Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/19/26 Larry Johnson on the Ongoing and Coming Failures in the US and Israel’s War with Iran

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Scott brings Larry Johnson back on the show three weeks after his last appearance where Johnson predicted the war with Iran hours before it kicked off. Scott and Johnson examine what’s happened, dig into who’s really calling the shots here, address some of the nonsensical talking points used to make the Iranians out as a unique evil and anticipate what the global consequences of this war will be. Discussed on the show: “​​The Failure of US and Israeli Air Defense” (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. It's the babies I make it. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not 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, guys, on the line here, I've got the former CIA officer turned decent guy, Larry Johnson. He's a good guy. He writes at Sonar 21. The CIA, they lie us into war.

Larry Johnson, he truths us out of war as best as he can anyway and analyzes all of the empire's shenanigans and wrongdoings all around the world, all the time. Sonar21.com. Welcome back to the show, Larry. I'm a recovering spook. There you go. Listen. For shame on you, sir, because, you know, three weeks ago, you came on my show and you

said that there was a 90% chance that Donald Trump was going to attack Iran. And then he attacked Iran like seven hours later. So explain yourself, why did you think that the chance was only 90% when it was a short thing? Well, yeah. There's always a chance that the unexpected happens. But, you know, well, not only were all the signs there, but a week before the attack when they stood up what's called the cat, the crisis action team. So there's, you know, a cat at the Pentagon, cat at Centcom. It's basically an operation center. So we start setting up all these operations centers. They, you know, they run 24-7. And the Shifts are usually, you work 12, you get 12 off, 12 on, 12 off. And so, and then they were canceling exercises. So I just, I knew this was, we were going to do it.

And it was, you know, despite being warned not to do it, Trump was worn multiple times, both by Danny Kane, you know, the raging cane of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by even apparently John Radcliffe. and then the National Intelligence Council, you know, senior analysts. And as Trump said, he didn't care what they say. He's just, he's made the decision. We have learned that Tulsi Gabbard is a complete embarrassment. She is a disgrace.

And, you know, she has lost any credibility or respect in my eyes. I had held out hope. You know, I thought she was stronger than this. but it turns out she's a very weak person. Joe Kent, to his credit, he stood up and had the balls to follow through on it. So, you know, you can't fault the man for, you know, standing up. Somebody needs to stand up. And I thought, if Tulsi had followed suit, then we wouldn't be in this mess.

Man, we were stuck. And there's, I can only think of one. relatively painless way out. And it's this. Trump will have to agree to lift the sanctions on Iran, and he will agree, not necessarily in public, but the agreement will be no more U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf, in exchange for Iran committing to full open inspection of its nuclear facilities to prove that it doesn't have a nuclear weapon. That's the only way, peaceful way, where Trump could then declare C. We've had such a major effect.

We have, we've forced those Iranians to come back and accept the JCPOA. That would essentially be the agreement. But, you know, it's only going to come after enormous financial pain and maybe even further combat losses. Because we just saw today, you know, we had total air supremacy. We destroyed all their air defense, but somehow they managed to shoot down an F-35 stealth aircraft. And, you know, they've been shooting down other planes, but the, you know, they've been shooting down other planes, but the Pentagon is lying. Department of War is lying about, you know, the KC-135 last week that supposedly it crashed.

Didn't quite explain how it, but it crashed. It wasn't shot down. It just crashed. Yeah, that happens to planes all the time, just flying along and then boom, go into the ground. Well, you know, I know from friends who were involved or had access to the material, it was absolutely. shot down by a surface air missile. Because the trailing aircraft saw the launch,

managed to peel off. It got some damage to its aircraft, but I thought it was a mid-air collision because didn't they show like the deal was broken off, another plane that had somehow been able to still land safely? Yeah, but it wasn't. It was a shoot-down. The three

15 eagles that were downed, they said it was friendly fire. No, it was actually unfriendly fire. The Kuwaiti pilot, who was flying the F-18, decided he was going to side with Iran in this war and shot him down. So, you know, we've had, and what's so despicable about Hague Seth and this crew, the six crew members that died on that KC-135,

they didn't want to recognize him as combat casualties. They just, it was an accident, so all, they don't get recognized. recognize his combat casualties. Larry, on that shoot-down, do we really know that the Kuwaiti didn't make a mistake there? Was there a real indication of that or just best guess? No, what I'm told is he went rogue. It was not, you know, you can mistakenly identify one aircraft, but not three. De-confliction should have taken care of it.

That's true. Yeah, that's exactly. Now, you could make the case that part of the problem with deconfliction was with the loss of all those radars that Iran blew up. I guess the total of the numbers now total 10. So you're looking at like $7 billion worth of radar that had been destroyed over the course of the last two weeks. Man, that's significant. Well, this is something that you and I talked about hours before the war broke out, but that, you know, and I'm sure you've been saying the same stuff, maybe on my show as well,

but I certainly have been saying this for years and years and years. Gareth Porter and I've been talking about this certainly since 2007. That, because it was Joel Klein in January of 2007, had the report, maybe the report came out in February or March or something, but it was about how in January the chiefs had taken W. Bush down to the basement of the Pentagon, down to the tank to the skiff there, and they told them, look, we'll do the surge in Iraq. But don't make us go to Iran.

We don't want to do Iran. And the reason why is because, yeah, we can obviously beat them up real bad if it comes down to it, but we won't have escalation dominance. In other words, we won't be able to control every stage of the war. And we don't want to if we don't think

we can control every stage of what happens. In this case, we've got, at that time especially, we had hundreds of thousands of guys in the region. But then also all of these bases from Iraq at that time and even still, but Kuwait

and all the way down the Gulf, right? In Qatar and Bahrain, we got the headquarters of Central Command there in Qatar and the headquarters of the 5th Fleet at Bahrain. And then all these Army and Air Force bases all up and down the Gulf there. And we have interceptors, but it's always

a question of just volume. They can only shoot down so many. They can't be completely effective. And so then all those bases ultimately are at risk and the gates of Hormuz are at risk and $200 a barrel oil and the collapse of the world economy and all of these things.

So can America beat Iran in a war? I mean, certainly from the air, no one really talks about an actual invasion. But yeah, ultimately, like we can bomb the crap out of them in a way that they cannot reach out and bomb us here in North America. Nobody's saying that. But can we just have our way with them and at a reasonable price?

No, we can't. So we should just not. And so that just makes, since I read that then in 2007, like that's essentially the same way I've explained it. On average, like once every couple of days for 19 years. You know, that's exactly the deal, man. Well, in fact, back then, so I guess it was 2006, a couple of other things. I was involved with scripting an exercise for the Joint Special Operations Command. And the exercise scenario was we, we, the United States,

were attacking a target inside Iran called an HDBT, hardened, deeply buried target for the express purpose of either destroying or recovering enriched uranium. So we did that in 2006. I can't remember. I think it was what they call an FTX, a field exercise. I don't think it was just a communications exercise, what they call a command post, a CP exercise. But the lesson learned out of that was, don't do it.

Also, at the same time, one of my CIA, buddies was assigned to what was called the Iran Task Force. And the CIA was actively planning an operation inside Iran to remove the Islamic regime. And I remember my friend early on said, raised his hand and said, okay, so let's say we remove them, then what? What's the replacement plan? It was told, oh, don't worry about that. It'll take care of itself.

And so he said, oh, yeah, that's, and so he went to look for another job. He got the hell out of there because he knew that it was going to be a mess. So there was, there were active plans back in 2006, 2007, just to confirm what you're saying, to go after and take out Iran. The reality is, had we done it, then it might have been, oh, it would have been, we would have had more chance of success. I'm not saying it would have succeeded, but we're stuck right now. now because Iran in the intervening 20 years has built miles of underground storage facilities and factories, missile factories in particular. And those are protected.

Those are we can't destroy them. And even if we were able to insert some, you know, some troops at the entrance of one of those, they're literally miles underground. We don't have enough troops to go in and actually secure these, which is the other fantasy that the Trump administration is currently living with. So Iran's got the Gulf of the Persian Gulf shut down, 20% of the world's oil, 25% of the world's liquid natural gas, 35% of the world's fertilizer.

That's the kill. That is the long-time killer here. Because right now, it's planting season in the Northern Hemisphere. And the Northern Hemisphere accounts for at least 60 to 70% of all arable land on planet Earth. So that's where the growth is supposed to take place. And no fertilizer, no growing food in many places. So we're looking at, you know, I'm going to call it famine, starvation, serious hunger in some kind of. countries six to eight months from now.

The price of gas is going to continue to go up. I don't know about where you live in Texas, but it's up now a buck in two weeks here here in Florida. And then the liquid natural gas, that's just, it's causing real problems throughout Asia because a lot of the Asian people use that for cooking and deep frying things. And they're not deep frying right now because it's getting too expensive. So that's what I said. The economic pressure on the United States is going to grow and grow.

And can we militarily open the Strait of Hormuz? Yeah, but at what cost? You know, the cost in loss of lives, loss of ships, loss of prestige will be significant. and there's no guarantee that we could actually pull it off because Iran has dug in like, you know, a tick in a dog's butt and they've got caves, they've got underground facilities, they've got missiles, they've got drones, maritime missiles as well, maritime drones, so it's, there's no quick, easy military solution to this.

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So, I mean, I think that much is just proven, right, that this thing is rolling on and on. They can continue to use their drones. They can light up any boat that they want in that golf. It can, you know, any kind of target, essentially, in all the states have been down the southwestern, however you want to call it, side of the golf there. But so, let's see, can you take us through? I know I read a great piece by you would have been, I don't know, four or five days ago, where you went down and kind of gave the litany of the battle damage on the American side here.

I think it's crucial to point out that even though apparently they, hit every last base, is it? Yeah, 13 bases. So 13, from Erbil down to wherever the... Man, Muscat down there in Iran, in Oman, I mean to say. But now, importantly, because, you know, people's imaginations can run wild on partial information where. So I think it's really important to point out that they were not targeting the barracks

and trying to kill every last guy that we have stationed at Bahrain or Qatar or. any of these places. And I think they must have been really evacuated to a great degree, even leading up to the thing. So thank goodness, we do not have like the worst case scenario of just missiles raining out of the sky on our guys' heads over there. And yet, what is, please, if you can, you know, medium length form summarize for us the battle damage from Earbold down to Oman, just how bad is it? What's it look like? So most of the The three critical bases, I mean, there are 13, but the ones up in Kuwait, those are basically ground detachments, so they don't have any air power to speak of. The three critical ones are the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, and then Al-Udid Air Force Base, which has been sort of CENTCOM headquarters.

as well as the location of what's called the chaos, the combined air operation center. And so the chaos, its function, is to monitor every single plane taking off or landing or operating in that entire airspace, extending from the Mediterranean, north to Turkey, south to the Arabian Sea, and over to, say, Afghanistan. then. That has been relocated.

I don't know where it was relocated to, but it was relocated. The biggest damage was to the radars. Without those radars, because the radars were tied in directly to the air defense systems, the THAAD in particular. Those radars are kaput. Now, the United States can. compensate for it, I'm told, by using AWACs, but it's still not as good as having those radars in place.

And they cost anywhere, there are two types. One type costs a half a billion dollars, $500 million. The other one comes in at $1 billion. So 10 of those have been destroyed. So that is, you know, let's put this, you got at least $5 billion worth of damage and it's probably closer to $8 billion when all is said and done.

Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain has basically been destroyed. There is no, you know, that was a place where ships, U.S. ships would come, refit, you know, like a destroyer after it had been firing off, surface air, you know, air defense missiles. They would have to come and get reloaded there

at that port. And let's point out what a difference 40 years makes. So when I moved down to state in 1989, one of my colleagues was a Navy SEAL commander.

He had just come off an assignment in the Persian Gulf. Two years previously when the United States was backing Iraq in its war against Iran, the Iranians tried to block the Persian Gulf, tried to mine it in order to prevent Iraq from getting oil out.

So we conducted what was called an oil escort operation. And as part of that operation, we erected, there was a floating barge outside of Bahrain, and it was called the Hercules barge. So my buddy, commander of Paul Evanco, he was the commander of that. and he led the oil escort operations. They boarded Iranian mine layers.

They took the Iranians captive. Iranians set out like 24 gunboats to attack them one night. They fought off, beat them back. And in fact, in that, they recovered a surface-to-air missile that Ali North had sold to the Iranians. Just, you know, bring it home. So we could do that 40 years ago. we can't do that now.

If that base was, if we tried to do something, that base would be destroyed instantly by drones and missiles. And we don't have a defense. At one of those bases, I won't specify which one right now, because it's still, I think, operationally sensitive. The air defense has been completely depleted. Out.

No more Pact threes, no more thads. They are gone. up, no replacement. And that's the real damage that's being done by the Iranian strategy. Because early on, you know, they sort of flooded the system with older missiles, older drones. And, you know, our radar systems don't have the ability to say, oh, that's a 12-year-old missile. So we can ignore. No, they have to assume that it's always the worst.

And in the course of that, you know, let's assume that on February 28th, that we had never used a single THAAD missile and had never used the single PACT 3 Patriot missile, understanding that when those systems are used, they have to fire two, two missiles, at a minimum to engage one target. Sometimes they fire three or four. The total number of Pact three Patriots had had,

been produced since 2015 is 4,620. That's the maximum number. We may have produced less than that. Total number of that's, the terminal high altitude area defense weapon, 900. So just you assume, do the math, that you've got 6,420. So that means you've got 3,000. 2,210 missiles that they could intercept. And on the Fad side, 450.

Well, we know that some of those systems, the Patriots in particular, have been used in Ukraine for the last three years. And Russia, over the course of that period, has fired over 12,000 missiles, crews and ballistic. So obviously, if we'd used all of our patriots up there, they would have been completely depleted there. We don't know how many patriots were used last June in the 12-day war, but it's estimated that Iran fired over 800 missiles in that 12-day war.

So, you know, the math doesn't work out. We are literally running out. If we are not all, we're in some areas we're depleted. But across the board, we're going to be completely. completely out of Patriot Pact 3 missiles and THAAD missiles. Boom. They have to wait for more to be produced. And the production rate, you know, do the math.

If we could produce 900, they started producing them in the Thads in 2007. So basically in 20 years, we produced 900. About four a year, you know, five a year, something like that. at least with the PAC three, we get more, we get 50 a month. Okay? So that means we can handle 25 missiles, which is about what Iran is firing right now at Israel and at the U.S. bases in one day. So we can produce in one month what we would use up in one day.

So I actually say, this is madness. We've picked a fight that we can't win. And then we were told, yeah, but we've suppressed their. Air Defense, boy. We can fly out will. We got air supremacy. Yeah. They just shot down 35 today.

Yeah, I know. I hate to quote the economist at you, but they had a tweet earlier that said that Trump says that we've destroyed 100% of Iran's military capability. But the remaining 0% is wreaking havoc all across the region still, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So look, God dang, I mean, I'm sorry, but I happen to remember, as I'm sure we must have discussed at the time right before the war broke out three weeks ago, one day short of three weeks ago, is it? They put it in the Wall Street Journal.

I think the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it in the Wall Street Journal. I told Trump there are a lot of reasons not to do this. And one of the main ones is they have more missiles, offensive missiles than we have defensive missiles. Yeah. And as you just said, we need double. And we don't have them. And so at some point, the arithmetic's there. They exhaust our defenses and then they keep firing and then what?

And, you know, I'm sorry, I've done so many interviews today. They all kind of blend together. I don't think we mentioned so far in this interview that they reached out and blew up an oil refinery in Haifa Israel today. Well, David Wormser's magic pipeline to Haifa. It was a missile pipeline. Yeah, well, this is, you know, it's been fair. fascinating watching Iran's, they've not been a strictly eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth response.

They did say, if you hit our air bases, we're going to hit your air bases. If you hit our oil and gas facilities, we're going to hit yours. So we did yesterday, and Iran wasted no time. They fired right back. The one area where they haven't, and this goes to what I'll call the integrity of the Islamic regime. when their desalinization plant was struck last week, I'm thinking, oh, my God, if Iran follows through on this, they are going, it will end up killing a lot of people in,

all the countries are going to have to vacate a lot of their population because they depend heavily upon the desalinization plants for fresh water. Iran didn't respond. It didn't react that way. It left those other desalienization. plants alone alone. And one of my, one of my readers, a Shia Muslim, he explained it. He said, look, the Shiaism began with the Imam Hussein, who was facing off against an army. He had 70 men facing off against an army of 3,000, and he was deprived of water for three days, he and his men.

And he said, so out of that, we have learned as Shia, we're never going to be. going to do to our enemies what was done to our martyr. We're not going to deprive them of water. And I thought, huh, you know, I hadn't thought about that, but it makes sense. And again, I've got a real thing about the demonization of Iran. When you go back to September 1980 when Iraq attacked Iran, at the time, it was, there's no written document showing that Carter ordered it. But I guarantee you it was done with the encouragement of the CIA as a way to apply pressure on Iran who is still holding Americans hostage. That war started in September of 1980.

The first chemical weapon attack was in August of 1983. And that attack was made possible by Don Rumsfeld supplying chemical precursors to Iraq so they could do that. And Iraq from August of 1983 through August of 1988 carried out 20 chemical weapon attacks, weapons of mass destruction, courtesy of the United States helping them do that. And what did Iran do? Iran did not make chemical weapons and had never responded in kind with chemical weapons. Why? Because within their theology, it was haram. It was a sin to do that.

So I'm just going to point out that Iran is not, they are not devoid of legal boundaries. And they're really not keen on killing civilians, unlike us. I went back as part of this question about effectiveness of bombing campaigns. Now, you know, you growing up in the United States like me, we're taught basically in school that the way we ended World War II in the Pacific was by dropping the atomic bombs. You know, we dropped those bombs, kill all those civilians, and the Japanese went, oh, we give up. Stop.

But that's a lie. That's not what happened. We started a bombing campaign in Japan in March of 1945, killed in the initial Tokyo fire bombing like 100,000 Japanese. And before our bombing campaign was over, with August 9th dropping of the last atomic bomb in Nagasaki, over 700,000 Japanese civilians had died. Japan didn't surrender on August 10th. They surrendered on August 15th, if I remember correctly. And what happened?

Well, on August 8th, the Soviet Red Army entered the war in Manchuria as they had promised, as Joseph Stalin had promised to FDR at the Alta conference they had earlier that spring. and in the first days, the Russians crushed the Japanese army. And there are documents from the Japanese government at the time that show. They were still, even getting bombed with an atomic bomb, hadn't convinced them to surrender. They thought they still had a chance they could negotiate with Russia. They could still save some of their.

And when Russia said, no, you know, it's unconditional. It was Russia's intervention in that war that finally, brought that war to an end. That's why I said, we've got to stop with this mythology that if we just kill enough civilians, that that's going to force them to quit. Nope, it's not. Terrible founding myth for your world empire

that a few nukes will put the natives in line. Yeah. Fear of this battle station, you know? Yeah. All right, guys. Well, if you're like me and pretty much everybody else, you use Amazon.com all the time, because what are you going to do?

They got prime. They bring this stuff right to door and all that. So that's fine. but what you do is make sure it stop by Scott Horton.org and click the Amazon link in the right-hand margin there. Get yourself a bug assault shotgun for destroying flies, trespassing on your property. And then also whatever you get from Amazon and the Scott Horton show will get a kickback from Amazon's end of the sale, which is very nice. Man, so listen, I'm jumping around for you here. There's so much to talk about about the war itself and all of that.

And maybe I'll try to figure out a better way to ask a good question about that later. But I want to get to the politics here in the United States a bit. It seems like a pretty kind of stark bifurcation of opinion between whether America calls all the shots and Israel's just our client state and that kind of thing. Or whether, no, the Lakud and the Israel lobby and the neoconservatives and their remnants and allies and whoever, the think tanks. and they really have this way and they've hijacked our foreign policy and bent it this way. I hear and see a lot of people rationalizing that,

no, see, this is somehow about sticking it to China and depriving them of hydrocarbons or this kind of thing. That's not sense. But then so, and look, you and I already agree about the role of the Israel lobby, but there's even there, and I did speak with Joe Kent earlier, there's still a couple of things there.

One of them is the absolute obvious, incontrovertible fact that it was Netanyahu and then his friends, Lindsay Graham, and the guys at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and others who just continually beat Trump over the head until he agreed with this and did it. Then there's a southern narrative that says that they really blackmailed Trump and had doing it by threatening to go ahead and launch the war and force Iran to attack American targets in response and then drag up. Trump in kicking and scream, and so he decided he'd better just do it anyway, as Rubio put it and so forth. I know for a fact that in especially the first Obama term, well, maybe even in the second Obama term, certainly in like 2012 especially,

they were really afraid that Netanyahu was going to start the war and drag them in. But ultimately, the president of the United States puts his foot down and that's it, you know, kind of thing. Seems like. But then they were, want us to believe that really Netanyahu almost kind of blackmailed the world emperor here

and made him do this, where it seems much more likely that they just came to an agreement. They decided to do this together. But I wonder, you know, what's your interpretation of all that stuff? Well, actually, I think it's more of the latter because we already, we already had one example where Israel attacked Iran on June 13, 2025. A surprise attack. A surprise attack Iran. A surprise attack, a decapitation attack. Now, Trump gave us two different stories. First he said, oh, I knew nothing about it.

You know, he was like the actress from Gone with the Wind. I don't know nothing about birth and no babies, Miss Scarlett. You know, there he was. I don't know nothing about Israel bombing Iran. Then later, you know, two days later, oh, yeah, no, I knew all about it. I was pre-coordinated.

But the point was, Iran and its response did not attack U.S. military bases. It saw this as a strict. It's Israel versus Iran. And in the course of that, Israel suffered and was begging Trump at the end, hey, got to help us get out of this. And Trump, I don't know who the intermediary was, maybe Oman, but they negotiated an end where this gets the bomb and, you know, obliterate Iran's nuclear program, which, you know, Iran's a foreign bomb that we've already got the unrest of uranium out. And then in exchange, Iran, this deal was they got the bomb, Al-Udid, you know, showed some, that they punched back.

But they got to get out of jail free card on the sanctions side in terms of being able to sell oil to China. That was the deal. So what makes this different is the United States jumped into this full, the planning was done in advance. You know, it wasn't like Israel said, hey, we're going to hit Iran tomorrow. So you better, you know, you want to come on fine and remind we're doing. No, no, no, no. Weeks in advance.

You know, going back, that was one of the issues that was being discussed between Trump and BB Netanyahu on December 29th. of 2025, just before the turn of the new year. It's the latter. This was a joint effort, but, you know, Rubio is trying to blame it on, oh, the Israelis made us do it. Now, Israel does exert an enormous amount of influence and power over the U.S. foreign policy. Yeah, still their fault, just not like that.

Yeah, yeah. And as we had talked about that day, you know, it was just a just a few hours before they launched the strikes, was that you can tell by the way that they're dealing with the issue, that they're clearly just using the nuclear program as a pretext for war. They're not trying to solve this thing at all. Yeah, people said, well, what's, what is the real intent of the United States? Well, it is regime changes.

It's to put in place a regime that will do what we tell them to do and that will allow us free unfettered access to their, oil and gas, and that way we can assure that Iran, that Israel has free access. Yeah, I mean, is that just Netanyahu talking to Trump and going, yeah, this is about America's oil and gas kind of? I think things are like, but it's also, it goes back to a longer strategy of the United States with respect to Russia and China because they basically is like Iran's one big chess piece.

You've got to take it off the board because then, because you've got to have that control of that. in order to make your move against Russia. You make your move against Russia, which they tried with Ukraine. Yeah, but why you need Iran to screw Russia? I mean, if you really want to screw Russia, you just have the Saudis increase production, right? Well, no, no, no, it's not that. It wasn't so much, it's not on the oil front, but it's just the physical placement that you were

you can launch operations literally onto the belly of Russia through the caucuses. You know, that's why the United States has been spending so much time with Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan. Those are critical nodes now. That's one of the reasons why the CIA station in Armenia on a per capita basis

is probably one of the largest in the world, if not the largest. Well, so then, all right, on a scale of like 1 to 10 or whatever, how do you score the joint staff and there's stacks of papers

on global strategic planning for the next few decades, versus the Lacude cracking their whip and demanding this war. Well, there really is no strategic planning on the part of the United States. I mean, if there was strategic planning, we would have understood that the future is with drones, not with $14, $15 billion aircraft carriers. Well, that's all attempted strategic planning or no.

But in other words, though, like this is, as you said, that, you know, this is ultimately about the ongoing Cold War against Russia and China, or no, this is really about greater Israel and taking the Shiite menace off of their problem list. Well, yeah, I think it's more of the former. This is ultimately more about Russia and China over the long term. You know, when you look at the actual, what kills me, and I don't know if you've got a clarification from Joe Kent on this.

I listened to him last night with Tucker, and he was talking about all the Iranian proxies that they were fighting in Iraq. I did. In fact, I saw where you wrote about that this morning, and I did get clarification on that. He fought against the soderists in March 2004, and again, in 2007 and 8,

when Petraeus was attacking them. So it was on the occasions when we were literally fighting against the Iranian-Bakshite militias that he was talking about, not conflating that with al-Qaeda. and ISIS. Yeah, and he's actually really good on the redirection and how Iraq War II backfired and empowered the Shiites, and then that's why they decided to take out Assad as a consolation

prize and back the Islamic State and all that. Like, he's really good on that stuff. Yeah, well, because, you know, to justify, to blame Iran for backing Shia Muslims who have been illegally invaded by the United States, Shia Muslims who are fighting for their territory and then to characterize Iran as this bad guy for supporting what are essentially freedom fighters. I mean, that's why the problem I have with our narrative

because we like, yeah, how dare they put explosively formed projectiles against us? Well, we had no goddamn reason to be in Iraq. Well, the thing is, the Daughterists are some nasty guys, but yes, our guys were trespassing and also those bombs were made by Iraqis, not Iranians. That's all propaganda hoax in the first place there too.

And we talked about that also about how, you know, I think he thought that the Iranians taught them how to make the EFPs. My affirmation was they learned it from Lebanese Hezbollah who got it from the IRA. No, no, no, no. It was U.S. Special Forces trained the Iranians

back in the 60s. Oh, okay. That's where they got it. All right. So then he may be right then. So then the Iranians taught it to the soderists. But then the point being that it really was a propaganda campaign in 07 to say, and as they still do repeat like minor birds, they always skip a few on the explanation, but they just say Iran killed 600 of our guys in Iraq. And then if you nail them down, they'll say, well, that means Iran supplied the bombs that killed 600 of our guys when they were fighting the Shia. Of course, the number was really 500, not 600,

and those bombs were made by Iraqi Shiites, not by Iranians. Even though they were Iranian-supported groups, even then as Kent is good on this, because he really was in the thick of this and knows what he's talking about and may have read my book and got some clarity too, where he agrees and understands that Dawah and Skiri of the three major Shiite factions

who were part of the United Iraqi Alliance that we fought Iraq War II for. that Sauter was the Iraqi nationalist, and it was Dawa and Skiri who had taken Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq War and had lived in Iran for the last 20 years, who were now coming to inherit the power. And America took the side of Iran's puppets

in Dawa-Nskiri against Sauter because Sauter wanted America and Iran out. And we said, well, we prefer the Iranian parties because at least they're not kicking us out, not yet. And then they bet that they're going to love us more than their friend's next story. in the end, which was not true. And that was why in the end, Maliki told Bush to beat it.

Thanks for giving me all the power and not get the hell out. And that's why also Sada remains one of the most influential Shiite leaders in the country to this day. It was really, the war was fought for him, even though they attacked him a few different times. Yeah. Well, and let's use the proxy standard. Okay? I'm saying if we're going to condemn Iran for supporting proxies that carried out attacks against Americans, then let's use the same standard.

Did America support any proxies that attacked Iran? Well, as a matter of fact, the Americans backed Saddam Hussein, who started a war against Iraq that killed about 300,000 Iranians. So by that standard, we killed far more Iranians than Iranians ever killed Americans. Okay? Number one. Then, how about the Mujahadino Kolk, a designated foreign terrorist organization in 1997. That was then when we invaded Iraq in 2003, we found these guys, and it took us about six months to figure out, hey, they hate Iran. And so then all of a sudden the CIA takes over.

And the CIA then in the incident like 2005, 2006, gets them, you know, in a camp and they're protected. and they're supported and they're funded, and then they get them into Albania. And by 2012, then, hey, Hillary and Barack say, no, they're not terrorists. They're our buddies. And this is a bipartisan decision. I mean, John Bolton was wildly applauding,

and it was, and what did the Mech do? Carried out assassinations, carried out terrorist attacks. So that's what I, I don't want to hear a thing from any American complaining about, oh, Iran sponsored these terrorists. We've done more. We've killed more. We've killed more. We got more blood on our hands, for God's sake.

Sorry. You're muted. I always do that. Sorry. Hey, guys, Scott here. You know, you've probably noticed when I'm interviewing somebody or somebody's interviewing me. I've got this great bust of Dr. Ron Paul in the background on my bookshelf here.

Well, you can get one like that, too. They're available again from the great artist Rick Casale. Just go to my website, Scott Horton.org, and look in the right-hand margin. Click the link through there and use promo code Horton. You'll save $25 and get free shipping, at least in the lower 48 states. And he does custom work as well. In the case that Joe Kent, he's not really moralizing and demonizing Iran doing that as much as saying, look, as a guy who went toe to toe against Iranian-backed Shiites, let me tell you,

we also fought on their side over and over again, too. And as he talked about on my show, after Obama's support, along with Israeli and Turkish and Saudi and Qataris support, helped build up the caliphate, and then they launched Iraq War III, America was not only backing Iran's best friends among the Iraqi Shiite militias, but there were literally Iranian forces on the ground when America was cooperating flying as air cover for them, particularly, for example, in the case of the liberation of Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, is it was. was literally the Coeds Force on the ground and American air power flying, you know, at the time. In fact, there's a, you may know this guy. He's a decent guy. I've never met him, but I've talked with him on the emails and things before.

His name is Michael Horton, no relation to me. But he was at the Jamestown Foundation, which I know is very hawkish kind of thing. But he's a real terrorism expert type. And I remember he told Mark Perry in March of 2015 when Obama was, launching the Yemen war with Saudi and Qatar

and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula against the Houthis. Michael Horton told Mark Perry, the great journalist Mark Perry, he said, John McCain complains that we're flying as al-Qaeda, I'm sorry, that we're flying as Iran's air force in Iraq.

Well, we're flying as al-Qaeda's air force in Yemen. And then the thing was, of course, the irony was John McCain had supported Iraq War II and the dirty war in Syria. and Iraq War III, all of which put us on the side of doing Iran's dirty work in that whole thing. And then he had the nerve to complain that America was helping the Iranians liberate to Crete from Baghdad's caliphate. Yes. Yeah, I mean, the reality was Iran and the United States were natural allies and fighting against ISIS.

And, you know, the Shia I've talked to because I'll talk to, I said it is radical. Islamic terrorism, and they say, no, it's un-Islamic. This is, he said, this terrorism is not in accordance with Islam. These are takfiris. Now, they are, they are apostates from true Islam. It's okay. But, but it's that attitude. But, but again, we, on average, again, when I was working with Jay Sock and it was right

after 9-11 in 2001, the, you know, the average, you know, the average, you know, the average, folks out in the field, they didn't understand Shia from Sunni. They didn't understand the histories and the different symbolism. And, you know, some learned. But, but again, it's not faulting Joe Kent. But Joe was never, he never had the chance to get, if you will, formally educated, joining the Army at 17, so he didn't go to college. And he wasn't able, I don't know how much reading he did over the years.

but this demonization that's been part of demonizing Iran in America for the lot. You know, we keep talking, they've killed all these Americans. Go through and count the numbers. Show me the number of attacks and do the proxies as well. The number of proxies attacks by Hezbollah, the number of proxy attacks by Hamas. What you'll find is that most of Hezbollah's attacks are against military and or government targets. they're not strapping a suicide bomber up to run into a cafe and blow himself off. That's not their saying.

And so you find that the death count, and I got this as well from the Israeli government's own website, it was not tens of thousands of Israelis and foreigners. It was less than 1600 from 2000 to 2000. Even that's probably embellished, right? They throw in Argentina, the hoax and other things like... Right. Yeah, so it's just we've got this, you know, I think it's just the fundamental hatred of Iran boils down to, they beat the CIA.

I mean, the CIA had taken it over and they kicked us out. By God, we can't let that happen. We've got to go back and we keep going back and we keep looking for a way. to turn it around so that we can once again control what goes on in Iran. And that's what, and so to that end, we got to demonize him. Yeah. Well, and you know, this goes along with Trump and so many of these older guys talking about the hostage crisis of 79.

Like this is just a grudge. They're not over it. And that, you know, they'll bring up Beirut 83. And say any reasonable person, it sounds like they're screaming, we have no plausible excuse to launch this war right now. Yeah. But they're saying what they really think, which is, we're going to get those guys for what they did to us. We'll have the last word eventually and all that.

Although, again, well, let me bend it back toward Israel. So how do you measure Netanyahu's rolled in in egging Trump on and getting him to do this? Is he a minor player then? Oh, no, no, no. He's major player. I mean, he was a major influence. Seven trips to the White House. This was, as they kept saying, man, this is our last chance.

We've got to do it now. We've got him right where we want. on up. Yeah, that's not working out so well. You know, Alan, I rely up on Alistair Crook for a lot because he was there. Oh, he's great. By the way, you know what? Nobody ever says about him is that he was one of the first guys to say, hey, there's a massive covert operation to back the jihadists in Syria. Like, everybody knows the support for the jihadists in Libya was like from February and March right from the beginning of 2011 on. But Alistair Krook was, As far as I know, he was the first guy to say it's on in Syria, too.

And there are a couple of others. There's only like two, three, four, five sources from 2011 that were really good on that. A lot of people have 2012 and then 13 with Timber Sycamore or whatever. But Alastair Crook was way out. Yeah, he was early. I got onto it. I got onto it after Benghazi. Okay.

Yeah, which was September of 11 or 12, 12. Yeah, September of 12, because what happened, you know, the sequence of that is, is David Petraeus flew to Ankara, Turkey, on like September 4th, met with the Turks. Basically, you say, okay, this armed shipment program we got coming out of Benghazi, we've got to turn that off until after the election. Okay. And then Ambassador Stevens, that's why he went the following week. You know, like on Sunday to 9th to – and he met.

with the Turkish counterpart there to close down. That was what they were doing. They were closing it down that a weapons transfer. Because that base in Benghazi, you know, it was huge. You know, a normal CIA base or a station, particularly in places like Africa, they'll sometimes have like six people. You know, you don't have 26 people running around. So this was a big deal.

And so that's where we knew. that they were funneling all these weapons. In fact, at the time, I came across one of the guys who was supplying, who was getting the missiles, getting them out of Libya. It was one of my old CIA buddies. He called me, he said, hey, we got this guy and let's talk to him. So my CIA buddy's wife, she was a hairdresser. One of her clients came in, they got talking, and she says,

Do you know anybody that does taxes? And the guy's wife said, sure, my husband, you know, Mike, he used to be at CIA. And she goes, oh, good. Because my husband, he's been doing something. He's been engaged with some top secret activities, et cetera. Well, it turned out this guy had been a member of the 75th Rangers. He got an dishonorable discharge. You know, poor weapons handling something.

But then he got recruited by the CIA. or so he thought. Now, what made my friend Mike so important is Mike used to be the admin officer for the non-official cover program, the knock program. People who are not really associated with the CIA but are working for the CIA. So this guy comes in and goes, yeah, he goes, I'm a knock for the CIA. And Mike's suspecting and goes, really? and starts asking him questions.

Has he got to dug through it? He'd been recruited by the Brits who had convinced him that he was working for the CIA, but he was really working for the Brits. And his job was to go into Tripoli and buy up surface-terror missiles. So I say, yeah, CIA was up to its ass and working with the radical Sunnis

to overthrow Assad. Sorry, it didn't mean to go out for the detour, but... No, that's okay. I did. I just wanted to give it. credit to Alistair Crook because he's so great. But anyway, go ahead because you were going to say something else about him entirely. Well, you know, Alistair has been all over Iran. He was in, he's been in the tunnels, in the silos, in the underground cities. He knows what they're capable of. And the

West, you know, the West doesn't want to listen. They've, they've constructed a fantasy and they're now wedded to that fantasy. And as a result, You know, it's not only burning up dollars, but burning up military resources that we really can't replace anytime soon. Yeah. Okay, so listen, I'm sorry, we're almost out of time here, man. I'm sure you've got to go as bad as I do. But let me, the final question here is,

considering the amount of damage that's already been sustained, the amount of relative power between all the sides and everything, the way that you see the risk board laid out now, what difference does it make? What does it mean here? I mean, obviously there's a lot of variables and how long the war could continue and all of that.

But overall, is there going to be something that Trump can spin as a partial win or no, this is the absolute destruction of the American Empire or something in between? I think Trump has done irreparable damage to the U.S. reputation in the Persian Gulf. that you're going to, I think you're likely to see a collapse of the United Arab Emirates. I mean, it's 83% of its GDP is now shut down, literally shut down.

So they're not going to have a source of continuing cash flow if this war continues for six months, which I think it will at least. So, yeah, I think the outcome will be, the U.S. will be forced out of the Persian Gulf. and our credibility that there will be a move among the Gulf Arabs to China and Russia for guarantees of security going forward. All right. With that, I'll let you go. We'll have to catch up in another few weeks, but really appreciate you.

Spend some time with us this afternoon. Always honored by the invitation, Scott. Thanks so much. Thank you. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts and Brokers, Brokridge, Inc., Moondos, Artisan, Call, coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, fools errand, enough already,

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