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Scott Horton is the director of the Libertarian Institute, host of “The Scott Horton Show,” co-host of “Provoked” with Darryl Cooper, and author of several books, the most recent of which is “Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine.” https://www.thefactsaboutiran.com https://www.youtube.com/@scotthortonshow https://www.youtube.com/@Provoked_Show https://www.libertarianinstitute.org https://www.scotthortonacademy.com https://www.scotthortonshow.com https://www.scotthorton.org
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Do I sound okay?
Check, check, check.
This is my normal complaint volume.
One of those one ear on, one ear off guys?
Yeah, my right ear hurts a lot from ears to this.
And so I usually just leave it off.
There's a volume adjuster thing too.
So if it's too loud, you can turn it up or turn it down.
You sound good.
But no, it's just, I have a pain in my right ear, so I try not to antagonize it.
And thank you very much for the gift, ladies and gentlemen.
Scott Horton gave me a professorial pipe.
And like I was saying, Metzger uses a pipe now because of you.
Yeah, I love that guy.
He's the best.
He's so funny.
He's such a nut.
He comes into the room, he just blows the room away.
He's just a force in there.
It's incredible.
And he's a giant dude.
So he like hovers over you like, oh, you didn't know?
You don't know about this?
And then he just hits you with 15 conspiracies in a row, rapid fire.
So good.
Yeah, with no breaks in between them.
So thanks for doing this, man.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
We have a great mutual friend in Dave Smith.
He recommends you highly.
Yeah.
So I'm glad we could finally do this.
I wish there was more going on in the world right now we could talk about,
though.
It just seems like everything's so calm and peaceful.
We'll just have to go back over Vietnam or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Some of the old stuff back when we didn't know any better.
It's kind of a mess.
Yeah.
I've seen you argue on television like a thousand times.
Do you enjoy like that Piers Morgan type chaos?
No.
Yeah.
In fact, I just got back from England.
I got invited to do the Oxford debate, which I lost on Ukraine.
But then I invited myself on Piers Morgan Live as long as I was in town.
When you say you lost a debate, is that because the people voted that were in
the audience?
Yeah.
All those people with Ukraine flags?
Well, they didn't have Ukraine flags that time.
I think someone showed an old picture or something.
But yeah, same crowd.
So what happened was, yeah, when they leave, they either leave through the yes
door or the no door.
And the yeses had it, which was unbelievable to me.
But not that I did my very best job.
But on Piers Morgan, I was trying to get myself just an interview so I could
just talk to him about some things.
And instead, they just prefer that format where you got to mix it up with a guy,
which I can do that too, you know?
Yeah, the interview thing is way better.
The thing that he does, though, is really good for engagement.
He's very smart.
Like Piers has done, he's mastered it.
He's taken like the Jerry Springer type format and thrown it into the world of
politics and any other social issue that's going on.
Yeah.
But it is too, like years ago, the guy from antiwar.com can't be on TV.
But we can be on his show.
He doesn't care.
He's cool with it.
I mean, I guess same thing here.
Yeah.
And that is a big change from how things used to be.
We just had this whole separate conversation going on below the higher one
where he has reach, you know, up and down the chain, I guess, is a way to put
it.
Is he on TV TV or is it just YouTube?
No, but he just has massive.
Yeah, massive.
Viewership.
So it counts, I guess.
TV TV is actually a hindrance now because the only way people watch TV TV is
clips that someone takes and puts on X or YouTube.
That's it.
Or they just see it accidentally.
It's just on.
It happens to be on when they're in the room or whatever.
What a fucking dying market.
Like, imagine if you're in broadcast television right now and you're just
thinking, like, where am I?
What am I doing?
Like, this is a bad format.
You have to break for commercials every seven minutes.
No conversation could ever get into depth.
There's executives in your ear telling you what to say and what not to say.
They'll edit out anything that they think is, like, controversial that's going
to fuck with their sponsors or fuck with the government or fuck with whatever
their narrative is.
It's just everything's changed.
When I first started doing podcasting, it was the archives of the interviews
for my radio show.
And it was so important to me that I'm on the radio because that's real
legitimacy.
That means somebody hired you.
Somebody thought you were good enough to be there.
Whereas podcasting, any jerk can do from his basement and it just doesn't count.
And then that just became not true and I kind of clung on to my radio show.
I actually gave up my last radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles last year.
I mean, where it didn't matter anymore anyway.
And podcasting has completely changed the entire market.
Do you know how many people were listening to you actually on the radio before
you quit?
I think it's, like, probably high thousands but not 10,000, you know, KPFK in L.A.
Isn't that crazy?
It's the most powerful FM transmitter west of the Mississippi River.
It's grandfathered in at 115,000 watts.
But the thing is about it, too, and it's always been like this, the programming
on there is so inconsistent
that you're listening to Latina lesbians one hour and then you're listening to
crystal worship
and then you're listening to hard-hitting news and then you're listening to,
like, leftist union organizing
or then just whatever, you know what I mean?
But it's just, there's no, like, real rhyme or reason to it.
So it's hard to follow, you know?
What kind of a channel is it?
Oh, it's, you know, left of the dial at 90.7 FM.
So it's, you know, comparable to, like, KUT type.
It's not actual public radio, but it's no commercials, all donations.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I mean, they were good to me.
A regular radio show that's no commercials and it's not public?
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Yeah, it's like, um, I don't know if co-op still exists here in Austin, um, co-op
radio.
You must have made a lot of money from that.
You must be so rich from doing that.
Like, a leftist radio with no, no ads at all, just donations.
Boy, you must be raking it in.
No, they never did pay me.
But I looked at it like, they let me be on there for 14, 15 years or something.
And, um, you know, like, even when I was writing my book about the Russia-Ukraine
stuff, I would do my radio show once a week and I was able to still cover what
was going on in Palestine.
And in a way that I felt like, you know, you know, something meaningful that I
can do, even though my attention was completely diverted elsewhere.
I still got all my guys from the Libertarian Institute and anti-war.com and I
can interview them once a week.
And then when I left KPFK, I got some response.
They're like, oh no, where are you going?
Kind of thing.
So, I mean, some people were caring for it at the time.
Did you let them know, hey, I have a podcast.
You could see them all, all these episodes would be archived.
Yeah, I kind of always let them know that.
You know, I've done 6,200 something interviews since 2003 on my various shows.
So I always try to remind people to go check the archives if they want for the
full dose of that stuff.
Before we get into any of these subjects, how did you get into this?
Well, you know, in the 90s, I was, you know, when I was younger, I was much
more of like a New World Order truther type.
And, but then I basically dropped all that.
I grew out of that.
How do you define New World Order truther type?
Okay, well, I mean, the New World Order conspiracy was that American foreign
policy ultimately is about building a one world federal government under the
United Nations that would ultimately dominate the United States.
The John Birch Society sort of idea of how, and I really like those guys.
And I believed that for a long time, really through Clinton and even into the
beginning of W. Bush.
But then I finally realized with the way that the Iraq war was prosecuted that
this is not about building up the U.N. Security Council.
We got the National Security Council and Cheney and his neocons, and they have
their own separate policy that just disproves that sort of New World Order
theory.
And the American, and in fact, so what H.W. Bush meant by that was just the era
of the American empire with no one to stop us this time, was all.
It was never to build up the U.N. as the world government.
It was to build up Washington, D.C. as the world government.
And, of course, they've been failing and failing at trying to establish that
ever since.
Yeah.
So the conspiracy was that the United Nations would be the government of the
entire earth, and that all other governments would somehow or another give up
their power to the United Nations for what reason?
Because they're all in on it together in secret, whatever.
And that's the point, is it ain't right.
It's not true.
Well, my question would be like.
Too many people would have to, exactly.
Too many people have to sacrifice the power they do have to somebody else when
they don't have to.
Money.
That's the other thing.
I mean, as soon as you lose power, then you lose access to insane amounts of
wealth.
Yeah.
So we don't want, you know, obviously, it's the ultimate nightmare would be
that you would have some kind of one world government and then some kind of
totalitarian regime take power with a monopoly on nukes and a monopoly on
police power.
And, you know, but that's just a nightmare for centuries from now.
I mean, that's just not going to happen anytime soon at all.
That's not what it's about.
You don't think there's any push towards centralizing things in that regard?
Like, wasn't the World Health Organization trying to push for something where
the entire world would have to respond to their pandemic rules?
Well, look, so yes, there's always, you know, the widening and deepening of the
international law as much as they can.
At the end of the day, there is no actual world state to enforce that law other
than just the United States of America.
But there is no one world army, one world police force to enforce these things.
It's all about coercing and cajoling governments to go along.
And which goes to show, I mean, this is the whole thing about when they talk
about, you know, what H.W. Bush meant when he talked about the new world order
is the same thing that Joe Biden meant when he would say the liberal rules
based international order of just doing what America says.
Right. That's what it is. You know, it's a pseudo empire. It's not exactly the
same kind of empires and, you know, colonialism that we've had in the past.
But it's sort of a neo-colonialism where if we can overthrow your government
with some money, then we'll do that.
A little bit of CIA help, we'll do that.
And if we have to if we have to bomb your capital city, we'll go for that if we
think so.
Yeah.
And it does go back really to the Wolfowitz Doctrine, you know, of various
degrees.
But this is a reference to right after the first Gulf War, Paul Wolfowitz at
that time was the deputy secretary of defense for policy.
And him and a couple other neocons, Scooter Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad, they
wrote up this document called the Defense Planning Guidance.
And it was saying this is going to be, you know, the posture for the post-Cold
War era and the post-first Iraq War, Gulf War era.
And what it said was we're going to be the most dominant power on every
continent anywhere in the world.
And we're not even going to tolerate any other nation or alliance or group of
nations anywhere to try to join together to balance against us.
We will be dominant everywhere.
We'll never let anyone get that far ahead.
Or at least we're going to try to construct an order where our power is
essentially permanent and they don't even try it.
And so that's what they've been trying to do with expanding our footprint in
the Middle East, expanding our footprint into Eastern Europe.
And, of course, you know, working hard at least on building their alliances or
tightening them and arming their alliances in Eastern Asia.
And it's, you know, under the theory that if it's not us, it'll be somebody
else.
It'll be so much worse.
So we have to stay and dominate everything forever.
But, of course, you look at the dead and just see, well, we can't afford it.
So I don't know how anybody else can, but we certainly cannot afford to keep
doing this.
Right.
And if you look at Wolfowitz, if you see Popeye's image of Paul Wolfowitz, he
looks exactly like the kind of guy you would expect to make something like the
Wolfowitz Doctrine.
Right.
And by the way, they did rewrite it because it was a scandal.
It was leaked to the New York Times.
And so they went back and rewrote it.
And they just said, well, we'll bring our friends, you know, from the
international institutions along to...
That picture right there where your cursor is right below, right there.
No, to the right of that.
That one.
Yeah, there you go.
Look at that.
That looks like...
That completely looks like the type of guy that would do something like this.
So listen, there's a book about the neoconservatives by Jacob Hilbrun called
They Knew They Were Right.
Which is, of course...
That's hilarious.
Yeah, these guys who have no idea what they're doing, really, you know.
That's hilarious.
Let me try this.
Yeah.
It doesn't fit right on my little head.
Like I said, you can fuck with the volume on that little knob and turn it up
and down.
So this was one of the things that when Coleman Hughes and our buddy Dave Smith
got into it
with was about whether...
Remember when they brought up this seven countries thing that, you know, and he
was saying that
there was no real proof that that exists, that he didn't actually read it.
He was told that we were going to go into seven countries, but, you know, I was
talking to
Dave about this the other day.
He's like, if you just look at the fact that we did everything on that list
except Iran,
every single one of them took place except Iran.
Like, he's like, I really want to go and do that debate again, and I can't get
Coleman
to sit down with me.
Yeah.
You know, yes.
For people who are interested in this subject, you know, long term, there's no
mystery about
the connection between the neoconservatives' doctrines and then the activities
that the
W administration engaged in, you know, subsequent.
I mean, what happened was you have, you know, Andrew Coburn, the great
journalist Andrew Coburn,
says that the neoconservatives are a cross between the Israel lobby and the
military industrial
complex.
The fighter bomber salesmen needed eggheads to justify their policies, and the
neoconservatives
wanted to support Israel, wanted to support American hegemony, and so took all
the military
industrial complex money to build their think tanks, to create their consensus,
to build their
policy.
You know, their own kind of thousand little council on foreign relations is to
get what they
want, and then when, you know, the seven countries thing is...
So what we're talking about, just to clarify, is Wesley Clark was given, well,
he was on
some television show.
I forget what the show was.
Do you remember?
There's two different statements.
One of them I know was with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now.
That's right.
Democracy Now.
And basically what he's talking about is, you know, he says that a general or,
I'm sorry,
a military officer of some rank told, then retired, but still with access,
former General
Wesley Clark, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in
Europe under Bill
Clinton, did the Kosovo War.
So very prominent four-star general.
And he said, the way he told the story was, he told them, hey, you know, they're
planning
for a war with Iraq.
And he said, Iraq, why?
And the guy said, I don't know.
And then the second part of the story was he came back a week later or
something, and the
same guy said, there's this memo that has the seven countries, and they say
they want
to take them all in five years.
So they, meaning the office of the Secretary of Defense.
So that's Donald Rumsfeld, who's not a neoconservative, he's his own separate
thing here, he's the
Secretary of Defense, but all of his guys, all of his most important guys are
neoconservatives.
So the Deputy Secretary of Defense is Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of
Defense for
Intelligence is Stephen Cambon, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy is
Douglas Fythe, and
then under him is Abram Shulsky and Bill Lutie, and all of these guys, Michael
Rubin and
others, who are all working on this project to get us into Iraq.
And this is the neoconservative network of power.
You've got Scooter Libby and David Wormser would travel around from state to
defense to
the Vice President's office, but you've got Scooter Libby and John Hanna in the
Vice President's
office.
You've got Zalmi Khalilzad and Elliott Abrams on the National Security Council,
Robert Joseph
and Stephen Hadley and Eric Edelman.
All of these guys were already the network of guys who agreed with this policy
going back
through the 1990s.
And it was what they had founded the Project for a New American Century on.
And so what they're saying is, we should not tolerate any, remember the time,
this was the
stated doctrine.
We will not tolerate the existence of any Middle Eastern regime that supports
terrorism.
And supports terrorism can mean anything, right?
Like Abu Nidal died in Iraq before the war even started and was a washed up old
terrorist from
a previous day.
But like, that's good enough.
Got Mujahideen-y cult commie terrorists who've worked for us ever since, but at
that time was
a good enough excuse to invade Iraq.
They would invoke that.
And so they made up that doctrine.
The Mujahideen were in Iraq as well as Afghanistan?
Well, this is a particular sect of Mujahideen kooks who were Iranian communist
cultists who
were, had left Iran and gone to work for Saddam Hussein.
And then were, you know, he supported them.
They had nothing to do with anti-American terrorism at that time, except, you
know, I guess, committing
it when they had worked for Iran previously during the Iranian Revolution.
But by, I mean, by the time we invaded Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld inherited them and
they've worked
for America and Israel ever since then.
They have a base in Albania now.
But in other words, though, this wasn't Al-Qaeda.
This was not any real excuse.
They would just invoke the doctrine of fighting terrorism in order to check off
this list of
all of these governments that they didn't like.
And coincidentally and incidentally and very importantly, of course, is this
was really,
in many cases, Israel's list of enemies, where if it was, say, Colin Powell,
which is what
people thought they were voting for in the year 2000, by the way.
Well, I don't know about this W. Bush, but at least Colin Powell will be up
there.
We can trust him.
They all said if it had been up to him, we would have done a two-state solution
in Palestine
and solve that issue.
And then we would have had probably the most limited of wars against Al-Qaeda
in Afghanistan.
And that would have been it.
The rest of it would have been police and or special forces action.
There would have been no invasion of Iraq, which he did lie us into that war,
and he's
responsible for that.
But that was not his policy.
That was the policy that came out of the vice president's office and this neoconservative
set.
And it's really, as Dave Smith correctly says, it's all based on the Clean
Break Doctrine,
which David Wormser and Richard Perle, oh, I neglected to mention Richard Perle
and his
friends on the Defense Policy Board.
But Perle and David Wormser had written up this policy paper called A Clean
Break in 1996,
and they wrote it for Netanyahu when he was first prime minister the first time
back then.
And what it said was, instead of going along with the Oslo peace process and
making a deal
with the Palestinians, we should just forget all that and just, we'll have
peace through
a position of strength and total dominance over our neighbors.
And so, but the problem, of course, is, and of course, meaning, continue to devour
Palestine,
what's left, the 22% of what's left of historic Palestine in the West Bank and
Gaza.
But the problem is, we have Hezbollah on our northern border, and Hezbollah is
backed by Iran
by way of Syria.
So if you just picture the Middle East, you know, if you want, you can throw up
a map and just
kind of show there's this arc of power from Tehran in Iran through Syria and to
Hezbollah,
this Shiite militia in southern Lebanon.
Now, Saddam Hussein was the Sunni roadblock in that arc of power.
But these guys are stupid, the neoconservatives.
They're as stupid as they are arrogant and certain in their policy.
And they believed in this harebrained scheme, essentially, that the Jordanians
and the Turks
would be dominant in the new Saddam Hussein-less Iraq.
And that even though it's a supermajority Shiite Arab country, those Shiites,
they just love
being told what to do by either their original plan was the Hashemite king, the
cousin of the
king of Jordan.
And then they threw that out.
And it was the guy who sold them this line that this was possible in the first
place.
An Iraqi exile, you might remember from that time, Ahmed Chalabi, the head of
the Iraqi
National Congress.
They said, well, we'll just make him the guy instead, which ended up not
happening.
But that was their plan.
And they said, the new Shiite dominated Iraq will then, the religious leaders
in Iraq will
then force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start being friends
with Israel
instead.
And they'll even build an oil pipeline to Haifa or reopen the old British oil
pipeline
to Haifa-Israel.
And they were sold this bill of goods and they really believed it.
And so, and you can find this on my website, scotthorton.org.
I have a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm.
And then the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States, a balance
of power strategy
for the Levant.
They're both by David Wormser, signed off on by Richard Perle.
And then they wrote a book where Wormser wrote the book and Richard Perle wrote
the
foreword.
It's called Tyranny's Ally, America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein.
Get that.
America's the ally of Saddam just because we won't launch a war to regime
change.
And they're right in the title.
And then based on the same harebrained scheme.
And what's funny about this is this guy, David Wormser, now tries to defend
himself.
And he did an interview on a podcast not too long ago with this born-again
Christian about
September 11th and stuff.
And, but he talked about this and he's like, yeah, no, that's still right.
They'll do whatever the Hashemites tell them to do.
Those Shiites, they just worship and revere anyone who claims to have the blood
of the prophet.
But if that was true, as Dave Smith pointed out, well, then how come you can't
just call
the king of Jordan right now and ask him to ask the Ayatollah to knock it off?
Call him and ask, have him ask Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran.
Why couldn't they have just done that this whole time?
Why do you have to have a regime change in Baghdad before you can make this
magic wish
come true?
And the whole thing is completely stupid.
And the Shiites do revere some of the lineage of the family of the prophet
Muhammad.
But one, it's not a magic spell of hypnosis and total control over them.
And two, that has nothing to do with the Hashemites, who are Sunnis and a whole
separate line and
are the British sock puppet kings of Jordan, who used to rule Iraq back 70
years ago or something,
but have no purchase there whatsoever.
And of course, what happened, just real quick, what happened then in the war
was they just
empowered Iran.
They didn't empower Jordan and Turkey and America and Israel over the Iraqis.
They just gave Iran even more power than they ever had before.
When it was all meant to screw them over, it blew up in the Americans' face.
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Do you think that that is because of total incompetence and stupidity?
Or do you think that it was a scam and that they kind of knew this was going to
happen in the
first place, but what they really wanted to do was sell a lot of weapons, sell
a lot of
war, make a ton of money?
I mean, the amount of money that was generated, how much money did we spend on
the Iraq war?
Oh, I mean, on Iraq alone, at least five or seven trillion.
I think it was probably 10 trillion for the whole terror war.
So let's stop and think about that.
Yeah.
Five or 10 trillion.
Let's just say five.
Let's be nice.
Yeah.
Where's that money going?
How many defense contractors were deeply enriched by that?
How many defense contractors are involved in, you know, lobbyists, policy,
influencing change,
influencing certain actions?
And why would they do that?
Why would they do that?
Why would they push a harebrained scream?
Is it because of stupidity or is it because they don't give a fuck what the
excuse is?
Let's get the party started.
I think let's get some missiles.
Let's get some new planes.
Yeah.
OK, so boom, boom.
But OK, so we can see right in front of us right here where Netanyahu convinced
Trump this
would be easy and then it wasn't.
I think that's the same thing here.
Iraq was supposed to be easy and it was easy after all.
Right.
You send the Marines to take Baghdad.
They could take it.
The third infantry division and the Marines were done regime changing the place
in what,
five weeks?
But then it was a matter of occupying the place and the whole thing devolving
into civil
war and all that.
And I think, well, I'll put it to you like this.
In the clean break, we might be in coping with crumbling states, but it might
even, yeah,
I think it's in coping with crumbling states, which is the same thing.
Are we back?
OK, sorry about that.
We had that stupid glitch again.
Yeah, this is my.
Did we get a new computer?
I've done everything, even, yeah, I've talked to the company.
They don't know what's going on.
Motherfuckers.
Crazy.
Firmware.
Yeah, anyway.
I'm sorry.
Let me.
Can I ask you this?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
On the stupidity of the plan.
I think, look, plan A is it'll be fine.
And then plan B is, well, at least we can make some money and push this thing
on and let
both sides fight and weaken each other and these kinds of attitudes for sure.
But that's the point.
Like, did they genuinely think that this plan would work or was this plan just
a feasible
excuse to talk them into getting the party started?
I have one good argument in your favor there for sure, which would be Senator
Joe Biden at
the time insisted that we break Iraq into three.
Our greatest president?
Yeah.
Right there with the worst that that that we draw these lines and essentially
enforce ethnic
cleansing or sectarian cleansing and create three sort of mini states within
Iraq.
And, you know, Antony Blinken was his right hand man then.
And I mean, that's who these guys are is, you know, very, very much America.
I mean, Israel first, Israel instead types.
There is something before the clean break called the Oded Yanon plan from, I
believe, 1981,
which is a real riot to read.
It's this Israeli strategist.
And the premise of the thing is that the Soviet Union is certain to conquer the
entire planet.
Talk about one world government.
We're about to have one world communism run out of Moscow and poor little
Israel is going
to be all alone out here.
So we have no choice to smash every near Arab state into as many warring tribal
pieces as
we possibly can to weaken all of them relative to us as this desperate strategy.
And of course, the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore at all by the end of the
decade.
But that was the premise for the thing.
And there's oh, and here's what I was going to say before the glitch was there
is a statement
in I think it's in coping with crumbling states where he kind of says, yeah,
you know,
these states are pretty artificial.
And without, you know, the Baathist construct in Iraq and Syria, you would have
these smaller
tribal based type units.
So then, you know, in other words, if you can't have a completely compliant
sock puppet
there, might as well make them fight and destroy their countries.
And that certainly happened in the case of Iraq, certainly happened in the case
of Syria under
Obama as well, where they just said, look, if we can't get the al-Qaeda guys to
sack Damascus
and get rid of Assad, at least we can just destroy the place.
Do you think there's a parallel in when we first went into Iraq, like Desert
Storm?
It was very easy.
Right?
Relatively.
It was minimal loss of American lives.
Yeah.
And I think everybody got a little cocky.
Oh, yeah.
That absolutely was part of that.
Just like what we just saw with Venezuela.
That's what I was going to say.
It was so easy.
That's exactly what I was going to say.
I mean, people asked me right after Venezuela, so what do you think this means
for Iran?
And I was like, bad news.
Bad news.
Right?
Like, nobody thinks we're going to go in there and kidnap the Ayatollah.
But if you put eyeballs on them, you can put a bomb on them.
Well, they killed them.
Yeah.
And that's all you got to do.
And that didn't even help.
Of course not.
Yeah.
Is it true that whenever they've been negotiating with someone, Israel kills
them?
I think that happened at least a couple of times early in the war.
Yeah.
I mean, that was what they said.
In fact, I forget if it was Vance or Trump who said, well, we can't say.
I think it was Trump who said, we can't say who we're negotiating with because
they'll get
killed.
And like, you're supposed to think that what like hardliners in Iran will kill
them for
trying to negotiate.
But no, the Israelis will kill them.
Yeah.
That is wild.
Yeah.
That's wild.
It's wild that it's true.
One of the things that's not talked about at all since Iran, we rarely talked
about,
is Ukraine.
Yeah.
It's so strange how that kind of just left people's consciousness.
It's like they now just concentrating entirely on this Iran thing.
And the Ukraine thing is fascinating too, because it was one of the few wars
that I saw leftist
support.
It was very interesting.
It was like kind of right after they put the masks and the syringes down from
their profiles,
and it was Ukraine flags.
Right.
Metzger had a joke about that.
Did he?
Yeah.
He starts out like, hey, invading Ukraine is bad.
Can't we all agree on that?
Like, he really gives them like, he like leans on, can't we all agree that it's
bad?
And he's like, but it wasn't cure for COVID, you got to admit, you know?
And it was.
They just switched from night to day on that.
And then, yeah, the other thing, and look, a big part of that is Putin is a
great stand-in
for Trump.
If you're an angry liberal something, you got to be angry at something.
And he represents, now we're the common turn, and the Russians are the more
conservative
Christian force.
And so, like, not that Trump's a Christian, but you know what I mean, and they're
anti-right
everything, that the Russians are the right, not the Ukrainians are the left,
but whatever.
And Russia is obviously the much larger country and the one that invaded, that
crossed the border
first here, and they are the aggressor in the war, so it's, as far as the
narrative goes,
it's easy to justify sticking up for those, you know, plucky defenders, which
is, you know,
I was actually surprised, but I shouldn't have been, right, when I went to
Oxford and lost
that debate.
That was who was, not that they were leftists, but they're liberals, you know,
or progressive
type college kids, and they're just totally on the side of Ukraine.
In fact, the question of the debate was, this house would rather go to war with
Russia than
lose Ukraine.
And I thought that was just the most ludicrous thing in the whole world.
That's not even debatable.
They've got H-bombs, 7,000 of them.
And we're not having a war with Russia.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
And then I should have made my case better, because they did not like me or my
case at
all.
They were so just staunchly for Ukraine that they were willing to support that,
that they
think that Britain should get into a war with Russia over the Donbass, which is
just absurd.
But I take responsibility for not framing my argument well enough.
I just thought the question was so ridiculous in the first place, I would
barely have to make
my case.
Thought I'll just make an H-bomb joke, and that'll be the end of that.
You know?
I said, "Have you ever seen Threads?
Have you ever seen Threads?"
It's like the British version of The Day After, where Margaret Thatcher gets
them nuked
in a war.
No.
It's a movie?
The The Day After from 1983 of Steve Guttenberg.
So this is the Russian's version from the same time frame.
And I was like, "Have you all seen Threads?"
Which of course they haven't.
They're a bunch of little kids.
Well, they probably think it's that social media app.
Yeah, right.
The Instagram one?
Yeah, exactly.
We should talk about how this whole thing got started in Ukraine, because most
Americans
don't even realize that the United States kind of overthrew the government
there.
Yeah, absolutely.
Twice in 10 years, in the Orange Revolution of 2004 and in 2014.
And in fact, you know, George Soros bragged that he had really influenced the
vote toward
the pro-Russian candidate in 1994, you know, back 10 years before that.
He bragged about that in an interview with The New Yorker, Connie Brooke, in
The New Yorker
magazine.
He said, "Like, real estate investment trusts, I make it happen with my
investments."
You know?
Fun guy.
Yeah.
And look, I mean, Russia and Ukraine have a long and difficult history, but the
long and
the short of it for our purposes is that they wanted out at the end of the
Soviet Union.
And in fact, even embarrassingly for the Republicans, George Bush Sr. and his
government even intended
the USSR to stay together.
They wanted not communism, but they wanted Russia to be able to hang on to
Belarus and Ukraine
and at least some of the stands.
And...
But what happened was really the Russians under Boris Yeltsin overthrew the
Soviet Union.
The most powerful member of the Soviet Union overthrew what was left of it.
And it was actually in the aftermath of a hardline commie coup in August of
1991, which failed.
And so it was Boris Yeltsin who saved the day, but then ended up doing his own
coup basically,
just destroying what was left of the USSR and kicking Mikhail Gorbachev out.
So...
Why did the United States get involved in Ukraine and why did they stage a coup?
Yeah.
Well, so it's been a contest for dominance there ever since, right?
And so back to the Wolfowitz doctrine, and they talked about this in Rebuilding
America's
Defenses, the PNAC strategy document from the 1990s, 1998, I guess.
And I believe in the defense plan and guidance that he wrote in 1992, Wolfowitz,
that we got
to expand NATO into Eastern Europe.
And this is, the debate at the time was whether to include Russia or not, but,
and in fact,
in the 90s, there were some people who opposed expansion altogether.
But then there was another school of thought that just said, well, we'll expand,
but we'll
bring the Russians in.
But then they never did.
And so they ended up expanding the military lines up to Russia's border in a
threatening
manner and in a way that did not include them at all.
And they had alternatives like the Partnership for Peace.
And before that, we still have the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in
Europe, where those had been brought up as alternatives to NATO, where NATO
would be more political.
This is what James Baker and under H.
Bush and Warren Christopher under Bill Clinton had promised the Russians, so
that we're going
to make NATO a political organization.
And we're going to have as a security organization, it'll be the OSCE or the PFP,
which will include
you guys.
And which was not true.
They're basically, you know, never really meant to live up to those promises.
So, it's not a perfect analogy, but imagine if America had lost the Cold War
from all the
spending in the 1980s, and then the Soviets had come to dominate Western Europe,
and then
they started moving into the Caribbean, and then they started overthrowing the
government
in Canada when they voted wrong.
And this is Ukraine is Russia's Canada, right?
Kazakhstan's their Mexico, Ukraine's their Canada.
It's their most important neighboring state, other than maybe Belarus, but same
difference
here.
That narrative gets lost here.
Yes, it does.
But it's weird because it's so obvious.
When you lay it out like that, and when you look at the agreement that was made
at the
fall of the Soviet Union, that they wouldn't push arms closer to the border of
Russia.
And yet they consistently did that.
Absolutely.
And by the way, so let's talk about that for just a second, because people
dispute that
and say it's not true.
But it is true.
In fact, H. W. Bush gave the first promise to Gorbachev in Malta in December of
1989, that
if you let the Eastern European Warsaw Pact states go, not the Soviet republics,
but the
Warsaw Pact states, if you let them go, we promise not to take advantage, like
full stop.
That's it.
100%.
And then from there, and I cover all this in my book, Provoked, and it's even
overkill
on the research because I wasn't sure where to stop.
So it's all there for you, where it wasn't just on February the 9th, it was all
of these
meetings over the course of months where the Americans, the British, and
especially the
Germans, but with the Americans standing right there in many cases too, affirm
to the Russians,
the Soviets, and then the Russians over and over again that we are not coming,
we are not
going to integrate Poland, we're not going to integrate Hungary, then Czechoslovakia,
which
hadn't split apart yet.
And we have no intention of doing that, and that was, you know, came from Hans
Dietrich
Genscher, the foreign minister of Great Britain, as well as Helmut Kohl, the
chancellor, Margaret
Thatcher, and John Major, the prime ministers of England, and Douglas Hurd,
their foreign minister,
and even Francois Mitterrand, the president of France, and along with George
Bush's government,
over and over again promised them that we're not going to do this.
And then they just went ahead anyway, and the Clintons, you know, went along
with it too.
And in fact, in the Clinton years, one of the major proponents of NATO
expansion was a
guy named Strobe Talbot, who originally opposed it.
And, by the way, so when all of the, anybody in that era, whenever they, on
America's side,
or on the west side, whenever they opposed this, it was always for one reason.
There was no, like, variety of reasons.
There's always one reason.
This is an unnecessary provocation against the Russians.
These are our friends who just overthrew the communists for us.
So why would we pick a fight with them?
Why would we disrespect them?
We should be doing everything we can to integrate them into the west, into
Europe, into everything.
And this is totally unnecessarily antagonistic.
That was the one and only reason.
And it was brought up by a lot of people, including famously George Kennan, who
had coined the containment
policy against the Soviet Union in the 1940s, and, you know, was, had been
ambassador to Moscow.
And he was the one who said, we got to contain communism.
Well, now he's saying, we should not be trying to contain Russia when they didn't
do anything.
And he said, in fact, in an interview in the New York Times in 1998, Kennan
said, and he
was the most highly respected Russia expert out of all of the old so-called
foreign policy
great beers.
And he told Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, he goes, I'll tell you
exactly what's
going to happen here, okay?
We're going to expand NATO right up close to Russia, and we're going to get a
negative reaction
from the Russians.
And then as soon as we do, all of the people who are now telling us that'll
never happen, don't
worry about it, will then say, aha, see, that's how the Russians are.
That's why we have to do this, which is exactly what they say now.
See, the Russians are coming.
That's why we need NATO more than ever before.
When it was building up NATO more than ever before was what created this
antagonistic relationship
in the first place.
And then, you know, and I should specify, I am from Austin, Texas.
I don't have any connection to Russia whatsoever.
I don't give a damn about Russia whatsoever.
It has nothing to do with favoring their side of the story or whatever.
This is like, whatever.
What can I say?
I reluctantly admit that, and I'm not saying this is a good enough reason for
war, but I'm
saying that this is true, essentially.
That in his declaration of war, when Putin said that, basically, we tried
independence.
We tried letting Ukraine be an independent country.
But it turns out that, no, it just became a colony of the United States of
America.
It's totally controlled by America.
So, well, but we're just not going to stand for that.
You know?
So, we're going to intervene.
We're going to do what we have to do, at least to mitigate that.
If America is still going to control Kiev, then at the very least, we're going
to control the
Donbass and the southeastern coast here.
And so, I'm not saying that's a good enough reason to do what he did, but I'm
saying that
was essentially true.
America had, you know, almost like it was a British colony, just had total sock
puppets
in charge of that country.
In fact, there's a clip that I quote extensively.
It's one of the only block quotes in my book because I got rid of almost all of
them for
space, but I think I have the block quote of Victoria Nuland testifying.
That's Robert Kagan's wife, very important neoconservative, worked in Dick Cheney's
office
in the W. Bush years and everything, helped, you know, cause all of this
problem.
And she goes on and on describing the level of what can you call the infiltration
essentially
of the Ukrainian government by the United States that she says, we have our
people, state department
people and whoever, working at every level of the Ukrainian government
throughout their
police services, throughout their military, throughout their judicial branch,
throughout,
you know, and out in the provinces and everywhere, we're doing everything we
can to control everything
that's going on in that country.
And, you know, the WikiLeaks are very beneficial on this story because they
show where the Americans
understand clearly by the Americans.
I mean, Washington, the state department, whatever these guys, that they know
good and
well that Ukraine is deeply divided, especially politically on questions like
whether they
should join the NATO alliance or whether they rather be closer to Russia, try
to split the
difference and stay out of it or anything like that.
And so they say, well, so we just have to push then.
We'll just have to spend tens of millions of dollars on massive propaganda
campaigns and we'll just
have to make sure to support the candidates that support us and our wishes.
And essentially, the book is how Washington provoked, how Washington started
the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine.
I'm not blaming it on Kiev, I'm blaming it on essentially Bush senior through
Joe Biden, that they, all of them had such a ham-handed Russia policy that it
led to this.
It's just fascinating that this perspective is not being discussed or wasn't
being discussed when it was in the news every day.
When people were talking about Russia and Ukraine, it was always that Russia
had done this horrible thing and attacked Ukraine, which was horrible.
Which was horrible.
Of course.
But no one gave any background.
No one really talked about and made the comparison to imagine if the Soviet
Union or Russia, rather, took over Canada.
Right.
You know, or was proxying Canada.
Yeah, exactly.
Or if they went back at all, they would go, well, you know, this all started
when Russia seized Crimea.
But of course, they seized Crimea as a direct reaction to America overthrowing
the government and the so-called Revolution of Dignity in February 2014.
And so then, it's a complicated mess, but Crimea happened after that, but they
just want to start history at places where it's the most convenient for them.
And there's also the control of Ukraine is also connected to resources, right?
I mean, there's immense amounts of minerals, natural gas.
There's trillions of dollars of that stuff there that and this also connects
Burisma to the Biden administration, right?
Yes.
So, like, I would not buy anyone arguing that these minerals or these resources
are somehow crucial for the United States of America, for the American people,
for our betterment or anything like that.
Only as Ross Perot called them, the special interests, right?
Chevron wants that oil.
And Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and Monsanto have investments in those
grains.
And so, this is about them, but that isn't necessarily us.
You look at, you know, whatever benefit they have to our GMP or GDP is negligible,
certainly not worth starting a war or anything like that.
Of course.
These are all the free riders.
These are, you know, the excuse makers for this kind of policy.
But essentially, I think what it really is is just trying to keep Russia weak
and off balance as much as possible.
And, you know, like, there's this really important RAND Corporation study that
was published in 2019.
So, the RAND Corporation is a Pentagon-sponsored think tank, but it's out in
Santa Barbara.
They put it in California so it would be somehow a little bit less political, a
little insulated from East Coast stuff, and be able to come up with their thing.
But that's basically who they are.
So, of all the think tanks, they're, like, the most directly connected to the
Pentagon itself.
And they came up with this thing.
It's called Extending Russia.
And by extending Russia, they mean overextending them.
In other words, how to provoke them into overextending themselves.
Like during the Cold War.
Right, exactly.
So, cause small trouble for them in as many places as we can just to bog them
down with expenses and commitments.
So, we want to, at that time, the pipeline wasn't complete yet.
So, we want to intervene with sanctions, whatever we can, to disrupt the Nord
Stream pipeline.
They said maybe we could try to overthrow the government of Belarus again,
which they actually did in 2020.
They had done it before in 2005 and 2001, failed all three times.
Which, if they did that, boy, that might lead right to a nuclear war right
there, man.
You don't want to succeed in, especially a bloody, if it turned bloody, a coup
in Belarus.
But anyway, then they said we could increase weapons to the jihadists in Syria.
We could try to overthrow the government of Kazakhstan.
We could increase support for the Ukrainian military.
And what's interesting about this, so in other words, see how they're saying,
do all these things to essentially agitate the Russians, to keep them off
balance, to keep them bogged down, to keep them spending money they can't
afford to spend.
But then, all throughout it, they have all these disclaimers where they say,
don't listen to us.
If you do this, it'd be terrible.
Like, if you overthrow the government of Belarus, the Russians might just
invade it immediately and station nuclear weapons there, to make the point.
If we support the jihadists in Syria, they could break out of the Idlib
province and sack Damascus, and then we'd have an Al-Qaeda government in Damascus,
which is, of course, exactly what happened at the end of '24.
They said, we could increase support for what was then the ongoing civil war
that had broken out after the revolution in 2014.
We could increase support for the Ukrainian side of that, or the Kiev side of
that war.
But then that could provoke the Russians into a full-scale invasion of the
country, which would, of course, be terrible for Ukraine and terrible for the
United States.
A massive expense for us, a humiliation for as far as our international
standing and prestige, and, of course, untold chaos for the people of Ukraine.
And so, we better be real careful about pursuing these policies.
And then, I swear, you look at how Biden ran things, and it was like he got
that memo just without any of the disclaimers.
And they just went ahead and did all of these things.
And, in fact, they were doing, they were messing around, it was actually the
last year of Trump that they tried to overthrow Belarus.
So, that was independent of Biden's wishes.
That was already going on.
And then, they were messing around in Kazakhstan in January of '22, right on
the eve of war.
Right when you might have hoped that the entire, you know, pressure in
Washington was to try to figure out a way to avoid war, to prevent this from
breaking out.
What kind of deal might we have to make with Putin to try to prevent him from
invading Ukraine, as they're threatening to do?
And we're building up their forces in preparation for it.
And then, what do they do?
They support an armed insurrection in Kazakhstan, which is, that's the big one,
right on Russia's southern border there, out of all the stands.
It's the most important one, which is just madness.
And it goes to show that that's essentially what they're up to when it comes to
that, is just, you know, if we can't overthrow Putin,
we're going to still weaken him, hem him in, surround him, agitate him, and
force him to make commitments.
And, of course, this is why the war's been going on for four years.
America could tell Kiev, under Biden or under Trump, that, look, you guys are
just going to have to compromise here, obviously.
You've lost, you know, all of Luhansk, and most of Donetsk, and, you know, at
least half of Zaprosha and Khursan.
And so just make a deal, figure it out, and we're not supporting you anymore.
Instead, what did they say?
Remember, they said over and over again, we want to inflict a strategic defeat
on Russia.
Russia might win the war, or, but no, we promise they won't.
But yeah, but if it takes a long time, good.
And, in fact, I have a collection of quotes in the book where politicians and pundits
and all these people would say,
and maybe they still say this, we're getting such a good bang for our buck in
Ukraine.
Because just think about it, Russian soldiers are dying, but American soldiers
are not.
So all we got to do is we just give them money and then they go fight.
And then sometimes they wouldn't even make any reference to the Ukrainian
soldiers at all.
Hundreds of thousands of whom have been killed.
Hundreds of thousands of whom have been, you know, horrifically maimed.
A major part of this country completely destroyed huge segments of their
population,
fleeing the country as refugees, many of whom to never come home again, right?
The total destabilization of their culture and society in every way.
And then, but you can tune into Fox News or hell, the Democrats too, talking
about, or maybe worse,
that, oh, but we're getting such a good bang for our buck because we're killing
Russians.
We're sending them home in body bags.
We're sending them home in coffins.
We're even killing their generals in the field.
But none of our guys are dying.
Heh, heh, heh.
As though the Ukrainians don't matter at all.
And that's the way they think of it.
This is inflicting costs on the Russians.
Joe Biden would say that over and over again.
It's almost like the underpants gnomes thing with the first you steal the underpants,
then question mark, question mark, question mark, and then profit.
Not really sure.
I don't know what that is.
Oh, in South Park, the poor, I think it's butters, the underpants gnomes are
stealing his underwear.
And they're trying to explain how this is supposed to work.
And they don't really have it worked out what they're going to do with the
underpants.
But they're sure they're going to make a lot of money in the end.
And that's the same kind of thing here where they skip the step about, well,
is this really weakening Vladimir Putin's regime?
Or maybe it's strengthening his regime?
Is it, you know, increasing American power and influence in the region?
Or in fact, we're shown as sort of a paper tiger ourselves.
And we've done more than, you know, you could have imagined to push Russia
towards China
and toward the rest of Eurasia.
You know, Joe Biden is essentially deliberately trying to prevent them
from being part of European civilization and to emphasize their turn to the
east.
That seems to me to be a terrible mistake, you know?
And I think part of it is part of the longer term Cold War with China, too.
And you hear them talk about this, Joe.
They'll say, you know, essentially, Russia's friends with China.
So there's two things we can do there.
And this is what I think Trump would prefer to do,
would be just make friends with Russia and pull them away from China.
Maybe he's already decided it's too late for that, or he doesn't know how.
And then the other side was, no, lure Russia into Eastern Europe,
bog them down so they're no use to China.
You know, weaken their power, inflict on them this strategic defeat in Ukraine
so that then they won't be as useful to China in our Cold War with them or
worse.
Which I think is stupid and didn't work.
I think that was the choice that Joe Biden made.
And I think it was totally wrong because it just strengthened the relationship
between
Russia and China.
The Russians have a huge new pipeline that they opened.
Well, not that new.
About 12 years ago that they opened to China and they keep adding to it.
So they're able to sell all the hydrocarbons they want.
And the Chinese will burn every hydrocarbon you got.
So, you know, they really don't need Europe.
You know, Joe Biden kicked them out and basically solidified their economic
break with Europe.
Totally unnecessarily, but in a way that didn't really hurt Russia.
And the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline was a part of this?
This was to disconnect their oil supply or their natural gas supply to Europe?
Yeah, in fact, more specifically, right, it was to make this break between,
to solidify the break between Germany and Russia.
It's the previous German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
She had this project she called Eurasian Home.
And what she was trying to do was balance American and Russian interests in
Europe.
And then they were closing down all their nuclear stuff,
all the green movement, you know, environmental stuff.
They closed down all their nuclear in Germany.
And then the idea was, don't worry, we're going to import all this clean
burning CH4 from the Russians.
And then, but to the Americans, this is the worst thing that could happen,
would be an alliance or this strengthening, any part of any strengthening
relationship
or budding relationship between the Germans and the Russians.
Because with, you know, German manufacturing power and Russian raw materials,
and both of their, at least potential military strength,
that if they have an alliance and dominate Eastern Europe, they can keep
everybody else out.
And so I think that has always been the British and the American fear there.
And, you know, there's, um, here in Austin, there's that sort of, uh,
corporate CIA strat four run by this guy, George Friedman.
What is it?
Strat four, it stands for strategic forecasting.
They do dirty tricks.
Yeah, it's here in Austin.
Oh, no, they, they do some dirty tricks,
but I think they mostly like do like, you know, pseudo CIA briefings for
corporations and stuff.
Let them know what's going on in the world.
That kind of thing.
Mostly their emails got leaked on, uh, WikiLeaks.org, uh, years ago.
And, you know, they're involved.
They're, they're close with some of these color coded revolutionaries.
And anyway, I don't know them or anything, but their leader is a guy named
George Friedman.
And I'll give him credit.
I know he opposed Iraq war two in 2003, because I heard him on the radio back
then.
But, um, I mean, I'm not vouching for the guys like, uh, a good guy or whatever,
but just to say he's sort of like a realist school foreign policy analyst type,
um, not too ideological or anything like that.
And he gave a speech years ago where he says, and this is the key words, primordial
fear.
This is the primordial fear of American, you know, imperial policy planners,
is that you would have an alliance between the Germans and the Russians.
And so anything that we can do to prevent that, we'll do.
Now, I don't know exactly who blew up that pipeline, but I'm sure they had at
least
the support of the United States.
Seymour Hersh has it that it was American military guys who did it.
Um, which I think, I don't know.
I don't know.
And then there's a whole cover story about this yacht.
And then there's six different versions of who rented this yacht and whether it
was used
and whether it was robots or whether it was divers or whatever.
And it's all meant to confuse.
But this episode is brought to you by Visible.
Ah, spring is in the air, which means time for some spring cleaning.
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The bottom line is, nobody wants to know, right?
Seymour Hersh, what did he say happened?
He said that it was
miners based out of Pensacola, Florida, meaning not pickaxe miners or children,
but meaning
divers that go down and disable sea mines.
That that was their expertise.
Those were the guys that they sent to do it.
And that was in, I think he did that in the London Review books or something
like that.
Is that disputed?
Yeah.
And including by people who blame the Ukrainians and people who blame,
I don't know, like Polish or I guess Polish groups or whatever.
They had all these different investigations that all led different directions.
I know Jeremy, I think Jeremy Scahill had one version of it.
And then James Bamford, who I really respect.
He's the guy that wrote all the books about the National Security Agency over
the years.
And he had it that it was the Ukrainians and they used robots to do it.
And he's, you know, sussed that out through documents and stuff
and decided that that must have been what had happened.
And, you know, so I don't know, there's, there's six different versions of it.
And I have, I'm not choosing which is the favorite here,
but I think it's clearly was in America's interest.
And of course, Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland have both sort of cheekily said,
we're not going to let this proceed.
And if they do, we'll, we will do whatever it takes to stop it.
And so evidently they did.
And you can see how they would consider that to be,
you know, what they would be trying to prevent would be this
strengthened relationship between Germany and Russia.
Where's all that natural gas going now?
Is it just pouring right into the ocean?
Well, eventually they capped it,
but I think it was the biggest release of methane into the atmosphere ever.
It was a huge thing.
It was a massive, if you were a liberal, progressive,
Democrat, environmentalist type.
That ought to be like the most offensive thing you ever heard of.
Yeah. It's way worse than cow burps.
Oh yeah.
Remember they were worried about cow burps?
Yeah. It's centuries worth of cow burps.
Centuries worth.
Jesus.
So the Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan thing, I never heard of.
I hadn't heard a peep about that.
I had no idea that we were meddling in Kaz, Kazakhstan.
Yeah. It was one of those where, much like what just happened in Iran in
January, where there's
protest over some economic policy. I think in that case they had cut the gas
ration or something like
that. And it's, you know, it's a country that's divided by ethnicity. Those
borders are in all the
wrong places and whatever. So you have sort of the ruling cast and the people
on the outs and whatever.
So you had a big protest movement. And then all of a sudden there's armed gangs
of guys killing
cops, seizing police stations, trying to seize airports and this kind of thing.
And then what
happened was the Russians invaded. They sent regular troops across. They were
asked by the government
there to come and intervene and they sent troops. They crushed the insurrection.
And then it was
funny because Antony Blinken said, oh, there's a lesson when the Russians come,
they don't ever want to
leave. And then the next day they turn around and left and then they invaded
Ukraine. They haven't left there since.
But, um, so yeah, who were these insurrections? I don't know.
I mean, I think presumably they worked for the CIA and probably the Turks or
something, you know,
I don't know. Smirks. Yeah, them too. Yeah. And so this whole thing was just
what you were saying
earlier, just to try to get Russia to be spread as thin as possible, spend as
much money as possible,
cause as many problems in as many places as possible. Yeah. And in fact, the
same George
Friedman from Stratford, I think it's in that same speech or maybe a different
one where he says,
yeah, when, when Iran is doing a little bit better, you hit them. When Russia's
doing better,
you hit them. When China's achieving a thing or two, you hit them. You do
whatever you can to
always be effing with everybody all the time in order to, you know, that's how
to press your
advantage, which I think is totally just short sight. It's high time preference,
you know,
sort of government thinking, right? That like, well, if we can get away with
this now, we should,
without really thinking about the long-term consequence. In fact, that was one
of the things
that failed to impress at Oxford that I brought up that I thought was crucial
that is in my book is
a strobe Talbot, Bill Clinton's guy who originally opposed NATO expansion and
then later championed it
in 2018, when it was the middle of the war, uh, the, the civil war so-called
with America supporting
Kiev and the Russians supporting the so-called rebels on the other side. Um, uh,
New York Times
reporter named Keith Gessen went and interviewed strobe Talbot. And it just
kind of went without
saying that, like, clearly what is going on here is the project of NATO
expansion has sort of blown
up and caused all these problems. You know, what are we going to do? And, and
what do you think now,
pal? I forgot exactly what he phrased it, but it's sort of, you know, what do
you have to say for
yourself, strobe? And so strobe Talbot says, well, listen, he goes, when you're
in power, you have
one job and that is to pursue your nation's national interests. And if you don't
do that,
well, then you won't be in power very long. So that was what we had to do. But
then he says,
no, maybe should we have had a higher, wiser conception of our national
interest?
Maybe. In other words, at the time, what they were thinking is we want Lockheed
dollars and we want
Polish votes for 1996, Illinois's crucial swing state. Right. So, or was, I don't
know if it still is.
So that's why we got to do this because it's in America's national interest
that Bill Clinton get
reelected and we all get to keep our jobs. So we're going to, we're going to
make these promises
to these people and pursue this policy for our narrow interests as rulers of
the empire. But then
if he had had a higher, wiser conception of America's national interest, he
might have thought, wow,
are we scheduling a military conflict with Russia for the next century? Maybe
we shouldn't do that.
Maybe we should look at it like actually nothing in the world is more important
than America
continuing to get along with the Russians. And again, when the communists are
long gone. So whatever
problem you have with these guys, it ain't Stalinism and it ain't evangelical
Marxism at the point of a
rifle. Right. I mean, this is just whatever it is, we can deal with it. And, um,
and so no,
they chose the lower, dumber conception of America's national interest instead
of the higher, wiser one.
And they blew it. You know, is there anyone that's ever made the argument to
you like where you've had
these debates where you have a utopian perspective on international relations
and that this libertarian
ideology of like staying out of people's business, staying out of the, what you'll
do if you don't
fuck with the Russians, you don't keep them spending, you don't keep them
stretched out.
They'll just amass more and more power. And then they'll start to try to take
over what was
traditionally the Soviet union. What was originally the Soviet union?
Yeah. You know, it just so happens, right? That America never leaves anybody
alone. So we just
don't have a controlled experiment, right? We're constantly provoking and
everything that we see
them do is clearly a reaction. And it's just like when we talk about terrorism,
again, I'm not in any
way justifying it, but I'm just saying we have so much intervention preceding
the terrorism. You have
to be able to attribute that. Yes.
Now, so how would things be otherwise? For example, if HW Bush had just said,
okay, well,
we won the cold war, Pat Buchanan's right, let's just come home and had brought
the empire home from
Europe. Then what would happen is the Germans would have reunified and then
they would have joined into
a new European union army with the British and the French and probably the Poles.
And then it would have
been on them to keep the peace between each other, to police the smaller
countries in their region,
and hopefully strike a long-term security partnership with the new red, white,
and blue
Republican Russians. And, you know, if people want to say, but, and in fact,
the other side in that debate at
Oxford, Daniel Fried said, yeah, but it was Poland wanted to join our alliance.
It's not like we made them,
they wanted to. But the thing is, yeah, they might have reason to fear Russia
based on old things.
But the question is, why are we obligated to be the guarantor of their
independence? It's,
it's too far from here. And it's something that we're no good at. We only cause
problems
and something that the other European states who are all Western Christian
capitalist democracies and
friends of ours, that they can all work together and solve on their own. I mean,
when Germany reunified,
it's not like the commies were taken over. It was the West that was dominant in
the new Germany,
right? These are our pals. There's no reason a world that America should have
had to have,
well, for example, like a big part,
part of the horrible war in the Balkans was because of a contest for power
between America
and Germany over who's going to be dominant in the former Yugoslavia. We should
just let the Germans
have it. Or I mean, not have it and kill everybody or whatever, but God, it
could hardly have been worse than
what America helped to cause there by trying to compete with the Germans for
dominance
in a land that's quite literally 6,000 miles from here.
But it's the fear from the American side that if you let other countries
consolidate power,
if you let them grow in influence without fucking with them and keeping them
spread out,
like we're doing with Russia, that they'll eventually get stronger and then
they'll become
a real problem. And they keep them weak, keep them distracted, keep them
engaged in this Ukraine
conflict and Kazakhstan and anything else you can cook up. And that keeps them
down.
Well, it's like this. When it was the Cold War against the commie Soviet Union,
I was a kid and I'm not an expert on all of that history. I think there were
real questions about
the dangers of world communism at that time, where at least I'd be willing to
hear you out.
But since the end of the Cold War, no, there's just no justification for it.
Because as Bill Hicks
would say, right, like just spin the globe, man. There's no countries out there,
right?
Every power in Europe is our friend and no threat to us and mean us no harm
whatsoever.
There are no powers in in Egypt. I mean, pardon me, in Africa that count at all
except for Egypt,
which is our friend. India will be a power in 100 years from now. China is a
rising power,
but we've been their friends for 50 years, even when they were still communists.
Nixon went and
made friends with them in the early 1970s and then the Soviet Union. Yeah.
But aren't they constantly infiltrating our different universities and people?
Well, I ain't endorsing that. You can keep them out, but it's nothing.
But Chinese infiltration is kind of crazy, like what they're doing in America.
It's like,
if you're saying they're our friends, you know, the mayor of Arcadia just got
busted.
I saw that. Yeah.
She was a communist spy. She's a fucking mayor of a city in California.
I'm putting that on the FBI counterintelligence division. That should have
never been allowed
to happen in the first place. Um, and no, I don't mean that they're totally benign,
but
look, worst case scenario, China invades or just surrounds and forcibly reintegrates
Taiwan.
That doesn't mean they're going to invade Korea. It doesn't mean they're going
to invade Japan or
Australia or, or have the appetite to want to do that. I think China's already
a pretty overextended
empire and it's very poor and many parts of it. And they have something, is it
14 or 15
neighbors that they got to deal with already? You know, their, their greatest
ambition is to build
this, um, uh, you know, highway and, and, and fiber optics and whatever from
Shanghai to Lisbon,
right? This where they call it the, why am I forgetting the name of the damn
thing? The, the great,
uh, the, the great new highway they're trying to build all the way across Eurasia.
Um,
they can't do that by intimidating everyone and lording it over everyone. They
got to cut through
Tajikistan. You know, these are wild lands. They're going to make deals the
whole way across if they're
going to do that. If you know, they there, and, and if you look at the way they're
building their empire
so far, it's all just briefcases, you know, right. Government backed businesses
making deals and buying
up resources and stuff. But I, I, I really don't think that Xi Jinping is
looking at George W. Bush
and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden and going, yeah, that's what I
want to do for my country
is blow my own brains out trying to take over the whole rest of the planet
earth.
Well, and you know, you know, just to point to what you're saying, it's like
China's not invading
anybody. They're not, they're not doing what we're doing. And I'm not saying
they're nice guys or
whatever, but they don't rule us and they're no threat to North America. They
have no need to pick
a fight with us. People say, oh, you got all your microchip factories on Taiwan.
Well then move them to
Austin. We've had advanced micro devices here for 30 years or whatever, 35
years, maybe more than that.
Build that stuff here. They can, but they tried. It's very difficult. The thing
about what they've
got going on in Taiwan, the reason why Taiwan is the head of it is that they're
far more advanced
than anybody else in the world at doing it. Bring them. Yeah, you would have to,
that's a lot. I thought you were going to say it was something special about
the salt water over
there or something. No, no, no, no. They're just way ahead of everybody else. I
mean, in fact,
didn't Samsung try to do a chip manufacturing plant in Texas? And I think their
yields were
so poor. I don't know what the actual story with that is. So I'm speaking way
over my pay scale here,
but I think what it is, is you have to have like certain tolerances when you're
creating these chips
and they weren't achieving what they were trying to achieve despite spending an
enormous amount of
money. So it's not as simple as build a plant, the schematics are there, you
just crank out chips.
Yeah. Like apparently these chips are super complicated to make. Sure. Not
worth having a war over.
You're dismissing it. No, not worth, I'm not saying it's worth a war over. Yeah.
But I'm
just saying that this idea, just move them to Austin, I don't think it's that
easy. I think chip
manufacturing is one of the most complex technological challenges. Yeah. In 2026.
Yeah.
I don't know. I mean, we've had, um, I don't, I don't know what all AMD does
here,
but I'm pretty sure that, that, um, them and Samsung and others have, you know,
all the facilities
they need here to do whatever they want. I don't think that's quite true. Or
they should be able
to. They should, they maybe could with enough resources and time and maybe
stole all the
fucking eggheads from Taiwan and bring them over here. All the geniuses that
have figured
out how to make those chips. Just pay them. Maybe, maybe they wouldn't let them.
But what,
what happened with the Samsung chip factory?
it's never been fully open and it's not done yet. Oh, okay. But what was, there
was some. I used
to be a rent-a-cop at some pretty fancy factories here, you know, back 25 years
ago. Oh yeah? What kind
of factories? Uh, I think it would have been AMD or, and or Samsung. Some
pretty fancy, like, uh, chip
fabrication and stuff like that. Well, let's ask perplexity. Let's ask. And I
did have a job being a
rent-a-cop because he's skate parking garages at work and do my homework at
work. It was great.
Yeah. Easy job for the most part, right? Just free time. Um, let's ask perplexity.
Why are all the,
why are so many chip manufacturers in Taiwan? Because I'm pretty sure there's
something about the
advancements that they've made in chip manufacturing that no one's been able to
replicate. Otherwise it
doesn't make sense that China wouldn't just make their own. Yeah. Like they're
right there. I read this
thing not long ago about how, like with the China's AI stuff, they figured out
how to write their
program where they need much less computing power to do the same kind of effort
in the way that they
did it. So they just found their own work around. Yes. Well, they also, there's
a lot of espionage
going on too. Yeah, probably. Um, a lot of the world's chip manufacturers is in
Taiwan because the
island deliberately built a specialized ecosystem around contract chip
fabrication, foundries,
then compounded that early lead with huge investment, dense clustering of
suppliers and talent and strong
government support over several decades. So early strategic bet on
manufacturing. Starting in the
1980s, Taiwan chose to focus on precision manufacturing, fabricating chips for
others,
instead of trying to build its own big consumer tech brands. And then their
dominance and scale.
Yeah. Founded in 87, now the world's leading contract. TSMC, the leading
contract chip manufacturer,
produces over half of the world's advanced semiconductors and more than 90% of
the most
cutting edge nodes. Because of advanced fabs, uh, because advanced fabs cost
tens of billions of
dollars and must run near full capacity to be profitable. Only a few players
can keep up.
And Taiwan's leader kept pulling ahead as others dropped out. See, that's what
I'm talking about. Like,
I don't think it's easy.
The biggest issue I was seeing was that, uh, no customers is what kept popping
up.
What is that?
No, there are no customers.
I mean, the thing is at the same time,
huge problem delays because there's no one to buy them.
Well, why not?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, when it comes to capital...
If you have to run full capacity, then it's a lot probably.
But go ahead.
We got Samsung and Dell and AMD and IBM here.
I mean, it seems like they can invest their own money and build their own
whatever they need to.
Right?
Right.
They should be able to.
But just read what they said there about the amount of money that's involved in
keeping it running.
Like, I think they're so...
I think the idea about Taiwan, and again, this is not really my area of
expertise,
not that I have any, but that they're so far ahead that this process that they
bet on early on,
that they've got their manufacturing to this point where they've already
invested this enormous
amount of money and the money, and they have to keep them running constantly.
I don't think it's simple.
I don't think it's like car manufacturing.
And then by no customers, you mean that essentially everybody who needs these
chips
is already getting them from Taiwan.
There's not much more demand than that.
Well, not necessarily.
It could just mean that they already have contracts, that they don't need them
because they've already, you know, made commitments to Taiwan chip
manufacturers.
On the other hand, if Beijing is a military threat to Taiwan,
and these people would rather not be under the rule of Beijing and the
Communist Party,
then there's a pretty big incentive for them to move to Texas.
There is, but again, what I'm saying is I don't think it's a simple step.
I think, I don't think it's just like move here.
I think it's an enormous investment in capital, like beyond normal things.
And then I think to keep them running is an insane commitment.
It's very difficult.
And again, if Samsung doesn't have any, if right now they don't have any
customers,
didn't they have an issue with yields though?
Wasn't there an issue with chips being made to standard?
I think there was something else on top of that.
I tried typing that in and out.
I didn't see anything, but they're trying to get to two nanometer production.
They started on trials and then there's rumors about why they have not moved
into mass production.
And that's all these articles are saying.
Well, the Pentagon budget is a trillion and a half this year.
Let's just cut all that.
Then we'll have plenty of capital freed up to hold your microchip.
That's cute.
They're not going to do that.
Who needs a world empire?
Hey, look, one of the lessons of the war in Iran is the empire is good for
nothing anyway.
We have H-bombs that are enough to deter anyone from attacking us.
But America's military empire in the Middle East is completely bankrupt, right?
That whole thing was a hollow bluff and the Iranians just called it and we lost.
I mean, our bases have been evacuated.
They keep coming out.
I think you talked about this on your show, right?
How they were covering up the satellite photos.
They weren't letting Americans have access to the satellite photos
when you could get them online, whatever other countries had them.
And then you've had the New York Times and I hate to cite CNN,
but it was a well-sourced story where they got all these great satellite photos
and went and showed how the Iranians reached out and touched 18 bases
from Erbil in northern Iraq all the way down to Muscat in Oman
and took out all radar stations and pitted our runways,
hit refueling tankers and AWACS radar planes,
and took out the entire, not the entire, but a huge percentage of the
overlapping radars for the
missile defense systems over there, left our allies in Saudi, Qatar, UAE, Bahrain,
wide open.
You know, our naval's fifth fleet station at Bahrain is destroyed and offline.
I read this thing, said the Qataris, our main air base in the Middle East,
the headquarters of Central Command and our main air base at Qatar,
the Qataris made a deal with Iran.
Please stop hitting us.
And they promised to not allow America to fly any sorties out of Qatar,
our main air base during that war.
And so, as Justin Logan from the Cato Institute said,
well, what good is a military base that you can't fight a war from?
You know, it's just like that, I know you've seen this, right?
That old meme that says, well, if Iran doesn't want trouble with us,
how come they put their country so close to all our military bases?
And it has all the map of all our bases in the region.
But the thing is, what Donald Trump, I guess, didn't understand was that
those were a trip wire that were essentially,
we were making our own guys hostages of Iran to prevent war.
Those bases were preventing war because it should have been out of the question
that we would attack Iran because all those bases would be up for grabs against
them.
So how are they so poorly defended?
That's what I don't understand.
Like, how is it so easy for Iran to attack these bases?
And did they have any foreknowledge of this?
Did they understand?
Oh, yeah.
So why they were so poorly defended,
that's got to be political decision-making among the brass, right?
About like, well, we don't want to admit that we need these fortifications in
the first place,
maybe, or just the other general said, don't.
So we don't want to fight with him about it for office politics reasons or what.
Like, I don't know.
So it's not a gross underestimation?
It's not a gross underestimation?
It can't be because, listen, I'll tell you, man, in January of 2007,
the chiefs took W. Bush down to the tank in the basement of the Pentagon,
and they told him, look, we'll do your rock surge where we increase the war in
Iraq,
but we really don't want to go to Iran.
And they told him the reason why not is because the Iranians have escalation
dominance,
or at least we won't have it.
I shouldn't have said that.
I was overstating it.
We will not have escalation dominance there.
And that means that, you know, it's a Pentagon term for if we're going to get
into a fight,
we don't want to fight at all unless we know we're going to control every stage
of that conflict.
And in the case of, say, invading Iraq, there's nothing Saddam Hussein can do
about it, right?
As Paul Wolfowitz said, Iraq is doable.
In the case of Iran, they have, most importantly of all,
a short and medium range missile force that we cannot defend from.
Now, we can defend from it some.
We have our Patriot missiles and our other type of interceptors,
but they can pour on volume that there is no magic Star Wars shield that can
protect from.
And we had at that time more than 100,000 guys in Iraq, 50,000 in Afghanistan,
and then plus still, as we still do, tens of thousands, Air Force and Army in
Kuwait,
Air Force and Army in Saudi Arabia, Air Force in Qatar, Navy at Bahrain,
I guess Air Force and Army in UAE.
And I didn't know in Oman, but yeah, of course, in Oman,
they had, you know, some naval presence there as well.
So, and they knew then that all of that stuff will be up for grabs.
And then the Strait of Hormuz will also be at risk.
And in fact, it's true, at antiwar.com, you can find in the archives there,
I wrote an article in August of 2005 called, "Who's behind the coming war with
Iran?"
And I say in there, they can close the strait and they can inflict economic
damage,
drive the cost of a barrel of oil up above $200 a barrel and all of that.
So, there were people a lot smarter than me who were writing about that at the
time that I was
interviewing on my show at the time, who were just saying, "Look, we can start
a war with Iran,
but we don't really have a good way to finish one."
And so, and we talk about the nuclear program and how unnecessary all this was
in Sec 2.
But point being that you want to do a regime change, as you just said,
you kill the Ayatollah, it doesn't do any good.
They have a new Ayatollah.
You can kill the whole ruling council that appoints the Ayatollah,
but then they'll just appoint a new ruling council.
So then you can dump in the 82nd Airborne Division, but they can't occupy and
control Tehran.
There's no good land route to invade the country.
They have two massive mountain ranges.
And one of the most preposterous narratives was like getting the people to rise.
Oh yeah, we're going to arm up some Kurds.
Yeah, not just the Kurds.
They were trying to get just the Iranian civilians with no arms.
Yeah, and they'll talk about, you know, arming the Kurds and arming the Balukis,
which
I don't know if there are other factions, but that seems to be a direct
reference to
groups like Jandala, who the Obama administration and the Israelis both backed
about 15 years ago,
who were Bin Ladenite, head choppers, suicide bomber guys.
They were, you know, no different from Al-Qaeda or ISIS.
And they, you know, John Bolton on Pierce Morgan,
that the same show that I was on was saying, yeah, we could arm up the Balukis
and stuff is crazy.
I actually wrote in that article at that time, the neocons daydream that if we
just start the war,
then the people will rise up and create a new pro-American government there.
But that's crazy to bet on that.
There's no reason to believe that.
And so, and there's video of me in 2010 warning the same thing.
And I'm not claiming any great insight.
I didn't go to college, man.
I just, you know, I'm interested in this stuff.
And I, you know, have a show where I was interviewing all these experts about
it at the time.
And it was just complete consensus.
Everybody knew they can reach out and, and boy, over 20 years, I must have said
this a thousand times.
They can not only hit all of our military stuff in Iraq and Kuwait and Bahrain
and Qatar,
et cetera, Saudi, et cetera, but a trillion dollars of economic targets all up
and down that gulf,
which is exactly what they did.
They hit refineries.
They hit chemical plants.
They hit, not just at the Strait of Hormuz, they hit American oil tankers up
near Kuwait,
just to show that like we pwned this entire thing now.
So back to my original point when I got on this tangent was that America's
conventional
military empire is bankrupt.
Donald Trump just blew his big bluff that we're the big player in the region.
We're actually not in the region.
We're here.
The region is over there.
And the entire, you know, threat of our dominance over there
is basically called.
I mean, obviously we still have aircraft carriers and planes and bombs and even
nukes and all that,
but can the leaders in Bahrain, in Qatar and UAE and Saudi rely on America to
defend them?
Right.
Or are they going to come up with their own different policy now?
Haven't we also used up like two thirds of our Patriot missile supply?
Oh yes.
I don't know the exact percentages, but a lot.
And they're admitting now that the Iranians still have 70, 75% of all their
missiles and launchers.
All that stuff about we decimated everything they had was all just blistered.
They're admitting that?
Who's admitting that?
Government officials talking to the New York Times and the Washington Post in
the last three days.
Yeah.
Oh, I hadn't heard that.
70, 75%.
They got all their launchers, all their missiles.
They dug out missiles that had been buried.
They refurbished some and finished some that were on the assembly line.
That was what they told the Post.
They were finishing some that had been on the assembly line that they went
ahead and restarted
up again.
And don't they have some crazy like missile elevator system where they're
buried deep underground?
And I don't know how it works exactly.
But yeah, they and even they have apparently like the factories are buried deep
underground
as well and just dispersed throughout the country.
And so they've been preparing for something like this for a long time.
Yeah.
And so these bases that we had are all of them non-functional?
All the ones that have been hit?
I don't think so.
I don't know the exact extent of that.
But as far as their usefulness over the long term, they might as well have just
been abandoned
at this point.
Let's see like what the conventional news says.
Like New York Times and CNN have two big profiles on this.
I don't know off the top of my head better stuff than that.
The CNN one, oh and NBC also had had one within.
The CNN and the NBC are within the last couple of weeks.
The New York Times is about six weeks old maybe.
One of the things that disturbed me to no end and we talked about this a couple
of times
the podcast was there was one of the guys who was over there who attended a
briefing and
they were told that this is bringing about Armageddon and that Trump was anointed
by Jesus Christ
and that this war in Iran was going to cause Jesus to return and that this was
actually
being told to a bunch of military people that were having a war debriefing.
Man.
And then the guy had a whoever this officer was that was talking about this
said that the
guy had a giant smile on his face when he was telling this which made it all
the more creepy.
Oh good.
The end of the world.
Nobody wants to die alone right Joe?
But they were saying that there's a faction in the military that is these
religious fundamentalists
that actually believe that it's bringing about Jesus's return.
Yeah.
So look there's a guy named...
Commander claimed Trump was anointed by Jesus to cause Armageddon to justify
Iran strikes.
So there's a guy named Mikey Weinstein?
This is...
But look at that.
Let's just go over this real quick.
Yeah, yeah.
This is so crazy.
Because let's go up to the top please.
Right there.
So no, where it says who it was.
So it's a military commander.
Told a group of non-commissioned officers that President Donald Trump anointed
by Jesus
to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to
earth.
Yeah, and then that's that's Mikey Weinstein right there.
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
He was...
I believe he was an Air Force officer.
Maybe he was an army officer.
And then he created this group to advocate against this kind of stuff in the
military.
And it's been a long time since I spoke to him.
But he was saying to me years ago that it's especially in the highest ranks of
the Air Force,
the highest ranks of the Air Force.
They really believe this stuff.
It is time to bring on the apocalypse.
And it's a good thing that they are the ones in charge of the nukes,
so that they can use them according to the divine plan.
And this kind of thing.
It is scary stuff.
People need to know this.
Go back to that, please.
Because there's one quote that's below that.
This is so fascinating.
He urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God's divine plan.
And he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the book of Revelations,
referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
Can you imagine if you're over there,
you already think the war is sketchy?
Like, why the fuck are we doing this?
And then this guy comes in and you're like, oh my God, we're cooked.
This is a big part of how they justified Iraq.
I mean, there's so many Protestant ministers out there who told their people
that this is the Bible.
Get it?
Middle East, year 2000, sort of-ish.
This is how you're going to get raptured up to heaven in your body.
And all you have to do is support this aggressive war.
And all this magic stuff is going to come true.
And in fact, this is why there's such a massive crash in evangelical support
for Israel and these
kind of foreign policies now is because people just don't believe that anymore
because that's
what the left behind series at Walmart said 25 years ago and then it never
happened.
It didn't come true.
Speaking of the one world government and all this stuff, where's Satan?
Where's the deal?
Instead, it's just Obama and Trump, you know?
So how do you think we got talked into this Iran thing?
Because J.D. Vance, very against it.
A lot of people, Tulsi Gabbard, very against it.
So what the fuck happened?
I think that Netanyahu essentially, you know, all this talk about
four-dimensional chess and whatever.
I think what it is, is it's just checkers, right?
Is Netanyahu goes, listen, for Iran to have a civilian nuclear program
come on, that's just cover for really a weapons program.
It's just a stage in a weapons program.
We know eventually they're going to make nukes and then they're going to attack
Israel with them.
And we also know that, um, and you already said that you're not going to let
them have nukes.
Well, having a nuclear program at all is having nukes.
Same difference.
And you already agreed to that, right?
Right.
Okay.
Well, and they won't give up enrichment.
So what do we do?
We got to attack.
It's just like Obama's red line on the fake chemical weapons scare in Syria
there.
That once you agree to this thing, now it's written in stone.
And now like we got you on this technicality, double jump.
You already agreed with the stupid things I said.
And so now you have to do the thing that I said.
And then Trump goes, okay.
And then plus on top of that, just the flattery.
And like, you know, honestly, this is the most obvious thing.
Back when he was on Twitter in his first term,
I used to tweet at him and I would say wealth, strength, gold,
get out of Afghanistan, height, power.
And we're like, just tell him like things that he likes, right?
With get out of Afghanistan in the middle.
And so this is what Netanyahu does is he goes, listen,
you're greater than Abraham Lincoln.
You're greater than George Washington.
You're a world historical figure.
You're sure to go to heaven now.
You're like if FDR had done the right thing and invaded Germany in 1935
and prevented that whole thing from ever happening.
Well, you're just guessing that this is how we talk to him, right?
Well, kind of, but...
Wouldn't it be awesome to be a fly on the wall?
Because he repeats a lot of it.
Oh, it would.
It would be great.
But he repeats so much of it back that I think that like, yeah,
you could pretty much tell this is what they're saying to him.
And then this is what he's responding is Obama wasn't man enough to do it.
George Bush wasn't man enough to do it.
He knows what has to be done.
He's willing to do it.
And he's ill-informed enough to believe that it makes any sense,
that if you just bomb their nuclear program, that somehow it'll go away.
If you just hit them hard enough, then eventually they'll just do what you say.
It doesn't work like that.
It oftentimes does not work like that.
And with these guys, they've made it clear that we're not making bombs,
but we absolutely reserve our right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.
And we will suffer your airstrikes.
We will not give up that right.
And so that's it.
And they've been completely clear about that this entire time.
But Netanyahu convinced him, right?
This is why he also believed that the Strait of Hormuz was not at risk,
because Netanyahu convinced him, once we hit him,
once he killed Ayatollah, the whole thing's going to fall apart.
There'll be no one too close to the Strait of Hormuz,
because we'll have already won by then.
But what do you think happens if Iran does get nuclear weapons?
Probably the other states in the region will.
You know, Daryl Cooper, who's my partner on our show, Provoked, and I know a
good friend of yours.
I love Daryl.
He is so great.
He's awesome.
And he was pointing out...
That guy gets...
Boy, does he get fucking misrepresented on the way.
Oh, he does.
Oh my God.
He does.
Oh my God.
Heroic guy, man.
He's very fucking smart.
And if you listen to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem,
anybody who listens to that and thinks that guy's anti-Semitic is fucking crazy.
Yeah, no.
You're crazy.
All that stuff is just a...
So balanced.
Out of context stuff.
It's so balanced and so objective and, you know, his perspective on it and just...
People take that one thing that he said about, um, uh, fuck...
Churchill.
The thing that he said about Churchill being the real villain.
He's being provocative, right?
And what he's trying to say is that Churchill, by imposing those embargoes,
essentially was starving them and was keeping resources from getting to Germany.
And he forced Hitler's hand to do what he did.
It's not excusing him.
It's not like saying Hitler wasn't a fucking evil cunt.
It's not...
It's not like saying he...
Hitler's a good guy, but Winston Churchill's the bad guy.
Somebody was saying it all.
But he was saying Winston Churchill, also a bad guy.
Right.
Also wanted to attack Soviet Union right after they were done with the war.
And he was actually...
He even introduced the subject by saying to Tucker that, you know, I like to
pick on my friend
Jocko, who's very waspy, and I like to pick on him and joke with him that, you
know,
Churchill was the real bad guy.
Exactly.
Because he wouldn't accept, you know, peace for an answer.
He had to finish the regime change, no matter what, even if it took America
doing it for him
and whatever.
And then his point about...
He never even finished the point about the people starving in the camps.
He was totally taken out of context to mean that the only people who died in
the Holocaust,
all that happened was the Germans didn't care enough to feed them well enough
or something.
But that was not what he was saying at all.
He was essentially arguing that even if you were some kind of German apologist,
even you would have to admit that every single soul they took possession of,
they took responsibility for.
And if people are starving to death by the millions in their camps, then nobody
could deny that.
Right.
And then he didn't even discuss the rest of the Holocaust.
His point had nothing to do with like trying to diminish the rest of it or
discount the rest of
it or anything like that.
He was just saying, you know, arguing even the devil's advocate would have to
admit so much of the
case on the face of it.
And then there he was segwaying right into a point about Gaza and how the
Israelis,
Gaza is not a country.
Gaza is an Indian reservation.
They were already whooped and conquered and besieged.
And so you take control of people like that, then you're responsible to make
sure that they're fed
and that they're not starving to death under your captivity, which was the
point that he was making.
So it ended up being, you know, half of a thing in jest and half explained
about Churchill.
And then a point about the war in the East that was totally, and I think in
some cases,
honestly, misinterpreted.
But what's dishonest is people pretending like he didn't explain himself on the
record
over and over and over, clarifying what he meant by all of that stuff.
And that's the problem with video clips.
Yeah, yeah.
Clips are a real problem because you lose the context of the entire
conversation.
You get one person's point where they might be steel manning something else,
or they might be like trying to be provocative or whatever it is.
But to me, it's always very fascinating that this one war is beyond debate.
Like there's no room for any discussions of what might be true, what might not
be true.
I don't think there's a single fucking moment in human history
where we have gotten a completely objective, 100% accurate representation of
why the war started.
What were the factors?
What were the motivations?
We could go all the way back to Smedley Butler, and Smedley Butler's war is a
racket,
which I always point out because here's a guy in 1933 that was realizing, he
was a major general,
realizing at the end of his tenure, like, holy shit, what did I do?
I thought that I was doing this to make the world safer, and really I was
making it better for bankers,
better for all these interests to go in and control resources or do whatever
the fuck they were actually doing.
And you can talk about that, but if you get into discussions about World War II
and anything involving
the Nazis, anything involving the Holocaust, all of a sudden anti-Semitic gets
thrown around.
All of a sudden, you're a bad person.
Yeah, as he says, it's, you know, a huge part of our civic religion, basically.
You know, we're like George Washington and even Abraham Lincoln and all that
stuff is too long ago,
where it's really Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower are
the founding fathers of
the American empire, and their great project, the greatest generation, and all
of those things.
That was, you know, that's, that's how we know that that's who we are.
I mean, my grandfather was in that war, and my great uncle was, you know, death
marched by the
Japanese in that war and stuff like a lot of people have, uh, connections to
that.
As Bill Kristol and his friends would say, this is how you build national
greatness.
You need big projects that we can all do together.
And World War II is the biggest project of all.
So it's the kind of thing that, that people don't really want to question.
It's also, we should point out that they were bankrolling Smedley Butler,
trying to get him to overthrow the fucking government.
Right, and he refused to do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He marched up Capitol Hill with the documents and,
yeah, and showed them.
Yeah.
They were trying to get him to throw a military coup on the United States
government and take it over.
Yep.
I mean, you thought FDR was bad.
These guys wanted to overthrow him.
He wasn't, you know.
Isn't that crazy?
Wrong faction, I guess.
Um, but, um, look, I'm not an expert on,
and I, I've only read a few books about the second world war,
and you'd have to read hundreds to really know what you're talking about on
that one.
But I can tell you that Pat Buchanan's great book, Churchill, Hitler, and the
Unnecessary War,
that Pat knew that everybody was going to try to smear him,
and everyone was going to attack him,
and nobody wanted to hear his version of how this all happened.
So he only quotes the highest level,
most credentialed English historians from Cambridge and Oxford.
And so he's not relying on the German point of view whatsoever.
He's quoting only these English historians saying, here's how the idiot Neville
Chamberlain
and Winston Churchill essentially fumbled into this war,
screwed up, and got us into this war that was way worse than we ever could have
hoped.
And they ended up turning Poland over to the commies at the end anyway,
and all of that.
And it's really, honestly, is what I think it is, is a decent take on World War
II
without all that religiosity that you're referring to there.
And just take a cold look at it, you know, like they say that W. Bush,
he's the Winston Churchill of the 21st century.
And I'm like, you know what, maybe that's right.
And maybe Winston Churchill was really just the George W. Bush of the 20th
century.
It's just, you're supposed to never admit that or talk about that.
Who's Winston Churchill's Dick Cheney?
Oh, yeah, that's a good question.
I don't know.
Dick Cheney, that was, boy, that guy, he had no pulse for a while.
Yeah.
You know, is that not in the Bible or something?
Yeah, it should be.
A fucking guy who wants war, who is giving no-bid contracts to the company that
he was
the fucking CEO of, where they're going over there and fixing for billions of
dollars
shit that we blew up.
And this guy doesn't even have a pulse.
I know.
That's really weird.
Fake heart.
He lived so long too, like, only the good die young kind of thing.
I mean, how many people dropped dead after COVID of heart attacks that were
young and healthy?
And this fucking guy, keep on trucking.
Remember when he shot his friend in the face and his friend apologized?
Yep.
He fucking, they were doing, which is one of the most very, I'd say it's one of
the hardest
to argue in support of type of hunts.
It's called a canned hunt.
You know what it is?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You can say, what it is, they just released these-
Like in Gaza.
Very similar.
They just, well, this is, you know, birds.
They just released these birds from a cage, literally.
And they fly, and then they shoot them out of the sky.
And even then, he blasts his friend.
And then he wouldn't do-
Drinking and hunting.
Well, yeah.
Allegedly.
So he wouldn't do any interviews or anything.
He wouldn't talk to anybody for like 24 hours.
And so he had to sober up or, you know, allegedly, or whatever.
And then his friend was like,
minor misunderstanding.
Got a few pellets in my face.
What the fuck?
I'm very sorry if this reflected negatively on the vice president.
That's a gangster.
My fault for putting my face there.
I don't know.
Isn't that amazing?
No lawsuit.
No nothing.
Your friend shoots you in the face.
No worries.
And what angle exactly did he get shot that he was okay after that?
Well, you-
The thing about it is it's birdshot.
It was just birdshot, yeah.
And if you-
Birdshot spreads, right?
And depending upon the distance and how far he was away from him,
he could have just got clipped.
Most likely that's what tapped, because I think he was 70.
You know, if you're 70, you get shot in the face with a shotgun.
Usually that's a wrap.
Yeah.
So I think he just got clipped with a couple of pellets and you know-
Yeah.
He probably should have just shut the fuck up and not reported it.
Right.
I don't know how it even got out.
He must have had to go to the hospital.
Yeah, you say, I fucked up.
I dropped my gun and it went off.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, you don't fucking-
The vice president shot me.
I mean-
Don't tell the newspaper I said that.
If that was my friend, you know, I would probably say let it go.
Yeah.
Let's figure this out.
You don't have to go to the fucking press.
Yeah.
Come on, bro.
We're both hammered.
There's a guy who's killed and wounded a lot of people, that's for sure.
Mostly vicariously, but not always.
Yes.
Well, I mean, there's a special place in hell.
He's there already.
It's just so weird that that worked.
You know, just all of it.
The no-bid contracts, the fact that he was essentially running.
Remember when he was in a bunker and Bush was running around?
Yeah, he's out at Mount Weather.
He's in a bunker somewhere.
Like, why is he in a bunker?
Like, what the fuck?
That whole war was so weird.
It was to pretend that there's a threat, that there's an ongoing threat when
there wasn't.
I had a bit about it in my act.
It's like that the elites really have no idea how dumb people are.
And the only way to find out how dumb people are is make a dumb guy president.
And that's what they did.
And then when we went into a war with Iran, or with Iraq rather, like, how did
we justify that?
And they bought that?
What the fuck?
And then the bit was like, he won again?
Right, yeah.
He got reelected on that.
Yeah.
And then I go, there's someone sitting in the back of the room going,
I think we can go dumber.
Yeah.
That was the idea of the bit, is this is the only way to find out how dumb we
are.
Right.
I like that Kurt Vonnegut story, Harrison Bergeron, where there's like the
ruling elite,
but the president, I think is the president in the movie of it is Tim Curry or
something.
He's just a total, like, buffoon.
And they just, the real power's all behind the throne running things.
Well, my favorite movie about that is Dr. Strangelove.
Because it's like, because it's kind of humorous and, you know, but the whole
thing is like,
oh my God, I think when you see this Pete Hexess thing where these guys are
talking about this and this
commander is saying that it's all to bring about Armageddon, it's, this is
right out of Dr. Strangelove.
Yeah.
Oh, you can tell, and this is one of the most dispiriting things, right,
is when you can tell a lot of times when these people are talking that, wow,
they're,
he's really not lying.
He really thinks that that stupid lie is true.
And he's telling us what he thinks is true.
Like, you know, depending on their tone and the way they explain it, he is
sometimes,
like, even with Donald Trump, like, it's possible he's even talked himself or
allowed himself to be
talked into believing that they really were making nuclear weapons and that
then they were going
to use them on us.
I mean, that might just be this dumbest lie and he knows it.
Right.
But if they did have nuclear weapons, it would be a giant problem.
Because the Iranian government, just what could they've done to their people?
The executed protesters, they've done some wild shit.
Nah, I don't know.
You don't think that's a big deal, what they've done to their protesters?
No, in fact, that's where we got off on, on Martyr Maid there a minute ago was
because
on our show, he was saying right now, through their conventional power, and
especially because
W. Bush gave their best friends Baghdad, Iran is by far the dominant power in
the region,
conventionally speaking, other than us.
If they rush to an atom bomb, say to somehow deter us, which I don't think that
would work.
I think we'd just attack them.
If they really did it, we'd just attack them again.
But if they did somehow get an atomic bomb, well then that would then incentivize
all of the other
powers, I mean, or other states on the GCC there, Saudi and Qatar and Bahrain
and UAE to get their
own nukes.
And at that point, Iran's entire strategic advantage is canceled because now
they got nukes too.
And so now nobody has a strategic advantage.
Right, but then, but no one can do to them what happened to them now if they
had nukes.
Maybe.
This was the argument for Ukraine not disarming.
But that would include them being able to deliver them to the United States as
well.
And I think, see, it's like this.
Here's how it worked, okay?
The Iranians, they're members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty going way back.
And they had a safeguarded civilian nuclear program where the IAEA could verify
they're
not diverting their nuclear material.
How could they verify this?
Oh, it's just-
If they have their bases all underground, I mean-
No, no, no, because all that stuff was open and declared and safeguarded by the
IAEA.
So they're enriching at two major facilities at Fordow and Natanz.
And then they followed the uranium from womb to tomb, from the mine, through
the conversion process-
Right, but how much oversight do they have of this?
I mean, how much of it could be done in secrecy?
It was very robust up until, you know, last June.
Can I pause you there?
Essentially, they're proving the negative there.
Can I pause you there?
Yeah, yeah.
Because they didn't know that the Iranians had the capacity to, they sent one 4,000
kilometers,
right?
The Diego Garcia attack?
Oh, yeah, the missile.
So those missiles had a far greater range than anything that they had declared.
Actually, not quite, because, well, first of all, that's, the missile stuff is
totally
separate from their safeguards going with the IAEA.
They have nothing to do with that.
But as far as the missiles, the only limit on their missile range
previously was a political limit.
And it was in-
Oh, it wasn't a capability?
That's right.
So they had-
So it wasn't that they stated that all we have is this?
They only previously, but then in October of, I'm pretty sure it was last
October in the
aftermath of the June war.
And so then in October of 25, the Ayatollah announced we're lifting our limit
on the range
of our missiles.
Oh.
And they said that publicly, that they were doing that.
And so, and that was as a result, again, of this provocation of the war last
June.
So it wasn't-
And that's still separate from the nuclear stuff though, but go ahead.
Well, I'm sorry.
So it wasn't a capability thing.
No, no.
It was just a, an agreement.
Although they don't have the capability to launch a three-stage intercontinental
ballistic
missile to the United States of America.
They can hit Israel, but they can do that with the intermediate range missile.
But if they're cooperating with China and China has that capability-
Because Bill Clinton gave it to them.
Yeah.
Yikes.
Jesus.
Why did he do that?
I love this story for the money.
If you remember the scandal of 96 and all the Chinese money in his campaign in
96,
they spent all their money hyping or all the media attention hyping up Charlie
tree and Johnny
Chung, who were like low level fundraisers who didn't have anything to do with
anything.
And then they framed an entirely innocent Taiwanese scientist named Wenho Lee.
And the evil FBI persecuted poor Wenho Lee.
And it was this huge distraction from what really happened, which was this
Chinese Indonesian
billionaire named Riyadi, who was directly tied to Chinese intelligence.
He got his guy, John Wong, appointed to the Commerce Department where he was
put in
charge of licensing missile technology transfers to China.
And they took that authority away from state and defense and gave it to the
Commerce.
And then John Wong was the guy who got to rubber stamp those missile technology
transfers.
So then Hughes Aircraft and Loral Corporation then sent their very best three-stage
rocket
technology to China.
Oh, geez.
Because it's cheaper to have them launch the satellites, you know.
So they were not, I don't think, able to deliver hydrogen bombs to the United
States before that.
And they were able to because, I mean, for a few hundred thousand dollars or
maybe a couple
of million dollars or whatever, they were able to buy this from Bill Clinton.
But no, you're right.
Look, could Iran, with Chinese help or whatever, someday be able to deliver a
war here?
Yes.
However, the much better solution to that certainly would have been, I know we
can't go back,
but certainly would have been just normalizing relations with Iran and just
dealing with them.
The reality was Iran's position was not that they were racing to a nuke.
Their position was they had this safeguarded program where, again, the IAEA is
essentially
proving the negative.
We know where all their uranium is.
It's right where it's supposed to be.
And they haven't taken it and diverted it yet.
And we know how much they're enriching and we know where it all goes.
And so then Israel would say, America, they're making nukes.
If they have a nuclear program at all, this is the same during W. Bush, during
Obama.
This is true under Olmert, as well as under Netanyahu, who's been in charge
almost the
entire time since Obama.
And the policy was from the Israelis.
America, bomb them.
They got a civilian program.
And you know, that's just cover for they're going to make nukes someday.
And they're going to use them on us.
So just go ahead and let's get them now.
Then America would say, no, we're not doing that.
This is under W. Bush, again, under Obama, under Trump one and under Biden.
No, we're not going to just start a war.
But we will warn the Iranians, don't you break out and try to make a nuke now.
Because if you do, then we will attack you.
And we'll bomb your Manhattan Project before you can complete it and before you
can get an atom bomb.
We'll see you then.
But then the Iranians would say, we're not making nukes, so don't attack us.
And then the heavy implication was, if you attack us, then we might make nukes.
So they had a latent deterrent, right?
A half-assed nuclear weapons deterrent.
They proved that they had mastered the fuel cycle, that they could enrich
uranium if they wanted to up to weapons grade.
They never did.
But they said, they were essentially saying, we have a revolver in one pocket
and bullets in the other.
Let's not escalate this.
And that could have and should have stood.
Except this is what, this is the answer to your question about how did they get
us into this.
Because Netanyahu convinced Trump to change that line and to adopt the Israeli
line.
That for them to have a civilian nuclear program at all is equivalent to the
exact same thing as them making nuclear weapons.
And we're just not going to allow that.
So how much understanding do we have of their capabilities?
And how do we have that understanding?
Like how much do we know about their enrichment program?
How much do we know about whether or not they're capable of making a weapon?
Because haven't they stated recently that they are capable of making a nuclear
weapon?
Well, I think that was not a threat.
I think what, in fact, if I know the statement that you're talking about, they
were saying, look,
we're not making nukes.
And the proof that we're not is the fact that we know how to, we could, and we're
still not.
And you can see all this time.
They mastered the fuel cycle back in 2006.
Once you, okay, so it's like this.
And they have been set back on this.
They got their facility blown up last June.
But, especially you have, remember Yellow Cake?
Don't drop that shit.
You have that refined yellow cake is refined uranium ore.
Then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas.
And that's the stuff that you inject into the centrifuges.
Then you have what's called a cascade of centrifuges.
A whole bunch of them all connected together with tubes.
And then you spin the uranium hexafluoride gas in the centrifuges.
And you spin the U-238, which is heavier, out and away from the 235, which is
the sweet stuff.
And the more you enrich it, then the more capable it is of being used for nukes.
Well, that's one way to put it, but so they would, they need like 3.6% U-235
for their electricity program.
They need 20% U-235 for targets for their medical isotope reactors, for like
cancer treatment, radiation,
or like that radioactive dye that they put in people for, to see your circulatory
system and stuff.
Then to make weapons grade uranium, you need typically above 90% pure uranium-235.
In any case, once you spin it through the centrifuges to whatever stage of
purity,
then you got to convert it back into a metal again.
Whether you're going to make fuel rods or whether you're going to try to make a
bomb warhead out of it.
So under the Obama deal of 2015, the JCPOA, it was really just an extra layer
on top of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty and on top of the safeguards agreement that we already
had.
But the way that was worked out was, a big part of it was, that they would
scale back their capability
to enrich by shutting down, I think it was two-thirds of their centrifuges at
Natanz.
And then at Fordo, they would change it from a production facility to just a
research facility.
And then whatever stockpile of uranium they came up with would be transferred
out of the
country to Russia, and they would turn it into fuel rods and send it back.
That way they had no stockpile that they could just quickly reintroduce into
the centrifuges
and enrich to a higher grade. They'd have to basically start at nothing again.
And so under the theory and the way the scientists worked it out, that if they
withdrew from the
treaty, kicked the inspectors out of the country, and said we are now making
atom bombs, it would
take them a year to enrich enough uranium at weapons grade to make one bomb out
of it.
Then on top of that, you have to have the actual experts who know how to
machine it into the exact
specifications as in how to detonate it and everything else. And the simpler
the nuke,
the harder it is to deliver. So typically, like the Hiroshima bomb was a gun-type
nuke where you just
shoot one uranium pit into the other one, which they didn't even test. The
Trinity test was the
Nagasaki bomb, basically. They knew it would work, but it's essentially a very
heavy bomb
and very difficult to deliver. And virtually all miniaturized implosion bombs
in the world that
can ever be married to a missile, they're virtually all made out of plutonium.
And they don't have a
plutonium root to the bomb. Because under the Obama deal, they poured concrete
into the Iraq,
that's A-R-A-K, which was supposed to be a heavy water reactor, which can
produce weapons-grade
plutonium as waste. But they poured concrete into that thing and shut it down
completely before it
was even open. Their reactor that they do have operating is at Boucher, and it's
a light water
reactor, which means that it is possible for it to produce weapons-grade plutonium
as waste,
but it's much more difficult. They would have to shut it off all the time to
harvest the stuff out of
there and all of that. Under inspections, they can't do that. So this is all
monitored? This is all
monitored. It's like if you had a gun shop and you have an ATF cop sitting at
the barstool, well,
unless he was fast and furious smuggling your guns to cartels, but assuming not
that, but like assuming
he was just a regular cop. Like, you can't accuse me of selling illegal laser
rifles from my gun shop
when I've got a cop sitting right here. And that's the deal here, is they've
got inspectors throughout
the place. And then what happened was, so we had that perfect Mexican standoff,
right? Where is Israel
saying bomb them? They're making nukes. We say, no, we won't bomb them, but we
will if they do. And
them saying, don't bomb us because we're not. Then Trump called their bluff
last June. And really,
Netanyahu did. And then Trump jumped in the thing. And they really did set
their nuclear program back
quite a bit. Now, I don't think there's any proof that they destroyed the
centrifuges at Natanz and
Fordo. They're deep underground, under granite, and very hard to get at. But
they got the elevator
shafts and they got the air shafts. And if anybody was working down there, they
were buried alive.
The Iranians were incentivized to move giant boulders in front of the doors to
protect them from missiles
and attack and stuff like that. But so all the reporting is that the Natanz and
Fordo facilities
are essentially just frozen right now. There's nothing going on there. There's
open source reporting from
last November. And then there was a report in the newspapers just two weeks ago,
or maybe three,
based on classified information that there's nothing going on there. You know
what my deep concern is?
Okay. No one said what you said to the president. Yeah. See, that's right. Not
only that. You're right.
That the people, these elected officials and these appointed officials that get
into positions around him,
they don't know this. Right. Which is crazy. Dude, I'll tell you what, that New
York Times article,
did you read that one where Netanyahu came and they sat across from each other
at the table like this
instead of Trump sitting at the head of the table? And Netanyahu gave him the
whole presentation about
how easy the war would be. So as soon as he left, then they said, everyone else
at the table said,
don't listen to him, boss. He's blowing smoke, man, that this is going to be so
easy. Now, they didn't
really tell him, don't do it, but they told him, don't trust Netanyahu. And
that ought to be a snap
the way that he promises and all that. But then, and look, it's Maggie Haberman
and them at the New York
Times. I mean, it seemed like a very well-reported story from, you know, the
principals are talking to
her about this stuff. Well, this is what Joe Kenneth said as well, right? Yeah.
So they, they go around the table
and Rubio has his say, the vice president has his say, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff
and whoever, but none, as you just said, none of them say what I just said.
Right. And it really is,
it's like a, it's like four or five dudes in a room who may or may not know
very much about this,
really. And, and, and talking about it and none of them man enough to say like,
Mr. President,
permission to speak freely here, sir, don't make this mistake, buddy. Well, my
fear is that they
don't know as much as you know about it. I think they probably don't. Which is
wild. I've been at
this for a long time, but that is wild. That is really crazy that you'd be in a
position of making
these decisions without having this understanding of the fact that they're not
even really capable
right now of making nuclear weapons. If any of them were capable of really
knowing about it
like this, it would be Rubio or Vance or hell came to the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff.
He, all of these guys should have been able to say to the president, this is an
illusory threat,
sir. Wasn't Vance not there? Wasn't Vance not there while this was going on?
He was not there for the Netanyahu part, but then he came in later, which were
what he was in
Azerbaijan prepared for the war, right, was where he was as well. He was late.
Wasn't Azerbaijan,
didn't they have some sort of a peace agreement with Armenia at the time and he
visited both of them?
Oh, I don't know. I had missed that then. You're right then.
I didn't know that. I think he visited both of them and that's one of the
reasons why he couldn't come
back. Okay. I assumed he was in Azerbaijan as preparation for the war with Iran.
If you visit
Azerbaijan, you also have to visit Armenia, otherwise it would cause some sort
of an international
conflict. Yeah, because we support the hereditary dictatorship in Azerbaijan
because they help us
run the oil pipelines west instead of north through Russia. But it was also
because they had made
some sort of a peace agreement, correct? Didn't Azerbaijan and Armenia make a...
Possibly. I
mean, they're fighting over, or the contest was over whether Armenia is going
to open this corridor
across Armenia to an Azerbaijani or Naziri enclave on the Turkish border.
Okay. France met in Baku, JD Vance and how do you say his name? Aliyev met in
Baku to discuss
the implementation of historic August 8th White House Peace Summit and reaffirmed
their shared
commitment to regional peace, security, and prosperity. Leaders signed the U.S.-Azerbaijan
Strategic Partnership Charter which will strengthen bilateral relations between
our countries. The United
States remains committed to working with Azerbaijan to unlock the great
potential of the South Caucus
region. So it was a peace summit and so he met with Azerbaijan and he also had
to meet with Armenia as
well. This is February 10th so this is right before the war. Okay. So yeah. I
guess I thought he was
like just tipping them off. No. War on your southern border in a week or two. I'm
pretty sure that the
reason for this was that he had to meet with both of them so he could not be
there. So if I was JD Vance
and I knew or rather if I was Netanyahu and I knew that JD Vance was really not
into this war and didn't
want to be a part of it at all, I would probably try to time it for them. What
a good time. You can't even
come back. Yeah, that makes sense. What does it say? Ah, the gathering had been
deliberately small to guard
against leaks. Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea that it was happening.
Also absent was
Vice President JD Vance who was in Azerbaijan and the meeting had been
scheduled on such short notice
that he was unable to make it back in time. Now, if I was Netanyahu and I knew
that JD Vance is
going to be in Azerbaijan. You know, I don't really, you know, try to spend too
much time on the symbolism
of things. You know, leave that to the symbol minded, right? As Carl would say.
Symbol minded? Yeah.
But like, isn't it meaningful that this is the situation room? The president's
supposed to
sit at the head of the table. Instead, Netanyahu sat there and Trump sat here
opposite him and let him run the thing as an equal instead of... Why do you
think that is? Why do you
think they have that kind of influence? I don't know. I really don't know. I
mean,
they've been friends for a very long time. All the speculation about him being
compromised,
I mean, it's very possible, but unknowable really, right? Netanyahu would do
that. I mean,
he he brought up Monica Lewinsky to to Bill Clinton. Did he? Oh, yeah. You know,
we're tapping your phone, homeboy. We got you on tape. You better let Jonathan
Pollard out of prison.
And then Bill Clinton refused to do it because George Tenet and the whole top
tier of the CIA
were going to resign over it if he did it. So he didn't do it. It was Trump
that let Pollard out.
And now Pollard is running to the right of Netanyahu. He's now announced that
he's running for the
Knesset over there. So the reason why the Monica Lewinsky scandal went public?
No, because... No, no, no. I don't think so.
That was Linda Rice, right? Netanyahu said to have offered Lewinsky tapes for
Pollard.
Oh, they had tapes? What do you mean they had like recordings?
It may have been after the scandal had broken, but they had him on tape with
her because
the only tapes were her on the phone with Linda Tripp, that Linda Tripp had
recorded.
Right. But they had him on the phone with her.
I forgot her name. You know, the story is
the first time Bill Clinton met Netanyahu in 1996, they were in the room for
half an hour or something.
And when they came out, Clinton was just completely exasperated and says, "Who
the F does this guy think
he is? Who's the superpower and who's the client state?" Because Netanyahu had
just told him like,
"Look here, Butler, here's your orders." For half an hour, just barked commands
at Bill Clinton in
a way that he was like, "I can't believe this guy." Wow.
It's hard to feel sorry for him. In fact, here's one too. Barack Obama was
caught on a hot mic.
This is the only time I've ever been sympathetic with Barack Obama. He was
caught on a hot mic talking
to the president of France. And he goes, "Oh man, you think you hate him. I
gotta deal with him every day."
And that was about Netanyahu? About Netanyahu. Well, wasn't there an issue with
JFK and Israel
over their ability to acquire nuclear weapons? Yes. He was demanding
inspections of Demona,
their nuclear facility there. To this day, they don't officially have nuclear
weapons.
Correct. And the reason for that is because it's illegal for America to give
aid to a nuclear weapons
state that refuses to sign the nonproliferation treaty. And they don't want to
do that. In fact,
they did proliferate nuclear weapons to South Africa, who gave them up before
the change after apartheid.
But if they openly possess nuclear weapons, then, I mean, hell, it should
already be illegal because
everybody already knows. But the Glenn Symington law says that you can't give
military aid to a nuclear
weapons state that won't sign the NPT. That's America's treaty that we forced
the whole world to
accept. And which, by the way, is in terrible jeopardy now, right? Because, you
know, Saddam Hussein
goes, "Look, my hands are up. I got nothing." They invaded him anyway. The
North Koreans armed up with nukes.
The Libyans said, "Well, look, we have some centrifuge material, but we have no
operational program,
but you can have our junk." And they killed him. And then the Iranians said, "Look,
we can make nukes,
but we're not making nukes, so leave us alone already, and then we kill them."
So America is the great destroyer of America's nonproliferation treaty that we
foisted on the
world, by which the non-nuclear weapon states promise never to get them, and
the nuclear weapon
states promise never to share them. And that's all in jeopardy now. That may
not even exist anymore.
The Poles are talking about getting their own nukes now because of Trump's
pivot away from Europe in the
middle of a war that America helped cause over there. Jesus. So Israel
officially doesn't have nukes.
Officially they don't, but everybody knows that they have at least 200. And in
fact, I have that
personally from Mordecai Venunu, who is the Israeli whistleblower who went to
prison. They
kidnapped him in a honey trap plot, I think in England or in Italy.
With chicks?
With chicks, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's always chicks.
They went to get him laid and they kidnapped him and they held him in solitary
confinement for like
25 years or something. Wow.
But he gave the whole story to the Sunday Times, the London Times. And they
published it back in,
I'm going to say 86. And then, um, what happened was he was on Twitter. He may
still be on Twitter. Um,
but, um, I had an anecdote from Daniel Ellsberg, the great, uh, whistleblower
of the Pentagon
papers and who was a friend of mine for a long time. He died a couple of years
ago now, but, um,
he had an anecdote about Venunu that turned out was incorrect, but I asked Venunu,
is this correct?
And then he said, no, it's just like I told the Sunday Times back then. And
that was that they had
200 atom bombs by the time that he squealed on them. And we know from Grant F.
Smith's research,
he got this through some FOIA documents. Um, he's from the Institute for
Research,
Middle Eastern policy, really great researcher on this. And he showed that they
had at least been
researching hydrogen bombs, the big ones, although there's no proof that they
ever actually made H-bombs.
And I don't think it's been reported that they've made them, but they at least
were looking into how to.
Jeez. And this was part of the conflict that JFK had with Israel. Yes. And
trying to register
what was then, I think the American Jewish council, I believe is what it was
called,
the predecessor to AIPAC as a foreign, as foreign agents. And then they
dissolved it and created AIPAC
instead, I guess is the long and the short of that, how they got around that.
And there are people,
you know, and it was, you know, I don't know, man, honestly, like I told you, I
was more of a
conspiracy theorist in the nineties, but I never did all read into JFK because
there's just a hundred
books about it and a hundred different theories. And I'm just not sure if LBJ
hired French hitmen to do
it, or if the Israelis got James Jesus Angleton to do it, or if Alan Dulles got
some Cubans to do it,
or what the hell, right? Like, I don't know. And so I really get, you know, um,
I don't, I don't think
I ever really could figure it out. So. Well, no one really has. There's a bunch
of speculation, but
Oliver Stone is the best guy to talk to. There are a lot of people with motive.
Yeah. You know what's
funny about that? And I think he even admitted this at one point, man, you
watch the whole movie JFK. Oh,
God. You watch the whole movie JFK. And I'm sorry, man. No worries. It's just
Dr. Pepper. I like a little
stains on this table. There you go. Makes it live. In the edit later, we'll
just clip to Joe and back. No,
we'll just show the Dr. Pepper. Why Dr. Pepper? Why are you so into Dr. Pepper?
I should tell
everybody. He brought a whole cooler filled with Dr. Pepper. I got to have Dr.
Pepper, man, for my
Rick here. Um, no, the, um, the, uh, you watch the whole movie JFK, right? He's
got every theory
under the sun in there. And then as soon as it's over, it says produced by Arnan
Milchan, who was an
Israeli spy and who helped Benjamin Netanyahu steal Krytrons, which are an
essential part
of these nuclear triggers for their weapons. That's who produced the movie. And
so then someone asked
Oliver Stone, like, Hey man, an Israeli spy produced your movie where you point
the finger at everyone
except maybe the Israelis. What's about that? And he's like, wow, you're right.
And I, I forgot exactly
how he says it, but he acknowledges that, you know what? Like it could have
been even that my own film
was part of, but put on there. Well, especially when you consider the fact that
his own film was made
in what the nineties. Yeah. It came out in like 91, I think. Right. So back
then he probably didn't
know as much as he knows now. Right. Yeah. Probably never even heard the angle
that it would have been
the Israelis. Right. But of course, you know, uh, LBJ was very close to the
Zionists and even had a
Mossad agent for a girlfriend. I'm sorry, I forget her name, but one of his
mistresses was a Mossad
agent. And then he, he completely reversed all those policies as soon as he was
in power. But of course,
same thing with Vietnam. He reversed. Well, or at least released any skepticism
about Vietnam and said,
let's go ahead and escalate there and all that. So like I say, that one's, it's
too muddy for me to
try to wade through and figure out exactly. It's all the trigger on that one.
Crazy.
Crazy. The not so secret life of, uh, Matilda. Is that how you say her name?
Matilda Krim. That was his
Israeli spy girlfriend. Uh, yeah, I believe that's her. She looks like a dirty
girl. Good old Phil Weiss.
I love that guy. He's a great guy. That's, uh, Mondoweiss.net is a great
website for anti-Zionist.
The no daylight policy, the U S alignment with the Israeli government. So
obviously today,
Trump's deference to Netanyahu was born under Matilda Krim's dear friend, Lyndon
Johnson.
In the feverish weeks surrounding the 1967 war, Krim, who had once emigrated to
Israel and her husband,
Arthur, a leading fundraiser, were continually at Johnson's side and advised
him on what to say
publicly. I mean, you gotta give it up to a country the size of Rhode Island
that has
that kind of pull. They got their priorities straight. That's for sure. Kind of
amazing
that they've been doing this since the sixties and before. Yep. I mean, I mean,
they threatened
Harry Truman. They bribed him and they also threatened him. They sent his, his
daughter's
memoir says the Zionists sent letter bombs to the white house and they'd stop
at nothing to get their
state. Truman. Yeah. Wow. And they paid for his reelection too. In fact, um,
there's a great scholar
named, um, John B. Judas, uh, J U D I S. And he wrote a book about this. What
an unfortunate name.
Uh, yeah, it kind of, you mispronounce it, you know, he actually also wrote out
as long as I'm
talking about him. He wrote a great article for foreign affairs in 1995 about
the neoconservatives
called from Trotskyism to anachronism. And it was about how now that the cold
war is over, who needs
these crazy hawks anymore? Right. And then these are the guys who took us, who
launched the Iraq war,
you know, a few years later, uh, seven years later or whatever he was, he was
saying they're a spent
force and they should be by now. Cause they had been Trotskyite communists and
then had moved to the
right for the militarism and stuff. But he wrote a book about how Truman did
this. And, and I think
that was part of it was this intimidation campaign. And it was his own daughter
that in her book and her
memoir said that they sent a letter bombs to the white house. And they also
paid for his elections.
It was, you know, carrot and stick kind of a thing. And then, yeah, look, if
you ran the Israeli foreign
ministry, you only have one priority in the world that outranks every other
priority by a million
billion. And that is your relationship with the United States of America. How
friendly is the
president? How friendly is the Senate? What do we got to do to make sure that
everything stays in line?
It's everything to them. So let me ask you this. How, what do you think happens
with Iran now?
Like, how does this play out if you had to speculate? Well, I'll tell you that
first of all,
they're more likely to go ahead and try to break out and make an atom bomb now
than ever before.
Although I'm not necessarily predicting that I think, you know, Trump has
proven by calling their bluff
on their latent deterrent. He has proven he's willing to bomb them. And if they
really break out and try to
make a nuclear weapon, it's almost impossible that they could do that without
us knowing.
And then this president, and I think the next one too, would be willing to go
back to war over it.
As Barack Obama promised, he would absolutely launch a war against Iran if they
broke out and tried to
make an atom bomb. And you know, he did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in
the Atlantic called "As
President, I Don't Bluff," where he's essentially begging Jeffrey Goldberg to
tell Netanyahu and them,
"I really, really mean it. If they try to make a nuke, I will bomb them, but
just let me try to solve this
another way." So I think that promise stands. This is the same as W. Bush, same
as Obama, same as Biden,
and I think that will continue to last into the next presidency. And if the
Iranians are smart,
what they'll do is they'll hold the same posture they've had, which is we're
not giving up enrichment,
and we're not giving up our capability to make a bomb one day, but we're never
going to call it that.
And just don't do this to us anymore, and try to bet on the fact that Trump's
only got three years left,
and the next presidents won't be so belligerent, and they won't call the bluff
and go ahead and
launch another war unless they break out and try to make a nuke. And as Daryl
was saying,
they're so much more powerful than all their neighbors conventionally, they
really have no need
to make a nuclear bomb. And they can, I think, successfully deter Israel even
with their conventional
missile force. And we saw them just absolutely blast the crap out of Tel Aviv.
Yeah. Very under-reported, right?
And I think, you know, they should not have killed the conservative old Ayatollah,
right? And they kill him
and apparently like the new Ayatollah, his son, they killed his mother and
sister and, or mother and
wife and baby. And that's the new Ayatollah over there is, you know, he's got
to be more radical than his
father. He's got to be angrier at us than his father ever was.
So what is the pathway to resolution?
Well, this is, it's so unfortunate because honestly, um, you know, whatever,
maybe some
genius at some think tank has a better idea, but I really think that the thing
to do is just quit.
The thing to do is for America to just come home, for Trump to say, look, I won.
Yeah. But we don't really need these bases over there. The American people don't
need to dominate
the Middle East. We're not worried about the Soviet Union invading Iran and
dominating the Gulf anymore.
So forget the Carter Doctrine. Let's just come home. And I think if we do that,
we, we bring all
of our ships home, all of our planes, all of our bases, just close them all up
and come home.
Then that shifts the entire burden onto Iran, that they still have to deal with
the rest of Eurasia.
We're not the one dependent on their hydrocarbon exports. Everybody else is.
So are they going to now levy a tax to get through the Strait of Hormuz?
Absolutely. But
too bad shouldn't have started this war then. Nothing we can do about that now.
Willie Nelson said,
you know, so like the way going forward is, and by the way, like in, in Panama,
they tax, um,
ships going through the isthmus there through the Panama Canal, the Indonesians,
I believe it is a tax
people going through some of the bottlenecks in the Indies. And so it's not
entirely unheard of that.
You know, the, the dominant power there is going to, uh, levy a fee on people
coming in and out of
there. But again, too late, too bad. I mean, America already, we had the
exactly what Marco Rubio says
he wants. Now we had on February the 27th and then they launched this war on
the 28th, which by the
way was the anniversary of the Waco raid. This is a pretty ugly time to start
an aggressive war.
And in fact, as long as I'm on that, I don't know, you know this, but it's
really worth dwelling on
that they killed not just one, but two girls schools in their initial assault.
They killed in one
building, they killed a hundred and I think 73 or 74, uh, almost all little
girls. And then in the other
one was 20 more. And with, and with that was an experimental new Lockheed
missile that fires
tungsten pellets out the front before it detonates, uh, or as it detonates, uh,
in a creative new way
to cut people to shreds. And the thing is about that is as, um, there's this
great media critic
named Adam Johnson who pointed out this is equivalent to the Oklahoma city
bombing,
which, you know, for young people, uh, Oklahoma was nine 11 before nine 11,
right? It was massive.
And nevermind. It was a bunch of FBI informants who did it and got away with it.
That's another
interview, Joe. But, but it was another interview and that's a deep one. Yeah,
it is. And just the,
I'm here for you, buddy. Yeah. Yeah. But, but they kill 167 people were killed
in that thing. And it
was just the ugliest damn thing. And it included like 20 kids in the daycare
there, right? That was
the cover of news week was a firefighter holding a dead baby. So worst thing is
the most traumatic
thing for this country and in the heartland of Oklahoma city and all that. Well,
that's what
America did to Iran. Only the entire building full of kids, all 167 of them, a
few teachers,
but virtually all of them, little girls and another school down the street to,
or
relatively nearby where they get the volleyball game where they killed even
more. So now think
about the Pearl Harbor attack with Donald Trump himself compared it to Pearl
Harbor out of context,
but still it was a sneak surprise attack in the middle of negotiations on
behalf of a foreign country
over a lie. And then they killed a bunch of kids. It's like, imagine if at
Pearl Harbor,
if our story of Pearl Harbor was that they sank all our heroes and drown them
down in their ships,
in the halls, stuck in their halls down there, but also they wiped out schools
full of 180 little girls,
the children of those sailors who drown at Pearl Harbor. Oh, and also they
killed FDR that same day,
too. Oh, and also is a Catholic country. And he's also the Pope. Imagine how we
would react to that.
Imagine what our story of Pearl Harbor to this day would be. I'll tell you what
our story of
World War II would be. It would be that we kept nuking them until they were all
dead is what our story of
World War II would be if that's how they had done us at Pearl Harbor.
It's just
Somehow, we just don't really think of it in that context, but we should.
If that had happened to us,
again, just like we, you know, we did a little on Ukraine there and the way
America just absolutely pushes their luck.
If Russia overthrew the government of Canada twice in 10 years because they
kept voting wrong,
we would invade Canada and nuke Moscow. And in fact, when you bring up the
analogy,
it's completely absurd, right? How ridiculous is it that the Russians would
dare try to overthrow the
regime in Ottawa, that they would dare threaten to try to kick us out of our
bases in Alaska or any of
these kinds of things, that they would go to war with the people of Vancouver
who refused to accept
the new Kuhunta. It's comic book crazy. They wouldn't dare, but we do that to
them.
You know, and we act like, as Dr. Paul said,
if we go around the world killing people like this, bombing people like this,
and we think that we can
just get away with it and not have to suffer the blowback, then we do that at
our own peril.
And he was speaking for the government as a member of Congress at the time that
we're putting the
American people in danger by acting this way. It's completely crazy.
You know, remember the Shiite fatwa that the old Ayatollah, the Ayatollah
before last Komeini,
put on Salman Rushdie, the author of the book, The Satanic Verses, where people
have tried to
kill him numerous times, including got his eyeball in one case. We've had a
real problem with bin Ladenite
jihadi terrorism over the time. We have not had the Shiites. We have not had
the Ayatollah Sistani
in Iraq or the Ayatollah Khamenei declare that all good believers should attack
the West now.
They could do that.
That's the kind of fire that we're playing with. It's extremely dangerous.
I mean, bin Laden didn't even really have a religious rank. He was just a rich
guy who
he had earned respect because he was wounded in battle and stuff. He had money
and influence.
Ayatollah Sistani put out a full jihad, which I'm not saying he would do that.
I don't have any real
reason to believe that he would go that far, but he's been willing to stand up
to the United
States numerous times, especially during the war, um, in, you know, the last
couple of wars over there.
And so, and remember what happened the night that they started this war on the
February the 28th,
the next day on Saturday, the 29th, or was it, I think it was Friday was the 28th.
And it was
like late in the night they started the war. And then Saturday, I believe was
the 29th and
a, uh, an American, uh, immigrant from Sierra Leone here in Austin took an AR-15,
put on a shirt with the Ayatollah and an Iranian flag on it. I didn't even know
they had Shiites in
Sierra Leone, Joe, but I guess they do. And he went down to sixth street and he
shot 18 people,
killed three and wounded 15 people in an immediate blowback terrorist attack
called backdraft. I,
I coined the phrase in my book that, and if blowback means long-term
consequences
from secret foreign policies that the American people then don't understand and
are left up to
false explanations or left susceptible to false explanations. Well then backdraft
terrorism is
when the consequences of your overt foreign policies just blow up right in your
face.
And you know, frankly, like those three people were crucified for Israel for
their sins for,
and 15 more wounded. And I don't know how terribly wounded for all I know
people are still in the
hospital or that thing. And that was the immediate blowback terrorist attack
from this war just right
away. And, and it's the kind of danger that our government is continues to put
us in through
these interventions over there at some point, you know, all the sort of, um,
hypotheticals about,
yeah, but what if Russia took over the world or what if China did, if it wasn't
us or whatever,
those have got to just kind of fall away, you know, by the wayside. There's no
real reason to fear
that in the first place, but also who in the hell are we to stop it at this
point? Right? Another South
Park reference when Cartman is so scared by the Chinese display at the Olympics
ceremony,
he gets all paranoid that China's coming for us. So he recruits Butters to come
with him to fight and
keep all the Chinese away. And then over and over again throughout the episode,
Butters keeps like
closing his eyes and shooting some guy accidentally in the dick just over and
over again. And then by the
end of the episode, Cartman says, you know what, just forget it. Okay? If that's
the best you can do,
Butters, let's just stop. We're just going around. We're, this is not working,
our intervention. It's just
not. What do you predict is going to happen with Iran? No, I don't know. I'm
really worried. I mean,
I try not to take Trump too seriously when he's, you know, or too literally
when he's being hyperbolic,
but he has threatened to nuke them over and over again, including just the
other day. He said the
country's going to have a glow around it, you know, when I'm done with them or
whatever.
Do you really think he would do that?
I mean, I, no, no, I don't. I'm not predicting that. But I think it's symbolic,
right, of his
frustration. He absolutely just should not have done this. And now he has no
good way out of it,
right? He could just declare victory and it would be fine by me. In fact, there
was a story in the
Jerusalem Post, um, the end of April, I think, I think it was like April 28th
about how Trump ordered
the intelligence agencies to do an estimate about what would happen if I just
walked away.
Right. And then they're looking into it. Well, just how bad will Iran exploit
the new vacuum that
we've created and the power and influence that we're handing to them? How bad
will it really be?
Because he has no options to fix it. He just doesn't. You want a regime change
in Tehran,
you can drop a hydrogen bomb on the capital city and kill 10 million people and
then claim the
desolation is peace, or you can just forget it. And like, man, you know what?
We're all tough and
badass enough to kill all these people. We should be tough enough to admit when
we screwed up then.
Look at Afghanistan. We stayed for 20 years because Washington couldn't admit
that we can't win this
war. There's only one way to tame the Pashtuns and that is kill them all. And
we're not willing to
do that. So what are we doing? We're just losing slowly. And then what they do,
they finally admitted
it. They finally just said, fine, I guess we lost and left. That's what we got
to do here. But sooner is
better. Do you think that it's possible that this war will go on to the end of
his regime and then
whoever comes into power in 2028 then gets out? God, I hope not. I can't
imagine what's going to
happen if this thing keeps on for three years. You know, this is a real flaw in
our system, quite
frankly, is like if we had a parliament, we could just vote no confidence in
this guy and put a new
guy in there whose fault this isn't and try to get him to resolve it. Instead,
all we can do is wait
three years, wait for him to keel over of a heart attack or wait for his own
cabinet to overthrow him
in the name of him being, you know, too demented to continue, which is not
going to happen.
Um, you know, that 25th amendment, they always invoked that like they could do
a coup against
him for being a Russian agent or whatever, back in his first term.
But you can't do that. Yeah, if they didn't do it with Biden, he would have to
be completely off his
rocker and to to a degree where his own cabinet is going to agree to overthrow
him, which I just
think is virtually impossible. So the good news is, right, is that he's he
could just flip flop on
anything, right? He just changed his mind about anything. In fact, when he
announced the ceasefire,
he said, we're going to we're going to negotiate based on Iran's 11 point
proposal. Like, okay, man,
fine. Right. Go from unconditional surrender to surrendering unconditionally,
like call it whatever
you want. And and he is good at that. You could call that a gift if you want to
politically that
you can just pretend like, yeah, no, I meant to do that. So what is the holdup?
Like, what are they
disagreeing on? Well, he's got to deal with Netanyahu, right? The master blaster
thing, you know, from
Thunderdome on his back shouting in his ear what he's got to do and what he's
got to not do in the 60
minutes interview. He tells the major Garrett that, you know, we're not done.
The war's not over until
we get that uranium. And Garrett says, well, how are we going to get? He says,
Trump promised me he
wants to get it. He's going to get it. And and of course, they have this ever
since they announced
the ceasefire. The Israelis immediately escalated their bombing campaign in
Lebanon just to destroy
the ceasefire. This is what prompted Tucker Carlson to say that Trump has
clearly been somehow enslaved
by Netanyahu, that he's willing to put up with that. As Bill Clinton said again,
who's the superpower
and who's the client state? How is it? We have a ceasefire deal and then you
can come and veto it like
this and then not be chastised and not told to get back in your corner. We're
handling this. And and
I really just don't know the answer to that. Some people speculate that it's
blackmail or it's just the
bribery or he's just into it that he just, you know, he wants to be great. He
wants to have a legacy.
This is I really should study more about this, but this is a part of libertarian
economic theory
called public choice theory and which is kind of a clunky name, but it just
means that
the public choices are still made by private individuals and they're acting
based on what's
good for them rather than what's good for the country like Strobe Talbot. We
need those Lockheed dollars.
We need those Polish votes. So we do a policy that ultimately is bad for the
country, even though
it's good for the Democrats at the time. And same thing here. What's good for
the country is to just
come home. But and you can hear this just built in. People don't even question.
It's just built in,
of course, to every single discussion about this. How are we going to do this
in a way that it looks
good enough for Trump that he's willing to accept his defeat here? Right. How
can we spin it for him?
How big of a gold medal do we have to give him? How big of a ticker tape parade
do we have to give
him? How firm of a pat on the back and a congratulations do we have to give him
for
him to decide that it's OK to come home otherwise and without looking like too
much of a jerk himself
for what he's done here and then and having to live with it for three years,
the aftermath of however
it works out with Iran newly dominant. And so again, Bush put Iran up two pegs
in Baghdad.
Obama put him up two pegs by building the caliphate and then helping them
destroy it again.
And then, of course, Al Qaeda rules Damascus now. So that's a big hit against
them.
But what what Donald Trump has done with this war is about at least equivalent
to what W. Bush did
in terms of enhancing Iranian power in the region. It's like the guy in the
football grand in the
football game grabs the ball and then runs the wrong direction and scores the
goal for the other
team. Do you really think it's that bad? Oh, it's absolutely. I mean America
look before
despite the destruction of their absolutely. Oh, yeah, yeah, because I mean, it's
just as simple
as this right on February the 27th the Gulf was open for business and the
illusion of American
conventional air and naval power kept it that way and nobody questioned it. It's
America's dominated
order. Yes, Iran has Iraq and they have Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. But hell,
we even got Sunni's
ruling in Damascus now. And so the GCC and including Jordan and Turkey and
Israel, this is America's
empire in the Middle East on February 29th, 30th. I mean, well, no, sorry.
There is no one leap
here on March 1st, 2nd, 3rd this year. All that was over. I mean, Daryl Cooper
again is,
you know, we did the show provoked every Friday night and he said, listen, I'm
hearing from my
friends in the Pentagon. This was one week into the war. He goes, I'm here for
my friends. This war
is not going well. They're hitting all our bases. They've killed a couple of
our guys and they're
pitting our runways and hitting our radars and hitting our planes. And we knew
it then right then
just, and I'm sorry, man, it's just true. Told you so. For 20 years, all of our
assets in the
Gulf are up for grabs. They can reach out and touch us there and there ain't a
damn thing that we can do
about it. You know, and it just absolutely is true. Scott, you're a real bummer,
but thank you.
It's a lot of fun, isn't it? Talking to me. It is. It's, uh, it's good to get
your perspective
and I really wish someone had had your perspective before this all got started,
at least an understanding
of the ability to enrich the uranium and turn it into an actual weapon. But
thank you very much. Um, tell
everybody about your shows where people could find them, where people could
find you. Absolutely.
So I do the Scott Horton show, which is my interview show and provoked with Daryl
Cooper. And, um,
Where can people get those? Uh, here on the YouTubes and on Spotify and all
those things.
And then, um, I have, uh, I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com. I'm the
director of the
Libertarian Institute. That's libertarianinstitute.org. And for the deep, deep
dive and the deep background
on all this stuff, I have the Scott Horton Academy of foreign policy and
freedom at scotthortonacademy.com.
And, oh, you know what? I have them here. If I could just show my books real
quick.
If I can find the zipper on this thing.
Got these for you here. Got fool's errand on Afghanistan.
Enough already on the war on terrorism and provoked on Russia and Ukraine.
Boy, those are some fat ass books, dude. You do a lot of work.
I do. I have a lot of jobs. I work real hard on this stuff. Um,
and these have been very well received. You know, I'm, uh, I basically,
my job is, uh, I was inspired by Bill Hicks like this. When I was a young kid,
there's a great interview of Bill Hicks on raw time, which was the heavy metal
show on the access channel
here in town. And I think this is probably not too long before he died. And
this is of course,
the days before the internet and everything, um, where he talks about the
importance of seeing
people get up there and tell the truth and not be afraid to tell the truth and
set the example for
other people. And you know, at that time it was like to have a guy like him, a
comedian,
able to tell the truth on a platform where other people could hear it was just
so exciting to even,
it was like just breaking through this, this, you know, impenetrable force
field.
And then he was just saying, he says, well, well, if that guy can do it, well
then maybe I can do it
and I'll get up there and I'll say what I think is true too. And then that kind
of deal. And so
I've been more or less following that same path since then.
Well, thank you for all this because the amount of work that's involved in
putting together these
books and all the interviews and all the podcasts you've done for most people
to occupy their mind
with the kind of information that's in yours, it's gotta be very troubling. It's
probably not so much fun.
And, uh, it's also very important for people like me who haven't done that work
to, to have access
to it, to get an understanding of it. So thank you. Cool. Thank you very much
for having me. It's been
great. We'll do it again, Scott. All right. Bye everybody.