Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 8/19/26 Arta Moeini: Trump’s Iran War Is More Dangerous than People Realize

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Scott interviews Arta Moeini of The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy about several articles he’s written recently digging into the true risk of Trump’s decision to kill Iran’s supreme leader and launch this regional war in the Middle East. Discussed on the show: “The dangerous martyrdom of Khamenei” (Unherd) Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn “Welcome to Fortress Iran” (Unherd) “Trump can forge a new Middle East” (Unherd) “The virtue of America First” (Unherd) “The Coming Multi-World: A New Civilizational Theory of International Relations” (The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy) Dr. Arta Moeini is a realist scholar of geopolitics and Managing Director at The Institute for Peace & Diplomacy in Washington DC. Follow him on X @ArtaMoeini Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com 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/43D82oY (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/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx 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: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; 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; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow 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! 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. All right, y'all, introducing Ardemoini, and he writes for unheard, as you can see here, and he is Director of Research at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy and founding editor of Aegon or Agon, something like that.

And he's got a couple of extremely interesting articles at issue for us here today, The Dangerous Martyrdom of Cominee. And welcome to Fortress. Iran. So welcome to the show, Arda. How you doing? Good. Thank you. Glad to be here with you again. Yeah, I absolutely appreciate you joining us here. So, man, I read with terror this article about the martyrdom of the Ayatollah there. And, you know, I had put this to John Mearsheimer the other day about how, you know, it's really bad to assassinate somebody's leader. But, man, especially the Shiites really have a thing about martyrdom and holding grudges.

And it might not be a good idea to pick a fight with Shiite Islam writ large by killing the Ayatollah, I guess the second highest ranking Shiite leader in the world after Sistani, but the only one who is the supreme leader of a nation state. And like, you know, I don't know, a hair or less authority than Sistani. if anything, I don't know exactly how that works, but not much lower rank than that, if anything. And then they exploded him and his family to death with high explosives in the opening of this war.

They helped Israel do it, is what looks like from the reports there. And so, man, I would be really worried about just exactly what kind of fire we're playing with here in terms of unexpected blowback and consequences from that. And then Meersheimer, I thought wisely rejoined that, like, hey, man, forget.

any religion at all, the obvious nationalist reaction to that could be as extreme as you could imagine. Just think about, like, for example, if we had known and it really had been the USSR that had killed Kennedy, we'd have gone to war over that, nuclear war over that. You don't do that.

And so, and he wasn't our Pope or anything, but just president was enough. You know what I mean? Then you wrote this article about how, no, man, see, yeah, but the thing is about it, is Shiites have this thing about martyrdom and holding grudges that is really kind of particular to their, even the foundations of the Shiite sect of Islam, that it's all in, it's all the foundations are in the great laws at Karbala and the stab in the back and the betrayal and all of these things,

which I'm not familiar with all the ins and the ounce of it, but it's kind of at the core of the thing. It's not exactly Buddhism, you know what I mean? So, and then the way you put it here is, that, yeah, this isn't nothing. This is actually extremely important and particularly not just because of the way I framed it in the simplest terms here, but because of his politics and the way he had framed his entire position of authority inside that country since 1989 when he took over for the Ayatollah before that. So there's so much there. And I guess, you know, for a guy like me who's been so obsessively paranoid about the threat of bin Ladenite terror, and especially in reaction

of what Israel's done in Gaza over the last few years and regarding particular lone wealth attacks that are still already going on in this country or continuing to happen in this country. What does it really mean

for the future of the West and particularly America and the future of Shiite Islam and the Iranian people and their position regarding their old Supreme Leader and their new one going forward and all of these things, please.

Yeah. So a lot, there's to unpack, obviously, but I wrote this, the original piece, just basically the night of the assassination. And I write as a realist scholar and, you know, in the same school as John Mearsheimer and perhaps yourself. And I was looking at this in terms of the other causes that, that, you know, could create a red line and a survivalist mentality in a country. I mean, any country who has, which has its head of state assassinated, will see down an existential threat

and we'll do anything to survive. But in the Iranian case, you had both the religious undertones and as you mentioned, the nationalists undertones, because you have to remember, the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was not just an Islamist revolution. It was a mixture of leftist anti-colonialism,

Islamist Shiot activism, and nationalist sovereign to sentiment all brought in together. It only got its, you know, exclusively Shiite or religious character after it consolidated itself during the Iran-Iraq War. So the first war, the Iran-Iraq War, kind of allowed for that picture of martyrdom

to really be consolidated. And, you know, Harmony Sr. used to run Iran's military operations, both, you know, he was a military man, both during the war, but also when he became president, he was very close with the security establishment. So from the very beginning of his tenure, he was pushing this message of resistance and martyrdom and lack of trust

as part of Iran's national identity. So then you take that kind of a state. And what we also have to see, and this was the second piece, this is the second sort of part of that, is that Iran is ultimately a modern total state. It uses Shiism, it uses national, nationalism, it uses even leftist ideology, an anti-colonial ideology, but it's fundamentally

a modern total, which means that it is multi-layered, it has redundancies, it is horizontally organized. You can't, you know, I talked back then about the mosaic defense, which has now been discussed multiple times, that Iran actually is both politically not a monolith, but also its defense strategy since the 12-day war became a multi-layered mosaic defense. When you, basically you can't decapitate. It doesn't have a central command in that sense. And so when you look at this whole thing together, what we ended up with is an Iran that I argued is going to be stronger

and Khomey's death will actually strengthen. You know, he will do more for the Islamic Republic in his death than he perhaps even did in his life. You know, Iran was highly polarized before the strikes and before the assassination, But, you know, there is a rally around the flag effect with any foreign military strike. But in this case, you actually had the, you know, his basically what he looked like, you know, he looked like he has embraced death and martyrdom.

And with doing that, he was able to then consolidate the Islamic Republic's most ardent supporters. And so all of this then has to be put in place of Iran's power as a regional power. Iran's statehood as a civilizational state, and Iran's history as a country that's even mountainous and geographic fortress. So both the geography of Iran, the politics of Iran, and the specific sort of particular culture and strategic culture of Iran, all of them pointed to a resistance that will be ground-shaking and seismic and that the United States has underestimated this. Remember that when we did this, President Trump originally said that this is going to take 48 to 72 hours. Because the Israelis had told them that Iran is in such bad shape, this perception of weakness, right?

So that they had basically said that as soon as we decapitated its head, everybody is going to fall apart. But what we saw was the exact opposite, right? The cohesion internally, the regime consolidating, and that they had anticipated this for 47 years, their entire regime was just there not to thrive, but to survive. And so that actually allowed it now, at this moment, six months into the war, to then, you know, actually we're about to see a different kind of an Islamic Republic emerge that is far more autarkic, that is far more, you know, resilient. And it now wants to change the picture on the United States by basically spearheading this post-American

Middle East and saying, then, you know, Iran will have a share, or at least a seat at this table. And, you know, we can no longer just want to survive. We want to now be a regional power and be respected and recognized as such. So everything that Donald Trump wanted to do in terms of Iran, which was the Israeli policy of destabilizing and perhaps collapsing Iran, was fundamentally not only did it have blowback, it had the exact opposite effect.

And this is without getting to the straight-of-Hormuz question and everything else. Yeah, we talked about that. But, Scott Horton-flavored coffee. I drink this stuff first thing in the morning, every morning, and then right around 2 o'clock when the potential siesta starts to kick in. No siesta. More coffee. Moondos artisan coffees.

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Expanddesigns.com, they do what they say they're going to do, when they say they're going to do it, and it works. And you can get a hold of them later, and it's great. Expandesigns.com. They'll have run your website. Just on this, I mean, this is straight out of Andrew Coburn's book, Kill Chain, and where he shows all this research where decapitation strikes almost never work. I mean, in the case of Maduro, what the hell?

Fine, you got your magic wish there in a compliant new government and minimal bloodshed and, you know, what a miracle. But in virtually every other case, what happens is all the lieutenants fight for power, whether you're talking about the mob or whatever drug cartels or states that, I mean, you can imagine right now without knowing anything about it, just picture a bunch of random Iranian faces with brown hair sitting around a table in their green uniforms and things. They're all shouting at each other over who's the toughest guy

and what's the toughest stance that we better take in this circumstance. after all, they are the far weaker power, but through their toughness, they have prevailed so far. So all of the economics of politics in Iran are to be worse, to stick the screws to Trump. The guy around the table who says, no, I say we double down.

The advantage is ours, let's press it. He's going to have more wind at his back than ever before in the current type of circumstances. And then, so this is your second piece that I show there too was about, well, what was the title again so I can do you justice here. It's some, welcome to Fortress, Iran. And part of this discussion, this goes to something else that me and Mir Shamir discussed. I had been reading in Ali Sufans' morning email thing, the Sufant group, he had a thing about

how when you talk about hawks and doves in Iran, the clerics, the mad mullahs, they're with the doves or at least the more moderate type of forces. That's part of the split there. And I'm not sure what Mearsheimer said about that. I asked him about that. But anyway, so you do have a bit of that in here where, you know, kind of defining. And of course, it's not as simple as that, right? There are multiple factions on each side.

And like, oh, man, I'm afraid I have all of these names to memorize and backstories to learn and all of this stuff. But, you know, some of it made sense to me, like, well, when you kill Lara Johnny, then it goes to this guy. But then now I think you say the guy who is in charge of talking with Vice President Vance has been cashiered and replaced by a guy to his right. Is that correct? He hasn't been replaced. I mean, the guy who was the counterpart to Vance for the MOU was Golibov. Golibov still has a lot of power.

And what I was trying to actually point out in the piece is that there are. rivalries in Iranian system. Iranian system is not a monolith. And, you know, we mistake it by thinking that it's a monolith. But, I mean, we can also talk about, you know, is there different wings of the U.S. administration or even within the Trump administration? Are there different wings in the Trump administration? Of course there are. You know, you have the hexap wing. You have the J.D. Vance wing. You have, you know, but at the end of the day, they sort of are working towards, in this case, the president's agenda. So they claim. Iranian case, actually, because it's an existential crisis, I would argue that all of these

different factions have one thing in common. They have a similar end goal, which is for Iranian sovereignty to be respected. In this case, they're all sovereignists. Nobody wants to basically say, okay, let's hand over the nuclear materials and abandon our nuclear capability and give up on our missiles. The reason they have survived is because of those things, especially the missiles and drones. So none of these sides is going to capitulate to the United States and to Donald Trump. Let's make that clear. However, they have different approaches as to how and what you need to do at this point in time. So with the replacement, with the assassination of Laurie Johnny, Laurie Johnny and Golibov were both part of a similar faction, which united, I call them the

pragmatist, the conservative pragmatist in the peace. They, you know, they both coalesced around this idea of defend Iran, have, you know, prevent the containment, but try to cash in and, you know, make a new deal with America because America ultimately, I mean, should be a rational country. And, you know, it's a, it's a rational deal to be made. And, you know, it was very sort of black box. It's actually kind of like realist if you think about it. America is a black box. It has to follow its interests. And its interest at this point is no longer to decapitate Iran. They should have known that Iran is, you know,

they should now know that Iran is not weak, that Iran will survive this. So why not come to a new arrangement, a new reset between Iran and the United States that's beneficial for both sides? So let's do that. And that was basically, we saw that in the MOU, you know, the signage of the MOU,

was basically their position, which the entire Iranian system backed because it did respect the Iranian sovereignty. Actually, for the first time, I believe, know, since 79, actually recognizes Iran's sovereignty as an equal state. And it talked about the Strait of Hormuz. It basically says that Iran would manage the Strait of Hormuz for 60 days until

new arrangement. So Iran got everything that we wanted on freezing of the funds and all the sanctions on oil and gas will go away. So it was a recipe for a reset. And so people like Wallywell continue to say even now, this was a huge victory, right? We did what we did in the realm of diplomacy, what we were doing in the realm of the military action by actually delivering a new world order.

But the other side likes the end result of that MOU, if that it held up. But they were just fundamentally cynical about American intent. They believed that Donald Trump does not have the personality to be consistent. He's erratic. He doesn't know what's good for him

when it comes to Iran, he perhaps is compromised by Israel, so all these different considerations, but ultimately it all comes down to the United States lacks credibility. The United States is not a trusted partner, and therefore we cannot trust anything they say that Donald Trump and the Trump administration will continue to want to unravel the Iranian system even after the MOU.

And so watch and behold, right after, I think it was 24 to 48 hours after, that, you know, the United States was, you know, Sancom was basically pushing in traffic from a southern corridor that all, I mean, there is no mention in paragraph five, if you read the paragraph of America having any role in the Strait of Hormuz. And yet 24 hours to 48 hours later, it's the Sancom trying to push, you know, vessels down a southern corridor through the UAE and, and Oman.

And immediately, you know, Iran rejected that and started firing on these ships to, to say that you're violating the MOU and the ceasefire agreement. So that was the basic beginning of the unraveling of the MOU because, I mean, we violated it. At the same time as, you know, the Rubio faction went to Lebanon and tried to do another deal that sort of pushed aside the Hezbollah and that was also not well received in Iran. So it was like, see, we told you, right?

We told you that the other side cannot be trusted. And the only language that Donald Trump understands is strength and force. And so this faction, I call them the militant sovereignists or the militarized sovereignists. So they are both sovereignists. One group is trying to focus on pragmatism, dealmaking, and more sort of like conservative legitimacy of the clerical establishment. It has ties to the clerical establishment. This new group, which is, you know, I mentioned in a piece Rezaa, Ahad Bahidi, who is the head

of the IRGC, or confirmed as the head of the IRGC now, specifically. and also the former head of the IRGC, Rahim Safavi. This clique is basically saying what, in fact, many realists in America might have said, which is, you know, the only language that really matters is power and force, and you got to resist and you got to actually, and you shouldn't wait until the other side attacks you and retaliate. You should actually go on the offensive and be erratic. Learn from the Israelis.

Their model is effectively the Israeli model and Trump's model. They are saying that Trump acts like a madman, act like a madman, you know, suggest different things. Maybe try to attack Bulgaria or Poland or any country that, you know, fights against Iran or can be used as a base of operations. You know, and it was this group that preemptively attacked Jordan and claimed to have hit U.S. F-35s, There are staff on images of that as well, but SETCOM hasn't confirmed it.

So that group now actually says that, look, we did this right before Donald Trump was saying that he's about to attack Cargoyle and put U.S. troops on the ground. And look and behold, they didn't do that. They actually pulled back and went to this new strategy that they have right now, which is the old strategy prior to the 40-day war or prior to the February war, which is, which is just to economically strangle it, economically strangle Iran and cut it off and basically force an economic collapse. Donald Trump sort of pushed that, you know, that's basically FD's in Israel's position. FDD just wants Iran to be weak and economically down and destabilized.

And so they were like, well, that's really what we want, a weak Iran. So let's go back to that strategy and continue to naval blockade. Except that this new you know, Rezae faction, the militant sovereignists, the autarkists, or the Machiavillians, depending on how you want to think about them.

They are basically saying the naval blockade is the continuation of the war. We're not going to sit back for the United States to just do what it wants. We will break the blockade one way or another.

So I believe that we are in for a huge escalation over the next days and weeks. Donald Trump thinks that he can just, you know, cruise this out until the midterms. He has another thing coming.

The only office would be either what Joe Kent says, which is to just close the bases that are already broken and just pull back, or to actually recognize that this could be a periodic defeat, that actually, you know, every U.S. President has promised to pull back from the Middle East and endless wars, and every president, whether it's Obama or Donald Trump, becomes an interventionist hawk when they're in office. But except that Iran has turned a table on that. So perhaps it's time for us to recognize this and make a kind of a Nixonian reset on our end and just understand that Iran is a country that's going to be there and stay there. And so let's deal with the reality of it. And from that

perspective, you can actually, you don't need a formal deal, but you can do something with the Iranians that actually changes U.S. Iran relations. Again, I don't see this administration under Donald Trump doing this. He wants the photo op. He wants the formal deal. But also, He wants to say that Iran lost. And the Iranians are very, you know, they're ancient people. They have a very proud culture. They're never going to accept that they lost the war that they think they actually won. So at best, you know, a new arrangement could be agreed based on just a reality on the ground.

And you mentioned it yourself, I think a few minutes ago, you know, decapitation, but any kind of aerial campaign, right, just by itself, just bombing the hell out of the country, it doesn't work unless you're able to actually. you're willing and able to invade a country. And for Iran, you have to commit a million, more than a million, close to two million troops at the least. This is a huge country. And it's going to be a disaster. I don't think even Donald Trump will be as stupid to do this. So ultimately, there is no military solution to the Iran file.

And anything, any push towards a hybrid war, an economic sabotage or an economic war on Iran, to try to cut it off and, you know, basically make them go hungry, as Donald Trump says. That's just not going to be something that Iran will tolerate. Iran already, I mean, the war hasn't ended. I mean, we keep talking about the 12-day war, you know, the 40-day war, you know, the return of the war. Well, ultimately, I think, you know, you would agree, Scott, that this war is one continuous war. It was a cold war before June of 25th.

And it became a hot war since June of 25. So the 12-day war and the U.S. Israeli strikes on February of 26 that have carried until the six months of this war now, they're all part of one continuous war to try to dislodge the Islamic Republic. And it's just not going to work out because Iran is more than just its regime type. Iran is an actual civilizational state, whether or not its own leaders appreciate this or not. And that's why it has sustained for thousands of years.

not because of any particular regime type. Hooray, I own LibertyStickers.com again. It was my company. I invented it way back a long time ago. I used to write these things down, driving around in my cab. Oh, I wish I had a bumper sticker that said this. Anyway, now it's mine again.

LibertyStickers.com. Everyone else's stickers suck. You guys know I have another show, right? Yeah, the provoked podcast every Thursday night, me and Daryl Cooper talk about stuff. Well, you know, wars mostly. Man, all right, well, a lot there. First of all, thanks for reminding me.

about Rubio's Lebanon deal, which was so absurd, we just laughed about how, yeah, right, if the Lebanese army could get rid of Hezbollah, they'd have done that a long time ago, and the only purpose that served was to help ruin diplomacy.

And that really should, as you put it, that should always be paired with the attempt to run the blockade near Oman that led to the death of the MOU. And I kind of, I've been out of practice and using kind of one or the other of those instead of both together, but that's important that those go together.

But then, So back to the beginning of this, though, obviously, well, I don't know, obviously, the news is, so far, the Madmullahs and or even including the real Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf, they have not issued a fatwa against the American people or the West, like, you know, the kill Salman Rushdie if you can get your hands on them because he wrote a book we don't like kind of thing like the old Khomeini did back in the West. 80s, which people have tried to kill that guy repeatedly, lost an eye over it and everything. As I pointed out a couple of times, bin Laden didn't have any religious rank as a Sunni Imam of any kind. He was just a Sheikh and a rich boy who had respect because he fought with his men and was wounded and slept on the floor of the cave and sacrificed his rich boy status in order to fight with the guys on their own level and whatever. And so earned his respect in that sense and was able to command people to do what he wanted in that way,

without an army or a tax ability or anything like that due to his stature. But that's not the same as being an Ayatollah. And if the Ayatollah put a death mark on a soul and said, all good Shiites, if you believe in God, kill an American, that could be really bad news. And that has not happened and thank goodness. But I wonder, even with that aside, and let's say that's not even on the table at all and couldn't possibly be,

well, what about what we saw in those scenes at the funeral, the funerals of Cominee, where there were blatant calls for revenge and for the death of our president as well as God knows who and revenge for, after all, what America has done here is absolutely heinous the way that they started this war. And as Mir Shimer was saying,

we went through this for somebody killed our president in the 60s. I wasn't there, but he was. And people were really, really upset, dude, even if they weren't Kennedy fans. You know what I mean? It was a big deal. If that had been the Russians had done it with a bomb,

we'd a nukeed Moscow. It would have been on, right? So anyway, back to that part of it, because I think that all of this crap about the Gulf, we can negotiate this. This is just business. But if somebody's going to put an eternal fatwa on somebody or any kind of thing like that at all,

then we could have a real problem for a very long time, I think. Yeah, I would caution against, you know, reducing Iran into a Shiite sort of axis. Because I think what the Islamic Republic really represents, it was what you mentioned in the beginning, was a fusion of Shia ideology. For those who don't know, Shiism is very different from Sunni and specifically Bahabism, right? So Shiasm is, I would say that Shizm is more like Catholicism. It has a lot of subsidiarity. It has a lot of difference to the, to how much.

higher authorities, rather than Sunnis, which is much more like Protestantism. So it was like much more literalist than reading the Quran and determining what it should be and using it as, you know, as an anti-modern force. Well, and picking your own local leaders instead of having this one big order, right? Well, and the Iranian case, you know, Shiism, it's kind of like the Catholic Church, except it doesn't have a pope. So it has the cardinals. So the Ayatollahs are like the cardinals.

So you don't have it, you actually don't have it. you actually don't have a pope. So Fulmini actually, the founder of the Islamic Republic actually, you know, was revolutionary in more than just political sense. He did something that a lot of the religious leaders didn't like, which is he wanted to fundamentally change the character of Shiism and make, make it into the Catholic sort of Catholic kind of, you know, way in which you do have a pope, and he would be the pope. except that, you know, more religious Shiites wouldn't accept that.

But so the Supreme Leader is a political position, and it sort of brings, so a lot of people talk about theocracy, but I would actually say that Iran is not a theocracy, but it's what it was, was a, you know, a Cesar or Papist regime. It was an Herastian regime, was a regime in which the government, the state, controls religion, even if it has a religious figure at the top, it's the government. And the state expanded onto the religious sphere rather than the religious sphere controlling, you know, the government. So like, you know, the religious center in Iran would be Qom or would be in Iraq, it would be Najaf. They are not

controlling Tehran. Tehran is controlling them. So it's actually an inverse relationship that a lot of people mistake. So I would actually caution against, you know, seeing this just as a religious war because it's really a nationalist war. It's a war of national resistance. And so a lot of people that that's sort of, just like with the bin Ladenites on the other side, that that's kind of the extra persuasive part. You know what I mean? That like, look, we're in a battle for our lives and deaths, but you strap this bomb to your chest and get out there.

I promise you're going straight to paradise is a good little sweetener for that. You know what I mean? And I have seen where Ayatollah Sistani has been willing to absolutely stand up to George W. Bush and really to Barack Obama as well. And he's not injudicious about it. But he told George W. Bush in 2004, hey, you want to start this war all over again, boy? And Bush said, no, sir. And Sistani made him his slave after that is what actually happened in the history of that war. And then in 2014, when the Islamic Caliphate came in from Syria, he said, listen, if you believe in God, I need you to grab a rifle and go join the local militia to fight off the Islamic State.

And then hundreds of thousands or maybe more of Iraqi Shiite Arabs grabbed rifles and went to join to go and do like their leader said. And that's a lot of power. It's like Malcolm X going and the cops freak out because he's got command all these guys. Like this guy, Sistani, I'm not saying he's reckless, but I'm just saying that's a hell of a lot of power. And the same goes for whatever religious leaders are. left in Iran after the old Iatollah.

I know his son is not an Ayatollah, but has a lower religious rank, but whatever. I'm just saying, them being mad as hell as one thing, their religious authorities telling them, yeah, you're right to be indulge that hatred and get revenge until you're done would be potentially a much worse crisis

from our point of view, you know? Yeah, yeah, except I just wanted to, again, the nuance there is like, if you look at most of our, most of the suicide bombers, right? There were Wahhabis or they were Salafis. Sure. The Shiite sense of religion is less, you know, sacrifice yourself as one and kill,

you know, as many people as you can, like the, you know, Belawden types or the Salafi types. In fact, most of the Iranian, and Donald Trump said this ironically in 2015, was it? You know, why are we fighting the Iranians? They're helping us fight our enemies in Iraq or helping us fight. Islamic State in Syria because the Iranian Shiite networks are against that Salafi reading of Islam, in fact. And then so that's one aspect. The second aspect is there was no love lost between Sistani as a religious leader and Hohmani, the senior. Oh, tell me more about that.

Yeah, because one was a religious leader, the other was a political leader. And so Sistani saw the formation of the Islamic Republic as a betrayal. of Shiite, you know, promise. It's kind of like the Jewish Orthodox who went against the Zionists, right? Because Zionism was creating a state for the Jewish identity and culture, but it wasn't necessarily supposed to be

even a religious state. And religious readers understood this. And they were like, well, you're putting something else above the religion, which is the state of Israel. And in this case, Sistani was like, you're putting a state, the political state, above. I think libertarians would actually like this. You're putting this above religion

and above personal commitment. You're basically subjugating a religion to politics, and that's not part of the Shia tradition. And also, as I mentioned as well, Shiism originally in classical form, it was highly quietest. So you push away from the politics and the everyday life for the ultimate salvation.

So you're not supposed to try to get what you are getting in the afterlife in this world. So for all those reasons, Khomeini, you know, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and then homine by virtue of his, you know, succession, would be, you know, innovations and revolutions into Shiite theology. And so that was one reason. Except for whenever the actual sort of viability of a society and a state has been in question, Sistani has not shied away from saying that the people of that particular state have to come together in collective defense and form militias to defend like any sort of militias. So they call to arms to defend their properties and their livelihoods.

And so Sissani did that for Iraq before. And then he actually said for the Iranian Shiai to do that in wholly defense of their country. So that's the way that the Shiite are usually responsible. to these questions. But again, Hamini was very popular among the Iraqis Shias and the Pakistani Shias

over the past four years, much more than Phrasi was even among the Iranians themselves because Iran is a very different society. It's highly polarized. It has a hugely Western population as well, westernized population as well. And so you have,

so how many had, so all the funeral images that you saw, he did have millions of supporters, but I would say that they were like 23, 30% of the population. You still have a whole bunch of Iranians who didn't like him. But it doesn't matter because once a head of state is the campaign that you have a lot of people who probably didn't feel the Islamic Republic is the right form of government for Iran

who still had to, who were outraged by the fact that either, you know, a foreign country was attacking their government, but also their own people. I mean, this war started with the death and murder of 168 children in Southern Iran and Minab, who worked at school at that time. And, you know, Donald Trump and Hexed have not even accepted responsibility for this blatant crime. But in any case, that the combination of the death of children and the decapitation of, you know, Iranian military heads and the head of state really kind of like immediately showed that this is a war against the Iranian people. And so it put a lot of people who might have been, you know,

maybe two months before that kind of like in the streets, even protesting the regimes, the Iranian state's economic policies and bad economic conditions rallied them around defending Iran, which is, again, that's what it looks like when you actually have a nation and a culture to fall back on. Yeah. Yeah, not to keep harping on this, but just to close it up, You're right. And I noticed, I didn't know enough about him. I should read some biographies

with the guy or something, but I had noticed that the Ayatollah Sistani could have named himself Supreme Leader of Iraq any time from, say, January 2004 on, and he did not do that. So he has not done that this whole time. So it's interesting to know about the doctrinal differences between and the rivalry and stuff there. But then also, so that was going to be my next question was, I know that This is a very big country with a lot of people who are not Shiite Persians as well. And so how do you measure that rally around the flag effect from all the Arabs and the Azeris and the Kurds and the Balukes and everybody else there? So this is the thing, right?

Iran is a cultural or a civilizational state. So this idea that we have of like various ethnicities fighting to the death and, you know, this like a Balkanization model, which is what Israel really wanted to do in Iran. Israel's plan wasn't to, you know, just attack a few places. It wanted regime collapse, followed by, you know, a Syrianization of Iran, where Iran cannot defend its borders and various different armed groups and militias take over certain cities in Iran. To their credit, the Trump administration, so far as I understand, it did not want that, because it realized that's a huge disaster for a lot of terrorism in the region.

But it did send weapons to the courts still. So there are all these contradictory policies from the United States. But ultimately, I don't think that we were fully behind the Israeli plan. We just thought that, you know, we bought into the lie, the fantasy, that, you know, you just take away your leadership, you bomb a few places. And there is enough political resistance inside Iran or political opposition inside Iran against the government that they would sort of rally and do a democratic revolution. But that was just not going to happen because there is no internal organization and there is no unity among these opposition groups. So when I say there, so 90% of Iran is Shiite, but again, many of the nominal Shiites don't necessarily practice. You walk in the streets of Tehran and parts of it look like New York City, parts of it look like, you know, London and Paris, not the Muslim version, the actual sort of liberal.

Western version of, you know, people dying their hair blonde and, you know, just going to cafes and everything else. So you do have a lot of that. So Iran is a country that's divided culturally and sociologically and yet, you know, even demographically. But then you also, all of these people, all these different groups, like the Azzavries, for example, right? The Azzaries, for a long time, the Israelis wanted to pit them against the state and pit them against the Persians. But ultimately, there is one civilization. The Persian civilization, the Iranian civilization is one, and it includes Azeris as part of it. Civilizations, as opposed to nations or ethnic groups, a civilization is fundamentally diverse, is fundamentally multicultural. And even the old empires, look at the Roman

Empire, look at the Ottoman Empire, they always had multiple ethnic groups, but they were united as part of one cultural form. And that's why the founders of our country kind of put, you know, the Roman model as part of the American model, right? So because we knew that there were different regions in America, and America is too big, and there were various groups here. But we wanted to create a sense of unity. So Iran had that sense of unity, and it was a lot of sort of, I would say,

just erroneous Wilsonianism in the air that is sort of like, oh, people are just going to fight each other over ethnic group and ethnic dynamics. But Iran was not, was culturally in history, historically resistant to that more than other places, even though there have been a huge campaign, you know, billions of dollars by foreign outlets like Iran International, that's an Israeli-Saudi outlet, that was trying to push this, you know, sort of a soft coup, you know, a kind of a velvet revolution in Iran by trying to basically say that this war is coming for the liberation of the Iranian people

and this is not a real war and that, you know, elevating resopalabi, sold out to Israel as the sort of head of a new state. Again, Iranians do have real grievances against the state, but there is an organized opposition because most of the opposition is co-opted by and corrupted by foreign elements, intelligence and otherwise. And so that is, until you don't have an independent opposition group, you're never going to have a fundamental change.

That's something that the C-Sy. CIA and, you know, the Mossad just fundamentally refused to understand. If you really genuinely wanted a democratic governance, you have to just let that internal process happen instead of interfering and actually changing and leading for fake candidates that are not going to be able to do that. And in fact, Reza Palabi, I've argued, as kind of undermined even the monarchist cause, because monarchism is a traditionalism ultimately, but the Palabi is always wedded their sort of position as the head of state or as a monarch with Western liberalization programs,

which was fundamentally at odds with Iranian tradition. So by doing that, they kind of undermine the sources of their own legitimacy, right? And the biggest critique someone can actually lodge at the Islamic Republic is they did the same thing with Shiism by trying to modernize and bring it into the modern state, which they did successfully, The modern state in Iran is now a behemoth. But this Leviathan of a state also undermines certain traditions. And it undermines the old doctrines, as we discussed earlier.

So the modern state is against all sorts of traditions, I would say. Hey, guys, me here for crowdhealth at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton. And the deal is this. You need health care, but you can't afford health insurance because who possibly can. I can't. But so here is a great solution and alternative to health insurance. Basically, the way it works is you join up, you pay a monthly fee, and then you pay cash for the first $500 of your health care costs on any one thing.

But then you get to crowdsource the rest. And then when it's somebody else's turn, you help crowdsource for them. And the more you help others, the more they help you. It's just a great alternative to health insurance in these insanely, highly regulated and inflationary times. So learn all about it at Join CrowdHealth. The Scott Horton. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by Matt Sersely, tax attorney.

And this guy, he's anti-government like you, only he's a tax attorney. And so if you own a small business or you're a high-saloried professional and you're trying to avoid paying the revenues, he'll help you. No gimmicks here. You have to follow the law, but nobody knows it better than him. And he will make sure that you don't pay one red cent, whatever that's worth, more than you have to, to the revenues. every year.

So check out Matt Sersely at agoristtaxadvice.com. And Tom Scott sent you. I found an article that I wrote at the end of 2006 the other day, 20 years ago, or 19 and a half, called, could Bush start another war? And in there, I say, are Bush and Cheney stupid enough to believe that they could accomplish anything by an air war against Iran other than driving them out of the non-proliferation treaty and driving the people of Iran back into the arms of the arms of the war. the mullahs. So pretty obvious kind of thing. And I had never even heard the term rally around

the flag effect because I didn't go to college. I just thought like, yeah, I mean, I saw the American people rally around George W. Hell, I saw him rally around Bill Clinton, the face biting rapist, degenerate scum child killer when, after the Oklahoma City bombing. And then same thing, after George W., he pushed the greatest failure of any president in all of American history. He's been in charge of our security force for eight months, and this massive attack happens on his watch, and the people tell the pollsters 90% we support this guy in whatever he wants to do against our enemies.

United, we stand. What do you think? Of course the Iranian is going to be like, way. And in fact, just because Persia geographically is so huge and so mountainous and everything, that they're hardly ever conquered. You talk about a civilization. You mean a civilization that's been there for thousands of years.

When we talk about Arabs and Azis and Balukes, it's not like these are all mass recent migrations to Persia, right? They've been part of this thing for thousands of years. And it used to be the regional empire back before. And so, you know, you think about like the strength of patriotism among Texans surrounding, you know, the Alamo or, you know, whatever are all of our hard one possessions and all that. Well, now add a couple of thousand years on top of the couple of hundred that we've had

and start to see out of their eyes a little bit better, you know? Yeah. I mean, the first thing is when you're, you know, as part of the great game and, you know, part of the colonial, you know, influx into the region, you did get a lot of, you know, weak Iranian states during the Gajar period. And then afterwards, you ended up having this sort of quest for Iranian sovereignty, ultimately. And, you know, one of the things that we saw was, you know, the Americans since Woodrow Wilson have been pushing this kind of like ethnic divides within, in different areas, like in Yugoslavia,

like in Iran, like they're trying to break up these old conglomerate states and conglomerate nations because they think that smaller states are more manageable. Except that, you know, some of these older empires, order civilizations, reform or stabilizing for these regions because they didn't reduce everything to language or skin color or, you know, they were not woke effectively. And so it was kind of really a different thing

that we need to understand as Americans. We need to shed our Wilsonianism and our sense of, you know, exceptionalism that gears us towards, you know, reshaping the world in our image. We just got to leave these areas alone because we just don't understand them. But, you know, if you are, you know, different parts of a state, and in the beginning, you have certain sort of political or fractional rivalries, regional rivalries.

Like, let's say between, you know, the South and, you know, the Northeast. Imagine, like, you know, a foreign state from Europe, which they actually did, comes in and tries to sort of metal and tries to, you know, pit the Southerners against the Northerners. And, you know, in the beginning, you might kind of be like, you don't know the foreigner. So you're like, well, maybe they're just there and we can just use them. But once you realize that you are being used for their nefarious purposes, you end up uniting and understanding that you're actually one people. It's a similar thing between the Azeris and the Persians, ultimately. Like, the Azores are smart enough, especially in this case, to realize that there's a plot

at bay. And almost very few Azeris like turned on the state. The cores are a different story. They were much more infiltrated by the Mossad. And this was mostly happening in Iraqi Kurdistan, which is why Erbil, which is the head of, you the center of the sort of U.S. Israeli intelligence operations into the region has been attacked more than a thousand times and has been decimated. And the U.S. forces have effectively pulled back from Erbil. And, you know, Iraq is under a lot of pressure because Iran has been attacking

the northern energy lines that the courts use as a warning to them that you just can't work with Israel against that. So I think one of the... a few major things have changed strategically with this war. One is the straight of Hormoz that, you know, Iran has reestablished his sovereignty over the Persian Gulf, which it had historically, but it had lost since the advent of the British in the 19th century. And number two, so that's a huge moment. It's basically as important as, you know, Japan resisting Russia in the early 1900s.

It changes the international sort of geopolitical game. And the second one is the presence of these infiltrated Mossad groups on the Western Iranian border, especially in Iraqi Kurdistan, have been decimated. So Iran has been able to reestablish its control over its border regions with help from Iraq, the Iraqi state, and Turkey. So Turkey has been, and also Pakistan in the east. So Pakistan and Turkey have been critical to helping Iran defend its. borders and push back these, you know, militia groups that were funded by the CIA and

and Mossad from actually in Iran. And we're out of time here, but I'm reminded of something that Seymour Hirsch wrote about, or at least talked about, you know, in relation to his writing back in the W. Bush years, which was exactly the parallel that you made. Imagine some foreigners come in and try to bribe a bunch of Dixie boys to rise up, the South to rise again against America. Oh, but you're mistaken because these are the most. patriotic Americans that there are, and they are the mass of the American infantry,

and they are actually the ones who are going to fight you, not do what you say. Exactly. But it's the same level of ignorance of America saying, hey, you Iranian group with grievances, take our money and whatever. They don't know how to pick winners and losers over there. They don't know who's likely to do their bidding or not. I guess with the exception of the John Dalla's suicide bombers, who worked for the CIA and then Mossad posing as CIA for a while there.

But otherwise, I guess there hadn't been too much from the Balooks lately. That was 10, 15 years ago now. Right. Iran has done a good job of trying to manage that. But it has done so against these sort of separatist groups. It has done so with the help of its neighboring countries, which is why I have talked about the rise of a regional sort of security architecture focused on the ME5, Middle East 5, which is Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,

Turkey and Egypt. And these five, you're seeing sort of the contours of which with the Mekai agreement, but this five is actually reiterating or at least underscoring that, first of all, the Arama Accords are not going to fly and that we have actually entered the post-American Middle East. And so what we need to do as Americans, ultimately, we are thinking of policy for America is actually embrace what America first means and push and pull back from the region because you have really very little interest

of being in the Middle East, being in West Asia, we are energy independent. And so America first means putting our interests first and putting a concrete national interest of the United States first, and that does not include us. Being in another quagmire like Afghanistan in Iran, this is a war that if you're not careful, can become an Afghanistan.

And we need to all be up in arms about that because that's what they're trying to push. That's what APAC and FD are trying to push, and we need to really, really be vigilant about that. And on that note, I would say that my organization, the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, we have launched an America First project to try to reclaim it from these Lumerists, from the Mark Levin types,

who, in the name of conservatism, in the name of patriotism, have sold out America and the long tradition of American realism that starts from George Washington and goes all the way to George Kennet, this kind of American realism that focuses on the here and now, you know, the home front, and, you know, especially our interests, you know,

in America and in the Western Hemisphere, we need to reclaim that. And we need to make sure that whatever government we get, you know, is not another kind of a uniparty deep state, whether it's ran by Trump or Biden or Kamala Harris. You know, none of this makes a difference to us. So we need to figure out what an America first foreign policy actually looks like that puts American interests first

and American well-being first. And that is, you know, what we are focused on at IPD. Okay, cool. Well, so here's the screen, unheard, Artimoini, director of the research at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. As he's just talking about there, that's where you can find his great articles, including the dangerous martyrdom of Cominee.

And welcome to Fortress Iran. And one last note on the way out here, a positive thing, this coming out in the Washington Post, I guess late last night or this morning or something, a Pentagon weighing smaller U.S. military presence after losing this war. So not that they have much choice, but hey, at least they're willing to face up

to the unfaced sub-touable, which is fine with me. So a little positive note to end the thing. But thank you again for coming on the show. I've got a good to talk to you. No, same here, Scott. Looking forward to being in touch. And, yeah, I mean, that's a silver lining there.

Maybe Iran and this disastrous war group actually force our hand to recalibrate our long-held strategy and abandon the Carter doctrine of being there and just come back home and focus on our real national interest. Thank you. Got that right. Thank you.

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