Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/29/23 James R. Webb on the Problems with RFK Jr.’s Views on Gaza

Episode Date: December 31, 2023

Scott is joined by veteran, journalist and former RFK Jr. policy advisor James R. Webb to discuss his resignation from the campaign. Kennedy has thrown his support not only behind the state of Israel but behind their indiscriminate tactics in Gaza. Scott and Webb talk about why this is morally abhorrent as well as politically and strategically foolish. Discussed on the show: “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza” (Washington Post) Jim Webb’s Resignation Letter Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem - MartyrMade James R. Webb is a veteran and journalist. He is also a former aide for Rand Paul and a former policy advisor for RFK Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign. Follow him on Twitter @SgtJRWebb This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, you guys, Scott Horton here to remind you that it's fun drive time at the Institute right now. We only do this twice a year, but it's got to be done. And I'm proud to do it, too. We've got an incredible crew of the best writers, authors, and podcasters in the Libertarian Movement. From Jim Bovard, Lori Calhoun, Tom Woods, and Ted Carpenter, to Keith Knight, Kyle Anzalone, Hunter Durenc, Connor Freeman, and all the rest of the guys. It's the best team around. We've published three books this year. Keith Knight's Voluntaryist Handbook, Lori Calhoun's questioning the COVID company line,

and Joseph Solis Mullins, the fake China threat. And here any day now, we will be publishing Thomas E. Woods' Diary of a Psychosis, Jim Bovard's Last Rights, and Keith Knight's latest, domestic imperialism. That makes 13 books so far, with more coming in the new year, including my new one, provoked how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine, which I know is already overlong and overdue, but I'm working on it, I promise. And which brings me to the point, we don't have a big glass office building in downtown Washington. The money we raise goes straight to payroll and book production costs, and that's about it.

The Libertarian Institute is the best bang for your buck in the movement. If you believe in what we're doing, please go to Libertarian Institute.org slash donate for detail. on how you can help keep us going into the new year, and the great kickbacks we offer as well. And we thank you for your support. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan,

and the brand new enough already time to end the war on terrorism and i've recorded more the 5,500 interviews since 2003 almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show aren't you guys on the line i got my friend Jim Webb. Welcome to show. Jim, how are you doing? Doing great, Scott. Thanks for having me. Hell you. Happy to be here. Listen, usually I do a big introduction, but I think I'd like to let you introduce yourself. Sure. Until recently, I was working on RFK Junior's campaign, but that is not exactly the seminal, professional event of my career. I started off as a journalist in 2004

embedded in Afghanistan with a whole bunch of different units, marine special operations, spent a month there doing an article for Parade Magazine, and that was on my summer break in college, and I liked it so much that about six months later I enlisted in the Marine Corps and ended up in the same Marine Battalion that I was covering in Afghanistan and actually in the same company. And from there, I fought as an infantryman in Iraq. I was in the Battle of and moved over into, you know, the private sector after that. I was, you know, trying to find my footing. I got into writing. Did a little bit of defense contracting and ended up working in the U.S. Senate for Senator Ram Paul as his military legislative assistant, worked on the

Senate Foreign Relations Committee for him for a little more than two years, and then went over to a couple think tanks after that while mixing in journalism at various outlets. And recently, I started working for Mr. Kennedy. He called me in August, and we had a great conversation about peace and withdrawing the U.S. empire or whittling it down. And, you know, the center focal point of that and the center focal point of my entire professional career outside of the military has been ending these forever wars, raining back in U.S. foreign policy for no other reason. reason, you know, then A, it's the right thing to do objectively, you know, how can you defend your nation if you are spread out across six, seven, eight hundred bases around the world with an all volunteer force? It's pretty limited in size. And also, you know, it's the waste,

the waste that has happened in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, you know, blood, treasure, and then also the energy of this country. It's a huge point, I think, you know, a huge part that's driven us to this point, you know, where you have Americans kind of at their throats over all kinds of different, all kinds of different things. You know, as you know, Scott and as you've written about a bunch of times, and I'm a long time admirer of yours. You know, war is about the worst thing the state can do, and you can really just pick a reason for it. Yeah, I know you know. And also, by the way, people might recognize that name. You're the senator's son. I want to talk about your dad a little bit that's correct um i'm glad you didn't intro me with any ccr uh team

sent it to be my uh fortunate son is kind of my calling card around my friends oh that's too better my skin but yeah you know what i had thought of that and also thought of the fact that other people must have already thought of that and i don't want to play credence on my show anyway go but no he's uh i am his son uh my dad was a u.s senator for one term from virginia uh he's the in case people out there don't know, he's the author of the new GI Bill. He's a decorated Marine from Vietnam. And we have very similar foreign policy views. I've been more recently called chip off the old block with my resignation. But yeah, and it's, I'm proud to be his son and, you know, proud to be carrying on the family tradition in a couple different ways,

although, you know, I don't think I'll ever be a senator. I don't really have a desire for it. I'd rather catch fish. Yeah. Well, that's kind of too bad, man. We'll have to have another conversation about that. But listen, for people who are too young to know, your father made a big splash in the W. Bush years because even though he's a Democrat, he's clearly a conservative Democrat and had been Ronald Reagan's secretary of the Navy. And as you said, had fought in Vietnam. And so he brought, well, and he's got the tough guy shaped chest. Right. And so he was able to get up there and say that like, listen, here's some anti-Iraq war stuff from a guy who has the credentials to say so as opposed to whatever some, you know, Nancy Pelosiite in the House of Representatives

who's never been in a fight. And so when he came, it was an important thing. It really was an important thing for American politics that even though he was a Democrat, in a sense, it was like a Republican going ahead and saying we shouldn't be doing this for a lot of people. They were able to hear it from him, you know, so it mattered a lot, and he created some waves. And then do I remember it right that this is just the story that he could have kept running for Senate and winning, but he just hated those people in that situation so bad. He just didn't want to live his life in the U.S. Senate and just quit for that reason. He just couldn't stand it anymore. Is that all?

Yeah, that's part of it. So to give you, to give a flavor. Because you got to figure once you're a senator, man, most senators want to keep being senators. See Diane Feinstein, you know? Yeah, exactly. It's a six years a long time. And, you know, his mentality is similar to mine. He wants to get stuff done.

And if he can't get, if he can't feel, if he doesn't feel he's being effective on an everyday basis, then, you know, it's on to the next thing. And having worked for two and a half years in the Senate, it's a, it's a tough place to really move the ball unless you're you're really on shall we say the establishments page pro war you know that's the easiest way to you know to not only get legislation passed but to build favors um across the board and to give you like a little additional flavor of like the perspective that he raised me with he opposed the Gulf War um was one of the few people opposed the Gulf War in September of 2001 or maybe it was October of 2001, he wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal identifying Iraq as the target for invasion, and he was against it. And it was actually the only piece that the Wall Street Journal has ever, ever rejected.

And, you know, I knew at the time, and I was in college when Iraq happened, and I knew at the time that, you know, it was a horrific strategic mistake. But then you have our family tradition where we can go back to the French and Indian War. And we have family members, direct family members who fought in every American conflict from there all the way forward to today. And it's never been a, it's never been a career. It's the, you know, kind of the citizen soldier model where people step forward, they serve because they feel it's the right thing to do and then go back to, you know, right thing to do on behalf of the country and then go back to their lives. You know, and he got to a point, you know, looking at the Senate, his mandate for running, I was deployed. actually to Iraq for most of his campaign, you know, he was running against the war. He'd switched parties over to the Dems because he felt it was the right thing to do.

He wanted to make an impact and carried that forward. And I guess I got a little bit of it today. You know, that's kind of been a driving force for me. I've worked for Republicans. I consider myself, you know, more libertarian than anything else. I worked for Mr. Kennedy when he was, he stepped forward as a Democrat and then switched over to being an independent. And I, you know, I don't care who you are out there as long as, you know, you want to accomplish the same things on behalf of the country, particularly around foreign policy. I don't think if left wing or right wing has, you know, any bearing on making a good decision, unless you're using the ideology to fuel what you're doing.

And that generally leads to bad decisions and disagreement. Yeah, well said. And going back real quick to your old dad on Iraq War I got two quotes from you. Thank you very much that people can read from his book that I quoted in enough already. One of them, again, absolutely authoritative source explicitly declaring that H.W. Bush refused to negotiate in good faith with Saddam Hussein once he was on the path to war. And then the other quote, I can paraphrase more closely, was, that the people who had supported the Vietnam War were looking for a war to fight. And the people had supported Vietnam were looking for a war to win. And so this was kind of almost like

the North and the South teaming up to go kill off all the Indians after the Civil War. You know, this is how we're going to make up again is do another thing and carry that out that way. you know it does go to show i think it is important stuff like that because it shows the absolute childish mentality of the people in charge here you know oh absolutely they're just absolutely and i think there's a pretty good argument that you know that that coming together of the the anti-war left which then became uh the neo-conservative movement yeah so it was a pretty

bad tactical decision for somebody up there um i mean because One of the things that sticks out to me about the Gulf War was Schwarzkopf, and the idea or the statement that going into Baghdad would do nothing but create a long-term insurgency that we could not solve. So that was deliberately avoided. Regardless of all the other pieces of the war, that's the big piece that stands out to me, because these same people who are largely in place decided to, you know, take that to the nth degree about 10 years later. and, you know, they changed the framing a little bit from this is going to be a quagmire and, you know, a long-term insurgency that's going to be sparked off to telling everybody they're going to be welcome with flowers when they got there, which is a pretty broad, logical leap. All right, enough Barry in the lead. Tell us, Jim. Oh, yeah.

You quit the Kennedy campaign. Why? So, quite simply, I disagreed with the campaigns. perspective on the war in Gaza and my final straw. And the letter is public. It was personal communication between me and the candidate. I felt the need to put it out there because I have my own reputation. And, you know, it's not a campaign communication. So, you know, it's just, this is, this is my feeling to him on my way up the door. But the situation in Gaza with the way that the IDF is conducting this conflict, you know, as a military man, is completely. completely unacceptable. And I'm not here to armchair quarterback, you know, any kind of individual

decisions, but you look at the number of munitions, the types of munitions, the displaced civilians. And, you know, this is not an operation that the Department of Defense here would sanction. It is something way beyond the pale. And really, the final red line for me was when, when Mr. Kennedy, unfortunately, went on breaking points and drew a moral equivalency between the conduct of the IDF and the US military in Iraq by saying that we had engaged in collective punishment in Iraq for 10 years. And that is simply just not true. There was, first of all, collective punishment is a policy. You know, you have to deliberately engage in efforts to deliberately punish the civilian population, you know, as military units. And there's a lot of ways

you can do that primarily by depriving them of housing, you know, or just wanton violence, indiscriminate firing. You know, you're not, you just don't care. The inverse was my experience in Iraq. I fought in the Battle of Armadi in 2006, 2007. It was some of the most intense urban combat of that war outside of Fallujah. And we, I think, you know, back of the napkin math here, I've been trying to figure this out for, you know, a couple of weeks, like how many air strikes, because of my entire battalion call in while we were there and talking to a lot of my friends, the best number we can come up with is about a half dozen. That doesn't mean we weren't calling.

We weren't requesting indirect fire support or air support or the types of things that could really bail us out when we were under fire, but they were denied always for civilian considerations. And that's the kind of extent that is, you know, the extent of the restrictions on the guys on the ground that was apparent from Iraq all the way through Afghanistan, but we're going to talk about specifically about Iraq here, like where we had, you know, we couldn't even use particular types of small arms munitions. They were off limits because they might go through buildings. And, you know, it's, this is not me complaining. You know, it's, it definitely made things more stressful. It caused our unit and other units to take casualties on, you know, on behalf of the civilians. You know,

That's quite the opposite of collective punishment. But when you look at how you need to operate in these environments, you know, it's counterinsurgency 101, you know, is to, you have to find a way to separate the enemy from the population. You know, and there's, you can, you can say that's, hey, we got to, you know, physically separate them. But the biggest point is letting the people know that they, like the people, that they are not the enemy. there are there are people amongst them who are and you know it is on you like if you want to get something done to ensure that you are not causing them undue harm you know because which by the way look I mean the point being beside the fact that that's ridiculous and never works anyway just as it didn't work in Iraq or Afghanistan at least it means that you're trying to limit the civilian

in casualties here. You're not going in and just leveling the place. But so let me ask you a little bit about some of the worst examples, though, and I already know the answer, but what about Fallujah in March and in November of 2004? And what about Mosul in Raqa in 2017 and, well, 1617? Because those air wars, we had special operations on the ground with laser pointers. and we had massive bombing campaigns that are at least. And, you know, Afghanistan, there was a hell of an air war.

It's much more pinprick, but a lot less fighting on the ground and a lot more just killing people from the air, especially during the Trump years. So there's no cities to level in the way that they're doing to Gaza City. And, you know, right now, exactly. But, and I don't know if you saw, but the Washington Post had a big write-up of this last week. doing the comparison. But can you talk a little bit about that? Because those would be the most excessive times of air power under Bush, Obama, and Trump. Right. Well, so the, I wasn't in Fallujah, but what I can tell you, you know, about the, the way that the Marine Corps and the Army eventually cleared that city was, you know, it was, you can, you can maybe try to draw, you know, some sort of

moral equivalency between the two. The first point is that, you know, the city of Fallujah was, it was cordoned off. You know, that will look familiar to some people. But, you know, we dropped leaflets and issued warnings for, I believe, weeks, weeks and weeks and weeks before anything happened. And also the city itself was a little bit, it had already tilted very hard over towards the insurgency. It was, you know, it was very difficult for U.S. troops to enter it. You know, and what were our efforts perfect there? No, but a tremendous amount was done on the front end to reduce encountering civilians

on the way through. Additionally, I'd be interested to see the stat on this, but it would shock me. It would absolutely shock me if you totaled up all the air that was used in the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, you know, if it came anywhere close to what the IDF is used since October 7th. I would argue with it absolutely does not. It doesn't. It doesn't. You're right. And look, even Raqa and Mosul at the end of Iraq War III as well fall far short of what's happening here. And the Washington Post has a detailed analysis of, you know, all of this that they ran.

I'm sorry. Let me see here. Jim, I have the tab, the Washington Post here. Here it is. Israel has waged one of this century's most destructive wars in Gaza. that's what it's called and the date on it is December the 23rd

for anyone who wants to look at that and even if you get stuck behind the paywall everybody you just go to archive.is and you can get past any paywall in the world the post the times the journal or anything else even the financial times the economist or all of those it works great

you know you got to know your enemy but they actually did a decent job on this and and showed all the bomb craters and this that and the other thing and this just completely blows america's air war even against mosul and rocket completely out of the water and those people did have somewhere to go unlike the poor people of the gaza strip and and the rules of engagement here we know from

this article in 972 magazine and then the follow-up and the guardian that the rules of engagement are to hit power targets meaning civilians and they say they know good and well when they hit a house that has children in it they did that on purpose they knew there was a kid in there and they decided they didn't care and they did it anyway every time that happens they know exactly what's going on there this is like you know an eight-year-old with a ant pile and a magnifying glass they got total surveillance over the place total control over the place they know every house every address where everyone lives they talk about this is like if um hamas somehow had guided rockets they were able to follow each idf soldier when he went home for the weekend and then kill him and his

family in their home back in Tel Aviv or wherever, you know, would be what they're doing and killing them all, killing journalists and explicitly saying, yes, we're killing journalists and their families. Yes, we're killing doctors. Yes, we're blowing up universities. Yes, we're blowing up and destroying hospitals because we want to make the place completely unlivable and force the people out. I don't remember that being Barack Obama's policy in Fallujah. Sorry, not to cut the guy any slack because what he or pardon me i meant to say mosul not to cut the guy any slack because it was brutal as hell and you know trump finished it for him um but it is not the same as this and you know when i read your resignation note there um which people can find that on my twitter account i guess

i'll republish it at the institute on the blog or something um uh i was reminded of of an argument that martyr made got in which he wouldn't in a rock or two he's navy but he's He knows a lot about it and he's Jocko's good friend and he was a seal in, I believe, the Battle of Vermont, along with you. Yeah, Jocko is there. We overlapped very briefly. He was there. His deployment was right before mine.

So, uh, he, Daryl Cooper knows a thing or two about a thing or two. I'd say that. And, and, uh, I remember now, but I'll leave out the name of his, uh, the guy he was arguing with because it's beside the point. But the point being that he was saying, no, no, no, don't you. compare and he this guy was justifying what Israel's doing in Gaza saying well this is how America fought our wars in the terror wars and he says oh no we didn't and it ain't right for you to dishonor our guys that way and there are a lot of guys who look all the wars this shouldn't

happen at all and there are a lot of people on all different ranks and services who committed war crimes in those wars there's no question about that but it's not the same as saying this was the standing policy that all our soldiers and Marines followed was to go around blowing up entire neighborhoods and massacring families in their homes, deliberately targeting and killing journalists. Okay, that might have happened a few times, but deliberately targeting and killing journalists and their families and this kind of thing. This is Israeli doctrine. This is not even at the very height of the worst time of Iraq War II in 2006 or 2007, where they doing business like this.

No, Scott, no, it's it's it's the polar opposite. And there's, uh, there's two things to, you know, one under international law, which is very, very, you know, very clear and it governs the way that the U.S. military operates. And it, that, that is proportionality. Um, you know, you can boil this all the way down to if you have, you know, not even civilians, one or two guys firing a tooth in AK, um, technically under international law, it's wrong to hit them with a 2,000 pound bomb.

because that lacks proportion. Within that, also, you know, when you have an incredibly, shall we say, deep bench of munitions when you are the superior power, you know, under those same governing statutes, you have an added responsibility to rein in your firepower. You know, it's to put it a little anecdotally here, like, you know, if you've got a building, like you're saying they know, has kids in it, the answer is not well. there's kids there, we're still going to do it because we have to, because that's no longer, you know, a protected civilian structure. It's quite the opposite. It's like, okay, well, you can't

hit it with a bomb. So you are the superior force. Figure it out. You know, figure out a way to go get those guys. You know, you have a, you have a moral obligation and a legal obligation to ensure that the people in between you and the people trying to kill you are not harmed because they had nothing to do with it. You know, and that is, that is the law of the land. And it's also like an outlook you should have as a combatant. Well, there's a direct comparison in there as your marine infantry on foot and in a Humvee driving around out there and this kind of thing, right? So there's a direct comparison to you on the ground in Ramadi and the IDF on the ground in Gaza in the terms of slightly built up concrete terrain, urban terrain around you, going through, looking for

essentially civilian slash armed insurgent fighters, melting and living among the population because that's who's resisting you as the population. So almost a direct comparison there. So you can really see the contrast. Well, talk about exactly how it was. What were your rules when you're out there and getting shot at surrounded by all this built-up terrain full of civilians? So there's two components to this.

one is positive ID. You had to, you had to witness somebody engaging in a hostile act or hostile intent, you know, like, say, pointing a rifle at you before you could engage. You had to know know the target and what lies beyond it. The second piece of this, you know, is when you have at least decent relations with a civilian population, it makes your job not only easier, but it makes you safer. You know, a number of times before, say, my platoon was engaged. or hit an IED or whatever it was, you know, we'd be moving through an area and there would be civilians around us, kind of trying to ignore us, milling about their business, like, you know, like a bunch of white guys with, you know, tan helmets wasn't suddenly mixed

into their, you know, into their Middle Eastern city. But the second they started to clear out, you knew trouble was coming. Sometimes I'd even tip you off. But, you know, the, they know where the insurgents are or they did you know they know where the bad guys are in gaza um you know they know where hamas is and if the relations were better just like you know our relations in iraq you know you kind of have a little bit of a you have a window before you get attacked to know it's going to happen um you turn a corner on an empty street that's normally packed something bad's probably going on there and the flip side of this is i'm sure you read about um the idf shooting three of their own guys who yeah yeah and so i can stay say straight up with 100% confidence something like

that i don't think would ever happen in the u.s military because of positive iD um people waving white flags uh without shirts on you know in the marine corps what we would have done is you know you make them stop like they just stop and if they have clothing on show you their clothing like pull up their shirt, you know, open their jacket, whatever it is. And then you confirm that this guy, it's pretty hard to conceal, you know, a bomb on you, to be quite frank, unless, I mean, it's been a while since I've been in the game, so maybe their technology has gotten a lot better. That's a bad joke. But the, you can tell. And, you know, if you can't tell, then you have these people approaching you, I don't care who they are, then it's your job to go out and grab them

and ask them what they're doing. You don't shoot them unless there is a reason, you know, that reason being a bomb on their person or a weapon. And to me, this illuminates their ROE at the individual level to a pretty high degree. They're shooting first. They're asking questions later. And, you know, that might be good, you know, for a conventional war, say on the eastern front of World War II or what's going on in Ukraine right now or World War I where you have uniformed sides back and forth. But even if somebody, but even in those environments, if somebody's surrendering with a white flag and these were their own people, then you, you don't engage them. You just don't do it. Even if that means, you know, you put your guys at risk for, you know, for something else.

And if you've got, you know, the IDF, which you do have, running around with that kind of policy in a built up area, it's no wonder the civilian casualties are at 20,000 dead. It's a, it's, it's, It's grotesque as, you know, for me to think about because, you know, you go into these environments, you fight in a war, you see really terrible things. And the one, I guess, driving force, at least in my head while I was there, is, you know, don't do anything to make it worse. It's already bad. You know, nothing, few things in life are worse than seeing a dead civilian in that environment. And I'll give you a little story about, you know, one of one of my personal experiences, you know, it was the, it was a time I did not pull the trigger. And I am happy to this day, I never did it. And, you know, it had to do with positive ID.

My platoon, it was a mounted platoon, moved up right outside of the Suk area in Ramadi, towards the end of our deployment. And we took some fire and one of my fellow Marines ended up killing a guy. Like about 20 or 30 yards in front of us, the guy was armed. We were in contact. And so immediately what we did is we stopped and set up a cordon. And where my team was set up was on the outside and you'd understand contextually with the environment, we've been there long enough to know where different roads went and the road that was directly in front of me coming out of one part of the city.

going into this suck was kind of a major traffic route for civilian foot traffic. And we had a guy who was wearing a wool jacket, look like a dark brown wool sport coat with a hat on. Mind you, the air temperature is probably 85 degrees. He's dressed like he's walking around Central Park in New York City during Christmas. And, you know, chatter on the radio.

We've got a potential, you know, suicide, suicide bomber coming through our line. lines, stop him and figure it out. I stepped out and started yelling I'm in Arabic to stop or I was going to shoot him, show me his hands, et cetera, et cetera. And he just glared at me and kept walking. And I looked through my, I looked through my acog at him, looked through my optic. And real quickly saw that this guy had one arm and a look on his face of absolute pure hate and was probably at the time in his mid-40s or 50s. And, you know, it took like two or three steps right at me and then just pivoted and went

directly into the suck. And I let him go. And part of the, like, part of the calculus was of a sudden, like, I see this guy coming at me. And it's, you know, he reminds me of, you know, maybe this guy was in the Republican Guard in 1990. Maybe he was in there, maybe he was an Iraqi, you know, military officer during, uh, during our initial invasion. And we took his arm already, you know, and I could, you know, under the rules of engagement, it would have been if he could have shot him. But at the same time, the fact that I let him go, you know, is one of those things that to this day, it makes you feel better about the experience. It's something you don't have to carry, you know, because I don't know, I don't know one person who's, you know, been party to

civilian casualties overseas that doesn't think about that, you know, at least intermittently, not constantly for the rest of their life. So what the IDF is doing in, you know, in Gaza, at a minimum is, is going to haunt these, the individuals for a very long time. You know, and that's before you get to the legality of it and start addressing just the disgusting nature of the larger policy. Yeah. Hey, you guys.

Did you know that I don't just write books? I publish them. Well, the Institute does, and I'm the director. So, yeah. 13 of them now, including my four. We published five more in 2023. Lori Calhoun and Tom Woods books about the COVID regime, Joe Solis Mullen on the fake China threat,

Jim Bovard's latest, last rights, and our managing editor Keith Knight's domestic imperialism. And we've got more great titles coming in 2024. Check them out at Libertarian Institute.org slash books and help support our anti-government efforts at Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And thank you. Hey, y'all, Scott here.

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Call Tim Fry and the guys at 800-874-9760. That's 800-874-9760, or check them out at r-rbi.co. That's r-rbi.co. You'll be glad you did. To be clear here, by the time we're recording this at the end of December, it's the 29th of December, 2003, it could not be more clear that despite all the propaganda about hunting Hamas, that all the other statements that what they're really doing is cleansing the Gaza Strip of the Palestinian population is what is going on here. And that is clearly the policy. Netanyahu has said he expects other nations to absorb his words, the population here.

and they have been the people of Palestine have been referred to over and over and over again by prominent officials clearly representing including former ones too but very close to the government and including a government intelligence report that was leaked and the rest where they have said one they're cleansing the people but in fact really one that's two one they're not people they're all terrorists they're all animals they're all Nazis. They're all enemies. And we're going to treat them not like Valuja or Mosul or Raqa. We're going to do them like Dresden and Hamburg and Tokyo. They're talking about the Warsaw Ghetto. Yeah. As though it's the Third Reich, which everybody knows. Have you ever read Kurt Vonnegut? Dresden

is one of the most horrific sins that the American government ever committed. Tokyo, 100,000 people burned to death in the night, jump in the river with their children and then boil the death. And Hiroshima and Nagasaki

explicitly, according to credible hearsay, from the Biden government, Netanyahu himself invoked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, thanks to Truman, there's now no limit on how many innocent civilians can be killed if they are the enemies of the Israeli state, as defined by the Israeli state, including men, women, and children, and babies and grandparents. And they've said it over and over again, and that's the policy that they're engaging in. So now I'm going to spare everyone listening to this episode my opinions and things that I think and have to say about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

And I don't want to do that to you. But I do want for you to talk about what the hell is the matter with this guy and that it went so far that instead of deciding that you wanted to stay and try to get him good on this and other things, that you decided it wasn't worth it to try. anymore so so Scott so the to go all the way back um you know to what you're saying it is it is the policy of the of the Israeli government to to engage in these activities um however like I I would disagree in the in the only fact that it can be checked it can be stopped and that is because the United States is the senior partner in this relationship. And it's incumbent on us to do something about it, you know, to act like, you know, we are the senior partner to understand the regional and global ramifications of, of what's

happening every single day. And very early on, which that opportunity has been missed, to put the breaks on this. You know, Hamas, nobody, Hamas is a terrible organization. You know, it's, They've done some really messed up stuff to both the Israelis and their own people. You know, the people within Hamas who planned October 7th or are engaged in, you know, active hostilities or whatever, they know they're putting themselves on the line to be killed. But, you know, what I was advocating for from the jump, you know, and I still hope someone can can rein all this in and put us on a correct trajectory. trajectory, you know, was, no, you do, you do not view the Palestinian people as the enemy. I have, I have a lot of Palestinian friends. I went to a high school where our quarterback was Palestinian, you know, the Awa Dala brothers. I played wide receiver with them in Virginia. You know, my barber was Palestinian. I had a Palestinian guy in, in my company in the Marine Corps, you know, and individually, these are good people, you know, and every, every single war that we've engaged in, good people, you know, are held under the thumb of, you know, shall we say bad people? That sounds a little bit too simplistic.

And if we had applied, you know, if we had urged the Israelis and effectively demanded that they adopt a very narrow way of doing this, that's very appropriate for, you know, what they're doing is counterterrorism. It's not, it's not conventional war. It's not supposed to be conventional war because the Israelis, or pardon me,

the Palestinians don't have a state. They don't have a military. You know, how can you justify the use of an entire armored division against a civilian population that doesn't have any means to defend itself? It's not even an insurgent force left over from a state. You know, these are people doing it on the fly. You know, and then we have, you know, the United States counterterrorism program for all its flaws is designed to be very narrow and target the people who are in charge of these networks. And my recommendation, you know, from day one, and it remains today, it is for somebody to get up there. And at the time, I was hoping it was going to be Mr. Kennedy to say, hey, you know, Hamas is a, it's a, you know, they've lost their legitimacy. Um, it, they engage in large scale terrorist activities. You know, nobody likes that. But the people who have done this, you know, Israel has the right to defend themselves. And they are, they're coming for you. It might be today, tomorrow, 10 years from now. You know, if you were, if you were, if,

you were party to killing civilians on the other side, we're going to find you. And quite frankly, they have the best intelligence agency in the world. They were killing Nazis. Like, are they still killing Nazis? You know, they can find whomever they want. They can do whatever they want, you know. And allowing them to run unchecked through Gaza, killing scores, if not tens of thousands of civilians while they're doing this, you know, doesn't do the United States any favors. It is, it does nothing for the interest of the American people. If you want to stretch it out and make an argument, you know, is this good even for the American empire? Like, no, it's not because you're putting our, you're putting the U.S. on the more, not only the morally wrong side of one of

the seminal arguments of our time, but you're galvanizing the entire. region against us. And it's going to be really ironic, Scott, when all of a sudden the militias in Iraq that we train, turn around and start, you know, really, really coming after their former trainers on the ground there over this issue. And every single day that this goes on, we're a step closer and a step closer. And eventually at a point, it became clear that, you know, for whatever reason, there's a, there's a, there's a good people who work in the campaign. There's a, there's good people inside there who shared the same opinions as me and we tried to drive the ball as far as we could and it became clear that was not happening and you know on a personal level i can't be partied for that

it's uh i wake up every morning i've got a two year old and you know you see the images of these kids being killed and or maimed or hurt or trapped or their parents are dead and for a split second i think you know you can't help but do it it's like that's my daughter in that video is she's thinking about me or is that is this me watching her i i can't you know it's a it's it's a highly emotional subject um and through that vein i couldn't support you know the furthering of this policy or at worst justifying it and drawing a uh a moral parallel you know moral justification because it's the way we quote unquote act interact because that's false and you know it's uh it's very unfortunate i uh I had a tremendous amount.

I still have respect for Mr. Kennedy, you know, but I had a tremendous hope for his campaign. And this is, this is the same as, you know, Hillary Clinton, but worse in terms of his perspective. Well, look, I mean, what he's saying makes no sense whatsoever. You know, why are you picking on Israel? I didn't hear you saying anything when America was bomb in Iraq. He said that to Crystal Ball, but as representative of the progressive left, but the progressive left was against the Iraq war, the entire time. I mean, not the new republic liberals in D.C. and whatever, but out in the country. And by the way, the House of Representatives under Pelosi voted against the war. No, that's not right.

Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic majority, pardon me, the majority of Democrats under Nancy Pelosi voted against the war, but the Republicans controlled the House. So that's why it passed. But so maybe it was safe for them to oppose it, but still they did. Whereas the Senate, Democrats went and all cheered for it, led by Joe Biden, of course. Yep. But anyways, the thing is for him to say that whatever America did in Iraq on its, the worst days of Iraq War II or Iraq War III, something that is universally condemned by the entire right as well now as something we should have never done, as somehow being the justification. for what Israel is doing when they're going

a hundred times as far the whole thing is just stupid you know sorry I'm only going to pick on them a little bit I'll leave the rest out but it started with he's got all this great stuff about Ukraine to say sounds like he read something

I wrote or something that somebody wrote that had read what I wrote or something I don't know someone who's paying attention to the same things I was paying attention to very closely but then it became real clear all of a sudden didn't it? They're like oh I get it the way he mixes up quotes and stuff that he's really a dilettante and he really doesn't know

this stuff at first it sounded like he knows this stuff but then he was like george kennin said that you better not bring ukraine into nato and like no no no dude you don't even you got all your talking points confused like john mccain only on the other side but yeah and then well anyway i'll stop right there because i got too much but um i think maybe that's just the core of it all that the guy's too lazy to know enough to be really good on anything? Well, I'm trying to cut him some slack, actually. You know what? I wrote him that memo trying to explain this situation in Israel-Palestine to him

before this happened back last spring. My presumption was he doesn't understand what's going on there at all. He's looking at it like, oh, my dad stood with Israel when they fought the 67 war against three nation states at the same time. And, but this ain't that. This is something else entirely. This is like Israel represents three nation states ganging up on the tiny little Gaza Strip, for example.

If you want to use the same kind of analogy, you've got to flip the script around of who's, you know, attacking, well, or at least who's surrounding who we all know what really happened with this start of the 67 war. But anyway, for sake of his argument, that this isn't that, man. this is apartheid this is occupation this is picking on the indians who already lost living on their

reservation and you can't you know you can't talk about they have the right to have aspirations someday of something they're human beings with rights or they ain't and what the hell are we doing here and then he didn't respond to that at all and then it turns out that he either already did know the situation or he didn't even read that thing or didn't care to want to learn anything about it I know he turned down the opportunity to talk to Max Blumenthal about it. And then there was the debate with Crystal Ball, you know, the interview with Crystal Ball there. But I don't know. It seems like he made a decision sort of like, no matter what, like your little brother is in a fist fight.

Like, no matter what, you're on his side or like he's just that bound to it. It doesn't matter what fact you can come up with, how many pictures of people. people's hands sticking out from under the rubble that you can show him he isn't going to ever care yeah it's uh the i think uh the way i rationalize it in in my head at least is that uh it's a very complicated part of the world you know it's a very complicated subject you know that uh you know folks like you and you and me have for whatever reason, you know, spent a very disproportionate amount of time trying to understand U.S. involvement in just the greater spider web that is, you know, the region generally. And I mean, I don't know one school in the U.S. outside of a college where you take a, like a particularly

specific course that will teach you about Zionism or the Palestinian, you know, quest for statehood or examine this in depth enough so you can see all the fault lines and quite frankly, Martyr-made does a fantastic job weighing that out there. Daryl just broke that down. It was like intellectual candy

for a couple weeks for me. You know, and I was also surprised that he had the, you know, the balls to do that. You know, my hat's off to him.

Yeah. No, don't be surprised about that. He's a great guy, man. And you know what? As long as you mentioned it, I want to say it too.

I listen that thing and I'll listen to it again someday. I listen to the whole thing, and including now the addendum that goes up to the invasion of Lebanon and maybe even the end of Lebanon, I forget now. But anyway, I learned so much from that thing.

And the best thing about it, and I say this, like with the best of intentions, of course, is that I'm so jealous of him because I think that he is just the greatest, you know, I don't know, broadcaster, podcaster. uh in the way that he does that i'm just so jealous of his skill in being able you can tell i guess sort of he's essentially rummaging through his notes as he's reading this he's not reading a script he's going off his notes and then he's just explaining it and he's just so damn good and his

uh his temperament and his uh cadence and whatever the hell i don't know it's magic it's perfect yeah it's Perfect. Anyone listened out, be like, man, I love this guy. You know what? If I want somebody to tell me about the history of Zionism in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and the 50s, this is the guy I want to hear it from. Right now, bring it. It's so damn good. It is just, and I, like in that funny, don't really mean it way. I hate him for it. Because damn it, 6,000 interviews is nothing. I'd done 15,000 shows, you know? And I ain't near as good as him at all. That's how good it is. And I only say that as a recommendation, not that I mean it at all. Well, you're pretty good, Scott. So I think you're awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, but that's the point. Everybody really needs to listen to that. It's called Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem by Daryl Cooper. Martyr Made is his name on Twitter and his podcast, his great podcast, his substack and all that. As long as we're talking about all that. anyway yeah so to get back to this the other piece of this you know it's uh that it is complicated um but at the same time like we've been directly involved in the region in a state of war for more than 20 years and the the relationship between palestine and palestine people and the Israelis

is the underpinning piece of all of this you know and it it doesn't mean that you, you know, you support Hamas if you, if you, if you accept that or, you know, you're, you're anti-Semitic or whatever, you know, it's that without that situation resolved, you know, Israel is going to be a garrison state in perpetuity, perpetually, forever. And as long as they're a garrison state, guess who is the guarantor? It's us, you know, and as long as we're guaranteeing their security and they're a garrison state having, you know, forced to essentially survive based off of military operations, it's going to raise tensions, you know, it's going to, it's going to make sure that we have a large military presence

in the region, which we've kind of accepted at this point. You know, I remember when we were leaving Iraq, was it 13 years ago. Like, you know, we're still there. Um, you know, and it doesn't do anything to further anything for the United States itself. You know, you, we placed these guys, our occupying forces still in Iraq and Syria are sitting static in a region where not only they completely outnumbered, but B, not really doing a whole heck of a lot other than maintaining our presence, but see, you know, as we continue to guarantee the security of the Israeli state and quite frankly, you know, provide a screen for them with our carrier groups off the coast to do whatever they want to do, then we're going to have conflict.

You know, we're going to irritate any number of powers in the region, ranging from Turkey who's in NATO to the Saudi Arabians to obviously Iran. You know, even the Jordanians and the Egyptians are not happy about what's going on in Gaza right now. You know, you could, you could, you could, in a heartbeat, if, you know, the powers in the region got together, you know, powers, You want to call them powers, but the numerically superior force in the region got together and said, hey, we've had enough of this and we don't care if the U.S. smacks us. We're going to put a stop to it. You know, what next? Are we going to throw the Marines in off the coast into Lebanon? That seems like a pretty terrible idea. You know, are we willing to, I mean, there's talk about it right now about bombing Iran over this. Like, is that really something that is a good idea? And the degree of propaganda that's coming out about, you know, the need for the IDF to keep doing what they're doing, you know, without really an explained solution for the situation other than to kill all of Hamas and effectively displaced the entire population, you know, it's not, it's not taking us anywhere productive. And my worry, you know, is that we're heading, like, I thought, I thought Ukraine was going to be the spark for World War III just based on, you know, the collision of major powers. But this is, uh, this, this looks like, you know, more like 1914 than anything else, um, you know, and it's, it's pretty scary.

Yeah, it is. So listen, I'm proud of you for taking the risk. I think you probably knew a little bit of what you were getting into with this, but I'm really proud of you that you tried to influence this guy and for all the good that you did. And it was definitely worth a chance. And I'm also proud of you for throwing in the, the towel and disgust and quitting and no longer, you know, uh, letting yourself be identified with his horrible takes on this, his unconditional support for Israel. It's, it's a real tragedy. I think I represent a lot of people who had a lot of hope for this guy. Not that he was a libertarian. Hell, I met him once and I told him, don't be too libertarian now, man, you know, you're a liberal. Remember, just emphasize welfare or something. Make sure people don't, you know, you don't want to be too good on everything people hate that you know that was the joke but uh so i think i represent and i saw a speech at porkfest we said a lot of really great stuff about you know what

they knew about the germ and when and how they manipulated all the censorship and all of this stuff he had all this important stuff to say and then it isn't just disagreement about an issue right like this shows a level of moral cowardice or whatever you want to say character defect on his part that is just devastating to any other thing someone on twitter to me said today well here he is saying something right about armenia and Azerbaijan right you know in regards to nagorno karabok i don't know if he even knows what that really is or what but probably not thing is it just false flat means nothing to me it'd be like if bill clinton said something good about Nagorno-Karbach. So what? It's all his fault anyway, or it would be if he was in that place. And he doesn't really give a damn. I know he doesn't. And people were joking immediately on Twitter. Oh, he's good on Azerbaijan all of a sudden, right? Nobody tell him that Israel backs Azerbaijan, because you'll see him, of course, flip-flop immediately. See, somehow, the servant of the lobby of a foreign power. It clearly comes first. That's everyone's impression of him now.

It's toll sell out. Oh, you know what? Here's something to bring up right as we before we go as long as I'm rambling and saying things here man sure here i got a note from a guy right when we were going on the air hi scott and the folks at antiwar dot com i'm a u.s marine corps veteran former leader of iraq veterans against the war long time admirer etc inspired by your coverage of james webb's resignation letter from the rfk campaign i wrote this letter to a friend of mine who who was a close advisor to RFK, think parentheses, in the hopes that he would forward it on. And it's another note, along the lines of your same note,

that he's now asking me to republish as an open letter, which I'll have to read it a little more carefully. I scanned it real quick before we went on the air. So I'll have to see, but I think I probably will run it. And he's essentially agreeing with you that, like, man, you shouldn't be misconstruing the way America fought the Iraq War and overall excess death rates with people directly killed by Americans in combat. These are different questions, this kind of thing.

And he also says in the same way that, well, he is right to say, our nations blindly on critical support of Israel represents a commitment to a forever war that undermines your credibility in the eyes of many. Who? Maybe not voters. This is not the issue most people will vote for you on, It is the issue on which the hyper-politically aware young people and media influencers who animate the volunteer base and who will influence the voters you need will make their judgments on how to allocate their passions and resources. It's a very polite way of just explaining that, and he says elsewhere, it's a little redundant because he said earlier, too, that, yes, here, Jim is an avatar of your volunteer champions. so never mind the mass of the voters who's going to actually get the work done for you

and there are so many people who would be your guys who are never going to show up for day one you already drove them away and you're blowing it but you know what isn't this the problem with the democrats right now jim is they got voters and then they got donors and so whose side are you on pretty much you know and i think i think i think he's uh I think he's totally correct, you know, it's, this is an issue that I've been working for a long time. And I'm at the, you know, this, this interesting point where, you know, I work very heavily in foreign and defense policy. But, you know, my heart and my head, for lack of better term, is, you know, kind of tied into veterans because these are my peers. You know, I've, and I've, I've handled a VA portfolio for, for a senator.

And, you know, at the same time, like the everyday, like my everyday peer group is still the guys I served in or served with. And, you know, no matter how, you know, pro-Bush or pro-war they were back in 2004, 2005, 2006, you know, all you got to do is give somebody a little dose of combat and it changes, you know, their entire perspective. You know, it's, it's, and this was the draw to Kennedy is he seemed to understand. this. He, uh, he, uh, he was out there on a, uh, an anti-war platform to, you know, reign in the empire. Um, and for, uh, you know, on a personal level, for the guys that I know who have served in these wars, like you serve for six, seven, eight years. You're gone for um, if you're lucky. It's really tough. You know, you, you end up sacrificing a ton of your personal life, your physical health, your mental health, um, you know, impacts your kids,

when you can start a family. It impacts, you know, it impacts the rest of your life. So it's got to be for a really good reason. And people have come to realize that, you know, what we've been doing is, you know, A, like the reasons weren't great. You know, B, everybody, everybody I know accepted that we needed to leave Afghanistan. However, the way it was done was pretty humiliating to the people who, who serve there. You know, it left people feeling pretty bad about the whole experience. And it's, you know, so that you're driving them, you know, they're naturally gravitating towards, you know, someone who will change this, who won't let those kinds of things happen again. And most importantly, you know, who will, if the U.S. needs to use force,

it's going to be done specifically in the interest of the American people. Because at the cost that the individuals, you know, going to implement that policy are going to incur along the way. Like, you know, we've, me and my peers, we've done the math. We've been, you know, we've been the numerals in the equation. And to see a flip like this, and I don't think he truly believes that his stance on Gaza is pro war. But, you know, it's kind of, it's kind of like pulling the mask, you know, off of, off of the villain at the end of Scooby-Doo. You know, you actually see, you actually see where he's at, whether he knows it or not. And I wish you would have corrected it because this guy's, this guy's totally correct.

You know, the people I've been talking to were motivated by that message. And over time, they were harder and harder to reach on the phone until they were totally gone. So I'll be interested to see if he can turn Azerbaijan into a major issue. But, I mean, quite frankly, man, like, I don't think like that would have been a major issue for Bill Clinton. You know, if you decided to intervene in Azerbaijan or wherever else over there, you know, instead of going into, into Bosnia and Kosovo it wouldn't have it wouldn't have you been a foreign policy blip back that so yeah Bill Clinton supported the British coup in Azerbaijan in 1993 and the dictatorship in the country ever since you know for the rest of his presidency there and I don't know if

he ever said a word in favor of the poor Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh but that's over now Joe Biden sat there and did nothing oh he knows if his advisors even told him a thing as they finally cleansed that place earlier this year at the end of last summer they forced march the last few hundred thousand people out of there um yeah and and who knows if if uh if kennedy knows the first thing about that but um you know the thing is what the hell that's my show it's the end of the year first of all roger water says something good about ukraine and kennedy He goes, yeah, man, see what Roger Waters said? Good old Roger Waters.

And the Israel lobby said, no, we hate Roger Waters. You never allowed to say anything good about him. He's a horrible anti-Semite, which, of course, is a horrific and horrible bullshit pile of lies. Which, of course, is a ridiculous lie. Anyway, then he gets caught on camera speculating about Jewish immunity. to the germ, which I know people say it was taken out of context by the New York Post or whatever, but it was something

like that. Like, isn't it interesting how Jewish people don't seem to die of it or something? Like, it was some ridiculous thing, and people go, oh, no, there was some study. Whatever. I'm not saying he was an anti-Semi. I'm just saying he said something stupid that got him in trouble. And then instead of just

saying, oh, sorry, I didn't mean it like that or something. What did he do? He goes, I'm not racist against Jews. I hate Palestinians. How could I possibly be anti-Jewish? Look how anti-Palestinian I am. And he started making up a bunch of lies about them, including you talk about blood libel, you know, Robert Kennedy claimed that the PA has an open bounty on every Jew in the world and will pay anyone to kill any Jew in the world, which is completely preposterous and wrong. And is essentially, Robert

Kennedy taking out a hit on every Jew in the world. If some kook wants to take him at his word that that's true and that somehow he's going to get a PayPal bonus if he commits some horrific crime which is completely crazy. He wasn't

talking about Hamas. He was talking about Mahmoud Abbas. And then he went on and he brought up Elon Omar who hadn't even been in trouble in two years and even then all she had said was the joke about it's all about the Benjamin's baby. She never said anything hateful against Jews. And I don't know much about her

other than she's a leftist. I disagree with her on virtually everything. And I don't really pay attention to the house that much, honestly. But like, I know she didn't say anything hateful about Jews. All she made was a joke, a double entendre about Netanyahu and Franklin on the $100 bill. Like APEC raises a quarter of a billion dollars a year to spend on American politics for no reason got that and you're not allowed to say that there's a reason behind it even when they say there's a reason behind it but anyway

he brought her up and which is some weird thing man like Winston Smith at the end of 1984 I'm repeating myself from Dave Smith's show but what the hell it's a good analogy it's what I thought of it's Winston Smith when they put the rat cage on his face and he goes

no do it to Julia do it to Julia not to me it's like how is the richest whitest bread guy, like not to be too leftist about it, but come on. We're talking about a Kennedy here. American royalty goes, no, that black

immigrant woman two years ago made a joke. Get her, not me. Throw her under the bus, not me. Throw the Palestinians under the bus. So you can't call me an anti-Semite. What kind of crap is that?

That's not even just, he's got a really bad policy. That shows him to be some kind of ridiculous coward yeah and uh to be clear uh none of that came from me and quite frankly i i wish i knew where this stuff came from um you know and it's uh at the risk of making me sound more disconnected but you know it's uh how many times did you meet with him i've met him in person talked on the phone so it's uh pretty regularly when you can't say too much like beyond your contract and whatever, but you're essentially giving him kind of foreign policy briefings on all kinds of things, right?

Yep. And so, okay. It's one of my jobs. Look, everybody listening to this who's ever had a boss knows sometimes your bosses make sense and you can communicate with them. And sometimes they just, man, you just can't talk to a guy. Would you put him in one or the other or in between those categories? He's just impossible to get through.

to on anything or just on this? I would say, I would say just on this. You know, it's, I found him personally, he's personally very affable, very polite, you know, someone that very easy to have a conversation with seems like a good guy. And part of me, you know, I agree with that. I met him and that's how I felt about him too. He seemed like a decent guy. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's like, and part of me sees where he's landed on this in particular and, like, it pains me. because it's so wrong and it's not like particularly based in any kind of real fact or reality. Like, you know, you see the public comments about, you know, Israel being an aircraft carrier or the Palestinians being the most pampered people. And it makes me wonder like, hey, where the, where the F did that come from? And B, like, how did somebody think that was a good thing to say, you know, to get this man elected or even to articulate an understanding of the issue? When there's a bullpen, there was a bullpen of really smart people who had, you know, experience in these areas around him, advising him on a regular basis. And, you know, everybody makes their own choices, you know, and one thing I've learned in politics is that, you know, your boss, whether he's a, you know, a candidate or, you know, you know,

you know, a senator or whomever, you know, they ultimately, they're an individual, they have agency, they, uh, you know, they'll make their own decisions for their own set of reasons. And I respect, you know, I respect that part of the game. Uh, but, you know, you, you can't be so incredibly wrong on something like this, you know, and expect people to be, I guess, to, to, to maintain their loyalty, you know, and because it's, uh, like, if you look at my, track record. It's all, you know, it's, it's ending the Forever Wars. It's working with Rand Paul. It's, you know, it's working at the Quincy Institute. You know, and it goes one way. You know, and the last thing I would want is to be viewed as somebody who's for all of this, you know, and to be, to have my

credibility tied up in somebody's perspective, which, A, not only do I disagree with, but is historically inaccurate in several different areas, whether it's the U.S. military in Iraq, Whether it's what's going on on the ground in Gaza, you know, the presentation of the war in Gaza through his eyes and largely in the media is completely false. And it's driven by a particular narrative being laid out by the IDF, which is super eaten up. I don't know if you watch BBC, Scott, but, you know, I've got this cool little feature on my YouTube TV where I can watch all four channels at the same time if I want to. But this BBC commentator last week, I think it was like tough talk or something like that, brought on the Israeli spokesman, the Israeli IDF, I think it was the IDF spokesman for 30 minutes and just beat the crap out of him on the air, you know, challenged every single thing he said, you know, challenged every one of these talking points, you know, that you see popping up with Kennedy or popping up on American news channels or Ted Cruz or whomever. it is and really ran that stuff into the ground and you know I'm assuming gave the uh the spokesman incredible heartburn and probably a nice verbal admonishment from its boss because he was

unable to do his job now you put that same guy on American TV whether it's Fox MSNBC or CNN and they will just give him carte blanche for whatever the time block is and laud all of his answers and applaud him on the way out and it's just uh I think that's probably a big reason why we're here where we're now, but it's, it's pretty disheartening, you know. And I wish there were more people out there who had the balls to get out there and, you know, approach this issue the way you do, to be quite frank, you know, to challenge the narrative, to put the facts on the table, you know, because if we don't start doing that, you know, in any number of areas and, you know, the conflict in Gaza right now is just a, it's a major highlight of, you know, it's a major highlight of,

of, you know, how, you know, how dishonest our discourse is across the board. You know, it's going to be, it's very, it's very damaging to the U.S. and, you know, they're very, near term. And I don't, we could, we could go down a rabbit hole about the bricks and OPEC plus and all, you know, and the geopolitical realignment that's happening while we're, you know, focused on, you know, a bullshit presentation of the IDF's invasion and subjugation of Gaza. but you know that's that that particular important conversation is not being had publicly and we're going to wake up you know in the very near future and it's going to be a very different world and I'm scared that you know your kids and my kids are going to pay for it

hey y'all I got a new coffee sponsor Moondose artisan coffee at moondose artisan coffee dot com when I wake up in the morning I feel like my brain is all dried out I need to pour a hot mug of rich tasty coffee all over it to get it back working again, like 10w30 for the noggin. Though not necessary, it helps if the coffee tastes good. Well, Moondos Artisan Coffee does taste good. They get the best beans from all around the world, and they don't burn them. Support the show and support your brain at Moondoseartisancoffee.com. Just click the link at the right margin at Scott Horton.org. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault 3.0

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See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. Yeah, well, you know, I'm not much of a religious guy or a Buddhist either or anything like that but I don't think there's really anything magic to karma other than if you kind of put it in mystical terms or whatever but it just means

that you know pick a lot of fights you're going to get in some is just another way of saying it you know and and people can make it you know there's this great Jefferson quote where he's talking about

oh you know what I hate this quote i love it and i hate it he's talking about the guilt of those who would try to restrict slavery because it's causing disunion son of a bitch but then he's saying i tremble for my country when i reflect that god is just and that his justice cannot sleep forever wait forever something like that you know in other words man we're we're so in the wind here what are we doing you know the rest of the verse right what the hell is this and and you know ron paul is my modern prophet libertarian idealist and moralist and writer and thinker and economist and also

a congressman for a minute there to i think presidential candidate just a just a touch yeah there was a little bit of politician in there but the greatest american hero who ever taught liberty to people and he said look if we think we the royal we speaking on behalf of the government quite unfairly to himself but when he was a member of Congress if we think that we can do this and we just go around the world bombing people like this

and suffer no consequences then we're gonna do even worse things and we do that at our own peril I mean the American people's peril we're putting them in danger and then of course they just get to say they're like oh no you're in danger we're here to help you or whatever

and get to erase all the history of how it's all their fault for putting us in danger in the first place but I mean I don't know look at how they are when Ron Paul this it was 16 years ago it was almost 17

when Ron Paul won the Giuliani moment and he didn't quite convince the whole population but he sure did Red Pill I don't know quarter of it or something and it's made progress since then they're like remember everybody we were bomb in Iraq for 10 years straight before 9-11

from bases in Saudi Arabia and everyone listening went like Oh, yeah. I remember that. Bill Clinton bombed the no-fly zones all the time. You know, what are you going to do? Pretend the 90s didn't happen? We all live through it. He bombed them all the damn time. And so, oh, that was what they were mad about. Yeah. How do you know? I read a thing or two about it. Oh, okay. Instead of being a liar and telling you that they hate you because you're free and white and love your mama and love Jesus, which was, you know, the implied lie of the rest I embellished. a little but that's George Bush's lie identity politics

base they hate you because of who you are America and now we have to defend ourselves from them most cynical damn thing gross it was you know I went to high school across the street from the mosque where Anwar

Alalaki got his start oh yeah yeah yeah it was it's pretty wild to turn on like to turn on the news like right after September 11th and see, you know, camera crew is talking to this guy inside the mosque, because he was Bush's, I guess, like his liaison to the Islamic community for a little while,

some sort of title in there. But you take into context that. That mosque, you know, it supported the, it was the home of the Fort Hood shooter for a little bit. We had a D.C. sniper running through the neighborhoods back there for a while. But the point is, is that I went to high school with a lot of, of Muslims. And there was never any type of we hate you, we don't like you, any kind of ostracization. Like I used to go with my friends to the hookabar on every Friday night, you know, and sit there and drink juice and, you know, play games. And it wasn't until, you know, the,

you're either with us or a terrorist moment that that became awkward. I remember going back in 2002 to try and go to that same hookabar. And the attitude was totally different. But the overarching point to that is that the people are people everywhere. You know, and I have found that, you know, while extremists of any stripe, you know, are rather difficult to be around, you know, particularly in a place like Iraq. But at the same time, your individuals, you know, there is like God-fearing. and as, you know, morally grounded, if not more so, than just about every American.

And, you know, it just, it pains me to think back and see how this population was manipulated into, you know, into the position of thinking that, you know, Islam was, you know, some sort of collision of worlds. It was a, you know, it was a, it was a fight for one or the other, like we were back into crusades or something. because it was never true. You know, and if you look at the text of the Quran, like, and if you're Christian, you know, Jesus is a major feature in there. So why would they hate us if they also study the same guy? So anyways, that's just my little mini rant, you know, historically, but it just shows you where we're at.

And it just shows you the power of, you know, how somebody beating a drum over and over and over again, you know, can direct the American people. you know, towards an outcome they don't want, in fact, get them to, to mobilize against their best interests, you know, and I would, I would say unequivocally, it is in every American's best interest that the, you know, the IDF stop killing civilians, you know, because it's a, you know, not only you're going to have like what you're saying, right, like, you get what you deserve, karma, you know, the, any, you know, litany, you know, biblical or, or regular, you know, interpersonal sayings depending on the culture but you know it's a it's a moral stain that you have to know

about the information is out there you know it has to stop you know because it's uh it's it's just grotesque like i'm you know i'm buckling up here because i'm getting really emotional thinking about all this all the scenes going through my head um and but you know as a as a country we have to write ourselves if we're truly like this christian nation or morally superior nation you got to see what's going on and killing kids is wrong um you know particularly if there's like a complete absence of the need to do it man all right i'm sorry we're already this far over time i'm going to ask you one more thing yeah i've got enough tally bennett here in the wall street journal the former and probably future prime minister of israel he says the u.s and

Israel need to take Iran on directly. Well, okay. So you already established, you know a thing or two about war. What do you know about war with Persia, Jim Wood, the third? Well, I know that they've been around for a really long time and they're not going away. You know, that's the baseline. This is a, you know, this is a historical empire. You know, but it's the same thing with the Russians.

They're not going anywhere just because we don't like them. You have to plan for them to be a player because they've always been a player. But war directly with Iran, well, first of all, I don't think that the IDF is going to be able to do a whole heck of a lot. They seem to have their hands full with Gaza. Their experience in northern or southern Lebanon a few years ago was particularly disastrous. And there's absolutely no way that they're driving their tanks, you know, across the desert to Iran. I'm feeling a couple countries might have a problem with that. You know, but in terms of who they are as a military, like they're not a pushover.

You know, they're completely defensive-oriented. They've gone the direction of the Russians and the Chinese with AT-2-A-D systems. You know, their job is to, or their perspective is to prevent them themselves from being bombed by the U.S. And, you know, you want to put ground troops in Iran. Like, it's a, think of Afghanistan with a conventional military on the deck. It would not be a good time. And I don't think we, quite frankly, have the military capabilities to pull it off. And what that clearly is to me, Bennett's statement is, you know, he's trying to bait the U.S. into entering their conflict.

You know, I think they probably felt that if they caused enough carnage in Gaza or the West Bank, That the situation would boil over on their border with Lebanon and that we would naturally throw the Marine Corps in because they're off the coast right now. You know, and that would be, you know, their entry point for us into their conflict, thereby, you know, ensuring, you know, the whole perpetuity thing again, it ensures that we're right there next to them. And then we are tied to them as they have to accomplish their policy objectives. That's failed.

So why not stir up Iran again? You've always got Lindsey Graham in the Senate. You know, he's never thought that was a bad idea. Yeah, well, it seems like the less they know about this stuff, the easier it is for them to imagine how easy it might be. But, you know, we'll go back to 2007. The Chiefs took W. Bush into the tank at the Pentagon and told him, we're not doing Iran.

Yeah. And the Air Force was like, we think we can take them. And the Navy was like, well, we like flying planes and the Marines and the Army, I guess the Army and the Marines and the Special Operations Command, said, no, dude, we are not doing this. We are losing so many guys, way more guys than we want to lose in Iraq right now. And just the number of so calm guys who would have to die infiltrating Iran to lays the anti-aircraft targets, assuming that would work at all, that they'd be capable of doing that at all. be in the thousands. They'd be dying by the thousands just going ahead to try to lazy anti-aircraft that we can hit their anti-aircraft from standoff distances before we can even fly our planes in there. And meanwhile, they have tens of thousands of missiles that they can

rain down the west side of the Persian Gulf, meaning the Alulid Air Base Centcom headquarters at Qatar and the Fifth Fleet Naval Base headquarters at Bahrain and including all the economic targets from Kuwait to Oman. Every single thing they want to set on fire, they could reach out and touch that we can't do a thing about. Yeah, what a great fight for Israel to get America in. And, you know, as long as I'm talking about this, and I got the notes in the book, you know, I don't have footnotes at the bottom of the page, but I cite the authors and the

publications that they wrote their articles in, in the prose, dude. It's in there, in enough already. where David Wormser, Dick Cheney's foreign policy advisor, was bragging about. They had a plan to work with Israel to force a conflict in the Gulf to drag America into the war, to do, as he put it, an end run around George W. Bush and work with Israel to force America into that war. And I'm not sure why he was talking so big about it, but Wormser essentially got him busted. But then the New York Times confirmed the story, and so did Barton Gellman. The Washington Post reporter in his book, Angler, also confirmed the story.

It originally was published by Stephen Clemens at the New America Foundation. And there's one more source, I forget. Clemens, the Post and the Times in the, I'm sorry. There's one more source that also confirmed the story as well. Maybe it was the Washington Post separate from Gelman who confirmed it in his book, as well as the New York Times and Stephen Clemens. way, that's a possibility. That's something that they talked about.

In fact, Seymour Hirsch also talked about one time a plan to use I forgot which deniable forces to attack Americans in the Gulf as a complete false flag to provoke the war to start. Yeah. Well, I mean, the silver lining at all that is that, I mean, these are some pretty advanced, bold plans that they're thrown out there. That haven't happened, but it goes to show, you know, it's almost like when the Russians got a nuclear alert.

It's almost like when the Russians got a nuclear alert and some wise lieutenant colonel decides not to panic. You know what I mean? It's like, wow, that was close. Dick Cheney and David Wormser were close to the two most important and powerful men in world history. They were like, what? Fourth and fifth or something like that, you know?

So for a minute there. so it could have happened and you know when it takes George Bush's patience and wisdom to say no way then we're on a knife's edge same thing with the Georgia War of 08 where Dick Cheney urged strikes on the tunnels

where the Russians were coming under the Caucasus mountains and Bush apparently had already arranged with Stephen Hadley that we're going to all shoot this down or maybe Hadley had arranged with everybody else and so only Vice President Cheney

raised his hand and said let's do it and everybody else said no and the thing didn't go anywhere there's is a sort of disputed telling of the anecdote was basically the same but again we're the vice president of the united states we should hit the russians let's do it yeah and that's uh i mean you put that into context today um i don't think that uh the current vice president you know has the the mental capacity to really put that together which is good yeah or her staff at all right like as far as we know they she got no influence at all and no and don't even have an opinion in the first place so that's fine yeah but the scary thing is like just objectively here is that uh i don't see a whole lot of leadership in the white house um i i like i dislike

the president for a number of things but ultimately i feel like he at his point in life this is like kind of elder abuse he needs to be on a beach somewhere drinking a mitai um but what that presents is like We don't know who's in charge. You know, we know that, like, the folks like Sullivan, you know, are up there directing policy. It's led to an absolute horrific entanglement in Russia, which hope, or in Ukraine with Russia, hopefully, which is kind of unwinding itself right now because the inevitable is finally happening, you know, but they're the same people who are signing off and creating this policy, you know, in Gaza. Israel and enabling Israel to do it. So with those two things in mind, like what is their, what is their limit? You know, what are they, you know, at what point do they stop and say, hey, we've done enough or this is more than, this is more than we can chew or this is, this is wrong because they've

done none of it. And, you know, it's, I'll have to watch what happens with Iran, but, you know, this is, I think rendering a pretty dangerous time. You know, I think we got pretty close with the, we definitely got pretty close with what you're saying, but, you know, at least there were, you know, As the left like to say about Trump, at least there were some adults in the room, even though that crew with Bush was, you know, pretty vile. They were at least professionals. These folks are strictly ideologues, and there's clearly nobody in charge. And, you know, it's not a good thought to consider, at least in my opinion.

Yeah. And you know what? On one hand, it's like, somebody's got to be in charge, but I don't know who it is. I don't know if it is there any good reporting about this that anybody knows of somebody email me a story if there's ever one in Politico or the Atlantic or whatever about who's the most powerful staff or now is it Jake Sullivan the national security advisor is it the chief of staff whose name I don't even know it can't be the secretary defense and I would have said blinking because I know Blinken is really Biden's guy trusted right hand guy for many years in going back to I know help lies into Rock War II and probably Serbia before that and whatever. And so I would think that they're very close and that Biden trusts him, but then I see him downranked

in the CIA director being sent to go and negotiate in his place because there's no confidence, I guess, from the foreigners, there's no confidence in him. I don't know how much confidence Biden has, but he can't really be directing Biden too much if he's out of the loop on the actual operations of the government.

and then I don't know I guess I shudder to think that like you know what we're kind of assuming the conclusion here that Biden himself is not still in charge it's just to only what degree he is a guy who you would imagine is very jealous of his power and still insist no I'm the old man behind the desk and you got to do what I say oh yeah he's going to be like that he's going to not want to relinquish a thing to them it's just he does have to go take a nap but still he he may not have been willing to let, I don't know, his deputy chief of staff

become really the guy, you know, running the game or what, who knows? I don't even know. There should be an investigative story. There should be even like the Bob Woodward official take of this question should have been published by now, you know? Yeah, and you'd also figure that like an outlook like Politico, you know, you got a dem in the White House would have a, you know, a friend on the staff. They want to highlight, you know, this nice big puff piece about the rise of somebody inside

the Biden White House. And there's none of that. You know, there's absolutely these folks like you're saying are kind of anonymous. I admit, I don't watch too closely for that kind of content, man, but I sure haven't seen it. No, I scan for it. Yeah, in previous years. And I guess Woodward is just getting really old, too. And it's always, of course, the very official naval intelligence Washington Post version when it's Woodward of course but he always does have access to the principles they all give him access even Trump they all say come on in and talk to whoever you want and so he gets firsthand takes not that they're honest but he's a lot of times they're conflicting and you can suss it out yourself but he does get takes from them as well edited

as they may be before they hit print but I haven't seen anything really along that line or know of anything along that line, especially that's really critical about Biden. And again, if anybody listening knows, then fill me in. You got my email address. Anyway, look, anyway, I'm going to reiterate. I'm sorry, I'm wasting your time now, Rambling. I want to thank you for coming on the show. I really admire you and the work that you're doing for peace

and to educate people about what the hell is going on. I know you'll have a great future, so I don't need to wish your luck with that. And I'm proud of you for standing up to Bobby Kennedy when he's such a disappointment. but like I say I am proud of you for taking the chance it was the right thing to do and I know that you gave it your very best so congratulations on both counts and thank you for your time again on the show happy new year buddy hey hey not a problem thank you for all the kind of word Scott you're awesome keep doing what you're doing and yeah let's talk again soon sometime the Scott Horton show anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA

Antiwar.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.