Speaker 1: Meaning a light man like this man letting butterfly flapping
his wing big down in the forest. Man, it gonna
cause the tree fall, letting five thousand miles away. Man,
nobody seen, nobody. You don't need to know. Man, you
followed the story and you got back to flect that.
That's when man don't blackly dag on the Panama Man. Man,
you don't don't.
Speaker 2: Better Man, I know all right, Scott Orton, Welcome back
to the Jay Burden Show. How you doing, Man, happy
to be here.
Speaker 1: I'm doing all right. How are you?
Speaker 2: I'm doing well. Obviously I wish uh you and I
could ever have conversations about something happy, but uh, unfortunately
seems to me that every time we hang out there's
something bad going on. And uh, obviously I don't need
to tell anyone at home there is a war in Iran.
I guess it's not technically a war. We didn't declare it,
but nears makes no difference. And one of the things
that I've noticed, particularly in the wake of Joe Kent resigning,
is a new argument has sort of been called out
of the dirt, which is basically, well, this war isn't new.
We've been at war with Iran for forty years. So
I'm curious if I could one to get your reaction to,
you know, Joe Kent's resignation, and two, well, how true
is that claim?
Speaker 1: Well it's funny now. Harry Brown said after September eleventh that, oh,
everybody wants to pretend that history started this morning or yesterday.
And as Robert Haig says, truncate the antecedents as they
do with Pearl Harbor. They pretend we had no Pacific
policy until Pearl Harbor. You know this kind of thing. Well,
in fact, America's war against Iran started in nineteen fifty three.
If you want to look at it that way, how
come we got to start with Jimmy Carter? Be fair America,
as everyone knows he's oftentimes very proud of, We're number one.
America is the superpower it used to be. There was
a balance in the Soviet Union in China, and there's
a you know, somewhat non aligned you know, Third World
and all of that. But as far as who's dominant
in South Asia, Southeast and southwest and south central Asia,
in the days of the Cold War, it was either
us or we were trying in a contest with the
Soviets for influence there. And the question is never about
Iran coming to North America and trying to gain dominance here,
overthrowing the governor of Texas and taking our oil for
a song, or any of that. The question was whether
American can get away with completely poning their ass or not.
And so what happened was America originally supported the rise
of the Prime Minister of Mohammed Mosadek, but then they
decided they didn't like him lean slightly left, and they
were afraid he was going to deal with the Soviets
in a way that they didn't want, so they did
a coup and overthrew him and reinstalled the Shah Recipa Labi,
was the son of the dictator from before, and who
had also been in power himself for a while before
being deposed, and then America reinstalled him, and he was
essentially like a right wing fascist dictatorship El Presidente in
the mold of Samosa or somebody like that in Latin America.
Right mirrored sunglasses and Uncle sam behind him, and he
ruled the place for twenty six years and leading up
to the Revolution of nineteen seventy nine, and is very
convenient that the Hawks want to leave all of that out.
But seriously, imagine that some foreign force had come and
overthrown say W. Bush, and reinstalled Bill Clinton and then
kept him in as a foreign sock puppet authoritarian dictator
for twenty five years because he served their interest, say
the Chinese or something like that. Would we be over
it and used to it in twenty six years. Well,
that's just the way of the world. The Chinese get
to pick our leaders, and we just look at our
shuffling feet as we walk and sacrifice ever having dignity again.
Or no, we would be madder and madder and madder
about that all the time until it came to an end.
I mean. And of course this is not universal in
the sentiment, as it wouldn't be in any country. But
it was a real grassroots popular revolution that overthrew that
dictatorship in seventy nine, as opposed to say, for example,
the bloody Coudeta of Saddam Hussein who overthrew his predecessor
Albacer in Iraq in that same year. And it was
a massive popular revolution in the streets and America in
the Jimmy Carter government supported the rise of the Ayatola Komane.
And I'm older than you. I remember in the nineteen eighties,
and I was very young. In seventy nine, I was three.
But in the nineteen eighties I was old enough to
be interested in this stuff, as you know, even a preteen,
you know, as a ten year old and stuff. I
was somewhat interested in this. Watch these kinds of shows
on TV. So you didn't grow up with this, but
we used to. The TV was always on and there's
always stuff like this going on, you know, talking about
this kind of thing. And I remember, even as a kid,
asking some grown up, either one of my parents, or
my friend's parents or somebody, isn't that funny that the
French sent the Ayatola back to Iran? Aren't they our friends?
Why would they do that? But of course the answer
is because America wanted them to do that, and they
would never do that against Washington's wishes, of course, So
why the answer was because the CIA said, we know Komine,
he was a part of a group of conservative Chiai
clerics that helped us agitate against Mosedek back in nineteen
fifty three. We can work with him, and they knew
that the Shaw was dying of cancer anyway, so they
threw his ass overboard and supported the revolution. Now this
is only barely you or your audience's fault. Okay, everybody
gets this wrong. Everybody gets this wrong, but you'll never
get it wrong anymore. After this, the hostage crisis didn't
break out coinciding directly with the revolution. The revolution was
complete by February nineteen seventy nine. The hostage crisis didn't
break out until November. And so for the ten months
or nine months in between, the US government under the
Jimmy Carter's have been to Brazilski administration, we're trying to
work with the I tool, and we're actually working with
the Iranians and in fact, for example, passing them intelligence
about alleged threats from the Soviet Union which supposedly was
considering invading Iran after having invaded Afghanistan, which Carter and
Brazinski had been trying to bait them into doing, and
which they did do in December of seventy nine, and
then also warning well, I guess that would have been
coinciding with the threats to invade Afghanistan. Sorry, not just after,
but then and also warning about threats from Saddam Hussein
after he took power in Iraq, and he had major
reason to fear the site revolution in Iran because that
could very easily spread to the Schiaite supermajority population of Iraq,
which could rise up and overthrow him. So he wanted
to conscript those Iraqi Siites and send them to war
against Iran instead, And at that time America was warning
Iran about the possibility. But then what happened was David Rockefeller,
convinced that he was the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank,
Rockfeller grandson and president the on Foreign Relations and Zabin
Neu Brazinski's patron, he convinced Jimmy Carter to let the
Shaw into the United States for cancer treatment, and that
was what sparked the revolution because they thought that meant
America was going to nurse him back to health and
reinstall him in power, which it didn't really, but that
was the way they took it. And I'm not justifying
and taking our hostages for Christ's sake, but I'm just
saying all this kids blurred together in popular memory because
it's so important for the War Party. For you to
think and see just even on this one crucial point,
for you to think that the very existence of a
revolutionary site regime under this group of theocrats in Iran
is necessarily this great Satan right, this permanent menace against
the United States, this implacable enemy that cannot be reasoned
with a radical fundamentalist Islam. And if the Democrats could
get along with them for most of a year until
a big stupid diplomatic blunder led to the hostage crisis
and Carter and Brazinski's humiliation with especially the failed operation
to rescue the guys Eagle Claw to try to rescue
the guys which failed, and all of that leading to
the Carter doctrine and all of the rest. Without that
whole humiliation, we could have figured out how to get
along with them all along. And in fact, the Israelis
continued to get along with the Iranians all the way
through the nineteen eighties and into the early nineteen nineties,
because for example, or not because, but for example, when
Ronald Reagan, even though he continued Carter's policy of backing
Saddam Hussein against Iran after Hussein invaded with Carter's green
light in nineteen eighty, when Reagan switched sides and sold
missiles to the Ayatola in the Irankantra, he used the
Israelis as cutouts to do it because the Israelis still
had this ongoing relationship, as Treated Parsi shows in this
book Treacherous Alliance, the Ayatola would publicly be denouncing the
Little Satan Israel and threatening Israel the same day he'd
be taking a shipment of missiles from them, and all
of his bleusser was just cover for their covert relationship
that had lasted through that whole period, and that didn't
change on the Israelis part until their strategy changed in
nineteen ninety three. So you know, I'm from Texas, Okay,
I'm an American, I'm not a Sheite, and I'm not
any kind of Persian or related to any or anything.
I have no partisan reason to take their side in this.
That's not what it's about. It's just about looking at
the facts of the situation, being honest, look at it
from the other point of view of who's been at
war with who. When Jimmy Carter told Saddam Hussein, yeah,
go ahead and invade, We'll support you and America under
Carter and then Reagan supported Saddam Hussein's war for eight
years against him, including arming them with chemical weapons, but
well helping them by and helping them develop their own
chemical weapons and giving them the satellite targeting information to
use those chemical weapons on Iranian conscripts in the field
and ultimately even against Iranian cities. Something like half a
million people died on both sides in that absolutely horrific
war in the nineteen eighties, and people get upset, and
for some good reason. Right about the Bay Root bombing
of nineteen eighty three, Okay, that was two hundred and
forty one marines that ron O Reagan himself said he
should have never put there was the worst mistake of
his presidency. And yes, including the lack of proper force protection.
If you're going to put marines in barracks the end
of an airport tarmac, then yeah, you need men with
M sixties out front to prevent or worse right out
front to prevent some guy in a suicide truck from
getting at your guys. Of course, but it was the
policy and the politics, and Reagan himself said he should
have never put them in there. He wrote in his diaries,
the big mistake of his presidency was not being a
whimp and withdrawing it was intervening in the first place
where America had no business. And by the way, the
Israelis knew about the nineteen eighty three Bay Route attack
that it was coming, as Victor Ostrowski, the Masad whistleblower
wrote in his book By Way of Deception, they knew
all about it. They knew there was a very short
list of targets that were appropriate for the truck bomb
that was being built that they knew all about. And
they did not warn the Americans. And they said that's
what they'd get for sticking their nose into our business
where we didn't want them. And now I believe the
political government of Israel had actually asked Reagan to intervene,
But this was the Masad guys at least said they
want They didn't give a damn what happened to us.
They're big boys, they could take care of themselves, and
if they don't, then that's just tough. That was how
the Israelis felt about the American Marines getting bombed at
Bay Route. So they're just to me, no less worse
than proto Hasbala and the group of Shites that did that,
and by the way, it was Lebedi Shehites that did that,
and it was a group supportive by Iran, But it
wasn't literally necessarily exactly Iran that did that, unless we
want to take full responsibility for every single thing Israel
and Ukraine. Do you know, be careful how you pass
these standards around here. But it was certainly they supported
Saddam Hussein against Iran and bear a lot of that
kind of responsibility for that. And then I'll skip to
the next major real talking point on the list would
be in Iraq War two. They say that Iran killed
six hundred Americans in Iraq War two. Now George W.
Bush would say, well, I shorthanded it meaning this is
sort of like when you're a little kid. I don't know,
you're a different generation. Mean, when I was a little
kid in like four or five years old, right around there,
we would say maybe three four years old, one, two,
skip a few, ninety nine, one hundred, you know what
I mean, if you didn't want to count all the
way to one hundred, is kind of do that. That's
how they do here. Listen, I don't want to have
to explain, you know, Jerry Seinfeld, YadA, YadA, YadA, and
then but yeah, Iran killed six hundred of our guys. Oh,
it's just not true. I mean, it's why it's you
might have noticed. It's this cliche. It's this talking point
that they never explain. He knows how I always explain.
He knows how they never explain. It's kind of a tell.
Speaker 2: So, Scott, I've been reliably informed that that is because
you were an agent of I guess it would have
been the Katari government several months ago, but since they
got hit. Now now you're an Iranian or Russian, I'm
not entirely sure, Paige.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you about the Qataris. They helped Obama build
the caliphate in Siri if you want to talk about
the sins of the Qataris and whose bankroll I'm not on.
But and look, I have done six thousand interviews. In fact,
next month will be the twenty third anniversary of my show,
and you can hear the first interview I did well.
The real first interview I did is of a survivor
Branch Davidian in nineteen ninety nine. Is on the bottom
of the list if you go to Scott Horton dot
org slash archives. But then the next one is it's
April twelfth, two thousand and three. My first interview is
of Alan Bach from the Orange County Register in anti
war dot com. And I'm just doing Austin, Texas, anti government,
anti war, libertarian shit. You like it or you don't,
but it's all all that you got, dude, the Weekend
Interview show with Philip Drew, and I got six thousand
interviews showing who I've been the whole time and what
I've been right and wrong about, which is almost nothing
this whole time. And so people can take that for
what it's worth if they don't like what they're here
and they're interested in trying to prove who they think
I really am and what's behind some deconstructionists thing about
my motives. And there's no opener book anywhere on the internet,
probably than my six thousand interview archive right there at
Scott Horton dot org slash archives. So and including my
coverage of this question in two thousand and seven, and
here's what happened, Okay, Dick Cheney and David Petraeus and
Michael Gordon of the New York Times entered into a
conspiracy to lie to the American people and make the
American people believe that every time a Shiite Arab set
off a roadside bomb in Iraq, that that bomb came
from Iran. This is the part they shorthand to. Now
you're supposed to just believe it was Iranian setting the
bombs when okay, they're dumbing that down from well, Iran
supplied all those bombs, but in fact that's not true.
And the worst accusation they got, which I think is
also unproven although widely asserted, is that Iran taught, like
the IRGC taught the Iraqi sites how to make these
explosively formed penetrators, which are EFPs, which are the new
and improved, worse roadside bombs compared to a plain old
ied like the Sunni Insurgeon were making out of just
artillery shells and whatever other bombs that they could find.
The explosively foreign penetrators had a copper slug Basically, they
had like a copper plate on it that when the
shape charge exploded, turned that plate into a molten slug
that would cut right through armors, very deadly killed a
lot of Americans who were fighting against Maktada Alsader and
his Mahdi army in the early part of two thousand
and seven. Now, the thing of it is this, even
if you accept that Iran taught them how to make
these bombs, there's just as much evidence it says they
learned how to make these bombs from Lebanese has Bala,
and that Lebanese has Bala learned it from the ira
not from Iran.
Speaker 2: And then to that point, Scott, that technology dates back
to World War Two, so you know, it's not exactly
like it came down to the you know, the Iranians
from God in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 1: Right, So, but there was a huge propaganda campaign and
in fact, we used to joke at the time on
the show that wow, they totally forgot about it. Iron's illicit,
secret parallel nuclear weapons program that we know is there somewhere.
They totally forgot about that absolute pile of crap for
like half a year, three quarters of a year, so
they could tell this pile lies instead now instead of
their making an adam bomb, trust me, is every time
a shee sets off a bomb, it's an iranium bomb,
trust me. But here's the thing. I have it in
my book, a giant collection of citations in which I
actually if you type in my name Scott Wharton and
Soda Straws and EFPs, that you'll find it on my
substack there. And it's for free for anybody to read.
And it is one section of the Iraq chapter of
my book enough already where I talk about the irony
of America biting the Sheites under mctada Alsado when we're
actually fighting that entire war for him and them, but
then also this total propaganda campaign about the EFPs. And
in there you'll see I cite the Wall Street Journal,
Yoki Dresden. I believe it is Reuter's staff Los Angeles Times,
Andrew Coburn in the Los Angeles Times, Gareth Porter, of
course in Enterpress Service and probably truth Out and whatever
it was. But the great Gareth Port is nobody better
than him on this stuff. And then Ellen nick Meyer
in the Washington Post, Alyssa Rubin in the New York Times, who,
by the way, you know, is Michael Gordon's colleague at
the New York Times. So here he's shoveling these lines
all day long. And then she goes, yeah, the military says,
today they found another one of these garages, another one
of these machine shops where these bombs are being made
in Iraq by Iraqis. So Iraqi Sheites are the super majority.
They're Arabs, and they're Rockies, and they're the super majority
of the country. They don't have to be Iranians to
be Iraqi Sheites. They're not. They're Rocky Sheites. And in fact,
the three major pillars of the United Iraqi Alliance that
America bought that war or Dhawa and Scary, the Supreme
Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which became renamed ISKI
the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq because George W. Bush
won their revolution for them, they didn't need to be
for a revolution anymore. ISKI and Dawa and Soder were
the three major pillars of the United Iraqi Alliance under
the overall tuteligion guy and guidance of the Ayatola Ali
al Sistani down in Naja, the in fact highest ranking
Shai cleric in the world, who already did outrank even
the Ayatola Commedee in Iran before the Israelis and the
Americans killed in a few weeks ago. And so of
those three major pillars of the Iraqi Shiaid alliance, Soder
was the least Iran tied. He had stayed in Iraq.
Dawa and Skiri were guys who had fled to Iran
back during when the Iran Iraq War broke out, or
when the Iranian Revolution broke out. They took the Iranian
revolution side and fought. Many of them, especially from the
Supreme Islamic Council in Dawa, fought on Iran's side against
Iraq in the Iran Iraq War, on the side of
the Shiite Revolution against Saddam's Sunnibathis led government. Right so
now they were coming from Iran to take over the government. Fact,
these are the people who led the Shiite Revolution uprising
attempted uprising of nineteen ninety one after the First Iraq
War that H. W. Bush had encouraged and then betrayed.
And why did he do that Because Iraqis who had
chosen Iran side in the Iran Iraq War were coming
across the border to lead it. Well, these are the
same guys that W. Bush took all the way to Baghdad.
Bush Junior took all the way to Baghdad twelve years later. Well,
Soder was more of a nationalist and he was more
willing to all with Sunni Arabs to kick a Maria
and to kick Iran out. So America preferred the Iraqi Shiads,
who were closer to Iran, because at least they would
let us stay, instead of favoring Solder because at least
he actually wanted to limit Iran's influence in the country.
So America instead targeted him. And so I'm not saying
he's a good person or anything like that. His men
did kill something like five hundred Americans in that uprising
during that time, But America picked that fight. David Petraeus
picked that fight, and quite honestly, I think the majority
of the reason that they did it was simply to
provoke a reaction from Solder that they could blame on
Iran and for providing the training for what they call
the Special Groups, which was just the Mahdi Army, and
providing these bombs in order to justify strikes on ir
GC targets inside Iran, which was supposed to kick off
the war. But the reason at this stage the war
that we're undergoing right now. But the reason that didn't
happen was because the chiefs told w Bush, don't make
us go to Iran. We'll do the surge. Hell, we'll
turn around and fight Solder, but don't make us attack Iran,
because in fact, we have one hundred and fifty thousand
troops in Iraq. We're mostly fighting on the Site side,
who are now going to get Order sixty six right
in the back if we turn and take Iran's side,
turn against the Sites, I mean, and against Iran. They're gonna,
as they say, we will do our duty and serve
the Saite Revolution at America's expense. And we had fifty
thousand guys in Afghanistan that were at least within missile
range if nothing else. Plus, as we've seen now, thirteen
bases all up and down the southwest coast of the
Persian Gulf there in Kuwait. We had air bases and
army bases in Saudi Arabia Air and Army in cutter
the biggest air base in the region, in Central Command headquarters,
the alu Did Air Base, which was also where the
British Air Force is station at Bahrain, the Fifth Fleet
Naval Headquarters and then various other bases smaller I guess
Army Air Force bases in UAE and Oman as well.
And then this is what they told him was if
we fight Iran ultimately we can prevail, yes, but at
great cost, and they will be able to fight back
in ways that we can't control. So, as they put it,
they want escalation dominance, which means they believe they'll be
able to control every stage of the fight. And if
they don't believe they'll be able to control every stage
of the fight, they don't even want to get in
it at all. We only fight to win way you,
hands down, in a no contest thing, big enough enemy,
we don't want to mess with them. And in this case, yes,
is America more powerful than Persia, Yes, no question about that.
But can they overwhelm our defenses with missile fire? Yes,
and across that not wide Persian Gulf they can? Can
they close the straits of horror moves? Yes they can.
And as we've seen, it's the New York Times today,
and I know it's the New York Times, but it's true. Man,
Darryl Cooper, my guy has sources still inside the military.
Your guy as well, he still has sources inside the
Pentagon who told him, Man, our bases are decimated, They're ruined.
He said that on our show on I think the sixth,
when Kyle Anzelone was co hosting with him and I
was out of town and people were all criticizing him. Oh,
mister Cooper, the historian claims he has sources that tell
him our bases are decimated. Huh. And then now twenty
days later they're going, yeah, that's right, and they've been decimated.
All our guys had to withdraw from there. And as
Justin Logan from the Cato Institute said on Twitter today,
well what's the point of having a bunch of bases
in the lease if we can't fight a war from them?
How can we claim ever again after this war? No
matter how this works out, let's say it works out
in the most positive way you can think of, other
than like, I don't know, whatever full sock puppetry regime
change where like we get the next show it works
out perfectly something after this, like how can we ever
claim to dominate the golf with our military presence there
ever again? If we have to evacuate everyone because we
can't stop Iran from blowing up whatever radar, creating whatever runway,
hitting whatever barracks, if they were trying that they wish.
And so this is the reason that the chiefs told w. Bush, Look,
we'll escalate the Iraq war, but we don't want to
do the Iran war. But Dick Cheney and David Petraeus
and Michael Gordon of the New York Times, who's now
at the Wall Street Journal. He's the same guy who
lied about Saddam's plot to get the A bomb before
the war with Judith Miller, and she got disgrace, and
somehow he lives on and is at the Wall Street
Journal to this day. But they tried very hard to
push this and to convince w. Bush to attack Iran,
and he ended up backing down and not doing it.
And Ahodolmert was simultaneously the Prime Minister of Israel, was
you know, lobbying as hard as he could, and Bush
told him forget it. And that was in you know,
by oh and also, by the way, the commander of
Central Command was Admiral fox Fallin, William fox Fallon, and
he had leaked that. I don't know whether he really
told Channing this or he just leaked that he did
that he had told Chaney, will go to a run
over my dead body. We're not doing this, I guess,
particularly because we're not doing this as long as we
have one hundred fifty thousand boys in Iraq, because they
will be you know, in real trouble, they'll be stranded.
They won't be able to get out from there. I
guess they could head west to Jordan, they won't be
able to get out by way of Kuwait, and so
so I think that was the sticking point for him.
But so so, look, so that's the worst of the
accusations against them really, other than as far as what
they ever did to America. It was just really not
true that Solder was their sock puppet, or that those
bombs came from Iran. As I said, I cited all
those sources where they found over and over again these
bombs were being made in Iraq by Iraqis and including
Oh did I leave off who wasn't in a Christian
Science Monitor It may Sam Dagger, I think in the
Christian Science Monitor had one. I left that off the list.
But anyway, so, yeah, their accusations against Iran really fall
flat and come down to the fact that they had
this missile program that they are now using. It was
their deterrent and now their bluff has been called. So
they're using it to demonstrate that they can and will
again next time too. And then they're saying, aha, see
they have these missiles and that proves why we had
to do this now when they were only shooting a
match it because you're the one who started the war
in the first place, you know. And then they claimed
the nuclear program. And look, the reality is for almost
everybody that nuclear mean one dangerous, if not scary, and
also two very complicated and essentially somebody else's job to
know about and tell us about. Like, what are you
really going to do? Read a bunch of books about
nuclear stuff? You're probably not. So what do you know
about nukes? You got from TV? Probably? And maybe you
know the difference between an adam bomb and a hydrogen bomb.
Maybe you don't. You know one's bigger than the other.
But you know that when your government says that, listen,
this country is run by religious mad men who would
stop at nothing to nuke you and your jammi's if
they had the chance, and they're working on getting the
chance to do it. Then that is a costUS belly
in the minds of a lot of Americans. Now, it
wasn't good enough for Eisenhower to invade the Soviet Union,
wasn't good enough for Johnson to invade China, But it's
supposed to be a good enough reason for America to
invade Iran to prevent them from getting new And then
whether they're actually getting them or not comes down to
whether you like the current president or whether it's the
other guy this time. It's basically what it comes down
to you, because people just don't know. However, I think
it actually is only fair to ask people to just
stop and think it out as their own just thought
experiment in their head for a moment that like, haven't
they been telling you that I wrong was making nuclear
weapons for say, your entire lifetime. Don't you think they'd
have a single atom bomb by now? They don't have
a single atom bomb, much less hundreds of them, much
less thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems. Why. The reason why
this is nineteen forties technology. Even a Nagasaki style plutonium
implosion device, much more sophisticated than the Hiroshima gun type nuke,
is nineteen forty five technology man. And so there's only
one explanation for why they don't have any atom bombs.
They didn't make any. They never tried. They weren't making
atom bombs. Those were lies by the Israelis and the
Israeli War Party in the United States of America. That's it.
They weren't making nukes. And it's okay. If you want
to hate and fear and distrust them, you should Why
should you presume the innocence of some theocracy, of some
alien religion on the other side of the planet. You
should not presume their innocence. But you can actually observe
their behavior from here. If you pay close attention, you
can see this is not opaque. This is not about
the dark side of Mars where we can't really tell
what's happening. We can too tell what's happening. We know
what they have. They have a civilian nuclear program, and
we know that up until at least June, they were
not diverting their nuclear material to any military purpose. We
know they've never enriched to weapons grade. We know that
in twenty fifteen they poured concrete into their heavy water
reactor so it could never be used. And even have
the potential for producing plutonium, which could provide a separate
route to the bomb. Their light water reactor cannot produce
plutonium or waste that can be even reprocessed to produce
nuclear weapons fuel, and their enrichment has all of uranium
two thirty five has always remained below weapons grade, and
even when they went up to sixty percent, it was
as obvious as the sun in the sky that this
is simply a bargaining chip to try to get back
into the negotiations and get sanctions, relieve and try to
normalize relations. And as Joe Kent has been saying in
his recent interviews, he calls it the escalation ladder. The
Uranians have the sock puppet militias in Iraq, the same
ones that are allied with the Iraqi Army that George W.
Bush built over there. Not their enemies, their allied malicious
that really rose up, especially to fight against ISIS after
Obama built the caliphate in his time. But these guys
were doing potshot attacks from time to time on American
bases in Iraq as well as American bases in Jordan
and Syria, and some people were killed in h I'm
sorry man, I'm forgetting the I'm blanket on the dates
and times. It may have even been some of them
in reaction to Solamani's assassination. Yeah, because that kicked off
some with Katid Hesbala, which is Iraqi Hesbala, and then
there were also later attacks. I forgot what was supposedly
the the the precipitating factor, But there were attacks that
killed Americans in station in Syria but were within range
of these Iraqi militias. So Joe Kent says that when
Trump came in, the Iyad Tolan knows that this guy's
no pushover, and he clearly comand and Control top down
ordered the Iraqi SHIAI malicious to cool it. We were
going to try to get back into negotiations with this guy.
You know. Joe Biden didn't want to negotiate, didn't want
to do anything to get back in the Obama deal,
even though it was his own staff for the same
people who'd done it in the Obama years. He did not.
He kept Trump one's you know, ultimate crippling sanctions campaign
as they called it, what do they call it? Not
crippling sanctions was Obama before Trump called it the maximum
Pressure campaign, and Joe Biden kept that even worse than
the crippling sanctions of the Obama times and did nothing
to resolve the issue. But so it was in Biden's
lame duck period in twenty twenty. In December of twenty twenty,
the Israelis they used the Mujahadini called communist terrorists cult
to assassinate a guy named Fakun Zada who was the
head of Iran's nuclear program. And then in and there
was something the Iranians did in direct response to that
that I'm sorry, I forget I have to go back
and look at that. Then in April of twenty one,
so five months later, they did a sabotage attack at
Natance and attacked the power plant that supported the centrifuge
cascades at Natance. And in response to that, they started
enriching up to sixty percent. And so, yeah, they were
playing hardball. Their point was they're trying to get back
into the deal, and the deal which guaranteed the civilian
nature of their nuclear program and vastly expanded inspections and
the rest the deal that Trump had torn up before.
And so then when you get to Trump's second term,
here It's clear that, especially from all of Netanyahu's trips
to the United States and the way that the War
Party has pushed all of this thing, that they were
determined to get Trump into this, and I don't know
at what point he agreed. I think probably very early
on he agreed with Yahoo to do this. I'm very
dubious about this story, by the way, about Trump being
sort of blackmailed into this, as Rubio would put it
that or did put it in that one press conference
at Israel was going to start this war and drag
America kicking and screaming into it by forcing the IATOLA
to hit American targets and then forcing Trump to hit back.
You know, they had talked about doing that to Obama,
and they had even talked about doing that to George W.
Bush in two thousand and seven, trying to do an
end run around w Bush and have Israel start the war.
But they didn't dare do that to w. Bush and
they didn't even dare do that to Obama. The idea
that net and Yaho would do that to Trump. Nah.
What happened here was net and Yahoo convinced Trump and
Trump agreed, and they did it so it's still all
Israel's fault, except that Donald Trump is the president of
the United States, not Benjamin Nett Yahoo. But it's you know,
responsibility is a quality, not a quantity, So you can
divvy it up how you like. But it was clearly
still the Israel least that browbeat Donald Trump's government into
doing this thing and into accepting their idiot red line
of any enrichment at all is the same thing as
a nuclear weapons program. And so we can't let them
have any enrichment at all. Once you get him to
agree to that, well, now you know, it's like stand
by me that they throw their hats over the fence
of the junkyard. Now they gotta climb the fence and
go run across. So it's that kind of thing, like, well,
once you agreed to the thing that they that you
will bomb them over the thing that we know that
they will never give up no matter what, what are
you going to do now? And so they got him
in it and and so look, that's the longest hell
answer to like, who's at war with who? Here? United
States of America is the global superpower? Is the world
empire has been doing all this too. Iran and by
the way, just like when you talk about, you know,
the expansion of the Empire in Eastern Europe and all
the warnings along the way, We've had plenty of off
ramps along the way. We're in the nineteen nineties, for example,
So big New Brazinski who had egged all over his
face from the Rainy Revolution being all his fault and
on his watch on a hostage crisis and all the
rest of that. Other than Jimmy Carter, no one was
more humiliated than some big New Brazinski for that. But
by nineteen ninety three he said, oh, we can do
business with them. We really want to screw the Russians.
So let's build a pipeline across Iran. And then you
know who agreed with him. Henry Kissinger's buddy, supposedly Alexander Haig,
Ronald Reagan's secretary of State, said yeah, that's what we
should do. We should build a pipeline across Iran. And
you know who else agree with him? Dick Cheney, the
former congressman and former Defense secretary turned CEO of Halliburton, said,
I'll build the pipeline across Iran. Bill Clinton should lift
his irresponsible sanctions. Doesn't he know that God didn't see
fit to put all the oil under countries with nice
democratic governments that we like. Oh well, we got to
do business with these people. Fact that Cheney even committed
the cardinal sin, at least at the time, this was
considered to be a terrible faux pas to criticize your
own government's foreign policy while you're standing on foreign soil.
And he complained about Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iran while
he was on a junket in Australia, and that was
seen as like a scandalous thing for him to criticize
Clinton for anything while he was standing on Australia and
soil to do it. But that was what it was about,
because he was saying Clinton should lift the sanctions and
let us do business with the Iotola, because why the
hell not. The mean old Iotola died in nineteen eighty nine.
This is Iotola comedy. We had robson, Johnny and Katami.
Were these new so called, you know, reformist presidents who
came in who the Iotola gave permission to try to
suck up to Bill Clinton and try to normalize relations.
And you know what happened. The Israel lobby said, no,
you know, that was the only force that could beat
the oil companies led by Rockefeller men like Henry Kissinger's guy, Haig.
I don't know I know exactly Haiges connection to the Rockefellers,
but obviously he was Kissinger's guy, and Kissinger was Nelson
Rockefeller's guy, and some bigger brasilent Sky was David Rockefeller's guy.
So this is standard Oil of New Jersey aka Exxon,
the most powerful corporation in the history of the world.
You've probably heard of it. So who could stop them?
Who's that? Dick Cheney, the former Defense secretary. You just
won a war. The Israel lobby, they said, no, you
have to have dual containment from Saudi arabi You have
to stay in Saudi Arabia to balance against Iraq and Iran,
both keep the Cold War going against them both and
normalize nothing, which of course was the primary cause of
turning America Saudi and Britain's Alcada mercenaries against the United States.
Is occupying that supposedly holy Arabian peninsula there and so
this is that huge cost to the United States that
they had this policy on behalf of Israel, which prevented
this normalization of relations with Iran way back then. And
then when w. Bush came into power, and in fact
they waited I think until right after the sacking of Baghdad,
and then they came to well, no, no, no, pardon me,
let me rewind. After September eleventh they held And I
may have said this wrong before because somebody called me
out for this and I couldn't find it. But I
thought I remembered it pretty well. I've got some pictures
in my brain that were much wider angles that I
was not able to find. I do have to admit that.
So I used to say it was a million man
vigil and I was not able to find out though
maybe I can do some more digging. But it was
at least like thousands of thousands of people came out
in Tehran in a government sanctioned type event to do
like a candlelight vigil for the American people. There was
on September twelfth, or it was one week later, or
something very close to that, and it was it was
sanctioned by the regime and on top of which that's
just symbolic. But the point is that, according to Flint,
Leverett and Hillary Man Leverett who I believe Hillary Hillary,
she was just Hillary Man. Then I believe was at
State or maybe she was at CIA. And then her husband,
Flint Leverett or her future husband Flint Levertt, was on
the National Security Council and they were in charge of
dealing with Iran during that time, and Iran was sucking
up to the United States. Because here's the way Iran
saw it. They said, oh, you want to kill the Taliban.
We want to kill the Taliban. They had actually been
planning on invading Afghanistan, which I think they earlier that
summer and had decided not to. But the Iranians, I
mean par me the Taliban had killed some Iranians spies
aka diplomats, had just executed them, and the Iranians were
considering going ahead and attacking the Taliban. Says, oh, you
want to kill the Taliban, will help you. Here's their
hideouts and whatever. Just like the Russians gave us intelligence
to help fight the Taliban from the beginning of the
war in Afghanistan, and then they said, you know, any
help against the bin Laden Knites were happy to provide,
and in fact, we caught some and we'd be happy
to negotiate with you over trading them, for example, some
members of the Mujaidini Kalk And this came up again
after the war. But this is in the very early
part before Rock War two, after September eleventh, but before
Rock War two, they were giving America intelligence. People would say,
you know, the Hawks often say, oh, all these al
Qaeda guys had safe haven and refuge inside Iran. That
wasn't true. They were like under house arrest, and the
question was whether we could properly negotiate for them to
be handed over. They hadn't committed any crimes in Iran,
but they were under control and after fleeing there mostly
from the Afghan War. And then w Bush ruined that
this was like in just the first few months of it.
He put the first big stake in that when he
put Iran in the axis of evil in his State
of the Union speech of January of two thousand and two,
where he says, get this, okay, there's this axis of evil.
It's Saddam Hussein, the secular. Soon he bought this with
the mustache and the beret. It's him and the Ayatola comedie,
the guy who they just bought an eight year war
with you know, the guys the gas with Mustard and
Sarah and tabin nerve Gas is horrific, for these are
deadly blood enemies here and Osama bin Laden, who of course,
both of those guys are terrified of his you know,
Solifie suicide bomber head chopper, you know revolutionaries, you know,
band of roaming mercenaries and terrorists, and oh and Kim
Jong il over there in North Korea. These guys are
all in alliance together get it axis like Mussolini and
Hitler and Tojo Hirohito all all lined up against you,
don't you see. And of course the only reason they
threw in North Korea was because if they said Syria,
you'd just like they wait a minute, This Axis of
be evil list was written in Tel Aviv, not in Washington,
d C. What is this stuff? Which was really the case.
And so when they did that, the Iranians were really
unnotice And then you know, Levertt said, and it's been
a long time, I should go back and listen to
my own interviews of LeVert, because we talked deep about this,
and he wrote a book about it called Going to Tehran.
They both did he and his wife Hillary, And I
know there was still at least some cooperation going because
it was just after the invasion of Iraq. There was
a Terroristan maybe it was in early o four, It
might have been in early O four there was a
terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, and the War Party in
like the Neo cons and the Vice President's office convinced w.
Bush that the attack had been orchestrated from Iran. And
this proved that Iran was protecting al Qaeda and using
al Qaeda to kill Americans in Saudi, which is just
total idiocy. But they convinced Bush that ce, the Iranians
can never be our partners in the war against al Qada.
They use al Qaeda against us, Sir blah blah blah.
And he bought that line of crap, and so that
really helped us spoil any possibility of the warming of
relations with Iran at that time. And then one more thing,
real fast was then very important golden offer right after
the invasion of Iraq, where they said we want to
negotiate Hamas and Hesbala, we want to negotiate even our
potential nuclear program, which didn't even really exist at that point,
we want to negotiate oil rights with you, energy, whatever
you want. Let's normalize relations and figure this out. And
the Bush administration told them to go to hell, refuse
to talk to them. Even though we fought a rock
War two for them for eight years, we refused to
talk to them almost the whole time.
Speaker 2: It's absurd, Genuinely it's absurd. I was driving to the
gym the other day early and I sort of had
this thought because, you know, one of my buddies had
sent me, you know, a news message from ABC basically
talking about how you know, the conditions you know that
can that make you eligible for you know, rolling in
the Army have been massively loocid.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: You can be older, you can be fatter, you can
be dumber. And I just had this crushing realization that,
like time is a flat circle, the last twenty years
have just been one giant circle and here we are again.
Speaker 1: Sucks to be me. I'll tell you what, Well, I'm
talking about pissing up a rope man. How about the
last twenty years of my life? Ah?
Speaker 2: Well, and that's that's really what I want to ask you.
I'm genuinely curious about this because I lived through, you know,
the build up to you know, the g WATT, But
I was pretty young, and so while I remember it,
you know, it's it's my childhood, I don't have the
best you know, I guess recall for exactly what was
going on, But if you could, could you compare how
it felt? Is it the same? Is it different? Because
it seems as if, and this is an interesting discussion
on its own, other than the very narrow, consciously selected
group of MAGA Republicans writ whatever that term means, this
war is already deeply unpopular. So I guess, if I
could put it more succinctly, does this really feel like
the g WATT all over again? Does something seem different
to you as someone who's, again, as you've said, been
talking about this for two decades.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's a lot like Iraq and for that matter,
Obama's dirty war in Syria. In this sense of one
is the absolute unforced error, where there's nothing that says
that you had to do this today when you didn't
have to do it yesterday, and you don't have to
do it tomorrow, but today you had to. There's just
nothing happening, there's no imminent threat there's nothing that changed,
some artificial deadline expired or some kind of crap. Right,
just did not have to do it. Man. So many
other options for resolving these things, I mean, especially like
you look at a rock The Secretary of State was
Colin Powell, the former four star general, chairman of the
Shei's of staff, successful prosecutor of a Rock War one.
You couldn't have sent him over there to tell Saddam,
who's saying, all right, listen, you dirty sob here's the
riot Act.
Speaker 2: Sign it, Oh, run this experiment?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, No, Colon Pale's too much of a
whim So send Donald Rumsveld over there. Donald Rumsveld, torture
child in front, Saddam, do what I say. Sign on
the dotted line. They weren't willing to bully the guy.
There's nothing short of regime change will do. I'm sorry.
That's just crazy. And it was crazy then and listen
and here's how it is, and just like it is
now and then it's just whose side are you on?
The South Park at the time. I love this. I
actually rewatched this within the last year. The South Park
really only one big episode that they did about a
Rock War two was had nothing to do with Saddam
Hussein or rock or weapons or al Qaeda or threats
or nothing, nothing, nothing at all. The division in the
town over whether we should go to war with Iraq
was whether you like country or whether you like rock
and roll. And if you're with Jim Bow and the
rednecks out on the suburbs and further, then you gotta
go get them terrorists, kick their ass and take their
gas and fight the bad guy and start the Saddam
and thing. But then if you live in the city
and you listen to National Public Radio and you like
Paul Simon records or whatever, then you know that, like, no,
this is a terrible thing to do. You don't you know,
Saddam didn't have anything to do with nine to eleven,
you big redneck dumb dumbs and whatever that. And then
so that was it. That was the cultural divide. And
if somebody said, listen, Saddam isn't friends with Osama, they
would say, you're a Democrat, because that's just how people are, right.
It's the same way as like, remember how extra long
so many democrats kept their stupid masks on where they
didn't even have to anymore because they were just still
trying to signal that I'm not one of those Trump voters.
Those are the kinds of people who want to take
their mass off so irresponsibly as fast as they can.
Look at me. I'm a good little Democrat with my
masks still on. Whatever. This is how people are, It's all.
I wrote a tweet attacking Jack Kennedy the other day
and one of the first responses was accusing me of
defending Donald Trump and something that Donald Trump had done.
There's no like, it wasn't even a non sequitur because
you couldn't even get to that many syllables like it
doesn't it's not a non nothing, right, It's just nothing.
But what are you even talking about? How could I
possibly say anything bad against Jack Kennedy unless I was
spinning for Trump? Okay, fine, right, So that is how
it was then too. And the thing is, and really,
God damn George W. Bush for this. The worst thing
that anybody did today culture and society in a very
long time, really was demand that people support this war
based on lies, and then double extra worse on top
of that, demanding that they support torture. After he got
caught torturing people and so first of all was the
lie that Saddam somehow his friends with al Qaeda before
was after May May not. But there's something like had
something to do with helping Osaom bin Laden attack us.
And basically, if you were a country and you believe
that at the time, then you basically bought it whole hog.
Saddam did nine to eleven. Now they didn't want to stop,
and so South, well, how can we attack Afghanistan immediately?
But we have to go ask the UN Security Council
and permission from the French and the Chinese to be
allowed to start this war. It's because he didn't do
nine to eleven, that's goddamn why Okay, but they weren't.
Uh whatever? Do you love terrorism? And then so, but
then to the right side, who believed this, which is
virtually unanimous on the right other than the American Conservative Magazine,
a few other great readouts and some great palaeoconns and
libertarians of course, but there's virtually unanimous on the right
that yes, Saddam did do nine to eleven. And you,
Homo Kami, left wing trader to America, you love terrorism,
you love Saddam Hussein. How can you hate America so
much that you would side with Saddam Hussein and the
nine to eleven attackers against this country. You despicable Kami,
rat trader, Pinko whatever. But the thing is they were
stupid and wrong about that, and the hippies were right,
the Kami's were right, and those right wingers were illiterate
and had no idea what they were talking about. The
guy with the mustache is different than the guy with
the beard, y'all. And yet you had families destroyed over this,
fathers and daughters who never spoke to each other again
over this. Across this country, people hated each other, hated
their neighbors who had been their best friends. I can't
believe you are so stupid that you think that it's
okay to do this. I can't believe you're such a
commi rat trader that you think it's okay to not
do this. And it was just really like the partisanship
of today was really born then. I mean, there always
was whatever kind of faux competition, but you know, in
two thousand, I sold the bumper sticker. I'm that old.
I had a bumper sticker company back then, and I
sold the bumpersuit that Bush and Gore on it, and
it said, how is the nation divided if the candidates agree?
Because now they were both just competing for who could
be the most centrist right, the compassionate conservative and the
conservative Democrat. I get the hell out of here, right like.
So it was it was I Rock War two that
reinvented that kind of partisan hatred, and it was based
on this abject study. And then they got caught torturing
people to death, and they went, one, it isn't torture,
and two, it is two torture, and three all good
true American patriot anti terrorists support torturing people because otherwise
would if they were gonna nuke your city and then
you only you had to torture someone to get them
to tell the secret of where the nuke is. And
it was a ticking time bomb scenario. And they put
on TV keeper Sutherland in twenty four where in every
episode he has to torture some guy to prevent an
Adam baumb from going on. And they did this, and
there's an article in the New Yorker magazine I Believe
by Jane Mayer, who later disgraced herself with the Stele
dossier stuff, but still I'm pretty sure it was by her.
It was in the New Yorker, and it was about how,
oh yes, in the words of the producers, they made
twenty four to help normalize torture, and they did it worked,
They put it on fire, and people loved it. And
it told the story that if government can't break the law,
you'll get killed, and so they have to and so,
and there's actually and they can even torture bound prisoners
to death and you can't object. And they demanded that
the American right come with them on that path to hell,
and they went for it. And the polls all show
the more you go to church, the more you support torture,
because it's the more loyal you are to the w
Bush regime as part of the right. You don't listen
to rock and roll. You listen to the country station,
and you believe in Jesus. So that's how you know
you have to let George Bush torture people to death
for the greater glory of God and the American flag.
That was how it was. That is how absolutely stupid
and horrible it was. And then you wonder where Barack
Obama came from it was. He was, on the surface,
the opposite of Bush, and people were desperate for that
era to finally end. And so the pendulum then swung
to like this idiot progressivism that you know so well
from the Obama years when you were a little bit older.
But there would have never been an Obama if it
hadn't have been for the way that George Bush had
done all that and the level of pressure. You know,
the internet was the Internet and everything, don't get me wrong,
but it was nothing like the social media of today,
and the TV was still so much more dominant, and
Fox News, like you just think of Sean Hanny. I mean,
you know who Sean Hannity is now. I want you
to seriously imagine Sean Hannity at twenty five years younger
and twenty five years louder and more certain, just at
the top of his lungs every day, shouting down anyone
who knew better at all him and Bill O'Reilly too,
there were the twins there. And Hannity had this extra
little stunt where he had the weakest, little milk toast
pussy boy liberal named Alan Colmes who would come and
just be his straw man and punching bag. Oh, Lucien, Sean,
I agree with everything you say. It's just this one
little thing. And then Sean hay Go, you hate America
and then beat the crap out of them every night,
and just and man, it worked so well, it works
so well, and people, you know, I'd like to joke
about how I studied social psychology for one semester in
junior college. So that's how I know that it's just
the most important thing of all, right, is like what
you think other people think about what you think. Like,
for one example, I'm just gonna, you know, forgive me
for this, but like if you thought that your entire
audience would just somehow immediately just they would never be
able to break from the conclusion that you're some kind
of communist because you had a libertarian on to say
things against our foreign policy, Like you might not really
ever talk to me again. You might not have had
me on at all if you really thought that, like,
everyone's gonna misunderstand you. Everyone's gonna think that you're something
or not in a way where they're never gonna listen
to you again. They're never gonna take they're never gonna
care about the things that you want to help persuade
them to care about if you do this, or at
least you'd have to do this interview very differently where
you don't just give me this free reign like this.
You'd have to prove every six minutes what a right
winger you are still, And that does Scott Wharton just
cause Scott Hurton saying this stuff about the war doesn't
mean that I'm a comedy now, guys or whatever, like
you see like, And it depends on who the audience is.
It depends, I guess, on like what your chat room
is saying. Right, if we're live in your chat room
hates my guts like that matters, you see what I mean?
And that's the social psychology of it all. What did
What did these people think about? What you think? If
you take off your mask a little liberal, everyone's gonna
think you're a Trump voter and you can't have that right.
And if you oppose the war, everyone's gonna think you're
some sissy boy liberal Democrat And you just, dude, what
if your uncle Bob stopped respecting you? You're not willing
to sacrifice the respect of your uncle Bob, and you
know he's a solid right winger, he's a national security guy,
and you're just not gonna You're going to make that
trade off somewhere and in the I don't know. I
think it's less worse now, must be less worse now, because,
as you said in introducing the question, really the polls
already show right. But that certainly was the way it
was then. The peer pressure, as the guidance counselors would say,
was at one hundred and thirty percent on the entire
right and really the entire center left as well. You
had Ken Pollock and Michael O'Hanlon, Peter Beinart and Jeffrey
Goldberg and all these damn center left liberal Democrat hawks,
and of course John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and Dick
Gephard and all these in the Senate who were all
the national security Democrats who all said, w Bush is right,
we have to do this so to make sure it
was not a partisan thing, that was somehow some national
security consensus and all that. Where Trump is much more reckless,
I think I don't think he really would have been
able to get the American national security establishment on board
for this. I don't know what the politics are like
inside the Pentagon right now. But there's got to be
generals and admirals who are absolutely furious about this thing.
It's already an absolute shit show, and it cannot be
I well, somebody showed me some good journalism. I got
an open mind. I'm willing to hear it. But I
do not believe that what we are seeing here is
the long term strategic planning of the Pentagon Joint Staff
being implemented by our civilian figureheads. Here, this is the lacud.
This is greater Israel at the expense of the United States,
even at the expense of the United States Empire, not
in further into of its own goals.
Speaker 2: Well, man, I think that's I mean, it's obvious, you know,
despite all the invective that's thrown out by you know,
Mark Levin, John Podhorritz, who is a legitimate crazy person
in need of a padded room, or even Alan Dershwitz. Right,
I'm working on a piece right now talking about exactly that,
you know, Alan Dershowitz going up to completely and totally insane.
Speaker 1: Hey, guess what you know. I know the funniest John
podhr Its anecdote in the whole world, And I'm shoot,
I can't.
Speaker 2: Okay, fair enough, But you mentioned earlier, right, you said,
you know, imagine listening to a twenty five years younger
version of Sean Hannity. I don't have to. That's how
I grew up, right, bumping around on country roads listening
to you know, shortwave radio. And I mean, you know,
even to that point. I don't have it out now.
But the reason I occasionally bring out a cardboard life
sized cutout of George W. Bush is because I went
to summer camp and they had one at the front. Yeah, yeah,
I had Is it Jesus Camp.
Speaker 1: Or was it that?
Speaker 2: It was almost exactly the same. Oh wow, geographically distant,
But I mean I would have been at camp like
when that movie was filmed, you know. Like, so point
is I know exactly what you're talking about. I lived
through it. I'll beet a very different version. But one
of the things that I've found really interesting, and I'm
listening to my sources, and I have multiple on this
who are in the more establishment world, right, who are
in places like Heritage, who are in these sort of institutions,
and what I'm hearing from them is basically, there's a
civil war ripping through every one of these institutions on
foreign policy and be more explicit on the issue of Israel.
It is sharply generationally divided. You see this in the polling,
I'm sure you see it in your audience, and I
certainly see it in just my personal interactions with people.
And obviously we understand that's what this whole episode has
been about, that there is not a direct correlation between
what most people think is a good idea and what
actually gets done in Washington or Tel Aviv. Right, we
understand that. But fundamentally, and to your point about this
not being a long term plan, it seems this war
has been a disaster on so many levels.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Obviously at the economic level there's you know, a physical
military reality as well, but also politically, this is completely
shattered any sort of consensus or coalition in the magabase
in other areas. And look, I differ from some thinkers
on this. You know, there are some people who you know,
will say, you know, we need to learn, like we
need to we need to feel a pain from this
in order to you know, learn that lesson like that.
But man, I'm at the point where whatever the reason
we end this, whether it's for polling, reasons, whether it's
because the economy takes a dump in diesel seven dollars
a gallon, or whether it's because we just plant a
flag in the dirt and say we did whatever we
were going to do in Iran, we got their nuclear
program that we got last time, or I guess their
navy's gone. Whatever it is, I don't care, but this
needs to end. And again, as you've said, not because
I'm a you know, a homosexual, Islamic communist liberal, just
because it is bad for the country I live in.
You can see the damage the last time we did this,
the last time we had one of these stupid Middle
Eastern wars, did to our country. I don't want to
go through that again. And the idea that I am impugned,
You know that I am slandered and you as well
many others as unpatriotic as hating the nation, as being
traders in the face of that is morally galling. As
an understatement. I think that my lawyer will be upset
if I express my true feelings on that. But it's
incredibly insulting, Scott.
Speaker 1: You know, for the cultural right, you guys especially, and look,
I think everyone who ain't as woke as hell has
all moved at least a little bit to the right
as the you know, in reaction to the woke over
the last generation. But where did that left wing, you know,
progressivist type cultural hegemony come from. It came from George W.
Bush discrediting Christian Conservatism by turning it into the war party,
by turning it into the torture Party, by turning into
the Party of lies from morning till night, where people
are so damn sick of them, they completely I mean
you think about all of like the major Protestant preachers
on Sunday Morning TV from you know, Hagee and Tilton
and Bolwell and Robertson, all of those guys, all of
them sold their soul for the war on terrorism, a
lot of them promising the rapture and promising that this
is the fulfillment of prophecy. Get it, the year two thousand,
get it. The Middle East, just like the Bibles from
the Middle East, dude, get it. So we got to
do these things because that's what Israel wants. And this
kind of they completely discredited right wing cultural hegemony from
at least Obama's inauguration until Trump's inauguration a year ago
and when Trump, you know, was in there in the
meantime after two terms of Obama and he had the
first term of Trump, that didn't change anything. The cultural
left was still dominant through the whole verse Trump term,
it was really and then he lost twenty and then
it was only in twenty four where he well, yeah,
you're fair enough whatever. In effact, he lost twenty and
in twenty four. Finally his victory was actually seen as
the culture sing enough woke, enough transing the boys and girls,
enough of you know, everybody is a racist and especially
you and whatever all of that stuff. People are so
sick of that that the Trump election really symbolized finally
a break after sixteen years straight of leftist cultural hegemony.
Because Conservatism sold its soul for Israel's war in Iraq.
It's the same thing that's happening now. Everybody's already predicting.
You see all the best Maga guys on Twitter saying
we are so screwed because the Congress is going to
be back onto the control of the Democrats. And you know,
for whatever reversals Donald Trump was ever making on whatever,
you know, left wing craziness was going on. They couldn't
reverse a lot of that stuff. He still never did
build that wall, by the way, you know, doing all
this other stuff, he still is not even stopping the
illegal immigrants from being able to get into the country.
So as soon as the government is handed back over
to the Democrats, it's you know, whatever gains that Conservatives
have made against woke over the last you know, a
few years are almost all certain to be reversed. And
look at who won in twenty four. Man, it wasn't
a victory just you know, for Trump. It was of
this massive coalition of not just die hard maga always Trumpers,
but of everybody who was sick and damn tired to
the Democrats and the wocus left cultural revolution and wanted
to put an end to this stuff. And you had
the most numbers of Blacks and Latinos have voted for Trump,
you know, compared to the previous two elections. By bar
It's a huge revolt against price inflation and just all
the wars and mismanagement of everything in the Biden years especially,
and just the culmination of just how bad can the
damn Democrats get? My god, you expect every church to
burst into flames like the branch Davidian's house at any minute,
and then what do you got two years gone now
wasted sacrifice on the altar of Greater Israel completely at
the detriment of the entire that coalition.
Speaker 2: Is dead man. And this is what did it well
one hundred percent. And one of the things that really
bothers me is this this meme that you've seen sort
of artificially tried it out, you know, like, oh, the
PanicIn you know, you're not you're not trusting the plan.
And look, I voted for Donald Trump the first time
I ever voted for president. And the reason I did
it is exactly what you mentioned that, you know, I
felt like there was at least a marginal chance that
if Kamala Harris was in you know, was in charge,
I might get arrested for things I said on the internet.
It was self serving, but in all seriousness, right, there
was certainly, you know, like the cultural aspect, but also
it felt like the country was in a bad way.
Things weren't going well. And honestly a large part of
that is that graded on a curve free twenty twenty four,
Trump comparing to any other twenty first century president, did
pretty good. On foreign policy wasn't great, but you know what,
better than some And so given a binary, I think
a lot of people rolled the dice. They said, you
know what, fine, I'll give you a shot. Make it stop.
But that's not this unconditional, eternal, you know, bond of
loyalty for whatever. My vote mattered and I stayed, it
didn't much, but you know, it was always predicated on
you doing the things that you said you were going
to do. A pretty revolutionary concept in politics, I realized.
But the idea that again I'm not only a traitor
to my nation, but apparently more importantly to President Donald Trump,
because I don't think it's a good idea for him
to do something that he spent his entire career telling
us was a bad idea, right, criticizing other presidents for
foreign wars. It's completely and totally laughable. It's not how
politics works. Right Anyway, Scott, we are over time. This
has been fascinating. I really appreciate your expertise. And actually
I should have said this earlier, but you yourself spoke
to Joe Kent not too long ago, as far as
I understand. So, man, where can people find you? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Well, you can find me real easy here on the YouTube.
I'm at Scott Wharton's show. That's also my handle on
X and you can find links to all of my
stuff but on the director of the Libertarian Institute and
director of the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar dot Com, host of
the Scott Warton Show, co host of Provoked with Darryl Cooper,
and I wrote the books Fool's errand Enough Already and Provoked.
So but yeah, you can just find all that at
x dot com slash Scott Horton Show.
Speaker 2: I will say, because you know, I put out enough
hours of me talking mostly about serious topics. If I,
you know, engage too much in material like that, I
just start regurgitating it. I will say, one of the
very few serious podcasts that I barely miss an episode
of is your show with Daryl excellent? I highly recommend it.
I was going to say the last couple episodes have
been good. They have been really the whole chronicle of
this you know, ill conceived war and Iran is worth
your time. And as you said earlier, Daryl was three
weeks ahead of time on pointing something out. So if
you were wondering where do I get news on this war,
well there's your answer. It's at least better than the
New York Times. But Scott, this has been a ton
of fun as far as my stuff, the Jay Burdon Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you listen to podcasts, this is what I do.
If you want to support me five bucks a month
on Patreon, Substack or gum road gets see the episodes.
Early in ad free Beat brief bit of business. I
wasn't really happy with how the ads were going out,
so I made some changes to make them more seamless
and to also do less of them. So I am
listening to your complaints. I can't get rid of them
right because I need to pay my mortgage. But hopefully
this will be less annoying than how it used to work.
It's something right again, Scott, this has been great, and
everyone at home keep your head up. Good night. Thank you,
But of perfect persigarigram