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

Scott Horton is the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of The Scott Horton Show, co-host of Provoked, and for the past three decades a staunch critic of U. S. military interventionism. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep478-sc See below for timestamps, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Supplemental Notes & Corrections: https://lexfridman.com/scott-horton-links-and-notes/ Scott’s X: https://x.com/scotthortonshow Scott Horton Show: https://youtube.com/@scotthortonshow Provoked Show: https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Scott’s Substack: https://scotthortonshow.com/ Scott’s Website: https://scotthorton.org/ Scott’s Books: https://amzn.to/3T9Qg7y Libertarian Institute: https://libertarianinstitute.org/ Antiwar.com: https://antiwar.com/ SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Allio Capital: AI-powered investment app that uses global macroeconomic trends. Go to https://alliocapital.com/ https://lexfridman.com/s/allio_capital-ep478-sc Hampton: Community for high-growth founders and CEOs. Go to https://joinhampton.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/hampton-ep478-sc BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/betterhelp-ep478-sc AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drink. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/ag1-ep478-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (00:35) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (09:14) – From the Cold War to the War on Terror (1:02:13) – Iraq War 1 (1:30:17) – Bin Laden (2:29:39) – Afghanistan War (2:44:35) – Iraq War 2 (3:10:59) – Military Industrial Complex (3:50:25) – Scott’s life story (4:20:15) – Iraq War 2 (continued) (5:11:43) – Syria (6:05:01) – Iraq War 3 (6:17:28) – Somalia (6:22:56) – Iran (7:12:41) – Israel-Palestine (9:02:19) – Cold War 2.0 PODCAST LINKS: – Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast – Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr – Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 – RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ – Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 – Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Scott Horton. He's the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of NTWar.com, co-host of Provoked, and host of The Scott Horton Show, on which he has done over 6,000 interviews since 2003. He's the author of Provoked, Enough Already, and other books and articles that have, over the past three decades, criticized US foreign policy, especially in regard to military interventionism and the military industrial complex. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast.

• 0:45Lex Fridman?

  We got Alio Capital for investment, Hampton for connecting with founders, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. They're all here in one place. I try to make them interesting, but if you must skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. Oh, and to get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Alio Capital, an investment app designed by people who understand global markets

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  and the macroeconomics of a world that is increasingly becoming divided, politically, socially, and economically. Alio is powered by Altitude AI, which identifies shifts in inflation, interest rates, and global risk, and based on that, adapts portfolios in real time. I use it. Took me a few minutes to set up. It is obviously the future that AI should be integrated deeper and deeper in your investment processes, whether you're hands-on or hands-off investor. I'm very much hands-off. Set it and forget it. And in that case, certainly AI needs to be part of the "set it and forget it" way of life.

• 2:11Lex Fridman?

  One of the things I've come to understand more and more that the 21st century is not going to be defined by the economy of one nation. It is not going to be a unipolar world. It is going to be a large collections of nations cooperating and competing.

• 2:27Lex Fridman?

  Trading and starting conflicts. And through all of that turmoil and tension, it is difficult to know what to do with your money. So you don't get screwed over. And that's why I'm happy there's people like Allio that once again, look at the global markets. Download their app in the App Store, Google Play, or text Lex to 511511. That's A L L I O capital. Text Lex to 511511. Investing involves risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not guaranteed results. See terms and conditions. Text fees may apply.

• 3:07Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Hampton, a private community for high growth founders and CEOs. I recently got a chance to have dinner, a couple of times, actually, with a few CEOs that are local here in Austin. And well, one, I should say, they're all incredible people. But two, directly and indirectly through osmosis, I begin to understand how difficult the journey of a founder is. Of somebody that builds something in the world, how exciting it is, but also how challenging it is. And I think nobody really knows that as well as other founders. And so you have to find ways to connect with other founders.

• 3:47Lex Fridman?

  If you want to build something special in the world, to get advice, to get strength, to get wisdom, to make friends. It's not enough to look online because online there's full of BS, surface level information. Even talking to any of the L L M's is not going to be enough. The real conversations have to happen between founders, between people who have been in the arena, as the famous speech goes. I just speak with them privately, behind closed doors. And Hampton arranges that in-person group meetings. It's a tight structure for the meetings and there's no performative bullshit. They understand how busy people are. They want to have extremely high value connections with people that are trying to

• 4:30Lex Fridman?

  build epic shit at a very fast rate. Groups are forming in many of the wonderful cities of the United States. New York City, Austin, San Francisco, LA, Miami, Denver, and other top cities nationwide. Stop messing around and go connect with other crazy people like you that want to build something awesome in this world. Find your group at joinhampton.com/lex. That's joinhampton.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.

• 5:13Lex Fridman?

  I think as we have learned from the GPT-4O saga, where people were in pain, legitimately so, when they were shut down, they missed it. That shows that there's a real connection that's being formed increasingly so with LLM systems. But there is nevertheless, in the realm of therapy, sycophantic behavior in LLMs. So you really do need to connect with a licensed professional therapist, human therapist, if you want to work through some of the Jungian shadow, some of the corners of the darkness and shine a light on it. Over 350 million messages, chat, phone, video sessions, 35,000 licensed therapists,

• 5:58Lex Fridman?

  4.4 million people got help through BetterHelp. So check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. I feel like there's a big business theme. So we already talked about the complexity, the hardship, the excitement, the turmoil, the madness of being a founder and creating something new in this world. But once you take those early steps of creation, you have to actually build up the machine that scales. The machine within the machine that makes the whole thing run,

• 6:41Lex Fridman?

  that does the financials, the human resources, the inventory and supply, the e-commerce, if you do that kind of thing, and all the messy things that make a business run. For that, you have to use the best tools available. NetSuite is amazing for that. You should check out Reddit or anywhere else for reviews. People love it. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Anyway, I drink it for the multivitamin and for the deliciousness. And it makes me feel like I have my life together.

• 7:24Lex Fridman?

  Otherwise, I feel like it's all falling apart. I'm doing a lot of crazy physical stuff. I've been under a lot of strain mentally for a variety of reasons. That's life. I'm sure as it goes on, it will continue so and probably will get harder. Or at least the ups will get higher and the lows will get lower. And then it'll be over too soon. And maybe it'll be over tonight and tomorrow and I have to accept that and I have to meditate on it. All of that is just the human condition. Best we can do is try to hold on and do the basic low-hanging fruit of getting our vitamins and minerals, eating healthy, doing a little bit of exercise, trying to minimize stress

• 8:09Lex Fridman?

  and surround yourself with good people, or at least see the good in the people and the situation that you're surrounded by. All of the things I contemplate as I sip on a cold AG1 after a long run in the Austin heat. All of it. The run, the AG1, life, everything, the people I meet on the run. The whole thing just makes me truly happy. Anyway, they'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com/lex.

• 8:46Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, here's Scott Horton.

• 9:14Lex Fridman?

  I think one of the darkest, the most disturbing chapters of modern American history is everything that happened around conducting the so-called wars on terror. I think, to me, it was a wake-up call. I think it was a wake-up call to a lot of Americans in understanding and seeing the military-industrial complex and seeing what the government's capacity is to mislead us into war and to continuously erode basic human freedoms. If I can, allow me to list some of the estimates from the Cost of War Project from Brown University, just so we understand the costs of these wars. The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen led to an estimated

• 9:58Lex Fridman?

  900,000 to 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths. And the cost, in terms of dollars, was $8 trillion, with 2.2 trillion on Afghanistan and 2.9 trillion on Iraq and Syria. And the result on every front, as we'll talk about, I think it's fair to say that did not accomplish its purpose. And in fact, if we even just look at the human toll of the people of Afghanistan, I was also looking at the numbers before the war and after the war. Percent of Afghans facing food insecurity went from 62% to 92%.

• 10:39Lex Fridman?

  Percent of children under 5 experiencing acute malnutrition went from 9% to 50%. Percent of Afghans living in poverty went from 80% to 97%. So it was extremely costly for Americans, and it was extremely costly for Afghans. As you do in your book Enough Already, can you lay out how, the full history, the full context of how it is that the American people were misled into this war on terror that was so costly in so many ways?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me again. It's great to be with you on the show. One important statistic that you could have mentioned from the Cost of War Project as well is 37 million people displaced from their homes. Right, and the same group, it was, Lex, I'm telling you, it was at least five years ago. God, it's the future now. This may have been seven, eight years ago that they did a study that determined that 30,000 American servicemen have blown their own brains out since then, well, one way or the other, deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it is. So, talk about the cost of war. That's far beyond, you know, the actual deaths in the war. We had about 4,500 in Iraq and about 2,500 in Afghanistan of just official airmen, Marines,

• 11:53Speaker 01

  and soldiers on the ground killed, plus contractors and all that.

• 11:57Lex Fridman?

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

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know what, too? Like, you would have guessed this probably, right? You probably know more about this subject than me. There's a New York Times headline, I think, yesterday was, oh, my God, look at, or maybe it was the Wall Street Journal, "Look at this insane list of the kinds of drugs that all these depressed soldiers get put on. Here's 15 different psychoactive drugs, all to temper the side effects of the others" and whatever, where, you know, and then they say that this could lead to suicide because, of course, we know that, right? They even have to say that on TV sometimes. Some of these drugs cause suicidal or homicidal obsessions and this kind of thing. We know that's one of the side effects. So, some percentage of these guys might have made it if the government healthcare system

• 12:48Speaker 01

  hadn't helped them in the end, is another bitter irony, you know? The whole thing is just, you know, you said we got nothing out of it. I said half in jest, but it is serious, but it's also, it shows by relief what a disaster this is, that the only thing we did get out of it, like, literally, was advancements in prosthetic limbs for amputees.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  Whether they lost their limb in war or otherwise. If you want to boil it down, what did anyone get out of this? Other than, you know, some people got a dividend check from Lockheed or that kind of thing. But that's not to the benefit of the society whatsoever. So that does not count. You want to talk about what society got out of it? What America got out of it? We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before. That's it.

• 13:32Lex Fridman?

  I don't think there's any more clear illustrations of the complete failure of the military industrial complex. How did this begin? How do we get into this?

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so I'll try to tell the somewhat fast version, although Lex has a kiss of death every time I say that.

• 13:45Lex Fridman?

  Please.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  We'll go through.

• 13:46Lex Fridman?

  Please go the slow version.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Okay, so the slow version is. I'll start with the end of Vietnam. Okay. So one major aspect of the end of Vietnam was that Richard Nixon felt like he had to bribe the military industrial complex some other way. And so one of the things that he did was he turned to the Shah, Reza Pahlavi in Iran, and asked him to increase arms sales. And I guess I could go back. I think everybody knows that the CIA helped with the coup of 1953 to reinstall the Shah, who was the son of the last dictator and had already been in for a while. And they put him back in. And so now this is, and that was in 53. So now this is in the early 70s, 20 years later. And Nixon's saying, hey, you know, it'd really help me would be if you would buy a bunch of fighter jets.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  So I think it's kind of notorious, right? That Iran still has F4s and F14s. That's where they got them from, was the Nixon and Ford administration, this push to do that. And the Shah was apparently pretty obsessed with looking very first world with his very fancy first world army that he couldn't really afford. And it helped to destabilize his regime somewhat. And then, I don't know the full extent of America turning on him before the revolution. But I know that by the time of the revolution in 1979, he was sick with cancer and very sick. And the Americans secretly knew that CIA knew that, you know, but it was not public knowledge. It was whatever, stage four or whatever, he was doomed. And so they knew the revolution was coming and they were trying to figure out how to handle it. And there was, the revolution was coming anyway. And it wasn't just, there's going to be a change of leadership.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  When we say revolution here, we mean mobs in the street demanding an end to the old regime in huge numbers, right? A very large scale popular revolution. And they're trying to figure out how to get the handle on it. Some of Carter's critics said, what he should have done was had the military massacre all those people. That'll shut them up or like, you know what I mean? They're trying to figure out what to do. Well, the CIA and the State Department told Jimmy Carter, listen, this Ayatollah Khomeini, he's not so bad. We know this guy. He was part of a group of Shiite clergy who helped to agitate against Mossadegh in 1953. And so we have at least some contact and we think that we can deal with him.

• 15:54Lex Fridman?

  Did they actually believe that?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 15:57Lex Fridman?

  Is this incompetence or malevolence? Like, how does this whole process happen? That you go into this process of regime change and keep installing people that are creating more and more instability and destruction in the world? And then you use that to then justify invading and starting wars? How does this happen?

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot of things. And the whole time we're in our discussion here, we'll be talking about a massive conspiracy of interests at play all the time. But this is, and I've never read a bunch of books about this. I probably should, at least interview these guys. You'd be interested in this. If you don't already know, the subject is public choice theory. It's kind of a branch of libertarian political economy studies that says that essentially, one of its major aspects is that there really is no national interest, the way you and I might think of it, sitting here hashing it out across the table. Because what becomes the national interest is the interest of the people in charge of making the decisions for the nation. And so they all ultimately are private choices, aren't they? And the national interest becomes subsumed by what's good for me now. And so

• 17:06Speaker 01

  telling all my bosses they're all wrong is not good for me now. And on the very basic level, you know, I've read quite a few books, just from former insiders like Daniel Ellsberg and other people like that. Ellsberg tells the story of where he's the deputy undersecretary of state for making up nonsense, or whatever it is, or defense of the, no, no, state, I believe. And his whole job is making his boss look good, whether he agrees with him or not. And then the hope is that next year, he'll be in his boss's position, and his boss will move up one. And then his job will be making his boss look good then. And how, and he explains how the truth and reality just gets washed out of this. Right? Another famous one, or should be famous, is my friend David Hardy, who wrote the best book about the Waco massacre. He's a great lawyer, and he had been a former Interior Department

• 17:51Speaker 01

  cop. And he said, there's truth, and there's falsity. Like, that's the world we live in. But in government work, there's our position. And our position takes place on an entirely different plane than truth and falsity. Our position is the thing a bunch of people in a room agreed that they would say and do as they can in committee, like come to a consensus. And then a lot of times, once those decisions are made, now to go back on that decision means that you are attempting to disgrace the people who led the decision making on that thing and say that they were wrong and they shouldn't have done the thing they did. Now they gotta do this instead. And so you see just an absolute unwillingness to make change.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  And this is something that capitalism ultimately, like everybody's got ego problems, but ultimately the boss has to look at an accounting sheet and say, this isn't working. So I'm gonna have to swallow my pride or go out of business, right? In government, it's not like that. The worse they do, the better off they are. This is why it was the soldiers in Vietnam called the military itself, the army itself, the self-licking ice cream cone. Because it means that they cause chaos, but then chaos is their job, is to go and fix that. And so, you know, and if you're a government bureaucrat getting paid way above the market, then what do you want to do? Go get a job? A great example of this I cite in the book is at the end of the Afghan war, there are

• 19:15Speaker 01

  multiple military officers, like not too, too high, but like high enough to be quoted by the news saying, well, now that that's over, we're looking for other things to do. So we're gonna pivot to Africa and go find some Islamists there. Because we are looking for ways to stay globally engaged. Because of course, that's their interest to do. Whether that's good for Africa or good for the American people is just, it's kind of a separate question that they're not really dealing with. And so I think that's a huge part of it. I mean, one of the things was William Sullivan said that, well, Khomeini, he's like the Iranian Gandhi. Well, first of all, he's not a pacifist. But second of all, didn't Gandhi kick the British Empire out of India? So what are you saying?

• 19:57Speaker 01

  You're deliberately putting in a guy who's gonna limit your influence there and it's gonna declare independence for you, from you. How are you gonna handle that? Like, they don't seem to think this through. And I have to say, it's one of the great disappointments of growing up is you find out that the rest of the adults aren't so smart. They're just regular dudes like you. And I think a lot of times, State Department people might have very advanced knowledge, doesn't mean they have very advanced wisdom. You know, there's something else Daniel Ellsberg talks about is... When you have access to classified information, then you don't pay any attention to anybody who doesn't. Because what do they know? You know, all these things that they couldn't possibly be taking into account. So you immediately close your circle of people who you listen to.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you, a great example of this from my own experience was I interviewed a CIA analyst, apparently a pretty important executive at one time in the terror war named Cynthia Storber. And I asked her, I forget if it was in the interview or not, I hope I'm not like speaking out of school. I believe it was in the interview that I asked her about, well, I can't remember the exact context, but I asked her about, well, don't you read Patrick Coburn? And she goes, who's Patrick Coburn? And I go, who's Patrick Coburn? Patrick Coburn is the most important Anglo in Iraq. He's the one who understands all of this stuff more and better than all of y'all. And he writes in The Independent, you can read it for free. Just register with your email address, for God's sake, man. I can't believe.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  And she's like, who even is that?

• 21:27Lex Fridman?

  So a lack of basic curiosity, a rigor of research, understanding the situation.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  And she could know a lot of secret things, but without understanding what he understands, she does not understand what she needs to know. I can promise you that much, you know?

• 21:42Lex Fridman?

  I think it's a basic lack of humility. The ego grows, the power grows, then you, to self preserve, to maintain power, you start deluding yourself in that, in those closed rooms. You start shutting yourself off from the reality of the world. And then as, as your own delusion drifts, you're more incentivized to grow that delusion, incentivized to hide, to do secrecy. And then it just goes off. And that's, that's why I was hoping you could speak to, more to Daniel Ellsberg. So the importance of somebody like that. So it sounds like, if we think about the machinery of how this happens, it feels like heroic whistleblowers are essential to this process. If we talk about Snowden and Assange and one of the OGs is Daniel Ellsberg,

• 22:27Lex Fridman?

  who, just reading here, was an American military analyst, economist and renowned whistleblower, best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Can you tell me about who he was and the importance of him?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, well, he's an absolutely brilliant guy. I'm proud to say I was a friend, you know, for 10, 15 years there. I don't know, quite a while. So he endorsed my first two books, I'm very proud to say, and. And he did not have a chance to reprovoked, unfortunately. But I know I would have liked it because we were email buddies and I know that he thought very much along the same lines as me and John Mearsheimer and others, you know, as, as people are probably familiar, I think we'll get more to that. But um, on that issue, he was great. But um, he was a brilliant genius and, and he was a nuclear war planner. That was his second book was called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  And he had liberated a bunch of documents about nuclear war as well. But he had decided with his quote unquote co-conspirator that they should just focus on Vietnam first. That's the thing that it matters the most right now. And that was the Pentagon Papers. And then all the papers that he had hidden away, he gave them to his brother and his brother lost them. And so then he decided later, you know what? I remember enough of this stuff that I can go ahead and just write from memory. And he was so brilliant, dude. I mean, I don't know what his IQ was, but I know his father built the first assembly line for the atom bomb. And they asked him if he would do the same for the H bomb and he refused for moral reasons. So that was his background in the first place. And he's just such a great guy, man.

• 24:02Lex Fridman?

  So he's a person who was able to see the situation. Like you mentioned, like that room. And in that room, understand that there's some shit that's wrong that's going on here. And to be able to speak up.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And he was at Rand, right? His job was writing. And this was when Rand, I guess, was much more important and very closely tied to the Pentagon and their whole thing was like writing up game theory, nuclear warfare plans. One of the things he did was he found out and, and Jack Kennedy had to fight like mad. They had to go back and forth over and over and over to even get the war plan from the Pentagon. And they finally got the war plan from the Pentagon. And it said, if we have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China. So that would be, I don't know if that includes all the Warsaw Pact, but it includes all the republics and China. And the thinking was that. If America and the Soviet Union destroy each other and Europe, well, we'll be damned

• 24:55Speaker 01

  if we're gonna leave Earth to those dirty Chicoms. So we're gonna kill all them too. And that was the thinking and thing. And it was Ellsberg told Kennedy that and Kennedy told Ellsberg to make sure and force the Pentagon to rewrite the plan and narrow that thing down. So that's part of the guy's background, where he comes from. I beg people to read the Pentagon. It's called Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and Pentagon Papers, and then also The Doomsday Machine. And by the way, his first book Secrets begins with his first day on the job. I was joking around earlier. He's Deputy Undersecretary of State for whatever it was. Was I can't remember if it was State or Defense. Maybe it was Defense. It had to have been Defense. Forgive me for before. And then the first thing that happens when

• 25:37Speaker 01

  he clocks in that day for his job is the thing starts coming across the teletype. Ships attacked in the Tonkin Gulf. And then he's reading, oh, never mind, that was a mistake. And then he sees the president run with it anyway. And now the historian Gareth Porter says that actually McNamara lied to BJ and he can prove it. I can't cite all the chapter and verse, but I trust Gareth. He's great. And he says it actually was McNamara lied to BJ when they knew that it was a mistake.

• 26:05Lex Fridman?

  And the same thing happened again and again. You take a little piece of information and run with them in order to justify war.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:15Lex Fridman?

  And that's gonna be a theme.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 26:16Lex Fridman?

  What was, what was important in the Pentagon Papers? What are some key ideas?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so the Pentagon Papers, first of all, was, and, and he wrote this while he was working at RAN, that he had full top secret clearance, and they were commissioned by Secretary of Defense McNamara to write a real secret, top secret history of the Vietnam War and the entire history of our involvement in Indochina since the end of the Second World War. And so that was what they did, was they wrote like Eyes Only for the Secretary of Defense type material. So it had everything in there. And Ellsberg was in charge of writing it, along with Leslie Gelb, who shut his mouth and went along and later became the Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a good dog, right? But anyway, they were the ones who wrote it together. And Ellsberg was brave enough to liberate the thing. And he tried to leak it to the Senate over and over and over again. Mike Ravel eventually started reading it into the record.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And then finally, the New York Times got the courage to start publishing the thing. And it showed that they knew that they couldn't win all along. They knew that the South Vietnamese government could not stand, they did not have popular consent, that the insurgency in the South was not just based on support from the North, but their own indigenous revolution against what they see, you know, as intolerable foreign intervention and wanted to force this out. And it's funny because McNamara later says, that I guess he didn't read the Pentagon Papers, that, no, we were just sure that it was the capitalists versus the communists. Like all this stuff about they didn't want to be ruled over foreign white devils. And that never occurred to us, you know, like, come on.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  You know, as Chomsky said, come on, America invaded South Vietnam. The government that was inviting us to stay was the government that we put in there, or at least after we overthrew the one we didn't like, the one we put in there. No different than, as we're going to talk about, Hamid Karzai inviting us to please stay in Afghanistan. It's like, come on, who's zooming who here? But so it showed, and that was the deal. And that was why it was such a big deal and how he made Nixon's enemies list and all these things, even though it didn't really expose Nixon, it exposed LBJ and the predecessors. But it was a huge shock that they had been lying to us and lying to us and lying to us deliberately, knowing that this is gotta be somebody else's problem, right? There's a phone call of LBJ saying to a Republican senator friend of his,

• 28:35Speaker 01

  that I can't be the first president to lose a war. So, right, he's just going to retire first and make it Nixon's problem, right? Same as George W. Bush said, oh, the end of Iraq? Well, that'll just have to be up to other presidents to decide. Not my responsibility. All I did was do it. You know, and that's how they are. And they have, that's their, this is also part of the economics of democracy too, where they have such, and I'm not arguing for the opposite, but I'm just saying the reality is you have such short terms of office. You have very high time preference, right? Instead of like working on long-term projects about what's the future of mankind going to look like 100 years from now, you're looking at a much shorter time horizon, you know,

• 29:17Speaker 01

  including who's going to finance your next election so that you'll have any say so whatsoever. And as Yoda and Palpatine agree that like all who have power are afraid to lose it. Because what if the other guy had it instead? It would be worse. Everybody knows that, which is of course a huge part of the story of the American empire here. You know?

• 29:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, but fundamentally that's cowardly. Right? So what we want from leaders, from great leaders is courage. And courage means making difficult decisions that are going to make the world a better place. Long term, the country, a better country long term. And that means if you start a war, that means understanding the full cost of that war and how it's going to have to end. And then if you understand the full cost of war, you're not going to start it.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:01Lex Fridman?

  Right? So how does, how do we go from the CIA, 1979, the Shah, Ayatollah, Nixon? What is the thread that now starts inching towards the 90s?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And Right.

• 30:15Lex Fridman?

  Towards 9/11 in Iraq?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  I know, there's so much, but we're going to do it, man. So here's what happens. America goes ahead and allows Ayatollah get on the plane in Paris, France and go home. And I remember even as a kid saying, but aren't the French our friends? Wouldn't they have checked with us before doing that? In fact, I just recently found the clip of Peter Jennings interviewing him. And the smartest thing Peter Jennings can think of to say is, so how do you feel on your triumphant return? Mr. Ayatollah? Right? Which USA is just completely aiding and abetting, right? These are shots they called and made happen, right? They sent him home to inherit the thing. And then they did work with him. People forget, man, and I was just very young at that time.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  But I, you know, was raised kind of in the atmosphere of all of this. And even back then, people conflated the revolution itself with the hostage crisis as just one story at all is spoken in one breath. But in fact, the revolution was in February of 1979. And the hostage crisis didn't break out until November. So what was happening in the meantime? Well, one of the things was the Americans were warning the new Iranian regime about threats from the new dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had just overthrown the government in a bloody coup d'etat. No revolution there. And you can watch the video of this. Have you ever seen the video? Saddam's overthrowing Iraq and he's got a huge stadium of guys. And he just starts calling names and everybody whose name he calls has to go out back and get shot.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Like it's gnarly, man.

• 31:42Lex Fridman?

  I think that video is a dark study of human nature.

• 31:48Lex Fridman?

  It's terrifying.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Oh, it is. It's ugly, man.

• 31:50Lex Fridman?

  Because everybody is afraid. And of there's a disgusting face that Saddam Hussein has.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know.

• 31:57Lex Fridman?

  I don't know if there's a sadistic.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Sure. He was a psychopath, man. No question. He was a brute of a dictator, right? There's a lot of El Presidentes in the world. Not all of them like train their sons to torture people from the time they're young and stuff.

• 32:11Lex Fridman?

  Oh, fuck. All the cowards in that room. But then you have to ask yourself, what would you do if you were in that room?

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've already been bested at that point. I mean, they could all rush the stage, but that ain't gonna do them any good, you know?

• 32:23Lex Fridman?

  But before you how did you get to that room?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:26Lex Fridman?

  And then that's why you have to give props to whistleblowers. You have to give props to people that stand up and risk their life in situations like that, which in those parts of the world is even harder than it is in the United States of America.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  And you know what? By the way, I usually forget to mention this when I tell this story. Takes another few seconds to mention it. Saddam Hussein had been groomed by the CIA since the 1950s, on and off, and he had been part of different dictator regimes on and off. He'd been in exile in Cairo for a little while and this kind of thing. And then in the seventies, leading up to the coup, I think it was really closer to the Soviet Union and and so we'll get to the, I guess I'll mention it now, there's a huge irony of the fact that in the Iran-Iraq war, it was America supporting Saddam Hussein and his Soviet military versus Iran, and it's American one. Right?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  But anyway.

• 33:20Lex Fridman?

  The absurdity of this is insane.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Well, I'm skipping ahead a step, but I just like that part. Um, but so, okay, so America supports the revolution in seventy-nine, in February. They're warning this guy, hey, you better look out for Saddam Hussein and his intentions, and we're gonna get back to that in one moment here.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  And they were also warning him about the threat from the Soviet Union. Now, why is that? Well, that's because skip over Iran. Now we're talking about Afghanistan and Zbigniew Brzezinski's policy that lets support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to try to provoke Soviet intervention there. And so there's a memo, and people can find this at scotthorton.org/bearuse. If you want to look at it, it's from, you wanna go ahead and pull it up?

• 34:10Lex Fridman?

  So if you allow me to read President Jimmy Carter's July 3, 1979, "finding," in quotes, "authorizing covert support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan." Secret, sensitive.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  And the important part is, "provide unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support to Afghan insurgents." This is, now, a finding is an order from a president to the CIA to do something. That's what a finding means. So this is an order to CIA to do this. Now, on that order, they did start pouring in support to the Mujahideen. Now, I have to tell you that my best experts on this, like Eric Margulies, and I got this also from reading Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident, they both said that it was an American support for the Mujahideen that really provoked the Russians into invading Afghanistan. Because what it was, was the sock puppet dictator was a basket case, and he had created so many enemies that he just couldn't hold it together.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  So the first thing the Soviets did when they invaded in December of 79 was take him out back and shoot him and replace him with a new guy. So that was really the cause of the Soviet intervention there. They had a commie sock puppet regime. It was not one of the Soviet republics, right? But they had a sock puppet regime there, but they, they wanted to, you know, maintain it, and it was falling apart. So they rushed to intervene. However, Lex, the point still remains that the United States of America was trying to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. I mean, we're gonna get back to why it's so relevant to the Iran thing in just one second, but let's stop and talk about this for a second. Why would they do that? And they would do that also because of Vietnam. Because at the end of Vietnam, Americans had what the government

• 35:50Speaker 01

  considered to be a mental illness, Vietnam Syndrome. That meant that Americans didn't want to do this anymore. Contain communism at this cost? And who really cares if Vietnam goes commie? We do business with them now, you know? And so, people weren't into it anymore. So this is where Zbigniew Brzezinski and his, he was national security advisor under Jimmy Carter, and his, I guess counterpart at defense, a guy named Walter Slocum, they came up with this brilliant idea that what we'll do is, we will bait the Soviets into over-expansion. Now, we don't want them to invade West Germany, but the Afghans are expendable.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  So if we can bait the Soviets into Afghanistan and bog them down, we will be adding straw to the camel's back. This is a way to inflict, because by then, think of it. The word Vietnam, that's not even the name of a country over there somewhere anymore. Vietnam at that time, that word means some horrible, stupid, no-win, quagmire thing that you shouldn't have done. You shot yourself in the foot and the leg and lost your friend Jimmy down the street and everything. And we don't want to do that, you know? That was what Vietnam meant to America, was like, god dang, what a mistake that was. So now they're saying, let's do that to the Reds, okay? We'll bog them down, bleed them to bankruptcy and force them out the hard way and hurt them in doing that. So that's what they were trying to do.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  That was the wisdom behind the operation in the first place. And now if you go, click back one to Brzezinski, you'll see where, and he later misparaphrases this a little bit. He's kind of cute, Brzezinski, but-

• 37:29Lex Fridman?

  National Security Advisor is big new. Brzezinski's memo to President Carter on December 26, 1979, regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  And the important part here, I mean, there's a lot, it's a bit, but if you go down, you will see where, oh, here, this could become a Soviet Vietnam. While it could become a Soviet Vietnam. In other words, see, they're already talking about it in that context here in writing, we see, and it's from Robert Gates's first memoir, by the way, where he says it was Brzezinski and Slocum. By the way, that's my source for that, when I say that those two were the ones really innovating this policy. And he says, "The initial effects of the invention are likely to be adverse for us for the following reasons." And then he says that it'll make the Hawks talk about how we better do something about Iran. And he says, "This could bring us into a head-to-head confrontation with the Soviets."

• 38:21Speaker 01

  So this is very interesting, Lex, because, well, one, this is why America's passing intelligence to the Ayatollah about threats from the Soviets. We think that now that Iran is essentially destabilized because of the revolution, and we just deliberately, or at least were trying to, and apparently succeeded in a sense in baiting them into invading Afghanistan, now we're worried that they're too expansionist and that they're going to roll into Persia next, and then they'd be right on the Persian Gulf. And we can't have that. So that was when Jimmy Carter announced in his speech in 1980, the Carter Doctrine, that said that the Persian Gulf is now an American lake, and we will take any move by

• 39:01Speaker 01

  any power, read the USSR, to move into the Persian Gulf as an attack on the United States itself, right? We're like, bringing the Gulf, those waters into NATO, right? Giving a full war guarantee to keep the Soviets. And by the way, a regime, oh, I'm sorry, I'm skipping one. See, go back. Forgive me for the, it's hard to stay in line here. The hostage crisis breaks out in November 79, because David Rockefeller, from of course, Standard Oil of New Jersey, AKA Exxon and Aramco and all those things, the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank at that time, he was very close with Jimmy Carter, and he convinced Carter to let the Shah into the United States for cancer treatment. And that was what caused the riot

• 39:44Speaker 01

  at the embassy and the seizure of the hostages. Now, I don't know, and I'm sure there are books about this that I just haven't read yet, you know, kind of thing that explain whether it really was the IRGC that took the lead in that, or whether it was the students who did it, or what. But obviously, the government held the hostages and kept the thing going. So they bear responsibility for that. But the point being that, America had been trying to work with the Ayatollah up until then. The idea was not that, oh, Shiite fundamentalist Islam says that all white Christians from North America must lay down dead right now, because that's their religious belief. Look at them ranting, "We're the great Satan," and burning our flag. And then, so when so many people, when the story begins with their calling us great Satan and burning our flag, then, well, they just hate us,

• 40:29Speaker 01

  and so we're just gonna have to do something about that. And, you know, I remember meeting a guy one time, who said, "Listen, Al Qaeda hates us for all these complicated reasons." And he explained them. And then he goes, "But not Iran, they just hate us. I remember when I was a boy, they were burning our flag and calling us Satan." So it's like, yeah, but, well, they had a reason too. Not that it justifies them doing anything sinful or criminal, but I'm just saying, they also had reasons for reacting the way that they reacted. America had launched a coup in 53 from that same embassy. And by saying that they were gonna cure the Shah's cancer, Seemed to be an indication to them that we were going to try to reinstall him in power and cancel their revolution. And so they were preempting that. Again, not a justification for everything that happened there or whatever, but just to tell the whole story in a way

• 41:13Speaker 01

  that I've told that story to people for another guy. I never knew that. I always thought that it all happened in one big show, you know, and never do they admit, unless sometimes the Republicans accuse Carter of this. They'll tell the part about that Carter was so naive as to send the Ayatollah home, although that's usually always left out. But so now he announces the Carter Doctrine, giving a war guarantee to Iran that he now officially hates and is holding our hostages and completely humiliating him, right? And there's Operation Eagle Claw, where they sent forces into Iran and that was a, it was supposed to be a rescue mission that ended up in disaster where the planes and the helicopters crashed into each other. They were already leaving anyway because it was going to be botched and then they crashed

• 41:58Speaker 01

  on the way out. And so that was a big humiliation for Carter as well. And then, oh, and I should also tell you that Gareth just found this. It's a classified document that he only found in the State Department records that show that just after the Carter Doctrine speech, Brzezinski, in a private meeting with the Saudi Foreign Minister and also with his deputy, Warren Christopher, who was later Clinton's Secretary of Defense, he admitted that we don't think there's really a Soviet threat to Iran. Brzezinski himself admitted that. So the pretext for the Carter Doctrine was fake and he admitted himself that they weren't really afraid of that, even though they were pretending to be afraid of that as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that they were trying to provoke.

• 42:40Lex Fridman?

  And we should also give a shout out to Gareth Porter. He has written about the Vietnam War, books including Perils of Dominance and Balance of Power and The Road to War in Vietnam.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  And I have to say, I believe that he is the most important journalist of the war on terrorism era. I call him Gareth the Great. He's a good friend of mine. I've interviewed him 300 something times on my show about essentially everything he's written since 2007. He is the best of the best of the best.

• 43:06Lex Fridman?

  It's not just the war in Vietnam. It's he, he writes also about the continuing wars.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely specialized in Iraq, Afghanistan, exposing the entire fraud of David Petraeus and his career. He wrote the book Manufacture Crisis on the Iranian Nuclear Program. That is bar none, the very best book on that.

• 43:22Lex Fridman?

  You have to say Vietnam, Cambodia, Syria, Iran, and the war on terror. All the things he's written extensively about.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Gareth Porter, the great man, absolutely. The great. I learned so much from him, I couldn't begin to explain. Fair enough. So the story continues. Yes. Carter. So another aspect of the Carter Doctrine was that Carter gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. Now, first thing is, why Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran? It ain't just because he likes doing what Jimmy Carter says. He had his own reasons. Now, picture your map of Iraq. I know you got one in your head there. Everything from Baghdad over east to Iran and down to Kuwait, that is what you could call Shiaistan, predominantly Shiite Iraq, right? And then, there's 60% of the population, supermajority.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  In the north, you have the Kurds who are Sunnis, but they're Kurds of separate ethnicity than the Arabs. And then you have the Sunni Arabs, who are another 20%. Well Saddam Hussein was a secular Sunni Arab, leading essentially like, like on The Simpsons, the Khami Nazis, the Baath Party, who are like, sort of both, a little, just a fascist state essentially, right? With Arab characteristics or whatever.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And, but, and, and not an entirely sectarian one. He had Christians and Kurds and Shiites in his government and things like that. It was not, you know, like just a caricature or whatever. It was a balance of power act. But after the Iranian Revolution, Saddam had a real reason to fear that the Shiite Revolution was going to spread to Iraq and that Iraqi Shiites, at least the armed and convinced ones, would choose their religious sect and their alliance with Iran on that basis over their national and ethnic sect as Iraqis and Arabs, right? Separate from the Persians. So, and he had real reason to believe that, including that members of

• 45:20Speaker 01

  the Dawah Party and people loyal to the Hakim family were Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his people. They left to go to Iran and they chose Iran's side in the war. So Saddam Hussein's solution to that was to conscript all these people and force them into his army and march them east against Iran and use them in that way. And this led to an absolutely brutal World War I, maybe Russia-Ukraine style trench warfare, tanks, artillery, and there's planes and, and ships. And it was a hell of a war for nine years, all through the 1980s, as the United States almost entirely backed Saddam Hussein.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Except for when they backed the Ayatollah, remember Iran-Contra? And during Iran-Contra, what did they do? They went to the Israelis and they said, hey, you're still friends with the government in Iran? You guys don't mind the Ayatollah one bit and have maintained your friendship there? We want to sell them some missiles and try to get the hostages out and then take the rest of the proceeds from the missiles and give them to the Contras in Nicaragua. And this is what became the great Iran-Contra scandal.

• 46:30Lex Fridman?

  And so we should also say, and you highlight the importance of understanding Iran-Contra. So this here, reading a major political scandal in the United States during the mid 1980s, senior officials in President Ronald Reagan's administration facilitated the secret sale of arms to Iran, which was under an arms embargo, with the proceeds being used to find Contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua, despite Congress explicitly prohibiting such funding.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Yep. And this is of course supposedly a side story, but a huge part of the side story is it absolutely was true, as the great Gary Webb reported in the Dark Alliance series and in his great book, Dark Alliance, that, and many other great journalists as well, that the CIA had a massive operation to bring cocaine into the United States by the truckload and plane load to sell it to poor Americans, blacks especially in LA. But also, yes, it's true, they even made a Tom Cruise movie after years of calling us conspiracy kooks and all this. The movie's about a guy named Barry Seal, whose job it was to fly guns and money down there and cocaine up here for the Contras, for the CIA, and into Bill Clinton's Arkansas,

• 47:41Speaker 01

  where he was read in on this and the operation was run out of the Vice President's office, George H. W. Bush. And that much is true and the same, they had, I know less about, but they had, this is where all the cocaine from Miami Vice was coming into Florida in the same way. And this is where the crack epidemic came from in South LA and throughout the country, really, in many places. And they just don't give a damn about us, man. Congress said, you can't have any money to fund the Contras. And they said, yeah, but we want to anyway. So this is how they did it.

• 48:10Lex Fridman?

  So the CIA would help orchestrate?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  This kind of transport of drugs.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Absolutely right. And then they completely destroyed the heroic Gary Webb for exposing this. And they didn't murder him, but they drove him to suicide. And, you know, his, his good friend, Robert Perry, the great journalist, verified that, no, it really was a suicide. People thought it was suspicious because he shot himself twice, but that does happen sometimes where people flinch on the first one. But it was his father's gun and he was totally depressed and he'd signed his house over to his wife. And somebody stole his motorcycle and he was like at the, at the, and, but they had run him out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News. They first ran him to the Hollywood beat and then he eventually, he just quit and went to become an investigator for the California state legislator.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  So the CIA doesn't have to kill you directly, they can psychologically destroy you.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah, they put the gun in his mouth either way, um, for doing the right thing. Uh, but anyway, and, and didn't get any facts wrong. The only thing that anyone had to attack him on was like the graphics editor put like a phrase out of context, big on the page or something in the newspaper, you know what I mean? It was like something silly that made it sound like he was saying the purpose of the mission was to destroy the black community. When that, he never said that. What he said was they didn't give a damn about those people. I don't even know if he addressed that, right? But he certainly wasn't saying that was what it was about. It was about funding the Contras. But anyway, so they found their separate ways of doing it. And this is one of the things that made me like this is I don't even have any idea where I first learned this, but I knew this while Reagan was still in office,

• 49:35Speaker 02

  or at least by the time Bush senior was in office, when I was still just like maybe a freshman in high school or younger than that. I knew that Ronald Reagan was a dope pusher, the same guy with the just say no, and the same guy with the massively increased penalties for people engaging in just simply the possession, much less the sale and trade in drugs. And so there are people who went to prison for decades for life, essentially and literally, for just possession of the same drugs that the government was bringing in. And so how are you ever going to believe in a security force like that again? I never have. I don't know why you'd even need to see a Waco massacre or any other, or an Iraq war, or any other thing to detest these people. That's who they are. You know, I had this, um,

• 50:14Speaker 01

  The only part I really remember about it, but uh, there's this great film producer named Kevin Booth. He was Bill Hicks' best friend and producer. And he did a documentary about the drug war. Where they show this guy and he goes, oh, they're all in prison and they're filming him through the gate. And they're all yelling and whatever. You can't really make out much, right? They're all like yelling over each other. And one guy finally like makes everybody be quiet and he looks at the camera and he goes, listen, I'm doing 35 years. Cause I had a few rocks in my pocket. Does that sound right to you? I was like, dude, it was Ronald Reagan's cocaine in his pocket. Like that guarantees a full pardon, man. Right? What are we talking about? That's not fair.

• 50:54Lex Fridman?

  It's a dark aspect of human nature, that the people that try to, if we talk about drugs, to ban drugs.

• 51:02Lex Fridman?

  And really anyone who tries to ban a thing are often secretly participating in doing that thing.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Bootleggers and Baptists, you know?

• 51:11Lex Fridman?

  Just on a small tangent.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 51:13Lex Fridman?

  Have you ever, since you're Texan, have you ever met Bill Hicks?

• 51:16Speaker 01

  No, man. I learned about Bill Hicks like a month after he died. And so they started playing sane man on the access channel all the time. And I was like, oh my God, who's this guy? And then they're like, oh, he just died.

• 51:26Lex Fridman?

  He's a legend.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  I, he has been a huge influence on me, you know? In a lot of ways, so I'm very much a Hicksian.

• 51:34Lex Fridman?

  I apologize for that. It's good to do a shout out back to the drug war. And that involvement from Carter and on and Reagan and Iran.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, let's go back to Iran, cause the cocaine is really tied up in the contra end of the scandal. Point being, America's back in Saddam, except when they're helping Israel back Iran. And by selling them these missiles and they're even, I don't have my footnote anymore, but it's findable, I'm sure. Where they did talk about, you know what we do is we support one side till they start getting ahead a little bit. Then we support the other side a little bit more and go, or we authorize the Israelis to increase support for Iran. And play them back and forth against each other. So that's just not just, you know, offshore balancing in peacetime. That's balancing in wartime, encouraging them to keep killing each other, which is some pretty horrific policy to do.

• 52:22Lex Fridman?

  Could you also comment during this stage and this thread will continue? What role does Israel have to play in this, in this part of the story with Iran?

• 52:30Speaker 01

  I don't know. Yeah. I don't know much about what. They were saying about America's Iraq policy during that time, but I know that they were still friends with the Ayatollah. And we're not going to get to them switching gears on the Ayatollah until Ruben in 1993. So, hold that thought. So, the war's still going on. We have to mention the chemical weapons, too.

• 52:49Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  America bought them. Taxpayers bought them. There's a huge Iraq Gate scandal, it was called, where people were put on trial for the money. But then their defense was, but the government made me do it. What are you talking about? This was the whole thing to do. And it was German chemical weapons, I believe, and maybe some French, but that were bought with supposed agricultural loans from the United States to Iraq. And they had a sophisticated biological weapons program, too, with anthrax and the rest. And the Americans sent them the precursors for the germs that he would eat.

• 53:19Lex Fridman?

  During the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime used chemical weapons extensively against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians, most notably in the 1988 Halalja attack that killed an estimated 5,000 people and injured 20,000 more. There is substantial documentation that Western governments, especially the US and some of its allies, provided Iraq with dual-use technology, intelligence, and materials, which facilitated Iraq's chemical weapons program.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 53:49Lex Fridman?

  And it goes on.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Let me drop two good footnotes for people here. The first one would be Shane Harris, who's now at The Washington Post, you know, very efficient national security beat reporter. He wrote a piece about this at foreignpolicy.com a few years back, where he goes into extensive detail. So, as far as authoritative sources, there you go, okay? Nothing conspiratorial about this narrative at all. But then you want to do a deeper dive onto it, then go to fff.org. And this is the Future Freedom Foundation. And there they have a page, and I'm sorry, I always get the headline wrong, but it's something like, where did Saddam get his WMDs? Or where did Saddam get his chemical weapons?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  You know what you can do? You can go site colon fff.org. And then that way you search just that site. And then you can do chemical weapons, Iraq, and I bet you'll find it.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, right there. Where did Iraq get its weapons of mass destruction? And I had mentioned this, I guess, on the Tucker Show. And so I actually talked with Hornberger and I went back and I found and I made sure that all of those links are up to date and work for each of those stories. So people can go through and take a very close look at, those are just articles. Never mind all the books about it and stuff, which there are plenty.

• 55:01Lex Fridman?

  So this is a set of links assembled by Jacob Hornberger. The title is, Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction on FFF.org? That people should check out.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  And then, oh, there's the, there's the Shane Harris and Matthew M. A. CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam As He Gassed Iran.

• 55:20Lex Fridman?

  The US knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history and still gave him a hand.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  And now by the official rules of confirmation bias, when Shane Harris admits something that I'm accusing, that means it's definitely true. If I ever disagree with him, well, he's a liar from the post. Got that?

• 55:40Lex Fridman?

  Okay, good to know. That's how truth works. Good.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Thanks, of course.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  So there, there's your authoritative source, everybody. Shane Harris from the Post. And that's a special inside joke for fans of Where the Buffalo Roams too. Remember Harris from the Post? You ever seen that? It's the original Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Bill Murray.

• 56:01Lex Fridman?

  I didn't realize there was original Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Bill Murray. What? Really?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Where the Buffalo Roams. I promise you will have a good time. And there's a joke in there about, I'm Harris from the Post. He's pretending to be Harris from the Post and he's hanging out in the bathroom with Richard Nixon. And I forgot the conversation. It's funny as hell, though.

• 56:18Lex Fridman?

  Similar type of wild journey of Fear and Loathing?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I gotta admit, I don't remember the story that well. It's very different than Fear and Loathing, but it's also very good.

• 56:27Lex Fridman?

  Well, I know what I'm doing tonight. Okay, cool.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Where the Buffalo Roams. It's good. Everyone will like it, I promise. Underrated Bill Murray.

• 56:35Lex Fridman?

  He's forever underrated, actually. Genius actor. Okay, and so back to the chemical weapons and Hussein.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  So, okay, the war finally comes to an end in 1989. And at the same time, the Soviets are withdrawing in Afghanistan. We're getting back to them in a minute. But the war comes to an end. And for the next couple of years, Saddam Hussein is in a struggle over war debts with his creditors Kuwait, Saudi, and UAE. Are demanding all their money back that they gave him for the war. They loaned to him for the war. Now, of course, he feels like he fought that war partially in their defense. And so, and also at this time, oil is trading at $12 a barrel. So he has no ability to repay them, rebuild his country, or do any kind of thing.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  And they're completely putting the screws to him. And on top of that, this is disputed whether they were literally, the Kuwaitis, literally slant drilling under the border, or whether it's really, that's kind of shorthand, I think, usually for they were overproducing from shared oil wells that straddled the border. And when you have a contract that where your property and my property butt up next to each other, and we got mineral rights, but we have a shared oil well down there, then we have a quota, how much we pump. And you're not allowed to cheat and pump more out of our shared well than me in any given month or whatever, as per the contract. That's kind of how that thing works. So in this case, it's the same thing over an international border. And the Kuwaitis, at least they're also accused, and I know less about this, but they're accused also of using slant drilling techniques

• 58:09Speaker 01

  that they'd been taught by Americans to drill that way and steal Iraqi oil, you know, from the margin. So Hussein's pissed about this at the same time they're putting the screws to him over calling in their war debts. Now, I don't believe that this was a deliberate trap. But in effect, it was. I think what happened was it was a matter of, you know, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. There was no real unified policy that had been sent down from on high, how to handle this evidently. And so the CIA and CENTCOM were encouraging, which had been created as part of the Carter Doctrine, were encouraging Kuwait to be intransigent against Saddam and tell him to go to hell. Well, the State Department, James A. Baker,

• 58:54Speaker 01

  through Ambassador Glasby and through Margaret Tutwiler and John Kelly, were sending signals that actually, go ahead, we don't really care. And we just celebrated April Glasby Day the other day, we do every year, July 25th, where she told Saddam Hussein, listen, it's the same thing as when I was the ambassador to Kuwait. The Iraq issue and your border dispute is not associated with America. And we have no position on this, you're gonna have to settle it. And now, we always had the Iraqi version of that story published in the New York Times. But then, we got from Manning and Assange, we got the State Department's version of that document. And so, it's a little less explicit as far as how it makes the Americans look, but it's essentially the same.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  And in there, she says, now, listen, George Bush wanted me to emphasize to you that he does not want a war in the Gulf. And so, Stephen Walt from Harvard University at foreignpolicy.com, he said, now, listen, in diplomatic language, you know, these things are, you know, mathematical formulas. You gotta be very careful how you say these things. Saddam Hussein wasn't anticipating a war. He knew he's gonna roll right into Kuwait. They couldn't stop him. He was counting on a coup de main. So, when she says, the president doesn't want a war, it sounds like she's saying, the president won't go to war with you if you do this. And that he very well could have read it that way. And that was, at the very least, a flashing yellow light, if not a green light, to go right ahead.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  And we know that, again, John Kelly and Margaret Tutwiler also made statements essentially downplaying American concerns about what was happening.

• 1:00:32Lex Fridman?

  I should give a quick shout out, since you mentioned Stephen Walt. I had a few email exchanges with him. He's a co-author with John Mearsheimer on one of his books. He's a prominent, just reading here, prominent American political scientist and currently professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  He's the best of them, man. He's Mearsheimer's partner on a lot of things. They're basically considered like the co-deans of the realist school of foreign policy in America. So, they're like, you know, Henry Kissinger, realpolitik, only without the bloody hands and the, you know, the hawkish instinct. They're, you know, I think both would be relative hawks on China compared to me, for example. They're not libertarian, non-interventionists, but they're very skeptical of...

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  A lot of this misuse, you know, both of them opposed the Iraq war, for example, in the first place and that kind of thing.

• 1:01:21Lex Fridman?

  If I may, I can never sing enough praises to John Mearsheimer. Of course, his work is very important.

• 1:01:28Lex Fridman?

  He's fearless as an academic, as a writer, as a historian, but also as a human being. I got a chance to know him. We had dinner, we had many conversations, we exchanged a lot of emails and he's a sweetheart.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a great guy. I email back and forth with him too. I'm trying to get him on next week, but, and he just killed it on Tucker the other day, too. He was fantastic on there. He sets such a great example, you know?

• 1:01:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's just a good human being.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:51Lex Fridman?

  Well, like a real deep compassion.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Lex Fridman?

  And sometimes when you cover these topics and you, just like you said, you realize the adults in the room.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And people call him some kind of hater and it's like, come on, that's because that's all you got. That's the only reason you could call him that is because you got no other thing to say, you know?

• 1:02:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, a real heart of gold. Like this is a really special guy. Anyway, sorry.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no problem. So Iraq war won. So America gives like a flashing yellow light to Saddam Hussein, their client, that to go ahead and take back the northern oil fields. And, oh, I left out one piece was, when I saw him out, the left hand and the right hand, Wolfowitz worked for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon at that time and he was always an Iraq hawk. And he had warned, maybe not knowing that the CIA or that Carter was encouraging it explicitly, but he had warned that Saddam was going to attack Iran back in 1980. So he was always an Iraq hawk and he was very worried that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait. And he convinced Dick Cheney that we should make a statement telling Saddam not to do it.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  But then, oh, I'm going to think of his name in just one moment. Pete Williams, who later became the NBC news reporter. He was the Pentagon spokesman at that time. Isn't that funny how that works?

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  If you go back in time, that's how it worked. He was Pentagon spokesman. He made a statement where he seemed to walk back their warning, which was probably just incompetence, right? He didn't know exactly what he was doing, but the way that he phrased it was softer than the way they had phrased it. So then they were like, oh, man. And they tried to get George Bush to write a letter. I believe it was like this, that Bush sent a letter. But then they thought, I believe Cheney and Wolfowitz thought, it's too conciliatory. It's not clear enough that we're saying, don't you do it. So send another letter, but by then it was too late. And Hussein went ahead and rolled in. So this is from all very elite accounts of the story from the inside, you know, these different books and whatever I read and all that. This version of the story, and then you can see if you check the timeline where

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  for the first few days, they weren't threatening to do anything about it. Colin Powell chaired the National Security Council meeting. He was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And they announced the first day, well, they better just not move on Saudi Arabia. You roll into Riyadh, you got trouble with us, bub. But they were essentially prepared to accept the invasion of Kuwait.

• 1:04:12Lex Fridman?

  It's crazy that Cheney was involved with all this. Cause then the story continued.

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  So, yeah, he's, he's Secretary of Defense at that time. So, um, he, um, and he was the only one in the government at that time who was not from the Reagan administration. He had been in the Congress. All of the rest of these guys were Reagan's guys. The vice president was now the president. Colin Powell had been National Security Advisor for Reagan. He's now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And then you have James Baker was Treasury Secretary, is now Secretary of State. Like this is Brent Scowcroft, I forgot. Maybe he was Deputy National Security Advisor under Reagan. Now he's National Security Advisor under H W Bush. So this is the third Reagan term without Reagan, basically is. And Cheney would have been the newer guy and tended to be more hawkish.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  And in this case, it was like hawkish, trying to stop the war from breaking out in the first place in that sense was more concerned about the, the danger of the thing or whatever.

• 1:05:08Lex Fridman?

  Sorry if this is a distracting question, but can we talk about the, the birth and the evolution of the neo con movement? How does it connect to this?

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can mention here that, you know, there are, when I go through and look like who were all the worst hawks on Iraq War one? Many of them were the neo conservatives. So we probably shouldn't get into that whole like biography of a movement here or whatever, but they certainly were very much in support of this intervention in Desert Storm or Iraq War one, as I call it. I'm trying to get that to catch on because we're Iraq War three and a half or four now. So like, gonna have to keep these things straight somehow.

• 1:05:39Lex Fridman?

  But some of the same characters that were responsible for Iraq War two.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  That's right, because of course Clinton's in there for a while, but then it's President Bush's son. It's the next president. He brings Cheney and Powell with him and then all this other stuff. Behold your wars and now I'll be patient. So what happens is Margaret Thatcher comes to town. And she gives, this is her people's term for it. She gives Bush Senior a backbone transplant. And she says to him, don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush. In other words, calling out his manhood and she's a woman. So, and from a smaller, weaker country. And so what's he gonna do now? And that's when he says, yeah, this will not stand just out of his own personal embarrassment. Speaking of Bill Hicks, this was a Bill Hicks joke that this was the wimp president. It was a cover Newsweek wimp president.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Apparently that's stuck in this guy's craw a little bit. I'll show you who's a wimp. And he had to go and really feel like he had to do something about that. And when Margaret Thatcher called him out, instead of being prudent, as he would say, and patient and conservative, he went, no, I'm tougher than you lady. I'll show you how tough I am. I'll do a big tough thing. But meanwhile, what did America care about Kuwait? Right? They had, uh, Britain had interests in Kuwaiti oil and the Kuwaiti royal family, His Highness Al Jabir had investments in British debt. But what do I care about that? Lex Fridman, not one bit. You know what I mean? But that was a big part of how the war started. So after the first three days, they said, we're not going. It's, we're gonna, they're not gonna invade Saudi. We're warning them, they better not invade Saudi, wherever.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  And it was after that, that they decided, okay, now we are going. And then once they decided that, they refused to negotiate in good faith for the rest of the time. And Noam Chomsky did the best of documenting this, but what did he document? He documented like 10 different sources from the summer of 1990 through January 91, where the Americans refused, the Bush administration in Washington DC refused time after time after time after time after time to negotiate in good faith with Saddam to get him out of there peacefully. Because once the gauntlet was thrown down, now we have a big set piece battle. Now we're gonna go in there and we're gonna rock them. And I have the quote from Brent Scowcroft in there. This was long an accusation from some liberal types that you might dismiss, but it is true.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  It was literally an explicitly stated part of their thinking was, we have to defeat.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  Vietnam Syndrome. The reluctance of the American people to do things like this. We gotta give them one that we can do. That'll be short, that'll be sweet, that'll be fun, that'll be easy. And we can hold a big ass parade and be victorious again like the old days. Rebuild that martial spirit and make that normalcy in America, not the post Vietnam anti-militarist malaise that you remember from the seventies and eighties. Now it's time to get back to work remaking the world and give the American people something to believe in again. And Bush Senior then after the fact said, "By God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all." This is a huge part of it. And if you think about Iraq War I to this day, people still think of it as like short

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  and sweet and we use all this space age technology and we whooped them good, right? And Colonel McGregor and Daniel Davis and General McMaster then of lower rank, they went in there and won the big tank battle of 73 Easting and showed the superiority of American tanks versus Soviet tanks and all of these things that were so much fun for them, such a big deal for them at that time that they wanted to again for our nation's overall long-term interest, for what was good for them, their donors, their benefactors, and the, essentially the psychological warfare campaign that they wanted to wage against the American people, that this is what we're here for.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  We go and rescue helpless little countries like His Royal Highness Al-Jaber's monarchy in Kuwait so we can reinstall the monarchy because everybody knows how much superior they are to fascist dictatorships like the Iraqis have, that we've supported for the last decade, by the way, including helping him gas people, not just while he gassed people, while he's gassing his own people supposedly, the Kurds and the Anfal campaign and along with the Iranians and the rest. But now he's Hitler. Now he's gonna roll on Saudi, he's gonna take over, the next thing you know, he's gonna take over all of the Middle East's resources, he's gonna build up a thousand year Reich and roll on Paris. Saddam Hussein is?

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  And that was the way that they put it and they absolutely lied us into war. They claimed that he had lined up his massive armored tank divisions on the Saudi border and was preparing to roll on Riyadh. And that was a lie. It was the St. Petersburg, Florida Times hired a Soviet company to, or maybe the Soviet government, to provide the satellite photos and show that there's nothing but empty desert out there. You know, they'd send a couple of patrols near the border, whatever. There's nothing like armored divisions preparing to expand the war into Saudi Arabia. They knew they were lying about that. And in fact, the St. Petersburg, Florida Times published that like a week and a half before the invasion.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  And AP Reuters, CS, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, whatever, all refused to run it and just buried it. Then the other thing was, a major part of this was, and it's amazing, it sounds so silly now after everything going on. Uh, and that's gone on since then, but it was a huge deal. They did the Iraqi incubators hoax where they brought in a girl who claimed to be a nurse, who said that she was in the hospital in Kuwait city when the Iraqi soldiers came in there, stole the incubators, threw the babies out of the incubators onto the cold floor to die, and then ran off with the incubators. Whether to just destroy them out of sadism or to bring them back to Baghdad,

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  because they have a big incubator shorter in Baghdad, she didn't say. But it turns out she wasn't a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and the thing was a 100% hoax. 0% of it ever happened, but Amnesty International vouched for it and said it was true. And so that was all you needed. So George Bush repeatedly brought this up and said, see, this shows that Iraq was determined to systematically dismantle Iraq, that this isn't just an invasion, it's these horrible crimes against humanity. And what would we do if they were doing it to us? And oh, we have to help the poor people. And they, that was a big part of what they used to beat people over the head about that war.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  And the other one was, and they learned this from the focus groups, was we have to threaten the American people with nukes. That even with moral atrocities like the incubator hoax going on, that Americans are still like, I don't know. You know, like Richard Pryor said in 1986, he had a bit where he stops joking and he just says, isn't it weird like we stick on the Germans and the Soviets and now we're bombing Libya? Does that sound right? Like they can't fight back even like it's just weird. Seems weird. So people needed a real reason to go and that was atom bombs. And, and so people forget this now because Iraq war two takes the place in their memory, right? But in Iraq war one, they also alleged repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons,

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  or he very well could be, and this was one of the reasons why we had to go. Now here's the screwed up part about that. They were lying, but they turned out to be telling the truth accidentally. Because in fact, what they found out in the aftermath of the war, when they occupied southern Iraq, was there was a bear, but a beginning of the beginnings of a nuclear weapons program there. Very, very early. We're talking 91, right? Early 91, at the end of Iraq war one. So what happened was people always cite the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981 and say what a great success it was. No, that was an IAEA safeguarded facility. That was not producing weapons grade anything of any kind. And when they bombed it, all they did was drive his program underground. Now it became a nuclear weapons program.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  And it was only a coincidence that America, after launching Iraq war one, found his secret program that the CIA had no idea about. And so this became a major consequence and here's why. Because Dick Cheney would later cite this and go, well, if the CIA can't find it, that doesn't mean it's not there. Remember that one time? And so it became a big part of the Hawks talking points after that. If the CIA claimed, like confirmation bias again, CIA agrees, then they're right. CIA disputes, then yeah, well, we don't have to listen to them, right? Even when they're the ones that they cite as the authoritative source for every positive claim they're making.

• 1:14:20Lex Fridman?

  So the playbook even with Iraq war one is you try to look for different stories, whether it's anecdotal stories with nurses or it's anecdotal, or it's stories about nuclear weapons, you're trying to find a way to justify war.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:14:35Lex Fridman?

  And the same playbook was applied in the second Iraq war.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  And back to Noam Chomsky for one second about them refusing to accept Hussein's surrender was that by the end of the thing, like he had been demanding, come on, let me keep these uninhabited islands at the north of the Persian Gulf where I could make like an oil shipping facility there or something like that, you know? He dropped all those demands. Here were his final demands, right? He wasn't just going to turn tail for nothing. He had to save some face. So his final demands were, promise that America will leave the Middle East and that Israel will leave the occupied territories someday. Right? In other words, nothing. He's demanding nothing.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  He's demanding, please let me keep the skin on my face only is the only face he's saving. Right? And they wouldn't give it to him because that would have stopped the war from happening, Lex. I'm sorry, man, but that's the history of how that happened. I mean, think about the relative power of the United States of America with the entire UN Security Council on board too. Telling Iraq for six months, five months, you better give in. And they couldn't figure out a way to get him to give in, huh? Yeah, they could too. They didn't want him to give in. You know, they had all of these chances and there were reports in Newsday and the New York Times and whatever, and that had all the stories where he kept making all these offers and they would just reject them out of hand.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  In fact, Noam Chomsky talked about how it would be in the business press in England that, oh, look, um, oil prices fall because they think there's a peace deal. And, and the business press knows that this is happening. Oh, it looks like they're going to have a peace deal. And so the price of oil falls from the relaxed tension and then nope. Right? And then they cancel the thing and they go on anyway.

• 1:16:26Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned the part, which I think is fascinating about defeating Vietnam syndrome and reinvigorating martial spirit. Can you just psychoanalyze the State Department, CIA, people in government? Why did they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit? Is it money? Is it power? Is it just coming up with a narrative, age old narrative of?

• 1:16:50Lex Fridman?

  Nationalism is good and one of the ways to achieve nationalism is to invade somebody? What is the motivation in a room, these folks sitting together? Why do they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit?

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  So they can enforce what they called the new world order, which was, again, I borrowed this from Chomsky, but I found two original citations for it. As George Bush Senior himself said, what we say goes. So this is what Biden and them call the liberal rules based international order of global governance. What it means is, forget the UN Charter, forget the UN Security Council. There's the US National Security Council and everybody's going to bow down and do what we say. It's our unipolar moment, as Charles Krauthammer put it in Foreign Affairs. And we're going to take full advantage of it. But don't worry Lex, again, as Bush Senior said, the world trusts us with this power because they know that we are good people and we know what we're doing. And we only have their best interests at heart. We care about them so much.

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  And so the world allows us to be the global police force, to enforce the law and make sure everything's fair. Because man, what if we stopped holding the world together? Boy, it would all just fall apart.

• 1:17:58Lex Fridman?

  So it's just clamoring for power.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  It'd be Germany and Japan. I don't know if you remember this, but when the Soviet Union fell apart, people said, oh my God, Germany and Japan are going to rise back up and take back over the world again.

• 1:18:09Lex Fridman?

  Really?

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Lex Fridman?

  Messaging.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  And before the war on terrorism, they tried for a while. They made Harrison Ford movies out of it and every, to try to build up the war against the Mexican drug cartels and the Peruvian drug cartels, because we gotta have somebody to fight in the nineties. While we're trying to get something else going on here, basically, you know? That they don't want to have to get a job. And yet, like Bush Senior, you gotta give him credit for this. He absolutely slashed military spending, slashed the bomber fleets, slashed the military, slashed army divisions and ships and everything. We don't need an anti Soviet military for a world without the Soviet Union. And he really cut it way, way back and especially on nuclear weapons. In fact,

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  I hate to say this because I never was a H W Bush guy and I'm so critical of the all of his Middle East policy and all these things, but in a way you could say he's the most heroic guy who ever lived in the sense of working with the Russians, the Soviets, and then the Russians on these treaties to bring the global stockpile down from approximately 70,000 down to where we have about 7,000 each, which is way more than enough to do you. But when the Soviets had 40,000 and we had 30,000, come on, somebody's got to do something. And Bush Senior is the man who did something about it. And as I show in the book, he, well, we're skipping ahead of the other Cold War book here, but he did make unilateral cuts because he didn't have time to do negotiations. So you say made

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  massive unilateral cuts in hopes that Gorbachev would respond in kind, or was it Yeltsin by then? And then I think it was Yeltsin by then. And then Yeltsin did respond in kind and made these drastic cuts on his own unilateral basis, just without even an agreement. But you know what? We'll get rid of our class of those same kind of weapons, too. So I got to give credit where it's due. He handled the end of the Cold War, you know, a lot better than he might have, I guess you could say, you know?

• 1:20:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, anybody who's trying to decrease the number of nuclear weapons in the world is, it requires some degree of heroism to do that.

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he wasn't a neocon, right? He's the old WASP-y guy from the older establishment. And he called the neoconservatives the crazies. And he had told General Scocroft to keep the crazies in the basement. In other words, they're allowed to kill people down in Latin America, but you keep them away from Middle East policy, right? They're not allowed to mess around with what we're doing over there. And I guess here's where let's start talking more about bringing Israel into our narrative here because, as I said, the Israelis had stayed friends with Iran.

• 1:20:48Speaker 03

  Through the Iran-Iraq war, they had no problem with fundamentalist Shiite Islam then. Sold these guys weapons. In fact, Tita Parsi shows in his absolutely excellent book, Treacherous Alliance, which if you haven't read that, you'll absolutely love it. I'm so good. You know, and pull that up. He's one of the co-founders of the Quincy Institute for International Statecraft.

• 1:21:07Lex Fridman?

  Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States by Tita Parsi. This work examines the complex, often contradictory, relationship between Israel, Iran, and the US, countries whose alliances and rivalries have repeatedly shifted since the mid 20th century.

• 1:21:23Speaker 03

  Oh, it's just fascinating. Of course, the poor Iraqis are stuck in the middle of this thing is a big, like, subtext to the story, right? But what's so great about that book is it's all, there's no news cycle stuff in there anywhere. It's all told from the point of view of the highest level military strategists in all three countries. And it started out, I believe, as his PhD and became this thing, but it is just a masterpiece. But anyway, he's the best guy to read about this and the way that all this transpired, that essentially, when Ayatollah, the mean old Ayatollah Khomeini, who died in 89, when he would be threatening the Israelis, they're like, oh, we're going to destroy you one day or whatever, they would be shipping him missiles that day, right? So this was this covert relationship that was going on behind the scenes, even when they were,

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  you know, saying very malicious things about each other in public. That was really cover for the extent that of their covert relationship that was still ongoing at that time. And so now, in, we got to put this off one second. I'm sorry, I left out, it's important to go back to the Shiite uprising of 1991. Because in the aftermath of Iraq War I, Saddam Hussein crushed the Shiite uprising, which George Bush Senior had encouraged. And I'm not sure if you've ever seen the movie Three Kings. I like to bring this up. It's kind of a touchstone for people because a lot of people learn history just from movies, you know? So the movie is Ice Cube and Marky Mark and George Clooney.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  And they're soldiers on a gold heist, but they're in southern Iraq, occupying Iraq in the aftermath of the first Iraq war. And in the background, Saddam Hussein's forces are murdering everybody, crushing the Shiite uprising. And that's what's going on in the background. So people remember that movie, that'd be probably the most they ever learned about the crushed Shiite uprising in 1991. That's fair, you know, that's how it is. Yeah. They didn't make that big of a deal of it at the time because it was a horrible Bay of Pigs type situation where America told them to do it. George Bush, his own voice on Voice of America, encouraged them to rise up and finish Saddam Hussein. The air force dropped leaflets over predominantly Shiite army divisions and, and the rest of them, I guess, too, and saying, now's everybody's chance to rise up and overthrow this guy.

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  But Lex, then they changed their mind. And the reason they changed their mind was, remember when I said in 1980, why Saddam invaded Iran? Because some Iraqis were choosing Iran's side in the war. And he was afraid they all were and that the Iranian revolution was going to come for him, right? So he conscripted the army and sent them to war against Iran instead. Well, now in the Shiite uprising, those very same Iraqis who've been living in Iran for 10 years and fought on Iran's side in the war, they're now coming across the border to lead the uprising. Does that make sense? Mm hmm. Okay, this is namely, and most importantly, the Badr Brigade, B A D R. The Badr Brigade is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  is run by, at that time, a guy named Abdul Aziz Al Hakim, who's now dead, but is a very important guy and he's going to come back up in our story here. So when the Badr Brigade started coming across the border was when George Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and the boys all flinched and said, uh oh, we, because again, this is the third Reagan term essentially, right? So we just spent a decade supporting Saddam to contain the Iranian revolution. Now we're the ones importing it into Iraq. That is a mistake. And so he called it off. He was more cautious and said, let's not do that. And, but the problem with that was 100,000 Kurds and Shiites were killed.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  But also, that then became the excuse for America to stay in Saudi Arabia. They had promised the king, you let us get rid of Saddam and drive him out of Kuwait. And, and we have this on Dick Cheney's word himself. It's so funny. There's a podcast that, uh, Bill Kristol's podcast. Do you know Bill Kristol has a podcast? And he, and he interviewed Dick Cheney. Somebody put this on archive.org before it's gone forever, man. And it's great because they talk about everything except Iraq war two. They don't say a word about it, either of them, the whole time. So Dick Cheney explains in that interview to Bill Kristol that he was the one. Never even mind James Baker, the Secretary of State, as Secretary of Defense.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  He promised King Fad of Saudi Arabia that we promise we'll leave as soon as the war is over. And now, uh, which is, uh, I really screwed this up, man. I'm sorry. When we talked about Afghanistan before, I should have dwelled a little longer on the fact that as we all know, when we talked about bogging them down into their own Vietnam, the Soviets in the 1980s, that America supported not just the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, but what became the international Islamic brigades. Meaning Arabs and other Muslims from all around the world, especially from Arab lands, to go to Afghanistan to fight on the side of the Mujahideen against the Soviets. And this included Egyptian Islamic Jihad and what was called then the Azam group,

• 1:26:20Speaker 03

  which was the main group that was controlled by the Saudi intelligence services during the 1980s.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  And that was the thing that United States wanted.

• 1:26:28Speaker 03

  Yes. So Zbigniew Brzezinski was trying to bait Russia into invading Soviet Union, into invading Afghanistan, and then they wanted to extend the war. So America had a deal with Saudi Arabia. We would match them dollar for dollar. And we would work with their intelligence services and the Pakistanis to support local Mujahideen like Gubel Dean Heckmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who later became America's enemies in our Afghan war. But then, and various other Pashtun warlords of different descriptions.

• 1:26:55Lex Fridman?

  So US is essentially helping train up these militia groups.

• 1:26:59Speaker 03

  Yes, and including bringing them to the United States and having our special forces train them in car bombs and sabotage and assassinations and everything, yes. Full-scale US support for building up the Bin Ladenite movement as long as they're killing Soviets.

• 1:27:12Lex Fridman?

  And those same people then come back and become the enemies in the United States.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  That's right. So when we talk about Al Qaeda, what we're talking about is eventually the merger of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Azam group. After Azam was killed, and I don't think anybody really knows who killed him, Osama bin Laden took over his group. And Osama bin Laden, so then, this is the main reason, and there are many, this is the main reason that Al Qaeda turned against the United States, was that Osama bin Laden was outraged that the king had allowed the United States to liberate Kuwait instead of him and his men, which is not like they have a bunch of mountains to hide out in Kuwait, but he wanted to try it, to kick Saddam out. And then he was just driven crazy by the fact that the king allowed white Christian combat forces to come and occupy this holy

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  land. It's not just their country, but their holy land where Mecca, Medina, the birthplace of Mohammed and the birthplace of the religion of Islam are, and the two holy places Bin Laden called them, I guess they all do, and that then we didn't leave. This is the ultimate outrage, right? And this is the main overriding reason for the Bin Ladenite, well, at least for his jihad, which was really based on the idea of trying to get all the disparate groups from around the Middle East. These are more or less stateless groups. They're in some cases backed by Saudi, you know, more or less at different times, but they're jihadists from all over the place, you know, Egyptians and Saudis and Syrians and, and,

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  you know, Azam himself was Palestinian, raised in a refugee camp in Kuwait. But you had all these different people and then, so Bin Laden's genius was to figure out, the one thing we can agree on is let's attack the United States, because America is at the root of all of our problems. And just like, we had helped them to bog the Soviets down in Afghanistan, they wanted to do the same thing to us. And so.

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  This was the beginning, really, of Al Qaeda's war against the United States began at this time in reaction to the declaration of this new world order, the permanent stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia and what became the permanent, the unrelenting, full global embargo, United Nations Security Council, full global sanctions regime against the Iraqi state, which led to, at the very least, 300,000 excess deaths, although a UN study later embellished that and Bin Laden would embellish the numbers even higher than that to 600,000 or a million, but whatever, it was, it was a ruthless economic war of collective punishment against the entire people of the country, even though they had

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  their chance to overthrow him. USA encouraged it and then let Saddam keep his helicopters and tanks while we were standing right there and let him crush the insurrection. Now, the Bush administration and later the Clinton administration's position was the sanctions stay until Saddam is gone. But he's still young and in pretty good health and no one in Iraq is in any position to do anything about this. So it's just, this is the policy that Clinton inherited from Bush and ended up keeping.

• 1:30:17Lex Fridman?

  Can we go to, can you linger on Bin Laden? So this gave enough fuel for Bin Laden to construct a narrative where America, the bad guys.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  That's right. And this is such an important thing. There's this great book by Michael Schwerer, who was the former chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit. It's called Imperial Hubris. And I will say that he went a bit crazy in later years and said really mean things like, we ought to help all the Muslims kill each other and we ought to have a civil war over Russiagate and, which I'm very, very opposed to Russiagate, Lex, but I wouldn't go that far. So he went a little nuts later on, but he's a very bright guy and a very honest guy, for what it's worth, a very straightforward guy, I should say. I don't know if he's ever told a lie or what.

• 1:31:01Lex Fridman?

  Imperial Hubris, Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror by Michael Schwerer. And I should also say, echoing that statement. That some of the smartest people I know are walking the line between genius and madness.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  It happens.

• 1:31:14Lex Fridman?

  And when you study the dark aspects of human nature and geopolitics, sometimes it's easy to lose yourself in the madness.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's totally true. But so in this book, he makes it so clear. There are six overriding reasons that Bin Laden cited for why the United States should be attacked. Okay, and he compared this directly to the Ayatollah Khomeini, who would relentlessly criticize our culture. And you know, licentiousness and Hollywood R-ratedness and all of that kind of stuff as like the degenerate society. But you can't recruit people for a war over that. You know what I mean? Not that he's really trying to, but that only inspires, inspires so much resentment. You know, and conservatives don't like

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  libertine-ism, right? Like, that's okay, but it only goes so far, right? Bin Laden, on the other hand, said, "They occupy the land of the two holy places. They help Israel kill Palestinians and Lebanese. They support the dictators, especially in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but around the Middle East. They put pressure on those dictators to keep oil prices artificially low, to subsidize our economy at their expense. Just think of all the times you've heard presidents say, "I'm telling the Saudis, they better ramp up production and get the price of gas down for election day," right? As blatant as can be. But what does that sound like to the poor person in those countries? Not money supposed to go to them? And then, as Bin Laden would say falsely,

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  turning a blind eye to Russia, India, Kazakhstan, and China in their persecution of Muslims. So they say they love us so much, but they don't really, because they don't say anything when this group or that group are the ones killing us. So these were the things. And look, let us stipulate, Lex, okay? That Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer. And by tradition, I don't take the word of mass murderers for meaning very much. And I don't expect you to, okay? That's not the point. The point is...

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  What did he say that got anybody to listen to him and do what he said? He wasn't in charge of a government. He had no coercive apparatus at all. His organization is purely volunteer, volunteer based. And he's asking people to blow themselves up over something important enough to blow yourself up for it. It's not virgins. It's, we have a policy. I should stipulate virgins after you die. It was, we have a policy. We're trying to provoke a war with the United States of America and you're going to help us do it. Why? Because of these six reasons. That's why. And that was what worked to recruit people to attack the United States of America. Okay. Major, important case in point.

• 1:33:58Speaker 03

  And, oh, whatever. The timeline jumps around here a bit, but major case in point is in 1996. When Israel, under Shimon Perez, invade, re-invaded Lebanon. And what was called Operation Grapes of Wrath. And during that invasion. It's hard to believe this. Wait, don't, don't Google yet. Search this part. It was Naftali Bennett called in the artillery strike on a UN shelter and killed 106 women and children in Qana. That's Q A N A. In 1996.

• 1:34:33Lex Fridman?

  Naftali Bennett, while serving as an Israeli army officer in 1996, commanded a commando unit during Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon. During this operation, his troops came under mortar fire near the village of Qana. Bennett radioed for artillery support, so on, so on, so on, killing 106 people and injured many others.

• 1:34:54Speaker 03

  In a UN shelter.

• 1:34:56Lex Fridman?

  This humanitarian tragedy is widely known as the Qana massacre.

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. So when Shimon Perez launched that war. Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11th plotters in the United States, pilot of Flight 11, I believe. He and his buddy, Ramsay bin Al Sheeb, they were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany.

• 1:35:18Speaker 01

  And when this invasion started, they both signed their last will and testament, which their friends and family and neighbors and whatever said was their expressed intent to like, they're joining the army. They're deciding, forget engineering, I want to join the Mujahideen and go fight the good fight somewhere, whatever. Then, just a couple of months later, Bin Laden put out his first declaration of war against the United States. It's called Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. Pretty subtle, right? And then, on the first page, he goes on and on about the Kana massacre and says, we'll never forget the severed heads and arms and legs of the babies and the children in Kana.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  He told Robert Fisk, I believe, how come your blood is blood, but our blood is water? Well, we'll see about that.

• 1:36:08Lex Fridman?

  That's a strong reminder that there's a cost to killing people.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. So what happened was Mohammed Atta and Ramsay bin Al-Shib, they read that declaration of war, and that was when they decided to join Al Qaeda. It was based on the Kana massacre that Israel had perpetrated in Lebanon. So, again, we're skipping ahead in the story. We're going to do the whole 90s here, but literally on September 11th, you had Egyptians volunteer for a Saudi sheikh to slaughter Americans by the thousands as revenge for American support for Israel killing people in Lebanon. That, my friend, is why George Bush said, "The Taliban did it because they hate your freedom." Right, because they couldn't tell you that.

• 1:36:51Lex Fridman?

  106 people. It's a reminder that killing can cause immeasurable escalation, trillions of dollars, all of it.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Yep. And here's the other thing. Bill Clinton, I think foolishly, said something about how he would like to normalize relations with Iraq, or at least look into it or something. And boy, he should not have said that because people got all upset and tried to figure out how to stop it, including the Kuwaitis. And what happened was, I know you're familiar with this, we all are, and virtually everyone gets this wrong.

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  The myth that Saddam Hussein tried to murder George H. W. Bush with a truck bomb assassination attempt in Kuwait in 1993. Total hoax debunked by Seymour Hersh by the end of the year in an article for The New Yorker called "Case Not Closed." He shows it was just a whiskey smuggling ring that they embellished into this plot against Bush. And then it was Martin Indic, who was Bill Clinton's advisor. Who was he? He was an Australian who'd been working for Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud Party, well, former terrorist murderer and then Likud Party Prime Minister of Israel.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  And Indic had gone from there to go work in, I don't know exactly the time off, a year or so. He stopped and went to work for Clinton. In the meantime, he founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, WINEP, which was directly a spinoff of AIPAC. AIPAC put up the money. That's the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the heart of the Israel lobby. They put up the money for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which you have heard that name a million times and you're going to continue to hear it because they are always cited as middle-of-the-road scientific experts on American foreign policy when they were. And this is not the same about all neocon think tanks, but this one was literally created by the Israel lobby in the United States.

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  And then he became an advisor to Bill Clinton and he was insisting on this policy, essentially continuing the H. W. Bush policy of staying in Saudi Arabia in order to patrol the so-called no-fly zones over Iraq to keep Saddam Hussein from killing the Iraqis and enforce the blockade, which was enforced by world law anyway, right? Like, there's some smuggling going on or whatever, but no nation-state is violating the embargo against Iraq here. So it's completely unnecessary on both counts. But the Israelis, and this is Rabin's government, Yitzhak Rabin's government, is, I guess, in agreement with this Likud guy, Indic, on this. They're pushing for a policy that they called dual containment.

• 1:39:33Speaker 03

  And the point was that Iraq, now that we beat them up so bad in Iraq War I, Desert Storm, first Gulf War, now they're not powerful enough to balance against Iran. So now America has to stay in Saudi Arabia to balance against them both. And Bill Clinton resisted this and resisted this until the big fake assassination attempt against Bush senior, which again, I don't have any reason to believe the Israelis were behind that. It was the Kuwaitis who rigged up, oh, did I leave out that it was the girl who pretended that she saw the babies thrown out of their incubators? It was her father was the one who spun up this story. So in other words, the same guy spun up that story was the same guy spun up this story about the assassination attempt against Bush senior, which everybody still believes and

• 1:40:16Speaker 03

  which I'm sure Bush junior believed at the time that he launched that war, probably was he read Seymour Hersh? He doesn't know. And it was just conventional wisdom. And I was still just a teenager in the 1990s, but I don't remember, wow, that assassination against Bush thing was debunked. I don't remember that ever getting around. You know what I mean? I don't know who was reading Hersh at that time. It was pre-internet times by a year. Right? It just wasn't, it just wasn't a hot enough topic. You know what I mean?

• 1:40:42Lex Fridman?

  How do you fight those false narratives that the military industrial complex tries to produce in order to get us into war?

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Well, the main thing is, I think the most, yeah, the most important thing is read antiwar.com every day for a long period of time in a row, and you will have a very good handle on what the hell is going on in the world. It's founded by Eric Garrison, Justin Raimondo, who are both a couple of libertarians. Raimondo was a student of Murray Rothbard's, or at least one of his mentees, you know, learned a lot from air of his foreign policy thought. Murray and Rothbard, the best libertarian. And so that's where we come from is that tradition. And, you know, Ron Paulian, non-interventionist types. And, but the news is, and, but our opinion pieces come from all of the spectrum, as long as we're anti-war. We're not sectarians at all. It's a one-issue thing. And really, we just do the hard news more than anything. We have a lot of great editorials as well. But it's

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  Eric Garrison, Dave DeCamp, and Kyle Anzalone, who get the lion's share of the credit for the actual work that goes into the site every day.

• 1:41:41Lex Fridman?

  And that goes to every single war in the world.

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  Everything, every day, we have our top news. We have a frontline section. And then at the bottom, we have every region of the world where there's conflict breaking out.

• 1:41:51Lex Fridman?

  Trump sends two nuclear subs towards Russia. So obviously Russia.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  That's reassuring. God.

• 1:41:59Speaker 03

  And you see our spotlight article is by Bronco March Teach and he's a leftist, but we love him. He does absolutely fantastic work.

• 1:42:06Lex Fridman?

  So it doesn't matter if you're left or right.

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  That's right. And we're very close with the American Conservative Magazine, for example. Pat Buchanan is a good friend of ours and we ran his articles for many years. Ron Paul, of course, as well, the greatest American ever.

• 1:42:18Lex Fridman?

  Ron Paul's amazing. And you give love and respect to Ron Paul all the time.

• 1:42:22Speaker 03

  He absolutely deserves it.

• 1:42:24Lex Fridman?

  We spoke of heroes. He's one of the legends.

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  That's how I knew antiwar.com was for me. The first day I laid eyes on it, my friend said, "Look, they run Ron Paul." And I went, "Huh, I like these guys."

• 1:42:33Lex Fridman?

  Can we take a quick pause for bathroom break?

• 1:42:34Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:42:36Speaker 03

  So before we get too far into Bill Clinton, I should say, because I did say these words, I know, the New World Order thing, that was a very popular conspiracy theory in the 90s and even before that, which was about building a one world government under the United Nations and subsuming the United States under it and all that. That's not what I'm talking about. And I actually was a New World Order kook in the 1990s, but I was a kid. It's fine. I grew out of it. But point being, Bush Senior did use that phrase repeatedly. And what he meant by it was, you know, in the guise of the United Nations, baby blue flag and all of that, for like PR purposes more than the real agenda, he was saying, "American power is the guarantor of world peace, and we will enforce it through war," right? And that's the deal of it.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  Nobody's allowed to bite, or we will intervene, right? So it's just essentially, it's the irony, right? That any government powerful enough to keep the peace between the 50 states is powerful enough to try it for the rest of the world as they can. They do this. We're just extending our security umbrella. Everybody who joins up with us, it's guaranteed, nobody's gonna ever mess with you, or else they'd have to mess with us, except for everyone on the outside, who now are put in the position of having, you know, not just the United States, but all of their allies lined up against them and feel that much, you know, more threatened, namely, of course, Russia and China, the other major, you know, potential adversaries and nuclear weapon states.

• 1:44:06Lex Fridman?

  And I think the lesson there is, if you think you can run the world by threatening everybody with military power, considering all the very cultures and peoples and histories of the world, you're going to fuck things up. You're going to create a lot of hate. You're going to create a lot of... Increased war, increased terrorism, increased threats to America versus decreased.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so more on the neocons here too, before we get too far into Bill Clinton is in 1992, a year after the end of Iraq War I, under Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, his deputies Scooter Libby and Zalmi Khalilzad wrote what was called the Defense Plan and Guidance for 1994, for fiscal year 1994. And it caused a huge upset. It was leaked to the New York Times and it became a really big deal because what it said was, "America is essentially world police. We're not going to tolerate the rise of any near peer competitor against us in the world. Like, we'll fight them before we allow them to get powerful enough to even be one.

• 1:45:09Speaker 03

  We will not let any nation or group of nations become powerful enough to ever even be able to think about challenging our military dominance on the planet. And of course, we're doing all this in the interests of world peace. And that means that we have to have total military dominance in the Middle East. We have to expand NATO and have total military dominance in Eastern Europe. And of course, we have to maintain our position with Japan and Korea and the rest in order to maintain total dominance in Asia as well. And this is what Charles Krauthammer called our unipolar moment again, and said, "We should stop short of nothing less than total world domination." That was the quote. And at that time, Jean Kirkpatrick, who had been a neoconservative,

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  she was a member of the Young People Socialist League of the Social Democrats USA, which were the Trotskyites, under Max Schachmann, who was Trotsky's most important guy in the United States. And this is something that Mark Dubowitz tried to deny and argue with me about of whether she was a neoconservative or not. Well, she was, like James Woolsey, a Presbyterian. Now, most neoconservatives are Jewish and/or Catholic, although you have Zalmi Khalilzad and Francis Fukuyama and others who are of other, you know, different, you know, cultural inheritances, you might say there. And so, the defining characteristics, and he was saying, well,

• 1:46:35Speaker 03

  she didn't believe in democracy as the single most important thing in the whole world. And of course, she had written this article in the National Interest that had gotten Reagan's attention in the first place. Saying that it's okay to support authoritarians as long as they're right wingers and anti-communists. That anti-communism is more important than democracy. And so we should put, for example, we should support people like Samosa in Nicaragua and things like that in order to keep the commies at bay, that that's number one. And so some of the neocons disagreed with that. Dubowicz was trying to say that's what makes her not a neocon, but that's really not true. Cause neocons, there's about a hundred of them or something and they disagree about all kinds of things. They sure do work together on lots of things, but sure they disagree on things.

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  I'll give another example on democracy where Robert Kagan said in 2013 that we should allow the Muslim Brotherhood to rule in Egypt because they won fair and square. Parliament and the presidency, just barely. They won in fair elections and after all we've done in the name of democracy, don't we have to allow them to have a chance? Well, Frank Gaffney was like, are you kidding me? Like I'll go overthrow him myself right now. Are you crazy? He's got an H-bomb going off over his head. Is he even gonna deny that Frank Gaffney is a neoconservative just because he differed with Robert Kagan on his order of importance in democracy in this or that instance? Give me a break. Jean Kirkpatrick came from the neoconservative left. She wrote for Commentary Magazine with Norman Podhoretz and all the guys.

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  And I don't mean, again, just a leftist. She was with the Trotskyites, Max Schottman and the Young People Socialist League and the Social Democrats USA. So she's like a card carrying neoconservative. This is what it means to be a neocon. And she wrote, and then she was Reagan's second ambassador to the United Nations. Was widely respected by the Republicans as a conservative hawk and a very like American interest oriented type. And she would even rail against the UN itself in almost a bircher sounding kind of way that appeals to me. Although she didn't really mean it, she was just mad that they would ever get in our way. Rather than that they really are a threat to our independence in any way. But the point is this, man, that I'm trying to get to is at the end of the Cold War,

• 1:48:47Speaker 03

  a year before the Soviet Union was even gone, in the fall of 1990. So she must have written this in the summer of 1990. This is a year before the failed commie coup and the final unraveling where the Russians overthrew the last of the Soviet Union government at that time, at the end of 91. It's a year before that and she. Importantly, right on the confirmation bias trick again, it's Jean Kirkpatrick, right? Not Susan Sarandon, it's Jean Kirkpatrick, who wrote this piece in The National Interest, called "A Normal Country in a Normal Time." The only place you can find it is on my website, scotthorton.org/fairuse. And I won't tell you where I got it. And it's, and don't ever sue me, National Interest, I love you guys.

• 1:49:32Speaker 03

  And the thing is, so it's, it's in there somewhere, you have to page down, I'm not, oh, there it is, right there. "Normal Country in a Normal Time," March, oh, that's the date I published it, fall 1990.

• 1:49:42Lex Fridman?

  "A Normal Country in a Normal Time," you published it on March 23rd, 2022, is by Jean Kirkpatrick, "The National Interest," fall 1990. "It's the first time since 1939 that there has been an opportunity for Americans to consider what we might do in a world less constrained by political and military competition with a dangerous adversary. I am pleased that The National Interest has provided a forum for this discussion." And it goes on, "American purposes are mainly domestic. Our purpose in the world are merely human, not transcendent. To be legitimate, the American government's purpose must be ratified by popular majorities."

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  Here's what she says in here. She says, "We should eschew the burdens of superpower status." She sounds like George Washington. She's saying, "Okay, the commies are gone, the Cold War is over, the emergency is over. So now we can go back to being what we were supposed to be, what we used to be before, that we put on hold because we had to wage the Cold War. Now we can have a real return to normalcy, meaning 28, right? Before the, the permanent world empire was built for the purposes of destroying the Nazis and then containing the commies."

• 1:50:57Lex Fridman?

  So- She was very anti-communist and neoconservative perspective. She had a significant role in the Reagan administration. And then after she evolved and saying, we need to let go.

• 1:51:10Speaker 01

  That's right. In other words, she is here, she's aligned with Pat Buchanan. Now, for people who aren't familiar with Pat Buchanan, he's a Catholic paleoconservative. He was Nixon's speechwriter and Reagan's speechwriter. To this day, he's retired, sweet old guy now, but he's lifelong cold warrior and doesn't regret it. The commie threat absolutely had to be contained. Vietnam had to be done. He's a wonderful guy. He really is. And he's written just a grip of great books. I mean, I don't know, eight or 10 of them.

• 1:51:40Lex Fridman?

  So there's an evolution here. There's some of the folks really saw Russia and the Soviet Union as a major threat.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:51:48Lex Fridman?

  And then they've evolved saying, okay, now that the Cold War is over, we need to calm down.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  And, and see, Pat is the perfect avatar for this. Him and his buddies, you know, Scott McConnell and Jude Wanniski. Wanniski himself had been a former neoconservative. But there's this whole group of paleoconservatives who nobody can question their patriotism. This is Ronald Reagan's guy. This is a guy that puts words in Ronald Reagan's mouth, right? And he's saying, okay, you guys promised the empire was a defensive measure, right? We don't want an empire. Chalmers Johnson is another one. Chalmers Johnson was a professor at USC who was a hardcore, ardent cold warrior. You're familiar with him, I'm sure. He wrote the book Blowback and then Sorrows of Empire and Nemesis, or the trilogy that he wrote about the American empire then.

• 1:52:39Speaker 01

  And he was adamantly cold warrior until the Soviets were gone. And then the empire continued to expand. And then he went, wait a minute now, I taught a generation of students.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  That we were holding the tide back. What's all this about we're the tide now? That's not right. And in fact, I like to cite this because it's just so astonishing to people that William F. Buckley, one of the major, not that he was a neoconservative. He wasn't, but he was one of their main godfathers, basically. The founding editor of the National Review. He wrote an article in 1952 in Common Wheel Magazine. Again, you can find this at Scott Horton, our slash fair use. It's called the party in the deep blue sea. It's about the Republican Party, I guess is what it means. Party in the deep blue sea. And in there, he says, we must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores

• 1:53:34Speaker 03

  for the duration of the emergency, even with Truman at the reins of it all. Because of the need to face down the Soviet threat. And you need a powerful domestic empire that's capable of forcing the American people to enforce a world empire to contain the threat of Stalinist Soviet communism.

• 1:53:56Speaker 01

  That's horrible, right?

• 1:53:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  Totalitarian bureaucracy.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  The same one we still got. And see, Pat said, okay, look, I was buying it when the enemy was in Moscow. But now that there's no enemy in Moscow and world communism, the threat of world revolution is dead and gone. Well, I don't want to hear it about why we have to suffer this anymore. We're supposed to be, and then again, this is why I cite Gene Kirkpatrick. I could just cite Ron Paul to you all day long here, right? But everybody knows that Ron Paul is good on everything. The point is here is these are people who are very hawkish when they feel like it needs to be. You might even, your, your readers might, or your listeners, viewers might think that Ron Paul is just too biased for peace. Well, Pat ain't, okay?

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

  Pat is willing to fight, but not if there's not a good reason to. And that's the big qualification. Why would a guy like Pat be anti-war? We know he's not a hippie. There must be another explanation. And the other explanation is he is learned. He knows more about this than you, and he knows why you shouldn't do this, because this is what's going to happen if you do. And that's the kind of guy he is. And that's why he and his paleo conservative friends said, okay, enough, we want to come home. And so Jean-Curk Patrick, she didn't really join with the paleo cons, but she was certainly aligning with him on this issue at this time. That now's our chance to go back to being a limited constitutional republic

• 1:55:25Speaker 03

  with a free economy and a usually successful commercial republic, I believe she says in the piece. And which had a typo because it said unusually, but she couldn't have meant that. Go ahead.

• 1:55:38Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. I think I I leaned towards Ron Paul a little bit. I don't think totalitarian bureaucracy is justified ever. Almost, I mean, you can come up with a really extreme case, but really you're going to get into trouble.

• 1:55:50Speaker 03

  This is why the Berchers turned against the Cold War in this during Vietnam. Robert Welch, I mean, you can't get more anti-communist than that guy, the leader of the Berch Society. But he goes, wait a minute, why are we turning our country into a communist country in the name of containing communism over there? And he was being very liberal with the use of the word there, but meaning why are we building a total state here? When that's everything that we're trying to oppose in Vietnam, but we're building it here at home is crazy. We need to save this money. We need to build our country and lead the world by example, not by force. It was the obvious thing. And if it was that obvious to Robert Welch and Ron Paul during the Cold War, then after the Cold War, you gotta make up a bunch of crap about Saddam Hussein is Hitler,

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  and he's killing all the babies in their incubators and these kinds of Belgian babies on bayonets and related hoaxes to keep the thing going. Because again, as Richard Pryor said, that doesn't make any sense to me. Right? Like if it doesn't just sound right to your average guy, you tell me we had a face down Hitler? All right. We had a face down Stalin and Mao. That makes sense. We got to bomb Gaddafi? There's not a better way that we, USA number one can handle that? You know, same kind of thing going forward here. And this is why, you know, these, and I like to emphasize this so much is that in the aftermath of Vietnam, people think that, oh, peace is just hippies and leftists and anti-Americans of one stripe or another.

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  People who are just no good in a fight anyway. So what do they know about security, right? Jack Nicholson, I stand on that wall. Even think about what a joke that was. He was down in Guantanamo Bay. Keeping Castro a bay for me? Yeah, thanks a lot, dude. I can't handle that truth, whatever you're burying down there. Lot of torture later, but anyway.

• 1:57:38Lex Fridman?

  So you're saying like it's really people that were hawks for a time woke up.

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:57:43Lex Fridman?

  The reality of the ridiculousness, the absurdity of a, what a totalitarian bureaucracy does as it expands and creates momentum. And then you're now become the thing you were fighting.

• 1:57:54Speaker 03

  Right. But Francis Fukuyama knew better. He said, no, it's the end of history. And America has proven that more or less democracy and more or less free market capitalism as like Bill Clinton would define them or something of that era, that that's the future of mankind. We proved it. They tried every other way of having a modern, successful society. And this is the one and only way to do that. And not only that then, but that's obviously America's mandate. And all his neocon friends took it as America's mandate that we're going to force the world to accept our ways in that same way. Of course, the British justified their obviously very self-interested empire in the very same way. That we're going to teach you to have a separate, independent judiciary at any cost, right?

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  And it's all the, you know, I hate to say it, but the white man's burden type of argument that, and they say this to this day, look, if it wasn't us, it would be the Russians. If it wasn't us, it would be the Chinese. If it wasn't us, it would be somebody else and it would be worse. And so that's it. And so it is our responsibility. We're the most mature and adult and responsible stewards of global power. And so it has to be us to do this. And that was what it said in the defense planning guidance. And now it's true that Bush lost that election and the Clintonites came in. But as Paul Wolfowitz bragged again in the national interest, by the end of the decade, that they all adopted the Wolfowitz doctrine anyway, that. You know, like, for example, Bill Clinton going right around NATO to do the war in Kosovo in 1999 because he wanted to. And Russia had a veto on the UN Security Council, and

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  so, well, forget that. We just go around that. That's straight out of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, right? That it's what's good for us and our predominance of power in those regions of the world is what matters the most. And these other considerations will have to take a backseat to make sure that we can be the guarantors of our world order, regardless of what the treaties everybody signed up for say. And so that really is what they call the Wolfowitz Doctrine. It's not just, hey, let's go to Iraq for Israel, although that's a huge part of it, but it's, let's, America, our military power is always beneficial compared to the alternative. And so we should be the ones to guarantee the peace or the

• 2:00:04Speaker 03

  war. But in our case, if it's war, it's only because the alternative was worse, we promise. And so that's the doctrine. And there is ideology of American empire here. I don't want to dismiss the corruption. It's a huge part. I mean, if, if, hopefully, we have time later and talk really about the new Cold War with Russia, we can talk a lot about the role that Lockheed and the other military industrial complex firms played in pushing all these policies for it. It's true with Iraq, too. The Committee on the Liberation of Iraq was sponsored by Bruce Jackson from Lockheed Martin. And, and he also financed the Project for a New American Century of Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. He financed the Weekly Standard Magazine. And the agenda was, like, let's sell NATO planes in Europe,

• 2:00:46Speaker 03

  and let's push for war in the Middle East. And there's, so there's a lot of self-interested reasons there. But I think, overall, like, you've got to take these people at their word when they say, "We know we're heroes. We know we're doing the right thing. We know everybody's better off without us. We know that. We have to. This is our morality-based foreign policy. We just can't allow that bad thing to happen any longer. We have to do something worse to stop it." And this kind of thing is very, like, you could tie it back to, like, whatever. I'm not this smart to talk all about the influence of, of the pilgrims and their glorious mission, you know, in ancient Massachusetts to create the new city on the hill to...

• 2:01:28Speaker 03

  To be like the new Zion and, and ultimately determine the fate of mankind. But there's a lot of Yankee busybodyhood that is built into this. And of course, the Scotch Irish like to get drunk and get into fistfights for fun. And I take responsibility for that. It's a bit of my background too. I'm not being a racist bigot, but like, that's part of our culture is like being a tough guy and being able to get in a brawl and win one, or even suffer a defeat and, and not cry about it. You know what I mean? And like.

• 2:01:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, some of that was, it was the dual, it's a double edged sword of human nature is the Scots Irish. I mean, they're so, and I had a great conversation with Saagar and Jedy about this, uh, are so foundational to the individualism that makes America great. But then you get into trouble where you start to believe you're.

• 2:02:13Speaker 03

  Tell them there's a bad guy out there.

• 2:02:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And you, you start, and then you have the biggest military in the world. And there's Lockheed Martin, there's the military, that's a complex. And now you think you're better than everybody and now you're creating wars all over the place.

• 2:02:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:02:25Lex Fridman?

  Creating enemies all over the place.

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  And see, of course, there's partisanship is all built into this. It's everybody supports their guy because the other guy is, you, we can't let them win. So we can't undermine, even when we disagree with our own guy, we can't undermine him. Or we're helping the other guys are going to bid him, get him in the midterms or they'll get him in the next election. So people close ranks around things they even disagree with just because they consider, again, the alternative worse. That's even from the point of view of voters, a lot of times that like, you know, even Murray Rothbard endorsed George H W Bush, who had just done the Iraq war because Rothbard's like, well, at least he hates Yitzhak Shamir. And at least he's not bringing Hillary Clinton and the leftist cultural revolution with him.

• 2:03:07Speaker 03

  Right? So, well, you know, uh, people got to make these choices and, and make their comparisons of, you know, what they favor or what they value at any given time and make those compromises, you know?

• 2:03:18Lex Fridman?

  And that's why you said antiwar.com is nonpartisan, right?

• 2:03:21Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah, we're reaching out to everybody. We're here to inform everybody again.

• 2:03:26Speaker 01

  As I was mentioning during the short break there, that Hawks read our website too. Because if you want really the best briefing of what's going on in the country, like we do hear from them from time to time that like, I gotta admit, those guys really do have the most comprehensive coverage of the stuff I'm interested in, even if from their point of view, the wrong point of view.

• 2:03:44Lex Fridman?

  If, uh, before go to Iraq war two.

• 2:03:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:03:48Lex Fridman?

  If it's okay, take a brief aside, uh, since you mentioned it, we did an Iran debate a few weeks ago.

• 2:03:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:03:55Lex Fridman?

  Uh, where about actually 20 minutes was cut toward the end where it went a bit off the rails. And, uh, you agreed with the description that I wrote on X. I hope it's cool if I read it. I try hard to avoid editing. That's why I do four, five, six, seven, eight hour podcasts. I wonder how long we go today. Uh, the part I cut in the Iran debate was where it went off the rails after four hours, not content wise, but tone wise, mockery, interruption, et cetera. Both had very little sleep the night before and were tired and not their best selves, as they both said. I cut not because of the content, but the style. I try, I try all I can to avoid having that kind of drama on the podcast.

• 2:04:37Lex Fridman?

  Instead, I thought the first four hours had a lot of strong rants, which it did. And you were continuing the rants very well today. Uh, I'm enjoying it. Uh, so you wanted to echo that description and that the edit made sense. Uh, maybe can you speak to that? And then also can you please, it'd be great now that you're fresh. For Dr. Pepper, say anything and everything you would like to say that went unresponded to maybe, uh, that is left to be said.

• 2:05:04Speaker 01

  Thank you. Yes. So first of all, I'll take my responsibility for that part. I literally had a long drive and a long flight and four hours sleep and no food in my stomach whatsoever. And I quite honestly, absolutely despise Mark Dubowitz and I have for a very long time. And so it was. I really had thought about this beforehand. I really should have rejected your terms at the beginning where we're all friends here, having a friendly discussion. I had already kind of rehearsed in my mind, what I wanted to say to you was actually no, right? This is just business.

• 2:05:35Speaker 02

  I wish you did.

• 2:05:35Speaker 01

  And I know that I really do regret that. And I'm sorry to you personally for that. Because what I should have said was, this is just business. What's going to happen here is, he's going to lie the whole time because he has to. And so then I'm going to spend all of my time telling you why what he just said isn't actually true, and how you can go verify that for yourself, etc., which is what ended up happening. But it made it much more acrimonious because it was like, and for you, it was more frustrating because you're trying to hold things in the conception that you had it, where we're all just going to be friends here, when that just was never gonna really last. And part of that is, look, I'm just, I'm Luke from Empire. I'm not quite all the way grown up, Return of the Jedi Skywalker here, myself.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  So I get angry and, and say angry things. So as far as how bad it went, I take my responsibility for my part of that. Except the reality was, it was just because I was up against a horrible foreign agent lying his ass off, trying to get my fellow Americans killed, and their dollars wasted. And I got a problem with that. And now on the edit, though, this is where we had a problem. And I do accept from you that this part was inadvertent. I know that you didn't mean to do it this way. What happened was, there were two instances of him saying, oh, Scott Horton thinks the Jews control everything and dictate everything and blah

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  da blah, which I never said at all. And he said twice. And yet, my response was completely deleted. But him saying that against me was still in there. And I thought, like, on one hand, it's completely silly and stupid. But on the other hand, that's also like a pretty ruthless and horrible thing to try to do to somebody, not you, him, to try to put those words in my mouth and say, all those facts that you just heard for four hours, nah, this guy just hates Jews. So if you're on my side, you don't have to listen to him. You don't have to believe him, anything like this. And then our discussion about, that's not true, dude. Just because I was talking about the neoconservatives, doesn't mean I was talking about the Jews. Because, for example, Jen Kirkpatrick and Jim Woolsey are Presbyterians. And Michael Novak.

• 2:07:41Speaker 03

  And, uh, oh, what's his name? Our Catholics and Francis Fukuyama's, I guess, is a Buddhist. And, and Zame Khalilzad is a Muslim. And so I didn't say the Jews at all, did I? I was talking about this and that. And my very good response to that went to the cutting room floor. And so I thought, well, that was kind of lame. And then I thought I was going to come back sooner. And so I apologize for kind of putting you on blast in that interview where I mentioned it. But I was waiting to hear back from you where we're gonna make up for that by doing this interview. And so I was like, yeah, I'm kind of disappointed. Now it's nearly August and I hadn't heard from the dude and I thought we were gonna do that. And so, and because it is important that, and it goes to my overall point that I'm trying to make here is

• 2:08:25Speaker 03

  obviously the American empire is very much against the interests of the American people. But also, and most especially, our support for Israel, the great albatross around our neck. You know, what they do or millstone is maybe better, right? Albatross was a symbol of good luck before you shot it down. But Israel's interests are vastly different than America's interests. And people try to lie even to themselves and say that that's not true. But they are very different. For example, when Israel killed those women and children in Kana in 1996, that's what brought our towers down. Right? So this is something very important that we have to grapple with as a country.

• 2:09:08Speaker 03

  That we're not just talking about Israel being a nice Jewish boy, minding its own business over there. Kind of like in some cliche or narrative, we're talking about an absolutely ruthless state that is in the process of trying to get rid of millions of people they wish they hadn't kidnapped back in 1967. And we can do a whole bit on that. But they are, put themselves in a very difficult position. And so they need our help to a very great degree. Now,

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  From all that we discussed here today, does this sound like I'm saying the Israelis and their lobby are behind every single thing in American policy and what we're doing here? Like, that's not at all what I'm talking about. Zbigniew Brzezinski is not the Israel lobby at all. He's Rockefeller's guy, and that's a separate group of guys, right? And so, go ahead.

• 2:09:52Lex Fridman?

  Just, I'm really sorry for missing the two mentions that you're referring to. You know, people can search in the transcript the word Jew. It appears, I guess, a couple of times, and that's what you're referring to. Your back and forth argument actually came about 15 minutes after that moment, because you kind of were patiently waiting.

• 2:10:13Speaker 01

  I had to get back to it, kind of thing.

• 2:10:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and you know, there is no disrespect, Matt, and I really apologize if there's any hurt or anything like that caused because of that.

• 2:10:22Speaker 01

  And it's true that the thing did really turn into an argument at that point. I mean, called Jim Loeb, of all people, a vicious anti-Semite, which is just completely hilarious considering how Jewish Jim Loeb is and what an extraordinarily sweet and kind and decent gentleman he is. This is the most ridiculous thing in the world. When we were on the curb outside arguing, he said J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward also is a vicious anti-Semite because he wrote something that explained the difference between Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon's positions on Iraq and Iran. In other words, Mark Dubois is very dubious. He is not a serious man. He's, in a sense, not really a man as much

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  as just a foreign agent representing a position on behalf of a foreign power. And as I said in that debate, do you think, and I mean this honestly, for anyone listening, you don't have to answer, but does anyone think that Mark Dubois really regrets that Americans died on September 11th because of what Israel was doing? He would hide behind, no, they hate us because we're free. No, maybe he'd say they were mad about our presence in Saudi Arabia, but he would never say, yeah, but that's because Martin Indic said so, and that's because, and the Khan massacre helped motivated Mohammed Atta. He just lied that point, just like all Israel lobbyists would. How could they justify, you know?

• 2:11:44Lex Fridman?

  I wish I knew the animosity you have for Mark Dubowitz because I was part of my, I'm not very good at this, the moderator thing, but I was very confused by the animosity in the room.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  Well, it's the dishonesty too. Even if I just met him that day, like everything out of his mouth was some kind of twisted fact. Like, yes, there was a Kobar Tower attack, but you're going to blame that on the Ayatollah when it was Bin Laden that did that? And we all know that that's true. So don't sit here and try to give me some pro-Israel, you know, my truth. There's only the truth and Mark Dubowitz is not associated with it. He has an agenda. And, but you're right that I should have made that clear, that what this is, is this is a foreign lobbyist trying to get America to serve a foreign nation. And I am the guy from America and antiwar.com trying to fend him off.

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  And look, and I, I, I accept too, that I ain't so mature for a 49 year old, whatever, 48 then. I was, I was a very immature 48 at the time, but I lose my temper very quickly when people lie. I just can't stand it. I just don't have time to listen to people being willfully dishonest to me or in front of me, you know?

• 2:12:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And I'm glad we got a chance to clear that up. We're going to go hard and, and for as long as needed.

• 2:12:58Speaker 01

  Great. And yeah, I, no hard feelings at all, man. I'm glad we worked it out.

• 2:13:02Lex Fridman?

  Do we, do we go to Iraq war two first?

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Well, let's do, wait, let's, let's stay on Bill Clinton in the nineties for a minute because, you know, we were talking about the neo cons got brought up in the, in the sense that they did help to encourage Iraq war one. Although I don't think there were the real, you know, kingpins behind it or whatever, in the way that they were in Iraq war two. And then the doctrine of global dominance that Wolfowitz developed, you know, in 92, that became more or less the standard for foreign policy thought and through the nineties.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  And then, but during the Clinton years, it's really important to mention that Bill Clinton backed the Mujahideen. Even though they were already attacking us in the United States and American targets overseas. Bill Clinton kept backing them in Bosnia, Kosovo, and in Chechnya. And to a greater degree than I understood. Now mostly this means working with the Saudis and the Brits to support them. And including Bin Laden himself was seen by at least four credible journalists in Izbegovic's office, the president of Bosnia in Sarajevo in 1994.

• 2:14:09Speaker 03

  And and his men fought there and Bill Clinton knew it and Richard Holbrook said, "We could have never won without their help," and all these kinds of things. I've got all the sources in the latest book, Provoked. I go into much further detail about this even than in the Terror War book enough already. And and the same was true in Chechnya too. Essentially, and as we've seen, and you know this from just your own recent memory, right, that as we've seen in Syria as well, that as long as the Bin Ladenites are killing Serbs or Russians or Shiites, then it's cool. And that's what America and Britain and Saudi use them for. And so even though their first attack in the United States was Rabbi Kahane in 1990,

• 2:14:51Speaker 03

  the leader of the Koch Party, who's a very right-wing Israeli rabbi who advocated for the extermination or expulsion of all Palestinians from all of historic Palestine. And his party had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being fascist and was banned from Israeli politics. But he was a radical rabbi, lived in New York, I believe, and he was assassinated in 1990 by a guy who was part of Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Now, this is, that was their first hit. In 92, they hit us at a hotel in Aden, Yemen. Then in 93, they did the First World Trade Center attack. Now, as we're dwelling on this one for a second, because Bill Clinton had just been president for a month and a week. It was the end of February,

• 2:15:30Speaker 03

  February 26, 1993. And the truck bomb, they parked it in the wrong place. It could have toppled one tower over into the other. It could have just that truck bomb without another one. If they had put it in the wrong place, it could have toppled one tower over into the other at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. Right? And so, and then from there into more and more towers, who knows? Like, there could have been tens and tens and tens of thousands of people killed. And it almost worked.

• 2:16:01Speaker 03

  And the thing is about that, a couple of things. First of all, the CIA had allowed these guys into the country when INS wanted to keep them out because they said, we know these guys, they're our friends from the Afghan war. We don't mind them and let them in. So they're all living in Brooklyn and dangerous terrorists. Then the second thing was that the FBI had a walk-in informant, a guy named Ahmad Saleh, who was an Egyptian army intelligence officer, former one. And he had been recruited by them and he allowed them to recruit him to be the bomb maker. You can trust me, I'm a military guy, I can make the bomb, he said. Then he went to the FBI, said, I've been recruited by some terrorists to make a bomb. And there were two agents who believed him, Floyd and Anticev, Nancy Floyd and John Anticev,

• 2:16:46Speaker 03

  where the agents work in the case. And the plan was they were going to use him to use an inert powder, make a fake bomb, and it'd be a perfect sting. But the thing is, their boss was a guy named Carson Dunbar, and he would not, he in fact demanded they cut his pay, the informant's pay, from $500 to $300 a week and demanded he wear a wire on the floor of the mosque where, you know, while he's staying, he's sleeping on the floor of the mosque with these guys, he can't wear a wire, right? So he ends up bugging out and says, I think the FBI is on to me and bugs out. Then they brought in Ramsey Youssef, the guy who built the bomb, the real bomb, the real terrorist who came in. And again, almost top of one tower over the end of the other. Problem is a couple of things, only six people died.

• 2:17:31Speaker 03

  That's a lot of people if you're one of the six or the survivors of the six, right? I'm not saying that, but I'm saying in the imagination of the American people, it was kind of just not that big of a deal. And New York City is pretty far from here and just people were not feeling it nearly as much as say, for example, both of them collapsing with 3,000 people inside still, right? So. Then also, two days later, the ATF raided the Branch Davidians and thus began a six weeks long siege of this religious group 100 miles up the road from here, who ultimately the FBI and the Army Delta Force massacred on April the 19th, 93. So the American people's attention was just completely diverted and Clinton's too. This is his whole first 100 days. It's all bogged down in Waco and this kind of thing.

• 2:18:15Speaker 03

  So, and who wants to learn a bunch of Arab names and all of this stuff? It just, to the FBI agents, they didn't do a very good job of following up and, and, and preventing the same group from carrying out these things. Now, they had, I think, I don't really know enough about this. I need to go back and reread about the Holland Tunnels plot, the UN building and all that. I think that was the setup where they were trying to get the rest of these guys in a sting, basically, on that, that part of the plot. But in 1995, the Bin Ladenites attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard. And in 1996, they blew up the Kobar Towers in Dhaoran, Saudi Arabia.

• 2:19:00Speaker 03

  And that was a truck bombing that killed 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq. And that was who was the target. But then what happened was the Saudi Kingdom, in alliance with the corrupt criminal Louis Freeh, of course, the director of the Federal Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, they, who were in charge, not CIA, they had the, the mandate to treat all these Al Qaeda attacks as crimes, as they are crimes under federal code. So as FBI took the lead at that time, and Louis Freeh wanted to believe the story that somehow it was Iranian-backed Shiite Saudi Hezbollah that had done the attack.

• 2:19:42Speaker 03

  Because, of course, the Saudi monarchy hates their Shiite majority and they just happen to live right on top of where all the oil is. And they didn't want to blame it on Bin Laden, who was, you know, adjacent to the royal family and who they wanted to take care of themselves, etc. And so they blamed it on Iran. But it was Bin Laden who did it. And the FBI agent in charge, John O'Neill, knew that it was them who did it. His enemy, Michael Scheuer from the CIA, also knew that it was Bin Laden who did it. And Bin Laden himself bragged about it to Abdelbari Atwan, the editor of Al Quds Al Arabi in London.

• 2:20:18Speaker 03

  And named the names of the martyrs and celebrated them and said, that's exactly right. Are you listening now? And all of these things about it. It was Al Qaeda that did that. Then in 1998, they hit the African embassies. And in 2000, they hit the USS Cole. They had bailed on an attack against the USS The Sullivans, the dinghy sank. And then they hit the Cole, killed 17 sailors in Aden in 2000.

• 2:20:42Lex Fridman?

  So this is, uh, these attacks are building up and

• 2:20:44Speaker 03

  These are building up and building up in the run up to September 11. And then the whole time, they're saying exactly why they're doing this. So we know their motive. And they're also saying their strategy. Their strategy is to provoke us into invading Afghanistan. They're going to replicate. They're going to give us our own Afghanistan, the way we gave the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan. And bin Laden said repeatedly, the point was to provoke us into overreacting, to bog us down, bleed us to bankruptcy, break our empire on the rocks of Afghanistan, the same way we had helped them do to the USSR. And so

• 2:21:27Speaker 03

  then W. Bush, when he was elected, his son, bin Laden's son, gave an interview to Rolling Stone in 2010, where he says, I was in Afghanistan with my father. And when Bush was elected in 2000, my father was so happy. He said, this is the kind of president he needs. One who will attack and spend money and break the country. He said, this is in 2010, so bin Laden's still alive. He says, Bill Clinton sent missiles after my father and didn't get him. But now you spent 10 years in Afghanistan and you still haven't gotten him. America used to be smart, not like the bull that runs after the red scarf. Okay. So that was

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  the strategy, was to get America to kill itself, to get us to strap on the suicide vest.

• 2:22:19Speaker 03

  Get the irony of the whole thing? How is a group of 400 bandits hiding out in Nanggarh Province supposed to bring down the empire? The answer is, you give the empire an excuse to exploit. And it's not that George Bush is stupid and innocent, it's that he's stupid and guilty, right? You know, it's not that Bin Laden thought, oh, here's a guy who's such a super patriot that he'll go the extra mile. He looked at Bush and said, here's a guy who's a corrupt, evil, narrow-minded, short-sighted idiot of a criminal who will exploit a crisis to the nth degree if I give him one. And that's what I'm trying to do.

• 2:23:01Speaker 03

  And which, by the way, I consider the collectivism of Osama bin Laden, who considers that there's no limit, apparently, on the number of Afghans that he can get killed in his plan here, when he ain't from there, right? He's trying to provoke a war with a superpower against a regime that's allowed him to stay and against a people who did nothing to him or to us, right? A people, I hate that, but some people, millions of people, who did nothing to us whatsoever. And he put them in our crosshairs on what? The idea, well, God will sort them out, they'll go to paradise if they believe well, and so who cares about them? And, which was something that was a big problem with Mullah Omar, where Mullah Omar, despite the narrative, actually hated and feared Osama bin Laden and wanted rid of him and

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

  was trying to negotiate to get rid of him because, as Murray Rothbard says, "A radical becomes conservative the day he captures the capital city," right? And so Mullah Omar didn't want a world revolution like, you know, Osama bin Laden, right? He wasn't interested in that, he was interested in holding down Afghanistan. He'd already won most of the country, he hadn't finished winning it all yet. And he wasn't trying to get in a fight with America, which Bill Clinton had supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996, had encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to encourage the Taliban to go all the way to Kabul. And in fact, wanted them to not even settle with the Northern Alliance, wanted to see an outright victory against the Northern Alliance

• 2:24:28Speaker 03

  because they wanted the Taliban to have total control, a monopoly on the entire state, so they could build an oil pipeline from Tajikistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan. Now, they abandoned this project after 98, after the embassy bombings of 98. People sometimes say that's why Bush invaded in 01 or whatever. No, that wasn't it. But that is why Bill Clinton supported the rise of the Taliban in 1996 in the first place. And they said, well, we figured there will be an Emir and no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that. That was the Bill Clinton administration's, what they said about that, right? So in Ahmed Rashid's book, The Taliban, has all that stuff in it. And I quote him at length in my books. And so what was the point of that? Screwing

• 2:25:11Speaker 03

  the Russians, figuring out a way to get hydrocarbons out of the Caspian Basin without having to go through Russia or Iran. And so that was part of that whole game, which we'll have to talk about that in later in the Cold War segment here. But that's part where these stories overlap a bit. Now, so it's important to bring up too, that during this time, the cliche in the Pentagon, among the joint staff, who are the most important policy planners for the Pentagon, they had a cliche that said, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower. Right? What are they gonna do? They're gonna set off a truck bomb here or there. They're gonna kill a few hundred people here or there.

• 2:25:51Speaker 03

  Look at the Africa embassies, it's mostly Africans who died. And so, the, I don't think that they thought that losing a couple of towers full of a couple of thousand people would be a small price to pay. I think they weren't not imagining that level of consequence. But after all, they did have to hijack our airliners to have something to crash into anything. We are talking about a stateless group of essentially penniless bandits, right? Who have millions of dollars, not billions, much less trillions, right? These are, these were criminals, right? Outlaws, terrorists. So they had no ability to truly bring us down. They had to, and of course, the analogy to Pearl Harbor is perfect because 3,000 people

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

  died in a sneak attack. What more do you need to know? And I kind of like to harp on this, not that I ever really like studied psychology more than a couple of semesters in junior college, but it seems probably meaningful, right? That in the images, the planes literally come out of the clear blue sky. Right? And so geez, I guess I don't know what's behind this. Someone explain it. It's just like tabula rasa. Man, go ahead and let me know what I'm supposed to think about this. I'm shocked and I'm completely surprised. So, you know, of course, people who knew a lot about this were very worried about it, of course, but for the average American, and this was the meaning of the term blowback, by the way, as Chalmers Johnson explained, and it was coined

• 2:27:20Speaker 03

  in Donald Wilbur, who was a CIA historian in his after action report against, about the coup in Iran. He said, CIA officer is going to have to be very careful about blowback coming down the line from operations like this. And then, as Johnson explained, what it really meant was not just consequences, because you can just have a funny term for consequences, but blowback meant the long-term consequences of secret foreign policies. So that when they come due, the American people don't understand what it means. Why are the Iranians burning our flag? Why are the Bin Ladenites crashing into our towers? Somebody tell us, because we don't know. And when the answer is, well, it's actually all our fault, then the security force, our

• 2:28:01Speaker 03

  national government will not tell us that. In fact, they'll make up a lie and say Islam makes them hate us because we love our mamas and Jesus so much. And then people go, oh, man, what a terrible psychopathic, I didn't realize Islam was that bad of a religion. We better have to fight all of them now if that's what it does to you. It's radical Islam. See, once you believe in Islam hard enough, it turns you into a suicide bomber and makes you hate North Americans. There is no other cause and effect that you guys need to be aware of. And People might not remember this, but boy, did they push it that fall that the Taliban had done it. Al Qaeda was the Taliban, the Taliban was Al Qaeda.

• 2:28:41Lex Fridman?

  You mean 2001?

• 2:28:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:43Lex Fridman?

  That they was Taliban and they were Al Qaeda and then it's the extreme.

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  They conflated them together so powerfully that then this became a reason why people were just so doubtful about the entire narrative because they're going, what do you mean a bunch of cavemen from the town of Bedrock out there in Kandahar province did this to us because they don't like that we have a bill of rights? Like, that obviously is not true. So what is the truth? And then people come up with endless answers other than the obvious one, which is America has a really bad Middle East policy and Israel is a real big part of that. That's the answer is blowback. Again, Egyptians volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel is doing to the Lebanese. It's a little bit complicated, but not that complicated if you want to be honest. But at the end, what is it?

• 2:29:32Speaker 03

  It's all George Bush's bothers and Bill Clinton's fault. Right? And so what are they gonna do?

• 2:29:38Lex Fridman?

  I remember being, I was sitting in Chicago and 9/11 happened. I remember being really confused in the months after, in the hours and the days and the months after with all the narratives that were coming out. It didn't quite make sense. A lot of the thing, it almost felt like they're improvising with different stories that will convince the American people. And I remember being extremely confused. Iraq, yeah, yeah, Saddam Hussein. Here, they're trying to see who can we create the evil guy out of Al Qaeda Taliban? And then they just ran with it. Can you, can you just, can you break that down?

• 2:30:19Lex Fridman?

  What the different lies that end up sticking that were used to mislead us into the war?

• 2:30:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so on Afghanistan, it's clear that the CIA and Conny Lisa Rice, and we know this, not that Bob Woodward is really trustworthy, but he published supposedly verbatim, verbatim transcripts from the National Security Council meetings in his book, Bush at War. And so we know from those National Security Council meetings that Conny Lisa Rice and the CIA were advising that we try our best to divide the Taliban from Al Qaeda and let the Taliban know, we don't have a fight with you or just after these Arabs that hit us. In fact, it's very important. Taliban tried to warn us that the attack was coming and were essentially turned away. They warned the UN in Pakistan and they sent a guy to the

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  United States and he was denied a meeting at State Department at all and went home. And they only knew it was true because of that an attack was coming because they had learned it from a Tajik jihadist or a, I believe a Tajik who was one of their informants basically told them Bin Laden didn't tell Mullah Omar. In the summer of 2001, Mullah Omar had told Arnaud de Barav from the Washington Times, he said, "Bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat. I can neither swallow him nor spit him out." And Milton Bearden, who had helped run the CIA covert war in the 1980s, told the Washington Post, "We've been negotiating with Mullah Omar over Bin Laden since 98. After the Africa Embassy attack, Omar said, 'I gotta get rid of this guy.'" And he ordered Bin Laden,

• 2:31:53Speaker 03

  "Don't you do any more attacks against the United States." And Bin Laden had promised him that he wouldn't and then kept attacking anyway. And so, Mullah Omar, this is the dictator of the Taliban ruling regime in Afghanistan. Milton Bearden said that the Taliban would tell the CIA, "Oh, Bin Laden? Jeez, you know, we lost track of him today. He's out falconing in the countryside somewhere. We don't know where he is." And then the Americans would pound their fist on the table and say, "We said hand him over." When that's what he just said was, "Go ahead and kill him. He's outside of our protection right now. And if you were to murder him, it would not be our fault. Take your best drone strike. Take the best hint."

• 2:32:38Speaker 03

  That's Milton Bearden talking about. That's where I got this from, okay? The Taliban hated this dude. He was nothing but trouble and they wanted rid of him. And remember what Bush said? "No negotiations. Hand him over." They said, "Well, come on. Give us some evidence and we'll hold a proceeding here." And Bush said, "No way. Give him over." And Colin Powell at one point said, "Well, we'll come up with the evidence. We will accuse him of this. We'll show you." And then they're like, "Nope, no evidence." The Taliban said, "Well, tell you what. Let us give him over to any Muslim country in the world," which of course you know could be Malaysia or Indonesia or Jordan or Egypt, who are going to do exactly what they're told by the United States. He's going to land on the tarmac and he's going to go straight to Virginia. Give me a break, right?

• 2:33:21Speaker 03

  Nope, not good enough. Then he started bombing on December the 8th and the Taliban said, okay, we have no more conditions. We're willing to give them up if you'll just stop the bombing. Bush said, too little, too late, no, and kept the war going then. Why, why, why? The Occam's razor answers, you can't read the guy's mind. There's so much circumstantial evidence about the thinking at the time. And this was going to what I was saying about CIA and Rice said, we should just bomb Al Qaeda, not the Taliban. Donald Rumsfeld overruled them, said, no, we need to take the fight to the Taliban. We need to keep the Afghan war going on because we want the American people to understand. He actually proposed that we should bomb Baghdad now so that the American people

• 2:34:06Speaker 03

  understand the war on terrorism is not over if we kill Bin Laden and it ain't lost if we don't. The war is much bigger than him and is going to take place over a vast space and a vast period of time. And we want the American people to know that this is not ending anytime soon. We're going to Baghdad. It's going to take a while to build up the force in Kuwait and they hoped Turkey, which didn't work out, but in order to go. And so if we kill Bin Laden now, or even if we do, we want to make sure the American people know that the war is not over yet. And I believe and I make the case in both books, and probably better in the second

• 2:34:48Speaker 03

  one, um, fool's errand enough already, that they let Bin Laden go. The CIA and the Delta Force on the ground were begging for reinforcements and reinforcements were available. There were tens of thousands of Rangers, or at least what 10,000 Rangers or something at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. The Green Berets were fighting the Taliban up in Mazar-i Sharif. The 75th Airborne Rangers, who are top tier special operations forces, considered right with Delta and Navy SEALs, were available in Kandahar province. And General Mattis was there with 10,000 Marching Marines. And he could have told them, 10 hut, go now. And they had helicopters, but even then they were like 40 miles away. Yeah, it's mountains, so what? Right?

• 2:35:33Speaker 03

  And they were not allowed to go and to seal the border. And the CIA and the Delta Force are like, man, we got them cornered on three sides. The fourth side is the Pakistani border. They're gonna get away. We need more men. In the military, they did a congressional investigation. They just said, they had a plan. It's called block and sweep. Make sure you get everybody in between here and here, right? And that's exactly how you do it. And the Delta Force guys and the CIA guys, namely Thomas Greer, AKA Dalton Fury in his book Kill Bin Laden, and Gary Bernson in his book Jawbreaker, talk about how they just could not understand why they could not get the support that they wanted.

• 2:36:14Speaker 03

  And Bernson talks about how his boss at CIA went and laid out the desk in the map on the desk. And Ron Suskin writes about this too, that they showed Bush the map and said, "We need more men for this." And they were denied the men that they needed. And then what? And think about this, your whole life ever since then. Talk about confusing narratives from that time. How about this one, dude? How about, "As soon as Bin Laden and his friends cross the border into Pakistan on December the 17th, Delta Force is not allowed to chase them." Why? They always say the same thing. I bet you do like a LexisNexis thing from back then and find, how many times they use the term, "Bin Laden and his men slipped across the border."

• 2:36:59Speaker 03

  And then, once that happened, it's like they jumped into hyperspace and got away. Once that happened, they crossed the semi-permeable membrane that only terrorists can cross, but that the Delta Force, top-tier Army Special Operations Forces, cannot cross into a friendly allied country of ours, Pakistan. And where we know from Robert Grenier, the CIA Station Chief in Islamabad, in his book 88 Days to Kandahar, he had already made arrangements with the Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps that, "We expect the Bin Ladenites to come fleeing across the border, and we expect Americans to be hot on their tail in pursuit." And so, they set up deconfliction so that the Pakistanis would not accidentally kill the Americans, because they were expected to come. They were not allowed to cross the border and give chase.

• 2:37:44Speaker 03

  And Dalton Fury is, "Man, this is amazing too." And maybe someone in your audience can find the full thing, but I went on a deep dive trying to find the full 60 Minutes episode with Dalton Fury, and I can only find severely edited ones. But his name is, Thomas Greer is his real name. And he's wearing a disguise and everything and he does a thing with Scott Pelley. And man, they edit it because the important part that I'm looking for is where he says, we had all these plans to follow them into Pakistan. We have Chinook helicopters. We were gonna go over them and then meet them coming back the other way. We were gonna drop landmines and there are only three valleys out of there that they could have taken. We were gonna drop mines. That was gonna slow them down. So they knew exactly how to kill Bin Laden and they were told to stand up.

• 2:38:29Speaker 03

  And they were not allowed by Donald Rumsfeld in the military to go further. And, and even we have W. Bush and Dick Cheney both implicated in this too, in that Susskind book where they, and Bernson, I believe, talks about this in his book too, where Thomas Greer is the guy who wrote Kill Bin Laden and was on 60 Minutes. He was the lieutenant colonel in the Delta Force in charge there. And then Gary Bernson was the guy on the scene who wrote the book Jawbreaker. And then his boss was Henry Crumpton. And he was the guy who had laid the map out onto Bush's desk and said, we need more men and was denied by Bush himself. So it might be nice to blame just Rumsfeld, but it was the president himself who refused to commit the forces necessary to get Bin Laden then.

• 2:39:09Speaker 03

  And it is just a circumstantial, a circumstantial case. I don't have a direct quote of any of these people saying this, but it seems pretty clear to me that they decided that they would prefer that Bin Laden go so that like in the book 1984, they would have Emmanuel Goldstein, the enemy, the wrecker, the saboteur out there, the danger who could still kill you. He's not gone yet. W. Bush used to love to say, imagine Saddam Hussein giving Bin Laden's hijackers chemical weapons. Imagine September 11th, only this time armed by Saddam Hussein. Well, Bin Laden's already dead. And the American, the American people by and large believe that that's what you get for messing with us, pal. We win, you lose, and it's over by Christmas. Well, then how the hell are we gonna go to a Baghdad?

• 2:39:54Speaker 03

  Let's say it'd take us a year and a half to build up the forces and to make people's mom and dad scared enough to think that we need to do this. We have a massive propaganda campaign to wage here. And here's where we get right back into the neoconservatives again. In March of 2002, Justin Ramondo wrote a piece at antiwar.com and it's called Our Hijacked Foreign Policy. Neocons Take Washington. Baghdad is next.

• 2:40:22Speaker 03

  And Justin was a brilliant genius and because he was a libertarian, he had a longtime ideological axe to grind and personal enemy relationship with these neocons. You know, us libertarians, we really are their polar opposite on so many things. And he called it the Axis of Crystal there, the Little Lenin of the neoconservative movement. And he, he's here citing benevolent global hegemony is the actual quote. He kind of got that a little wrong. It's Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote this article in Foreign Affairs in 1996, toward a neo-Reaganite foreign policy where they say, we have to have benevolent global hegemony.

• 2:41:04Speaker 03

  And that's what he's talking about there. And he's talking about the few people, and I have to tell you, man, I was really interested in foreign policy, politics and all of these things for many years leading up to this. But if you just asked me, what's a Republican, I would have said Houston, right? James Baker III, right? Dark Lord of the Sith, lawyer for Exxon. That's what conservatism is, is big business, right? Is, you know, I don't know what else, what? I knew who Bill Kristol was, but I didn't know who he was, right? I knew there was the Weekly Standard. I knew they were crazy after Saddam Hussein. I didn't know why, and I didn't look enough into it leading up to then.

• 2:41:39Lex Fridman?

  It's so interesting to, uh, sorry to interrupt, but

• 2:41:41Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:41:42Lex Fridman?

  sort of the lens of this analysis in 2020, to go back and read some of this.

• 2:41:47Speaker 03

  You need to go back and read all of Justin from 1999 all the way through.

• 2:41:52Lex Fridman?

  Through the whole thing.

• 2:41:53Speaker 03

  Get yourself a rainy day. You can stop about halfway through Obama, probably.

• 2:41:59Speaker 03

  But man, at this time, he was the most important writer for America, as neglected as he was. There was nobody better at what was happening to this country at that time.

• 2:42:08Lex Fridman?

  Even from just a brief glance, as I could see the cutting wit and the brilliance and the humor.

• 2:42:13Speaker 03

  You know what he was? He was a big gay Pat Buchanan. He's big gay Archie Bunker from San Francisco, right? He was, he, he was a right winger and a paleo libertarian, but like Buchananite leaning. He gave Pat Buchanan's nomination speech for the Reform Party in 1999. And, and he's, you know, a right wing libertarian, but.

• 2:42:35Speaker 03

  He is what he is. He's at where he's at. And so it sounds kind of ironical or whatever. Why would a gay guy like Pat Buchanan so much? And it's because Pat Buchanan, at that time, his reputation was very much the culture war and very much like gay people should still stay in the closet and things like that. And so Justin was like, I don't care about that. What matters is the world empire. And then even here, he's a right winger too. It's not that he's a liberal and he founds a found a right winger that he likes. It's that Patrick Buchanan is like the perfect kindred spirit, even though you might think not. But Justin was from Queens and he was from that era, you know, raised in the 1950s and 60s. He was a crusty old paleo con in his way. And, um, and that was why he was so good.

• 2:43:19Speaker 03

  And when I first started reading him, I remember saying even to my friends, how does this guy know all this stuff? It's just unbelievable how plugged in he is and he lives out in San Francisco, but he knows everything happening at every important think tank in Washington. And he knows the difference between them all. He knows who all these guys are and what their role is and who is who's mentor and student. And all of these things in a way is just unbelievable. And he had the neo cons number, man. And yes, Iraq war two was their war and it was mostly for Israel.

• 2:43:50Lex Fridman?

  I'm severely distracted by how hilarious his writing is.

• 2:43:53Speaker 03

  Go ahead.

• 2:43:54Lex Fridman?

  I'm glad. No, it's all right. It's all right. I won't. It'll be a rabbit hole that we're going to, but he goes hard against the neo conservatives.

• 2:44:00Speaker 03

  Oh, so bad. And look, his first article was about the Kosovo war in 1999. And he goes after the neo conservatives right then and there from the very get go. He used to love to quote this guy, um, uh, I believe David Tall in the Weekly Standard said about Slobodan Milosevic that he better do what we say, or he knows we'll kick their skulls in. And he's like, yeah, this is who the neo conservatives are, dude. They're barbarians, essentially Bill Kristol's men.

• 2:44:27Lex Fridman?

  Quick pause. I'm sorry. I need another bathroom break. Uh, and then maybe you can get back to military industrial complex.

• 2:44:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:44:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so before we get too far into Iraq War II and the neoconservatives, we need to decide whether we want to talk about the Afghanistan war now, or whether we want to come back and talk more about Afghanistan later, or maybe not even at all, or whatever. You've got to make that call because there's plenty to talk about there. It was a hugely important thing. On the other hand, of course, and this is the same dilemma I faced when I was writing Enough Already. It's like, how much can I tell you about Afghanistan before I gotta bring you to Iraq, which is the heart of the story that everybody's so interested in, where most of the action takes place, it's on the other side of Iran from Afghanistan. And Afghanistan remained on the margin throughout the whole thing, even though it's in itself, it was its own huge thing.

• 2:45:17Speaker 01

  So, but I leave that to you, to like, how far you want to get into that and when?

• 2:45:21Lex Fridman?

  I think Iraq specifically is the deepest, the most thorough case study of the military industrial complex and the abuse of power. So as much as we can explore that, it's great. And I think it was really insightful, we described that right there in Afghanistan.

• 2:45:39Lex Fridman?

  We could have gotten, been on. There's a lot of places where this did not have to go as long as it did. And that was, that highlights one clear moment.

• 2:45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's real tragedy. It really is. They could have negotiated and they could have killed them. And the whole thing really could have been over by Christmas. And by the way, Gary Burnson said that. He said that to the reporter, Michael Hirsch, in 2016. He said, "It's really sad when you think about it, how this thing could have all been over by Christmas." So that ain't just me, that's them, that's him. That's the guy who was the second CIA officer on scene in charge, who wrote, and you read his book, you know how editors do this sometimes when a CIA guy writes a book? They'll leave the redaction marks in the big black boxes, because it's like good salesmanship to do that, right? So when you read Gary Burnson's book, he goes, "And there I was, and me and my fellow CIA officers,

• 2:46:32Speaker 01

  were talking about how frustrated we were that we could not understand why they wouldn't give us reinforcements while he's getting away." And then the next four sentences are blacked out.

• 2:46:43Speaker 03

  You know, and then, and same thing for, for Dalton Fury, Thomas Greer.

• 2:46:47Lex Fridman?

  So how do we get to Iraq?

• 2:46:49Speaker 03

  Let's do Iraq. Here's where we're going to start Iraq. First of all, Wolfowitz and all them wanted to go all the way to Baghdad in 1991. And Senior told them no and stopped short of that. Also let Saddam crush the Iraqi, the Shiite and Kurdish uprising. Then of course, we have the status quo of Bill Clinton's containment policy, dual containment policy from Iraq, from Saudi Arabia against Iraq and Iran through the 1990s. Sanctions, no-fly zone bombings and all of that. So, and by the way, there are two failed CIA coups in 1995 and 1996 against Saddam. One of them was the one that got Robert Baer in so much trouble because he was working with Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile to try to overthrow Saddam.

• 2:47:30Speaker 03

  And it all went to hell because Chalabi was basically selling them.

• 2:47:37Speaker 03

  Chalabi was basically making a bunch of promises to them about how it would go that of course did not work out at all. And so this is where the CIA first put their burn notice on him. So Ahmed Chalabi is this important Iraqi exile. He was a banker in Jordan who then fled the country because he was wanted for embezzling money. And here he was selling the CIA on all of his promises about what he could do in Iraq, and then he was not coming through. And so that's sort of a minor part of the story, but then in 1996, David Wormser, who's an important neoconservative

• 2:48:13Speaker 03

  in alliance with the more important neoconservative, Richard Pearl, and also Douglas Feith, their fellow traveler. And I think there were two more people signed it. It may have been Charles Fairbanks Jr. And one other guy signed it too, I think.

• 2:48:28Speaker 03

  It was really Wormser and Pearl talking, okay? And it's called A Clean Break, A New Strategy For Securing The Realm. Oh man, you know what? Hell, as long as we're doing this, we want to do this, right?

• 2:48:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:48:41Speaker 03

  So we want to talk about our Rockward two legs. What we got to do is let's go back to. The early 1990s in Yitzhak Rabin. Now, Israel had a strategy, as I said, being friends with Iran. At the same time, they're friends with Turkey and friends with Ethiopia. Why? This was called the strategy of the periphery in Israel. It meant, if you picture the map, okay? From Israel's perspective, we want to support Turkey to divide Syria's attention. We want to support Iran to divide Iraq's attention. And we want to support Ethiopia to divide Egypt's attention. Does that make sense? Geographically speaking? Yes. So, Rabin says, no, we're going to turn that upside down.

• 2:49:22Speaker 03

  And what we're going to do instead is, we're going to negotiate with the Arabs, the closer states. And we're going to even make a deal with Yasser Arafat. And this is the Oslo peace process that Rabin started. Now, they weren't really going to give them an independent state. They were going to give them something like a Shinon Yehan pseudo sort of kind of independent state, which actually probably would have been the best solution, right? Would be, you have your local police forces, but we are in one country together, kind of a thing. There are lots of states that are, have kind of complicated arrangements like that and pull it off. But anyway, this was Rabin's plan. But then Netanyahu fan murdered him in 1995. This was when Shimon Peres took over.

• 2:50:07Speaker 03

  Now, Shimon Peres had been the president. He's now promoted to prime minister and he continues the same policy. This is why, oh, I'm sorry, in the, I should have mentioned, in the reversal of the periphery doctrine and negotiating with the Arabs, part of that was now turning on Iran and demonizing Iran. Because just for domestic political reasons in Israel, they, Rabin had to be tough against somebody. So now it's Iran that's the problem. And that's why we need to negotiate with the Arabs even, right? So he makes that change in 1993. And in fact, there's a funny anecdote in Treacherous

• 2:50:47Speaker 03

  Alliance by tree to Parsi again, where the Clinton people were surprised and even laughed because, what do you mean you hate Iran now? Last week, you were demanding that we like Iran along with you. Now you've changed your mind, but what happened? And all that happened was Israel changed their mind. They just had a different policy now. It wasn't any particular thing that Iran had done at that point to cross their line. And so they just decided that this is important to do now. And so somebody's got to be the enemy. So now the enemy is going to be Shiite fundamentalist Islam revolutionary Iranian threat. And in fact, as one important Israeli strategist told Parsi, we needed new glue for the alliance with the United States. Now that we don't have the Soviet Union

• 2:51:31Speaker 03

  anymore, why does America need us? And the answer is radical Islam. And of course, that's great, because you could be anybody as long as you're Muslim, you can be called radical Islam. And it doesn't matter how radical or which sect or whose side you're on or anything, right? You could just do anything with that, right? For you apply that to Palestinians or anybody else. So that's a great one, like for propaganda wise from the Israeli point of view. And so then when Shimon Peres took over after Abin was assassinated, he launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, re-invading Lebanon as part of that same doctrine. See, we're going after the Shiites now. And that was again, the operation that motivated the lead hijacker of September 11th to join the jihad against

• 2:52:14Speaker 03

  us right there. That was why he did that was part of that same strategy, right? But then Shimon Perez's rule was short-lived and Benjamin Netanyahu first came in and became the Prime Minister of Israel for the first time in 1996. Okay, now David Wormser and Richard Pearl write this study for him. It's called A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Again, you can find that at scotthorton.org/fairuse. And in fact, I'm sure there are archive.org versions of it. You can find it was the, this Israeli think tank published it. It wasn't an American think tank. It was the Israeli Center for Strategic Study or something like that, posted it there.

• 2:52:53Lex Fridman?

  Yes, posted on scotthorton.org/fairuse. A Clean Break: A New Strategy of Securing the Realm. By David Wormser, 1996.

• 2:53:01Speaker 03

  And the companion piece, as it says there, is called Coping With Crumbling States.

• 2:53:06Lex Fridman?

  Coping With Crumbling States, A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant by David Wormser, 1996.

• 2:53:14Speaker 03

  And both of these, well, certainly the first one is officially signed off on by Richard Pearl. And then I should have hot links on those. I'm not sure why I don't. But there are three related articles here by Lowenberg, Wormser, and Pearl promoting the same agenda in the newspapers there, in the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal.

• 2:53:35Lex Fridman?

  Okay. And they're called The Ultimate Peace Process Prize, Justice Saddam's Powers Under Assault, Balance of Power, all three pieces.

• 2:53:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And now there's even a book. It's called Tyranny's Ally by David Wormser, with a foreword by Richard Pearl. They all say the same thing. Okay. What they say is that we're Israeli agents and Ahmed Al-Abe sold us a bunch of crap and we bought it. And it's this magic theory about how overthrowing Saddam is going to be good for Israel. Now, oh, don't let me leave out that as part of Israel's secret relationship with Iran through the 1980s, or their friendship continuing through the 1980s and into the 1990s, they had a secret oil pipeline from the port of Akaba, which I never say that right. I forget

• 2:54:26Speaker 03

  how to pronounce it right. But it's, we're talking about the Sinai Peninsula in the Red Sea. Now, on the western side of the Sinai Peninsula is the Suez Canal and the gate to the Mediterranean Sea. On the eastern side of the Sinai Peninsula is the port of Akaba there. Okay. And there was a secret oil pipeline that was run by Mark Rich's company, the guy that Bill Clinton pardoned on his last day in office, who was this corrupt financier and oil industry guy. And he, his company had this secret pipeline where Iranian ships would come and drop off oil and it would then go through this pipeline to Israel. Right? Well, once Rabin turned on Iran, when he turned the periphery strategy upside

• 2:55:10Speaker 03

  down, then the Iranians quit sending oil. In fact, it may not have been till 95 that they quit sending the oil because.

• 2:55:21Speaker 03

  Tree to Parsi explains that Iran didn't start backing Hamas until 95, or at least, maybe they had given them a little bit of something. They had given them very little until then. And so it was, it was provocations by Rabin against Iran had finally, after a year and a half of this or more, I believe, if I'm remembering it right, I don't think it was 93. I don't, I think it wasn't until 95 that Iran finally said, fine, then if you guys are going to be that way and stop shipping the oil in. So now this becomes a major interest of the neoconservatives and the Likud Party. And Ahmed Chalabi understands very quickly that this is what these guys want to hear. Is that if America will put him and his friends in power in Iraq, they'll be friends with Israel.

• 2:56:05Speaker 03

  Now, in the original clean break, they say they want to use the cousin of the king of Jordan. And they're going to put a Hashemite kingdom in their legs to rule Iraq. Now, the magic theory here is that, let's do a very, very elementary divide of the Sunnis and the Shiites here, history lesson, okay? The Shiites went off with Mohammed's family after he died. The Sunnis picked their own imams, right? So there's like kind of one hierarchy. It's a very, very, very inept, but very crude comparison between the Protestants and the Catholics. There's one Shiite church, basically, right? Under the Ayatollahs and their system. And they, their inherited power through the bloodline and all of that. On the Sunni side, they picked their own ministers, right?

• 2:56:49Speaker 03

  Like the Protestants, they have their own and do their, there are many more sects and different kinds of Sunnis and that sort of deal. If that makes sense on the most basic level here, okay? So, um, not that I'm saying the Shiites claim to be priests or anything like more analogous with the Catholic Church. I'm not saying that, I'm just saying there's this order of Ayatollahs, the same way there are of the Cardinals and whatever, if you understand. So, the deal is this. Yes, the Shiites do revere their clergy leadership who are descended from Mohammed. And evidently can prove it, I don't know, apparently, right? And where are their black turbans? And that means that they share his bloodline and all that, okay? Well, the Hashemites also declare themselves to be his descendants. Whether that's true or not, whatever, fine, take it for face granted, and it is.

• 2:57:34Speaker 03

  But they're Sunnis, so. The thing is about the Shiites revering people with the blood of the prophet, their Shiite clergy, it doesn't mean that they consider them to be infallible dictators whose will is their law and all of these things. Like even the Pope says, "Some things are my opinion, some things I'm speaking for the Lord, but sometimes I'm just saying, I think this is how it should be your way." You know what I mean? So the Ayatollahs do not exercise like a spellbinding power over these people through mysticism and irrational demands of religious fealty to their every order or whatever, right? Like there's some much more consensual relationship than that or whatever. You know what I mean?

• 2:58:18Speaker 03

  It's not completely top-down sort of thing like that and like where they have this magic spell of their bloodline than is like acts as hypnosis or whatever, or demands total obedience. That's just never been the implication of the thing. So Cholub is just telling these guys whatever they need to hear, that if we put a Hashemite king in there, then he will be able to tell the Shiite clergy that they better stop being friends with Iran and that they better tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. And then Hezbollah will be friends with Israel and then the Israelis can finish stealing

• 2:58:58Speaker 03

  Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah causing them problems on their northern flank. That's the clean break. Now, here's the thing about this, man. Picture the region in your head a little bit, or pull up the map again if you need to. You got, here's David Wormser's argument, okay? He's saying Iran backs Hezbollah in southern Lebanon by way of Syria. So what we want to do is get rid of Saddam Hussein, the secular Sunni, who's the roadblock to all this, right? Huh? Well, again, magic wish. What's gonna happen is our Sunni king will just enslave the will of the Shiite

• 2:59:43Speaker 03

  supermajority, and they'll be our castaways and do whatever we want. And we'll lord them over Iran? David Wormser said, "Chalabi assures us that a democratic Shiite Iraq will be a nightmare for Iran because the Iranians will want to live like the Iraqis in their wonderful new awesome supermajority Shiite democracy." And so, under the rule of their benevolent king, or however, because they end up changing it a little bit, I guess, and emphasizing the democracy part more later. But still, it would be a nightmare for Iran. Because what happened was, I think the king of Jordan died and was replaced, and they said, "Okay, forget that. We'll just put Chalabi in power himself. He'll be the guy that we put in."

• 3:00:23Speaker 03

  Now, um, they also promised, Chalabi promised the neoconservatives, "We'll build an oil pipeline from northern Iraq to Haifa, Israel, to make up for the pipeline that they just lost with the Iranians." Netanyahu bought this, and David Wormser and Richard Pearl bought this. And this is one of the reasons, one of the major reasons, that 4,500 Americans and a million Iraqis died in Iraq War II, was so Israel could save a nickel, a barrel, on Iraqi oil, because their own policies had cost them their access to Iranian oil. And so, they were paying this extra premium after losing that source.

• 3:01:06Speaker 03

  And this oil pipeline to Haifa was a big deal, and you'll want to pull this up because you'll want to read it later and laugh and weep. It's called "How Ahmed Chalabi Coned the Neocons." Okay, now, for your audience, they need to know, disclaimer, a long time ago, salon.com did journalism.

• 3:01:28Speaker 01

  I know, it sounds absurd and you probably don't believe me, even though I know you kinda like me and trust me, but this guy, John Dazard, is from the Financial Times. He is a solid guy. I have a very brief acquaintance with him emailing back and forth and he is no slouch and this is not some woke ridiculous propaganda. This article is very good stuff. Go ahead.

• 3:01:48Lex Fridman?

  May 4th, 2004, John Dazard, how Ahmed Chalabi conned the neo cons. The hawks who launched the Iraq war believed the deal making exile when he promised to build a secular democracy with close ties to Israel. Now the Israel deal is dead. He's cozying up to Iran and his patrons look like they're on the way out.

• 3:02:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in this article, man, it's brutal. In there, he quotes Douglas Feith. Douglas Feith was, again, the third signatory on the clean break, although I believe he now disowns it and says, well, I never agreed with that part in this kind of thing, but whatever. And he helped run the, he was the deputy secretary of defense for policy in the first Bush term and ran the office of special plans with Abram Shulsky that lied us into war using lies funneled into the intelligence stream by Ahmed Chalabi. It's a huge part of how they lied us into war. I'm kind of skipping ahead. I'm gonna come back to that in a minute. Okay. But in this article, they quote Douglas Feith's law partner, Mark Zell, and people might follow him on Twitter. The guy's a riot dude and meaning

• 3:02:51Speaker 01

  he's completely insane and a lot of fun if you're into insane Zionist warhawk genocidal lunatics. But anyway, so he has these quotes in here. Okay. And like, this is not me talking. I'm very careful with my words. I'm a libertarian. I'm an individualist. I'm not a collectivist and I don't go around categorizing people by their religion and ethnicity and all this crap. I just don't. I want to raise that way. It's just, it is what it is. This is Dazard talking to Chalabi's friends. Okay. I'm quoting a guy quoting a guy quoting a guy. Okay. Forgive me. I said to Ahmed, what are you doing running around with all these Jews? And he said, I just need them until I can get my war. And then I'm gonna

• 3:03:36Speaker 01

  stab him in the back and we're gonna get what we want.

• 3:03:41Speaker 01

  So in other words, Richard Pearl is as stupid as he is evil. And David Wormser and Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz and the neoconservative group, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, Hadley and Joseph and Edelman and all of these guys who rode, did I say Hannah and Edelman and Abrams, Shulsky. That's what these idiots believed. These are all neocons? These are the neocons in the W. Bush administration, in the vice president's office, in the State Department, in the Defense Department, that lied us into war.

• 3:04:23Speaker 01

  Colin Powell called them the Ginsa crowd. Ginsa is the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which at that time, I believe, was run by David Wormser. He was one of the most powerful guys there. And they were part and parcel with the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for a New American Century, the Center for Security Policy, and the other of the major neoconservative think tanks that pushed for that war at that time. And they had power, that influence? They had all the power and influence they needed because they got it from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. And what Powell said was this was a separate government inside the government that was run, like a cell, that was run by Dick Cheney.

• 3:05:07Speaker 01

  Wormser was known as Cheney's agent, his plant at State, where his job, he and John Bolton, who is not a neoconservative because he's never any kind of leftist, he's just a conservative nationalist type, but one of their fellow travelers, very close with them. Bolton and Wormser's job was preventing Powell and Armitage, his guy, from preventing the war, to keep a leash on them in whatever ways that they could obstruct their efforts. And then...

• 3:05:35Speaker 03

  So in the vice president's office, you had Scooter Libby and Eric Edelman and Elliott Abrams. No, no, pardon me. Elliott Abrams was on the National Security Council with Zalmi Khalilzad, the same guy who was the primary author of the 1992 Defense Plan and Guidance, along with Libby and Stephen Hadley, who was the Deputy National Security Advisor. Then you had in on the Defense Policy Board, you had Jean Kirkpatrick, who again was from the Social Democrats USA and the Young People's Socialist League before she converted to Commentary Magazine and Reaganism, making her a classical definition, and as a hardcore Zionist, of course, a classical definition neoconservative, along with Kenneth Edelman. And Richard Pearl was the Chair of the Defense Policy Board,

• 3:06:20Speaker 03

  which is a very important position in advisory board. And he was really the power of behind the scenes, majoring leader of the group there. Then Newt Gingrich was another fellow traveler, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican, who you could consider him sort of like John Bolton in a way where he's like more or less one of them, but not exactly. But for example, you may have heard the stories about how Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby made 14 trips to CIA headquarters to beat them over the head and say, "We need more against Iraq. Come up with it." And they wouldn't come up with it enough. Well, Newt Gingrich did the same thing, went to CIA headquarters over and over and over again, saying, "Give us the goods. We don't have enough. We need more."

• 3:07:00Lex Fridman?

  That's really dark.

• 3:07:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. So then, under Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, was Douglas Feith, who was Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy. And under him was Abram Shulsky. And Shulsky was the guy who ran the Office of Special Plans, which sounds innocuous enough, but this was the core of the neoconservative plot to launder lies from Ahmed Chalabi's exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, into the intelligence stream, along with whatever they could dig out of the CIA's trash that the CIA had decided already to ignore. And they were, they had Michael Rubin and Michael Ledeen and a whole group of, I used to know all of their names, the guys at the Office of Special Plans. There's six or eight of them. And across the hall was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group,

• 3:07:47Speaker 03

  which was led by David Wormser. Again, he's traveling around. He's vice president's office. He's State. He's Defense. Wherever they need him. And that's Wormser and a guy named Michael Malouf. And their job was to dig through the CIA's trash and the exiles lies and try to come up with anything to connect Saddam to Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. And these guys all had this agenda and man, it was Zionism is at the core of it all. And there's really just no denying that. And in many cases, they admitted it. And there are very authoritative sources on this. For example, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, for a very long time, a reporter and is now, of course, the famous columnist, wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat. Bill Clinton said he's the most important public intellectual in America.

• 3:08:32Speaker 03

  He's is a somewhat conservative Jewish Zionist, New York Times writer and Iraq war supporter. Okay. But he gave an interview, he's not a neoconservative and not really a fellow traveler of theirs. He's a guy who just lives in the same world as them, but he knows a hell of a lot. He's extremely plugged in. Okay. For people who don't know, look him up. Okay. Thomas L. Friedman. Thomas L. Friedman gave an interview to Harretts where he goes, let me tell you something. Okay. There's nine guys within a mile of here and they're the ones who did it. I'm sorry, I'm getting the quote wrong. I think the nine guys was Seymour Hearst said it was nine guys.

• 3:09:14Speaker 03

  But Friedman said something very close to that to Harretts, that it was the neoconservatives. It was this very small group of guys. This was their war. They plotted it. They planned it. They made the advertising push to make it acceptable. It was their war and they got it. That's what it was. Philip Zelikow, who was not a neoconservative, he was more of a Council on Foreign Relations type with Conalisa Rice and Robert Blackwell and some of those other guys who were not part of the neoconservative set in the same government. Zelikow, you might remember, was the principal author of the 9/11 Commission Report. A lot of people don't like him for that, for whatever reasons, good and bad, probably.

• 3:09:57Speaker 03

  But Zelikow said, let me tell you something, okay, about the motivation for the Iraq war. And this is not something that you'll hear very much. Okay. But Saddam Hussein paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

• 3:10:11Speaker 03

  Saddam Hussein would pay any family who lost anybody into Israeli violence, no matter what, or on, no matter what. So that meant if the Israelis bulldozed some old lady in her home and murdered her, then Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to her survivors. But it also meant if some guy went and did a suicide attack and blew up a pizzeria full of kids on a Friday night, Saddam Hussein would pay a bounty to his survivors, too. So this was quite clearly incentivizing terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, right? So that is a real security problem for Israel. And as Philip Zelikow said, this

• 3:10:51Speaker 03

  was a real hard motivating factor for the neoconservatives to want to launch this war.

• 3:10:59Lex Fridman?

  So how does the military industrial complex not start stepping into this whole picture?

• 3:11:03Speaker 03

  Great place for this question. So Andrew Coburn is a great author. His brother, Patrick Coburn, I mentioned previously, is the most important, or at least in our era, has been the most important Western journalist, especially in Iraq, I would argue. Alexander Coburn is the leftist agitator, founder of Counterpunch, who died of cancer years ago. And Andrew is the author who writes the books and his wife, Leslie Coburn, wrote the great book Out of Control about the Iran-Contra scandal. And then Andrew wrote Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, and Kill Chain, about the terror wars, especially the drone wars and all that stuff. Brilliant guy. So he told me years ago, he goes, listen,

• 3:11:45Speaker 03

  here's the best way to understand the neoconservative movement. They're the cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex, right? So we already have banking and oil. And banking and oil already has the Council on Foreign Relations since the end of the First World War. That's their center of gravity, right? Well, the neocons weren't all that welcome there, right? So they said, well, screw you guys. We'll make our own think tanks. And they made their alliance with the military industrial complex, who had a lot of money at stake. But not so many eggheads to write the studies about why their products needed to be purchased by their captive audience, the Pentagon. So this is where the neoconservatives come in very handy to the military industrial

• 3:12:30Speaker 03

  complex. And of course, what's the center of America's relationship with Israel? Military support and security guarantees, right? That's what it all comes down to, is America guaranteeing Israel's security militarily. So how do we do that? We do that by making Lockheed Ridge, making Israel armed. And so you have this perfect alliance between these factions. So in the 1980s, it was really with this money is how they took over and the organization it provided was how they took over the Olin and Mellon and Scafe Foundations. They took over the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage. Then they created their own forest of all the new ones. Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

• 3:13:11Speaker 03

  I think the Committee on the Present Danger was previous to this, but I guess they recreated the Committee on the Present Danger. They had PNC and the Center for Security Policy. Again, that's Frank Gaffney and his guys and whatever, a handful of others there that helped to boost that whole and created that echo chamber. And of course, along very importantly with, again, the Weekly Standard Magazine and Bruce Jackson from Lockheed is really the exemplar of this because he came in in the 1990s and he put up all the money for the Committee on NATO Expansion and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. And they focused mostly on humanitarian excuses for going in and helping the Iraqi people, but they were working hand in glove with Bill Kristol as, you know, one of the agents

• 3:13:56Speaker 03

  of the axis of Kristol, as Justin called it, the guys lying us into war with the Weekly Standard leading the charge and Jonah Goldberg and the National Review right behind him, doing everything they could to push us into that war. Michael Ledeen would write and Jonah Goldberg would publish over and over and over again, Michael Ledeen demanding faster, please, we have to keep going to the rest of the terror masters, especially Tehran as soon as possible. As Jonah Goldberg wrote Baghdad de lenda est, meaning must be destroyed, right? Like Carthage must be destroyed. And Baghdad de lenda est, part two, where he says, it's the Ledeen Doctrine, he approvingly quotes, the Ledeen Doctrine is that America, every 10 years or so, we have to take some

• 3:14:41Speaker 03

  small country and throw them up against the wall just to show the world that we mean business. That's conservatism in the hands of these essentially bastard children of Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army. Right? And, and Justin, when you read, when you get into Justin Raimondo and you read Trotsky, Strauss and the neocons and all this, you can see where he's talking about. There were, there were arguments in the pages of the National Review about Trotsky and his legacy from some of these neocons at that time. And Justin talks about like, how baffled must the readership of the National Review be right now? These are your leaders.

• 3:15:22Speaker 03

  They're Trotskyites. This is who controls the Republican Party, an American foreign policy. The, the world won't be safe till the revolution is complete. And by the way, we got to start with all Israel's enemies first. It's nuts.

• 3:15:36Lex Fridman?

  So underpinning this kind of ever-growing bureaucracy that's connected to the military industrial complex is this kind of collectivism thinking.

• 3:15:44Speaker 03

  And money. You know, it's a captive market, so much money. And you know, as I show, we'll talk about this more in the Cold War section when we get to it later. But it was a real crisis at the end of the Cold War for the military industrial complex. And they were open about it. Like, what's going to happen to us now? Lockheed tried to get in to administering welfare payments and stuff. They're like, they're, they're not a free market operation. They're a government-connected regime.

• 3:16:10Lex Fridman?

  Are they trying to pivot, you're saying?

• 3:16:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're trying to figure out, yeah, what are we going to do in the world? Right? And then, but the idea is clear that, look, if we control the think tanks and the think tanks decide the policy, then we can decide what kind of weapons we need to develop to have for sale. So are we building jungle gear? Or are we building desert gear? What kind of tanks? What kind of helicopters? If we set the policy, then we get to save money.

• 3:16:38Speaker 03

  By developing the, by making good guesses about what kind of weapons the Pentagon is gonna need, because we're the ones deciding.

• 3:16:45Lex Fridman?

  It's so.

• 3:16:46Speaker 03

  I just remembered a great footnote for this. Your guys will love it. Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels by Richard Cummings. And it's at my site, again, scotthorton.org/fareuse. And you can also find it at corpwatch as well. It was originally written for playboy.com. And I interviewed the guy. That was one of the first interviews I did when I started the show full time in January of 2007. And he says, guess what? All those neocons who are such lacunatics and who are palling around with Netanyahu and talking about oil pipelines to Haifa, they're all on Lockheed's payroll. The only one who wasn't was Hadley, but Hadley worked for a law firm that had represented them. But the rest of them had had, or not all the rest of them, many of, and I don't just mean the think tank guys, but like the

• 3:17:31Speaker 03

  guys in the W. Bush administration, had some direct connection to Lockheed, including Dick Cheney's wife sat on the board of directors. Not that he's a neoconservative, you understand, but.

• 3:17:41Lex Fridman?

  Can you actually speak to that? I'm sorry to zoom out again on human nature.

• 3:17:45Speaker 03

  No, you should.

• 3:17:46Lex Fridman?

  Do you think? So I should actually mention, I don't know much about Lockheed, but to the degree I've interacted with folks that are Lockheed, who are engineers, and it's,

• 3:17:59Lex Fridman?

  there's some incredible engineering that's going on there.

• 3:18:01Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:18:01Lex Fridman?

  And I wonder, like, do they all believe in what they're doing?

• 3:18:08Speaker 03

  They have a narrower problem set that they're solving. It's just no different than a soldier. I mean, if you ask them, I know what they'll tell you. That ain't my job. My job is making sure this gizmo works.

• 3:18:20Lex Fridman?

  But does anyone at any place in Lockheed think like it is their job to think about the big picture ethics of all of this?

• 3:18:29Speaker 03

  Yes, but their customers, the US government, and the US government is a democracy that represents the will of the consensus of the majority adult population of this great free land. And so.

• 3:18:39Lex Fridman?

  Always outsourcing the ethics.

• 3:18:41Speaker 03

  Yes. And listen, I gotta tell you, man, this is so important. So glad that you mentioned this because you do have, in fact, like, direct quotes from, for example, Raytheon is one coming straight to mind, where they say, listen, I mean, these policies are decided by the government. Our job is to make sure that they have what they need. And that's to be decided by other people, right? But then, no, Raytheon will directly intervene in policy to make sure that the policy is what they want. For example, Barack Obama started a genocidal war against the people of Yemen in 2015, which Donald Trump continued. I'm jumping way ahead in our narrative here, but the House, and only because of peace activists, there's no Houthi lobby in America, believe me.

• 3:19:26Speaker 03

  It was only Quakers and hippies and libertarians said, please stop this and got Congress to pass the War Powers Resolution twice to try to force Trump to end the war. But they passed the wimpy kind that he's allowed to veto instead of the other kind that he can't. And so he vetoed it twice. But then guess what? Pete Navarro, his trade representative, we're talking Trump one term here. Pete Navarro, his trade representative, told the New York Times that the reason that they kept the war going and vetoed and refused to end the war was to pay Raytheon because Raytheon wanted the Yemen war because it was making them a bunch of money. And the Trump people, since they had done these tariffs that were frustrating big manufacturing

• 3:20:08Speaker 03

  firms in America, they said, we had to find a way to put, talk about collectivism, we have to find a way to put manufacturing on welfare. So what we'll do is we'll commit genocide against the people of Yemen because that's what Saudi and UAE want, not because of anything that has anything to do with America's national interest. The Houthis were helping us kill Al Qaeda guys a month before that. But we're going to do this for them and because industry wants free money because they're mad that we put these tariffs on China and disrupted some of their supplies and whatever. So they're going to put this one big company on the dole and that's going to make somehow all of manufacturing in America happy.

• 3:20:50Speaker 03

  And that was their reasoning for doing it because Raytheon was demanding it. And then Raytheon will turn right around and go, hey, listen, Lex, don't come crying to me. It was the democratically elected people of this country who demanded that we make these wares to provide your security, pal. I don't know what you want to say. And they pretend that they're not dealing with the devil, but they are. Somehow they know it, somewhere they know it, somewhere this department knows that that's that department's job. Like we do hire lobbyists to... To advocate for policies, don't we? Yeah, of course, we do.

• 3:21:25Lex Fridman?

  But it's very uncomfortable to think about that. So they.

• 3:21:27Speaker 03

  You know what gets me, man? Is this is how the H-bomb lobby works too. It's no different. Honeywell makes in Lockheed. They make hydrogen bombs and they will send a salesman to Capitol Hill talking about, Senator, Senator, let me tell you, I gotta get rid of some H-bombs here. What kind of deal can I cut? What do I gotta do to get this H-bomb in your driveway by tonight? They are like, uh, supply side. You might have some, you probably didn't think it all the way through, right? But somewhere in the back of your mind is this like half articulated fantasy that nuclear weapons are a demand side business in this country where the military comes to the Congress and says, we need exactly this many.

• 3:22:12Speaker 03

  And then the Congress says to industry, we need exactly this many. What do you mean the industry is trying to push H-bombs because of their awesome profit margins and that we run the H-bomb supply business the same way you would expect with M4 rifles or combat boots? Yep, that's exactly right.

• 3:22:33Lex Fridman?

  And that's exactly what's meant by the military industrial complex. So there's a real strong case to be made that it's a supply side. War is a supply side, uh, entity.

• 3:22:47Speaker 03

  In our era, it sure as hell is, isn't it? It's the era of the phony wars, man. What do I gotta do to put this war in your driveway today, Lex? I tell you that they hate Islam. I tell you, I mean, that the Islam's hate your religion and they hate your mama. They hate freedom. They did this. Did I ever tell you about the Beirut bombing in 1980? What do I gotta do to get you mad enough to do this with me? Right? That's why it's a constant bombardment of propaganda. They don't have a real case to make. They gotta try to scare you and lie to you.

• 3:23:15Lex Fridman?

  And that's from their perspective, from the industry perspective. The Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen wars are a success. Eight trillion dollars.

• 3:23:25Speaker 03

  It's the self-licking ice cream cone. It's the military industrial complex. Hey, you know what? Don't you criticize it, Lex. It's called now the Defense Industrial Base. And if you ask the Democrats, they'll tell you it's the number one best and most important reason for the Ukraine war is because it's a good subsidy for our defense industrial base. They ran out of arguments and they settled on that. And they did not know how absolutely demonic they sounded. That that's why we want to have a war is just literally like in your crazy conspiracy theory, you're crazy when you say it and you call it the MIC. But now it's the Defense Industrial Base and it's awesome. It's spectacular and you better get on board for it.

• 3:24:10Speaker 03

  It's the best reason to have these wars, in fact. And we're not embarrassed to tell you. You can go read it in Politico. I don't know what else to say. This is straight out of the Democrats' mouths on the last war in the last presidential term there.

• 3:24:23Speaker 01

  How do the American people fight this?

• 3:24:26Speaker 03

  Well, the first thing would be to get used to the idea that they're lying to you next time, too. Right? They've done nothing but take advantage this whole time. There's no reason to give your government the benefit of the doubt that they care what's true or that they want you to understand the truth. That's not what they're about. They're trying to get you. I mean, just think about how they operate. Always, they're trying to get you upset so that then you'll let them do something. Right? Like I'm detecting a pattern here. And it doesn't mean that everything is a false flag or anything like that, but it's just they do nothing but create crises and then exploit them. It's a monopoly on security services. So when George W.

• 3:25:09Speaker 03

  Bush is on the job for eight months before September 11th, his approval rating goes up to 90%. Because we can't fire the national government and replace it with another one. We're not having another election for another three years. And so this is the security force we got. And so we better support it because what? We're trying to send a signal to the world that you better know that we're all one for all. And you better not mess with us or whatever, but what are we really doing? We're telling George Bush that he has a mandate to do anything he thinks he can get away with. And that we do nothing but support him after the greatest failure of any president in all of American history. For that to be allowed to happen on his watch. And when we all know, of course, that they knew it was coming and that at least parts of the CIA were warning

• 3:25:54Speaker 03

  and trying desperately to get the White House to pay attention to the fact that this attack was coming. And that Bush refused to pay attention. I think because he didn't want to be distracted with going after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. When he was trying to go to Iraq. And which is another important point, point to bring up back to our, the debate with Dubowitz there. Where, oh, the Jews, this, the Jews, that, and the neo conservatives and whatever. Well, to be perfectly clear, as everyone knows, George W. Bush is a Methodist, right? He's the son of Episcopalian wasps from Connecticut. And Dick Cheney is some kind of redneck from out in Wyoming. And I mean that in a complimentary way. Yeah, no, I, I, I appreciate working class folk.

• 3:26:39Speaker 03

  I've done plenty of that kind of work myself. But he like climbed electric poles and stuff like that. He's a from out West and is a cowboy and a conservative and a right winger and a nationalist and a tough guy. That's his problem. Donald Rumsfeld was previously the Secretary of Defense. And had his own plans for, there was this whole debate back during that era of the transformation of the military. Everybody knows now that the Soviet Union's gone and it's the whole new order. What order is it? And what should the military look like? What sort of weapon systems should we focus on this and that? And Rumsfeld had his own ideas. Like generically speaking, he wanted to stick it to big army and give their money to

• 3:27:22Speaker 03

  the air force and the special operations forces instead. Again, the Lockheed promo video where what we do is we send in special operations forces and air power to whoop anybody in a few weeks and then move on to the next one. We don't, we want to stay light and fast and not get bogged down. That was one of their excuses for letting bin Laden go. Well, we didn't want to get bowed down. Oh, what? Killing bin Laden and Zawahiri, the two most important guys that you could possibly target in the thing who are both there? You know, come on, but that was part of their excuse. Light and fast, keep it going. W. Bush, I think, wanted to prove he was tougher than his father. In a sense, probably wanted to avenge his father and from the fake assassination plot, but also the humiliation.

• 3:28:03Speaker 03

  Again, Bill Hicks was so wise about this, that the humiliation of H. W. Bush being voted out of office while Saddam Hussein was still in the chair. And he, he says they had to wait a couple of days for Saddam Hussein to quit gut laughing to get his quote. And then he goes, we have nothing against America. We just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the road like a soccer ball. And then Bill goes, wow, me and Saddam Hussein, we're like this. Who would have thunk it? So some of it is personal too, right? And in fact, Crystal said, I remember seeing Crystal on TV say, well, of, and see, wait, wait, before Crystal, I said this to my math teacher in 11th grade. Were you Scott Horton? Yes. To your math teacher?

• 3:28:48Speaker 03

  In, in 1994, when the day that they announced, or the next day after they announced that W. Bush was going to also run for governor, just like his brother Jeb is running for governor in Florida. I said to my math teacher, oh, you see what they're doing? I was 17. I said, you see what they're doing? They're making sure that one or the other, at least of these guys will be a second term governor in the year 2000. Then they can run for president and go back to Iraq, which means the Democrats are gonna, I mean, which means the Republicans are gonna run a weakling in 96 and throw the election for Bill and let him win again so that they can run a fresh Bush in 2000. Nailed it, dude. And why?

• 3:29:32Speaker 03

  Because of the humiliation. That was my high school thinking at that. Because of the humiliation that Saddam's still there, but Bush is gone. Bush lost after only one term. And then, so that's gotta be avenged. And that's clearly what they're doing here. And then Bill Kristol said the same thing. Now, Bill Kristol is bullying W. Bush, right? Bill Kristol ain't me. He's him up there. And he's saying, well, I just can't imagine that W. Bush would risk being unelected after only one term with Saddam Hussein still in charge over there. So I think that it's just an obvious matter, of course, that he will have to invade Iraq in his first term. And I encourage that and think it's great, and he should. And I saw Kristol say that

• 3:30:16Speaker 03

  probably during the campaign, before he was even elected president, somewhere around there. And again, I wasn't quite sure who Kristol was. And I surely didn't know who his father was in the neoconservative movement yet. But I knew that this is the guy from the Weekly Standard that's always on about Saddam Hussein. And so that was the way that he was trying to frame it to W. Bush himself, that of course, you can't take the risk of running for reelection in '04 with Saddam Hussein still sitting there. What if you lost, just like your dad? Your family could never live that down. Saddam still in the chair after two Bushes got unelected after only one term? Perish the thought.

• 3:30:56Lex Fridman?

  That makes me realize that when you're in the seat of the president, it takes real courage to basically resist the military-industrial complex.

• 3:31:06Speaker 03

  And W. Bush had no courage, or insight, or depth, or humanity.

• 3:31:11Lex Fridman?

  And so there's something about our political system that doesn't make it easy for truly courageous singular figures to win the presidency, right?

• 3:31:19Speaker 03

  And you'd probably be terrified of them if they did. You know what I mean? Because you've got people like that, or they're gonna use that courage. Again, this is sort of the irony of the neoconservatives is they say, you know, Henry Kissinger's a monster. His amoral foreign policy that says, well, if the Indonesians feel like killing all the Timorese, I guess they have to, or whatever, that not like us, we're a morality-based foreign policy. That's why we have to invade Iraq, because Saddam Hussein is so immoral. And we have to go and bring Light and goodness to the world by doing the right thing by starting another war. And so that's right, those are your two choices.

• 3:31:58Speaker 03

  You have amoral and immoral in the name of morality, you know, and using that excuse. And as they would always put it, the Straussian's, because he was one of the former Trotskyites that then a lot of these guys studied under. And he would say, oh, no, we're all philosopher kings. See, and unlike Lockean or Jeffersonian type American principles, our principles are that elites, you know, like David Wormser and Richard Pearl, who are so smart that only they can understand the real truth and the subtext of the truth. And everybody else is some idiot who has to be lied to with noble lies by their philosopher kings, because they won't do the right thing for the right reasons.

• 3:32:42Speaker 03

  They have to be told false reasons to make them do the right thing and all these things. And they got to justify all their lies by wrapping it up in all those justifications that they know what they're doing. When, of course, these people are just clowns, dude, there's no difference. And, and I know, look, at the time I was driving a cab in this town, on this, up and down this street, okay? And the average idiot around here knew better than all of this, right? And it wasn't because they had special knowledge, but they just knew you don't start a war. God knows what could happen. You have no idea, dude, how many just regular people told me, I don't think Saddam Hussein is friends with Osama bin Laden, you know?

• 3:33:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a deep wisdom in that common sense.

• 3:33:21Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 3:33:21Lex Fridman?

  And that's what makes America great is for the longest time, the people had power.

• 3:33:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:33:27Lex Fridman?

  And so to the degree that the people have power and that wisdom can speak through its representatives, then, then we'll be all right. But the more and more the bureaucracy grows, the more the military industrial complex gains power, then that common sense wisdom of the people is silenced.

• 3:33:43Speaker 03

  Hmm. Well, and I like telling this story too, so I'll go ahead and run it on the guy to you too. I had a guy in my cab who was like a Mr. Fance, Fance man about town. I dropped him off, had some very swanky bachelor pad apartments off of South Mopack there. He was a real nice guy and we had a long conversation because I wouldn't let the porous OB go. And I'm beating him over the head and I'm telling him, damn it. I swear to God that this is true, okay? George W. Bush, Conalisa Rice, Colin Powell, George Tenet, none of them have said that Saddam did 9/11. Now, Dick Cheney did, but he's a damn liar. But there's a real important reason why Bush and Powell are not saying that. Okay? They're perfectly happy to leave you with that impression that that must be what they were trying to imply.

• 3:34:28Speaker 03

  And that's what you thought you heard them say, but you didn't. And you promised me you'd go inside and you Google, you look hard, you will not find them directly saying that. And he says to me, ah, but come on, man. I mean, if Saddam Hussein didn't do 9/11, then why are we attacking him then? Right? Which is a good question. But to him, the answer was built into the thing that actually the cab driver couldn't possibly be right. Because the people in Washington would not lead me to believe that this has anything at all to do with avenging that innocent dead Americans slaughtered on September 11, airplanes full of little kids on their way on vacation. That, what do you mean this has nothing to do with that?

• 3:35:10Speaker 03

  What's more likely, your cab driver knows better? Or that, no, you are right to disbelieve and believe in authority that swears that they're doing this to protect you from the enemy that attacked you. And so that's the kind of cognitive dissonance that is always baked into these kinds of things. It's the same thing with Israel now. Well, if this is the most barbarian society on the planet, how come we're their best friends? Yeah, again, a very good question. But it's not answered by, they must not be. They must be really great. Otherwise, we wouldn't be. Which is what the cognitive dissonance would try to have you explain to yourself, I guess.

• 3:35:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, by the way, the everyday people, like, just like we said, often have a deep wisdom that the government lacks. And more than almost any other career, I think cab drivers really have that wisdom. I don't know what it is about cab drivers, but they really get it. Because they get to talk to a lot of people. They get to think through a lot of it. You get to like think through it.

• 3:36:07Speaker 03

  Hey, I think all the time about. I mean, there's a lot of cabris I don't remember, but there are a few that I do where it was I got something wrong. And the guy goes, no, no, no, it's not like that. It's like this and he was right and I was wrong. And I went, ah, you know, I really picked up something there. You know what I mean? Like one of the good ones, I said, I was kind of a new world order cook back then. And, and one of the good ones, I still remember where I was on MoPAC, where the guy said to me that like, listen, man, it ain't conspiracy. It's just politics. Okay. It's the game over who controls the power. You don't need secret societies. You just need oak tables, man. It's, this is business. And that's how it goes. And, and if you take

• 3:36:45Lex Fridman?

  Click with you.

• 3:36:46Speaker 03

  Even, yeah. And even the most conspiratorial type thing, if you just leave out the secret society crap. And just focus on Lockheed and the Israel lobby and the Republican party and oil interests and whatever, where all these things come together. It's all very clear. You know what I mean? And you don't have to be a Chomskyite leftist to see it that way at all. Like I'm a libertarian. We're pure free market types, which means we find it morally criminal for any company to get a government contract for anything. Right? Like we want no public, private partnerships of any kind. When we say privatization, we don't mean government contracts. We mean privatization, get government out of it and let free people figure it out.

• 3:37:28Speaker 03

  Any corporation on welfare deserves to be destroyed to a libertarian. So it's, you don't have to like identify somehow as like, well, only an anarcho syndicalist in the Chomskyite mold would think that we have this problem with these crony corporations. No, indeed we do. And in fact, again, not again, but go back. Who coined the term military industrial complex? It was Dwight David Eisenhower, the five star army general, who was the commander of all United Nations forces in Europe in World War II. And then came home and was the two term Republican president of the United States of America. Who is the one who did the coup in 53 in Iran, who's the one who built as many nuclear missiles as he possibly could, but why?

• 3:38:10Speaker 03

  To try to hold the army at bay. Eisenhower said, God help the next president of this country who doesn't have the experience with the army that I do. To try to keep these men from their demands where they were constantly demanding more divisions, more divisions, more divisions. And he said, no, I'm going to build more missiles instead. You guys get away from me. And only he had the power to do it at the time. I'm not taking a stance on this, but widely believed that these same forces blew the head off of his successor for getting in their way.

• 3:38:45Speaker 03

  You know, which is at least possible, if not likely, right? That that was what happened in Dallas.

• 3:38:51Speaker 01

  By by these forces, and we don't really know the full.

• 3:38:53Speaker 03

  Meaning the military and the intelligence agencies, right? Is was the idea.

• 3:38:57Speaker 01

  It's like a network of people that work together.

• 3:39:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, the black access program, special access program in the military goes Fletcher Proud and them, their argument about the thing, which whatever.

• 3:39:11Speaker 03

  Whether that's true or not, it's believable enough because and what Eisenhower said that on his last day in office, sorry, Charlie, I did the best I could. Maybe this is half my fault. Good luck to you and then quit and was out the door. And then, but have we ever had a major reckoning since then? Where what? Oh, after Vietnam and Nixon was impeached, that was when we destroyed the military industrial complex? No. Right? That that never happened after the end of the Cold War? Is that what happened? No, we went to Bosnia and then we went to Iraq. We went to Bosnia and stayed in the Middle East and expand wherever we can.

• 3:39:43Speaker 01

  Eisenhower's speeches are haunting.

• 3:39:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's the other one is the Cross of Iron speech where he calculates the cost of battleships compared to schools and grocery stores and things. It's not all public good or, you know, so-called public goods, like public schools. But he talks about like private investment and the comparisons that every bit of money that we spend on this is wealth that comes from the American people that the government then denies to us, takes from us and destroys. Like, if you ever read 1984 in the part of the book.

• 3:40:12Speaker 01

  I've read it many times, of course.

• 3:40:13Speaker 03

  And there's part of the book where Winston Smith is being brought under the wing of his future torturer, O'Brien, and O'Brien gives him the manual for how we do it. Right? And he holes up in his bedroom and reads the book of how we do it. And it says in there that, listen, we keep them in a permanent state of war at all times to keep them on edge, to keep them insecure, to take any excess wealth that the people would otherwise spend improving their own lives. And we sink it into the ocean in the form of the floating fortress, or we blast it off into space in the form of these missiles and rockets that we're building, so that the people can't have it, so that we cannot build up our society to protect our own needs and interests. Now, of course,

• 3:40:56Speaker 03

  anyone leaning left listening to this would prefer that the government spend this money on public school and healthcare and infrastructure. Anybody right-leaning listening to this says, that's my money. Stop printing money and inflating the money supply. Stop taxing me. Leave me alone. Me and my buddies will invest in private businesses and we will produce the wealth society needs. Fine. What we all have to agree is that this has to all come to an end, where we let them take trillions and trillions of our dollars. What they can't tax, they borrow, and what they can't borrow, they inflate. And with the inflation, this is the absolute crisis of confidence. Again, Bin Laden invited our government to do this, quote, "self-inflicted wound," meaning really our government wounding all of us. And this

• 3:41:41Speaker 03

  is the absolute crisis of our era, is price inflation. It's why people can't pay the rent. It's why they can't afford to feed their family. It's why they're forced to send their children to government school, like a German or a Russian. It's why they are broke, it's why young men and women can't start families and buy homes. It's because of price inflation, which is the result of monetary expansion. The expansion, especially of bank credit, although in our very current era, because of Donald Trump and Joe Biden's massive stimulus bills that they signed during COVID. And you can trace that back to wars. And it's almost entirely like, well, big government overall relies on inflationary

• 3:42:23Speaker 03

  money. But then, yes, this is a massive part of our budget, is the annual militarism for the global empire. And so, like to turn it around, Jonah Goldberg from the National Review, Mr. Levine, doctor, he says, well, we can't have a gold standard, because what if there's a war? Right, but then that's Ron Paul's point. That's why we should have a gold standard. So Jonah Goldberg can't have a war, right? Because they have to print the money. If they had to raise your taxes to go stop Tojo, maybe even then they had to print money and, and, and borrow money. But people sure as hell took Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan seriously enough to fight, and they still had to conscript millions of people to do it, but whatever. At least you got a credible threat there.

• 3:43:08Speaker 03

  But you're gonna tell the American people, hey, we're gonna have to raise everybody's income tax in every bracket by 6% so that we can launch an aggressive war against Iraq, so that Israel can save a nickel a barrel. Hopefully, if they can get their silly pipeline they want built. And married people say, hell, no. But when they print the money, remember this, George Bush sent people, anyone who paid income taxes, got a refund check of an extra $300 or $400, depending on your bracket, in 2003 and '04. This was meant to look like, well, I infer this. It was meant to look like your dividend is meant to fool you into thinking that the Iraq war is profitable, that America is making money off of this. Like in the cliche that you would hear from people in the neighborhood.

• 3:43:52Speaker 03

  Well, war is good for the economy. And look, we're all directly benefiting from this, apparently. We all get an extra $300 or $400. But of course, they just printed that money. And all that inflation during the W. Bush years is what led to the giant housing bubble and the crash of '08 and the absolute decimation that came after that. And then what Obama do? Came and printed even more money, built up an even bigger bubble to try to deal with that. Then, of course, the COVID lockdowns essentially played the role of high interest rates in just crushing the economy and forcing a massive recession on people. But then what'd they do? They didn't just have the Fed, like, lower interest rates and lower reserve ratios so that they could expand money even more. They literally just mailed everybody checks of brand-new money from the Treasury, all brand-new money.

• 3:44:36Speaker 03

  And by some measures, they created 2/3 of all US dollars that were ever created were created since 2020. And so that's Trump's fault and Biden's fault for doing those giant monetary expansion acts. That's what has led to the giant inflationary crisis today, is these absolutely incompetent managers of our economy. And this is the thing where... If people aren't libertarians at all, if people lean any degree left or right from me and from Austrian School libertarian things is totally fine, disagree with me on whatever you want, warfare, welfare, anything, but it's just true, man, it's just true. The Austrians are correct about the cause of the business cycle, the boom and bust.

• 3:45:19Speaker 03

  Now, of course, if the frost wipes out all the oranges, then that's going to cause disruptions in that one market or whatever. But what caused what Ludwig von Mises called the cluster of errors, where all these businessmen are making all these bad bets all at the same time, that then leads to these terrible crashes and resets and corrections. And the answer is it's inflationary money and artificially low interest rates, because what it does is it's manipulating the price of money, artificially valuing money with government control and leading producers to follow false price signals and to mistakenly

• 3:46:01Speaker 03

  believe that there are more resources available in the economy for use than there really are. If you had free market interest rates, then the more capital you use to invest, the more it costs to borrow more capital, right? And when savings are low and capital is low to invest in new things, then interest rates would naturally go up. But when the Federal Reserve Bank holds interest rates low, then that doesn't happen. And so you have, especially in the higher order goods, like mining and quarries and machine tools and the kinds of things that are then used to sell the other businesses to make other things and these kinds of things, they make long-term, farmers are another

• 3:46:42Speaker 03

  ones, they make long-term loans at artificially low interest rates that then they end up getting screwed later because they're not able to produce to keep up when the crash comes. Now, let's say you own a quarry and you're Austrian School guy and you see what's going on here. Well, Alan Greenspan is just printing a bunch of money. And so all my competitors are hiring new workforces and they're buying new machine tools and they're getting way ahead of me in their productive capacity. But I know that they're screwed because they're going deep into debt for all this stuff and the music's going to stop. However. If I don't, if you, the Corey owner, if you don't play the same game.

• 3:47:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you're also.

• 3:47:22Speaker 03

  You're gonna lose sooner than them.

• 3:47:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:47:24Speaker 03

  You're gonna lose before they have a chance to get screwed. So even if you know better, you still have to expand beyond what you really know that you do. So like one example that Austrians like to use, I think, is like if the circus comes to town for a month or whatever, and this, the local Dairy Queen is really busy. And then the guy builds a giant extension onto the thing, thinking that like, this is how it's gonna be now. But no, this is just temporary. This is a boom followed by a bust, right? Well, so this is the, the artificial value of those customers in that time induced by the traveling circus. But in our case, we're talking about money artificially inflating the value of certain firms and certain banks' investments and these kind of things.

• 3:48:08Speaker 03

  This is what leads to the cluster of errors that leads to the collapses. And people can read the, of course, the brilliant Ludwig von Mises in his Theory of Money and Credit from a hundred years ago. Then of course, there's Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done To Our Money and The Case Against The Fed. And then there's all of the brilliant guys of the Austrian School, especially Robert Murphy and Tom Woods and all the guys at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And imperialism and militarism are at the heart of this. David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's former budget advisor, calls this the Great Deformation. He says, all these little bubbles, like eighty-seven and ninety-two and ninety-nine and oh-eight, these are the little bubbles on top of the big bubble of America's overall

• 3:48:51Speaker 03

  inflationary monetary policy since the end of the Second World War in order to make the militarism seem artificially cheap, to make it seem more... Imagine how deceived people would have to be to think that war is good for the economy because they notice the Russian spending and the immediate stimulative effect when this is the difference between the seen and the unseen. Where's all that wealth coming from? And now where's it going? It's going to make tools of death and destruction, net losses in property values all the way around. In, you know, and a lot of times, goods that can never be reused again. The plane can fly again, but the bomb sure can't. F-35s fall out of the sky all the time in the headlines again today. And so this is all a net loss.

• 3:49:35Speaker 03

  Um, in terms of all of this capacity being directed into militarism and then going away, but people get fooled into thinking that this is what's good and this is what's necessary. And of course, Lockheed does things and the rest of them too, Boeing and the rest, they have explicit um gerrymandering type policies where they will have one small part of every weapon system made in as many factories as possible all across the country. So that if Congress ever wants to roll back anything, they will have an army of lobbyists to threaten them that we're talking about 600 jobs in your district Congressman. Is that what you're willing to do? And then they all just snap right into line. You know, again, what they say, hey, we're just supplying the weapons that the Congress demands. No, they're not.

• 3:50:20Speaker 03

  They're rigging the whole game. So we have no choice but to give in to them essentially.

• 3:50:25Lex Fridman?

  If I can just take an aside, you mentioned you used to be a cab driver.

• 3:50:32Lex Fridman?

  I would love to understand the story of somebody that was a cab driver that eventually became one of the most prolific libertarians anti-war intellects of the modern era.

• 3:50:44Lex Fridman?

  Who are you?

• 3:50:45Speaker 03

  I'm just a wrong guy.

• 3:50:47Lex Fridman?

  I'm a, I mean, look at this, look at this, right? The number of citations here breaks.

• 3:50:53Speaker 03

  Seven thousand.

• 3:50:54Lex Fridman?

  Seven thousand. Look, I mean, how? And why were you driving a cab? And what, how did you come to be this, this person?

• 3:51:03Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I'm a skateboarder type and I'm just anti-government type. Like I say, I, I learned about Ronald Reagan being a dope pusher when I was a child. Bill Clinton burned the Branch Davidians to death in front of my eyes and called it a suicide when I was 16. Covered up the Oklahoma bombing, blamed it on one guy two years later, which they're still, they're no longer getting away with that. There's a brand new book out called Blowback and I haven't read it yet, but I know the fact checker and I know that it's right. That McVeigh had friends, they were undercover FBI informants, at least two of them, Roger Moore and Andre Strasmeier were agent provocateurs and they covered it up because it was their own guys who did it. I'm not saying the government did it on purpose, but I'm saying the FBI was essentially a sting that they were meant to stop it and they didn't stop it.

• 3:51:48Speaker 03

  And they cover that up and they got the whole media to go along with that. And then, you know, I was a big fan of like, see. It's kind of funny, but I'm kind of angry at them, so I'll put them on blast anyway. I don't care. When I was young, I read Reason Magazine and I thought, I hate these guys. That's what a libertarian is, that they think their job is debunking Gulf War illness. They think their job is debunking the number of Iraqis starving to death under Bill Clinton's sanctions. And, and they don't give a damn about the Branch Davidians. They don't give a damn about any of this. Right? I don't know what they're good for, lower taxes and maybe guns, not that they're doing anything important about it.

• 3:52:33Speaker 03

  And so I shied away from the libertarian movement for a long time. Because that's what I thought the libertarian movement was, and I would rather pal around with a bunch of right wing militia guys. Cause at least they care about the Branch Davidians. And there was, and in Austin at that time, there was kind of a thriving, what they called the patriot movement, which is like the civilian side of the militia movement, basically. And it's all like, yeah, right wing conspiracy guys who are right about everything then, about who started that fire in Waco, about who helped blow up Oklahoma City, about the sanctions in Iraq, killing kids, about the Gulf War illness that they were covering up, illness says, I should say, that they were covering up and saying, oh, drink a beer, chin up and don't be a wimp. And all this to these guys who are dying of cancers and other diseases that they got from what the Pentagon did to them,

• 3:53:16Speaker 03

  exposed them to in Iraq War One. And so, you know, the neo, the, the, the conspiracy kooks were batting a hundred, batting a thousand, whatever. I'm not a baseball guy, I'm a skateboarder. They're batting a thousand, you know, during that era, they're, they're really right about a lot of things. And I would have rather hung around them, even though I wasn't culturally right wing like them. But William Norman Grig at the New American Magazine was really a great, and of course Ron Paul came back to Congress in 97.

• 3:53:43Lex Fridman?

  Was Ron Paul the, the person that sort of convinced you that libertarianism could be a powerful movement?

• 3:53:48Speaker 03

  Yes. Ron Paul convinced me of a lot of things, man. He's, he's really been a north star to me this whole time, ever since then. I was so excited from the, I'll tell you, the first time I ever saw Ron Paul was 10 years before everybody else got their big Giuliani moment, when Ron whooped Rudy Giuliani in that debate in March, pardon me, in May of 2007, where they fought over the motivation of Osama bin Laden to attack us on 9/11. Ron says, because we're bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi for 10 years. Everybody knows that. And Giuliani flipped his lid and Ron was of course heroic and right. But my Giuliani moment was a decade before. I saw Ron in the middle of the night on C-SPAN. Dr. Paul on C-SPAN, the middle of the night, speaking to an empty Congress.

• 3:54:31Speaker 03

  Uh, it said whoever was filling in in the speaker chair. "Mr. Speaker, I have here in my hands reports from the British press today about how George Bush was selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein, leading right up to the invasion of Kuwait." "What's up with that? And now, and we still have all these sanctions and doing all these things, and we're so responsible for this guy's evil in the first place, after we had backed him all that time and all these things, and this is not wise foreign policy, Mr. Speaker, we ought to come home." And I'm like, wow, that any congressman would say anything that honest on the record, inside the Capitol building like that, I couldn't believe it. And then I looked at the bottom of the screen, it says, "Ron Paul, R, Texas." And I'm like, no way, because, you know, Bush Senior himself is nominally from here,

• 3:55:14Speaker 03

  right? He's from Connecticut, really, but he made his fortune here in oil and lived here for a very long time, and, you know, raised his family in West Texas for much of the time and that kind of thing. So, he's an extremely important guy in Texas politics. So for this congressman to dare to say that, he's essentially accusing Bush of treason. Um, okay, this is, I'm interested in this guy. And then, I'm reading the New American Magazine, which is the John Birch's magazine, they have a very bad rap as racist and stuff, which is totally not true. They're conspiratorial, and I don't agree with them on everything, and they're more conservative than me, but they're good people, they're George Washington's Constitution guys, and, and mostly Protestant and Catholic Christians and American patriotic folk, they're good people.

• 3:55:58Speaker 03

  And the editor of their magazine at that time was the great William Norman Grig. And, he would run Ron Paul stuff constantly, he would cover Ron. Um, and then, I used to be a pirate radio guy, so I had, I would call his weekly update, I don't know if he still does this, it was 888-322-1414, and then I would just play the Ron Paul weekly update and put that out over the air. And it was always just killer stuff, dude, financial, you know, monetary policy and boom and bust, and, and the evils of war. I would drive around in my cab and I would have printed out Ron Paul speeches. And there was one that was called, "A Republic If You Can Keep It." And then, which is the famous Benjamin Franklin quote to the baker lady about, what do

• 3:56:41Speaker 03

  we have, a monarchy or a republic? A republic if you can keep it. And then the sequel is called, I'm sorry, Mr. Franklin, we are all Democrats now. And it was just so good. And I would give this to people in the cab. Hey, did you know there's one good congressman? One. And he's not good. He's better than Thomas Jefferson. Read this, and read this, and read this. And this is the light and the way. And the thing is, is all I'm selling you is a peaceful foreign policy. I'm not saying like, well, and, and freedom overall, as this is what Ron Paul emphasized. If you, if he's asking for your trust or your faith in anything, it's just that you trust in freedom, that it does work. It's why we have all this stuff, is because of liberty in the first place. And so you can count on that, you know? But otherwise,

• 3:57:27Speaker 03

  he's not selling you anything. He delivered like a third of the population of his district when he was a baby doctor, right? He's not going anywhere. He didn't have, he wasn't soliciting donations. He wasn't asking you to join his cult, or his sect of Protestant Christianity. He was just saying, we don't have to do this stuff. We don't have to believe in this. They say these things, but geez, that doesn't seem right, because what about this thing? And he's just so wise and so good. And, and his, his aides, by the way, his, his right-hand men all that time were also really great guys, too. Especially Jeff Deist and Daniel McAdams has been his right-hand man and his great, you know, advisor this whole time.

• 3:58:05Lex Fridman?

  And another just really good human being.

• 3:58:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, yes. And, and he's a doctor, not a lawyer. He delivered 4,000 babies. And you know, I met his sister-in-law, who married his older brother Wayne. And, and she says to me, yeah, well, when you guys say that Ron Paul delivered 4,000 babies, well, I did too, because I'm his head nurse, and I delivered every one of them myself, too, along with him and all of that thing. So that's where he comes from. He's a decent, sweet, old country doctor. He's married to his high school sweetheart since her sweet 16 party. Okay? No scandals, not a hint of it. He's got, I don't know, 150 grandchildren or whatever it is. This is the American dream. It's perfect, dude. And nobody's got nothing on him. Right? He's just, he's the best.

• 3:58:44Lex Fridman?

  I wish we lived in a country where a guy like that can have a chance of being president.

• 3:58:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 3:58:51Speaker 01

  Could have been, dude. Listen, the Republicans of the United States of America nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney instead of him. You explain that to me when we got George Washington himself only without the slaves and without the bloody hands. The only vet in the race, but he was a doctor in the air force. The only one, he got up on stage and quoted Jesus and they booed him.

• 3:59:18Lex Fridman?

  He's the guy that's supposed to be president. That's, I mean, you say George Washington, one of the greatest Americans ever. That's the guy.

• 3:59:27Speaker 01

  That's the guy, dude. Could have been. Hey, and if you doubt me, just go to antiwar.com/paul and read the last 30 years of everything he's had to say about everything. What can I tell you, man?

• 3:59:38Lex Fridman?

  But the aspect, the rigor, you talked about the motivation, like where you discovered, like, how the hell did you do this?

• 3:59:46Speaker 01

  Okay, I could think of an answer to that, which is that, like, unlike all your Harvard professors and all of this stuff, like, the burden of proof is really on me, right? Like, it's because I'm just a skater cab driver from Austin who didn't go to your fancy pants college. I don't have, there's no reason that you're supposed to defer to me. And that book is about how everybody's wrong except me. So if I'm gonna tell you that, then I better be able to really demonstrate it. And I want you to go, oh, yeah, well, but what about that coup in Montenegro in 2016? Well, turn the page. I got a whole section on that. I didn't leave out nothing. And I wrote it in that kind of defensive posture. People are gonna not like this. They're gonna say I don't know what I'm talking about. Now, when I wrote Enough Already, the war was over. Enough Already

• 4:00:31Speaker 01

  came out in January 21, and I was in a race to get it done, because Joe Biden's gonna be inaugurated on January 20, and the era's over. The Bush Obama era capstoned with Trump won is just at an end. And after all, it's the true beginning of the decade is January 21, right? And so I knew that this book has to come out now, but this is really about the terror wars that are over mostly, not that were completely done in the Middle East, you understand, but like...

• 4:01:06Speaker 03

  That's a bit after the fact. This is written, provoked is written in the middle of the war.

• 4:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:01:11Speaker 03

  And I'm trying to change people's mind and really get them not just to regret the stupid things they believed in a minute ago, but to change their mind and get on board and let's see if we can bring this thing to a more reasonable conclusion sooner than later and, and get it done. It'd be like if I wrote enough already in 2005 or six. Um, and so I knew I wanted it to be as bulletproof as it just possibly can be because I don't have argumentation from authority. I don't have like, oh yeah, I'm from here and I can tell you that. I'm a reporter. I'm a, I'm a linguist and I've read 10,000 Russian newspapers going back to whatever, whatever. I don't have any of those things. What I do have is I've been working for antiwar.com this whole time. I've done 6,000 interviews with the best

• 4:01:53Speaker 03

  experts. We covered the Orange Revolution when it happened. We covered the Maidan Revolution when it happened and everything in between and all of these things. So, um, just like with the book about Afghanistan and the book about the Middle East, I was already ready to write the book before I started writing it. I already know the whole story. Obviously I had to do a lot of research and fill in a lot of information and correct myself on things I had wrong or oversimplified or whatever and learned a lot while I was writing it. But I already knew the story overall because I've been working on it for a very long time. What are the main things that Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden did to cause the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine? I already know those things. I already have the bullet points. I, that book started as a speech I gave in 2020. Um, in

• 4:02:35Speaker 03

  fact, it was Leap Day 2020, Carol Paul's birthday. Um, and the day that Donald Trump signed the peace deal with the Taliban to get us out of Afghanistan, I gave a speech to the Libertarian Party of King County, um, in Seattle, Washington, called the Cold, the new Cold War with Russia is all America's fault. And that, that's published at antiwar.com. And then two years later, I spent, I stayed up all night doubling the length of the speech and gave it again. And this is, it's a four hour speech I gave in Utah on, I think March the 2nd, 2022, right after the war started. Explaining all the same stuff and then that became the nucleus of that book, basically. And then it's just a matter of filling it out.

• 4:03:17Lex Fridman?

  And sorry to ask a silly detailed question, but this is a gigantic book, extremely detailed, extremely well cited. What's your writing process like? What, how do you go through it? So it started as speech and now you have this, this manifesto, this tome.

• 4:03:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, as you can see, the chapters are just H W Bush, Clinton, W Bush, Obama. And, and you know, when you, if you ever get the chance to read the thing, you'll see that it, this is really just a giant collection of citations. I don't do too much writing in the book. Much unlike Justin Raimondo, I'm really not that smart and have a lot to say. I'm great on names and dates and I hold a grudge real well. But Justin could write a thousand words just of like wisdom and understanding and opinions about things that I'm, I'm just not really like that. So this book in a way is 7,000 note cards arranged by your maestro here to be,

• 4:04:15Speaker 03

  hopefully to tell the story in a way that everybody can understand. And you know, whatever, there's pros in there. I'm, I'm writing to you, but I'm, I'm, mostly I'm marshaling evidence is the point of the whole thing. That this is what these guys did. Here's what the war party says. And I don't straw man my arguments. I link, when I say 7,000 citations, a third of them are to the bad guys. And this is their point of view. And I'm telling you, here's what they admit that they're lying. You know, that's basically how it's written. And I cite very little Ron Paul and very little Pat Buchanan in there because as much as I revere them, I don't need them. I can quote the apparatchiks in charge themselves explaining how stupid the things

• 4:04:58Speaker 03

  that they are doing are and then show why they did them anyway and all the consequences and whatever. So I don't, I don't need to cite the good guys. I can cite the involved.

• 4:05:10Lex Fridman?

  So basically going to the primary sources versus citing the quote unquote experts.

• 4:05:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and just spending a hell of a lot of time going through the archives. And I am an obsessive type of like I there are absolutely times where I spent four days hunting one footnote that I know exists and I want to make this claim and I can't make it without my citation. I'm gonna find this thing. And I have gone to the ends of the earth in some cases for these, especially like about the Balkan wars and stuff. Some of those articles are so hard to hunt down. But then, you know, I'm reading all these books and then all those books got all their own citations. And a lot of, you know, I learned this a long time ago, but this was reinforced in this book. Um, and this is no slam against them. It's just against everybody. There's a lot of times the people that I agree with are wrong and they will cite something.

• 4:05:57Speaker 03

  And then I go and read that something and it does not say what they said it says. And I can see why they misunderstood it even that they're not lying and not exaggerating. But that's not really the the implication there. It's really something different. So I double, triple, quadruple check every goddamn thing I can until I'm like, I I'm terrified of being caught out being wrong on a fact. And I have, um, the book is 477,000 words and I it's if if it was six by nine and if the font was regular size, it would be 1,200 pages long. That's how long the book is. Um, and it's, but it's not. Well, first of all, a major portion of that is like literally hundreds and hundreds of pages of that is footnotes, although I keep them all at the bottom of the page where you can see them.

• 4:06:42Speaker 03

  And damn anyone who doesn't do that. That's exactly how a book like this should be. Um, but then, so a lot of that space really is citations. But then also, um, I don't dwell too long on any one topic. I don't think the only two exceptions to that are. In when we talk about the NATO promises against expansion and the Nazis in Ukraine, because these, I believe, are the two most controversial subjects or, you know, stances or whatever in the book. And so I go absolutely to the ends of their, to beat the dead horse all the way to death to prove the absolute fact of the position that I'm taking there.

• 4:07:25Speaker 03

  And then there's still probably a lot of overkill on a lot of things. But as far as like the writing goes, when I I mentioned the Montenegro coup of 2016, it's just a short little thing. It's called the Vaudeville coup, and it's kind of funny, and it's a little mysterious. And then the different poisonings by the Russians, or at least alleged ones. I have, you know, Litvinenko and the scribbles and whoever. And I just, I was thinking it from the point of view of my accusers, like, oh, yeah, well, what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what about that? I bet you left that out. And like, no, I didn't, dude, I have it all in there. And I tried to write it in a way to satisfy my worst critics as best as I could. The, as the Declaration of Independence says, with a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.

• 4:08:05Speaker 03

  That like, so I should assume that you don't agree with me and in good faith. And so how in the hell am I going to fix that? Like, I'm gonna have to make you accept that I'm not lying to you when I put these things together. If you, if, when you read that, you feel like I, I'm trying to get away with something, you're gonna put it down. And so I didn't write it for you to put it down. Think I wrote a thousand page book for you to put it down? I want you to get through all the way to the end going, God dang, man, I didn't really realize it was as bad as all of that.

• 4:08:37Speaker 01

  So to convince the critics.

• 4:08:38Speaker 03

  That's, that's what it's for. As opposed to enough already, which I really wrote enough already for my people, my fans to give to their brother in law and their dad and whoever. It's a little bit after the fact. As I said, I was in a real rush to get it done. So I don't have the citations. I do have the citations in full air and about Afghanistan. And actually, we're working on now, me and one of my guys at the institute, we're working on putting the footnotes back into enough already and doing like the ultimate scholar edition with the overkill on the citations there. But I actually, I had footnotes on most of it. I turned them off and I just raced to the end because I was out of money and I was out of time and I just had to go. And so friends of mine rationalize it like, well, Think Bill O'Reilly has footnotes in his books, you know, get that thing out there, man.

• 4:09:23Speaker 03

  And so I did. And but I did try to write it in a way where I either cite my citations in the prose, or at least I wrote it in a way where it's a very specific claim. On November the ninth, they held a meeting and these five people were there and this is what they decided. So you can go and Google that. You know what I mean? It's not, it's, it should be specific enough that people can double check me, but, but then, yeah. So why I'm like this, um, I'm just a Ron Paul guy and I can't stand being lied to. And, and I can't stand all this violence and I want to live in a free society and the empire's ruining it. And then, and then, so why do I write, why am I like that meticulous about it all is, is I don't want to be caught being wrong. I'll tell you one funny story and then we'll stop. One time I lost an argument about Waco.

• 4:10:07Speaker 03

  It was these three people in my cab and the one of them was this real jerk. And the other two were on his side because it was his friends. And I was arguing with him about everything, but the thing was he was like the son of a federal cop. And he knew their side of the story, like down pat. He really knew his stuff. And so even though I was right and he was wrong, he won. And they got out of the car going, huh, huh, screw you, Branch Davidian boy and whatever. And, oh, man, that never happened to me again. You know why? Yeah. Cause I read like six books about Waco. I already knew more than enough about it. And then I decided that, yeah, no, actually no one's going to ever beat me in an argument about that ever again.

• 4:10:48Lex Fridman?

  So you can have really thoroughly articulate the, the evidence for your claims.

• 4:10:53Speaker 03

  And you're just like me too, dude. When, when you read a 300 page book, it takes, well, like if you want to read this thing, it's not like a chore, but like, oh, I want to read that. You're done in a day and a half or two. Like it's easy to do. Once you set that precedent a few times, it's pretty easy to read a thing and jot down some notes and learn something from it. And then teach it to somebody else and whatever. Well, yeah. Listen, welcome to adulthood or whatever. That's what we do. So like, that's all it is. It's just, that's my only job is compiling reasons to resent these liars. And, and why to know better than all their false promises.

• 4:11:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. But also be able to, uh, to articulate it.

• 4:11:28Speaker 03

  And see also I'm a talk radio guy, man. And I grew up in the radio of Rush Limbaugh. I'm driving for a living in the era of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy and all the local guys and I mean, the. I'll go ahead and say this on the record too. The local hosts on K O B J A M in Austin all suck and always have. All of them since Raleigh James in nineteen ninety six. Love her. Everybody since then, I mean, I don't know who listens to K O B J A M at all. How they even stay in business at all. Their hosts suck.

• 4:11:55Lex Fridman?

  The, the, the content of their words or the actual raw skill of how they talk and what they talk.

• 4:12:00Speaker 03

  And they. All of it, and mostly how stupid and wrong and horrible they are about everything. But also just how like meaningless their drivel is, right? You'd be in the middle of the world's worst crisis and they're like, the liberals are trying to take God out of the pledge of allegiance. Like dude, I would prefer that you just shoot me in the face to listen to this for the love of God, please. Anyway, but I, I love the potential there. And in that era before the internet was what it is today. This is the real town square where you can have a host who knows something. You can have a guest who knows something and you can have callers who know a lot more than you think they would, dude. And I remember listening to them talk about like the Texas Homesteading Act that said you weren't allowed to take out a second mortgage on your house and whatever.

• 4:12:43Speaker 03

  Cause it was to protect the little ladies and they were debating over whether they should have that law or not. And I remember thinking, wow, all these people know so much about this topic that I've never heard of before. And all of these callers are just so deep on their knowledge of what they know. And whether on that issue or so many other things. The first real time I heard real AM radio in Austin, I was sixteen. I was, wait, nah, I might've been, I might've been eighteen. No, no, I would, I was sixteen. It was, it was, yeah, it was the same year that the Davidians were killed. I was driving my first car down one eighty three. And I said, you know, I've lived in Austin my whole life and I've never listened to the AM band. I wonder what it is. And the first thing I hit was K O B J A M.

• 4:13:23Speaker 03

  And it was Johnny Walker, the great Johnny Walker, the FM, uh, rock and roll DJ. Was sub hosting. And his whole thing, he was a great guy, by the way, ripped Johnny Walker. But he goes, look, I don't know anything. I'm literally just hosting this show. The guest is this guy, a surviving Branch Davidian, and we're taking your calls.

• 4:13:47Speaker 03

  And this hit me like, what? There's even a Branch Davidian alive? And they have a point of view and you can hear it? And he's live right now and he's talking and people can call in and they can, what? Because in my world that I lived in, what you know about the Branch Davidians is what you read in the Austin American Statesman, or what you're told by Ted Koppel and Dan Rather. And that's all you get. What do you mean? I can interact with one? Yeah. And then the callers are brilliant. The callers know all, they're not kooks. They know exactly what they're talking about. And they'll be like, I'll tell you what happened was on March the 19th, blah, blah, blah. Oh, okay. So this is why I'm like this.

• 4:14:27Speaker 03

  This is talk radio to me is, it's like, if you believe in the idea of like, any kind of like, so-called popular government, like if we have to settle for any sort of statism at all, you want the people to be able to have one big ass conversation with each other, right? That's why your show is so important. So you get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of views and listens, maybe millions if you include all the podcasts. And so for a guy like me, it's like, yeah, it's a chance to talk to a whole bunch of people, to get a bunch of people having the same conversation together. Instead of everybody just all spread out, having their own little separate arguments and not interacting with each other. So to me, that was the brilliance of talk radio. And then where Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy were all polished and had their little programs.

• 4:15:11Speaker 03

  The guys on 550 AM in San Antonio, especially Carl Wigglesworth was my favorite. But him and all those guys, even Ricky Ware, who was the John Hagueite lunatic, but he was still such a sweet guy. And their talk radio, their version of talk radio was, all right, it's Carl Wigglesworth's show, everybody. We're talking about Bill Clinton selling cocaine down there with Dan Lasseter and me in Arkansas. And we got Terry Reed on the phone. Tell us about your book, Compromise: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, Terry. But everybody's kicking back.

• 4:15:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 4:15:43Speaker 03

  Everybody's got this front porch.

• 4:15:45Lex Fridman?

  That's all.

• 4:15:45Speaker 03

  Attitude and they got all the time in the world. We're here every day for three hours a day. No thing we're talking about and and they're just the nicest guys. Come back from commercial and go, it's Carl. We're talking with Terry about the thing and no bumper music, no fanfare, no last name. You just dropped, jumped in the middle of a conversation, tune in, figure it out. And it's just beautiful. It's perfect. And then I modeled myself and the way I do my show on beginning on Free Radio Austin in 98 and 99. And then on Chaos Radio Austin from 2002 through 2010, I guess I was on Chaos. Although it wasn't, yeah, it was 2010 before they ceased our last transmitter from Chaos, wasn't it? I think it was so.

• 4:16:25Lex Fridman?

  Over 10 years.

• 4:16:26Speaker 03

  I did Chaos for like, yeah, a long time. And then so that was my whole attitude was, look, I am a regular guy. I ain't got to fake that. I didn't go to college. I dropped out of ACC and my message ain't for elite policymakers. My message is for my peers and look at what they're doing. That's it. And and this is why the, you know, the Rothbardian style libertarian populism really always appealed to me is because that's who it's geared toward. The Cato Institute wants an audience with the Senate. The Mises Institute and the Libertarian Institute and antiwar.com. We want an audience with the population of this country. Right? That's who we're trying to talk to. That's who we are. That's where we come from. We're not Washington DC folk.

• 4:17:06Speaker 03

  We're from out here and we're, we're speaking in the third person about them, you know, rather trying to be part of the regime.

• 4:17:14Lex Fridman?

  I, I just want to say briefly that the, you said the people that call in are usually brilliant. And that's the experience I've had. Uh, I've recorded a few conversations just on the street. Like I went to the West Bank and I interviewed a bunch of people on the street.

• 4:17:29Lex Fridman?

  And I really want to do that a lot more because I didn't meet a single person who's not brilliant in their own way. It's like, it's remarkable. It's remarkable, the brilliance that comes from people.

• 4:17:39Speaker 03

  You ever listen to sports radio?

• 4:17:41Lex Fridman?

  Not, not as much as I probably should.

• 4:17:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, look, you know, well, I don't know if this counts anymore, but I spent a little bit of time in Denver, listening to sports radio in Denver. And these people are fanatics, man. But the point being that.

• 4:17:54Speaker 03

  You know, Jimmy, the air conditioner repairman is smarter than you, dude.

• 4:17:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 4:17:59Speaker 03

  And he knows everything that every baseball team ever achieved and when and who and everyone on the teams, all their stats, all their everything and why it mattered and it mattered a lot to them. And the level of expertise there is no different than in your highest applied sciences or history or any other thing. You know what I mean? It all just depends on what you're interested in and what you want to know that much about. And this is Noam Chomsky's thing that he talked about where, look, if you're a primate that's intelligent enough to speak, then you are a genius. Right? Then you are absolute miracle, unbelievable, impossible.

• 4:18:42Speaker 03

  You know, circumstance, um, situation of your very existence. And so we all ought to be taken like at that very level. You know what I mean? Like, no matter who you're dealing with, there's something special in there.

• 4:18:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And usually it comes with humility because people with PhDs and Harvard and so on, they usually have this overinflated ego that comes from authority. But sports radio, people on the street, everyday folks, they don't have that. And so they could just speak their expertise without the ego.

• 4:19:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and that's my thing too, is I don't have nothing to sell you other than, I mean, my coffee sponsor and whatever. But like my, my sincerity is like all I got. I don't have any other argument from authority that I can invoke other than people listen to me. They know I'm not lying and they can tell what my biases are. I wear them absolutely on my sleeve. You know what I mean? Is every day I only try to quantify whether I hate Bill Clinton or George W. Bush more. And it's, and that's where I'm coming from and everybody understands that. And they know that I'd never deliberately try to make them think one thing instead of another. And if I did, they would obviously catch on to that. And then I'd be completely ruined and have to just go get a job delivering auto parts or something. And which would be fine.

• 4:19:58Speaker 03

  In fact, I like delivering auto parts. I've had that job before. Although I'd rather drive at night if I got to drive. I'd rather, I guess, drive Uber at night, but.

• 4:20:07Lex Fridman?

  If you still have energy.

• 4:20:09Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm not even halfway done. What about you?

• 4:20:11Lex Fridman?

  All right. Got all the energy in the world, maybe a quick bathroom break.

• 4:20:15Speaker 03

  A good place to pick up our story here would be John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's book. We've talked about Mearsheimer and Walt previously. Now, their book is called The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy. It came out in 2007. It started out as an essay that they wrote first for The Atlantic Monthly that commissioned the story and then refused to run it. And they ended up running it in the London Review of Books. We also ran it at antiwar.com. People can find it there. It's called The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy. It's a fantastic article. And then they made it into a book. And now, these guys are, again, the co-deans, basically, of the realist school of foreign policy. One from the University of Chicago, the other from Harvard, both highly respected. Neither

• 4:20:57Speaker 03

  of them haters or ideologues or any of these things. They were ruthlessly attacked as antisemites for this, which is completely preposterous. And what they did, though, was say that, look, man, Israel's interests are very different than ours. And that's why they spend so much money and effort lobbying in the United States to try to obfuscate that fact, that what's good for them ain't necessarily good for us at all. Well, they have to make sure it's at least good for the people in charge here, if not for the country itself. And that's their object. And as Walton Mearsheimer say in the essay and in the book, that you can't blame the whole Iraq war on them. George W. Bush was the one sitting in the chair behind

• 4:21:39Speaker 03

  that desk, calling that shot. He could have changed his mind at the very last moment. It was on him. And now, it's the Congress's responsibility, but they passed that responsibility to him with their unconstitutional authorization that they passed in October of 2002. But, like, ultimately, who pulled that trigger? George W. Bush did, and in conspiracy with his vice president and his secretary of defense and the rest of them. So, the neocons, yes, they were the deputy secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense for policy. And the, you know, staff in the vice president's office, the staff of the National Security Council, they were there, operating, really, as I said, as that, as Colin Powell called

• 4:22:23Speaker 03

  it, that separate government, and operating mostly for Benjamin Netanyahu's goals.

• 4:22:30Speaker 03

  This is part of what we argued about me and Mark Dubowitz on your show last time was he insisted somewhat partially correctly here that Ariel Sharon wanted Bush to hit Iran, not Iraq, and Ariel Sharon, not Netanyahu, was the prime minister. And that was the occasion of him accusing J.J. Goldberg of being an anti Semite, because he had written in the Jewish Daily Forward about how Netanyahu wants to hit Iraq. Sharon would rather hit Iran. And J.J. Goldberg, as long as I'm citing him, let me tell you, he says in there very clearly that he is not saying that the neocons bear even the lion's share of the responsibility for

• 4:23:15Speaker 03

  the war. Of course, he blames George W. Bush for launching the war. And of course, he's not peddling in some anti Semitic conspiracy theory in the pages of the Forward, for God's sake, right? He's extremely conservative in his statements and in his accusations. But what he's saying is that the Likudniks in America are closer to Netanyahu than Sharon. And of course, George W. Bush wants to go to Iraq. He wants to go to Baghdad, not Tehran. And so it and Wolfowitz, of course, always especially was an Iraq hawk. And so the confluence of interest here was to go to Iraq. Now Sharon was smart enough to see that Iran, you know,

• 4:23:56Speaker 03

  the clean break wasn't him. That was Netanyahu and his buddies. Sharon, I think, was skeptical about what's going to happen when we overthrow Saddam Hussein and the Shiites takeover. And this is where he tried to insist, and John Bolton did echo him in this and promise him that, yes, and then we'll go to Iran and Syria and Lebanon and everywhere else next, because we can't just get rid of Saddam. That's going to change the balance of power in a way that's going to benefit Iran in a way that Sharon did not prefer. However, Sharon absolutely did go along with the program and help lie us into war. And he had his own office of special plans that he created in the, the prime minister's

• 4:24:36Speaker 03

  office in Israel, where they manufactured fake intelligence in English to stovepipe into the intelligence stream to help lie us into war. And here's three authoritative sources on that. Julian Borger in The Guardian, The Spies Who Pushed For War. And it's not the spies, it's the neoconservatives is who he's talking about, not CIA officers. The Spies Who Pushed For War by Julian Borger. Then there's More Missing Intelligence by Robert Dreyfus in The Nation. Then is A Pretext For War. 9/11 Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies by James Bamford. The great book by the great James Bamford, the guy that wrote The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets and The Shadow Factory about the National Security Agency. Best author on NSA.

• 4:25:21Speaker 03

  Pretext For War focuses on the neocons and the CIA and how the neocons lied us into war for Netanyahu and Israel. I don't remember, oh, and the whole first part is about 9/11 and how 9/11 happened and how the government failed to stop it. And then The Shadow Factory is really insightful on those lines because we often hear about the infighting between the FBI and the CIA. But the NSA also hoarded all their information and would not share with the FBI or CIA. And the CIA at one point, and, and Michael Schoyer also tells the story, CIA had to create their own listening station on Madagascar to try to spy on Al Qaeda hiding out in Yemen, the switchboard house in Yemen, because the NSA would not give them the intercepts. They had to get their own, but they could only get half the conversation and not the other half talking to the terrorists in Afghanistan.

• 4:26:06Speaker 03

  And as Schoyer put it to me on my show, I don't know, 15 years ago or something, he said, yeah, because George Tenet didn't have the moral courage to just walk down there and demand the damn intercepts. Because at that time, the head of the CIA was also the Director of Central Intelligence, which meant the boss, like the DNI, is supposed to be over all the other intelligence agencies. So George Tenet had the authority to command NSA to do what he said. He didn't have to ask nicely. But according to Schoyer, he didn't have the courage to just go down there and say, give me the damn intercept. Why not? Scumbag.

• 4:26:39Speaker 03

  You know, he came from staff in the Senate, I think, just wanted to please the real spies, you know, like he was kind of the new guy and didn't really fit in and was trying to like, be cool or whatever. And I don't know, who knows these people. But, um, so importantly, you know, the Ariel Sharon government did help to push this thing, even though Dubowitz is right that Sharon first said, no, Bush, you should go to Tehran first because that was his problem. It was, I guess, I don't know if I'd have to go back and see if anybody ever wrote about this, but I never saw like Sharon's opinion of the clean break. But it's easy to see how anyone could see through how stupid the plan was. We're going to weaken the Shiites by getting rid of the most powerful Sunni standing in their way. That's pretty dumb, right? And

• 4:27:24Speaker 03

  especially if you really know about, for example, the history of the Iran-Iraq war, the history of the post-Iraq War I Shiite uprising, you might have a real reason to worry. Justin Armando at antiwar.com wrote in 2002, he said, hey, look, everybody, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the CIA tried to give them money and they said, piss off, we don't need you, we got Iran. And Justin said, better watch out. Here's who's coming to power when we invade Iraq a year from now. And then that's exactly what happened is the, again, the bottom brigade was the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. And that was exactly who George W. Bush took all the way to power in Baghdad. So for the guys

• 4:28:07Speaker 03

  who fought in that war, who are listening to this, who still don't know why they fought in that war, ultimately, they fought on the Shiite side of a massive civil war against the minority Sunni ruling regime and to replace them with a new, essentially Islamist theocracy, sort of pseudo republic like in Iran, and that that's what it was for. It's not for freedom, it was for one faction over the other. And in this case, it was the Shiites. And then, of course, the most powerful fact, it's worth explaining, not of course, that the most powerful Shiite groups that came together to form the new Iraqi government was the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, SKIRI, which is now called ISKI because we won their revolution for them. So now it's just the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

• 4:28:53Speaker 03

  The Dawa Party and Muktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army. Now, Dawa and Skiri had been living in Iran and they were kind of more higher class types. Whereas Muktada al-Sadr is like the son of important guys. It was much more like a street ruffian type. And the ghetto, the Shiite ghetto in eastern Baghdad was called Saddam City. As soon as America invaded, they renamed it Sadr City after his father. But he inherited a lot of that street credibility as like the, the most legitimate of the Shiite leaders on the ground there. So these three groups, under the guidance of the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who lived down in Najaf.

• 4:29:34Speaker 03

  Under his leadership or guidance or whatever, they formed what was called the United Iraqi Alliance. That was the group that wrote the constitution in the fall of 2004. That was the group that won the elections, the big purple fingered elections of 2005. And that's what kicked off the real civil war started after that. Now, there was already a predominantly Sunni based insurgency at that time. It was not exclusively Sunni. It started out much more nationalist and mixed, but very quickly it was the Sunni tribal leaders and former Baathist and, and military leaders realizing that they have everything to lose now. And that they have the super majority of the country backed by the United States is now taking power.

• 4:30:15Speaker 03

  And then, so this pushed the Sunnis into the arms, the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the Bin Ladenites, who were coming from all over the place, just like it was Afghanistan or Bosnia or Chechnya again, or Kosovo, coming to all chip in to fight the holy jihad this time against us instead of with our help, although still backed by our friends, the Saudis.

• 4:30:36Speaker 03

  And they came in there and America and the Shiites pushed the Sunni insurgency into the arms of the Bin Ladenites. And in fact, I'll tell you an anecdote about how that happened.

• 4:30:51Speaker 03

  And so much of this is tied up in what's happening in Israel at this time as well.

• 4:30:57Speaker 03

  In January of 2004, Sheikh Yassin, who was the founder of Hamas, which was a break off of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was originally like a charitable type organization that ended up growing into this militia, with the aid and comfort of the Israelis. And there are some really great articles that you might like to peruse about this, including by Richard Sale in UPI. If you just type in Richard Sale, UPI Hamas, I'm sure it'll just come straight up there. Israel gave major aid to Hamas. This is an in-depth study. It's based on CIA as well as Shin Bet and Mossad sources.

• 4:31:38Speaker 03

  Richard Sale, if people aren't familiar, UPI is the news agency most closely tied to The Washington Times, which would be the Reaganite conservative newspaper in Washington. It's funny because it's The Washington Post and The New York Times are the liberal papers, and The New York Post and The Washington Times are the conservative papers, if you got that right.

• 4:32:00Lex Fridman?

  So basically, this article details how Tel Aviv, Israel, gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of many years.

• 4:32:11Speaker 03

  And the purpose was to build them up to divide and conquer the Palestinians, to create a religious right-wing alternative to the secular nationalist sort of pseudo-kami PLO under Yasser Arafat. They wanted to divide and conquer the Palestinians. And so what they would do is they would finance, directly finance Hamas, while at the same time arresting all of their competitors and holding them in prison, disarming them, weakening them, while bolstering the Hamas government. So they did not create Hamas, but they did very deliberately bolster its rise. Now Hezbollah is a different story, where Hezbollah just really grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon in 82, without any direct support from them in that sense.

• 4:32:56Speaker 03

  Although, maybe I don't know enough about that. But certainly, in this case with Hamas, that's true. And you can also read Andrew Higgins in The Wall Street Journal, wrote a great piece along the same lines.

• 4:33:08Speaker 03

  I'm gonna pull that up for us here. "How Is Your Help to Spawn Hamas?" Andrew Higgins, 2009. So, I can also recommend Robert Dreyfus's book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped to Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. Masterpiece. Also, again, "Treat a Parsi's Treacherous Alliance." Cannot recommend that book highly enough. That thing might go into its third printing just because of me. I'm telling you, everybody's got to read that book. And then "Obstacle to Peace" by Libertarian Institute Fellow Jeremy R. Hammond, wrote a masterpiece about Israel and Palestine and the fight over the occupied territories and America's role in making it all worse than the rest. Fantastic book, goes in deep study about this. Now, back to our anecdote.

• 4:33:54Speaker 03

  In January 2004, old Sheikh Yassin, with his big Santa Claus beard and his wheelchair, says, "I give up. I give in. We need to go ahead and negotiate with the Israelis and settle for our measly stinking 22% of historic Palestine, just as Arafat had done in 1988.

• 4:34:14Speaker 03

  Two months later, the Israelis killed him in a missile strike, just so they could lie to you, Lex, and say, 'We have no partner for peace.' Somehow, a missile blew up his car. And they're the ones who killed him. And when they killed him, in March of 2004, that's what touched off the riot in Fallujah, where the four Blackwater Guards were murdered and burned, and their bodies hanged from the bridge outside of town. And they had a giant parade. Dar Jamel, the great war journalist, was there and saw. They had pictures of Yassin in their windshields. They called themselves the Ah Yassin Brigades. And it was this impromptu protest against Israel's murder of the leader of Hamas. And that's what caused that riot that killed those Blackwater Guards.

• 4:34:59Speaker 03

  And then George W. Bush sent General James Madison there with his Marines, including now a couple of friends of mine, who had to go in there and bite that thing and declared the thing a free-fire zone like Vietnam and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians in the first Battle of Fallujah, which... They claim that Zarqawi, the Bin Ladenite, who wasn't even really a Bin Ladenite yet, he didn't declare his loyalty to Bin Laden until the end of 2004, a year and a half into the war. But they pretended, so six months later, but they pretended that he was already tied to Bin Laden. He was one of the lies in Colin Powell's UN speech, that there's this guy named Zarqawi and he's tied to Bin Laden and he's tied to Saddam. Well, he wasn't tied to Bin Laden. He had told Bin Laden, "No, I don't want to join your group."

• 4:35:41Speaker 03

  And he wasn't tied to Saddam, unlike the lies of Ahmed Chalabi and the exiles. He was not operated on by Saddam Hussein and given a peg leg in the Baghdad hospital. That was a hoax perpetrated by the Weekly Standard and the neoconservative set to tie those two together. In fact, he wasn't tied to either. And then only after the war, and America made him famous and claimed that he was a Bin Ladenite, Zarqawi raised in stature. Zarqawi was like more apocalyptic and revolutionary and even nihilistic and destructive than Bin Laden's doctrines ever were. And he was notoriously sectarian against the Shiites, where Bin Laden, you know, I don't think, and I have not read

• 4:36:23Speaker 03

  everything the guy ever wrote, but I have read a lot of his stuff. And I never saw where he really seems to focus on problems against the Shiites. Again, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin Ashib, they were mad because of Shimon Perez and Naftali Bennett killing Shiite Palestinians in Lebanon. The fact that they were Shiites didn't make them less valuable as far as wanting to avenge their deaths, as far as that goes. Zarqawi, on the other hand, thought, "No, the only good Shiite is a dead Shiite. God says so," and this kind of like bring on the apocalypse kind of deal, and went for, you know, madness, suicide bombing Shiite pilgrims and doing like just absolute atrocities against civilians,

• 4:37:04Speaker 03

  which of course, like, the guy may be good at making bomb vests, but he's not good at math, because there's just way too many Shiites. And so, by boycotting the election, refusing to participate in the new order, which they got the American superpower occupying the country with 300,000 troops, or at that point, maybe 200,000, but still, and in alliance with the supermajority, those Sunni chiefs should have figured out a way to deal. Saying, "No way, let's fight," was a huge mistake from them. And then... Entering into alliance with the Bin Ladenites only made it worse because and this is it is

• 4:37:44Speaker 03

  directly because of Israel killing Yassin and then the Battle of Fallujah that helped drive a bunch of refugees out of Fallujah who then went to Baghdad who drove people out of their areas and then you had a lot of tit and tit for tat back and forth as refugees from the different cities are being cleansed out so in the predominantly Shiite cities they're kicking all the Sunnis out and in the predominantly Sunni areas they're kicking all the Shiites out and people are being displaced and Dar Jamel I swear I looked and looked and maybe I still could find it somewhere but I think the last time I tried to find it I couldn't find it anymore but it was Dar Jamel had this most brilliant article where he traced the cause and effect through the wars from the beginning of the

• 4:38:26Speaker 03

  you know the war began in 03 of course but like the real worsening of the insurgency in 04 and the chain of events from this city to this city to this city where these different refugees are displacing other people and causing these worst consequences to go through and were more and more than the Sunnis especially being cleansed from Baghdad and they're being pushed into the arms of the Bin Ladenites again all touched off by Israel assassinating their own pseudo sock puppet you know terrorist front man excuse for an imperialist policy that they had supported when he was finally ready to completely capitulate to them they killed him so he couldn't and that was what caused all this problem for

• 4:39:10Speaker 03

  America or you know not caused but contributed significantly to the problems during the war also during that same time this was the first time that Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army fought against the Americans and he even sent Shiites in pickup trucks to Fallujah to go help in the name of Iraqi nationalism to help the Sunnis at that time and they had a whole separate little war with him in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad at that time which is a real problem because As I said, Sotter had so much street credibility there among the people. And where to this day, he is still one of the most empower, one of the most important and powerful kingmakers in Shiite politics in that country right now.

• 4:39:53Speaker 03

  And so they were, you know, essentially blowing up and sabotaging their own ability to use diplomacy to work with this guy. And he became the most intransigent part of the Sunni insurgency. There's so many different parts of this, but one of the things that's really important, I think, to talk about is that David Petraeus, his first job was up in Mosul, trying to train up a militia to be our guys. And they just took the money and guns and joined the insurgency against us. It was an absolute catastrophe. He gave them a bunch of weapons and money and then was humiliated and kicked right the hell out of there. His next job, right after empowering the Sunni insurgency up in Mosul, was to go to Baghdad and to turn the Ba'ath Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council.

• 4:40:38Speaker 03

  The same guys who Saddam feared in 1980, which is why he started the war. The same guys who George H. W. Bush feared in 1991, which is why he betrayed their uprising. Same guys that W. Bush is now taking all the way to Baghdad. David Petraeus is now in charge of building them into the Iraqi army. And that's who is going around torturing everybody to death. And I don't know if you saw the movie American Sniper about Chris Kyle, directed by Clint Eastwood. And I'm a real big Clint Eastwood fan. I'm really disappointed in this, in this fact. It's really bad what he did in that movie was he portrayed the Sunni insurgents torturing people to death with power drills and portrayed Chris Kyle saving them. But that's not true.

• 4:41:21Speaker 03

  It was America's guys, the Ba'ath Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council. They were the ones torturing people to death with power drills. Through the shoulder, through the heart, through the eyeball, through the ear, through the temple.

• 4:41:35Speaker 01

  So at that time, America was supporting the Ba'ath Brigade?

• 4:41:37Speaker 03

  That time, America is building the Ba'ath Brigade into the Iraqi army as we know it today. And David Petraeus, this is where we have what's called the El Salvador option, which what does that sound like? Paying right-wing destuas to go around killing commies, in the case of El Salvador, preventing it from becoming a Nicaragua, right? In the 1980s, it was John Negroponte who had worked for Ronald Reagan in El Salvador as the ambassador then on this covert action, killing all these people, who was then brought in to be ambassador to run what they called the El Salvador option, of empowering the Shiite militias to finally finish crushing the Sunni insurgency, which of course, they absolutely failed to do. They simply radicalized them and made it that much worse and worse and worse. And this was all on David Petraeus. He was the one in

• 4:42:22Speaker 03

  charge of this thing. So that made the civil war just absolutely horrific through 2005, 6, and then coming into 7. Now in 06, James Baker says, "We gotta get out of there." Old Guard brought in to say, "We need to figure out a way out." That's embarrassing for Bush. Bush decides, no, he wants to double down instead. He's gonna do the surge at David Petraeus's recommendation. He fired Rumsfeld, who now wanted out. Said, "I told you light and fast. Let's get out." He said, "We gotta take the training wheels off. Let the Iraqi democracy figure out a way to work on its own without us now." Which was, you know what? Hell, take it, right? Cut and run. This ain't working. And he's really

• 4:43:04Speaker 03

  right. They're like, if they're gonna figure this out, for good or for ill, through blood or through handshakes and bribes or what, it has to be up to them ultimately. And so, yeah. So what did Bush do? Kick him right out the door. It's the first time he's said something reasonable. And he brought in Robert Gates, who's supposed to be like an old James Baker type, his father's guy who had been the head of the CIA, whose fault it was that the CIA didn't know that the Soviet Union was falling apart, right? Because they were too busy pretending that the Soviet Union was 12 feet tall at the time. Same guy. Bush Jr. brings him in, and he oversees the surge. And this is where they do the massive escalation in the beginning of 2007. And it's funny, because they dropped all the propaganda about Iran's nuclear program for a little bit, because they had a new line. And the new line was that whenever a Shiite

• 4:43:49Speaker 03

  sets off a bomb in Iraq, it's an Iranian bomb. And this is where you and your audience have heard 100 times, 1,000, that Iran killed 600 of our guys in Iraq. That's what they say. Well, here's the truth of that. It was 500 guys, not 6, and it wasn't Iran.

• 4:44:10Speaker 03

  Those bombs, they were a new and improved kind of IED, improvised explosive device. Our guys called them explosively formed penetrators, EFPs. And they were shaped charged and they had a copper core. And that copper core, when the explosive went off, would melt. And that molten copper would then slice right through armor. And that was what made it the new and improved bomb. Now, the propaganda at the time was, even though it was David Petraeus, who at this time decided to attack Muqtada al-Sadr, in the name of claiming that he was an Iranian agent. In fact, Muqtada al-Sadr, I think I talked about this a little bit on a tangent I shouldn't have taken on the last time I was here.

• 4:44:55Speaker 03

  Muqtada al-Sadr was the least Iranian puppet of the major Shiite faction leaders. Because where Dawa and Skiri had lived in Iran for 20 years at this point, he hadn't. He'd stayed. And he was insisting that Iran and the United States butt out and leave Iraq to Iraqis. So you see the problem there. Even though he wants Iran to leave and wants to limit their influence, he also wants to limit ours. The Bush administration's idea is, no, we're gonna bet that the government of Iraq, mostly made of Dawa and Skiri, that they will need our money and our weapons more than they need Iran next door.

• 4:45:35Speaker 03

  So if we stick it out and even compromise repeatedly with Iran on who should be the prime minister, like Ibrahim Jafari and Nouri al-Maliki from the Dawa party, and we come to, this is the only time we talked to Iran at all, is sort of secretly, quietly agreeing on who the Iraqi prime minister should be as we're doing this, right? So Muqtada al-Sadr, even though he is trying to limit Iranian authority, he also wants to limit ours. So the Americans decide they want to target him. So it wasn't Sadr that picked that bite. It was David Petraeus, in the service of Dick Cheney, working to try and with...

• 4:46:16Speaker 03

  With in conspiracy with Michael Gordon of the New York Times to try to lie the American people into war with Iran, then in the name of these bombs, and they made a massive propaganda campaign in the spring of 2007. Every time a bomb goes off in Shiite territory, that was Iran that did it, they claimed over and over. So the point is, and the problem is, and I cite in the book by names of the journalists and their affiliations, at least eight or 10 different American and other foreign reporters there, nobody with a, you know, Iranian dog in the, I'm not citing Press TV here. I'm citing the New York Times.

• 4:46:57Speaker 03

  Michael Gordon, he's now at the, the Wall Street Journal, but he was at the New York Times. He's, he's the guy who bylined with Judy Miller. Every story where they lied that Saddam Hussein is seeking A-bomb parts and Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons and wants germs and chemicals and all these things. Judy Miller took the rap for the whole media. But her co-author, Michael Gordon, lived to still lie to us to this day in the Wall Street Journal, but he was the one in charge of this, um, this essentially just this conspiracy to lie the American people into war through the pages of the New York Times. But I show that his colleague Alyssa Rubin proved that he's a damned liar because she was there with soldiers, printed it in his same newspaper. She was there with American soldiers when they found an EFP factory in Sotter City.

• 4:47:42Speaker 03

  I'm pretty sure that there was a bunch, wherever it was, it was in Shiite territory in Iraq. And it was Iraqis working in a machine shop making these bombs. And now they go, okay, well, but the parts all came from Iran. Oh yeah, no, they had it. The Iranians thought, you know what we'll do, we'll ship the parts into Iraq for them to make bombs out of instead of just sending them bombs. Like, whatever, man. It was obviously just a bunch of propaganda and I cite in there. The Christian Science Monitor was there when they did Operation Eagle Claw, found another factory making EFPs. And then I cite also Wired Magazine, the brilliant Andrew Coburn, and a bunch of other great sources that just showed these bombs were made in Iraq by Iraqis.

• 4:48:22Speaker 03

  I don't care what you say, and I just proved this over and over again on the blog at antiwar.com in 2007, over and over and over again. So in fact, if you just search my name, antiwar.com, especially if you search antiwar.com/blog, and EFPs, you will get a bunch of hits because we went over this all at the time. Making me feel extra old right now.

• 4:48:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's

• 4:48:44Speaker 03

  That was 18 years ago.

• 4:48:45Lex Fridman?

  Holy shit.

• 4:48:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. EFPs are made in Iraq by Iraqis.

• 4:48:50Lex Fridman?

  Scott Horton, August 12th, 2007.

• 4:48:53Speaker 03

  And there's a bunch of them. That's just one of many that I did at the, you know, during that era. And again, citing solid proof.

• 4:49:03Lex Fridman?

  For those who listen to Antiwar Radio, you know I refute this lie every single day.

• 4:49:09Speaker 03

  Citing Reuters and this Christian Science Monitor.

• 4:49:14Speaker 03

  Operation Black Eagle. I'm sorry, I got the name of the eagle thing wrong. I said Eagle Claw, didn't I? Operation Black Eagle was where the Christian Science Monitor was tagging along. But there's a bunch of these.

• 4:49:28Speaker 03

  And so now Dubowitz said, oh yeah, well, Iran taught them how to do it then. No, Gareth Porter showed that it was the IRA, the Irish Republican Army that taught Lebanese Hezbollah, and it was Lebanese Hezbollah that taught the Shiite Iraqis how to do it. So when I said it was Lebanese Hezbollah, Dubowitz goes, aha, Iran, nope. They got it from the Irish. So, sorry Charlie, nice little propaganda campaign you got there. But then what happened was they did a big press conference where they laid out all the EFP bombs. And the parts and the reporters started milling around and they go, well, that's funny. That one says made in Haditha on it, which is the city in Iraq.

• 4:50:10Speaker 03

  And that one says made in UAE and all this. And then, so what do we have here? Do we have any evidence that any of this stuff came from Iran? No. And then what did they do next? They canceled the press conference, closed it down, embarrassed. And Stephen Hadley, the national security advisor himself admitted, we didn't have the proof that we needed to make the case, just promising, oh, we're gonna prove it. We're gonna prove it. We're gonna prove it. And kicking that can down the road for months until I think it must've been May or June, when they finally did this press conference that fell apart and started to back down.

• 4:50:46Lex Fridman?

  Was that the major justification for the escalation?

• 4:50:49Speaker 03

  It was not the justification for the escalation of the surge overall. The rationalization there was we are going to send an extra 30,000 or 40,000 troops to Baghdad. We are going to secure the capital city. And once we have peace in the capital city, the peace of desolation, where we kill every last Sunni who resist by putting a power drill through his eyeball, then we'll be able to negotiate peacefully in the setting of our new democratic republic that we've built here. That was the justification there. And at the same time, David Petraeus, and this is the only victory that David Petraeus ever won in his entire stupid, stinking failure of a pathetic, lying life. And that is when he convinced George W. Bush to surrender to the Sunni insurgency.

• 4:51:34Speaker 03

  Mr. President, you're not going to defeat the Sunni insurgency. Read me loud and clear. All this victory you've been promising all these years? All the people that you've killed trying to bring it, sending the desert ox Ray Odierno in there to kill every last living, fighting aged male in the Ambar province? We've lost, Mr. President. And so what we're going to do is we're going to bribe the Sunni insurgency. Right now, they've, they have. Well, okay, I overstate that. We didn't lose, we failed to beat them. But they did lose much territory to the Shiites. So they were licking their wounds at that time. The Sunni insurgency, the Iraqi Sunnis, had too many enemies. They were fighting the Shiites, they were fighting the Americans,

• 4:52:18Speaker 03

  and they had to deal with the Bin Ladenites. And they hated the Bin Ladenites. They didn't want to live like Saudis and a bunch of Egyptian weirdo suicide bombers trying to outlaw women from buying cucumbers at the market because it's some kind of sexual innuendo and where these people like, get these people out of my face. And I show in the book, there are plenty of reporting about, there was plenty of reporting about this, that beginning at least in early 2005, it was the local Sunni population, this is two years before David Petraeus runs to try to get to the head of this parade. Two years previously, in the beginning of 05, was when the local Sunnis started killing the Bin Ladenites themselves and saying, you can't tell us what to do. You're more harm than good. You're making

• 4:53:03Speaker 03

  our insurgency into a counterproductive war by killing all these Shiite civilians and generating all new support for our crushing at their hands and all of that. So they were isolating and killing these guys off. And you got to figure, dude, I mean, this is like a magic wish come true, okay? George W. Bush comes and he turns all of Western Iraq, right? Fallujah to Crete, much of Ramadi and obviously Mosul into Bin Ladenistan, into Jihadi University, bigger and better and worse than Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya.

• 4:53:42Speaker 03

  This is all those combined. And it's in Western Iraq, right on the border of the Levant, in Mesopotamia, not Nangar province, out there in no man's land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is, this is what made America's, Michael Schor said, Bin Laden's only indispensable ally.

• 4:54:05Speaker 03

  Right, that you could do like a reverse 9/11 truth tourism where all the Americans are actually Al Qaeda agents all this time because all they're doing is exactly what Bin Laden wants them to do. Michael Schuer said that, oh, of course, Afghanistan was the plan. But Iraq, that was the hoped for but unexpected gift to Bin Laden. Bin Laden said on the eve of the invasion, "Rise up Iraqis, kill the socialist infidels Saddam Hussein, and then resist the Americans when they arrive."

• 4:54:37Speaker 03

  Okay, one guy's got a beret and a mustache. The other guy's got a beard and is all wearing a funny robe like Obi-Wan Kenobi. And, and they clearly are extremely different men with extremely different sets of priorities, right? Couldn't be more different. And of course, Saddam Hussein was terrified of Osama bin Laden and had no connection to his regime whatsoever. And in fact, we know now that he had kicked himself upstairs and was semi-retired, writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion. Is, uh, that's how determined Saddam Hussein was to attack inside the United States, to paraphrase the CIA warning George Bush about Al Qaeda on August the 6th, 2001, when he told Michael Morell, his briefer, the guy

• 4:55:22Speaker 03

  who later helped frame Donald Trump for treason with Russia and everything, he told Michael Morell, "Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, you've covered your ass."

• 4:55:29Lex Fridman?

  Uh, can you clarify Saddam Hussein was writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion?

• 4:55:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:55:33Lex Fridman?

  Is that real?

• 4:55:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:55:35Lex Fridman?

  That's real?

• 4:55:35Speaker 03

  Yes. No harm to us whatsoever. What they could have done, let me, let me ask you to stretch your engineer's imagination here to like wild metaphysical type concepts, uh, outside of your usual reach. You know, you're maybe more of a right-brain guy or something, but like, trip out, Lex Fridman. The Secretary of State was Colin Powell, the four-star general, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You'd think he might have been tough enough to just send over there and tell Saddam Hussein, "Here's the riot act. I'm gonna read it to you and then you're gonna sign on the dotted line, buddy boy." And, and if you think that Colin Powell wasn't man enough for that,

• 4:56:18Speaker 03

  don't you think that mean old Donald Rumsfeld, his old friend from 1983, when Ronald Reagan sent him to be special emissary over there, when he offered Saddam Hussein support for his military campaign against Iran and browbeat him and tried to get him to build a pipeline to the port of Akaba for Israel? That's what that famous picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein, that's what that meeting was about. "One will give you weapons, too. We want you to build a pipeline for the Israelis."

• 4:56:48Speaker 03

  You think he could have sent gruff old Donald Rumsfeld over there to tell Saddam Hussein one thing? "Your job is keeping bin Ladenites down." Read me? Okay, "We have a new priority in our foreign policy in the Middle East. We don't want anyone to be friends with Osama bin Laden or his men." That sound reasonable to you? And then Saddam Hussein, of course, would have said, "Of course." And in fact, Saddam Hussein, and you can read this only months later into the war, maybe a year into the war, James Risen wrote it in the New York Times, that Saddam Hussein sent an emissary to meet with Richard Pearl in London and surrender to him and say, "If this is about democracy, we'll hold elections.

• 4:57:33Speaker 03

  If this is about Israel, we'll stop funding Hamas. If this is about oil, we'll give you the mineral rights. If this is about weapons of mass destruction, you can send your army

• 4:57:45Speaker 03

  and FBI wherever you want to look.

• 4:57:50Speaker 03

  I give up. Please don't kill me." And Richard Pearl told the emissary, "You tell them we'll see them in Baghdad."

• 4:57:59Speaker 03

  They refused, and Seymour Hersh had another story just like that, where Hussein sent a Lebanese businessman to again surrender, to say, "We're willing to negotiate on any and every term that you could possibly name for us." And America refused and went to war anyway. By the way, when they did in 2003... Uh, first of all, in 2001, they held a million man candlelight vigil in Tehran on September the 12th. And the Ayatollah said, now's our chance to make friends with the United States. They hate Saddam Hussein and they hate the Taliban. Great, us too. So they said, now's our chance to again try to reach out to the United States. Did I skip and forget to mention that in 1993?

• 4:58:41Speaker 03

  Oh, this was going to be part of our Cold War story, but it overlaps. In 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the right wing sort of hawkish, realist, national security advisor for Jimmy Carter and Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger's right hand man and was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State. They both wanted to build oil pipelines across Iran to the Persian Gulf. One, to make money and for American companies, but also two, to bring in Iran from the cold and open up an opportunity to normalize relations between our country and their country. The oil business is a great way to do that. Later in the 1990s, the CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, said the same thing, that Bill

• 4:59:25Speaker 03

  Clinton's sanctions are irresponsible. We should lift the sanctions against Iran and we should do business with Iran because after all, God didn't see fit to leave all the oil under wonderful Western allied democracies. And so we have to deal with who we have to deal with. And that was in the interest of his company and quite frankly, it was in the interest of the United States of America at the time. Cause a little mini scandal because one of the times that Cheney repeated himself in these criticisms was in Australia. And that's supposed to be a cardinal sin to criticize your own country from the soil of another country. And he had been the former Secretary of Defense. So that was a kind of a, you know, um, social, uh, you know, error or whatever that got

• 5:00:06Speaker 03

  him a little more controversy about those statements than probably they would have got any, uh, probably more attention than they would have got otherwise for the substance of them. Um, but so we had every opportunity to deal with Iran in the 1990s and then let's guess why. Clinton didn't do that. It was because the Israel lobby said, no, that was in the Washington Post. They did this great series, Dan Otway and Dan Morgan, I think. Well, whatever. Morgan and Otway, I forget their first names. They did a multi-part series all about the oil politics of the Caspian Basin. And it was AIPAC and the Israel lobby that said, no, you cannot normalize relations with Iran veto. And so Brzezinski and Hague backed down from their plans and the companies that they were representing in doing that and

• 5:00:50Speaker 03

  went the other way. And the Cold War with Iran remained all through the rest of the century. Again, waged from bases in Saudi, getting our towers knocked down. Now it's the new era. We go to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Iran says, we'll do anything that we can to help you with that. Then you guys want to get rid of Saddam Hussein? Not only will we help you with that, guess what? Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress's headquarters was in Tehran.

• 5:01:19Speaker 03

  Guess who sponsored the Iraqi Shiite exile to tell the neoconservatives that the new Shiite supermajority regime will build a oil pipeline to Haifa and tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and be nice to Israel?

• 5:01:37Speaker 03

  And so they said, we have these common interests. And yet there was a terrorist attack in 2004 and the neocons just lied. It was inside Saudi Arabia and the neocons lied and said Bin Laden and his men had planned it from inside Iran, which was a total lie. It had nothing to do with Iran. But that was enough for idiot W. Bush, who doesn't know anything, to go along with, oh, okay, then. And so now Iran is back on the enemy side of the ledger of the war on terror, where of course they had no alliance with Bin Laden. The only time they backed Bin Laden was as a favor to Bill Clinton in Bosnia in 1990s. And so they had no love for the Bin Ladenites whatsoever. And despite all the lies, Bin Laden was hiding

• 5:02:18Speaker 03

  in Pakistan, not in Iran. And the Bin Ladenites who did make it to Iran were under house arrest. And the Iranians were trying to negotiate with the Americans to hand them over or... At least hand them over to their home countries, wherever they were from. And they were offering to negotiate what was then called, they submitted this through the Swiss ambassador in the spring of oh three, either right before the war or right after the war. I think it must have been right after the invasion of Iraq. It was called the golden offer. And not only did Bush and his men reject it, but they even gave, I think John Bolton gave a big dressing down to the Swiss ambassador for daring to even bring the proposal to them.

• 5:03:01Speaker 03

  And again, it, just like with Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah was showing his willingness to negotiate essentially anything of controversy, including support for Hamas and Hezbollah, including their nuclear program, which at that point was just, you could barely even call it nascent at all. They had not begun spinning a single centrifuge at that point. And they wanted to negotiate over these Bin Ladenites, if we would exchange them for members of the MEK, the Mujahideen E. Kalk Communist Terrorist Cult, which was like some Jonestown, total cookery type of a cult that, that level of cookery, like Heaven's Gate, you know, just comet chasing lunatics. And they had helped with the Iranian revolution,

• 5:03:45Speaker 03

  but then they had betrayed it and had been kicked out of Iran by the Ayatollah. But then they went to work for Saddam Hussein. They helped Saddam Hussein during the Shiite and Kurdish uprising in 1991. They helped crush the Kurds with their tanks in that as special agents of Saddam during that. And then they, and then the US inherited them when we invaded Iraq in 2003 and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld took control of them. Again, the MEK they're called, the Mujahideen E. Kalk. And Iranians are saying, look, let's trade. We got Bin Ladenites, including Bin Laden's son, and including this guy Hamza, who is extremely dangerous. Al Qaeda terrorists and we could have traded them, but the American, the neoconservatives,

• 5:04:29Speaker 03

  and I guess, you know, Rumsfeld and Cheney themselves said, no, we want, we would rather keep the MEK so that we can use them for operations inside Iran, which they did. In fact, my now wife wrote a story, breaking that story for Ross Story back then, that Rumsfeld was using the MEK for intelligence inside Iran. And a lot of times, usually working as cutouts for the Israelis nowadays, you will hear rumors about Iran that come from the MEK. Now, sometimes it's true. It's also known as the NCI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran is their front. And they'll, in fact, right before the current war, in the last few months, like in June,

• 5:05:08Speaker 03

  probably in May, they put out a picture of some buildings and said, this is a secret Iranian nuclear weapons site. We just found it. Of course, it was total propaganda. They do that all the time. Then at one point, they put out a stock photo of a vault door from a vault door company or a vault company. And they said, behind this vault door, that's where the secret nuclear weapons program is. And they do that kind of thing all the time. And so, America kept the MEK when they could have traded them with the Iranians. So just one more thing about that is, on the NSC, were two people who are now a married couple, Flint Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.

• 5:05:49Speaker 03

  And I've interviewed both of them at length and they had talked all about how willing the Iranians were to negotiate with the Americans on essentially anything at that time and how essentially the Bush administration just refused to work for them. And now, think about, you know, we're fighting for them in Afghanistan, putting in power a coalition government that includes the Hazaras, who are Shiites and friends with Iran. And in Iraq, we're putting their sock puppets from Dawa and Skiri in power. We fought an eight-year civil war for Iran's guys, but refused to talk to them the whole time. Refuse to negotiate with them in good faith when George Bush is the Ayatollah's errand boy in this thing and refuses to acknowledge it, likes to pretend he's the emperor of the

• 5:06:33Speaker 03

  world or whatever, when he's serving their interests and putting their guys in power. And so that's why in, at the end of his presidency, they made him sign the deal to get out by the end of 2011. And he said, well, can I have 64 bases? And they said, no. And he goes, oh, can I 24 bases? And he said, no. So can I have any bases? And Nouriel Malak, he said, well, let me go talk to the guys. I'm not real sure. Sorry, I talked to the guys. They said, beat it, scum. Don't let the door hitch in the ass on the way out. Didn't even say thank you for fighting a gigantic eight-year civil war for them to exterminate their Sunni enemies and put them in power, Wisconsin in power

• 5:07:13Speaker 03

  there. And so that was the sofa that Bush had to agree to in his last year in office in 2008, was that we had to withdraw because he had fought the war for his adversaries, not our enemies, but America's regional rivals in the Middle East, the Iranians and their Shiite axis, now including Baghdad and also, of course, then Damascus and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. This is when the King of Jordan coined the term, the Shiite Crescent. It was America who made it. And in fact, in, I think, January of 2006, the Sunni king

• 5:07:53Speaker 03

  of Saudi Arabia, would have been King Abdullah, read the riot act of Zalmi Khalilzad and said, listen, this is in the Wikileaks, he said, listen, it was always us and you and Saddam against Iran. Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter.

• 5:08:16Speaker 03

  So what are you gonna do about it? And Khalilzad says, I know, Your Royal Majesty. I'm so sorry about that. We're gonna do everything that we can to try to fix it. This is the birth of the policy called the redirection, where America, under Bush, before Obama ever came to town, where Bush accepted that he had screwed up, that he had scored, like in soccer, an own goal for the other side of the ledger, the Shiite crescent dominated by Tehran, and that now he had to make up for that by tilting toward the Sunnis.

• 5:08:48Lex Fridman?

  You'd be nice to sort of linger and understand to what degree is the Iranian regime and the Ayatollah are good and bad for the Iranian people? And then to what degree could they, just so we sort of clarify that, and to what degree could they have been actual good collaborators with the United States in fighting Bin Ladenites?

• 5:09:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, good questions. So I would not ally with anybody to kill anybody. The time of September 11th, there were only 400 Bin Ladenites hiding out in Afghanistan. Any of the rest of their associates around the Middle East could be arrested by police forces. Again, we could have negotiated over them in the first place. And again, the CIA and Delta Force could have finished annihilating Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and their few hundred men in the White Mountains in the Naggarh Province at the Lyons Den hideout in December of 2001. There's your whole actual terror war. So do we really need Iran to help us other than, what, hand over a few prisoners that they had captured who were trying to hide out in their country that they had put on house arrest?

• 5:10:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but that's all the help we needed, right? We didn't have to have a new alliance with them. And we didn't have to try to pretend that the Ayatollah is a saint or that his republic is a republic at all, right? If it's a republic, then how come he's the supreme leader since 1989? Doesn't sound like a republic to me. But at the same time, you want to talk about flawed republics? We're sitting in one. And so, you know, in this case, lying us into aggressive war after aggressive war, you can't say the same for him unless you want to, again, blame him for sending Ahmed Chalabi to lie to Richard Pearl, to lie to George W. Bush, you know? And so...

• 5:10:41Speaker 03

  The, we can, and in fact, I'm skipping ahead, but in Iraq War III, we fought with them again against the Bin Ladenite Caliphate. And so here, we fought really three wars for Iran against the Taliban and against Sunni Saddam and against Baghdadi, the Bin Ladenite Caliph in 14 through 17 there. So why do we hate them, Lex, so much? We keep fighting wars for them. You know, like, I used to joke with Patrick Coburn, that like, man, they better sign this nuclear deal with Obama. They owe us a favor. After all that we've done for them lately, you know, despite all of the hatred and vitriol, when you listen to the Likudniks, what you end up doing is empowering the Ayatollah and his men.

• 5:11:26Lex Fridman?

  Well, what do you think about the attack of the United States on Iran that, as I mentioned, had me so nervous there would be another escalation into another forever war?

• 5:11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:11:37Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about that situation?

• 5:11:39Speaker 03

  Wait, let's hold that, because let's do Syria first and the redirection, then we'll do the Iran war, okay?

• 5:11:43Lex Fridman?

  Can you talk about the redirection?

• 5:11:45Speaker 03

  Okay, so the redirection was from, the policy was really, I think, invented in late '05 and then sort of discussed and implemented in, beginning in 2006. And the article is called "The Redirection" by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker Magazine. So Hersh, pardon me, yes, Hersh has an incredible series from this whole year long. It includes "The Coming Wars," "Preparing the Battlefield," "The Redirection," and I forget the fourth one, maybe the fifth one. Had a bunch of great ones this time. So I might be combining these articles a little bit here, but it's along the same lines. Here's what you need to understand about the redirection, okay? Oops, we screwed up and we fought Iraq War II for the Shiites.

• 5:12:29Speaker 03

  Now to make up for that, we're tilting back toward the Sunnis. But what does that mean? That means we're tilting back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber brigades. Saudis don't have an army. We don't trust them with one, probably. And we're their army for the most part. And so how are we going to make it up to the Israelis? That we took their stupid idiot advice and launched this war, but empowered their regional rivals? And how are we going to make it up to the Saudis who tried to warn us for the most part, I think, against it? But we ignored their advice and did it anyway and empowered their regional rivals, the Iranians. And so how are we going to fix this?

• 5:13:10Speaker 03

  And how are we going to fix this is since we put Tehran up two pegs in Baghdad, we're going to take them down a peg in Damascus. And so they started in Lebanon backing a group called Fatah al Islam, bin Ladenite, suicide bomber, head chopper, lunatic terrorist to fight against Hezbollah. In Syria, Elizabeth Cheney, who was then working in the State Department, later known as Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney's daughter. She had the job of working with

• 5:13:43Speaker 03

  the Muslim Brotherhood to create the first major government in exile to try to use to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. And I gotta tell you, man, we used to joke on my show going back to, I think, 2004, 2005, would have been probably the first time that I had asked Eric Margulies, "Hey, Eric, if they do," because Eric Margulies was there, just like Patrick Cobra, he was there when Bashar al-Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, had crushed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1984, or was it 82? And he crushed them. He killed like 20,000 people in this horrific thing to crush the Muslim Brotherhood. Margulies was there, knew all about it, told me that story. And I says to him, I says, "Well,

• 5:14:27Speaker 03

  if the neocons get their way and they overthrow Bashar al-Assad, then what organized force is there in the country after the Ba'athists that could possibly take over other than maybe the Muslim Brotherhood if you're lucky?" And Margulies says, "Yeah, exactly. Or it could be the bin Ladenites could take over." Now, back to David Wormser in A Clean Break and Coping with Crumbling States. In Coping with Crumbling States, Wormser says, "We have to expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria."

• 5:14:58Speaker 03

  Expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria so that we will control the outcome, which will be more to our liking. And he says, and he's acknowledging Bin Ladenite terrorism is what he's referring to here with the recent history at the time he's writing this in 96. And he's saying, now, there's a lot of talk about the dangers of fundamentalism. Meaning, okay, we're going to get rid of these secular Ba'athist regimes. There are fundamentalist terrorist wackos running around right now. He acknowledges that and he says, but America will just have to find better allies against fundamentalism than the Ba'athists.

• 5:15:38Speaker 03

  So now maybe some idiot could write that as policy advice for the Likud in 1996. Maybe before the Kobar Towers, but then they kill our airmen at Kobar Towers. And then they bomb the embassies and then they bomb the coal. And then they hit us on September 11th. And then they lead as the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed 4,000 of our guys in Iraq War II. And now you're telling me that we still better find better allies against the Bin Ladenites than the Ba'athists? That Bashar al-Assad is worse than Osama bin Laden?

• 5:16:22Speaker 03

  Yes, that's what they're telling you because Assad is friends with Ayatollah and Assad helps Ayatollah arm Hezbollah and Israel as per the clean break. What's the clean break? It's a clean break from Oslo. Forget Rabin and Perez. We are going to steal all that's left of the West Bank and Gaza Strip sooner or later, but we don't want to have to worry about Hezbollah on our northern flank. We need to neutralize them somehow. So Syria Wormser wrote was the keystone in that arc of Iranian power, which was true. But of course, he was the one who added Saddam Hussein to that same arc. Now they're saying, oops, we have to fix this.

• 5:17:05Speaker 03

  And it was the neoconservatives, Elliott Abrams and Zalmi Khalilzad, who came to W. Bush and said, sir, we really screwed up here. We have to turn this thing around now. And Bush understood. Now, what's funny, we read the article and it's all Connolly's Rice and her people trying to explain that, oh, you know what? It's not really about Sunnis and Shiites, Lex. It's about moderates and extremists. Uh huh. And the Ba'athists are the extremists in this, you're saying, right? Uh huh. The, the multi-ethnic, secular dictatorship in Syria, the last country in the Middle East where you can get a drink. Those are the extremists.

• 5:17:47Speaker 03

  And we got to support the Bin Ladenite insurgency against them. Now, this is the reason that Barack Obama supported Al Qaeda in Syria. It's not because he was a secret Muslim terrorist with an allegiance to Bin Laden's goals. It's that he was a secret George W. Bush with allegiance to the American foreign policy establishment's goals, including the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby in this country, Likud interests in this country. And at that time, you know, in Iraq War II, for the average person, they'd have had to read Mearsheimer in 07 to know, or read Justin Ramondo at antiwar.com to even know, what is a neocon?

• 5:18:32Speaker 03

  What's the difference between them and the rest of the Republicans? And what do they have against Iraq so bad? And what is that agenda about? And what does that have to do with the Likud Party in Israel? You didn't think that. If you ask, you know, like Dave Chappelle in his skit, it's all like, he tried to kill my daddy kind of stuff, right? Because people just don't know this deeper layer to it. Well, in Syria, it was just as obvious as it could be. The war party in America is the Israel lobby, right? It is all Zionists, led by the Likudniks and the neoconservatives, but on the so-called liberal side too. People like Jamie Rubin, who had worked for Bill Clinton,

• 5:19:14Speaker 03

  wrote a giant thing in, first it was a secret memo that he wrote to Hillary Clinton, and they later published it as an essay in Foreign Policy Magazine. You can pull it up right now if you want. Jamie Rubin. I'm pretty sure it's 2011. If it's 12, I'm sorry, but I'm pretty sure it's 11 in Foreign Policy Magazine. And I don't know, chipping Syria, Assad and Israel. The reason we have to do this is for Israel. The real reason to intervene in Syria. There was a funny anecdote about this one too, Lex, because I just happened to be screwing around on Twitter that morning that Assange published the State Department cables. Maybe it was that morning or soon after

• 5:19:58Speaker 03

  that. And I'm virtually certain it was David Rothkopf, who was then the editor of Foreign Policy, and I can't remember who else. One of his right-hand men at foreignpolicy.com, the journal of, uh, what is it? It's a journal, the Foreign Policy Journal. I forgot if there's a specific think tank behind them. Anyway.

• 5:20:19Speaker 03

  And they freaked out and they attacked Julian Assange and they said, aha, we caught WikiLeaks posting a fake document. Cause this is not a State Department document. This is an article that we ran at Foreign Policy and you, you obviously copied and pasted it and are running it at WikiLeaks. And not only that, but you've changed it. And then Assange says, no, you kooks. This is a memo that somebody wrote to Hillary Clinton. And apparently it was Jamie Rubin who wrote it. And then he submitted the same essay to you to run at Foreign Policy. That's what happened. And the article is about, Madam Secretary, we gotta support Bin Ladenite

• 5:20:59Speaker 03

  head choppers, suicide bombers in the greatest act of treason that you could possibly imagine. Because Israel matters more than the United States of America and the 3,000 killed on September 11th. That's why I'm paraphrasing roughly.

• 5:21:13Lex Fridman?

  The real reason to intervene in Syria, cutting Iran's link to the Mediterranean sees a strategic price worth the risk.

• 5:21:20Speaker 03

  And why? Because Israel's foreign policy interests, not those of the United States of America. Now, what's the true history of that war? They called it an uprising. They called it a revolution. We're skipping Libya here, but they supported the Bin Ladenites in Libya. Then this was Hillary Clinton's bank shot to take the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia, the same guys that did the Benghazi attack of September 11, 2012. And send them on to Syria for the next jihad. Now, in Libya, Gaddafi wasn't a Shiite, and this wasn't about that, although the Israelis did hate him and want him gone. But in Syria, it was all about this redirection policy and continuing the redirection policy of trying to weaken Assad as essentially consolation prize after America screwed up so bad by putting

• 5:22:05Speaker 03

  the Shiites in power in Baghdad. And so this is why we have to do this. And there was a whole chorus around that time. And if you remember the first major fake sarin attack of August 2013 in Ghouta, which the war party tried to claim that Assad did it in order to launch a war there. And they were trying to get us to do it. At that time, you know, first of all, Barack Obama is the commander in chief at this point. It's not the same as George W. Bush. And, you know, escalating the Afghan war that was already going on, and we have to win it, and that's the consensus or whatever, that's kind of one thing. But Obama wants to start a new war in Syria now? The American right said, I don't think so.

• 5:22:50Speaker 03

  And in fact, on this point, all hail Stephen Bannon, because it was Bannon and Breitbart that led the campaign that said, at that time Breitbart was an incredible, like, much more important, I think, than it probably is now. But whatever, I don't, I don't know how to measure that. But at that time, they were extremely influential. And they led the charge. We do not want to fight this war. And you might remember this, Lex, you had army soldiers and Marines and Navy sailors would be holding up pieces of paper in still shots and in short video clips that said, I didn't join the Marines to fight a civil war for Al Qaeda in Syria. Remember that? And those were going viral, there's a bunch of them.

• 5:23:29Speaker 01

  What was this, 13?

• 5:23:31Speaker 03

  This is August of 13. And at this point, Barack Obama reaches out to AIPAC in the Israel lobby and asks them to please do everything you can to push this. Now, I have to say, I don't know what was going on there, but I actually thought that he was being kind of sarcastic there. So at that point, there was nobody pushing for war with Syria except the Israel lobby. And Obama seemed to be saying, hey, guys, if you want this, you need to really stick your neck out for it. But the thing is, they stuck their neck out. It's almost like, um, Member in that Will Ferrell movie where he goes to college and he's running naked down the street and he thinks everybody's behind him, but he's just wasted.

• 5:24:13Lex Fridman?

  Old school.

• 5:24:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like that. They're like, come on, everybody, we're going to Syria, running drunk down the street. And then they look and nobody else is coming with them. It's just the Israel lobby. It's just as plain as day. Whose interest is this in? Nobody else cares. Nobody else wants to do this. Nobody else believes the lies that, oh, the day that the chemical weapons inspectors arrive, Assad gassed a bunch of people, huh? Give me a break, dude. This whole thing is so stupid. And then, so they couldn't do it. The Israel lobby basically failed. And then importantly, this is the one good thing I'll ever say in my life about James Clapper. And by the way, this was a secret. They didn't tell us this. We only found this out later from Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic.

• 5:24:54Speaker 03

  Commissar Goldberg, the former prison guard and ruthless abuser of Palestinian captives. He wrote in The Atlantic that James Clapper told Barack Obama, it's not a slam dunk that Bashar Assad was behind the gas attack. And Dempsey, who was then the chairman, Admiral, was it general or Admiral? General Dempsey, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also gave a public statement who said, I don't know why we have to do this right now. And so at that point, his own staff was telling him, Mr. President, like, hey, if anybody asks me, I'm going to tell them that I told you that I can't even prove that this is true.

• 5:25:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, James Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence, DNI, from August 2010 to 2017, acting as the principal intelligence advisor to President Barack Obama and overseeing all US intelligence agencies.

• 5:25:46Speaker 03

  He also is the guy who planned Operation Storm, where they cleansed the Kragina and eastern Slovenia in 1995 of Croatian Serbs. He's also the guy who lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He could prove it from the satellite pictures. He's also the guy that lied that Vladimir Putin helped Saddam Hussein move those chemical weapons to Syria is why we can't find them. He's also the guy that lied that the NSA is not all up in your phone seizing all of your data, which is what motivated the hero Edward Snowden to leak and tell the truth. And he's also the guy that lied that Donald Trump was a blackmailed suborn agent

• 5:26:28Speaker 03

  of Vladimir Putin, who helped to usurp Hillary Clinton's rightful throne in a coup d'etat and take over this country. And of course, he's a paid analyst at CNN. And if Donald Trump doesn't give him life in prison, I'm gonna really regret it a lot. He deserves to suffer horribly. But

• 5:26:44Lex Fridman?

  You did say a positive thing about him.

• 5:26:46Speaker 03

  I did say a positive thing about him, which was he told Barack Obama, I'm not gonna vouch for this chemical weapons lie here, buddy. No slam dunk. And that was a reference to George Tenet telling George Bush, it's a slam dunk, sir. And you know what else wanna know what's funny about that? Is that George Tenet said, oh, that's not fair. They're throwing me under the bus. I didn't say that Iraq's possession of chemical weapons was a slam dunk. What I said was, you can convince the American people with this story. That's the slam dunk. In other words, I wasn't lying. I was saying, Mr. President, you'll be able to get away with this lie. That's George Tenet's defense of that statement.

• 5:27:27Speaker 03

  Anyway, so Clapper was saying, well, this ain't a slam dunk. I won't stand by it. By the way, as long as we're talking about Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic, it may be the same article. If you type, type in James Clapper and slam dunk in Syria there. Let me see if I got this right. The Obama Doctrine. That's the article. Okay? Not a slam dunk. Okay. I'm glad we clarified this. It's a different article. The article is called As President, I Don't Bluff. It's another interview of Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg. And in this article is where Jeffrey Goldberg, well, I'll tell you what, no, no, no, get the, this is just the Politico. Do The Atlantic, yeah.

• 5:28:12Lex Fridman?

  Obama to Iran and Israel as President of the United States. I don't bluff by Jeffrey Goldberg, March 2, 2012.

• 5:28:20Speaker 03

  Okay, just so people understand, the headline there is he is telling Jeffrey Goldberg to please tell the Israelis that they can trust me, that you trust me, that I promise that I really, really, really, really, really, really mean it. That if the Ayatollah breaks out for a nuclear bomb, I will go to war. I will not let him get one. Jeffrey, please tell them I'm not lying about this. Okay, that's what, where that comes from. That's what he's doing there. But now, will they show you the whole thing or you're paywalled here? Maybe if you put it in archive.is, can you copy and paste that and put it in archive.is? Oh, you gotta just sign in. Um, so now, see if you can Ctrl+F for classified or clearance.

• 5:29:05Speaker 03

  Can we talk about Syria as a strategic issue? Talk about it as a humanitarian issue as well, but it would seem to me that one way to weaken and further isolate Iran is to remove or help remove Iran's only Arab ally, Obama. Absolutely. Okay, this is why we want to weaken Syria is a easier way to weaken Iran. And as they continue to talk about here, he's saying that we are intervening there and this is a way to weaken Iran in this way. And then Goldberg says, is there anything you could do to move it faster? And Obama, on a less funny version of the joke about I could tell you, but I'd have

• 5:29:46Speaker 03

  to kill you, he says, well, nothing that I can tell you because your classified clearance isn't good enough. In other words, and check my date on this again, was it 12 or 11? I forget. No, no, this would have been 12. This is 12, yeah, March 12. Um, and so he's saying, it's already on, Jeffrey. We're doing it, buddy.

• 5:30:07Speaker 03

  What's he doing? He's working with Britain and France, Turkey, Israel, Saudi, and Qatar to back Osama bin Laden's suicide bomber brigades.

• 5:30:17Speaker 03

  In fact, worse, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's suicide bomber brigades. Remember, we talked about how the local Iraqi Sunnis had turned on Al Qaeda. It wasn't America and the Shiites that defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq. It was the local Iraqi Sunnis that did so, and they're the ones even who turned in Zarqawi to the Americans to kill. I know the interrogator, I interviewed the interrogator, who, without torture, but by being a nice guy, got the information. Tell us where Zarqawi is, we'll get him. And the guy told him, and they got him. This is in the summer of 2006, they killed him. And at that time, Al Qaeda in Iraq then renamed itself the Islamic State of Iraq. And we all got a good chuckle out of it, because you guys don't control a single county anywhere in Iraq. There is no state.

• 5:31:02Speaker 03

  But at the same time, we said, aha, though, look at what they're talking about. Bin Laden's policy always was, just keep fighting. There's no point in creating a caliphate, as long as the American empire is here to erase it again. So we fight the far enemy. We fight a long-term strategy to bog the empire down, bleed them to bankruptcy, force them all the way out. Only then can we have our perfect Islamic state we want to create. Zarqawi says, no, I want that now. This was his doctrine. And they called their group Islamic State of Iraq, just about, I forget, it was just before he died, I believe it was just after he died, they started calling themselves that.

• 5:31:44Speaker 03

  But very clearly, you know, betraying their intentions, if they were to have the ability to take over anything, that's their goal. And they have that level of ambition. Now, it's very important to note that in Iraq war II, when I say America fought that war as a civil war for the Shiite side against the Sunnis. They didn't want the whole country. They only wanted Cheistan. They only wanted the land basically from Baghdad over to Iran and down to Kuwait, down to Najaf, right? Down to the Saudi border. They didn't so much worry about the Sunni Iraqis of Fallujah and Tikrit and Mosul. Let them burn in the sun, man. Screw them. Ooh, I should have

• 5:32:28Speaker 03

  said, this was a big part of why the Sunnis fought so hard in the first place, was because, remember, they're losing control of the national government. Well, all the oil is down in the south near Basra, and it's up in the north near Karakuk, where it's going to be controlled either by the Shiites or by the Kurds, now by the Shiites. And so what does that mean for the Sunnis? They have some oil, but it's virtually all undeveloped oil and much less of it in the predominantly Sunni areas of the country. So when they lose control of the national government, they lose control over all the spoils, right? And so they get nothing. And so the Shiites idea is, not by the Shiites, I mean the Supreme Islamic Council of Abdulaziz al-Hakim, the Dawah Party of Nuri al-Maliki, and their

• 5:33:12Speaker 03

  murderous forces. Their idea, they're just as chauvinistic as the Bin Ladenites. Screw you guys, man. You can just burn in the sun. We'll do nothing for you. We got nothing for you. But what did that mean in practice? And again, the heroic Patrick Coburn. It meant that all Western Iraq was wide open. No man's land, no consolidated political authority anywhere. Ongoing low-level Sunni insurgency led by Bin Ladenites. Even when the Americans leave by the end of 2011, they still leave a few CIA guys and drones there. And as we joked on the show in real time, Lex, me and Jason Ditz from antiwar.com would joke that we're still doing drone strikes in Iraq after the withdrawal, but we still

• 5:33:57Speaker 03

  got spies there and still doing drone strikes. Why? Not that we're killing the Bin Ladenites. We're aiming at their heels because we're trying to chase them west into Syria where they're heroes. In Syria, they're the moderate rebels. In Syria, they're just trying to fight for freedom against the forces of evil, Baath's tyranny. These are Bin Laden's guys. These are Zarqawi's guys. It's Bin Laden's agent in, uh, his main agent in, in Iraq was a guy named Abu Mohammed Al Jolani. And then later, you know, his boss was this guy, um, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was apparently the second leader after Zarqawi. Some say that the first leader after Zarqawi was actually made up, that there was no leader

• 5:34:42Speaker 03

  and they just sort of put this persona out there. Well, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sure existed. These guys had all been locked up in Camp Bouqah together and had, you know, kind of reorganized Al Qaeda in Iraq. And when America left, they sprung them all loose. They're ready to go. So Baghdadi tells Jolani, "Go to Syria." Jolani, you know as al-Shara, the self-appointed president of Syria right now. That's Abu Mohammed Al Jolani, lets he join the jihad because he was inspired by September 11th. He told frontline that you damn right, he fought and killed Americans in Mosul and Ramadi in Iraq War II.

• 5:35:21Speaker 03

  Then he went to Syria to help lead the so-called uprising, revolution, civil war? In Syria, no. Again, we have from 2011 that Prince Bandar bin Sultan was emptying Saudi jails and sending all the jihadists off to Syria to fight. And they were on the record. I have the quotes where they say, "It's, it's, is it Bandar? Bandar says, 'We're sick and tired of the Shiites and they're gonna find out whatever.'" I forgot the exact, it's, it's in there. And then the other quote was from a guy named Prince Turkey who said, "Dash," that is ISIS, that is Al Qaeda in Iraq.

• 5:36:06Speaker 03

  "Dash is our answer to your support for the Dawah." Get it? Why is Saudi Arabia in conspiracy with Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, Raisa Baradawan and all these guys? Why are they backing the Bin Ladenites in Syria? Because we put the Dawa Party in power in Baghdad. This is their answer to that. Where, so this is again, the redirection. We empowered the Shiites so much, now we gotta move to limit them again, mostly because that's what our allies want so badly, especially the Israelis and the Saudis. And so, from 2011, we knew, this is not a revolution, this is not an uprising.

• 5:36:51Speaker 03

  I don't care if there's footage of protesters on TV, or even if Bashar al-Assad's forces are shooting them, which they were. I would note, although it's proven by Shamin Al-Narwani and the great journalist William Van Wagenen, whose book on Syria I'm gonna publish any day now at the Libertarian Institute, who's written these massive long-form studies on the origins of the Syria war for the Libertarian Institute, and shows how, yes, you would have peaceful protests, but then the Bin Ladenites would be there and would snipe cops. Of course, for the direct purpose of provoking a reaction. It's exactly how they started the Kosovo War.

• 5:37:32Speaker 03

  They'd assassinate police officers, forcing the military to intervene to radicalize and increase the whole situation. Was the same thing that they were doing there, is how they got the whole thing started. And again, it's literally Al Qaeda in Iraq, thus taking the lead at that time. Now, remember hours ago when we talked about truth, falsity, and our position? Well, our position was, we're supporting moderate rebels. We're not supporting Bin Ladenites. And in fact, the Bin Ladenites, if they're not backed by Assad just to make the protesters look bad, then at least they're only benefiting because we just won't give enough support to the moderates.

• 5:38:17Speaker 03

  That was our position, but that was not true. From the very beginning, it was clear, these guys are lunatics, man. There was a boy in 2000, early 13, a boy had a fruit stand, and one of the Bin Ladenites, or just some guy, said, "Hey, give me a discount on this orange." And the kid said, 13 year old boy, I believe.

• 5:38:45Speaker 03

  He said, I'm sorry, I can't give discounts. I wouldn't even give a discount to Mohammed himself.

• 5:38:54Speaker 03

  And Bin Ladenite standing within earshot said, what did you just say? Boom, and shot the 13 year old boy right in the face to death.

• 5:39:00Lex Fridman?

  That's one of the moderate rebels.

• 5:39:01Speaker 03

  That's the moderate rebels. And, and what were the moderate rebels the whole time? The ones who were quote unquote moderate, the Free Syrian Army, the guys with shorter beards who would come and talk to the Americans, who would, who, there are famous pictures of them in tents that say USAID on them. And their job was just receiving the money and the guns and delivering to the Bin Ladenites. Just like with the war in Afghanistan in the eighties or something.

• 5:39:27Speaker 03

  You know, Bandar can empty his jails and whatever, but for the most part, like these guys are volunteers. There's not an organized state army on the ground that's like conscripted them and controls them to that degree. So who's out there fighting? The guys who are fighting are the ones who don't mind dying. The ones who are absolutely the most committed to this revolution, and we know who they are. They're Bin Laden and Zawahiri and Zarqawi's guys. Al Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria. Going at that time by the name Jabat al-Nusra, which I'm told roughly translates from Association of Assistance or Helpers. And then they're Al Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, the same guys that were the vanguard of

• 5:40:10Speaker 03

  the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War II are now the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency in Syria. And while there's just one line on a map between them, we're still on the side of the Shiites in Iraq, but we're on the side of the Sunnis in Syria. Now, this goes on for two years, and you have Bin Ladenites from all over the place, including Chechens and Chinese Uighurs and people from all over everywhere coming to join the jihad. Just like in Iraq War II, Egyptians and Libyans and whoever coming to join the thing. And by the late spring, early summer of 2013, you now have a split between Baghdadi, who's now also come to Syria. Sorry, from your point of view, this way into Syria.

• 5:40:55Speaker 03

  And now Baghdadi and Jolani, the leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, split. And it's a fight over control and over, really over oil wealth and who controls the, their gangster spoils or a bunch of terrorists. But also over doctrine, too. Baghdadi is more like a Zarqawiite. And Baghdadi is saying, I want my caliphate now. Against the advice of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is now the surviving leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq after Bin Laden was killed in May of 2011. Zawahiri is the one who said, no, we should fight the far enemy. Don't create a state now because you won't be able to hold on to it. Just keep fighting. And he sent an emissary,

• 5:41:40Speaker 03

  who had been an original veteran of the Afghan war, named Al-Suri, to come and negotiate between Baghdadi and Jolani. Baghdadi killed the guy and declared a state in eastern Syria. Now, at this time, Assad has to pull his forces back from the east and consolidate. All the population centers, other than Raqqa, all the other big population centers are in the west of the country. Hama, Hamzah, Aleppo and Damascus. And he has to try to protect these areas. And so he ends up being forced to leave eastern Syria basically wide open. So by June of 2013, Baghdadi splits from Jolani and creates ISIS,

• 5:42:24Speaker 03

  the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or Iraq and the Levant, or, you know, whatever they called it. In Arabic, the acronym is pronounced Daesh, D-A-E-S-H. And so when we say ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, the caliphate or Daesh, that's all the same thing. That's Al Qaeda in Iraq, went to Syria, consolidated eastern Syria. Now, that's in June of 13. Six months later, they hoist the black flag over Fallujah.

• 5:43:01Speaker 03

  And at antiwar.com, we're freaking out. And I've been saying on my show this whole time, Western Iraq is wide open. Patrick Coburn says, Western Iraq is wide open. Red alert, man. This is a problem here. We're backing these guys. There's nobody seems to think about the next stage of this conflict. I remember even Michael Schoyer said on my show, I think the big problem right now is Boko Haram. And I'm like, uh, excuse me. We're backing the bin Laden caliphate in eastern Syria and Western Iraq is wide open for the taking. And you can go back and check my archives from especially the first half of 2014, where I'm interviewing even the despicable Jonathan Landay and all kinds

• 5:43:43Speaker 03

  of anyone that I know who knows anything about the bin Laden Knights. I'm interviewing them mostly so I can browbeat them and tell them, eye on the ball, everybody. This is what matters. Right? This is the most important crisis that could possibly be going on. And we know now that Mike Flynn was the head of the DIA at the time. And he, we know from Seymour Hersh, there's an article called Military to Military in the London Review of Books about how Mike Flynn was heroically insubordinate and was giving secret intelligence to the Germans to give to Assad to use to kill the bin Laden Knights, to kill the CIA's terrorists on the ground there. And that's what got him fired from the DIA. And now,

• 5:44:23Speaker 03

  Mike Flynn is a Ron Hawk. He hates the Ayatollah and the Shiites and that whole thing is a absolutely pro-Israel Zionist guy, 100%. But his point of view was, well, let's just bomb Tehran. Just because I hate the Shiites doesn't mean I want to back Osama bin Laden's suicide bomber head chopper brigades against their friend in Syria. What the hell is this? It's crazy. Same thing for Tulsi Gabbard, by the way. The most controversial thing about this woman supposedly, her entire career, somehow she was a toady of Assad is what Bari Weiss told Joe Rogan. And he asked her, what's a toady? And she said, I don't know. And he said, how do you spell it? And she said, with a Y, and had no idea even to spell

• 5:45:08Speaker 03

  the word that she was trying to smear Tulsi Gabbard as some kind of agent of Bashar al-Assad. Tulsi Gabbard, who at that time was a major, later promoted to captain in the Army National Guard, who I believe only left the National Guard to become Director of National Intelligence. American military officer, right? Oh, yeah, I'm so sure. She's such a traitor to this country. Give me a break. They keep promoting her. She may even still be in the National Guard. I'm not sure if that, how that works when you're the DNI. But anyway.

• 5:45:39Speaker 03

  Tulsi Gabbard never said that Bashar Assad is a good man. She never said he's a hero. She never said America should ally with him. She never said anything like that. What she said was Assad is less worse than his enemies. America is backing Al Qaeda. Now, if you know anything about Tulsi Gabbard, she has never been, is not, and has never been against the war on terrorism. In fact, when she was running for president, she put out statements defining Al Qaeda so broadly. She said hundreds of groups are linked to Al Qaeda in the world and that she's willing to fight them.

• 5:46:18Speaker 03

  Okay, she is a over the line to unreason hawk on killing Bin Ladenites. Okay? But she, and by the way, why Lex? Because she fought in Iraq War II, not fought, but she was in Iraq War II in a medical unit at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad for like a year. And I've never heard her talk about this part of it, but it is clear. There's no question. It's impossible otherwise. She saw our guys screaming and dying in front of her, right? Over and over and over again. Okay? So that's why she has that gray streak in her hair like Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street. It's because of that. So now the Democrats are saying,

• 5:47:03Speaker 03

  "Forget what you know about the shirts and skins, lady. We're on the skin side now." We like Al Qaeda now. Now Lex, like quite frankly, like every other idiot in Washington DC apparently could not have told you the difference. But Tulsi Gabbard could. Tulsi Gabbard knew who was who, and she knew that Assad's enemies are Al Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, and you couldn't have tortured her into switching sides in that war. Right? That doesn't mean that she's soft on Iran, but it means that she wants Bin Ladenites dead, dead, dead, and she's supposed to be siding with them now?

• 5:47:44Speaker 03

  And we're all supposed to be encouraging them to overthrow this secular dictator who is, who protects and backs the Christians, the Shiites, the Druze, and even, and somebody argued with me the other day in a YouTube comment somewhere I saw about, because I had said the majority of Sunnis backed him too. I think that that's true. And certainly it was true of the middle class in Aleppo. And it was certainly the fact that the Syrian Arab Army was always majority Sunni Arab, serving that secular government. Just because they were Sunnis didn't mean that they were Bin Ladenites, these, you know, crazy tech theory, Salafi, whatever ideology, and especially, I call them Bin Ladenites because it ain't just that they're Salafis, because there are innumerable, I

• 5:48:29Speaker 03

  don't know, hundreds of thousands or millions even of Salafis and Wahhabis in this world who are quietists. They don't have politics. Their politics are, your king is your king because God made it that way. You're not questioning that, are you? I didn't think so. We used to have that tradition in the West, the divine right of kings and that kind of thing. If you're a good Muslim to a great many Muslim people, never mind their leadership, but I mean people out in the world. And it depends on the sect and the region and everything. But the super majority of them, quite apparently, are quietists.

• 5:49:03Speaker 03

  Their job is not to question the civil authority. Their job is to do what civil authority says. That's why they're the civil authority. That's how most people feel about their governments anyway. Right? For what? The Bin Laden's problem was he was political and he had these political goals for this earthly realm where we exist today. And so he really was, Loretta Napoleone, the great Italian journalist, compared him very much to like a Leninist where he's trying to overthrow this world and have things the way that he wants it to be in a way that even, again, radical and fundamentalist Muslims usually don't believe in. And usually, in fact, the studies have shown it's amateurs

• 5:49:46Speaker 03

  who are actually kind of new at Islam and don't know that much about it, who tend to be the more fanatical and the more violent. Whereas people who actually know more about it will say, ah, actually, as Mohammed says, you better not do that and that kind of thing. Right? And I cite all the studies in Fools' Air and I have the footnotes in Fools' Air showing that directly and including some of the nine 11 hijackers, including the bulk of the fighters for the Islamic State Caliphate. They're just regular Iraqis who are conscripted in things, fighting for ISIS. But that didn't make them even necessarily that political, much less motivated by simply theology to behave in these ways. You know what I mean?

• 5:50:24Lex Fridman?

  Sure. If, just briefly, because you brought Tulsi up. Why do you think? I had a chance to have multiple conversations with her. Why do you think she was smeared so much on this topic and other topics? Why does she piss off?

• 5:50:40Speaker 03

  The first thing was this. She absolutely just knew better and was immovable like Stonewall Jackson on this issue. You're not going to be able to convince her these are moderate rebels. Those lies don't work here. So now that put her severely on the outside of the consensus. And with authority, she actually knew what she was talking about. That was her problem. And that was their problem with her. They couldn't fix that. And then, of course, she, even though they loved her, oh, man, they groomed her. People forget when she first came in. She's pretty, she's intelligent, she's in the military. She fought in Iraq or, you know, is a quote unquote combat vet because even though she wasn't pulling

• 5:51:22Speaker 03

  triggers there, she was shelled while at Camp Bellade. So she's earned her stripes as an official combat veteran in that sense. And she's a woman and she's a Democrat and this is everything that they wanted. But then she endorsed Bernie Sanders.

• 5:51:38Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:51:38Speaker 03

  And then they went for full jihad and never forgive her for that. And so that was her.

• 5:51:44Lex Fridman?

  Hillary Clinton went after her, is that what happened?

• 5:51:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:51:46Lex Fridman?

  I don't remember.

• 5:51:47Speaker 03

  And Hillary Clinton tried to smear her with Russiagate. The pathetic, diseased, dying windbag, Robert Windrum from NBC News, attempted to smear her, as well as he attempted to smear my colleague and editor and friend, Hunter Durensis, as part of the Russiagate hoax. This absolutely ludicrous reporting. Have you ever heard of anything that Robert Windrum ever reported in your life? Can you think of anything where you go, oh, Robert Windrum, he's the guy that did this? No, he will only be known, when he dies, which will be soon, as a disgrace to humanity and to his profession for his disgusting and despicable lies against Tulsi Gabbard, against Jill Stein and against Hunter Durensis. May he burn in hell. So anyway, and his entire NBC News organization too. And that's why they hated her, because she told the truth.

• 5:52:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's sad. It's sad that people like that, like we spoke about this with Ron Paul, this is different, obviously, different humans, different walks of life and so on. But there's, there's like, there's certain people that just have this authenticity.

• 5:52:43Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 5:52:43Lex Fridman?

  And agree with them or disagree. It's like, this is like a strong, this is a really interesting person. And actually, for, for a long time, Bernie Sanders was that also. And it's like, and there's something about the system that wants to destroy those kinds of folks, or at least suffocate the authenticity in that person.

• 5:52:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:52:59Lex Fridman?

  And to make them conform.

• 5:53:01Speaker 03

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't give him as much credit as the two of them, but, but Ron is in a class by himself, of course. I, I guess you could say that they're comparable because I disagree with her and pretty severely enough on enough things that, but on the other hand, I think Bernie Sanders is sometimes disingenuous in a way that I don't find her to be, um, without getting too far into that. But anyway, you're right, though, that, you know, you can see. The people who are outside the norm usually are treated as the outcasts up there. If they're anywhere near the halls of power up there, they're the ones usually who are telling the truth about things and are getting things right. Okay, so, so now let's fast forward now. So, so as I said, in January of 14, they hoist the black flag over Fallujah.

• 5:53:45Speaker 03

  And we at antiwar.com, et cetera, are freaking out over this. Oh, and I was gonna say about Mike Flynn. Mike Flynn was the head of the DIA that put out a report, a secret report that's now published, Judicial Watch got it, and the great Brad Hoff wrote about it at his great blog, Levant Report, people can find it. And what happened was, the DIA put out a report saying, "Our allies are backing Bin Ladenite terrorists in Syria. Their goal is to create a solist principality in eastern Syria, and there is a real danger that this could blow back into western Iraq, and Al Qaeda in Iraq could return to their old haunts in Mosul and Ramadi."

• 5:54:30Speaker 03

  He warned that in the summer of 2012. Okay, then, they, just short of a year later, they consolidate a state in eastern Syria, just as he said, just as I said. Again, you can check the records, all my, all 6,100 and something of my interviews are at scotthorton.org if anyone ever wants to see whether I was good on this, back when I claimed I was. And then, Obama was asked, "Mr. President, what about the black flag being hoisted over Fallujah?" And Obama, this is Vanity Fair magazine, and he tells him, "Listen, just because the junior varsity puts on a Kobe Bryant jersey doesn't make them the Lakers." Right?

• 5:55:15Speaker 03

  So, this idiot, I'm sorry, excuse me for a moment, but- Don't you like to somehow take the slightest comfort in the fact that like at least Barack Obama can read, at least he's like the slightest bit maybe interested in what he's doing compared to W. Bush or Trump, who are clearly just winging it and W. Bush just, oh, forget it. Bill Clinton, of course, they would say he would know more about any subject than his briefers and they better be on topic because he read six books about it and he's a horrible child killer, but that's still true about him, that he's a brilliant guy, or at least a brilliant consumer of data and in trying to form his policies. He wanted to be in charge and know as much as he could.

• 5:55:58Speaker 03

  How could Barack Obama elects not know who Al Qaeda in Iraq is? How could he think that ISIS is the junior varsity? These guys are the vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that killed 4,000 out of the 4,500 of our guys that died in Iraq War II. These are the Zarqawiites. They're worse than Bin Laden. They are... Patrick Coburn said they're the Islamist Khmer Rouge, right? Like Pol Pot and the communists, the most insane lunatics to ever be armed with weapons before, right? Nutcases, berserkers.

• 5:56:41Speaker 03

  This is the junior varsity, the suicide bomber brigade, the most dangerous one that's ever been created in history? And six months later, they rolled right into Mosul. And this is the picture you still have in your head of that long train, that long train of Toyota Helix pickup trucks, rolling into Mosul with their headlights on and all the jihadis in the back of the trucks with their rifles. And just as Patrick Coburn and I had predicted, the Shiite Iraqi army that had hardly any interest whatsoever in ruling Mosul or Tikrit or Fallujah turned tail and ran. And the Islamic State caliphate then conquered all

• 5:57:20Speaker 03

  of Western Iraq. From 2014, they took Mosul to Crete. It took them a little while, but they took Ramadi in 15. They took Fallujah right away and they created an area the land mass the size of Great Britain. With a standing army of its highest about 250 to 300,000 men. If you take, if you look at their troop strength in various places during that time. And then what did Obama do? This is in, oh, man, you know what? We should watch this clip, dude. Let's pipe this in here. Speaking of Jonah Goldberg, type in Oren, O R E N, Oren Sunnis. And it's going to come right up as your first YouTube link. It's going to automatically launch right there. There it is, right there.

• 5:58:05Speaker 03

  Sunnis versus Shiites and the lesser of two evils. And I actually met the guy who asked the question here, came up to me at a thing and said, hey, I'm the guy that asked the question at that thing. So kudos to you, buddy. Thank you. Lex Fridman, let's watch this clip and trip out.

• 5:58:20Speaker 04

  Doesn't stay in there for another couple more weeks. What, what do you think your country is doing in order to protect your interests?

• 5:58:27Speaker 03

  Pause one sec. Did I mention now? This is in the middle of June, 2014. Okay. They sacked Mosul and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi got up there at the Mosul Grand Mosque, like a cross between Benito Mussolini and Osama bin Laden, and declared himself the divinely appointed Caliph Ibrahim, ruler of the Islamic State Caliphate. This is two weeks later. Okay, hit the button.

• 5:58:57Speaker 04

  How are you working in line with other partners? All right, now, keep in mind, I don't speak for the government anymore. It's making for me.

• 5:59:03Speaker 03

  Not true. Wait, pause it again. He gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post where he said these exact same things while he was still Netanyahu's ambassador to the United States. And this is treason. This man was born in the United States of America. Okay, go ahead.

• 5:59:16Speaker 04

  And what I'm going to say is, is harsh, perhaps a little edgy. But if we have to choose the lesser of evils here, the lesser evil is the Sunnis over the Shias. For the reason I mentioned before. Okay, it's a lesser evil. It's an evil, believe it, it's terribly. Again, they've just taken out 700 former Iraqi soldiers and shot them in the field. But who are they, who are they fighting against? They're fighting against the proxy with Iran that's complicit in the murder of 160,000 people in Syria. You can just, you know, do the math. And again, one side is armed with suicide bombers in Iraq, the other side has access to military nuclear capabilities. So from Israel's perspective, um, you know, if someone's

• 5:59:58Speaker 04

  got, if, if, if there's got to be an evil that's going to prevail, you know, let, let the Sunni evil prevail. And I, again, I'm speaking entirely for myself.

• 6:00:05Speaker 03

  No, he just said, from Israel's perspective, from the Netanyahu regime's perspective, is exactly what he meant. And it's fine, because we have plenty of Mossad and military officers echoing those exact same statements. Even Thomas Al Friedmann says, we shouldn't defeat the Islamic State yet. They're taxing the Shiites. Okay, there's no question of what he meant there. And by the way, is he talking about the mythical moderates, the Free Syrian Army? No, he's not. How do we know that? Because he did just say Sunnis. But he also said, we just saw them take 1700 Iraqi, he says, soldiers, but it was Air Force cadets at Camp Spitzer, and massacred them in the field. Iraqi Shiites, that was ISIS that

• 6:00:49Speaker 03

  did that, just a week ago, when he's saying this. He's not talking about the mythical moderates. He's saying the Sunni evil, let the Sunni evil prevail. He's talking about Baghdadi's Bin Ladenite caliphate. Because, and what are his two excuses? That Assad is responsible for every single death in the war, when all he's doing is defending his state from foreign invasion by foreign-backed, superpower-backed Bin Ladenite suicide bomber. He just said, suicide bomber mercenaries, right? But no, Assad's responsible for every single one of the deaths. And then he lies again outright and says, and Iran has military nuclear technology, implying that somehow, the Ayatollah has a bomb, and he's going to give one to Assad

• 6:01:34Speaker 03

  or to Hezbollah. And so that's why we need to back Al Qaeda in Syria, both of which are, of course, complete and total hoaxes. And again, he admitted in the middle of that, after lying and saying he's only speaking for himself, he accidentally said, from Israel's perspective. He also said the same thing, again, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, either right before he left, or right after he left, being the ambassador, said the exact same thing. And he's clearly reflecting Benjamin Netanyahu's view here. There's no question about that. And I have, in enough already, I have an entire section called Israel's role, that showed how they were giving direct aid and comfort to the Bin Ladenites.

• 6:02:15Speaker 03

  By way of the Golan Heights. And there was even at one point, quite famously, there was an attack by local Druze on the Golan Heights, kidnapped prisoners of the Israelis, basically, who attacked an Israeli ambulance that was shipping Bin Ladenites back to the front because the Bin Ladenites had been killing Syrian Druze, their brethren. And so they attacked this ambulance and it became kind of a controversy. It also was controversial and ISIS, not even Nusra or Jaish al Islam or Arar al-Sham or one of these other groups. Actually ISIS accidentally hit Israel with a rocket and immediately apologized.

• 6:02:55Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:02:57Speaker 03

  Very sorry about that. We like you guys. No offense. Forget that. You can read, let's look at this. As long as we're on this, I'm having so much fun. Type in foreign affairs and accepting Al Qaeda. There you go. The enemy of the United States enemy. And just in case you're confused with a nice big picture of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri on the top. And the article is about how we're supposed to hate the Shiites more now. Because that's what our allies want. Regardless of who killed all those Americans in New York City. They ran another one. Type it in. The Good and Bad of Arar al-Sham.

• 6:03:42Lex Fridman?

  This is from Brookings, The Good and Bad of Syria's Arar al-Sham.

• 6:03:46Speaker 03

  Yep, it's by that trader, Michael Duran. And Clint Watts. Who's Clint Watts? He's the guy, the former FBI agent who was behind Hamilton 68 that lied and said that you and all your friends are all Russian bots and that you ought to be censored right off of Twitter. That's who Clint Watts is. He's a damned liar. And he later admitted to BuzzFeed, oh, I don't really know about that whole bot thing. He was the guy who did it, working for Bill Kristol. They created the Alliance for Securing Democracy. And it was Clint Watts who lied, that whole, and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories claiming that Russian bots were behind it every time anything good ever happened on Twitter during that era. That's who Clint Watts is. And then they say, what's, did you click the thing?

• 6:04:31Speaker 03

  Pitch up just a sec. What's the byline here? The Good and Bad of Arar al-Sham? Oh, they deleted it. In the foreign affairs version, the subhead is "An Al Qaeda-Linked Group Worth Defending."

• 6:04:44Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, it also says the Al Qaeda of yesterday is gone, so it's changing the story.

• 6:04:48Speaker 03

  They're good guys now, man. They kill Shiites for us now.

• 6:04:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 6:04:53Speaker 03

  They killed Serbs for us. We really liked it when they were helping kick in Serb skulls.

• 6:05:00Speaker 03

  Well, just to wrap that up, Obama launched a war. He waited a couple of months to try to push out Maliki, and then he launched Iraq War III to destroy the caliphate again. In this time, in this case, directly on the side of the Iranians, you had Iranians on the ground, Quds Force on the ground, running the Iraqi Shiite militias, fighting for Tikrit, liberating Tikrit from the Bin Ladenites with America flying air cover for them. At this time, John McCain complained, "We're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq, but we're flying as Iran's air force against the Bin Ladenite caliphate that McCain had helped build up to spite Iran for accepting our Christmas gift of fighting Iraq War II for them." So it was all John McCain's fault when he complained that. And then there's a

• 6:05:46Speaker 03

  guy named Michael Horton, no relation to me, but who is from the Jamestown Foundation and a terrorism expert. Says, "Yeah, John McCain complains that we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq. Well, we're flying as Al Qaeda's air force in Yemen, because this was at the time that Obama switched sides in the Yemen war, where America was giving intelligence to the Houthis." Wall Street Journal, January 2012, uh, 2015, and Al Monitor by Barbara Slavin from the Atlantic Council, uh, January 2015. "America's passing intelligence." Lloyd Austin, Obama's, I mean, pardon me, Biden's later Secretary of Defense, was the head of Central Command. "He's passing intelligence to the Shiite Houthis to use to kill Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,

• 6:06:26Speaker 03

  our enemies, the ones who tried to blow up the plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 with the Underpants bomb, the guys who, uh, did the horrific attacks in Nice and in Paris, France, the Charlie Hebdo and the Eagles of Death Metal concert. They attacked a kosher grocery store in, uh, France and a, uh, Jewish museum in Brussels. This was the first, I think, ISIS in Syria attack, uh, was at a Holocaust, uh, museum in, in Brussels. So that blowback was coming all, all the way, right away. But anyway, AQAP in Yemen, they were like real ass Al Qaeda guys, and they were coming for us.

• 6:07:07Speaker 03

  They weren't just like, oh, al-Shabaab in Syria, right? These guys were real enemies. And Obama's willing to turn right around. And because the new deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, wanted a promotion. He was the Defense Minister, he's a brand new, 29 years old, Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince. He wants to make a political move, so he launches a war in Yemen against the new Houthis regime with Obama's support. So that he can use that as a power play inside the royal family. This is when he arrests the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Naeef and Talal and all of those Saudi billionaires that got marginalized and arrested in there, all their property stolen at that time in a big move by MBS

• 6:07:52Speaker 03

  to make himself Crown Prince and de facto king, which he is right now. And he did that in alliance with Mohammed bin Zayed from UAE. And they convinced Obama to do it. And it was an absolutely genocidal war against the civilian population of Yemen that whole time. I'd hate to leave that out. I guess we have to skip Somalia for, let me say about Somalia real quick. It's the longest war in American history. George W. Bush sent JSOC there in December and CIA in December of 01, and they never left. We've been killing people in Somalia ever since then. And the first thing that they did was they took the bad guy warlord from Black Hawk down in 93. And they tried to put his son in power. They built up his son. You bring us the scalps of jihadis.

• 6:08:37Speaker 03

  And get this, according to the CIA talking to the Washington Post, this is their version. There were three, not 13, not 30, not 3,000, not 3, nothing, 3. Al Qaeda members, suspects, wanted for questioning by the FBI for their potential involvement in the USS Cole attack and the Africa Embassy's attack. That was the excuse for this intervention. The potential that there were three Bin Ladenites in Somalia. So America started backing the warlords against them. More people started, and whoever their other enemies were, right? Whatever they want to do. The more that they fight, the more they keep coming back to the CIA and saying, oh, man,

• 6:09:21Speaker 03

  you wouldn't believe how many enemies there are out there. And they make matters worse and worse. And this is at a time where people mock libertarians for noticing that without a government Somalia was thriving. They had come from communism. Then they had a civil war of 50 warlords versus each other, but everyone was spent and nobody won. And so they had essentially a stateless country, but it was more or less at peace. And no one was powerful enough to gangsterize everybody else. And so the ports at Kismejo and Mogadishu were open with no tariffs. And they had massive trade. And one of the best ways to measure economic growth at that time was in the expansion of the cellphone industry, which was more extensive in Somalia at that time than any other place in Eastern Africa.

• 6:10:05Speaker 03

  And this was under de facto accidental libertarian capitalist anarchism, right? With no one in charge and libertarians noticed that. And to this day, freaks and kooks and especially liberal democrats like to say, oh, if you like freedom so much, why don't you move to Somalia? Well, excuse me, but George W. Bush, you know, freedom himself has been destroying Somalia with the power of the most powerful regime in the history of the solar system this whole time since then. So only an American who knows nothing about America's responsibility for destroying that

• 6:10:44Speaker 03

  society could possibly be ignorant and idiot enough to blame libertarianism and freedom and liberty and capitalism and and free trade among property owners for what ails Somalia? USA. The regime is what ruins Somalia, our military, our CIA. And so by 2005, they formed their own little pseudo-government in response to American intervention and aggression called the Islamic Courts Union. W. Bush then hired the Ethiopians to invade, to crush them, their historical Christian enemies against this Muslim society and hired Ethiopia to invade.

• 6:11:26Speaker 03

  And they did, complete with mass rapes and torture and want and murder and just absolute war crimes. And That was what led to the rise of al-Shabaab. Al-Shabaab means the youth, or I've been told more accurately, the boys. And under the Islamic Courts Union, it was a group of 13 different groupings that came together. That's why it was a union. And, but who was in charge? The elders, the uncles, the imams, the grandfathers, the old men of the village were the ones who were in charge of dispute resolution going on, right? But now, once George Bush had Ethiopia invade, Christmas time 2006, well, guess who leads the insurgency? The boys.

• 6:12:09Speaker 03

  And that's why we've been fighting al-Shabaab in Somalia since 2006, because George W. Bush invented them with his horrific, satanic, demonic, murderous war that he waged there from 2001 through 2006. Then, self-licking ice cream cone, oh, look, we have a terrorist enemy we have to fight. In 2012, America kicked them out of Kismeya, or the Kenyans did with American support, kicked them out of the port city of Kismeya, where they had a black market charcoal operation going, financing their efforts. And when they did that, it was only then that they turned to the Saudis and accepted a sack of gold coins to declare themselves al-Qaeda.

• 6:12:51Speaker 03

  2012, 11 years after George Bush came to Somalia, he succeeded, he and his successor, Obama, succeeded in turning them into Bin Ladenites. Only then, the Americans killed the worst leader of the Bin Ladenite faction, a guy named Godain. They killed him in 2012 or 13. Oh, I should have mentioned that the guys they overthrew in Bush's last year in power, Condoleezza Rice made a deal with them, that they can actually be the government of Somalia after all. Never mind our giant war against the Islamic Courts Union. You can be the president, a guy named Sharif. You can be the president after all, but it has to be in the form of our transitional federal government that we've built for you.

• 6:13:33Speaker 03

  So, once those guys, their original enemies, that they waged this whole war to thwart, once they went ahead and accepted them and empowered them, al-Shabaab said, "You guys are traitors and sellouts," and kept fighting. And, by the way, Obama murdered men, women, and children with drones. He had our nuclear submarines firing cruise missiles at thatched huts full of women and their daughters. Okay? That's what Barack Obama did, made that thing nothing but worse and worse and worse the whole time he was in there. When Donald Trump came in... This is according to James Mattis. He complained to James Mattis, his Secretary of Defense, and said, "I want out of Somalia. Why are we in Somalia? Where's Somalia? What do I care about Somalia? Get me out of there."

• 6:14:16Speaker 03

  And Mattis said two things. One, we're trying to prevent a Times Square attack type attack. Well, the thing about that is, the Times Square attack was committed by a Pakistani-American named Faisal Shazad, who was living the dream, man. He had an advanced degree. He had a nice house and a wife and a kid and a car and was doing fine. And then he went home to Pakistan on vacation and he saw the results of one of Barack Obama's drone strikes that killed a family there. And he volunteered to sign up for the Pakistani Taliban that had never done anything to us. They had not targeted us at all. It was the first time that they did.

• 6:14:59Speaker 03

  They recruited him, taught him how to make a bomb, and then he went to Times Square and tried to kill a bunch of innocent people on, I think it was a Friday night or a Thursday night there. And luckily, his bomb was just a dud and didn't kill people. So James Mattis is causing Times Square attacks. He's not preventing them. And then secondly, again, this is Mattis told The Post that he told Trump, "You have no choice." And that Trump said, "Okay." And then not only that, because this was his policy was, you know, the myth that America only lost Vietnam because Lyndon Johnson tied one arm behind the military's back and wouldn't let the generals do the job because he's poring over the maps all day and, and penny pinching and micromanaging the war effort. Well, that's been a big myth. H.W. Bush said, "I ain't doing that.

• 6:15:44Speaker 03

  General Sworchkov, you do what you gotta do. I'm not..." Right? Donald Trump said the same thing. "Nobody's ever gonna accuse me of micromanaging the military and preventing them from accomplishing their goals." So to that end, from the moment he took power in 17, he devolved decision-making authority as low down the chain of command as he possibly could, cut out all of Obama's lawyers and whatever who were in the way and second guessing. And, um...

• 6:16:13Speaker 03

  And so he devolved command responsibility. Oh, and then he also changed the rules of engagement to make, uh, to re-categorize these sort of pseudo war zones like Somalia and Yemen into full-scale active war zones where now the rules are less. And essentially, he told James Mattis, you do everything that you can and want to do within the law. That's it. You go as far as you possibly can on everything.

• 6:16:39Lex Fridman?

  He empowered the military.

• 6:16:41Speaker 03

  He empowered the military greatly, especially when it came to fighting Bin Ladenites. I don't ever want to hear somebody say that I didn't kill enough people in Somalia, and that's why it didn't work. I told James Mattis, you do whatever you got to do in Somalia. If they couldn't make it work, it still ain't my fault, right? That was the way that he played it. And that was the way he did the same thing in Afghanistan. He wanted out of Afghanistan from the moment he came in. Instead, he escalated the war for four years while he was negotiating with the Taliban, killed another extra couple of tens or hundreds of thousands of people even in a massive air and drone war, especially in Nangahar and in Helmand for, you know, almost his entire four years in power, um, during that.

• 6:17:21Lex Fridman?

  Can we take that tangent and talk about his second term, how that changed? And first, maybe a bathroom break?

• 6:17:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:17:28Lex Fridman?

  All right, we absolutely today must talk about Israel, Palestine, and the Iran war. But before that, can we, uh, wrap up Somalia and Iraq War III?

• 6:17:40Speaker 03

  Right. So, yeah, we'll get those out of the way real quick. Just to say about Somalia, it's been the status quo. I have no new information for you other than it's been the sock puppet government failing to quell the al-Shabaab-based insurgency this whole time. Bush bombed them, then Obama for eight each, then Trump for four, then Biden for four, and now Trump in his second term now has vastly increased the strikes. His counterterrorism guy Sebastian Gorka, who's an idiot and a hawk and couldn't tell you the difference between this or that, but he knows he wants to kill them all. And he's one of these, you know, Fox News blowhard, know-nothing idiots that Trump has hired and put in charge over there. And he's massively escalated the war against al-Shabaab. But of course, that means...

• 6:18:24Speaker 03

  Blasting men, women and children to tiny pieces with high explosives and that kind of thing. And in fact, at one point, Trump even sent regular troops there for training and then pulled them back out again, I believe in his first term. But this is something that Dave DeCamp does a really good job of covering this every day at antiwar.com. The ongoing war, it literally is America's longest war is against Somalia since December 2001 without stopping.

• 6:18:52Speaker 03

  And then on Iraq War III, again, Obama finally launched it after using the pressure and the threat of ISIS to force Maliki out temporarily. He's still not all the way gone. They replaced him with a guy named Al-Mati, who was from the Supreme Islamic Council. So again, take your pick, Dawa or scary.

• 6:19:11Speaker 03

  And then he launched the war in 2014. It was a brutal war, special operations forces on the ground, mostly guiding air power to targets. They absolutely just decimated the cities that they liberated, including to create Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah, especially Mosul.

• 6:19:30Speaker 03

  Killed, you know, another many tens of thousands of people to destroy the caliphate that they had built. And when I say Iraq War III, that includes eastern Syria as well, because they ended up going to Raqqa, which was the capital. We call it eastern Syria, it's really sort of north central Syria, but it's relatively east and where most of the rest of the east is empty desert out there.

• 6:19:51Lex Fridman?

  Can you actually break down Iraq War I, II, III, 3.5? Exactly where you're dealing in the hit.

• 6:19:58Speaker 03

  So Iraq War I is Operation Yellow Ribbon, Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, 1991, January through February, 1991. Iraq War I and a half is from the end of that all the way through W. Bush. That's Bill Clinton bombing them on average every other day for eight years straight.

• 6:20:19Speaker 03

  That's Iraq War one and a half. Then W. Bush comes in and he and the neoconservatives lie us into Iraq War Two. And that's the war that we fought through 2008 slash 11. The worst of the fighting was over by the end of 08. We'd won the war for our adversaries by then and then stayed and finally left by the end of 2011. Then we're gone for about two years, although, as I said, CIA was still doing drone strikes there. So we really hadn't stopped bombing Iraq that whole time. And then they build up the caliphate and launch Iraq War Three in August of 2014, which ends at the end essentially of Trump's first year in power, 2017.

• 6:21:01Speaker 03

  Maybe into the beginning of 2018 is when they wrap up Iraq War Three. And now is what I would call Iraq War Three and a half, which is America again embedded with the Shiite army, hunting down and killing the last of the Bin Ladenite Sunni insurgency, which still pops its head up from time to time here and there. But of course, it puts us, our guys, right in range of Shiite militias that operate sometimes independently and sometimes under the control, although maybe deniable control of Iran and groups like Khatib al Hezbollah, which is very closely linked to the Badawi Brigade. I say all, it's just Khatib Hezbollah. But they're very similar to the Badawi Brigade.

• 6:21:46Speaker 03

  Essentially adjuncts of the official army, Shiite militias. They call them the PMUs, the Popular Mobilization Units. Once ISIS came to Western Iraq, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called on all Shiites to rise up and defend, you know, the new Iraqi Shia stand from them and all that. So that's where the PMUs, you know, really came into existence. And then, of course, they have their own incentive structures going on and are probably pretty close in relative power to the official Iraqi army itself at this point. And are very much under, I don't know, complete control, but are very close to the Iranian Quds Force Revolutionary Guard. So.

• 6:22:29Speaker 03

  I think you would say that Iraq War III and a half is what continues to this day. The worry is that it'll turn into Iraq War IV and we're going to end up turning around again and fighting against the Shiites that we fought Iraq War II and III for.

• 6:22:43Lex Fridman?

  In connection to what's going on.

• 6:22:45Speaker 03

  In alliance with Israel against Iran and their friends.

• 6:22:47Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 6:22:48Speaker 03

  That's the danger. That's what if we get to Iraq War IV, it would be that.

• 6:22:56Lex Fridman?

  We started talking about Iran and then you went to Somalia because we had to cover Somalia. And then I guess because we were both just focused and a little bit exhausted, forgot to talk about Iran. So Scott, one of the amazing things about you is that you said, why don't we just continue today? And you came back.

• 6:23:17Lex Fridman?

  Let's do this. Let's talk about the war in Iran.

• 6:23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:23:20Lex Fridman?

  What's the right way to?

• 6:23:21Speaker 01

  Punch it in.

• 6:23:22Lex Fridman?

  Well, punch it in.

• 6:23:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here's the question that you asked me that I never answered, which was, well, so what is with Israel's hyper focus on Iran then anyway? Like this obsession at this point. So as we talked about, it's kind of a distraction for Rabin in the first place. And then, you know, the Likud took Rabin's same demonization of Iran, but without the compromise with the Palestinians part, right? And that was the Netanyahu doctrine. And I always thought, well, not always, but you know, it was an issue that potentially it seemed to make more sense for Netanyahu to not really seek regime change in Iran, to hawk it up against them, you know, at all times, keep tensions high.

• 6:24:03Speaker 01

  But isn't Iran the basis of trying to rally all the Gulf states to come and be partners with Israel now? That like, come on, we have to have a united front against the Persians, especially since Netanyahu's men in America convinced George W. Bush to go to Baghdad and put Iran's best friends in power there. And in fact, We didn't talk all about the mechanics of the thing, but we did talk a little bit about the Yemen war. It was blowback from Obama's CIA anti Al Qaeda war that through a few complicated steps, as I outline in the book, led to the rise of the Houthis coming and taking over the, who are Shiite group from the north of Yemen, coming, taking over the capital city of Sanaa in 2015. As I said, America was backing them for a little while

• 6:24:46Speaker 01

  against Al Qaeda before Obama stabbed them in the back and took Saudi and Al Qaeda's side against the Houthis. But this is another example of the increase supposedly of Iranian power, although the Houthis are not nearly as close to Iran as say, for example Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, who you could, I think fairly characterize as Iran's 51st state, right? Where in the case of the Houthis in Yemen, that's pretty exaggerated most of the time. And they were under total blockade. So all the propaganda about Iran shipping them all these weapons was exaggerated. But anyway, so the Iranian Shiite crescent has been empowered by American foreign policy. And by the way, until last December, we talked about the caliphate and the war with Iran against the caliphate, right? Iraq war three

• 6:25:29Speaker 01

  to destroy it again. But then in Syria, that left Assad far more dependent on Iran than ever before, and more dependent on Hezbollah than ever before. So you could fairly characterize the dirty war of the Obama years in Syria as having fully backfired and not really accomplished anything. That is up until last November, December, when Al Qaeda broke out of the Idlib province and sacked Damascus. That was a major score for the Sunni side against the Shiites. By the Sunni side, I mean America and Al Qaeda and Israel and Turkey and Saudi and friends, right? So as I say, it made sense for Netanyahu to have an enemy in Iran to rally the Sunni Arab

• 6:26:13Speaker 01

  states against. On the other hand, hey, man, we're getting rid of the, from the point of view of Likud here, we're getting rid of the Palestinians, at least of the Gaza Strip. West Bank is next. We got Hezbollah completely crippled. Their charismatic leader Nasrallah dead. We got Assad overthrown and replaced with friendly Bin Ladenites in Syria. Of course, the Shiites still control Baghdad. There ain't no reverse in that. But Israel is essentially, you know, winning in many ways in the war over there, at least in the short term. And so, just like I was saying about Netanyahu's speech before the UN, that this is the new Middle East, basically, I won.

• 6:26:54Speaker 01

  The Netanyahu doctrine is, we get everything we want and without compromising with the Palestinians. And then, the last major enemy player on the board is Iran. And apparently, they thought, you know what? Like, having an incentive for these Sunni kings to be friends of ours is one thing, but actually just going ahead and getting rid of them? And turning Iran into something like the chaos in Syria, where there's no central state in Iran anymore at all? And it's all just baluki jihadis blowing up suicide bombs? And, and, you know, Kurdish leftists and whatever going on, you know, tearing the country apart is, you know, like the Oded Yinon Plan? Which, I guess I'll explain that. There's a, it's really funny, man. If you read this, it's, it's so ridiculous.

• 6:27:39Speaker 01

  Uh, it's O-D-E-D-Y-I-N-O-N. Oded Yinon. There you go, Yinon Plan. So, what it is?

• 6:27:50Lex Fridman?

  The Yinon Plan is an article published in February 1982 in the Hebrew journal Kiwo Nim, entitled "The Strategy for Israel in the 1980s." This article was penned by Oded Yinon, reputedly a former advisor of Ariane Sharon, a former senior official with the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

• 6:28:11Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. So, here's what the thing says. It says, "Oh no, the Soviet communists are sure to finish conquering the entire world real soon. And poor little Israel will stand alone against the one world communist state." Which, of course, is exactly how it worked out, right? Said the Soviets were gone by the end of the decade. They didn't exist at all anymore. But that's like premise one. The Soviets are gonna conquer everything, and poor little Israel's gonna be all alone. So, the only way we can secure our existence now will be to smash every Arab state into warring tribes. Where the worst armed enemy we have is a kook shaking a rifle over his head, right? And, and warring tribes by religious and, and, um, whatever ethnic sectarian divisions that they can help to engineer. To keep everybody else just completely divided and weak.

• 6:28:56Speaker 01

  There's no point in being friends with anyone. Let's just be way more powerful than everyone because that's the darkness of the world we face now. Even though the premise is false, that, you know, still was the policy. Along the lines of the clean break too, where it's a piece through overwhelming strength rather than friendly and decent relations with the neighboring states. So anyway, um, like what's going on in Syria now is like, is there even really any such thing as Syria now? The Turks have a big, you know, chunk in the north. The Israelis are already taking a major chunk in the south, including uh, Mount Herman or Hernan. I always say it wrong, uh, right outside of Damascus.

• 6:29:36Speaker 01

  And um, and then you got Bin Ladenites, like what kind of real state can they make there? It's gonna be, you know, just this guy Jolani has been to CIA finishing school, right? He clearly is like, or he's under control of the Turks to a degree and has stopped chopping off heads and doing suicide attacks and bad public relations like that. But there's still a bunch of Bin Ladenite kooks. And if he's really that tame, his own men are getting, get rid of him soon enough anyway.

• 6:30:02Speaker 01

  So uh, so you see like, you know, in, in far eastern, northeastern Syria, you have the Kurds under the protection sort of kind of the Americans.

• 6:30:12Speaker 01

  But then so are their enemies, the Turks. Uh, and then you have, you know, the, the um, Allahites in the far west of the country who've been, you know, massacred in the thousands. And you have Christians who are at least threatened that, you know, their, their uh, civil status has changed under the new jihadi regime. There's uh, fighting um, between the jihadis and the Druze where people are being lined up and shot and all this. So in other words, like there is no Syria, which is perfectly good with Israel, right? They're like, if they could do the same thing, I guess Jordan and Egypt are tame enough, but they, if they could just wreck every state in the region, I think, uh, well, that would be according to the Oded Yanon plan. And I think that may have been their plan for Iran.

• 6:30:55Speaker 01

  Now, Lex, they tweet out pictures and I forget, I'm sorry, which official it was. If it was the defense minister? I think it was the Defense Minister of Israel tweeted out a picture of him with the son of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, or the grandson of the older Shah Reza Pahlavi, senior there, as though like the plan was, we're going to parachute this guy in when we launch this war, it's going to be a regime change war. And the Washington Post had a piece that said the Israelis sent messages to all the leading generals and told them, if you don't rise up and overthrow the Ayatollah right now, we're going to kill your families. And then they are hitting all these regime targets, including police stations and all this kind

• 6:31:37Speaker 01

  of stuff, command and control systems in the military, where the idea apparently was, they hoped to get a regime change. They hoped that it would be enough to weaken the government and that some force would come to power, which shows that probably they're delusional and listening to kooks, you know, telling them that things like parachuting a monarch back into Persia could possibly work to be, you know, a full-scale regime change. They knew, we know that they knew, of course, that they would need America to finish the war against the nuclear program, which they actually didn't, but at least it would take America to hit Natanz and Forto, these deeply buried nuclear centrifuge facilities. So whether they really hoped that they could get the United States to go all the way and follow

• 6:32:20Speaker 01

  through with a regime change, hunt down and kill the Ayatollah, I mean, there was a news story that Donald Trump told the Israelis, don't kill the Ayatollah. Like, we all know where he is, but don't do it. They claimed that. I don't know that that's true, but that was one of the stories that they put out anyway, was that America had made its explicit choice to preserve the regime. Although, if you just kill the Ayatollah, that doesn't necessarily destroy the government, right? Somebody killed our president, that doesn't mean the whole government falls, right? The Congress is still going to convene and they're going to, whatever, have a new guy, whatever.

• 6:32:48Lex Fridman?

  Well, didn't Trump explicitly post, don't kill the Ayatollah? I think he said, we know where he is.

• 6:32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he threatened him, but I think they also put out a story saying that he told the Israelis not to kill him. But I think, I think both things are right there. So, but then, the point being that, to get a real regime change in Tehran means a real war in Iran. And air dominance is one thing, but boots on the ground, standing around in Tehran, telling mullahs that they cannot convene anymore, or whatever, is a whole different ballgame, right? And it's a thing that, for all the talk of war with Iran over all of these, you know, last two decades at least, nobody's talked about, we're gonna send in some kind of occupation force or do anything like that. But so, that's always been a big part of the argument against the war, is that you start the war, you don't really

• 6:33:35Speaker 01

  have a way to finish it. Right? Because, that's as we've already seen, contrary to Trump's claims, they did not completely obliterate their centrifuge capacity. Now, they seem to have inflicted some pretty heavy damage on Fordo and/or Natanz, although there are conflicting reports, and some say that Natanz was less damaged than might have been. They did destroy importantly, the conversion facility at Isfahan, and that's where you can take uranium metal, after you refine the ore, then you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas. That's what you spin in the centrifuge cascades. Then, you convert it back into metal. So without that facility, you either have a bunch of gas, or you have a bunch of metal

• 6:34:17Speaker 01

  that you can't enrich to another state, you know, to a higher state. So, or if you have a bunch of gas, you can't convert it back into metal. So without that facility, they have a setback. But I don't think all their, all their facilities are destroyed, and they've already announced that they're not, and that they still reserve the right to enrich uranium, and that they're going to, and that they're not even gonna talk with us anymore until we recognize their right to enrich uranium, although they do, and I'm not saying that this is true, I don't know that this is true, but I'm saying, it is true that they've said this, that they are still bound by the Ayatollahs Fatwa of 2003, that bans, you know, reiterating the previous Ayatollahs Fatwa, that bans the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. So they are declaring that they have not broken out to a nuke.

• 6:35:01Speaker 01

  Are are calling their bluff, which again, it was always an implied bluff. They never explicitly said, don't you bomb us or we'll make nukes. But that seemed to be the the implied threat that they're they're a threshold state. They have a latent deterrent. Well, what happens if you bomb them? Well, now we'll make nukes was always the implied threat. Well, now they're saying, no. And that could be that just because America inflicted so much damage on their thing that they they it's going to take them a while to get up and running enough to even make a credible breakout. I don't know. It could also be that the Ayatollah has just said, no. The principle of our sovereign right to enrich uranium and have a nuclear program for peaceful purposes is the only thing that we're insisting on. And we really, just like we always said, don't want nukes anyway. And but now that Trump, one more thing.

• 6:35:46Speaker 01

  Now that Trump has accepted Netanyahu's definition of any nuclear program is a nuclear weapons program.

• 6:35:54Speaker 01

  Well, then if they keep enriching, then we keep bombing. And Trump has explicitly threatened that. Right? So we're just on this ladder. They're not going to give up enrichment. And Trump is apparently so far never going to back down on enrichment, which W. Bush and Obama had done like, ah, what are you going to do? They're never going to give up enrichment. If we're going to be reasonable and get a deal, we are going to have to recognize their right to enrich, which is actually in the non proliferation treaty there, you know, which they have signed, which is America's treaty.

• 6:36:26Lex Fridman?

  Do you think the world is a more dangerous place if Iran gets a nuclear weapon?

• 6:36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't want anybody having nukes. I hate to see the proliferation. I mean, in a way, nuclear weapons seem to make states more responsible a lot of times. But you can't really count on that, right? You can say, yeah, they keep the peace. They do keep the peace. Major powers don't want to fight with hydrogen bombs. Come on, it's insane. It's beyond insane. It's unthinkable. On the other hand, it's a great bluff until it fails. And if it fails, then you're talking about devastation beyond imagination.

• 6:36:59Lex Fridman?

  Is it surprising to you, sorry to once again zoom out on human nature, that the mutual shared destruction has worked?

• 6:37:06Speaker 01

  Up to this point, seemingly effectively. It's just a blink of an eye, right? And the Soviets got nukes in forty six. Yeah. So. Meaning in the full arc of human history, it's a blink of an eye. That's right. Yeah, there's no. Yeah. There's no like real base of statistics to measure from, right? It's been a few decades. Think of it like this. If I say to you, look, man, here's how international security is going to work for the next two hundred and seventy five years. Okay. All the major powers are going to have hydrogen bombs and they're all going to hold them at each other's capital cities heads in a Mexican standoff permanently. It's gonna be great. And that's how we're gonna go forward for the next, I don't know, ten generations.

• 6:37:49Speaker 01

  No. It couldn't possibly work, could it? We're all gonna die at some point if that's the setup. And I'm not advocating for a global state here. I'm perfectly against that, better than anybody. But I'm just saying, there's gotta be a better way than the permanent H-bomb Mexican standoff. And I'm not advocating for unilateral disarmament and surrender. But I am advocating for multilateral disarmament. And Ronald Reagan thought we could. Not Walter Mondale. Ronald Reagan went to Ryakhovik in eighty six and he was a hair away from making a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. This is three years before the wall came down in Berlin, okay? They didn't know that the Soviet Union was about to cease. And hell, Soviet Union didn't cease to exist again until the end of ninety one. They didn't know.

• 6:38:34Speaker 01

  Ronald Reagan didn't know this is the end of the Soviet Union. He knew it was the end of the Cold War. Him and Gorbachev were in the Cold War. And Reagan believed at that point, to some degree or another, I can't speak exactly, but they reportedly believed he was on a mission from God that he had the, like, destiny granted to him, mandated to him to abolish nuclear weapons from the face of the earth. And he was a hair away from making that deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. And the tragedy of it is that the deal fell apart because of the completely fantastic and ridiculous promise of the Star Wars Shield program, where they were going to have lasers in space to shoot down all incoming ICBMs and all this. And we're talking nineteen eighty six technology, right? This is a joke. There's no way in the world they're gonna do that. It would have cost.

• 6:39:19Speaker 01

  You know, however many trillions we didn't have and never worked anyway. And Reagan said, well, I promised the American people that I would build one. But the whole thing is, man, if we're getting rid of all the nuclear missiles, then you don't need one anyway. So it's okay. And then, by the way, they were not counting on a magic wish to implement it either. The plan always was going to be America and Soviet Union would try to get our nuclear stockpiles down to roughly rough parity with the other nuclear weapons states at that time. France, Britain, Israel, and China, India, Pakistan didn't have nukes yet. South Africa only had a few before they gave them up. And then, once we got down to about two or 300 each, then we see if we get down to 100 each. Then we see if we get down to 50 each. Then we see if we can get down to 10, right?

• 6:40:01Speaker 01

  So it was not like, oh, Ronald Reagan turned into Jane Fonda, the commie hippie sellout trader who wanted to just give away the store to the enemy. And all of a sudden became, you know, a naive believer in like fantasies coming true. It was all like a hard-headed realism that these machines are too dangerous to let politicians hold on to them over the long term. It's the same conclusion that William Perry and Henry Kissinger too, at the end of their lives. They formed a group called Global Zero. George Shultz as well, Reagan's Secretary of State, formed a group called Global Zero about saying, we have to got to get rid of these weapons. And William Perry, he had been Clinton's Secretary of Defense, who had opposed NATO expansion, almost resigned over it and should have. But he wrote a book about my life at the nuclear brink.

• 6:40:45Speaker 01

  And he wrote about like, you just don't understand about these machines, okay? Right? Talking about a hydrogen bomb. Like, you just can't imagine what it would be like to have Dallas wiped off the face of the earth. That level of devastation and and what that would mean for the survivors and the rest. And having all of our cities wiped off the face of the earth in an afternoon like that. Everything our ancestors have built for 3,000 years destroyed over. Nothing could possibly be worth it. Nothing could be.

• 6:41:11Lex Fridman?

  There's so many difficult questions here. Do you think the world is stable and smart enough to deal?

• 6:41:20Lex Fridman?

  With a situation where somebody drops one nuclear weapon.

• 6:41:25Speaker 01

  I don't, that's the worry, right? And from all the war games, once the nukes start going off, they keep going off. We can't let them nuke us without nuking them back. We have to do something, sir. And then it just keeps going and going. The Americans claimed that the Russians, and I don't know the truth to this, could be true, that the Russians have a doctrine of escalate to de-escalate. I think they denied it, but in other words, they'll go ahead and drop a nuke first and say, see, that's how angry we are. You guys better back down. And the Americans immediately ran a war game and publicly leaked it and said, if the Russians ever try to do that escalate to de-escalate stuff, no, we will nuke Belarus. And we'll say, oh, no, we're the ones who are loco. Don't you mess with us. We are escalating to de-escalate. Now you back

• 6:42:08Speaker 01

  down. So you see, then we all die by 7:30, right?

• 6:42:13Lex Fridman?

  Is there a number, again, a difficult question. Is there a number of warheads that's low enough to where, as you said, bring it down from 100 to 50 to 10?

• 6:42:23Speaker 01

  I don't know. I did have a fun conversation with Tom and Lyle Goldstein, who's this brilliant, all kinds of nuclear war planner and defense analyst. He used to be at the Naval War College. And I was saying, but come on, Lyle, like, what if we just got them down to like, a few low kiloton type bombs or whatever? And he's going, yeah, no, we don't want to do that because that makes it really much more thinkable and usable. What you want to do is have at least a certain minimum number of multi-megaton city killer bombs, so that the capital cities remain in jeopardy because that is the counter incentive to the politicians going that far. You need, forget the tactical, you need the strategic nukes to prevent war, right? And so all that makes sense if you're a certain kind of egghead, but I'm just saying,

• 6:43:08Speaker 01

  man, I don't know, even the bombs that they hit Japan with are nothing compared to the super, as they called it then, the hydrogen fusion bombs, where you're talking high kilotons or low megatons.

• 6:43:23Lex Fridman?

  I was wondering if you can comment on some of the interesting interviews that there are in Hotter Than the Sun, another one of your books, Hotter Than the Sun, Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. It is a book by Scott Horton that features over a decade of interviews with a wide array of experts on this very topic, on the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, the nuclear arms industrial complex, and the history of politics and future risks surrounding nuclear proliferation.

• 6:43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:43:49Lex Fridman?

  Is there any, some interesting interviews you remember, like insights?

• 6:43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, the funny story about that is, a friend of mine just came to me and goes, "Look what I did," and he sends me a PDF of transcripts of all these interviews I've done about nuclear weapons over 20 years. I didn't even ask him to do it or anything, he just came to me.

• 6:44:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 6:44:06Speaker 01

  And then, so I was like, "Okay, well, I'm gonna delete a couple of these and I'm gonna add a couple more," and then we just kind of shipshaped it. I stopped writing Provoked for a minute to get this out in '22.

• 6:44:15Lex Fridman?

  But when you like, look that as a piece of work, the transcripts?

• 6:44:19Speaker 01

  It's really-

• 6:44:19Lex Fridman?

  Because sometimes, it's like, you might be so busy thinking about the current thing and looking into the future, that you forget to look back at all the conversations you've had on this particular topic, and to sort of start to extract some deeper wisdom from it, you know?

• 6:44:34Speaker 01

  Well, the title of the book, you know, I'd already done, my first two books are Time to End the War in Afghanistan and Time to End the War on Terrorism. So this one's called Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which I think really puts people off, it makes it sound like, oh, just unilateral surrender to the ChiComs or whatever kind of thing, you know? But that's not really what the book is about, right? The book is essentially about all aspects of nuclear weapons. America and Russia's nuclear arsenals, past and present, North Korea, Israel, Iran, India and Pakistan, and, you know, all their different nuclear weapons programs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all of the anti-nuclear activists, including like, the nuns who break into naval bases and bang on ICBMs with a hammer and then go to prison for 10 years.

• 6:45:17Speaker 01

  And there's a whole, like, very proud tradition of essentially like, socialists, like the Catholic workers, who, the Barrigan family, you've probably heard of Father Barrigan, Daniel Barrigan, and I forgot his brother's name. And Frida's his daughter, and McAllister is his wife, the nun. And these guys-

• 6:45:43Speaker 01

  They go to prison all the time. Daniel and Philip, that's right. They're peace activists, you know, Frida is their daughter. She's a great one. And so I have, you know, all that kind of stuff. As I say, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why North Korea's nuclear weapons program is all George W. Bush's fault? Which you don't want to get me on that topic, probably. Although I could do it pretty quick, but we should do Iran first, at least before we forget.

• 6:46:06Lex Fridman?

  I mean, on Iran and in general.

• 6:46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:46:08Lex Fridman?

  What? What are the things in the American toolkit that should be used? To minimize the chance that states like Iran get a nuclear weapon in your future?

• 6:46:19Speaker 01

  We're approach mount.

• 6:46:22Speaker 01

  Just send whoever is the Secretary of State. Oh, God, Marco Rubio. Send somebody over there. And just be cool.

• 6:46:30Lex Fridman?

  Diplomacy.

• 6:46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had, look, as I said before. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexander Haag, they wanted to normalize relations with Iran in 1993. He said, we can do business with these people. Dick Cheney said, we do business with these people. You know, it's just the attitude. All you have to say is like, this is USA. We're number one. I ain't afraid to know Ayatollah. Like, we have all the power. So you're telling me, even though we have all the power? We hold all the cards? There's nothing we can do to work it out with these people? Come on. We still hold a grudge over because they supported the groups that did the Beirut attack in 1983? Get out of here. Ronald Reagan was selling missiles a year, two years after that.

• 6:47:15Speaker 01

  Through the Israelis. So come on, you know, you can't, you're not allowed to, look, we, we helped Saddam Hussein gas their cities. Our, our aircraft carrier shot down one of their civilian airliners with almost 300 people on board. So should they forgive us for that? And so that we can move forward, yes, they should. That was a stupid thing that some idiots did, but that was a long time ago. And we, we have to live on this planet together. So what are we gonna do? You put those things behind us and you move on. This is business, man. And so that's what you do. You just ignore the Israel lobby and you just put Trump on a plane to Tehran. Look here, Ayatollah. I was talking with my guys and we figured out this is what we could probably agree on. And here the issue is still outstanding and let's figure it out.

• 6:47:59Speaker 01

  And by the way, this is how Nixon and Kissinger did Mao. They went over there and they agreed to be friends first. Then they worked on all the stipulations.

• 6:48:08Lex Fridman?

  And we should say, so the idea here is basically talk to everyone, but trust no one.

• 6:48:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 6:48:14Lex Fridman?

  And so when we say friends, we mean basic courtesy and diplomacy.

• 6:48:19Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 6:48:20Lex Fridman?

  But don't, doesn't mean you trust the person.

• 6:48:22Speaker 01

  Think about the phrase, Ronald Reagan's phrase, trust but verify. Well, what does that mean?

• 6:48:26Lex Fridman?

  Don't trust.

• 6:48:27Speaker 01

  It doesn't mean anything. It means don't trust. It means be polite and verify. That's what it means, right? It means pretend like you're trusting because that's how you get along in the world. But what, but you verify. You send your inspectors to make sure, that's all. And you have an agreement to do so and it's fine. And so, and quite honestly, like, look, man, the Ayatollah, if he wanted to secretly try to break out and enrich up to weapons grade and make a nuclear weapon, he could have. You know, I'm sure you've heard this propaganda numerous places on TV. Marco Rubio said this numerous times. Mike Baker is a regular podcast guest around here somewhere and was saying this kind of thing a week ago or so, that, look, Iran had 60% enriched uranium.

• 6:49:11Speaker 01

  Get it? Like, that's on its way to weapons grade. That would be easier to enrich to weapons grade. But this, you see, there's, they don't go anywhere with it. It's all just a non sequitur, doesn't mean anything. Marco Rubio goes, the only countries with 60% enriched uranium 235 are countries with nuclear weapons. You see how that doesn't mean anything? You can't make a nuclear weapon with 60% enriched uranium. So what was the point of them making 60% enriched uranium? It was so they had leverage in the negotiations that they were in the middle in, so they can negotiate it away. They did the same thing in the Obama years when they were working on getting into the JCPOA. And it was America that broke the deal, not them. And

• 6:49:54Speaker 01

  Then it says in the deal that if America starts breaking the deal, then Iran can stop abiding by some of the stipulations in it without actually leaving the deal. And without being in violation of the deal, they would just be stop abiding by some of the stipulations. Then in December of 2020, the Israelis killed the top nuclear scientist over there, Fakhrizadeh, in a machine gun ambush thing. And then in April of 21, they did a sabotage attack at Natanz, which they took credit for. Okay, and it was in reaction to that was when the Iranians started enriching up to 60%. Now, at this point in the story, Mike Baker goes, this is something, something, yada, yada, yada, and can't finish the statement.

• 6:50:39Speaker 01

  What does it mean that they have 60% uranium? What are they doing with it? Yes, it's true that if they turned it back into a gas and enriched it all the way up to 90%, then they would have enriched, you know, weapons-grade uranium. But they're not doing that, and they weren't doing that. And so why try to frame it as a dangerous threat? The only reason they were enriching it up is because, of course, it is closer to weapons-grade. They're demonstrating that like, hey, guys, you keep assassinating our guys and sabotaging our plants. We keep, it's, it's counterproductive for you, isn't it? We keep enriching to a higher and higher degree. If you want us to stop doing that, you need to engage in diplomacy instead of murder and sabotage. That was the message that they're sending.

• 6:51:22Speaker 01

  And then, of course, they're just going to ship all the uranium to Russia or to France, probably, I guess, the Russians, to dilute it down back into, you know, to a lower grade to burn in their civilian reactor. And so

• 6:51:39Speaker 01

  there, this whole time, they have not broken out to make a nuclear weapon. Now, the North Koreans did. George Bush, well, I'll tell you real quick, this is a quick little thing. In 2002, George Bush put them in the Axis. Well, first of all, Bill Clinton had an agreement with them. It's called the Agreed Framework of 1994 that said that If you leave your heavy water reactor off at Yongbyon that the Soviets had built for them, you leave it off, we will build you two light water reactors that cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium as waste, and we'll give you a bunch of fuel oil and a bunch of welfare. If you stay in the NPT, don't enrich to, they didn't have an enrichment program at all. Stay in the NPT, keep the inspectors in the country, leave your reactor

• 6:52:22Speaker 01

  off, and we'll do these things for you. Now, America never lived up to their end of the deal. Newt Gingrich would let Bill Clinton live up to his end of the deal in the 90s. It was actually Donald Rumsfeld's company that got the contract to build the light water reactors and never delivered them. And then they delivered some of the fuel oil, but very little of it. But still, the North Koreans stayed in their side of the deal until W. Bush came to town, and W. Bush, first of all, put them in the axis of evil. And then in the fall of 2002, John Bolton accused them of admitting, supposedly, although not on camera or on audio anywhere, but supposedly a guy admitted at a cocktail party that they had a secret uranium enrichment program. Well, if they did, that's not necessarily

• 6:53:03Speaker 01

  a violation of the NPT, or their safeguards agreement, or of the agreed framework. Again, a civilian enrichment program is protected under the NPT as long as you're not making weapons out of it in violation of the deal, right? So even if they were doing that, that's a cause to sit back down at a table. That's not a cause to break the deal. But what did Bush do? Him and Bolton, they tore up the agreed framework, officially announced that it's dead. Then they added new sanctions. Then they announced something called the proliferation security initiative, which was their claim to have the right to seize any North Korean ship on the high seas in order to prevent proliferation, which is nothing in international law allowing that, but they just claimed it unilaterally. And then in December of 02, they put them in the nuclear pause to review on the short list

• 6:53:44Speaker 01

  for a potential nuclear first strike. And it was only then that Kim Jong-il said, "Fine, screw you guys," and announced he was going to withdraw from the treaty, kick the inspectors out of the country, and they started making nuclear weapons. Now, you might ask, "What the hell were they doing?" And I think the answer is, they thought they would have a chance to go to war with North Korea before they were able to complete their bombs. Problem is, Iraq didn't go like Ahmed Chalabi promised it would go. And so they were in no position whatsoever to go to North Korea. So they forced them out of the deal, pushed Bush to nukes. That was the great, the last article that the great Gordon Prather wrote for us at antiwar.com. It was called "How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes." And it tells this whole story. Rest in peace, my friend Gordon. He was a great one, man.

• 6:54:28Lex Fridman?

  How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes by Gordon Prather.

• 6:54:33Speaker 01

  So the Ayatollah said, no, no, man, hands up. Don't shoot. Here's my books. Yes, I'm enriching uranium, and I know you don't want me to. He bought some material, some equipment to do it off the black market, but only because Bill Clinton denied the Chinese the right to just sell them a light water reactor, prevented them from doing so when that would have been fine. If you just let the Chinese sell them a light water reactor, they would have never had a heavy water one, you know? Well, in fact, one more thing about North Korea. Donald Trump proved that diplomacy works. He completely broke the ice with Kim the last time he was the president. It was John Bolton that sabotaged the thing. He brought John Bolton with him to, I forgot if it was Vietnam or Singapore, which meeting it was where Bolton sabotaged the thing.

• 6:55:13Speaker 01

  And the second meeting, he literally sent Bolton to outer Mongolia to keep him out of the way, but it wasn't enough. But if he had let Stephen Began, he was the guy who said, hey, we could take denuclearization off the table first and just work on normalization first and denuclearization later. That was always obviously the poison pill of the Bush and Obama people. First, give up all your nukes, then we'll begin to talk to you. Yeah, right. And so Stephen Began, who worked for Trump, was saying, no, we don't have to do it like that. We can work with them. He gave a speech like that. But then if you look at the pictures, Began's in the chair in the back by the wall and doesn't get to sit at the table, say nothing, or he's down further on the table, whatever it was, and didn't get to have a say. And so it was Bolton helped. It was the same guy, John Bolton,

• 6:55:57Speaker 01

  who Sheldon Adelson picked to be Donald Trump's national security advisor, was the one who ruined that. Anyway, on Iran, me and every other don't bomb Iran activist in America for two decades have been saying, if we attack them, then they're more likely to break out and make a nuke. So I have to stand on that, that yes, they are now more likely to break out and make a nuke than they were before because of the completely foreseeable fact that we can't pursue a regime change. We're only incentivizing them to arm themselves up worse. So now we're counting on like the cool, patient wisdom of the Ayatollah Khamenei to not be that crazy, when the whole point supposedly of this is that he's so crazy that you can't trust him with any nuclear technology at all, right?

• 6:56:42Speaker 01

  You can't trust him with the ability to enrich uranium up to weapons grade, whether he is or not. But now we gotta just rely on him and hope he doesn't. Because now he could, he just dig a deeper hole under a bigger mountain and try again.

• 6:56:55Lex Fridman?

  Do you think Trump should travel to Iran?

• 6:56:57Speaker 01

  I do. I absolutely think that Donald Trump could go straight to Tehran and then Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang and come home and be Trump the great. Said before, I'll say it again. And even with the Russia situations we talked about before, but I don't want to spoil it, but very difficult to solve.

• 6:57:14Lex Fridman?

  It's coming up.

• 6:57:15Speaker 01

  That's right. We're punching this in everybody, but it's very difficult to solve.

• 6:57:21Speaker 01

  But there's gotta be a way. And, and even if that's the hardest one, I think we could absolutely put away our problems with Iran and North Korea. No question. I don't really know exactly what we have outstanding with China, other than the potential of conflict over Taiwan. They're not really threatening our allies in Korea, Japan, or Australia, or anybody else. I don't, you know, really worry about that. That's not been their history. They got their own problems. And so very poor country in the West and all that. So I'm not so worried about the rise of China as some are, but.

• 6:57:58Lex Fridman?

  So go in and do diplomacy.

• 6:58:00Speaker 01

  Go in and do diplomacy. And that's Trump's whole thing. And look, you know, they say only Nixon can go to China. Well, why is that? Because if a Democrat did it, Nixon would call him a commie, right? Like you can't, it would be Nixon to, to, to stop it. But if Nixon goes, well, you know, it's not that he's a commie. Here he's shaking hands with Mao Zedong. Why would Henry, I mean, why, yeah, why would Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, of all people, shake hands with Mao? They did because they're smart, right? Not because they're communist, but because they were making what they thought was a wise move to benefit America's national interests at the expense of the Soviet Union. And if that means shaking the bloodiest hand in the history of the world, then business is business, right? Same thing as Ronald Reagan

• 6:58:41Speaker 01

  can end the Cold War with Mikhail Gorbachev. Imagine if Mondale had won in 84 and it was Walter Mondale that was trying to negotiate the end of the Cold War in front of the Republicans.

• 6:58:53Speaker 01

  You could imagine it going terribly, right? In a way totally different than having Reagan and his successor Bush handling it from the GOP side. And then same thing here, man. If, if Donald Trump just gets up there and goes, as he always does, right? I'm the tallest, richest, most handsome, most successful diplomat in the history of the world. Watch me. And then go out and make that the standard. Being a good diplomat is the measure of a man. I say so. And then go out there and act that way, then it is what he says it is, right? What the hell?

• 6:59:27Lex Fridman?

  And do the thing where you meet and then you pull him in with that handshake.

• 6:59:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get that handshake. You gotta appreciate the fact that the Republicans probably still, even though there's obviously a lot of resentment and a lot of bad feelings over all these years, but it comes down to it, a Republican president really says, come on, everybody, we gotta go fight them radical Islam's. He could probably get a lot of Republicans to go ahead. Oh, man, terrorism's a problem again. Remember Islam from before was the thing? And like, yeah, and go along with that. I think they could. And I think Donald, Donald Trump could simply just run on, I kill Muslims dead and I'm a big tough right winger, but he does not. He runs on, I'm the peace president. I'm the one who's trying to solve all this. I'm the one who's gonna make all this go away for you. He knows that's what we want to hear.

• 7:00:10Speaker 01

  And I think it's his, his basic bias, except of course he has, you know, Israel, the devil on his shoulder, making him, or, you know, strongly influencing him to choose the wrong thing a hell of a lot of the time. But I think that's his basic instinct is to wanna do that kind of stuff, you know?

• 7:00:28Lex Fridman?

  I don't think I've heard a politician talk about peace as much as him. Like legitimately, I mean, yeah, it's grounded in ego and narcissism and so on, that I'm the best dealmaker in the world.

• 7:00:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 7:00:40Lex Fridman?

  But fine.

• 7:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, let him have it. Yeah. Call it victory. I don't care. Call it whatever you want, dude.

• 7:00:46Lex Fridman?

  What it means to be a man is to go into the fire and make the best deals in the world.

• 7:00:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 7:00:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, fuck, yeah. That's America. That should be, because America has a gigantic stick and gigantic carrot. Fucking use it.

• 7:00:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and especially the carrot thing. That's my thing with North Korea is like, dude, we have everything to give. And nothing to lose. Like even when I described the Bill Clinton deal, we give them some fuel oil and some welfare. You know what? Like I'm a libertarian. I'm against all taxation, but all other things being equal, what's it to you Lex? We pay him a little bit of welfare to keep them from turning their heavy water reactor back on and harvesting plutonium out of the SOB. Okay. Now they're sitting on a couple of dozen nukes and it's all America's fault. So, you know, could have tried harder and better and not hire John Bolton to help. You know what I mean? These are decisions that men made. They could have gone the other way and they still could. You know, if you remember when Trump first came in, he was saying a lot of really

• 7:01:37Speaker 01

  cool stuff about, yeah, I'm gonna splat, I wanna sign a big new nuke treaty. I wanna slash the military budget. I wanna have a new treaty with Russia and China where we all slash our military budgets. He said, I don't want to pivot from the Middle East to great power competition. I want to get along with everybody. Let's all just get along and make money for the rest of the century. Like, yeah, dude, that is, you know, the, the lack of special interests talking, right? That's what Trump thinks before everybody gets to get in there and have their say about, no, sir, we gotta do this, that, and the other thing. But why have major power competition at all? Why have any of this stuff? Maybe we can just be a world of people owning

• 7:02:20Speaker 01

  property and exchanging it freely to, you know, uh, greater enhance our standard of living, you know?

• 7:02:27Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if you can comment, I forget if we already did about the treatment of the Iranian people by the Iranian regime.

• 7:02:35Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Uh, yes, you did start to ask that and I, this is where we went to.

• 7:02:40Lex Fridman?

  It was a good question.

• 7:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a good question. But hang on, let's do Samai real quick. Yeah. No, I'm sure it would suck to live in Tehran. You know what I mean? Or in Iran. I don't know. It's, I'm, I'm sure it's a police state. It's, on the face of it, it's an extremely flawed republic, the same as ours, only different in, you know, in different ways. Um, but I mean, the very worst things you can say about them in international diplomacy or international, you know, action lately is they keep opening up America's Christmas gifts, right? They keep accepting. I mean, if you want to blame them for sending Chalabi to lie to Pearl, you can, but I mean, essentially, they stay home and let America do their dirty work for them. You know, we fought three wars for them, two Iraq wars and Afghanistan.

• 7:03:26Speaker 01

  And and hell, helped empower their friends in Iran, in Yemen accidentally, you know, in in reaction form, but still. And so,

• 7:03:37Speaker 01

  you know, they're not the aggressive power that they're portrayed to be oftentimes. You know, even again, look at this current war where they fired all these rockets at an empty corner of a base again in Qatar. They called Donald Trump beforehand and let him know the rockets are coming. They fired exactly as many rockets as bombs America dropped 14. And remember, Trump tweeted, thanks for the heads up that you're shooting the rockets so we could shoot them all down. In other words, even after America hit them with our biggest conventional bombs, they still struck back only in a symbolic way and absolutely signaled they did not want to tangle with the USA at all. And this is after Trump warned them to evacuate Tehran, right? Which could have been a threat of a nuclear strike, or at least a carpet bombing campaign, or at least a very heavy bombing campaign against government

• 7:04:22Speaker 01

  targets, you know, civilian government and military government targets in the country, in the city. That, you know, is a pretty major threat. And the Ayatollah still is like, come on, man, I don't want to fight you. And and shoots his 14 little measly missiles as essentially a show only. And so, we're relying on that. This thing could have escalated, right? This war that Israel is dragging us into, it could have. What if they had shot 5,000 missiles at our bases in the Gulf? We'd be in the middle of a ugly as hell war right now. They'd had to, quote unquote, had, they'd have talked themselves into probably sending in ground troops to complete the regime change. Once it gets that bad. So that is a risk that they were taking. And thank goodness that cooler heads prevail.

• 7:05:06Speaker 01

  But it's kind of nuts that America has to rely on the supposedly mad mullahs to be cool while we're bombing them, right? In a way where if they escalate at all, we could escalate and and the thing could get way out of control very quickly. With America attempting to occupy a land, three or four times the size of Iraq, with mountains and four times the population and the rest.

• 7:05:29Lex Fridman?

  I was really worried. I think we got lucky. And I was really worried that this would be another forever war.

• 7:05:35Speaker 01

  It ain't over yet, man. That's the problem. Is they're just, they didn't solve it. They could have solved it at the table. They probably still could. But they're gonna have to recognize.

• 7:05:45Lex Fridman?

  Just go there. Just go to Ayatollah. Just speak with Ayatollah.

• 7:05:48Speaker 01

  But you know, like, I talked with Treda Parsi, and he's a great expert on this and has been preaching more or less the dove's side of the case here for a very long time. But he told me on the show the other day, he's like, I fully expect them to break out and make a nuke now. Hell, they kicked the inspectors out. Israel and America just gave them cause to kick the inspectors out of the country. They think the inspectors were spies, past intelligence to the planners for the war. So they kicked the inspectors out. So now we lost track of every last atom. We had it where I could sit here and tell you, man, the IAEA, for all their complaints about, oh, we found this little thing, and we found that little thing. Explain this, explain that. For all of their little nitpicking,

• 7:06:28Speaker 01

  they always continued to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose. Meaning, they knew where it all was. They had their scales, they had their sensors, they had their seals and their cameras, and they knew this much uranium is here today, it's there tomorrow, and whatever. They tracked it all around. And they could verify the non-diversion. That's the IAEA's job. Now that chain of evidence is broken. Now, like, we don't know exactly what they're enriching. We don't know how much exactly they've been able to convert and where they diverted it to and whatever, and what is happening now, essentially undercover darkness. So if they invite the inspectors back in and say, see our civilian program? At that point, they very well could have a secret, parallel weapons program that we don't know about.

• 7:07:14Speaker 01

  Now, that has not been the case this whole time. It very well could be the case going forward from the summer of 2025.

• 7:07:22Lex Fridman?

  So from this point on, you still think carrot is more effective than steak? So diplomacy versus threatening and military action? So here diplomacy is the only way out?

• 7:07:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and especially considering, like, I'm not saying that's like the magic trick of all foreign policy or whatever, although I'm just a non-interventionist anyway. But I'm just saying, as far as like solving this problem.

• 7:07:44Speaker 01

  The Ayatollah wasn't making nukes. There wasn't an emergency that we had to preempt. So yeah, of course diplomacy is the answer when he's sitting there saying, look, man, I have a civilian program and that's going to have to be good enough for you. Of course. Violence and threats are what has made it far more likely that they're now going to make nukes because the Israelis say for them to have nuclear technology at all is equivalent to them having an advanced weapons program, which is just really not true. And again, it's a problem that we can't solve for them without committing to a serious war effort that no war planners have talked about in this whole time. But again, that's the unreality of the whole thing. You can't solve it from the air, so don't start it.

• 7:08:28Speaker 01

  You're going to make matters worse, but you can't fix it with a B2. Even if you kill the Ayatollah and 10 of his best guys, you still didn't overthrow the government there. They got 20 more guys. What are you talking about? They just make a new guy, the Ayatollah and pull the old president out of retirement, put him up there. You know, so if you're insisting on regime change, it's going to take the third infantry division. Anybody signing up for that?

• 7:08:55Lex Fridman?

  And the thing I really, really deeply worry about is something you spoke about, which is the God forbid, the possibility of a bin Ladenite type character doing a terrorist attack in the United States. And then the machinery, the military industrial complex, creating propaganda that says Iran, somehow connecting Iran to it. And now we have to invade Iran. We, the American people, have to put feet on the ground and regime change and all of a sudden. But I think the American people, I mean, the wars in the Middle East have really taught the lesson, like, no.

• 7:09:29Speaker 01

  Depends on how quick it's forced on them, right? At this point. See, it took Bush a year and a half to license a war with Iraq. Obama just goes, yeah, we're going to war in Libya. And everyone's like, okay, whatever. Right?

• 7:09:40Lex Fridman?

  But war with Iran is another, I mean.

• 7:09:43Speaker 01

  Trump too. Trump didn't barely even light us into it. Right? His own government was saying, they're not making nukes. And he goes, I don't care what they say. I want to do it anyway. Israel says they are. And they just did, they barely even lied us into it. They just didn't wait. And then they go, well, see, that was over, short and sweet, time for peace. And then they call timeout. But again, it's not over yet.

• 7:10:05Lex Fridman?

  And then we got lucky because Iran did not respond.

• 7:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 7:10:08Lex Fridman?

  By escalating.

• 7:10:09Speaker 01

  And Trump claimed that he completely obliterated their program and total victory, which is not true. So where are we now? We're at the second half, you know?

• 7:10:19Lex Fridman?

  I mean, I was really worried because Iran was essentially humiliated. And when, when states like that, especially regimes like Iran's is humiliated, they don't usually like to be sort of calm and de-escalate.

• 7:10:33Speaker 01

  Right. In fact, especially if it's true that they're so fragile in their power, right? That this would make them even more desperate to show how tough they are.

• 7:10:42Lex Fridman?

  That's how you create terrorists.

• 7:10:43Speaker 01

  In fact, the headline today is Iran Demands Full Reparations For The War Before Talks. In other words, just exactly what you said, give us our pride and then we'll talk to you. Recognize enrichment and then we'll talk to you. In other words, we're going nowhere with talks right now until Donald Trump climbs way down on the ladder.

• 7:11:00Lex Fridman?

  And by the way, in diplomacy in general, on a basic human level, letting people have their pride, not humiliating them is essential. You know, doing things like labeling somebody as the axis of evil, you're signaling to your own people, maybe. But you're humiliating, you're deeply disrespecting the other side. Sometimes you have to like soften the communication in order to achieve, not trusting anybody, but in order to achieve ends.

• 7:11:28Speaker 01

  Right. And that was their whole point was to escalate conflict, right? And also think about the lie, you talk about signaling to the Americans. How's this for a lie? That Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah.

• 7:11:42Speaker 01

  And Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong Il are all in a big alliance against you to kill you, right? So Saddam and Ayatollah both hate each other more than any two men in the world. The Ayatollah probably doesn't think too much about Osama, but Saddam Hussein is clearly terrified of him. And none of them had a damn thing to do with Iran, pardon me, with North Korea, except that North Korea had shipped some missiles to Iran back in the day, but they had no tight alliance at that time. And they're mid-range missiles, not that big of a deal anyway. So access, nothing. But the point was, these are all people we want to pick a fight with, basically.

• 7:12:17Lex Fridman?

  What do you think? Do we cover Iran?

• 7:12:19Speaker 01

  I think we got it.

• 7:12:20Lex Fridman?

  I think we got it. Now, I forgot, and I wanted to thank you for signing all the books that you gave me with Lex for Peace. I think that's a beautiful way to sign it. A beautiful goal to live by.

• 7:12:31Speaker 01

  Hope you like it, man.

• 7:12:33Lex Fridman?

  All right, brother. And back to...

• 7:12:37Speaker 01

  Now, yesterday, again, more.

• 7:12:41Speaker 03

  Now, let's, let's go back to Iran and their nuclear program and the recent war in a minute, but you want to do Israel-Palestine. Okay, so it's a huge, long, complicated story. I really highly recommend Darryl Cooper's podcast, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. I know people say a lot of terrible things about Darryl Cooper, but none of them are true. And he's my partner on my podcast, Provoked, our new show. And the guy's a total sweetheart, man. He's not a hater of anyone. He's not a Holocaust denier. What happened was people misunderstood him when he was on the Tucker Carlson Show that day. In fact, he was making the opposite point of what people think. They thought that he was saying the Holocaust was just that the Nazis didn't have a good plan to feed all their prisoners. That's

• 7:13:25Speaker 03

  not what he was saying. What he was saying was that even if you were a Holocaust denier, you could not deny the fact that the Nazis were taking possession of millions of people that they had no plan to care for, and that, yes, in fact, a great many of them were starved to death and shot in this thing. And that if you were the worst, even you would have to admit that. That's what he was saying. But what happened was, a minute ago, he had just said he thought Churchill was worse than Hitler. And it was kind of tongue in cheek, but he was saying for various reasons that Churchill was the real villain of the war. And there's just a case to be made for the role that Churchill played in escalating that whole thing. But that aside...

• 7:14:07Speaker 03

  When they heard him say the thing about the feeding in the eastern, in Eastern Europe and the, the care for the prisoners, they misunderstood. And they thought that what he was doing is just spinning for the Third Reich at this point or whatever, when that was absolutely not the case whatsoever, dude. He's a really great guy. And if, and in fact, I'd ask anybody, listen to even just the very first section of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, and he demands that you put yourself, if you're going to listen to him, he doesn't just tell it as objectively as he can, he demands subjectivity from you and that you, the listener, put yourself in the shoes of the people that we're talking about here. Imagine if this was you. And the first thing that he describes, it sounds like a bunch of Israeli settlers coming

• 7:14:51Speaker 03

  to murder some Palestinians on the West Bank. But then you realize that, no, he's talking about Russians doing pogroms against Jews in Russia in the dawn of the Zionist movement in the early 20th century, late 18th century and into the 20th century. And he's talking about their victimhood and why they were so motivated to create this movement and get the hell out of there. It was the era of nationalism, but they had no place for their state of their own. So they wanted to move somewhere else and do it, whatever. He tells it from their point of view as much as he possibly can. There's just no hatred or prejudice against Jews in there at all. And it bothers me, liars don't really bother me, they just make for a good foil. But it bothers me that good people would misunderstand and believe lies and think the worst of the guy.

• 7:15:34Speaker 03

  Because I think his 25 hour long podcast, Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, leads up to the creation of the state. That's where it ends. It's the whole backstory to the creation thing. And it's just brilliant, man. It is, it's so good. But in any case, so, look, the story is, there is this radical Jewish nationalist movement called Zionism from Eastern Europe, where they wanted to find a homeland. They thought maybe they go to Argentina or Madagascar and they settled on Palestine for obvious historical reasons and all of that kind of thing. And the movement only had so much Jews at the time. The majority of religious and reformed Jews in the United States and in Europe.

• 7:16:20Speaker 03

  I don't know how many reformed Jews there were in Europe at that time. In the United States, it was a big movement, but they mostly were against it. The consensus was against it for a variety of reasons. Then, of course, after the Second World War, it really took off. And the argument was made that the Jews of Europe need somewhere else to go after the Holocaust. And so that was what led to a push by the Western powers to transport many more of them to Palestine and to help them to create the state there. Now, obviously, there's only so much we can cover here. But to try, from my point of view, I think, to try to like narrow in on like what is crucial

• 7:17:03Speaker 03

  to understand about the thing is that in 1948, they launched what was called the Nakba by the Palestinians, the catastrophe. And this is when they were all cleansed off of what's now what we call Israel proper. That is less the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. But they went as far as West Jerusalem. And they, when they created the state, they cleansed that territory through terror and murder and rape and pillage. They, and mostly through terror, they forced all those people out of their homes. And when we say 750,000 people, Lex, we're talking about the population of Greater Austin, Texas, right?

• 7:17:48Speaker 03

  Including Flugerville and Round Rock and maybe Buta.

• 7:17:53Speaker 03

  Okay, we're talking about a lot of people who are forced off of their property and into what then the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and then refugee camps elsewhere in Kuwait and in Lebanon and Syria and the rest. Now, when they did that, all morality aside, just strictly like, let's say, descriptive, not normative, right? They're like, in this sense, it worked.

• 7:18:23Speaker 03

  In the aftermath, the Zionists had created an 80/20, super duper Jewish majority. So they could call themselves the Jewish democracy and have a lot of the trappings of democracy and ingratiate themselves with the West, or try to on that basis. And there's some of, some truth to it, of course. But you know, and by the way, let me recommend to you and to your listeners, I really hope you read this. I'll bring you one. I should have brought you one today. I didn't think of it. I have a stack them at my house. It's called, Coming to Palestine, by my colleague Sheldon Richman. And he is the co-founder with me of the Libertarian Institute, and a brilliant and longtime libertarian writer and activist.

• 7:19:06Speaker 03

  And he was, of course, raised Jewish and Zionist in the United States, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And this is a collection of essays that he wrote over probably 30 years or something. And it's just about how he learned the truth about all this. And how that's why he ain't a Zionist no more. Man, what do you mean the Darjeeling massacre? Which is like the Mele massacre, right? This horror show. I never heard of that. They told me it was a land without people, for a people without land. That kind of sounds scary, doesn't it? The eastern Mediterranean shore was devoid of life? That's, I don't know. So that was a lie, right? And in fact, I mentioned Eric Margulies, my friend, the journalist. His

• 7:19:49Speaker 03

  mother was sort of a Lois Lane character, an independent journalist of her own, who went tramping around the, um, tramping around the, um, the region after World War II, interviewing sultans and kings and potentates and whatever. And she reported on the horrific conditions of the poor Palestinian refugees, the Muslims and Christians, who had been cleansed from their land and forced into the West Bank. And they threatened to murder her and they threatened to murder my friend, little baby Eric Margulies, if she would dare to continue to tell the truth. At that time, Lex, the Palestinian

• 7:20:26Speaker 03

  people's existence was a wild conspiracy theory by kooks. Only kooks believe there's Palestinians. This was a land without people for a people without land. What a coincidence and what good fortune that they could come and just make an empty desert bloom at a cost to nobody and a cost of nobody's conscience here. And that was, of course, you know, people who really knew a lot about things would have known better than that, I guess. But that was essentially the mythology that the American people were told by popular culture and particularly in Hollywood movies and the way that they did the movie of Exodus and all of those

• 7:21:08Speaker 03

  things in pushing this mythology. Now, the thing about that is, oh, and I was going to say about Sheldon's book. Sheldon points out that the Israelis, Golda Meir, made a secret deal with the King of Jordan, that he would take the West Bank and Israel would not fight him over it. He, they would encourage him and even to help him to take the West Bank. Why? To preclude the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state on what was left of Palestine. They wanted it all, at least someday. If they can't have it all now, they can at least prevent the Palestinians from making their own state out of it. If we got to take it from the other side, the, the party on the other side of the Jordan River later, that's easier. So they did that deliberately on purpose to screw the Palestinians

• 7:21:52Speaker 03

  out of their own independent state from the first place. Okay. Now here's getting to the meat of the thing. Go ahead.

• 7:21:58Lex Fridman?

  If I may just read a little bit more about the book, that it's a collection of essays written over 30 years that critically examines the history of the Israelis' disposition of Palestinians and challenges the mainstream narrative often presented in the United States regarding Israel's founding. Richmond, a noted libertarian author, argues for reason, freedom, peace, and toleration with respectable Palestinians and Israelis, turning conventional

• 7:22:24Lex Fridman?

  Stories regarding the region on their head. In this volume, Richmond meticulously documents historical events and policies that led to the displacement and suffering of Palestinian people, emphasizing their rights as individual human beings and the injustices suffered when they were made refugees, dispossessed, or killed. This book is recognized for being forthright and honest in its depiction of the conflict, drawing on well documented data and offering a perspective that is often absent from mainstream discourse.

• 7:22:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely right. And Sheldon, again, just like if we were talking about Mearsheimer or these guys or Dr. Paul, he's a saint. Right? Nobody's got nothing on Sheldon, man. He is an exceptionally decent man, and there's nothing that nobody can do about it. Right? So what's his motive here? His motive here is decency. His motive here is, and he tells the story of his grandfather. They would always say, next year in Jerusalem, and his grandfather would say, next year in Philadelphia, because he hated Zionism. And he would say, this, I'm quoting a quote of a quote of a Jewish guy quoting his Jewish grandfather. Okay. Say that Jews are responsible for all the problems over there, not the Palestinians.

• 7:23:38Speaker 01

  And Sheldon says that he always regretted that he never had a chance to really ask him what he meant by that and really talk with him about that. He was too young and, and didn't ever get around to it. But that his extremely Jewish grandfather who helped raise him in Philadelphia had nothing but contempt for the Zionist project. And he shows how most religious and again, reformed Jews were against it. So it's going to, you know, cause Jews to divide their loyalties. It's going to cause Jews to be falsely accused of dividing their loyalties. It's going to cause nothing but endless disruptions in the Middle East and problems for the United States of America, which is actually their country. I mean, think how insane it is.

• 7:24:19Speaker 03

  To call American Jews the Israeli diaspora when they're not from Israel. Israel was created in 1948. American Jews came here in the 18th century, man. What the hell? And in the 20, pardon me, the 19th, I meant to say, century, in the 1800s. And in the 1900s is when millions of Jews came to the United States, right? How in the world are they the diaspora from Israel that came into existence after America became their promised land, you know? And so this was a big part of why there was so much resistance among Jewish communities against the creation of the Israeli state in the first place. And Sheldon goes into that in great depth. It's just fantastic book.

• 7:25:02Speaker 03

  It's a little bitty book. I mean, everybody get right through it, but it's really worth your time. So where I'm going with this is the 67 war. And what happened in 1967 is that Israel took possession of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and all the Palestinians on it. Now, they cleansed another 250,000 Palestinians. They expanded their border a little bit in the West Bank and cleansed about another quarter of a million Palestinians off of their territory at that time. That usually goes unnoted. But the thing is, is they, quite literally, man, they de facto annexed. I heard a report on my way here today. I was listening to Dave DeCamp's Anti-War News and he was saying Israel is threatening to annex Gaza.

• 7:25:45Speaker 03

  Well, Israel Gooden stole Gaza in 1967 and all the people on it too. And the West Bank too, and East Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, as well as the Golan Heights that he stole, that they stole from the Syrians. Those poor Druze and their occupation usually gets much less mentioned, but they were kidnapped along with the Palestinians as well. And the thing is about it is that they wanted that land. They didn't want the people, but they couldn't just get rid of them all. They had cleansed their 750,000 to create the Israeli state. They couldn't push the rest of them, the rest of the way into Jordan. Now they have, I don't know what the number was exactly then, or I forget what it was then.

• 7:26:27Speaker 03

  We're now talking about almost 6 million Palestinians on the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and including the one-fifth of the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, who don't live under occupation, but as sort of second-class citizens of Israel, like under Jim Crow type situation, where they're not allowed to intermarry. They're not allowed to. Live wherever they want around Jewish communities that don't want them. And with only one slight exception, the tradition has always been that they can have a political party in the Knesset, but no group of parties would form a majority with them. In other words, any group of Israeli Jewish parties would rather let the other guys form a coalition than form a coalition with the Arabs.

• 7:27:10Speaker 03

  And that only changed one time in our very recent history here, I believe during Donald Trump's first term, or maybe early Biden, when Yair Lapid needed to ally temporarily with Arabs, was the one time they've ever broken that tradition. So anyway, I'm off on a tangent, but there are, as I said before, it's 80/20. So there's a one-fifth of the population of Israel proper, whatever, Green Line Israel, 67 borders Israel, or Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians. So you combine their population with the occupied population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, now you're talking about 50/50. Only the Israeli Jews have all the power and the Palestinian Muslims and Christians have none.

• 7:27:52Speaker 03

  And in the occupied territories, they live as utter slaves, as though under communism, under not just martial law, but foreign government occupation military law. In other words, and by the Israelis, no law at all. We're talking children brought before military courts in a foreign language and sentenced to dungeons without any process. We are talking about totalitarian slavery, like under the NKVD and the USSR. They are not free and Israel is not a democracy when half the people under the control of their state have no rights at all. No civil liberties, no civil rights as far as like participation in governmental process,

• 7:28:37Speaker 03

  no taxation without representation. They have no representation whatsoever. Okay? And the thing is about it is what makes them not slaves is the Israelis don't want them, right? They're not forcing them to work for free. They're certainly depriving them of all of their rights. And humiliating them every chance they get, stealing all their water resources, murdering them, pillaging them, stealing their territory a little bit at a time. And working toward a day when they can finish the job and just take it all. And what's really messed up, man, is that they don't even really want the Gaza Strip that bad. I mean, sure, they do. What they really want is the West Bank, as their religious zealots call it Judea and Samaria. And that they have a leftover religious edict from 3,000 years ago.

• 7:29:21Speaker 03

  That says that you can say whatever you want about the Palestinians and their natural property rights under Lockean theory and the Western conception of how one comes to own the thing. And they will say, no, we have supernatural property rights. That says that we get to come and kill you and move into your house and do whatever we want and recognize no rights to the Palestinians, just like Justice Taney or Tani saying that the black men have no rights that a white man is bound to respect, right? And Dread Scott, that's the way that they treat the Palestinians. They call them grasshoppers, right? Not even mammals, they're just insects to be eradicated. Because the Israelis covet their properties, as simple as that.

• 7:30:06Speaker 03

  They want to covet it so they kill, so they can steal. And that's it. And then they'll come up with every lie in the world to try to justify it all. Now, David Ben-Gurion, the founding Prime Minister of Israel, said, give it back, give it up, let them have it. Yeah, we want the land, but we don't want all these people. What are we going to do with them all? How, like, what's the end game here? When we're taking possession of millions of people that we hate and don't want in our country? And so it's not worth it to do this. That's Ben-Gurion, the founding guy, said that. And they told him, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know what we're doing. And you're probably familiar with this woman, Daniela Weiss. You'll see her in various documentaries and so forth. She's the insane zealot saying, we must occupy and settle all of Gaza and all of the West Bank.

• 7:30:53Speaker 03

  And so she, there's a great new documentary called The Settlers. I forget, I never saw part one of it, but the, the sequel, it just came out is called The Settlers. It's really good and it includes extensive interviews with her. And there was a statement that she made recently, in the last two years, where, or, or a video that came out that someone, some journalist had revealed this video, I guess, of her in the 1970s. Explain, or maybe it's her in more recent times, just talking about the 1970s. Um, forgive me, but people can find this, I'm sure. And what she's saying is from the moment they took over the West Bank,

• 7:31:32Speaker 03

  she worked with Ariel Sharon to create an archipelago of settlements across the West Bank in a way to preclude the possibility of a Palestinian state as fast as they possibly could. That was absolutely their first object is we've got to bisect them here and bisect them there so that they can never have a state of their own. And that was their goal this whole time, this radical settler movement. Now, in, you know, we talked about the 90s, we talked about the clean break when Netanyahu came in. The, the clean break again is a clean break from Oslo. And yet Zaka Bean and Shimon Peres's attempt to negotiate with the Arab states and the Palestinians.

• 7:32:16Speaker 03

  And of course Netanyahu, if you're not familiar with this, we should maybe play this. As long as we're taking our time here, Lex, let's see if we can find secret video of Netanyahu.

• 7:32:29Speaker 03

  This is it, this is it. Yeah. So you just mute that and, and just read the, uh, read the caption there. So let me set this up. Netanyahu, in this, in this video, he is no longer the prime minister. He's at a settler's house in the living room. He tells the boy, turn off the video camera. And the boy either fails to turn it off, or he deliberately turns it right back on again. It's a bit unclear, but the video keeps rolling and Netanyahu keeps blabbing. And he's saying, what you do is you just beat these Palestinians. You just hurt them and cripple them and kill them and weaken them and let them know that they'll never win and we'll crush them and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she says, ah geez, baby, but aren't you going to drive the world crazy and make them mad, especially America?

• 7:33:12Speaker 03

  And, and Netanyahu then ridicules us and says, let me tell you something about America, okay? America is a thing that is easily moved.

• 7:33:23Speaker 03

  80% of them support us. It's absurd. I'm not afraid of Bill Clinton. Let me tell you what I did to Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton said, yada, yada, Area C. I said, no problem, Bill. But then you know what I did? I made it where Area C is this huge military area, two thirds of the West Bank. Ha, ha, ha. Sexually assaulted old Bill right in the face and got away with murder. And not because his spies were blackmailing Bill Clinton, tapping his phone and all of his sexcapades. They used that blackmail to try to get him to pardon Jonathan Pollard. That's different. They were doing that. But Netanyahu here is mocking Bill Clinton and he's mocking the American people for being

• 7:34:06Speaker 03

  essentially a bunch of grasshoppers that he can do whatever he wants with us, including lie our fathers into sending their sons to die in his wars.

• 7:34:18Lex Fridman?

  If I may just comment, one of the things that troubles me a lot in these, the geopolitical aspect of this is when the Prime Minister of Israel shows so much disrespect towards the President of my country.

• 7:34:31Speaker 03

  No, he never had any respect at all. Don't let, don't let me sound sympathetic to old Bill Clinton, the child killer here when I say this, but I can almost sympathize with him when they say after his first meeting with Netanyahu in 1996, after half an hour, he came out and said, who the F does this guy think he is? Oh my God, who's the superpower and who's the client state? Like he was out of breath, exasperated, just stunned.

• 7:35:01Lex Fridman?

  Why, why is he able to talk like this to the United States President?

• 7:35:04Speaker 03

  I have no idea. He blackmailed Bill. He told Bill Clinton, you better let Jonathan Pollard out because I have you on tape with Monica Lewinsky, pal. And Bill Clinton was going to do it, except that George Tenet said he would resign and that many leaders of the CIA would resign in protest if he did it. Jonathan Pollard was the, one of the most destructive spies in American history. He was spying for Israel and they were turning over everything that he stole. I mean, rooms full to the Soviet Union.

• 7:35:33Lex Fridman?

  But it's not just Clinton. Like he shows even just, let's just take it to today. Benjamin Netanyahu seems to show a lot of continued disrespect towards Donald Trump. Like this is the, this is the, Donald Trump is the president of the most powerful country.

• 7:35:50Speaker 03

  And the best friend he ever had, moved the, moved the embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel's seizure of the Golan Heights, wrangled these phony Abraham Accords, which we're about to describe here in a minute. Did all of this for him, has only barely talked him out of annexation, but said, we'll get to it though, buddy. It's cool. Just wait on full annexation of the West Bank last time around. Clearly it's the agenda this time. Clearly Trump's wrapped around his little finger and still he has nothing but contempt. And I wish that someone would tell Trump, listen pal, you might as well be a Palestinian to this guy. He doesn't care about you at all. He doesn't care about our country at all. Back to my question about Mark Dubowitz, my hypothetical here, which goes for all pro-Israel factions in the

• 7:36:32Speaker 03

  United States. You think Benjamin Netanyahu cares that 3,000 Americans died on September 11th? Because Mohammed Atta was taking revenge for what Israel had done in Lebanon? No. And you know how I know that Lex? He told the New York Times, they didn't overhear this and report it. He said to the New York Times in an interview on September 11th, "It's very good." You want to pull that up?

• 7:37:02Speaker 03

  September 12th, 2001, New York Times, Netanyahu, "Very good."

• 7:37:09Speaker 03

  That's how much respect Benjamin Netanyahu has for the enlistment aged sons of the United States of America and the dead civilians on those planes and in those towers. New York Times, that's it.

• 7:37:25Lex Fridman?

  "A day of terror, the Israelis spilled blood to see as bond that draws two nations closer." Asked tonight what the attack meant for the relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, "It's very good." Then he edited himself, "Well, it's not very good, but it will, it will generate immediate sympathy." He predicted that the attack would, quote, strengthen the bond between our two peoples because we've experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.

• 7:38:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, man, and listen, on September 11th, Donald Trump says that there were Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the attack. There was somebody in New Jersey celebrating the attack. They were Israeli Mossad officers and they were arrested and they told the arresting officers, the problem isn't us, the problem is the Palestinians. And the FBI released the pictures and they're holding lighters up like they're the ones burning the tower down and they're all laughing and celebrating. Justin Raimondo called them the high fivers. The FBI arrested them and held them for months. Carl Cameron of Fox News did a four-part investigative series quoting FBI agents as saying they had to have known what was happening.

• 7:38:48Speaker 03

  Mossad was in the United States, following the hijackers around, and they only gave the barest of warnings that August. They did not tell everything that they knew about the September 11th attack. And then it hit and Netanyahu said, it's very good. And then his fifth column lied us into war with Iraq. And he never got his pipeline to Haifa, by the way, but he did make a deal with the Kurds to ship the, the oil out of there through Syria to Israel. So they got their nickel a barrel discount at the cost of $10 trillion of our wealth. And they just, and the ruining of the entire beginning of the third millennium, pardon

• 7:39:33Speaker 03

  me. But it just did not have to be this way. It just did not at all.

• 7:39:39Lex Fridman?

  Is it worthwhile here, before we talk about Gaza, to draw a distinction between the Israeli government and the Israeli people?

• 7:39:46Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 7:39:47Lex Fridman?

  Just like we can draw the distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people?

• 7:39:50Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. Although I would say that by the Israelis' argument about popular sovereignty and popular consent among the Palestinians for Hamas, they are far more implicated in the actions of their government. There's virtually unanimous political consent for Israel's government's actions in that country. Their political spectrum is from Dick Cheney to Hitler. With Dick Cheney being the leftist progressive. They are a national socialist regime at war under a theory of that they are a master race ruling over the Unter Mension. It is a barbarian society.

• 7:40:32Speaker 03

  And does that implicate every last Israeli individual civilian human being? Of course not, Lex. The, you know, a bunch of the people who were killed at that rave, they were actually there at a peace function. They were trying to figure out a way to help the people of the Gaza Strip and even to someday recognize their independence and freedom and do something for them. Those people got caught up and murdered by Hamas that day. Right? There, there are not just liberals and leftists, but libertarians and different, there are plenty of army veterans and whatever. You want to go like the overall percentages? There is a resounding consensus for this type of policy in that country reminiscent

• 7:41:17Speaker 03

  of America circa 2002. In a way that we do not have.

• 7:41:22Lex Fridman?

  After October 7th.

• 7:41:24Speaker 03

  Even more so. No, even before that. Even before that. You know, the, the Palestinians are considered to be the barbarians. They are the enemy. They are the Goyim. They are the, the obstacle to what the Palestinian, what the Israeli government and, and the ideal is for the country to have. Wouldn't it just be better if we could get rid of them all? And that is the consensus. And just get rid of them all, one way or the other. Um, and I, I think that, you know, whatever, I'm not saying as Madeleine Albright would say, the people of Iraq are all responsible for Saddam Hussein and I'll starve them all and grind their bones to make my bread as long as they won't overthrow Saddam for me.

• 7:42:10Speaker 03

  Which is the same thing Osama bin Laden said, which is the American people are responsible for the actions of our government. After all, you're a democracy, aren't you? And you pay your taxes, he said. And so that was why he said it was okay to kill us. I would never agree with Madeleine Albright or Osama bin Laden about why it's okay to kill innocent civilians at all. I'm as diametrically opposed to their philosophy as I could possibly be. And that goes for absolutely when Palestinians kill innocent Israeli civilians. And if people say, well, they're settlers and colonists and all this too, fine, if they're not holding a gun, they're not a combatant, then they're not holding the gun and they're not a combatant. That's it. That's, you know, I don't know what the Geneva Convention

• 7:42:53Speaker 03

  say. That's what the Horton Convention say. I don't care about any of that, you know? So.

• 7:42:58Lex Fridman?

  And especially when it's children.

• 7:43:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so even if the population of the United States, say, the population of Texas, broadly, and hell, and you could measure the polls go back, I bet you it's better than 85% of Texans supported George Bush's invasion of Iraq. Does that mean any of them deserved to be killed because they supported his evil premeditated plot to kill people? No. That's politics. That's government. And that's the individual men who pulled the decisions, the individual men who told the lies to convince the hapless to go along. They're responsible. People who cheer led for it, let's just concede much less so. Okay? You

• 7:43:44Speaker 03

  know, if the people of America said absolutely not, well, that would have been better. And ultimately, it was up to us. If we could get enough of us to be good on it all at once, like we talked about with Syria and stopping the war in 2013, they just could not get past the population that wouldn't budge.

• 7:44:01Lex Fridman?

  We should say that in such dire situations, the propaganda machine turns on in every individual nation.

• 7:44:08Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 7:44:08Lex Fridman?

  And so it's actually very difficult to be a citizen.

• 7:44:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:44:11Lex Fridman?

  That can see the reality of the world clearly because you're swimming in information that is.

• 7:44:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:44:17Lex Fridman?

  Very constrained to a particular kind of narrative. And this is true for every single nation at war.

• 7:44:23Speaker 03

  And have you ever seen the documentary defamation? It's really great. It's made by an Israeli Jew who goes out in search of antisemitism. And the worst antisemite in the whole movie is his grandma on the West Bank. I'm not going to quote her because she's a vicious antisemite. But the thing is, is he goes traveling all around the world, trying to find anybody who hates Jews for being Jews. And he has no such luck. And he goes and he hangs out with a boxman at the Anti-Defamation League. And he goes on a field trip to Auschwitz with some Israeli kids. But the beginning of the documentary, he shows how the propaganda campaign against the Israeli people by their government is essentially like America 2002 forever with no let up.

• 7:45:07Speaker 03

  It's show of this, show of that, always. And they really tell the people, they really do raise them to believe that every non-Jew in the world wakes up in the morning with only one goal, to kill all the Jews. And that's all anyone else cares about or thinks about. And they're all looking for the first opportunity. And aren't you glad that Israel's here to protect you? Otherwise, it would be another Holocaust immediately tomorrow. Right? That wasn't the result of the most insane, fanatical, cranked out lunatics to ever seize power in a major industrial nation.

• 7:45:47Speaker 03

  No, that's what all of humanity wants to do to us and would do at any moment if they could. That's what they're told all day, every day. And to a great extent, then believe it. And so then, and it's like an anti-fragile belief. Daryl Cooper was talking about this on our show the other day. That the more people say, my God, Israel, what they're doing is so wrong and I disapprove and I don't like them anymore. The more they say, see. Right. He compared them to the Branch Davidians, right? When, when people turn against us, it's just like we predicted they would. You see what they're doing? It's just like before. And so there's no room in there to say, hey, wait a minute.

• 7:46:32Speaker 03

  Maybe we really are going too far here. If all our friends are telling us that we're doing the wrong thing, what the hell? Nope. You know how the anti Semites are. And that's all they do is that's all they want to do is, and that's all they think about all day long is how they can harm us. All of them. And so under that state of paranoid siege, then you shouldn't be too surprised that people are willing to then go to the utmost lengths to destroy their enemies. You know, when they can, and of course Hamas did a very good job on October 7th of playing into that script. But now we're taking our time here today. So before we get to that, let's talk about Eros Sharon one more minute here because.

• 7:47:14Lex Fridman?

  I should mention briefly that this defamation movie looks excellent.

• 7:47:19Speaker 03

  Oh, it's so good.

• 7:47:20Lex Fridman?

  Israeli director and a lot of the Israeli press are praising it. It looks fascinating. Of course, this 2009, it'd be interesting to see how that evolves with the social media and all that kind of stuff. But it's actually, uh, it's fascinating when you confront the reality.

• 7:47:35Speaker 03

  And how dis- how uncomfortable the, there's Mearsheimer, right? There's a, how uncomfortable people are.

• 7:47:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 7:47:44Speaker 03

  When confronted with the fact that actually nobody hates you at all. And then it's like, they feel so uncomfortable. At one point when they go, he goes on the field trip to Auschwitz with these high school kids. And they meet this old man and he's like, hi, who are you? And they're like, we're kids from Israel and we came to see Auschwitz. He's like, huh, that's interesting. Why are you doing that? And they're like, well, it's part of our history and the thing that we're doing. And he's like, oh, okay. And then the next day on the, at one point they're walking through this beautiful green field. It's like puffy clouds and blue skies and chirping birds. And the Holocaust is long over now in Poland. And so they're just, it's a beautiful scene and they have a Mossad bodyguard there to protect them from the anti Semites who are going to jump out of the woods and Holocaust them all if he wasn't there to protect them.

• 7:48:29Speaker 03

  And then the next day, the guy says to him, so how was your trip to Poland? How have you liked it and everything? And the one girl starts explaining, yeah, this old man, he came up to us and attacked us and called us Jew donkeys and all these things. And he says, no, he didn't. I have it on film. I'll show it to you right here. He said, hi, who are you? And what are you doing here? Oh, that's interesting. Why are you doing that? That's what he said.

• 7:48:51Speaker 03

  But the thing is, is they came all this way after being told that everybody's trying to murder them. They're in the land of the Holocaust and there is no Holocaust going along anywhere. That was at that time, 70 years before. And they don't need a Mossad bodyguard at all. In fact, they don't even need Stanley Smith's security there at all. Just their teacher would be fine. And no one there is anti-Semitic and no one there means them any harm at all. And these high school students then have a hard time coping with that. And trying to figure out what this weird world is that they're living in, where it can't be that they were lied to. It's gotta be, that guy must have said something hateful to us under his breath. I'm pretty sure he did. Didn't he say something about how we're donkeys or something, right?

• 7:49:35Speaker 03

  And they just have to come up with this in their own mind to rationalize the danger that they've been told by people that they trust that they're in, when in fact, they're not, right? And when in fact, when they are, it's the direct result of American wars, like scaring a bunch of refugees into Europe and then killing even more people. And then they commit terrorist attacks, things like that, which is again, all Israeli foreign policy that's getting them killed. But now antisemitism is good for Israel and they know it. Benjamin Netanyahu is cynical as can be about this. If you remember when there was one of these attacks, I believe at the kosher grocery store in Paris.

• 7:50:13Speaker 03

  Netanyahu came to France and he said, that's right. French Jews, you'll never be French. You're Jews. Come home to Israel. And they said, damn you, screw you and get out. We are too French. And how dare you come here to this country and tell everybody else that we're really, we're your fifth column and not patriotic members of our civil society, civic society that we are in fact, part of and have lived here for centuries. Screw you dude. But that's good for him. He likes it when people hate Jews overseas because it's good for driving Jews overseas to move to Israel. And that's what's good for Israel. And that's the only thing he cares about.

• 7:50:56Speaker 03

  Again, September 11th. Oh man, this is great.

• 7:51:01Speaker 03

  Is the only way that he can see it. What he always wanted. And just like the high fibers. Oh, good. The Palestinians are the problem. Now we can get you to do what we want.

• 7:51:17Lex Fridman?

  Um, can we go to?

• 7:51:19Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, we gotta do Ariel Sharon 2005 real quick. Ariel Sharon disengages from the Gaza Strip. Now, why'd he do that? Well, there is two major reasons, okay? The first one is, and you can pull this up if you want to at scotthorton.org/fairuse. It's, the guy's name is Arnon Soffer with two Fs. Arnon Soffer, and then type in kill and kill. That should bring it up. There you go. An interview with him from, as I say it here, the year is 2004. It is a year before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, quote, "disengages from Gaza. Two years before Hamas wins a plurality in the election George W. Bush forced them to hold.

• 7:52:04Speaker 03

  Three years before Elliott Abrams failed coup, which led to Hamas kicking the Palestinian Authority out of Gaza and seizing so-called control under the Strip, of the Strip, under Israeli overlordship, of course, and the institution of the full-scale siege and the beginning of the, quote, "mowing the grass campaigns," which began in 2008. Sharon's advisor, Arnon Soffer, explained to the Jerusalem Post that the problem is the Palestinian Muslims and Christians are having too many babies. The Israelis don't want to let them have a state, but they do want to kick them, quote, "out of Israel, at least virtually or figuratively, by so-called disengaging with them, so as

• 7:52:47Speaker 03

  to reduce the number of Palestinians officially occupied by Israel by a couple of million people." Does that make sense? So this guy is a demographer from Tel Aviv University. He comes to Ariel Sharon and says, "Mr. Prime Minister, you gotta look at my mathematics here. We have a problem. There are too many Palestinians and they are out reproducing us. We are approaching a 50-50 split or worse, where we are going to be a literal dictionary definition apartheid state of a minority ruling the majority under this iron fist. And that could be very untenable for the future of the state and our support from the rest of the Western states, et cetera."

• 7:53:30Speaker 03

  So to solve this problem, what we want to do is just figuratively kick the Gazans out of Israel, even though Israel stole the Gaza Strip in 67 and they never did literally disengage, they just put the thing under siege. If you listen to pro-Israel, you know, propagandists now, they'll say, well, we gave them a Palestinian state. We gave them full independence with the disengagement of 2005 and all we got in return is rockets. But that's not true. It was the Israelis that broke the ceasefire originally, just as they always did ever since that time, until October the 7th of 23. They broke the ceasefires every single time. And then it was W. Bush who forced

• 7:54:14Speaker 03

  them to hold the election where Hamas won again, a plurality, not a majority in even any single district anywhere in Palestine, did they win a majority of the popular vote? Then they formed a coalition government, which W. Bush then secretly conspired, and it's funny to read, the article is called "The Gaza Bombshell" by David Rose in Vanity Fair. And in that article, David Wormser throws Elliott Abrams under the bus for this, and says this was an idiotic scheme to help Fatah overthrow Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which led to Hamas kicking their ass and pushing them out instead, and Hamas then

• 7:54:56Speaker 03

  having more control over the Gaza Strip, which is what I think the Likud guys probably wanted. And because, so first of all, now, again, I'll get right back to that in a second, but softer again.

• 7:55:09Speaker 03

  This article is from the Jerusalem Post, where he gives an interview to a lady named Sarah something, and he explains the whole thing. Now, I found this, I forget where I got it from, but it was, I found on the Jerusalem Post where it used to be, like the URL is still there, but, and you can see where other people have linked to it in the past, but now that URL is dead, and that kind of thing. But if you search the Jerusalem Post website carefully for her name and his name, you will find other articles about it where they refer back to this and refer back to the most explosive quotes out of it, etc. So this is verified and definitely a real interview, even though I don't believe you can find the whole thing at the Jerusalem Post anymore. But that's where it comes from.

• 7:55:52Lex Fridman?

  So by the way, and yes, go ahead. You've mentioned many times scotthorton.org/fairuse.

• 7:55:58Lex Fridman?

  So you're almost like creating an archive of important documents that if they were to be erased from the internet, they're here to be found.

• 7:56:07Speaker 03

  Right. The stuff that's like most important, especially if I need it and I need to link to it and I think, you know, whoever's got it now is going to be unreliable in the near future. Link Rod is a real thing. That's a real problem. And so, yeah, on things like this, where it's like, I can only find it in a pretty obscure place. I'll go ahead and reprint it here. So if that obscure place goes away, it'll still exist. Because man, I mean, I really am shocked and surprised and dismayed how many times you'll have crucial information that there's only one version of it anywhere online and it could go away any day. You know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of things like that stresses me out.

• 7:56:45Speaker 03

  So I try to do stuff like this. So now, so he says, listen, this is what we got to do. We have to disengage from Gaza. So that like just as a ruse, right? As an optical illusion. We're going to make it seem as though we're kicking the Palestinians of Gaza out of Israeli control and jurisdiction. That way, you can't say it's an apartheid state anymore. Now we're back more to majority rules over the minority. Of course ruthlessly, but still, it's less worse than having a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian Arab Muslim and Christian majority. That would be less tenable, right? Was the idea. So he told Sharon this

• 7:57:29Speaker 03

  and said, you got to do this. And this is why. He explains this to Sarah, what's her name? At, oh, it was even called One on One. It's the Demography, Stupid, was the original title of the thing. And he tells her, this is what we got to do. And then we got, we'll have to put them under siege, of course, and, and lock them in this cage like animals, basically. And she says, well, what do we expect the Palestinians to do, right? They're going to freak out and fight. And he goes, yeah, of course they are. But then we will just have to kill and kill and kill. We will have to just bomb them and bomb them and bomb them and bomb them to just keep them weak and keep them from being able to resist.

• 7:58:09Speaker 03

  That's it. That's where that comes from. Ariel Sharon's advisor, Arnon Soffer, by Ruthie Blum. I'm sorry, I said her name wrong. I thought it was Sarah something. It's Ruthie Blum. And, and that's what he explains. We will just have to kill and kill and kill. Now,

• 7:58:27Speaker 03

  Another important Ariel Sharon advisor was a guy named Dov Weisglas. And he explained to Haaretz that the whole point of the disengagement from Gaza is to put the peace process in formaldehyde. Again, dividing and conquering the Palestinians. We leave Hamas, at least ascendant at that time, in Gaza. Then he says, "We can say to the American Congress, we have no partner for peace." And he says, "We have from the Congress a no one to talk to certificate that says we have no one to talk to.

• 7:59:10Speaker 03

  And it says, 'We'll have no one to talk to until Gaza is Norway. See you then, and shalom.'" Okay? So for Ben Shapiro and his minor birds and mindless parroting puppets out there who believe him when he lies, that this was the gifting to the Palestinians of independence. What it was, was it was a Likud scheme to divide and conquer and destroy the Palestinian people so that one day the Israelis could take the last of their property from them. That's what it was. And then when they put them under siege, you know what they said, Lex? They said, "The people of the Gaza Strip are hungry, but not starving."

• 7:59:52Speaker 03

  And I wonder if that rings a bell in your mind where you've heard that before? That's what Walter Duranty wrote in the New York Times about the Holodomor. In the same article where he said, "You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet." "They're hungry, but not starving," said Walter Duranty and Ariel Sharon's men as they inflicted a Holodomor on the people of the Gaza Strip. That's again, you know, for the cognitive dissonance, they're like, well, why are we doing this then? Again, it's the lobby, it's the compromise of the American political system. But if your dissonance is telling you it can't be that bad, your dissonance is wrong.

• 8:00:37Speaker 03

  Yes, it can too. That's exactly how they are. And because Americans, we, we're Westerners. We have a different tradition. I mean, we were all, even in government school, they teach us that every man is born equal, not in every way, but in terms of our rights that we possess to own our own life and control our own destiny. That's what we believe. You know what? Myar Kahane, that rabbi, that was Al Qaeda's first target in New York City in 1990 in the United States, he gave an interview to Mike Wallace in the late 1970s, where he complains that American Jews believe in all this Thomas Jefferson crap. Well, we don't. It's us versus

• 8:01:22Speaker 03

  our enemies. We will destroy them. Now, that was considered fascism by the Israeli Supreme Court then. That is the Likud Party doctrine now. Every Arab Palestinian, Muslim and Christian must be killed and/or forcibly removed from the last of the 22% of measly stinking what's left of historic Palestine there.

• 8:01:48Lex Fridman?

  I think what's happening in Gaza is absolutely horrific. And I think the US government should not be supporting that in any way. So how can we end it?

• 8:02:04Speaker 03

  So on October 7, let's, let's rewind from October 7. Why do we do the Abraham Accords? Under Trump's first term, we did the Abraham Accords because Saudi Arabia especially, and the other Sunni Arab kingdoms, had always promised that they would refuse to officially normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians got a deal, either an independent state of their own, or equal rights and citizenship in a single state. Now, what Jared Kushner figured out was, well, we can just print money. So what's your price? And so what he did was he bought F-16s for Bahrain, F-35s for UAE,

• 8:02:47Speaker 03

  debt forgiveness for Sudan, and they made a deal with Morocco that they would recognize Morocco's illegal invasion and seizure of the northern half of the nation of Western Sahara. And then that would be essentially these countries bribed to normalize relations with Israel, and they were working on Saudi Arabia. Now, on September the 22nd, 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech before the UN General Assembly. You know, like he likes to do with his visual aids, this time he held up a map of the Middle East, the big red arrow across from Israel to the Sunni Arab states of the Gulf. He said, "This is the new Middle East."

• 8:03:26Speaker 03

  Well, that was an inside joke. He was mocking Shimon Peres, because Shimon Peres said, "We gotta deal with Arafat and the PLO, Fatah, and deal with a pseudo-Palestinian state at least. Then we can make peace with the Sunni Arab states and have a new Middle East." So Netanyahu is up there crowing that under the Netanyahu doctrine, he got the new Middle East without giving in to the Palestinians in any way. Now, of course, he frames it like, "Oh, the Palestinians have been holding peace hostage", when what he's really saying to them is, "Y'all are screwed now, boy. Ain't nobody coming for you.

• 8:04:05Speaker 03

  I got you. You never get in a state of your own, an independence, and you never get in citizenship? You gonna live in those concentration camps of yours until you're dead and we're done taking them from you. I win, you lose." That was his speech of September 22nd, 2003. Two weeks later, Hamas broke out of their pen and launched the October 7th attack. And they did kill probably 1,000 people, as the Israelis killed at least dozens, perhaps more than 100 of their own people by invoking the Hannibal directive. Now, you might remember the story of an Israeli soldier named, I think it's Eisenkot, who had been captured by Hamas and taken into the Gaza Strip back years ago.

• 8:04:51Speaker 03

  And the Israelis ended up having to negotiate like and release a thousand Palestinian captives, not prisoners, because the Israelis hold them without trial, without any process whatsoever. They just kidnapped them and hold them. So they're hostages too, these Palestinians. But they had to release a thousand Palestinian hostages to get their one Israeli hostage back. And they said, never again are we going to do that. So they invented a new doctrine, which says if one of their soldiers or two of their soldiers getting successfully captured by Hamas and taken back into the strip, that they'll kill their own soldiers as well as the captors in order to prevent that from happening. They called that the Hannibal Directive. Well, on October the 7th, and this is all from, first of all, very astute American observers

• 8:05:35Speaker 03

  like Max Blumenthal, Abu, uh, sorry, Ali Abu Nima and Brad Pierce at the Wayward Rabbler. They all immediately noticed this, but then it was double extra, triple super verified by the Israeli press, Haaretz, Ynet, the Jerusalem Post. That's all you need to show that they introduced what they call, and I think they probably made this up on the fly, mass Hannibal, which means not just kill a soldier, but even if it's a little old lady who's been kidnapped and is in the back of a car on the way, any car on their way back to, to back to the Gaza Strip, they bombed.

• 8:06:17Speaker 03

  And they also used a tank to hit and kill a house full of at least nine civilians in one case in one of the kibbutzes. Now, I'm not playing down what Hamas did there. I am pointing out what Israel did. And this is a big part of why they had to embellish what Hamas did. Because look at these houses are blown up. What happened here? Hamas only had grenades. This is much more destruction than that. All the cars at the rave that were destroyed, they were destroyed by helicopter fire, not by Hamas. How could Hamas have destroyed all those cars? They did not have the ability to do that. And now I'm not saying who all was in those cars when they were blasted at the rave and what all, every little thing that happened there.

• 8:06:59Speaker 03

  But it's clear that Israel waged a bunch of the destruction on their own people and deliberately so. And there's video testimony of this girl talking about they're shooting a house and her officer's telling her to keep shooting and all of these things. I think she's even saying she defied one of these orders at one point. And so she didn't want to keep doing it because it didn't seem like it made sense to her and that kind of thing. And so. This is part of why they embellished what Hamas did, but of course, then they also wanted to do the Belgian babies on bayonets. That's from the First World War. All the lurid stories of the Huns atrocities against the Belgians and why we have to go and stop them. And again, Saddam Hussein and the Kuwaiti babies thrown out of their incubators.

• 8:07:41Speaker 03

  These are the kinds of atrocities that jerk tears. These are the kinds of atrocities that get people to change their mind and support a thing that they otherwise would not. And when in fact Hamas did kill unarmed women and children and particularly, I don't know how many children, but at least a few, and many, many unarmed civilians, many, many women. And so their atrocities were already scarlet. They already were absolutely guilty of war crimes and what they had done that day. And in fact, it was so bad that people think, I don't know, man, I'm not taking a stance on this. But I tend to doubt it,

• 8:08:23Speaker 03

  I guess, would be my stance. And I have simpler explanations. But there are people who think that Netanyahu let the attack happen because he wanted that kind of horror show to be inflicted on his own people so that he could get away with doing what he's doing now. Because why? Because what Hamas did is what's letting him get away with what he's doing now. He gave them this excuse, just like Bin Laden gave George Bush one, only Israel ain't gonna be wrecked here. This is not working out for Hamas the way they hoped. And I think their primary objective really was to take captives so they'd have them to trade for their own captives back, for their own hostages to get back. But they went way too far. They killed way too many innocent people and then gave the Israelis

• 8:09:05Speaker 03

  the writ. Now, as far as the attack being successful, it's worth pointing out, we call it October 7th because it was over by supper time.

• 8:09:17Speaker 03

  Okay, it wasn't the second week of October. It wasn't the autumn of 23. It was one day that these captives were out, were able to break out of their concentration camp and commit some atrocities. Right? This is not the nation next door. Again, contra Ben Shapiro's explicit lies that when he says, well, what would we do if Mexico was shooting rockets across the Rio Grande into Texas? Well, Mexico is the name of the national government in Mexico City and its armed military force. If they were firing rockets across the border into Texas?

• 8:09:58Speaker 03

  Well, we would have some negotiation to do, wouldn't we? Okay? Or worse. What we're talking about here is not Mexico. We're talking about an Indian reservation. We're talking about people who were already conquered and captured in 1967, who've been living under the totalitarian control of this foreign occupying army ever since then. We're talking about the closer equivalent would be Nelson Rockefeller sending the National Guard to put down the riot in Attica Prison and killing all the guards along with the prisoners. This would be, imagine, maybe in an earlier time,

• 8:10:42Speaker 03

  an Indian reservation where they break out and they commit some atrocities, scalp some Anglo heads. And then what do we do? We go in there and bomb and kill 100,000 of them? Or if, again, because this is Israeli territory. Okay, de jure, no. De facto, absolutely. This is a ghetto. So how about if, if the Trump government decided to build a wall around South Chicago and say, we can't tolerate the violence of the blacks of South Chicago anymore? Everybody knows that's one of the highest crime rates in the country. We're just going to bomb them. Because occasionally they break out of the black part of town and hurt other people, too. So we're going to enclose their ghetto in giant concrete and razor wire walls.

• 8:11:26Speaker 03

  And then we're going to bomb them all to death. That's what Israel is doing. Fish in a barrel, a canned hunt. You understand? Like a father abusing his son. A helpless captive.

• 8:11:40Speaker 03

  Right? A guard beating an inmate. Jeffrey Goldberg torturing some poor Palestinian in his cell.

• 8:11:50Speaker 03

  Not a sovereign nation defending itself from attack from another sovereign nation of any kind. And Americans don't understand this because they're called Palestinians. And so, aren't they from a country called Palestine? Everybody's got a country, right? But no, Israel's on top of Palestine. So no, they don't have a Palestine. They don't have a country. They don't have a government. If, if Fatah, the PA on the West Bank, if they are trustees in an Israeli open-air prison, then Hamas is just the strongest gang. They're the Crips or the Bloods or the Latin Kings or the Aryan nations have taken over the prison in the Gaza Strip. They're not the duly-elected government of the people of Palestine.

• 8:12:32Speaker 03

  When George W. Bush forced those people to hold that election in 2005, the majority of the population of Gaza were children, were minors, at least under 18. Okay? Could not vote. The majority of them were minors. That was in 2005. The last time they got a chance to vote. Guess what? The majority of them are minors still to this day.

• 8:12:55Speaker 03

  They have popular sovereignty behind Hamas and bear collective responsibility for Hamas's crimes? When, as we mentioned a previous era, it was Israel that helped to install Hamas in power in the Gaza Strip in the first place, helped their rise. Their botched coup, well, they did the disengagement to empower them. Again, no one to talk to certificate, bragging about it. Then they did the botched coup, which maybe was deliberately botched, or I don't know exactly what happened there, but that ended up with Hamas in charge of the entire Gaza Strip. And then we have, as we know, and people can, you might want to pull this up if you want to and show them. It's by me and one of my guys, Connor Freeman is his name.

• 8:13:39Speaker 03

  And the article is called Netanyahu's Support For Hamas Backfired.

• 8:13:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, right there. Second one. I'll tell you a funny story. I did the Pierce Morgan Show the other day. I debated Wesley Clark on Ukraine again. But while I was on hold, Pierce Morgan was whooping the Israeli ambassador. And I'm not sure if it was the ambassador to Britain or the ambassador to the United States. But um, he was going after him so hard. And at one point, it was so funny, you could see his face twist a little bit because the guy realized what he said after he said it that like, oops, this undermines the narrative a little bit. But the ambassador railed to Pierce Morgan, "Nobody elected Hamas. They're not the legitimate power there." Which is, yeah, that's right. He's railing against Hamas, right? But what's he just did? What did he just do? He just told the

• 8:14:25Speaker 03

  truth and acquitted the Palestinian people of responsibility for Hamas. And then what did Pierce Morgan do? Heroically told the truth that you know who did support Hamas? Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud. Oh, check that out. You know who you get to kill? Anybody who's near somebody who years ago supposedly may have voted for Hamas to win a plurality. Well, you know who really voted for Hamas? Benjamin Netanyahu did. So who gets the death penalty now? They're willing to kill 20,000 children or more so far, burying little

• 8:15:07Speaker 03

  babies. Imagine a little five-year-old baby buried alive in rubble and has to starve to death for five days in there. That's what Benjamin Netanyahu, the actual owner, controller, creator of Hamas, foister of Hamas onto the hapless, helpless Palestinian people. They supposedly have popular sovereignty and chose Hamas. Netanyahu chose Hamas for them. And he said over and over, "We control the height of the flame. Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support Hamas in Gaza so that

• 8:15:52Speaker 03

  we can keep the Palestinians divided and so that we can continue to tell American," again, we're talking about Netanyahu here, "so American idiots, absurd fools, that we have no partner for peace." Because we keep the terrorists in charge in Gaza. And you know what's funny about this? Netanyahu has been quoted repeatedly saying, "We control the height of the flame." Three different people said he said that to a group of Likud ministers. And then he denied it, and his friends denied it and said he never said that. Even though we got all his buddies here bragging about how smart he is for doing it that way, etc. But anyway, there's a new documentary called "The Bibi Files."

• 8:16:37Speaker 03

  It's all the footage is Shin Bet, National Police interrogation videos of Benjamin Netanyahu and his disgusting wife Sarah and all of their friends. And including Sheldon Adelson and Miriam Adelson, who gave Donald Trump $600 million to do whatever Israel says. And they're all interrogated in there because Sarah Netanyahu is a beast who demands that all of their friends give her jewelry and champagne and cars and what I don't know cars, all kinds of fancy things, and this is illegal in Israel. This is absolutely against the letter of the law.

• 8:17:18Speaker 03

  They are not allowed to accept these gifts from wealthy people in this way. They're totally compromised. He is a guilty felon 100%. This is probably a huge part of why he's keeping the war going as long as he can. Because they won't put him in prison as long as he's keeping the war going. But here's my point. On Videolex, Shin Bet asks Prime Minister Netanyahu, "Why do you support Hamas in Gaza? Why are you leaning on Qatar to give them billions of dollars?" And Netanyahu says, "This is how we keep the Palestinians divided, but we control the height of the flame."

• 8:18:00Speaker 03

  On video to the cops, okay? So that means also that everyone who said that that quote was a lie is either a liar or a damned fool.

• 8:18:14Speaker 03

  Okay, I just had to make that point because that's important. That this is absolutely true, okay? They say the Palestinians are responsible for Hamas. No, Benjamin Netanyahu is responsible for Hamas. Benjamin Netanyahu owns the entire chessboard.

• 8:18:31Speaker 03

  Benjamin Netanyahu is backed by the unlimited budget and military power of the global superpower and all of his myriad civilian and military intelligence services. Hamas and the Palestinians are pawns on his board. That's the fact. And if it's okay to kill Palestinians because they are nearby Hamas, then it's okay to kill Benjamin Netanyahu because he is literally, not figuratively, their greatest ally. And in a direct sense, not like, oh, America is Osama bin Laden's indispensable ally. I mean, literally, he sent Mossad to Qatar to demand that they give more money to Hamas

• 8:19:14Speaker 03

  over and over and over again, and his own men ratted him out for it. Okay? That's treason. He's the one who should hang from the end of a rope, not the people of the Gaza Strip, who have been killed, probably 100,000 of them have been killed now, including torn to shreds, including they bombed their tents, they bury them alive. And they, quite literally,

• 8:19:40Speaker 03

  herd them in to narrow yards after starving them almost to death, and bring them in to a narrow area. Then they open the gate all at once. They don't bring them in through some kind of checkpoint.

• 8:19:57Speaker 03

  They make them, they just open the gate and so that the people rush in a mad mob rush to grab whatever food they can. And then these people are literally starving. So the spirit of friendship and cooperation falls aside. And now I will stab you so that I can feed my kid today, dude. And so people, it's the Hunger Games out there, or worse, whatever analogy that you have to... Soviet communism is, is, it's the equivalent, it's the moral equivalent of Soviet communism is what it is, Lex. It's the worst thing in the world. It's the most barbarian regime in the world, far worse than the ChiComs. And they have to lie their ass off to try to pretend that Beijing treats the Uighurs this way. Give me a break. The Uighurs are kings compared

• 8:20:42Speaker 03

  to what's happening to the Palestinians right now. And the only thing that makes Israel the second worst government in the world is the United States of America has the power to do this, to help them do this to the Palestinians, but also do it to the Iraqis and the Syrians and the Yemenis and whoever else Israel says as well. But this is pure barbarianism. And I strongly urge, I know that you've seen it, I strongly urge your audience to go watch this interview of this man, Anthony Aguilera, who was a special forces guy, that's above the Rangers, but below Delta, but that's second tier special operations, Army Special Operations Forces, the Green Berets. Been fighting in the terror

• 8:21:23Speaker 03

  wars all these years, fought in Iraq. I don't know how old the guy is, if he fought in Iraq War II, he certainly fought in Iraq War III and in Afghanistan and, and had been deployed 12 times, Tucker said, including to the stands in Central Asia and Vietnam. I don't know who he's killing in Vietnam, maybe just training there, I don't know.

• 8:21:39Lex Fridman?

  He also did an interview on Breaking Points with Saga and Crystal.

• 8:21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. So the story is that they demonized UNRWA, which was the UN Relief Refugee Relief Agency. What refugees? Well, 80% of the population of the Gaza Strip are refugees from what we call Israel proper. Israeli Jews stole that land from them. That's their land. That's why they live in Gaza. They're not from Gaza. 80% of them are not from Gaza, or they are, but their parents and grandparents and great grandparents were not. They're refugees there. So ever since then, UNRWA has been there to provide humanitarian relief for these poor people who've been cut off from their country on the other side of the razor wire. And so Unruh was in charge of distributing the aid.

• 8:22:22Speaker 03

  But then they lied, of course, this ridiculous propaganda that Unruh had been involved in the October 7th attack. And there may have been one guy who had worked for them before, who said something, or maybe even participated to some small degree. It was a ridiculous charge against the entire organization. And as this guy Aguilera explains, they had, I believe, I can't remember the number, was it? Do you remember if he said they had 40 sites around the gun? I believe he said they had 40 sites around the strip where they were delivering aid to people. When they closed that down, the Israelis replaced it with this new humanitarian relief foundation, or global humanitarian foundation, I think it's called GHF, right?

• 8:23:06Speaker 03

  And they only have four stations. And three of them are near the Egyptian border. And only one of them is what they call the, in the, what they call the Narazim corridor, I believe it's pronounced, that's like halfway through the strip. The people of the north have nothing. There's no aid coming into the people of the north at all. They're starving to death up there. And, and he says, there's only these four places. And then, here's what we're talking about, Lex, when we're talking about killing the starving people as they line up for aid. What it is, and this has been explained in Haaretz, by the way. They have senior officials and army people talking to Haaretz about this. This is the most important liberal daily in Israel, the Israeli New York Times, basically,

• 8:23:51Speaker 03

  has firsthand reporting from enlisted and officers perpetrators, saying that, yes, it's true, we do this, okay? Then Aguilera tells the story the best and has some video and shows. What it is, is this. They opened the, the food place early in the morning for this riot, where everybody's supposed to come and rush and grab the food. So people come walking and they force them to walk through war zones to get to the places where there's firing going on anyway. Force them to walk for, I don't know how many miles this is, 12 kilometers. So, um, 10 miles? It was just a hell of a walk, man, I don't know, eight miles? I'm still, incredible long walk for poor, hungry, starving people. They get all the way there.

• 8:24:37Speaker 03

  And then, but from the IDF's point of view, they're supposed to go this way. And then they're supposed to go that way. They're supposed to go over this hill and then come around this way. And then you line up at the thing. But there's no signs anywhere. And there's no little metal barricades like a Black Sabbath show or something for people to follow. So how do they direct the Palestinians' foot traffic? With machine guns, with artillery and tank rounds. There's an invisible line. You'll know you cross it when I blow your head off. And when the mob of Palestinians coming down for their food, when they can see that people on the edges of the crowd are being shot and killed. They know that, oh, I guess that's where the line is.

• 8:25:22Speaker 03

  That's how they're supposed to know where the invisible lines are drawn. Aguilera said, he asked them, why don't you just put up a sign? Let's just go this way. And they go, no, that's too expensive. So instead, they shoot at them not just with fully automatic rifles, but with artillery and with tank rounds. They blast them to hell, man, in the name of crowd control.

• 8:25:45Speaker 03

  And he says, and they say, oh, no, we're just shooting over their heads and shooting at their feet and shooting behind them to direct them. Can you imagine directing civilian traffic that way with machine gun fire? So what happens is they all die. He says, they're coming down this thing. They're shooting over the heads of these guys, but behind them is a hillside where people are coming down there. So then when the sun finishes coming up, there's just roses, just dead bodies everywhere.

• 8:26:12Speaker 03

  And then he says, then the Israelis go, oh, Hamas did it. Come on, man. Like, yeah.

• 8:26:19Speaker 03

  You know, would be Hamas in Bosnia did some false flag attacks in 1995. That's not what's happening here. Okay. These people are being slaughtered. Starving people are being brought in and massacred. As Tucker Carlson rightly said. Men were hanged to death from the neck for this at Nuremberg. Murdering prisoners. This is if you've seen Schindler's List, there's a scene in there, which I don't even know if this really happened or not, probably did, what the hell? Or if this is just Spielberg, shows one of the concentration camp guards shooting the Jews for target practice. That's what they do. There's numerous reports coming in in just the last couple of weeks that there has clearly

• 8:27:04Speaker 03

  been, well, I don't know, I shouldn't say numerous. I saw that there's a British doctor saying this. And then there was someone who said that he confirmed it, although I wasn't sure how serious he was or not, I shouldn't take that. But it seemed like a very credible report in the first place. And in fact, the British doctor is at least claiming that he's passing on reports for other doctors. And what are they seeing? They're seeing Palestinian children who all have the same signature type of wound to the same body part. One day they're all shot in the genitals, children. The next day they're all shot in the elbow. The next day they're all shot in the knee or in the heart. And what's happening here is the Israelis are shooting them for fun, for target practice,

• 8:27:49Speaker 03

  just like the Nazis in Schindler's List, killing the little girl in the red coat. That's what they're doing. They're burying them alive. And they're starving them to death and then forcing them into mobs and then machine gunning them. Right? If this was a movie, you'd say it was too over the top. It's too fake. It can't be true. If it was, if anybody leaned left and they heard this about the communists, they'd say, no, it's right wing propaganda. Like, no, dude, this is how they are. This is exactly how they are. And it's exactly how they treat the Palestinians. They do not recognize their humanity. They are N-words. They are gooks. They are goyim. Grasshoppers.

• 8:28:32Speaker 03

  And that means it's okay to kill them. All of them. The Prime Minister gave a speech to the Officer Corps, where he said, "The enemy is Amalek," out of a 3,000-year-old Bible story, where Jehovah supposedly told the ancient Hebrews to wipe out a tribe called the Amalek and kill every last man, woman, and child, and baby, and oxen, and wipe them off the face of the earth. Now Lex, nobody thinks that God whispered to Benjamin Netanyahu and said the Palestinians are Amalek? Right? This is just a bunch of crap,

• 8:29:16Speaker 03

  even if you believe every single word of the Bible as the literal, inspired word of God from back then. That ain't got a thing to do with this now, other than a cynical, lying, thieving murderer, invoking a God who says it's okay to kill children, that you must, that you are commanded to kill them all. And this was his orders to the Officer Corps? And then I gotta read Liz Wolfe in Reason Magazine every morning, telling me that Israel's goal is fighting Hamas? Benjamin Netanyahu said in May, "We are destroying all of their homes,

• 8:30:00Speaker 03

  so they have nowhere to go back to, so that we can force them all to leave." And I gotta read Liz Wolfe in Reason Magazine? Telling me that Likud means well? And they're just trying to protect themselves from armed terrorists? When they are explicitly and deliberately slaughtering children, shooting toddlers in the head, shooting pregnant women in the stomach, bombing refugees' tents with 2,000-pound bombs?

• 8:30:36Speaker 03

  It is a genocide. They, it's not, and that doesn't just mean a giant massacre. And it doesn't just mean ethnic cleansing. They are attempting to destroy the Palestinian people as Palestinian people. They have bombed all of their universities and schools, all of their government offices that have any records of land ownership or family histories. They bombed every last hospital in the Strip, Lex. Remember when we argued about whether or not they bombed the parking lot that one time at the start of the war? They destroyed them all. You want to talk about babies in incubators? There was a hospital in the Gaza Strip. This is absolute guaranteed verified fact. If you want to stop and pause and look it up, we can do that.

• 8:31:19Speaker 03

  Otherwise, you know, your audience can surely find this. These Palestinian doctors were threatened and told, "We are going to absolutely kill every single last one of you if you don't get out of that hospital right now." And they refused to leave and said, "We are protecting a NICU full of premature babies in their incubators and we will not leave them." And the Israelis said, "You have to leave or we're going to blow the place up. But if you do leave, we promise that we will take possession of these premature babies and protect them." And then you know what they did? They left them in their incubators to die, all of them. And the media went in there and found a room full of corpses.

• 8:32:04Speaker 03

  So, under George H. W. Bush's theory, America has to launch a war against Israel now and carpet bomb Tel Aviv because this is proof of Israel's intent to, quote, "systematically dismantle Palestine." That was the excuse for Iraq War I, and it was a lie. This is true. It's true. And Lex, they like it. They think it's funny. They don't give a damn. They don't give a damn to kill a premature baby. That premature baby was going to grow up to be a Palestinian one day. Nits make lice. Kill them all. That's the doctrine. Again, Haaretz, there are free fire zones. If anyone is between here and here, you just kill them.

• 8:32:48Speaker 03

  There's no sign that says this is a free fire zone. If it's an 11-year-old boy walking with his little sister, you shoot and kill them both. Kill anything that moves, just like America and Vietnam. This is like James Madison Fallujah.

• 8:33:05Speaker 03

  Worse, worse. And in fact, as, as Aguilar says, he goes, man, I've been all over the terror wars. I've never seen anything like this. He told the BBC, he said, what's it like? It's like Terminator two. Remember Terminator two, where it's after the H bombs have hit Los Angeles? That's what it's like, right? An absolute horror show. And man, it's America's fault. No less than the Yemeni war was the American Saudi war. This is the American Israeli genocide. It's not a war. It's a slaughter. It is a canned hunt against a helpless captive, uh, you know, prisoner population.

• 8:33:47Speaker 03

  And just like happened on September 11th, just like happened to that couple that were assassinated outside of the Israeli embassy, uh, just like what happened with the guy attacked with the makeshift flamethrower in Boulder, Colorado. And I can't prove this yet, but you mark my words and we'll see whether I'm right, that the guy that attacked New Orleans on New Year's Day drove his truck down Bourbon Street, killed 12 people and injured another few dozen. And then we're very lucky in the sense that when he finally crashed, he crashed into a backhoe or a bulldozer at the end of Bourbon Street. And there just happened to be a group of six cops, I think it was standing right there. So when he crashed and he got out of his truck with his gun, they blew him away. Otherwise, he could have killed many, many more people. Who was he?

• 8:34:31Speaker 03

  He was an American Army veteran who had converted to Islam and signed up with the Islamic State. And what are the chances, Lex, that on New Year's Eve 2024, that this man is motivated to do, to do this for any other reason than American support for Israel and the Gaza Strip? There's a 99% chance that that was what he was ranting about to his parents in his video messages that he recorded on his way from Houston to New Orleans. And just the same as Omar Mateen complaining about Obama killing the women and children in Syria in the nightclub massacre of, uh, I'm sorry, what year? 2000? I'm sorry, the Orlando Night Pulse massacre. Um, this is blowback from American foreign policy. And again, not for being a good friend

• 8:35:16Speaker 03

  to a good friend. But for being a loyal ally to a state that doesn't give a damn about us, that celebrates when September 11th happens to us because it means that we will now be easier to manipulate and put into the service of carrying out their foreign policy goals, and spend our treasure, that kill our men, that empower their enemies, requiring us to do even more to fight for them and against them, back and forth, over and over for decades. And all we get out of it is confiscated wealth and dead civilians. And I'm terrified, quite honestly. I know a lot of people who kind of downplay this. I am legitimately terrified of Bin Ladenite terrorism.

• 8:36:01Speaker 03

  I ain't afraid of the Shiites. I don't think the Ayatollah wants to fight us. And I don't think Hezbollah is gonna do nothing to the United States of America without his say so, and he ain't given it. It's the Bin Ladenites who tried to knock our towers down in 93, and who did in 2001, killing thousands of our people. And they're still here. They did San Bernardino. They had a failed attack on the subway in New York. They had a failed attack on a marathon in New York and New Jersey. They had a successful attack in Boston, at Fort Hood, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pensacola, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas.

• 8:36:44Speaker 03

  These are all in our era, post-September 11 terrorist attacks against our people because of our government serving Israel's interests primarily in the Middle East.

• 8:36:54Lex Fridman?

  So there's a strong case to be made that what's happening in Gaza is going to lead to the growth of the increased number of Bin Ladenites in the world.

• 8:37:05Speaker 03

  And dead American civilians as a result of that.

• 8:37:07Lex Fridman?

  So basically, it makes the United States less safe.

• 8:37:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 8:37:14Lex Fridman?

  Dooming up on the broader world that makes the entire world less safe, including Israel.

• 8:37:18Speaker 01

  That's right. It's the most cynical thing, man. You know, like, there's an interview, you probably read this before, a lot of people are familiar with this. Sabine Brzezinski was interviewed by a French magazine in 1998, No Llewellyn Observatoire, or some kind of thing, I don't speak French, man. And they interviewed him and they said, this is in 98 now, so this is after the Taliban have come to power. I think it's before the embassy attack, but it's after COVID-19, and it's after the First World Trade Center bombing and the National Guard attack of 95 in Saudi. And the reporter asks him, "Hey, man, so, all our support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan

• 8:38:00Speaker 01

  in the 80s, that was your brilliant idea, this kind of helped lead to the rise of all this terrorism. So what do you think about that?" He says, "Are you kidding me? What's a couple of stirred up Muslims versus the liberation of Eastern Europe and the destruction of Soviet communism?" And we know what we're doing. And he says in that same interview that we were not necessarily, I love the way he says this, you could apply this exactly to the Ukraine war. "We were not trying to provoke them into invading Afghanistan, but we were knowingly increasing the probability that they would," which is of course the exact same thing. And so,

• 8:38:44Speaker 01

  you know, that's the attitude. Again, terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower. If you get to be the superpower, that's how they look at us. Some people partying on Bourbon Street on New Orleans, like to you, you might say, "That is a sacrifice I'm not willing to pay." Who could be more innocent than people partying on Bourbon Street?

• 8:39:10Speaker 03

  What could be more American than having fun with your friends and family on New Year's Eve? Why should they have to be crucified for Israel's sins? It makes no sense at all for the American people to have to put up with this. But where you would say, no, enough, intolerable, they would say, well, who cares? A few expendable civilians, they might as well be Afghans. They might as well be Palestinians, the people of New Orleans. George Bush doesn't care about them, nor does Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Donald Trump, for that matter. The next time there's a terrorist attack, you and I already know what's gonna happen. They're gonna blame it on fundamentalist radical Islam,

• 8:39:52Speaker 03

  which makes evil people hate good people and want to kill us. Now we have no choice but to do with whatever, what do you want us to do next, BB? Whatever he said is whatever we have to do next, the next time that we have to pay the price for what Israel did the last time. And I'm sick and I'm tired of it.

• 8:40:13Lex Fridman?

  I think there's a really big, deeper, human nature point that you've spoken to over the last several hours, which is trying to defeat terror with military force. Over the past 30 years, we have learned the lesson that that only creates more terror.

• 8:40:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and which they don't mind again, because it just gives them more to do. And because, again, the Bin Ladenites are over there, not over here, and they like killing Serbs and Russians and Shiites, and so that's all cool.

• 8:40:43Lex Fridman?

  But also with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

• 8:40:46Speaker 03

  I'm glad you mentioned that. Guess what? The LET, which are the Bin Ladenites of Pakistan? There's a journalist named Steve Kahl, who wrote Ghost Wars about Afghanistan, and he wrote Directorate S. about the Pakistani ISI, their secret intelligence service, who backed the Taliban and backed the Bin Ladenites. Well, the LET, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was one of their groups, and they seized, according to Steve Kahl, they seized control of an Indian ship for a time, before special operations troops were able to go in there and kill them all off. Well, that ship had nuclear weapons on board. Apparently the jihadists didn't know that.

• 8:41:29Speaker 03

  They probably would not have been able to access them or know how to use them. But still. Bin Ladenite jihadists seized control of a ship that had atomic bombs on it. That is not nothing, right? It's just like Bin Ladenites almost toppled one tower over into the other. Let's start paying attention now instead of later. Which by the way, Ramsey bin Al Sheib, before he fled, he wrote letters to all the New York papers, saying he bombed the World Trade Center as revenge for American support for Israel and bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi. Just as his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would say years later after doing September 11th. It's always about Israel, dude. Always was.

• 8:42:14Speaker 03

  Again, even the dual containment was always about Israel. It's Akshamir's guy that said, we had to stay in Saudi. So, you know, I know Dubowitz is watching this right now and saying, see, see? He's blaming it all on the Jews. But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that Israel, which calls itself the Jewish state and happens to be run by Jewish men. And that's what their thing is, that they have interests that are very different from ours. And that their lobbyists and their, as Justin would call it, their amen corner in the United States has their interests at heart and those interests are opposite of ours. As Justin, I know, would hasten to point out that the majority of American Jews opposed Iraq War II. And you might say, well, yeah, but that's because they're liberal Democrats. Okay, fine.

• 8:42:59Speaker 03

  Well, they're not Ariel Sharon's men, are they? More American Jews per capita opposed Iraq War II than any other ethnic or religious group as they divided it up in the polls at that time, right? So, this is clearly not the lie that Mark Dubowitz would try to put in my mouth in order to discredit what I'm saying. But what I am saying is some pretty ugly, true things about the role of the Israel lobby in the United States. And again, just as Mir Schimer says, they have to work this hard. They have to spend this much money and they have to go around calling everybody a Nazi. Because that's what it takes to get Israel to keep doing what Israel wants.

• 8:43:45Speaker 03

  The US has different interests that we would pursue otherwise. And so it takes this extraordinary effort to bend our empire to their will. And including, yes, even supporting the empire itself because as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, probably the two most important neoconservative leaders of that generation, both said in the 1970s that, this is their words, I'm not saying this and I'm not saying people took their advice. I'm saying this is what these two neocon nuts said was, this is, I'm virtually certain this is the Podhoretz quote, is Jews don't like large defense budgets, but we need to support them

• 8:44:28Speaker 03

  because we have to make sure that under whatever excuse, we keep America engaged in the world so that it is available to help Israel. And this is a big part of why they're China hawks, why they're Russia hawks, why they're anything hawks, why they're Venezuela hawks. Because to them, the greatest, this is what Bret Stephens said in the New York Times, the former editor of the Jerusalem Post, who's now a regular writer at the New York Times. He, he said the very same thing about keeping America available to protect Israel. And then he says in the same article, but it's totally an anti-Semitic canard, that anybody who supports Israel and supports these wars does so at America's expense or in any way contrary to America's interests.

• 8:45:12Speaker 03

  But then he's the one who's saying, that's what we have to do is bend America to Israel's interests. It couldn't be anything more anti-American than that. And I would encourage people to read George Washington's Farewell Address. I mean, the guy was a brilliant genius and, and he wrote the thing himself. And it's probably four or 5,000 words on foreign policy, where he says that we should always issue entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world. Because we'll form unnatural, passionate attachments to the interests of these other nations. And then that will divide the people here. It'll lead to all kinds of acrimony and accusations. And eventually you'll have the partisans of foreign nations in charge and they will denounce

• 8:45:57Speaker 03

  as unpatriotic the Americans who don't want to share their allegiance with another power. And all of these things, you couldn't have a 21st century author write it any more eloquently or convincingly than George Washington himself in his farewell.

• 8:46:14Lex Fridman?

  What a truly great man George Washington was.

• 8:46:17Speaker 03

  He had his flaws, but yeah.

• 8:46:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, yes, yes, Jefferson too, all of them, yeah. But I'm grateful for this country and these men that founded the country and these set of principles that revolutionized human history.

• 8:46:33Speaker 03

  Absolutely right.

• 8:46:34Lex Fridman?

  And we have to make sure we carry the flag of those ideas forward.

• 8:46:38Speaker 03

  I absolutely think that, and this is why I'm a libertarian, to me libertarianism is real American distilled. To me, the Declaration of Independence, that is the North Star. Everybody's born free and I don't even have to prove it to you because I'm armed and I'm telling you, dude, I'm not giving up. You understand?

• 8:46:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:46:55Speaker 03

  That's what it says.

• 8:46:56Lex Fridman?

  Me too.

• 8:46:57Speaker 03

  It's self-evident to me. Yeah.

• 8:46:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 8:46:59Speaker 03

  I don't have an argument, I'm just saying. And, and that's the American creed. And, and that's what I believe in. I believe that especially all of liberalism and conservatism and socialism are all deviations from the true American way, which is liberty and property. And, and, and the individual's right to determine their own destiny. That is what it's all about. And if we lived that, I'm going to imagine being afraid Germany and Japan are going to rise back up again. This whole time, we never needed to do any of this. All we had to do was be free. We could have done, as Jean Kirkpatrick said, abandon the entire empire, been a normal country in a normal time. This whole time stayed out of all the world's conflicts, perfected our republic to the

• 8:47:44Speaker 03

  best of our ability, made. Political and individual liberty, our highest political goal, and shown the world how it's done. Y'all's bills of rights ain't good enough, not like ours is. Y'all's independent judiciaries aren't independent enough, not like ours. Y'all's rule of law is too subject to the will of men. You need to really encode this thing and follow it, like in the deal, right? We could have, I one time humiliated Neil Ferguson's wife, Hursa Ali, if you know her, she's the atheist ex-Muslim little pet mascot of the war party there that they traipse around and have her demonize Muslims and whatever. And I humiliated her in a debate

• 8:48:28Speaker 03

  in front of a bunch of people at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. And it was funny because at the end of the debate, the, the host of the debate said to me that, wow, you made her case better than she did, and then you destroyed it. And my case that I was making was about that there are real problems in the Muslim world. Like, for example, the worst thing probably is the female genital mutilation, female circumcision, they call it, in Eastern Africa. And in Kurdistan is where that seems to be the, the worst places where those traditions are still continued to this day. And then you have, of course, the brutality and the

• 8:49:09Speaker 03

  corruption of the dictatorships of North Africa and of the Gulf. You have just the absolute widespread accepted custom of child abuse among the posh tunes of Afghanistan and Pakistan, especially Afghanistan, I don't know as much about, and Pakistan. You have, of course, the absolute tyranny over women in almost all of these countries where they're made to wear the hijab or the veil or even a burka, if, whether they want to or not, and these kinds of things. Whatever, we could go on and on here, Lex, about the imperfections of these countries. But guess what? You know what's the worst thing about Somalia and Libya,

• 8:49:49Speaker 03

  Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan? America is the worst thing about all those countries. The violence that our country has brought to them, the absolute destruction, the wholesale wanton and cruel violence against-

• 8:50:11Speaker 01

  Populations that never did anything to us. Not one of these groups had the slightest thing to do with September 11th, unless you want to say that Omar should have just slit Bin Laden's throat in 99. I guess I'd agree with you about that. But, you know, the Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq and Syria, none of them had anything to do with September 11th. There wasn't a single Iraqi, Syrian or Iranian on those planes or behind any of that at all. Obviously, the only reason they put North Korea in the Axis of Evil is because if they put Syria in, you'd have went, wait a minute, this speech was written in Tel Aviv, dude. What does this have to do with Osama bin Laden, who killed our guys, who Bush has already let get away? Oh, you want to do something? Let's end with this for this part of our section before we move on to the Cold War.

• 8:50:56Speaker 01

  To show just how much our government cares about the American people's interests here. See if you can find George Bush from March 2002. And the quote would be, "I'm truly not concerned about him, Bin Laden."

• 8:51:16Lex Fridman?

  During White House news conference on March 13th, 2002, President George W. Bush stated concerning Osama bin Laden that he was not truly concerned about him. That's a quote. This statement generated controversy, particularly when Senator John Kerry brought it up during a presidential debate in 2004.

• 8:51:34Speaker 01

  Well, and screw John Kerry. This ain't got nothing to do with sticking up for him. And, you know, in my book, I quote the entire statement here because I would, I would not want anyone to mistakenly believe that I quoted any of this out of context. It's one of those things where like, nope, let's go ahead and see everything that he has to say. And to our benefit, George W. Bush is only so smart and only so good at getting away with this. He would like.

• 8:52:02Speaker 03

  He clearly has had conversations with his staff about how we're work. We have to change the subject really from Osama to Saddam. And it's a little clumsy and a little difficult to do, but we're going to have to kind of figure out how to do that. And so this is W. Bush sort of taking a stab at it, except that he's just not up to the task, right? So he can only be as smooth as he is in trying to make these statements. And I would, I would argue it does not work out too well for him. But it makes it, I think, very clear to us, just frankly, like how much contempt they have for us. You know, George W. Bush, it really meant a lot to people, Lex.

• 8:52:46Speaker 03

  When he climbed up on that fire truck and he said, I hear you and we all hear you and the rest of the world will hear you soon. People really were like, man, we need a leader and we got one. Can you imagine Bill Clinton being even pretend macho enough to act like that? When America needed a man, there was W. Bush, right? And, and people believed so hard in him after that. And then he ruthlessly exploited their goodwill and their faith in him in order to manipulate them and lie to them, to use their sons to go to a war for his own reasons that he knew had nothing to do with protecting us from terrorism.

• 8:53:31Speaker 03

  In fact, again, W. Bush is so bad at this. He told Katie Couric on CBS News, "One of the hardest parts of my job is connecting Iraq to the war on terrorism." Because he, right? That's all he can do. He sputtered, oops, was I supposed to say it like that? I guess probably not, right? But that was, because what's he saying? He knows it is the most difficult part of his job is trying to figure out how to get people to believe that this aggressive war has anything to do with defending ourselves from that other thing that happened that one time, you know? When he clearly was just obfuscating and...

• 8:54:19Speaker 01

  Forgive me for stipulating, this is six months after the September 11th attack. Okay, sorry, go ahead. Also, can you tell the American people if you have any more information if you know if he is dead or alive?

• 8:54:30Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:54:31Speaker 01

  Find a target.

• 8:54:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:54:33Speaker 01

  Deep in your heart, don't you truly believe that until you find out if he is dead or alive, he won't really eliminate the threat of...

• 8:54:37Speaker 05

  Well, deep in my heart, I know the man's on the run if he's alive at all. And, uh, I, uh, you know, who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not? We hadn't heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is, um, really indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. And, uh, he's just, he's, he's, he's a person who's now been marginalized. His network is, uh, his host government has been destroyed.

• 8:55:16Speaker 05

  He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and, um, met his match. He is, uh, you know, as I mentioned in my speeches, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death, and he himself tries to hide if in fact he's hiding at all. So I, I don't know where he is. Nor do, you know, I just don't spend that much time on him, let me be honest with you. I'm more worried about making sure that our soldiers are well-supplied, that the strategy is clear, that the coalition is strong, that when we find, uh, enemy bunched up like we did in Shariqoat Mountains, that the, that the military has all the support it needs

• 8:56:00Speaker 05

  to go in and do the job which they did. And, uh, there'll be other battles in Afghanistan, there's gonna be other struggles like Shariqoat, and I'm just as confident about the outcome of that, of those future battles as, uh, as I was about Shariqoat. Our soldiers are performing brilliantly, we're tough, we're strong, they're well-equipped, we have a good strategy. We are showing the world we know how to fight a guerrilla war with conventional means.

• 8:56:32Speaker 04

  That Bin Laden move won't truly be eliminated until he has found either Deder or Alaa.

• 8:56:37Speaker 05

  Well, as I say, we hadn't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, you know, again, I don't know where he is. I, I, I repeat what I said, I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country.

• 8:57:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And then, of course, we know, and we've talked about the events that followed.

• 8:57:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. I gotta say again, I guess, just to finish this segment up, to reiterate, I think our highest priority, really, and in fact, as much as I like seeing Tulsi Gabbard persecute the Russiagate felons who framed President Trump for treason and deserve to be banished with their families from North America forever, I really wish that Tulsi Gabbard actually only had one priority in the entire world, which is protecting us from Bin Ladenite terrorism. I'm serious about that. These guys are coming back here. And like, now, it's true, I should stipulate again, Israel loves Al Qaeda and ISIS. As long as they're killing Shiites, they've got a pretty good relationship with Al Qaeda in Syria now.

• 8:57:51Speaker 03

  Last December, Abu Mohammed Al Jolani, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, broke out of his pen and sacked Damascus with the help of Turkey and Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu went to the border, gave a press conference, and took credit for it himself, okay? And Ben Shapiro got on there and said, yeah, it's Al Qaeda taking over, but that's good because at least they're pushing the Shiites out. This is somehow the leader of American conservatism? You tell me how that worked. But yeah, anyway, so, right now, overall, Israel has a very close relationship with Al Qaeda. But then again, so did Bill Clinton, and they still attacked us. Right? Just because we're supporting them here doesn't mean they won't attack us there. And we're still motivating them to come at the United States.

• 8:58:36Speaker 03

  And, and especially when you're talking like lone wolf kooks, where it can be just one jerk with a rifle can do a hell of a lot of damage, whether anybody on the internet even recruited him to do it or not. And especially with real ability to recruit there. And again, just like always, man, just like with the FBI entrapments. There's almost 300, more than 300 FBI entrapments on terrorism charges. Trevor Aronson is the greatest journalist on that question. He wrote a book called The Terror Factory about the FBI. And every time they entrap some idiot into a bin Laden night plot, what do they tell him? Don't you hate freedom? No, they tell him, isn't it impossible to tolerate the violence that George Bush slash Barack Obama

• 8:59:19Speaker 03

  slash Donald Trump slash Joe Biden are bringing to the people of the Middle East? And don't you want to do something about it? Here's $10,000. Say you love Osama into the microphone kid. And he goes, yeah, I'm really angry about American foreign policy. I love Osama, give me $20,000. And off to the penitentiary he goes. And that's how they get them every time they cite American foreign policy. Do you think that there's a six-figure salary paid FBI informant in this country anywhere? That's going to try to recruit a terrorist by citing freedom? You know what's really bad about Americans is they let three or four million Muslims live here and go to whatever mosque they want and don't bother them at all. And it's fine. Whoa, that enrages us.

• 9:00:02Speaker 03

  Oh, we hate that America for all their freedom of religion, where a tiny Muslim minority is able to practice in peace and security. That ain't it. And that's not how an FBI informant recruits Dupe into a plot. They cite American foreign policy 100% of the time. So the FBI knows, same thing that I know, same thing that the FBI testified to the 9/11 Commission. I think they identify with the Palestinian issue. And I think that's why they're taking revenge against the United States of America. And so what do we get from Israel on all this? Like, maybe we need to invite Dubowitz back in here so he can tell us, what is one thing that Israel has ever done for us?

• 9:00:44Speaker 03

  They helped Obama back Al Qaeda in Syria, but that was Obama helping them back Al Qaeda in Syria. They helped Ronald Reagan sell missiles to the Ayatollah when he was backing Saddam at the very same time. I guess we owe them big for that. Otherwise, they steal our secrets and sell them to the Soviets or to the Chinese. Including like the Chinese supersonic sea skimming missiles, they got those from American designs pilfered by the Israelis. Jeff Stein from Spy Talk, when he's not being an insane Russiagate lunatic, poor Jeff, I used to respect him, but Jeff Stein reported numerous times that the FBI and CIA do a

• 9:01:28Speaker 03

  report, actually, they made them stop doing this report because every year they said that after Russia and China, Israel is the worst country that spies on the United States of America and is the greatest security threat for the counterintelligence agents in the United States, trying to hold them at bay. Russia and China and Israel are the countries that spy on us the most, again, including Bill Clinton, and they tried to blackmail him with their information about Bill Clinton and cheating on his wife. They're just a security threat to the United States of America. I'd buy anybody to, to make a coherent argument that's not based on just pure lies and sophistry.

• 9:02:12Lex Fridman?

  Quick bathroom break once more?

• 9:02:14Speaker 03

  And then let's do that Cold War, man. I'm having fun.

• 9:02:19Lex Fridman?

  So like we talked about provoked, your book on Cold War 2.0. How Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. So can you lay out the history and the mechanism of how this went down?

• 9:02:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:02:39Speaker 03

  The book is divided by presidents. Those are the chapters. And then I go through, I start with H W Bush. We have a few flashbacks to the fall of the Soviet, or, or earlier days of the Cold War and the Reagan years. But basically, we start with the end of the last Cold War and the overthrow of the Soviet Union by the Russian government led by Boris Yeltsin at that time, at the end of 1991. Red flag came down on Christmas Day, 1991. Never forget it. And people can watch that on YouTube. There's a great Ted Koppel special about it. ABC News, really good thing.

• 9:03:15Speaker 03

  And so that was the end of Soviet communism.

• 9:03:19Speaker 03

  And then the question was, well, now what?

• 9:03:24Speaker 03

  And the answer was, America's gotta stay. If America leaves, and by the way, the Soviets, I think, and Jeffrey Sachs said this the other day on Pierce Morgan, I think, no, no, no. Yeah, I think that's right. But the Soviets actually agreed with that, that as James Baker put it in his discussions with Gorbachev, he's like, hey, would you prefer an independent, potentially nuclear armed Germany with its own foreign policy? Or wouldn't you prefer that we stay in Germany? And the Soviets said, actually, we like you guys better than the Germans. So yes, we, we would even agree with that.

• 9:04:07Speaker 03

  Now, the purpose of NATO in the first place, according to its first general secretary, Lord Ismay, the Brit, was to keep the Soviets out, sorry, the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Soviets out. Replace the Soviets with the Russians, right? But then, so the idea is, we're not leaving. Again, this is the era of the Defense Planning Guidance. America will dominate the planet. You can call it empire, you can call it dominance, you can call it preeminence, or, or primacy. Zbigniew Brzezinski liked to call it, Kristol and Kagan called it benevolent global hegemony.

• 9:04:50Speaker 03

  This is the unipolar moment of Charles Krauthammer. And in fact, in his rejoinder to Jean Kirkpatrick, he said, we should stop at nothing short of global domination. And so this was the idea. And in the Defense Planning Guidance, just as in the famous study by the Project for New American Century, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan's group, that was called Rebuilding America's Defenses, that came out in 1998. And by the way, you can find, I'm pretty sure you can find both at scotthorton.org/fairuse. The Defense Planning Guidance for 1994, again, written in 1992, and there are two different versions of it. They made them rewrite it, but it's essentially the same thing.

• 9:05:32Speaker 03

  And then, The Project for New American Century's Rebuilding America's Defenses. And these are basic neocon doctrine for the end of the 20th century.

• 9:05:43Speaker 01

  And where they say, hey, we have to stay in the Middle East to contain Saddam Hussein. First and foremost, Fried Zacharias said in the 90s, Saddam Hussein is our linchpin in the Middle East. If he did not exist, we would have to invent him, get it as an enemy to have. So we have an excuse to stay. So, um, uh, we have to expand in the Middle East. And this is the whole story as we've told so far here. But then also we have to expand NATO. That's the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, America's military alliance with Britain, France, and the other Western democracies, including Western Germany and now Germany and the rest, as we've incorporated more and more in Eastern Europe as well, our military

• 9:06:24Speaker 01

  alliance, we have to expand it into Eastern Europe. And there's a huge question at the time about, like, the obvious thing was, after our great peaceful victory here, I mean, for people who are too young for this and don't understand or something like, if you were to ever believe in magic, or God, or miracles, or something like that kind of a thing, the Soviet Union essentially just fell away in peaceful revolutions and simple withdrawals in almost every case. Now, the dictator in Romania and his wife were put up against the wall and machine gun to death. Civil war broke out in Tajikistan,

• 9:07:06Speaker 01

  I think, and there was fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan. And it was not perfect. But man, on the sliding scale of grading things on a curve flex, it was perfect, man. It was, you could not have had magic wishes come true in a way to make the Soviet Union just dissolve away the way they did. That kind of peaceful victory was the kind of thing where it was like, how best in deep senses of that term to take advantage of this? We really have a huge responsibility for how we act now. And so, one of the things that occurred to them immediately was, as so many of them put it, them being the foreign

• 9:07:49Speaker 01

  policy establishment and including the administration, uh, Bush Senior and Bill Clinton too, we don't want to move the dividing lines in Europe further east. We want to erase them completely. We want a Europe that's whole and free.

• 9:08:08Speaker 03

  Does that or does that not include the Russians? But at first, the message was, yes, it does. And George Bush Senior said, "We want to have a single zone of peace from Vancouver to Vladivostok," meaning the entire northern hemisphere. Now, this is why I was such a New World Order kook in the 1990s, is because there were enough threads of things like this, where part, one side of the argument was essentially that, yes, we should bring Russia into NATO too. Now, what's that? To me, in my mind, that fit in with J. Edward Griffin's John Birch's grand design conspiracy,

• 9:08:50Speaker 03

  where you take the two enemies, move them together, and they're going to form basically like a single white world army of the North to then lord it against Islamic South Asia and/or China. And, but it would essentially be the single one-world army of the one-world government under the United Nations in this new alliance between the United States and Russia. But that was not true at all. That was not right. And the woolly-headed one-worlders like Strobe Talbot, that's his own word for himself. That idea that we're going to really befriend Russia and bring them in from the cold all the way with us was never really on the table for discussion. It was dismissed essentially immediately.

• 9:09:35Speaker 03

  And so, like, in 1997, when Bill Clinton is throwing them scraps and giving them the NATO-Russia Council, I'm going, "Oh, my God, look, they're doing it. They're building the NATO-Russia Council." When in fact, he's giving them the stiff arm and treating them like crap. But I was a kid, and I didn't have the Internet back then, and it was different times. But, so in fact, in a way, chapter one and two of that book are me. grappling with what was really going on at that time when I thought it was something else back then, where I really thought that they were trying to build this world federalism with Russia and then come to find out that this is Dick Cheney's world, not Al Gore's. If that's, if that's, does that make sense, right? That like this liberal namby pamby,

• 9:10:17Speaker 03

  baby blue UN flag internationalism, that's just cover for the brute force of American hegemony over the world. And of course, you gotta get the liberals on board. So you tell them a bunch of namby pamby stuff to get them on board because they like that kind of thing that, oh, look, it's all humanitarianism and we're passing out food or, you know, it's world federalism, it's multilateralism and all of these like little buzzwords that make them feel good about what we're really doing is seeking essentially a Pax Americana over the world. And so that was what was going on. Now, obviously, if instead of erasing dividing lines, we're just moving them further east, what does that mean? It means that

• 9:10:57Speaker 03

  we stop at Russia. You gotta ask yourself, how does that look from Russia's side? And how it looks from Russia's side is an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance encroaching steadily toward their borders and obviously regards that as a threat. And when I say obviously, I mean, the George H. W. Bush administration understood that that would be a result of NATO expansion. That's why they lied and said, what we're going to do is, we're going to empower what was then called the CSCE, the Conference on Security and Cooperation on in Europe, which is now called the OSCE for Organization. We're going to empower

• 9:11:40Speaker 03

  them and we're going to have a security partnership. And so what's going to happen is NATO is going to become irrelevant. We're going to marginalize NATO is essentially going to become a political organization. So even if it expands, it doesn't really matter because what we're really talking about is something that's sort of like the EU plus the United States. But it's going to be relegated to a political organization and it's going to be replaced by the CSCE because who needs an alliance? There's no enemy.

• 9:12:11Speaker 03

  And we want to be partners with you. And since Russia and all the middle states in Central and Eastern Europe and Far Eastern Europe, if you want to call it that, right? The Baltics and Ukraine and Belarus are all members of the CSCE already since the Helsinki Accords of 1975. Well, then, cool. Presto. Everybody's neutrality is baked in and we're all in it together. But they were lying, man. They never meant to do that. The plan always was to expand NATO, of course, to keep it a military alliance and to keep it the center of American power in Europe and to use the CSCE. And then later, the Clinton administration's version of the same scam was called the Partnership

• 9:12:54Speaker 03

  for Peace, where Warren Christopher knowingly, the Secretary of State knowingly lied directly to Gorbachev's face and tried to make him believe that we're doing the Partnership for Peace instead of NATO expansion and/or again reiterating that NATO is just going to be this political thing and it's not, we're not really doing much with it anyway right now at all. When they knew that wasn't true, they had already decided that they were going to expand NATO for certain. The decision had been made like in stone by then. And they were shining them on and trying to get them to go along with their further agendas as much as they could get away with, as long as they could get away with it before breaking the bad news to them that actually we are expanding NATO after all. Because, man, they knew that this is going to destroy Yeltsin.

• 9:13:39Speaker 03

  This is going to cause such pressure against him. In fact, when Clinton gave his speech announcing that he had been lying and that he really does mean to expand NATO in 1994, Yeltsin freaked out because he misunderstood that Bill Clinton was saying that we're going to start doing it next year in 95, which was Clinton had promised him that they definitely would not do that. Yeltsin had to stand for reelection in 96 and this would absolutely destroy him and they all knew it, Lex. Was that me? That means that every pro-American, moderate, English-speaking liberal in Moscow.

• 9:14:23Speaker 03

  Would be implicated, right? That they said we were cool. And we're doing what we promised we wouldn't. While they were telling everybody else, don't worry about the Americans. We can trust them. It's all good and this and that. Right? So they knew this was going to destroy Yeltsin politically. So they promised that, no Boris, no, no, no, man. Don't worry, we're not going to do it until after you're safely reelected in 96. They absolutely understood, all of them understood the depth of how destructive that would be to him. Because of how the entire consensus inside Russia at that time and their entire, you know, political and foreign policy establishment was absolutely opposed to NATO expansion.

• 9:15:07Speaker 03

  And we're of course terrified by it. And this is all before Putin or W Bush ever come to town. This is just H W Bush and Bill Clinton years and dealing with Mikhail Gorbachev. And then Boris Yeltsin in all of this. And I give credit to Joshua Schifrinson is the great academic. I believe he's now at Cato. He was at Texas A&M University and I'm not sure where else he has written, but he wrote a bunch of great journal articles that I learned a hell of a lot from and cite in my book, where he shows explicitly is this beyond argument that they knew that they were lying. They were planning one thing and they were doing something else. And he's very polite and says that they were knowingly misleading.

• 9:15:51Speaker 03

  I think, but I call them damn liars. And it's pretty clear that they were. And so that's a huge part of it, just to get us started off here in the 1990s. What are we going to do? Oh, and I'm sorry. Yes, we're going to expand NATO. But first, it's important to emphasize that yes, in fact, they did promise not to.

• 9:16:15Speaker 03

  And people keep trying to debunk this, but they can't. I have rebunked it and they cannot at all challenge the facts as I marshal in my book. And it's overkill. This is one of the two sections where I have probably far more than I need to demonstrate my case. Because I tried to simply on, I think I already said this earlier in interview, I'm sorry. On the case of the promises against NATO expansion and on the subject of the Ukrainian Nazis, I went for absolute overkill on the citation and the development of the idea and the story and the proof and what it all means. Because I feel like those are the two most controversial

• 9:16:55Speaker 03

  stances that I'm taking in the book as being factually true. And I want the skeptical reader to say, oh, boy, I didn't really realize it was like that when they're done.

• 9:17:05Lex Fridman?

  So to be clear, on the NATO expansion, saying that there was clear indication made official that NATO promises made by the United States that NATO will not expand.

• 9:17:17Speaker 03

  And not just promises, but it was an agreement that we promise not to expand the NATO alliance if you'll allow the reunification of Germany. And that was what convinced Gorbachev to say, okay, fine, we'll agree to withdraw and allow Germany to reunify under NATO. And then the deal is, and as I show in the book, it's not just that James Baker said this one time on February the 9th, 1990. He said it six times on February the 9th, 1990. And on many other, in fact, on that same day, Robert Gates, who was then the Deputy Secretary

• 9:17:58Speaker 03

  of, pardon me, the Deputy Director of the CIA, told the same thing to the Director of the KGB in a meeting on that same day in Moscow. And then the German Foreign Minister, Hans Dietrich Genzer, said this over and over and over again, including in public at public press conferences right in front of James Baker, who only nodded in assent and never said anything against it, that we promise not only not to expand NATO, but that includes in, because here's the rub. And this is what makes it a little complicated. And maybe people's eyes glaze over or the world party tries to say, this is all anybody ever meant by that, was Baker said.

• 9:18:38Speaker 03

  In a weird way, that if you allow Germany to reunite, we won't spread NATO one inch inside Germany. That's where the phrase "not one inch" comes from. Well, that doesn't make any sense. It's not like the East German government is going to be the government of the new Germany. Right? Bahn is going to move to Berlin and West Germany is going to be the regime that rules the new pre-united Germany, right? No question about that. So how is it that only the western half of the country is in NATO? That doesn't make sense. So then they had to walk that back and go, okay, well, you know what we'll do, though, is, yes, obviously, the whole country will be in NATO,

• 9:19:22Speaker 03

  but we promise not to move any substantial military forces into the then GDR, East Germany. That was short for German Democratic Republic, which was commie enslaved East Germany. We promise not to move our forces in there or nuclear weapons into the eastern part. So they're still respecting the promise. They're kind of revising it because they have to. Because the first, in the first sense, the promise doesn't actually make rational sense. Right? You can't really bring, you can't reunite Germany, but only leave the first half inside the military alliance. Okay, but they said, okay, but we're not going to build new bases

• 9:20:04Speaker 03

  and station forces further east, and we're not going to put nuclear weapons there. Okay, so they're still respecting that promise. And that part ended up in the final Washington treaty, uh, final treaty that they signed. Now, um, Hans Dietrich Genscher made the most of this, but so did the Chancellor Helmut Kohl. And this is the part, and Mary Elise Serat wrote a whole book about this called "Not One Inch", and she has a whole hell of a lot on this. As her and Schiffern sind are probably the two best on it, although I think he's probably got the edge. But she shows where... Helmut Kohl went and met with Gorbachev and he knew that H W Bush wanted to reconsider

• 9:20:49Speaker 03

  this and thought that Baker was being too conciliatory. But Helmut Kohl went ahead and stuck with the day before yesterday's interpretation, or was it just yesterday's interpretation instead of the new one? Because he knew that that's what he wanted Gorbachev to hear, that this is how it's going to be. And it was based on that promise from Helmut Kohl, that Gorbachev said, okay, fine, you can do it. And Helmut Kohl said, can I quote you on that right now? And he goes, yeah. And Helmut Kohl went right outside and held a press conference and said, Gorbachev just said that Germany can reunite. Blam, got it. Now, was that in the treaty? Like, right there, it was just a spoken word, but they moved to reunite right then, based on it? The treaty came later, right? So, same kind of thing here.

• 9:21:32Speaker 03

  They try to argue that words don't mean things only when it's a treaty ratified by the Senate, but that's not true. And Schiffrer, especially, goes through and shows some examples, and there are plenty of others, but you have the entire arrangement around West Berlin, for example, which your younger viewers may not know, that West Berlin, the western half of Berlin, was a free city, wholly within commie East Germany, was still occupied by the US as a remnant of the Second World War. And so, it was a very complicated situation there. But America's entire arrangement with the Soviets about how to treat West Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie and all these things, was purely handshake agreements. They had no treaty at all.

• 9:22:15Speaker 03

  And Roosevelt, in fact, when he was still alive, they were already working on this and said that the agreement that we were already working out over Vienna, Austria, should also apply to Berlin. And he did not want it on a piece of paper because he wanted it specifically for a trust building measure. And if we don't put it in writing, and both sides just have to live up to it based on what's the right thing to do in the circumstance, then that'll help build our relationship for the better. And that's really because Roosevelt was a Stalinist commie dictator himself, but don't get me off on that tangent. But anyway, speaking of one world communism, but, so...

• 9:22:56Speaker 03

  There was no formal arrangement over West Berlin. Then same thing when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon split Mao Zedong off from the Soviet Union in the Cold War and made them really our allies in the war. We didn't have a war guarantee, but we had a deep relationship that they crafted at that time. All handshake deals, nothing official, no treaties is how they handled it. When in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy negotiated with Khrushchev secretly with his brother, the Attorney General, over the heads of and around the CIA and the State Department, and made a secret deal with Khrushchev that if you get your missiles out of Cuba, we will remove our mid-range missiles from Turkey.

• 9:23:41Speaker 03

  And they didn't even say this, but just implicitly also Italy, where we had stationed these same Jupiter mid-range missiles. And, and we promised never to invade Cuba again. That informal, secret deal that wasn't revealed until the end of the Cold War. They said at the time, yeah, Jack Kennedy just faced him down. No, he made this secret deal and it held and it has held this whole time. They kept the missiles. They've never put missiles back in Turkey. We do have airdropped and hydrogen bombs and airplanes stationed at the Interlik Base there.

• 9:24:23Speaker 03

  But we have not stationed missiles in Turkey ever since, or in Italy ever since then, as and lived up to that deal, nor have we invaded Cuba, although they did try to murder Castro more times after that, but we haven't invaded. So that was an informal deal. It was not only a handshake deal. It was a secret and completely deniable. And yet they abided by it anyway, because sometimes you gotta do that. And that's the way these things go. When it comes to this, you have Peter Baker in the New York Times saying, nah, come on, if it's not in a treaty, then it's not anything at all. But that's not true. As Ted Snyder said, this wasn't just a promise. This was an agreement. We promised not to expand NATO. Okay? Can we reunite now? Yes, you can shake on it.

• 9:25:07Speaker 03

  That's a deal. And the Americans lied and broke it and they knew they're lying and breaking it. And when the Russians started complaining to the Clinton people.

• 9:25:17Speaker 01

  Warren Christopher launched the internal investigation at the State Department to find out if it was true or not, and they decided it was true, but that, oh, well, screw them. We're gonna go ahead anyway.

• 9:25:26Lex Fridman?

  Can we, if it's okay, fast forward, as you said, your book is called Provoke, Not Justified.

• 9:25:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:25:33Lex Fridman?

  I should say for me, maybe you can speak from your perspective, that the reason the war in Ukraine in 22 started was because Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine.

• 9:25:49Lex Fridman?

  And you could backtrack, like, what, why?

• 9:25:52Speaker 01

  What he did was he escalated the war in Ukraine by about 100,000%, right? But the war had been going on for a very long time, right? And that's very important. You know, it's not just the backstory, but it really is the start of the war was when John Brennan came to town on April the 12th and 13th of 2014 and demanded that the acting president, Turgenev, launched the war, and he did on the 14th.

• 9:26:21Speaker 01

  It was all John Brennan's fault, like a lot of things.

• 9:26:23Lex Fridman?

  A drastic escalation

• 9:26:28Lex Fridman?

  was committed by Vladimir Putin.

• 9:26:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely right, yeah.

• 9:26:32Lex Fridman?

  And there's, when we look at responsibility and we talk about warmongers and we talk about the military industrial complex.

• 9:26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:26:40Lex Fridman?

  That's, I think it's really important to explore from an American perspective. When you look at the region and who started that escalation, you have to put the chief responsibility on Vladimir Putin.

• 9:26:55Speaker 01

  Of course. The guy's a gangster. It's how he got a job in the first place. He was part of the Yeltsin family, and he had been the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, where he worked for a criminal named Sobchak, who was part of the Yeltsin family. And we say family like the Italian mob in New York, families. That's exactly, in this exact same meaning of that term, that's what they called it at the time. And that was where he came from in the first place. And his first job really was protecting all the Yeltsin and his guys and getting them out of the country with all their money safely and then, you know, taking control of the thing. So we're ahead of the story a little bit, but the guy's an SOB. You know, people say, oh, he's a KGB and he's a commie. Well, he's not a commie.

• 9:27:37Speaker 01

  He sided with the reformers against the coup plotters in August of 1991, when it counted.

• 9:27:44Speaker 01

  Right. And, and also, he wasn't a spy. He was a clerk. Like, he was, you know, he was a Colonel. But like, I've never seen anything that said he's out slitting throats and bribing people and blackmailing people and turning spies. He was a operations guy back at headquarters. I know a lady named Susan Tennyson. You ever heard of her? She's an American who was doing outreach to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, spent her whole lifetime. I think she's still alive, little old lady, sweet old lady, spent her whole lifetime trying to make friends with Russia. And she talked, she told me the story about meeting Putin when he was the deputy mayor of, of St. Petersburg, and how he wouldn't take a bribe. He just wanted to get the job done, whatever

• 9:28:29Speaker 01

  the job was. She needs some bureaucratic hurdles taken. He said, well, check this box and sign here, and thank you very much, and didn't want her money, which she thought was a really big deal at the time, that wow, like, this guy has a sense of honor and duty and doing his job in a way that nobody else here does. Everybody else here is a Mexican cop going kick down, you know what I mean? Everybody. And where he wasn't. So, no, I'm not saying that makes him a moral guy or whatever, but I'm saying that makes him very much like a business is business, sort of a dude who has his priorities, like, in that way. He's the head of state in a powerful state, and you have to be, in practice, a psychopath to run a country like that. That goes for Obama and the rest of them too,

• 9:29:12Speaker 01

  man. All of these guys, it's a psychopathic job to kill people, and especially in the kind of large numbers, especially that the Americans do, but Putin's been responsible for a bit of violence of himself up until even this time. And I don't think anybody underestimates, I don't, you know, there's some people, I guess, who kinda, they're so anti-American empire, they start seeing, or maybe too sympathetic, instead of just empathetic with the other side, right, and sort of maybe rationalize a bit of the Russian point of view or whatever in a way that doesn't appeal to me. I don't, I don't think you have to, like, honestly, I don't see anything, well, I have in

• 9:29:53Speaker 01

  the book, it's a Bill Hicks quote, "There's options." He's talking about pro-life people ought to be blocking cemeteries and preventing funerals. But he says, "There's options." So I just, like, little tiny little Easter eggs like that. Putin could have done other things like, for example, he could have,

• 9:30:15Speaker 01

  again, like in 2018, demanded, only this time really seriously and loudly and with the world paying close attention in a way that they weren't in 18, that I want baby blue helmet UN peacekeepers from a third non-interested country to go stand on the border of the gray zone in the Donbass on what's supposed to be the ceasefire line in eastern Ukraine. And I demand it and I'm serious and I'm gonna come up with ways to force you all to give into this. In other words, to to ratchet up the tension, not to start the war, but to find a creative way to force the West to

• 9:30:54Speaker 01

  implement the Minsk II deal that the West signed along with Ukraine and Russia in 2015. And that Obama rubber stamped and that the UN Security Council rubber stamped and that America and Kiev had always refused to implement. He also, and maybe as part of enforcing that, he could have vowed to obstruct all UN Security Council business. He's got veto power. He can vote no on anything and just grind the UN Security Council to a halt. That's a hell of a lever of pressure. He could have also cut off all gas to Western Europe through the Nord Stream. He'd already shut off Nord Stream 1. I forgot exactly the offense that caused him to do

• 9:31:36Speaker 01

  that. It's in the book. But he had already shut down Nord Stream 1. He could have shut down Nord Stream 2 and he could have shut off all the gas pipelines running through Ukraine as well. This is in the winter of 21 we're talking about, in November, December of 21 into January, February 22. It's cold as hell. Europe is up at Canada-type latitudes, man, where it's cold in the winter up there. And he could have played hardball like that. And as I complain in the book as well, he also could have been just not so damn coy about the thing. And where he kept denying that he was going to invade and saying, well, this is very coercive diplomacy essentially, but like, come on, just give in. Which I think he did offer treaties and this is, we're jumping way ahead in

• 9:32:20Speaker 01

  the story. I think Biden could have negotiated his way out of it if he'd been trying to. I think he was not trying to. So when Biden was president, you were saying, That he did not do enough. Right, to negotiating good faith. In fact, this is why I thought there wouldn't be a war. It's not because I didn't think Putin had it in him. I'd been warning for years. He had been warning for years and I noticed. He had told an Italian diplomat in 2014, you know, I could be in Kiev in two weeks. And so this was always the threat that this could get, you know, much worse. And but I thought it wouldn't happen because William Burns, who is the author of the Net Means Net Memo and was, I don't know if he was ever CIA,

• 9:33:05Speaker 01

  but he was stationed in the embassy over there since the 1990s, had been Bush's ambassador to Russia and was like, if there's one guy who can work this out with Sergey Lavrov, it's William Burns. And I idiotically thought, and God, how stupid could I have been? That I thought that of course, William Burns mandate from Biden will be see us through this. Prevent this war from happening. And I knew the war was preventable because the issues on the table were not just some front, some excuse. The issues on the table were deadly serious issues of NATO expansion,

• 9:33:46Speaker 01

  the potential for missile emplacements in Ukraine, especially after Trump tore up the nom- the intermediate nuclear forces treaty of 1987, which would have made it legal for America to station nuclear missiles in Europe again. And in the ongoing war in the Donbass. And if if William Burns had the mandate to figure this out, dude, then he could have, and I know that he could have, and I know that they did not try to do that. They never negotiated either of those proposed treaties. One was for the US, one was for NATO. And they were reasonable. And Lex, I have in the book, not just Chos Freeman, the brilliant genius, you know, career diplomat who went to China with Nixon

• 9:34:30Speaker 01

  and was the former ambassador to Saudi and all these things, who told me personally that like absolutely, this is a reasonable treaty to negotiate. Am I saying we should sign on the dotted line? Hell, no. We don't do that for anyone. But is this reasonable to sit at a table and negotiate? Absolutely. And I show in the book.

• 9:34:50Speaker 03

  Joe Biden administration, White House officials, possibly State Department, but at least high level officials, NSC and or state, told The Post and The Times that we think these are reasonable treaties and that they should be negotiated. But then they did not do that. They refused to negotiate those treaties. They refused to negotiate NATO expansion. They refused to negotiate the emplacement of missiles, the potential emplacement of missiles in Ukraine, and they refused to implement Minsk II or do anything to end the civil war. And in fact, helped to increase it. According to the OSCE, Kiev was escalating artillery attacks

• 9:35:30Speaker 03

  on the other side of the line into the third week of February of 2022. And so, listen, there's a quote in there of Putin where he says, you know, I think they're trying to provoke me into invading. That's not the exact quote, forgive me, but he acknowledges that this could be a trap, but I really don't know what else to do. And, and quite frankly, I think that's right, Lex. And I think, and my excuse is, is I was too damn busy recording the audiobook of The Last War. Enough already in the Middle East. I'm one of those generals always behind. And so I was outsourcing too much of my primary reading

• 9:36:13Speaker 03

  to my opinion pieces that I was reading from smart people and people that I was interviewing at the time. But I wasn't reading just enough of, hate to say it, but just The Post, The Times and The Journal. That's who the US government talks to. So you gotta read The Post, The Times and The Journal. And if you read The Post and The Times and The Journal very carefully, and a lot of the rest of the media too, from the era of, especially December of 21 and into January and February 22, you'll find a lot of references to Afghanistan. Not our recent absolutely humiliating disgraceful failure and ultimate withdrawal after 20 years, just three months before, in the end of the summer of 2021.

• 9:36:58Speaker 03

  Just three months later.

• 9:37:00Speaker 01

  They have the word Afghanistan in their mouths. We want to replicate the Afghan war. You know, Rambo three. What we did to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Not our Afghan war, their Afghan war. But we're going to do it this time with the Ukrainian Nazi right as the Mujahideen. And we're going to lure the Russians in, bog them down and bleed them to bankruptcy. Inflict on them a strategic defeat. Uh, Niall Ferguson, who's wifi humiliated in front of all those people in Las Vegas at time, he wrote an article in Bloomberg News. Where he says, look, everybody who's anybody

• 9:37:41Speaker 01

  in Washington and London knows that the policy is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. We're not trying to dissuade them from invading. And you could just see where right after the start of the war, somebody asked Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, man, what are we doing to negotiate an end of this thing? I mean, you would just think that the consensus of all eight billion of us would be, you can't have a hot war on Russia's southern, western border. This could go nuclear. We have to cease fire immediately. General strike, call it off. Somebody go to Geneva and figure this out. That's what everybody thought was happening. And so the reporters asked Ned Price, man, what are we doing to do the thing to end the thing?

• 9:38:24Speaker 01

  And Ned Price goes, well, you know, there are larger principles at stake here about independence and sovereignty and the right of a nation to direct its gaze in whichever direction that it wishes to direct its gaze. In other words, this is sticking with what they call the open door policy, which says that any country that wants to join NATO can join NATO if we say so, and no third country can say otherwise. And no third country's security interests will be taken into account. And you see how they do this in committee. They go, well, is anybody at the table here think that Russia ought to have veto power over who we allow into our military alliance?

• 9:39:08Speaker 01

  And of course, nobody raises their hand when you put it that way. So then that's it. We dismiss that forever. Now we have an open door. Now, of course, there is no door, no doors, just jargon. It's just meaningless garbage, basically thought up by a bunch of bureaucrats. They could change it just as easy. But instead they say, nope. Especially when the Russians, and this is pointed out by Stephen Walt and by Samuel Cherap at Rand, pointed out that, yeah, it's hard because, once the Russians are demanding that we do these reasonable things, well, now doing them seems unreasonable because we don't want to give in to their demands. And so, like, no, we, and, man, this is the

• 9:39:52Speaker 01

  worst Joe Biden. And Joe Biden has always been the worst since 1973, but this is him at his absolute most dim-witted. So he can't really think hard about any of these things. He mostly would just speak in historical analogies about World War II. He's Churchill facing down Hitler. And so, you're gonna talk him out of that? You're gonna tell him that he ought to be Neville Chamberlain and appease Hitler at Munich? Of course not. You know what you gotta do to a bully? You gotta punch him in the nose. And I'm sure you must have heard this 100 times in the lead up to this war. They'd all say this. All these dorks would talk about, yeah, you know how you face down a bully, you punch

• 9:40:36Speaker 01

  him in the nose? Well, how would they know? They never punched a bully in the nose before, right? They're dorks. And they now have all this power and think that they know what they're doing and the best thing they can do is relive their third grade trauma? Of getting bullied by me? And my friends on the playground? You know, and they get to pretend like, what, they're the star of the baseball team that came and stuck up for the bullied kid? Nah-uh. No, they're not. That's their little fantasy that they're playing out. And they would say things like that over and over again. It's, it's Chamberlain at Munich and the bully on the playground. But nobody can just talk about, what about

• 9:41:17Speaker 01

  the ongoing war in the Donbass? Can we get off of your analogies? I got in an argument again, I, for the third time, I debated General Wesley Clark about Ukraine on the Piers Morgan Show. And again, he immediately retreats to World War II fantasies. Well, that's like saying that Stalin should have given in to Hitler and neer, neer, neer, neer, because he can't talk about the war. They're losing Provost right now.

• 9:41:42Speaker 01

  The war is getting worse and worse for Ukraine all the time. So he has a uh uh, you know what? The Ukrainians believe hard and you just need to believe hard like them. That's the level of argument that I got out of General Wesley Clark, the former four-star general, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, who served Bill Clinton launching the aggressive war against Kosovo based on lies in 1999, based on a false claim that the Serbs had murdered 100,000 Kosovo Albanians, when that was a lie and they're fighting for Bin Laden, a bunch of heroin dealers and organ smugglers and Bin Ladenite terrorists in that war of treason. But anyway, that's General Wesley Clark for you. But that's basically all they got. It's a bunch of believe hard and a bunch of World

• 9:42:25Speaker 01

  War II metaphors and playground metaphors because they can't talk about the actual war themselves.

• 9:42:30Lex Fridman?

  To be clear, if I may comment, you're referring to Americans or maybe Europeans?

• 9:42:35Speaker 01

  Well, and the foreign policy establishment got it.

• 9:42:37Lex Fridman?

  Right. I do want to say that Ukrainians, people in Ukraine, and I know many of them are true heroes and they're fighting for their country. And whether the geopolitics of it makes any sense, it doesn't take away from the human beings.

• 9:42:55Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 9:42:56Lex Fridman?

  Defending their land.

• 9:42:57Speaker 01

  And in absolute hellish war scape, man. I mean, it's World War I plus drones, right? Muddy trenches and tank rounds and artillery, airdrop dumb bombs and drones hunting you. It's an absolute nightmare out there, man. Anybody would telegram this going, Jesus Christ, looking through the thing, you know, it's not quite as bad as Gaza because it, and look, they're conscripts. So it's very unfair, but in essence, they're wearing green in our fair game out there fighting on the field. Most of the civilians have been able to flee. The civilian deaths are counted in the single thousands, I believe, low thousands, uh, which is absolutely horrific for those people. But at least that's like

• 9:43:42Speaker 01

  the silver lining is that it's essentially combatants fighting, but it's still absolute horse show. And you're right that, look, You know, I can't deny the bravery of anybody out there risking their balls for, you know, any of this stuff, but the thing is there are different wars going on, right? There's a war between the United States and Russia going on with a proxy war. Hell, there's a war with America and China going on with using Ukraine and Russia as our proxies. Then there's America and Russia using their proxies in Ukraine. Then you have Ukraine, you know, Kiev versus Moscow, but then you also have Lviv versus Donetsk, right? And these nationalists from out West trying to force their version of what Ukraine's

• 9:44:24Speaker 01

  supposed to be on the people of the East, who of course are ethnically and culturally Russian. And I'm not saying that means everyone who is so wants to join the Russian Federation, but I'm just saying there's a severe culture war going on for dominance in the country. And all of these wars are playing out at the same time. But then, so anybody who says, hey, I'm defending my land, my neighborhood, my community, give me a rifle and I'll go do brave things, like, hey, that is what it is. Overall, what's really happened here is the United States of America has gotten their weak friend in a fight with their stronger, tougher neighbor when we had no ability or intention whatsoever to bail them out of it.

• 9:45:08Speaker 01

  When they said, we're going to give you all the weapons it needs as much as it takes, as long as it takes, they knew they were lying. Even Kamala Harris can tell you Russia is a bigger country. By the way, that's a real quote. I don't know if you know that, but she sounded like she's talking to a four-year-old. And I'm sure she was simply parroting her own advisors from what they told her. Not even what they told her to say, but what they told her. Ukraine is a country in Europe. Russia is a bigger country in Europe. Russia is next door to Ukraine and Russia has invaded Ukraine. And that's bad and we are against it.

• 9:45:53Speaker 01

  When I heard that, I thought it was fake, or I thought, come on, she was talking to elementary school kids and you guys are taking it out of context. No, she said that on the Black Eyed Morning Show on the radio in Chicago. And they looked at her like, lady, we know that Russia and Ukraine are in Europe. We know that Russia's a bigger country than all other countries. Tell us something that we don't know.

• 9:46:18Speaker 03

  And she didn't know anything that they didn't know, so she could not tell them. But she could tell them that Russia is bigger than Ukraine. She might have been able to extrapolate that they have a hell of a lot more available fighting aged males to complete this war than Ukraine, and they always will. And there's nothing anybody can do about it, other than if Joe Biden would be willing to send the United States Army in there to fight them. Even the Germans and the French and the British and the Poles combined couldn't do it without America to help them do it, without America to run the whole thing for them anyway. If you wanted to really whoop the Russians and drive them out of the Donbass and Zabroza and Gerson and Crimea, you need to send in the Marines.

• 9:47:03Speaker 03

  You need to send in the Air Force and the Navy. And we're not going to do that, Lex. And Joe Biden said explicitly, we're not doing that. That's World War III. We'll give the Ukrainians everything they need to fight. As you said, zoom all the way in, here's some hero making the ultimate sacrifice. Zoom all the way out, here's some damned fool using these people as cannon fodder on some fool's errand. They can't possibly win to, to deliver a strategic defeat against the Russians that they have completely failed to deliver. If anything, they delivered a strategic victory to China by kicking, front kick, straight

• 9:47:46Speaker 03

  in the chest, Russia right out of Europe and into the arms of the Chinese. When, of course, Russia is the eastern frontier of European civilization. And we're doing everything we can to change that. Joe Biden himself said, no Russian leader in all history has ever thrown in as hard with the West as Vladimir Putin.

• 9:48:10Speaker 01

  It's Joe Biden himself who kicked it right back out again.

• 9:48:15Lex Fridman?

  It really seemed that Donald Trump, more than any recent president, wanted to make peace.

• 9:48:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:48:23Lex Fridman?

  There's a strong will for peace. Why do you think he has not been successful?

• 9:48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, let me just emphasize here, we're skipping a lot to the end, and I know it's late, so it's okay. But there are a lot of other things beside NATO expansion, including tearing up the treaties, installing anti ballistic missile systems in Romania and Poland, but that are fired from dual use launchers, the MK41 or Mark 41 missile launcher that can also hold Tomahawk cruise missiles. And while all the while refusing an inspection regime. There's also, of course, overthrowing the government twice in 10 years in Ukraine, all the other color coded revolutions in Georgia and in Kyrgyzstan and the rest. And of course, support for the Maidan Revolution of 14 and the war that broke out after that.

• 9:49:11Speaker 01

  And as I said, I I beat essentially every topic that I could think of outstanding between America and Ukraine. That's happened this entire time. I do not spin for the Russians the whole time. I accuse them of plenty of things in there that they actually did. And I defend the truth from false accusations rather than defending the Russians because screw them and they don't need my help. And this book is not for them, it's for us.

• 9:49:39Speaker 01

  But I I tried not to leave out anything. I mentioned sort of it's the epitome, the Montenegro weird phony coup of 16, but we tried to overthrow the government of Belarus three times, oh, one, oh, five and 20.

• 9:49:57Speaker 01

  We've been messing around a lot in in building up this Cold War. That's why that book is so long. Is it? It is 475,000, 477,000 words. And and I don't think wasted, and that does include the footnotes, which, by the way, like when I took the URLs out and the the the footnotes are font size nine, I believe. When I took the URLs out, that saved me 77 pages.

• 9:50:22Speaker 01

  That's how many articles are are in there. But if people go to scotthorton.org/provoked/notes, I have a PDF file there of all the notes with their links. I only took the links out at the very last moment. So there's a PDF file where you can take anything in here. And I'll have a working link to it at scotthorton.org/provoked/notes. And people can download the whole PDF and the whole thing. And it's 375 pages of notes in regular font.

• 9:50:53Lex Fridman?

  How would you recommend one where? So I've read parts of this that jumped around.

• 9:50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:50:59Lex Fridman?

  Unless I

• 9:51:02Lex Fridman?

  my mental health goes to complete shit. I hope to travel back to Ukraine and to Russia to interview the key figures there. And you said that I should definitely read the entirety of the book.

• 9:51:15Speaker 01

  And look, I think it's written to be a page turner all the way through. And I am outraged and the book is written from this point of view and it's engaging enough. And as I say, it's so long because there's so many subtopics. I do not belabor and beat the dead horse and force you to read a bunch about things that you're not interested anymore. We do the Litvinenko chapter, then it's over. We do the Belarus chapter, then we're done and move on to the next subject as fast as I can take you through it. It's the same way I wrote the previous books too. This is what I need to tell you before I let you off the hook and change the channel. Right? Just like in Enough Already, I give you four pages on Somalia.

• 9:51:59Speaker 01

  I know you're not going to read six. You might not get to Libya if I try to make you read six on Somalia. So I only gave you four. You know what I mean? I wrote it that way in the first place. I, I think I proved my point and I give you, you know, the ability to find the proof for yourself to track these things down further. If I say, these people essentially made this claim in this piece, you can track that down and double check and see if I'm lying or not, or see if I understood right, or whatever, as you go through there.

• 9:52:31Speaker 03

  People will falsely assume that I don't have Ukrainian and Russian sources in there, but I do. But the thing is, I just, I don't use Cyrillic at all because nobody can read that. So I use Google Translate on the titles. So a lot of times you don't realize that it's, you know, unless you look closely, you won't realize that these are, there are plenty of foreign sources that I cite in there, but I just give them their English headlines through Google Translate or whatever, so that people know what they're looking at. But again, I have the links and even the links to the translated versions of the stories and all of that. But I'm not dodging your question about Trump, by the way, I do want to talk about that. But I wanted to make it clear that I'm not just saying Bill Clinton expanded NATO

• 9:53:10Speaker 03

  in the 90s. W. Bush did too, in the 2000s. Obama did too, in the 2010s, and Trump did too. Brought Montenegro and Northern Macedonia into NATO. There's the color coded revolutions and the missiles and all of these things. And so it all came to a head essentially in the Biden years. And it could have, Trump, I think, could have solved it if they hadn't have framed him for Russiagate. By the way, I have 75 pages on Russiagate in there. It's the most thorough take down of Russiagate I think you can find anywhere. Although, I don't take credit, I give credit to the great Russiagate journalists who absolutely destroyed

• 9:53:50Speaker 03

  those lies. People like Paul Sperry and Matt Taibbi, Aaron Matei, and Robert Perry, for that matter, before he died, Gareth Porter, of course, and so many others who did such great work on Russiagate. It's just absolute, one hair away from just blowing the guy's head off in Dallas. I don't know what's the difference. It's unbelievable to have the CIA and the FBI come at the President of the United States this way, come at a major party candidate for president this way, and then the president-elect, and then the sitting President of the United States, talking about trying to overthrow him with the 25th Amendment, hire a special counsel to pretend to investigate him for another two years. These people should have all of their property confiscated.

• 9:54:34Speaker 03

  They and their family should be exiled from the United States forever. Everyone involved in that plot, everyone involved at Perkins Coie, everybody involved at the Georgia Tech team, everybody involved in, you know, Glenn Simpson and his Fusion GPS, everyone at the FBI and CIA and NSA and any of the government agencies who went along with that plot ought to all be kicked out of the United States forever and their great grandchildren.

• 9:54:58Lex Fridman?

  As you write, it was the CIA and FBI, as well as the Clinton campaign and their agents that did this to Trump, the frontrunner for major party candidates for the US president, later the Republican nominee, president-elect, and eventually sitting chief executive. None of it was true. And you go on.

• 9:55:17Speaker 03

  And more of that's coming out all the time about just how not true it was and just how not true they already knew it was. And I have so much in there and I beg your audience to read the Durham report. There are new newly declassified appendixes to it that are just being released as we record this. One came out yesterday. And so we're going to get much, much more about the origins of Russia get here. But Lex, at the bottom line, they go, okay, after it all falls away, still Russia hacked the DNC and gave it to WikiLeaks. Nuh-uh, that's a lie. And it was CrowdStrike that made up that lie in combination with the Georgia Tech team and DARPA at the Pentagon. I have trouble keeping track of exactly it all.

• 9:56:01Speaker 03

  People should follow Undead Foyah on Substack. He's brilliant anonymous guy, brilliant analyst to this stuff. The core allegation there, there's no proof of that whatsoever. And now we know for a fact, we only just found this out, read Aaron Mate at Real Clear Investigations. And we know for a fact now that the FBI and the NSA gave, no, pardon me, CIA and NSA, is it FBI and NSA?

• 9:56:29Speaker 03

  FBI and NSA gave it only low to moderate confidence. In other words, none of this information came from the National Security Agency. They're the ones who would really know. And the CIA and the FBI had both already debunked this stuff before they started to pretend to believe it again. And part of it is because of compartmentalization inside the agencies. These analysts are in charge of looking at this. These analysts are in charge of looking at that. But Brennan and Comey are in charge of ignoring all of the disputing information and cherry picking out all the rest to try to make it look true. And man, what a fraud. I mean, we are talking on the level of the Branch Davidians killed themselves, on the

• 9:57:11Speaker 03

  level of Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons to murder you with. Bashar al-Assad woke up one morning and decided to murder the entire population of his country. So it's a good thing that USA and Al Qaeda are here to protect the poor population of Syria from his wrath. And it's on that level of lie. It is unbelievable what they did to him. And, you know, I have so many problems with Donald Trump, but man, I hate his enemies. And I would love to see him ruthlessly, lawlessly persecute these people. They deserve to suffer for what they did to him and to this country, putting us through that. Think of how many women bankrupted their husbands with therapy bills because they were

• 9:57:53Speaker 03

  that convinced that the Russians had done a coup d'etat and installed a Nazi fascist white supremacist to overthrow us. They heard it on national public radio. They're freaking out, man. I mean, you could come up, if you wanted to, you could have a conspiracy theory where it was the drug companies that did this just to sell more Zoloft to these people. They drove them up the wall, like, see Lex, the problem is you know better, dude. But pretend for a minute that you're one of these idiot women that listens to Mara Liasson on national public radio, and she says the Russians did a coup and put a ensuring candidate in power, usurped Hillary Clinton's rightful throne, and he hates all the blacks and the trans, he's gonna murder them all and start and he's in, you know, attack Canada

• 9:58:38Speaker 03

  or whatever. They were terrified. They were terrified. It's no less cynical than what W. Bush did when he said, oh yeah, be afraid, be very afraid. You won't be safe until a year and a half from now when I get to invade Iraq. You know how many people on the edge of sanity went over?

• 9:58:55Speaker 01

  People did. I know for a fact people did. I know stories of people who were driven crazy by that stress of believing that every Arab they see is a murderer terrorist trying to kill them. People believe in that. People think that their leaders wouldn't lie to them. Willie Nelson said, "They wouldn't lie to me, not on my own damn TV." Yeah, they would too. The ones you love the most, you're a Republican? It's the Republicans that are lying to you. You're a Democrat? You have no idea how much they despise you. They'll lie right to your face. And they think it's funny when you believe it. They enjoy your terror because your your fear and upset makes it easier for them to do wrong.

• 9:59:39Speaker 01

  That's what it's about. That's what it's all about. Why'd they do this to Trump? Because he said he wanted to get along with Russia. He wasn't gonna give them our nuclear codes. He even said, "Lex, I'm doing this because I talked to Henry Kissinger." And Henry Kissinger said, "Wow, you're the tallest, smartest, most handsome, wealthiest, successful person I've ever met, and you have a very smart Russia policy, which is to split Russia away from China." Is that because they have a blackmail pee tape of Donald Trump and his prostitutes? No, it's what Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller's man, wanted. The grand Republican, grand strategist of American foreign policy,

• 10:00:25Speaker 01

  for he only died a few years ago, right? And he was still writing books. I mean, they were still turning to him for advice for decades, this guy, since the 1970s, since before I was born. Henry Kissinger, the most important counselor to Richard Nixon about what are we gonna do about the Soviet Union and China? He told Trump, "Yes, Trump, I agree with you. That's what we should do. We should do what it takes to befriend Russia so that we can contain China." Now, I'm not a China hawk, but whatever, man. That's the point. And there's another major point here to mention too. Which, as I was saying before, in this book, I don't quote a whole lot of Buchanan and Paul. I give them the credit that they deserve, but I make a special point to constantly quote Kissinger

• 10:01:10Speaker 01

  and Brzezinski and their contemporaries, where they admit these are the vanguard of the NATO expanders, and Brzezinski especially was an anti-Russia hawk. He's the son of Polish aristocrats and fierce anti-communist and anti-Russian even still too after. And they all said, we have to come up with a special status for Ukraine because it's so closely intertwined with Russia, dating back hundreds of years. And even the foundation of Russian civilization began in Kiev before traveling, moving to the center of gravity to Moscow later. And as Kissinger said, Ukraine's been part of

• 10:01:54Speaker 01

  Russia for 300 years, and this is not just some deal where we just get to do what we want. We have to take into account how deeply complicated this is and how deeply riven Ukrainian society is, especially on who do we want to run with? And they said, so what we have to do is we have to create a special status for Ukraine, just like we had for Austria and Finland in the old Cold War, where Austria and Finland were not members of the Warsaw Pact, nor were they members of NATO. And they did not have troops. Well, they did have Soviet troops still occupied Austria for a while. They finally didn't, I don't think they withdrew until the 50s, but they eventually did withdraw. But they were not members, they were not forced to be made

• 10:02:39Speaker 01

  members of the Warsaw Pact, like all the rest of the Eastern European states were. They had no choice but to join with sock puppet commie dictatorships, run out of the Kremlin and everything. And so, but Austria and Finland had this neutral status in the last Cold War. And they said, well, that's what we want to do again. That's what we need to do for Ukraine. That's again Kissinger and Brzezinski, who were not neoconservatives, but were very hawkish on NATO expansion and on Russia and on.

• 10:03:09Speaker 03

  And NATO expansion being for the purposes of containing Russia, no fooling about it. But in this case, man, if we try to take Ukraine away, the Russians are gonna break it, cuz in fact, it ain't going anywhere. It's stuck next to Russia. This was another thing that Obama explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, that, "Well, Jeffrey Goldberg, Russia's always going to have escalation dominance in Ukraine, because it's right there, and it means a lot more to them than it does to us. They are willing to go much further than we are." And then he says to Goldberg, he challenges him, and he says, this is after Obama's coup has

• 10:03:49Speaker 03

  put whatever transition of power has led to the loss of Crimea. And he says, "Jeffrey Goldberg, you tell me, who in Washington says that we ought to put American boys on the ground to secure the independence of the Donbass from Russia? Can you name me somebody who's ready to do that right now? No, of course not." So, the rest of Washington pipe down, right? You keep saying we're not doing enough, but there's nothing we can do that won't get NATO into a war with the Russian Federation. And as even Robert Kagan, I'm ruining the end of the book now, even Robert Kagan said, "You know what?

• 10:04:32Speaker 03

  It actually doesn't matter to the United States who runs Ukraine. The northern coast of the Black Sea, that's so far beyond our jurisdiction." And this is Kagan's words, not mine, Lex. And I don't agree with him about this at all. But he says, you understand his context, what he means here. He says, "The Soviet Union dominated Ukraine the whole time after World War II, and we think of those as the good old days." Now, I do not, I know people who are enslaved by the communists in Ukraine in those good old days. There's nothing good about them at all, okay? But what he was saying was, "America never had a problem with Russian dominance in Ukraine. We always called it the Ukraine, and we always pronounced it Kiev." And what are you talking about?

• 10:05:17Speaker 03

  That we're willing to go to the mat for the Donbass? No, dude, it makes no sense. And the mat is H-bombs burning hotter than the sun. So, we cannot fight them, and certainly not over this. They're rolling on Berlin, call me. They're rolling on London. They're gonna nuke London. Man, I'd hate to see the world end that way, but maybe we would have to fight for the Brits. Lex, I'm really more of a continental defense kind of guy myself, to tell you the truth. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about Czechoslovakia, that would now the Czech Republic and Slovakia, that's Central Europe.

• 10:05:58Speaker 03

  When we, or maybe the Czech Republic is Slovakia, that's Eastern Europe. Bulgaria, Romania, that's Eastern Europe. Ukraine is east of Eastern Europe. Right? Brent Skrokov said, "We only want to liberate Eastern Europe, not Ukraine."

• 10:06:18Speaker 03

  Okay, this is too far away. It's not our concern, and it's not to say that, "Oh yeah, no, it's fine for Russia to invade and kill and dominate this place with violence, because hey, that's their sphere of influence." That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying it was suicidal madness for them to go along with America's push, for them to join our military alliance. That's as much respecting of Russia's sphere of influence as they needed to do. Was not mess with that. That's what got them in trouble. That's what made the Russians say, "Look, it's either sooner or later. It might as well be now.

• 10:06:59Speaker 03

  The longer we wait, the more the Americans build up their forces and we're gonna end up having to fight them anyway." They were making them a de facto member of NATO with what they called interoperability, normalizing their military forces with ours as much as possible. Making them a de facto auxiliary of the NATO alliance so that if NATO ever fought the Russian Federation, just like Germany and Lithuania and Hungary and Poland and the rest, the Ukrainian army would be one other auxiliary army fighting under United American NATO command.

• 10:07:33Speaker 03

  That's what we were doing with them without the Article Five war guarantee that we promised to come protect you, but still normalizing and integrating their military force with ours is one standard thing, constantly training with them, changing their equipment, changing their command and control structure, everything to mirror NATO standards. And so it was a legitimate threat. Putin said in his speech when he declared war, he said, if the if the Americans put Tomahawk cruise missiles in Kharkiv, they'll have a flight time to Moscow in 25 minutes. If they put ballistic missiles in Kharkiv, they could get here in 10. Their new nuclear ballistic missiles

• 10:08:15Speaker 03

  that they're making after they have torn up the intermediate nuclear forces treaty of 1987. And if they put hypersonics there, they could hit Moscow in five minutes. He said it's like a knife to the throat. Now, you don't have to sympathize with the Russians at all. You could hate them and want the Chinese to kill them all for you. I don't know. But you have to admit that these are serious, incredible security concerns. This is not a bunch of bluster and a bunch of bluffing and a bunch of ideological, you know, you know, garbage or propaganda. And it's and it's not the nationalist theories of some romantic swept away by visions of a

• 10:08:57Speaker 03

  lost glorious past that he wants to regain and all these things, as everyone says. As I said to Pierce Morgan the day before yesterday, that's the weapons of mass destruction of this war, is that Putin woke up and started this war because of what an aggressor he is. And that there's no backstory that anybody needs to know about how America put Ukraine in the position of getting their ass whooped by their bigger next door neighbor in this way. That's the lie under the whole thing. The same way that Clinton lied us into Kosovo with 100,000 dead Kosovars, Bush with his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Obama with his impending genocide in Benghazi and Libya. Give me a break. All of these lies. That's the lie of this one.

• 10:09:43Speaker 03

  Unprovoked attack, unprovoked attack. It's like white separatist Randy Weaver. You have to say that. You can't just say Randy Weaver. You can't say Randy Weaver, survivor of a boy and a dog and a woman. His wife, who were slaughtered by federal agents. No, you have to call him white separatist Randy Weaver. Well, Russia's attack has to be unprovoked attack. Oh, look at this shiny coin. Unprovoked attack. And that works on people. Somehow people don't just rebel against that and say, wait a minute. Are you calling me stupid or something? Why would you mandate that we call it that in such a way?

• 10:10:25Speaker 03

  If you weren't lying and covering up for the fact that you provoked it and you know you did, which is clearly the case. That's why they called it that. You know, you could call it an unprovoked attack sometimes. They called it an unprovoked attack a hundred thousand times because the public relations firms decided that this is the lie. And this is the best way to stick it to the American people. It's absurd how easily moved the Americans are. Just give us some lies. And by the way, our Zionist friend would say that I just blame the Israelis for everything. Well, the only role that the Israelis play in my book is Naftali Bennett,

• 10:11:08Speaker 03

  the guy who caused the September 11th attack. It tried to end the war, tried to negotiate in good faith and do shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia and tried to stop the war right after it started in the spring of 2022. And that's all I have to say about the Israelis role in any of this part. Other than it was their fit column, the neo conservatives in America, who really got our policy off this way in the first place. And Robert Kagan's disgusting wife, Victoria Nuland, who really was the ringleader behind the overthrow of 2014, which was even what Carl Gershman, the head of the NED called it. It was the overthrow with a government there that they did.

• 10:11:46Lex Fridman?

  What can Trump do to help bring peace in Ukraine? As I mentioned, that he legitimately, from every interaction I've had, from everything I understand, he legitimately wanted to make peace very quickly.

• 10:12:03Speaker 03

  I think he's totally sincere about it, too.

• 10:12:05Lex Fridman?

  But why was he not successful? And how can he be successful? What are your thoughts on that?

• 10:12:12Speaker 01

  I don't have an answer to the second one. I don't know what the hell he's gonna do. I'll tell you what. The backstory here is that in September of 22, the weekend of September 11th, in fact, of 22, Ukraine had their best few days. They had a brilliant feint where they started building up forces in Kherson, and they convinced the Russians to move forces to Kherson. Then they made a huge move in Kharkiv and forced all the Russians out of Kharkiv and back into Luhansk. And then they also hit them in Kherson, down at the river, and kicked them back across the river.

• 10:12:53Speaker 01

  And so maintained that one-third of Kherson on the right bank, I guess they call it the right.

• 10:12:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, they were extremely successful in those offenses at that time. Probably the most, the biggest success, arguably the basic success of the war.

• 10:13:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and it's been all downhill from there. And the worst thing probably of all is that Putin said, "Oh yeah? Well, I hereby annex Zaporozhye and Kherson too." And these are the two provinces between the Donbass and Crimea. And he hadn't claimed them yet. Now, this is the so-called land bridge. Importantly, the Ukrainians gave him a real motive to do this because they had cut off the fresh water. There was a canal from the Dnipro River down to Crimea. And to collectively punish the people of Crimea, they cut off the water resources there, which they still had enough for drinking water, but they did not have enough for any agriculture or anything else, and it really hurt them a lot.

• 10:13:49Speaker 01

  So they already had their pretext there to take that territory so they could reopen that channel of fresh water to Crimea. And then he was just angry. His men were humiliated on the ground there. And he said, "Oh yeah? Well, I hereby annex two moro blasts then." Then they passed a law in the Duma, and he signed it. Ryan, I guess it's two houses. He signed a law that said, we've now redrawn the Russian border here. Okay. But now, if you look at how they're fighting the war, and I'm not a military expert on this, but I know some. And for example, Colonel Douglas McGregor and Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis, I think Davis is the one I trust the best.

• 10:14:28Lex Fridman?

  Can I take a small attention on that?

• 10:14:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 10:14:30Lex Fridman?

  Uh, just to give a shout out to Daniel L. Davis that you mentioned, excellent podcast, somebody that I've had a bunch of conversations with privately. He's a sweetheart.

• 10:14:41Speaker 01

  Oh, he's a wonderful man.

• 10:14:43Lex Fridman?

  First of all, his backstory is a fascinating one, but also, uh, he's extremely knowledgeable on the very nuanced details of all aspects of military operations.

• 10:14:55Speaker 01

  Absolutely does. As I mentioned an eon ago, when we began this interview, that in Iraq War I, it was Colonel McGregor with McMaster and Davis under him that did the Battle of 73 Easting against the Iraqi army. And what the Soviet tanks assesses is where they both, all three come from. McMaster sold his soul to Satan and McGregor and Davis have been good guy. Well, at least since Iraq War II. Now, I don't know if you know this about Danny Davis, I guess you probably do, but your audience doesn't, that he was the heroic whistleblower

• 10:15:38Speaker 01

  of the Afghan war in 2012. Do you know that story? So in 2009, there was a former Marine captain turned State Department employee named Matthew Ho, and he warned Obama not to do the surge. And his boss, the ambassador, I can bury, he had been the general in charge of the war previously. And I can bury backed up Ho and said, don't do the surge. That's all Obama needed to hide behind was I can bury and Ho, and he could have said no. And instead, he gave in and he ordered the escalation. He had already sent 40,000 troops. Then he announced he's sending 30,000 more for a total of 70,000 additional troops. The giant horrific failed Afghan surge of 2009 through 12.

• 10:16:25Speaker 01

  And then at the end, Davis was the whistleblower who broke ranks, testified before the Senate, and published an article in the Armed Forces Journal saying that David Petraeus is a liar, and that America has not achieved what Petraeus called "success," because he wouldn't dare call it victory, in the war in Afghanistan. And here's the real truth, and here's how Davis knew, is he had a special job, which was arming and equipping all the guys all around the country, whatever they needed. His job was to go and give them whatever equipment, so that gave him a special insight into the war, because he was going to all areas of the country and seeing the guys everywhere that they were. And he said the same thing that Matthew Ho said, says, "These boys are getting killed for this."

• 10:17:10Speaker 01

  And then, as Ho had put it, like, "How am I supposed to write a letter home to this guy's wife? And say that he died a good death, when I know it's not true?" And same thing with Davis, like, "These guys, you know how military guys are. They talk about, 'These are my men. They're mine.'" You know? And so, what do you do when they're dying for nothing? And so Davis said enough of this, and came home and did what he could, told the truth in the war. And he's a great American patriot, and you're right, he's a brilliant genius, too. And he's a brilliant war analyst on all the wars, particularly Ukraine right now. That's his show, is Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

• 10:17:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, highly recommend people listen to DDD, Daniel Davis Deep Dive. It's on YouTube, it's on all the podcast platforms. He served for 21 years in the Army with four combat deployments.

• 10:18:04Speaker 01

  And he's got stars in things, too, man.

• 10:18:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 10:18:07Speaker 01

  But the most heroic thing he ever did was quit and tell the truth. Anyway, I trust his analysis of the war better than anybody else. There's another guy I really like named Willie OAM. His name is Matt Williams. He's an Australian veteran of the war in Afghanistan. You'd really like him.

• 10:18:28Speaker 01

  He's a brilliant war analyst. He looks at the maps every day and analyzes day by day by day. Oh, see, there's where he interviewed me. He's a wonderful guy. I'm afraid he's got cancer right now. But he's, he's hanging in there and, and he's a, he's just a brilliant analyst of the war. You'd really like him. And he goes day by day by day, he shows who's taking how much land. This is why I could only shake my head at Wesley Clark the other day. That I'm going, listen, the Russians are ascending on the battlefield, dude. There's no reversing this. Believe harder. Come on, man. And, and, and he acts like, what are you talking about, Horton? The Russians aren't winning. It's like, yeah, they are, dude.

• 10:19:10Speaker 01

  They are Danny Davis and, and Willie O A M. They're not wrong about that. You know, these reports, this depends, I guess, on who you're reading. And I do see some kind of wishful thinking from people from time to time. But no, Lord, they are losing. Provost is about to fall. They move, they have virtually a hundred percent of Luhansk. They are making major gains in Donetsk and they're making moves in Dnipro, Provost, which is the big, I can never say it right, but that's as good as I could ever get. Of the, the oblast between the river and the Donbass there. And of course there's Sumy and Harkeev in the north.

• 10:19:54Speaker 01

  And all of this is still in danger of being taken. Oh, and I'm sorry, because I never really answered your question right about Trump. Trump's problem is Lex, that he got just elected and inaugurated at the wrong time for his second term here. And the Russians, they annex those territories, but they don't control them. Daniel Davis, our tangent here, he explains that this strategy in the war is to fight a war of attrition, to grind up Ukrainian forces with artillery and airdrop bombs, and move slowly to preserve Russian soldiers' lives and make the other guys die more.

• 10:20:34Speaker 01

  Now typically, and this is in some specialized stuff out of my purview, but it's like they say that like, If you'll lose three, three, it's three to one disadvantage for the advancing army on a defensive position or whatever, that doesn't hold in all cases. And I think I may even have said that wrong. Somebody tried to correct me on that recently. Like it's, it's not exactly that way. But the thing is, it's more dangerous, obviously, to move on a defensive position than to remain in one, like all other things being equal, I guess. But then they just have way more artillery and way more time. And they can just move very slowly and make sure that actually the, the defenders die at a much higher rate than they do. And they're not running out of artillery,

• 10:21:19Speaker 01

  and they're not running out of men. They've not even launched a full scale mobilization for the war. People know that they're winning, and so they're volunteering to go and get some. And, um, and they're, they can afford, their economy is not crushed. And so they can afford to pay bonuses and have people sign up. And while meanwhile, Ukraine's on a conscript army that's had at least tens, and some reports say more than a hundred thousand of deserters flee the front lines, refuse to fight. There's been at least hundreds of people have drowned to death in the Denister River on the border with Moldova, trying to escape. Um, people, oppressed gangs,

• 10:22:00Speaker 01

  riding around in vans, beating people up and kidnapping them and throwing them in the back of the van and taking them off to the front to be killed in a few hours. It's a horror show over there, man. And then, and I don't know if Ukraine is going to survive because see, and this is part of my argument, and I said this in my four hour speech right after the war began, that, and I was assuming then, as a lot of people did, that the Russians were going to have a lot more success a lot sooner, and that the Ukrainian military would essentially be smashed, and they'd be fighting an insurgency here, which is what that was Plan B. Plan A was to warn them, don't you do it. Plan B was, we're going to back the Mujahideen.

• 10:22:38Speaker 03

  In other words, the Nazis, Reichsak der Nazis and whatever, because the military will be smashed and Russia will dominate the entire east of the country, at least was the presumption going in by the American side. So we're now on like Plan C was actually better than Plan B, right? They skipped a step in wanting to back an insurgency. The state army has been able to hold. We're recording this thing three and a half years into the war and the state army still exists. They've still been able to pour arms in there all this time and keep the thing going for now. But as I predicted in that speech, I said, you know, this could be a real Pyrrhic victory for the Russians. And Russia's government is a government program.

• 10:23:23Speaker 03

  And all they do is fail upwards in their self-licking ice cream going fashion. That's not a speciality about Americans. That's a speciality about the economics of government monopolies on security forces. Right? And so think about the map for a minute. Putin just went in there and drew a line around all the pro Russians. Not that everyone who's an ethnic Russian and a Russian speaker in Ukraine wanted to join the Russian Federation, but I'm sure you've seen the election result maps where it goes from dark blue to dark red and a real kind of grayscale fade in between there. Where when you get all the way in Donetsk and Luhansk, you have people who are, you know, have a lot of intermarriages and mixed families

• 10:24:08Speaker 03

  across the borders and very much consider themselves to be Russians, even living inside Ukraine. And I read a study of Ukrainian nationalism that was about how the only Ukrainian nationalists are the Nazis out West. Most Ukrainians really identify with their city more or their region more than really considering themselves overall Ukrainian patriots in that larger nationalist sense, according to some, some pretty in-depth surveys about all that they had done in the past. And so, but anyway, I'm, in other words, I'm not trying to oversimplify it and say, oh yeah, everybody in Donetsk was just begging for Russia to invade or whatever. Some of them were, uh, some of them, of course, were not, but anyway.

• 10:24:50Speaker 03

  By drawing the line where he has now, he's now taken everyone who could even be potentially pro Russia out of Ukraine permanently. So it used to be that the people who leaned more or less, people always said Yanukovych was Putin's puppet or whatever, it's not actually true, separate tangent, but the more or less Russian leaning guys from the parties in the east, they would win. That's why America had to overthrow the government there twice in 10 years, and the Orange Revolution and the Maidan Revolution. Well, that's never gonna happen again. All of those people are never gonna vote in a Ukrainian election again. And who's gonna be dominant if they ever do hold elections? It's probably gonna

• 10:25:33Speaker 03

  be somebody to the right of Zelensky that wins. Remember, Zelensky was brought in because he was Jewish, meant he wasn't ethnically Russian, he wasn't ethnically Ukrainian, or like culturally whatever, the sectarian, Lee with those, he was kind of a third choice. And he was from Kharkiv, so he wasn't from all the way in the Donbass, right? But he's still a Russian speaker, and ran on peace. That was supposed to be his charm, right? Well, those days are over. So who's gonna win now? My biggest fears is gonna be Andriy Bulewski, who's the leader of the Azov Battalion, which is now known as the Third Army Corps. It went from the Azov Battalion to the Azov Regiment to the Third Separate Infantry Division. Now it's the Third Army Corps. And Bulewski is the guy, the famous quote I'm sure you've

• 10:26:16Speaker 03

  heard about, leading the white race against the Semite-led Untermenschen. That's him. And I quote at length, that whole speech, which I found on archive.org, you know, the official Azov Battalion website is down, but you can find the Wayback Machine version of it. That whole speech is absolute insane Hitlerian lunacy about Aryan values and the nation of Ukraine is a single living organism, and every egg and every sperm belongs to the state for the greater glory of the Ukrainian empire and just... Yeah, that's Nazism, all right. That's exactly what that is. There's no mistaking it for any other thing. And these are the proud grandsons of the Galician SS and, you know,

• 10:26:58Speaker 03

  Stepan Bandera and the UPA and UN, who had served the Nazis in the Holocaust and the Second World War. And these are their proud grandsons and legacies. And this guy, Bolesky, is from, this is called the Patriot of Ukraine, which is a group out of Kharkiv that was, again, descended from these Nazis. And he's, he and his ilk are very likely to be the leaders of the new Ukraine. And so how's Russia supposed to deal with that now? Well, now we gotta go to Odessa, so at least we can take that great and important port city from them. And jeez, now we can see Transnistria from here, you know, that little strip of land that Russia controls on the Moldovan side of the river, on the Moldovan Ukrainian border? That's Russian-controlled

• 10:27:42Speaker 03

  land, a frozen conflict since the end of the Soviet Union. Well, man, from Crimea, we can see Odessa, and from Odessa, we can see Transnistria, and we can really punish those Ukrainians by completely cutting them off from the Black Sea. And then still, you have a frozen conflict with a bunch of right-wing, radical, severely anti-Russian, grudge-holding National Socialists. And so now, what is anybody gonna do with them? You know, that's who the new Ukrainian government is going to be dominated by, is people who are far to the right of conservatives, man. And, man, then what? And then, so, now, put yourself in Putin's point of view. Again, this is a government program. Gets worse and worse and

• 10:28:27Speaker 03

  worse. Well, the next option is, now that you've created, I'm assuming some things, but still, you created a radical, right-wing, rump state of Ukraine that is going to constantly be a disruption. Well, what you do is you finish cleansing them into Poland and Romania. You just kick them all the way out and reabsorb the entire place. Right. That is the obvious solution from the Russian point of view. And that's how they fight their wars. They just move very slowly with artillery and wipe out everything in their path until they own it. And that's the mess that America has gotten Ukraine in. I don't see how this ends anytime soon, or anytime that really...

• 10:29:08Speaker 03

  You know, again, from the Russian point of view, let's say they take those four Oblasts. Well, look at all the people in Dnipro, Provost and all the people in Sumy and Harkeev, who are Russian speakers, who of course, the Russian government is going to say need our protection, especially now that they're a smaller minority in the country than before. When their side will never win an election again, a national election again, wow, we're gonna have to go all the way to the river now. Right? It only makes sense, man. It's a government program. It's a disaster and it's gonna keep getting worse and worse and worse.

• 10:29:42Lex Fridman?

  I really hope the next leader of Ukraine is not a right wing extremist, as you're suggesting.

• 10:29:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too.

• 10:29:49Lex Fridman?

  And I think the bigger picture here is, as we've been talking about for many hours, that it's the politicians and the bureaucrats that waged a war and it's regular people that pay the price of it.

• 10:30:03Speaker 03

  That's right. As Ozzy Osbourne said, right? They leave that all to the poor.

• 10:30:09Lex Fridman?

  Rest in peace, by the way, Ozzy Osbourne.

• 10:30:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, man.

• 10:30:12Lex Fridman?

  I think this whole conversation was a really deep, eloquent case against war

• 10:30:22Lex Fridman?

  in all parts of the world and especially to the degree the United States is involved. And your whole life's work has too been this incredible case against war. The antiwar.com, with the Libertarian Institute, with all the work you've done. And so

• 10:30:47Lex Fridman?

  in this goal, I'm very much with you 100%. I'm really glad that you're doing the work you're doing. So thank you for fighting the good fight.

• 10:30:55Speaker 03

  Thank you very much, Lex. As long as you're here, I'll say one more thing, which is if you've ever heard of the great libertarian, Tom Woods, from the Mises Institute and Libertarian Institute.

• 10:31:08Speaker 03

  He has something called Liberty Classroom, where it's him and his professor friends telling you the truth about the things that they were supposed to teach you in school, but didn't. Well, he built me my own Liberty Classroom. It's called the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. And if anybody got all the way through this podcast this far, they might be interested to know. We plan on going live

• 10:31:30Speaker 03

  next month. And it's two huge courses on the Middle East and the Cold War with Russia by me. And then I also have the great James Bovard, the most successful and important libertarian journalist in world history, current writer for the New York Post and fellow at the Institute, great author, brilliant man, is going to be doing a course on his entire career of investigative journalism. And then we have Ramsey Baroud is going to do the story of Israel Palestine, the great Palestinian refugee in exile, writer of the Palestine Chronicle and a regular writer with us, a regular contributor at antiwar.com, good friend of mine, wonderful man. Then we also have William Bupert on how he's an army infantry officer

• 10:32:13Speaker 03

  and expert on debunking the bankrupt counterinsurgency doctrine of David Petraeus and James Mattis. They call it COIN in Afghanistan and Iraq. He debunks all that and is from the Chasing Ghosts podcast. And he's going to do a course on how America lost every war since 1945. And then the great historian, Dangerous History, C.J. Kilmer is going to be doing a course on how Woodrow Wilson is the worst person who ever lived, because of course, he is the father of Lenin and Stalin, Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and World War II. And for that matter, the American empire to contain communism after it was all over too.

• 10:32:56Speaker 03

  And so it's going to be a hell of a thing, man. And we got a bunch of great guys doing really great work to put this thing together. So that's at scotthortonacademy.com.

• 10:33:07Speaker 01

  And it'll go live in September.

• 10:33:09Speaker 03

  I'm really hoping in August, maybe not. So you can watch, first of all, this awesome video by Dan Smots, who's the most talented video editor in the world. But then also just enter your email address, then you'll be the first to know when we go live and launch the Scott Horton Academy.

• 10:33:28Speaker 01

  Scott, thank you, brother.

• 10:33:31Speaker 03

  Appreciate it.

• 10:33:32Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Scott Horton. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you once again with the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, spoken in 1953. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this:

• 10:34:16Lex Fridman?

  A modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully-equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. Thank you for listening, and I hope to see you next time.