor to this country. Give me a break. They keep promoting her. She may

05:37:03.320 | even still be in the National Guard. I'm not sure how that works when you're the DNI. But anyway,

05:37:07.960 | Tulsi Gabbard never said that Bashar al-Assad is a good man. She never said he's a hero. She never said

05:37:16.040 | America should lie with him. She never said anything like that. What she said was, Assad is less worse

05:37:24.600 | than his enemies. America is backing Al-Qaeda. Now, if you know anything about Tulsi Gabbard,

05:37:30.920 | she has never been, is not, and has never been against the war on terrorism. In fact, when she was

05:37:37.320 | running for president, she put out statements defining Al-Qaeda so broadly, she said hundreds of groups are

05:37:44.520 | linked to Al-Qaeda in the world and that she's willing to fight them. Okay. She is a over the

05:37:51.320 | line to unreason hawk on killing bin Ladenites. Okay. But she, and by the way, why Lex? Because she

05:38:01.160 | fought in Iraq war two, not fought, but she was in Iraq war two in a medical unit at Balad air base,

05:38:07.160 | north of Baghdad for like a year. And I've never heard her talk about this part of it, but it is clear.

05:38:13.240 | There's no question. It's impossible. Otherwise she saw our guys screaming and dying in front of her,

05:38:21.320 | right over and over and over again. Okay. So that's why she has that gray streak in her hair,

05:38:27.000 | like Nancy from nightmare on Elm street is because of that. So now the Democrats are saying,

05:38:34.200 | forget what you know about the shirts and skins lady. We're on the skin side now. We like Al-Qaeda now.

05:38:41.640 | Now Lex, like quite frankly, like every other idiot in Washington, DC apparently could not have told you

05:38:49.640 | the difference, but Tulsi Gabbard could. Tulsi Gabbard knew who was who. And she knew that Assad's enemies are

05:38:59.160 | Al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria. And you couldn't have tortured her into switching sides in that war,

05:39:05.560 | right? It doesn't mean that she's soft on Iran, but it means that she wants bin Ladenites dead,

05:39:11.640 | dead, dead. And she's supposed to be siding with them now. And we're all supposed to be encouraging them

05:39:17.720 | to overthrow this secular dictator who's is, who protects and backs the Christians, the Shiites,

05:39:24.600 | the Druze. And even, and somebody argued with me the other day in a YouTube comment somewhere I saw

05:39:30.840 | about, cause I had said the majority of Sunnis backed him too. I think that that's true. And certainly it was

05:39:36.200 | true of the middle-class in Aleppo. And it was certainly the fact that the Syrian Arab army was always

05:39:42.120 | majority Sunni Arab serving that secular government, just cause they were Sunnis didn't mean that they

05:39:47.880 | were bin Ladenites, these, you know, crazy tech theory, Salafi, whatever ideology. And especially

05:39:54.600 | I call them bin Ladenites. Cause it ain't just that they're Salafis. Cause there are innumerable,

05:39:59.880 | I don't know, hundreds of thousands or millions, even of Salafis and Wahhabis in this world who are

05:40:04.200 | quietists. They don't have politics. Their politics are your King is your King. Cause God made it that way.

05:40:10.440 | You're not questioning that. Are you, I didn't think so. We used to have that tradition in the

05:40:14.840 | West, the divine right of Kings and that kind of thing. If you're a good Muslim to a great many

05:40:20.440 | Muslim people, nevermind their leadership, but I mean, people out in the world.

05:40:24.200 | And it depends on the sect and the region and everything, but the super majority of them quite

05:40:31.880 | apparently are quietists. Their job is not to question the civil authority. Their job is to do

05:40:37.320 | what civil authority says. That's why they're the civil authority. That's how most people feel about

05:40:41.320 | their governments anyway. Right. For what's the bin Laden's problem was he was political and he had

05:40:48.760 | these political goals for this earthly realm where we exist today. And so he really was, um, Loretta

05:40:56.920 | Napoleone, the great Italian journalist compared him very much to like a Leninist where he's trying to overthrow

05:41:03.000 | this world and have things the way that he wants it to be in a way that even again, radical and

05:41:09.480 | fundamentalist Muslims usually don't believe in. And usually in fact, the studies have shown it's rat,

05:41:15.640 | it's amateurs who are actually kind of new at Islam and don't know that much about it, who tend to be the

05:41:21.640 | more fanatical and the more violent. Whereas people who actually know more about it will say, uh, actually,

05:41:27.560 | as Mohammed says, you better not do that. And that kind of thing. Right. Um, and I cite all the studies

05:41:32.920 | in fool's errand. I have the footnotes in fool's errand, uh, showing that directly and including some

05:41:37.640 | of the nine 11 hijackers, including the bulk of the fighters for the Islamic state caliphate. They're just

05:41:43.560 | regular Iraqis who are conscripted and things fighting for ISIS, but that didn't make them

05:41:47.400 | even necessarily that political, much less motivated by simply theology to behave in these ways. You know

05:41:54.760 | what I mean? Sure. Uh, if just briefly, because you brought Tulsi up, why do you think I had a chance

05:42:03.000 | to have multiple conversations with her? Why do you think she was smeared so much on this topic and other

05:42:09.240 | topics? Why does she piss off? The first thing was this. She absolutely just knew better and was

05:42:16.520 | immovable like Stonewall Jackson on this issue. You're not going to be able to convince her. These

05:42:21.960 | are moderate rebels. Those lies don't work here. So now that put her severely on the outside of the

05:42:27.960 | consensus and with authority, she actually knew what she was talking about. That was her problem. And that

05:42:34.760 | was their problem with her. They couldn't fix that. And then of course she, even though they loved her,

05:42:40.600 | oh man, they groomed her. People forget when she first came in, she's pretty, she's intelligent,

05:42:46.600 | she's in the military. She fought in Iraq or, you know, is a quote unquote combat vet, because even

05:42:52.280 | though she wasn't pulling triggers there, she was shelled while at Camp Balad. So she's earned her stripes

05:42:58.280 | as an official combat veteran in that sense. And she's a woman and she's a Democrat and this is

05:43:04.120 | everything that they wanted. But then she endorsed Bernie Sanders. And then they went for full jihad

05:43:11.400 | and never forgive her for that. And so that was her Hillary Clinton went after her. Is that what happened?

05:43:16.680 | Yeah. And Hillary Clinton tried to smear her with Russiagate, the pathetic, uh, diseased,

05:43:22.760 | dying windbag, Robert Windrum from, uh, NBC news attempted to smear her as well as he attempted to

05:43:29.000 | smear my colleague and editor and friend Hunter Durensis as part of the Russiagate hoax. This is

05:43:34.120 | absolutely ludicrous reporting. Have you ever heard of anything that Robert Windrum ever reported in your

05:43:38.920 | life? Can you think of anything where you go, Oh, Robert Windrum, he's the guy that did this. No,

05:43:43.000 | he will only be known when he dies, which will be soon as a disgrace to humanity and to his profession

05:43:49.160 | for his disgusting and despicable lies against Tulsi Gabbard, against Jill Stein and against Hunter

05:43:54.520 | Durensis. May he burn in hell. So anyway, and his entire NBC news organization too. And that's why they

05:44:01.240 | hated her because she told the truth. Yeah. It's sad. It's sad that people like that, like we spoke about

05:44:05.720 | this with Ron Paul, this is different, obviously different humans, different walks of life and so on.

05:44:09.960 | But there's, there's like, uh, there's certain people that just have this authenticity and agree

05:44:14.360 | with them and disagree. There's like, this is like a strong, this is a really interesting person.

05:44:18.680 | And actually for, for a long time, Bernie Sanders was that also. And it's like, and there's something

05:44:24.040 | about the system that wants to destroy those kinds of folks, or at least suffocate the authenticity in

05:44:28.840 | that person. Yeah. And to make them conform. I wouldn't, I wouldn't give him as much credit as the two of

05:44:34.200 | them, but, but Ron is in a class by himself, of course, I guess you could say that they're comparable.

05:44:39.800 | Cause I disagree with her and pretty severely enough on enough things that were, but on the

05:44:44.520 | other hand, I think Bernie Sanders is sometimes disingenuous in a way that I don't find her to be,

05:44:48.920 | um, without getting too far into that. But anyway, you're right though, that, you know, you can see

05:44:54.040 | the people who are outside the norm usually are treated as the outcasts up there. If they're anywhere

05:44:59.800 | near the halls of power up there, they're the ones usually who are telling the truth about things

05:45:03.560 | and are getting things right. Okay. So, so now let's fast forward now. So, so as I said, in January of

05:45:10.840 | 14, they hoist the black flag over Fallujah and we at antiwar.com, et cetera, are freaking out over this.

05:45:21.800 | Oh, and I was going to say about Mike Flynn. Mike Flynn was the head of the DIA that put out a report,

05:45:26.200 | a secret report that's now published. Judicial watch got it. And the great Brad Hoff wrote about it

05:45:31.320 | at, uh, his great blog, uh, Levant report. People can find it. And what happened was

05:45:36.520 | the DIA put out a report saying our allies are backing bin Ladenite terrorists in Syria.

05:45:43.240 | Their goal is to create a solid fist principality principality in Eastern Syria. And there's a real danger

05:45:52.120 | that this could blow back into Western Iraq and Al Qaeda in Iraq could return to their old haunts in

05:45:58.280 | Mosul and Ramadi. He warned that in the summer of 2012. Okay. Then they just short of a year later,

05:46:08.280 | they consolidate a state in Eastern Syria, just as he said, just as I said, again, you can check the

05:46:13.800 | records, all my, all 6,100 and something of my interviews are at Scott Horton.org. If anyone ever wants to

05:46:19.720 | to see whether I was good on this back when I claim I was, um, and then, um,

05:46:25.400 | Obama was asked, Mr. President, what about the black flag being hoisted over Fallujah and Obama?

05:46:35.400 | This is vanity fair magazine. And he tells them, listen, just cause the junior varsity puts on a

05:46:41.080 | Kobe Bryant jersey doesn't make them the Lakers. Right. So this idiot, I'm sorry, excuse me for a

05:46:49.240 | moment, but don't you like to somehow take the slightest comfort in the fact that like, at least

05:46:56.680 | Barack Obama can read, at least he's like the slightest bit, maybe interested in what he's doing

05:47:02.920 | compared to W. Bush or Trump, who are clearly just winging it. And W. Bush, just forget it. Bill Clinton,

05:47:09.880 | of course, they would say he would know more about any subject than his briefers and they better be on

05:47:13.800 | topic because he read six books about it and he's a horrible child killer, but that's still true about

05:47:19.080 | him, that he's a brilliant guy, or at least a brilliant consumer of data and, and, and trying

05:47:24.840 | to form his policies. He wanted to be in charge and know as much as he could. How could Barack Obama,

05:47:30.680 | Lex, not know who Al Qaeda in Iraq is? How could he think that ISIS is the junior varsity?

05:47:38.760 | These guys are the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed 4,000 out of the 4,500 of our guys that

05:47:48.280 | died in Iraq War II. These are the Zarqawiites. They're worse than Bin Laden. They are. Patrick

05:47:57.320 | Coburn said they're the Islamist Khmer Rouge, right? Like Pol Pot and the communists, the most insane

05:48:04.840 | lunatics to ever be armed with weapons before, right? Nut cases. Berserkers. This is the junior varsity,

05:48:14.120 | the suicide bomber brigade, the most dangerous one that's ever been created in history.

05:48:18.920 | And six months later, they rolled right into Mosul. And this is the picture you still have in your

05:48:25.320 | head of that long trine, that long train of Toyota Helix pickup trucks rolling into Mosul with their

05:48:31.880 | headlights on and all the jihadis in the back of the trucks with their rifles. And just as Patrick

05:48:37.480 | Coburn and I had predicted, the Shiite Iraqi army that had hardly any interest whatsoever in ruling

05:48:44.440 | Mosul or Tikrit or Fallujah turned tail and ran. And the Islamic State Caliphate then conquered all of

05:48:51.080 | Western Iraq. From 2014, they took Mosul, Tikrit. It took them a little while, but they took Ramadi in 15.

05:48:59.160 | They took Fallujah right away and they created an area of the landmass, the size of Great Britain

05:49:04.040 | with a standing army of its highest, about 250 to 300,000 men. If you take, if you look at their

05:49:12.040 | troop strength in various places during that time. And then what did Obama do? This is in, oh man,

05:49:17.960 | you know what? We should watch this clip, dude. Let's pipe this in here. Speaking of Jonah Goldberg,

05:49:24.040 | type in Oren, O-R-E-N, Oren, Sunnis. And it's going to come right up as your first

05:49:31.000 | YouTube link. It's going to automatically launch right there. There it is right there.

05:49:36.280 | Sunnis versus Shiites in the lesser of two evils. And I actually met the guy who asked the question

05:49:41.080 | here, came up to me at a thing and said, Hey, I'm the guy that asked the question at that thing.

05:49:45.000 | So kudos to you, buddy. Thank you. Lex Friedman, let's watch this clip and trip out.

05:49:49.720 | Lex Friedman: It doesn't stay in there for another couple more weeks. What do you think

05:49:55.080 | your country is doing in order to protect your interests?

05:49:58.120 | Pause one sec. Did I mention now, this is in the middle of June, 2014. Okay. They sacked Mosul

05:50:07.320 | and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi got up there at the Mosul Grand Mosque, like a cross between Benito Mussolini

05:50:15.400 | and Osama bin Laden and declared himself the divinely appointed Caliph Ibrahim, ruler of the Islamic State

05:50:23.800 | Caliphate. This is two weeks later. Okay. Hit the button.

05:50:27.800 | How are you working in a line with other partners? All right. Now, keep in mind,

05:50:31.720 | I don't speak for the government anymore. I'm speaking for me.

05:50:34.120 | Not true. Wait, pause it again. He gave an interview to the Jerusalem

05:50:37.480 | Post where he said these exact same things while he was still Netanyahu's ambassador to the United

05:50:41.640 | States. And this is treason. This man was born in the United States of America. Okay. Go ahead.

05:50:45.640 | And what I'm going to say is, is, is harsh and perhaps a little A-D. But if we have to choose

05:50:53.160 | the lesser of evils here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the shits for the reason I'm speaking for me.

05:50:58.600 | Okay. It's a lesser evil. It's an evil. Believe me. It's terribly evil. Again, they've just taken out

05:51:03.880 | 700, 900 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field. But who are they, who are they fighting against?

05:51:09.320 | The fighting was the, against the proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people

05:51:15.480 | in Syria. You can just, you know, do the math. And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers

05:51:21.800 | and rockets. The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities. So from Israel's perspective,

05:51:26.920 | um, you know, if someone's gotta, if there's gotta be an evil that's gonna prevail, you know,

05:51:32.440 | let, let the, the Sunni evil prevail. And I, again, I'm speaking entirely for myself.

05:51:36.120 | Robert Leonard: No, he just said from Israel's perspective, from the Netanyahu regime's

05:51:40.920 | perspective is exactly what he meant. And it's fine because we have plenty of Mossad and military

05:51:46.120 | officers echoing those exact same statements. Even Thomas L. Friedman says we shouldn't defeat

05:51:50.840 | the Islamic state yet. They're taxing the Shiites. Okay. There's no question of what he meant there.

05:51:56.040 | And by the way, is he talking about the mythical moderates, the free Syrian army? No, he's not.

05:52:01.960 | Robert Leonard: How do we know that? Because he did just say Sunnis, but he also said,

05:52:05.800 | we just saw them take 1700 Iraqi, he says soldiers, but it was air force cadets at Camp Spicher

05:52:14.360 | and massacred them in the field. Iraqi Shiites. That was ISIS that did that just a week ago when he's

05:52:22.440 | saying this. He's not talking about the mythical moderates. He's saying the Sunni evil, let the Sunni

05:52:27.880 | evil prevail. He's talking about Baghdadi's bin Laden night caliphate because, and what are his two

05:52:34.840 | excuses that Assad is responsible for every single death in the war when all he's doing is defending

05:52:39.880 | his state from foreign invasion by foreign backed superpower backed bin Laden night suicide bomber.

05:52:46.280 | He just said suicide bomber mercenaries, right? But no, Assad's responsible for every single one of the

05:52:53.160 | the deaths. And then he lies again outright and says, and Iran has military nuclear technology,

05:53:00.200 | implying that somehow the Ayatollah has a bomb and he's going to give one to Assad or to Hezbollah.

05:53:05.960 | And so that's why we need to back Al Qaeda in Syria, both of which are, of course, complete and total

05:53:13.720 | hoaxes. And again, he admitted in the middle of that after lying and saying he's only speaking for himself,

05:53:19.240 | he accidentally said from Israel's perspective, he also said the same thing again in an interview with

05:53:25.000 | the Jerusalem post, either right before he left or right after he left being the ambassador said

05:53:30.680 | the exact same thing. And he's clearly reflecting Benjamin Netanyahu's view here. There's no question

05:53:35.720 | about that. And I have in enough already. I have an entire section called Israel's role that showed how

05:53:41.560 | they were giving direct aid and comfort to the Bin Ladenites by way of the Golan Heights. And there was

05:53:48.440 | even at one point, quite famously, there was an attack by local Druze on the Golan Heights, kidnapped prisoners

05:53:57.400 | of the Israelis, basically, who attacked an Israeli ambulance that was shipping Bin Ladenites back to the front

05:54:04.120 | because the Bin Ladenites had been killing Syrian Druze, their brethren. And so they attacked this ambulance and it

05:54:09.880 | became kind of a controversy. It also was contrary, controversy on ISIS, not even Nusra or Jaish al-Islam

05:54:18.760 | or Aral al-Sham or one of these other groups, but actually ISIS accidentally hit Israel with a rocket

05:54:24.520 | and immediately apologized. Very sorry about that. We like you guys. No offense. Forget that. You can read.

05:54:31.960 | Let's look at this. As long as we're on this, I'm having so much fun. Type in foreign affairs and accepting Al-Qaeda.

05:54:40.280 | There you go. The enemy of the United States enemy. And just in case you're confused with a nice big picture

05:54:49.400 | of Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri on the top. And the article is about how we're supposed to hate

05:54:56.520 | the Shiites more now. Because that's what our allies want, regardless of who killed all those Americans in

05:55:03.720 | New York City. They ran another one. Type it in. The good and bad of Arar al-Sham.

05:55:12.280 | This is from Brookings. The good and bad of Syria's Arar al-Sham.

05:55:17.400 | Yep. It's by that, uh, traitor, Michael Duran and Clint Watts. Who's Clint Watts? He's the guy,

05:55:26.440 | the former FBI agent who was behind Hamilton 68, that lied and said that you and all your friends are

05:55:31.160 | all Russian bots and that you ought to be censored right off of Twitter. That's who Clint Watts is.

05:55:35.880 | He's a damned liar. And he later admitted to Buzzfeed. Oh, I don't really know about that whole bot thing.

05:55:41.960 | He was the guy who did it working for Bill Kristol. They created the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

05:55:47.480 | And it was Clint Watts who lied that whole, and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and

05:55:51.640 | hundreds of stories claiming that Russian bots were behind it every time anything good ever happened on

05:55:56.840 | Twitter during that era. That's who Clint Watts is. And then they say, what's, did you click the thing?

05:56:01.640 | Pitch up just a sec. What's the byline here? The good and bad of Arar al-Sham. Oh, they deleted it.

05:56:07.240 | In the foreign affairs version, the subhead is an Al-Qaeda linked group worth defending.

05:56:14.520 | Yeah. I mean, it also says the Al-Qaeda of yesterday is gone. So it's changing the story.

05:56:18.680 | They're good guys now, man. They kill Shiites for us now.

05:56:21.880 | Yeah.

05:56:22.760 | They killed Serbs for us. We really liked it when they were helping kick in Serbs skulls.

05:56:28.600 | Um, well, just to wrap that up, Obama launched a war. He waited a couple of months to try to push out

05:56:36.040 | Maliki. And then he launched Iraq war three to destroy the caliphate again. In this time, in this case,

05:56:42.040 | directly on the side of the Iranians, you had Iranians on the ground, Quds Force on the ground,

05:56:47.000 | running the Iraqi Shiite militias fighting for Tikrit, liberating Tikrit from the bin Ladenites

05:56:52.600 | with America flying air cover for them. At this time, John McCain complained, we're flying as Iran's air

05:56:59.160 | force in Iraq, but we're flying as Iran's air force against the bin Ladenite caliphate that McCain had

05:57:06.280 | helped build up to spite Iran for accepting our Christmas gift of fighting Iraq war two for them.

05:57:11.480 | So it was all John McCain's fault when he complained that. And then there's a guy named Michael Horton,

05:57:18.120 | no relation to me, but who is from the Jamestown foundation and a terrorism expert says, yeah,

05:57:22.120 | John McCain complains that we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq. Well, we're flying as Al-Qaeda's

05:57:27.800 | air force in Yemen, because this was at the time that Obama switched sides in the Yemen war,

05:57:33.400 | where America was giving intelligence to the Houthis wall street journal, January, 2012,

05:57:38.920 | uh, 2015 and Al monitor by Barbara Slavin from the Atlantic council, uh, January, 2015. America's

05:57:46.760 | passing intelligence, Lloyd Austin, Obama's, I mean, pardon me, Biden's later secretary of defense was

05:57:51.400 | the head of central command. He's passing intelligence to the Shiite Houthis to use to kill Al-Qaeda in the

05:57:56.120 | Arabian peninsula. Our enemies, the ones who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit on Christmas day,

05:58:01.560 | 2009 with the underpants bomb, the guys who, uh, did the horrific attacks in Nice and in Paris,

05:58:08.680 | France, the Charlie Hebdo and the Eagles of death metal concert. They attacked a kosher grocery store

05:58:15.640 | in, uh, France and a, uh, uh, Jewish museum in Brussels. This was the first, I think, uh, ISIS in Syria attack,

05:58:25.480 | uh, was at a Holocaust, uh, museum in, in, uh, Brussels. So that blowback was coming all, all the way right

05:58:32.600 | away. But anyway, AQAP in Yemen, they were like real ass Al-Qaeda guys and they were coming for us. They

05:58:38.200 | weren't just like, Oh, Al-Shabaab in Syria, right? These guys were real enemies and Obama's willing to

05:58:44.760 | turn right around. And because the new deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman wanted a

05:58:53.880 | promotion. He was the defense minister. He's the brand new 29 years old defense minister and deputy

05:58:58.600 | crown prince. He wants to make a political move. So he launches a war in Yemen against the new Houthi regime

05:59:04.760 | with Obama support so that he can use that as a power play inside the Royal family. This is when

05:59:09.960 | he arrests the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef and, um, uh, Talal and all of those Saudi billionaires

05:59:17.880 | that got marginalized and arrested in there, all their property stolen at that time in a big move

05:59:22.360 | by MBS to make himself crown prince and de facto King, which he is right now. And he did that in

05:59:27.480 | alliance with Mohammed bin Zayed from UAE and they convinced Obama to do it. And it was an absolutely

05:59:34.200 | genocidal war against the civilian population of Yemen that whole time. I'd hate to leave that out.

05:59:38.840 | I guess we have to skip Somalia for, let me say about Somalia real quick. It's the longest war in American

05:59:44.040 | history. George W. Bush sent JSOC there in December and CIA in December of '01 and they never left. We've been

05:59:52.920 | killing people in Somalia ever since then. And the first thing that they did was they took the bad guy

05:59:58.120 | warlord from Black Hawk down in 93 and they tried to put his son in power. They built up his son.

06:00:04.680 | You bring us the scalps of jihadis. And get this, according to the CIA talking to the Washington Post,

06:00:12.920 | this is their version. There were three, not 13, not 30, not 3000, not three, nothing. Three

06:00:20.680 | Al-Qaeda members, suspects, wanted for questioning by the FBI for their potential involvement in the USS

06:00:29.320 | coal attack and the Africa embassies attack. That was the excuse for this intervention. The potential that

06:00:35.960 | there were three bin Ladenites in Somalia. So America started backing the warlords against them.

06:00:42.120 | More people started and whoever their other enemies were, right? Whatever they want to do.

06:00:47.000 | The more that they fight, the more they keep coming back to the CIA and saying, "Oh man,

06:00:51.560 | you wouldn't believe how many enemies there are out there." And they make matters worse and worse. And

06:00:55.720 | this is at a time where people mock libertarians for noticing that without a government, Somalia was

06:01:01.080 | thriving. They had come from communism. Then they had a civil war of 50 warlords versus each other,

06:01:06.760 | but everyone was spent and nobody won. And so they had essentially a stateless country,

06:01:13.080 | but it was more or less at peace. And no one was powerful enough to gangsterize everybody else.

06:01:18.520 | And so the ports at Kismayo and Mogadishu were open with no tariffs and they had massive trade.

06:01:24.360 | And one of the best ways to measure economic growth at that time was in the expansion of the cell phone

06:01:29.240 | industry, which was more extensive in Somalia at that time than any other place in Eastern Africa.

06:01:35.480 | And this was under de facto, accidental libertarian capitalist anarchism,

06:01:41.880 | right? With no one in charge. And libertarians noticed that. And to this day,

06:01:46.200 | freaks and kooks and especially liberal Democrats like to say, "Oh, if you like freedom so much,

06:01:51.720 | why don't you move to Somalia?" Well, excuse me, but George W. Bush, you know, freedom himself,

06:01:57.880 | has been destroying Somalia with the power of the most powerful regime in the history of the solar

06:02:05.160 | system this whole time since then. So only an American who knows nothing about America's

06:02:12.840 | responsibility for destroying that society could possibly be ignorant and idiot enough to blame

06:02:19.880 | libertarianism and freedom and liberty and capitalism and free trade among property owners

06:02:26.920 | for what ails Somalia? USA. The regime is what ruined Somalia, our military, our CIA. And so by 2005,

06:02:38.440 | they formed their own little pseudo-government in response to American intervention and aggression

06:02:44.600 | called the Islamic Courts Union. W. Bush then hired the Ethiopians to invade, to crush them,

06:02:51.320 | their historical Christian enemies against this Muslim society, and hired Ethiopia to invade. And they did

06:02:57.880 | complete with mass rapes and torture and wanton murder and just absolute war crimes.

06:03:05.080 | So that was what led to the rise of al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab means the youth, or I've been told,

06:03:12.120 | more accurately, the boys. And under the Islamic Courts Union, it was a group of 13 different

06:03:19.160 | groupings that came together. That's why it was a union. But who was in charge? The elders. The uncles,

06:03:26.360 | the imams, the grandfathers, the old men of the village were the ones who were in charge of dispute

06:03:30.840 | resolution going on, right? But now once George Bush had Ethiopia invade at Christmastime 2006,

06:03:36.760 | well, guess who leads the insurgency? The boys. And that's why we've been fighting

06:03:41.880 | al-Shabaab in Somalia since 2006, because George W. Bush invented them with his horrific satanic,

06:03:50.520 | demonic, murderous war that he waged there from 2001 through 2006.

06:03:56.440 | Then, self-licking ice cream cone. Oh, look, we have a terrorist enemy we have to fight.

06:04:01.080 | In 2012, America kicked them out of Kismayo, or the Kenyans did with American support,

06:04:07.960 | kicked them out of the port city of Kismayo, where they had a black market charcoal operation going,

06:04:13.000 | financing their efforts. And when they did that, it was only then that they turned to the Saudis and

06:04:17.480 | accepted a sack of gold coins to declare themselves al-Qaeda. 2012, 11 years after George Bush came to

06:04:26.600 | Somalia, he succeeded. He and his successor, Obama, succeeded in turning them into bin Ladenites. Only

06:04:34.760 | then, the Americans killed the worst leader of the bin Ladenite faction, a guy named Godain. They killed

06:04:39.800 | him in 2012 or '13. Oh, I should have mentioned that the guys they overthrew in Bush's last year

06:04:46.280 | in power, Condoleezza Rice made a deal with them, that they can actually be the governor of Somalia

06:04:51.160 | after all. Never mind our giant war against your Islamic courts union. You can be the president,

06:04:55.800 | a guy named Sharif, you can be the president after all, but it has to be in the form of our,

06:05:00.600 | our transitional federal government that we've built for you. So once those guys, their original

06:05:06.680 | enemies that they waged this whole war to thwart, once they went ahead and accepted them and empowered

06:05:12.040 | them, Al-Shabaab said, you guys are traitors and sellouts and kept fighting. And by the way,

06:05:18.200 | Obama murdered men, women and children with drones. He had our nuclear submarines firing cruise missiles

06:05:25.240 | at thatched huts full of women and their daughters. Okay. That's what Barack Obama did, made that thing

06:05:30.840 | nothing but worse and worse and worse the whole time he was in there. When Donald Trump came in,

06:05:35.640 | this is according to James Mattis. He complained to James Mattis, his secretary of defense and said,

06:05:41.400 | I want out of Somalia. Why are we in Somalia? Where's Somalia? What do I care about Somalia?

06:05:45.400 | Get me out of there. And Mattis said two things. One, we're trying to prevent a Times Square attack

06:05:53.240 | type attack. Well, the thing about that is the Times Square attack was committed by a Pakistani American named

06:06:02.680 | Faisal Shahzad who was living the dream, man. He had an advanced degree. He had a nice house and a wife

06:06:10.360 | and a kid and a car and was doing fine. And then he went home to Pakistan on vacation and he saw the

06:06:16.440 | results of one of Barack Obama's drone strikes that killed a family there. And he volunteered to sign up for

06:06:23.320 | the Pakistani Taliban that had never done anything to us. They had not targeted us at all. It was the

06:06:28.680 | first time that they did. They recruited him, taught him how to make a bomb. And then he went to Times

06:06:33.240 | Square and tried to kill a bunch of innocent people on, I think it was a Friday night or a Thursday night

06:06:37.240 | there on a, and luckily his bomb was just a dud and didn't kill people. So James Mattis is causing

06:06:43.560 | Times Square attacks. He's not preventing them. And then secondly, again, this is Mattis told the post

06:06:49.800 | that he told Trump, you have no choice. And that Trump said, okay. And then not only that, because this

06:06:57.880 | was his policy was, you know, the myth that America only lost Vietnam because Lyndon Johnson tied one arm

06:07:03.080 | behind the military's back and wouldn't let the generals do the job because he's pouring over the

06:07:06.520 | maps all day and, and a penny pinching and micromanaging the war effort. Well, that's been a big myth. H.W.

06:07:13.320 | Bush said, I ain't doing that. General Schwarzkopf, you do what you gotta do. I'm not right. Donald Trump

06:07:20.440 | said the same thing. Nobody's ever going to accuse me of micromanaging the military and preventing them

06:07:25.160 | from accomplishing their goals. So to that end, from the moment he took power in 17, he devolved

06:07:31.560 | decision-making authority as low down the chain of command as he possibly could, cut out all of

06:07:37.000 | Obama's lawyers and whatever who were in the way and second guessing. And, um, and so he devolved

06:07:45.000 | command responsibility. Oh, and then he also changed the rules of engagement to make, uh, to recategorize

06:07:51.960 | these sort of pseudo war zones like Somalia and Yemen into full-scale active war zones where now

06:07:58.040 | the rules are less. And essentially he told James Mattis, you do everything that you can

06:08:04.120 | and want to do within the law. That's it. You go as far as you possibly can on everything.

06:08:10.360 | So he empowered the military. That's right.

06:08:11.480 | He empowered the military greatly, especially when it came to fighting Bin Ladenites. I don't

06:08:16.680 | ever want to hear somebody say that I didn't kill enough people in Somalia and that's why it didn't work.

06:08:21.960 | I told James Mattis, you do whatever you got to do in Somalia. If they couldn't make it work,

06:08:26.680 | it still ain't my fault, right? That was the way that he played it. And that was the way he did the

06:08:30.760 | same thing in Afghanistan. He wanted out of Afghanistan from the moment he came in. Instead,

06:08:34.840 | he escalated the war for four years while he was negotiating with the Taliban, killed another

06:08:39.800 | extra couple of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, even in a massive air and drone war,

06:08:45.400 | especially in Nangarhar and in Helmand for, you know, almost his entire four years in power.

06:08:51.160 | Um, during that, can we take that tangent and talk about his second term, how that changed

06:08:56.520 | and first maybe about the break. Yeah, sure. All right. We absolutely today must

06:09:01.320 | talk about Israel, Palestine and the Iran war. But before that, can we, uh, uh, wrap up, uh, Somalia

06:09:08.200 | and, uh, Iraq war three, right? So yeah, I'll get those out of the way real quick. Just to say about

06:09:14.360 | Somalia, it's been the status quo. I have no new information for you other than it's been

06:09:18.600 | the sock puppet government failing to quell the Al Shabaab based insurgency this whole time.

06:09:24.920 | Bush bombed them, then Obama for eight each, then Trump for four, then Biden for four. And now

06:09:32.280 | Trump in his second term now has vastly increased the strikes. His counter-terrorism guy, Sebastian

06:09:37.960 | Gorka, who's an idiot and a hawk and couldn't tell you the difference between this or that,

06:09:41.720 | but he knows he wants to kill them all. And he's one of these, you know, Fox news, blowhard,

06:09:46.120 | no nothing idiots that Trump has hired and put in charge over there. And he's massively escalated

06:09:51.000 | the war against Al Shabaab. But of course that means blasting men, women, and children to tiny

06:09:56.840 | pieces with high explosives and that kind of thing. Um, and in fact, at one point, Trump even sent,

06:10:02.920 | uh, regular troops there for training and then pull them back out again, I believe in his first term.

06:10:08.280 | But this is something that, uh, Dave DeCamp does a really good job of covering this every day at

06:10:12.120 | antiwar.com. Uh, the ongoing war, it literally is America's longest war is against Somalia since

06:10:18.360 | December, 2001 without stopping. Um, and then on Iraq war three, again, Obama finally launched it

06:10:28.120 | after using the pressure and the threat of ISIS to force Maliki out temporarily. And he's still not all

06:10:33.800 | the way gone. They replaced him with a guy named Dalmadi who was from the Supreme Islamic council.

06:10:38.120 | So again, take your pick Dawa or scary. Um, and then he launched the war in 2014. It was a brutal war,

06:10:46.120 | special operations forces on the ground, mostly guiding air power to targets. They absolutely

06:10:51.640 | just decimated the cities that they liberated, including to create Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah,

06:10:58.040 | especially Mosul, um, killed, you know, another many tens of thousands of people to destroy the

06:11:06.440 | caliphate that they had built. And when I say Iraq war three, that includes Eastern Syria as well,

06:11:11.880 | because they ended up going to Raqqa, which was the capital. We call it Eastern Syria. It's really

06:11:16.440 | sort of North central Syria, but it's relatively East now where most of the rest of the East is empty

06:11:21.560 | desert out there. Can you actually break down Iraq war one, two, three, 3.5 exactly where you're dealing

06:11:27.320 | in it? So Iraq war one is operation yellow ribbon, desert storm, the first Gulf war, 1991, January

06:11:36.840 | through February, 1991. Iraq war one and a half is from the end of that all the way through W. Bush.

06:11:44.120 | That's Bill Clinton bombing them on average, every other day for eight years straight.

06:11:48.200 | Um, that's Iraq war one and a half. Then W. Bush comes in and he and the neoconservatives

06:11:55.080 | lie us into Iraq war two. And that's the war that we fought through 2008 slash 11. The worst

06:12:02.040 | of the fighting was over by the end of 08. Uh, we'd won the four, the war for our adversaries by then,

06:12:07.720 | and then stayed and finally left by the end of 2011. Then we're gone for about two years. Although,

06:12:13.960 | as I said, CIA was still doing drone strikes there. So we really hadn't stopped bombing Iraq that whole

06:12:18.200 | time. Um, and then they build up the caliphate and launch Iraq war three in August of 2014, which ends

06:12:27.000 | at the end essentially of Trump's first year in power, 2017, maybe into the beginning of 2018 is when they

06:12:34.440 | wrap up Iraq war three. And now is what I would call Iraq war three and a half, which is America again,

06:12:41.880 | embedded with the Shiite army hunting down and killing the last of the bin Ladenite Sunni insurgency,

06:12:47.800 | which still pops its head up from time to time here and there. But of course it puts us, our guys,

06:12:53.480 | right in range of Shiite militias that operate sometimes independently and sometimes under the control,

06:13:01.240 | although maybe deniable control of Iran and groups like Khatib al-Hizballah, which is very closely

06:13:08.680 | linked to the Bada Brigade. I say al, it's just Khatib Hezballah. Um, uh, but they're very similar to

06:13:16.200 | the Bada Brigade, essentially, um, adjuncts of the official army, Shiite militias, they call them the PMUs,

06:13:23.400 | the popular mobilization units that once ISIS came to Western Iraq, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani

06:13:30.120 | called on all Shiites to rise up and defend, you know, the new Iraqi Shiistan from them and all that.

06:13:37.720 | So that's where the PMUs, you know, really came into existence. And then of course they have their own

06:13:41.880 | incentive structures going on and are probably pretty close in relative power to the official Iraqi army

06:13:48.040 | itself at this point and are very much under, I don't know, complete control, but are very close

06:13:53.960 | to the Iranian Quds Force revolutionary guard. Um, so, um, I think you would say that Iraq war three and a

06:14:02.520 | half is what continues to this day. The worry is that it'll turn into Iraq war four, and we're going to

06:14:07.640 | end up turning around again and fighting against the Shiites that we fought Iraq war two and three,

06:14:13.640 | four in connection to what's going on in alliance with Israel against Iran and their friends. Right.

06:14:18.680 | That's the danger. That's what, if we get to Iraq war four, it would be that

06:14:23.000 | we started talking about Iran and then you went to Somalia because we had to cover Somalia. Right.

06:14:32.360 | And then I guess because we were both just focused and a little bit exhausted forgot to talk about

06:14:38.840 | Iran. So, uh, Scott, one of the amazing things about you is that you said, why don't we just continue

06:14:44.920 | today? And you came back. Let's do this. Let's talk about the war in Iran. Yeah. What's the right

06:14:51.560 | way to punch it in. We'll punch it in. Yeah. So here's the question that you asked me that I never answered,

06:14:56.840 | which was, well, so what is with Israel's hyper-focus on Iran then anyway, like this obsession at this

06:15:03.400 | point. So as we talked about, it's kind of a distraction for Rabin in the first place.

06:15:07.160 | And then, you know, the Likud took Rabin's same demonization of Iran, but without the compromise

06:15:13.080 | with the Palestinians part. Right. And that was the Netanyahu doctrine. And I always thought, well, not

06:15:18.200 | always, but you know, it was an issue that potentially it seemed to make more sense for

06:15:25.720 | Netanyahu to not really seek regime change in Iran, to hawk it up against them, you know, at all times,

06:15:32.680 | keep tensions high. But isn't Iran the basis of trying to rally all the Gulf states to come

06:15:38.360 | and be partners with Israel now that like, come on, we have to have a united front against the Persians,

06:15:42.760 | especially since Netanyahu's men in America convinced George W. Bush to go to Baghdad and put

06:15:50.440 | Iran's best friends in power there. And in fact, we didn't talk all about the mechanics of the thing,

06:15:55.800 | but we did talk a little bit about the Yemen war. It was blowback from Obama's CIA anti-Al Qaeda war

06:16:01.640 | that through a few complicated steps, as I outline in the book, led to the rise of the Houthis coming and

06:16:07.880 | taking over who are Shiite group from the north of Yemen, coming and taking over the capital city of

06:16:13.240 | Sana'a in 2015. As I said, America was backing them for a little while against Al Qaeda before

06:16:18.280 | Obama stabbed them in the back and took Saudi and Al Qaeda side against the Houthis. But this is another

06:16:23.240 | example of the increase supposedly of Iranian power, although the Houthis are not nearly as close to

06:16:28.360 | Iran as say, for example, Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, who you could, I think, fairly characterize

06:16:33.400 | as Iran's 51st state, right? Where in the case of the Houthis in Yemen, that's pretty exaggerated most

06:16:41.080 | of the time. And they were under total blockade. So all the propaganda about Iran shipping them,

06:16:45.960 | all these weapons was exaggerated. But anyway, so the Iranian Shiite Crescent has been empowered by

06:16:52.360 | American foreign policy. And by the way, until last December, we talked about the caliphate and the

06:16:56.760 | war with Iran against the caliphate, right? Iraq war three to destroy it again. But then in Syria,

06:17:04.440 | that left Assad far more dependent on Iran than ever before and more dependent on Hezbollah than ever

06:17:11.320 | before. So you could fairly characterize the dirty war of the Obama years in Syria as having fully

06:17:17.000 | backfired and not really accomplished anything. That is up until last November, December, when Al Qaeda

06:17:22.680 | broke out of the Idlib province and sacked Damascus. That was a major score for the Sunni side against

06:17:29.000 | the Shiites. By the Sunni side, I mean, America and Al Qaeda in Israel and Turkey and Saudi and friends,

06:17:35.480 | right? So as I say, it made sense for Netanyahu to have an enemy in Iran to rally the Sunni Arab states

06:17:44.840 | against. On the other hand, hey, man, we're getting rid of the power from the point of view of Likud here.

06:17:51.000 | We're getting rid of the Palestinians at least of the Gaza Strip. West Bank is next. We got Hezbollah

06:17:56.600 | completely crippled, their charismatic leader Nasrallah dead. We got Assad overthrown and replaced with

06:18:02.280 | friendly bin Ladenites in Syria. Of course, the Shiites still control Baghdad. There ain't no reverse in

06:18:07.960 | that. But Israel is essentially, you know, winning in many ways in the war over there,

06:18:16.760 | at least in the short term. And so just like I was saying about Netanyahu's speech before the UN,

06:18:23.160 | that this is the new Middle East. Basically, I won. The Netanyahu doctrine is we get everything we want

06:18:27.400 | and without compromising with the Palestinians. And then the last major enemy player on the board

06:18:33.720 | is Iran. And apparently they thought, you know what, like having an incentive for these Sunni

06:18:39.480 | kings to be friends of ours is one thing, but actually just going ahead and get rid of them

06:18:44.280 | and turning Iran into something like the chaos in Syria, where there's no central state in Iran

06:18:50.360 | anymore at all. And it's all just baluki jihadis blowing up suicide bombs and, and, you know, Kurdish

06:18:57.640 | leftists and whatever going on, you know, tearing the country apart is, you know, like the Oded Yanon

06:19:03.000 | plan. Um, which I guess I'll explain that there's a, it's really funny, man. If you read this, it's,

06:19:08.120 | it's so ridiculous. Uh, it's O D E D Y I N O N O N O dead Yanon. There you go. Yanon plan. So what it is,

06:19:21.400 | the Yanon plan is an article published in February 1982 in a Hebrew journal, Kivu Nim,

06:19:27.320 | entitled the strategy for Israel in the 1980s. This article was penned by Oded Yanon, reputedly a

06:19:36.280 | former advisor of Ariane Sharon, uh, a former senior official with the Israeli foreign ministry.

06:19:43.000 | So here's what the thing says. It says, Oh no, the Soviet communists are sure to finish conquering the

06:19:48.840 | entire world real soon. And poor little Israel will stand alone against the one world communist

06:19:54.040 | state, which of course is exactly how it worked out. Right. So the Soviets were gone by the end of the

06:19:59.080 | decade. It didn't exist at all anymore, but that's like premise one. The Soviets are going to conquer

06:20:03.480 | everything and poor little Israel is going to be all alone. So the only way we can secure our existence

06:20:07.320 | now will be to smash every Arab state into warring tribes where the worst armed enemy we have is a

06:20:13.880 | kook shaking a rifle over his head. Right. And, and warring tribes by religious and, and, um, whatever

06:20:20.440 | ethnic sectarian divisions that they can help to engineer to keep everybody else just completely

06:20:25.800 | divided and weak. There's no point in being friends with anyone. Let's just be way more powerful than

06:20:30.360 | everyone, because that's the darkness of the world we face now. Even though the premise is false,

06:20:35.400 | that, you know, still was the policy, um, along the lines of the clean break to where it's a piece

06:20:40.920 | through overwhelming strength rather than friendly and decent relations with the neighboring states.

06:20:47.480 | So anyway, um, like what's going on in Syria now is like, is there even really any such thing as Syria?

06:20:53.240 | Now the Turks have a big, you know, chunk in the North, the Israelis are already taken a major chunk in

06:20:59.800 | the South, including, uh, Mount Hermon or Hernan, I always say it wrong, uh, right outside of Damascus.

06:21:06.040 | And, um, and then you got bin Laden nights, like what kind of real state can they make there? It's

06:21:13.080 | going to be, you know, just this guy, Jelani has been to CIA finishing school, right? He clearly is,

06:21:18.200 | uh, or he's under control of the Turks to a degree and has stopped chopping off heads and doing suicide

06:21:23.560 | attacks and bad public relations like that. But there's still a bunch of bin Laden night kooks and

06:21:27.240 | he's really that tame. His own men are getting, get rid of him soon enough anyway. Um, so, uh,

06:21:34.600 | so you see like, you know, in, in far Eastern, Northeastern Syria, you have the Kurds under the

06:21:39.320 | protections sort of kind of the Americans. Um, but then so are their enemies, the Turks. Uh, and then

06:21:45.400 | you have, you know, the, the, um, all the whites in the far west of the country who've been, you know,

06:21:52.040 | massacred in the thousands. And you have Christians who are at least threatened that, you know, their,

06:21:57.800 | their, uh, civil status has changed under the new jihadi regime. There's a fighting, um,

06:22:04.120 | between the jihadis and the Druze where people are being lined up and shot and all this. So in other

06:22:09.080 | words, like there is no Syria, which is perfectly good with Israel, right? That like, if they could

06:22:13.320 | do the same thing, I guess Jordan and Egypt are tame enough, but they, if they could just wreck every

06:22:17.880 | state in the region, I think, uh, well, that would be according to the Oded Yanan plan. And I think that may

06:22:23.880 | have been their plan for Iran. Now Lex, they tweet out pictures and I forget, I'm sorry,

06:22:30.280 | which official it was. If it was the defense minister, I think it was the defense minister

06:22:36.200 | of Israel, tweet out a picture of him with the son of the Shah Reza Pahlavi or the grandson

06:22:41.720 | of the older Shah Reza Pahlavi, uh, senior there as though, like the plan was, we're going to parachute

06:22:48.920 | this guy in when we launched this war, it's going to be a regime change war. And the Washington

06:22:52.680 | post had a piece that said the Israelis sent messages to all the leading generals and told

06:22:56.920 | them, if you don't rise up and overthrow the Ayatollah right now, we're going to kill your families.

06:23:01.800 | And then they are hitting all these regime targets, including police stations and all this kind of

06:23:07.880 | stuff, command and control systems in the military where the idea apparently was they hoped to get a

06:23:13.640 | regime change. They hoped that it would be enough to weaken the government and that some force would come

06:23:17.880 | to power, which shows that probably they're delusional and listening to kooks, you know,

06:23:22.760 | telling them that things like parachuting a monarch back into Persia could possibly work to be, uh, uh,

06:23:29.400 | you know, full-scale regime change. They knew, we know that they knew of course that they would need

06:23:35.000 | America to finish the war against the nuclear program, which they actually didn't, but at least it would take

06:23:40.040 | America to hit Natanz and Fordo, these deeply buried nuclear centrifuge facilities. So whether

06:23:47.240 | they really hoped that they could get the United States to go all the way and follow through with

06:23:51.480 | a regime change, hunt down and kill the Ayatollah. I mean, there was a new story that Donald Trump told

06:23:56.760 | the Israelis, don't kill the Ayatollah. Like we all know where he is, but don't do it. They claimed that.

06:24:01.720 | I don't know that that's true, but that was one of the stories that they put out anyway, was that

06:24:05.880 | America had made his explicit choice to preserve the regime. Although if you just kill the Ayatollah,

06:24:10.520 | that doesn't necessarily destroy the government, right? Somebody killed our president. That doesn't

06:24:13.480 | mean the whole government falls, right? The Congress is still going to convene and they're going to,

06:24:17.160 | whatever, have a new guy, whatever. Well, didn't Trump explicitly post, don't kill the Ayatollah.

06:24:22.200 | I think he said, we know where he is. Yeah. I think he threatened him,

06:24:26.120 | but I think they also put out a story saying that he told the Israelis not to kill him. But I think,

06:24:30.280 | I think both things are right there. So, but then the point being that to get a real regime change

06:24:36.280 | in Tehran means a real war in Iran and air dominance is one thing, but boots on the ground,

06:24:42.600 | standing around in Tehran telling mullahs that they cannot convene anymore or whatever is a whole

06:24:48.680 | different ball game, right? And it's a thing that we're all the talk of war with Iran over all of

06:24:54.680 | these, you know, last two decades, at least nobody's talked about, we're going to send in some kind of

06:24:59.000 | occupation for us or do anything like that. But so that that's always been a big part of the argument

06:25:03.480 | against the war is that you start the war. You don't really have a way to finish it, right? Because

06:25:08.600 | in fact, as we've already seen that contrary to Trump's claims, they did not completely obliterate

06:25:14.600 | their centrifuge capacity. Now they seem to have inflicted some pretty heavy damage

06:25:18.520 | on Fordow and or Natanz, although there are conflicting reports. And some say that Natanz was

06:25:25.000 | less damaged than might have been. They did destroy importantly, the conversion facility at Isfahan.

06:25:31.400 | And that's where you can take uranium metal after you refine the ore, then you convert that to uranium

06:25:38.040 | hexafluoride gas. That's what you spend in the centrifuge cascades. Then you convert it back into metal.

06:25:44.200 | So without that facility, you either have a bunch of gas or you have a bunch of metal that you can't

06:25:48.840 | enrich to another state, you know, to a higher state. So, um, or if you have a bunch of gas,

06:25:54.680 | you can't convert it back into metal. So without that facility, they have a setback, but I don't

06:25:59.320 | think all their, all their facilities are destroyed and they've already announced that they're not,

06:26:03.880 | and that they still reserve the right to enrich uranium and that they're going to,

06:26:07.800 | and that they're not even going to talk with us anymore until we recognize the right to enrich uranium.

06:26:11.720 | Although they do, and I'm not saying that this is true. I don't know that this is true,

06:26:15.400 | but I'm saying it is true that they've said this, that they are still bound by the Ayatollah's fatwa

06:26:21.240 | of 2003 that bans, you know, reiterating the previous Ayatollah's fatwa that bans the pursuit

06:26:27.640 | of weapons of mass destruction. So they're declaring that they have not broken out to a nuke are,

06:26:32.040 | are calling their bluff, which again, it was always an implied bluff. They never explicitly said,

06:26:37.160 | don't you bomb us or we'll make nukes, but that seemed to be the, the implied threat that they're,

06:26:41.320 | they're a threshold state. They have a latent deterrent. Well, what happens if you bomb them?

06:26:44.920 | Well, now we'll make nukes was always the implied threat. Well, now they're saying, nah,

06:26:48.600 | and that could be that just because America inflicted so much damage on their thing that they,

06:26:53.720 | they, it's going to take them a while to get up and running enough to even make a credible

06:26:57.640 | breakout. I don't know. It could also be that the Ayatollah has just said, no,

06:27:01.240 | the principle of our sovereign right to enrich uranium and have a nuclear program for peaceful

06:27:06.520 | purposes is the only thing that we're insisting on. And we really, just like we always said,

06:27:11.080 | don't want nukes anyway. And, um, but now that Trump, one more thing,

06:27:17.080 | now that Trump has accepted Netanyahu's definition of any nuclear program is a nuclear weapons program.

06:27:23.400 | Well, then if they keep enriching, then we keep bombing and Trump has explicitly threatened that.

06:27:30.840 | Right. So we're just on this ladder. They're not going to give up enrichment. And Trump is apparently

06:27:37.880 | so far, never going to back down on enrichment, which W. Bush and Obama had done like, ah, what are you

06:27:43.240 | going to do? They're never going to give up enrichment. If we're going to be reasonable and get a deal,

06:27:47.880 | we are going to have to recognize their right to enrich, which is actually in the nonproliferation

06:27:53.320 | treaty there, you know, which they have signed, which is America's treaty.

06:27:56.920 | Do you think the world is a more dangerous place if, uh, Iran gets a nuclear weapon?

06:28:00.680 | Yeah. I don't want anybody having nukes. I hate to see the proliferation. I mean, in a way, nuclear

06:28:06.280 | weapons seem to make States more responsible a lot of times, but you can't really count on that. Right.

06:28:11.080 | You can say, yeah, they keep the peace. They do keep the peace. Major powers don't want to fight

06:28:16.440 | with hydrogen bombs. Come on. It's insane. It's beyond insane. It's unthinkable. On the other hand,

06:28:21.720 | it's a great bluff until it fails. And if it fails, then you're talking about devastation beyond

06:28:28.840 | imagination. Is it surprising to you? Sorry to once again, zoom out on human nature,

06:28:33.640 | that the mutual shared destruction has worked up to this point, seemingly effectively.

06:28:39.560 | It's just a blink of an eye. Right. And the Soviets got nukes in 46.

06:28:44.120 | Yeah. So meaning in the full arc of human history, it's a blink of a nut.

06:28:48.760 | That's right. Yeah. There's no, there's no like real base of statistics to measure from. Right.

06:28:55.240 | It's been a few decades. Think of it like this. If I say to you, look, man, here's how international

06:29:00.760 | security is going to work for the next 275 years. Okay. All the major powers are going to have hydrogen

06:29:05.960 | bombs and they're all going to hold them at each other's capital city's heads in a Mexican standoff

06:29:10.520 | permanently. And it's going to be great. And that's how we're going to go forward for the next,

06:29:15.400 | I don't know, 10 generations.

06:29:19.800 | No, it couldn't possibly work. Could it? We're all going to die at some point if that's the setup.

06:29:25.000 | And I'm not advocating for a global state here. I'm perfectly against that better than anybody,

06:29:30.440 | but I'm just saying there's gotta be a better way than the permanent H bomb Mexican standoff. And I'm not

06:29:35.960 | advocating for unilateral disarmament and surrender, but I am advocating for multilateral disarmament.

06:29:43.320 | And Ronald Reagan thought we could not Walter Mondale. Ronald Reagan went to Reykjavik in 86,

06:29:50.440 | and he was a hair away from making a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. This is three years before the wall

06:29:55.000 | came down in Berlin. Okay. They didn't know that the Soviet union was about to cease and hell,

06:29:59.400 | Soviet union didn't cease to exist again until the end of 91. They didn't know Ronald Reagan didn't know

06:30:05.400 | this is the end of the Soviet union. He knew it was the end of the cold war. Him and Gorbachev were in,

06:30:09.720 | in the cold war. And Reagan believed at that point to some degree or another, I can't speak exactly,

06:30:14.760 | but they reportedly believed he was on a mission from God that he had the like destiny granted to

06:30:22.120 | him mandated to him to abolish nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. And he was a hair away from

06:30:27.400 | making that deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. And the tragedy of it is that the deal fell apart because of the

06:30:34.680 | completely fantastic and ridiculous promise of the Star Wars shield program, where they were going to

06:30:39.800 | have lasers in space to shoot down all incoming ICBMs and all this. And we're talking 1986 technology,

06:30:45.320 | right? This is a joke. There's no way in the world they're going to do that. It would have cost,

06:30:48.920 | you know, however many trillions we didn't have and never worked anyway. And Reagan said, well,

06:30:53.960 | I promised the American people that I would build one. But the whole thing is, man, if we're getting rid of

06:30:58.280 | all the nuclear missiles, then you don't need one anyway. So it's okay. And then by the way, they were

06:31:03.160 | not counting on a magic wish to implement it either. The plan always was going to be America

06:31:07.880 | and the Soviet Union would try to get our nuclear stockpiles down to roughly rough parity with the

06:31:12.760 | other nuclear weapon states at that time, France, Britain, Israel, and China. India and Pakistan didn't

06:31:19.000 | have nukes yet. South Africa only had a few before they gave them up. And then once we got down to

06:31:24.840 | about two or 300 each, then we see if we get down to a hundred each, then we see if we get down to 50

06:31:29.880 | each and we see if we can get down to 10. Right? So it was not like, oh, Ronald Reagan turned into Jane

06:31:35.080 | Fonda, the commie hippie sellout trader who wanted to just give away the store to the enemy. And all of a

06:31:40.840 | sudden became, you know, a naive believer in like fantasies coming true. It was all like a hard headed

06:31:47.720 | realism that these machines are too dangerous to let politicians hold on to them over the long term.

06:31:53.320 | It's the same conclusion that William Perry and Henry Kissinger too, at the end of their lives,

06:31:57.160 | they formed a group called Global Zero. George Shultz as well, Reagan's secretary of state formed

06:32:01.400 | a group called Global Zero about saying, we have to, got to get rid of these weapons. And William Perry,

06:32:06.920 | he had been Clinton's secretary of defense who had opposed NATO expansion, almost resigned over it and

06:32:11.720 | should have. But he wrote a book about my life at the nuclear brink. And he wrote about like,

06:32:17.080 | you just don't understand about these machines. Okay. Right. Talking about a hydrogen bomb.

06:32:21.480 | Like you just can't imagine what it would be like to have Dallas wiped off the face of the earth,

06:32:25.880 | that level of devastation and, and what that would mean for the survivors and the rest and, and having

06:32:32.040 | all of our cities wiped off the face of the earth in an afternoon like that, everything our ancestors

06:32:35.880 | have built for 3000 years destroyed over. Nothing could possibly be worth it. Nothing could be.

06:32:41.560 | There's so many difficult questions here. Do you think the world is stable and smart enough to deal

06:32:49.880 | with a situation where somebody drops one nuclear weapon?

06:32:54.920 | I don't, I, that's the worry, right? And from all the war games, once the nukes start going off,

06:33:00.280 | they keep going off. We can't let them nuke us without nuking them back. We have to do something,

06:33:04.360 | sir. And then it just keeps going and going. The Americans claimed that the Russians, and I don't

06:33:09.640 | know the truth of this could be true, that the Russians have a doctrine of escalate to deescalate.

06:33:15.000 | I think they denied it, but in other words, they'll go ahead and drop a nuke first and say,

06:33:20.120 | see, that's how angry we are. You guys better back down. And the Americans immediately ran a war

06:33:25.720 | game and publicly leaked it and said, if the Russians ever try to do that escalate to deescalate stuff,

06:33:30.600 | no, we will nuke Belarus. And we will say, oh no, we're the ones who are loco. Don't you mess with us.

06:33:36.760 | We are escalating to deescalate. Now you back down. So you see, then we all die by 7:30, right?

06:33:43.800 | Is there a number, again, a difficult question. Is there a number of warheads that's low enough?

06:33:49.960 | To where? Because you said, bring it down from 100 to 50 to 10.

06:33:54.040 | I don't know. I did have a fun conversation one time with Lyle Goldstein, who's this brilliant,

06:33:57.960 | all kinds of nuclear war planner and defense analyst. He used to be at the Naval War College.

06:34:03.080 | And I was saying, but come on, Lyle, like, what if we just got them down to like

06:34:06.680 | a few low kiloton type bombs or whatever? And he's going, yeah, no, we don't want to do that.

06:34:12.680 | Cause that makes them really much more thinkable and usable. What you want to do is have at least a

06:34:18.200 | certain minimum number of multi megaton city killer bombs so that the capital cities remain in jeopardy,

06:34:26.120 | because that is the counter incentive to the politicians going that far. You need, forget the

06:34:30.920 | tactical, you need the strategic nukes to prevent war, right? And so all that makes sense if you're

06:34:37.080 | a certain kind of egghead, but I'm just saying, man, I don't know. Even the bombs that they hit

06:34:43.960 | Japan with are nothing compared to the super, as they called it then the hydrogen fusion bombs,

06:34:50.200 | where you're talking high kilotons or low megatons. I was wondering if you can comment on some of the

06:34:55.640 | interesting interviews that there are in hotter than the sun. Another one of your books, hotter than

06:35:01.000 | the sun time to abolish nuclear weapons. It is a book by Scott Horton that features over a decade of

06:35:06.280 | interviews with a wide array of experts on this very topic and the dangers posed by nuclear weapons,

06:35:13.400 | the nuclear arms industrial complex, and the history of politics and future risks surrounding

06:35:18.200 | nuclear proliferation. Is there any, some interesting interviews you remember like insights?

06:35:23.880 | Yeah. Well, I mean, the funny story about that is a friend of mine just came to me and goes,

06:35:28.120 | look what I did. And he sends me a PDF of transcripts of all these interviews I've done about nuclear

06:35:32.600 | weapons over 20 years. I didn't even ask him to do it or anything. He just came to me. And then, so I was

06:35:37.560 | like, okay, well, I'm going to delete a couple of these and I'm going to add a couple more. And then we just kind of

06:35:41.480 | ship shaped it. I stopped writing provoked for a minute to get this out in 22.

06:35:45.400 | But when you like look that as a piece of work, the transcripts,

06:35:49.560 | it's because sometimes it's like, you might be so busy thinking about the current thing and looking

06:35:56.360 | into the future that you forget to look back at all the conversations you've had on this particular

06:36:01.000 | topic and to sort of start to extract some deeper wisdom from it, you know?

06:36:04.840 | Well, the title of the book, I, you know, I had already done my first two books are time to end

06:36:09.480 | the war in Afghanistan and time to end the war on terrorism. So this was called time to abolish

06:36:13.960 | nuclear weapons, which I think really puts people off. It makes it sound like, oh, just, you know,

06:36:18.200 | um, unilateral surrender to the chai comms or whatever kind of thing, you know?

06:36:22.760 | Um, but that's not really what the book is about, right? The book is essentially about

06:36:27.560 | all aspects of nuclear weapons, America and Russia's nuclear arsenals past and present North Korea,

06:36:33.160 | Israel, Iran, India, and Pakistan, and, you know, all their different nuclear weapons programs,

06:36:38.360 | Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of the anti-nuclear activists, including like the nuns who break into

06:36:43.560 | naval bases and bang on ICBMs with a hammer and then go to prison for 10 years. And there's a whole,

06:36:48.360 | like very proud tradition of essentially like socialists, uh, like the Catholic workers,

06:36:53.720 | um, who, uh, the Berrigan family probably heard of, of, uh, father Berrigan, Daniel Berrigan. And,

06:36:59.560 | uh, I forgot his, his, uh, brother's name. Um, and Frida's his daughter and, um, McAllister is his wife,

06:37:09.720 | the nun. And, and these guys, um, they go to prison all the time, Daniel and Philip. That's right.

06:37:17.960 | They're a peace activist, you know, um, Frida is their daughter. She's a great one.

06:37:21.800 | And so I have, you know, all that kind of stuff. Um, as I say, Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

06:37:26.120 | why North Korea's nuclear weapons program is all George W. Bush's fault,

06:37:29.720 | which you don't want to get me on that topic probably. Although I could do it pretty quick,

06:37:34.120 | but we should do Iran first, at least before we forget.

06:37:36.280 | I mean, uh, on Iran and in general, what, what are the things in the American toolkit that should be used

06:37:44.440 | to minimize the chance that states like Iran get a nuclear weapon in the near future?

06:37:49.960 | Reproachment.

06:37:51.480 | Send whoever is the Secretary of State, oh God, Marco Rubio, send somebody over there and just be cool.

06:38:00.600 | Diplomacy.

06:38:01.240 | Yeah. We had, look, as I said before, um, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexander Haig,

06:38:07.960 | they wanted to normalize relations with Iran in 1993. He said, we can do business with these people.

06:38:12.600 | Dick Cheney said, we do business with these people. You know, it's just the attitude. All you have to say

06:38:17.720 | is like, this is a USA. We're number one. I ain't afraid to know Ayatollah. Like, we have all the power.

06:38:26.600 | So you're telling me, even though we have all the power, we hold all the cards. There's nothing we

06:38:32.680 | can do to work it out with these people. Come on. We still hold a grudge over because they supported

06:38:38.280 | the groups that did the Beirut attack in 1983. Get out of here. Ronald Reagan was selling missiles a

06:38:43.880 | year or two years after that through the Israelis. So come on, you know, you can't, you're not allowed to

06:38:50.440 | look, we, we helped Saddam Hussein gas their cities. Our, our aircraft carriers shot down one of their

06:38:57.000 | civilian airliners with almost 300 people on board. So should they forgive us for that?

06:39:03.000 | And so that we can move forward? Yes, they should. That was a stupid thing that some idiots did,

06:39:08.440 | but that was a long time ago. And we, we have to live on this planet together. So what are we going to

06:39:12.360 | do? You put those things behind us and you move on. This is business, man. And so that's what you do.

06:39:18.040 | You just ignore the Israel lobby and you just put Trump on a plane to Tehran. Look here, Ayatollah.

06:39:24.040 | I was talking with my guys and we figured out this is what we could probably agree on. And here,

06:39:28.040 | the issue is still outstanding and let's figure it out. And by the way, this is how Nixon and

06:39:32.120 | Kissinger did Mao. They went over there and they agreed to be friends first. Then they worked on all

06:39:38.280 | the stipulations. And we should say, so the idea here is basically talk to everyone, but trust no one.

06:39:44.520 | That's right. And so when we say friends, we mean basic courtesy and diplomacy, but don't,

06:39:51.560 | doesn't mean you trust the person. That's right. Think about the phrase,

06:39:53.800 | Ronald Reagan's phrase, trust, but verify. Well, what does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. It

06:39:58.280 | means don't trust. It means be polite and verify. That's what it means, right? It means pretend like

06:40:04.120 | you're trusting because that's how you get along in the world. But what, but you verify, you send your

06:40:09.240 | inspectors to make sure that's all. And you have an agreement to do so and it's fine. And so, and quite

06:40:14.040 | honestly, like, look, man, the Ayatollah, if he wanted to secretly try to break out and enrich up to

06:40:18.520 | weapons, great and make a nuclear weapon, he could have, you know, I'm sure you've heard this propaganda

06:40:23.640 | numerous places on TV. Um, Marco Rubio said this numerous times. Uh, Mike Baker is a regular podcast

06:40:32.360 | guest around here somewhere and was saying this kind of thing, uh, a week ago or so that look,

06:40:38.840 | Iran had 60% enriched uranium. Get it. Like that's on its way to weapons grade.

06:40:47.400 | That would be easier to enrich to weapons grade. But this, you see, there's, they don't go anywhere

06:40:54.920 | with it. It's all just a non-secondary. It doesn't mean anything. Marco Rubio goes,

06:40:58.120 | the only countries with 60% enriched uranium 235 are countries with nuclear weapons.

06:41:03.240 | You see how that doesn't mean anything. You can't make a nuclear weapon with 60% enriched uranium.

06:41:08.680 | So what was the point of the making 60% enriched uranium? It was so they had leverage in the

06:41:12.760 | negotiations that they were in the middle in so they can negotiate it away. They did the same thing

06:41:17.720 | in the Obama years when they were working on getting into the JCPOA. And it was America that broke the

06:41:22.440 | deal, not them. And then it says in the deal that if America starts breaking the deal, then Iran can

06:41:30.520 | stop abiding by some of the stipulations in it without actually leaving the deal and without being in

06:41:35.480 | violation of the deal, they would just be stopped abiding by some stipulations. Then in December of 2020,

06:41:42.840 | the Israelis killed the top nuclear scientist over there, Fakhrizada in a machine gun ambush thing.

06:41:51.720 | And then in April of 21, they did a sabotage attack at Natanz, which they took credit for.

06:41:57.320 | Okay. And it was in reaction to that was when the Iranians started enriching up to 60%.

06:42:01.640 | Now, at this point in the story, Mike Baker goes,

06:42:04.680 | He goes, something, something, yada, yada, yada, and can't finish the statement. What does it mean

06:42:10.200 | that they have 60% uranium? What are they doing with it? Yes, it's true that if they turned it back

06:42:16.040 | into a gas and enriched it all the way up to 90%, then they would have enriched weapons grade uranium,

06:42:22.280 | but they're not doing that. And they weren't doing that. And so why try to frame it as a dangerous

06:42:28.200 | threat? The only reason they were enriching it up is because of course it is closer to weapons grade.

06:42:33.880 | They're demonstrating that like, Hey guys, you keep assassinating our guys and sabotaging our plants.

06:42:39.080 | We keep it, it's, it's counterproductive for you, isn't it? We keep enriching to a higher and higher

06:42:44.120 | degree. If you want us to stop doing that, you need to engage in diplomacy instead of murder and sabotage.

06:42:50.040 | That was the message that they're sending. And then of course, they're just going to ship all

06:42:55.320 | the uranium to Russia or to France, probably, I guess the Russians to dilute it down back into,

06:43:02.120 | you know, to a lower grade to burn in their civilian reactor. And so

06:43:07.320 | Speaker 1: this whole time, they have not broken out to make a nuclear weapon.

06:43:13.800 | Now, the North Koreans did George Bush. Well, I'll tell you real quick, it was this quick little thing.

06:43:18.280 | In 2002, George Bush put them in the axis. Well, first of all, Bill Clinton had an agreement with

06:43:22.040 | them. It's called the agreed framework of 1994 that said that if you leave your heavy water reactor off at

06:43:29.880 | Yang Byung that the Soviets had built for them, you leave it off, we will build you two light water

06:43:36.040 | reactors that cannot produce weapons grade plutonium as waste. And we'll give you a bunch of fuel oil and

06:43:40.760 | a bunch of welfare. If you stay in the NPT, don't enrich to, they didn't have an enrichment program at all.

06:43:49.240 | Stay in the NPT, keep the inspectors in the country, leave your reactor off, and we'll do these things for you.

06:43:54.360 | Speaker 1: Now America never lived up to their end of the deal. Newt Gingrich would let Bill Clinton

06:43:57.800 | live up to his end of the deal in the nineties. It was actually Donald Rumsfeld's company that got

06:44:01.400 | the contract to build the light water reactors and never delivered them. And then they delivered some

06:44:05.400 | of the fuel oil, but very little of it. But still the North Korean stayed in their side of the deal

06:44:10.120 | until W. Bush came to town and W. Bush, first of all, put them in the axis of evil. And then in the fall of

06:44:16.760 | 2002, John Bolton accused them of admitting supposedly, although not on camera or on audio

06:44:26.280 | anywhere, but supposedly a guy admitted at a cocktail party that they had a secret uranium enrichment

06:44:31.720 | program. Well, if they did, that's not necessarily a violation of the NPT or their safeguards agreement

06:44:36.760 | or of the agreed framework. Again, a civilian enrichment program is protected under the NPT,

06:44:42.040 | as long as you're not making weapons out of it in violation of the deal, right? So even if they were doing

06:44:46.360 | that, that's a cause to sit back down at a table. That's not a cause to break the deal.

06:44:50.360 | But what did Bush do? Him and Bolton, they tore up the agreed framework, officially announced that

06:44:54.280 | it's dead. Then they added new sanctions. Then they announced something called the

06:44:58.040 | Proliferation Security Initiative, which was their claim to have the right to seize any North Korean

06:45:02.280 | ship on the high seas in order to prevent proliferation, which is nothing in international

06:45:07.400 | law allowing that, but they just claimed it unilaterally. And then in December of 2002,

06:45:11.080 | they put them in the nuclear posture review on the short list for a potential

06:45:15.960 | nuclear first strike. And it was only then that Kim Jong Il said, fine, screw you guys,

06:45:20.440 | and announced he was going to withdraw from the treaty, kick the inspectors out of the country,

06:45:25.320 | and they started making nuclear weapons. Now, you might ask, what the hell were they doing?

06:45:29.240 | And I think the answer is they thought they would have a chance to go to war with North Korea before

06:45:32.760 | they were able to complete their bombs. Problem is Iraq didn't go like Ahmed Chalabi promised it would

06:45:38.120 | go. And so they were in no position whatsoever to go to North Korea. So they forced them out of the deal,

06:45:43.080 | pushed Bush to nukes. That was the great, the last article that the great Gordon Prather wrote

06:45:47.560 | for us at antiwar.com was called how Bush pushed North Korea to nukes. And it tells this whole story.

06:45:55.320 | rest in peace, my friend Gordon, he was a great one, man. How Bush pushed North Korea to nukes by

06:46:01.640 | Gordon Prather. So the Ayatollah said, no, no, man, hands up. Don't shoot. Here's my books. Yes,

06:46:09.400 | I'm enriching uranium. And I know you don't want me to. He bought some material, some equipment to do it

06:46:14.760 | off the black market, but only because Bill Clinton denied the Chinese the right to just sell them a

06:46:19.480 | light water reactor. Prevented them from doing so when that would have been fine. If you just let

06:46:23.960 | the Chinese sell them a light water reactor, they would have never had a heavy water one, you know?

06:46:27.880 | Well, in fact, one more thing about North Korea, Donald Trump proved that diplomacy works. He

06:46:34.120 | completely broke the ice with Kim the last time he was the president. It was John Bolton that

06:46:38.360 | sabotaged the thing. He brought John Bolton with him to, I forgot if it was Vietnam or Singapore,

06:46:42.040 | which meeting it was where Bolton sabotaged the thing. And the second meeting,

06:46:45.080 | he literally sent Bolton to outer Mongolia to keep him out of the way, but it wasn't enough.

06:46:50.600 | But if he had let Stephen Began, he was the guy who said, hey, we could take denuclearization

06:46:56.040 | off the table first and just work on normalization first and denuclearization later.

06:47:00.920 | That was always obviously the poison pill of the Bush and Obama people.

06:47:04.280 | First, give up all your nukes. Then we'll begin to talk to you. Yeah, right. And so Stephen Began,

06:47:09.800 | who worked for Trump was saying, no, we don't have to do it like that. We can work with them.

06:47:13.400 | He gave a speech like that. But then if you look at the pictures, Began's in the chair in the back by

06:47:17.800 | the wall and doesn't get to sit at the table, say nothing, or he's down further on the table,

06:47:21.400 | whatever it was, and didn't get to have his say. And so it was Bolton helped. It was the same guy,

06:47:26.360 | John Bolton, who Sheldon Adelson picked to be Donald Trump's national security advisor,

06:47:32.120 | was the one who ruined that. But anyway, on Iran, me and every other don't bomb Iran activist in

06:47:39.240 | America for two decades have been saying, if we attack them, then they're more likely to break

06:47:43.560 | out and make a nuke. So I have to stand on that, that yes, they're now more likely to break out and

06:47:49.080 | make a nuke than they were before because of the completely foreseeable fact that we can't pursue

06:47:53.800 | a regime change. We're only incentivizing them to arm themselves up worse. So now we're counting on

06:48:00.680 | like the cool patient wisdom of the Ayatollah Khamenei to not be that crazy when the whole

06:48:06.920 | point supposedly of this is that he's so crazy that you can't trust him with any nuclear technology at

06:48:12.280 | all. Right. You can't trust him with the ability to enrich uranium up to weapons grade, whether he is

06:48:16.440 | or not. But now we got to just rely on him and hope he doesn't because now he could just dig a deeper

06:48:22.680 | hole under a bigger mountain and try again.

06:48:25.160 | Do you think Trump should travel to Iran?

06:48:28.200 | I do. I absolutely think that Donald Trump could go straight to Tehran and then Moscow,

06:48:33.400 | Beijing and Pyongyang and come home and be Trump the great. Said before, I'll say it again. And even

06:48:39.240 | with the Russia situations we talked about before, but I don't want to spoil it, but very difficult to

06:48:45.000 | solve. That's right. We're punching this in everybody, but it's very difficult to solve.

06:48:50.280 | That's funny. But there's got to be a way. And even if that's the hardest one, I think we could

06:48:57.240 | absolutely put away our problems with Iran and North Korea. No question. I don't really know exactly what

06:49:05.960 | we have outstanding with China other than the potential of conflict over Taiwan. They're not

06:49:11.000 | really threatening our allies in Korea, Japan or Australia or anybody else. I don't really worry about

06:49:16.840 | that. That's not been their history. They got their own problems. It's a very poor country in

06:49:21.560 | the West and all that. So, um, I'm not so worried about the rise of China as some are, but so go in

06:49:29.640 | and do diplomacy, go in and do diplomacy. And that's Trump's whole thing. And look, you know, they say only

06:49:33.720 | Nixon can go to China. Well, why is that? Because if a Democrat did it, Nixon would call him a commie,

06:49:39.080 | right? Like you can't, it would be Nixon to stop it. But if Nixon goes, well, you know,

06:49:44.680 | it's not that he's a commie here. He's shaking hands with Mao Zedong. Why would Henry, I mean,

06:49:48.680 | what? Yeah. Why would Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon of all people shake hands with Mao? They did

06:49:55.880 | because they're smart, right? Not because they're communists, but because they were making what they

06:49:59.640 | thought was a wise move to benefit America's national interest at the expense of the Soviet Union. And if that

06:50:05.320 | means shaking the bloodiest hand in the history of the world, then business is business, right?

06:50:10.600 | Same thing is Ronald Reagan can end the cold war with Mikhail Gorbachev. Imagine if Mondale had won in

06:50:16.520 | 84 and it was Walter Mondale that was trying to negotiate the end of the cold war in front of the

06:50:21.640 | Republicans. You could imagine it going terribly, right? In a way, totally different than having

06:50:28.840 | Reagan and his successor Bush handling it from the GOP side. And then same thing here, man.

06:50:35.880 | If Donald Trump just gets up there and goes, as he always does, right? I'm the tallest, richest,

06:50:41.880 | most handsome, most successful diplomat in the history of the world. Watch me and then go out and

06:50:46.920 | make that the standard. Being a good diplomat is the measure of a man. I say so, and then go out there and

06:50:54.120 | act that way. Then it is what he says it is, right? What the hell? And do the thing where you meet and then

06:50:58.600 | you pull them in with that handshake? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got to appreciate the fact that the

06:51:03.800 | Republicans probably still, even though there's obviously a lot of resentment and a lot of bad

06:51:08.600 | feelings over all these years, but it comes down to it. A Republican president really says, come on,

06:51:13.480 | everybody, we got to go fight them radical Islams. He could probably get a lot of Republicans to go ahead.

06:51:19.640 | Oh man, terrorism's a problem again. Remember Islam from before or the thing? And like, yeah,

06:51:24.360 | and go along with that. I think they could. And I think Donald Donald Trump could simply just run on,

06:51:29.800 | I kill Muslims dead and I'm a big tough right winger, but he does not. He runs on, I'm the peace

06:51:35.720 | president. I'm the one who's trying to solve all this. I'm the one who's going to make all this go

06:51:39.080 | away for you. He knows that's what we want to hear. And I think it's his, his basic bias, except of course,

06:51:46.520 | he has, you know, Israel, the devil on his shoulder, making him or, you know, strongly influencing him to

06:51:52.840 | choose the wrong thing a hell of a lot of the time. But I think that's his basic instinct is

06:51:56.760 | to want to do that kind of stuff. You know, I don't think I've heard a politician talk about peace as

06:52:02.040 | much as him, like legitimately. I mean, yeah, it's grounded in ego and narcissism and so on that

06:52:08.440 | I'm the best deal maker in the world. Sure. But fine. Yeah. Let him have it. Yeah. Call it victory.

06:52:12.840 | I don't care. Call it whatever you want. What it means to be a man is to go into the fire

06:52:17.720 | and make the best deals in the world. That's right. Yeah. Fuck. Yeah. That's America. That

06:52:22.040 | should be, cause America has a gigantic stick and gigantic carrot. Yeah. Fucking use it. Yeah. And

06:52:27.560 | especially the carrot thing. That's my thing with North Korea is like, do we have everything to give

06:52:31.320 | and nothing to lose? Like, even when I described the Bill Clinton deal, we give them some fuel oil

06:52:36.520 | and some welfare. You know what? Like I'm a libertarian. I'm against all taxation, but all other things being

06:52:42.120 | equal, what's it to you, Lex? We pay them a little bit of welfare to keep them from turning their heavy

06:52:47.640 | water reactor back on and harvesting plutonium out of the SOB. Okay. Now they're sitting on a couple of

06:52:53.080 | dozen nukes and it's all America's fault. So, you know, could have tried harder and better and not hire

06:52:59.800 | John Bolton to help. You know what I mean? These are decisions that men made. They could have gone the

06:53:03.800 | other way and they still could. You know, if you remember when Trump first came in, he was saying

06:53:07.880 | a lot of really cool stuff about, yeah, I'm going to splat. I want to sign a big new new treaty. I

06:53:12.760 | want to slash the military budget. I want to have a new treaty with Russia and China where we all slash

06:53:18.200 | our military budgets. He said, I don't want to pivot from the Middle East to great power competition.

06:53:22.680 | I want to get along with everybody. Let's all just get along and make money for the rest of the century.

06:53:28.520 | Like, yeah, dude, that is, you know, the, the lack of special interests talking, right? That's what

06:53:37.000 | Trump thinks before everybody gets to get in there and have their say about, no, sir,

06:53:41.720 | we got to do this, that, and the other thing. But why have major power competition at all? Why

06:53:46.520 | have any of this stuff? Maybe we can just be a world of people owning property and exchanging

06:53:51.800 | it freely to, you know, uh, greater enhance our standard of living. You know, I wonder if you can

06:53:58.760 | comment, forget if we already did about the treatment of the Iranian people by the Iranian regime.

06:54:05.560 | Oh yeah. Uh, yes, you did start to ask that and I, I, this is where we went to.

06:54:10.440 | It was a good question.

06:54:11.400 | Yeah, that is a good question, but hang on. Let's do some real quick.

06:54:14.280 | Yeah, no, I'm sure it would suck to live in Tehran. You know what I mean? Or in Iran. I don't know.

06:54:18.680 | It's I'm, I'm sure it's a police state. It's on the face of it. It's an extremely flawed

06:54:23.400 | republic. The same as ours, only different in, you know, in different ways. Um, but I mean,

06:54:29.640 | the very worst things you can say about them in international diplomacy or international, you know,

06:54:35.800 | action lately is they keep opening up America's Christmas gifts, right? They keep accepting. I mean,

06:54:41.560 | if you want to blame them for sending Chalabi to light a pearl, you can, but I mean, essentially

06:54:46.840 | they stay home and let America do their dirty work for them. You know, we fought three wars for them,

06:54:53.000 | two Iraq wars in Afghanistan. Um, and, and hell helped empower their friends in Iran, in Yemen,

06:55:00.920 | accidentally, um, you know, in, in reaction form, but still. And so, um, you know, they're not the

06:55:09.960 | aggressive power that they're portrayed to be oftentimes, you know, even again, look at this

06:55:14.680 | current war where they fired all these rockets at an empty corner of a base again in Qatar. They

06:55:20.280 | called Donald Trump beforehand and let him know the rockets are coming. They fired exactly as many

06:55:24.360 | rockets as bombs. America dropped 14. And remember Trump tweeted, thanks for the heads up that you're

06:55:29.800 | shooting the rockets so we could shoot them all down. In other words, even after America hit them

06:55:33.720 | with our biggest conventional bombs, they still struck back only in a symbolic way and absolutely

06:55:39.640 | single. They did not want to tangle with the USA at all. And this is after Trump warned them to

06:55:44.120 | evacuate Tehran, right? Which could have been a threat of a nuclear strike or at least a carpet

06:55:49.800 | bombing campaign, or at least a very heavy bombing campaign against government targets, you know,

06:55:54.440 | civilian government and military government targets in the country, in the city that, you know,

06:55:58.440 | is a, a pretty major threat. And the Ayatollah still is like, come on, man, I want to fight you.

06:56:03.160 | And, and shoots his 14 little measly missiles as essentially a show only. And so we're relying on

06:56:10.920 | that. This thing could have escalated, right? This war that Israel's dragging us into, it could have,

06:56:15.720 | what if they had shot 5,000 missiles at our bases in the Gulf, we'd be in the middle of a ugly as hell war

06:56:21.880 | right now. They'd have had to, quote unquote, had, they'd have talked themselves into probably sending

06:56:26.760 | in ground troops to complete the regime change once it gets that bad. So that is a risk that they were

06:56:33.080 | taking. Um, and thank goodness that cooler heads prevail, but it's kind of nuts that America has to

06:56:39.080 | rely on the supposedly mad mullahs to be cool while we're bombing them, right? In a way where if they

06:56:46.280 | escalate at all, we could escalate and, and the thing could get way out of control very quickly.

06:56:50.840 | Um, with America attempting to occupy a land three or four times the size of Iraq with mountains and

06:56:57.960 | four times the population and the rest.

06:56:59.800 | I was really worried. I think we got lucky and I was really worried that this would be

06:57:04.440 | another forever war.

06:57:05.640 | It ain't over yet, man. That's the problem is they're just, they didn't solve it.

06:57:10.360 | They could have solved it at the table. They probably still could,

06:57:13.640 | but they just have to recognize.

06:57:15.800 | Just go there. Just go to Ayatollah. Just speak with Ayatollah.

06:57:19.400 | But you know, like I talked with Trita Parsi and he's a great expert on this and has been

06:57:24.440 | preaching more or less the dove side of the case here for a very long time.

06:57:28.680 | But he told me on the show the other day, he's like, I fully expect them to break out and make

06:57:31.800 | a nuke now. Hell, they kicked the inspectors out. Israel and America just gave them cause to kick

06:57:38.520 | the inspectors out of the country. They think the inspectors were spies, passed the intelligence

06:57:42.680 | to the planners for the war. So they kicked the inspectors out. So now we lost track of every

06:57:48.680 | last atom. We had it where I could sit here and tell you, man, the IAEA for all their complaints

06:57:53.160 | about, oh, we found this little thing and we found that little thing. Explain this, explain that.

06:57:57.160 | For all of their little nitpicking, they always continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear

06:58:02.840 | material in Iran to any new, any military or other special purpose. Meaning they knew where it all was.

06:58:07.480 | They had their scales, they had their sensors, they had their seals and their cameras, and they knew

06:58:12.280 | this much uranium is here today. It's there tomorrow and whatever. They tracked it all around and

06:58:17.960 | they could verify the non-diversion. That's the IAEA's job. Now that chain of evidence is broken.

06:58:24.920 | Now, like we don't know exactly what they're enriching. We don't know how much exactly they've

06:58:28.440 | been able to convert and where they diverted it to and whatever, and what is happening now,

06:58:32.760 | essentially undercover darkness. So if they invite the inspectors back in and say, see our civilian

06:58:37.880 | program. At that point, they very well could have a secret parallel weapons program that we don't know

06:58:43.720 | about. Now that has not been the case this whole time. It very well could be the case going forward

06:58:51.080 | from the summer of 2025.

06:58:52.680 | So from this point on, you still think carrot is more effective than sticks. So diplomacy versus

06:58:59.720 | threatening and military action. So here, diplomacy is the only way out.

06:59:04.040 | Yeah. Well, and especially considering, like, I'm not saying that's like the magic trick of all foreign

06:59:07.800 | policy or whatever, although I'm just a non interventionist anyway, but I'm just saying,

06:59:11.800 | as far as like solving this problem, the Ayatollah wasn't making nukes.

06:59:17.480 | There wasn't an emergency that we had to preempt. So yeah, of course, diplomacy is the answer when

06:59:23.320 | he's sitting there saying, look, man, I have a civilian program and that's going to have to be

06:59:27.800 | good enough for you. Of course, violence and threats are what has made it far more likely that they're now

06:59:34.680 | going to make nukes because the Israelis say for them to have nuclear technology at all is equivalent to

06:59:39.800 | them having an advanced weapons program, which is just really not true. And again, it's a problem

06:59:45.080 | that we can't solve for them without committing to a serious war effort that no war planners have

06:59:51.080 | talked about in this whole time. But again, that's the unreality of the whole thing. You can't solve

06:59:55.960 | it from the air. So don't start it. You're going to make matters worse, but you can't fix it with a B2.

07:00:03.880 | Even if you kill the Ayatollah and 10 of his best guys, you still didn't overthrow the government

07:00:09.480 | there. They got 20 more guys. What are you talking about? They just make a new guy, the Ayatollah

07:00:14.840 | and pull the old president out of retirement, put him up there, you know? So if you're insisting on

07:00:20.680 | regime change, it's going to take the third infantry division. Anybody signing up for that?

07:00:24.680 | And the thing I really, really deeply worry about is something you spoke about,

07:00:30.440 | which is the, God forbid, the possibility of a Bin Ladenite type character doing a terrorist attack

07:00:37.480 | in the United States. And then the machinery, the military industrial complex, creating propaganda

07:00:42.520 | that says Iran, somehow connecting Iran to it. And now we have to invade Iran. We, the American

07:00:47.720 | people have to put feet on the ground and regime change. And all of a sudden, but I think the American

07:00:54.120 | people, I mean, the wars in the Middle East have really taught the lesson, like, no.

07:00:58.840 | It depends on how quick it's forced on them, right, at this point. See, it took Bush a year

07:01:03.880 | and a half to lie to send a war with Iraq. Obama just goes, "Yeah, we're going to war in Libya."

07:01:07.640 | And everyone's like, "Okay, whatever." Right? But war with Iran is another, I mean...

07:01:13.720 | Trump too. Trump did barely even light us into it, right? His own government was saying,

07:01:17.960 | "They're not making nukes." And he goes, "I don't care what they say. I'm going to do it anyway."

07:01:22.680 | Israel says they are. And they just did... They barely even light us into it. They just didn't

07:01:27.960 | wait. And then they go, "Well, see, that was over. Short and sweet. Time for peace." And then

07:01:31.640 | called time out. But again, it's not over yet.

07:01:35.720 | And then we got lucky because Iran did not respond.

07:01:38.520 | Yeah, exactly.

07:01:39.720 | By escalating.

07:01:40.440 | And Trump claimed that he completely obliterated their program and total victory, which is not true.

07:01:45.720 | So where are we now? We're at the second half, you know?

07:01:49.080 | I mean, I was really worried because Iran was essentially humiliated.

07:01:53.400 | And when states like that, especially regimes like Iran's, is humiliated, they don't usually like

07:01:59.960 | to be sort of calm and deescalate.

07:02:03.800 | Right. In fact, especially if it's true that they're so fragile in their power,

07:02:08.760 | right, that this would make them even more desperate to show how tough they are.

07:02:12.920 | That's how you create terrorists.

07:02:14.200 | In fact, the headline today is, "Iran demands full reparations for the war before talks."

07:02:18.360 | In other words, just exactly what you said. Give us our pride and then we'll talk to you.

07:02:23.720 | Recognize enrichment and then we'll talk to you. In other words, we're going nowhere with talks right

07:02:27.880 | now until Donald Trump climbs way down on the ladder.

07:02:30.760 | And by the way, in diplomacy in general, on a basic human level, letting people have their pride,

07:02:38.200 | not humiliating them is essential. You know, doing things like labeling somebody as the axis of evil,

07:02:44.920 | you're signaling to your own people maybe, but you're humiliating, you're deeply disrespecting

07:02:50.520 | the other side. Sometimes you have to like, soften the communication in order to achieve,

07:02:56.520 | not trusting anybody, but in order to achieve ends.

07:02:58.760 | Right. And that was their whole point was to escalate conflict.

07:03:02.120 | Right. And also think about the lie. You talk about signaling to the Americans.

07:03:05.400 | How's this for a lie? That Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah and Osama bin Laden

07:03:15.240 | and Kim Jong-il are all in a big alliance against you to kill you. Right. So Saddam and the Ayatollah

07:03:22.360 | both hate each other more than any two men in the world. The Ayatollah probably doesn't think too much

07:03:26.440 | about Osama, but Saddam Hussein's clearly terrified of him. And none of them have a damn thing to do with

07:03:32.120 | Iran, or with, pardon me, with North Korea, except that North Korea had shipped some missiles to Iran

07:03:36.280 | back in the day, but they had no tight alliance at that time. And they're mid-range missiles,

07:03:40.760 | not that big of a deal anyway. So Axis, nothing. But the point was, these are all people we want

07:03:45.560 | to pick a fight with, basically. What do you think? Do we cover Iran?

07:03:50.200 | I think we got it. I think we got it. I forgot. And I wanted to thank you for

07:03:53.880 | signing all the books that you gave me with Lex for peace. I think that's a beautiful way to sign it.

07:04:00.280 | Beautiful goal to live by. I hope you like it, man.

07:04:03.720 | All right, brother. And back to...

07:04:06.920 | Yeah. Now, yesterday, again, more...

07:04:10.600 | Now, let's go back to Iran and their nuclear program and the recent war in a minute,

07:04:16.760 | but you want to do Israel-Palestine. Okay. So it's a huge, long, complicated story. I really

07:04:24.360 | highly recommend Daryl Cooper's podcast, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. I know people say a

07:04:30.120 | lot of terrible things about Daryl Cooper, but none of them are true. And he's my partner on my podcast,

07:04:34.840 | provoked our new show. And the guy's a total sweetheart, man. He's not a hater of anyone.

07:04:39.640 | He's not a Holocaust denier. What happened was people misunderstood him when he was on the Tucker

07:04:45.560 | Carlson show that day. In fact, he was making the opposite point of what people think. They thought

07:04:50.840 | that he was saying the Holocaust was just that the Nazis didn't have a good plan to feed all their

07:04:55.400 | prisoners. That's not what he was saying. What he was saying was that even if you were a Holocaust

07:05:00.760 | denier, you could not deny the fact that the Nazis were taking possession of millions of people that

07:05:07.960 | they had no plan to care for. And that, yes, in fact, a great many of them were starved to death and

07:05:14.040 | shot in this thing. And that if you were the worst, even you would have to admit that that's what he was

07:05:20.920 | saying. But what happened was a minute ago, he had just said he thought Churchill was worse than Hitler.

07:05:25.720 | And it was kind of tongue in cheek, but he was saying for various reasons that Churchill was the

07:05:29.960 | real villain of the war. And there's just a case to be made for the role that Churchill played in

07:05:35.080 | escalating that whole thing. But that aside, when they heard him say the thing about the feeding in

07:05:39.880 | Eastern Europe and the care for the prisoners, they misunderstood. And they thought that what he was

07:05:46.920 | doing is just spinning for the third Reich at this point or whatever, when that was absolutely not the

07:05:51.160 | case whatsoever, dude. He's a really great guy. And if, and in fact, I'd ask anybody, listen to even just

07:05:57.400 | the very first section of fear and loathing in the new Jerusalem. And he demands that you put yourself,

07:06:04.920 | if you're going to listen to him, he doesn't just tell it as objectively as he can. He demands

07:06:09.080 | subjectivity from you and that you, the listener, put yourself in the shoes of the people that we're

07:06:15.720 | talking about here. Imagine if this was you. And the first thing that he describes, it sounds like

07:06:20.200 | a bunch of Israeli settlers coming to murder some Palestinians on the West Bank. But then you realize

07:06:25.240 | that no, he's talking about Russians doing pogroms against Jews in Russia and the dawn of the Zionist

07:06:30.680 | movement in the early 20th century, late 18th century and into the 20th century. And he's talking

07:06:36.360 | about their victimhood and why they were so motivated to create this movement and get the hell out of

07:06:41.000 | there. It was the era of nationalism, but they had no place for their state of their own. So they wanted

07:06:45.720 | to move somewhere else and do it, whatever. He tells it from their point of view, as much as he possibly

07:06:50.360 | can. There's just no hatred or prejudice against Jews in there at all. And it bothers me. Liars don't really

07:06:56.040 | bother me. They just make for a good foil, but it bothers me that good people would misunderstand and

07:07:02.200 | believe lies and think the worst of the guy. Because I think his 25 hour long podcast, Fear and Loathing in

07:07:08.840 | the New Jerusalem leads up to the creation of the state. That's where it ends. It's the whole backstory to

07:07:14.920 | the creation of the thing. And it's just brilliant, man. It is. It's so good. But in any case, so

07:07:21.320 | look, the story is there was this radical Jewish nationalist movement called Zionism from Eastern

07:07:28.040 | Europe, where they wanted to find a homeland. They thought maybe they go to Argentina or Madagascar and

07:07:33.320 | they settled on Palestine for obvious historical reasons and all of that kind of thing. And the

07:07:39.240 | movement only had so much, uh, juice at the time, the majority of religious and reformed Jews in the

07:07:48.360 | United States and in Europe. Um, I don't know how many reformed Jews there were in Europe at that time

07:07:53.240 | in the United States, it was a big movement, but they mostly were against it. The consensus was against it

07:07:58.760 | for a variety of reasons. Then of course, after the second world war, it really took off. And the argument

07:08:04.760 | was made that the Jews of Europe need somewhere else to go after the Holocaust. And so they, that was what

07:08:11.800 | led to a push by the Western powers to transport many more of them to Palestine and to help them to

07:08:19.160 | create the state there. Now, obviously there's only so much we can cover here, but to try from, from my

07:08:28.200 | point of view, I think to try to like narrow in on like, what is crucial to understand about the

07:08:34.680 | thing is that in 1948, they launched what was called the Nakba by the Palestinians, the catastrophe.

07:08:43.800 | And this is when they were all cleansed off of what's now what we call Israel proper. That is

07:08:50.760 | less the West bank and the Gaza strip, um, and East Jerusalem, but they went as far as West Jerusalem.

07:08:59.480 | And they, when they created the state, they cleansed that territory through terror and murder and rape

07:09:07.320 | and pillage. They, and mostly through terror, they forced all those people out of their homes.

07:09:12.760 | And when we say 750,000 people, we're talking about the population of greater Austin, Texas,

07:09:17.800 | right? Including Pflugerville and Round Rock and maybe Buda.

07:09:23.720 | Okay. We're talking about a lot of people who are forced off of their property and into what,

07:09:32.520 | then the Gaza strip and the West bank, and then refugee camps elsewhere in Kuwait and in,

07:09:37.240 | in Lebanon and Syria and the rest. Um, now, when they did that, all morality aside,

07:09:44.600 | just strictly like, um, let's say descriptive, not normative, right? That like in this sense,

07:09:51.080 | it worked in the aftermath. The Zionists had created an 80, 20, super duper Jewish majority.

07:10:01.480 | So they could call themselves a Jewish democracy and have a lot of the trappings of democracy and

07:10:06.600 | ingratiate themselves with the West to try to on that basis. And there's like some of some truth to it,

07:10:12.680 | of course. Um, but you know, and by the way, let me recommend to you and to your listeners,

07:10:18.200 | but I really hope that you read this. I'll bring you one. I should have brought you one today. I

07:10:21.080 | didn't think of it. I have a stack of them at my house. Um, it's called coming to Palestine

07:10:26.600 | by my colleague, Sheldon Richman. And he is the co-founder with me of the Libertarian Institute

07:10:33.960 | and a brilliant and longtime libertarian writer and activist. And he was of course, uh, raised Jewish and

07:10:40.120 | Zionist in the United States in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And, um, this is a collection of

07:10:47.480 | essays that he wrote over probably 30 years or something. And it's just about how he learned

07:10:52.040 | the truth about all this and how that's why he ain't a Zionist no more, man. What do you mean?

07:10:56.760 | The Darius scene massacre, which is like the meal I massacre, right? This horror show. I never heard of

07:11:02.600 | that. They told me it was a land without people for a people without land. That kind of sounds screwy,

07:11:09.400 | doesn't it? The Eastern Mediterranean shore was devoid of life. That's, I don't know. So that was a lie.

07:11:15.800 | Right. And in fact, I mentioned Eric Margulies, my friend, the journalist, his mother was sort of a

07:11:20.600 | Lois Lane character, an independent journalist of her own who went tramping around the, um,

07:11:25.880 | tramping around the, um, the region after world war II interviewing sultans and kings and potentates

07:11:33.960 | and whatever. And she reported on the horrific conditions of the poor Palestinian refugees,

07:11:39.800 | the Muslims and Christians who had been cleansed from their land and forced into the West bank.

07:11:45.400 | And they threatened to murder her. And they threatened to murder my friend, little baby,

07:11:50.200 | Eric Margulies. If she would dare to continue to tell the truth at that time, Lex, the Palestinian

07:11:57.160 | people's existence was a wild conspiracy theory by kooks. Only kooks believe there's Palestinians.

07:12:06.120 | This was a land without people for a people without land. What a coincidence. And what good fortune that

07:12:13.400 | they could come and just make an empty desert bloom at a cost to nobody and the cost of nobody's

07:12:19.800 | conscience here. And that was, of course, you know, people who really knew a lot about things would

07:12:24.600 | have known better than that, I guess, but that was essentially the mythology that the American people

07:12:30.120 | were told by popular culture. And particularly in Hollywood movies and the way that they did, uh,

07:12:36.520 | the movie of Exodus and all of those things in pushing this mythology.

07:12:40.440 | Now, the thing about that is, oh, and I was going to say about Sheldon's book. Sheldon points out that

07:12:46.920 | the Israelis, Golda Meir made a secret deal with the King of Jordan, that he would take the West bank

07:12:53.320 | and Israel would not fight him over it. He, they would encourage him and even to help him to take the

07:12:58.360 | West bank. Why? To preclude the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state on what was left

07:13:05.320 | of Palestine. They wanted it all. At least someday, if they can't have it all now, they can at least

07:13:11.560 | prevent the Palestinians from making their own state out of it. If we got to take it from the other side,

07:13:16.360 | the party on the other side of the Jordan river later, that's easier. So they did that deliberately

07:13:21.640 | on purpose to screw the Palestinians out of their own independent state from the first place. Okay.

07:13:26.520 | Now here's getting to the meat of the thing. Go ahead. Uh, if I may just read a little bit more

07:13:31.480 | about the book that it's a collection of essays written over 30 years that critically examines

07:13:35.880 | the history of the Israeli's dispossession of Palestinians and challenges the mainstream

07:13:40.200 | narrative often presented in the United States regarding Israel's founding. Richmond,

07:13:45.880 | a noted libertarian author argues for reason, freedom, peace, and toleration with respect to

07:13:51.720 | both Palestinians and Israelis turning conventional stories regarding the region on their head.

07:13:57.320 | In this volume, Richmond meticulously documents historical events and policies that led to the

07:14:03.080 | displacement and suffering of Palestinian people, emphasizing their rights as individual human

07:14:07.800 | beings and the injustices suffered when they were made refugees, dispossessed or killed. This book is

07:14:14.600 | recognized for being forthright and honest in its depiction of the conflict, drawing on well-documented

07:14:20.920 | data and offering a perspective that is often absent from mainstream discourse.

07:14:25.640 | Absolutely right. And Sheldon, again, just like if we were talking about Mearsheimer and these guys

07:14:30.520 | or Dr. Paul, he's a saint, right? Nobody's got nothing on Sheldon, man. He is an exceptionally decent

07:14:39.560 | man. And there's nothing that nobody can do about it. Right? So what's his motive here? His motive here is

07:14:46.120 | decency. His motive here is, and he tells the story of his grandfather. They would always say next year in

07:14:53.560 | Jerusalem. And his grandfather would say next year in Philadelphia, because he hated Zionism. And he would

07:14:59.240 | say this, I'm quoting a quote of a quote of a Jewish guy, quoting his Jewish grandfather. Okay. Say that

07:15:05.160 | Jews are responsible for all the problems over there, not the Palestinians. And Sheldon says that he always

07:15:10.680 | regretted that he never had a chance to really ask him what he meant by that and really talk with him

07:15:15.640 | about that. He was too young and, and didn't ever get around to it, but that his extremely Jewish

07:15:20.920 | grandfather who helped raise him in Philadelphia had nothing but contempt for the Zionist project.

07:15:27.160 | And he shows how most religious and again, reformed Jews were against it. So it's going to, you know,

07:15:32.760 | cause Jews to divide their loyalties. It's going to cause Jews to be falsely accused of dividing their

07:15:39.080 | loyalties. It's going to cause nothing but endless disruptions in the Middle East and problems for the United

07:15:44.680 | States of America, which is actually their country. I mean, think how insane it is to call American Jews, the

07:15:51.240 | Israeli diaspora when they're not from Israel. Israel is created in 1948. American Jews came here in the 18th

07:15:58.280 | century, man. What the hell? And in the 20, pardon me, the 19th, I meant to say a century in the 1800s. And in the

07:16:05.320 | 1900s is when millions of Jews came to the United States, right? How in the world are they the diaspora from

07:16:13.240 | Israel that came into existence after America became their promised land, you know? Um, it's,

07:16:20.040 | and so this was a big part of why there was so much resistance among Jewish communities against the

07:16:25.560 | creation of the Israeli state in the first place. And Sheldon goes into that in great depth. It's just

07:16:31.480 | fantastic book. It's a little bitty book. I mean, everybody get right through it. It's, but it's really

07:16:35.880 | worth your time. So where I'm going with this is the 67 war. And what happened in 1967 is that Israel

07:16:43.000 | took possession of the West bank and the Gaza strip and all the Palestinians on it. Now they

07:16:48.440 | cleansed another 250,000 Palestinians. They expanded their board a little bit in the West bank and

07:16:53.720 | cleansed about another quarter of a million, uh, Palestinians off of their territory at that time

07:16:58.920 | that usually goes unnoted. But the thing is, is they quite literally, man, they deep back dough and next.

07:17:07.640 | I heard a report on my way here today. I was listening to Dave DeCamp's anti-war news and he

07:17:12.280 | was saying Israel is threatening to annex Gaza. Well, Israel Gooden stole Gaza in 1967 and all the people

07:17:20.680 | on it and the West bank too. And the West bank too, and East Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem,

07:17:25.640 | as well as the goal on Heights, uh, that he stole, uh, that they stole from the Syrians. Um, those poor

07:17:31.480 | Druze and their occupation usually gets, uh, much less mentioned, but they were kidnapped along with the

07:17:36.440 | Palestinians as well. And the thing is about it is that they wanted that land. They didn't want the people,

07:17:42.760 | but they couldn't just get rid of them all. They had cleansed their 750,000 to create the Israeli state.

07:17:48.440 | They couldn't push the rest of them, the rest of the way into Jordan. Now they have, I don't

07:17:54.200 | know what the number was exactly then, or I forget what it was then it. We're now talking about almost

07:17:59.960 | 6 million Palestinians on the West bank, the Gaza strip, and including the one fifth of the Palestinians

07:18:06.120 | who are citizens of Israel, who don't live under occupation, but a sort of second class citizens of

07:18:10.840 | Israel, like under Jim Crow type situation, where they're not allowed to intermarry. They're not allowed to

07:18:16.920 | live wherever they want around Jewish communities that don't want them. And there with only one

07:18:22.280 | slight exception, the tradition has always been that they can have a political party in the Knesset,

07:18:27.240 | but no group of parties would form a majority with them. In other words, any group of Israeli Jewish

07:18:35.480 | parties would rather let the other guys form a coalition than form a coalition with the Arabs.

07:18:41.160 | And that only changed one time in our very recent history here, I believe during Donald Trump's

07:18:46.520 | first term, or maybe early Biden, when Yara Lapid needed to ally temporarily with Arabs,

07:18:54.600 | was the one time they've ever broken that tradition. So anyway, I'm off on a tangent, but there are,

07:18:59.240 | as I said before, it's 80-20. So there's a one fifth of the population of Israel proper or whatever,

07:19:05.560 | green line Israel 67 borders Israel are Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians. So you combine their

07:19:12.760 | population with the occupied population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Now you're talking about

07:19:17.640 | 50-50. Only the Israeli Jews have all the power and the Palestinian Muslims and Christians have none.

07:19:22.680 | And in the occupied territories, they live as utter slaves, as though under communism,

07:19:27.800 | under not just martial law, but foreign government occupation military law. In other words, and by

07:19:34.920 | the Israelis, no law at all. We're talking children brought before military courts in a foreign language

07:19:42.040 | and sentenced to dungeons without any process. We are talking about totalitarian slavery, like under the

07:19:49.080 | NKVD and the USSR. They are not free. And Israel is not a democracy when half the people under the control

07:19:58.520 | of their state have no rights at all, no civil liberties, no civil rights, as far as like participation

07:20:05.560 | in governmental process, no taxation without representation. They have no representation whatsoever.

07:20:12.280 | Okay. And the thing is about it is what makes them not slaves is the Israelis don't want them,

07:20:16.760 | right? They're not forcing them to work for free. They're certainly depriving them of all of their

07:20:20.600 | rights and humiliating them every chance they get, stealing all their water resources, murdering them,

07:20:26.760 | pillaging them, stealing their territory a little bit at a time, and working toward a day when they can

07:20:33.640 | finish the job and just take it all. And what's really messed up, man, is that they don't even really

07:20:38.120 | want the Gaza Strip that bad. I mean, sure they do. What they really want is the West Bank, as their

07:20:43.880 | religious zealots call it Judea and Samaria, and that they have a leftover religious edict from 3,000

07:20:51.160 | years ago that says that you can say whatever you want about the Palestinians and their natural property

07:20:57.080 | rights under Lockean theory and the Western conception of how one comes to own a thing. And they will say,

07:21:02.760 | "Nope, we have supernatural property rights that says that we get to come and kill you and move into your

07:21:07.880 | house and do whatever we want and recognize no rights to the Palestinians." Just like Justice

07:21:15.080 | Taney saying that the black men have no rights that a white man is bound to respect in Dred Scott.

07:21:24.360 | That's the way that they treat the Palestinians. They call them grasshoppers, not even mammals. They're

07:21:30.600 | just insects to be eradicated because the Israelis covet their property. It's as simple as that.

07:21:37.080 | They want to covet it so they kill, so they can steal. And that's it. And then they'll come up with

07:21:42.040 | every lie in the world to try to justify it all. Now, David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of

07:21:47.240 | Israel said, "Give it back. Give it up. Let them have it. Yeah, we want the land, but we don't want all

07:21:52.440 | these people. What are we going to do with them all? What's the end game here when we're taking

07:21:57.640 | possession of millions of people that we hate and don't want in our country? And so it's not worth

07:22:03.560 | it to do this." That's Ben-Gurion, the founding guy said that. And they told him, "Yeah, yeah, yeah,

07:22:08.920 | we know what we're doing." And you're probably familiar with this woman, Daniela Weiss. You'll see

07:22:13.000 | her in various documentaries and so forth. She's the insane zealot saying we must occupy and settle all of

07:22:19.800 | Gaza and all of the West Bank. There's a great new documentary called The Settlers. I forget. I never

07:22:30.280 | saw part one of it, but the sequel that just came out is called The Settlers. It's really good and it

07:22:35.400 | includes extensive interviews with her. And there was a statement that she made recently in the last two

07:22:43.160 | years where, or a video that came out that someone, some journalists had revealed this video, I guess,

07:22:50.280 | of her in the 1970s, explaining, or maybe it's her in more recent times, just talking about the 1970s.

07:22:56.920 | Forgive me, but people can find this, I'm sure. And what she's saying is from the moment they took over

07:23:02.040 | the West Bank. She worked with Ariel Sharon to create an archipelago of settlements

07:23:09.480 | across the West Bank in a way to preclude the possibility of a Palestinian state as fast as they

07:23:15.480 | possibly could. That was absolutely their first object is we've got to bisect them here and bisect

07:23:20.920 | them there so that they can never have a state of their own. And that was their goal this whole time,

07:23:26.680 | this radical settler movement. Now, we talked about the '90s. We talked about the clean break

07:23:33.960 | when Netanyahu came in. The clean break, again, is a clean break from Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin and

07:23:42.280 | Shimon Peres' attempt to negotiate with the Arab states and the Palestinians. And of course, Netanyahu,

07:23:50.120 | if you're not familiar with this, we should maybe play this as long as we're taking our time here, Lex.

07:23:53.720 | Let's see if we can find secret video of Netanyahu.

07:23:57.240 | This is it. This is it. Yeah. So you just mute that and, and just read the, uh, read the caption

07:24:05.160 | there. So let me set this up. Netanyahu in this, in this video, he is no longer the prime minister.

07:24:10.120 | He's, um, at a settler's house in the living room. He tells the boy, turn off the video camera and the boy

07:24:17.400 | either fails to turn it off or he deliberately turns it right back on again. It's a bit unclear,

07:24:22.760 | but the video keeps rolling and Netanyahu keeps blabbing. And he's saying, what you do is you

07:24:28.600 | just beat these Palestinians. You just hurt them and cripple them and kill them and weaken them

07:24:33.240 | and let them know that they'll never win. And we'll crush them and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

07:24:37.160 | And she says, ah, geez, baby, but aren't you going to drive the world crazy and make them mad,

07:24:41.560 | especially America. And, and Netanyahu then ridicules us and says, let me tell you something

07:24:47.800 | about America. Okay. America is a thing that is easily moved. 80% of them support us. It's absurd.

07:24:57.480 | I'm not afraid of Bill Clinton. Let me tell you what I did to Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton said, yada, yada,

07:25:04.360 | area C. I said, no problem, Bill. But then you know what I did? I made it where area C is this huge

07:25:10.840 | military area, two thirds of the West bank. Ha ha ha. Sexually assaulted old Bill right in the face

07:25:17.480 | and got away with murder. And not because his spies were blackmailing Bill Clinton, tapping his phone

07:25:23.400 | and all of his sexcapades. They use that blackmail to try to get him to pardon Jonathan Pollard. That's

07:25:28.440 | different. They were doing that. But Netanyahu here is mocking Bill Clinton and he's mocking the American

07:25:35.320 | people for being essentially a bunch of grasshoppers that he can do whatever he wants with us, including

07:25:43.320 | lie our fathers into sending their sons to die in his wars. If I may just comment, one of the things

07:25:51.000 | that troubles me a lot in these, the geopolitical aspect of this is when the prime minister of Israel

07:25:58.440 | shows so much disrespect towards the president of my country. No, he never had any respect at all.

07:26:04.680 | Don't let, don't let me sound sympathetic to old Bill Clinton, the child killer here when I say this,

07:26:09.960 | but I can almost sympathize with him when they say after his first meeting with Netanyahu in 1996,

07:26:17.000 | after half an hour, he came out and said, who the F does this guy think he is? Oh my God. Who's the

07:26:24.840 | superpower and who's the client state? Like he was out of breath, exasperate, just stunned.

07:26:31.400 | Why, why is he able to talk like this to the United States president? I have no idea. He blackmailed Bill.

07:26:38.040 | He told Bill Clinton, you better let Jonathan Pollard out. Cause I have you on tape with Monica Lewinsky,

07:26:42.920 | pal. And Bill Clinton was going to do it, except that George Tenet said he would resign and that

07:26:48.920 | many leaders of the CIA would resign in protest. If he did it, Jonathan Pollard was the, one of the most

07:26:55.000 | destructive spies in American history was spying for Israel and they were turning over everything that he

07:27:00.040 | stole. I mean, rooms full to the Soviet Union, but it's not just Clinton. Like he shows, even just,

07:27:06.920 | let's just take it to today. Uh, Benjamin Netanyahu seems to show a lot of continued disrespect towards

07:27:13.240 | Donald Trump. Like this is the, this is the, Donald Trump is the president of the most powerful country.

07:27:21.080 | And the best friend he ever had. Moved the, moved the embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel's seizure

07:27:26.360 | of the Golan Heights, wrangled these phony Abraham Accords, which we're about to describe here in a minute.

07:27:31.640 | Did all of this for him. Has only barely talked him out of annexation, but said, we'll get to it though,

07:27:36.920 | buddy. It's cool. Just wait. On full annexation of the West Bank last time around. Clearly it's the agenda this

07:27:42.120 | time. Clearly Trump's wrapped around his little finger and still he has nothing but contempt.

07:27:46.600 | And I wish that someone would tell Trump, listen, pal, you might as well be a Palestinian to this guy.

07:27:53.000 | He doesn't care about you at all. He doesn't care about our country at all.

07:27:58.040 | Back to my question about Mark Dubowitz, my hypothetical here, which goes for all pro-Israel

07:28:02.680 | factions in the United States. You think Benjamin Netanyahu cares that 3000 Americans died on September 11th

07:28:09.960 | because Mohammed Atta was taking revenge for what Israel had done in Lebanon. No. And you know,

07:28:15.000 | how I know that Lex, he told the New York times, they didn't overhear this and report it. He said to

07:28:21.400 | the New York times in an interview on September 11th, it's very good. You want to pull that up.

07:28:30.600 | September 12th, 2001, New York times, Netanyahu. Very good. That's how much respect Benjamin Netanyahu

07:28:42.440 | has for the enlistment age sons of the United States of America and the dead civilians on those

07:28:51.720 | planes and in those towers. New York times. That's it. A day of terror. The Israelis spilled blood is seen as

07:28:59.480 | a bond that draws two nations closer. Asked tonight what the attack meant for the relations

07:29:07.000 | between the United States and Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister replied,

07:29:13.240 | it's very good. Then he edited himself. Well, it's not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.

07:29:21.160 | He predicted that the attack would, quote, strengthen the bond between our two peoples because

07:29:28.680 | we've experienced terror over so many decades. But the United States has now experienced a massive

07:29:34.600 | hemorrhaging of terror. Yeah, man. And listen, on September 11th, Donald Trump says that there

07:29:40.200 | were Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the attack. There was somebody in New Jersey celebrating the

07:29:46.120 | attack. They were Israeli Mossad officers and they were arrested. And they told the arresting officers,

07:29:52.760 | the problem isn't us. The problem is the Palestinians. And the FBI released the pictures and they're

07:29:58.440 | holding lighters up like they're the ones burning the tower down and they're all laughing and celebrating.

07:30:03.240 | Justin Raimondo called them the high-fivers. The FBI arrested them and held them for months. Carl

07:30:09.640 | Cameron of Fox News did a four-part investigative series, quoting FBI agents as saying they had to have

07:30:17.080 | known what was happening. Mossad was in the United States following the hijackers around and they only

07:30:24.600 | gave the barest of warnings that August. They did not tell everything that they knew about the September

07:30:31.720 | 11th attack. And then it hit and Netanyahu said it's very good. And then his fifth column lied us into war

07:30:40.200 | with Iraq. And he never got his pipeline to Haifa, by the way, but he did make a deal with the Kurds to

07:30:47.240 | ship the, the, uh, oil out of there through Syria to Israel. So they got their nickel a barrel discount

07:30:54.280 | at the cost of $10 trillion of our wealth. And they just, and the ruining of the entire beginning of the

07:31:03.000 | third millennium, pardon me. Um, but it just did not have to be this way. It just did not at all.

07:31:10.200 | Is it worthwhile here before we talk about Gaza to draw a distinction between the Israeli government

07:31:15.560 | and the Israeli people, just like we can draw the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people.

07:31:20.840 | Yes, absolutely. Although I would say that by the Israeli's argument about popular sovereignty and

07:31:26.920 | popular consent among the Palestinians for Hamas, they are far more implicated in the actions of their

07:31:34.600 | government. There's virtually unanimous political consent for Israel's government's actions in that

07:31:41.320 | country. Their political spectrum is from Dick Cheney to Hitler with Dick Cheney being the leftist

07:31:47.480 | progressive. They are a national socialist regime at war under a theory of that they are a master race

07:31:57.160 | ruling over the Untermenschen. It is a barbarian society. And does that implicate every last Israeli

07:32:06.440 | individual civilian human being? Of course not, Lex. The, you know, a bunch of the people who were killed

07:32:12.440 | at that rave, they were actually there at a peace function. They were trying to figure out a way to

07:32:18.840 | help the people of the Gaza Strip and even to someday recognize their independence and freedom and do

07:32:25.400 | something for them. Those people got caught up and murdered by Hamas that day, right? There, there are

07:32:31.800 | not just liberals and leftists, but libertarians and different. There are plenty of army veterans and

07:32:37.080 | whatever. You want to go with like the overall percentages. There is a resounding consensus

07:32:45.320 | for this type of policy in that country, reminiscent of America, circa 2002,

07:32:49.880 | in a way that we do not have after October 7th, even more. So no, even before that, even before that,

07:32:58.760 | you know, the, the Palestinians are considered to be the barbarians. They are the enemy. They are the

07:33:06.680 | goyim. They are the obstacle to what the Palestinian, what the Israeli government and the ideal is for

07:33:17.080 | the country to have. Wouldn't it just be better if we could get rid of them all? And that is the

07:33:21.560 | consensus and just get rid of them all one way or the other. And I, I think that, you know, whatever,

07:33:27.880 | I'm not saying as Madeline Albright would say, the people of Iraq are all responsible for Saddam Hussein

07:33:33.800 | and I'll starve them all and grind their bones to make my bread. As long as they won't overthrow

07:33:38.520 | Saddam for me, which is the same thing Osama bin Laden said, which is the American people are responsible

07:33:45.560 | for the actions of our government. After all, you're a democracy, aren't you? And you pay your taxes,

07:33:50.200 | he said. And so that was why he said it was okay to kill us. I would never agree with Madeline Albright or

07:33:55.880 | Osama bin Laden about why it's okay to kill innocent civilians at all. I'm as diametrically opposed to their

07:34:02.760 | philosophy as I could possibly be. Um, and that goes for absolutely when Palestinians kill innocent

07:34:09.160 | Israeli civilians. And if people will say, well, they're settlers and colonists and all this too,

07:34:13.800 | fine. If they're not holding a gun, they're not a combatant, then they're not holding the gun and

07:34:19.160 | they're not a combatant. That's it. That's, you know, I don't know what the Geneva Conventions say.

07:34:24.360 | That's what the Horton Conventions say. I don't care about any of that, you know? Um, so,

07:34:28.520 | and especially when it's children. Yeah. And so even if the population of the United States,

07:34:34.360 | say the population of Texas broadly in hell and you could measure the polls go back, I bet you it's

07:34:43.400 | better than 85% of Texans supported George Bush's invasion of Iraq. Does that mean any of them deserve

07:34:50.200 | to be killed because they supported his evil premeditated plot to kill people? No, that's

07:34:56.600 | politics. That's government. And that's the individual men who pulled the decisions, the

07:35:01.640 | individual men who told the lies to convince the hapless to go along. They're responsible.

07:35:07.800 | People who cheer led for it. Let's just concede much less so. Okay. You know, if the people of

07:35:16.040 | America said absolutely not, well, that would have been better. And ultimately it was up to us

07:35:21.720 | if we could get enough of us to be good on it all at once. Like we talked about with Syria and stopping

07:35:27.080 | the war in 2013, they just could not get past the population that wouldn't budge.

07:35:31.800 | We should say that in such dire situations, the propaganda machine turns on in every individual

07:35:38.440 | nation. And so it's actually very difficult to be a citizen that can see the reality of the world

07:35:44.600 | clearly because you're swimming in information that is very constrained to a particular kind of

07:35:50.040 | narrative. And this is true for every single nation at war. And have you ever seen the documentary

07:35:55.320 | "Defamation"? It's really great. It's made by an Israeli Jew who goes out in search of anti-Semitism.

07:36:01.560 | And the worst anti-Semite in the whole movie is his grandma on the West Bank. I'm not going to quote

07:36:07.080 | her because she's a vicious anti-Semite. But the thing is, is he goes traveling all around the world,

07:36:12.360 | trying to find anybody who hates Jews for being Jews. And he has no such luck. And he goes and he

07:36:17.000 | hangs out with Abe Boxman at the Anti-Defamation League. And he goes on a field trip to Auschwitz with

07:36:22.760 | some Israeli kids. But at the beginning of the documentary, he shows how the propaganda campaign

07:36:29.080 | against the Israeli people by their government is essentially like America, 2002, forever.

07:36:35.160 | With no let up. It's show of this, show of that, always. And they really tell the people, they really

07:36:43.960 | do raise them to believe that every non-Jew in the world wakes up in the morning with only one goal:

07:36:50.280 | to kill all the Jews. And that's all anyone else cares about or thinks about. And they're all looking

07:36:57.560 | for the first opportunity. And aren't you glad that Israel's here to protect you? Otherwise,

07:37:04.840 | it would be another Holocaust immediately tomorrow. That wasn't the result of the most insane, fanatical,

07:37:12.040 | cranked out lunatics to ever seize power in a major industrial nation. No, that's what all of humanity

07:37:20.680 | wants to do to us and would do at any moment if they could. That's what they're told all day, every

07:37:28.040 | day. And to a great extent, then believe it. And so then it's like an anti-fragile belief. Daryl Cooper

07:37:34.840 | was talking about this on our show the other day, that the more people say, "My God, Israel, what they're

07:37:41.640 | doing is so wrong and I disapprove and I don't like them anymore." The more they say, "See?" He compared

07:37:48.760 | them to the Branch Davidians. When people turn against us, it's just like we predicted they would. You see what

07:37:55.400 | they're doing. It's just like before. And so there's no room in there to say, "Hey, wait a minute.

07:38:03.320 | Maybe we really are going too far here. If all our friends are telling us that we're doing the wrong

07:38:08.200 | thing, what the hell?" Nope. You know how the anti-Semites are. That's all they do. That's all they

07:38:13.640 | want to do. And that's all they think about all day long is how they can harm us. All of them. And so

07:38:20.840 | under that state of paranoid siege, then you shouldn't be too surprised that people are

07:38:28.120 | willing to then go to the utmost lengths to destroy their enemies, you know, when they can. And of course,

07:38:34.360 | Hamas did a very good job on October 7th of playing into that script. But now we're taking our time here

07:38:40.360 | today. So before we get to that, let's talk about Eros Aronimo a minute here, because...

07:38:44.360 | I should mention briefly that this defamation movie looks excellent.

07:38:49.400 | Oh, it's so good.

07:38:50.680 | Israeli director and a lot of the Israeli press are praising it. It looks fascinating. Of course,

07:38:55.960 | this 2009 would be interesting to see how that evolves with social media and all that kind of stuff.

07:39:00.920 | But it's actually, it's fascinating when you confront the reality.

07:39:05.160 | How uncomfortable people are when confronted with the fact that actually nobody hates you at all.

07:39:17.720 | And then it's like, they feel so uncomfortable. At one point when he goes on the field trip to

07:39:23.000 | Auschwitz with these high school kids and they meet this old man and he's like, "Hi, who are you?" And

07:39:28.120 | they're like, "We're kids from Israel. We came to see Auschwitz." He's like, "Oh, that's interesting.

07:39:31.400 | Why are you doing that?" And they're like, "Well, it's part of our history and the thing that we're

07:39:34.280 | doing." And he's like, "Oh, okay." And then the next day, at one point they're walking through this

07:39:39.160 | beautiful green field. It's like puffy clouds and blue skies and chirping birds. And the Holocaust is

07:39:47.400 | long over now in Poland. And so they're just, it's a beautiful scene and they have a Mossad bodyguard

07:39:53.080 | there to protect them from the anti-Semites who are going to jump out of the woods and Holocaust them

07:39:57.480 | all if he wasn't there to protect them. And then the next day, the guy says to him, "So, how was your trip

07:40:03.320 | to Poland? How have you liked it?" And everything. And the one girl starts explaining, "Yeah,

07:40:06.200 | this old man, he came up to us and attacked us and called us Jew donkeys and all these things."

07:40:10.760 | And he says, "No, he didn't. I have it on film. I'll show it to you right here." He said, "Hi,

07:40:16.520 | who are you? And what are you doing here? Oh, that's interesting. Why are you doing that?" That's what he said.

07:40:20.200 | But the thing is, is they came all this way after being told that everybody's trying to murder them.

07:40:26.360 | They're in the land of the Holocaust and there is no Holocaust going along anywhere. That was at that

07:40:32.280 | time, 70 years before. And they don't need a Mossad bodyguard at all. In fact, they don't even need

07:40:39.880 | Stanley Smith security there at all. Just their teacher would be fine. And no one there is anti-Semitic

07:40:45.960 | and no one there means them any harm at all. And these high school students then have a hard time coping

07:40:51.240 | with that and trying to figure out what this weird world is that they're living in where it can't be

07:40:56.200 | that they were lied to. It's gotta be, that guy must've said something hateful to us under his

07:41:01.400 | breath. I'm pretty sure he did. Didn't he say something about how we're donkeys or something?

07:41:05.400 | Right. And they just have to come up with this in their own mind to rationalize the danger that they've

07:41:10.520 | been told by people that they trust that they're in when in fact they're not. Right. And when in fact,

07:41:15.960 | when they are, it's the direct result of American wars, like scaring a bunch of refugees into

07:41:21.000 | Europe and then killing even more people. And then they commit terrorist attacks,

07:41:25.000 | things like that, which is again, all Israeli foreign policy, that's getting them killed.

07:41:29.320 | But now anti-Semitism is good for Israel and they know it. Benjamin Netanyahu is as cynical as can be

07:41:35.800 | about this. If you remember when, uh, there was one of these attacks, I believe at the kosher grocery

07:41:40.920 | store in Paris. Netanyahu came to France and he said, that's right. French Jews. You'll never be French.

07:41:50.200 | You're Jews. Come home to Israel. And they said, damn you. Screw you and get out. We are too French.

07:41:58.840 | And how dare you come here to this country and tell everybody else that we really were your fifth column

07:42:04.840 | and not patriotic members of our civil society, civic society that we are in fact part of and have lived

07:42:11.640 | here for centuries. Screw you, dude. But that's good for him. He likes it when people hate Jews overseas because it's

07:42:19.960 | it's good for driving Jews overseas to move to Israel. And that's, what's good for Israel. And that's the

07:42:25.800 | only thing he cares about again, September 11th. Oh man, this is great. Is the only way that he can see it.

07:42:33.800 | What he always wanted. And just like the high fibers. Oh, good. The Palestinians are the problem.

07:42:42.920 | Now we can get you to do what we want.

07:42:44.920 | Can we go to, Oh yeah. We got to do, uh,

07:42:51.480 | Aero Sharon 2005 real quick. Aero Sharon disengages from the Gaza Strip. Now, why do you do that? Well,

07:42:57.720 | there's two major reasons. Okay. The first one is, and you can pull this up if you want to at

07:43:03.560 | scotthorne.org/fairuse. It's the guy's name is Arnon Soffer with two Fs. Arnon Soffer and then type in

07:43:11.640 | kill and kill. That should bring it up. There you go. An interview with him from, as I say it here,

07:43:21.080 | the year is 2004. It is a year before prime minister, Ariel Sharon quote, disengages from Gaza. Two years

07:43:29.080 | before Hamas winds of plurality in the election George W. Bush forced them to hold. Three years

07:43:36.120 | before Elliott Abrams failed coup, which led to Hamas kicking the Palestinian authority out of Gaza

07:43:42.040 | and seizing so-called control under the Strip. Of the Strip, under Israeli overlordship, of course,

07:43:47.960 | and the institution of the full-scale siege and the beginning of the "mowing the grass" campaigns,

07:43:53.560 | which began in 2008. Sharon's advisor, Arnon Soffer, explained to the Jerusalem Post that the

07:44:00.520 | problem is the Palestinian Muslims and Christians are having too many babies. The Israelis don't want

07:44:06.280 | to let them have a state, but they do want to kick them, quote, out of Israel, at least virtually or

07:44:14.040 | figuratively, by so-called disengaging with them so as to reduce the number of Palestinians officially

07:44:21.720 | occupied by Israel by a couple of million people. Does that make sense? So this guy is a demographer

07:44:29.320 | from Tel Aviv University. He comes to Ariel Sharon and says, "Mr. Prime Minister, you got to look at my

07:44:35.800 | mathematics here. We have a problem. There are too many Palestinians and they are out reproducing us.

07:44:41.880 | We are approaching a 50/50 split or worse, where we are going to be a literal dictionary definition,

07:44:48.440 | apartheid state of a minority ruling the majority under this iron fist. And that could be very

07:44:55.000 | untenable for the future of the state and our support from the rest of the Western states, etc."

07:44:59.320 | So to solve this problem, what we want to do is just figuratively kick the Gazans out of Israel,

07:45:07.800 | even though Israel stole the Gaza Strip in 67 and they never did literally disengage. They just put the

07:45:14.280 | thing under siege. If you listen to pro-Israel propagandists now, they'll say, "Well, we gave

07:45:21.880 | them a Palestinian state. We gave them full independence with the disengagement of 2005,

07:45:27.560 | and all we got in return is rockets." But that's not true. It was the Israelis that broke the ceasefire

07:45:33.720 | originally, just as they always did ever since that time, until October the 7th of '23. They broke the

07:45:41.240 | ceasefires every single time. And then it was W. Bush who forced them to hold the election, where Hamas won,

07:45:47.240 | again, a plurality, not a majority in even any single district anywhere in Palestine, did they win a

07:45:53.400 | majority of the popular vote. Then they formed a coalition government, which W. Bush then secretly

07:46:02.200 | conspired. And it's funny to read, the article is called "The Gaza Bombshell" by David Rose and Vanity

07:46:07.240 | Fair. And in that article, David Wormser throws Elliott Abrams under the bus for this and says this was an

07:46:15.640 | idiotic scheme to help Fatah overthrow Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which led to Hamas kicking their ass and

07:46:24.600 | pushing them out instead. And Hamas then having more control over the Gaza Strip, which is what I think the

07:46:31.080 | Likud guys probably wanted. So first of all, now again, I'll get right back to that in a second, but

07:46:37.480 | Safar again. This article is from the Jerusalem Post, where he gives an interview to a lady named Sarah

07:46:45.240 | something, and he explains the whole thing. Now I found this, I forget where I got it from, but it was,

07:46:51.800 | I found on the Jerusalem Post where it used to be, like the URL is still there, but, and you can see where other

07:46:57.880 | people have linked to it in the past, but now that URL is dead, and that kind of thing. But if you

07:47:03.480 | search the Jerusalem Post website carefully for her name and his name, you will find other articles

07:47:08.440 | about it where they refer back to this and refer back to the most explosive quotes out of it, etc.

07:47:13.480 | So this is verified and definitely a real interview, even though I don't believe you can find the whole

07:47:19.640 | thing at the Jerusalem Post anymore. But that's where it comes from. So by the way, yes, go ahead.

07:47:24.600 | You've mentioned many times Scott Horton.org/fairyuse, so you're almost like creating an archive of

07:47:32.920 | important documents that if they were to be erased from the internet, they're here to be found.

07:47:38.280 | Right. As the stuff that's like most important, especially if I need it and I need to link to it,

07:47:43.000 | and I think, you know, whoever's got it now is going to be unreliable in the near future. Link

07:47:46.600 | rod is a real thing. That's a real problem. And so yeah, on things like this where it's like, I can

07:47:53.640 | only find it in a pretty obscure place, I'll go ahead and reprint it here so that if that obscure

07:47:58.120 | place goes away, it'll still exist. Because man, I mean, I really am shocked and surprised and dismayed

07:48:03.800 | how many times you'll have crucial information that there's only one version of it anywhere online,

07:48:10.120 | and it could go away any day. You know what I mean? Like there's a lot of things like that stresses me

07:48:15.720 | out. So I try to do stuff like this. So now, so he, he says, listen, this is what we got to do.

07:48:24.840 | We have to disengage from Gaza. So that like, just as a ruse, right? As an optical illusion,

07:48:30.920 | we're going to make it seem as though we're kicking the Palestinians of Gaza out of

07:48:36.360 | Israeli control and jurisdiction. That way you can't say it's an apartheid state anymore.

07:48:41.960 | Now we're back more to majority rules over the minority, of course, ruthlessly, but still

07:48:47.000 | it's less worse than having a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian

07:48:53.960 | majority. That would be less tenable, right? Was the idea. So he told Sharon this and said,

07:49:00.280 | you got to do this. And this is why he explains this to Sarah. What's her name at, um, oh,

07:49:06.680 | it was even called one-on-one it's the demography. Stupid was the original title of the thing.

07:49:12.840 | And he tells her, this is what we got to do. And then we got, we'll have to put them under siege,

07:49:17.720 | of course, and, and lock them in this cage, like animals basically. And she says, well, what do we

07:49:22.600 | expect the Palestinians to do, right? They're going to freak out and fight. And he goes, yeah,

07:49:26.680 | of course they are. But then we will just have to kill and kill and kill. We will have to just bomb

07:49:32.680 | them and bomb them and bomb them and bomb them to just keep them weak and keep them from being able

07:49:38.680 | to resist. That's it. That's where that comes from. Ariel Sharon's advisor, Arnon Soffer by Ruthie Bloom.

07:49:46.360 | I'm sorry. I said her name wrong. I thought it was Sarah something. It's Ruthie Bloom.

07:49:49.560 | And, and that's what he explains. We will just have to kill and kill and kill. Now,

07:49:56.600 | another important Ariel Sharon advisor was a guy named Dov Weisglass. And he explained to Haaretz

07:50:04.920 | that the whole point of the disengagement from Gaza is to put the peace process in formaldehyde.

07:50:14.120 | Again, dividing and conquering the Palestinians. We leave Hamas, at least ascendant at that time

07:50:22.280 | in Gaza. Then he says, we can say to the American Congress, we have no partner for peace. And he says,

07:50:33.000 | we have from the Congress and no one to talk to certificate. That says we have no one to talk to.

07:50:41.320 | And it says, we'll have no one to talk to until Gaza is Norway. See you then. And shalom.

07:50:47.640 | Okay. So for Ben Shapiro and his mina birds and mindless parroting puppets out there who believe him

07:50:55.880 | when he lies that this was the gifting to the Palestinians of independence. What it was, was it

07:51:02.360 | was a Likud scheme to divide and conquer and destroy the Palestinian people so that one day the Israelis could

07:51:08.360 | take the last of their property from them. That's what it was. And then when they put them under siege,

07:51:13.720 | you know what they said, Lex? They said, the people of the Gaza Strip are hungry, but not starving.

07:51:22.120 | And I wonder if that rings a bell in your mind where you've heard that before.

07:51:27.960 | That's what Walter Durante wrote in the New York Times about the Holodomor in the same article where he

07:51:35.160 | said, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. They're hungry, but not starving. Said Walter Durante

07:51:44.440 | and Ariel Sharon's men, as they inflicted a Holodomor on the people of the Gaza Strip.

07:51:52.440 | That's again, you know, for the cognitive dissonance, they're like, well, why are we doing this then?

07:51:58.360 | Again, it's the lobby. It's the compromise of the American political system. But if your dissonance

07:52:05.000 | is telling you it can't be that bad, your dissonance is wrong. Yes, it can too. That's exactly how they

07:52:10.840 | are. And because Americans, we, we're Westerners. We have a different tradition. I mean, we were all,

07:52:16.840 | even in government school, they teach us that every man is born equal, not in every way, but in terms of

07:52:22.600 | our rights that we possess to own our own life and control our own destiny. That's what we believe.

07:52:30.280 | You know what? Myr Kahane, the rabbi that was Al Qaeda's first target in New York city in 1990 in the

07:52:37.880 | United States. He gave an interview to Mike Wallace in the late 1970s, where he complains that American

07:52:45.960 | Jews believe in all this Thomas Jefferson crap. Well, we don't. It's us versus our enemies. We will destroy

07:52:55.160 | them. Now that was considered fascism by the Israeli Supreme Court. Then that is the Likud party doctrine.

07:53:04.520 | Now every Arab Palestinian Muslim and Christian must be killed and or forcibly removed from the last of the 22%

07:53:15.080 | of measly stinking what's left of historic Palestine there. I think what's happening in Gaza

07:53:21.240 | is absolutely horrific. And I think the US government should not be supporting that in any way. So how can we end it?

07:53:34.200 | So on October 7th, let's rewind from October 7th. Why did we do the Abraham Accords under

07:53:42.200 | Trump's first term? We did the Abraham Accords because Saudi Arabia especially and the other Sunni Arab

07:53:49.400 | kingdoms had always promised that they would refuse to officially normalize relations with Israel until the

07:53:57.080 | Palestinians got the Palestinians got a deal either an independent state of their own or equal rights and citizenship in a single state.

07:54:03.640 | Now what Jared Kushner figured out was well, we can just print money. So what's your price?

07:54:10.120 | And so what he did was he bought F-16s for Bahrain, F-35s for UAE, debt forgiveness for Sudan.

07:54:19.480 | And they made a deal with Morocco that they would recognize Morocco's illegal invasion and seizure of the northern half of the nation of Western Sahara.

07:54:29.000 | And then that would be essentially these countries' bribes to normalize relations with Israel. And they were working on Saudi Arabia.

07:54:37.080 | Now, on September the 22nd, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech before the UN General Assembly.

07:54:45.240 | You know, like he likes to do with his visual aids. This time he held up a map of the Middle East,

07:54:50.520 | with a big red arrow across from Israel to the Sunni Arab states of the Gulf.

07:54:54.920 | And he said, "This is the new Middle East." Well, that was an inside joke. He was mocking Shimon

07:55:01.000 | Perez because Shimon Perez said, "We got to deal with Arafat and the PLO, Fatah, and deal with a pseudo-Palestinian

07:55:09.320 | state at least. Then we can make peace with the Sunni Arab states and have a new Middle East."

07:55:14.440 | So Netanyahu was up there crowing that under the Netanyahu doctrine, he got the new Middle East without

07:55:21.800 | giving in to the Palestinians in any way. Now, of course, he frames it like, "Oh, the Palestinians

07:55:27.160 | have been holding peace hostage." When what he's really saying to them is, "Y'all are screwed now,

07:55:33.160 | boy. Ain't nobody coming for you. I gotcha. You never get in a state of your own, an independence,

07:55:40.600 | and you never get in citizenship. You're going to live in those concentration camps of yours until you're

07:55:45.720 | dead and we're done taking them from you. I win, you lose." That was his speech of September 22nd, 2003.

07:55:54.120 | Two weeks later, Hamas broke out of their pen and launched the October 7th attack. And they did kill

07:56:01.720 | probably a thousand people as the Israelis killed at least dozens, perhaps more than a hundred of their

07:56:06.840 | own people by invoking the Hannibal Directive. Now, you might remember the story of an Israeli soldier

07:56:13.720 | named, I think it's Eisenkot, who had been captured by Hamas and taken into the Gaza Strip back years ago.

07:56:21.480 | And the Israelis ended up having to negotiate and release a thousand Palestinian captives, not prisoners,

07:56:29.000 | because the Israelis hold them without trial, without any process whatsoever. They just kidnap them and

07:56:32.760 | hold them. So they're hostages too, these Palestinians. But they had to release a thousand

07:56:36.840 | Palestinian hostages to get their one Israeli hostage back. And they said, "Never again are we

07:56:41.560 | going to do that." So they invented a new doctrine which says if one of their soldiers or two of their

07:56:46.760 | soldiers is getting successfully captured by Hamas and taken back into the Strip, that they'll kill their

07:56:52.600 | own soldiers as well as the captors in order to prevent that from happening. They called that the

07:56:57.880 | Hannibal Directive. Well, on October the 7th, and this is all from, first of all, very astute American

07:57:04.920 | observers like Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunima, and Brad Pierce at the Wayward Rabbler. They all immediately

07:57:15.880 | noticed this, but then it was double, extra, triple, super verified by the Israeli press. Haaretz, Ynet,

07:57:24.360 | the Jerusalem Post. That's all you need to show that they introduced what they call, and I think

07:57:30.520 | they probably made this up on the fly, Mass Hannibal, which means not just kill a soldier,

07:57:37.320 | but even if it's a little old lady who's been kidnapped and is in the back of a car on the way,

07:57:43.480 | any car on their way back to the Gaza Strip, they bombed. They also used a tank to hit

07:57:50.600 | and kill a house full of at least nine civilians in one case in one of the kibbutzes. Now, I'm not

07:57:57.080 | playing down what Hamas did there. I am pointing out what Israel did, and this is a big part of why

07:58:04.360 | they had to embellish what Hamas did, because look at these houses are blown up. What happened here?

07:58:09.800 | Hamas only had grenades. This is much more destruction than that. All the cars at the rave that were destroyed,

07:58:16.520 | they were destroyed by helicopter fire, not by Hamas. How could Hamas have destroyed all those

07:58:20.920 | cars? They did not have the ability to do that. Now, I'm not saying who all was in those cars when

07:58:26.360 | they were blasted at the rave and every little thing that happened there, but it's clear that Israel waged

07:58:32.440 | a bunch of the destruction on their own people, and deliberately so. There's video testimony of this

07:58:38.760 | girl talking about they're shooting in a house, and her officer's telling her to keep shooting, and

07:58:42.600 | all of these things. I think she's even saying she defied one of these orders at one point, and so

07:58:46.280 | she didn't want to keep doing it because it didn't seem like it made sense to her, and that kind of

07:58:49.960 | thing. And so, this is part of why they embellished what Hamas did, but of course then they also wanted

07:58:56.200 | to do the Belgian babies on bayonets. That's from the First World War. All the lurid stories of the Huns

07:59:02.760 | atrocities against the Belgians, and why we have to go and stop them. And again, Saddam Hussein and the Kuwaiti

07:59:09.480 | babies thrown out of their incubators, these are the kinds of atrocities that jerk tears. These are

07:59:15.480 | the kinds of atrocities that get people to change their mind and support a thing that they otherwise

07:59:20.520 | would not. And when in fact, Hamas did kill unarmed women and children, and particularly, I don't know

07:59:27.640 | how many children, but at least a few, and many, many unarmed civilians. Many, many women. And so, their

07:59:36.840 | atrocities were already scarlet. They already were absolutely guilty of war crimes and what they had

07:59:43.640 | done that day. And in fact, it was so bad that people think, "I don't know, man. I'm not taking

07:59:49.960 | a stance on this." But I tend to doubt it, I guess, would be my stance. And I have simpler explanations.

07:59:57.560 | But there are people who think that Netanyahu let the attack happen because he wanted that

08:00:02.040 | kind of horror show to be inflicted on his own people so that he could get away with doing what

08:00:06.600 | he's doing now. Because why? Because what Hamas did is what's letting him get away with what he's

08:00:11.560 | doing now. He gave them this excuse, just like Bin Laden gave George Bush one. Only Israel isn't going to

08:00:18.040 | be wrecked here. This is not working out for Hamas the way they hoped. And I think their primary

08:00:22.680 | objective really was to take captives so they'd have them to trade for their own captives back,

08:00:27.480 | for their own hostages to get back. But they went way too far. They killed way too many innocent people

08:00:33.480 | and then gave the Israelis the writ. Now, as far as the attack being successful, it's worth pointing out.

08:00:41.240 | We call it October 7th because it was over by supper time. Okay? It wasn't the second week of October.

08:00:51.240 | It wasn't the autumn of 23. It was one day that these captives were able to break out of their

08:01:00.120 | concentration camp and commit some atrocities, right? This is not the nation next door. Again,

08:01:07.240 | Contra Ben Shapiro's explicit lies that when he says, well, what would we do if Mexico was shooting

08:01:15.800 | rockets across the Rio Grande into Texas? Well, Mexico is the name of the national government in Mexico City

08:01:23.240 | and its armed military force. If they were firing rockets across the border into Texas, well,

08:01:30.520 | we would have some negotiation to do, wouldn't we? Okay? Or worse. What we're talking about here is not

08:01:38.680 | Mexico. We're talking about an Indian reservation. We're talking about people who were already conquered

08:01:44.920 | and captured in 1967, who've been living under the totalitarian control of this foreign occupying army

08:01:54.040 | ever since then. We're talking about the closer equivalent would be Nelson Rockefeller sending

08:02:01.880 | the national guard to put down the riot in Attica prison and killing all the guards along with the

08:02:07.720 | prisoners. This would be, imagine maybe in an earlier time, an Indian reservation where they break out and

08:02:16.200 | they commit some atrocities, scalp some Anglo heads. And then what do we do? We go in there and bomb and kill a

08:02:22.200 | hundred thousand of them. Or if, again, because this is Israeli territory. Okay. De jure? No. De facto?

08:02:30.760 | Absolutely. This is a ghetto. So how about if, if the Trump government decided to build a wall around

08:02:38.440 | South Chicago and say, we can't tolerate the violence of the blacks of South Chicago anymore. Everybody knows

08:02:44.440 | that's one of the highest crime rates in the country. We're just going to bomb them. Because occasionally they

08:02:49.320 | break out of the black part of town and hurt other people too. So we're going to enclose their ghetto

08:02:54.200 | and giant concrete and razor wire walls. And then we're going to bomb them all to death. That's what

08:02:59.960 | Israel is doing. Fish in a barrel, a canned hunt. You understand? Like a father abusing his son,

08:03:07.640 | a helpless captive. Right? A guard beating an inmate. Jeffrey Goldberg torturing some poor Palestinian in

08:03:18.840 | his cell. Not a sovereign nation defending itself from attack from another sovereign nation of any kind.

08:03:26.920 | And Americans don't understand this because they're called Palestinians. And so aren't they from a country

08:03:32.120 | called Palestine? Everybody's got a country, right? But no, Israel's on top of Palestine. So no,

08:03:37.080 | they don't have a Palestine. They don't have a country. They don't have a government. If,

08:03:41.720 | if Fatah, the PA on the West Bank, if they are trustees in an Israeli open air prison,

08:03:49.320 | then Hamas is just the strongest gang. They're the Crips or the Bloods or the Latin Kings or the Aryan

08:03:55.640 | nations have taken over the prison in the Gaza Strip. They're not the duly elected government of the

08:04:01.640 | people of Palestine. When George Shabby Bush forced those people to hold that election in 2005,

08:04:07.800 | the majority of the population of Gaza were children, were minors, at least under 18. Okay?

08:04:14.440 | Could not vote. The majority of them were minors. That was in 2005. The last time they got a chance to

08:04:21.560 | vote. Guess what? The majority of them are minors still to this day. They have popular sovereignty

08:04:27.560 | behind Hamas and bear collective responsibility for Hamas's crimes. When, as we mentioned a previous era,

08:04:37.240 | it was Israel that helped to install Hamas in power in the Gaza Strip in the first place,

08:04:43.720 | helped their rise, their botched coup. Well, they did the disengagement to empower them. Again,

08:04:49.000 | no one to talk to certificate bragging about it. Then they did the botched coup, which maybe was

08:04:54.600 | deliberately botched or I don't know exactly what happened there, but that ended up with Hamas in

08:04:58.680 | charge of the entire Gaza Strip. And then we have, as we know, and people can, you might want to pull

08:05:04.040 | this up if you want to and show them. It's by me and one of my guys, Connor Freeman is his name.

08:05:09.480 | And the article is called Netanyahu's support for Hamas backfired.

08:05:15.320 | Yeah. Right there. Second one. I'll tell you a funny story. I did the Pierce Morgan show the other

08:05:19.480 | day. I debated Wesley Clark on Ukraine again, but while I was on hold, Pierce Morgan was whooping the

08:05:25.640 | Israeli ambassador. And I'm not sure if it was the ambassador to Britain or the ambassador to the United

08:05:29.960 | States, but he was going after him so hard. And at one point it was so funny. You could see his face

08:05:37.800 | twist a little bit because the guy realized what he said after he said it, that like, oops, this undermines

08:05:42.120 | the narrative a little bit, but the ambassador railed to Pierce Morgan. Nobody elected Hamas.

08:05:47.880 | They're not the legitimate power there, which is, yeah, that's right. He's railing against Hamas,

08:05:53.000 | right. But what's he just did. What did he just do? He just told the truth and acquitted the

08:05:56.920 | Palestinian people of responsibility for Hamas. And then what did Pierce Morgan do? Heroically told the

08:06:03.480 | truth that, you know, who did support Hamas Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud. Oh, check that out.

08:06:12.840 | You know who you get to kill anybody who's near somebody who years ago supposedly may have voted

08:06:20.600 | for Hamas to win a plurality. Well, you know who really voted for Hamas? Benjamin Netanyahu did.

08:06:27.960 | So who gets the death penalty now? They're willing to kill 20,000 children or more so far,

08:06:36.680 | burying little babies. Imagine a little five year old baby buried alive in rubble and has to starve to

08:06:41.800 | death for five days in there. That's what Benjamin Netanyahu, the actual owner, controller, creator of

08:06:50.040 | Hamas, foister of Hamas onto the hapless, helpless Palestinian people. They supposedly have popular

08:06:59.560 | sovereignty and chose Hamas. Netanyahu chose Hamas for them. And he said over and over, we control the height of

08:07:09.800 | the flame. Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support Hamas

08:07:20.440 | in Gaza so that we can keep the Palestinians divided and so that we can continue to tell American, again,

08:07:29.000 | we're talking about Netanyahu here. So American idiots, absurd fools, that we have no partner for peace

08:07:38.200 | because we keep the terrorists in charge in Gaza. And you know what's funny about this? Netanyahu has

08:07:44.680 | been quoted repeatedly saying we control the height of the flame. Three different people said he said

08:07:51.080 | that to a group of Likud ministers. And then he denied it and his friends denied it and said he never said

08:07:57.240 | that. Even though we got all of his buddies here bragging about how smart he is for doing it that way,

08:08:02.200 | etc. But anyway, there's a new documentary called the BB files. It's all the footage is Shin Bet,

08:08:11.400 | national police interrogation videos of Benjamin Netanyahu and his disgusting wife, Sarah and all of their

08:08:18.200 | friends and including Sheldon Adelson and Miriam Adelson, who gave Donald Trump 600 million dollars

08:08:26.760 | to do whatever Israel says. And they're all interrogated in there because Sarah Netanyahu is a

08:08:33.080 | beast who demands that all of their friends give her jewelry and champagne and cars and what I don't know,

08:08:41.160 | cars, all kinds of fancy things. And this is illegal in Israel. This is absolutely against the letter of

08:08:48.200 | the law. They are not allowed to accept these gifts from wealthy people in this way. They're totally

08:08:54.600 | compromised. He is a guilty felon. A hundred percent is a probably a huge part of why he's keeping the

08:08:59.880 | war going as long as he can, because they won't put him in prison as long as he's keeping the war going.

08:09:04.440 | But here's my point. On video, Lex, Shin Bet asks Prime Minister Netanyahu, why do you support Hamas in

08:09:16.040 | Gaza? Why are you leaning on Qatar to give them billions of dollars? And Netanyahu says, this is how we keep

08:09:25.320 | the Palestinians divided, but we control the height of the flame on video to the cops. Okay. So that means

08:09:36.120 | also that everyone who said that that quote was a lie is either a liar or a damned fool.

08:09:43.000 | Okay. I just had to make that point because that's important that this is absolutely true. Okay. They say

08:09:50.680 | the Palestinians are responsible for Hamas. No, Benjamin Netanyahu is responsible for Hamas.

08:09:56.680 | Benjamin Netanyahu owns the entire chessboard. Benjamin Netanyahu is backed by the unlimited

08:10:04.600 | budget and military power of the global superpower and all of his myriad civilian and military intelligence

08:10:11.880 | services. Hamas and the Palestinians are pawns on his board. That's the fact. And if it's okay,

08:10:20.520 | to kill Palestinians because they are nearby Hamas, then it's okay to kill Benjamin Netanyahu because

08:10:28.520 | he is literally, not figuratively, their greatest ally. And in a direct sense, not like, oh, America

08:10:36.360 | is Osama bin Laden's indispensable ally. I mean, literally, he sent Mossad to Qatar to demand that they

08:10:43.080 | give more money to Hamas over and over and over again. And his own men ratted him out for it. Okay. That's

08:10:50.360 | that's treason. He's the one who should hang from the end of a rope, not the people of the Gaza Strip,

08:10:56.680 | who have been killed. Probably a hundred thousand of them have been killed now, including torn to shreds,

08:11:02.040 | including they bomb their tents, they bury them alive. And they quite literally

08:11:11.080 | heard them in to narrow yards after starving them almost to death and, and bring them in to a narrow

08:11:22.120 | area. Then they open the gate all at once. They don't bring them in through some kind of checkpoint.

08:11:26.280 | They make them, they just open the gate. And so that the people rush in a mad mob rush to grab whatever

08:11:34.680 | food they can. And then these people are literally starving. So the spirit of friendship and cooperation

08:11:41.000 | falls aside. And now I will stab you so that I can feed my kid today, dude. And so people it's the

08:11:46.760 | hunger games out there are worse, whatever analogy that you have to Soviet communism is, is it's the

08:11:53.880 | equivalent. It's the moral equivalent of Soviet communism is what it is. Lex, it's the worst thing

08:11:59.240 | in the world. It's the most barbarian regime in the world, far worse than the Chikoms. And they have to

08:12:05.160 | lie their ass off to try to pretend that Beijing treats the Uyghurs this way. Give me a break. The

08:12:11.080 | Uyghurs are Kings compared to what's happening to the Palestinians right now. And the only thing that

08:12:17.560 | makes Israel the second worst government in the world is the United States of America has the power

08:12:22.440 | to do this, to help them do this to the Palestinians, but also do it to the Iraqis and the Syrians and the

08:12:29.000 | Yemenis and whoever else Israel says as well. But this is pure barbarianism. And I strongly urge,

08:12:36.520 | I know that you've seen it. I strongly urge your audience to go watch this interview of this man,

08:12:41.880 | Anthony Aguilera, who was a special forces guy that's above the Rangers, but below Delta, but that's

08:12:48.520 | second tier, special operations, army, special operations forces, the green berets been fighting

08:12:53.960 | in the terror wars all these years fought in Iraq. I don't know how old the guy is. If he fought in

08:12:58.760 | Iraq war two, he certainly fought in Iraq war three and in Afghanistan and, and had been deployed 12

08:13:04.200 | times, Tucker said, including to the stands in central Asia and Vietnam. I don't know who he's

08:13:08.200 | killing in Vietnam. Maybe just training there. I don't know.

08:13:10.440 | But he also did an interview on breaking points with Sagar and Crystal.

08:13:14.120 | Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that. So the story is that they demonized UNRWA, which was the UN relief,

08:13:20.120 | refugee relief agency. Well, what refugees? Well, 80% of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees from

08:13:26.840 | what we call Israel proper. The Israeli Jews stole that land from them. That's their land.

08:13:31.720 | That's why they live in Gaza. They're not from Gaza. 80% of them are not from Gaza or they are,

08:13:36.600 | but their parents and grandparents and great grandparents were not their refugees there.

08:13:40.920 | So ever since then, UNRWA has been there to provide humanitarian relief for these poor people

08:13:46.600 | who've been cut off from their country on the other side of the razor wire. And so UNRWA was in charge of

08:13:52.120 | distributing the aid. But then they lied, of course, this ridiculous propaganda that UNRWA

08:13:57.000 | had been involved in the October 7th attack. And there may have been one guy who had worked for them

08:14:03.800 | before, who said something, or maybe even participated to some small degree. It was a ridiculous charge

08:14:10.520 | against the entire organization. And as this guy, Aguilera explains, they had, I believe,

08:14:17.000 | I can't remember the number, was it? Do you remember if he said they had 40 sites around the gun? I

08:14:21.880 | believe he said they had 40 sites around the strip where they were delivering aid to people. When they

08:14:26.520 | closed that down, the Israelis replaced it with this new humanitarian relief foundation or global

08:14:33.480 | humanitarian foundation, I think it's called GHF, right? And they only have four stations. And three

08:14:41.080 | of them are near the Egyptian border. And only one of them is what they call the Narazim Corridor,

08:14:49.720 | I believe it's pronounced, that's like halfway through the strip. The people of the north have nothing.

08:14:54.600 | There's no aid coming into the people of the north at all. They're starving to death up there.

08:14:59.880 | And then he says, there's only these four places. And then here's what we're talking about, Lex,

08:15:05.320 | when we're talking about killing the starving people as they line up for aid. What it is, and

08:15:11.080 | this has been explained in Haaretz, by the way, they have senior officials and army people talking to Haaretz

08:15:16.120 | about this. This is the most important liberal daily in Israel. The Israeli New York Times, basically,

08:15:20.840 | has firsthand reporting from enlisted and officers, perpetrators, saying that, yes, it's true,

08:15:27.400 | we do this, okay? And Aguilera tells the story the best and has some video and shows.

08:15:32.200 | What it is, is this. They open the, the food place early in the morning for this riot where

08:15:40.600 | everybody's supposed to come and rush and grab the food. So people come walking and they force them to

08:15:46.280 | walk through war zones to get to the places where there's firing going on anyway. Force them to walk for,

08:15:52.680 | I don't know how many miles this is, 12 kilometers. So, um, 10 miles. It was just a hell of a walk, man.

08:15:59.640 | I don't know. Eight miles. I'm still incredible long walk for poor, hungry, starving people. They get all

08:16:05.960 | the way there. And then, but from the IDF's point of view, they're supposed to go this way. And then

08:16:13.240 | they're supposed to go that way. They're supposed to go over this hill and then come around this way. And then you line up at the thing, but there's no signs anywhere.

08:16:19.880 | And there's no little metal barricades like a black Sabbath show or something for people to follow.

08:16:25.560 | So how do they direct the Palestinians foot traffic with machine guns, with artillery and tank rounds.

08:16:34.760 | There's an invisible line. You'll know you cross it when I blow your head off.

08:16:41.320 | And when the mob of Palestinians coming down for their food, when they can see that people

08:16:46.520 | on the edges of the crowd are being shot and killed, they know that, Oh, I guess that's where the line is.

08:16:52.360 | That's how they're supposed to know where the invisible lines are drawn.

08:16:55.720 | Aguilera said, he asked them, why don't you just put up a sign? Let's just go this way.

08:17:00.120 | And they go, no, that's too expensive. So instead they shoot at them, not just with fully automatic

08:17:05.320 | rifles, but with artillery and with tank rounds. And they blast them to hell, man. In the name of crowd

08:17:13.720 | control. And he says that they say, Oh no, we're just shooting over their heads and shooting at their

08:17:19.880 | feet and shooting behind them to direct them. Imagine directing civilian traffic that way with machine gun

08:17:25.400 | fire. So what happens is they all die. He says, they're coming down this thing. They're shooting

08:17:29.640 | over the heads of these guys, but behind them is a hillside where people are coming down there.

08:17:35.240 | So then when the fun, the sun finishes coming up, there's just roses, just dead bodies everywhere.

08:17:41.160 | And then he says, then the Israelis go, Oh, Hamas did it. Come on, man. Like, yeah.

08:17:47.720 | You know, would be Hamas in Bosnia did some false flag attacks in 1995. That's

08:17:55.000 | not what's happening here. Okay. These people are being slaughtered. Starving people are being

08:18:02.280 | brought in and massacred as Tucker Carlson, rightly said. And then we're hanged to death

08:18:09.000 | from the neck for this at Nuremberg murdering prisoners. This is, if you've seen Schindler's

08:18:16.440 | list, there's a scene in there, which I don't even know if this really happened or not, probably did what

08:18:20.680 | the hell. Or if this is just Spielberg shows one of the concentration camp guards shooting the juice

08:18:26.760 | for target practice. That's what they do. There's numerous reports coming in, in just the last couple

08:18:33.080 | of weeks that there has clearly been, well, I don't know. I shouldn't say numerous. I saw that there's

08:18:39.640 | an, uh, a British doctor saying this. And then there was someone who said that he confirmed it. Although I

08:18:45.400 | wasn't sure how serious he was or not, I shouldn't take that, but it seemed like a very credible report

08:18:50.520 | in the first place. And in fact, the British doctor is at least claiming that he's passing on reports for

08:18:55.080 | other doctors. And what are they seeing? They're seeing Palestinian children who all have the same

08:19:01.240 | signature type of wound to the same body part. One day they're all shot in the genitals, children.

08:19:08.120 | The next day they're all shot in the elbow. The next day they're all shot in a knee or in the heart.

08:19:14.360 | And what's happening here is the Israelis are shooting them for fun, for target practice,

08:19:19.880 | just like the Nazis in Schindler's List, killing the little girl in the red coat. That's what they're

08:19:25.400 | doing. They're burying them alive and they're starving them to death and then forcing them into

08:19:31.560 | mobs and then machine gunning them. Right? If this was a movie, you'd say it was too over the top. It's

08:19:37.160 | too fake. It can't be true. If it was, if anybody leaned left and they heard this about the communists,

08:19:42.760 | they'd say, no, it's right-wing propaganda. Like, no, dude, this is how they are. This is exactly how they are.

08:19:49.240 | And it's exactly how they treat the Palestinians. They do not recognize their humanity.

08:19:56.600 | They are N-words. They are gooks. They are goyim, grasshoppers. And that means it's okay to kill them.

08:20:05.640 | All of them. The prime minister gave a speech to the officer corps where he said the enemy is Amalek out of

08:20:18.200 | a 3,000-year-old Bible story where Jehovah supposedly told the ancient Hebrews to wipe out a tribe called the

08:20:28.680 | Amalek and kill every last man, woman, and child, and baby, and oxen, and wipe them off the face of

08:20:38.120 | the earth. Now, Lex, nobody thinks that God whispered to Benjamin Netanyahu and said the Palestinians are Amalek.

08:20:44.600 | Right? This is just a bunch of crap. Even if you believe every single word of the Bible as the

08:20:49.800 | literal-inspired word of God from back then, that ain't got a thing to do with this now other than a

08:20:57.640 | cynical, lying, thieving murderer invoking a God who says it's okay to kill children, that you must,

08:21:07.960 | that you are commanded to kill them all. And this was his orders to the officer corps. And then I got to

08:21:15.320 | read Liz Wolf in Reason Magazine every morning telling me that Israel's goal is fighting Hamas?

08:21:23.000 | Benjamin Netanyahu said in May we are destroying all of their homes so they have nowhere to go back to so

08:21:33.160 | that we can force them all to leave? And I got to read Liz Wolf in Reason Magazine?

08:21:41.400 | Telling me that Likud means well, and they're just trying to protect themselves from armed terrorists?

08:21:50.920 | When they are explicitly and deliberately slaughtering children, shooting toddlers in the head,

08:21:59.160 | shooting pregnant women in the stomach, bombing refugees' tents with 2,000-pound bombs?

08:22:07.080 | It is a genocide. And that doesn't just mean a giant massacre. And it doesn't just mean ethnic

08:22:15.080 | cleansing. They are attempting to destroy the Palestinian people as Palestinian people.

08:22:21.320 | They have bombed all of their universities and schools, all of their government offices that have

08:22:26.360 | any records of land ownership or family histories. They've bombed every last hospital in this strip,

08:22:33.240 | Lex. Remember when we argued about whether or not they bombed the parking lot that one time at the

08:22:37.480 | start of the war? They destroyed them all. You want to talk about babies in incubators? There was a

08:22:43.080 | hospital in the Gaza Strip. This is an absolute, guaranteed, verified fact. If you want to stop and

08:22:47.960 | pause and look it up, we can do that. Otherwise, your audience can surely find this. These Palestinian

08:22:54.280 | doctors were threatened and told, "We are going to absolutely kill every single last one of you if

08:23:00.040 | you don't get out of that hospital right now." And they refused to leave and said, "We are protecting

08:23:05.560 | a NICU full of premature babies in their incubators and we will not leave them." And the Israelis said,

08:23:13.080 | "You have to leave or we're going to blow the place up. But if you do leave, we promise that we will take

08:23:19.880 | possession of these premature babies and protect them." And then you know what they did? They left them

08:23:27.000 | in their incubators to die. All of them. And the media went in there and found a room full of corpses.

08:23:35.240 | So under George H.W. Bush's theory, America has to launch a war against Israel now and carpet bomb

08:23:41.240 | Tel Aviv. Because this is proof of Israel's intent to "systematically dismantle Palestine." That was the

08:23:50.840 | excuse for Iraq war one. And it was a lie. This is true. It's true. And Lex, they like it. They think

08:23:58.600 | it's funny. They don't give a damn. They don't give a damn to kill a premature baby. That premature baby

08:24:05.160 | was going to grow up to be a Palestinian one day. Knits make lice. Kill them all. That's the doctrine.

08:24:14.200 | Again, Haaretz. There are free fire zones. If anyone is between here and here, you just kill them.

08:24:19.240 | There's no sign that says this is a free fire zone. If it's an 11-year-old boy walking with his little

08:24:24.840 | sister, you shoot and kill them both. Kill anything that moves, just like America and Vietnam.

08:24:30.760 | This is like James Madison Fallujah. Worse. Worse. And in fact, as Aguilera says, he goes, "Man,

08:24:39.880 | I've been all over the terror wars. I've never seen anything like this." He told the BBC. He said,

08:24:45.480 | "What's it like?" It's like Terminator 2. Remember Terminator 2 where it's after the H-bombs have hit

08:24:52.600 | Los Angeles. That's what it's like. Right? Absolute horror show. And man, it's America's fault.

08:24:59.240 | No less than the Yemeni war was the American Saudi war. This is the American Israeli genocide. It's not a war.

08:25:09.400 | It's a slaughter. It is a canned hunt against a helpless, captive, uh, you know, a prisoner population.

08:25:17.160 | And just like happened on September 11th, just like happened to that couple that were assassinated

08:25:22.760 | outside of the Israeli embassy. Uh, just like what happened with the guy attacked with the makeshift

08:25:27.640 | flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado. And I can't prove this yet, but you mark my words and we'll see whether

08:25:33.640 | I'm right that the guy that attacked New Orleans on new year's day drove his truck down Bourbon street,

08:25:39.320 | killed 12 people and injured another few dozen. And then we're very lucky in the sense that when

08:25:45.480 | he finally crashed, he crashed into a backhoe or a bulldozer at the end of Bourbon street. And there

08:25:50.680 | just happened to be a group of six cops. I think it was standing right there. So when he crashed and he

08:25:55.480 | got out of his truck with his gun, they blew him away. Otherwise he could have killed many, many

08:26:00.120 | more people. Who was he? He was an American army veteran who had converted to Islam and signed up

08:26:05.480 | with the Islamic state. And what are the chances Lex that on new year's Eve, 2024, that this man is

08:26:13.480 | motivated to do this for any other reason than American support for Israel and the Gaza Strip.

08:26:18.840 | There's a 99% chance that that was what he was ranting about to his parents in his video messages

08:26:25.160 | that he recorded on his way from Houston to new Orleans. And just the same as Omar Mateen, uh,

08:26:30.920 | complaining about Obama killing the women and children in Syria in the nightclub massacre of,

08:26:36.040 | uh, I'm sorry, what year 2000? I'm sorry, the Orlando night pulse massacre. Um, this is blowback

08:26:43.480 | from American foreign policy. And again, not for being a good friend to a good friend, but for being

08:26:49.880 | a loyal ally to a state that doesn't give a damn about us that celebrates when September 11th happens

08:26:55.720 | to us, because it means that we will now be easier to manipulate and put into the service of carrying out

08:27:01.480 | their foreign policy goals. I spend our treasure that kill our men that empower their enemies,

08:27:07.720 | requiring us to do even more to fight for them and against them back and forth over and over for

08:27:14.040 | decades. And all we get out of it is confiscated wealth and dead civilians. Um, and I'm terrified,

08:27:22.840 | quite honestly, I know a lot of people who kind of downplay this. I am legitimately terrified of

08:27:30.920 | Bin Laden night terrorism. I ain't afraid of the Shiites. I don't think the Ayatollah wants to fight

08:27:36.040 | us. And I don't think Hezbollah is going to do nothing to the United States of America without his

08:27:41.160 | say. So, and he ain't given it. It's the Bin Laden nights who tried to knock our towers down in 93 and who

08:27:49.240 | did in 2001 killing thousands of our people. And they're still here. They did San Bernardino. They had a failed

08:28:00.200 | attack on the subway in New York. They had a failed attack on a marathon in New York and New Jersey.

08:28:05.000 | They had a successful attack in Boston, at Fort Hood, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pensacola, Florida,

08:28:12.200 | and Corpus Christi, Texas. These are all in our era, post September 11th terrorist attacks against

08:28:18.520 | our people because of our government serving Israel's interests primarily in the Middle East.

08:28:25.160 | So, there's a strong case to be made that what's happening in Gaza is going to lead

08:28:29.640 | to the growth of the increased number of Bin Laden nights in the world.

08:28:35.240 | And dead American civilians as a result of that.

08:28:38.200 | So, basically it makes United States less safe.

08:28:41.960 | Absolutely.

08:28:42.920 | And zooming up on the broader world, it makes the entire world less safe, including Israel.

08:28:49.160 | That's right. It's the most cynical thing, man. You know, like there's an interview, you probably read this,

08:28:55.080 | before. A lot of people are familiar with this. Sabina Brzezinski was interviewed by a French

08:28:59.320 | magazine in 1998. No Llewell Observateur or some kind of thing. I don't speak French, man.

08:29:05.560 | And they interviewed him and they said, this is in 98 now. So, this is after the Taliban have come to

08:29:10.520 | power. I think it's before the embassy attack, but it's after Khobar. And it's after the first

08:29:15.720 | World Trade Center bombing and the National Guard attack of 95 in Saudi. And the reporter asks him,

08:29:25.400 | "Hey, man. So, all our support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 80s, that was your brilliant idea,

08:29:33.160 | is going to help lead to the rise of all this terrorism. So, what do you think about that?"

08:29:40.280 | He says, "Are you kidding me? What's a couple of stirred up Muslims versus the liberation of Eastern

08:29:47.480 | Europe and the destruction of Soviet communism?" And we know what we're doing. And he says in that

08:29:54.120 | same interview that we were not necessarily, I love the way he says this. You could apply this exactly to

08:30:00.200 | the Ukraine war. "We were not trying to provoke them into invading Afghanistan,

08:30:06.280 | but we were knowingly increasing the probability that they would." Which is, of course, the exact same

08:30:12.280 | thing. And so, you know, that's the attitude. Again, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a

08:30:19.720 | superpower. If you get to be the superpower, that's how they look at us. Some people partying on Bourbon

08:30:27.400 | Street, on New Orleans, like to you, you might say, "That is a sacrifice I'm not willing to pay."

08:30:36.440 | Who could be more innocent than people partying on Bourbon Street? What could be more American than

08:30:42.360 | having fun with your friends and family on New Year's Eve? Why should they have to be crucified for

08:30:48.280 | Israel's sins? It makes no sense at all for the American people to have to put up with this.

08:30:54.680 | But where you would say, "No, not intolerable." They would say, "Well, who cares?" A few expendable

08:31:02.040 | civilians. They might as well be Afghans. They might as well be Palestinians, the people of New Orleans.

08:31:07.480 | George Bush doesn't care about them, nor just Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Donald Trump for that matter.

08:31:14.840 | The next time there's a terrorist attack, you and I already know what's going to happen. They're going to

08:31:19.560 | going to blame it on fundamentalist radical Islam, which makes evil people hate good people and want

08:31:26.760 | to kill us. Now we have no choice but to do whatever. What do you want us to do next, BB?

08:31:34.280 | Whatever he said is whatever we have to do next, the next time that we have to pay the price for what

08:31:40.200 | Israel did the last time. And I'm sick and I'm tired of it. I think there's a really big, deeper human

08:31:49.000 | nature point that you've spoken to over the last several hours, which is trying to defeat terror with

08:31:56.200 | military force. Over the past 30 years, we have learned the lesson that that only creates more terror.

08:32:03.160 | Yeah. And which they don't mind again, because it just gives them more to do. And because,

08:32:07.560 | again, the Bin Ladenites are over there, not over here. And they like killing Serbs and Russians and

08:32:12.280 | Shiites. And so that's all cool. But also with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

08:32:17.000 | I'm glad you mentioned that. Guess what? The L-E-T, which are the Bin Ladenites of Pakistan.

08:32:21.880 | There's a journalist named Steve Call who wrote Ghost Wars about Afghanistan. And he wrote Directorate S

08:32:29.080 | about the Pakistani ISI, their Secret Intelligence Service, who backed the Taliban and backed the Bin Ladenites.

08:32:36.440 | Well, the L-E-T, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was one of their groups and they seized, according to Steve

08:32:45.640 | Call. They seized control of an Indian ship for a time before special operations troops were able to

08:32:52.600 | go in there and kill them all off. Well, that ship had nuclear weapons on board. Apparently,

08:32:57.800 | the jihadists didn't know that. They probably would not have been able to access them or know how to use

08:33:02.120 | them. But still, Bin Ladenite jihadists seized control of a ship that had atomic bombs on it.

08:33:11.000 | That is not nothing, right? It's just like Bin Ladenites almost toppled one tower over into the

08:33:19.400 | other. Let's start paying attention now instead of later. Which, by the way, Ramzi bin al-Sheib, before he

08:33:25.800 | fled, he wrote letters to all the New York papers saying he bombed the World Trade Center as revenge for

08:33:31.400 | American support for Israel and bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi, just as his uncle Khalid Sheikh

08:33:36.840 | Mohammed would say years later after doing September 11th. It's always about Israel, dude. Always was.

08:33:45.080 | Again, even the dual containment was always about Israel. See, it's Al-Shemir's guy that said we had to

08:33:49.320 | stay in Saudi. So, you know, I know Dubowitz is watching this right now and saying, "See? See? He's

08:33:55.560 | blaming it all on the Jews." But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that Israel, which calls

08:34:00.840 | itself the Jewish state and happens to be run by Jewish men and that's what their thing is, that

08:34:06.680 | they have interests that are very different from ours and that their lobbyists and their, as Justin

08:34:12.040 | would call it, their "amen" corner in the United States has their interests at heart and those interests

08:34:17.560 | are opposite ours. As Justin, I know, would hasten to point out that the majority of American Jews opposed

08:34:24.840 | Iraq War II. And you might say, "Well, yeah, but that's because they're liberal Democrats." Okay,

08:34:29.240 | fine. Well, they're not Ariel Sharon's men, are they? More American Jews per capita opposed Iraq War II

08:34:37.480 | than any other ethnic or religious group as they divided it up in the polls at that time.

08:34:43.320 | Right? So, this is clearly not the lie that Mark Dubowitz would try to put in my mouth in order to

08:34:51.880 | discredit what I'm saying. But what I am saying is some pretty ugly, true things about the role of the

08:34:57.800 | Israel lobby in the United States. And again, just as Mir Shimer says, they have to work this hard,

08:35:03.560 | they have to spend this much money, and they have to go around calling everybody a Nazi, because that's what

08:35:09.320 | it takes to get Israel to keep doing what Israel wants. The U.S. has different interests that we

08:35:17.560 | would pursue otherwise. And so it takes this extraordinary effort to bend our empire to their

08:35:24.280 | will. And including, yes, even supporting the empire itself, because as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz,

08:35:32.520 | probably the two most important neoconservative leaders of that generation, both said in the 1970s

08:35:39.720 | that this is their words. I'm not saying this, and I'm not saying people took their advice.

08:35:45.800 | I'm saying this is what these two neocon nuts said. I'm virtually certain this is the Podhoretz quote is,

08:35:53.400 | "Jews don't like large defense budgets, but we need to support them, because we have to make sure

08:36:00.840 | that under whatever excuse we keep America engaged in the world so that it is available to help Israel."

08:36:09.080 | And this is a big part of why they're China hawks, why they're Russia hawks, why they're anything hawks,

08:36:15.240 | why they're Venezuela hawks, because to them, the greatest, this is what Bret Stephens said in the New

08:36:21.160 | York Times, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, who's now a regular writer at the New York Times.

08:36:25.960 | He said the very same thing about keeping America available to protect Israel. And then he says in

08:36:32.920 | the same article, but it's totally an anti-Semitic canard that anybody who supports Israel and supports

08:36:37.800 | these wars does so at America's expense or in any way contrary to America's interests. But then he's the

08:36:43.800 | one who's saying, "That's what we have to do is bend America to Israel's interests." It couldn't be anything

08:36:50.360 | more anti-American than that. And I would encourage people to read George Washington's farewell address.

08:36:54.840 | I mean, the guy was a brilliant genius, and he wrote the thing himself, and it's probably

08:37:00.600 | four or five thousand words on foreign policy, where he says that we should always eschew

08:37:07.880 | entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world, because we'll form unnatural,

08:37:14.440 | passionate attachments to the interests of these other nations. And then that will divide the people

08:37:19.960 | here. It'll lead to all kinds of acrimony and accusations. And eventually you'll have the

08:37:24.600 | partisans of foreign nations in charge, and they will denounce as unpatriotic, the Americans who don't

08:37:32.040 | want to share their allegiance with another power. And all of these things, you couldn't have a 21st

08:37:38.360 | century author write it any more eloquently or convincingly than George Washington himself in

08:37:44.200 | his farewell. What a truly great man George Washington was. He had his flaws, but yeah. Well, yes. Yes.

08:37:50.840 | Jefferson too. All of them. Yeah. But I'm grateful for this country and these men that founded the country

08:38:00.520 | on these side of principles that revolutionized human history. Absolutely right.

08:38:05.080 | And we have to make sure we carry the flag of those ideas forward.

08:38:09.080 | I absolutely think that, and this is why I'm a libertarian. To me, libertarianism is

08:38:13.240 | real American distilled. To me, the Declaration of Independence, that is the North Star. Everybody's

08:38:20.280 | born free, and I don't even have to prove it to you, because I'm armed, and I'm telling you,

08:38:23.880 | dude, I'm not giving up. You understand? Yeah. That's what it says. Me too.

08:38:27.880 | We're Texans. Self-evident to me. Yeah. Yeah.

08:38:30.360 | I don't have an argument. I'm just saying. And that's the American creed. And that's what I

08:38:36.440 | believe in. I believe that especially all of liberalism and conservatism and socialism are all

08:38:41.400 | deviations from the true American way, which is liberty and property and the individual's right to

08:38:49.560 | determine their own destiny. That is what it's all about. And if we lived that, I'm going to imagine being

08:38:56.360 | afraid Germany and Japan are going to rise back up again. This whole time, we never needed to do

08:39:00.920 | any of this. All we had to do was be free. We could have done, as Gene Kirkpatrick said,

08:39:05.480 | abandoned the entire empire, been a normal country in a normal time. This whole time

08:39:10.840 | stayed out of all the world's conflicts, perfected our republic to the best of our ability, made political

08:39:17.800 | and individual liberty, our highest political goal, and shown the world how it's done.

08:39:23.400 | Y'all's bills of rights ain't good enough, not like ours is. Y'all's independent judiciaries aren't

08:39:29.880 | independent enough, not like ours. Y'all's rule of law is too subject to the will of men. You need to

08:39:37.320 | really encode this thing and follow it like in the deal. I one time humiliated Neil Ferguson's wife,

08:39:46.760 | Hursa Ali. If you know her, she's the atheist ex-Muslim little pet mascot of the war party there that they

08:39:53.880 | traipse around and have her demonize Muslims and whatever. And I humiliated her in a debate in front

08:39:59.080 | of a bunch of people at a Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. And it was funny because at the end of the debate,

08:40:05.800 | the host of the debate said to me that, "Wow, you made her case better than she did, and then you

08:40:14.360 | destroyed it." And my case that I was making was about that there are real problems in the Muslim world.

08:40:20.120 | Like, for example, the worst thing probably is the female genital mutilation, female circumcision,

08:40:27.240 | they call it, in Eastern Africa. And in Kurdistan is where that seems to be the worst places where

08:40:34.680 | those traditions are still continued to this day. And then you have, of course, the brutality

08:40:40.200 | and the corruption of the dictatorships of North Africa and of the Gulf. You have just the absolute

08:40:48.600 | widespread accepted custom of child abuse among the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially

08:40:55.000 | Afghanistan. I don't know as much about in Pakistan. You have, of course, the absolute tyranny over women

08:41:02.360 | in almost all of these countries where they're made to wear the hijab or the veil or even a burqa,

08:41:07.480 | whether they want to or not, and these kinds of things. Whatever. We could go on and on here,

08:41:13.000 | Lex, about the imperfections of these countries. But guess what? You know what's the worst thing about Somalia

08:41:18.600 | and Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan? America is the worst thing about all those countries.

08:41:30.120 | The violence that our country has brought to them. The absolute destruction. The wholesale

08:41:38.440 | wanton and cruel violence against populations that never did anything to us. Not one of these groups

08:41:46.040 | had the slightest thing to do with September 11th, unless you want to say that Omar should have just

08:41:50.840 | slit Bin Laden's throat in 99. I guess I'd agree with you about that. But, you know, the axis of evil,

08:41:57.560 | Iran, Iraq, and Syria, none of them had anything to do with September 11th. There wasn't a single Iraqi,

08:42:03.080 | Syrian or Iranian on those planes or behind any of that at all. Obviously, the only reason they put

08:42:08.680 | North Korea in the axis of evil is because if they put Syria in, you'd have went, wait a minute,

08:42:12.440 | this speech was written in Tel Aviv, dude. What does this have to do with Osama Bin Laden who killed

08:42:17.800 | our guys, who Bush has already let get away? Oh, you want to do something? Let's end with this for this

08:42:23.240 | part of our section before we move on to the Cold War. To show just how much our government cares about

08:42:31.080 | the American people's interests here. See if you can find George Bush for March 2002.

08:42:38.280 | And the quote would be, "I'm truly not concerned about him." Bin Laden.

08:42:44.520 | During White House news conference on March 13th, 2002, President George W. Bush stated concerning

08:42:51.800 | Osama Bin Laden that he was not truly concerned about him. That's a quote. This statement generated

08:42:59.320 | controversy, particularly when Senator John Kerry brought it up during a presidential debate in

08:43:04.280 | 2004. Well, and screw John Kerry. This ain't got nothing to do with sticking up for him.

08:43:09.320 | And in my book, I quote the entire statement here because I would not want anyone to mistakenly

08:43:15.960 | believe that I quoted any of this out of context. It's one of those things where like, "Nope, let's go ahead and

08:43:21.480 | see everything that he has to say." And to our benefit, George W. Bush is only so smart and only

08:43:28.200 | so good at getting away with this. He clearly has had conversations with his staff about how we have

08:43:37.400 | to change the subject, really, from Osama to Saddam. And it's a little clumsy and a little difficult to do,

08:43:43.640 | but we're going to have to kind of figure out how to do that. And so this is W. Bush sort of taking a stab

08:43:50.120 | at it, except that he's just not up to the task, right? So he can only be as smooth as he is in trying

08:43:58.600 | to make these statements. And I would argue it does not work out too well for him, but it makes it, I think,

08:44:07.800 | very clear to us just frankly, like how much contempt they have for us. You know, George W. Bush, it really

08:44:15.480 | meant a lot to people, Lex, when he climbed up on that fire truck and he said, "I hear you and we all

08:44:23.000 | hear you and the rest of the world will hear you soon." People really were like, "Man, we need a

08:44:29.400 | leader and we got one." Can you imagine Bill Clinton being even pretend macho enough to act like that

08:44:37.320 | When America needed a man, there was W. Bush, right? And people believed so hard in him

08:44:44.920 | after that. And then he ruthlessly exploited their goodwill and their faith in him in order to manipulate

08:44:52.920 | them and lie to them, to use their sons to go to a war for his own reasons that he knew had nothing to

08:44:59.800 | do with protecting us from terrorism. In fact, again, W. Bush is so bad at this. He told Katie Couric

08:45:06.840 | on CBS News, "One of the hardest parts of my job is connecting Iraq to the war on terrorism."

08:45:15.240 | Because he, right? That's all he can do. He sputtered it. Oops. Was I supposed to say it like

08:45:20.680 | that? I guess probably not. Right? Because what's he saying? He knows it is the most difficult part of

08:45:26.520 | his job. He's trying to figure out how to get people to believe that this aggressive war has anything to do

08:45:32.040 | with defending ourselves from that other thing that happened that one time, you know? When he clearly

08:45:36.920 | was just obfuscating and-

08:45:41.320 | Speaker 2: Mr. President, in your speeches now,

08:45:43.320 | you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that?

08:45:45.720 | Speaker 1: Wait, wait, hit pause real quick.

08:45:48.040 | Speaker 2: Also, can you tell the American people-

08:45:48.440 | Speaker 1: Forgive me for stipulating. This is six months

08:45:52.600 | after the September 11th attack. Okay. Sorry. Go ahead.

08:45:55.560 | Speaker 2: Also, can you tell the American people you have any more information if you know if he is dead

08:45:59.320 | or alive. Deep in your heart, don't you truly believe that until you find out if he is dead or alive,

08:46:06.280 | you won't really eliminate the threat of-

08:46:08.200 | Speaker 2: Deep in my heart, I know the man's on the run if he's alive at all.

08:46:11.000 | And I, you know, who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not. We hadn't heard from him in a long time.

08:46:21.880 | Speaker 2: And the idea of focusing on one person, uh, is, um, really, uh, indicates to me people don't

08:46:29.240 | understand the scope of the mission. Uh, terror is bigger than one person. And, uh, he's just,

08:46:37.560 | he's, he's, he's a, he's a person who's now been marginalized. Um, his network is, uh, his host

08:46:43.880 | government has been destroyed. Um, he's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it,

08:46:52.760 | and, um, um, met his match. Uh, he is, uh, you know, as I mentioned in my speech, I do mention

08:47:02.200 | the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death and he himself

08:47:07.080 | tries to hide if in fact he's hiding at all. So I, I don't know where he is, nor, you know,

08:47:11.640 | I just don't spend that much time on him. I'll be honest with you, I, I'm, I'm more worried about

08:47:16.280 | making sure that our soldiers are well supplied, that the strategy is clear, that the coalition is

08:47:21.720 | strong, that when we find, uh, enemy bunched up like we did in Sharikot mountains, that the, that,

08:47:28.920 | that the military has all the supporters need, that needs to go in and do the job which they did.

08:47:34.680 | And, uh, there'll be other battles in Afghanistan. There's going to be other, uh, struggles like

08:47:41.160 | Sharikot. And I'm just as confident about the outcome of that, of those future battles as, uh,

08:47:47.400 | as I was about Sharikot. Where our soldiers are performing brilliantly. We're tough. We're strong.

08:47:53.720 | They're well equipped. We have a good strategy. We are showing the world. We know how to fight a good,

08:47:58.760 | a, a guerrilla war with conventional means.

08:48:01.880 | I thought you were a different threat that the modern codes won't truly be eliminated until

08:48:06.600 | he is found either dead or alive.

08:48:08.040 | Well, as I say, we hadn't heard much from him. And, uh, I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the

08:48:13.000 | center of any command structure. And, uh, you know, again, I don't know where he is. I, uh,

08:48:18.920 | I, I, I, I repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run.

08:48:26.120 | I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country. Yeah. And then, uh, of course we know,

08:48:32.840 | and we've talked about the events that followed. Yeah. I gotta say again, I guess just to finish

08:48:40.360 | this segment up to reiterate, I think our highest priority really. And in fact, as much as I like

08:48:47.000 | seeing Tulsi Gabbard persecute, persecute the Russiagate felons who framed president Trump for

08:48:54.120 | treason and deserve to be banished with their families from North America forever. Um, I really

08:49:00.920 | wish that Tulsi Gabbard actually only had one priority in the entire world, which is protecting

08:49:05.560 | us from bin Laden night terrorism. I'm serious about that. These guys are coming back here and like,

08:49:12.520 | now it's true. I should stipulate again, Israel loves Al Qaeda and ISIS.

08:49:17.000 | As long as they're killing Shiites, they've got a pretty good relationship with Al Qaeda in Syria.

08:49:21.880 | Now, last December, Abu Muhammad Al Jolani, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria broke out of

08:49:27.960 | his pen and sacked Damascus with the help of Turkey and Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu went to the border,

08:49:32.840 | gave a press conference and took credit for it himself. Okay. That, and then Shapiro got on there and

08:49:37.640 | said, yeah, it's Al Qaeda taken over, but that's good because at least they're pushing the Shiites out.

08:49:41.960 | Yeah. This is somehow the leader of American conservatism. You tell me how that worked.

08:49:47.080 | But yeah, anyway, so, um, right now, overall, Israel has very close relationship with Al Qaeda,

08:49:53.080 | but then again, so did Bill Clinton and they still attacked us, right? Just because we're supporting

08:49:58.920 | them here doesn't mean they won't attack us there. And we're still motivating them to come at the United

08:50:05.880 | States. And, and especially when you're talking like lone wolf kooks, where it can be just one

08:50:10.840 | jerk with a rifle can do a hell of a lot of damage, whether anybody on the internet even recruited him

08:50:15.400 | to do it or not. Um, and especially with real, uh, ability to recruit there. And again, just like always,

08:50:23.560 | man, just like with the FBI entrapments, there's almost 300, more than 300 FBI entrapments on terrorism

08:50:30.120 | charges. Trevor Aronson is the greatest journalist on that question. He wrote a book called the terror

08:50:34.920 | factory about the FBI. And every time they entrap some idiot into a bin Ladenite plot, what do they

08:50:40.520 | tell him? Don't you hate freedom? No. They tell him, isn't it impossible to tolerate the violence that

08:50:47.800 | George Bush slash Barack Obama slash Donald Trump slash Joe Biden are bringing to the people of the

08:50:53.160 | Middle East. And don't you want to do something about it? Here's $10,000. Say you love Osama into

08:50:58.040 | the microphone kid. And he goes, yeah, I'm really angry about American foreign policy. I love Osama.

08:51:03.240 | Give me $20,000. And off to the penitentiary, he goes, and that's how they get them. Every time they

08:51:09.400 | cite American foreign policy. Do you think that there's a six figure salary paid FBI informant in

08:51:15.640 | this country anywhere that's going to try to recruit a terrorist by citing freedom? You know,

08:51:21.240 | what's really bad about Americans is they let three or 4 million Muslims live here and go to whatever

08:51:26.680 | mosque they want and don't bother them at all. And it's fine. Ooh, that enrages us. Oh, we hate that

08:51:34.200 | America for all their freedom of religion, where a tiny Muslim minority is able to practice in peace and

08:51:39.640 | security. That ain't it. And that's not how an FBI informant recruits a dupe into a plot. They cite

08:51:47.800 | American foreign policy a hundred percent of the time. So the FBI knows, same thing that I know,

08:51:54.040 | same thing that the FBI testified to the 9/11 commission. I think they identify with the

08:51:58.840 | Palestinian issue. And I think that's why they're taking revenge against the United States of America.

08:52:05.320 | And so what do we get from Israel on all this? Like, maybe we need to invite Dubowitz back in here so he can

08:52:10.840 | tell us what is one thing that Israel has ever done for us. They helped Obama back Al-Qaeda in Syria,

08:52:17.320 | but that was Obama helping them back Al-Qaeda in Syria. They helped Ronald Reagan sell missiles to the

08:52:24.440 | Ayatollah when he was back in Saddam at the very same time. I guess we owe him big for that. Otherwise, they steal our

08:52:33.720 | secrets and sell them to the Soviets or to the Chinese, including like the Chinese supersonic

08:52:41.160 | sea skimming missiles. They got those from American designs pilfered by the Israelis. Jeff Stein from

08:52:47.720 | SpyTalk when he's not being an insane Russiagate lunatic. Poor Jeff, I used to respect him. But Jeff Stein

08:52:53.960 | reported numerous times that the FBI and CIA do a report. Actually, they made them stop doing this

08:53:01.560 | report because every year they said that after Russia and China, Israel is the worst country that spies on

08:53:09.240 | the United States of America and is the greatest security threat for the counterintelligence agents

08:53:15.400 | in the United States, trying to hold them at bay. Russia and China and Israel are the countries that

08:53:21.400 | spy on us the most. Again, including Bill Clinton, and they tried to blackmail him with their information

08:53:26.520 | about Bill Clinton cheating on his wife. They're just a security threat to the United States of America.

08:53:33.400 | I'd buy anybody to make a coherent argument that's not based on just pure lies and sophistry.

08:53:42.760 | Quick bathroom break once more, and then let's do that Cold War, man. I'm having fun.

08:53:49.960 | So like we talked about, Provoked, your book on Cold War 2.0, how Washington started

08:53:58.040 | the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. So can you lay out the history and the

08:54:04.760 | mechanism of how this went down? Yes. The book is divided by presidents. Those are the chapters.

08:54:14.760 | And then I go through, I start with H.W. Bush. We have a few flashbacks to the fall of the Soviet,

08:54:19.640 | you know, or earlier days of the Cold War in the Reagan years. But basically, we start with the end

08:54:24.360 | of the last Cold War and the overthrow of the Soviet Union by the Russian government led by Boris Yeltsin

08:54:31.160 | at that time at the end of 1991. Red flag came down on Christmas Day, 1991. Never forget it.

08:54:38.680 | And people can watch that on YouTube. There's a great Ted Koppel special about it, ABC News,

08:54:43.080 | really good thing. And so that was the end of Soviet communism. And then the question was, well, now what?

08:54:55.080 | And the answer was, America's got to stay. If America leaves, and by the way, the Soviets, I think,

08:55:03.080 | and Jeffrey Sachs said this the other day on Pierce Morgan, I think, no, no, no. Yeah, I think that's

08:55:08.920 | right. But the Soviets actually agreed with that, that as James Baker put it in his discussions with

08:55:15.240 | Gorbachev. He's like, Hey, would you prefer an independent,

08:55:19.720 | potentially nuclear armed Germany with its own foreign policy? Or wouldn't you prefer that we

08:55:29.880 | stay in Germany? And the Soviets said, actually, we like you guys better than the Germans. So yes, we,

08:55:35.560 | we would even agree with that. Now, the purpose of NATO in the first place, according to his first

08:55:41.080 | general secretary, Lord Ismay, the Brit was to keep the Soviets out, sorry, the Americans in the

08:55:51.240 | Germans down and the Soviets out to replace the Soviets with the Russians, right? But then so the

08:55:57.080 | idea is we're not leaving. Again, this is the era of the defense planning guidance, America will dominate

08:56:03.000 | the planet, you can call it empire, you can call it dominance, you can call it preeminence, or

08:56:09.960 | primacy. Zbigniew Brzezinski liked to call it. Krystal and Kagan called it benevolent global hegemony.

08:56:20.600 | This is the unipolar moment of Charles Krauthammer. And in fact, in his rejoinder to Jean Kirkpatrick,

08:56:28.040 | he said we should stop at nothing short of global domination. And so this was the idea. And in the defense

08:56:36.280 | planning guidance, just as in the famous study by the project for new American century,

08:56:41.880 | Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan's group, that was called rebuilding America's defenses that came out

08:56:46.840 | in 1998. And by the way, you can find, I'm pretty sure you can find both at scotthorton.org/fairuse,

08:56:54.120 | the defense planning guidance for 1994, again, written in 1992. And there are two different versions of

08:57:00.040 | it, they made him rewrite it, but it's essentially the same thing. And then the project for new American

08:57:05.160 | centuries, rebuilding America's defenses. And these are basic neocon doctrine for the end of the 20th

08:57:12.840 | century. And where they say, hey, we have to stay in the Middle East to contain Saddam Hussein first and

08:57:19.880 | foremost. Freed Zacharias said in the 90s, Saddam Hussein is our linchpin in the Middle East. If he did not

08:57:25.880 | exist, we would have to invent him, get it as an enemy to have. So we have an excuse to stay. So

08:57:31.960 | we have to expand in the Middle East. And this is the whole story as we've told so far here.

08:57:39.240 | But then also, we have to expand NATO. That's the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,

08:57:44.040 | America's military alliance with Britain, France, and the other Western democracies, including Western

08:57:49.320 | Germany and now Germany and the rest as we've incorporated more and more in Eastern Europe as

08:57:53.800 | well. Our military alliance, we have to expand it into Eastern Europe. And there's a huge question at

08:57:59.640 | the time about like the obvious thing was after our great peaceful victory here. I mean, for people who are

08:58:09.560 | too young for this and don't understand or something like, if you were to ever believe in magic or God or

08:58:15.480 | miracles or something like that kind of a thing, the Soviet Union essentially just fell away in

08:58:24.680 | peaceful revolutions and simple withdrawals in almost every case. Now, the dictator in Romania and his wife

08:58:31.800 | were put up against the wall, a machine gun to death. Civil war broke out in Tajikistan, I think, and there was

08:58:38.600 | fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and it was not perfect. But man, on the sliding scale of grading

08:58:46.520 | things on a curve flex, it was perfect, man. You could not have had magic wishes come true in a way

08:58:54.040 | to make the Soviet Union just dissolve away the way they did. That kind of peaceful victory was the kind of

08:59:00.680 | thing where it was like how best in deep senses of that term to take advantage of this. We really have a huge

08:59:09.720 | responsibility for how we act now. And so one of the things that occurred to them immediately was, as so many of them

08:59:17.560 | put it, them being the foreign policy establishment and including the administration, uh, Bush senior and Bill Clinton, too. We don't want to

08:59:27.880 | move the dividing lines in Europe further east. We want to erase them completely. We want a Europe that's

08:59:37.080 | whole and free. Does that or does that not include the Russians? But at first the message was, yes, it does.

08:59:46.120 | And George Bush senior said, uh, we want to have a single zone of peace from Vancouver to Vladivostok,

08:59:55.160 | meaning the entire Northern hemisphere. Now, this is why I was such a new world order kook in the 1990s

09:00:00.840 | is because there were enough. Threads of things like this were part one side of the argument was

09:00:07.720 | essentially that, yes, we should bring Russia into NATO too. Now, what's that to me in my mind that fit in

09:00:17.240 | with G. Edward Griffin's John Bircher grand design conspiracy where you take the two enemies, move them

09:00:24.200 | together, and they're going to form basically like a single white world army of the north to then lord it

09:00:29.640 | against Islamic South Asia and or China. And, but it would essentially be the single one world army of the

09:00:36.760 | one world government under the United Nations in this new alliance between the United States and Russia.

09:00:43.720 | But that was not true at all. That was not right. And the woolly headed one worlders like

09:00:49.400 | strobe Talbot. That's his own word for himself. Um, that idea that we're going to really befriend

09:00:56.920 | Russia and bring them in from the cold all the way with us was never really on the table for discussion.

09:01:03.000 | It was dismissed essentially immediately. And so like in 1997, when Bill Clinton is throwing

09:01:10.040 | them scraps and giving them the NATO Russia council, I'm going, Oh my God, look, they're doing it. They're

09:01:15.240 | building the NATO Russia council. When in fact, he's given them the stiff arm and treating them like crap.

09:01:20.280 | But I was kidding. I didn't have the internet back then. And it was different times. Um, but so in fact,

09:01:26.200 | in a way, chapter one and two of that book are me grappling with what was really going on at that

09:01:33.160 | time when I thought it was something else back then, I really thought that they were trying to build this

09:01:37.880 | world federalism with Russia and then come to find out that this is Dick Cheney's world, not Al Gore's.

09:01:43.320 | If that's, if that's, does that make sense? Right. That like this liberal Namby Pamby,

09:01:48.040 | baby blue UN flag internationalism, that's just cover for the brute force of American hegemony

09:01:54.440 | over the world. And of course you got to get the liberals on board. So you tell them a bunch of

09:01:58.520 | Namby Pamby stuff to get them on board. Cause they like that kind of thing that, oh, look,

09:02:02.200 | it's all humanitarianism and we're passing out food or, you know, it's world federalism. It's

09:02:07.000 | multilateralism and all of these like little buzzwords that make them feel good about

09:02:11.800 | what we're really doing is seeking essentially a Pax Americana over the world. And so that was

09:02:18.520 | what was going on. Now, obviously if instead of erasing dividing lines, we're just moving them

09:02:25.480 | further east. Was that me? It means that we stop at Russia. You got to ask yourself, how does that look

09:02:32.440 | from Russia's side and how it looks from Russia's side is an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance

09:02:39.720 | encroaching steadily toward their borders? And obviously regards that as a threat.

09:02:47.720 | And when I say, obviously, I mean, the George HW Bush administration understood that that would be a

09:02:54.120 | result of NATO expansion. That's why they lied and said, what we're going to do is we're going to empower

09:03:00.360 | what was then called the CSCE, the conference on security and cooperation on in Europe, which is now

09:03:06.440 | called the OSCE for organization. We're going to empower them and we're going to have a security

09:03:13.320 | partnership. And so what's going to happen is NATO is going to become irrelevant. We're going to

09:03:19.400 | marginalize. NATO is essentially going to become a political organization. So even if it expands, it doesn't

09:03:25.240 | really matter because what we're really talking about is something that's sort of like the EU plus

09:03:28.680 | the United States, but it's going to be relegated to a political organization. And it's going to be

09:03:35.640 | replaced by the CSCE because who needs an alliance? There's no enemy. And we want to be partners with you.

09:03:44.840 | And since Russia and all the middle states in Central and Eastern Europe and Far Eastern Europe,

09:03:51.960 | if you want to call it that, right, the Baltics and Ukraine and Belarus are all members of the CSCE

09:03:57.400 | already since the Helsinki Accords of 1975, well then cool. Presto, everybody's neutrality is baked in

09:04:06.120 | and we're all in it together. But they were lying, man. They never meant to do that.

09:04:11.000 | The plan always was to expand NATO, of course, to keep it a military alliance and to keep it the

09:04:16.280 | center of American power in Europe and to use the CSCE. And then later the Clinton administration's

09:04:22.360 | version of the same scam was called the partnership for peace where Warren Christopher knowingly,

09:04:27.960 | the secretary of state knowingly relied directly to Gorbachev's face and tried to make him believe

09:04:35.240 | that we're doing the partnership for peace instead of NATO expansion. And, or again, reiterating that

09:04:42.600 | NATO is just going to be this political thing and it's not, we're not really doing much with it anyway

09:04:46.520 | right now at all. When they knew that wasn't true, they had already decided that they were going to

09:04:50.520 | expand NATO for certain. The decision had been made like in stone by then. And they were shining them

09:04:55.960 | on and trying to get them to go along with their further agendas as much as they could get away with,

09:04:59.560 | as long as they could get away with it before breaking the bad news to them that actually we

09:05:03.880 | are expanding NATO after all. Because man, they knew that this is going to destroy Yeltsin.

09:05:10.040 | This is going to cause such pressure against him. In fact, when Clinton gave his speech announcing

09:05:17.960 | that he had been lying and that he really does mean to expand NATO in 1994, Yeltsin freaked out because

09:05:26.520 | he misunderstood that Bill Clinton was saying that we're going to start doing it next year in 95,

09:05:34.200 | which was Clinton had promised him that they definitely would not do that. Yeltsin had to stand

09:05:39.640 | for reelection in 96 and this would absolutely destroy him. And they all knew it. Lex was at me.

09:05:46.680 | That means that every pro American moderate English speaking liberal in Moscow

09:05:52.280 | would be implicated, right? That they said we were cool and we're doing what we promised. We wouldn't

09:06:02.360 | while they were telling everybody else, don't worry about the Americans. We can trust them. It's all good.

09:06:07.400 | And this and that. Right? So they knew this was going to destroy Yeltsin politically.

09:06:12.200 | So they promised that no Boris, no, no, no, man, don't worry. We're not going to do it until after

09:06:18.040 | you're safely reelected in 96. So they absolutely understood all of them understood the depth of how

09:06:24.760 | destructive that would be to him because of how the entire consensus inside Russia at that time in their

09:06:32.040 | entire, you know, political and foreign policy establishment was absolutely opposed to NATO

09:06:37.320 | expansion. And we're of course terrified by it. And this is all before Putin or W. Bush ever come to

09:06:43.400 | town. This is just H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton years and dealing with, um, Mikhail Gorbachev and then

09:06:50.520 | Boris Yeltsin in all of this. And I give credit to Joshua Shifrinson is the great academic. I believe he's now at Cato.

09:06:58.840 | Um, he was at Texas A&M university and I'm not sure where else he has written, but he wrote a bunch

09:07:05.000 | of great journal articles that I learned a hell of a lot from and cite in my book where he shows

09:07:10.280 | explicitly is this beyond argument that they knew that they were lying. They were planning one thing

09:07:16.600 | and they were doing something else. And he, he's very polite and says that they were knowingly misleading.

09:07:22.200 | I think, but I call them damn liars as pretty clear that they were. And so that's a huge part of

09:07:30.440 | it. Just to get us started off here in the 1990s, what are we going to do? Oh, and I'm sorry. Yes,

09:07:36.040 | we're going to expand NATO, but first it's important to, to emphasize that. Yes. In fact, they did promise

09:07:44.920 | not to, and people keep trying to debunk this, but they can't, I have rebunked it and they cannot

09:07:51.640 | at all challenge the facts as I marshal in my book. And it's overkill. This is one of the two sections

09:07:58.920 | where I have probably far more than I need to demonstrate my case because I tried to simply on,

09:08:05.560 | I think I already said this earlier in the review. I'm sorry. On the case of the promises against NATO

09:08:10.360 | expansion and on the subject of the Ukrainian Nazis, I went for absolute overkill on the citation and the

09:08:17.640 | development of the idea and the story and the proof and what it all means, because I feel like those are

09:08:23.320 | the two most controversial stances that I'm taking in the book as being factually true. And I want

09:08:30.200 | the skeptical reader to say, Oh boy, I didn't really realize it was like that when they're done.

09:08:35.560 | So to be clear on the NATO expansion, saying that there was clear indication made official

09:08:41.960 | that NATO promises made by the United States that NATO will not expand.

09:08:47.480 | And not just promises, but it was an agreement that we promise not to expand the NATO alliance if you'll

09:08:55.000 | allow the reunification of Germany. And that was what convinced Gorbachev to say, okay, fine,

09:09:03.400 | we'll agree to withdraw and allow Germany to reunify under NATO. And then the deal is, and as I show in the

09:09:12.280 | book, it's not just that James Baker said this one time on February the 9th, 1990, he said it six times

09:09:21.400 | on February the 9th, 1990. And on many other, in fact, on that same day, Robert Gates, who was then the

09:09:28.200 | deputy secretary of, pardon me, the deputy director of the CIA told the same thing to the director of the KGB in

09:09:37.160 | a meeting on that same day in Moscow. And then the German foreign minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher

09:09:43.000 | said this over and over and over again, including in public at public press conferences, right in front

09:09:47.800 | of James Baker, who only nodded in a cent and never said anything against it, that we promise not only

09:09:53.880 | not to expand NATO, but that includes in, because here's the rub, and this is what makes it a little

09:09:59.880 | complicated. And maybe people's eyes glaze over the war party tries to say, this is all anybody ever meant by

09:10:05.640 | that was Baker said in a weird way that if you allow Germany to reunite, we won't spread NATO one inch

09:10:17.400 | inside Germany. That's where the phrase not one inch comes from. Well, that doesn't make any sense. It's

09:10:25.160 | not like the East German government is going to be the government of the new Germany, right? Bonn is going to

09:10:30.360 | move to Berlin and West Germany is going to be the regime that rules the new reunited Germany, right?

09:10:37.080 | No question about that. So how is it that only the Western half of the country is in NATO? That doesn't

09:10:43.400 | make sense. So then they had to walk that back and go, okay, well, you know what we'll do though is yes,

09:10:49.880 | obviously the whole country will be in NATO, but we promise not to move any substantial military forces

09:10:57.560 | into the then GDR, East Germany. That was short for German democratic republic, which was commie enslaved

09:11:07.560 | East Germany. Um, we promise not to move our forces in there or nuclear weapons into the Eastern part.

09:11:16.600 | So they're still respecting the promise. They're kind of revising it because they have to, because the first

09:11:21.400 | in the first sense, the promise doesn't actually make rational sense, right? You can't really bring,

09:11:27.160 | you can't reunite Germany, but only leave the first half inside the military alliance. Okay. But they said,

09:11:32.760 | okay, but we're not going to build new bases and station forces further East, and we're not going to

09:11:37.320 | put nuclear weapons there. Okay. So they're still respecting that promise. And that part ended up in the

09:11:43.320 | final Washington tree, uh, final treaty that they signed. Now, um, Hans Dietrich Genscher made the

09:11:51.800 | most of this, but so did the chancellor Helmut Kohl. And this is the part of Mary Elise Surratt wrote a

09:11:58.840 | whole book about this called not one inch. And she has a whole hell of a lot on this, uh, as her and

09:12:04.120 | Shiffrinson are probably the two best on it. Although I think he's probably got the edge,

09:12:08.200 | but she shows where Helmut Kohl went and met with Gorbachev. And he knew that HW Bush wanted to

09:12:19.080 | reconsider this and thought that Baker was being too conciliatory. But Helmut Kohl went ahead and stuck

09:12:24.920 | with the day before yesterday's interpretation, or was it just yesterday's interpretation instead of the new

09:12:30.200 | one? Cause he knew that that's what he wanted Gorbachev to hear that this is how it's going to

09:12:35.800 | be. And it was based on that promise from Helmut Kohl that Gorbachev said, okay, fine, you can do it.

09:12:42.440 | And Helmut Kohl said, can I quote you on that right now? And he goes, yeah. And Helmut Kohl went right

09:12:47.000 | outside and held the press conferences that Gorbachev just said that Germany can reunite. Blam. Got it.

09:12:52.040 | Now was that in a treaty? Like right there, it was just a spoken word, but they moved to reunite right

09:12:58.360 | then based on it. The treaty came later, right? So same kind of thing here. They try to argue that

09:13:03.960 | words don't mean things only when it's a treaty ratified by the Senate, but that's not true.

09:13:08.040 | And Shiffrinson especially goes through and shows some examples and there are plenty of others, but

09:13:13.880 | you have the entire arrangement around West Berlin, for example, which your younger

09:13:19.720 | viewers may not know that West Berlin, the Western half of Berlin was a free city,

09:13:24.760 | wholly within common East Germany was still occupied by the U S as a remnant of the second world war.

09:13:30.440 | And so it was a very complicated situation there, but America's entire arrangement with the Soviets

09:13:37.400 | about how to treat West Berlin, checkpoint Charlie and all these things was purely handshake agreements.

09:13:43.960 | They had no treaty at all. And Roosevelt, in fact, when he was still alive, they were already working

09:13:50.520 | on this and said that the agreement that we were already working out over Vienna, Austria should also

09:13:55.960 | apply to Berlin. And he did not want it on a piece of paper because he wanted it specifically for a

09:14:02.600 | trust building measure. And if we don't put it in writing and both sides just have to live up to it

09:14:08.280 | based on what's the right thing to do in the circumstance, then that'll help build our relationship

09:14:12.920 | for the better. And that's really because Roosevelt was a Stalinist commie dictator himself, but don't

09:14:17.880 | get me off on that tangent. But anyway, uh, speaking of one world communism, um, but so

09:14:25.320 | there was no formal arrangement over West Berlin.

09:14:29.880 | Then same thing when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon split Mao Zedong off from the Soviet union in

09:14:35.960 | the cold war made them really our allies in the war. We didn't have a war guarantee, but we had a

09:14:40.920 | deep relationship that they crafted at that time. All handshake deals, nothing official, no treaties.

09:14:49.240 | This is how they handled it. When in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev secretly

09:14:57.800 | with his brother, the attorney general over the heads of and around the CIA and the state department

09:15:03.240 | and made a secret deal with Khrushchev that if you get your missiles out of Cuba, we will remove

09:15:10.120 | our mid range missiles from Turkey. And they didn't even say this, but just implicitly also Italy, where

09:15:18.440 | we had stat, uh, a station, these same Jupiter mid range missiles and, and we promise never to invade Cuba

09:15:26.920 | again. That informal secret deal that wasn't revealed until the end of the cold war. They said at the time,

09:15:35.960 | yeah, Jack Kenny just faced him down. No, he made this secret deal and it held, and it has held this whole time.

09:15:43.640 | They kept the missiles. They've never put missiles back in Turkey. We do have airdropped

09:15:48.440 | and, and, uh, hydrogen bombs and airplanes stationed at the Incirlik base there. Um, but we have not

09:15:54.600 | stationed missiles in Turkey ever since, or in Italy ever since then as, and lived up to that deal, nor

09:16:00.520 | have we invaded, uh, Cuba. Although they did try to murder Castro more times after that, but we haven't

09:16:06.200 | invaded. So that was an informal deal is not only a handshake deal. It was a secret and completely

09:16:11.720 | deniable. And yet they abided by it anyway, because sometimes you got to do that. And that's the way

09:16:17.400 | these things go. When it comes to this, you have Peter Baker in the New York times saying, nah, come

09:16:23.800 | on. If it's not in a treaty, then it's not anything at all, but that's not true. As Ted Snyder said,

09:16:28.520 | this wasn't just a promise. This was an agreement. We promise not to expand NATO. Okay. Can we reunite now?

09:16:35.560 | Yes, you can shake on it. That's a deal. And the Americans lied and broke it and they knew they're

09:16:43.320 | lying and breaking it. And when the Russians started complaining to the Clinton people,

09:16:46.920 | Warren Christopher launched the internal investigation at the state department to

09:16:51.720 | find out if it was true or not. And they decided it was true, but that, oh, well, screw them. We're

09:16:55.960 | going to go ahead. Anyway. Can we, if it's okay, fast forward. As you said, your book is called

09:17:02.120 | provoked, not justified. I should say for me, maybe you can, uh, speak from your perspective

09:17:08.120 | that the reason the war in Ukraine in 22 started was because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

09:17:17.960 | And then you could backtrack like what, why, what he did was he escalated the war in Ukraine by about

09:17:26.680 | a hundred thousand percent. Right. But the war had been going on for a very long time. Right.

09:17:32.440 | And that's very important. You know, it's not just the backstory, but it really is the start of the war

09:17:37.880 | was when John Brennan came to town on April the 12th and 13th of 2014 and demanded that the acting

09:17:46.440 | president Terzhnev launched the war. And he did on the 14th. It was all John Brennan's fault. Like a lot of

09:17:53.800 | things. A drastic escalation

09:17:55.960 | was committed by Vladimir Putin. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. And there's, when we look at responsibility and we

09:18:06.200 | talk about warmongers and we talk about the military industrial complex. Yeah. That's, I think it's really

09:18:12.520 | important to explore from an American perspective, but when you look at the region and who started that

09:18:20.600 | escalation, you have to put the chief responsibility on Vladimir Putin. Of course. The guy's a gangster.

09:18:28.040 | That's how he got a job in the first place. He was part of the Yeltsin family and he had been the deputy

09:18:33.960 | mayor of St. Petersburg, where he worked for a criminal named Sobchak, who was part of the Yeltsin family.

09:18:39.240 | And we say family like the Italian mob in New York families. Uh, that's exactly in this exact same

09:18:46.120 | meaning of that term. That's what they called it at the time. And that was where he came from in the

09:18:50.680 | first place. And his first job really was protecting all the Yeltsin and his guys and getting them out of

09:18:55.080 | the country with all their money safely. And then, you know, taking control of the thing. So we're ahead

09:19:00.680 | of the story a little bit, but the guys in Sob, you know, people say, oh, he's a KGB and he's a commie.

09:19:06.360 | Well, he's not a commie. He sided with the reformers against the coup plotters in August of 1991 when it

09:19:13.480 | counted. Right. And, and also he wasn't a spy. He was a clerk. Like he was, you know, he was a colonel,

09:19:22.680 | but like, I've never seen anything that said he's out slitting throats and bribing people and blackmailing

09:19:29.160 | people and turning spies. He was a operations guy back at headquarters. Um, I know a lady named

09:19:36.200 | Susan Tennyson. You ever heard of her? She's an American who was doing outreach to the Soviet

09:19:41.400 | union in the 1980s, spent her whole lifetime. I think she's still alive. Little old lady,

09:19:45.640 | sweet old lady spent her whole lifetime trying to make friends with Russia. And she talked,

09:19:50.520 | she told me the story about meeting Putin when he was the deputy mayor of, of St. Petersburg and how he

09:19:57.320 | wouldn't take a bribe. He just wanted to get the job done. Whatever the job was, she needs some

09:20:01.080 | bureaucratic hurdles taken. He said, well, check this box and sign here. And thank you very much.

09:20:06.200 | And didn't want her money, which she thought was a really big deal at the time that, wow, like this

09:20:10.840 | guy has a sense of honor and duty and doing his job in a way that nobody else here does. Everybody else

09:20:16.280 | here is a Mexican cop going kicked out. You know what I mean? Everybody, um, and where he wasn't.

09:20:22.440 | So now I'm not saying that makes him a moral guy or whatever, but I'm saying that makes him very much

09:20:27.960 | like a business is business sort of a dude who has his priorities. Like in that way, he's a head of state

09:20:34.200 | in a powerful state. And you have to be in practice, a psychopath to run a country like that, that goes for

09:20:41.480 | Obama and the rest of them too, man. Uh, all of these guys, it's a psychopathic job to kill people.

09:20:47.560 | Uh, and especially in the kind of large numbers, especially that the Americans do, but

09:20:53.000 | Putin's been responsible for a bit of violence of itself, uh, up until even this time. And I don't

09:21:00.120 | think anybody underestimates, I don't, you know, there's some people, I guess, who kinda, they're so anti-American

09:21:07.640 | empire. They start seeing maybe too sympathetic instead of just empathetic with the other side.

09:21:13.000 | Right. And sort of maybe rationalize a bit of the Russian point of view or whatever, in a way that

09:21:17.560 | doesn't appeal to me. I don't, I don't think you have to like, honestly, I don't see anything.

09:21:23.320 | Well, if I have in the book, it's a Bill Hicks quote, there's options. He's talking about pro-life

09:21:29.800 | people ought to be blocking cemeteries and preventing funerals, but he says, there's options.

09:21:34.840 | So I just like little tiny little Easter eggs like that. Putin could have done other things.

09:21:41.080 | Like for example, he could have, um, again, like in 2018 demanded only this time really seriously and

09:21:51.720 | loudly. And with the world paying close attention in a way that they weren't in 18, that I want baby

09:21:57.480 | blue helmet UN peacekeepers from a third non-interested country to go stand on the border of the gray zone

09:22:04.600 | and the Donbass on what's supposed to be the ceasefire line in Eastern Ukraine. And I demand it and I'm

09:22:11.800 | serious and I'm going to come up with ways to force y'all to give into this. In other words,

09:22:15.880 | to ratchet up the tension, not to start the war, but to find a creative way to force the West to implement

09:22:25.960 | the Minsk two deal that the West signed along with Ukraine and Russia in 2015. And that Obama rubber

09:22:34.520 | stamped and that the UN security council rubber stamped and that America and Kyiv had always

09:22:39.160 | refused to implement. He also, and maybe as part of enforcing that, he could have a vow to obstruct

09:22:47.320 | all UN security council business. He's got veto power. He can vote no on anything and just grind the

09:22:53.160 | UN security council to a halt. That's a hell of a lever of pressure. He could have also cut off all gas

09:23:00.520 | to Western Europe through the Nord Stream. He'd already shut off Nord Stream one. I forgot exactly the

09:23:05.400 | offense that caused him to do that. It's in the book, but he had already shut down Nord Stream one.

09:23:10.200 | He could have shut down Nord Stream two, and he could have shut off all the gas pipelines running

09:23:13.560 | through Ukraine as well. This is in the winter of 21. We're talking about in November, December 21,

09:23:19.560 | into January, February 22. It's cold as hell. Europe is up at Canada type latitudes, man, where it's cold

09:23:26.120 | in the winter up there. And he could have played hardball like that. And as I complain in the book as well,

09:23:34.040 | he also could have been just not so damn coy about the thing and where he kept denying that he was going

09:23:40.920 | to invade and saying, well, this is very coercive diplomacy, essentially, but like, come on, just give

09:23:46.520 | in, which I think he did offer treaties. And this is, we're jumping way ahead in the story. I think Biden

09:23:52.280 | could have negotiated his way out of it if he'd been trying to, I think he was not trying to.

09:23:56.440 | So when Biden was president, you were saying that he did not do enough.

09:24:03.000 | Right. To negotiate in good faith. In fact, this is why I thought there wouldn't be a war. It's not

09:24:07.720 | because I didn't think Putin had it in him. I'd been warning for years. He had been warning for years.

09:24:13.320 | And I noticed he had told an Italian diplomat in 2014, you know, I could be in Kyiv in two weeks.

09:24:19.320 | And so this was always the threat that this could get, you know, much worse.

09:24:24.520 | Um, and, but I thought it wouldn't happen because William Burns, who is the author of the

09:24:32.760 | Nyet means Nyet memo. And was, I don't know if he was ever CIA, but he was stationed in the embassy

09:24:38.200 | over there since the 1990s had been Bush's ambassador to Russia. And it was like, if there's one guy who

09:24:44.840 | can work this out with Sergei Lavrov, it's William Burns. And I idiotically thought, I mean, God,

09:24:53.400 | how stupid could I have been that I thought that of course William Burns mandate from Biden will be,

09:25:00.520 | see us through this, prevent this war from happening. And I knew the war was preventable

09:25:06.760 | because the issues on the table were not just some front, some excuse. The issues on the table were

09:25:14.120 | deadly, serious issues of NATO expansion, the potential for missile emplacements in Ukraine,

09:25:20.600 | especially after Trump tore up the non, the, uh, intermediate nuclear forces treaty of 1987,

09:25:27.080 | which would have made it legal for America to station, uh, nuclear missiles in Europe again. And, um,

09:25:34.360 | and the ongoing war in the Donbass. And if, if William Burns had the mandate to figure this out,

09:25:41.800 | dude, then he could have, and I know that he could have, and I know that they did not try to do that.

09:25:47.240 | They never negotiated either of those proposed treaties. One was for the U S one was for NATO

09:25:52.120 | and they were reasonable. And Lex, I have in the book, not just Choss Freeman, the brilliant genius,

09:25:57.480 | you know, career diplomat who went to China with Nixon and was the former ambassador to Saudi and

09:26:03.320 | all these things who told me personally that like, absolutely. This is a reasonable treaty to negotiate.

09:26:09.960 | Am I saying we should sign on the dotted line? Hell no, we don't do that for anyone, but is this

09:26:16.040 | reasonable to sit at a table and negotiate? Absolutely. And I show in the book, Joe Biden administration,

09:26:23.240 | White House officials, possibly state department, but at least high level officials, NSC and or state

09:26:29.960 | told the post and the times that we think these are reasonable treaties and that they should be

09:26:37.800 | negotiated, but then they did not do that. They refused to negotiate those treaties. They refused to

09:26:42.760 | negotiate NATO expansion. They refused to negotiate the emplacement of missiles,

09:26:47.320 | as a potential emplacement of missiles in Ukraine. And they refused to implement Minsk to or do anything

09:26:53.320 | to end the civil war. And in fact, helped to increase it. According to the OSCE,

09:26:58.600 | Kiev was escalating artillery attacks on the other side of the line, uh, into the third week of February of 2022.

09:27:07.080 | And so, listen, there's a quote in there of Putin where he says, you know, I think they're trying

09:27:15.080 | to provoke me into invading. That's not the exact quote, forgive me, but he acknowledges that this

09:27:21.880 | could be a trap, but I really don't know what else to do. And, and quite frankly, I think that's right,

09:27:27.400 | Lex. And I think, and my excuse is, is I was too damn busy recording the audio book of the last war

09:27:33.560 | enough already in the Middle East. I'm one of those generals always behind.

09:27:37.240 | And so I was outsourcing too much of my primary reading to my opinion pieces that I was reading

09:27:46.680 | from smart people and people that I was interviewing at the time, but I wasn't reading just enough of,

09:27:52.200 | hate to say it, but just the post, the times in the journal, that's who the U S government talks to.

09:27:57.160 | So you got to read the post, the times in the journal. And if you read the post in the times in the

09:28:01.240 | journal very carefully from, and a lot of the rest of the media too, from the era of,

09:28:07.320 | especially December of 21 and into January and February 22, you'll find a lot of references to

09:28:14.360 | Afghanistan, not our recent, absolutely humiliating disgraceful failure and ultimate withdrawal

09:28:21.720 | after 20 years, just three months before in the end of the summer of 2021, just three months later,

09:28:30.120 | they have the word Afghanistan in their mouths. We want to replicate the Afghan war, you know, Rambo three,

09:28:38.520 | what we did to the Soviet union in the 1980s, not our Afghan war, their Afghan war, but we're going to do it

09:28:46.920 | this time with the Ukrainian Nazi right as the Mujahideen. And we're going to lure the Russians in,

09:28:54.120 | bog them down and bleed them to bankruptcy, inflict on them a strategic defeat.

09:28:58.920 | Niall Ferguson, who's wife, I humiliated in front of all those people in Las Vegas that time.

09:29:04.360 | He wrote an article in Bloomberg news where he says, look, everybody who's anybody

09:29:11.880 | in Washington and London knows that the policy is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.

09:29:17.480 | We're not trying to dissuade them from invading. And you could just see where right after the start

09:29:23.960 | of the war, somebody asked Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, man, what are we doing to

09:29:28.760 | negotiate an end of this thing? I mean, you would just think that the consensus of all 8 billion of

09:29:34.200 | us would be, you can't have a hot war on Russia's southern western border. This could go nuclear.

09:29:41.240 | We have to cease fire immediately. General strike, call it off. Somebody go to Geneva and figure this

09:29:47.720 | out. That's what everybody thought was happening. And so the reporters asked Ned Price, man, what are we

09:29:52.680 | doing to do the thing, to end the thing? And Ned Price goes, well, you know, there are larger principles

09:29:59.400 | at stake here about independence and sovereignty and the right of a nation to direct its gaze in

09:30:07.400 | whichever direction that it wishes to direct its gaze. In other words, this is sticking with what

09:30:14.040 | they call the open door policy, which says that any country that wants to join NATO can join NATO if we

09:30:21.800 | say so. And no third country can say otherwise. And no third country's security interests will be taken

09:30:29.960 | into account. And you see how they do this in committee. They go, well, does anybody at the table

09:30:33.960 | here think that Russia ought to have veto power over who we allow into our military lines? And of course,

09:30:39.320 | nobody raises their hand when you put it that way. So then that's it. We dismiss that forever. Now we have

09:30:44.520 | an open door. Now, of course, there is no door. No door is just jargon. It's just meaningless garbage,

09:30:50.600 | basically thought up by a bunch of bureaucrats. They could change it just as easy. But instead they say,

09:30:56.200 | nope. Especially when the Russians, and this is pointed out by Stephen Walt and by Samuel Cherup at Rand

09:31:05.640 | pointed out that, yeah, it's hard because once the Russians are demanding that we do these reasonable things,

09:31:13.640 | well, now doing them seems unreasonable because we don't want to give in to their demands.

09:31:18.200 | And so like, no, we and man, this is the worst Joe Biden and Joe Biden has always been the worst since

09:31:27.000 | 1973. But this is him at his absolute most dim witted. So he can't really think hard about any of these

09:31:35.400 | things. And mostly we just speak in historical analogies about World War Two. He's Churchill facing down

09:31:43.240 | Hitler. And so you're going to talk him out of that. You're going to tell him that he ought to be Neville

09:31:50.120 | Chamberlain and appease Hitler at Munich. Of course not. You know what you got to do to a bully, you got

09:31:56.120 | to punch him in the nose. And I'm sure you must have heard this a hundred times in the lead up to this war.

09:32:00.680 | They'd all say this. All these dorks would talk about, yeah, you know how you face down a bully,

09:32:07.080 | you punch him in the nose. Well, how would they know? They never punched a bully in the nose before.

09:32:12.920 | Right? They're dorks. And they now have all this power and think that they know what they're doing.

09:32:19.240 | And the best thing they can do is relive their third grade trauma of getting bullied by me and

09:32:25.640 | my friends on the playground, you know, and they get to pretend like what they're the star of the

09:32:30.440 | baseball team that came and stuck up for the bullied kid. No, no, they're not. That's their little fantasy

09:32:38.280 | that they're playing out. And they would say things like that over and over again.

09:32:42.040 | It's it's Chamberlain at Munich and the bully on the playground, but nobody can just talk about what

09:32:48.120 | about the ongoing war in the Donbass? Can we get off of your analogies? I got an argument again. I,

09:32:53.400 | for the third time, I debated General Wesley Clark about Ukraine on the Pierce Morgan show. And again,

09:32:58.360 | he immediately retreats to World War II fantasies. Well, that's like saying that Stalin should have given

09:33:04.600 | into Hitler because he can't talk about the war. They're losing provost right now.

09:33:11.480 | The war is getting worse and worse for Ukraine all the time. So he has to say, oh, you know what,

09:33:17.880 | the Ukrainians believe hard and you just need to believe hard like them. That's the level of argument

09:33:23.240 | that I got out of General Wesley Clark, the former four star generals, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO

09:33:28.360 | forces in Europe, who served Bill Clinton launching the aggressive war against Kosovo based on lies

09:33:34.040 | in 1999, based on a false claim that the Serbs had murdered a hundred thousand Kosovar Albanians.

09:33:39.800 | When that was a lie and they're fighting for Bin Laden, a bunch of heroin dealers and organ smugglers

09:33:45.240 | and Bin Ladenite terrorists in that war of treason. But anyway, that's General Wesley Clark for you.

09:33:51.080 | But that's basically all they got. It's a bunch of believe hard and a bunch of World War II metaphors

09:33:57.240 | and playground metaphors because they can't talk about the actual war themselves. To be clear, if I may comment,

09:34:03.160 | you're referring to Americans or maybe Europeans. Well, in the foreign policy establishment guts. Right.

09:34:08.600 | I do want to say that Ukrainians, people in Ukraine, and I know many of them are true heroes and they're

09:34:16.360 | fighting for their country. And whether the geopolitics of it makes any sense, it doesn't take away from

09:34:25.160 | the human beings. Yeah, of course. Defending their land. And in absolute hellish warscape, man. I mean,

09:34:31.560 | it's World War I plus drones, right? Muddy trenches and tank rounds and artillery,

09:34:37.720 | airdrop dumb bombs, and drones hunting you. It's an absolute nightmare out there, man. Anybody would

09:34:46.040 | do a telegram that's going, Jesus Christ, looking through the thing. You know, it's not quite as bad

09:34:51.000 | as Gaza. And look, they're conscripts, so it's very unfair. But in essence, they're wearing green in our

09:34:58.280 | fair game out there fighting on the field. Most of the civilians have been able to flee. The civilian deaths

09:35:04.120 | are counted in the single thousands, I believe, low thousands, which is absolutely horrific for those

09:35:11.000 | people. But at least that's like the silver lining is that it's essentially combatants fighting, but

09:35:16.920 | it's still absolute horse show. And you're right that, look, you know, I can't deny the bravery of

09:35:22.040 | anybody out there risking their balls for, you know, any of this stuff. But the thing is, there are different

09:35:27.080 | wars going on, right? There's a war between the United States and Russia going on with a proxy war.

09:35:32.280 | Hell, there's a war with America and China going on with using Ukraine and Russia as our proxies.

09:35:38.280 | Then there's America and Russia using their proxies in Ukraine. Then you have Ukraine,

09:35:45.240 | you know, Kyiv versus Moscow, but then you also have Lviv versus Donetsk, right? And these nationalists

09:35:52.360 | from out West trying to force their version of what Ukraine is supposed to be on the people of the East,

09:35:57.160 | who of course are ethnically and culturally Russian. And I'm not saying that means everyone who is so wants

09:36:02.840 | to join the Russian Federation, but I'm just saying there's a severe culture work going on for dominance

09:36:08.520 | in the country. And all of these wars are planning out at the same time. But then, so anybody who says,

09:36:15.640 | hey, I'm defending my land, my neighborhood, my community, give me a rifle and I'll go do brave

09:36:20.840 | things. Like, hey, that is what it is.

09:36:23.320 | Overall, what's really happened here is the United States of America has gotten their weak friend in a

09:36:29.880 | fight with their stronger, tougher neighbor when we had no ability or intention whatsoever to bail them

09:36:37.640 | out of it. When they said, we're going to give you all the weapons it needs, as much as it takes,

09:36:42.840 | as long as it takes, they knew they were lying. Even Kamala Harris can tell you, Russia is a bigger

09:36:50.760 | country. By the way, that's a real quote. I don't know if you know that, but she sounded like she's

09:36:54.840 | talking to a four year old. And I'm sure she was simply parroting her own advisors from what they told

09:37:02.440 | her. Not even what they told her to say, but what they told her. Ukraine is a country in Europe.

09:37:09.960 | Russia is a bigger country in Europe. Russia is next door to Ukraine and Russia has invaded Ukraine.

09:37:19.560 | And that's bad. And we are against it. When I heard that I thought it was fake or I thought,

09:37:26.280 | come on, she was talking to elementary school kids and you guys are taken out of context. No,

09:37:30.280 | she said that on the black guy morning show on the radio in Chicago. And they looked at her like,

09:37:35.320 | lady, we know that Russia and Ukraine are in Europe. We know that Russia is a bigger country than all

09:37:43.400 | other countries. Tell us something that we don't know. And she didn't know anything that they didn't

09:37:51.480 | know. So she could not tell them. But she could tell them that Russia is bigger than Ukraine. She might

09:37:58.120 | have been able to extrapolate that they have a hell of a lot more available fighting aged males to complete

09:38:04.360 | this war than Ukraine. And they always will. And there's nothing anybody can do about it. Other than if

09:38:09.640 | Joe Biden would be willing to send the United States army in there to fight them. Even the Germans and the

09:38:16.440 | French and the British and the Poles combined couldn't do it without America to help them do it.

09:38:21.080 | It's without America to run the whole thing for them anyway. If you wanted to really whoop the Russians

09:38:26.440 | and drive them out of the Donbass and Zabrosha and Kherson and Crimea, you need to send in the Marines.

09:38:33.400 | You need to send in the Air Force and the Navy. And we're not going to do that, Lex. And Joe Biden said

09:38:40.360 | explicitly, we're not doing that. That's World War Three. We'll give the Ukrainians everything they need

09:38:45.960 | to fight. As you said, zoom all the way in, here's some hero making the ultimate sacrifice. Zoom all

09:38:52.120 | the way out. Here's some damned fool using these people as cannon fodder on some fool's errand.

09:39:00.440 | They can't possibly win to deliver a strategic defeat against the Russians that they have completely

09:39:09.560 | failed to deliver. If anything, they delivered a strategic victory to China by kicking, front

09:39:16.120 | kick, straight in the chest, Russia right out of Europe and into the arms of the Chinese.

09:39:20.520 | When, of course, Russia is the Eastern frontier of European civilization.

09:39:26.600 | And we're doing everything we can to change that. Joe Biden himself said,

09:39:32.360 | no Russian leader in all history has ever thrown in as hard with the West as Vladimir Putin as Joe Biden

09:39:42.360 | himself, who kicked him right back out again. It really seemed that Donald Trump more than

09:39:49.800 | any recent president wanted to make peace. There's a strong will for peace. Why do you think he has not

09:39:57.320 | been successful? Yeah. Okay. Let me just emphasize here. We're skipping a lot to the end and I know

09:40:01.560 | it's late, so it's okay. But there are a lot of other things beside NATO expansion, including tearing

09:40:06.600 | up the treaties, installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Romania and Poland, but that are fired from

09:40:13.800 | dual use launchers, the MK 41 or Mark 41 missile launcher that can also hold Tomahawk cruise missiles.

09:40:20.600 | And while all the while refusing an inspection regime, there's also, of course, overthrowing the

09:40:26.680 | government twice in 10 years in Ukraine, all the other color coded revolutions in Georgia and in

09:40:33.240 | Kyrgyzstan and the rest. And of course, support for the Maidan revolution of 14 and the war that broke

09:40:40.920 | out after that. And as I said, I, I beat essentially every topic that I could think of outstanding between

09:40:49.400 | America and Ukraine and Ukraine that's happened this entire time. I do not spin for the Russians the whole

09:40:54.040 | time. I accused them of plenty of things in there that they actually did. And I defend the truth from false

09:41:00.280 | accusations rather than defending the Russians because screw them and they don't need my help. And this book is not for

09:41:06.920 | them. It's for us. Um, but, um, I, I tried not to leave out anything I mentioned sort of is the epitome, the

09:41:17.480 | Montenegro, weird, phony coup of 16, but we tried to overthrow the government of Belarus three times. Oh, one, oh, five and 20.

09:41:27.080 | Uh, we've been messing around a lot in, in building up this cold war. That's why that book is so long because it is 475,000,

09:41:35.960 | 477,000 words. And, and I don't think wasted. And that does include the footnotes, which by the way, Lex, when I took the

09:41:41.720 | urls out and the, the, the footnotes are font size nine, I believe when I took the urls out that saved me 77 pages.

09:41:52.680 | That's how many articles are, are in there. But if people go to scotthorton.org slash provoked slash notes,

09:42:01.240 | I have a PDF file there of all the notes with their links. I only took the links out at the very last

09:42:08.520 | moment. So there's a PDF file where you can take anything in here and I'll have a working link to it

09:42:16.280 | at scotthorton.org slash provoke slash notes. And people can download the whole PDF of the whole thing.

09:42:20.840 | And it's 375 pages of notes in regular font. How would you recommend one word?

09:42:25.880 | So I've read parts of this that jumped around, um, unless I, my mental health goes to complete

09:42:34.200 | shit. I hope to, uh, travel back to Ukraine and to Russia to interview the key figures there.

09:42:41.720 | And you said that I should definitely read the entirety of the book.

09:42:45.640 | And look, I think it's, it's written to be a page turner all the way through.

09:42:49.240 | And I am outraged. And the book is written from this point of view and it's engaging enough.

09:42:55.800 | And as I say, it's so long because there's so many sub topics. I do not belabor and beat the dead horse

09:43:06.040 | and force you to read a bunch about things that you're not interested anymore. We do the lit,

09:43:11.560 | the Nenko chapter. Then it's over. We do the Belarus chapter. Then we're done and move on to the next subject.

09:43:17.960 | As fast as I can take you through it. It's the same way I wrote the previous books too.

09:43:22.120 | This is what I need to tell you before I let you off the hook and change the channel.

09:43:26.040 | Right. Just like in enough already, I give you four pages on Somalia. I know you're not going to read

09:43:30.920 | six. You might not get to Libya if I try to make you read six on Somalia. So I only gave you four.

09:43:37.960 | You know what I mean? I wrote it that way in the first place. I, I think I proved my point and I give

09:43:43.720 | you, um, you know, the ability to find the proof for yourself, uh, to track these things down further.

09:43:50.840 | If I say these people essentially made this claim in this piece, you can track that down and double

09:43:55.960 | check and see if I'm lying or not, or see if I understood right or whatever. As you go through

09:44:00.520 | there, people will falsely assume that I don't have Ukrainian and Russian sources in there, but I do.

09:44:06.520 | But the thing is, I just, I don't use Cyrillic at all because nobody can read that. So I use Google

09:44:12.280 | translate on the titles. So a lot of times you don't realize that it's, you know, unless you look closely,

09:44:18.120 | you won't realize that these are, there are plenty of foreign sources that I cite in there,

09:44:22.600 | but I just give them their English headlines, um, through Google translator, whatever. So that people

09:44:27.400 | know what they're looking at. But again, I have the links and even the links to the translated versions

09:44:32.440 | of the stories and all of that. Um, but I'm not dodging your question about Trump, by the way,

09:44:37.320 | I do want to talk about that, but I wanted to make it clear that I'm not just saying Bill Clinton

09:44:40.760 | expanded NATO in the nineties. W. Bush did too in the two thousands. Obama did too in the two thousand

09:44:47.080 | teens. And Trump did too, uh, brought Montenegro and Northern Macedonia into NATO. Um,

09:44:52.520 | they there's the color coded revolutions and the missiles and all of these things. Um, and so

09:44:58.840 | it all came to a head essentially in the Biden years and it could have Trump, I think could have

09:45:07.000 | solved it if they hadn't have framed him for Russiagate. By the way, I have 75 pages on Russiagate in

09:45:11.160 | there. It's the most thorough takedown of Russiagate. I think you can find anywhere. Although I don't take

09:45:16.440 | credit, I give credit to the great Russiagate journalists who absolutely destroyed those

09:45:21.880 | lies. People like Paul Sperry and Matt Taibbi, Aaron Matei, and, uh, and Robert Perry, for that

09:45:29.240 | matter, before he died, a Gareth Porter, of course, and so many others who did such great work on

09:45:35.720 | Russiagate. And it's just absolute one hair away from just blowing the guy's head off in Dallas. I don't

09:45:41.320 | know what's the difference. It's unbelievable to have the CIA and the FBI come at the president of

09:45:46.280 | the United States this way, come in a major party candidate for president this way. And then the

09:45:50.360 | president elect, and then the sitting president United States. So I'm not trying to overthrow

09:45:54.920 | him with the 25th amendment, hire a special counsel to pretend to investigate him for another two years.

09:46:00.200 | These people should have all of their profit property confiscated. They and their families should be

09:46:06.200 | exiled from the United States forever. Everyone involved in that plot, everyone involved at

09:46:10.600 | Perkins Coy, everybody involved at the Georgia tech team, everybody involved in, uh, you know,

09:46:16.280 | Glenn Simpson and his fusion GPS, everyone at the FBI and CIA and NSA and any of the government agencies

09:46:23.800 | who went along with that plot ought to all be kicked out of the United States forever and their great

09:46:28.200 | grandchildren. As you write, it was the CIA and FBI, as well as the Clinton campaign and their agents that did

09:46:35.240 | this to Trump, the front runner from major party candidates for the U S president, later the

09:46:40.360 | Republican nominee, president elect, and eventually sitting chief executive. None of it was true.

09:46:46.280 | And you go on and more of that's coming out all the time about just how not true it was and just how

09:46:52.200 | not true they already knew it was. And I have so much in there and I, I beg your audience to read the

09:46:58.360 | Durham report. There are new, uh, newly declassified, uh, appendixes, uh, to it that are just being

09:47:05.000 | released as we record. This one came out yesterday. Um, and so we're going to get much, much more about

09:47:11.400 | the origins of Russia get here, but Lex, the, the, at the bottom line, they go, okay, after it all falls

09:47:16.760 | away, still Russia hacked the DNC and gave it to WikiLeaks. No, as a lie. And it was CrowdStrike that

09:47:24.520 | made up that lie in combination with the Georgia tech team and DARPA at the Pentagon. I have trouble

09:47:30.600 | keeping track of exactly at all. People should follow undead FOIA on sub stack. He's brilliant,

09:47:35.480 | anonymous guy, uh, brilliant analyst to this stuff. Um, the core allegation there, there's no proof of that

09:47:41.960 | whatsoever. And now we know for a fact, we only just found this out. Read Aaron Maté at Real

09:47:47.000 | Clear Investigations. And we know for a fact now that the FBI and the NSA gave, no, pardon me,

09:47:54.280 | CIA and NSA, is it FBI and NSA? FBI and NSA gave it only low to moderate confidence. In other words,

09:48:05.640 | none of this information came from the national security agency. They're the ones who would really know.

09:48:10.920 | And the CIA and the FBI had both already debunked this stuff before they started to pretend to believe

09:48:18.680 | it again. And part of it is because of compartmentalization inside the agencies.

09:48:22.840 | These analysts are in charge of looking at this. These analysts are in charge of looking at that,

09:48:26.920 | but Brennan and Comey are in charge of ignoring all of the disputing information and cherry picking out

09:48:33.080 | all the rest to try to make it look true. And man, what a fraud. I mean, we are talking on the level of the

09:48:39.800 | Branch Davidians killed themselves on the level of Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons to murder

09:48:45.080 | you with. Bashar al-Assad woke up one morning and decided to murder the entire population of his

09:48:50.040 | country. So it's a good thing that USA and Al-Qaeda are here to protect the poor population of Syria from

09:48:55.880 | his wrath. And it's on that level of lie. It is unbelievable what they did to him. And

09:49:05.320 | you know, I have so many problems with Donald Trump, but man, I hate his enemies and I would

09:49:09.560 | love to see him ruthlessly, lawlessly persecute these people. They deserve to suffer for what they

09:49:15.560 | did to him and to this country, putting us through that. Think of how many women bankrupted their husbands

09:49:22.360 | with therapy bills because they were that convinced that the Russians had done a coup d'etat and installed

09:49:28.360 | the Nazi fascist white supremacist to overthrow us. They heard it on national public radio.

09:49:33.480 | They're freaking out, man. I mean, you could come up if you wanted to, you could have a conspiracy theory where it was the drug

09:49:40.920 | companies that did this just to sell more Zoloft to these people. They drove them up the wall. Like,

09:49:47.000 | see, Lex, the problem is, you know better, dude, but pretend for a minute that you're one of these

09:49:51.240 | idiot women that listens to Mara Liason on national public radio. And she says the Russians did a coup

09:49:58.040 | and put a maturing candidate in power, usurped Hillary Clinton's rightful throne. And he hates

09:50:03.160 | all the blacks and the trans. He's going to murder them all and start and, you know, attack Canada or

09:50:09.160 | whatever. They were terrified. They were terrified. It's no less cynical than what W. Bush did when he

09:50:16.040 | said, oh yeah, be afraid, be very afraid. You won't be safe until a year and a half from now when I get to

09:50:21.640 | invade Iraq. You know how many people on the edge of sanity went over? People did. I know for a fact

09:50:28.120 | people did. I know stories of people who were driven crazy by that stress of believing that every

09:50:32.840 | Arab they see is a murderer, terrorist trying to kill them. People believe in that. People think that

09:50:38.520 | their leaders wouldn't lie to them. Willie Nelson said, they wouldn't lie to me, not on my own damn TV.

09:50:45.720 | Yeah, they would too. The ones you love the most, you're a Republican. It's the Republicans that are

09:50:52.040 | lying to you. You're a Democrat. You have no idea how much they despise you. They lie right to your

09:50:58.120 | face. And they think it's funny when you believe it. They enjoy your terror because your fear and upset

09:51:06.440 | makes it easier for them to do wrong. That's what it's about. That's what it's all about. Why'd they do

09:51:13.560 | this to Trump? Because he said he wanted to get along with Russia. He wasn't going to give them our nuclear

09:51:18.920 | codes. He even said, Lex, I'm doing this because I talked to Henry Kissinger and Henry Kissinger said,

09:51:25.720 | wow, you're the tallest, smartest, most handsome, wealthiest, successful person I've ever met. And

09:51:30.840 | you have a very smart Russia policy, which is to split Russia away from China. Is that because they

09:51:38.440 | have a black male pee tape of Donald Trump and his prostitutes? No. It's what Henry Kissinger,

09:51:45.560 | Nelson Rockefeller's man wanted. The grand Republican, grand strategist of American foreign policy,

09:51:54.760 | for he only died a few years ago, right? And he was still writing books. I mean, they were still turning to

09:52:00.920 | him for advice for decades. This guy, since the 1970s, since before I was born, Henry Kissinger,

09:52:08.600 | the most important counselor to Richard Nixon about what are we going to do about the Soviet Union and

09:52:15.080 | China. He told Trump, yes, Trump, I agree with you. That's what we should do. We should do what it takes

09:52:20.920 | to befriend Russia so that we can contain China. Now I'm not a China hawk, but whatever, man,

09:52:27.000 | that's the point. And there's another major point here to mention too, which as I was saying before,

09:52:32.600 | in this book, I don't quote a whole lot of Buchanan and Paul. I give them the credit that they deserve,

09:52:37.880 | but I make a special point to constantly quote Kissinger and Brzezinski and their contemporaries,

09:52:43.960 | where they admit these are the vanguard of the NATO expanders. And Brzezinski especially was an

09:52:50.760 | anti-Russia hawk. He's the son of Polish aristocrats and fierce anti-communist and

09:52:56.680 | an anti-Russian even still too after. And they all said, we have to come up with a special status for

09:53:05.000 | Ukraine because it's so closely intertwined with Russia dating back hundreds of years. And even the

09:53:12.760 | foundation of Russian civilization began in Kyiv before traveling, moving to the center of gravity to Moscow.

09:53:20.600 | And as Kissinger said, Ukraine has been part of Russia for 300 years. And this is not just some

09:53:28.840 | deal where we just get to do what we want. We have to take into account how deeply complicated this is

09:53:35.400 | and how deeply riven Ukrainian society is, especially on who do we want to run with. And they said, so what we

09:53:44.200 | have to do is we have to create a special status for Ukraine, just like we had for Austria and Finland

09:53:50.840 | in the old Cold War, where Austria and Finland were not members of the Warsaw Pact, nor were they members

09:53:56.920 | of NATO. And they did not have troops. Well, they did have Soviet troops still occupied Austria for a

09:54:02.520 | while. They finally didn't, I don't think they withdrew until the fifties, but they eventually did

09:54:06.360 | withdraw. But they were not members, they were not forced to be made members of the Warsaw Pact,

09:54:11.960 | like all the rest of the Eastern European states were. They had no choice but to join with sock puppet

09:54:16.600 | commie dictatorships, run out of the Kremlin and everything. And so, but Austria and Finland had this

09:54:23.240 | neutral status in the last Cold War. And they said, well, that's what we want to do again. That's what we need to do for Ukraine.

09:54:28.360 | That's again, Kissinger and Brzezinski, who were not neoconservatives, but were very hawkish on NATO

09:54:35.560 | expansion and on Russia and on, and on NATO expansion being for the purposes of containing Russia, no fooling

09:54:43.720 | about it. But in this case, man, if we try to take Ukraine away, the Russians are going to break it because

09:54:50.520 | in fact, it ain't going anywhere. It's stuck next to Russia. This is another thing that Obama explained to

09:54:56.840 | Jeffrey Goldberg that well, Jeffrey Goldberg, Russia is always going to have escalation dominance in

09:55:03.000 | Ukraine because it's right there. And it means a lot more to them than it does to us. They are willing to

09:55:11.400 | go much further than we are. And then he says to Goldberg, he challenges him. And he says, this is after

09:55:17.320 | Obama's coup has put whatever transition of power has led to the loss of Crimea. And he says,

09:55:26.600 | Jeffrey Goldberg, you tell me who in Washington says that we ought to put American boys on the ground to

09:55:34.920 | secure the independence of the Donbass from Russia. Can you name me somebody who's ready to do that right

09:55:41.080 | now? No, of course not. So the rest of Washington pipe down, right? You keep saying we're not doing

09:55:48.040 | enough, but there's nothing we can do that won't get NATO into a war with the Russian Federation.

09:55:54.760 | And as even Robert Kagan, I'm ruining the end of the book. Now, even Robert Kagan said, you know what,

09:56:02.840 | it actually doesn't matter to the United States who runs Ukraine, the Northern coast of the Black Sea,

09:56:09.240 | that's so far beyond our jurisdiction. And this is Kagan's words, not mine, Lex. He, and I don't agree

09:56:15.560 | with him about this at all. But he says, you understand his context, what he means here. He says,

09:56:21.400 | The Soviet Union dominated Ukraine the whole time after World War II. And we think of those as the

09:56:27.640 | good old days. Now, I do not. I know people who are enslaved by the communists in Ukraine in those

09:56:33.400 | good old days. There's nothing good about them at all. Okay. But what he was saying was America never

09:56:39.080 | had a problem with Russian dominance in Ukraine. We always called it the Ukraine. And we always

09:56:44.600 | pronounced it Kyiv. And what are you talking about? That we're willing to go to the map for the Donbass?

09:56:50.440 | No, dude, makes no sense. And the mat is H-bombs burning hotter than the sun. So we cannot fight them.

09:56:59.400 | And certainly not over this. They're rolling on Berlin, call me. They're rolling on London,

09:57:05.720 | they're going to nuke London. Man, I'd hate to see the world in that way. But maybe we would have to

09:57:10.920 | fight for the Brits. Lex, I'm really more of a continental defense kind of guy myself,

09:57:16.200 | to tell you the truth. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about

09:57:20.680 | Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, that's Central Europe. Or maybe the Czech

09:57:31.240 | Republic of Slovakia, that's Eastern Europe. Bulgaria, Romania, that's Eastern Europe. Ukraine

09:57:38.200 | is east of Eastern Europe. Right? Brent Skrokov said, we only wanted to liberate Eastern Europe,

09:57:45.880 | not Ukraine. Okay, this is too far away. It's not our concern. And it's not to say that, oh, yeah,

09:57:57.160 | no, it's fine for Russia to invade and kill and dominate this place with violence because, hey,

09:58:02.280 | that's their sphere of influence. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it was suicidal madness for

09:58:08.600 | them to go along with America's push, for them to join our military alliance. That's as much respecting

09:58:16.120 | of Russia's sphere of influence as they needed to do, was not mess with that. That's what got them in

09:58:23.800 | trouble. That's what made the Russians say, look, it's either sooner or later. It might as well be now.

09:58:29.960 | The longer we wait, the more the Americans build up their forces and we're going to end up having to

09:58:34.600 | fight them anyway. They were making them a de facto member of NATO with what they called interoperability,

09:58:41.160 | normalizing their military forces with ours as much as possible, making them a de facto auxiliary of the

09:58:47.880 | NATO alliance. So that if NATO ever fought the Russian Federation, just like Germany and

09:58:53.720 | Lithuania and Hungary and Poland and the rest, the Ukrainian army would be one other auxiliary army

09:59:00.200 | fighting under United American NATO command. That's what we were doing with them without the article five

09:59:07.160 | war guarantee that we promised to come protect you, but still normalizing and integrating their military

09:59:13.880 | force with ours is one standard thing, constantly training with them, changing their equipment,

09:59:18.120 | changing their command and control structure, everything to mirror NATO standards. And so

09:59:24.200 | it was a legitimate threat. Putin said in his speech, when he declared war, he said, if the,

09:59:30.440 | if the Americans put Tomahawk cruise missiles in Harkiv, they'll have a flight time to Moscow at 25 minutes.

09:59:39.000 | If they put ballistic missiles in Harkiv, they could get here in 10. They're new nuclear ballistic missiles

09:59:46.040 | that they're making after they have torn up the intermediate nuclear forces treaty of 1987.

09:59:52.040 | And if they put hypersonics there, they could hit Moscow in five minutes. He said, it's like a knife to

09:59:58.440 | the throat. Now you don't have to sympathize with the Russians at all. You could hate them and want the

10:00:04.920 | Chinese to kill them all for you. I don't know. But you have to admit that these are serious,

10:00:10.280 | incredible security concerns. This is not a bunch of bluster and a bunch of bluffing and a bunch of

10:00:15.320 | ideological, you know, you know, garbage or propaganda. And it's, and it's not the nationalist

10:00:23.800 | theories of some romantic swept away by visions of a lost glorious past that he wants to regain. And all

10:00:31.320 | these things, as everyone says, as I said to Pierce Morgan, the day before yesterday,

10:00:36.520 | that's the weapons of mass destruction of this war is that Putin woke up and started this war because

10:00:43.240 | of what an aggressor he is. And that there's no backstory that anybody needs to know about how

10:00:48.280 | America put Ukraine in the position of getting their ass whooped by their bigger next door neighbor in this

10:00:54.440 | way. That's the lie under the whole thing. The same way that Clinton lied to send to Kosovo with

10:00:59.800 | the hundred thousand dead Kosovars, Bush with his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Obama with his

10:01:05.720 | impending genocide in Benghazi and Libya. Give me a break. All of these lies. That's the lie of this one.

10:01:13.000 | Unprovoked attack. Unprovoked attack. It's like white separatist Randy Weaver. You have to say that.

10:01:20.280 | You can't just say Randy Weaver. You can't say Randy Weaver, survivor of a boy and a dog and a woman,

10:01:26.280 | his wife who were slaughtered by federal agents. No, you have to call him white separatist Randy Weaver.

10:01:33.880 | Well, Russia's attack has to be unprovoked attack. Oh, look at this shiny coin. Unprovoked attack.

10:01:42.920 | And that works on people. Somehow people don't just rebel against that and say, wait a minute,

10:01:47.080 | are you calling me stupid or something? Why would you mandate that we call it that in such a way

10:01:55.560 | if you weren't lying and covering up for the fact that you provoked it and you know you did,

10:02:02.680 | which is clearly the case. That's why they called it that. You know, you could call it an unprovoked

10:02:08.600 | attack sometimes. They called it an unprovoked attack a hundred thousand times because the

10:02:13.640 | public relations firms decided that this is the lie and this is the best way to stick it to the American

10:02:19.000 | people. It's absurd how easily moved the Americans are. Just give us some lies. And by the way,

10:02:30.120 | our Zionist friend would say that I just blame the Israelis for everything. Well,

10:02:34.920 | the only role that the Israelis play in my book is Naftali Bennett, the guy who caused the September

10:02:40.200 | 11th attack. It tried to end the war, tried to negotiate in good faith and do shuttle diplomacy

10:02:45.880 | between Ukraine and Russia and tried to stop the war right after it started in the spring of 2022.

10:02:51.720 | And that's all I have to say about the Israelis role in any of this part, other than it was their

10:02:56.520 | fifth column, the neoconservatives in America who really got our policy off this way in the first

10:03:02.280 | place. And Robert Kagan's disgusting wife, Victoria Newland, who really was the ringleader behind the

10:03:08.840 | overthrow of 2014, which was even what Carl Gershman, the head of the NED called it was the overthrow of

10:03:14.760 | the government there that they did. What can Trump do to help bring peace in Ukraine? As I mentioned,

10:03:25.000 | that he legitimately, from every interaction I've had from everything I understand, he

10:03:31.400 | legitimately wanted to make peace very quickly. I agree. I think he's totally sincere about it too.

10:03:35.880 | But why was he not successful? Okay. And how can he be successful? What are your thoughts on that?

10:03:41.800 | I don't have an answer to the second one. I don't know what the hell he's going to do. I'll tell you what,

10:03:49.960 | the backstory here is that in September of 22, the weekend of September 11th, in fact, of 22,

10:03:56.600 | Ukraine had their best few days. They had a brilliant feint where they started building up

10:04:02.840 | forces in Kursan, and they convinced the Russians to move forces to Kursan. Then they made a huge move

10:04:09.320 | in Kharkiv and forced all the Russians out of Kharkiv and back into Luhansk. And then they also

10:04:17.240 | hit them in Kursan, down at the river and kicked them back across the river. And so maintain that one

10:04:25.400 | third of Kursan on the right bank, I guess I'd call it the right bank.

10:04:29.880 | Yeah. They were extremely successful, uh, in those offensives at that time, probably the most,

10:04:35.400 | the biggest success, arguably the basic success of the war.

10:04:38.360 | Absolutely. And it's been all downhill from there. And the worst thing probably of all is that Putin

10:04:43.960 | said, oh yeah, well, I hereby annex Aprosia and Kursan too. And these are the two provinces between

10:04:49.800 | the Donbass and the Crimea. And he hadn't claimed them yet. Now this is the so-called land bridge.

10:04:56.680 | Importantly, the Ukrainians gave them a real motive to do this because they had cut off the

10:05:02.280 | fresh water. There was a canal from the Dnieper river down to Crimea and to collectively punish

10:05:08.360 | the people of Crimea. They cut off the water resources there, which they still had enough

10:05:13.960 | for drinking water, but they did not have enough for any agriculture or anything else. And it really

10:05:18.920 | hurt them a lot. So they already had their pretext there to take that territory so they could reopen that

10:05:24.520 | channel of fresh water to Crimea. And then he was just angry. His men were humiliated on the ground

10:05:31.800 | there. And he said, oh yeah, well, I hear by annex two more oblasts then. Then they passed a law in

10:05:36.840 | the Duma and he signed it. Right. And I guess it's two houses. He signed a law and said, we've now redrawn

10:05:44.520 | the Russian border here. Okay. But now if you look at how they're fighting the war and I'm not a military

10:05:50.120 | expert on this, but I know some, and for example, Colonel Douglas McGregor and Lieutenant Colonel

10:05:55.160 | Danny Davis, I think Davis is the one I trust the best. Can I take a small tangent on that? Sure.

10:06:01.320 | Uh, just to give a shout out to Daniel L Davis that you mentioned, excellent podcast, somebody that I've

10:06:07.400 | had a bunch of conversations with, uh, privately. He's a sweetheart. Oh, he's a wonderful man. First of all,

10:06:13.960 | his backstory is a fascinating one, but also, uh, he's extremely knowledgeable on the very nuanced

10:06:23.160 | details of all aspects of military operations. Absolutely does. As I mentioned an eon ago,

10:06:29.800 | when we began this interview that in Iraq war one, it was Colonel McGregor with McMaster and Davis under him

10:06:39.640 | that did the battle of 73 Easting against the Iraqi army and what the Soviet tanks is where they both,

10:06:47.000 | all three come from. McMaster sold his soul to Satan and McGregor and Davis have been good guy. Well,

10:06:54.760 | at least since Iraq war two. Now, I don't know if you know this about Danny Davis, I guess you probably do,

10:07:02.920 | but your audience doesn't that he was the heroic whistleblower of the Afghan war in 2012. Do you know

10:07:11.480 | that story? So in 2009, there was a former Marine captain turned state department employee named Matthew

10:07:20.120 | Ho. And he warned Obama not to do the surge. And his boss, the ambassador, I can bury. He had been the

10:07:30.520 | general in charge of the war previously. And I can bury backed up Ho and said, don't do the surge.

10:07:36.600 | That's all Obama needed to hide behind was I can bury and Ho. And he could have said no. And instead

10:07:41.640 | he gave in and he ordered the escalation. He had already sent 40,000 troops. Then he announced he's

10:07:46.760 | sending 30,000 more for a total of 70,000 additional troops. The giant horrific failed Afghan surge of 2009

10:07:54.200 | through 12. And then at the end, Davis was the whistleblower who broke ranks, testified before

10:08:01.560 | the Senate and published an article in the armed forces journal saying that David Petraeus is a liar.

10:08:07.560 | And that America has not achieved what Petraeus called success. Cause he wouldn't dare call it victory

10:08:13.560 | in the war in Afghanistan. And that here's the real truth. And here's how Davis knew is he had a special job,

10:08:20.040 | which was arming and equipping all the guys all around the country, whatever they needed. His job

10:08:25.800 | was to go and give them whatever equipment. So that gave him a special insight into the war. Cause he

10:08:30.760 | was going to all areas of the country and seeing the guys everywhere that they were. And he said the same

10:08:36.520 | thing that Matthew Ho said. So these boys are getting killed for this. And then as, as Ho had pointed,

10:08:43.960 | like, how am I supposed to write a letter home to this guy's wife and say that he died a good death

10:08:49.800 | when I know it's not true. And same thing with Davis, like these guys, you know, how military guys are.

10:08:56.920 | They talk about, these are my men. They're mine, you know? And so what do you do when they're dying for

10:09:03.880 | nothing? And so Davis said enough of this and came home and did what he could told the truth to end the

10:09:10.840 | war. And he's a great American patriot and he, you're right. He's a brilliant genius too. And

10:09:15.800 | he's a brilliant war analyst on all the wars, particularly Ukraine right now. That's his show

10:09:20.840 | is Daniel Davis deep dive. Yeah. I highly recommend people listening to DDD, uh, Daniel Davis deep dive.

10:09:27.400 | It's on YouTube. It's on all the podcast platforms. He served for 21 years in the army with four combat

10:09:33.960 | deployments. And he's got stars and things too, man. Yeah. And, but the most heroic thing he ever did was quit.

10:09:40.760 | And tell the truth. Um, but anyway, I trust his analysis of the war better than anybody else.

10:09:46.600 | There's another, uh, guy, um, I really like named Willie OAM. His name is Matt Williams. He's an

10:09:53.080 | Australian veteran of the war in Afghanistan. You'd really like him. Um, he's a brilliant war analyst.

10:09:59.800 | He looks at the maps every day and analyzes day by day by day. Oh, see, there's where he interviewed me.

10:10:06.040 | Um, he's a wonderful guy. I'm afraid he's got cancer right now, but, uh, he's, he's hanging in

10:10:12.680 | there and, and he's, uh, he's just a brilliant analyst of the war. You'd really like him. And he

10:10:17.000 | goes day by day by day. He shows who's taken how much land. This is why I could only shake my head

10:10:22.520 | at Wesley Clark the other day that I'm going, listen, the Russians are sending on the battlefield,

10:10:27.960 | dude. There's no reversing this. Believe harder. Come on, man. And, and, and he acts like, what are

10:10:35.000 | you talking about Horton? The Russians aren't winning. It's like, yeah, they are dude. They

10:10:41.800 | are Danny Davis and, and Willie OAM. They're not wrong about that. You know, these reports,

10:10:49.560 | this depends, I guess, on who you're reading. And I do see some kind of wishful thinking from

10:10:54.520 | people from time to time, but no Lord, they are losing. Provoska is about to fall. They move.

10:11:02.280 | They have virtually a hundred percent of Luhansk. They are making major gains in Donetsk and they're

10:11:09.720 | making moves in the Dnipro provosk, which is the big, I can never say it right, but that's as good

10:11:16.040 | as I could ever get of the pro, the Oblast between the river and the Donbass there. And of course there's

10:11:22.680 | Sumi and Harkiv in the north. And all of this is still in danger of being taken. Um, oh, and I'm sorry,

10:11:30.520 | because I never really answered your question right about Trump. Trump's problem is Lex, that he got

10:11:35.080 | just elected and inaugurated at the wrong time for his second term here. And the Russians, they annexed

10:11:42.200 | those territories, but they don't control them. Daniel Davis, our tangent here, he explains that

10:11:48.920 | the strategy in the war is to fight a war of attrition, to grind up Ukrainian forces with artillery and airdrop bombs,

10:11:58.040 | and move slowly to preserve Russian soldiers' lives and make the other guys die more.

10:12:04.440 | Daniel Davis: Now, typically, and this is in some specialized stuff out of my

10:12:09.080 | purview, but it's like, they say that like

10:12:11.720 | it, you'll lose three, three, it's three to one, uh, disadvantage for the advancing army on a defensive

10:12:19.960 | position or whatever. That doesn't hold in all cases. And I think I may even have said that wrong.

10:12:23.720 | Somebody tried to correct me on that recently. Like it's, it's not exactly that way, but the thing is,

10:12:28.600 | it's more dangerous, obviously, to move on a defensive position than to remain in one, like all

10:12:33.160 | other things being equal, I guess. But then they just have way more artillery and way more time.

10:12:41.640 | And they can just move very slowly and make sure that actually the defenders die at a much higher

10:12:47.080 | rate than they do. And they're not running out of artillery and they're not running out of men.

10:12:51.560 | They've not even launched a full scale mobilization for the war. People know that they're winning.

10:12:57.160 | And so they're volunteering to go and get some. And, um, and they're, they can afford their economy

10:13:03.480 | is not crushed. And so they can afford to pay bonuses and have people sign up. And while meanwhile,

10:13:10.840 | Ukraine's on a conscript army that's had at least tens and some reports say more than a hundred thousand

10:13:17.080 | of deserters flee the front lines, refuse to fight. There's been at least hundreds of people

10:13:21.800 | have drowned to death in the Dniester river on the border with Moldova trying to escape. Um,

10:13:28.760 | people, oppressed gangs, riding around in vans, beating people up and kidnapping them and throwing

10:13:35.320 | them in the back of the van and taking them off to the front to be killed in a few hours.

10:13:38.920 | I mean, it's a horror show over there, man. And then, and I don't know if Ukraine is going to survive

10:13:44.680 | because see, and this is part of my argument. And I said this in my four hour speech right after the

10:13:49.880 | war began that, and I was assuming then as a lot of people did, that the Russians were going to have

10:13:54.280 | a lot more success, a lot sooner. And that the Ukrainian military would essentially be smashed and

10:13:58.920 | they'd be fighting an insurgency here, which is what that was plan. B plan a was to warn them. Don't

10:14:04.840 | you do it. Plan B was we're going to back the Mujahideen. In other words, the, the Nazis,

10:14:11.000 | right sector and Azob and whatever, because the military will be smashed and Russia will dominate

10:14:16.280 | the entire East of the country. At least was the presumption going in by the American side.

10:14:21.560 | So we're now on like plan C was actually better than plan B, right? They skipped a step and wanting

10:14:28.760 | to back an insurgency. The state army has been able to hold, we're recording this thing three and a half

10:14:33.720 | years into the war and the state army still exists. They've still been able to pour arms in there all this

10:14:39.320 | time and keep the thing going for now. But as I predicted in that speech, I said, you know,

10:14:43.720 | this could be a real Pyrrhic victory for the Russians and Russia's government is a government program.

10:14:52.840 | And all they do is fail upwards in their self licking ice cream cone fashion. That's not a

10:14:58.360 | special reality about Americans. That's a speciality about the economics of government monopolies on security

10:15:06.680 | forces, right? And so think about the map for a minute. Putin just went in there and drew a line

10:15:14.280 | around all the pro Russians. Not that everyone who's an ethnic Russian and a Russian speaker in Ukraine

10:15:20.200 | wanted to join the Russian Federation, but I'm sure you've seen the election result maps where it goes

10:15:26.040 | from dark blue to dark red and a real kind of grayscale fade in between there, where when you

10:15:31.080 | get all the way in Donetsk and Luhansk, you have people who are, you know, have a lot of intermarriages

10:15:37.720 | and mixed families across the borders and very much consider themselves to be Russians even living inside

10:15:43.800 | Ukraine. And I read a study of Ukrainian nationalism that was about how the only Ukrainian nationalists are

10:15:48.600 | the Nazis out West, most Ukrainians really identify with their city more or their region more than

10:15:54.280 | really considering themselves overall Ukrainian patriots in that larger nationalist sense, according

10:16:01.560 | to some, some pretty in-depth surveys about all that they had done in the past. And so, but anyway,

10:16:07.640 | I'm not, in other words, I'm not trying to oversimplify it and say, oh yeah, everybody in Donetsk

10:16:11.880 | was just begging for Russia to invade or whatever. Some of them were, uh, some of them of course were

10:16:18.840 | not. But anyway, by drawing the line to where he has now, he's now taken everyone who could even be

10:16:27.640 | potentially pro-Russia out of Ukraine permanently. So it used to be that the people who leaned more or less,

10:16:35.800 | people always said Yanukovych was Putin's puppet or whatever, it's not actually true, it was a separate

10:16:40.200 | tangent, but the more or less Russian leaning guys from the parties in the east, they would win.

10:16:48.600 | That's why America had to overthrow the government there twice in 10 years and the orange revolution

10:16:53.320 | and the Maidan revolution. Well, that's never going to happen again. All of those people are never going

10:16:58.600 | to vote in a Ukrainian election again. And who's going to be dominant if they ever do hold elections?

10:17:03.240 | It's probably going to be somebody to the right of Zelensky that wins. Remember, Zelensky was brought in

10:17:07.400 | because he was Jewish meant he wasn't ethnically Russian. He wasn't ethnically Ukrainian or like

10:17:12.360 | culturally, whatever the sectarian lead with those, he was kind of a third choice and he was from

10:17:17.800 | Kharkiv. So he wasn't from all the way in the Donbass, right? But he's still a Russian speaker and ran on

10:17:24.920 | peace. That was supposed to be his charm, right? Well, those days are over. So who's going to win now?

10:17:31.160 | My biggest fear is it's going to be Andrew Bolesky, who's the leader of the Azov Battalion,

10:17:35.400 | which is now known as the 3rd Army Corps. It went from the Azov Battalion to the Azov Regiment to the

10:17:41.000 | 3rd Separate Infantry Division. Now it's the 3rd Army Corps. And Bolesky is the guy, the famous quote

10:17:46.600 | I'm sure you've heard about leading the white race against the Semite-led Untermenschen. That's him.

10:17:53.160 | And I quote at length that whole speech, which I found on archive.org, you know, the official

10:17:58.760 | Azov Battalion website is down, but you can find the Wayback Machine version of it. That whole speech

10:18:03.640 | is absolute insane Hitlerian lunacy about Aryan values. And the nation of Ukraine is a single

10:18:09.800 | living organism and every egg and every sperm belongs to the state for the greater glory of the Ukrainian

10:18:15.960 | empire. And just, yeah, that's Nazism. All right. That's exactly what that is. There's no mistaking

10:18:23.240 | it for any other thing. And these are the proud grandsons of the Galatian SS and, you know, Steppen

10:18:29.400 | Bandera and the UPA and OUN, before the UPA was OUN, who had served the Nazis in the Holocaust in the

10:18:37.880 | Second World War. And these are their proud grandsons and legacies. And this guy Bolesky is from,

10:18:43.240 | is called the Patriot of Ukraine, which is a group out of Kharkiv that was again, descended from these

10:18:47.960 | Nazis. And he's, he and his ilk are very likely to be the leaders of the new Ukraine. And so how's

10:18:55.160 | Russia supposed to deal with that now? Well, now we got to go to Odessa. So at least we can take

10:19:01.080 | that great and important port city from them. And geez, now we can see Transnistria from here,

10:19:05.560 | you know, that little strip of land that Russia controls on the Moldovan side of the river

10:19:09.640 | on the Moldovan Ukrainian border. That's Russian control land, a frozen conflict since the end of

10:19:14.680 | the Soviet Union. Well, man, from Crimea, we can see Odessa and from Odessa, we can see Transnistria.

10:19:21.800 | And we can really punish those Ukrainians by completely cutting them off from the Black Sea.

10:19:26.600 | And then still you have a frozen conflict with a bunch of right wing radical, severely anti Russian,

10:19:34.360 | grudge holding national socialists. And so now what is anybody going to do with them?

10:19:39.560 | You know, that's who the new Ukrainian government is going to be dominated by his people who are far

10:19:46.360 | to the right of conservative men. And, and then what? And then, so now put, put yourself in Putin's

10:19:54.920 | point of view. Again, this is a government program gets worse and worse and worse. Well, the next option

10:19:59.800 | is now that you've created, I'm, I'm assuming some things, but still you created a radical right

10:20:05.160 | wing rump state of Ukraine that is going to constantly be a disruption. Well, what you do

10:20:12.040 | is you finish cleansing them into Poland and Romania. You just kick them all the way out and reabsorb the

10:20:17.080 | entire place. Right. That is the obvious solution from the Russian point of view. And that's how they fight

10:20:23.560 | their wars. They just move very slowly with artillery and wipe out everything in their path until they own it.

10:20:28.760 | And that's the mess that America has gotten Ukraine in. I don't see how this ends anytime soon or anytime

10:20:36.440 | that really, you know, again, from the Russian point of view, let's say they take those four oblasts.

10:20:42.440 | Well, look at all the people in Dnipro-Provost and all the people in Sumy and Kharkiv who are Russian

10:20:47.960 | speakers, who of course the Russian government is going to say need our protection, especially now that

10:20:53.000 | they're a smaller minority in the country than before, when their side will never win an election

10:20:58.440 | again, a national election again. Well, we're going to have to go all the way to the river now.

10:21:03.160 | Right. It only makes sense, man. It's a government program. It's a disaster

10:21:07.880 | and it's going to keep getting worse and worse and worse.

10:21:12.680 | I really hope the next leader of Ukraine is not a right-wing extremist as you're suggesting.

10:21:18.760 | Yeah, me too.

10:21:20.360 | And I think the bigger picture here is, as we've been talking about for many hours,

10:21:25.400 | that it's the politicians and the bureaucrats that waged a war and it's

10:21:30.280 | regular people that pay the price of it.

10:21:33.400 | That's right. As Ozzy Osbourne said, right? They leave that all to the poor.

10:21:38.360 | Rest in peace, by the way, Ozzy Osbourne.

10:21:42.040 | Yeah, man.

10:21:42.680 | I think this whole conversation was a really deep, eloquent case against the war

10:21:50.920 | in all parts of the world and especially to the degree United States is involved.

10:21:57.880 | And your whole life's work has, too, been this incredible case against the war.

10:22:07.160 | The antiwar.com, with the Libertarian Institute, with all the work you've done.

10:22:12.920 | In this goal, I'm very much with you, 100%.

10:22:21.320 | I'm really glad that you're doing the work you're doing.

10:22:24.520 | So thank you for fighting the good fight.

10:22:26.120 | Thank you very much, Lex. As long as here, I'll say one more thing, which is,

10:22:30.360 | if you've ever heard of the great libertarian Tom Woods from the Mises Institute and the

10:22:36.600 | Libertarian Institute, he has something called Liberty Classroom, where it's him and his professor

10:22:42.280 | friends telling you the truth about the things that they were supposed to teach you in school,

10:22:45.720 | but didn't. Well, he built me my own Liberty Classroom. It's called the Scott Horton Academy

10:22:50.600 | of Foreign Policy and Freedom. And if anybody got all the way through this podcast this far,

10:22:55.720 | they might be interested to know. We plan on going live next month. And it's two huge courses on the

10:23:04.920 | Middle East and the Cold War with Russia by me. And then I also have the great James Bovard,

10:23:10.440 | the most successful and important libertarian journalist in world history, current writer for

10:23:14.840 | the New York Post and fellow at the Institute, a great author, brilliant man, is going to be doing

10:23:20.040 | a course on his entire career of investigative journalism. And then we have Ramzi Baroud is going

10:23:26.440 | to do the story of Israel-Palestine, the great Palestinian refugee in exile, writer of the

10:23:32.120 | Palestine Chronicle and a regular writer with us, a regular contributor at antiwar.com, good friend of

10:23:37.720 | mine, wonderful man. Then we also have William Bupert on how he's an army infantry officer and expert on

10:23:47.560 | debunking the bankrupt counterinsurgency doctrine of David Petraeus and James Mattis. They call it COIN

10:23:54.920 | in Afghanistan and Iraq. He debunks all that and is from the Chasing Ghosts podcast. And he's going

10:24:00.840 | to do a course on how America lost every war since 1945. And then the great historian, dangerous history,

10:24:08.600 | CJ Kilmer is going to be doing a course on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person who ever lived,

10:24:14.600 | because of course he is the father of Lenin and Stalin, uh, Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and World

10:24:21.400 | War II. And for that matter, the American empire to contain communism after it was all over too.

10:24:26.360 | And so, um, it's going to be a hell of a thing, man. And we got a bunch of great guys doing really

10:24:32.360 | great work to put this thing together. So that's at scotthortonacademy.com.

10:24:37.960 | And it will go live in September.

10:24:39.480 | David Petraeus: I'm really hoping in August, um, maybe not. So you can watch first of all,

10:24:45.800 | this awesome video by Dan Smotts, who's the most talented video editor in the world,

10:24:50.920 | but then also just enter your email address. Then you'll be the first to know when we go live

10:24:56.040 | and launch the Scott Horton Academy.

10:24:58.280 | David Petraeus: Scott.

10:24:59.720 | Scott Horton Academy: Thank you, brother.

10:25:01.320 | Scott Horton Academy: Appreciate it.

10:25:02.120 | David Petraeus: Thanks for listening to this conversation with Scott Horton.

10:25:05.800 | David Petraeus: To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

10:25:08.840 | David Petraeus: And now, let me leave you once again with the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower,

10:25:14.440 | spoken in 1953.

10:25:17.240 | David Petraeus: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies,

10:25:24.600 | in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

10:25:32.280 | David Petraeus: This world in arms is not spending money alone.

10:25:36.280 | David Petraeus: It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists,

10:25:41.560 | David Petraeus: the hopes of its children.

10:25:43.160 | David Petraeus: The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this:

10:25:46.280 | David Petraeus: A modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

10:25:49.400 | David Petraeus: It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

10:25:54.280 | David Petraeus: It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

10:25:57.320 | David Petraeus: It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

10:26:00.680 | David Petraeus: We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

10:26:05.560 | David Petraeus: We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

10:26:12.200 | David Petraeus: This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.

10:26:16.520 | David Petraeus: Under the cloud of threatening war,

10:26:19.320 | David Petraeus: it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

10:26:23.000 | David Petraeus: Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

10:26:27.160 | David Petraeus:

10:26:28.120 | Thank you.

Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex | Lex Fridman Podcast #478

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