Julian Dorey Podcast - #344 - Black Budget Tyranny, $37 Trillion Time BOMB & Pearl Harbor 2.0 | Scott Horton

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) GHOSTBED: Right now, as a Julian Dorey listener, you can get 25% off your order for a limited time. Just go to http://ghostbed.com/julian and use promo code JULIAN at checkout. 2) MINNESOTA NICE: Minnesota Nice wants to help you find harmony—go to www.mnniceethno.com/julian and use code JD22 for 22% off your first order! PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Scott Horton is the director of The Libertarian Institute and editorial director of Antiwar.com. He’s the author of Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terror and Fool’s Errand, and one of the leading voices challenging America’s endless wars. SCOTT's LINKS: X: https://x.com/scotthortonshow YT:  @scotthortonshow  PROVOKED:  @Provoked_Show  SUBSTACK: https://scotthortonshow.com/ WEBSITE: https://scotthorton.org/ BOOKS: https://amzn.to/3T9Qg7y Antiwar.com: https://antiwar.com/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 – Intro 01:25 – Piers Morgan, Iran Contra, Waco, Oklahoma, UN & Korea, Cheney, America’s Decline 11:24 – China’s Strategy, Smart Power, Psychology of Empire, Abandon Control, U.S. Overreach 23:18 – EU Self-Correction, $37 Trillion Debt, Cold War Promise, The Big Lie, Putin, Warsaw Pact 33:08 – HW Bush, CIA Overstep, Black Budget, World Empire vs Republic, 1,000 Lies 45:16 – T0rture Committee, John Brennan, 9/11 Saudis, Yemen War, 50lb ‘Scalpel’ Bombs, Al Qaeda 58:10 – Arab Spring, Hillary & Yemen, Obama Alliance, 300K Deaths, Trump’s Continuation 01:09:37 – Trump Airstrikes, Afghanistan, Northern Alliance, Anti-Fragile Terror Groups 01:36:05 – Neocons, Israel Ties, Six-Decade Pattern, Israel Lobby, Policy Influence, Corp Funding 01:46:25 – Iraq & Israel, Iran Destabilization, Clean Break, Office of Special Plans, Cooked Intel 01:57:14 – Saddam Lies, Oil Motive?, Pentagon Strategy, Cheney vs Powell, Cheney Driving Force 02:04:48 – Saddam’s Real Threat, 9/11 Excuse, GW Justifications 02:18:17 – Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Bojinka Plot, FISA Warrants, 9/11 Missed Prevention 02:32:30 – Freedom Fighters vs Terrorists, Pearl Harbor Debate, FDR Manipulation, Churchill 02:41:58 – WWII Revisionism, Power over Evil, FDR Treason Claim 03:02:51 – Next topics CREDITS: - Host, Editor & Producer: Julian Dorey - COO, Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 344 - Scott Horton Part 1 Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Is there anything good about the CIA? No, they are absolutely the destructive force. And what? Because it's unaccountable power. They got a black budget. By definition, their job is to break the law. But you want to know the story of the Yemen war. I'll tell you real quick.

Obama comes in, told CIA, I want you to focus on actually killing real friends of Osama, who are threat ties in Pakistan and in Yemen. There were only 29 al-Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan at the time. Something like 80,000 people were killed. a giant test. Now, Kada just grew more and more and more. When Donald Trump came in his first turn, didn't do a thing to stop it. Because, yeah, we did bomb Afghanistan for four years and did bomb Yemen for four years. But hey, W. Bush started that one. That was almost all the ground

fighting that was happening in the Trump years. They bombed the crap out of him the whole time. They always say no new wars. But wait. Hey, guys, if you haven't already, can you just take one quick second and please hit that subscribe button? It is the most important metric we track. on our channel to be able to grow this thing and allow our videos to get into the algorithm. You guys have been doing a great job with that over the past week or two. So let's keep that street going. And if you're not already subscribed, just hit that button right now and enjoy the episode.

Thank you. I don't know if this is going to be 10 and a half hours, but I'm sure we could talk for a while, Scott. thanks for having me good to be here of course i'm sure it won't be the last time as well i i had seen you for the first time probably about three months ago when the iran war broke out you were on pierce morgan and went on this like epic 11 12 minute like speech at the beginning of it and it just kept going i was like this guy can spit on information then i went and did some research on you and i'm like you've been you've been doing this for a long time yeah well that's how come i know all this stuff yeah yeah now what you've been doing focusing mostly on foreign policy stuff for what the

better part of the last two decades or so three three decades okay and what what really made you gravitate towards that because like you're a you're a full-blown libertarian guy there's a lot of different things you could look at and be an expert on but what made you gravitate towards the foreign policy aspect um you know uh i'm not exactly sure as you know you look back on your life it kind of cherry-pick out different little anecdotal type things. I remember it being very interesting that Ronald Reagan was in trouble over Iran-Contra, whatever that was, but how it was all involving all these foreign countries and all this stuff and that he's just the president.

He's just a citizen like everybody else. And he could get in trouble for a thing like that, not that he really did. But that's a difference between a president and a king son, you know, stuff like that, like when I was eight or ten or whatever. so there's that stuff and then and the cocaine dealing was a huge part of that and I don't remember how I first learned this but I knew all along a sort of true folklore that the CIA was bringing all that cocaine into the country during the Reagan years to help pay for the secret war in Nicaragua that Congress refused to allocate money for anymore and how some of that implicated Bill Clinton

so you had H.W. Bush and the vice president's office and his guys are running drugs into Bill Clinton's Arkansas, and, of course, the governor's covering up for it. And see, all this was crazy conspiracy stuff until they made a Tom Cruise movie about it a couple of years ago called American Maid, where he's Barry Seal running guns and drugs for the CIA. And then, of course, the story of the crack epidemic in South L.A. and all of the cocaine coming to Miami at the time. Scott, the CIA investigated itself and found no wrongdoing.

Come on now. Yes. But good journalism says they did it. And then, you know, so Waco and Oklahoma were big ones to me. But also, you know, Iraq War I had learned just in regular government school that Congress has to declare war because James Madison said the president being in charge of the war, he's the one who's going to want to have a war. So it's got to not be up to him. It's got to be up to the legislature and particularly up to the House of Representatives closest to the people to decide whether they're going to let him do it. That way, this is a republic, not an empire. Right. Right. And then H.W. Bush said, I don't need to. no stinking congress i have a united nation security council resolution so i can go to iraq how does that how does that even work we we throw these terms around and stuff but like i don't think people understand how the like our government but particularly governments like in general can get around some of their very own laws to do the thing that they're not supposed to do yeah okay so it's the way

it's supposed to work on again seventh grade basic level checks and balances is if the president tries to get away with murder that congress will have his ass because that's what's good for them right but that ain't always true and in fact what congress likes to do is pass all their authority of the executive branch that way nothing's their fault but they still get to keep all the money and so the basic system of the three branches of government meant to check each other in power are you know that system is kind of bankrupt and this is the prime example of it after world war two they created the united nations and then harry truman in the middle of the night sent troops to invade Korea and well to defend the south from the north but then again the south had kind of

been picking the fight across the line but anyway and he did this and then he told congress we're at war in korea everybody and so then i think they fought about it for a while but they ended up sort of ratifying it and appropriating money for it and putting a rubber stamp on it and at that point the precedent was set we haven't declared war since 1942 against romania and i think Bulgaria was the last time America declared war and was in World War II and ever since then yes so ever since then sometimes the president just does whatever he wants but oftentimes what they'll do like in the case of Vietnam and eventually in the case of Iraq War I he did eventually go to the Congress but he still didn't get a declaration same for the overall global terror war and

Iraq War II was they got an authorization to use military force from the congress which what that really is is the congress giving their power away to the president to let him decide not them and that way they're not really answerable except in the sense that well you can't accuse me of hamstringing our great leader i gave him all the power he needs to keep us safe so they get to say that like on the stupid level it's a cop out right but it's a cop out exactly right then they get to come home and if the war went bad well it was w bush that launched the thing i just said he could, which is what a lot of them said, like literally Hillary Clinton and others said, hey, all I did was authorize the thing. He's the one who decided to do it. Joe Biden said the

same thing about Iraq War II in particular. So this is something that really caught me and my attention, like just as a ninth grader, that Bush declares, oh, this is the new world order now that the Soviet Union is falling apart. And we don't, I don't need the Congress's authority. I can launch a war in the name of enforcing international law over there with the UN saying it's okay instead of the U.S. Congress. So that was really the start of me becoming like what we would now consider to be a new world order coup. Maybe a lot of people did then because that's a code word that means a lot of things to a

lot of people. Yes. But to the Patriot right, it meant that America's government are traders and that the ultimate grand goal is to build the one world federal government under the United Nations where America would lose our sovereignty just like we destroy everybody else's, which was always bullshit. But that was what I thought at the time because I was a stupid kid. But that was what got me very interested in foreign policy.

So I ended up, I don't regret it because I ended up learning a lot of really great revisionist history of the 20th century and including in the World Wars and Vietnam and all that stuff, you know, back when I was still a kid in the 90s or, you know, early 20s. So then by the time W. Bush came to town and Dick Cheney was really running the show, It was clear that as a smart person told me, no, dummy, like Dick Cheney is not a one-worlder, okay, like, there's a world government, but it's in Washington, D.C. It ain't anywhere else. Can you explain that a little more? yes well okay so that's going back to iraq war one what i should have understood then in 91 in 91 what i should have understood then was what bush senior meant by new world order was not a one world government that ends up like subsuming the usa what he meant was the well just in the general

sense the world order is new now the soviet union is gone america is the only superpower left in the world, we're friends with every major power in Europe and East Asia. And so as Bush Sr. really meant it when he said this, what we say goes. So that wasn't about some overall plan to build a world government. That was the overall plan. In other words, it's not the UN Security Council. It's the National Security Council in the White House. These are the men who really rule the planet. and certainly at that time they were full of this hubris that and they wrote their doctrine that said we will never allow another major nation in the world or alliance of nations to challenge our military supremacy over the planet there's only one superpower and from now on there only will be one superpower so who's the dominant power in europe the middle part of north america and who's the dominant power in the middle east the middle part of the middle part of north america and who's the dominant power in east asia the middle part of north america and then that's the big controversy now is that to fast forward in our story w bush blew our entire wad

invading rock for no good reason yep and led this whole era of the terror wars where they blew 10 trillion dollars and all of our dignity and credibility along with the blood of four million people and 37 million driven out of their homes and 30 million soldiers suicides. And God knows we saw two veterans do mass shootings over the last weekend here, guys with trauma coming home from the war. So all the guys that you see on the street who are homeless now too and on taking care of. Let me tell you when I was a kid, they were all wearing green army jackets because they all were Vietnam veterans and who were just cast aside, you know, when the war was over.

That's exactly how they do it. um and so now america's power is receding all over the world and our government is not particularly president trump in this case but the rest of our political establishment the entire foreign policy establishment they're in a panic because what's and the irony is they wanted rightly for the soviet union to disappear they wanted for communist China to abandon Marxist economics which they've done right

it was Americans who sent Milton Friedman over there to teach these people you need property rights and markets and prices man otherwise that's why you got 10 million starving people on the ground here and so we saved him from that Karl Marx is stupid

and Milton Friedman ain't no Murray Rothbard but he's a hell of a lot better than Karl Marx so read this and so would we prefer that the Chinese are still actual communists starving by the tens of millions? Or we helped them to save themselves. The greatest increase in the standard of living are the most people in the shortest amount of time in the history of the world. It's unbelievable. What happened to China coming up from communism. And what was the USSR is now just the Russian Federation

with a red, white, blue flag and conservative Christian religion and basic overall Western European doctrine. This is what we wanted. But now, oh, we can't stand it that anybody has the power to resist our power. Okay, well, yes, China can afford a Navy now. That doesn't mean they want to rule the seven seas. It just means they can keep us out of the South China Sea

if it comes down to it, out of the Taiwan Straits, if it comes down to it. It doesn't mean that they're trying to overthrow our power and replace us as the dominant power in the world. Shopping for a new mattress can feel like, a hassle. Too many choices, too many inflated prices, which is why GhostBed is here to make it simple. Not only are GhostBed's mattresses priced up to 50% less than comparable brands. They also ship fast directly to you. Most customers are going to get their mattress in the next two to five days,

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That's ghostbed.com slash Julian, promo code Julian. upgrade your sleep with ghost bed, the makers of the coolest beds in the world. Some exclusions apply, C-Sight for details. You don't think they are? No, I don't. Why don't you think they are? Well, first of all, just think about it. Imagine Chairman Shee looking at W. Bush and Barack Obama and Joe Biden and, for that matter, Trump, this whole era, and saying, oh, yeah, that's what I want to do, is blow my country's brains out.

right when we're just getting our act together after our century of humiliation and domination by foreign powers. You know what we should do? We should try to invade and conquer the entire Middle East. Maybe remake Afghanistan, you know, we'll sponsor every regime we can possibly prop up in Africa at unlimited expense. Why would they do that?

I mean, they're trying to do business. Where America sends soldiers, they send businessmen and waste a lot less money that way. Right. Yeah. And look, their ambition is to build what they call the Belt and Road, which I think this is probably a pipe dream,

but they want to go from Shanghai to Lisbon. Yeah. Right? Like, in other words, railways, fiber optics, highways, and whatever you got all the way across Eurasia from tip to tip, more or less. And they're going to do that by killing everybody and lording it over everybody

and causing fights everywhere and causing wars? No, they are going to have to choose, right? They're going to be a belligerent world empire, then they're not going to get very far. If they want to expand their influence, I mean, look at what they're doing now. They're acting smart, where America just does nothing but waste money.

And you'll hear our Pentagon say, we got to really move deeper into Africa to keep the Chinese out. We have to impeachy. materialize Africa, we've got to do coups and prop up dictators and intervene in elections and support the, you know, train up armies and do all of these things because China might bribe somebody into letting them pump some oil out of the ground and ship it to the coast, which is good for humanity overall anyway. Don't we want to drive down the price of energy?

I don't know. Isn't it okay for China to buy petroleum products? I think that it may be, you know. I see what you're saying. There's a lot, there's a lot on the bone here. So I'm going to try to keep it, keep it straight and just start with one thing. Okay. China's using the pen where we have over the years proven to try to use the sword, right? So like you said, we send in people start wars. We send in covert intelligence operations to cause problems, kill people sometimes, things like that that are problematic. China writes a check and says, okay, here is something. is $600 million to build this new port right here. We know you can never pay it back, but now you just at least let us use it and have our influence here. We're not going to kill anyone. We're not going to hurt anybody, but like, you know, we kind of own you. Isn't it problematic when you have a country whose GDP is now neck and neck with ours, potentially buying influence across the world when they are, I will agree with you. They're objectively better.

today than they were in communism under Mao and stuff like that for sure they have more of a dual system but at the end of the day it is still a communist government that still does touch and control everything they're including their billionaires you know to the point that if they don't give them their information and business intelligence they just kill them like isn't that somewhat problematic if you don't again not saying going and do regime change send an army like that everywhere but isn't it problematic if you don't try to exert your own soft power to at least try to co-opt that? Sounds like it might be problematic for Zimbabwe, which ain't a state in the union, and I don't

care what happens to them. And no, it is not in the interest of the American people that we got to pay our taxes, have our currency destroyed so that our government can wage a world empire to keep China from getting Zimbabwe in a debt trap and taking control of a port, not a naval port, but a port where people are doing business and maybe we should kill people maybe we should overthrow the government there maybe we should train up the army of the government next door

to invade them and kill them and teach them to do business with the Chinese because to save their ass meanwhile how does America do this business we already know America goes in there we get them in a debt trap and then we confiscate all their natural resources permanently your mines your water

your farmland everything belongs to us. And the Chinese don't. Prom up the dictator. Not like that. Not like the Americans have. I mean, that's the IMF way. They go in there and absolutely gangsterize the hell out of countries and turn their entire water supplies over to American favored multinationals and all that. The confessions of the economic hit pan. Yeah, he's great. And you know, G. Edward Griffin has a great bit about this and the creature from Jekyll Island too. This is just straight gangsterism. It's what you expect from the British Empire and not it has nothing to do with free markets it's the U.S. government forcing our way and so you know if African countries need to figure out how to protect their sovereignty

from China well then I guess they need to do that right that doesn't have nothing to do with me what about the psychology here though right if you you and I were talking for a second before we got on camera and I was kind of telling you where I see some nuance here like I despise the military industrial complex. I despise getting involved in wars for the sake of like, you know, basically carrying our cock around the show we got the biggest one. I despise the blood, death and economic trauma and generational things that happen as a result of that. And I do agree with you. I think we have a lot of things to fix at home that we seem to just make second rate.

Oh, here's $700 for a victim of Maui while we're giving, you know, $14 billion on a Tuesday to Ukraine. I'm completely with you on that. but if you go completely opposite like the polar opposite of what the military industrial complex is which in some ways would be like absolute pure libertarianism isolationism stay away just deal with our problems let everyone else deal with theirs how do you keep your power in the world if you retreat from everything well that's the whole point is abandon that power in the world we don't need that power in the world we don't to have to have the freedom that we have we don't need to be able to have power in the world that includes also having some economic might so that we can

have you know advantage in trade and things like that look if you need your government to rig the game for you so that you can get artificially cheap labor or so that you can have some local government expropriate property and turn it over to your buddies and your standard of living depends on that and then that's just that's wrong and unacceptable and so tough like you're going to have to pay more for grapes then if you're using state power to take unfair advantage in order to get artificial low prices on whatever it is um so that's that it's not isolationism to have private corporations have international trade around the world um you know to have you know, in fact, our current empire has sanctions on probably two-thirds of the countries in the

world. And then they call the free traders, the isolationist, just because we don't want to exert government power around the world. But why is it just built in? We're supposed to assume forever that America must be the dominant power in Italy, in Germany, and France, and Britain? Why? They can't solve their own problems. This is the era of totalitarians. from 100 years ago where it's the commies versus the Nazis and all of this stuff or no it's not actually at all if america retreated from europe and pulled our troops out of there then germany and france and britain would create an e u army they'd have a deal with poland and italy and whatever you think it would take care of itself and it would take care of itself we've had the osce and all these

organizations all of this time we don't need to be and look at who runs germany now would germany be the dominant power in Europe? Sure. Does that mean they'd have to go to war with Russia next? No. In fact, that's America and Britain's greatest fear, is that Germany and Russia will get along too well. That's what we've got to prevent. Merkel and Putin want to do a Eurasian home. We've got to intervene to destabilize that, blow that thing up, prevent that kind of deal from happening. So, and then the same thing for Japan and China. Now, there's in korea for that matter there's plenty of historical problems going back there and you could argue that japan right now doesn't have nukes because we're there and we do have nukes and they're like

they have a security guarantee from us on the other hand the chinese aren't making any threatening moves towards japan they're not sending any signals to to tokyo they're like yeah you better be on your best behavior or any kind of thing so the japanese are not militarizing any more than what the Americans are insisting on, but they have no particular agenda to militarize against China. And the Chinese don't seem to be trying to pick that fight at all. So maybe now would be a good time for America to broker a permanent, you know, treaty of friendship and understanding between China and Japan to freeze things as they are, to hold tensions where they are and prevent them from escalating so that they can get on without us and we're in debt 37 trillion

dollars how many more trillion dollars can we borrow from south korea and japan and china so that we can be the dominant military power keeping them from fighting each other it seems like there's got to be a better way to do this you know what i mean it's it seems like it's always built in that like yeah but if we didn't dominate east asia then east asians would but and then that would be a crisis for some reason. And I'm not saying that America can just like, what, pull the tablecloth out and all the glasses will be perfect. I understand.

But we can move cautiously and deliberately and negotiate deals and we can create a Eurasian home. This was the whole promise in, and this is in my most recent book, Provoked. The whole promise at the end of the Cold War was as Bush, and this is why I was a New World Order Cooke, by the way, was because Bush Sr. said, we want to create. create a single security system from Vancouver to Vladivostok, right? That's the far east of Russia there. So in other words, what I thought he meant was like bringing Russia into NATO and making a one world white army of the north to then lord it over China and Islamic South Asia.

And there were, there was a lot of talk like that. The thing is, they were just bluff and they didn't mean that. Mostly they were saying those things in order to, for American domestic consumption, to bring the more like humanitarian intervention-minded liberal Democrat types alone. But then on the international level, more importantly, to get the Soviets and then later the Russians to acquiesce to America staying in Germany and then expanding their influence into Eastern Europe, that you're all going to be a part of it too. You're going to see, we already have the OSCE and we're all members of it.

So we're going to replace NATO with the OSCE. And then so that way, yeah, Ukraine will be a member, but so will Russia be a member and all of the members, all the states in between. And so there will be no problem, nothing to fight about there. But they were lying the whole time. And as I show in the book, and I cite other great scholars who demonstrate that they knew that they were lying and that they were telling the Russians in the Bush senior administration, the promise was they do this with the OSCE, what was then called the CSCE, the conference. and now it's the organization on Cooperation International I was screwed up I had it a second ago and it flew away and then in the Clinton years

it was the partnership for peace but they were lying both times and the plan always was to expand NATO not to erase the dividing lines in Europe but to move them further east right up to Russia's border and then what are they going to do about it and now we see what they're going to do about it

which was long predicted by the way too that all the hawks as i as i show in my books all the hawks who were responsible for all of our worst policies they all knew better all along and they all said so all along boy we better not do the stupid thing that we want to do because you know what's going to happen and then it they do it and then that thing happens and it's kind of an unbroken chain and i and then so i don't have to quote all the good guys i can quote the bad guys themselves describing their own worst behavior well that's that's the thing though like you keep coming back to this USSR Russia example and it's and it's actually a really prescient one because I think it's fair to say there were a fuck ton of mistakes made throughout the Cold War that not the least of which is wars that happened all in the middle of it on on you know in proximity to this East versus West disagreement that was going on you also had damn near you know potential nuclear holocaust scenarios so a lot of could have gone wrong that you know even some things thank God it didn't that said what

what's always stood out to me about the end of it is that the way that the USSR eventually fell was that it was an ideological game you know you didn't you you basically got enough information in there talking about from like the west perspective you got enough information inside of the Soviet Union to get 15% of the population. That's all it was. 15% to be like, yo, fuck this, and then effectively overthrow the government. So you would think, oh, my God, you did something without, like, actually intervening. It worked out. This government that you didn't like is overthrown. Now let's work with the rebuild. But to your point, it's like we learn zero lessons because in the rebuild, we made promises that we didn't keep. We gave them, meaning Russia to Russia,

We gave them ideas that they were going to be a part of things that then they weren't a part of. We set up a new type of iron curtain. It just had like a nice red curtain around it too so that it seemed like it was like pleasant. And we effectively created a vacuum in the 90s for a guy like Putin to then take power and decide we're going to make this instead of USSR left. It's kind of going to be like more fascist Russia. Right. And so in a lot of ways, like, I'm not saying the U.S. should be blamed for every decision that Vladimir Putin makes or anything, but it's hard for me to not look at it and wonder if our very own, like, stabbing ourselves in the back, created it. The truth comes out. Julian Dory ghost wrote my most recent book, provoked.

And that's the story of the book, you know? That's, that's, I summarized it, effectively. that's it's yeah the organization for security and cooperation in europe is what i was trying to say when my brain wasn't working earlier gotcha and yeah that was exactly the deal was yeah you're going to be part of this whole thing and yeah and and now the one place i would differ with you is um that the end of the cold war in the soviet union really wasn't about us and it wasn't an achievement of the cia and the n ed um it was really what happened was the economic system in the country had just ground essentially to a halt.

And the new leadership decided that they needed to try to emulate the West some and reform the economy some in order to try to get it moving again. But the problem was you can't really half-ass communism in the way that they tried to half-ass it and it just made it even worse. Like for example, instead of having just the central commissar run all the industry and this district they devolved control but not ownership down to the managers of each firm so then those guys could just loot all the stuff and take all the money and run you know this kind of thing so it was just so once they started trying to fix it they just made it worse and worse and worse right and then idiot

gorbachev tried to outlaw vodka and you know he did his own prohibition people never mentioned this part of it but this was a huge part of the reason why fDR was elected four times was he was was the guy who re-legalized drinking you know god help us all ever since then because of him and uh but that was what he did and and so this was a huge thing that undermined his rule and then you just had a new young generation of kgb guys i think who wanted to overthrow the old system and take control of the new one and so um then see america the bush senior government actually wanted to uh uphold the Soviet Union to prolong the Soviet Union. Wait, what? Yeah, because, see,

what they wanted to do was dissolve the Warsaw Pact. They wanted to let the satellite countries go free. And as far as the Soviet republics, they wanted the Baltics to go free. Who, so Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, but H.W wanted that. HW wanted for the USSR to remain under what was going to be called the new union treaty. and it was going to include Belarus, Ukraine, and the stands in South Asia still. And what happened was the commies, the hardliners did a coup in August of 1991, which failed. And to his credit, Bush Sr. refused to take a phone call from the commie and would only take a phone call from Gorbachev.

So the coup failed. That wasn't why, but that was part of why the coup failed. But it was really Boris Yeltsin, who was the president of Russia. and he led the people who crushed the coup and saved Gorbachev. But then he did his own coup and he went ahead and overthrew what was left of the USSR at all himself by making a secret deal with the leader of Belarus and Ukraine and agreeing to break the last thing apart. The USA had nothing to do with that and did not want that. As Brent Skokroft said, says we didn't want Ukraine.

We just wanted Eastern Europe. Ukraine is east of Eastern Europe to Brent Skowcroft, Bush Senior's alter ego here. And then, so not that I'm taking his side, but I'm just saying you can see why they didn't want that kind of trouble. They didn't necessarily want the USSR to dissolve. They just wanted for Poland and Hungary and the Baltics to go free. Did you know that one in eight Americans are currently prescribed anti-anxiety medications? It is a quiet epidemic that is sweeping the West right now. And people who start on these medications have a very hard time.

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slash Julian link in description below and use code jd 22 for 22% off much love you know interesting so they you're effectively saying they wanted a hafer of what they got yeah it went further than they had in history i i didn't know that at all the book is called provoked how washington started the new cold war with russia and the catastrophe in ukraine and it's all in there for you interesting your audience might be familiar with what is called the chicken Kiev speech and this is where bush senior went to Kiev and he gave a speech to the Rada where he said independence is not the same as freedom and america will not support you moving on any timetable other than what gorbachev has in mind in moscow and so don't come looking to me to help you declare independence

from them he said it to their parliament all right question and then he's not said and beware of ethnic nationalism and the danger of the danger of suicidal ethnic nationalism and the and the horror it can bring to your country like before etc. And then it was William Sapphire who I don't think was actually a neo-conservative but he was very close to the neo-conservatives who wrote for the New York Times who called it the chicken Kiev speech which you got to admit like here's your chance to destroy the USSR once and for all and they're like doing everything they can to prop it up i'm not taking their side and thing i mean i would have had a total non-interventionist policy and it would have happened

you know in fact push senior deserves some credit because as he put it he did not go tap dance on the berlin wall and say ha ha ha we won and you lost because if he had done that that would have helped the hardliners that would have saved the soviet union the fact that he stayed home and played it relatively cool at least in terms of the gloating actually made it easier for Yeltsin to ultimately destroy what was left of the USSR for us. That's my question. That's what I'm thinking as you're explaining this whole thing. And this is a little bit of, I'm not well versed on this part. So I appreciate you going through this. But H.W. Bush is a lifelong spy. You know, these, you're talking about a guy who literally made his bones on subversive tactics. Could it not have been some sort of,

you know, passive aggressive, double speak, reverse psychology in a way for him to do that? You don't think that's a possibility? No, look, Gorbachev wanted the new union treaty. Bush's position was, I want what Gorbachev wants. That's it. It was Yeltsin who overthrew Gorbachev. And I never seen any indication anywhere that the CIA put him up to it or anything like that. That was Yeltsin taking his chance. That was not America's doing. The CIA didn't even know the Soviet Union was falling apart because the CIA was too busy line that they were 12 feet tall so they could justify American militarism. Robert Gates was the head of the CIA at the time and they missed this whole thing. And even as it was all unraveling, they still were not saying that, oh yeah,

their days are numbered, sir, until it was all over. And they're like, well, red flag is down. Hooray. We did it. Right, like the FBI taking credit when some guy's dad turns him in. We found them. You know, in the parking lot. I'll see you in Valhalla, brother.

Yeah, I see what you're saying. Do you, when you look at the history of CIA, something that's born after World War II, but effectively was born as the OSS, you know, during World War II, all those figures eventually created what we now know is CIA. It is quite obvious that there is scandal after scandal, overstep after overstep, bureaucracy taking control of the will of the people, you know, and holding, I mean, you could even go just straight up and say, hold it blackmail or whatever you want to say over the people that we supposedly elect into power.

Is there anything good about the CIA in your book? Are there things that they do on a daily basis that you think are useful? I mean, there must be some pat answer in their right about how they read foreign newspapers and tell the president what they say. Maybe they have some electronic spying or some sources somewhere that give them some insight. But, I mean, overall, by and large, no, they are absolutely the destructive force that you describe them to be. And why? Because it's unaccountable power.

They got a black budget. and they can never get in trouble for anything by definition their job is to break the law and that's what a finding is so order by the president to do something that's right and then and it can be as illegal as hell and so they're a post constitutional national security bureaucracy fit for an old world empire not a constitutional republic a post constitutional what was that phrase post constitutional a national security bureaucracy right like the rest of them there are a bar of them yeah i mean you know all this stuff was invented after world war two yes which goes to show that it ain't part of what was the american system up until it was and doesn't have to be yeah so you think it's well it's kind of obvious when i say this of course it's different but like the premise of having an apparatus like that assuming for a second it's not completely taking advantage of everything which it is but the premise of having like a spy apparatus is an american when you know we won the Revolutionary War because of our spy apparatus. I would argue that was probably the most

important thing. We got to... If we renounce all our power, then the foreign spies don't have much business to accomplish here, right? The whole point of a foreign spy in America is to bend the American government to their will to exercise their global imperial power in favor of whatever government. But if we don't have a world empire, then they're just barking up the wrong tree. I'm let's be the wrong tree. So you think... America itself is safe. We have two weak and friendly neighbors

and marine life to the east. Yeah, Canada and Mexico could never threaten us ever. We have threatened them numerous times, but never vice versa, right? You count Pancho Villas raids or something. I don't know if I would characterize

Mexico as fully friendly, just to be fair. Well, it's run by cartels. Okay, but... Fine, but I'm just saying their military force has no... intention to cross our borders in a violent way in the next couple of hundred years that we got to worry about right um we got gigantic oceans east and west and as ron paul said we can

defend this country with a couple of good submarines that's enough to sink your navy uh if you want to come anywhere near our guys and it's enough one sub can hold 200 h bombs that's enough to kill all of russia which is one of our submarines so we can hold the entire world hostage. Don't anybody ever nuke us or we will nuke you. And maybe that's hyperbole, a couple of good submarines? Fine. A dozen then. Well, like, what do you want for me? Like, we don't need a world empire to secure North America. And we, look, if, who framed Donald Trump for treason? The CIA and the FBI counterintelligence division. Why do we have a CIA and a counterintelligence division.

To not do that. Because we're a world empire. And so we need a CIA and an FBI counterintelligence division. And then when the people vote wrong, they just do a coup the same way they do anywhere else. I mean, look at the way that they frame Trump for treases is essentially with the same thing they did to Saddam Hussein.

Same thing. Yeah, just tell 1,000 lies. The Russiagate hoax, not one word of that was true, not one word of it. That's been proven. 10,000 accusations. This is the exact same thing they did to Saddam Hussein. Then in 2020, they did it just like they would do, like the Orange Revolution or the Rose Revolution over when they're overthrown a friendly government to Russia.

And they're near abroad. And they treated Trump just like he was Yanukovych in that case. You know what I mean? Where the CIA, you know, when Diane Feinstein, the senior senator from California, was the chair of the... Torture Committee? the yeah the senate intelligence committee she had the her staff investigate torture i guess you already know this story and you know where i'm going she said it's a good one though she had her staff they were ensconced in an office at cia where cia would bring them the material to review now someone

at cia either accidentally or accidentally on purpose gave the staff the real secret torture report that was written eyes only for Leon Panetta, which they were supposed to have covered up and lied and pretended didn't exist and only give them another separate, not even a redacted version, but another whole separate different report. And then when the bosses found out about it,

was John Brennan, who found out about it. Great guy. He's an awesome guy. Yeah, don't get me starting the whole list. You can't, if you want, get me started on the whole list. But he then made a criminal referral to the FBI to have the FBI and the Justice Department prosecute Diane Feinstein's staff for he claimed breaking into their computers

and stealing this document. So the head of the CIA is coming at the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in this way. As though he is the separate and co-eco branch of government from the checks and balances we were talking about earlier when no, I mean, come on, man.

He's supposed to be five ranks down. he's not even officially a member of the cabinet the head of the CIA i guess sometimes depending on the president but he's not a secretary of anything hey guys if you haven't already subscribed please hit that subscribe button it's a huge huge help thank you and and even if he was he's a huge step down from the elected president of the united states of america and in this case the courts had ruled that the president had no right to keep this information from her and better turn it over so in other words she had all the authority in the world to do what she was doing and he was swinging and punching way above what should have been his weight but in fact no and he absolutely

got away with it that's what he's always done that's right look at that guy's career he's done it every fucking step of the way yep even when he wasn't in charge of sea i long before that when he was what was it when he was back running the i'm gonna fuck it up but he was like the he was like the station chief down in the Philippines or something like he everywhere that guy went and john kiriaku who's a friend of mine who's been in here who got fucked right up the ass by him he's great you know john lays out exactly what this guy was all about he also explains how the dude was like literally fired and and then found his way back in and basically like sucked enough dick to to get back into some positions to be able to move papers around so i don't know the philippines part you see i don't remember if it's

please check me in the comments on that he was the station chief of one of something out there Saudi I know that Saudi that yeah and this is in Tucker Carlson's new thing about 9-11 he was the station chief in Saudi when the hijackers were all the last of the muscle hijackers have been you know brought into the country yeah there was nothing about that and then yes he ran the drone wars for Barack Obama before then running the war for al-Qaeda in Syria that backing al-Nusra that led to the rise of ISIS in the Islamic State Caliphate. And then, of course, he framed Trump for high treason with Moscow and the overthrow of the election in 2016, total lie. And I'm trying to remember if, did Kyriaku say if he was involved in the torture program?

I bet he was. Oh, yeah. Brennan's role in torture. This is the sickest part. There was a documentary on Showtime back in 2015 called C. CIA spies in the crosshairs. And they interviewed every living former director or acting director of CIA. At the time, H.W. was still alive. Like, they had everybody on there. And then they had a few guys from the War on Terror who weren't, you know, like heads, but like a Jose Rodriguez, guys like

that who were involved in some of the Blackside programs and things. And so John Brennan, at the time of the documentary, is the head of the CIA, the current head of the CIA at the time. And he gets on there and they're asking each CIA director about, in hindsight, do you think the CIA should ever be allowed to torture somebody? And John Brennan gives like this answer. Like I just think, you know, in America, we should, I just feel very strongly. We should not torture. He's the fucking guy who wrote the initial memos.

He's the guy who helped create the fucking program. He's not the only one, by the way, on that. But I'm saying, like, he is one of the godfathers of that whole program. He's one of the people who had John Kyriaku prosecuted because he was the only guy back there, the human rights guy, who said, we don't do this in America. He was like, fuck you, John. And they made Eric Holder, the whole thing is like illegal go after him for it. So when I see a guy, that's on record. When I see a guy like that go onto a documentary and lie his fucking face off, I understand if you got to lie about some foreign intelligence somewhere, that, listen, that is what it is.

But when you're going to lie about your own actions and try to make yourself look like, oh, I'm the, I'm the wrong. righteous guy here, fuck you. I don't fuck with that one bit. Yep. Yeah. And he was, I think he was in the White House in charge of the drone strikes when they killed American citizens, Anwar Al-Laki and his son Abdulraman in Yemen as well. That's right. So, I mean, that's the least of what they did in Yemen. But it's, you know, legally, yeah, oh, by far. I'll tell you all about that one moment. But in this case, it's, you know, it ain't a technicality when you're talking about murdering American-born American citizens, man. And that's absolutely, you know, life in prison time. Anybody else does it just because it's one or two or three. That doesn't

make a difference when it comes to that principle. Jesus Christ, like there's got to be a line somewhere and we crossed a long time ago. They did. But you want to know the story of the Yemen war. I'll tell you real quick. So, you know, have to tell me quick. Tell me whatever you want. I'll tell you slow. So look, Barack Obama comes in. We're way ahead in our timeline, but we don't have to do one. It's all right. You'll be back, Scott. Yeah, we'll just talk about this one.

So, and this is in that book, if you want to show them. Right up on the screen here. Enough already. This is the second to the last chapter in there. Scott Horton's story. Yeah. Enough already, Horton, we heard you. We'd said this part before.

Okay. So, W. Bush's Iraq war. really benefits al-Qaeda a lot it wasn't meant to do that but it did they really gain a lot for fighting in western iraq um Obama comes in and he decides on i mean a whole cascade of idiotic things but one of the things that at least on the face of it seemed rational not to a non-interventionist like me but just on the face of it all the things being equal was he told CIA i want you to focus on actually killing actual ass bin Ladenites right not random Sunni insurgents in western iraq but real friends of

osama who are a threat to us and particularly in Pakistan and in Yemen so they did that kiriaku tells the story that there were he knows for a fact there were only 29 al Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan at the time that the CIA launched that drone war when Obama came in and they killed hundreds or low thousands of Pakistanis in those drone strikes trying to kill 29 guys. Then they also allied with the Pakistani government in a giant war

that they launched against the Pakistani Taliban who never did anything to us in the Swat Valley and the federally administered tribal territories and all that. Something like 80,000 people were killed and you know hundreds of thousands driven from their homes and it was a giant catastrophe. Anyway

that's what that's what happens when Obama says you know what would make sense would be murdering people who actually are friends of Osama, right? And they're like, okay, here's how we do that and turn this country upside down, right? Okay. Anyway, when it comes to Yemen, there are bin Ladenites there, real-ass bin Laden nights. You'll remember that on, in fact, this was after Obama already started bombing them. But on Christmas Day 2009, the underpants bomber tried to blow up a plane over Detroit. What was AQAP that sent him? in the Arabian Peninsula of Yemenite bin Ladenites and Yemeni bin Ladenites so they were centered in a

couple of small towns on the coast basically not too many of them CIA begins this drone war against them the whole time they're bombing them this is in 09 is when this starts like in the fall of 09 the whole time they're bombing them al-Qaeda's getting bigger and bigger there's a great article by Jeremy Scahill in the nation about this has the word backfires in it. Yemen, terror war backfires, something like that. And he talks about in there how there was this

tribal chief, you know, whatever alpha male guy of this town who had called a meeting with these bin Ladenites to tell them, you better stay the hell out of my town. And Obama bombed the meeting and killed the guy who was putting a break on these guys. did you do that? Because he's an idiot. The CIA, they're bombing little black and white figures on a monitor. They don't know who's who and who's saying what to who down there. They're taking a wild guess. They call it a scalpel. It's not a scalpel. It's a 50, at minimum, it's a 50 pound bomb. A lot of times it's bigger than that. But if it's, you know, a small drone-fired bomb, it's still enough to kill five people or blow up a pickup truck. That's not a scalpel. Right. Right.

A 500 pound bomb will blow up your whole damn building and kill the family. Yeah, when Eric Prince was here, he was whipping out his phone and showing me some of the live drone strikes. That shit's gnarly. Yeah. And so, yeah, it is not at all a scalpel if it hits you. And so when you have these drone strikes on these towns, then what ends up happening is it ends up driving people into the insurgency. Whoever's bombing us, we want to join up with the people who are getting bombed. Not because, yay, we want to be bombed,

but because we want to be part of the force that's worth bombing. We want to be part of the force that's fighting against the people who are fighting us. It's the same thing that you and I would do if they started bombing our towns. We're going to join up with the guys

who already have their guns and their act together and tell them who do I shoot, right? Like, yeah, that's what we do. So that was what they did. And now, Kada just grew more and more and more. Okay? Then, in order to accomplish all of that, though, Obama had to bribe the dictator of Yemen, a guy named Abdullah Saleh.

And he had to bribe them. Yes, with money and guns. That's how you do it. Yeah. And so this guy had been the dictator since the end of the Cold War era, and he had reunited north and south Yemen. And the south was the more, you know, calmy backed by the Soviets. And the north was the British redoubt.

And so he had united the country in America had backed him all this time. But now, he's a pretty like a slick double game plan type of guy. So he's allowing Obama to bomb al-Qaeda. But he's actually backing them and the Muslim Brotherhood, a group called Al-Isla. And he's using them to attack his enemies, a group of Shiites in the north of the country called the Houthis, which that's their family and tribal name, but they're a sect of Zadis Shiites from the mountainous north in the Sada province. and he keeps attacking them over and over and he's using even though he's taking our money and guns to allow Obama to bomb Al-Qaeda, he's actually backing Al-Qaeda as long as they're

killing the Houthis. But then, you know, it's funny about that is he's actually backing the Houthis to kill his own army and the al-Qaeda guys too. Yeah. Because that's how they do politics in Yemen. I talked to a reporter one time. He said, that's the reason why they have those curved daggers is so you can stab somebody in the back even when he's standing behind you.

um and so sounds like an awesome place yeah so that was the way solid did business anyway yeah so then comes the herb spring right 2011 the degree to which uh n ed and cia are behind all of this or some of it or whichever let's leave that aside but revolution breaks out in tunisia and egypt and then you have day of rage protests all across the middle east including in Bahrain and Saudi and Iraq and in Yemen. And in Yemen, they have huge protests. And everybody came out, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Houthis, the southern socialists from aid in the southern transitional council, they call themselves. They're backed by the UAE and our socialists kind of left over from the Soviet days. And all these different groups were coming together to protest to try

to get rid of Sala. But he wasn't going anywhere. But then somebody tried to kill him twice. And the second time it was with a bomb i forgot i think it was a bombing both times but the second time they got him and wounded him and he had to go to saudi arabia to convales and while he was gone hillary clinton the secretary state swooped in and this is in early 2012 Hillary clinton swooped in and insisted that whatever the people of yemen have going on here no you are going to suffer the vice president under the old system mansur had he's coming to power and there's nothing you you can do about that and we're going to hold a big election they held a big election with one guy on the ballot and even npr news covered it like you can pull up the website

where you can see the ballot with one man just type in mansur hadi ballot npr news and it'll come up i promise and there's there's the ballot with one guy one face one oval i don't think i don't think right it you see micky mouse down the bottom like people do something Kanye West finished second. People writing in Ron Paul. Oh, my God. And so Hillary Clinton declared this was the advent of democracy. Did you find it? Something about Hillary Clinton talking about democracy just never sits right with me. Yeah, that's the end of hearing right there. Yeah, Yemen election, one person, one vote, one candidate, February 2012. Millions of people in Yemen, I like Yemen. I like saying it like the old comstock, millions of people in Yemen turned out to

vote Tuesday in an unusual presidential election. There was only one candidate and a only one way to vote. Yes, that candidate, Abdurami Mansour Hadi, was the vice president under Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than three decades. Salé finally agreed to step down and transfer power to his vice president after nearly a year of mass protests against his rule. In the outgoing president's dusty hometown, about an hour's drive outside of the capital Sana'a and inside a school that served as a polling station, several pictures of Salé preside over the proceedings as he ran as he has for 33 years in Yemen

people say that they're that they are voting for the new Yemen the new start with the same fucking okay whatever but it seems as if they are doing it because it's what Saleh wants them to do I cried today as I voted says Rasa Al-Sayani as someone held a gun to her head behind her we loved our

president but if he says his deputy is the best man for Yemen then I know he knows better I'm making up this last part then he is the best man for Yemen That's wow. Wow. I mean, it doesn't surprise me. And the thing is, look, I'm not saying that all the protesters knew exactly what to do, but I am saying, as I show in the book, they did have processes and councils and committees that were, you know, coming to agreement. They were trying to form a new government. They had the right to. America had no right to intervene in their process and to insist on propping up this guy over them the way that they did. And by the way, according to the rules of confirmation bias, when national public radio says something that agrees with me, then that means that even national public radio admits that I'm right. You see how that works? Especially when, and I know that's funny, but also especially when these are Democrat times and they're confirming my bias, not Obama's.

They are accusing Obama here essentially. They're really implicating our government, the Democrat government in what was happening there. So when they're willing to make the Democrats look bad in that way, like arguing against interest, but hey, what are you going to do? It is the news and it runs anyway. Then that's a bit more credible because it's just as easy to turn around and go, come on NPR. You wouldn't cite them for anything else, which is a good point, depending on the store. Broken clock is right twice a day.

That's right. And you got to use your discernment. But also I get to make a joke about confirmation bias. that like, see, it fits with what I think, so I get to cite it, you know, come on. Anyways, here's the deal, though. Mansra Sadi sucked at being a dictator, and he didn't have the talent, I guess, that Sala had had. And so he, well, oh, I'll say that for a second. So he had cut all the gasoline rations for the poor.

He had failed to stand for re-election as promised. And he had kind of taken a magic market and drawn hard borders between the regions of the country as though they were states in a way that cut the Houthis off from the sea, from the Red Sea. So them's fighting words there, right? Like that was a declaration of war against them. So, and then, but here's the ironical part,

is that it turns out that Abdullah Salah, the former dictator, he was a Zadishite. Even though he wasn't a Houthi, he was a Shiite from the north. So those same Houthis that he'd been attacking and failing to defeat over and over again, he went up north and joined them. He took about half his army or more with him. And so now he had the former dictator of the country, changed sides, became allies with his old enemies in the north.

Now they marched together down back to Sana'a to take the capital city. Am I making sense? Tom is a flat circle That's right And so the world too apparently They get to Sanah in the end of 2014 And they get Kadi out of power

He flees to Aden And then to a hotel in Saudi Arabia I don't know if he ever came home again So In a lot of ways The world is like a fucked up It's actually bloody and gross But like the back office stuff

Is like a giant episode of VEP that's not like that far off. It is. It's pretty stupid. It's like, oh, which dictator? Oh. You'll like this part. So the Houthis come to power.

And like I said, they're Shiites. But that means one thing about them. That means about them that Al-Qaeda thinks they should all be dead. Because to the al-Qaeda guys, the only good, well, and not to every Sunni, but to the bin Ladenites, especially in a post-Iraqwar II era, the only good Shiite is a dead Shiite. so America under Lloyd Austin remember him the secretary of defense under Joe Biden terrific secretary defense yeah before that he was the head of central command four-star general over there oh and he had a program right when the Houthis took power in the end of 14 and into 15 where he was giving them intelligence to use to kill al-Qaeda guys hey you know how the al-Qaeda guys like killing you and the Shiites

said yeah and he said well you want to kill them good and they said please and he said well here here's intelligence to use so that you can target them and so we have this from the wall street journal january 2015 um america um give support to huthies and that same month a lady named barbara slavin who used to write for upi um press service and is a member of the atlantic council she wrote a story for Al Monitor about how General Michael Vickers who is Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence came to the Atlantic Council

and gave them a big briefing and told the whole story and I guess what we're doing everybody we're giving intelligence to the Houthis to use to kill al-Qaeda with. It's like the Mujah Hadin all over again. Well, in this case, it's back in the Shiites to kill the Mujahideen. Yeah, exactly, what I'm saying, like the concept's the same.

Sort of. but wait because in two months you found it there you go yeah you're like the billy maze of like politics but wait there's more that's right there's a big wrinkle in this story which is this piece as I mentioned just show us the headline there

there you go so this is January as I mentioned January 2015 same as Barbara Slavin's piece and I'll monitor on the same topic is from January of 2015 and the funny thing about that is that two months later Barack Obama turned around and stabbed the Houthis in the back

and took Al-Qaeda's side against them. That's like back in the Mujahideen all over again, my friend. And the reason why... Wait, he took Al-Qaeda's side? Yeah, dude. And the reason why he did is because that was what the Saudis and the UAE wanted. And by the Saudis in UAE, I mean

the then brand new deputy crown prince and deputy defense minister, 29-year-old defense minister, Muhammad bin Salman. And so he needed to make a big name for himself by launching a war. And he teamed up with Muhammad bin Zayed in the UAE. And they launched this war. They came to Barack Obama and asked for permission and help. And he gave him the green light. Go. Where did Israel stand on that? I think I'm sure they were for it. But as far as I know, they stayed out of that part of it. You think they were for him taking al-Qaeda's

side against the Houthis. Oh, sure. To the Israelis, the enemy or the Shiites. Anybody who's friends with Iran is their priority by far. All right. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. And we can, I got other examples, but that would be one of them. Oh, we're going to talk around. Yeah, sure.

That's coming. We're working our way there. You know, we're going across the map a little bit. I like that. That's fine. Yeah, and I'm tired of telling the story in order. It's better this way. Yeah.

I told you. We free will it here. Yeah. So, MBS and MBZ come to Obama and they say, look, man, we want a bomb. Yemen and get rid of the Houthis. Obama tells them, go ahead. And the New York Times has a piece where they admit all of this

and it's from Obama administration official sources. It's no propaganda or whatever. It's them admitting basically. And if you want to look this up, the key words are they knew the war would be long, bloody, and indecisive. And this was

and then they said, but they had to do this to placate the Saudis. And why do they have to placate the Saudis? Yeah, why? Because America, and this part is the stupidest part, America just signed the new nuclear deal, or they were just working on it. It was signed the summer of 15, but they were in the middle of working on the Iran deal.

And now you might think, well, the Saudis would probably like the Iran nuclear deal since it vastly scaled back Iran's nuclear program and vastly expanded the inspections regime and absolutely guaranteed the lack of their progress toward a nuclear weapon. As long as that deal was in effect, why would they be against that? Well, the reason they would be against that is because they were worried that Obama wanted to tilt back toward Iran. And, you know, presidents can't help but say mean things about Saudi Arabia sometimes,

and then they learn real quick that they better. shut up and not do that because of all the economic interests at stake and all that. But the Saudis know that in the old days, America backed the Persians, right? Iran was our guy for a long time after World War II, right? So they know that that's an option. And I think that they believed a lot of the propaganda about Obama that, oh, he loves the Ayatollah so much and all that, which is not true. And I'm not defending Obama. Damn him. I'll send him to hell myself. But I'm just saying on this particular issue, and yes, I am that arrogant. I do that. Um, no, forgiveness here on this particular issue with eric prince at the same time that needs to happen wouldn't

that be interesting that needs to happen but please continue scott's sorry sorry just on this thing he was just trying to take war off the table he was not trying to redirect american foreign policy toward the Shiites right in the region yeah yeah but that was the concern and plus the ambition of mbs just to do something big and by the way as soon as he launched the war what he do he sees the opportunity from that new stature to arrest his cousin, Muhammad bin Nayef, and make himself crown prince. Right. Exactly right.

So he did his coup and it worked out well for him. But that meant what? That meant America was now on the side of AQAP and they were back directly by the UAE on the ground. And for a time, I mean, first of all, we're, I don't want to overstate things because I don't mean to and I don't need to, okay? We're talking about we took their side, right? So Michael Horton, no relation to me, expert on terrorism from the Jamestown Foundation,

typically a hawkish group. He said, we're flying as al-Qaeda's Air Force in Yemen. Now, that's a figure of speech, right? He's not saying that they are directing our planes around in the chain of command and this and that. We understand what he's saying there is that we are bombing their enemies. We have now, we've gone from telling the Houthis, where to find al-Qaeda guys and kill them, to now flying as air cover for the al-Qaeda guys making offensives on the ground against those same Houthis, okay? And that is treason. Call it lowercase T. I'm not saying like some of the right-wing

hawks of the time would have said that, oh, it's because Barack Obama is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and he's born in Kenya and all this crap. That's not what it is. It's that he's W. Bush. It's the same thing. It's the American foreign policy establishment. This is essentially how they do business and in other words it's in this started the redirection started we're telling it out order but the redirects started under bush where essentially like 9-11 never happened like the sunni insurgency in Iraq war two never happened and we like these guys as long as they're killing Serbs and Russians and Shiites we use the bin Ladenites and so in this case we got these Shiites they're not anything like you know Iran's cats paws like total age

or whatever. They just happen to be Shiites too. But they're Zadhi Shiites, which is different than the 12er sort of different tradition in Shiite Islam. So there's no like direct control. In fact, as Obama himself admitted on video, in fact, in his interview with Thomas Friedman, that he knows for a fact Iran told the Houthis not to take the capital city because the Saudis are going to freak out and bomb you don't do it it's a bridge too far man and they ignored iran and did it anyway yeah so now this goes on now the problem is this Saudi and UAE can't do any of this without America right so this is Obama still has two years left in his presidency at this point America's now we already had sold them all the F-15s and F-16s that they're using for the thing

and also they have British tornadoes and typhoons I guess but then we're selling them all the bombs and then plus our contractors are over there doing all the care and feeding of the planes all the maintenance and everything they're doing all the logistics all the air traffic control and everything to run the war our military officers and civilians as well as you know civilian DOD employees as well as contractors and they're running the whole thing and they even got American Boeing refueling tankers refueling the fighter jets um and allowing the UAE and the Saudis to loiter, essentially just picking targets from the air, meaning bombing innocent people. They have no idea what they're bombing, and just bombing for fun. And they bomb the crap out of them.

And here's the thing about this is the Saudi way of war, the Americans, they pretend like this, oh, and I left our Navy, was enforcing the blockade the whole time. Oh, we were outside. Yeah, absolutely. So this is the American Saudi war. Absolutely right there.

Yes, and enforcing the Saudis rule on total blockade against Yemen. So now it's all denial, right? It's like a lynch mob. Well, we're all murdering the guy a little bit. And so nobody's truly responsible kind of thing. So America is doing all these things to simply assist. Our friends and the Saudis in the thing. That's right.

We're here to help them do. Jamalka Shoggi. I don't know who that is. Never heard of them. That's right. We're going to make a million more now. That's right. Right.

And so. But then it's. the Saudis won a wage war like utter barbarians well listen i mean the Saudis that's their problem and they're going to have to work that out in their court system and yeah right so we're deniable even though no none of this could happen without the USA and then but so there's the Saudi way of war was to bomb all the farms kill the horses in their stables bomb all the fishermen's boats bomb all the irrigation ditches try to you know use napalm and whatever set the crops on fire bomb the marketplaces and the factories.

There was like a potato chip factory. They bomb and like anything where any food creation or distribution around the country is the main target to starve the population of the country inflict collective punishment on them in that eastern, oriental, non-American way of war, which I'm not saying the American way of war is a whole hell of a lot better because we're the ones doing it. But I'm just saying this is not what even the U.S. Air Force would do if it was just their war they would do it differently than this you'd like to think anyway um maybe when nobody's looking but um but anyway so that was how they did it and you know something like

300,000 people were killed it must have been much more than that if you count all the excess death rate and all that there's 100,000 people yeah because over how long because see that was the deal when Donald Trump came in his first term he kept this war on autopilot for his entire four years long and didn't do a thing to stop it. And in fact, when the Congress passed war powers resolutions to force him to stop, he vetoed it twice. And I got to tell you about that, that there is no Yemen lobby in America. There ain't no Shiite lobby in America. I thought there was a white pack. I was pretty sure. Yeah, not one eye. There's a lot of coffee right down the street. They just opened up. It's fine timing, if I might say. They got coffee. That's a really good coffee. Oh, it's fucking

great, bro. I'm a big fan. I'm like, I didn't know you guys were still around. I'm happier here. But no, it really was just the Quakers and the hippies and the libertarians who raise hell. It was just well-meaning people. I mean, there were some you many Americans, but, you know, there are no groups with money. Yes. No groups with resources, right, other than just trying hard. And it worked and got the resolutions passed twice and Trump vetoed him twice.

And I know this is the New York Times, but it was his own guy, Pete Navarro, his trade representative, who explained all this in an interview with the New York Times. That the reason that they kept the war going was so that they could keep funneling money to Raytheon. The war was important for Raytheon. They were making a lot of money off of those bombs. Why would Donald Trump? All right. So here's the question because obviously this is true.

This is inarguable what you're saying. Why is he doing that when every time he's campaigned since 2015, it's on, we're too many wars, it's endless wars. We've got to stop the wars. And yet when it comes down to it, even if this isn't a war where we have a ton of like our boots on. on the ground or something like that, he is openly subverting that policy idea right in our face. Well, it's different audiences. I mean, they always say no new wars because, yeah, well, he did bomb Afghanistan for four years. He did bomb Yemen for four years. He did bomb Iraq and Syria for a year. And, you know, like, yeah, he killed a hell of a lot of people. He bombed Somalia the whole time he was

empowered too. But hey, that was W. Bush started that one. So you know what I mean? That's like a technicality in that way but see running overall on i'm not sending the third infantry division in there the way w bush did right a drone war here a proxy war there air wars here b1 bombers and drones that's different you know even when he thought he did keep the war going in afghanistan for all four years but you had a few marines of i think hundreds not thousands i could be wrong about that i'm pretty sure if it was thousand it was very low thousands of marines down in helmand and then you had the Green Berets in the Nangahar province in the low hundreds max, right? Special Forces. So that was almost all the ground fighting that was happening in the Trump years. But he bombed the crap out of him

the whole time. And so on the campaign trail, sounds good to say, I'm Mr. Peace guy. That's what every president says except Joe Biden, the W Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Joe forgot his line. Everybody, yeah, Joe. Yeah, exactly. He was like, no, we're going to kill him is what we're going to do. you heard me we're look the fuck out um you know the thing and he won on that by the way remember um people like fuck it we're we all know we're going we're going to be at war anyway might as well this guy like george carlin and said about uh bill clinton i'm completely full of shit hey at least he's honest he is honest um but yeah no um so the reason why and then so look it's good to say to the voters no more of this w bush

stuff, right? Nobody wants that. But it's good to say to Raytheon, oh, you like money? I got money for you. Need to stop market. Yeah. And then, but overall does the society rebel against that and say, what do you mean you're bombing Yemen? Right? They're not, they don't know. Yeah, they're not as engaged on that narrow issue. You know what I mean? And so it sucks because as I joke in my first book about Afghanistan, Afghanistan is probably the least supported and least opposed war in American history. Lease supported and le... All right, let me ask this. Afghanistan right away in 2001 or Oh yeah. No, I mean overall. Like by, well, but even by like, you know, by the end of the Bush year, certainly into the Obama. I agree completely with your statement. It was like super majority, 60, 70%

said we should have never fought it at all, right? That kind of thing. I was a super majority oppose it. But then they would ask people, well, what's your biggest concern for what America is dealing with a kind of open-ended question and Afghanistan wouldn't even be in the top 30 right that's right so it was like oh yeah we're all against that but far away and so who cares really got you know it's crazy dude i've had so many tier one guys in here be it navy seals seal team six guys army rangers you know delta guys talk about and give an oral history in here of like afghanistan and particularly say 07 to like 2014, no one remembers that because it was, as you just said, not even a top 30 issue for a lot of people, but shit was going down every day. And it was a

war where, and we can talk about this because I'd love your thoughts, but like 9-11 happens. Okay, Taliban is harboring al-Qaeda, you know, crashed into the building, so we're going to go there and fight them. Fine. But then the, The puck immediately moved to, no, let's go to Iraq, which had nothing. You know, I'm not saying Saddam Hussein was a good guy, he was a bad guy, but like had nothing to do with 9-11, had nothing to do with our problems responding to that. And so all the resources come out of Afghanistan and go into Iraq. And then you wonder why, you know, over the next 18, 19 years, the Taliban's able to slowly

like kind of spread like a disease back all over the country. I mean, is that a fair way to look at it? you're close i mean my argument would be that they should have never done a regime change in afghanistan at all and i think that the argument that the diversion of resources led to a less effective afghan war is essentially a red herring because if you put in more troops it just would have made matters worse the thing is about insurgency like this is they're uh what my friend bill bupert is an expert on the bankruptcy of counterinsurgency

doctrine. And he explains that these groups are anti-fragile, meaning when you hit them, they get stronger, right? The more you go to war against these people, the more people you're driving into the insurgency because they're basically just citizen militias. So when the Americans come out to the countryside, then people grab their rifles and become the enemy where before they were just standing there. And so it really was a whole self-fulfilling thing. Afghanistan is the size of Texas. But it's got deserts like California and mountains like Colorado. And it's bad lands inhabited by wild men who like to fight and they're not given in to a foreign occupation any more than your community or my community would give in to foreign troops. Yeah. Throughout

world history. Yeah. So the thing is they talk about, you know, oh, keeping the Taliban out or whatever, no offense, but just like the way you phrase the question there is the thing is the Taliban, all that meant was, is just another term at that time, certainly. for Pashtun resistance. That was it. The people from the south and the east of the country who had, oftentimes connections with these loose networks

of the former regime, but most often were just the locals. The Talenban meant anyone who resists us. And then so the whole thing became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I've just been doing this long enough. I covered it the whole time all the way through. And then so by the time Obama did the big escalation in Afghanistan in 2000,

2009, me and all of my experts were already on the record saying, not only is this not going to work, it's going to make matters worse. And they're just going to cause suicide bombings. You're going to cause foreign fighters to come here and expand the war. You're going to cause more Afghans to join the insurgency. And then you're going to lose anyway. And, you know, I said for the first time, and I can prove it's in the transcripts on audio, I said for the first time in 2008, that when America leaves Afghanistan, the Taliban are going to walk right into Kabul like it's the fall of Saigon, but probably not even fighting. They're just going to walk right in. Because the whole thing that we had tried to do there was a bunch of crap.

It could only be held up. It was like a zombie company propped up by government financial injections or whatever. There's a group of people who had no natural authority, you know, the Northern Alliance essentially propped up. Maybe they would have had some authority in their own district. if they tried to leave it at that.

But America was essentially trying to foist a coalition of the Tajik's Uzbeks and Hazaras who were about 20% each onto the plurality, Pashtun population, of 40% in the south of the country. And a country whose borders were drawn by the Americans, right? Or pardon me by the British in the 19th century is how they've been fought.

So the people from the north who speak Urdu can't communicate with the people from it and it's it's like probably even more vast than the difference between you know like english speakers and spanish speakers in texas we there's some overlap there you know what i mean there's like a severe lack of overlap these people don't share a country a culture a civilization at all the urdu speakers are like there our soldiers are going hey translate for me and the translator's like i don't speak poshto like we're in we're in a different country when we're down south here. So the whole thing was completely stupid and bankrupt and wrong.

And in fact, as I make the case in the book, the only reason they took the war to the Taliban and kept that war going and came up with all this crap about rebuilding the country and saving women's rights and all of this stuff was just so they could prolong the war long enough to spread it into Iraq. Because in order to invade Iraq, it was going to be a lot different than just parachuting guys in the way they were able to do it. In Iraq, we're going to have to build up a massive force in Kuwait and they hoped Turkey. And that was going to take a year and a half.

And they had that plan. There's transcripts and records that on the night of September 11th, the administration was discussing Iraq. Absolutely. So we have in writing, you can see the handwriting and the typewritten memo of Donald Rumsfeld to Stephen Cambone, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. and Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon of September 11th for the sun is even down for anyone's really even sure the attack is over right Donald Rumsfeld is saying sweep it all up things related and not contact Paul Wolfowitz for deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz for connections between Saddam Hussein and OBL that's who I would have contacted to that's yeah he he's the one

who knows yeah and then as yes Richard Clark says that that day at the White House as well that they were running around talking about we got to find a way to connect this to Iraq and especially Wolfowitz was saying we got to connect this to Iraq and the guys who knew better were like come on this was there was a whole little cottage industry of Washington DC conspiracy theorists who had been trying to pin al Qaeda on Saddam Hussein for 10 years led by Lori Milroy and yeah that's right Saddam Hussein was terrified of the bin Laden nights he had no business with them whatsoever but but they had this lie there was this lady named lorry who wrote a book called saddam hussein's unfinished war with the united states and the same

lady judy miller who's famous for lying us into war with iraq with all the wmd stuff yeah yeah yeah she ended up or before that she was pals with lory milroy and i think lynn cheney wrote the forward to their book and all this stuff and the whole point was they had tried to claim that Ramsey Yusef who cooked the bomb for the First World Trade Center bombing and whose uncle was the ringleader of the September 11th attack that he was actually not really Ramsey Yusuf. He was an Iraqi Mukbarat agent who murdered Ramsey Yusuf and stole his identity. Oh, come on. And that's the proof that Saddam Hussein is behind Osama bin Laden and all of the al-Qaeda war against the United States. And blamed him for the Oklahoma City bombing, which was in fact a bunch of neo-Nazi FBI informants who did that, not Arabs at all. And blamed him for. for everything that they could under the sun, including the guy who shot up CIA headquarters, or the left turn lane out front of CIA headquarters in 1993, tried to blame that on Saddam Hussein.

And so Wolfowitz was like part of this clique. This is like the cooks from the American Enterprise Institute, the neo-conservative faction, trying to make this connection, not giving a damn what the truth was. Who, I know you, this is a good tangent to go into, because I know you know this history extremely well. Everyone, on every platform,

when we're talking about these things, at some point, in some context, the neocon click gets thrown around as the term. And I think most people out there kind of know what it is. But for the people who are like, you know, it's like when people throw around the term postmodernness, like I kind of get it. But like what is this? How far does it go back? Who are these people?

What are their motivations? How would you define that as someone who's paid attention that closely for probably 30 years? Yeah. Okay. Broadly speaking, they're X Trotskyites. and Cold War Democrats who moved right and became Reaganites in reaction to essentially the new left hippie movement of the late 60s.

They were, what's important about them being Trotskyites is they were communists, but they were like right-wing communists. Well, it depends, no, actually, it depends on how you really define that. Maybe you flip that around. Stalin's, yeah, I should take that back and strike that and reverse it. Stalin's doctrine as murderous as it was was communism in one country

forget all this world revolution it's a big world man and we can't afford all that let's chew what we've bitten off here right Chorosky said no you gotta overthrow the whole planet because as long as the capitalist countries remain

they'll destroy the communist ones by you know they'll attack them and whatever so and this whole doctrine of world revolution but Stalin had won the faction fight after Lenin died took control the place and had exiled Trotsky out of there. So Troski had come to the United States and had some followers here for a while and it traveled around the Americas or wherever until eventually a Stalinist assassin killed them down in Mexico. But so in the days after the Cold War, you know, there had been all kinds of different communists sort of in the 20s and 30s in

America. Not that many, but different factions of them and whatever. But after World War, we're World War II, it was very convenient for these Trotskyites to be big supporters of the Cold War because it proved that they were sorry that they had ever been commies. And it proved, and after all, they were Americans, not Russians, right? And they hated the Stalinists. Right? And so they made a great fit for the new Cold Warriors. Enemy of my enemy is my friend.

That's right. So a lot of the people who had been, what had been considered the right was essentially everybody who hated FDR and wanted to stay out of World War II. And that was not uniformly kind of known as the same thing as the conservatives. There were other factions, including the Libertarians and others. But after World War II, it really became the mission of William F. Buckley, especially, to make the right synonymous with conservatism. And conservatism synonymous with support for the Cold War. against the commies that was mission number one of the conservative movement and therefore of the national review but that meant then that all of the old right non-interventionists had to be purged

and famously he purged out the avowed racists and he purged out the iranrandians and he and then but less well known was he purged out all the libertarians and essentially anyone who wouldn't tow the line but then that left the staff of the national review was a bunch of of ex trots and you know give them credit that yeah fine x it's not i'm not saying they were like undercover still communists that's not the point but it's just to say like that's a fine group representing american conservatism you got there when these guys were all reds a few years ago right and then so it's james burnham and sydney hook and all of these guys um who now buckley himself had never been a leftist but um and there is a question here of whether

neoconservatism was potentially even still is a CIA plot they certainly I don't want to oversimplify it like that because the truth is they have definitely been at odds many times on the other hand Buckley was CIA

and when you look at like CIA influence at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and stuff like that you start to I mean come on the CIA is the CIA for Christ's sake So like, you know, who's driving the car and the horse and the whatever in any particular situation is interesting to see the interplay there. But it was CIA asset, not officer, but agent, Buckley, who hired all these guys. But also see, there was Leo Strauss and Leon Wollsteader at the University of Chicago who were both

ex-Troskiites and there was a guy named Max Schockman and he was one of the most important of Trotsky's agents in the country and he founded a group called Social Democrats USA and which included the young people's socialist league and so a lot of the neo-conservative names that you hear were members of groups like that you know leading up to like into the 60s and 70s so they're camillions so well that's part of it yes I don't want to say like the whole thing is disingenuous because part of it was a reaction against the civil rights movement and affirmative action and all of that stuff which is why they had alliances with libertarians and conservatives in the 1970s who were against all that kind of great society stuff that

they kind of wisely reacted against irving crystal bill crystal's father famously said that a neo-conservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality and so mean and he also wrote a book called two cheers for capitalism right so you can see these guys are they moved to the very center right yes is that makes sense yes um and but and so they're rejecting the civil rights movement they're rejecting affirmative action and all that and they're rejecting the hippie kind of non-interventionist aftermath of the vietnam war and apparently i don't know this much about this but apparently the hippie types were not so supportive of israel in the 67 war either and so for a lot of these guys they said well that's it and that was where a lot of them started moving to the right and that

and by the way sorry to get you off for one second but yeah unless i'm misunderstanding i've been misunderstanding like the whole space of neocons there does seem to be a large overlap between neocons and people who are like strongly pro-israel yes so that goes way back you're saying yes now So let's talk about that. So part of the whole thing here is that you have many of these, you could say the vast majority of them, I guess, were Jewish. And because who was ever Trotskyites in the first place? Like, yeah.

And then, but the thing is they were maybe lower middle class guys, but they were able to go to city college. They were intellectuals, right? So they had come from kind of the working class, but they were not like born rich waspy types or like banker's sons either. They were from Brooklyn and things like that, right? So they were not really allowed to be the establishment

at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Catholics either. At that time, you know, it was really like Brooks Brothers, waspy wasps, skull and bones, Yale guys, and this and that kind of thing, right? So for these Catholics and Jews, they didn't really have, they didn't want to get really,

jobs they wanted to be foreign policy intellectuals and apparatchiks right but they needed money and so this is where Andrew Coburn says that the um the neoconservative movement is i'm sorry they needed money oh so where'd they go so Andrew Coburn says the neo conservative movement is best understood as a cross between the military industrial complex and the Israel lobby so that's where they went and got their money and then you look at all their think tanks what they did was they said fine the bankers and oil men have the council on foreign relations well we'll just create the foundation for defensive democracies and the washington institute for near east policy policy and then but create the jewish institute for national security affairs and i say the center for security policy already there's a few there's you know six or seven of these things that they created to make their own little forest think tanks all saying the same thing. And most of which was, we need America to get rid of Saddam Hussein for Israel. Now, which is, so I'm skipping ahead in the story, but real quickly, they got jobs in the Reagan administration as the deputy undersecretary of this and that, but more marginal positions.

During H.W. Bush, they were called the crazies in the basement. And Brent Scowcroft was told to keep the crazies in the basement, which meant they could mess around in Latin America, but keep them away from middle east policy but w bush and dick cheney hired them to run everything so now i'll stop and you were going to say okay so that that's really important context though because it shows that that type of potential alliance relationship building pattern goes back we're talking six decades here yeah so that obviously has happened since then and everything but there's this you know everyone just runs to every single thing in the world is Israel now, which I think that's a little bit intellectually dishonest. That said, we can see that, you know, right now, whatever's going on there

is not humane. And there are a lot of problems that seem to be stemming from, you know, some weird alliance between them and certain aspects of the United States government, be it, you know, straight up lobbying in congress and the senate which we can all see the money on that or some of these alliances with the think tank types and the people who help kind of drive policy in these different places in the bureaucracies and stuff like that well i'm trying to think where i want to start here what do you think is the truth there let's start with that what do you think the truth is about the about the israel lobby and the relationship with the united states do you think that there is a mass awakening right now in America that is showing that has always been the most

powerful thing? Or do you think that it's one powerful thing among a lot of other powerful things that, you know, should just be looked at and kind of have its knees capped? Yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's a lot more powerful than it should be. It's not that they control every single thing, but they have way too much influence, far more influence than the American people have. That ought to be the end of that, right? Yeah. Yeah, there should be, foreign countries want to talk to the United States of America. They should take it up with the ambassador. That's it. It shouldn't be influencing, they shouldn't have any of these lobby groups whatsoever. Agreed. You know, APEC, they pretend like, oh, no, this is just Americans. No, it's not either, man. It's the Israeli foreign ministry is exactly

what it is. 100%. It's like we never talked. Yeah. Okay. And so, yeah, this should, this should, all of it is completely intolerable. As far as, as you know Israel's role in the neoconservative movement it's at the heart of their doctrine now you know to give the devil is due I think they if you listen to them talk they seem sincere enough when they say that America's interest in Israel's interest are the exact same thing right Israel is just our kind of Fort Apache out there holding the barbarian east at bay for us and all that hell they're doing our dirty work and we what would we do without them Joe Bodhi and says, there are unsinkable aircraft

car. You hear all this kind of stuff? Oh, yeah. And so now, that's all a bunch of crap. It's bullshit. It's totally ridiculous. But, I mean, especially if that's your job, then you can believe that. You know, like, yeah, hey, they look like us. They talk like us. They're our friends. And like, I don't know.

What's your problem? England's our friend, and France is our friend and Israel's our friend. These are our friends. That's everybody thinks that. I don't know what the problem is. You know what I mean? that's just kind of built in and especially when that's their job when that's you know their their defense intellectuals and and and and more mongers I mean this is the ticket dude this is what to do and so that's how they make all their money and you can look at all their think tanks they're outright financed by Northrop Grumman and Boeing and Lockheed

and rate the on and why did they so then that's why they recommend policies that make those companies money and supporting Israel is a big part of that as well. It's a big part of the Iron Triangle. But of course, it's an ideological commitment to the well-being of Israel as well. And there's some people who, quite frankly, probably don't give a damn about the United States and truly do see the United States simply as just a vehicle for, you know, taking control of their country. In fact, there's one more thing here is that there's a couple of famous quotes from Norman Podhoritz and Irving Crystal where from the 1970s where they both say something very close to American Jews don't like big defense budgets.

Like in other words, they're liberals. This is in the 70s, right, aftermath of Vietnam. Right. They're liberals. They don't want militarism, right? And he goes, but we have to support big defense budgets in the name of anything. so that America is available to protect Israel. So whether the threat is the Soviet Union or whether it's China or whether it's Germany

could rise back up again or whatever it is, no, no, America must be the dominant power in the world so that we're there to bail out their primary interest, Israel, which is not even hardly the interest, the primary interest of American Jews, much less the American people. at large, but that's what's important to Norman Podhoritz, you know what I mean? So that's the deal. And in fact, he's on film saying that in 2007, if America bombs Iran, which I hope and pray that they will, it will cause a wave of anti-Americanism around the Muslim world that'll make our current situation look like a love fest. And he wanted that. And then he goes, Well, I mean, that's a worst case scenario.

But what he's saying is he hadn't really considered what's good for America in this at all. He's talking about what's Israel's interest. So what was the thought with, obviously, like, we'll get to the Israel-Iran thing because that is as relevant as ever day to day right now. Sure. But with Iraq back in the day, with all the neocons, strong Israel supporters, leading the way for this, What was the main interest in Israel's mind in the United States destabilizing Iraq? All right.

So it goes like this. And I'm sorry this doesn't make any sense, but it's because these guys are cooks, not me. David Wormser and Richard Pearl, primarily, wrote a doctrine for Netanyahu when he was the incoming prime minister of Israel in 1996. It's called a clean break. a new strategy for securing the realm. So these are American neoconservatives telling Benjamin Netanyahu. Now, labor just lost. A Netanyahu fan murdered Rabin in 95.

In 95. And then Shimon Perez was a caretaker prime minister for a short time and launched a war in Lebanon, which helped inspire the 9-11 attacks. And then was quickly succeeded. We'll come back to that. We'll come back to that. It was quickly succeeded by Benjamin Netanyahu in power in 96. so a clean break from what a clean break from oslo the rabbin deal to create a pseudo sort of kind of

Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and what Lakoud is saying is the same thing in Benjamin Netanyahu will tell you in his UN address the other day hell no never going to happen forget about it yeah never going to allow there to be a Palestinian state we want that land and so but the problem with that is for you know take a break with Oslo and you're just going to keep colonizing all of the Palestinian territories, you have to deal with Hezbollah on Israel's northern flank in southern Lebanon. And so what we want to do is we've got to figure out a way to neutralize Hezbollah and Syrian power in southern Lebanon as well, and particularly Iran's ability

to back Hezbollah by way of Syria. Okay, so if you're picturing your great map in the middle east here's iran here's iraq here's syria here's lebanon and little israel here's jordan so we want to break this arc of iranian power now to do that worms are said we need to focus on getting rid of saddam hussein in iraq well he's the sunni dictator yeah the minority 20 percent secular Sunni dictator of Iraq, Mesopotamia, the land between Persia and the Levant here.

Exactly. What? Yeah. It's never made sense to me. So here's why they thought that, though. It was because an Iranian-backed Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi was blowing a bunch of smoke up their ass and telling them, hey man,

if you do this and you get rid of Saddam Hussein for me, me and my friends will see to it that Hezbollah stops being friends with Iran and the new Iraq will be friends with Israel, build an oil pipeline to Haifa. Everything's going to come out just how you want it. Trust me, bro. Jordan and Turkey will be dominant in the new Iraq. Because the king of Jordan, he's a Hashemite, which means he claims to have the blood of the prophet. And that means that he can just cast a magic spell and every Shiite in Iraq will obey his every command. man and do whatever he wants. And so he'll be able to tell the Shiite clergy in Najaf to tell

Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start being friends with Israel. And then the people of Shiite Iraq under the new regime will love it so much and we'll have it so good that it'll be a nightmare for Iran. And we'll end up getting a regime change and Iran will be natural as the people of Iran rise up so they can have it just like the Iraqis. That's the clean break. And they ended up replacing the Hashemite king with Chalabi himself should be the new Shiite dictator of the country when we take over. I mean, democratically installed the leader. Yeah, well, that's what we'll call it. And then that ended up not working out when they launched the war, of course.

But that was the thinking behind it. And there's a companion piece called coping with crumbling states where he says, then we need to expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria so that the new Syria can be remade in a fashion closer to. our liking. So this is all about Israel. Now then David Wormson became Dick Cheney's foreign policy advisor and Richard Probe became the head of the defense policy board. And their buddy Paul Wolfowitz became Deputy Secretary of Defense, Fythe Deputy Secretary for Policy and then all the gang were there. But you're not allowed to talk about Wolfowitz because he has a horrible name. What a ridiculous thing. Oh God, that fucking guy. So now here's a deal. In the

W. Bush years. I'm old enough that this was all yesterday to me. And, you know, I know you and probably a lot of your audience are too young for all this, but it still bothers me. So it's worth remembering here, I think, that yes, W. Bush was in charge. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, they had their own reasons for wanting to do this. But as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has said, could have never happen without the neo-conservatives and the Israel lobby. They're the ones who really got it done. And so they're divided up. They wrote, you had guys ensconced at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post, and then especially and most importantly, at the National Review and the Weekly Standard. Right.

And then, and of course, Fox News all day long. Then inside the government, you had in the vice president's office, Scooter Libby, Victoria Newland, John Hanna. and Elliot Abrams. Now, pardon me, Eric Edelman. Then on the National Security Council, you had Robert Joseph, Eric Edelman, and Salmea Khalil Zod. And then at state, you had David Wormser and John Bolton.

Wormser traveled around. He was, I think, first at state, then defense, then the vice president's office. But he was with Bolton at state. Now, Bolton is not a neoconservative. He was just a lifelong right-winger. Yeah, he just loves a war. That's right.

and he loves those guys. He's always been very close with their group. And so it was known as Cheney's agent over there anyway. What was it that Trump said about him? He said about him. He said, he's a bad hire, but you took him to a meeting and everyone shit their pants. He was going to bomb us.

Which, of course, accomplished nothing. He ruined the meeting with North Korea, is what he did. That's what Trump means by that. Yeah, I one time brought him to the most important diplomatic event of my life, and he sabotaged it. You should have seen him go. It was really something. at the second meeting he literally sent bolton to outer mongolia literally sent him to outer mongolia

to keep them out of the way but too late too little too late that time all right so you had these two panels supporting you were saying yes yes yes um and then at defense you had on the defense policy board you had richard pearl jingert patrick kenneth adleman and james wolsey now wolsey had been clinton's head of the cia but he was a neo-conservative um and it totally kook, and he was the one who went to England to try to prove that Ramsey Youssef was a secret Iraqi agent, which was, didn't work because the fingerprints actually didn't match. Thank you very much. But anyway, and Kissinger was on the defense policy board too and got on board for this one. He's not a neo-conservative, but he went along with him on this one. And then, though, under

Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, you had Douglas Fyth, was Deputy Secretary of Defense for policy and under him was a guy named abram shulski and he ran a group called the office of special plans and at the office of special plans this was the expanded iraq desk and what it was was they staffed the thing they essentially fired all the arabists oh i i forgot to mention that harold road took over the office of net assessment which is the internal pentagon think tank and it purged all the arabists out of there anybody really knew the job got kicked out of there the arabists yeah that meant people who are like, especially people who specialize in getting along with the petroleum states rather than focusing on Israel issues. But yeah, so they like have have ties with and

or an understanding of how Middle East politics actually work. And so we don't need a bunch of like expert opinion getting in our way here. Instead they brought in, Colin Powell said they brought in the Jinsa crowd. The Jinsa crowd. The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. The neo-conservatives. They're friends with the Arabs. That's right. Yeah, they know what to do. Yeah, they got it. And this was David Wormser and his buddies.

And so Colin Powell said they set up a separate government. And this was them. This is the network I'm describing it put all these neocons in there. And so they had Michael Rubin and Michael Ledeen and a bunch of the other cooks that came in to take over the Office of Special Plans. And at the Office of Special Plans, this is where they cooked all the intelligence and dug through the CIA's trash and received the embellishments and made up tall tales. Doug to the CIA's cat trash? Yes, this like literally got the CIA's raw intelligence that and including things that the CIA had discarded or understood in its proper context

and went and said, aha, an Iraqi met with a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. We got one, you know what I mean? Stuff that didn't count for real intelligence, but that something could be made out of. That's what I mean by that. Then they also took all the lies from the exiles. And so you had, it was Ahmed Chalabi in his group, the Iraqi National Congress. They were the ones who came up with all the lies about the mobile biological weapons labs and the nuclear laboratories and they got secret centrifuges hidden in everybody's garden and 10,000 lies about chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in Iraq. And they then took from the Office of Special Plans what was called the stovepipe where they bypassed CIA and all the regular intelligence and sent the stuff straight to the vice president's office and straight to the media.

And one more thing is right across the street from the OSP, what was. is what was called the policy counterterrorism evaluation group, which is a fancy way of saying David Wormser and Michael Maloof, and their job was coming up with lies about Saddam's friendship with Osama bin Laden. And so this was why... Who he hated. And I, who he absolutely hated and feared and would have had nothing to do with it. And I believe that they let bin Laden go, and I make the case in both books.

You believe the U.S. let bin Laden now the Torah Bora. And I'll make that case in a moment, but I think the motive for them doing so was so that they could tell you that Saddam could give these weapons to Osama. If Osama bin Laden was already dead and your dad and your next door neighbor already had said, well, that's what you get for messing with us. We kick your ass by Christmas time.

Well, then it's hard to get the war started again. You've got to keep the thing going. And this is what Donald Rumsfeld said. It's in the National Security Council notes that maybe we should start bombing Iraq right now, even as we're bombing Afghanistan right away, because we want the American people to understand this war is going to take place over a large geographical area and over an extended period of time. He says, if we get Osama bin Laden, that's not victory. And if we fail to get him, that is not failure because he ain't got

nothing to do with this now. We're going to Baghdad, baby. We're doing all of this. I don't want to get you off track here. That was their motive. I don't want to get you off track here, Scott, but I do have one question on this. financially. How much of the motive do you think was also some underhanded, like, well, there's a lot of oil there, and this could be in the U.S. interest that we maybe control some of this land in the future and, you know, colonize the oil, if you will. Do you think that was a piece of it? No. I think the oil aspect was Chalabi promised he'd build a pipeline to Haifa, and it'd be good for Israel. And they bought it. Pearl and Wormsor and Netanyahu himself even made reference to these promises.

and Douglas Weiss law partner Mark Zell complained. Chalby promised us an oil pipeline to Haifa. He's a treacherous spineless turncoat. He promised us one thing and now he's paling around with a whole new group of friends and not doing anything, he said. So he really used them and essentially tricked them into doing this war. Now, everything I understand about it was that Exxon and all of them said, we didn't do business with Saddam.

was saying they had no interest in over that was not their project to overthrow bagdad and when we're doing the war anyway they got james baker who was the lawyer for bake you know baker bots the lawyer for exon to come in and insist see the neoconservatives led by a guy named elliot cohen who i believe also was on the defense policy board uh from the heritage foundation he had a plan to rapidly privatize iraqi oil in order to break opex control and James Baker came to town and said, no, we're not doing that. There's going to be a national oil company, and our guys are going to run it, and they're going to set their quote of the way that the Saudis want it to be and quash that.

But so the, no, I don't believe that it was, that the motive was taking control of those fields for American companies. Now, did Houston try to stop them or something like that? No. Although, I don't know, James Baker did try to stop W. Bush. I don't know how hard you tried to stop him. But if Houston is James Baker, then yeah, they did try to stop him. And, but it is true that Exxon got away with murder anyway. I mean, they have huge interests in northern Iraqi Kurdistan now.

Yeah. They're doing what they can. But do I think that they were driving this car? No. And that's the most powerful corporation in the world. But it wasn't their warding. They were, you know, a lot of times, you know, even all the pipeline politics and stuff like that is not about corporations demanding

pipelines to satisfy their profits. It's about the national government saying, our military strategy says, if we build a pipeline here, we'll really screw those guys there. Do you guys want to do this pipeline with us? And then the corporations go, yeah, sure. But you got to help build the pipeline. Hell, especially if you want it to go west instead of south, you better subsidize it because it's going to cost twice as much. And so we see that a lot where it's really the Pentagon overall is driving the strategy and the oil companies are, of course, you know, riding along but are not driving. You've kind of mentioned directly and indirectly throughout the day in different contexts,

referring to like the power structure during the W. Bush years between, you know, him on one end and then call it like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the people behind them on another end. And I just kind of want to get it straight on officially what you think. But do you think it was more Dick Cheney in charge of that White House? I mean, you had said something like nothing happens without W. And I guess constitutionally, that is what it's supposed to be. But it always felt like, you know, this was a guy who had significant power long before W was around. He was placed in there by W's father, who was the previous president, you know.

And he had all these ideas, including the backing of a company called Halliburton, and who's in fucking charge. of that then seemed to kind of come to fruition while everything crashed and burned. Yeah. You know, that was supposed to be the outcome. Like, how, what do you think the dynamic was there? Well, I mean, I think it's pretty much on the record, pretty well confirmed, as Dick Cheney would say, that they had an agreement that Bush would delegate foreign policy to him in large part. The idea was, you know, W. Bush is the president.

He gets to decide on all the biggest. stuff but after all vice you're the smart guy who knows all the foreign policy stuff my dad says you're great whatever so there was kind of a contest at first there's a contest between him and powell for who was going to have the most influence i think powell lost out pretty quickly there and then yeah cheney was driving and like i say he had this alliance with these neoconservatives this network and they knew what to do it by no means did they make w bush do it what they did really in terms of their relationship with him

because they did a hell of a lot in terms of the lies and in the media and everything else but in terms of dealing with him their responsibility was telling him yes sir you're smart this is going to work this is going to be great we know we game this out and we got our guys he knows what to do

and the thing and so and then it was like well geez everybody says Paul Wolfowitz is the smartest guy in the defense department And, you know, so that was, I think, the role that they played as far as their influence on him. And I think it was crucial. Yeah. But the responsibility absolutely was his, you know. I mean, even when the planes are flying, even weeks or months into it, he could call the whole thing off the whole damn time and never did.

He launched it and he owned it every moment of that war, you know, through the end of his presidency. What's really bizarre to me to take a step back for a second is that you have. 91 desert storm at last whatever it was like 72 hours or 96 hours it was quick they get in take control what they need to they get out they don't continue this whole war and then there's this narrative that you know probably has some truth to it that like it was unfinished business and w wanted to finish what his father started but you have between march 1st 2003 and 91 you have effectively an 11 12 year gap where saddam hussein's in charge and like he's still has a seat at the table in the world it's like we went in we said this guy's a maniacal dictator

who shouldn't have charge of anything you know we handled some of the oil field business in 91 and then we left and it's not like you know he was completely separated from the world he still ruled the whole country and everything and then suddenly they start drumming up the war bells again the war drums again in oh 1 oh 2 and saying no like he's killing everyone and you said it earlier so I want to dig into this, that they lied all about Saddam Hussein. Now, to be clear, you are a thousand percent right when you talk about they lied about nuclear bombs and they lied about his relationship with Osama bin Laden as if he had one. He didn't like him.

Like Trump actually, I'll give him credit for this. He had a good line back in 2015. He's like, you know, Saddam Hussein, bad guy killed terrorists, right? Like, you know, it wasn't our job to go in there and overthrow another leader and start a whole war. And I will agree with Donald Trump on that. but some of the other things like you wouldn't say that they they were lying that like he was a bad guy and that he was a dictator and that he ruled with iron with an iron fist and killed a lot of people and you know was a threat on some level to some stability in the middle east would you be able to say that that part is true well not exactly the way that you put it like he absolutely was a ruthless dictator but the way they make that always is that directly translate into, translates into an aggressive threat against

neighboring states. You know how those dictators are. That's not true. There are all kinds of dictators that don't invade people all the time. So even just in that sense, I mean, what he really was was Tony Soprano trying to hold everything together. You know what I mean? Not like, oh, his will is like a, again, like this magic spell that controls these people's every behavior it's a rowdy land you know over there he was a and and he was ruthless in power but then what did they say they said he tortured people by putting him in giant human shredders you know they said yeah that you know they made up the most ridiculous tortures that he was involved in you know they said that um they said oh he gassed his own people but they neglect to mention that that was when he

worked for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and they took his side in it, and they had paid for his purchase of those chemical weapons from the Europeans. They helped him target the Iranians with those chemical weapons. Then, yeah, he used some on the Kurds, and then what? Ronald Reagan blamed it on Iran when he used chemical weapons on his Kurds. So, and then that was all in the 1980s. So what in the hell does that have to do with an excuse to invade Iraq in 2003? Nothing, right? So, in other words, like, even when, and I know you're being fair, but even the way you phrase the fair question, it's a bunch of loaded crap, right? That was what they were shoveling at the time. Yeah, it was like, terrible war.

You could boil your question down to, hey, this guy didn't stand for election, which is like, yes, I agree with you. He clearly, like, took power in a bloody coup and immediately Jimmy Carter sponsored his invasion of Iran, which Ronald Reagan continued back for the next eight years, right? like um so uh we used to joke when we were kids like yeah of course the guys are ruthless dictator that's what he got the job working for the united states of america before usa betrayed him in 1990 and 91 um is what really happened there and so um was he dangerous yeah if you live in east bagdad he was dangerous was he dangerous even to jordan or israel no is he a danger to the United States of America. Got to be kidding.

And even Kuwait, he asked permission to invade Kuwait and got it. And then they lied their asses off that he was about to invade Saudi Arabia so that they could launch that war to drive him out of Kuwait when he had no intention to go into Saudi Arabia in the first place. And especially after they told him, don't you go to Saudi Arabia now? And then he was like, yeah, but they gave him a flashing yellow light at least for Kuwait. The ambassador herself told the New York. times you can pull it up if you want well we didn't think he was going to take the whole country

her name's april glassby i've heard this one 1990 so in other words they gave him permission to invade part of kuwait and conquer their northern oil fields they told them to go ahead this and that was at the height of his power right so no the way that they framed it that he was a danger not at all. But you know what? You know who he's a danger to? Israel. Even then, just a nuisance. I was going to say, was it bluster or was it actual danger? It was actual danger, but on a, on a minimal level, oh, there you go. Is that where you were looking for? What deep pulled up? Confrontation in the Gulf. U.S. gave Iraq little reason not to Mount Kuwait

assault. This is from September 1990. All right. In the two weeks before Iraq, Iraq's seizure of Kuwait, the Bush administration on the advice of Arab leaders gave President Saddam Hussein little reason to fear of forceful American response of his troops invaded the country. The administration's message to Baghdad articulated in public statements in Washington by senior policymaker and delivered directly to Mr. Hussein by the United States Ambassador April Glasby was this. The United States was concerned about Iraq's military buildup on the border with Kuwait, but did not intend to take sides and what it perceived is a no-win border dispute between Arab neighbors in a meeting with Mr. Hussein and Baghdad on July 25th, eight days

before the invasion, Ms. Glasby urged the Iraqi leader to settle his differences with Kuwait but added, we have no opinion on the Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait according to an Iraqi document described as a transcript. The American version of that document was released in 2010 by Manning and Assange. So that's true and holds up by the way. And then the quote is in there somewhere where she says, well, we didn't think he was going to take the whole country. She says that to the times. Yeah, can you find that? We didn't.

And she does have... To suggest that we are to blame for all this and we lulled them into thinking they could have Kuwait is really terrible, but we should have had a stiffer tone and it's unlikely to have made a difference, but it might have made a difference. That's not it.

Okay. It's in there somewhere. I believe you. Somewhere in there. Don't worry about it. It's fun. Point being, I got you. So there...

Try whole. maybe that's the wrong i say maybe that's the wrong there are a few there are a few different news reports about her and and her role in this so that the quote i'm almost certain is nobody thought or we didn't think he was going to take the whole country um and i'm sorry because i already had skipped ahead to have one more story after this and then i i i forgot what it was though what were we talking about after the border dispute here after the border dispute yeah after a rock we were we were going through a rock's or a rock's threat or perceived threat to israel oh yes so i was going to say

thank you dude um i was going to not find that one in my head just a little bit like on this big one you're good i don't want you worried about it i just want him up a little bit um or down i'm sorry so this heads up so in this quote uh you'll like to find this too it's uh in fact i can find it have it on my phone because i just sent it to a friend recently other way deep um those heads up higher yep there we go okay here we go i sent this quote to a friend so i have it right here okay this is philip zellicow uh famous as the chief uh author of the 9-11 commission report great report very accurate i never read that by the way you never read it no i don't know i don't No, I didn't want to be, as Ron Paul would say, I don't want to be confused by their propaganda.

There's good journalism out there. But so Zelikow, he's, you should understand it about him, if you want to, that he is not a neoconservative. Zellicow was more of a Brent Scowcroft, Connolly's Rice, Council of Foreign Relations type, along with Robert Blackwell. And good old, what's his name? There was one other guy that was kind of around Rice at that time. who was a little bit separate from the neocons. Anyway, just so you know, more of a centrist time. But anyway, here's what Zelikow said in 2002, before the war.

He said, why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990. It's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name because the Europeans don't care deep. about that threat i will tell you frankly and the american government doesn't want to lean too hard on

it rhetorically because it is not a popular cell so yeah in other words the rock's no threat to the united states you kidding me but these neocons are a bunch of lecudniks and they think iraq is a threat to israel and they think they can get w bush to get rid of saddam hussein for them and so let's do this that was what it was about and now so what was iraq's threat to israel It was not a land invasion. What it was was that Saddam Hussein would pay money to the family of anybody who died in conflict with Israel, any Palestinian who died in conflict with Israel. So that meant if some little old lady got bulldozed in her home, he would pay her family,

a condolence payment type thing, right? But that also meant the family of a suicide bomber who targeted civilians on a city bus. His family would get a stipend too. And so that was taken quite, I mean, you would too, right, as a bounty, essentially. for Palestinian terrorists to kill Israeli civilians. So even though you look at this as even a bus full of Israeli civilians at a time,

that's a horror show, but that's not a national security threat to the United States of America. Yeah. That's, and that's not even Iraq attacking Israel. That is Iraq backing a proxy force doing something horrible, but I'm sorry, you've got to send

the infantry from Texas in Colorado and Alabama and Indiana to go and fight that way. and you got to you got to threaten to nuke our cities we can't wait for the proof to be a smoking a mushroom cloud we can't wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud would have an American city got nuked because you wouldn't let us preempt this threat the one percent we can't wait yeah and and dubby bush would say and this was sophisticated for him and they made him practice it I'm sure but he would say people say why do we have to do this or he would even bring it up himself and he would say people ask me why do we have to do this we have to do this because of september 11th and then wait wait pregnant pause still he's talking because we learn that day that you can't just wait around for threats to hit you you have to preempt them first by starting the war first thing but see during that pregnant pause because w bush was such an idiot people would

would rewrite his grammar for him, and they would assume what they thought he was saying. Why do we have to attack Iraq because of September 11th? Well, it sounds like what he means to say is because Iraq had something to do with the attack on September 11th. Iraq was behind it. Iraq paid for it. Iraq planned it. Iraq did it. Isn't that what he's saying? No, it's not, but you have to hold through, see, you couldn't do it. I tried to do the pregnant pause and you were ready to talk because it sounds like he's done talking, but he's not. He picks up. after six seconds and goes, because we learn the lesson that day that from now on we get to start all the wars, which is just a bunch of crap, right? Which means nothing. But he gets to invoke

your hate and grief and fear over that terrible thing that happened so that he can essentially manipulate you into letting him do something that he knows is wrong. And he knows he has to lie to you and manipulate you to get you to allow him to do. There's two like 500 pound elephants in the room there, though. Number one, his administration came in, you know, in 2001 after the contentious 2000 election and didn't, you know, they ignored a lot of these reports for all the fault that CIA had with all this stuff and that's a whole separate conversation. There were senior people at these various agencies who were like, dude, like some shit's going to happen. Like, you know, it's pretty fucked. And you can look at it on the July 6th, 2001 meeting. You can look at it, I believe

the August 11, 2001 meeting. they were like yeah yeah yeah run along didn't take it seriously so then it happens and they're like oh fuck and they never want that to happen again because now it's like you know you're playing defense through offense all the time the second problem here yeah that's just bullshit though it's total bullshit no no I'm not making that argument yeah I got you're right though that was what they said this second problem here is the psychologically brilliant but sadistic maneuver that Dick Cheney pulled on George W. Bush, which is that 1% doctrine, which is like Mr. President, if there was even a 1% chance that a nuclear bomb could be set off in New York or Washington or

insert U.S. city here, would you not want to make sure you got it to 100% that that wouldn't happen? And it creates a psychology of fear of loss rather than, you know, whatever the opposite is in that type of scenario. And Bush goes, oh, well, I already had 9-11 happen. Can't have a new cap. let's attack Iraq. And so they, you know, it's interesting. The pregnant pause example is like a pure context, snafu, if you will. I disagree that Cheney was manipulating Bush on this.

Bush wanted to do this. Oh, I, yes, yes. Bush's attitude was, I'm shopping for a bill of goods. But that put them over the top. So come on with the excuses. I need as many as I can get. One percent doctrine, that sounds like a good one. He had at one point had said,

I need a way to say this that it makes sense to the guys at the bar in Lubbock. In other words, in other words, help me lie to people so that they will falsely believe that we need to do this. You know, like, that's it.

That's what that means. Going to Iraq. Yeah. I mean, you know, I was a cab driver at the time, and I used to argue with people that, like, look, man, remember after September 11th we started bombing Afghanistan essentially immediately

and didn't ask anybody if it was okay first? Yeah. So why do you think we're asking Russia and China and France for permission to attack Iraq? Oh no.

And we're waiting for a year and a half to start the carpet bombing. Just think hard now, dude. Like you're stuck in my cab in traffic. Think it through. You're the cab driver from the house. It's because they didn't do it. That's why.

That's why. Yeah. It's because they couldn't, they wouldn't dare go in front of the UN Security Council and say, oh, yeah, no, we're convinced that Iraq did it. Because the intelligence agencies of the other First World nations know that that is not true. That's why. That's why we bombed Afghanistan a year and a half ago and we still haven't quite invaded Iraq yet. And we're sitting around pouting that the friends. French won't let us. And then we're going to have to just go ahead and invade even without a

UN Security Council resolution, et cetera, which was never a debate over Afghanistan. Because it wasn't illegal to attack Afghanistan because somebody committed an act of war based out of Afghanistan. And that was already the agreed consensus. You know, they didn't even, I don't think they even needed a rubber, a UN rubber stamp on that. It was just accepted. They needed maybe a UN resolution for the continued occupation of Afghanistan or something like that, possibly. Anyway, I needed to get in a cab with you in 2002. That could have been a lot of fun. That probably would have been a great reality show.

We got some work done. We did, used to joke about, see, there was a show, there was a show back then called Taxi Cab Confessions on HBO. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah. And for people not familiar, it was, they would talk about their sex lives and then say some hilarious shit.

and then they would go and say, hey, sign this waiver and we're going to put you on HBO. Yeah. So it was totally candid stuff, right? Scott's like, shut the fuck up. We're talking about Iraq. Yeah, exactly. So mine, that was the joke was at the time was if I could get, I'd have to get a good lawyer. And then we just do it for the access channel.

But instead of me asking them about their sex lies, it would be me lecturing them about the Federal Reserve System and the coming war on terrorism. And then how killer that would be if we had footage of me in 1998 going, here's what's going to happen. There's going to be a massive terrorist attack in New York, and then we're going back to Iraq. You know, yeah, those were the days. But you called the terrorist attack in New York? A lot of people did, by the way. A lot of people did. I mean, in fact, the Council on Foreign Relations had a giant symposium on we need to create a

Department of Homeland Security because Osama bin Laden's coming. And that was in 1999, whatever. So, like, there have been a lot of attacks leading up to that. Didn't they, in that 96 report, though? What was that called again? I predicted the dot-com crash, too. I was really good. I just listen to what Ron Paul says, quite frankly.

Ron Paul knows some shit. Go back and read his archives and be like, wow. The 96 one, the report that they share with Netanyahu when he came in, what was that it called again? A clean break. Right. Isn't that, because that was written by a lot of neocon guys. Isn't that also where they introduced the idea of like a major attack on U.S. soil? No.

I'm thinking of a different one. You're close, though. This was a project for the New American Century document called Rebuilding America's Defenses from 1998. Got it. And it doesn't really say that. It just says, and this was a cliche at the time. I know it sounds kind of shocking at first if you hadn't heard it. But people would talk like this kind of a lot because it was obviously there, this was a thing.

It was there's a reason it was a cliche was it's going to be hard to get the American Empire to change direction and, and move in any important way without something like a Pearl Harbor attack. Yeah. That comes out of the. the blue that gives us then the incentive to get our act together and change. So people see that and they go, aha, see, they orchestrated the whole thing. But in fact, I think Zabigna Bresenski uses that phrase in the grand chess board in a slightly different context, but essentially the same. And I remember reading like in the Wall Street Journal and stuff. People just talk about that like in the 1990s that because, you know, the narrative about Pearl Harbor was America

was a sleeping giant and once they hit the united states then everything changed and we reoriented our whole posture and blah to blah so you know obviously it is obvious too that there's a motive there to maybe allow one through um that was my assumption at the time was that they'll allow one through so they can escalate into the new century and whatever um which is still unproven but um you know definitely there are a lot of people who wanted conflict and they would have and could have and should have known that that attack was coming because at the very least in 1995, Ramsey Youssef, who had done the First World Trade Center bombing, when he had escaped to the Philippines, they got his laptop and his two buddies,

Wali Khan Amin Shah and Abdul Hakim Mirat, but he got away to Pakistan where he was arrested the next year. But on his laptop was a plan to kill Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II when they came to the Philippines, a plan to time bomb 12 planes over the Pacific, and a plan to hijack 10 planes and crash them into landmarks on America's coast. And that's the planes operation that eventually became September 11th in the hands of Ramsey Youssef's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And it was Wali Khan Amin Shah, I believe, was the one who made it, or Abdul Hakim Raad, maybe this was the one who came up with the idea. And so they had that information from 1995. it's called bojinka and people would say that that's a serbo-croation term for a big bang but i could

not verify that anywhere and in fact i found a croasian who told me that that was nonsense so i don't know where in the world the term bojinka comes from originally but it's that plan and um so they you know that was obviously where i think it did i think that word did get out inside the government to a degree that that was a possibility there were like pentagon um tabletop exercises that considered that a possibility and when they arrested um zacharias musawi in minneapolis one of the agents there said this guy says he wants to fly from heath road to new york i think maybe to jfk i think maybe he wants to hit the world trade center he didn't like land didn't yeah he wasn't interested in how to take off the land and by the way so i write about that in in this book enough

already but it's also in the new book um provoked your next title needs to be stf you america something like that yeah i'm feeling that yeah exactly listen up everybody um everyone except ron paul shut the fuck do you remember i think you probably will you apparently know a lot about this stuff um in i pretend to in 2002 Colleen rowley one person of the year for time magazine and she was the lawyer for the fbi office in minneapolis minnesota who the The local flight school had turned in Musawi to the FBI. And it wasn't even the bosses there. It was the flight instructor.

I think the bosses told him, don't worry about it. And he was like, no, I am worried about it and made the call. So then they speculated, man, I wanted this guy wants to suicide bomb New York. So they went to Washington and said, we want a FISA warrant so that we can search this guy's stuff. now you may know but i'll explain for your audience real quick under the fourth amendment to the u.s constitution if the government wants to search you or me or our stuff they have to go to a judge who is pretend to at least a separate branch of government and convince him that is more likely than not right probable cause that if they look where they want to look they will find evidence of a

crime that they already know has been committed and they're trying to prove who did that crime right they're not allowed to say we want to look at this guy and go fishing on you they have to be in search of solving a crime and then so that's why the fourth amendment says particularly describing the things to be searched and the place the places to be searched and the persons with things to be seized right okay so when it comes to national security all that's out the window there's something from the uh foreign intelligence surveillance act of 1970 created this authority and it created a new court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

And that court has the authority, the justice are appointed by the Supreme, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and they have the authority to give a warrant to the National Security Agency or the FBI Counterintelligence Division to do, or I guess other national police, if in an emergency anyway,

to search, or, and or fish on any monitor or surveil anyone who they have a reasonable belief much lower threshold of evidence right a reason to believe essentially is all that means um that this person is an agent of a foreign state or a foreign terrorist group and if they're an agent of foreign power then fourth amendment out the window you're not an uh american citizen or a u.s person protected by the Fourth Amendment. You are now an agent of a foreign state or terrorist group. And so on that basis, they can search you morning till night without knowing anything else about you. Right. It's very, very, very low threshold of evidence. Yes. They could get, look,

they had a FISA warrant on anti-war.com. That's how easy it is to get a FISA warrant. Okay. They can violate my rights with one, but they couldn't violate Zacharias Musa. Because you're questioning the state, Scott. have that. Yeah, Zacharias Missoui apparently was doing what they wanted. I don't know. But so here's a thing though, is they didn't search him. And then September 11th happened. And, and oh, I'm sorry, Michael Rollins and Michael Maltsby at FBI headquarters in Washington. They denied Minneapolis the authority to even go ask the court for the warrant. So they, didn't even get a chance to.

And I think they begged and, like, you know, repeatedly asked and we're turned down. And then on September 11th, they asked, now can we get a FISA warrant? And they still were told no by headquarters until the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, said, hey, I wonder if this has anything to do with that Minneapolis thing. And so that evening, they got their FISA warrant and they searched his papers. and they tied him directly to Ramsey bin al-Shib and the terrorists in Florida, bin Al-Shib, I guess, in Spain and the guys in Florida. So in other words, if they had gotten their FISA warrant on time,

they would have been able to roll up the September 11th plot. And why wouldn't FBI headquarters give him their FISA warrant? Even though French intelligence said, we know Musawi and his brother. They both fought in Chechnya and our recruiters for the terrorist. Chechnya, FBI headquarters said, we like the terrorists in Chechnya. They're not terrorists. They're freedom fighters. There are guys. And so that makes them not agents of a foreign terrorist war. So you can't have your war. There's egg on every face. It's pretty

bad, man. It is pretty bad. My God. It's like when I look at, when I look at September 11th, first of all, in my life, it's very significant because it's one of the first things I can really remember. I was like seven or eight years old. You know, and I, you know, you don't know the full gravity of it, but you know, if you're from New Jersey, like we knew people who died in those towers, you know, it hit close to home and it's kind of like that's where life begins. But it's also this seminal, sociocultural, geopolitical world order shifting moment in time where everything that happens afterwards, a lot of it with us at the forefront of it, obviously, from a foreign conflict standpoint, a just pure geopolitical alliances standpoint, a cultural standpoint,

which I would say is directly tied more importantly to an economic standpoint when you consider that afterwards we have the great housing crisis that emanates around the world and crashes economies and the middle class suddenly like goes even more like this than already had been, gets kind of legislated away. You have this like domino effect that happens. after September 11th and we are now 24 years on from that plus to where you've had a full generation already passed through of people now having the malaise of this of this past moment in time where in the I guess similarly to the cover your book here in the remains of the rubble that we started this whole thing with there there's all these wars that happen that have

all different types of you know I guess motives behind them countries that have different opinions and everything, but it has completely made people want to sink away. And this comes back to a theme we talked about earlier, want to sink away from all conflict around the world. The reason I ask all this, though, is because I try to look at history and see where it's, you know, kind of like a repetition of itself in some way. And when you look at the 20 years leading up to World War II, you know, you had in there, you had the boom and the bust, right? You had the 1929 stock market crash that leads to the Great Depression. And this is a generation that's growing up after World War I, which is an ignored brutal war of history. I fully understand why that generation

hated foreign wars, hated all that stuff. But then it's like we got so isolationist that then something did happen and a Pearl Harbor happened. And then we had to get involved in this crazy war that, you know, was a World War, the biggest war of all time in World War II. And luckily, you know we won that war but do you worry about the malaise that has happened from all these kind of smaller but consequential wars that have gone on leading to something like a september 11th or something like that that then suddenly makes this a thermonuclear struggle nope because you got it all backwards i have it was yeah it was american intervention that led to pearl harbor not isolationism america had a deliberate eight point plan a half-point plan a

how to provoke Japan into attacking us first, uncovered by Robert Stinnett in his book and published in his book, Day of Deceit in 1999. It's called the McCollum Memo. That is correct. And so, you know, that was all very deliberate. And in fact, I mean, this included shipping planes to China for them to use in the war.

So they're directly intervening. So obviously for everyone, you know, with an IQ lower than 110 listening or whatever, That's not a justification for what Tojo did. It just means that the myth, that isolationism led to our involvement in the war or, you know, led to a situation where we belatedly intervened. If only we had intervened sooner or something like that. Like all of that is the mythology that they've laid down since that war. But it made sense at the very least to stay out of it as long as possible.

let everybody else exhaust our enemies as much as possible before we have to fight if we do have to fight assuming that much can i give you something on that i just want to see what you think of this sure and by the way i've interviewed robertsdenette a few times oh you have back in the yeah interesting talk to all about this and he was by the way a supporter of fDR and he even supported fdr deliberately provoking pearl harbor and allowing it to happen because he said it was that important that we fight the war he was a sailor in the pacific yeah and so that was his point of view on it but he says still true it's it is true i've actually had two separate people in here from wildly different backgrounds talk about this directly i had jesse fink back in episode 223 and he wrote a book on it

about how my six had an office in the building where this picture is taken on the wall right here which is rockefeller center in the buildup to world war two they knew damn well about pearl harbor and there was a back office, back channel to FDR that he knew about it too. And to your point, yeah, there was like the eight point plan and all kinds of shit going on behind the scenes there. And it absolutely was provoked. Here's where it gets really fucking uncomfortable though. And this is what I want to ask you about. FDR let that happen because people would not get behind the war because both the left and the right in America was incredibly.

salationist at the time and unfortunately if something like that did not suddenly literally flip the page one day to where everyone was like fuck that we got to go get these people we may never get into that war it was so bad that when britain was getting the shit bombed out of him by hitler churchill was coming to fDR asking for help and he even at one point asked fDR for two completely out-of-service ships that were in the caribbean that congress had had an act that they've voted on and then tabled like a year before to whether or not they were going to destroy those boats or not because they weren't even usable. So Churchill said, I'll take anything. Give me those. And FDR said, I'm sorry, I can't even give you that. I have an election on November 5th,

1940 and my opponent's running to the isolationist right. So I need to run there with them. Right. So you had such an isolationist attitude that I would argue and it certainly gets into a moral question here that the reason they did the, you know, all right, let's provoke them into doing this was to be able to get the go ahead to enter the war because they were concerned that if that war blew up and you had an enormous GDP like Hitler had, which is, by the way, when people make that reference to Russia now, I'm sorry, but that's not relevant. Russia has a GDP the size of Italy. Hitler had the about to be the largest GDP in the world and he was taking over all of Europe. If you let something like that spread and then he builds alliances in

in Asia that potentially does come to our shores that's where i would have the argument with you yeah i'm sorry that's a extremely slippery slope i mean in fact what was going on right was that the germans continued to sue for peace and the british continued to hold out and continue bombing them hoping that eventually they could get america to get into the war and win it for them and then when we finally did get in the war what do we do other than save Stalin and Mao satan and through our unconditional surrender on on both fronts empowered world communism and then necessitated the creation of the American world empire to contain it for the whole Cold War which as you said earlier ended up risking total global thermonuclear annihilation on numerous occasions so like that's the

best of all timelines is the way World War II worked out because we finally got in there I'm not so sure that i don't think the german right could have outlived hitler and i don't think he could have lived very long in any circumstance where soviet communism and chinese communism and and the legacy of all of that through asia the korean and vietnam wars and all of that's the least equivalent to the holocaust right there just america's cold war in asia so um and never mind the tens of millions starved to death by mouth satan you know by far the most violent man who ever lived and you know the highest body count of anyone who ever lived all because America forced the Japanese unconditional surrender to get completely out of China and then we'll deal with what comes next then yeah great so you know none of

this was thought through well or done right at all by anyone I don't think if you read um I think pat Buchanan's book Churchill Hitler and the unnecessary war and there's a of course AJP Taylor if you've ever read that the um on the origins of world war two I have and this is something you know Pat Buchanan knew that everybody was going to say, oh, you love Hitler, Pat, which is a bunch of crap. And so in his book, he only cites British historians from Oxford and Cambridge, right? That's the only people he cites. And he goes, look, this is ridiculous, man.

You know, people said that George W. Bush was the Winston Churchill of the 21st century. More I look at it, I'm starting to think that's right. The Winston Churchill was the George W. Bush of the 20th century. And everybody, you're just supposed to line eyes the guy. had not asked too many questions. And after all, it's obvious enough for like a grade schooler that when the enemy is Hitler and Tojo, pure evil, then that means that you're on the side of light and goodness and whatever. When now is the British Empire whose side we were on. And that's, you know, only better in comparison to the worst totalitarians that the devil ever could have

created. You know what I mean? Yeah. But the British Empire before that was nobody to be sticking up for we had overthrown it once upon a time you might remember you know yes they were not perfect at all yeah so look and then your question also had the same kind of um assumptions about september 11th that through the 1990s we were just sitting around and so then the isolationism caused september 11th to happen to us or whatever when in fact what happened was these were america's mercenaries that we had backed in afghanistan in bosnia in kosovo and chichnia all through the 1980s and 1990s, while at the same time, completely driving them crazy by occupying bases in Saudi Arabia from which to bomb and blockade Iraq and contain Iran as well, backing

Israel in their wars against the Lebanese and Palestinians and support for all the dictatorships in the region, pressure on them to read the oil prices to subsidize our economy at their expense, events. And they would say, the bin Ladenite said that we turn a blind eye to the Russian, Chinese, Indian, and Kazakh aggressions against Muslims. When in fact, America backed the Chechen Mujahideen against the Russians, just as well as they backed the Mujahideen against the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. And they backed the Uyghurs against China as well. My friend Eric Margulies saw Chinese Uyghurs training in Afghanistan under, Pakistani ISI and CIA supervision

in the summer of 2001 right before the September 11th attack and so we're on one hand our government supports these cooks all over the place on the other hand we do all of these things that make them want to attack us and then we the regime and then in the third case

they do nothing to protect us when they're coming. And so that's what caused September 11th. I would say- Killing Iraqis from bases in Saudi Arabia, not isolationism. I agree with that. I want to be clear.

If I misstated that, I see similarities in like timelines post-9-11 with things, but I don't think it was isolationism that caused 9-11. I think it was far more corruption, incompetence, and conspiracy more than anything. I'm with you. on 9-11 where where i get you know like frustrated sometimes with the historical arguments is

everyone i shouldn't let's not say everyone a lot of people try to make everything everything or nothing right it's zero or a hundred it's this or that you know history is written by the victors and it's not all true and there's there's no doubt about that Winston Churchill was not a perfect guy by any stretch i can point to a lot of things in india that's just one place to start with where you know there's plenty to say that was completely wrong and you know he was he was a flawed guy in many ways but i think like when we get into the conversation of like well no actually not only wasn't he a hero he was the complete villain i think it ignores a lot of the history because if you look at if you look at the bombing of britain it is you are correct britain was then bombing

Germany back. They were flying in Royal Air Force, basically like, I don't want to say every night, but a lot of nights throughout that year between 1940 and 1941. But Germany was doing the same thing and trying to come in there to start the third front of the war, I think at that point, at least second front of the war. It's like, what are they supposed to do, though? You know, are they just supposed to sit there? You're starting the story in the middle, though. The story, what happened was Neville Chamberlain was humiliated. Right. when Hitler annexed the Sudetenland or went further in the Czechoslovakia. So then he threw a big emotional fit and declared a war guarantee to Poland.

His foreign secretary, Lord Gray, said that he should be locked in an insane asylum, that this was the absolute most idiot blunder in the world. So in other words, this is, imagine Condoleez-I or Colum Powell while he's in power, saying that George W. Bush should be locked in an insane asylum that he has no idea what he's doing. He must be stopped before he invades Iraq.

That's what was going on in England at the time. Because why? Because Neville, it wasn't Winston Churchill that gave the war guarantee to Poland. It was Neville Chamberlain. It was Neville Chamberlain. The same guy that everybody hates because he's the most incompetent diplomat

in the history of the world because he ever made the Munich deal, right? Yep. Well, that same idiot used that same idiocy to promise that he would protect Poland from Germany when he had no ability to do so whatsoever. I see what he was doing, in fact, was he was allowing the Polish colonels who were themselves a bunch of fascists to have the right to declare war on Germany for England.

He's just outsourcing the war. They were supposed to be negotiating over Danzig. He's telling them, you don't have to negotiate with Hitler. Why would you negotiate with Hitler? I got your back, little buddy. and then, but he didn't have their back whatsoever. But Danzig was a German city. Just let them, let them have their damn easement, dude.

You know, that was what they were fighting about. It was like, no, we must draw the line against evil because Winston Churchill was so concerned about evil. The centuries long and to this day policy, we already talked about this a couple hours ago. The policy is you can't let Germany and Russia have a deal. You can't let Germany dominate. Europe, and particularly Eastern Europe, where they can keep Britain out. The discussion wasn't about the evil of Nazism.

The discussion was about, what is their power going to do to our power? We're going to lose some. And then they made idiot decisions in an emotional peak. And then, once the war started that they couldn't possibly finish without forcing us to fight the war for them from their propaganda office and Rockefeller Center and the rest instead and

Hitler I'm not giving him any credit whatsoever but the fact is he didn't want to fight England he wanted to a lie with England against the Reds and by the way at the end of the war Churchill himself said what's the evidence for that I guess oh it's in the book it's in Churchill

Hitler in the Unnecessary War by Pat Buchanan and it's also in AJP Taylor on the origins of World War II? Then why do you go across their red lines and invade the Sudetenland? Why do you then send in the Luftwaffe to bomb them into submission? If you are trying to make them an ally...

England declared war on them first. England declared war on them because this is where I would have a problem with your... Because they'd given an idiot war guarantee to a country that couldn't defend. This is where I would have a problem with your argument. Okay. The parallel nature of Iraq and Poland

Well, I'm just bringing, I wasn't bringing up Iraq and Poland as like strategic equivalence on the risk board. I was bringing up the politics of secretary, a foreign minister, Lord Gray saying that prime minister, Chamberlain was an idiot out of his mind, that this was an absolute blunder, that it made no sense whatsoever. And how in the world could you have done this without consulting me first, et cetera, et cetera. et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I was saying if Colin Powell had rioted over what W. Bush was doing, imagine the politics of that, like how desperate he would have to be to react in that way. You know what I mean? That's all I was saying. The politics of that. Okay. The fact, to me, the fact that Lord Gray thought the war guarantee was insane is like ipso facto proof that it was. It means that Chamberlain,

he did that because he had been made to look ridiculous and this was how he was going to fix that was by looking tough instead where do you say all right so here's the question and by the way i should have said at the beginning of this too i don't know jack's shit about world war two other than i've read stinette about pearl harbor and i've interviewed him a bunch of times about that back in the days before he died okay and um i've read actually i read um was it victor gold or something's book about Pearl Harbor as well. And, and, um, and John Tolan's book about Pearl Harbor I read years ago. And, and then, but like the revision of stuff about the European war, all I've read was

AJP. Taylor, uh, on the origins of World War II. Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. And there's another one by a guy named Nicholson Baker called Human Smoke. And which is really great because it's just, um, new, Newspaper headlines from all throughout the lead-up to the war. And it actually ends at the point where America's getting involved. Germany's declared war in America, and America is now going to join the war. That's interesting. That's where it ends.

And the point of the book is it's just off-ramp after off-ramp, after off-ramp, after off-ramp, that are ignored. Once- As the war is escalated to the worst thing that ever happened. Then in hindsight, we're supposed to essentially rationalize that. that this thing that killed 60 million people, man, it had to be or it would have been worse. But like, I don't know, dude. You know, when you read human smoke, you go,

it looks like the only heroes in all of Europe during that time were the Quakers trying to smuggle in food to dying, starving people. Everybody else was, by everyone else, I mean, all political power was arrayed against the people. of christenedom man it was nuts here's the thing scott here's the thing there's the world that exist as we want to see it and then there's the world that really exists and the i think that's what i'm saying in in the world that really exists there's also flawed men there who sometimes

actually want to do the right thing other times don't by the way to be clear but i don't know how else something like that goes down because when i look at the world i have a lot of of things that it's cynical to say it but unfortunately i think it's true sometimes i got to pick the best shit on a steaming pile of shit what's the least smelly one there is right not to say it's good it's still shit but it's better than that shit down there and when i look at that and study the history of it i would say that for all the flaws and problems with the british empire of which there is a laundry list. The Western, big air quotes here, freedoms that may be that represented versus a fascist, ethno, Nazi state in Germany, that's an easy argument for me.

The argument is if I need one piece of shit, that is a way better shit over there in Britain than it is in Germany. And so, yes, you are absolutely right. the Neville Chamberlain really looks like a total cuck in in hindsight with everything he did and then felt like he had to protect his pride to you know say well if they cross this red line I'm gonna declare a war I would argue he just shouldn't have fucking he shouldn't have even tried to negotiate with Hitler over the Sudetland and I'm not an interventionist kind of guy in case that's not clear in this conversation but I'm looking at it like the guy had already proven that he was going to he was on meth he was going to take whatever he wanted to fucking take

And then you sit down with him and think he's going to keep a promise. And then he doesn't. So at that point, even if it's a pride protector, what the fuck else is he supposed to do? Look, I think. Say, oh, I'm sorry. All right. He broke the, he broke the agreement. You know what?

I think he'd like Pat's book. I think he'd like Pat's book. At this point, at this point, his enemy that he wants to fight is in the east. He has no intention to attack France and Belgium and Denmark and Great Britain. Why is the basis of that? Well, first of all, mine conf. that's where all the leban's realm is is where all the slavs live there to be either killed or or cleansed and that's going to be all german land up up through the borderlands of russia and even

including into russia so you think a guy that would think that about other people and his enemy was the communists in the east this is where it was matter and anti matter i'm not saying that england was like their natural ally but and i think this is clear from pat's book and from taylor's book, that Hitler looked at it like war with the Soviets was inevitable. And I, if, forgive me if I'm screw this. It's been maybe 15, 20 years since I read Pat's book, but I'm pretty sure the way that the timeline worked was that it was after Chamberlain gave the war guarantee to Poland was when Hitler said, well, shit, then went and sent, uh, uh, uh, Ribbentrop to go do the Hitler-Stalin pact. It was then that he made the peace with the Soviet. I think that's right. I think that's

with the Soviet Union. So then he stopped to attack the Western democracies for two years before finally going East and attack on the commies anyway. That's what I'm saying about. So what did the English accomplish with their idiot war guarantee and their declaration of war on Germany other than, and they're convincing France to also declare war on Germany, other than to get Germany to kick all their asses first

before the inevitable war in the East anyway. And which, by the way, all the innocent civilians who died in the east at least they would have had a west to flee to not easily but at least there would have been a west to flee to that hadn't already been conquered by the nazis if they hadn't had done that i think you're making a big assumption about a psychotic leader who already was demonstrating in the 1920s in mind confin in his speeches that there were groups of people including in this case you are 100% right about that the slavs and the people to the east who he politically most disagreed with.

He was already demonstrated that he viewed other land and other peoples. And of course, everything like you wrote about that Jews. That was in dispute. In Poland, remember, he was going east. But either way, he all, point being, he already viewed large swaths of tens of millions of people as subhuman and the land they live on, not their land. German should be able to take that. Right.

Why would you ever assume that that person, that psycho will not turn around and do that to anyone else that he doesn't like. That's my problem with the non-interventionist argument. Because I've seen Napoleon try to invade the Soviet Union before. I've seen the Kaiser try. So you're assuming he would lose. Invading Russia sucks and is yes it does and doesn't work. Right. So the point is he was he was going to fight the Soviet Union and lose to the Soviet Union anyway. All the English did was by the Reds two years. I would argue, and I can't say, I know I'm right about this. I would argue, though, that Hitler, the fact that he started a war on technically three other fronts, but if you don't include North Africa and just

say west and north with Britain, the fact that he was fighting war fronts there is the reason he lost Russia more than anything. If he had just focused on Russia with the entire resources and power of the German military and the science, you know, of the weaponry they used, I do think he would have taken Russia. He didn't, he wasn't that far off. It was a winter that stopped them from taking Russia. And it was because he had wars going on in three other places at the same time. So that's where this. I don't think it would have been able to hold it though, not for the long term. Maybe not hold it for the long term, but it could it, it could, he could have taken it and had massive implications. And the Western democracies would have had two years to build up

instead of Stalin having two years to build up. Maybe, maybe, but it still ends in a massive world war. And it still ends in tens of millions of people dying. That's what I'm saying. Like, I hate war. But I also try to look at the lens of the world where, like, sometimes, like, it happens. And you should do everything you can to prevent that on the buildup. And you're absolutely right to say the buildup was wrong.

Why did FDR do that? Because 80% of the American people were opposed to it. And it's supposed to be up to them. Yes. So this, you know, this Robert Stennett attitude that, well, FDR had to commit the greatest act of treason in all history in order to, you know, bamboozle essentially to manipulate the American people and to go into war in Europe by getting their sons killed out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That kind of shows right there what a betrayal it was of the American people. And then 16 million of them had to be conscripted, forced to go and join the fight. So in hindsight, you can make a great movie out of it and all of this.

But at the time, ipso facto, the people had to be made to do it because they didn't want to. They didn't agree and they didn't think it was necessary to do it in that way. You know, Harry Truman said, we should back Hitler and then we should back Stalin and then we should back Hitler again and keep backing them against each other when he was a senator is what he said. He also wasn't the brightest bulb. Yeah, how about just stay that? hell out of it you got two totalitarians as he said scorpions fighting in a bottle why do we have to lend lease anybody in this thing you know what i mean i'm not saying we should back iraq or iran or israel or anyone you know um that's the thing of it uh but anyway look i admit again

that i'm not the greatest expert on world war two i know there's a hundred books about it and i do know also that for all Americans who get interested in like revisionist history, you know, it's really easy to be a revisionist about the terror wars, about Vietnam, about Korea. Why is it the forgotten war anyway? Ah, geez, Truman. Look what he did there. And then, God, World War won. That idiot. Woodrow Wilson, you know, if he hadn't had done that, there would have never been a Soviet Union. There would have never been a Nazi Germany. There would have never been the British replacement of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and the creation of Israel and all this crap. Damn him forever for that. And then go back. McKinley starting this fake fight with

Spain and then stealing the Philippines and killing 300,000 of them so you can take their land, dominate their land. We've got no right to the Philippines. What is this crazy? And then you go back and you go, man, the way Lincoln picked that fight at Fort Sumter, they should have just surrendered that fort dude and then you get you know and but world war two though come on man that's hitler and tojo that's black and white dude that's superman versus lex luther and don't muddy those waters that's our hero origin story that's the basis of our civic religion here george washington and abraham lincoln and all that is too long ago it's fDR and truman are in eisenhower they're the founding fathers of the united states of america now

of our world empire and so to to sully the the origin kind of mythology of that whole era and what happened out of that is it's like questioning the virgin birth or whatever it comes to um like emotional ties this is what we have in common is our grandfathers fought world war two together and stuff like that like we don't have much in common anymore this is something and And we're the good guys in the thing, facing down evil and all of that. But then, of course, as you see, it's been the excuse for every act of evil our government's committed around the world and forcing this empire ever since then. Everybody knows we're the ones who whooped Hitler.

We're the guys you call when your Hitler needs whooping. And we've been acting as the Hitler and calling it, you know, anti, ever since then. Why can't it be both? Well, that's the whole thing. So in 1821, John Quincy Adams, John Adam's son, who was the Secretary of State, gave his 4th of July speech. And he says, America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And because America is the champion and vindicator only of her own. And the problem is, even though we mean well, we could help good people in other countries.

If we went out on that mission, we would end up becoming the dicotress of the world. we would forfeit our own spirit the same one that we're trying to preserve and trying to export to them we would kill it in the process of trying to export it militarily and control the world in the way that we want and so if we want to have our republic here we're going to have to leave the old world to the old world and then you know james minroe by the way in in uh people should read the speech that were they he inaugurated the monroe doctrine he said that uh you know as everyone knows i think that the european powers better stay out of the americas in no more new colonies here and this is america's sphere of influence all the way down to the tip of argentina you better believe it however

america promises in return to stay out of europe and to recognize as the de facto legitimate whoever is in power in whatever European state. And so the old world is the old world's problem. The new world is ours. And we still insist that European powers stay the hell out of the Americas. You know, the Soviet Union tries to make a military outpost out of Cuba. Nope. We will reverse that, in fact. But we don't live up to our end. We say there are no spheres of influence anywhere in the world except the entire sphere that's our sphere of influence but nobody else can have a sphere of influence anywhere at all that's right um and so that's the whole thing i mean quincy adams was right and in fact we talked about the neo-conservatives robert kagan who is

oftentimes at least was maybe still is oftentimes uh bill crystal's writing partner um and very influential guy that's your favorite guy's uh husband yeah that's your boy yeah good good good good friend of mine. Robert Kagan and, oh, and Crystal Both, it was, I think it was in their article toward a neo-Raganite foreign policy from 1996. I'm pretty sure it's in that essay that he says, well, John Quincy Adams says, America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Well, why not?

Well, just read it. He explains why not? He just said, we'll become the dicotress of the world and the betrayer of our own spirit, man. It's right there in English, Robert Kagan, whose horrible wife and horrible brother and horrible sister-in-law and horrible father have been probably the most destructive force in this country, this side of the Crystal family, that you could find anywhere. And all based on this complete idiot thinks he knows better than John Quincy Adams. It's not like you read Quincy Adams speech and think, I don't understand what this guy's talking about. It's very clear,

dude. It makes perfect sense. You know, it should have been good enough, even for a Kagan. All right, real quick, I got to go to the bathroom, but we'll come back and talk about Iran, a little bit of Israel, obviously, in there to go together, China. And then I also want to get into the book you wrote on the Russia-Ukraine war, which is very fascinating. We touched on that earlier, but we got to go deeper. We'll be right back. We'll have to talk fast. Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.