On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the world's most popular podcaster and podcaster joins me to talk about his new show, the war in Ukraine, and his thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
00:00:23.000The goal of this is every time I see people that disagree with anything that's happening, any gigantic world events, it's one of these retarded shows where they're screaming.
00:02:33.000I just think I'd like to talk to this person.
00:02:35.000But... Can I just, sorry, it's your show, but if you're going to interview historians of the conflict, or historians in general, why would you get somebody like Ian Carroll?
00:02:48.000Yeah, but Ian Carroll, I didn't bring him on for that purpose.
00:02:50.000I brought him on because I want to find out, like, how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business?
00:02:55.000Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.
00:03:02.000There's been a tilt in the conversation, in both conversations, in the last couple of years, and it's largely to do with people who have appointed themselves experts who are not experts.
00:05:04.000I think if you're on the outside, you'd say, oh, look, they're trying to get attention by talking about this very polarizing issue publicly.
00:05:38.000And I think that if you just throw a lot of shit out there and then say, I'm not interested in the alternative views on this, and particularly when it's a counter narrative that is wildly off.
00:05:49.000And when you get people, look, I just feel we should get it out straight away.
00:05:54.000I feel you've opened the door to quite a lot of people.
00:06:40.000One is, when he was offered, To debate the current greatest living biographer of Churchill, he said I can't because he knows much more than me and I admire his work and I've learned from it, but I can't possibly debate him.
00:08:27.000He didn't know what he was talking about.
00:08:28.000He had a contrary view and it was interesting and stimulating to hear.
00:08:32.000But if you only get the contrary view, which is, isn't it fun if we all pretend Churchill was the bad guy of the 20th century?
00:08:40.000At some point, you're going to lead people down a path where they think that's the view.
00:08:44.000And that's horseshit of the most profound kind.
00:08:49.000I don't think that's what he's trying to do I mean, your own platform has come about because you're a very successful comedian and much more.
00:09:05.000But there are a lot of people who have come along, partly, I think, because they've come on this show, who have come along and they've decided, I can play this double game.
00:09:13.000On the one hand, I'm going to push really edgy and frankly, sometimes horrific opinions.
00:09:42.000You need to listen to Daryl to really understand what he's...
00:09:45.000If you take Daryl's words out of context, Daryl has some of the most nuanced, balanced, and charitable views On all the figures in history.
00:11:09.000He announces to the German parliament.
00:11:11.000Okay. I mean, I think that it's kind of hard because I don't think I don't know exactly what Daryl's point on that was,
00:11:30.000and so I'm not really in a position to argue what he was saying there.
00:11:34.000I don't think you're giving him the most charitable interpretation.
00:11:37.000I don't need to give him the most charitable interpretation to be able to see what he's doing.
00:11:42.000Okay, I think you're strawmanning him, I should say.
00:11:43.000Look, anyone can look up what he said on this show and others, what these two guys in particular have said on repeated podcasts with both of you.
00:11:52.000It's an attempt to downplay Hitler and always to do down church.
00:12:07.000And I think this is very, very interesting and also very dangerous because we live in an era now that the right has got some mojo back in America, we saw years of crazy left overreach.
00:12:50.000Well, can I just say, because I kind of do agree with part of what you said there.
00:12:54.000Like, I do think it is true that almost as a reaction to, like, the woke insanity that we've seen on the left, and I think nobody's been a more effective critic of that than you, I do think there has kind of been a right-wing reaction that has embraced racialism and is...
00:13:12.000Dangerous and not a good path to go down.
00:13:14.000And now they're flirting with Holocaust denial and Hitler and absolving Hitler of blame and much more.
00:13:18.000I think you're wrong to include Daryl in that group.
00:13:21.000Now, the other thing is, I'm sorry, because maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
00:13:24.000You're saying people that I've had conversations with have downplayed the Holocaust?
00:13:33.000I've never podcasted with Ian Carroll.
00:13:36.000I have podcasted with Daryl Cooper once, and he absolutely did not downplay.
00:13:41.000I think that if we're zooming out here a little bit, maybe this is kind of part of the disconnect.
00:13:49.000Broadly speaking, in American culture, the idea that it has not been driven into people enough that the Nazis were bad and that Adolf Hitler was a...
00:14:57.000They still march on occasions with posters of Lenin.
00:15:02.000They've spent decades trying to do down evils that were done on their side.
00:15:08.000And I would suggest that one of the things that is going on at the moment is despite or maybe because of what you just described, there are movements now on the right in America, subcultures, including people who follow both of you,
00:15:23.000who are very interested in playing with this absolute...
00:15:30.000Why somebody like Jake Shields wants to play around with Holocaust denial?
00:15:51.000Well, it's also, I mean, there's something about, you know, Michael Malice had that great line.
00:15:56.000He goes, when you take the red pill, you're supposed to take one and not swallow the whole bottle.
00:16:00.000And I think there's like this dynamic.
00:16:02.000What happens is, and of course, people know the red pill is the analogy from The Matrix.
00:16:06.000The idea that you wake up to realizing that so much of the stuff you believed was bullshit propaganda and it's all lies.
00:16:13.000And this is a real danger when the establishment and the institutions are all caught with their pants down having sold a bunch of very consequential policies based on lies.
00:16:25.000And then once people realize that, they go, well, what else have they been lying to me about?
00:16:29.000And then they almost want to look into every single thing and go, yeah, I think the whole thing was lies.
00:16:58.000We live in an era where podcasters have a lot of power.
00:17:02.000If you go on a podcast with Jake Shields, and Jake Shields goes on to another podcast and says he doesn't think six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, what do you think's happening there?
00:17:14.000Okay. And I agree with you about the breakdown of trust.
00:17:19.000Absolutely. We have lived through an era where, in real time, we saw something called a conspiracy, the lab leak, which turns out to be true, as you and others said it might be from the beginning.
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00:19:18.000And if you're watching on YouTube, you can get your four free months by scanning the QR code on screen or by clicking the link I was referencing the New York Times calling the lab leak racist, which is just the funniest thing ever.
00:19:33.000They go, it's racist to think that there was a sophisticated lab where they were developing gain-of-function research.
00:19:40.000And they go, no, what happened is these freaks were eating bat heads.
00:19:57.000I've said repeatedly, it's kind of inevitable to me that if you see something that is called a racist conspiracy theory fall apart and become also what we used to call true in a few years, it's likely to blow a lot of people's minds.
00:20:12.000But the question then is, do you help those minds that have been blown?
00:20:16.000Blow themselves out some more by doing a whole load of other conspiracy stuff.
00:20:21.000Do you decide to go, hey, what else have we been lied to?
00:21:22.000What you're guilty of here is kind of similar to, I think, something that the woke left has done, which is this concept creep where you're talking about some people online who are doing this thing, and then you're lumping in other people with them.
00:21:48.000When this comes out, I am quite confident to say beforehand that if you're going into it expecting him to be downplaying the atrocities of the Nazis or downplaying the evil things that Adolf Hitler did, you're going to be disappointed.
00:22:01.000My point is, why are we even talking about this guy?
00:22:47.000And he's doing it from the perspective, initially, of these Jewish people that are living in Europe that all of a sudden their neighbors are turning on them and they're being attacked.
00:23:22.000There's a weird way in which figures like him, whose ideas are not being counted when they are raised, are given platform after platform to spread their views.
00:23:33.000I'm not saying they shouldn't be platformed.
00:23:34.000I'm saying these are very, very fringe figures who are pushing ideas that are either debunked now, have been debunked before, or they will not stand up against somebody who disagrees with them.
00:23:45.000Okay, I would just say, maybe this is the disconnect here.
00:23:48.000When you say there's not pushback, Daryl's one...
00:23:51.000One line on Tucker Carlson, this one line where he himself said he was being hyperbolic and kind of says this to prod at his buddy, got more pushback than any one line I've ever heard on a podcast.
00:24:02.000There were numerous articles written by historians, numerous shows that covered it.
00:25:00.000So you're saying that what Joe shouldn't have Darryl Cooper on?
00:25:03.000I'm saying that there will have that if you mainstream very, very fringe views, which are easily able to be debunked, if you mainstream them, at some point, that view that was so fringe will be
00:25:19.000what eager, very disconnected, unhappy people are going to start playing with, too.
00:25:26.000And if these people are such experts in how you see a society go weird, they can look at what is happening to a portion of the right everywhere on this stuff.
00:25:37.000There is a portion of the right across.
00:26:51.000Operation Unthinkable was at the end of the war, I believe, Churchill was concerned about the rise of Russia, and the rise of the Soviet Union.
00:27:01.000And the idea was, and we'll find out what the historical facts are about this, Operation Unthinkable, the name given to two related possible future war plans developed by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee.
00:27:17.000The creation of the plans was ordered by the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on May 1945 and developed by the British Armed Forces Joint Planning Staff in May 1945, the end of World War II in Europe.
00:27:28.000One plan assumed a surprise attack on the Soviet forces stationed in Germany to oppose...
00:27:34.000The will of the United States imposed, rather, the will of the United States and the British Empire upon Russia.
00:27:39.000The will was qualified as a square deal for Poland, but added that that does not necessarily limit the military commitment.
00:27:46.000The assessment, signed by the chief of army staff on 9 June 1945, concluded it would be beyond our power to win a quick but limited success, and we would be committed to a protracted war against heavy odds.
00:28:09.000Okay, but first of all, yes, at the end of the war, a plan requested that wasn't seen through that suggests that after the defeat of Nazism, communism of the Soviet form is also going to be a threat to Europe was simply evidence that,
00:28:33.000I'm sorry, but I have to return to this point that this man manages to do one of the most heroic things in human history in standing alone against evil in its most concentrate form.
00:28:47.000And he does about as much as any human being can do to save the civilized world.
00:28:54.000If you just park that and you go on to a Plan in 1945 to try to counter Soviet domination of Europe.
00:29:47.000If you want to argue, I'm Jewish of German descent, so I'm not against the argument that the Nazis had to be defeated and that was the most important thing, but there still is just the basic facts that it almost couldn't have gone worse.
00:30:01.000It was like just a nightmare for civilization.
00:30:04.000And if people want to look back at that and go, man, was there any other way this could have been handled?
00:30:09.000Were there blunders that were made here?
00:30:12.000Now, personally, what I feel much more comfortable arguing would be that I try to blame everything I can on Woodrow Wilson as much as I can, because also he created the income tax on the Federal Reserve and did so much to damage my country.
00:30:23.000But I think American entry into World War I was really a disaster, and imposing the Treaty of Versailles on Germany was a disaster.
00:30:32.000I also think that's kind of fairly mainstream history.
00:30:37.000That's not a particularly controversial view, that imposing the Treaty of Versailles on Germany ended up in disaster.
00:30:43.000Well, no, except that, as Martin Amis said, the only way to not...
00:30:46.000Get to the Treaty of Versailles would be for Germany to win World War I, but yeah.
00:30:49.000Yeah, but we're not talking about the Nazis winning the war.
00:30:52.000We're talking about, you know, listen, I think that...
00:30:55.000But secondly, sorry, I just have to address that fundamental.
00:30:59.000You say the outcome of World War II and everything that happened in it was the worst thing that's ever happened, and the worst thing imaginable, worst possible outcome, you said.
00:32:06.000This particular school of, as it were, history.
00:32:10.000It's doing something that I've seen happen with American history as well, particularly with Lincoln.
00:32:14.000Lincoln's an interesting comparison to make with Churchill on this.
00:32:17.000There are people who will criticize Churchill for mistakes made, not hard to do, quite hard not to make mistakes while fighting at a war of total annihilation against your country.
00:32:30.000People will say, oh, he didn't sort this out in 1945.
00:32:36.000He didn't solve every problem in the world for all time, but he solved a hell of a big problem for his time.
00:32:43.000And that requires some kind of generosity of spirit and understanding in hindsight, as opposed to, I will find something that he did that I wouldn't have done, because if I'd have been running the British Empire in 1939,
00:32:59.000I'd have known exactly how to do it, and I'd have known how to hold the whole thing together, and I'd have kept Stalin back, and he'd have been great at Yalta.
00:33:07.000But I don't think anybody's saying that.
00:33:09.000I think there's a tendency of woke left kids to do this, but I don't think that's what, certainly not what I'm saying, and I don't think what Daryl's saying.
00:33:17.000I do also think that one of the bigger, kind of the bigger picture dynamics to all of this is that we have, at least since 9-11, been in a state of perpetual war.
00:33:39.000The whole Iraq war, the whole war in Afghanistan, just lying the whole way through.
00:33:44.000I mean, I remember literally having conversations with Green Berets in the middle of the war in Afghanistan, and they're like, George W. Bush is telling you that the army we're building up there is really successful?
00:33:54.000This thing's gonna fall in a week without us.
00:33:57.000And then all through the Obama administration, it's just like lie after lie after lie with disastrous wars.
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00:38:30.000It wasn't like you suddenly decided to bomb, again, Myanmar or something.
00:38:34.000You went to Afghanistan to find bin Laden and take revenge for 9-11 and stop.
00:38:41.000An attack like that happening again on the American homeland.
00:38:43.000That is very different from a country being at war.
00:38:46.000Yeah, but that's a total mischaracterization of the war in Afghanistan.
00:38:49.000It's one thing to say that might be an accurate characterization of the special operations mission in late 2001, but then we fought a 20-year regime change war against the Taliban.
00:38:58.000Because you got dragged into the quicksand of war.
00:39:15.000Douglas, if I went back and corrected you on every time you've used the term we to refer to your government or something like that, like, if I were to say, oh, we just imposed tariffs on China, would you point out that I didn't and it was the Trump administration?
00:39:26.000You take it, obviously, very personally, and that's your right to do so, of course.
00:39:30.000I'm just trying to make sure we're accurate here.
00:39:32.000What do you think I'm taking personally?
00:40:56.000You're wildly not listening to what I'm saying.
00:41:02.000I think you have to take, I think we should agree perhaps on the following, that One major thing can break down in front of your eyes, or many major things.
00:41:12.000And it does not mean that every single one of the sewer gates should be lifted.
00:41:21.000I'm saying this is a chatter on what is part of our side at the moment.
00:41:26.000Is that a lot of the sewer gates are being lifted, sometimes by people who know that they're doing it, sometimes by people who don't, sometimes by people who say, I don't know, I'm just throwing it out there.
00:41:39.000But at the very least, there's some damn hygiene that should be required, isn't there?
00:41:45.000Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but sure.
00:42:22.000But if your argument is that, like, You're saying, I claim to be an expert, but then I have, like, a parachute to get out of it by being like, hey, I'm just a comedian who's just saying this.
00:42:29.000But I don't think I've ever, like, really claimed to be an expert.
00:44:15.000No. There are some things we can still verify to be true and can still agree on as baseline levels of agreement in a free society.
00:44:25.000And yes, everyone is free to air their views, but it does not mean that everyone who sounds off on an issue, whether it's World War II, the war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, has an equally valid point of view.
00:44:43.000To me is just batting down a straw, man.
00:44:45.000I mean, I certainly wouldn't argue that everyone has an equally valid point of view.
00:44:48.000And I certainly wouldn't argue that there shouldn't be some standards of, like, who you would want to find interesting and talk to and who you wouldn't.
00:44:56.000But also, it's like, so let's have the conversation that, like, I don't know, like, if there's...
00:45:01.000If there are experts out there who can smack all of this stuff down or just destroy every point that I make over the years or whatever, like, okay, so then do it.
00:45:25.000I think what I'm trying to get at, Joe, is that it's a bit like the Twitter algorithm thing.
00:45:29.000Which is, yes, everyone is and should be free to say what they like on Twitter apart from whatever the very fringe things of like immediate incitement to violence and all that kind of thing.
00:45:42.000But we all know that one of the oddities of Twitter, including since Elon took over, is that what you hope is a restored marketplace of ideas ends up pushing you really crazy shit.
00:45:54.000Yes. And that is what I'm suggesting is happening on a podcast level and maybe on a wider level beyond that.
00:46:05.000I do not want a guy with one half thousand followers who's got some zany new view on something who isn't an expert, but is an expert to be pushed at me.
00:46:15.000And effectively, what is happening with the Twitter algorithm is happening everywhere else as well.
00:46:20.000And we're all for the open marketplace of ideas.
00:46:37.000Why am I being constantly pushed this view?
00:46:40.000And I think that the answer to a great degree is the same thing in your world as it is in the Twitter world, which is if you go straight online and you say, you know...
00:47:03.000That's kind of what's needed is for the people who know the documents to go through the documents.
00:47:08.000But you and I know that if, as there was some guy who did immediately, you do something like live stream Mossad involvement in JFK, you're going to milk it.
00:47:22.000I'm saying that there's a similar algorithm in all of our lives that we're not as aware of as we should be.
00:47:28.000Because we all know this at some level, that there are certain things that get a bit of your base going or get people going interesting and crazy and then they start debating it and all that sort of thing.
00:47:43.000And that algorithm of online seems to me to be spilling into the real world.
00:47:49.000I don't disagree that there's certainly more sensationalist stuff will get you more clicks.
00:47:54.000I also don't think it's not really unique to social media or podcasting.
00:47:59.000No, believe me, I write for the tabloids.
00:49:09.000Well, my broad view is that, again, something to do with the algorithm, that anything that is conspiratorial about Zelensky or the Ukrainians in the conflict does very well.
00:49:27.000anything that says actually the Ukrainian army is fighting to try to retain as much of their country as they can doesn't do as well.
00:49:37.000I think that everything that is pushing the idea that, for instance, the Americans caused it or something like that does well.
00:49:47.000I think everything that says actually in February 2022 Vladimir Putin's tanks invaded Ukraine and they shouldn't have done,
00:49:56.000I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that what Vladimir Putin did wasn't horrific.
00:50:06.000The point is that after that, there's a whole set of things.
00:50:10.000Let's look at, for instance, the issue of corruption.
00:50:13.000Ukraine is a pretty corrupt country by EU standards, by World Bank standards.
00:50:21.000And it's been a problem, as it is in that neck of the woods.
00:50:25.000And it's understandable that if the US is one of the countries putting money and arms into Ukraine, then it's going to be a subject of legitimate interest to the American people and others, the European taxpayers.
00:50:38.000Nevertheless, you end up in this, and I know this because it's the same thing in the old media.
00:50:43.000You end up on the new bit of the story, and there's always a risk that you will lose sight of the beginning of the story.
00:52:02.000He says he only got $70 billion of it, but we've spent closer to $170, so whatever.
00:52:07.000But the point is that, obviously, if there is a country that we are propping up, funding, arming, and they're corrupt, I would say my starting point would always be to be more concerned with that corruption than an enemy country,
00:52:23.000which it's almost kind of a given, is a corrupt country.
00:52:26.000I'm sure there are fringes of the right who might say, like, Vladimir Putin's some great guy or something like that.
00:52:32.000But that is, I really do not think that is the argument that most people who are critical of this, of Biden's policy, are making.
00:52:39.000Sure. I mean, I think one of the interesting things that happens in this is the old cliche of losing the wood for the trees.
00:53:00.000I remember this debate with Pat Buchanan when he was debating much more learned historians on the subject of the origins of World War II. And the whole thing got lost in all of this sort of mad puzzle of views about iron ore production in the Bavarian forest and this sort of thing.
00:53:16.000And I remember everyone was all over the place.
00:53:18.000And the moderator turned to the historian Andrew Roberts and said, Andrew Roberts, why did World War II begin?
00:53:23.000And he said, World War II began because Hitler invaded Poland.
00:53:28.000And those moments come along quite often at the moment, which is...
00:53:38.000There's a lot of very interesting things going on which we should all be able to talk about and do talk about.
00:53:42.000But... Sometimes you have to remember the origin causes of things as well, and you have to stick to keeping that in mind.
00:53:51.000And I think that a lot of people are pretty bad at the moment of keeping that in mind.
00:53:56.000You can concede Ukrainian corruption, you can concede all sorts of things, and still not lose sight of the thing of if Russia rolls tanks into neighboring countries.
00:54:13.000Okay, so on that, I think we have an area of agreement.
00:54:16.000And I do think, like, even while I much prefer the path that Donald Trump is pursuing to the path that Joe Biden pursued when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
00:54:26.000And of course, this is, you know, Donald Trump's thing is once you piss him off.
00:54:31.000He's going to call you every bad nickname that there is.
00:54:33.000And sometimes when you don't piss him off.
00:55:00.000If he feels that you disrespected him or came at him, he's going to be ten times more vicious to you.
00:55:05.000By the way, this happened two weeks before the disastrous Oval Office meeting.
00:55:10.000Yeah. And I wrote the next day the cover in the New York Post, which was a big picture of Vladimir Putin with the headline, This is a dictator.
00:55:18.000Just, again, as I say, not to lose track.
00:55:22.000In all of the melee, not to lose track.
00:55:28.000As somebody who is very anti-war, broadly speaking, and I do agree with you that we should be able to have conversations about all the things that led up to the war and all the different blunders that were made,
00:55:44.000and also still recognize that Vladimir Putin invaded a country and is responsible for, you know, I think it's the best book that's been written on the history leading up to the war between,
00:56:03.000it basically takes you from the collapse of the Soviet Union up to the war in Ukraine.
00:56:07.000And even in that book, the book is called Provoked, and the argument is that Western policy was very provocative toward Vladimir Putin, and there were a lot of off-ramps that could have been explored and should have been explored.
00:56:19.000But he has an entire chapter in the book where he is saying like, look, Putin had a lot of other options.
00:56:26.000It's not as if any of that justifies his invasion.
00:56:29.000And so I do agree with you that whenever we're talking about a war, particularly a war of aggression, That should always be in the front of people's minds.
00:56:38.000I mean, you can criticize, you know, I would say, I think I'm consistent on this across the board, you can criticize lots of things about the insurgency in Iraq, certainly, but you should remember that George W. Bush invaded the country when he shouldn't have, and based off lies.
00:56:55.000So I say that when my government does it, I'll say it when the Russian government does it also.
00:56:59.000That being said, there's a very strong argument that there were Many policies that the US, you know, NATO and Europe as well, but mostly the US, pursued that were just almost like if you wanted to come to this inevitable conflict,
00:57:17.000this would have been the policy to pursue to give you the best chance to end up there.
00:57:20.000I was with a British military friend recently and somebody asked, what does the fog of war mean?
00:57:31.000Example of what it means on the battlefield, which a lot of people don't understand.
00:57:35.000There's a version of the fog of war in history as well.
00:57:38.000The great Czech writer Milan Kundera had this beautiful phrase in a book of his from the 90s called Testaments Betrayed, where he said the odd thing about mankind is, he said, we walk through life in a fog and we stumble along a path and we create the path as we stumble along it.
00:57:57.000He said that's not the interesting thing.
00:57:59.000The interesting thing is, That when we look back, we see the man and we see the path, but we don't see the fog.
00:58:06.000Everything looks inevitable when you're standing in the present.
00:58:11.000Everything looks like it was going to happen this way, and you have these endless, often fascinating, often futile, explorations of what might have been.
00:58:23.000But it doesn't take into account the fog.
00:58:29.000After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was pretty considerable.
00:58:33.000The efforts in the 1990s to bring them into a more obvious part of the international order failed.
00:58:40.000My own view has always been that in part we missed an opportunity to pay a kind of civilizational respect to the Russians, which they deserved.
00:58:54.000But also, throughout the period that people now say there are all of these off-ramps, and now so many people claim that NATO went around the region desperately trying to provoke the Russians into some kind of war or inevitably leading them that way because of NATO expansionism,
00:59:11.000they never take into account what was in my memory and experience very clear, which was NATO didn't go around recruiting.
00:59:24.000Countries came to NATO wanting to join, precisely because they feared the aggression that Ukrainians have suffered since February 2022, and indeed before.
00:59:32.000I was in Georgia just after the 2008 war began.
00:59:57.000In fact, they were desperate to join the European Union.
00:59:59.000I rather frivolously said to a Georgian friend, if you want, we can swap.
01:00:03.000You can take our British membership of the EU.
01:00:06.000But in the NATO thing, they were desperate for it.
01:00:10.000And they were desperate for it precisely for the reason that many of the Ukrainians were desperate for it, which was only way to stop Putin expansionism.
01:00:19.000So, you know, in the whole fog of the post-Soviet era, that is one of the many things that gets left out of the conversation.
01:00:28.000And by the way, Putin's actions in February 2022 and since, all he's done is provoke...
01:01:08.000First off, the war in Georgia in 2008 actually came, was it two or three months after the Bucharest summit where NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine would be entering NATO.
01:01:19.000So just making that point that the NATO aspirations came first.
01:01:22.000But listen, I don't think you're wrong.
01:01:24.000I don't think anybody is ever implying that like we've expanded NATO through force and that the countries who were joining or at least the governments of the countries who were joining didn't want it.
01:01:33.000Although in the case of Ukraine, there's a great piece in the Washington Post about.
01:01:37.000You know, the question I think isn't...
01:02:09.000there was, as you know well, in the 90s, in the late 90s during the first round of NATO expansion, there was a lively debate.
01:02:17.000I don't mean a debate amongst outsiders or non-expert experts or whatever.
01:02:22.000I mean, within the real deal experts, the wisest graybeards in the national security apparatus, there was a real debate with at least three secretaries of defense who warned against this.
01:02:32.000Robert Gates, Robert McNamara, William Perry, the secretary of defense at the time, almost resigned, said his biggest regret in life is that he didn't resign over it.
01:02:39.000George Kennan was able to see right through that fog.
01:02:42.000He literally said, the cold warrior, founder of the containment strategy, saw right through that fog.
01:02:47.000This will inevitably lead to a conflict with Russia.
01:02:50.000And his exact words were, and then when there's a Russian response, everybody will say, look, this is why we needed to expand NATO.
01:02:57.000But the point here is, okay, even within that deep debate, which there were lively debates about, even the people who were on the pro-expansionist side of things, like Henry Kissinger, even he said Ukraine would have to be a special arrangement.
01:03:13.000Ukraine will not come into NATO because obviously that's leading to a war with Russia.
01:03:18.000And so I don't think it's unreasonable and I think this is a fair thing that we should do in all conflicts is like...
01:03:25.000To, as Mearsheimer puts it, to have strategic empathy.
01:03:30.000To say like, hey, listen, let's reasonably place ourselves in the other person's shoes and say, how would we react if somebody was expanding their military alliance that is explicitly anti-us and is bringing it up to our borders and now is openly for years and years and years saying that we are going to bring your largest neighbor,
01:03:51.000where you have very important strategic interest from your point of view into our military alliance and you are saying over and over again this is our brightest red line do not do this and then they keep flirting with doing this over and over then they back a street push that
01:04:06.000overthrows the government there don't you think maybe that would be a provocation
01:04:29.000Do the same thing with the Latvians and others.
01:04:31.000Yeah, but I would never, Douglas, but my response to you was never, I can't understand why the Latvians or the Lithuanians would want to be in NATO.
01:04:45.000But that wasn't why Putin invaded in 2022.
01:04:49.000And I think there's an oddity, if I can say so, maybe this particularly comes across on the libertarian, bisexual side, but I think there's an oddity of the...
01:04:59.000Let the record show him, a happily married heterosexual man.
01:05:05.000I think there's an oddity that sometimes particularly happens on the libertarian side, which is a presumption that things only really happen in the world because we make them so.
01:05:17.000You know, Russia invades Ukraine because of American policy in Eastern Europe post-1989, 1990.
01:05:26.000Something happened in the Middle East because of American policy.
01:05:29.000And I think it's a very blinkered and parochial view of things.
01:05:34.000Because my experience in countries around the world is that there's a heck of a lot going on that America is frankly...
01:05:57.000It's one of the things I find very interesting about this with democracies, which is that it's one of the things in the nature of a liberal democracy that because we have the right to air our opinion, because we have the right to criticize our government and much more, But
01:06:24.000when a liberal democracy comes against the kind of rock,
01:06:42.000Like a death cult, a totalitarian regime, a dictatorship like Russia or the Iranian revolutionary government.
01:06:53.000There's always this temptation to say, to focus our attention on our own side because we can't do a darn thing about the other one.
01:07:02.000It's a version of, you know, the great late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said when he was ambassador to the UN.
01:07:11.000...known among those who know about it as Moynihan's rule, which is, he said, if you sit at the UN, or the UN Human Rights Council, or any of these bodies, you would come away with the belief that the most abused people with the fewest rights in the world live in America and other Western liberal societies.
01:07:29.000And he came because we're the ones that talk about it.
01:07:33.000You know, if there's one incident of racism in America, the whole world knows about it.
01:07:40.000If there's one incident of racism in North Korea, it's not going to make any news.
01:07:46.000And then you have on top of that the fact that the way in which despotisms and death cults and dictatorships work, the information just doesn't come out.
01:07:56.000And Moynihan's rule ended up being that the...
01:08:03.000That his rule by the end of his time in the UN was that the number of human rights violations that occur in a country happen in exactly inverse proportion to the numbers of claims of human rights violations.
01:08:15.000Because only the countries which care about it and which such things can be aired in are ever going to get it out.
01:08:22.000But the point of Moynihan's law and the warning of it is be careful not to come away with the mistaken idea.
01:08:31.000That the freest and most liberal societies are the worst.
01:08:35.000And I think there's a version of Moynihan's law that applies, whether it's to the Middle East, to Ukraine and Russia, which is, we come away with this, people may come away with the impression that the bad things in the world effectively all come from here.
01:08:52.000And there is quite a lot to be said for some of that, but there's not everything to be said.
01:08:57.000Much of the world runs on a dynamic and a dynamo, which you can't do a darn thing about, other than to try to understand it.
01:09:06.000Yeah, okay, so I mean, again, I certainly...
01:09:11.000There is truth to a lot of that, and I think that is a fascinating kind of dynamic where there is something about kind of like, you know, I noticed this even just with my own kids.
01:09:20.000When you have kids and you raise them really, you know, like you're really sweet to them and you don't hate them and you give them a good life, small things end up becoming huge things in their mind.
01:09:30.000Like someone pushed me at the playground and it's like, whoa, this is, whereas like the way I grew up, that would have just been kind of like a non-event.
01:10:05.000Right, so very specifically, you know, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I'll just get two, like, bullet points on this, and we could talk about a lot of this, but look, number one, in 2008, as you well know, right, the...
01:10:18.000Joe Biden's CIA director, who was the CIA director for the entire war up until Donald Trump just came back in, he wrote the Net Means Net memo to Condoleezza Rice, a private cable to the then Secretary of State when he was ambassador to Russia, to let her know that this flirting with bringing Ukraine into NATO is going to end up in a war.
01:10:38.000And by the way, the Russians don't want to do it.
01:10:41.000If you keep pushing with this, the Russians are going to have they are going to have to make a decision that they don't want to make, which is whether they intervene or not.
01:10:49.000And number two, Strahltenberg, if I might be butchering that again, but the head of NATO, he himself said that Vladimir Putin sent him a draft draft.
01:11:00.000I admire your appeal to authority to the head of the CIA.
01:11:38.000I'm not going to pretend to read his heart and mind or something like that.
01:11:41.000But at the very least, you handed him the giant excuse in order to do it.
01:11:46.000I mean, maybe he doesn't really believe it, but this is his argument to his own people and to the world that it's like, look, and we put him in a position.
01:11:54.000You know, if you hate Vladimir Putin, he's such a terrible guy.
01:11:57.000Well, we put him in this position where he gets to now very plausibly say to the international community in the same way that if the Soviet Union had survived and the United States had.
01:12:06.000He doesn't very plausibly have the opportunity to.
01:12:10.000Well, I mean, okay, the whole place wasn't run by Nazis.
01:12:19.000There's certainly worse than Nazis there.
01:12:26.000You can lie an awful lot when you're a dictator and you have the ability not just to run all of the media but to kill your political opponents.
01:12:38.000You know, I just got back from Ukraine again the other week and it's so weird.
01:12:44.000I saw the Oval Office meeting as it happened from a trench in the front line between the Russian and Ukrainian positions in the east of the country.
01:12:51.000And it was so weird seeing the way in which this country's territory was being talked about by outsiders, particularly by America.
01:13:06.000And there's so many oddities about it, but the people who are fighting there, the soldiers on the front lines, the ones I was with, they're not fighting.
01:16:49.000The Soviet Union did not fall just because of Afghanistan.
01:16:52.000I didn't say, I said it played a role.
01:16:53.000I didn't say it was just because of Afghanistan.
01:16:55.000Also because communism as an economic model just doesn't work and it was a disaster and it was destined to collapse.
01:17:02.000All centrally planned, totally socialist economies are destined for bad results.
01:17:07.000I don't like the word destined in that because my experience I thought when I went to North Korea some years ago, that couldn't go on for much longer, and on it goes.
01:17:19.000Yeah, no, okay, so fair point there, but certainly it's gonna be the, you know, it's a much different dynamic for a communist country like North Korea, who is a relatively small and not a
01:17:33.000Not expansionist, whereas the Soviet Union was trying to maintain an empire, which is a much tougher thing to do.
01:17:38.000Look, the United States of America is going broke trying to do it.
01:17:40.000So it was pretty tough for them to do.
01:17:42.000All I'm saying here is that, like, if you if the dynamic again, it's not just that, like, first off, in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, we announced we were doing it and we didn't give them a map plan, but we announced they are coming into NATO.
01:17:57.000Over and over, not just the Kamala Harris comment, over and over and over again through the years, people at the highest level of the U.S. government asserted that this is going to happen, that it's a matter of time.
01:18:07.000And then 2014, this was a major, major provocation toward the Russians, that we backed this street protest against the democratically elected government there.
01:18:19.000That's, again, it's tricky because the Maidan protests were...
01:18:24.000Genuine students in the center of the city who were uprising against a corrupt government.
01:19:30.000We have a history of just standing with the people because we love democracy so much.
01:19:34.000No. We use that as an excuse when we think it's in our strategic advantage.
01:19:38.000We will overthrow democratically elected governments with no problem, which, by the way, Yanukovych was democratically elected with elections verified by the EU.
01:19:46.000But I'm not denying any of those kids had agency, and I'm sure a lot of them were protesting against their own corrupt government.
01:19:52.000But the point is that, like, look, imagine on, I think Jeffrey Sachs came up with this, this isn't mine, but imagine on January 6th if, like, Chinese politicians We're coming over and handing out sandwiches to the rioters and saying,
01:20:46.000$100 million into a street protest against a democratically elected president of Ukraine, and the whole issue is over, essentially, whether he's going to tilt toward an economic deal with Europe or tilt toward an economic deal with Vladimir Putin.
01:21:02.000I mean, Douglas, if anyone did that in our region of the world, we would, D.C. would overthrow that government, invade in a moment.
01:21:44.000I think I just sent you something about that this morning.
01:21:46.000Yes, I mean, well, okay, but that is a little bit different than overthrowing our neighbor government and trying to install a hostile government toward us.
01:21:54.000You're saying that we'd lose our mind if anyone tried to interfere here.
01:22:31.000They should try with the political class more if they're trying to turn us anti-Israel or something like that because both major parties in this country will fund and unconditionally support Israel no matter what.
01:22:43.000But, I mean, Qatar is definitely trying to influence things their way as other countries are.
01:22:49.000I mean, I cite it as an example of something that's very interesting.
01:22:53.000An attempt to interfere in American public life, which gets almost no attention.
01:22:57.000And indeed the governments, whether Democrat or Republican, still seem to adore the Qataris, even as they act as one of the backers of terrorist groups across the Middle East and elsewhere.
01:23:14.000And I cannot understand why it doesn't get more attention.
01:23:17.000Well, according to the former defense minister of Israel, they were begging.
01:24:08.000I think I'm allowed to quote powerful people when they admit what they're doing.
01:24:11.000No, I know, but again, it's just an interesting thing, because again, it's a discipline about this, which is, do I only quote powerful people when they say the odd thing that I agree with, or do I simultaneously distrust all powerful people?
01:24:27.000It's just an interesting rhetorical...
01:24:30.000Well, no, I mean, I think that obviously, like, I don't blindly trust anyone in the political class or the media class, for that matter, either.
01:24:39.000But when they admit things that are, like, very against their interest to admit and kind of give away the whole game that now they're pretending doesn't matter...
01:24:47.000Are you sure whether it's the CIA or Mossad that it isn't just if they say something that you happen to want?
01:24:54.000Well, this is kind of like saying if I were to end on trial and I were to, like, I'm the prosecution and I'd enter into evidence a written confession by the defendant.
01:25:03.000And you go, well, are you only entering this in because this kind of goes along with your case?
01:25:07.000Like, I suppose we're all guilty of having these incentives to some degree.
01:25:11.000But I do think it's a relevant detail that the former defense secretary admitted this.
01:25:15.000And by the way, Netanyahu's admitted this.
01:25:51.000The situation there, On the war of the last 18 months now, more than 18 months in the Middle East, is a result not of that, but of Hamas deciding to start another war with Israel and trying to annihilate their neighbor.
01:26:06.000But you don't think if they were being propped up by Israel, that has nothing to do with the group?
01:26:11.000They were not being propped up by Israel.
01:26:12.000The reason why Hamas were in power, as you know, much, much against the interests of the Israelis, was that they were voted into power Thank you.
01:26:23.000Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 05. Condoleezza Rice and other American states folk insisted that the Palestinians should have elections straight after the Israeli withdrawal.
01:26:37.000perhaps unwisely and Hamas won and then didn't have another election again and ruled the Gaza for 18 years until they finally got the great fruit of their labors on the 7th of October 2023 and went around southern Israel
01:26:53.000massacring everyone they could including young people at a dance party and then caused in turn the destruction of the place that they were meant to be governing it's a the whole thing
01:27:10.000I certainly agree with you that it's a great tragedy.
01:27:19.000And I do, you know, I think it's, you know, when you accuse me of using the quotes that kind of, you know, back up what I believe, I think it's very convenient here to remove all responsibility from the Israelis.
01:27:33.000Like, even if I'm telling you that you have these quotes, I mean, again, I'm not talking about fringe figures.
01:27:39.000We could read through the list of people who have admitted what the strategy was with them funding Hamas and propping them up.
01:27:45.000But hold on, let me just say, so if you're going to tell me Israel props up, This terrorist organization, in order to kill the peace process, in order to make sure that the international community gives them a known...
01:28:15.000And then even Ehud Barak admitted like this was also so that liberal Israelis, you know, if it was the Palestinian Authority, they'd be like, hey, we should make a deal with them.
01:28:26.000OK, so if Israel props up this terrorist organization and then as a response to them committing a horrific act of terrorism decides to level the entire place and just slaughter women and children.
01:28:36.000Well, it didn't decide to do that, and it didn't do that.
01:28:55.000Since you're interested in the question of the Palestinian state, the Palestinians were given another state in 2005 when every single Jew was removed from the Gaza by the IDF.
01:29:07.000and when even the graves of Israelis in Gaza were dug up and taken into the rest of Israel.
01:29:13.000Of all of the what-ifs of Palestinian Arab history, the era since 2005 should be one of the great what-ifs, which is what if the American taxpayers'money that was poured
01:29:29.000into Gaza, the European Union taxpayer money that was poured into Gaza, had been used by a government in Gaza
01:29:36.000To build a state that lived side by side with their Israeli neighbors and flourished.
01:29:44.000And it's not like the money wasn't there.
01:29:46.000It's not like there wasn't the international will.
01:29:49.000Ismail Haniyeh and the other leaders of Hamas used that money, as you know, to make themselves billionaires and to buy themselves and their kids condos in Qatar and to live extremely well whilst withholding the money from the Palestinian people.
01:30:06.000Whilst building their network of tunnels throughout Gaza and building an infrastructure of terror.
01:30:11.000And that's what they did with 18 years in Gaza.
01:30:16.000And of all of the what-ifs, just consider that that one was in their hands.
01:30:23.000The Israelis did not make them vote in Hamas.
01:30:27.000The Israelis would not want a terrorist entity that wants to annihilate the state of Israel.
01:30:34.000That is there on their doorstep, constantly firing rockets, starting wars every few years.
01:30:42.000Why would the Israelis want a group there that means that if you're living in towns like Sderot or Ashkelon or Ashdod, your children grow up all the time knowing that they might have to go to the bomb shelters.
01:30:57.000Well, according to them, the reason they want it there is because then it kills the peace process.
01:31:01.000And then you have no one to negotiate with certificate.
01:31:06.000it. And then you can keep your eyes on building up settlements in the West Bank.
01:31:09.000There are, as now, many people to negotiate with.
01:31:14.000Mahmoud Abbas may be, I don't know, as the joke goes, currently in something like his 20th year of his first four-year term as head of the Palestinian Authority.
01:31:21.000But Mahmoud Abbas is there in Ramallah.
01:31:24.000The compounds of the Palestinian Authority, which I've been to many times in Ramallah, are there.
01:31:33.000They could be there to negotiate with at any moment.
01:31:36.000The Israelis have said they want to negotiate with them at any moment and come to the deal.
01:31:40.000In fact, Netanyahu, you're so fond of quoting, said again before this war began that he would come to the table with no protection.
01:31:50.000Red lines to begin with to start another negotiation with the Palestinian Authority.
01:31:56.000But let's just get back to this thing because this is so crucial.
01:31:59.000I am so startled by the post-October 7th world, not just in Israel and Gaza and everywhere where I've spent most of the last 18 months, but in what's happening here in the United States of America.
01:32:14.000It blows my mind much of the response here.
01:32:19.000And the desire to leap over the first victims of this and go on to all of the proximate causes, theoretical causes, what-ifs and so on.
01:32:33.000I was, as I described in the opening of this book, I was in New York on the 7th of October and I woke up and started seeing what was happening and discovered that later that day already there were plans to organize a protest in Times Square.
01:32:48.000And what was the protest in Times Square?
01:32:51.000Massive protests in support of Hamas as the massacre was still going on.
01:32:56.000And one of the things I just cannot get out of my head is why in the last 18 months, when Hamas did what they did, have so many people made excuses for them or decided to side with them or deny their actions or excuse their actions?
01:33:19.000One is, I think people wanted to ignore the nature of the atrocity because it was so appalling that it went against much of their narrative.
01:33:31.000I was at a reunion of one of the survivors of the Nova Party on one occasion and he said to me, what would you do if this had happened in your country?
01:33:41.000And I thought, well, it hasn't happened at this scale.
01:33:58.000But all of these occasions when young people were murdered for being at a pop concert or a nightclub, the world's attention, the world's empathy, the world's sympathy went to the victims.
01:34:11.000Only in the case of the young Israelis dancing in the early hours of the morning on October 7th, 2023, do the victims become victimized again and not believed.
01:34:23.000The era we lived through in the late 2010s was the era of believable women.
01:34:30.000And of all the Israeli women who were raped that morning, much of the international community does not want to listen to them at all and certainly doesn't want to believe them.
01:34:41.000One, at the most fundamental level, is that I think a part of a generation that's coming up has been told there is something especially wicked about Israel, that there is something especially wicked about Israel's existence and its actions and its people,
01:34:59.000and it means that when their people are burned alive in their homes or raped at a music festival and shot in the head, they are uniquely undeserving of sympathy.
01:35:09.000And I think that people have been indoctrinated by very bad actors into this and as a result have excused atrocities or make excuses for them, make excuses for the people who do them.
01:35:23.000I think in addition it plays to some of the darkest things of the regional mind
01:35:33.000The aims of Hamas, their stated aims, Include the annihilation of the Jewish people.
01:35:42.000And October 7th, they had their best go at doing that.
01:35:47.000And the fact that in a decision between whether or not you're on the side of the people who want to dance and live in peace with their neighbors, or whether you're on the side of the people who want to rampage through a dance party bar in the early morning,
01:36:07.000i find it amazing that there are so many people who don't know which side they're on but there are a lot of them there are a lot of reasons for that but one of the foremost reasons is the fact that the state of israel
01:36:19.000It has been uniquely libeled, has been uniquely lied about.
01:36:23.000Its history has been uniquely lied about.
01:36:25.000It has been uniquely put under an international spotlight and then misrepresented in a way which I cannot think of many other countries in the world that have been treated that way.
01:36:37.000And there are deep reasons for it and shallow reasons for it.
01:36:43.000The deep reasons include some of the most ancient bigotries of the human heart, and the shallow reasons are people who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
01:37:29.000I'm not arguing that there are no people who are actually pro-Hamas or there are no people who are actually like hate Jews or something like that.
01:37:37.000I do think that what happens is that a lot of people get put in that category who do not belong there.
01:37:44.000Much like we've seen this over the last year and a half where a lot of people, you know, you have John Podhoretz calling Thomas Massey anti-Semitic scum.
01:38:19.000I will certainly say, that's certainly not my position.
01:38:21.000I think your description of them, death cult, by the way, the same term that Daryl Cooper used to describe Hamas, I think is an accurate one.
01:38:35.000I think that your characterization, first of all, that they gave the Palestinians a state in 2005 is just wrong.
01:38:42.000I just think that is not at all an accurate way to describe the disengagement, which we could get into more if you want to.
01:38:47.000But first of all, I would just point out that if the two-state solution was achieved, I assume you're arguing it was taken away after that.
01:38:56.000You're not still arguing that the Palestinians have a state, or are you saying they have had a state since 2005?
01:40:57.000I would say, okay, I think that the disengagement, I think Smotrich was correct when he said, I'm sorry, my mistake there.
01:41:05.000I think the, which another quote that I'm sure you're familiar with, but Dov Weissklaff, who was the senior advisor to Sharon, who was the prime minister at the time, he essentially said, the reason we're doing the disengagement, the reason we're doing this, is so that we can put the peace process in formaldehyde.
01:41:48.000If the Palestinian leadership in Gaza after 2005 had not from the get-go decided to use Gaza as a stockpiling place for rockets to fire into Israel,
01:42:05.000If they had just resisted the temptation that so many of us do in our lives to stop keeping RPGs in our cellars and then Katyusha rockets in our children's bedrooms, all of it could have been different.
01:42:18.000If that desire to live in peace beside your neighbors had superseded the desire to stockpile rockets, it would all be different.
01:42:28.000Yeah, or if Israel just hadn't occupied them for 60 years, it would all be different too.
01:42:54.000And in the years after that, they made bad decision after bad decision.
01:42:59.000It was a very bad decision to continually fire thousands of rockets.
01:43:04.000It was a very bad decision to use what boats came in early on and to use the smuggling networks from Egypt, not to bring in supplies you could actually build a thriving society with, but to bring in rockets.
01:44:42.000It's not a non-argument if you're insisting that you're an expert of some kind, or not claiming you're an expert, but still talking about it, about the provisions going into Gaza or not, if you've never seen any of this going on.
01:44:57.000So you're not allowed to speak about things that you've read about.
01:44:59.000You can only speak about things that you've seen with your own eyes.
01:45:02.000You can talk about what you want, as you're proving.
01:45:07.000But that is a different matter from spending an awfully long amount of time talking about an issue in a region you haven't even had the courtesy to visit whilst developing all of these views about it.
01:45:26.000I mean, now I slightly get an idea of where you're coming from.
01:45:30.000You've read about this blockade, and so you imagine that that's what it is.
01:45:36.000I imagine you've read all the people who say that Gaza was a concentration camp, and you probably think that too.
01:46:16.000You've got to stop interrupting and let him finish the sentence.
01:46:19.000The World Bank said that 40% drop in the GDP of one year due to the blockade and there's been a blockade from 2007 on so are you saying that this hasn't had an economic effect?
01:46:51.000If you have never seen the countries in question, you've never spoken to the people in question, you've never interviewed anyone, you've never gone around, you've never seen the terrain, and so on, and you've used Wikipedia, I'm sorry, no, that's not the same thing.
01:47:05.000Okay, well, I've not just used Wikipedia, but didn't you write a big piece when the war in Ukraine first came out titled something like, I've been to Ukraine and they can win, they can repel the Russians?
01:47:16.000So you could go there and still get it wrong, right?
01:47:19.000No, I was with the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2022 when they were retaking territory from the Russians.
01:47:24.000Right, the last time they had any advances, yeah.
01:47:27.000Yeah, I said I can see how they can win, which would be advances like that, yeah.
01:47:30.000You said if we just fund them, or if we just arm them, that they can then, they can rebel.
01:47:34.000I said that the Ukrainian Army was making great successes, which it was when I was with them in the fall of 22. Okay, listen, there were lots of people who went to Iraq and said, we'll be greeted as liberators, and it'll be paid foreign oil, and democracy will spread through the region.
01:47:45.000So, I don't know, either take on the arguments or don't, but I don't.
01:47:48.000But I'm saying that your argument is incorrect.
01:48:01.000But you keep playing this game where it's like the whole opening to this podcast was like the non-experts talking about this is such a problem.
01:48:08.000Now you're saying because I haven't been there, I can't talk about it.
01:48:10.000Is there a blockade there that's causing economic devastation or not?
01:48:14.000According to the World Bank, there is.
01:48:16.000First of all, I don't think it's a game.
01:48:42.000The blockade that existed to the extent it existed was a blockade to try to make sure that the Israelis and the Egyptians knew what materials were going in and out of Gaza after the first rocket fires when Hamas, in fact, before Hamas was elected.
01:48:55.000The Israelis and the Egyptians, the Egyptians didn't do a very good job of it, were meant to be trying to make sure that the materials that went into Gaza were not materials that could be used to build up the Gaza and Hamas war machine.
01:50:41.000This is why I think it's so unbelievable taking agency away from the Palestinians of Gaza, is that Hamas had 18 years, and 18 years is Obviously, the time from the birth of a child to the end of their formal education.
01:50:57.000They literally had the opportunity to create a generation in Gaza that wanted to live beside their Israeli neighbors.
01:51:04.000And from everything I've seen since the 7th of October in the region and from all of the dead and the survivors and the family members I've seen, so many of them, particularly the people in the south who were attacked on the morning of the 7th, were literally people who dreamed of living in peace with their
01:51:21.000They were people like Vivian Silva, whose body wasn't identified for months because there wasn't enough of her chard remains left to even extract DNA from.
01:51:29.000She spent every weekend, like so many people in the communities in the south of Israel, every weekend driving children with the most rare medical conditions that couldn't be treated in one of the Hamas-run hospitals in Gaza into very specialist
01:51:46.000And she spent every weekend doing that and working with Bet Sulem and all of these radical left Israeli groups.
01:51:53.000And it didn't matter a bit when Hamas came in because they burnt her in her own home anyway.
01:51:57.000My point is, in all of the counterfactuals of this conflict, the most important one is what?
01:52:21.000You think any of the people on the kibbutzim in the south...
01:52:25.000Although young people dancing at the Nova Party weren't dreaming of the day that the Palestinian government in Gaza would have created those conditions for them to live beside as well.
01:53:46.000Would be Chaim Weizmann, who was essentially supposed to be the David Ben-Gurion, like he was in line as like the number one ranking Zionist.
01:53:54.000This is pre the creation of the state of Israel, who urged all of the Zionist militias to not embrace terrorism.
01:54:00.000And he ended up losing that battle ultimately.
01:54:03.000In many ways, this is how terrorism was introduced.
01:54:05.000He was the first president of the state.
01:54:09.000And he basically ended up losing his position to David Ben-Gurion because they just wanted to be more hardcore.
01:54:16.000By the way, the Ergon and the Lehi and the Haganah, they openly embraced terrorism to drive out an occupying force.
01:54:25.000This is literally the story of the creation of the state of Israel.
01:54:29.000The Palestinians fell into a terrible, tragic mistake early on.
01:54:36.000And I'm saying, listen, I reject terrorism as we all should just because killing innocent people is wrong.
01:54:40.000I'd like to get to that a little bit more in a second because it's interesting that we haven't really gotten into what I think is a great humanitarian crisis here.
01:54:49.000But they were following, I think in some ways they were very influenced by the Algerian model that they were like, hey, look, we could embrace...
01:55:03.000Yes. But look, there's a lot of these scenarios where we look back at Nelson Mandela, for example.
01:55:10.000Nelson Mandela was not imprisoned because he was making picket signs.
01:55:15.000There have been people who have embraced violence as a means to achieve a policy end, including the early Zionist settlers, including the Israeli government, including the U.S. government, and lots of governments around the world.
01:55:27.000The tragic, tragic mistake in terms of political outcome from the Palestinians is that they really just underestimated the fact that these Jews had no home to go to.
01:55:57.000It should be pointed out, by the way, that in 2005 you did mention that it was really part of the Bush administration's exporting democracy around the world that put pressure on them to have these elections.
01:56:07.000It should also be mentioned that Hamas did not win a majority in one single precinct.
01:56:13.000So just saying, when we're bringing up this election, half the population of Gaza today is under the age of 18. They were toddlers if they were alive in 2005.
01:56:22.000Of the other half that maybe, maybe half of them voted in these elections, it was never a majority that supported Hamas.
01:58:38.000This is a captive people, you know, that Israel has dominated since at least 1967.
01:58:44.000Many of them are there because of the creation of the state of Israel, who used to live in what is now called Israel.
01:58:51.000And they are just, I mean, the amount of human suffering that's being inflicted on them, when even as you kind of acknowledged with the George W. Bush exporting democracy, Hamas in many ways was forced on these people.
01:59:03.000In fact, we saw protests against Hamas just recently.
02:00:17.000doubling in size their number because of the children they could have in Auschwitz.
02:00:21.000Yeah, but nobody's calling a concentration camp because it's the same as Auschwitz.
02:00:26.000Okay, but let's just at least tidy up the language a bit.
02:00:30.000Either you think the place is a concentration camp or you think it's not a concentration camp and I don't think it can be a concentration camp or any such term is suitable when you're talking about a place which you yourself have admitted has a disproportionately young population.
02:01:42.000It's certainly not even sadly among the standards of our time by any means the most brutal.
02:01:48.000We don't need to get into the rather statistician.
02:01:51.000Ugly debate about whether or not you follow the Hamas government in Gaza's figures for the death counts, which most of the world's media rely on and which I don't think are reliable to the least extent.
02:02:06.000But you don't need to rely on that to say that even by the standards of a conflict in neighboring Syria, the highest Hamas death count inside Gaza for the appalling last year and a half...is less than an average year has been for the last decade in Syria during the civil war.
02:02:45.000There are far too many examples of wars in the region and in the wider world to go to, but...
02:02:50.000I think we get, once again, back to the issue of language on this.
02:02:54.000One of the most brutal wars is simply obvious that it's an appalling war, but it is not, by any numerical or other standards, the most appalling war of our time.
02:03:05.000It's a war that Hamas started because they shouldn't have invaded their neighbor and they shouldn't have tried to genocide their neighbor.
02:03:11.000Now, if the war can be prosecuted, could be prosecuted, it was always for two reasons.
02:03:19.000The first one, as stated by the unanimity of Israeli politicians and others, was to retrieve the hostages, who we also haven't spoken about, but there are still hostages in Gaza held for the last 18 months by Hamas, including young Eden Alexander from New Jersey.
02:03:37.000But if Hamas had not stolen the hostages and hidden them in their tunnels and hidden them in civilian homes, this war would have all been different.
02:03:46.000If they had have given them back and they could give them back tomorrow, it would all be different.
02:03:53.000They decided to do what they did on the 7th and to hold on to the 250-odd hostages as it was at the beginning from the beginning.
02:04:00.000The second reason why the war is still being prosecuted is because of the stated aim to destroy Hamas, which is the stated aim of the Israelis.
02:04:11.000Neither of these things is remotely easy.
02:04:14.000OK? And just from a point of humility, I think, on everyone's side, we should concede none of that is easy.
02:04:22.000It is not easy to get 250 hostages back when they have been distributed across the Gaza to civilian homes, hidden in tunnels, surrounded by munitions and much more.
02:04:45.000They have a totally different time scale that they think along.
02:04:49.000They have a totally different scale of values as well.
02:04:53.000The taunts of Hezbollah's leadership, of Hamas's leadership, of their backers in Tehran are annihilationist to their core.
02:05:05.000But at any point in the last 18 months, the Qataris, for instance, or the Iranians, The Iranian Revolutionary Government or the Turkish government or others could have put their pressure on Hamas to return the hostages who are still being held in captivity and everything would be different.
02:05:25.000Secondly, as you know, I'm sure, you don't have to have seen this with your own eyes to know it.
02:05:31.000As I'm sure you know, the way in which Hamas built up the structure of the Gaza throughout the 18 years that they had was precisely to flout and use every law of war against the Israelis.
02:05:43.000Every army in a conflict has certain rules of war that you're meant to abide by.
02:05:52.000One of the most obvious is that you are identified as being a combatant not as a civilian.
02:06:00.000Okay? Another is, you don't put weapons in civilian houses and civilian buildings.
02:06:07.000You do not fire from houses of worship rockets.
02:06:11.000You do not launch attacks from hospitals.
02:06:15.000You do not keep detention facilities where you can torture and disappear people inside hospitals and other medical facilities.
02:06:22.000All of these laws of war are the laws that Hamas breaks every minute of every day.
02:06:30.000So if you want to get the hostages back, and if you want to destroy Hamas, when you're fighting against a force which does not only not follow the rules of war, but uses your following of the rules of the laws of war against you,
02:06:49.000at least concede this is a highly specific and complex military operation.
02:06:56.000And if you have or anyone else has, and I say this genuinely, a better way to get
02:07:06.000the hostages and to destroy Hamas, I at any rate am all ears.
02:07:13.000Okay. Okay, well, there's a lot there.
02:07:15.000So, number one, like, I do agree generally with your point about having some humility in these complex situations, but I would also say, like, Do you not then, at any point, as you're like a very well-known public figure who's supporting this war, think about the level of human suffering that is being inflicted on these innocent people and go like,
02:07:48.000I describe what I see in Gaza with the Palestinians when they're...
02:07:54.000Okay, let me just respond to some of the stuff you say.
02:07:57.000Okay, so then I guess it's not really that much of humility involved in this, but there's two very different goals that are being stated here, right?
02:08:05.000Like, there's the retrieving the hostages, and then there's taking out Hamas.
02:08:10.000Retrieving the hostages, and actually many of the families of hostages who were taken have been some of the only people really protesting this war in Israel, because of course, you know, if you imagine, if you have your family over there, and your government is leveling this place, that is not the best path to pursue to make sure you get all the hostages out alive.
02:08:27.000I would say that it fell apart, but Donald Trump having his envoy, Witkoff, go over there and work out this ceasefire deal that they had for a few weeks.
02:09:14.000Gaza doesn't have an air force or an army or a navy.
02:09:18.000They're just basically militias running around, terrorists who are trying to do everything they can to fight an asymmetrical war.
02:09:26.000And just like we helped teach Osama bin Laden how to do the Soviets and then Osama bin Laden successfully did to us, the whole game in these asymmetrical wars is to get exactly what Hamas got out of this, right?
02:09:38.000Like Osama bin Laden knew that he couldn't bankrupt the United States of America by taking down the Twin Towers, but he thought he could lure us into a war in Afghanistan that would bankrupt us.
02:09:48.000It didn't completely, but it came pretty close.
02:09:52.000That being said, well, I just mean in terms of how much it drained the treasury, it was way more than any terrorist attack could have possibly done.
02:10:19.000You know, there's lots of governments around the world that we would, and Hamas isn't exactly a government, but there's lots of regimes around the world that...
02:10:27.000We would all like to see removed, but that doesn't mean that we would approve of any means by which to get there.
02:10:32.000You know, if you were like, hey, I think Kim Jong-un's government should be dissolved, I'm sure we would all agree with that.
02:10:39.000But if you were like, I'm going to level the place and just like slaughter people in order to do it, you might be like, okay, hold on.
02:10:45.000But aside from that, this has been acknowledged at the highest levels of Israeli intelligence and U.S. intelligence.
02:10:52.000There's just no way to get rid of Hamas without it being replaced by more Hamas or Hamas-like group because it's the basic understanding of this whole situation, right?
02:11:02.000It's General McChrystal's insurgent math.
02:11:06.000Hamas are popping back up in the areas that Israel's already leveled.
02:11:11.000And the more innocent people you kill, the more radicalized you're going to get this population, the more these people are going to hate Hamas.
02:11:48.000I totally disagree with your characterization of Osama bin Laden and what he wanted to do, and I don't think that Osama bin Laden's stated public utterances were along those lines.
02:11:58.000But anyway, the reason why the hostages have been released, the numbers that have, is because of constant kinetic force by the IDF.
02:12:10.000Hamas does not come to the table and ever hand over hostages out of goodwill.
02:12:16.000It doesn't do it out of the goodness of their own heart.
02:12:19.000It does it because of the constant kinetic force of the IDF in Gaza.
02:12:24.000And if it weren't for that, all 250 hostages would still be there.
02:12:30.000Second thing is, when it comes to Hamas itself,
02:12:35.000totally disagree with the presumption that if you tackle a terrorist entity, Thank you.
02:14:25.000They go in, you have a group of people coming out of a civilian building with their hands up, and from their midst come a bunch of Hamas terrorists firing at you, in the hope that the IDF will fire back at the civilians.
02:14:39.000Gadi Eisenkot, one of the members of the war cabinet in the early stages of the war, lost his own son and then his nephew.
02:14:45.000His nephew was killed in a firefight in Gaza because the Hamas terrorists were firing from a mosque.
02:14:53.000And that was why Gaddy Eisenkot from the Israeli cabinet's nephew died.
02:14:57.000The whole operating theatre is hideous because of what Hamas has done to the Gaza.
02:15:04.000The reason why Sinoir cropped up in Rafah, finally the mastermind of October 7th, one of the most brutal, sadistic psychopaths, to use an overrated term you can ever imagine.
02:15:16.000In an Israeli prison, by the way, for having strangled Palestinians to death in the 2000s.
02:15:21.000But anyway, the reason why Sinoir crops up in Rafah late last year is because there was nowhere else for him to run because of the actions of the IDF to pursue the leadership of Hamas that was responsible for the 7th.
02:15:59.000No. Every single war of this kind will include civilian casualties, and you and I will almost certainly disagree on the numbers.
02:16:07.000I'm not claiming that the health ministry's numbers are perfect.
02:16:10.000But there will be, almost certainly, the best case analysis is that one innocent Gazan has been killed for every one terrorist.
02:16:21.000That's the best case scenario you can hear.
02:16:24.000But that would be almost unparalleled in the laws of war, and it's not how the American or British militaries operate in terms of casualties to terrorist ratios.
02:16:33.000But when we had the campaign against ISIS a decade ago, after ISIS's fighters had gone and massacred people at the Bataclan theater in Paris and so on, We used Turkish fighters,
02:16:48.000brilliant, brave fighters from the Peshmerga militias, to work on the ground.
02:16:53.000And the French and American and British air forces bombed like hell from the air.
02:16:59.000And we made ISIS effectively touch wood ten years later, operationally incapable in capital cities in Europe.
02:17:51.000But if the people of the Palestinians in Gaza can find it within themselves to realize the thing they asked for in the elections is the thing that has destroyed the area they live in.
02:18:05.000And like that brave young man two weeks ago in Gaza who rose up against Hamas and was identified by the people who remain in Hamas and was tortured and his body thrown onto his parents'doorstep in the Gaza.
02:18:19.000And the parents started a or the family, the clan started a bit of a war against Hamas.
02:18:25.000But that's how that's how Hamas treats Palestinian dissidents.
02:18:29.000But if there were more people like that young man.
02:18:31.000And of course, as we all know, the history of totalitarian and terrorist groups running societies is.
02:18:54.000And if they could avoid electing a terrorist group that invades their neighbours and fires rockets at their neighbours, yes, it could all be different.
02:19:06.000There is not a person living by the Gaza in the south of Israel who does not dream of the day that such a generation of Palestinians emerges.
02:19:25.000Okay, so John Brennan and Barack Obama, the head of the CIA, and of course the...
02:19:31.000The former president of the United States of America had a policy of committing literal treason.
02:19:36.000Before they ended up accusing Donald Trump of treason, which was all bullshit.
02:19:40.000But they had a policy of committing literal treason by funding Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the Syrian civil war.
02:19:46.000Poured billions of dollars and tons of weapons into that conflict.
02:19:50.000Now it is true, by the way, you are correct, that there certainly were military actions taken against ISIS after they invaded Iraq, which was not supposed to be part of the plan.
02:20:01.000There was also a lot of military actions taken by Vladimir Putin.
02:20:04.000...against ISIS after he came in on Assad's request, as you know.
02:20:09.000In 2017, when Donald Trump came in, one of the best things Donald Trump ever did, he cut off the CIA program to fund the anti-Assad rebels.
02:20:18.000And this was also a big part of what ended up taking the energy out of ISIS.
02:20:24.000Also, I think there was a lot of good reporting that they turned enough people on the ground against them.
02:20:28.000They were even just too radical and people ended up hating them.
02:20:32.000It is true that they receded for quite a while, although the former emir of Al-Qaeda, al-Jilani, is now ruling Syria, which does not seem like a great deal or something that people in America should support.
02:20:44.000The true enemy of the American people, Al-Qaeda, now being in charge of Syria.
02:20:50.000I think that it's easy to talk about how if the Palestinians had done this different, then maybe things would have worked out different.
02:20:59.000But I just think, again, When you look at things, when you say, which essentially I think is your point here, right?
02:21:05.000Which, I mean, I tried to push you on this, but you're saying, look, we can degrade Hamas, but the cost of that is going to be slaughtering a whole bunch of people.
02:21:27.000And little kids screaming out for help under rubble and no help is coming.
02:21:32.000They sit there under the rubble until they die.
02:21:34.000That is the level of human suffering that's being inflicted.
02:21:37.000And if you want to say, well, listen, that's a price that I'm willing to pay to try to degrade Hamas, even though you yourself recognize that we can't totally eliminate them, but we could maybe degrade them or maybe take them down a peg.
02:21:48.000And the price for that is these babies being tortured to death, essentially, whatever you want to call it.
02:21:55.000Okay. But, from the other side of that story, like, if there's, like, I got little kids, I don't know if you have kids, I know you have kids, Joe, if anybody ever was saying to me that, like, my kids were the acceptable price for this policy that we want to put into place, I'm saying,
02:22:10.000I don't think there's any scenario, any scenario, Douglas, where there would be any time where you would accept Israeli kids dying like that as an acceptable price for a policy that you're going to be advocating for.
02:22:23.000First of all, again, Go back to what is actually happening.
02:22:30.000There is no desire or aim by the IAF or the IDF to go into Gaza and kill women and children.
02:22:47.000And that is one of the very ugly rules of war and things that happens in war.
02:22:51.000And it's another of the reasons why it's almost like you shouldn't start a war and hide your rockets and your terrorists inside civilian buildings.
02:23:21.000And, by the way, when I say it like this, I'm not claiming that disputes between nations are the same as handling dispute domestically.
02:23:29.000I'm just saying on the idea of intentionality or who wants to do this or whatever.
02:23:33.000Look, if you, even if you had the right, let's say, somebody broke onto your property and killed some of your family members and you want to go kill this guy.
02:23:44.000...apartment building, and you know that there's women and children in that apartment building, and so your move is to blow up the building, what you would be charged with is murder in the first degree.
02:24:52.000That is intentionally murdering innocent people.
02:24:55.000And if you're going to advocate for this war, I don't see how you can do it without saying that, like, at least bite the bullet that Madeleine Albright did when she was asked, we've played this clip on the show before, when she's point-blank asked about the sanctions on Iraq,
02:25:10.000and are 500,000 children, is that price acceptable?
02:25:14.000And she said, yes, we believe that price is acceptable.
02:25:17.000You're saying, if you're going to support this war, you know this is...
02:25:20.000Because, first of all, I don't agree with any of the characterization you make.
02:25:47.000They act on information about where the terrorists are, just like they act on information of where the hostages are.
02:25:54.000Secondly, when you talk about the destruction in the Gaza, something you probably haven't realized, but is one of the reasons why the destruction looks so bad and is so bad, is because when the IDF were clearing the areas that they'd asked the civilian population to leave,
02:26:13.000And we're going house to house, and it isn't just stories here or stories there.
02:26:19.000It's every second or third house in Gaza that has either munitions or tunnel entrances.
02:26:30.000One of the things that everybody who has been there knows is that you go into a mosque and you know there will be either rockets and or tunnel entrances.
02:26:42.000That there will be grenades or tunnel entrances or dungeons or whatever, just on a lighter note, early in the conflict when the Shifa complex, which is used as a Hamas headquarters and has also been used as a hospital, but even in 2014 the BBC said this is where Hamas are operating from.
02:26:59.000When that was shown by the Israelis to have massive weapons stores in the tunnels and cellars underneath it, the...
02:27:08.000They had grenades, RPGs, Kalashnikovs, and the BBC's chief Middle East correspondent was asked live on air, why would these things be in a hospital?
02:27:17.000And Jeremy Bowen said, well, it's perfectly possible, because there's a lot of guns in the Middle East, it's perfectly possible the security department of the hospital had the Kalashnikovs.
02:27:27.000I said, yeah, and did the grenades belong to the cardiologists?
02:27:35.000Every civilian mill building like this and every second or third house in Gaza is a weapons dump or a place that you enter the tunnels from.
02:27:43.000But the reason why the devastation, which it is in the north in particular, but also in Rafah and elsewhere, is what it is, is because every time the IDF went into an area where they had told the civilians to leave, the Hamas terrorists that remained We're in civilian buildings and booby-trapped a very large number of the buildings.
02:28:11.000So what they did as they proceeded through those areas of the Gaza to clear them was to set off munitions, which the American military and others use, which sets off secondary explosions in places that are booby-trapped.
02:28:23.000And much of what you see in the photographs that you see and many other people have seen from Gaza is the result of that.
02:28:30.000It is the result of the IDF trying to clear an area which has been very carefully and well booby trapped for years.
02:28:39.000Let me make one other very quick point about the bigger picture that you see.
02:28:43.000I think again it's really important to keep this in mind, what I said earlier about let's not think we...
02:29:01.000I remember the debate over the Syrian intervention issue.
02:29:05.000And at the time, despite being in many cases an interventionist, I said on that occasion, we didn't know what we were doing.
02:29:12.000Clearly didn't know who we were going to back.
02:29:14.000If you remember, John McCain went to Syria to speak to some rebels and one of them immediately turned out to be a kind of head-hacking jihadist.
02:29:22.000And I said, I don't have any confidence that we know who to back.
02:29:25.000And despite many Syrian friends of mine imploring me otherwise, I say I don't think it's something we can get involved in.
02:29:32.000However, if you look at the last 10 years or more, what is it now, 13 years of conflict in Syria, the US and the Western powers are not remotely significant actors in that conflict.
02:29:44.000The significant actors in that conflict were, always have been, the Russians, the Iranians.
02:29:54.000One of the things that blows my mind in the analysis of the region is the fact that the prime mover in the region, the revolutionary Islamic government in Iran that has been oppressing the Iranian people since 1979 and has been holding a great civilization in captivity,
02:30:13.000that the Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran has literally been colonizing the region.
02:30:19.000I have this rule about, I took it from Vasily Grossman, the great Soviet Jewish writer, who had this great line about, tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of.
02:30:29.000This absolutely runs as well with the accusations against the Jewish state in the region.
02:30:34.000The Iranian revolutionary government is constantly accusing the Israelis of colonialism, of expansionism.
02:30:40.000It is the Iranian revolutionary government that has been colonizing Iraq, colonizing Yemen.
02:30:45.000colonizing and destroying Lebanon and colonizing Syria and the amazing thing when you look at the disaster that has happened in Syria in the last 13 years and I don't see it getting especially better under the current jihadist the disaster is not of our making primarily We are bit players.
02:31:12.000Well, the great idiocy of that was that Iraq notices our failings, our lack of staying power, our desire to get out as soon as possible and much more, which is all understandable.
02:31:32.000In the Syrian theater, The main actors are not us.
02:31:38.000And one of the things I'm still interested in about this mindset that you have is why does it always have to be us?
02:31:45.000It's other people who have actions in the world.
02:31:49.000The Russians, the revolutionary government in Iran, they are so busy.
02:31:54.000See, I think this is all about framing here, because I don't think I've ever once made this claim.
02:31:59.000You've made this point several times so far, but I've never once made the claim that everything is always us.
02:32:04.000I think you're the one who's downplaying the influence and impact that we have.
02:32:07.000We are, after all, when I'm saying we, I'm saying the United States of America's federal government, is the largest, most powerful organization in the history of the world.
02:32:47.000There were other forces there aside from the U.S. meddling there.
02:32:52.000But at the same time, you've got the most powerful government in the history of the world, who, as we all know, put Syria on its seven countries in five years list of who we're going to go overthrow.
02:33:01.000And it's had a profound impact on the region.
02:33:05.000It was a huge contributing factor to that civil war to begin with.
02:33:09.000I think America is obviously a major actor, certainly could be, is meant to be the major actor on the world stage.
02:33:14.000I think that the history of the region and many other regions around the world is that America does not have either the staying power, the capability, the intelligence, the kind of people that you would produce in order to have the kind of impact that you actually think it has.
02:33:27.000American weakness in the Middle East has been, I mean, I say this as somebody obviously from Britain, but when Britain was a dominant world power, she produced the type of person who...
02:33:42.000...was keen to go and be a governor of, you know, a stan somewhere and learn the local dialects and, you know, run the civil service.
02:33:50.000You guys were better at empire than we are.
02:33:52.000The point is they produced that sort of person because they wanted to stay.
02:33:57.000America has never produced that sort of person, and it certainly hasn't in the Middle East in particular.
02:34:02.000it acts militarily on occasions and in my view sometimes well sometimes poorly but the reason why america was so badly outplayed by the mullers in iraq was simply that as you say after the war
02:34:26.000And so, yes, if we create a vacuum like that, or somebody else creates a vacuum, and after all, we did not cause the beginning of this, we, the West, I'm saying on this occasion, did not cause the beginning of the Arab Spring, as it was optimistically called at the beginning,
02:34:42.000or the beginning of the revolutionary uprising in Syria in 2011.
02:34:47.000These things were ground up and the actors in the region moved in much more deftly and effectively than we did.
02:35:21.000There are so many people who outwit America in the Middle East all the time.
02:35:25.000Yeah, but you can't tell me that there hasn't been an impact from the $8 trillion that we've spent there and the multiple regime changes all around the Middle East that were done by America.
02:35:34.000These weren't just going to happen on their own.
02:35:37.000Are you saying that didn't have an impact?
02:35:38.000Iraq was certainly done by America, of course.
02:35:40.000Okay, so Iraq was certainly done by America.
02:37:15.000I mean, you always kind of like ascribe the best of motives to Israel and the West and nothing but the worst of motives to all of their enemies.
02:37:24.000If we just went in because there was this uprising in 2011 and because we were worried that Gaddafi was about to go genocidal, something that your own, the UK Parliament, did an investigation into and found out was just completely wrong.
02:37:37.000But why is it then that I got four-star general Wesley Clark?
02:37:46.000Why is it that he told me that he saw the plans in 2001 to overthrow Gaddafi, and that this was part of a strategy to overthrow seven governments in five years, and all of them except one have been done at this point?
02:38:00.000So you're telling me it's a complete coincidence that he saw that the neoconservatives had this plan to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, and then ten years later we happen to do it when we have the opportunity?
02:39:03.000Yeah, but again, this is not what Wesley Clark's like.
02:39:07.000He wasn't saying, like, we've drawn up war games.
02:39:10.000We've drawn up war games with everybody.
02:39:12.000We have war games with China, war games with Russia.
02:39:14.000We've mapped out how a kinetic war would work, even with countries that have nuclear arsenals, like, just in case we have to fight a traditional war and nukes aren't being used.
02:40:10.000Well, what he said is that essentially these plans...
02:40:13.000He said later in an interview with Piers Morgan that he had seen the plans at first in 1991, that they came from Paul Wolfowitz, that basically then they got...
02:40:21.000What? What's funny about what the four-star general said?
02:40:31.000Paul Wolfowitz is a great figure for almost any deep conspiracy in this country because he was a deputy secretary of defense at the highest in his life.
02:40:44.000He is forever being ascribed almost supernatural power.
02:40:52.000The highest position he ever got to was as Donald Rumsfeld's deputy.
02:41:00.000It's a very strange thing, always, when Wolfrids' name comes up, because he was a relatively low-level person to whom almost everything can be ascribed.
02:41:32.000I just feel like you're batting down straw men.
02:41:34.000I never said that he is the creator of all conspiracies or anything.
02:41:36.000I'm literally saying that the four-star general said that he first saw the plans from him, that he had brought this to the National Security Advisor, and it had basically been like, eh, we'll look at this after the election, and that then it was resurrected later by Richard Perle, and that these guys were producing...
02:41:53.000This is four-star General Wesley Clark.
02:41:55.000He said, in a study paid for by the Israelis, and yeah, you can laugh at this all you want to, Douglas, but you can go read the clean break memo for yourself.
02:42:03.000This was the neoconservative strategy, along with their counterpart, the Likud's in Israel, that they wanted to remake the region in a way, and I'm sure by their own justification, they believed that democracy would sweep the region and it would be better off for them.
02:42:17.000nonetheless, they pursued this path that has ended in nothing but disaster.
02:42:21.000And I don't think that to say that in 2011, it was like a purely humanitarian mission to go overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, I do not think is right.
02:42:29.000Well, first of all, before I get to the stuff,
02:42:30.000Why would they want the current situation in Libya?
02:42:35.000Huh? Why would they want the current situation in Libya?
02:42:39.000Well, because they wanted Gaddafi out.
02:42:42.000Why? Well, okay, if you read the Clean Break memo, what their argument essentially is, is that you wanted to have regime change against the hostile surrounding Muslim countries.
02:42:52.000But... Was Gaddafi not hostile to Israel?
02:43:11.000After he hands over the nuclear program and thus makes himself very vulnerable, unfortunately, for the future of world peace, Libya has been unutterably disastrous for Europe.
02:43:48.000Him being overthrown after he's given over the nuclear weapons is a disaster because it leaves on the table this thing that you have to hold on to nuclear weapons and if you don't hold on to nuclear weapons you could be dead.
02:43:58.000Do you think maybe the Israelis should stop using the term the Libyan model to push for negotiations with Iran?
02:44:04.000No, I don't think anyone should use...
02:44:07.000Lib what happened to Gaddafi as being a good precursor.
02:44:10.000Well, we certainly have a lot of agreement there.
02:44:12.000It was an absolute disaster, particularly to do it, to let a guy get sodomized to death after he denuclearized is not a good precedent to set.
02:44:22.000I agree, and that's one of the reasons why...
02:44:23.000One of the reasons why Iran wants a nuke so bad.
02:44:28.000I'm not sure it's just being sodomized to death, as you put it, but yeah, they want a nuke because they...
02:44:35.000I mean, if you like what the Iranian revolutionary government's done since 1979, you'd love what they'll do with the world when they've got a nuke.
02:44:41.000But anyway, put that aside for a second.
02:45:04.000A member of the Defense Policy Board, which had an advisory capacity toward the Pentagon in the early 2000s, but it was by no means a policy board that dictated Pentagon policy.
02:45:19.000Okay. In the last 30 years of American foreign policy, there have been many major actors.
02:45:29.000Paul Wolfowitz is a relatively major one.
02:45:33.000But we come slightly back full circle.
02:45:36.000In my view, I'm not saying you're guilty of this, certainly not knowingly.
02:45:40.000In my view, when people start talking about Paul Wolfowitz, I always remember that line of Mark Stein's many years ago.
02:45:46.000And he said, you can't help thinking that one of the reasons why people find Wolfowitz so appealing to talk about is that his name starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish.
02:46:55.000People of right and left, particularly on the left, spent all those years in the W. Bush administration saying W. wasn't the real president.
02:47:04.000He was being run by Dick Cheney because he was the brilliant, etc., etc.
02:47:08.000You're certainly listening to him at the beginning.
02:47:10.000Okay, but I'm just saying it goes back to this thing of when certain ideas catch hold and what's really going on in them.
02:47:19.000To attribute American foreign policy in the last 40 years to Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Pearl is, knowingly or otherwise, to encourage a conspiracy that has very obvious legs.
02:48:09.000But the implication is that I'm unwittingly giving fertile ground to some, like, Jew-hating conspiracy if I bring up a guy who's got a Jewish last name who was a consequential person in our government.
02:48:21.000This is, like, identical to the arguments of the woke left.
02:48:24.000That would just be like, oh, if you even say something, you know, if you bring up the crime rate in Chicago, you're basically a bigot because other people could take this and run with it.
02:48:44.000I think I'd be right in saying there was something a bit...off about the character of the person doing that because it seemed like they were playing to some kind of lazy old trope.
02:49:15.000And I think similarly that if you give the implication that a cabal of people, particularly, and you should be really careful about this because of the people who will come up underneath you, if you give the implication that these cabals exist and you decide to...
02:49:35.000To elevate the Jews, or people with Jewish names in it, and then play down the non-Jews.
02:49:42.000I can tell you, you will be opening up a world of madness.
02:49:47.000Am I really playing down the non-Jews?
02:49:50.000I mean, go look at the stuff that I've said about Obama, about George W. Bush.
02:50:25.000I'm giving fertile ground to Jew haters to mention that.
02:50:28.000I think that when you decide to elevate what is a conspiracy of people who are overthrowing the governments of various countries, some of which haven't been overthrown and others of which have, but by the way, were not overthrown by American dominance,
02:50:56.000More judicious than that, because you probably know what bubbles up underneath you online by now.
02:51:02.000Yeah, look, I mean, there's no question that there are, you know, no matter what, and by the way, you know, it's funny just hearing you say this to me.
02:51:10.000I mean, look, and by the way, I completely agree with you.
02:51:12.000I think you've been one of the best champions on opposing Europe's insane immigration policy.
02:51:18.000I also think the United States of America's had an insane immigration policy.
02:51:25.000But imagine you made a point about immigration, and I were to say to you, be careful what's bubbling up online, because now you're getting...
02:51:32.000Look, the fact is, if you are taking a position that opposes, say, Muslim immigration into the UK...
02:51:40.000Then yes, it is quite possible that a lot of people who really just hate Muslims are going to end up liking what you had to say or following you.
02:51:47.000But that doesn't mean you're responsible to it.
02:51:49.000And if I were to say that to you, you would be the first to very eloquently point out that that is a complete non-argument.
02:51:55.000The question is, is this policy good or is it bad?
02:51:58.000And whether there's not – and if you want to say to me, hey, I should, like, disclaim when I make this point that, like, hey, I'm Jewish.
02:52:34.000sure. I think kind of what Israel's doing in this war and the U.S. funding and arming it have been something that is really a great facilitator for that stuff to bubble up.
02:52:43.000We could go back to that, but I disagree.
02:52:45.000I think that Israel has every right to go in and destroy the terrorist group that carried out the massacres.
02:52:49.000Yes, again, but no one's arguing that they have the right to destroy the terrorists.
02:52:53.000The question is they have the right to kill innocent people.
02:52:55.000Let's not go around again, which I think we've done.
02:52:57.000We're just not answering what I'm saying.
02:52:58.000I think I've already answered that, but just to go back to the meat of that, I think you don't realize that actually People like me who have a voice and write and much more do think about that all the time.
02:53:14.000It's a profound concern and responsibility.
02:53:21.000And don't think I don't worry all the time and make sure I intervene.
02:53:28.000...into the debate very carefully at times when I think some people have picked up something that I've been saying and are going to go wrong with it.
02:53:51.000But you do say on occasion, I mean, most obvious one on that, if there is something where something really fetid happens, something really terrible, and there's a bunch of people that decide to riot or commit violence or something like that,
02:54:12.000I know that I have to, as a duty, say absolutely this is to be condemned.
02:54:21.000If it is people trying to pretend that all Muslims this or all that, absolutely I intervene to stop that.
02:54:29.000But I think that this is one of the responsibilities that comes with putting out ideas in the public square.
02:54:37.000And I think that none of us are blame-free, but all of us have some kind of responsibility to know that what we...
02:54:49.000put out there is very carefully watched, very carefully followed, and that we have to tread well.
02:54:59.000Well, okay, so I agree with that, but when you say you intervene, what exactly do you mean by that?
02:55:26.000I literally say it as a point of caution.
02:55:31.000Yeah, well, I mean, I don't disagree with that, and I've certainly done the same thing, and said that, like, I don't know, like, I don't like the, I don't like Jew hatred on Twitter, and I don't like people jumping to wild conspiracies that they don't have enough,
02:55:47.000nearly enough evidence to, you know, actually back up, which I've seen quite a bit of.
02:55:52.000That being said, I also think there's a whole lot of real conspiracies, and I'm not going to stop talking about those just because some people on Twitter might take it in a bad direction.
02:56:01.000As the great Michael Malice said, and as you quoted, one red pill, not the whole bottle.
02:56:07.000I've been trying to limit people to one red pill.
02:57:22.000No! This is, by the way, a little insight into the comedy community.
02:57:28.000The deal is that Joe will help advance the careers of comedians unlike anybody since Johnny Carson, but then the cost is you do have to sniff smelling salts.