Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 2/27/26 Larry Johnson Predicts Trump’s War on Iran and Exposes the Lies It’s Built On

Episode Date: February 28, 2026

Scott interviewed Larry Johnson hours before the joint US-Israeli air campaign on Iran commenced. In the interview, Johnson presciently explained why he was virtually certain this was coming. He and Scott then debunked all the ridiculous lies this insane operation is built on and reflected on the complete lack of a clear endgame. Discussed on the show: “Will Trump Take the Exit Ramp or Go to War with Iran?” (Sonar21) Larry C. Johnson is a former CIA officer and intelligence analyst, and a former planner and advisor at the US State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. Follow his analysis at Sonar21. 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 this. 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 illegal. 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. Okay, you guys, introducing Larry Johnson again. He's a former CIA guy, but no, he's all right. And he's always done. Don't explain why we shouldn't get in another bad intervention here,

there, and the other place and why we should cease the ones we're already in a lot of the times. And he writes at sonar21.com is this great website and always long in-depth articles. good insight and good sourcing and lots of great stuff. I really appreciate you and everybody knows you from all the different podcasts. So we are recording this, what, midday, well, kind of actually toward later afternoon on Friday. And as of now, we're not bombing around yet, and they're all different kind of mixed signals. But I guess they are saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that they have talks scheduled for next week.

Maybe they're taking a break for the weekend. This is deja vu all over again to quote Yogi Berra. Well, I wonder about that. I mean, so last June, that was just cover before they went ahead and started bombing them anyway. So is that what you think is going to happen now? Yeah, I think so. It certainly looks that way. This, you know, number one, the lie that's being pushed is that this is all about whether Iran's going to have access to nuclear weapons or not.

And Trump said Tuesday night, they've got to say that they're not. them permanently ever okay they came out within 24 hours and said that yeah yeah we agree we don't want them and they've got that all along anyway yeah so uh but trump can't take yes for an answer and uh even though the iranians came out of the negotiations in geneva yesterday saying hey you know generally we're we're on the path to a to an agreement and the umani mediator who is you know ferrying the messages back and forth, he was equally upbeat and optimistic. But not so Donald Trump. And Trump made it clear today that he was not happy at all with Iran's position.

So I listened to what he says. You know, my good friend Ray McGarver and I have a difference of the pit in over this. But, you know, I'm listening to what Trump is saying today. He could have come out and been very straightforward and saying, you know what I am happy with what the Iranian said they showed some progress so we got a lot to talk about on Monday but that's not what he said and I'm quoting him now he said I'm not happy with the fact that they're not willing to give up what we have to have we will have to have some additional talks today well that's additional talks amongst ourselves so you know I think I think we're

being set up for just another replay of what happened last April yeah or or happened in June, June 13th. So June 13th was a Friday. And back 23 years ago, too. Yeah. It's like Iraq War II. Yeah. So, you know, again, if this was just about the nuclear weapon, this would be easy and done. Trump would have a victory lap. This is about regime change, and it's all predicated on a lie about the nature of Iran. We're told repeatedly that Iran is the the number one sponsor of terrorism. But all you have to do is go, as I have done, back through every single U.S. government report put out

through my old office, the office of the, it was called the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Now it's the Bureau of Counterterrorism. Every April 30th, they're supposed to issue a report on international terrorism. It used to be called Patterns of Global Terrorism. Starting in 2004, they changed the name to country, reports on terrorism. What that shows is that over 80% of all international terrorist attacks since 1979 have been carried out by radical Sunni groups that are funded and supported by the

Saudis, the Qataris, the Emirates, not a single one supported by Iran. Yeah. And American Britain. Yeah. Don't leave us out of the Sunni axis of bin Laden on evil there. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And look, and this is what I meant about the Iraq War II thing where it really is exactly like this, where in one hand, I got to explain to you everything I know about Iraq's nuclear program and or lack thereof and how you can know that our side's lying when they say that they got this threat and blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, I could also stop like you just did and debunk the idea that this has anything to do with aluminum tubes spinning uranium at all. It's a pretext for war. It's a simple. as that and the war the whole plan doesn't begin in washington or across the river at the pentagon it's in tel aviv is where this whole thing comes from supreme commander nettingahu comes to town and orders another aircraft carrier to the gulf i mean at that point what is trump other than the secretary of defense in the netting yahoo administration here larry yeah yeah no it is um america is under the domination the control of Jerusalem.

Now, the good news is the recent opinion polls are showing that now 41% of Americans support the Palestinians, and only 36% support Israel. So that's, it's now moving in the right direction. It's moving away from this complete subservience to Israel. But this war is all about trying to get rid of the mullahs, and, you know, even Iran, it has provided support to Palestinians seeking to be free, seeking to protect their land. But we have to cast it as there's somehow some emissary of Satan bent on destroying the innocence of Israel.

I mean, it's just this whole narrative business has just gotten out of control. Yeah, now, and so on the talks, I was actually surprised I'm so far behind. I've had a very busy week here, but I read in your piece from maybe it was yesterday's piece. I don't know if you haven't knew of it, where the Iranian proposal going into the talks was a three to five year moratorium on any enrichment. And even then when they start enriching again, only to 1.5%, which I didn't even know that you could run your light water reactor on that. I thought it had to be at least 3.6%.

That was the standard thing or 3.6. they're uh yeah 3.675 or whatever it was so um that is a huge climb down larry from the iatola from where he has stood on this position since 2006 right 20 years straight he said no screw you i'm never going below that and now and look and this does reflect the fact right that donald trump did call his bluff and netting yahoo did call his bluff last june and bomb the crap out of isfahan and taunts and and or no yeah the com facility they used used to call it. And by the way, I don't know if you ever pay attention to this kook. And I mean, maybe, I don't know what you think of them, but David Albright from, they called the good ISIS,

right? He's the former sort of pseudo-weapons inspector who was, you know, he debunked Iraq's nuclear weapons, but stood by the claims of their chemical weapons. He's a very mixed bag. He's been a very mixed bag on Iran this whole time. On the other hand, he's the only guy I know who's doing real good open source or in-depth open source work on the satellite photos and what all can be gleaned from what's happening at Fordo Natanz and Isfahan. And they had a new report, at least the latest one that I saw was as of last November. And it said that they're totally out of business. Natanz and Fordo and Isfahan are just closed up. They're doing nothing. Now there's a site at what they call pickax mountain where potentially they're digging a tunnel. But nobody thinks they have a spinning centrifuge

anywhere and their transformation facility at Isfahan is all important where that's where you go from metal to gas back to metal again and if you can't do that then you're stuck anyway right so the superpower bomb the crap out of them these are the new facts of life is we're talking about a situation where like when Trump says on one hand their nuclear program has been obliterated and on the other hand there are a nuclear weapons threat he's right the first time it's been very close to obliterated and in fact the iatoll even insisting on enrichment at all at this point is almost like, you know, like daydreaming, right? Like, he has no facility to do that.

And I don't know about the next president, but this president has certainly already made it clear that any enrichment at all will get you bombed. So don't even try it because I'll just kill your guys, forget it kind of thing. Anyway, it seemed to me like this whole talk about this huge moratorium and then 1.5% limitation and get rid of the rest and all of that and their entire stockpile and for limited type sanctions relief.

That to me sounds like the Ayatollah screaming uncle, man. And yet back to the question of it just being a pretext. If that's not good enough, if that amounts to a nuclear weapons program, then there's just no question that they don't even give a damn about uranium. This has nothing to do with uranium. They're clinging to a pretext for war at this point. Well, not only Israel, but I think the United States as well. And here's why.

Over the course of the last year, there has been a fundamental change in Iran's economic status vis-a-vis the BRICS countries. When Europe voted to do the snapback sanctions under JCPOA, even though Trump had walked away from it and the agreement was no longer valid, up until last August, Russia and China had been willing to support the sanctions on Iran that were specified in the JCPOA agreement. Once it sort of in the aftermath of the June 12-day war, Russia and China basically reappraised their situation and have now come out firmly against any of the sanctions. on Iran. For Russia, it's important with respect to the north-south corridor, a combination of rail line, shipping that goes across the Caspian Sea, back to rail lines and roads. They go all the

way down to a port called Chabahar in southern Iran. This cuts dramatically the time to require to move products from Asia into Europe and vice versa. They no longer have to go through the Red Sea and the as a U.S. Canal. They could go directly over land. Similarly, China set up on east-west, they're calling it the new Silk Road, based on the old Silk Road. So with respect to both of those countries, Iran is now a critical geographic center for construction of a new world economic order. And so from that standpoint, Iran now suddenly can see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel, whereas it had been, you know, heavily punished economically with sanctions over the years.

Now it's got a way out. And so this is one of the other things that people haven't paid attention to. In the aftermath of that attempted color revolution that was launched by my old outfit, the Central Intelligence Agency with the help of Mossad on December 28th in Iran, they, you know, they went with a collapse the bank, created a financial crisis, got people. people in the streets protesting, and then outsiders funded by the agency came in, started killing some of the protesters, killing some of the security forces. Iran, with the help of China and Russia, found, discovered the Starlink network that we had

sent, the United States had sent, turned it off, shut down the Internet temporarily, and they stopped that attempt at a color revolution. Three weeks after that, January 29th, Russia, China, and Iran signed a trifle. apartheid security agreement first time. There had up to this point been bilateral agreements between Iran and Russia and Iran and China, but now they all three signed on. So Iran's taken on a much more important role now and they're not going to be, they're frankly not going to be pushed around and bullied like they have been in the past. Hey guys, you know I have another podcast now, right? Yeah, me and the great American historian Daryl Cooper, that is Martyr Made. He's my co-host.

and we host a show every Friday night. We might be switching to two days a week here sometime soon, but right now we're doing Friday nights live at 8 o'clock Eastern time on the YouTube's. Checked out our Twitter handle Provoked Show. And so I want to get back to the uprising there and ask you all about that more. But it's an incredible story in Politico, which I admit, I didn't read it in Politico. but I did read in the Jerusalem post.

They had a link to it and a quote from it. And I'm just too busy, but I don't think they forged the quote. And what it was was, well, hell, I'll tell you a story. You might remember this one and it seems important. David Wormsler, the principal author of the Clean Break Strategy. Yeah, yeah. In 2007, he was bragging at the American Enterprise Institute

about a plan by him and the vice president to get Israel to attack Iran and get Iran then to retaliate against the United States to do a quote and run around W. Bush and forced W. Bush to do the war that thus far he was reluctant to do. And this was before the NIE that debunked the nuclear program. This was in fact, instead, they were pushing the EFP hoax, blaming every Shiite bomb in Iraq on Iran, which was a lie, but they did that. Him and Petraeus, we're working on that. Anyway, so Stephen Clemens from the Washington note broke that story. But then it was confirmed by Barton Gelman of the Washington Post and by I forgot who at the New York Times. And one more. I forgot. I have it in my book, but it was like

Time Magazine or another. There's a third confirming source or like, you know, report on that saying, I know it does sound crazy, but David Wormser was spouting his mouth off about that at that time. But see, the point being that when they say end run, W. Bush is the end. He's the president of United States, the one that they're trying to get around and force into a corner where he has to do this, right? Right, right. Here's this report in the Jerusalem Post by way of the Politico there where the White House is saying that they want to get Israel to start the war in order to force Iran to attack the United

States, just like in Wormster's plan, to do an end run around the American public who don't want to do this war. And so now it's Donald Trump himself as David Wormser, and we're all W. Bush, the one that he's trying to screw and force us and saying, yeah, well, I guess we have to attack Iran now that they hit our base in Kuwait. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, this is like, this is honestly, this is no less worse. They really let that happen. Anything like that happened. I mean, that is Franklin Roosevelt's treason at Pearl Harbor level treason there. That they're going to get another country to get us into a war to get our guys attacked so that the American people have to rally around our guys that they set up to be killed. Yeah. That's the gist of it. And, you know, going back to 2007.

So one of my good friends, former colleagues, was directly involved with what was called the Iran Task Force back then. And there was a full-born plan to invade Iran, try to overthrow the government. And then the issue, though, when it came down, the question was asked, okay, we do this. Then what comes next? And the answer was, oh, don't worry about it. It'll take care of itself. So we're still at that level of planning. that is why this is not if this was simply left to Donald Trump that Donald Trump was the one making the decisions about I'm going to go to war I'm not going to go to war then you could maybe make a case that he was sincere about trying to get a negotiated settlement but there are there are too many other of these forces that you identified that are working within the intelligence community within Department of Defense or

or AKA Department of War, that are pushing for this war. We did see recently that one of the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was basically reassigned, kicked out. And I don't know if that was because he was raising, apparently reportedly had raised questions and objections to starting a war with Iran. And I think that individual will ultimately have been proven to be a profit in his warnings,

because military leadership is making a lot of assumptions about our ability to defeat Iran, to defeat Russia, to defeat China. And hell, we couldn't defeat the Houthis last March, so I don't know what's made us suddenly more powerful. Yeah, well, good point there. Although the Houthis, you know, they had a lot of practice hiding from American and Saudi air strikes for those seven years. And, you know, but I guess, you know, Iran ain't Iraq.

it's not just bigger but it's all those mountains and all of that too but now so well i promise we're gonna get back to that uprising i even took notes so i wouldn't forget um but so let's talk about that because i guess your argument then would be larry that last june they just held their fire and decided to take that one on the chin and hope to not provoke a worse war but that this time they won't now they got a hell of a lot more missile capacity than they did that they did that they did that they then and a lot more willingness to use it. You mean Iran? Yes.

Yeah. No, actually, they got caught with their pants down. The attacks that took place on radar sites and on air defense systems were carried out in-country through networks that have been set up through Mossad and through CIA. Alistair Crook has looked at this extensively, and he insists, actually, no Israeli aircraft actually flew in to Iranian airspace. It was all done from the ground or with missiles launched, air-to-ground missiles launched from a distance outside of Iran.

But this time, they're ready. Because we've been warning them that we're coming after them. We've not been coy about that at all. And it's gone from the initial, what I've been told by someone who was in a position to know is that Trump was actually planning to do the first military strike on January 13th. That would have been 16 days into this attempted color revolution. But the Iranians basically got it turned off on January 10th.

So he walked it back. But they were ready to go on January 13th. And now we've seen how the narrative shifted that, oh, Iran was persecuting and killing protesters. to Iran's got a nuke and we got to stop the nuke. So, you know, they're very, they're very flexible when it comes to picking up what the, what the causes, Beli is. Yeah, exactly. Well, and they wore the casualties out. They embellished so badly, so quickly to numbers that were like on the level of World War I battlefield casualties, where it was just completely impossible, either the Ayatollah carpet bomb, the capital city, or those numbers are lies. Right. Like, there's a Dresden

sized firestorm or there wasn't. But otherwise, how do you explain, you know, 30 to 50,000 deaths? It's the answer simple. They're lying about that. The number of far. You know why they use the number 30,000. I believe if you go back and look at what the Shaw did, it was documented in killing 30,000 Iranian students and protesters in the year and a half prior to his ouster. I think they went back and used the 30,000 as sort of, okay, you know, they updated it. But it was, you know, one of my, I've been in contact with a podcaster by the name of Nima Alkarsid. Nima lives in Brazil. He's a professor, engineering professor, but he runs a pretty good podcast.

And he went back home to Ron for a visit, first time in 12 years. So it took his wife and his two children, you know, the parents, his parents and her parents hadn't seen the kids. And again, his last trip there was in 2014. And what he reported on was I took his view as much more credible. Because he's not an ideologue. He's not, you know, some devout Shia fanatic. But he's just, you know, he really is an answer. academic. And he said, the one thing that had happened is as a result of that January 13 attack,

or the June 13 attack last year, is it has united Iran in the same way that we experienced that unity in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks, where partisan differences between Republicans, Democrats, independents, at least temporarily evaporated. And if you think about it, The last time Iran was actually attacked from an outsider was the Saddam Hussein invasion back in 1980, 81. And the people who remember that where it's a vivid memory for them, they're 53 years, 55 years of age and older. The people who are under the age of 50 in Iran right now had never experienced that kind of attack until last year. So the irony is the United States and Israel launching that attack actually galvanized support for the Islamic Republic

away from prior to that yeah there had been some complaints and protests but it had the exact opposite effect yeah so again like Iraq War II there's the liars and the lied too who repeat it and you know have their own thing so you can see how there's a lot of people go yeah no

we just have to support the people we bring violence to that regime the people will take their chance to free themselves and all that where you and I know that God it's got to be that somebody in charge knows that that's a lie at least and they know that what they're actually doing is just trying to destroy the place and that that's the most likely result of what they're doing. But we have the same kind of arguments about freeing the Iraqi people when what we're really talking about is, well, you're going to have a civil war now as the majority takes power from the minority by force, you know, who've been kept from this whole time. Now, in this case,

So Shiite Persians are the majority. Yeah. But then again, there are a lot of minorities, but then again, they may have all different degrees of patriotism and nationalism in mind and rather than sectarianism. I have no reason to believe that the average Sunni Arab, Iranian, or the average Azeri or the average Qarid or the average Baluk wants to secede in a violent civil war. Right. Other than here the Americans are giving them guns and money again more.

But the ethnic composition of Iran right now is 61% Persian, 18, 19% Azeri. And then, you know, the remaining, you know, 19%, 20%, is split between Kurds and Baluch and some others. What's interesting, though, is the Ayatollah Khomeini, he's a Zeri. You know, he's not a majority Persian. He's a Zeri. This, you know, right now this is like deja vu for, for me all over again, going back to in May of 2003,

I was interviewed on National Public Radio by Michelle Norris. And I remember telling her at the time, based upon my colleagues who were still at the CIA, one was Fulton Armstrong, who was the National Intelligence Officer for Latin America. But it was telling me that the entire intelligence case for going into Iraq had been cooked. It was manufactured. And trying to put that word out, I mean, I was debating the name I'm sure of Lori Milroy may be familiar to you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I debated her and debunked her on several different occasions.

But in the 90s even, shoveling, she was trying to claim that it was Saddam Hu done Oklahoma City. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it was, there was a massive propaganda effort there, and it succeeded. It is succeeded in fooling the American people. But at the time, when Bush decided to invade Iraq, 71, 72 percent of the American public was behind him. Not now. Those numbers have flipped. You've got over 75 percent of the American people oppose going into Iran.

So this, you know, Trump and his team stupidly, instead of going out and trying to, you know, even build a false case, but get Congress to vote on it and support. him. He's now, he's going to be on his own. And you know Washington, boy, if you're out there on your own and things go bad, you're looking around for all your friends. They've disappeared. Yeah, it's good to be king until everything goes to hell and it's all your fault. Expandesigns.com. That's my friend Harley Abbott's company. And he is the webmaster for the Scott Horton Show, as well as the Libertarian Institute. He is the guy that redesigned the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website. He's done a lot.

lot of great work for other friends of mine. And unlike a lot of webmasters and web developers and different guys that I have worked with over the years, the thing is about Harley Abbott and his team is they do what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it and are just extremely reliable and extremely knowledgeable and 100% vouch for the great Harley Abbott over there. You got a website. You need it fixed up. You need a new one. You're setting up a business working on any kind of online project like that. Check out expanddesigns.com. And look, I mean, I don't know, but I know that Tucker was there. And this has to have been what Tucker told him the other day was that like, don't do it, man. You're crazy. Don't let these

cooks tell you it'll be fine. It will not either. And like, I mean, honestly, man, I'm sorry because I'm a broker. We've been talking about this for 25 years in a row now. that look iran is bigger they got mountains they have not been at war ever since 1980 the way iraq had basically been if you count the iraq war one and a half through the 1990s yeah they have not been at war this entire time and um it's a much but the population i think is three times the size of iraq's population or no it's the population is four times the size the country's three times the size um and uh And, well, as Marco Rubio put it to the Senate, that, you know, we don't have a plan, right?

It's the same thing that they said about Venezuela. Well, look, we got to keep the commies because we can't put the right wiggers in there because it just won't work to do a whole regime change. And we learned that from Paul Wolfowitz's error. We're not going to deba by Venezuela and abolish their army and rebuild an entire state. So we got to keep the commie. Well, here, what are they going to do? They're going to have to keep the next cleric in line if they do kill the Ayatollah because there's no one prepared to rule. You have the monarchists who absolutely do not have support inside the country.

You have the M.E.K., the Mujahideen-E cult, communist terrorist cult of total free codes, who have no support whatsoever in the country. And then you have bin Ladenite-type suicide bomber sorts and Kurdish communists. You know, it's funny, the Wall Street Journal, they even admitted that the CIA was backing them. They're not called Pijack anymore, I guess, for some reason they dropped the J. But back in 2007, they were called Pijak when the CIA was back in them then. But now it's just Piac, I guess. The Kurdish commies, the Kurdish version or the Iranian version of the PKK or the YPG from Turkey and Syria.

And so even Rubio says it like, well, so what's it supposed to look like the day after we bomb the government out of existence? We don't know. Yeah, we don't know. So, okay, I mean, I'm sorry. Forgive me, please, Larry. because on one hand, I'm just going, maybe it's a right brain, left brain thing. I'm not really sure how that works. But on one hand, I says to myself, I says, look, the biggest argument against doing this,

this is completely stupid. It's almost guaranteed to be an absolute catastrophe. And the Ayatollah does not want to fight. It's just crazy to launch. I mean, hell, even fine, I'll define it down for argument's sake today here. Just that like bombing Fordo and the taunts, fine, like whatever. what it is. It's already over. That's a pinpoint kind of a thing. 12 bombs here, 12 bombs there. I don't know. You can do a real ass war here when every sign is pointing that this is crazy,

that Lindsey Graham is the only one who thinks that it's smart, you know, who's like, you know, licking his chops. And the whole rest of the world is like red alarm lights. Every ally in the region begging and please don't do it. And all of these things. And again, the Ayatollah not begging, but begging to avoid this fight, right? He's not going to lose face. like that, but they're not doing anything to aggress against us or threaten us in any way. It seems like what I just said there, and I'm sure there's more and better arguments to it, too. That right there ought to amount to, so we're not going to war. We can't go to war.

Donald Trump couldn't possibly make that bad of a call right now in a way that even he would have to. It's inescapable. The comparison to George W. Bush, the idiot who ruined everything when he did the giant stupid horrible thing he did not have to do. And how could he possibly do that? And especially Obama and Libya, whatever, you name it. Afghanistan, for him to repeat that kind of error now after running on no new wars and all

these things, like the Israelis must got him by the balls or what? I mean, I don't even know. I mean, honestly, it's the same pile of lies that they couldn't get W. Bush to do it in 07. Well, how can it be that they can get him to do it now? Well, see, I'm old enough now to remember vividly, George H. W. Bush and his promise, read my lips, no new taxes. Yeah. And what did he do in post-taxas?

And his base pummeled him. And it brought us Bill Clinton. And this was in the aftermath of, quote, winning a war on the ground in Kuwait with the first Gulf War back in 1990. he still got pummeled in the polls. The American people, when you get a politician making a promise like that, and you break it, they don't forgive you. And that's where Donald Trump is headed right now.

You know, as we go over all this old territory, you know, I knew Paul Wolfowitz. I mean, we sat together at our son. My son and his son were in the same class at Bethesda Chevy Chase High School. So I knew Paul. but I also knew the lies that they were telling. And they got away with at that time. This time is going to be different because the entire political, geopolitical space has changed and changed dramatically with Russia and China now firmly committed to creating an alternative

financial and political order that's outside the reach of United States bullying. The United States efforts to coerce and punish other countries has really produced the backlash. And they're looking for a way out and it's starting to emerge as more and more countries are dumping U.S. treasuries. They're not buying U.S. treasuries. The United States is finding its currency being devalued, but in devaluing their currency, it's not bringing about a greater production, industrial production on the side. and then here once again, we're going to go into a war that on paper we look like we're dominating.

But I keep encouraging people. And said, we're not a wimps like. Number two, we're going to dismantle the Houthi's ability at Israel. How did that work out? We had at the time two aircraft carriers that were there operating together with five destroyers. right now, even though they came, we got two aircraft carriers. The Gerald Ford, which has been rechristened from aircraft to aircraft carrier because of plumbing malfunctions, it's in a simply, it's in a defensive posture off the coast of Israel.

Its job is to shoot down missiles and drones if Iran launches on Israel after the West attacks Iran. So we got one aircraft carrier down in the South of Russia. Arabian Sea. Well, so we go back where we had twice, if you will, the naval combat power of the Red Sea and much easier, much easier access to Yemen itself. We didn't have to stay a thousand miles offshore, and we were pretty confident we could defeat some of their anti-ship missiles, and we were trying desperately to find their mobile missile launchers. After seven weeks, after losing seven MQ9 predator drones at a cost of $35 million a piece, and then losing the three F-18 fighter jets, and suffering damage to one of the aircraft carriers, we declared victory and pulled out.

Now, if we couldn't take, you know, we had complete supremacy of the air, and yet we couldn't stop the Houthis from firing missiles. And now we think we're going to do that to Iran, which is nine times the physical size of Yemen and has, as you pointed out, these mountains, underground cities, underground launchers, mobile launchers, it's mission impossible. Hey guys, Scott here for Mundo's 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 they'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 Show Coffee is the number one bestselling coffee at Moondos Artisan Coffees right now. Just go again to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. Tell me more about this tripartite pact that Iran just signed with Russia and China. It can't be a full Article 5 style war guarantee there.

What is it? No, but it was establishing that both Russia and China were now going to supply unnecessary equipment and that the key thing here is Iran was willing to accept it. Back prior to the June 13th, 12-day war, Russia and China had both been offering assistance to Iran, but Iran was like, you know, mother, please, I'd rather do it myself. We've got it under control. We don't need your charity. We don't need your help. After that 12-day war, Iran had a change of heart. They went back to Russia and China and said, is that offer for help still open? And they said, of course. And so they began to supplying ample amounts. The most interesting one is this

radar that China has provided, is described as a three-dimensional radar that penetrates out to 430 miles. So if you set that up at the border with Saudi Arabia, that essentially reaches all the way to Prince Sultan air base where a number of U.S. fighters and tankers are now currently based. So that gives the Iranians the capability to detect stealth aircraft. That was what it was specifically designed for. At the same time, you've had Russia reportedly deploy S-300, S-400, as well as Iran has, I mean, the Chinese have supplied some long distance. surface-air missiles for taking out aircraft.

So that tripartite deal was basically to solidify, I said, okay, we're in this together. Now, it's important to note that Russia, China, and Iran have been conducting annual naval drills exercises since 2019. But this is really, this was a broadening of that relationship, both on intelligence sharing, on receiving military equipment that would be, employed in Iran and then also economic cooperation. Okay.

Now, I guess last question, the one that I put off from a long time ago. Tell us more about the uprising in January. We've seen this happen in numerous places, including in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan where there's a tax protest. And then all of a sudden, they're armed men. attacking police stations, this kind of thing. So I don't know who is exactly behind the uprising in Kazakhstan in January of 2021, but my guess at the time was that America had Turkey do it. Yeah, we were involved heavily. It's important to understand that one of the largest CIA stations

is in Armenia. And you go, what? Armenia's got like three million people, but you've got this massive CIA presence in Armenia. And the reason is it can work with dissident groups in Iran, in Russia, in Kazakhstan. So it's a big op center from that standpoint. And then we still steadily betray them in favor of the

Azores anyway. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. Oh, I know. Now, what happened in January? Because, again, the Wall Street Journal said, hey, we're backing these Kurdish communist terrorists on the ground. They're the ones chanting death to the Ayatollah. Godspeed, Kurdish communists.

I don't know. And then you got the M.E.K. and you got the monarchists and you got who, but tell me about CIA and Assad and the extent to which the Turks, whoever is involved in this. I don't think the Turks won't overthrow Iran right now. No, no, no. In fact, so what happened was, so we've got to go back a couple of years. The United States, there's a group out of the Netherlands called Gname, G-A-A-A-A-M, and they're working in tandem with a VPN provider. out of Canada. Well, when I dug into it, it turns out that both of those organizations are funded by National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. And what they were doing was they were conducting an online poll,

and their poll results said that 80%, overwhelming 80% of Iranians supported getting rid of the Ayatollah, that there was this massive, massive popular support for an uprising. So essentially, we were lying to ourselves. We created the lie, sold it to the policymakers, that, hey, there's this massive opposition. Now, the Maryland Institute for National Security Studies, I think that's its name, they had also been conducting polls in Iran, and they had discovered the exact 180-degree opposite. Yeah, people were upset about some of the economic things, but they weren't ready to overthrow the government. Then when that started, I said at the outset, I said, this is a U.S. backed, this is a U.S. created crisis.

And sure enough, man, three weeks later, Scott Besson admitted, yeah, we did that. We crashed that bank. We caused that financial crisis. And it had been pre-planned with, they had smuggled in, we've learned now through the Wall Street Journal, you know, several thousand Starlink terminals. So these, these groups, these, and they were working primarily through minority, groups. I'm really upset with some of the economic corruption, but then we sort of these outsiders that were backed by CIA attached themselves. And then just like we saw in the Maidan in Ukraine in 2014, which you've written about,

these outside forces also started shooting some of the very demonstrators in order to make it look like the government was killing them. and they were attacking the government. And they were coordinating all of this through the Starlink terminals. Once the Iranian counterintelligence folks realized that was going on, and then with the assistance of China and Russia, they shut that off, and that movement started collapsing. So the effort to try to spark a color revolution, again, came undone

once the Iranians realized what was up. Yeah. all right larry well that's a very handsome book behind you on the shelf there i must say yeah very happy to have your endorsement for provoke there you did you did great work on that as you as you have on all the other books that you've done too ah well appreciate that and uh and seriously man i appreciate your time on the show i guess oh last thing i did want to ask you so give us your percentage here then man 60 40 70 30 99% chance we're going to war or what oh i'd say 90% chance Yeah, man, I hope I'm wrong.

And if we don't go, call me, I'm saying, boy, you were stupid. You were wrong. But I don't what I'm, what I'm, I'm mad or if you're right? Yeah, I'm hearing. This is, this is just what I'm hearing from my, my, my friends in the military who are, they're not sitting off in some other location. They're, they're involved. Man. They've absolutely got it.

You know, we're cocked and loaded. And it's just now get the order to press the trigger. Yeah. I wonder, I guess this would be more heavily and deeply kind of rumored, right, if it was something as simple as just the things behind those redactions and the Epstein documents that still pertain to Donald Trump, something that blatant. It's just absolute blackmail like that. Yeah, this is. He's not really dumber than W. Bush. No. So stupid. Jesus Christ. It's just, it ain't that. You know what I mean? It has to be that he's able to weigh many of the things that we're talking about here. But he's going to do this anyway for reasons that aren't the pretext.

The pretext are just the pretext. It's some blood debt he owes to Netanyahu. Then it remains undefined to me. It can't just be because Miriam Adelson bribed him that he's willing to do this to us. You know, it's just nuts, man. I can't believe it. Well, if you've been federalized. And I'm not saying because he's a good guy.

I'm saying because W. Bush wouldn't do it. Yeah. Because that's how damn dumb and wrong it is to do, right? Well, right. And I explain it this way that when you're told, when you're Trump and you're told repeatedly that Iran's the number one sponsor of terrorism, that Iran has killed millions of Americans, and you don't have the critical thinking skills to say, let me see the actual evidence on that. and that oh, the Hamas and Hezbollah are killing tens of thousands of Israelis?

Again, not true. In fact, the last statistic I'll leave you with, the Israeli foreign ministry keeps a list of every attack since August of 2000, and they record death or wounded. During that, from August of 2000 through April 30th of 2024, that's when I first pulled the statistics. there had been 672 terrorist attacks in that time frame. Only 105 of them were attributed to Hamas.

Five were attributed to Hezbollah. Yeah. You know, they're not exactly dominating the field of play on the terrorism front. And by the way, too. And this goes for years past, but also during the last most recent war, too, when bin Ladenites, fellow Sunni Arabs still, but when bin Ladenites poke their heads up in the Gaza Strait, Hama, kills them dead.

They shoot them right in the head. They don't behead them. They shoot them and kill them. And they don't tolerate that stuff. And that was why I'm in Al-ZWari, always denounce them as a bunch of sellouts for participating in democracy and trying to go along with Western wishes and compromising instead of waging holy jihad and all of that. So I don't know exactly the political spectrum, how you measure this, but they're at least

a click or two away from Al-Qaeda when it comes to all of that, you know? All right. Anyway, I'll let you go. Thank you, Larry. It's been great to have you on again. Hey, Scott. Thanks for the invite. We'll see you again. Thanks. Thanks, man. Bye. This Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos, Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods, Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places, and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest, Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scotthorton.org, and I'm serializing the audio book of Provote at Scotthorton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music,

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