How the US backed Khomeini, then armed Saddam | Scott Horton | UNAPOLOGETIC

[00:00:00]If Donald Trump told Netanyahu, "You heard me, pal. This is the deal now. Do what I say or I'm going to be really mad and I'm going to do things." Then Netanyahu would. The Army GIS in Vietnam came up with the phrase self-licking ice cream cone for the Pentagon itself, for the army itself. They are the reason for their own existence.

[00:00:22]>> It's also a war about personalities, about Donald Trump, about Ronald Reagan, about George W. Bush. And on the other side, how many how many Saddam Hussein?

[00:00:30]>> So they overthrew him and they essentially reinstalled the Sha who had been kicked upstairs to essentially a position of powerlessness as a constitutional monarch. And they made him the real dictator of the country, ironfisted sort of fascist dictator for 25 years. And again aligning with the Iraqi Shiites that they wish they hadn't fought Iraq War II for the people who they built the caliphate to spite in the first place. Can we pacify the posh tunes any better than the Soviet commies could? Of course not.

[00:01:00]>> How how do we get here? Like how does the US history in the region kind of get us here?

[00:01:04]>> They keep trying to spite Iran, but they keep empowering them. The Ayatollah, the mean old Ayatollah, Kmeni said that it was haram to make weapons of mass destruction. And in fact, apparently the IRGC even got all the precursors together and said all we got to do is mix them. And he said no and they had to tear it all down. Um, I'm starting to record. Once the call's done, I may need you to stay online just for about a minute for this to upload. I'm sure you've used Zencaster before. So, >> and I do have a heart out at the top of the hour there.

[00:01:33]>> Okay, sure. So, top of the hour meaning seven or I mean >> 57 minutes from now. 57 >> 57 minutes from now. Okay, cool.

[00:01:39]Awesome. Excellent.

[00:01:41]>> One, two, three.

[00:01:43]>> Hi, good day. Welcome to another episode of Unapologetic. I'm your host Karim and joining me today is Scott Horton. Scott, welcome to the show.

[00:01:51]>> Thank you very much for having me. Good to be with you.

[00:01:53]>> Uh Scott, you may be familiar with Scott. He's making a lot of appearances in media over the last two years. He he host he hosts a show called the the Scott Holden Show. Um he infamously had a 10-hour conversation with Lex Friedman about 10 months ago about empire, the war, the US and military indust industrial complex. Scott, we just have an hour with you today, not 10 hours, so we can't we can't cover all of that. But what I'd like to speak with you >> what I'd like to speak to you about specifically is maybe tracing a line uh you know that goes from uh when Kmeni is brought back into Iran or is living in in France um and sort of the relationship with the USA has with Iran and how that kind of leads us into the present situation. Now obviously we can't go through all the details but I also want to want to touch on because in very in many ways this is these wars and the wars that the US has has waged on the region. It's a war about geopolitics and oil and empire but it's also a war about personalities about Donald Trump about Ronald Reagan about George W. Bush and on the other side Saddam Hussein and because of what's happened with Israel's genocide in Gaza Ahmed Yasin. So I want to kind of touch on those things. Um, so yeah, I mean what what how do how how do we get here? Like how does the US history in the region kind of get us here?

[00:03:09]>> Well, look, I think if you want, you can just look at it like a series of dominoes falling down, right? a bunch of bad cause and effect uh on the way really in an almost unbroken chain since the end of World War II with a few unforced errors during moments of pause where we really just made things much worse where we didn't have to but where overall each intervention sets the stage for the next crisis which sets the excuse or becomes the reason for the next intervention and And on the way down we go. Which is really in the libertarian view pretty much how all government activity works. They make problems as Harry Brown says. They break your leg and then they hand you crutches and say where would you be without us? And so look their job is security right? So that also means their job is insecurity so that you need them otherwise what good are they? So, um, the military, the the army gis in Vietnam came up with the phrase self-licking ice cream cone for the Pentagon itself, for the army itself. Um, they are the reason for their own existence, right? Um, and which is the same really bureaucratic inertia anywhere. So, anyway, that's sort of the framework for how I look at it. And then it's really simple. I'll go through the relatively fast version for you if I can which a lot of times that backfires when I say that but let's try America o overthrew the government in a CIA coup d'eta in 1953 because the prime minister who actually they had favored at first they decided they didn't like him anymore Muhammad Mosedc was nationalizing the oil and was allowing too much communism you know the rise of the communist party in a way that they worried about so they overthrew him and they essentially reinstalled the Shaw who had been kicked upstairs to essentially a position of powerlessness as a constitutional monarch and they made him the real dictator of the country, ironfisted sort of fascist dictator for 25 years and then the problem was that led to one a revolution but it also was right when he was dying anyway and America knew it that was a secret but the Americans knew it so there was no point in really trying to prop him up in power at that time they weren't really sure what to do and so they ended up supporting ing as you mentioned in your question there the return from Paris France of the Ayatollah Kmeni now he had been exiled by the Shaw had lived in Iraq for many years down in Najaf with Ayatollah Sistani which I want to read a book about their time together down there that's interesting isn't it but anyway then he had gone off to um to Paris France had been exiled by Saddam Hussein to Paris France and I remember even as a kid wondering ing why would the French put this guy on the plane back to Iran?

[00:06:09]Aren't they our friends? And the answer is of course they are our friends and they would never do that without the permission of Washington. Washington in fact asked them to send him home. Guess what? The CIA and the State Department, they said, "Hey, this guy Comey, we actually know him. He was part of a group of conservative clerics that agitated against Mosedc back in 53. We think we can work with him." And they even compared him to Mahatma Gandhi in India. And which is funny too. I know I'm sorry this isn't the fast version, but Gandhi was Yeah. He was known for his nonviolence, but wasn't he also known for kicking the British Empire the hell off of the subcontinent? Yeah.

[00:06:47]Well, huh. Okay. Put that one under your hat. But anyway, so America supported the revolution. And what happens is, I don't know about where you're from, but around here, everyone conflates the revolution of 79, which was in February, began at the end of 78, was complete by the end of February 79. People conflate that with the hostage crisis that didn't break out until November. And so people just conflate that as all one thing when in fact we're able to get along with the new revolutionary Shiite regime for the first almost year, nine months, 10 months. and even uh were giving uh the United States was giving them warnings about threats from the new dictator Saddam Hussein and threats from the Soviet Union which was supposedly considering invading although that's pretty dubious. But then what happened was David Rockefeller convinced Jimmy Carter to let the Shaw into the United States for cancer treatment. And that was interpreted back in Iran as a signal that America was going to nurse him back to health and then reinstall the dictatorship and cancel the revolution.

[00:07:54]And so that was what caused the riot and the holding of the hostages. Not that I'm justifying it in any way, but just to explain that this wasn't all just one thing where once these horrible Shiite clerics came to power that they just simply started chanting great Satan and burning our flag and hating our guts.

[00:08:11]That it really wasn't like that. It was much more complicated than that. But then this was a major humiliation for Jimmy Carter. And so he announced in the um in the State of the Union address of 1980 the Carter doctrine of permanent expansion of America's presence in the Middle East. Now we had already pretty much had given a war guarantee to Saudi Arabia years before, but this was a major expansion of American power and influence throughout the region. And it included ultimately later that year Carter giving the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. Now first of all obviously America had their own interests in doing that. But secondly Saddam did. Remember America a year before was warning the new Iranian revolutionary regime that Saddam might come after him. Now America's helping Saddam come after him. So what's his problem? Well, his problem is he's a minority Sunni dictator, 20% Sunni Arabs, and it was a multi-confessional government with Christians and Kurds and others and Shiites involved in the government, but it was at the at the very ruling elite. Most of them were Sunnis and the national government was bent toward diverting wealth toward the Sunni tribes and you know, people who are closer friends of Saddam. So Saddam is now worried that this Shiite revolutionary fervor from Iran is going to spread into Iraq and they're going to rise up and overthrow him because it's 20% Kurds in the north, 20% Sunni Arabs in the west, but it's 60% Shiite Arabs, super majority from Baghdad from Baghdad down to Kuwait and over to Iran. So Saddam is afraid that the Shiite population is going to rise up and overthrow him. So he decides to solve that problem by conscripting them instead and invading Iran with them and making them fight. Now the the purpose was to destroy the Iranian revolution and the revolutionary regime which it did not. In fact it only rallied people to support the new government more than ever before which might be a lesson in that for you. But anyway, um, and America supported not just through the end of Jimmy Carter, but through virtually the end of Ronald Reagan, uh, before the war ended, supported Saddam Hussein's war against them the whole time. And by the way, and this is not exactly on our Iran question, but it's in the background to the Iran question and very important on the same timeline is Jimmy Carter also had started backing the mujahedin in Afghanistan beginning in the summer of 1979 and hoping to provoke the Russians, the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan in order to inflict costs on them, to inflict on them a strategic defeat, as Joe Biden might say. And that eventually ended up including not just the Afghan mujaheden but what was later called the Arab Afghan army or the international Islamic brigades which were mostly Arabs but included Sunni Muslims and especially Wahhabis and Salafies from around the world to come and fight in the thing. And this is where the people who ended up later founding al Qaeda earned their stripes, including Bin Laden, who was a rich boy from Saudi Arabia, but who was wounded three times in battle and slept on the floor of the cave with his men and so had earned respect as a leader and a fighter there at that time. And his group that he ended up taking over, the Isam group, um, later merged with Egyptian Islamic Jihad and who were also all Afghan war veterans. And these were the guys who ended up bringing the terrorist war to the United States. At the same time, the United States was still backing them, not just in Afghanistan, but later in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chetchna in the 90s, even while they were already attacking us.

[00:11:59]But just so people got that straight, that if people heard that that's where al-Qaeda comes from is the Afghan war, you're right, it is. And it was Jimmy Carter, the same guy who got that ball rolling, and Ronald Reagan, the next same guy, who kept that going all through the 1980s. that's on the other side of Iran from Iraq where you know the Iran Iraq war is on Iran's western border this is all going on to their east but at the same time now the war and support for Saddam did include uh purchasing for him giving him the money to buy chemical weapon precursors from the French and the Germans and then he made chemical weapons that he used sarin and tab and nerf gas and mustard gas that he used against Iranian troops in the and including against Iranian cities. Uh during that war, Iran did not make chemical weapons uh to fight back with the Ayatollah. The mean old Ayatollah Kmeni said that it was haram to make weapons of mass destruction. And in fact, apparently the IRGC even got all the precursors together and said all we got to do is mix them. And he said no and they had to tear it all down. Um now at the end of the Iran Iraq war, it was essentially a stalemate. It just ended with a peace deal at the end of the war.

[00:13:16]But Saddam Hussein was in a tough place because he had borrowed a lot of money, I don't know, billions from the Gulf Arab states and now they were all being hard asses and calling in all their loans. The Kuwaitis were adding insult to injury by overproducing from shared oil wells on the border between Iraq and Kuwait.

[00:13:36]And now I don't think this was deliberate. I have no evidence that it is. It seemed much more like just too many government departments trying to administer an empire here and left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing all the time. And so indications are that the central command and CIA were encouraging the Kuwaitis to be intrigent towards Saddam Hussein. What's he going to do? And they were being very insulting. They were saying things like, "If you can't pay your war debts, maybe just send us your war widows and just pay us in in the the wives of your dead heroes." You know, everybody really likes being talked to like that. Anyway, at the same time, the State Department led by James Baker and Ambassador April Glasby were telling Saddam Hussein, "Eh, go ahead, man. Take back the northern oil fields. Break their knees. Punish them if they're screwing you. You don't have to put up with that." But at the Defense Department, and this is what makes me really think that it was not coordinated, is this seems totally sincere. Dick Cheney was the Secretary of Defense and Paul Wolawitz was then the deputy secretary of defense for policy, the job that Douglas Ve would later have in the W. Bush administration. We're talking Bush one, 1990 here. And Wolawitz was an Iraq hawk and he freaked out that Saddam was moving his troops toward Kuwait and he demanded that Cheney demand that the president send a letter to Saddam and tell him, "Don't you dare." And then he did. But then they freaked out on top of that because they said that the letter was worded too softly that it wasn't clear that he was saying do not go. And so there was enough wiggle room in there to to indicate that yeah no maybe you should actually flashing yellow light instead of red. And so he did go and you know the ambassador later told the New York Times well we didn't think he was going to take the whole country. He was just supposed to take the northern oil fields and teach them sheiks a lesson over there, right? Instead, he did the whole thing. And then it was the British really who freaked out. America didn't care. It was the British who freaked out and demanded that we do something about it. And then once we got started, there was no backing down. Saddam tried to negotiate. They refused to let him negotiate his way out of there in the second half of 1990. And then they started the war in January 1991. Now, we know Iraq War I won, the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Yellow Ribbon, and that was a huge success. It was three or four weeks of air war followed by a 100hour ground war. Oh, they love that. 100 hours and we were done. And the Iraqis were turning tail and getting the hell out of there. And I actually know some of the guys who fought in the tank battle and kicked their asses out there in the desert during that time. And so the lesson from that was one, we can do whatever we want and no one can stop us and war is cheap and easy and the Soviet Union is gone.

[00:16:27]By the end of the year, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. At that point, they were already out of our way and receding and giving up the Warsaw packed empire.

[00:16:35]Um there the whole thing ceased to exist by the end of the year. So now we're unopposed unipolar power and we're light years ahead in terms of our space age technology and our ability to uh you know hit targets with precision in a way that other powers can't. And so it's a wide open field for American power was one major lesson. Um, but at the same time they got themselves caught up in a bind. And that was because George HW Bush, now we're talking about the spring of 91, about a month after the war. HW Bush encourages Oh, and America occupies the south of the country, by the way. And Bush encourages the Shiites and the Kurds to rise up and overthrow Saddam. And including like army units, he's dropping leaflets and making announcements on the radio. rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Well, they take him up on it and they start revoling and marching on Baghdad. But then Bush changes his mind and he let Saddam keep enough tanks and helicopters to crush the insurrection and kill something like a 100,000 people to do so. Now, why did he change his mind? Well, he changed his mind because remember when I said Saddam Hussein was afraid that the Iraqi Shiites were going to take the Iranian revolution side and go to war against him and that's why he conscripted them all and sent them to war against Iran instead. Well, he was right that some Iraqis were signing up with the Iranian revolution did want to overthrow him and in the Iran Iraq war they fled to Iran and took Iran's side.

[00:18:11]Now those Iraqis were coming across the border to lead the revolution, namely the Brigade of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was a breakoff, basically part of the Dawa party. And Dawa and Skiri both have been living in Iran at that time for about 10 years. They come across the border to lead the revolution. Now, HW Bush, who he was had been Ronald Reagan's vice president and he and almost his entire administration had come from the Reagan administration. It was just, you know, Reagan's third term, so to speak. And they said, "Oh my god, we just supported Saddam Hussein for a decade to contain the Iranian revolution. Now we are importing it and we're about to give Thrron Baghdad." Oh crap. So that was why they flinched and that was why they let Saddam go ahead and crush the insurrection.

[00:19:08]But then that became the excuse of why they had to stay in Saudi Arabia. That Saddam Hussein apparently he's going to kill every last Shiite till they're all dead. Even though the insurrection was over, right? He wasn't going to kill every last one till they were all dead.

[00:19:24]But under that pretext, we have to stay in our new expanded bases in Saudi Arabia in order to perpetually bomb and blockade Iraq and including the no-fly zones above northern Iraqi Kurdistan as well. And then to refuse to lift the embargo from the invasion of Kuwait and keep the essentially a planetwide blockade because it was a UN Security Council resolution and the only thing that could undo it was a new one. and America and Britain, you know, first of all, were the pen holders on the case and then also would veto any attempt by Russia or China or anyone else to lift the embargo. I don't think anybody even did try. So the fullscale economic war against Iraq and maintained literally, you know, with firepower from Saudi Arabia remained the policy not just through the Bush years, but then even through the Bill Clinton years and the rest of the 20th century. When Bill Clinton came in in 1993, he was considering trying to figure out a way to normalize relations with Iraq and Iran.

[00:20:30]And what happened was the vested interest did not want that. And it was first of all, the Israelis were pushing for a policy called dual containment. It said, "Ah, geez, it's too bad that you just beat up on Saddam Hussein so badly that now he's not powerful enough to contain Iran anymore, to balance against Iran anymore. Now you, America, has to stay in Saudi Arabia in order to balance against them both." And that policy was being pushed on Bill Clinton by his aid Dennis Indic who had worked for Yeetsak Shamir in Israel and was now and he later became the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and and pushing this. Then the Kuwaitis embellished a whiskey smuggling ring into a pretended plot to buy Saddam Hussein to assassinate George HW Bush and James Baker while they were visiting Kuwait in 1993. This is a total hoax, but it was believed widely believed at the time. And even though it was debunked at the time, it never really got around the debunking. And so it's still widely believed even at the time of the second Iraq war that this was somehow true that Kuwait had or that Saddam had tried to kill Bush Senior in Kuwait. And Bush Jr. even was quoted saying he tried to kill my dad which probably did play into his thinking in launching the war. Not that that would be a good enough reason to or anything.

[00:21:56]So, but then this decision to stay in Saudi Arabia in order to bomb and blockade Iraq ended up becoming the primary motivation for the mujaheden that our government had backed in Afghanistan to now turn against the United States. And I know people thought then and they think now that what they're supposed to just believe that this attack came out of the clear blue sky, but it didn't. They'd been attacking American targets since 1990.

[00:22:22]And I mean just very quickly they assassinated a rabbi Kahane a right-wing rabbi in New York City in 1990. They attacked a hotel in aid in Yemen in 1992. They attacked the first the first world trade center bombing in 93. They um killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard in '95. They got busted with their laptop full of their Bojinka plot which was included to kill or Bojinka was one of the plots but the whole thing is called that. A plot to kill Bill Clinton to kill Pope John Paul II to blow up 12 airliners with time bombs over the Pacific or to hijack and kamicazi 10 airliners into targets in the United States. That ended up becoming the planes plot. That was all discovered in 1995 in the Philippines.

[00:23:11]this the guy it was the guy who did the first World Trade Center bombing and got away Ramsey Yusef who was essentially part of the Egyptian Islamic Shahad side of the group. Then um the uh Kobar Towers attack in 1996, they killed 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb and blockade Iraq. And Bill Clinton and the FBI and the Saudis all lied and blamed it on Iran. Oh yeah, Iran did it. They backed Saudi Shiite Hezbala to do it. Why? No reason apparently, right? Just Tyrron wanted to get bombed and said Bill Clinton didn't bomb Tyrron. Isn't that funny? He must not have believed his own lie because he didn't do anything about it. Tyrron, if they were behind it, seems like we'd have done something. I'm sure it hurt our relations at that time.

[00:24:02]I should go back and check like what what all that did that lie did to help the warming of relations between America and Iran during that time. I'm sure it was a major setback, but it wasn't them.

[00:24:11]It was Osama bin Laden and colleague Shake Muhammad that did it. And it was pretty, you know, unfortunate that we didn't get to have an honest conversation about why anyone would target our airmen stationed in Saudi Arabia and whether we should actually still have them there or not. And all that got washed away in the propaganda about Iran doing it. Then they did the Africa embassies in Dar Salam, Tanzania, Nairobi, Kenya in 98 and the USS Cole in the year 2000. And then they did September 11th. And as I already said, and it's true and I prove this in my book. I show I collect as many footnotes I possibly can for you about the reality of these same mujaheden. These and I don't mean like Afghan posh tunes.

[00:24:55]They're not. Those guys stayed home.

[00:24:56]This is after Afghanistan. These are the international brigades went off to fight in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and in Cheschna.

[00:25:04]And they even complained to Bin Laden.

[00:25:06]The Chetchins complained to Bin Laden, why do you want to attack America?

[00:25:09]They've been so good to us in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, and now here in Cheschna. Why do you want to hit them?

[00:25:16]And he said, look, man, I got bigger fish to fry. I got a larger vision. You don't understand. You guys go back to your fight and I'll get back to you. You know what I mean? But then the thing is about that is Bin Laden and I know the inside job thing is so popular um and maybe there maybe the official version is such a straw man that you know people just dismiss it but essentially the reality of it is this is that it was the Bin Laden who did it although they did have substantial help from the Saudi government. So I'm not saying that all mysteries are solved regarding the thing, but it was the bin Laden. And bin Laden had said for a very long time why he was doing what he was doing. And so first the motive was because we were occupying Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq. And that was more than anything else then was support for Israel, support for especially the kingdom in Saudi and the military dictatorship in Egypt. pressure on them to keep oil prices low. Well, obviously not in Egypt so much, but in the in the Gulf to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense. And then supposedly turning a blind eye to Russia, China, and India.

[00:26:29]Well, I always leave out the weaguers.

[00:26:30]America was supporting the weaguers against the Chinese at the same time, too. And he said, supposedly we turn a blind eye to Russia, China, Kazakhstan, India when um when they kill Muslims, which wasn't really true. We're America was backing the Muchadine. Although I I bet they felt pretty burned in Bosnia because we did back them for a while and then steal their victory from the jaws of defeat kind of in a way. So, um or I don't know if I said that right, but you know what I mean. Did kind of screw them. But anyway, um and and Bosnia was a huge part of how their movement grew from what it had been in Afghanistan to what it became later. You know, it was really treasonous activity on Bill Clinton's part at that time.

[00:27:11]It's all unprovoked. Anyway, um the thing is so those were his motives, but then his strategy was to try to bait the United States into invading Afghanistan so that they could do the same thing to us that we helped them do to the Soviet Union, which is get us in a long drawn out war of attrition that we lose. We can fight against a first or second world military and blow up military targets and things like that. But can we pacify the posh tunes any better than the Soviet commies could? Of course not.

[00:27:43]But if he could get us to try, if he could get us to get bogged down in a war there, then that would drive us to bankruptcy and force us out the long way and the hard way. And he said that over and over again through the 1990s. So that was the motive and the strategy of the bin Laden attacks against us. But then so Bush did him one better. He stayed in Afghanistan and did a regime change. Forget Al Qaeda. Let them escape. Took the war to the Taliban, the locals essentially. He put in a new government and declared war against all the new government's new enemies and decided to stay for 20 years on that ridiculous thing just to draw out the whole war so they could use September 11th as a cheap excuse to go to Iraq.

[00:28:25]And in going to Iraq, W. Bush picked up right where his father left off when he betrayed the Shiite uprising of 1991.

[00:28:35]And those same Shiites that had fled to Iran and chosen Iran's side in the Iran Iraq war, those same Shiites that came to lead the Iranian I mean pardon me, the Shiite uprising in 1991, W. Bush now took them all the way to Baghdad. So when you look at Iraq war, that is essentially and that was one of those unforced errors. I'm not saying this was directly caused by the previous intervention because Bush Senior called it off, right? the if if the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a direct consequence of the Iran Iraq war, which was a direct consequence of the Iranian revolution, which was a direct consequence of the coup. Well, still when W. Bush came into power, everybody's just standing still. He did not have to do that, damn it, at all.

[00:29:23]But he did. and he picked up that Shiite revolution where his father had left off. Took him all the way to Baghdad.

[00:29:28]And then so what we know as the Iraq war or what I call Iraq War II cuz there's a one and there's a three. So like we got to make sure we know which Iraq war we're talking about now. But in Iraq War II, that whole horrific civil war or well makings of one and then completion of one from 2003 through 2008 or 11, however you count it there, that that whole thing was America fighting on the Shiite side. Even though they fought the war in part to spite Iran, they thought that if they empowered the supermajority Shiites in Iraq and made them very compliant friends of the United States that then they would lord that over Iran and they would force Iran to change and become more like us and more like the way we want them to be. That just did not play out at all the way that they had hoped. and instead Iran's best friends from Skiri, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, now known as just Iski because we won the revolution for them. So now it's just the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Dawa party. They took over the place and virtually every prime minister since then has been Dawa. I think one was from scary and including the new guy is from the DA party even though he seems to be from a more American leaning faction and America intervened hard to on his side in the recent elections over there. But when we say elections, we just mean the super majority rules and at the cost of a horrible war um at the expense of the minority there. But then zoom out now.

[00:31:02]If in Iraq War II, America just completely empowered Iran and therefore their friends in Syria and Hezbala as well by giving Baghdad over to the Shiites.

[00:31:14]Well, then what? Right? Then Obama comes in and he tilts back toward the Sunnis.

[00:31:20]And really W. Bush started this with his redirection policy back in 2006 that like oops we're really screwing ourselves and all of our regional allies over by empowering Iran in this way and yet it's not cost effective to go to Tyrron man. There's nothing really that we can do about that. So you know what we could do though? We could focus on taking out Assad in Damascus. If we put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad, at least we can take him down a peg there. And because even though they are bathes in Syria, they were he the ruling cast were the Alawites who are sort of kind of a breakoff of the Shiites and very close to the Shiites and treaty allies with Iran.

[00:32:04]And of course the Israelis were always very upset that Iran used Syria to arm and bankroll Hezbollah and to you know for their kind of arc of power there as the neoconservatives coined it. Now getting rid of Saddam was supposed to solve that problem but of course it did not. It just made that problem that much worse. Now they had what they complained was a land bridge, you know, a road without any Sunni Botist dictators in the middle of it stretching from Thrron to Beirut or at least to southern Lebanon. And so that was why we had to break that chain. So then that was why the Obama government in league with Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and I think also Qatar and maybe to a somewhat lesser degree UAE. um poured billions of dollars worth of cash and weapons and jihadi fighters from their jails and from you know wherever else to go to Syria to fight in the dirty war there starting in 2011 and we knew starting in 2011 Prince Bandar bin Sultan is emptying the prisons and sending jihadis off to fight in Syria. It was openly reported in the major media uh for people who were watching for it when they emptied the prisons in Iraq. They said, "Look, here you're a terrorist.

[00:33:25]There you're a moderate rebel. Go and be a hero." And they were essentially chasing them out of Iraq and into Syria.

[00:33:33]And the problem with that is that in 2013, the Iraqi dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria, who are sort of the worst vanguard of the Sunni insurgency that had resisted the rise of the new Shiite regime in Iraq War II. those guys now um broke off from the Syrian dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria and al-Qaeda doctrine was just keep fighting until the Americans are gone. You can't build a caliphate now even if you could overthrow your local kingdom or your local presidente. The Americans will just come and bomb your new righteous regime off the face of the earth. So you got to just keep fighting.

[00:34:13]It doesn't matter if you die in the thing. Just someday it'll all work out.

[00:34:18]Well, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Iraqi dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria said, "Well, screw that. I don't want to wait. I want my caliphate now, and I don't have to do what I'm also says." Bin Laden was killed by this point in in early 2011 or mid 2011.

[00:34:36]So, um, he said, "Look, Zawahi can make his law, but he can't enforce it. So, I want to do what I want." And he declared an Islamic state in eastern Syria.

[00:34:45]That's in June of 2013.

[00:34:48]Half a year later, in January of 14, they hoisted the black flag over Fallujah, Iraq, a predominantly Sunni city, but just 20 wild 20 miles west of Baghdad. And somebody asked Barack Obama about this. And they said, "Hey man, what about this black flag flying over Fallujah?" And Obama said, "Well, come on. Just because the junior varsity team puts on a Kobe Bryant jersey doesn't make them the Lakers."

[00:35:16]at that. What was he kidding? Because ISIS is just al Qaeda in Iraq and they're not the junior varsity. Those were the most suicidebombingist, head chopping office, absolute marauder bin Laden terrorists that had ever existed in the world. They made the mujahaden that fought the commies in Afghanistan look like nothing. They were absolute, you know, Zarqawi and his guys were routinely suicide bombing groups of Shiite pilgrims, women and children, targeting American soldiers, cutting prisoners heads off, and all their crazy bin Laden antics. Junior varsity. Are you kidding? Well, 6 months later, they rolled into Western Iraq and they seized all of Western Iraq because where America had created that new Shiite regime, they didn't really care about the West. They had all the oil down in the south and up in the north near Kir Cook. The Sunni Arabs out west, screw them. What are they going to do about it? That had been the extremely chauvinist position of the Shiite regime that America had installed in power there. So when I say new Shiite Iraq, I only really mean Shiastan. All of the West from Fallujah and through Samara and to Cree and up to Mosul was essentially stateless territory. there were sort of nominal numbers of soldiers standing around. But when ISIS came rolling in, they all hight tailed it and ran because they didn't have force protection. They did not have enough people to sustain a real defensive war against ISIS. Or they didn't think they did. And so all of that territory of Western Iraq had been left wide open. So ISIS was able to roll in there and declare the caliphate, which guess what then required Barack Obama in August of 2014 declaring Iraq War II. And again aligning with the Iraqi Shiites that they wish they hadn't fought Iraq War II for the people who they built the caliphate to spite in the first place.

[00:37:12]Now the caliphate was too big, too ugly.

[00:37:14]It might as well have been bin Laden up there on the balcony himself declaring himself the califf Ibrahim ruler of the new Islamic State. It was too much. It was too bad a PR. So they had to ally with Iran and with Iran's Shiite militias in Iraq. again the ones they wish they hadn't fought Iraq war II for had to ally with them to defeat the Islamic State the bin Laden Islamic State that war lasted from 2014 through 2018 and it included such scenes as not just Iranianbacked Shiite militias but literally the Iranian goods force on the ground leading Iranianbacked Shiite Iraqi militias with American airplanes flying as air cover overhead for them doing strikes against the Islamic state to liberate Saddam Hussein's hometown of Toree in 2014 or that may have been in 15. So in other words, America, you know, in this latest series of wars here that we're talking about, they keep trying to spite Iran, but they keep empowering them, right? They empowered him with Iraq War II, then they ended up empowering them again with Iraq War II, which they forced themselves to fight against the caliphate they wish they hadn't built, right? So then in the balance of power in the region, Iran is way up because not only do their best friends rule Baghdad, but now Assad, who was already their friend in Syria, is wholly dependent on their welfare and their military support and everything else. So we have pushed Syria into Iran's arms and made Iran more powerful in the Levant than they previously had been and given Hezbala a bunch of battlefield experience fighting in the war which they sorely needed from a certain point of view, right? If you were, you know, from one of their military commanders point of view, they needed a good test and they got sure got a good one over there fighting against the bin Laden. Um, so that essentially then is the leadup to Trump coming in.

[00:39:19]Now, when Trump comes in, of course, he is determined essentially to ruin America's relationship with Iran, which the nuclear program negotiations are going on in the background here. They never were making nukes and Obama's deal just ultra verified that beyond any measure before. But then Trump tore up that deal and took this more hawkish position towards Iran. And in a way that benefited Israel because if as long as Iran was on the outs that helped to radicalize or I don't know about that but at least you know pushed the Sunni kingdoms of the Gulf toward the United States and Israel as sort of the anti-Iran front because after all Iran is a much larger state than any of them and controls entirely one half of the Persian Gulf. That's why it's called that and everything. And so this helped to consolidate the Abraham Accords. Now they call these peace deals, but they're not. What they are is normalization deals, but what's the real point? The point is that Saudi and these other Gulf powers and other Muslim states have had kind of an agreement among themselves.

[00:40:28]I'm not sure when they when they wrote this down. They probably had a vote at the Organization of Islamic Conference years ago about this or whatever. I don't know the exact details. I forget.

[00:40:36]But they essentially had an agreement that no one will normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians get a fair deal. Essentially, whatever is good enough for Arafat will be good enough for us. But unless they get a deal, either a Palestinian state or citizenship and equal rights within Israel, then normalization was on the back burner. What Trump and his son-in-law figured out was that they could just print money and pass it out.

[00:41:02]What's your price? And so they gave F-15s or F-16s to Bahrain, F-35s to UAE, debt forgiveness to Sudan, and they recognized Morocco's seizure of the northern half of the nation of Western Sahara. And in exchange for all that, they got these countries to sign these Abraham Accords. Also, uh well, shortly after that, Biden comes in and the Ukraine war breaks out and the Ukraine war completely diverts attention from the Middle East. Netanyahu is crowing that he's essentially getting away with it.

[00:41:40]First of all, he has to form a new um coalition government with parties that are far to the right that he never joined up with before. and Lood is a pretty right-wing nationalist party. But now he's lined up with Bengavir and Bezal Smootrich and these guys who are hardcore right-wing greater Israel nationalist Bible thumper kind of nuts.

[00:42:02]And he had to do that to stay out of prison because he and his wife are both very corrupt and had in blatant violation of Israeli law accepted lavish gifts and even demanded lavish gifts from their donors and benefactors and so forth, which is just straight up illegal, right? in a way that policy almost can never be. But crimes like that, that's just like picking a pocket, man. You robbing a bank. You can't do that. So to stay out of prison, he had to stay in government. And to do that, he had to join up with these far right-wing parties. And then he went crowing in September of 23 at the United Nations that I win, you lose. It's the new Middle East and the Palestinians get nothing. And he even the new Middle East was a phrase that was kind of um he was being sarcastic and mocking the former labor leader Shimon Perez who had taken up the banner of the two-state solution mildly after Yeetssak Rabbine was killed in 1995.

[00:43:00]And and Perez had always said we have to deal with the Palestinians so that we can deal with the Arab states. And Netanyahu's doctrine was, "We don't have to deal with the Palestinians, but I'm going to deal get a deal with the Arab states anyway." And so that was the Netanyahu doctrine. And that's what he was crowing about in his speech in September of 2023. September 22nd, 2023.

[00:43:22]I win, you lose. It's the new Middle East. You get nothing, Palestinians, and I get to normalize relations with all the Sunni Arab kingdoms anyway, and there's nothing you can do about it.

[00:43:32]Well, two weeks after that was when Hamas broke out of their pen and committed the atrocity of October the 7th, which it was. They did not just target military targets. They targeted little old ladies and you know, young women dancing and and innocent civilians. Um, and in doing so, the purpose of that was, and it doesn't matter because yes, it's true that Israel embellished those war crimes almost beyond all reason, but still the purpose behind that attack was to provoke a reaction. I mean, I think on one hand, they wanted to kidnap a bunch of people to have to trade. Um, it was that was the primary purpose of it, but it was also to kind of shock the world back into paying attention to Israel Palestine and to controversialize the Abraham Accords in Saudi Arabia because they had not yet signed them. And if they did, that would have been, you know, obviously seen by Hamas leaders as a huge setback for them. So, this was, I think, one of their big reasons that they did what they did. Then I don't think they realized that they were writing the license to Netanyahu that they ended up writing for him to do what he ended up doing and killing, you know, upwards of 80,000 something people there, maybe more in the absolute horrific genocide that that the Israelis launched against um the Palestinians after that. Then also predictably, and I don't know who fired the first rocket, it almost doesn't matter. Um, but I think it was Hezbollah jumped in on the Palestinian side and then that opened up a new front there and then the Houthis who that's a whole other story I wasn't able to work into this particular timeline but it's in the background there. It's all in the book enough already. Um, but the Houthis now ruled by a Shiite regime even though actually might as well mention the Iranians warned them not to take the capital city because that'll just drive Saudi crazy and they'll launch a war which is exactly what happened. But anyway, um the Houthis jumped in also on the Palestinian side, uh hitting Israeli shipping and and hitting Israeli targets. Um so this opened up what became what they call this sevenfront war. And maybe the seventh or eighth one is American public opinion because we're not allowed to know the truth about this stuff. We'll have to be censored from knowing how horrible it all is. But it ended up with the um Americans, the Turks, and the Israelis supporting al Qaeda, what was left of Al Qaeda in Syria. um who had lost the war to Assad and Iranian and Hezbollah and Russian combined forces by you know 2016ish.

[00:45:58]Um and they had been held up in the or held up in the Idlib province there uh before uh at the end of 2024 they broke out and finally sacked Damascus and did take Iran down a peg in Damascus which America cheered for. Joe Biden took credit for it. Benjamin Netanyahu took credit for it for guys who were sworn blood oath loyal to Osama bin Laden and al- Zawahari the butchers of New York City. This guy Golani who's the current president of Syria bragged or admitted to American government TV to frontline PBS. You can find the transcript that he fought and presumably killed Americans as part of Zarqawi's group, the worst of the Sunni insurgency, Al Qaeda in Iraq, which became the Islamic State in Iraq War. And he's now the president of Syria, and everybody loves him because he hates Shiites. He hates Hzbal, and he hates Iran. And that's all we're supposed to care about is Israel's interest. Never mind who killed 3,000 Americans, who hit the damn Pentagon, or who led as the vanguard, the worst part of the Sunni insurgency that fought against our guys in Iraq War II. All those bygones are bygones somehow. They say, boy, they don't like Islamism and they don't like terrorism. But boy, it sure seems now that like, yeah, no, as long as it's Sunnis killing Shiites, Serbs, or Russians, it's all good, dude.

[00:47:18]And then they're right back to the same old policy like September 11th never happened. um like Iraq war II never happened. And so then that's the leadup to the current war is that Netanyahu said, "Look, man, essentially I got Hamas severely degraded. I've got Hezbala severely degraded. Although I think he may have overestimated that, but he did kill their charismatic leader, Hassan Nasalla, and destroyed a bunch of their missile stores and all that and set them back pretty severely."

[00:47:47]Uh, we got al Qaeda now overthrew the Alawites in Damascus. Now's the time to and I guess Baghdad doesn't make too much of a nuisance of themsel most of the time. Um, now's the time to just go after the coup d'etra. We got to hit Thrron. And so then that became mission number one was to get Donald Trump to move the red line from Iran better not ever make nuclear weapons to it better not have any nuclear capability at all.

[00:48:17]No enriched uranium, no enrichment of uranium. And by moving that red line to a place that the Israelis knew the Iranians would never give in, they baited Trump into the thing, which he went for it. He's responsible for his actions 100%. That was why they did it.

[00:48:32]because the Israelis thought that now this was their chance to take out their major regional rival and that the next president won't do it. So, it's got to be you. And then he bought it and went for it. And so, and and then what happened, right? He failed. He killed the Ayatollah, but they just put the Ayatollah's son in there. The IRGC is still in power. The the Kuds force and whatever, all that structure remains the same. Their navy and air force were degraded, but nobody cares about that.

[00:49:00]They never did. those were like just sitting there anyway. They never thought they're going to fight the US Navy on the high seas out there. Like no, that was never that. They were sunk at port, right? Um same for their A4s and or F4s and F-14s that America that Nixon and Ford sold them in the 1970s are just sitting there, you know, waiting to be bombed in their hangers or whatever.

[00:49:20]They apparently they got one strike off on Kuwait, but otherwise their air force, it was neutralized from the get-go anyway. Bragging about destroying it really isn't anything. They're and their their you know infantry force is a million man army of guys who all stay home. They don't have the ability to project power anywhere uh in terms of weapons, armor, logistics, air power, whatever. They're not marching on Jordan and Israel or any kind of thing like that. They wouldn't they couldn't. Um, so their entire military force was just bent toward short and medium and intermediate range missiles, which they figured out how to make very good use of, and how, especially over the last year after they were attacked last year, how to diversify those launch sites out to as many separate places as they could. And they were able to hang on and to prove that they can reach out and even destroy any American base in the region that they want, including in Jordan and including hit targets in Tel Aviv. and that ultimately through volume of firepower they can overwhelm any anti-missile defense that we can muster.

[00:50:20]And so America's entire conventional military posture in the region is now called into question in a way that it wasn't with Iraq War II. Iraq War II was a humiliating failure. But what was it?

[00:50:31]Right? It was a a long-term very difficult counterinsurgency campaign that ultimately worked out because we were fighting for the supermajority.

[00:50:39]then we just lost in politics because they said we don't like you and we don't need you and we have our friends next door so beat it but that's not the same thing as Iran proving that no base is safe anywhere from down to Kuwait to Saudiq Bahrain UAE Oman again even Jordan and and Israel that they can hit essentially whatever they want that means and hell even look at the way they're feeling their posture now They're hitting Israel in defense of Lebanon, which you can call it Hezbollah, which they've never done before. Israel would not abide by the ceasefire. They kept hitting Lebanon, not Iran, and Iran went ahead and took retaliation and set a brand new precedent that they will now not just support these proxies in the region, but they will outright intervene on their behalf. And thank you for your service, too. And so, you know, I think that proves that, well, it proves that at least they think, I think for good reason, that they are now in a much greater position of strength than they have been. And all this because Dwight Eisenhower overthrew the elected prime minister in 1953.

[00:51:57]>> Okay, Scott, well done. That was 52 minutes to summarize all of that. Um just I mean we are we are where you said we are where um you know there's there's a standoff and and Iran seems to have strategically won. What do you think happens next? I mean it's clear that you know Donald Trump wants a deal. It's clear that Iran wants a deal but they want a deal where they're not setting ducks. Uh Israel doesn't want a deal.

[00:52:19]Israel wants to be ensure you know that Iran can be further degraded and can can continue lashing out at will against the Palestinians and the Lebanese. Where do you think we go?

[00:52:30]Man, I really don't know what's going to happen here. Um, I'm not sure how sincere Trump is that he really wants to negotiate at all. I'm not sure, you know, how tightly he and Netanyahu agree on all these things. I think my default understanding and explanation is that they do agree on virtually everything.

[00:52:52]And I'm I don't know really what to think about the times when Netanyahu seems to be outright defiant of Trump. It's not that I don't think he would be if he felt like he had to be, but I'm not sure that Trump would even put him in that position.

[00:53:12]So, like, in other words, when Trump says any further Israeli attacks on Lebanon are prohibited, for all I know, he just got off the phone with Netanyahu and told them, "Hey, I'm going to tweet that." But anyway, go ahead and do what you want, but I just got to make it look like there's some kind of difference of opinion here. And I did an interview with the American Conservative magazine.

[00:53:34]They suggested that, you know, one useful purpose for that could be to try to demonstrate some daylight between us and Israel for dealing with the Iranians.

[00:53:42]that they can tell them, "Well, look, that wasn't us. That was them, but don't worry, we're trying to reign them in, but we're not responsible for everything that they do because you know how they are." Um, Vice President Vance said they're freelancing over there in Lebanon. But that also, of course, calls into question the weakness of or strength of the president over his client state here. So, it does definitely cut both ways there if they're trying to get some short-term advantage out of that. But I guess my basic take on the talks is that Iran's demands are way too many and too strong and same for Trump and that they're both way up on their ladder and I don't see them climbing down to get to a point where they're going to shake hands and deal and go forward here. It's almost one of those things where it's like all or nothing, man. You either need to completely normalize relations and decide like screw it, we're friends now, right? like two boys in a fist fight and like the one who wins is like, "Well, still I respect you for punching me in the mouth a couple times or whatever."

[00:54:36]And then like, "Okay, now they can go on and be friends in the neighborhood now that they got that out of their way, you know, kind of thing. Maybe we could do that and just But that's what it would take is either a like a fullscale agreement. Let's normalize. I mean, hell, Nixon went and shook hands with Ma Tong and said, "Listen, now that we're friends, I'll have my people call your people and we'll work out all the things that we need to work out." But they went and made friends first. So, that's not impossible.

[00:55:04]You know, Ron Paul likes to point out that Kennedy went and talked with Kruef.

[00:55:08]Well, maybe people don't know who Crusef was, but Cruchef was Stalin's number one henchman in Ukraine.

[00:55:15]Okay, that's who Cruchef was. That guy had blood on his hands equivalent to any monster in the history of all human monsters who ever lived. And Kennedy said, "Hey, put her there, pal. We got business to discuss."

[00:55:30]And so if that's true, then we could make peace. We could figure out a way.

[00:55:34]However, I think the easiest thing to do, which would also be very difficult politically, but still would be to just quit and just come home and just say, "I already won. I already got what I want."

[00:55:44]And you know what? I don't give a damn what happens in the straight over there because that's up to Iran and the rest of Eurasia to work out between themselves. We're way over here and we got oil for sale. Our Gulf is open. So screw them and just try to spin it like we got what we wanted. We severely degraded their nuclear program. Never mind that was last year. But whatever.

[00:56:07]We killed the Ayatollah we don't like.

[00:56:09]So there I don't know. And then call that a win and just sail home. That's the only thing to do.

[00:56:16]>> I mean, I I can see how that makes sense. Just final question because I know we're running out of time, but would Israel I mean, they would Netanyahu would not like that. I >> No, he would not like that. Although, I have to say that I think if if America, any American president, if they are very very serious and they put their foot down and they tell the prime minister of Israel, "Listen, pal, this is how it's going to be and you're going to have to learn to like it." then they'll get what they want. And any any Israeli prime minister has to back down to that power.

[00:56:45]And you know, Netanyahu did push back hard against Obama, but Obama was an exceptionally weak president. If Donald Trump told Netanyahu, "You heard me, pal. This is the deal. Now, do what I say or I'm going to be really mad and I'm going to do things." Then Netanyahu would he would obey. He would have to obey.

[00:57:05]>> Excellent. Thanks, Scott. Thank you for your time and have a have a good day.

[00:57:08]Absolutely. Thank you so much for having us. Byebye.