Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/18/26 Brian McGlinchey on the Deadliness of Washington’s Sanction Regime

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Scott interviews Brian McGlinchey about an article he wrote recently telling the story of Ameneh Abbasi, a 23 year old Iranian woman who died while waiting for a lifesaving medical procedure that was delayed by the “crippling sanctions” the US government has put on the country. McGlinchey and Scott dig into what happened and discuss how Ameneh’s story provides an insight into the true intended nature of these sanctions, rather than an unfortunate accident or deviation. Discussed on the show: “Sanctions Target Iran’s Government, But Kill Hospitalized 23-Year-Old Woman” (Stark Realities) Watch “Ameneh’s Golden Blood” “Iran Will Recover, But Trump's Damage To US Diplomacy Could Last A Generation” (Stark Realities) Brian McGlinchey is a freelance journalist. He started the 28Pages project in 2014 and now writes at Substack. Follow his work there, or on Twitter @LibertyMcG. 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

Yes, sir, it's the Scott Horton show brought to you by expat money. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. 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 I'm anxious. We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly.

When the president visit, that means that it is not only... We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys, introducing Brian McClintchy. Again, welcoming back, Brian, from Stark realities.

And, of course, it used to be 28 pages, because he helped to lead the effort to get the 28 pages to, that their original congressional investigation into September 11th attacks released, which succeeded and which he gets to take a lot of credit for. Thank goodness. But now it's stark realities, and he writes all good stuff about lots of stuff,

and we reprint pretty much everything, I think, at the Libertarian Institute. So, yeah, quite a good. You do that. Happy to have you here. How are you doing, Brian? Hey, great, Scott. Great to see you.

And I'm looking forward to seeing you again in a few weeks at that Quincy Institute event, Austin on October 20th. Okay, yeah. That's next Wednesday. I thought it was October 20th. Oh, is it October? I just put it in the wrong place.

Yeah, October 20th. Thank goodness that I don't know how to use my talent or that. I'm glad I brought it up. Okay, so then I'll see you in a month in a week. It's right. Buddy, that's going to be cool because it's going to be, yeah, Joe Kent and Dan McKnight and Kelly Blahos and Adam Weinstein, which I don't know too much about him. think, but I guess I need to learn.

He's from Quincy. And so that should be a good old time there. Yeah, it looks like a great event. Yeah. So yeah. And then, so look, hey, everybody, look at this, man. Sanctions target Iran's government, but kill hospitalized 23-year-old woman. And we also published this here.

You can see at the Institute. I got it on dark mode so you can't read our logo. But I swear our logo was there. It says Libertarian Institute, right there. And where that blue stealth mode. Anyway, whatever. It's the URL that counts. Libertarian Institute.org.

And we got a great archive of Brian McGlitchie stuff there. So U.S. sanctions killed 23-year-old one in. And that's a terrible story, man. But one that you tell very well. So introduce sarcastic characters, would you? Yes, this story was brought to me by a Iranian professor at the University of Tehran named Dr. Habib Ahmadinezad. and he produced,

Road, directed this documentary on his own, out of his own pocket. It is the story of this woman going through this medical crisis several years ago. And for me, what really drew me to the story and feeling compelled to share it with the world as much as possible

was the fact that when we look at the harms caused by sanctions, Western, I think, have a tendency to view them in such abstract terms. Oh, we're hurting their economy. And they just think of it in terms of gross domestic product or maybe an unemployment rate and kind of dehumanizing that, what that really means. Looking at exports or just inflation.

And even though they know some of these things, they should know these things have a human impact, it's just totally understated in the Western's mind what is actually happening. You know all too well, and much of your audience knows all too well, that sanctions kill. They kill people.

they cause them to be malnourished, they cause them to be dislocated, displaced, and, you know, saying in the article that is the old saying that a million deaths is a statistic, but one death is a tragedy.

And so this is a case, to look at this case of this young, 23-year-old Iranian woman, promising young woman, named Amina Abassi. 23 old living in Bouchier, Iran, city we see in the headlines, of course, now relating to the military program, excuse me, the nuclear program of Iraq, where its sole nuclear reactor is. But in 2016, she was living in that city. She had recently graduated from college and was about to start a new wave of study. She had been studying biology. She's going to be going to lab science next. she took a routine medical examination to as part of the admissions process and getting on board

at the school, it found that she was anemic. And this led to one of these medical mysteries where they're trying to figure out why she's anemic. She felt fine and so forth. She went into a series of conflicting diagnoses, conflicting treatments, this type of thing, transfusions, and then her condition really started turning grave. And they sent her blood for further analysis to Tehran, where they discovered that she has had R.H. null blood.

This is the rarestead in the world. And to say it's rare is just the best exorbitant of understatements. Only 50 people have ever been known to have this type of blood. That's how rare it is. And so immediately, erases on to find some of this blood somewhere to transfuse. Iran had its own repository of rare blood, but it did not include this exceedingly rare type.

And so medical experts and those overseeing the rare blood bank in Tehran, so forth, they reached out, a global push looking for this. And while they're reaching out to all their colleagues across the country in this same rare blood realm, Iranians are all hearing about it or streaming forward trying to find

if they might happen to have this type of blood and help this poor young woman. Now, what this story becomes as an illustration of the pervasive nature of sanctions and how they can have such a far-reaching effect on people's lives in so many ways. What happened is, at first they put out this call, hey, does anybody have this type of blood

and all these experts are getting back to Tehran and saying, no, we don't have it, we don't have it. Then, thank goodness comes to great news that from a Spanish counterpart, that someone in the Basque region of Spain has this type of blood and is a willing donor. Now we start running into this impediment of sanctions. One of the big parts of sanctions, so many, that affects Iran, is the inability of Iran to secure replacement aviation parts for their airliners. what this translates into is you know obviously older less well-maintained less airworthy fleet of airliners

and that in turn translates into much of their fleet having not been approved for flight to europe which meant there were no flights from spain to iran now all the time her she's been through a heart attack and all this type of thing she's laying in a hospital bed it's it is truly a race against time And so now they've got to find another means. They looked at shipping, you know, finding a courier. That would be obviously the ideal before even airliners is to get a commercial shipper to transport this blood point to point. They spent a whole day coordinating this with the shipper.

And then suddenly the shipper gets back in contact with them and says, well, whoa, whoa, we can't do this. We're not going to be sending anything to Iran. And then that little chapter illustrates one of the words. worst parts of the sanctions regime. In that, the sanctions regime has explicit exceptions, humanitarian carveouts for medicine, food, and this type of thing. However, in practice, what we see is what's called overcompliance or derisking, where given the complex nature of the sanctions laws and how they're applied, given the enormous consequences that could befall somebody who runs a of the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

What you see is this overcompliance, this refusal to even bother doing business with it. It's just not worth it. You know, getting lawyers to sort things out, and even then you might end up facing some million dollar fine from the United States or even being sanctioned yourself. So with the shipper route, the airline route then goes to the next closest flight leaving from Germany.

And so they're rushing, they have to rush this blood up to Germany. And then, you know, they're going through all this. It's a medical drama. And the documentary really should be watched by everybody. It's embedded at Starcrialities.net inside the article.

You've got diplomats in Germany taking custody of this blood and being instructed live over the phone from Tehran on how to handle it, how to pack it, buying the materials out of pocket to make sure it will survive that next flight. So after these delays, the jet takes off, lands in Tehran. They have to do some work to prepare the blood for transfusion. They're up into the night doing this.

And then the expert up there who's handling this was set for a 5 a.m. flight to take it to Boucher to save this woman's life. He gets up for his flight and receives a text message that she had died overnight. And so these delays meant the difference between life or death for this woman. So this is a real person. And you would think, oh, what's a big deal if flights aren't flying to Iran or what have you? But it just really illustrates the far-reaching nature of this, this promising young woman who her very life in existence defies the cartoonish stereotypes of life in Iran that many people have thinking it's.

like life under the Taliban or something like that. You know, she's moving forward on a professional path, professional career, and it's just pointlessly, needlessly cut short because of the U.S. sanctions regime. All right, you guys, me here for expatmoney.com slash Scott. And what it is is it's this great guy, Mikhail Thorup, and he's a world traveler and a real expert in what you can do to buy property and invest in property overseas, protect your assets, and look into even living overseas if that is your interest.

And if you just go to expatmoney.com slash Scott, you can get this free handy booklet, plan B, residencies, and instant citizenships. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. Scott Horton Show is brought to you by Matt Sersely tax attorney. Let's say you run a small business or you're a high salary professional and you're looking to protect your revenue from the revenurers who would rather take it and spend it on helping foreign countries kill people or something like that. Well, what you do is you contact Matt Sersley and he's an attorney, not a CPA, and so you can discuss all of your business with him

in complete confidentiality, and he will help you construct your taxes in such a way where you pay the absolute minimum. That's agoristtaxadvice.com for Matt Sersley, Agarist Tax Advice.com. dot com. Yeah, it's just terrible. And you're right about the whole Stalinist thing about the one is a tragedy, a million's a statistic, I think it's just too hard to imagine

a million corpse in a row. I guess unless you've been watching the Gaza slot of the last few years, you could sort of imagine what it would look like. But anyway, sorry. Right. Yeah, no, in this case, it's like, hey, wait, you're talking about somebody's daughter.

You're talking about somebody's daughter. Exactly. You know? And this document is very touching It's very well done. You are going back and looking at the event through the eyes of everybody who has involved it, including her parents, her siblings,

kind of walking you through the whole account of it, and you're really feeling it with them and feeling... Sanctions aren't even a central theme necessarily. They just suddenly raised their head in the middle of this medical drama as this impediment that cost precious hours that the doctors and Amonik could not afford yeah and by the way I went ahead and gave up I'm used to my vision being so blurry

but it's like really bothering me so I went ahead and put on my stupid reading glasses so I can see your face right while we're talking about you actually a little high death like I used to be able to see back when I was young and you talk about millions of deaths being a tragedy there's a lancet study that came out saying that between 1971 and In 2021, they attributed globally around the world 38 million deaths to economic sanctions. And even if somebody wants to say, oh, that sounds wildly exaggerated, okay, let's cut that by 90% and call it 3.8 million deaths or what have you. You know, this. And it's supposed to be that way, right?

I mean, they don't work if they're not cruel or what, you know, that's the, they're crippling sanctions. we're going to bring them to their knees. It's just, it's supposed to work the way they promise, supposed to work quickly, and then it just doesn't. Right, that's your favorite word, crippling sanctions. Yeah. The most crippling sanctions ever. Maximum pressure.

Yeah. And yeah, and then when it doesn't work, then they just persist, even for generations. Now, one thing, God, we've been at this for so long now, man. But back in the Obama years, they called it the crippling sanctions. Maximum pressure came with Trump, I guess. Right. But decrypturing.

sampling sanctions thing. They had rashed it up in various ways at that time. And I remember covering this with Muhammad Sahimi at the time. And of course, if you just stop and think about it, right? Like even just a high school education, you go, well, wait a minute. Now, like, if you outlaw capitalism and trade between people in a country, then all that means is that you're forcing it all into the black market. It doesn't mean you abolish trade.

It just means that you've made it instead of open and above, board trade, you've just handed it all over to criminals. And now the meanest criminals are in charge of everything. Well, who are the meanest criminals in Iran? The IRGC. And so these are the people that you're trying to spite, but all you're doing is you're saying, okay, it's illegal to have an economy. So now you can only have an underground black market parallel economy that's run by the people that we're trying to hurt the most. Exactly. You're the ones who get to benefit the most at the expense of everybody else. There's the same kind of thing in the 1980, pardon me, in the 1990s with the sanctions regime against Iraq. They would even say, yeah, that's Saddam. He's spending all the

money on his own palaces. We have the oil for food program. He spends it all on his own palaces. So we have the sanctions, but we know that they're not hurting him. They're only hurting the Iraqi people and they're making the Iraqi people poorer and poorer and weaker and weaker compared to him. And then the excuse was, and they didn't really mean this, you could tell it was an excuse. It was, well, we're trying to make the Iraqi people so desperate that they'll just, all of them at once risk everything to overthrow him. When we all know, they had their chance and Bush encouraged him to do it. And then he let Saddam Ian really helped Saddam, or allowed, in a literal sense, allowed Saddam to crush their insurrection when they had the chance in the spring of 91 anyway. So, but anyway, so yeah, that idea of, that idea of causing suffering to prompt the Iranian people or whoever the targeted people are to rise up against your government, that brings up the point that sanctions share so much in common with this morality and the rationale of terrorism.

What is terrorism, the intentional use of violence against civilians? to achieve political aim. What are sanctions? Intentional infliction of suffering, up to it, including deaths on a grand scale, to achieve political aims. It's the same sinister type of ideology

and lack of morality in both situations. And again, like you said, it's quite deliberate, quite explicit that suffering is the point. The Obama architect, Richard Nephew, I wrote a book about sanctions.

And in it, he's basically bragging about what they accomplished. Hey, during a major Iranian religious holidays, we caused the price of chicken to triple. They deliberately targeted eliminating manufacturing jobs. So you'd have people unemployed and poor. One interesting to mention, too, was the selective use of sanctions. They, for example, did not,

for a period, they were not sanctioning high value, high ticket items, luxury items. And that was to, A, help that achieve the flow of dollars out of the country, but also to foment even more resentment by allowing the better off Iranians to continue to have this. So it's really this diabolical machinations going on, all in the name of regime change and making the region safe for the state of Israel and greater Israel. Yeah. Yeah, and I have the Secretary of the Treasury boasting about causing the protests that became, I guess, cover for the riots and the insurrection that led to the

a few thousand killed at least in January, I think the real number is probably three, four thousand or so. Because, you know, forget all the Trump and everybody. else's, you know, on Twitter's hyperbole, but in the Wall Street Journal, the sort of CIA NED sock puppet groups were saying it was six. See a bit it was probably like four. But it was, you know, armed insurrections. I don't know how many, you know, actual innocent civilian protesters were caught in the crossfire, presumably quite a few. But also just, it said the insurrectionists were hiding among the protesters as they were, you know, burning down police stations and mosques. and, you know, do what...

I think the Trump count of protesters dead is up to 150,000 maybe, or... Yeah. Well, it was 100,000 earlier this week. Oh, I think I heard of do 150. Oh, was it 150? I think I heard one. You know, it's just...

Whatever crosses his mind, you can lay any insult against the country or whatever that you want to without... Yeah, it's just, you know, he's from Queens. My friend Jennifer was explaining. She's just like, look, when Trump says it was the biggest thing ever, he just means it was big, dude, it's cool. Like, you don't have to take him literally.

He doesn't mean that. When he says 150,000, he means 3,000. Right? Like, you just have to understand it in that context. I hadn't heard that sociological avenue before. Thank you. Yeah, he's like, in a way, he's not even lying. It's just a New Yorker.

That's just how they talk, you know? So, yeah. But yeah, so. I was going to say, this maliciousness, you know, you could trace it all the way back to Cuba even. Uh-huh. During that economic warfare, some deputy assistant secretary of state,

there's a memo where he says, you're denying money and supplies to Cuba will cause hunger and desperation. So it's just really Machiavellian. and long and long lived now with that 60 70 years man it's so cool i own liberty stickers again liberty stickers dot com everyone else's stickers suck but these ones are really good like for example this one i made back years ago so what if they never tell the truth about the oklahoma city bombing

i mean who cares right it's supposed to be ironic and sarcastic you get it and then here's one join the cia creating tomorrow's enemies today that kind of thing you know know so you can put them on the back of your truck and tell everybody else how stupid their politics are liberty stickers.com. Hey look guys Scott Horton's show and Scott Horton academy swag. Just look at the YouTube channel there and under every video there's links to all the stuff. Hey guys if you sign up for my substack at Scott Horton show.com then you get all the shows a day early and without ads. Pretty good, right? Scott Horton Show.com. Now look, I would have said to you, Brian, that sanction don't even work, man. They only ever empower the Saddam against his own people kind of,

you know, relative to his own people. But it seems like we do have a counter example in favor of the war party this time. And that would be Syria. Helped to accomplish regime change for Al-Qaeda against the old secular botist regime of the Assad family there. And with the Americans occupying the eastern wheat fields and oil fields and keeping the first. And keeping the first and the energy and the revenue from each out of the hands of the government. And then along with all the crippling sanctions, they reduced that regime to such nothing but a gangster state. We have the most powerful guys who are just dealing drugs and whatever,

trying to stay alive, that they were no match whatsoever for Al Qaeda when they finally did their October 7th and broke out of their pen and they led there in the end of 24 and marched on Damascus. the army just fell apart, they weren't paid. They were hungry. They were, you know, they're in no position to fight and their commanders. You know, the thing had been hollowed out to such a degree. It seems like the sanctions, obviously a decade of war with the bin Ladenites

backed by the United States and its corrupt allies, you know, was one thing. But the sanctions really seemed to help finish them off there. But Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Uniting, right, completely just obliterating the ability of the people to. fend for themselves, including even the government's own employees to be able to maintain themselves. Yeah, I was going to say, Dr. Pape, you know, who studies sanctions for decades, he always speaks to their ineffectiveness in achieving regime change, but usually he does phrase it carefully to say sanctions alone. And so I think, as you pointed out here in Syria, they were not

you know, unitarially responsible, but I think a key, key. avenue the aspect of that. One thing that's funny, man, and I'm sure you're very familiar with this in all of your own experience in these issues, too, is you really have, like, on one hand, the unmitigated evil of the empire where they're just willing to do anything.

They're just as ruthless as could be. The Treasury Department might be the most dangerous organization in world history, Brian? Like, these guys, God dang, you know? But then, on the other hand, you read Foreign Policy.com, and they're like, you know, I have a real good eye.

you guys for how I think we should proceed with the thing. And you can see the idiocy and the lack of nuance and the lack of history and the corrupt interest sponsored by the Katari Fund and the whatever the hell or the UAE more likely. So you can see kind of all that in it. But, you know, I don't know. Like in my job and your job more or less now too, also where the point is just criticizing everything about what the regime is doing.

I try also really hard to question myself and say that like when I'm reading foreign policy.com, like, oh, they really are trying their best. Guys are like, whatever, as best as I can to be charitable. You know what I mean? Right. And maybe these are just policy disagreements

and I shouldn't be, you know, so drastic the way that I am and whatever. But then, and then maybe even I'm wrong, right? Like maybe if the American Empire was not in charge of things, Maybe the war party is right, that things would get much, much worse. Maybe the Wolfowitz doctrine where we better expand everywhere where Soviet power is receding. Otherwise, total chaos is going to break out. Maybe they are right.

Maybe I am an idiot and all that. But then I read articles like yours and then whatever, just day in, day out with this stuff, where it's just, it's nothing but Joe Biden and John McCain and various Bushes and Clintons and now Trump too and all of their people, just killing people all the time to spreading. chaos everywhere. Like, how could anyone argue that, yeah, think of how bad the middle, how bad off the Middle East would be if we weren't there holding things down for them over the last, you know, generation here, or in Eastern Europe or anywhere else for that matter, you know, like I hate, I'm really not self-righteous and I don't want to sound like I am. Like, whatever, I am just a

skateboarder from my neighborhood where I'm from. Like, what do I know about this? But then again, And on the other hand, all they do is starve people to death. And when it works, it's because they're empowering Al-Qaeda in the highest reason you could imagine. Like, what the hell? I'm tired of being so right all the time about stuff, man. You know, it's not my fault. Yeah, I'm with you and periodically thinking about that hypothetical counterfactual of, okay, if we hadn't had bases in the Middle East all these years and these interventions and

involvements and machinations and so forth, what would the situation be? But you come back to, well, how could it be, how could it be worse than this? The blood would be on somebody else's hands, perhaps. But there's, like you said, from bow to stern, it's just the U.S. foreign policy is just drenched in blood and unpointless suffering. I mean, as a point, and not a point that serves any real human interest or U.S. interests or the interest of citizens in these countries. Yeah. So you had this other piece, historic realities here, about Iran eventually will recover here,

but the damage to American diplomacy could last a generation. And, you know, by the way, I got one here from the Atlantic. The American age is over by some guy. I don't know. But there are things like this, Brian, in foreign affairs. And this is two or three in the Atlantic, including a couple by Robert Kagan, which is amazing and hilarious to see. But then in foreign affairs and foreign policy and all this. They're just saying like, ah, geez, whatever it was, this is one hell of a resounding thump of a end to American hegemony and what comes next.

In fact, even Robert, I think it's Robert Cupchin, has a piece in foreign policy about, okay, so now that America's global hegemony is over. What next? And he, like, suggests a new concert of powers where it would be sort of like, sub-agencies under the UN or beside the UN somehow where like regional groupings would work together

to solve problems like they did in Europe that one time after the whatever war. And this, you know what I mean? We're like, they're kind of scrambling because they know this is, they might as well have put George W. Bush back in there, dude. Donald Trump has crashed this thing headlong into a cliff. Right.

Yeah, he has taken the ship of state right into a tree. And we've seen it play out in this latest round, you know, since, February 28th, it's a new era for the Iranians in terms of how they deal with the United States. Basically, the demands are, we have to have everything up front. Promises from this country, the United States, are utterly unreliable. So that's why you see them wanting before anything else happens, the return of frozen assets, the sanctions relief, and so forth.

Because how many times can they be Charlie Brown with the football? Of course, it was Trump himself who set this all in motion by killing, withdrawing unilality from the JCPOA, the Obama-Iran nuclear deal, when Iran was in full compliance with that deal. So full of compliant with the deal, and then boom, the next president comes in and just undoes it, reimposes sanctions and so forth. Just say nothing of now in this second. administration, the farcical negotiations where you send Trump's son-in-law and real estate crony

to handle this complex nuclear negotiations. Don't even bring them along nuclear experts with them to the discussions. And then what do you do in the midst of negotiations twice, right? You unleash a surprise attack. You murder their leader, the supreme leader. And how do you do diplomacy with that. And all the while you have the establishment pro-Israel talking heads talking about Iran being so deeply untrustworthy when they have, you know, adhered to their commitments. And it's the United States that's shown itself to be just something you can't negotiate with. Yeah. Hey, guys, me here for crowd health at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton. And what it is, is it's a replacement for insurance. It's not insurance. It's crowdsourcing instead.

And who could possibly afford insurance at these prices in this day and age? It makes no sense. But what this is is it's crowdsourcing. You help pay for other people's medical bills and they help pay for yours and it really works. You pay the first 500 of whatever you're doing up front in cash. And anything over that, you bill it to the group and they help you pay. And then when it's somebody else's turn, you chip in a fair amount to pay for them. And it's all for a low monthly subscription fee. And it's totally a great deal. And I highly encourage you to check it out at join crowdhealth.com slash Horton. Mmm, Moondos artisan coffees. Explicitly, Scott Horton's show flavored coffee from Moondos artisan coffees. Get it, they hate Starbucks

because Starbucks supports the war party. But Moondos Artisan coffees, they support peace. And so here you go. Scott Horton show flavored coffee. It's part, what, Sumatran and part Ethiopian, all mixed together and tastes so good in the morning and also in the mid afternoon. If you start getting sleepy, Scott Horton.org slash coffee. Get you some. And man, look, the status quo as of February 27th was horrible, right? As we were discussing, all these sanctions going out all the way through since the 1970s, since Hartfeelans over the hostage crisis at the end of 79. And, you know, with some slight fits and starts of diplomacy,

but really no normalization at all. Economic war varying degrees the whole time. And now this, on top of that, and of course, you know, I guess, look, it had to have just been a mistake. There's no reason to think that, like, this was a deliberate thing. the slaughter of all the children. And, you know, I think the latest thing I read about it, it wasn't just girls.

It was little boys, too, tens of them, however many young. There's 150-something little kids killed in that thing. And to just start the war that way, and a surprise attack, but then also it's just slaughtering these kids, we're still our regime in Washington, Brian, has still completely bent out of shape about the hostage crisis, the 79.

They got to stretch and try to come up with other things. Oh, yeah, and also, Beirut, and also some rumor that I don't even understand and can't even explain about how they killed all our guys in Iraq somehow or something and that they don't even know what they're talking about. But they just have like a few talking points they try to memorize from the focus group

of tell them what to say when the answer is we just absolutely will not forgive them for declaring independence from our regime that had no right to rule them in the first place back 50 years ago, 45 years ago, you know? And what a rallying point that slaughter at that school of Menab has been? that imagery, the images of backpacks that you see all over Iran.

It's a touchstone. It's something that will live long in their national memory and feeds this resilience that you're seeing right now in the rally around the flag component of this horribly executed war. I don't think, I don't believe they were trying to target the women's school, a girl school, but they're absolutely responsible for it. And we know that the Hegsef, regime in the DoD

was actively undoing mechanisms and safeguards that try to minimize civilian harms and civilian conflicts. And then on top of that, as if this whole episode, that whole attack wasn't so dastardly and depressing, you have the

humiliation of being in a U.S. citizen where your government won't even acknowledge that it happened yet. no apology, no, they keep putting off questions while we're looking into that type of thing. You know, to at least acknowledge that, you know, and claim that a mistake was made. It's just, again, it's another hit to the standing of the United States around the world, this type of behavior. Yeah. And it would have just cost them nothing to do that.

We're just talking about this with Kyle and then I go, it would cost them nothing to say, hey, look, man, we didn't do that on purpose. That was us, but we were trying to hit that thing and our targeting information forgot that y'all built a wall and turned that one building into a school, which that was a pretty stupid idea of theirs to do that. By the way, not I'm really blaming them, but damn, dude, you might put it down the street,

but hey, they blew out the volleyball game down the street, so what the hell? And, yeah, there's U.S. military installations are full of elementary schools and high schools. Of course, yeah. So, human shield. So, yeah, and then, but I mean, yeah, it does really raise the question, right? If, you know, it's partially fake, but in a way, part of it's legit that the guys at the State Department

and wherever just can't get around to forgiving Iranians for the hostage crisis of 79 and all that. But then how are we supposed to imagine, like just how can we get? going forward for the next 50 or 75 or 100 years, the people of Pershing, and a feel about the people of the middle part in North America after all that we have done to them this whole time. And most of them, only these bony pretexts generated by their enemies, the Israelis.

That's not even really serving American national interests at all, but like, you know, a lot of people over there. And, you know, the people of Iran do draw a great distinction between our government and, the individual people of the United States. So it's legendary when U.S. tourists go to Iran, the warm welcome they receive. So they're able to do what so many U.S. citizens are unable to do

to draw that distinction between the citizens of a country and its government. Yeah. Well, we're lucky there. It could be a lot worse and still may be. I should say so far. So far they've drawn that distinction. Yeah, I mean, they put a death warrant on that guy, Salman Rushdie, because he wrote a book they don't like.

And, you know, if the next Ayatollah decides he wants to escalate things, he could. Yeah, this points to another aspect of the sanctions regime that, in addition to the suffering inflicts abroad, it inspires terrorism against our own citizens. Yeah. Bin Laden, others very vocal in the, role of, for example, sanctions in Iraq and not only motivating terrorism, but justifying it. I think it was one of his videos that bin Laden put out where he said, you guys chose the government

that did this, so it's your fair game because you did so. Yep. And so all this suffering going on right now, we just have to imagine what kind of fuse is burning right now as we saw the long gap between some of these early Obama. Excuse me, Obama. Bin Laden declarations of war against the United States and so forth between that and when the terrorism came to fruition. So we have planted this potentially dreadful seeds of terrorism

that could be sprouting in years ahead. Yeah, especially when we've empowered them so much in Syria, where they have their own new ISIS caliphate there, but we're supporting it and backing it and nurturing the thing. the next gauge of blowback from that is just, I don't even want to think about it, man, but it's coming. You know, all you special operations guys, saddle up, dude. That's the next fight.

And it may not break out for a while because, after all, Israel prefers them to Hezbollah next door, and that's America's greatest priority. The Sunni evil must prevail, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, to quote the American foreign Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Orrin, That's right. And look, yeah, until the next major bin Ladenite terrorist attack in the United States, in which case we pretend all this never happens, start over again, you know.

Oh, well. Yeah, that's the worst part is the self-reinforcing thing when, even though it's U.S. support of Israel that promotes terrorism when it happens, then the pro-Israel crowd points to that as the example. See, this is why we need. to support Israel now more than ever because we're united with them against this menace. So, yeah. Yeah.

And in fact, yeah, that's exactly what happened, right? It'll be a bin Laden night and I'll just blame it on Tehran anyway. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Brian, for your time, man. And thank you so much for sharing all your great articles with us at the Institute as well. It's a great wealth of information here. Yeah, I really appreciate all the work you guys do over there.

and such a great honor to be back on the show. You've been a great influence on me, obviously, as so many people with educating me and helping me understand how things work out there. Yeah, cool. Thanks a lot. So there you go. Stark realities is the substack for the great Brian McClinty there. And, of course, we run him also at the Libertarian Institute as well.

This one is U.S. sanctions kill the 23-year-old hospitalized woman in Iran. Thanks again, Brian. Thank you so much. much. This Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, fools errand, enough already, and my latest, Provote, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia

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