Hey everybody, Tom Woods here. It's episode 2749 of the Tom Woods show. We all know who Scott Horton is,
host of the Scott Horton show, director of the Libertarian Institute, just everything in the
history of the world, director of the Scott Horton Academy, which of course you are all
members of, scothortonacademy.com. And I want to talk to him about a question that is of course
related to this current Iran war, but goes beyond it. And that is the issue of not just the
subject of Israel, but specifically the question of where do Israeli and American interests diverge?
Because as I keep saying in recent episodes, you pick any two countries, they'll always have
something in common, but they'll also have areas in which their interests are at odds with each
other. And I want to kind of flesh that out a bit. Poor Scott is in the, I'm going to just
spill the beans here, he's in the middle of moving. So for a while it was Scott in front
of bookcases full of books. Then it was Scott in front of bookcases with no books on them.
And now it's Scott with no bookcases. So welcome, Scott.
Happy to be here, Tom. Thank you.
All right. Let me start with a little commentary on my own and then we'll go from there. So
the US so-called special relationship with Israel didn't develop immediately in 1948,
even though the US recognized the independence of the state of Israel almost immediately.
But I will say that at that time, there was a perceived issue that could arise given that the
US had implicitly endorsed the state of Israel. It seemed like it was endorsing,
you know, by being so quick to recognize that it was endorsing its behavior
toward the Palestinians and particularly the Palestinian refugee problem,
which even Harry Truman, who was anxious to support the state of Israel,
at least in his words, said he was unhappy with. And a lot of people were unhappy with the way
to say the least. Israel was handling the Israeli refugee problem. And if you look
at State Department statements at the time, they are warning that the United States is
going to attract whatever enemies Israel attracts as a result of this unresolved refugee problem.
And so we need to proceed with caution. So right off the bat, there was a sense that
the interests of the United States and of Israel were not necessarily aligned,
certainly on that issue. But this comes into much greater relief, obviously,
as the United States and Israel become much closer, more closely aligned, as we can see,
for example, in all, not that I put a lot of stock in the United Nations,
but all the UN votes that are, you know, whatever, 160 something to two,
and the two are Israel and the United States, this problem becomes clearer and clearer.
So let's start off, Scott, just speaking very broadly, not about any specific issue,
but very broadly, what is it that Israel wants to see happen in the Middle East?
Whereas if the United States had its way, what would it prefer to see in the Middle
East? Assuming it wasn't, you know, completely staffed by people who already agreed with Israel.
Well, the Israelis, I mean, are led by the Likud Party, which is a right-wing nationalist
government that is founded on a doctrine of creating a greater Israel. So at a minimum,
that means that they wish to expel all the Palestinians from the West Bank and cause a
strip and keep all that land for themselves. More maximalist takes, as we can see actually
happening in front of our eyes right now, would be the seizure of Southern Lebanon,
maybe even all of Lebanon, parts of Syria, and ultimately all of Jordan, and all the way,
all of Western Iraq, all the way to the Euphrates River, and then down the coast of
the Red Sea on the Saudi side and the Egyptian side. That is supposedly all the land
of Israel from the Bible. And as Mike Huckabee explained to Tucker Carlson, that yes,
I'd be happy if they took it all. That's their point of view of the Zionists. And that's why Israel
is actually the only country, I'm thinking in the world, that certainly on America's
dola, a so-called ally of ours, even though we have no actual Treaty of Alliance,
that has no undefined, that has no defined borders. They refuse to say where their
borders are because they mean to continually expand them. And that means especially,
back to the more minimal mistake here, it means at the expense of the absolute horrific
persecution of the Palestinians whose land they've already stolen and are in the process of stealing
the rest of, and they must be tortured and murdered and their children killed and their
societies obliterated so that they can finally be cleansed. As we saw in the case of the
two-year slaughter of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, as I said over and over and over again
explicitly, their goal was to reduce the standard of living so low that the people would finally just
give up and leave so-called voluntarily, would emigrate to just somewhere else that they would
just give up and let Jerry Kushner and them build their Miami on the Mediterranean without
Palestinians. And same thing ultimately for the West Bank, we see constant pogroms going
on in the West Bank. And the potential is there, obviously, for them to just simply start bombing
Ramallah and Bethlehem and Hebron and the other Palestinian cities there in the way that they
did the Gaza Strip in order to force them all to simply just flee. And I think that's probably in
the medium term, if not short-term future here. With Donald Trump, it's sort of like they
had their last chance to get away with it. Well, maybe not their very last chance, but
a big chance to get away with as much as they possibly can. And so we see as soon as they
started the war in Iran, they immediately invaded Lebanon and are taking as much of Lebanon as they
can take. I remember years ago on your show, I said, yeah, Tom, they want to ultimately go up to
at least the Latani River in Lebanon. That goes back to Jabotinsky and the founders of Zionism.
And some guy in my email told me what an idiot I was and how I had no idea what I was
talking about. Well, that's what they're doing right this minute is taking all that land
up to the Latani River and then even the one north of there and cleansed already a million
people out of their homes, more than the Nakba in southern Lebanon right now, just in the last few
weeks under the cover of the war in Iran. Now, America's interests are entirely different. America's
interests are, well, first of all, there's the interest of the American people, which is,
we just want to be free and live in prosperity and we don't need that oil. It really has
nothing to do with us. So our interest is just in peace and commerce and free trade throughout
the world as best as we can. Honest friendship with everybody. That's the American people's
interests. But even the American empire's interest is in dominating the nations of the region,
keeping compliant puppets in there, and so that and controlling the choke points,
so that in the event of war with China, we can cut them off of Middle Eastern oil,
or for that matter, that we can lord it over our allies, especially in eastern Asia,
like Japan and South Korea, that they better stay our allies and not dream of becoming
anybody else's allies because we can close off those choke points. But that, of course, is
all in the event of a crisis. I mean, the major interest of certainly the oil companies is
simply in stability and that tends to go really, I think, for the Pentagon, for the joint
staff and the major, at least, old establishment. You probably heard me point out before that
at the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Bill Clinton administration in 1993 that you had
Zabini Brzezinski, who along with Jimmy Carter was tied for most agonist space for the
failure of the hostage crisis and the Iranian revolution and all of that.
Well, by 1993, Brzezinski was saying we should normalize relations with Iran and because really
wanted to stick it to the Russians and stick all their sodas straws in the Caspian Basin and then
pump all that oil across Iran to stations on the Persian Gulf. And Alexander Haig,
who had been reigned in Secretary of State, agreed. That was what we should be doing. And then
Defense Secretary and then CEO of Haliburton on numerous occasions denounced Bill Clinton's policy
for his sanctions on Iran because he said we should build oil pipelines out of the Caspian Basin
across Iran. They all agreed this would be a way to help normalize relations with Iran,
as well as make some money for the Americans and again, the strategy of sticking it to the
Russians and getting all those hydrocarbons out of the Caspian Basin without having to go
through the Caucasus or through the North Caucasus. So, and then we see, for example,
I think very telling is after H.W. Bush won Iraq War One, he and his Secretary of State James Baker
started pushing for and did create the Madrid Conference where they wanted to get the ball
rolling on a Palestinian state. And he had a notorious fight with the Israel lobby over his
withholding of loan guarantees. As you and your audience know, a loan guarantee is when
Uncle Sam gives welfare to a foreign country on the American taxpayers' dime. They call it a loan
at first until they don't pay it back and then don't worry, it's guaranteed by the American
taxpayer. So H.W. Bush said, you can't have these loan guarantees until you rein in the
settlements on the West Bank. And he famously said, geez, I'm just one guy up against all these
lobbyists on the Hill. And that's what he was talking about was the Israel lobby.
And they went after him really hard. And this ended up becoming a real problem
for his reelection campaign in 1992 because his Secretary of State James Baker, I'm sure he
said it in jest, Tom, if you're familiar with James Baker and his character, I sincerely doubt
he meant this in a bad way, in a sincerely bad way. But he was quoted and it was in print.
And it's not as funny in print. He said, F the Jews, they don't vote for us anyway.
Well, they do write checks and they do control MTV and the entire rock the vote
movement, dude. And so out you go and in comes Bill Clinton who ran to H.W. Bush's
right in 1992 on the issue of the settlements. In fact, you can read at MondoWeiss.net where H.W.
Bush later did blame the Israel lobby for his loss that they arrayed the entire kind of media
establishment and everybody else against him for the election of 1992. And then the same thing
happened after September 11, when like his father, W. Bush had an approval rating in the high
80s and even above 90% and Colin Powell, who had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for
his father. And before that had been Nationalist Security Advisor for Ronald Reagan was now W.
Bush's Secretary of State. So Powell was able to convince W. Bush that this is necessary.
This is one of the main causes of terrorism against the United States is that we support
Israel and their perpetual denial of independence and or citizenship to the Palestinian people.
And this is a problem that we absolutely have to solve.
Do you mean in the occupied territories?
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, why can't they just go live in somebody else's country?
Which is exactly the same thing as I'm telling you, why don't you go live in some other country?
At least they're from there. Why don't the Israelis move to Europe where they're
actually from? Although many of them were born there now after all these decades, but
anyways, point being that they were to have this sort of pseudo state, not a real state,
but something like a binational type arrangement in the West Bank and Gaza, but it would be much
more independence and prosperity than what they have under the current occupation situation for
sure. But then Eris Heron beat him. And it's in Mir Shimer and Walt's paper, The Israel Lobby,
which anyone can read at antiwar.com. And they also wrote a book developing the same thing.
And they tell the story of how the majority whip of the House of Representatives, so the third
ranking Republican in the House, the exterminator Tom Delay came and told W. Bush, hey, Mr. President,
you want to be a one-term president like your father? Because I guarantee you, you do this
two-state solution. Every single evangelical Christian is going to stay home in 2004 and you're
going to lose. And so Bush blinked and back down. And Eris Heron's men even mocked him in
a press and said, yeah, we saw the whites in their eyes, but they blinked first and turned around.
Well, then back up for a minute. In that case, then, if we're talking about American
interests versus Israeli interests, well, look, the Christian Zionist heretics, though they may be,
they are American just like you and me, and they have an opinion and they have a stance. So if
a lot of them think, you know, so maybe that's American interest. So what makes you say that's
not the true American interest? Well, I don't know exactly what the proportions are,
but I know that it is far from unanimous, even among dispensationalist evangelical Christians,
that somehow they are supposed to participate in politics in as far as the Holy Land in order
to somehow coerce Jesus into coming back sooner and performing the rapture. You know, this is
the line that has been pushed by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Robert Tilton,
and especially John Haguey and others of these guys over the decades. And of course,
this was very popular in the W. Bush years because it was right, the new millennium,
the turn of the year 2000, and you had all these left behind books that they sold at
Walmart that said that here's what the end times is all going to look like. And it's,
you know, basically David Koresh in a nicer jacket, but it's the same kind of like,
it's your role to not just read the biblical prophecies, but to their side with certainty that
you know what they say and exactly what they say and what you are supposed to do to make it all come
true. And basically what's happened is they were all promised that 25 years ago, 20 years ago,
and none of it came true, or they got left behind with the rest of us. But, you know,
obviously the whole thing was a hoax. And so a lot of people are really seeing through that.
In fact, I saw your great interview on our McIntyre show the other day where he said that was to
know you that he was raised in, but that people just don't believe in that stuff anymore, especially
the young. They're just not buying it. So yes, some Americans do believe that the USA,
even though North America is not in the Bible anywhere for obvious reasons, that the middle
part of North America is mandated to carry out this policy to serve the Israelis over there.
It's a vanishingly small number of American Christians who believe that it's nothing like
the majority will of the population of this country. And frankly, it's completely stupid,
ridiculous, idiotic superstitions that no offense to people, but if they do believe in it,
they're victims. They've been propagandized by people essentially serving a foreign power.
But there couldn't be anything further from the truth that Jesus is about to come back
because evangelical Christians twisted Uncle Sam's arm into supporting the Lakut over there,
and that, oh, but if you didn't play that proper role, he wouldn't come back. And it'd be all your
fault that the Savior didn't come. This is complete nonsense. And whatever, not to tell
people they're religion, but give me a break, dude. There's a million sets of Christianity that
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convenience, the Scott Horton Academy actually created a course on what actual Christianity
has to say about these questions with a, I would say, distinguished Lutheran theologian teaching it.
So if you're not a member of the Scott Horton Academy, you'd know all this stuff inside now.
So check that out, scotthortonacademy.com. See, I'm good at this, Scott.
Absolutely. And then look, okay, so if you believe that like, yes, we're all going to
get raptured, it's fine. So let's start a nuclear war. Then yeah, great. But for everybody else,
you know, this is absolutely completely dangerous and preposterous to get us into a war for religious
reasons in this way. And based on, especially predictions based on prophecies interpreted
out of the Bible, it's just nuts to think that that would have sway over how these decisions
are made. Give me the old line Episcopalians over this kind of craziness, you know what I mean?
But again, there are many millions of American Baptists and Methodists and other sorts of
evangelical Christians who do not believe in this stuff. And even, I'm not the expert on this,
but the dispensations and the dispensationalists, there are dispensationalists who think it's
very important that we're changing from one age into another right now and whatever.
They still don't believe the blasphemies of the preacher of San Antonio who says that you got to
go kill babies for Israel in order to make this stuff come true. And so that is really being soundly
rejected. And then, but by the way, so then that would be us scraping the bottom of the barrel,
looking for excuses for what America has to do, what about our interests coincide with the
Israelis at all? When if you look back at the end of the Cold War, when their excuse was no longer
where you need us to keep the commies at bay, which was not really an issue anyway, but without
that excuse, they had to come up with this scam about we have to fight together against
Islamic fundamentalism. And with this public relations, Tom, you know,
Trita Parsi showed in his book, he interviews these high level Israeli strategists who said,
listen, our goal was we had to come up with an excuse. We needed new glue for the alliance with
the United States of America. So we decided to turn on our friends, the Iranian fundamentalists
who had overthrown the government more than a decade before over in Iran. And they decided to
turn on them and say, look, Islamic fundamentalism, just to come up with something to have in
common with the United States. And then by the way, and that convenient that Muslims are most of
the people who they want to murder and steal their property from. And so if they can get Americans
to resent Muslims and hate and fear Muslims, and they can get us to aid and abet their conquering
of Muslim people in their own neighborhood. And I'll tell you something, Tom, when we talked
about this along a lot of times before, when it comes to bin Ladenite terrorism,
and the motive of really America, Saudi and Britain's pet terrorists to turn against
the United States as they have done on numerous occasions, that it's America's support for Israel
that has driven so much of that. And guess what? I know you're familiar with that New York Times
story from the night of September 11th, 2001, when James Bennett from the New York Times called
up Benjamin Netanyahu. And he asked him, Benjamin Netanyahu, what do you think that this attack
means for America's relationship with Israel? And Netanyahu said, quote, it's very good,
end quote. And he said, oh, or, you know, I mean, not that it's very good, but just it'll help to
strengthen the sympathies, you know, between us for our common enemy, et cetera, et cetera, blah,
blah, blah. But guess what, Tom, you won't be surprised to find out the New York Times
actually edited out part of his answer. But 10 years later and lost to me,
thank you to John Schwartz, no T, J-O-N, no H, Schwartz pointed this out the other day that on
the 10th anniversary of September 11, September 11, 2011, James Bennett, the same reporter, wrote
a piece for the Atlantic, where he has another quote from Netanyahu from September 11, from that
same interview that the New York Times decided to leave on the cutting room floor. Guess
what it was? It was Netanyahu musing to himself. I wonder if the Americans will blame us for this.
No, he decides, I'm sure it won't. It'll just, you know, strengthen solidarity,
you know, and sympathy between us. But he couldn't help but wonder out loud whether the American
people would blame Israel or September 11. And he didn't mean Mossad agents crawling around
Clinton bombs in the towers. He meant because he knew good and well that it was Israel's sins
that motivated the bin Ladenite terrorists to attack the United States of America,
not entirely, but in great measure, especially Bill Clinton's dual containment policy that
kept the troops in Saudi Arabia in order to bomb and blockade Iraq throughout the 1990s,
and then outright support for the Israelis in their wars against the Palestinians and the
Lebanese. I've told the story many times about how when Shimon Peres invaded Lebanon in 1996,
that day, Mohammad Atta, the head hijacker from September 11, and his buddy Ramazan al-Shid
decided to fill out their last will and testament, which was like their symbolic joining the
army in the great fight against the United States. And then a couple of days after that, it
was literally Naqtali Bennett, the once and future Prime Minister of Israel, at that time
future Prime Minister of Israel. He called in an artillery strike on a UN shelter that killed
106 women and children. And when he did that, bin Laden ended up writing about that in his first
declaration of war against the United States a couple of months later. And right there on the
first page, he talks about the Kana maskers as we'll never forget the severed heads and arms
and legs of the babies and the children and women from Kana. And that was when Mohammad Atta
and Ramzi bin al-Shid decided to join up the fight against the United States. So here we have Egyptian
engineering students go to Afghanistan to volunteer for a Saudi shake to kill Americans as revenge
for what Israel is doing in Lebanon. And Benjamin Netanyahu understood that dynamic.
That's what he was abusing about out loud to James Bennett. I wonder if Tom Woods will say
that this would have never happened if it wasn't for Bill Clinton's support for Israel. And they
said, no, no, no, Tom, they hate you because you're free. They hate you because you love your
mama. You're not going to stop loving your mama, are you? Well, then we've got to go to war.
And that was the way that they pushed it. That was the way that they sold it. They
couldn't possibly tell the truth to the American people. But actually, Bill Clinton is not
just a face-biting rapist and a church-burning serial killer here at home, but he's also been
considered by many to be the mad bomber overseas where he bombed Iraq on average every other day
for eight years straight and where he supported the Israelis and their ruthless violence against
the Lebanese and the Palestinians. That's why, Tom, when Ron Paul said the truth in May 2007,
when he beat the crap out of Rudy Giuliani in the famous Giuliani moment, what was it?
What was the Giuliani moment? It was Ron Paul. So we were bombing Iraq for 10 years
before the terrorists attacked us. And that's why they attacked us because we were bombing
Iraq from bases in Saudi. And Giuliani said, jeez, I never heard anything so crazy,
but the American people knew that that was true. Hey, I remember Bill Clinton using
massive violence the entire time that he was in office. I wonder if Ron Paul's right about
this. And clearly he had the respect to tell us the truth about the nature of our problem.
Our problem was ultimately Zionism. Well, let's, what might as well fast forward to
Iran today. Regardless of how this, you know, what the ins and outs are of
whatever Trump is able to hammer out, if anything, if the Iranians are in the mood
to negotiate, which is a big question. But what we, what I want to know is
I hear a lot of propaganda about, look, Iran has been at war with the U.S. for 47 years,
and they did this and they did that, this that and the other thing. And so, you know,
Donald Trump isn't actually starting a war. Of course, we're not even calling it a war.
He's finishing one, you know, this is, and so this is quote America first, you know,
they have to misuse the term America first over and over and over just to really stick it to
us. But they're framing it as, you know, all these other presidents were wimps and failures
because they wouldn't face the Iranian regime head on, which has been our mortal enemy for 47 years.
So the way they're phrasing it is, the U.S. has had this mortal enemy for 47 years,
and now is as good a time as any to put a stop to it. Now that doesn't sound like
it has anything to do with, with Israel. So what's the real story? And again,
where is the divergence? Just today, I haven't, I'm sorry, I didn't have time to watch it.
But Dinesh D'Souza released a video in which he said, the ground invasion idea is where the
interests diverge. The United States should not engage in a ground invasion, even though
Israel wants us to. That was a surprise to me to hear him say that. So fill in all these gaps
for us. Yeah. Well, first of all, just like in your question, isn't it funny how
when America is literally bombing the Jesus out of their country, including their capital city
and all their military forces and all that, that's not war. But when Iran is just sitting there or
maybe chanting death to America or calling us names, oh, the great Satan, that's a war.
And we're supposed to be upset. We're supposed to believe that they've been at war with us
for 47 years, but we haven't been at war with them for five weeks.
Oh, what? I mean, the same people who are telling you that clearly don't believe what they're saying
because their lives are too preposterous to even consider. But then also, by the way, Scott,
I am pretty sure that if I go back and look, I can find rhetoric from the Christian right,
the really hardcore Christian right in which they essentially call the US government the great
Satan because of abortion, because of homosexuality, because of transgender.
I'm sure they've called it the great Satan. Here's an area of agreement you have.
Yeah, exactly. That was actually, Dinesh D'Souza wrote a book like that. He said,
they do hate us for our freedom. That's why we should give up freedom and we should have
much more authoritarian right wing society so that we're not so free so that the terrorists
don't hate us anymore. So that guy's an idiot. He's lost to that. But the thing of it is,
look, and notice they picked 47 years. Well, why not 73? That was when America overthrew the government
there. America supported the rise of Mohammed Mosaddek and then stabbed him in the back and
overthrew him and supported the reinstallation of the Shah-Raz-e-Palawi who was the fascist dictator.
I think you, did you say 53 or 73? Yeah, 53. Yeah.
Yeah, 73 years ago. Oh, 73 years ago. Yeah, right. Of course, right. I think I did the
matter. Yeah. Yeah, we've been at war with them for 73 years. Yeah, right. They've been
at war with us for 47, you know? And so, or was it 72? I don't know. I suck at arithmetic when
I'm live. Leave me alone. But the point being that America overthrew their government in 1953
in the Eisenhower years and supported a right-wing military dictator over their gantry until 1979.
And then Jimmy Carter was convinced by the CIA and the State Department that it would be a good
idea to send the Ayatollah Khomeini home from France to inherit the revolution. They said,
we know this guy. He's a friend of ours. He was part of a group of Shiite clerics who helped agitate
against Mosaddek back in 53. We can deal with him. And the revolution was successful in February of
1979. The hostage crisis didn't break out until November. People forget that Carter spent most
of the year 79 trying to be friends with the new regime. What happened was David Rockefeller
convinced Jimmy Carter to let the Shah into the country for cancer treatment. And the Iranians, at
least the students, and I guess IRGC took that as a symbol that they were going to try to nurse the
Shah back to health and reinstall him in a counter-revolutionary coup. And so they rated the
embassy, which is where the previous coup had been staged from, and took those hostages,
not to justify it, but just to explain, that was what actually happened there, was
America couldn't got along with the Ayatollah after the revolution. It was just that they really
screwed up doing this favor for David Rockefeller that created this absolute public relations
disaster for the Democrats, which was then compounded when they did their failed rescue
mission, Eagle Claw, where the guys were killed out in the desert and had to abort.
And so then they launched the Carter Doctrine, which declared that the Persian Gulf was an American
lake and started building up massive military bases across the region. And then in September of
that year, Jimmy Carter's government gave the green light to the new dictator of Iraq,
who was not the result of a revolution. He took power to bloody coup d'etat against his
predecessor in that same year. And in 1980, Jimmy Carter gave him the green light to invade Iran
in an absolutely horrific war that included American purchases and financing and satellite
targeting information to help Iraq wage chemical war against the Iranians, including with sarin and
tabin nerve gas and mustard gas and help them to develop anthrax, although I don't know if
they ever actually deployed it in the war. They later tried to frame up Iraq for doing the
anthrax attack on the United States. And no one you might remember, because guess what? We know
he has anthrax because as Bill Hicks would say, we looked at the receipt, says it right there.
And so something like half a million were killed on both sides of that war. Is that Iran?
Being at war with the United States when Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan support Saddam
Hussein, you know, the Hitler of the Middle East exterminating them by the hundreds of thousands
for a decade straight. And then, you know, in the 1990s, as I said, when Brzezinski and Haig
and Cheney said, lift the sanctions, normalize with Iran, it was the Israel lobby that vetoed
it and said, absolutely not. We have to do dual containment, a policy invented by Martin
Ndik, who had just come from the Yitzhak Shamir administration over in Israel and came to work
for Bill Clinton, who founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as literally,
not just figuratively, literally a spin-off of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
And it was his policy, Israel's policy, that said Bill Clinton has to stay, can't
normalize relations with Iraq or Iran. It's got to stay in Saudi Arabia to contain and
cold war and balance against them both through the end of the century. Again,
the major out front precipitating cause for turning the Al Qaeda terrorist network against the United
States. And so then in Iraq War II, which W. Bush named them in the Axis of Evil, put all
these sanctions on them, and then invaded Iraq, which they thought was going to weaken Iran
because they're stupid. But as soon as they did that, Iran sent what they called the golden offer,
or I don't know who called it the golden offer, but they sent it through a Swiss ambassador.
And the Americans, the W. Bush government just completely rejected it out of hand and even
gave the Swiss ambassador dressing down, oh, I'm skipping a step, because see after September
11th, they helped the Bush administration with their invasion of Afghanistan, gave them
all kinds of intelligence about the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to target them at
the start of the war. And so they had an ongoing relationship with the W. Bush administration. So
they had enemies in common in the bin Ladenites. And they were working with Flint Leverett on
the W. Bush National Security Council on all kinds of stuff through the end of the year 2001.
But then in January 02 was when W. Bush put them in the Axis of Evil, and then they started
adding all these sanctions and ramping up pressure. And then there was a bad terrorist
attack on some barracks, I think it was in 2004 in Saudi Arabia, and the neocons convinced W.
Bush that it had been ordered by Al Qaeda commanders inside Iran, and that Iran had put
them up to it. So that then because idiot W. Bush didn't know anything, because they were
able to convince him of that, that then destroyed the idea of Iran being an American
partner in the war against Al Qaeda. And they said, no, if you're going to back Al Qaeda,
then we hate you too. And they refused to talk to them. Then came the golden offer after
America invaded Iraq. They said, listen, we hate Saddam Hussein too. We'll work with you. You want
to build a new government in Iraq? Negotiate with us. Work with us. We'll work together with you.
We'll build a new government in Iraq. If you want us to trade, to give up on the Palestinians,
fine. We'll turn it back on the Palestinians. If you want to negotiate over oil, over the
nuclear program, which they were only just barely getting started, they had a totally,
just a medical isotope reactor, research reactor in Tehran at that time. They said,
we're willing to negotiate all of this stuff. And normalize relations right now. And W. Bush
told them to go to hell. As you know, America fought Iraq war II for Iran anyway,
but refused to talk to them the whole time. Blamed them every time a Shiite ever resisted
when Americans attacked the Shiites then. And then why did they support Al Qaeda in Syria?
They ended up even building the caliphate in Syria that they had to go to war to destroy again.
It was just despite Iran and the Shiites. And then it blew up into a caliphate so bad,
then they had to take Iran's side to destroy it again in Iraq war III in 2014 through 18.
So the Americans have been doing everything they can this whole time, really,
to stick it to the Iranians. Now, obviously, it started out over control of oil
in the Cold War, but that has not been America's interest since then. Again,
the Rockefeller guys wanted to normalize relations with the Ayatollah's regime.
They weren't insisting on a regime change over there. They were saying we should normalize
relations, we should do business with these guys. And it was the Israelis who said that we
can't. And so in the broadest strokes, America's interests would be in keeping the bin Ladenites
down and keeping the oil flowing. Where the Israelis position is actually they need the
bin Ladenites because the bin Ladenites kill Hezbollah and they hate the Shiites more.
So you couldn't have a starker difference there. And then on top of that,
you know, the Sunni Shi'a divide, they prefer chaos. They prefer to reduce as like in the Odeh
Dianon plan from 1980. They want to reduce and even David Worms are kind of hints at this in the
clean break and in coping with crumbling states that they would like to see all these nation
states in the region reduced to warring tribes. So that Israel is then the unquestioned power.
I mean, that's what the clean break in the title even refers to. It's a clean break
from the policy of Oslo and which Bill Clinton had begun to pursue.
Even though he ran to Bush seniors right in the election, he did begin to pursue the two state
solution with Yitzhak Rabin before he was assassinated in 1995. And so in 1996, David Wormser
and Richard Pearl wrote this study for Netanyahu, when he was first coming in, saying,
let's make a clean break from the idea of negotiating with Arafat and having anything
like a two state solution with the Palestinians. Instead, what we should do is seek to simply be
the regional hedgeman completely dominant in military power so that nobody even can
mess with us. And that way we don't even have to worry whether they want to.
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small business. Now, we all know Donald Trump speaks in a kind of over the top language,
but early on he said something like, we hope that what comes out of this is an Iran that is
greater than ever before. He loves than ever before and we want to see a prosperous,
successful Iran. A number of observers said, see that right there is a problem because
that is the last thing Israel wants is a prosperous, successful Iran. I assume that more or less
carries into what you just said. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think,
look, if they really believed that they could parachute the Shah Reza Pahlavi's son, which would
now be the grandson, to be the new monarch, I think they'd probably be happy with that. But
they know that they can't do that. There is no faction ready to take over power in that country.
That's why when they talk about dissident factions, they talk about Kurdish communists
like P. Jack or the Mujahideen E. Kalk, communist terrorist cult, their Persians,
but crazy cults of Marxist terrorists. Then you have John Dala's suicide bombers. You have
monarchist mercenaries. The people of Iran are not going to accept any of these groups,
seizing power. They had no ability to seize power and wield it in that country. As Donald
Trump himself has admitted, he threw the monarch under the bus and said that no,
we're not going to put him in power there. They don't have any illusion that it would work.
Did you see a CPAC? He got a huge standing ovation.
Yeah, from a bunch of Iranian expats who are essentially traders to their own country,
urging their own countries, bombing and invasion by the United States.
But he's got no support outside of Los Angeles or that APAC conference.
Just like in Venezuela, remember Donald Trump said, we're not putting Machado in there.
The Venezuelan right wing has no popular support in the country, and we're not going
to try to poise them on there. So we just want to keep the current vice president in hopes that
she falls in line. Well, apparently the Americans wanted something like that to happen here and
said that the new regime is not going to just fall in line. I think they had that worked out
in advance with the vice president of Venezuela. In fact, I don't know that, but it sure
seems like it. They don't have anybody here. In fact, as repeatedly confirmed, the Israelis
continue to assassinate anybody that the Americans tried to negotiate with.
And Trump even hinted at this when he said he didn't want to say who he was talking to,
because he didn't want them to get murdered. And now that could mean that from other people
inside the regime, but I don't think so. I think he meant the Israelis will kill them
as they killed Larjani and others who they were afraid that Trump would be able to
negotiate with. So I think that, yes, their plan, at least be here, is to simply try to
destroy Iran, to try to see what they can do to turn it into a civil war.
So again, I think the problem is when you name all of the different dissident groups,
I think you give them a billion dollars each, it ain't going to make a difference.
They're just not going to be able to bring the firepower to bear
in a way that would truly threaten the state there.
Well, and then, of course, other people have said that whenever Trump says,
I mean, you know, Trump says all these things about this war, all, you know,
he says one thing, then he says another, but when he has, when he first started indicating that
he might wind it down, I mean, now nobody knows whether to take that seriously,
because he said it 12 times. But when he first started talking that way,
he would say something like that. And then, you know, almost immediately Israel would bomb
something, some part of civilian infrastructure in Iran that makes it harder for him to do that.
And obviously the ground invasion, which Netanyahu said from the beginning you would have to have,
and that they're not going to participate in, would have the effect of drawing the United States
in for a longer period of time, because it seems like their interest is just in whatever erosion
of the regime can be carried out by the US being present there is a good thing,
even if it's an impossible slog for the US. Well, that's on our dime.
And those are our people dying, but it's not Israel's problem.
Yep. And by the way, you know, I gotta admit, I don't know exactly what they're planning, but
the rumors that they put out, the leaks that they put out about sending in the 82nd Airborne
to try to seize the buried uranium hexafluoride gas and canisters or, you know, whatever
that they have there at Isfahan sounds like an absolutely impossible task. I mean,
you can imagine them dropping all of Socom and JSOC in there, plus, you know,
whatever 75th Rangers and 82nd Airborne and whatever to try to secure the perimeter.
And then what? Build a runway and land C-130s full of earth moving equipment,
or we're just going to car jack bulldozers and back hose from the neighborhood and use them
to dig down, you know, past boulders into, you know, wherever they buried this stuff
at Isfahan, and they're going to be able to hold back the absolute, you know,
teeming hordes of people. I mean, the Isfahan facility is not far from a major city,
the city of Isfahan. I mean, you could have just the men of the town come with pitchforks and
rifles. It could be an unstoppable force. Never mind their million man army. I mean,
and Isfahan is like more or less in the center of the country, like somewhat west,
but basically do south of Tehran. It's deep inside the country. And then how do you get them back out
again? I mean, it sounds completely crazy. It sounds like a Hollywood movie where all the guys die at
the end except like one or two somehow escape or whatever. Like it sounds like they would be
insane to do it, or, you know, or maybe they would have some idiot idea that they could
just threaten to use nukes. If anybody comes near our guys, we'll nuke you or something
like that and think that that would hold them at bay. But like, you know what I mean?
Like you can imagine if it's a Hollywood movie, you know, A-10 Warthogs flying the
flying the perimeter and keeping the teaming hordes back. But again, we're talking deep behind
enemy lines here. And for how long is this mission supposed to be sustainable for weeks?
So they find every last bit of partially enriched uranium or something sounds completely
bananas. I mean, there's just no way. And especially when God dang it, we had the day
before or a couple of days before the war started, the Iranians were offering to turn over
their entire stockpile even to the United States, not just to the Russians to turn into fuel rods,
but even give it to the US. And then we would only ship them back fuel rods at low levels of
enrichment, diluted way down. That was the deal that they really stopped. They really
started the war to stop that deal. I think they were worried that Steve Witkoff was bringing
home an offer that was too good to refuse. So they went ahead and launched the war before
we could accept it. Well, on that front, but at the same time, Scott,
is there any indication from Israel at all that maybe even they are concerned that this
thing is not going the way they want, that maybe their missile defense isn't exactly
the way they want it, and maybe they do need an off ramp here? Is there any prospect of that?
Yes. Yeah, I mean, I'm not hearing that from Netanyahu's people, but there have been
people inside the government have been talking to the media like that. There have been massive,
or I don't know how massive, but there have been significant anti-war protests in Tel Aviv,
which are banned, and people are getting cracked over the skull for daring to protest
against the war now. And I think, obviously, they were running low on missile defense
systems stuff last June. And I guess it was kind of weird. I wasn't quite sure what to
make of this, but there were at least some stories that said that Netanyahu actually urged Trump to
wait when he wanted to start the war a little bit earlier in February, maybe even January,
because they wanted to get their defensive systems together a little bit better first,
which is kind of funny because the rumor is, of course, that Netanyahu essentially
blackmailed Trump into doing this war. As Rubio tells it, they were going to start
the war anyway and drag us in. I actually don't believe that. I still blame Israel
just the same, because I think that it was Netanyahu and his people that convinced Trump to do it,
but I don't think that they forced him to do it. I think they convinced him to do it,
and he bought their line of crap as close as you can get on that one.
But yeah, I think, by the way, it's worth pointing out that the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff put a story in the Wall Street Journal two days before the war
saying, we're going to run out of interceptors here, and we got to be really cautious if we're
going to do this, and maybe we shouldn't. And then they went ahead and did it anyway,
and I think, by the way, according to The Washington Post anyway, the National Intelligence
Council put out a national intelligence estimate saying that this will not work to collapse the
regime. And Trump evidently went ahead based on the word of Benjamin Netanyahu,
that don't listen to them, trust me, we hit them good and hard once and they'll fall.
And so I may have said this on your show after the Venezuela thing, that this was the real danger
of Venezuela was that it was so easy to kidnap the president and his wife, that they'll think
they can do it again in Iran, not that they'll try to kidnap them, but they'll think that they
can just drop a bomb on his head. If you put eyes on the eye, it's whole or you could drop a bomb
on. So, and then, but the narrative would be that see how easy this is, you just got to get
the top guy and then you can get what you want. And that unfortunately Donald Trump,
I think, was really reinforced in that point of view by the ease of the Venezuelan operation.
Well, I had exactly the same concern. Well, we're going to let Scott go because he's in the middle
of moving, which is a fate we would not wish on our worst enemy. It is awful, as you all know,
it's terrible moving. But he was a great sport to come on here all the same with a makeshift
setup in order to keep us informed. So also, of course, everybody, if you're finding
that, you know, it is sometimes hard on your feet to deal with with the boomer cons because
they've got like bumper sticker slogans in on their side. And you feel like, well, my side
requires like 10 paragraphs. So how do I compete with these people? Scott Horton Academy will
fix you up real good. So that's Scott's new venture that I hope you guys will go support
and get a lot out of Scott Horton Academy.com is the website. Scott, thanks again.
In fact, Tom, they can get a taste of that at the facts about Iran.com.
That's a good thing to be a taste of it. Yeah, I beg your pardon, Scott. I forgot to mention that
the facts about Iran.com. Check that out. I'll have everything linked to Tom Woods.com
slash 2749. But the facts about Iran.com, go check that out. Thank you, Scott.
Absolutely. Thank you, Tom. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Make yourself and those you love less vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically.
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