Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex | Lex Fridman Podcast #478
The post-9/11 wars consumed roughly $8 trillion while producing a deeply negative human and strategic return. Lex cites 900,000–940,000 direct deaths, 3.6–3.8 million indirect deaths, and 37 million displaced people, alongside sharply worse Afghan food insecurity, poverty, and child-malnutrition rates. Horton adds roughly 4,500 official US military deaths in Iraq and 2,500 in Afghanistan, plus contractors and lifelong veteran suffering. He also recalls, with uncertainty about the study’s date and method, an estimate of 30,000 American servicemen who had died by suicide. Lex’s brutal summary is that, beyond prosthetic advances and defense dividends, “We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before. That’s it.”
Horton’s institutional explanation is the “self-licking ice cream cone.” Public-choice incentives, promotion, bureaucratic consensus, reelection, and contractor lobbying make failure a reason for more resources rather than correction. Ellsberg’s lesson is that subordinates make their bosses look good; David Hardy’s is that government operates through “our position” rather than truth and falsity. Defense firms help define the missions and distribute jobs across districts, so security spending can grow while actual security deteriorates.
The episode traces al-Qaeda’s rise through policies Washington treated as separate. US, Saudi, and Pakistani support built the Afghan jihad and international brigades; permanent US forces in Saudi Arabia, Iraqi sanctions, support for regional dictators, and support for Israeli operations supplied bin Laden’s recruiting case. Horton stresses that explaining motive neither excuses mass murder nor requires trusting bin Laden: his strategic aim was to provoke an American overreaction and reproduce the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
Iraq is Horton’s clearest example of policy capture producing the opposite of its advertised result. Incubator stories, nuclear insinuations, exile intelligence, and conflation with 9/11 helped launch a war against a secular enemy of al-Qaeda. Regime change then empowered Iran-aligned Shiite parties, ignited civil war, expanded the jihadist theater, and eventually required another US war against ISIS. Horton’s strategic verdict is that America fought a war for its adversaries.
Horton argues that US alignment with Israeli policy has become a security liability as well as a moral and fiscal one. He attributes Gaza’s destruction and starvation to a policy of permanent dispossession, warns that it will recruit more jihadists, and says attacks on Iran have made nuclear breakout more plausible. His preferred off-ramp is direct diplomacy with verification: “Be polite and verify.”
On Ukraine, Horton separates provocation from justification. He argues that NATO enlargement, treaty withdrawals, regime-change politics, and refusal to implement Minsk helped create the crisis; Lex insists, and Horton agrees, that Vladimir Putin still chose the 2022 invasion and bears primary responsibility for that escalation. The investment-relevant risk is a long attritional war whose manpower balance favors Russia while escalation remains connected to nuclear arsenals.
Horton rejects a permanent H-bomb “Mexican standoff” as a stable civilizational architecture. He favors negotiated, reciprocal reductions rather than unilateral disarmament, recalling Reagan and Gorbachev’s near-deal at Reykjavík and George H. W. Bush’s large cuts. His tail-risk warning is categorical: once one nuclear weapon is used, retaliation may keep escalating.
The macro through-line is that militarism socializes losses while concentrating gains. Horton links taxation, borrowing, monetary expansion, distorted interest rates, boom-bust investment, and foregone housing or productive capital to war finance. Eisenhower’s closing framework is the valuation test: every weapon represents resources withheld from people who are hungry, cold, or otherwise unmet.
1. The war ledger
Lex opens with Costs of War estimates for the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen: 900,000–940,000 direct deaths, 3.6–3.8 million indirect deaths, 37 million displaced people, and roughly $8 trillion in cost. The transcript gives $2.2 trillion for Afghanistan and $2.9 trillion for Iraq and Syria.
Lex also cites Afghanistan’s deterioration: food insecurity rising from 62% to 92%, acute malnutrition among children under five from 9% to 50%, and poverty from 80% to 97%. Horton adds approximately 4,500 official US military deaths in Iraq and 2,500 in Afghanistan, plus contractors and the much wider psychological burden.
Horton recalls a study that he says estimated 30,000 American servicemen had died by suicide, while acknowledging uncertainty about whether it was five, seven, or eight years earlier. Lex separately cites reporting on veterans receiving as many as 15 psychoactive drugs, sometimes to counteract the side effects of other drugs. His bleak social return is: “We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before. That’s it.”
2. Why failure expands the system
Horton uses public-choice theory to argue that “the national interest” is often the private interest of the people empowered to define it: promotion, status, departmental survival, reelection, and avoiding the career cost of admitting failure.
Daniel Ellsberg’s bureaucratic lesson is that a subordinate’s job is making the boss look good, hoping to occupy the boss’s position later. David Hardy’s formulation is that ordinary life has truth and falsity, while government has “our position,” a consensus that exists on a different plane.
Private businesses eventually face accounting losses. Government agencies can turn poor results into evidence that they need more money and authority. Vietnam-era soldiers therefore called the military a “self-licking ice cream cone”: it creates disorder, then claims an indispensable role repairing it. Horton cites post-Afghanistan officers openly looking for new Islamist missions in Africa as a clear example.
3. From Vietnam to Iran and Afghanistan
Horton begins the longer chain at the end of Vietnam, when Richard Nixon encouraged the Shah of Iran to buy large quantities of US aircraft, including the F-4s and F-14s Iran retained. He says the Shah’s expensive first-world military helped destabilize a regime already rooted in the 1953 CIA-backed restoration of the monarchy.
By 1979, US intelligence knew the Shah was terminally ill while a mass revolution demanded an end to the old order. CIA and State Department officials told Jimmy Carter that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was manageable; William Sullivan reportedly compared him to an “Iranian Gandhi.” Horton treats this as institutional overconfidence rather than a single simple conspiracy: secret information did not give officials social understanding or wisdom.
Carter’s July 3, 1979 finding authorized covert support for Afghan insurgents. Horton accepts Eric Margolis and Andrei Sakharov’s view that US aid did not itself cause the Soviet invasion; the immediate cause, in that account, was the collapse of the Soviet-backed Afghan regime. But Zbigniew Brzezinski and Walter Slocombe were deliberately trying to raise the probability of Soviet intervention and turn Afghanistan into a Soviet Vietnam.
After the revolution, Washington’s attempt to work with Khomeini was overtaken by the hostage crisis, which began in November rather than February. Horton says David Rockefeller persuaded Carter to admit the Shah for cancer treatment, and that Iranians interpreted this through the memory of the 1953 coup. He presents that as context, not justification for hostage-taking.
Carter then declared that a hostile power’s move into the Persian Gulf would be treated as an attack on vital US interests. Horton calls the Gulf an “American lake” and cites Gareth Porter’s account of Zbigniew Brzezinski privately admitting that the Soviet threat to Iran was not genuine.
4. Saddam, Iran-Contra, and chemical weapons
Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 for his own reasons: fear that Iran’s revolution would spread among Iraq’s Shiite majority, territorial disputes, and regime-survival concerns. Horton describes the 1980–1988 war as World War I–style trench warfare while the United States largely backed Saddam’s Soviet-equipped military.
The Reagan administration nevertheless secretly sold missiles to Iran through Israel and diverted proceeds to the Nicaraguan Contras despite Congress prohibiting that funding. Horton says officials sometimes balanced the combatants against one another, encouraging the Iran-Iraq war to continue.
He also endorses Gary Webb’s account that CIA-linked Contra networks brought cocaine into the United States. The claim Horton emphasizes is not that destroying Black communities was the stated purpose, but that officials tolerated the damage while pursuing Contra financing. He sees the resulting contrast—severe drug penalties for possession alongside tolerated covert supply—as formative evidence of government hypocrisy.
Horton says Western states supplied Iraq with dual-use technology, intelligence, materials, and biological precursors while the United States knew Saddam was using chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians. He cites the 1988 Halabja attack, with an estimated 5,000 killed and 20,000 injured, and points to Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid’s reporting, “CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran.”
5. Kuwait and the first Iraq war
After the Iran-Iraq war, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE demanded repayment of wartime loans. Oil was trading near $12 a barrel, leaving Iraq unable to repay, rebuild, and restore its finances. Iraq also accused Kuwait of overproducing from shared fields and possibly slant-drilling; Horton says the literal slant-drilling claim is disputed.
He argues that US agencies sent conflicting signals. CIA and CENTCOM encouraged Kuwait to resist Saddam, while State Department figures, including Ambassador April Glaspie, Margaret Tutwiler, and John Kelly, downplayed America’s position. Glaspie conveyed that the United States had “no position” on the Arab-Arab boundary dispute while saying Bush did not want war. Horton says this could reasonably sound like a flashing yellow light or permission to proceed.
He also argues that Washington initially appeared prepared to tolerate Kuwait’s seizure before changing course. Margaret Thatcher’s “Don’t go wobbly on me” challenge and Bush’s sensitivity to the “wimp president” label helped turn caution into “This will not stand.”
The administration then used several emotional and strategic justifications: satellite claims that Iraqi divisions were poised to invade Saudi Arabia, the Kuwaiti incubator story, and suggestions that Saddam might be developing nuclear weapons. Horton says the incubator witness was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter rather than a nurse present during the invasion. He also argues that the 1981 Israeli attack on the safeguarded Osirak reactor drove Iraqi nuclear work underground, later giving hawks a precedent for dismissing skeptical intelligence.
Horton says Noam Chomsky documented repeated Iraqi offers that Washington refused, including face-saving demands involving eventual US withdrawal from the region and Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory. Bush later declared, “By God, we’ve kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
6. The 1991 uprising and the making of al-Qaeda
After Desert Storm, George H. W. Bush encouraged Iraqis to rise against Saddam and dropped leaflets urging revolt. When Iran-based Badr Brigade forces began crossing into the Shiite uprising, Washington reversed course and allowed Saddam to retain enough helicopters and armor to crush it. Horton says approximately 100,000 Shiites and Kurds were killed.
The continued US presence in Saudi Arabia, no-fly-zone enforcement, and sanctions became central to bin Laden’s recruiting narrative. Horton lists recurring grievances attributed to bin Laden: US forces in Saudi Arabia, support for Israel, support for regional dictators, pressure to keep oil prices low, Iraqi sanctions, and perceived indifference to Muslim suffering elsewhere.
He stresses that this is an explanation of recruitment, not a defense of mass murder. Bin Laden’s strategic argument was that America could be provoked into invading Afghanistan, bogged down, and bankrupted just as the Soviets had been.
Horton says Washington, Riyadh, and Islamabad supported an international Islamic brigade in Afghanistan, including figures such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, while US special forces trained participants in sabotage, assassinations, and car bombs. Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Azzam network eventually formed the nucleus of al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden.
The presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia and US support for Israeli operations supplied what Horton calls the “blowback” mechanism: the delayed consequences of secret policies that the public does not understand when they arrive.
7. From the first World Trade Center attack to 9/11
The episode lists attacks before September 11: Meir Kahane’s assassination in New York in 1990, an attack in Aden in 1992, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, attacks in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, the African embassy bombings in 1998, and the USS Cole attack in 2000.
Horton says the 1993 World Trade Center bomb could have toppled one tower into the other if positioned differently. FBI informant Emad Salem offered to construct an inert bomb for a sting, but agents Nancy Floyd and John Anticev were overruled by supervisor Carson Dunbar. Ramzi Yousef then built the real bomb.
Two days after the bombing, the Branch Davidian siege began at Waco. Horton says Waco consumed Clinton’s attention and diverted public focus from the transnational network that continued preparing attacks.
He describes the Taliban and al-Qaeda as enemies of convenience rather than one organization. The Taliban had negotiated with the CIA about removing bin Laden, and Mullah Omar reportedly called him “a chicken bone stuck in my throat.” After September 11, the Taliban offered proceedings or transfer to a third Muslim country, but Bush demanded unconditional surrender without providing evidence.
At Tora Bora, CIA officer Gary Berntsen and Delta commander Thomas Greer requested reinforcements to close the route into Pakistan. Horton says forces and helicopters were available, but the requests were denied. He labels his conclusion circumstantial: he has no direct proof that Bush or Rumsfeld deliberately allowed bin Laden to escape, but argues that a living enemy made it easier to sustain a long war while preparing for Iraq.
8. Iraq War II and the neoconservative project
Rumsfeld wanted Americans to understand that the war on terror would continue even if bin Laden were killed. Justin Raimondo’s 2002 essay, “Our Hijacked Foreign Policy,” identified Baghdad as the next target and mapped the neoconservative network around Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Michael Ledeen, and the Weekly Standard.
The 1996 paper “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” by David Wurmser and Richard Perle, proposed reshaping the Levant through regime change. A companion paper advocated “expediting the chaotic collapse” of Syria. Ahmed Chalabi promised that a new Iraqi government would be democratic, friendly to Israel, hostile to Iran, and able to weaken Hezbollah. He also promised an oil pipeline from northern Iraq to Haifa.
The sectarian result was the opposite of the advertised one. Removing Saddam eliminated the principal Sunni barrier to Iranian influence and empowered the Shiite majority. The Office of Special Plans, led by Abram Shulsky under Douglas Feith, moved exile claims and rejected intelligence into policy channels. Horton says the network operated as a separate government inside the government, with Cheney at its center.
He emphasizes that attributing influence to the Israel lobby does not absolve George W. Bush. Congress passed the October 2002 authorization, but Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their senior officials chose the war.
9. The military-industrial complex
Andrew Cockburn’s formulation is Horton’s preferred map: the neoconservative movement fused the Israel lobby with the military-industrial complex. Think tanks supplied the arguments, magazines supplied the public campaign, and contractors supplied money and personnel.
Horton cites Bruce Jackson of Lockheed, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, PNAC, the Weekly Standard, and Richard Cummings’s “Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.” He says Lockheed-linked interests helped promote NATO expansion and the Iraq war, while defense personnel and policy writers shaped the conflicts from which future procurement would benefit.
At the individual level, engineers can focus narrowly on whether a weapon works and leave the ethical question to elected officials. At the corporate level, however, firms lobby to influence what the government decides it needs. Horton cites Peter Navarro’s account, as he reports it, that the Trump administration continued supporting the Yemen war partly to benefit Raytheon and manufacturing interests affected by tariffs.
He applies the same logic to nuclear weapons: suppliers do not merely wait for demand; they help create it. Programs are distributed across congressional districts so cancellation threatens local jobs. The result is a “self-licking ice cream cone” with durable revenue but weak accountability.
10. War finance and the hidden cost
Horton’s macro argument follows Eisenhower: weapons divert labor, scientific talent, industrial capacity, and capital from housing, infrastructure, food, and productive investment. Borrowing and monetary expansion conceal the cost from taxpayers.
He links Bush-era tax refunds, wartime spending, the housing bubble, the 2008 crash, later monetary expansion, and the COVID-era stimulus to a broader Austrian-school account of distorted price signals. Artificially low interest rates encourage firms to invest as though more real savings exist than actually do. Even managers who recognize the bubble must often expand or lose market share before competitors fail.
The political illusion is that war spending is “good for the economy” because its immediate jobs and contracts are visible while foregone homes, family formation, private investment, and purchasing power are diffuse. Horton’s gold-standard argument is that making war require explicit taxation would make aggressive war harder to sell.
11. Iraq’s result: Iran’s advantage
The post-invasion order centered on SCIRI, Dawa, and Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement under Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The United Iraqi Alliance wrote the constitution in 2004 and won the 2005 election.
SCIRI and Dawa had deep ties to Iran; Sadr was more rooted in Iraq and opposed both Iranian and American domination. Sunni leaders, former Ba’athists, and tribal figures lost control of the central state and access to most developed oil fields. The insurgency was progressively pushed toward foreign jihadists.
Horton says Petraeus first armed local forces in Mosul that joined the insurgency, then helped build Badr forces into the Iraqi army. Under the “El Salvador option,” US-backed Shiite militias and commandos carried out torture and sectarian killings. Horton argues that American Sniper misattributed some of those abuses to Sunni insurgents.
The surge did not defeat the Sunni insurgency. Horton says Petraeus eventually persuaded Bush to pay and redirect Sunni fighters who had already begun turning against al-Qaeda. By 2008, Iran-aligned forces controlled the Iraqi state, while the United States had destroyed Saddam, fought Iran’s Sunni enemies, and weakened al-Qaeda for Tehran.
12. Syria, ISIS, Yemen, and Somalia
After empowering Iran-aligned forces in Baghdad, Washington adopted the “redirection” toward Sunni powers and Sunni militants. Seymour Hersh’s “The Redirection” is Horton’s principal source. The goal was to weaken Assad in Damascus and thereby weaken Iran and Hezbollah.
Horton says the United States and its partners backed forces that included al-Qaeda-linked fighters while presenting the conflict as support for moderate rebels. In 2013, public resistance—including service members holding signs that they had not joined to fight a civil war for al-Qaeda—helped prevent a larger overt US war after the Ghouta chemical attack. James Clapper told Obama the case was not a “slam dunk,” and Martin Dempsey questioned intervention.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq became ISIS under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. After Baghdadi and Abu Muhammad al-Jolani split, ISIS declared a state in eastern Syria and later captured Fallujah and Mosul. Obama initially called the group “junior varsity,” but Horton argues that it was the successor to the force that had led the Sunni insurgency and killed most US troops lost in Iraq.
The United States then fought ISIS alongside Iraqi Shiite forces and Iran’s Quds Force. The same policy reversal appears in Yemen: Washington first shared intelligence with the Houthis against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, then joined Saudi Arabia and the UAE against the Houthis. Horton calls the resulting war and blockade genocidal and says Raytheon revenue became part of the rationale for continuing it.
Somalia became the longest continuous post-9/11 US war. Horton says US intelligence and special operations entered in 2001 over only three suspected al-Qaeda figures, backed warlords, helped Ethiopia overthrow the Islamic Courts Union, and thereby contributed to al-Shabaab’s rise. Subsequent administrations continued airstrikes and delegated more targeting authority without resolving the political conditions sustaining the insurgency.
13. Iran’s nuclear program
Horton argues that attacks on Iran traded a monitored civilian program for a less observable one. He says Iran’s 60% enrichment was closer to weapons grade but was not itself a nuclear weapon, and that Iran had not enriched it to roughly 90% or fabricated a bomb.
He cites the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and the sabotage at Natanz as reasons Iran raised enrichment levels for negotiating leverage. The JCPOA had allowed Iran to respond to US noncompliance by suspending some restrictions without formally leaving the deal.
Before the recent attacks, IAEA monitoring could verify the non-diversion of declared material through seals, cameras, scales, and measurements. Horton says that chain of evidence broke when Iran expelled inspectors it suspected of passing intelligence to war planners. He reports Trita Parsi’s expectation that breakout is now more plausible.
In the recent exchange described in the transcript, Iran fired 14 missiles after warning of the response, and Trump thanked Tehran for the notice. Horton treats the limited response as evidence that Iran did not want a larger war, but warns that the conflict is not resolved. Reports on damage to Fordow and Natanz remain conflicting; the Isfahan conversion facility was particularly important because it converts uranium between metal and uranium-hexafluoride gas.
14. Nuclear deterrence and North Korea
Horton opposes proliferation but acknowledges that nuclear weapons can make states more cautious. He rejects a permanent H-bomb “Mexican standoff” as a stable ten-generation arrangement. War games, he says, repeatedly suggest that once one weapon is used, retaliation can continue until “we all die by 7:30.”
He favors multilateral, staged reductions rather than unilateral disarmament. Reagan and Gorbachev nearly reached a sweeping agreement at Reykjavík in 1986, but the Strategic Defense Initiative helped derail it. Horton recalls George H. W. Bush’s large unilateral cuts and the later nuclear warnings of George Shultz, William Perry, and Henry Kissinger.
North Korea illustrates the opposite lesson. Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework exchanged a reactor freeze, inspections, and nonproliferation commitments for fuel, support, and light-water reactors. Horton says the United States failed to deliver fully, then George W. Bush placed North Korea in the “axis of evil,” ended the framework, imposed new pressure, and included it in a possible nuclear first-strike posture.
North Korea then withdrew from the treaty, expelled inspectors, and built nuclear weapons. Horton credits Donald Trump with showing that direct diplomacy could thaw relations, while blaming John Bolton for insisting on denuclearization before normalization. His preferred sequence is to establish relations first and negotiate weapons later.
15. Israel, Palestine, and Gaza
Horton recommends Darryl Cooper’s Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem for a history of Zionism told from the perspective of Jews fleeing pogroms. He says many Orthodox and Reform Jews initially opposed political Zionism because it could divide loyalties and create further danger.
He presents the 1948 Nakba as the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians and says the 1967 war displaced another roughly 250,000. Israel then controlled the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Horton argues that the resulting system rules Israeli Jews and Palestinians under different legal and political conditions and cannot be described as a democracy over the whole territory.
He describes the 2005 Gaza “disengagement” as an attempt to reduce the demographic burden of ruling Palestinians without ending the siege. He cites Arnon Soffer’s demographic argument and Dov Weisglass’s description of freezing the peace process. Horton says Israeli officials described Gazans as “hungry but not starving.”
Horton also argues that Israel helped strengthen Hamas as a religious alternative to the secular PLO, then supported Qatar’s funding of Hamas while using its presence to claim there was no Palestinian partner for peace. He cites Netanyahu’s reported formulation that Israel could “control the height of the flame” while keeping Palestinians divided.
The Abraham Accords bypassed Palestinian statehood or equal-rights demands through inducements: military support for Bahrain, F-35 access for the UAE, debt relief for Sudan, and US recognition of Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara. Netanyahu’s September 2023 “new Middle East” map, Horton argues, signaled that regional normalization would proceed without a Palestinian settlement.
16. October 7 and Gaza’s aftermath
Horton clearly attributes war crimes to Hamas: the group killed unarmed civilians, attacked kibbutzim and a music festival, and took hostages. He suggests that hostage-taking and prisoner exchange were among its strategic aims but says the operation went far beyond those aims and supplied Netanyahu with a pretext for the subsequent assault.
He also cites Israeli reporting on a mass form of the Hannibal Directive and argues that Israeli fire may have killed some Israelis during the attack. He estimates at least dozens and perhaps more than 100, while acknowledging uncertainty. This is presented as a claim about the episode’s disputed facts, not as an acquittal of Hamas.
Horton says Israel’s objective is broader than defeating Hamas: destroying homes, schools, universities, hospitals, records, and the conditions for Palestinian life. He cites reports of premature babies left in incubators after hospital staff evacuated and says the episode resembles the incubator story used to justify Desert Storm, except that the Gaza case was real.
Former US special operator Anthony Aguilar described aid delivery through four Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites after UNRWA’s wider network was displaced. Horton relays Haaretz reporting and Aguilar’s account that starving civilians were forced through combat zones and that gunfire, artillery, and tank rounds functioned as invisible crowd-control lines. He separately relays less certain reports of children arriving with patterned wounds that may indicate deliberate shooting.
Horton’s broader warning is blowback. He fears that Gaza will create more bin Laden-style recruits and make the United States and Israel less safe. He explicitly marks his suspicion that the New Orleans attacker was motivated by Gaza as a prediction rather than an established fact.
17. Ukraine and NATO
Horton argues that NATO expansion continued after the Soviet Union disappeared and that Washington moved the dividing line east rather than dissolving it. He says James Baker repeatedly conveyed “not one inch” assurances around German reunification, while Robert Gates and Hans-Dietrich Genscher conveyed comparable understandings.
He rejects the claim that only a Senate-ratified treaty can create a meaningful commitment. The transcript compares the NATO assurances with informal arrangements over West Berlin, Nixon’s opening to China, and Kennedy’s secret Cuban Missile Crisis deal with Khrushchev.
Horton says Clinton presented the Partnership for Peace as an inclusive alternative while preparing NATO expansion, and that Yeltsin understood the political damage this would cause. NATO expansion, missile systems using Mark 41 launchers, withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, political interventions, and the 2014 Maidan transition compounded Russian fears.
He describes Minsk II as a negotiated settlement that Washington and Kyiv refused to implement and says Russia’s late-2021 proposals addressed NATO, missile deployments, and the broader security architecture. He believes the Biden administration could have negotiated but chose not to.
Lex insists that Russia’s invasion was a massive escalation for which Putin bears primary responsibility. Horton agrees and calls Putin a gangster. He lists alternatives Moscow could have pursued: demanding UN peacekeepers, using its Security Council veto, cutting energy supplies, escalating diplomatic pressure, or openly presenting coercive terms. His argument is causal rather than exculpatory: provocation increased the probability of war, but Putin still chose invasion.
18. Ukraine’s attritional risk and Trump
Lex emphasizes the bravery of Ukrainians defending their homes. Horton agrees, while arguing that Washington used Ukraine as a proxy against Russia without an intention to deploy NATO forces directly.
He says Ukraine’s September 2022 Kharkiv and Kherson offensives were its strongest successes. Russia responded by claiming Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, then shifted toward a slower artillery-led war intended to preserve Russian manpower while exhausting Ukraine.
Horton believes Russia’s larger population, industrial base, and volunteer pool favor it in a long war. He fears that a postwar Ukrainian state could be dominated by figures farther right than Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including Andriy Biletsky, whom he associates with explicitly racial and authoritarian rhetoric. He hopes that prediction is wrong.
Horton says Donald Trump sincerely wanted peace but was constrained by the timing of his return, the battlefield balance, and Russiagate. He argues that Russiagate made any accommodation with Moscow appear corrupt or treasonous, narrowing the political space for diplomacy.
19. Method, Ron Paul, and evidence
Horton says his authority comes not from elite credentials but from accepting the burden of proof. Provoked contains roughly 477,000 words and about 7,000 citations, including many to adversaries. He describes it as thousands of evidence cards arranged into a narrative.
He says he has spent days locating individual footnotes and repeatedly discovered that writers he agreed with had overstated what their sources said. His method is to let primary documents and admissions by officials carry the argument rather than rely only on friendly authorities.
Ron Paul converted Horton’s anti-government instinct into a philosophy of liberty. Horton first saw Paul on C-SPAN criticizing US support for Saddam, then watched Paul’s 2007 exchange with Rudy Giuliani over the motives for 9/11. Paul’s appeal was consistency on war, money, civil liberties, and constitutional limits rather than patronage or institutional status.
The recurring implication is that ordinary people can understand these issues when they are given the evidence. Talk radio, cab passengers, sports fans, and other non-elite audiences supplied Horton with examples of serious domain expertise outside official institutions.
20. Eisenhower’s final allocation test
The episode closes with Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron” arithmetic. One modern heavy bomber could equal a school in more than 30 cities, two power plants serving towns of 60,000, two hospitals, or roughly 50 miles of concrete highway. A fighter plane could cost half a million bushels of wheat; a destroyer could equal homes for more than 8,000 people.
The final premise is not that every listener must agree on whether the alternative should be public infrastructure or private investment. It is that resources used for unnecessary war cannot be used for either.
Lex reads Eisenhower’s conclusion: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired” represents labor, scientific talent, food, homes, and children’s hopes redirected into destruction. Under permanent war, humanity hangs “from a cross of iron.”
I think one of the darkest and most disturbing chapters of modern American history is everything that happened around conducting the so-called wars on terror. To me, it was a wake-up call. I think it was a wake-up call to a lot of Americans in understanding and seeing the military-industrial complex, seeing what the government’s capacity is to mislead us into war, and continuously erode basic human freedoms.
Let me list some of the estimates from the Costs of War Project at Brown University, just so we understand the cost of these wars. The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen led to an estimated 900,000 to 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths. The cost in terms of dollars was $8 trillion, with $2.2 trillion on Afghanistan and $2.9 trillion on Iraq and Syria.
The result on every front, as we’ll talk about, did not accomplish its purpose. In fact, if we even just look at the human toll on the people of Afghanistan, I was also looking at the numbers before and after the war: the percentage of Afghans facing food insecurity went from 62% to 92%; children under 5 experiencing acute malnutrition went from 9% to 50%; and the percentage of Afghans living in poverty went from 80% to 97%.
So it was extremely costly for Americans, and it was extremely costly for Afghans. As you do in your book Enough Already, can you lay out the full history and context of how the American people were misled into this war on terror, which was so costly in so many ways?
First of all, thank you for having me again. It’s great to be with you on the show. One important statistic that you could have mentioned from the Costs of War Project as well is 37 million people displaced from their homes.
The same group—it was, Lex, I’m telling you, at least 5 years ago. God, it’s the future now. Maybe 7 or 8 years ago—they did a study that determined that 30,000 American servicemen had blown their own brains out since then. Well, one way or the other, deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it is.
So, talk about the cost of war. That’s far beyond the actual deaths in the war. We had about 4,500 in Iraq and about 2,500 in Afghanistan—just official airmen, Marines, and soldiers on the ground killed, plus contractors and all that. That’s speaking not just to the things that can be measured, but you can just imagine the scale of suffering that’s going on in veterans’ minds.
You would have guessed this probably, right? You probably know more about this subject than me. There was a New York Times headline, I think yesterday—or maybe it was the Wall Street Journal—that said, “Oh my God, look at this insane list of the kinds of drugs that all these depressed soldiers get put on.”
Here are 15 different psychoactive drugs, all to temper the side effects of the others and whatever. Then they say that this could lead to suicide, because of course we know that, right? They even have to say on TV sometimes that some of these drugs cause suicidal or homicidal ideation, and this kind of thing. We know that’s one of the side effects.
Some percentage of these guys might have made it if the government healthcare system hadn’t helped them in the end. That’s another bitter irony. You said we got nothing out of it. I said it half in jest, but it is serious, and it also shows in relief what a disaster this is.
The only thing we did get out of it—literally—was advancements in prosthetic limbs for amputees, whether they lost their limb in war or otherwise. If you want to boil it down, what did anyone get out of this, other than some people getting a dividend check from Lockheed or something like that? That’s not to the benefit of society whatsoever, so that does not count. I’m talking about what society got out of it, what America got out of it. We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before. That’s it.
I think there’s no clearer illustration of the complete failure of the military-industrial complex.
How did this begin? How did we get into this?
I’ll try to tell the somewhat fast version. Although, Lex, that’s a kiss of death every time I say that.
Please.
We’ll go through it.
Please go the slow version.
Okay. The slow version is, we’ll start with the end of Vietnam. 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. One of the things he did was turn to the Shah of Iran and ask him to increase arms sales.
I guess I could go back. 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 power for a while. They put him back in. Now this is in the early 1970s, 20 years later, and Nixon is saying, “Hey, you know what would really help me? If you would buy a bunch of fighter jets.”
I think it’s kind of notorious, right, that Iran still has F-4s and F-14s. That’s where they got them from. It was the Nixon and Ford administrations in this push to do that. The Shah was apparently pretty obsessed with looking very first-world, with his very fancy first-world army that he couldn’t really afford. It helped to destabilize his regime somewhat.
I don’t know the full extent to which America turned 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. The Americans secretly knew that. The CIA knew that, but it was not public knowledge that he was at whatever stage—Stage 4 or whatever. He was doomed.
They knew the revolution was coming, and they were trying to figure out how to handle it. The revolution was coming anyway. It wasn’t just that there was going to be a change of leadership. When we say “revolution” here, we mean mobs in the street demanding an end to the old regime in huge numbers—a very large-scale popular revolution.
They were trying to figure out what to do. Some of Carter’s critics said what he should have done was have the military just massacre all those people. That’ll shut them up. You know what I mean? They were trying to figure out what to do.
The CIA and the State Department told Jimmy Carter, “Listen, this Ayatollah Khomeini, he’s not so bad. We know this guy. He was part of a group of Shiite clergy who helped to agitate against Mossadegh in 1953, and so we have at least some contact. We think that we can deal with him.”
Did they actually believe that?
I think so.
Is this incompetence or malevolence? How does this whole process happen, where you go into this process of regime change and keep installing people who are creating more and more instability and destruction in the world, and then you use that to justify invading and starting wars? How does this happen?
There are a lot of things to it. The whole time in our discussion here, we’ll be talking about a massive conspiracy of interests at play all the time. I’ve never read a bunch of books about this. I probably should at least interview these guys. You’d be interested in this if you don’t already know the subject: public choice theory.
It’s a branch of libertarian political economy 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. What becomes the national interest is the interest of the people in charge of making the decisions for the nation.
They all ultimately are private choices, aren’t they? The national interest becomes subsumed by what’s good for me now. Telling all my bosses they’re all wrong is not good for me now.
On the very basic level, I’ve read quite a few books just from former insiders like Daniel Ellsberg and other people like that. Ellsberg tells a story about how he’s the deputy under secretary of defense, I believe, and his whole job is making his boss look good, whether he agrees with him or not.
The hope is that next year he’ll be in his boss’s position, and his boss will move up one. Then his job will be making his boss look good, and eventually he’ll be in his boss’s position. He explains how the truth and reality just get washed out of this.
Another famous one, or should be famous, is my friend David Hardy, who wrote the best book about the Waco massacre. He’s a great lawyer, and he had been a former Interior Department cop. He said, “There’s truth and there’s falsity. That’s the world we live in. But in government work, there’s our position, and our position takes place on an entirely different plane than truth and falsity.”
“Our position is the thing a bunch of people in a room agreed that they would say and do as they came to a consensus. A lot of times, once those decisions are made, 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 shouldn’t have done the thing they did.”
Now they’ve got to do this instead. And so you see an absolute unwillingness to make change. This is something that capitalism ultimately—everybody’s got ego problems, but ultimately the boss has to look at an accounting sheet and say, “This isn’t working, so I’m going to have to swallow my pride or go out of business.” Right? In government, it’s not like that. The worse they do, the better off they are.
This is why 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: to go and fix that. And so, if you’re a government bureaucrat getting paid way above the market, what do you want to do? Go get a job?
A great example of this that I cite in the book is at the end of the Afghan war. There were multiple military officers—not too high-ranking, but high enough to be quoted by the news—saying, “Well, now that that’s over, we’re looking for other things to do. So we’re going to pivot to Africa and go find some Islamists there, because we are looking for ways to stay globally engaged.” Of course, that’s in their interest. Whether that’s good for Africa or good for the American people is just a separate question that they’re not really dealing with.
And so I think that’s a huge part of it. One of the things was that William Sullivan said that Khomeini—he’s like the Iranian Gandhi. Well, first of all, he’s not a pacifist. But second of all, didn’t Gandhi kick the British Empire out of India? So what are you saying? You’re deliberately putting in a guy who’s going to limit your influence there and declare independence from you. How are you going to handle that? They don’t seem to think this through.
I have to say that one of the great disappointments of growing up is finding out that the rest of the adults aren’t so smart. They’re just regular dudes like you. I think a lot of times State Department people might have very advanced knowledge, but that doesn’t mean they have very advanced wisdom.
This is something else Daniel Ellsberg talks about: when you have access to classified information, then you don’t pay any attention to anybody who doesn’t, because what do they know? You know all these things that they couldn’t possibly be taking into account. So you immediately close your circle of people who you listen to.
A great example of this from my own experience was when I interviewed a CIA analyst, apparently a pretty important executive at one time in the terror war, named Cynthia Storer. I asked her—I forget if it was in the interview or not, and I hope I’m not speaking out of school—about whether she read Patrick Cockburn. I said, “Don’t you read Patrick Cockburn?”
She said, “Who’s Patrick Cockburn?” And I said, “Who’s Patrick Cockburn? Patrick Cockburn is the most important Anglo in Iraq. He’s the one who understands all of this stuff more and better than all of you, and he writes in The Independent. You can read it for free. Just register with your email address, for God’s sake.” I couldn’t believe it. And she was like, “Who even is that?”
So, a lack of basic curiosity, rigor of research, and understanding the situation. She could know a lot of secret things, but without understanding what he understands, she does not understand what she needs to know. I can promise you that much.
I think it’s a basic lack of humility. The ego grows, the power grows. Then, to self-preserve and maintain power, you start deluding yourself in those closed rooms. You start shutting yourself off from the reality of the world. And then, as your own delusion drifts, you’re more incentivized to grow that delusion, incentivized to hide and to keep secrets, and then it just goes off.
That’s why I was hoping you could speak more to Daniel Ellsberg—the importance of somebody like that. If we think about the machinery of how this happens, it feels like heroic whistleblowers are essential to this process. If we talk about Snowden and Assange, one of the original whistleblowers is Daniel Ellsberg, who, just reading here, was an American military analyst, economist, and renowned whistleblower best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Can you tell me about who he was and the importance of him?
Oh, yeah. He was an absolutely brilliant guy. I’m proud to say I was a friend for 10 or 15 years—I don’t know, quite a while. He endorsed my first 2 books, which I’m very proud to say. He did not have a chance to read Provoked, unfortunately, but I know he would have liked it because we were email buddies, and I know that he thought very much along the same lines as me, John Mearsheimer, and others.
I think we’ll get more into that, but on that issue, he was great. He was a brilliant genius, and he was a nuclear war planner. His second book was called The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He had liberated a bunch of documents about nuclear war as well.
But he had decided with his quote-unquote co-conspirator that they should just focus on Vietnam first. That was the thing that mattered the most right then, and that was the Pentagon Papers. All the papers that he had hidden away, he gave to his brother, and his brother lost them. So later he decided, “You know what? I remember enough of this stuff that I can go ahead and just write it from memory.”
He was so brilliant, dude. I don’t know what his IQ was, but I know his father built the first U.S. assembly line for the atom bomb, and they asked him if he would do the same for the H-bomb, but he refused for moral reasons. So that was his background in the first place, and he’s just such a great guy, man.
He was a person who was able to see the situation, like you mentioned, in that room, understand that there was some shit wrong that was going on there, and be able to speak up. He was at RAND, right? His job was writing, and this was when RAND was much more important and very closely tied to the Pentagon. Their whole thing was writing up game-theory nuclear warfare plans.
One of the things he did was find out that Jack Kennedy had to fight like mad. They had to go back and forth over and over again just to get the war plan from the Pentagon. They finally got it, and it said that if we had a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we would nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China.
I don’t know if that included all the Warsaw Pact, but it included all the republics and China. The thinking was that if America, the Soviet Union, and Europe destroyed each other, well, we’d be damned if we were going to leave Earth to those dirty Chicom communists. So we were going to kill all of them, too. That was the thinking.
Ellsberg told Kennedy that. Kennedy forced the Pentagon to rewrite the plan and narrow that thing down. That’s part of the guy’s background—where he comes from. I beg people to read Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and also The Doomsday Machine.
By the way, his first book, Secrets, begins with his first day on the job. I was joking around earlier: he was deputy undersecretary of defense for whatever it was. I can’t remember if it was State or Defense. Maybe it was Defense. It had to have been Defense—forgive me.
The first thing that happens when he clocks in that day for his job is that something starts coming across the teletype: “Ships attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.” Then he’s reading, “Oh, never mind. That was a mistake.” And then he sees the president run with it anyway.
The historian Gareth Porter says that McNamara actually lied to LBJ, and he can prove it. I can’t cite all the chapter and verse, but I trust Gareth. He’s great. He says that McNamara lied to LBJ when they knew that it was a mistake.
And the same thing happened again and again. You take a little piece of information and run with it in order to justify war. That’s right. That’s going to be a theme. Absolutely. What was important in the Pentagon Papers? What are some key ideas?
Okay. So, the Pentagon Papers, first of all, were written while Ellsberg was working at RAND. He had full top-secret clearance, and they were commissioned by Secretary of Defense McNamara to write a real, top-secret history of the Vietnam War—the entire history of our involvement in Indochina since the end of the Second World War.
They wrote it as eyes-only material for the secretary of defense. It had everything in there, and Ellsberg was in charge of writing it along with Leslie Gelb, who shut his mouth and went along with it and later became the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a good dog, right?
Anyway, they were the ones who wrote it together, and Ellsberg was brave enough to liberate the thing. He tried to leak it to the Senate over and over again. Mike Gravel eventually started reading it into the record, and then finally The New York Times got the courage to start publishing the thing.
It showed that they knew they couldn’t win all along. They knew that the South Vietnamese government could not stand. It did not have popular consent. The insurgency in the South was not just based on support from the North, but was its own indigenous revolution against what they saw as intolerable foreign intervention, and they wanted to force us out.
It’s funny, because McNamara later says—I guess he didn’t read the Pentagon Papers—that we were just sure it was the capitalists versus the communists. All this stuff about them not wanting to be ruled over by foreign white devils never occurred to us.
As Chomsky said, come on. America invaded South Vietnam. 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. No different than, as we're going to talk about, Hamid Karzai inviting us to please stay in Afghanistan. It's like, come on, who's zooming who here?
So it showed, and that was the deal, and that was why it was such a big deal. That's 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. It was a huge shock that they had been lying to us, and lying to us, and lying to us deliberately, knowing that this has got to be somebody else's problem. Right? There's a phone call of LBJ saying to a Republican senator friend of his, “I can't be the first president to lose a war.” So, right, he's just going to retire first and make it Nixon's problem, right? Same as George W. Bush said, “Oh, the end of Iraq—well, that'll just have to be up to other presidents to decide. Not my responsibility. All I did was do it.” And that's how they are.
This is also part of the economics of democracy, too, where they have such short terms of office. 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? Instead of working on long-term projects about what the future of mankind is going to look like 100 years from now, you're looking at a much shorter time horizon, including who's going to finance your next election so that you'll have any say-so whatsoever. And as Yoda and Palpatine agree, all who have power are afraid to lose it, because what if the other guy had it instead? It would be worse. Everybody knows that, which is, of course, a huge part of the story of the American empire here.
Well, but fundamentally, that's cowardly, right? So what we want from leaders—from great leaders—is courage. Courage means making difficult decisions that are going to make the world a better place long term, the country a better country long term. And that means, if you start a war, understanding the full cost of that war and how it's going to have to end. If you understand the full cost of war, you're not going to start it.
Yep. Right. So how do we go from the CIA in 1979, the Shah, the Ayatollah—
Mhm.
Nixon? What is the thread that now starts inching toward the ’90s and—
Right.
—toward 9/11 and Iraq? I know there's so much, but we're going to do it, man.
So here's what happens. America goes ahead and allows Ayatollah Khomeini to get on a plane in Paris, France, and go home. Now, I remember even as a kid saying, “But aren't the French our friends? Wouldn't they have checked with us before doing that?” In fact, I just recently found the clip of Peter Jennings interviewing him. The smartest thing Peter Jennings can think of to say is, “So, how do you feel on your triumphant return, Mr. Ayatollah?” Right? The U.S. was just completely aiding and abetting, right? These are shots they called and made happen, right? They sent him home to inherit the thing, and then they did work with him.
People forget, man, and I was just very young at that time. But I was raised in the atmosphere of all of this, and even back then people conflated the revolution itself with the hostage crisis as just one story. It all is spoken in one breath. But in fact, the revolution was in February of 1979, and the hostage crisis didn't break out until November. So what was happening in the meantime?
Well, one of the things was that the Americans were warning the new Iranian regime about threats from the new dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had just overthrown the government in a bloody coup d’état. No revolution there. And you can watch the video of this.
Have you ever seen the video?
Saddam overthrowing Iraq. He's got a huge stadium of guys, and he just starts calling names. Everybody whose name he calls has to go out back and get shot. It's gnarly, man. I think that video is a dark study of human nature. It's terrifying.
Oh, it is. That's ugly, man. That's—
Because everybody is afraid of that disgusting face Saddam has.
Sure. He was a psychopath, man. No question. He was a brute of a dictator, right? There are a lot of presidents in the world. Not all of them train their sons to torture people from the time they're young and stuff.
Oh, fuck. All the cowards in that room. But then you have to ask yourself: What would you do if you were in that room?
Yeah. You've already been bested at that point. I mean, they could all rush the stage, but that ain't going to do them any good, you know?
But before you judge them, how did you get to that room?
Yeah.
And then that's why you have to give props to whistleblowers. You have to give props to people that stand up and risk their life in situations like that, which in those parts of the world is even harder than it is in the United States of America.
By the way, I usually forget to mention this when I tell this story. It takes another few seconds to mention that Saddam Hussein had been groomed by the CIA since the 1950s, on and off. He had been part of different dictatorial regimes, on and off. He'd been in exile in Cairo for a little while and this kind of thing. And then, in the ’70s leading up to the coup, I think it was really closer to the Soviet Union.
And so we'll get to—I guess I'll mention it now—the huge irony of the fact that in the Iran-Iraq War it was America supporting Saddam Hussein and his Soviet military versus Iran and its American one, right?
The absurdity of this is insane.
Well, I'm skipping ahead a step, but I just like that part. But, okay, so America supports the revolution in February of ’79. They're warning this guy, “Hey, you better look out for Saddam Hussein and his intentions.” And we're going to get back to that in one moment here. They were also warning him about the threat from the Soviet Union.
Now, why is that? Well, that's because—skip over Iran. Now we're talking about Afghanistan and Zbigniew Brzezinski's policy: Let's support the mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to try to provoke Soviet intervention there. And so there's a memo, and people can find this at scotthorton.org/fairuse if you want to look at it. It's from—do you want to go ahead and pull it up? So, if you allow me to read President Jimmy Carter's July 3, 1979 finding authorizing covert support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan—
Secret, sensitive.
And the important part is: “Provide unilaterally, or through third countries as appropriate, support to Afghan insurgents.” Now, a finding is an order from a president to the CIA to do something. That's what a finding means. So this is an order to the CIA to do this. On that order, they did start pouring in support to the mujahideen.
Now I have to tell you that my best experts on this, like Eric Margolis—and I got this also from reading Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident—they both said that it wasn't American support for the mujahideen that really provoked the Russians into invading Afghanistan. What it was was that the sock-puppet dictator was a basket case and had created so many enemies that he just couldn't hold it together.
So the first thing the Soviets did when they invaded in December of ’79 was take him out back and shoot him and replace him with a new guy. So that was really the cause of the Soviet intervention there. They had a commie sock-puppet regime. It was not one of the Soviet republics, right? But they had a sock-puppet regime there, and they wanted to maintain it, and it was falling apart. So they rushed to intervene.
However, Lex, the point still remains that the United States of America was trying to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. And we're going to get back to why this is so relevant to the Iran thing in just 1 second, but let's stop and talk about this for a second. Why would they do that? They would do that also because of Vietnam.
Because at the end of Vietnam, Americans had what the government considered to be a mental illness: Vietnam syndrome. That meant that Americans didn't want to contain communism at this cost, and who really cares if Vietnam goes commie? We do business with them now, you know. And so people weren't into it anymore.
So this is where Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, and his, I guess, counterpart at Defense, a guy named Walter Slocombe, came up with this brilliant idea: What we'll do is we will bait the Soviets into overexpansion. Now, we don't want them to invade West Germany, but the Afghans are expendable.
So if we can bait the Soviets into Afghanistan and bog them down, we will be adding straw to the camel's back. By then, think of it, the word Vietnam—that's not even the name of a country over there somewhere anymore. Vietnam, at that time, meant some horrible, stupid, no-win quagmire thing that you shouldn't have done. You shot yourself in the foot and the leg and lost your friend Jimmy down the street and everything, and we don't want to do that.
So now they're saying, “Let's do that to the Reds.” Okay, we'll bog them down, bleed them to bankruptcy, and force them out the hard way, and hurt them in doing that. So that's what they were trying to do. That was the wisdom behind the operation in the first place. And now, if you go click back 1 to Brzezinski, you'll see where he later misrepresented it.
National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's memo to President Carter on December 26, 1979, regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
And the important part here—I mean, there's a lot to it, but if you go down, you will see where—oh, here: “This could become a Soviet Vietnam.” Well, it could become a Soviet Vietnam. In other words, they're already talking about it in that context here, in writing.
We see this in Robert Gates's first memoir, by the way, where he says it was Brzezinski and Slocombe. That's my source for that when I say those 2 were the ones really innovating this policy. He says, “The initial effects of the invasion are likely to be adverse for us for the following reasons.” Then he says that it'll make the hawks talk about how we better do something about Iran. He says this could bring us into a head-to-head confrontation with the Soviets.
So this is very interesting, Lex, because, well, one, this is why America's passing intelligence to the Ayatollah about threats from the Soviets. We think that Iran is now essentially destabilized because of the revolution, and we just deliberately—or at least were trying to, and apparently succeeded in a sense—baited them into invading Afghanistan. Now we're worried that they're too expansionist and that they're going to roll into Persia next, and then they'd be right on the Persian Gulf, and we can't have that.
That's when Jimmy Carter announced, in his speech in 1980, the Carter Doctrine, which said that the Persian Gulf was now an American lake, and that we would take any move by any power—read: the USSR—into the Persian Gulf as an attack on the United States itself. Right? We're, like, bringing the Gulf—those waters—into NATO, right? Giving a full war guarantee to keep the Soviets out.
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm skipping one. Go back. Forgive me. It's hard to stay in line here.
The hostage crisis broke out in November 1979 because David Rockefeller—from, of course, Standard Oil of New Jersey, a.k.a. Exxon, and Aramco, and all those things—was the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank at that time. He was very close with Jimmy Carter, and he convinced Carter to let the Shah into the United States for cancer treatment. That was what caused the riot at the embassy and the seizure of the hostages.
Now, I don't know—and I'm sure there are books about this that I just haven't read yet—that explain whether it really was the IRGC that took the lead in that, or whether it was the students who did it, or what. But obviously, the government held the hostages and kept the thing going, so they bear responsibility for that. The point being that America had been trying to work with the Ayatollah up until then.
The idea was not that Shiite fundamentalist Islam says that all white Christians from North America must lay down dead right now because that's their religious belief. “Look at them ranting, ‘We're the Great Satan,’ and burning our flag.” But when so many people hear the story begin with, “They're calling us the Great Satan and burning our flag,” then, well, they just hate us, and so we're just going to have to do something about that.
I remember meeting a guy one time who said, “Listen, al-Qaeda hates us for all these complicated reasons.” And he explained them. And then he goes, “But not Iran. They just hate us. I remember when I was a boy, they were burning our flag and calling us Satan.” It's like, “Yeah, but, well, they had a reason, too. Not that it justifies them doing anything sinful or criminal, but I'm just saying they also had reasons for reacting the way that they reacted.”
America had launched a coup in 1953 from that same embassy. By saying that they were going to cure the Shah's cancer, it seemed to be an indication to them that we were going to try to reinstall him in power and cancel the revolution. And so they were preempting that.
Again, this is not a justification for everything that happened there or whatever. I'm just trying to tell the whole story in a way that I've told it to people before. People say, “I never knew that. I always thought that it all happened in one big show.” And they never admit—unless sometimes the Republicans accuse Carter of this—they'll tell the part about how Carter was so naive as to send the Ayatollah home, although that's usually always left out.
But now he announces the Carter Doctrine, giving a war guarantee to Iran, which he now officially hates and which is holding our hostages and completely humiliating him. Right? And there's Operation Eagle Claw, where they sent forces into Iran. It was supposed to be a rescue mission that ended up in disaster, where the planes and the helicopters crashed into each other. They were already leaving anyway because it was going to be botched, and then they crashed on the way out. So that was a big humiliation for Carter as well.
And I should also tell you that Gareth just found this: a classified document that he found in the State Department records. It showed that just after the Carter Doctrine speech, Brzezinski, in a private meeting with the Saudi foreign minister and also with Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who was later Clinton's Secretary of State, admitted that “we don't think there's really a Soviet threat to Iran.” Brzezinski himself admitted that.
So the pretext for the Carter Doctrine was fake, and he admitted it himself. 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.
And we should also give a shout-out to Gareth Porter. He has written about the Vietnam War, including the book Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam.
I have to say I believe that he is the most important journalist of the War on Terrorism era. I call him Gareth the Great. He's a good friend of mine. I've interviewed him 300-something times on my show about essentially everything he's written since 2007. He is the best of the best of the best.
It's not just the war in Vietnam. He writes also about—
Absolutely. He specialized in Iraq and Afghanistan, exposing the entire fraud of David Petraeus and his career. He wrote the book Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare on the Iranian nuclear program. That is by far the very best book on that.
You're absolutely right. Vietnam, Cambodia, Syria, Iran, and the War on Terror—all things he's written extensively about.
Gareth Porter the Great, man. Absolutely great.
I learned so much from him. I couldn't begin to explain.
Fair enough. So, the story continues.
Yes.
Carter.
So, another aspect of the Carter Doctrine was that Carter gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. Now, first thing is, why did Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran? It ain't just because he likes doing what Jimmy Carter says. He had his own reasons.
Now, picture your map of Iraq. I know you got one in your head there. Everything from Baghdad east to Iran and down to Kuwait—that is what you could call Shiastan: predominantly Shiite Iraq, right? And then there's 60% of the population—a supermajority. In the north, you have the Kurds, who are Sunnis, but they're Kurds, a separate ethnicity from the Arabs. And then you have the Sunni Arabs, who are another 20%.
Saddam Hussein was a secular Sunni Arab leading essentially the Ba'ath Party, which was sort of a fascist state, with Arab characteristics or whatever. It was not an entirely sectarian one. He had Christians, Kurds, and Shiites in his government and things like that. It was not, you know, just a caricature or whatever. It was a balance-of-power act.
But after the Iranian Revolution, Saddam had real reason to fear that the Shiite revolution was going to spread to Iraq, 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 identity as Iraqis and Arabs, right? Separate from the Persians.
He had real reason to believe that, including that members of the Dawa Party and people loyal to the Hakim family—Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his people—left to go to Iran, and they chose Iran's side in the war. Saddam Hussein's solution to that was to conscript all these people, force them into his army, march them east against Iran, and use them in that way.
This led to an absolutely brutal World War I–style—maybe Russia-Ukraine-style—trench warfare, with tanks, artillery, planes, and ships. It was a hell of a war for 8 years, all through the 1980s, as the United States almost entirely backed Saddam Hussein, except for when they backed the Ayatollah. Remember Iran-Contra?
During Iran-Contra, what did they do? They went to the Israelis and said, “Hey, you're still friends with the government in Iran. You guys don't mind the Ayatollah one bit and have maintained your friendship there. 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.” This is what became the great Iran-Contra scandal.
And so we should also say—and you highlight the importance of understanding Iran-Contra—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, which was under an arms embargo, with the proceeds being used to fund Contra rebels fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, despite Congress explicitly prohibiting such funding.”
Yep. And this is, of course, supposedly a side story, but a huge part of the side story is that it absolutely was true, as the great Gary Webb reported in the “Dark Alliance” series and in his great book Dark Alliance, and as many other great journalists reported as well: the CIA had a massive operation to bring cocaine into the United States by the truckload and planeload to sell it to poor Americans, Black people especially, in L.A.
But also, yes, it’s true. They even made a Tom Cruise movie after years of calling us conspiracy cooks and all this. The movie is about a guy named Barry Seal, whose job it was to fly guns and money down there and cocaine up here for the Contras, for the CIA, and into Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, where he was read in on this. The operation was run out of the vice president’s office: George H. W. Bush. That much is true.
In the same way—I know less about this—they had the cocaine from Miami Vice coming into Florida. This is where the crack epidemic came from, in South L.A. and throughout the country, really, in many places. They just don’t give a damn about us, man. Congress said, “You can’t have any money to fund the Contras,” and they said, “Yeah, but we want to anyway.” So this is how they did it.
So the CIA would help orchestrate this kind of transport of drugs?
Absolutely right. And then they completely destroyed the heroic Gary Webb for exposing this. They didn’t murder him, but they drove him to suicide. His good friend Robert Parry, the great journalist, verified that. No, it really was a suicide. People thought it was suspicious because he shot himself twice, but that does happen sometimes, where people flinch on the first one.
It was his father’s gun, and he was totally depressed. He signed his house over to his wife, and somebody stole his motorcycle. They had run him out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News. They first ran him to the Hollywood beat, and then eventually he just quit and went to become an investigator for the California State Legislature.
So the CIA doesn’t have to kill you directly. They can psychologically destroy you.
That’s right. They put the gun in his mouth either way for doing the right thing. But anyway, he didn’t get any facts wrong. The only thing that anyone had to attack him on was that the graphics editor put a phrase out of context, big on the page or something in the newspaper.
It was something silly that made it sound like he was saying the purpose of the mission was to destroy the Black community, when he never said that. What he said was they didn’t give a damn about those people. I don’t even know if he addressed that, right? But he certainly wasn’t saying that was what it was about. It was about funding the Contras.
They found their separate ways of doing it. This is one of the things that made me—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 maybe a freshman in high school or younger than that. I knew that Ronald Reagan was a dope pusher: the same guy with “Just Say No” and the same guy with the massively increased penalties for people engaging in simply the possession, much less the sale and trade, of drugs.
There are people who went to prison for decades, for life essentially and literally, for just possession of the same drugs that the government was bringing in. How are you ever going to believe in a security force like that again? I never have. I don’t know why you’d even need to see a Waco massacre, or an Iraq war, or any other thing to detest these people. That’s who they are.
There’s this great film producer named Kevin Booth. He was Bill Hicks’s best friend and producer, and he did a documentary about the drug war where they show this guy. They’re filming the prisoners through the gate, and they’re all yelling over each other. You can’t really make out much. One guy finally makes everybody be quiet, looks at the camera, and goes, “Listen, I’m doing 35 years because I had a few rocks in my pocket. Does that sound right to you?”
I was like, “Dude, it was Ronald Reagan’s cocaine in his pocket.” That guarantees a full pardon, man. Right? What are we talking about? That’s not fair. It’s a dark aspect of human nature that people who try to ban drugs are often secretly participating in doing that thing.
Bootleggers and Baptists, you know. Just on a small tangent: since you’re a Texan, have you ever met Bill Hicks?
No, man. I learned about Bill Hicks like a month after he died. They started playing Sane Man on the access channel all the time, and I was like, “Oh my God, who’s this guy?” Then they’re like, “Oh, he just died.”
He has been a huge influence on me in a lot of ways. I’m very much a Hicksian. I apologize for that. It’s good to do a shout-out back to the drug war and that involvement from Carter onward, and Reagan and Iran-Contra.
Well, yeah, let’s go back to Iran, because the cocaine is really tied up in the Contra end of the scandal. The point being, America’s backing Saddam, except when they’re helping Israel back Iran by selling them these missiles. There’s even—I don’t have my footnote anymore, but it’s findable, I’m sure—where they talked about, “What we do is we support one side until they start getting ahead a little bit, then we support the other side a little bit more,” or we authorize the Israelis to increase support for Iran and play them back and forth against each other.
That’s not just offshore balancing and peacetime. That’s balancing in wartime, encouraging them to keep killing each other, which is some pretty horrific policy to pursue.
Could you also comment, during this stage—and this thread will continue—what role does Israel have to play in this part of the story with Iran?
Well, I don’t know. I don’t know much about what they were saying about America’s Iraq policy during that time, but I know that they were still friends with the Ayatollah. We’re not going to get to them switching gears on the Ayatollah until Rabin in 1993, so hold that thought. The war is still going on. We have to mention the chemical weapons, too.
Yes.
America bought them. Taxpayers bought them. There was a huge Iraqgate scandal, where people were put on trial for the money, but then their defense was, “But the government made me do it.” What are you talking about? This was a whole thing, and it was German chemical weapons, I believe, and maybe some French ones, that were bought with supposed agricultural loans from the United States to Iraq.
They had a sophisticated biological weapons program, too, with anthrax and the rest. The Americans sent them the precursors for the germs that they would need. During the Iran-Iraq War, from 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. There is substantial documentation that Western governments, especially the United States and some of its allies, provided Iraq with dual-use technology, intelligence, and materials that facilitated Iraq’s chemical weapons program. Yeah, and it goes on.
Let me drop 2 good footnotes for people here. The first one would be Shane Harris, who’s now at the Washington Post, a very official national security beat reporter. He wrote a piece about this at ForeignPolicy.com a few years back where he goes into extensive detail. So, as far as authoritative sources, there you go. Nothing conspiratorial about this narrative at all.
But if you want to do a deeper dive into it, go to FFF.org. This is the Future of Freedom Foundation, and they have a page there. 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?” You can go to FFF.org, search just that site, and then search for “chemical weapons Iraq.” I bet you’ll find it.
Yeah, right there: “Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction?” I had mentioned this, I guess, on the Tucker show, and so I actually talked with Hornberger. I went back and found it, and I made sure that all of those links are up to date and work for each of those stories. People can go through and take a very close look at those. They’re just articles, never mind all the books about it and stuff, which there are plenty.
This is a set of links assembled by Jacob Hornberger. The title is “Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction?” on FFF.org. People should check it out.
And then, oh, there’s Shane Harris and Matthew M. Aid: “CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran.”
“The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history and still gave him a hand.” By the official rules of confirmation bias, when Shane Harris admits something I’m accusing him of, that means it’s definitely true. If I ever disagree with him, well, he’s a liar from the Post. Got that?
Okay. Good to know. That’s how truth works. Good.
Of course. So there’s your authoritative source, everybody: Shane Harris from the Post.
All right.
And that’s a special inside joke for fans of Where the Buffalo Roam, too. Remember “Harris from the Post”? Have you ever seen that?
He's pretending to be Harris from the Post, and he's hanging out in the bathroom with Richard Nixon.
And I forgot the conversation. It's funny as hell, though.
Similar type of wild journey as Fear and Loathing.
Oh, yeah. I got to admit, I don't remember the story that well. It's very different from Fear and Loathing, but it's also very good. Well, I know what I'm doing tonight.
Okay, cool. We're watching Where the Buffalo Roam. It's good. Everyone will like it. I promise.
Okay.
Underrated Bill Murray.
He's forever underrated, actually. Genius actor. Okay, and so, back to chemical weapons and Saddam Hussein.
So, the war finally comes to an end in 1989, and at the same time, the Soviets are withdrawing from Afghanistan. We're going to get back to them in a minute. But the war comes to an end, and for the next couple of years, Saddam Hussein is in a struggle over war debts with his creditors—Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—who are demanding all their money back that they gave him for the war, that they loaned to him for the war.
Now, of course, he feels like he fought that war partially in their defense. Also, at this time, oil is trading at $12 a barrel. So he has no ability to repay them, rebuild his country, or do anything else. And they're completely putting the screws to him.
On top of that, it's disputed whether the Kuwaitis were literally slant drilling under the border, or whether that's really shorthand, I think, usually, for the fact that they were overproducing from shared oil wells that straddled the border. When you have a contract where your property and my property abut each other, and we have mineral rights but a shared oil well down there, then we have a quota for how much we pump. 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. That's kind of how that thing works.
So in this case, it's the same thing over an international border. The Kuwaitis, at least, are also accused—and I know less about this—of using slant-drilling techniques that they'd been taught by Americans to drill that way and steal Iraqi oil, from the margin. So Hussein's pissed about this, at the same time that they're putting the screws to him over calling in the war debts.
I don't believe that this was a deliberate trap, but in effect, it was. I think what happened was a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. There was no real unified policy that had been sent down from on high on how to handle this, evidently. So the CIA and CENTCOM, 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.
The State Department—James A. Baker, through Ambassador Glaspie, and through Margaret Tutwiler and John Kelly—was sending signals that actually said, “Go ahead. We don't really care.” We just celebrated April Glaspie 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 Iraq: the Iraq issue and your border dispute is not associated with America, and we have no position on this. You're going to have to settle it.”
We always had the Iraqi version of that story published in The New York Times, but then, from Manning and Assange, we got the State Department's version of that document. It's a little less explicit as far as how it makes the Americans look, but it's essentially the same. In there, she says, “Now listen, George Bush wanted me to emphasize to you that he does not want a war in the Gulf.”
Stephen Walt from Harvard University, at ForeignPolicy.com, said, “Listen, in diplomatic language, these things are mathematical formulas. You have to be very careful how you say these things.” Saddam Hussein wasn't anticipating a war. He knew he was going to roll right into Kuwait; they couldn't stop him. He was counting on a coup de main.
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, and he very well could have read it that way. That was, at the very least, a flashing yellow light, if not a green light, to go right ahead. We know that, again, John Kelly and Margaret Tutwiler also made statements essentially playing down American concerns about what was happening.
I should give a quick shout-out, since you mentioned him, to Stephen Walt. I had a few email exchanges with him. He's a co-author with John Mearsheimer on one of his books.
He's a prominent American political scientist and currently a professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. He's the best of them, man. He's Mearsheimer's partner on a lot of things. They're basically considered the co-deans of the realist school of foreign policy in America.
They're like Henry Kissinger and realpolitik, only without the bloody hands and the hawkish instinct. I think both would be relative hawks on China compared to me, for example. They're not libertarian non-interventionists, but they're very skeptical of a lot of this misuse. Both of them opposed the Iraq War, for example, in the first place, and that kind of thing.
If I may, I can never sing enough praises to John Mearsheimer. Of course, his work is very important. He's fearless as an academic, as a writer, as a historian, but also as a human being. I got a chance to know him. We had dinner. We had many conversations. We've exchanged a lot of emails, and he's a sweetheart.
Yeah, he's a great guy. I email back and forth with him, too. I'm trying to get him on next week, and he just killed it on Tucker the other day, too. He was fantastic on there. He sets such a great example.
Well, he's just a good human being.
Yeah. Yeah.
He has a real, deep compassion. Sometimes when you cover these topics, and just like you said, you realize who the adults in the room are.
Yeah. And people call him some kind of hater, and it's like, come on. That's because that's all you got. The only reason you could call him that is because you got no other thing to say, you know.
Yeah. A real heart of gold.
This is a really special guy. Anyway, sorry.
Yeah. Yeah. No problem. So, Iraq War. America gives a flashing yellow light to Saddam Hussein, their client, to go ahead and take back the northern oil fields.
I left out one piece. When I was talking about the left hand and the right hand, Wolfowitz worked for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon at that time. He was always an Iraq hawk, and he had warned—maybe not knowing that the CIA, or that Carter, was encouraging it explicitly—that Saddam was going to attack Iran back in 1980.
So he was always an Iraq hawk, and he was very worried that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait. He convinced Dick Cheney that we should make a statement telling Saddam not to do it. But then—I'm going to think of his name in just one moment—Pete Williams, who later became the NBC News reporter, was the Pentagon spokesman at that time. Isn't that funny how that works? If you go back in time, that's how it worked.
He made a statement where he seemed to walk back their warning, which was probably just incompetence, right? 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. So then they were like, “Oh, man.” They tried to get George Bush to write a letter. I believe Bush sent a letter, but then Cheney and Wolfowitz thought it was too conciliatory. It wasn't clear enough that they were saying, “Don't you do it,” so they wanted to send another letter. But by then it was too late, and Hussein went ahead and rolled in.
This is from all these very elite accounts of the story from the inside, these different books and whatever I read. You can see, if you check the timeline, that for the first few days they weren't threatening to do anything about it. Colin Powell chaired the National Security Council meeting—he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—and they announced the first day, “Well, they better just not move on Saudi Arabia. You roll into Riyadh, you got trouble with us, bub.”
But they were essentially prepared to accept the invasion of Kuwait. It's crazy that Cheney was involved with all this, because then the story continues.
So, yeah, he's secretary of defense at that time.
So wild.
He was the only one in the government at that time who was not from the Reagan administration. He had been in Congress. All the rest of these guys were Reagan's guys. The vice president was now the president. Colin Powell had been national security adviser for Reagan; he's now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. James Baker was Treasury secretary and is now secretary of state.
Likewise, Brent Scowcroft—I forgot, maybe he was deputy national security adviser under Reagan—is now national security adviser under H.W. Bush. So this is the third Reagan term without Reagan, basically. Cheney would have been the newer guy and tended to be more hawkish. In this case, he was hawkish, trying to stop the war from breaking out in the first place. In that sense, he was more concerned about the danger of the thing and whatever.
Sorry if this is a distracting question, but when we talk about the birth and evolution of the neoconservative movement, how does it connect to this?
Yeah, we can mention here that when I go through and look at who were all the worst hawks on Iraq War 1—
Many of them were neoconservatives. We probably shouldn't get into the whole biography of a movement here, but they certainly were very much in support of this intervention in Desert Storm, or Iraq War I, as I call it. I'm trying to get that to catch on because we're at Iraq War 3½ or 4 now, so we're going to have to keep these things straight somehow.
But some of the same characters were responsible for Iraq War II.
That's right. Because, of course, Clinton's in there for a while, but then it's President Bush's son. He's the next president. He brings Cheney and Powell with him and then all this other stuff. But he was impatient.
So what happens is Margaret Thatcher comes to town and gives Bush Senior a backbone transplant. This is her people's term for it. She says to him, “Don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush.” In other words, she's calling out his manhood, and she's a woman from a smaller, weaker country. So what's he going to do now? That's when he says, “Yeah, this will not stand,” just out of his own personal embarrassment.
Speaking of Bill Hicks, this was a Bill Hicks joke: that this was the wimp president. It was a Newsweek cover: “Wimp President.” Apparently, that stuck in this guy's craw a little bit. “I'll show you who's a wimp.” He really felt like he had to do something about that.
When Margaret Thatcher called him out, instead of being prudent, as he would say—patient and conservative—he went, “Nuh-uh. I'm tougher than you, lady. I'll show you how tough I am. I'll do a big, tough thing.”
Meanwhile, what did America care about Kuwait? Britain had interests in Kuwaiti oil, and the Kuwaiti royal family—His Highness Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah—had investments in British debt. But what do I care about that, Lex Fridman? Not one bit. You know what I mean? But that was a big part of how the war started.
So after the first 3 days, they said, “We're not going. They're not going to invade Saudi. We're warning them. They'd better not invade Saudi,” or whatever. It was after that that they decided, “Okay, now we are going.” Once they decided that, they refused to negotiate in good faith for the rest of the time.
Noam Chomsky did the best job of documenting this. What did he document? He documented 10 different sources from the summer of 1990 through January 1991 where the Americans—the Bush administration in Washington, D.C.—refused, time after time after time after time, to negotiate in good faith with Saddam to get him out of there peacefully. Once the gauntlet was thrown down, now we had a big set-piece battle. Now we're going to go in there and rock him.
I have the quote from Brent Scowcroft in there. This was long an accusation from some liberal types that you might dismiss, but it is true. It was literally an explicitly stated part of their thinking: We have to defeat Vietnam syndrome, the reluctance of the American people to do things like this.
We have to give them one that we can do, that will be short, sweet, fun, and easy—something where we can hold a big-ass parade and be victorious again like the old days. Rebuild that martial spirit and make that normalcy in America, not the post-Vietnam, antimilitarist malaise that you remember from the ’70s and ’80s. Now it's time to get back to work remaking the world and give the American people something to believe in again.
Bush Senior then, after the fact, said, “By God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” This is a huge part of it. If you think about Iraq War I, to this day people still think of it as short and sweet: We used all this space-age technology and whooped them good.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Daniel Davis, and General H.R. McMaster, then of lower rank, went in there and won the big tank battle of 73 Easting and showed the superiority of American tanks over Soviet tanks. All of these things were so much fun for them and such a big deal for them at that time that they wanted to do it again—for our nation's overall long-term interest, or for what was good for them, their donors, their benefactors, and the psychological-warfare campaign they wanted to wage against the American people.
This is what we're here for: We go and rescue helpless little countries like the monarchy of His Royal Highness Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah in Kuwait so we can reinstall the monarchy, because everybody knows how much superior they are to fascist dictatorships like the one the Iraqis have, which we've supported for the last decade. We even helped him gas people—not just while he was gassing his own people, supposedly the Kurds in the Anfal campaign, but also while he was gassing the Iranians and the rest.
But now he's Hitler. Now he's going to roll on Saudi. He's going to take over. Next thing you know, he's going to take over all of the Middle East's resources. He's going to build up a thousand-year Reich and roll on Paris. “Huh? Saddam Hussein is?” That was the way they put it.
They absolutely lied us into war. They claimed that he had lined up his massive armored tank divisions on the Saudi border and was preparing to roll on Riyadh. That was a lie. The St. Petersburg Times hired a Soviet company—or maybe the Soviet government—to provide the satellite photos and show that there was nothing but empty desert out there. They had sent a couple of patrols near the border, or whatever, but there was nothing like armored divisions preparing to expand the war into Saudi Arabia.
They knew they were lying about that. In fact, the St. Petersburg Times published it about a week and a half before the invasion, and the AP, Reuters, CBS, CNN, ABC, NBC, and everybody else refused to run it and just buried it.
The other thing was a major part of this, and it's amazing—it sounds so silly now after everything that's gone on since then—but it was a huge deal. They did the Iraqi incubators hoax. They brought in a girl who claimed to be a nurse and said that she was in the hospital in Kuwait City when the Iraqi soldiers came in, stole the incubators, threw the babies out of the incubators onto the cold floor to die, and then ran off with the incubators.
Whether they destroyed them out of sadism or brought them back to Baghdad because there was a big incubator shortage there, she didn't say. But it turned out she wasn't a nurse, and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, and the whole thing was a 100% hoax. Zero percent of it ever happened.
But Amnesty International vouched for it and said it was true, and that was all you needed. So George Bush repeatedly brought this up and said, “See, this shows that Iraq was determined to systematically dismantle Kuwait. This isn't just an invasion; it's these horrible crimes against humanity. What would we do if they were doing it to us?” That was a big part of what they used to beat people over the head about that war.
The other thing was—and they learned this from the focus groups—“We have to threaten the American people with nukes.” Even with moral atrocities like the incubator hoax going on, Americans were still like, “I don't know.” Like Richard Pryor said in 1986, he had a bit where he stops joking and just says it: “We used to hate the Germans and the Japanese, and now we're bombing Libya. Does that sound right?” They can't fight back. It's just weird. It seems weird.
So people needed a real reason to go, and that was atomic bombs. People forget this now because Iraq War II takes the place of it in their memory, but in Iraq War I they also alleged repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons, or that he very well could be. This was one of the reasons why we had to go.
Here's the screwed-up part about that: They were lying, but they turned out to be telling the truth accidentally. In fact, what they found out in the aftermath of the war, when they occupied southern Iraq, was that there was barely the beginning of the beginnings of a nuclear-weapons program there. This was very, very early—we're talking 1991, right? Early 1991, at the end of Iraq War I.
So what happened was, people always cite the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981 and say what a great success it was. No, that was an IAEA-safeguarded facility; it was not producing weapons-grade anything of any kind. When they bombed it, all they did was drive his program underground. Now it became a nuclear-weapons program, and it was only a coincidence that America, after launching Iraq War I, found his secret program that the CIA had no idea about.
This became a major consequence. Here's why: Dick Cheney would later cite this and say, “Well, if the CIA can't find it, that doesn't mean it's not there. Remember that one time?” So it became a big part of the hawks' talking points after that.
It's confirmation bias again: If the CIA agrees, then they're right. If the CIA disputes it, then, yeah, we don't have to listen to them, even when they're the ones they cite as the authoritative source for every positive claim they're making. So the playbook, even with Iraq War I, is that you try to look for different stories. Whether it's anecdotal stories with nurses or stories about nuclear weapons, you're trying to find a way to justify war.
That's right. The same playbook was applied in the second Iraq War.
Yeah. And back to Noam Chomsky for one second: They refused to accept Hussein's surrender. By the end of the thing, he had been demanding, “Come on, let me keep these uninhabited islands at the north of the Persian Gulf, where I could make an oil-shipping facility there or something like that.”
You know, he dropped all those demands. Here were his final demands. He wasn't just going to turn tail for nothing; he had to save some face. His final demands were that America promise to leave the Middle East and that Israel leave the occupied territories someday. In other words, nothing. He's demanding nothing. He's demanding, “Please let me keep the skin on my face.” That's the only face he's saving.
And they wouldn't give it to him because that would have stopped the war from happening. Lex, I'm sorry, man, but that's the history of how that happened. Think about the relative power of the United States of America, with the entire UN Security Council on board, too, telling Iraq for 6 months, 5 months, “You better give in.” And they couldn't figure out a way to get him to give in, huh?
Yeah, they could, too. They didn't want him to give in. They had all of these chances. There were reports in Newsday and The New York Times that had all the stories about how he kept making all these offers, and they would just reject them out of hand.
In fact, Noam Chomsky talked about how it would be in the business press in England: “Oh, look, oil prices fall because they think there's a peace deal.” The business press knows that this is happening. “Oh, it looks like they're going to have a peace deal,” and so the price of oil falls from the relaxed tensions. Then, nope, they cancel the thing and go on anyway.
You mentioned the part which I think is fascinating about defeating Vietnam syndrome and reinvigorating martial spirit. Can you just psychoanalyze the State Department, CIA, and people in government? Why did they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit? Is it money? Is it power? Is it just coming up with a narrative—an age-old narrative—that nationalism is good, and one of the ways to achieve nationalism is to invade somebody? What is the motivation in a room with these folks sitting together? Why do they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit?
So they could enforce what they called the new world order, which was—again, I borrowed this from Chomsky, but I found 2 original citations for it—as George Bush Senior himself said, “What we say goes.” This is what Biden and them call the liberal, rules-based international order of global governance. What it means is, forget the UN Charter. Forget the UN Security Council. There's the US National Security Council, and everybody's going to bow down and do what we say.
It's our unipolar moment, as Charles Krauthammer put it in Foreign Affairs, and we're going to take full advantage of it. But don't worry, Lex. Again, as Bush Senior said, the world trusts us with this power because they know that we are good people, we know what we're doing, and we only have their best interests at heart. We care about them so much.
And so the world allows us to be the global police force to enforce the law and make sure everything's fair because, man, what if we stopped holding the world together? Boy, it would all just fall apart.
So just clamoring for power.
It'd be Germany and Japan. I don't know if you remember this, but when the Soviet Union fell apart, it was, “Oh, my God, Germany and Japan are going to rise back up and take back over the world again.”
Really?
Yeah.
The messaging.
And before the war on terrorism, they tried for a while to build up the war against the Mexican drug cartels and the Peruvian drug cartels. They even made Harrison Ford movies out of it. We had to have somebody to fight in the 1990s while we were trying to get something else going on here, basically. They don't want to have to get a job.
And yet, like Bush Senior, you've got to give him credit for this: He absolutely slashed military spending, slashed the bomber fleets, slashed the military, slashed Army divisions and ships and everything. We don't need an anti-Soviet military for a world without the Soviet Union. He really cut it way, way back, especially on nuclear weapons.
In fact, I hate to say this because I never was an H. W. Bush guy, and I'm so critical of all of his Middle East policy and all these things, but in a way, you could say he's the most heroic guy who ever lived in the sense of working with the Soviets and then the Russians on these treaties to bring the global stockpile down from approximately 70,000 to where we have about 7,000 each, which is way more than enough to do you in.
But when the Soviets had 40,000 and we had 30,000, come on. Somebody's got to do something. Bush Senior is the man who did something about it.
As I show in the book—well, we're skipping ahead to the other Cold War book here—but he made unilateral cuts because he didn't have time to do negotiations. So he made massive unilateral cuts in hopes that Gorbachev would respond in kind. Or was it Yeltsin by then? I think it was Yeltsin by then.
Yeltsin did respond in kind and made these drastic cuts on his own unilateral basis, just without even an agreement. “You know what? We'll get rid of our class of those same kinds of weapons, too.” You've got to give credit where it's due: He handled the end of the Cold War a lot better than he might have, I guess you could say.
Yeah. Anybody who's trying to decrease the number of nuclear weapons in the world requires some degree of heroism to do that.
Yeah. And he wasn't a neocon, right? He's an old WASP-y guy from the older establishment, and he called the neoconservatives “the crazies.” He told General Scowcroft to keep the crazies in the basement. In other words, they're allowed to kill people down in Latin America, but you keep them away from Middle East policy, right? They're not allowed to mess around with what we're doing over there.
And I guess here's where let's start talking more about bringing Israel into our narrative here because, as I said, the Israelis had stayed friends with Iran through the Iran-Iraq War. They had no problem with fundamentalist Shia Islam then; they sold these guys weapons.
In fact, Trita Parsi shows in his absolutely excellent book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel, and the United States—which, if you haven't read, you'll absolutely love it—it's so good. You want to pull that up? He's one of the co-founders of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Treacherous Alliance
The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel, and the United States by Trita Parsi. This work examines the complex, often contradictory relationship between Israel, Iran, and the United States—countries whose alliances and rivalries have repeatedly shifted since the mid-20th century. The poor Iraqis, of course, are stuck in the middle of this thing. That's a big subtext of the story, right?
But what's so great about that book is that there's no news-cycle stuff in there anywhere. It's all told from the point of view of the highest-level military strategists in all 3 countries. It started out, I believe, as his PhD and became this thing, but it is just a masterpiece.
Anyway, he's the best guy to read about this and the way that all this transpired. Essentially, when the Ayatollah Khomeini, the mean old Ayatollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, would be threatening the Israelis—“Oh, we're going to destroy you one day,” or whatever—they would be shipping him missiles that day, right?
This was a covert relationship that was going on behind the scenes, even when they were saying very malicious things about each other in public. That was really cover for the extent of their covert relationship that was still ongoing at that time.
And so now we've got to put this off for 1 second. I'm sorry, I left out—it's important to go back to the Shia uprising of 1991. In the aftermath of Iraq War I, Saddam Hussein crushed the Shia uprising, which George Bush Senior had encouraged.
I'm not sure if you've ever seen the movie Three Kings. I like to bring this up as kind of a touchstone for people because a lot of people learn history just from movies. The movie stars Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, and George Clooney.
And they're soldiers on a gold heist, but they're in southern Iraq, occupying Iraq in the aftermath of the first Iraq War.
And in the background, Saddam Hussein's forces are murdering everybody, crushing the Shia uprising. That's what's going on in the background. So people remember that movie. That'll probably be the most they ever learned about the crushed Shia uprising of 1991.
That's fair. You know, that's how it is. Yeah.
They didn't make that big of a deal out of it at the time because it was a horrible Bay of Pigs-type situation where America told them to do it. George Bush, in his own voice on Voice of America, encouraged them to rise up and finish Saddam. The Air Force dropped leaflets over predominantly Shia army divisions—and the rest of them, I guess, too—saying, “Now's everybody's chance to rise up and overthrow this guy.”
But then they changed their mind. And the reason they changed their mind was—remember when I said in 1980 why Saddam invaded Iran? Because some Iraqis were choosing Iran's side in the war. He was afraid they all were and that the Iranian Revolution was going to come for him, right? So he conscripted the army and sent them to war against Iran instead.
Well, now in the Shia uprising, those very same Iraqis who've been living in Iran for 10 years and fought on Iran's side in the war are now coming across the border to lead the uprising. Does that make sense?
Mhm.
Okay. This is, namely and most importantly, the Badr Brigade. The brigade is the militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was run at that time by a guy named 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 story here.
When the Badr Brigade started coming across the border was when George Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and the boys all flinched and said, “Uh-oh,” because, again, this is essentially the third Reagan term, right? So we just spent a decade supporting Saddam to contain the Iranian Revolution.
Now we're the ones importing it into Iraq. That is a mistake.
And so he called it off. He was more cautious and said, “Let's not do that.” But the problem with that was that 100,000 Kurds and Shiites were killed. That also became the excuse for America to stay in Saudi Arabia.
They had promised the king, “You let us get rid of Saddam and drive him out of Kuwait,” and we have this on Dick Cheney's word himself. It's so funny. There's a podcast—Bill Kristol's podcast. Do you know Bill Kristol has a podcast?
He interviewed Dick Cheney. Somebody put this on Archive.org before it's gone forever, man. It's great because they talk about everything except Iraq War II. They don't say a word about it, either of them, the whole time.
So Dick Cheney explains in that interview to Bill Kristol that he was the one—never mind James Baker, the secretary of state—who, as secretary of defense, promised King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, “We promise we'll leave as soon as the war is over.”
I really screwed this up, man. I'm sorry. When we talked about Afghanistan before, I should have dwelled a little longer on the fact that, as we all know, when we talked about bogging the Soviets down into their own Vietnam in the 1980s, America supported not just the mujahideen of Afghanistan, but what became the International Islamic Brigades.
That meant Arabs and other Muslims from all around the world, especially from Arab lands, going to Afghanistan to fight on the side of the mujahideen against the Soviets. This included Egyptian Islamic Jihad and what was called then the Azzam Group, which was the main group controlled by the Saudi intelligence services during the 1980s.
And that was something the United States wanted.
Yes. Brzezinski was trying to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, and then they wanted to extend the war. So America had a deal with Saudi Arabia: we would match them dollar for dollar. We would work with their intelligence services and the Pakistanis to support local mujahideen like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who later became America's enemies in our Afghan war, as well as various Pashtun warlords of different descriptions.
Wait, so the U.S. was essentially helping train up these militia groups?
Yes, including bringing them to the United States and having our Special Forces train them in car bombs, sabotage, assassinations, and everything. Yes, full-scale U.S. support for building up the bin Laden movement, as long as they were killing Soviets.
And those same people then came back and became the enemies of the United States.
So when we talk about al-Qaeda, what we're talking about is eventually the merger of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Azzam Group after Azzam was killed. I don't think anybody really knows who killed him. Osama bin Laden took over his group.
This is the main reason—and there are many—that al-Qaeda turned against the United States: Osama bin Laden was outraged that the king had allowed the United States to liberate Kuwait instead of him and his men. It's not like they have a bunch of mountains to hide out in in Kuwait, but he wanted to try to kick Saddam out.
He was driven crazy by the fact that the king allowed white Christian combat forces to come and occupy this holy land. It's not just their country, but their holy land, where Mecca and Medina—the birthplace of Muhammad and the birthplace of the religion of Islam—are, the two holy places, as bin Laden called them. I guess they all do.
And then we didn't leave. This is the ultimate outrage, right? This is the main overriding reason for bin Laden—or at least for his jihad, which was really based on the idea of trying to get all the desperate groups from around the Middle East.
These are more or less stateless groups. They're, in some cases, backed by Saudi Arabia at different times, but they're jihadists from all over the place: Egyptians, Saudis, Syrians, and Azzam himself, who was Palestinian and raised in a refugee camp in Kuwait.
Bin Laden's genius was to figure out that the one thing they could agree on was, “Let's attack the United States, because America is at the root of all of our problems.” Just as we had helped them bog the Soviets down in Afghanistan, they wanted to do the same thing to us.
This was really the beginning of al-Qaeda's war against the United States. It began in reaction to the declaration of this new world order, the permanent stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, and what became the permanent, unrelenting, full global embargo—the United Nations Security Council's full global sanctions regime—against the Iraqi state.
That led to at least 300,000 excess deaths, although a U.N. study later embellished that, and bin Laden would embellish the numbers even higher, to 600,000 or a million. Whatever it was, it was a ruthless economic war of collective punishment against the entire people of the country, even though they had their chance to overthrow Saddam.
The United States encouraged it and then let Saddam keep his helicopters and tanks while we were standing right there, allowing him to crush the insurrection. The Bush administration's, and later the Clinton administration's, position was that the sanctions would stay until Saddam was gone.
But he was still young and in pretty good health, and no one in Iraq was in any position to do anything about this. So it was just this policy that Clinton inherited from Bush and ended up keeping.
Can we go to—can you link in on Bin Laden? So this gave enough—
Fuel for Bin Laden to construct a narrative where America—
That's right: the bad guys.
And this is such an important thing. There's a great book by Michael Scheuer, who was the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit. It's called Imperial Hubris. I will say that he went a bit crazy in later years and said really mean things like, “We ought to help all the Muslims kill each other,” and “We ought to have a civil war over Russiagate,” which I'm very, very opposed to, Lex, but I wouldn't go that far.
So he went a little nuts later on, but he's a very bright guy and a very honest guy, for what it's worth—a very straightforward guy, I should say. I don't know if he's ever told a lie or what. Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, by Michael Scheuer.
It happens. And when you study the dark aspects of human nature and geopolitics, sometimes it's easy to lose yourself in the madness.
Yeah, it's totally true. In this book, he makes it so clear. There are 6 overriding reasons that bin Laden cited for why the United States should be attacked.
He compared this directly to the Ayatollah Khomeini, who would relentlessly criticize our culture—our licentiousness, Hollywood's R-ratedness, and all that kind of stuff—as a degenerate society. But he can't recruit people for a war over that.
Not that he was really trying to, but that only inspires so much resentment. Conservatives don't like libertinism, right? That's okay, but it only goes so far.
Bin Laden, on the other hand, said: they occupy the land of the two holy places; they help Israel kill Palestinians and Lebanese; they support the dictators, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but throughout the Middle East; they put pressure on those dictators to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense.
Just think of all the times you've heard presidents say, “I'm telling the Saudis they better ramp up production and get the price of gas down for Election Day,” right? As blatant as can be. But what does that sound like to the poor person in those countries? Isn't that money supposed to go to them?
Then, as bin Laden would say, they falsely turn a blind eye to Russia, India, Kashmir, and China in their persecution of Muslims. They say they love us so much, but they don't really, because they don't say anything when this group or that group are the ones killing us.
Look, let us stipulate, Lex, okay, that Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer. By tradition, I don't take the word of mass murderers for meaning very much, and I don't expect you to, either. That's not the point. The point is: what did he say that got anybody to listen to him and do what he said?
He wasn't in charge of a government. He had no coercive apparatus at all. His organization was purely voluntary and fear-based, and he was asking people to blow themselves up over something important enough to blow yourself up for.
It's not virgins. It's, “We have a policy, and we're trying to provoke a war with the United States of America, and you're going to help us do it.” Why? “Because of these 6 reasons.” That's why. And that was what worked to recruit people to attack the United States of America.
A major, important case in point—and the timeline jumps around here a bit—is in 1996, when Israel, under Shimon Peres, invaded Lebanon again in what was called Operation Grapes of Wrath.
During that invasion—it's hard to believe this; wait, don't Google yet, search this part—it was Naftali Bennett who called in the artillery strike on a U.N. shelter and killed 106 women and children in Qana. That's Qana, Q-A-N-A, in 1996.
Naftali Bennett, while serving as an Israeli Army officer in 1996, commanded a commando unit during Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon. During this operation, his troops came under mortar fire near the village of Qana.
Bennett radioed for artillery support, killing 106 people and injuring many others in a UN shelter. This humanitarian tragedy is widely known as the Qana massacre.
Mhm. So when Shimon Peres launched that war, Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 plotters in the United States and the pilot of Flight 11, I believe he and his buddy Ramzi bin al-Shibh were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany. When this invasion started, they both signed their last will and testament, which their friends, family, neighbors, and whatever said expressed their intent: They were joining the army. They were deciding, “Forget engineering. I want to join the mujahideen and go fight the good fight somewhere.”
Then, just a couple of months later, bin Laden put out his first declaration of war against the United States. It’s called Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. Pretty subtle, right? On the first page, he goes on and on about the Qana massacre and says, “We’ll never forget the severed heads, arms, and legs of the babies and children in Qana.” He told Robert Fisk, I believe, “How come your blood is blood, but our blood is water?” Well, we’ll see about that. That’s a strong reminder that there’s a cost to killing people.
Oh, yeah. So what happened was Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh read that declaration of war, and that was when they decided to join al-Qaeda, based on the Qana massacre that Israel had perpetrated in Lebanon. Again, we’re skipping ahead in the story. We’re going to do the whole ’90s here, but literally on September 11, you had Egyptians volunteer for a Saudi sheikh to slaughter Americans by the thousands as revenge for American support for Israel and its killing of people in Lebanon.
That, my friend, is why George Bush said they hate us because they hate your freedom, right? Because they couldn’t tell you that people were being killed. It’s a reminder that killing can cause immeasurable escalation and trillions of dollars.
All of it.
Yep. And here’s the other thing: Bill Clinton, I think foolishly, said something about how he would like to normalize relations with Iraq, or at least look into it or something. He should not have said that, because people got upset and tried to figure out how to stop it, including the Kuwaitis.
What happened was—I know you’re familiar with this, and we all are—virtually everyone gets this wrong. The myth that Saddam Hussein tried to murder George H. W. Bush with a truck-bomb assassination attempt in Kuwait in 1993 was a total hoax, debunked by Seymour Hersh by the end of the year in an article for The New Yorker called “The Case Is Not Closed.” He shows it was just a whiskey-smuggling ring that they embellished into this plot against Bush.
Then it was Martin Indyk, who was Bill Clinton’s adviser. Who was he? He was an Australian who had been working for Yitzhak Shamir, the former terrorist and murderer who became a Likud Party prime minister of Israel. Indyk had gone from there to work for Clinton. In the meantime, he founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy—I don’t know exactly, it was a year or so before he stopped and went to work for Clinton. WINEP was directly a spinoff of AIPAC. AIPAC put up the money. That’s the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the heart of the Israel lobby. They put up the money for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a name you have heard a million times and will continue to hear, because they are always cited as middle-of-the-road scientific experts on American foreign policy.
This is not true of all neocon think tanks, but this one was literally created by the Israel lobby in the United States. Then he became an adviser to Bill Clinton, and he was insisting on a policy of essentially continuing the H. W. Bush policy of staying in Saudi Arabia in order to patrol the so-called no-fly zones over Iraq, keep Saddam Hussein from killing the Iraqis, and enforce the blockade, which was enforced by international law anyway, right? There was some smuggling going on, but no nation-state was violating the embargo against Iraq. It was completely unnecessary on both counts.
The Israelis—and this is Rabin’s government, Yitzhak Rabin’s government—were, I guess, in agreement with this Likud guy, Indyk, on this. They were pushing for a policy they called dual containment. The point was that Iraq, now that we had beaten them up so badly in the Iraq War I—Desert Storm, the First Gulf War—was no longer powerful enough to balance against Iran. So now America had to stay in Saudi Arabia to balance against both of them.
Bill Clinton resisted this and resisted this until the big fake assassination attempt against Bush Senior. Again, I don’t have any reason to believe the Israelis were behind that. It was the Kuwaitis who rigged it up.
Oh, did I leave out that it was the girl who pretended that she saw the babies thrown out of their incubators? Her father was the one who spun up this story. In other words, the same guy who spun up that story was the same guy who spun up this story about the assassination attempt against Bush Senior, which everybody still believes and which I’m sure Bush Jr. believed at the time that he launched that war, probably.
Was he reading Seymour Hersh? He doesn’t know. It was just conventional wisdom. I was still only a teenager in the 1990s, but I don’t remember thinking, “Wow, that assassination attempt against Bush thing was debunked.” I don’t remember that ever getting around. You know what I mean? I don’t know who was reading Hersh at that time. It was pre-internet times by a year, right? It just wasn’t a hot enough topic.
How do you fight those false narratives that the military-industrial complex tries to produce in order to get us into war?
The main thing is to speak up. The most important thing is to read Antiwar.com every day for a long period of time in a row, and you will have a very good handle on what the hell is going on in the world.
Antiwar.com was founded by Eric Garris and Justin Raimondo, who were both libertarians. Raimondo was a student of Murray Rothbard’s, or at least one of his mentees, and learned a lot from him. Murray Rothbard was the best libertarian, and that’s where we come from: that tradition, Ron Paulian non-interventionist types.
The news and opinion pieces come from all over the spectrum. As long as we’re anti-war, we’re not sectarians at all. It’s a one-issue thing. Really, we just do the hard news more than anything. We have a lot of great editorials as well, but it’s Eric Garris, Dave DeCamp, and Kyle Anzalone who get the lion’s share of the credit for the actual work that goes into the site every day.
And that goes to every single war in the world.
Everything. Every day, we have our top news, we have a frontline section, and then at the bottom we have every region of the world where there’s conflict breaking out. Trump sends 2 nuclear subs toward Russia.
So, obviously, Russia—
That’s reassuring. God. And you see our spotlight article is by Branko Marcetic. He’s a leftist, but we love him. He does absolutely fantastic work. It doesn’t matter if you’re left or right.
That’s right.
We’re very close with The American Conservative magazine, for example. Pat Buchanan is a good friend of ours, and we ran his articles for many years. Ron Paul, of course, as well—the greatest American ever.
Ron Paul is amazing, and you give love and respect to Ron Paul all the time.
He absolutely deserves it. We spoke of heroes—he’s one of the legends. That’s how I knew Antiwar.com was for me. The first day I laid eyes on it, my friend said, “Look, they run Ron Paul.” And I went, “All right, I like these guys.”
So, before we get too far into Bill Clinton, I should say, because I did say these words: I know the New World Order thing was a very popular conspiracy theory in the ’90s and even before that, which was about building a one-world government under the United Nations, subsuming the United States under it, and all that. That’s not what I’m talking about. I actually was a New World Order kook in the 1990s, but I was a kid. It’s fine. I grew out of it.
The point being, Bush Senior did use that phrase repeatedly. What he meant by it was, in the guise of the United Nations, with the baby-blue flag and all of that, more for PR purposes than the real agenda, he was saying American power is the guarantor of world peace, and we will enforce it through war. That’s the deal: Nobody’s allowed to bite, or we will intervene.
The irony is that any government powerful enough to keep the peace between the 50 states is powerful enough to try it for the rest of the world, and they can. They do this. We’re just extending our security umbrella. Everybody who joins up with us is guaranteed nobody’s ever going to mess with you, or else they’d have to mess with us, except for everyone on the outside, right?
Those countries are put in the position of having not just the United States but all its allies lined up against them and feeling that much more threatened—namely, of course, Russia and China, the other major potential adversaries and nuclear-weapon states. I think the lesson there is that if you think you can run the world by threatening everybody with military power, considering all the very different cultures, peoples, and histories of the world, you’re going to fuck things up. You’re going to create a lot of hate, a lot of increased war, increased terrorism, and increased threats to America rather than decreased threats.
Yeah. So more on the neocons here, too, before we get too far into Bill Clinton. In 1992, a year after the end of Iraq War I, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and his deputies, Scooter Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, wrote what was called the Defense Planning Guidance for fiscal year 1994, and it caused a huge upset. It was leaked to The New York Times and became a really big deal because what it said was, “America is essentially world police. We’re not going to tolerate the rise of any near-peer competitor against us in the world. We’ll fight them before we allow them to get powerful enough to even be one. We will not let any nation or group of nations become powerful enough to ever even be able to think about challenging our military dominance on the planet.”
Of course, we’re doing all this in the interests of world peace. That means we have to have total military dominance in the Middle East. We have to expand NATO and have total military dominance in Eastern Europe. Of course, we have to maintain our position with Japan and Korea and the rest in order to maintain total dominance in Asia as well.
This is what Charles Krauthammer called our “unipolar moment” and said we should stop short of nothing less than total world domination. That was the quote. At that time, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been a neoconservative, was a member of the Young People’s Socialist League of the Social Democrats, USA, which were the Trotskyites under Max Shachtman, who was Trotsky’s most important guy in the United States.
This is something that Mark Dubowitz tried to deny and argue with me about—whether she was a neoconservative or not. Well, she was like James Woolsey: a Presbyterian. Most neoconservatives are Jewish and/or Catholic, although you have Zalmay Khalilzad and Francis Fukuyama and others who are of different cultural inheritances, you might say.
He was saying, “Well, she didn’t believe in democracy as the single most important thing in the whole world.” Of course, she had written this article in Commentary that had gotten Reagan’s attention in the first place, saying that it’s okay to support authoritarians as long as they’re right-wingers and anti-communists. Anti-communism is more important than democracy. We should support, for example, people like Somoza in Nicaragua and things like that in order to keep the commies at bay. That’s number one.
Some of the neocons disagreed with that. Dubowitz was trying to say that’s what makes her not a neocon. But that’s really not true, because there are about 100 neocons or something, and they disagree about all kinds of things. They do work together on lots of things, but they disagree on things.
I’ll give another example on democracy, where Robert Kagan said in 2013 that we should allow the Muslim Brotherhood to rule in Egypt because they won fair and square—Parliament and the presidency, just barely. They won in fair elections. After all we’ve done in the name of democracy, don’t we have to allow them to have a chance?
Frank Gaffney was like, “Are you kidding me? I’ll go overthrow them myself right now. Are you crazy?” He’s got an H-bomb going off over his head. Is anybody going to deny that Frank Gaffney is a neoconservative just because he differed with Robert Kagan on the order of importance of democracy in this or that instance? Give me a break.
Jeane Kirkpatrick came from the neoconservative left. She wrote for Commentary magazine with Norman Podhoretz and all the guys. I don’t mean, again, just a leftist. She was with the Trotskyites, Max Shachtman, the Young People’s Socialist League, and the Social Democrats, USA. She’s a card-carrying neoconservative. This is what it means to be a neocon.
Then she was Reagan’s second ambassador to the United Nations and was widely respected by Republicans as a conservative hawk and a very American-interest-oriented type. She would even rail against the UN itself in almost a Bircher-sounding kind of way that appeals to me, although she didn’t really mean it. She was just mad that they would ever get in our way, rather than that they really are a threat to our independence in any way.
But the point is this, man, that I’m trying to get to: at the end of the Cold War, a year before the Soviet Union was even gone, in the fall of 1990—so she must have written this in the summer of 1990—this is a year before the failed KGB coup and the final unraveling, where the Russians overthrew the last of the Soviet Union government at that time, at the end of ’91. This is a year before that.
Importantly, the confirmation-bias trick again: it’s Jeane Kirkpatrick, right, not Susan Sarandon, who wrote this piece in The National Interest called “A Normal Country in a Normal Time.” The only place you can find it is on my website, scotthorton.org/fairuse. I won’t tell you where I got it. And don’t ever sue me, The National Interest. I love you guys. And the thing is—
Yeah.
So it’s in there somewhere. You have to page down. I’m not—oh, there it is right there: “A Normal Country in a Normal Time.” Fall 1990.
“A Normal Country in a Normal Time.” You published it on March 23, 2022. It’s by Jeane Kirkpatrick, The National Interest, Fall 1990.
“It’s the first time since 1939 that there has been an opportunity for Americans to consider what we might do in a world less constrained by political and military competition with a dangerous adversary. I am pleased that The National Interest has provided a forum for this discussion.”
And it goes on: “American purposes are mainly domestic. Our purposes in the world are merely human, not transcendent. To be legitimate, the American government’s purposes must be ratified by popular majorities.”
Here’s what she says in here. She says we should shed the burdens of superpower status. She sounds like George Washington. She’s saying, “Okay, the commies are gone. The Cold War is over. The emergency is over. Now we can go back to being what we were supposed to be, what we used to be before that. We put it on hold because we had to wage the Cold War. Now we can have a real return to normality, meaning 1928, right before the permanent world empire was built for the purposes of destroying the Nazis and then containing the commies.”
So she was very anti-communist, from a neoconservative perspective. She had a significant role in the Reagan administration, and then she evolved, saying, “We need to let go.”
That’s right. In other words, she is aligning with Pat Buchanan. For people who aren’t familiar, Pat Buchanan is a Catholic paleoconservative. He was Nixon’s speechwriter and Reagan’s speechwriter. To this day, he’s a retired, sweet old guy now, but he’s a lifelong Cold Warrior and doesn’t regret it. The commie threat absolutely had to be contained. Vietnam had to be done. He’s a wonderful guy. He really is.
He’s written a grip of great books—I don’t know, 8 or 10 of them. So there’s an evolution here. Some of these folks really saw Russia and the Soviet Union as a major threat.
Oh, yeah.
And then they evolved, saying, “Okay, now that the Cold War is over—”
We need to calm down.
And see, Pat is the perfect avatar for this. Him and his buddies, Scott McConnell and Jude Wanniski. Wanniski himself had been a former neoconservative. But there’s this whole group of paleoconservatives whose patriotism nobody can question. This is Ronald Reagan’s guy. This is a guy who puts words in Ronald Reagan’s mouth, right?
And he’s saying, “Okay, you guys promised. The empire was a defensive measure, right? We don’t want an empire.”
Chalmers Johnson is another one. Chalmers Johnson was a professor at USC who was a hardcore, ardent Cold Warrior. You’re familiar with him, I’m sure. He wrote Blowback, then The Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis—the trilogy that he wrote about the American empire—and he was an adamant Cold Warrior until the Soviets were gone. Then the empire continued to expand, and he went, “Wait a minute. I taught a generation of students that we were holding the tide back. What’s all this about? We’re the tide now? That’s not right.”
In fact, I like to cite this because it’s just so astonishing to people that William F. Buckley—he wasn’t a neoconservative, but he was one of their main godfathers, basically, the founding editor of National Review—wrote an article in 1952 in Commonweal magazine. Again, you can find this at scotthorton.org/fairuse. It’s called “The Party in the Deep Blue Sea.” It’s about the Republican Party, I guess, is what it means.
In there he says, “We must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores for the duration of the emergency, even with Truman at the reins of it all, because of the need to face down the Soviet threat. You need a powerful domestic empire that’s capable of forcing the American people to enforce a world empire to contain the threat of Stalinist Soviet communism.”
That’s horrible, right?
Yes.
Totalitarian bureaucracy. The same one we’ve still got. And see, Pat said, “Okay, look, I was buying it when the enemy was in Moscow, but now that there’s no enemy in Moscow and world communism—the threat of world revolution—is dead and gone, I don’t want to hear about why we have to suffer this anymore. We’re supposed to be…”
And again, this is why I cite Jeane Kirkpatrick. I could just cite Ron Paul to you all day long here, right? Everybody knows that Ron Paul is good on everything. The point is, these are people who are very hawkish when they feel like it needs to be. Your listeners and viewers might think that Ron Paul is just too biased for peace.
Well, Pat ain’t a pacifist. Pat is willing to fight, but not if there’s not a good reason to.
And that’s the big qualification. Why would a guy like Pat be anti-war? We know he’s not a hippie. There must be another explanation. And the other explanation is he is learned. He knows more about this than you, and he knows why you shouldn’t do this because this 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 paleoconservative friends said, “Okay, enough. We want to come home.” And so Jeane Kirkpatrick, she didn’t really join with the paleocons, but she was certainly aligning with them on this issue at this time: now’s our chance to go back to being a limited constitutional republic with a free economy, a usually successful commercial republic, I believe she says in the piece. It had a typo because it said “unusually,” but she couldn’t have meant that. Go ahead.
I don’t know. I think I leaned toward Ron Paul a little bit. I don’t think totalitarian bureaucracy is justified ever. You can come up with a really extreme case, but you’re really going to get into trouble.
This is why the Birchers turned against the Cold War during Vietnam. Robert Welch—I mean, you can’t get more anti-communist than that guy, the leader of the John Birch Society. But he goes, “Wait a minute. Why are we turning our country into a communist country in the name of containing communism over there?”
He was being very liberal with the use of the word “communist” there, but meaning, why are we building a total state here when that’s everything that we’re trying to oppose in Vietnam? We’re building it here at home. It’s crazy. We need to save this money, we need to build our country, and lead the world by example, not by force. That was the obvious thing.
If it was that obvious to Robert Welch and to Ron Paul during the Cold War, then after the Cold War, you’ve got to make up a bunch of crap about Saddam Hussein as Hitler, and that he’s killing all the babies in their incubators, and these kinds of Belgian babies on bayonets and related hoaxes to keep the thing going. Again, as Richard Pryor said, “That doesn’t make any sense to me,” right?
If it doesn’t just sound right to your average guy—you tell me we had to face down Hitler, all right. We had to face down Stalin and Mao. That makes sense. We’ve got to bomb Gaddafi? There’s not a better way that we, USA number one, can handle that? You know, the same kind of thing going forward here.
This is why—and I like to emphasize this so much—in the aftermath of Vietnam, people think that peace is just hippies and leftists and anti-Americans of one stripe or another, people who are just no good in a fight anyway. So what do they know about security, right? Jack Nicholson: “I stand on that wall.” Even think about what a joke that was. He was down in Guantanamo Bay keeping Castro at bay for me. Yeah, thanks a lot, dude. “I can’t handle that truth,” whatever you’re burying down there. A lot of torture later.
So you’re saying it’s really people who were hawks for a time and woke up?
That’s right.
The reality of the ridiculousness, the absurdity of what a totalitarian bureaucracy does, is it expands and creates momentum, and then you now become the thing you were fighting, right?
But Francis Fukuyama knew better. He said, “No, it’s the end of history.” America has proven that more or less democracy and more or less free-market capitalism, as Bill Clinton would define them or something of that era, that that’s the future of mankind. We proved it. They tried every other way of having a modern, successful society, and this is the one and only way to do that.
And not only that, then, but that’s obviously America’s mandate. All his neocon friends took it as America’s mandate that we’re going to force the world to accept our ways, in the same way, of course, that the British justified their obviously very self-interested empire in the very same way: that we’re going to teach you to have a separate, independent judiciary at any cost, right?
It’s all—I hate to say it—the white man’s burden type of argument. They say this to this day: “Look, if it wasn’t us, it would be the Russians. If it wasn’t us, it would be the Chinese. If it wasn’t us, it would be somebody else, and it would be worse.” And so that’s it. It is our responsibility. We’re the most mature and adult and responsible stewards of global power, and so it has to be us to do this.
That was what it said in the Defense Planning Guidance. It’s true that Bush lost that election and the Clintonites came in, but as Paul Wolfowitz bragged again in The National Interest, by the end of the decade they all adopted the Wolfowitz Doctrine anyway.
For example, Bill Clinton went right around NATO to do the war in Kosovo in 1999 because he wanted to, and Russia had a veto on the U.N. Security Council. So, forget that—we just go around that. That’s straight out of the Wolfowitz Doctrine: what’s good for us and our preponderance of power in those regions of the world is what matters the most, and these other considerations will have to take a back seat to make sure that we can be the guarantors of our world order, regardless of what the treaties everybody signed up for say.
That really is what they call the Wolfowitz Doctrine. It’s not just, “Hey, let’s go to Iraq for Israel,” although that’s a huge part of it. It’s, “America, our military power is always beneficial compared to the alternative, and so we should be the ones to guarantee the peace or the war.” But in our case, if it’s war, it’s only because the alternative was worse. We promise. And so that’s the doctrine.
There is an ideology of American empire here. I don’t want to dismiss the corruption—it’s a huge part. Hopefully, we have time later to talk really about the new Cold War with Russia. We can talk a lot about the role that Lockheed and the other military-industrial-complex firms played in pushing all these policies forward.
It’s true with Iraq, too. The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was sponsored by Bruce Jackson from Lockheed Martin, and he also financed the Project for the New American Century of Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. He financed The Weekly Standard magazine, and the agenda was, “Let’s sell NATO planes in Europe, and let’s push for war in the Middle East.”
So there are a lot of self-interested reasons there. But I think overall, you’ve got to take these people at their word when they say, “We know we’re heroes. We know we’re doing the right thing. We know everybody’s better off without us. We know that we have to. This is our morality-based foreign policy. We just can’t allow that bad thing to happen any longer. We have to do something worse to stop it.”
This kind of thing is very—you could tie it back to, I’m not smart enough to talk all about the influence of the Puritans and their glorious mission in ancient Massachusetts to create the new city on the hill, to be like the new Zion, and ultimately determine the fate of mankind. But there’s a lot of Yankee busybodyhood that is built into this.
And, of course, the Scotch-Irish like to get drunk and get into fistfights for fun. I take responsibility for that as a bit of my background, too. I’m not being a racist bigot, but that’s part of our culture: being a tough guy and being able to get in a brawl and win one, or even suffer a defeat and not cry about it. You know what I mean?
Some of that—the double-edged sword of human nature—is the Scotch-Irish. They’re so foundational to the individualism that makes America great. I had a great conversation with Saagar Enjeti about this. But then you get into trouble when you start to believe you’re—
—tell there’s a bad guy out there. Yeah.
And you start, and then you have the biggest military in the world, and there’s Lockheed Martin’s military-industrial complex, and now you think you’re better than everybody, and now you’re creating wars all over the place.
Yep.
Creating enemies all over the place.
And see, of course, partisanship is all built into this. Everybody supports their guy because the other guy is you. We can’t let them win. So we can’t undermine—even when we disagree with our own guy, we can’t undermine him, or we’re helping the other guys. They’re going to beat him, get him in the midterms, or they’ll get him in the next election.
So people close ranks around things they even disagree with just because they consider, again, the alternative worse. That’s even from the point of view of voters. A lot of times, people have to make these choices and make their comparisons of what they favor or what they value at any given time, and make those compromises.
And that’s why you said Antiwar.com is nonpartisan, right?
That’s right. Yeah, we’re reaching out to everybody. We’re here to inform everybody. Again, as I was mentioning during the short break, hawks read our website, too, because if you want really the best briefing of what’s going on in the country, we do hear from them from time to time. They say, “I’ve got to admit, those guys really do have the most comprehensive coverage of the stuff I’m interested in,” even if from their point of view, the wrong point of view.
Before we go to Iraq War II, if it’s okay, I’d like to take a brief aside. Since you mentioned it, we did an Iran debate a few weeks ago.
Yes.
About 20 minutes was cut toward the end, where I went a bit off the rails, and you agreed with the description that I wrote on X.
I hope it's cool if I read it. I try hard to avoid editing. That's why I do 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, and 8-hour podcasts. I wonder how long we go today.
The part I cut in the Iran debate was where it went off the rails after 4 hours—not content-wise, but tone-wise: mockery, interruption, and so on. Both had very little sleep the night before and were tired and not their best selves, as they both said. I cut it not because of the content, but because of the style. I try all I can to avoid having that kind of drama on the podcast.
Instead, I thought the first 4 hours had a lot of strong rants, which it did, and you were continuing the rants very well today. I'm enjoying it. So, you wanted to echo that description and say that the edit made sense. Maybe can you speak to that?
And then also, now that you're fresh and full of Dr Pepper, can you say anything and everything you would like to say that went unresponded to, or that is left to be said?
Thank you. Yes. First of all, I'll take responsibility for that part. I literally had a long drive and a long flight, 4 hours' sleep, and no food in my stomach whatsoever. And I quite honestly absolutely despise Mark Dubowitz, and I have for a very long time.
I had really thought about this beforehand. I really should have rejected your terms at the beginning, where we're all friends here having a friendly discussion. I had already rehearsed in my mind what I wanted to say to you, which was, actually, no, right? This is just business. What's going to happen here is he's going to lie the whole time because he has to. And so then I'm going to spend all of my time telling you why what he just said isn't actually true and how you can go verify that for yourself, et cetera. That is what ended up happening.
But it made it much more acrimonious because, for you, it was more frustrating because you're trying to hold things in the conception that you had, where we're all just going to be friends here, when that was never really going to last. And part of that is, look, I'm just—I'm Luke from Empire. I'm not quite all the way grown-up Return of the Jedi Skywalker here myself. So I get angry and say angry things.
As far as how bad it went, I take responsibility for my part of that. Except the reality was it was just because I was up against a horrible foreign agent lying his ass off, trying to get my fellow Americans killed and their dollars wasted, and I have a problem with that.
On the edit, though, this is where we had a problem, and I do accept from you that this part was inadvertent. I know that you didn't mean to do it this way. What happened was there were 2 instances of him saying, “Oh, Scott Horton thinks the Jews control everything and dictate everything and blah, blah,” which I never said at all. And he said it twice. Yet my response was completely deleted, while him saying that against me was still in there.
I thought, on one hand, it's completely silly and stupid, but on the other hand, that's also a pretty ruthless and horrible thing to try to do to somebody—not you, him—to try to put those words in my mouth and say, “All those facts that you just heard for 4 hours? Nah, this guy just hates Jews. So if you're on my side, you don't have to listen to him. You don't have to believe him.” Anything like this.
And then our discussion about, “That's not true, dude. Just because I was talking about the neoconservatives doesn't mean I was talking about the Jews.” For example, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Jim Woolsey are Presbyterians, and Michael Novak and—oh, what's his name?—are Catholics, and Francis Fukuyama, I guess, is a Buddhist, and Zalmay Khalilzad is a Muslim. So I didn't say the Jews at all, did I? I was talking about this and that, and my very good response to that went to the cutting-room floor. So I thought, well, that was kind of lame.
I thought I was going to come back sooner. I apologize for putting you on blast in that interview where I mentioned it, but I was waiting to hear back from you, because we were going to make up for that by doing this interview. So I was like, yeah, I'm kind of disappointed. Now it's nearly August, and I hadn't heard from the dude, and I thought we were going to do that.
It is important, and it goes to my overall point that I'm trying to make here: obviously, the American empire is very much against the interests of the American people, but also, and most especially, our support for Israel—the great albatross around our neck. You know what they do, or “millstone” is maybe better. Albatross was a symbol of good luck before you shot it down. But Israel's interests are vastly different from America's interests.
People try to lie even to themselves and say that that's not true. But they are very different. For example, when Israel killed those women and children in Qana in 1996, that's what brought our towers down. Right? This is something very important that we have to grapple with as a country, that we're not just talking about Israel being a nice Jewish boy minding its own business over there, kind of like in some cliché or narrative.
We're talking about an absolutely ruthless state that is in the process of trying to get rid of millions of people they wish they hadn't kidnapped back in 1967. We can do a whole bit on that, but they have put themselves in a very difficult position, and so they need our help to a very great degree now.
From all that we discussed here today, does it sound like I'm saying the Israelis and their lobby are behind every single thing in American policy and what we're doing here? That's not at all what I'm talking about. Brzezinski is not the Israel lobby at all. He's Rockefeller's guy, and that's a separate group of guys, right? So, go ahead.
I'm really sorry for missing the 2 mentions that you're referring to. People can search in the transcript for the word “Jew.” It appears, I guess, a couple of times, and that's what you're referring to.
Your back-and-forth argument actually came about 15 minutes after that moment, because you were patiently waiting, and I had to get back to it, kind of thing.
Yeah. And you know, there is no disrespect, man, and I really apologize if there's any hurt or anything like that.
It's true that the thing really did turn into an argument at that point. He called Jim Lobe, of all people, a vicious antisemite, which is just completely hilarious, considering how Jewish Jim Lobe is and what an extraordinarily sweet, kind, and decent gentleman he is. It's the most ridiculous thing in the world.
When we were on the curb outside arguing, he said J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward also is a vicious antisemite because he wrote something that explained the difference between Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon's positions on Iraq and Iran. In other words, Mark Dubowitz is very dubious. He is not a serious man and, in a sense, not really a man as much as just a foreign agent representing a position on behalf of a foreign power.
As I said in that debate, do you think—and I mean this honestly for anyone listening; you don't have to answer—does anyone think that Mark Dubowitz really regrets that Americans died on September 11 because of what Israel was doing? He would hide behind, “No, they hate us because we're free.” Maybe he'd say they were mad about our presence in Saudi Arabia, but he would never say, “Yeah, but that's because Martin Indyk said so.” And that's because the Qana massacre helped motivate Mohamed Atta. He just denied that point, just like all Israel lobbyists would. How could they justify it?
I wish I knew about the animosity you have for Mark Dubowitz, because I'm not very good at this moderator thing, but I was very confused by the animosity in the room.
Well, it's the dishonesty. Even if I just met him that day, everything out of his mouth was some kind of twisted fact. Yes, there was a Khobar Towers attack, but are you going to blame that on the Ayatollah when it was bin Laden who did that? And we all know that's true.
So don't sit here and try to give me some pro-Israel “my truth.” There's only the truth, and Mark Dubowitz is not associated with it. He has an agenda. But you're right that I should have made that clear: what this is is a foreign lobbyist trying to get America to serve a foreign nation, and I am the guy from America and Antiwar.com trying to fend him off.
Look, I accept, too, that I ain't so mature for a 49-year-old—whatever, 48 then. I was a very immature 48 at the time, but I lose my temper very quickly when people lie. I just can't stand it. I just don't have time to listen to people being willfully dishonest to me or in front of me, you know?
Yeah. And I'm glad we got a chance to clear that up. We're going to go hard and for as long as needed.
Great. And yeah, no hard feelings at all, man. I'm glad we worked it out, too.
Do we go to Iraq War II first?
Well, let's—wait, let's stay on Bill Clinton in the '90s for a minute. We're talking about the neocons, who got brought up in the sense that they did help to encourage Iraq War I, although I don't think they were the real kingpins behind it, or whatever, in the way that they were in Iraq War II.
The doctrine of global dominance that Wolfowitz developed in '92 became more or less the standard for foreign-policy thought through the '90s. During the Clinton years, it's really important to mention that Bill Clinton backed the mujahideen, even though they were already attacking us in the United States and American targets overseas.
Bill Clinton kept backing them in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya, to a greater degree than I understood. Mostly, this means working with the Saudis and the Brits to support them. Bin Laden himself was seen by at least 4 credible journalists in Izetbegović’s office, the president of Bosnia, in Sarajevo in 1994, I guess. He and his men fought there, and Bill Clinton knew it. Richard Holbrooke said, “We could have never won without their help,” and all these kinds of things.
I’ve got all the sources in the latest book, Provoked. I go into much further detail about this even than in the Terror War book, Enough Already. The same was true in Chechnya, too.
Essentially, as we’ve seen—and you know this from just your own recent memory—as long as bin Laden’s people are killing Serbs, Russians, or Shiites, then it’s cool. That’s what America, Britain, and Saudi Arabia used them for.
And so, even though their first attack in the United States was Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990, the leader of the Kach party, who was a very right-wing Israeli rabbi who advocated for the extermination or expulsion of all Palestinians from all of historic Palestine, his party had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being fascist and was banned from Israeli politics. He was a radical rabbi who lived in New York, I believe, and he was assassinated in 1990 by a guy who was part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
That was their first hit. Then, in 1992, they hit us at a hotel in Aden, Yemen. In 1993, they did the first World Trade Center attack.
It’s worth dwelling on this one for a second because Bill Clinton had just been president for a month and a week. It was the end of February, February 26, 1993. They parked the truck bomb in the wrong place. If they had put it in the right place, it could have toppled one tower over into the other at 5:00 in the afternoon, right? It could have done that with just that truck bomb, without another one, and from there into more and more towers. Who knows? There could have been tens and tens and tens of thousands of people killed.
It almost worked. The thing is, there are a couple of things. First of all, the CIA had allowed these guys into the country when INS wanted to keep them out, because they said, “We know these guys. They are friends from the Afghan war. We don’t mind them. Let them in.” So they’re all living in Brooklyn, these dangerous terrorists.
The second thing was that the FBI had a walk-in informant, a guy named Emad Salem, who was a former Egyptian army intelligence officer. He had been recruited by them, and he allowed them to recruit him to be the bomb maker. “You can trust me. I’m a military guy. I can make the bomb,” he said.
Then he went to the FBI and said, “I’ve been recruited by some terrorists to make a bomb.” There were 2 agents who believed him: Nancy Floyd and John Anticev. They were the agents working the case. The plan was to use him to make a fake bomb with inert powder, and it’d be a perfect sting.
But the thing is, their boss was a guy named Carson Dunbar. He wouldn’t let them do it. In fact, he demanded that they cut the informant’s pay from $500 to $300 a week and demanded that he wear a wire on the floor of the mosque where he was sleeping with these guys. He can’t wear a wire, right? So he ends up bugging out, saying, “I think the FBI’s on to me.”
Then they brought in Ramzi Yousef, the guy who built the real bomb, the real terrorist who came in, and again almost toppled one tower over into the other.
The problem is, only 6 people died. That’s a lot of people if you’re one of the 6 or the survivors of the 6, right? I’m not saying that. But I’m just saying, in the imagination of the American people, it was kind of just not that big of a deal. New York City is pretty far from here, and people were not feeling it nearly as much as, for example, both of them collapsing with 3,000 people inside still, right?
Then, 2 days later, the ATF raided the Branch Davidians, and thus began a 6-week-long siege of this religious group 100 miles up the road from here, who ultimately the FBI and the Army Delta Force massacred on April 19, 1993.
The American people’s attention was completely diverted, and Clinton’s too. His whole first 100 days was bogged down in Waco and this kind of thing. Who wants to learn a bunch of Arab names and all of this stuff? The FBI agents didn’t do a very good job of following up and preventing the same group from carrying out further attacks.
They had—I think, I don’t really know enough about this; I need to go back and reread about the Holland Tunnel plot, the UN building, and all that. I think that was the setup where they were trying to get the rest of these guys in a sting, basically, on that part of the plot.
In 1995, bin Laden attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard. In 1996, they blew up the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. That was a truck bombing that killed 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq. They were the target.
But then what happened was that the Saudi kingdom, in alliance with the corrupt criminal Louis Freeh—the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation—were in charge, not the CIA. They had the mandate to treat all these al-Qaeda attacks as crimes, as they are crimes under federal code.
Freeh’s FBI took the lead at that time, and Louis Freeh wanted to believe the story that somehow it was Iranian-backed Shiite Saudi Hezbollah that had done the attack. Of course, the Saudi monarchy hates their Shiite majority, and they just happen to live right on top of where all the oil is. They didn’t want to blame it on bin Laden, who was adjacent to the royal family and whom they wanted to take care of themselves, et cetera.
So they blamed it on Iran. But it was bin Laden who did it. The FBI agent in charge, John O’Neill, knew that it was them who did it. His enemy, Michael Scheuer from the CIA, also knew that it was bin Laden who did it.
Bin Laden himself bragged about it to Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi in London. He named the names of the martyrs and celebrated them and said, “That’s exactly right. Are you listening now?” It was al-Qaeda that did that.
Then, in 1998, they hit the African embassies. In 2000, they hit the USS Cole. They had bailed on an attack against the USS The Sullivans. The dinghy sank, and then they hit the Cole and killed 17 sailors in Aden in 2000.
So, these attacks are building up.
These are building up and building up in the run-up to September 11th. The whole time, they’re saying exactly why they’re doing this. We know their motive, and they’re also saying their strategy.
Their strategy is to provoke us into invading Afghanistan. They’re going to give us our own Afghanistan the way we gave the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. Bin Laden said repeatedly, “The point was to provoke us into overreacting, to bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy, break our empire on the rocks of Afghanistan the same way we had helped them do to the USSR.”
Then, when W. Bush was elected, bin Laden’s son gave an interview to Rolling Stone in 2010, where he says, “I was in Afghanistan with my father when Bush was elected in 2000. My father was so happy.” He said, “This is the kind of president he needs, one who will attack and spend money and break the country.”
He says, “This is in 2010, so bin Laden’s still alive. Bill Clinton sent missiles after my father and didn’t get him. But now you’ve spent 10 years in Afghanistan and you still haven’t gotten him. America used to be smart, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf.”
That was the strategy: to get America to kill itself, to get us to strap on the suicide vest. Do you get the irony of the whole thing? How is a group of 400 bandits hiding out in Nangarhar Province supposed to bring down the empire?
The answer is, you give the empire an excuse to exploit. It’s not that George Bush is stupid and innocent. It’s that he’s stupid and guilty, right? It’s not that bin Laden thought, “Oh, here’s a guy who’s such a super patriot that he’ll go the extra mile.” He looked at Bush and said, “Here’s a guy who’s a corrupt, evil, narrow-minded, shortsighted idiot of a criminal who will exploit a crisis to the nth degree if I give him one. And that’s what I’m trying to do.”
By the way, consider the collectivism of Osama bin Laden, who considers that there’s apparently no limit on the number of Afghans that he can get killed in his plan here, when he ain’t from there, right? He’s trying to provoke a war with a superpower against a regime that’s allowed him to stay and against a people who did nothing to him or to us, right?
A people—I hate that phrase, but some people, millions of people—who did nothing to us whatsoever. He put them in our crosshairs on what? The idea that, well, God will sort them out. They’ll go to paradise if they believe, so who cares about them?
That was a big problem with Mullah Omar, who, despite the narrative, actually hated and feared Osama bin Laden and wanted rid of him. He was trying to negotiate to get rid of him because, as Murray Rothbard says, “A radical becomes a conservative the day he captures the capital city.”
Mullah Omar didn’t want a world revolution like Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t interested in that. He was interested in holding down Afghanistan. He’d already won most of the country; he hadn’t finished winning it all yet.
He wasn't trying to get into a fight with America, which Bill Clinton had supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996. He had encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to encourage the Taliban to go all the way to Kabul. In fact, he wanted them not even to settle with the Northern Alliance. He wanted to see an outright victory against the Northern Alliance because they wanted the Taliban to have total control—a monopoly on the entire state—so they could build an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan.
They abandoned this project after 1998, after the embassy bombings of 1998. People sometimes say that's why Bush invaded in 2001 or whatever. No, that wasn't it. But that is why Bill Clinton supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996 in the first place. They said, “Well, we figure there will be an emir and no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.” That was what the Bill Clinton administration said about it, right?
It's in Ahmed Rashid's book The Taliban. It has all that stuff in it, and I quote him at length in my books. So what was the point of that? Screwing the Russians, figuring out a way to get hydrocarbons out of the Caspian Basin without having to go through Russia or Iran. That was part of that whole game, which we'll have to talk about later in the Cold War segment here. That's the part where these stories overlap a bit.
It's important to bring up, too, that during this time, the cliché in the Pentagon among the Joint Staff, who are the most important policy planners for the Pentagon, was: “Terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower.” What are they going to do? They're going to set off a truck bomb here or there. They're going to kill a few hundred people here or there. Look at the African embassies. It was mostly Africans who died.
I don't think that they thought losing 2 towers full of a couple thousand people would be a small price to pay. I think they were not imagining that level of consequence. After all, they did have to hijack our airliners to have something to crash into. We're talking about a stateless group of essentially penniless bandits who had millions of dollars, not billions, much less trillions. These were criminals, outlaws, terrorists. They had no ability to truly bring us down.
And, of course, the analogy to Pearl Harbor is perfect because 3,000 people died in a sneak attack. What more do you need to know? I like to harp on this. Not that I ever really studied psychology more than a couple of semesters in junior college, but it seems probably meaningful that in the images, the planes literally come out of the clear blue sky. It's just like tabula rasa, man. Go ahead and let me know what I'm supposed to think about this.
“I'm shocked and I'm completely surprised,” said the average American. Of course, people who knew a lot about this were very worried about it. But for the average American, this was the meaning of the term “blowback,” by the way, as Chalmers Johnson explained. It was coined by Donald Wilber, who was a CIA historian, in his after-action report about the coup in Iran. He said, “We CIA officers are going to have to be very careful about blowback coming down the line from operations like this.”
As Johnson explained, what it really meant was not just consequences, because you can have a funny term for consequences. Blowback meant the long-term consequences of secret foreign policies, so that when they came due, the American people didn't understand what they meant. Why are the Iranians burning our flag? Why are bin Laden's people crashing into our towers? Somebody tell us, because we don't know.
When the answer is, “Well, it's actually all our fault,” the security forces—our national government—will not tell us that. In fact, they'll make up a lie and say, “Islam makes them hate us because we love our mamas and Jesus so much.” Then people go, “Oh, man, what a terrible, psychopathic idea. I didn't realize Islam was that bad of a religion. We'd better fight all of them now.”
If that's what it does to you, it's radical Islam. Once you believe in Islam hard enough, it turns you into a suicide bomber. It makes you hate North Americans. There is no other cause and effect that you need to be aware of.
And people might not remember this, but boy, did they push it that fall: that the Taliban had done it, that al-Qaeda was the Taliban, and that the Taliban was al-Qaeda.
You mean 2001?
Yeah. Yeah.
That it was the Taliban, then it was al-Qaeda, and then—
They conflated them together so powerfully that this became a reason why people were just so doubtful about the entire narrative. They were going, “What do you mean, a bunch of cavemen from the town of Bedrock out there in Kandahar Province did this to us because they don't like that we have a Bill of Rights? That obviously is not true. So what is the truth?”
People come up with endless answers other than the obvious one, which is that America has a really bad Middle East policy, and Israel is a real big part of that. That's the answer: blowback. Again, Egyptians volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel is doing to the Lebanese. It's a little bit complicated, but not that complicated if you want to be honest.
But at the end, what is it? It's all George Bush's father's and Bill Clinton's fault, right? And so what are they going to do? I remember sitting in Chicago when 9/11 happened. I remember being really confused in the hours, the days, and the months after, with all the narratives that were coming out. It didn't quite make sense. A lot of the time, it almost felt like they were improvising with different stories that would convince the American people.
And I remember being extremely confused. Iraq. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Saddam Hussein. They're trying to see who they can create the evil guy out of—
Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and then they just ran with it.
I mean, can you break that down? What were the different lies that ended up sticking that were used to mislead us into the war?
Yeah. Well, on Afghanistan, it's clear that the CIA and Condoleezza Rice—and we know this, not that Bob Woodward is really trustworthy—were advising that we try our best to divide the Taliban from al-Qaeda and let the Taliban know we didn't have a fight with them. We're just after these Arabs that hit us. In fact, it's very important: the Taliban tried to warn us that the attack was coming and were essentially turned away.
They warned the UN in Pakistan, and they sent a guy to the United States, but he was denied a meeting at the State Department and went home. They only knew an attack was coming because they had learned it from a Tajik jihadist—or, I believe, a Tajik who was one of their informants. Basically, bin Laden didn't tell Mullah Omar in the summer of 2001. Mullah Omar had told Arnaud de Borchgrave from The Washington Times, “Bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat. I can neither swallow him nor spit him out.”
Milton Bearden, who had helped run the CIA covert war in the 1980s, told The Washington Post, “We've been negotiating with Mullah Omar over bin Laden since 1998.” After the African embassy attack, Omar said, “I've got to get rid of this guy,” and he ordered bin Laden, “Don't you do any more attacks against the United States.” Bin Laden had promised him that he wouldn't and then kept attacking anyway.
Mullah Omar—the dictator of the Taliban ruling regime in Afghanistan—wanted rid of him. Milton Bearden said that the Taliban would tell the CIA, “Oh, bin Laden? Geez, we lost track of him today. He's out falconing in the countryside somewhere. We don't know where he is.” Then the Americans would pound their fist on the table and say, “We said, hand him over,” when what he had just said was, “Go ahead and kill him. He's outside of our protection right now, and if you were to murder him, it would not be our fault. Take your best drone strike. Take your best shot.”
That's Milton Bearden talking. That's where I got this from. The Taliban hated this dude. He was nothing but trouble, and they wanted rid of him.
Remember what Bush said: “No negotiations. Hand him over.” They said, “Come on. Give us some evidence and we'll hold a proceeding here.” Bush said, “No way. Hand him over.” Colin Powell at one point said, “Well, we will come up with evidence. We will accuse them of this. We'll show you.” Then they were like, “Nope, no evidence.”
The Taliban said, “Well, tell you what. Let us hand him over to any Muslim country in the world.” Of course, that could be Malaysia, Indonesia, Jordan, or Egypt, all of which were going to do exactly what they were told by the United States. He would land on the tarmac and go straight to Virginia. Give me a break, right?
Nope. Not good enough. Then Bush started bombing on October 7, and the Taliban said, “Okay, we have no more conditions. We're willing to give him up if you'll just stop the bombing.” Bush said, “Too little, too late. No,” and kept the war going.
Why? Why? Why? The Occam's razor answer is that you can't read the guy's mind. There's so much circumstantial evidence about the thinking at the time. This goes to what I was saying about the CIA and Rice saying we should just bomb al-Qaeda and not the Taliban.
Donald Rumsfeld overruled them and said, “No, we need to take the fight to the Taliban. We need to keep the Afghan war going on because we want the American people to understand.” He actually proposed that we should bomb Baghdad now so that the American people would understand the war on terrorism was not over if we killed bin Laden.
And it ain't lost if we don't. The war is much bigger than him, and it's going to take place over a vast space and a vast period of time. We want the American people to know that this is not ending anytime soon. We're going to Baghdad. It's going to take a while to build up the force in Kuwait, and they hoped to go through Turkey, which didn't work out.
And so, if we kill Bin Laden now, or even if we don't, we want to make sure the American people know that the war is not over yet. I believe—and I make the case in both books, probably better in the second one, Fool's Errand and Enough Already—that they let Bin Laden go.
The CIA and the Delta Force on the ground were begging for reinforcements, and reinforcements were available. There were tens of thousands of Rangers, or at least 10,000 Rangers or something, at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. The Green Berets were fighting the Taliban up in Mazar-i-Sharif. The 75th Ranger Regiment, which is a top-tier special operations force considered right alongside Delta and Navy SEALs, was available in Kandahar Province.
General Mattis was there with 10,000 marching Marines, and he could have told them, “Go now.” They had helicopters, but even then they were only about 40 miles away. It's mountains, so what? They were not allowed to go and seal the border.
The CIA and the Delta Force were saying, “Man, we have them cornered on 3 sides. The fourth side is the Pakistani border. They're going to get away. We need more men.” The military did a congressional investigation. They said they had a plan. It's called “block and sweep”: make sure you get everybody in between here and here. That's exactly how you do it.
The Delta Force guys and the CIA guys—namely, Thomas Greer, a.k.a. Dalton Fury, in his book Kill Bin Laden, and Gary Berntsen in his book Jawbreaker—talk about how they just could not understand why they could not get the support that they wanted. Berntsen talks about how his boss at the CIA went and laid out the map on the desk. Ron Suskind writes about this, too: They showed Bush the map and said, “We need more men for this,” and they were denied the men that they needed.
And then what? Think about this: your whole life ever since then—talk about confusing narratives from that time. How about this one, dude? How about as soon as Bin Laden and his friends crossed the border into Pakistan on December 17th, Delta Force was not allowed to chase them? Why? They always say the same thing. You could do a LexisNexis search from back then and find how many times they used the term “Bin Laden and his men slipped across the border.”
Once that happened, it's like they jumped into hyperspace and got away. They crossed this semipermeable membrane that only terrorists can cross, but that Delta Force—the top-tier Army special operations force—cannot cross into a friendly allied country of ours, Pakistan.
We know from Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Islamabad, in his book 88 Days to Kandahar, that he had already made arrangements with the Pakistani army and Frontier Corps. They expected Bin Laden to come fleeing across the border, and they expected Americans to be hot on his tail in pursuit. They set up deconfliction so that the Pakistanis would not accidentally kill the Americans, because they were expected to come. They were not allowed to cross the border and give chase.
And Dalton Fury—man, this is amazing, too. Maybe someone in your audience can find the full 60 Minutes episode with Dalton Fury. I went on a deep dive trying to find it, and I can only find severely edited ones. His real name is Thomas Greer, and he's wearing a disguise and everything. He does a thing with Scott Pelley, and they edit it, because the important part that I'm looking for is where he says:
“We had all these plans to follow them into Pakistan. We had Chinook helicopters. We were going to go over them and then meet them coming back the other way. We were going to drop land mines, and there were only 3 valleys out of there that they could have taken. We were going to drop mines; that was going to slow them down.”
So they knew exactly how to kill him, and they were told to stand down.
They were not allowed by Donald Rumsfeld and the military to go further. We even have George W. Bush and Dick Cheney both implicated in this, too, in that Suskind book. Berntsen, I believe, talks about this in his book, too.
Thomas Greer is the guy who wrote Kill Bin Laden and was on 60 Minutes. He was the lieutenant colonel in Delta Force in charge there. Gary Berntsen was the guy on the scene who wrote the book Jawbreaker, and his boss was Henry Crumpton. He was the guy who had laid the map out on Bush's desk and said, “We need more men,” and was denied by Bush himself.
So it might be nice to blame just Rumsfeld, but it was the president himself who refused to commit the forces necessary to get Bin Laden. It is just a circumstantial case. I don't have a direct quote from any of these people saying this, but it seems pretty clear to me that they decided they would prefer that Bin Laden go, so that, like in the book 1984, they would have Emmanuel Goldstein—the enemy, the wrecker, the saboteur, the danger who could still kill you—out there. He's not gone yet.
Bush used to love to say, “Imagine Saddam Hussein giving Bin Laden's hijackers chemical weapons. Imagine September 11th, only this time armed by Saddam Hussein.” Well, Bin Laden's already dead, and the American people, by and large, believe that's what you get for messing with us, pal. We win, you lose, and it's over by Christmas.
Well, then how the hell are we going to go to Baghdad? It's going to take us a year and a half to build up the forces and to make people's mom and dad scared enough to think that we need to do this. We have a massive propaganda campaign to wage here.
Here's where we get right back into the neoconservatives again. In March of 2002, Justin Raimondo wrote a piece at Antiwar.com called “Our Hijacked Foreign Policy: The Neocons Take Washington, Baghdad Is Next.”
Justin was a brilliant genius. Because he was a libertarian, he had a long-time ideological axe to grind and a personal-enemy relationship with these neocons. We libertarians really are their polar opposite on so many things. He called it the Axis of Kristol, the little Lenin of the neoconservative movement.
Here he's citing “benevolent global hegemony.” That's the actual quote. He got that a little wrong. Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote this article in Foreign Affairs in 1996, “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” where they say we have to have benevolent global hegemony. That's what he's talking about there.
He's talking about the few people, and I have to tell you, man, I was really interested in foreign policy, politics, and all these things for many years leading up to this. But if you had just asked me what a Republican was, I would have said, “Houston,” right? James Baker III, right? Dark Lord of the Sith, lawyer for Exxon. That's what conservatism is: big business, right?
I knew who Bill Kristol was, but I didn't know who he was, right? I knew there was the Weekly Standard. I knew they were crazy about Saddam Hussein. I didn't know why. I didn't look enough into it leading up to then.
It's so interesting—sorry to interrupt.
Sure.
The lens of this analysis in 2002 is something I need to go back and read.
You need to go back and read all of Justin Raimondo from 1999 all the way through the whole thing.
Get yourself a rainy day. You can stop about halfway through Obama, probably.
But, man, at this time he was the most important writer for America. As neglected as he was, there was nobody better at describing what was happening to this country at that time. I'm severely distracted by how hilarious his writing is. I'm glancing at it.
Even from just a brief glance, I could see the cutting wit, the brilliance, and the humor.
You know what he was? He was a big gay Pat Buchanan. He's big gay Archie Bunker from San Francisco, right? He was a right-winger and a paleolibertarian, but Buchananite-leaning. He gave Pat Buchanan's nomination speech for the Reform Party in 1999.
He's a right-wing libertarian, but he is what he is. He's where he's at. It sounds ironic or whatever: Why would a gay guy like Pat Buchanan so much? It's because Pat Buchanan at that time—his reputation was very much the culture war and very much that gay people should still stay in the closet and things like that.
Justin was like, “I don't care about that. What matters is the world empire.” And even here, he's a right-winger, too. It's not that he's a liberal and he found a right-winger that he likes. It's that Pat Buchanan is the perfect kindred spirit, even though you might think not.
But Justin was from Queens, and he was from that era, raised in the 1950s and '60s. He was a crusty old paleocon in his way. That was why he was so good.
When I first started reading him, I remember saying even to my friends, “How does this guy know all this stuff?” It's just unbelievable how plugged in he is. He lives out in San Francisco, but he knows everything happening at every important think tank in Washington. He knows the difference between them all. He knows who all these guys are, what their role is, and who is whose mentor and student, in a way that is just unbelievable.
He had the neocons' number, man. And yes, the Iraq War was their war, and it was mostly for Israel.
No, it's all right. It's all right. It'll be a rabbit hole that we'll go into, but he goes hard against the neoconservatives.
Oh, so bad. And look, his first article was about the Kosovo War in 1999. He goes after the neoconservatives right then and there, from the very get-go. He used to love to quote this guy—I believe David Tell in The Weekly Standard—who said about Slobodan Milošević, “He better do what we say, or he knows we’ll kick their skulls in.” And he’s like, “Yeah, this is who the neoconservatives are, dude. They’re barbarians, essentially—Bill Kristol’s men.”
Quick pause. I’m sorry, I need another bathroom break. Then maybe you can get back to the military-industrial complex.
Oh, yeah. Okay. So, before we get too far into Iraq War 2 and the neoconservatives, we need to decide whether we want to talk about the Afghanistan War now, whether we want to come back and talk more about Afghanistan later, or maybe not even at all, or whatever. You have to make that call, because there’s plenty to talk about there as a hugely important thing.
On the other hand, of course—and this is the same dilemma I faced when I was writing Enough Already—it’s like, how much can I tell you about Afghanistan before I’ve got to bring you to Iraq, which is the heart of the story that everybody’s so interested in, where most of the action takes place? It’s on the other side of Iran from Afghanistan, and Afghanistan remained on the margin throughout the whole thing, even though in itself it was its own huge thing. But I leave that to you: how far you want to get into that and when.
I think Iraq specifically is the deepest, most thorough case study of the military-industrial complex and the abuse of power. So, as much as we can explore that, great. And I think it was really insightful, the way you described that—
Right there in Afghanistan.
We could have gotten bin Laden there. There are a lot of places where this did not have to go as long as it did, and that highlights 1 clear moment.
Yeah. But real tragedy. It really is. They could have negotiated, and they could have killed him, and the whole thing really could have been over by Christmas. And by the way, Gary Berntsen said that. He said that to the reporter Michael Hirsh in 2016. He said, “It’s really sad when you think about it, how this thing could have all been over by Christmas.”
So that ain’t just me. That’s them. That’s him. That’s the guy who was the 2nd CIA officer on the scene, in charge, who wrote—and you read his book. You know how editors do this sometimes when a CIA guy writes a book? They’ll leave the redaction marks in the big black boxes because it’s good salesmanship to do that, right?
So, when you read Gary Berntsen’s book, he goes, “And there I was, and me and my fellow CIA officers were talking about how frustrated we were that we could not understand why they wouldn’t give us reinforcements while he was getting away.” And then the next 4 sentences are blacked out. That’s like, you know—and the same thing for Dalton Fury, Thomas Greer. So, how do we get to Iraq?
Let’s do Iraq. Here’s where we’re going to start Iraq. First of all, Wolfowitz and all them wanted to go all the way to Baghdad in 1990, and Bush senior told them no and stopped short of that. Also, he let Saddam crush the Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish uprisings.
Then, of course, we have the status quo of Bill Clinton’s containment policy, the dual-containment policy against Iraq and Iran through the 1990s: sanctions, no-fly-zone bombings, and all of that. And, by the way, there were 2 failed CIA coups in 1995 and 1996 against Saddam.
One of them was the one that got Robert Baer in so much trouble, because he was working with Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, to try to overthrow Saddam. It all went to hell because Chalabi was basically selling them a bunch of promises about how it would go. That, of course, did not work out at all. And so this is where the CIA first put their burn notice on him.
Ahmed Chalabi was this important Iraqi exile. He was a banker in Jordan who then fled the country because he was wanted for embezzling money. And here he was selling the CIA on all of his promises about what he could do in Iraq, and then he was not coming through.
That’s sort of a minor part of the story. But then, in 1996, David Wurmser, who’s an important neoconservative, in alliance with the more important neoconservative Richard Perle, and also Douglas Feith, their fellow traveler—and I think 2 more people signed it. It may have been Charles Fairbanks Jr. and 1 other guy who signed it, too. I think it was really Wurmser and Perle talking.
Okay, and it’s called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Oh, man. You know what? Hell, as long as we’re doing this, we want to do this right?
Hell yeah. So, we want to talk about Iraq War 2. What we’ve got to do is go back to the early 1990s and Yitzhak Rabin.
Now, Israel had a strategy, as I said, being friends with Iran. At the same time, they’re friends with Turkey and friends with Ethiopia. Why? This was called the strategy of the periphery in Israel.
It meant, if you picture the map from Israel’s perspective, we want to support Turkey to divide Syria’s attention. We want to support Iran to divide Iraq’s attention. And we want to support Ethiopia to divide Egypt’s attention. Does that make sense geographically speaking?
Yes.
So, Rabin says, “Nope, we’re going to turn that upside down.” And what we’re going to do instead is negotiate with the Arabs, the closer states. And we’re going to even make a deal with Yasser Arafat. This was the Oslo peace process that was being started.
Now, they weren’t really going to give them an independent state. They were going to give them something like a sham, pseudo-sort-of-kind-of independent state, which actually probably would have been the best solution, right? You’d have your local police forces, but we’d be in 1 country together, kind of a thing. There are lots of states that have kind of complicated arrangements like that and pull it off.
But anyway, this was Rabin’s plan. Then a Netanyahu fan murdered him in 1995. This was when Shimon Peres took over. Now, Shimon Peres had been the foreign minister. He was now promoted to prime minister, and he continued the same policy.
This is why—in the reversal of the periphery doctrine and negotiating with the Arabs, part of that was now turning on Iran and demonizing Iran, because just for domestic political reasons in Israel, Rabin had to be tough against somebody. So now it’s Iran that’s the problem, and that’s why we need to negotiate with the Arabs, right?
He makes that change in 1993. In fact, there’s a funny anecdote in Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi, where the Clinton people were surprised and even laughed: “What do you mean, you hate Iran now? Last week you were demanding that we like Iran along with you. Now you’ve changed your mind. But what happened?”
All that happened was Israel changed its mind. They just had a different policy now. It wasn’t any particular thing that Iran had done at that point to cross their line. They just decided that this was important to do now. Somebody’s got to be the enemy, so now the enemy is going to be Shiite fundamentalist Islam, the revolutionary Iranian threat.
In fact, as 1 important Israeli strategist told Parsi, “We needed new glue for the alliance with the United States now that we don’t have the Soviet Union anymore. Why does America need us?” And the answer is radical Islam.
Of course, that’s great, because you could be anybody as long as you’re Muslim, and you can be called radical Islam. It doesn’t matter how radical, or which sect, or whose side you’re on, or anything, right? You can just do anything with that. You can apply that to Palestinians or anybody else. So, propaganda-wise, that’s a great one from the Israeli point of view.
And so, when Shimon Peres took over after Rabin was assassinated, he launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, reinvading Lebanon as part of that same doctrine. See, we’re going after the Shiites now. That was, again, the operation that motivated the lead hijacker of September 11 to join the jihad against us right there. That was why he did that; it was part of that same strategy, right?
But then Shimon Peres’s rule was short-lived, and Benjamin Netanyahu first came in and became the prime minister of Israel for the 1st time in 1996.
Okay. Now, David Wurmser and Richard Perle write this study for him. It’s called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Again, you can find that at scotthorton.org/fairuse. I’m sure there are Archive.org versions of it, too. You can find it. The Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies published it. It wasn’t an American think tank.
Yes, it’s posted at scotthorton.org/fairuse: A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm by David Wurmser, 1996.
And the companion piece, as it says there, is called Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant by David Wurmser in 1996. Both of these—well, certainly the 1st one—is officially signed off on by Richard Perle.
And I should have hot links on those. I’m not sure why I don’t, but there are 3 related articles here by Loewenberg, Wurmser, and Perle, promoting the same agenda in the newspapers there, in The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal. They’re called “The Ultimate Peace Process Prize,” “Just as Saddam’s Power Is Under Assault,” and “The Balance of Power”—all 3 pieces.
And now there’s even a book. It’s called Tyranny’s Ally by David Wurmser, with a foreword by Richard Perle. They all say the same thing, okay? What they say is that we’re Israeli agents, and Ahmed Chalabi sold us a bunch of crap, and we bought it.
And it’s this magic theory about how overthrowing Saddam is going to be good for Israel. Don’t let me leave out that, as part of Israel’s secret relationship with Iran through the 1980s, or their friendship continuing through the 1980s and into the 1990s, they had a secret oil pipeline from the port of Eilat, which I never say right—I forget how to pronounce it correctly. We’re talking about the Sinai Peninsula in the Red Sea.
On the western side of the Sinai Peninsula is the Suez Canal and the gate to the Mediterranean Sea. On the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula is the port of Aqaba. There was a secret oil pipeline run by Marc Rich’s company—the guy Bill Clinton pardoned on his last day in office, who was this corrupt financier and oil industry guy. His company had this secret pipeline where Iranian ships would drop off oil, and it would then go through this pipeline to Israel, right?
Well, once Rabin turned on Iran—when he turned the periphery strategy upside down—the Iranians quit sending oil. In fact, it may not have been until 1995 that they quit sending the oil, because Trita Parsi explains that Iran didn’t start backing Hamas until 1995, or at least maybe they had given them a little bit or something. They had given them very little until then, and so it was provocations by Rabin against Iran that finally, after a year and a half of this or more—I believe, if I’m remembering it right; I don’t think it was 1993—I think it wasn’t until 1995 that Iran finally said, “Fine, then, if you guys are going to be that way,” and stopped shipping the oil in.
Now this becomes a major interest of the neoconservatives and the Likud Party, and Ahmed Chalabi understands very quickly that this is what these guys want to hear: that if America will put him and his friends in power in Iraq, they’ll be friends with Israel. In the original document, A Clean Break, they say they want to use the cousin of the king of Jordan, and they’re going to put a Hashemite kingdom in Iraq to rule Iraq.
The magic theory here is, let’s do a very, very elementary division of the Sunnis and the Shiites—a history lesson. The Shiites went off with Muhammad’s family after he died. The Sunnis picked their own imams, right? There’s kind of one hierarchy. It’s a very, very inept but very crude comparison between the Protestants and the Catholics.
There’s one Shiite church, basically, right under the ayatollahs and their system, and their power is inherited through the bloodline and all of that. On the Sunni side, they pick their own ministers, like the Protestants, and have many more sects and different kinds of Sunnis and that sort of deal. If that makes sense on the most basic level here.
Not that I’m saying the Shiites claim to be priests or anything—it’s more analogous to the Catholic Church. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying there’s this order of ayatollahs, the same way there are cardinals and whatever, if you understand.
The Shiites do revere their clergy leaders, who are descended from Muhammad and evidently can prove it. I don’t know. Apparently, they wear their black turbans, and that means that they share his bloodline and all that. The Hashemites also declare themselves to be his descendants. Whether that’s true or not, whatever, fine—take it for granted that it is.
But they’re Sunnis. The thing about the Shiites revering people with the blood of the Prophet—their Shiite clergy—is that it doesn’t mean they consider them to be infallible dictators whose will is their law and all of these things. Even the Pope says, “Some things are my opinion. Some things I’m speaking for the Lord, but sometimes I’m just saying I think this is how it should be.” You know what I mean?
The ayatollahs do not exercise a spellbinding power over these people through mysticism and irrational demands of religious fealty to their every order or whatever. It’s a much more consensual relationship than that. It’s not a completely top-down sort of thing, where they have this magic spell of their bloodline that acts as hypnosis or demands total obedience. That’s just never been the implication of the thing.
Chalabi is just telling these guys whatever they need to hear: that if we put a Hashemite king in there, then he will be able to tell the Shiite clergy that they better stop being friends with Iran, and that they better tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. Then Hezbollah will be friends with Israel, and the Israelis can finish stealing Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah causing them problems on their northern flank. That’s the Clean Break.
Now, here’s the thing about this, man. Picture the region in your head a little bit, or pull up the map again if you need to. Here’s David Wurmser’s argument. He’s saying Iran backs Hezbollah in southern Lebanon by way of Syria. So what we want to do is get rid of Saddam Hussein, the secular Sunni who’s the roadblock to all this.
Again, magic wish. What’s going to happen is our Sunni king will just enslave the will of the Shiite supermajority, and they’ll be our cat’s paws and do whatever we want, and we’ll lord them over Iran. David Wurmser said, “Chalabi assures us that a democratic Shiite Iraq will be a nightmare for Iran because the Iranians will want to live like the Iraqis in their wonderful, new, awesome supermajority Shiite democracy.”
Under the rule of their benevolent king—or however they ended up changing it a little bit, I guess, and emphasizing the democracy part more later—it would still be a nightmare for Iran. I think what happened was the king of Jordan died and was replaced, and they said, “Okay, forget that. We’ll just put Chalabi in power himself. He’ll be the guy that we put in.”
They also promised—the neoconservatives; Chalabi promised the neoconservatives—“We’ll build an oil pipeline from northern Iraq to Haifa, Israel,” to make up for the pipeline that they had just lost with the Iranians. Netanyahu bought this, and David Wurmser and Richard Perle bought this.
This was one of the reasons—one of the major reasons—that 4,500 Americans and a million Iraqis died in Iraq War II: so Israel could save a nickel a barrel on Iraqi oil because their own policies had cost them their access to Iranian oil. They were paying this extra premium after losing that source, and this oil pipeline to Haifa was a big deal.
You’ll want to pull this up, because you’ll want to read it later and laugh and weep. It’s called “How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons.”
For your audience, they need to know: a long time ago, Salon.com did journalism. I know it sounds absurd, and you probably don’t believe me, even though I know you kind of like me and trust me, but this guy John Dizard is from the Financial Times. He’s a solid guy. I have a very brief acquaintance with him, emailing back and forth, and he’s no slouch. This is not some woke, ridiculous propaganda. This article is very good stuff.
Go ahead. May 4, 2004. John Dizard: “How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons.” The hawks who launched the Iraq war believe the dealmaker exile when he promised to build a secular democracy with close ties to Israel. Now the Israel deal is dead. He’s cozying up to Iran, and his patrons look like they’re on the way out.
In this article, it’s brutal. He quotes Douglas Feith. Douglas Feith was, again, the third signatory on A Clean Break, although I believe he now disowns it and says, “Well, I never agreed with that part,” and this kind of thing. He was the deputy secretary of defense for policy in the first Bush term and helped run the Office of Special Plans with Abram Shulsky, which lied us into war using lies funneled into the intelligence stream by Ahmed Chalabi. It’s a huge part of how they lied us into war. I’m skipping ahead; I’m going to come back to that in a minute.
In this article, they quote Douglas Feith’s law partner, Marc Zell, and people might follow him on Twitter. The guy’s a riot, dude—meaning he’s completely insane and a lot of fun if you’re into insane Zionist, war-hawk, genocidal lunatics. But anyway, he has these quotes in here.
This is not me talking. I’m very careful with my words. I’m a libertarian. I’m an individualist. I’m not a collectivist. I don’t go around categorizing people by their religion and ethnicity and all this crap. I just don’t. I was raised that way. It is what it is.
This is Dizard talking to Chalabi’s friends. I’m quoting a guy, quoting a guy, quoting a guy. Forgive me: “I said to Ahmed, ‘What are you doing running around with all these Jews?’ And he said, ‘I just need them until I can get my war, and then I’m going to stab them in the back, and we’re going to get what we want.’”
So, in other words, Richard Perle is as stupid as he is evil. David Wurmser, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and the neoconservatives Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, John Hannah, Elliott Abrams, and Abram Shulsky—all of these guys who lied—that’s what these idiots believed.
These are all neocons.
These are the neocons in the George W. Bush administration, in the vice president’s office, in the State Department, and in the Defense Department who lied us into war. Colin Powell called them the JINSA crowd. JINSA is the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, which, at that time, I believe, was run by David Wurmser. He was one of the most powerful guys there, and they were part and parcel of the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for a New American Century, the Center for Security Policy, and the other major neoconservative think tanks that pushed for that war at that time.
And they had power and influence?
They had all the power and influence they needed because they got it from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. What Powell said was that this was a separate government inside the government, run like a cell by Dick Cheney. David Wurmser was known as Cheney’s agent, his plant at State. His job, along with John Bolton—who is not a neoconservative because he’s never been any kind of leftist; he’s just a conservative nationalist type, but one of their fellow travelers, very close with them—was to prevent Powell and Armitage, his guy, from preventing the war, to keep a leash on them in whatever ways they could obstruct their efforts.
Then, in the vice president’s office, you had Scooter Libby and Eric Edelman. Elliott Abrams was on the National Security Council with Zalmay Khalilzad—the same guy who was the primary author of the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance along with Libby—and Stephen Hadley, who was the deputy national security adviser. Then, on the Defense Policy Board, you had Jeane Kirkpatrick, who again was from the Social Democrats USA and the Young People’s Socialist League before she converted to Commentary magazine and Reaganism, making her, by the classical definition—and as a hardcore Zionist, of course—a classical neoconservative.
Along with Kenneth Adelman, Richard Perle was the chair of the Defense Policy Board, which is a very important advisory position. He was really the power behind the scenes, a major ringleader of the group there. Newt Gingrich was another fellow traveler, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, a Republican who you could consider sort of like John Bolton in a way. He’s more or less one of them, but not exactly.
For example, you may have heard the stories about how Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby made 14 trips to CIA headquarters to beat them over the head and say, “We need more against Iraq. Come up with it.” They wouldn’t come up with enough. Newt Gingrich did the same thing. He went to CIA headquarters over and over and over again, saying, “Give us the goods. We don’t have enough. We need more.”
That’s really dark. Yeah. So then, under Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense was Douglas Feith, who was deputy secretary of defense for policy. Under him was Abram Shulsky. Shulsky ran the Office of Special Plans, which sounds innocuous enough, but this was the core of the neoconservative plot to launder lies from Ahmed Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, into the intelligence stream, along with whatever they could dig out of the CIA’s trash that the CIA had already decided to ignore.
They had Michael Rubin and Michael Ledeen and a whole group of—I used to know all their names—the guys at the Office of Special Plans. There were 6 or 8 of them. Across the hall was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which was led by David Wurmser. Again, he’s traveling around: he’s in the vice president’s office, he’s at State, he’s at Defense—wherever they need him. That was Wurmser and a guy named Michael Maloof.
Their job was to dig through the CIA’s trash and the exiles’ lies and try to come up with anything to connect Saddam to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. These guys all had this agenda, and Zionism was at the core of it all. There’s really just no denying that, and in many cases they admitted it. There are very authoritative sources on this.
For example, Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, for a very long time a reporter and now, of course, the famous columnist, wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World Is Flat. Bill Clinton said he’s the most important public intellectual in America. He’s a somewhat conservative Jewish Zionist New York Times writer and Iraq War supporter. He’s not a neoconservative and not really a fellow traveler of theirs. He’s a guy who just lives in the same world as them, but he knows a hell of a lot. He’s extremely plugged in. For people who don’t know, look him up: Thomas L. Friedman.
Friedman gave an interview to Haaretz where he said, “Let me tell you something. There are 9 guys within a mile of here, and they’re the ones who did it.” I’m sorry, I’m getting the quote wrong. I think Seymour Hersh said the thing about 9 guys. But Friedman said something very close to that to Haaretz: It was the neoconservatives; it was this very small group of guys. This was their war. They plotted it, they planned it, they made the advertising push to make it acceptable. It was their war, and they got it. That’s what it was.
Philip Zelikow, who is not a neoconservative, was more of a Council on Foreign Relations type with Condoleezza Rice, Robert Blackwill, and some of those other guys who were not part of the neoconservative set in the same government. Zelikow, you might remember, was the principal author of the 9/11 Commission report. A lot of people don’t like him for that, for whatever reasons—good and bad, probably.
But Zelikow said, “Let me tell you something about the motivation for the Iraq War. This is not something that you’ll hear very much, but Saddam Hussein paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Saddam Hussein would pay any family who lost anybody to Israeli violence, no matter what.”
So that meant if the Israelis bulldozed some old lady in her home and murdered her, Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to her survivors. But it also meant if some guy went and did a suicide attack and blew up a pizzeria full of kids on a Friday night, Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to his survivors too. So this was quite clearly incentivizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. That is a real security problem for Israel. As Philip Zelikow said, this was a real hard motivating factor for the neoconservatives to want to launch this war.
So how does the military-industrial complex now start stepping into this whole picture?
Great place for this question. Andrew Cockburn is a great author. His brother Patrick Cockburn, whom I mentioned previously, is the most important—or at least, in our era, has been the most important—Western journalist, especially in Iraq, I would argue. Alexander Cockburn was the leftist agitator and founder of CounterPunch, who died of cancer years ago. Andrew is the author who writes the books. His wife, Leslie Cockburn, wrote the great book Out of Control about the Iran-Contra scandal, and then Andrew wrote Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy and Kill Chain about the terror wars, especially the drone wars and all that stuff. Brilliant guy.
He told me years ago, “Listen, here’s the best way to understand the neoconservative movement. They’re the cross between the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex, right? So we already have banking and oil, and banking and oil already has the Council on Foreign Relations since the end of the First World War. That’s their center of gravity, right?”
Well, the neocons weren’t all that welcome there, right? So they said, “Screw you guys. We’ll make our own think tanks,” and they made their alliance with the military-industrial complex, which had a lot of money at stake but not so many eggheads to write the studies about why their products needed to be purchased by their captive audience, the Pentagon. This is where the neoconservatives come in very handy to the military-industrial complex.
Of course, what’s the center of America’s relationship with Israel? Military support and security guarantees, right? That’s what it all comes down to: America guaranteeing Israel security militarily. So how do we do that? We do that by making Lockheed rich, making Israel armed. You have this perfect alliance between these factions.
In the 1980s, it was really with this money—and the organization it provided—that they took over the Olin, Mellon, and Scaife foundations. They took over the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage. Then they created their own forest of all the new ones: the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I think the Committee on the Present Danger was previous to this, but I guess they recreated the Committee on the Present Danger. They had PNAC and the Center for Security Policy—again, that’s Frank Gaffney and his guys—and whatever handful of others there that helped to boost that whole thing and created that echo chamber.
Of course, very importantly, along with that was The Weekly Standard magazine. Bruce Jackson from Lockheed is really the exemplar of this because he came in in the 1990s and put up all the money for the Committee on NATO Expansion and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. They focused mostly on humanitarian excuses for going in and helping the Iraqi people, but they were working hand in glove with Bill Kristol, as you know, one of the agents of the Axis of Kristol, as Justin Raimondo called it—the guys lying us into war—with The Weekly Standard leading the charge and Jonah Goldberg and National Review right behind him, doing everything they could to push us into that war.
Michael Ledeen would write, and Jonah Goldberg would publish, over and over and over again: Michael Ledeen demanding, “Faster, please. We have to keep going to the rest of the terror masters, especially Tehran, as soon as possible.” As Jonah Goldberg wrote, “Baghdad delenda est,” meaning “must be destroyed,” like “Carthage must be destroyed,” and “Baghdad delenda est, Part 2,” where he says it’s the Ledeen doctrine. He approvingly quotes the Ledeen doctrine: “America, every 10 years or so, we have to take some small country and throw them up against the wall just to show the world that we mean business.”
That’s conservatism in the hands of these essentially bastard children of Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army. And, Scott, when you get into Justin Raimondo and you read Trotsky, Strauss, and the neocons and all this, you can see where he’s talking about arguments in the pages of National Review about Trotsky and his legacy from some of these neocons at that time.
And Justin talks about how baffled the readership of the National Review must be right now that these are their leaders. They’re Trots. This is who controls the Republican Party and American foreign policy. The world won’t be safe until the revolution is complete, and, by the way, we have to start with all Israel’s enemies first. It’s nuts.
So, underpinning this ever-growing bureaucracy that’s connected to the military-industrial complex is this kind of collectivist thinking, and money, you know, makes so much money. As I show—we’ll talk about this more in the Cold War section when we get to it later—but it was a real crisis at the end of the Cold War for the military-industrial complex, and they were open about it. They were like, “What’s going to happen to us now?” They tried to get into administering welfare payments and stuff. They’re not a free-market operation. They’re a government-connected regime.
Are they trying to pivot, you’re saying?
Yeah, they’re trying to figure out, “What are we going to do in the world?” The idea is clear: If we control the think tanks and the think tanks decide the policy, then we can decide what kind of weapons we need to develop and have for sale. Are we building jungle gear or desert gear? What kind of tanks? What kind of helicopters? If we set the policy, then we get to save money by making good guesses about what kind of weapons the Pentagon is going to need, because we’re the ones deciding.
I just remembered a great footnote for this. You guys will love it: Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels by Richard Cummings. I interviewed the guy. That was one of the first interviews I did when I started the show full-time in January 2007. It was originally written for Playboy.com, and he says, “Guess what? All those neocons who were such lunatics and who were palling around with Netanyahu and talking about oil pipelines to Haifa—they were all on Lockheed’s payroll.”
The only one who wasn’t was Hadley, but Hadley worked for a law firm that had represented them. Many of the others—and I don’t just mean the think-tank guys, but the guys in the George W. Bush administration—had some direct connection to Lockheed, including the fact that Dick Cheney’s wife sat on the board of directors. Not that he’s a neoconservative, you understand, but can you actually speak to that? I’m sorry to zoom out again on human nature.
No, you should.
Do you think so?
I should actually mention I don’t know much about Lockheed, but to the degree I’ve interacted with folks that are Lockheed engineers, there’s some incredible engineering going on there.
Sure.
And I wonder, do they all believe in what they’re doing? They have a narrower problem set that they’re solving. It’s no different from a soldier. If you ask them, I know what they’ll tell you: “That ain’t my job. My job is making sure this gizmo works.”
But does anyone at any place in Lockheed think that it is their job to think about the big-picture ethics of all of this?
Yes, but their customer is the US government. The US government is a democracy that represents the will and consensus of the majority of the adult population of this great free land.
Always outsourcing their ethics.
Yes. Listen, I’ve got to tell you, this is so important. I’m so glad that you mentioned this, because you do have direct quotes from, for example, Raytheon—one is coming straight to mind—where they say, “Listen, these policies are decided by the government. Our job is to make sure that they have what they need, and that’s to be decided by other people.”
But Raytheon will directly intervene in policy to make sure that the policy is what they want. For example, Barack Obama started a genocidal war against the people of Yemen in 2015, which Donald Trump continued. I’m jumping way ahead in our narrative here, but the House did it only because of peace activists. There’s no Houthi lobby in America, believe me. It was only Quakers, hippies, and libertarians who said, “Please stop this,” and got Congress to pass a War Powers Resolution twice to try to force Trump to end the war.
They passed the wimpy kind that he’s allowed to veto instead of the other kind that he can’t, and so he vetoed it twice. But then guess what? Peter Navarro, his trade representative—we’re talking Trump’s first term here—told The New York Times that the reason they kept the war going, vetoed it, and refused to end the war was to pay Raytheon, because Raytheon wanted the Yemen war. It was making them a bunch of money.
The Trump people had imposed these tariffs that were frustrating big manufacturing firms in America, so they said, “We have to find a way to put manufacturing on welfare.” Talk about collectivism. “What we’ll do is commit genocide against the people of Yemen, because that’s what Saudi Arabia and the UAE want—not because of anything that has to do with America’s national interest.” The Houthis were helping us kill al-Qaeda guys a month before that.
“We’re going to do this for them, and because industry wants free money, because they’re mad that we put these tariffs on China and disrupted some of their supplies.” They’re going to put this one big company on the dole, and somehow that’s going to make all of manufacturing in America happy. That was their reasoning for doing it, because Raytheon was demanding it.
Then Raytheon will turn right around and go, “Hey, listen, Lex, don’t come crying to me. It was the democratically elected people of this country who demanded that we make these wares to provide your security, pal. I don’t know what you want to say.” They pretend that they’re not dealing with the devil, but they are. Somehow they know it. Somewhere they know it. Somewhere this department knows that that’s that department’s job. We do hire lobbyists to advocate for policies, don’t we?
Yeah, of course we do. But it’s very uncomfortable to think about that.
You know what gets me, man? This is how the H-bomb lobby works, too. It’s no different. Honeywell and Lockheed make hydrogen bombs, and they’ll send a salesman to Capitol Hill talking about, “Senator, Senator, let me tell you, I’ve got to get rid of some H-bombs here. What kind of deal can I cut? What do I have to do to get this H-bomb in your driveway by tonight?”
They’re, like, supply-side. You might have some—you probably didn’t think it all the way through, right? But somewhere in the back of your mind is this half-articulated fantasy that nuclear weapons are a demand-side business in this country, where the military comes to Congress and says, “We need exactly this many,” and then Congress says to industry, “We need exactly this many.”
What do you mean the industry is trying to push H-bombs because of their awesome profit margins, and that we run the H-bomb supply business the same way you would expect with M4 rifles or combat boots? Yep, that’s exactly right, and that’s exactly what’s meant by the military-industrial complex. There’s a really strong case to be made that war is a supply-side entity in our era.
It sure as hell is, isn’t it? It’s the era of the phony wars, man. “What do I have to do to put this war in your driveway today, Lex? I’ll tell you that they hate Islam. I’ll tell you the Muslims hate your religion. They hate your mama. They hate freedom. They did this.” Did I ever tell you about the Beirut bombing in 1983? “What do I have to do to get you mad enough to do this with me?”
That’s why it’s a constant bombardment of propaganda. They don’t have a real case to make. They have to try to scare you and lie to you.
And that’s from their perspective. From the industry perspective, the Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen wars are a success: $8 trillion. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone. It’s the military-industrial complex.
Hey, you know what? Don’t you criticize it, Lex. It’s now called the defense industrial base. If you ask the Democrats, they’ll tell you it’s the number one best and most important reason for the Ukraine war, because it’s a good subsidy for our defense industrial base. They ran out of arguments and settled on that, and they did not know how absolutely demonic they sounded.
That’s why we want to have a war? It’s literally like your crazy conspiracy theory. You’re crazy when you say it and call it the MIC, but now it’s the defense industrial base, and it’s awesome. It’s spectacular, and you better get on board for it. It’s the best reason to have these wars. In fact, we’re not embarrassed to tell you. You can go read it in Politico. I don’t know what else to say. This is straight out of the Democrats’ mouths during the last war in the last presidential term.
How do the American people fight this?
Well, the first thing would be to get used to the idea that they’re lying to you next time, too, right? They’ve done nothing but take advantage of you this whole time. There’s no reason to give your government the benefit of the doubt that they care what’s true or that they want you to understand the truth. That’s not what they’re about.
They’re trying to get you—I mean, just think about how they always operate. They’re trying to get you upset so that then you’ll let them do something, right? I’m detecting a pattern here. It doesn’t mean that everything is a false flag or anything like that, but they do nothing but create crises and then exploit them.
They have a monopoly on security services. So when George W. Bush is on the job for 8 months before September 11, his approval rating goes up to 90%.
Yeah.
Because we can't fire the national government and replace it with another one. We're not having another election for another 3 years. And so this is the security force we got, and so we better support it because what? We're trying to send a signal to the world that you better know that we're all one for all, and you better not mess with us or whatever.
But what are we really doing? We're telling George W. Bush that he has a mandate to do anything he thinks he can get away with. And that we do nothing but support him after the greatest failure of any president in all of American history was allowed to happen on his watch.
When we all know, of course, that they knew it was coming, and that at least parts of the CIA were warning and trying desperately to get the White House to pay attention to the fact that this attack was coming. And that Bush refused to pay attention, I think, because he didn't want to be distracted with going after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan when he was trying to go to Iraq.
And that's another important point to bring up, back to our debate with Dubowitz there, where it's, “Oh, the Jews, this, the Jews that,” and the neoconservatives and whatever. Well, to be perfectly clear, as everyone knows, George W. Bush is a Methodist, right? He's the son of Episcopalian WASPs from Connecticut.
And Dick Cheney is some kind of redneck from mountain Wyoming. I mean that in a complimentary way. I appreciate working-class folk. I've done plenty of that kind of work myself. He climbed electric poles and stuff like that. He's from out west, a cowboy, a conservative, a right-winger, a nationalist, and a tough guy. That's his problem.
Donald Rumsfeld was previously the secretary of defense and had his own plans for—there was this whole debate back during that era about the transformation of the military. Everybody knows now that the Soviet Union's gone, and it's the whole new order. What order is it, and what should the military look like? What sort of weapon systems should we focus on? This and that.
Rumsfeld had his own ideas. Generically speaking, he wanted to stick it to Big Army and give their money to the Air Force and the special operations forces instead. Again, the Lockheed promo video: What we do is send in special operations forces and air power to whoop anybody in a few weeks and then move on to the next one. We want to stay light and fast and not get bogged down.
That was one of their excuses for letting bin Laden go. “We didn't want to get bogged down.” Oh, what? Killing bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, the 2 most important guys that you could possibly target in the thing, who were both there? Come on. But that was part of their excuse: light and fast, keep it going.
W. Bush, I think, wanted to prove he was tougher than his father. In a sense, he probably wanted to avenge his father, not only from the fake assassination plot but also for the humiliation. Bill Hicks was so wise about this: the humiliation of H. W. Bush being voted out of office while Saddam Hussein was still in the chair.
And he says they had to wait a couple of days for Saddam Hussein to quit gut-laughing to get his quote. Then he goes, “We have nothing against America. We just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the road like a soccer ball.” And then Bill goes, “Wow, me and Saddam Hussein, we're like this. Who would have thought it?”
So some of it is personal, too, right?
And in fact, Kristol said—I remember seeing Kristol on TV saying, “Well, of course...” And, wait, wait, before Kristol, I said this to my math teacher in 11th grade.
Were you Scott Horton?
Yes.
To your math teacher?
In 1994, when they announced—or the next day after they announced—that W. Bush was also going to run for governor, just like his brother Jeb was running for governor in Florida, I said to my math teacher, “Oh, you see what they're doing?”
I was 17. I said, “You see what they're doing? They're making sure that at least one or the other of these guys will be a second-term governor in the year 2000. Then they can run for president and go back to Iraq.”
Which means the Republicans are going to run a weakling in '96 and throw the election for Bill and let him win again, so that they can run a fresh Bush in 2000. Nailed it, dude.
And why? Because of the humiliation. That was my high school thinking at the time: the humiliation that Saddam's still there, but Bush is gone. Bush lost after only 1 term. And so that's got to be avenged. That's clearly what they're doing here.
And then Bill Kristol said the same thing. Now Bill Kristol is bullying W. Bush, right? Bill Kristol isn't me; he's bullying him up there. And he's saying, “Well, I just can't imagine that W. Bush would risk being unelected after only 1 term with Saddam Hussein still in charge over there. So I think that it's just an obvious matter of course that he will have to invade Iraq in his first term, and I encourage that and think it's great, and he should.”
I saw Kristol say that probably during the campaign, before he was even elected president, somewhere around there. Again, I wasn't quite sure who Kristol was, and I surely didn't know who his father was in the neoconservative movement yet. But I knew that this was the guy from The Weekly Standard who was always on about Saddam Hussein.
And so that was the way he was trying to frame it to W. Bush himself: Of course you can't take the risk of running for reelection in '04 with Saddam Hussein still sitting there. What if you lost just like your dad? Your family could never live that down—Saddam still in the chair after 2 Bushes got unelected after only 1 term. Perish the thought.
That makes me realize that when you're in the seat of the president, it takes real courage to basically resist the military-industrial complex. And W. Bush had no courage or insight or depth or humanity.
And so there's something about our political system that doesn't make it easy for truly courageous, singular figures to win the presidency, right?
And you'd probably be terrified of them if they did. You know what I mean? Because you got people like that, or—
They're going to use that courage.
Again, this is sort of the irony of the neoconservatives. They say, “Henry Kissinger is a monster. His amoral foreign policy says, ‘Well, if the Indonesians feel like killing all the Timorese, I guess they have to,’ or whatever.” Not like us—we're a morality-based foreign policy. That's why we have to invade Iraq, because Saddam Hussein is so immoral, and we have to go and bring light and goodness to the world by doing the right thing, by starting another war.
And so that's right. Those are your 2 choices. You have amoral and immoral in the name of morality, using that excuse. As they would always put it—the Straussians, because he was one of the former Trotskyites that a lot of these guys then studied under—“Oh, no. We're all philosopher kings.”
Unlike Lockean or Jeffersonian-type American principles, our principles are that elites like David Wurmser and Richard Perle are so smart that only they can understand the real truth and the subtext of the truth. Everybody else is some idiot who has to be lied to with noble lies by their philosopher kings, because they won't do the right thing for the right reasons.
They have to be told false reasons to make them do the right thing, and all these things. And they have to justify all their lies by wrapping them up in all those justifications that they know what they're doing, when of course these people are just clowns, dude. There's no difference.
And I know—look, at the time I was driving a cab in this town, up and down this street, okay? And the average idiot around here knew better than all of this, right? It wasn't because they had special knowledge, but they just knew: You don't start a war. Who knows what could happen?
You have no idea, dude, how many just regular people told me, “I don't think Saddam Hussein is friends with Osama bin Laden.”
Yeah. There's a deep wisdom in that common sense.
Of course.
And that's what makes America great: for the longest time, the people had power.
Yep.
And so to the degree that the people have power and that wisdom can speak through its representatives, then we'll be all right. But the more and more the bureaucracy grows, the more the military-industrial complex gains power, then that common-sense wisdom of the people is silenced.
Mhm. Well, I like telling this story, too, so I'll go ahead and rattle on about the guy to you, too. I had a guy in my cab.
Mhm.
Who was like a Mr. Fancy Pants, man about town. I dropped him off at some very swanky bachelor-pad apartments off South MoPac there. And he was a real nice guy. We had a long conversation because I wouldn't let the poor soul go.
Mhm.
And I'm beating him over the head, and I'm telling him, “Damn it, I swear to God that this is true, okay? George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tenet—none of them have said that Saddam did 9/11. Now, Dick Cheney did, but he's a damn liar.”
But there's a real important reason why Bush and Powell are not saying that. They're perfectly happy to leave you with the impression that that must be what they were trying to imply and that's what you thought you heard them say, but you didn't. And you promise me you'll go inside and Google, and you'll look hard—you will not find them directly saying that.
And he says to me, “Ah, but come on, man. I mean, if Saddam Hussein didn't do 9/11, then why are we attacking him, then, right?”
Which is a good question. But to him, the answer was built into the thing: the cab driver couldn't possibly be right. The people in Washington would not lead me to believe that this had anything at all to do with avenging those innocent, dead Americans slaughtered on September 11th—airplanes full of little kids on their way on vacation.
What do you mean, this has nothing to do with that? What's more likely: your cab driver knows better, or that you are right to disbelieve and believe in the authority that swears they're doing this to protect you from the enemy that attacked you? That's the kind of cognitive dissonance that's always baked into these kinds of things.
It's the same thing with Israel now. Well, if this is the most barbarian society on the planet, how come we're their best friends? Again, a very good question, but it's not answered by, "They must not be. They must be really great; otherwise, we wouldn't be," which is what the cognitive dissonance would try to have you explain to yourself, I guess.
Yeah. By the way, everyday people, just like we said, often have a deep wisdom that the government lacks. More than almost any other career, I think cab drivers really have that wisdom. I don't know what it is about cab drivers, but they really get it because they get to talk to a lot of people and think through a lot of it. You get to think through it.
Hey, I think all the time about—I mean, there's a lot of cab rides I don't remember, but there are a few that I do, where I got something wrong and the guy goes, "No, no, no. It's not like that. It's like this," and he was right and I was wrong. I really picked up something there. You know what I mean?
I said I was kind of a New World Order kook back then. One of the good ones I still remember was when I was on MoPac and the guy said to me, "Listen, man, it ain't conspiracy. It's just politics, okay? It's the game over who controls the power. You don't need secret societies. You just need oak tables, man. This is business, and that's how it goes."
Yeah. Even the most conspiratorial thing, if you just leave out the secret society crap and focus on Lockheed, the Israel lobby, the Republican Party, oil interests, and whatever, where all these things come together, it's all very clear. You know what I mean? You don't have to be a Chomskyite leftist to see it that way at all.
I'm a libertarian, and we're pure free-market types, which means we find it morally criminal for any company to get a government contract for anything, right? We want no public-private partnerships of any kind. When we say privatization, we don't mean government contracts. We mean privatization: get government out of it and let free people figure it out. To a libertarian, any corporation on welfare deserves to be destroyed.
You don't have to identify somehow as, like, "Well, only an anarcho-syndicalist from the Chomskyite mold would think that we have this problem with these crony corporations." No, indeed, we do. In fact, again—not again, but go back—who coined the term "military-industrial complex"? This is Dwight David Eisenhower, the 5-star Army general who was the commander of all Allied forces in Europe in World War II and then came home and was the 2-term Republican president of the United States of America.
He's the one who did the coup in 1953 in Iran. He's the one who built as many nuclear missiles as he possibly could. But why? To try to hold the Army at bay. Eisenhower said, "God help the next president of this country who doesn't have the experience with the Army that I do to try to keep these men from their demands," when they were constantly demanding, "More divisions, more divisions, more divisions."
He said, "No, I'm going to build more missiles instead. You guys get away from me." Only he had the power to do it at the time. I'm not taking a stance on this, but it's widely believed that these same forces blew the head off of his successor for getting in their way. You know, which is at least possible, if not likely, right? That that was what happened in Dallas.
By these forces, we don't really know the full—
Meaning the military and the intelligence agencies, right? That was the idea.
It's like a network of people that work together.
Yeah. The black-access program, the special-access program in the military—goes back to Fletcher Prouty and them. Their argument about the thing, whatever. Whether that's true or not, it's believable enough because of what Eisenhower said on his last day in office:
"Sorry, Jack. I did the best I could. Maybe this is half my fault. Good luck to you."
And then he quit and was out the door. But have we ever had a major reckoning since then? What—after Vietnam and Nixon was impeached, was that when we destroyed the military-industrial complex? No, right? That never happened. After the end of the Cold War, is that what happened? No. We went to Bosnia, and then we went to Iraq. We went to Bosnia and stayed in the Middle East and expanded wherever we could.
Eisenhower's speeches are haunting.
Yeah. There's the other one, the Cross of Iron speech, where he calculates the cost of battleships compared to schools, grocery stores, and things. It's not all public goods, or so-called public goods like public schools, but he talks about private investment and the comparisons—that every bit of money that we spend on this is wealth that comes from the American people, that the government then denies to us, takes from us, and destroys.
If you ever read 1984—
I read it many times, of course.
There's a part of the book where Winston Smith is being brought under the wing of his future torturer, O'Brien, and O'Brien gives him the manual for how we do it, right? He holes up in his bedroom and reads the book of how we do it. It says in there, "Listen, we keep them in a permanent state of war at all times to keep them on edge, to keep them insecure, to take any excess wealth that the people would otherwise spend improving their own lives."
We sink it into the ocean in the form of the floating fortress, or we blast it off into space in the form of these missiles and rockets that we're building, so that the people can't have it, so that we cannot build up our society to protect our own needs and interests.
Now, of course, anyone leaning left listening to this would prefer that the government spend this money on public schools, healthcare, and infrastructure. Anybody right-leaning listening to this says, "That's my money. Stop printing money and inflating the money supply. Stop taxing me. Leave me alone. Me and my buddies will invest in private businesses, and we will produce the wealth society needs."
Fine. What we all have to agree on is that this has to come to an end, where we let them take trillions and trillions of our dollars. What they can't tax, they borrow. What they can't borrow, they inflate. And with the inflation, this is the absolute crisis of confidence.
Again, Bin Laden invited our government to do this "self-inflicted wound," meaning really our government wounding all of us. This is the absolute crisis of our era: price inflation. It's why people can't pay the rent. It's why they can't afford to feed their family. It's why they're forced to send their children to government school like a German or a Russian. It's why they are broke. It's why young men and women can't start families and buy homes.
It's because of price inflation, which is the result of monetary expansion—the expansion especially of bank credit, although in our very current era, because of Donald Trump and Joe Biden's massive stimulus bills that they signed during COVID. You can trace that back to wars.
And it's almost entirely—well, big government overall relies on inflationary money, but, yes, this is a massive part of our budget: the annual militarism for the global empire. To turn it around, Jonah Goldberg from the National Review—the Ledeen doctrine—says, "Well, we can't have a gold standard because what if there's a war?" right?
But then that's Ron Paul's point. That's why we should have a gold standard: so Jonah Goldberg can't have a war, right? Because they have to print the money. If they had to raise your taxes to go stop Tojo, maybe even then they had to print money and borrow money. But people sure as hell took Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan seriously enough to fight, and they still had to conscript millions of people to do it.
Whatever, at least you got a credible threat there. But you're going to tell the American people, "Hey, we're going to have to raise everybody's income tax in every bracket by 6% so that we can launch an aggressive war against Iraq so that Israel can save a nickel a barrel, hopefully, if they can get their silly pipeline they want built." The American people say, "Hell no."
When they print the money, remember this: George W. Bush sent people—anyone who paid income taxes got a refund check of an extra $300 or $400, depending on your bracket, in 2003 and 2004. This was meant to look like—I infer this—it was meant to look like your dividend. It was meant to fool you into thinking that the Iraq War is profitable, that America is making money off of this, like in the cliché you would hear from people in the neighborhood: "Well, war is good for the economy." And look, we're all directly benefiting from this. Apparently, we all get an extra $300 or $400.
But, of course, they just printed that money. All that inflation during the George W. Bush years is what led to the giant housing bubble, the crash of 2008, and the absolute decimation that came after that. And what did Obama do? He came and printed even more money, built up an even bigger bubble to try to deal with that.
Then, of course, the COVID lockdowns essentially played the role of high interest rates, crushing the economy and forcing a massive recession on people. But what did they do? They didn't just have the Fed lower interest rates and lower reserve ratios so that they could expand money even more. They literally just mailed everybody checks of brand-new money from the Treasury.
All brand-new money. By some measures, two-thirds of all U.S. dollars that were ever created were created since 2020. And so that's Trump's fault and Biden's fault for doing those giant monetary expansion acts, and that's what has led to the giant inflationary crisis today: these absolutely incompetent managers of our economy.
This is the thing where, if people aren't libertarians at all, if people lean any degree left or right of me or of Austrian-school libertarian things, that's totally fine. Disagree with me on whatever you want—warfare, welfare, anything—but it's just true, man. It's just true: the Austrians are correct about the cause of the business cycle, the boom and bust.
Now, of course, if the frost wipes out all the oranges, then that's going to cause disruptions in that one market or whatever. But what caused what Ludwig von Mises called the cluster of errors, where all these businessmen are making all these bad bets at the same time, which then leads to these terrible crashes, resets, and corrections? The answer is inflationary money and artificially low interest rates.
What it does is manipulate the price of money, artificially valuing money through government control and leading producers to follow false price signals and mistakenly believe that there are more resources available in the economy for use than there really are. If you had free-market interest rates, then the more capital you use to invest, the more it costs to borrow more capital, right? And when savings are low and capital is low to invest in new things, then interest rates would naturally go up.
But when the Federal Reserve Bank holds interest rates low, then that doesn't happen. And so, especially in the higher-order goods, like mining and quarries and machine tools, and the kinds of things that are then used to sell to other businesses to make other things, they make long-term loans at artificially low interest rates. Then they end up getting screwed later because they're not able to produce to keep up when the crash comes.
Now, let's say you own a quarry and you're an Austrian-school guy, and you see what's going on here. Alan Greenspan's just printing a bunch of money, and so all my competitors are hiring new workforces, buying new machine tools, and getting way ahead of me in their productive capacity. But I know that they're screwed because they're going deep into debt for all this stuff, and the music's going to stop.
However, if I don't—if you, the quarry owner, don't play the same game—
You're going to lose sooner than them. You're going to lose before they have a chance to get screwed.
So even if you know better, you still have to expand beyond what you really know that you do. One example that Austrians like to use, I think, is if the circus comes to town for a month or whatever, and the local Dairy Queen is really busy, and then the guy builds a giant extension onto the thing, thinking, “This is how it's going to be now.” But no, this is just temporary. This is a boom followed by a bust, right?
Well, this is the artificial value of those customers in that time induced by the traveling circus. But in our case, we're talking about money artificially inflating the value of certain firms and certain banks' investments and these kinds of things. This is what leads to the cluster of errors that leads to the collapses.
People can read, of course, Ludwig von Mises's “The Theory of Money and Credit” from 100 years ago. Then, of course, there's Murray Rothbard's “What Has Government Done to Our Money?” and “The Case Against the Fed.” Then there's all of the brilliant guys of the Austrian school, especially Robert Murphy and Tom Woods and all the guys at the Mises Institute. Imperialism and militarism are at the heart of this.
David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's former budget adviser, calls this the Great Deformation. He says all these little bubbles, like 1987, 1992, 1999, and 2008, are the little bubbles on top of the big bubble of America's overall inflationary monetary policy since the end of the Second World War, in order to make militarism seem artificially cheap, to make it seem more affordable.
Imagine how deceived people would have to be to think that war is good for the economy because they notice the war spending and the immediate stimulative effect. This is the difference between the seen and the unseen. Where's all that wealth coming from, and now where's it going? It's going to make tools of death and destruction—net losses in property values all the way around, and a lot of times goods that can never be reused again.
The plane can fly again, but the bomb sure can't. F-35s fall out of the sky all the time—in the headlines again today. And so this is all a net loss in terms of all of this capacity being directed into militarism and then going away. But people get fooled into thinking that this is what's good and this is what's necessary.
And of course, Lockheed does this, and the rest of them too—Boeing and the rest. They have explicit gerrymandering-type policies where they will have one small part of every weapon system made in as many factories as possible all across the country, so that if Congress ever wants to roll back anything, they will have an army of lobbyists to threaten them: “We're talking about 600 jobs in your district, Congressman. Is that what you're willing to do?” And then they all just snap right into line.
Again, they say, “Hey, we're just supplying the weapons that Congress demands.” No, they're not. They're rigging the whole game, so we have no choice but to give in to them, essentially.
If I can just take an aside, you mentioned you used to be a cab driver. I would love to understand the story of somebody who was a cab driver and eventually became one of the most prolific libertarian, anti-war intellectuals of the modern era. Who are you?
I'm just talking.
I mean, look at this.
Look at this, right.
The number of citations here breaks 7,000.
7,000.
7,000. Look, I mean, how and why were you driving a cab, and how did you come to be this person?
Well, I'm a skateboarder type, and I'm just an anti-government type. Like I say, I learned about Ronald Reagan being a dope pusher when I was a child. Bill Clinton burned the Branch Davidians to death in front of my eyes and called it a suicide when I was 16. He covered up the Oklahoma City bombing, blamed it on one guy two years later, and they're no longer getting away with that.
There's a brand-new book out called “Blowback,” and I haven't read it yet, but I know the fact-checker, and I know that it's right: McVeigh had friends. They were undercover FBI informants. At least 2 of them, Roger Moore and Andreas Strassmeir, were agent provocateurs, and they covered it up because it was their own guys who did it.
I'm not saying the government did it on purpose, but I'm saying the FBI was essentially a sting: They were meant to stop it, and they didn't stop it. They covered that up, and they got the whole media to go along with that.
And then, you know, I was a big fan of—it's kind of funny, but I'm kind of angry at them, so I'll put them on blast anyway. I don't care. When I was young, I read Reason magazine, and I thought, “I hate these guys. That's what a libertarian is?” They think their job is debunking Gulf War illness. They think their job is debunking the number of Iraqis starving to death under Bill Clinton's sanctions.
They don't give a damn about the Branch Davidians. They don't give a damn about any of this, right? I don't know what they're good for: lower taxes and maybe guns. Not that they're doing anything important about it. And so I shied away from the libertarian movement for a long time because that's what I thought the libertarian movement was.
I would rather pal around with a bunch of right-wing militia guys because at least they care about the Branch Davidians. In Austin at that time, there was a kind of thriving, what they called the Patriot movement, which is basically the civilian side of the militia movement. It's all right-wing conspiracy guys who were right about everything: who started that fire in Waco, who helped blow up Oklahoma City, the sanctions in Iraq killing kids, and the Gulf War illnesses that they were covering up.
I should say, illnesses that they were covering up and saying, “Oh, drink a beer and chin up. Don't be a wimp.” These guys were dying of cancers and other diseases that they got from what the Pentagon did to them and exposed them to in the first Iraq War.
And so, you know, the conspiracy cooks were batting a thousand. I'm not a baseball guy. I'm a skateboarder. They're batting a thousand.
You know, during that era, they were really right about a lot of things, and I would have rather hung around them even though I wasn't culturally right-wing like them. William Norman Grigg at The New American was really great, and of course Ron Paul came back to Congress in 1997. Was Ron Paul the person who sort of convinced you that libertarianism could be a powerful movement?
Yes, Ron Paul convinced me of a lot of things, man. He's really been a north star to me this whole time. I'll tell you, the first time I ever saw Ron Paul was 10 years before everybody else got their big Giuliani moment, when Ron Paul whooped Rudy Giuliani in that debate in May 2007, where they fought over the motivation of Osama bin Laden to attack us on 9/11.
And Ron said, “It's because we were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi for 10 years.” Everybody knows that.
And Giuliani flipped his lid. Ron was, of course, heroic, right? But my Giuliani moment was a decade before I saw Ron Paul in the middle of the night on C-SPAN, speaking to an empty Congress, except for whoever was filling in in the speaker’s chair.
“Mr. Speaker, I have here in my hands reports from the British press today about how George Bush was selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein, leading right up to the invasion of Kuwait. What’s up with that? And now we’re still imposing all these sanctions and doing all these things, and we’re so responsible for this guy’s evil in the first place, after we had backed him all that time. This is not wise foreign policy, Mr. Speaker. We ought to come home.”
And I’m like, “Wow, that any congressman would say anything that honest on the record inside the Capitol building like that—I couldn’t believe it.” I looked at the bottom of the screen, and it said, “Ron Paul, R-Texas.” I’m like, “No way.”
Because Bush Senior himself is nominally from here, right? He’s from Connecticut, really, but he made his fortune here in oil and lived here for a very long time. He raised his family in West Texas for much of that time and everything. He’s an extremely important guy in Texas politics.
For this congressman to dare to say that, he’s essentially accusing Bush of treason. Okay, I’m interested in this guy.
Then I’m reading The New American magazine, which is the John Birch Society’s magazine. They have a very bad rap as racist and stuff, which is totally not true. They’re conspiratorial, and I don’t agree with them on everything, and they’re more conservative than me, but they’re good people. They’re George Washington’s Constitution guys, mostly Protestant and Catholic Christians and American patriotic folk. They’re good people.
The editor of their magazine at that time was the great William Norman Grigg, and he would run Ron Paul’s stuff constantly. He would cover Ron.
I used to be a pirate-radio guy, so I had—I would call his weekly update. I don’t know if he still does this. It was 888-322-1414. I would just play the Ron Paul weekly update and put that out over the air. It was always killer stuff: financial and monetary policy, boom and bust, and the evils of war.
I would drive around in my cab, and I would have printed-out Ron Paul speeches. There was one called “A Republic, If You Can Keep It,” which is the famous Benjamin Franklin quote to the lady: “Do we have a monarchy or a republic?” “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The sequel was called “I’m Sorry, Mr. Franklin, We Are All Democrats Now,” and it was just so good. I would give these to people in the cab: “Hey, did you know there’s one good congressman? One. And he’s not God. He’s better than Thomas Jefferson. Read this, and read this, and read this. This is the light and the way.”
The thing is, all I’m selling you is a peaceful foreign policy. I’m not saying anything else—well, and freedom overall, as this is what Ron Paul emphasized. If he’s asking for your trust or your faith in anything, it’s just that you trust in freedom, that it does work. It’s why we have all this stuff in the first place: because of liberty. You can count on that, but otherwise he’s not selling you anything.
He delivered a third of the population of his district when he was a baby doctor, right? He’s not going anywhere. He wasn’t soliciting donations. He wasn’t asking you to join his cult or his sect of Protestant Christianity. He was just saying, “We don’t have to do this stuff. We don’t have to believe in this. They say these things, but geez, that doesn’t seem right, because what about this thing?”
And he’s just so wise and so good. His aides—his right-hand men all that time—were also really great guys, too. Especially Jeff Deist and Daniel McAdams. Daniel has been his right-hand man and his great adviser this whole time, and he’s another really good human being.
Yeah. Well, he is. He’s a doctor, not a lawyer. He delivered 4,000 babies. I met his sister-in-law, who married his older brother Wayne, and she says to me, “Yeah, well, when you guys say that Ron Paul delivered 4,000 babies, I did, too, because I’m his head nurse. I delivered every one of them myself, too, along with him,” and all of that.
That’s where he comes from, man. He’s a decent, sweet old country doctor. He’s been married to his high school sweetheart since her sweet 16 party. No scandals, not a hint of it. He’s got, I don’t know, 15 grandchildren or whatever it is. It’s the American dream. It’s perfect, dude. Nobody’s got anything on him.
Right. He’s just the best. I wish we lived in a country where a guy like that could have a chance of being president.
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It could have been. Dude, listen. The Republicans of the United States of America nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney instead of him. You explain that to me when we got George Washington himself, only without the slaves and without the bloody hands.
The only veteran in the race—but he was a doctor in the Air Force. The only one. He got up onstage and quoted Jesus, and they booed him. He’s the guy who’s supposed to be president. You say George Washington was one of the greatest Americans ever? That’s the guy. That’s the guy, dude. It could have been.
And if you doubt me, just go to antiwar.com/paul and read the last 30 years of everything he’s had to say about everything. What can I tell you, man?
But the aspect of the rigor—you talked about the motivation, how you discovered it. How the hell did you do this?
Okay, I could think of an answer to that, which is that, unlike all your Harvard professors and all of this stuff, the burden of proof is really on me. I’m just a skater cab driver from Austin who didn’t go to your fancy-pants college. I don’t have any reason that you’re supposed to defer to me. And that book is about how everybody’s wrong except me.
So, if I’m going to tell you that, then I better be able to really demonstrate it. I want you to go, “Oh, yeah, but what about that coup in Montenegro in 2016?” Well, turn the page. I’ve got a whole section on that. I didn’t leave out anything.
I wrote it in that kind of defensive posture. People are going to not like this. They’re going to say I don’t know what I’m talking about.
When I wrote Enough Already, the war was over. Enough Already came out in January 2021, and I was in a race to get it done because Joe Biden was going to be inaugurated on January 20, and the era was over. The Bush-Obama era, capstoned with Trump, was just at an end on January 20. After all, the true beginning of the decade is January 21, right?
I knew that this book had to come out now, but it’s really about the terror wars that are mostly over—not that we’re completely done in the Middle East, you understand, but that’s a bit after the fact. Provoked was written in the middle of the war.
I’m trying to change people’s minds and really get them not just to regret the stupid things they believed a minute ago, but to change their minds, get on board, and see if we can bring this thing to a more reasonable conclusion sooner rather than later and get it done. It would be like if I wrote Enough Already in 2005 or 2006.
I knew I wanted it to be as bulletproof as it possibly could be because I don’t have argumentation from authority. I don’t have, “Oh, yeah, I’m from here, and I can tell you that. I’m a reporter. I’m a linguist, and I’ve read 10,000 Russian newspapers going back to whatever.” I don’t have any of those things.
What I do have is that I’ve been working for Antiwar.com this whole time. I’ve done 6,000 interviews with the best experts. We covered the Orange Revolution when it happened. We covered the Maidan Revolution when it happened, and everything in between.
Just like with the book about Afghanistan and the book about the Middle East, I was already ready to write the book before I started writing it. I already knew the whole story. Obviously, I had to do a lot of research, fill in a lot of information, and correct myself on things I had wrong or oversimplified, or whatever. I learned a lot while I was writing it, but I already knew the story overall because I’d been working on it for a very long time.
What are the main things that Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden did to cause the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine? I already know those things. I already have the bullet points. That book started as a speech I gave in 2020.
In fact, it was Leap Day 2020, Carol Paul’s birthday, and the day that Donald Trump signed the peace deal with the Taliban to get us out of Afghanistan. I gave a speech to the Libertarian Party of King County in Seattle, Washington, called “The New Cold War with Russia Is All America’s Fault.” That’s published at Antiwar.com.
Two years later, I stayed up all night doubling the length of the speech and gave it again. This was a 4-hour speech I gave in Utah on, I think, March 2, 2022, right after the war started, explaining all the same stuff. That became the nucleus of the book, basically, and then it was just a matter of filling it out.
Sorry to ask a silly, detailed question, but this is a gigantic book—extremely detailed, extremely well cited. What’s your writing process like? How do you go through it? It started as a speech, and now you have this manifesto, this tome.
Yeah. Well, as you can see, the chapters are just H. W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, and so on. When you get the chance to read the thing, you’ll see that this is really just a giant collection of citations.
I don't do too much writing in the book. Much unlike Justin Raimondo, I'm really not that smart and don't have a lot to say. I'm great on names and dates, and I hold a grudge really well, but Justin could write a thousand words just of wisdom, understanding, and opinions about things that I'm not really like that about.
So, this book is, in a way, 7,000 note cards arranged by your maestro here, hopefully to tell the story in a way that everybody can understand. There's prose in there. I'm writing to you, but I'm mostly marshalling evidence. That's the point of the whole thing: This is what these guys did. Here's what the war party says, and I don't straw-man my arguments.
When I say 7,000 citations, a third of them are to the bad guys. This is their point of view, and I'm telling you, here's what they admit—that they're lying. That's basically how it's written. I cite very little Ron Paul and very little Pat Buchanan in there because, as much as I revere them, I don't need them.
I can quote the apparatchiks in charge themselves explaining how stupid the things that they're doing are, and then show why they did them anyway, and all the consequences and whatever. So, I don't need to cite the good guys. I can cite the evil ones.
So, basically, going to the primary sources versus citing the quote-unquote experts.
Yeah, and just spending a hell of a lot of time going through the archives. I am an obsessive typist. There are absolutely times where I spend 4 days hunting for 1 footnote that I know exists, and I want to make this claim, and I can't make it without my citation. I'm going to find this thing, and I have gone to the ends of the earth in some cases for these, especially about the Balkan Wars and stuff. Some of those articles are so hard to hunt down.
Then, I'm reading all these books, and all those books have all their own citations. I learned this a long time ago, but this was reinforced in this book—and this is no slam against them, it's just against everybody—a lot of times the people that I agree with are wrong. They will cite something, and then I go and read that something, and it does not say what they said it says.
I can see why they misunderstood it, even though they're not lying or exaggerating, but that's not really the implication there. It's really something different. So, I double-, triple-, quadruple-check every goddamn thing I can until I'm terrified of being caught out being wrong on a fact.
The book is 477,000 words, and if it was 6 by 9, and the font was regular size, it would be 1,200 pages long. That's how long the book is. First of all, a major portion of that is literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of footnotes, although I keep them all at the bottom of the page where you can see them. Damn anyone who doesn't do that. That's exactly how a book like this should be.
A lot of that space really is citations, but I also don't dwell too long on any 1 topic. The only 2 exceptions to that are when we talk about the NATO promises against expansion and the Nazis in Ukraine, because I believe these are the 2 most controversial subjects, or stances, or whatever, in the book. So, I go absolutely to the ends of the earth, beating the dead horse all the way to death, to prove the absolute fact of the position that I'm taking there.
There's still probably a lot of overkill on a lot of things, but as far as the writing goes, when I mention the Montenegro coup of 2016, it's just a short little thing. It's called the Vaudeville Coup, and it's kind of funny and a little mysterious. Then there are the different poisonings by the Russians, or at least alleged ones. I have Litvinenko and the Skripals and whoever.
I was thinking of it from the point of view of my accusers: “Oh, yeah? Well, what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what about that? I bet you left that out.” And I'm like, “No, I didn't, dude. I have it all in there.” I tried to write it in a way to satisfy my worst critics as best as I could.
As the Declaration of Independence says, “with a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” I should assume that you don't agree with me, and that you disagree in good faith. So, how in the hell am I going to fix that? I'm going to have to make you accept that I'm not lying to you when I put these things together.
If, when you read that, you feel like I'm trying to get away with something, you're going to put it down. I said, I didn't write a thousand-page book for you to put it down. I want you to get all the way to the end going, “God dang, man. I didn't really realize it was as bad as all of that.”
So, to convince the critics.
That's what it is for, as opposed to Enough Already, which I really wrote for my people, my fans, to give to their brother-in-law and their 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 I don't have the citations. I do have the citations in Fool's Errand, about Afghanistan.
Actually, now me and one of my guys at the institute are working on putting the footnotes back into Enough Already and doing the ultimate scholar edition, with the overkill on the citations there. I had footnotes on most of it. I turned them off and just raced to the end because I was out of money and I was out of time. I had to go.
Friends of mine rationalized it like, “Well, do you think Bill O'Reilly has footnotes in his books?” You know, “Get that thing out there, man.” And so I did. But I did try to write it in a way where I either cite my citations in the prose, or at least I wrote it in a way where it's a very specific claim: “On November 9, they held a meeting, and these 5 people were there, and this is what they decided.” So you can go and Google that. You know what I mean? It should be specific enough that people can double-check me.
Why am I like this? I'm just a Ron Paul guy, and I can't stand being lied to. I can't stand all this violence, and I want to live in a free society, and the empire's ruining it. Why am I so meticulous about it all? I don't want to be caught being wrong.
I'll tell you 1 funny story, and then we'll stop. One time I lost an argument about Waco. It was these 3 people in my cab, and 1 of them was this real jerk. The other 2 were on his side because they were his friends, and I was arguing with him about everything. But the thing was, he was the son of a federal cop, and he knew their side of the story down pat. He really knew his stuff.
Even though I was right and he was wrong, he won. They got out of the car going, “Screw you, Branch Davidian boy,” and whatever. That never happened to me again. You know why?
Because you read 6 books about Waco.
I already knew more than enough about it. Then I decided that, no, actually, no one was ever going to beat me in an argument about that again.
Really thoroughly articulate the evidence for your claims.
And you're just like me, too, dude. When you read a 300-page book, it takes—what? If you want to read this thing, it's not like a chore. It's like, “Oh, I want to read that.” You're done in a day and a half or 2. It's easy to do once you set that precedent a few times.
It's pretty easy to read a thing, jot down some notes, learn something from it, and then teach it to somebody else and whatever. Well, yeah. Listen, welcome to adulthood or whatever. That's what we do. That's all it is. My only job is compiling reasons to resent these liars and why to know better than all their false promises.
Yeah, but also be able to articulate it.
And see, also, I'm a talk-radio guy, man. I grew up on the radio of Rush Limbaugh. I was driving for a living in the era of Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and all the local guys.
I'll go ahead and say this on the record, too: The local hosts on KLBJ-AM in Austin all suck and always have. All of them since Raleigh James in 1996—I love her. Everybody since then, I mean, I don't know who listens to Kelly James at all, or how they even stay in business at all. Their hosts suck.
All of it.
The content of their words, the actual raw skill of how they talk and what they talk about, and mostly how stupid, wrong, and horrible they are about everything. But also just how meaningless their drivel is, right? You'd be in the middle of the world's worst crisis, and they're like, “The liberals are trying to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance.” Like, dude, I would prefer that you just shoot me in the face than listen to this. For the love of God, please.
Anyway, I love the potential there. In that era, before the internet was what it is today, this was the real town square, where you could have a host who knows something, a guest who knows something, and callers who know a lot more than you think they would, dude.
I remember listening to them talk about the Texas Homestead Act, which said you weren't allowed to take out a second mortgage on your house or whatever because it was to protect the little old ladies. They were debating over whether they should have that law or not. I remember thinking, “Wow, all these people know so much about this topic that I've never heard of before.”
All of these callers were just so deep in their knowledge of what they knew. That was true whether on that issue or so many other things. The first real time I heard real AM radio in Austin, I was 16. Wait, I might have been 18.
No, no, I was 16. It was the same year that the Branch Davidians were killed. I was driving my first car down 183, and I said, “You know, I’ve lived in Austin my whole life and I’ve never listened to the AM band. I wonder what it is.” The first thing I hit was KLBJ-AM, and it was Johnny Walker, the great Johnny Walker, the FM rock-and-roll DJ.
Yeah.
He was subhosting, and his whole thing—he was a great guy, by the way. RIP, Johnny Walker. But he goes, “Look, I don’t know anything. I’m literally just hosting this show. The guest is this guy, a surviving Branch Davidian, and we’re taking your calls.” And this hit me like, what? There’s even a Branch Davidian alive, and they have a point of view, and you can hear it, and he’s live right now, and he’s talking, and people can call in and they can—what?
In my world, what you knew about the Branch Davidians was what you read in the Austin American-Statesman or what you were told by Ted Koppel and Dan Rather, and that’s all you got.
Mhm. What do you mean? I can interact with one.
Yeah. And then the callers are brilliant. The callers know everything—they’re not kooks. They know exactly what they’re talking about, and they’ll be like, “I’ll tell you what happened on April 19th…” Okay, so this is why I’m like this.
Talk radio to me is like, if you believe in the idea of any kind of so-called popular government, if we have to settle for any sort of statism at all, you want the people to be able to have one big-ass conversation with each other, right? That’s why your show is so important. You get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views and listens, maybe millions if you include all the podcasts.
For a guy like me, it’s a chance to talk to a whole bunch of people, to get a bunch of people having the same conversation together instead of everybody being spread out, having their own little separate arguments, and not interacting with each other. To me, that was the brilliance of talk radio.
Where Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy were all polished and had their little programs, the guys on 550 AM in San Antonio—especially Carl Wigglesworth, who was my favorite, but him and all those guys, even Ricky Ware, who was the John Hagee lunatic—were still such sweet guys. Their version of talk radio was, “All right, it’s Carl Wigglesworth’s show, everybody. We were talking about Bill Clinton selling cocaine down there with Dan Lasater and me in Arkansas, and we got Terry Reed on the phone. Tell us about your book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, Terry.”
Everybody’s kicking back. Everybody’s got this front-porch attitude, and they’ve got all the time in the world. We’re here every day for 3 hours a day. Ain’t no thing. We’re talking about it, and they’re just the nicest guys.
They come back from commercial and go, “It’s Carl. We’re talking with Terry about the thing.” No bumper music, no fanfare, no last name. You just jumped right into the middle of a conversation, tuned in, and figured it out. It’s just beautiful. It’s perfect.
I modeled myself and the way I do my show beginning on Free Radio Austin in ’98 and then on Chaos Radio Austin from 2002 through 2010. I guess I was on Chaos. Yeah, it was 2010 before they seized our last transmitter from Chaos, wasn’t it? I think it was. So, yeah, I did Chaos for a long time.
My whole attitude was, look, I am a regular guy. I ain’t got to fake that. I didn’t go to college. I dropped out of ACC. My message ain’t for elite policymakers. My message is for my peers. Look at what they’re doing. That’s it.
This is why the Rothbardian style of libertarian populism always appealed to me, because that’s who it’s geared toward. The Cato Institute wants an audience with the Senate. The Mises Institute, the Libertarian Institute, and Antiwar.com want an audience with the population of this country, right? That’s who we’re trying to talk to. That’s who we are. That’s where we come from.
We’re not Washington, D.C., folk. We’re from out here, and we’re speaking in the third person about them, rather than trying to be part of the regime.
I just want to say briefly that you said the people who call in are usually brilliant, and that’s the experience I’ve had. I’ve recorded a few conversations just on the street. I went to the West Bank and interviewed a bunch of people on the street, and I really want to do that a lot more because I didn’t meet a single person who wasn’t brilliant in their own way.
It’s remarkable. It’s remarkable, the brilliance that comes from people.
Have you ever listened to sports radio?
Not as much as I probably should.
Yeah. Well, look, I don’t know if this counts anymore, but I spent a little bit of time in Denver listening to sports radio. These people are fanatics, man. But the point being that Jimmy, the air-conditioner repairman, is smarter than you, dude. He knows everything that every baseball team ever achieved and won, who’s on every team, all their stats, all their everything, and why it mattered. It mattered a lot to him.
The level of expertise there is no different from that in the highest applied sciences, history, or anything else. It all just depends on what you’re interested in and what you want to know that much about.
This is Noam Chomsky’s thing that he talked about, where—
Look, if you’re a primate that’s intelligent enough to speak, then you are a genius, right? Then you are an absolute miracle. Unbelievable. Impossible—
You know, circumstance, situation of your very existence. We all ought to be taken at that very level, no matter who you’re dealing with. There’s something special in there.
Yeah, and usually it comes with humility, because people with PhDs from Harvard and so on usually have this overinflated ego that comes from authority. But sports-radio people, people on the street, everyday folks—they don’t have that. They can just speak from their expertise without the ego.
Yeah. Well, that’s my thing, too. I don’t have nothing to sell you other than—I mean, my coffee sponsor and whatever—but my sincerity is all I’ve got. I don’t have any other argument from authority that I can invoke other than the fact that people listen to me. They know I’m not lying, and they can tell what my biases are. I wear them absolutely on my sleeve.
Every day, I only try to quantify whether I hate Bill Clinton or George W. Bush more. That’s where I’m coming from, and everybody understands that. They know that I’d never deliberately try to make them think one thing instead of another. If I did, they would obviously catch on to that, and then I’d be completely ruined and have to just go get a job delivering auto parts or something, which would be fine. In fact, I like delivering auto parts. I’ve had that job before.
Although I’d rather drive at night if I got to drive. I’d rather, I guess, drive an Uber at night. But if you still have energy—
Oh, I’m not even halfway done. What about you? All right, got all the energy in the world. Maybe a quick bathroom break.
A good place to pick up our story here would be John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book. We’ve talked about Mearsheimer and Walt previously. Their book is called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. It came out in 2007.
It started out as an essay that they wrote first for The Atlantic Monthly, which commissioned the story and then refused to run it. They ended up running it in the London Review of Books. We also ran it at Antiwar.com. People can find it there. It’s called The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. It’s a fantastic article, and then they made it into a book.
These guys are the co-deans, basically, of the realist school of foreign policy—one from the University of Chicago, the other from Harvard. Both highly respected. Neither of them are haters or ideologues or any of these things. They were ruthlessly attacked as antisemites for this, which is completely preposterous.
What they did, though, was say that, look, man, Israel’s interests are very different from ours. That’s why they spend so much money and effort lobbying in the United States to try to obfuscate that fact: what’s good for them ain’t necessarily good for us at all. They have to make sure it’s at least good for the people in charge here, if not for the country itself. That’s their object.
As Walt and Mearsheimer say in the essay and in the book, you can’t blame the whole Iraq War on them. George W. Bush was the one sitting in the chair behind that desk, calling that shot. He could have changed his mind at the very last moment. It was on him.
Now it’s Congress’s responsibility, but they passed that responsibility to him with their unconstitutional authorization that they passed in October 2002. Ultimately, who pulled that trigger? George W. Bush did, in conspiracy with his vice president, his secretary of defense, and the rest of them.
So the neocons, yes, they were the deputy secretary of defense and the undersecretary of defense for policy, the staff in the vice president’s office, and the staff of the National Security Council. They were there operating, really, as what Colin Powell called that separate government, and operating mostly for Benjamin Netanyahu’s goals.
This is part of what Mark Dubowitz and I argued about on your show last time. He insisted, somewhat partially correctly here, that Ariel Sharon wanted Bush to hit Iran, not Iraq. Ariel Sharon, not Netanyahu, was the prime minister. And that was the occasion of him accusing J.J. Goldberg of being an antisemite.
Because he had written in the Jewish Daily Forward about how Netanyahu wanted to hit Iraq, while Sharon would rather hit Iran. J.J. Goldberg, as long as I’m citing him, says very clearly in there that he is not saying that the neoconservatives bear even the lion’s share of the responsibility for the war. Of course, he blames George W. Bush for launching the war, and of course, he’s not peddling some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in the pages of the Forward, for God’s sake. He’s extremely conservative in his statements and in his accusations.
What he’s saying is that the Likudniks in America are closer to Netanyahu than to Sharon. And of course, George W. Bush wanted to go to Iraq. He wanted to go to Baghdad, not Tehran. Wolfowitz, of course, was always, especially, an Iraq hawk. The confluence of interests here was to go to Iraq.
Now, Sharon was smart enough to see that Iran—you know, the Clean Break—wasn’t his. That was Netanyahu and his buddies. Sharon, I think, was skeptical about what was going to happen when we overthrew Saddam Hussein and the Shiites took over. This is where he tried to insist, and John Bolton did echo him in this, and promised him that, yes, then we’ll go to Iran and Syria and Lebanon and everywhere else next, because we can’t just get rid of Saddam Hussein. That’s going to change the balance of power in a way that’s going to benefit Iran, in a way that Sharon did not prefer.
However, Sharon absolutely did go along with the program and help lie us into war. He had his own Office of Special Plans that he created in the prime minister’s office in Israel, where they manufactured fake intelligence in English to stovepipe into the intelligence stream and help lie us into war.
Here are 3 authoritative sources on that: Julian Borger in The Guardian, “The Spies Who Pushed for War.” And it’s not the spies—it’s the neoconservatives he’s talking about, not CIA officers. “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” by Julian Borger. Then there’s “More Missing Intelligence” by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation. Then there’s A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies by James Bamford, the great book by the great James Bamford, the guy who wrote The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory about the National Security Agency. He’s the best author on the NSA.
A Pretext for War focuses on the neocons and the CIA, and how the neocons lied us into war for Netanyahu and Israel. I don’t remember—oh, and the whole first part is about 9/11, how 9/11 happened, and how the government failed to stop it. The Shadow Factory is really insightful along those lines, because we often hear about the infighting between the FBI and the CIA, but the NSA also hoarded all their information and would not share with the FBI or CIA.
The CIA, at one point—and Michael Scheuer also tells the story—had to create its own listening station on Madagascar to try to spy on al-Qaeda hiding out in Yemen, the switchboard house in Yemen, because the NSA would not give them the intercepts. They had to get their own, but they could only get half the conversation and not the other half, talking to the terrorists in Afghanistan.
As Scheuer put it to me on my show, I don’t know, 15 years ago or something, he said, “Yeah, because George Tenet didn’t have the moral courage to just walk down there and demand the damn intercepts.” At that time, the head of the CIA was also the director of central intelligence, which meant he was the boss. The DNI is supposed to be over all the other intelligence agencies. So George Tenet had the authority to command the NSA to do what he said. He didn’t have to ask nicely.
But according to Scheuer, he didn’t have the courage to just go down there and say, “Give me the damn intercept.”
Why not?
Scumbag. He came from the staff in the Senate. I think he just wanted to please the real spies. He was kind of the new guy and didn’t really fit in, and was trying to be cool or whatever. I don’t know. Who knows these people?
So, importantly, the Ariel Sharon government did help to push this thing, even though Dubowitz is right that Sharon first said, “No, Bush, you should go to Tehran first,” because that was his problem. I guess I’d have to go back and see if anybody ever wrote about this, but I never saw Sharon’s opinion of the Clean Break. It’s easy to see how anyone could see through how stupid the plan was: We’re going to weaken the Shiites by getting rid of the most powerful Sunnis standing in their way. That’s pretty dumb, right?
Especially if you really know, for example, the history of the Iran-Iraq War and the history of the post–World War I Shiite uprising, you might have real reason to worry. Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com wrote in 2002. He said, “Hey, look, everybody. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq—the CIA tried to give them money, and they said, ‘Piss off. We don’t need you. We’ve got Iran.’” Justin said, “Better watch out. Here’s who’s coming to power when we invade Iraq a year from now.”
And then that’s exactly what happened. The Badr Brigade was the militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and that was exactly who George W. Bush took all the way to power in Baghdad.
So for the guys who fought in that war, who are listening to this and still don’t know why they fought in that war, ultimately they fought on the Shiite side of a massive civil war against the minority Sunni ruling regime, to replace them with a new, essentially Islamist theocracy—a sort of pseudo-republic like in Iran. That’s what it was for. It’s not for freedom. It was for one faction over the other, and in this case, it was the Shiites.
The most powerful Shiite groups that came together to form the new Iraqi government were the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SCIRI, which is now called ISCI because we won their revolution for them. Now it’s just the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq; the Dawa Party; and Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army.
Dawa and SCIRI had been living in Iran, and they were more high-class types, whereas Muqtada al-Sadr was the son of important guys but was much more of a street-ruffian type. The Shiite ghetto in eastern Baghdad was called Saddam City. As soon as America invaded, they renamed it Sadr City after his father, but he inherited a lot of that street credibility as the most legitimate of the Shiite leaders on the ground there.
These 3 groups, under the guidance of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who lived down in Najaf—under his leadership, or guidance, or whatever—they formed what was called the United Iraqi Alliance. That was the group that wrote the constitution in the fall of 2004. It was the group that won the elections, the big purple-fingered elections of 2005. That’s what kicked off the real civil war.
There was already a predominantly Sunni-based insurgency at that time. It was not exclusively Sunni; it started out much more nationalist and mixed. But very quickly, the Sunni tribal leaders, former Ba’athists, and military leaders realized that they had everything to lose, and that the supermajority of the country, backed by the United States, was now taking power.
This pushed the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the bin Ladenites, who were coming from all over the place, just like it was Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya again, or Kosovo, coming to all chip in to fight the holy jihad—this time against us instead of with our help, although still backed by our friends, the Saudis. America and the Shiites pushed the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the bin Ladenites.
In fact, I’ll tell you an anecdote about how that happened. So much of this is tied up in what was happening in Israel at this time as well.
In January of 2004, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was the founder of Hamas—which was an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—was killed. Hamas was originally a charitable-type organization that ended up growing into this militia with the aid and comfort of the Israelis.
There are some really great articles that you might like to peruse about this, including one by Richard Sale in UPI. If you just type in “Richard Sale UPI Hamas,” I’m sure it’ll come straight up there: “Israel Gave Major Aid to Hamas: An In-Depth Study.” It’s based on CIA as well as Shin Bet and Mossad sources.
If people aren’t familiar, UPI is the news agency most closely tied to The Washington Times, which would be the Reaganite conservative newspaper in Washington. It’s funny, because The Washington Post and The New York Times are the liberal papers, and The New York Post and The Washington Times are the conservative papers, if you’ve got that right.
Basically, this article details how Tel Aviv, Israel, gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of many years. The purpose was to build them up, to divide and conquer the Palestinians, to create a religious right-wing alternative to the secular-nationalist, sort of pseudo-commie PLO under Yasser Arafat.
They wanted to divide and conquer the Palestinians. So what they would do is directly finance Hamas while, at the same time, arresting all of their competitors and holding them in prison, disarming them, weakening them, and bolstering the Hamas government. They did not create Hamas, but they did very deliberately bolster its rise.
Now, Hezbollah is a different story, where Hezbollah really grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon in 1982, without any direct support from them in that sense. Although maybe I don’t know enough about that, but certainly in this case with Hamas, that’s true. You can also read Andrew Higgins in The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a great piece along the same lines.
Want to pull that up for us here?
“How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas.” Andrew Higgins, 2009.
I can also recommend Robert Dreyfuss’s book Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. Masterpiece. Also, Trita Parsi’s Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States. I cannot recommend that book highly enough. That thing might go into its third printing just because of me. I’m telling you, everybody’s got to read that book.
And then there’s Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Libertarian Institute fellow Jeremy R. Hammond, who wrote a masterpiece about Israel and Palestine, the fight over the occupied territories, America’s role in making it all worse, and the rest. It’s a fantastic book. He goes into deep study about this.
Now, back to our anecdote. In January 2004, old Sheikh Yassin, with his big Santa Claus beard and his wheelchair, says, “I give up. I give in. We need to go ahead and negotiate with the Israelis and settle for our measly, stinking 22% of historic Palestine, just as Arafat had done in 1988.” Two months later, the Israelis killed him in a missile strike just so they could lie to you, Lex, and say, “We have no partner for peace.” Somehow, a missile blew up his car, and they’re the ones who killed him.
When they killed him in March 2004, that’s what touched off the riot in Fallujah, where 4 Blackwater guards were murdered and burned, and their bodies were hanged from the bridge outside of town. There was a giant portrait. The great war journalist was there and saw that they had pictures of Yassin in their windshields. They called themselves the al-Yassin Brigades. It was an impromptu protest against Israel’s murder of the leader of Hamas, and that’s what caused the riot that killed those Blackwater guards.
Then George W. Bush sent General James Mattis there with his Marines, including a couple of friends of mine, who had to go in there and fight that thing. They declared it a free-fire zone, like Vietnam, and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians in the first battle of Fallujah.
They claimed that Zarqawi was a bin Ladenite, even though he wasn’t really a bin Ladenite yet. He didn’t declare his loyalty to bin Laden until the end of 2004, a year and a half into the war, but they pretended that he was already tied to bin Laden six months earlier. It was one of the lies in Colin Powell’s U.N. speech: that there was this guy named Zarqawi, and he was tied to bin Laden and tied to Saddam.
Well, he wasn’t tied to bin Laden. He had told bin Laden, “No, I don’t want to join your group.” He wasn’t tied to Saddam, unlike the lies of Ahmed Chalabi and the exiles. He was not operated on by Saddam Hussein and given a peg leg in the Baghdad hospital. That was a hoax perpetrated by The Weekly Standard and the neoconservative set to tie those two together. In fact, he wasn’t tied to either.
Only after the war, when America made him famous and claimed that he was a bin Ladenite, did Zarqawi rise in stature. Zarqawi was more apocalyptic and revolutionary and even nihilistic and destructive than bin Laden’s doctrines ever were. He was notoriously sectarian against the Shiites, whereas bin Laden—I don’t think, and I have not read everything the guy ever wrote, but I have read a lot of his stuff—I never saw where he really seemed to focus on problems against the Shiites.
Again, Muhammad Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh were angry because of Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon killing Shiite Palestinians in Lebanon. The fact that they were Shiites didn’t make them less valuable, as far as wanting to avenge their deaths goes. Zarqawi, on the other hand, thought, “No, the only good Shiite is a dead Shiite. God says so.” It was this kind of bring-on-the-apocalypse deal, and he went for madness, suicide-bombing Shiite pilgrims and committing absolute atrocities against civilians.
Of course, the guy may be good at making bomb vests, but he’s not good at math because there are just way too many Shiites. By boycotting the election and refusing to participate in the new order—with the American superpower occupying the country with 300,000 troops, or at that point maybe 200,000, but still, and in alliance with the supermajority—those Sunni sheikhs should have figured out a way to deal with it. Saying, “No way, let’s fight,” was a huge mistake for them. Entering into an alliance with the bin Ladenites only made it worse.
This was directly because of Israel killing Yassin and then the battle of Fallujah. That helped drive a bunch of refugees out of Fallujah who then went to Baghdad, driving people out of their areas. Then you had a lot of tit-for-tat back and forth as refugees from the different cities were being cleansed out. In the predominantly Shiite cities, they were kicking all the Sunnis out, and in the predominantly Sunni areas, they were kicking all the Shiites out. People were being displaced.
Dahr Jamail had this most brilliant article where he traced the cause and effect through the wars from the beginning. The war began in 2003, of course, but the real worsening of the insurgency was in 2004, and he traced the chain of events from this city to this city to this city, where these different refugees were displacing other people and causing these worse consequences. More and more Sunnis, especially, were being cleansed from Baghdad and pushed into the arms of the bin Ladenites.
It was all touched off by Israel assassinating their own pseudo-sock-puppet terrorist front man—their excuse for an imperialist policy that they had supported. When he was finally ready to completely capitulate to them, they killed him so he couldn’t. That was what caused all this trouble for America—or, you know, not caused it, but contributed significantly to the problems during the war.
Also during that same time, Muqtada al-Sadr sent Shiites in pickup trucks to Fallujah to help, in the name of Iraqi nationalism, to help the Sunnis. They had a whole separate little war with him in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad at that time. That was a real problem because, as I said, Sadr had so much street credibility there among the people. To this day, he is still one of the most important and powerful kingmakers in Shiite politics in that country.
They were essentially blowing up and sabotaging their own ability to use diplomacy to work with this guy. He became the most intransigent part of the Shiite insurgency. There are so many different parts of this, but one of the things that’s really important, I think, to talk about is that David Petraeus’s first job was up in Mosul, trying to train up a militia to be our guys, and they just took the money and guns and joined the insurgency against us. It was an absolute catastrophe. He gave them a bunch of weapons and money and then was humiliated and kicked right the hell out of there.
His next job, right after empowering the Sunni insurgency up in Mosul, was to go to Baghdad and turn the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council into the Iraqi army. These were the same guys Saddam feared in 1980, which is why he started the war; the same guys George H. W. Bush feared in 1991, which is why he betrayed their uprising; and the same guys George W. Bush was now taking all the way to Baghdad. David Petraeus was now in charge of building them into the Iraqi army. Those were the people who were going around torturing everybody to death.
I don’t know if you saw the movie American Sniper about Chris Kyle, directed by Clint Eastwood. I’m a real big Clint Eastwood fan, and I’m really disappointed in this. It’s really bad. What he did in that movie was portray the Sunni insurgents torturing people to death with power drills and portray Chris Kyle saving them. But that’s not true. It was America’s guys, the Badr Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council. They were the ones torturing people to death with power drills through the shoulder, through the heart, through the eyeball, through the ear, through the temple.
So at that time, America was supporting the Badr Brigade. At that time, America was building the Badr Brigade into the Iraqi army as we know it today. David Petraeus—this is where we have what’s called the El Salvador option. What does that sound like? Paying right-wing death squads to go around killing communists in the case of El Salvador, preventing it from becoming a Nicaragua, right?
In the 1980s, it was John Negroponte, who had worked for Ronald Reagan in Honduras as the ambassador and then worked on this covert action, killing all these people. He was then brought in as ambassador to run what they called the El Salvador option of empowering the Shiite militias to finally finish crushing the Sunni insurgency, which, of course, they absolutely failed to do. They simply radicalized them and made it that much worse and worse and worse. This was all on David Petraeus. He was the one in charge of this thing.
That made the civil war absolutely horrific through 2005, 2006, and into 2007. In 2006, James Baker said, “We’ve got to get out of there.” The old guard was brought in to say, “We need to figure out a way out.” That was embarrassing for Bush. Bush decided no; he wanted to double down instead. He was going to do the surge at David Petraeus’s recommendation.
He fired Rumsfeld, who now wanted out. Rumsfeld said, “I told you: light and fast. Let’s get out.” He said, “We’ve got to take the training wheels off. Let the Iraqi democracy figure out a way to work on its own without us now.”
Which was, you know what? Hell, take it, right? Cut and run. This ain’t working. He was really right. If they’re going to figure this out, for good or for ill, through blood or through handshakes and bribes or whatever, it has to be up to them ultimately.
So what did Bush do? Kick him right out the door. It’s the first time he said something reasonable. He brought in Robert Gates, who was supposed to be an old James Baker type, his father’s guy. Gates had been the head of the CIA, whose fault it was that the CIA didn’t know the Soviet Union was falling apart, right? They were too busy pretending that the Soviet Union was 12 feet tall at the time.
Bush Jr. brings in the same guy, and he oversees the surge. This is where they carried out the massive escalation at the beginning of 2007. It’s funny because they dropped all the propaganda about Iran’s nuclear program for a little bit because they had a new line. The new line was that whenever a Shiite set off a bomb in Iraq, it was an Iranian bomb. You and your audience have heard 100 times, 1,000 times, that Iran killed 600 of our guys in Iraq. That’s what they say.
Well, here’s the truth of that: It was 500 guys, not 600, and it wasn’t Iran. Those bombs were a new and improved kind of IED—improvised explosive device. Our guys called them explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs. They were shaped charges, and they had a copper cone. When the explosive went off, that copper cone would melt, and the molten copper would then slice right through armor. That was what made it the new and improved bomb.
The propaganda at the time was that, even though it was David Petraeus who decided to attack Muqtada al-Sadr in the name of claiming that he was an Iranian agent, Sadr was supposedly the Iranian puppet. In fact, Muqtada al-Sadr talked about this a little bit on a tangent I shouldn’t have taken the last time I was here. But Muqtada al-Sadr was the least Iranian puppet of the major Shiite faction leaders because, while Dawa and SCIRI had lived in Iran for 20 years at that point, he hadn’t. He’d stayed in Iraq. He was insisting that Iran and the United States butt out and leave Iraq to the Iraqis.
So you see the problem there. Even though he wanted Iran to leave and wanted to limit its influence, he also wanted to limit ours. The Bush administration’s idea was, no, we’re going to bet that the government of Iraq, mostly made up of Dawa and SCIRI, will need our money and our weapons more than it needs Iran next door. If we stick it out and even compromise repeatedly with Iran over who should be the prime minister—like Ibrahim Jaafari and Nouri al-Maliki from the Dawa Party—and we come to this—this is the only time we talk to Iran at all, sort of secretly and quietly agreeing on who the Iraqi prime minister should be as we’re doing this, right?
So Muqtada al-Sadr, even though he was trying to limit Iranian authority, also wanted to limit ours. The Americans decided they wanted to target him. It wasn’t Sadr who picked that fight. It was David Petraeus, in the service of Dick Cheney, working in conspiracy with Michael Gordon of The New York Times to try to lie the American people into war with Iran, in the name of these bombs.
They made a massive propaganda campaign in the spring of 2007. Every time a bomb went off in Shiite territory, they claimed over and over that Iran had done it. The point is—and I cite in the book the names of the journalists and their affiliations—there were at least 8 or 10 different American and other foreign reporters there, nobody with an Iranian dog in the fight. I’m not citing Press TV here. I’m citing The New York Times.
Michael Gordon is now at The Wall Street Journal, but he was at The New York Times. He’s the guy who bylined every story with Judy Miller in which they lied that Saddam Hussein was seeking bomb parts, that Saddam Hussein was making nuclear weapons, and that he wanted germs and chemicals and all these things. Judy Miller took the rap for the whole media, but her co-author Michael Gordon lived to still lie to us to this day in The Wall Street Journal. He was the one in charge of this conspiracy to lie the American people into war through the pages of The New York Times.
But I show that his colleague, Alissa Rubin, proved that he was a damned liar because she was there with soldiers. She printed it in the same newspaper. She was there with American soldiers when they found an EFP factory in Sadr City, I’m pretty sure. It was somewhere in Shiite territory in Iraq. Iraqis were working in a machine shop, making these bombs.
Then they said, “Okay, but the parts all came from Iran.”
“Oh, yeah, no, they had to. The Iranians thought, ‘You know what we’ll do? We’ll ship the parts into Iraq for them to make bombs out of instead of just sending them bombs.’”
Like, whatever, man. It was obviously just a bunch of propaganda. I cite in there the Christian Science Monitor, which was there during Operation Black Eagle when they found another factory making EFPs. I also cite Wired magazine, the brilliant Andrew Cockburn, and a bunch of other great sources that show these bombs were made in Iraq by Iraqis.
I don’t care what you say. I disproved this over and over again on the blog at Antiwar.com in 2007—over and over and over again. So if you search my name on Antiwar.com, especially if you search antiwar.com/blog and EFPs, you’ll get a bunch of hits because we went over this all at the time, making me feel extra old right now.
Yeah, that’s years ago.
Holy shit.
Yeah, EFPs are made in Iraq by Iraqis. Scott Horton, August 12, 2007.
And there’s a bunch of them. That’s just one of many that I did during that era. Again, citing solid proof for those who listen to Antiwar Radio, I refute this lie every single day. I cite Reuters and the Christian Science Monitor’s reporting on Operation Black Eagle. There’s a bunch of these.
Then Dubowitz said, “Oh, yeah, well, Iran taught them how to do it.”
No. Gareth Porter showed that it was the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, that taught Lebanese Hezbollah, and it was Lebanese Hezbollah that taught the Shiite Iraqis how to do it. When I said it was Lebanese Hezbollah, Dubowitz went, “Aha, Iran.”
Nope. They got it from the Irish. So sorry, Charlie. Nice little propaganda campaign you’ve got there.
But then what happened was they held a big press conference where they laid out all the EFP bombs and the parts. The reporters started milling around, and they said, “Well, that’s funny. That one says ‘Made in Haditha’ on it,” which is a city in Iraq. “And that one says ‘Made in the UAE,’” and all this.
So what do we have here? Do we have any evidence that any of this stuff came from Iran?
No.
Then what did they do, Lex? They canceled the press conference, closed it down, and embarrassed themselves. Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser himself, admitted, “We didn’t have the proof that we needed to make the case.” They just kept promising, “Oh, we’re going to prove it. We’re going to prove it. We’re going to prove it,” kicking that can down the road for months until, I think, it must have been May or June, when they finally held this press conference that fell apart and started to back down.
Was that the major justification for the escalation?
It was not the justification for the escalation of the surge overall. The rationalization there was, “We are going to send an extra 30,000 or 40,000 troops to Baghdad. We are going to secure the capital city, and once we have peace in the capital city—the peace of desolation, where we kill every last Sunni who resists by putting a power drill through his eyeball—then we’ll be able to negotiate peacefully in the setting of our new democratic republic that we’ve built here.”
That was the justification there. At the same time, David Petraeus—and this is the only victory that David Petraeus ever won in his entire stupid, stinking, failure of a pathetic, lying life—is when he convinced George W. Bush to surrender to the Sunni insurgency.
“Mr. President, you’re not going to defeat the Sunni insurgency. Read me loud and clear. All this victory you’ve been promising all these years, all the people that you’ve killed trying to bring it, sending the Desert Fox, Ray Odierno, in there to kill every last living, fighting-age male in Anbar Province—we’ve lost, Mr. President. So what we’re going to do is bribe the Sunni insurgency right now.”
They had—well, okay, I overstate that. We didn’t lose. We failed to beat them, but they did lose much territory to the Shiites. So they were licking their wounds at that time. The Sunni insurgency, the Iraqi Sunnis, had too many enemies. They were fighting the Shiites, they were fighting the Americans, and they had to deal with Bin Laden.
They hated Bin Laden. They didn’t want to live like Saudis with a bunch of Egyptian weirdo suicide bombers trying to outlaw women from buying cucumbers at the market because it’s some kind of sexual innuendo. They were like, “What are these people? Get these people out of my face.”
I show in the book—and there was plenty of reporting about this—that beginning at least in early 2005, the local Sunni population started killing the Bin Ladens themselves. This was 2 years before David Petraeus ran to try to get to the head of this parade. Two years previously, at the beginning of 2005, the local Sunnis were saying, “You can’t tell us what to do. You’re doing more harm than good. You’re making our insurgency into a counterproductive war by killing all these Shiite civilians and generating all this new support for our crushing at their hands,” and all of that.
So they were isolating and killing these guys off. You’ve got to figure, dude, this is like a magic wish come true. George W. Bush comes, and he turns all of western Iraq—Fallujah, Tikrit, much of Ramadi, and obviously Mosul—into Bin Laden’s jihadi university, bigger and better and worse than Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.
This is all of those combined, and it's in western Iraq, right on the border of the Levant and Mesopotamia—not Nangarhar Province, out there in no man's land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is what made America, as Michael Scheuer said, Bin Laden's only indispensable ally. You could do a reverse 9/11 trutherism, where all the Americans were actually al-Qaeda agents all this time, because all they're doing is exactly what Bin Laden wants them to do.
Michael Scheuer said that, of course, Afghanistan was the plan, but Iraq was the hoped-for but unexpected gift to Bin Laden. Bin Laden said on the eve of the invasion, “Rise up, Iraqis. Kill the socialist infidel, Saddam Hussein, and then resist the Americans when they arrive.” One guy's got a beret and a mustache; the other guy's got a beard and is wearing a funny robe like Obi-Wan Kenobi. They clearly are extremely different men with extremely different sets of priorities. They couldn't be more different.
Of course, Saddam Hussein was terrified of Osama bin Laden and had no connection to his regime whatsoever. In fact, we know now that he had kicked himself upstairs and was semi-retired, writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion. That's how determined Saddam Hussein was to attack inside the United States—to paraphrase the CIA's warning to George W. Bush about al-Qaeda on August 6, 2001, when he told Michael Morell, his briefer—the guy who later helped frame Donald Trump for treason with Russia and everything—“Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've covered your ass.”
Can you clarify? You said Saddam Hussein was writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion. Is that real?
Yes, that's real. He posed no harm to us whatsoever. But what they could have done—let me ask you to stretch your engineer's imagination here to wild, metaphysical-type concepts outside of your usual reach. You're maybe more of a right-brain guy or something, but trip out, Lex Fridman.
The Secretary of State was Colin Powell, the four-star general and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Do you think he might have been tough enough to just send him over there and tell Saddam Hussein, “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”? If you think Colin Powell wasn't man enough for that, don't you think that mean old Donald Rumsfeld—his old friend from 1983, when Ronald Reagan sent him to be a special emissary over there, when he offered Saddam Hussein support for his military campaign against Iran, browbeat him, and tried to get him to build a pipeline to the port of Aqaba for Israel?
That's what that famous picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein was about. “1. We'll give you weapons. 2. We want you to build a pipeline for the Israelis.” Do you think he could have sent gruff old Donald Rumsfeld over there to tell Saddam Hussein one thing: “Your job is keeping Bin Laden down. Read me? Okay. We have a new priority in our foreign policy in the Middle East. We don't want anyone to be friends with Osama bin Laden or his men. Does that sound reasonable to you?”
Saddam Hussein, of course, would have said, “Of course.” In fact, you can read this only months later into the war, maybe a year into the war—James Risen wrote it in The New York Times—that Saddam Hussein sent an emissary to meet with Richard Perle in London and surrender to him, saying, “If this is about democracy, we'll hold elections. If this is about Israel, we'll stop funding Hamas. If this is about oil, we'll give you the mineral rights. If this is about weapons of mass destruction, you can send your army and FBI wherever you want to look. I give up. Please don't kill me.”
Richard Perle told the emissary, “You tell them we'll see them in Baghdad.” They refused. Seymour Hersh had another story just like that, where Hussein sent a Lebanese businessman to surrender again and say, “We're willing to negotiate on any and every term that you could possibly name for us.” America refused and went to war anyway.
By the way, when they did it in 2003, first of all, in 2001, they held a million-man candlelight vigil in Tehran on September 12. The Ayatollah said, “Now's our chance to make friends with the United States. They hate Saddam Hussein and they hate the Taliban. Great. Us too.” So they said, “Now's our chance to again try to reach out to the United States.”
Did I skip and forget to mention that in 1993? This was going to be part of our Cold War story, but it overlaps. In 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the right-wing, sort of hawkish realist national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, and Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger's right-hand man and was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, both wanted to build oil pipelines across Iran to the Persian Gulf: 1. to make money for American companies, but also 2. to bring Iran in from the cold and open up an opportunity to normalize relations between our country and theirs. The oil business is a great way to do that.
Later in the 1990s, the CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, said the same thing—that Bill Clinton's sanctions were irresponsible. We should lift the sanctions against Iran, and we should do business with Iran because, after all, God didn't see fit to leave all the oil under wonderful Western-allied democracies, so we have to deal with who we have to deal with.
That was in the interest of his company and, quite frankly, it was in the interest of the United States of America at the time. It caused a little mini-scandal because one of the times Cheney repeated himself in these criticisms was in Australia, and that's supposed to be a cardinal sin: to criticize your own country from the soil of another country. He had been the former Secretary of Defense, so that was a kind of social error or whatever that got him a little more controversy about those statements than they probably would have gotten otherwise for the substance of them.
We had every opportunity to deal with Iran in the 1990s. Then, Lex, guess why Clinton didn't do that? It was because the Israel lobby said no. That was in The Washington Post. They did this great series—David Ottaway and Dan Morgan, I think; well, whatever. Morgan and Ottaway—I forget their first names. They did a multipart series all about the oil politics of the Caspian Basin.
It was AIPAC and the Israel lobby that said, “No, you cannot normalize relations with Iran. Veto.” So Brzezinski and Haig backed down from their plans, and the companies that they were representing in doing that went the other way. The Cold War with Iran remained all through the rest of the century, again waged from bases in Saudi Arabia, getting our towers knocked down.
Now it's the new era. We go to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Iran says, “We'll do anything that we can to help you with that. Then you guys want to get rid of Saddam Hussein? Not only will we help you with that, guess what? Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has its headquarters in Tehran.”
Guess who sponsored the Iraqi Shiite exile to tell the neoconservatives that the new Shiite supermajority regime would build an oil pipeline to Haifa and tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and be nice to Israel? So they said, “We have these common interests.” And yet there was a terrorist attack in 2004, inside Saudi Arabia, and the neocons just lied. They said bin Laden and his men had planned it from inside Iran, which was a total lie. It had nothing to do with Iran, but that was enough for idiot W. Bush, who doesn't know anything, to go along with it: “Oh, okay.”
So now Iran is back on the enemy side of the ledger in the war on terror, where, of course, they have no alliance with bin Laden. The only time they backed bin Laden was as a favor to Bill Clinton in Bosnia in the 1990s. They had no love for bin Laden whatsoever.
Despite all the lies, bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, not in Iran. The bin Laden people who did make it to Iran were under house arrest. The Iranians were trying to negotiate with the Americans to hand them over, or at least hand them over to their home countries, wherever they were from.
They were offering to negotiate what was then called the “golden offer.” They submitted this through the Swiss ambassador in the spring of 2003, either right before the war or right after the war. I think it must have been right after the invasion of Iraq. Not only did Bush and his men reject it, but they even gave—I think John Bolton gave—a big dressing-down to the Swiss ambassador for daring to bring the proposal to them.
Again, just like with Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah was showing his willingness to negotiate essentially anything of controversy, including support for Hamas and Hezbollah, including their nuclear program, which at that point was so undeveloped you could barely even call it nascent. They had not begun spinning a single centrifuge at that point.
They wanted to negotiate over these bin Laden people if we would exchange them for members of the MEK, the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a communist terrorist cult. It was some Jonestown-level kookery, a type of cult like Heaven's Gate—comet-chasing lunatics. They had helped with the Iranian Revolution, but then they had betrayed it and had been kicked out of Iran by the Ayatollah.
Then they went to work for Saddam Hussein. They helped Saddam Hussein during the Shiite and Kurdish uprising in 1991. They helped crush the Kurds with their tanks as special agents of Saddam. Then the United States inherited them when we invaded Iraq in 2003, and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld took control of them.
Again, the MEK—they're called the Mujahedin-e Khalq—and the Iranians are saying, “Look, let's trade.”
We got bin Laden, including bin Laden’s son and this guy Saad, who was an extremely dangerous al-Qaeda terrorist, and we could have traded them. But the American neoconservatives—and, I guess, Rumsfeld and Cheney themselves—said, “Nope. We would rather keep the MEK so that we can use them for operations inside Iran,” which they did.
In fact, my now-wife wrote a story breaking that story for Raw Story back then, that Rumsfeld was using the MEK for intelligence inside Iran. A lot of times, they’re working as cutouts for the Israelis nowadays. You will hear rumors about Iran that come from the MEK. Sometimes it’s true.
It’s also known as the NCRI, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. That’s their front. Right before the current war, in the last few months—in June, probably in May—they put out a picture of some buildings and said, “This is a secret Iranian nuclear weapons site. We just found it.” Of course, it was total propaganda. They do that all the time.
At one point, they put out a stock photo of a vault door from a vault door company, or a vault company, and said, “Behind this vault door, that’s where the secret nuclear weapons program is.” They do that kind of thing all the time. America kept the MEK when they could have traded them with the Iranians.
One more thing about that is that on the NSC were 2 people who were then a married couple, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. I’ve interviewed both of them at length, and they have talked all about how willing the Iranians were to negotiate with the Americans on essentially anything at that time, and how the Bush administration essentially just refused to work with them.
Think about it: We’re fighting for them in Afghanistan, putting in power a coalition government that includes the Hazaras, who are Shiites and friends with Iran. In Iraq, we’re putting their sock puppets from Dawa and SCIRI in power. We fought an 8-year civil war for Iran’s guys, but refused to talk to them the whole time. We refused to negotiate with them in good faith, while George Bush was the Ayatollah’s errand boy in this thing and refused to acknowledge it. He liked to pretend he was the emperor of the world or whatever, when he was serving their interests and putting their guys in power.
At the end of his presidency, they made him sign the deal to get out by the end of 2011. He said, “Well, can I have 64 bases?” They said, “No.” He said, “Well, can I have 24 bases?” They said, “No.” He said, “Can I have any bases?” Nouri al-Maliki said, “Well, let me go talk to the guys. I’m not really sure.” Then he came back and said, “I talked to the guys. They said, ‘Beat it, scum. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.’”
They didn’t even say thank you for fighting a gigantic 8-year civil war for them, exterminating their Sunni enemies and putting their guys in power there. So that was the SOFA that Bush had to agree to in his last year in office, in 2008: We had to withdraw because he had fought the war for his adversaries—not our enemies, but America’s regional rivals in the Middle East, the Iranians, and their Shiite axis, now including Baghdad and, of course, Damascus and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
This is when the king of Jordan coined the term “the Shiite crescent.” America made it. In fact, in, I think, January of 2006, the Sunni king of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, read the riot act to Zalmay Khalilzad. This is in the WikiLeaks. He said, “Listen, it was always us and you and Saddam against Iran. Now you’ve given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter. So what are you going to do about it?” Khalilzad says, “I know, Your Royal Majesty. I’m so sorry about that. We’re going to do everything that we can to try to fix it.”
This is the birth of the policy called “the redirection,” where America, under Bush, before Obama ever came to town, accepted that he had screwed up—that he had scored, like in soccer, an own goal for the other side of the ledger, the Shiite crescent dominated by Iran—and that now he had to make up for that by tilting toward the Sunnis.
It would be nice to linger and understand to what degree the Iranian regime and the Ayatollah are good or bad for the Iranian people, and to what degree they could have been actual good collaborators with the United States in fighting bin Laden.
Yeah, good questions. I would not ally with anybody to kill anybody. At the time of September 11th, there were only 400 of bin Laden’s men hiding out in Afghanistan. Any of the rest of their associates around the Middle East could be arrested by police forces.
Again, we could have negotiated over them in the first place. The CIA and Delta Force could have finished annihilating bin Laden, Zawahiri, and their few hundred men in the White Mountains in Nangarhar Province, at the Lion’s Den hideout, in December of 2001. There’s your whole actual terror war.
Do we really need Iran to help us, other than what? Hand over a few prisoners that they had captured who were trying to hide out in their country, and whom they had put under house arrest? That’s all the help we needed, right? We didn’t have to have a new alliance with them, and we didn’t have to pretend that the Ayatollah was a saint or that his republic was a republic at all.
If it’s a republic, then how come he’s been the Supreme Leader since 1989? Doesn’t sound like a republic to me. At the same time, if you want to talk about flawed republics, we’re sitting in one. In this case, we’re lying ourselves into aggressive war after aggressive war.
You can’t say the same for him unless you want to blame him for sending Ahmed Chalabi to lie to Richard Perle, to lie to George W. Bush. In fact, I’m skipping ahead, but in Iraq War II we fought with them again against the bin Laden caliphate. So here we fought really 3 wars for Iran: against the Taliban, against Sunni Saddam, and against Baghdadi’s bin Laden caliphate from 2014 through 2017.
Why do we hate them, Lex, so much if we keep fighting wars for them? I used to joke with Patrick Cockburn that they better sign this nuclear deal with Obama. They owed us a favor after all that we had done for them lately. Despite all of the hatred and vitriol, when you listen to the Likudniks, what you end up doing is empowering the Ayatollah and his men.
What do you think about the attack of the United States on Iran that, as I mentioned, had me so nervous that there would be another escalation into another forever war?
Yeah.
What do you think about that situation?
Wait, let’s hold that, because let’s do Syria first and the redirection, then we’ll do the Iran war.
Okay. Can you talk about the redirection?
The redirection policy was really, I think, invented in late 2005 and then discussed and implemented in the beginning of 2006. The article is called “The Redirection,” by Seymour Hersh, in The New Yorker magazine.
Hersh has an incredible year-long series from this period. It includes “The Coming Wars,” “Preparing the Battlefield,” “The Redirection,” and I forget the fourth one—maybe the fifth one. He had a bunch of great ones at this time. I might be combining these articles a little bit here, but it’s along the same lines.
Here’s what you need to understand about the redirection. Oops, we screwed up: We fought Iraq War II for the Shiites. To make up for that, we’re tilting back toward the Sunnis. But what does that mean? That means we’re tilting back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber brigades.
The Saudis don’t have an army. We don’t trust them with one, probably, and we’re their army for the most part. So how are we going to make it up to the Israelis, who gave us their stupid idiot advice and launched this war, but empowered their regional rivals? How are we going to make it up to the Saudis, who tried to warn us, for the most part, against it, but we ignored their advice and did it anyway, empowering their regional rivals, the Iranians?
Here’s how we’re going to fix this: Since we put Iran up 2 pegs in Baghdad, we’re going to take them down a peg in Damascus. So they started in Lebanon, backing a group called Fatah al-Islam—bin Laden suicide bombers, former head-choppers, lunatics, terrorists—to fight against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Elizabeth Cheney, who was then working in the State Department and later became known as Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney’s daughter, had the job of working with the Muslim Brotherhood to create the first major government in exile to try to use to overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
I have to tell you, we used to joke on my show, going back to 2004 or 2005. That would probably have been the first time that I asked Eric Margolis, “Hey, Eric, if the neocons get their way and they overthrow Bashar al-Assad, what organized force is there in the country after the Ba’athists that could possibly take over, other than maybe the Muslim Brotherhood, if you’re lucky?”
Eric Margolis was there, just like Patrick. He was there when Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, crushed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1984—or was it 1982? He crushed them and killed about 20,000 people in this horrific thing to crush the Muslim Brotherhood. Margolis was there, knew all about it, and told me that story.
Margolis said, “Yeah, exactly. Or bin Laden could take over.” Now, back to David Wurmser in “A Clean Break” and “Coping with Crumbling States.” In “Coping with Crumbling States,” Wurmser says, “We have to expedite the chaotic collapse of Syria”—expedite the chaotic collapse of Syria—“so that we will control the outcome, which will be more to our liking.”
And he says—and he's acknowledging that the terrorism of bin Laden is what he's referring to here, in the recent history at the time he's writing this in 1996. He's saying, now there's a lot of talk about the dangers of fundamentalism. Meaning, okay, we're going to get rid of these secular Ba’athist regimes, but there are fundamentalist terrorist wackos running around right now. He acknowledges that.
And he says, “America will just have to find better allies against fundamentalism than the Ba’athists.” So now maybe some idiot could write that as policy advice for the Likud in 1996, maybe before the Khobar Towers. But then they kill our airmen at Khobar Towers. Then they bomb the embassies. Then they bomb the Cole. Then they hit us on September 11th. And then they lead as the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed 4,000 of our guys in the Iraq War.
And now you're telling me that we still better find better allies against bin Laden than the Ba’athists? That Bashar al-Assad is worse than Osama bin Laden? Yes, that's what they're telling you. Because Assad is friends with the Ayatollah, and Assad helps the Ayatollah arm Hezbollah, and Israel—as per “A Clean Break”—
What's “A Clean Break”? It's a clean break from Oslo. Forget Rabin and Peres. We are going to steal all that's left of the West Bank and Gaza Strip sooner or later, but we don't want to have to worry about Hezbollah on our northern flank. We need to neutralize them somehow.
So Syria, Wurmser wrote, was the keystone in that arc of Iranian power, which was true. But, of course, he was the one who added Saddam Hussein to that same arc. Now they're saying, “Oops, we have to fix this.” It was the neoconservatives Elliott Abrams and Zalmay Khalilzad who came to George W. Bush and said, “Sir, we really screwed up here. We have to turn this thing around now.” And Bush understood.
Now, it's funny: You read the article, and it's all Condoleezza Rice and her people trying to explain that, oh, you know what, it's not really about Sunnis and Shiites; it's about moderates and extremists.
The Ba’athists are the extremists in this, you're saying, right?
Uh-huh. The multiethnic, secular dictatorship in Syria—the last country in the Middle East where you can get a drink. Those are the extremists, and we've got to support the bin Laden insurgency against them.
Now, this is the reason that Barack Obama supported al-Qaeda in Syria. It's not because he was a secret Muslim terrorist with an allegiance to bin Laden's goals. It's that he was a secret George W. Bush with allegiance to the American foreign policy establishment's goals, including the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby—Likud interests—in this country.
At that time, in Iraq War II, for the average person, they'd have had to read Mearsheimer in 2007 or read Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com to even know: What is a neocon? What's the difference between them and the rest of the Republicans? What do they have against Iraq so badly? What is that agenda about? And what does it have to do with the Likud party in Israel?
You didn't think that. If you ask, like Dave Chappelle in his skit, it's all, “He tried to kill my daddy” kind of stuff, right? Because people just don't know this deeper layer to it.
Well, in Syria, it was just as obvious as it could be. The war party in America is the Israel lobby, right? It is all Zionists, led by the Likudniks and the neoconservatives, but on the so-called liberal side too. People like Jamie Rubin, who had worked for Bill Clinton, wrote a giant thing. First it was a secret memo that he wrote to Hillary Clinton, and they later published it as an essay in Foreign Policy magazine. You can pull it up right now if you want.
Jamie Rubin—I'm pretty sure it's 2011. If it's 2012, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure it's 2011 in Foreign Policy magazine. Type in “Syria, Assad, and Israel.” The reason we have to do this is for Israel. The real reason to intervene in Syria.
There was a funny anecdote about this one too, Lex, because I just happened to be screwing around on Twitter the morning that Assange published the State Department cables. Maybe it was that morning or soon after. I'm virtually certain it was David Rothkopf, who was then the editor of Foreign Policy, and I can't remember who else—one of his right-hand men at ForeignPolicy.com, the Foreign Policy journal. I forgot if there's a specific think tank behind them.
Anyway, they freaked out and attacked Julian Assange. They said, “Aha, we caught WikiLeaks posting a fake document, because this is not a State Department document. This is an article that we ran at Foreign Policy, and you obviously copied and pasted it and are running it at WikiLeaks. And not only that, but you've changed it.”
And Assange says, “No, you kooks. This is a memo that somebody wrote to Hillary Clinton.” Apparently, it was Jamie Rubin who wrote it, and then he submitted the same essay to you to run at Foreign Policy. That's what happened.
The article is about, “Madam Secretary, we've got to support Bin Ladenite head-chopper suicide bombers in the greatest act of treason that you could possibly imagine, because Israel matters more than the United States of America and the 3,000 killed on September 11th.” That's why I'm paraphrasing, roughly.
“The real reason to intervene in Syria: Cutting Iran's link to the Mediterranean Sea is a strategic price worth the risk.” And why? Because of Israel's foreign policy interests, not those of the United States of America.
Now, what's the true history of that war? They called it an uprising. They called it a revolution. We're skipping Libya here, but they supported the Bin Ladenites in Libya. Then this was Hillary Clinton's bank shot: to take the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia—the same guys that did the Benghazi attack of September 11, 2012—and send them on to Syria for the next jihad.
In Libya, Gaddafi wasn't a Shiite, and this wasn't about that, although the Israelis did hate him and want him gone. But in Syria, it was all about this redirection policy and continuing the redirection policy of trying to weaken Assad as essentially a consolation prize after America screwed up so badly by putting the Shiites in power in Baghdad.
And so, this is why we have to do this. There was a whole chorus around that time. If you remember the first major fake sarin attack of August 2013 in Ghouta, the war party tried to claim that Assad did it in order to launch a war there. They were trying to get us to do it at that time.
First of all, Barack Obama is the commander in chief at this point. It's not the same as George W. Bush escalating the Afghan war that was already going on, where we have to win it and that's the consensus or whatever. That's one thing, but Obama wants to start a new war in Syria.
Now, the American right said, “I don't think so.” In fact, on this point, all hail Steve Bannon, because it was Bannon and Breitbart that led the campaign. At that time, Breitbart was incredible—much more important, I think, than it probably is now, but whatever. I don't know how to measure that, but at that time they were extremely influential. And they led the charge: We do not want to fight this war.
You might remember this, Lex. You had Army soldiers, Marines, and Navy sailors holding up pieces of paper in still shots and short video clips that said, “I didn't join the Marines to fight a civil war for al-Qaeda in Syria.” Remember that?
What was this? 2013?
This is August of 2013. At this point, Barack Obama reaches out to AIPAC and the Israel lobby and asks them to please do everything they can to push this. Now, I have to say, I don't know what was going on there, but I actually thought that he was being kind of sarcastic. At that point, there was nobody pushing for war with Syria except the Israel lobby. Obama seemed to be saying, “Hey, guys, if you want this, you need to really stick your neck out for it.”
But the thing is, they stuck their neck out. It's almost like—remember in that Will Ferrell movie, Old School, where he goes to college and he's running naked down the street and he thinks everybody's behind him, but he's just wasted?
Yeah. It's like that.
They're like, “Come on, everybody. We're going to Syria.” They're running drunk down the street, and then they look and nobody else is coming with them. It's just the Israel lobby. It's just as plain as day. Whose interest is this in? Nobody else cares. Nobody else wants to do this. Nobody else believes the lie that, on the day the chemical weapons inspectors arrived, Assad gassed a bunch of people. Give me a break, dude. This whole thing is so stupid.
And so they couldn't do it. The Israel lobby basically failed. And then, importantly, this is the one good thing I'll ever say in my life about James Clapper. By the way, this was a secret. They didn't tell us this. We only found this out later from Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.
Jeffrey Goldberg, the former prison guard and ruthless abuser of Palestinian captives, wrote in The Atlantic that James Clapper told Barack Obama it was not a slam dunk that Bashar al-Assad was behind the gas attack. And General Dempsey, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also gave a public statement saying, “I don't know why we have to do this right now.”
At that point, his own staff was telling him, “Mr. President, if anybody asks me, I'm going to tell them that I told you that I can't even prove that this is true.”
Yeah. James Clapper was the director of national intelligence, DNI, from August 2010 to 2017, acting as the principal intelligence adviser to President Barack Obama and overseeing all U.S. intelligence agencies.
He also is the guy who planned Operation Storm, where they cleansed the Krajina and western Slavonia in 1995 of Croatian Serbs.
He's also the guy who lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He could prove it from the satellite pictures. He's also the guy who lied that Vladimir Putin helped Saddam Hussein move those chemical weapons to Syria, which is why we can't find them. He's also the guy who lied that the NSA is not all up in your phone, seizing all of your data, which is what motivated the hero Edward Snowden to leak and tell the truth. He's also the guy who lied that Donald Trump was a blackmailed, suborned agent of Vladimir Putin who helped to usurp Hillary Clinton's rightful throne in a coup d'état and take over this country.
And, of course, he's a paid analyst at CNN. If Donald Trump doesn't give him life in prison, I'm going to really regret it a lot. He deserves to suffer horribly.
You did say a positive thing about him.
I did say a positive thing about him, which was that he told Barack Obama, “I'm not going to vouch for this chemical weapons lie here, buddy.” No slam dunk. That was a reference to George Tenet telling George Bush, “It's a slam dunk, sir.”
And you know what's funny about that is that George Tenet said, “Oh, that's not fair. They're throwing me under the bus. I didn't say that Iraq's possession of chemical weapons was a slam dunk. What I said was, ‘You can convince the American people with this story. That's the slam dunk.’” In other words, I wasn't lying. I was saying, “Mr. President, you'll be able to get away with this lie.” That's George Tenet's defense of that statement.
Anyway, Clapper was saying, “Well, this ain't a slam dunk. I won't stand by it.” By the way, as long as we're talking about Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, it may be the same article. If you type in “James Clapper” and “slam dunk” in Syria there, let me see if I got this right. The Obama Doctrine. That's the article. Okay, not a slam dunk. I'm glad we clarified this. It's a different article. The article is called “As President of the United States, I Don't Bluff.” It's another interview of Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg.
And in this article is where Jeffrey Goldberg—well, I'll tell you what. No, no, no. Get the—this is just Politico. Do The Atlantic. Yeah: “Obama to Iran and Israel: As President of the United States, I Don't Bluff,” by Jeffrey Goldberg, March 2nd, 2012.
Okay, just so people understand, the headline there is him telling Jeffrey Goldberg to please tell the Israelis that they can trust me, that you trust me, that I promise, that I really, really, really, really, really, really mean it: if the Ayatollah breaks out for a nuclear bomb, I will go to war. I will not let him get one. Jeffrey, please tell them I'm not lying about this. That's where that comes from. That's what he's doing there.
Now, will they show you the whole thing, or is your paywall here? Maybe if you put it in Archive.is. Can you copy and paste that and put it in Archive.is? Oh, you have to just sign in. So now, see if you can Ctrl+F for “classified” or “clearance.”
“Can we talk about Syria as a strategic issue? Talk about it as a humanitarian issue as well. But it would seem to me that one way to weaken and further isolate Iran is to remove or help remove Iran's only Arab ally.” Obama: “Absolutely.”
Okay, this is why we want to weaken Syria: it's an easier way to weaken Iran. And as they continue to talk about here, he's saying that we are intervening there, and this is a way to weaken Iran.
Then Goldberg says, “Is there anything you could do to move it faster?” And Obama, on a less funny version of the joke about “I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you,” says, “Well, nothing that I can tell you because your security clearance isn't good enough.”
In other words—and check my date on this again. Was it 2012 or 2011? I forget. No, no, this would have been 2012. This is 2012. Yeah, March 2nd. He's saying, “It's already on, Jeffrey. We're doing it, buddy.” What's he doing? He's working with Britain and France, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to back Osama bin Laden's suicide bomber brigades. In fact, worse: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's suicide bomber brigades.
Remember, we talked about how the local Iraqi Sunnis had turned on al-Qaeda. It wasn't America and the Shiites that defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq; it was the local Iraqi Sunnis that did so. They're the ones who even turned in Zarqawi to the Americans to kill. I know the interrogator. I interviewed the interrogator who, without torture but by being a nice guy, got the information: “Tell us where Zarqawi is. We'll get him.” The guy told him, and they got him. This was in the summer of 2006. They killed him.
And at that time, al-Qaeda in Iraq then renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq. We all got a good chuckle out of it because, “You guys don't control a single country anywhere in Iraq. There is no state.” But at the same time, we said, “Aha, though, look at what they're talking about.”
Bin Laden's policy always was just keep fighting. There's no point in creating a caliphate as long as the American Empire is here to erase it again. So we fight the far enemy. We fight a long-term strategy to bog the empire down, bleed them to bankruptcy, force them all the way out. Only then can we have the perfect Islamic state we want to create.
Zarqawi says, “No, I want that now.” This was his doctrine. And they called their group the Islamic State of Iraq. I forget whether it was just before he died or just after he died that they started calling themselves that, but very clearly betraying their intentions if they were to have the ability to take over anything. That's their goal. They have that level of ambition.
Now, it's very important to note that in Iraq War II, when I say America bought that war as a civil war for the Shiite side against the Sunnis, they didn't want the whole country. They only wanted Shiastan. They only wanted the land basically from Baghdad over to Iran and down to Kuwait, down to Najaf, right? Down to the Saudi border. They didn't so much worry about the Sunni Iraqis of Fallujah, Tikrit, and Mosul. “Let them burn in the sun, man. Screw them.”
Oh, I should have said this was a big part of why the Sunnis fought so hard in the first place: because, remember, they're losing control of the national government. Well, all the oil is down in the south near Basra, and it's up in the north near Kirkuk, where it's going to be controlled either by the Shiites or by the Kurds—now by the Shiites. And so what does that mean for the Sunnis? They have some oil, but it's virtually all undeveloped oil and much less of it in the predominantly Sunni areas of the country. So when they lose control of the national government, they lose control over all the spoils, right? And so they get nothing.
And the Shiites' idea—I mean the Supreme Islamic Council of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Dawa Party of Nouri al-Maliki, and their murderous forces—their idea is: “They're just as chauvinistic as the bin Ladenites. Screw you guys, man. You can just burn in the sun. We'll do nothing for you. We got nothing for you.”
But what did that mean in practice? And again, the heroic Patrick Cockburn, it meant that all western Iraq was wide open, no man's land, no consolidated political authority anywhere. Ongoing low-level Sunni insurgency led by bin Laden.
Even when the Americans left by the end of 2011, they still left a few CIA guys and drones there. As we joked on the show in real time, Lex, me and Jason Ditz from Antiwar.com would joke that we're still doing drone strikes in Iraq after the withdrawal, but we still got spies there. We're still doing drone strikes. Why? Not that we're killing the bin Ladenites. We're aiming at their heels because we're trying to chase them west into Syria, where they're heroes.
In Syria, they're the moderate rebels. In Syria, they're just trying to fight for freedom against the forces of evil, Bashar's tyranny. These are bin Laden's guys. These are Zarqawi's guys.
Bin Laden's main agent in Iraq was a guy named Abu Muhammad al-Adnani. And then later, his boss was this guy Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was apparently the second leader after Zarqawi. Some say that the first leader after Zarqawi was actually made up, that there was no leader, and they just sort of put this persona out there. Well, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sure existed. These guys had all been locked up in Camp Bucca together and had kind of reorganized al-Qaeda in Iraq. When America left, they sprung them all loose. They're ready to go.
So Baghdadi tells Julani, “Go to Syria.” Julani—you know him as al-Sharaa, the self-appointed president of Syria right now. That's Abu Muhammad al-Julani. He says he joined the jihad because he was inspired by September 11th. He told Frontline that, damn right, he fought and killed Americans in Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq War II. Then he went to Syria to help lead the so-called uprising, revolution, civil war in Syria.
No. Again, we have from 2011 that Prince Bandar bin Sultan was emptying Saudi jails and sending all the jihadists off to Syria to fight. And they were on the record. I have the quotes where they say—was it Bandar? Bandar says, “We're sick and tired of the Shiites.” I forgot the exact quote; it's in there. And then the other quote was from a guy named Prince Turki, who said, “ISIS—that is, al-Qaeda in Iraq—is our answer to your support for the Dawa.” Get it?
Why does Saudi Arabia, in conspiracy with Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Erdoğan, and all these guys, back bin Laden in Syria? Because we put the Dawa Party in power in Baghdad. This is their answer to that. So this is, again, the redirection. We empowered the Shiites so much; now we have to move to limit them again, mostly because that's what our allies want so badly, especially the Israelis and the Saudis.
And so, from 2011, we knew this is not a revolution. This is not an uprising.
I don't care if there's footage of protesters on TV or even if Bashar al-Assad's forces are shooting them, which they were. I would note that Sharmine Narwani and the great journalist William Van Wagenen have proven this. I'm going to publish Van Wagenen's book on Syria any day now at the Libertarian Institute; he's written these massive, long-form studies on the origins of the Syria war for the Libertarian Institute.
Their work shows how, yes, you would have peaceful protest, but then the bin Ladenites would be there and would snipe cops, of course, for the direct purpose of provoking a reaction. It's exactly how they started the Kosovo War. They'd assassinate police officers, forcing the military to intervene, radicalizing and escalating the whole situation. It was the same thing they were doing there. It's how they got the whole thing started.
And again, it's literally al-Qaeda in Iraq taking the lead at that time. Now, remember hours ago when we talked about truth, falsity, and our position? Our position was, "We're supporting moderate rebels. We're not supporting bin Laden." In fact, our position was that if the bin Ladenites weren't backed by Assad just to make the protesters look bad, then at least they were only benefiting because we just wouldn't give enough support to the moderates. That was our position. But that was not true.
From the very beginning, it was clear: these guys are lunatics, man. There was a boy in early 2013 who had a fruit stand, and one of the bin Ladenites—or just some guy—said, "Hey, give me a discount on this orange." The kid, a 13-year-old boy, I believe, said, "I'm sorry, I can't give discounts. I wouldn't even give a discount to Muhammad himself." The bin Ladenite, standing within earshot, said, "What did you just say?" Boom—and shot the 13-year-old boy right in the face, killing him.
That's one of the moderate rebels.
That's the moderate rebel. And what were the moderate rebels the whole time? The ones who were, quote-unquote, moderate: the Free Syrian Army, the guys with shorter beards who would come and talk to the Americans, who had pictures of themselves in tents that said, "U.S. aid," on them. Their job was just receiving the money and the guns and delivering them to the bin Ladenites, just like with the war in Afghanistan in the '80s or something.
Bandar can empty his jails and whatever, but for the most part, these guys are volunteers. There's not an organized state army on the ground that's conscripted them and controls them to that degree. So who's out there fighting? The guys who are fighting are the ones who don't mind dying, the ones who are absolutely the most committed to this revolution.
And we know who they are. They're bin Laden's, Zawahiri's, and Zarqawi's guys: al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria, going at that time by the name Jabhat al-Nusra, which I'm told roughly translates as "association of assistance" or "helpers." They're al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria. The same guys who were the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War II are now the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency in Syria. While there's just one line on a map between them, we're still on the side of the Shiites in Iraq, but we're on the side of the Sunnis in Syria.
Now, this goes on for 2 years, and you have bin Ladenites from all over the place, including Chechens, Chinese Uyghurs, and people from everywhere coming to join the jihad, just like in Iraq War II: Egyptians and Libyans and whoever come to join the thing. By the late spring or early summer of 2013, you now have a split between Baghdadi, who's now also come to Syria—sorry, from your point of view, this way, into Syria—and Julani, the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria.
They split, and it's a fight over control, really over oil wealth and who controls their gangster spoils. They're a bunch of terrorists, but it's also over doctrine. Baghdadi is more like a Zarqawiite, and Baghdadi is saying, "I want my caliphate now," against the advice of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is now the surviving leader of al-Qaeda after Bin Laden was killed in May of 2011.
Zawahiri is the one who said, "No, we should fight the far enemy. Don't create a state now, because you won't be able to hold on to it. Just keep fighting." He sent an emissary who had been an original veteran of the Afghan War, named al-Suri, to come and negotiate between Baghdadi and Julani. Baghdadi killed the guy and declared a state in eastern Syria.
At this time, Assad has to pull his forces back from the east and consolidate around all the population centers other than Raqqa. All the other big population centers are in the west of the country—Hama, Aleppo, and Damascus—and he has to try to protect these areas. So he ends up being forced to leave eastern Syria basically wide open.
By June of 2013, Baghdadi splits from Jolani and creates ISIS: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or Iraq and the Levant, or whatever they called it in Arabic. The acronym is pronounced Daesh. When we say ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, the Caliphate, or Daesh, that's all the same thing. That's al-Qaeda in Iraq, which went to Syria and consolidated eastern Syria.
Now, that's in June of 2013. Six months later, they hoist the black flag over Fallujah. At Antiwar.com, we're freaking out. I've been saying on my show this whole time, "Western Iraq is wide open." Patrick Cockburn says Western Iraq is wide open. "Red alert, man. This is a problem here. We're backing these guys."
Nobody seems to think about the next stage of this conflict. I remember even Michael Scheuer said on my show, "I think the big problem right now is Boko Haram." And I'm like, "Excuse me? We're backing the Bin Ladenite caliphate in eastern Syria, and Western Iraq is wide open for the taking."
You can go back and check my archives, especially from the first half of 2014, where I'm interviewing even the despicable Jonathan Landay and all kinds of people—anyone I know who knows anything about the Bin Ladenites. I'm interviewing them mostly so I can browbeat them and tell them, "I'm on the ball, everybody. This is what matters, right? This is the most important crisis that could possibly be going on."
And we know now that Mike Flynn was the head of the DIA at the time. We know from Seymour Hersh—there's an article called "Military to Military" in the London Review of Books—how Mike Flynn was heroically insubordinate and was giving secret intelligence to the Germans to give to Assad, to use to kill the Bin Ladenites, to kill the CIA's terrorists on the ground there. That's what got him fired from the DIA.
Now, Mike Flynn is an Iran hawk. He hates the Ayatollah and the Shiites and that whole thing, and he's an absolutely pro-Israel, Zionist guy, 100%. But his point of view was, "Well, let's just bomb Tehran. Just because I hate the Shiites doesn't mean I want to back Osama Bin Laden's suicide-bomber, head-chopper brigades against their friend in Syria. What the hell is this? It's crazy."
Same thing for Tulsi Gabbard. By the way, the most controversial thing about this woman—supposedly, her entire career, somehow she was a toady of Assad—is what Bari Weiss told Joe Rogan. He asked her, "What's a toady?" and she said, "I don't know." He said, "How do you spell it?" and she said, "With a Y," and had no idea even how to spell the word that she was trying to use to smear Tulsi Gabbard as some kind of agent of Bashar al-Assad.
Tulsi Gabbard, who at that time was a major, later promoted to captain in the Army National Guard, and who I believe only left the National Guard to become director of National Intelligence—this American military officer, right? Oh, yeah, I'm so sure she's such a traitor to this country. Give me a break. They keep promoting her. She may even still be in the National Guard. I'm not sure how that works when you're the DNI.
Anyway, Tulsi Gabbard never said that Bashar Assad is a good man. She never said he's a hero. She never said America should ally with him. She never said anything like that. What she said was, "Assad is less worse than his enemies. America is backing al-Qaeda."
Now, if you know anything about Tulsi Gabbard, she has never been, is not, and has never been against the War on Terrorism. In fact, when she was running for president, she put out statements defining al-Qaeda so broadly. She said hundreds of groups are linked to al-Qaeda in the world and that she's willing to fight them.
Okay? She is an over-the-line, unreasonable hawk on killing Bin Laden.
But she—and by the way, why, Lex? Because she was in Iraq War II, in a medical unit at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad for like a year. I've never heard her talk about this part of it, but it is clear. There's no question; it's impossible otherwise. She saw our guys screaming and dying in front of her, right? Over and over and over again.
That's why she has that gray streak in her hair, like Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street. It's because of that. Now the Democrats are saying, "Forget what you know about the shirts and skins, lady. We're on the skins side now. We like al-Qaeda now."
Now, Lex, quite frankly, like every other idiot in Washington, D.C., apparently, could not have told you the difference. But Tulsi Gabbard could. Tulsi Gabbard knew who was who, and she knew that Assad's enemies are al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. You couldn't have tortured her into switching sides in that war, right?
It doesn't mean that she's soft on Iran, but it means that she wants Bin Laden dead—dead—and she's supposed to be siding with them now. We're all supposed to be encouraging them to overthrow this secular dictator who protects and backs the Christians, the Shiites, the Druze, and even—and somebody argued with me the other day in a YouTube comment somewhere, because I had said the majority of Sunnis backed him too. I think that's true, and certainly it was true of the middle class in Aleppo. It was certainly the case that the Syrian Arab Army was always majority Sunni Arab, serving that secular government.
Just because they were Sunnis didn't mean that they were bin Ladenists. This crazy Takfiri-Salafi, whatever, ideology—especially, I call them bin Ladenists because it ain't just that they're Salafis. There are innumerable—I don't know, hundreds of thousands or millions, even—of Salafis and Wahhabis in this world who are quietists. They don't have politics.
Their politics is, “Your king is your king because God made it that way. You're not questioning that, are you?” I didn't think so. We used to have that tradition in the West: the divine right of kings and that kind of thing. If you're a good Muslim, to a great many Muslim people—never mind their leadership, but I mean people out in the world, and it depends on the sect and the region and everything—the supermajority of them, quite apparently, are quietists.
Their job is not to question the civil authority. Their job is to do what the civil authority says. That's why they're the civil authority. That's how most people feel about their governments anyway, right?
Bin Laden's problem was that he was political, and he had these political goals for this earthly realm where we exist today. Loretta Napoleoni, the great Italian journalist, compared him very much to a Leninist, where he's trying to overthrow this world and have things the way that he wants them to be in a way that even radical and fundamentalist Muslims usually don't believe in.
In fact, the studies have shown it's amateurs who are actually new at Islam and don't know that much about it who tend to be more fanatical and more violent, whereas people who actually know more about it will say, “Actually, you'd better not do that,” and that kind of thing. I cite all the studies in Fool's Errand, and I have the footnotes in Fool's Errand showing that directly, including some of the 9/11 hijackers and including the bulk of the fighters for the Islamic State caliphate. They're just regular Iraqis who were conscripted and then fighting for ISIS, but that didn't make them necessarily that political, much less motivated simply by theology to behave in these ways. You know what I mean?
Sure. If just briefly, because you brought Tulsi up, why do you think—I've had a chance to have multiple conversations with her—why do you think she was smeared so much on this topic and other topics? Why did she piss people off?
The first thing was this: She absolutely just knew better and was immovable, like Stonewall Jackson, on this issue. You're not going to be able to convince her these are moderate rebels. Those lies don't work here.
That put her severely on the outside of the consensus, and she actually knew what she was talking about. That was her problem, and that was their problem with her. They couldn't fix that.
Then, of course, even though they loved her—oh, man, they groomed her. People forget: when she first came in, she's pretty, she's intelligent, she's in the military, she fought in Iraq, or is a quote-unquote combat vet. Even though she wasn't pulling triggers there, she was shelled while at Camp Balad, so she's earned her stripes as an official combat veteran in that sense.
She's a woman, and she's a Democrat, and this is everything that they wanted. But then she endorsed Bernie Sanders.
Oh, yeah. Hillary Clinton went after her. Is that what happened? I'm trying to remember.
Hillary Clinton tried to smear her with Russiagate. The pathetic, diseased, dying windbag Robert Windrem from NBC News attempted to smear her, as he attempted to smear my colleague, editor, and friend Hunter DeRensis as part of the Russiagate hoax.
This absolutely ludicrous reporting—have you ever heard of anything that Robert Windrem ever reported in your life? Can you think of anything where you go, “Oh, Robert Windrem, he's the guy that did this”? No. He will only be known, when he dies—which will be soon—as a disgrace to humanity and to his profession for his disgusting and despicable lies against Tulsi Gabbard, against Jill Stein, and against Hunter DeRensis. May he burn in hell.
So anyway, and his entire NBC News organization, too. That's why they hated her: because she told the truth.
Yeah, it's sad. It's sad that people like that—like we spoke about this with Ron Paul. This is different, obviously: different humans, different walks of life, and so on. But there are certain people who just have this authenticity.
Sure.
And whether you agree with them or disagree, there's this sense that this is a strong, really interesting person.
Actually, for a long time, Bernie Sanders was that also. There's something about the system that wants to destroy those kinds of folks, or at least suffocate the authenticity in that person.
Yeah.
And make them conform. I wouldn't give him as much credit as the two of them, but Ron is in a class by himself. Of course, I guess you could say that they're comparable, because I disagree with her pretty severely on enough things. But, on the other hand, I think Bernie Sanders is sometimes disingenuous in a way that I don't find her to be.
Without getting too far into that, you're right, though: you can see the people who are outside the norm, usually, and are treated as the outcasts up there. If they're anywhere near the halls of power up there, they're usually the ones who are telling the truth about things and getting things right.
Okay. So now let's fast-forward.
As I said, in January 2014, they hoist the black flag over Fallujah, and we at Antiwar.com, et cetera, are freaking out over this.
I was going to say about Mike Flynn: Mike Flynn was the head of the DIA that put out a report, a secret report that's now published. Judicial Watch got it, and the great Brad Hoff wrote about it at his great blog, the Levant Report. People can find it.
What happened was, the DIA put out a report saying, “Our allies are backing bin Laden terrorists in Syria. Their goal is to create a Salafist principality in eastern Syria, and there is a real danger that this could blow back into western Iraq, and al-Qaeda in Iraq could return to their old haunts in Mosul and Ramadi.” He warned that in the summer of 2012.
Then, just short of a year later, they consolidated a state in eastern Syria, just as he said, just as I said. Again, you can check the records. All 6,100-something of my interviews are at scotthorton.org if anyone ever wants to see whether I was good on this back when I claim I was.
Then Obama was asked, “Mr. President, what about the black flag being hoisted over Fallujah?” This is Vanity Fair magazine, and he tells them, “Listen, just because the junior varsity puts on a Kobe Bryant jersey doesn't make them the Lakers, right?”
So this idiot—I'm sorry, excuse me for a moment—but don't you like to somehow take the slightest comfort in the fact that at least Barack Obama can read, at least he's maybe the slightest bit interested in what he's doing, compared to W. Bush or Trump, who are clearly just winging it?
W. Bush, just forget it. Bill Clinton, of course, they would say he would know more about any subject than his briefers, and they better be on topic because he read 6 books about it. He's a horrible child killer, but that's still true about him: he's a brilliant guy, or at least a brilliant consumer of data and in trying to form his policies. He wanted to be in charge and know as much as he could.
How could Barack Obama, Lex, not know who al-Qaeda in Iraq is? How could he think that ISIS is the junior varsity? These guys are the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed 4,000 of the 4,500 Americans who died in the Iraq War. These are the Zarqawists. They're worse than bin Laden. Patrick Cockburn said they're the Islamist Khmer Rouge, right? Like Pol Pot and the Communists—the most insane lunatics to ever be armed with weapons before, right? Nutcases. Berserkers.
This is the junior varsity: the suicide bomber brigade, the most dangerous one that's ever been created in history. Six months later, they rolled right into Mosul. This is the picture you still have in your head of that long train of Toyota Hilux pickup trucks rolling into Mosul with their headlights on and all the jihadis in the back of the trucks with their rifles.
Just as Patrick Cockburn and I had predicted, the Shiite Iraqi army—which had hardly any interest whatsoever in ruling Mosul or Tikrit or Fallujah—turned tail and ran. The Islamic State caliphate then conquered all of western Iraq starting in 2014. They took Mosul and Tikrit. It took them a little while, but they took Ramadi in 2015. They took Fallujah right away, and they created an area of landmass the size of Great Britain, with a standing army of, at its highest, about 250,000 to 300,000 men if you look at their troop strength in various places during that time.
And then what did Obama do?
Oh, man, you know what? We should watch this clip, dude. Let's pipe this in here. Speaking of Jonah Goldberg, type in “Oren”—O-R-E-N—“Oren Sunnis,” and it's going to come right up as your first YouTube link. It's going to automatically launch right there. There it is right there: “Sunnis versus Shiites and the lesser of two evils.”
I actually met the guy who asked the question here. He came up to me at a thing and said, “Hey, I'm the guy who asked the question at that thing.” So kudos to you, buddy. Thank you. Lex Fridman, let's watch this clip and trip out.
It doesn't stay in there for another couple more weeks. What do you think your country is doing in order to protect your interest?
Pause one sec. Did I mention this is in the middle of June 2014?
Okay.
They sacked Mosul, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi got up there at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri like a cross between Benito Mussolini and Osama bin Laden and declared himself the divinely appointed caliph Ibrahim, ruler of the Islamic State Caliphate. This is 2 weeks later. Okay, hit the button.
Dave Rubin
How are you working to align with other partners?
Michael Oren
All right, keep in mind I don't speak for the government anymore. I'm just speaking for me.
Not true. Wait, pause it again. He gave an interview to The Jerusalem Post where he said these exact same things while he was still Netanyahu's ambassador to the United States. And this is treason. This man was born in the United States of America. Okay, go ahead.
Michael Oren
What I'm going to say is harsh and perhaps a little edgy, but if we have to choose the lesser of evils here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shiites, for me.
Dave Rubin
Okay, it's the lesser evil.
Michael Oren
It's an evil, believe me. It's terribly evil. Again, they had just taken out 1,700 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in a field. But who are they fighting against? They're fighting against the proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria. You can just do the math.
And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers and rockets. The other side has access to military nuclear capabilities. So, from Israel's perspective, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail. And I, again, am speaking entirely for myself.
No, he just said, “From Israel's perspective.” From the Netanyahu regime's perspective is exactly what he meant. And it's fine, because we have plenty of Mossad and military officers echoing those exact same statements. Even Thomas L. Friedman says, “We shouldn't defeat the Islamic State yet. They're taxing the Shiites.” There's no question what he meant there.
And by the way, is he talking about the mythical moderates, the Free Syrian Army? No, he's not. How do we know that? Because he did just say Sunnis. But he also said we just saw them take 1,700 Iraqi soldiers—he says soldiers, but they were Air Force cadets at Camp Speicher—and massacre them in the field. Iraqi Shiites. That was ISIS that did that just a week ago.
When he's saying this, he's not talking about the mythical moderates. He's saying, “The Sunni evil, let the Sunni evil prevail.” He's talking about Baghdadi's bin Laden caliphate.
What are his 2 excuses? That Assad is responsible for every single death in the war, when all he's doing is defending his state from foreign invasion by foreign-backed, superpower-backed, bin Laden suicide-bomber mercenaries. He just said “suicide-bomber mercenaries,” right? But no, Assad's responsible for every single one of the deaths.
And then he lies again outright and says, “Iran has military nuclear technology,” implying that somehow the Ayatollah has a bomb and he's going to give one to Assad or to Hezbollah. And so that's why we need to back al-Qaeda in Syria. Both of those are, of course, complete and total hoaxes.
Again, he admitted in the middle of that, after lying and saying he's only speaking for himself, he accidentally said, “From Israel's perspective.” He also said the same thing again in an interview with The Jerusalem Post, either right before he left or right after he left being the ambassador. He said the exact same thing, and he's clearly reflecting Benjamin Netanyahu's view here. There's no question about that.
And I have, in Enough Already, an entire section called “Israel's Role” that showed how they were giving direct aid and comfort to the bin Laden guys by way of the Golan Heights. There was even, at one point, quite famously, an attack by local Druze on the Golan Heights. They attacked an Israeli ambulance that was shipping bin Laden guys back to the front because the bin Laden guys had been killing Syrian Druze, their brethren. It became kind of a controversy.
It was also controversial when ISIS—not even Nusra or Jaysh al-Islam or Ahrar al-Sham or one of these other groups, but actually ISIS—accidentally hit Israel with a rocket and immediately apologized.
Michael Oren
Very sorry about that. We like you guys. No offense. Forget that.
Mhm.
You can read. 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.”
There you go: “The Enemy of the United States' Enemy.” And just in case you're confused, there's a nice big picture of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri at the top. The article is about how we're supposed to hate the Shiites more now because that's what our allies want, regardless of who killed all those Americans in New York City.
They ran another one. Type in “The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-Sham.” This is from Brookings. “The Good and Bad of Syria's Ahrar al-Sham.”
Yep. It's by that traitor Michael Doran and Clint Watts.
Who's Clint Watts?
He's the guy, the former FBI agent, who was behind Hamilton 68, which lied and said that you and all your friends were Russian bots and that you ought to be censored right off of Twitter. That's who Clint Watts is. He's a damned liar. He later admitted to BuzzFeed, “I don't really know about that whole bot thing.”
He was the guy who did it, working for Bill Kristol. They created the Alliance for Securing Democracy, and it was Clint Watts who lied about that whole thing. There were hundreds and hundreds of stories claiming that Russian bots were behind it every time anything good ever happened on Twitter during that era. That's who Clint Watts is.
What's the byline here? “The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-Sham.” Oh, they deleted it. In the Foreign Affairs version, the subhead is “An al-Qaeda-linked group worth defending.”
Yeah. I mean, it also says, “The al-Qaeda of yesterday is gone.” So, it's changing the story.
They're good guys now, man. They kill Shiites for us now.
Yeah, they killed Serbs for us. We really liked it when they were helping kick in Serb skulls.
Well, just to wrap that up, Obama launched a war. He waited a couple of months to try to push out Maliki, and then he launched Iraq War 3 to destroy the caliphate again. In this case, directly on the side of the Iranians, you had Iranians on the ground, Quds Force on the ground, running the Iraqi Shiite militias, fighting for Tikrit, liberating Tikrit from the bin Laden guys, with America flying air cover for them.
At this time, John McCain complained, “We're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq,” but we were flying as Iran's air force against the bin Laden caliphate that McCain had helped build up to spite Iran for accepting our Christmas gift of fighting Iraq War 3 for them. So, it was all John McCain's fault when he complained about that.
There's a guy named Michael Horton, no relation to me, who's from the Jamestown Foundation and is a terrorism expert. He says, “Yeah, John McCain complains that we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq.” Well, we're flying as al-Qaeda's air force in Yemen, because this was at the time that Obama switched sides in the Yemen war, where America was giving intelligence to the Houthis.
The Wall Street Journal, January 2015, and Al-Monitor, by Barbara Slavin from the Atlantic Council, January 2015: America was passing intelligence to the Houthis. Lloyd Austin, Biden's later secretary of defense, was the head of Central Command. He was passing intelligence to the Shiite Houthis to use to kill al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Our enemies—the ones who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 with the underwear bomb, the guys who did the horrific attacks in Nice and Paris, France, Charlie Hebdo and the Eagles of Death Metal concert. They attacked a kosher grocery store in France and a Jewish museum in Brussels. This was, I think, the first ISIS-inspired attack at a Jewish museum in Brussels.
That blowback was coming right away. But anyway, AQAP in Yemen—they were real-ass al-Qaeda guys, and they were coming for us. They weren't just like, “Oh, al-Shabaab in Syria,” right? These guys were real enemies.
Obama was willing to turn right around because the new deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, wanted a promotion. He was the defense minister. He was the brand-new 29-year-old defense minister and deputy crown prince. He wanted to make a political move, so he launched a war in Yemen against the new Houthi regime with Obama's support so that he could use that as a power play inside the royal family.
This is when he arrested the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, and Alwaleed bin Talal and all of those Saudi billionaires who got marginalized and arrested, and had all their property stolen at that time, in a big move by MBS to make himself crown prince and de facto king, which he is right now.
He did that in alliance with Mohammed bin Zayed from the UAE, and they convinced Obama to do it. It was an absolutely genocidal war against the civilian population of Yemen the whole time. I'd hate to leave that out.
I guess we have to skip Somalia for now. Let me say about Somalia real quick. It's the longest war in American history. George W. Bush sent JSOC there in December and the CIA in December of 2001, and they never left. We've been killing people in Somalia ever since then.
The first thing they did was take the bad-guy warlord from Black Hawk Down in 1993 and try to put his son in power. They built up his son: “You bring us the scalps of jihadis.”
And get this: According to the CIA, talking to The Washington Post, this is their version. There were 3—not 13, not 30, not 3,000, just 3—al-Qaeda suspects wanted for questioning by the FBI for their potential involvement in the USS Cole attack and the African embassy attacks.
That was the excuse for this intervention: the potential that there were 3 bin Ladens in Somalia. America started backing the warlords against them. More people started fighting, and whoever their other enemies were, right? Whatever they wanted to do. The more they fought, the more they kept coming back to the CIA and saying, “Oh, man, you wouldn’t believe how many enemies there are out there.” They made matters worse and worse.
And this was at a time when people mocked libertarians for noticing that, without a government, Somalia was thriving. They had come from communism. Then they had a civil war of 50 warlords fighting each other, but everyone was spent and nobody won. So they had essentially a stateless country, but it was more or less at peace, and no one was powerful enough to gangsterize everybody else.
The ports at Kismayo and Mogadishu were open with no tariffs, and they had massive trade. One of the best ways to measure economic growth at that time was through the expansion of the cell phone industry, which was more extensive in Somalia at that time than anywhere else in Eastern Africa. This was under de facto, accidental libertarian-capitalist anarchism, right? There was no one in charge.
Libertarians noticed that. To this day, freaks and kooks, and especially liberal Democrats, like to say, “Oh, if you like freedom so much, why don’t you move to Somalia?” Well, excuse me, but George W. Bush—freedom himself—had been destroying Somalia with the power of the most powerful regime in the history of the solar system this whole time. Only an American who knows nothing about America’s responsibility for destroying that society could possibly be ignorant and idiotic enough to blame libertarianism, freedom, liberty, capitalism, and free trade among property owners for what ails Somalia. The U.S. regime is what ruins Somalia: our military and our CIA.
By 2005, they formed their own little pseudo-government in response to American intervention and aggression called the Islamic Courts Union. George W. Bush then hired the Ethiopians—their historical Christian enemies—to invade and crush them. They did, complete with mass rapes, torture, wanton murder, and absolute war crimes. That was what led to the rise of al-Shabaab.
Al-Shabaab means “the youth,” or, I’ve been told, more accurately, “the boys.” Under the Islamic Courts Union, it was a group of 13 different groupings that came together. That’s why it was a union. Who was in charge? The elders, the uncles, the imams, the grandfathers—the old men of the village—were the ones in charge of ongoing dispute resolution, right?
But once George Bush had Ethiopia invade at Christmastime in 2006, guess who led the insurgency? The boys. That’s why we’ve been fighting al-Shabaab in Somalia since 2006: because George W. Bush invented them with his horrific, satanic, demonic, murderous war that he waged there from 2001 through 2006. Then it became a self-licking ice cream cone: “Oh, look, we have a terrorist enemy we have to fight.”
In 2012, America kicked them out of Kismayo—or the Kenyans did, with American support. They kicked them out of the port city of Kismayo, where they had a black-market charcoal operation financing their efforts. It was only then that they turned to the Saudis and accepted a sack of gold coins to declare themselves al-Qaeda. In 2012, 11 years after George Bush came to Somalia, he and his successor, Obama, succeeded in turning them into bin Laden.
Only then did the Americans kill the worst leader of the bin Laden faction, a guy named Godane. They killed him in 2014. I should mention that, in Bush’s last year in power, Condoleezza Rice made a deal with the guys they had overthrown: they could actually be the government of Somalia after all. “Never mind our giant war against your Islamic Courts Union. You can be the president”—a guy named Sharif—“after all. But it has to be in the form of our transitional federal government that we’ve built for you.”
Once those guys—their original enemies, against whom they had waged this whole war—went ahead and accepted them and empowered them, al-Shabaab said, “You guys are traitors and sellouts,” and kept fighting. Obama murdered men, women, and children with drones. We had our nuclear submarines firing cruise missiles at thatched huts full of women and their daughters. That’s what Barack Obama did. He made that thing nothing but worse and worse and worse the whole time he was in there.
When Donald Trump came in, according to James Mattis, he complained to his secretary of defense and said, “I want out of Somalia. Why are we in Somalia? Where’s Somalia? What do I care about Somalia? Get me out of there.” Mattis said 2 things. First, “We’re trying to prevent a Times Square-type attack.”
The thing about that is, the Times Square attack was committed by a Pakistani American named Faisal Shahzad, who was living the dream, man. He had an advanced degree, a nice house, a wife, a kid, and a car, and was doing fine. Then he went home to Pakistan on vacation and saw the results of one of Barack Obama’s drone strikes that had killed a family there. He volunteered to sign up for the Pakistani Taliban, which had never done anything to us. They had not targeted us at all. It was the first time they did. They recruited him, taught him how to make a bomb, and then he went to Times Square and tried to kill a bunch of innocent people on, I think, a Friday night or a Thursday night.
Luckily, his bomb was just a dud and didn’t kill anyone. So James Mattis is causing terrorist attacks; he’s not preventing them. Secondly—and again, this is Mattis telling the Post—he told Trump, “You have no choice.” Trump said, “Okay.”
This was the myth that America only lost Vietnam because Lyndon Johnson tied 1 arm behind the military’s back and wouldn’t let the generals do the job, because he was poring over the maps all day, penny-pinching, and micromanaging the war effort. That’s been a big myth. H.W. Bush said, “I ain’t doing that. General Schwarzkopf, you do what you got to do.” Donald Trump said the same thing: “Nobody’s ever going to accuse me of micromanaging the military and preventing them from accomplishing their goals.”
To that end, from the moment he took power in 2017, he devolved decision-making authority as far down the chain of command as he possibly could. He cut out all of Obama’s lawyers who were in the way and second-guessing, and he devolved command responsibility. He also changed the rules of engagement to recategorize these pseudo-war zones, like Somalia and Yemen, into full-scale active war zones where the rules were looser. Essentially, he told James Mattis, “You do everything you can and want to do within the law. That’s it. You go as far as you possibly can on everything.”
He empowered the military greatly, especially when it came to fighting bin Laden. “I don’t ever want to hear somebody say that I didn’t kill enough people in Somalia and that’s why it didn’t work. I told James Mattis, you do whatever you got to do in Somalia. If they couldn’t make it work, it still ain’t my fault.” That was the way he played it, and that was the way he did the same thing in Afghanistan.
He wanted out of Afghanistan from the moment he came in. Instead, he escalated the war for 4 years while he was negotiating with the Taliban, killing an extra couple of tens or hundreds of thousands of people in a massive air and drone war, especially in Nangarhar and Helmand, for almost his entire 4 years in power.
Can we take that tangent and talk about his second term, how that changed, and first maybe take a bathroom break?
Yeah, sure.
All right, we absolutely must talk about Israel-Palestine and the Iran war today. But before that, can we wrap up Somalia and Iraq War II?
Right. So, yeah, we’ll get those out of the way real quick. Just to say about Somalia, it’s been the status quo. I have no new information for you other than that it’s been the sock-puppet government failing to quell the al-Shabaab-based insurgency this whole time. Bush bombed them, then Obama for 8 years, then Trump for 4, then Biden for 4, and now Trump, in his second term, has vastly increased the strikes.
His counterterrorism guy, Sebastian Gorka, is an idiot and a hawk who couldn’t tell you the difference between this or that, but he knows he wants to kill them all. He’s one of these Fox News blowhards, know-nothing idiots that Trump has hired and put in charge over there. He’s massively escalated the war against al-Shabaab. Of course, that means blasting men, women, and children to tiny pieces with high explosives and that kind of thing.
At one point, Trump even sent regular troops there for training and then pulled them back out again, I believe, in his first term. Dave DeCamp does a really good job covering this every day at Antiwar.com. The ongoing war is literally America’s longest war: against Somalia since December 2001, without stopping.
On Iraq War II, Obama finally launched it after using the pressure and threat of ISIS to force Maliki out temporarily. He’s still not all the way gone. They replaced him with a guy named Haider al-Abadi, who was from the Supreme Islamic Council. So again, take your pick: Dawa or SCIRI.
Then he launched the war in 2014. It was a brutal war, with special operations forces on the ground mostly guiding air power to targets. They absolutely decimated the cities that they liberated, including Tikrit, Mosul, Ramadi, and Fallujah—especially Mosul.
Killed another many tens of thousands of people to destroy the caliphate that they had built. And when I say Iraq War 3, that includes eastern Syria as well, because they ended up going to Raqqa, which was the capital. We call it eastern Syria, but it’s really sort of north-central Syria. It’s relatively east, where most of the rest of the east is empty desert.
Can you actually break down Iraq War 1, 2, 3, and 3.5—exactly where are you dealing with those?
Iraq War 1 is Operation Yellow Ribbon, Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, from January through February 1991. Iraq War 1.5 is from the end of that all the way through George W. Bush.
That’s Bill Clinton bombing them, on average, every other day for 8 years straight.
That’s Iraq War 1.5. Then George W. Bush comes in, and he and the neoconservatives lie us into Iraq War 2. That’s the war that we fought through 2008 and 2011. The worst of the fighting was over by the end of 2008. We’d won the war for our adversaries by then, and then stayed and finally left by the end of 2011.
Then we were gone for about 2 years. Although, as I said, the CIA was still doing drone strikes there, so we really hadn’t stopped bombing Iraq that whole time. Then they built up the caliphate and launched Iraq War 3 in August of 2014, which ended essentially at the end of Trump’s first year in power. 2017, maybe into the beginning of 2018, is when they wrapped up Iraq War 3.
Now is what I would call Iraq War 3.5, which is America again embedded with the Shiite army, hunting down and killing the last of the bin Laden Sunni insurgency, which still pops its head up from time to time here and there. But, of course, it puts our guys right in range of Shiite militias that operate sometimes independently and sometimes under the control—although maybe deniable control—of Iran, and groups like Kata’ib Hezbollah, which is very closely linked to the Badr Brigade.
I say all that—it’s just Kata’ib Hezbollah. But they’re very similar to the Badr Brigade. Essentially, they’re adjuncts of the official army: Shiite militias. They call them the PMUs, the Popular Mobilization Units. Once ISIS came to western Iraq, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called on all Shiites to rise up and defend the new Iraqi Shia state from them and all that. That’s where the PMUs really came into existence.
Then, of course, they have their own incentive structures going on and are probably pretty close in relative power to the official Iraqi army itself at this point. They’re very much under—I don’t know—complete control, but they’re very close to the Iranian Quds Force and the Revolutionary Guard. I think you would say that Iraq War 3.5 is what continues to this day.
The worry is that it’ll turn into Iraq War 4, and we’re going to end up turning around again and fighting against the Shiites that we fought Iraq Wars 2 and 3 for, in connection to what’s going on—
In alliance with Israel against Iran and their friends. Right? That’s the danger. If we get to Iraq War 4, that would be it.
We started talking about Iran, and then you went to Somalia because we had to cover Somalia.
Right.
I guess because we’re both just focused and a little bit exhausted, we forgot to talk about Iran. So, Scott, one of the amazing things about you is that you said, “Why don’t we just continue today?” And you came back. Let’s do this. Let’s talk about the war in Iran.
Yeah.
What’s the right way to—
Punch it in.
We’ll punch it in.
Yeah. Here’s the question that you asked me that I never answered: What is with Israel’s hyperfocus on Iran, anyway? Why this obsession at this point?
As we talked about, it’s kind of a distraction for Rabin in the first place. Then the Likud took Rabin’s same demonization of Iran, but without the compromise with the Palestinians part. That was the Netanyahu doctrine.
I always thought—not always, but it was an issue—that it potentially made more sense for Netanyahu not to really seek regime change in Iran, but to hawk it up against them at all times and keep tensions high. But isn’t Iran the basis for trying to rally all the Gulf states to come and be partners with Israel now? Like, “Come on, we have to have a united front against the Persians,” especially since Netanyahu’s men in America convinced George W. Bush to go to Baghdad and put Iran’s best friends in power there?
In fact, we didn’t talk at all about the mechanics of the thing, but we did talk a little bit about the Yemen war. It was blowback from Obama’s CIA anti-al-Qaeda war that, through a few complicated steps, as I outlined in the book, led to the rise of the Houthis. The Houthis are a Shiite group from the north of Yemen who came and took over the capital city of Sana’a in 2015.
As I said, America was backing them for a little while against al-Qaeda before Obama stabbed them in the back and took Saudi and al-Qaeda’s side against the Houthis. This is another example of the supposed increase of Iranian power. Although the Houthis are not nearly as close to Iran as, say, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, which you could, I think, fairly characterize as Iran’s 51st state. In the case of the Houthis in Yemen, that’s pretty exaggerated most of the time, and they were under total blockade, so all the propaganda about Iran shipping them all these weapons was exaggerated.
Anyway, the Iranian Shiite crescent has been empowered by American foreign policy. And, by the way, until last December, we talked about the caliphate and the war in Iraq against the caliphate—right, Iraq War 3 to destroy it again. But then in Syria, that left Assad far more dependent on Iran than ever before, and more dependent on Hezbollah than ever before.
So, you could barely characterize the dirty war of the Obama years in Syria as having fully backfired and not really accomplished anything. That is, up until last November or December, when al-Qaeda broke out of Idlib Province and sacked Damascus. That was a major score for the Sunni side against the Shiites.
By the Sunni side, I mean America, al-Qaeda, Israel, Turkey, Saudi, and friends. As I say, it made sense for Netanyahu to have an enemy in Iran to rally the Sunni Arab states against.
On the other hand, from the point of view of Likud, we’re getting rid of the Palestinians—at least in the Gaza Strip. The West Bank is next. We’ve got Hezbollah completely crippled, with their charismatic leader, Nasrallah, dead. We’ve got Assad overthrown and replaced with a friendly bin Laden in Syria.
Of course, the Shiites still control Baghdad. There ain’t no reversing that. But Israel is essentially winning in many ways in the war over there, at least in the short term.
Just like I was saying about Netanyahu’s speech before the UN, this is the new Middle East. Basically, “I won.” The Netanyahu doctrine is: We get everything we want without compromising with the Palestinians.
The last major enemy player on the board is Iran. Apparently, they thought, “You know what? Having an incentive for these Sunni kings to be friends of ours is one thing, but actually just going ahead and getting rid of them and turning Iran into something like the chaos in Syria—where there’s no central state in Syria anymore at all, and it’s all just Balochi jihadis blowing themselves up in suicide bombings, and Kurdish leftists, and whatever going on, tearing the country apart—is like the Yinon Plan.”
I guess I’ll explain that. It’s really funny, man. If you read this, it’s so ridiculous. The Yinon Plan is an article published in February 1982 in the Hebrew journal Kivunim, entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.” This article was penned by Oded Yinon, reputedly a former adviser of Ariel Sharon and a former senior official with the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
Mhm.
Here’s what the thing says. It says, “Oh no, the Soviet communists are sure to finish conquering the entire world real soon, and poor little Israel will stand alone against the one-world communist state,” which, of course, is exactly how it worked out, right? The Soviets were gone by the end of the decade. They didn’t exist at all anymore.
But that’s premise 1: The Soviets are going to conquer everything, and poor little Israel is going to be all alone. So the only way we can secure our existence now will be to smash every Arab state into warring tribes, where the worst-armed enemy we have is a kook shaking a rifle over his head, and warring tribes divided by religious and ethnic sectarian divisions that they can help engineer to keep everybody else completely divided and weak.
There’s no point in being friends with anyone. Let’s just be way more powerful than everyone, because that’s the darkness of the world we face now—even though the premise is false, that still was the policy. It’s along the lines of the Clean Break, too: peace through overwhelming strength rather than friendly and decent relations with the neighboring states.
So, what’s going on in Syria now? Is there even really any such thing as Syria anymore? The Turks have a big chunk in the north. The Israelis are already taking a major chunk in the south, including Mount Hermon, right outside of Damascus.
And then you’ve got bin Laden. What kind of real state can they make there? It’s going to be this guy, al-Julani, who’s been to CIA finishing school. He clearly is—or he’s under the control of the Turks to a degree—and has stopped chopping off heads and doing suicide attacks and other bad public relations like that.
There’s still a bunch of bin Laden kooks. If he’s really that tame, his own men are going to get rid of him soon enough.
Anyway, you see, in far eastern and northeastern Syria, you have the Kurds under the protection, sort of, of the Americans, but so are their enemies, the Turks. Then you have the Alawites in the far west of the country, who have been massacred in the thousands, and you have Christians who are at least threatened because their civil status has changed under the new jihadi regime. There’s fighting between the jihadis and the Druze, where people are being lined up and shot and all this.
In other words, there is no Syria that is perfectly good with Israel, right? If they could do the same thing, I guess Jordan and Egypt are tame enough, but if they could just wreck every state in the region, I think that would be according to the Yinon Plan, and I think that may have been their plan for Iran.
Now, Lex, they tweet out pictures, and I forget—I’m sorry—which official it was. If it was the defense minister, I think it was the defense minister of Israel. He tweeted out a picture of himself with the son of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, or the grandson of the older Shah, Reza Shah Pahlavi, as though the plan was, “We’re going to parachute this guy in when we launch this war. It’s going to be a regime-change war.”
The Washington Post had a piece that said the Israelis sent messages to all the leading generals and told them, “If you don’t rise up and overthrow the Ayatollah right now, we’re going to kill your families.” Then they were hitting all these regime targets, including police stations and command-and-control systems in the military, where the idea apparently was to get a regime change.
They hoped that it would be enough to weaken the government and that some force would come to power, which shows that they’re probably delusional and listening to kooks telling them that things like parachuting a monarch back into Persia could possibly work to be a full-scale regime change.
They knew—we know that they knew, of course—that they would need America to finish the war against the nuclear program, which they actually didn’t, but at least it would take America to hit Natanz and Fordow, these deeply buried nuclear centrifuge facilities.
So whether they really hoped that they could get the United States to go all the way and follow through with a regime change, hunt down and kill the Ayatollah—I mean, there was a news story that Donald Trump told the Israelis, “Don’t kill the Ayatollah. We all know where he is, but don’t do it.” They claimed that. I don’t know that that’s true, but that was one of the stories that they put out anyway: that America had made its explicit choice to preserve the regime.
Although, if you just kill the Ayatollah, that doesn’t necessarily destroy the government, right? Somebody killed our president. That doesn’t mean the whole government falls, right? Congress is still going to convene, and they’re going to have a new guy or whatever.
Well, didn’t Trump explicitly post, “Don’t kill the Ayatollah”? I think he said, “We know where he is.”
Yeah, I think he threatened him, but I think they also put out a story saying that he told the Israelis not to kill him. I think both things are right there.
The point being that to get real regime change in Iran means a real war in Iran. Air dominance is one thing, but boots on the ground, standing around in Tehran telling mullahs that they cannot convene anymore or whatever, is a whole different ballgame, right?
For all the talk of war with Iran over the last 2 decades at least, nobody’s talked about sending in some kind of occupation force or doing anything like that. That’s always been a big part of the argument against the war: You start the war, but you don’t really have a way to finish it, right?
In fact, as we’ve already seen, contrary to Trump’s claims, they did not completely obliterate their centrifuge capacity. They seem to have inflicted some pretty heavy damage on Fordow and/or Natanz, although there are conflicting reports, and some say that Natanz was less damaged than might have been expected.
Importantly, they did destroy the conversion facility at Isfahan. That’s where you can take uranium metal after you refine the ore, and then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas. That’s what you spin in the centrifuge cascades, and then you convert it back into metal. Without that facility, you either have a bunch of gas or you have a bunch of metal that you can’t enrich to another stage, to a higher stage.
Or if you have a bunch of gas, you can’t convert it back into metal.
So without that facility, they have a setback. But I don’t think all their facilities are destroyed. They’ve already announced that they’re not all destroyed and that they still reserve the right to enrich uranium, and that they’re not even going to talk to us anymore until we recognize their right to enrich uranium.
Although they do say—and I’m not saying that this is true, I don’t know that this is true, but I’m saying it is true that they’ve said this—that they are still bound by the Ayatollah’s fatwa of 2003, reiterating the previous Ayatollah’s fatwa that bans the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
So they’re declaring that they have not broken out to a nuke and are calling their bluff, which, again, was always an implied bluff. They never explicitly said, “Don’t you bomb us or we’ll make nukes,” but that seemed to be the implied threat. They’re a threshold state. They have a latent deterrent. What happens if you bomb it? “Well, now we’ll make nukes” was always the implied threat.
Well, now they’re saying no. That could be just because America inflicted so much damage on their facilities that it’s going to take them a while to get up and running enough to even make a credible breakout. I don’t know.
It could also be that the Ayatollah has just said, “No, the principle of our sovereign right to enrich uranium and have a nuclear program for peaceful purposes is the only thing that we’re insisting on. And we really, just like we always said, don’t want nukes anyway.”
Now that Trump has accepted Netanyahu’s definition that any nuclear program is a nuclear weapons program, if they keep enriching, then we keep bombing. Trump has explicitly threatened that, right? So we’re just on this ladder.
They’re not going to give up enrichment, and Trump is apparently, so far, never going to back down on enrichment, which George W. Bush and Obama had done. What are you going to do? They’re never going to give up enrichment. If we’re going to be reasonable and get a deal, we are going to have to recognize their right to enrich, which is actually in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which they have signed, which is America’s treaty.
Do you think the world is a more dangerous place if Iran gets a nuclear weapon?
Yeah. I don’t want anybody having nukes. I hate to see the proliferation. In a way, nuclear weapons seem to make states more responsible a lot of times, but you can’t really count on that, right?
“Yeah, they keep the peace.”
They do keep the peace. Major powers don’t want to fight with hydrogen bombs. Come on. It’s insane. It’s beyond insane. It’s unthinkable.
On the other hand, it’s a great bluff until it fails. If it fails, then you’re talking about devastation beyond imagination.
Is that surprising to you? Sorry to once again zoom out on human nature, but mutual assured destruction has worked up to this point, seemingly effectively.
It’s just a blink of an eye.
Right. The Soviets got nukes in 1949.
Yeah.
Meaning, in the full arc of human history, it’s a blink of an eye.
That’s right. There’s no real base of statistics to measure from, right? It’s been a few decades.
Think of it like this: If I say to you, “Look, man, here’s how international security is going to work for the next 275 years, okay? All the major powers are going to have hydrogen bombs, and they’re all going to hold them at each other’s capital cities’ heads in a Mexican standoff permanently, and it’s going to be great. That’s how we’re going to go forward for the next 10 generations.”
No, that couldn’t possibly work, could it? We’re all going to die at some point if that’s the setup. I’m not advocating for a global state here. I’m perfectly against that, better than anybody, but I’m just saying there’s got to be a better way than the permanent H-bomb Mexican standoff.
I’m not advocating for unilateral disarmament and surrender, but I am advocating for multilateral disarmament. Ronald Reagan thought we could do it, not Walter Mondale. Ronald Reagan went to Reykjavik in 1986, and he was a hair away from making a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev.
This was 3 years before the wall came down in Berlin. They didn’t know that the Soviet Union was about to cease to exist. The Soviet Union didn’t cease to exist until the end of 1991. They didn’t know. Ronald Reagan didn’t know this was the end of the Soviet Union. He knew it was the end of the Cold War. He and Gorbachev were ending the Cold War.
Reagan believed, to some degree or another—I can’t speak exactly, but reportedly—that he was on a mission from God, that he had a destiny granted to him, mandated to him, to abolish nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. He was a hair away from making that deal with Gorbachev.
The tragedy of it is that the deal fell apart because of the completely fantastic and ridiculous promise of the Star Wars shield program, where they were going to have lasers in space to shoot down all incoming ICBMs and all this. We’re talking about 1986 technology, right? This is a joke.
There’s no way in the world they’re going to do that. It would have cost however many trillions we didn’t have and never worked anyway. Reagan said, “Well, I promised the American people that I would build one.” But the whole thing is, man, if we’re getting rid of all the nuclear missiles, then you don’t need one anyway, so it’s okay.
And, by the way, they were not counting on a magic wish to implement it either. The plan always was going to be that America and the Soviet Union would try to get our nuclear stockpiles down to roughly parity with the other nuclear-weapon states: at that time, France, Britain, Israel, and China. India and Pakistan didn’t have nukes yet. South Africa only had a few before they gave them up.
And then, once we got down to about 200 or 300 each, we’d see if we could get down to 100 each. Then we’d see if we could get down to 50 each. Then we’d see if we could get down to 10.
So it was not like, “Oh, Ronald Reagan turned into Jane Fonda, the commie hippie sellout traitor who wanted to just give away the store to the enemy,” and all of a sudden became a naive believer in fantasies coming true. It was all hard-headed realism: these machines are too dangerous to let politicians hold on to them over the long term.
It’s the same conclusion that William Perry and Henry Kissinger came to at the end of their lives. They formed a group called Global Zero. George Shultz as well, Reagan’s Secretary of State, formed a group called Global Zero to say, “We’ve got to get rid of these weapons.”
William Perry had been Clinton’s Secretary of Defense. He had opposed NATO expansion, almost resigned over it, and should have. But he wrote a book, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, and wrote about how you just don’t understand these machines.
Talking about a hydrogen bomb, you just can’t imagine what it would be like to have Dallas wiped off the face of the earth—that level of devastation, and what that would mean for the survivors and the rest of us, and having all of our cities wiped off the face of the earth in an afternoon like that. Everything our ancestors have built for 3,000 years, destroyed over nothing, could possibly be worth it. Nothing could be.
There are so many difficult questions here. Do you think the world is stable and smart enough to deal with a situation where somebody drops one nuclear weapon?
I don’t know. That’s the worry, right? From all the war games, once the nukes start going off, they keep going off. “We can’t let them nuke us without nuking them back. We have to do something, sir.” And then it just keeps going and going.
The Americans claimed that the Russians—and I don’t know the truth of this; it could be true—have a doctrine of “escalate to de-escalate.” I think they denied it, but in other words, they’ll go ahead and drop a nuke first and say, “See, that’s how angry we are. You guys better back down.”
The Americans immediately ran a war game, publicly leaked it, and said, “If the Russians ever try to do that ‘escalate to de-escalate’ stuff, no, we will nuke Belarus, and we will say, ‘Oh no, we’re the ones who are loco. Don’t you mess with us. We are escalating to de-escalate. Now you back down.’”
So you see, then we all die by 7:30, right?
Is there a number of warheads that’s low enough—because you said bring it down from 100 to 50 to 10?
I had a fun conversation one time with Lyle Goldstein, who’s this brilliant nuclear war planner and defense analyst. He used to be at the Naval War College. I was saying, “But come on, Lyle. What if we just got them down to a few low-kiloton-type bombs or whatever?”
He goes, “Yeah, no, we don’t want to do that, because that makes them much more thinkable and usable. What you want to do is have at least a certain minimum number of multimegaton city-killer bombs so that the capital cities remain in jeopardy, because that is the counter-incentive to politicians going that far. You need—forget the tactical—you need the strategic nukes to prevent war.”
All that makes sense if you’re a certain kind of egghead. But I’m just saying, man, I don’t know. Even that—the bombs that they hit Japan with are nothing compared to the “Super,” as they called it then, the hydrogen fusion bombs, where you’re talking high kilotons or low megatons.
I was wondering if you could comment on some of the interesting interviews in Hotter Than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, another one of your books. It is a book by Scott Horton that features over a decade of interviews with a wide array of experts on this very topic: the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, the nuclear arms industrial complex, and the history, politics, and future risks surrounding nuclear proliferation.
Yeah.
Are there any interesting interviews you remember, or insights?
Yeah. Well, the funny story about that is a friend of mine just came to me and goes, “Look what I did.” He sends me a PDF of transcripts of all these interviews I’ve done about nuclear weapons over 20 years. I didn’t even ask him to do it or anything. He just came to me.
Yeah.
Then I was like, “Okay, well, I want to delete a couple of these and I want to add a couple more.” Then we just kind of shaped it. I stopped writing Provoked for a minute to get this out in 2022.
But when you look at that as a piece of work, the transcripts, sometimes you might be so busy—
You might be so busy—
Thinking about the current thing and looking into the future that you forget to look back at all the conversations you’ve had on this particular topic and to start to extract some deeper wisdom from it.
Well, the title of the book—I had already done my first 2 books, Time to End the War in Afghanistan and Time to End the War on Terrorism. So this one’s called Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which I think really puts people off and makes it sound like, “Oh, just unilateral surrender to the ChiComs,” or whatever kind of thing.
But that’s not really what the book is about. The book is essentially about all aspects of nuclear weapons: America and Russia’s nuclear arsenals, past and present; North Korea, Israel, Iran, India, and Pakistan and all their different nuclear weapons programs; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and all the anti-nuclear activists, including the nuns who break into naval bases, bang on ICBMs with a hammer, and then go to prison for 10 years.
There’s a whole proud tradition of essentially socialists, like the Catholic Workers—the Berrigan family. You’ve probably heard of Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip. Frida is their daughter, and McAlister is his wife, the nun. These guys go to prison all the time. Daniel and Philip, that’s right. They’re peace activists. Frida is their daughter. She’s a great one.
So I have all that kind of stuff. As I say, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, why North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is all George W. Bush’s fault, which you don’t want to get me on that topic probably. Although I could do it pretty quick, but we should do Iran first, at least before we forget.
On Iran, and in general, what are the things in the American toolkit that should be used to minimize the chance that states like Iran get a nuclear weapon in the near future?
Send whoever is the Secretary of State—God, Marco Rubio—send somebody over there and just be cool. Look, as I said before, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexander Haig wanted to normalize relations with Iran in 1993. They said, “We do business with these people.” Dick Cheney said, “We do business with these people.”
It’s just the attitude. All you have to say is, “This is the USA. We’re number one. I ain’t afraid of no ayatollah. We have all the power.” So you’re telling me even though we have all the power, we hold all the cards, there’s nothing we can do to work it out with these people? Come on.
We still hold a grudge because they supported the groups that did the Beirut attack in 1983? Get out of here. Ronald Reagan was selling them missiles a year or 2 years after that through the Israelis. So come on. You can’t—you’re not allowed to.
Look, we helped Saddam Hussein gas their cities. Our aircraft carrier shot down one of their civilian airliners with almost 300 people on board. So should they forgive us for that so that we can move forward? Yes, they should. That was a stupid thing that some idiots did, but that was a long time ago, and we have to live on this planet together. So what are we going to do? You put those things behind us and you move on.
This is business, man. So that’s what you do. You just ignore the Israel lobby and you put Trump on a plane to Tehran. “Look here, Ayatollah. I was talking with my guys, and we figured out this is what we could probably agree on. Here are the issues still outstanding, and let’s figure it out.”
And, by the way, this is how Nixon and Kissinger dealt with Mao. They went over there and agreed to be friends first. Then they worked on all the stipulations.
And we should say, the idea here is basically: talk to everyone, but trust no one.
That’s right.
And so when we say “friends,” we mean basic courtesy and diplomacy, right?
But it doesn’t mean you trust the person.
Think about the phrase, Ronald Reagan’s phrase, “Trust but verify.” Well, what does that mean?
Don’t trust.
It doesn’t mean anything. It means don’t trust. It means be polite and verify. That’s what it means, right? It means pretend like you’re trusting because that’s how you get along in the world. But you verify.
You send your inspectors to make sure. That's all. You have an agreement to do so, and it's fine.
Quite honestly, look, man, the Ayatollah, if he wanted to secretly try to break out and enrich up to weapons grade and make a nuclear weapon, he could have. I'm sure you've heard this propaganda numerous places on TV. Marco Rubio said this numerous times.
Mike Baker is a regular podcast guest around here somewhere and was saying this kind of thing a week ago or so: Look, Iran had 60% enriched uranium. Get it? That's on its way to weapons grade. That would be easier to enrich to weapons grade. But you see, they don't go anywhere with it. It's all just a non sequitur. It doesn't mean anything.
Marco Rubio goes, "The only countries with 60% enriched uranium-235 are countries with nuclear weapons." You see how that doesn't mean anything? You can't make a nuclear weapon with 60% enriched uranium.
So what was the point of them making 60% enriched uranium? It was so they had leverage in the negotiations they were in the middle of, so they could negotiate it away. They did the same thing in the Obama years when they were working on getting into the JCPOA. And it was America that broke the deal, not them.
Then it says in the deal that if America starts breaking the deal, Iran can stop abiding by some of the stipulations in it without actually leaving the deal and without being in violation of the deal. They'd just stop abiding by some of the stipulations.
In December 2020, the Israelis killed the top nuclear scientist over there, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in a machine-gun ambush. Then, in April 2021, they did a sabotage attack at Natanz, which they took credit for. It was in reaction to that that the Iranians started enriching up to 60%.
Now, at this point in the story, Mike Baker goes, "Something, something, yada yada yada," and can't finish the statement. What does it mean that they have 60% uranium? What are they doing with it?
Yes, it's true that if they turned it back into a gas and enriched it all the way up to 90%, then they would have enriched weapons-grade uranium. But they're not doing that, and they weren't doing that.
Why try to frame it as a dangerous threat? The only reason they were enriching it up is because, of course, it is closer to weapons grade. They're demonstrating, "Hey, guys, you keep assassinating our guys and sabotaging our plants. We keep enriching to a higher and higher degree. If you want us to stop doing that, you need to engage in diplomacy instead of murder and sabotage."
That was the message that they were sending. Then, of course, they're just going to ship all the uranium to Russia or to France, probably the Russians, to dilute it down to a lower grade to burn in their civilian reactor. So this whole time, they have not broken out to make a nuclear weapon.
The North Koreans did. George W. Bush—well, I'll tell you this quick little thing. In 2002, George Bush put them in the Axis of Evil.
First of all, Bill Clinton had an agreement with them. It's called the Agreed Framework of 1994, and it said that if you leave your graphite-moderated reactor off at Yongbyon that the Soviets had built for you, we will build you 2 light-water reactors that cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium as waste. We'll give you a bunch of fuel oil and a bunch of welfare if you stay in the NPT, keep the inspectors in the country, leave your reactor off, and we'll do these things for you.
America never lived up to its end of the deal. Newt Gingrich wouldn't let Bill Clinton live up to his end of the deal in the '90s. It was actually Donald Rumsfeld's company that got the contract to build the light-water reactors and never delivered them. They delivered some of the fuel oil, but very little of it.
Still, the North Koreans stayed on their side of the deal until W. Bush came to town. W. Bush, first of all, put them in the Axis of Evil. Then, in the fall of 2002, John Bolton accused them of admitting—supposedly, although not on camera or on audio anywhere—that a guy had admitted at a cocktail party that they had a secret uranium-enrichment program.
If they did, that's not necessarily a violation of the NPT, their safeguards agreement, or the Agreed Framework. Again, civilian enrichment is protected under the NPT as long as you're not making weapons out of it in violation of the deal, right? So even if they were doing that, that's a cause to sit back down at a table. That's not a cause to break the deal.
But what did Bush do? He and Bolton tore up the Agreed Framework and officially announced that it was dead. Then they added new sanctions. Then they announced something called the Proliferation Security Initiative, which was their claim to have the right to seize any North Korean ship on the high seas in order to prevent proliferation. There's nothing in international law allowing that, but they just claimed it unilaterally.
Then, in December 2002, they put them in the Nuclear Posture Review on the short list for a potential nuclear first strike. It was only then that Kim Jong-il said, "Fine, screw you guys," and announced he was going to withdraw from the treaty, kicked the inspectors out of the country, and they started making nuclear weapons.
Now, you might ask, what the hell were they doing? I think the answer is they thought they would have a chance to go to war with North Korea before they were able to complete their bombs. The problem is, Iraq didn't go like Ahmad Chalabi promised it would go. So they were in no position whatsoever to go to North Korea.
They forced them out of the deal and pushed North Korea to nukes. The great Gordon Prather's last article for us at Antiwar.com was called "How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes," and it tells this whole story. Rest in peace, my friend Gordon. He was a great one, man. "How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes" by Gordon Prather.
So the Ayatollah said, "Look, man, hands up, don't shoot. Here's my books. Yes, I'm enriching uranium, and I know you don't want me to." He bought some material and some equipment to do it off the black market, but only because Bill Clinton denied the Chinese the right to just sell them a light-water reactor. He prevented them from doing so when that would have been fine.
If you just let the Chinese sell them a light-water reactor, they would have never had a heavy-water one. In fact, one more thing about North Korea: Donald Trump proved that diplomacy works. He completely broke the ice with Kim the last time he was president.
It was John Bolton who sabotaged the thing. He brought John Bolton with him to—I forgot if it was Vietnam or Singapore, which meeting it was where Bolton sabotaged the thing. On the second meeting, he literally sent Bolton to Outer Mongolia to keep him out of the way, but it wasn't enough.
If he had let Stephen Biegun—he was the guy who said, "Hey, we could take denuclearization off the table first and just work on normalization first and denuclearization later"—that was always obviously the poison pill of the Bush and Obama people: first, give up all your nukes, then we'll begin to talk to you. Yeah, right.
Stephen Biegun, who worked for Trump, was saying, "No, we don't have to do it like that. We can work with them." He gave a speech like that. But then, if you look at the pictures, Biegun's in the chair in the back by the wall and doesn't get to sit at the table, saying nothing. Or he's down further at the table, whatever it was, and didn't get to have his say.
It was Bolton who helped. It was the same guy, John Bolton, who Sheldon Adelson picked to be Donald Trump's national security adviser, who was the one who ruined that.
Anyway, on Iran, me and every other "don't bomb Iran" activist in America for 2 decades have been saying that if we attack them, then they're more likely to break out and make a nuke. So I have to stand on that. Yes, they're now more likely to break out and make a nuke than they were before because of the completely foreseeable fact that we can't pursue a regime change. We're only incentivizing them to arm themselves up worse.
So now we're counting on the cool, patient wisdom of the Ayatollah not to be that crazy, when the whole point supposedly of this is that he's so crazy that you can't trust him with any nuclear technology at all. You can't trust him with the ability to enrich uranium up to weapons grade, whether he is or not. But now we've got to just rely on him and hope he doesn't, because now he could.
You just dig a deeper hole under a bigger mountain and try again.
Do you think Trump should travel to Iran?
I do. I absolutely think that Donald Trump could go straight to Tehran, and then Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang, and come home and be Trump the Great. I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
And even with the Russia situations we talked about before—I don't want to spoil it, but it's very difficult to solve—
Coming up.
That's right. We're punching this in, everybody, but it's very difficult to solve.
It's funny—
—but there's got to be a way. Even if that's the hardest one, I think we could absolutely put away our problems with Iran and North Korea, no question.
I don't really know exactly what we have outstanding with China other than the potential of conflict over Taiwan. They're not really threatening our allies in Korea, Japan, Australia, or anybody else. I don't really worry about that. That's not been their history. They have their own problems. It's a very poor country in the West and all that.
I'm not so worried about the rise of China as some are. So go in and do diplomacy.
Go in and do diplomacy. And that's Trump's whole thing. Look, they say, “Only Nixon can go to China.” Why is that? Because if a Democrat did it, Nixon would call him a commie, right? He couldn't stop it. But if Nixon goes, well, it's not that he's a commie. Here he is shaking hands with Mao Zedong.
Why would Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, of all people, shake hands with Mao? They did because they're smart, right? Not because they were communists, but because they were making what they thought was a wise move to benefit America's national interests at the expense of the Soviet Union. If that means shaking the bloodiest hand in the history of the world, then business is business, right?
Same thing: Ronald Reagan can end the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev. Imagine if Mondale had won in 1984 and it was Walter Mondale trying to negotiate the end of the Cold War in front of the Republicans. You could imagine it going terribly, right? In a way totally different from having Reagan and his successor, Bush, handling it from the GOP side.
It's the same thing here, man. If Donald Trump just gets up there and goes, as he always does, “I'm the tallest, richest, most handsome, most successful diplomat in the history of the world. Watch me,” and then goes out and makes that the standard—being a good diplomat is the measure of a man—I say so, and then go out there and act that way. Then it is what he says it is, right?
And do the thing where you meet and then pull them in with that handshake.
Yeah, get that handshake.
You have to appreciate the fact that the Republicans probably still—even though there's obviously a lot of resentment and a lot of bad feelings over all these years—when it comes down to it, a Republican president really says, “Come on, everybody. We have to go fight those radical Islamists,” he could probably get a lot of Republicans to go along with that. “Oh, man, terrorism is the problem again. Remember when Islamists were the thing?” They would go along with that. I think they could.
I think Donald Trump could simply run on, “I kill Muslims dead, and I'm a big, tough right-winger.” But he does not. He runs on, “I'm the peace president. I'm the one who's trying to solve all this. I'm the one who's going to make all this go away for you.” He knows that's what we want to hear.
I think that's his basic instinct, except, of course, he has Israel—the devil on his shoulder—strongly influencing him to choose the wrong thing a hell of a lot of the time. But I think his basic instinct is to want to do that kind of stuff.
I don't think I've heard a politician talk about peace as much as him. Legitimately, I mean, it's grounded in ego and narcissism and so on—that I'm the best dealmaker in the world—but fine.
Yeah, let him have it. Call it victory. I don't care. Call it whatever you want, dude.
What it means to be a man is to go into the fire and make the best deals in the world.
That's right.
Yeah. Fuck yeah. That's America. That should be, because America has a gigantic stick and a gigantic carrot.
Fucking use it.
Yeah. And especially the carrot thing. That's my thing with North Korea. It's like, we have everything to give—
—and nothing to lose. Even when I describe the Bill Clinton deal, we give them some fuel oil and some welfare. You know what? I'm a libertarian. I'm against all taxation. But, all other things being equal, what's it to you, Lex? We pay them a little bit of welfare to keep them from turning their heavy-water reactor back on and harvesting plutonium out of the spent fuel.
Okay, now they're sitting on a couple dozen nukes, and it's all America's fault. So, you know, we could have tried harder and better and not hired John Bolton to help. These are decisions that men made. They could have gone the other way, and they still could.
If you remember when Trump first came in, he was saying a lot of really cool stuff: “Yeah, I want to sign a big new nuclear treaty. I want to slash the military budget. I want to have a new treaty with Russia and China where we all slash our military budgets.” He said, “I don't want to pivot from the Middle East to great-power competition. I want to get along with everybody. Let's all just get along and make money for the rest of the century.”
That's the lack of special interests talking, right? That's what Trump thinks before everybody gets in there and has their say about, “No, sir, we have to do this, that, and the other thing.” But why have major-power competition at all? Why have any of this stuff? Maybe we can just be a world of people owning property and exchanging it freely to greatly enhance our standard of living.
I wonder if you can comment—I forget if we already did—about the treatment of the Iranian people by the Iranian regime.
Oh, yeah. You did start to ask that, and this is where we went to a good question.
Yeah, that is a good question. But hang on, let's do Somalia real quick.
No, I'm sure it would suck to live in Tehran. Or in Iran, I don't know. I'm sure it's a police state. On the face of it, it's an extremely flawed republic, the same as ours, only different in different ways.
But the very worst things you can say about them in international diplomacy or international action lately is that they keep opening up America's Christmas gifts, right? They keep accepting them. If you want to blame them for sending Shia to die for them, you can. But, essentially, they stay home and let America do their dirty work for them.
We fought 3 wars for them: 2 Iraq wars and Afghanistan. And, hell, we helped empower their friends in Yemen accidentally, in reaction to them, but still. So they're not the aggressive power that they're portrayed to be oftentimes.
Again, look at this current war, where they fired all these rockets at an empty corner of a base, again, in Qatar. They called Donald Trump beforehand and let him know the rockets were coming. They fired exactly as many rockets as the bombs America dropped: 14.
Remember, Trump tweeted, “Thanks for the heads-up that you're shooting the rockets so we can shoot them all down.” In other words, even after America hit them with our biggest conventional bombs, they still struck back only in a symbolic way and absolutely signaled that they did not want to tangle with the USA at all.
This is after Trump warned them to evacuate Tehran, right? That could have been a threat of a nuclear strike, or at least a carpet-bombing campaign, or at least a very heavy bombing campaign against government targets—civilian and military government targets—in the city. That's a pretty major threat.
And the ayatollah is still like, “Come on, man. I want to fight you,” and shoots his 14 little, measly missiles as essentially a show only. So we're relying on that. This thing could have escalated, right? This war that Israel is dragging us into could have escalated.
What if they had shot 5,000 missiles at our bases in the Gulf? We'd be in the middle of an ugly-as-hell war right now. They'd have had to—quote unquote—send in ground troops to complete the regime change once it got that bad.
That is a risk that they were taking, and thank goodness cooler heads prevailed. But it's kind of nuts that America has to rely on the supposedly mad mullahs to be cool while we're bombing them, right? In a way where, if they escalate at all, we could escalate, and the thing could get way out of control very quickly, with America attempting to occupy a land 3 or 4 times the size of Iraq, with mountains, 4 times the population, and the rest.
I was really worried. I think we got lucky, and I was really worried that this would be another forever war.
It ain't over yet, man. That's the problem. They didn't solve it. They could have solved it at the table. They probably still could.
But they have to recognize it. Just go to the ayatollah and speak with the ayatollah.
But, you know, I talked with Trita Parsi, and he's a great expert who has been preaching more or less the dove side of the case here for a very long time. He told me on the show the other day, “I fully expect them to break out and make a nuke.”
Now, hell, they kicked the inspectors out. Israel and America just gave them cause to kick the inspectors out of the country. They think the inspectors were spies passing intelligence to the planners for the war. So they kicked the inspectors out.
Now we've lost track of every last atom. We had it where I could sit here and tell you, man, the IAEA—for all their complaints about, “Oh, we found this little thing, and we found that little thing. Explain this. Explain that.”—for all of their nitpicking, they always continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose.
Meaning, they knew where it all was. They had their scales, their sensors, their seals, and their cameras, and they knew this much uranium was here today, there tomorrow, and whatever. They tracked it all around, and they could verify the non-diversion. That's the IAEA's job.
Now that chain of evidence is broken. We don't know exactly what they're enriching. We don't know exactly how much they've been able to convert, where they diverted it to, or whatever. What's happening now is essentially under cover of darkness.
So if they invite the inspectors back in and say, “See our civilian program,” at that point they very well could have a secret parallel weapons program that we don't know about.
Now, that has not been the case this whole time. It very well could be the case going forward from the summer of 2025.
So, from this point on, you still think the carrot is more effective than the stick—diplomacy versus threatening and military action? Here, diplomacy is the only way out.
Yeah. Well, especially considering—I'm not saying that's the magic trick of all foreign policy or whatever. I'm just a non-interventionist anyway. But I'm just saying, as far as solving this problem, the Ayatollah wasn't making nukes. There wasn't an emergency that we had to preempt. So, of course diplomacy is the answer when he's sitting there saying, “Look, man, I have a civilian program, and that's going to have to be good enough for you.”
Of course, violence and threats are what has made it far more likely that they're now going to make nukes, because the Israelis say that for them to have nuclear technology at all is equivalent to them having an advanced weapons program, which is really not true. And again, it's a problem that we can't solve for them without committing to a serious war effort that no war planners have talked about in this whole time.
But again, that's the unreality of the whole thing. You can't solve it from the air, so don't start it. You're going to make matters worse, but you can't fix it with a B-2. Even if you kill the Ayatollah and 10 of his best guys, you still didn't overthrow the government there. They have 20 more guys. What are you talking about? They just make a new guy the Ayatollah and pull the old president out of retirement and put him up there.
So, if you're insisting on regime change, it's going to take the 3rd Infantry Division. Anybody signing up for that?
And the thing I really, really deeply worry about is something you spoke about: the possibility—God forbid—of a bin Laden-type character doing a terrorist attack in the United States, and then the machinery, the military-industrial complex, creating propaganda that somehow connects Iran to it. Now we have to invade Iran. We, the American people, have to put feet on the ground for regime change.
But I think the American people—I mean, the wars in the Middle East have really taught them the lesson. It depends on how quickly it's forced on them, right? It took Bush a year and a half to lie us into Iraq. Obama just goes, “Yeah, we're going to war in Libya,” and everybody's like, “Okay, whatever,” right? But war with Iran is a whole other deal. I mean—
Trump, too. Trump barely even lied us into it, right? His own government was saying, “They're not making nukes.” And he goes, “I don't care what they say. I want to do it anyway. Israel says they are.” And they just did it. They barely even lied us into it; they just did it anyway.
And then they go, “Well, see, that was over. Short and sweet. Time for peace.” Then call timeout. But again, it's not over yet.
And then we got lucky because Iran did not respond—
Yeah, exactly.
By escalating.
And Trump claimed that he completely obliterated their program and total victory, which is not true. So where are we now? We're at the second half. I mean, I was really worried because Iran was essentially humiliated. And when states like that, especially regimes like Iran's, are humiliated, they don't usually like to be calm and de-escalate.
Right. In fact, especially if it's true that they're so fragile in their power, right, that this would make them even more desperate to show how tough they are.
That's how you create terrorists.
In fact, the headline today is, “Iran demands full reparations for the war before talks.” In other words, exactly what you said: “Give us our pride, and then we'll talk to you. Recognize enrichment, and then we'll talk to you.” In other words, we're going nowhere with talks right now until Donald Trump climbs way down on the ladder.
And by the way, in diplomacy in general, on a basic human level, letting people have their pride, not humiliating them, is essential. Doing things like labeling somebody as the “Axis of Evil”—you're signaling to your own people, maybe, but you're humiliating, you're deeply disrespecting, the other side. Sometimes you have to soften the communication in order to achieve—not trusting anybody, but in order to achieve ends, right?
And that was their whole point: to escalate conflict, right? And also, think about the lie—you talk about signaling to the Americans. How's this for a lie: that Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah and Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong-un are all in a big alliance against you to kill you, right?
Saddam and the Ayatollah both hate each other more than any 2 men in the world. The Ayatollah probably doesn't think too much about Osama, but Saddam Hussein's clearly terrified of him.
Mhm.
And none of them had a damn thing to do with Iran—or, pardon me, with North Korea—except that North Korea had shipped some missiles to Iran back in the day. But they had no tight alliance at that time, and they're mid-range missiles. Not that big of a deal, anyway. So, Axis, nothing. But the point was, these are all people we want to pick a fight with, basically.
What do you think? Did we cover Iran?
I think we got it.
I think we got it. Now, I forgot, and I wanted to thank you for signing all the books that you gave me with “Lex for Peace.” I think that's a beautiful way to sign it and a beautiful goal to live by. I hope you like it, man. All right, brother.
Now, let's go back to Iran and their nuclear program and the recent war in a minute, but you want to do Israel–Palestine.
Okay. So, it's a huge, long, complicated story. I really highly recommend Darryl Cooper's podcast, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. I know people say a lot of terrible things about Darryl Cooper, but none of them are true. He's my partner on my podcast, Provoked, our new show. The guy is a total sweetheart, man. He's not a hater of anyone. He's not a Holocaust denier.
What happened was people misunderstood him when he was on the Tucker Carlson show that day. In fact, he was making the opposite point of what people think. They thought that he was saying the Holocaust was just that the Nazis didn't have a good plan to feed all their prisoners. That's not what he was saying.
What he was saying was that even if you were a Holocaust denier, you could not deny the fact that the Nazis were taking possession of millions of people that they had no plan to care for and that, yes, in fact, a great many of them were starved to death and shot in this thing. And if you were the worst Holocaust denier, even you would have to admit that that's what he was saying.
But what happened was, a minute earlier, he had just said he thought Churchill was worse than Hitler. It was kind of tongue-in-cheek, but he was saying, for various reasons, that Churchill was the real villain of the war. And there's a case to be made for the role that Churchill played in escalating that whole thing.
But that aside, when they heard him say the thing about the feeding in Eastern Europe and the care for the prisoners, they misunderstood and thought that what he was doing was just spinning for the Third Reich at this point or whatever, when that was absolutely not the case whatsoever.
Dude, he's a really great guy. And in fact, I'd ask anybody listening to even just the very first section of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. He doesn't just tell it as objectively as he can; he demands subjectivity from you. He demands that you, the listener, put yourself in the shoes of the people that we're talking about here. Imagine if this was you.
The first thing that he describes sounds like a bunch of Israeli settlers coming to murder some Palestinians on the West Bank. But then you realize that, no, he's talking about Russians carrying out pogroms against Jews in Russia at the dawn of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century and into the 20th century. And he's talking about their victimhood and why they were so motivated to create this movement and get the hell out of there.
It was the era of nationalism, but they had no place for their own state. So they wanted to move somewhere else and do it. He tells it from their point of view as much as he possibly can. There's just no hatred or prejudice against Jews in there at all.
And it bothers me. Liars don't really bother me. They just make for a good foil. But it bothers me that good people would misunderstand and believe lies and think the worst of the guy, because I think his 25-hour-long podcast, Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem, leads up to the creation of the state. That's where it ends. It's the whole backstory to the creation thing, and it's just brilliant, man. It is. It's so good.
But in any case, look, the story is there was this radical Jewish nationalist movement called Zionism, which came from Eastern Europe, where they wanted to find a homeland. They thought maybe they'd go to Argentina or Madagascar, and they settled on Palestine for obvious historical reasons and all of that kind of thing.
The movement only had so many Jews at the time. The majority of Orthodox and Reform Jews in the United States and in Europe mostly were against it. I don't know how many Reform Jews there were in Europe at that time. In the United States, it was a big movement, but they mostly were against it. The consensus was against it for a variety of reasons.
Then, of course, after World War II, it really took off. The argument was made that the Jews of Europe needed somewhere else to go after the Holocaust. And so that was what led to a push by the Western powers to transport many more of them to Palestine and to help them create the state there.
Now, obviously, there’s only so much we can cover here, but from my point of view, to try to narrow in on what is crucial to understand about the thing: In 1948, they launched what was called the Nakba by the Palestinians—the catastrophe—and this is when they were all cleansed off what’s now what we call Israel proper, that is, less the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, but they went as far as West Jerusalem. When they created the state, they cleansed that territory through terror, murder, rape, and pillage. Mostly through terror, they forced all those people out of their homes.
When we say 750,000 people, Lex, we’re talking about the population of greater Austin, Texas, including Pflugerville and Round Rock and maybe Buda. We’re talking about a lot of people who were forced off their property and into what were then the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and then refugee camps elsewhere in Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria, and the rest.
Now, when they did that, all morality aside—strictly, what I’m saying is descriptive, not normative—in this sense, it worked. In the aftermath, the Zionists had created an 80/20, super-duper Jewish majority, so they could call themselves a Jewish democracy and have a lot of the trappings of democracy and ingratiate themselves with the West, or try to, on that basis. There’s some truth to it, of course.
By the way, let me recommend to you and to your listeners—I really hope you read this. I’ll bring you one. I should have brought you one today; I didn’t think of it. I have a stack of them at my house. It’s called Coming to Palestine by my colleague Sheldon Richman. He is the co-founder with me of the Libertarian Institute and a brilliant and longtime libertarian writer and activist. He was, of course, raised Jewish and Zionist in the United States, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
This is a collection of essays that he wrote over probably 30 years or something. It’s about how he learned the truth about all this and why he ain’t a Zionist no more. He says, “What do you mean, the Deir Yassin massacre,” which is like the My Lai massacre, right? This horror show. “I never heard of that. They told me it was a land without people for a people without land.” That kind of sounds screwy, doesn’t it? “The Eastern Mediterranean shore was devoid of life.” I don’t know. So that was a lie, right?
In fact, I mentioned Eric Margolis, my friend, the journalist. His mother was sort of a Lois Lane character, an independent journalist of her own, who went tramping around the region after World War II, interviewing sultans and kings and potentates and whatever. She reported on the horrific conditions of the poor Palestinian refugees, the Muslims and Christians who had been cleansed from their land and forced into the West Bank. They threatened to murder her, and they threatened to murder my friend, little baby Eric Margolis, if she would dare to continue to tell the truth.
At that time, Lex, the Palestinian people’s existence was a wild conspiracy theory believed by kooks. Only kooks believed there were Palestinians. This was a land without people for a people without land. What a coincidence. What good fortune that they could come and just make an empty desert bloom at a cost to nobody and at no cost to anybody’s conscience here.
People who really knew a lot about things would have known better than that, I guess, but that was essentially the mythology that the American people were told by popular culture, and particularly in Hollywood movies and the way that they did the movie Exodus and all of those things in pushing this mythology.
Now, the thing about that is—and I was going to say about Sheldon’s book—Sheldon points out that the Israeli government made a secret deal with the king of Jordan that he would take the West Bank and Israel would not fight him over it. They would encourage him and even help him to take the West Bank. Why? To preclude the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state on what was left of Palestine.
They wanted it all, at least someday. If they can’t have it all now, they can at least prevent the Palestinians from making their own state out of it. If we’ve got to take it from the other side—the party on the other side of the Jordan River—later, that’s easier. So they did that deliberately, on purpose, to screw the Palestinians out of their own independent state in the first place.
Okay, but now here’s getting to the meat of the thing. Go ahead.
If I may, I’ll just read a little bit more about the book. It’s a collection of essays written over 30 years that critically examines the history of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians and challenges the mainstream narrative often presented in the United States regarding Israel’s founding. Richman, a noted libertarian author, argues for reason, freedom, peace, and toleration with respect to both Palestinians and Israelis, turning conventional stories regarding the region on their head.
In this volume, Richman meticulously documents historical events and policies that led to the displacement and suffering of the Palestinian people, emphasizing their rights as individual human beings and the injustices suffered when they were made refugees, dispossessed, or killed. This book is recognized for being forthright and honest in its depiction of the conflict, drawing on well-documented data and offering a perspective that is often absent from mainstream discourse.
Absolutely right. Sheldon, again, just like if we were talking about Mearsheimer and these guys, or Dr. Paul, he’s a saint, right? Nobody’s got nothing on Sheldon, man. He is an exceptionally decent man, and there’s nothing that nobody can do about it, right?
So, what’s his motive here? His motive here is decency. He tells the story of his grandfather. They would always say, “Next year in Jerusalem,” and his grandfather would say, “Next year in Philadelphia,” because he hated Zionism. He would say this—I’m quoting a quote of a quote of a Jewish guy quoting his Jewish grandfather, okay: “The Jews are responsible for all the problems over there, not the Palestinians.”
Sheldon says that he always regretted that he never had a chance to really ask him what he meant by that and really talk with him about it. He was too young and never got around to it, but his extremely Jewish grandfather, who helped raise him in Philadelphia, had nothing but contempt for the Zionist project. He shows how most Orthodox and, again, Reform Jews were against it.
It’s going to cause Jews to divide their loyalties. It’s going to cause Jews to be falsely accused of dividing their loyalties. It’s going to cause nothing but endless disruptions in the Middle East and problems for the United States of America, which is actually their country. Think how insane it is to call American Jews the Israeli diaspora when they’re not from Israel. Israel was created in 1948. American Jews came here in the 18th century. Man, what the hell?
In the 19th century—in the 1800s—and in the 1900s is when millions of Jews came to the United States, right? How in the world are they the diaspora from Israel, which came into existence after America became their promised land? This was a big part of why there was so much resistance among Jewish communities against the creation of the Israeli state in the first place.
Sheldon goes into that in great depth. It’s just a fantastic book. It’s a little bitty book; everybody can get right through it, but it’s really worth your time.
So, where I’m going with this is the 1967 war. What happened in 1967 is that Israel took possession of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and all the Palestinians on them. They cleansed another 250,000 Palestinians. They expanded their border a little bit in the West Bank and cleansed about another quarter of a million Palestinians off their territory at that time. That usually goes unnoted.
The thing is, they quite literally de facto annexed it. I heard a report on my way here today. I was listening to Dave DeCamp’s Antiwar News, and he was saying Israel is threatening to annex Gaza. Israel stole Gaza in 1967—and all the people on it, too—and the West Bank, too, and East Jerusalem, as well as the Golan Heights that they stole from the Syrians.
Those poor Druze and their occupation usually get much less mentioned, but they were kidnapped along with the Palestinians as well. The thing about it is that they wanted that land. They didn’t want the people, but they couldn’t just get rid of them all. They had cleansed their 750,000 to create the Israeli state; they couldn’t push the rest of them all the way into Jordan.
I don’t know what the number was exactly then; I forget what it was. We’re now talking about almost 6 million Palestinians on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including the one-fifth of the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, who don’t live under occupation but live as sort of second-class citizens of Israel, in a Jim Crow–type situation where they’re not allowed to intermarry, and they’re not allowed to live wherever they want around Jewish communities that don’t want them.
With only one slight exception, the tradition has always been that they can have a political party in the Knesset, but no group of parties would form a majority with them. In other words, any group of Israeli Jewish parties would rather let the other guys form a coalition than form a coalition with the Arabs. That only changed one time in our very recent history here, I believe during Donald Trump’s first term, or maybe early in Biden’s, when Yair Lapid needed to ally temporarily with Arabs. That was the one time they’ve ever broken that tradition.
So anyway, I'm off on a tangent, but as I said before, it's 80/20. There's 1/5 of the population of Israel proper—or whatever Israel's Green Line, its '67 borders, is—that are Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians. So you combine their population with the occupied population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and now you're talking about 50/50. Only the Israeli Jews have all the power, and the Palestinian Muslims and Christians have none.
In the occupied territories, they live as utter slaves, as though under communism, under not just martial law but foreign-government occupation and military law—in other words, under the Israelis, with no law at all. We're talking about children brought before military courts in a foreign language and sentenced to dungeons without any process. We are talking about totalitarian slavery, like under the NKVD in the USSR. They are not free, and Israel is not a democracy when half the people under the control of its state have no rights at all.
They have no civil liberties, no civil rights as far as participation in the governmental process, no taxation without representation. They have no representation whatsoever. The thing about it is, what makes them not slaves is that the Israelis don't want them, right? They're not forcing them to work for free. They're certainly depriving them of all of their rights and humiliating them every chance they get, stealing all their water resources, murdering them, pillaging them, stealing their territory a little bit at a time, and working toward a day when they can finish the job and just take it all.
What's really messed up, man, is that they don't even really want the Gaza Strip that badly. I mean, sure they do, but what they really want is the West Bank, what their religious zealots call Judea and Samaria. They have this leftover religious edict from 3,000 years ago that says you can say whatever you want about the Palestinians and their natural property rights under Locke, in theory, and the Western conception of how one comes to own a thing, and they will say, “Nope, we have supernatural property rights. We get to come and kill you, move into your house, do whatever we want, and recognize no rights to the Palestinians.”
It's just like Justice Taney saying that Black men have no rights that a white man is bound to respect, right, in Dred Scott. That's the way that they treat the Palestinians. They call them grasshoppers, right? Not even mammals. They're just insects to be eradicated because the Israelis covet their property. It's as simple as that. They want to covet it, so they kill so they can steal, and that's it.
Then they'll come up with every lie in the world to try to justify it all. Now, David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel, said, “Give it back. Give it up. Let them have it. Yeah, we want the land, but we don't want all these people. What are we going to do with them all? What's the endgame here when we're taking possession of millions of people that we hate and don't want in our country?” So it's not worth it to do this. That's Ben-Gurion, the founding guy, saying that. And they told him, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know what we're doing.”
You're probably familiar with this woman, Daniella Weiss. You'll see her in various documentaries and so forth. She's the insane zealot saying we must occupy and settle all of Gaza and all of the West Bank. There's a great new documentary called The Settlers. I forget—I never saw part 1 of it, but the sequel that just came out is called The Settlers. It's really good, and it includes extensive interviews with her.
There was a statement that she made recently, in the last 2 years, or a video that came out that some journalist had revealed, I guess, of her in the 1970s explaining—or maybe it's her in more recent times just talking about the 1970s. Forgive me, but people can find this, I'm sure. What she's saying is that from the moment they took over the West Bank, she worked with Ariel Sharon to create an archipelago of settlements across the West Bank in a way to preclude the possibility of a Palestinian state as fast as they possibly could.
That was absolutely their first objective: “We've got to bisect them here and bisect them there so that they can never have a state of their own.” That was their goal this whole time, this radical settler movement. In the '90s, we talked about the Clean Break when Netanyahu came in. A Clean Break, again, is a clean break from Oslo and Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres's attempt to negotiate with the Arab states and the Palestinians.
Of course, Netanyahu—if you're not familiar with this, we should maybe play this, as long as we're taking our time here. Lex, let's see if we can find secret video of Netanyahu. This is it. This is it. Yeah, so you just mute that and read the caption there.
Let me set this up. Netanyahu, in this video, is no longer the prime minister. He's at a settler's house in the living room. He tells the boy, “Turn off the video camera,” and the boy either fails to turn it off or deliberately turns it right back on again. It's a bit unclear, but the video keeps rolling, and Netanyahu keeps blabbing.
He's saying, “What you do is you just beat these Palestinians. You just hurt them and cripple them and kill them and weaken them and let them know that they'll never win, and we'll crush them,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she says, “Ah, geez, Bibi, but aren't you going to drive the world crazy and make them mad, especially America?”
Netanyahu then ridicules us and says, “Let me tell you something about America, okay? America is a thing that is easily moved. 80 percent of them support us. It's absurd. I'm not afraid of Bill Clinton. Let me tell you what I did to Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton said, ‘Yada yada, Area C.’ I said, ‘No problem, Bill.’ But then you know what I did? I made it where Area C is this huge military area, 2/3 of the West Bank. Ha-ha. I sexually assaulted old Bill right in the face and got away with murder.”
And not because his spies were blackmailing Bill Clinton, tapping his phone and all of his sex escapades. They used that blackmail to try to get him to pardon Jonathan Pollard. That's different. They were doing that. But Netanyahu here is mocking Bill Clinton, and he's mocking the American people for being essentially a bunch of grasshoppers that he can do whatever he wants with us, including lie our fathers into sending their sons to die in his wars.
If I may just comment, one of the things that troubles me a lot in the geopolitical aspect of this is when the prime minister of Israel shows so much disrespect toward the president of my country.
Oh, he never had any respect at all. Don't let me sound sympathetic to old Bill Clinton, the child killer, when I say this, but I can almost sympathize with him. After his first meeting with Netanyahu in 1996, after half an hour, he came out and said, “Who the fuck does this guy think he is? Oh, my God, who's the superpower and who's the client state?” He was out of breath, exasperated, just stunned. Why? Why is he able to talk like this to the United States president?
I have no idea. He blackmailed Bill Clinton. He told Bill Clinton, “You better let Jonathan Pollard out, because I have you on tape with Monica Lewinsky, pal.”
And Bill Clinton was going to do it, except that George Tenet said he would resign, and that many leaders of the CIA would resign in protest if he did it. Jonathan Pollard was one of the most destructive spies in American history. He was spying for Israel, and they were turning over everything that he stole—I mean, rooms full of it—to the Soviet Union.
But it's not just Clinton. He shows this even just—let's take it to today. Benjamin Netanyahu seems to show a lot of continued disrespect toward Donald Trump. Donald Trump is the president of the most powerful country.
Norman Finkelstein
And the best friend he ever had. He moved the embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel's seizure of the Golan Heights, and wrangled these phony Abraham Accords, which we're about to describe here in a minute. Trump did all of this for him and has only barely talked him out of full annexation of the West Bank last time around, but said, “We'll get to it, though, buddy. It's cool. Just wait.”
Clearly, that's the agenda this time. Clearly, Trump's wrapped around his little finger, and still Netanyahu has nothing but contempt. I wish that someone would tell Trump, “Listen, pal, you might as well be a Palestinian to this guy. He doesn't care about you at all. He doesn't care about our country at all.”
Back to my question about Mark Dubowitz, my hypothetical here, which goes for all pro-Israel factions in the United States: Do you think Benjamin Netanyahu cares that 3,000 Americans died on September 11 because Mohamed Atta was taking revenge for what Israel had done in Lebanon? No. And you know how I know that, Lex? He told the New York Times.
They didn't overhear this and report it. He said it to the New York Times in an interview on September 11. It's very good. You want to pull that up? September 12, 2001, New York Times. Netanyahu. Very good. That's how much respect Benjamin Netanyahu has for the enlistment-age sons of the United States of America and the dead civilians on those planes and in those towers. New York Times. That's it.
“A day of terror. The Israelis' spilled blood is seen as a bond that draws 2 nations closer. Asked tonight what the attack meant for the relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied,
Guest
But the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror. Yeah, man. And listen, on September 11, Donald Trump says that there were Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the attack. There was somebody in New Jersey celebrating the attack. They were Israeli Mossad officers, and they were arrested. They told the arresting officers, “The problem isn’t us. The problem is the Palestinians.” The FBI released the pictures, and they’re holding lighters up like they’re the ones burning the tower down, and they’re all laughing and celebrating. Justin Raimondo called them the high-fivers.
Carl Cameron of Fox News did a 4-part investigative series quoting FBI agents as saying they had to have known what was happening. Mossad was in the United States, following the hijackers around, and they only gave the barest of warnings that August. They did not tell everything that they knew about the September 11 attack. Then it hit, and Netanyahu said, “It’s very good.”
Then his fifth column lied us into war with Iraq. He never got his pipeline to Haifa, by the way, but he did make a deal with the Kurds to ship the oil out of there through Syria to Israel. So they got their nickel-a-barrel discount at the cost of $10 trillion of our wealth and the ruining of the entire beginning of the 3rd millennium, pardon me.
But it just did not have to be this way. It just did not at all.
Is it worthwhile here, before we talk about Gaza, to draw a distinction between the Israeli government and the Israeli people? Just like we can draw the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people.
Guest
Yes, absolutely. Although I would say that, by the Israelis’ argument about popular sovereignty and popular consent among the Palestinians for Hamas, they are far more implicated in the actions of their government. There’s virtually unanimous political consent for Israel’s government’s actions in that country. Their political spectrum is from Dick Cheney to Hitler, with Dick Cheney being the leftist progressive. They are a National Socialist regime at war under a theory that they are a master race ruling over the Untermensch. It is a barbarian society.
Does that implicate every last Israeli individual, civilian human being? Of course not, Lex. A bunch of the people who were killed at that rave were actually there at a peace function. They were trying to figure out a way to help the people of the Gaza Strip and even someday recognize their independence and freedom and do something for them. Those people got caught up and murdered by Hamas that day, right?
There are not just liberals and leftists, but libertarians. There are plenty of army veterans and, whatever you want to go by, the overall percentages show a resounding consensus for this type of policy in that country, reminiscent of America circa 2002 in a way that we do not have.
After October 7, you’re saying?
Guest
Even more so. No, even before that. Even before that, you know, the Palestinians are considered to be the barbarians. They are the enemy. They are the goyim. They are the obstacle to what the Israeli government and the ideal for the country are. Wouldn’t it just be better if we could get rid of them all? And that is the consensus: just get rid of them all, one way or the other.
Whatever. I’m not saying, as Madeleine Albright would say, “The people of Iraq are all responsible for Saddam Hussein, and I’ll starve them all and grind their bones to make my bread as long as they won’t overthrow Saddam for me.” Which is the same thing Osama bin Laden said: “The American people are responsible for the actions of our government. After all, you’re a democracy, aren’t you? And you pay your taxes,” he said. And so that was why he said it was okay to kill us.
I would never agree with Madeleine Albright or Osama bin Laden about why it’s okay to kill innocent civilians at all. I’m as diametrically opposed to their philosophy as I could possibly be. And that goes absolutely for when Palestinians kill innocent Israeli civilians. If people say, “Well, they’re settlers and colonists and all this too,” fine. If they’re not holding a gun, they’re not a combatant. If they’re not holding a gun, they’re not a combatant. That’s it.
I don’t know what the Geneva Conventions say. That’s what the Horton Conventions say. I don’t care about any of that. So—
And especially when it’s children.
Guest
Yeah. And so, even if the population of the United States—say, the population of Texas broadly—and hell, you could measure the polls, I bet you it’s better than 85% of Texans supported George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Does that mean any of them deserve to be killed because they supported his evil, premeditated plot to kill people? No. That’s politics. That’s government. Those are the individual men who made the decisions, the individual men who told the lies to convince the hapless to go along.
People who cheered for it, let’s just concede, much less so. Okay? If the people of America said, “Absolutely not,” well, that would have been better. Ultimately, it was up to us if we could get enough of us to be good on it all at once. Like we talked about with Syria and stopping the war in 2013, they just could not get past the population that wouldn’t budge.
We should say that in such dire situations, the propaganda machine turns on in every individual nation.
Guest
Sure.
And so it’s actually very difficult to be a citizen—
Guest
Yeah, that can see the reality of the world clearly, because you’re swimming in information that is very constrained to a particular kind of narrative. This is true for every single nation at war. Have you ever seen the documentary “Defamation”?
It’s really great. It’s made by an Israeli Jew who goes out in search of antisemitism, and the worst antisemite in the whole movie is his grandma on the West Bank. I’m not going to quote her because she’s a vicious antisemite, but the thing is, he goes traveling all around the world trying to find anybody who hates Jews for being Jews, and he has no such luck.
He goes and hangs out with Abe Foxman at the Anti-Defamation League. He goes on a field trip to Auschwitz with some Israeli kids. But at the beginning of the documentary, he shows how the propaganda campaign against the Israeli people by their government is essentially like America 2002 forever, with no letup. It shows this, it shows that, always.
And they really tell the people—they really do raise them to believe—that every non-Jew in the world wakes up in the morning with only one goal: to kill all the Jews. That’s all anyone else cares about or thinks about, and they’re all looking for the first opportunity. “Aren’t you glad that Israel’s here to protect you? Otherwise, it would be another Holocaust immediately tomorrow,” right?
That wasn’t the result of the most insane, fanatical, cranked-out lunatics to ever seize power in a major industrial nation. No, that’s what all of humanity wants to do to us and would do at any moment if they could. That’s what they’re told all day, every day. And, to a great extent, they believe it.
And so it’s like an antifragile belief. Darryl Cooper was talking about this on our show the other day. The more people say, “My God, Israel, what they’re doing is so wrong. I disapprove, and I don’t like them anymore,” the more they say, “See? Right?” He compared them to the Branch Davidians, right? When people turn against us, it’s just like we predicted they would. “You see what they’re doing? It’s just like before.”
And so there’s no room in there to say, “Hey, wait a minute. Maybe we really are going too far here. If all our friends are telling us that we’re doing the wrong thing, what the hell?” Nope. You know how the antisemites are. That’s all they do, that’s all they want to do, and that’s all they think about all day long: how they can harm us. All of them.
And so, under that state of paranoid siege, you shouldn’t be too surprised that people are willing to go to the utmost lengths to destroy their enemies when they can. And of course, Hamas did a very good job on October 7 of playing into that script. But now we’re taking our time here today. So, before we get to that, let’s talk about Eretz Yisrael one more minute here, because I should mention briefly that this “Defamation” movie looks excellent.
Guest
Oh, it’s so good.
It’s an Israeli director, and a lot of the Israeli press are praising it. It looks fascinating. Of course, it’s from 2009. It would be interesting to see how that evolves with social media and all that kind of stuff, but it’s fascinating when you confront the reality.
Guest
And how uncomfortable that is, Lex, right?
That shows how uncomfortable people are.
Guest
Yeah.
When confronted with the fact that actually nobody hates you at all, they feel so uncomfortable. At one point, when he goes on the field trip to Auschwitz with these high school kids, they meet this old man, and he’s like, “Hi, who are you?” And they’re like, “We’re kids from Israel, and we came to see Auschwitz.” He’s like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why are you doing that?” And they’re like, “Well, it’s part of our history and the thing that we’re doing.” He’s like, “Oh, okay.”
At one point, they’re walking through this beautiful green field with puffy clouds, blue skies, and chirping birds. The Holocaust is long over now in Poland. It’s a beautiful scene, and they have a Mossad bodyguard there to protect them from the antisemites who are going to jump out of the woods and Holocaust them all if he wasn’t there to protect them.
And then the next day, the guy says to him, “So, how was your trip to Poland? How have you liked it?” One of the girls starts explaining, “Yeah, this old man came up to us and attacked us and called us ‘Jew donkeys’ and all these things.”
And he says, “No, he didn’t. I have it on film. I’ll show it to you right here.” The man says, “Hi, who are you, and what are you doing here?” “Oh, that’s interesting. Why are you doing that?” That’s what he said.
But the thing is, they came all this way after being told that everybody was trying to murder them. They’re in the land of the Holocaust, and there is no Holocaust going on anywhere. That was 70 years before, and they don’t need a Mossad bodyguard at all. In fact, they don’t even need any security there at all. Just their teacher would be fine.
No one there is antisemitic. No one there means them any harm at all. These high school students then have a hard time coping with that and trying to figure out what this weird world is that they’re living in, where it can’t be that they were lied to. It has to be that the guy must have said something hateful to them under his breath. “I’m pretty sure he did. Didn’t he say something about how we’re donkeys or something?”
And they just have to come up with this in their own minds to rationalize the danger that they’ve been told by people they trust that they’re in, when in fact they’re not. And in fact, when they are, it’s the direct result of American wars, like scaring a bunch of refugees into Europe and then killing even more people, and then they commit terrorist attacks and things like that, which is again all Israeli foreign policy that’s getting them killed.
But now antisemitism is good for Israel, and they know it. Benjamin Netanyahu is as cynical as can be about this. If you remember, when there was one of these attacks—I believe at the kosher grocery store in Paris—Netanyahu came to France and said, “That’s right, French Jews. You’ll never be French. You’re Jews. Come home to Israel.”
And they said, “Damn you. Screw you and get out. We are too French. How dare you come here to this country and tell everybody else that we really are your fifth column and not patriotic members of the civic society that we are, in fact, part of and have lived here for centuries? Screw you, dude.”
But that’s good for him. He likes it when people hate Jews overseas because it’s good for driving Jews overseas to move to Israel. That’s what’s good for Israel, and that’s the only thing he cares about. Again, September 11. Oh, man, this is great. This is the only way that he can see it—what he always wanted. And just like the high-fivers: “Oh, good. The Palestinians are the problem. Now we can get you to do what we want.”
Can we go to Ariel Sharon?
Oh, yeah. We have to do Ariel Sharon, 2005, real quick. Ariel Sharon disengages from the Gaza Strip. Now, why did he do that? Well, there are 2 major reasons.
The first one is—and you can pull this up, if you want to, at scotthorton.org/fairuse—the guy’s name is Arnon Soffer, with 2 Fs. Arnon Soffer. Then type in “kill and kill.” That should bring it up.
It’s an interview with him from 2004. It is 1 year before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon “disengages” from Gaza, 2 years before Hamas wins a plurality in the election George W. Bush forced them to hold, and 3 years before Elliott Abrams’s failed coup, which led to Hamas kicking the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza and seizing so-called control of the Strip under Israeli overlordship, of course, along with the institution of the full-scale siege and the beginning of the so-called “mowing the grass” campaigns, which began in 2008.
Sharon’s adviser, Arnon Soffer, explained to The Jerusalem Post that the problem is that the Palestinian Muslims and Christians are having too many babies. The Israelis don’t want to let them have a state, but they do want to kick them “out of Israel,” at least virtually or figuratively, by so-called disengaging from them, so as to reduce the number of Palestinians officially occupied by Israel by a couple of million people.
Does that make sense? So, this guy is a demographer from Tel Aviv University. He comes to Ariel Sharon and says, “Mr. Prime Minister, you’ve got to look at my mathematics here. We have a problem. There are too many Palestinians, and they are out-reproducing us. We are approaching a 50/50 split or worse, where we are going to be, by the literal dictionary definition, an apartheid state of a minority ruling the majority under this iron fist. That could be very untenable for the future of the state and our support from the other Western states, et cetera.
“So, to solve this problem, what we want to do is just figuratively kick the Gazans out of Israel, even though Israel stole the Gaza Strip in 1967, and they never did literally disengage. They just put the thing under siege.”
If you listen to pro-Israel propagandists now, they’ll say, “Well, we gave them a Palestinian state. We gave them full independence with the disengagement of 2005, and all we got in return is rockets.” But that’s not true. It was the Israelis that broke the ceasefire originally, just as they always did from that time until October 7, 2023. They broke the ceasefires every single time.
Then it was George W. Bush who forced them to hold the election where Hamas won, again, a plurality, not a majority. They didn’t win a majority of the popular vote in even a single district anywhere in Palestine. Then they formed a coalition government, which George W. Bush secretly conspired to overthrow.
It’s funny to read. The article is called “The Gaza Bombshell,” by David Rose, in Vanity Fair. In that article, David Wurmser throws Elliott Abrams under the bus for this and says this was an idiotic scheme to help Fatah overthrow Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which led to Hamas kicking their ass and pushing them out instead. Hamas then had more control over the Gaza Strip, which is what I think the Likud guys probably wanted.
And so, first of all, now, again, back to that in a second. Soffer’s article is from The Jerusalem Post, where he gives an interview to a woman named Ruthie Blum, and he explains the whole thing.
I found this—I forget where I got it from—but it was on The Jerusalem Post. The URL is still there, and you can see where other people have linked to it in the past, but the page is now dead and that kind of thing. If you search The Jerusalem Post website carefully for her name and his name, you will find other articles about it where they refer back to this and refer back to the most explosive quotes from it, et cetera.
So, this is verified and definitely a real interview, even though I don’t believe you can find the whole thing at The Jerusalem Post anymore. But that’s where it comes from.
By the way, you’ve mentioned scotthorton.org/fairuse many times. You’re almost creating an archive of important documents that, if they were to be erased from the internet, are here to be found.
Right. The stuff that’s most important, especially if I need it and I need to link to it, and I think whoever has it now is going to be unreliable in the near future. Link rot is a real thing.
It’s a real problem.
And so, on things like this, where I can only find it in a pretty obscure place, I’ll go ahead and reprint it here so that if that obscure place goes away, it’ll still exist. I mean, I really am shocked and surprised and dismayed by how many times you’ll have crucial information where there’s only 1 version of it anywhere online, and it could go away any day. You know what I mean? There are a lot of things like that. It stresses me out, so I try to do stuff like this.
So, he says, “Listen, this is what we’ve got to do. We have to disengage from Gaza.” Just as a ruse, as an optical illusion, we’re going to make it seem as though we’re kicking the Palestinians of Gaza out of Israeli control and jurisdiction. That way, you can’t say it’s an apartheid state anymore. Now we’re back more to majority rule over the minority.
Of course, ruthlessly, but still, it’s less worse than having a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian Arab, Muslim, and Christian majority. That would be less tenable, right? That was the idea.
So, he told Sharon this and said, “You’ve got to do this, and this is why.” He explains this to Ruthie Blum. It was even called “It’s the Demography, Stupid,” which was the original title of the thing. And he tells her, “This is what we’ve got to do. Then we’ll have to put them under siege, of course, and lock them in this cage like animals, basically.”
And she says, “Well, what do we expect the Palestinians to do? They’re going to freak out and fight.”
And he goes, “Yeah, of course they are. But then we will just have to kill and kill and kill. We will have to bomb them and bomb them and bomb them and bomb them to just keep them weak and keep them from being able to resist.”
That’s it. That’s where that comes from: Ariel Sharon’s adviser, Arnon Soffer, in an interview by Ruthie Blum. I’m sorry, I said her name wrong. I thought it was Sarah or something. It’s Ruthie Blum. That’s what he explains: “We will just have to kill and kill and kill.”
Now, another important Ariel Sharon adviser was a guy named Dov Weisglass, and he explained to Haaretz that the whole point of the disengagement from Gaza is to put the peace process in formaldehyde again, dividing and conquering the Palestinians.
“We leave Hamas, at least ascendant at that time, in Gaza.” Then he says, “We can say to the American Congress, ‘We have no partner for peace.’” And he says, “We have from the Congress a ‘no one to talk to’ certificate that says we have no one to talk to.” And it says, “We’ll have no one to talk to until Gaza is Norway.”
Dave Smith
See you then, and shalom.
Okay, so for Ben Shapiro and his minions and mindless parroting puppets out there who believe him when he lies that this was the gifting to the Palestinians of independence: what it was was a long scheme to divide and conquer and destroy the Palestinian people so that one day the Israelis could take the last of their property from them. That's what it was.
And then when they put them under siege, you know what they said, Lex? They said the people of the Gaza Strip are hungry but not starving. I wonder if that rings a bell in your mind, where you've heard that before. That's what Walter Duranty wrote in The New York Times about the Holodomor, in the same article where he said, "You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette." "They're hungry but not starving," said Walter Duranty and Ariel Sharon's men as they inflicted a Holodomor on the people of the Gaza Strip.
That's, again, for the people with cognitive dissonance who are like, "Well, why are we doing this then?" Again, it's the lobby. It's the compromise of the American political system. But if your dissonance is telling you it can't be that bad, your dissonance is wrong. Yes, it can be that bad. That's exactly how they are.
And because Americans—we're Westerners—we have a different tradition. I mean, even in government school, they teach us that every man is born equal. Not in every way, but in terms of our rights to own our own life and control our own destiny. That's what we believe.
You know what? Meir Kahane, the rabbi who was Al-Qaeda's first target in New York City in 1990 in the United States, gave an interview to Mike Wallace in the late 1970s where he complains that American Jews believe in all this Thomas Jefferson crap. "Well, we don't. It's us versus our enemies. We will destroy them." Now, that was considered fascism by the Israeli Supreme Court then. That is the Likud Party doctrine.
Now every Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian must be killed and/or forcibly removed from the last 22% of measly, stinking what's left of historic Palestine there. I think what's happening in Gaza is absolutely horrific, and I think the U.S. government should not be supporting that in any way.
So how can we end it? On October 7th—let's rewind from October 7th. Why did we do the Abraham Accords under Trump's first term? We did the Abraham Accords because Saudi Arabia especially, and the other Sunni Arab kingdoms, had always promised that they would refuse to officially normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians got a deal: either an independent state of their own or equal rights and citizenship in a single state.
What Jared Kushner figured out was, "Well, we can just print money, so what's your price?" So what he did was buy F-16s for Bahrain, F-35s for the UAE, and debt forgiveness for Sudan. 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. That would essentially be these countries' bribes to normalize relations with Israel. And they were working on Saudi Arabia.
On September 22nd, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech before the U.N. General Assembly. You know, he likes to do that with his visual aids. This time, he held up a map of the Middle East, with the big red arrow across from Israel to the Sunni Arab states of the Gulf, and he said, "This is the new Middle East."
Well, that was an inside joke. He was mocking Shimon Peres, because Shimon Peres said, "We've got to deal with Arafat and the PLO-Fatah and deal with a pseudo-Palestinian state, at least. Then we can make peace with the Sunni Arab states and have a new Middle East." So Netanyahu is up there crowing that, under the Netanyahu doctrine, he got the new Middle East without giving in to the Palestinians in any way.
Now, of course, he frames it like, "Oh, the Palestinians have been holding peace hostage," when what he's really saying to them is, "Y'all are screwed now, boy. Ain't nobody coming for you. I got you. You never get a state of your own and independence, and you're never getting citizenship. You're going to live in those concentration camps of yours until you're dead, and we're done taking them from you. I win, you lose." That was his speech of September 22nd, 2023.
Two weeks later, Hamas broke out of their pen and launched the October 7th attack. They did kill probably 1,000 people, as the Israelis killed at least dozens, perhaps more than 100, of their own people by invoking the Hannibal Directive.
You might remember the story of an Israeli soldier named—I think it was Gilad Shalit—who had been captured by Hamas and taken into the Gaza Strip years ago. The Israelis ended up having to negotiate and release 1,000 Palestinian captives—not prisoners, because the Israelis hold them without trial, without any process whatsoever. They just kidnap them and hold them. So they're hostages too, these Palestinians.
But they had to release 1,000 Palestinian hostages to get their 1 Israeli hostage back. And they said, "Never again are we going to do that." So they invented a new doctrine which says that if 1 or 2 of their soldiers is successfully captured by Hamas and taken back into the Strip, they'll kill their own soldiers as well as the captives in order to prevent that from happening. They called that the Hannibal Directive.
Well, on October 7th—and this is all from, first of all, very astute American observers like Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, and Brad Pearce at The Wayward Rabbler—they all immediately noticed this. But then it was double-, extra-, triple-, super-verified by the Israeli press: Haaretz, Ynet, and The Jerusalem Post. That's all you need to show that they introduced what they called—and I think they probably made this up on the fly—Mass Hannibal, which means not just kill a soldier, but even if it's a little old lady who's been kidnapped and is in the back of a car on the way back to the Gaza Strip, they bomb it.
They also used a tank to hit and kill a house full of at least 9 civilians, in one case, in one of the kibbutzim. Now, I'm not playing down what Hamas did there. I am pointing out what Israel did. And this is a big part of why they had to embellish what Hamas did.
Because look at these houses—what happened here? Hamas only had grenades. This is much more destruction than that. All the cars at the rave that were destroyed were destroyed by helicopter fire, not by Hamas. How could Hamas have destroyed all those cars? They did not have the ability to do that.
Now, I'm not saying who all was in those cars when they were blasted at the rave or exactly what happened there. But it's clear that Israel waged a bunch of the destruction on their own people, and deliberately so. There's video testimony of this girl talking about there being shooting in a house and her officers telling her to keep shooting. I think she's even saying she defied one of these orders at one point and said she didn't want to keep doing it because it didn't seem like it made sense to her, and that kind of thing.
This is part of why they embellished what Hamas did. But, of course, then they also wanted to do the Belgian babies on bayonets. That's from the First World War—all the lurid stories of the Huns' atrocities against the Belgians and why we have to go and stop them. Again, the Saddam Hussein and Kuwaiti babies thrown out of their incubators. These are the kinds of atrocities that jerk tears. These are the kinds of atrocities that get people to change their minds and support a thing that they otherwise would not.
And when, in fact, Hamas did kill unarmed women and children—particularly, I don't know how many children, but at least a few—and many, many unarmed civilians, many, many women, their atrocities were already horrific. They were already absolutely guilty of war crimes for what they had done that day.
In fact, it was so bad that people think, "I don't know, man. I'm not taking a stance on it." But I tend to doubt it, I guess, would be my stance. I have simpler explanations. But there are people who think that Netanyahu let the attack happen because he wanted that kind of horror show to be inflicted on his own people so that he could get away with doing what he's doing now.
Because why? Because what Hamas did is what's letting him get away with what he's doing now. He gave them this excuse just like Bin Laden gave George Bush one. Only Israel ain't going to be wrecked here. This is not working out for Hamas the way they hoped.
And I think their primary objective really was to take captives so they'd have them to trade for their own captives, their own hostages, to get back. But they went way too far. They killed way too many innocent people and then gave the Israelis the right.
Now, as far as the attack being successful, it's worth pointing out: we call it October 7th because it was over by suppertime. It wasn't the second week of October. It wasn't the autumn of 2023. It was 1 day that these captives were able to break out of their concentration camp and commit some atrocities, right?
This is not the nation next door. Again, contra Ben Shapiro's explicit lies, when he says, "Well, what would we do if Mexico was shooting rockets across the Rio Grande into Texas?" Well, Mexico is the name of the national government in Mexico City and its armed military force. If they were firing rockets across the border into Texas, we would have some negotiation to do, wouldn't we? Okay, or worse.
What we're talking about here is not Mexico. We're talking about an Indian reservation. We're talking about people who were already conquered and captured in 1967, who've been living under the totalitarian control of this foreign occupying army ever since then.
We're talking about—the closer equivalent would be Nelson Rockefeller sending the National Guard to put down the riot in Attica prison and killing all the guards along with the prisoners. Imagine, maybe in an earlier time, an Indian reservation where they break out and commit some atrocities, scalp some Anglo heads, and then what do we do? We go in there and bomb and kill 100,000 of them.
Or, again, because this is Israeli territory. Okay, de jure? No, de facto. Absolutely. This is a ghetto.
How about if the Trump government decided to build a wall around the South Side of Chicago and say, “We can't tolerate the violence of the Black people of the South Side of Chicago anymore. Everybody knows that's one of the highest crime rates in the country. We're just going to bomb them because occasionally they break out of the Black part of town and hurt other people, too. So we're going to enclose their ghetto in giant concrete and razor-wire walls, and then we're going to bomb them all to death.” That's what Israel is doing. Fish in a barrel, a canned hunt. You understand?
Like a father abusing his son, a helpless captive, right? A guard beating an inmate. Jeffrey Goldberg torturing some poor Palestinian in his cell. Not a sovereign nation defending itself from an attack from another sovereign nation of any kind.
Americans don't understand this because they're called Palestinians. And so, aren't they from a country called Palestine? Everybody's got a country, right? But no, Israel is on top of Palestine. So, no, they don't have a Palestine. They don't have a country. They don't have a government.
If Fatah, the PA on the West Bank, are trustees in an Israeli open-air prison, then Hamas is just the strongest gang. They're the Crips or the Bloods or the Latin Kings or the Aryan Brotherhood that have taken over the prison in the Gaza Strip. They're not the duly elected government of the people of Palestine.
When George W. Bush forced those people to hold that election in 2005, the majority of the population of Gaza were children, were minors, at least under 18. They could not vote. The majority of them were minors. That was in 2005. The last time they got a chance to vote, guess what? The majority of them are still minors to this day.
They have popular sovereignty behind Hamas and bear collective responsibility for Hamas's crimes, when, as we mentioned, in a previous era, it was Israel that helped to install Hamas in power in the Gaza Strip in the first place and helped their rise. Well, they did the disengagement to empower them again—“no one to talk to,” Netanyahu bragging about it. Then they did the botched coup, which maybe was deliberately botched. I don't know exactly what happened there, but that ended up with Hamas in charge of the entire Gaza Strip.
And then we have, as we know—and people can, you might want to pull this up if you want to and show them—it's by me and one of my guys, Connor Freeman is his name, and the article is called “Netanyahu's Support for Hamas Backfired.” Yeah, right there. Second one.
I'll tell you a funny story. I did the Piers Morgan show the other day. I debated Wesley Clark on Ukraine again. But while I was on hold, Piers Morgan was whooping the Israeli ambassador. I'm not sure if it was the ambassador to Britain or the ambassador to the United States, but he was going after him so hard. At one point, it was so funny—you could see his face twist a little because the guy realized what he said after he said it, like, “Oops, this undermines the narrative a little bit.”
But the ambassador railed at Piers Morgan, “Nobody elected Hamas. They're not the legitimate power there.” Which is—yeah, that's right. He's railing against Hamas, right? But what did he just do? What did he just do? He just told the truth and acquitted the Palestinian people of responsibility for Hamas.
And then what did Piers Morgan do? He heroically told the truth: “You know who did support Hamas? Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud.” Oh, check that out. You know who you get to kill? Anybody who's near somebody who years ago supposedly may have voted for Hamas to win a plurality. Well, you know who really voted for Hamas? Benjamin Netanyahu did. So who gets the death penalty now?
They're willing to kill 20,000 children or more so far, burying little babies. Imagine a little 5-year-old baby buried alive in rubble and having to starve to death for 5 days in there. That's Benjamin Netanyahu, the actual owner, controller, and creator of Hamas, who foisted Hamas onto the hapless, helpless Palestinian people. They supposedly have popular sovereignty and chose Hamas. Netanyahu chose Hamas for them.
And he said over and over, “We control the height of the flame. Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support Hamas in Gaza so that we can keep the Palestinians divided and so that we can continue to tell Americans—again, we're talking about Netanyahu here—so American idiots, absurd fools, that we have no partner for peace because we keep the terrorists in charge in Gaza.”
And you know what's funny about this? Netanyahu has been quoted repeatedly saying, “We control the height of the flame.” Three different people said he said that to a group of Likud ministers. Then he denied it, and his friends denied it and said he never said that, even though we got all his buddies here bragging about how smart he is for doing it that way, et cetera.
But anyway, there's a new documentary called The Bibi Files. It's all footage from Shin Bet and national police interrogation videos of Benjamin Netanyahu and his disgusting wife, Sara, and all of their friends, including Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who gave Donald Trump $600 million to do whatever Israel says. They're all interrogated in there because Sara Netanyahu is a beast who demands that all of their friends give her jewelry, champagne, cars, and all kinds of fancy things.
This is illegal in Israel. This is absolutely against the letter of the law. They are not allowed to accept these gifts from wealthy people in this way. They're totally compromised. He is a guilty felon, 100%. It's probably a huge part of why he's keeping the war going as long as he can, because they won't put him in prison as long as he's keeping the war going.
But here's my point. On video, Shin Bet asks Prime Minister Netanyahu, “Why do you support Hamas in Gaza? Why are you leaning on Qatar to give them billions of dollars?” And Netanyahu says, “This is how we keep the Palestinians divided, but we control the height of the flame,” on video to the cops.
Okay, so that means also that everyone who said that quote was a lie is either a liar or a damned fool. It's important that this is absolutely true. They say the Palestinians are responsible for Hamas. No. Benjamin Netanyahu is responsible for Hamas.
Benjamin Netanyahu owns the entire chessboard. Benjamin Netanyahu is backed by the unlimited budget and military power of the global superpower and all of his myriad civilian and military intelligence services. Hamas and the Palestinians are pawns on his board. That's the fact.
And if it's okay to kill Palestinians because they are nearby Hamas, then it's okay to kill Benjamin Netanyahu because he is literally, not figuratively, their greatest ally. And in a direct sense—not like, “Oh, America is Osama bin Laden's indispensable ally”—I mean literally, he sent Mossad to Qatar to demand that they give more money to Hamas over and over and over again, and his own men ratted him out for it. Okay, that's treason.
He's the one who should hang from the end of a rope, not the people of the Gaza Strip who have been killed. Probably 100,000 of them have been killed now, including people torn to shreds. They bomb their tents. They bury them alive. They quite literally herd them into narrow yards after starving them almost to death and bring them into a narrow area.
Then they open the gate all at once. They don't bring them in through some kind of checkpoint. They just open the gate so that the people rush in a mad mob to grab whatever food they can. These people are literally starving. So the spirit of friendship and cooperation falls aside, and now I will stab you so that I can feed my kid today, dude.
It's the Hunger Games out there, or worse. Whatever analogy that you have to Soviet communism, it's the equivalent—the moral equivalent—of Soviet communism. It's the worst thing in the world. It's the most barbarian regime in the world, far worse than the ChiComs.
They have to lie their ass off to try to pretend that Beijing treats the Uyghurs this way. Give me a break. The Uyghurs are kings compared to what's happening to the Palestinians right now. And the only thing that makes Israel the second-worst government in the world is that the United States of America has the power to do this, to help them do this to the Palestinians, but also do it to the Iraqis and the Syrians and the Yemenis and whoever else Israel says, as well.
But this is pure barbarianism. I strongly urge—I know that you've seen it—I strongly urge your audience to go watch this interview of this man, Anthony Aguilar, who is a special forces guy. He's above the Rangers but below Delta, but that's second-tier special operations: Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. He's been fighting in the terror wars all these years, fought in Iraq. I don't know how old the guy is. If he fought in Iraq War I, he certainly fought in Iraq War II and in Afghanistan, and had been deployed 12 times, Tucker said, including to the “Stans” in Central Asia and Vietnam.
I don't know who he's killing in Vietnam. Maybe just training there. I don't know.
He also did an interview on Breaking Points with Saagar and Krystal.
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. So the story is that they demonized UNRWA, which was the UN refugee relief agency. “What refugees?” Well, 80% of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees from what we call Israel proper.
Israeli Jews stole that land from them. That’s their land. That’s why they live in Gaza. They’re not from Gaza. 80% of them are not from Gaza, or they are, but their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were not. They are refugees there.
Ever since then, UNRWA has been there to provide humanitarian relief for these poor people who’ve been cut off from their country on the other side of the razor wire. UNRWA was in charge of distributing the aid. But then they lied, of course. It is ridiculous propaganda that UNRWA had been involved in the October 7 attack. There may have been 1 guy who had worked for them before who said something, or maybe even participated to some small degree, but it’s a ridiculous charge against the entire organization.
As this guy Aguilar explains, they had—I believe, I can’t remember the number. Do you remember if he said they had 40 sites around the country? I believe he said they had 40 sites around the Strip where they were delivering aid to people.
When they closed that down, the Israelis replaced it with this new humanitarian relief foundation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, I think it’s called—the GHF, right? They only have 4 sites, and 3 of them are near the Egyptian border. Only 1 of them is what they call the Netzarim Corridor, I believe it’s pronounced. That’s halfway through the Strip. The people of the north have nothing. There’s no aid coming into the people of the north at all. They’re starving to death up there.
Here’s what we’re talking about, Lex, when we’re talking about killing the starving people as they line up for aid. This has been explained in Haaretz, by the way. They have senior officials and army people talking to Haaretz about this. This is the most important liberal daily in Israel, basically the Israeli New York Times. It has firsthand reporting from enlisted men and officers—perpetrators—saying that, yes, it’s true: “We do this.”
Then Aguilar tells the story best, has some video, and shows what it is. They open the food place early in the morning for this riot, where everybody’s supposed to come and rush and grab the food. People come walking, and they force them to walk through war zones to get to the places where there’s firing going on anyway.
They force them to walk, I don’t know how many miles this is—12 kilometers. So, 10 miles? That’s a hell of a walk, man. I don’t know, 8 miles or something. Still, an incredibly long walk for poor, hungry, starving people. They get all the way there, but from the IDF’s point of view, they’re supposed to go this way, and then they’re supposed to go that way. They’re supposed to go over this hill, then come around this way, and then line up at the thing.
But there are no signs anywhere, and there are no little metal barricades like at a Black Sabbath show or something for people to follow. How do they direct the Palestinians’ foot traffic? With machine guns, with artillery, and with tank rounds. There’s an invisible line. You’ll know you’ve crossed it when I blow your head off.
When the mob of Palestinians is coming down for their food, and they can see that people on the edges of the crowd are being shot and killed, they know, “Oh, I guess that’s where the line is.” That’s how they’re supposed to know where the invisible lines are drawn. Aguilar said he asked them, “Why don’t you just put up a sign that says, ‘Go this way’?” And they go, “Nah, that’s too expensive.”
So instead, they shoot at them not just with fully automatic rifles, but with artillery and tank rounds. They blast them to hell in the name of crowd control. They say, “Oh no, we’re just shooting over their heads and shooting at their feet and shooting behind them to direct them.” Can you imagine directing civilian traffic that way with machine-gun fire?
What happens is they all die. He says they’re coming down this thing, and they’re shooting over the heads of these guys, but behind them is a hillside where people are coming down. Then, when the sun finishes coming up, there are just rows of dead bodies everywhere. The Israelis go, “Oh, Hamas did it.” Come on, man.
It would be like saying that Hamas in Bosnia did some false-flag attacks in 1995. That’s not what’s happening here. These people are being slaughtered. Starving people are being brought in and massacred. As Tucker Carlson rightly said, men were hanged by the neck for this at Nuremberg: murdering prisoners.
If you’ve seen Schindler’s List, there’s a scene in there—which I don’t even know if this really happened or not. It probably did. What the hell? Or maybe that’s just Spielberg showing 1 of the concentration-camp guards shooting Jews for target practice. That’s what they do.
There are numerous reports coming in in just the last couple of weeks. I shouldn’t say “numerous.” I saw that there’s a British doctor saying this, and then there was someone who said that he confirmed it, although I wasn’t sure how serious he was or not. I shouldn’t take that, but it seemed like a very credible report in the first place. In fact, the British doctor is at least claiming that he’s passing on reports from other doctors.
What are they seeing? They’re seeing Palestinian children who all have the same signature type of wound to the same body part. One day, the children are all shot in the genitals. The next day, they’re all shot in the elbow. The next day, they’re all shot in the knee or in the heart. What’s happening here is the Israelis are shooting them for fun, for target practice.
Just like the Nazis in Schindler’s List, killing the little girl in the red coat. That’s what they’re doing. They’re burying them alive. They’re starving them to death and then forcing them into mobs and machine-gunning them. If this was a movie, you’d say it was too over the top. It’s too fake. It can’t be true.
If anybody on the left heard this about the communists, they’d say, “No, it’s right-wing propaganda.” It’s like, no, dude. This is how they are. This is exactly how they are, and it’s exactly how they treat the Palestinians. They do not recognize their humanity. They are n-words. They are gooks. They are goyim, grasshoppers. That means it’s okay to kill them. All of them.
The prime minister gave a speech to the officer corps where he said the enemy is Amalek, out of a 3,000-year-old Bible story where Jehovah supposedly told the ancient Hebrews to wipe out a tribe called Amalek and kill every last man, woman, child, baby, and ox, and wipe them off the face of the Earth.
Now, Lex, nobody thinks that God whispered to Benjamin Netanyahu and said, “The Palestinians are Amalek,” right? This is just a bunch of crap. Even if you believe every single word of the Bible as the literal, inspired word of God from back then, that ain’t got a thing to do with this now, other than a cynical, lying, thieving murderer invoking a god who says it’s okay to kill children, that you must—you are commanded to kill them all. These were his orders to the officer corps.
Then I’ve got to read Liz Wolfe in Reason magazine every morning telling me that Israel’s goal is fighting Hamas. Benjamin Netanyahu said in May, “We are destroying all of their homes so they have nowhere to go back to, so that we can force them all to leave.” And I’ve got to read Liz Wolfe in Reason magazine telling me that Likud means well and they’re just trying to protect themselves from armed terrorists when they are explicitly and deliberately slaughtering children, shooting toddlers in the head, shooting pregnant women in the stomach, and bombing refugee tents with 2,000-pound bombs.
It is a genocide. They say it’s not. And that doesn’t just mean a giant massacre, and it doesn’t just mean ethnic cleansing. They are attempting to destroy the Palestinian people as Palestinian people. They have bombed all of their universities and schools, all of their government offices that have any records of land ownership or family histories. They bombed every last hospital in the Strip.
Lex, remember when we argued about whether or not they bombed the parking lot that one time at the start of the war? They destroyed them all. You want to talk about babies in incubators? There was a hospital in the Gaza Strip. This is an absolutely guaranteed, verified fact. If you want to stop and pause and look it up, we can do that. Otherwise, your audience can surely find this.
These Palestinian doctors were threatened and told, “We are going to absolutely kill every single last one of you if you don’t get out of that hospital right now.” They refused to leave and said, “We are protecting a NICU full of premature babies in their incubators, and we will not leave them.”
The Israelis said, “You have to leave or we’re going to blow the place up. But if you do leave, we promise that we will take possession of these premature babies and protect them.” Then you know what they did? They left them in their incubators to die. All of them. The media went in there and found a room full of corpses.
Under George H.W. Bush’s theory, America has to launch a war against Israel now and carpet-bomb Tel Aviv because this is proof of Israel’s intent to “systematically dismantle Palestine.” That was the excuse for Iraq War I, and it was a lie. This is true. It’s true.
And, Lex, they like it. They think it’s funny. They don’t give a damn. They don’t give a damn about killing a premature baby. That premature baby was going to grow up to be a Palestinian one day. “Nits make lice. Kill them all.” That’s the doctrine.
Again, Haaretz: there are free-fire zones. If anyone is between here and here, you just kill them. There’s no sign that says, “This is a free-fire zone.” If it’s an 11-year-old boy walking with his little sister, you shoot and kill them both. Kill anything that moves, just like America in Vietnam.
Dave Smith
This is like Dresden, Fallujah. Worse, worse. And, in fact, as Aguilar says, he goes, “Man, I’ve been all over the terror wars. I’ve never seen anything like this.” He told the BBC, he said, “What’s it like?” It’s like Terminator 2. Remember Terminator 2, where it’s after the H-bombs have hit Los Angeles? That’s what it’s like, right? An absolute horror show.
And, man, it’s America’s fault. No less than the Yemeni war was the American-Saudi war, this is the American-Israeli genocide. It’s not a war. It’s a slaughter. It is a canned hunt against a helpless, captive prisoner population.
And just like happened on September 11, just like happened to that couple who were assassinated outside of the Israeli embassy, just like what happened with the guy who attacked people with the makeshift flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado—and I can’t prove this yet, but you mark my words and we’ll see whether I’m right—the guy who attacked New Orleans on New Year’s Day drove his truck down Bourbon Street, killed 12 people, and injured another few dozen.
And then we were very lucky in the sense that when he finally crashed, he crashed into a backhoe or a bulldozer at the end of Bourbon Street. There just happened to be a group of 6 cops, I think it was, standing right there. So when he crashed and got out of his truck with his gun, they blew him away. Otherwise, he could have killed many, many more people.
Who was he? He was a U.S. Army veteran who had converted to Islam and signed up with the Islamic State. What are the chances, Lex, that on New Year’s Eve 2024 this man was motivated to do this for any other reason than American support for Israel in the Gaza Strip? There’s a 99% chance that was what he was ranting about to his parents in the video messages that he recorded on his way from Houston to New Orleans. That was just the same as Omar Mateen complaining about Obama killing the women and children in Syria in the Orlando Pulse nightclub massacre.
This is blowback from American foreign policy. And, again, it’s not for being a good friend to a good friend, but for being a loyal ally to a state that doesn’t give a damn about us, that celebrates when September 11 happens to us because it means that we will now be easier to manipulate and put into the service of carrying out their foreign policy goals, and spend our treasure, kill our men, and empower their enemies, requiring us to do even more to fight back against them, back and forth, over and over for decades. And all we get out of it is confiscated wealth and dead civilians.
And I’m terrified, quite honestly. I know there are a lot of people who downplay this. I am legitimately terrified of bin Laden terrorism. I ain’t afraid of the Shiites. I don’t think the Ayatollah wants to fight us, and I don’t think Hezbollah is going to do anything to the United States of America without his say-so. And he ain’t giving it.
It’s bin Laden who tried to knock our towers down in 1993 and who did in 2001, killing thousands of our people, and they’re still here. They did San Bernardino. They had a failed attack on the subway in New York. They had a failed attack on a marathon in New York and New Jersey. They had successful attacks in Boston, at Fort Hood, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pensacola, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas. These are all, in our era, post-September 11 terrorist attacks against our people because of our government serving Israel’s interests, primarily in the Middle East.
So there’s a strong case to be made that what’s happening in Gaza is going to lead to the growth of, and the increased number of, bin Ladens in the world and dead American civilians as a result of that.
So basically, it makes the United States less safe.
Absolutely.
And zooming out to the broader world, it makes the entire world less safe, including Israel.
That’s right. It’s the most cynical thing, man. There’s an interview—you probably read this before. A lot of people are familiar with this. Zbigniew Brzezinski was interviewed by a French magazine in 1998, Le Nouvel Observateur or some kind of thing. I don’t speak French, man.
They interviewed him and they said—this is in 1998 now, so this is after the Taliban had come to power. I think it’s before the embassy attack, but it’s after Khobar, after the first World Trade Center bombing, and the National Guard attack of 1995 in Saudi Arabia. The reporter asks him, “Hey, man, so all our support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the ’80s, that was your brilliant idea. It’s going to help lead to the rise of all this terrorism. So what do you think about that?”
He says, “Sir, are you kidding me? What’s a couple of stirred-up Muslims versus the liberation of Eastern Europe and the destruction of Soviet communism?” And we know what we’re doing. He says in that same interview—and I love the way he says this; you could apply this exactly to the Ukraine war—that we were not necessarily trying to provoke them into invading Afghanistan, but we were knowingly increasing the probability that they would, which is, of course, the exact same thing.
So that’s the attitude. Again, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower. If you get to be the superpower, that’s how they look at us. Some people partying on Bourbon Street in New Orleans—like, to you, you might say, “That is a sacrifice I’m not willing to pay.” Who could be more innocent than people partying on Bourbon Street? What could be more American than having fun with your friends and family on New Year’s Eve? Why should they have to be crucified for Israel’s sins? It makes no sense at all for the American people to have to put up with this.
But where you would say, “No, enough. Intolerable,” they would say, “Well, who cares? A few expendable civilians—they might as well be Afghans, they might as well be Palestinians, the people of New Orleans.” George Bush doesn’t care about them. Nor does Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Donald Trump, for that matter.
The next time there’s a terrorist attack, you and I already know what’s going to happen. They’re going to blame it on fundamentalist radical Islam, which makes evil people hate good people and want to kill us. Now we have no choice but to do whatever—what do you want us to do next? Bibi? Whatever he says is whatever we have to do next. The next time we have to pay the price for what Israel did the last time. And I’m sick and I am tired of it.
I think there’s a really big, deeper point about human nature that you’ve spoken to over the last several hours, which is trying to defeat terror with military force over the past 30 years. We have learned the lesson that that only creates more terror.
Yeah. And they don’t mind, again, because it just gives them more to do. And because, again, the bin Ladens are over there, not over here. And they like killing Serbs and Russians and Shiites, and so that’s all cool.
But also with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
I’m glad you mentioned that. Guess what? The LeT, which are the bin Ladens of Pakistan. There’s a journalist named Steve Coll who wrote Ghost Wars about Afghanistan, and he wrote Directorate S about the Pakistani ISI, their secret intelligence service, which backed the Taliban and backed bin Laden.
The LeT was one of their groups, and they seized, according to Steve Coll, control of an Indian ship for a time before special operations troops were able to go in there and kill them all off. Well, that ship had nuclear weapons on board. Apparently, the jihadists didn’t know that. They probably would not have been able to access them or know how to use them, but still.
Bin Laden jihadists seized control of a ship that had atomic bombs on it. That is not nothing, right? It’s just like bin Laden almost toppled one tower over into the other. Let’s start paying attention now instead of later.
Which, by the way, Ramzi Yousef, before he fled, wrote letters to all the New York papers saying he bombed the World Trade Center as revenge for American support for Israel and bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi, just as his uncle and colleague, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, would say years later after doing September 11. It’s always about Israel, dude. It always was.
Again, even dual containment was always about Israel. Zbig’s guy that said we had to stay in Saudi. So, you know, I know Mark Dubowitz is watching this right now and saying, “See, see, he’s blaming it all on the Jews.” But that’s not what I’m saying.
What I’m saying is that Israel, which calls itself the Jewish state and happens to be run by Jewish men—and that’s what their thing is—has interests that are very different from ours, and that their lobbyists and their, as Justin would call it, their amen corner in the United States have their interests at heart, and those interests are opposite of ours.
As Justin, I know, would hasten to point out, the majority of American Jews opposed Iraq War II. You might say, “Well, yeah, but that’s because they’re liberal Democrats.” Okay, fine. Well, they’re not Ariel Sharon’s men, are they? More American Jews, per capita, opposed Iraq War II than any other ethnic or religious group, as they divided it up in the polls at that time, right?
So it’s clearly not the lie that Mark Dubowitz would try to put in my mouth in order to discredit what I’m saying. But what I am saying is some pretty ugly, true things about the role of the Israel lobby in the United States. And again, just as Mearsheimer says, they have to work this hard. They have to spend this much money, and they have to go around calling everybody a Nazi, because that’s what it takes to get Israel to keep doing what Israel wants.
The U.S. has different interests that we would pursue otherwise. And so it takes this extraordinary effort to bend our empire to their will, including, yes, even supporting the empire itself, because Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, probably the 2 most important neoconservative leaders of that generation, both said in the 1970s—and these are their words:
I'm not saying this, and I'm not saying people took their advice. I'm saying this is what these 2 neocon nuts said. I'm virtually certain this is the Podhoretz quote: “Jews don't like large defense budgets, but we need to support them because we have to make sure that, under whatever excuse, we keep America engaged in the world so that it is available to help Israel.”
This is a big part of why they're China hawks, why they're Russia hawks, why they're anything hawks, and why they're Venezuela hawks. This is what Bret Stephens said in The New York Times—the former editor of The Jerusalem Post, who's now a regular writer at The New York Times. He said the very same thing about keeping America available to protect Israel.
Then he says in the same article, “But it's totally an antisemitic canard that anybody who supports Israel and supports these wars does so at America's expense, or in any way contrary to America's interests.” But then he's the one who's saying that's what we have to do: bend America to Israel's interests. It couldn't be anything more anti-American than that.
I would encourage people to read George Washington's Farewell Address. The guy was a brilliant genius, and he wrote the thing himself. It's probably 4,000 or 5,000 words on foreign policy where he says that we should always avoid entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world, because we'll form unnatural, passionate attachments to the interests of these other nations, and then that will divide the people here. It'll lead to all kinds of acrimony and accusations, and eventually you'll have the partisans of foreign nations in charge. They will denounce as unpatriotic the Americans who don't want to share their allegiance with another power, and all of these things. You couldn't have a 21st-century author write it any more eloquently or convincingly than George Washington himself in his Farewell Address.
What a truly great man George Washington was.
He had his flaws, but yes—Jefferson, too. All of them. But I'm grateful for this country and these men who founded the country on these settled principles that revolutionized human history. Absolutely right.
And we have to make sure we carry the flag of those ideas forward. I absolutely think that, and this is why I'm a libertarian. To me, libertarianism is real America distilled. To me, the Declaration of Independence—that is the North Star. Everybody's born free. And I don't even have to prove it to you because I'm armed. I'm telling you, dude, I'm not giving up. You understand? That's what it says.
Me, too.
Self-evident to me. Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't have an argument. I'm just saying. And that's the American creed. That's what I believe in. I believe that essentially all of liberalism, conservatism, and socialism are deviations from the true American way, which is liberty and property and the individual's right to determine their own destiny. That is what it's all about.
If we lived that, imagine being afraid Germany and Japan are going to rise back up again. This whole time, we never needed to do any of this. All we had to do was be free. We could have, as Jeane Kirkpatrick said, abandoned the entire empire, been a normal country in a normal time this whole time, stayed out of all the world's conflicts, perfected our republic to the best of our ability, made political and individual liberty our highest political goal, and shown the world how it's done.
“Y'all's bills of rights ain't good enough, not like ours is. Y'all's independent judiciaries aren't independent enough, not like ours. Y'all's rule of law is too subject to the will of men. You need to really encode this thing and follow it like in the deal,” right?
We could have. I one time humiliated Niall Ferguson's wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, if you know her. She's the atheist, ex-Muslim little pet mascot of the war party there that they traipse around and have her demonize Muslims and whatever. I humiliated her in a debate in front of a bunch of people at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. It was funny because at the end of the debate, the host said to me, “Wow, you made her case better than she did, and then you destroyed it.”
My case was that there are real problems in the Muslim world. The worst thing, probably, is female genital mutilation—female circumcision, they call it—in Eastern Africa and Kurdistan. Those seem to be the worst places where those traditions are still continued to this day. Then you have, of course, the brutality and corruption of the dictatorships of North Africa and the Gulf. You have the absolute, widespread, accepted custom of child abuse among the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially Afghanistan. I don't know as much about Pakistan.
You have, of course, the absolute tyranny over women in almost all of these countries, where they're made to wear the hijab, or the veil, or even a burqa, whether they want to or not, and these kinds of things. Whatever. We could go on and on here, Lex, about the imperfections of these countries.
But guess what? You know what's the worst thing about Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan? America is the worst thing about all those countries. The violence that our country has brought to them. The absolute destruction, the wholesale, wanton, cruel violence against populations that never did anything to us.
Not one of these groups had the slightest thing to do with September 11, unless you want to say that Mullah Omar should have just slit bin Laden's throat in '99. I guess I'd agree with you about that. But the Axis of Evil—Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—none of them had anything to do with September 11. There wasn't a single Iraqi, Syrian, or Iranian on those planes or behind any of that at all.
Obviously, the only reason they put North Korea in the Axis of Evil is because if they put Syria in, you'd have gone, “Wait a minute. This speech was written in Tel Aviv. Dude, what does this have to do with Osama bin Laden, who killed our guys, who Bush has already let him get away? Oh, you want to do something?”
Let's end with this for this part of our section before we move on to the Cold War. To show just how much our government cares about the American people's interests here, see if you can find George W. Bush from March 2002. The quote would be, “I'm truly not that concerned about him”—bin Laden. That's a quote.
This statement generated controversy, particularly when Senator John Kerry brought it up during a presidential debate in 2004.
Well, and screw John Kerry. This ain't got nothing to do with sticking up for him. In my book, I quote the entire statement here because I would not want anyone to mistakenly believe that I quoted any of this out of context. It's one of those things where we're like, “Nope, let's go ahead and see everything that he has to say.”
To our benefit, George W. Bush is only so smart and only so good at getting away with this. He clearly had conversations with his staff about how we have to change the subject, really, from Osama to Saddam. It's a little clumsy and a little difficult to do, but we're going to have to figure out how to do that. This is W. Bush sort of taking a stab at it, except that he's just not up to the task, right?
He can only be as smooth as he is in trying to make these statements. I would argue it does not work out too well for him. But it makes it very clear to us, frankly, how much contempt they have for us.
George W. Bush really meant a lot to people, Lex, when he climbed up on that fire truck and said, “I hear you, and we all hear you, and the rest of the world will hear you soon.” People really were like, “Man, we need a leader, and we got one.” Can you imagine Bill Clinton being even pretend-macho enough to act like that? When America needed a man, there was W. Bush, right?
People believed so hard in him after that. Then he ruthlessly exploited their goodwill and their faith in him in order to manipulate them and lie to them, to use their sons to go to a war for his own reasons that he knew had nothing to do with protecting us from terrorism.
In fact, again, W. Bush is so bad at this, he told Katie Couric on CBS News, “One of the hardest parts of my job is connecting Iraq to the war on terrorism.” Because, right, that's all he can do. He sputters, “Oops, was I supposed to say it like that? I guess probably not,” right?
What's he saying? He knows it is the most difficult part of his job, trying to figure out how to get people to believe that this aggressive war has anything to do with defending ourselves from that other thing that happened that one time, when he clearly was just obfuscating.
Katie Couric
Mr. President, in your speeches now, you rarely talk about or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that?
Wait, pause real quick. The American people—forgive me for stipulating this is 6 months after the September 11th attack. Okay, sorry. Go ahead.
Katie Couric
Also, can you tell the American people if you have any more information? If you know if he is dead or alive, deep in your heart, don't you truly believe that until you find out if he is dead or alive, you won't really eliminate the threat of al-Qaeda?
George W. Bush
Well, deep in my heart, I know the man's on the run, if he's alive at all. And, you know, who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not? We haven't heard from him in a long time. The
terrorism is bigger than one person. He's just a person who's now been marginalized. His network—his host government—has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match. As I mentioned in my speeches, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death, and he himself tries to hide, if, in fact, he's hiding at all.
So I don't know where
But then also, we have to expand NATO. That's the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, America's military alliance with Britain, France, and the other Western democracies, including West Germany, and now Germany and the rest, as we've incorporated more and more in Eastern Europe as well. Our military alliance—we have to expand it into Eastern Europe.
There was a huge question at the time about the obvious thing after our great, peaceful victory here. For people who are too young for this and don't understand it, if you were ever to believe in magic, God, miracles, or something like that, the Soviet Union essentially just fell away in peaceful revolutions and simple withdrawals in almost every case. Now, the dictator in Romania and his wife were put up against the wall and machine-gunned to death. Civil war broke out in Tajikistan, I think, and there was fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan, so it was not perfect. But, man, on the sliding scale of grading things on a curve, Lex, it was perfect. You could not have had magic wishes come true in a way that made the Soviet Union just dissolve away the way it did.
That kind of peaceful victory was the kind of thing where it was like, how best, in the deepest sense of that term, do we take advantage of this? We really have a huge responsibility for how we act now. One of the things that occurred to them immediately was, as so many of them put it—them being the foreign policy establishment, including the administrations of Bush Senior and Bill Clinton—we don't want to move the dividing lines in Europe further east. We want to erase them completely. We want a Europe that's whole and free.
Does that, or does that not, include the Russians? At first, the message was yes, it does. George H.W. Bush said, “We want to have a single zone of peace from Vancouver to Vladivostok,” meaning the entire Northern Hemisphere.
This is why I was such a New World Order kook in the 1990s: there were enough threads of things like this where part of one side of the argument was essentially that, yes, we should bring Russia into NATO too. To me, in my mind, that fit in with G. Edward Griffin's John Bircher grand-design conspiracy, where you take the 2 enemies, move them together, and they're going to form basically a single white-world army of the North to then lord it against Islamic South Asia and/or China.
It would essentially be the single one-world army of the one-world government under the United Nations in this new alliance between the United States and Russia. But that was not true at all. That was not right. The woolly-headed one-worlders, like Strobe Talbott—that's his own word for himself—never really had the idea that we were going to befriend Russia and bring them in from the cold all the way with us on the table for discussion. It was dismissed essentially immediately.
In 1997, when Bill Clinton was throwing them scraps and giving them the NATO-Russia Council, I was going, “Oh my God, look, they're doing it. They're building the NATO-Russia Council,” when in fact he was giving them the stiff arm and treating them like crap. But I was a kid, I didn't have the internet back then, and these were different times.
In fact, in a way, Chapters 1 and 2 of that book are me grappling with what was really going on at that time, when I thought it was something else back then. I really thought that they were trying to build this world federalism with Russia. Then I came to find out that this is Dick Cheney's world, not Al Gore's, if that makes sense—that this liberal, namby-pamby, baby-blue U.N.-flag internationalism is just cover for the brute force of American hegemony over the world.
Of course, you've got to get the liberals on board, so you tell them a bunch of namby-pamby stuff to get them on board because they like that kind of thing. “Oh, look, it's all humanitarianism, and we're passing out food,” or, you know, it's world federalism, it's multilateralism, and all of these little buzzwords that make them feel good about what we're really doing, which is seeking essentially a Pax Americana over the world. That was what was going on.
Now, obviously, if instead of erasing dividing lines we're just moving them further east, what does that mean? It means that we stop at Russia. You've got to ask yourself, how does that look from Russia's side? It looks from Russia's side like an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance encroaching steadily toward its borders. Obviously, Russia regards that as a threat.
When I say “obviously,” I mean the George H.W. Bush administration understood that that would be a result of NATO expansion. That's why they lied and said, “What we're going to do is empower what was then called the CSCE, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is now called the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. We're going to empower them, and we're going to have a security partnership.”
What's going to happen is NATO is going to become irrelevant. We're going to marginalize NATO. NATO is essentially going to become a political organization. So even if it expands, it doesn't really matter, because what we're really talking about is something that's sort of like the European Union plus the United States. It's going to be relegated to a political organization and replaced by the CSCE, because who needs an alliance? There's no enemy, and we want to be partners with you.
Since Russia and all the middle states in Central and Eastern Europe and Far Eastern Europe, if you want to call it that—the Baltics, Ukraine, and Belarus—are all members of the CSCE already, since the Helsinki Accords of 1975, well then, cool, presto: everybody's neutrality is baked in, and we're all in it together.
But they were lying, man. They never meant to do that. The plan always was to expand NATO, of course, to keep it a military alliance, to keep it the center of American power in Europe, and to use the CSCE. Later, the Clinton administration's version of the same scam was called the Partnership for Peace, where Warren Christopher, the Secretary of State, knowingly lied directly to Gorbachev's face and tried to make him believe that we were doing the Partnership for Peace instead of NATO expansion.
He was reiterating that NATO was just going to be this political thing and that we weren't really doing much with it anyway. They knew that wasn't true. They had already decided that they were going to expand NATO for certain. The decision had been made, like, in stone by then.
They were shining him on and trying to get him to go along with their further agendas as much as they could get away with, for as long as they could get away with it, before breaking the bad news to him that actually, we were expanding NATO after all. They knew that this was going to destroy Yeltsin. This was going to cause such pressure against him.
In fact, when Clinton gave his speech announcing that he had been lying and that he really did mean to expand NATO in 1994, Yeltsin freaked out because he misunderstood Bill Clinton as saying that we were going to start doing it the next year, in 1995, which Clinton had promised him they definitely would not do. Yeltsin had to stand for reelection in 1996, and this would absolutely destroy him. They all knew it.
Lex, what does that mean? That means that every pro-American, moderate, English-speaking liberal in Moscow would be implicated, right? They had said we were cool and that we were doing what we promised we wouldn't, while they were telling everybody else, “Don't worry about the Americans. We can trust them. It's all good,” and this and that.
They knew this was going to destroy Yeltsin politically. So they promised, “No, Boris, no, no, no, man. Don't worry. We're not going to do it until after you're safely reelected in 1996.” They absolutely understood the depth of how destructive that would be to him, because the entire consensus inside Russia at that time, in their entire political and foreign policy establishment, was absolutely opposed to NATO expansion. They were, of course, terrified by it.
This is all before Putin or George W. Bush ever came to town. This is just the H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton years, dealing with Mikhail Gorbachev and then Boris Yeltsin in all of this. I give credit to Joshua Shifrinson, a great academic. I believe he's now at the University of Maryland. He was at Texas A&M University, and I'm not sure where else he has written, but he wrote a bunch of great journal articles that I learned a hell of a lot from and cite in my book.
He shows explicitly—it's beyond argument—that they knew they were lying, that they were planning one thing and doing something else. He's very polite and says that they were knowingly misleading, I think, but I call them damn liars, and it's pretty clear that they were.
That's a huge part of it, just to get us started off here in the 1990s. What are we going to do? Oh, and I'm sorry. Yes, we're going to expand NATO. But first, it's important to emphasize that, yes, in fact, they did promise not to. People keep trying to debunk this, but they can't. I have rebunked it, and they cannot challenge the facts as I marshal them in my book.
It's overkill. This is one of the 2 sections where I have probably far more than I need to demonstrate my case, because I tried to simplify the case—I think I already said this earlier in our interview, I'm sorry—on the promises against NATO expansion and on the subject of the Ukrainian Nazis. I went for absolute overkill on the citation and the development of the idea, the story, the proof, and what it all means, because I feel like those are the 2 most controversial stances that I'm taking in the book as being factually true.
I want the skeptical reader to say, “Oh boy, I didn't really realize it was like that,” when they're done. To be clear on the NATO expansion, there were clear, official indications—promises made by the United States—that NATO would not expand. And not just promises, but an agreement: we promised not to expand the NATO alliance if you would allow the reunification of Germany.
And that was what convinced Gorbachev to say, “Okay, fine. We’ll agree to withdraw and allow Germany to reunify under NATO.” The deal is—and as I show in the book, it’s not just that James Baker said this one time on February 9, 1990. He said it 6 times on February 9, 1990.
On that same day, Robert Gates, who was then the deputy director of the CIA, told the same thing to the director of the KGB in a meeting in Moscow. Then the German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, said this over and over and over again, including publicly at press conferences, right in front of James Baker, who only nodded, in a sense, and never said anything against it: We promise not to expand NATO, but that includes East Germany, because here’s the rub.
This is what makes it a little complicated and maybe makes people’s eyes glaze over, or the war party tries to say, “This is all anybody ever meant by that”: Baker said, in a weird way, that if you allow Germany to reunite, we won’t spread NATO one inch inside Germany. That’s where the phrase “not one inch” comes from.
Well, that doesn’t make any sense. It’s like the West German government is going to be the government of the new Germany, right? Bonn is going to move to Berlin, and West Germany is going to be the regime that rules the new, reunited Germany. There’s no question about that. So how is it that only the western half of the country is in NATO? That doesn’t make sense.
Then they had to walk that back and go, “Okay, well, you know what we’ll do, though? Yes, obviously the whole country will be in NATO, but we promise not to move any substantial military forces into the then-GDR, East Germany.” That was short for German Democratic Republic, which was communist-enslaved East Germany.
“We promise not to move our forces in there or nuclear weapons into the eastern part.” So they were still respecting the promise. They were kind of revising it because they had to, because in the first sense, the promise doesn’t actually make rational sense, right? You can’t reunite Germany but only leave the eastern half inside the military alliance.
They said, “Okay, but we’re not going to build new bases and station forces further east, and we’re not going to put nuclear weapons there.” So they were still respecting that promise, and that part ended up in the final treaty that they signed.
Now, Hans-Dietrich Genscher made the most of this, but so did Chancellor Helmut Kohl. This is the part where Mary Elise Sarotte wrote a whole book about this called Not One Inch, and she has a whole hell of a lot on it. She and Joshua Shifrinson are probably the 2 best on it, although I think he probably has the edge.
She shows where Helmut Kohl went and met with Gorbachev. He knew that H. W. Bush wanted to reconsider this and thought that Baker was being too conciliatory, but Helmut Kohl went ahead and stuck with the day-before-yesterday’s interpretation—or was it just yesterday’s interpretation?—instead of the new one, because he knew that’s what he wanted Gorbachev to hear: This is how it’s going to be.
It was based on that promise from Helmut Kohl that Gorbachev said, “Okay, fine. You can do it.” Helmut Kohl said, “Can I quote you on that right now?” And he said, “Yeah.” Helmut Kohl went right outside and held a press conference and said, “Gorbachev just said that Germany can reunite.” Blam, got it.
Now, was that in a treaty right there? It was just a spoken word, but they moved to reunite right then based on it. The treaty came later, right? So, same kind of thing here. They try to argue that words don’t mean things, only when it’s a treaty ratified by the Senate. But that’s not true.
Ted Snider especially goes through and shows some examples, and there are plenty of others. You have the entire arrangement around West Berlin, for example, which your younger viewers may not know about. West Berlin—the western half of Berlin—was a free city wholly within communist East Germany, and it was still occupied by the United States as a remnant of the Second World War. It was a very complicated situation there.
America’s entire arrangement with the Soviets about how to treat West Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie, and all these things consisted purely of handshake agreements. They had no treaty at all.
Roosevelt, in fact, when he was still alive, said that the agreement we were already working out over Vienna, Austria, should also apply to Berlin. He did not want it on a piece of paper because he wanted it specifically as a trust-building measure. If we don’t put it in writing and both sides just have to live up to it based on what’s the right thing to do in the circumstance, then that’ll help build our relationship for the better.
And that’s really because Roosevelt was a Stalinist communist dictator himself. But don’t get me off on that tangent. Anyway, speaking of one-world communism, when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon split Mao Zedong off from the Soviet Union in the Cold War and made them really our allies in the Cold War, we didn’t have a war guarantee, but we had a deep relationship that they crafted at that time. All handshake deals, nothing official, no treaties. That’s how they handled it.
When, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev secretly, with his brother, the attorney general, over the heads of the CIA and the State Department, he made a secret deal with Khrushchev: If you get your missiles out of Cuba, we will remove our mid-range missiles from Turkey.
They didn’t even say this, but implicitly, it also included Italy, where we had stationed these same Jupiter mid-range missiles. And we promised never to invade Cuba again. That informal, secret deal wasn’t revealed until the end of the Cold War.
They said at the time, “Yeah, Jack Kennedy just faced him down.” No, he made this secret deal, and it held. It has held this whole time. They kept the missiles out. They’ve never put missiles back in Turkey.
We do have air-dropped hydrogen bombs and airplanes stationed at the Incirlik base there, but we have not stationed missiles in Turkey or in Italy ever since then and have lived up to that deal. Nor have we invaded Cuba, although they did try to murder Castro more times after that. But we haven’t invaded.
So that was an informal deal. It’s not only a handshake deal; it was secret and completely deniable. And yet they abided by it anyway, because sometimes you have to do that. That’s the way these things go.
When it comes to this, you have Peter Baker in The New York Times saying, “Nah, come on. If it’s not in a treaty, then it’s not anything at all.” But that’s not true. As Ted Snider said, this wasn’t just a promise. This was an agreement. We promised not to expand NATO. “Okay, can we reunite now?” “Yes, you can.” Shake on it—that’s a deal.
And the Americans lied and broke it. They knew they were lying and breaking it. When the Russians started complaining to the Clinton people, Warren Christopher launched an internal investigation at the State Department to find out if it was true or not. They decided it was true, but, “Oh well, screw them. We’re going to go ahead anyway.”
Can we, if it’s okay, fast-forward? As you said, your book is called Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. I should say, from me, maybe you can speak from your perspective, that the reason the war in Ukraine in ’22 started was because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.
And then you could backtrack, like, why he did it was that he escalated the war in Ukraine by about 100,000%, right? But the war had been going on for a very long time, right? And that’s very important. You know, it’s not just the backstory, but it really is—the start of the war was when John Brennan came to town on April 12 and 13, 2014, and demanded that the acting president, Turchynov, launch the war, and he did on the 14th.
It was all John Brennan’s fault, like a lot of things. A drastic escalation was committed by Vladimir Putin. Absolutely right. Yeah.
And when we look at responsibility and we talk about warmongers and we talk about the military-industrial complex—
Yeah.
That’s, I think, really important to explore from an American perspective. But when you look at the region and who started that escalation, you have to put the chief responsibility on Vladimir Putin.
Of course,
The guy’s a gangster. That’s how he got a job in the first place. He was part of the Yeltsin family, and he had been the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, where he worked for a criminal named Sobchak, who was part of the Yeltsin family.
And we say “family” like the Italian mob in New York families. That’s exactly the same meaning of that term. That’s what they called it at the time. That was where he came from in the first place.
His first job really was protecting Yeltsin and his guys, getting them out of the country with all their money safely, and then taking control of the thing. We’re ahead of the story a little bit, but the guy’s an SOB.
People say, “Oh, he’s KGB and he’s a commie.” Well, he’s not a commie. He sided with the reformers against the coup plotters in August of 1991, when it counted, right? Also, he wasn’t a spy. He was a clerk.
He was a colonel, but I’ve never seen anything that said he was out slitting throats, bribing people, blackmailing people, and turning spies. He was an operations guy back at headquarters.
I know a lady named Susan Tennyson. You ever heard of her? She’s an American who was doing outreach to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. She spent her whole lifetime—I think she’s still alive—a little old lady, a sweet old lady—trying to make friends with Russia.
And she told me the story about meeting Putin when he was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg and how he wouldn’t take a bribe. He just wanted to get the job done. Whatever the job was, she needed some bureaucratic hurdles taken care of. He said, “Well, check this box and sign here, and thank you very much,” and didn’t want her money, which she thought was a really big deal at the time. She thought, “Wow, this guy has a sense of honor and duty, and he’s doing his job in a way that nobody else here does.” Everybody else here was a Mexican cop getting a kickback, you know what I mean? Everybody else was, and he wasn’t.
I’m not saying that makes him a moral guy or whatever, but I’m saying that makes him very much a business-is-business sort of dude who has his priorities in that way. He’s the head of state of a powerful state, and you have to be, in practice, a psychopath to run a country like that. That goes for Obama and the rest of them, too, man. It’s a psychopathic job to kill people, especially in the kind of large numbers that the Americans do. Putin’s been responsible for a bit of violence himself, up until this time.
I don’t think anybody underestimates him. There are some people who are so anti-American empire that they start seeing—or maybe are too sympathetic, instead of just empathetic with—the other side, and sort of rationalize the Russian point of view in a way that doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t think you have to. Honestly, I don’t see anything.
Well, look, I have a Bill Hicks quote in the book. He’s talking about how pro-life people ought to be blocking cemeteries and preventing funerals, but he says, “There’s options.” I just like little tiny Easter eggs like that.
Putin could have done other things. For example, he could have, again, like in 2018, demanded—only this time really seriously, loudly, and with the world paying close attention in a way that they weren’t in 2018—that he wanted baby-blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from a third, non-interested country to go stand on the border of the gray zone in the Donbas, on what was supposed to be the ceasefire line in eastern Ukraine. He could have said, “I demand it, and I’m serious, and I’m going to come up with ways to force you all to give in to this.” In other words, to ratchet up the tension—not to start the war, but to find a creative way to force the West to implement the Minsk II deal that the West signed, along with Ukraine and Russia, in 2015, that Obama rubber-stamped, and that the UN Security Council rubber-stamped, but that America and Kyiv had always refused to implement.
He also, maybe as part of enforcing that, could have vowed to obstruct all UN Security Council business. He’s got veto power. He can vote no on anything and just grind the UN Security Council to a halt. That’s a hell of a lever of pressure.
He could have also cut off all gas to Western Europe through Nord Stream. He had already shut off Nord Stream 1. I forgot exactly the offense that caused him to do that—it’s in the book—but he had already shut down Nord Stream 1. He could have shut down Nord Stream 2, and he could have shut off all the gas pipelines running through Ukraine as well. This was in the winter of 2021. We’re talking about November and December of 2021 into January and February 2022. It’s cold as hell. Europe is up at Canada-type latitudes, where it’s cold in the winter, and he could have played hardball like that.
As I complain in the book as well, he also could have been less coy about the thing. He kept denying that he was going to invade and saying, “Well, this is very coercive diplomacy, essentially, but come on, just give in.” I think he did offer treaties, and this is jumping way ahead in the story, but I think Biden could have negotiated his way out of it if he’d been trying to. I think he was not trying to.
So when Biden was president, you were saying that he did not do enough to negotiate in good faith?
Right, to negotiate in good faith. In fact, this is why I thought there wouldn’t be a war. It’s not because I didn’t think Putin had it in him. I’d been warning for years. He had been warning for years, and I noticed. He had told an Italian diplomat in 2014, “I could be in Kyiv in 2 weeks.” This was always the threat, that this could get much worse.
I thought it wouldn’t happen because William Burns, who is the author of the “Nyet Means Nyet” memo, and who—I don’t know if he was ever with the CIA—had been stationed at the embassy over there since the 1990s, had been Bush’s ambassador to Russia, and was, if there’s one guy who can work this out with Sergey Lavrov, that guy. I idiotically thought—and God, how stupid could I have been?—that of course William Burns’s mandate from Biden would be, “See us through this. Prevent this war from happening.”
I knew the war was preventable because the issues on the table were not just some front, some excuse. The issues on the table were deadly serious: NATO expansion, the potential for missile emplacements in Ukraine, especially after Trump tore up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, which would have made it legal for America to station nuclear missiles in Europe again, and the ongoing war in the Donbas.
If William Burns had the mandate to figure this out, dude, then he could have. I know that he could have, and I know that they did not try to do that. They never negotiated either of those proposed treaties. One was for the United States, and one was for NATO. They were reasonable.
Lex, I have in the book not just Chas Freeman—the brilliant, genius career diplomat who went to China with Nixon and was the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, among all these other things—who told me personally that this was absolutely a reasonable treaty to negotiate. Am I saying we should sign on the dotted line? Hell no. We don’t do that for anyone. But is it reasonable to sit at a table and negotiate? Absolutely.
I show in the book that White House officials in the Joe Biden administration—possibly State Department, but at least high-level officials from the NSC and/or State—told The Washington Post and The New York Times that they thought these were reasonable treaties and that they should be negotiated. But then they did not do that. They refused to negotiate those treaties. They refused to negotiate NATO expansion. They refused to negotiate the potential emplacement of missiles in Ukraine, and they refused to implement Minsk II or do anything to end the civil war. In fact, they helped to increase it.
According to the OSCE, Kyiv was escalating artillery attacks on the other side of the line into the 3rd week of February 2022. So listen, there’s a quote in there from Putin where he says, “I think they’re trying to provoke me into invading.” That’s not the exact quote, forgive me, but he acknowledges that this could be a trap. “I really don’t know what else to do.” Quite frankly, I think that’s right, Lex.
My excuse is that I was too damn busy recording the audiobook of Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism. I’m one of those journalists who’s always behind, so I was outsourcing too much of my primary reading to the opinion pieces I was reading from smart people and to people I was interviewing at the time. But I wasn’t reading just enough of—hate to say it—the Post, the Times, and the Journal. That’s who the U.S. government talks to, so you’ve got to read The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
If you read the Post, the Times, and the Journal very carefully—and a lot of the rest of the media, too—from especially December 2021 into January and February 2022, you’ll find a lot of references to Afghanistan. Not our recent, absolutely humiliating, disgraceful failure and ultimate withdrawal after 20 years, just 3 months before, at the end of the summer of 2021. Just 3 months later, they had the word Afghanistan in their mouths.
“We want to replicate the Afghan War.” You know, Rambo 3, what we did to the Soviet Union in the 1980s—not our Afghan War, their Afghan War. We’re going to do it this time with the Ukrainian Nazi right as the mujahideen. We’re going to lure the Russians in, bog them down, bleed them to bankruptcy, and inflict on them a strategic defeat.
Niall Ferguson, who was humiliated in front of all those people in Las Vegas at that time, wrote an article in Bloomberg News where he said, “Look, everybody who’s anybody in Washington and London knows that the policy is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. We’re not trying to dissuade them from invading.”
You could see that right after the start of the war, somebody asked Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, “What are we doing to negotiate an end to this thing?” You would just think that the consensus of all 8 billion of us would be, “You can’t have a hot war on Russia’s southwestern border. This could go nuclear. We have to cease fire immediately. General strike, call it off. Somebody go to Geneva and figure this out.”
That’s what everybody thought was happening. So the reporters asked Ned Price, “What are we doing to end the thing?” And Ned Price said, “Well, there are larger principles at stake here about independence and sovereignty, and the right of a nation to direct its gaze in whichever direction it wishes to direct its gaze.”
In other words, this is sticking with what they call the open-door policy, which says that any country that wants to join NATO can join NATO if we say so. No 3rd country can say otherwise, and no 3rd country’s security interest will be taken into account.
You see how they do this in committee. They go, “Well, does anybody at the table here think that Russia ought to have veto power over who we allow into our military alliance?” Of course, nobody raises their hand when you put it that way.
So then that’s it. We dismiss that forever. Now we have an open door. Now, of course, there is no door. It’s just jargon. It’s just meaningless garbage basically thought up by a bunch of bureaucrats. They could change it just as easily, but instead they say, “Nope.”
Especially when the Russians—and this was pointed out by Stephen Walt and by Samuel Charap at RAND—pointed out that, yeah, it’s hard because once the Russians are demanding that we do these reasonable things, doing them seems unreasonable because we don’t want to give in to their demands.
This is the worst Joe Biden. Joe Biden has always been the worst since 1973, but this is him at his absolute most dim-witted. He can’t really think hard about any of these things. He mostly just speaks in historical analogies about World War II. He’s Churchill facing down Hitler. Are you going to talk him out of that? Are you going to tell him that he ought to be Neville Chamberlain and appease Hitler at Munich? Of course not.
You know what you’ve got to do to a bully? You’ve got to punch him in the nose. I’m sure you must have heard this a hundred times in the lead-up to this war. They’d all say this. All these dorks would talk about, “Yeah, you know how you face down a bully? You punch him in the nose.” Well, how would they know? They never punched a bully in the nose before, right? They’re dorks.
They now have all this power and think that they know what they’re doing, and the best thing they can do is relive their third-grade trauma—getting bullied by me and my friends on the playground. They get to pretend that they’re the star of the baseball team who came and stuck up for the bullied kid. Nuh-uh. No, they’re not. That’s their little fantasy that they’re playing out.
They would say things like that over and over again. It’s Chamberlain at Munich and the bully on the playground. But nobody can just talk about the ongoing war in the Donbas. Can we get off your analogies?
I got in an argument again. For the third time, I debated General Wesley Clark about Ukraine on the Piers Morgan show, and again, he immediately retreats to World War II fantasies. “Well, that’s like saying that Stalin should have given in to Hitler.” He can’t talk about the war. They’re losing provinces right now. The war is getting worse and worse for Ukraine all the time.
So he has to say, “Uh-uh. You know what? The Ukrainians believe hard, and you just need to believe hard like them.” That’s the level of argument that I got out of General Wesley Clark, the former four-star general and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, who served Bill Clinton in launching the aggressive war against Serbia based on lies in 1999—based on the false claim that the Serbs had murdered 100,000 Kosovo Albanians, when that was a lie.
They were fighting for bin Laden—a bunch of heroin dealers, organ smugglers, and bin Laden terrorists—in that war of attrition. But anyway, that’s General Wesley Clark for you. That’s basically all they’ve got: a bunch of “believe hard,” a bunch of World War II metaphors, and playground metaphors, because they can’t talk about the actual war themselves.
To be clear, if I may comment, you’re referring to Americans or maybe Europeans in the foreign policy establishment, right? I do want to say that Ukrainians—people in Ukraine—and I know many of them are true heroes, and they’re fighting for their country. Whether the geopolitics of it makes any sense, it doesn’t take away from the human beings defending their land and living in an absolute hellish warscape.
Yeah, of course. Defending their land in an absolute hellish warscape, man. I mean, it’s World War I plus drones, right? Muddy trenches and tank rounds and artillery, airdropped dumb bombs, and drones hunting you. It’s an absolute nightmare out there, man. Anybody with Telegram is going, “Jesus Christ,” looking through the thing, you know?
It’s not quite as bad as Gaza, because—and look, they’re conscripts, so it’s very unfair—but in essence, they’re wearing green and are fair game out there fighting on the field. Most of the civilians have been able to flee. The civilian deaths are counted in the single-digit thousands, I believe—low thousands—which is absolutely horrific for those people, but at least that’s the silver lining: it’s essentially combatants fighting.
But it’s still an absolute horror show, and you’re right that, look, I can’t deny the bravery of anybody out there risking their balls for any of this stuff. The thing is, there are different wars going on, right? There’s a war between the United States and Russia going on—a proxy war. Hell, there’s a war with America and China going on, using Ukraine and Russia as our proxies. Then there’s America and Russia using their proxies in Ukraine.
Then you have Ukraine—Kyiv versus Moscow. But then you also have Lviv versus Donetsk, right? You have these nationalists from out west trying to force their version of what Ukraine is supposed to be on the people of the east, who, of course, are ethnically and culturally Russian. I’m not saying that means everyone who is Russian wants to join the Russian Federation, but I’m just saying there’s a severe culture war going on for dominance in the country, and all of these wars are playing out at the same time.
Anybody who says, “Hey, I’m defending my land, my neighborhood, my community. Give me a rifle and I’ll go do brave things”—that is what it is. Overall, what’s really happened here is the United States of America has gotten its weak friend in a fight with its stronger, tougher neighbor, when we had no ability or intention whatsoever to bail them out of it.
When they said, “We’re going to give you all the weapons it needs, as much as it takes, as long as it takes,” they knew they were lying. Even Kamala Harris can tell you, “Russia is a bigger country.” By the way, that’s a real quote. I don’t know if you know that, but she sounded like she was talking to a 4-year-old.
I’m sure she was simply parroting her own advisers—not even what they told her to say, but what they told her: “Ukraine is a country in Europe. Russia is a bigger country in Europe. Russia is next door to Ukraine. Russia has invaded Ukraine, and that’s bad, and we are against it.”
When I heard that, I thought it was fake, or I thought, “Come on, she was talking to elementary school kids and you guys are taking it out of context.” No, she said that on the Black Guy Morning Show on the radio in Chicago. They looked at her like, “Lady, we know that Russia and Ukraine are in Europe. We know that Russia is a bigger country than all other countries. Tell us something that we don’t know.” She didn’t know anything that they didn’t know, so she couldn’t tell them. But she could tell them that Russia is bigger than Ukraine.
She might have been able to extrapolate that they have a hell of a lot more available fighting-age males to complete this war than Ukraine, and they always will. There’s nothing anybody can do about it other than if Joe Biden would be willing to send the United States Army in there to fight them.
Even the Germans, the French, the British, and the Poles combined couldn’t do it without America to help them do it—without America to run the whole thing for them. Anyway, if you wanted to really whoop the Russians and drive them out of the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea, you need to send in the Marines. You need to send in the Air Force and the Navy. And we’re not going to do that, Lex.
Joe Biden said explicitly, “We’re not doing that. That’s World War II. We’ll give the Ukrainians everything they need to fight.” As you said, zoom all the way in: here’s some hero making the ultimate sacrifice. Zoom all the way out: here’s some damned fool using these people as cannon fodder on some fool’s errand they can’t possibly win, to deliver a strategic defeat against the Russians that they have completely failed to deliver.
If anything, they delivered a strategic victory to China by front-kicking Russia straight in the chest, right out of Europe and into the arms of the Chinese, when, of course, Russia is the eastern frontier of European civilization. Joe Biden himself said, “No Russian leader in all history has ever thrown in with the West as hard as Vladimir Putin.” It’s Joe Biden himself who kicked him right back out again.
It really seemed that Donald Trump, more than any recent president, wanted to make peace.
Yeah.
There’s a strong will for peace. Why do you think he has not been successful?
Yeah. Okay, let me just emphasize here: we’re skipping a lot to the end, and I know it’s late, so it’s okay. But there are a lot of other things besides NATO expansion, including tearing up the treaties, installing anti-ballistic missile systems in Romania and Poland that are fired from dual-use launchers—the MK-41, or Mark 41, missile launcher, which can also hold Tomahawk cruise missiles—all the while refusing an inspection regime.
There’s also, of course, overthrowing the government twice in 10 years in Ukraine, all the other color-coded revolutions in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and the rest, and, of course, support for the Maidan revolution of 2014 and the war that broke out after that.
As I said, I hit essentially every topic that I could think of outstanding between America and Ukraine that’s happened this entire time. I don’t spin for the Russians the whole time. I accuse them of plenty of things that they actually did, and I defend the truth from false accusations rather than defending the Russians, because screw them. They don’t need my help, and this book is not for them. It’s for us.
I mention sort of the epitome of it: the weird, phony coup in Montenegro in 2016. We tried to overthrow the government of Belarus three times—in 2001, 2005, and 2020.
We’ve been messing around a lot in building up this Cold War. That’s why that book is so long: it is 477,000 words, and I don’t think any of it is wasted. That does include the footnotes, which, by the way, Lex, are in 9-point font, I believe.
When I took the URLs out, that saved me 77 pages. That’s how many articles are in there. But if people go to scotthorton.org/provoked/notes, I have a PDF file there of all the notes with their links. I only took the links out at the very last moment, so there’s a PDF file where you can take anything in here and have a working link to it. People can download the whole PDF, and it’s 375 pages of notes in regular font.
How would you recommend one read it? I’ve read parts of this that jumped around. Yeah.
Unless my mental health goes to complete shit, I hope to travel back to Ukraine and Russia to interview the key figures there. And you said that I should definitely read the entirety of the book.
And look, I think it’s written to be a page-turner all the way through. I am outraged, and the book is written from this point of view, but it’s engaging enough. It’s so long because there are so many subtopics. I do not belabor and beat the dead horse or force you to read a bunch about things that you’re not interested in anymore. We do the Litvinenko chapter, then it’s over. We do the Belarus chapter, then we’re done and move on to the next subject as fast as I can take you through it.
It’s the same way I wrote the previous books, too. This is what I need to tell you before I let you off the hook and change the channel, right? Just like in Enough Already, I gave you 4 pages on Somalia. I know you’re not going to read 6. You might not get to Libya if I try to make you read 6 pages on Somalia, so I only gave you 4. You know what I mean? I wrote it that way in the first place.
I think I proved my point, and I give you the ability to find the proof for yourself—to track these things down further. If I say these people essentially made this claim in this piece, you can track that down and double-check and see if I’m lying or if I understood it right, or whatever, as you go through there.
People will falsely assume that I don’t have Ukrainian and Russian sources in there, but I do. The thing is, I just don’t use Cyrillic at all because nobody can read that. I use Google Translate on the titles. A lot of times, unless you look closely, you won’t realize that there are plenty of foreign sources that I cite in there. I just give them their English headlines through Google Translate or whatever, so people know what they’re looking at. But again, I have the links, even the links to the translated versions of the stories and all of that.
I’m not dodging your question about Trump, by the way. I do want to talk about that, but I wanted to make it clear that I’m not just saying Bill Clinton expanded NATO in the ’90s. George W. Bush did too in the 2000s. Obama did too in the 2010s, and Trump did too—he brought Montenegro and North Macedonia into NATO. There are the color-coded revolutions and the missiles and all of these things, and so it all came to a head, essentially, in the Biden years.
It could have been solved. Trump, I think, could have solved it if they hadn’t framed him for Russiagate. By the way, I have 75 pages on Russiagate in there. It’s the most thorough takedown of Russiagate, I think, that you can find anywhere. Although I don’t take credit; I give credit to the great Russiagate journalists who absolutely destroyed those lies—people like Paul Sperry, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Maté, and Robert Parry, for that matter, before he died; Gareth Porter, of course; and so many others who did such great work on Russiagate.
It was just absolute—one hair away from blowing the guy’s head off in Dallas. I don’t know what the difference is. It’s unbelievable to have the CIA and the FBI come at the president of the United States this way, first when he was becoming a major-party candidate for president, then when he was the president-elect, and then when he was the sitting president of the United States. They were talking about trying to overthrow him with the 25th Amendment and hiring a special counsel to pretend to investigate him for another 2 years.
These people should have all of their property confiscated. They and their families should be exiled from the United States forever—everyone involved in that plot, everyone involved at Perkins Coie, everybody involved with the Georgia Tech team, everybody involved with Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS, and everyone at the FBI, CIA, NSA, and any of the government agencies who went along with that plot. They ought to all be kicked out of the United States forever, along with their great-grandchildren.
As you write, it was the CIA and FBI, as well as the Clinton campaign and their agents, that did this to Trump—the front-runner for a major-party candidacy for U.S. president, later the Republican nominee, president-elect, and eventually sitting chief executive. None of it was true. And you go on, with more of that coming out all the time about just how untrue it was and just how untrue they already knew it was.
I have so much in there, and I beg your audience to read the Durham report. There are newly declassified appendixes to it that are just being released as we record this. One came out yesterday, so we’re going to get much, much more about the origins of Russiagate here.
But, Lex, the bottom line is that they go, “Okay, after it all falls away, still Russia hacked the DNC and gave it to WikiLeaks.” Nuh-uh. That was a lie. It was CrowdStrike that made up that lie in combination with the Georgia Tech team and DARPA at the Pentagon. I have trouble keeping track of exactly how it all worked. People should follow Undead FOIA on Substack. He’s a brilliant, anonymous analyst of this stuff.
The core allegation there has no proof whatsoever. Now we know for a fact—we only just found this out—read Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations. We know for a fact now that the CIA and the NSA gave it only low to moderate confidence. In other words, none of this information came from the National Security Agency. They’re the ones who would really know.
The CIA and the FBI had both already debunked this stuff before they started to pretend to believe it again. Part of it is because of compartmentalization inside the agencies. These analysts are in charge of looking at this, and those analysts are in charge of looking at that. But Brennan and Comey are in charge of ignoring all of the disputing information and cherry-picking out all the rest to try to make it look true.
Man, what a fraud. We’re talking about lies on the level of “the Branch Davidians killed themselves,” on the level of “Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons to murder you with,” and “Bashar al-Assad woke up one morning and decided to murder the entire population of his country, so it’s a good thing that the USA and al-Qaeda are here to protect the poor population of Syria from his wrath.”
It’s on that level of lie. It is unbelievable what they did to him, and I have so many problems with Donald Trump. But, man, I hate his enemies, and I would love to see him ruthlessly, lawlessly persecute these people. They deserve to suffer for what they did to him and to this country, putting us through that.
Think of how many women bankrupted their husbands with therapy bills because they were that convinced that the Russians had done a coup d’état and installed a Nazi, fascist, white supremacist to overthrow us. They heard it on National Public Radio and they were freaking out, man. You could come up with a conspiracy theory, if you wanted to, that it was the drug companies that did this just to sell more Zoloft to these people. They drove them up the wall.
See, Lex, the problem is you know better, dude. But pretend for a minute that you’re one of these idiot women who listens to Mara Liasson on National Public Radio, and she says the Russians did a coup and put a Manchurian candidate in power to serve Hillary Clinton’s rightful throne. He hates all the Blacks and the trans people. He’s going to murder them all and attack Canada or whatever.
They were terrified. It’s no less cynical than what George W. Bush did when he 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 invade Iraq.” You know how many people on the edge of sanity went over? People did. I know for a fact people did. I know stories of people who were driven crazy by the stress of believing that every Arab they saw was a murderer terrorist trying to kill them.
People believe in that. People think that their leaders wouldn’t lie to them. Willie Nelson said, “They wouldn’t lie to me. Not on my own damn TV.” Yeah, they would too—the ones you love the most. You’re a Republican? It’s the Republicans who are lying to you. You’re a Democrat? You have no idea how much they despise you. They’ll lie right to your face, and they think it’s funny when you believe it.
They enjoy your terror because your fear and upset make it easier for them to do wrong. That’s what it’s about. That’s what it’s all about.
Why’d they do this to Trump? Because he said he wanted to get along with Russia. He wasn’t going to give them our nuclear codes. He even said, “Lex, I’m doing this because I talked to Henry Kissinger.” And Henry Kissinger said, “Wow, you’re the tallest, smartest, most handsome, wealthiest, successful person I’ve ever met, and you have a very smart Russia policy, which is to split Russia away from China.”
Is that because they have a blackmail tape of Donald Trump and his prostitutes? No. It’s what Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller’s man, wanted.
He was the grand Republican strategist of American foreign policy, and he only died a few years ago, right? They were still turning to him for advice for decades. This guy—Henry Kissinger—was, since the 1970s, since before I was born, the most important counselor to Richard Nixon about, “What are we going to do about the Soviet Union and China?”
He told Trump, “Yes, Trump, I agree with you. That’s what we should do. We should do what it takes to befriend Russia so that we can contain China.” Now, I’m not a China hawk, but whatever, man. That’s the point.
There’s another major point here to mention, too. As I was saying before, in this book I don’t quote a whole lot of Buchanan and Paul. I give them the credit they deserve, but I make a special point to constantly quote Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski and their contemporaries, where they admit that they are the vanguard of the NATO expanders.
Brzezinski especially was an anti-Russia hawk. He was the son of Polish aristocrats, a fierce anti-communist, and anti-Russian even still after that. They all said, “We have to come up with a special status for Ukraine because it’s so closely intertwined with Russia,” dating back hundreds of years. Even the foundation of Russian civilization began in Kyiv before moving the center of gravity to Moscow later.
As Kissinger said, Ukraine’s been part of Russia for 300 years. This is not just some deal where we get to do what we want. We have to take into account how deeply complicated this is and how deeply riven Ukrainian society is, especially over who they want to run with.
They said, “What we have to do is create a special status for Ukraine, just like we had for Austria and Finland in the old Cold War.” Austria and Finland were not members of the Warsaw Pact, nor were they members of NATO, and they did not have troops. Well, they did have Soviet troops still occupying Austria for a while. They finally did—I don’t think they withdrew until the 1950s—but they eventually did withdraw.
Austria and Finland were not forced to be made members of the Warsaw Pact like all the rest of the Eastern European states were. They had no choice but to join with sock-puppet commies run out of the Kremlin and everything. Austria and Finland had this neutral status in the last Cold War, and they said, “That’s what we want to do again. That’s what we need to do for Ukraine.”
Again, that’s Kissinger and Brzezinski, who were not neoconservatives but were very hawkish on NATO expansion, on Russia, and on NATO expansion being for the purposes of containing Russia. No fooling about it. But in this case, man, if we try to take Ukraine away, the Russians are going to break it, because in fact, it ain’t going anywhere. It’s stuck next to Russia.
This is another thing that Obama explained to Jeffrey Goldberg: Russia’s always going to have escalation dominance in Ukraine because it’s right there, and it means a lot more to them than it does to us. They are willing to go much further than we are.
This is after Obama’s coup—whatever transition of power had led to the loss of Crimea—and he says to Goldberg, “Jeffrey Goldberg, you tell me who in Washington says that we ought to put American boys on the ground to secure the independence of the Donbas from Russia. Can you name me somebody who’s ready to do that right now? No, of course not.”
“So the rest of Washington, pipe down, right? You keep saying we’re not doing enough, but there’s nothing we can do that won’t get NATO into a war with the Russian Federation.”
Even Robert Kagan—I’m ruining the end of the book now—even Robert Kagan said, “You know what? It actually doesn’t matter to the United States who runs Ukraine. The northern coast of the Black Sea, that’s so far beyond our jurisdiction.” These are Kagan’s words, not mine, Lex. I don’t agree with him about this at all, but you understand the context of what he means here.
He says, “The Soviet Union dominated Ukraine the whole time after World War II, and we think of those as the good old days.” Now, I do not. I know people who were enslaved by the communists in Ukraine in those good old days. There’s nothing good about them at all. But what he was saying was, America never had a problem with Russian dominance in Ukraine. We always called it “the Ukraine,” and we always pronounced it “Kiev.” What are you talking about, that we’re willing to go to the mat for the Donbas? No, dude. It makes no sense.
And the mat is H-bombs burning hotter than the sun. We cannot fight them, and certainly not over this. They’re rolling on Berlin—call me. They’re rolling on London—they’re going to nuke London. I’d hate to see the world end that way, but maybe we would have to fight for the Brits. Lex, I’m really more of a continental-defense kind of guy myself, to tell you the truth.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic and Slovakia. That’s Central Europe. Maybe the Czech Republic and Slovakia are Eastern Europe. Bulgaria and Romania, that’s Eastern Europe. Ukraine is east of Eastern Europe, right?
Brent Scowcroft said, “We only wanted to liberate Eastern Europe, not Ukraine.” This is too far away. It’s not our concern. And it’s not to say, “Oh, yeah, no, it’s fine for Russia to invade, kill, and dominate this place with violence because, hey, that’s their sphere of influence.” That’s not what I’m saying.
I’m saying it was suicidal madness for them to go along with America’s push for Ukraine to join our military alliance. That’s as much respect for Russia’s sphere of influence as they needed to show. They should not have messed with that. That’s what got them in trouble. That’s what made the Russians say, “Look, it’s either sooner or later. It might as well be now. The longer we wait, the more the Americans build up their forces, and we’re going to end up having to fight them anyway.”
They were making Ukraine a de facto member of NATO with what they called interoperability, normalizing their military forces with ours as much as possible, and making them a de facto auxiliary of the NATO alliance. So that if NATO ever fought the Russian Federation, just like Germany, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, and the rest, the Ukrainian army would be one other auxiliary army fighting under unified American-NATO command.
That’s what we were doing with them without the Article 5 war guarantee—the promise that we would come protect them—but still normalizing and integrating their military force with ours as one standard thing. Constantly training with them, changing their equipment, changing their command-and-control structure, everything to mirror NATO standards.
And so it was a legitimate threat. Putin said in his speech when he declared war, “If the Americans put Tomahawk cruise missiles and nuclear ballistic missiles that they’re making after they have torn up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987, and if they put hypersonics there, they could hit Moscow in 5 minutes.” He said, “It’s like a knife to the throat.”
Now, you don’t have to sympathize with the Russians at all. You could hate them and want the Chinese to kill them all for you. I don’t know. But you have to admit that these are serious and credible security concerns.
This is not a bunch of bluster, a bunch of bluffing, ideological garbage, or propaganda. And it’s not the nationalist theories of some romantic who’s swept away by visions of a lost, glorious past that he wants to regain and all these things.
As everyone says—as I said to Piers Morgan the day before yesterday—the weapon of mass destruction in this war is that Putin woke up and started this war because of what an aggressor he is, and that there’s no backstory that anybody needs to know about how America put Ukraine in the position of getting its ass whooped by its bigger next-door neighbor in this way. That’s the lie under the whole thing.
The same way that Clinton lied us into Kosovo with the 100,000 dead Kosovars, Bush with his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Obama with his impending genocide in Benghazi and Libya. Give me a break. All of these lies. That’s the lie of this one: “unprovoked attack.” “Unprovoked attack.”
It’s like white separatist Randy Weaver. You have to say that. You can’t just say Randy Weaver. You can’t say, “Randy Weaver, survivor of a boy and a dog and a woman, his wife, who were slaughtered by federal agents.” No, you have to call him “white separatist Randy Weaver.”
Russia’s attack has to be “unprovoked attack.” Look at this shiny coin: “unprovoked attack.” And that works on people. Somehow, people don’t just rebel against that and say, “Wait a minute. Are you calling me stupid or something?”
Why would you mandate that we call it that in such a way if you weren’t lying and covering up for the fact that you provoked it, and you know you did, which is clearly the case? That’s why they called it that. You could call it an unprovoked attack sometimes. They called it an unprovoked attack 100,000 times because the public relations firms decided that this is the lie and this is the best way to stick it to the American people.
It’s absurd how easily moved the Americans are. Just give us some lies.
And by the way, our Zionist friend would say that I just blame the Israelis for everything. The only role that the Israelis play in my book is Naftali Bennett, the guy who caused the September 11th attack, tried to end the war, tried to negotiate in good faith, and tried to do shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia and stop the war right after it started, in the spring of 2022.
That’s all I have to say about the Israelis’ role in any of this, other than that it was their fifth column—the neoconservatives in America—who really got our policy off this way in the first place.
And Robert Kagan’s disgusting wife, Victoria Nuland, who really was the ringleader behind the overthrow in 2014, which was even what Carl Gershman, the head of the NED, called it: the overthrow of the government there that they did.
What can Trump do to help bring peace in Ukraine?
As I mentioned, from every interaction I’ve had, from everything I understand, he legitimately wanted to make peace very quickly.
I think he’s totally sincere about it, too. But why was he not successful? And how can he be successful? What are your thoughts on that?
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 the backstory here is. In September of 2022, the weekend of September 11, in fact, Ukraine had their best few days. They had a brilliant feint where they started building up forces in Kherson and convinced the Russians to move forces to Kherson. Then they made a huge move in Kharkiv and forced all the Russians out of there, back into Luhansk. Then they also hit them in Kherson, down at the river, and kicked them back across the river, and so maintained that one-third of Kherson on the right bank, I guess I’d call it the right.
Yeah, they were extremely successful in those offensives at that time—probably the biggest success, arguably the biggest success, of the war.
Absolutely. And it’s been all downhill from there. The worst thing, probably, of all is that Putin said, “Oh, yeah? Well, I hereby annex Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, too.” These are the 2 provinces between the Donbas and Crimea, and he hadn’t claimed them yet.
Now, this is the so-called land bridge. Importantly, the Ukrainians gave him a real motive to do this because they had cut off the fresh water. There was a canal from the Dnieper River down to Crimea, and to collectively punish the people of Crimea, they cut off the water resources there. They still had enough for drinking water, but they did not have enough for agriculture or anything else, and it really hurt them a lot.
So they already had their pretext there to take that territory, so they could reopen that channel of fresh water to Crimea. Then he was just angry. His men were humiliated on the ground there, and he said, “Oh, yeah? Well, I hereby annex 2 more oblasts.” Then they passed a law in the Duma. He signed it, right? I guess it’s 2 houses. He signed a law that said, “We’ve now redrawn the Russian border here.”
But now, if you look at how they’re fighting the war—and I’m not a military expert on this, but I know some—for example, Colonel Douglas Macgregor and Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis. I think Davis is the one I trust the best as far as his point of view on that.
Sure. Just to give a shout-out to Daniel L. Davis, who you mentioned: excellent podcast. He’s somebody that I’ve had a bunch of conversations with privately. He’s a sweetheart.
Oh, he’s a wonderful man.
First of all, his backstory is a fascinating one. But also, he’s extremely knowledgeable on the very nuanced details of all aspects of military operations.
Absolutely, he is. As I mentioned an eon ago, when we began this interview, in Iraq War I—
Yes.
—it was Colonel Macgregor, with McMaster and Davis under him, who fought the Battle of 73 Easting against the Iraqi army and the Soviet tanks, which is where all 3 of them come from. McMaster sold his soul to Satan, and Macgregor and Davis have been good guys—well, at least since Iraq War I.
I don’t know if you know this about Daniel Davis. I guess you probably do, but your audience doesn’t. He was the heroic whistleblower of the Afghan War in 2012. Do you know that story?
Mhm.
So, in 2009, there was a former Marine captain turned State Department employee named Matthew Hoh, and he warned Obama not to do the surge. His boss, the ambassador Karl Eikenberry—he had been the general in charge of the war previously—backed up Hoh and said, “Don’t do the surge.” That’s all Obama needed to hide behind: Eikenberry and Hoh. He could have said no, but instead he gave in and ordered the escalation.
He had already sent 40,000 troops. Then he announced he was sending 30,000 more, for a total of 70,000 additional troops: the giant, horrific, failed Afghan surge of 2009 through 2012.
At the end, Daniel Davis was the whistleblower who broke ranks, testified before the Senate, and published an article in the Armed Forces Journal saying that David Petraeus is a liar, and that America had not achieved what Petraeus called success, because he wouldn’t dare call it victory, in the war in Afghanistan. Davis said, “Here’s the real truth.”
Here’s how Davis knew: he had a special job, which was arming and equipping all the guys all around the country with whatever they needed. His job was to go and give them whatever equipment they needed. That gave him a special insight into the war, because he was going to all areas of the country and seeing the guys everywhere they were.
He said the same thing that Matthew Hoh said. These boys are getting killed for this. As Hoh had put it, “How am I supposed to write a letter home to this guy’s wife and say that he died a good death when I know it’s not true?”
It was the same thing with Davis. These guys—you know how military guys are? They talk about, “These are my men. They’re mine.” What do you do when they’re dying for nothing? Davis said enough of this, came home, and did what he could to tell the truth and end the war. He’s a great American patriot, and you’re right, he’s a brilliant genius, too.
He’s a brilliant war analyst on all the wars, particularly Ukraine right now. His show is Daniel Davis Deep Dive. I highly recommend people listen to DDD—Daniel Davis Deep Dive. It’s on YouTube and all the podcast platforms. He served for 21 years in the Army, with 4 combat deployments, and he’s got stars and things, too, man.
Yeah.
The most heroic thing he ever did was quit and tell the truth.
There’s another guy I really like named Willie OAM. His name is Matt Williams. You’d really like him. He’s a brilliant war analyst. He looks at the maps every day and analyzes them day by day by day.
Oh, see, there’s where he interviewed me. He’s a wonderful guy. I’m afraid he’s got cancer right now, but he’s hanging in there, and he’s just a brilliant analyst of the war. You’d really like him. He goes day by day by day and shows who’s taken how much land.
This is why I could only shake my head at Wesley Clark the other day. I’m going, “Listen, the Russians are advancing on the battlefield, dude. There’s no reversing this. Believe harder. Come on, man.”
Then he acts like, “What are you talking about, Horton? The Russians aren’t winning.” It’s like, “Yeah, they are, dude. They are. Danny Davis and Willie OAM—they’re not wrong about that.”
These reports depend, I guess, on who you’re reading. I do see some kind of wishful thinking from people from time to time, but no, Lord, they are losing. Pokrovsk is about to fall. They have virtually 100% of Luhansk. They are making major gains in Donetsk, and they’re making moves in Dnipropetrovsk, which is the big—I can never say it right, but that’s as good as I could ever get—oblast between the river and the Donbas there. Of course, there’s Sumy and Kharkiv in the north, and all of this is still in danger of being taken.
I’m sorry, because I never really answered your question about Trump. Trump’s problem, Lex, is that he got elected and inaugurated at the wrong time for his second term here. The Russians annexed those territories, but they don’t control them.
Daniel Davis—our tangent here—explains that the strategy in the war is to fight a war of attrition: to grind up Ukrainian forces with artillery and air-dropped bombs, and move slowly to preserve Russian soldiers’ lives and make the other guys die more.
Typically—and this is in some specialized stuff out of my purview—they say that it’s a 3-to-1 disadvantage for the advancing army on a defensive position, or whatever. That doesn’t hold in all cases, and I think I may even have said that wrong. Somebody tried to correct me on that recently. It’s not exactly that way.
But the thing is, it’s more dangerous, obviously, to move on a defensive position than to remain in one, all other things being equal, I guess. But then they just have way more artillery and way more time, and they can move very slowly and make sure that, actually, the defenders die at a much higher rate than they do. They’re not running out of artillery, and they’re not running out of men.
They haven’t even launched a full-scale mobilization for the war. People know that they’re winning, and so they’re volunteering to go and get some. They can afford it. Their economy is not crushed, so they can afford to pay bonuses and have people sign up.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s got a conscript army that’s had at least tens of thousands—and some reports say more than 100,000—of deserters flee the front lines and refuse to fight. There have been at least hundreds of people who have drowned in the Dniester River on the border with Moldova trying to escape. People report gangs riding around in vans, beating people up, kidnapping them, throwing them in the back of the van, and taking them off to the front to be killed in a few hours.
It’s a horror show over there, man. I don’t know if Ukraine is going to survive, because, see, this is part of my argument. I said this in my 4-hour speech right after the war began, assuming then, as a lot of people did, that the Russians were going to have a lot more success a lot sooner, and that the Ukrainian military would essentially be smashed and they’d be fighting an insurgency there, which was Plan B.
Plan A was to warn them: “Don’t you do it.” Plan B was, “We’re going to back the mujahideen.” In other words, the Nazis, Right Sector, and Azov and whatever, because the military would be smashed and Russia would dominate the entire east of the country, at least was the presumption going in on the American side.
So we’re now on, like, Plan C, which was actually better than Plan B, right? They skipped a step in wanting to back an insurgency. The state army has been able to hold. We’re recording this thing 3½ years into the war, and the state army still exists. They’ve still been able to pour arms in there all this time and keep the thing going for now.
But as I predicted in that speech, I said, “You know, this could be a real Pyrrhic victory for the Russians.” Russia’s government is a government program, and all they do is fail upward in their self-licking ice cream cone fashion. That’s not a specialty of Americans. That’s a specialty of the economics of government monopolies on security forces, right?
So think about the map for a minute. Putin just went in there and drew a line around all the pro-Russians. Not that everyone who’s an ethnic Russian and a Russian speaker in Ukraine wanted to join the Russian Federation, but I’m sure you’ve seen the election-result maps where it goes from dark blue to dark red, with a real grayscale fade in between there.
When you get all the way into Donetsk and Luhansk, you have people who have a lot of intermarriages and mixed families across the borders and very much consider themselves to be Russians, even living inside Ukraine. I read a study of Ukrainian nationalism that was about how the only Ukrainian nationalists are the Nazis out west. Most Ukrainians really identify with their city more, or their region more, than really considering themselves overall Ukrainian patriots in that larger nationalist sense, according to some pretty in-depth surveys they had done in the past.
But anyway, I’m not trying to oversimplify it and say, “Oh, yeah, everybody in Donetsk was just begging for Russia to invade,” or whatever. Some of them were, of course; some were not. But anyway, by drawing the line where he has now, he’s taken everyone who could even potentially be pro-Russia out of Ukraine permanently.
It used to be that the more-or-less Russian-leaning guys from the parties in the east would win. People always said Yanukovych was Putin’s puppet or whatever. It’s not actually true. Separate tangent, but that’s why America had to overthrow the government there twice in 10 years, in the Orange Revolution and the Maidan Revolution.
Well, that’s never going to happen again. All of those people are never going to vote in a Ukrainian election again. Who’s going to be dominant if they ever do hold elections? It’s probably going to be somebody to the right of Zelensky who wins.
Remember, Zelensky was brought in because he was Jewish, meaning he wasn’t ethnically Russian. He wasn’t ethnically Ukrainian. He was kind of a third choice. He wasn’t from all the way in the Donbas, right? But he’s still a Russian speaker and ran on peace. That was supposed to be his charm, right?
Well, those days are over. So who’s going to win now? My biggest fear is it’s going to be Andriy Biletsky, who’s the leader of the Azov Battalion, which is now known as the 3rd Army Corps. It went from the Azov Battalion to the Azov Regiment to the third separate infantry division. Now it’s the 3rd Army Corps.
Biletsky is the guy behind the famous quote—I’m sure you’ve heard it—about leading the white race against the Semite-led Untermenschen. I quote at length that whole speech, which I found on Archive.org. The official Azov Battalion website is down, but you can find the Wayback Machine version of it.
That whole speech is absolutely insane, Hitlerian lunacy about Aryan values and the nation of Ukraine as a single living organism, and every egg and every sperm belonging to the state for the greater glory of the Ukrainian Empire. That’s Nazism. There’s no mistaking it for anything else.
These are the proud grandsons of the Galician SS and, you know, Stepan Bandera and the UPA, and before the UPA, the OUN, who had served the Nazis in the Holocaust in the Second World War. These are their proud grandsons and legacies.
This guy Biletsky is from what’s called the Patriot of Ukraine, which was a group that was, again, descended from these Nazis. He and his ilk are very likely to be the leaders of the new Ukraine. So how’s Russia supposed to deal with that now?
Well, now we’ve got to go to Odessa. At least we can take that great and important port city from them. Geez, now we can see Transnistria from here—you know, that little strip of land that Russia controls on the Moldovan side of the river, on the Moldovan-Ukrainian border.
That’s Russian-controlled land, a frozen conflict since the end of the Soviet Union. Well, man, from Crimea we can see Odessa, and from Odessa we can see Transnistria, and we can really punish those Ukrainians by completely cutting them off from the Black Sea.
And still, you have a frozen conflict with a bunch of right-wing, radical, severely anti-Russian, grudge-holding national socialists. So now, what is anybody going to do with them? You know, that’s who the new Ukrainian government is going to be dominated by: these people who are far to the right of conservatives, man.
Then put yourself in Putin’s point of view. Again, this is a government program; it gets worse and worse and worse. The next option is that now you’ve created—I’m assuming some things, but still—you’ve created a radical right-wing rump state of Ukraine that is going to constantly be a disruption.
What you do is you finish cleansing them into Poland and Romania. You just kick them all the way out and reabsorb the entire place, right? That is the obvious solution from the Russian point of view. That’s how they fight their wars. They just move very slowly with artillery and wipe out everything in their path until they own it.
That’s the mess that America has gotten Ukraine into. I don’t see how this ends anytime soon. Again, from the Russian point of view, let’s say they take those 4 oblasts. Well, look at all the people in Dnipropetrovsk and all the people in Sumy and Kharkiv who are Russian speakers, who of course the Russian government is going to say need our protection, especially now that they’re a smaller minority in the country than before, when their side will never win a national election again.
Well, we’re going to have to go all the way to the river now, right? It only makes sense, man. It’s a government program. It’s a disaster, and it’s going to keep getting worse and worse and worse.
I really hope the next leader of Ukraine is not a right-wing extremist, as you’re suggesting.
Yeah, me too.
And I think the bigger picture here is, as we’ve been talking about for many hours, that it’s the politicians and the bureaucrats that wage the war, and it’s regular people that pay the price of it.
That’s right. As Ozzy Osbourne said, right? They leave that role to the poor.
Rest in peace, by the way, Ozzy Osbourne. I think this whole conversation was a really deep, eloquent case against war in all parts of the world, and especially to the degree that the United States is involved. Your whole life’s work has been this incredible case against war, with Antiwar.com, with the Libertarian Institute, and with all the work you’ve done.
In this goal, I’m very much with you 100%. I’m really glad that you’re doing the work you’re doing. So thank you for fighting the good fight.
Thank you very much, Lex.
Scott, thank you, brother.
Appreciate it.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children.
The cost of 1 modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is 2 electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is 2 fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with half a million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.