The Tucker Carlson Show - Scott Horton： Coups, WMDs, & CIA – A Deep Dive Into What Led to the US⧸Israeli War With Iran

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00:00:30.320 Scott Horton, thank you.

00:00:32.240 So we appear to be in the middle of a war with Iran.

00:00:35.040 It's on pause, thank heaven, at the moment.

00:00:37.260 But we are in some sort of conflict with Iran.

00:00:40.160 And whatever you think of that, I think it's important to know how we got here.

00:00:43.800 And that context is wholly missing from most coverage, which is crazy.

00:00:49.700 It's a little bit like assessing a marriage the day the divorce is filed.

00:00:53.060 Like, you can take a side or not, but there's a story there.

00:00:56.700 And the question is, where do you get the story?

00:00:58.500 And, you know, Wikipedia is not a reliable narrator.

00:01:02.100 I know it's full of historians.

00:01:03.900 You're someone I think I consider honest and well-informed.

00:01:07.620 You've written a book on it.

00:01:09.520 Enough already.

00:01:10.160 But most important, from my perspective, is that if you make a mistake, you will admit it.

00:01:16.980 If you were wrong, you will admit it immediately and apologize.

00:01:20.040 And for me, that's the acid test.

00:01:21.280 Like, is a person honest?

00:01:22.240 I don't know.

00:01:22.740 Does he admit fault?

00:01:23.420 And you do.

00:01:24.980 So people can assess what they think of the story you're about to tell.

00:01:28.540 This is not a conversation for everyone.

00:01:30.620 This is a conversation for people who are interested in knowing the backstory, how we got here.

00:01:38.420 And so with that, I will just ask you to start wherever you think the story begins.

00:01:41.680 How did we get into a war with Iran?

00:01:43.440 Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me here, Tucker.

00:02:06.580 It's truly an honor to be here with you.

00:02:08.180 And the story begins, as I think a lot of people know, back in 1953 with the coup against

00:02:15.020 Mohamed Mossadegh, who was the democratically elected prime minister of the country, and

00:02:19.280 the reinstallation of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, who was the monarch and the son of the previous

00:02:24.860 dictator.

00:02:26.120 And there's actually a really great CIA history of that, declassified history of that by a guy

00:02:32.320 named Donald Wilber, where this is where they coined the phrase blowback.

00:02:36.720 And he says, you know, agents should be aware of the danger of blowback coming down the

00:02:42.000 line when we do projects like this.

00:02:44.740 And so then in CIA-

00:02:45.560 This is an internal history written by CIA for CIA?

00:02:48.580 Right.

00:02:49.000 And later published by James Risen at the New York Times.

00:02:52.400 Oh.

00:02:53.040 And so as there's a former CIA analyst named Chalmers Johnson, who turned a great opponent

00:02:59.600 of empire in his later years after the Cold War.

00:03:03.200 Uh, but he explained, he had been a professor at USC and a contract analyst for CIA, and

00:03:09.520 he explained that blowback really meant not just consequences, but it meant the long-term

00:03:13.600 consequences of secret foreign policies.

00:03:16.340 So when they come due, the American public at large is unaware of the true causes and are

00:03:21.520 then left open or susceptible to misleading interpretations of what's happening.

00:03:26.420 So then the Iranian revolution in 1979 is the perfect example of that. 0.98

00:03:31.380 If you ask people of that generation who were around then, all they remember is Iranians

00:03:36.480 chanting death to America and burning American flags. 0.98

00:03:39.720 These people hate us.

00:03:41.200 I knew a guy, I just met a guy one day who explained, well, the bin Ladenites, they have 1.00

00:03:45.940 all these complicated reasons for hating us, but the Iranians, they just hate us because 1.00

00:03:50.140 I remember them burning our flag.

00:03:51.560 Yes, I do too, and it was infuriating and upsetting.

00:03:55.920 But that's the beginning of the story for most people there, even if they go back.

00:03:59.640 But that was actually 26 years after America had installed a dictator to rule over those

00:04:05.160 people.

00:04:06.060 And in fact, when Nixon started getting us out of Vietnam, he realized he needed to bribe

00:04:11.180 the military industrial complex in another way.

00:04:13.460 And so he started putting pressure on the Shah to increase weapons purchases from the United

00:04:17.700 States, which he really couldn't afford and helped to undermine his rule.

00:04:21.580 This is where the Iranians got their F-4s and F-14s from, was from Nixon and Ford during 0.86

00:04:26.460 that time.

00:04:27.700 And then there's a famous clip-

00:04:30.060 His military spending, of course, was in decline as we withdrew from Vietnam.

00:04:33.420 Right.

00:04:34.040 And so they needed to keep the big companies on the dole, right?

00:04:37.620 Keep them happy.

00:04:38.640 And so the military industrial complex firms.

00:04:41.420 And so this was one of the ways that they did it, but the Shah couldn't really afford it. 0.73

00:04:45.880 And it really helped to undermine his rule in the country, which is a very poor country.

00:04:49.680 And he's buying all this first world military equipment on the taxpayer's dime there.

00:04:54.580 And there's a clip of Jimmy Carter toasting the Shah at his birthday and calling him your

00:04:59.320 majesty and saying, the stability of your country is a testament to your people's love for your

00:05:04.820 rule over them.

00:05:06.320 And people can find that on YouTube.

00:05:08.900 And this is just months before the revolution breaks out.

00:05:11.880 And what had happened with the revolution was that the Shah's rule was weakened because

00:05:18.240 he had cancer and he had to leave the country anyway to try to get cancer treatment.

00:05:22.960 And the revolution was breaking out all over the country.

00:05:26.880 And it was a real popular revolution.

00:05:29.540 And now I remembered this and I actually remembered it wrong.

00:05:32.160 I thought I remembered the Ayatollah walking up the stairs.

00:05:34.380 I couldn't find that footage.

00:05:35.520 I did find footage of the Ayatollah on the plane on the way back to Iran from Paris, France.

00:05:42.540 Oh, yeah.

00:05:42.980 And he's being interviewed by Peter Jennings, who's asking him, so how do you feel about

00:05:47.160 your triumphant return to Iran right now?

00:05:49.220 And this kind of thing.

00:05:50.320 Well, I remember even as a kid wondering, but aren't the French our friends?

00:05:55.060 And why would they send the Ayatollah back to Iran to inherit this deadly anti-American

00:05:59.840 revolution if that wasn't what America wanted?

00:06:02.560 But the answer is, that is what America wanted.

00:06:05.820 The CIA and the State Department had advised Jimmy Carter that we know this guy.

00:06:10.880 Khomeini, he's not so bad. 0.99

00:06:12.740 He was part of a Shiite group that we helped to agitate against Mohamed Mosaddegh back in

00:06:17.760 53.

00:06:18.620 We can work with him.

00:06:20.360 And a State Department guy named William Sullivan, I believe he was the ambassador, William Sullivan

00:06:25.300 compared him to Mahatma Gandhi.

00:06:28.100 And so...

00:06:29.020 I remember this.

00:06:29.420 And in fact, I remember one of the hostages, a State Department guy, possibly a CIA guy,

00:06:34.960 but who, you know, spent 444 days in the embassy when he got out saying, wow, I miscalled that

00:06:40.880 one.

00:06:41.780 Like, because I think it was a pretty conventional view that the Ayatollah was more reasonable

00:06:48.200 than he turned out to be.

00:06:49.180 Well, and the thing is, too, though, is everybody conflates the whole revolution into one big

00:06:55.900 scene with especially the hostage crisis.

00:06:58.040 That's what everyone remembers in their popular imagination, right?

00:07:00.680 But the revolution was successful by February 1979.

00:07:07.540 America spent the rest of the year between then and November trying to work with the Ayatollah's 0.99

00:07:13.660 new government, warning him about threats from Saddam Hussein, who was a former CIA asset

00:07:18.720 and who had just taken over Iraq in a bloody coup against his predecessor, al-Bakr, that

00:07:24.400 same year.

00:07:25.200 And people can find video of that coup, by the way, where Saddam takes over and orders

00:07:29.100 all his enemies taken out back and shot in the middle of the thing.

00:07:31.900 It's crazy footage.

00:07:32.920 And they were warning the Ayatollah's new regime about threats from Saddam and threats

00:07:37.880 from the USSR and the potential that the Soviet Union would invade Iran throughout that year.

00:07:43.840 But then what happened was that in November, David Rockefeller, who is the chairman of the

00:07:50.340 Chase Manhattan Bank and the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, an extremely

00:07:53.840 influential guy, sort of the George Soros of his day, very politically influential billionaire

00:07:59.380 type, he intervened with Carter and asked Carter to let the Shah into the United States

00:08:05.580 for cancer treatment.

00:08:07.200 And that was what caused the riot, because the signal was sent that, at least they interpreted

00:08:13.220 it, that to mean America was going to nurse the Shah back to health and then reinstall him 0.98

00:08:17.160 in power in a counter-revolution.

00:08:19.420 And so that was when, and it very well may have been the IRGC and the Revolutionary Guard

00:08:23.760 Corps that started the riot.

00:08:25.880 They say it was a spontaneous student uprising thing, who knows.

00:08:29.360 But that was when they sacked the embassy and seized the hostages.

00:08:32.320 Obviously not justifying that, but it's just, that was obviously the CIA station in the country

00:08:37.160 is in the embassy.

00:08:38.120 That was where they had waged the counter-revolution of 53, the coup d'etat of 53, to reinstall the

00:08:44.600 Shah then.

00:08:45.480 And that was what led to the sacking of the embassy.

00:08:48.360 That's fascinating.

00:08:49.020 So that wasn't until November of 79.

00:08:50.800 So from February to November, we were in contact with the Ayatollah, the U.S. government was

00:08:56.400 in contact.

00:08:57.460 Do we know what David Rockefeller's motive would be?

00:09:00.900 I think the Shah was his friend and he was dying.

00:09:04.200 Just straightforward.

00:09:05.420 Yeah, I believe that was the whole of it.

00:09:07.640 He was in Mexico, I think, before he came to the United States.

00:09:09.960 Right.

00:09:10.240 And so then that was what touched off the crisis.

00:09:13.300 Then there was Operation Eagle Claw, where they sent in, you know, primordial JSOC, right, 0.99

00:09:18.920 to go, and that was a catastrophe, where they were actually leaving.

00:09:23.540 Enough planes and helicopters had broken down in the desert, where they were going to turn

00:09:27.520 around and leave. 0.56

00:09:28.100 But then on turning around and leaving, one of the helicopters crashed into one of the

00:09:31.220 planes.

00:09:32.020 I'm sorry, I forget the number of people who were killed, but a few guys were killed.

00:09:35.700 And it was a total embarrassment and a disaster.

00:09:38.140 So then in reaction to that, Carter came in, and in his State of the Union address in 1980,

00:09:43.420 he announced the Carter Doctrine.

00:09:44.860 This was a big new Brzezinski's doctrine, really, that said that now the entire Persian

00:09:49.620 Gulf is an American lake.

00:09:52.000 And we essentially are giving a war guarantee to Iran that we just lost control of. 0.91

00:09:57.620 But saying, essentially warning that no power, read the USSR, better consider rolling into 0.73

00:10:03.300 the Persian Gulf and trying to establish dominance there.

00:10:06.700 We'll establish it first.

00:10:08.580 And now, let me stop for a second, because I really should have talked about Afghanistan at

00:10:12.020 the same time.

00:10:12.620 The Soviets, the same year, 1979, the Soviets had a problem with their sock puppet dictator,

00:10:19.720 Hafezullah Amin.

00:10:20.920 He was basically no good at being a dictator, and the country was falling apart.

00:10:25.840 And so in July of 79, at Brzezinski's insistence, Carter signed a finding authorizing the CIA to

00:10:33.280 begin support for the Mujahideen there.

00:10:35.400 It was not all that much at first, but it was working with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to

00:10:39.540 support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

00:10:41.020 The Soviets did invade in 79.

00:10:43.940 And I don't actually have any direct causation there that they invaded because of the American

00:10:47.820 intervention.

00:10:48.760 But that is why America was trying to intervene there.

00:10:51.880 Walter Slocum and Zbigniew Brzezinski had this, Slocum was a Defense Department official,

00:10:57.680 a civilian official.

00:10:58.360 Their idea was, Vietnam was so bad for us.

00:11:03.580 The word itself wasn't even a country anymore. 0.99

00:11:06.040 It was a terrible, stupid thing that you shouldn't have done that cost too much money and disrupted 0.99

00:11:10.060 the society back home in so many ways. 1.00

00:11:12.520 It was a disaster, a quagmire for our society as well as the army there. 1.00

00:11:17.180 So let's not do that anymore.

00:11:18.900 We had the Vietnam syndrome.

00:11:20.220 The American people said, we don't want to do that.

00:11:22.900 So if the American people don't have the appetite to contain communism anymore, what if we bait

00:11:29.080 them into overexpansion?

00:11:30.740 Now, we don't want them to roll into West Germany, but the Afghans, they're essentially 1.00

00:11:34.640 expendable.

00:11:35.680 And if we can get to the Soviets to expand their commitments in Africa and in Latin America, 0.80

00:11:39.900 good.

00:11:40.240 Because they can't afford it.

00:11:42.380 We know they can't.

00:11:43.640 And this is like part of the overall brinksmanship of that era.

00:11:47.060 So this policy was started by Jimmy Carter.

00:11:50.600 And when the Soviets did invade, Eric Margulies, who's a great war reporter who was around then,

00:11:56.860 and Andrei Sakharov, who was the Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident.

00:12:00.740 I quote in the book, both of them saying they don't think that American intervention is what

00:12:04.340 caused the Soviets to intervene.

00:12:06.060 But doesn't matter because that's still what the Americans were trying to do was in Brzezinski's

00:12:09.900 words, give the Soviets their own Vietnam. 0.84

00:12:13.360 And that was July 3rd.

00:12:14.600 I guess tomorrow will be the anniversary.

00:12:15.760 July 3rd, 1979 was that finding.

00:12:17.960 And you can find it at scotthorton.org slash fair use.

00:12:20.720 I have the finding there.

00:12:22.560 And then when they invaded in December, Brzezinski did say this could give the Soviets their own

00:12:28.460 Vietnam in December.

00:12:29.780 He wrote that in his memo there and said, but, you know, causes challenges for us too, including

00:12:35.820 Soviet threats to invade Iran.

00:12:38.360 So that's where the Carter Doctrine comes from is we're trying to get the Soviets to invade 0.57

00:12:42.660 Afghanistan.

00:12:43.180 Then when they did, well, we, Brzezinski was trying to get them to invade Afghanistan.

00:12:48.520 Then when they did, he said, oh, no, now they might come to Iran.

00:12:52.480 So now we got to announce this Carter Doctrine in the Gulf to warn the Soviets they better not 0.97

00:12:57.220 come.

00:12:57.480 And now this is a recent development to me.

00:12:59.840 My friend Gareth Porter found, great journalist and historian, found a document in the State

00:13:05.360 Department declassified records, which is two weeks after Carter's speech, Brzezinski admitted

00:13:10.280 in a private meeting with Warren Christopher was there and they were meeting with the Saudi

00:13:14.580 foreign minister.

00:13:16.720 And Brzezinski admitted that we don't really believe that there's a Soviet threat to Iran.

00:13:21.160 We're basically just saying that.

00:13:23.360 Interesting.

00:13:23.860 Why?

00:13:24.040 Why was he just saying that?

00:13:25.640 To justify the buildup, to justify the assertion of American dominance on the, in the Gulf.

00:13:32.080 May I just go back 26 years to Mossadegh.

00:13:37.380 So the convention, to the extent that people follow this, the coup was arranged by Teddy

00:13:45.040 Roosevelt's grandson, Kermit, CIA officer in Tehran.

00:13:49.160 Iran, this is the popular understanding, and the motive was Mossadegh's insistence that

00:13:54.600 Iran get a bigger slice of its own oil money.

00:13:58.500 That was it.

00:13:59.220 And then-

00:13:59.820 So that's true?

00:14:00.640 Yeah.

00:14:00.920 And then John Foster and Alan Dulles, who were brothers, Alan was the director of central

00:14:04.620 intelligence and John Foster was the secretary of state.

00:14:07.480 They said, aha, see, he's a commie, which he wasn't trying to ally with the Soviet Union,

00:14:11.720 but they were, you know, and people always say that he was trying to completely nationalize

00:14:16.840 Iranian oil.

00:14:17.580 I think that's an overstatement.

00:14:19.020 And I really should go back and research that better.

00:14:21.020 But I know a guy who's a great energy reporter who says, really, he was just asking for a

00:14:25.240 greater percentage.

00:14:26.360 But they use that as an excuse.

00:14:27.840 And see, the Americans wanted to edge the British out, too, take the opportunity to get 0.94

00:14:32.600 American dominance over Iranian oil instead of them.

00:14:35.400 And so they use the excuse that, oh, Mossadegh, he's a pinko, if not a red.

00:14:39.460 And so we got to get rid of him.

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00:17:08.860 And was the, I mean, do we have any way of knowing how popular or unpopular the Shah was during the 26 years he was in power?

00:17:15.980 I know that he had a brutal secret police force that was trained by the Israelis that was in charge of keeping him in power. 1.00

00:17:23.280 But, you know, all regimes maintain their power through fear, at least fear of if it wasn't us, it would be somebody else who's worse.

00:17:31.360 Right.

00:17:31.620 So I think it's very likely that he had probably support in the big cities and less so out in the countryside.

00:17:39.940 If 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.

00:17:53.200 I mean, who in the world is comfortable calling anybody your highness and your majesty and all this stuff?

00:17:58.000 That's so bananas and archaic to me.

00:18:01.480 It's insane.

00:18:02.360 I don't know.

00:18:02.740 Maybe some people really do like that.

00:18:04.980 But many do, the evidence suggests.

00:18:07.320 I guess so.

00:18:08.180 So, 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.

00:18:19.380 Now, 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.

00:18:31.500 And 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. 0.69

00:18:40.900 So now, why would Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran?

00:18:45.580 Well, so everybody picture a map of Iraq here.

00:18:48.600 All the land from Baghdad down to Kuwait and east to Iran is predominantly Shiite Arab territory.

00:18:55.840 They're the 60% supermajority population of Iraq.

00:19:00.040 Saddam Hussein was a Sunni Arab sitting on a secular dictatorship.

00:19:04.020 Yes.

00:19:04.260 Run the most, and he had Christians and Kurds and others inside his government.

00:19:09.140 But it's essentially a monopoly minority Sunni regime.

00:19:13.160 And then lording it also over the Kurds in the north, who are Sunnis, but not Arabs. 0.77

00:19:18.280 They're their own ethnicity. 0.99

00:19:19.720 And so they were essentially on the outs along with the Shiites. 1.00

00:19:23.860 So when the Iranian revolution is successful next door, it's not just a revolution.

00:19:30.180 It's a religious fundamentalist revolution.

00:19:33.080 And the mullahs and the Ayatollah Khomeini take over the country. 0.78

00:19:37.060 So Saddam Hussein is afraid that his supermajority Shiite population are now going to choose their religious sect.

00:19:44.660 And after all, Shiite Islam was born in Iraq and then traveled into Iran from there.

00:19:48.800 He's afraid they're going to choose Shiite Islam was born in Iraq?

00:19:53.820 Yes.

00:19:54.260 This is where the split happened after Muhammad died.

00:19:56.740 Right.

00:19:56.920 There was a split where the Sunnis decided that they would just go by consensus and choose their own ministers and imams, basically.

00:20:02.820 Right.

00:20:03.140 And the Shiites went with Ali, the son-in-law. 0.97

00:20:05.120 That's right.

00:20:05.440 The son-in-law.

00:20:06.000 That was Iraq that happened in?

00:20:07.840 Well, that's where the big battle of Karbala was and all that stuff going back.

00:20:11.880 My ignorance astounds me.

00:20:13.920 That's okay. 0.91

00:20:14.300 I know that.

00:20:14.940 But so, yeah, and like the main holy sites are in Najaf and in, I guess, eastern Baghdad and Samarra.

00:20:22.740 I've been there, but I didn't get the significance.

00:20:24.880 But 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.

00:20:39.340 And they're going to join up with the Shiite revolution and march all the way to Baghdad and overthrow him. 0.56

00:20:44.280 So, 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.

00:20:55.840 So, he had reason to fear.

00:20:58.280 So, what he did was he conscripted all those Shiites and sent them to war instead. 1.00

00:21:02.540 He asked Jimmy Carter for permission and support and Jimmy Carter gave it to him.

00:21:06.060 And he launched the war to try to overthrow the Ayatollah.

00:21:08.560 This was right around the time that the Grand Mosque in Mecca was taken over.

00:21:11.820 Right.

00:21:12.160 That was in 79, right.

00:21:13.760 Right.

00:21:14.060 So, 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.

00:21:25.040 Right.

00:21:25.320 And destabilize every regime with a majority Muslim population. 1.00

00:21:28.920 People were scared shitless.

00:21:29.900 And 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. 0.97

00:21:45.060 Better 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. 0.95

00:21:54.580 I get it. 1.00

00:21:55.040 Right.

00:21:55.540 All these stories are playing out simultaneously.

00:21:57.480 I know that to this day, the takeover of the mosque in Mecca is a raw subject in Saudi.

00:22:03.880 Yeah.

00:22:04.320 You could see their reason for fear there.

00:22:06.780 If you had a credible enough imam.

00:22:08.500 Oh, yeah.

00:22:09.160 Like, 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.

00:22:20.200 Oh, yeah.

00:22:20.660 Well, it's the seat of the religion, that city.

00:22:22.600 I mean, yeah.

00:22:24.160 Sorry to interrupt.

00:22:25.020 No, it's okay.

00:22:25.440 It's so interesting.

00:22:26.180 Okay.

00:22:26.280 I just think it's important to think through, like, what were people thinking given the time and place in which they lived?

00:22:32.680 Right.

00:22:33.340 Yeah.

00:22:33.700 So, yeah.

00:22:34.080 So, in other words, Saddam Hussein had real reason to fear and act the way he did. 0.82

00:22:36.340 I think that's right.

00:22:37.000 I'm not, you know, defending Saddam or the CIA or the Aitola Khomeini.

00:22:40.200 But, I mean, like, they're, like, as we all are, products of the moment.

00:22:43.440 Right.

00:22:43.660 And so, yeah, just, it's an explanation for what was going on.

00:22:48.080 Yes.

00:22:48.240 Why he did what he did.

00:22:48.840 That's right.

00:22:49.140 So, now, America and Ronald Reagan picks up where Carter left off, essentially, with all this unbroken and on the Afghan policy and on Iraq.

00:22:58.520 So, in Iraq, they supported him for essentially the entire eight years of the Reagan years.

00:23:03.640 And the war didn't end until 89 in his settlement.

00:23:06.400 It was, and by the way, you know, Randolph Bourne said, war is the health of the state.

00:23:10.960 Asterisk, unless you lose.

00:23:12.600 Right.

00:23:13.120 Completely.

00:23:13.480 But, otherwise, Saddam Hussein's assault on Iran helped solidify support for the Ayatollah's rule, which was actually quite shaky at that time.

00:23:22.120 But 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. 0.56

00:23:30.480 Same thing happened in Yemen more recently.

00:23:32.380 I know a guy, a reporter in Yemen, who told me, well, we're all Houthis now.

00:23:36.400 I mean, which he's not.

00:23:37.880 Right.

00:23:38.480 The Houthis are a sect of Shiites from up in the Sada province.

00:23:40.920 But they're the ones in charge, and you're attacking us, so now we're all with them.

00:23:44.800 The same way Americans rallied around W. Bush or whatever, right?

00:23:47.560 Rallied around Trump when he was shot.

00:23:49.020 Right, exactly.

00:23:49.660 Elon Musk endorsed him that night.

00:23:51.080 Right.

00:23:51.220 No, there's a, of course, it's a very familiar human psychology, and it's understandable.

00:23:55.560 I don't judge it at all.

00:23:56.560 And so, that's what saved the Ayatollah's regime, which may have toppled, right?

00:24:00.660 It was very unstable.

00:24:01.260 So, 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.

00:24:11.700 That has a reputation as one of the most brutal wars of the century.

00:24:15.900 Is that true?

00:24:16.860 Yeah, my understanding was, in fact, I don't know if you're familiar with a guy named the war nerd, Gary Brecher.

00:24:21.160 He did a really great essay about the Iran-Iraq War.

00:24:24.640 That'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.

00:24:30.300 Just brutal trench warfare, tank and artillery.

00:24:33.200 And 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.

00:24:41.280 And 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. 0.65

00:24:54.480 Do we know that for certain?

00:24:55.260 Yes, and we know that they supplied them with satellite intelligence to use to target.

00:24:59.820 The U.S. government made it possible for Saddam to use chemical weapons against the Iranians.

00:25:04.820 That's right.

00:25:05.180 So, the U.S. dollar is not the bulwark it has been for our lifetimes.

00:25:11.000 It's actually getting weaker.

00:25:12.320 It's depressing, but it's true.

00:25:13.600 Decades 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.

00:25:24.020 Bad decisions in Washington are making you poorer, and it should make you a little nervous.

00:25:28.200 It makes us a little nervous.

00:25:29.460 The entire system is just backed by trust in the government, but what if no one trusts the government?

00:25:33.680 So, one of the results of this is that a lot of people want to invest some of their money outside the dollar system and some in crypto.

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00:28:00.100 So, I've heard that.

00:28:02.820 That's so crazy.

00:28:04.160 It's like Fauci's working with the Chinese to develop a global pandemic. 1.00

00:28:09.020 I'll tell you one, there's many great footnotes about this,

00:28:12.580 but one real great one is by Shane Harris, who's now at the Washington Post, a very official national security beat reporter,

00:28:18.760 did a big special on this at ForeignPolicy.com, the establishment journal.

00:28:23.740 It was, forgive me, I'm forgetting the name of the essay.

00:28:28.340 It was by Shane Harris in Foreign Policy back 10 years ago or something about where did Saddam get all his chemical weapons.

00:28:34.220 But that's just absolutely crazy since chemical weapons were part of, a big part of the justification for invading Iraq in 2003.

00:28:41.560 That's right.

00:28:42.060 Well, we'll get there in just a minute.

00:28:43.320 No, 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.

00:28:50.100 And they even spun it for him when he used them against the Kurds. 0.76

00:28:52.500 That's so bonkers.

00:28:52.920 They blamed it on Iran.

00:28:54.480 The 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.

00:29:01.860 And I was like, back then, y'all covered for him.

00:29:03.380 I mean, Colin Powell was Reagan's national security advisor, right?

00:29:06.940 He was in the administration at the time when they blamed that on Iran.

00:29:11.240 So crazy.

00:29:12.220 It is.

00:29:12.900 And just to linger for one more moment, we know that's true.

00:29:16.940 Oh, yeah.

00:29:18.700 There'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?

00:29:30.100 And he has links to like 10 very thorough sources all about this.

00:29:35.140 There's no question about it.

00:29:36.180 They admit it over and over.

00:29:37.280 Post, Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, whatever.

00:29:40.140 That is just crazy.

00:29:40.620 And then, you know, 20 years later, we're invading Iraq because he might have chemical weapons. 0.69

00:29:49.320 Right.

00:29:49.460 And it turned out-

00:29:50.140 No one mentions this?

00:29:50.920 Yeah.

00:29:51.240 And it turned out years later, the only ones that they ever found in the country were from the 80s.

00:29:56.000 Stuff that America had helped them purchase from the Europeans then was the only stuff that anyone ever found.

00:30:02.300 And that was why they covered it up was because this is stuff that Ronald Reagan and George Bush's father had helped supply them.

00:30:08.440 And 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.

00:30:20.060 But now, so the same time that the Iran-Iraq horrific bloodbath is going on, the Iran-Iraq war, America supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

00:30:27.640 And this included, as we were just talking about, the Arab-Afghan army, the International Islamist brigades or Islamic brigades.

00:30:35.200 And 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.

00:30:49.380 I knew people who did that, yes.

00:30:51.120 And when I was a kid, this was an open secret.

00:30:53.120 They made Rambo 3 about it.

00:30:55.880 In fact, the hero in Rambo 3, Rambo's mentor, Colonel Trotman, tells the Soviet KGB interrogator, we already had our Vietnam.

00:31:06.560 Now you're going to have yours.

00:31:08.480 That's built into the story.

00:31:09.900 That's why we're helping to do this to them, is to break them.

00:31:13.560 And which, by the way, I think worked, right?

00:31:15.200 I don't really think it's disputable that the Afghan war was one of the straws that broke the U.S. wars back. 0.99

00:31:21.920 It was their Vietnam, actually, in the end. 0.93

00:31:24.060 Yep.

00:31:24.380 And 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.

00:31:40.000 I mean, it was totally out in the open.

00:31:42.320 It wasn't, this was not a secret at all.

00:31:44.620 Yep.

00:31:45.200 And so, and then the warlords that America backed, their favorite warlords were Gubaldin Hekmatyar and Jalal ad-Din Haqqani.

00:31:53.880 I remember.

00:31:54.600 Two of the worst throat-slitten, murderous warlords in the whole country and ended up becoming America's enemies in our Afghan war later on. 0.85

00:32:05.400 But, so, this is also the birth of what became Al-Qaeda.

00:32:10.040 You 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.

00:32:19.100 And 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. 0.69

00:32:28.960 Yes.

00:32:29.280 And they had all been, you know, buddies together in Afghanistan.

00:32:33.960 And so, then, all right, now let's switch back to the other side of Iran again.

00:32:38.940 So, then we get to Iraq War I, Desert Storm, Operation Yellow Ribbon, right.

00:32:44.660 So, 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.

00:32:56.060 Now, Saddam owes them billions in war debts, but he can't pay them because oil's trading at, I think, $12 a barrel.

00:33:02.000 He can't rebuild his country and he can't pay off his war debts. 0.70

00:33:04.620 And they're calling in their loans and they're being real hard asses about it.

00:33:08.620 And 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.

00:33:17.360 Now, I do not believe that this was on purpose.

00:33:20.480 As 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.

00:33:25.280 Too many government departments, too many different people calling shots in different places.

00:33:29.280 There is no real one mind running the government, right?

00:33:32.680 It's a bunch of different guys and different fiefdoms.

00:33:34.900 So, 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. 0.98

00:33:47.320 Tell him to go to hell, basically.

00:33:48.700 The 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— 0.97

00:34:00.700 That'd be Jim Baker's assistant spokeswoman.

00:34:02.980 Yes. 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.

00:34:20.600 As Glaspie told him, I used to be the ambassador to Kuwait, and it was the same thing then.

00:34:26.220 This is not our concern. Your border dispute with Kuwait is not our concern.

00:34:30.900 She said, we don't want to see a war here.

00:34:32.700 But 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. 0.99

00:34:37.440 And so, it seemed like what she was saying was, we won't attack you if you attack.

00:34:42.640 And 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.

00:34:56.400 And so, Stephen Walt gave a thorough treatment on it. Boy, it sure looks like a flashing yellow light to me.

00:35:00.760 Now, 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.

00:35:14.220 And 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.

00:35:29.480 And 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.

00:35:42.480 So, 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.

00:35:50.500 So, they really, in essence, like, figuratively, in the end, they trapped him into it.

00:36:00.000 They 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. 0.92

00:36:09.380 And then their warnings, actually, when they changed their mind and tried to get him to stop, were not enough to dissuade him.

00:36:15.160 And April Glaspy, the American ambassador to Kuwait, told the New York Times, we didn't think he was going to take the whole country.

00:36:22.240 He was supposed to just take the northern oil fields, but instead he went too far and took the whole country.

00:36:26.980 But 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.

00:36:38.820 They're not even going to threaten to attack Iraq over Kuwait.

00:36:42.020 We don't like it, but we're prepared to accept it.

00:36:45.620 And that held for three days until Margaret Thatcher came to town. 1.00

00:36:49.960 And Margaret Thatcher essentially called Bush a wimp and said, don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush.

00:36:54.940 And that became a big scandal because she's a woman and she's calling out his manhood. 1.00

00:36:58.920 And he had already been called a wimp president. 0.90

00:37:01.040 That was like the cover of Newsweek.

00:37:02.280 It's a famous Bill Hicks joke. 0.92

00:37:03.980 Cover of Newsweek, wimp president. 0.98

00:37:05.720 And he had to somehow get over that. 0.79

00:37:07.840 So that was when he said, oh, this will not stand and all that.

00:37:10.620 Well, the British had investments in Kuwaiti oil and the Kuwaitis had investments in British debt.

00:37:14.860 But what's that got to do with you and me, Tucker Carlson?

00:37:17.500 I mean, we declared independence from the British Empire a long time ago, I heard.

00:37:20.840 But no.

00:37:21.640 And so they went to run this errand essentially for the Brits to reinstall.

00:37:27.140 And I remember, and I was very interested in this.

00:37:28.840 I was ninth grade at the time, very interested in the war.

00:37:31.400 I don't remember the words, His Royal Highness King Al-Jabber being mentioned once on the news.

00:37:38.000 That that was what the war was for, to reinstall King Al-Jabber to his throne.

00:37:42.780 Right?

00:37:43.180 Like most, I don't even remember hearing that name a single time during all that.

00:37:46.520 We just must protect the poor Kuwaitis. 1.00

00:37:48.260 And 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.

00:37:56.860 Never happened.

00:37:57.960 And the St. Petersburg, Florida Times got Soviet satellite pictures that showed nothing but empty desert out there.

00:38:04.380 And I've known guys who were stationed there said, yeah, they came and tested the border a little bit and left.

00:38:08.120 But there never was mechanized divisions lined up prepared to invade on Riyadh.

00:38:13.460 All they had to do was warn Hussein, you better not go to Riyadh, pal.

00:38:17.240 Are you going to deal with us?

00:38:18.240 He wasn't ever going to go.

00:38:20.100 And then they lied about the atrocities.

00:38:21.680 And 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.

00:38:39.260 And 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.

00:38:51.820 Total hoax.

00:38:52.580 She was not a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion.

00:38:55.640 It was all just a made up lie, but it was good enough to create the moral outrage in the country to get people to support the war.

00:39:01.640 Now, the reason I dwell on this is because mostly people look at Iraq War I as this huge success.

00:39:10.900 It's a 100-hour land war.

00:39:13.480 We 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.

00:39:23.760 And it was just short and sweet.

00:39:26.460 We lost less than 100 guys or less than 200 guys, depending on how you count them from various accidents and whatever.

00:39:32.080 And so it was just known as, it was just wonderful at the time.

00:39:34.600 It was Operation Yellow Ribbon.

00:39:36.240 And George Bush Sr. said, by God, we kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.

00:39:40.760 We're back, baby.

00:39:41.600 Now we can have wars again.

00:39:43.420 And in fact, Brent Scowcroft did say specifically that this was one of the reasons that they wanted to have the war,

00:39:50.900 was to beat Vietnam Syndrome, to give the American people a cheap and quick and easy win on the Powell Doctrine, 0.81

00:39:58.840 and 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. 0.90

00:40:08.940 And it worked. 0.99

00:40:09.820 It was explicitly one of their goals.

00:40:11.440 And 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.

00:40:24.820 Bush 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,

00:40:34.600 which America occupied the entire south of Iraq in the aftermath of the war.

00:40:37.320 And they encouraged all of these Shiites to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.

00:40:43.720 And they did.

00:40:44.520 They took him up on it.

00:40:45.640 People 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.

00:40:53.920 And 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.

00:41:00.560 And 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. 0.98

00:41:09.840 So that's kind of a touchstone for people.

00:41:11.840 That's probably the best way they would ever remember that such a thing ever happened is that movie popularized it a little bit.

00:41:18.620 But so what happened was they were on their way to Baghdad.

00:41:22.620 But George Bush and his national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, Secretary of State Baker, Secretary of Defense Cheney, they changed their mind.

00:41:31.620 And they left the Shiites high and dry, and they let Saddam Hussein keep his helicopters and tanks to crush the revolution. 0.94

00:41:37.540 Why?

00:41:39.060 It 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.

00:41:49.800 And that was why Saddam conscripted them all to fight the war. 0.95

00:41:52.620 Right?

00:41:52.940 Because that was what he was afraid of.

00:41:54.540 Well, 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.

00:42:11.300 And had fought on Iran's side in the Iran-Iraq war.

00:42:14.680 Now they're coming across the border to lead the revolution.

00:42:17.680 So this is the Bush senior administration.

00:42:19.720 These are all the Reaganites, right?

00:42:20.860 This is Ronald Reagan's vice president and all of his men.

00:42:25.240 Dick Cheney was the only new guy.

00:42:26.500 He had come from the House.

00:42:27.660 All of the rest of them had been Reagan administration officials.

00:42:30.500 So 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.

00:42:40.420 Now we're importing it.

00:42:42.060 We're going to be the ones to put it in power in Baghdad.

00:42:45.000 So they called it off and they let Saddam Hussein massacre 100,000 people or so in order to crush that insurrection and stay in power.

00:42:55.460 Well, here's the story you probably haven't heard a lot about.

00:42:58.320 The Chinese mafia is exploiting rural America to create a drug empire. 0.98

00:43:04.040 This is not available on cable news.

00:43:07.100 The network's not telling you about this, but it's totally real.

00:43:09.320 Communist-affiliated drug gangs destroying parts of the United States, the parts that Washington ignores, to sell drugs.

00:43:16.580 Laundering money and building a black market network inside this country's most beautiful but least served areas.

00:43:25.400 We've got a brand new documentary on this.

00:43:27.440 It's called High Crimes, the Chinese Mafia Takeover of Rural America. 1.00

00:43:31.640 It's available now on tuckercarlson.com.

00:43:34.200 It's excellent.

00:43:35.660 The 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.

00:43:44.740 It's unbelievable.

00:43:46.540 By the way, one of the drug houses is like walking distance from my house.

00:43:49.820 I didn't know that.

00:43:50.780 It's a layered and fascinating story.

00:43:53.140 Head to tuckercarlson.com to watch now.

00:43:55.680 We think you'll love it.

00:44:00.440 That then became the excuse of why we have to stay at our new basis in Saudi Arabia.

00:44:07.080 Because we have to contain Saddam Hussein. 0.98

00:44:09.500 The pretension was that, what, he's going to murder every last Shiite in the country until they're all dead? 0.99

00:44:13.860 No. 0.99

00:44:14.200 I mean, the insurrection was over.

00:44:16.460 But 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. 0.99

00:44:26.440 And so that was the principal excuse for the Bush administration to stay.

00:44:31.260 Now, 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.

00:44:44.500 I've convinced Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both, for example, are the worst presidents we've ever had.

00:44:50.560 And personally, I despise them. 0.97

00:44:52.180 So don't anyone take me wrong like I'm saying anything nice about the guy who burned all the branch of Indians, babies to death. 1.00

00:44:57.860 But Bill Clinton idiotically had said, maybe we can get along with Iraq and bring them back in from the cold. 0.95

00:45:06.580 I forgot his exact words. 0.98

00:45:07.560 Poor paraphrase.

00:45:08.100 But he had indicated maybe we can normalize relations with Iraq.

00:45:10.620 Well, that set a few different groups into a panic, namely the Kuwaitis. 0.98

00:45:16.900 And 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.

00:45:28.940 Well, that was a damn lie. 0.99

00:45:30.380 And it was invented by the father of the girl who told the Kuwait the incubator's hoax. 0.99

00:45:35.400 It 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.

00:45:42.880 They've never heard it contradicted.

00:45:44.300 But in fact, Seymour Hersh wrote a piece in The New Yorker completely debunking it before the end of the year called Case Not Closed.

00:45:51.200 And it's about how it was just a whiskey smuggling ring.

00:45:54.400 And they just embellished it into this murder plot against Bush Sr., which is never any such thing.

00:45:59.320 And it's probably part of the reason that we had the War of 03 was that W. Bush believed that that story was true.

00:46:05.400 And I think probably, you know, to this day, almost everybody seems to still believe that.

00:46:09.460 But it wasn't true.

00:46:10.880 But 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,

00:46:25.960 who was the former terrorist and Likud Party prime minister of Israel, who Bush Sr. had tangled with.

00:46:32.100 And I don't think Martin Indyk was Americanized.

00:46:35.520 I remember he was Australian.

00:46:36.880 Right.

00:46:37.460 An Australian and then had lived in Israel and was an advisor to the Likud.

00:46:40.800 So what is he doing in our government?

00:46:42.780 Good question.

00:46:43.580 So 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,

00:46:54.500 when 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.

00:47:02.060 It was—and that's not true of all neocon think tanks.

00:47:05.200 It is the case with Wynep. 0.94

00:47:06.440 There's a direct spinoff of AIPAC.

00:47:09.140 And it was at Wynep where Indyk went and gave his speech inaugurating what was called the dual containment policy.

00:47:15.680 And that dual containment policy was born in Israel.

00:47:18.700 And the idea was where Bill Clinton is saying, hey, maybe we can normalize with Iraq. 0.55

00:47:23.360 Maybe we can normalize with Iran. 1.00

00:47:25.940 In fact, this is a good place to mention that Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had all this egg on his face from the Iranian Revolution,

00:47:32.000 now it's 1993, and he's saying we ought to try to get along with Iran.

00:47:35.960 We ought to bring them in from the cold, and we could build an oil pipeline from Azerbaijan through Iran

00:47:41.360 and to the Persian Gulf as a way that we can make money together and begin to warm up relations.

00:47:46.800 And so instead of having a cold war against Iraq and Iran, we can go ahead and normalize relations with both.

00:47:51.740 And in fact, Alexander Haig, who had been Reagan's Secretary of State, as previously mentioned,

00:47:56.520 found the Green Light memo there, or wrote the Green Light memo that Robert Perry found.

00:48:02.000 He also agreed with Brzezinski.

00:48:04.120 And this is first year of Bill Clinton, and now we can begin to normalize relations with Iran.

00:48:10.060 We ought to build oil pipelines across Iran, and we have those interests in common.

00:48:13.940 You might even remember Dick Cheney caused a minor stir.

00:48:17.100 He was the chairman of Halliburton, and in 1997 and 98, he gave repeated statements condemning Bill Clinton's sanctions

00:48:23.060 and saying we should get along with Iran, because after all, God didn't see fit to only put oil

00:48:28.000 under the ground of countries with Western democracies, but we have to do business with them anyway, and we can.

00:48:34.640 Who's afraid of the Ayatollah anyway?

00:48:36.200 We're the USA, right?

00:48:37.240 Nobody can mess with us.

00:48:38.240 That was what Dick Cheney said, and it caused a little scandal because he said it in Australia in 1998.

00:48:42.540 He said it numerous times, but in 98, he said it in Australia, and that's a big sin to criticize your country from foreign soil, right?

00:48:48.860 So it was like a little bit of a scandal.

00:48:50.180 But what was he saying?

00:48:50.920 He was saying we can be reasonable and deal with these guys.

00:48:52.800 But anyway, in the early 90s, this was a position of Brzezinski and Haig and others that now we can try to get along.

00:49:00.000 But it was the Israelis who said no.

00:49:02.020 They vetoed it and insisted on this dual containment policy.

00:49:06.460 Iraq, because we just beat them up so bad in Iraq War I, they're too weak to balance against Iran. 1.00

00:49:11.920 So America has to stay in Saudi to balance against them both. 0.99

00:49:15.500 This, 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.

00:49:27.400 Bin 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.

00:49:39.920 And then not only that, but they broke their promise.

00:49:43.140 It's so funny.

00:49:43.780 Hey, Bill Kristol one time interviewed Dick Cheney for two hours.

00:49:46.800 Bill Kristol has a podcast.

00:49:48.280 Interviewed him for like two hours and they talked about everything under the sun except Iraq War II.

00:49:52.160 They just didn't mention it at all.

00:49:54.400 But...

00:49:54.680 Is that true?

00:49:56.860 It's true.

00:49:57.360 It's so funny.

00:49:58.080 I can't believe you listened to the whole Bill Kristol podcast.

00:50:00.000 Well, you can watch it on double speed, you know.

00:50:03.060 I debated Bill Kristol once if you haven't seen that.

00:50:05.420 It's a lot of fun.

00:50:07.800 But Cheney tells Kristol that it was him, not Baker.

00:50:11.000 Secretary of Defense Cheney promised the king, as soon as the war is over, we'll leave.

00:50:15.700 And it was on that condition that he allowed America to come to defend the Saudi kingdom in Iraq War I in the first place.

00:50:21.340 And then as soon as it was over, they found this reason to stay.

00:50:24.060 We got to protect the Shiites. 0.80

00:50:25.280 And then later under Bill Clinton, you know, adopting the same policy.

00:50:29.440 The sanctions stay until Saddam is gone.

00:50:31.880 And 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. 0.93

00:50:39.700 And again, this is what really was responsible for turning al-Qaeda against the United States.

00:50:44.280 Well, I mean, Osama bin Laden said that in his now suppressed letter.

00:50:51.340 By the way, reading what someone you despise writes is not an endorsement of that person, of course.

00:50:58.300 But it's essential, I mean.

00:50:59.820 And that letter, by the way, that was only written in 2002.

00:51:02.720 And there's crucial information in there.

00:51:04.840 But more important to me would be his declarations of war from 1996 and 1998.

00:51:09.120 Well, actually, there's another letter that was found by a Wall Street Journal reporter on Osama's laptop.

00:51:16.160 Oh, yeah.

00:51:17.120 That's in there.

00:51:18.020 And it's an amazingly interesting document.

00:51:22.040 And he's like, I'm watching this on TV.

00:51:23.760 I guess I did this.

00:51:25.000 And here's why I did it.

00:51:26.340 And, you know, American support for Israel is the number one reason, obviously. 0.74

00:51:31.060 But also on the list is you've got bases in Saudi, which is, you know, where Mecca and Medina are.

00:51:36.860 Like, what are you doing?

00:51:37.460 Right.

00:51:37.780 And it's, by the way, for people interested in this, you can read all about it.

00:51:40.340 The guy's name is Alan Cullison.

00:51:41.660 It's the Wall Street Journal reporter.

00:51:42.980 And he wrote a huge write-up about this in The Atlantic, which I quoted in my previous book.

00:51:46.980 It's called Fool's Aaron.

00:51:47.720 It's all about Afghanistan. 1.00

00:51:48.440 It's an amazing story.

00:51:49.680 The guy, like, loses his laptop charger.

00:51:52.420 And it's a letter to Mullah Omar, is what it is.

00:51:55.800 Oh, I've forgotten that.

00:51:56.660 Yeah, and so what he's saying is, listen, I know I got you in a lot of trouble here, okay?

00:52:02.120 But 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.

00:52:11.220 Or we'll bog them down and we'll bleed them to bankruptcy over 10 years, the same way we did the Soviet Union. 1.00

00:52:17.820 And then they'll leave, in which case they'll be humiliated in their power weekend.

00:52:21.560 And so that's the game we're playing.

00:52:24.120 So sorry for getting you into this, but that's why I did it.

00:52:26.820 You 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.

00:52:38.360 And I tried to bring this up.

00:52:39.620 In 2002, when the journal finally printed it, I think it was a year lag.

00:52:43.500 The FBI grabbed the laptop.

00:52:45.420 The reporter had a copy on a thumb drive, if I'm calling this right.

00:52:48.940 And it finally comes out, and I read it on the air.

00:52:51.240 And just because, hey, this is interesting.

00:52:52.940 I was at CNN, and boy, man, they called me a Nazi, you know.

00:52:58.460 What?

00:52:59.620 I'm pretty anti-Nazi, just for the record.

00:53:01.700 But I just thought, so that was like totally suppressed.

00:53:04.720 Yeah.

00:53:05.160 But that turned out to be prescient, because it did bankrupt us, actually.

00:53:08.040 Yeah.

00:53:08.440 And so, now let's go back to the beginning of the terror wars here in the 90s.

00:53:13.420 So we have, well, first of all, let's just go through the list of the attacks.

00:53:17.900 They started attacks in 1990.

00:53:20.020 They killed Rabbi Kahane in New York City in an assassination.

00:53:23.940 It was a guy named Nasser, I believe, was the hitman.

00:53:26.920 But this was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, essentially the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman's guys. 0.97

00:53:31.860 So, proto-Al Qaeda, like half of what became Al Qaeda later.

00:53:36.320 And we know that.

00:53:38.420 Oh, Akkadah, the precursor to Akkadah, murdered Kahane. 0.93

00:53:42.040 Right.

00:53:42.480 Now, he was a radical rabbi who advocated the entire expulsion of the entire Arab population. 0.77

00:53:47.840 And just so people know who he was, that was their motive.

00:53:50.880 He was, his party, the Koch party, had been banned by the Israeli Supreme Court for being, quote, fascist.

00:53:57.860 Yeah, they were genocidal, openly genocidal.

00:54:00.280 But you can't assassinate people on American soil.

00:54:03.100 Yeah, so that was what happened.

00:54:04.940 Then the same, essentially, group.

00:54:07.200 Did people, I mean, I remember when he was murdered, outside his speech, I think, in New York City.

00:54:13.020 Was it widely known at the time that it was these radical Muslims who did it?

00:54:18.860 So, 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.

00:54:30.460 I 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.

00:54:43.400 But 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.

00:54:52.120 And 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.

00:55:07.320 And so then they're attacking us here and overseas all during that time.

00:55:10.620 So, they hit us in 1992 at the Radisson Hotel in Aden, Yemen.

00:55:16.340 Then in 93 was the first World Trade Center attack, which, you know, context is important here.

00:55:23.300 Bill Clinton had only been the president for a month and a week.

00:55:25.960 And then two days later, the ATF attacked the Branch Davidians.

00:55:29.440 So, all attention went to Waco and away from the World Trade Center.

00:55:34.380 Six people had died, which was tragic, but it was over, essentially.

00:55:39.680 And it was a bunch of complicated Arab names and stuff.

00:55:43.100 And just the news wasn't particularly interested in it.

00:55:46.340 And 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. 0.79

00:55:54.760 So, it—I mean, what did they do?

00:55:58.560 They set off a truck bomb in the basement of one tower.

00:56:00.780 They were trying to topple it over into the other tower, knock them both over.

00:56:04.360 They could have—it was like four in the afternoon.

00:56:05.880 They could have killed 20,000, 30,000 people or something.

00:56:09.160 At least.

00:56:09.580 And 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.

00:56:18.380 They 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.

00:56:29.020 New York FBI was more interested in John Gotti and whatever other stuff they were doing then.

00:56:33.120 Absurd, absurd.

00:56:34.440 And 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.

00:56:43.440 I'll never forget.

00:56:44.220 And 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.

00:56:56.120 Same thing.

00:56:56.680 He was a Pakistani.

00:56:57.820 Yeah.

00:56:58.020 Um, 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. 0.61

00:57:12.100 So, um, in the First World Trade Center bombing, the FBI could have stopped it.

00:57:18.300 They had a walk-in informant named Ahmad Salem, who was an Egyptian Army intelligence officer, and he had volunteered to make the bomb.

00:57:25.760 So he was going to make a fake bomb, and it was going to be a great sting.

00:57:29.640 And 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.

00:57:43.080 And 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.

00:57:48.620 I'm not wearing a wire, you know?

00:57:50.260 So he ended up bugging out and telling the bad guys, look, I think the FBI's on to me, and left.

00:57:55.500 Well, then they brought in Ramzi Yousef, who cooked the real truck bomb that almost succeeded in topping one tower over into the other. 0.98

00:58:02.580 He 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.

00:58:10.120 And then he got on a plane to the Philippines and got out of town.

00:58:14.340 They didn't know where he went.

00:58:16.100 And 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.

00:58:25.000 They were messing with explosives, and they got busted.

00:58:27.620 And Yousef got away, but the other two got caught, and they got Yousef's laptop.

00:58:32.920 And 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.

00:58:48.380 A plan to hijack 10 planes and crash them into major landmarks in the United States.

00:58:51.980 And 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.

00:59:00.260 So, and they got busted on all this.

00:59:02.500 And Yousef fled to Pakistan, where he was later caught.

00:59:05.080 He's now doing life in Florence, Colorado.

00:59:08.900 But, so that was another huge one.

00:59:13.240 Then 96, they did the Khobar Towers in Saudi.

00:59:16.140 Now, this is 19 American airmen were killed.

00:59:19.260 And 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.

00:59:30.960 The Iranians had no motive to do it whatsoever. 0.88

00:59:33.400 You notice Bill Clinton didn't bomb Tehran over it or anything like that.

00:59:36.940 And we know who did it.

00:59:38.460 It was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shib's, no, pardon me, Ramzi Yousef's uncle is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

00:59:47.340 They were the ones who did it.

00:59:48.960 And we know that from the chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, has told me that personally.

00:59:55.640 Plus, 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.

01:00:05.820 You 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.

01:00:13.020 Well, what was the target?

01:00:14.040 The target was American airmen.

01:00:15.540 It was 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq. 0.93

01:00:18.400 And 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. 0.67

01:00:34.760 They're sleeping in the towers.

01:00:36.600 They ought to have guys with belt-fed machine guns out front to prevent a truck from creeping up on them like that.

01:00:42.220 We'd had the same kind of attack in Beirut in 1983.

01:00:45.000 And so how could this happen, right? 0.99

01:00:47.640 So the lady yelled, you suck at Bill Clinton. 1.00

01:00:49.540 And he had the Secret Service arrest her and hold her for two days. 0.99

01:00:52.540 And that was the only scandal.

01:00:54.220 The scandal wasn't, why would a bunch of right-wing religious kooks in Saudi Arabia blow up our airmen? 0.80

01:00:59.480 Is 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.

01:01:15.880 And so, boy, are we pushing our luck here or what?

01:01:18.360 And we didn't have that conversation because they blamed it on Iran. 0.98

01:01:21.520 And they're lying their asses off to do so. 0.83

01:01:24.700 Why did they blame it on Iran? 0.98

01:01:25.860 Because that was what the Saudi kingdom wanted, basically.

01:01:29.960 I don't know if there was much, well, Mark Dubowicz sure likes that version of the story.

01:01:33.780 So it could be that the Israel lobby had their own interest in pushing that part of the story.

01:01:38.160 But the Saudis wanted that. 0.93

01:01:40.040 The Saudis wanted to, yeah, deflect blame from bin Laden.

01:01:42.920 And there's a documentary about John O'Neill, who had been the head of the counterterrorism unit for the FBI in New York.

01:01:49.020 And it's called The Man Who Knew.

01:01:50.140 It was on PBS Frontline.

01:01:51.820 I think Frontline.

01:01:52.520 But it was the man who was killed.

01:01:54.280 He died on September 11th.

01:01:56.840 And 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.

01:02:05.980 And Louis Free was buying the story that Iran did it. 1.00

01:02:10.220 And John O'Neill told him, come on, boss, the Saudis, they're just blowing smoke up your ass. 1.00

01:02:16.040 And 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. 0.99

01:02:24.000 And so, like, put him in the doghouse and refused to listen to him after that.

01:02:28.360 And went along with the story, essentially.

01:02:31.200 So, 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.

01:02:44.800 Do we have to have combat forces stationed on Saudi soil?

01:02:49.740 Really?

01:02:50.680 You know?

01:02:51.320 And that conversation was not had.

01:02:53.520 And they hit the Africa embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Nairobi, Kenya, 98, in the summer of 98.

01:02:59.500 And then there was, in 2000, there was an attempted attack on the USS, the Sullivans, but the dinghy sank.

01:03:06.740 And then they did get lucky.

01:03:08.240 Oh, I'm sorry, I skipped.

01:03:09.100 At the end of 99, an alert Border Patrol officer busted a Bin Ladenite at the border of Washington State and British Columbia. 0.99

01:03:16.900 And he had explosives and a map to LAX and a book of Bin Laden sayings or whatever in his trunk and got caught.

01:03:23.700 So, that was one thwarted.

01:03:25.220 Then 2000 was the failed attack on the Sullivans and then the successful attack on the USS Cole.

01:03:31.400 And 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.

01:03:46.200 Right.

01:03:46.740 And see, what's interesting here is, well, a couple of things.

01:03:49.380 So, first of all, so that was first of all, those are the attacks.

01:03:53.420 Second 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.

01:04:17.920 And 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.

01:04:27.300 There's plenty to complain about American libertine culture if you're a conservative Islamist somewhere. 0.60

01:04:32.600 But is that enough to get suicide bombers to do kamikaze attacks?

01:04:35.740 Forget it.

01:04:36.700 Right.

01:04:36.820 Bin 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. 0.97

01:04:48.240 So, 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.

01:04:58.760 They were studying, they were Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany.

01:05:03.760 And 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.

01:05:16.660 And what was Operation Grapes of Wrath?

01:05:18.180 This was the invasion of southern Lebanon, which actually I left this out, I guess I should skip back here.

01:05:23.060 Forgive me.

01:05:23.480 When the Clintonites came into power, I did, yeah, this belongs here.

01:05:28.880 It belonged earlier maybe, but whatever.

01:05:32.040 After the Iranian Revolution, the Israelis stayed friends with Iran.

01:05:36.460 And you might remember during Iran-Contra when the Reaganites skipped-

01:05:39.180 With the Ayatollah in charge?

01:05:40.400 With the Ayatollah in charge. 0.83

01:05:41.780 The mean old Ayatollah with the dark circles around his eyes, that one. 1.00

01:05:44.580 Yeah.

01:05:45.700 He was on every dartboard in my neighborhood.

01:05:48.180 Yeah, I bet.

01:05:49.040 In 1980, yeah.

01:05:49.940 I bet.

01:05:50.520 So, but the Israelis stayed friends with him.

01:05:52.560 So, 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.

01:05:59.080 They used the Israelis as cutouts to do it. 1.00

01:06:01.200 You give them your tow missiles and we'll give you more to repay you, basically.

01:06:06.260 And they had this relationship that they maintained through the early 1990s.

01:06:13.000 And it was in 1993 that Yitzhak Rabin decided to turn Israeli foreign policy upside down.

01:06:21.760 They 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.

01:06:30.620 They wanted to back Iran in their east to divide Iraq's attention. 0.87

01:06:35.640 And they wanted to support Ethiopia in their south to divide Egypt's attention. 0.67

01:06:39.960 Does that make sense?

01:06:41.100 But then Rabin said, no, we're going to turn this around now.

01:06:44.520 And 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.

01:06:52.300 Best thing that they had on offer, you know, going for sure.

01:06:55.540 And in doing so, then we'll put aside the last major issue.

01:07:00.480 We can negotiate with the closer Arab states.

01:07:03.320 They already had their peace treaty with Egypt, but they can now make their peace deal with Jordan, which they did complete in 1994.

01:07:09.600 And negotiate with the Gulf states as well.

01:07:15.500 But 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.

01:07:25.540 In a single state.

01:07:27.900 And so, what Rabin wanted to do then was he decided to begin to demonize the Iranians as, like, just politics, right?

01:07:40.900 To keep the right off his back while he's negotiating with Arafat.

01:07:44.560 He's going to say, yeah, but look at those bad guys over there, essentially, and demonize the Iranians as part of that policy.

01:07:50.220 So, it was Israel that turned on Iran first, and for no particular thing that Iran had done to them.

01:07:56.380 They had kept Iran out of the Madrid peace conference, which was like an insult, but it was not that big of a deal.

01:08:02.400 And 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.

01:08:17.740 And 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?

01:08:28.440 You loved Iran and wanted us to be friends with Iran last week.

01:08:31.860 Now you've changed your mind?

01:08:33.360 Like, why?

01:08:34.620 And so, it just had caught them by surprise.

01:08:37.180 What was the relationship pre-93 between Israel and Iran?

01:08:41.000 Well.

01:08:41.780 Was there a commercial relationship?

01:08:43.460 Mostly, yeah, weapons and oil.

01:08:45.180 So, as Trita shows, the Ayatollah would be raging, I'm going to destroy Israel. 0.97

01:08:49.540 That day, he would be taking a shipment of missiles from Israel, right? 0.65

01:08:53.420 And so, all that bluster was covered for their covert relationship.

01:08:56.260 Israel, 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?

01:09:05.260 Yes.

01:09:06.940 Confirmed.

01:09:07.620 Yeah.

01:09:08.080 Getting along with them all the way up until the very beginning of Bill Clinton.

01:09:12.280 But not just getting along with, but sending them weapons.

01:09:14.840 Yeah.

01:09:14.860 Well, I'm not sure when the last weapon shipment took place.

01:09:17.400 But certainly, through the Iran-Iraq war, Israel was backing Iran.

01:09:21.840 And this was a cynical thing by the Reaganites, too, that they would give permission to the Israelis to increase support for Iran.

01:09:28.280 And then they would switch and increase support for Iraq and play them back and forth against each other like that through the war.

01:09:34.080 That's pretty dishonorable.

01:09:35.380 Yeah, it's pretty dishonorable, indeed. 0.94

01:09:36.840 But it also goes to show, though, that, like, all this crap about, oh, when fundamentalist Shiite Islam, well, I don't know.

01:09:42.820 The Likud got along with the Ayatollah just fine, or maybe not just fine, but they kept their relationship all through the 90s.

01:09:49.740 And 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.

01:10:04.580 But then, of course, a Benjamin Netanyahu fan assassinated Rabin in 95.

01:10:09.760 And it was his successor, Shimon Peres, as part of this same strategy, though, who launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996.

01:10:19.000 Now, as I said, Mohammed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shib filled out their last will and testament when that began.

01:10:28.440 Because they were upset.

01:10:29.660 Because they were upset.

01:10:30.520 And, by the way, it's Lebanese Shiites who were being killed here, but there's the same difference to them.

01:10:35.660 They've still felt shared solidarity with the victims there that they wanted to avenge.

01:10:40.860 And then it was in that summer of 96 was when bin Laden put out his first declaration of war.

01:10:45.900 Get this.

01:10:46.340 It's called Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.

01:10:52.380 Pretty subtle, right?

01:10:53.580 Yeah.

01:10:53.660 So, 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.

01:11:00.200 It's now known as the first Khanna Massacre because they did it again in 2006. 0.99

01:11:03.920 But 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.

01:11:17.700 And bin Laden went off about that in his declaration of war against the United States in 1996.

01:11:24.200 Said, we'll never forget the severed heads and arms and legs of the children in Khanna. 1.00

01:11:28.880 And when Ramzi bin al-Shib and Mohammed Atta read that, that was when they decided to join the war.

01:11:34.400 So here are Egyptian engineering students in Hamburg, Germany, volunteering for a Saudi to kill Americans as revenge for what Israel's doing in Lebanon. 0.97

01:11:44.820 Which, Tucker, is why they told you that the Taliban did it because they hate our freedom.

01:11:49.280 Because they didn't want to get into why these Saudis and Egyptians did it. 0.98

01:11:53.200 It's because they hate our foreign policy.

01:11:55.320 The Taliban, most of them had probably never even heard of the new world and had no grudge against us at all.

01:11:59.900 In fact, their government had tried to warn the United States of an impending al-Qaeda attack.

01:12:04.940 And their leader, Mullah Omar, had been trying to negotiate bin Laden away since 1998 after the Africa embassy bombings.

01:12:12.140 And it was even the CIA officer, Milton Bearden, who helped to run the Afghan operation in the 1980s,

01:12:22.520 who told the Washington Post the Taliban were trying to give this guy up.

01:12:26.520 They would say, geez, he's out falconing.

01:12:28.600 We don't know where he is, meaning he's outside of our protection. 0.97

01:12:33.740 And if you guys were to kill him, it wouldn't be our fault.

01:12:36.880 And then the Americans would say, we said hand him over and just refuse to listen. 0.92

01:12:42.360 That's what they're doing is hand him over, you know.

01:12:45.060 Mullah Omar told, oh, I bet you know, Arnaud de Borghrav from the Washington Times.

01:12:49.960 I interviewed him.

01:12:50.540 I knew him well.

01:12:51.160 Yeah.

01:12:51.260 So Arnaud de Borghrav interviewed Mullah Omar in the summer of 2001 in Pakistan.

01:12:56.340 And he said, listen, bin Laden is like a chicken bone stuck in my throat.

01:13:00.080 I can neither swallow him nor spit him out. 0.89

01:13:02.460 So you got to help me, you know, or you Americans need to help me find a way to get rid of this guy.

01:13:07.740 Essentially, there's no love lost between those two.

01:13:10.100 But they lied and they pretended that it was the Taliban who had attacked us.

01:13:14.260 So they didn't want to get into who were these Mujahideen.

01:13:17.320 So now one more thing.

01:13:20.060 So first we did all their attacks and their motives.

01:13:22.400 Now their strategy was to bait us into invading Afghanistan. 0.98

01:13:26.360 And this is, as we talked about, the letter between bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

01:13:30.120 So we're trying to get the Americans to invade Afghanistan. 0.78

01:13:32.520 And then we'll do to them the same thing that we did to the Soviets. 0.99

01:13:35.560 Same thing we had helped them do to the Soviets. 0.85

01:13:38.020 So that was the strategy.

01:13:39.200 That was why they tried to knock down the World Trade Center in 93. 0.87

01:13:42.700 That was why they hit the Khobar Towers.

01:13:44.520 They didn't think we were going to run away crying.

01:13:46.800 They were trying to get us to double and triple down, to invade, to spend money.

01:13:52.100 It's asymmetric war.

01:13:53.180 It's a group of a couple of hundred bandits against the global empire.

01:13:58.400 How do you get, how did they beat us?

01:14:00.780 They get us to beat ourselves.

01:14:03.240 They get, and this is what's poetically beautiful and horrible here,

01:14:08.500 is that bin Laden's son, Omar, gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine in 2010,

01:14:14.880 where he explains, he says,

01:14:16.360 when Bush was elected, my father was so happy.

01:14:20.020 This is the kind of president he needs.

01:14:22.360 One who will attack and spend money and break the country.

01:14:26.320 He says, Bill Clinton fired missiles at my father and didn't get them.

01:14:30.100 But now you've been, this is in 2010.

01:14:31.660 Now you've been in Afghanistan for 10 years and you still don't have him.

01:14:35.920 America then was very smart.

01:14:37.580 Not like the bull that runs after the red scarf. 1.00

01:14:41.380 So the point being not that George Bush's stupidity makes him innocent. 1.00

01:14:45.620 It's that George Bush's stupidity and cruelty and corruption made him the perfect mark for a guy like bin Laden. 1.00

01:14:53.360 This 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? 1.00

01:15:03.740 To get away with bloody murder on his end, which is what the Al-Qaeda guys wanted for our side to do. 0.93

01:15:09.840 And look at our national debt, you might say it has worked some. 0.99

01:15:14.100 They're preying upon national character weakness or tick that Americans have that I have, which is you assume all foreigners are kind of dumb. 1.00

01:15:23.520 Yeah. 0.99

01:15:24.280 And, you know, it's a pretty sophisticated trap that they laid.

01:15:28.420 Yeah.

01:15:28.960 You know, it's not higher math or anything, but it's like they were thoughtful in their attempt to destroy the United States.

01:15:36.120 And we didn't give them credit for thinking through anything that they did.

01:15:40.760 I didn't anyway.

01:15:41.660 And 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.

01:15:58.700 Took them from Afghanistan to Bosnia, then to Kosovo, and then on to Chechnya. 0.73

01:16:04.520 And 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.

01:16:17.320 And 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. 0.93

01:16:31.480 But 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.

01:16:44.140 I never understood the hatred for the Baathists.

01:16:47.680 I mean, they seemed like pretty reasonable, actually.

01:16:51.260 They were our guys.

01:16:52.080 Well, there's that.

01:16:53.620 But 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. 0.98

01:17:05.400 We're dropping our sanctions.

01:17:06.740 He's great.

01:17:07.280 He's great.

01:17:07.680 But 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?

01:17:20.320 Yeah, seriously.

01:17:21.380 I mean, am I missing something?

01:17:23.180 Yeah.

01:17:23.480 Well, the bin Ladenites, they might not be reasonable, but they're not the Shiites, so that's what matters to the Israelis here. 0.87

01:17:30.920 So that's the thing.

01:17:31.760 It's like this monomania about Iran.

01:17:35.560 And about Russia, too.

01:17:36.460 I mean, why were they so determined to fight the war on the side of the Muslims in Bosnia?

01:17:40.860 It was to essentially establish American dominance, to reestablish American dominance in Europe.

01:17:47.260 To put a NATO base in Kosovo.

01:17:48.520 Now I know.

01:17:49.020 And at the expense of the Catholic Croats and the Orthodox Serbs and Russia's friends, the Serbs. 0.96

01:17:54.740 Well, as always, we take this, you know, we wind up abetting the murder of Christians. 1.00

01:17:59.200 Like, 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. 0.94

01:18:08.720 Like, we're always against the Christians. 1.00

01:18:10.200 And I know you probably disagree.

01:18:12.840 I don't think you're a rabid Christian or anything.

01:18:14.940 But from my perspective, none of that's an accident.

01:18:18.940 It sure seems to be the regular effect.

01:18:21.420 I mean, at the very least, they don't care what's going to happen to the Christians when they do these things.

01:18:25.040 They certainly don't.

01:18:25.680 The world's only nonviolent religion. 0.50

01:18:27.700 And, you know, they're the ones who wind up killed.

01:18:29.640 Like, and then you have to like it and you're a Nazi if you don't like it or something.

01:18:32.980 It's like, I'm not playing along anymore.

01:18:34.180 And 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?

01:18:44.520 Let's support a bunch of Bin Ladenite suicide bombers against them. 1.00

01:18:47.520 That's exactly right. 0.88

01:18:47.940 And this is years after the Soviet Union is dead and gone.

01:18:51.040 We 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.

01:19:03.180 It's exactly, I agree.

01:19:04.800 And 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.

01:19:19.940 And we just don't have time.

01:19:21.280 I mean, that's like a five-hour conversation.

01:19:23.100 Yeah, that's another interview there.

01:19:24.560 Are you doing that?

01:19:25.500 I know, just parenthetically here, but are you doing that with Daryl Cooper?

01:19:31.300 Well, so that's our new show.

01:19:32.580 Now, the book actually, he was going to be my co-author on the book, but I just ran way out too far ahead, and he couldn't catch up.

01:19:40.320 And he's got this great podcast, and as you know, he's the most important historian in America.

01:19:45.460 I think that.

01:19:46.260 And I absolutely agree with you.

01:19:48.500 So we just launched a brand new podcast together, and he named it Provoked.

01:19:52.220 I wouldn't have, but he named it after the book.

01:19:55.080 But I'm really excited about it.

01:19:56.700 And is it on America's policy toward Russia?

01:20:00.840 Well, the show, we will be touching on that for sure.

01:20:03.820 Yeah.

01:20:05.440 Well, did you pause before partnering with someone who's so reviled on Twitter?

01:20:11.140 No.

01:20:11.860 I love Daryl Cooper.

01:20:13.060 I do too.

01:20:13.400 We've been friends for years.

01:20:14.760 And in fact, I'm glad, as long as we're talking about this now, I'll go ahead and say,

01:20:18.120 there are people who got this wrong in good faith, and many more probably who got it wrong in bad faith.

01:20:23.380 And 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.

01:20:32.520 But the bottom line, basically, is people really misunderstood him.

01:20:36.780 Some people in good faith misunderstood him as somehow minimizing the Holocaust,

01:20:41.280 when what he was actually saying in that episode was,

01:20:43.880 even if you were one who would try to minimize the Holocaust,

01:20:49.040 even, not you, but even if one were,

01:20:52.200 even that person would have to admit that when the Nazis took possession of all of these people,

01:20:58.760 they had no plan to feed them and take care of them.

01:21:01.800 He wasn't saying that was the extent of the Holocaust.

01:21:04.280 He was saying the worst kind of pro-Hitlerite, like, spinning for the Germans there,

01:21:10.700 even they would have to concede.

01:21:12.160 And his point wasn't even about the World War.

01:21:13.620 His point was actually about the Israelis' responsibility for feeding the people of Gaza,

01:21:17.840 who are not in a neighboring nation, but are a captive population on an Indian reservation there.

01:21:22.980 And so they have the responsibility to keep them alive as they're killing them.

01:21:27.100 It was a propaganda campaign that I, you know, I spent my life around propaganda campaigns.

01:21:31.340 I participated in a few, to my great discredit, but I've never really seen anything like what they did to Daryl Cooper.

01:21:39.220 And they're mad at Daryl Cooper for a bunch of different reasons,

01:21:42.460 questioning the thematic orthodoxy of the Second World War.

01:21:46.300 He's never called into question whether Hitler murdered Jews.

01:21:49.260 I mean, of course Hitler murdered Jews.

01:21:50.600 Like, what?

01:21:51.960 He's not a Holocaust denier or whatever that is.

01:21:55.260 He is a guy who's trying to understand with precision and honesty what led to World War II

01:22:01.900 and what it has meant for the world over the past 80 years.

01:22:05.860 And look, have you ever read Pat Buchanan's book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary Works?

01:22:09.120 And I was there when they tried to basically send Pat into exile and destroy his life and call him a Nazi, which he's not.

01:22:16.780 It's completely crazy.

01:22:17.360 You read that book and you get the idea.

01:22:18.820 Remember when they said that George W. Bush was the Winston Churchill of the 21st century?

01:22:22.700 Yeah.

01:22:23.320 I think that's probably right.

01:22:24.780 That Winston Churchill was the George W. Bush of the 20th century.

01:22:27.940 Yeah, go ahead and apologize for Gallipoli, then get back to me on whether you get to run a country during another war.

01:22:32.540 Yeah.

01:22:33.060 I would say.

01:22:33.880 So, whatever.

01:22:34.380 Anyway, but the Daryl Cooper thing is, and then add to that, and this is relevant to me as a human being,

01:22:42.160 Daryl Cooper is just a wonderful and humane person.

01:22:44.720 Right.

01:22:45.180 That's the other thing.

01:22:45.920 So, even if, like, I don't think his ideas are dangerous or naughty or anti-Semitic or hateful, they're nothing like that.

01:22:54.080 I mean, that's just a lie.

01:22:55.900 But even, but his ideas aside, he is just a humane person who feels sad over the death of anybody, friend or foe, as we all should.

01:23:08.940 And, by the way, that campaign didn't hurt him, right?

01:23:10.900 Every friend of his took his side.

01:23:13.060 I know, you're right.

01:23:13.600 And had his back.

01:23:14.440 You're right.

01:23:14.780 And Substack said, hey, we got you, dude.

01:23:17.720 You're not going anywhere.

01:23:19.100 And his podcast went way up on the charts.

01:23:22.380 You're absolutely right.

01:23:23.100 And probably, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands more people have heard Mr. Humane explain.

01:23:29.020 It's easy to get my goat.

01:23:30.420 Obviously, I'm falling for it.

01:23:31.620 Sure.

01:23:31.960 Right.

01:23:32.180 Well, look.

01:23:32.560 Who cares?

01:23:33.400 I mean, they use his appearance on your show to try to destroy him.

01:23:37.060 But, like, yeah, no, it just didn't work.

01:23:38.520 And then in our first episode that we recorded last week, we're going to do our second episode tomorrow.

01:23:43.880 But in the first episode of our show, it's at provoked.show, by the way, if people want to look that up.

01:23:47.740 But 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.

01:23:59.320 And he's just the most decent guy in the world.

01:24:01.460 Total stoic.

01:24:02.400 He doesn't get angry about anything.

01:24:03.720 He's, like, the most gentle guy.

01:24:05.800 And, like, there's just no way in the world that any of that stuff can stick.

01:24:08.340 He's as committed to accuracy and honesty as I think you are.

01:24:11.100 And if he gets, again, that's the test.

01:24:13.840 Is someone honest?

01:24:14.940 I don't know.

01:24:15.760 Is he willing to admit when he's wrong?

01:24:17.320 That is, that's my test.

01:24:19.900 I don't know a better test.

01:24:21.080 I think it's better than a lie detector test.

01:24:22.540 Are you willing to say in public, I screwed this up?

01:24:26.620 You know, I was wrong or, you know, whatever.

01:24:30.880 To admit fault is the measure.

01:24:32.920 And he, unlike any mainstream, quote, historian, the Wikipedia historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin or whoever these absurd figures they trot out.

01:24:43.060 Yeah.

01:24:43.480 Whatever her students wrote.

01:24:44.840 Exactly.

01:24:45.420 Whatever her students wrote.

01:24:46.260 Exactly.

01:24:46.800 But they're all like that.

01:24:47.980 Michael Beschloss.

01:24:49.160 Can you imagine? 1.00

01:24:50.700 He's just a liar. 0.87

01:24:51.860 And 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. 0.95

01:24:57.800 But 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.

01:25:04.640 And they have reason to be jealous, right?

01:25:07.460 The narrative is outside of their control.

01:25:09.480 Well, that's totally right.

01:25:10.380 They thought that Morning Joe had a monopoly on history.

01:25:13.920 And, you know, I'm not against Morning Joe.

01:25:15.820 I mean, first of all, I'm against monopolies in general.

01:25:18.100 I'm certainly against monopolies on ideas and interpretations of the past.

01:25:21.840 I'm against the gatekeeping of facts.

01:25:24.500 I'm against lying.

01:25:25.380 And they really, for, like, 70 years, had that.

01:25:31.000 Yep.

01:25:31.200 You have to believe this.

01:25:32.420 And they're in a panic now because, no, we don't either.

01:25:35.120 Not anymore.

01:25:35.680 It's unbelievable.

01:25:36.800 Yeah.

01:25:37.280 I mean, the fact that in a lot of the world, actually, it is a crime.

01:25:43.240 Certain opinions are a crime.

01:25:45.540 Now, I probably don't even share those opinions.

01:25:47.620 It doesn't, but it doesn't matter.

01:25:48.880 It's like no opinion should ever be a crime.

01:25:51.020 Yeah, especially in the Western world.

01:25:52.600 It's insane.

01:25:53.380 You're not man enough to stand up for your own argument. 0.84

01:25:56.300 People go to jail.

01:25:56.820 I mean, it's just like the name calling and the refusal to engage with facts, refusal to make a legitimate, rational argument.

01:26:04.980 It's a threat to all of us, actually, because it's a threat to reason and decency and, like, civil discourse.

01:26:13.040 And the censors were really winning there for a while, but they're not anymore.

01:26:16.420 No.

01:26:16.640 Yeah, and you've got to give credit to Elon Musk for that, for saving X, you know, Twitter.

01:26:21.960 I give, he's in my daily prayers, and I just hope.

01:26:24.400 It's an important thing that he did there.

01:26:25.700 I 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.

01:26:34.540 If there are acts of violence where people are murdered, someone else is blamed for it for political effect.

01:26:39.580 I, again, I pray that doesn't happen.

01:26:41.520 I hate all violence.

01:26:42.300 However, if it does, it will instantly be used as a pretext to shut down free speech on social media instantly.

01:26:49.720 And I fear that that's coming.

01:26:51.280 Yeah, me too.

01:26:52.440 Sorry.

01:26:52.860 Wow, did we get far afield?

01:26:54.140 No, that's great.

01:26:54.600 I 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?

01:27:03.280 What do we hope to achieve?

01:27:04.580 Where does that come from?

01:27:05.560 It seems like kind of out of the blue.

01:27:07.500 I think you've written the definitive book on that called Provoked, and I would just want to recommend it to our audience.

01:27:13.460 Thank you very much for that.

01:27:14.400 I appreciate that.

01:27:15.240 So, but anyway, back to Iran.

01:27:17.220 Yeah.

01:27:17.420 I'm sorry.

01:27:17.700 I swear we're going to make this Al-Qaeda-centric conversation, Iran-centric, again, here in a moment. 0.88

01:27:24.620 One last thing, though, about Bill Clinton's treason in supporting Al-Qaeda in Chechnya is that you might remember Colleen Rowley.

01:27:32.980 She 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.

01:27:43.960 Because 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.

01:27:49.440 I think Katani was the 20th hijacker, and this guy was for a different mission later, but whatever.

01:27:55.900 Point 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.

01:28:02.360 And 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.

01:28:09.680 And 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.

01:28:21.340 I think he might want to crash into the World Trade Center.

01:28:26.060 So 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.

01:28:39.420 And 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.

01:28:48.580 Him and his brother both are Chechen terrorists.

01:28:51.000 They 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.

01:29:05.640 People 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.

01:29:21.580 So that's what they were doing there.

01:29:22.980 There'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.

01:29:32.020 But FBI headquarters said, we like the terrorists in Chechnya.

01:29:35.280 They're not terrorists.

01:29:36.020 They're freedom fighters.

01:29:36.980 Because they're fighting Putin.

01:29:37.800 Because they're fighting Putin.

01:29:39.320 And so we're not against them.

01:29:40.720 We're for them.

01:29:41.440 And so, no, you can't have your FISA warrant.

01:29:43.280 Now, a FISA warrant is unlike a Fourth Amendment warrant.

01:29:46.220 Fourth 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.

01:29:53.240 They 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.

01:29:57.520 Well, for a FISA warrant, it's nothing like that.

01:29:59.020 For 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.

01:30:07.120 I've been surveilled under a FISA warrant, so I'm very aware.

01:30:09.920 I have too.

01:30:10.840 Antiwar.com got surveilled in the same illegal way.

01:30:13.740 And so, yeah, they can get a FISA warrant for you and me, Tucker, but not for Zacharias Moussaoui.

01:30:23.460 So, even on September 11th, they said, now can we have our warrant?

01:30:28.880 And now can we talk to the judge?

01:30:30.360 And they still were told no by FBI headquarters.

01:30:32.660 And 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.

01:30:40.060 Then 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.

01:30:49.520 They could have wrapped up, completely rolled up and prevented the September 11th attack if they'd just been allowed to do their job.

01:30:55.880 And they weren't because, why?

01:30:57.560 Because 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.

01:31:10.620 And they said, well, whatever.

01:31:12.640 We like these guys when they're killing Russians. 1.00

01:31:14.840 And the same thing in August of 2001, Delta Force, that's top tier army special operations forces, Delta Force had been training KLA terrorists.

01:31:25.880 Bin Ladenites terrorists in Kosovo, who then invaded Macedonia in an attempt to create a greater Kosovo. 0.69

01:31:32.500 And they were wrapped up by Macedonian troops. 0.99

01:31:34.780 Kill more Christians. 1.00

01:31:35.700 And ferried out of the country by the Americans. 0.99

01:31:39.960 And this is just one month before the September 11th attack.

01:31:42.960 And I know a lot of people just think that these guys are totally controlled by the United States.

01:31:46.260 But 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.

01:31:55.880 And rather than buying their loyalty, they're just blinding themselves to the danger.

01:32:02.160 And 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.

01:32:09.820 And 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. 0.59

01:32:16.800 And, you know, they had the rendition program.

01:32:19.120 That was in Clinton.

01:32:20.300 That was before Bush.

01:32:21.580 You might be familiar with the statement by Robert Baer, the former CIA officer.

01:32:25.240 He said, if you want an interrogation, you send them to Jordan.

01:32:27.940 If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria. 1.00

01:32:30.160 If you want them to disappear forever, you send them to Egypt. 1.00

01:32:33.340 And he was talking about the Clinton years. 0.93

01:32:34.620 So 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.

01:32:43.520 So that was going on during that time.

01:32:45.560 And in fact, there's a huge and hilarious and important and tragic and crazy clip of Michael Scheuer.

01:32:53.140 Again, the CIA's, the chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit.

01:32:55.520 I know him, yeah.

01:32:56.220 He 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.

01:33:06.000 And 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.

01:33:15.820 Because that was how bad the CIA and the FBI hated each other in their fight over the intelligence.

01:33:21.160 This is why Scheuer no longer does television.

01:33:22.500 This is why Scheuer no longer does television.

01:33:23.720 He went a little nutty in later years.

01:33:26.220 His book, Imperial Hubris, is bar none the best book on the terror wars from that era.

01:33:29.900 Oh, he's so smart.

01:33:30.160 I haven't seen him in many, many years.

01:33:31.520 Me either.

01:33:32.220 I think he was like, he's now a banned person for some reason.

01:33:35.520 I can't remember why. 1.00

01:33:36.520 He started saying, we ought to help the Sunnis and Shiites all kill each other till they're all dead. 0.99

01:33:40.640 And like, I think when they did the Russiagate hoax, he said, it's time for civil war. 0.99

01:33:45.200 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:45.720 Okay.

01:33:46.240 A little bit moderate, I would say.

01:33:48.060 A little carried away.

01:33:49.780 But so that's the importance of the Bin Ladenite treason there. 0.84

01:33:53.820 So now, here's where Iran kicks back into the story.

01:33:57.160 Because 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.

01:34:05.180 But so here's where we get to the neoconservatives.

01:34:09.340 Who's a neocon and what's a neocon?

01:34:11.200 Well, Tucker, everybody always says that everybody who's a hawk is a neocon.

01:34:14.220 That guy's a neocon and that guy's a neocon. 0.51

01:34:15.860 But as you know, that's not true.

01:34:18.160 Neoconservative is a biographical designation.

01:34:20.140 And it applies to, I don't know, 100 guys in the world, something like that, would you say?

01:34:24.140 And 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.

01:34:34.400 And so there's, it's kind of a complicated history.

01:34:38.700 But essentially, most of them were Trotskyites and had become kind of Cold War Democrats and then eventually Reaganites.

01:34:46.680 And in the second and third generation came Reaganites.

01:34:47.920 More precisely, most of them seem to have gone to City College of New York.

01:34:50.600 Yeah, there's a bunch of them from City College.

01:34:52.000 In the 30s and 40s, yeah.

01:34:52.580 And people can watch on YouTube.

01:34:53.740 There's a documentary called Arguing the World, which is a PBS documentary about Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer and all those guys.

01:35:00.780 Daniel Bell.

01:35:01.540 And Irving Howe.

01:35:02.900 Yep.

01:35:03.140 Right.

01:35:03.900 Or Norman Puthoritz, Mitch Dector.

01:35:05.480 And so then there's a guy named Max Schockman, who was an important Trotskyite.

01:35:12.160 And 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.

01:35:26.980 Then 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?

01:35:48.560 So all those people got pushed out and luckily—

01:35:51.560 Well, not just pushed out, but maligned.

01:35:54.860 Yeah.

01:35:55.380 Attacked.

01:35:55.860 Destroyed. 0.98

01:35:56.140 Nazis, as haters, you know, yeah. 0.99

01:35:59.780 And replaced by a bunch of ex-communists.

01:36:01.780 But see, because they were Trotskyites and Americans, they hated Stalin and the Soviet Union.

01:36:06.520 And this is post-World War II.

01:36:08.300 So they became the leaders of the Cold War in America.

01:36:11.160 And all the real conservatives had to sit out why a bunch of ex-communists took their role.

01:36:15.480 It's funny the damage that—I mean, National Review is a joke now.

01:36:18.400 No one—I don't even know if it exists, actually.

01:36:20.940 But in some theoretical sense, maybe it does, but it doesn't really exist anymore.

01:36:25.200 But the damage that National Review did to the country kind of—it's hard to overstate.

01:36:31.400 Yeah.

01:36:31.760 In a very insidious way.

01:36:34.200 Absolutely.

01:36:34.620 Took out all the clear thinkers, the honest people, the people who really loved their country, all exiled.

01:36:41.420 Replaced with Jonah Goldberg.

01:36:43.260 No, no.

01:36:43.600 Right.

01:36:44.100 Like, literally, and Rich Lowry and these other, like, really weird, weird people you wouldn't ask advice from on any topic ever.

01:36:53.240 Yeah.

01:36:53.440 Like, just not wise, unhappy, controlled by God knows whom.

01:36:58.920 You know what I mean?

01:36:59.960 Yeah.

01:37:00.520 But—and that's fine. 0.97

01:37:01.640 They're miserable ones, for sure. 0.62

01:37:02.420 Lots of weak people in the world, but to take out the strong people is unforgivable. 0.97

01:37:06.180 Yeah.

01:37:06.380 That's what they did.

01:37:07.160 Right.

01:37:08.300 And then, so, Leon Wollstetter and Leo Strauss were both also ex-Trotskyites who taught at the University of Chicago.

01:37:16.360 Yep.

01:37:16.640 And Pearl and Libby and Fythe and Wolfowitz and a bunch of those guys had studied under him and then went—them.

01:37:23.880 And then went and worked for Scoop Jackson, who was kind of a Cold War Democrat, right-wing Democrat from Washington State.

01:37:30.000 Senator, yep.

01:37:30.700 Oh, sorry, yeah.

01:37:31.660 Senator.

01:37:32.100 They called him the senator from Boeing.

01:37:33.600 Yep.

01:37:33.820 And 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.

01:37:44.500 And then this is essentially the core of the war party in the United States of America.

01:37:49.400 The great journalist Andrew Coburn says this is—they're the cross between the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex.

01:37:56.080 So, like, oil and banking already had the Council on Foreign Relations, basically.

01:38:04.080 These guys were not so much invited in there.

01:38:06.420 That was more like blue blood wasps in that era and stuff.

01:38:09.460 So, they made their alliance with the military-industrial complex, said, we need money.

01:38:14.200 You guys need eggheads, right, to write your studies and justify your policies and your arms sales.

01:38:19.620 So, that was kind of where that mob marriage was born. 1.00

01:38:22.180 And so, this is how the neocons ended up creating this whole kind of forest of think tanks of their own.

01:38:31.920 I 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.

01:38:43.780 They had taken over at Heritage and AEI and Hudson, right?

01:38:49.400 They had made their alliance with the Olin and Scaife Foundations.

01:38:53.420 And 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.

01:39:03.980 The Weekly Standard, of course, as you know, and the National Review had two big flagships.

01:39:09.020 And, yeah, these were your guys back then.

01:39:11.720 And so, these were the guys who took us to war.

01:39:14.060 They are the vanguard of the war party.

01:39:16.200 And they're, in many cases, directly tied to Israel.

01:39:20.400 And now, I don't want to get you in unfair trouble.

01:39:23.020 I'm perfectly happy to get you in trouble that you deserve.

01:39:25.680 Or we want to get in together.

01:39:27.880 But I don't want anyone to misunderstand me, and especially not on your show.

01:39:31.640 I am not anti-Semitic, and I'm not saying anything anti-Semitic about these guys.

01:39:35.660 The neoconservative movement was a largely Jewish movement, is a largely Jewish movement, because, hey, Trotskyism was only ever really popular in Brooklyn, right?

01:39:44.940 There's just not too many people who were ever, whoever were part of these radical politics.

01:39:50.000 But there are Presbyterians.

01:39:53.600 Gene Kirkpatrick and James Woolsey are two prominent Presbyterian Christians who were part of it.

01:39:59.000 And 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.

01:40:13.940 But 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. 0.58

01:40:23.260 Wrote for Commentary Magazine with Podhoretz and all of the guys.

01:40:26.400 She's a neocon.

01:40:27.680 And I have all the sources.

01:40:28.840 I link to a bunch of great sources in my book about that.

01:40:31.700 And, of course, there's differences of opinion among the neoconservatives.

01:40:34.940 When the Muslim Brotherhood won elections in Egypt in 2012, Robert Kagan said, hey, we've been spouting nonstop about democracy this whole time.

01:40:44.840 These guys won fair and square.

01:40:46.280 We should give them a chance.

01:40:47.260 And after all, they weren't really suicide bomber types in Egypt at that time.

01:40:49.940 They're a bunch of old guys, conservative old guys. 0.87

01:40:52.080 And he said, yeah, they're conservative Islamists, but let's see.

01:40:55.160 Well, old Frank Gaffney at the Center for Security Policy about blew his top.

01:41:00.040 Absolutely not.

01:41:00.960 We should not do—I don't care if they won with 99%.

01:41:03.720 We don't let the Muslim Brotherhood take power, right? 1.00

01:41:05.880 So there are differences of opinion within the neoconservative movement, just fine.

01:41:10.060 But Gene Kirkpatrick clearly was one of them.

01:41:13.340 And there are Catholics who are part of the movement as well.

01:41:16.600 Michael Novak was a prominent one.

01:41:18.660 And I'm sorry, there's quite a few others that are escaping my attention.

01:41:23.360 There are a few other Catholics.

01:41:25.020 Well, the Staff of the National Review, I think, is heavily Catholic.

01:41:26.880 And I mean, you would—

01:41:28.160 I don't know how many of them were ever leftists.

01:41:30.420 Of course.

01:41:30.600 Some of them were not.

01:41:31.240 This is a strict definition.

01:41:32.700 Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're being strict here.

01:41:34.060 So like John Bolton, for example, is not a neoconservative.

01:41:36.480 He's very close with them, but he's just a Goldwater guy.

01:41:38.740 He's always been a right-wing nationalist, conservative Republican, and never had that move from the left to the right.

01:41:43.440 So he's obviously very close with them, but not a card-carrying member kind of a thing.

01:41:48.020 That's the way I like to distinguish the thing.

01:41:50.280 So now, this brings us to the clean break.

01:41:52.080 So David Wormser and Douglas Feith and Richard Perl—well, I should put them in the other.

01:41:57.220 David Wormser is the principal author.

01:41:59.220 Richard Perl is really the ringleader and his mentor and co-author.

01:42:03.940 And 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.

01:42:10.920 But whatever.

01:42:11.640 However, the document is called The Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.

01:42:17.060 And it's written by Wormser for Netanyahu when he becomes prime minister in 1996.

01:42:24.180 He replaces Shimon Peres.

01:42:26.220 Now, he comes in.

01:42:26.980 He also is into demonizing Iran, although he hates Iraq more, I think.

01:42:31.520 But he doesn't want to negotiate with the Palestinians. 0.85

01:42:33.840 He's with the Likud.

01:42:34.920 They don't get a two-state solution.

01:42:36.340 He'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.

01:42:48.120 You want me to deal with the Palestinians? 1.00

01:42:49.440 Well, what about Iran?

01:42:50.940 Becomes the Netanyahu doctrine. 0.89

01:42:53.300 And so he wants nothing to do with Oslo and a two-state solution.

01:42:56.900 So Wormser writes, this is what The Clean Break is.

01:42:58.760 It's a clean break from Oslo and a two-state solution for the Palestinians.

01:43:01.840 And it says, what we're going to do, instead of making nice with the Arab states, we're going to have peace through strength.

01:43:07.160 And we're going to be the dominant power in the region by far.

01:43:10.540 And then no one's going to mess with us, and we'll have peace that way.

01:43:13.340 And what he says is the major threat to Israel is if they want to continue colonizing Palestine, what's left of it?

01:43:21.660 They 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.

01:43:30.960 82.

01:43:32.420 82, right.

01:43:33.800 And so they say, the problem is Iran backs Hezbollah through Syria.

01:43:42.260 So what we want to do is focus on getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, which is crazy.

01:43:49.760 And for anyone listening to this who immediately thinks, wait, that doesn't make sense.

01:43:52.780 You're right.

01:43:53.280 That doesn't make sense.

01:43:54.180 It only makes sense in like a weird Rube Goldberg contraption sort of a way.

01:44:02.240 What 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.

01:44:16.840 And 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. 0.99

01:44:36.000 Well, that's completely crazy and stupid and wrong. 0.95

01:44:39.000 When 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. 0.99

01:44:50.060 It fell.

01:44:51.280 And yes, as we talked about before, this is part of the split that the Shiites went with Muhammad's family.

01:44:57.840 But 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.

01:45:09.600 This 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.

01:45:19.420 It was nonsense.

01:45:20.540 But 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.

01:45:26.320 So then they changed the plan to Chalabi himself would be the guy.

01:45:30.240 But the whole promise was, and this is in A Clean Break and the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States.

01:45:37.400 And the third one is a book.

01:45:39.360 It's called Tyranny's Ally, America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein, written by Wormser with a foreword by Pearl.

01:45:45.420 And they all basically say the same thing.

01:45:47.060 It's all of this smoke that Ahmed Chalabi is blowing about how if we get rid of Saddam, Jordan and Turkey will be dominant in Iraq.

01:45:57.540 And then we'll make the Iraqi Shiite clergy, who are the highest ranking clergy, like the Ayatollah Sistani, for example, down in Najaf.

01:46:04.060 We'll make them make Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran, or yeah, stop being friends with Iran and be friends with Israel instead. 0.96

01:46:13.200 This is completely nuts.

01:46:14.840 But this is what they thought would happen.

01:46:16.880 And so then-

01:46:17.700 Did it happen?

01:46:18.740 No.

01:46:19.180 Because 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.

01:46:31.380 They created what Colin Powell called a separate government.

01:46:33.740 He was the Secretary of State.

01:46:34.940 He called it a separate government run by the JINSA crowd, which meant David Wormser and Richard Pearl and their friends.

01:46:40.800 What does JINSA mean?

01:46:41.920 The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

01:46:44.320 It's now of America, but it's the same group. 0.98

01:46:46.560 They'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. 0.88

01:46:54.760 That's one of their major roles.

01:46:56.860 But it was David Wormser and his friends were the men from JINSA.

01:46:59.940 The JINSA crowd was what Powell called them.

01:47:02.920 And they created a separate government, again, Powell's words, working under Dick Cheney.

01:47:06.700 And 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.

01:47:19.500 And Victoria Nuland as well.

01:47:20.900 And Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan's wife, exactly.

01:47:23.080 And 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.

01:47:33.200 And Salmay Khalilzad, who's their pet Muslim, were on the National Security Council. 0.95

01:47:37.500 Then 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.

01:47:44.520 And 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.

01:47:52.060 And then at defense, you had on the defense policy board, Richard Pearl, Kenneth Edelman, Gene Kirkpatrick, and Newt Gingrich, again, a fellow traveler.

01:48:00.180 Not 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.

01:48:10.640 Played a major role in that.

01:48:11.600 And 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.

01:48:22.860 And this is, we know all about this, especially because of the heroic Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Whistleblower Karen Katowski told this story numerous times.

01:48:31.820 But there's a lot.

01:48:33.040 In 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.

01:48:40.800 I've got all of these, all of the best articles about the neoconservatives in the Office of Special Plans.

01:48:45.960 And 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.

01:48:53.680 Across the hall was the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, and that was run by Wormser and a guy named Michael Malouf.

01:49:01.600 And they were in charge of coming up with lies about Saddam's ties to al-Qaeda.

01:49:06.180 And there's a guy named Harold Road who worked in the Office of Net Assessment, which is like the internal Pentagon think tank.

01:49:12.840 And 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. 1.00

01:49:19.240 And 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,

01:49:36.320 which 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.

01:49:45.220 And the purpose of that war was to neutralize Iran, actually.

01:49:49.020 That's right.

01:49:49.700 Again, I just want to ask you to pause.

01:49:50.900 So 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?

01:50:03.220 Right.

01:50:03.460 And this had been a pipeline under the British in the 20s, and they wanted to reopen it or rebuild the thing.

01:50:08.900 And 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.

01:50:26.880 Well, the right side of the Sinai, that's Aqaba, is that port there.

01:50:30.940 And the Iranians had a secret pipeline that was, I guess, was operated by Mark Rich.

01:50:37.540 I don't know exactly who originally had built it.

01:50:39.660 Mark Rich.

01:50:40.040 Mark Rich, the—

01:50:41.240 Are you making this up?

01:50:42.020 Same guy.

01:50:42.780 And so there was this secret oil pipeline where the Iranians would drive their tankers up and unload oil and ship it to Israel. 0.50

01:50:49.880 But then when Rabin turned on Iran in 93, the Iranians cut that oil supply off.

01:50:56.400 So, 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.

01:51:05.280 In 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,

01:51:13.380 the 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.

01:51:22.680 So when people say it was a war for oil, there's some truth in that, but it wasn't oil for us.

01:51:27.240 That's right.

01:51:28.240 And—

01:51:28.780 Is this real?

01:51:30.560 Yeah.

01:51:31.200 And when I—

01:51:32.180 But why do we care how much Israel pays for oil?

01:51:34.820 Like, what does it have to do with us?

01:51:36.260 Oh, Tucker, I don't care.

01:51:38.880 But David Wormser and them are essentially Likud guys. 0.63

01:51:42.080 I 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.

01:51:49.820 I mean, these guys are very close to the Likud.

01:51:50.720 But what does this have to do with the United States?

01:51:52.400 Yeah, exactly.

01:51:54.660 Well, that was a sincere question.

01:51:56.040 I guess there's no answer.

01:51:57.000 Right.

01:51:57.360 Nothing.

01:51:57.820 That's it.

01:51:58.360 Just the lobby and their control inside America.

01:52:00.880 So when I wrote that book, a guy named Gary Vogler contacted me, and he was the American vice-froy over Iraqi oil during that war.

01:52:11.440 And he wrote a review of Enough Already on Amazon that says, hey, let me tell you, this is the only book that gets it right.

01:52:18.140 This is what really happened and what that war was really about.

01:52:20.620 How do I know?

01:52:21.320 Because I was the oil minister.

01:52:22.960 I was in charge.

01:52:24.340 And he—I published his book at the Libertarian Institute.

01:52:27.240 We published his book.

01:52:27.980 It'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.

01:52:45.120 And he talks all about it.

01:52:47.260 And I wouldn't want to go into too much detail about what he explains in there and how it all worked.

01:52:51.580 But he was, like, front row to seeing the role that the promises of that pipeline played in the neocons' thinking.

01:52:59.600 And Netanyahu bought it as well.

01:53:01.120 And Netanyahu mentioned it in a speech that he gave, I believe, in England.

01:53:04.680 And—or was it at Jinsa?

01:53:09.140 No, no, it was Chalabi gave a speech at Jinsa.

01:53:11.880 But Netanyahu mentioned it, I believe, in England one time that, yeah, they promised they're going to rebuild the oil pipeline to Haifa.

01:53:18.420 So this was a huge part of the neocons' thinking at the time.

01:53:20.140 I remember scoffing at the idea it was a war for oil because I couldn't see how Iraqi oil would benefit the United States.

01:53:26.820 Right.

01:53:27.980 So I was like, how could it be a war for oil?

01:53:30.300 And on the left was all, war for oil, no blood for oil, no blood for oil.

01:53:33.220 But I guess I'm not deranged enough even to imagine it could be a war for oil for somebody else.

01:53:40.780 Right.

01:53:41.140 I know.

01:53:41.940 It's completely absurd.

01:53:43.100 And it's completely real.

01:53:44.400 I mean, people can check me.

01:53:45.940 I have, you know, plenty of notes on that and including—I'm pretty sure it was the Jerusalem Post that reported on Netanyahu's speech.

01:53:55.180 But this is all very findable and double-checkable, you know.

01:53:58.640 It was a huge part of their thinking.

01:54:00.120 And 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. 0.98

01:54:11.140 Because 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. 1.00

01:54:17.840 And then they will tell Hezbollah to leave Israel alone. 0.51

01:54:21.120 And that way Israel can finish colonizing Palestine without having to worry about Hezbollah on their northern flank. 0.95

01:54:26.440 So 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.

01:54:40.140 And I remember having this exact conversation in Iraq in 2003.

01:54:43.580 It's like, wait a second, if this is a majority Shiite country, if it becomes a democracy, it'll become a Shiite country. 0.57

01:54:48.160 It'll be aligned in some basic way with Iran.

01:54:52.360 How is that a win?

01:54:54.220 And you're saying, of course, they knew that.

01:54:56.760 At the time, I was like, don't they know?

01:54:58.860 Don't they know?

01:55:00.420 But they knew, and they thought that that would somehow be good for Israel. 0.85

01:55:04.760 Yeah, they thought that they would have dominance over the new order there, which, of course, they didn't.

01:55:09.540 And by the way, when W. Bush invaded in 2003, what did he do?

01:55:13.240 He picked up exactly where his father had left off when he betrayed the Shiite uprising in 1991.

01:55:19.720 And he took who?

01:55:21.400 The 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. 0.91

01:55:30.060 Who had led the uprising in 91 before Bush Sr. changed his mind and left them high and dry to be crushed.

01:55:36.100 Now W. Bush in 03 takes them all the way to Baghdad.

01:55:39.460 And so that's the history of Iraq War II.

01:55:41.460 That 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. 0.97

01:55:52.280 In what they call in soccer an own goal, like this giant stupid mistake fought for the other side of the ledger.

01:55:58.840 And that they thought that it would somehow help Israel to have a Shiite government in Iraq. 0.97

01:56:13.240 Right, because we would have such control over the Shiites, they would force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. 0.97

01:56:19.000 They would separate Syria and Iran. 0.78

01:56:20.880 And 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. 0.69

01:56:33.340 It will surely lead to the fall of the Ayatollah. 0.95

01:56:36.100 One 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.

01:56:44.820 But 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.

01:56:52.500 But they also kind of shaft Israel. 0.77

01:56:54.800 Like they're not even good at, they're not even good at serving the interests, their own interests, or what they think.

01:57:01.040 I absolutely agree with that.

01:57:01.320 It's like wild.

01:57:02.420 It's so interesting.

01:57:03.820 Yep.

01:57:04.520 I mean, I guess I shouldn't be surprised by that.

01:57:06.400 Because I think a lot of, there are actual, you know, anti-Semites who are like, oh, you know, the Israel people are controlling everything.

01:57:13.820 Okay.

01:57:14.680 But I don't think it's helping Israel very much.

01:57:17.400 It's definitely not helping us, which is my concern.

01:57:19.780 Right.

01:57:19.960 But it's just kind of funny that it's not helping Israel either.

01:57:22.500 Yeah, of course.

01:57:23.080 I mean, the Rabin doctrine made a lot more sense.

01:57:27.000 Let's be friends with all our nearby neighboring states.

01:57:30.140 We have a peace treaty with Egypt.

01:57:31.540 We're working on one with Jordan, which they did get in 94.

01:57:35.200 That's what I try and do with people who live near me.

01:57:37.700 Yeah.

01:57:38.180 I don't want to be at war with them.

01:57:39.540 There was even a time in the W. Bush years when the Israelis were talking with Assad and Condoleezza Rice stopped them.

01:57:47.140 She's really a sinister person. 1.00

01:57:48.640 Yeah, 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.

01:57:56.140 And she prevented them from making peace then.

01:57:58.040 She's the one who prevented Russia from joining NATO. 0.61

01:58:02.600 Well, yeah, a lot of things.

01:58:05.100 In 2000 when, well, this is what Putin told me, when Putin said to Bush, I would like to join NATO.

01:58:11.160 And he's like, okay.

01:58:11.940 And then Condoleezza Rice, I guess 2001, jumps in and it's like, no.

01:58:16.900 Oh, okay.

01:58:17.520 That's interesting.

01:58:18.140 So I know that Colin Powell had put him off in July of 01.

01:58:23.020 I'm not familiar with that anecdote.

01:58:24.520 But I believe in him.

01:58:24.840 I mean, I'm just too.

01:58:25.760 Sounds right.

01:58:26.020 Here I am taking Putin at his word again as a Russian student.

01:58:28.660 Russian talking point.

01:58:30.240 Tucker Carlson.

01:58:30.920 I don't know.

01:58:31.380 I bet we can find it.

01:58:32.480 I bet we can find it.

01:58:32.980 No, I know that he asked to join NATO in July of 2001 and that he was told, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:58:38.060 You know, noncommittal.

01:58:39.000 That was the tradition.

01:58:39.600 He claims Bush was for it.

01:58:41.720 I wasn't there.

01:58:43.020 I can see Bush saying that.

01:58:44.000 That's so, yeah.

01:58:45.300 That's amazing.

01:58:46.380 Okay.

01:58:46.560 So the next big step is the redirection because Elliott Abrams, the neocon, and Zalmay Khalilzad,

01:58:52.060 they realized how bad they screwed up here.

01:58:54.320 And they come to Bush in 05 and 06, and they say, listen, we've really empowered the Shiites

01:59:00.840 and the Iranians at our own expense here.

01:59:03.500 Our side of the ledger is the Sunni kings and Israel and Turkey. 0.70

01:59:07.920 And so we have to fix this.

01:59:10.840 And this is when they launched what's called the redirection.

01:59:13.620 And this is a really important article by Seymour Hirsch from March 2007.

01:59:17.760 And he had a whole series that year in the New Yorker, the coming wars, preparing the

01:59:22.960 battlefield, and I always forget one other one, but the redirection is the most important

01:59:27.640 one.

01:59:28.340 This is where they say, man, we really screwed up by empowering the Shiites. 1.00

01:59:31.420 Now we have to tilt back towards the Sunni kings. 0.97

01:59:34.260 Except the Saudis don't have an army.

01:59:36.960 So what do they really mean by that?

01:59:38.960 They mean now it's time to tilt back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber head 0.73

01:59:44.180 chopper enemies of the United States of America.

01:59:46.660 The fact that al-Qaeda in Iraq was the bleeding edge, the worst vanguard of the Sunni-based insurgency,

01:59:52.480 resisting American and Shiite rule during that war.

01:59:55.760 The fact that all the civilians they had killed and all the people at the Pentagon, all the

01:59:59.360 people in those planes and the towers meant nothing.

02:00:02.240 They said now, this is before Obama ever came to town.

02:00:04.900 This is still W. Bush.

02:00:06.420 They said, we're going to start backing Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, which was a bin Ladenite 0.52

02:00:10.760 group there to try to attack Hezbollah.

02:00:12.920 We start backing the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. 0.80

02:00:15.220 And by the way, this was Elizabeth Cheney, who worked at the State Department for George

02:00:21.700 Bush.

02:00:22.280 And she was the one who created the first Syrian National Council of a Syrian government

02:00:26.200 in exile to try to replace Assad, which was chock full of members of the Muslim Brotherhood. 0.99

02:00:31.080 But big picture, we're doing this because why?

02:00:33.400 Because Israel wants us to? 0.90

02:00:35.060 And the Saudis do. 1.00

02:00:35.880 So Khalilzad goes to Saudi.

02:00:39.560 This is in the WikiLeaks from beginning of 06.

02:00:42.780 And the Saudi king says to Khalilzad, it used to be us and you and Saddam against Iran.

02:00:49.980 Now you have given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter. 0.98

02:00:54.220 That was my take.

02:00:55.420 Right.

02:00:55.680 Just as an observer.

02:00:56.780 I never understood why would they do that.

02:00:58.780 I never got it.

02:00:59.620 So that's the answer is this magical thinking that they would have through Hashemite king 0.97

02:01:05.280 or through Chalabi, that they would have this total control over the Shiites will and bend 0.96

02:01:09.980 them to ours.

02:01:10.540 If the Hashemite king thing works, then how come the Hashemites in Jordan are always on 1.00

02:01:14.900 the edge?

02:01:15.580 Yeah, it doesn't.

02:01:16.620 It doesn't.

02:01:17.260 And of course, they have no rule over Shiites at all. 0.94

02:01:19.280 The idea that the Hashemites are going to boss the Shiites around and say, oh, I got magical 1.00

02:01:23.780 blood that you have to obey is total nonsense.

02:01:27.020 Right?

02:01:27.280 No more than I'm the pope.

02:01:28.760 It's just not right.

02:01:30.260 And it's total, you know, the con that Chalabi was selling.

02:01:35.340 And if you read A Clean Break, Coping the Crumbling States, and Tyranny's Ally, Chalabi's

02:01:38.820 in there over and over and over again.

02:01:40.460 Our good friend, the Iraqi exile, Chalabi assures us over and over again.

02:01:44.920 Whatever happened to him, do you know?

02:01:46.320 He died.

02:01:47.180 He ended up in charge of the oil industry for a while.

02:01:49.580 And then he died in, I'm going to say, early Obama years.

02:01:52.560 And in fact, I'll urge your, I won't do the direct quote and get you in too much trouble

02:01:56.720 here, Tucker, but I'll urge people to go and read a great article by John DeZard at Salon.com.

02:02:02.700 And for people not familiar, an eon ago, Salon.com actually published real journalism.

02:02:07.580 I know no one would think that now.

02:02:08.900 It's such a woke rag. 0.65

02:02:09.980 But they did actually publish real journalism back then.

02:02:12.040 And John DeZard is a serious guy.

02:02:13.660 He's from the Financial Times.

02:02:15.060 And I am briefly acquainted with him.

02:02:17.420 And he's a serious journalist.

02:02:18.500 The article is called, How Chalabi Conned the Neocons.

02:02:24.080 And in there, they quote, DeZard quotes a Lebanese businessman friend of Chalabi's.

02:02:30.160 And he says, I asked Chalabi, what are you doing running around with these J words?

02:02:37.460 And Chalabi said, I just need them to get America to launch the war. 0.99

02:02:43.460 And then I promise I'll stab them in the back as soon as it's accomplished. 0.99

02:02:47.940 Right? 1.00

02:02:48.320 So he was using them and they were his fools. 0.99

02:02:51.420 And there's a great quote, Mark Zell, I mentioned, was Douglas Weiss, law partner. 0.99

02:02:54.980 And he says, oh, that Chalabi, he's a treacherous, spineless turncoat. 0.99

02:02:58.860 He betrayed us.

02:02:59.740 He promised us an oil pipeline to Haifa.

02:03:01.840 And 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. 1.00

02:03:09.080 So it's all just as plain as day in there.

02:03:11.100 He was using David Wormser as a mark. 0.98

02:03:13.860 Richard Perl as like a pathetic sock puppet tool of his. 0.98

02:03:18.620 And they thought that they were smart, but they were not. 0.98

02:03:21.280 And Danielle Pletka also deserves a hell of a lot of blame and responsibility for this. 0.99

02:03:25.920 She was Chalabi's main handler at the American Enterprise Institute.

02:03:28.980 And, you know, card carry member of this neocon faction that pushed this stuff.

02:03:34.400 So once they realized how bad they screwed up, they launched this redirection.

02:03:38.680 They're back in Fatal Islam in Lebanon, Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. 1.00

02:03:43.200 And the Iranian Kurds had a group called PJAK, which was whatever it's an acronym for.

02:03:49.720 But 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.

02:04:00.380 And then their allies are the YPG in Syria.

02:04:03.840 And in but in Iran, they're called PJAK.

02:04:06.760 And America was supporting them there.

02:04:08.520 And 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.

02:04:22.080 And these guys were kidnapping and beheading officers and army officers and doing truck bombings and all kinds of stuff.

02:04:29.580 And so this is America under W. Bush, again, before Obama ever came to town.

02:04:34.120 This is W. Bush saying, oops, I screwed up and I put the Iranians, best friends in power in Baghdad. 0.99

02:04:39.960 There's only so much I can do about that.

02:04:41.820 At the request of neocons who then change their mind and decide, oh, we screwed up.

02:04:45.660 So then all American foreign policy has to pivot to backing the people who did 9-11. 0.65

02:04:51.040 That's right.

02:04:52.080 Back to the bin Laden. 0.96

02:04:53.020 This is like, yeah.

02:04:55.100 So then Barack Obama comes to town.

02:04:56.760 It'd be nice to have sovereignty.

02:04:57.760 Oh, yeah.

02:04:58.380 No, we don't have that.

02:05:00.000 It's somewhere, but it ain't here.

02:05:02.620 So Barack Obama comes to town and everybody thought, oh, this guy's a secret Muslim and all of this stuff.

02:05:07.300 But that wasn't it.

02:05:08.020 He's W. Bush.

02:05:09.320 That was what happened was he was the centrist foreign policy establishment.

02:05:12.460 He was Bill Clinton's, all he ever was.

02:05:14.680 And he came in and he picked up right where W. Bush left off.

02:05:19.400 And it's actually interesting because he actually did assign, I don't think there's any question about this.

02:05:25.440 He assigned the CIA to find and kill bin Ladenite, real bin Ladenite terrorists in Yemen and in Pakistan.

02:05:32.880 And in Pakistan, as John Kiriakou told me, the former CIA officer, there were only 29 al-Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan.

02:06:10.000 He was also bombing them in Yemen as well, which was totally counterproductive.

02:06:14.820 As 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.

02:06:24.140 But so that's like the first couple of years.

02:06:27.920 And of course, he escalated the war in Afghanistan, even though there were no Arab terrorists left in Afghanistan at all by then.

02:06:33.600 But then at the beginning of the Arab Spring, which breaks out in 2011, Obama takes Osama's side in Libya.

02:06:41.820 And this is just as he's killing the guy.

02:06:44.300 He's put down on May the 2nd of 2011.

02:06:50.400 Well, 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.

02:07:00.900 That's all they are.

02:07:01.460 They're the Libyan veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

02:07:03.960 They just got home from fighting with Zarqawi against our guys in Iraq War II.

02:07:07.640 Now they want to take on Gaddafi and Barack Obama takes their side.

02:07:12.380 Yeah.

02:07:12.460 And 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.

02:07:20.200 I 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.

02:07:30.460 And Libya was on that list. 0.91

02:07:32.660 And 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.

02:07:40.540 And they had screwed them on oil. 0.74

02:07:41.540 He had screwed them on oil deals.

02:07:43.200 And the same for the British. 0.81

02:07:45.000 And I think Sarkozy in France, Gaddafi had helped bankroll his election campaign, and he wanted to cover that up.

02:07:50.840 So that was his motive, was trying to take him out.

02:07:54.120 Gaddafi helped to bankroll Sarkozy's presidential campaign?

02:07:57.120 Yeah.

02:07:57.620 And that was one of his big motives for wanting to launch the war. 0.56

02:08:01.160 And then-

02:08:01.520 Well, not a very grateful character, is he?

02:08:03.800 No, not at all. 0.99

02:08:04.660 You pay for my election campaign, I'll send NATO in to kill you? 1.00

02:08:07.560 Yeah. 0.99

02:08:07.800 And what was NATO doing there anyway?

02:08:09.620 That's not the North Atlantic.

02:08:11.320 Well, you know, it's-

02:08:12.260 This isn't the NATO I was promised, the defensive alliance protecting the North Atlantic from the Soviets?

02:08:16.620 I know.

02:08:17.120 Well, you know, help me figure out how Estonia and Lithuania belong in NATO either.

02:08:22.920 As you said, that's another show.

02:08:24.560 So, Al-Qaeda in Libya all of a sudden becomes an ally of Barack Obama?

02:08:30.780 Right.

02:08:31.520 Well, Barack Obama becomes theirs.

02:08:33.640 Becomes theirs. 0.92

02:08:34.220 Yeah.

02:08:34.480 And 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.

02:08:40.100 In 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.

02:08:51.120 Why are you targeting the United States?

02:08:53.420 They've been so good to us.

02:08:55.020 They supported us in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, now here in Chechnya.

02:09:00.300 And then he explained to them, well, you guys just don't understand.

02:09:02.880 We have this larger agenda.

02:09:04.480 Based around what's going on in Palestine and in Iraq and the rest of this.

02:09:08.840 So, some of them had been bribed, but the loyalty really did not come through the leadership.

02:09:13.840 So, some of the leadership was just to, because I think it, well, because he attacked my country.

02:09:19.760 I 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?

02:09:28.380 It's right there.

02:09:30.400 Yes.

02:09:30.700 The main motive was, I believe, the basis in Saudi Arabia to bomb and blockade Iraq. 0.70

02:09:34.860 And then two on the list was support for the Israelis in Palestine and in southern Lebanon.

02:09:39.660 And then it was support for the dictators of the region.

02:09:42.220 Pressure on them to keep oil prices artificially low to subsidize our economy at their expense.

02:09:46.540 And 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.

02:09:57.520 But those were the grievances, for real.

02:09:59.540 And 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.

02:10:11.140 And this is where they started the dirty war in Syria. 0.96

02:10:13.440 And again, why?

02:10:14.480 Because, as David Wormser wrote back so many years ago, Syria is the keystone in the arc of Iranian power in the region. 0.83

02:10:21.580 And 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. 1.00

02:10:38.140 This is like alcoholism.

02:10:39.420 Like, you get drunk, then you feel terrible, so you have to get drunk again.

02:10:42.680 And it just gets worse.

02:10:44.000 It's a government program.

02:10:45.080 It's unbelievable.

02:10:45.740 And 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.

02:10:58.580 The 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.

02:11:08.260 And so, I was just talking about, mentioned the drone war in Pakistan.

02:11:11.860 In July of 2012, the CIA killed a Libyan al-Qaeda guy named Sheikh Yahya al-Libi.

02:11:21.380 His brother is the same guy that George Bush and Dick Cheney tortured into falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein supported al-Qaeda.

02:11:30.300 And Sheikh Ibn al-Libi, and who later Gaddafi murdered in his prison cell in a case of Arkanside, as they call it, supposed suicide.

02:11:38.440 Because Gaddafi was cooperative in the terror war.

02:11:41.060 Arkanside?

02:11:41.860 Yeah, it's when a friend of Bill or Hillary dies under mysterious circumstances, you know what I mean?

02:11:46.360 I'm sorry, I thought, excuse me.

02:11:48.080 They say he killed himself, but boy, it seems like a weird angle, you know, kind of.

02:11:53.420 Then he stuffed himself, he stuffed his own corpse into the trunk.

02:11:56.180 Yeah, and blew himself out the airlock, you know?

02:11:58.920 But Arkanside, sorry, I went over my head.

02:12:01.240 Pardon me.

02:12:03.380 I bring some of these things with me from the 90s.

02:12:05.780 But 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?

02:12:21.480 Well, time to reach out and touch someone.

02:12:23.980 And he put out that podcast in, like, August.

02:12:27.400 Then on September 11th, on the anniversary of the attack, they reached out and got us.

02:12:31.900 Our guy, what was Christopher Stevens doing there?

02:12:34.240 He 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.

02:12:43.480 That we hate the Shiites more, because that's what these foreign client states of ours want. 1.00

02:12:50.620 And so, again, Hillary's bank shot. 0.98

02:12:53.220 Her and Petraeus and Leon Panetta were working together.

02:12:55.660 We take all these jihadis and all these weapons and ship them on to Syria for the war. 1.00

02:13:00.460 So the war in Syria then was never a revolt.

02:13:03.360 The war in Syria was not a revolution or an uprising.

02:13:06.580 The war in Syria was a foreign invasion by American, Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and Qatari-backed al-Qaeda mercenary terrorists.

02:13:16.440 That's what it was.

02:13:17.840 It was absolute treason and against why?

02:13:20.420 Because Assad, the secular dictator, as you said, the ophthalmologist who wasn't even supposed to be dictator.

02:13:26.060 His older brother died in a car wreck.

02:13:27.380 He was an eyeball doctor in London when he was summoned to be the dictator of Syria.

02:13:33.380 Syria, that, well, he's friends with Iran, and he helps Iran back Hezbollah. 0.54

02:13:38.820 And so, that's it.

02:13:40.280 We got to get rid of him.

02:13:41.940 It's just interesting.

02:13:43.660 Okay, so that's a perspective.

02:13:45.160 And whether the U.S. government ought to be following orders from other countries is another question.

02:13:50.360 But, you know, maybe you don't like Assad or whatever.

02:13:53.280 But the posture of the American media was just, it was just crazy.

02:14:00.200 In one day, it went from, you know, Assad's wife on the cover of Vogue to anyone who likes Assad is a bad American.

02:14:08.200 Tulsi Gabbard got drummed out of the Democratic Party just for talking to the guy.

02:14:11.500 She was never even pro-Assad.

02:14:12.960 Oh, I'm glad you brought that up.

02:14:13.860 So, what was her problem?

02:14:15.500 She had been stationed at Balad Air Base during Iraq War II north of Baghdad at a medical unit.

02:14:20.920 So, 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.

02:14:28.540 Why?

02:14:29.100 Because they were fighting against the Sunnis, fighting against al-Qaeda in Iraq. 0.51

02:14:32.800 Now, it's two years later, we're in Syria, and they're saying, we're flipping sides.

02:14:37.860 We support the shirts now against the skins. 0.92

02:14:40.080 And Tulsi Gabbard is like, no, because she actually knows what she's talking about.

02:14:43.600 So, that was her, like, obsessive mission, was to get us to stop funding al-Qaeda.

02:14:49.760 So, she was always for the war on terrorism.

02:14:52.120 She was just against the war for terrorism.

02:14:54.220 No, it's so right.

02:14:56.020 And, I mean, she's more hawkish than a lot of people I respect.

02:14:59.820 She's not a dove, that's for sure.

02:15:01.440 I mean, she's still in the U.S. arms.

02:15:02.660 That's right. 0.86

02:15:02.940 Yeah, she wants bin Ladenites dead, not empowered. 0.98

02:15:06.120 Well, 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.

02:15:12.760 I mean, they're trying now.

02:15:16.000 It's really beyond belief.

02:15:18.900 But her point, so far as you know, you clearly follow this, was not, I love Assad. 0.65

02:15:26.580 No, of course not.

02:15:27.600 It never was that.

02:15:28.900 It was that you guys are saying that these so-called rebels are good guys, but they're not.

02:15:33.760 I know them.

02:15:34.540 They're bin Ladenites. 1.00

02:15:35.980 I mean, I'm not for Assad either.

02:15:37.260 I'm totally agnostic on Assad.

02:15:38.720 But, like, why does the U.S. media take these positions at the order of whom?

02:15:44.200 I don't know.

02:15:44.440 Is there a meeting that I missed?

02:15:45.780 Yeah.

02:15:46.020 Where 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.

02:15:54.020 No one ever explains why.

02:15:56.060 Assad! 0.68

02:15:56.880 And then, who's that?

02:15:58.360 Oh, that, I can't remember her name.

02:16:01.320 The woman who runs the free press. 0.99

02:16:03.600 Barry Weiss.

02:16:04.640 Barry Weiss.

02:16:05.220 All of a sudden, she's like, oh, Assad, he's bad, you know.

02:16:09.480 Oh, Assad.

02:16:11.140 You don't know anything about anything.

02:16:13.040 Yeah, and she called, famously on Joe Rogan's show, she called Tulsi Gabbard an Assad toady. 0.68

02:16:17.640 Well, exactly.

02:16:18.220 And then Rogan says, what's a toady?

02:16:19.840 And she says, I have no idea.

02:16:21.180 Well, she didn't.

02:16:21.660 And didn't know even how to spell it.

02:16:23.500 Of course.

02:16:24.140 And doesn't know anything about Assad other than you're supposed to hate him for some reason.

02:16:29.980 Right.

02:16:30.080 And everyone doesn't hate him vehemently enough as a Nazi or something.

02:16:32.780 I don't really get it.

02:16:34.020 But why, I mean, obviously, Barry Weiss is not a serious person.

02:16:37.860 But there are serious people in the media who go along with this.

02:16:41.020 Why?

02:16:41.680 I mean, it really is astounding to me.

02:16:44.320 I think mostly it's they don't learn anything and keep it.

02:16:47.720 You know what I mean?

02:16:48.180 They're not reflecting on, like, Tulsi Gabbard's going, but these are my enemies from a year and a half ago.

02:16:53.500 They don't remember a year and a half ago.

02:16:55.160 You sent me to go fight them.

02:16:55.400 Yeah.

02:16:55.900 They don't know that.

02:16:57.020 So, like, in Libya before Syria even, it was responsibility to protect.

02:17:03.400 They manufactured this ridiculous hoax that Gaddafi was about to exterminate every last man, woman, and child in the city of Benghazi.

02:17:13.260 Barack Obama said, imagine the city of Charlotte being wiped off the face of the earth. 0.97

02:17:17.220 Well, this is a complete hoax.

02:17:18.660 At least Bill Clinton lied that 100,000 people had already been killed in Kosovo.

02:17:22.740 Barack Obama's just lying that hundreds of thousands are about to be killed.

02:17:25.940 And this is the responsibility to protect.

02:17:28.780 And 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. 1.00

02:17:36.560 These are radical Sunni fighters who just got home from Iraq.

02:17:39.900 And now we don't care about the war on terrorism at all anymore.

02:17:44.320 Now we're doing a humanitarian mission for bin Ladenites. 0.99

02:17:48.660 So how's the city of Benghazi, the ancient port city of Benghazi now?

02:17:52.100 Well, it's under the control of a former American sock puppet dictator named Haftar. 0.61

02:17:57.440 The city, the country of Libya no longer exists. 0.98

02:18:00.080 It was only created after World War II.

02:18:01.740 And it's now divided in three in a state of low-level civil war.

02:18:05.920 And the leader of Tripoli is actually a guy named Bel Hodge, who was a former bin Ladenite terrorist,

02:18:11.500 who was actually kidnapped and tortured by the CIA and the Brits and sued the Brits and won for their...

02:18:17.680 Wait, so you're saying that we didn't successfully protect Benghazi?

02:18:20.960 Nope.

02:18:21.360 Not at all.

02:18:23.320 You used a total hoax to launch that war. 0.92

02:18:24.920 But now, so I know we're running short on time here, but so importantly now,

02:18:30.740 the Obama administration's support for the bin Ladenites in Syria led to the rise of the Islamic state.

02:18:37.800 Now they had renamed Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic state of Iraq back in 2006 after they killed Sarkawi.

02:18:44.180 But they had no state.

02:18:45.980 They didn't even control a single county.

02:18:47.300 It was a joke at the time.

02:18:48.500 But 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.

02:19:01.680 Instead of going west and putting pressure on Assad, they just conquered the east of the country.

02:19:07.440 Then six months later, they raised the black flag over Fallujah.

02:19:12.520 And Barack Obama was asked about this by Vanity Fair magazine.

02:19:16.720 And 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.

02:19:23.780 So in other words, he's calling Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the junior varsity, not real terrorists, not anybody we need to be worried about.

02:19:30.560 Well, 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.

02:19:42.320 From there, they take over Samarra to Crete, Fallujah. 0.95

02:19:46.860 And then about a year later, they took Ramadi.

02:19:49.080 And so the Islamic State, this was the creation of the Islamic State Caliphate.

02:19:52.800 And the leader was this guy, Baghdadi, who was just Zarqawi's successor.

02:19:56.260 He was the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

02:19:58.040 And he had sent his deputy, Jolani, to go and run what was called Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria.

02:20:03.960 And then he split with Jolani and created his state.

02:20:07.940 And so here he's like a cross between.

02:20:09.580 Whatever happened to Jolani?

02:20:10.480 Oh, well, Jolani's actually the president of Syria right now.

02:20:14.160 Wait a second, Scott.

02:20:15.900 I don't believe that.

02:20:17.180 Yeah, so Jolani.

02:20:18.740 I'm just joking, but it's like so.

02:20:21.420 So America fights Iraq War III on the Shiite side again, right? 0.96

02:20:26.360 Because we built the caliphate to spite the Shiites because we're mad at them that we fought Iraq War II for them. 1.00

02:20:31.000 But 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. 0.64

02:20:39.380 This is too much.

02:20:40.100 It's like bin Laden himself owns a state now.

02:20:42.080 We can't do that.

02:20:42.980 So what do we do?

02:20:43.940 We fight with the Shiites. 1.00

02:20:45.100 The Iraqi Shiites we wish we hadn't fought Iraq War II for. 1.00

02:20:47.820 All their Iranian-backed Shiite militias. 0.98

02:20:49.740 These are the guys who crushed the Islamic State.

02:20:52.140 And in Tikrit, he literally had American airplanes flying air cover for the Iranian Quds Force on the ground.

02:20:57.540 And the Americans saying, well, it is the Quds Force, but at least they're helping us kill ISIS. 0.80

02:21:02.100 And 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. 0.99

02:21:10.000 And 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. 0.63

02:21:27.160 And then, of course, spreading bin Ladenite terrorism elsewhere throughout the world, even worse. 0.95

02:21:34.560 And 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.

02:21:49.120 So 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.

02:22:08.100 And then last, end of November, early December of 24, they broke out of their pen in a big October 7th style attack.

02:22:16.760 And they sacked Hama, Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus in 14 days, or 10 days, 12 days, and took over the country. 0.83

02:22:26.380 And, you know, our president said, this is a strong guy with a very strong past.

02:22:32.580 Well, his strong past is murdering American soldiers, fighting and killing American soldiers in Mosul and Ramadi during Iraq War II.

02:22:38.620 So why would he be dropping sanctions against him?

02:22:40.940 Because that's what Israel wants, because Israel hates the Shiites more, and the Alawites were friends with the Shiites. 0.99

02:22:46.520 And so they don't mind the bin Ladenites, even though the bin Ladenites targeted us over Israel's crimes. 0.94

02:22:51.540 They've never given Israel a problem directly. 0.55

02:22:53.720 And, in fact, one of the Israeli intelligence or military officials admitted to the press when he was asked,

02:23:00.260 why do you guys give aid and comfort to al-Qaeda in the war?

02:23:02.780 You give them medical treatment and all these things.

02:23:04.820 And he said, well, you know, it's the humanitarian thing to do.

02:23:07.420 And they said, well, do you give that same kind of support to Hezbollah when they're injured on the battlefield?

02:23:11.560 And he goes, well, of course not.

02:23:12.580 They're our enemies.

02:23:13.780 And the reporter says, yeah, but al-Qaeda attacked the United States.

02:23:17.180 He says, yeah.

02:23:19.140 What's that got to do with us?

02:23:20.360 So they're worried about their national interests, and our country's somehow worried about their national interests instead of ours.

02:23:28.180 So why in the world would any American prefer a bin Ladenite to Assad, a Ba'athist? 0.99

02:23:36.420 Only because they hate the Shiites more. 1.00

02:23:38.540 Only because they put Israel's interests before those of the United States.

02:23:42.300 That's the one and only answer to that.

02:23:46.120 Yeah.

02:23:46.560 And again, if you care about the Christian, the ancient Christian population of Syria, it's been there 2,000 years.

02:23:53.000 Yeah.

02:23:54.220 You know, they're being massacred now.

02:23:56.000 Yeah, my friend Brad Hoff, I should have brought you this.

02:23:58.160 I have an extra copy of this.

02:23:59.140 My 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.

02:24:07.560 And they're in danger right now.

02:24:08.740 There was a suicide bombing by an al-Qaeda-tied guy at a church in Syria three days ago.

02:24:14.260 I just don't understand.

02:24:15.880 I do repeat myself at the age of 56, but I can't control it.

02:24:20.720 Where are American churches lecturing us about those who bless Israel or whatever?

02:24:26.260 Again, I'm not against Israel, but shouldn't American churches care about Syrian churches, about their brothers in Christ in Syria?

02:24:33.660 And they support a government that's like, whose policies basically are killing all the Christians in the whole region.

02:24:43.260 Yeah.

02:24:43.480 That's just a fact.

02:24:44.160 I mean, I don't—

02:24:44.820 Completely destroyed the Christian, the Chaldean Christian communities of Iraq. 1.00

02:24:48.080 They don't exist anymore.

02:24:49.000 They're gone.

02:24:49.500 Oh, I know.

02:24:50.300 They're scattered to the winds.

02:24:51.620 And 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.

02:25:03.060 It's one of the last places in the world where they speak Aramaic.

02:25:05.460 And the Bin Ladenites took that town over and, you know, tyrannized those people for two or three years during the last war there. 0.98

02:25:11.560 Now they're in charge. 0.97

02:25:13.080 They've been slaughtering Alawites and slaughtering Christians. 1.00

02:25:15.800 Oh, I know. 0.99

02:25:16.360 And it promises to get nothing but worse from here.

02:25:19.420 But where are the Christians in this country when the IDF rolls into an all-Christian town in the West Bank?

02:25:24.780 They're reading their Schofield Bible.

02:25:26.260 It says Israel can do whatever they want.

02:25:28.060 Well, I mean, you know, whatever.

02:25:29.640 I'm not—I hate theological debates.

02:25:31.460 I'm not qualified to have one.

02:25:33.200 But 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. 0.86

02:25:41.180 I just don't—I mean, what—you think Jesus is for that?

02:25:43.860 Is that what you're saying to me?

02:25:44.840 Well, 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.

02:25:56.840 And they just don't know that that's not true.

02:25:59.500 In fact—

02:26:00.160 They're persecuted.

02:26:01.020 They're persecuted and occupied along—

02:26:02.580 Well, they'll just ask them. 0.90

02:26:03.740 And if you do ask them, then all these liars in the United States will tell you, well, they're an al-Qaeda. 0.85

02:26:08.600 They're an al-Qaeda, really? 0.92

02:26:09.960 Yes.

02:26:10.300 Some Christian priest in the West Bank is actually an al-Qaeda?

02:26:15.740 Okay.

02:26:16.180 Right.

02:26:17.000 So you want to talk about Iran's nuclear program?

02:26:18.840 I do.

02:26:19.280 Yeah, let's roll through it.

02:26:20.200 It's a nuclear program.

02:26:21.320 Yeah.

02:26:21.420 So the Ayatollah—W. Bush puts Iran, Iraq, and North Korea in the axis of evil in 2002.

02:26:29.600 And 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? 0.83

02:26:37.840 And 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. 0.64

02:26:46.220 And then Kim in North Korea, which he had sold some missiles to Iran, but they got no tight alliance.

02:26:52.740 And 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.

02:27:02.540 So they went ahead and threw North Korea in there. 0.82

02:27:05.020 That's a whole other interview.

02:27:06.200 I like talking about that one, too.

02:27:07.900 But so Saddam Hussein's strategy is to say, here's my 12,000-page dossier on all the weapons I ever had.

02:27:15.540 It's the same stuff his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, had given up in 1995.

02:27:18.980 There was nothing else to show.

02:27:20.520 They knew by the end of 95 he'd given up everything.

02:27:23.440 Any weapons left in the country had been declared and had just been left there by the inspectors to rot in the sun.

02:27:29.180 Shelf life expired anyway.

02:27:31.980 They had no nuclear program or any of that stuff.

02:27:34.580 But it just wasn't good enough.

02:27:35.900 They were able to just buffalo us into that war no matter what. 0.80

02:27:39.660 The North Koreans, they were bullied.

02:27:41.800 I'll skip the details, but people can read how Bush pushed North Korea to nukes by Gordon Prather.

02:27:47.740 It's the last article the great Gordon Prather wrote for us at antiwar.com.

02:27:51.340 It's really great.

02:27:51.940 It 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. 0.72

02:27:58.940 No, can't.

02:28:01.020 The Ayatollah in Iran took a different tactic.

02:28:03.900 In fact, I'll go ahead and throw in Libya. 1.00

02:28:05.920 Gaddafi didn't have a nuclear program. 0.86

02:28:08.120 He just had warehouses full of crates, full of junk that he bought from the Pakistanis. 1.00

02:28:11.820 He didn't have the men with the know-how to build a nuclear program of any description anyway.

02:28:16.120 But that was enough for him to trade away to Bush for normalization.

02:28:19.360 It was seven years later that Barack Obama stabbed him in the back. 0.81

02:28:22.580 Sorry, literally lynched him to death. 0.99

02:28:25.860 Stabbed him in the rectum, I think. 0.99

02:28:27.420 Yeah. 0.99

02:28:27.720 And then shot him in the side of the head on the side of the road.

02:28:30.140 But then the Ayatollah said, look, my books are open.

02:28:35.360 I'm part of the nonproliferation treaty.

02:28:37.380 I have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

02:28:39.980 Hands up.

02:28:40.540 Don't shoot.

02:28:41.200 You have no cost to spell it here.

02:28:43.500 And that has been essentially his strategy this whole time.

02:28:47.160 Now, they made facilities at Natanz and later at Fordo.

02:28:51.780 The war party says that these were top secret facilities that were only revealed by Israel.

02:28:56.580 That's not true.

02:28:57.320 So they did buy junk from AQ Khan, the Pakistani nuclear technology supplier, distributor.

02:29:06.360 But only because America wouldn't let them buy a light water reactor from China.

02:29:09.800 If 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.

02:29:17.320 But they basically drove them to the black market where they got uranium enrichment equipment.

02:29:21.640 And they started enriching uranium at Natanz in 2005.

02:29:24.760 Now, 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.

02:29:33.180 And they did that.

02:29:34.500 And they have developed, quite frankly, a latent nuclear deterrent.

02:29:39.460 So 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.

02:29:47.520 They know how to enrich uranium.

02:29:49.020 They could enrich up to weapons grade.

02:29:51.040 But so let's not fight and we won't have to go that far.

02:29:54.420 So that's essentially what they've had this whole time.

02:29:56.680 The 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.

02:30:10.700 And the IAEA can't find it, but trust us, it's there.

02:30:13.420 And they never explained it because they couldn't because they were lying.

02:30:15.980 They just heavily implied it all the time.

02:30:18.060 It's a secret, illicit nuclear weapons program as though the thing existed, which it never did.

02:30:23.640 And we almost went to war over it a couple of times, but it was stopped in 2007 by the commander of CENTCOM, Admiral Fallon.

02:30:30.080 And 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.

02:30:39.680 Bush complained in his memoir, W. Bush, that, well, how was I supposed to attack him?

02:30:44.220 He said, oh, I'm so sorry, your highness, to the king of Saudi Arabia.

02:30:47.640 I can't attack them because my own intelligence agencies say they're not making nukes.

02:30:51.600 And if they don't have a military program, I can't do anything.

02:30:54.640 So his hands were tied, he thought.

02:30:57.160 And then this was essentially the status quo until Obama comes in and Netanyahu comes in right before Obama does.

02:31:05.280 It comes back to power and he starts threatening like he's going to attack Iran and drag us into it. 0.54

02:31:11.280 At this point, Zbigniew Brzezinski even said, if Netanyahu flies planes over Iraq to attack Iran, Obama should shoot them down over Iraq.

02:31:22.000 So I know Robert Kennedy says Brzezinski was the founder of the neoconservative movement, but no, he was never a neocon.

02:31:28.760 And they hated each other sometimes.

02:31:30.480 They worked together on Russia issues.

02:31:31.920 He was a two-state solution guy and definitely not a lakutnik and not on Iran, especially.

02:31:40.400 But so Obama was, I think, really worried.

02:31:47.480 And a lot of people were really worried that Netanyahu was going to start the war in his first term and drag him into it.

02:31:52.620 And so the way to prevent that was to create the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the John Kerry nuclear deal.

02:32:01.840 That was the point of it.

02:32:02.620 That 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.

02:32:10.180 The 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. 0.97

02:32:17.320 So Obama said, fine, we'll just add another layer of deal on top of that.

02:32:21.240 But the Iran deal was a way to keep Netanyahu from starting over with Iran and dragging us in.

02:32:29.720 Yes, although I think he was bluffing.

02:32:33.400 I don't think Netanyahu really was going to do it back then.

02:32:36.220 I think he did it here because he had Trump's permission.

02:32:38.440 I'm not certain of that.

02:32:39.600 I don't think, I don't know if you know, but I don't know that it's really clear exactly.

02:32:44.040 But 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.

02:32:55.020 But so what they did was the JCPOA, you know, Trump called it the worst deal that any men ever signed or whatever.

02:33:03.180 It's just not really true.

02:33:04.200 I mean, what it did was it severely rolled back their nuclear program.

02:33:07.900 So they poured concrete in their Iraq, that's A-R-A-K, their Iraq heavy water reactor. 0.71

02:33:12.780 They severely restricted the number of centrifuges spinning at Natanz by two thirds, I believe it was.

02:33:18.260 They turned the Fordo or the comm facility into a research only facility, no uranium production there.

02:33:25.060 And 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.

02:33:37.840 So 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.

02:33:46.640 This is what they call the breakout period.

02:33:48.140 It would take them a year to have enough fizzile material to make a single gun type nuke out of.

02:33:54.000 And so they wanted to make it that difficult.

02:33:57.360 So they would have to ship out all their uranium to France and the French would turn it into fuel rods and ship it back. 0.68

02:34:02.500 And they would burn that in their heavy water reactor. 0.74

02:34:04.860 Now, there's two routes to the nuclear bomb.

02:34:07.860 Forget the H-bomb for a minute.

02:34:09.280 We're just talking about fission bombs, atom bombs.

02:34:11.680 The 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.

02:34:21.860 And so you need a reprocessing facility to get all that out to make usable fuel.

02:34:26.100 They don't have that reprocessing facility.

02:34:28.480 The Russians had the right to come and get all their waste and take it back to Russia to be diluted down there. 1.00

02:34:34.060 So there was no plutonium route to the bomb.

02:34:36.160 Now, 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.

02:34:43.480 I had overstated this on the Pierce Morgan show and on Breaking Points last week and two weeks ago.

02:34:50.060 And so I was trying to fix that with this statement.

02:34:53.840 And they did let me go back on Breaking Points to address it.

02:34:57.180 That what I had said wrongly was that you can't really make an implosion bomb that you could miniaturize out of uranium.

02:35:05.620 That's not correct.

02:35:06.600 You can.

02:35:07.340 What you can't do is make a gun-type nuke out of plutonium.

02:35:10.080 And I had overstated that.

02:35:12.780 But 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,

02:35:23.660 it's virtually unanimous among the experts that if they wanted to race and get a bomb as fast as they could,

02:35:30.680 it would be a simple gun-type nuke like the kind America dropped on Hiroshima,

02:35:34.380 which is essentially a uranium slug fired into a uranium target, and it just causes a supercritical mass there.

02:35:42.140 But to do that, it's too big to miniaturize and fit onto Iran's missiles and their nose cones or any of that.

02:35:48.580 So if they had, if they raced to a nuke, they would have one that they could test in the desert,

02:35:52.580 but 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.

02:35:58.180 Which they couldn't get to Israel and they couldn't use it.

02:36:01.580 If they were to even make an implosion bomb with uranium, though,

02:36:06.620 it would take years worth of testing and development to get the implosion system right to make it work.

02:36:12.560 So 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.

02:36:19.400 So in other words, even if they withdrew from the deridi, kicked out the inspectors and started making nukes, 0.91

02:36:25.160 it's very likely that their first nuke or two would be simple, undeliverable gun-type nukes.

02:36:31.680 That would be not much more of a deterrent than their latent deterrent.

02:36:36.580 So now Trump gets out of the deal in 2018 at Netanyahu's behest, and there were problems with the deal.

02:36:44.280 So it had sunset provisions in it that said, you know, after a certain period of time,

02:36:48.860 you can increase your number of centrifuges again and these other things.

02:36:53.380 Now, I believe that if Trump had come in and told Netanyahu to pipe down, in his first term, I mean,

02:36:59.260 and had said to the Ayatollah, now listen, I don't like this deal.

02:37:03.820 It was my predecessor's deal, and I want to improve it.

02:37:08.560 Let's get along.

02:37:10.380 Take it at face value.

02:37:11.160 I came into office with this agreement.

02:37:14.280 Let's see if we can improve it.

02:37:15.640 Let's see if we can get rid of some of these sunset provisions.

02:37:18.120 Let's see if we can find a way to renegotiate the deal and make it better.

02:37:21.480 He didn't do that.

02:37:22.420 He just withdrew.

02:37:24.040 And in consequence of that, it's actually part of the deal that Iran is allowed to stop abiding

02:37:28.980 by some of the restrictions in the deal and still stay within the deal if America breaks

02:37:34.040 its agreement first.

02:37:36.140 And so they did.

02:37:38.680 They started enriching.

02:37:39.760 After Israel murdered their top weapon scientist, Fakr Zada, or pardon me, his top nuclear scientist.

02:37:46.200 I don't know that he was a weapon scientist at all.

02:37:48.040 Their top nuclear scientist in December of 20, they started enriching up to 20% again,

02:37:53.820 which is still legitimate.

02:37:54.880 They need 20% enriched uranium-235 for their medical isotope reactors.

02:37:58.420 But then in April, the Israelis did a sabotage mission at Natanz, and they bragged about it. 0.81

02:38:03.440 They were the ones who did it.

02:38:04.960 And in reaction to that, the Iranians then started enriching up to 60% uranium-235.

02:38:10.780 Now, you need really above 90% to make an effective uranium atom bomb.

02:38:17.240 It's technically possible to make one with above 80% enriched uranium-235.

02:38:22.620 Mark Dubowitz says you can make one with 60% enriched uranium-235, but I don't think that's

02:38:26.960 really right.

02:38:27.420 But anyway, typically-

02:38:28.420 What's the point of doing it then?

02:38:30.080 Typically, up to 60%.

02:38:31.900 Right.

02:38:32.400 Good question.

02:38:32.920 Because this is what you'll hear all the hawks say.

02:38:34.840 Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and all of them say over and over again, that, oh,

02:38:38.020 yeah, well, what do they need the 60% for?

02:38:40.220 To negotiate away.

02:38:42.200 That was why.

02:38:43.100 They're trying to get America back in the deal.

02:38:45.240 If they had wanted to race toward weapons-grade uranium, they could have just raced toward weapons-grade

02:38:49.540 uranium and enriched it up to 90%.

02:38:51.200 They're going up to 60% because it makes them closer.

02:38:55.600 It means their breakout time is shorter, and they're trying to put pressure on the Americans 0.65

02:38:59.940 to get back into the deal, which we already had and which they are still officially a

02:39:03.860 part of.

02:39:05.020 And so that was why they were going up to 60%.

02:39:07.960 And they're still officially a part of it.

02:39:09.340 They're still officially a part because they signed the JCPOA with France and Britain,

02:39:14.480 the United States, Russia, and China, all the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

02:39:18.840 So they're still part of the JCPOA.

02:39:20.860 It still is the law, basically.

02:39:24.020 It's still the international law and their agreement.

02:39:26.040 But as I said, there are subsections of the agreement itself that say that if America stops

02:39:32.900 abiding by our part of it, they can stop abiding by some of the restrictions, even while remaining

02:39:37.760 inside the deal.

02:39:39.240 So they were really just, the purpose of the 60% was to try to force America back to the 1.00

02:39:44.380 table.

02:39:45.120 And Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, was so disingenuous.

02:39:48.500 I saw him give a statement on the Sunday morning news show last week, where I guess on this

02:39:52.420 week, where he says, the only countries that have 60% uranium have nuclear weapons.

02:39:58.820 Now, come on, man.

02:40:00.020 That's just obfuscation.

02:40:02.260 You know, if we're making nuclear weapons out of uranium, it's not at 60%, which all ours

02:40:06.540 are plutonium bombs anyway.

02:40:07.720 But he knows what he's doing when he says that, right?

02:40:10.380 He wants you to understand that Iran is racing toward a nuke without actually claiming that

02:40:15.620 because he knows it's really not true.

02:40:17.120 And then there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the 60%. 0.99

02:40:22.100 It was to negotiate away.

02:40:24.380 But so now, Trump gives them their deadline, they pass the deadline, and I'm not exactly

02:40:31.000 certain what happens, but Israel starts the war.

02:40:34.420 Donald Trump comes in, what, a week into it, 10 days into it, and bombs Fordo, Natanz, and

02:40:40.440 Isfahan.

02:40:41.320 Isfahan is where they have the conversion facility to transform uranium, ore, and metal

02:40:46.980 to gas, and then back again.

02:40:49.500 It has to be uranium hexafluoride gas is what they spin and enrich, and then they turn it

02:40:53.760 back into metal.

02:40:56.200 And they bombed all three of those.

02:40:57.960 And I don't know for certain the extent of the damage.

02:41:00.740 Although I did read a report by David Albright, who's a nuclear weapons expert, who talked

02:41:06.860 about they got commercial satellite footage, and he seemed to think that they had done

02:41:11.980 significant damage to Natanz, Fordo, and Isfahan, and all the important nuclear facilities there.

02:41:20.160 So in other words, Donald J.

02:41:21.960 Trump called the Ayatollah's bluff.

02:41:24.280 You say you have a latent nuclear deterrent, and I better not attack you, or else then you

02:41:28.140 might make one.

02:41:28.860 Which, he never said that outright, but that was clearly the implication of the Iranian program.

02:41:33.020 All right, well, I'm bombing your program.

02:41:35.480 So now what are you going to do?

02:41:38.100 And their other bluff was that they would shoot their mid-range missiles at our bases in

02:41:42.580 the Gulf region.

02:41:43.520 And in Qatar, we have CENTCOM headquarters at the Al-Udid airbase there, and our fifth

02:41:49.200 fleet is stationed at Bahrain.

02:41:50.540 We have tens of thousands of army soldiers in Kuwait, and they were all essentially hostage

02:41:54.820 to Iranian missiles.

02:41:56.140 But when it came down to it, they didn't dare.

02:41:59.600 That was their bluff.

02:42:00.960 We called their bluff, and they didn't dare.

02:42:02.780 What did they do?

02:42:03.160 They shot, Trump dropped 14 bombs on them, they fired 14 missiles at Qatar, and they called 0.88

02:42:07.800 him in advance and warned him, we're about to fire 14 missiles, get ready to shoot them 0.50

02:42:11.520 down.

02:42:11.760 In other words, a purely symbolic retaliation against the United States.

02:42:15.580 While they're still firing missiles at Tel Aviv, he didn't dare to hit American forces

02:42:21.320 in the Gulf, not this time at least, for probably out of fear of what Donald Trump would

02:42:25.620 do.

02:42:26.020 Now, this is the same Ayatollah who they say can't wait to cause the apocalypse and nuke 1.00

02:42:30.660 Israel, even if every last Iranian gets nuked off the face of the earth. 0.99

02:42:33.660 He doesn't care because he wants the end of the world, and yet he doesn't dare pick a

02:42:37.240 fight with Donald Trump.

02:42:38.160 And telegraphs, I do not want to fight you every chance that he gets.

02:42:41.000 With the American superpower.

02:42:43.600 So now, where does that leave us?

02:42:44.980 Either I've been right for 15, 20 years, warning that if we bomb them, that is the most likely

02:42:54.640 thing to cause them to then now race for a nuke.

02:42:57.860 Or Trump is right, and he has just degraded their program so severely that there's no point

02:43:04.720 in even restarting it again.

02:43:06.420 He's got the credible threat that he'll just start bombing it again if they try.

02:43:09.880 And so his position seems to be, I think he said, I don't need a new nuclear deal because

02:43:14.840 there's no nuclear there.

02:43:16.540 Now, I'm not certain that's true, that he's completely decimated what they have.

02:43:20.800 But I guess as we're recording this, it very much remains to be seen what is the long-term

02:43:27.700 reaction of the Iranians, whether they are now going to weaponize their latent program. 0.91

02:43:32.840 They've already kicked all the inspectors out of the country.

02:43:36.680 And I saw this headline, and I don't know the entire story here, but a lower cleric, not

02:43:44.360 the supreme leader, but a lower cleric has now issued a fatwa for President Trump like

02:43:49.100 they did to Salman Rushdie order on his life.

02:43:52.560 I know a great journalist named Ken Silva, who's really put the lie to and showed and

02:43:58.040 debunked these kind of FBI hoaxes about these Iranian assassination plots against Trump.

02:44:03.520 They're really not true.

02:44:05.000 And Ken Silva is the guy's name.

02:44:06.920 He's an excellent reporter from Headline USA and the Institute.

02:44:10.540 We're going to publish his book about the assassination attempts against Trump that he's

02:44:13.840 working on now.

02:44:14.680 And he's really debunked those.

02:44:16.240 But I don't think there's really much debunk in this other than that this public statement

02:44:20.680 came from a lower level cleric who, I guess, could be overridden by the Ayatollah if the

02:44:25.520 Ayatollah would be so wise as to say, actually, we didn't mean that and try to find a way to

02:44:31.060 move forward.

02:44:31.720 Because a death threat against a very credible threat like that against the life of the President

02:44:36.160 of the United States is the kind of thing to absolutely solidify American support for

02:44:41.700 even further war against their country is a huge error for them to say that.

02:44:46.280 The question is, who's the guy who issued it?

02:44:47.940 Is it meaningful?

02:44:48.860 Does it in any sense?

02:44:49.900 Yeah.

02:44:50.180 Can it be walked back?

02:44:51.700 Yeah.

02:44:52.020 Does he speak for the religious authorities of Iran or not?

02:44:56.440 You know, I don't know the answer, but I agree.

02:44:58.620 That's nuts.

02:44:59.420 Don't do that.

02:45:00.320 Yeah.

02:45:00.920 And look, back to Brzezinski.

02:45:03.520 He and Alexander Haig said in 1993, you know, we should normalize relations with Iran.

02:45:09.460 We should build an oil pipeline across that country and get along with them.

02:45:12.820 The Ayatollah keeps preferring that modernists and reformers win the presidency.

02:45:17.060 You know, Ahmadinejad was a big counter to that.

02:45:21.640 But Rafsanjani and Khatami and these other guys, Rouhani and these other presidents that

02:45:26.680 we've had, they want to get along with the United States.

02:45:29.060 I mean, Tucker, if you're the Ayatollah, what are you going to do with a problem like 0.78

02:45:32.260 the USA?

02:45:33.600 We're the global empire, arms of the teeth with H-bombs. 0.99

02:45:37.000 And we do nothing but dictate to them all day.

02:45:41.340 And they do what they have to to survive, essentially.

02:45:45.120 And this is why the Israelis and their partisans always have to resort to this propaganda about 0.63

02:45:49.160 how, no, the Ayatollah wants the end times.

02:45:51.420 He wants to force the 12th Imam to come back and blow up the world and all of these things. 1.00

02:45:55.720 Because they essentially have to resort to those claims in order to, you know, obfuscate

02:46:01.880 and to confuse the issue of just why wouldn't Iran's government act in their national interest

02:46:06.980 as close as they can for their own short-term survival, which is the obvious correct way

02:46:12.960 and medium-term survival, which is obviously the correct way to look at it.

02:46:16.640 Is Iran the last government on the list?

02:46:19.980 Yes.

02:46:20.760 Okay.

02:46:21.300 So it's Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, meaning especially, you know, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

02:46:27.320 Nasrallah.

02:46:27.680 Nasrallah is dead. 1.00

02:46:30.600 Libya, Somalia, and Sudan, which they, we've been at war in Somalia since 2001.

02:46:35.980 It's the longest war in American history.

02:46:37.580 That's a whole other interview for you.

02:46:39.340 And Sudan, at least the CIA broke off the south from the north and they've had a regime change

02:46:44.780 there.

02:46:44.980 Luckily, we didn't go to war against Sudan. 0.90

02:46:46.580 And then last on the list was Iran.

02:46:52.740 So let's say there is regime change in Iran and the point of this is not to stop their

02:46:56.700 nuclear program.

02:46:57.440 That's like absurd.

02:46:59.260 The point is to change the government there by force.

02:47:04.620 Let's say that happens.

02:47:06.160 Not a single one of the countries you just listed has been a success, I think we can say.

02:47:12.920 You know, hasn't helped the United States, hasn't helped the people of that country, hasn't

02:47:16.460 helped the region.

02:47:17.540 It's crazier than it was 20 years ago by a lot.

02:47:20.960 So what happens if Iran gets regime change?

02:47:24.320 Well, then Osama bin Laden throws a party in hell, first of all.

02:47:28.340 Right.

02:47:28.720 Again, doing the bin Ladenites dirty work there. 1.00

02:47:31.360 You know, the Israelis are posting pictures of them piling around with the Shah of Pahlavi's 0.93

02:47:37.180 son saying, we're just going to parachute him in there and his royal majesty will take

02:47:43.360 over because that's the American way is installing royal monarchs over people. 1.00

02:47:47.440 I think he's in the U.S.

02:47:48.440 Chalabi, not Chalabi, sorry, Pahlavi.

02:47:51.640 Same difference.

02:47:52.600 Yeah, exactly.

02:47:54.000 Exactly.

02:47:54.220 Is there like a groundswell of popular support for him to come back and establish a monarchy

02:47:59.740 in Iran?

02:48:00.020 I sincerely doubt it. 0.97

02:48:01.580 You know, they talk about putting the Mujahedini cult in there too, which is this crazy communist 0.99

02:48:05.520 terrorist cult. 0.94

02:48:06.860 They kidnap people's children and, you know, force them to be celibate and all this like

02:48:11.720 total Heaven's Gate cult type stuff was this group that had helped with the Iranian revolution.

02:48:15.800 Then they went to work for Saddam Hussein and helped Saddam crush the Shiite revolution 0.99

02:48:21.220 insurrection in 91.

02:48:25.120 And then Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney took possession of them when America invaded Iraq

02:48:29.960 and then turned them over to the Israelis who used them as Israeli, or pardon me, as intelligence 0.66

02:48:34.420 cutouts, usually to deliver false claims against Iran and their nuclear program.

02:48:40.580 And they're now kept safe at an American base in Albania.

02:48:43.660 And they have talked for years about somehow, like, believe in their own BS about how somehow

02:48:50.140 they could use the MEK to do a regime change in Iran, that there would be some groundswell

02:48:56.460 of support for them.

02:48:57.760 I mean, we're talking like total kooks here.

02:49:00.600 What was the celibacy part?

02:49:02.540 Control.

02:49:03.780 So they demand celibacy from their followers?

02:49:05.880 Oh yeah.

02:49:06.280 And like any member has to raise their hand to speak like kindergarten.

02:49:09.580 They kidnap their children and take them away to keep them under total control.

02:49:12.680 It's a real sick call.

02:49:14.020 The MEK, I mean, aren't there members of Congress and various administration officials

02:49:19.160 who are dealing with them?

02:49:20.160 Yep.

02:49:20.600 And you take money from them and speak at their conferences and all of that.

02:49:23.620 Actually?

02:49:24.060 Oh yeah.

02:49:24.560 Oh yeah.

02:49:26.000 Including, I really like Dana Rohrabacher, but he's one of them.

02:49:30.320 And quite a few of those guys have been toeing the line for the MEK.

02:49:33.400 Is this the group that Pompeo was connected with?

02:49:36.340 I believe so, yeah.

02:49:37.660 And then most of the time, the propaganda that they push are total hoaxes.

02:49:41.880 I mean, just a few weeks ago, right, like one week before the bombing started, maybe

02:49:45.660 two weeks, the NCRI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, which is their front

02:49:50.140 group, put out a thing saying, hey, look, satellite pictures of this new base in Iran,

02:49:54.680 which we swear is a nuclear weapons facility.

02:49:57.300 And that went nowhere.

02:49:59.060 It was just some Israeli propaganda that they funneled through this group, but then the

02:50:02.640 CIA didn't vouch for that.

02:50:03.820 And it wasn't one of the targets that was bombed in the recent campaign or anything.

02:50:06.840 This is like a wasteland of like deception and shifting alliances and broken promises

02:50:14.020 and shattered dreams.

02:50:16.060 I mean, like everything you've said for the past two, whatever hours it's been is so depressing

02:50:21.640 and also confusing, but more than anything, utterly divorced from America's national interest.

02:50:27.260 That's right.

02:50:27.600 None of this has anything to do with what's happening in New York City, Wright, or Eugene,

02:50:32.980 Oregon, or anywhere.

02:50:34.520 And I just wonder, do you, since you work on this full time, do you imagine a time in

02:50:39.200 our lifetimes where the attention of the U.S. government has drawn back to the United

02:50:42.580 States?

02:50:43.520 Some attempt is made to improve life here.

02:50:46.220 Over their dead bodies.

02:50:47.460 I mean, figuratively speaking, that like, yeah, it'll have to be a coalition of Americans

02:50:51.960 who just will not stand for it anymore.

02:50:54.540 I mean, we're already at the point, Tucker, where they would much prefer to back Bin Laden 0.98

02:50:58.240 night suicide bombers and fly Predator and Reaper drones around than send the 3rd Infantry

02:51:02.820 Division anywhere.

02:51:03.680 They know we won't stand for it, right?

02:51:06.560 Iraq War II, I think, was the last gasp for these large-scale land invasions.

02:51:12.940 Yeah, we got the Vietnam syndrome again, and we don't want to do that. 0.98

02:51:16.680 I mean, there's a huge movement in this country now called Defend the Guard, which is led by

02:51:21.920 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

02:51:24.580 They're trying to get the state law, the state legislatures to pass laws forbidding the governor

02:51:28.980 from transferring National Guard troops to the president for foreign combat without an

02:51:35.020 official declaration of war from the Congress, which they know they'll never get.

02:51:38.860 And these are guys who are just saying, enough of this, we're not doing this anymore.

02:51:42.160 And they saw their boys die over there for real. 0.99

02:51:44.520 The Guard got screwed. 0.99

02:51:45.080 Dude, I saw it. 0.80

02:51:46.980 I mean, people don't remember, but before 2001, really 2003, the National Guard wasn't a joke

02:51:53.740 exactly, but people did make fun of it.

02:51:56.000 Like weekend warriors, they're not really in the military.

02:51:59.140 They're like the secondary reserve.

02:52:01.160 Yeah, I mean, exactly.

02:52:03.240 And then the next thing you know, like, they're fighting a real war.

02:52:06.640 Yeah.

02:52:07.380 And I don't think that they signed up for that.

02:52:09.920 Yeah.

02:52:10.180 No, they didn't.

02:52:10.780 They clearly didn't.

02:52:11.340 You joined the National Guard to sandbag rivers during floods.

02:52:14.960 Totally.

02:52:15.500 And put out forest fires.

02:52:16.000 To help your country in emergencies.

02:52:17.400 Yes.

02:52:17.960 But then to get, you know, benefits and all that.

02:52:20.260 I mean, whether that's a good system or not is another question, but that's the deal they signed.

02:52:26.000 That's right.

02:52:26.440 And the next thing you know, these guys from like, every little town in America are like

02:52:32.080 fighting a hot war in Iraq.

02:52:34.240 I mean, I saw it.

02:52:35.040 I was like, wow, the guardsmen are doing that?

02:52:37.160 Yep.

02:52:37.460 And getting suicide bombed, right?

02:52:39.040 Going through the absolute worst of it.

02:52:40.740 Oh, for sure.

02:52:41.340 With the rest of the guys.

02:52:42.160 Yep.

02:52:42.600 Do you know what percentage of Americans killed in Iraq were guardsmen?

02:52:46.700 No, I don't.

02:52:47.960 But it was not insignificant.

02:52:49.180 Yeah, no, it was plenty.

02:52:50.860 It was 4,500 troops overall, Marines and soldiers and airmen died.

02:52:55.580 And then, you know, another couple of thousand contractors and then high tens of thousands.

02:53:01.220 A couple of thousand contractors?

02:53:04.200 And many tens of thousands wounded.

02:53:07.180 And there's a study at the Cost of War Project.

02:53:09.320 This is now many years old, Tucker.

02:53:10.840 This is five, six, seven years old or something.

02:53:13.560 They did a study where they had determined that 30,000 veterans had killed themselves since

02:53:18.080 coming home.

02:53:18.580 I know one.

02:53:19.380 Yeah.

02:53:19.660 No, I believe that.

02:53:21.020 Completely.

02:53:21.680 Yeah, it's really messed up.

02:53:25.060 So just to close out the second half of my final question, you said, I asked, you know,

02:53:32.020 will our leaders ever turn their attention to like their actual job, which is in protecting

02:53:36.840 and improving America?

02:53:38.780 And you said over their dead bodies.

02:53:40.520 But are you hopeful at all that changes is coming?

02:53:43.800 Yeah.

02:53:43.960 Yeah.

02:53:44.160 Look, I mean, I think my most important mission as director of the Libertarian Institute

02:53:50.260 and editorial director of antiwar.com and all that is reaching out to the MAGA right, the

02:53:56.120 America first right.

02:53:57.960 You just, you can't have a limited republic and a world empire.

02:54:02.060 You can't have a constitutional government and a bill of rights and have your government be

02:54:08.120 the most powerful force on the planet attempting to dominate the entire world.

02:54:12.040 There's just completely contrary forms of governmental systems to have.

02:54:17.480 And, you know, we mentioned William F. Buckley.

02:54:19.640 Buckley wrote in 1952 in the Commonweal magazine that because of the emergency of the Soviet Union,

02:54:27.640 Americans must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores, even with Truman at the reins of it all,

02:54:35.960 in order to, you know, the red flag came down on Christmas Day, 1991.

02:54:49.320 And somehow we still must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores, even with Obama or Biden at the reins of it all.

02:54:57.120 In order to what?

02:54:59.200 To prevent the Ayatollah from threatening Israel? 0.98

02:55:03.000 Well, that doesn't sound like the global threat of Soviet Stalinist communism to me. 0.52

02:55:08.440 It sounds far dumbed down, especially when you're talking about a power that, again,

02:55:12.120 we could have normalized relations with a long time ago if the Israelis hadn't stopped us from doing so. 1.00

02:55:17.400 It's just intolerable.

02:55:19.300 And look, and I think American right-wingers know.

02:55:21.000 So, his conservative sons who went and died in these wars, liberals are no good in a fight anyway.

02:55:27.780 They can monger war all they want, but does anybody think they're going to go and fight?

02:55:31.400 No.

02:55:31.800 Of course not, no.

02:55:32.540 So, if the American right, you know, the Colin Powell Doctrine said,

02:55:35.740 it was the Caspar Weinberger, Colin Powell Doctrine said,

02:55:38.540 the American people must be united behind any war before we launch it.

02:55:42.560 And then we better know exactly what the exit strategy is, exactly what the stakes for victory are,

02:55:47.400 so we can go in there and win.

02:55:48.500 He was so attacked by the neocons.

02:55:50.200 Oh, they hated him for that.

02:55:51.880 And then, so, W. Bush said, ah, forget the Powell Doctrine.

02:55:54.280 You know what?

02:55:54.620 We don't need America United.

02:55:55.760 We just need the right. 0.97

02:55:57.140 As long as the right is all hyped up on let's go and kick butt, then we can do what we want.

02:56:03.680 But then Obama showed that when he tried to get the right to line up behind him and go to Syria in 2013

02:56:09.080 over that fake sarin attack in Gouda, they said no.

02:56:13.480 In fact, there were soldiers, these were memes that went around soldiers holding up signs that said,

02:56:17.500 I didn't join the Marine Corps or I didn't join the Army to fight.

02:56:20.500 I know Marines are not soldiers.

02:56:22.380 Troops holding up signs saying, I didn't join the Army to fight a civil war for Al-Qaeda in Syria.

02:56:28.440 And they had to stop.

02:56:29.920 And the American right was not willing to follow Barack Obama into battle.

02:56:33.440 Same for Joe Biden.

02:56:34.460 And I would say it should be the same thing here.

02:56:37.600 And no matter who the president is, this is the era of the phony wars.

02:56:41.720 This is America's attempt to maintain a global hegemony that we should not have in the first place,

02:56:46.480 which is essentially murder-suicide to our own society anyway.

02:56:49.680 And we can't maintain it anyway.

02:56:50.900 And we can't.

02:56:51.280 Even if it was a good idea, even if it was helping us, we've reached the limits of our resources.

02:56:56.020 That's right.

02:56:56.340 People are so afraid that China is going to take over the world if we can't.

02:56:58.820 But we have a $37 trillion national debt, and we can't do it.

02:57:03.140 If we can't afford it, they can't either.

02:57:05.080 So we can have a multipolar world where we figure out, you know,

02:57:07.680 and Donald Trump himself said in his first few days in power here,

02:57:12.480 he said, you know what?

02:57:13.200 I don't want to pivot from the Middle East to great power conflict.

02:57:16.380 I don't want to have conflict with anyone.

02:57:18.860 We should be able to get along with Russia and with China and with the Middle Eastern powers

02:57:23.320 and just have a century of prosperity ahead of us.

02:57:26.880 That's America first. 0.98

02:57:27.860 And I believe, Tucker, that Donald Trump could get on a plane and go to Tehran right now.

02:57:33.280 He could go from there to Moscow, to Beijing, and then Pyongyang,

02:57:37.020 and he could come home and be Trump the Great and spend the rest of his term

02:57:41.120 overseeing the retrenchment of American power and the building up of peace and prosperity here.

02:57:49.380 Yep.

02:57:50.480 It makes me sad to hear that.

02:57:51.940 Of course, I strongly agree with that.

02:57:53.440 That's why I campaigned for him.

02:57:54.460 Um, but, you know, there are people who don't want that in Washington.

02:58:01.100 Yeah.

02:58:01.560 But you know what?

02:58:02.040 That's what the people of the country want.

02:58:03.520 I agree.

02:58:03.920 That's who voted for him.

02:58:04.940 I agree.

02:58:05.380 You know, they say, well, there are these factions of Warhawks who supported him too.

02:58:08.740 That's true.

02:58:09.180 And they have money.

02:58:10.400 But who turned out to vote for him?

02:58:12.480 The people who turned out to vote for him were the people who heard America first.

02:58:15.960 Yeah.

02:58:16.100 And that means defend America first. 1.00

02:58:17.700 That doesn't mean be George Bush, the selfish jerk, and go around and do whatever you want. 1.00

02:58:21.040 It means leave the world the hell alone. 1.00

02:58:23.240 Take care of our problems.

02:58:24.920 I couldn't agree more.

02:58:26.820 Scott Horton, author of, among others, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.

02:58:34.120 Thank you.

02:58:34.820 Thank you, Tucker.

02:58:35.760 I appreciate it.

02:58:36.420 We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day.

02:58:44.340 We know the people who run it, good people.

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The Tucker Carlson Show - July 03, 2025

Scott Horton： Coups, WMDs, & CIA – A Deep Dive Into What Led to the US⧸Israeli War With Iran

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