The United States deliberately baited the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan to create a 'Soviet Vietnam' that would bankrupt and weaken the USSR, while simultaneously fabricating a Soviet threat to Iran to justify the Carter Doctrine.

(00:00:00) The following is a conversation with Scott Horton. (00:00:03) He's the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, co-host of Provoked, and host of the Scott Horton Show, on which he has done over 6,000 interviews since 2003. (00:00:18) He's the author of Provoked, (00:00:21) enough already and other books and articles that have over the past three decades criticized US foreign policy, especially in regard to military interventionism and the military industrial complex. (00:00:35) And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. (00:00:38) Check them out in the description or lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. (00:00:42) It's the best way to support this podcast. (00:00:45) We got Alio Capital for investment, Hampton for connecting with founders, (00:00:50) BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin. (00:00:59) Choose Wise and my friends. (00:01:01) And now onto the full ad reads. 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(00:06:32) But once you take those early steps of creation, you have to actually build up the machine that scales. (00:06:39) the machine within the machine that makes the whole thing run, that does the financials, the human resources, the inventory and supply, the e-commerce, if you do that kind of thing, and all the messy things that make a business run. (00:06:52) For that, you have to use the best tools available. (00:06:56) NetSuite is amazing for that. (00:06:57) You should check out Reddit or anywhere else for reviews. (00:06:59) People love it. (00:07:00) Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash Lex. (00:07:07) That's netsuite.com slash Lex. (00:07:11) This episode is also brought to you by AG1, an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. (00:07:18) Anyway, I drink it for the multivitamin and for the deliciousness, and it makes me feel like I have my life together. (00:07:25) Otherwise, I feel like it's all falling apart. (00:07:28) I'm doing a lot of crazy physical stuff. (00:07:30) I've been under a lot of strain mentally for a variety of reasons. (00:07:36) That's life. (00:07:36) I'm sure as it goes on, it will continue so, and probably it will get harder, or at least the ups will get higher and the lows will get lower, and then it'll be over too soon, and maybe it'll be over tonight and tomorrow and I have to accept that and have to meditate on it. (00:07:53) All of that is just the human condition. (00:07:56) The best we can do is try to hold on and do the basic low-hanging fruit of getting our vitamins and minerals (00:08:05) Eating healthy, doing a little bit of exercise, trying to minimize stress and surround yourself with good people, or at least see the good in the people and the situation that you're surrounded by. (00:08:17) All of the things I contemplate as I sip on a cold AG1 after a long run in the Austin heat. (00:08:25) All of it. (00:08:27) The run, the AG1, life, everything. (00:08:31) The people I meet on the run. (00:08:33) The whole thing just makes me truly happy. (00:08:36) Anyway, they'll give you a one-month supply of fish oil when you sign up at drinkag1.com slash Lex. (00:08:47) This is the Lex Friedman podcast. (00:08:48) To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. (00:08:55) And now, dear friends, here's Scott Horton. (00:09:15) I think one of the darkest and most disturbing chapters of modern American history is everything that happened around conducting the so-called wars on terror. (00:09:24) I think to me it was a wake-up call. (00:09:26) I think it was a wake-up call to a lot of Americans in understanding and seeing the military-industrial complex and seeing what (00:09:35) the government's capacity is to mislead us into war and to continuously erode basic human freedoms. (00:09:44) If I can, allow me to list some of the estimates from the Cost of War project from Brown University, just so we understand. (00:09:51) the costs of these wars. (00:09:52) The post-9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen led to an estimated 900,000 to 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths. (00:10:06) And the cost in terms of dollars was $8 trillion, with 2.2 trillion on Afghanistan and 2.9 trillion on Iraq and Syria. (00:10:17) And (00:10:18) The result on every front, as we'll talk about, I think it's fair to say that it did not accomplish its purpose. (00:10:26) And in fact, if we even just look at the human toll of the people of Afghanistan, I was also looking at the numbers (00:10:33) Before the war and after the war, percent of Afghans facing food insecurity went from 62% to 92%. (00:10:38) Percent of children under 5 experiencing acute malnutrition went from 9% to 50%. (00:10:44) Percent of Afghans living in poverty went from 80% to 97%. (00:10:50) So it was extremely costly for Americans, and it was extremely costly for Afghans. (00:10:56) As you do in your book, Enough Already, (00:10:58) Can you lay out how the full history, the full context of how it is that the American people were misled into this war on terror that was so costly in so many ways? (00:11:09) Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me again. (00:11:11) It's great to be with you on the show. (00:11:12) One important statistic that you could have mentioned from the Cost of War project as well is 37 million people displaced from their homes, right? (00:11:21) And the same group, (00:11:24) It was, Lex, I'm telling you, it was at least five years ago. (00:11:27) God, it's the future. (00:11:29) Now, this may be 7, eight years ago that they did a study that determined that 30,000 American servicemen have blown their own brains out since then, while one way or the other, deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it is. (00:11:42) So (00:11:43) Talk about the cost of war. (00:11:44) That's far beyond the actual deaths in the war. (00:11:47) We had about 4,500 in Iraq and about 2,500 in Afghanistan of just official airmen, marines, and soldiers on the ground killed, plus contractors and all that. (00:11:57) So that's speaking not just to the things that could be measured, but you can just imagine the scale of suffering that's going on in the veterans' minds. (00:12:05) Yeah. (00:12:05) And you know what, too? (00:12:08) you would have guessed this, probably right. (00:12:09) You probably know more about this subject than me. (00:12:11) It was a New York Times headline, I think, yesterday was, oh my God, look at, or maybe it was the Wall Street Journal. (00:12:17) Look at this insane list of the kinds of drugs that all these depressed soldiers get put on. (00:12:23) Here's 15 different psychoactive drugs, all to temper the side effects of the others and whatever, where (00:12:31) and then they say that this could lead to suicide because of course we know that, right? (00:12:35) They even have to say that on TV sometimes. (00:12:37) Some of these drugs cause suicidal or homicidal obsessions and this kind of thing. (00:12:42) We know that's one of the side effects. (00:12:44) So some percentage of these guys might have made it if the government healthcare system hadn't helped them in the end is another bitter irony. (00:12:53) the whole thing is just, you said we got nothing out of it. (00:12:56) I said half ingest, but it is serious, but it's also, it shows by relief what a disaster this is. (00:13:02) That the only thing we did get out of it, like literally, was advancements in prosthetic limbs for amputees, whether if they lost their limb in war or otherwise. (00:13:15) If you want to boil it down, what did anyone get out of this other than, some people got a dividend check from Lockheed or that kind of thing, but that's not to the benefit of the society whatsoever. (00:13:24) So that does not count. (00:13:25) You know what I'm talking about? (00:13:26) What society got out of it? (00:13:27) What America got out of it? (00:13:28) We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before. (00:13:32) That's it. (00:13:33) I don't think there's any more clear illustrations of the complete failure of the military industrial complex. (00:13:38) How did this begin? (00:13:39) How do we get into this? (00:13:40) Yeah, well, so I'll try to tell the somewhat fast version, although Alexa's a kiss of death every time I say that. (00:13:46) Please, we'll go through. (00:13:47) Please go with the slow version. (00:13:48) Okay, so the slow version is, I'll start with the end of Vietnam, okay? (00:13:55) So one major aspect of the end of Vietnam was that Richard Nixon felt like he had to bribed the military-industrial complex some other way. (00:14:03) And so one of the things that he did was he turned to the Shah of Reza Pahlavi in Iran and asked him to increase arms sales. (00:14:10) Now I guess I could go back. (00:14:11) I think everybody knows that the CIA helped with the coup of 1953 to reinstall the Shah, who was the son of the last dictator and had already been in for a while, and they put him back in. (00:14:22) And so now this is (00:14:24) And that was in 53. (00:14:26) So now this is in the early 70s, 20 years later. (00:14:29) And Nixon's saying, hey, what would really help me would be if you would buy a bunch of fighter jets. (00:14:32) So I think it's kind of notorious, right, that Iran still has F-4s and F-14s. (00:14:37) That's where they got them from, was the Nixon and Ford administration and this push to do that. (00:14:41) And the Shah was apparently pretty obsessed with looking very first world with his very fancy first world army that he couldn't really afford. (00:14:48) And it helped to destabilize his regime somewhat. (00:14:52) And then I don't know the full extent (00:14:54) of America turning on him before the revolution. (00:14:56) But I know that by the time of the revolution in 1979, he was sick with cancer and very sick. (00:15:02) And the Americans secretly knew that. (00:15:04) CIA knew that, you know, but it was not public knowledge. (00:15:07) It was whatever, stage 4 or whatever. (00:15:08) He was doomed. (00:15:10) And so they knew the revolution was coming and they were trying to figure out how to handle it. (00:15:13) And there was, the revolution was coming anyway. (00:15:15) And it wasn't just, there's going to be a change of leadership. (00:15:17) When we say revolutionary, we mean mobs in the street demanding an end to the old regime in huge numbers, right? (00:15:23) A very large scale popular revolution. (00:15:25) And they're trying to figure out how to get the handle on it. (00:15:28) Some of Carter's critics said what he should have done was had the military just massacre all those people. (00:15:31) That'll shut them up or like, you know what I mean? (00:15:33) They're trying to figure out what to do. (00:15:35) the CIA and the State Department told Jimmy Carter, listen, this Ayatollah Khomeini, he's not so bad. (00:15:41) We know this guy. (00:15:42) He was part of a group of Shiite clergy who helped to agitate against Mossadeq in 1953. (00:15:49) And so we have at least some contact and we think that we can deal with him. (00:15:54) Did they actually believe that? (00:15:56) I think so. (00:15:57) Is this incompetence or malevolence? (00:16:00) Like how does this whole process happen that you go into this (00:16:05) process of regime change and keep installing people that are creating more and more instability and destruction in the world, and then you use that to then justify invading and starting wars. (00:16:20) How does this happen? (00:16:21) there's a lot of things. (00:16:23) And the whole time we're in our discussion here, we'll be talking about a massive conspiracy of interests at play all the time. (00:16:28) But this is, and I've never read a bunch of books about this. (00:16:31) I probably should at least interview these guys. (00:16:34) You'd be interested in this if you don't already know the subject is public choice theory. (00:16:38) It's kind of a branch of libertarian political economy studies that says that essentially one of its major aspects is that there really is no national interest the way you and I might think of it, sitting here hashing it out across the table. (00:16:51) because what becomes the national interest is the interest of the people in charge of making the decisions for the nation. (00:16:58) And so they all ultimately are private choices, aren't they? (00:17:01) And the national interest becomes subsumed by what's good for me now. (00:17:05) And so telling all my bosses they're all wrong is not good for me now. (00:17:09) And on a very basic level, you know, I've read quite a few books just from former insiders like Daniel Ellsberg and other people like that. (00:17:16) Ellsberg tells the story of where he's the deputy undersecretary of state for (00:17:21) making up nonsense or whatever it is, or defense of the, no, state, I believe. (00:17:25) And his whole job is making his boss look good, whether he agrees with him or not. (00:17:30) And then the hope is that next year he'll be in his boss's position and his boss will move up one. (00:17:34) And then his job will be making his boss look good then. (00:17:37) And how, and he explains how the truth and reality just gets washed out of this, right? (00:17:42) Another famous one, or should be famous, is my friend David Hardy, who wrote the best book about the Waco massacre. (00:17:48) He's a great lawyer and he had been a former, (00:17:51) interior department cop. (00:17:53) And he said, there's truth and there's falsity. (00:17:56) That's the world we live in. (00:17:58) But in government work, there's our position. (00:18:02) And our position takes place on an entirely different plane than truth and falsity. (00:18:08) Our position is the thing a bunch of people in a room agreed that they would say and do as they (00:18:15) can in committee, like come to a consensus. (00:18:17) And then a lot of times, once those decisions are made, now to go back on that decision means that you are attempting to disgrace the people who led the decision-making on that thing and say that they were wrong and they shouldn't have done the thing they did. (00:18:31) Now they got to do this instead. (00:18:32) And so you see just an absolute unwillingness to make change. (00:18:35) And this is something that capitalism, ultimately, like everybody's got ego problems, but ultimately the boss has to look at an accounting sheet and say, this isn't working. (00:18:45) So I'm going to have to swallow my pride to go out of business, right? (00:18:48) In government, it's not like that. (00:18:50) The worse they do, the better off they are. (00:18:52) This is why it was the soldiers in Vietnam called the military itself, the army itself, the self-licking ice cream cone, because it means that they cause chaos, but then chaos is their job, is to go and fix that. (00:19:04) And so (00:19:05) and if you're a government bureaucrat getting paid way above the market, then what do you want to do? (00:19:10) Go get a job? (00:19:12) A great example of this I cite in the book is at the end of the Afghan war, there are multiple military... (00:19:18) officers, not too, high, but high enough to be quoted by the news saying, now that that's over, we're looking for other things to do. (00:19:26) So we're going to pivot to Africa and go find some Islamists there because we are looking for ways to stay globally engaged. (00:19:33) Because of course, that's their interest to do. (00:19:36) Whether that's good for Africa or good for the American people is just, it's kind of a separate question that they're not really dealing with. (00:19:42) And so I think that's a huge part of it. (00:19:44) I mean, one of the things was William Sullivan said that, well, Khomeini, (00:19:47) He's like the Iranian Gandhi. (00:19:50) Well, first of all, he's not a pacifist. (00:19:52) But second of all, didn't Gandhi kick the British Empire out of India? (00:19:57) So what are you saying? (00:19:58) You're deliberately putting in a guy who's going to limit your influence there, and it's going to declare independence from you. (00:20:04) How are you going to handle that? (00:20:06) Like, they don't seem to think this through. (00:20:07) And I have to say, (00:20:10) That's one of the great disappointments of growing up is you find out that the rest of the adults aren't so smart. They're just regular dudes like you. And I think a lot of times State Department people might have very advanced knowledge. It doesn't mean they have very advanced wisdom. You know, there's something else Danielle Ellsberg talks about is when you have access to classified information, then you don't pay any attention to anybody who doesn't, because what do they know? You know all these things that they couldn't possibly be taking into account. So you immediately (00:20:39) close your circle of people who you listen to. And I'll tell you a great example of this from my own experience was I interviewed a CIA analyst, apparently a pretty important executive at one time in the terror war named Cynthia Storer. And I asked her, I forget if it was in the interview or not, I hope I'm not like speaking out of school. I believe it was in the interview that I asked her about, well, I can't remember the exact context, but I asked her about, well, don't you read Patrick Coburn? And she goes, who's Patrick Coburn? And I go, who's Patrick Coburn? (00:21:09) Patrick Coburn is the most important Anglo in Iraq. He's the one who understands all of this stuff more and better than all of y'all. And he writes in the Independent. You can read it for free. Just register with your email address, for God's sake, man. I can't believe. And she's like, who even is that? So a lack of basic curiosity, rigor of research, understanding the situation. (00:21:33) And she could know a lot of secret things, but without understanding what he understands, she does not understand what she needs to know. I can promise you that much. I think it's a basic lack of humility. The ego grows, the power grows, then you to self-preserve to maintain power. You start deluding yourself in those closed rooms. You start shutting yourself off from the reality of the world. And then (00:21:58) as your own delusion drifts, you're more incentivized to grow that delusion, incentivized to hide, to do secrecy, and then it just goes off. And that's why I was hoping you could speak more to Daniel Ellsberg. So the importance of somebody like that. So it sounds like if you think about the machinery of how this happens, it feels like heroic whistleblowers are essential to this process. If we talk about Snowden and Assange, and one of the OGs is Daniel Ellsberg. (00:22:28) who, just reading here, was an American military analyst, economist, and renowned whistleblower, best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Can you tell me about who he was and the importance of him? Oh yeah, well, he's an absolutely brilliant guy. I'm proud to say I was a friend, you know, for 10, 15 years there, I don't know, quite a while. So he endorsed my first two books, I'm very proud to say. And (00:22:52) and he did not have a chance to read Provoked, unfortunately. But I know I would have liked it because we were email buddies and I know that he thought very much along the same lines as me and John Mearsheimer and others, you know, as people are probably familiar, I think we'll get more to that. But on that issue, he was great. But (00:23:13) He was a brilliant genius and he was a nuclear war planner. That was his second book was called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. And he had liberated a bunch of documents about nuclear war as well. But he had decided with his quote unquote co-conspirator that they should just focus on Vietnam first. That's the thing that matters the most right now. And that was the Pentagon Papers. And then (00:23:36) All the papers that he had hidden away, he gave them to his brother and his brother lost them. And so then he decided later, you know what, I remember enough of this stuff that I can go ahead and just write it from memory. And he was so brilliant, dude. I mean, I don't know what his IQ was, but I know his father built the first assembly line for the atom bomb. And they asked him if he would do the same for the H-bomb and he refused for moral reasons. (00:23:58) So that was his background in the 1st place. And he's just such a great guy, man. So he's a person who was able to see the situation. Like you mentioned, like that room. And in that room, understand that there's some shit that's wrong that's going on here. And to be able to speak up. And he was at Rand, right? His job was writing. And this was when Rand, I guess, was much more important and very closely tied to the Pentagon. And their whole thing was like writing up game theory, nuclear warfare plans. One of the things he did was he found out (00:24:26) And Jack Kennedy had to fight like madly. They had to go back and forth over and over and over to even get the war plan from the Pentagon. And they finally got the war plan from the Pentagon. And it said, if we have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China. So that would be, I don't know if that includes all the Warsaw Pact, but it includes all the republics and China. And the thinking was that if (00:24:51) America and the Soviet Union destroy each other and Europe, well, we'll be damned if we're going to leave Earth to those dirty chicoms. So we're going to kill all them too. And that was the thinking and thing. And it was Ellsberg told Kennedy that. And Kennedy told Ellsberg to make sure and force the Pentagon to rewrite the plan and narrow that thing down. So that's part of the guy's background where he comes from. I beg people to read the, it's called Secrets, a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and then also the Doomsday Machine. And by the way, (00:25:22) His first book, Secrets, begins with his first day on the job. I was joking around earlier. He's deputy undersecretary of state for whatever it was. I can't remember if it's state or defense. Maybe it was defense. It had to have been defense. Forgive me for before. And then the first thing that happens when he clocks in that day for his job is the thing starts coming across the teletype, ships attacked in the Tonkin Gulf. And then he's reading, oh, never mind, that was a mistake. (00:25:49) And then he sees the president run with it anyway. And now the historian Gareth Porter says that actually McNamara lied to LBJ and he can prove it. I can't cite all the chapter and verse, but I trust Gareth. He's great. And he says it actually was McNamara lied to LBJ when they knew that it was a mistake. And the same thing happened again and again. You take a little piece of information (00:26:12) and run with them in order to justify war. That's right. That's gonna be a theme. Absolutely. What was important in the Pentagon Papers? What are some key ideas? Okay, so the Pentagon Papers, first of all, was... (00:26:24) And he wrote this while he was working at RAND, but he had full top secret clearance. And they were commissioned by Secretary of Defense McNamara to write a real secret, top secret history of the Vietnam War and the entire history of our involvement in Indochina since the end of the Second World War. And so that was what they did, was they wrote like eyes only for the Secretary of Defense type material. So it had everything in there. And Ellsberg was in charge of writing it, along with Leslie Gelb, who shut his mouth and went along and later became the chairman of the Council on Foreign (00:26:54) Congratulations and was a good dog, right? But anyway, they were the ones who wrote it together. And Ellsberg was brave enough to liberate the thing. And he tried to leak it to the Senate over and over and over again. Mike Gravel eventually started reading it into the record. And then finally, the New York Times got the courage to start publishing the thing. And it showed that they knew that they couldn't win all along. (00:27:14) They knew that the South Vietnamese government could not stand, they did not have popular consent, that the insurgency in the South was not just based on support from the North, but their own indigenous revolution against what they see as intolerable for an intervention and wanted to force this out. And it's funny because McNamara later says that, I guess he didn't read the Pentagon Papers, that, no, we were just sure that it was the capitalists versus the communists. Like all this stuff about (00:27:44) They didn't want to be ruled over foreign white devils. And that never occurred to us. like, come on. as Chomsky said, come on, America invaded South Vietnam. The government that was inviting us to stay was the government that we put in there, or at least after we overthrew the one we didn't like, the one we put in there. No different than, as we're going to talk about, Hamid Karzai inviting us to please stay in Afghanistan. It's like, come on, who's Zooming who here? (00:28:10) But so it showed and that was the deal. And that was why it was such a big deal and how he made Nixon's enemies list and all these things, even though it didn't really expose Nixon, it exposed LBJ and the predecessors. But it was a huge shock that they had been lying to us and lying to us and lying to us deliberately knowing that this is got to be somebody else's problem, right? There's a phone call of LBJ saying to a Republican senator friend of his that I can't be the first president to lose a war. (00:28:40) right? He's just going to retire for us and make it Nixon's problem, right? Same as George W. Bush said, oh, the end of Iraq? Well, that'll just have to be up to other presidents to decide. Not my responsibility. All I did was do it. You know, and that's how they are. And they have, that's their, this is also part of the economics of democracy too, where they have (00:29:00) such, and I'm not arguing for the opposite, but I'm just saying the reality is you have such short terms of office, you have a very high time preference, right? Instead of like working on long-term projects about what's the future of mankind going to look like 100 years from now, you're looking at a much shorter time horizon, you know, including who's going to finance your next election so that you'll have any say-so whatsoever. And as Yoda and Palpatine agree that like all who have power are afraid to lose it, because what if the other guy had it instead? It would be (00:29:30) worse. Everybody knows that, which is of course a huge part of the story of the American Empire here. Well, but fundamentally that's cowardly, right? So what we want from leaders, from great leaders is courage. And courage means making difficult decisions that are going to make the world a better place long-term, the country a better country long-term. And that means if you start a war, (00:29:53) That means understanding the full cost of that war and how it's going to have to end. And then if you understand the full cost of the war, you're not going to start it. Yep. Right. So how do we go from the CIA, 1979, the Shah, Ayatollah, Nixon, what is the thread that now starts inching towards the 90s and towards 9-11 in Iraq? I know, there's so much, but we're into it, man. (00:30:21) So here's what happens. America goes ahead and allows Ayatollah to get on the plane in Paris, France and go home. Now I remember even as a kid saying, but aren't the French our friends when they had checked with us before doing that? In fact, I just recently found a clip of Peter Jennings interviewing him. And the smartest thing Peter Jennings can think of to say is, so how do you feel on your triumphant return, Mr. Ayatollah? Right, which the USA is just completely aiding and abetting, right? These are shots they called and made happen, right? They sent him home to inherit the thing. And then they did work with him. (00:30:51) People forget, man, and I was just very young at that time, but I was raised kind of in the atmosphere of all of this. And even back then, people conflated the revolution itself with the hostage crisis. That's just one story, it all is spoken in one breath. But in fact, the revolution was in February of 1979, and the hostage crisis didn't break out until November. So what was happening in the meantime? Well, one of the things was, (00:31:18) the Americans were warning the new Iranian regime about threats from the new dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had just overthrown the government in a bloody coup d'etat. No revolution there. And you can watch the video of this. Have you ever seen the video of Saddam's overthrown Iraq? And he's got a huge stadium of guys, and he just starts calling names. And everybody whose name he calls has to go out back and get shot. Like, it's gnarly, man. I think that video is a (00:31:46) dark study of human nature. It's terrifying. Oh, it is. It's ugly, man. Because everybody is afraid. And there's a disgusting face as an almost saying has. Oh, I don't know. I don't know if there's a sadistic. Sure. He was a psychopath, man. No question. He was a brute of a dictator, right? There's a lot of El Presidentes in the world. Not all of them like train their sons to torture people from the time they're young and stuff. Oh, fuck. All the cowards in that room. (00:32:15) But then you have to ask yourself, what would you do if you were in that room? Yeah, you've already been bested at that point. I mean, they could all rush the stage, but that ain't gonna do them any good, you know? But before you, how did you get to that room? Yeah. And then that's why you have to give props to whistleblowers. You have to give props to people that stand up and risk their life in situations like that, which in those parts of the world is even harder than it is in the United States of America. And you know what, by the way, (00:32:41) I usually forget to mention this when I tell this story. It takes another few seconds to mention that. Saddam Hussein had been groomed by the CIA since the 1950s, on and off. And he had been part of different dictator regimes on and off. He'd been in exile in Cairo for a little while and this kind of thing. And then in the 70s leading up to the coup, I think it was really closer to the Soviet Union. And so we'll get to the, I guess I'll mention it now, the huge irony of the fact that in the Iran-Iraq war, (00:33:09) It was America supporting Saddam Hussein and his Soviet military versus Iran and its American one, right? But anyway. The absurdity of this is insane. Well, I'm skipping ahead a step, but I just like that part. But so, okay, so America supports the revolution in 79 in February. They're warning this guy, hey, you better look out for Saddam Hussein and his intentions. And we're going to get back to that in one moment here. (00:33:38) And they were also warning them about the threat from the Soviet Union. Now, why is that? Well, that's because, skip over Iran, now we're talking about Afghanistan and Zabidian Brzezinski's policy that let's support the mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to try to provoke Soviet intervention there. And so there's a memo and people can find this at scotthorton.org slash bear use. If you want to look at it, it's from, you want to go ahead and pull it up? (00:34:11) So if you allow me to read, President Jimmy Carter's July 3rd, 1979 finding, in quotes, authorizing covert support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Secret sensitive. And the important part is (00:34:25) provide unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support to Afghan insurgents. This is now a finding is an order from a president to the CIA to do something. That's what a finding means. So this is an order to CIA to do this. Now, on that order, they did start pouring in support to the Mujahideen. Now, I have to tell you that my best experts on this, like Eric Margulies, and I got this also from reading Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident, (00:34:52) that they both said that it wasn't American support for the mujahideen that really provoked the Russians into invading Afghanistan. Because what it was, the sock puppet dictator was a basket case, and he had created so many enemies that he just couldn't hold it together. So the first thing the Soviets did when they invaded in December of 79 was take him out back and shoot him and replace him with a new guy. So that was really the cause of the Soviet intervention there. They had a commie sock puppet regime. It was not one of the Soviet republics, (00:35:21) right? But they had a sock puppet regime there, but they wanted to, maintain it and it was falling apart. So they rushed to intervene. However, Lex, the point still remains that the United States of America was trying to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. We're going to get back to why this is so relevant to the Iran thing in just one second, but let's stop and talk about this for a second. Why would they do that? And they would do that also because of Vietnam. (00:35:48) Because at the end of Vietnam, Americans had what the government considered to be a mental illness, Vietnam syndrome. That meant that Americans didn't want to do this anymore. Contain communism at this cost. I mean, who really cares if Vietnam goes commie? We do business with them now. And so people weren't into it anymore. So this is where Zbigniew Brzezinski and his, he was national security advisor under Jimmy Carter. (00:36:16) And his, I guess, counterpart at defense, a guy named Walter Slocum, they came up with this brilliant idea that what we'll do is we will bait the Soviets into over-expansion. Now, we don't want them to invade West Germany, but the Afghans are expendable. So if we can bait the Soviets into Afghanistan and bog them down, we will be adding straw to the camel's back. This is a way to inflict, because by then, think of it, (00:36:45) The word Vietnam, that's not even the name of a country over there somewhere anymore. Vietnam at that time, that word means some horrible, stupid, no-win quagmire thing that you shouldn't have done. You shot yourself in the foot and the leg and lost your friend Jimmy down the street and everything. And we don't want to do that, you know? That was what Vietnam meant to America, was like, God dang, what a mistake that was. So now they're saying, let's do that to the Reds, okay? We'll bog them down, bleed them to bankruptcy, (00:37:15) and force them out the hard way and hurt them in doing that. So that's what they were trying to do. That was the wisdom behind the operation in the 1st place. And now if you go click back one to Brzezinski, you'll see where, and he later misparaphrases this a little bit, he's kind of cute, Brzezinski, but. National Security Advisor is big new Brzezinski's memo to President Carter on December 26, 1979, regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And the important part here, I mean, there's a lot, it's a bit, but if you go down, you will see where, (00:37:45) here, this could become a Soviet Vietnam, while it could become a Soviet Vietnam. In other words, see, they're already talking about it in that context here in writing, we see. And it's from Robert Gates's first memoir, by the way, where he says it was Brzezinski and Slocum. By the way, that's my source for that when I say that those two were the ones really innovating this policy. And he says, the initial effects of the invention are likely to be adverse for us for the following reasons. And then he says, (00:38:12) that it'll make the Hawks talk about how we better do something about Iran. And he says this could bring us into a head-to-head confrontation with the Soviets. So this is very interesting, Lex, because... (00:38:24) one, this is why America's passing intelligence to the Ayatollah about threats from the Soviets. We think that now that Iran is essentially destabilized because of the revolution, and we just deliberately, or at least were trying to, and apparently succeeded in a sense, in baiting them into invading Afghanistan, now we're worried that they're too expansionist and that they're going to roll into Persia next, and then they'd be right on the Persian Gulf. And we can't have that. (00:38:51) So that was when Jimmy Carter announced in his speech in 1980, the Carter Doctrine that said that the Persian Gulf is now an American lake. And we will take any move by any power, read the USSR, to move into the Persian Gulf as an attack on the United States itself, right? We're like bringing the Gulf, those waters into NATO, right? Giving a full war guarantee to keep the Soviets. And by the way, Regine, oh, I'm sorry, I'm skipping one. See, go back. (00:39:19) Forgive me for the, it's hard to stay in line here. The hostage crisis breaks out in November 79 because David Rockefeller from, of course, Standard Oil of New Jersey, AKA Exxon and Aramco and all those things, the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank at that time, (00:39:37) He was very close with Jimmy Carter, and he convinced Carter to let the Shah into the United States for cancer treatment. That was what caused the riot at the embassy and the seizure of the hostages. Now, I don't know, and I'm sure there are books about this that I just haven't read yet, you know, kind of thing that explain whether it really was the IRGC that took the lead in that or whether it was the students who did it or what. But obviously, the government held the hostages and kept the thing going. (00:40:00) doing so. (00:40:00) They bear responsibility for that. (00:40:02) But the point being that America had been trying to work with the Ayatollah up until then. (00:40:08) The idea was not that, oh, Shiite fundamentalist Islam says that all white Christians from North America must lay down dead right now because that's their religious belief. (00:40:17) Look at them ranting, we're the great Satan and burning our flag. (00:40:20) And then, but so when so many people, when the story begins with they're calling us great Satan and burning our flag, then (00:40:29) they just hate us. (00:40:30) And so we're just going to have to do something about that. (00:40:32) And I remember meeting a guy one time who said, listen, Al-Qaeda hates us for all these complicated reasons. (00:40:38) And he explained them. (00:40:39) And then he goes, but not Iran. (00:40:41) They just hate us. (00:40:42) I remember when I was a boy, they were burning our flag and calling us Satan. (00:40:45) So it's like, yeah, but well, they had a reason too. (00:40:48) Not that it justifies them doing anything sinful or criminal, but I'm just saying, (00:40:52) they also had reasons for reacting the way that they reacted. (00:40:55) America had launched a coup in 53 from that same embassy. (00:40:59) And by saying that they were going to cure the Shah's cancer, seemed to be an indication to them that we were going to try to reinstall him in power and cancel the revolution. (00:41:08) And so they were preempting that. (00:41:09) Again, not a justification for everything that happened there or whatever, but just to tell the whole story in a way that I've told that story to people before and I'm like, I never knew that. (00:41:16) I always thought that it all happened in one big show, you know? (00:41:19) And never do they admit, unless sometimes the Republicans (00:41:22) accuse Carter of this. (00:41:23) They'll tell the part about that Carter was so naive as to send the Ayatollah home, although that's usually always left out. (00:41:31) But so now, (00:41:33) He announces the Carter Doctrine, giving a war guarantee to Iran that he now officially hates and is holding our hostages and completely humiliating him, right? (00:41:43) And there's Operation Eagle Claw where they sent forces into Iran and that was a, it was supposed to be a rescue mission that ended up in disaster where the planes and the helicopters crashed into each other. (00:41:55) They were already leaving anyway because it was going to be botched and then they crashed on the way out. (00:41:59) And so that was a big humiliation for Carter as well. (00:42:03) And then, oh, and I should also tell you that Gareth just found this. (00:42:08) It was a classified document that he only found in the State Department records that show that just after the Carter Doctrine speech, Brzezinski, in a private meeting with the Saudi foreign minister and also with his deputy, Warren Christopher, who was later Clinton's Secretary of Defense, he admitted that we don't think there's really a Soviet threat to Iran. (00:42:27) Brzezinski himself admitted that, so the pretext for the Carter Doctrine was fake. (00:42:31) and he admitted it himself. (00:42:33) They weren't really afraid of that, even though they were pretending to be afraid of that as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that they were trying to provoke. (00:42:41) And we should also give a shout out to Gareth Porter. (00:42:43) He has written about the Vietnam War. (00:42:47) books, including Perils of Dominance and Balance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. (00:42:52) I have to say, I believe that he is the most important journalist of the war on terrorism era. (00:42:57) I call him Gareth the Great. (00:42:58) He's a good friend of mine. (00:42:59) I've interviewed him 300 something times on my show about essentially everything he's written since 2007. (00:43:05) He is the best of the best of the best. (00:43:06) It's not just the war in Vietnam. (00:43:08) He writes also about the continued war. (00:43:10) Absolutely specialized in Iraq, Afghanistan, exposing (00:43:14) the entire fraud of David Petraeus in his career. (00:43:17) He wrote the book, Manufactured Crisis on the Iranian Nuclear Program. (00:43:20) That is bar none the very best book on that. (00:43:23) Vietnam, Cambodia, Syria, Iran, and the War on Terror, all the things he's written extensively about. (00:43:31) Gareth Porter the Great, man. (00:43:32) Absolutely. (00:43:33) Great. (00:43:33) I learned so much from him. (00:43:34) I couldn't begin to explain. (00:43:36) Fair enough. (00:43:36) So the story continues. (00:43:38) Yes. (00:43:39) Carter. (00:43:39) So another aspect of the Carter Doctrine was, (00:43:44) Carter gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. (00:43:50) Now, first thing is, why did Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran? (00:43:54) It ain't just because he likes doing what Jimmy Carter says. (00:43:56) He had his own reasons. (00:43:57) Now, picture your map of Iraq. (00:43:59) I know you got one in your head there. (00:44:02) Everything from Baghdad over east to Iran and down to Kuwait, that is what you could call Shia stand, predominantly Shiite Iraq, right? (00:44:12) And then the (00:44:13) They're 60% of the population, supermajority. (00:44:16) In the north, you have the Kurds who are Sunnis, but they're Kurds of separate ethnicity than the Arabs. (00:44:21) And then you have the Sunni Arabs who are another 20%. (00:44:23) Well, Saddam Hussein was a secular Sunni Arab, leading essentially like on the sentence, the Commie Nazis, the Baath Party, who are like sort of both, a little, just a fascist state essentially, right, with Arab characteristics or whatever. (00:44:40) And not an entirely sectarian one. (00:44:43) He had Christians and Kurds and Shiites in his government and things like that. (00:44:47) It was not like just a caricature or whatever. (00:44:50) It was a balance of power act. (00:44:52) But after the Iranian Revolution, Saddam had real reason to fear that the Shiite revolution was gonna spread to Iraq and that Iraqi Shiites, at least the armed and convinced ones, would choose their religious sect. (00:45:07) and their alliance with Iran on that basis over their national and ethnic sect as Iraqis and Arabs, right? (00:45:15) Separate from the Persians. (00:45:17) So, and he had real reason to believe that, including that members of the Daba party and people loyal to the Hakim family were Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his people. (00:45:27) They left to go to Iran and they chose Iran's side in the war. (00:45:32) So Saddam Hussein's solution to that was to conscript all these people and force them into his army and march them east against Iran and use them in that way. (00:45:42) And this led to an absolutely brutal World War I, maybe Russia-Ukraine style trench warfare, tanks, artillery, and there's planes and ships. (00:45:51) And it was a hell of a war for nine years, all through the 1980s, as the United States almost entirely backed Saddam Hussein, except for (00:46:02) when they backed the Ayatollah, remember Iran-Contra. (00:46:06) And during Iran-Contra, what do they do? (00:46:09) They went to the Israelis and they said, hey, you're still friends with the government in Iran. (00:46:15) You guys don't mind the Ayatollah one bit and have maintained your friendship there. (00:46:18) We want to sell them some missiles and try to get the hostages out and then (00:46:23) take the rest of the proceeds from the missiles and give them to the Contras in Nicaragua. (00:46:28) And this is what became the great Iran-Contra scandal. (00:46:30) And so we should also say, and you highlight the importance of understanding Iran-Contra. (00:46:35) So this here reading, a major political scandal in the United States during the mid-1980s, senior officials in President Ronald Reagan's administration facilitated the secret sale of arms to Iran, which was under an arms embargo. (00:46:49) with the proceeds being used to find Contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas government in Nicaragua, despite Congress explicitly prohibiting such funding. (00:46:59) And this is, of course, supposedly a side story, but a huge part of the side story is it absolutely was true, as the great Gary Webb reported in the Dark Alliance series and in his great book, Dark Alliance, that, and many other great journalists as well. (00:47:13) that the CIA had a massive operation to bring cocaine into the United States by the truckload and plane load to sell it to poor Americans, blacks, especially in LA. (00:47:23) But also, yes, it's true, they even made a Tom Cruise movie after years of calling us conspiracy kooks and all this. (00:47:29) The movie's about a guy named Barry Seal whose job it was to fly guns and money down there and cocaine up here for the Contras for the CIA and into Bill Clinton's Arkansas, where he was read in on this. (00:47:43) And the operation was run out of the vice president's office, George H.W. (00:47:46) Bush. (00:47:46) And that much is true. (00:47:48) And the same, they had the, I know less about, but they had, this is where all the cocaine from Miami Vice was coming into Florida in the same way. (00:47:55) And this is where the crack epidemic came from in South LA and throughout the country, really, in many places. (00:48:02) And they just don't give a damn about us, man. (00:48:05) Congress said you can't have any money to fund the Contras. (00:48:08) And they said, yeah, but we want to anyway. (00:48:10) So this is how they did it. (00:48:11) So the CIA would help orchestrate this kind of transport of drugs. (00:48:16) Absolutely right. (00:48:17) And then they completely destroyed the heroic Gary Webb for exposing this. (00:48:21) And they didn't murder him, but they drove him to suicide. (00:48:23) And you know, his good friend Robert Perry, the great journalist, verified that, no, it really was a suicide. (00:48:29) People thought it was suspicious because he shot himself twice, but that does happen sometimes. (00:48:33) where people flinch on the first one. (00:48:34) But it was his father's gun and he was totally depressed and he'd signed his house over to his wife and somebody stole his motorcycle and he was like at the end. (00:48:43) But they had run him out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News. (00:48:45) They first ran to the Hollywood beat and then he eventually he just quit and went to become an investigator for the California state legislator. (00:48:52) So the CIA doesn't have to kill you directly. (00:48:53) They can psychologically destroy you. (00:48:55) That's right. (00:48:55) Yeah, they put the gun in his mouth either way for doing the right thing. (00:49:00) But anyway, and didn't get any facts wrong. (00:49:02) The only thing that anyone had to attack him on was like the graphics editor put like a phrase out of context, big on the page or something in the newspaper. (00:49:10) You know what I mean? (00:49:11) It was like something silly that made it sound like he was saying the purpose of the mission was to destroy the black community. (00:49:16) He never said that. (00:49:18) What he said was, they didn't give a damn about those people. (00:49:20) I don't even know if he addressed that, right? (00:49:22) But he certainly wasn't saying that was what it was about. (00:49:24) It was about funding the Contras. (00:49:27) But anyway, so they found their separate ways of doing it. (00:49:29) And this is one of the things that made me like this is I don't even have any idea where I first learned this. (00:49:33) But I knew this while Reagan was still in office, or at least by the time Bush senior was in office, when I was still just like maybe a freshman in high school or younger than that, I knew that Ronald Reagan was a dope pusher. (00:49:43) The same guy with the just say no, and the same guy with the massively increased penalties for people engaging in just simply the possession, much less the sale and trade and drugs. (00:49:53) And so there are people who went to prison for decades for life, essentially and literally (00:49:57) for just possession of the same drugs that the government was bringing in. (00:50:01) And so how are you ever going to believe in a security force like that again? (00:50:04) I never have. (00:50:05) I don't know why you'd even need to see a Waco mask or any other, or an Iraq war or any other thing to detest these people. (00:50:11) That's who they are. (00:50:12) You know, I had this (00:50:15) It's the only part I really remember about it, but there's this great film producer named Kevin Booth. (00:50:19) He was Bill Hicks's best friend and producer. (00:50:21) And he did a documentary about the drug war where they show this guy and he goes, oh, they're all in prison and they're filming him through the gate. (00:50:30) And they're all yelling and whatever. (00:50:31) He can't really make out much, right? (00:50:33) They're all like yelling over each other. (00:50:35) And one guy finally like makes everybody be quiet and he looks at the camera and he goes, listen, I'm doing 35 years because I had a few rocks in my pocket. (00:50:42) Does that sound right to you? (00:50:44) I was like, dude, it was Ronald Reagan's cocaine in his pocket. (00:50:49) Like, that guarantees a full pardon, man. (00:50:52) Right? (00:50:53) What are we talking about? (00:50:53) That's not fair. (00:50:54) It's a dark aspect of human nature that the people that try to, if we talk about drugs, to ban drugs, and really anyone who tries to ban a thing are often secretly participating in doing that thing. (00:51:09) Bootleggers and Baptists, you know? (00:51:11) Just on a small tangent, have you ever, since you're a Texan, have you ever met Bill Hicks? (00:51:16) No, man. (00:51:17) I learned about Bill Hicks like a month after he died. (00:51:20) And so they started playing insane man on the Access Channel all the time. (00:51:23) And I was like, oh my God, who's this guy? (00:51:25) And then they're like, oh, he just died. (00:51:27) But he's a legend. (00:51:28) He has been a huge influence on me, you know, in a lot of ways. (00:51:33) So I'm very much a Hicksian. (00:51:35) I apologize for that. (00:51:36) It's good to do a shout out. (00:51:37) Back to the drug war. (00:51:39) And that involvement (00:51:41) from Carter and on and Reagan and Iran. (00:51:45) Well, yeah, let's go back to Iran, because the cocaine is really tied up in the Contra end of the scandal. (00:51:50) Point being, America's back in Saddam, except when they're helping Israel back Iran. (00:51:55) and by selling them these missiles. (00:51:57) And they're even, I don't have my footnote anymore, but it's findable, I'm sure, where they did talk about, you know what we do is we support one side till they start getting ahead a little bit, then we support the other side a little bit more and go, or we authorize the Israelis to increase support for Iran and play them back and forth against each other. (00:52:12) So that's just not just, you know, offshore balancing in peacetime. (00:52:16) That's balancing in wartime, encouraging them to keep killing each other, which is some pretty horrific policy to do. (00:52:22) Could you also comment during this stage and this (00:52:25) thread will continue. (00:52:26) What role does Israel have to play in this part of the story with Iran? (00:52:30) I don't know. (00:52:31) Yeah, I don't know much about what they were saying about America's Iraq policy during that time, but I know that they were still friends with the Ayatollah. (00:52:40) And we're not going to get to them switching gears on the Ayatollah until Rabin in 1993. (00:52:44) So hold that thought. (00:52:46) So the war still going on, we have to mention the chemical weapons too. (00:52:49) America bottom, taxpayers bottom. (00:52:52) There was a huge Iraq Gate scandal, it was called, where people were put on trial for the money. (00:52:57) But then their defense was, but the government made me do it. (00:52:59) What are you talking about? (00:53:00) This was the whole thing to do. (00:53:02) And they were, it was German chemical weapons, I believe, and maybe some French, but that were bought with supposed agricultural loans (00:53:10) from the United States to Iraq. (00:53:12) And they had a sophisticated biological weapons program, too, with anthrax and the rest. (00:53:17) And the Americans sent them the precursors for the germs that he would need. (00:53:20) During the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 to 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime used chemical weapons extensively against Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians, most notably in the 1988 Halabja attack that killed an estimated 5,000 people and injured 20,000 more. (00:53:36) There is substantial documentation that Western governments (00:53:40) especially the US and some of its allies provided Iraq with dual use technology, intelligence and materials, which facilitated Iraq's chemical weapons program. (00:53:49) And it goes on. (00:53:50) Let me drop 2 good footnotes for your people here. (00:53:52) The first one would be Shane Harris, who's now at the Washington Post, you know, very official National Security Beat reporter. (00:53:58) He wrote a piece about this at foreignpolicy.com a few years back where he goes into extensive detail. (00:54:05) So as far as like authoritative sources, (00:54:08) there you go. (00:54:08) Okay, nothing conspiratorial about this narrative at all. (00:54:12) But then you want to do a deeper dive onto it, then go to fff.org. (00:54:17) And it's, this is the Future Freedom Foundation. (00:54:19) And there they have a page, and I'm sorry, I always get the headline wrong, but it's something like, where did Saddam get his WMDs or where did Saddam get his chemical weapons? (00:54:29) You know what you can do? (00:54:30) You can go site colon, (00:54:32) fff.org and then that way you search just that site and then you can do chemical weapons Iraq and I bet you'll find it. (00:54:40) Yeah, right there. (00:54:41) Where did Iraq get its weapons of mass destruction? (00:54:44) And I had mentioned this (00:54:46) I guess on the Tucker Show. (00:54:47) And so I actually talked with Hornberger and I went back and I found and I made sure that all of those links are up to date and work for each of those stories. (00:54:54) So people can go through and take a very close look at, those are just articles, never mind all the books about it and stuff, which there are plenty. (00:55:02) So this is a set of links assembled by (00:55:06) Jacob Hernberger, the title is Where Did Iraq Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction on fff.org. (00:55:12) The people should check out. (00:55:13) And then, oh, there's the Shane Harris and Matthew M. (00:55:16) H. (00:55:16) CIA files prove America helped Saddam as he gassed Iran. (00:55:21) The US knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history and still gave him a hand. (00:55:29) And now by the official rules of confirmation bias, (00:55:31) When Shane Harris admits something that I'm accusing, that means it's definitely true. (00:55:36) If I ever disagree with him, well, he's a liar from the Post. (00:55:38) Got that? (00:55:41) Okay, good to know that's how truth works. (00:55:43) Of course. (00:55:47) There's your authoritative source, everybody. (00:55:48) Shane Harris from the Post. (00:55:51) And that's a special inside joke for fans of Where the Buffalo Roams, too. (00:55:55) Remember Harris from the Post? (00:55:57) You ever seen that? (00:55:58) It's the original Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Bill Murray. (00:56:01) I didn't realize there was an original Fear and Loathing Las Vegas with Bill Murray. (00:56:04) What? (00:56:05) Really? (00:56:06) Where the buffalo roams. (00:56:07) I promise you will have a good time. (00:56:09) And there's a joke in there about, I'm Harris from the Post. (00:56:11) He's pretending to be Harris from the Post, and he's hanging out in the bathroom with Richard Nixon. (00:56:15) And I forgot the conversation. (00:56:17) It's funny as hell though. (00:56:18) Similar type of wild journey of fear and loathing. (00:56:22) Oh yeah. (00:56:23) I got to admit, I don't remember the story that well. (00:56:25) It's very different than Fear and Loathing, but it's also very good. (00:56:27) Well, I know what I'm doing tonight. (00:56:28) Okay, cool. (00:56:30) We're in the buffalo realm. (00:56:32) It's good. (00:56:32) Everyone will like it, I promise. (00:56:33) Okay. (00:56:34) Underrated Bill Murray. (00:56:35) He's forever underrated, actually. (00:56:37) Genius actor. (00:56:38) Okay, and so back to the chemical weapons and Hussein, Saddam Hussein. (00:56:43) So, okay, the war finally comes to an end in 1989. (00:56:49) And at the same time, the Soviets are withdrawing in Afghanistan. (00:56:52) We're going to get back to them in a minute. (00:56:55) But (00:56:56) The war comes to an end, and for the next couple of years, Saddam Hussein is in a struggle over war debts with his creditors, Kuwait, Saudi, and UAE, who are demanding all their money back that they gave him for the war, they loaned to him for the war. (00:57:11) Now, of course, he feels like he bought that war partially in their defense. (00:57:16) And so, and also at this time, oil is trading at $12 a barrel. (00:57:21) So he has no ability to repay them, rebuild his country, or do any kind of thing. (00:57:26) And they're completely putting the screws to them. (00:57:28) And on top of that, this is disputed whether they were literally the Kuwaitis literally slant drilling under the border or whether it's really, that's kind of shorthand, I think, usually for they were overproducing from shared oil wells that straddled the border. (00:57:42) And when you have a contract that where your property and my property, but up next to each other and we got mineral rights, but we have a shared oil well down there, then we have a quota, how much we pump. (00:57:52) And (00:57:53) you're not allowed to cheat and pump more out of our shared well than me in any given month or whatever as per the contract. (00:57:58) That's kind of how that thing works. (00:58:00) So in this case, it's the same thing over an international border. (00:58:03) And the Kuwaitis, at least, they're also accused, and I know less about this, but they're accused also of using slant drilling techniques that they've been taught by Americans (00:58:12) to drill that way and steal Iraqi oil you know from the margin so Hussein's pissed about this at the same time they're putting the screws to him over calling in the war debts now um I don't believe that this was a deliberate trap but in effect it was I think what happened was it was a matter of in you know the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing there was no real unified policy that had been (00:58:38) sent down from on high how to handle this, evidently. (00:58:41) And so the CIA and CENTCOM were encouraging, which had been created as part of the Carter Doctrine, were encouraging Kuwait to be intransigent against Saddam and tell him to go to hell. (00:58:52) But the State Department, James A. (00:58:54) Baker, through Ambassador Glaspie and through Margaret Tutwiler and John Kelly, were sending signals that actually go ahead, we don't really care. (00:59:03) And we just celebrated April Glaspie Day the other day, we do every year, July 25th, where she told Tsadami saying, listen, it's the same thing as when I was the ambassador to Kuwait. (00:59:13) the Iraq issue and your border dispute is not associated with America. (00:59:17) And we have no position on this. (00:59:19) You're going to have to settle it. (00:59:21) And now we always had the Iraqi version of that story published in the New York Times. (00:59:25) But then we got from Manning and Assange, we got the State Department's version of that document. (00:59:30) And so it's a little less explicit as far as how it makes the Americans look, but it's essentially the same. (00:59:38) And in there she says, now listen, (00:59:40) George Bush wanted me to emphasize to you that he does not want a war in the Gulf. (00:59:45) And so Stephen Walt from Harvard University at foreignpolicy.com, he said, now listen, in diplomatic language, you know, these things are, you know, mathematical formulas. (00:59:57) You got to be very careful how you say these things. (01:00:00) Saddam Hussein wasn't anticipating a war. (01:00:02) He knew he's going to roll right into Kuwait. (01:00:04) They couldn't stop him. (01:00:05) He was counting on a coup de main. (01:00:07) So when she says, (01:00:09) the president doesn't want a war. (01:00:11) It sounds like she's saying the president won't go to war with you if you do this, and that he very well could have read it that way. (01:00:18) And that was at the very least a flashing yellow light, if not a green light, to go right ahead. (01:00:22) And we know that, again, John Kelly and Margaret Tutwiler also made statements essentially downplaying American concerns about what was happening. (01:00:32) I should give a quick shout out since you mentioned Stephen Walt. (01:00:35) I had a few e-mail exchanges with him. (01:00:38) He's a co-author with John Mearsheimer on one of his books. (01:00:42) He's a prominent, just reading here, prominent American political scientist and currently professor of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. (01:00:51) He's the best of a man. (01:00:52) He's Mearsheimer's partner in a lot of things. (01:00:54) They're basically considered like the co-deans of the realist school of foreign policy in America. (01:00:58) So they're like, you know, Henry Kissinger, realpolitik, only without the bloody hands and the, you know, the hawkish instinct. (01:01:06) They're, you (01:01:07) I think both would be relative hawks on China compared to me, for example. (01:01:11) They're not libertarian, non-interventionists, but they're very skeptical of a lot of this misuse. (01:01:18) Both of them oppose the Iraq War, for example, in the 1st place and that kind of thing. (01:01:21) If I may, I can never sing enough praises to John Mearsheimer. (01:01:25) Of course, his work is very important. (01:01:28) He's fearless as an academic, as a writer, as a historian. (01:01:32) But also as a human being, I got a chance to know him. (01:01:35) We had dinner, we had many conversations, we've exchanged a lot of emails, and he's a sweetheart. (01:01:39) Yeah, he's a great guy. (01:01:40) I emailed back and forth with him too. (01:01:41) I'm trying to get him on next week, but, and he just killed it on Tucker the other day too. (01:01:45) He was fantastic on there. (01:01:46) He sets such a great example, you know. (01:01:49) With just a good human being. (01:01:51) Yeah. (01:01:52) With like a real deep compassion. (01:01:54) Yeah. (01:01:54) And sometimes when you cover these topics and you, just like you said, you realize the adults in the room. (01:01:59) Yeah. (01:02:00) And people call him some kind of hater. (01:02:01) And it's like, come on. (01:02:03) That's because that's all you got. (01:02:05) That's the only reason you could call him that is because you got no other thing to say, you know. (01:02:09) Yeah, a real heart of gold. (01:02:10) This is a really special guy. (01:02:12) Anyway, sorry. (01:02:12) Yeah, no problem. (01:02:14) So Iraq war one. (01:02:17) So America gives like a flashing yellow light to Saddam Hussein, their client, that to go ahead and take back the northern oil fields. (01:02:26) And oh, I left out one piece was (01:02:29) I'm not talking about the left hand and the right hand. (01:02:31) Wolfowitz worked for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon at that time, and he was always an Iraq hawk. (01:02:36) And he had warned, maybe not knowing that the CIA or that Carter was encouraging it explicitly, but he had warned that Saddam was going to attack Iran back in 1980. (01:02:48) So he was always an Iraq hawk, and he was very worried that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait. (01:02:53) And he convinced Dick Cheney that we should make a statement telling Saddam not to do it. (01:02:57) But then, (01:03:00) I'm going to think of his name in just one moment. (01:03:02) Pete Williams, who later became the NBC news reporter. (01:03:05) He was the Pentagon spokesman at that time. (01:03:07) Isn't that funny how that works? (01:03:09) If you go back in time, that's how it worked. (01:03:12) He was Pentagon spokesman. (01:03:13) He made a statement where he seemed to walk back their warning, which was probably just incompetence, right? (01:03:18) He didn't know exactly what he was doing, but the way that he phrased it was softer than the way they had phrased it. (01:03:22) So then they were like, oh man, and they tried to get George Bush to write a letter. (01:03:27) I believe it was like this, that Bush sent a letter, but then they thought, I believe Cheney and Wolfowitz thought, it's too conciliatory. (01:03:35) It's not clear enough that we're saying, don't you do it. (01:03:38) So send another letter, but by then it was too late. (01:03:41) And Hussein went ahead and rolled in. (01:03:44) So this is from all very elite accounts of the story from the inside, you know, these different books and whatever I read and all that, this version of the story. (01:03:52) And then you can see if you check the timeline where (01:03:55) for the first few days, they weren't threatening to do anything about it. (01:03:58) Colin Powell chaired the National Security Council meeting. (01:04:00) He was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (01:04:01) And they announced the first day, well, they better just not move on Saudi Arabia. (01:04:06) You roll into Riyadh, you got trouble with us, Bob. (01:04:08) But they were essentially prepared to accept the invasion of Kuwait. (01:04:13) It's crazy that Cheney was involved with all this, because then the story continued. (01:04:17) So yeah, he's Secretary of Defense at that time. (01:04:21) So he, (01:04:25) And he was the only one in the government at that time who was not from the Reagan administration. (01:04:31) He had been in the Congress. (01:04:33) All the rest of these guys were Reagan's guys. (01:04:35) The vice president was now the president. (01:04:37) Colin Powell had been National Security Advisor for Reagan. (01:04:40) He's now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (01:04:41) And then you have James Baker, was Treasury Secretary, is now Secretary of State. (01:04:46) Like this is Brent Scowcroft, I forgot. (01:04:48) Maybe he was Deputy National Security Advisor under Reagan. (01:04:51) Now he's National Security Advisor under H.W. (01:04:53) Bush. (01:04:54) So this is the third Reagan term without Reagan, basically. (01:04:57) And Cheney would have been the newer guy and tended to be more hawkish. (01:05:00) And in this case, (01:05:02) It was like hawkers trying to stop the war from breaking out in the 1st place. (01:05:05) In that sense, was more concerned about the danger of the thing and whatever. (01:05:09) Sorry if this is a distracting question, but when we talk about the birth and the evolution of the Neocon movement, how does it connect to this? (01:05:16) Yeah, we can mention here that, you know, there are, when I go through and look at like who were all the worst hawks on a Rock War One, (01:05:22) Many of them were the neoconservatives. (01:05:24) So we probably shouldn't get into that whole like biography of a movement here or whatever, but they certainly were very much in support of this intervention in Desert Storm or Iraq War One, as I call it. (01:05:34) I'm trying to get that to catch on because we're at Iraq War 3 1/2 or 4 now, so like gonna have to keep these things straight somehow. (01:05:40) But some of the same characters that were responsible for Iraq War Two. (01:05:44) That's right, because of course, Clinton's in there for a while, but then it's President Bush's son. (01:05:48) It's the next president. (01:05:49) He brings Cheney and Powell with him. (01:05:51) And then all this other stuff. (01:05:53) But hold your horses now and be patient. (01:05:55) So what happens is Margaret Thatcher comes to town and she gives, this is her people's term for it. (01:06:02) She gives Bush Senior a backbone transplant. (01:06:06) And she says to him, don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush. (01:06:11) In other words, calling out his manhood, and she's a woman, and from a smaller, weaker country, and so what's he going to do now? (01:06:18) And that's when he says, yeah, this will not stand, just out of his own personal embarrassment. (01:06:22) Speaking of Bill Hicks, this was a Bill Hicks joke, that this was the wimp president. (01:06:26) It was a cover of Newsweek, wimp president. (01:06:28) Apparently, that's stuck in this guy's craw a little bit. (01:06:31) I'll show you who's a wimp. (01:06:32) And he had to go and really feel like he had to do something about that. (01:06:35) And when Margaret Thatcher called him out, instead of being prudent, as he would say, (01:06:40) and patient and conservative, he went, no, I'm tougher than you, lady. (01:06:44) I'll show you how tough I am. (01:06:46) I'll do a big tough thing. (01:06:47) But meanwhile, what did America care about Kuwait? (01:06:49) Right? (01:06:50) They had, Britain had interests in Kuwaiti oil and (01:06:54) the Kuwaiti royal family, His Highness Al-Jaber, had investments in British debt. (01:07:00) But what do I care about that, Lex Friedman? (01:07:02) Not one bit. (01:07:03) You know what I mean? (01:07:03) But that was a big part of how the war started. (01:07:06) So after the first three days, they said, we're not going. (01:07:08) It's we're going to they're not going to invade Saudi. (01:07:10) We're warning them. (01:07:11) They better not invade Saudi, wherever. (01:07:13) And it was after that (01:07:14) they decided, okay, now we are going. (01:07:16) And then once they decided that, they refused to negotiate in good faith for the rest of the time. (01:07:21) And Noam Chomsky did the best of documenting this, but what did he document? (01:07:25) He documented like 10 different sources from the summer of 1990 through January 91, where the Americans refused (01:07:34) the Bush administration in Washington, D.C. (01:07:36) refused time after time after time after time after time to negotiate in good faith with Saddam to get him out of there peacefully. (01:07:42) Because once the gauntlet was thrown down, now we have a big set piece battle. (01:07:47) Now we're going to go in there and we're going to rock them. (01:07:49) And I have the quote from Brent Scowcroft in there. (01:07:52) This was long an accusation from some liberal types that you might dismiss, but it is true. (01:07:57) It was literally an explicitly stated part of their thinking was, we have to defeat (01:08:05) Vietnam syndrome. (01:08:07) The reluctance of the American people to do things like this. (01:08:10) We got to give them one that we can do. (01:08:13) That'll be short, that'll be sweet, that'll be fun, that'll be easy. (01:08:16) We can hold a big ass parade and be victorious again like the old days. (01:08:21) Rebuild that martial spirit and make that normalcy in America, not the post-Vietnam anti-militarist malaise that you remember from the 70s and 80s. (01:08:31) Now it's time to get back to work, (01:08:34) remaking the world and give the American people something to believe in again. (01:08:38) And Bush Sr. (01:08:39) then after the fact said, by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all. (01:08:45) This is a huge part of it. (01:08:46) And if you think about Iraq War I to this day, people still think of it as like short and sweet and we use all this space age technology and we whooped them good. (01:08:55) right? (01:08:56) And Colonel McGregor and Daniel Davis and General McMaster, then of lower rank, they went in there and won the big tank battle of 73 Easting and showed the superiority of American tanks versus Soviet tanks and all of these things that were so much fun for them, such a big deal for them at that time that they wanted to, again, for our nation's overall long-term interests or what was good for them, their donors, their benefactors, and the (01:09:24) essentially, the psychological warfare campaign that they wanted to wage against the American people, that this is what we're here for. (01:09:31) We go and rescue helpless little countries like His Royal Highness Al Jaber's monarchy in Kuwait so we can reinstall the monarchy because everyone knows how much superior they are to fascist dictatorships like the Iraqis have. (01:09:46) that we've supported for the last decade, by the way, including helping him gas people, not just while he gassed people, while he's gassing his own people, supposedly the Kurds and the Anfal campaign, along with the Iranians and the rest. (01:10:01) But now he's Hitler. (01:10:02) Now he's gonna roll on Saudi. (01:10:04) He's gonna take over, next thing you know, he's gonna take over all of the Middle East resources. (01:10:09) He's gonna build up a thousand-year Reich and roll on Paris. (01:10:14) Saddam Hussein is? (01:10:16) And that was the way that they put it. (01:10:18) And they absolutely lied us into war. (01:10:20) They claimed that he had lined up his massive armored tank divisions on the Saudi border and was preparing to roll on Riyadh. (01:10:27) And that was a lie. (01:10:28) It was the St. (01:10:28) Petersburg, Florida Times hired a Soviet company to, or (01:10:35) maybe the Soviet government, to provide the satellite photos and show that there's nothing but empty desert out there. (01:10:40) You know, they'd send a couple patrols near the border, whatever. (01:10:42) There's nothing like armored divisions preparing to expand the war into Saudi Arabia. (01:10:46) They knew they were lying about that. (01:10:48) And in fact, the St. (01:10:50) Petersburg, Florida Times published that like a week and a half before the invasion. (01:10:56) And AP, Reuters, CS, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, whatever, all refused to run it. (01:11:03) and just buried it. (01:11:04) Then the other thing was, a major part of this was, it's amazing, it sounds so silly now after everything going on, and that's gone on since then, but it was a huge deal. (01:11:15) They did the Iraqi incubators hoax, where they brought in a girl who claimed to be a nurse who said that she was in the hospital in Kuwait City when the Iraqi soldiers came in there, (01:11:27) stole the incubators, threw the babies out of the incubators onto the cold floor to die, and then ran off with the incubators, whether to just destroy them out of sadism or to bring them back to... (01:11:39) Baghdad, because they have a big incubator shorter in Baghdad, she didn't say, but it turns out she wasn't a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion. (01:11:47) She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. (01:11:49) And the thing was a 100% hoax. (01:11:53) 0% of it ever happened, but Amnesty International vouched for it and said it was true. (01:11:57) And so that was all you needed. (01:11:58) So George Bush repeatedly brought this up and said, see, this shows that Iraq was determined to systematically dismantle Iraq, that this isn't just an invasion, it's these horrible (01:12:09) crimes against humanity. (01:12:11) And what would we do if they were doing it to us? (01:12:13) And we have to help the poor people. (01:12:15) And that was a big part of what they used to beat people over the head about that war. (01:12:21) And the other one was, and they learned this from the focus groups, was we have to threaten the American people with nukes, that even with moral atrocities like the incubator hoax going on, that Americans are still like, I don't know. (01:12:34) Richard Pryor said in 1986, he had a bit where he stops joking and he just says, isn't it weird? (01:12:40) Like we shake on the Germans and the Soviets and now we're bombing Libya? (01:12:44) Does that sound right? (01:12:45) Like they can't fight back even, like it's just weird. (01:12:48) Seems weird. (01:12:49) So people needed a real reason to go, and that was atom bombs. (01:12:54) And so people forget this now because Iraq War II takes the place in their memory, right? (01:12:59) But in Iraq War I, they also alleged repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons, or he very well could be. (01:13:06) And this was one of the reasons why we had to go. (01:13:08) Now, here's the screwed up part about that. (01:13:10) They were lying, but they turned out to be telling the truth accidentally. (01:13:13) Because in fact, what they found out in the aftermath of the war when they occupied southern Iraq was there was (01:13:19) a bear, but a beginning, the beginnings of a nuclear weapons program there. (01:13:23) Very, very early. (01:13:24) We're talking 91, right? (01:13:25) Early 91, at the end of Iraq war one. (01:13:28) So what happened was people always cite the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981 and say what a great success it was. (01:13:34) No, that was an IAEA safeguarded facility. (01:13:38) that was not producing weapons-grade anything of any kind. (01:13:41) And when they bombed it, all they did was drive his program underground. (01:13:44) Now it became a nuclear weapons program. (01:13:47) And it was only a coincidence that America, after launching Iraq War One, found his secret program that the CIA had no idea about. (01:13:55) And so this became a major consequence, and here's why. (01:13:58) Because Dick Cheney would later cite this and go, well, if the CIA can't find it, that doesn't mean it's not there. (01:14:03) Remember that one time? (01:14:04) And so it became a big part of the Hawks' talking points after that. (01:14:08) If the CIA claim, like confirmation bias, again, CIA agrees, then they're right. (01:14:13) CIA disputes, then yeah, well, we don't have to listen to them, right? (01:14:16) Even when they're the ones that they cite as the authoritative source for every positive claim they're making. (01:14:21) So the playbook, even with Iraq War One, is you try to look for different stories, whether it's anecdotal stories with nurses, or it's anecdotal, or it's stories about nuclear weapons. (01:14:31) You're trying to find a way to justify war. (01:14:35) That's right. (01:14:36) And the same playbook was applied in the second Iraq war. (01:14:40) And back to Noam Chomsky for one second about them refusing to accept Hussein's surrender was that by the end of the thing, like he had been demanding, come on, let me keep these uninhabited islands at the north of the Persian Gulf where I could make like an oil shipping facility there or something like that. (01:14:59) He dropped all those demands. (01:15:00) Here were his final demands. (01:15:02) He wasn't just going to turn tail for nothing. (01:15:03) He had to save some face. (01:15:05) So his final demands were promise that America will leave the Middle East and that Israel will leave the occupied territories someday. (01:15:16) Right, in other words, nothing. (01:15:17) He's demanding nothing. (01:15:19) He's demanding, please let me keep the skin on my face only, is the only face he's saving, right? (01:15:26) And they wouldn't give it to him because that would have stopped the war from happening, Lex. (01:15:31) I'm sorry, man, but that's the history of how that happened. (01:15:34) I mean, think about the relative power of the United States of America with the entire UN Security Council on board too. (01:15:40) Telling Iraq for six months, five months, (01:15:45) You better give in. (01:15:46) And they couldn't figure out a way to get him to give in, Yeah, they could too. (01:15:50) They didn't want him to give in. (01:15:52) You know, they had all of these chances and there were reports in Newsday and the New York Times and whatever that had all the stories where he kept making all these offers and they would just reject them out of hand. (01:16:03) In fact, Noam Chomsky talked about how it would be in the business press in England that, oh, look, oil prices fall because they think there's a peace deal. (01:16:15) And the business press knows that this is happening. (01:16:18) it looks like they're gonna have a peace deal. (01:16:19) And so the price of oil falls from the relaxed tension and then nope, right? (01:16:24) And then they cancel the thing and they go on anyway. (01:16:26) You mentioned the part, which I think is fascinating about defeating Vietnam syndrome and reinvigorating martial spirit. (01:16:33) Can you just psychoanalyze the State Department, CIA, people in government? (01:16:38) Why did they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit? (01:16:42) Is it money? (01:16:43) Is it power? (01:16:45) Is it just coming up with a narrative, age-old narrative of nationalism is good and one of the ways to achieve nationalism is to invade somebody? (01:16:56) What is the motivation in a room, these folks sitting together, why do they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit? (01:17:03) So they can enforce what they called the New World Order, which was, again, I borrowed this from Chomsky, but I found two original citations for it. (01:17:10) As George Bush Sr. (01:17:11) himself said, what we say goes. (01:17:15) So this is what Biden and them call the liberal rules-based international order of global governance. (01:17:20) What it means is forget the UN Charter, forget the UN Security Council. (01:17:24) There's the US National Security Council, and everybody's going to bow down and do what we say. (01:17:28) It's our unipolar moment, as Charles Krauthammer put it in Foreign Affairs, and we're going to take full advantage of it. (01:17:34) But don't worry, Lex. (01:17:35) Again, as Bush Sr. (01:17:36) said, the world trusts us with this power because they know that we are good people and we know what we're doing and we only have their best (01:17:44) interests at art. (01:17:45) We care about them so much. (01:17:46) And so the world allows us to be the global police force, to enforce the law and make sure everything's fair. (01:17:54) Because man, what if we stopped holding the world together? (01:17:57) Boy, it would all just fall apart. (01:17:59) So it's just clamoring for power. (01:18:01) It'd be Germany and Japan. (01:18:02) I don't know if you remember this, but when the Soviet Union fell apart, oh my God, Germany and Japan are going to rise back up and take back over the world again. (01:18:10) Really? (01:18:10) Yeah. (01:18:11) And before the war on terrorism, they tried for a while. (01:18:15) They made, Harrison Ford movies out of it and never to try to build up the war against the Mexican drug cartels and the Peruvian drug cartels, because we got to have somebody to fight in the 90s while we're trying to get something else going on here, basically, (01:18:30) that they don't want to have to get a job. (01:18:32) And yet, like Bush Sr., you got to give him credit for this. (01:18:35) He absolutely slashed military spending, slashed the bomber fleets, slashed the military, slashed army divisions and ships and everything. (01:18:46) We don't need an anti-Soviet military for a world without the Soviet Union. (01:18:51) And he really cut it way, way back, and especially on nuclear weapons. (01:18:55) In fact, (01:18:57) I hate to say this because I never was a H.W. (01:19:00) Bush guy, and I'm so critical of all of his Middle East policy and all these things. (01:19:04) But in a way, you could say he's the most heroic guy who ever lived in the sense of working with the Russians, the Soviets, and then the Russians on these treaties to bring the global stockpile down from approximately 70,000 down to where we have about 7,000 each, which is way more than enough to do you. (01:19:22) But when the Soviets had 40,000 and we had 30, come on, (01:19:27) Somebody's got to do something, and Bush Sr. (01:19:28) is the man who did something about it. (01:19:30) And as I show in the book, he, well, we're skipping ahead of the other Cold War book here, but he did make unilateral cuts because he didn't have time to do negotiations. (01:19:40) So you say made massive unilateral cuts in hopes that Gorbachev would respond in kind, or was it Yeltsin by then? (01:19:46) And then I think it was Yeltsin by then. (01:19:47) And then Yeltsin did respond in kind and made these drastic cuts on his own unilateral basis, just without even an agreement. (01:19:54) But you know what? (01:19:55) We'll get rid of our class of those same kind of weapons. (01:19:56) It's due, so I gotta give credit where it's due.