Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 1/15/26 Max Blumenthal on the CIA and Mossad’s Latest Move Against the Iranian Regime

Episode Date: January 17, 2026

Max Blumenthal returns to the show to discuss what’s been happening in Iran and what may come to pass as the US and Israel continue to escalate their effort to overthrow the current government in Iran.   Discussed on the show: “Western media whitewashes deadly riots in Iran, relying on US govt-funded regime change NGOs” (The Grayzone) Max Blumenthal is a senior editor of the Grayzone Project and the author Goliath, Republican Gomorrah and The 51 Day War. Follow him on Twitter @MaxBlumenthal. Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries in five years.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. All right, you guys, introducing Max Blumenthal again, editor of the Gray Zone and author of this great book, The 51 Day War, about Israel's slaughter in Gaza back in 2014. He also made a great documentary about that called Killing Gaza,

and then you can see there behind him his great book, Goliath, that he wrote back 15 years ago, when I still remember talking to you on the phone, interviewing you from Israel, where you live for, I think, 10 months writing that book from inside the belly of the beast there. And, well, obviously, you don't really need much of an introduction.

One of the most important journalists in America today. Very happy to have you here. Welcome back, Max. Thanks a lot, Scott. All right, so regime change in Iran. How's it going? It's not going very well. It's a protracted war, it looks like.

And if you believe the news about what happened last night, Trump called off strikes, but I don't know if that's exactly what took place. But kind of panning out, I think there is an assessment that there's not going to be some Venezuela-style solution to a, Israeli imposed, that the plan was imposed by Israel

because of this, what they thought was a moment of opportunity, supposed protests, which were not actually just protests, and I'll talk about that in a second. And there was an understanding within the Trump administration that a series of airstrikes

would have no effect whatsoever except to end whatever protests were left. and consolidate the power of the institutions of the Islamic Republic and that it would actually boomerang and lead to attacks on U.S. military bases. And the deeper the U.S. is drawn in, the more likely there will be casualties among U.S. personnel that will damage Trump politically as midterms roll around.

So I don't think there's a good solution for the Trump administration here, but the Israelis keep pushing and they seem to have some kind of agreement with Trump. Miriam Adelson kicks in 150 million to your campaign, continues to contribute, pumps in millions to take out Thomas Massey and anyone who challenges you from within,

and you agree to take out Iran's Islamic Republic and replace it with either balkanize it or destroy it or destabilize it or replace it with some kind of, a Zionist monarchy, but that's the deal. And so Trump is in a conundrum. Okay, so as we record this on Thursday morning, the news is that yesterday afternoon, Trump announced that,

oh, the Iranians are no longer killing protesters, and they promise not to execute anyone. And so it was actually funny. I rarely watch TV by that time like this. Sometimes I have to, so I was watching a lot of BBC and Al Jazeera and other things yesterday. And essentially everyone was playing the same Kremlinologist type game here trying to figure out.

Is he signaling that he's backing down and there are going to be no strikes? And then we all woke up this morning, relieved to see that there were no strikes overnight. And so obviously you build yourself caustus belly on killing protesters, then that's one you could also easily back down from, too, I guess. So at least, you know, we're lucky in that sense. but a huge part of this is how much of this just depends on the whim of Donald Trump. Everybody is wondering if this most mercurial president will make a decision or even change his mind at 2 o'clock in the morning.

And God knows what, Congress has, of course, long-seated their authority over foreign policy in this way. So we could have just as easily ended up in a major war last night, but luckily didn't so far, I guess. But yeah, so let's get back to these protests here because obviously, you know, this is the same thing that really hurt Joe Biden. It's the same thing that's hurting Donald Trump right now. Price inflation. And they've got 40% inflation just this year in Iran. And a huge part of that, of course, is the crippling sanctions of Trump, Biden, and Trump again,

and the economic war that they've waged against Iran. And, of course, their central bank doesn't know how to do anything but print money all day like every other one. And so they did have these huge protests. But the thing is on TV, if there's a protest in Iran, then they just immediately assume and translate and presume and explain that the demand of every protester is that the government ceased to exist, right? That if there's a protest, it's a revolution and a peaceful one. And so then any, you know, resistance by the government against that is pure. you know, tyrannical crackdown on peaceful protesters and that kind of thing.

But so I wonder if it's even right that the original protest movement was really demanding the fall of the government, was that entirely, you know, kind of a foreign orchestrated thing? Or was that really like somewhat, you know, domestic and homegrown, but then, you know, kind of co-opted? Or how do you interpret that? the original protest movement came from within the bazaars where the Islamic Republic has strong support and they went out into the streets with police protection and were engaged in dialogue with the government

and the clerical leadership and they were protesting the collapse of the Rial which was a problem when I was in Iran in May everyone was complaining about it but this followed in these protests immediately followed Netanyahu's visit to Washington where I don't know it was the fifth time or the sixth time, fifth time or six time since early 2024,

that's 2025 that Trump had played babysitter to Netanyahu and he was obviously there to discuss plans for an attack on Iran. Iran's currency exchange faced manipulation according to the Iranian government. And I saw how that worked in Venezuela, where the currency was constantly manipulated and goods were withheld by anti-Chavista business elements who had moved their operations to Colombia

and they would basically hoard goods. There was something called Dolar Tudda. which every Venezuelan used to try to determine what the exchange rate between the dollar and the Bolivar was. But Dolar Taday was run by a former Venezuelan military officer who had participated in a coup against Hugo Chavez and worked out of Home Depot in Huntsville, Alabama. And so he and the forces behind him,

which were obviously very powerful, would manipulate the currency exchange rate in order to constantly throw Venezuela's economy into chaos. And then you have secondary sanctions. Iran is unable to access something like $250 billion that are in international exchanges because of secondary sanctions, so it can't release its reserves

to firm up the value of the Rial. But this is all, it all looked orchestrated to me. Then the protests come out. And then these monarchist and nihilistic elements, which are committed to regime change and have been receiving instructions from abroad, use those protests as a vehicle to create mayhem in the streets of Iran

and to generate violence, to attack police officers, to attack besiege guards. Basij guards are mostly like young guys who are put out on street corners, to keep watch or in squares. They're not armed. And they were essentially sent to their own deaths

because they were brutally lynched and beaten by crazed mobs, highly organized mobs, and you can see a lot of it on camera through CCTV that's being released on Iranian State TV. I wouldn't advise watching it. It's horrible footage. And hundreds of police officers in Basisi

have been killed. along with civilians, children, a friend of mine and Isfahan, her neighbor was killed by the so-called protesters. She was an eight-year-old girl because they're armed. And who's arming them? Well, there are hunting rifles in Iran that they can get access to,

but the Mossad has effectively claimed credit for arming and weaponizing these protests and militarizing these protests to create a kind of serious scenario On December 29th, the Mossad's Farsi account declared, we are in the, go to the streets, take on your government, and we will be walking alongside you, we are with you. That was before Mike Pompeo, former CIA director,

uttered almost the same exact words when he said the Mossad is walking beside you. It looked like the Mossad had written Mike Pompeo's tweet. Maybe he was paid $7,000 for it. but they weren't really making a secret about it. And then it took until like two days ago, or actually yesterday, for the expert class and Twitterati

to realize that this was what was taking place. Because Channel 14, the pro-Netanyahu settler fanatic channel in Israel, one of their correspondents tweeted that Mossad has been active in, in militarizing the so-called protests and that they are responsible for the many body bags you see in morgues in Tehran,

sort of taking pride in what they did. And you could also see in Hebrew Twitter, a lot of Israelis, like Zionist Israelis, were very mad at that correspondent for letting the cat out of the bag because it hurts their propaganda efforts. There are numerous accounts you can follow on Twitter X and elsewhere

that will show you the content kind of violence that Iran has endured at the hands of these rioters. We're talking about scores of mosques being burned, burned on camera, crowd standing outside cheering, large mosques being burned, burning shrines to, including to imams who are said to be from the direct lineage of the Prophet Muhammad. The burnings. That's like bin Ladenites, right?

ISIS or al-Qaeda types attacking Shiite. Well, I'll get to that. I'll get to that in a second. It might be a slightly different scenario, but also burning police stations, burning fire stations, attacking emergency workers, attacking and burning city buses,

randomly beating elderly motorists. There's a new video today showing that weapons in the hands of the so-called protesters. And then, you know, bodies are piling up in the morgue. And the Western media is falsely claiming that all the deaths are just protesters who are out in the street with signs. They're basically sitting at the Woolworth segregated lunch counter non-violently following the tactics of Gandhi's Satya-Graha

and trying to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That's the way the Western media is framing it. Like it's the civil rights movement. Everybody's lying, but a lot of people are starting to wake up to what this really was. It was Mossad Renta riots. Most of the cells, I think, were, if you want to classify their ideology, it's referred to as ISIS attacks, ISIS style attacks or ISIS attacks in Iranian media and Iranian culture. But I think these were monarchists.

and the monarchists are very Islamophobic and see themselves as kind of the original Iranians and see themselves, many of them see themselves as kind of like racially Aryan and they see the Islamic Republic's leadership as racially inferior and they just see any mosque or shrine

as representative of the Islamic Republic that they hate. So they draw no distinction and have been even burning Korans, which is why you've got figures like Tommy Robinson celebrating it, that and the fact that he's clearly one of these political prostitute influencers who's getting, you know, cashing checks from Israel and the United Arab Emirates. All right, this episode of a Scott Horton show brought to you by the books I wrote.

You can see them behind me there. Enough already. Fool's errand and then enough already and provoked. and then of course one might have fallen down there but i got uh ron paul the great ron paul um scott horton show interviews and hotter than the sun see that one back there over there that way hotter than the sun time to abolish nuclear weapons that's all interviews i did all about nukes and uh really great stuff and i blessed my ass on these things and you know i've gotten a really great reception on all of them uh they were all been endorsed by ron paul and daniel elzberg

endorsed two of the three I wrote. He would have endorsed the third one I know, but he died too soon, unfortunately. Tucker Carlson says that provoked is the definitive account. In fact, that's what Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Matei said about it too. The definitive account of the new Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine, so maybe check that up. We have an article at anti-war.com and Libertarian Institute today,

citing Reuters and a couple of others about where they're boasting about They have armed groups of Kurdish fighters. They're calling them just P-A-K instead of P-J-A-K. We used to call them P-J-A-K. If you go back to that great series of articles by Seymour Hersch in 2007, starting with the redirection, preparing the battlefield,

and there's a few more. And the scam men was arming bin Ladenites in Lebanon, in Syria, and in Iran, Jandala in Iran, but also the Kurdish commies, the Iranian branch of the Turkish PKK, or as we call them, the YPG in Syria, and that they were using them way back then. And some was saying, which armed groups do you think are running around? And I had a tweet yesterday saying, well, based on the past, I'd say America is probably back

in the Pijack Kurds up there. And then out comes this Reuters article that says, yep, here's a bunch of armed. Pijack fighters intervening in this thing in Iran. So who do you think behind that since we have that exact anecdote from previously, you know, in this same era, although it was almost 20 years ago, but still. Yeah, I mean, that's reported in the National, the United Arab Emirates paper that Pijack or Kurdish Free Life fighters killed eight besiege guards. Again, these are guys who are usually unarmed.

They killed eight of them on the night of January 10th. January 10th was the night of the most intense and violent riots. And they're not the only militarized force that's involved. Komole, which is spelled kind of almost like Kamala Harris, but it's K-O-M-A-L-A. They're another, I would say, former communist group that consists of Iranian Kurds and has been involved in the riots.

They have an office here in Washington. They met with George W. Bush publicly, and I would assume they're tied in with the CIA. Then you have Balukistan. I don't know if the Balukhi fighters are involved, but they've been a traditional CIA proxy against Iran. And Mike Pompeo actually mentioned them in his statement when he said the Mossad is walking alongside the protesters.

during the so-called women-life freedom protests in 2023, which started as real demonstrations against the enforcement of the hijab. The Baluki fighters got involved and were carrying out fairly intense battles along and skirmishes along the frontiers of Iran against IRC. And that's when that protest devolved into, violence and you saw people stabbing besiege guards in the streets and then amnesty international declaring them prisoners of conscience and just lying amnesty international is lying completely about what's

happening right now just as it lied to the american public about uh the testimony of naira claiming that saddam hussein's armies were pulling kuwaiti babies off their incubators back in 1990. Amnesty retracted that report, but they're not retracting any of their false statements about Iran and its protests being, in their words, largely peaceful. They are not, the protests are over at this point, and any other action that's taking place is practically militarized. No one's going to go out in the street and challenge the Islamic Republic and its security forces without some form of weapons at this point. And I think it's all pretty much over based on what I'm hearing,

but because of the internet blackout, it's hard for me to get in touch with sources there. Yeah. The fact that they would use that exact phrase largely peaceful, which is completely notorious and hilarious from the Minnesota riots in 2020 at the CNN reporter and the massive arson fire behind him at the time. Yeah. Pretty, pretty nice choice.

of words on their part. So, and by the way, so speaking of ancient history, when we talk about John Dalla, the Baluki group there, remember Mark Perry's great reporting about how at least some of the time that the CIA was running those guys. And there's plenty of other extensive reporting about the CIA running those guys, including using a former DIA agent as one of the cutouts doing it and so forth.

But Mark Perry had a great story about Mossad posing a CIA to recruit these guys to work for them back then. And good old Mark Perry rest in peace. Yeah, RIP Mark Perry, a great reporter. I knew him, actually went to high school with his son. Oh, really? We played on the same baseball team together. And I think he went to work for CNN.

He's like working in the big leagues. Yeah, Mark was a great guy, really great guy. Great reporter. I cite him on a lot of things and enough already, especially. including like, for example, the way the military was near revolt when Obama switched sides in the Yemen war and started back in al-Qaeda there. And Lloyd Austin and them were all so upset about it.

They went squealed to Perry about it. Yeah. Anyway. So, go ahead. Him and Bob Perry and Sy Hirsch, definitely inspirations for what we're doing at the Gray Zone are trying to do. Yeah. Oh, man, you guys are killing it.

And you know what? I had in my notes here because I knew I would forget, as long as we're on this tangent. let me just take a second to praise Kate Clarenberg. I can never get this guy on my show. And I think he likes me and wants to do the show. It just never works out.

I tried to send him a book, but they just won't deliver the mail in Serbia. I don't know why. And I had the same problem with George Zamouli. I tried to send him a book, and they just want, customs just hates me. But anyway, I love Kate Clarenberg. This guy's journalism, he is just a killer.

And he writes for you. So I just wanted to fast along the compliment since I haven't spoken to them in in a couple of years probably at this point. Well, I'll get him on here. I'll make a big issue of it. But Kit is one of the best investigative journalists working today. And one of the only ones in the Western sphere who is actually exposing these kinds of influence operations and subterfuge by Western intelligence services.

I mean, most other, the official investigative journalism outlets mainly work with the intelligence services at this point. Right. OCCRP, what is it? OCCRP, the organized crime and corruption reporting project. That's state department right there. Yeah, yeah. Yep, for real. And man, he gets his hands on great documents and stuff.

He's really broken some stories. And, you know, you subscribe to a substack and the gray zone substack. And just in the email, investigative scoop by this guy just regularly by you guys. But yeah, anyway, I just want to work that in. And, man, if you have any money, you should be buying gold with it. Central banks are hoarding it up. And if you need some, you should go to rrbi.com. That's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.

It's my buddy Tim Frye. He's a really great guy. Him and this business, they've been over there for a very, very long time. And they will help you get your medals. And they will always do you right. That's Roberts and Roberts, Brokerage, Inc. at R-RBI.co. Can you talk a little bit about the so-called green revolution of 2009 and then a little bit more about the women's protest and stuff?

Because I know we had from, I'm pretty sure it was Kenneth Timmerman, bragged to newsmax about the National Endowment for Democracy's role in the Green Revolution. So we got them red-handed right there. But I wonder, you know, if you can remind people like what all that was about and what all we know about the National Endowment for Democracy and their associated groups in Iran in the meantime. The Green Revolution, when I wasn't following this issue quite as closely, was supposedly sparked by public opposition to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad allegedly stealing the election.

And obviously it was propelled by not just Western intelligence and the National Endowment for Democracy, which functions as the overt operator of Western intelligence, but also by reformist forces inside Iran. And it became a big opening for the reformist movement in Iran. And I think it ultimately helped lead to the Iran nuclear deal,

which many Iranians are now furious about. And the outcome, the ultimate outcome of the nuclear deal has really strengthened the principalist camp, which are referred to as hardliners in the U.S. and it was not necessarily a protest for regime change. It was a more reform-minded, rights-based protest that did face repression, but also had elements, foreign elements backing it.

And it was, I think it was mishandled by Iran at the time, and they have proved a little more sophisticated over the years. The Masa Amini, sorry, women like freedom protests were sparked by the death of a woman named Masa Amini who was a Kurd, who was arrested for not wearing hijab

and suffered a medical emergency in a police station. There's no evidence that she was beaten to death by police or killed for not wearing hijab. the autopsy, which, you know, I've, I've, I've, I've come as pretty, I, I feel pretty confident in saying this. The autopsy showed that she was not beaten to death. And I've talked to reporters who reviewed the autopsy and reviewed the details, who really have no reason to lie to me. And they say that she died of a medical emergency. However, there was no reason for her to have been arrested.

That's what many Iranians, there was sort of a mass movement of Iranians who said, whether she was beaten to death or not, we need to stop these mandatory hijab laws. And these were younger, more middle class, cosmopolitan Iranians in places like Tehran and Shiraz and other major cities who went out and had major deaths. demonstrations, then the demonstrations kind of caught on in this viral way and young people just wanted to be part of it because it was the thing to do. And then as I mentioned before, Western intelligence and Mossad got involved and militarized it on Iran's borders and it became violent on the inside of the country. And many besiege guards as well as average people

were killed by the same kind of elements we now see really dominating the opposition in the streets in Iran. And these protests have been much more violent. What I've heard from in the brief period when I was able to make any contact with anyone inside Iran, them talking to like police officers

in their neighborhood and so on was that the police officers have never seen anything like this before. They've never seen this level of violence. They've never felt this threatened. Academic, I know, not Mohammed Morandi, by the way, who's a friend who has been threatened on Pierce Morgan with being chopped to pieces by a psychotic monarchist from Canada.

But another one who's lower profile, this is very serious scholar, who occasionally does interviews in English, is getting death threats. Iranians, I know on the outside, too, who have been outspoken against regime change or, like, the U.S. attacking Iran, say they're being flooded with death threats

by the monarchists. It's a very dark, disturbing moment. At the same time, we have never seen protests like those in support of the government and against the regime change operation and these protests do include some Iranians who do not cover or women who do not cover people who are simply nationalistic, but primarily it's supporters of the Islamic Republic,

going through great lengths to get out in the streets, especially in Tehran, which has some of the worst traffic I've ever seen. It's one of the most difficult cities to navigate. Even the Tehran Metro, which is clean and fairly well run, it's still tough to take it. I mean, it gets so crowded. So they went to great lengths and filled the streets of Tehran

in multiple demonstrations. Over a million people have been seen in the streets. And this is a show of legitimacy for the Iranian Islamic Republic that Western media has been eager to ignore or cover up. And I think at this point,

Iran now faces the next stage of the regime change operation, which is an escalated, more violent war, more violent than the 12-day war. But what we've seen between the end of the 12-day war in June and now was a continuation of that war through hybrid warfare,

not peaceful, largely peaceful protests. All right, well, so somewhere in here, make sure and mention if you know anything about what's going on with the Mujah D&E calk right now. I know they're a potential major factor in all of this. But also, I think just speculating, it would not make sense that Rubio or anyone else would be telling Trump that he could do a Delta Force type raid and snatch the Ayatollah.

However, I don't think anybody would deny that if you could put eyeballs on the Ayatollah, you can kill him. And I think they probably know where he is most of the time. He just lives in that one little compound and doesn't lead very much. And for an American bomber to put firepower on him and just say, okay, well, now's the first day of the rest of history without common knee anymore and see what happens. I think it's almost probable or likely that someone is at least telling him that that that's part of the advice that he's getting is that, look, man, you know, just like in Venezuela. They didn't do regime change.

They just did president change. So what if, you know, we don't necessarily overthrow the entire Islamic Republic, but what if we just kill the Ayatoll and his friends boss? I could see Trump buying that and going for that and not being too worried. You know, they said like in the Washington Post, the raid on Maduro was flawless almost, right?

No Americans died, that kind of thing. He's really worried about getting scuffed up, though. You try to do something like that in Tehran, you're going to lose some helicopters and stuff. You drop a bomb on the guy from 60,000 feet, then why not? And that's what I'm worried about is that sort of how H.W. Bush was so high on Panama, he thought Iraq will be easy. And we've been bombing them for 35 years ever since then, you know?

And that's kind of my worry here is that Ben Shapiro is right, that at least in Trump's mind, Iraq syndrome has now been defeated by the Venezuela raid, and maybe it's time. Maybe it'd be easy to go ahead and take out the Iatoll after all. Maybe Bush's problem was he was a wimp and didn't follow through. I'm like, you can see Trump being advised that and agree with that pretty easily, I think, right? Did you want me to talk about the M.E.K. first because you asked. Sure. Yeah, and or whatever you think about, you know, the politics in the White House

and how likely you think Trump is to act on, I mean, obviously I was speculating there about some things, but that's more or less the frame of reference that he's within, right? Yeah. The People's M.E.K is another one of these sort of retired or former Marxist organizations that's basically a cult run by Mariam Rajavi, the wife of its founder out of Paris, and she's a tool for all the intelligence agencies and received backing from Saudi Arabia.

They are not at the forefront of the riots that are that have gripped Iran. These are mainly being instrumentalized by the monarchist forces who are run by the self-described crown prince or clown prince Reza Palavi, who is based near here in Potomac, Maryland, in a giant McMansion. And he's been issuing all of these absurd statements from his living room calling for, you know, killing government workers and blowing up media stations and so on. He was just meeting with Lindsay Graham yesterday. The monarchist forces inside Iran,

they have received some training and instructions. It's kind of apparent from the videos you see of the violence that we've witnessed. And they have a very, they have a very hateful mentality. But they're not trained like the M.E.K.R. They haven't been based out of a literal U.S. military base in Albania for like 15 years. And then before that, based in Iraq where they received support and training from Saddam Hussein.

This is a force that has had tanks, not just small arms, but fairly heavy weapons. and if they were able to infiltrate into Iran, the situation would look a lot more like Syria. And so the Iranian security state wants to squash this before it gets to that point. And then all the other Kurdish groups you mentioned and the groups in Balochistan would start to infiltrate. And that's when you would see like cities taken over.

That's something that I think is not fathomable right now. and is, but it's, it looms. The question of assassinating the leader, Ali Khomeini, is important right now because that might be the only thing that Trump and the U.S. could do to please the Israelis and to make any psychological impact

on the calculus of the Islamic Republic. and to potentially shatter its sense of confidence. I've been by the compound that he lives in. It's very humble. It's in the middle of Tehran. It's in central Tehran. And, you know, when you go by it,

you don't see lots of security around it. But Hamané is protected by his own army. It's like his own intelligence service and force that is considered the most effective within the realm of the IRGC. And they successfully hid him from the Israelis during the 12-day war. The Israelis wanted to kill him, and they failed.

And it's unclear if they would be able to get him. There's also a line of succession. He has a son, and there are other figures who could rise to the occasion. I mean, we saw eight of the major IRGC generals be killed in the first day of the 12-day war. the figures who designed the true promise operations. Important, people who are so important,

Bulgaria, for example, his brother was one of the major heroes who fell in the eight years' war with Iraq, and he is sort of like a legend within the culture of the Islamic Republic, and he was an important figure in any transition, political transition. He was killed,

and within eight hours, the leader replaced them all. And the war, and they got back on their feet and fought Israel to the point where Israel seemed to be ready to sue for peace by the 11th, 10th or 11th day. So Trump comes in and does the kind of climb, the strike that gives him a climb down.

And it might be that right now Trump is seeking some kind of climb down through a limited strike, which would be foolish, given the possibility that Iran could blanket U.S. military bases within its immediate periphery with short-range ballistic missiles and target Israel as well. And I think one of the main targets in Israel this time

would be Hakirya and the Mossad headquarters, which is located within that complex in North Tel Aviv, where it's the central node of Israel's defense and intelligence, military intelligence apparatus, and it's where Netanyahu hides out in his luxury bunker. And, you know, if anything is struck there, all hell breaks loose. So what I've heard kind of through the grapevine is that it wasn't just Trump who called off striking Iran.

there were elements within Israel's military intelligence apparatus that called it off for now because they did not think the moment was opportune possibly. And this makes sense to me based on what I know. Their missile defenses weren't ready for Iranian ballistic missile barrage. I should also say there's a lot of popular pressure in Iran within the principalist camp and the people who would be called hardliners,

and are very furious about what happened during the 12-day war for a preemptive strike on Israel, for Iran to actually preempt the inevitable and to take the initiative and just hit the Mossad base, hit Hakiria, hit Dimona, which, by the way, had an earthquake today, a mysterious earthquake,

because it looks like they're doing nuclear tests in Israel. So that's the kind of pressure that Iranian leadership is under right now from its own population. Hey guys, Scott here for Moondos artisan coffees. It's the Scott Horton Show flavored coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra. It's really good.

All you do is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee and it'll forge you on there to Mundo's artisan coffees. Get it. They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course. And so they're Moondos and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton's Show coffee is the number one bestselling coffee at Moondos Artisan coffees right now.

Just go again to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. And I got to jump off really soon. Okay, fair enough. I was just going to ask you. We'll have to catch up on Venezuela another time. But I wanted to just bring this up real quick at the end here that you hear so much of this hype about the evil, the guaranteed built-in, you know, Mao Zetong level evil of Ayatollah's regime there.

And they surely have a very flawed republic. We would all just obviously reject any much. monarchy or theocrat where religious leader claims to be the supreme leader of our country. And it sounds crazy to us, anyone would have a system like that. And yet on TV, all they talk about is that anything would be better than this. But one of the things that you brought up at the beginning was the risk of Iran falling apart, being balkanized or tearing itself apart in or being torn apart by foreign powers here in a Syrian-style catastrophe.

And I just wanted to, if you have a moment, to address the, the, the, risk of that if a real regime change was sought here? I think that was the recognition of even Marco Rubio and Venezuela was that one of the top Trump concerns is migration and they would destabilize Venezuela and cause another mass migration wave which would flood the U.S. Mexico border if they tried to install Maria Carina Machado because they would have to tear down the entire apparatus of the state. So what they did is they plucked out Maduro after crippling the Venezuelan military's communications systems

and it's whatever it had of radar. And then just left the Chavista structure and power with a gun to its head. Don't know if it'll stay stable, but for now they are stable and that's the ace card that the government of acting president Delci Rodriguez has to play is we guarantee stability.

so you have to deal with us. And that means that there will be negotiations with a group that the, every U.S. administration since at least Obama, but I would say going back to George W. Bush, has tried to delegitimize an overthrow and sanction. Iran is the same, it's the same thing in Iran. Iran, while it doesn't have the problem that Syria had

of a religious minority sect, the Alouites, controlling the presidency and trying to ensure a very diverse mosaic of sects and religious traditions under one flag, coexisting with a Sunni majority that was easily propagandized and recruited by al-Qaeda forces. Iran doesn't have that. It has a very large Kurdish minority. It has even an Arabic-speaking.

minority, there are, it is much more diverse than we think. It's a large, massive land. Some of the rural areas are experiencing drought right now. There are all sorts of crises that could unfold. And when you remove the apparatus of the Islamic Republic, which obviously has lots and lots of legitimacy among its constituency, then you don't really have anything to replace it and this giant nation of 80 to 90 million people begins to balkanize. And that's something that Israel would like to see, but it's not something Europe would like to see. It's not something I think the United States would like to see, but they're playing Israel's game and Israel's playing them like a fiddle. And they really have no plan beyond the

Islamic Republic. And Reza-Phalavi has no legitimacy inside Iran. It's not even me saying that. Trump himself said that just as he said. said that about Maria Karina Machado. They don't have a plan B for debathification 2.0. And just another point I wanted to make since you brought it up, the idea of Delta Force coming in and extracting the Supreme Leader, which would be even more symbolic than kidnapping Maduro as an act of humiliation to the Iranian people, to those who had to Shia Islam. I mean, you have to go there and talk to people in the street to really understand

how much so many of them love the leader and see him as someone who's above politics and who's a guide in their personal lives. He is sort of a religious guide for them. You can't, you just, You can't imagine what it would be like for them to see him kidnapped by violently by soldiers and what kind of reaction it would produce. But it doesn't seem possible because of Tehran's location. There's nowhere for those helicopters to refuel.

And so they would have to land somewhere outside Tehran and then travel in through other means. We saw in 1980 Operation Eagle Claw Carter sent the Delta forces to rescue the American embassy workers and intelligence operatives inside the U.S. embassy who were being held hostage. And the helicopters landed, and they all basically crashed in the desert of Tabas

because there was a massive sandstorm and suffered casualties. I saw the helicopter engine when I visited the former U.S. embassy in Tehran. It's outside on display next to a quote. by Ayatollah Khomeini that God sent the sands of Tabas to defeat the invaders Yeah, no surprise there

and yeah, I think I only brought that up as something that there's no way they're going to try that so they're more likely to just try to drop a bomb if anything. Yeah. Yeah, we got them. We got them and it's not going to,

it's not going to, I don't think that would produce the effect that they want, but. Yeah. I don't know what they want for. Yeah. All right, well, listen, I'll let me go. It's really sick, man. Like, that's our government right now.

They're just looking to bump off heads of state, like a mafia. They've become completely Israelified, and that's where we are right now. Yeah. I mean, as you said, when you said the new government of Venezuela, the new president of Venezuela with a gun to her head, he literally said, if she doesn't do what I say, Rodriguez, then she'll suffer a fate worse than Maduro, which is just an honest,

just straight up threat to murder her. Right after the Delta Force kidnapped, the last guy, worse than that is a bullet in the head. And that's pretty gangster, pretty hard to characterize that any other way. So yeah, you're right. It is.

It's completely disgusting. Anyway, I know you've got to go. Hang around just long enough to upload your side here, but thank you very much. Everybody, it's Max Blumenthal, editor at the Gray Zone. And follow him on Twitter at Max Boondall. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts and Roberts, Brokerge, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News.

Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fools Aaron, enough already, and my latest provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org. and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music, intro and outro videos by dissident media, audio mastering by Potsworth Media.

See y'all next time.