#344 - Black Budget Tyranny, $37 Trillion Time BOMB & Pearl Harbor 2.0 | Scott Horton

Summary

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Julian Dorey Podcast #344

Black Budget Tyranny, $37 Trillion Time BOMB & Pearl Harbor 2.0 | Scott Horton
Date: October 10, 2025
Host: Julian Dorey | Guest: Scott Horton

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Brief Overview

In this episode, Julian Dorey is joined by Scott Horton, veteran libertarian foreign policy analyst, radio host, and author, for a dense, deep-dive discussion covering the true machinery of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA's unaccountable covert operations, the trillions spent on empire, the tangled origins of America’s postwar global dominance, and the ideological and strategic drivers of recent and current U.S. interventions, especially in the Middle East. The conversation touches on the pathological incentives behind endless war, the revolving door between empire and democratic ideals, the catastrophic effects of policy decisions on places like Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond, and how “Pearl Harbor moments” are cynically manufactured to fuel perpetual conflict.

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Key Discussion Points & Major Insights

1. The CIA: Myth, Power and Unaccountability

• No Good in the CIA?

  • Scott Horton wastes no time:

    “No, they are absolutely the destructive force. … they got a black budget. By definition, their job is to break the law.” (00:04)

  • The CIA’s “black budget” fosters unaccountability and enables continual illegal activity with zero consequences or oversight.

• The CIA’s Role in Drug Smuggling and Covert Wars:

  • Horton describes learning as a child about Iran-Contra, CIA involvement in drug-running to fund illegal wars, and media complicity until mainstream films (e.g., American Made) made it “safe” to confront the truth.
  • Connections between vice presidents, state governors, and covert operations (e.g., H.W. Bush’s team running drugs into Clinton’s Arkansas).

• Postwar Power Structure:

  • Horton: The supposed balance of powers is largely bankrupt; after WWII, the National Security State and the CIA were created as organs of empire, not republican governance.

Notable Quote:

“What Congress likes to do is pass all their authority to the executive branch. That way, nothing's their fault, but they still get to keep all the money... Congress giving their power away to the President to let him decide, not them.” (04:56)

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2. The Machinery of War and Unchecked Executive Power

• “New World Order” (NWO) Misconceptions:

  • Horton explains how the NWO meant US unilateral dominance—not some UN-centered world government.
  • The doctrine became: America will never allow another nation or alliance to challenge US military supremacy.
  • The result: $10 trillion spent on “terror wars,” millions dead, displaced, or traumatized.

• U.S. War Powers and the Erosion of Constraints:

  • War is waged now without Congressional declaration; “authorizations to use military force” serve as Congressional cop-outs, not real oversight.

Notable Quote:

“So by the time Bush came to town and Dick Cheney was really running the show ... Dick Cheney is not a One worlder, okay? Like there's a world government, but it's in Washington, D.C.” (07:29)

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3. China, “Commercial Empire” vs “Sword Empire”

• China Builds, the US Bombs:

  • Julian: “China's using the pen where we have over the years proven to try to use the sword.” (16:04)
  • Horton: US sends soldiers and covert ops; China writes checks and builds infrastructure, often with long-term leverage.
  • The US political class sees any gain in Chinese influence as a crisis, despite China focusing on commercial, not colonial strategies.

• Is “Retreat” from Empire Catastrophe or Salvation?

  • Horton advocates for abandoning empire, focusing on US affairs, and letting European and Asian powers build their own security structures.
  • The $37 trillion US national debt makes endless foreign security guarantees unsustainable.

Notable Quote:

“If you need your government to rig the game for you ... so that you can have some local government expropriate property and turn it over to your buddies and your standard of living depends on that, ... that's wrong and unacceptable and so tough.” (20:44)

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4. The Catastrophe in Yemen: How U.S. Policy Enabled Mass Disaster

• Obama’s Drones, the CIA, and Growing al-Qaeda:

  • Obama ordered targeted killings of bin Laden loyalists. But the result? Collateral deaths, mass resentment, and al-Qaeda bloomed:

    “They killed hundreds or low thousands of Pakistanis in those drone strikes trying to kill 29 guys. … Al Qaeda just grew more and more and more.” (50:01 – 54:27)

  • Growing chaos and civilian suffering followed every attempt at “precision” warfare.

• Saudi Power Politics and U.S. Complicity:

  • The U.S. first worked with Yemen’s Houthis to kill al-Qaeda, then shifted to backing the Saudis, who supported al-Qaeda to fight the Houthis:

    “Barack Obama turned around and stabbed the Houthis in the back and took al Qaeda's side against them…” (64:54)

  • US military ran logistics, maintenance, and blockade enforcement for the Saudi campaign, culminating in famine and mass death:

    “The Saudi way of war was to bomb all the farms, kill the horses in their stables, bomb all the fishermen's boats ... Starve the population... to inflict collective punishment...” (73:32 – 74:49)

• Trump’s Continuation and Congressional Futility:

  • Trump kept the war running, vetoed Congressional attempts to stop it—largely because of defense contractor pressure (e.g., Raytheon profits).
  • “They always say no new wars ... but he bombed the crap out of them the whole time.” (76:36)

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5. How Policy “Blowback” Creates Perpetual Disaster

• Origin Stories of Modern Terror Threats:

  • Horton details how America’s post-Cold War interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, and elsewhere directly produced today’s adversaries.
  • “These were America's mercenaries that we had backed in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo and Chechnya … while at the same time completely driving them crazy by occupying bases in Saudi Arabia … backing Israel’s wars….”

• War on Terror: The “Pearl Harbor” Script:

  • Julian and Horton discuss how U.S. planners see every major war as requiring a “Pearl Harbor” moment to overcome public resistance.
  • Project for a New American Century’s “Rebuilding America's Defenses” (1998) used that explicit language—the idea that only a major shock could unleash radical policy change.

Notable Quote:

“It is obvious too that there's a motive there to maybe allow one through. That was my assumption at the time was that they'll allow one through so they can escalate into the new century...” (140:16)

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6. The Iraq War: Neoconservativism, Israel, and Manufactured Consent

• Who are the Neocons?

  • Horton traces their roots:
    • Former Trotskyites and Cold War Democrats moving to the right after the 1960s.
    • Central to the neocon rise: a network entwined with military contractors and the Israel lobby; think tanks and media mouthpieces like Project for the New American Century, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, AEI, etc.

• Motivation for War:

  • Not primarily oil or “democracy promotion”—but Israeli strategic interests, as articulated in the “A Clean Break” memo to Netanyahu in '96.
  • The war was sold as a pretext for US preeminence post-9/11, and as a way to “remake the Middle East” for Israel’s benefit via regime change in Iraq, then Syria, Iran, and beyond.
  • Horton repeatedly notes neocon policymakers like Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and how they dominated key government positions under W. Bush.

• Deception & Media Manipulation:

  • “The neoconservatives are the ones who really got it done.”
  • Lies about WMDs, Saddam-Al Qaeda ties, and humanitarian horrors were engineered and laundered through approved channels, both inside and outside government.

Notable Quote:

“They're divided up. They wrote you had guys ensconced at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, and then especially, and most importantly, at the National Review and the Weekly Standard. And of course, Fox News all day long.” (109:19)

• Strategic Catastrophe and Blowback:
  • Instead of a quick regime change, the war empowered Iran, fueled sectarian conflict, led to the rise of ISIS, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths and millions displaced.

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7. The World Wars, Pearl Harbor, and the Revisionist Lens

• Were the US and Britain “forced” into WW2 / Pearl Harbor?

  • Horton: The war was provoked by deliberate escalation and backdoor dealings (“the McCollum memo”), not the result of naive isolationism.
  • The US and British governments manipulated events to gain public support for war, often at the expense of their own citizens’ opposition.

• Churchill, FDR, and the Origins of the US Global Order:

  • Buchanan and AJP Taylor’s revisionist history: Churchill’s “war guarantee” to Poland was blundered posturing; the British government acted out of self-interest and imperial anxiety, not just anti-Nazism.
  • Post-war US power cemented World Empire, at unbelievable cost.

Notable Quote:

“So, you know, none of this was thought through well or done right at all by anyone. … That's the best of all timelines, is the way World War II worked out because we finally got in there. I'm not so sure of that. I don't think the German Reich could have outlived Hitler and I don't think he could have lived very long in any circumstance…” (156:10)

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8. Lessons from the “Forever Wars” and America’s Declining Power

• Why Opposite Policies (Imperialism vs. Isolationism) Get Weaponized:

  • The US routinely demonizes “isolationism” to justify ongoing intervention, but it’s empire that has produced danger, blowback, and decline.
  • Horton underscores the cost: Trillions wasted, millions dead, and a government now $37 trillion in debt.

• Why the US Should “Retreat” and What That Might Look Like:

  • Return to the principles of John Quincy Adams and the original Monroe Doctrine: Defend the home front, avoid entanglements, and empower other regions to solve their own security.
  • Horton tears down the “if not us, chaos” argument, noting that unmanaged intervention is what creates the chaos.

Notable Quote:

“If we want to have our republic here, we're going to have to leave the old world to the old world.” (179:47)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Scott Horton on CIA’s Permanent Lawlessness:

  “They are absolutely the destructive force that you describe them to be. And why? Because it's unaccountable power. They got a black budget and they can never get in trouble for anything.” (39:07)

• On Ideological Roots of Permanent War:

  “What Congress likes to do is pass all their authority to the executive branch. That way, nothing's their fault, but they still get to keep all the money....” (04:56)

• On Yemen:

  “America goes in there, we get them in a debt trap and then we confiscate all their natural resources permanently...the confessions of the economic hitman.” (17:39-18:53)

• On Neocon Influence in Iraq War:

  “They're the ones who really got it done...The neoconservatives are the ones who really got it done. And so they're divided up...especially, and most importantly, at the National Review and the Weekly Standard. And of course, Fox News all day long.” (109:19)

• On US justification for preemptive war:

  “We can't wait for the proof to be a smoking... A mushroom cloud. We can't wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. What if an American city got nuked because you wouldn't let us preempt this threat?” (132:56)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• CIA, Iran-Contra, Drugs, and Power: 00:00 – 04:00
• How War Powers Shift (Post-WWII): 04:20 – 08:20
• US Unipolar Era and Global Hubris: 08:26 – 12:40
• Comparing US Empire to Chinese Expansion: 16:04 – 22:20
• Why Not “Isolationism”? Superior to Empire: 20:24 – 24:17
• Yemen: From Drone War to Proxy Hell: 49:52 – 64:41
• Switching Sides: US Enables AQAP in Yemen: 64:54 – 73:32
• Trump’s Continuation and Raytheon Profits: 76:08 – 78:54
• Afghanistan as the "Least Supported & Opposed" War: 78:54 – 82:00
• Origins and Motives of the Neoconservatives: 88:33 – 96:09
• Israel, Lobby Power, and Endless Wars: 99:01 – 104:55
• Pearl Harbor/False Flag Mentality in War Policy: 140:08 – 144:02
• US/Britain in WW2, Revisionist History: 152:08 – 159:03
• Grand Lessons: Why the US Needs to Leave Empire Behind: 179:48 – 183:21

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Tone & Style

Scott Horton maintains a sharply anti-establishment, libertarian, and revisionist tone—speaking in rapid-fire detail, referencing both mainstream and contrarian sources, and weaving together news events, historical context, and personal commentary. He is animated, deeply skeptical of official narratives, and unflinching in critiquing US foreign policy from both left and right angles. Julian Dorey encourages open debate, pushes for clarification, and peppers the discussion with contemporary parallels and probing questions, keeping the energy high and sometimes injecting dark humor.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a rich, unfiltered tour through America’s foreign policy machine—pulling back the curtain on covert power structures, the origins of endless war, and the real-world consequences for millions at home and abroad. Horton argues persuasively that the “Pearl Harbor” model for policy change is not just history, it’s a continually deployed tool for empire. The great question he leaves for listeners: Will the US learn from its mistakes, or keep running the “black budget” world on borrowed time and blood?

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For further information:

• Scott Horton’s books: "Enough Already" and "Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine"
• See specific timestamps above for segments of greatest interest.

Transcript

[Julian Dory]

Is there anything good about the CIA?

[Scott Ritter]

No. They are absolutely the destructive force. And what, because it's unaccountable power? They got a black budget. By definition, their job is to break the law. But you want to know the story of the Yemen war? I'll tell you real quick. Obama comes in, told CIA, I want you to focus on actually killing real friends of Osama who are threatas in Pakistan and Indiana. There were only 29 Al Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan at the time. Something like 80,000 people were killed. And there was a giant attest. Al Qaeda just grew more and more and more. When Donald Trump came in his first term, didn't do a thing to stop it. Because, yeah, we did bomb Afghanistan for four years and did bomb Yemen for four years, but hey, W. Bush started that one. That was almost all the ground fighting that was happening in the Trump years. He bombed the crap out of him the whole time. They always say no new wars.

[Julian Dory]

But wait, hey, guys, if you haven't already, can you just take one quick second and please hit that subscribe button? It is the most important metric we track on our channel to be able to grow this thing and allow our videos to get into the algorithm. You guys have been doing a great job with that over the past week or two. So let's keep that streak going. And if you're not already subscribed, just hit that button right now and enjoy the episode. Thank you. I don't know if this is going to be ten and a half hours, but I'm sure we could talk for a while. Wow, Scott, thanks for having me.

[Scott Ritter]

Good to be here.

[Julian Dory]

Of course. I'm sure it won't be the last time as well. I had seen you for the first time probably about three months ago when the Iran war broke out. You were on Piers Morgan and went on this, like, epic 1112 minute, like, speech at the beginning of it, and it just kept going. I was like, this guy can spit on information. Then I went and did some research on you. I'm like, you've been, you've been doing this for a long time.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, well, that's how come I know all this stuff.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, yeah. Now, what you've been doing, focusing mostly on foreign policy stuff for what, the better part of the last two decades or so?

[Scott Ritter]

Three.

[Julian Dory]

Three decades.

[Scott Ritter]

Okay.

[Julian Dory]

And what, what really made you gravitate towards that because, like, you're a, you're a full blown libertarian guy. There's a lot of different things you could look at and be an expert on. But what made you gravitate towards the foreign policy aspect.

[Scott Ritter]

You know, I'm not exactly sure as, you know, you look back on your life with kind of cherry pick out different little anecdotal type things. I remember it being very interesting that Ronald Reagan was in trouble over Iran Contra, whatever that was, but how it was all involving all these foreign countries and all this stuff and that he's just the President, he's just a citizen like everybody else and he could get in trouble for a thing like that. Not that he really did, but that's difference between a president and a king son. You know, stuff like that. Like when I was 8 or 10 or whatever. So there's that stuff and then. And the cocaine dealing was a huge part of that. And I don't remember how I first learned this, but I knew all along as sort of true folklore, that the CIA was bringing all that cocaine into the country during the Reagan years to help pay for the secret war in Nicaragua that Congress refused to allocate money for anymore. And how some of that implicated Bill Clinton. So you had H.W. bush in the Vice President's office and his guys are running drugs into Bill Clinton's Arkansas and of course the Governor's covering up for it. And see, all this was crazy conspiracy stuff until they made a Tom Cruise movie about it a couple of years ago called American Made, where he's Barry Seal running guns and drugs for the CIA. So and then of course the story of the crack epidemic in South LA and all of the cocaine coming to Miami at the time.

[Julian Dory]

Scott. Oh, CIA investigated itself and found no wrongdoing. Okay, come on now.

[Scott Ritter]

Yes, but good journalism says they did it. And then, you know, so Waco and Oklahoma were big ones to me. But also, you know, Iraq War one, I had learned just in regular government school that Congress has to declare war because James Madison said the President being in charge of the war, he's the one who's going to want to have a war. So it's got to not be up to him. It's got to be up to the legislature and particularly up to the House of Representatives closest to the people to decide whether they're going to let him do it that way. This is a republic, not an empire.

[Julian Dory]

Right, right.

[Scott Ritter]

And then H.W. bush said, I don't need no stinking Congress. I have a United Nations Security Council resolution, so I can go to Iraq.

[Julian Dory]

How does that, how does that even work? We throw these terms around and stuff, but like, I don't think people understand how the, like our government but particularly governments, like, in general, can get around some of their very own laws to do the thing that they're not supposed to do.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. Okay, so the way it's supposed work on again, seventh grade, basic level checks and balances is if the President tries to get away with murder, the Congress will have his ass because that's what's good for them.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

But that ain't always true. And in fact, what Congress likes to do is pass all their authority to the executive branch. That way, nothing's their fault, but they still get to keep all the money. And so the basic system of the three branches of government meant to check each other in power are. You know, that system is kind of bankrupt. And this is the prime example of it. After World War II, they created the United nations, and then Harry Truman, in the middle of the night, sent troops to invade Korea and, well, to defend the south from the North. But then again, the south had kind of been picking the fight across the line. But anyway, and he did this, and then he told Congress, we're at war in Korea, everybody. And so then I think they fought about it for a while, but they ended up sort of ratifying it and appropriating money for it and putting a rubber stamp on it. And at that point, the precedent was set. We haven't declared war since 1942 against Romania. And I think Bulgaria was the last time America declared war and was in World War II. And ever since then. Yes. So ever since then, sometimes the President just does whatever he wants, but oftentimes what they'll do, like in the case of Vietnam and eventually in the case of Iraq War one, he did eventually go to the Congress, but he still didn't get a declaration. Same for, for the overall global terror war and Iraq War two was they got an authorization to use military force from the Congress, which what that really is is the Congress giving their power away to the President to let him decide, not them. That way they're not really answerable, except in the sense that, well, you can't accuse me of hamstringing our great leader. I gave him all the power he needs to keep us safe. So they get to say that, like, on the stupid level, it's a cop out. Right, but it's a cop out. Exactly right. Then they get to come home. And if the war went bad, well, it was W. Bush that launched the thing. I just said he could, which is what a lot of them said. Like, literally, Hillary Clinton and others said, hey, all I did was authorize the thing. He's the one who decided to do it. Joe Biden said the same thing about Iraq War II in particular. So this is something that really caught me and my attention, like just as a ninth grader that Bush declares, oh, this is the New World Order. Now that the Soviet Union is falling apart and we don't. I don't need the Congress's authority. I can launch a war in the name of enforcing international law over there with the UN Saying it's okay instead of the US Congress. So that was really the start of me becoming like what we would now consider to be a New World Order coup. Maybe a lot of people did then, because that's a code word that means a lot of things to a lot of people. Yes, but to the patriot, right, it meant that America's government are traitors and that the ultimate grand goal is to build a one world federal government under the United nations, where America would lose our sovereignty just like we destroy everybody else's. Which was always bull. But that was what I thought at the time because I was a stupid kid. But that was what got me very interested in foreign policy. So I ended up. I don't regret it because I ended up learning a lot of really great revisionist history of the 20th century and including in the world wars in Vietnam and all that stuff, you know, back when I was still a kid in the 90s or, you know, early 20s. So then by the time W. Bush came to town and Dick Cheney was really running the show, it was clear that as a smart person told me, no, dummy, like Dick Cheney is not a One worlder, okay? Like there's a world government, but it's in Washington, D.C. it ain't anywhere else.

[Julian Dory]

Can you explain that a little more?

[Scott Ritter]

Yes. Well, okay, so that's going back to Iraq War 1. What I should have understood then in 91. In 91. What I should have understood then was what Bush Sr. Meant by New World Order was not a One World Government that ends up like subsuming the usa. What he meant was the. Well, just in the general sense, the World Order is new now. The Soviet Union is gone. America is the only superpower left in the world. We're friends with every major power in Europe and East Asia. And so as Bush Sr. Really meant it when he said this, what we say goes. So that wasn't about some overall plan to build a world government. That was the overall plan. In other words, it's not the UN Security Council, it's the National Security Council in the White House. These are the men who really rule the planet. And certainly at that time they were full of this hubris that, and they wrote their doctrine that said we will never allow another major nation in the world or alliance of nations to challenge our military supremacy over the planet. There's only one superpower, and from now on, there only will be one superpower. So who's the dominant power in Europe, the middle part of North America, and who's the dominant power in the Middle East? The middle part of North America. And who's the dominant power in East Asia, the middle part of North America? And then that's the big controversy now is that to fast forward in our story, W. Bush blew our entire wad invading Iraq for no good reason and led this whole era of the terror wars where they blew $10 trillion and all of our dignity and credibility, along with the blood of 4 million people and 37 million driven out of their homes and 30 million soldier suicides. And God knows we saw two veterans do mass shootings over the last weekend here, guys with trauma coming home from the war. So how about all the guys that.

[Julian Dory]

You see on the street who are homeless too and untaken care of?

[Scott Ritter]

Let me tell you, when I was a kid, they were all wearing green army jackets because they all were Vietnam veterans and who were just cast aside when the war was over. That's exactly how they do it. And so now America's power is receding all over the world. And our government, not particularly President Trump in this case, but the rest of our political establishment, the entire foreign policy establishment, they're in a panic because what's, and the irony is they wanted rightly for the Soviet Union to disappear. They wanted for communist China to abandon Marxist economics, which they've done right. It was Americans who sent Milton Friedman over there to teach these people you need property rights and markets and prices, man. Otherwise that's why you got 10 million starving people on the ground here. And so we saved them from that. Karl Marx is stupid and Milton Friedman ain't no Murray Rothbard, but he's a hell of a lot better than Karl Marx. So read this.

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[Scott Ritter]

And so would we prefer that the Chinese are still actual communists starving by the tens of millions or we did we help them to save themselves? The greatest increase in the great in the standard of living are the most people in the shortest amount of time in the history of the world. It's unbelievable what happened to China coming up from communism and, and what was the USSR is now just the Russian Federation with a red, white and blue flag and A conservative Christian religion and right and basic overall Western European doctrine. This is what we wanted. But now, oh, we can't stand it that anybody has the power to resist our power. Okay, well, yes, China can afford a navy now. That doesn't mean they want to rule the seven seas. It just means they can keep us out of the South China Sea if it comes down to it. Out of the Taiwan Straits if it comes down to it. Doesn't mean that they're trying to overthrow our power and replace us as the dominant power in the world.

[Julian Dory]

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[Scott Ritter]

No, I don't.

[Julian Dory]

Why don't you think they are?

[Scott Ritter]

Well, first of all, just think about it. Imagine Chairman Xi looking at W. Bush and Barack Obama and Joe Biden and for that matter Trump this whole era and saying, oh yeah, that's what I want to do is blow my country's brains out right when we're just getting our act together after our century of humiliation and domination by foreign powers. All this. You know what we should do? We should try to invade and conquer the entire Middle east. Maybe remake Afghanistan. We'll sponsor every regime we can possibly prop up in Africa at unlimited expense. Why would they do that? I mean, they're trying to do business where America sends soldiers, they send businessmen.

[Julian Dory]

That'S what I'm saying.

[Scott Ritter]

And waste a lot less money that way.

[Julian Dory]

Right?

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. And look, their ambition is to build what they call the Belt and Road, which I think this is probably a pipe dream, but they want to go from Shanghai to Lisbon. Yeah, right. Like in other words, railways, fiber optics, highways and whatever you got all the way across Eurasia from tip to tip, more or less. And they're going to do that by killing everybody and, and lording it over everybody and causing fights everywhere and causing wars? No, they are going to have to choose.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

They're going to be a belligerent world empire. Then they're not going to get very far if they want to expand their influence. I mean, look at what they're doing now. They're acting smart where America just does nothing but waste money. And you'll hear our Pentagon say, we gotta really move deeper into China, into Africa to keep the Chinese out. We have to imperialize Africa. We gotta do coups and prop up dictators and intervene in elections and support train up armies and do all of these things because China might bribe somebody into letting them pump some oil out of the ground and ship it to the coast, which is good for humanity overall anyway. Don't we want to drive down the price of energy? I don't know. Isn't it okay for China to buy petroleum products? I think that it may be.

[Julian Dory]

I see what you're saying. There's a lot on the bone here. So I'm going to try to keep it, keep it straight and just start with one thing. China's using the pen where we have over the years proven to try to use the sword. Right? So like you said, we send in people, start wars, we send in covert intelligence operations to cause problems, kill people sometimes, things like that, that are problematic. China writes a check and says, okay, here, Zimbabwe is $600 million to build this new port right here. We know you can never pay it back, but now you just let, at least let us use it and have our influence here. We're not going to kill anyone, we're not going to hurt anybody, but like, you know, we kind of own you. Isn't it problematic when you have a country whose GDP is now neck and neck with ours, potentially buying influence across the world when they are, I will agree with you, they're objectively better today than they were in communism under Mao and stuff like that. For sure, they have more of a dual system, but at the End of the day, it is still a communist government that still does touch and control everything there, including their billionaires. You know, to the point that if they don't give them their information and business intelligence, they just kill them. Like isn't that somewhat problematic if you don't again, not saying go in and do regime change, send an army like that everywhere, but isn't it problematic if you don't try to exert your own soft power to at least try to co opt that sounds like it might.

[Scott Ritter]

Be problematic for Zimbabwe, which a stupid. I don't disagree with that and I don't care what happens to them. And no, it is not in the interest of the American people that we got to pay our taxes, have our currency destroyed so that our government can wage a world empire to keep China from getting Zimbabwe in a debt trap and taking control of a port, not a naval port, but a port where people are doing business. And you know, maybe we should kill people. Maybe we should overthrow the government there. Maybe we should train up the army of the government next door to invade them and kill them and teach them to do business with the Chinese because to save their ass. Meanwhile, how does America do this business? We already know. America goes in there, we get them in a debt trap and then we confiscate all their natural resources permanently. Your mines, your water, your farmland, everything belongs to us. And the Chinese up the dictator. Not like that.

[Julian Dory]

Not like that.

[Scott Ritter]

Not like the Americans have. I mean that's the IMF way. They go in there and absolutely gangsterize the hell out of countries and turn their entire water supplies over to American favored multinationals and all that. The confessions of the economic hitman.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, he's great.

[Scott Ritter]

And you know, G. Edward Griffin has a great bit about this and the creature from Jekyll island too. This is just straight gangsterism, dude. It's what you expect from the British Empire and not. It has nothing to do with free markets. It's the US government forcing our way. And so, you know, if African countries need to figure out how to protect their sovereignty from China, well then I guess they need to do that, right? That doesn't have nothing to do with me.

[Julian Dory]

What about the psychology here though, right? If you, you and I were talking for a second before we got on camera and I was kind of telling you where I see some nuance here. Like I despise the military industrial complex. I despise getting involved in wars for the sake of like, you know, basically carrying our around the show. We got the biggest one. I despise the blood, death and economic trauma and generational things that happen as a result of that. And I do agree with you. I think we have a lot of things to fix at home that we seem to just make second rate. Oh, here's $700 for a victim of Maui while we're giving, you know, $14 billion on a Tuesday to Ukraine, I'm completely with you on that. But if you go completely opposite, like the polar opposite of what the military industrial complex is, which in some ways would be like absolute pure libertarianism, isolationism, stay away, just deal with our problems, let everyone else deal with theirs. How do you keep your power in the world if you retreat from everything?

[Scott Ritter]

Oh well, that's the whole point is abandon that power in the world. We don't need that power in the world.

[Julian Dory]

We don't to have to have the freedom that we have. We don't need to be able to have power in the world. That includes also having some economic might so that we can have, you know, advantage in, in trade and things like that.

[Scott Ritter]

Look, if you need your government to rig the game for you so that you can get artificially cheap labor or so that you can have some local government expropriate property and turn it over to your buddies and your standard of living depends on that. And then that's just, that's wrong and unacceptable and so tough. Like you're gonna have to pay more for grapes then if you're using state power to take unfair advantage in order to get artificial low prices on whatever it is. So that's that. It's not isolationism to have private corporations have international trade around the world, you know, to have, you know, in fact, our current empire has sanctions on probably two thirds of the countries in the world. And then they call the free traders the isolationists just because we don't want to exert government power around the world. But why is it just built in? We're supposed to assume forever that America must be the dominant power in Italy and Germany and France and Britain. Why? They can't solve their own problems. This is the era of totalitarians from 100 years ago where it's the commies versus the Nazis and all this stuff or. No, it's not actually at all. If America retreated from Europe and pulled our troops out of there, then Germany and France and Britain would create an EU army, They'd have a deal with Poland and Italy and whatever you think.

[Julian Dory]

It would take care of itself.

[Scott Ritter]

And it would take care of itself. We've had the osce and all these organizations all of this time, we don't need to be. And look at who runs Germany now. Would Germany be the dominant power in Europe? Sure. Does that mean they'd have to go to war with Russia next?

[Julian Dory]

No.

[Scott Ritter]

In fact, that's America and Britain's greatest fear is that Germany and Russia will get along too well. That's what we got to prevent. Merkel and Putin want to do a Eurasian home, we got to intervene to destabilize that, blow that thing up, prevent that kind of deal from happening. So. And then the same thing for Japan and China. Now there's In Korea, for that matter. There's plenty of historical problems going back there. And you could argue that Japan right now doesn't have nukes, because we're there and we do have nukes. And they're like, they have a security guarantee from us. On the other hand, the Chinese aren't making any threatening moves towards Japan. They're not sending any signals to Tokyo. They're like, yeah, you better be on your best behavior. Any kind of thing. So the Japanese are not militarizing any more than what the Americans are insisting on, but they have no particular agenda to militarize against China. And the Chinese are. Don't seem to be trying to pick that fight at all. So maybe now would be a good time for America to broker a permanent new treaty of friendship and understanding between China and Japan to freeze things as they are, to hold tensions where they are and prevent them from escalating so that they can get on without us. And we're in debt $37 trillion. How many more trillion dollars can we borrow from South Korea and Japan and China so that we can be the dominant military power, keeping them from fighting each other. It seems like there's got to be a better way to do this. You know what I mean? It's. It seems like it's always built in that like, yeah, but if we didn't dominate East Asia, then East Asians would.

[Julian Dory]

But.

[Scott Ritter]

And then that would be a crisis for some reason. And I'm not saying that America can just, like, what, pull the tablecloth out and all the glasses will be perfect. I understand. But. But we can move cautiously and deliberately and negotiate deals and we can create a Eurasian home. This was the whole promise in. And this is in my. My most recent book provoked. The whole promise at the end of the Cold War was as Bush. And this is why I was a New World Order kook, by the way, was because Bush Senior said, we want to create a single Security system from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Right, that's the far east of Russia there. So in other words, what I thought he meant was like bringing Russia into NATO and making a one world white army of the north to, to then lord it over China and Islamic South Asia. And there were, there was a lot of talk like that. The thing is they were just bluff and they didn't mean that. Mostly they were saying those things in order to, for American domestic consumption, to bring the more like humanitarian intervention minded liberal Democrat types along. But then on the international level, more importantly to get the Soviets and then later the Russians to acquiesce to America staying in Germany and then expanding their influence into Eastern Europe, that you're all going to be a part of it too. You're going to see we already have the OSCE and we're all members of it. So we're going to replace NATO with the osce. And then so that way, yeah, Ukraine will be a member, but so will Russia be a member. And all of the members, all the states in between. And so there'll be no problem, nothing to fight about there. But they were lying the whole time. And as I show in the book, and I cite other great scholars who demonstrate that they knew that they were lying and that they were telling the Russians in the Bush senior administration, the promise was they do this with the osce, the, what was then called the csce, the conference and now it's the Organization on Cooperation International Security.

[Julian Dory]

Close.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, yeah, I had it a second ago and it flew away. And then in the Clinton years it was the Partnership for Peace, but they were lying both times. And it was all, the plan always was to expand NATO, not to erase the dividing lines in Europe, but to move them further east, right up to Russia's border. And then what are they going to do about it? And then now we see what they're going to do about it. And which was long predicted by the way too, that all the hawks, as I, as I show in my books, all the hawks who are responsible for all of our worst policies, they all knew better all along and they all said so all along, boy, we better not do the stupid thing that we want to do because you know what's going to happen. And then it, they do it and then that thing happens and it's kind of an unbroken chain. And I, and then, so I don't have to quote all the good guys, I can quote the bad guys themselves describing their own worse behavior.

[Julian Dory]

Well, that's, that's the thing Though, like, you keep coming back to this USSR Russia example, and it's, and it's actually a really prescient one because I think it's fair to say there were a fuck ton of mistakes made throughout the Cold War, not the least of which is wars that happened all in the middle of it on, on, you know, in proximity to this east versus west disagreement that was going on. You also had damn near, you know, potential nuclear holocaust scenarios. So a lot could have gone wr that, you know, even some things. Thank God it didn't. That said what. What's always stood out to me about the end of it is that the way that the USSR eventually fell was that it was an ideological game. You know, you didn't. You, you basically got enough information in there talking about from like the west perspective, you got enough information inside of the Soviet Union to get 15% of the population. That's all it was, 15%. To be like, yo, fuck this, and then effectively overthrow the government. So you would think, oh my God, you did something without, like actually intervening. It worked out. This government that you didn't like is overthrown. Now let's work with the rebuild. But to your point, it's like we learn zero lessons because in the rebuild, we made promises that we didn't keep. We gave them meaning, Russia to Russia. We gave them ideas that they were going to be a part of things that then they weren't a part of. We set up a new type of iron curtain. It just had like a nice, like, red curtain around it too, so that it seemed like it was, like, pleasant. And we effectively created a vacuum in the 90s for a guy like Putin to then take power and decide we're gonna, we're gonna make this instead of USSR left, it's kind of going to be like more fascist Russia. Right. And so in a lot of ways, like, I'm not saying the US should be blamed for every decision that Vladimir Putin makes or anything, but it's hard for me to not look at it and wonder if, if our, our very own, like stabbing ourselves in the back.

[Scott Ritter]

Created it, the truth comes out. Julian Dory Ghost wrote my most recent book Provoked. And that's the story of the book, man.

[Julian Dory]

That's, that's. I summarized it effectively.

[Scott Ritter]

That's it. Yeah. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is what I was trying to say when my brain wasn't working earlier.

[Julian Dory]

Gotcha.

[Scott Ritter]

And yeah, that was exactly the deal was, yeah, you're going to be part of this whole thing then. Yeah. And, and now the one place I would differ with you is that the end of the Cold War in the Soviet Union really wasn't about us. And it wasn't an achievement of the CIA and the ned. It was really what happened was the economic system in the country had just ground essentially to a halt. And the new leadership decided that they needed to try to emulate the west some and reform the economy some in order to try to get it moving again. But the problem was you can't really half ass Communism in the way that they tried to half ass it. And it just made it even worse. Like for example, instead of having just the central commissar run all the industry in this district, they devolved control but not ownership down to the managers of each firm. So then those guys could just loot all the stuff and take all the money and run, you know, this kind of thing. So it was just. So once they started trying to fix it, they just made it worse and worse and worse, Right? And then idiot Gorbachev tried to outlaw vodka and you know, he did his own prohibition and people never mentioned this part of it, but this was a huge part of the reason why FDR was elected four times was he was the guy who re legalized drinking, you know, God help us all, ever since then, because of him. And, but that was what he did. And and so this was a huge thing that undermined his rule. And then you just had a new young generation of KGB guys, I think, who wanted to overthrow the old system and take control of the new doing. And so then see America, the Bush senior government actually wanted to uphold the Soviet Union to prolong the Soviet Union and project. Wait, what? Yeah, because see, what they wanted to do was dissolve the Warsaw Pact. They wanted to let the satellite countries go free. And they. And as far as the Soviet republics, they wanted the Baltics to go free.

[Julian Dory]

Who.

[Scott Ritter]

So Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. But HW1, HW wanted for the USSR to remain under what was going to be called the New Union Treaty. And it was going to include Belarus, Ukraine and the stands South Asia still. And what happened was the commies tried, the hardliners did a coup in August of 1991 which failed. And to his credit, Bush Sr. Refused to take a phone call from the commie and would only take a phone call from Gorbachev. So the coup failed. That wasn't why, but that was part of why the coup failed. And but it was really Boris Yeltsin who was the president of Russia and he led the people who crushed the coup and saved Gorbachev. But then he did his own coup and he went ahead and overthrew what was left of the USSR at all himself by making a secret deal with the leader of Belarus and Ukraine and agreeing to break the last thing apart. The USA had nothing to do with that and did not want that. As as Brent Scowcroft said says we didn't want Ukraine, we just wanted Eastern Europe. Ukraine is east of Eastern Europe. To Brent Scowcroft, Bush Senior's alter ego here and then. So they're not that I'm taking his side, but I'm just saying you can see why they didn't want that kind of trouble. They didn't necessarily want the USSR to dissolve, they just wanted for Poland and Hungary and the Baltics to go free.

[Julian Dory]

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[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, it went.

[Julian Dory]

That's further than well known history. I, I didn't know that at all.

[Scott Ritter]

The book is called Provoked How Washington Started the New Cold War With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. And it's all in there for you. In fact, your audience might be familiar with what was called the Chicken Kiev speech. And this is where Bush Senior went to Kiev and he gave a speech to the Rada where he said independence is not the same as freedom and America will not support you moving on any timetable other than what Gorbachev has in mind in Moscow. And so don't come looking to me to help you declare independence from them. He said it to their parliament.

[Julian Dory]

All right, question.

[Scott Ritter]

And then he said, and beware of ethnic nationalism and the danger of the danger of suicidal ethnic nationalism and the, and the horror it can bring to your country like before, etc. That didn't work out too well. And then it was William Sapphire who I don't think was actually a neoconservative, but he was very close to the neoconservatives who wrote for the New York Times who called it the Chicken Kiev speech. Which you gotta admit, like here's your chance to destroy the USSR once and for all and they're like doing everything they can to prop it up. I'm not taking their side and thing, I mean I would have had a total non interventionist policy and it would have happened. You know, in fact, Bush senior deserves some credit because as he put it, he did not go tap dance on the Berlin Wall and say, hahaha, we won a new loss. Because if he had done that, that would have helped the hard line, that would have saved the Soviet Union. The fact that he stayed home and played it relatively cool, at least in terms of the gloating, actually made it easier for Yeltsin to ultimately destroy what was left of the USSR for us.

[Julian Dory]

That's my question. That's what I'm thinking as you're explaining this whole thing. And this, this is a little bit of, I'm not well versed on this part, so I appreciate you going through this, but H.W. bush is, is a lifelong spy. You know these, you're talking about a guy who literally made his bones on subversive tactics. Could it not have been some sort of, you know, passive aggressive double speak, reverse psychology in a way?

[Scott Ritter]

No, no.

[Julian Dory]

For him to do that, you don't think that's a possibility.

[Scott Ritter]

No, look, Gorbachev wanted the new union treaty. Bush's position was I want what Gorbachev wants. That's it. It was Yeltsin who overthrew Gorbachev. And I never seen any indication anywhere that the CIA put him up to it or anything like that. That was Yeltsin taking his chance. That was not America's doing. The CIA didn't even know the Soviet Union was falling apart because the CIA was too busy lying that they were 12ft tall so they can justify American militarism. Robert Gates was ahead of the CIA at the time, and they missed this whole thing. And even as it was all unraveling, they still were not saying that, oh yeah, their days are numbered, sir. Until it was all over. And they're like, well, red flag is down. Hooray, we did it. Right? Like the FBI taking credit when some guy's dad turns him in. We found them, you know, in the parking lot.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, I'll see you in Valhalla, brother. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Do you? When you look at the history of CIA, something that's born after World War II, but effectively was born as the OSS, you know, during World War II, all those figures eventually created what we now know as CIA. It is quite obvious that there is scandal after scandal, overstep after overstep, bureaucracy taking control of. Of the will of the people, you know, and holding. I mean, you could even go just straight up and say holding, blackmail, or whatever you want to say over the people that we supposedly elect into power. Is there anything good about the CIA in your book? Are there things that they do on a daily basis that you think are useful?

[Scott Ritter]

I mean, there must be some pat answer in there, right, about how they read foreign newspapers and tell the President what they say. Maybe, maybe they have some electronic spying or some. Some sources somewhere that give them some insight. But I mean, overall, by and large, no. They are absolutely the destructive force that you describe them to be. And why? Because it's unaccountable power. They got a black budget and they can never get in trouble for anything. By definition, their job is to break the law. And that's what a finding is. To order by the present to do something that's right. And then. And it can be as illegal as hell. And so they're a post constitutional national security bureaucracy fit for an old world empire, not a constitutional republic.

[Julian Dory]

Post constitutional. What was that phrase? Post constitutional.

[Scott Ritter]

A national security bureaucracy. Right. Like the rest of them. There are a bunch of them Yeah, I mean, you know, all this stuff was invented after World War II.

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[Scott Ritter]

Which goes to show that it ain't part of what was the American system up until it was and doesn't have to be, you know.

[Julian Dory]

So you think it's. Well, it's kind of obvious when I say this. Of course it's different, but, like, the premise of having an apparatus like that, assuming for a second it's not completely taking advantage of everything, which it is, but the premise of having, like, a spy apparatus is an American. When, you know, we won the Revolutionary War because of our spy apparatus, I would argue that was probably the most important thing we see. Here's the thing.

[Scott Ritter]

If we renounce all our power, then the foreign spies don't have much business to accomplish here. Right. The whole point of a foreign spy in America is to bend the American government to their will, to exercise their global imperial power in favor of whatever government. But if we don't have a world empire, then they're just barking up the wrong tree. I'm saying let's be the wrong tree. So you think America itself is safe? We have two weak and friendly neighbors and marine life to the east? Yeah. Canada and Mexico could never threaten us, ever. We have threatened them numerous times, but never vice versa.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

And Count Pancho Villas raids or something.

[Julian Dory]

I don't know if I would characterize Mexico as fully friendly, just to be fair. Well, it's run by cartels.

[Scott Ritter]

Okay. But fine, but I'm just saying their. Their military force is. Has no intention to cross our borders in a violent way in the next couple of hundred years that we got to worry about. Right. We got gigantic oceans east and west. And as Ron Paul said, we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines. That's enough to sink your navy if you want to come anywhere near our guys. And it's enough. One sub can hold 200 H bombs. That's enough to kill all of Russia with just one of our submarines, so we can hold the entire world hostage. Don't anybody ever nuke us, or we will nuke you. And maybe that's hyperbole. A couple of good submarines. Fine, a dozen then. Well, like, what do you want from me? Like, we don't need a world empire to secure North America. And we. Look if. Who framed Donald Trump for treason? The CIA and the FBI Counterintelligence division. Why do we have a CIA and a counterintelligence division to not do that? Because we're a world empire. And so we need a CIA and an FBI Counterintelligence division. And then when the people vote wrong, they just do a coup the same way they do anywhere else. I mean, look at the way that they frame Trump for treason with the same thing they did to Saddam Hussein.

[Julian Dory]

Same thing.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. Just tell 1000 lies. The Russiagate hoax. Not one word of that was true. Not one word of it that's been proven. 10,000 accusations. The exact same thing they did to Saddam hussein. Then in 2020, they did it just like they would do like the Orange Revolution or the Rose Revolution over when they're overthrown a friendly government to Russia and they're near abroad and they treated Trump just like he was Yanukovych in that case. You know what I mean? Where the CIA. You know, when Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California, was the chair of the Torture Committee. The. Yeah, the Senate Intelligence Committee, she had her staff investigate torture. I guess you already know this story and you know where I'm going. She said it's a good one, though. She had her staff, they were ensconced in an office at CIA where CIA would bring them the material to review. Now, someone at CIA, either accidentally or accidentally on purpose, gave the staff the real secret torture report that was written eyes only for Leon Panetta, which they were supposed to have covered up and lied and pretended didn't exist, and only give them another separate, not even a redacted version, but another whole separate different report. And then when the bosses found out about it, was John Brennan who found out about it, and.

[Julian Dory]

Great guy. He's an awesome guy.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, don't get me started on the whole list. Or you can, if you want, get me started on the whole list. But he, he then made a criminal referral to the FBI to have the FBI and the Justice Department prosecute Dianne Feinstein's staff for, he claimed, breaking into their computers and stealing this document. Right. So he. This is the head of the CIA, is coming at the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in this way as though he is the separate and co. Equal branch of government from the checks and balances we were talking about earlier when. No, I mean, come on, man. He's supposed to be five ranks down. He's not even officially a member of the Cabinet. The head of the CIA, I guess, sometimes, depending on the present, but he's not a secretary of anything.

[Julian Dory]

Hey, guys, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button. It's a huge, huge help.

[Scott Ritter]

Thank you. And. And even if he was, he's a huge step down from the elected president of the United States of America. And in this case, the courts had ruled that the president had no right to keep this information from her and better turn it over. So in other words, she had all the authority in the world to do what she was doing. And he was swinging and punching way above what should have been his weight, but in fact, no. And he absolutely got away with it.

[Julian Dory]

That's what he's always done.

[Scott Ritter]

That's right.

[Julian Dory]

Look at that guy's career. He's done it every fucking step of the way.

[Scott Ritter]

Yep.

[Julian Dory]

Even when he wasn't in charge of CI Long before that, when he was. What was it? When he was back running the. I'm gonna fuck it up. But he was like the. He was like the station chief down in the Philippines or something. Like, he. Everywhere that guy went. And John Kiriakou, who's a friend of mine who's been in here, who got fucked right up the ass by him.

[Scott Ritter]

He's great.

[Julian Dory]

You know, John lays out exactly what this guy was all about. He also explains how the dude was, like, literally fired and. And then found his way back in and basically, like, sucked enough dick to. To get back into some positions to be able to move papers around. So it's like.

[Scott Ritter]

I don't know, the Philippines part.

[Julian Dory]

You see, I don't remember if it's. Please check me in the comments on that. He was the station chief of One. Of something out there.

[Scott Ritter]

Saudi. I know that Saudi.

[Julian Dory]

That's.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. And this is in. In Tucker Carlson's new thing about 9 11. He was station chief in Saudi when the hijackers were all the. The last of the muscle hijackers of being, you know, brought into the country. Knows nothing about that. And then, yes, he ran the drone wars for Barack Obama before then running the war for al Qaeda in Syria that. Backing al Nusra that led to the rise of ISIS in the islamic state caliphate. And then, of course, he framed Trump for high treason with. With Moscow and the overthrow of the election in 2016. Total lie. And I'm trying to remember if. Did Kiriakou say if he was involved in the torture program? I bet he was. I forgot now.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

Rolling Torture.

[Julian Dory]

This is. This is the sickest part. There was a documentary on Showtime back in 2015 called CIA spies in the crosshairs. And they interviewed every living former director or acting director of CIA at the time H.W. was still alive. Like, they had everybody on there. And then they had a few guys from the war on terror who weren't you know, like heads, but like a. A Jose rodriguez, guys like that who were involved in some of the black site programs and things. And so john brennan, at the time of the documentary is the head of the CIA. Current head of the CIA at the time. And he gets on there and they're asking each CIA director about, in hindsight, do you think the CIA should ever be allowed to torture somebody? And john brennan gives like this answer. Like, I just think. I think, you know, in, in america, we, we should. I just feel very strongly we. We should not torture. He's the guy who wrote the initial memos. He's the guy who helped create the fucking program. He's not the only one, by the way, on that. But I'm saying, like, he is one of the godfathers of that whole program. He's one of the people who had john kiriakou prosecuted because he was the only guy back there, the human rights guy, who said, we don't do this in america. He was like, fuck you, john. And they made Eric holder. I, I. The whole thing's like illegal. Go after him for it. So when I see a guy that's on record, when I see a guy like that go onto a documentary and lie his face off. I understand if you gotta lie about some foreign intelligence somewhere that. Listen, that is what it is. But when you're gonna lie about your own actions and try to make yourself look like, oh, I'm the, I'm the righteous guy here. You, I, I don't with that one bit.

[Scott Ritter]

Yep. Yeah. And he was, I think he was in the white house in charge of the drone strikes when they killed american citizens Anwar alaki and his son Abdul rahman in yemen as well.

[Julian Dory]

That's right.

[Scott Ritter]

So, I mean, that's the least of what they did in yemen, but it's.

[Julian Dory]

The least of what they.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. Oh, by far. I'll. I'll tell you all about that one moment. But in this case, it's, it's, you know, it's. It ain't a technicality when you're talking about murdering american born American citizens, man. And that's absolutely, you know, life in prison time. Anybody else does it. Just because it's one or two or three, that doesn't make a difference when it comes to that principle. Jesus christ. Like, there's got to be a line somewhere and we crossed a long time ago. They did. But you want to know the story of the yemen war? I'll tell you real quick so that.

[Julian Dory]

Do you have to tell me quick?

[Scott Ritter]

Tell me whatever I'LL tell you.

[Julian Dory]

Slow up.

[Scott Ritter]

So look, Barack Obama comes in. We're. We're way ahead in our timeline, but we don't have to do one.

[Julian Dory]

It's all right. You'll be back, Scott.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, we'll just talk about this one. So. And this is in that book if you want to show them. Right up here.

[Julian Dory]

Enough already.

[Scott Ritter]

This is the second to the last chapter story. Yeah, enough already. Horton, we heard you. We said this part before. Okay, so w. Bush's Iraq war really benefits al Qaeda a lot. It wasn't meant to do that, but it did. They really gained a lot for fighting in western Iraq. Obama comes in and he decides on, I mean, a whole cascade of idiotic things. But one of the things that at least on the face of it seemed rational, not to a non interventionist like me, but just on the face of it, all other things being equal, was he told CIA, I want you to focus on actually killing actual aspen ladenites, right? Not random sunni insurgents in western Iraq, but real friends of Osama who are a threat to us and particularly in Pakistan and in Yemen. So they did that. Kiriakou tells a story that. That there were. He knows for a fact there were only 29 Al Qaeda guys hiding out in Pakistan at the time that the CIA launched that drone war when Obama came in. And they killed hundreds or low thousands of Pakistanis in those drone strikes trying to kill 29 guys. Then they also allied with the Pakistani government in a giant war that they launched against the Pakistani Taliban who never did anything to us in the swat valley and the federally administered tribal territories and all that. Something like 80,000 people were killed and, you know, hundreds of thousands driven from their homes. And it was a giant catastrophe. Anyway, that's what. That's what happens when Obama says, you know what would make sense would be murdering people who actually are friends of osama, right? And they're like, okay, here's how we do that and turn this country upside down. Right?

[Julian Dory]

Okay.

[Scott Ritter]

Anyway, when it comes to Yemen, there are bin Ladenites there. Real Aspen laud nights. You'll remember that on. In fact, this is after Obama already started bombing them. But on Christmas Day 2009, the underpants bomber tried to blow up a plane over Detroit. What was aqap that sent him? Okay. In the Arabian peninsula, Yemenite bin ladenites and yemeni bin ladenites. So they were centered in a couple of small towns on the coast, basically, not too many of them. CIA begins this drone war against them. The whole time they're bombing them. This is in 09 is when this starts. Like in the fall of 09. The whole time they're bombing them, Al Qaeda is getting bigger and bigger. There's a great article by Jeremy Scahill in the Nation about this. Has the word backfires in it. Yemen, terror war, backfire, something like that. And he talks about in there how there was this tribal chief, you know, whatever alpha male guy of this town, who had called a meeting with these bin Ladenites to tell them, you better stay the hell out of my town. And Obama bombed the meeting and killed the guy who was putting a break on these guys.

[Julian Dory]

Why did he do that?

[Scott Ritter]

Because he's an idiot. The CIA, they're bombing little, little black and white figures on a monitor. They don't know who's who and who's saying what to who down there. They're, they're taking a wild guess. They call it a scalpel. It's not a scalpel. It's a 50 at minimum. It's a 50 pound bomb. A lot of times it's bigger than that. But if it's, you know, a small drone fired bomb, it's still enough to kill five people or blow up a pickup truck. That's not a scalpel.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

A 500 pound bomb will blow up your whole damn building and kill the family, you know?

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. When Eric Prince was here, he was whipping out his phone and showing me some of the live drone strikes. That shit's gnarly.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. And so, yeah, it is not at all a scalpel if it hits you. And so when you have these, these drone strikes on these towns, then what ends up happening is it ends up driving people into the insurgency. Whoever's bombing us, we want to join up with the people who are getting bombed. Not because, yay, we want to be bombed, but because we want to be part of the force that's worth bombing. We want to be part of the force that's fighting against the people who are fighting us.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

It's the same thing that you and I would do if they started bombing our towns. We're going to join up with the guys who already have their guns and their act together and tell them, who do I shoot?

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

Like what? Yeah, that's what we do. So that was what they did. And Al Qaeda just grew more and more and more. Okay, then in order to accomplish all of that though, Obama had to bribe the dictator of Yemen, a guy named Abdullah Saleh. And he had to bribe him. Yes. With money and guns.

[Julian Dory]

That's how you do it.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. And so this guy had been the dictator since the end of the Cold War era, and he had reunited north and South Yemen and the south was the more commie backed by the Soviets and the north was the British readout. And so he had united the country and America had backed him all this time, but now he's a pretty like slick double game playing type of guy. So he's allowing Obama to bomb Al Qaeda, but he's actually backing them and the Muslim Brotherhood, a group called Al Isla, and he's using them to attack his enemies, a group of Shiites in the north of the country called the Houthis, which, that's their family and tribal name, but they're a sect of Zadishiites from the mountainous north in the Sada province. And he keeps attacking them over and over. And he's using, even though he's taken our money and guns to allow Obama to bomb Al Qaeda. He's actually backing Al Qaeda as long as they're killing the Houthis. But then, you know what's funny about that is he's actually backing the Houthis to kill his own army. And, and the Al Qaeda guys too do. Yeah, because that's how they do politics in Yemen. I talked to a reporter one time, he said that's the reason why they have those curved daggers is so you can stab somebody in the back even when he's standing behind you. And so.

[Julian Dory]

Sounds like an awesome place.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, so that was the way Salah did business. Anyway. So then comes the Arab Spring, right? 2011, the degree to which Ned and CIA are behind all of this, or some of it, or whichever, let's leave that aside. But revolution breaks out in Tunisia and Egypt, and then you have day of rage protests all across the Middle east, including in Bahrain and Saudi and Iraq and in Yemen. And in Yemen they have huge protests. And everybody came out. The Muslim Brotherhood, the. The Houthis, the southern socialists from aid, in the Southern Transitional Council they call themselves, they're backed by the UAE and our socialists, kind of left over from the Soviet days. And all these different groups were coming together to protest, to try to get rid of Salah, but he wasn't going anywhere. But then somebody tried to kill him twice. And the second time it was with a bomb. I forgot what happened. I think it was a bombing both times. But the second time they got him and wounded him and he had to go to Saudi Arabia to convalesce. And while he was gone, Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, swooped in. And this is in early 2012, Hillary Clinton swooped in and insisted that whatever the people of Yemen have going on here, no, you are going to suffer. The vice president under the old system, Mansoor Hadi, he's coming to power, and there's nothing you can do about that. And we're going to hold a big election. They held a big election with one guy on the ballot. And even NPR News covered it. Like, you can pull up the website where you can see the ballot with one man. Just type in Mansoor Hadi ballot, NPR News. And it'll come up, I promise. And there's. There's the ballot with one guy, one face, one oval.

[Julian Dory]

I don't think.

[Scott Ritter]

I don't think writing. You see Mickey Mouse down at the bottom like people do.

[Julian Dory]

Kanye west finished second. People writing in Ron Paul.

[Scott Ritter]

And so Hillary Clinton declared this was the advent of democracy. Did you find it?

[Julian Dory]

Something about Hillary Clinton talking about democracy just never sits right with me. Yeah, that's neither here nor there. Yeah. Yemen election. One person, one vote, one candidate. February 2012. Millions of people in Yemen. I like Yemen. I like saying it like Dale Comstock. Millions of people in Yemen turned out to vote Tuesday in an unusual presidential election. There was only one candidate and only one way to vote. Yes. That candidate, Abdurahmi Mansoor Hadi, was the vice president under Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled Yemen for more than three decades. Saleh finally agreed to step down and transfer power to his vice president after nearly a year of mass protests against his rule. School in the outgoing president's dusty hometown, about an hour's drive outside of the capital Sanaa, and inside a school that served as a polling station. Several pictures of. Of. Of Saleh preside over the proceedings as he ran for. As he has for 33 years in Yemen. People say that they're. That they are voting for the new Yemen, the new start with the same fucking. Okay, whatever. But it seems as if they are doing it because it's what Saleh wants them to do. I cried today as I voted, says Raisa Al Sayani, as someone held a gun to her head behind her. We loved our president. But if he says his deputy is the best man for Yemen, then I know he knows better. I'm making up this last part. Then he is the best man for Yemen. That's. Wow. Wow. I mean, it doesn't surprise me.

[Scott Ritter]

And the thing is, look, I'm not saying that all the protesters knew exactly what to do, but I am saying, as I show in the book, they did have processes and councils and Committees that were coming to agreement, they were trying to form a new government. They had the right to America had no right to intervene in their process and to insist on propping up this guy over them the way that they did. And by the way, according to the rules of confirmation bias, when National Public Radio says something that agrees with me, then that means that even National Public Radio admits that I'm right. You see how that works? Especially when, and I know that's funny, but also especially when these are Democrat times and they're confirming my bias, not Obama's. They are accusing Obama here, essentially. They're really implicating our government, the Democrat government, and what was happening there. Right. So when they're willing to make the Democrats look bad in that way, like arguing against interest, but hey, what are you going to do? It is the news and it runs anyway, then that's a bit more credible because it's just as easy to turn around and go, come on npr. You wouldn't cite them for anything else, which is a good point. Depending on the broken clock is right twice a day. That's right. And you got to use your discernment and then. But also I get to make a joke about confirmation bias that like, see, it fits with what I think. So I get to cite it, you know, Come on. Anyways, here's the deal, though. Mansor Saudi sucked at being a dictator and he didn't have the talent, I guess, that Salah had had. And so he. Well, I'll say that for a second. So he had cut all the gasoline rations for the poor. He had failed to stand for re election as promised. And he had kind of taken a magic Marker and drawn hard borders between the regions of the country as though they were states in a way that cut the Houthis off from the sea, from the Red Sea. So them's fighting words there, right? Like that's a declaration of war against them. So. And then. But here's the ironical part, is that it turns out that Abdullah Saleh, the former dictator, he was a Zaydi Shiite, even though he wasn't a Houthi, he was a Shiite from the north. So those same Houthis that he'd been attacking and, and failing to defeat over and over again, he went up north and joined them. He took about half his army or more with him. And so now he had the former dictator of the country, changed sides, joined, became allies with his old enemies in the north. Now they march together down back to Sauna to take the capital city Am I making sense?

[Julian Dory]

Tom is a flat circle.

[Scott Ritter]

That's right, yeah. And so the world too, apparently they get to Sanaa in the end of 2014 and they get caught. He out of power, he flees to Aiden and then to a hotel in Saudi Arabia. I don't know if he ever came home again.

[Julian Dory]

So in a lot of ways, the world is like a up. It's actually bloody and gross, but like the back office stuff is like a giant episode of Veep. It's not like that far off.

[Scott Ritter]

It is. It's pretty stupid.

[Julian Dory]

It really is. Oh, which dictator?

[Scott Ritter]

Oh, you'll like this part. So the Houthis come to power and like I said, they're Shiites. But that means one thing about them, that means about them that Al Qaeda thinks they should all be dead. Because to the Al Qaeda guys, the only good. Well, and not to every Sunni, but to the bin Ladenites, especially in a post Iraq War two era, the only good Shiite is a dead Shiite. So America under Lloyd Austin, remember him? The Secretary of Defense under Joe Biden.

[Julian Dory]

Terrific. Secretary of Defense.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. Before that he was the head of Central Command, four star general over there. And he had a program right. When the Houthis took power in the end of 14 and into 15, where he was giving them intelligence to use to kill Al Qaeda guys. Hey, you know how the Al Qaeda guys like killing you? And the Shiites said, yeah. And he said, well, you want to kill them good? And they said, please. And he said, well, here. Here's intelligence to use so that you can target them. And so we have this from the Wall Street Journal, January 2015. America gives support to Houthis. And that same month, a lady named Barbara Slavin, who used to write for UPI Press Service and is a member of the Atlantic Council, she wrote a story for Al Monitor about how General Michael Vickers, who is Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, came to the Atlantic Council and gave them a big briefing and told the whole story. I'll guess what we're doing, everybody. We're giving intelligence to the Houthis to use to kill Al Qaeda with.

[Julian Dory]

It's like the Mujahideen all over again.

[Scott Ritter]

Well, in this case, it's back in the Shiites to kill the Mujahideen.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, exactly what I'm saying. Like, the concept's the same, like, sorta.

[Scott Ritter]

But wait, because in two months you found it. There you go.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, you're like the Billy Mays of, like, politics. But wait, there's more. This.

[Scott Ritter]

That's right. There's a big wrinkle in this story, which is this piece, as I mentioned. Just show us the headline there. There you go. So this is January, As I mentioned, January 2015. Same as Barbara Slavin's piece in our Monitor on the same topic is from January of 2015. 2015. And the funny thing about that is that two months later, Barack Obama turned around and stabbed the Houthis in the back and took Al Qaeda's side against them. That's like back in the Mujahideen all over again, my friend. And the reason why. Yeah, dude. And the reason why he did is because that was what the Saudis and the UAE wanted. And by the Saudis in uae, I mean the then brand new deputy Crown Prince and deputy defense minister, 29 year old defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman. And so he needed to make a big name for himself by launching a war. And he teamed up with Mohammed bin Zayed in the UAE and they launched this war. They came to Barack Obama and asked for permission and help and he gave him the green light.

[Julian Dory]

Go, where did Israel stand on that?

[Scott Ritter]

I think I, I'm sure they were for it, but I, as far as I know, they stayed out of that, that part of it.

[Julian Dory]

You think they were for him taking Al Qaeda's side against the Houthis?

[Scott Ritter]

Oh, sure. To the Israelis, the enemy, or the Shiites, anybody who's friends with Iran is their priority by far.

[Julian Dory]

All right, that's interesting.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, yeah. And, and we can, I got other examples, but that would be one we're gonna talk around.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, sure, that's coming. We're working our way there. You know, we're going across the map a little bit. I like that.

[Scott Ritter]

That's fine. Yeah. And I'm tired of telling the story in order. It's better this way.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. I told you, we free will it here.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. So MBS and NBZ come to Obama and they say, look man, we want to bomb Yemen and get rid of the Houthis. Obama tells them, go ahead. And the New York Times has a piece where they admit all of this and it's from Obama administration official sources. It's no, you know, propaganda or whatever. It's them admitting, basically. And if you want to, if you want to look this up, the keywords are they knew the war would be long, bloody and indecisive. And, and this was, and then they said, but they had to do this to placate the Saudis. And why do they have to placate the Saudis? Yeah. Why? Because America and this part is the stupidest part. America just signed the new nuclear deal, or they were just working on it was signed the summer of 15, but they were in the middle of working on the Iran. The nuclear. The Iran nuclear deal. And now you might think, well, the Saudis would probably like the Iran nuclear deal since it vastly scaled back Iran's nuclear program and vastly expanded the inspections regime and absolutely guaranteed the lack of their progress toward a nuclear weapon as long as that deal was in effect. Why would they be against that? Well, the reason they would be against that is because they were worried that Obama wanted to tilt back toward Iran. And, you know, presidents can't help but say mean things about Saudi Arabia sometimes. And then they learn real quick that they better shut up and not do that because of all the economic interests at stake and all that. But the Saudis know that in the old days, America backed the Persians. Right. Iran was our guy for a long time after World War II. Right. So they know that that's an option. And I think that they believed a lot of the propaganda about Obama that, oh, he loves the Ayatollah so much and all that, which is not true. And I'm not defending Obama, damn him, I'll send him to hell myself. But I'm just saying on this particular issue, and yes, I am that arrogant. I do that. No forgiveness here.

[Julian Dory]

On this particular issue with Eric Prince at the same time, that needs to happen.

[Scott Ritter]

Wouldn't that be interesting?

[Julian Dory]

That needs to happen. But please continue, Scott. Start.

[Scott Ritter]

Sorry, Sorry. Just on this thing. He was just trying to take war off the table. He was not trying to redirect American foreign policy toward the Shiites in the region. Yeah, but that was the concern and plus the ambition of MBS just to do something big. And by the way, as soon as he launched the war, what he do, he sees the opportunity from that new stature to arrest his cousin, Mohammed bin Nayev and make himself crown prince. Yeah, right. Right. Exactly right. So he did his coup, and it worked out well for him. But that meant what? That meant America was now on the side of aqap, and they were backed directly by the UAE on the ground. And for a time, I mean, first of all, we're. I don't want to overstate things, because I don't mean to and I don't need to. Okay. We're talking about. We took their side, Right? So Michael Horton, no relation to me, expert on terrorism from the Jamestown foundation, typically a hawkish group. He said, we're flying as Al Qaeda's Air force in Yemen. Now that's a figure of speech. Right. He's not saying that they are directing our planes around in the chain of command and this and that. We understand what he's saying there is that we are bombing their enemies. We have now we've gone from telling the Houthis where to find al Qaeda guys and kill them to now flying as air cover for the Al Qaeda guys making offensives on the ground against those same Houthis. These. Okay. And that is treason. Call it lowercase T is. I'm not saying, like some of the right wing hawks of the time would have said that. Oh, it's because Barack Obama is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and he's born in Kenya and all this crap. That's not what it is. It's that he's W. Bush. It's the same thing. It's the American foreign policy establishment. This is essentially how they do business. And in other words, it's in this started the redirection started. We're telling it out of order, but the redirection started under Bush where essentially like 9, 11 never happened. Like the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War II never happened. And we like these guys, as long as they're killing Serbs and Russians and Shiites, we use the bin Ladenites. And so in this case, we got these Shiites. They're not anything like, you know, Iran's cat's paws, like total agents or whatever. They just happen to be Shiites too. But they're Zadi Shiites, which is different than the Twelver, sort of different tradition in Shiite Islam. So there's no like direct control. In fact, as Obama himself admitted on video, in fact, in his interview with Thomas Friedman, that he knows for a fact Iran told the Houthis not to take the capital city because the Saudis are going to freak out and bomb you. Don't do it. It's a bridge too far, man. And they ignored Iran and did it anyway. Yeah. So now this goes on. Now the problem is this Saudi and UAE can't do any of this without America. Right. So this is. Obama still has two years left in his presidency. At this point. America's now, we already had sold them all the F15s and F16s that they're using for the thing.

[Julian Dory]

Thing.

[Scott Ritter]

And also they have British tornadoes and typhoons, I guess. But then we're selling them all the bombs and then plus our contractors are over there doing all the care and feeding of the planes, all the maintenance and everything. They're doing all the Logistics, all the air traffic control and everything to run the war. Our military officers and civilians, as well as, you know, civilian DOD employees as well as contractors, and they're running the whole thing. And they even got American Boeing refueling tankers, refueling the fighter jets and allowing the UAE and the Saudis to loiter, essentially just picking targets from the air, meaning bombing innocent people. They have no idea what they're bombing and just bombing for fun and they bomb the crap out of them. And here's the thing about this is the, the Saudi way of war. The Americans, they pretend like this. Oh, and I left out our navy was enforcing the blockade the whole time from our side. Yeah, absolutely. So this is the American Saudi war. Yes, and enforcing the Saudi's rule on, on total blockade against Yemen. So now it's all deniable. Right. It's like a lynch mob. Well, we're all murdering the guy a little bit and so nobody's truly responsible kind of thing. So America is doing all these things to simply assist our friends, the Saudis. That's right. We're here to help them.

[Julian Dory]

I don't know who that is. Yeah, never heard of him.

[Scott Ritter]

That's right. We're going to make a million more now.

[Julian Dory]

That's right.

[Scott Ritter]

Right. And so, but then if the Saudis want to wage war like utter barbarians. Well, listen, I mean the Saudis, that's their problem and they're going to have to work that out in their court system and. Yeah, right. And so we're deniable even though, no, none of this could happen without the usa. And then, but so the, the Saudi way of war was to bomb all the farms, kill the horses in their stables, bomb all the fishermen's boats, bomb all the irrigation ditches, try to, you know, use napalm and whatever, set the crops on fire, bomb the marketplaces and the factories. There was like a potato chip factory. They bomb and like anything where any food creation or distribution around the country is the main target, to starve the population of the country, to inflict collective punishment on them in that eastern, oriental, non American way of war. Which I'm not saying the American way of war is a whole hell of a lot better because we're the ones doing it. But I'm just saying this is not what even the U.S. air Force would do. If it was just their war. They would do it differently than this. You'd like to think anyway, maybe when nobody's looking, but, but anyway, so that was how they did it. And you know, something like 300,000 people were killed it must have been much more than that, if you count all the excess death rate and all that.

[Julian Dory]

300,000 people.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, because over how long? Because, see, that was the deal. When Donald Trump came in his first term, he kept this war on autopilot for his entire four years long and didn't do a thing to stop it. And in fact, when the Congress passed war powers resolutions to force him to stop, he vetoed it twice. And I got to tell you about that, that there is no Yemen lobby in America. There ain't no Shiite in America.

[Julian Dory]

I thought there was a wipack. I was pretty sure.

[Scott Ritter]

Hey. And not.

[Julian Dory]

There's a Ryan coffee right down the street. They just opened up. It's fine timing, if I might say. They got any coffee?

[Scott Ritter]

That's some really good coffee.

[Julian Dory]

It's great, bro. A big fan. I didn't know you guys were still around. I'm happy you're here.

[Scott Ritter]

But no, it really was just the Quakers and the hippies and the libertarians who raise hell. It was just well meaning people. I mean, there are some Yemeni Americans, but you know, there are no. No groups with money. Yes. No groups with resources. Right. Other than just trying hard. And it worked. And got the resolutions passed twice and Trump vetoed them twice. And I know this is the New York Times, but it was his own guy, Pete Navarro, his trade representative, who explained all this in an interview with the New York Times, that the reason that they kept the war going was so that they could keep funneling money to Raytheon. The war was important for Raytheon. They were making a lot of money off.

[Julian Dory]

Why would Donald Trump. All right, so here's the question. Because obviously this is true. This is inarguable, what you're saying. Why is he doing that when every time he's campaigned since 2015, it's on? We're in too many wars. It's endless wars. We got to stop the wars. And yet, when it comes down to it, even if this isn't a war where we have a ton of like our boots on the ground or something like that, that he is openly subverting that policy idea right in our face.

[Scott Ritter]

Well, it's different audiences. I mean, they always say no new wars because, yeah, we did bomb Afghanistan for four years, he did bomb Yemen for four years, he did bomb Iraq and Syria for a year. And you know, like, yeah, he killed a hell of a lot of people. Bombed Somalia the whole time he was in power, too. But hey, that was W. Bush started that one. So, you know, What? I mean, that's like a technicality in that way. But see, running overall on, I'm not sending the 3rd Infantry Division in there the way W. Bush did. Right? A drone war here, a proxy war there, air wars here, B1 bombers and drones. That's different. You know, even when he thought he did keep the war going in Afghanistan for all four years. But you had a few Marines, I think hundreds, not thousands. I could be wrong about that. I'm pretty sure if it was thousand, it was very low thousands of Marines down in Helmand. And then you had the Green Berets in the Nangarhar province in the low hundreds max. Right. Special Forces. So that was almost all the ground fighting that was happening in the Trump years, but he bombed the crap out of him the whole time. And so on the campaign trail. Sounds good to say, I'm Mr. Peace Guy. That's what every president says except Joe Biden. But W. Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump, everybody. Yeah, Joe. Yeah, exactly. He was like, no, we're going to kill him is what we're going to do. You heard me, look the fuck out. You know, and he won on that, by the way. Remember, people like, fuck it, we all know we're going, we're going to be at war anyway.

[Julian Dory]

Might as well.

[Scott Ritter]

This guy like George Carlin has said about Bill Clinton, I'm completely full of, hey, at least he's honest.

[Julian Dory]

He is honest.

[Scott Ritter]

But yeah.

[Julian Dory]

No.

[Scott Ritter]

Oh, so the reason why. And then, so look, it's good to say to the voters, no more of this W. Bush stuff. Right? Nobody wants that. But it's good to say to Raytheon, oh, you like money? I. I got money for.

[Julian Dory]

You need to stop.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. And then, but overall, does the society rebel against that? And say, what do you mean? You're bombing Yemen. Right? They're not. They don't know.

[Julian Dory]

They don't. Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

They're not as engaged on that narrow issue. You know what I mean? And so it sucks because as I joke in my first book about Afghanistan, Afghanistan is probably the least supported and least opposed war in American history.

[Julian Dory]

Least supported. And Lee. All right, let me ask this. Afghanistan right away in 2001 or at.

[Scott Ritter]

No, I mean overall, like, well, but even by, like, you know, by the end of the Bush years, certainly into.

[Julian Dory]

The Obama years, I agree completely.

[Scott Ritter]

When you're saying it was like super majority, 60, 70% said we should have never fought it at all. Right. That kind of thing. I was a super majority oppose it. But then they would ask people what's your biggest concern for what America is dealing with. Kind of open ended question. And Afghanistan wouldn't even be in the top 30, right? That's right. So it's like, oh yeah, we're all against that, but far away. And so who cares?

[Julian Dory]

Scott? You know, it's crazy, dude. I've had so many tier one guys in here, be it Navy Seals, Seal Team 6 guys, Army Rangers, you know, Delta guys talk about and give an oral history in here of like Afghanistan and particularly say 07 to like 2014. No one remembers that because it was, as you just said, not Even a top 30 issue for a lot of people. But shit was going down every day and it was a war where we can talk about this because I'd love your thoughts, but like 911 happens, okay? Taliban is harboring Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda, you know, crashed into the building. So we're going to go there and fight them. Fine. But then the puck immediately moved to no, let's go to Iraq, which had nothing. You know, I'm not saying Saddam Hussein was a good guy, he's a bad guy. But like had nothing to do with 911 had nothing to do with our problems responding to that. And so all the resources come out of Afghanistan and go into Iraq. And then you wonder why, you know, over the next 18, 19 years the Taliban's able to slowly like kind of spread like a, like a disease back all over the country. I mean, is that a fair way to look at it?

[Scott Ritter]

You're close. I mean my argument would be that they should have never done a regime change in Afghanistan at all. And I think that the argument that the diversion of resources led to a less effective Afghan war is essentially a red herring because if you put in more troops, it just would have made matters worse. The thing is about insurgency like this is they're what? My friend Bill Buford is an expert on the bankruptcy of counterinsurgency doctrine. And he explains that these groups are anti fragile, meaning when you hit them, they get stronger. Right. The more you go to war against these people, the more people you're driving into the insurgency because they're basically just citizen militias. So when the Americans come out to the countryside, then people grab their rifles and become the enemy where before they were just standing there. And so it really was a whole self fulfilling thing. Afghanistan is the size of Texas, but it's got deserts like California and mountains like Colorado. And it's bad lands inhabited by wild men who like to fight. And they're not giving in to a foreign occupation any More than your community or my community would give in.

[Julian Dory]

They never have troops.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. Throughout world history. Yeah. So the thing is they talk about, you know, oh, keeping the Taliban out or whatever. No offense, but just like the way you phrase the question there is the thing is the Taliban, all that meant was is just another term at that time certainly for Pashtun resistance, that was it. The people from the south and the east of the country who had it oftentimes connections with these loose networks of the former regime, but most often were just the locals. The Taliban ban meant anyone who resists us. And then so the whole thing became a self fulfilling prophecy. And I've just been doing this long enough. I covered it the whole time, all the way through. And then so by the time Obama did the big escalation In Afghanistan in 2009, me and all of my experts were already on the record saying not only is this not going to work, it's going to make matters worse and they're just going to cause suicide bombings, you're going to cause foreign fighters to come here and expand the war, you're going to cause more Afghans to join the insurgency and then you're going to lose anyway. And you know, I said for the first time, and I can prove it's in the transcript and on audio, I said for the first time in 2008 that when America leaves Afghanistan, the Taliban are going to walk right into Kabul like it's the fall of Saigon, but probably not even fighting, they're just going to walk right in. Because the whole thing that we had tried to do there, there was a bunch of crap. It could only be held up right. It was like a zombie company propped up by government financial injections or whatever. There's a group of people who had no natural authority. You know, the Northern alliance essentially propped up. Maybe they would had some authority in their own districts if they tried to leave it at that. But America was essentially trying to foist a coalition of the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who were about 20 each onto the plurality costume population of 40% in the south of the country. And a country whose borders were drawn by the Americans right with it, or pardon me, by the British in The, in the 19th century is how they've been fought. So the people from the north who speak Urdu can't communicate with the people from. And it's, it's like probably even more vast than the difference between, you know, like English speakers and Spanish speakers in Texas. We, there's some overlap there, you Know, I mean, there's like, a severe lack of overlap. These people don't share a country, a culture, a civilization at all. The Urdu speakers are like, they're. Our soldiers are going, hey, translate for me. And the translator's like, I don't speak posh toe. Like, we're. We're in a different country when we're down south here.

[Julian Dory]

That's the toy. Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

So the whole thing was completely stupid and bankrupt and wrong. And in fact, as I make the case in the book, the only reason they. They took the war to the Taliban and kept that war going and came up with all this crap about rebuilding the country and saving women's rights and all of this stuff was just so they could prolong the war long enough to spread it into Iraq. Because it. In order to invade Iraq, it was going to be a lot different than just parachuting guys in the way they were able to do in Afghanistan, plan in Iraq. We're gonna have to build up a massive forest in Kuwait, and they hoped Turkey, and that was going to take a year and a half. So they need.

[Julian Dory]

And they had that plan. There's. There's transcripts and records that on the night of September 11, the administration was discussing Iraq.

[Scott Ritter]

Absolutely. So we have in writing, you can see the handwriting and the typewritten memo of Donald Rumsfeld to Stephen Cambone, who was the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon of September 11th. For the sun is even down, for anyone's really even sure the attack is over. Right. Donald Rumsfeld is saying, sweep it all up. Things related, and not contact Paul Wolfowitz for. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for connections between Saddam Hussein and obl.

[Julian Dory]

That's who I would have contacted, too.

[Scott Ritter]

That's. Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

Excellent, excellent.

[Scott Ritter]

He's the one who knows.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

And then as. Yes, Richard Clark says that that day at the pen, at the White House as well, that they were running around talking about, we got to find a way to connect this to Iraq. And especially Wolfowitz was saying, we got to connect this to Iraq. And the guys who knew better were like, come on. This was. There was a whole little cottage industry of Washington, D.C. conspiracy theorists who had been trying to pin Al Qaeda on Saddam Hussein for 10 years.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

And he led by Lori Milroy and. Yeah, that's right. Saddam Hussein was terrified of the bin Laden. Yeah. He had no business with them whatsoever. But. But they had this lie. There was this lady named Lori Milroy who wrote a book called Saddam Hussein's unfinished war with the United States. And the same lady, Judy Miller, who's famous for lying us into war where they rock stuff. Yeah, yeah. She ended up before that. She was palace with Lori Milroy and I think Lynn Chaney wrote the forward to their book and all this stuff. And, and the whole point was they had tried to claim that Ramsey Yousef, who cooked the bomb for the first World Trade center bombing and whose uncle was the ringleader of the September 11th attack, that he was actually not really Ramsay Yousef. He was an Iraqi Mukbarat agent who murdered Ramsey Yousef and stole his identity.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, come on.

[Scott Ritter]

And that's the proof that Saddam Hussein is behind Osama bin Laden and all of the Al Qaeda war against the United States and blamed him for the Oklahoma City bombing, which was in fact a bunch of neo Nazi FBI informants who did that, not Arabs at all. And blamed him for everything that they could under the sun, including the guy who shot up CIA headquarters. The. Or the left turn lane out front of CIA headquarters in 1993, tried to blame that on Saddam Hussein. And so Wolfowitz was like part of this click. This is like the kooks from the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative faction trying to make this connection, not giving a damn what the truth was.

[Julian Dory]

Who. I. I know you. This is, this is a good tangent to go into because I know you know this history extremely well. Everyone on every platform, when we're talking about these things at some point in some context, the neocon click gets thrown around as the term. And I think, I think most people out there kind of know what it is. But for the people who are like, you know, it's like when people throw around the term postmodernist, like, I kind of get it, but like, what is this? How far does it go back? Who are these people? What are their motivations? How would you define that? As someone who's paid attention that closely for probably 30 years.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. Okay. Broadly speaking, they're ex Trotskyites and Cold War Democrats who moved right and became Reaganites in reaction to essentially the new left hippie movement of the late 60s. They were, what's, what's important about them being Trotskyites is they were Communists, but they were like right wing Communists. Well, it depends. No, actually, it depends on how you really define that. That maybe he flipped that around. Stalin's. Yeah, I, I should take that back and, and strike that and reverse it. Stalin's doctrine, as murderous as it was, was communism in one country. Forget all this world revolution. It's a big world, man, and we can't afford all that. Let's, we, let's chew what we've bitten off here, right? Trotsky said, no, you got to overthrow the whole planet because as long as the capitalist countries remain, they'll destroy the communist one by, you know, they'll attack him and whatever. So. And this whole doctrine of world revolution. But Stalin had won the faction fight after Lenin died, took control of the place and had exiled Trotsky out of there. So Trotsky had come to the United States and had some followers here for a while and had traveled around the Americas or wherever until eventually a Stalinist assassin killed them down in Mexico. But so in the days after the Cold War, you know, there had been all kinds of different communists, sort of in the 20s and 30s in America. Not that many, but different factions of them or whatever. But after World War II, it was very convenient for these Trotskyites to be big supporters of the Cold War because it proved that they were sorry that they had ever been Commies. And it proved. And after all, they were Americans, not Russians. Right. And they hated the Stalinists. Right. And so they made a great fit for the new Cold Warriors.

[Julian Dory]

Enemy of Miami, my friend.

[Scott Ritter]

That's right. So a lot of the people who had been what had been considered the right was essentially Everybody who hated FDR and wanted to stay out of World War II. And that was not uniformly kind of known as the same thing as the conservatives. There were other factions, including the libertarians.

[Julian Dory]

Oh yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

And others. But after World War II, it really became the mission of William F. Buckley, especially to make the right synonymous with conservatism and conservatism synonymous with support for the Cold War against the commies. That was mission number one of the conservative movement and therefore of the National Review. But that meant then that all of the old right non interventionists had to be purged. And famously he purged out the avowed racists and he purged out the Ayn Randians and he. And then, but less well known was he purged out all the libertarians and essentially anyone who wouldn't tow the line. But then that left the staff of the National Review was a bunch of X trots. And you know, give them credit that, yeah, fine, X. It's not, I'm not saying they were like undercover still communist. That's not the point. But it's just to say, like that's a fine group representing American conservatism. You got there when these Guys were all Reds a few years ago, right? And then so it's James Burnham and Sidney Hook and all of these guys who now Buckley himself had never been a leftist. But, and there is a question here of whether neoconservatism was potentially even still is a CIA plot.

[Julian Dory]

They certainly a plot.

[Scott Ritter]

I don't want to oversimplify it like that because the truth is they have definitely been at odds many times. On the other hand, Buckley was CIA. And when you look at like CIA influence at the foundation for Defense of Democracies and stuff like that, you start to, I mean, come on, the CIA is the CIA for Christ's sake. So like you know, who, who's driving the car and the horse and the whatever in any particular situation. It's interesting to see the interplay there, there. But it was, it's, it was CIA asset, not officer, but Agent Buckley who hired all these guys. But also see, there was Leo Strauss and, and Leon Wollsteader at the University of Chicago who are both extraskyites. And there was a guy named Max Shockman and he was one of the most important of Trotsky's agents in the country. And he founded a group called Social Democrats USA and which included the Young People's Socialist League. And so a lot of the neoconservative names that you hear were members of groups like that, you know, leading up to like into the 60s and 70s.

[Julian Dory]

So they're chameleons, so.

[Scott Ritter]

Well, that's part of it, yes. I don't want to say like the whole thing is disingenuous because part of it was a reaction against the civil rights movement and affirmative action and all of that stuff, which is why they had alliances with libertarians and conservatives in the 1970s who were against all that kind of Great Society stuff that they kind of wisely reacted against. Irving Crystal, Bill Kristol's father, famously said that a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged by reality. And so, I mean, and he also wrote a book called Two Cheers for Capitalism. Right. So you can see these guys are, they move to the very center, right?

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[Scott Ritter]

Does that make sense?

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[Scott Ritter]

And, but, and so they're rejecting the civil rights movement, they're rejecting affirmative action and all that. And they're rejecting the hippie kind of non interventionist aftermath of the Vietnam War. And apparently I don't know this much about this, but apparently the hippie types were not so supportive of Israel in the 67 war either. And so for a lot of these Guys, they said, well, that's it. And that was where a lot of them started moving to the right and that.

[Julian Dory]

And by the way, sorry to get you off for one second, but yeah, unless I misunderstand, I've been misunderstanding, like the whole space of neocons. There does seem to be a large overlap between neocons and people who are like strongly pro Israel. Yes. So that goes way back, you're saying yes now.

[Scott Ritter]

So let's talk about that. So part of the whole thing here is that you have many of these, you could say mo. The vast majority of them, I guess, were Jewish and. Because who was ever Trotskyites in the first place? Like, yeah. And then. But the thing is, they were maybe lower middle class guys, but they were able to go to City College. They were intellectuals, right? They were. So they had come from kind of the working class, but they were not like born rich WASPy types or like banker's sons either. They were from Brooklyn and things like that. Right. So they were not really allowed to be the establishment at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Catholics either at that time, you know, it was really like Brooks Brothers, waspy, wasp, Skull and bones, Yale guys and this and that kind of thing. Right. So for these Catholics and Jews, they didn't really have. They didn't want to get real jobs. They wanted to be foreign policy intellectuals and apparatchiks. Right. But they needed money. And so this is where Andrew Coburn says that the neoconservative movement is.

[Julian Dory]

I'm sorry, they needed money. Oh, so where'd they go?

[Scott Ritter]

So they. So yeah, Andrew Coburn says the neoconservative movement is best understood as a cross between the military industrial complex and the Israel Lobby. So that's where they went and got their money. And then you look at all their think tanks. What they did was they said, fine, the bankers and oil men have the Council on Foreign Relations. Well, we'll just create the foundation for Defensive Democracies and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, take over Heritage and AEI and then. But create the Jewish Institute for National Security affairs and did I say the center for Security Policy Already there's a few. There's, you know, six or seven of these things that they created to make their own little forest of think tanks, all saying the same thing, and most of which was we need America to get rid of Saddam Hussein for Israel. Now, which is. So I'm skipping ahead in the story, but real quickly, they got jobs in the Reagan administration as the Deputy under Secretary of this and that net but more marginal positions. During H.W. bush, they were called the crazies in the basement. And Brent Scowcroft was told to keep the crazies in the basement, which meant they could mess around in Latin America but keep them away from Middle east policy. But W. Bush and Dick Cheney hired them to run everything. So now I'll stop. And you were going to say.

[Julian Dory]

Okay, so that, that's really important context though, because it shows that that type of potential alliance, relationship building pattern goes back. We're talking six decades here.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah.

[Julian Dory]

So that obviously what's happened since then and everything. But there's this, you know, everyone just runs to every single thing in the world is Israel now. Which I, I think that's a little bit intellectually dishonest. That said, we can see that, that you know, right now whatever's going on there is, is not humane. And there are a lot of problems that seem to be stemming from, you know, some weird alliance between them and certain aspects of the United States government, be it, you know, straight up lobbying in Congress and the Senate, which we can all see the money on that, or some of these alliances with the think tank types and the people who help kind of drive policy in these different places in the bureaucracies and stuff like that. That. I'm trying to think where I want to start here. What do you think is the truth there? Let's start with that. What do you think the truth is about the, about the Israel Lobby and the relationship with the United States? Do you think that there is a mass awakening right now in America that is showing that it has always been the most powerful thing, or do you think that it's one powerful thing among a lot of other powerful things that you know, should just be. Be looked at and kind of have its knee. Its knees kept?

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. It's a lot more powerful than it should be. It's not that they control every single thing, but they have way too much influence, far more influence than the American people have. That ought to be the end of that, right? Yeah, it should. The. There should be foreign countries want to talk to the United States of America. They should take it up with the ambassador. That's it. They shouldn't be influencing. They shouldn't have any of these lobby groups whatsoever agree, you know, apac. They pretend like, oh no, this is just Americans. No, it's not either, man. It's the Israeli Foreign Ministry is exactly what, 100 just a front?

[Julian Dory]

It's like we never Talk. Yeah, okay.

[Scott Ritter]

And so yeah, this is, this should, all of it is completely intolerable as far as, you know, Israel's role in the neoconservative movement. It's at the heart of their doctrine now, you know, to give the devil is due. I think they, if you listen to them talk, they seem sincere enough when they say that America's interest in Israel's interest are the exact same thing. Right. Israel is just our kind of Fort Apache out there holding the barbarian east at bay for us and all that hell, they're doing our dirty work and we, what would we do without them? Joe Biden says there are unsinkable aircraft. Carrot. You hear all this kind of stuff.

[Julian Dory]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

And so now that's all a bunch of crap. It's, it's totally ridiculous. But I mean, especially if that's your job, then you can believe that, you know, like, yeah, hey, they look like us, they talk like us, they're our friends. And like, I don't know, what's your problem? England's our friend and France is our friend and Israel's our friend. These are our friends. But that's, everybody thinks that. I don't know what the problem is. You know what I mean? That's just kind of built in. And especially when that's their job, when that's, you know, they're, they are defense intellectuals and, and, and, and more mongers. I mean this is the ticket, dude. This is what to do. And so that's how they make all their money. And you can look at all their think tanks, they're outright financed by Northrop Grumman and Boeing and Lockheed and Raytheon. And why did they. So then that's why they recommend policies that make those companies money. And, and supporting Israel is a big part of that as well. It makes money, you know, it's, yeah, it's a big part of the iron triangle, but of course it's an ideological commitment to the well being of Israel as well. And there's some people who quite frankly probably don't give a damn about the United States and truly do see the United States simply as just a vehicle for, you know, taking control of their country. In fact, there's one more thing here, is that there's a couple of famous quotes from Norman Podhoritz and Irving Crystal where from the 1970s where they both say something very close to American Jews don't like big defense budgets. Like in other words, they're liberals. This is in the 70s, right? Aftermath of Vietnam.

[Julian Dory]

Right, Right.

[Scott Ritter]

They're liberals, they don't want militarism. Right. And he goes, but we have to support big defense budgets in the name of anything so that America is available to protect Israel. So whether the threat is the Soviet Union or whether it's China or whether it's Germany could rise back up again or whatever it is. No, no, no, America must be the dominant power in the world so that we're there to bail out their prior primary interest, Israel, which is not even, hardly the interest, the primary interest of American Jews, much less the American people at large. But that's what's important to Norman Potoritz, you know what I mean? So that's the deal. And in fact, he, he's on film saying that in 2007, if America bombs Iran, which I hope and pray that they will, it will cause a wave of anti Americanism around the Muslim world that'll make our current situation look like a love fest.

[Julian Dory]

And he wanted that.

[Scott Ritter]

And then he goes, well, I mean, that's a worst case scenario. But what he's saying is he hadn't really considered what's good for America in this at all. He's talking about what's Israel's interest.

[Julian Dory]

So what was, what was the thought with? Obviously like, we'll get to the Israel, Iran thing because that is as, as relevant as ever day to day right now.

[Scott Ritter]

Sure.

[Julian Dory]

But with Iraq back in the day, with all the neocons, strong Israel supporters leading the way for this, what was the main interest in Israel's mind in the United States? Destabilizing Iraq.

[Scott Ritter]

All right, so it goes like this, and I'm sorry, this doesn't make any sense, but it's because these guys are kooks, not me. David Wormser and Richard Pearl primarily wrote a doctrine for Netanyahu when he was the incoming prime minister of Israel in 1996. It's called a clean break. A new strategy for securing the realm. So these are American neoconservatives telling Benjamin Netanyahu now, Labor just lost. A Netanyahu fan murdered Rabino in 95. In 95. And then Shimon Perez was a caretaker prime minister for a short time and launched a war in Lebanon which helped inspire the 911 attacks and then was quickly succeeded.

[Julian Dory]

We'll come back to that.

[Scott Ritter]

We'll come back to that. Was quickly succeeded by Benjamin Netanyahu in power in 96. So a clean break from what? A clean break from Oslo, the Rabin deal to create a pseudo sort of kind of Palestinian state, state on the west bank. And Gaza Strip. And what Likud is saying is the same thing in Benjamin Netanyahu will tell you in his UN address the other day, hell no. Never gonna happen. Forget about it.

[Julian Dory]

Yep.

[Scott Ritter]

Never gonna allow there to be a Palestinian state. We want that land. And so the problem with that is if you're gonna take a break with Oslo and you're just gonna keep colonizing all of the Palestinian territories, you have to deal with Hezbollah on Israel's northern flank in southern Lebanon. And so what we want to do is we got to figure out a way to neutralize Hezbollah and Syrian power in southern Lebanon as well, and particularly Iran's ability to back Hezbollah by way of Syria. Okay, so you're picturing your great map in the Middle East. Here's Iran, here's Iraq, here's Syria, here's Lebanon, and little Israel. Here is Jordan. So we want to break this arc of Iranian power. Now to do that, worms are said, we need to focus on getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Well, he's the Sunni dictator.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

The minority, 20% secular Sunni dictator of Iraq. Mesopotamia, the land between Persia and the Levant here. Exactly. What?

[Julian Dory]

Yeah. Okay. It's never made sense to me.

[Scott Ritter]

So here's why they thought that, though. It was because an Iranian backed Iraqi exile named Ahmed Chalabi was blowing a bunch of smoke up their ass and telling them, hey man, if you do this and you get rid of Saddam Hussein for me, me and my friends will see to it that Hezbollah stops being friends with Iran and the new Iraq will be friends with Israel. Build an oil pipeline to Haifa. Everything's going to come out just how you want it.

[Julian Dory]

Trust me, bro.

[Scott Ritter]

Jordan and Turkey will be dominant in the new Iraq because the king of Jordan, he's a Hashemite, which means he claims to have the blood of the Prophet.

[Julian Dory]

It.

[Scott Ritter]

And that means that he can just cast a magic spell and every Shiite in Iraq will obey his every command and do whatever he wants. And so he'll be able to tell the Shiite clergy in Najaf to tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and start being friends with Israel. And then the people of Shiite Iraq under the new regime will love it so much and will have it so good that it'll be a nightmare for Iran and we'll end up getting a regime change in Iran will be natural as the people of Iran rise up so they can have it just like the Iraqis. That's the clean break. And they ended up replacing the Hashemite king with Chalabi. Himself should be the new Shiite dictator of the country when we take over. I mean, democratically.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, yeah, listen.

[Scott Ritter]

Installed the leader. Yeah, well, that's what we'll call it. And then that ended up not working out when they launched the war, of course, but that was the thinking behind it. And there's a companion piece called Coping with Crumbling States, where he says, then we need to expedite the chaotic collapse to Syria so that the new Syria can be remade in a fashion closer to our liking. So this is all about Israel. Now, then David Wormson became Dick Cheney's foreign policy advisor. And Richard Pearl became the head of the Defense Policy Board. And their buddy Paul Wolfowitz became Deputy Secretary of Defense Fife. Deputy Secretary for Policy. And then.

[Julian Dory]

But you're not allowed to talk about.

[Scott Ritter]

Wolfowitz because he has a horrible name. What a ridiculous thing. God, that guy. So now, here's the deal. In the W. Bush years, I'm old enough that this was all yesterday to me. And you know, I know you and probably a lot of your audience are too young for all this, but it still bothers me. It's so. It's worth remembering here, I think that, yes, W. Bush was in charge. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, they had their own reasons for wanting to do this. But as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt has said, could it never happen without the neoconservatives and the Israel Lobby? They're the ones who really got it done. And so they're divided up. They wrote you had guys ensconced at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, and then especially, and most importantly, at the National Review and the Weekly Standard.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

And then. And of course, Fox News all day long. Then inside the government, you had in the Vice President's office, Scooter Libby, Victoria Newland. Oh, John Hannah and Elliot Abrams. Now, pardon me, Eric Edelman. Then on the National Security Council, you had Robert Joseph Eric Edelman and Zalme Khalil Zad. And then at State, you had David Wormser and John Bolton. Worms are traveled around. He was, I think, first at State, then Defense, then the Vice President's office, but he was with Bolton at State. Now, Bolton is not a neoconservative. He was just a lifelong right winger.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, he just loves war.

[Scott Ritter]

That's right. And he loves those guys. He's always been very close with their group.

[Julian Dory]

Group.

[Scott Ritter]

And so was known as Cheney's agent over there. Anyway, what did try.

[Julian Dory]

What was it that Trump said about him? He said, it's a Bad hire. But you took him to a meeting and everyone their pants. He's gonna bomb us.

[Scott Ritter]

Which, of course accomplished nothing. He ruined the meeting with North Korea is what he did. That's what Trump means by that. Yeah, I one time brought him to the most important diplomatic event of my life and he sabotaged it. You should have seen him go. It was really something, something. At the second meeting, he literally sent Bolton to Outer Mongolia. Literally sent him to Outer Mongolia to keep him out of the way, but too late. Too little, too late that time.

[Julian Dory]

All right, so you had these two.

[Scott Ritter]

These two panels supporting.

[Julian Dory]

You were saying you just.

[Scott Ritter]

Yes, yes. And then at Defense, you had. On the Defense Policy Board, you had Richard Pearl, Jean Kirkpatrick, Kenneth Adelman, and James Woolsey. Now, Woolsey had been Clinton's head of the CIA, but he was a neoconservative and a total kook. And he was the one who went to England to try to prove that Ramsey Yousef was a secret Iraqi agent, which was. Didn't work because the fingerprints actually didn't match. Thank you very much. But anyway. And Kissinger was on the Defense Policy Board too, and got on board for this one. He's not a neoconservative, but he went along with him on this one. And then, though, under Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, you had. Douglas Feith was Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, and under him was a guy named Abram Schulsky. And he ran a group called the Office of Special Plans. And at the Office of Special Plans, this was the expanded Iraq desk. And what it was was they staffed the thing. They essentially fired all the Arabis. Oh, I, I forgot to mention that Harold Road took over the Office of Net Assessment, which is the internal Pentagon think tank bank, and it purged all the Arabists out of there. Anybody really knew the job got kicked out of there.

[Julian Dory]

The Arabists.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, that meant people who are like. Especially people who specialize in getting along with the petroleum states rather than focusing on Israel issues. But yeah, so they, like, have, have ties with and. Or an understanding of how Middle east politics actually work. And so we don't need a bunch of, like, expert opinion getting in our way here. Instead, they brought in Colin Powell said they brought in the Ginsa crowd. The Ginsa crowd, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. The neoconservatives.

[Julian Dory]

They're friends with the Arabs.

[Scott Ritter]

That's right.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, they know what to do.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, they got it.

[Scott Ritter]

And. And this was David Wormser and his buddies. And so Colin Powell said they set up a separate government and this was them. This is the network I'm describing as it put all these neocons in there. And so they had Michael Rubin and Michael Ledeen and a bunch of the other kooks that came in to take over the Office of Special Plans. And at the Office of Special Plans this is where they cooked all the intelligence and dug through the CIA's trash and received the embellishments and, and made up tall tales from the CIA's cat trash. Yes. This like literally got the CIA's raw intelligence, that and including things that the CIA had discarded or understood in its proper context and went and said aha. An Iraqi met with a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. We got one. You know what I mean? Stuff that didn't count in for real intelligence but that something could be made out of. That's what I mean by that. Then they also took all the lies from the exiles. And so you had. It was Ahmed Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress. They were the ones who came up with all the lies about the mobile biological weapons labs and the nuclear laboratories. And they got secret centrifuges hidden in Everybody's Garden and 10,000 lies about chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq. And they then took from the Office of Special Plans what was called the stove pipe where they bypassed CIA and all the regular intelligence and sent the stuff straight to the Vice president's office and straight to the media. And Right. One more thing is right across the street from the osp, what was, is what was called the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group. Group which is a fancy way of saying David Wormser and Michael Maloof and their job was coming up with lies about Saddam's friendship with Osama bin Laden. And so this is why. And, and I, who he absolutely hated and feared and would have had nothing to do with. And, and I believe that they let bin Laden go. And I make the case in both books you believe the U.

[Julian Dory]

S let bin Laden out of Tora Bora.

[Scott Ritter]

And I'll make that case in a moment. But I think the, the motive for them doing so was so that they could tell you that Saddam could give these weapons to Osama if Osama bin Laden was already dead and your dad and your next door neighbor already had said, hell, that's what you get for messing with us. We kick your ass by Christmas time. Well then it's hard to get the war started again. You got to keep the thing going. And this is what Donald Rumsfeld Said it's in the National Security Council notes that maybe we should start bombing Iraq right now even as we're bombing Afghanistan right away. Because we want the American people to understand this war is going to take place over a large geographical area and over an extended period of time. He says if we get Osama bin Laden, that's not victory. And if we fail to get him, that is not failure because he ain't got nothing to do with this now we're going to Baghdad, baby. We're doing all of this.

[Julian Dory]

I don't want to. I don't want to get you off.

[Scott Ritter]

That was their motive.

[Julian Dory]

I don't want to get you off track here, Scott. But I do have one question on this. This financially, how much of the motive do you think was also some underhanded like, well, there's a lot of oil there and this could be in the US Interest that we maybe control some of this land in the future and, you know, colonize the oil, if you will. Do you think that was a piece of it?

[Scott Ritter]

No, I think the oil aspect was Chalabi promised he'd build a pipeline to Haifa and it'd be good for Israel and they bought it. Pearl and worms are and Netanyahu himself even made reference to these promises. And Douglas Feist law partner Mark Zell complain. Chalabi promised us an oil pipeline to Haifa. He's a treacherous, spineless turncoat. He promised us one thing and now he's pounding around with a whole new group of friends and not doing anything he said. So he really used them and and essentially tricked them into doing this war. Now, everything I understand about it was that Exxon and all of them said we didn't do business with Saddam Hussein. They had no interest in over that was not their project to overthrow Baghdad. And when we were doing the war anyway, they got James Baker, who was the lawyer for, you know, Baker bots the lawyer for Exxon to come in and insist see the neoconservatives led by a guy named Elliot Cohen, who I believe also was on the Defense Policy Board from the Heritage Foundation. He had a plan to rapidly privatize Iraqi oil in order to break OPEC's control. And James Baker came to town and said, no, that we're not doing that. There's going to be a national oil company and and our guys are going to run it and they're going to set their quota the way that the Saudis want it to be and quash that. But so the. No, I don't believe that it Was that the motive was taking control of those fields for American companies. Now, did Houston try to stop them or something like that?

[Julian Dory]

No.

[Scott Ritter]

Although, I don't know, James Baker did try to stop W. Bush. I don't know how hard he tried to stop him. But if Houston is James Baker, then, yeah, they did try to stop him. And. But it is true that Exxon got away with murder anyway. I mean, they have huge interest in. In northern Iraqi Kurdistan now. Yeah, they're. They're doing what they can. But do I think that they were driving this car? No. And that's the most powerful corporation in the world. But I just. It wasn't their warding. They were, you know, a lot of times, you know, even all the pipeline politics and stuff like that is not about corporations demanding pipelines to satisfy their profits. It's about the national government saying, our military strategy says if we build a pipeline here, we'll really screw those guys there. Do you guys want to do this pipeline with us? And then the corporations go, yeah, sure, but you got to help build the pipeline. Health, especially if you want it to go west instead of south, you better subsidize it, because it's going to cost twice as much. And so we see that a lot where it's really the. The Pentagon overall is driving the strategy. And the oil companies are, of course, you know, riding along, but are not driving.

[Julian Dory]

You've kind of mentioned directly and indirectly throughout the day in different contexts, referring to, like, the power structure during the Bush years between, you know, him on one end and then call it, like, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the people behind them on another end. And I. I just kind of want to get it straight on officially what you think, but do you think it was more Dick Cheney in charge of that White House? I mean, you had said something like, nothing happens without W. And I guess constitutionally, that is what it's supposed to be. But it always felt like, you know, this was a guy who had significant power long before W was around. He was. Was placed in there by W's father, who was the previous president, you know, and he had all these ideas, including the backing of a company called Halliburton, that he was in charge of that then seemed to kind of come to fruition while everything crashed and burned. Yeah, you know, that was supposed to be the outcome. Like how. What do you think the dynamic was there?

[Scott Ritter]

Well, I mean, I think it's pretty much on the record, pretty well confirmed, as Dick Cheney would say, that they had an agreement that Bush would Delegate foreign policy to him. In large part, the idea was, you know, W. Bush is the president. He gets to decide on all the biggest stuff. But after all, Vice, you're the smart guy who knows all the foreign policy stuff. My dad says you're great, whatever. So there's kind of a contest at first. There's a contest between him and Powell for who was going to have the most influence. And I think Powell lost out pretty quickly there and then. Yeah, Cheney was driving. And like I say, he had this alliance with these neoconservatives, this network, and they knew what to do. It by no means did they make W. Bush do it. What they did, really, in terms of their relationship with him, because they did a hell of a lot in terms of the lies and in the media and everything else. But in terms of dealing with him, their responsibility was telling him, yes, sir, you're smart. This is gonna work. This is gonna be great. We know we game this out, and we got our guys, he knows what to do. And the thing. And so. And then it was like, well, geez, everybody says Paul Wolfowitz is the smartest guy in the Defense Department, you know, so that was, I think, the role that they played as. As far as their influence on him. And I think it was crucial. Yeah, but. But the responsibility absolutely was his. You know, I mean, even when the planes are flying, even weeks or months into it, he could call the whole thing off the whole damn time and never did. He launched it and he owned it, every moment of that war, you know, through the end of his presidency.

[Julian Dory]

What's really bizarre to me to take a step back for a second, is that you have 91, Desert Storm at last, whatever it was, like 72 hours or 90, 26 hours, it was quick. They get in, take control. What they need to, they get out. They don't continue this whole war. And then there's this narrative that, you know, probably has some truth to it that, like, it was unfinished business and W. Wanted to finish what his father started. But you have between March 1, 2003 and 91, you have effectively an 1112 year gap where Saddam Hussein's in charge and, like, he still has a seat at the table in the world. It's like, we went in, we said, this guy's a maniacal dictator who shouldn't have char anything. You know, we handled some of the oil field business in 91, and then we left. And it's not like, you know, he was completely separated from the world. He still ruled the whole country and everything. And then suddenly they start drumming up the war bells again, the war drums again in 0102 and saying, no, like he's killing everyone. And you said it earlier. So I want to dig into this, that they lied all about Saddam Hussein. Now, to be clear, you are a thousand percent right when you talk about. They lied about nuclear bombs and they lied about his relationship with Osama bin Laden, as if he had one. He didn't like him. Like Trump, actually, I'll give him credit for this. He had a good line back in 2015. He's like, you know, Saddam Hussein, bad guy, killed terrorists. Right. Like, you know, it wasn't our job to go in there and overthrow another leader and start a whole war. And I will agree with you, Donald Trump, on that. But some of the other things, like you wouldn't say that they, they were lying, that like, he was a bad guy and that he was a dictator and that he ruled with iron, with an iron fist and killed a lot of people and, you know, was a threat on some level to some stability in the Middle East. Would you be able to say that that part is true?

[Scott Ritter]

Well, not exactly. The way that you put it, like, he absolutely was a ruthless dictator, but the way they make that is always is that directly translate into. Translates into an aggressive threat against neighboring states. You know how those dictators are. That's not true. There are all kinds of dictators that don't invade people all the time.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

So even just in that sense, I mean, what he really was was Tony Soprano trying to hold everything together. You know what I mean? Not like, like, oh, his. His will is like a. Again, like this magic spell that controls these people's every behavior. It's a rowdy land, you know, over there. I like that he was a. And. And he was ruthless in power. But then what did they say? They said he tortured people by putting them in giant human shredders. You know, they said, yeah, that, you know, they made up the most ridiculous tortures that he was involved in. You know, they said that. They said, oh, he gassed his own people. But they neglect to mention that that was when he worked for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. bush and they took his side in it and they had paid for his purchase of those chemical weapons from the Europeans. They helped him target the Iranians with those chemical weapons. Then, yeah, he used some on the Kurds. And then what? Ronald Reagan blamed it on Iran when he used chemical weapons on his Kurds. So. And then that was all in the 1980s. So what in the hell does that have to do with an excuse to invade Iraq in 2003? Nothing. Right. So in other words, like even when. And I know you're being fair, but even the way you phrase the fair question. It's a bunch of loaded crap. Right? That was what they were shoveling at the time.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah, it was like terrible war.

[Scott Ritter]

You could boil your question down to, hey, this guy didn't stand for election, which like, yes, I agree with you. He clearly, like, took power in a bloody coup and. And immediately Jimmy Carter sponsored his invasion of Iran, which Ronald Reagan continued to back for the next eight years.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

Like, so we used to joke when we were kids, like, yeah, of course the guy's a ruthless dictator. That's how he got the job working for the United States of America before USA betrayed him. Him in 1990 and 91 is what really happened there. And so was he dangerous? Yeah, if you live in East Baghdad, he was dangerous. See? Dangerous even to Jordan or Israel? No. Is he a danger to the United States of America? Gotta be kidding. And even Kuwait. He asked permission to invade Kuwait and got it. And then they lied their asses off that he was about to invade Saudi Arabia so that they could launch that war to drive him out of Kuwait when he had no intention of going to Saudi Arabia in the first place. And especially after they told him, don't you go to Saudi Arabia now? And then he was like, yeah, but they gave him a flashing yellow light, at least for Kuwait. The ambassador herself told the New York Times, you can pull it up if you want. Well, we didn't think he was going to take the whole country. Her name's April Glassby.

[Julian Dory]

I've heard this one.

[Scott Ritter]

1990. So in other words, they gave him permission to invade part of Kuwait and conquer their northern oil fields. They told him to go ahead this. And that was at the height of his power. Right. So, no, the way that they framed it, that he was a danger, not at all. But you know what, you know who he's a danger to? Israel, even then. Just a nuisance.

[Julian Dory]

I was going to say. Was he at. Was it bluster or was it actual danger?

[Scott Ritter]

It was actual danger, but on a. On a minimal level. There you go.

[Julian Dory]

Is that what you were looking for? With deep pulled up confrontation in the Gulf, US Gave Iraq little reason not to mount Kuwait assault. This is from September 1990. All right. In the two weeks before Iraq's seizure of Kuwait, the Bush administration, on the advice of Arab leaders, gave President Saddam Hussein little reason to fear a force Forceful American response of his troops invaded the country. The administration's message to Baghdad, articulated in public statements in Washington by senior policymaker and delivered directly to Mr. Hussein by the United States Ambassador April Glassby was this. The United States was concerned about Iraq's military buildup on the border with Kuwait but did not intend to take sides and what it perceived as a no win border dispute between Arab neighbors. In a meeting with Mr. Hussein in Baghdad on July 25, eight days before the invasion, Ms. Glassby urged the Iraqi leader to settle his differences with Kuwait peacefully, but added, we have no opinion on the Arab, Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait, according to an Iraqi document described as a transcript.

[Scott Ritter]

The American version of that document was released in 2010 by Manning and Assange. So that's true and holds up by the way. And, but, and then the quote is in there somewhere where she says well, we didn't think he was going to take the whole country. Country. She says that to the Times.

[Julian Dory]

Can we find that somewhere?

[Scott Ritter]

And she does have to suggest that.

[Julian Dory]

We are to blame for all this and we lulled them into thinking they could have. Kuwait is really terrible, but we should have had a stiffer tone. It is unlikely to have made a difference. But it might have made a difference.

[Scott Ritter]

That's not it. Okay. It's in there somewhere.

[Julian Dory]

I believe you. Somewhere in there. Don't worry about it.

[Scott Ritter]

It's fine.

[Julian Dory]

Point being I, I got you. So there.

[Scott Ritter]

Try whole. Maybe that's the wrong essay. Maybe that's the wrong. There are a few, there are a few different news reports about her and, and her role in this. So that the quote, I'm almost certain is nobody thought or we didn't think he was going to take the whole country. And I'm sorry because I already had skipped ahead to one more story after this and then I, I, I forgot what it was though. What were we talking about after the border dispute here?

[Julian Dory]

After the border dispute?

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, after Iraq.

[Julian Dory]

We, we were going through a, a rocks or Iraq's threat or perceived threat to Israel.

[Scott Ritter]

Oh yes. So I was going to say thank you, dude. I was going to not find that one in my camera.

[Julian Dory]

Up just a little bit on his big one. You're good. I don't want you worried about it. I just want him up a little bit. Up or down? I'm sorry. So there's heads up.

[Scott Ritter]

So in this quote, you'll like to find this too. It's in fact I can find it. I have it on my phone because I just sent it to A friend recently.

[Julian Dory]

Other way.

[Scott Ritter]

Deep down.

[Julian Dory]

So heads up higher. Yep, there we go.

[Scott Ritter]

Okay, here we go. I sent this quote to a friend, so I have it right here. Okay. This is Philip Zelikow, famous as the chief author of the 911 Commission Report.

[Julian Dory]

Great report. Very accurate.

[Scott Ritter]

I never read that, by the way.

[Julian Dory]

I never read it.

[Scott Ritter]

No. I didn't want to be. As Ron Paul would say, I don't want to be confused by their propaganda. There's good journalism out there. But, so Zelikow, he's. He. You should understand about him if you want to you that he is not a neoconservative. Zelicao was more of a Brent Scowcroft, Connolly's Rice Council of Foreign Relations type, along with Robert Blackwell and good old what's his name. There's one other guy that was kind of around Rice at that time who was a little bit separate from the neocons. Anyway, just so you know, more of a centrist type. But anyway, here's what zelikow said in 2002 before the war. He said, why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat is and actually has been since 1990, it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat. I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically because it is not a popular sell. So, yeah, in other words, the Rock's no threat to the United States. You kidding me? But these neocons are a bunch of Likudniks, and they think Iraq is a threat to Israel and they think they can get W. Bush to get rid of Saddam Hussein for them. And so let's do this. That was what it was about. And now. So what was. What was Iraq's threat to Israel? It was not a land invasion. What it was was that Saddam Hussein would pay money to the family of anybody who died in conflict with Israel, any Palestinian who died in conflict with Israel. So that meant if some little old lady got bulldozed in her home, he would pay her family a condolence payment type thing. Right? But that also meant the family of a suicide bomber who targeted civilians on a city bus. His family would get a stipend, too. And so that was taken quite. I mean, you would do, right, as a bounty essentially for Palestinian terrorists to kill Israeli civilians. So even though you look at this as even a bus full of Israeli civilians at A time that's a horror show. But that's not a national security threat to the United States of America. Yeah, that's. And that's not even Iraq attacking Israel. That is Iraq backing a proxy force doing something horrible. But I'm sorry, you gotta send the infantry from Texas and Colorado and Alabama and in Indiana to go and fight that war. And you gotta, you gotta threaten to nuke our cities. We can't wait for the proof to be a smoking. A mushroom cloud. We can't wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. What if an American city got nuked because you wouldn't let us preempt this threat?

[Julian Dory]

The 1%.

[Scott Ritter]

We can't wait.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

And. And W. Bush would say, and this was sophisticated for him. I mean, they made him practice it, I'm sure. But he would say, people say, why do we have to do this? Or he would even bring it up himself. And he would say, people ask me, why do we have to do this? We have to do this because of September 11th. And then. Wait, wait, pregnant pause. Still, he's talking because we learned that day that you can't just wait around for threats to hit you. You have to preempt them first by starting the war first thing. But see, during that pregnant pause, because W. Bush was such an idiot, people would rewrite his grammar for him and they would assume what they thought he was saying. Why do we have to attack Iraq because of September 11th? Well, it sounds like what he means to say is because Iraq had something to do with the attack on September 11th. Iraq was behind it. Iraq paid for it, Iraq planned it, Iraq did it.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

Isn't that what he's saying? No, it's not. But you have to hold through. See, you couldn't do it. I tried to do the pregnant pause and you were ready to talk because it sounds like he's done talking, but he's not. He picks up after six seconds and goes. Because we learned the lesson that day that from now on we get to start all the wars, which is just a bunch of crap, right? Which means nothing. But he gets to invoke your hate and grief and fear over that terrible thing that happened so that he can essentially manipulate you into letting him do something that he knows is wrong. And he knows he has to lie to you and manipulate you to get you to allow him to do.

[Julian Dory]

There's two and like 500 pound elephants in the room there, though. Number one, his administration came in, you know, in 2001 after the contentious 2000 election, and didn't you know, they ignored a lot of these reports for all the fault that CIA had with all this stuff? And that's a whole separate conversation. There were senior people at these various agencies who were like, dude, like, some shit's gonna happen. Like, you know, it's pretty. And you can look at it on the July 6, 2001 meeting. You can look at it. I believe the August 11, 2001 meeting. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, run along. Didn't take it seriously. So then it happens, and they're like, oh, and they never want that to happen again because now it's like, you know, you're. You're playing defense through offense all the time. The second problem here.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, but that's just though it's total.

[Julian Dory]

No, no, I'm not making that argument.

[Scott Ritter]

You're right, though. That was what they said. Said.

[Julian Dory]

The second problem here is the psychologically brilliant but sadistic maneuver that Dick Cheney pulled on George W. Bush, which is that 1% doctrine, which is like, Mr. President, if there was even a 1% chance that a nuclear bomb could be set off in New York or Washington or insert US City here, would you not want to make sure you got it to a hundred percent that that wouldn't happen? And it creates a psychology of fear of loss rather than, you know, whatever the opposite is in that type of scenario. And Bush goes, oh, well, I already had 9, 11 happen. Can't have a new cap and let's attack Iraq. And so they. You know, it's interesting. The pregnant pause example is like a. Is like pure context snafu.

[Scott Ritter]

I disagree that Cheney was manipulating Bush on this. Bush wanted to do this.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, yes.

[Scott Ritter]

Bush's attitude was, I'm shopping for a bill of goods.

[Julian Dory]

But that put him over the top.

[Scott Ritter]

So come on with the excuses. I need as many as I can get.1% doctrine. That sounds like a good one. He had at one point had said, I need a way to say this that makes sense to the guys at the bar in Lubbock. In other words. In other words, help me lie to people so that they will falsely believe that we need to do this. You know, like, that's it. That was what he's.

[Julian Dory]

That's what that means going to Iraq.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. I mean, you know, I was a cab driver at the time, and I used to argue with people that, like, look, man, remember after September 11th, we started bombing Afghanistan essentially immediately and didn't ask anybody if it was okay first. Yeah. So why do you think we're asking Russia and China And France for permission to attack Iraq. Oh no. And we're waiting for a year and a half to start the carpet bombing. Just think hard now, dude, like you're stuck in my cab in traffic. Think it through.

[Julian Dory]

You're the cab driver.

[Scott Ritter]

It's because they didn't do it. That's why. That's why. Yeah, it's because they couldn't, they wouldn't dare go in front of the UN Security Council and say, oh yeah, no, we're convinced that Iraq did it. Cuz the intelligence agencies of the other first world nations know that that is not true. That's why, that's why we bombed Afghanistan a year and a half ago and we still haven't quite invaded Iraq yet. And we're sitting around pouting that the French won't let us and that we're going to have to just go ahead and invade even without a UN Security Council resolution, et cetera, which was never a debate over FBI Afghanistan because it wasn't illegal to attack Afghanistan because somebody committed an act of war based out of Afghanistan. And that was already the agreed consensus. You know, they didn't even, I don't think they even needed a rubber, a UN rubber stamp on that. It was just accepted. They needed maybe a UN resolution for the continued occupation of Afghanistan or something like that. Possibly. But anyway.

[Julian Dory]

I needed to get in the cab with you in 2002.

[Scott Ritter]

That could have been a lot of fun.

[Julian Dory]

That probably would have been a great reality.

[Scott Ritter]

We got, we got some work done. Yeah, we did used to joke about there See there was a show, there was a show back then called Taxi Cab Confession.

[Julian Dory]

That's what I'm thinking.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. And for people not familiar, it was. They would talk about their sex lives and then say some hilarious. And then they would go and say, hey, hey, sign this waiver and we're going to put you on hbo. Yeah, but so it was totally candid stuff, right?

[Julian Dory]

Scott's like, shut the up, we're talking about Iraq.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, exactly. So mine that was, the joke was at the time was if I could get, I'd have to get a good lawyer. And then we just do it for the Access channel. But instead of me asking them about their sex lives, it would be me lecturing them about the Federal Reserve System and the coming war on terrorism and then how killer that would be. If we had footage of me in 1998 going, here's what's going to happen. There's going to be a massive terrorist attack in New York work. And then we're Going back to Iraq, you know. Yeah, those were the days.

[Julian Dory]

But you called the terrorist attack.

[Scott Ritter]

Oh, sure. A lot of people did, by the way. A lot of people did. I mean, in fact, the Council on Foreign Relations had a giant symposium on we need to create a Department of Homeland Security because Osama bin Laden's coming. And that was in 1999. Whatever. So, like, there have been a lot of attacks leading up.

[Julian Dory]

Didn't they? In that 96 report, though, what was that called again?

[Scott Ritter]

I predicted the dot com crash too. I was really good. Good. I just listen to what Ron Paul says, quite frankly.

[Julian Dory]

Ron Paul knows some go back and.

[Scott Ritter]

Read his archives and be like, wow.

[Julian Dory]

The 96 one, the report that they share with Netanyahu when he came in, what was that called again?

[Scott Ritter]

A Clean Break.

[Julian Dory]

Right. Isn't that. Because that was written by a lot of neocon guys. Isn't that also where they introduced the idea of like a major attack on U.S. soil?

[Scott Ritter]

No. You're thinking.

[Julian Dory]

I'm thinking of a different.

[Scott Ritter]

You're close, though. It's. This was a project for a New American, for the New American Century document called Rebuilding America's defenses in 1998.

[Julian Dory]

Got it.

[Scott Ritter]

And it doesn't really say that. It just says. And this was a cliche at the time. I know it sounds kind of shocking at first if you hadn't heard it, but people would talk like this kind of a lot because it was obviously there. This was a thing. It was. There's a reason it was a cliche, was it's going to be hard to get the American empire to change direction and, and move in any important way without something like a Pearl harbor attack that comes out of the blue. That gives us then the incentive to get our act together and change. So people see that and they go, aha. See, they orchestrated the whole thing. But in fact, I think Zabigna Brzezinski uses that phrase in a grand. In the grand chessboard, in a slightly different context, but essentially the same. And I remember reading like in the Wall Street Journal and so people just talk about that like in the 1990s and that because, you know, the narrative about Pearl harbor was America was a sleeping giant and once they hit the United States, then everything changed and we reoriented our whole posture and blah, blah. So, you know, obvious. It is obvious too that there's a motive there to maybe allow one through. That was my assumption at the time was that they'll allow one through so they can escalate into the new century and whatever which is still unproven. But, you know, definitely there are a lot of people who wanted conflict and, and they would have and could have and should have known that that attack was coming because at the very least in 1995, Ramsey Yousef, who had done the first World Trade center bombing, when he had escaped to the Philippines, they caught his. They got his laptop and his two buddies, Wally Khan, Amin Shah and Abdul Hakim Murat, but he got away to. To Pakistan, where he was arrested the next year. But on his laptop was a plan to kill Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II when they came to the Philippines, a plan to time bomb 12 planes over the Pacific and a plan to hijack 10 planes and crash them into landmarks on America's coast. And that's the planes operation that eventually became September 11th in the hands of Ramsey Yousef's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And it was Wally Khan, I mean, Shah, I believe, was the one who made it up, or Abdullah Kim, Iraq, maybe they said was the one who came up with the idea. And so they had that information from 1995. It's called Bojinka. And people would say that that's a Serbo Croatian term for a big bang, but I could not verify that anywhere. And in fact, I found a Croatian who told me that that was nonsense. So I don't know where in the world the term bojinka comes from originally, but it's that plan. And so they, you know, that was obviously where I think it did. I think that word did get out inside the government to a degree that that was a possibility. There were like Pentagon tabletop exercises that considered that a possibility. And when they arrested Zacharias Mousawi in Minneapolis, one of the agents there said, this guy says he wants to fly from Heathrow to New York. I think maybe to jfk. I think maybe he wants to hit the World Trade Center.

[Julian Dory]

He didn't like Landon.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, he wasn't interested in how to take off the land. And by the way, so I, I write about that in, in this book. Enough already. But it's also in the new book Provoked.

[Julian Dory]

Your next title needs to be STFU America. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, I'm feeling that.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, exactly. Listen up, everybody.

[Julian Dory]

Everyone except Ron Paul. Shut the up.

[Scott Ritter]

Do you remember? I think you probably will. You apparently know a lot about this stuff in pretend to. In 2002, Colleen Rowley won Person of the Year for Time magazine, and she was the lawyer for the FBI office in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who the local flight school had turned in Musawi to the FBI and it wasn't even the bosses there. It was the, the flight instructor. I think the bosses told him, don't worry about it. And he was like, no, I am worried about it, and made the call. So the. Then they speculated, man, I wonder, this guy wants to suicide bomb New York kind of thing. So they went to Washington and said, we want a FISA warrant so that we can search this guy's stuff. Now, you may know, but I'll explain for your audience real quick. Under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. constitution, if the government wants to search you or me or our stuff, they have to go to a judge who is pretend at least a separate branch of government and convince him that is more likely than not. Right? Probable cause. That if they look where they want to look, they will find evidence of a crime that they already know has been committed and they're trying to prove who did that crime. Right. They're not allowed to say, we want to look at this guy and go fishing on you. They have to be in search of solving a crime. And then. So that's why the Fourth Amendment says, particularly describing the things to be searched in the play, the places to be searched and the persons with things to be seized. Right. Okay, so when it comes to national security, all that's out the window. There's something from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance act of 1978 created this authority, and it created a new court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And that court has the authority, the justices are appointed by the Supreme. The Chief justice of the Supreme Court, and they have the authority to give a warrant to the National Security Agency or the FBI Counterintelligence Division to do, or I guess, other national police, if in an emergency anyway, to search or. And, or fish on any monitor or surveil anyone who. They have a reasonable, A reasonable belief, much lower threshold of evidence.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

A reason to believe, essentially, is all that means that this person is an agent of a foreign state or a foreign terrorist group. If they're an agent of foreign power, then Fourth Amendment out the window. You're not an American citizen or a U.S. person protected by the Fourth Amendment. You are now an agent of a foreign state or terrorist group. And so on that basis, they can search you morning till night and without knowing anything else about you. Right. It's very, very subjective. Very, very low threshold of evidence. Yes. They could get. Look, they had a FISA warrant on Anti War Dot Com. That's how easy it is to get a FISA warrant. Okay, they can violate my rights with one, but they couldn't violate Zacharias Mowi.

[Julian Dory]

Because you're questioning the state, Scott, we can't have that.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, Zacharias Mosawi apparently was doing what they wanted. I don't know. But. So here's the thing, though, is they didn't search him. And then September 11th happened and, and, oh, I'm sorry. The Michael Rollins and Michael Maltby at FBI headquarters in Washington, they denied Minneapolis the authority to even go ask the court for the warrant. So they didn't get a chance to. And I think they begged and like, you know, repeatedly asked and we're turned down. And then on September 11, they asked now can we get a FISA warrant? And they still were told no by headquarters until the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet said, hey, I wonder if this has anything to do with that Minneapolis thing. And so that evening they got their FISA warrant and they searched his papers and they tied him directly to Ramsay bin Al Sheb and the terrorists in Florida. It then Al Shiv, I guess, in Spain and the. And the guys in Florida. So in other words, if they had gotten their FISA warrant on time, they would have been able to roll up the September 11th plot. And why wouldn't FBI headquarters give them their FISA warrant, even though French intelligence said, we know Moussa and his brother, they both fought in Chechnya and are recruiters for the terrorists in Chechnya, FBI headquarters said, we like the terrorists in Chechnya. They're not terrorists. They're freedom fighters. They're our guys. And so that makes them not agents of a foreign terrorist group. There's just so you can't have your war.

[Julian Dory]

There's an egg on every face.

[Scott Ritter]

It's pretty bad, man. It is pretty bad. God.

[Julian Dory]

Yep. It's like when I look at, when I look at September 11, first of all, in my life, it's very significant because it's one of the first things I can really remember. I was like seven or eight years old, you know, and I, you know, you don't know the full gravity of it, but, you know, if you're from New Jersey, like, we knew people who died in those towers, you know, it hit close to home, and it's kind of like that's where life begins. But it's also this seminal socio cultural geopolitical world order shifting moment in time, where everything that happens afterwards, a lot of it with us at the forefront of it, obviously, from a foreign conflict standpoint, a just pure geopolitical alliances standpoint, a cultural standpoint, which I would say is directly tied more importantly to an economic standpoint when you consider that afterwards we have the great housing crisis that emanates around the world and crashes economies and the middle class suddenly like goes even more like this than already had been, gets kind of legislated away. You have this like domino effect that happens after September 11th. And we are now 24 years on from that plus to where you've had a full generation already passed through of people now having the malaise of this, of this past moment in time, where in the, I guess similarly to the COVID your book here in the remains of the rubble that we started this whole thing with. There. There's all these wars that happen that have all different types of, you know, I guess, motives behind them, countries that have different opinions and everything. But it has completely made people want to sink away. And this comes back to a theme we talked about earlier. Want to sink away from all conflict around the world. The reason I ask all this though, is because I try to look at history and see where it's, you know, kind of like a repetition of itself in some way. And when you look at the 20 years leading up to World War II, you know, you had in there you had the boom and the bust, right? You had the 1929 stock market crash that leads to the Great Depression. And this is a generation that's growing up after World War I, which is an ignored, brutal war of history. I fully understand why that generation hated foreign wars, hated all that stuff. But then it's like we got so isolationist that then something did happen and a Pearl harbor happened. And then we had to get involved in this crazy war that, you know, was a world war, the biggest war of all time in World War II. And luckily, you know, we won that war. But do you worry about the malaise that has happened from all these kind of smaller but consequential wars that have gone on, leading to something like a September 11th or something like that that then suddenly makes this a thermonuclear struggle.

[Scott Ritter]

Nope, because you got it all backwards.

[Julian Dory]

I have it back.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah. It was American intervention that led to Pearl harbor, not isolationism. America had a deliberate eight point plan how to provoke Japan into attacking us first uncovered by Robert Stinnett in his book and publishing his book Day of deceit in 1999. It's called the McCollum memo.

[Julian Dory]

That is correct.

[Scott Ritter]

And, and so, so, you know, that was all very deliberate. And in fact, I mean, this included shipping planes to China for them to use in their, in the War. So they're directly intervening. So obviously, for everyone, you know, with an IQ lower than 110 listening or whatever, that's not a justification for what Tojo did. It just means that it. The myth that isolationism led to our involvement in the war or, you know, led to a situation where we belatedly intervened, if only we had intervened sooner or something like that, like all of that is the mythology that they've laid down since that war. But it made sense at the very least to stay out of it as long as possible. Let everybody else exhaust our enemies as much as possible before we have to fight, if we do have to fight, assuming that much.

[Julian Dory]

Can I give you something on that? I just want to see what you think of this.

[Scott Ritter]

Sure. And by the way, I've interviewed Robert Stin at a few times.

[Julian Dory]

Oh, you have died.

[Scott Ritter]

Back in the day.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

Interesting talk to him about this. And he was, by the way, a supporter of fdr, and he even supported FDR deliberately provoking Pearl harbor and allowing it to happen because he said it was that important that we fight the war. He was a sailor in the Pacific.

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

And so that was his point of view on it. But he says, still true.

[Julian Dory]

It's. It is true. I've actually had two separate people in here from wildly different backgrounds talk about this directly. I had Jesse Fink back in episode 223, and he wrote a book on it about how MI6 had an office in the building where this picture is taken on the wall right here, which is Rockefeller center in the build up to World War II. They knew damn well about Pearl harbor. And there was a back office, back channel to FDR that he knew about it, too. And to your point, yeah, there was like the Eight Point Plan and all kinds of shit going on behind the scenes there. And it absolutely was provoked. Here's where it gets really fucking uncomfortable, though, and this is what I want to ask you about. FDR let that happen because people would not get behind the war because both the left and the right in America was incredibly isolationist at the time. Time. And unfortunately, if something like that did not suddenly, literally flip the page one day to where everyone was like that, we gotta go get these people. We may never get into that war. It was so bad that when Britain was getting the shit bombed out of him by Hitler, Churchill was coming to FDR asking for help. And fd, he even at one point asked FDR for two completely out of service ships that were in the Caribbean that Congress had had an act that they voted on and then tabled like a year before to whether or not they were going to destroy those boats or not, because they weren't even usable. So Churchill said, I'll take anything, give me those. And FDR said, I'm sorry, I can't even give you that. I have an election on November 5, 1940, and my opponent's running to the isolationist. Right. So I need to run there with them. Right. So you had such an isolationist attitude that I would argue, and it certainly gets into a moral question here, that the reason they did the, you know, all right, let's provoke them into doing this was to be able to get the go ahead to enter the war because they were concerned that if that war blew up and you had an enormous GDP like Hitler had, which is, by the way, when people make that reference to Russia. Now, I'm sorry, but that's not relevant. Russia has a GDP the size of Italy. Hitler had the, had the, about to be the largest GDP in the world and he was taking over all of Europe. If you let something like that spread and then he builds alliances in, in Asia that potentially does come to our shores. That's where I would have the argument with you.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, I'm sorry, that's a extremely slippery slope. I mean, in fact, what was going on, right, was that the Germans continued to sue for peace and the British continued to hold out and continue bombing them, hoping that eventually they could get America to get into the war and win it for them. And then when we finally did get in the war, what do we do other than save Stalin and Mao Saiton and through our unconditional surrender on, on both fronts, empowered world Communism and then necessitated the creation of the American world empire to contain it for the whole Cold War, which as you said earlier, ended up risking total global thermonuclear annihilation on numerous occasions. So, like that's the best of all timelines, is the way World War II worked out because we finally got in there. I'm not so sure of that. I don't think the German, right, could have outlived, outlived Hitler and I don't think he could have lived very long in any circumstance where Soviet Communism and Chinese Communism and, and the legacy of all of that through Asia, the Korean and Vietnam wars and all of that, it's the least equivalent to the Holocaust right there. Just America's Cold War in Asia. So. And never mind the tens of millions starved to death by Mao Saiton Young, you know, by far the most violent man who ever lived and the highest body count of anyone who ever lived, all because America forced the Japanese unconditional surrender to get completely out of China. And then we'll deal with what comes next then. Yeah, great. So, you know, none of this was thought through well or done right at all by anyone. I don't think. If you read, I think, Pat Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. And there's of course, AJP Taylor, if you've ever read that, the on the Origins of World War II.

[Julian Dory]

I have.

[Scott Ritter]

And this is something, you know, Pat Buchanan knew that everybody's gonna say, oh, you love Hitler, Pat, which is a bunch of crap. And so in his book, he only cites British historians from Oxford and Cambridge. Right. That's the only people he cites. And he goes, look, this ridiculous man is, you know, people said that George W. Bush was the Winston churchill of the 21st century. More. I look at it, I'm starting to think that's right. The Winston Churchill was the George W. Bush of the 20th century. And everybody, you're just supposed to lionize the guy and not ask too many questions. And after all, it's obvious enough for like a grade schooler that when the enemy is Hitler and Tojo pure evil, then that means that you're on the side of light and goodness and whatever. When Naz, the British Empire, whose side we were on, and that's, you know, only better in comparison to the worst totalitarians that the devil ever could have created. You know what I mean?

[Julian Dory]

Yeah.

[Scott Ritter]

But the British Empire before that was nobody to be sticking up for. We had overthrown it once upon a time, you might remember, you know.

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[Scott Ritter]

They were not perfect at all. Yeah. So look, and then your question also had the same kind of assumptions about September 11, that through the 1990s, we were just sitting around. And so then that isolationism caused September 11 to happen to us or whatever, when in fact what happened was these were America's mercenaries that we had backed in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo and Chechnya all through the 1980s and 1990s, while at the same time completely driving them crazy by occupying bases in Saudi Arabia from which to bomb and blockade Iraq and contain Iran as well, backing Israel in their wars against the Lebanese and Palestinians.

[Julian Dory]

And.

[Scott Ritter]

Support for all the dictatorships in the region. Pressure on them to read the oil prices to subsidize our economy at their expense. And they would say, the bin Ladenites said that we turn a blind eye to the Russian, Chinese, Indian and Kazakh aggressions against Muslims when In fact, America backed the Chechen Mujahideen against the Russians just as well as they backed the Mujahideen against the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. And they backed the Uyghurs against China as well. My friend Eric Margulies saw Chinese Uyghurs training in Afghanistan under Pakistani ISI and CIA supervision in the summer of 2001, right before the September 11 attack. And so we're, on one hand our government supports these kooks all over the place. On the other hand, we do all of these things that make them want to attack us and then we, the regime, and then in the third case, they do nothing to protect us when they're coming. And so that's what caused September 11th. I would say killing Iraqis from bases in Saudi Arabia, not isolationism.

[Julian Dory]

I agree with that. I want to be clear if, if I, if I misstated that. I see similarities in, like, timelines post 911 with things. But I don't think it was isolationism that caused, caused 9 11. I think it was far more corruption, incompetence and conspiracy more than anything. I'm on, I'm with you on 9 11. Where, where I get, you know, like, frustrated sometimes with the historical arguments is everyone. I shouldn't, let's not say everyone. A lot of people try to make everything, everything or Nothing right. It's 0 or 100, it's this or that. You know, history is written by the victors and it's not all true, true. And there's, there's no doubt about that. Winston Churchill was not a perfect guy by any stretch. I could point to a lot of things in India. That's just one place to start with where, you know, there's plenty to say that was completely wrong. And, you know, he was, he was a flawed guy in many ways. But I think, like, when we get into the conversation of, like, well, no, actually, not only wasn't he a hero, he was the complete villain. I think it ignored a lot of the history because if you look at, if you look at the bombing of Britain, it is, you are correct. Britain was then bombing Germany back. They were flying in Royal Air Force, basically, like, I don't want to say every night, but a lot of nights throughout that year between 1940 and 1941. But Germany was doing the same thing and trying to come in there to start the third front of the war. I think at that point, at least, second front of the war. It's like, what are they supposed to do, though? You know, are they just.

[Scott Ritter]

You're starting the story in the middle, though, the story, what happened was Neville Chamberlain was humiliated.

[Julian Dory]

Right.

[Scott Ritter]

When Hitler annexed the Sudetenland or went further in Czechoslovakia. So then he threw a big emotional fit and declared a war guarantee to Poland. His foreign secretary, Lord Gray, said that he should be locked in an insane assault asylum, that this was the absolute most idiot blunder in the world.

[Julian Dory]

Why?

[Scott Ritter]

So, in other words, this is imagine Condoleezza, right? Or Colin Powell while he's in power, saying that George W. Bush be locked in an insane asylum, that he has no idea what he's doing. He must be stopped before he invades Iraq. That's what was going on in England at the time. Time. Because why? Because Neville. It wasn't Winston Churchill that gave the war guarantee to Poland.

[Julian Dory]

It was Neville Chamberlain.

[Scott Ritter]

It was Neville Chamberlain, the same guy that everybody hates because he's the most incompetent diplomat in the history of the world. Because he ever made the Munich deal, right?

[Julian Dory]

Yep.

[Scott Ritter]

Well, that same idiot used that same idiocy to promise that he would protect Poland from Germany when he had no ability to do so whatsoever. And what he was doing, in fact, was he was allowing the Polish colonels, who were themselves a bunch of fascists, to have the right to declare war on Germany. For England. He's just outsourcing the war. They were supposed to be negotiating over Danzig. He's telling them, you don't have to negotiate with Hitler. Why would you negotiate with Hitler? I got your back, little buddy. And then. But he didn't have their back whatsoever. But Danzig was a German city. Just let them have their damn Eastman, dude. You know, that was what they were fighting about was like, no, we must draw the line against evil. Because Winston Churchill was so concerned about evil. The. The centuries long and to this day policy. We already talked about this a couple hours ago. The policy is, you can't let Germany and Russia have a deal. You can't let Germany dominate Europe and particularly Eastern Europe, where they can keep Britain out. The discussion wasn't about the evil of Nazism. The discussion was about what is their power going to do to our power. We're going to lose some. And then they made idiot decisions in an emotional peak. And then once the war started that they couldn't possibly finish without forcing us to fight the war for them from their propaganda office in Rockefeller center and the rest. And Hitler, I'm not giving him any credit whatsoever, but the fact is he didn't want to fight England. He wanted to ally with England against the Reds. And by the way at the end of the war, Churchill himself said, what's the evidence for that, I guess. Oh, it's in the book. It's in Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War by Pat Buchanan. And it's also in AJP Taylor on the origins of World War II.

[Julian Dory]

Then why do you go across their red lines and invade the Sudetenland? Why do you then send in the. Send in the Luftwaffe to bomb them into submission if you are trying to make them an ally?

[Scott Ritter]

England declared war on them first.

[Julian Dory]

England declared war on them because they crushed. This is where I would have a.

[Scott Ritter]

Problem because they'd given an idiot war guarantee to a country.

[Julian Dory]

Hold on one second.

[Scott Ritter]

Defend.

[Julian Dory]

This is where I would have a problem with your argument.

[Scott Ritter]

Okay.

[Julian Dory]

The parallel nature of Iraq and Poland.

[Scott Ritter]

Well, I'm just bring. I wasn't bringing up Iraq and Poland as like, strategic equivalents on the risk Board. I was bringing up the politics of Secretary of Foreign Minister Lord Gray saying that Prime Minister Chamberlain was an idiot, out of his mind, that this was an absolute blunder, that it made no sense whatsoever. And how in the world could you have done this without consulting me first? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I was saying, if Colin Powell had had rioted over what W. Bush was doing, imagine the politics of that, like how desperate he would have to be to react in that way. You know what I mean? That's all I was saying. The politics of that, okay? The fact, to me, the fact that Lord Gray thought the war guarantee was insane is like ipso facto proof that it was. It means that Chamberlain, he did that because he had been made to look ridiculous. And this was how he was going to fix that, was by looking tough. Instead, where do you.

[Julian Dory]

All right, so here's the question.

[Scott Ritter]

And by the way, I should have said at the beginning of this, too, I don't know jack about World War II other than I've read Stannette about Pearl harbor and I've interviewed him a bunch of times about that back in the days before he died.

[Julian Dory]

Okay.

[Scott Ritter]

And I've read. Actually, I read. Was it Victor Gold or something's book about Pearl harbor as well? And, and, and John Tolan's book about Pearl Harbor I read years ago. And, and then. But like the revisionist stuff about the European war, all I've read was A.J.P. taylor on the origins of World War II, Pat Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, and there's another one by a guy named Nicholson Baker called Human Smoke. And which is really great because it's just newspaper headlines from all throughout the lead up to the war. And it actually ends at the point where America's getting involved. Germany's declared war on America and America's now going to join the war. That's interesting. That's where it ends. But it. And the point of the book is it's just off ramp after off ramp after off ramp after off ramp that are ignored as the war is escalated to the worst thing that ever happened. Then in hindsight, we're supposed to essentially rationalize that this thing that killed 60 million people, man, it had to be or it would have been worse. But like, I don't know, dude. You know, when you read human smoke, you go, it looks like the only heroes in all of Europe during that time were the Quakers trying to smuggle in food to dying, starving people. Everybody else was in turn. By everyone else, I mean all political power was arrayed against the people of Christendom.

[Julian Dory]

But here's the thing. Here's the thing. There's the world that exists as we want to see it it, and then there's the world that really exists. And I think that's what I'm saying in the world that really exists. There's also flawed men there who sometimes actually want to do the right thing, other times don't, by the way, to be clear. But I don't know how else something like that goes down. Because when I look at the world, I have a lot of things that. It's cynical to say it, but unfortunately I think it's true. Sometimes I got to pick the best shit on a steaming pile of shit. What's the least smelly one there is, right? Not to say it's good. It's still shit, but it's better than that shit down there. And when I look at that and study the history of it, I would say that for all the flaws and problems with the British Empire, of which there is a laundry list. The, the western big air quotes here, freedoms that may be that represented versus a fascist ethno Nazi state in Germany. That's an easy argument. For me, the argument is, if I need one piece of shit, that is a way better shit over there in Britain than it is in Germany. And so, yes, you are absolutely right. The Neville Chamberlain really looks like a total cuck. In, In. In hindsight, with everything he did and then felt like he had to protect his pride to, you know, say, well, if they cross this red line, I'm gonna declare bore. I would argue he Just shouldn't have fucking. He shouldn't have even tried to negotiate with Hitler over the Sudeten land. And I'm not an interventionist kind of guy, in case that's not clear in this conversation. But I'm looking at it like the guy had already proven that he was gonna. He was on meth, he was gonna take whatever he wanted to fucking take. And then you sit down with him and think he's gonna keep a promise and then he doesn't. So at that point point, even if it's a pride protector, what the else is he supposed to do? Look, I think say, oh, I'm sorry, all right, he broke, he broke the. He broke the agreement. You know what?

[Scott Ritter]

I think Pat's book, I think he'd like Pat's book at this point. At this point, his enemy that he wants to fight is in the East. He has no intention to attack France and Belgium and Denmark and Great Britain. He wants to say that, well, first of all, Mein Kampf, that's where all the Lebens realm is, is where all the Slavs live there to be. Be either killed or, or cleansed. And that's going to be all German land up, up through the borderlands of Russia.

[Julian Dory]

And even including you think a guy that would think that about other people.

[Scott Ritter]

And his enemy was the communists on the. In the East. This is where it was matter and anti matter. I'm not saying that England was like their natural ally, but, and I think this is clear from Pat's book and from Taylor's book that Hitler looked at it like war with the Soviets was inevitable. And I, if, forgive me if I'm screwing this up, it's been maybe 15, 20 years since I read Pat's book, but I'm pretty sure the way that the timeline worked was that it was after Chamberlain gave the war guarantee to Poland, was when Hitler said, well, then went and sent Ribbentrop to go do the Hitler Stalin pact. It was then that he made the peace with the Soviet Union. So then he stopped to attack the western democracies for two years before finally going east and attacking the commies. Anyway, that's what I'm saying. So what did the English accomplish with their idiot war guarantee and their declaration of war on Germany and their convincing France to also declare war on Germany, other than to get Germany to kick all their asses first before the inevitable war in the east anyway? And which by the way, all the innocent civilians who died in the east, at least they would have had a west to flee to not easily, but at least there would have been a West to flee to that hadn't already been conquered by the Nazis if they hadn't had done that.

[Julian Dory]

I think you're making a big assumption about a psychotic leader who already was demonstrating in the 1920s in Mein Kampf and in his speeches that there were groups of people, including in this case, you are 100% right about that, the Slavs and the people to the east who he politically most disagreed with. He was already demonstrated that he viewed other land and other peoples and of course everything like you wrote about the.

[Scott Ritter]

Stanza that was in dispute in Poland, remember he was going east.

[Julian Dory]

But either way, he point being he already viewed large swaths of tens of millions of people as subhuman and the land they live on, not their land. Germans should be able to take that.

[Scott Ritter]

That right.

[Julian Dory]

Why would you ever assume that that person, that psycho will not turn around and do that to anyone else that he doesn't like? That's my problem with the Napoleon try.

[Scott Ritter]

To invade the Soviet Union before I seen the Kaiser try.

[Julian Dory]

So you're assuming he would lose.

[Scott Ritter]

Invading Russia sucks and is hard and doesn't work. Right. So the point is he was. He was going to fight the Soviet Union and lose to the Soviet Union anyway. All the English did was buy the Reds two years.

[Julian Dory]

I would argue, and I can't say I know I'm right about this. I would argue though that Hitler, the fact that he started a war on technically three other fronts, but if you don't include North Africa and just say west and north with Britain, the fact that he was fighting war fronts there is the reason he lost Russia more than anything. If he had just focused on Russia with the entire resources and power of the German military and the science, you know, that of the weaponry they used, I do think he would have taken Russia. He didn't. He wasn't that far off. It was a winter that stopped them from taking Russia and it was because he had wars going on in three other places at the same time. So that's where I don't think he.

[Scott Ritter]

Would have been able to hold it, though this is for the long term.

[Julian Dory]

Maybe not hold it for the long term, but it could, it could have. He could have taken it and then.

[Scott Ritter]

Had massive impressions and the western democracies would have had two years to build up instead of Stalin having two years to build up.

[Julian Dory]

Maybe, maybe. But it still ends in a massive world war and it still ends in tens of millions of people dying. That's what I'm Saying, like, I hate war. But I also try to look at the lens of the world where, like, sometimes, like, it happens, and you should do everything you can to prevent that on the buildup. And you're absolutely right. Back to Pearl harbor was wrong. Wrong.

[Scott Ritter]

Why did FDR do that? Because 80% of the American people were opposed to it. It's supposed to be right to them.

[Julian Dory]

Yes.

[Scott Ritter]

So this, you know, this Robert Stinette attitude that, well, FDR had to commit the greatest act of treason in all history in order to, you know, bamboozle essentially, to manipulate the American people into going to war in Europe by getting their sons killed out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That kind of shows right there what a betrayal it was of the American people. And then 16 million of them had to be conscripted, forced to go and join the fight. So in hindsight, you can make a great movie out of it and all of this, but at the time, ipso facto, the people had to be made to do it because they didn't want to, they didn't agree, and they didn't think it was necessary to do it in that way. You know, Harry Truman said we should back Hitler and then we should back Stalin and then we should back Hitler again and keep backing them against each other when he was a senator, is what he said.

[Julian Dory]

He also was the brightest bulb.

[Scott Ritter]

Yeah, how about just stay the hell out of it? You got two totalitarians, as he said, scorpions fighting in a bottle. Why do we have to lend lease anybody in this thing? You know what I mean? I'm not saying we should back Iraq or Iran or Israel or anyone. You know, that's the thing of it. But anyway, look, I admit again that I'm not the greatest expert on World War II. I know there's a hundred books about it. And I do know also that for all Americans who get interested in, like, revisionist history, you know, it's really easy to be a revisionist about the terror wars, about Vietnam, about Korea. Why is it the forgotten war anyway? Ah, geez, Truman, look what he did there. And then, God, World War I. That idiot Woodrow Wilson. You know, if he hadn't done that, there would have never been a Soviet Union, there would have never been a Nazi Germany. There would have never been the British replacement of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle east and the creation of Israel and all this crap. Damn him forever for that. And then go back McKinley starting this fake fight with Spain and then stealing the Philippines and killing 300,000 of them so you can take Their land, dominate their land. We got no right to the Philippines. What is this crazy? And then you go back and you go man, the way Lincoln picked that fight at Fort Sumter, they should have just surrendered that fort, dude. And then you get, you know, and. But World War II though, come on man. That's Hitler and Tojo. That's black and white, dude. That's Superman versus Lex Luthor. And don't muddy those waters. That's our hero origin story. That's the basis of our civic religion here. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and all that is too long ago. It's FDR and Truman or in Eisenhower, they're the founding fathers of the United States of America now of our world empire. And so to, to sully the origin kind of mythology of that whole era. And, and what happened out of that is it's like questioning the virgin birth or whatever it comes to like emotional ties. This is what we have in common is our grandfathers fought World War II together and stuff like that. Like as we don't have much in common anymore, this is something. And, and we're the good guys in the thing, facing down evil and all of that. But then of course you, as you can see, it's been the excuse for every act of evil our government's committed around the world enforcing this empire ever since then. Everybody knows we're the ones who whipped Hitler. We're the guys you call when your Hitler needs weapon. And. And we've been acting as the Hitler and calling it, you know, anti. Ever since then.

[Julian Dory]

Why can't it be both?

[Scott Ritter]

Well, that's the whole thing. So in, in 1821, John Quincy Adams, John Adams son who was the Secretary of State gave his fourth of July speech and he says America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. And because America is the champion and vindicator only of her own. And the problem is, even though we mean well, we could help good people in other countries, if we went out on that mission, we would end up becoming the dictatrice of the world. We would forfeit our own spirit, the same one that we're trying to preserve and trying to export to them. We would kill it in the process of trying to export it militarily and control the world in the way that we want. And so if we want to have our republic here, we're going to have to leave the old world to the old world. And then you know, James Monroe, by the way, in, in people should read the speech that where they. He inaugurated the Monroe Doctrine. He said that, you know, as everyone knows, I think that the European powers better stay out of the Americas and no more new colonies here. And this is America's sphere of influence all the way down to the tip. Argentina, you better believe it. However, America promises in return to stay out of Europe and to recognize as de facto legitimate whoever is in power in whatever European state. And so the old world is the old world's problem. The new world is ours. And we still insist that European powers stay the hell out of the Americas. You know, Soviet Union tries to make a military outpost out of Cuba. Nope, we will reverse that, in fact. But we don't live up to our end. We say there are no spheres of influence anywhere in the world except the entire sphere. That's our sphere of influence. But nobody else can have a sphere of influence anywhere at all. That's right. And so that's the whole thing. I mean, Quincy Adams was right. In fact, we talked about the neoconservatives. Robert Kagan, who is oftentimes, at least was, maybe still is oftentimes Bill, Crystal's writing partner and very influential guy. Yeah, that's your boy. Yeah, good, good friend of mine, Robert Kagan and oh, and Crystal both. It was, I think it was in their article toward a Neo Reaganite foreign policy from 1996. I'm pretty sure it's in that essay that he says, well, John Quincy Adams says America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Well, why not? Well, just read it. It. He explains why not. He just said, we'll become the dictatrice of the world and the betrayer of our own spirit, man. It's right there in English. Robert Kagan, whose horrible wife and horrible brother and horrible sister in law and horrible father have been probably the most destructive force in this country, this side of the Crystal family that you could find anywhere. And all based on this complete idiot things he knows better than John Quincy Adams. It's not like you read Quincy Adams speech and think, I don't understand what this guy's talking about. Right. It's very clear, dude. It makes perfect sense, you know, so it should have been good enough even for a Kagan.

[Julian Dory]

All right, real quick, I gotta go to the bathroom. But we'll come back and talk about Iran, a little bit of Israel, obviously in there to go together. China. And then I also want to get into the book you wrote on the Russia Ukraine war, which is very fascinating. We touched on that earlier. But we gotta go deeper. Cool, we'll be right back.

[Scott Ritter]

We'll have to talk fast.

[Julian Dory]

Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help and if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.