Show notes for Tom's interview with Scott Horton, "Ep. 2521 Iran in the Crosshairs Again?"

02:00, WOODS. I was watching the RNC and Iran is in the cross hairs again.  I thought what?  You'll never guess Scott they're just on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon it's the same thing.  I've been told that JD Vance is a breath of fresh air on foreign policy but then I'm told he said you know if you're going to punch I run you got it you got to punch hard 24 hours a day with propaganda they would not say you know what we probably got to go over there and bomb Iran this is yes so he can send the weapons to Taiwan that's America First for you.  Is there anything in the news over the past, however many months that would justify this abrupt return to John McCain anti-Iran hysteria, where where do you think it's coming from?

03:09, HORTON Well, no true things, but yes things.  The most recent one is supposedly Iranians wanted to kill President Trump.  And it was just a coincidence that this kid in Pennsylvania tried to kill him but that came out last week, people just believed it.  I don't know how it works.  You know it's like you show them a silver coin and they're just hypnotized.  "Oh my God, did you hear?  TV says that there's a report that Iran was going to try to kill Trump," and then people just accept that.  But if you look at all, they go well it's based on one single human source, okay?  Now I got a couple things to say about that.  First of all, that's completely stupid.  There is no way in the world that the Ayatollah put out a hit on Donald Trump because that's how he wants to start a war that he's guaranteed to lose with the United States of America that could end up with Tehran getting nuked off the face of the earth by murdering a presidential candidate.  Only if you believe in some ridiculous cartoon version of the Ayatollah Khomeini, that is not the actual man himself.  You can say all kinds of things, but he's clearly cautious on foreign policy, especially on how he deals with the United States of America.  America.  So the idea that's something like that people ought to be absolutely just Kevlar coated titanium bulletproof on this.  That's obviously a bunch of crap.  And their single source?  Probably comes from the MEK mujahideen, a cult communist, or terrorist cults or the Israelis, but it's definitely not true.  But my second thing to say about that is that as far as the Secret Service goes, I really don't care how not credible a rumor is.  If there's any rumor of someone going trying to kill our president, or our major party presidential candidate, they should have had absolutely had security up to the eyeballs for that.  And I don't care how non-credible the rumor is.  From the Secret Service point of view?  Credible enough.  Should be.  Leave it to the others to decide what the foreign policy response is going to be.  But as far as protecting the president, absolutely, that should have put them to Beyond Red Alert.  I don't care.  You know, let them go to infrared alert to protect somebody running for president of the United States from murderers . . . Based on the flimsiest of pretexts.  But I'm just telling you and your audience, don't believe it for a minute.  It's just crazy to think so.  

The other thing is that they have accumulated a larger quantity of 60% enriched uranium than they had before, which is just a diplomatic hardball.  In all the years of talking about this Tom I've never told you that Iran will never ever, definitely ever, get a bomb.  Because that's not the argument.  The argument is we should not force them to try to get one when so far they have refrained from trying to.  We know that they are not making nuclear weapons.  They do not have a secret parallel nuclear weapons program, and their nuclear electricity program that they do have is completely above board and safeguarded by the IAE.  Now Trump under the influence of Benjamin Netanyahu pulled out of the Obama nuclear deal of 2015, which had expanded inspections and restricted their program to a great degree.  And when Trump broke the deal, the Iranians stopped abiding by it although they did not officially withdraw from the deal it signed with the entire UN Security Council that they made the agreement with.  And so they have ceased abiding by its restrictions, but it actually says in the deal that they can do that.  That if the Americans break the deal, or anybody else breaks the deal, that they can stay within the deal but stop abiding by it's actual restrictions.  So they have gone ahead and begun to stockpile much more 60% enriched uranium 235, but you could take that as a subtle threat that I got bullets in one pocket and a revolver in the other don't make me go ahead and get to the point where I'm making bombs out of this uranium now that's it's a latent nuclear deterrent is what they've got

.  

HORTON, 5:42  Let's go back to 1979.  America used to have a friendly government in Iran that fell, and the American government knew the government in Iran was going to fall but that they couldn't do anything about it because the Shah, the dictator himself, had cancer and was a dead man.  And so the CIA and the State Department, you know, let's go ahead and tell our friends, the French, send the Ayatollah Khomeini home to Iran to inherit the revolution which had been rising up to overthrow the American-backed dictatorship there.  Because after all, we know the Ayatollah.  He's an old friend of ours.  We know him from 1953 when his group helped agitate to help destabilize and overthrow Prime Minister Mosaddegh to reinstall the Shah back in the last coup. 

Two of my good friends. Together. Worth a watch. I am about to make some coffee and sit down for it... https://t.co/60p2Lj0Zbt

— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) February 10, 2024

DAWSON, 6:30  Operation Ajax, Kermit Roosevelt.

HORTON, 6:33   1953 when the U.S. government overthrew the government of Iran, and reinstalled the dictator, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, kept him in power for 26 years, 1953-1979.  Then he fell and his regime fell in 1979, but as I said, the CIA and the State Dept. told Jimmy Carter, we better go ahead and let the Ayatollah come to power.  We think we can deal with him and it'll be fine.  Horton recommends Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States, Trita Parsi, 2007.

"If our bases are not for containing the Soviet Union, then maybe they're for interdicting drugs, or maybe it's for threatening Iran, or maybe it's for providing security for some pipeline we're building to cut the Russians out of the Caspian Sea, "

Posobiec's interview doesn't start until the 11:00 mark, so simply fast forward through all the hype and advertisement.  

Great job @JackPosobiec and @scotthortonshow !! https://t.co/aNlJ4qwBRf

— Daniel McAdams (@DanielLMcAdams) October 19, 2023

Scott Horton's Show.   

AntiWar.

Posobiec opens with a reference to John Mearsheimer.

Horton magnificently refers to Pat Buchanan [articles listed @ Lew Rockwell and books listed here] to answer Posobiec's question about "How did we get here with 2 major war fronts, Ukraine and now Israel?" In the 1990s, he ran for president.  He was Ronald Reagan's, first Nixon's, and then Ronald Reagan's speechwriter, CNN and then MSNBC host.  He ran against Bush, Sr. in the primaries in 1992 and later switched to the Reform Party.  He wrote this incredible book, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, 1999.

And Jack, at the end of the Cold War 30 years ago, the Soviet Union ceased to exist on Christmas Day, 1991, a major section of the Conservative and Libertarian movement especially that said, 

The Cold War is over.  The emergency is over.  World communism is dead.  Now it's time to end our empire and bring our troops home from around the world.  And let Europe and Asia take care of their own security needs as Ronald Reagan's Ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, who was herself a Neo-Conservative hawk, said, "Now, we can be a normal country in a normal time.  Now we can shed the burdens of superpower status and seek to preserve our own liberty in our own society here at home. 

And instead, the National Security establishment refused to just get a real job.  And they found reasons to expand America's footprint in the Middle East, first, with Iraq War I, and the rest with the Bill Clinton Doctrine and Iraq War 1.5 through the 1990s.  And, of course, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, also the build-up in Asia, but we'll leave that aside for now.  

14:15  No coincidence at all, and no conspiracy either.  There are books about it, New York Times all about it.  It was Bruce Jackson, Executive Vice President from Lockheed Martin Murrieta who founded the Committee for NATO Expansion and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.  This is basic economics, basic rent-seeking by government contractors.  Doesn't matter whether it's the military or any other government program.  They would rather get paid with tax money than have to compete in the marketplace.  And that was just what happened.  And not just them, but the National Security bureaucracy themselves, of course, the generals and all the spies at the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all these guys . . . no one wants to give up their fiefdom.  If our bases are not for containing the Soviet Union, then maybe they're for interdicting drugs, or maybe it's for threatening Iran, or maybe it's for providing security for some pipeline we're building to cut the Russians out of the Caspian Sea, or some other project, anything but coming home.  

15:21  And so what they did was that they got us into the Terror War, fought it for 20 years and don't have a single thing to show for it.  

MUST-LISTEN: Tom Woods and Scott Horton on the Role of Hamas in the Palestine vs. Israel War

Osama Bin Laden knew good and well that the Soviets had killed a million Afghans.  They make Bush and Obama look like angels . . . well, not really, they killed hundreds of thousands.  

If you disagree with Ben Shapiro you probably hate Jews. That's not much of an exaggeration of what he's been saying. The conservative movement is in a degraded state if it's still listening to this guy. Here's another perspective https://t.co/1DrIcdspbJ @scotthortonshow

— Tom Woods (@ThomasEWoods) October 18, 2023

 

So what's just happened with this attack by Hamas and the Israeli counter-attack.

2:04. Why would Hamas do this?  What is the endgame for them when they obviously know the overwhelming firepower that Israel has and its friendship with the US?  Why would it do this?  It has to know that the counterattack is going to be overwhelming, what are you thinking here?  And I noticed on Anti-war.com that you recently wrote up something very similar to what you said to me in the car.  So can we start there: why would you do this knowing what is sure to happen?

2:35. The whole purpose was the reaction you got it right quite literally they had to have known Hamas had to have known that they were bringing on a massive campaign by the Israeli government in retaliation for this horrendous slaughter which they perpetrated.  They killed hundreds of people.  I'm not exactly sure about the number of civilians versus the Israeli military that were killed.  I know it's right around a thousand that were killed.  After all, the Israeli military is mostly conscripts, you know, drafted so I have to presume that none of them want to be there; maybe some of them do, it's a gray area.  But if you're a conscript, that's not exactly the same as being a volunteer.  They murdered hundreds of non-combatants two men women and children slaughtered them okay that's what they did they did that in order to "make" Netanyahu launch the giant attack that he has launched and has slaughtered already hundreds and hundreds of civilians in the Gaza Strip . . . the last I checked they have not launched a ground invasion yet but were preparing a massive ground invasion with the stated intention of completely obliterating Hamas off the face of the earth which seems an impossible task to do with the civilian population of Gaza stuck in the middle there.  So then the purpose of that is to get their people killed, the Palestinian civilians, off the Gaza Strip.  That's why Hamas murdered the Israeli civilians to force the Israeli government to launch this giant campaign that they know will kill civilians in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian civilians, men, women, and children, too, in order, then, to provoke the counter-reaction to that.  This is what Saul Alinsky says in his Rules for Radicals, that the action is in the reaction of the opposition.  I learned that from William Norman Grigg, the Bircher, "I'm not a communist," thank you very much. And he wasn't a communist either; he just knows his enemy.  The point is Hamas has no power.  Israel has all the power.  It's it's zero versus 1,000% power relationship there.  These guys have AK-47s and shoes.  The other side has essentially first-world military technology to the nth degree.  So Hamas can't defeat Israel in any kind of pitched battle.  They certainly can't invade Israel.  They can fend them off as we saw in 2014. The point is to provoke that reaction and then to provoke the counter-reactions, so now Hassan Nasrallah who is the leader of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon has to take a position of what he's going to do.  Apparently, he's been firing off some rockets, although I don't know if all those have been directly attributed to Hezbollah or not.  Exchanges of fire at the border could blow up into a real war with Hezbollah at the northern border of Israel.  At that point, you have the government of Syria, the Alawite government but very close to the Shiites, sort of a break-off group of the Shiites and very close to the Shiites allied to Hezbollah and allied to Iran.  Now these are the Shiites.  The Hamas are Sunnis and the Palestinians are Sunnis and yet they have supported the Palestinian cause for a very long time the Iranians have for their own political purposes, of course, not out of the goodness of their heart, but for their own political reasons they intervene.  And in this way, remember, Tom, that George W. Bush when he launched Iraq War II, all he did, by stupidly listening to the stupid Neoconservatives, was the exact opposite of what they had hoped to accomplish.  In other words, they put Iran's best friends in power in Baghdad, which is why we have hardly any influence there whatsoever right now. Also, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince bin Solomon, or Crown Prince Bone Saw as I call him, the murderer, got on the phone with the president of Iran. It was the first time they ever spoke, and they said Yeah, you know, we got to do something about this Palestinian thing.  So all the governments around the region, every armed group around the region, all the different little Sunni and Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and God knows where everybody has to take a position and politics gets radicalized.  Everybody's attention was diverted from the Middle East to the germ and then to Ukraine, and while your attention was diverted right back to their cause again.  I think the correct way to put this is, as Madeline Albright would say, they think the price is worth it to cause that to happen in order to get the end result that they want.  And quite frankly, as I detail in both of my books, 

Osama Bin Laden was exactly the same way. This is how he felt about the situation in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden's Gaza Strip.  He was a Saudi squatting, by the way, him and his Egyptian friends.  But their idea was [they] wanted to replicate the Soviet Union's war in the 1980s with America in the role of the USSR, bog them down in a war of attrition in Afghanistan, bleed them to bankruptcy, and force them out the hard way.  Well, Osama Bin Laden knew good and well that the Soviets had killed a million Afghans.  They make Bush and Obama look like angels . . . well, not really, they killed hundreds of thousands.  What the Soviets did in Afghanistan was just absolute bloody murder.  Osama bin Laden didn't care about that.  His idea was "Well, whatever, they'll all go to paradise, right?  Let God sort them out.  If they're good Muslims, it'll be fine.  If they're not, then damn them anyway."  If that means that America has to do all this because, in the end, we'll get what we want.  That's how a terrorist thinks, that's how a terrorist acts. "  This is the same thing that Hamas did here.  Is the price worth it?  Why?  Because quite frankly, they are, as Max Blumenthal said on my show the other day, and he is a first-hand witness to this, a real journalist over there, not a radio host like me staying home writing books.  He's been over there a lot, wrote a whole book about it, two books about it over there.  He said these are the most oppressed people in the world, or at least among them, right up there with the North Koreans or something.  

They live in what essentially Pat Buchanan, our friend, said on MSNBC back 10 years ago, "It's quite literally a concentration camp."  And I'd forgotten who the host of the show was, but the host said, 

Come on, Pat, I mean that sounds like you're talking about the Holocaust.  You can't do that.

And Pat goes, 

No, no, no.  Now that's a death camp.  That's different.  I'm not saying that, but it is a concentration camp. 

And then he brought up examples from history.  He said the British in Myanmar or Burma, something like that, the Spanish in Cuba have these concentration camps where they enslaved everybody and brought them together in this camp.  He could have mentioned Kennedy in South Vietnam maybe.  Anyway, strategic hamlets.  That's where they are they're in a concentration camp, Buchanan said.  And he's not a hippie; he's Ronald Reagan's guy.  He says, look man, that's the reality of this thing.

11:30. Each people have their own country Palestinians live in Palestine the Israelis live in Israel.  It sounds like there's some equal station in the world, right?  If we're talking about the United States versus Mexico, obviously the US has much more military power.  The Palestinians are Indians. They've already been conquered and licked, beaten and their land taken.  It's just that they're still stuck on it. They don't have control over it.  There is no Palestine.

What does the two-state solution mean?  It means that the fence there in Gaza is not a border, it's a prison wall. 

13:00. In provoking Israel in this way, Hamas was hoping to accomplish a particular outcome?  One of the things that it does as you say is it forces the regimes in the area to take a side.  So they either side with the US because of the relationship they have with the US, or they can side with the opinions of 100% of their people that force them into a corner they prefer not to be in.  Once all the political maneuvering is complete, how does this advance the cause of Hamas? Is it that it provokes an overreaction that leads to condemnation of two other powers getting involved?  What's the end game?

Scott Horton reminds us that it was Condoleezza Rice who tore up the Anti-Ballistics Missile Treaty.

from Greg Reese @ the Reese Report.

Here is the first of four interviews that Oliver Stone did with Vladimir Putin in 2017.  Scott Horton reminds us that it was Condoleezza Rice who tore up the Anti-Ballistics Missile Treaty.  

Condoleeza Rice is the one who tore up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and put dual use missile launchers in Poland that can launch Tomahawk missiles tipped with H-bombs

Condoleezza Rice calls Putin's invasion of Ukraine a war crime, citing his "mental illness" as his motive.  Isn't this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

Condoleezza Rice Agrees Russia's Invasion Is a War Crime https://t.co/HofIl1ZTmN

— Mike Walgenbach (@mwalgen44) March 2, 2022

Enter Scott Horton.   

The most critical context you'll get on corporate media about the US role in fueling the Ukraine-Russia conflict, delivered in less than two minutes by @scotthortonshow
https://t.co/ECjB5e52qv pic.twitter.com/2jRZmDnuUp

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) March 2, 2022

Scott explains that Condoleeza Rice is the one who tore up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ABM, and put dual-use missile launchers in Poland that can launch Tomahawk missiles tipped with H-bombs and she's the one who brought the Baltic states right on Russia's border into NATO and promised to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.  This is all her fault while she was working for George W. Bush.  What's she going to do, take responsibility?  No, she says it's because of his mental illness.  Oh, you know what it is?  He woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.  Related articles by Scott Horton are here and here.