In this episode, I sit down with Tucker Waldron, the author of a new book about the Iran War, and discuss the history of the conflict with Iran, and how the CIA got involved in it, and why it s important to know how we got there.
00:17:31.620So I think it's very likely that he had probably support in the big cities and less so out in the countryside.
00:17:39.940If you look at like Iranian election results these days, out in the countryside, people are much more religious and much more conservative and tend to reject the kind of modernity that the Shah represented and his absolute rule to.
00:17:53.200I mean, who in the world is comfortable calling anybody your highness and your majesty and all this stuff?
00:18:08.180So, but now here's another big part of the Carter Doctrine, was giving the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in the spring of 1980.
00:18:19.380Now, we know this because Robert Perry found the document where Alexander Haig, when he became Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, he went and did a tour of the Middle East and he met with then Prince Fahd, later King Fahd.
00:18:31.500And Prince Fahd told him that, yep, I'm the one who gave the green light to Jimmy Carter on behalf, I mean, to Saddam Hussein on behalf of Jimmy Carter to invade Iran.
00:18:40.900So now, why would Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran?
00:18:45.580Well, so everybody picture a map of Iraq here.
00:18:48.600All the land from Baghdad down to Kuwait and east to Iran is predominantly Shiite Arab territory.
00:18:55.840They're the 60% supermajority population of Iraq.
00:19:00.040Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Arab sitting on a secular dictatorship.
00:20:14.940But so, yeah, and like the main holy sites are in Najaf and in, I guess, eastern Baghdad and Samarra.
00:20:22.740I've been there, but I didn't get the significance.
00:20:24.880But so Saddam Hussein, minority Sunni, secular Saddam Hussein is afraid that his supermajority Shiite population is going to choose their religious sect as Shiites over their national sect as Iraqis and their ethnic sect as Arabs.
00:20:39.340And they're going to join up with the Shiite revolution and march all the way to Baghdad and overthrow him.
00:20:44.280So, and in fact, some Iraqis, Shiite factions were leaving to go to Iran and to join up with Iran and to try to encourage revolution in Iraq.
00:21:14.060So, there was this sense that, I mean, just to kind of defend everyone involved, I guess, on all sides, there was a sense that there's an Islamic revolution that could spread throughout the Islamic world.
00:21:29.900And in fact, that same crisis at the mosque in Mecca was part of the reason that the Saudis and the CIA and the Pakistanis worked together to take all these kooks and ship them off to Afghanistan to go help the local mujahideen to fight against the Soviet Union.
00:21:45.060Better they go off and get killed there or do the Lord's work killing godless communists there than have them still in Saudi and in the Middle East in the Gulf causing trouble.
00:22:09.160Like, gain the popular consent of the people to replace their rule with religious rule, like real religious rule, rather than these princelings on top, the Saud family and Salman family and all that on top.
00:22:49.140So, now, America and Ronald Reagan picks up where Carter left off, essentially, with all this unbroken and on the Afghan policy and on Iraq.
00:22:58.520So, in Iraq, they supported him for essentially the entire eight years of the Reagan years.
00:23:03.640And the war didn't end until 89 in his settlement.
00:23:06.400It was, and by the way, you know, Randolph Bourne said, war is the health of the state.
00:23:13.480But, otherwise, Saddam Hussein's assault on Iran helped solidify support for the Ayatollah's rule, which was actually quite shaky at that time.
00:23:22.120But people rallied around the new regime because, hey, we're all Shiite fundamentalists now, if that's who is in charge of the government that's defending them.
00:23:30.480Same thing happened in Yemen more recently.
00:23:32.380I know a guy, a reporter in Yemen, who told me, well, we're all Houthis now.
00:24:01.260So, let me ask, that war, the Iran-Iraq War, which began at the very, I think at the very, the Shat al-Arab at the top of the Gulf, the marshy area there.
00:24:11.700That has a reputation as one of the most brutal wars of the century.
00:24:16.860Yeah, my understanding was, in fact, I don't know if you're familiar with a guy named the war nerd, Gary Brecher.
00:24:21.160He did a really great essay about the Iran-Iraq War.
00:24:24.640That's the best thing I ever read about it, where he just compares it to World War I, kind of like what you're seeing in Ukraine now.
00:24:30.300Just brutal trench warfare, tank and artillery.
00:24:33.200And then, to the war nerd, it's all very interesting, because there's, the navies are involved, and the armies are involved, and the air forces are involved, and there's unconventional weapons.
00:24:41.280And America was America that paid for German chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein, that they provided to Saddam Hussein, that he used not just mustard gas, but including sarin and tabe and nerve gas that they used to target Iranians in the field.
00:25:13.600Decades of Washington money printing, the misbehavior of the Fed has devalued the U.S. dollar to a point that you couldn't have imagined 30 years ago.
00:25:24.020Bad decisions in Washington are making you poorer, and it should make you a little nervous.
00:28:42.060Well, we'll get there in just a minute.
00:28:43.320No, but I know, but it's just like, so I have heard that, oh, the U.S. paid for the chemical weapons that Saddam used against the Iranians and the Kurds.
00:28:50.100And they even spun it for him when he used them against the Kurds.
00:28:54.480The DIA did a big report blaming it on Iran when Saddam gassed Halabja, which, you know, was in Colin Powell's speech of why we have to attack them.
00:29:01.860And I was like, back then, y'all covered for him.
00:29:03.380I mean, Colin Powell was Reagan's national security advisor, right?
00:29:06.940He was in the administration at the time when they blamed that on Iran.
00:29:18.700There's, in fact, at FFF.org, the Future Freedom Foundation, there's an article by Jacob Hornberger that I believe is called, Where Did Saddam Get His WMD?
00:29:30.100And he has links to like 10 very thorough sources all about this.
00:29:51.240And it turned out years later, the only ones that they ever found in the country were from the 80s.
00:29:56.000Stuff that America had helped them purchase from the Europeans then was the only stuff that anyone ever found.
00:30:02.300And that was why they covered it up was because this is stuff that Ronald Reagan and George Bush's father had helped supply them.
00:30:08.440And so we don't really want to emphasize that so much when the claim had been that there was an ongoing program to develop this stuff circa early 2000s, which, of course, couldn't have been further from the truth.
00:30:20.060But now, so the same time that the Iran-Iraq horrific bloodbath is going on, the Iran-Iraq war, America supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
00:30:27.640And this included, as we were just talking about, the Arab-Afghan army, the International Islamist brigades or Islamic brigades.
00:30:35.200And these were mostly Arabs, but included Americans and Chechens and Filipinos and people from all over the place, went and traveled to Afghanistan to fight, to essentially bolster the Afghan Mujahideen in their war against the Soviet Union.
00:31:24.380And just to bolster what you're saying, in July of 1986, I went with my dad to a cocktail reception in the U.S. Senate for these guys, for the Mujahideen and their American supporters who had gone over there wearing their headgear fighting the show.
00:31:40.000I mean, it was totally out in the open.
00:31:42.320It wasn't, this was not a secret at all.
00:31:54.600Two of the worst throat-slitten, murderous warlords in the whole country and ended up becoming America's enemies in our Afghan war later on.
00:32:05.400But, so, this is also the birth of what became Al-Qaeda.
00:32:10.040You had a guy named Abdullah Azzam, who was a Palestinian refugee raised in Kuwait, who was the leader of this Islamist group that bin Laden ended up taking over.
00:32:19.100And then, the other kind of half of Al-Qaeda was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was led by the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ayman al-Zawahiri.
00:32:29.280And they had all been, you know, buddies together in Afghanistan.
00:32:33.960And so, then, all right, now let's switch back to the other side of Iran again.
00:32:38.940So, then we get to Iraq War I, Desert Storm, Operation Yellow Ribbon, right.
00:32:44.660So, what's going on here is the Iraqis have just fought a war on behalf of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, basically, to contain the Iranian Revolution.
00:32:56.060Now, Saddam owes them billions in war debts, but he can't pay them because oil's trading at, I think, $12 a barrel.
00:33:02.000He can't rebuild his country and he can't pay off his war debts.
00:33:04.620And they're calling in their loans and they're being real hard asses about it.
00:33:08.620And so, he's threatening, essentially, through body language, he's moving his troops toward the Kuwaiti border and threatening to solve it the hard way.
00:33:17.360Now, I do not believe that this was on purpose.
00:33:20.480As I explain in the book, the best I can tell, this is a lot of left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.
00:33:25.280Too many government departments, too many different people calling shots in different places.
00:33:29.280There is no real one mind running the government, right?
00:33:32.680It's a bunch of different guys and different fiefdoms.
00:33:34.900So, in this case, CENTCOM and CIA were telling, which brand new CENTCOM, which is just being established, were telling the Kuwaitis that you don't have to take that stuff from Saddam Hussein.
00:33:48.700The State Department, led by James Baker, and not just April Glaspie in the meeting on July 25th, but also a statement by Margaret Tutwiler and another by—
00:34:00.700That'd be Jim Baker's assistant spokeswoman.
00:34:02.980Yes. And then, I'm sorry, I forget the other guy's name, but it was the ambassador, April Glaspie, Margaret Tutwiler, and this other guy in testimony before the Congress had all three essentially given a green light to Saddam Hussein, or worse, like a flashing yellow light to go ahead and proceed.
00:34:20.600As Glaspie told him, I used to be the ambassador to Kuwait, and it was the same thing then.
00:34:26.220This is not our concern. Your border dispute with Kuwait is not our concern.
00:34:30.900She said, we don't want to see a war here.
00:34:32.700But he's saying when I'm planning a war, he's planning to roll right in there, where he could take Kuwait in a day, and he did.
00:34:37.440And so, it seemed like what she was saying was, we won't attack you if you attack.
00:34:42.640And Stephen Walt wrote at foreignpolicy.com. He has a blog there where he addressed the Glaspie memo, because we always had the Iraqis version of it, but then, thanks to Manning and Assange, we finally got our hands on the State Department's version of the same document.
00:34:56.400And so, Stephen Walt gave a thorough treatment on it. Boy, it sure looks like a flashing yellow light to me.
00:35:00.760Now, at the same time, though, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz were alarmed, and they wanted to warn Saddam Hussein not to do it.
00:35:14.220And they made a statement telling him not to do it, but then Pete Williams, who later became the NBC reporter, he was the spokesman for the Pentagon, and he walked back their warning and made it seem like, actually, maybe you can go ahead.
00:35:29.480And I don't know if that was deliberate or just incompetence on his part, but then, so Cheney and Wolfowitz got George Bush to send a letter, but the letter was too softly worded.
00:35:42.480So, they were like, no, we need to send another letter with a more stern warning, so Hussein really gets the message, but by then it was too late, and the troops rolled across the border.
00:35:50.500So, they really, in essence, like, figuratively, in the end, they trapped him into it.
00:36:00.000They basically encouraged the Kuwaitis to give him the stiff arm, right, and encouraged him to go ahead and get his revenge and take the northern oil fields.
00:36:09.380And then their warnings, actually, when they changed their mind and tried to get him to stop, were not enough to dissuade him.
00:36:15.160And April Glaspy, the American ambassador to Kuwait, told the New York Times, we didn't think he was going to take the whole country.
00:36:22.240He was supposed to just take the northern oil fields, but instead he went too far and took the whole country.
00:36:26.980But then, Colin Powell was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, and I believe he was the one who chaired the National Security Council meeting, where they all decided they're just going to draw the line at Saudi Arabia.
00:36:38.820They're not even going to threaten to attack Iraq over Kuwait.
00:36:42.020We don't like it, but we're prepared to accept it.
00:36:45.620And that held for three days until Margaret Thatcher came to town.
00:36:49.960And Margaret Thatcher essentially called Bush a wimp and said, don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush.
00:36:54.940And that became a big scandal because she's a woman and she's calling out his manhood.
00:36:58.920And he had already been called a wimp president.
00:37:43.180Like most, I don't even remember hearing that name a single time during all that.
00:37:46.520We just must protect the poor Kuwaitis.
00:37:48.260And of course, they lied and they pretended that Saddam was lining up his tanks on the Saudi border and was prepared to invade Saudi Arabia, which was a total hoax.
00:38:20.100And then they lied about the atrocities.
00:38:21.680And the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States lied before the Congress and said that she was a nurse at the hospital in Kuwait City and saw Iraqi soldiers dump premature babies out of the incubators and leave them on the cold floor to die, she said, and steal their incubators.
00:38:39.260And George Bush and the PR people repeated this, senior that is, and the PR people repeated this numerous times as an example of why we absolutely had to intervene for humanitarian reasons to save the poor Kuwaitis.
00:39:13.480We got to showcase all our laser-guided munitions flying down chimneys and in windows and all of this brand new space-age 21st century technology.
00:39:43.420And in fact, Brent Scowcroft did say specifically that this was one of the reasons that they wanted to have the war,
00:39:50.900was to beat Vietnam Syndrome, to give the American people a cheap and quick and easy win on the Powell Doctrine,
00:39:58.840and in and out, kick their butt and get out of there quickly and call it a victory and get the American people to mix their patriotism with militarism again like the good old days.
00:40:11.440And yet there's a huge rub, a big wrinkle in the story, which is the Shiite and Kurdish uprising that took place about six weeks later after the end of the war.
00:40:24.820Bush Sr. personally, in a radio message over Voice of America and the Air Force dropped leaflets over the Shiite army divisions in the south of the country,
00:40:34.600which America occupied the entire south of Iraq in the aftermath of the war.
00:40:37.320And they encouraged all of these Shiites to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
00:40:45.640People in your audience, I know you're not a big electronic media guy, but people in your audience may have seen the movie Three Kings with Ice Cube and Marky Mark and George Clooney.
00:40:53.920And in that movie, the setting, it's a gold heist movie, but the setting is they're occupying southern Iraq in the aftermath of the war.
00:41:00.560And all around them, the Iraqi army is putting down the Shiite insurrection, crushing the insurrection and killing all these poor people and driving the refugees into Iran.
00:41:09.840So that's kind of a touchstone for people.
00:41:11.840That's probably the best way they would ever remember that such a thing ever happened is that movie popularized it a little bit.
00:41:18.620But so what happened was they were on their way to Baghdad.
00:41:22.620But George Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of Defense Cheney, they changed their mind.
00:41:31.620And they left the Shiites high and dry, and they let Saddam Hussein keep his helicopters and tanks to crush the revolution.
00:41:39.060It was because, remember when I said, when the Iranian revolution happened, some of these Iraqi Shiites went to Iran and sided with the Iranians and wanted to import the revolution into Iraq.
00:41:49.800And that was why Saddam conscripted them all to fight the war.
00:41:52.940Because that was what he was afraid of.
00:41:54.540Well, they started coming back across the border from Iran, namely the Bada Brigade, which was the armed militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was a group of Iraqis tied very closely to the Dawah Party who were supported by Iran and had been living in Iran for the last 10 years.
00:42:11.300And had fought on Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq war.
00:42:14.680Now they're coming across the border to lead the revolution.
00:42:17.680So this is the Bush senior administration.
00:42:27.660All of the rest of them had been Reagan administration officials.
00:42:30.500So they're all saying to themselves, oh my God, we just spent 10 years, nine years, supporting Saddam Hussein's war against Iran to contain the Iranian revolution.
00:43:35.660The purchase of churches and schools to aid the operation, the jerry-rigging of power boxes to steal electricity, foreign pesticides, collusion with the Mexican cartels.
00:44:16.460But the potential was we have to protect the Shiites and the Kurds in the north by having these no-fly zones and by maintaining the blockade against Iraq.
00:44:26.440And so that was the principal excuse for the Bush administration to stay.
00:44:31.260Now, the Clinton administration comes in and, by the way, if I ever say anything that sounds like I'm saying anything positive about a president in this, it's probably a misunderstanding.
00:44:44.500I've convinced Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both, for example, are the worst presidents we've ever had.
00:45:08.100But he had indicated maybe we can normalize relations with Iraq.
00:45:10.620Well, that set a few different groups into a panic, namely the Kuwaitis.
00:45:16.900And I'm sure you're familiar with the allegations, at least, that Saddam Hussein tried to kill George H.W. Bush with a truck bomb attack in Kuwait in 1993.
00:45:30.380And it was invented by the father of the girl who told the Kuwait the incubator's hoax.
00:45:35.400It was the same guy whose daughter did that, was the same guy who invented the assassination of Bush Sr. hoax, which almost everybody still believes.
00:46:10.880But it was on the occasion of that hoax that Bill Clinton went ahead and gave in to his new foreign policy aide, a guy named Martin Indyk, who had been Yitzhak Shamir's guy,
00:46:25.960who was the former terrorist and Likud Party prime minister of Israel, who Bush Sr. had tangled with.
00:46:32.100And I don't think Martin Indyk was Americanized.
00:46:43.580So he's also the founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which you'll see their guys quoted all the time as just bland, middle-of-the-road experts on everything Middle East,
00:46:54.500when it was literally founded by a Likud guy as a spinoff of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, who put up the money for it.
00:47:02.060It was—and that's not true of all neocon think tanks.
00:49:02.020They vetoed it and insisted on this dual containment policy.
00:49:06.460Iraq, because we just beat them up so bad in Iraq War I, they're too weak to balance against Iran.
00:49:11.920So America has to stay in Saudi to balance against them both.
00:49:15.500This, then, Tucker, is a main reason why the Arab-Afghan Mujahideen that we had built up to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan then turned against the United States.
00:49:27.400Bin Laden wanted to use his men to repel the Iraqis from Kuwait and to protect the Saudi kingdom and was outraged that the king gave in and let a bunch of white Christian forces from across the ocean come and defend Saudi instead.
00:49:39.920And then not only that, but they broke their promise.
00:50:25.280And then later under Bill Clinton, you know, adopting the same policy.
00:50:29.440The sanctions stay until Saddam is gone.
00:50:31.880And instead of normalizing relations with Iraq and Iran, we're now going to keep Cold War against them both through the end of the century.
00:50:39.700And again, this is what really was responsible for turning al-Qaeda against the United States.
00:50:44.280Well, I mean, Osama bin Laden said that in his now suppressed letter.
00:50:51.340By the way, reading what someone you despise writes is not an endorsement of that person, of course.
00:51:56.660Yeah, and so what he's saying is, listen, I know I got you in a lot of trouble here, okay?
00:52:02.120But bear with me, because either we're going to whoop them good and they're going to turn and flee, in which case they'll be humiliated and their power will be destroyed.
00:52:11.220Or we'll bog them down and we'll bleed them to bankruptcy over 10 years, the same way we did the Soviet Union.
00:52:17.820And then they'll leave, in which case they'll be humiliated in their power weekend.
00:52:24.120So sorry for getting you into this, but that's why I did it.
00:52:26.820You know, it would have been nice to have a conversation about that, again, not as an endorsement of Osama bin Laden or the atrocities of 9-11, but just because it's important to know what your adversaries are thinking.
00:54:07.200Did people, I mean, I remember when he was murdered, outside his speech, I think, in New York City.
00:54:13.020Was it widely known at the time that it was these radical Muslims who did it?
00:54:18.860So, I'd have to go back, but my understanding is, essentially, the FBI did a terrible job on all these domestic terrorism cases in the 1990s, where, essentially, they had enough information.
00:54:30.460I forget if they had enough information to stop that one, or just from their investigation of that, they should have known enough to wrap all these guys up and prevent the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 and any of the rest of this stuff.
00:54:43.400But because each time they were trying to cover up what a bad job they'd done last time, they failed to pursue the leads to prevent the next one.
00:54:52.120And there's a book called A Thousand Years for Revenge by a journalist named Peter Lance, where he really goes through the FBI's failings all through the 90s as tracing these terrorists inside, especially in New York City, during that time.
00:55:07.320And so then they're attacking us here and overseas all during that time.
00:55:10.620So, they hit us in 1992 at the Radisson Hotel in Aden, Yemen.
00:55:16.340Then in 93 was the first World Trade Center attack, which, you know, context is important here.
00:55:23.300Bill Clinton had only been the president for a month and a week.
00:55:25.960And then two days later, the ATF attacked the Branch Davidians.
00:55:29.440So, all attention went to Waco and away from the World Trade Center.
00:55:34.380Six people had died, which was tragic, but it was over, essentially.
00:55:39.680And it was a bunch of complicated Arab names and stuff.
00:55:43.100And just the news wasn't particularly interested in it.
00:55:46.340And it did not really capture the attention of the country the way it could have and should have if they hadn't launched their horrible siege of the Branch Davidians just two days later.
00:56:09.580And so, instead of letting that take a hold of their imagination, they're like, oh, my God, we just barely missed that by the skin of our teeth and we better figure out what to do about this.
00:56:18.380They essentially blew it off like everybody else did and, you know, assigned the FBI to it, but on a basically lower level than should have been their absolute top priority at that time.
00:56:29.020New York FBI was more interested in John Gotti and whatever other stuff they were doing then.
00:56:34.440And then there was the guy—and I don't know if this guy was directly tied to the Bin Ladenites or not, but he shot up the left-turn lanes at CIA headquarters in 1993.
00:56:44.220And he was later—it was the headline, actually, my footnote in Fool's Herod is prosecutors say it was revenge for support for Israel and bases in Saudi Arabia or the bombing of Iraq.
00:56:58.020Um, and then in, um, 95, they attacked and killed Americans training the Saudi National Guard and, um, and also was the Bojinka plot was busted in the Philippines.
00:57:12.100So, um, in the First World Trade Center bombing, the FBI could have stopped it.
00:57:18.300They had a walk-in informant named Ahmad Salem, who was an Egyptian Army intelligence officer, and he had volunteered to make the bomb.
00:57:25.760So he was going to make a fake bomb, and it was going to be a great sting.
00:57:29.640And the agents working the case, Nancy Floyd and John Antisev, were doing their jobs, but their boss, Carson Dunbar was his name, wouldn't do his job and provide them with the authority that they needed and the money that they needed to keep their informant working.
00:57:43.080And he was insisting the guy wear a wire, and he's like, look, I'm sleeping in my pajamas on the floor of the mosque with these guys.
00:57:50.260So he ended up bugging out and telling the bad guys, look, I think the FBI's on to me, and left.
00:57:55.500Well, then they brought in Ramzi Yousef, who cooked the real truck bomb that almost succeeded in topping one tower over into the other.
00:58:02.580He then wrote letters to all the New York papers, saying it was all revenge for American bases and bombing, bases in Saudi to bomb Iraq and support for Israel.
00:58:10.120And then he got on a plane to the Philippines and got out of town.
00:58:16.100And then in 95, Philippine police busted him because two of his buddies, Wali Khan, Amin Shah, and Abdul Hakim Murad, they had started a fire at their apartment.
00:58:25.000They were messing with explosives, and they got busted.
00:58:27.620And Yousef got away, but the other two got caught, and they got Yousef's laptop.
00:58:32.920And on the laptop was what's now commonly referred to as the Bojinka plot, which include a plan to kill Bill Clinton and the Pope when they visited the Philippines, a plan to time bomb 12 airliners over the Pacific with Casio watch time bombs, and then the planes operation.
00:58:48.380A plan to hijack 10 planes and crash them into major landmarks in the United States.
00:58:51.980And then at the end, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who I guess was supposed to get on the microphone and demand an end to the Israeli occupation, was supposed to be the plan there.
00:59:13.240Then 96, they did the Khobar Towers in Saudi.
00:59:16.140Now, this is 19 American airmen were killed.
00:59:19.260And to this day, including my debate with Mark Dubowitz last week on the Lex Friedman podcast, they blame Iranian-backed Saudi Hezbollah for doing that attack, which makes no sense.
00:59:30.960The Iranians had no motive to do it whatsoever.
00:59:33.400You notice Bill Clinton didn't bomb Tehran over it or anything like that.
00:59:48.960And we know that from the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, has told me that personally.
00:59:55.640Plus, Osama bin Laden himself took credit for it to the British journalist, Abdelbari Atwan, in his book, The Secret History of Al-Qaeda, and in articles that he wrote for The Guardian.
01:00:05.820You can read all about that and said, yeah, these are our guys and they're our heroes and our martyrs and whatever, and took total credit for it.
01:00:15.540It was 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq.
01:00:18.400And you might remember, I remember at the time, because I used to love listening to the G. Gordon Liddy show, that the biggest scandal about it was a lady had yelled at Bill Clinton at a campaign rally, you suck, because he hadn't provided good enough security for these guys.
01:00:54.220The scandal wasn't, why would a bunch of right-wing religious kooks in Saudi Arabia blow up our airmen?
01:00:59.480Is it because they're bombing Iraqis from bases where their white Christian combat forces don't really belong at all in the land of not just their country, but their holy land, the birthplace of their religion, where Mecca and Medina, where Muhammad is from and founded the religion of Islam.
01:01:15.880And so, boy, are we pushing our luck here or what?
01:01:18.360And we didn't have that conversation because they blamed it on Iran.
01:01:21.520And they're lying their asses off to do so.
01:01:56.840And there's a story about he told Louis Free, who was at that time the head of the FBI, that they had both been to Saudi to investigate.
01:02:05.980And Louis Free was buying the story that Iran did it.
01:02:10.220And John O'Neill told him, come on, boss, the Saudis, they're just blowing smoke up your ass.
01:02:16.040And then, according to the story, Louis Free got very offended that John O'Neill had dared to use the A word in front of him.
01:02:24.000And so, like, put him in the doghouse and refused to listen to him after that.
01:02:28.360And went along with the story, essentially.
01:02:31.200So, it really helped to blunt an important lesson that the American populace and even the Clinton administration itself might have learned, which is, you know, we could have Tom Cruise just bomb Iraq from aircraft carriers in the Gulf.
01:02:44.800Do we have to have combat forces stationed on Saudi soil?
01:03:25.220Then 2000 was the failed attack on the Sullivans and then the successful attack on the USS Cole.
01:03:31.400And so, one thing that every terror attack that you've listed has in common is they were all perpetrated by Sunnis, by Sunnis, by Sunni radicals, not by Iranians or Iranian-backed proxies.
01:03:46.740And see, what's interesting here is, well, a couple of things.
01:03:49.380So, first of all, so that was first of all, those are the attacks.
01:03:53.420Second of all, their real motive, as they said over and over again, was they thought America was already at war with them by hosting the bases in Saudi Arabia, by bombing Iraq from them, by supporting all the Arab dictators in the region, particularly the King of Saudi and the Presidente of Egypt, Mubarak, and support for Israel and the merciless persecution of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
01:04:17.920And so, as Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, put it, the Ayatollah spent the 80s railing against American culture and nobody really cared.
01:04:27.300There's plenty to complain about American libertine culture if you're a conservative Islamist somewhere.
01:04:32.600But is that enough to get suicide bombers to do kamikaze attacks?
01:04:36.820Bin Laden, on the other hand, pointed at these concrete American foreign policies and the way that they negatively affected Muslims as his recruitment shtick, and it worked.
01:04:48.240So, for one very important example, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Sheib, who, bin al-Sheib is still in Guantanamo to this day, but Mohammed Atta was the lead hijacker on September 11th.
01:04:58.760They were studying, they were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany.
01:05:03.760And when Shimon Peres launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, they decided to fill out their last will and testament as like a symbol that they were joining the army to fight against the United States.
01:05:16.660And what was Operation Grapes of Wrath?
01:05:18.180This was the invasion of southern Lebanon, which actually I left this out, I guess I should skip back here.
01:05:50.520So, but the Israelis stayed friends with him.
01:05:52.560So, you might remember during Iran-Contra when the Reaganites sold missiles to Iran, when they switched sides in the war temporarily in the Iran-Iraq war.
01:05:59.080They used the Israelis as cutouts to do it.
01:06:01.200You give them your tow missiles and we'll give you more to repay you, basically.
01:06:06.260And they had this relationship that they maintained through the early 1990s.
01:06:13.000And it was in 1993 that Yitzhak Rabin decided to turn Israeli foreign policy upside down.
01:06:21.760They had what had been called the strategy of the periphery, which meant they wanted to focus on their alliance with Turkey in the north to divide Syria's attention.
01:06:30.620They wanted to back Iran in their east to divide Iraq's attention.
01:06:35.640And they wanted to support Ethiopia in their south to divide Egypt's attention.
01:06:41.100But then Rabin said, no, we're going to turn this around now.
01:06:44.520And what we're going to do is we want to negotiate with the Palestinians, with Arafat, and create not a real Palestinian state, but sort of a pseudo-Palestinian state.
01:06:52.300Best thing that they had on offer, you know, going for sure.
01:06:55.540And in doing so, then we'll put aside the last major issue.
01:07:00.480We can negotiate with the closer Arab states.
01:07:03.320They already had their peace treaty with Egypt, but they can now make their peace deal with Jordan, which they did complete in 1994.
01:07:09.600And negotiate with the Gulf states as well.
01:07:15.500But part of that being negotiate with the Palestinians, because the Gulf states, especially, had always promised they would never normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians either got an independent state or citizenship.
01:07:27.900And so, what Rabin wanted to do then was he decided to begin to demonize the Iranians as, like, just politics, right?
01:07:40.900To keep the right off his back while he's negotiating with Arafat.
01:07:44.560He's going to say, yeah, but look at those bad guys over there, essentially, and demonize the Iranians as part of that policy.
01:07:50.220So, it was Israel that turned on Iran first, and for no particular thing that Iran had done to them.
01:07:56.380They had kept Iran out of the Madrid peace conference, which was like an insult, but it was not that big of a deal.
01:08:02.400And as I believe Trita Parsi shows in his book, Treacherous Alliance, and Gareth Porter in his book, Manufactured Crisis, it was the Iranians only turned on the Israelis after the Israelis had turned on them.
01:08:17.740And in fact, Trita Parsi in his book talks about how when the Israelis announced, hey, we hate Iran now, and we want you to hate Iran now, the Clintonites all started laughing because they were like, what?
01:08:28.440You loved Iran and wanted us to be friends with Iran last week.
01:08:45.180So, as Trita shows, the Ayatollah would be raging, I'm going to destroy Israel.
01:08:49.540That day, he would be taking a shipment of missiles from Israel, right?
01:08:53.420And so, all that bluster was covered for their covert relationship.
01:08:56.260Israel, just to, again, to linger on a point, because it's surprising to hear it, Israel was supplying Iran with weapons as late as the 1990s?
01:09:36.840But it also goes to show, though, that, like, all this crap about, oh, when fundamentalist Shiite Islam, well, I don't know.
01:09:42.820The Likud got along with the Ayatollah just fine, or maybe not just fine, but they kept their relationship all through the 90s.
01:09:49.740And it was the Israelis who decided to turn on them over, you know, politics that were closer to home, that really weren't about Iran as much as they needed a bad guy to point their finger at while changing the policy and negotiating with the Palestinians.
01:10:04.580But then, of course, a Benjamin Netanyahu fan assassinated Rabin in 95.
01:10:09.760And it was his successor, Shimon Peres, as part of this same strategy, though, who launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996.
01:10:19.000Now, as I said, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib filled out their last will and testament when that began.
01:10:53.660So, and then in the beginning of the thing, it starts out with a whole rant about not just Grapes of Wrath, but the Khanna Massacre.
01:11:00.200It's now known as the first Khanna Massacre because they did it again in 2006.
01:11:03.920But in 1996, it was actually Naftali Bennett, the future prime minister of Israel, was the artillery officer who called in a strike on a United Nations shelter and killed 106 women and children.
01:11:17.700And bin Laden went off about that in his declaration of war against the United States in 1996.
01:11:24.200Said, we'll never forget the severed heads and arms and legs of the children in Khanna.
01:11:28.880And when Ramzi bin al-Shib and Mohammed Atta read that, that was when they decided to join the war.
01:11:34.400So here are Egyptian engineering students in Hamburg, Germany, volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel's doing in Lebanon.
01:11:44.820Which, Tucker, is why they told you that the Taliban did it because they hate our freedom.
01:11:49.280Because they didn't want to get into why these Saudis and Egyptians did it.
01:11:53.200It's because they hate our foreign policy.
01:11:55.320The Taliban, most of them had probably never even heard of the new world and had no grudge against us at all.
01:11:59.900In fact, their government had tried to warn the United States of an impending al-Qaeda attack.
01:12:04.940And their leader, Mullah Omar, had been trying to negotiate bin Laden away since 1998 after the Africa embassy bombings.
01:12:12.140And it was even the CIA officer, Milton Bearden, who helped to run the Afghan operation in the 1980s,
01:12:22.520who told the Washington Post the Taliban were trying to give this guy up.
01:12:26.520They would say, geez, he's out falconing.
01:12:28.600We don't know where he is, meaning he's outside of our protection.
01:12:33.740And if you guys were to kill him, it wouldn't be our fault.
01:12:36.880And then the Americans would say, we said hand him over and just refuse to listen.
01:12:42.360That's what they're doing is hand him over, you know.
01:12:45.060Mullah Omar told, oh, I bet you know, Arnaud de Borghrav from the Washington Times.
01:14:37.580Not like the bull that runs after the red scarf.
01:14:41.380So the point being not that George Bush's stupidity makes him innocent.
01:14:45.620It's that George Bush's stupidity and cruelty and corruption made him the perfect mark for a guy like bin Laden.
01:14:53.360This wimp with the cowboy hat, pretending he's a tough guy, is going to be very easy to provoke into doing what he wants, right?
01:15:03.740To get away with bloody murder on his end, which is what the Al-Qaeda guys wanted for our side to do.
01:15:09.840And look at our national debt, you might say it has worked some.
01:15:14.100They're preying upon national character weakness or tick that Americans have that I have, which is you assume all foreigners are kind of dumb.
01:15:41.660And I got to tell you, man, there's a huge rub here, too, which is one of the major reasons they were allowed, and I mean that in the generalist sense of the term allowed, to get away with all these attacks against the United States in this way, was because Bill Clinton's government was still supporting them.
01:15:58.700Took them from Afghanistan to Bosnia, then to Kosovo, and then on to Chechnya.
01:16:04.520And all through the 1990s, and I have a bit on this enough already, but I found much more in my latest book, Provoked, because a lot of it has to do with the wars in the Balkans, of course, and wars against the Russians.
01:16:17.320And so it makes sense to me in an amoral, strategic sense why America would support bin Ladenite types and fundamentalist Muslims against the Soviet Union.
01:16:31.480But once the Soviet Union is gone, it seems like leftists are going to be more reasonable people than Islamist fundamentalists for dealing with, and when there's no Soviet threat to keep at bay any longer.
01:16:44.140I never understood the hatred for the Baathists.
01:16:47.680I mean, they seemed like pretty reasonable, actually.
01:16:53.620But also, if it's a choice between Assad and Jelani, I don't, and I know that, you know, Israel likes Jelani, so we're all supposed to like him, and as he murders Christians and Alawites, it's like, oh, no, he's great.
01:17:07.680But it just seems like, you know, the kind of center-left atheist ophthalmologist from London is probably going to be a better negotiating partner than the guy who thinks he's getting the virgins, right?
01:17:49.020And at the expense of the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs and Russia's friends, the Serbs.
01:17:54.740Well, as always, we take this, you know, we wind up abetting the murder of Christians.
01:17:59.200Like, that's not an accident from dropping the atomic bomb on a Catholic church in Nagasaki through the Balkans, through what's happening in Syria, through what's happening in the West Bank.
01:18:08.720Like, we're always against the Christians.
01:18:27.700And, you know, they're the ones who wind up killed.
01:18:29.640Like, and then you have to like it and you're a Nazi if you don't like it or something.
01:18:32.980It's like, I'm not playing along anymore.
01:18:34.180And the cynicism with which, like, hey, you know what we should do to prevent the Russians from reopening this old Soviet oil pipeline through the Caucasus mountains?
01:18:44.520Let's support a bunch of Bin Ladenite suicide bombers against them.
01:18:47.940And this is years after the Soviet Union is dead and gone.
01:18:51.040We have no reason in the world to prefer such a narrow and short-sighted and parochial type policy to our overall, the overall health of our relationship with Moscow.
01:19:04.800And as you alluded a moment ago, you've just written a, like, a doorstopper on this, which I think is the definitive book on the question of the Balkans and our many wars against Russia, et cetera, called Provoked.
01:20:14.760And in fact, I'm glad, as long as we're talking about this now, I'll go ahead and say,
01:20:18.120there are people who got this wrong in good faith, and many more probably who got it wrong in bad faith.
01:20:23.380And it's a tiny bit Daryl's fault in that he was kind of off on a tangent and didn't completely say everything that he was trying to explain.
01:20:32.520But the bottom line, basically, is people really misunderstood him.
01:20:36.780Some people in good faith misunderstood him as somehow minimizing the Holocaust,
01:20:41.280when what he was actually saying in that episode was,
01:20:43.880even if you were one who would try to minimize the Holocaust,
01:23:33.400I mean, they use his appearance on your show to try to destroy him.
01:23:37.060But, like, yeah, no, it just didn't work.
01:23:38.520And then in our first episode that we recorded last week, we're going to do our second episode tomorrow.
01:23:43.880But in the first episode of our show, it's at provoked.show, by the way, if people want to look that up.
01:23:47.740But I just interviewed him about him for the whole first show is all we talked about was, like, his basis for doing these history podcasts and all the research that he's put into it and whatever.
01:23:59.320And he's just the most decent guy in the world.
01:24:32.920And he, unlike any mainstream, quote, historian, the Wikipedia historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin or whoever these absurd figures they trot out.
01:24:51.860And that was what got them so upset is you said this is the most important historian in America, which is, like, obviously your opinion and mine.
01:24:57.800But in a way, it's quantifiably the case, right, that he's teaching history to a hell of a lot more people than any of these kooks at Harvard and Yale.
01:25:04.640And they have reason to be jealous, right?
01:25:07.460The narrative is outside of their control.
01:26:16.640Yeah, and you've got to give credit to Elon Musk for that, for saving X, you know, Twitter.
01:26:21.960I give, he's in my daily prayers, and I just hope.
01:26:24.400It's an important thing that he did there.
01:26:25.700I hope that there, you know, if there are, I pray there aren't, but if there are acts of violence in the United States, whether they're real or they're false flags, there have been so many of those.
01:26:34.540If there are acts of violence where people are murdered, someone else is blamed for it for political effect.
01:26:54.600I want to say, for anyone who's interested in the topic of the war that we have been fighting for three years, three and a half years against Russia, why are we doing that?
01:27:17.700I swear we're going to make this Al-Qaeda-centric conversation, Iran-centric, again, here in a moment.
01:27:24.620One last thing, though, about Bill Clinton's treason in supporting Al-Qaeda in Chechnya is that you might remember Colleen Rowley.
01:27:32.980She was Time Magazine Person of the Year in 2002 because she was the lawyer for the FBI office in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who could have stopped September 11th, her and her team.
01:27:43.960Because what happened was there was a guy named Zacharias Moussaoui, and they said he was the 20th hijacker, except I don't think that's right.
01:27:49.440I think Katani was the 20th hijacker, and this guy was for a different mission later, but whatever.
01:27:55.900Point is, he's the guy who famously wanted to learn how to fly a jumbo jet, but wasn't so interested in how to take off or land.
01:28:02.360And the guy at the flight school went ahead over his boss's wishes and called the FBI and said, I'm really worried about this guy.
01:28:09.680And the FBI office out in Minneapolis, they did their job immediately, and one of their guys even speculated, this guy says he wants to learn how to fly, like somehow he's particularly interested in the route from Heathrow to JFK.
01:28:21.340I think he might want to crash into the World Trade Center.
01:28:26.060So they went to FBI headquarters in Washington, and they were denied, no, you cannot even ask the FISA court for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to search this guy's stuff.
01:28:39.420And the reason why is because even though in Minneapolis, they had contacted the European intelligence agencies and the French reported back, oh, we know this guy.
01:28:48.580Him and his brother both are Chechen terrorists.
01:28:51.000They fought in the war in Chechnya and are recruiters for the Bin Ladenites in Chechnya, led by Khatab and Basiev, both of whom were Bin Ladenites, both of whom were directly tied to Bin Laden, both of whom had traveled to Afghanistan numerous times.
01:29:05.640People might even remember that there was a detachment of Chechens fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance at the time that our war started in 2001, because Bin Laden had assigned them to what was called the 055 Brigade to go and help the Taliban to fight against the Northern Alliance.
01:29:22.980There's this, they absolutely were Bin Ladenite terrorists in the exact al-Qaeda sense that you would think of them in any other place in Chechnya.
01:29:32.020But FBI headquarters said, we like the terrorists in Chechnya.
01:29:41.440And so, no, you can't have your FISA warrant.
01:29:43.280Now, a FISA warrant is unlike a Fourth Amendment warrant.
01:29:46.220Fourth Amendment, they have to have probable cause, particularly describing the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized to find evidence of a crime.
01:29:53.240They have to be able to convince the judge that it's more likely than not they're going to find evidence of this crime there.
01:29:57.520Well, for a FISA warrant, it's nothing like that.
01:29:59.020For a FISA warrant, all they need is a reasonable belief, which is nothing, that a person is either an agent of a foreign power or of a foreign terrorist group.
01:30:07.120I've been surveilled under a FISA warrant, so I'm very aware.
01:30:30.360And they still were told no by FBI headquarters.
01:30:32.660And it wasn't until later that night that the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, said, I wonder if this has anything to do with that Minneapolis thing.
01:30:40.060Then they went to the court, got the warrant, they searched the guy's house, and they found papers that had been in his pockets and at his house directly connecting them to the hijackers in Florida.
01:30:49.520They could have wrapped up, completely rolled up and prevented the September 11th attack if they'd just been allowed to do their job.
01:30:57.560Because Bill Clinton was committing high treason, supporting the same bin Ladenites who had already attacked our towers, who had already killed our guys in Saudi Arabia, who'd already blown up our embassies, already attacked our battleship.
01:31:12.640We like these guys when they're killing Russians.
01:31:14.840And the same thing in August of 2001, Delta Force, that's top tier army special operations forces, Delta Force had been training KLA terrorists.
01:31:25.880Bin Ladenites terrorists in Kosovo, who then invaded Macedonia in an attempt to create a greater Kosovo.
01:31:32.500And they were wrapped up by Macedonian troops.
01:31:35.700And ferried out of the country by the Americans.
01:31:39.960And this is just one month before the September 11th attack.
01:31:42.960And I know a lot of people just think that these guys are totally controlled by the United States.
01:31:46.260But my point of view is that, no, what happened is they are essentially motivating them to attack the United States in one place while supporting them in other places.
01:31:55.880And rather than buying their loyalty, they're just blinding themselves to the danger.
01:32:02.160And so they kept attacking us and attacking us and attacking us, which was very convenient to notice when you're trying to still support them.
01:32:09.820And so even though you had people like Michael Scheuer at the CIA's Bin Laden unit, who I think is sincere, all he wanted to do in life was kill al-Qaeda guys.
01:32:16.800And, you know, they had the rendition program.
01:32:21.580You might be familiar with the statement by Robert Baer, the former CIA officer.
01:32:25.240He said, if you want an interrogation, you send them to Jordan.
01:32:27.940If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria.
01:32:30.160If you want them to disappear forever, you send them to Egypt.
01:32:33.340And he was talking about the Clinton years.
01:32:34.620So they were wrapping up guys who they considered to be the most dangerous al-Qaeda terrorists and sending them back home to be taken out and shot.
01:32:43.520So that was going on during that time.
01:32:45.560And in fact, there's a huge and hilarious and important and tragic and crazy clip of Michael Scheuer.
01:32:53.140Again, the CIA's, the chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit.
01:32:56.220He was testifying before the House and the congressman asked him about a statement that he had made about John O'Neill, the head of the FBI counterterrorism unit in New York.
01:33:06.000And he said, the only thing good that happened to America on 11 September is that that tower came down on John O'Neill's head.
01:33:15.820Because that was how bad the CIA and the FBI hated each other in their fight over the intelligence.
01:33:21.160This is why Scheuer no longer does television.
01:33:22.500This is why Scheuer no longer does television.
01:33:23.720He went a little nutty in later years.
01:33:26.220His book, Imperial Hubris, is bar none the best book on the terror wars from that era.
01:33:49.780But so that's the importance of the Bin Ladenite treason there.
01:33:53.820So now, here's where Iran kicks back into the story.
01:33:57.160Because of course, September 11th in Al-Qaeda's war is the excuse for America to go back to the Middle East in full scale once W. Bush is sworn in.
01:34:05.180But so here's where we get to the neoconservatives.
01:34:18.160Neoconservative is a biographical designation.
01:34:20.140And it applies to, I don't know, 100 guys in the world, something like that, would you say?
01:34:24.140And they're called neoconservatives, not because they're conservatives nowadays, but because they literally had been leftists who moved to the right and were new conservatives.
01:34:34.400And so there's, it's kind of a complicated history.
01:34:38.700But essentially, most of them were Trotskyites and had become kind of Cold War Democrats and then eventually Reaganites.
01:34:46.680And in the second and third generation came Reaganites.
01:34:47.920More precisely, most of them seem to have gone to City College of New York.
01:34:50.600Yeah, there's a bunch of them from City College.
01:35:05.480And so then there's a guy named Max Schockman, who was an important Trotskyite.
01:35:12.160And then there he had, he was a major wheel in the Young People's Socialist League, Young People's Socialist League, which included Gene Kirkpatrick, Joshua Moravchik, and Elliott Abrams.
01:35:26.980Then you had, you know, the National Review where William F. Buckley had, you know, essentially all the real old right-wingers were against the Cold War because they said, you know, why create this giant pseudo-communist government here just to keep them away over there when we ought to just work on keeping our country free here, you know?
01:35:48.560So all those people got pushed out and luckily—
01:35:51.560Well, not just pushed out, but maligned.
01:37:33.820And then, you know, they made their break with the new left in the late 60s over Vietnam and over civil rights and stuff like that and started moving to the right.
01:37:44.500And then this is essentially the core of the war party in the United States of America.
01:37:49.400The great journalist Andrew Coburn says this is—they're the cross between the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex.
01:37:56.080So, like, oil and banking already had the Council on Foreign Relations, basically.
01:38:04.080These guys were not so much invited in there.
01:38:06.420That was more like blue blood wasps in that era and stuff.
01:38:09.460So, they made their alliance with the military-industrial complex, said, we need money.
01:38:14.200You guys need eggheads, right, to write your studies and justify your policies and your arms sales.
01:38:19.620So, that was kind of where that mob marriage was born.
01:38:22.180And so, this is how the neocons ended up creating this whole kind of forest of think tanks of their own.
01:38:31.920I mentioned the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, but they also had, like, the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee on the Free World and the Center for Security Policy, the Project for a New American Century.
01:38:43.780They had taken over at Heritage and AEI and Hudson, right?
01:38:49.400They had made their alliance with the Olin and Scaife Foundations.
01:38:53.420And so, they were able to just take the pole position in leading conservative thought in the magazines and on TV and in the newspaper editorials and all that.
01:39:03.980The Weekly Standard, of course, as you know, and the National Review had two big flagships.
01:39:09.020And, yeah, these were your guys back then.
01:39:11.720And so, these were the guys who took us to war.
01:39:14.060They are the vanguard of the war party.
01:39:16.200And they're, in many cases, directly tied to Israel.
01:39:20.400And now, I don't want to get you in unfair trouble.
01:39:23.020I'm perfectly happy to get you in trouble that you deserve.
01:39:27.880But I don't want anyone to misunderstand me, and especially not on your show.
01:39:31.640I am not anti-Semitic, and I'm not saying anything anti-Semitic about these guys.
01:39:35.660The neoconservative movement was a largely Jewish movement, is a largely Jewish movement, because, hey, Trotskyism was only ever really popular in Brooklyn, right?
01:39:44.940There's just not too many people who were ever, whoever were part of these radical politics.
01:39:53.600Gene Kirkpatrick and James Woolsey are two prominent Presbyterian Christians who were part of it.
01:39:59.000And it was funny, because Mark Dubowicz from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies tried to argue with me about whether Gene Kirkpatrick was a neocon or not, because she supported dictatorships as long as they were right-wing ones, instead of supporting democracy uber-alus.
01:40:13.940But ISIS, well, she comes from the Young People's Socialist League with Max Schochman and Joshua Moravchik and Elliott Abrams, and then moved to the right and became a Reaganite with the rest of them.
01:40:23.260Wrote for Commentary Magazine with Podhoretz and all of the guys.
01:40:28.840I link to a bunch of great sources in my book about that.
01:40:31.700And, of course, there's differences of opinion among the neoconservatives.
01:40:34.940When the Muslim Brotherhood won elections in Egypt in 2012, Robert Kagan said, hey, we've been spouting nonstop about democracy this whole time.
01:41:32.700Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're being strict here.
01:41:34.060So like John Bolton, for example, is not a neoconservative.
01:41:36.480He's very close with them, but he's just a Goldwater guy.
01:41:38.740He's always been a right-wing nationalist, conservative Republican, and never had that move from the left to the right.
01:41:43.440So he's obviously very close with them, but not a card-carrying member kind of a thing.
01:41:48.020That's the way I like to distinguish the thing.
01:41:50.280So now, this brings us to the clean break.
01:41:52.080So David Wormser and Douglas Feith and Richard Perl—well, I should put them in the other.
01:41:57.220David Wormser is the principal author.
01:41:59.220Richard Perl is really the ringleader and his mentor and co-author.
01:42:03.940And then Douglas Feith was their fellow traveler who also signed on, although I think later he repudiated this document and said he didn't agree with it.
01:42:36.340He's going to now demonize Iran and Iraq, not as a way to kind of get away with dealing with the Palestinians like Rabin was trying to do, but as an excuse to never deal with the Palestinians.
01:42:48.120You want me to deal with the Palestinians?
01:42:53.300And so he wants nothing to do with Oslo and a two-state solution.
01:42:56.900So Wormser writes, this is what The Clean Break is.
01:42:58.760It's a clean break from Oslo and a two-state solution for the Palestinians.
01:43:01.840And it says, what we're going to do, instead of making nice with the Arab states, we're going to have peace through strength.
01:43:07.160And we're going to be the dominant power in the region by far.
01:43:10.540And then no one's going to mess with us, and we'll have peace that way.
01:43:13.340And what he says is the major threat to Israel is if they want to continue colonizing Palestine, what's left of it?
01:43:21.660They have to worry about Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in southern Lebanon on the northern flank, which grew up in reaction to their invasion of Lebanon in the early 1980s.
01:43:54.180It only makes sense in like a weird Rube Goldberg contraption sort of a way.
01:44:02.240What had been the lie that they believed had been sold to them by an Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite, who was an embezzler, a bank, a convicted bank fraudster from Jordan and a criminal.
01:44:16.840And he had convinced them that if you put the cousin of the king of Jordan, who's a Sunni but a Hashemite and claims the blood of the prophet, if you put him in power in Baghdad, then all the Shiites will all line up to obey and do whatever he says because he has the magic blood of the prophet, which they all revere.
01:44:36.000Well, that's completely crazy and stupid and wrong.
01:44:39.000When the British had installed a Hashemite king in the 20s, the Shiites had a fatwa against cooperating with him in any way, which is why his kingdom didn't last through the 20s.
01:44:51.280And yes, as we talked about before, this is part of the split that the Shiites went with Muhammad's family.
01:44:57.840But that doesn't mean that they revere anyone with the blood of the prophet as like a magical lord over them with total power to decide every question for them or anything like that.
01:45:09.600This is completely overstated by Ahmed Chalabi that this Hashemite king would be able to say, oh, I have royal blood and you all have to fall under my spell now.
01:45:20.540But then it didn't matter because I believe what happened was the king of Jordan died and his cousin replaced him and then there was nobody to put in there.
01:45:26.320So then they changed the plan to Chalabi himself would be the guy.
01:45:30.240But the whole promise was, and this is in A Clean Break and the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States.
01:46:19.180Because what happened was, once they lied us into Iraq, and it was Ahmed Chalabi and his exiles who helped provide a lot of the lies about the weapons of mass destruction, and it was the neoconservatives in the government.
01:46:31.380They created what Colin Powell called a separate government.
01:46:41.920The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
01:46:44.320It's now of America, but it's the same group.
01:46:46.560They're the ones who send American cops to be trained by shin-bet, ruthless occupation forces in Palestine and come back and treat Americans like that.
01:46:56.860But it was David Wormser and his friends were the men from JINSA.
01:46:59.940The JINSA crowd was what Powell called them.
01:47:02.920And they created a separate government, again, Powell's words, working under Dick Cheney.
01:47:06.700And there was Hannah and Libby and Joseph were in, and Elliot Abram, no, Eric Edelman were in the vice president's office, Dick Cheney's office.
01:47:20.900And Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan's wife, exactly.
01:47:23.080And then on the National Security Council was Robert Hadley, probably Stephen Hadley, Robert Joseph, I think moved from the vice president's office to National Security Council.
01:47:33.200And Salmay Khalilzad, who's their pet Muslim, were on the National Security Council.
01:47:37.500Then at State, you had David Wormser and John Bolton, who, again, was not exactly a neocon, but was clearly part of this group with Cheney.
01:47:44.520And their role was to keep a leash on Powell and his right-hand man, Dick Armitage, and prevent them from doing too much to obstruct the war.
01:47:52.060And then at defense, you had on the defense policy board, Richard Pearl, Kenneth Edelman, Gene Kirkpatrick, and Newt Gingrich, again, a fellow traveler.
01:48:00.180Not exactly one of them, but he also, like Libby and Cheney, went to CIA headquarters over and over again to berate them and force them to try to come up with more intelligence against Iraq.
01:48:11.600And then you had Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and then under him, Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Fythe, and then under him, Abram Shulsky, who ran the Office of Special Plans.
01:48:22.860And this is, we know all about this, especially because of the heroic Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Whistleblower Karen Katowski told this story numerous times.
01:48:33.040In fact, if you search my name in 28 articles about how the neoconservatives lied us into war, it's actually up to 30 or 35 or something now.
01:48:40.800I've got all of these, all of the best articles about the neoconservatives in the Office of Special Plans.
01:48:45.960And they focused on digging through the CIA's trash and laundering lies from the exiles to come up with the weapons of mass destruction narrative.
01:48:53.680Across the hall was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, and that was run by Wormser and a guy named Michael Malouf.
01:49:01.600And they were in charge of coming up with lies about Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda.
01:49:06.180And there's a guy named Harold Road who worked in the Office of Net Assessment, which is like the internal Pentagon think tank.
01:49:12.840And his job was firing all the Arabists who actually knew anything about the Middle East from there and replacing them all with guys from the think tanks.
01:49:19.240And so they did like, yes, it's true, Bush and Cheney sort of won that election, but they staffed the government in a way that very few political victors on that level have the ability to do what Dick Cheney did,
01:49:36.320which was to put his very best guys, most loyal guys from this neoconservative faction in all the most important places in the government to push us into that war.
01:49:45.220And the purpose of that war was to neutralize Iran, actually.
01:49:49.700Again, I just want to ask you to pause.
01:49:50.900So there was a promise from the neocons or parts of the U.S. government that there would be an oil pipeline after Saddam built from Mosul, Kirkuk, northern Iraq to the port of Haifa in Israel?
01:50:03.460And this had been a pipeline under the British in the 20s, and they wanted to reopen it or rebuild the thing.
01:50:08.900And part of the deal was that when, you know, Israel stayed friends with Iran, as we established all the way through the 1980s, and they had a secret pipeline at the port of Aqaba, which is, you know, they call it the Sinai Peninsula because it sticks out into the Red Sea there.
01:50:26.880Well, the right side of the Sinai, that's Aqaba, is that port there.
01:50:30.940And the Iranians had a secret pipeline that was, I guess, was operated by Mark Rich.
01:50:37.540I don't know exactly who originally had built it.
01:50:42.780And so there was this secret oil pipeline where the Iranians would drive their tankers up and unload oil and ship it to Israel.
01:50:49.880But then when Rabin turned on Iran in 93, the Iranians cut that oil supply off.
01:50:56.400So, like, in a large sense, America's Iraq War II was—part of that was so that they could rebuild this pipeline to make up for that loss.
01:51:05.280In fact, when Donald Rumsfeld, the famous meeting of Donald Rumsfeld with the video and the still shot of him shaking hands with Saddam Hussein when he was Reagan's special emissary in 1983,
01:51:13.380the huge part of that meeting was him badgering Hussein to build a pipeline to the port of Aqaba that would then have a separate spur that would go directly to Israel.
01:51:22.680So when people say it was a war for oil, there's some truth in that, but it wasn't oil for us.
01:51:38.880But David Wormser and them are essentially Likud guys.
01:51:42.080I mean, Douglas Feist's law partner, Mark Zell, who's a riot if you follow him on Twitter these days, he represents settlers on the West Bank.
01:51:49.820I mean, these guys are very close to the Likud.
01:51:50.720But what does this have to do with the United States?
01:52:27.980It's called Israel, Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War by Gary Vogler, where he explains that this is exactly right and how Michael Malouf, the same guy from the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, was on the phone with him, bugging him about the pipeline.
01:54:00.120And again, I know it's crazy, but again, if we get rid of secular Sunni Saddam and empower the Shiite supermajority, it'll be fine.
01:54:11.140Because actually either we will have a sock puppet Hashemite or we will have a sock puppet Shiite in charge to tell them what to do.
01:54:17.840And then they will tell Hezbollah to leave Israel alone.
01:54:21.120And that way Israel can finish colonizing Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah on their northern flank.
01:54:26.440So even if I thought that the purpose of foreign policy was to help a foreign country, which I don't, and even if I, you know, agreed with all the objectives, which I don't think I do, but even if I did, I would say that's not a very smart plan.
01:54:40.140And I remember having this exact conversation in Iraq in 2003.
01:54:43.580It's like, wait a second, if this is a majority Shiite country, if it becomes a democracy, it'll become a Shiite country.
01:54:48.160It'll be aligned in some basic way with Iran.
01:55:21.400The Bada Brigade and the Dawah Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the Iraqi traitors who had chosen Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq War.
01:55:30.060Who had led the uprising in 91 before Bush Sr. changed his mind and left them high and dry to be crushed.
01:55:36.100Now W. Bush in 03 takes them all the way to Baghdad.
01:55:39.460And so that's the history of Iraq War II.
01:55:41.460That bloody eight-year horrible war that we fought over there was America fighting for the supermajority Shiite side for their strategic rivals in the region, Iran.
01:55:52.280In what they call in soccer an own goal, like this giant stupid mistake fought for the other side of the ledger.
01:55:58.840And that they thought that it would somehow help Israel to have a Shiite government in Iraq.
01:56:13.240Right, because we would have such control over the Shiites, they would force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran.
01:56:20.880And it would be, Wormster said, a nightmare for Iran when the Iranian people see what a great new democratic Shiite Iraq looks like and how they could be living.
01:56:33.340It will surely lead to the fall of the Ayatollah.
01:56:36.100One of my theories for many, many years, and when people are always, if you say anything like this, like you're anti-Israel, which I am not and never have been.
01:56:44.820But one thing I've noticed is that the people who presume to speak for Israel not only kind of shaft the United States, they don't care at all about the United States, obviously.
01:57:04.520I mean, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that.
01:57:06.400Because I think a lot of, there are actual, you know, anti-Semites who are like, oh, you know, the Israel people are controlling everything.
01:57:48.640Yeah, and like they were, and the Israelis were even negotiating over the Golan Heights or maybe sharing it or some kind of, you know, whatever thing.
01:57:56.140And she prevented them from making peace then.
01:57:58.040She's the one who prevented Russia from joining NATO.
02:02:59.740He promised us an oil pipeline to Haifa.
02:03:01.840And now he's running around with all these Iranians and has a whole different set of friends and will never forgive him for his treachery and all that.
02:03:09.080So it's all just as plain as day in there.
02:03:13.860Richard Perl as like a pathetic sock puppet tool of his.
02:03:18.620And they thought that they were smart, but they were not.
02:03:21.280And Danielle Pletka also deserves a hell of a lot of blame and responsibility for this.
02:03:25.920She was Chalabi's main handler at the American Enterprise Institute.
02:03:28.980And, you know, card carry member of this neocon faction that pushed this stuff.
02:03:34.400So once they realized how bad they screwed up, they launched this redirection.
02:03:38.680They're back in Fatal Islam in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.
02:03:43.200And the Iranian Kurds had a group called PJAK, which was whatever it's an acronym for.
02:03:49.720But it's essentially the Iranian Kurdish version of the PKK, which is the leftist insurgent Kurdish group in Turkey, which is only recently disarmed completely.
02:04:00.380And then their allies are the YPG in Syria.
02:04:03.840And in but in Iran, they're called PJAK.
02:04:06.760And America was supporting them there.
02:04:08.520And they were also supporting a group of horrible bin Ladenite, suicide bomber, head chopper maniacs called Jandala in Baluchistan, which is in southeastern Iran, that region.
02:04:22.080And these guys were kidnapping and beheading officers and army officers and doing truck bombings and all kinds of stuff.
02:04:29.580And so this is America under W. Bush, again, before Obama ever came to town.
02:04:34.120This is W. Bush saying, oops, I screwed up and I put the Iranians, best friends in power in Baghdad.
02:04:39.960There's only so much I can do about that.
02:04:41.820At the request of neocons who then change their mind and decide, oh, we screwed up.
02:04:45.660So then all American foreign policy has to pivot to backing the people who did 9-11.
02:05:09.320That was what happened was he was the centrist foreign policy establishment.
02:05:12.460He was Bill Clinton's, all he ever was.
02:05:14.680And he came in and he picked up right where W. Bush left off.
02:05:19.400And it's actually interesting because he actually did assign, I don't think there's any question about this.
02:05:25.440He assigned the CIA to find and kill bin Ladenite, real bin Ladenite terrorists in Yemen and in Pakistan.
02:05:32.880And in Pakistan, as John Kiriakou told me, the former CIA officer, there were only 29 al-Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan.
02:06:10.000He was also bombing them in Yemen as well, which was totally counterproductive.
02:06:14.820As I show in my Yemen chapter in the book, the CIA and Air Force war against AQAP only grew them bigger and bigger the whole time and was counterproductive.
02:06:24.140But so that's like the first couple of years.
02:06:27.920And of course, he escalated the war in Afghanistan, even though there were no Arab terrorists left in Afghanistan at all by then.
02:06:33.600But then at the beginning of the Arab Spring, which breaks out in 2011, Obama takes Osama's side in Libya.
02:06:41.820And this is just as he's killing the guy.
02:06:50.400Well, at that very moment, we got American planes flying sorties as air cover for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia, who are al-Qaeda in Libya.
02:07:12.460And that's because, of course, Gaddafi was on Israel's list for a long time, the list of seven countries that they wanted to get rid of.
02:07:20.200I did last December a debate with General Wesley Clark, where he reconfirmed that that list of the seven countries in five years, that was Israel's list of countries they wanted overthrown.
02:07:32.660And the Saudis and Qataris also hated him for, you know, making fun of them for wearing robes and calling them women, wearing dresses and stuff.
02:08:34.480And so, that's the whole thing is just like with Bill Clinton, we might help them, but that doesn't buy their loyalty to us.
02:08:40.100In fact, I quoted in my new book, Provoked, I quote Ali Soufan, the former FBI counterterrorism agent, where he quotes the bin Ladenites complaining to bin Laden himself.
02:08:51.120Why are you targeting the United States?
02:09:04.480Based around what's going on in Palestine and in Iraq and the rest of this.
02:09:08.840So, some of them had been bribed, but the loyalty really did not come through the leadership.
02:09:13.840So, some of the leadership was just to, because I think it, well, because he attacked my country.
02:09:19.760I think it's fair to ask, do you believe, based on all the research you've done, that his main motive was what's happening in Gaza, the West Bank?
02:09:30.700The main motive was, I believe, the basis in Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq.
02:09:34.860And then two on the list was support for the Israelis in Palestine and in southern Lebanon.
02:09:39.660And then it was support for the dictators of the region.
02:09:42.220Pressure on them to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense.
02:09:46.540And as he put it, turning a blind eye to Russia and China and India and their wars against Muslims, which we know is not true, where America actually supported the bin Ladenites and two of the three of those.
02:09:57.520But those were the grievances, for real.
02:09:59.540And then, so, Obama takes al-Qaeda's side in Libya and then on to what Hillary Clinton called her bank shot and move all the Mujahideen and Gaddafi's guns to Syria.
02:10:11.140And this is where they started the dirty war in Syria.
02:10:14.480Because, as David Wormser wrote back so many years ago, Syria is the keystone in the arc of Iranian power in the region.
02:10:21.580And since we just moved Baghdad to Iran's column, we just put Iran up two pegs in Baghdad, now we got to take them down a peg in Damascus by getting rid of the Baathists there, who are run by the Alawites.
02:10:45.740And just to restate, as I've said many times, but it can't be said enough, the Benghazi tragedy where a U.S. ambassador and a number of American CIA personnel were killed in Benghazi, Libya.
02:10:58.580The real point of that story, the reason they were there in the first place, was moving Gaddafi's arms stockpiles to al-Qaeda-linked groups in Syria.
02:11:08.260And so, I was just talking about, mentioned the drone war in Pakistan.
02:11:11.860In July of 2012, the CIA killed a Libyan al-Qaeda guy named Sheikh Yahya al-Libi.
02:11:21.380His brother is the same guy that George Bush and Dick Cheney tortured into falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein supported al-Qaeda.
02:11:30.300And Sheikh Ibn al-Libi, and who later Gaddafi murdered in his prison cell in a case of Arkanside, as they call it, supposed suicide.
02:11:38.440Because Gaddafi was cooperative in the terror war.
02:12:03.380I bring some of these things with me from the 90s.
02:12:05.780But so, yeah, so now they killed Yahya al-Libi, and then Zawahiri put out a podcast saying, hey, all good Mujahideen in Libya, you know how the Americans are stationed right in the middle of your hornet's nest?
02:12:21.480Well, time to reach out and touch someone.
02:12:23.980And he put out that podcast in, like, August.
02:12:27.400Then on September 11th, on the anniversary of the attack, they reached out and got us.
02:12:31.900Our guy, what was Christopher Stevens doing there?
02:12:34.240He was committing high treason on the orders of the president of the United States, not out of loyalty to al-Qaeda, but out of loyalty to the Saudi king and to the Likud.
02:12:43.480That we hate the Shiites more, because that's what these foreign client states of ours want.
02:14:15.500She had been stationed at Balad Air Base during Iraq War II north of Baghdad at a medical unit.
02:14:20.920So, I've never heard her talk about this, but it is fair to presume that she saw a young guy screaming for their mama dying in front of her at that base.
02:15:02.940Yeah, she wants bin Ladenites dead, not empowered.
02:15:06.120Well, that's, but what's so interesting is she's in the crosshairs now, and they're going to try and, you know, the neocons are going to try and take her down.
02:15:46.020Where all of a sudden, one day, like, someone is acting in a way that, you know, somebody doesn't like, and everybody has to get on board with it.
02:17:18.660At least Bill Clinton lied that 100,000 people had already been killed in Kosovo.
02:17:22.740Barack Obama's just lying that hundreds of thousands are about to be killed.
02:17:25.940And this is the responsibility to protect.
02:17:28.780And even though anyone who's looking critically at the press at the time, especially the British press, but even the American press, knows these are bin Ladenites.
02:17:36.560These are radical Sunni fighters who just got home from Iraq.
02:17:39.900And now we don't care about the war on terrorism at all anymore.
02:17:44.320Now we're doing a humanitarian mission for bin Ladenites.
02:17:48.660So how's the city of Benghazi, the ancient port city of Benghazi now?
02:17:52.100Well, it's under the control of a former American sock puppet dictator named Haftar.
02:17:57.440The city, the country of Libya no longer exists.
02:18:00.080It was only created after World War II.
02:18:01.740And it's now divided in three in a state of low-level civil war.
02:18:05.920And the leader of Tripoli is actually a guy named Bel Hodge, who was a former bin Ladenite terrorist,
02:18:11.500who was actually kidnapped and tortured by the CIA and the Brits and sued the Brits and won for their...
02:18:17.680Wait, so you're saying that we didn't successfully protect Benghazi?
02:18:48.500But now that Obama took their side in Syria, they ended up controlling all of eastern Syria and consolidated a state by June of 2000, right this time, June of 2013.
02:19:01.680Instead of going west and putting pressure on Assad, they just conquered the east of the country.
02:19:07.440Then six months later, they raised the black flag over Fallujah.
02:19:12.520And Barack Obama was asked about this by Vanity Fair magazine.
02:19:16.720And he said, listen, just because the junior varsity team puts on a Kobe Bryant doesn't mean that they're in the majors or whatever.
02:19:23.780So in other words, he's calling Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the junior varsity, not real terrorists, not anybody we need to be worried about.
02:19:30.560Well, six months later, this is the famous footage that everybody's familiar with of the long line of Toyota Helix pickup trucks with their headlights on, roll right into Mosul, full of jihadis and sack Mosul.
02:19:42.320From there, they take over Samarra to Crete, Fallujah.
02:19:46.860And then about a year later, they took Ramadi.
02:19:49.080And so the Islamic State, this was the creation of the Islamic State Caliphate.
02:19:52.800And the leader was this guy, Baghdadi, who was just Zarqawi's successor.
02:19:56.260He was the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
02:19:58.040And he had sent his deputy, Jolani, to go and run what was called Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria.
02:20:03.960And then he split with Jolani and created his state.
02:20:07.940And so here he's like a cross between.
02:20:21.420So America fights Iraq War III on the Shiite side again, right?
02:20:26.360Because we built the caliphate to spite the Shiites because we're mad at them that we fought Iraq War II for them.
02:20:31.000But now that we built the caliphate, and this guy's like a cross between bin Laden and Mussolini up on the balcony at the mosque declaring himself the Caliph Ibrahim and all this.
02:20:45.100The Iraqi Shiites we wish we hadn't fought Iraq War II for.
02:20:47.820All their Iranian-backed Shiite militias.
02:20:49.740These are the guys who crushed the Islamic State.
02:20:52.140And in Tikrit, he literally had American airplanes flying air cover for the Iranian Quds Force on the ground.
02:20:57.540And the Americans saying, well, it is the Quds Force, but at least they're helping us kill ISIS.
02:21:02.100And on the ground, the Quds Force guys saying, well, it is the Americans, but at least they're providing us good air cover as they're liberating Saddam Hussein's hometown from the bin Ladenites.
02:21:10.000And so this is Iraq War III, beginning in August of 2014 through the end of 2017, basically, Trump's first year, was the destruction of the caliphate that Obama had built to spite the Shiites for Bush giving them Baghdad.
02:21:27.160And then, of course, spreading bin Ladenite terrorism elsewhere throughout the world, even worse.
02:21:34.560And so then this brings us back to Iran because that war ended with Russia intervening in Syria and protecting the Assad regime and preventing America from completing his overthrow.
02:21:49.120So from the end of Obama, basically, through Trump's first term and through Biden's term, you had Jelani and al-Qaeda were hiding up in, basically kept safe by the Turks up in the Idlib province, which is this rural province in northwestern Syria.
02:22:08.100And then last, end of November, early December of 24, they broke out of their pen in a big October 7th style attack.
02:22:16.760And they sacked Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus in 14 days, or 10 days, 12 days, and took over the country.
02:22:26.380And, you know, our president said, this is a strong guy with a very strong past.
02:22:32.580Well, his strong past is murdering American soldiers, fighting and killing American soldiers in Mosul and Ramadi during Iraq War II.
02:22:38.620So why would he be dropping sanctions against him?
02:22:40.940Because that's what Israel wants, because Israel hates the Shiites more, and the Alawites were friends with the Shiites.
02:22:46.520And so they don't mind the bin Ladenites, even though the bin Ladenites targeted us over Israel's crimes.
02:22:51.540They've never given Israel a problem directly.
02:22:53.720And, in fact, one of the Israeli intelligence or military officials admitted to the press when he was asked,
02:23:00.260why do you guys give aid and comfort to al-Qaeda in the war?
02:23:02.780You give them medical treatment and all these things.
02:23:04.820And he said, well, you know, it's the humanitarian thing to do.
02:23:07.420And they said, well, do you give that same kind of support to Hezbollah when they're injured on the battlefield?
02:23:59.140My friend Brad Hoff wrote a great book called Syria Crucified, which is all stories of Syrian Christians going through the hell of Obama's dirty war there.
02:24:51.620And the Marianites and the different kinds of Christians in Syria, you know, there was a village in—I think they reconstituted the village later, but for years there was a village where they speak Aramaic.
02:25:03.060It's one of the last places in the world where they speak Aramaic.
02:25:05.460And the Bin Ladenites took that town over and, you know, tyrannized those people for two or three years during the last war there.
02:25:33.200But I do think if you're a Christian and you see other Christians murdered, you can't take the side of the people who are making that possible.
02:25:41.180I just don't—I mean, what—you think Jesus is for that?
02:25:44.840Well, I think, you know, probably most Americans assume that, like in Israel-Palestine, that the Christians are Israelis and that they're allies with the Israeli Jews against the evil Muslims.
02:25:56.840And they just don't know that that's not true.
02:26:21.420So the Ayatollah—W. Bush puts Iran, Iraq, and North Korea in the axis of evil in 2002.
02:26:29.600And of all the preposterous lies, Saddam and the Ayatollah are allies when no two men in the world hate each other more than these two, right?
02:26:37.840And they're allies with Osama bin Laden, who is no friend of the Ayatollah and who Saddam Hussein is obviously deathly afraid of and has nothing to do with whatsoever.
02:26:46.220And then Kim in North Korea, which he had sold some missiles to Iran, but they got no tight alliance.
02:26:52.740And I think it's pretty clear that the only reason that they put North Korea in there is because if they had said the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq, and Syria, you might have wondered whether the speech was written in Tel Aviv or not.
02:27:02.540So they went ahead and threw North Korea in there.
02:27:51.940It explains how they essentially bullied Kim into leaving the treaty and starting to make nukes, which you notice we don't mess with North Korea anymore.
02:28:57.320So they did buy junk from AQ Khan, the Pakistani nuclear technology supplier, distributor.
02:29:06.360But only because America wouldn't let them buy a light water reactor from China.
02:29:09.800If Bill Clinton had just let the Chinese sell them a light water reactor, which cannot produce weapons fuel as waste, then everything would have been fine then.
02:29:17.320But they basically drove them to the black market where they got uranium enrichment equipment.
02:29:21.640And they started enriching uranium at Natanz in 2005.
02:29:24.760Now, they weren't in violation of the deal because the deal says you have to announce within six months before introducing nuclear material in any machines that you're going to do so.
02:29:34.500And they have developed, quite frankly, a latent nuclear deterrent.
02:29:39.460So that makes them what they call a threshold state, the same as Brazil or Germany or Japan, meaning they've proven they've mastered the fuel cycle.
02:29:49.020They could enrich up to weapons grade.
02:29:51.040But so let's not fight and we won't have to go that far.
02:29:54.420So that's essentially what they've had this whole time.
02:29:56.680The Americans, Washington, D.C., during the W. Bush years, they just lied that there's a secret parallel nuclear program that's really a nuclear weapons program that's going on there, too.
02:30:10.700And the IAEA can't find it, but trust us, it's there.
02:30:13.420And they never explained it because they couldn't because they were lying.
02:30:15.980They just heavily implied it all the time.
02:30:18.060It's a secret, illicit nuclear weapons program as though the thing existed, which it never did.
02:30:23.640And we almost went to war over it a couple of times, but it was stopped in 2007 by the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Fallon.
02:30:30.080And then later the CIA and the National Intelligence Council put out their NIE of November 2007 saying they have not decided to make nuclear weapons.
02:30:39.680Bush complained in his memoir, W. Bush, that, well, how was I supposed to attack him?
02:30:44.220He said, oh, I'm so sorry, your highness, to the king of Saudi Arabia.
02:30:47.640I can't attack them because my own intelligence agencies say they're not making nukes.
02:30:51.600And if they don't have a military program, I can't do anything.
02:32:02.620That was the point was we already have an NPT and we already have a safeguards agreement, but essentially everybody's pretending that they don't exist.
02:32:10.180The Western media is following the Likud party line, that there's essentially nothing stopping Iran from making a nuke right now if we don't hit them.
02:32:17.320So Obama said, fine, we'll just add another layer of deal on top of that.
02:32:21.240But the Iran deal was a way to keep Netanyahu from starting over with Iran and dragging us in.
02:32:29.720Yes, although I think he was bluffing.
02:32:33.400I don't think Netanyahu really was going to do it back then.
02:32:36.220I think he did it here because he had Trump's permission.
02:32:39.600I don't think, I don't know if you know, but I don't know that it's really clear exactly.
02:32:44.040But I think at that time he was really just bluffing and was trying to get Obama to do something, at least to roll back their program, if not completely eliminate it.
02:32:55.020But so what they did was the JCPOA, you know, Trump called it the worst deal that any men ever signed or whatever.
02:33:04.200I mean, what it did was it severely rolled back their nuclear program.
02:33:07.900So they poured concrete in their Iraq, that's A-R-A-K, their Iraq heavy water reactor.
02:33:12.780They severely restricted the number of centrifuges spinning at Natanz by two thirds, I believe it was.
02:33:18.260They turned the Fordo or the comm facility into a research only facility, no uranium production there.
02:33:25.060And then the deal is that they wanted to, the American side wanted for Iran to export any stockpile of enriched nuclear material out of the country.
02:33:37.840So that if they withdrew from the treaty and kicked the inspectors out of the country and started beating their chest and declared, now we're making a bomb, it would take them a year.
02:33:46.640This is what they call the breakout period.
02:33:48.140It would take them a year to have enough fizzile material to make a single gun type nuke out of.
02:33:54.000And so they wanted to make it that difficult.
02:33:57.360So they would have to ship out all their uranium to France and the French would turn it into fuel rods and ship it back.
02:34:02.500And they would burn that in their heavy water reactor.
02:34:04.860Now, there's two routes to the nuclear bomb.
02:34:09.280We're just talking about fission bombs, atom bombs.
02:34:11.680The plutonium route, like the Nagasaki bomb, was already precluded because even though their heavy water reactor produces plutonium waste, it's heavily polluted with other isotopes.
02:34:21.860And so you need a reprocessing facility to get all that out to make usable fuel.
02:34:26.100They don't have that reprocessing facility.
02:34:28.480The Russians had the right to come and get all their waste and take it back to Russia to be diluted down there.
02:34:34.060So there was no plutonium route to the bomb.
02:34:36.160Now, the uranium route to the bomb is interesting because, and this is something that you may have been referring to about, I make corrections when I'm wrong.
02:34:43.480I had overstated this on the Pierce Morgan show and on Breaking Points last week and two weeks ago.
02:34:50.060And so I was trying to fix that with this statement.
02:34:53.840And they did let me go back on Breaking Points to address it.
02:34:57.180That what I had said wrongly was that you can't really make an implosion bomb that you could miniaturize out of uranium.
02:35:12.780But my point more or less still stands because my point was that if Iran broke out and raced to a bomb in that one-year breakout capability,
02:35:23.660it's virtually unanimous among the experts that if they wanted to race and get a bomb as fast as they could,
02:35:30.680it would be a simple gun-type nuke like the kind America dropped on Hiroshima,
02:35:34.380which is essentially a uranium slug fired into a uranium target, and it just causes a supercritical mass there.
02:35:42.140But to do that, it's too big to miniaturize and fit onto Iran's missiles and their nose cones or any of that.
02:35:48.580So if they had, if they raced to a nuke, they would have one that they could test in the desert,
02:35:52.580but they couldn't really deliver other than strap it to the back of a flatbed truck or like put it in an airliner or something.
02:35:58.180Which they couldn't get to Israel and they couldn't use it.
02:36:01.580If they were to even make an implosion bomb with uranium, though,
02:36:06.620it would take years worth of testing and development to get the implosion system right to make it work.
02:36:12.560So they couldn't race toward a bomb if they wanted to make a bomb small enough to marry to a missile to be able to deliver to anyone.
02:36:19.400So in other words, even if they withdrew from the deridi, kicked out the inspectors and started making nukes,
02:36:25.160it's very likely that their first nuke or two would be simple, undeliverable gun-type nukes.
02:36:31.680That would be not much more of a deterrent than their latent deterrent.
02:36:36.580So now Trump gets out of the deal in 2018 at Netanyahu's behest, and there were problems with the deal.
02:36:44.280So it had sunset provisions in it that said, you know, after a certain period of time,
02:36:48.860you can increase your number of centrifuges again and these other things.
02:36:53.380Now, I believe that if Trump had come in and told Netanyahu to pipe down, in his first term, I mean,
02:36:59.260and had said to the Ayatollah, now listen, I don't like this deal.
02:37:03.820It was my predecessor's deal, and I want to improve it.