Scott Horton: Coups, WMDs, & CIA – A Deep Dive Into What Led to the US/Israeli War With Iran
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Scott Horton, thank you. Uh,

So we appear to be in the middle of a war with Iran. It's on pause, thank heaven, at the moment, but we are in some sort of conflict with Iran. And whatever you think of that, I think it's important to know how we got here. And that is, that context is wholly missing from most coverage. I mean, which is crazy. It's a little bit like assessing a marriage the day the divorce is filed. Like you can take a side or not, but there's a story there.

And the question is, where do you get the story? And, you know, Wikipedia is not a reliable narrator. I know it's full of historians. You're someone I think I consider honest and well-informed. You've written a book on it enough already. But most important from my perspective is that if you make a mistake, you will admit it. If you were wrong, you will admit it immediately and apologize. And for me, that's the acid test. Like, is a person honest? I don't know. Does he admit fault? No.

And you do. So people can assess what they think of the story you're about to tell. This is not a conversation for everyone. This is a conversation for people who are interested in knowing the backstory, how we got here. And so with that, I will just ask you to start wherever you think the story begins. How did we get into a war with Iran?

Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here, Tucker. It's truly an honor to be here with you. The story begins, as I think a lot of people know, back in 1953 with the coup against Mohamed Mossadegh, who was the democratically elected prime minister of the country, and the reinstallation of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who was the monarch and the son of the previous dictator. And

There's actually a really great CIA history of that, declassified history of that by a guy named Donald Wilber, where this is where they coined the phrase blowback. And he says, you know, agents should be aware of the danger of blowback coming down the line when we do projects like this. And so then in CIA... This is an internal history written by CIA for CIA? Right. And later published by James Risen at the New York Times. Huh. And...

So there's a former CIA analyst named Chalmers Johnson who turned a great opponent of empire in his later years after the Cold War. But he explained he had been a professor at USC and a contract analyst for CIA before.

And he explained that blowback really meant not just consequences, but it meant the long-term consequences of secret foreign policies. So when they come due, the American public at large is unaware of the true causes and are then left open or susceptible to misleading interpretations of what's happening. So then the Iranian revolution in 1979 is the perfect example of that.

If you ask people of that generation who were around then, all they remember is Iranians chanting death to America and burning American flags. Exactly. These people hate us. I knew a guy, I just met a guy one day who explained, well, the bin Ladenites, they have all these complicated reasons for hating us, but the Iranians, they just hate us.

because I remember them burning our flag. Yes, I do too. And it was infuriating. And that's the beginning of the story for most people there, even if they go back. But that was actually 26 years after America had installed a dictator to rule over those people.

And in fact, when Nixon started getting us out of Vietnam, he realized he needed to bribe the military industrial complex in another way. And so he started putting pressure on the Shah to increase weapons purchases from the United States, which he really couldn't afford and helped to undermine his rule. This is where the Iranians got their F-4s and F-14s from, was from Nixon and Ford during that time. And then...

There's a famous clip. His military spending, of course, was in decline as we withdrew from Vietnam. Right. And so they needed to keep the big companies on the dole, right? Keep them happy. And so the military industrial complex firms. And so this is one of the ways that they did it. But the Shah couldn't really afford it. And it really helped to undermine his rule in the country, which is a very poor country. And he's buying all this first world military equipment on the taxpayer's dime there.

And there's a clip of Jimmy Carter toasting the Shah at his birthday and calling him your majesty and saying the stability of your country is a testament to your people's love for your rule over them. And people can find that on YouTube. And this is just months before the revolution breaks out.

And what had happened with the revolution was that the Shah's rule was weakened because he had cancer and he had to leave the country anyway to try to get cancer treatment. And the revolution was breaking out all over the country.

And it was a real popular revolution. And now I remembered this, and I actually remembered it wrong. I thought I remembered the Ayatollah walking up the stairs. I couldn't find that footage. But I did find footage of the Ayatollah on the plane on the way back to Iran from Paris, France. Oh, yeah. And he's being interviewed by Peter Jennings, who's asking him, so how do you feel about your triumphant return to Iran right now? And this kind of thing. Well, I remember even as a kid wondering, but aren't the French our friends?

And why would they send the Ayatollah back to Iran to inherit this deadly anti-American revolution if that wasn't what America wanted?

But the answer is, that is what America wanted. The CIA and the State Department had advised Jimmy Carter that we know this guy. Khomeini, he's not so bad. He was part of a Shiite group that we helped to agitate against Mohammad Mossadegh back in 53. We can work with him. And a State Department guy named William Sullivan, I believe he was the ambassador, William Sullivan compared him to Mahatma Gandhi.

And so... I remember this. And in fact, I remember one of the hostages, a State Department guy, possibly a CIA guy,

but who spent 444 days in the embassy when he got out saying, wow, I miscalled that one. Because I think it was a pretty conventional view that the Ayatollah was more reasonable than he turned out to be. Well, and the thing is too, though, is everybody conflates the whole revolution into one big scene, especially the hostage crisis is what everyone remembers in their popular imagination, right? Yes.

The revolution was successful by February 1979. America spent the rest of the year between then and November 1979

trying to work with the Ayatollah's new government and warning him about threats from Saddam Hussein, who was a former CIA asset and who had just taken over Iraq in a bloody coup against his predecessor, al-Bakr, that same year. And people can find video of that coup, by the way, where Saddam takes over and orders all his enemies taken out back and shot in the middle of the thing. It's crazy footage.

And they were warning the Ayatollah's new regime about threats from Saddam and threats from the USSR and the potential that the Soviet Union would invade Iran throughout that year. But then what happened was that in November, David Rockefeller, who is the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, an extremely influential guy, sort of the George Soros of his day, very politically influential billionaire type guy.

he intervened with Carter and asked Carter to let the Shah into the United States for cancer treatment. And that was what caused the riot because the signal was sent that, at least they interpreted it, that to mean America was going to nurse the Shah back to health and then reinstall him in power in a counter-revolution. And so that was when, and it very well may have been the IRGC and the Revolutionary Guard Corps that started the riot,

they say it was spontaneous student uprising thing who knows but that was when they sacked the embassy and seized the hostages obviously not justifying that but it's just that was obviously the cia station in the country is in the embassy that was where they had waged the counter revolution of 53 the coup d'etat 53 to reinstall the shaw then and that was what led to the sacking of the embassy fascinating so that wasn't until november of 79. so from february to november

We were in contact with the Ayatollah. The U.S. government was in contact. Do we know what David Rockefeller's motive would be? I think the Shah was his friend and he was dying. Just straightforward. Yeah, I believe that was the whole of it. He was in Mexico, I think, before he came to the United States. Right. And so then that was what touched off the crisis. Then there was Operation Eagle Claw, where they sent in, you know, primordial JSOC agents.

right, to go. And that was a catastrophe where they were actually leaving. Enough planes and helicopters had broken down in the desert where they were going to turn around and leave. But then on turning around and leaving, one of the helicopters crashed into one of the planes. I'm sorry, I forget the number of people who were killed, but a few guys were killed. It was a total embarrassment and a disaster. So then in reaction to that,

Carter came in and in his State of the Union address in 1980, he announced the Carter Doctrine. This was Zbigniew Brzezinski's doctrine, really, that said that now the entire Persian Gulf is an American lake. And we essentially are giving a war guarantee to Iran that we just lost control of.

but saying, essentially warning that no power, read the USSR, better consider rolling into the Persian Gulf and trying to establish dominance there. We'll establish it first. And now let me stop for a second because I really should have talked about Afghanistan at the same time.

Same year.

It was not all that much at first, but it was working with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. The Soviets did invade in 79, and I don't actually have any direct causation there that they invaded because of the American intervention, but that is why America was trying to intervene there. Walter Slocum and Zbigniew Brzezinski had this—Slocum was a Defense Department official, a civilian official—

Their idea was Vietnam was so bad for us. The word itself wasn't even a country anymore. It was a terrible, stupid thing that you shouldn't have done that cost too much money and disrupted the society back home in so many ways. It was a disaster, a quagmire for our society as well as the army there. So let's not do that anymore. We had the Vietnam syndrome. The American people said, we don't want to do that. So if the American people don't have the appetite to contain communism anymore-

What if we bait them into overexpansion? Now, we don't want them to roll into West Germany, but the Afghans, they're essentially expendable. And if we can get the Soviets to expand their commitments in Africa and in Latin America, good, because they can't afford it. We know they can't. And this is like part of the overall brinksmanship of that era. So this policy was started by Jimmy Carter.

And when the Soviets did invade, Eric Margulies, who's a great war reporter who was around then, and Andrei Sakharov, who's the Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident, I quote in the book both of them saying they don't think that American intervention is what caused the Soviets to intervene. But it doesn't matter because that's still what the Americans were trying to do was, in Brzezinski's words, give the Soviets their own Vietnam.

And that was July 3rd. I guess tomorrow will be the anniversary. July 3rd, 1979 was that finding. And you can find it at scotthorton.org slash fair use. I have the finding there. And then when they invaded in December, Brzezinski did say,

This could give the Soviets their own Vietnam in December. He wrote that in his memo there and said, but, you know, causes challenges for us to including Soviet threats to invade Iran. So that's where the Carter Doctrine comes from is we're trying to get the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. Then when they did, well, we Brzezinski was trying to get them to invade Afghanistan. Then when they did, he said, oh, no, now they might come to Iran.

So now we got to announce this Carter Doctrine in the Gulf to warn the Soviets they better not come. And now this is a recent development to me. My friend Gareth Porter found, great journalist and historian, found a document in the State Department declassified records, which is two weeks after Carter's speech, Brzezinski admitted in a private meeting with Warren Christopher was there, and they were meeting with the Saudi foreign minister.

And Brzezinski admitted that we don't really believe that there's a Soviet threat to Iran. We're basically just saying that. Interesting. Why was he just saying that? To justify the buildup, to justify the assertion of American dominance in the Gulf. May I ask you to just go back 26 years to Mossadegh? So the convention, to the extent that people follow this—

The coup was arranged by Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, Kermit, CIA officer in Tehran. This is the popular understanding. And the motive was Mossadegh's insistence that Iran get...

A bigger slice of its own oil money. That was it. And then... So that's true? Yeah. And then John Foster and Alan Dulles, who were brothers, Alan was the director of Central Intelligence and John Foster was the secretary of state. They said, aha, see, he's a commie, which he wasn't trying to ally with the Soviet Union, but they were, you know,

And people always say that he was trying to completely nationalize Iranian oil. I think that's an overstatement. I really should go back and research that better. But I know a guy who's a great energy reporter who says, really, he was just asking for a greater percentage. But they use that as an excuse. And see, the Americans wanted to edge the British out to take the opportunity to get American dominance over Iranian oil instead of them. And so they use the excuse that, oh, Mossadegh, he's a pinko, if not a red. And so we got to get rid of him.

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You know, all regimes maintain their power through fear, at least fear of if it wasn't us, it would be somebody else who's worse. Right. So I think...

It's very likely that he had probably support in the big cities and less so out in the countryside. Yes. Right? If you look at like Iranian election results these days, out in the countryside, people are much more religious and much more conservative and tend to reject the kind of modernity that the Shah represented and his absolute rule to, I mean, who in the world is comfortable calling anybody your highness and your majesty and all this stuff? That's...

So bananas and archaic to me is insane. I don't know. Maybe some people really do like that, but... Many do, the evidence suggests. I guess so. So, but now here's another big part of the Carter Doctrine was given the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in the spring of 1980. Right.

Now, we know this because Robert Perry found the document where Alexander Haig, when he became Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, he went and did a tour of the Middle East and he met with then Prince Fahd, later King Fahd. And Prince Fahd told him that, yep, I'm the one who gave the green light to Jimmy Carter on behalf, I mean, to Saddam Hussein on behalf of Jimmy Carter to invade Iran. So now, why would Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran? Well, so everybody picture a map of Iraq here.

All the land from Baghdad down to Kuwait and east to Iran is predominantly Shiite Arab territory. They're the 60% super majority population of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Arab sitting on a secular dictatorship, run the most, and he had Christians and Kurds and others inside his government, but it's essentially a monopoly minority Sunni regime. And

And then lording it also over the Kurds in the north who are Sunnis but not Arabs. They're their own ethnicity. And so they were essentially on the outs along with the Shiites. So when the Iranian revolution is successful next door, it's not just a revolution. It's a religious fundamentalist revolution. And the mullahs and the Ayatollah Khomeini take over the country.

So Saddam Hussein is afraid that his supermajority Shiite population are now going to choose their religious sect. And after all, Shiite Islam was born in Iraq and then traveled into Iran from there. He's afraid they're going to choose. Wait, Shiite?

Shiite Islam was born in Iraq? Yes. This is where the split happened after Muhammad died. Right. There was a split where the Sunnis decided that they would just go by consensus and choose their own ministers and imams, basically. Right. And the Shiites went with Ali, the son-in-law. That's right. The son-in-law. That was Iraq that happened in? Well, that's where the big battle of Karbala was and all that stuff going back. So... My ignorance astounds me. It's okay. I know that. But so...

Yeah, and like the main holy sites are in Najaf and in, I guess, eastern Baghdad and Samarra. Yeah, I've been there, but I didn't get the significance. So Saddam Hussein, minority Sunni secular Saddam Hussein, is afraid that his supermajority Shiite population is going to choose their religious sect as Shiites over their national sect as Iraqis and their ethnic sect as Arabs. And they're going to join up with the Shiite revolution and march all the way to Baghdad and overthrow him.

So, and in fact, some Iraqis, Shiite factions were leaving to go to Iran and to join up with Iran and to try to encourage revolution in Iraq. So he had reason to fear. So what he did was he conscripted all those Shiites and sent them to war instead. He asked Jimmy Carter for permission and support and Jimmy Carter gave it to him.

And he launched the war to try to overthrow the Ayatollah. This was right around the time that the Grand Mosque in Mecca was taken over as well. Right. That was in 79, right? Right. So there was this sense that, I mean, just to kind of defend everyone involved, I guess, on all sides, there was a sense that

There's an Islamic revolution that could spread throughout the Islamic world and destabilize every regime with a majority Muslim population. People were scared shitless. Yep. And in fact, that same crisis at the mosque in Mecca was part of the reason that the Saudis and the CIA and the Pakistanis worked together to take all these kooks and ship them off to Afghanistan to go help the local Mujahideen to fight against the Soviet Union. Right.

Better they go off and get killed there or do the Lord's work killing godless communists there than have them still in Saudi and in the Middle East in the Gulf causing trouble. Right? All these stories are playing out simultaneously. I know that to this day, the takeover of the mosque in Mecca is a raw subject in Saudi. Yeah, you can see their reason for fear there. If you had a credible enough imam, like gain the popular consent of the people to replace their rule with religious rule...

like real religious rule rather than these princelings on top, the Saud family and Solomon family and all that on top. Oh, yeah. Well, it's the seat of the religion, that city. I mean, sorry to interrupt. No, it's okay. It's so interesting. Okay. I just think it's important to think through like what were people thinking given the time and place in which they lived? Right. Yeah. So, yeah. So, in other words, Saddam Hussein had real reason to fear. I think that's right. I'm not, you know, defending Saddam or the CIA or the Aitul Khomeini, but I mean, like they're like, as we all are, products of the moment. Right.

And so, yeah, just it's an explanation for what was going on. Yes. Why he did what he did. That's right. So now America and Ronald Reagan picks up where Carter left off, essentially with all this unbroken and on the Afghan policy and on Iraq. So in Iraq, they supported him for essentially the entire eight years of the Reagan years. And the war didn't end until 89 in a settlement. It was. And by the way, you know, Randolph Boren said war is the health of the state.

asterisk, unless you lose, right, completely. But otherwise, Saddam Hussein's assault on Iran helped solidify support for the Ayatollah's rule, which was actually quite shaky at that time. But people rallied around the new regime because, hey, we're all Shiite fundamentalists now, if that's who is in charge of the government that's defending them. Same thing happened in Yemen more recently. I know a guy, a reporter in Yemen who told me, well, we're all Houthis now, which he's not.

Right? The Houthis are secta Shiites from up in the Saada province. Yeah. They're the ones in charge and you're attacking us. So now we're all with them the same way Americans rallied around W. Bush or whatever. Right. Rallied around Trump when he was shot. Right. Exactly. Elon Musk endorsed him that night. Right. No, there's a, of course, it's very familiar human psychology and it's understandable. I don't judge it at all. So that's what, that's what saved the Ayatollah's regime, which may have toppled. Right.

It was very unstable. So let me ask, that war, the Iran-Iraq War, which began at the very, I think at the very, the Shat al-Arab at the top of the Gulf, the marshy area there. Yeah.

That has reputation as one of the most brutal wars of the century. Is that true? Yeah, my understanding was, in fact, I don't know if you're familiar with a guy named the war nerd, Gary Brecher. He did a really great essay about the Iran-Iraq war. That's the best thing I ever read about it, where he just compares it to World War I, kind of like what you're seeing in Ukraine now, just brutal trench warfare tank and artillery. And then

To the war nerd, it's all very interesting because there's the navies are involved and the armies are involved and the air forces are involved and there's unconventional weapons. And America was America that paid for German chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein, that they provided to Saddam Hussein, that he used not just mustard gas, but including sarin and taben nerve gas.

that they use to target Iranians in the field. We know that? Yes. And we know that they supply them with satellite intelligence to use to target. The U.S. government made it possible for Saddam to use chemical weapons against the Iranians. That's right. So the U.S. dollar is not the bulwark it has been for our lifetimes. It's actually getting weaker. It's depressing, but it's true. Decades of Washington money printing, the misbehavior of the Fed...

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I've heard that. That's so crazy. It's like Fauci's working with the Chinese to develop a global pandemic. I'll tell you what, there's many great footnotes about this, but one real great one is by Shane Harris, who's now at the Washington Post, a very official national security beat reporter, did a big special on this at foreignpolicy.com, the establishment journal, who was...

Forgive me, I'm forgetting the name of the essay, but it was by Shane Harris in Foreign Policy back 10 years ago or something about where did Saddam get all his chemical weapons. That's just absolutely crazy since chemical weapons were part of, a big part of the justification for invading Iraq in 2003.

That's right. Well, we'll get there in just a minute. No, but I know, but it's just like, so I have heard that, oh, the U.S. paid for the chemical weapons that Saddam used against the Iranians and the Kurds. And they even spun it for him when he used them against the Kurds. They blamed it on Iran. The DIA did a big report blaming it on Iran when Saddam gassed Halabja, which, you know, was in Colin Powell's speech of why we have to attack them. And I was like, back then, y'all covered for him. I mean, Colin Powell was Reagan's national security advisor, right? He was in the administration at the time when they blamed that on Iran.

It's so crazy. It is. And just to linger for one more moment, we know that's true. Oh, yeah. There's, in fact, at FFF.org, the Future Freedom Foundation, there's an article by Jacob Hornberger that I believe is called, Where Did Saddam Get His WMD? And he has links to like 10 very thorough sources all about this. There's no question about it. They admit it over and over. Post, Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, whatever. That is just crazy. Yeah.

And then, you know, 20 years later, we're invading Iraq because he might have chemical weapons. Right. And it turned out no one mentions this. Yeah. And it turned out years later, the only ones that they ever found in the country were from the 80s. Stuff that America had helped them purchase from the Europeans then.

It was the only stuff that anyone ever found. And that was why they covered it up, was because this is stuff that Ronald Reagan and George Bush's father had helped supply them. And so we don't really want to emphasize that so much when the claim had been that there was an ongoing program to develop this stuff circa early 2000s, which of course couldn't have been further from the truth. But now, so the same time that the Iran-Iraq horrific bloodbath is going on, the Iran-Iraq war, America supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and then

And this included, as we were just talking about, the Arab Afghan army, the International Islamist Brigades or Islamic Brigades. And these were mostly Arabs, but included Americans and Chechens and Filipinos and people from all over the place went and traveled to Afghanistan to fight, to essentially bolster the Afghan Mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union. I knew people who did that, yes. And when I was a kid, this was an open secret, they made Rambo 3 about it.

In fact, the hero in Rambo 3, Rambo's mentor, Colonel Trotman, tells the Soviet KGB interrogator, we already had our Vietnam. Now you're going to have yours. That's built into the story. That's why we're helping to do this to them is to break them. And which, by the way, I think worked, right? I don't really think it's disputable that the Afghan war was one of the straws that broke the U.S. wars back. It was their Vietnam war.

actually, in the end. And just to bolster what you're saying, in July of 1986, I went with my dad to a cocktail reception in the U.S. Senate for these guys, for the Mahajan Dean and their American supporters who had gone over there wearing their

headgear fighting this. I mean, it was totally out in the open. It wasn't, this was not a secret at all. Yep. And so, and then the warlords that America backed there, our favorite warlords were Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalal ad-Din Haqqani. I remember. Two of the worst throat-slitting murderous warlords in the whole country and ended up becoming America's enemies in our Afghan war later on. But, so,

This is also the birth of what became Al-Qaeda. You had a guy named Abdullah Azzam, who was a Palestinian refugee raised in Kuwait, who was the leader of this Islamist group that bin Laden ended up taking over. And then the other kind of half of Al-Qaeda was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was led by the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Yes. And they had all been buddies together in Afghanistan. And so then...

All right, now let's switch back to the other side of Iran again. So then we get to Iraq War I, Desert Storm, Operation Yellow Ribbon, right? So what's going on here is...

The Iraqis have just fought a war on behalf of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, basically, to contain the Iranian revolution. Now Saddam owes them billions in war debts, but he can't pay them because oil's trading at, I think, $12 a barrel. He can't rebuild his country and he can't pay off his war debts. And they're calling in their loans and they're being real hard asses about it.

And so he's threatening essentially through body language, he's moving his troops toward the Kuwaiti border and threatening to solve it the hard way.

I do not believe that this was on purpose. As I explain in the book, the best I can tell this is a lot of left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Too many government departments, too many different people calling shots in different places. There is no real one mind running the government, right? It's a bunch of different guys and different fiefdoms. So in this case, CENTCOM and CIA were telling, which brand new CENTCOM, which is just being established, were telling the Kuwaitis,

That you don't have to take that stuff from Saddam Hussein. Tell him to go to hell, basically. The State Department, led by James Baker, and not just April Glaspie in the meeting on July 25th, but also a statement by Margaret Tutwiler and another by... That'd be Jim Baker's assistant spokeswoman. Yes. And then...

I'm sorry, I forget the other guy's name, but it was the ambassador, April Glaspie, Margaret Tutwiler, and this other guy in testimony before the Congress had all three essentially given a green light to Saddam Hussein or worse, like a flashing yellow light to go ahead and proceed. As Glaspie told him, I used to be the ambassador to Kuwait and it was the same thing then.

this is not our concern. Your border dispute with Kuwait is not our concern. She said, we don't want to see a war here. But he's saying when I'm planning a war, he's planning to roll right in there where he could take Kuwait in a day and he did. And so it seemed like what she was saying was, we won't attack you if you attack Kuwait.

And Stephen Walt wrote at foreignpolicy.com. He has a blog there where he addressed the Glaspie memo because we always had the Iraqis version of it. But then thanks to Manning and Assange, we finally got our hands on the State Department's version of the same document. And so Stephen Walt gave a thorough treatment on it. Boy, it sure looks like a flashing yellow light to me. Now, at the same time, though...

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz were alarmed, and they wanted to warn Saddam Hussein not to do it. And they made a statement telling him not to do it. But then Pete Williams, who later became the NBC reporter, he was the spokesman for the Pentagon, and he walked back their warning and made it seem like actually maybe you can go ahead. And I don't know if that was deliberate or just incompetence on his part.

But then, so they tried, Cheney and Wolfowitz got George Bush to send a letter, but the letter was too softly worded. So they were like, no, we need to send another letter with a more stern warning. So Hussein really gets the message, but by then it was too late and the troops rolled across the border. So they really, in essence, like figuratively, in the end, they trapped him into it. They basically encouraged the Kuwaitis to,

Give him the stiff arm, right? And encouraged him to go ahead and get his revenge and take the Northern oil fields. And then their warnings, actually, when they changed their mind and tried to get him to stop, were not enough to dissuade him. And April Glaspie, the American ambassador to Kuwait, told the New York Times, we didn't think he was going to take the whole country. He was supposed to just take the Northern oil fields, but instead he went too far and took the whole country. But then Colin Powell was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time.

And I believe he was the one who chaired the National Security Council meeting where they all decided they're just going to draw the line at Saudi Arabia. They're not even going to threaten to attack Iraq over Kuwait.

We don't like it, but we're prepared to accept it. And that held for three days until Margaret Thatcher came to town. And Margaret Thatcher essentially called Bush a wimp and said, don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush. And that became a big scandal because she's a woman and she's calling out his manhood. And he had already been called a wimp president. That was like the cover of Newsweek. It's a famous Bill Hicks joke.

cover Newsweek, wimp president. And he had to somehow get over that. So that was when he said, oh, this will not stand and all that. Well, the British had investments in Kuwaiti oil and the Kuwaitis had investments in British debt. But what's that got to do with you and me, Tucker Carlson? I mean, we declared independence from the British empire a long time ago, I heard. But no. And so...

They went to run this errand essentially for the Brits to reinstall. And I remember, and I was very interested in this. I was ninth grade at the time, very interested in the war. I don't remember the words, His Royal Highness King Al-Jabr being mentioned once on the news that that was what the war was for, to reinstall King Al-Jabr to his throne.

Right? Like most, I don't even remember hearing that name a single time during all that. We just must protect the poor Kuwaitis. And of course they lied. They pretended that Saddam was lining up his tanks on the Saudi border and was prepared to invade Saudi Arabia, which was a total hoax, never happened.

and the St. Petersburg, Florida Times got Soviet satellite pictures that showed nothing but empty desert out there. And I've known guys who were stationed there said, yeah, they came and tested the border a little bit and left, but there never was mechanized divisions lined up prepared to invade on Riyadh. All they had to do was warn Hussein, you better not go to Riyadh, pal, or you're going to deal with us. He wasn't ever going to go. And then they lied about the atrocities and the daughter of the

A Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States lied before the Congress and said that she was a nurse at the hospital in Kuwait City and saw Iraqi soldiers dump premature babies out of the incubators and leave them on the cold floor to die, she said, and steal their incubators.

And George Bush and the PR people repeated this, senior that is, and the PR people repeated this numerous times as example of why we absolutely had to intervene for humanitarian reasons to save the poor Kuwaitis. Total hoax. She was not a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion. It was all just a made up lie, but it was good enough to create the moral outrage in the country to get people to support the war. Now, the reason I dwell on this is because

mostly people look at Iraq war one as this huge success. It's a hundred hour land war. Um, they, we got to showcase all our laser guided munitions flying down chimneys and in windows and all of this brand new space age, 21st century technology. And, um,

And it was just short and sweet. We lost less than 100 guys or less than 200 guys, depending on how you count them, from various accidents and whatever. And so it was just known as, it was just wonderful at the time. It was Operation Yellow Ribbon. And George Bush Sr. said, by God, we kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all. We're back, baby. Now we can have wars again. And in fact, Brent Scowcroft did say specifically that,

that this was one of the reasons that they wanted to have the war, was to beat Vietnam syndrome, to give the American people a cheap and quick and easy win on the Powell Doctrine, in and out, kick their butt and get out of there quickly and call it a victory and get the American people to mix their patriotism with militarism again, like the good old days. And it worked. It was explicitly one of their goals. And

Yet, there's a huge rub, a big wrinkle in the story, which is the Shiite and Kurdish uprising that took place about six weeks later after the end of the war. Bush Sr., personally, in a radio message over Voice of America and Air Force drop leaflets over the Shiite army divisions in the south of the country, which America occupied the entire south of Iraq in the aftermath of the war, and they encouraged all of these Shiites to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

And they did. They took him up on it. People in your audience, I know you're not a big electronic media guy, but people in your audience may have seen the movie Three Kings with Ice Cube and Marky Mark and George Clooney. And in that movie, the setting, it's a gold heist movie, but the setting is they're occupying southern Iraq in the aftermath of the war. And all around them, the Iraqi army is putting down the Shiite insurrection, crushing the insurrection and killing all these poor people.

and driving the refugees into Iran. So that's kind of a touchstone for people. That's probably the best way they would ever remember that such a thing ever happened is that movie popularized it a little bit. But so what happened was they were on their way to Baghdad, but George Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of Defense Cheney, they changed their mind.

And they left the Shiites high and dry and they let Saddam Hussein keep his helicopters and tanks to crush the revolution. Why? It was because, remember when I said,

When the Iranian revolution happened, some of these Iraqi Shiites went to Iran and sided with the Iranians and wanted to import the revolution into Iraq. And that was why Saddam conscripted them all to fight the war, right? Because that was what he was afraid of. Well, they started coming back across the border from Iran, namely the Bada Brigade, which was the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was a group of Iraqis tied very closely to the Dawa Party who were supported by Iran and had been living in Iran for the last 10 years.

and had fought on Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq war. Now they're coming across the border to lead the revolution. So this is the Bush senior administration. These are all the Reaganites, right? This is Ronald Reagan's vice president and all of his men. Dick Cheney was the only new guy. He had come from the house. All of the rest of them had been Reagan administration officials. So they're all saying to themselves, oh my God, we just spent 10 years, nine years, supporting Saddam Hussein's war against Iran to contain the Iranian revolution.

Now we're importing it. We're going to be the ones to put it in power in Baghdad. Oops. So they called it off and they let Saddam Hussein massacre 100,000 people or so in order to crush that insurrection and stay in power.

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Crack down on the middlemen. End the free writing. Lower drug prices. Go to balancethescales.org to learn more. Paid for by Pharma. That then became the excuse of why we have to stay at our new basis in Saudi Arabia. Because we have to contain Saddam Hussein. The pretension was that, what, he's going to murder every last Shiite in the country until they're all dead? No. I mean, the insurrection was over.

But the potential was we have to protect the Shiites and the Kurds in the north by having these no-fly zones and by maintaining the blockade against Iraq. And so that was the principal excuse for the Bush administration to stay. Now, the Clinton administration comes in and says,

By the way, if I ever say anything that sounds like I'm saying anything positive about a president in this, it's probably a misunderstanding. I've convinced Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both, for example, are the worst presidents we've ever had. And personally, I despise them. So don't anyone take me wrong like I'm saying anything nice about the guy who burned all the Branch Davidians' babies to death. Noted.

But Bill Clinton idiotically had said, maybe we can get along with Iraq and bring them back in from the cold. I forgot his exact words, poor paraphrase, but he had indicated maybe we can normalize relations with Iraq. Well, that set a few different groups into a panic, namely the Kuwaitis. And I'm sure you're familiar with the-

allegations, at least, that Saddam Hussein tried to kill George H.W. Bush with a truck bomb attack in Kuwait in 1993. Well, that was a damn lie. And it was invented by the father of the girl who told the Kuwait incubators hoax.

It was the same guy whose daughter did that, was the same guy who invented the assassination of Bush senior hoax, which almost everybody still believes. They've never heard it contradicted. But in fact, Seymour Hersh wrote a piece in The New Yorker completely debunking it before the end of the year called Case Not Closed. And it's about how it was just a whiskey smuggling ring.

And they just embellished it into this murder plot against Bush Sr., which is never any such thing. It's probably part of the reason that we had the War of 03, was that W. Bush believed that that story was true. And I think probably, you know, to this day, almost everybody seems to still believe that, but it wasn't true. But it was on the occasion of that hoax that Bill Clinton went ahead and gave in to his new foreign policy aide, a guy named Martin Indyk.

who had been Yitzhak Shamir's guy, who was the former terrorist and Likud party prime minister of Israel, who Bush Sr. had tangled with. I don't think Martin Indyk was American. I remember he was Australian. Right. An Australian and then had lived in Israel and was an advisor to the Likud. So what is he doing in our government? Good question. So he's also the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which you'll see their guys quoted all the time as just

bland middle-of-the-road experts on everything Middle East when it was literally founded by a Likud guy as a spinoff of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who put up the money for it. And that's not true of all neocon think tanks. It is the case with WNEP. There's a direct spinoff of AIPAC. And it was at WNEP where Indyk went and gave his speech inaugurating what was called the dual containment policy. And that dual containment policy was born in Israel.

And the idea was where Bill Clinton is saying, hey, maybe we can normalize with Iraq. Maybe we can normalize with Iran. In fact, this is a good place to mention that Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had all this egg on his face from the Iranian revolution, now it's 1993 and he's saying we ought to try to get along with Iran. We ought to bring them in from the cold and we could build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan through Iran and to the Persian Gulf as a way that we can make money together and begin to warm up relations.

And so instead of having a Cold War against Iraq and Iran, we can go ahead and normalize relations with both. And in fact, Alexander Haig, who had been Reagan's Secretary of State, as previously mentioned, found the Green Light Memo there, or wrote the Green Light Memo that Robert Perry found.

He also agreed with Brzezinski. And this is first year of Bill Clinton. And now we can begin to normalize relations with Iran. We ought to build oil pipelines across Iran. We have those interests in common. You might even remember Dick Cheney caused a minor stir. He was the chairman of Halliburton. And in 1997 and 98, he gave repeated statements condemning Bill Clinton's sanctions and saying we should get along with Iran. And because after all, God didn't see fit to only put oil under the ground of countries with Western democracies.

But we have to do business with them anyway, and we can. Who's afraid of the Ayatollah anyway? We're the USA, right? Nobody can mess with us. That was what Dick Cheney said, and it caused a little scandal because he said it in Australia in 1998. He said it numerous times, but in 1998, he said it in Australia, and that's a big sin to criticize your country from foreign soil, right? So it was like a little bit of a scandal. But what was he saying? He was saying we can be reasonable and deal with these guys.

But anyway, in the early 90s, this was a position of Brzezinski and Haig and others that now we can try to get along. But it was the Israelis who said no. They vetoed it and insisted on this dual containment policy. Iraq, because we just beat them up so bad in Iraq War I, they're too weak to balance against Iran. So America has to stay in Saudi to balance against them both.

This then, Tucker, is a main reason why the Arab-Afghan Mujahideen that we had built up to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan then turned against the United States. Bin Laden wanted to use his men to repel the Iraqis from Kuwait and to protect the Saudi kingdom and was outraged that the king gave in and let a bunch of white Christian forces from across the ocean come and defend Iraq.

Saudi instead. And then not only that, but they broke their promise. It's so funny. Bill Kristol one time interviewed Dick Cheney for two hours. Bill Kristol has a podcast. Interviewed him for like two hours and they talked about everything under the sun except Iraq War II. They just didn't mention it at all. But, but, Is that true? It's true. It's so funny. I can't believe you listened to the whole Bill Kristol podcast. Well, you can watch it on double speed, you know. Uh, I debated Bill Kristol once if you haven't seen that. It's a lot of fun. Uh,

But Cheney tells Crystal that it was him, not Baker. Secretary of Defense Cheney promised the king, as soon as the war is over, we'll leave. And it was on that condition that he allowed America to come to defend the Saudi kingdom in Iraq War I in the first place. And then as soon as it was over, they found this reason to stay. We got to protect the Shiites. And then later under Bill Clinton, you know, adopting the same policy, the sanctions stay until Saddam is gone.

And instead of normalizing relations with Iraq and Iran, we're now going to keep Cold War against them both through the end of the century. And again, this is what really was responsible for turning al-Qaeda against the United States. Well, I mean, Osama bin Laden said that in his now suppressed letter. By the way, reading what someone you despise writes is not an endorsement of that person, of course. Right.

but it's essential. I mean, and that letter, by the way, that was only written in 2002 and there's crucial information in there, but more important to me would be his declarations of war from 1996 and 1998. Well, actually, there's another letter that was found by a wall street journal reporter on Osama's laptop. Oh yeah. That's in there. And, um, it's an amazing, amazingly interesting document. And he's like, I'm watching this on TV. I guess I did this and here's why I did it. And, you

you know, American sport for Israel is the number one reason, obviously.

But also on the list is you've got bases in Saudi, which is where Mecca and Medina are. Like, what are you doing? Right. By the way, for people interested in this, you can read all about it. The guy's name is Alan Cullison. He's the Wall Street Journal reporter. And he wrote a huge write-up about this in The Atlantic, which I quote in my previous book. It's called Fool's Errand. It's all about Afghanistan. It's an amazing story. The guy, like, loses his laptop charger. And it's a letter to Mullah Omar is what it is. Oh, I'd forgotten that. Yeah, and so what he's saying is, listen—

I know I got you in a lot of trouble here, okay? But bear with me because either we're going to whoop them good and they're going to turn and flee, in which case they'll be humiliated and their power will be destroyed. Or we'll bog them down and we'll bleed them to bankruptcy over 10 years the same way we did the Soviet Union. And then they'll leave, in which case they'll be humiliated and their power weakened.

And so that's the game we're playing. So sorry for getting you into this, but that's why I did it. Please don't kill me. You know, it would have been nice to have a conversation about that. Again, not as an endorsement of Osama bin Laden or the atrocities of 9-11, but just because it's important to know what your adversaries are thinking. And I tried to bring this up in 2002 when the journal finally printed it. I think it was a year lag. The FBI grabbed the laptop. The reporter had a copy on a thumb drive, if I'm calling this right.

And it finally comes out and I read it on the air. And just because, hey, this is interesting. I was at CNN and boy, man, they called me a Nazi, you know. What? I'm pretty anti-Nazi, just for the record. But I just thought, so that was like totally suppressed. Yeah. But that turned out to be prescient because it did bankrupt us, actually. Yeah. And so now let's go back to the beginning of the terror wars here in the 90s. So we have...

Well, first of all, let's just go through the list of the attacks. They started attacks in 1990. They killed Rabbi Kahane in New York City in an assassination. It was a guy named Nasser, I believe, was the hitman. But this was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, essentially the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman's guys. So proto-Al-Qaeda, like half of what became Al-Qaeda later.

And we know that. Oh, yeah. The precursor to al-Qaeda murdered Kahane. Right. Now, he was a radical rabbi who advocated the entire expulsion of the entire Arab population. Just so people know who he was. That was their motive. His party, the Koch party, had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being, quote, fascist.

Yeah, they were genocidal, openly genocidal. But you can't assassinate people on American soil. So that was what happened. Then the same essentially group...

Was it widely known at the time that it was these radical Muslims who did it? So I'd have to go back, but my understanding is essentially the FBI did a terrible job on all these domestic terrorism cases in the 1990s, where essentially they had enough information. I forget if they had enough information to stop that one or just...

From their investigation of that, they should have known enough to wrap all these guys up and prevent the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 and any of the rest of this stuff. But because...

Each time they were trying to cover up what a bad job they'd done last time, they failed to pursue the leads to prevent the next one. And there's a book called A Thousand Years for Revenge by a journalist named Peter Lance, where he really goes through the FBI's failings all through the 90s as tracing these terrorists inside, especially in New York City during that time.

And so then they're attacking us here and overseas all during that time. So they hit us in 1992 at the Radisson Hotel in Aden, Yemen. Then in 93 was the First World Trade Center attack, which, you know, context is important here. Bill Clinton had only been the president for a month and a week. And then two days later, the ATF attacked the Branch Davidians. So all attention went to Waco and away from the World Trade Center. Six people had died there.

Which was tragic, but it was over, essentially. And it was a bunch of complicated Arab names and stuff. And just the news wasn't particularly interested in it. And it did not really capture the attention of the country the way it could have and should have if they hadn't launched their horrible siege of the British civilians just two days later. So it...

I mean, what would they do? They set off a truck bomb in the basement of one tower. They're trying to topple it over into the other tower, knock them both over. It was like four in the afternoon. They could have killed...

20, 30,000 people or something. At least. And so instead of letting that take a hold of their imagination, they're like, oh my God, we just barely missed that by the skin of our teeth and we better figure out what to do about this. They essentially blew it off like everybody else did and assigned the FBI to it, but on a basically lower level than should have been their absolute top priority at that time. New York FBI was more interested in John Gotti and whatever other stuff they were doing then. Absurd, absurd, absurd.

And then there was the guy, and I don't know if this guy was directly tied to the Bin Ladenites or not, but he shot up the left turn lanes at CIA headquarters in 1993. I'll never forget. And he was later, it was the headline, actually my footnote in Fool's Herod, is prosecutors say it was revenge for support for Israel and bases in Saudi Arabia or the bombing of Iraq. Same thing. He was a Pakistani. Yeah. And then...

In 95, they attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard. And also was the Bojinka plot was busted in the Philippines. So in the First World Trade Center bombing, the FBI could have stopped it. They had a walk-in informant named Ahmad Salem, who was an Egyptian army intelligence officer. And he had volunteered to make the bomb. So he was going to make a fake bomb and it was going to be a great sting.

And the agents working the case, Nancy Floyd and John Anticev, were doing their jobs. But their boss, Carson Dunbar was his name, wouldn't do his job and provide them with the authority that they needed and the money that they needed to keep their informant working. And he was insisting the guy wear a wire. And he's like, look, I'm sleeping in my pajamas on the floor of the mosque with these guys. I'm not wearing a wire, you know. So he ended up bugging out and telling the bad guys, look, I think the FBI is on to me and left.

Well, then they brought in Ramzi Youssef, who cooked the real truck bomb that almost succeeded in topping one tower over into the other. He then wrote letters to all the New York papers saying it was all revenge for American bases and bombing bases in Saudi to bomb Iraq and support for Israel. And then he got on a plane to the Philippines and got out of got out of town. They didn't know where he went.

And then in '95, Philippine police busted him because two of his buddies, Wally Khan Amin Shah and Abdul Hakim Murad, they had started a fire at their apartment. They were messing with explosives and they got busted. And Yousef got away, but the other two got caught.

And they got Yusuf's laptop. And on the laptop was what's now commonly referred to as the Bojinka plot, which include a plan to kill Bill Clinton and the Pope when they visited the Philippines, a plan to time bomb 12 airliners over the Pacific with Casio watch time bombs, and then the planes operation, a plan to hijack 10 planes and crash them into major landmarks in the United States. And then at the end, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who I guess was supposed to get on the microphone and demand an end to the Israeli occupation, was supposed to be the plan there.

So, and they got busted on all this. And Yousef fled to Pakistan where he was later caught. He's now doing life in Florence, Colorado. Um, but, uh,

So that was another huge one. Then in 96, they did the Khobar Towers in Saudi. Now this is 19 American airmen were killed. And to this day, including my debate with Mark Dubowitz last week on the Lex Friedman podcast, they blame Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah for doing that attack, which makes no sense. The Iranians had no motive to do it whatsoever. You notice Bill Clinton didn't bomb Tehran over it or anything like that. And

And we know who did it. It was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ramzi bin al-Shib's... No, pardon me. Ramzi Youssef's uncle is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were the ones who did it. And we know that from the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, has told me that personally. Plus...

Osama bin Laden himself took credit for it to the British journalist Abdel Bari Atwan in his book, The Secret History of Al-Qaeda and in articles that he wrote for The Guardian. You can read all about that.

And said, yeah, these are our guys and they're our heroes and our martyrs and whatever, and took total credit for it. Well, what was the target? The target was American airmen. It was 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq. And you might remember, I remember at the time, because I used to love listening to the G. Gordon Liddy show, that the biggest scandal about it was a lady had yelled at Bill Clinton at a campaign rally, you suck.

Because he hadn't provided good enough security for these guys. They're sleeping in the towers. They ought to have guys with belt-fed machine guns out front to prevent a truck from creeping up on them like that. We'd had the same kind of attack in Beirut in 1983. And so how could this happen, right? So the lady yelled, you suck at Bill Clinton. And he had the Secret Service arrest her and hold her for two days.

And that was the only scandal. The scandal wasn't, why would a bunch of right-wing religious kooks in Saudi Arabia blow up our airmen? Is it because they're bombing Iraqis from bases where their white Christian combat forces don't really belong at all in the land of not just their country, but their holy land, the birthplace of their religion, where Mecca and Medina, where Muhammad is from and founded the religion of Islam. And so, boy, are we pushing our luck here or what? And we didn't have that conversation because they blamed it on Iran.

And they were lying their asses off to do so. - Why did they blame it on Iran? - Because that was what the Saudi kingdom wanted, basically.

I don't know if there was much... Well, Mark Dubowitz sure likes that version of the story. So it could be that the Israel lobby had their own interest in pushing that part of the story. But the Saudis wanted that. The Saudis wanted to deflect blame from bin Laden. And there's a documentary about John O'Neill who had been the head of the counterterrorism unit for the FBI in New York. And it's called The Man Who Knew. It was on PBS Frontline. I think Frontline. But it was the man who was killed. He died on September 11th.

and there's a story about he told Louis Freeh who was at that time the head of the FBI they had both been to Saudi to investigate and Louis Freeh was buying the story that Iran did it and John O'Neill told him come on boss the Saudis they're just blowing smoke up your ass and then according to the story Louis Freeh got very offended that John O'Neill had dared to use the A word in front of him and so like

put him in the doghouse and refused to listen to him after that and went along with the story, essentially. So it really helped to blunt an important lesson that the American populace and even the Clinton administration itself might have learned, which is, you know, we could have Tom Cruise just bomb Iraq from aircraft carriers in the Gulf. Do we have to have combat forces stationed on Saudi soil?

Really? You know, and that conversation was not had. Then they hit the Africa embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Nairobi, Kenya in 98, in the summer of 98. And then there was in 2000, there was an attempted attack on the USS The Sullivans, but the dinghy sank. And then they did get lucky. Oh, I'm sorry, I skipped. At the end of 99-

They, an alert border patrol officer busted a bin Laden at the border of Washington state and British Columbia. And he had explosives and a map to LAX and a book of bin Laden sayings or whatever in his trunk and got caught. So that was one thwarted. Then 2000 was the failed attack on the Sullivans and then the successful attack on the USS Cole.

So one thing that every terror attack that you've listed has in common is they were all perpetrated by Sunnis, by Sunni radicals, not by Iranians or Iranian-backed proxies. Right. And see, what's interesting here is, well, a couple of things. So first of all,

So that was first of all, those are the attacks. Second of all, their real motive, as they said over and over again, was they thought America was already at war with them by hosting the bases in Saudi Arabia, by bombing Iraq from them, by supporting all the Arab dictators in the region, particularly the King of Saudi and the El Presidente of Egypt, Mubarak. Um,

and support for Israel in their merciless persecution of the Palestinians and the Lebanese. And so as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit put it,

The Ayatollah spent the 80s railing against American culture and nobody really cared. There's plenty to complain about American libertine culture if you're a conservative Islamist somewhere. But is that enough to get suicide bombers to do kamikaze attacks? Forget it. Bin Laden, on the other hand, pointed at these concrete American foreign policies and the way that they negatively affected Muslims as his recruitment shtick. And it worked. Right.

So, for one very important example, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib, who bin al-Shib is still in Guantanamo to this day, but Mohammed Atta was the lead hijacker on September 11th. They were studying, they were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany.

And when Shimon Peres launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, they decided to fill out their last will and testament as like a symbol that they were joining the army to fight against the United States. What was Operation Grapes of Wrath? This was the invasion of Southern Lebanon, which actually I left this out. I guess I should skip back here. Forgive me. When the Clintonites came into power, I did. Yeah, this this belongs here. It belonged earlier, maybe, but whatever.

After the Iranian Revolution, the Israelis stayed friends with Iran. And you might remember during Iran-Contra when the Reaganites skipped... With the Ayatollah in charge? With the Ayatollah in charge. The mean old Ayatollah with the dark circles around his eyes. That one. He was on every dartboard in my neighborhood. Yeah, I bet. In 1980, yeah. So...

But the Israeli state friends, so you might remember during Iran-Contra when the Reaganites sold missiles to Iran, when they switched sides in the war temporarily in the Iran-Iraq war, they used the Israelis as cutouts to do it. You give them your tow missiles and we'll give you more to repay you, basically. And they had this relationship that they maintained through the early 1990s. And it was in 1993 that Yitzhak Rabin decided to turn Israeli foreign policy upside down.

They had what had been called the strategy of the periphery, which meant they wanted to focus on their alliance with Turkey in the north to divide Syria's attention. They wanted to back Iran in their east to divide Iraq's attention. They wanted to support Ethiopia in their south to divide Egypt's attention. Does that make sense?

But then Rabin said, no, we're going to turn this around now. And what we're going to do is we want to negotiate with the Palestinians, with Arafat, and create not a real Palestinian state, but sort of a pseudo-Palestinian state. Best thing that they had on offer, you know, going for sure.

And in doing so, then we'll put aside the last major issue. We can negotiate with the closer Arab states. They already had their peace treaty with Egypt, but they can now make their peace deal with Jordan, which they did complete in 1994, and negotiate with the Gulf states as well.

But part of that being negotiate with the Palestinians, because the Gulf states, especially, had always promised they would never normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians either got an independent state or citizenship in a single state. And so what Rabin wanted to do then was he decided to begin to demonize the Iranians as like just...

politics, right, to keep the right off his back while he's negotiating with Arafat, he's going to say, yeah, but look at those bad guys over there, essentially, and demonize the Iranians as part of that policy. So it was Israel that turned on Iran first, and for no particular thing that Iran had done to them. They had

kept Iran out of the Madrid peace conference, which was like an insult, but it was not that big of a deal. And as I believe Trita Parsi shows in his book, Treacherous Alliance, and Gareth Porter in his book, Manufactured Crisis, it was the Iranians only turned on the Israelis after the Israelis had turned on them. And in fact, Trita Parsi in his book talks about how when the Israelis announced, hey, we hate Iran now, and we want you to hate Iran now,

the Clintonites all started laughing because they were like, what? You loved Iran and wanted us to be friends with Iran last week. Now you've changed your mind? Like, why?

And so it just had caught them by surprise. What was the relationship pre-93 between Israel and Iran? Well... Was there a commercial relationship? Mostly, yeah, weapons and oil. So as Trita shows, the Ayatollah would be raging, I'm going to destroy Israel. That day he would be taking a shipment of missiles from Israel, right? And so all that bluster was cover for their covert relationship. Israel, just to, again, to linger on a point, because it's surprising to hear it,

Israel was supplying Iran with weapons as late as the 1990s? Yes.

Yeah. Getting along with them all the way up until the very beginning of Bill Clinton. But not just getting along with, but sending them weapons. Well, I'm not sure when the last weapon shipment took place, but certainly through the Iran-Iraq war, Israel was backing Iran. And this was the cynical thing by the Reaganites too, that they would give permission to the Israelis to increase support for Iran. And then they would switch and increase support for Iraq and play them back and forth against each other like that.

through the war. It's pretty dishonorable. Yeah, it's pretty dishonorable, indeed. But it also goes to show, though, that like all this crap about, oh, fundamentalist Shiite Islam, well, I don't know, the Likud,

got along with the Ayatollah just fine, or maybe not just fine, but they kept their relationship all through the 90s. And it was the Israelis who decided to turn on them over, you know, politics that were closer to home that really weren't about Iran as much as they needed a bad guy to point their finger at while changing the policy and negotiating with the Palestinians. But then, of course, a Benjamin Netanyahu fan assassinated

Rabin in 95. And it was his successor, Shimon Peres, as part of this same strategy, though, who launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996. Now, as I said, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib filled out their last will and testament when that began.

Because they were upset. Because they were upset. And by the way, it's Lebanese Shiites who are being killed here, but there's the same difference to them. They've still felt shared solidarity with the victims there that they wanted to avenge. And then it was in that summer of 96 was when bin Laden put out his first declaration of war. Get this, it's called Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.

Pretty subtle, right? Yeah. So, and then in the beginning of the thing, it starts out with a whole rant about not just scrapes of wrath, but the Kana massacre. It's now known as the first Kana massacre because they did it again in 2006. But in 1996, it was actually Naftali Bennett, the future prime minister of Israel, was the artillery officer who called in a strike on a United Nations shelter and killed 106 women and children.

And bin Laden went off about that in his declaration of war against the United States in 1996. Said, we'll never forget the severed heads and arms and legs of the children in Ghana. And when Ramzi bin al-Shib and Mohammed Atta read that, that was when they decided to join the war. So here are Egyptian soldiers.

engineering students in Hamburg, Germany, volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel's doing in Lebanon, which, Tucker, is why they told you that the Taliban did it because they hate our freedom.

Because they didn't want to get into why these Saudis and Egyptians did it. It's because they hate our foreign policy. The Taliban, most of them, had probably never even heard of the new world and had no grudge against us at all. In fact, their government had tried to warn the United States of an impending al-Qaeda attack. And their leader, Mullah Omar, had been trying to negotiate bin Laden away since 1998 after the Africa embassy bombings. And it was even the...

The CIA officer Milton Bearden, who helped to run the Afghan operation in the 1980s, who told the Washington Post the Taliban were trying to give this guy up. They would say, geez, he's out falconing. We don't know where he is, meaning he's outside of our protection. And if you guys were to kill him, it wouldn't be our fault. And then the Americans would say, we said hand him over.

And just refused to listen. That's what they're doing is handing him over, you know? Mullah Omar told, oh, I bet you know, Arnaud de Bourgrave from the Washington Times. I interviewed him. I knew him well. Yeah. So Arnaud de Bourgrave interviewed Mullah Omar in the summer of 2001 in Pakistan. And he said, listen, bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat. I can neither swallow him nor spit him out.

So, you got to help me, you know, or you Americans need to help me find a way to get rid of this guy, essentially. There's no love lost between those two. But they lied and they pretended that it was the Taliban who had attacked us. So, they didn't want to get into who were these Mujahideen. So, now, one more thing.

So first we did all their attacks and their motives. Now their strategy was to bait us into invading Afghanistan. And this is, as we talked about, the letter between bin Laden and Mullah Omar. So we're trying to get the Americans to invade Afghanistan and then we'll do to them the same thing that we did to the Soviets. Same thing we had helped them do to the Soviets.

So that was the strategy. That was why they tried to knock down the World Trade Center in 93. That was why they hit the Khobar Towers. They didn't think we were going to run away crying. They were trying to get us to double and triple down, to invade, to spend money. It's asymmetric war. It's a group of a couple of hundred bandits against the global empire.

How do you get, how do they beat us? They get us to beat ourselves. They get as, and this is what's poetically beautiful and horrible here is that bin Laden's son, Omar,

gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine in 2010, where he explains, he says, when Bush was elected, my father was so happy. This is the kind of president he needs, one who will attack and spend money and break the country. He says, Bill Clinton fired missiles at my father and didn't get him. But now you've been, this is in 2010, now you've been in Afghanistan for 10 years and you still don't have him.

America then was very smart, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf. So the point being not that George Bush's stupidity makes him innocent. It's that George Bush's stupidity and cruelty and corruption made him the perfect mark for a guy like bin Laden. This wimp with the cowboy hat pretending he's a tough guy is...

Going to be very easy to provoke into doing what he wants, right? To get away with bloody murder on his end, which is what the Al-Qaeda guys wanted for our side to do. And look at our national debt, you might say it has worked some. They're preying upon national character weakness or tick that Americans have that I have, which is you assume all foreigners are kind of dumb, right?

Yeah. And, you know, it's a pretty sophisticated trap that they laid. Yeah. You know, it's not higher math or anything, but it's like they were thoughtful in their attempt to destroy the United States. And we didn't give them credit for thinking through anything that they did. I didn't anyway. And I got to tell you, man, there's a huge rub here too, which is one of the major reasons they were allowed. And I mean that in the generalist sense of the term allowed. Yeah.

to get away with all these attacks against the United States in this way was because Bill Clinton's government was still supporting them. Took them from Afghanistan to Bosnia, then to Kosovo, and then on to Chechnya. And all through the 1990s, and I have a bit on this enough already, but I found much more in my latest book, Provoked, because a lot of it has to do with the wars in the Balkans, of course, and wars against the Russians. And so...

It makes sense to me in a moral strategic sense why America would support bin Ladenite types and fundamentalist Muslims against the Soviet Union. But once the Soviet Union is gone...

Seems like leftists are going to be more reasonable people than Islamist fundamentalists for dealing with when there's no Soviet threat to keep at bay any longer. I never understood the hatred for the Ba'athists. I mean, they seemed like pro-Islam.

pretty reasonable actually. They were our guys. Well, there's that. But also, if it's a choice between Assad and Jelani, I don't... And I know that, you know, Israel likes Jelani, so we're all supposed to like him as he murders Christians and Alawites. It's like, oh no, he's great. We're dropping our sanctions. He's great. He's great. But it just seems like, you know, the kind of center-left...

atheist ophthalmologist from London is probably going to be a better negotiating partner than the guy who thinks he's getting the virgins, right? Yeah, seriously. I mean, am I missing something? Yes. Well, the Bin Ladenites, they might not be reasonable, but they're not the Shiites. So that's what matters to the Israelis. So that's the thing. It's like this monomania about Iran. And about Russia, too. I mean, why were they so determined to fight the war on the side of the Muslims in Bosnia? It was...

to essentially establish American dominance, to reestablish American dominance in Europe. To put a NATO base in Kosovo. No, I know. And at the expense of the Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs and Russia's friends, the Serbs. Well, as always, we take this, we, you know, we wind up abetting the murder of Christians. Like that's not an accident from dropping the atomic bomb on a Catholic church in Nagasaki through the Balkans, through what's happening in Syria, through what's happening in the West Bank. Like we're always against the Christians. And I,

I know you probably disagree. I don't think you're a rabid Christian or anything, but from my perspective, none of that's an accident.

It sure seems to be the regular effect. I mean, at the very least, they don't care what's going to happen to the Christians when they do these things. They certainly don't. The world's only nonviolent religion. And, you know, they're the ones who wind up killed. Like, and then you have to like it and you're a Nazi if you don't like it or something. It's like, I'm not playing along anymore. And the cynicism with which, like, hey, you know what we should do to prevent the Russians from reopening this old Soviet oil pipeline through the Caucasus Mountains? Yeah.

Let's support a bunch of bin Ladenite suicide bombers against them. That's exactly right. And this is years after the Soviet Union is dead and gone. We have no reason in the world to prefer such a narrow and short-sighted and parochial type policy to our overall, the overall health of our relationship with Moscow. It's insane. I agree. And as you...

a moment ago, you just written a doorstopper on this, which I think is the definitive book on the question of the Balkans and our many wars against Russia, et cetera, called Provoked. And we just don't have time. I mean, that's like a five-hour conversation. Yeah, that's another interview there. Are you doing that? I know...

just parenthetically here, but are you doing that with Daryl Cooper? Well, so that's our new show. Now the book actually, he was going to be my co-author on the book, but I just ran way out too far ahead and he couldn't catch up. And he's got this great podcast. And as you know, he's the most important historian in America. I think that. And I absolutely agree with you. So we just launched a brand new podcast together and he named it Provoked. I wouldn't have, but he named it after the book.

But I'm really excited about it. And is it on America's policy toward Russia? Well, the show, we will be touching on that for sure. Yeah. Did you pause before partnering with someone who's so reviled on Twitter? No. I love Daryl Cooper. I do too. We've been friends for years. And in fact, I'm glad as long as we're talking about this now, I'll go ahead and say, there are people who got this wrong in good faith and many more probably who got it wrong in bad faith.

And it's a tiny bit Daryl's fault in that he was kind of off on a tangent and didn't completely say everything that he was trying to explain. But the bottom line, basically, is people really misunderstood him.

Some people in good faith misunderstood him as somehow minimizing the Holocaust when what he was actually saying in that episode was, even if you were one who would try to minimize the Holocaust, even... Not you, but even if one were... Yes. Even that person would have to admit that when the Nazis took possession of all of these people, they had no plan to feed them and take care of them. He wasn't saying that was the extent of the Holocaust. He was saying...

the worst kind of pro-Hitlerite, like, spinning for the Germans there. Even they would have to concede. And his point wasn't even about the World War. His point was actually about the Israelis' responsibility for feeding the people of Gaza, who are not in a neighboring nation, but are a captive population on an Indian reservation there. And so they have the responsibility to keep them alive as they're killing them. It was such a... It was a propaganda campaign that I, you know, I spent my life around propaganda campaigns. I participated in a few, to my great discredit, but...

um i've never really seen anything like what's amazing cooper and um and they're mad at daryl cooper for a bunch of different reasons questioning the the thematic orthodoxy of the second world war he's never called into question whether hitler murdered jews i mean of course hitler murdered like what yeah that's he's not a holocaust denier or whatever that is he is a guy who's trying to understand with precision and honesty what

And what it has meant for the world over the past 80 years. And look, have you ever read a Pappy Cannon's book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary Work? Yeah, and I was there when they tried to...

basically send Pat into exile and destroy his life and call him a Nazi, which he's not. It's completely crazy. You read that book and you get the idea. Remember when they said that George W. Bush was the Winston Churchill of the 21st century? Yeah. I think that's probably right. That Winston Churchill was the George W. Bush of the 20th century. Yeah, go ahead and apologize for Gallipoli, then get back to me on whether you get to run a country during another war. Yeah. I would say, so whatever. Anyway, but the Daryl Cooper thing is...

And then add to that, and this is relevant to me as a human being, Daryl Cooper is just a wonderful and humane person. That's the other thing. So even if, like, I don't think his ideas are dangerous or naughty or anti-Semitic or hateful, they're nothing like that. I mean, that's just a lie. But even, but his ideas aside, he is just a humane person who feels sad over the death of

anybody, friend or foe, as we all should. And by the way, that campaign didn't hurt him, right? Every friend of his took his side and had his back. And Substack said, hey, we got you, dude. You're not going anywhere. And his podcast went way up on the charts. And probably, you know,

tens or hundreds of thousands more people have heard Mr. Humane explain. It's easy to get my goat. Obviously, I'm falling for it. Sure. Right. Well, look. Who cares? I mean, they use his appearance on your show to try to destroy him. But like, yeah, no, it just didn't work. And then in our first episode that we recorded last week, we're going to do our second episode tomorrow. But in the first episode of our show, it's at provoked.show, by the way, if people want to look that up.

I just interviewed him about him for the whole first show is all we talked about was like his basis for doing these history podcasts and all the research that he's put into it and whatever. And he's just the most decent guy in the world. Total stoic. He doesn't get angry about anything. He's like the most gentle guy. And like, there's just no way in the world that any of that stuff can stick. And he's totally committed to accuracy and honesty as I think you are. And if he gets...

Again, that's the test. Is someone honest? I don't know. Is he willing to admit when he's wrong? That is, that's my test. I don't know a better test. I think it's better than a lie detector test. Are you willing to say in public, I screwed this up? You know, I was wrong or...

you know, whatever, to admit fault is the measure. And he, unlike any mainstream, quote, historian, the Wikipedia historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin or whoever these absurd figures they trot out. Yeah, whatever her students wrote. Exactly, whatever her students wrote, exactly. But they're all like that. Michael Beschloss, can you imagine? He's just a liar. And that was what got them so upset is he said, this is the most important historian in America, which is

Like, obviously your opinion and mine, but in a way it's quantifiably the case, right? That he's teaching history to a hell of a lot more people than any of these kooks at Harvard and Yale. And they have reason to be jealous, right? The narrative is outside of their control. Well, that's totally right. They thought that Morning Joe had a monopoly on history.

And, you know, I'm not against Morning Joe. I mean, first of all, I'm against monopolies in general. I'm certainly against monopolies on ideas and interpretations of the past. I'm against the gatekeeping of facts. I'm against lying. And they really, for like 70 years, had that. You have to believe this. And they're in a panic now. Because no, we don't either. Not anymore. It's unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, the fact that in...

A lot of the world, actually, it is a crime. Certain opinions are a crime.

No, I probably don't even share those opinions. It doesn't, but it doesn't matter. It's like no opinion should ever be a crime. Yeah. Especially in the Western world. It's insane. You're not man enough to stand up for your own argument. People go to jail. I mean, just like the name calling and the refusal to engage with facts, refusal to make a legitimate, rational argument. It's, it's a threat to, to all of us actually, because it's a threat to reason and decency and like civil discourse and,

And the censors were really winning there for a while, but they're not anymore. No. And you got to give credit to Elon Musk for that, for saving X, you know, Twitter. I give, he's in my daily prayers. It's an important thing. I hope that there, you know, if there are, I pray there aren't, but if there are acts of violence in the United States, whether they're real or they're false flags, there have been so many of those.

where people are murdered, someone else is blamed for it, for political effect. Again, I pray that doesn't happen. I hate all violence. However, if it does, it will instantly be used as a pretext to shut down

free speech on social media instantly. And I fear that that's coming. Yeah, me too. Sorry. Wow. Did we get far? No, that's great. For anyone who's interested in the topic of the war that we have been fighting for three years, three and a half years against Russia. Why are we doing that? What do we hope to achieve? Where does that come from? It seems like kind of out of the blue.

I think you've written the definitive book on that called Provoked, and I would just want to recommend it to our audience. Thank you very much for that. I appreciate that. So, but anyway, back to Iran. Yeah. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I swear we're going to make this Al-Qaeda-centric conversation Iran-centric again here in a moment. One last thing, though, about Bill Clinton's treason in supporting Al-Qaeda in Chechnya.

is that you might remember Colleen Rowley. She was Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2002 because she was the lawyer for the FBI office in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who could have stopped September 11th, her and her team. Because what happened was there's a guy named Zacharias Moussaoui. And they said he was the 20th hijacker. I said, I don't think that's right. I think Katani was the 20th hijacker. And this guy was for a different mission later, but whatever. Yeah.

Point is, he's the guy who famously wanted to learn how to fly a jumbo jet, but wasn't so interested in how to take off or land. And the guy at the flight school went ahead over his boss's wishes and called the FBI and said, I'm really worried about this guy. And the FBI office out in Minneapolis, they did their job immediately. And one of their guys even speculated, this guy says he wants to learn how to fly. Like somehow he's particularly interested in the route from Heathrow to JFK. I think he might want to crash into the World Trade Center.

So they went to FBI headquarters in Washington and they were denied. No, you cannot even ask the FISA court for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to search this guy's stuff. And the reason why is because even though

In Minneapolis, they had contacted the European intelligence agencies and the French reported back, oh, we know this guy. Him and his brother both are Chechen terrorists. They fought in the war in Chechnya and are recruiters for the bin Ladenites in Chechnya, led by Khattab and Basiev.

both of whom were bin Ladenites, both of whom were directly tied to bin Laden, both of whom had traveled to Afghanistan numerous times. People might even remember that there was a detachment of Chechens fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance at the time that our war started in 2001, because bin Laden had assigned them to what was called the 055 Brigade to go and help the Taliban to fight against the Northern Alliance. So that's what they were doing there. There's this

They absolutely were bin Ladenite terrorists in the exact al-Qaeda sense that you would think of them in any other place in Chechnya.

But FBI headquarters said, we like the terrorists in Chechnya. They're not terrorists. They're freedom fighters. Because they're fighting Putin. Because they're fighting Putin. And so we're not against them. We're for them. And so, no, you can't have your FISA warrant. Now, a FISA warrant is unlike a Fourth Amendment warrant. Fourth Amendment, they have to have probable cause, particularly describing the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized to find evidence of a crime. They have to be able to convince the judge that it's more likely than not they're going to find evidence of this crime there. Well, for a FISA warrant, it's nothing like that. For a FISA warrant, all they need is a reasonable belief—

which is nothing, that a person is either an agent of a foreign power or of a foreign terrorist group. I've been surveilled under a FISA warrant, so I'm very aware. I have too. Antiwar.com got surveilled in the same illegal way. And so, yeah, they can get a FISA warrant for you and me, Tucker, but not for Zacharias Moussaoui. So even on September 11th, they said, now can we have our warrant? Yes.

And now can we talk to the judge? And they still were told no by FBI headquarters. And it wasn't until later that night that the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, said, I wonder if this has anything to do with that Minneapolis thing. And then they went to the court, got the warrant, they searched the guy's house and they found papers that had been in his pockets and at his house directly connecting them to the hijackers in Florida.

They could have wrapped up, completely rolled up and prevented the September 11th attack if they'd just been allowed to do their job. And they weren't because why? Because Bill Clinton was committing high treason, supporting the same bin Ladenites who had already attacked our towers, who had already killed our guys in Saudi Arabia, who'd already blown up our embassies, already attacked our battleship. And they said, well, whatever. We like these guys when they're killing Russians. And the same thing in August of 2001 happened.

Delta Force, that's top-tier army special operations forces. Delta Force had been training KLA terrorists, bin Ladenite terrorists in Kosovo, who then invaded Macedonia in an attempt to create a greater Kosovo. And they were wrapped up by Macedonian troops. Kill more Christians. And ferried out of the country, you know.

by the Americans. And this is just one month before the September 11th attack. And I know a lot of people just think that these guys are totally controlled by the United States. But my point of view is that, no, what happened is they're essentially motivating them to attack the United States in one place while supporting them in other places. And rather than buying their loyalty, they're just blinding themselves to the danger. And so they kept attacking us and attacking us and attacking us, which was very convenient to notice when you're trying to still

support them. And so even though you had people like Michael Schor at the CIA's bin Laden unit, who I think is sincere, all he wanted to do in life was kill al-Qaeda guys. And they had the rendition program. That was in Clinton. That was before Bush. You might be familiar with the statement by Robert Baer, the former CIA officer. He said, if you want an interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want them to disappear forever, you send them to Egypt. And he was talking about the Clinton years.

So they were wrapping up guys who they considered to be the most dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists and sending them back home to be taken out and shot. So that was going on during that time. And in fact, there's a huge and hilarious and important and tragic and crazy clip of Michael Scheuer, again, the chief of the CIA's bin Laden. I know him, yeah. Testifying before the House.

And the congressman asked him about a statement that he had made about John O'Neill, the head of the FBI counterterrorism unit in New York. And he said, the only thing good that happened to America on 11 September is that that tower came down on John O'Neill's head. What?

Because that was how bad the CIA and FBI hated each other in their fight over the intelligence. This is why Schroeder no longer does television. This is why Schroeder no longer does... He went a little nutty in later years. His book, Imperial Hubris, is bar none the best book on the terror wars from that era. Oh, he's so smart. I haven't seen him in many, many years. Me either. I think he was like... He's now a banned person for some reason. I can't remember why. He started saying, we ought to help the Sunnis and Shiites all kill each other till they're all dead. And like...

I think when they did the Russiagate hoax, he said it's time for civil war. Yeah, yeah. Okay, a little much. A little moderate, I would say. A little carried away. So that's the importance of the bin Ladenite treason there. So now, here's where Ron kicks back into the story. Because, of course, September 11th and Al-Qaeda's war is the excuse for America to go back to the Middle East in full scale once W. Bush is sworn in. So here's where we get to the neoconservatives.

Who's a neocon and what's a neocon? Well, Tucker, everybody always says that everybody who's a hawk is a neocon. That guy's a neocon and that guy's a neocon. But as you know, that's not true. Neoconservative is a biographical designation and it applies to, I don't know, a hundred guys in the world, something like that, would you say? And they're called neoconservatives, not because they're conservatives nowadays, but because they literally had been leftists who moved to the right and were new conservatives. And so there's

It's kind of a complicated history, but essentially most of them were Trotskyites.

And had become kind of Cold War Democrats and then eventually Reaganites. And in the second and third generation came Reaganites. More precisely, most of them seem to have gone to City College of New York. Yeah, there's a bunch of them from City College. In the 30s and 40s. And people can watch on YouTube. There's a documentary called Arguing the World, which is a PBS documentary about Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer and all those guys. Daniel Bell. And Irving Howe. Yep. Right. Or Norman Pudhoritz, Mitch Dechter. And so...

Then there's a guy named Max Schachman, who was an important Trotskyite. And then there you had, he was a major wheel in the young people's socialist movement.

League, Young People's Socialist League, which included Jean Kirkpatrick, Joshua Moravchik, and Elliott Abrams. Then you had, you know, the National Review where William F. Buckley had, you know, essentially all the real old right-wingers were against the Cold War because they said, you know, why create this giant

pseudo-communist government here just to keep them away over there when we ought to just work on keeping our country free here, you know? So all those people got pushed out and... Not just pushed out, but maligned. Yeah. Attacked as Nazis, as hate or, you know...

Yeah. And replaced by a bunch of ex-communists. But see, because they were Trotskyites and Americans, they hated Stalin and the Soviet Union. And this is post-World War II. So they became the leaders of the Cold War in America. And all the real conservatives had to sit out while a bunch of ex-communists took their role. It's funny the damage that, I mean, National Review is a joke now. I don't even know if it exists, actually. But in some theoretical sense, maybe it does. But it doesn't really exist anymore. But the

The damage that National Review did to the country kind of, it's hard to overstate. Yeah. In a very insidious way. Absolutely. Took out all the clear thinkers, the honest people, the people who really loved their country, all exiled. Replaced with Jonah Goldberg. No, no. Like literally in which Lowry and these other like really weird people.

people you wouldn't ask advice from on any topic ever. Like just not wise, unhappy, controlled by God knows whom. You know what I mean? And that's fine. There are miserable bones for sure. Lots of weak people in the world, but to take out the strong people is unforgivable. That's what they did. Right. And then so...

Leon Wohlstetter and Leo Strauss were both also ex-Trotskyites who taught at the University of Chicago. Yep. And Pearl and Libby and Fythe and Wolfowitz and a bunch of those guys had studied under him and then went, them, and then went and worked for Scoop Jackson, who was kind of a Cold War Democrat, right-wing Democrat from Washington State. Senator. Oh, sorry. Senator. They called him the Senator from Boeing. Yep. And...

And then, you know, they made their break with the new left in the late 60s over Vietnam and over civil rights and stuff like that and started moving to the right. And then this is essentially the core of the war party in the United States of America. The great journalist Andrew Coburn says this is – they're the cross between the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex. So, like –

Oil and banking already had the Council on Foreign Relations, basically. These guys were not so much invited in there. That was more like blue blood wasps in that era and stuff. So they made their alliance with the military-industrial complex, said, we need money, you guys need eggheads to write your studies and justify your policies and your arms sales. So that was kind of where that mob marriage was born. And so this is how...

The neocons ended up creating this whole kind of forest of think tanks of their own. I mentioned the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but they also had like the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee on the Free World and...

And the Center for Security Policy, the Project for a New American Century, they had taken over at Heritage and AEI and Hudson. They had made their alliance with the Olin and Scaife Foundations. And so they were able to just take the pole position in leading...

conservative thought in the magazines and on TV and in the newspaper editorials and all that. The Weekly Standard, of course, as you know, and the National Review, two big flagships. And yeah, these were your guys back then. And so these were the guys who took us to war. They are the vanguard of the war party. And

They're, in many cases, directly tied to Israel. And now, I don't want to get you in unfair trouble. I'm perfectly happy to get you in trouble that you deserve, or we want to get in together. But I don't want anyone to misunderstand me, and especially not on your show. I am not anti-Semitic, and I'm not saying anything anti-Semitic about these guys. The neoconservative movement was a largely Jewish movement, is a largely Jewish movement, because, hey—

Trotskyism was only ever really popular in Brooklyn, right? There's just not too many people who were ever, whoever were part of these radical politics. And, but there are Presbyterians, Jean Kirkpatrick and James Woolsey are two prominent Presbyterian Christians who were part of it. And it was funny because-

Mark Dubowitz from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tried to argue with me about whether Jean Kirkpatrick was a neocon or not because she supported dictatorships as long as they were right-wing ones instead of supporting democracy uber alice. But I says, well, she comes from the Young People's Socialist League with Max Schachman and Joshua Moravchik and Elliott Abrams and then moved to the right and became a Reaganite with the rest of them, wrote for Commentary Magazine with Pod Horowitz and all of the guys.

She's a neocon. And I have all the sources. I linked to a bunch of great sources in my book about that. And of course, there's differences of opinion among the neoconservatives. When the Muslim Brotherhood won elections in Egypt in 2012, Robert Kagan said, hey,

We've been spouting nonstop about democracy this whole time. These guys won fair and square. We should give them a chance. And after all, they weren't really suicide bomber types in Egypt at that time. They're a bunch of old guys, conservative old guys. And he said, yeah, they're conservative Islamists, but let's see. Well,

old frank gaffney at the center for security policy about blew his top absolutely not we should not do i don't care if they won with 99 we don't let the muslim brotherhood take power right so there are differences of opinion within the neoconservative movement just fine um but jinkert patrick clearly was one of them um and there are catholics who are part of the movement as well um michael novak was a prominent one and i'm sorry there's quite a few others that are escaping um

My attention there. There's a staff national review, I think is heavily Catholic. And I mean, you would, I don't know how many of them were ever leftists. Oh,

Of course. Some of them were not. This is a strict definition. Yeah, yeah. We're being strict here. So like John Bolton, for example, is not a neoconservative. He's very close with them, but he's just a Goldwater guy. He's always been a right-wing nationalist, conservative Republican and never had that move from the left to the right. So he's obviously very close with them, but not a card-carrying member kind of a thing. That's the way I like to distinguish the thing. So now this brings us to the clean break.

So David Wormser and Douglas Fythe and Richard Perle, well, I should put them in the other. David Wormser is the principal author. Richard Perle is really the ringleader and his mentor and co-author. And then Douglas Fythe was their fellow traveler who also signed on, although I think later he repudiated this document and said he didn't agree with it. But whatever. The document is called The Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.

And it's written by Wormser for Netanyahu when he becomes prime minister in 1996. He replaces Shimon Peres.

Now, he comes in. He also is into demonizing Iran, although he hates Iraq more, I think. But he doesn't want to negotiate with the Palestinians. He's with the Likud. They don't get a two-state solution. He's going to now demonize Iran and Iraq, not as a way to kind of get away with dealing with the Palestinians like Rabin was trying to do, but as an excuse to never deal with the Palestinians. You want me to deal with the Palestinians? Well, what about Iran? Becomes the Netanyahu Doctrine.

And so he wants nothing to do with Oslo and a two-state solution. So worms are right. This is what the clean break is. It's a clean break from Oslo and a two-state solution for the Palestinians. And it says what we're going to do instead of making nice with the Arab states, we're going to have peace through strength. And we're going to be the dominant power in the region by far. And then no one's going to mess with us and we'll have peace that way. And what he says is the major threat to Israel is if they want to continue colonizing Palestine, what's left of it.

They have to worry about Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in southern Lebanon on the northern flank, which grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s. 82. 82, right. And so they say, the problem is Iran backs Hezbollah through Syria. So what we want to do is focus on getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

Which is crazy. And for anyone listening to this who immediately thinks, wait, that doesn't make sense. You're right. That doesn't make sense. It only makes sense in like a weird Rube Goldberg contraption sort of a way. What had been the lie that they believed had been sold to them by an Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite, who was an embezzler, a bank, a convicted bank fraudster from Jordan and a criminal.

And he had convinced them that if you put the cousin of the king of Jordan, who's a Sunni but a Hashemite, and claims the blood of the prophet, if you put him in power in Baghdad, then all the Shiites will all line up to obey and do whatever he says because he has the magic blood of the prophet, which they all revere.

Well, that's completely crazy and stupid and wrong. When the British had installed a Hashemite king in the 20s, the Shiites had a fatwa against cooperating with him in any way, which is why his kingdom didn't last through the 20s. It fell. And yes, as we talked about before, this is part of the split that the Shiites went with Muhammad's family. But

But that doesn't mean that they revere anyone with the blood of the prophet as like a magical lord over them with total power to decide every question for them or anything like that. This is completely overstated by Ahmed Chalabi that this Hashemite king would be able to say, ooh, I have royal blood and you all have to fall under my spell now. It was nonsense. But then it didn't matter because I...

I believe what happened was the King of Jordan died and his cousin replaced him and then there was nobody to put in there. So then they changed the plan to Chalabi himself would be the guy.

But the whole promise was, and this is in A Clean Break and the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States. And the third one is a book. It's called Tyranny's Ally, America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein, written by Wormser with a foreword by Pearl. And they all basically say the same thing. It's all of this smoke that Ahmed Chalabi is blowing about how if we get rid of Saddam, Jordan and Turkey will be dominant in Iraq. And

And then we'll make the Iraqi Shiite clergy, who are the highest ranking clergy, like the Ayatollah Sistani, for example, down in Najaf. We'll make them make Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and be friends with Israel instead. This is completely nuts. But this is what they thought would happen. Did it happen?

No, because what happened was once they lied us into Iraq and it was Ahmed Chalabi and his exiles who helped provide a lot of the lies about the weapons of mass destruction. And it was the neoconservatives in the government. They created what Colin Powell called a separate government. He was the secretary of state. He called it a separate government run by the Jinsa crowd, which meant David Wormser and Richard Pearl and their friends. What does Jinsa mean? The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. It's now of America. Okay.

but it's the same group. They're the ones who send American cops to be trained by Shin Bet, Ruthless Occupation Forces in Palestine and come back and treat Americans like that. That's one of their major roles. But it was David Wormser and his friends were the men from Jinser. The Jinser crowd was what Powell called them. And they created a separate government, again, Powell's words, working under Dick Cheney. And there was Hannah and Libby and Joseph Wormser

And we're in and and Elliot Abram, no, Eric Edelman were in the vice president's office, Dick Cheney's office. Then and Victoria Nuland and Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan's wife. Exactly. And then on the National Security Council was Robert Hadley, Stephen Hadley, Robert Joseph, I think, moved from the vice president's office to National Security Council. And it's all made Khalilzad, who's their pet Muslim.

were on the National Security Council. Then at State, you had David Wormser and John Bolton, who again was not exactly a neocon, but was clearly part of this group with Cheney. And their role was to keep a leash on Powell and his right-hand man, Dick Armitage, and prevent them from doing too much to obstruct the war.

And then at defense, you had on the Defense Policy Board Richard Pearl, Kenneth Adelman, Jean Kirkpatrick, and Newt Gingrich, again, a fellow traveler. Not exactly one of them, but he also, like Libby and Cheney, went to CIA headquarters over and over again to berate them and force them to try to come up with more intelligence against Iraq.

played a major role in that. And then you had Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and then under him, Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Fythe, and then under him, Abram Shulsky, who ran the Office of Special Plans. And this is, we know all about this, especially because of the heroic Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Whistleblower Karen Katowski told this story

numerous times. But there's a lot. In fact, if you search my name in 28 articles about how the neoconservatives lied us into war, it's actually up to 30 or 35 or something now. I've got all of these, all of the best articles about the neoconservatives in the Office of Special Plans.

And they focused on digging through the CIA's trash and laundering lies from the exiles to come up with the weapons of mass destruction narrative. Across the hall was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, and that was run by Wormser and a guy named Michael Maloof. And they were in charge of coming up with lies about Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda.

And there's a guy named Harold Road who worked in the Office of Net Assessment, which is like the internal Pentagon think tank. And his job was firing all the Arabists who actually knew anything about the Middle East from there and replacing them all with guys from the think tanks. And so they did like, yes, it's true. Bush and Cheney sort of won that election. But they staffed the government in a way that very few...

political victors on that level have the ability to do what Dick Cheney did, which was to put his very best guys, most loyal guys from this neoconservative faction in all the most important places in the government to push us into that war. And the purpose of that war was to neutralize Iran, actually.

That's right. Again, I just want to ask you to pause. So there was a promise from the neocons or parts of the U.S. government that there would be an oil pipeline after Saddam built from Mosul, Kirkuk, northern Iraq to the port of Haifa in Israel? Right. And this had been a pipeline under the British in the 20s, and they wanted to reopen it or rebuild the thing. And part of the deal was that...

When, you know, Israel stayed friends with Iran as we established all the way through the 1980s, and they had a secret pipeline at the port of Aqaba.

which is, you know, they call it the Sinai Peninsula because it sticks out into the Red Sea there. Well, the right side of the Sinai, that's Aqaba, is that port there. And the Iranians had a secret pipeline that was, I guess, was operated by Mark Rich. I don't know exactly who originally had built it. Mark Rich. Mark Rich, the... Are you making this up? Same guy. And so there was this secret oil pipeline where the Iranians would drive their tankers up and unload oil and ship it to...

Israel, but then when Rabin turned on Iran in '93, the Iranians cut that oil supply off. So like in a large sense, America's a rock war too,

part of that was so that they could rebuild this pipeline to make up for that loss. In fact, when Donald Rumsfeld, the famous meeting of Donald Rumsfeld with the video and the still shot of him shaking hands with Saddam Hussein when he was Reagan's special emissary in 1983, a huge part of that meeting was him badgering Hussein to build a pipeline to the port of Aqaba that would then have a separate spur that would go directly to Israel. So when people say it was a war for oil, there's some truth in that, but it wasn't oil for us. That's right. And...

is this real? Yeah. And when I, why do we care how much Israel pays for oil? Like, what does it have to do with us? Oh, Tucker, I don't care. But David Wormser and them are essentially Likud guys. I mean, Douglas Feist's law partner, Mark Zell, who's a riot if you follow him on Twitter these days, he represents settlers on the West Bank. I mean, these guys are very close to Likud. Yeah, exactly.

Well, that was a sincere question. I guess there's no answer. Right. Nothing. That's it. Just the lobby and their control inside America. So when I wrote that book, a guy named Gary Vogler contacted me and he was the American viceroy over Iraqi oil during that war. And he...

And he wrote a review of Enough Already on Amazon that says, hey, let me tell you, this is the only book that gets it right. This is what really happened and what that war was really about. How do I know? Because I was the oil minister. I was in charge. And I published his book at the Libertarian Institute. We published his book. It's called...

Israel, winner of the 2003 Iraq oil war by Gary Vogler, where he explains that this is exactly right and how Michael Maloof, the same guy from the policy counterterrorism evaluation group, was on the phone with him, bugging him about the pipeline. And he talks all about it. And I wouldn't want to go into too much detail about what he explains in there and how it all worked. But he was like,

front row to seeing the role that the promises of that pipeline played in the neocons thinking and netanyahu bought it as well and netanyahu mentioned it in a speech that he gave i believe in england um or was it at ginsa no no it was chalabi gave a speech at ginsa

But Netanyahu mentioned it, I believe, in England one time that, yeah, they promised they're going to rebuild the oil pipeline to Haifa. So this was a huge part of the neocon. I remember scoffing at the idea it was a war for oil because I couldn't see how Iraqi oil would benefit the United States. Right. So I was like, how could it be a war for oil? And on the left was all war for oil, no blood for oil, no blood for oil. But I guess I'm not deranged enough.

even to imagine it could be a war for oil for somebody else. Right. I know. It's completely absurd and it's completely real. I mean, people can check me. I have, you know, plenty of notes on that and including, I'm pretty sure it was the Jerusalem Post that reported on Netanyahu's speech, but this is all very findable and double-checkable, you know. It was a huge part of their thinking. And again, I know it's crazy, but again, if we get rid of secular Sunni Saddam,

and empower the Shiite supermajority, it'll be fine because actually either we will have a sock puppet Hashemite or we will have a sock puppet Shiite in charge to tell them what to do. And then they will tell Hezbollah to leave Israel alone. And that way Israel can finish colonizing Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah on their northern flank. So even if I thought that the purpose of foreign policy was to help a foreign country, which I don't, and even if I, you know, agree with all the objectives, which I don't think I do,

But even if I did, I would say that's not a very smart plan. And I remember having this exact conversation in Iraq in 2003. It's like, wait a second. If this is a majority Shiite country, if it becomes a democracy, it'll become a Shiite country. It'll be aligned in some basic way with Iran. How is that a win? And you're saying, of course, they knew that. At the time, I was like, don't they know? Don't they know?

But they knew and they thought that that would somehow be good for Israel. Yeah, they thought that they would have dominance over the new order there, which of course they didn't. And by the way, when W. Bush invaded in 2003, what did he do? He picked up exactly where his father had left off when he betrayed the Shiite uprising in 1991. And he took who? The Bada Brigade and the Dawah Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the Iraqi traitors who had chosen Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq war.

who had led the uprising in 91 before Bush Sr. changed his mind and left them high and dry to be crushed. Now W. Bush in 03 takes them all the way to Baghdad. And so that's the history of Iraq War II, that bloody eight-year horrible war that we fought over there was America fighting for the supermajority Shiite side for their strategic rivals in the region, Iran.

In what they call in soccer an own goal. Like this giant stupid mistake fought for the other side of the ledger based on the idiocy and cruelty of these neocons who thought that they were smart and that they would get away with it. And that's what our guys died over there for. And that they thought that it would somehow help Israel to have a Shiite government in Iraq. Right, because...

We would have such control over the Shiites. They would force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. They would separate Syria and Iran and they would, it would be, Wormster said, a nightmare for Iran when they, when the Iranian people see what a great new democratic Shiite Iraq looks like and how they could be living. It'll surely lead to the fall of the Ayatollah. One of my theories for many, many years, uh,

And when people are always, if you say anything like this, like you're anti-Israel, which I am not and never have been. But one thing I've noticed is that the people who presume to speak for Israel not only kind of shaft the United States, they don't care at all about the United States, obviously, but they also kind of shaft Israel. Like they're not even good at, they're not even good at serving the interests of,

their own interests or what they think. I absolutely agree with that. It's like wild. It's so interesting. Yep. I mean, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that because I think a lot of, there are actual, you know, anti-Semites who are like, oh, you know, the Israel people are controlling everything. Okay. Yeah.

But I don't think it's helping Israel very much. It's definitely not helping us, which is my concern. Right. But it's just kind of funny that it's not helping Israel either. Yeah, of course. I mean, the Rabin doctrine made a lot more sense. Let's be friends with all our nearby neighboring states. We have a peace treaty with Egypt. We're working on one with Jordan, which they did get in 94. That's what I try and do with people who live near me. Yeah.

I don't want to be at war with them. There was even a time in the W. Bush years when the Israelis were talking with Assad and Condoleezza Rice stopped them. She's really a sinister person. Yeah. And the Israelis were even negotiating over the Golan Heights or maybe sharing it or some kind of whatever thing. And she prevented them from making peace then. She's the one who prevented Russia from joining NATO. Yeah.

Well, yeah, a lot of things. In 2000, when Putin, well, this is what Putin told me, when Putin said to Bush, I would like to join NATO, and he's like, okay. And then Condi Rice, I guess 2001, jumps in and it's like, no. Oh, okay. That's interesting. So I know that Colin Powell had put him off in July of 01. Yeah.

I'm not familiar with that anecdote, but I mean, I'm just sounds right here. I am taking Putin at his word again as a Russian student talking point. Tucker Carlson. I don't know. I bet we can find it. I bet we find. No, I know that he asked to join NATO in July of 2001 and that he was told. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, noncommittal. That was the tradition. He claims Bush was for it. I wasn't there.

I can see Bush saying that. That's so, that's amazing. Okay, so the next big step is the redirection because Elliot Abrams, the neocon, and Zalmay Khalilzad, they realized how bad they screwed up here. And they come to Bush in 05 and 06 and they say, listen, we've really empowered the Shiites and the Iranians at our own expense here. Our side of the ledger is the Sunni kings and Israel and Turkey. And so we have to fix this.

And this is when they launched what's called the Redirection. And this is a really important article by Seymour Hersh from March 2007. And he had a whole series that year in The New Yorker, the coming wars, preparing the battlefield. And I always forget one other one, but the Redirection is the most important one. This is where they say, man, we really screwed up by empowering the Shiites. Now we have to tilt back towards the Sunni kings. I said, the Saudis don't have an army. So what do they really mean by that?

They mean now it's time to tilt back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber head chopper enemies of the United States of America. The fact that al-Qaeda in Iraq was the bleeding edge, the worst vanguard of the Sunni based insurgency resisting American and Shiite rule during that war. The fact that all the civilians they had killed and all the people at the Pentagon, all the people in those planes and the towers meant nothing.

They said, now, this is before Obama ever came to town. This is still W. Bush. They said, we're going to start backing Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, which was a bin Ladenite group there to try to attack Hezbollah. We start backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. And by the way, this was Elizabeth Cheney.

who worked at the State Department for George Bush, and she was the one who created the first Syrian National Council of a Syrian government in exile to try to replace Assad, which was chock full of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But big picture, we're doing this because why? Because Israel wants us to? And the Saudis do. So Khalilzad goes to Saudi. This is in the WikiLeaks from beginning of 06.

And the Saudi king says to Khalilzad, it used to be us and you and Saddam against Iran. Now you have given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter. That was my take. Right. Just as an observer. I never understood why would they do that? I never got it. So that's the answer is this magical thinking that they would have through Hashemite King or through Chalabi, that they would have this total control over the Shiites will forever.

and bend them to ours. If the Hashemite king thing works, then how come the Hashemites in Jordan are always on the edge? Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't. And of course, they have no rule over Shiites at all. The idea that the Hashemites are going to boss the Shiites around and say, oh, I got magical blood that you have to obey is total nonsense, right? No more than I'm the Pope. It's just not right. And it's total...

you know, the con that Chalabi was selling. And if you read A Clean Break, Coping the Crumbling States, and Tyranny's Ally, Chalabi's in there over and over and over again. Our good friend, the Iraqi exile Chalabi assures us

Over and over again. Whatever happened to him, do you know? He died. He ended up in charge of the oil industry for a while, and then he died in, I'm going to say, early Obama years. And in fact, I'll urge your—I won't do the direct quote and get you in too much trouble here, Tucker, but I'll urge people to go and read a great article by John Dizard at Salon.com. And for people not familiar—

An eon ago, Salon.com actually published real journalism. I know no one would think that now. It's such a woke rag. But they did actually publish real journalism back then. And John Dazard is a serious guy. He's from the Financial Times. And I am briefly acquainted with him. And he's a serious journalist. The article is called How Chalabi Conned the Neocons. And in there, they quote, Dazard quotes a Lebanese businessman friend of Chalabi's.

And he says, I asked Chalabi, what are you doing running around with these J words? And Chalabi said, I just need them to get America to launch the war. And then I promise I'll stab them in the back as soon as it's accomplished. Right? So he was using them and they were his fools. And there's a great quote, Mark Zell, I mentioned it was Douglas Vice law partner. And he says,

oh that Chalabi he's a treacherous spineless turncoat he betrayed us he promised us an oil pipeline to Haifa and now he's running around with all these Iranians and has a whole different set of friends and we'll never forgive him for his treachery and all that so it's all just as plain as day in there as he was using David Wormser as a mark Richard Pearl as like a pathetic sock puppet tool of his and they thought that they were smart but they were not

And Danielle Pletka also deserves a hell of a lot of blame and responsibility for this. She was Chalabi's main handler at the American Enterprise Institute and, you know, card-carrying member of this neocon faction that pushed this stuff. So...

Once they realized how bad they screwed up, they launched this redirection. They're back in Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, and the Iranian Kurds had a group called PJAK, which was whatever it's an acronym for, but it's essentially the Iranian Kurdish version of the PKK, which is the leftist insurgent Kurdish group in Turkey, which is only recently disarmed completely. And then their allies are the YPG in Syria,

And in, but in Iran, they're called PJAC. And America was supporting them there. And they were also supporting a group of horrible bin Ladenite suicide bomber head chopper maniacs called Jandala in Baluchistan, which is in southeastern Iran, that region. And these guys were kidnapping and beheading officers and army officers and doing truck bombings and all kinds of stuff.

And so this is America under W. Bush again before Obama ever came to town. This is W. Bush saying, oops, I screwed up and I put the Iranians best friends in power in Baghdad. There's only so much I can do about that. At the request of neocons who then change their mind and decide, oh, we screwed up. So then all American foreign policy has to pivot to backing the people who did 9-11. That's right.

Back to the bin Laden. This is like, yeah. So then Barack Obama comes to town. It'd be nice to have sovereignty. Oh, yeah. No, we don't have that.

It's somewhere, but it ain't here. So Barack Obama comes to town and everybody thought, oh, this guy's a secret Muslim and all of this stuff. But that wasn't it. He's W. Bush. That was what happened was he was the centrist foreign policy establishment. He was Bill Clinton's all he ever was. And he came in and he picked up right where W. Bush left off. And when the it's actually interesting because.

He actually did assign, I don't think there's any question about this. He assigned the CIA to find and kill bin Ladenite, real bin Ladenite terrorists in Yemen and in Pakistan. And in Pakistan, as John Kiriakou told me, the former CIA officer, there were only 29 al-Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan.

And they launched this horrific drone war and they had to help the Pakistani government launch an even worse war against the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat Valley and the federally administered tribal territories that killed like 80,000 people as a favor to let them do the drone war against less than 30 al-Qaeda guys in the country, which was somewhat successful, but it also just created more blowback in driving people away and back to where they were from, places like Libya. And

He was also bombing them in Yemen as well, which was totally counterproductive. As I show in my Yemen chapter in the book, the CIA and Air Force war against AQAP only grew them bigger and bigger the whole time and was counterproductive. But so that's like the first couple of years. And of course, he escalated the war in Afghanistan, even though there were no Arab terrorists left in Afghanistan at all by then. But then at the beginning of the Arab Spring, which breaks out in 2011,

Obama takes Osama's side in Libya. And this is just as he's killing the guy. He's put down on...

May the 2nd of 2011. Well, at that very moment, we got American planes flying sorties as air cover for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia, who are al-Qaeda in Libya. That's all they are. They're the Libyan veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq. They just got home from fighting with Zarqawi against our guys in Iraq War II. Now they want to take on Qaddafi.

and Barack Obama takes their side. And that's because, of course, Gaddafi was on Israel's list for a long time, the list of seven countries that they wanted to get rid of. I did last December a debate with General Wesley Clark where he reconfirmed that that list of the seven countries in five years, that was Israel's list of countries they wanted overthrown. And Libya was on that list, and the Saudis...

And Qataris also hated him for, you know, making fun of them for wearing robes and calling them women, wearing dresses and stuff. And they had screwed him on. He had screwed them on oil deals and the same for the British. And I think Sarkozy in France, Gaddafi had helped bankroll his election campaign and he wanted to cover that up. So he won. That was his motive was trying to take him out. Gaddafi helped to bankroll Sarkozy's presidential campaign. Yeah.

And that was one of his big motives for wanting to launch the war. And then- Well, not a very grateful character, is he? No, not at all. You pay for my election campaign, I'll send NATO in to kill you? Yeah. And what was NATO doing there anyway? That's not the North Atlantic.

Well, you know, it's... This isn't the NATO I was promised, the defensive alliance protecting the North Atlantic from the Soviets. I know. Well, you know, help me figure out how Estonia and Lithuania belong in NATO either. As you said, that's another show. So, Al-Qaeda in Libya all of a sudden becomes an ally of...

Barack Obama? Right. Well, Barack Obama becomes theirs. Becomes theirs. Yeah. And so that's the whole thing. It's just like with Bill Clinton. We might help them, but that doesn't buy their loyalty to us. In fact, I quoted in my new book, Provoked, I quote Ali Soufan, the former FBI counterterrorism agent, where he quotes...

The bin Ladenites complaining to bin Laden himself, why are you targeting the United States? They've been so good to us. They supported us in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, now here in Chechnya. And then he explained to them, well, you guys just don't understand. We have this larger agenda based around what's going on in Palestine and in Iraq and the rest of this. So some of them had been bribed, but the loyalty really did not come through. Some bin Laden was...

Just because I think it might well because he attacked my country. I think it's fair to ask, do you believe based on all the research you've done that his main motive was what's happening in Gaza, the West Bank?

It's right there. Yes. The main motive was, I believe, the bases in Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq. And then two on the list was support for the Israelis in Palestine and in southern Lebanon. And then it was support for the dictators of the region, pressure on them to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense. And as he put it, turning a blind eye to Russia and China and India and their wars against Muslims, which we know is not true, where America actually supported the bin Ladenites and two of the three of those.

But those were the grievances for real. And then, so Obama takes al-Qaeda's side in Libya and then on to what Hillary Clinton called her bank shot and move all the Mujahideen and Gaddafi's guns to Syria. And this is where they started the dirty war in Syria. And again, why? Because as David Wormser wrote back so many years ago, Syria is the keystone in the arc of Iranian power in the region. And since we just moved Baghdad to Iran's column,

We just put Iraq, pardon me, we just put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad. Now we got to take them down a peg in Damascus by getting rid of the Baathists there who are run by the Alawites. This is like alcoholism. Like you get drunk, then you feel terrible. So you have to get drunk again. Yeah. And it just gets worse. It's a government program. It's unbelievable. And just to restate, as I've said many times, but it can't be said enough, the Benghazi tragedy where a U.S. ambassador and a

A number of American CIA personnel were killed in Benghazi, Libya. The real point of that story, the reason they were there in the first place was moving Qaddafi's armed stockpiles to al-Qaeda linked groups in Syria. And so we're just talking about, mentioned the drone war in Pakistan. In July of 2012, the CIA killed an al-Qaeda, a Libyan al-Qaeda guy named Sheikh Yahya al-Libby.

His brother is the same guy that George Bush and Dick Cheney tortured into falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein supported al-Qaeda and Sheikh ibn al-Libi, and who later Gaddafi murdered in his prison cell in a case of Arkansas, as they call it, supposed suicide case.

uh because Gaddafi was cooperative in the terror war arkanside yeah that's when a friend of bill or hillary dies under mysterious circumstances you know what i mean they say he killed himself but boy it seems like a weird angle you know that kind of um then he stuffed himself he stuffed his own corpse into the trunk yeah and blew himself out the airlock you know arkanside sorry i'm right over my head pardon me um

I bring some of these things with me from the 90s. But so, yes, so now they killed Yahya al-Libi and then Zawahiri put out a podcast saying, hey, all good Mujahideen in Libya. You know how the Americans are stationed right in the middle of your hornet's nest? Well, time to reach out and touch someone.

And he put out that podcast in like August. Then on September 11th, on the anniversary of the attack, they reached out and got us. Our guy, what was Christopher Stevens doing there? He was committing high treason on the orders of the president of the United States, not out of loyalty to al-Qaeda, but out of loyalty to the Saudi king and to the Likud, that we hate the Shiites more because that's what...

These foreign client states of ours want. And so we're, again, Hillary's bank shot. Her and Petraeus and Leon Panetta were working together. We take all these jihadis and all these weapons and ship them on to Syria for the war. So the war in Syria then was never a revolt whatsoever.

The war in Syria was not a revolution or an uprising. The war in Syria was a foreign invasion by American, Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and Qatari-backed al-Qaeda mercenary terrorists. That's what it was. It was absolute treason and against why? Because Assad, the secular dictator, as you said, the ophthalmologist who wasn't even supposed to be dictator, his older brother died in a car wreck. He was an eyeball doctor in London when he was...

summoned to be the dictator of Syria that, well, he's friends with Iran and he helps Iran back Hezbollah. And so that's it. We got to get rid of him. It's just interesting. Okay, so that's a perspective. And whether the U.S. government ought to be following orders from other countries is another question. But, you know, maybe you don't like Assad or whatever, but the posture of the American media is

was just, it was just crazy. In one day, it went from, you know, Assad's wife on the cover of Vogue to anyone who likes Assad is a bad American. Tulsi Gabbard got drummed out of the Democratic Party just for talking to the guy. She was never even pro-Assad. Oh, I'm glad you brought that up. So what was her problem?

She had been stationed at Balad Air Base during Iraq War II, north of Baghdad, at a medical unit. So I've never heard her talk about this, but it is fair to presume that she saw a young guy screaming for their mama, dying in front of her at that base. Why? Because they were fighting against the Sunnis, fighting against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Now it's two years later, we're in Syria, and they're saying...

we're flipping sides. We support the shirts now against the skins. And Tulsi Gabbard is like, no, because she actually knows what she's talking about. That was her obsessive mission was to get us to stop funding Al-Qaeda. So she was always for the war on terrorism. She was

just against the war for terrorism. No, it's so right. And I mean, she's more hawkish than a lot of people I respect. She's not a dove, that's for sure. I mean, she's still in the U.S. Army. That's right. So like... Yeah, she once been lot of nights dead, not empowered. Well, that's... But what's so interesting is she's in the crosshairs now and they're going to try and, you know, the neocons are going to try and take her down. I mean, they're trying now. It's really beyond belief. But...

And her point, so far as you know, you clearly follow this, was not...

I love Assad. No, of course not. It never was that. It was that you guys are saying that these so-called rebels are good guys, but they're not. I know them. They're bin Ladenites. I'm not for Assad either. I'm totally agnostic on Assad. But why does the U.S. media take these positions at the order of whom? I don't know. Is there a meeting that I missed? Yeah. Where all of a sudden one day someone is acting in a way that

you know, somebody doesn't like, and everybody has to get on board with it. No one ever explains why. Assad! And then, who's that? Oh, that, I can't remember her name. The woman who runs the free press. Barry Weiss. Barry Weiss. All of a sudden, she's like, oh, Assad, he's bad, you know. Assad!

You don't know anything about anything. Yeah, and she called, famously on Joe Rogan's show, she called Tulsi Gabbard an Assad toady. Well, exactly. And then Rogan says, what's a toady? And she says, I have no idea. And didn't know even how to spell it. Of course, and doesn't know anything about Assad other than...

You're supposed to hate him for some reason. Anyone who doesn't hate him vehemently enough is a Nazi or something. I don't really get it, but why? Obviously, Bear Weiss is not a serious person, but there are serious people in the media who go along with this. Why? I mean, it really is astounding to me. I think mostly they don't learn anything and keep it. You know what I mean? They're not reflecting on...

Like Tulsi Gabbard's going, but these are my enemies from a year and a half ago. They don't remember a year and a half ago. Yeah, they don't know that. So like in Libya before Syria even, it was responsibility to protect people.

They manufactured this ridiculous hoax that Gaddafi was about to exterminate every last man, woman and child in the city of Benghazi. Barack Obama said, imagine the city of Charlotte being wiped off the face of the earth. Well, this is a complete hoax. At least Bill Clinton lied that 100,000 people had already been killed in Kosovo. Barack Obama's just lying that hundreds of thousands are about to be killed.

And this is the responsibility to protect. And even though anyone who's looking critically at the press at the time, especially the British press, but even the American press knows these are bin Ladenites. These are radical Sunni fighters who just got home from Iraq. And now we don't care about the war on terrorism at all anymore. Now we're doing a humanitarian mission for bin Ladenites. So how's the city of Benghazi, the ancient port city of Benghazi now?

Well, it's under the control of a former American sock puppet dictator named Haftar. The city, the country of Libya no longer exists. It was only created after World War II, and it's now divided in three in a state of low-level civil war. And the leader of Tripoli is actually a guy named Belhaj, who was a former bin Ladenite terrorist who was actually kidnapped and tortured by the CIA and the Brits and sued the Brits and won for their... Wait, so you're saying that we didn't successfully protect Benghazi? Nope. Nope.

Not at all. He used a total hoax to launch that war. But now, so I know we're running short on time here, but so importantly now, the support, Obama administration support for the bin Ladenites in Syria led to the rise of the Islamic State. Now, they had renamed al-Qaeda in Iraq the Islamic State of Iraq back in 2006 after they killed Zarqawi. But

They had no state. They didn't even control a single county. It was a joke at the time. But now that Obama took their side in Syria, they ended up controlling all of eastern Syria and consolidated a state by June of 2000, right this time, June of 2013. Instead of going west and putting pressure on Assad, they just conquered the east of the country. Then six months later, they raised the black flag over Fallujah.

And Barack Obama was asked about this by Vanity Fair magazine. And he said, listen, just because the junior varsity team puts on a Kobe Bryant doesn't mean that they're in the majors or whatever. So in other words, he's calling al-Qaeda in Iraq, the junior varsity, not real terrorists, not anybody we need to be worried about.

Well, six months later, this is the famous footage that everybody's familiar with of the long line of Toyota Helix pickup trucks with their headlights on roll right into Mosul full of jihadis and sack Mosul. From there, they take over Samara to Crete, Fallujah. And then about a year later, they took Ramadi. And so the Islamic State, this was the creation of the Islamic State Caliphate.

And the leader was this guy Baghdadi, who was just Zarqawi's successor. He was the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. And he had sent his deputy Jolani to go and run what was called Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. And then he split with Jolani and created his state. And so here he's like a cross between... Whatever happened to Jolani? Oh, well, Jolani's actually the president of Syria right now. Wait a second, Scott. I don't believe that. Yeah, so Jolani... I'm just joking, but it's like so...

So America fights a rock war three on the Shiite side again.

Right? Because we built the caliphate to spite the Shiites because we're mad at them that we fought Iraq War II for them. But now that we built the caliphate, and this guy's like a cross between bin Laden and Mussolini up on the balcony at the mosque declaring himself the caliph Ibrahim and all this. This is too much. It's like bin Laden himself owns a state now. We can't do that. So what do we do? We fight with the Shiites, the Iraqi Shiites we wish we hadn't fought Iraq War II for. All their Iranian-backed Shiite militias. These are the guys who crushed the Islamic State.

And in Tikrit, he literally had American airplanes flying air cover for the Iranian Quds Force on the ground. And the Americans saying, well, it is the Quds Force, but at least they're helping us kill ISIS. And on the ground, the Quds Force guys saying, well, it is the Americans, but at least they're providing us good air cover as they're liberating Saddam Hussein's hometown from the bin Ladenites.

And so this is Iraq War III, beginning in August of 2014 through the end of 2017, basically, Trump's first year, was the destruction of the caliphate that Obama had built to spite the Shiites for Bush giving them Baghdad. And then, of course, spreading bin Ladenite terrorism elsewhere throughout the world, even worse. And so then this brings us back to Iran because...

That war ended with Russia intervening in Syria and protecting the Assad regime and preventing America from completing his overthrow. So from the end of Obama, basically, through Trump's first term and through Biden's term, you had Jelani and al-Qaeda were...

hiding up in, basically kept safe by the Turks up in the Idlib province, which is this rural province in northwestern Syria. And then last end of November, early December of 24, they broke out of their pen in a big October 7th style attack. And they sacked Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus in 14 days, or 10 days, 12 days, and took over the country. And

You know, our president said this is a strong guy with a very strong past. Well, his strong past is murdering American soldiers, fighting and killing American soldiers in Mosul and Ramadi during the Iraq War II. So why would he be dropping sanctions against him? Because that's what Israel wants, because Israel hates the Shiites more, and the Alawites were friends with the Shiites. And so they don't mind the bin Ladenites, even though the bin Ladenites targeted us over Israel's crimes. They've never given Israel a problem directly. And in fact...

One of the Israeli intelligence or military officials admitted to the press when he was asked, why do you guys give aid and comfort to al-Qaeda in the war? You give them medical treatment and all these things. And he said, well, you know, it's the humanitarian thing to do. And they said, well, do you give that same kind of support to Hezbollah when they're injured on the battlefield? And he goes, well, of course not. They're our enemies. And the reporter says, yeah, but al-Qaeda attacked the United States. He says, yeah. What's that got to do with us?

So they're worried about their national interests and our country somehow worried about their national interests instead of ours. So why in the world would any American prefer a Bin Ladenite to Assad, a Baathist? Only because they hate the Shiites more. Only because they put Israel's interests before those of the United States. That's the one and only answer to that.

Yeah. And again, if you care about the Christian, the ancient Christian population of Syria has been there 2000 years. Yeah. You know, they're being massacred now. Yeah. My friend Brad Hoff, I should have brought you this. I have extra copy of this. My friend Brad Hoff wrote a great book called Syria Crucified, which is all stories of Syrian Christians going through the hell of Obama's dirty war there.

And they're in danger right now. There was a suicide bombing by an Al-Qaeda-tied guy at a church in Syria three days ago. I just don't understand. I do repeat myself at the age of 56, but I can't control it. Where are American churches lecturing us about those who bless Israel or whatever? Again, I'm not against Israel, but shouldn't American churches care about Syrian churches, about their brothers in Christ in Syria? And they...

They support a government that's like, whose policies basically are killing all the Christians in the whole region. That's just a fact. I mean, they don't... Completely destroyed the Chaldean Christian communities of Iraq. They don't exist anymore. They're gone. Oh, I know. They're scattered to the winds. And the Marianites and the different kinds of Christians in Syria, you know, there was a village in...

I think they reconstituted the village later, but for years there was a village where they speak Aramaic because one of the last places in the world where they speak Aramaic and the Bin Ladenites took that town over and, you know, tyrannized those people for two or three years during the last war there. Now they're in charge. They've been slaughtering Alawites and slaughtering Christians. Oh, I know. And it promises to get nothing but worse from here.

But where are the Christians in this country when the IDF rolls into an all-Christian town in the West Bank? They're reading their Schofield Bible. It says Israel can do whatever they want. Well, I mean, you know, whatever. I hate theological debates. I'm not qualified to have one. But I do think if you're a Christian...

And you see other Christians murdered. You can't take the side of the people who are making that possible. I just don't. I mean, what you think Jesus is for that? Is that what you're saying to me? Well, I think, you know, probably most Americans assume that like in Israel, Palestine, that the Christians are Israelis and that they're allies with the Israeli Jews against the evil Muslims.

And they just don't know that that's not true. In fact, they're persecuted and occupied. We'll just ask them. And if you do ask them, then all these liars in the United States will tell you, well, they're an Al-Qaeda. They're an Al-Qaeda, really? Yes. Some Christian priest in the West Bank is actually an Al-Qaeda? Okay. Right.

So you want to talk about Iran's nuclear program? I do. Yeah, let's roll through it. It's a nuclear program. Yeah. So the Ayatollah, W. Bush puts Iran, Iraq, and North Korea in the axis of evil in 2002. And-

Of all the preposterous lies, Saddam and the Ayatollah are allies when no two men in the world hate each other more than these two, right? And they're allies with Osama bin Laden, who is no friend of the Ayatollah and who Saddam Hussein is obviously deathly afraid of and has nothing to do with whatsoever. And then Kim in North Korea, which he had sold some missiles to Iran, but it got no tight alliance.

And I think it's pretty clear that the only reason that they put North Korea in there is because if they had said the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq, and Syria, you might have wondered whether the speech was written in Tel Aviv or not. So they went ahead and threw North Korea in there. That's a whole other interview. I like talking about that one too. But-

So Saddam Hussein's strategy is to say, here's my 12,000 page dossier on all the weapons I ever had. It's the same stuff his son-in-law Hussein Kamel had given up in 1995. There was nothing else to show. They knew by the end of 95 he'd given up everything. Any weapons left in the country had been declared and had just been left there by the inspectors to rot in the sun. Shelf life expired anyway. They had no nuclear program or any of that stuff.

But it just wasn't good enough. They were able to just buffalo us into that war no matter what. The North Koreans, they were bullied. I'll skip the details, but people can read how Bush pushed North Korea to nukes by Gordon Prather. It's the last article the great Gordon Prather wrote for us at Antiwar.com. It's really great. It explains how they essentially bullied Kim into leaving the treaty and starting to make nukes, which you notice we don't mess with North Korea anymore. No, can't.

The Ayatollah in Iran took a different tactic. In fact, I'll go ahead and throw in Libya.

And Gaddafi didn't have a nuclear program. He just had warehouses full of crates full of junk that he bought from the Pakistanis. He didn't have the men with the know-how to build a nuclear program of any description anyway. But that was enough for him to trade away to Bush for normalization. It was seven years later that Barack Obama stabbed him in the back, literally lynched him to death. Stabbed him in the rectum, I think. Yeah, and then shot him in the side of the head on the side of the road. But then the Ayatollah said, look, my books are open.

I'm part of the nonproliferation treaty. I have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Hands up. Don't shoot. You have no cost to Spelly here.

And that has been essentially his strategy this whole time. Now, they made facilities at Natanz and later at Fordow. The war party says that these were top secret facilities that were only revealed by Israel. That's not true. They did buy junk from AQ Khan, the Pakistani nuclear technology supplier, distributor, and

but only because America wouldn't let them buy a light water reactor from China. If Bill Clinton had just let the Chinese sell them a light water reactor, which cannot produce weapons fuel as waste, then everything would have been fine then. But they basically drove them to the black market where they got uranium enrichment equipment, and they started enriching uranium at Natanz in 2005. Now, they weren't in violation of the deal because the deal says you have to announce within six months before introducing nuclear material into any machines that you're going to do so, and they did that.

And they have developed, quite frankly, a latent nuclear deterrent. So that makes them what they call a threshold state, the same as Brazil or Germany or Japan, meaning they've proven they've mastered the fuel cycle. They know how to enrich uranium. They could enrich up to weapons grade. But so let's not fight and we won't have to go that far. So that's essentially what they've had this whole time. The Americans...

the Washington DC during the W. Bush years, they just lied that there's a secret parallel nuclear program that's really a nuclear weapons program that's going on there too. And the IAEA can't find it, but trust us, it's there. And they never explained it because they couldn't because they were lying. They just heavily implied it all the time. Secret, illicit nuclear weapons program as though the thing existed, which it never did.

And we almost went to war over it a couple of times, but it was stopped in 2007 by the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Fallon, and then later the CIA and the National Intelligence Council put out their NIE of November 2007 saying they have not decided to make nuclear weapons.

Bush complained in his memoir, W. Bush, that, well, how was I supposed to attack them? He said, oh, I'm so sorry, your highness, to the king of Saudi Arabia. I can't attack them because my own intelligence agencies say they're not making nukes. And if they don't have a military program, I can't do anything. So his hands were tied, he thought. And then this was essentially the status quo until Obama comes in and Netanyahu comes in right before Obama does.

It comes back to power and he starts threatening like he's going to attack Iran and drag us into it. At this point, Zbigniew Brzezinski even said if Netanyahu flies planes over Iraq to attack Iran, Obama should shoot them down over Iraq.

So I know Robert Kennedy says Brzezinski was the founder of the neoconservative movement, but no, he was never a neocon. And they hated each other sometimes. They worked together on Russia issues. He was a two-state solution guy and definitely not a Likudnik and not on Iran, especially. But so...

Obama was, I think, really worried. A lot of people were really worried that Netanyahu was going to start the war in his first term and drag him into it.

And so the way to prevent that was to create the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the John Kerry nuclear deal. That was the point of it. That was the point was we already have an NPT and we already have a safeguards agreement, but essentially everybody's pretending that they don't exist. The Western media is following the Likud party line that there's essentially nothing stopping Iran from making a nuke right now if we don't hit them.

So Obama said, fine, we'll just add another layer of deal on top of that. But the Iran deal was a way to keep Netanyahu from starting a war with Iran and dragging us in. Yes, although...

I feel like I think he was bluffing. I don't think Netanyahu really was going to do it back then. I think he did it here because he had Trump's permission. I'm not certain of that. I don't think I don't know if you know, but I don't know that it's really clear exactly. But I think at that time he was really just bluffing and was trying to get Obama to to do something, at least to roll back their program, if not completely eliminate it. But so what they did was the JCPOA said,

Trump called it the worst deal that any men ever signed or whatever. It's just not really true. I mean, what it did was it severely rolled back their nuclear program. So they poured concrete in their ARAK, that's A-R-A-K, their ARAK heavy water reactor. They severely restricted the number of centrifuges spinning at Natanz by two thirds, I believe it was. They turned the Fordo or the COM facility into a research only facility, no uranium production there. And then the deal is that

They wanted to, the American side wanted for Iran to export any stockpile of enriched nuclear material out of the country so that if they withdrew from the treaty and kicked the inspectors out of the country and started beating their chest and declared, now we're making a bomb, it would take them a year. This is what they call the breakout period. It would take them a year to have enough fissile material to make a single gun type nuke out of.

And so they wanted to make it that difficult. So they would have to ship out all their uranium to France and the French would turn it into fuel rods and ship it back and they would burn that in their heavy water reactor. Now, there's two routes to the nuclear bomb. Forget the H-bomb for a minute. We're just talking about fission bombs, atom bombs. The plutonium route, like the Nagasaki bomb, was already precluded because...

Even though their Hever water reactor produces plutonium waste, it's heavily polluted with other isotopes. And so you need a reprocessing facility to get all that out to make usable fuel. They don't have that reprocessing facility. The Russians had the right to come and get all their waste and take it back to Russia to be diluted down there. So there was no plutonium route to the bomb. Now, the uranium route to the bomb is interesting because...

And this is something that you may have been referring to about I make corrections when I'm wrong. I had overstated this on the Pierce Morgan show and on breaking points last week and two weeks ago. And so I was trying to fix that with this statement. And they did let me go back on breaking points to address it. That what I had said wrongly was that

You can't really make an implosion bomb that you could miniaturize out of uranium. That's not correct. You can. What you can't do is make a gun-type nuke out of plutonium. And I had overstated that. But my point more or less still stands because my point was that if Iran broke out and raced to a bomb in that one-year breakout capability...

It's virtually, like, unanimous among the experts that if they wanted to race and get a bomb as fast as they could, it would be a simple gun-type nuke, like the kind America dropped on Hiroshima, which is essentially a uranium slug fired into a uranium target, and it just...

causes a supercritical mass there. But to do that, it's too big to miniaturize and fit onto Iran's missiles in their nose cones or any of that. So if they had, if they raced to a nuke, they would have one that they could test in the desert, but they couldn't really deliver other than strapped to the back of a flatbed truck or like put it in an airliner or something, which they couldn't get to Israel and they couldn't use it. If they were to

Even make an implosion bomb with uranium, though, it would take years worth of testing and development to get the implosion system right to make it work. So they couldn't race toward a bomb if they wanted to make a bomb small enough to marry to a missile to be able to deliver to anyone. So in other words, even if they withdrew from the Dridi, kicked out the inspectors and started making nukes,

it's very likely that their first nuke or two would be simple, undeliverable gun-type nukes that would be not much more of a deterrent than their latent deterrent. So now Trump gets out of the deal in 2018 at Netanyahu's behest, and there were problems with the deal. It had sunset provisions in it that said, you know, after a certain period of time, you can increase your number of centrifuges again and these other things.

Now, I believe that if Trump had come in and told Netanyahu to pipe down in his first term, I mean, and had said to the Ayatollah, now, listen, I don't like this deal. It was my predecessor's deal and I want to improve it. Let's get along. Take it at face value. I came into office with this agreement. Let's see if we can improve it. Let's see if we can get rid of some of these sunset provisions. Let's see if we can find a way to renegotiate the deal and make it better. He didn't do that. He just withdrew.

And in consequence of that, it's actually part of the deal that Iran is allowed to stop abiding by some of the restrictions in the deal and still stay within the deal if America breaks its agreement first. And, um,

And so they did. They started enriching after Israel murdered their top weapons scientist, Fakhrizadeh, or pardon me, his top nuclear scientist. I don't know that he was a weapons scientist at all. Their top nuclear scientist in December of 20, they started enriching up to 20% again, which is still legitimate. They need 20% enriched uranium-235 for their medical isotope reactors. But then in April, the Israelis did a sabotage mission at Natanz and they bragged about it. They were the ones who did it. And in reaction to that,

The Iranians then started enriching up to 60% uranium-235. Now, you need really...

above 90 to make an effective uranium atom bomb it's technically possible to make one with above 80 and rich uranium-235. um Mark dubowitz says you can make one with 60 rich or m235 but I don't think that's really right but anyway what's the point of doing it then typically uh to 60 right good question because this is what you'll hear all the Hawks say Marco Rubio the secretary of state and all of them say over and over again oh yeah well what do they need the 60 for to negotiate away

That was why. They're trying to get America back in the deal. If they had wanted to race toward weapons-grade uranium, they could have just raced toward weapons-grade uranium and enriched it up to 90%. They're going up to 60% because it makes them closer. It means their breakout time is shorter, and they're trying to put pressure on the Americans to get back into the deal, which we already had and which they are still officially a part of.

And so that was why they were going up to 60%. What do you mean they're still officially a part of it? They're still officially a part because they signed the JCPOA with France and Britain, the United States, Russia, and China, all the permanent members of the UN Security Council. So they're still part of the JCPOA. It still is...

the law, basically. It's still the international law and their agreement. But as I said, there are subsections of the agreement itself that say that if America stops abiding by our part of it, they can stop abiding by some of the restrictions even while remaining inside the deal.

So they were really just, the purpose of the 60% was to try to force America back to the table. And Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, was so disingenuous. I saw him give a statement on the Sunday Morning News show last week, where I guess on this week, where he says, the only countries that have 60% uranium have nuclear weapons. Now, come on, man, that's just obfuscation.

If we're making nuclear weapons out of uranium, it's not at 60%, which all ours are plutonium bombs anyway. But he knows what he's doing when he says that, right? He wants you to understand that Iran is racing toward a nuke without actually claiming that because he knows it's really not true. And then there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the 60%. It was to negotiate away. But so now Trump gives them their deadline. They pass the deadline and...

I'm not exactly certain what happens, but Israel starts the war. Donald Trump comes in, what, a week into it, 10 days into it, and bombs Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. Isfahan is where they have the conversion facility to transform uranium ore and metal to gas and then back again. It has to be uranium hexafluoride gas is what they spin and enrich, and then they turn it back into metal.

And they bombed all three of those. And I don't know for certain the extent of the damage, although I did read a report by David Albright, who's a nuclear weapons expert, who talked about

They got commercial satellite footage, and he seemed to think that they had done significant damage to Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, and all the important nuclear facilities there. So in other words, Donald J. Trump called the Ayatollahs bluff. You say you have a latent nuclear deterrent, and I better not attack you, or else then you might make one, which he never said that outright, but that was clearly the implication of the Iranian program. All right, well, I'm bombing your program. So now what are you going to do?

And their other bluff was that they would shoot their mid-range missiles at our bases in the Gulf region. In Qatar, we have CENTCOM headquarters at the Al-Yudid airbase there, and our 5th Fleet is stationed at Bahrain. We have tens of thousands of army soldiers in Kuwait, and they were all essentially hostage to Iranian missiles. But when it came down to it, they didn't dare.

That was their bluff. We called their bluff and they didn't dare. What'd they do? They shot, Trump dropped 14 bombs on them. They fired 14 missiles at Qatar and they called him in advance and warned him, we're about to fire 14 missiles, get ready to shoot them down. In other words, a purely symbolic retaliation against the United States while they're still firing missiles at Tel Aviv.

He didn't dare to hit American forces in the Gulf, not this time at least, for probably out of fear of what Donald Trump would do. Now, this is the same Ayatollah who they say can't wait to cause the apocalypse and nuke Israel. Even if every last Iranian gets nuked off the face of the earth, he doesn't care because he wants the end of the world. And yet he doesn't dare pick a fight with Donald Trump. And telegraphs, I do not want to fight you every chance that he gets with the American superpower. So now where does that leave us? Either...

I've been right for 15, 20 years, warning that if we bomb them, that is the most likely thing to cause them to then now race for a nuke. Or Trump is right, and he has just degraded their program so severely that there's no point in even restarting it again. He's got the credible threat that he'll just start bombing it again if they try. And so his position seems to be, I think he said, I don't need a new nuclear deal because there's no nuclear there.

Now, I'm not certain that's true, that he's completely decimated what they have. But I guess as we're recording this, it very much remains to be seen what is the long-term reaction of the Iranians, whether they are now going to weaponize their latent program. They've already kicked all the inspectors out of the country and...

And I saw this headline, and I don't know the entire story here, but a lower cleric, not the Supreme Leader, but a lower cleric has now issued a fatwa for President Trump like they did to Salman Rushdie order on his life, which I know a great journalist named Ken Silva who's really put the lie to and showed and debunked

these kind of FBI hoaxes about these Iranian assassination plots against Trump. They're really not true. And Ken Silva is the guy's name. He's an excellent reporter from Headline USA and the Institute. We're going to publish his book about the assassination attempts against Trump that he's working on now. And he's really debunked those, but I don't think there's really much debunk in this other than

That this public statement came from a lower level cleric who I guess could be overridden by the Ayatollah if the Ayatollah would be so wise as to say actually we didn't mean that and try to find a way to move forward because a death threat against a very credible threat like that against the life of the President of the United States is the kind of thing.

to absolutely solidify American support for even further war against their country. Of course. A huge error for them to say that. The question is, who's the guy who issued it? Is it meaningful? Does it in any sense? Yeah, can it be walked back? Yeah, does he speak for the religious authorities of Iran or not? You know, I don't know the answer, but I agree. That's nuts. Don't do that. Yeah. And look, back to Brzezinski, he and Alexander Haig said in 1993...

you know, we should normalize relations with Iran. We should build an oil pipeline across that country and get along with them. The Ayatollah keeps preferring that modernists and reformers win the presidency. You know, Ahmadinejad was a big...

counter to that, but Rafsanjani and Khatami and these other guys, Rouhani and these other presidents that we've had, they want to get along with the United States. I mean, Tucker, if you're the Ayatollah, what are you going to do with a problem like the USA? We're the global empire, armed to the teeth with H-bombs. And

We do nothing but dictate to them all day, and they do what they have to to survive, essentially. And this is why the Israelis and their partisans always have to resort to this propaganda about how, no, the Ayatollah wants the end times. He wants to force the 12th Imam to come back and blow up the world and all of these things, because they essentially have to resort to those claims in order to survive.

you know, obfuscate and to confuse the issue of just why wouldn't Iran's government act in their national interest as close as they can for their own short-term survival, which is the obvious correct way and medium-term survival, which is obviously the correct way to look at it. Is Iran the last government on the list? Yes. Okay. So it's Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, meaning especially, you know, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Nasrallah. Nasrallah is dead. Um,

Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, which we've been at war in Somalia since 2001. It's the longest war in American history. That's a whole other interview for you. And Sudan, at least the CIA broke off the south from the north, and they've had a regime change there. Luckily, we didn't go to war against Sudan. And then last on the list was Iran. So let's say there is regime change in Iran, and the point of this is not to stop their nuclear program. That's like absurd. Yeah.

The point is to change the government there by force. Let's say that happens. Not a single one of the countries you just listed has been a success, I think we can say. Hasn't helped the United States, hasn't helped the people of that country, hasn't helped the region. It's crazier than it was 20 years ago by a lot. So what happens if Iran gets regime change?

Well, then Osama bin Laden throws a party in hell, first of all, right? Again, doing the bin Ladenites dirty work there. You know, the Israelis were posting pictures then palling around with the Shah of Pahlavi's son saying, we're just going to parachute him in there.

And his royal majesty will take over because that's the American way is installing royal monarchs over people. I think he's in the U.S. Chalabi's, not Chalabi, sorry, Pahlavi. Same difference. Yeah, exactly. Is there like a groundswell of popular support for him to come back and establish a monarchy? I sincerely doubt it. You know, they talk about putting the Mujadini cult in there too, which this crazy communist terrorist cult, they kidnap people's children and-

uh, you know, forced them to be celibate and all this like total heaven's gate cult type stuff was this group that had helped with the Iranian revolution. Then they weren't, went to work for Saddam Hussein then and helped Saddam crush the Shiite revolution, uh, uh, insurrection in 91. Um,

And then Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney took possession of them when America invaded Iraq and then turned them over to the Israelis who used them as intelligence cutouts, usually to deliver false claims against Iran and their nuclear program. And they're now kept safe at an American base in Albania. And they have talked for years about somehow, like, believe in their own BS about how somehow they could use the MEK program

To do a regime change in Iran, that there would be some groundswell of support for them. I mean, we're talking like total kooks here. What was the celibacy part? Control. Control.

So they demand celibacy from their followers? Oh, yeah. And like any member has to raise their hand to speak like kindergarten. They kidnap their children and take them away to keep them under total control. It's a real sick call. The MEK, I mean, aren't there members of Congress and various administration officials who are dealing with them? Yep. And you take money from them and speak at their conferences and all of that. Actually? Oh, yeah. Including, I really like Dana Rohrabacher, but he's one of them.

And quite a few of those guys have been toeing the line for the MBK. Is this the group that Pompeo was connected with? I believe so, yeah. And then most of the time, the propaganda that they push are total hoaxes. I mean, just a few weeks ago, right, like one week before the bombing started, maybe two weeks, the NCRI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is their front group,

put out a thing saying, hey, look, satellite pictures of this new base in Iran, which we swear is a nuclear weapons facility. And that went nowhere. It was just some Israeli propaganda that they funneled through this group. But then the CIA didn't vouch for that. And it wasn't one of the targets that was bombed in the recent campaign or anything. This is like a wasteland of like deception and shifting alliances and broken promises and shattered dreams. I mean, like everything you've said for the past two, whatever hours it's been, it's

is so depressing and also confusing, but more than anything, utterly divorced from America's national interest. None of this has anything to do with what's happening in New York City, Wright or Eugene, Oregon or anywhere. And I just wonder, do you, since you work on this full time, do you imagine a time in our lifetimes where the attention of the U.S. government is drawn back to the United States? Some attempt is made to improve life here.

Over their dead bodies, I mean, figuratively speaking, that like, yeah, it'll have to be a coalition of Americans who just will not stand for it anymore. I mean, we're already at the point, Tucker, where they would much prefer to back Bin Ladenite suicide bombers and fly Predator and Reaper drones around than send the 3rd Infantry Division anywhere. They know we won't stand for it, right? Iraq War II, I think, was the last gasp for these large-scale...

Boots on the ground.

for foreign combat without an official declaration of war from the Congress, which they know they'll never get. And these are guys who are just saying, enough of this. We're not doing this anymore. And they saw their boys die over there for real. The Guard got screwed. Yeah. I saw it. I mean, people don't remember, but before 2001, really 2003, the National Guard wasn't a joke exactly, but people did make fun of it. Like weekend warriors, they're not really in the military. They're like the secondary reserve soldiers.

Yeah, I mean, exactly. And then the next thing you know, like, they're fighting a real war. Yeah. And I don't think that they signed up for that. Yeah. No, they didn't. They clearly didn't. You joined the National Guard to sandbag rivers during floods. Totally. And put out forest fires. But then to get, you know, benefits and all that. I mean, whether that's a good system or not is another question, but that's the deal they signed. That's right. And the next thing you know, these guys from, like...

Every little town in America are like fighting a hot war in Iraq. I mean, I saw it. I was like, wow, the guardsmen are doing that? Yep. And getting suicide bombed, right? Going through the absolute worst of it. Oh, for sure. With the rest of the guys. Yep. Do you know what percentage of Americans killed in Iraq were guardsmen? No, I don't. But it was not insignificant. Yeah, no, it was plenty. Yeah.

There's 4,500 troops overall, Marines and soldiers and airmen died. And then, you know, another couple of thousand contractors and then high tens of thousands. A couple of thousand contractors? Yeah.

And many tens of thousands wounded. And there's a study at the Costa War Project. This is now many years old, Tucker. This is five, six, seven years old or something. They did a study where they had determined that 30,000 veterans had killed themselves since coming home. I know one. Yeah. No, I believe that completely. Yeah. It's really messed up.

So just to close out the second half of my final question, you said, I asked, will our leaders ever turn their attention to their actual job, which is in protecting and improving America? And you said over their dead bodies. But are you hopeful at all that change is coming? Yeah. Look, I mean, I think my most important mission is

As director of the Libertarian Institute and editorial director of Antiwar.com and all that, he's reaching out to the MAGA right, the America First right. You can't have a limited republic and a world empire. You can't have a constitutional government and a bill of rights that

And have your government be the most powerful force on the planet attempting to dominate the entire old world. There's just completely contrary forms of governmental systems to have. And, you know, we mentioned William F. Buckley. Buckley wrote in 1952 in the Commonweal magazine that because of the emergency of the Soviet Union, Americans must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores, even with Truman at the reins of it all.

in order to wage the Cold War and prevent the Soviet Union from taking over the world. Well, the Soviet Union is dead and gone, right? The red flag came down on Christmas Day, 1991. And somehow we still must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores, even with Obama or Biden at the reins of it all, in order to what? To prevent the Ayatollah from threatening Israel?

Well, that doesn't sound like the global threat of Soviet Stalinist communism to me. It sounds far dumbed down, especially when you're talking about a power that, again, we could have normalized relations with a long time ago if the Israelis hadn't stopped us from doing so. It's just intolerable. And look, and I think American right-wingers know his conservative sons who went and died in these wars.

Liberals are no good in a fight anyway. They can monger war all they want, but does anybody think they're going to go and fight? No. So if the American right, you know, the Colin Powell doctrine said, it was the Casper Weinberger, Colin Powell doctrine said, the American people must be united behind any war before we launch it.

And then we better know exactly what the exit strategy is, exactly what the stakes for victory are, so we can go in there and win. He was so attacked by the neocons. Oh, they hated him for that. And then so W. Bush said, forget the Powell Doctrine. You know what? We don't need America United. We just need the right. As long as the right is all hyped up on let's go and kick butt, then we can do what we want. Then Obama showed that when he tried to get the right to line up behind him and go to Syria in 2013 over that fake sarin attack in Ghouta,

They said no. In fact, there are soldiers, these were memes that went around, soldiers holding up signs that said, I didn't join the Marine Corps, I didn't join the Army to fight. I know Marines are not soldiers, troops holding up signs saying, I didn't join the Army to fight a civil war for al-Qaeda in Syria. And they had to stop. And the American right was not willing to follow Barack Obama into battle. Same for Joe Biden. And I would say it should be the same thing here and no matter who the president is.

This is the era of the phony wars. This is America's attempt to maintain a global hegemony that we should not have in the first place, which is essentially murder-suicide to our own society anyway. And we can't maintain it anyway. And we can't. Even if it was a good idea, even if it was helping us, we've reached the limits of our resources. That's right. People are so afraid that China is going to take over the world if we can't. But we have a $37 trillion national debt, and we can't do it. If we can't afford it, they can't either.

So we can have a multipolar world where we figure out, you know, and Donald Trump himself said in his first few days in power here, he said, you know what? I don't want to pivot from the Middle East to great power conflict.

I don't want to have conflict with anyone. We should be able to get along with Russia and with China and with the Middle Eastern powers and just have a century of prosperity ahead of us. That's America first. And I believe, Tucker, that Donald Trump could get on a plane and go to Tehran right now. He could go from there to Moscow, to Beijing, and then Pyongyang, and he could come home and be Trump the Great and spend the rest of his term overseeing

the retrenchment of American power and the building up of peace and prosperity here. Yep. It makes me sad to hear that. Of course, I strongly agree with that. That's why I campaigned for him. But, you know, there are people who don't want that in Washington. Yeah. But you know what? That's what the people of the country want. That's who voted for him. I agree. You know, they say, well, there are these factions of war hawks who supported him too. That's true. And they have money.

But who turned out to vote for him? The people who turned out to vote for him were the people who heard America first. Yeah. And that means defend America first. That doesn't mean be George Bush, the selfish jerk, and go around and do whatever you want. It means leave the world to hell alone. Take care of our problems. I couldn't agree more. Scott Horton, author of, among others, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. Thank you. Thank you, Tucker. I appreciate it.

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