← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
EP:17 - LIVE : Deal or Deception? Peace or Just Politics? Inside the Israel–Hamas Deal
01:16:50
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- [00:00]
Ali Jackson
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- [01:35]
Scott Horton
Let's duke it.
- [01:36]
Kyle Anzalone
Earl.
- [01:49]
Scott Horton
Sam. God dang, I'm gonna have a heart attack one day just from my own intro. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I'm Scott Horton. This is provoked. You know me. I'm the host of the Scott Horton show, and I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, and I wrote some books and stuff like that. And Daryl is out this week, but it's okay because I've got the great Kyle Anzalone, and he is the news editor at the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and he hosts Conflicts of Interests, Conflicts of Interest and the Kyle Anzalone show here on the youtubes there for you all the time. Great stuff, and happy to see you. Good to have you here. Welcome.
- [03:02]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, Scott, thanks for having me on. I usually spend my Friday evenings watching Provote, so it's great to be one, the first guest here. So I'm looking forward to it.
- [03:13]
Scott Horton
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to have you here. So, obviously, we got to talk about the ceasefire in Gaza and what it all means. So I guess, first of all, can we just start with the latest news as you understand it in terms of the extent of the end of the fighting? Have the Israelis finally stopped bombing the Palestinians? I know I saw some footage of people walking along the beach side back north again.
- [03:40]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, so it does seem that there's ceasefire in effect. That's not really being abided to by Israel, but they are drawing back their position some. There was, I believe between 19 and 25 Palestinians killed today by Israeli strikes. And then of course I think they recovered like another 90 something bodies buried beneath the rubble. So the, you know, death toll jumped up by a hundred something today. But it does seem that Israeli strikes killed like 16 members of one family outside of Gaza City. And then there was another strike that killed between three and eight people. And then of course they say there's some people still buried beneath the rubble. So death toll likely to climb. Israeli strikes are at a more minimal level. But they're still going on.
- [04:27]
Scott Horton
Yeah, I saw footage of tanks blowing people away as they were just, you know, rail civilians walking. Not obviously not targeted strikes or defending against any threat, but just blowing people up. And then I, I think it was in one of your reports that you had written up for the Institute where you talked about how, yeah, you know, they've killed a hundred Lebanese in the last year since the ceasefire there. And so, and that's as many as they've been killing in a day in Gaza recently. But still it goes to show that ceasefire means something different to Israel than it does to most other people.
- [05:05]
Kyle Anzalone
Right. Well, that, that is an important example to look at as we enter into this ceasefire, how Netanyahu has handled the ceasefire and withdrawal agreement with Hezbollah. I mean, you know, Israel inflicted several blows on Hezbollah and they were more or less willing to declare a ceasefire and let Israel conduct the genocide in Gaza without sticking up for the Palestinians anymore. They withdrew their forces above the Latani River. So from, you know, the, the bottom, what quarter of Lebanon near the Israeli border and Israel was supposed to end airstrikes in Lebanon. They were supposed to withdraw their forces from southern Lebanon. They haven't done that. They've continued bombing nearly daily. Jason Ditz@antiwar.com is covering it. Every single day an Israeli drone strike kills two people. And that 100 number is report. And so I think Jason has said that it could be as high as 500 people killed. I think, you know, there's probably discrepancies on who was a militant. And you know, if you're a member of Hezbollah or whatever group that Israel alleges you are not, but hundreds of people and they've conducted thousands of strikes I think it's about 4,000 ceasefire violations in less than a year. So there's daily Israeli ceasefire violations, including you know, they haven't actually killed any members of the. I'm not sure what the UN peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon is called, but there is a. A UN peacekeeping mission there. I think there's Irish soldiers and from some other foreign countries. The Israelis have certainly been spying on them, destroying some of their infrastructure, firing near them. I. I think, you know, there's a couple times where they lob some grenades near the UNIFIL soldiers. So this is, uh, Israel is not backing down in southern Lebanon. And if that's any indication, what they're planning to do in Gaza is that the Palestinians will comply with everything, Hamas will comply with everything, and they'll just continue air strikes at a much smaller pace.
- [07:05]
Scott Horton
All right, so that's to be expected, as bad as it is. But so that aside, let's talk about the politics of this deal and what all is behind it. Oh, no. How true it is or how important it really is. I don't know if you saw it, but there's a big profile in the New York. And essentially how, you know, it's all full of a lot of spin about how, because we're real estate developers.
- [07:41]
Ali Jackson
How.
- [07:41]
Scott Horton
To get everybody to agree, yes, we really do want.
- [07:47]
Kyle Anzalone
Oh, there it is. Your audio was not too strong for a minute, but it's better now.
- [07:53]
Scott Horton
Oh, man. That keeps happening with this program. We're gonna have to switch to Streamyard or something. It was that same thing again. We've had happen to. And it's different people's microphones every week, too. Anyway, but you can hear me again now?
- [08:06]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, yeah, you sound strong now.
- [08:08]
Scott Horton
Okay. Anyway, so they're saying it was Kushner that came in, that essentially Trump called him in and said, God dang it, make a deal stick. And they did this. And this is what Nixon and Kissinger did with Mao. Say Tung was say, look, we're just going to make friends now, and then we'll have all our guys work out the details later, but handshake first, make a deal first. And so essentially, that was how they approached this thing, was get both sides to agree that, yes, we accept America wants us to make a deal now, and we're going to do what it takes to make that happen, that kind of thing. And so that was how they did it. But then. So I guess my question for you is about, like, your best approximation of why they did this was this Netanyahu came to Trump and needed a bailout here, that he was unable to win the war. And so he asked Trump to throw him a lifeline or this is maybe Trump really telling Netanyahu, I've had enough of this, and finally putting his foot down.
- [09:04]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah. So I think there's a possibility that is what happened. And Netanyahu really crossed the line with the assassination attempt in Qatar. You know, it wasn't just Israeli attempted to assassinate Hamas leadership. They launched 10 missiles at Qatar in Doha and killed a Qatari security official. And I was surprised by this. The White House statement actually said that Netanyahu apologized to the Qatari leader. I mean, that seems, you know, significant to me that he didn't just have Netanyahu made the call, but they actually publicized that. And that was, you know, I think, maybe the first release of the. The Trump Netanyahu meeting. And so it did seem like they kind of wanted to highlight that. So maybe there's a narrative here where Trump is actually upset with Netanyahu and he went too far with that strike, because at that time, Moss leadership was actually meeting to discuss Trump's deal. And there have been past reports from the White House where there's administration officials saying, and this is a NAT CEO. So it's very possible that this is essentially just a cover story, that this is just meant to make Trump's face feel like, you know, he's really getting upset with Netanyahu. But they do say things like, this effing guy bombed someone every time we're close to making peace. And so, you know, maybe there's a possibility that Trump really was just fed up with Netanyahu and he said, call it off. And that's. And then there's this report from Jeremy Scahill that I think is really important, that Hamas understands this as a gamble on Donald Trump, that they think Trump wants this deal bad enough that he's going to make Netanyahu to abide by it. And if they're right, I think from one perspective, it may look like they're more or less the victors of this thing at least were able to withstand the Israeli onslaught. They don't have to disarm. Gaza is going to be rebuilt. The Palestinian people are going to stay there. And the deal does say there should be a path to statehood. Now, I think another, just maybe even more likely scenario is that at least Netanyahu, but maybe Donald Trump don't intend to abide by this deal. Deal is certainly written vaguely enough that it doesn't really guarantee the Palestinians anything. There's no indication from anything that's happened in the past that the United States would stand up to Israel, that Donald Trump, if Netanyahu just violated this agreement tomorrow, wouldn't continue to send billions and billions and billions of dollars of year of weapons every year to Israel. So, you know, I really just, I think it's very possible that this deal is either a fiction meant to get the hostages out, so Israel could just go in and finish the job. The other possibility here is that Trump actually wants to get this done and Netanyahu sees the language worded vaguely enough that he's going to be able to claim Hamas violations. And I found this yesterday in Israel Hayam, which is, I think, a fairly pro Netanyahu outlet. And one of the things they explained is US And American officials said there's actually a side agreement here that said in response to any Hamas violations of the agreement, Israel could go back to war and they will have the full American backing to do so. So Netanyahu is going to be looking for an excuse, looking to sell on Donald Trump that, look, Hamas has gone too far. Maybe they can't find the bodies of all the Israeli prisoners at the captives. At this point. It's, it's very possible that some of them are buried in tunnels or they may take days or weeks to actually dig out, especially if Israel continues the airstrikes. I mean, Hamas isn't going to just call up the, the, whoever's holding the captives and say, hey, let these guys go. You know, this is going to be a process that involves relaying messages through couriers. And so I think Netanyahu's trying to give himself an out. And one other important detail in that article was, is Israel said they weren't interested in the negotiations with Hamas until Hamas made it clear they weren't leaking phase A and phase B of the agreement. And phase A is the hostage release, the ceasefire, the additional aid going into Gaza, and then phase B is the more extensive Israeli military withdrawal and the rebuilding of Gaza. And so I think it's pretty clear that they don't intend to go on to phase B. And this is what happened with the deal that Woff brokered in January, Right, Where Israel agreed to it, they abided by it for its weeds. Few dozen hostages were released. But then when it was time to go on phase two of the deal, a real Israeli withdrawal and allowing more aid into Gaza, Netanyahu broke the agreement, imposed a total siege and went back to war.
- [13:50]
Scott Horton
Yeah, and the thing about that one was, you're right, it was a, a Trump team deal, but it happened before he was inaugurated. Right. And I think it was done as a favor to him, to let him have a peaceful and triumphant inauguration into power without the shadow of the war there. And then he let him go right back to it. So, hopefully Trump has more at stake here. And I guess what I had read was, and maybe from that same Scahill piece, which you cited as well, where Hamas really climbed down here, where they had said they would not withdraw, they would not give up all of the captives, whether POWs or kidnapped civilians or whoever, all that. They would not do that until Israel withdrew from the entire area. And now they have gone ahead and climbed down as per Trump's wishes on that seems like several rungs on the ladder here, but under the promise that Trump gave them that he really means it, that he will prevent Israel from going back to war. So sounds like he's made promises to both sides on that. And of course, you know, Hamas or some kook from Islamic Jihad or who knows who could do something legitimately, or the Israelis could just claim a pretext and say that Hamas violated the ceasefire. That's traditionally what happens is Israel violates it, but they have some pretext to say it was the Palestinian side that did. And, you know, Hamas can't control every single thing in the Strip. There were even one of these ceasefires broken back years ago, you know, I guess in the Obama years, where Israelis even admitted that it wasn't Hamas that fired the rockets and they were trying to stop it. But, hey, whatever, you should be able to stop it. And since a couple of rockets went off and no one was hurt, still we get to bomb you now and that kind of thing. So if they want to be that cynical and exploit a pretext to relaunch the war, you know, at a moment's notice, they. They can, I guess. But then. So, I mean, go ahead.
- [15:49]
Kyle Anzalone
I just think, you know, to lay out what I think might be the likely scenario is there's thousands, maybe tens of thousands of unexploded bombs all over Gaza.
- [15:59]
Scott Horton
Right.
- [15:59]
Kyle Anzalone
When some, you know, poor man digs his entire family out, his little children out of the rubble of his house after he returns, and there's essentially Israeli occupying forces still in Gaza. Right. One of the things that this deal does is it leaves Israeli forces certainly in areas near where Palestinians are going to be, and I'm sure they're going to be doing patrols and having other interactions with the civilian population. And so it only takes one enraged Palestinian because there's going to be ordinances everywhere to, you know, rig it into even a rudimentary roadside bomb and take A shot at some Israelis. I mean, I even kill people. But at the same time, if Netanyahu is just looking for an excuse, and you're almost ensuring with this plan that these kinds of things are going to happen.
- [16:47]
Scott Horton
Yep. And you know, as I'm sure I know this because you reported it, where the Israeli military has admitted this is where Hamas gets all their bombs from, where all the talk about being backed by Iran, they're indirectly backed by the IDF because they dropped so many bombs on these people that whatever their dud rate is, is enough to fully supply Hamas with all the explosives they need for homemade landmines and the rest. So. Right, grenades and the rest.
- [17:16]
Kyle Anzalone
Well, and one other thing to add to that, that that story that I wrote, I think it was based on a hat's article. And one of the things they explained is because a lot of countries don't like to sell weapons to Israel because they're going to use them to bomb civilians. And because Israel has dropped such a high number of bombs on Gaza, they've had to use a lot of, like Vietnam era bombs that they had gotten from, you know, various Eastern European or Southeast Asian countries kind of on the black market. You know, these aren't publicized arms sales. And then there's also, they tend to use older bombs on easy targets. So like houses full of people and things like that. And then they end up having to drop multiple bombs to make sure that one doesn't go unexploded. And so there's just so many bombs being dropped on Gaza because of the way Israel is waging this war.
- [18:09]
Scott Horton
Yeah. All right, now. So look, I mean, we're just prognosticating about future things that we can't know and what have you. Anyway, so yes, on the typical recipe, this goes on for a little while, then Israel breaks the ceasefire and starts bombing them again. And maybe all other things equal, that's the most likely, you know, prediction of how the winter plays out. Fine. On the other hand, let's say, for example, that they are, you know, Trump is stern enough in his insistence that they keep the peace, that they allow minor violations that are out of centralized Hamas control to whatever degree that they can ignore what they can and mean to rebuild the Strip at all. What is phase B of this thing supposed to look like? Is it that Qatar and Egypt and UAE take over the Strip? Or Turkey, they take over the Strip? I guess Turkey and Egypt would be the most Muslim Brotherhood friendly country, especially Turkey, they take over. And Egypt, of course, used to run it. They're going to administer it or the plan, the 20 point plan was kind of vague about. Yeah, essentially, I think, implying that I infer correctly here that they were saying that essentially Hamas would stand aside, not disarm, but they would stand aside and allow a different separate, not the Palestinian Authority, but a different Palestinian Authority to be established to run the Strip. And then I guess my question is, does that mean then with the cooperation of these other nations would come in? Because of course, for anybody who's seen the drone footage of the thing, it looks like Dresden. I mean, they've absolutely leveled the place. So when you talk about reconstruction, shock doctrine, economics, man, you're talking about you need the world's largest bulldozer to come and scrape that land clean and, and build a new thing for the Palestinians. I mean, not for the Israelis to steal it from them, to be clear. But that's no way to live, quite literally after what the Israelis have done to the place. So.
- [20:19]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, so one of the things that I've recognized, I think for some time now is I don't think there's ever going to be a rebuilding of Gaza. If you look at what Israel's policy has been for Gaza over, you know, I guess since the disengagement, right, it's been complete blockade of all kinds of construction materials. How could you ever build the facilities and everything when Israel isn't going to allow in pipes and concrete and all other kinds of construction material? And I don't think that there's a doubt that Israel isn't going to fight even the United States every step of the way on this to prevent the reconstruction of Gaza. Because even if this deal, if phase A of this deal gets implemented and you know, Israel just kind of leaves the situation there, well, they have almost an immediate chokehold over the Palestinians where if you don't have infrastructure, if you don't have industry, if you don't have even the slightest ability to have a society, then if the aid gets cut off, you have maybe months to live before you're absolutely desperate. And so, I mean, at most I think that that's as far as we get in this deal where Israel just allows the Palestinian, some Palestinian technocrats that they pick to rule over some refugee camps made of 10 cities in like the coastal areas of Gaza. And that's essentially it. I don't think we're going to see a large scale Israeli withdrawal. I think the strikes will continue at least somewhat frequently. I mean, I just don't think we're going to get that far in the deal. And one other important thing is they haven't even negotiated that part. They agreed to the first phase of the deal. They haven't even started negotiations on the second phase. I mean, Israel has said Palestinian Authority could have no role, that they're never going to allow another body to have security control over Gaza. And so that sounds like continued occupation to me and, you know, no real plans to turn over anything to the Palestinians.
- [22:19]
Scott Horton
Yeah. One of our guests in the chat room here I saw a minute ago, had noted, which I hadn't seen this, but not surprised, that Itmar Ben gvir, who is a major part of Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government, has said that he would leave if they stop the war and fall short of their. Of completing their task of eradicating Hamas. And so that would mean that to go along with the deal, the Netanyahu government would have to fall and a new government would have to be elected and installed in power that's willing to go along with Donald Trump's wishes here. So that may be the end of that. Netanyahu wants to be, you know, he wants to die in office if he can, just to stay out of a prison cell, I think.
- [23:08]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah. And I think one of the real problems for Israel here, Scott, and this is actually in an article I wrote for the Institute on Thursday was that Israel's Channel 12 just released some documents about the discussions in Israel before this war started. And they had discussions and they decided that the hostages weren't going to be important and that they would see it as a loss. And if they just exchanged some Israeli or Palestinian prisoners in Israel for the hostages up front, they said they didn't want to do that. They learned the lessons of the Second Lebanon War. Well, one of the parts, even a phase A of this agreement, is 250 Palestinian lifetime prisoners. So people that at least Israel claims murdered someone are getting out of jail in exchange for the hostages. And so this is the exact outcome of the war that the Israeli government, the top levels of the Israeli government, Yoav Galant, the IDF chief, at the same time, Betsal Smallch, all said that this would be a failure. And this is, you know, phase A of the deal is to release the them for the hostages. And so I think with that, Netanyahu is probably concerned about his legacy and he doesn't want to be known as a loser. And to, to win this war for the situation they set up, it means genocide and Gaza now.
- [24:30]
Scott Horton
So look, this is the thing about it, man, right? Is this is what they were up against is they had failed. Right? It's not that they lost the war to Hamas, but, you know, all it takes to win as an insurgency is to not lose. And so all Hamas had to do was survive, and they did. And so it seemed to me like the most obvious interpretation of this thing was that Trump was throwing Netanyahu a lifeline here. He's sick of this for political reasons here, I guess, too. But he was, you know, the. It's very likely someone in the military profession explained to Trump that they're not able to destroy Hamas, sir. They're not willing to climb down into those tunnels to go after them, and there's still thousands of them left. And it's exactly as I said. And I think the first article I wrote a couple of articles for Anti War.com right after this thing happened in October of 2023, where I said, look, the Strip is small enough and 2 million people are few enough that with a real effort, you probably could hunt down anyone who was a part of this thing and kill them. But to do that, first of all, they would have to be really smart about how they filtered people out and relocated them into separate locations and whatever. We're not talking about South Vietnam here when we're talking about the Gaza Strip, where there's not a tree in sight. You know, this could be done, but at a cost far beyond what humanity is willing to bear in the. What the Palestinian civilian population can possibly be expected to tolerate in terms of their mass slaughter. In order to accomplish that, it's just too much. You have to find a way. You know, like, in other words, if there was ever an insurgency that could truly just be crushed, it might have been in the Gaza Strip, but only with Hitlerian efficiency of killing. Right? And I don't mean 60,000, but I mean 600,000 dead. Like, really, you know, we. We look at all this carpet bombing, and I ain't making excuses for what the Zionists have done here, but you look at the absolute carpet bombing of the Strip and destruction of all this territory, they mostly made all those people move first, and then they destroyed empty buildings, empty neighborhoods and things like that. So they. They definitely bombed a lot of apartment buildings with people still in them, too. I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying when you look at the vast destruction where entire cities are raised to the ground, all that the people have mostly been forced to flee before they came in and finished that job. So, you know, it's a little bit less worse than it might look on the face there. But still. Anyway, you see, what I mean is the. From the beginning, the calculation was obvious that, yes, with like, you know, even short of atom bombs, with enough absolute firepower, Hamas could be destroyed, but only at such a cost to the Palestinian civilian population around them that it would be absolutely criminal to do. It'd be impossible to do it in a reasonable way.
- [27:41]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, I mean, I would say, I do think that the death toll is in the hundreds of thousands at this point. I mean, I don't think it sits under thousand. But last year the, the pal American doctors who had done medical work in Palestine or in Gaza, like that was for one year and a couple months of the Israeli onslaught, they said 118,000 people had died. And so, you know, it seems like it wouldn't be unreasonable to think the number would be up close to 200,000 at this point. Sure. And I guess the other thing I would mention is at one point, I think it was bets el Smallch by my different genocidal maniac Israeli minister said we could kill a hundred Palestinians a day and no one cares. And I do think that is more or less the case. It was the starvation of children that started to push the world viewpoint against Israel, the capture of the flotilla activists. But when they were just killing 100 people a day. Nope, nobody really cared.
- [28:42]
Scott Horton
Yeah, we talked about that on the show. Right where it was at the beginning. The. The momentum was too high. Right. Donald Trump was even cringing at how bad it looked and advising them that for public relations purposes, they needed to dial things down. And then they settled on approximately a Waco massacre per day. Somewhere between like 75 and 120 people every single day. I see the headlines on anti war.com every single day. But seemed like we talked about this. I hadn't read anything in the Israeli press about this or whatever, but it seemed as though someone had given an order that said let's keep it at around, you know, low. 100 per day. 100 and something per day. And not too much higher than that in order to not raise the ire of, you know, adversarial politics too high to keep the temperature, you know, at an acceptable level. It sure seemed to be that way. And which is just, I mean, think about that. Where like an equivalent to the Waco massacre is probably politically acceptable, intolerable to do that on a daily basis to people. A Waco massacre every day for years. Okay, all right, listen, I do have to take care of some business. First of all, let's say that we're streaming live on YouTube here, which provoke from now on is just going to be a live show. Eventually we'll add a second show per week, I think me and Daryl, but we're here live every Friday. Me and Martyr made Daryl Cooper here and then we're also now streaming live on Rumble and you can find our full archive on there. We're also on Twitter. We got a brand new Twitter page which is at Provoked Podcast. No punctuation in there or anything, just at Provoked Podcast there on Twitter, slash X, et cetera, et cetera. And listen, you gotta buy my coffee. It's Scott Horton Show Coffee from Moon Do's Artisan Coffee. And I'm sorry, whatever. I. Everybody's got to make a living. So I'm interrupting this discussion of genocide to sell you coffee. But I got to drink it in the morning. You got to drink it in the morning. And you got to drink it so you can get home from the bar at night. And so coffee is good to drink. And this stuff is half Ethiopian, half Sumatran. And they hate the war party. They support me because they're pro peace guys and they hate Starbucks coffee for a lot of reasons, including that they support the war party and support the Zionist regime. So how about that? And it's really good. And you should get some. Just go to scott horton.org coffee for. For that stuff. And then the Expat Money Summit. This is Mikhail Thorup. He is a world traveler and a real expert on how you can buy property overseas, how you can protect your finances by diversifying your holdings and even literally around the world so that any one particular. The man can't get at it. And this is not a way to get in trouble with the irs. This is a way to follow the law and do the right thing by a guy who's a real expert and knows exactly what he's talking about. So that is expatmoneysummit.com provoked to check all that out and then get excited because the Scott Horton Academy for Foreign Policy and Freedom, I guess, of Foreign Policy and Freedom is coming very soon. And so I'll tell you more about that as I have in the past. I'll tell you more about that in the future here too. But so that is coming up. And then I lose anything. I remembered everything. Let me look at my list. Oh, I wanted to ask you about the yellow line here that Israel has withdrawn to. Can you describe that for me? Like, and, and have they actually withdrawn to it yet? And then are they supposed to stay there and for how long. And then I guess you've already stipulated you don't think they're ever going to get any further than where they are with this deal now anyway. But then supposedly they're to withdraw to a further line further back, not to the old Gaza border, but a new internal border.
- [32:49]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, I think there's overall three, three lines that they're supposed to withdraw from. There's like this first yellow line that basically just stops the offensive. They're not withdrawing from a whole lot of territory that they've taken. Still most of the Gaza Strip will be under Israeli control and then from there they're supposed to negotiate, I guess the nets withdraw line. At least this is according to the, the Trump peace map that I saw. And then there would be a third withdrawal which would be to the new buffer zone between Gaza and southern Israel again. So the second line I think is, is more or less at this point could be like pencil on a map. I, I, it could be withdrawn and redrawn and probably will be redrawn a couple times if they ever agree to anything. And, and then the border area seems to be just, you know, take the Gaza, Israel border and extend it between 1km and a half kilometer all the way around. So taking a pretty significant chunk, I think somebody calculated like 90% of the strip will be taken by this buffer zone.
- [33:55]
Scott Horton
Yeah. All right, well now at least they're going to unleash the humanitarian aid into the place. Do we got some strong indications of that?
- [34:03]
Kyle Anzalone
They say 600 shuts a day, so I would expect Israel to allow somewhere between, I think it was in the double digits recently, certainly not over 200, 600 a day is what kind of, at the very start of this conflict, aid organizations were saying were needed to feed the people of Gaza. Of course the situation has become much worse. Almost everybody in Gaza's depression displaced. I think Dave Decamp@antiwar.com had article this week, 83% of homes in Gaza are damaged, are destroyed. So everybody is living on the streets. Everybody is living, you know, just eating whatever they could get their hands on that day. And so the number of aid shots they need is probably a lot higher at than 600 at this point, just like sustained life. Additionally, all the warehouses, everything has been absolutely depleted. And so getting more aid into Gaza in case Israel does decide that Hamas is fighting bad too hard against our airstrikes or they're not giving up the captives enough and start to choke off the aid again, then there would be a little bit built up and you know, this is another important note. Whenever aid starts to enter a conflict zone, one of the things that aid agencies try to do is build up enough aid that you could flood the area with the food, food or else you create riots and stampedes and people getting knifed and killed at the aid distribution sites. Like with what we've seen with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Right. Like if you're forcing people to literally fight for their food that they're going to bring to their children, that day is going to end up with people being killed, Palestinians killing each other. And I think this is an intentional thing that the Israeli government is trying to do and cause the collapse of, of the, the Gaza culture, the, the Gaza society. That's why they've destroyed all the schools, the mosques, the hospitals. Not just because that's where people need to go, but those are community senators, that's where doctors are, that's where people like have meetings and things like that, making sure that none of those institutions no longer exist and then kind of forcing Palestinians to turn on each other. Right. If you throw a bag of rice between two starving people, they, they might kill each other for it. And I think that's a part of what Israel is trying to do here, where they don't necessarily have to do all the dirty work. They could create situations where Palestinians are killing each other or society is just breaking down to a point where the tens of thousands of orphaned children in Gaza don't have anybody to take them in. They don't have anywhere to go. They're just street children. Right. And they end up not being able to get food and starving to death and kind of just ending up, you know, lost.
- [36:45]
Scott Horton
Yeah, I think it's going to take a while before it really sinks in, even for people who have been paying close attention this whole time, about the absolute level of devastation of this society. Right. Not just the buildings, but like you're talking about the number of orphans, the number of people who are going to be absolutely traumatized beyond belief. Many people probably who are been driven out of their minds by surviving nearby explosions numerous times, including the physical brain damage from the concussions and then just the terror. Especially little kids growing up, you know, living through these airstrikes. You know, I talked with Phil Turney and the guys that survived the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty about what it was like to get machine gunned and Napalmed for what, 45 minutes. Those guys are absolutely effed up out of their minds, man. They're really traumatized to this day, dude. And they're tough guys, they're military guys, they're sailors and NSA officers. If anybody's supposed to be man enough to be able to survive being under fire like that and somehow come out okay, it would be them. And that was in 1967. And they are messed up, man. So now, like, how about the four year old who just spent two years living through this? These people are gonna have never mind drinking water after their basic needs are met, if they ever are. You know, what is going to happen to them as far as know, having lived through this, trying to somehow rebuild after this and what effort it's going to take to take care of all the orphans, for example, to raise them up and all that. It's. And as you say, when we already know the Israelis are never going to allow anyone to make a good faith effort to help these people. That's the real tragedy. This whole thing is the Israeli policies. We got to force them out of here, but no one wants to. No other nation state wants to abet the Israelis by letting them kick the Palestinians out into their country. And so. But the Israelis just refuse to let them out of this vice, though. They're not going to relent, say, okay, well, I'll tell you what, we'll just let Jared Kushner rebuild the Gaza Strip for you guys, right? They're not going to do that. They're just going to continue to, to keep the pressure on one way or the other. As you say, they're not going to let in the concrete for the rebuilding orphanage, nothing. They're not even going to have fresh water here.
- [39:24]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, no. And one of the things that doctors have brought up who've treated children in Gaza in the UN I think UNICEF has said that the largest population of children amputees in the world is in Gaza. And one of the reasons is that significant is for children, bones continue to grow. And so you really need a surgery. I think every light sits months to a year or else there's like extreme discomfort and, and really gnarly things could happen. I, I don't want to really go into it or think about it, but so you're going to have these children who need intensive medical care, you know, for 13, 14, 15 years. And there's one like semi functioning hospital left in Gaza. Even that hospital has been bombed multiple times. Right. The Israelis have raided the hospital before. So there's really no hospital in Gaza like the hospital in, in your neighborhood or your county. Right. There's nothing like that. Everything's damaged, destroyed. And even if there's what, you know, Israel's destroyed the roads and everything along the way. Nobody has cars. And so it would just, it's going to be an absolute nightmare to, for these at times orphaned and amputated children that have to like figure out and get medical care, get transportation to whatever medical centers there are. I do wonder if one of the things that Israel is more or less hoping for is that they've injured enough of these children that are going to need long term care that they're going to be able to like ship off large percentages of the Palestinian population by sending them and their families outside of Gaza. And this is not just pure speculation. One of the things that Ron Dermer said, this is one of Netanyahu's closest allies, the Israeli strategic affairs minister after, in his poor report that he gave Netanyahu after October 7th is basically you have to diminish the quality of life for Palestinians in Gaza to the point that all these Arab states that don't want to take them in because they don't want to facilitate the genocide of the Palestinian people will see it as an act of charity to the Palestinian people because there's nothing left and their children are dying. Like that's the situation that Israel is, has been trying to and has more or less created here. And one other thing I'll add there, Scott, is one of the things that really took me from like an average listener of the Scott Horton show to somebody who wanted to work@antiwar.com and be an anti war activist was I was a psychology major in college. And you know, you go through the classes and they talk about all the different mental illnesses and what causes it. And you take childhood development classes and you understand like what happens to children who are intensely traumatized when they're younger. And then this report came out, I think it was Human Rights Watch and they had some psychologists go to Yemen and they are talking about how all these 12 year old boys who had lived under four or five years of a drone war, you know, the constant buzzing of the drones and things like that, like the air conditioners and the fans would send off the boys into a violent rage. All the girls were withdrawn and scared all the time, wouldn't talk to anybody. And what we've inflicted on Gaza, I, I don't know what it's going to do to, you know, the children. So much to say about what Covid did to the children in, you know, the United States and around the world. Two years, a lot of people doing lockdowns, mandates and things like that two years of the genocide, of constant fear that you and your family are going to be blown apart. I mean, I, I, I hoard to think about what that is going to look like five and ten years down the road. And what, you know, the, the malnutrition, the widespread malnutrition of children in Gaza. I mean, everybody knows that has lifelong health consequences. Brain development, proper nutrition is very important there. So the entire population of Palestinian 4 to 12 year olds, I mean, are probably going to have some pretty serious, like lifelong consequences from this.
- [43:21]
Scott Horton
Yeah. All right. Well, few things. First of all, there's a comment here that says the Israelis didn't win because they weren't willing to do what it took to go and engage with Hamas toe to toe and fight. Well, yeah, instead they just bombed the crap out of them. And that was not effective. The Israeli way of war was not effective. And that was what I meant when I said that at the beginning too was understand they're, they're not going to do what it takes or they're unable to do what it takes to do this without inflicting massive collateral damage on everybody who happens to be nearby because. Exactly. Right, because they're cowards. As soon as somebody pops up out of some rubble and snipes them, they turn around and run the other way. So. Got that right, dude. No argument here. Now secondly, if you're just tuning in, this is provoked and you're looking for Daryl Cooper, Martyr Maid, but he's not here because he had some important things to do. So instead I've got the great Kyle Anzalone and he's news editor at the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor@antiwar.com and he hosts a couple great shows, Conflicts of Interest and the Kyle Anelone show, which you ought to subscribe to. He does great, such great work. He does the news roundup for us every day at the Libertarian Institute, Libertarian Institute.org news and is our managing editor there. He is right or no. News editor.
- [44:41]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah.
- [44:42]
Scott Horton
At the Institute. Yeah.
- [44:43]
Kyle Anzalone
And subscribe to the, the newsletter. Can I plug the newsletter?
- [44:47]
Scott Horton
Oh yeah, absolutely. Please do. I read that thing every day. I just forgot to say something about it just now is all.
- [44:52]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, every day at the Institute. All the news articles I write up I put in a newsletter so you can subscribe at the Institute. And then on Sundays I do like a little op ed style commentary and include some of the highlights from our featured articles over the past week and any podcast appearances Scott and some of our other guys have had.
- [45:12]
Scott Horton
Yep, yeah, absolutely. Great stuff. And everybody can just sign up there real easy from the front page of The Libertarian Institute, LibertarianInstitute.org that's all good stuff. Now, I want to slightly change the subject to another problem Israel is causing for us, and that is the potential of another conflict with Iran. And I wonder, first of all, here are some things I want to know from you, ma'. Am, assuming that you're up on all this better than me, which must be the case, what's your best estimation of the status of operations at Fordo, at Natanz, at Isfahan, if anything, what's left of Iran's nuclear program? How operational is any of it? Are they, in fact building new nuclear facilities? I know I've read reports that they said, one, y' all can go to hell. We're gonna still enrich forever. But also, too, we are not making nuclear weapons. The ayatollah's fatwa still stands. Now, obviously, they could be lying about that, but that's at least what they're saying. And it's obviously true that the inspectors were kicked out of the country for, what, 10 weeks, and that's enough time to divert nuclear material and try to figure out a way to get away with it. So before we talk about the politics of Washington and Tel Aviv, tell me about the reality of Iran's nuclear program now, the best you can, please.
- [46:38]
Kyle Anzalone
Yeah, I mean, I guess I haven't seen any recent updates, Scott, from maybe the past month or so, from the initial kind of battlefield assessments and what's been reported after. Certainly it seems like the White House's claims that all these sites were completely destroyed is really overblown. I think the big question is, what is Iran going to rebuild and what are they going to do with the stockpile of, I guess, you know, 60% of enriched uranium, which Israel seems to have known that they weren't going to destroy in this war and were okay with Iran possessing afterwards. That was, you know, in Israeli government defense ministry conversations before the war started. So I, I think for Israel, that kind of gives them an excuse to go back to war. Maybe they didn't want to want to destroy Iran's nuclear program too. Well, that they never have an excuse to go back to war or something like that. But that is still out there. And I think the big question is, what are the Iranians going to rebuild? And I wonder if Iran. So far, I haven't seen anything on any new reports that Iran is rebuilding or building a certain facility. They are saying that they are going to rebuild their facilities But I wonder if they maybe haven't started yet or aren't in a hurry to. That way they could maybe leverage not rebuilding something or only rebuilding something under a certain framework in an agreement with the United States. I do think Iran is still looking for kind of a diplomatic exit here, and I think Trump would prefer that as well. The, the, the question is, will Netanyahu allow that to happen?
- [48:10]
Scott Horton
Yeah, well, and of course, yeah, once Trump has adopted Netanyahu's theme or, you know, standard that a nuclear program is a nuclear weapons program, I mean, luckily he can change his mind about that, but he can also go back to war based on that fiction at any time, really, as long as they're still enriching. So now, a guy interviewed me earlier today and was saying he had all these indications that he thought it looked like they were preparing to go back to war here real soon. Netanyahu, after all, does need to stay in a conflict somewhere or another. Are you seeing anything like an emergency saying they're really getting ready to go again?
- [48:53]
Kyle Anzalone
I haven't seen anything, Scott. I read reports from Trita Parsi and Mads Blumenthal, who I think are usually right on these issues, and they are very concerned that Israel is going to go back to war sometime this year. It seems to me that Iran maybe should have, at least if there's any rational thinking in Israel, established a real deterrent during the 12 Day War. I do think at the end of that, it was Netanyahu that had to give up the war, not necessarily of the Iranians. Although, you know, with the Iranians, they do have to walk this very careful tightrope where if they do too much damage to Israel, then Israel is going to resort to their nuclear weapons. And so it's not as if Israel really lost the war, but lost the war without going nuclear, I think, is more or less the way that that ended. But at the same time, I do look at the, particularly the political situation in the United States. And if you're Israel or anybody in Tel Aviv, I think you have to calculate that Israel's support in the United states and the U.S. government in the halls of Congress, in the Pentagon, in the White House is never going to be higher than it is now. The American people, particularly younger Americans, has absolutely turned on Israel. And I'm sure they're going to launch propaganda campaigns and they're going to turn some of the support back after, even after they could completely genocide the people out of Gaza. I'm sure over time and with enough money and propaganda and they're able to like, sway the needle bat the other way a little bit. But the right now, I, I mean, Congress just absolutely subservient to Israel. Trump seems at this point to have not stood up to Netanyahu once, even as Netanyahu is probably what's preventing him from having a realistic chance to gain the Nobel priest Prize. He covered so much. And so I just, I think Netanyahu is going to do everything he can to at least significantly destabilize Iran. And I don't even know if they care so much about regime change. I don't think they would mind, say, if they were able to weaken the Iranian government enough and maybe get the Kurds to rise up or agitate some other kind of minority ethnic kind of violence in Iran. Right. They just, they want destabilization. Remember, you know, the Israelis wanted the Syrian war. They didn't want that to be resolved. They didn't want Assad to win. They didn't want the jihadists to win. They wanted Syria to bleed and to be destroyed and to be focused on internal conflicts so they couldn't focus on Israel. And so I could see something similar with Iran, but also really going for the west bank, if not outright annexation, making sure they carve out the west bank so significantly that there's just no possible Palestinian state. That would be laughable to say that, oh, there's going to be a Palestinian state, even though he had to travel through Israeli communities to go to one town from the nets and maybe parts of southern Lebanon and southern Syria, too.
- [51:53]
Scott Horton
Yeah. All right, well, we got a couple thousand people watching live tonight at least. So first of all, that means that we're kicking CBS News under Bari Weiss's ass. They had Nora O' Donnell interviewed, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, and 125 people tuned in. So you and me are a hell of a lot more persuasive than those two old freaks. So that's pretty good. And also, everybody like and subscribe and click the bell and share it with your friends. And this is a small and new and growing show. So we need your help with our pr. Let everybody know how great provoked is even when Daryl isn't here. It's a great show. We're doing just fine, I think, without him. And now, speaking of Nobel Peace Prizes, let me ask you a little bit here about Marina Corina Machado, who did win the Nobel Peace Prize. Apparently she is the new female Juan Guaido and they mean to put her in power over there in the Venezuela. And man, right before we went on, at first I thought it was just a put on, but it seemed like a credible source. It just sounded too perfectly hilarious to be true. That this same lady had asked Israel to do a regime change in Venezuela and install her in power personally, not just her friends or somebody she knows or the right, but her. Hey, Israel, will you put me in power in my country, please? Just as Juan Guaido had urged an American invasion of Venezuela. Imagine if Hillary Clinton had asked China to intervene to overthrow Donald Trump for her since, you know, Putin stole the election of 16 from her and all that. So obviously, you know, Maduro is a filthy commie rat and all of that, but what's the extent of American intervention in Venezuela? What's the danger we're really going to go to war down there? And is this Nobel Peace Prize all part of a plan to put this lady in power?
- [53:52]
Kyle Anzalone
Well, Scott, I didn't think Trump was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he actually might have, or at least his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. I mean, it seems absolutely insane to go to war in Venezuela that we would understand. This is going to create a huge migrant crisis. It's not going to go anywhere near smoothly as the military planners say it will, as whoever is agitating for this, probably Marco Rubio inside the halls of the White House is agitating for it. And so it seems almost too stupid that they really can't be thinking about as they talked about invading Venezuela and taking over some ports and things like that at the same time, it really seems like they're about to. And all the reporting says that's the talk. I even read this in the Atlantic. Nancy Yousef, I believe you used to interview her on the Scott Horton show, said that she spoke with defense officials who said that they are talking about extending the strikes on Venezuela to inside the territory, not just on ships that leave and are in international waters, but actually targeting strikes inside of Venezuelan territory. And Dave DeCamp has been doing a good job at Antiwar.com at documenting all the little times that Trump administration officials are, you know, unnamed. But they're saying things like, oh, you know, we could go after Maduro. We could stabilize his government. It's looking like this is more towards a regime change, war. And unfortunately, Scott, I was really worried about this whenever Marco Rubio was named Secretary of State. I thought, you know, my hopeful possibility here was that Trump names Marco Rubio Secretary of State because he looks good in a suit and he could read a press statement. Unfortunately, he has elevated Marco Rubio and is now national Security Advisor by read reports that he's really the most influential voice on foreign policy within the White House. And so, you know, because there are people who I think are more realistic and more likely to try to get deals done. Steve Wyckoff, Adam Bowler, Rick Cornell. In fact, Rick Cornell had gone to Venezuela at the start of the Trump administration, gotten Venezuela to agree to take back illegal immigrants in the United States. Maduro is willing to take them back. He releases six American captives. Like, I think Maduro actually made a good faith effort to like pay tribute to the new king, which really seemed like what Trump was trying to do in his first few weeks as president. Right. He was going through bullying all these countries and saying, if you don't stand or do what you're supposed to, I'm going to put all these sanctions and tariffs on you. So every country, I give up something. And Maduro tried to. And then Marco Rubio comes, he increases sanctions, he takes Maduro's plane and. And then he lists two cartels, one of which, Cartel De Los Solis, I don't even think exists. They say there's this drug trafficking network that essentially makes up the Venezuelan government that's headed by Maduro. There's also the other cartel that does is its tva. It has some presence in the United States. I believe even the US Intelligence community has said that. There's little evidence that Maduro is actually the leader of this cartel. But Marco Rubio claims he's the leader of the cartel. He has a $50 million bounty on Maduro's head. And Gurnell has been sidelined when it comes to Venezuela discussions. Trump told him they had to break off tots with Maduro. And it seems like this means we're ramping up for war.
- [57:22]
Scott Horton
Crazy. Venezuela is not Panama. A regime change, war there could go very sideways. You know, there's. Whenever they do these protests, even back in the days of Hugo Chavez, they would show on TV these pretty impressive seeming right wing protests against the regime. Then you turn the camera the other direction and there's a hundred times as many people protesting for the left. And this is what happened during wanguaGuaido too. On TV they show that same clip over and over and over and over again of that APC running over a guy's legs or something. They ran over him. I don't even think they killed him. It was, it had tires, not treads. And I think he lived. But they just played that over and over and over and showed a group of protesters and whatever. But then. And I never could find this again. I was bummed out because I really should have saved this. But I remember it was Max Blumenthal, no surprise, had found and was retweeting drone footage of the sea of protesters outside of the presidential. Whatever. If it's the palace or whatever, you know, I don't know the name of the building there. Their. Their White House, where the President was. And it was, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million people turned out essentially to protect the White House. Right, The. The presidential building. They weren't there protesting him. They were there. And. And we can understand this too, where, like, even if we had a commie government here that we wanted to kill so bad, if it was a legitimate homegrown government and we had foreigners invading our country trying to solve that problem for us, we'd shoot them first. And then our commies, you know, nobody wants to be invaded and saved, especially by the global superpower making it their business there. And especially not a tool like Juan Guaido or Juan Guido with breasts here, whatever her name is. Peace Prize winner here. So that's not to stick up for Maduro at all. But there's got to be a better way than this. I mean, there's, you know, if the CIA could just walk out of there, you know, and say, yep, we slit his throat, that problem solved, or something, hire a couple of guys to do a coup. I'm not in favor of that, but I'm just saying that's within the realm of. That's in the same hemisphere as reasonable, as opposed to a war launch. What, airstrikes, Sending in the Marines. Right. I mean, no, this is. That is absolute insanity. You might as well invade Persia. Forget it. So that's just crazy. And I'm not. Anyway, sorry. Yeah.
- [60:00]
Kyle Anzalone
So I. I think we're in the realm where we really do have to consider that even if it sounds insanely stupid, it doesn't mean that we have to completely write it off. And I. I think Venezuela is the best example of that. Marco Rubio is an idiot, but he has a lot of power and he hates Maduro. He doesn't have a good reason for it. And at this point, it doesn't seem like Congress or the American people really need to be informed on these issues. I mean, Trump says we're in armed conflict with the Latin American cartels. They just stuck them on the foreign terrorist organizations lives. No real reason to do that. They're not tied to Al Qaeda or jihadists. They don't even make a claim that they are. They just stick them on this list that Al Qaeda's on. And then they say, oh, just like Al Qaeda, we could bomb them. And they say Maduro is the leader of one of those cartels, so why not go kill him the same way we kill any terrorist leader anywhere else around the world. I mean, I, I really think this is a possibility and Congress has made some weak statements on this issue, but you know, I'm not sure that it's enough. And if they do this, it's going to be an absolute disaster. As you were saying, you know, Maduro shouldn't be popular. He seems like a fairly ineffective leader. He, you know, he's no Hugo Chavez. I'm not a commie in any way. But Chavez did seem like he was kind of effectively able to run the government. Maduro seems to always be hanging on and barely winning elections. That being said, the poor of the country do like them. They're dependent on the Venezuelan government. And the US has given them an excuse to blame the United States for every possible thing that's happened wrong in Venezuela. I was reading a story once, Scott. They had bought a power plant, I guess, or had it built by the Germans. And then once some parts and pieces went bad, I think it was Siemens that had to sell it to them and they couldn't because of the sanctions. And so they have this whole, you know, probably hundreds of millions of dollars that they invested in this power plant that they now can't replace the parts for anymore. And so, you know, there's so many reasons for the poor of Venezuela to hate the United States that when we invade, you know, I think Maduro has like 8 million people that are militia essentially, right? All these poor, they're absolutely loyal to him. Who will take up arms and who will shoot at the Americans. I mean, what they're talking about is insane. But you're talking about Pete Headset, Marco Rubio and what, 79 year old Donald Trump.
- [62:31]
Scott Horton
Yeah, so what I need to do is read oil price.com every day because I don't know anything and I don't know if, you know, have you been seeing any reports in the news whatsoever about Venezuela's oil industry and whether they had any ties with American firms left anymore? Yeah, last I had heard about this was a long time ago about how there's essentially one firm, one refinery in Corpus Christi that's capable of refining Venezuelan heavy crude, which is extremely polluted with sulfur and other pollutants. And so that was a Koch brothers now Koch brother Charles Koch firm corporation there and Sitco 711 gas was, was Venezuelan gas back when, but I don't know a damn thing about it from say the last even decade. So is any of that oil still flowing to Corpus and into American gas tanks or that's all under total blockade from America Now?
- [63:30]
Kyle Anzalone
There was one license that was given towards the end of the Biden administration and I believe Trump revoked that. He, I forget if he gave it a waiver. I revoked it. But there's not very much. There was a really good article in Responsible Statecraft, Harrison Berger, I actually had him on the show. And if you go, the most recent episode, the Kyle Anzlone show, it's the last thing we talk about. And in it, Harrison kind of explains that there is some lobbying firms that seem to be going one way and the other. Off the top of my, my head, I can't remember like who's lobbying for ads on and what, what they seem to be lobbying for. But it does seem there are still some competing interests when it comes to oil money. I'm just not sure how much interest, influence that has in the Trump White House at this point. It seems to more be like Marco Rubio, Latin American South Florida politics driving Latin American policy. And he's in complete control. And Pete Henseth wants to be the Secretary of War, you know what I mean? I think he wants to go on aircraft carriers and be taking in pictures of leather, leather jackets with aviators on, walking on the aircraft carriers as bombs are going off in the background. Like that's, I think, the way he looks at things. And so I'm very concerned that these two idiots are going to get the United States and create a massive mess that is really going to upend Latin America, you know, South America. One of the things I think they're going to agitate for is Guyana has a huge disputed area with Venezuela and there's a lot of offshore oil rights there. And so the Biden administration was even tinkering with this a little bit, backing the Guyanese military and giving them some assurances if Venezuela attacks, you know, maybe they agitate there and that's their go ahead and excuse for war.
- [65:17]
Scott Horton
Hey, I'll drink that Kool Aid. What the hell? Okay, no, not really. That was just a Guiana joke. Listen, well, that's insane. And you know, sometimes people take this wrong when you point this out like you're apologizing for the commies. I mean, first of all, Venezuela had, I believe, the most diverse and successful Economy in all of Latin America back under some mean old right wingers. They weren't libertarians anyway, but they were capitalists at least. And they had, you know, a major agriculture industry and all of this stuff. And Hugo Chavez ran that into the ground. And Maduro is, you know, probably even more common than him, and completely destroy that country's economy, but it ain't. You don't have to be an American commie to admit that. Yeah, and also Congress is just as commie when it comes to the Venezuelan economy as the Venezuelan government is. And we put such sanctions on these people. I mean, they have all these oil resources and we make it essentially a crime, de facto a crime in the world for any multinational oil firm to go to Venezuela and help get their oil back online so they can have enough money to whatever, at least get by. We wonder why we got all these Venezuelan immigrants, including criminal gangs, killing people in the United States of America. Well, our regime helped turn their country upside down as a form of punishment for them being commies and for being independent from us. We ended up destroying their country, helping to make it much worse. I don't know, Kyle. The percent Venezuela's economy sucks this bad since it was good, and some x percent of that is Uncle Sam's fault. I don't know how to quantify it for you exactly, but I can tell you this. We're number one and USA is the world empire and Venezuela is nothing. And so it's a safe bet that America's sanctions regime under Republicans and Democrats has a lot to do with the bankruptcy of the Venezuelan regime, because again, even economy can hire a French company to come in and develop their oil and run it for them. You know what I mean? If they want to. So. And I don't know about agriculture and everything, but. But at the very least could sell their energy that comes free out of the ground. And which, by the way, Greg palace told me years ago that wasn't even Indian land. It's essentially their oil is under rocks, under barren wilderness where nobody ever lived before. So the national government has always owned it and, you know, used it for patronage and whatever. But in this case, America's made that basically impossible and helped to devastate their economy and that meaning their population too, and drive them as refugees, not just to the United States, but all across Latin America and the rest. And you would think that Hillary Clinton just doesn't care what are the consequences of things that happens while she's Secretary of State and such like that, but that's exactly Right. And same for her and for Carrie and for Pompeo and the Rices and everybody else is completely crazy the way these people operate. And it sucks the way the American people never put these things together. It was same for Honduras. Whereas Hillary Clinton. Remember this one, Kyle? You might be too young for this one. I think it was 09, there was a coup in Honduras where the right wingers overthrew the left winger. And they were just business criminals. They weren't even like capitalist guys. They were gangsters and drug dealers and stuff who did the couple. And Obama said, we're not for that. We want to undo that. We don't like that one bit. And Hillary Clinton overruled him and told him, shut up, you. I'm in charge here, not you. And I say we stand by this coup and shut down the Organization of American States when they tried to oppose it and everything. And then they completely destroy the country. And criminal gangs thrived and ran everywhere. And then you had a massive refugee crisis, including, you can see Hillary Clinton on camera. Or somebody asked her, there are all these parentless little Honduran children at our border who are being sent.
- [69:18]
Ali Jackson
What do we do?
- [69:19]
Scott Horton
She go send them back. I was like, she's the one who overturned that country's entire domestic order and forced those kids. And of course, it was probably her and her friends who wrote the law that made it where you have to be a parentless child refugee seeking asylum to get through the loophole to get in there, you know, and whatever at that time. So it's the same story over and over again. The drug wars too, help to just destroy these countries. As you said, they're invoking the drug war to attack Venezuela now, and it's been that way. That's how George W. Bush destroyed Venezuela when he made Vincente Fox militarize. I mean, pardon me, Mexico. When he made Vincente Fox militarize the entire drug war. We talk about the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel and all those guys, they all come from the W. Bush era. They're the reaction to the militarization of. Of Mexico's drug war that America forced on them, USA forced on Mexico. Then it's the same story over and over again. Pisses me off too, by the way. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
- [70:19]
Kyle Anzalone
Oh, I guess one thing I had to ask, guys, just, you know, I think a lot of it is the result of the drug appetite of Americans, but that we demand that all these other countries in Latin America make it illegal. And these are tiny countries with small economies and so if there's billions of dollars worth of drugs flowing through, then the people who are moving those drugs have to act outside of the judicial system. So they're violent criminals. Right. That's how you establish dominance when you don't have any kind of rules or courts or things like that. And then they have a significant amount of weight and power. Right. A few billion dollars in the United States or 10, even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States doesn't give the cartels any real power in Washington, D.C. but when you're talking about Honduras or Guatemala or any of these smaller countries are, you know, poor areas of Mexico, the, the cartels are major business. And so that makes them a major part of the, the country's economy. And that it just fosters like an unstable situation where you're going to have a lot of chaos, a lot of crime in those countries.
- [71:28]
Scott Horton
Yep, absolutely. All right, so listen, we should wrap here soon, but I wanted to talk about one last thing here before we go. I wanted to recommend everybody read this great piece that we're running at the Libertarian Institute. It's by our scholar Joseph Solis Mullen. And it's called Libertarian Realism, Justin Raimondo's Challenge to Empire. And thank you, sir, for choosing that to be the spotlight today on antiwar.com as well. That's an easy way to find it, everybody, if you're looking for it. And it's about the founding Editorial Director of Antiwar.com of course, who is Murray Rothbard's protege, one of many Murray Rothbard proteges. And this article is about his theory of libertarian realism, which he wrote about in his toward his dying days. Nah, I guess not so much. This is from 2011. He ended up. He died in 2019 of lung cancer. Yeah, there he is. And there's the article there, Libertarian Realism. And so he had written back in 2011, a pair of articles, and they are called why Governments make war. That's October 26, 2011. And looking at the big picture, and that's November 11, 2011, and they're both@antiwar.com antiwar.com Justin. And these two articles, why governments Make War. And looking at the big picture, they essentially outline Raimondo's theory of libertarian realism. So this is taking, as Joseph Solis Mullins says in his article today, it's essentially one half public choice theory and one half non aggression principle. Right. So as libertarians, we are hell bent on having extremely limited government. And of course, you cannot have a limited republic at home when you have a global empire. And so we want to limit government intervention overseas as much as we possibly can in order that we may limit the size and the scope of the regime here in the United States. Of course, at the same time, Justin is trying to answer the question, well, why do we go to war all the time and it ain't for self defense, and so what is it? And the answer, what it really comes down to, is public choice theory, which is a wonky way of saying that private actors make all the public choices. Right? And so it's not about us, it's about Bush and Cheney or Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Pearl. It's what they want to do and for their reasons that they want to do it. And that can have very much to do with foreign lobbying, with the military industrial complex, with media pressures and with, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've had real, you know, longtime experienced experts tell me on my show that so much of our foreign policy can be boiled down to politicians being afraid of being called soft on communism or soft on terrorism. They're willing to get tens of thousands, hundreds, millions of people killed before they look weak. You know, there's that famous phone call of Lyndon Johnson on the phone with a Republican senator friend of his saying, I can't be the first American president to lose a war, so forget it, we're just going to keep going. As Bush Jr. Himself said, too, when asked about how Iraq was going to end, he said, well, that'll just have to be up to other presidents because there's no way he was going to make the decision to climb down on the thing because that would be in some sense admitting that he didn't get what he wanted. And he wasn't willing to do that. And he was willing for your cousin to pay any price for him to not have to admit it. And so that's the point of Justin's libertarian realism here is what's it all about? What's our foreign policy all about? It's all about domestic politics. And that isn't. He's not just saying so. A House member can run on a popular slogan like I'm tough on terrorists. He's not reducing it to just that. He's talking about the lobbies and the pressures and the incentives all the way around. But that, that's what it's really all about. The name of the game is, at the end of the day, the should be everyone's, but especially the libertarians insight is that people are individuals and they act like it and they act in their own interest and do what they think is good for them. And of course, if they're in power, they'll call it what they think is good for the government or good for the country at large when that ain't how it really works. So I just wanted to point that great article out to you because Joe wrote it and it's about Justin and Justin himself and all of his great work for Antiwar.com and his book. And everything is part of our anti imperialist heritage as libertarians in this society too. So we need to all know it good and well. And so those are a couple of great ones you can read again. Joe Solis Mullins piece is at Libertarian Institute LibertarianInstitute.org today. That's the spotlight on Antiwar.com right now as well. And I guess will be all weekend. Thanks to you Kyle for that. And then again, you can find I'm not sure if he links to Justin's articles in there. There's actually two Raimondo articles where he really tackles this two in a row here, why Governments make why Governments Make War and Looking at the Big Picture, both from the fall of 2011@antiwar.com and then with that, let me just recommend to you again follow Provoked's new Twitter handle. It's at Provoked Podcast and I'll be back here, I think with Daryl. Maybe not. If not Daryl, then I'll have another great special guest for you next week here Friday nights at 8 o' clock on the YouTubes for Provoked. Thank you very much Kyle and thank you everybody for watching.
- [77:16]
Kyle Anzalone
Thanks Scott.
- [77:43]
Scott Horton
Foreign.
- [77:48]
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