00:11:01.660they sent President Clinton a demand that said,
00:11:05.100remove Saddam Hussein from power, not someday, now.
00:11:09.980It's not fringe. These were people who were later at the top of the Pentagon, the top of the vice
00:11:14.420president's office, and the National Security Council. So by the time Bush took office in 2001,
00:11:20.920the blueprint for the Iraq war was already drawn. And of course, the first domino whose fall was
00:11:30.080supposed to unleash a democratic wave from the Tigris to Tehran. And of course, that was the
00:11:37.500theory. Joshua Lysak, I want to get you in on this. You've studied this stuff. You've looked
00:11:42.720into it. This isn't conspiracy talk. This is actually how our government functioned in those
00:11:48.720years, isn't it? That's correct. Yes. And there's a strange bit of slate of hand amongst the Bush
00:11:56.040administration and its allies and advisors from 2001 to 2002, 2003, leading up to the invasion
00:12:03.020of Iraq. And when we go and look at President George W. Bush's speeches, the policy,
00:12:09.660the think tanks that were surrounding him, the context of Afghanistan was this is a once-off.
00:12:16.000It is, in the context, it's going to be retribution for 9-11. There's not going to
00:12:23.160be long-term regime change. And this was explicit policy. This was explicit speech material. We go
00:12:30.540back and we look at 2001, 2002, and then suddenly we see a strange turn of events where his advisors
00:12:39.960and then President George W. Bush himself begin talking almost out of nowhere about this axis of
00:12:46.980evil. It's almost like marketing or advertising where, but wait, there's more. And the military
00:12:54.540industrial complex that needed to be reapplied. It was too successful, too quick. Oh, but behind
00:13:01.620Al-Qaeda, behind the Taliban, is a threat that's far worse than anything we've seen before.
00:13:08.660Now, Clean Break advises Israel, Bibi Netanyahu specifically, Prime Minister at the time,
00:13:14.160advises them to engage in preemptive policy. That's where we hit them so they can't hit us.
00:13:23.700And that is the argument that was used by the Bush administration with this, actually, we're going to have way more 9-11s if we don't stop Saddam Hussein, because that was still part and parcel with the American patriotic experience, right?0.77
00:13:40.000we all got to come together and be patriotic citizens and oppose those who oppose us.
00:13:46.680And that language began to emerge where we have to fight them over there so we don't fight them
00:13:52.580over here again and have more of these terrorist intervention. And imagine just how awful it would
00:13:59.020be. Go ahead, Jack. Oh, no, just again on that. Iraq did not attack the United States. And in
00:14:06.060fact the people who were who were on those planes on 9-11 and we're not okay and so people understand
00:14:12.700the for the scope of this project joshua and i are not discussing 9-11 itself um because we are
00:14:20.100focused on regime changes the same way and on humans we were focused on people say when we
00:14:24.420wrote on humans people were asking us why didn't you you know mention certain things and i said
00:14:28.220well they were outside the scope of our project and we were focused on marxist revolutions
00:14:34.160specifically at that time. There were other places where Marxists came to power and Marxist
00:14:38.200regimes that just didn't follow the model that we were looking at. So, um, but what's interesting
00:14:43.420is of course, 9-11, most of the hijackers were of course, from Saudi Arabia. They were not from
00:14:49.440any of the countries that are labeled in this document. And that obviously is, yeah, an Egyptian,
00:14:57.580right. And, uh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a, was a Kuwaiti. So he was the planner and who was down
00:15:02.880at uh i did not get the chance to meet him by the way um but uh for the record i could have if i
00:15:10.280wanted to go to the uh his trials but i never um never did and i had work to do so the key here
00:15:19.460right the key here that's very interesting i think for everyone is to understand that it's
00:15:24.200very clear iraq did not attack the united states and for people who and the fact that i need to
00:15:31.320say that, that I even need to pause and take this second to say it over and over just shows you how
00:15:37.580propagandized this time was, because these lies still exist, even to this very day where people
00:15:45.400will try to think, well, they were our enemy, they were our enemy. They didn't attack the United
00:15:50.060States, we beat them in the Gulf War after we intervened on the side of Kuwait. Again, they also
00:15:55.620did not attack the United States, they attacked Kuwait, which, again, a separate country. And
00:16:00.740prior to that, we were the ones who had propped up Saddam Hussein, working with him in the Reagan
00:16:08.000administration when he when Bush's vice president, propping him up as a bulwark against Iran. And
00:16:13.680then suddenly you just have this total shift in policy on Saddam Hussein, where someone who
00:16:19.540thought he was an ally of the US, someone who we had sold weapons to, then turns around and becomes0.81
00:16:26.480the the the enemy of all that is good we are told that he was gassing his people that they were
00:16:32.780killing babies and incubators in kuwait and there's just all this war propaganda that gets0.67
00:16:38.100spread and then even up to 2003 where we're told oh he's a threat to the united states he's threats
00:16:42.920united states they went to the united nation and joshua if you could just take two minutes we have
00:16:46.880two minutes left in this talk about the power of propaganda and persuasion that was used to gin up
00:16:52.600support for this war. And I can remember, you can remember, for folks who were too young to know
00:16:57.060this, and it's true, there was a lot of support for this war early on. There was a lot. America
00:17:02.260has been traumatized, and they abused it. Yes. This is where the George Soros versus George Bush
00:17:08.640alignment on Afghanistan begins to diverge on Iraq, because George Soros did believe in turning
00:17:14.680Iraq as a closed society into an open society, right, where you have these neoliberal values,
00:17:20.800You have feminism, you have secular government, you have separation between church and state or mosque and state in this case.
00:17:27.660And Soros seemed to resent the fact that George W. Bush's, let's say, coalition of regime change for Iraq was using neoconservatism rather than neoliberalism.
00:17:40.160Whereas there was almost like this Christian, American, patriotic, flag-waving propaganda that Soros opposed to be used in Iraq.
00:17:51.240And what's interesting is the commentary on the Clean Break report later appeared in the New York Times in 2003 around the time of the invasion.
00:18:02.700And it was a description of the ideologues that were behind that report for Bibi Netanyahu that the best way to prevent conflict for Israel is to preemptively intervene in these other countries.
00:18:17.000Those men behind that report, as you were saying, show up inside of the Bush administration.
00:18:22.580And in this commentary, I'm reading from the New York Times 2003,
00:18:27.580a peculiar alliance of evangelical Christians, foreign policy hardliners,
00:18:33.900lobbyists for the Israeli government, and neoconservatives.
00:18:38.340That's the supranationalist alliance where we began to see for the first time,
00:19:30.480All right, Jack Grosovic, we are back live.
00:19:32.700Joshua Lysak, you were talking about, and we're hearing this episode of Tales of Regime
00:19:38.640Change, Iraq, the war that rewired the world.
00:19:41.780you were talking and really from personal experience about why there were certain
00:19:45.760populations of the United States who fervently agreed with regime change in Iraq, the war in
00:19:53.880Iraq, the same people who fervently believe, many of whom are Christian, fervently believe in regime
00:20:01.220change in Iran today. They back these wars to the hilt. And it's really a question, right?0.91
00:20:08.680Why was the Bush administration, the second Bush administration, particularly run by George W. Bush, so fervently in a belief, and you mentioned there was a religious aspect to this, that we should have a war in Iraq.
00:20:26.980A lot of people will say that, oh, it was just blood for oil, and that was Cheney and Halliburton, and other people would say, oh, it's because they went after George H.W. Bush, Saddam went after his father, so he wanted to get rid of him.
00:20:39.380But perhaps you have another opinion, or at least another angle.
00:20:43.340yes we said moments ago how this coalition of support had a cast of characters that included
00:20:50.980a number of high profile prominent and powerful evangelical christians including those who worked
00:20:55.880within the bush administration and set and advocated for the specific interventionist policy
00:21:01.560this preemptive interventionist policy which goes back to 1996 and the clean break report
00:21:06.560which says that again in order to have peace in the middle east we need to advocate for regime
00:21:12.760change in these countries that are opposed to Israel. And there was an expression, three down,
00:21:18.360two go, with reference to Syria and to Iran following the Lebanon war in 2006. That said,
00:21:27.700remember Act I of regime change, as we saw in Afghanistan and we'll see in Syria. Act I of
00:21:33.880regime change, the first stage is this demonization and preparation and ideological propaganda,
00:21:40.840persuasion preparation, where you build the case for going in there and getting him out of there.
00:21:47.400And of course, there are a number of lies about chemical weapons and weapons of mass destruction,
00:21:51.440nuclear weapon, this enriched uranium from Africa, a hypothesis that was, of course,
00:21:57.020debunked prior to the invasion of Iraq, we should add. But I happen to recall at this time
00:22:04.100that my network, limited as it was as a youngster, it was representative of the national
00:22:11.180evangelical support for the Bush administration invasion of Iraq, which, by the way, is what
00:22:16.640George Soros opposed was the religiosity mixed with American patriotism, where we need to use
00:22:23.740the full force of the United States military to engage in this righteous Christian war was how
00:22:29.820it was positioned, which Soros opposed. He preferred the secular, neoliberal freedom,
00:22:36.440democracy, feminism, women's rights, etc. version of regime change. But it ultimately leads to the
00:22:41.300same thing, the toppling of Saddam, which Soros advocated for. But in the Bush movie,
00:22:46.500an evangelical world, you had prominent Christian preachers, pastor, televangelists like John Hagee,
00:22:53.240like Hal Lindsey, who are saying Iraq today is literally in Bible prophecy. You know where it
00:23:00.140talks about Babylon in the Old Testament? That's literally Iraq today. So where it says that
00:23:06.620there's going to be this end times conflict, this end of the world, Armageddon, we are right on the
00:23:11.960eve of Armageddon. Let's go. When that happens, the rapture, which is an evangelical Christian
00:23:17.200doctrine that's about 150 or so years old. When that happens, Jesus Christ is going to return to
00:23:24.240earth, and there's going to be this third temple built, and there's this tribulation, this whole
00:23:28.720world, this sort of a religious, theocratic, sci-fi situation from the left-behind novels,
00:23:36.000which also were very popular at that time. And the film and a number of films inspired by that
00:23:42.340also came out right around this time. Like there was one called, I think it was called The Omega
00:23:47.740Code. And of course, there's Left Behind with Kirk Cameron. And I remember at the mega church I
00:23:53.340attended with my family, the preacher on the eve of invasion gave a sermon entitled,
00:23:59.260What Would Jesus Say to Saddam Hussein? But the idea was that for the first time,
00:24:06.420christians so this i gotta say i'm just wait can i pop in because yes like this is me in in catholic
00:24:13.500world right we didn't have any of that we have any and in fact the pope was against the war john
00:24:18.300paul ii was still pope and i remember him speaking out against this and he said do not do this um i
00:24:24.060remember vladimir putin coming out and saying do not do this you i don't know you do not know what
00:24:28.820you will unleash and so you're saying that in in this world on your side of the house where you
00:24:33.840you know, where you were at the time, that there was this fervent support for it.
00:44:29.000And into that, I guess you could say, weak glass frame ideology comes the wrecking ball of nationalist populism under President Donald J. Trump and through powerful influencers and super connectors like Charlie Kirk.
00:44:47.380And so those individuals from both sides' establishment become enemies of this supranationalist utopian idea where everyone can get along, all people are basically the same.0.85
00:45:01.060On the right, we jokingly call it magic dirt theory, where you can bring a Haitian, plant them in my sister town next door to me, Springfield, Ohio, and they immediately become just like everyone else.
00:45:11.840if not better, as some have said in the past that immigrants are superior to citizens because we're0.85
00:45:18.920lazy, as certain mistakes of Christmas break have been known to report. That said, as we look
00:45:26.080towards regime change, we have to understand that it doesn't work that way. Not all peoples and
00:45:31.880cultures are literally the same. That's a both neoliberal and neoconservative overextension
00:45:38.360of Thomas Jefferson's words that all men are created equal. That does not mean that all men
00:45:44.080are created literally equally the same and are therefore interchangeable. That's what
00:45:48.580neoconservative, neoliberal ideology is founded on. What that means is having equal dignity in
00:45:55.420the eyes of God. There's a verse in Galatians, I believe, in which the Apostle St. Paul says that
00:46:01.160there is neither Jew nor Greek nor slave nor free nor male or female, but all are one in Christ.
00:46:06.080That is to say, from that perspective, all human beings have an inherent dignity as creations of God.
00:46:14.440To overextend that idea ironically violates separation of church and state.
00:46:23.600It is a Christian doctrine that has legs through neoliberal secular enlightenmentism.
00:46:29.000This is why we understand that the sort of secular liberal perspective is like a riff on Christianity and Christian values, where equality in terms of dignity becomes equality of everything else.
00:46:44.180Well, Joshua, we're getting into another subject there, but that's similar to that term I introduced recently on the show, ex-evangelicals, where they're taking the Christian superstructure and then applying that to progressivism.
00:47:01.540folks this has been tales of regime change iraq the war that rewired the world understand why
00:47:13.220this happened and understand why it can happen again ladies and gentlemen as always you have