EP:45 - Defeat at Oxford!

Summary

Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton

Episode 45: “Defeat at Oxford!”
Date: May 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Scott Horton and Darryl Cooper delve into the psychology of modern conflict, focusing on how narratives, abstractions, and institutional failures shape public perceptions and decisions about war. Scott recounts his recent experience debating at Oxford on whether the West should risk war with Russia to avoid Ukraine’s defeat. The hosts weave this anecdote into broader critiques of Western foreign policy, the dangers of political abstraction, culture’s tolerance of abuse and violence, and America’s declining global influence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: On the Road and Oxford Misadventures

• The episode opens with Scott describing his overseas trip, highlighting the discomforts of long-haul air travel and the allure of first-class luxury (“Go on a 16 hour flight in an Emirates Airline first class suite and you will disagree… If I could afford it, 100% dude, every time.” – Daryl, 05:19).
• Scott then recounts his visit to Piers Morgan’s studio in London, followed by a tour of Oxford and his participation in a high-stakes student debate.

2. The Oxford Debate: Reality vs. Abstraction

• Debate Topic: “This House would prefer to go to war with Russia than let Ukraine lose.”
• Scott expected the premise to be obviously absurd but was blindsided by the audience’s emotional, rhetorical support for war—especially among liberal students.
• Notable quote: “I bombed. I start off with a 1984 reference because I’m like, certainly they’ve all read Orwell, right? But...they didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.” (Scott, 11:19)
• Team breakdown: Scott, former Slovakian PM, Peter Hitchens (antiwar right-winger), vs. a Ukrainian student, Telegraph editor, and Daniel Fried (US ex-NSC).
• Emotional appeals trumped, with Scott’s side losing both the room and the debate.
• Memorable moment: “The lady that went first, she was just all rhetoric and emotion about the poor little Ukrainians… didn’t say anything about the war, who was winning… It was all just, like, stand for bravery or whatever.” (Scott, 10:48)
• Scott critiques the disconnect between real-world risks and the abstract way elites and students discuss war, including nuclear war scenarios.

3. Psychology of Policy and War: From Afghanistan to Oxford

• Daryl and Scott discuss how Western elites and students discuss war in the abstract, with decision-makers insulated from its consequences.
• Quote: “It’s so obnoxious because…it’s all just abstract…Should people that I’ve never met…go fight the Russians so that I can feel better about…Ukraine?” (Daryl, 14:51)
• They draw parallels to Afghanistan, noting how policy is often removed from ground realities: “The worst consequences…you sure can’t like, smell the burning bodies from here…” (Scott, 19:41)
• Discussion of bureaucratic self-delusion: military and government officials pass sugar-coated reports up the chain, resulting in catastrophic policy disconnects.

4. Cycles of Coverup, Degradation, and Amoral Leadership

• The conversation lurches into historical scandals highlighting the normalization of abuse and deception, both personally (Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusations—31:37) and institutionally (legalization of torture – 34:00).
• The hosts connect this to America’s political and moral decline, where each new scandal or abuse is rationalized rather than reckoned with.
• Daryl: “There’s this process of degradation…forcing people to defend indefensible things … and that has a bad effect on you, on how you see the world.” (Daryl, 33:47)

5. Normalization of Atrocity and Inaction

• Even when public outrage erupts (e.g., the Abu Ghraib scandal, 37:44), it rapidly subsides into resignation.
• Notable quote: “By the end of the week…that was what you got to do. And then… Bush… yes, you’re damn right it is [torture]. But we have to.” (Scott, 38:58)
• Expands to the broader “it doesn’t matter” theme: facts and scandals rarely translate into accountability (“The whole thing is, we have to get the information out to the public… Turns out that you can do that and it doesn’t matter. Nobody cares.” – Daryl, 40:07)

6. The Empire’s Limits & Own Goals

• Scott and Daryl turn to the shifting global order, discussing America’s reduced credibility following missteps and overextension.
• Daryl forecasts declining US influence: “So much of our global power was based on the uncertainty of the limits of that power…there’s no way anybody is going to look at us with the same trembling fear that they used to.” (Daryl, 57:30)
• They address recent US operations in Iran, including the mysterious F-15 rescue near Isfahan, and suggest these are signs of US overreach and confusion.

7. Nuclear Nonproliferation, Iran, and War Rationality

• Discussion pivots to Iranian nuclear policy, with both hosts agreeing Iran’s restraint is strategic rather than fear-based.
• Quote: “They’re not doing it [building nukes] because…they simply choose not to as a strategic decision… Why would you want to introduce that?” (Daryl, 61:39)
• They analyze nuclear weapons as political rather than usable tools, emphasizing the irrationality of most nuclear-war fears outside the Cold War context.

8. Maintaining Integrity in a World of Cynicism

• On cynicism and activism, Scott admits to humble ambitions, hoping mainly to provide a truthful resource rather than single-handedly change history (“I would not claim to have a lot of integrity, man. I’m just doing my job. But…just want to be like a place where y’all can show up to if you need to know what the hell’s going on…” – Scott, 65:38)

9. Super-chat Q&A: Iran Operations & China’s Role

• Audience questions spark deeper dives into the Isfahan rescue (see below), US-Russia-China relations, and the ironies of US geostrategic blunders—often “creating the alliances we most feared” (Scott, 69:45).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On abstraction in war:

• “It’s all just abstract…should they go fight the Russians so I can feel better about holding my position on Ukraine?” — Daryl (14:51)

On elite disconnects and dishonesty:

• “They were lying their asses off and they knew it, that they knew there was no way.” — Scott on Afghanistan withdrawal (21:27)
• “People still believe they lived in a society where…if you can prove it [corruption/scandal]…then you have to act, right? And it turns out, you don’t.” — Daryl (41:10)

On the normalization of wartime abuses:

• “The horrible thing is not that we’re in a war and torture happened…But when we legalized it, when we drew up an entire legal infrastructure to make it okay—that’s when we went way, way, way overboard.” — Daryl (34:00)

On diminishing American power:

• “So much of our global power was based on the uncertainty of what the limits of that power were… All of that stuff. Like, there’s just no way anybody is going to look at us with the same trembling fear that they used to.” — Daryl (57:30)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:04 – 07:30: Banter, trip reports, and Scott’s Oxford experience.
• 07:30 – 13:15: Oxford debate deep dive—topic, audience, debate dynamics.
• 13:15 – 15:18: War debates: emotional rhetoric vs. substance.
• 15:18 – 16:43: Abstraction and detachment in war discourse.
• 16:43 – 25:49: Afghanistan policy lessons; institutional dishonesty & decision-making.
• 25:49 – 33:47: Scandals and normalization—from Israeli intel to Bill Clinton.
• 33:47 – 41:10: Societal degradation under continual rationalizations.
• 41:10 – 46:08: Whistleblowing, inaction, and myth of accountability.
• 46:08 – 52:52: Reflections on Iran, restraint, and shifting US foreign policy.
• 52:52 – 57:30: Q&A; Oxford debate aftermath & US strategic standing.
• 57:30 – 65:38: The declining credibility of the American empire.
• 65:38 – Close: Iran Q&A, cynicism, and closing reflections.

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Special Q&A: The F-15 Rescue Near Isfahan (48:37–52:03)

• Context: Listener query about reported F-15 WSO rescue operation inside Iran.
• Many SF operators were reportedly involved – much more than for a standard rescue.
• Daryl suggests the operation likely leveraged teams pre-positioned for other covert ops (potentially a raid on Iranian nuclear facilities): “You don’t have several hundred Special forces guys…for a rescue of a single pilot…That’s not how you would normally do something like that.” — Daryl (48:54)
• Various hypotheses: the pilot rescue as cover for other operations, or an opportunistic combination of missions.
• Both agree: regardless of the details, the scale and aftermath reflect strategic confusion and declining US initiative.

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Final Thoughts

The episode wraps with frank exchanges about the personal cost of integrity, America’s waning influence, and the persistent dangers of abstraction and narrative over reality in matters of war. Despite the heavy themes, humor and asides—about travel, music, and pop culture—keep the discussion grounded and engaging.

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For Further Insight

• Scott Horton at antiwar.com
• Provoked Podcast YouTube
• Follow: @provoked_show on X (Twitter)

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Next episode: More probing discussions on conflict, power, and modern propaganda—subscribe to stay provoked.

Transcript

[Daryl Cooper]

All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans.

[Scott Horton]

Negotiate now end this war. You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present and future. This is Provoked. Hey, Daryl, how you doing, man? Good. Hey, man, guess what? Since the last time I seen you, I went and saw Willie Nelson down at the Whitewater Amphitheater in San Marcos. It was badass. He's 94 years old and he's more of a rapper than a singer now. I guess in a way he sort of talks through his songs.

[Daryl Cooper]

But I remember like years ago, it was like 10, maybe it was even 15 years ago. But he was on tour and his tour bus got stopped and he and a bunch of guys like got held by police because they had a ton of mushrooms on them. And I'm like, man, I hope I'm 85 years old. I'm still like to tour in the country doing mushrooms. That's what's.

[Scott Horton]

Seriously. Yeah, he doesn't quit, man. He just gets up there. Whiskey River. It's on pretty good.

[Daryl Cooper]

Because I saw Bob Dylan back when I was in college. Like, so he was old as hell.

[Scott Horton]

I mean, and they literally last 4th of July here.

[Daryl Cooper]

Really?

[Scott Horton]

Dude.

[Daryl Cooper]

I don't know if he was sick or whatever. Bob Dylan seemed like he was gonna die the next day when I saw him. Like, it was not good.

[Scott Horton]

Well, you know what, the way when I saw him, I couldn't tell what he looked like because they had him in full silhouette the whole time.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, yeah. Is he actually Bob Dylan's kind of. He did something similar to what you've done with the intro to this show where from the very beginning, like, he just kind of sings like this. And so he's not going to get any worse. Like the actual singing. I love Bob Dylan. I got a book around here about Bob Dylan's lyrics by this Yale English literature professor that's like compares him to a lot of great English poets. I like Bob Dylan, but he never tried to be a good singer. So that's actually a good strategy if you're going to do this for a really long time.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, that look, I mean, I come from pirate radio and my show has always been very informal. I mean, the interviews are always very subject matter based because I'm trying to learn a thing or two. So I can explain to you better, basically is the reason for the interview show this all these years, but this whole time. But otherwise, yeah, like, I. If I wanted to, like, dress up in a Suit and go to work in at the office every day. I'd have done that, but I'm not trying to do that.

[Daryl Cooper]

I don't think you're right. I don't think you're built for that.

[Scott Horton]

I mean they try to make me wear Edwardian tuxedo and bow tie, but not really. I said, you don't want, I don't have to wear that. Right? And they're like, yeah, I just got home. I, I may be quite incoherent in tonight's show actually a little forewarning there just because I am a little bit jet lagged. Not too bad. But I did fly to England and back where I dug university. Huh.

[Daryl Cooper]

Nice.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, but I had a great old time, man. So I never been to Europe before and I have to say I don't think I'm ever going again because I can't sit still on an airplane that long, dude. I don't have the temperament for that. And it's one way flight from Austin to London or not, you know, whatever. Yeah, non stop flight. I mean and it's eight and a half hours there, nine and a half hours back. Nah, no man, I fly a lot, but not that long in a row, dude. I, I can't do it because I can't really sleep sitting up in a chair like that or whatever. I don't sleep around a bunch of strangers. Anyway, the whole thing is all completely.

[Daryl Cooper]

Dude, when I used to work in the Middle East, I think it's watched

[Scott Horton]

Star wars and, or a little bit.

[Daryl Cooper]

When I used to work in the Middle East a lot, I would fly sometimes from like Qatar or Dubai, just straight flight to the east coast. Brutal. Brutal, dude. Like no, one time I was on, I can't remember who's Emirates or, or Cutter's airline, but one of the two, it was like a late night like red eye flight that was you know, half full. Maybe one of those like double decker, just a big beast of a plane, 787s or whatever. And you know, because I was always flying for work, I was like a double gold platinum superstar member of like all the airlines with my, you know and they had some open first class, not seats, first class suites, rooms bro, like a bed, a big screen tv, a fridge. And you know, because I had a billion miles with their, with their airline, they let me go ahead and DM it. Oh man, it like made me understand like, like I've always thought like I don't need to be rich, you know, like as long as I got a dog. And like a nice cat and I can feed them and my wife's nice to me and cooks me good, good dinners or whatever. Oh, that's fine. You know, just get to the point where, you know, I always say that line about which is, well, forget it. It's probably not true how they think about it now that I'm giving this example. But you know, once you reach that point where you can go to like a medium restaurant and you don't have to worry about what things cost on the menu, extra money doesn't really make you happy. Yeah. Go on a 16 hour flight in a Dubai in Emirates Airline first class suite and you will disagree. Like if you look it up, it's like a $50,000 flight. And I'm like, who? What human would ever. And then I did it and I was like, oh, if I could afford a 100% dude every time.

[Scott Horton]

It's amazing. Yeah, well, if only you.

[Daryl Cooper]

Right, hold on, somebody. Mic, how do I sound? I'm on my good mic.

[Scott Horton]

No, I don't know actually, now that you mentioned it, you do sound terrible. Are you on your good mic? I was actually happy I could hear you at all because you logged on so close to the top of the hour and I couldn't hear you at first.

[Daryl Cooper]

Back to my crappy.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, yeah, see, that is more better.

[Daryl Cooper]

Boom. Thank you. Adam is Rolling Stone.

[Scott Horton]

No wonder I lost at Oxford. I didn't use Oxford commas in my speech when I wrote it. That was how I sabotaged myself. Wait, so I gotta tell you a story. So I don't go to the London there and I get a cab from the airport to Piers Morgan's studio and which was, I could see like the Parliament and the Old Bailey and all that stuff across the river while I was driving there. It was pretty cool looking, I don't know, old cool stuff to look at. And then it was really cool just driving around London. Had to take 125 lefts and rights to get to the place. You know what I mean? It was, I get it. It's an ancient city, you know, and then that was cool. And then I went up there and beat up on some Zionist pig for a few minutes and had a good time and got to hang out with Pierce Morgan a little bit. And I like that guy. Got to do the show in person or whatever. He's been very generous with his gigantic audience and having me on there. So that was fun. And you should read the comments on that on that episode. Man, that's a little over the top, actually, people liked it. But then I went to Oxford, which. Oh, I took a train out there. So I got stuff, countryside and whatever, which is. That was kind of nice to see.

[Daryl Cooper]

What were you wearing?

[Scott Horton]

You know. Huh.

[Daryl Cooper]

What you wear for the debate. Yeah.

[Scott Horton]

The suit.

[Daryl Cooper]

Okay, you did do the suit. That's good.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, I didn't do a bunch of. I'm not dressing up like that. I'm not creating pictures and video of me wearing a tuxedo unless I'm like at a relations wedding or something. Even then it would have to be a real special one. But I can't think of a time that's ever happened in my life before. But anyways, so then this really nice lady named Izzy, she gave me a tour all around Oxford and she showed me all the different colleges there's, I think she said, 27 different colleges there that are part of it. So she showed me a bunch of them and all the different things and took me to the Christ Church thing. And here's where Henry VIII hit out during the Protestant Reformation when the Catholics were trying to kill him during the Civil War. And this was like his castle is all full of secret passages in the hiding places and stuff for him. And took me to the. All the massive libraries and the halls of paintings of all the great graduates of Oxford and whatever kind of thing. It was really cool, man. They had books that are like the history of every county in England going back for, I don't know, however many centuries. Many, you know, longer than you might think. You know, I mean, really cool stuff like that. So. And then I did a debate and I'll tell you the good news first, which is I got to make friends with Peter Hitchens. And I've always really been very fond of him because he's an anti war right winger of sorts and good enough for me, man. And you know, I despise his brother. I didn't tell him that. But I. I did not like Christopher Hitchens because I mostly. Well, actually I did kind of like him in the 90s because he did that documentary about what an evil bastard Henry Kissinger was. But then he went from Trotskyite to right winger, even though he wasn't really from Commentary magazine and part of that set. But he was a Trotskyite turned warhawk to support the invasion of Iraq. So him. But his brother was always really good on that stuff. And I got to meet him, pal around with him. He was on my team. So the way it was was four on four, was one student on Each side. And then on my side, it was me. And then Jan something. I'm sorry, I don't know how to memorize or say his name. Say and memorize his name, I guess, in that order. But a former prime minister of Slovakia and Peter Hitchens versus a student, a Ukrainian lady, the former editor, or, oh, no, a current editor of the Telegraph, and Daniel Freed, the sanctions monger from the National Security Council. So we totally lost because the lady. Well, first of all, it was funny, Daryl. I might have even mentioned this to you last week. Maybe I probably did, because it's the only thing I thought about it, that the premise of the debate was so absurd that I thought it was, like, not even fair how badly we were going to win. Because the premise of the debate was this House would prefer to go to war with Russia than lose Ukraine. Or I guess let Ukraine lose is what they mean by that. And so I thought, well, that's the most ridiculous thing in the world. Like, what are you talking about? And then. But I didn't have it in my head, right, that, like, no, dude, this is a room full of liberal college kids. And this is, you know, they're good on Palestine, but they're bad on Ukraine, just like here. And so the whole room was all biased against me in the first place,

[Daryl Cooper]

which is fine, whatever.

[Scott Horton]

But then the lady that went first, she was just all rhetoric and emotion about the poor little Ukrainians and the principle of standing against injustice and whatever, and. But she didn't say anything about the war, who was winning and who was on what territory and at what cost, the risk of further war or any kind of substantive thing. It was all just like, stand for bravery or whatever. And then I went up there and they didn't get my jokes and they didn't like me at all, man, I bombed. You know, I start off with a 1984 reference because I'm like, certainly they've all read Orwell, right? But, like, maybe he's considered to be a right winger now. I don't know if they had ever, because I called it Air Strip one, but they didn't seem to know what I was talking about.

[Daryl Cooper]

And then.

[Scott Horton]

Anyway, whatever. And then my other guy was, oh, the Telegraph guy said, what? Basic Republican talking points, I guess. And then on my side, the. The prime Minister of Slovakia, he was a nice guy, but he was like 70. And he just read this script real quietly and had a real thick accent. Nobody could understand him. He was really quiet and he was like, talking about that one time that a bunch of people you've never heard of did things that they have no idea what he's talking about. And so I could tell people weren't even listening to him anymore. So he was like kind of a net, nothing maybe for our side. And then Peter Hitchens, he was great. But and, and said a lot of things I wish I had had time to say in my thing and was a better rhetorician than me or whatever. What do you call that? But it wasn't enough, man. And then oh, and Daniel Freed got up there and at least he acknowledged that no, there is a risk of nuclear war here. But hey man, we were always willing to go to nuclear war over Denmark, so why shouldn't we go to nuclear war?

[Daryl Cooper]

There was a, there was a chancellor of West Germany back in the day who when this topic came up he had like kind of a, a semi famous quote that America, when it came down to it was not going to trade Detroit for Dusseldorf. Like that they would let it happen. Rather than.

[Scott Horton]

That's what I said. I said listen, and I got news for you Lithuania because I, I gave the example. I said NATO membership is a terrible moral hazard. And I gave a quote of a Lithuanian defense official saying that they closed the Suwaki corridor to prevent Russian shipments from going between Belarus and Kaliningrad. And they said well we wouldn't think of doing this or he doesn't say that. He says but we don't fear retaliation from the Russians because they know we're members of NATO. If we weren't members of NATO then we probably wouldn't do it. So he's like hiding blatantly saying you're hiding behind America's nuclear skirt here basically and taunting the Russian Federation. It squeak little Lithuania that couldn't do a damn thing about it. If the Russians came and would be 100% dependent on us, they're willing to pick that fight. That's what a war guarantee is. It's a license to a foreign nation to get you into a war. And I said and I got news for you Lithuania, we're not coming for you either. Forget your NATO membership doesn't mean anything. We're not America's has wants nothing to do with this. And I wish I had said Joe Biden was the most anti Russia hawk president that we've had since the Cold War. And he said explicitly we're not putting troops in Ukraine. That would mean World War 3, the end of all European civilization and American civilization forever. Well, the loss of all of our major cities. So you know, all of our major libraries and museums and churches and everything.

[Daryl Cooper]

Even if by some miracle it didn't come to that. The idea that modern Westerners have the stomach for even the casualties that Russia and Ukraine have suffered over the last few years, totally ridiculous. Like, the annoying thing about these kind of arguments with the kind of people that you were talking to is that it's all just abstract. Like that student, the girl, like, would we rather.

[Scott Horton]

What do you mean?

[Daryl Cooper]

We rather go to war? Nobody, you know is going to go to war if you go to war with Russia, unless it does escalate to, like, nuclear weapons. I mean, like, you're talking about. Should people that I've never met who are from a completely different social class than me that I'll never know or ever run into afterwards, should they go fight the Russians so that I can feel better about holding my position on Ukraine? Like, that's really what you're talking about, you know? I mean, at least give, like, you know.

[Scott Horton]

And you know what, darl? They just scoffed at the mention of nukes. Like, the whole room, I'm like, guys, I said we can't go. I see. I made another joke they didn't get. Haven't you seen Threads, which is the English version of the Day after, where it shows Maggie Thatcher gets England into a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, jumps into war on America's side in a. In a war with the Soviet Union, and England gets nuked and they all die. He was destroyed. Everything they built for a thousand years is gone. And as I joked in there, you'll be burning Empire Strikes Back action figures for cooking fuel, which is something that happens in that movie, which I thought was hilarious because I'm a big Star wars store.

[Daryl Cooper]

I'm guess that's another reference they didn't get.

[Scott Horton]

Another reference they didn't get. Well, actually, I. I knew they wouldn't get that, but I thought maybe if they watch Threads in the future, they'll be like all the Empire Strikes Back action figures he was talking about. I don't know. I was trying to be a little levity, you know, I don't know.

[Daryl Cooper]

I just think, like, it's.

[Scott Horton]

They didn't like me, man.

[Daryl Cooper]

That kind of stuff. These discussions are so, like, they're always in the abstract, and it's so obnoxious because, I mean, just like you just said, like, they just scoffed at the idea of nuclear weapons potentially coming into play. Like, it's not real to the people who. And, I mean, it's not as if these are people sitting around the bar, you know, sitting around the Cheers bar debating this issue. Like these people are going to go into public policy and like, you know, be members of parliament there at Oxford, you know.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah.

[Daryl Cooper]

And like, so they're actually going to be involved in these decisions that the consequences of which are just completely like, imaginary to them. Like, they can't even, they can't even fathom. It's like when, you know, if you go back to like the 1960s, the anti war movement before the draft opened up to be able to pull college kids in, the exemptions got pulled and the anti war movement, like really, really exploded on the college campuses. But there was a movement after that and it was large and it was energetic and give them some credit for that, that like, they were exempted from the draft and they were still getting out there protesting it. And like, you know, some people. And like, it's just. Yeah, I, I just think like, you know, back when, back when the Afghanistan withdrawal happened, Jocko and I did an unraveling about the whole thing and we didn't really focus much on just the things that happened on the ground. Whatever everybody was talking about that stuff. We went like a little, sort of a little deeper and more like behind how something like that could come to pass. Right where one of the things I mentioned is that the, the president of Afghanistan at the time, at the end,

[Scott Horton]

he was a dude who was like

[Daryl Cooper]

a, he was like a college professor and an author who had written a book literally called how to Fix Failed States. And I, I, you know, I, when, when I found that out, I didn't have time to read the book before we, the whole book at least before we did the show. So I looked up a whole bunch of reviews on it and. Because I just had a suspicion that like, I was going to go through all of the foreign policy, you know, journals, foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy magazine, like all the national interest, and every one of them was just going to review it like it was the most amazing thing they'd ever heard. And that. And I was, and I would just wanted to see what they said because this book, even the part that I got through, I mean, the examples he's using on the methods needed to fix failed states are like, you know, something that, like the state government of Oregon did, Singapore, like, all of these places that are just objectively not failed states and have nothing to do with like, the basic problems of how to ensure basic physical security for people or any, any of those kind of things. And I'm like, okay, but I'll bet You, this guy, when he walked into somebody's office in the State Department and he presented his thesis and he started talking about global flows of information and capital and blah, blah, blah, they just, oh, their hearts were a flutter. They melted in their seats at this guy. He definitely has to be the next president of Afghanistan. How could anything go wrong? And it's just because, like, the, these people live in world, in worlds that are defined by just words and concepts and have no real, like, connection to like, baseline reality, you know?

[Scott Horton]

I'm glad you brought up Afghanistan. I think it's a great example of this where a few different things that you're talking about, or a couple of these, that the unreality of the thing because of how far away it is.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, right.

[Scott Horton]

If the fighting was going on, like in France, and the question was, should Britain jump in the war right now? It would be a whole other thing. Maybe it'd be that much more important to do it, but it would be a whole other level of reality, that's for sure. Ukraine is far enough away, even from England, that it's still, you know, a bit abstract. And in Afghanistan, the worst consequences, I mean, everybody kind of knew it meant increase in the overall opiate supply in the black markets in the world, that was for sure. But otherwise, you sure can't like, smell the burning bodies from here, you know what I mean? What parts per million and all that. So, yeah, so it was it you could do like, if you're, if you're a Washington D.C. what they call the Coas, for example, who pushed for the Obama era surge. The whole thing was like, play time. It's like a science class without the teacher. And you just do your own experiments and just mess around, see, like, oh, you know what? I know what we could do. And just, they're just launching military missions hither and thither. They didn't know what the they're doing the whole time, man.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, yeah. And that leads to like, a mentality that, you know, that, that, that judges success in failure according to criteria that have nothing to do with reality. You know what I mean? Like where.

[Scott Horton]

And so that's why it went on for 20 years.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah. They look at it and they're like, well, we're checking all these boxes, we're meeting all of these, like, you know, I, I, when we put up the spreadsheet at our weekly meeting, there's a whole bunch of green, you know, and they see that kind of stuff. And that means we're winning the war. That means everything's going great. That means we can leave and the Afghan army will hold up and it'll be great, like, and then all of a, all of a sudden, reality crashes down on everybody and they're like, what's up?

[Scott Horton]

I, I, I, I think I have to differ with you a little bit there. My take on the situation then was that they were lying their asses off and they knew it, that they knew there was no way. They were, like, praying that the Afghan army could last. But that whole thing about how we won, that was a pure, like, hollow excuse to withdraw. And they should not have done that, dude. They should have been honest and said, look, dude, we're leaving because we lost. The Taliban already rules, like, 75% of the country in the daytime and 95% at night, and we just lost this war. That's it. So the Afghan army is a joke, and the Afghan national government cannot stand without us. So we're, we're going to pull out all of our equipment and we're going to pull out all of everybody who wants out of there or needs out of there, whatever that we got to take, and we're going. And then, and it just admitted it. By pretending that the reason we get to leave is because we won, they completely botched the timelines. What really happened. They kicked the can down the road from leaving in May to leaving in September. The Taliban didn't delay their takeover the country. We had our decent interval to leave, as they called it in Vietnam. We were supposed to be out in May. Then they would have sacked Cobble, you know, probably in August and then, or yeah, I guess July, August and then. But we'd have been out of there for a couple of months at least.

[Daryl Cooper]

And so, I mean, that's definitely themselves.

[Scott Horton]

They were just lying to us.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, that's definitely possible. I guess I only, like from my experience in the DoD, I can, I can see it being possible also that, you know, people who were there focusing on, like, who were there with the Afghan army officers, like, training them and stuff, they knew their bosses had some idea. The bosses above them had a very limited idea. And as you worked up, like, because I've seen that, like, in action, right, where I used to go out 8, 10, 11 months, a year sometimes, and I would be deployed with strike groups. I, you know, every cruiser destroyer other than the last four or five that have, have hit the water that you see over in the Middle east right now are deployed. I've been on all of them a bunch of times, right. And I, that's I would be assigned to strike groups, and they would fly me around to different ones that needed training or, or technical assistance or whatever. And so I spent a lot of time out there with all kinds of different crews, you know, good crews, bad crews, just the average ones, like, deployed in hot zones out in the middle of the Atlantic, like, steaming across, doing nothing. Right? So all different kinds of scenarios. And I, I had a good idea of, like, the state of the. The fleets, at least their combat system side, like, the training levels, all the things that were going on with these ships. And so I would get back and we would have like, one of our, you know, the. The. The technical director and the CEO of the installation that I worked on would have a, you know, their. Their town halls or whatever. And they, in totally good faith, like, I still believe this. I don't think that they were. I think they wanted the truth. They would ask for people to, you know, at the end of the whole thing, like, just, do you have any questions? You have any comments? Do you have. Blah, blah, blah. And I would raise my hand every time, and I. And as soon as I raised my hand, my boss, his supervisor, everybody on just went, oh, God. Like they were. They. And it was because. And I told him. I was like, look, I've been out here, and I can tell you, like, in this way, this way, like, readiness is not up to a standard that you want a war kicking off and, like, expecting these ships to be able to defend themselves or the carrier. Like, I'm. And here's all the reasons why. And I, I did that a few times. And when Newt. When town halls or co. Technical director meetings would come up after, they would literally find other things for me to do to, like, send me off on another assignment so that I couldn't come. And it's like, you know, probably something like that. I could see something like that happening. How's. How's the, you know, the training of the Afghan army going? Oh, sorry, you're, you know, a lieutenant. It's really, really bad. Okay, well, I got to go tell the colonel something. He's not going to want to hear that. Colonel, there are some holes, you know, that we've got to fill. There are some shortcomings that we got to make up. The colonel's got to go talk to the general, and he certainly isn't, you know what I mean? And by the time it gets up to the President, it's like, oh, look at this chart, sir. Everything's actually pretty good. We have full faith, you know, that I Can see that happening 100%.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. You know, that's the more benign version of October 7th, too, which I think is plausible that just no one was telling Netanyahu that, like, hey, man, I'm sorry, that game of yours that you were playing is over. Dude, you better wake up, buddy, for it's too late. Because nobody talks to him like that. And that's what it would have taken. And so it was like, okay, I

[Daryl Cooper]

guess we're just waiting around to imagine in Israel because they are, you know, they, they, they've. They've always had to be so much, you know, more plugged into reality because they were closer to it. But, you know, I, I could see it with like, the current Netanyahu government where, you know, he's. It, it is like that. I mean, he's got a government in place now that's a bunch of people who are fully, ideologically aligned or to the right of him, who are. Who. Who are not really. Yeah, I, I could see that under this government in the past, it would have been hard to imagine.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. And which I don't mean to dismiss the other possibility. I don't really know. I don't like to assume the worst because usually it's not quite the worst, but, yeah, I don't know, sometimes it is. So I don't want to dismiss the possibility because, you know, there are people who've done some work where they. I mean, we certainly know, even from what they've admitted through Ronan Bergman and others, that of how much prior knowledge they had. So, you know, they're not. Yes, it's a couple clicks worse, you know.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, they're not above it. It's not beyond them. And so, you know, that's. It's certainly a possibility. Like, did they, did that happen? I don't know. But would they do it? Absolutely.

[Scott Horton]

You know, that reminds me of when Ron Brown was killed in that plane crash in Bosnia in 1995. The Commerce Secretary. And it was like, oh, Bill Clinton murdered his own Commerce Secretary. And, and there was like the. I have on tape here somewhere on vhs, the doctor saying, well, he did seem to have a hole in his head, although, I don't know, he wasn't a plane crash. But the, the line on talk radio, Raleigh James was the, the radio host in. On KLBJ at that time. And her line was like, I just. Like how everybody just assumes Bill Clinton did it. Like, what does that say about the President, United States and the people of the country that if the Commerce Secretary dies in a plane Crash. People immediately assume that the President had him assassinated and the plane crashed over it. And like what, like the assassin jumped out the door or whatever. That's everybody's first assumption. Because we know Bill Clinton is a rapist and a murderer. We know that. That's of course what he would do, is murder some guy who got in his way. That's what he had to do.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, we're talking about Bill Clinton, the

[Scott Horton]

mad bomber, the sociopathic, throat slitting, face biting rapist killer. So what wouldn't he do? And that was earlier in his presidency. Right. That was in his first term. That might have even been a 94 or something.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, other presidents, it would have been like a lot harder to, you know, maybe to, to imagine for most of them. But when it's like your 14th or 15th person you've had killed, I mean, it's possible. You know what I mean?

[Scott Horton]

And by the way, I know it sounds crazy to call him a face biting rapist, but his victim is on Twitter and she's huge. Juanita Broderick, a tennis nut is her handle on there. And she's a very pro Trump kind of Republican. She certainly ain't a Democrat.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, even Democrats she told incredibly,

[Scott Horton]

man, she's not a part of. She's a partisan now, deep into the future. Back then, she absolutely was not. And she was only, let me just say real quick, she only told her story. She actually lied in the same deposition that, that or same set of depositions that Bill Clinton lied in originally and Apollo Jones civil lawsuit where she was subpoenaed to come and she li, she perjured herself there and said nothing ever happened. But then when it became the federal grand jury investigation, her son was a lawyer and told her, listen, you can't lie to a federal grand jury no matter what. So she told him the truth. And then, then she told the story to NBC and it was totally credible. Anyone can watch her interview with Lisa Meers and, and she talked to the Wall Street Journal and they published all about it. And she sued for no money at all, but just for her FBI file, but no damages whatsoever and did nothing to like seek publicity or any of that. So she didn't become a public person really until Twitter in, I mean, recent years.

[Daryl Cooper]

The. By the standards of MeToo, Bill Clinton should not be like publicly shamed and driven from public life. He should be in prison. Like, oh yeah, you know what I mean?

[Scott Horton]

He had a witness contemporaneous Tanya something or other. Like found her in her immediate victim state with her torn pantyhose and her bleeding, swollen face and whatever her. Like, yeah, yeah, he savagely bit her on the face as he raped her. And, you know, of course he did. That's a problem.

[Daryl Cooper]

But, I mean, that does, like, it really does. Like, you know, like, I've had times in my life where my moral code has oscillated, right? Better sometimes, worse other times. There's never been. And I could never imagine, like, a situation where I would be capable of doing anything like that. And that's pretty much everybody I know that that's the case. Like, I couldn't even imagine them doing it. And so when you have a type, like a personality, a pathological personality that could do something like, you know, sexually assault one of your female, like, underlings, bite her lip, make her bleed, like, leave her crying in the corner, and then. And then just go off and go about your day. Like, you can't just think of it in terms of like, oh, this dude disrespects women. He's disrespectful. Or he's like, no, no, no. This is a deeply pathological personality that is capable of all kinds of heinous stuff, you know, 100%. You have to take that into account. Yep.

[Scott Horton]

Yep. And you know what, too? NBC buried that interview. Lisa Myers interviewed her when the Senate trial was still going on or maybe even during the impeachment in the House. And then they buried the damn interview and didn't air it. And it was like, you know, there are a hundred reporters begging to interview her. And she. The one that she trusted was Lisa Myers from N. DC and then they still didn't run the damn thing until after he was acquitted. And a bunch of the centers that did vote to convict, they said that was the evidence that made them vote to convict on the perjury charges. Because it wasn't the perjury charges. It was. They read her transcript of her testimony to the grand jury, and they were like, all right, we're getting rid of this guy. And which, by the way, if they had just done the right thing, then. Then Al Gore would have been the president, and that would have been very bad for a lot of reasons, but we would not have done Iraq War Two. In fact, I bet September 11th wouldn't have happened either because he was terrified of al Qaeda and very interested in that subject and wanted to do everything he could to prevent something like that from happening. So. And we definitely would not have done Iraq War two, Afghanistan, Syria, all that, like, whatever. He would have been, you know at Israel's bidding to a degree. But Joe Lieberman ain't Dick Cheney. All right? Like, it's just not the same. And, and history would have been so much different. The whole goddamn third millennium start off just like because of George W. Bush. And it just did not have to be that way. And he would have been the incumbent president and he would have beat Bush by four states or whatever and it would have been fine, it would have been terrible. But it would have been so much less worse, dude. So much less worse than Bush and Cheney torturing people to death. Invading Somalia, kicking off the longest war in American history in Somalia in December 2001 that we're still fighting to this day. Look atnewsantiwar.com. we're bombing Somalia almost every day. Dave DeCamp is the only guy who writes about it. He just is following the DoD press releases. They admit it. They don't. You know, it's not secret. This is the war. We killed a bunch of guys today and they put it out on centcom.com or whatever the hell. Dave's the only one who writes about it. And never mind how Iraq War two kicked off Libya, Syria and the caliphate and all of the rest.

[Daryl Cooper]

There's this process where like, you know, like this process of degradation that a society undergoes when starts to attach itself to people or other countries or causes or whatever that, that force them to, that forces the people to defend indefensible things. Right? Like we, when we, when Bill Clinton was president and you have this guy who's like literally got a credible rape accusation against him, you know, at least one a corrupt, you know, family even before they're well known. But you know, we're in a very partisan environment. You gotta, you gotta fight for your guy and like whatever. But now you're not defending a guy's policies or whatever. You're, you're fending off like a guy's rape accusation. You know, you're talking crap about like the 18 year old intern who, you know, he was, he was taken advantage of. Well, who knows, maybe. Anyway, it's a longer story. But like, and, and as you start to do that, just like as we've done with the war on terror and especially like our just attachment at the hip to Israel. It just puts people in a position where you have to continually defend worse and worse things. And that has a bad effect on you, you know, on your, just on how you look at the world and, and see things. I mean think about like you mentioned torture during the Iraq war, like the, the the, the. The horrible thing is not that we're in a war and torture happened. That is a, a horrible thing. But you know, that ha. Like there have been a lot of wars where we get our hands on a captive or whatever side gets their hands on a captive and the guys, you know, the, the guys torture him. That, that is something that people who are under the stress of war sometimes do terrible terr. But when we legalized it, when we like, drew up an entire legal infrastructure to make it, to make it okay, that's when we went way, way, way overboard. Like, we went way off the rails because it's like, you know, we would have like, propaganda shows, like 24, right, that were like, totally just existed just to train Americans to understand that under the circumstances of like, global terror and everything, we, the government sometimes has to do whatever the hell it wants and nothing matters. There are no rules. And that's okay. That's actually cool. Like, but, you know, because the thing that they would always say, right, well, what if there was like a nuke about to go off in downtown Manhattan and, you know, the CIA's got this guy and he knows, but he knows where it is, but he's not going to tell. What if they tortured him and they saved the whole city? It's like, okay, we have a whole, we already have a whole legal setup for that. It's called arrest that guy, the CIA guy who tortured him, put him trial, let 12 of his peers hear the story, and they will decide that, you know, under the circumstances, we're going to let this guy go. We have a whole system for that already. You know, for people to judge things like that, to go out and like, make it legal. I mean, it's just things like that have just steadily deteriorated, like the political discourse and just the general morality of our culture, you know, and things that would have absolutely shocked us and shaken us to our core that, that, that government would, would feel the need to cover up and deny vehemently and like, you know, all these things, like, we just take for granted now is like, normal. Nobody even flinches. And that's not good because again, just like Bill Clinton being a crazy person who would rape a woman, like that is not restricted, just his treatment of women, but to just, you know, all kinds of, like, areas of his life. It's similar with us. Like, you start getting yourself and your society into a place where, you know, these snuff films coming out of Gaza or the west bank, like, just don't even raise an eyebrow with you anymore. That's going to affect a whole, whole, whole range of, you know, how you behave.

[Scott Horton]

Sorry, man. I always do that. I was burping earlier and I was sparing everyone by muting my microphone, and then I left it off. But, yeah, no, I remember when this happened. As you know, I was. I am. I guess I was real talk radio head back then. And I used to love, especially 5:50am down in San Antonio, Carl Wigglesworth and all those guys. And what happened was when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and broke, they freaked out. They were like, we do not do this. George Washington outlawed this in 1775. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Daryl Cooper]

No way.

[Scott Horton]

This is un American. That was like on Tuesday. By Friday, it was like, well, what are we going to do? Impeach and remove the president and put him in prison and all of his men for this? We're not going to do that. So I guess we're just going to go ahead then. Okay, well, so this is a thing we accept now. And it was like, by the end of the week. By the end of the week. And just. That was what you got to do. And then. And that was what it was. Because Bush, he got caught and he goes, look, it's not torture. But then also, yes, you're damn right it is. But we have to. And all good, true, patriotic Americans want to fight terrorism. Except that.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah. And I guess, like, you know, I guess it does. Like, there were people back, you know, in the 70s and even just like later on in ensuing decades who, who defended Cali, you know, after me lie. And. Yeah, that's always going to exist. But, you know, now it's like there's a little bit more of an insidious thing where, you know, those people were maybe like a certain. A certain type, you know, a certain segment of person who would defend Cali and, you know, say, well, we put our boys in this situation. You got to let them finish the job, or whatever it is. Like, there, that was a segment. But what you just described, you know, this thing where, like, it happens, it comes out. There's this big furor. I mean, think furor. I don't know. I don't want to get in trouble for saying furor, but you've been reading

[Scott Horton]

a lot of German history lately.

[Daryl Cooper]

It's all right about like, like the Snowden revelations, right? It's like, oh, wow. Like, you know, this guy got exiled to Russia, you know, is under threat for the rest of his life for getting this stuff out, and now it's out there, and all this stuff's still going on. Like, everybody, like, got outraged for a while, and maybe they're still outraged, but it's still. Still happening. And everybody's used to it now.

[Scott Horton]

And.

[Daryl Cooper]

And there that weird process of, like, you know, things being exposed. All the movies, like, in the 80s and 90s that were, you know, conspiracy theory movies, or you think of the X Files or something, all of these things were like. The whole thing is we have to get the information out to the public. We need to find the proof and get it out to the people. It turns out that you can do that and it doesn't matter. Nobody cares.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, me and Will. Greg used to joke about that. There's a Tom Clancy movie with Harrison Ford as the heroic CIA guy who marches up. The movie ends with him marching up Capitol Hill with an arm full of documents. And it's like. And then the credits roll because you know that, well, Congress is going to do the right thing and hold all the bad guys accountable. Of course they are. You don't even have to show that part. It's so taken for granted that everybody knows that the system works, dude. And even if the President is a murderous cocaine dealer, well, Johnny CIA agent is going to go march up the Hill and Congress is going to take appropriate action and everything's going to turn out fine in the end.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, because there was this mentality. It's not like people thought politicians were virtuous back then. You know, lawyers and politicians being terrible people has been like the meme going way back before memes were a thing. Like, it's not like they. They trusted politicians in that way. It's just that they. People still believe they lived in a society where, like, yeah, these can be terrible people, but if you can prove it, if you can get your case out there and nobody can deny it and this is what it is, well, then it doesn't matter if they're terrible people. Like, you have to act right? And it just turns out that, no, you don't. Like, you don't actually. You can just pretend that, you know, Bill Clinton's not a rapist until, you know, 2016 comes along and everybody's calling you hypocrites. When you're attacking Donald Trump for sexual assault allegations, they're calling you hypocrites because you defended Bill Clinton all those years. Now you have to kind of maybe walk it back and say, you know, maybe he actually did do some of that. Like, you could just do that. I mean, it's like, I've commented on this show before that like, I'll bet Biden after the Afghanistan withdrawal and all the criticism he took, I'll bet Bush, like after Iraq war, like, they're just kicking themselves watching Trump realizing that, like, oh wait, I could have just said mission accomplished and then just kept going with that no matter what happened.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, I know. I, I've been thinking about W. Bush a little bit lately too, man. About what he thinks about this. Like, either he's going, well, good thing I didn't go to Iran, because that's what it would have looked like. Or like, oh man, I could have gone ahead and done this same stupid. That would have been fun because we

[Daryl Cooper]

would have put ground troops in there

[Scott Horton]

could have been killed that he didn't get a chance to get killed.

[Daryl Cooper]

You know, if he had done it, that would have turned into a big ground war though. No doubt about it.

[Scott Horton]

Well, yeah, we, when we had tens of thousands of troops and over a hundred thousand troops in Iraq, you know, at one point there in 07, all that so. Or not at one point, at a few different points, all them would have been up for grabs. By the way, not to brag and boast about this or whatever, but it's worth pointing out for some other reasons too, probably besides bragging and boasting that like critics were pointing this out way back then, that's why we didn't do it this whole time. There have been a lot of people in Tel Aviv and Washington who've wanted to bomb Iran. And then a lot of other people told them no. And the reasons why are reasons that you can find where I explain [e-mail] in 2005. I mean, never mind reading Raimondo, but read my stuff from 2005. I say, who's behind the coming war with Iran? And I say, these could be the consequences. And then there's a symposium I did with the great, the late, great Reese Ehrlich, rest in peace, my friend, that we did at Riverside at, at the University of California, Riverside, where it was me and him versus neocon. And there's a student kid was, he was okay, but it was a horrible neocon named Greenfield or something like that. And it was me and Reese Ehrlich beating the crap out of him for a little while. Well, I was doing more than beating the crap, but Reese was great too. But. And then somebody posted today, my first time I ever was on tv, I think, doing one of these, it was on rt, which I don't do RT anymore for various reasons, but I was on RT and I remember that day I was living in LA and it was really hot and I for some stupid reason wrote, wore my suit all the way there and I was like really sick and I looked just terrible, dude, like I should have washed my face in the water fountain or anything before I went on. I look absolutely like I'm dying of cancer or something in the damn footage. But in the footage I'm going, look, man, the Boucher reactor is a light water reactor. It produces plutonium waste that's so heavily polluted with other isotopes that makes it almost impossible to transform into weapons fuel. And the Russians are taken out of the country anyway. Iran's a member of the npt. They've got a safeguards agreement with the IAEA who are monitoring and safeguarding all of the nuclear material and verifying its non diversion to military purposes. We already know that. And Barack Obama is just a liar, dude, when he's saying this stuff. It's not true. And here's what is true. And by the way, a war with Iran would be a disaster and it would mean. I said, I don't know if they could hit American ships in the Gulf, but I know that they could hit tankers and I know that they can close the straight of horror moose. And that could lead to oil at $200 a barrel and the complete destruction and breakdown of the division of labor in the global economy and an absolute global catastrophe over it, over nothing. Over a nuclear weapons program that doesn't exist. And that's from. I can't remember anymore what month I think in the summer of 2010. And like, dude, all I was doing was paying attention to the news, dude, I'm not, I don't, I've never worked the Pentagon. I don't know nothing about that stuff, dude. All I know is I read a lot. You know what, I interview the people who write the stuff I read.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I mean it's a good thing, I think that Bob Gates was in his Secretary of defense like during a lot of that time because, well, it

[Scott Horton]

was very bad for various reasons too. Afghanistan and Iraqi absolutely ruined Iran. And he, he started Libya too, man. He did not resign over Libya. He opposed it and then he clicked his heels and did it anyway.

[Daryl Cooper]

That's true.

[Scott Horton]

But you're right though, that he was a restraining influence when it came to Iran. And so was Admiral Fallon, who was the chairman, the commander of Central Command at the time was.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, he's one of the unstung heroes of that whole era. Fallon, for Sure,

[Scott Horton]

I. You know, it's. Right. So maybe we delayed it like a little bit. Had anything to do with it being delayed this whole time, but then it didn't matter anyway because Donald Trump just does whatever he wants. Anyway, dude, I saw some guy called his own. No. What? Oh, it's the guy, Seth Harp, that wrote the book about the corruption at Fort Bragg, which I have not had a chance to read yet, by the way, I'm afraid. But I saw him call the operation Oops, I Shot Myself in the Dick. Like just this absolute idiot war, man.

[Daryl Cooper]

Dude, don't give Pete Hegseth any. Any ideas. He would probably think that was cool and name something after it.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, no doubt. I can't believe that guy's the Secretary of Defense. I was joking about that with that guy at Oxford the other day. Yesterday at the party, we were talking about what a cartoon character he is, that he just. Trump got him from Fox News. He's like, I like that guy. That was what, you know, made him like John Bolton back before. It was like John Bolton goes on Fox News and he speaks in declarative sentences. No, I like that. You know.

[Daryl Cooper]

Okay, yeah, it's a hedging there.

[Scott Horton]

Here's what we should do. All right. You know what we should do? We should take some questions before we go. We're already at almost an hour just sitting here and BSing. Let's see here. Oxford debate. Can't find it anywhere. It is not posted yet, but it will be. There is a channel on the YouTube zero that have it. Let's see. Super chats. Rescue Isfahan. Oh, okay. Now, Darrell Cooper, I know you have things to say about this due to specific knowledge. What do y' all make of the F15WSO rescue near Isfahan? The public details of that operation do not seem to add up. And I believe that you said that it was what they said it was to some degree or another there or

[Daryl Cooper]

not to some degree, like my. We don't know. That person's right. There are a lot of people.

[Scott Horton]

Let me suggest here to set up, Daryl, that the. The opposing hypothesis, I believe there's only one major one that I've seen was that it was a failed attempt to go and seize some of that uranium.

[Daryl Cooper]

Yeah, I. So I think there's. There's. There's a couple ways that you could interpret what happened. Right. And the things that don't make sense to start off with that, like the person's talking about are just as an example, like, you don't have several hundred Special forces guys from multiple agencies going in for a rescue operation of a single pilot, you know, with just all of the resources that they had. That doesn't like, that's not how you would normally do something like that. The best guess that I have is because there's some people that go all the way maximalist, like conspiracy theory interpretation, which is that there was no pilot. Where is he? We haven't seen him interviewed or anything like that. They just told us that there was one. And actually we were never looking for a pilot. What we were doing was, you know, using that as a cover, maybe a diversion of some kind so that we could, we could try to raid the nuke material at Isfahan. That's possible. I think more likely is that, you know, the pilot went down in that region. And we had this group of people, this group of guys and intel people who had been studying the area preparing for a possible raid on the Isfahan nuke site. And they were the ones who were available at the time to go do it and so they were sent to do it. The other possible option is those two theses get combined, you know, is that this happens. We've got these guys who are going in there anyway. Let's go do that. That'll actually make it easier for us to go get that pilot. If the Iranians are focusing on, you know, what's going on one way or the other, like any of those things are possible, but the person's completely right that it like the resources that we brought to bear just. They really don't make a whole lot of sense in terms of like a standard extraction, even one that is like kind of far into the country and you know, might take some time. And it just. Yeah, I don't know, I mean it just. That's something that's normally, that you'd normally try to accomplish with stealth. Get in and out. It's not something you're going to go in and establish a position and like hold territory while an operation is carried out. You know, I don't, we don't know all the inner specifics of it. Like I talked to Jocko about it right as it was going on, going over all this stuff. Excuse me. And he, and he said like, you know, that yeah, a lot of this stuff would be totally non standard, not something you would expect to see. But you know, I could see why they would do that if X, Y and Z were the case. So who knows, you know, anything is possible. But yeah, the person's right. I mean it's a Very, very. It's a very strange scenario, especially when you look at what happened, like, immediately after that. It was very clear right after that that we were looking for a way out. It was like, okay, we blew our wad on that. And that is not, you know, that sort of magic pill. That magic pill that was going to get Trump out of the war and save face for. For everybody involved. Yeah. And we. Now we just have to sort of. We have to find a way to bail.

[Scott Horton]

I mean, it seems like the it. Well, whatever. That's too long of a subject. This guy says, hope you donated to Massie's money bomb. I did the last time around by. I have a short cameo in this great documentary about Massie that. That Dan Smtz did. The great Dan Smtz. He's the best video editor in the business. He's in business, by the way. Look him up, Dan Sm. And. But he did this great documentary about Massie, and there's a little bit of me in that and certainly hope that he does. Well, this guy says, I can't believe he hasn't been to Europe. Well, I'll have you know that I work for nonprofits for peanuts, man. I, you know, this was a business expense for me to go and do this thing, but, yeah, I can't afford to go travel the world. What the hell are you talking about, man?

[Daryl Cooper]

Dude, we've got a country the size of a continent. We don't need to go travel.

[Scott Horton]

Seriously. And I have been to like, 48 states. I went through the list, and I'm. I'm virtually certain I've been to all but Alaska and. And Hawaii. Now I have been to Canada and Mexico, if you count those. Thank you, everybody, for the nice comments on here and the. Whatever was this, and say, oh, the audience lost the Oxford debate, not you. Thank you. That's exactly right. Well, we'll see what you guys think when the video comes out. I don't know what I'm doing here. Page down the thing. I walked into a trap. You know what? It's my own stupid fault, man, because I. I wrongly assumed that the question was so biased to my side that it would be like a route. I didn't even spend my time really arguing the case other than, you know, they got nukes. Right. And then I just told a bunch of the background of different stuff that I thought was interesting.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, the thing is, though, I could have.

[Scott Horton]

I could have made my case. I should have adapted. Once I saw the reaction she got, I should have totally adapted my case and stated it way differently.

[Daryl Cooper]

Maybe, Yeah. I don't know. But I will say, remember that the audience, like, preface the audience that was

[Scott Horton]

there that day, like liberal Democrat types. I didn't. I'm too stupid to have planned this.

[Daryl Cooper]

Right.

[Scott Horton]

I just didn't. What am I, stupid? Yes.

[Daryl Cooper]

I mean, the audience that was there that day is not the audience. Like you're, you know, 100,000 more people are going to see it once it hits YouTube. And that's the audience. And so just know. Use people like that as a foil to get your point out.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah, yeah, Nukes. I remember in 98, when India and Pakistan started testing their atom bombs, threatening each other, and nobody cared because it was the last week of Seinfeld. So that was all anyone cared about that week. But I cared about it. And I remember watching this clip of this Pakistani general telling the cameraman, hey, listen, cameraman, you tell those Indians we're not afraid of their atom bombs. And I remember thinking, wow, like, that's really a stupid thing to say. Like, your fear of them or not really is not what's at play here so much other than the effect it should have on preventing you from doing something that'll get you killed along with other people near you. But I guess, you know, there's the. The theory and reality of. Of atomic weapons as far as, like, in people's heads, you know what I mean? People exaggerate the power of them sometimes as well. But I think it's just been too long since we did testing where people could see footage of Southern Pacific atolls being completely obliterated by these hydrogen bombs. Never even mind the A bombs they set off in Nevada and all that. All right? These people saying things at us. Here was a correct estimate of Iranian damage. And how much can they sustain this? Sustain the stupidity of us attacking under Israel's instructions. So that is a great question. I'm glad that you asked it. And thanks for the chipping in there. Super chat, man. What it is is this. There's a brand new story out that just came out. Daryl, maybe you can correct my sourcing if I screw up my footnote here, but it was. I want to say NBC, but then I think that that's not right. Let me get my. My head right here. There's a Washington Post. It was the Washington Post, dude. No, no, no. Ah, I'm sorry, man. I saw it on my Twitter, on my phone at the airport and in England earlier today or something, and I don't remember anymore where I saw it, but it was It. It stuck out of me. It was a government source said so that we only had a single source for this part of it. But the point is this. The numbers were that they still have 70% of their missile launchers and 75 of their missiles that they've been able to repair, missiles that were damaged. They've been able to finish creating missiles that they were still manufacturing and are still going. So that's a pretty specific intelligence that they were claiming to cite there. It must have been the Post, dude, because they're not even going to talk like that to anybody. That set the posted times of the Journal. Probably. It wasn't like Politico. It, it had to have been the Post, man. I'm sorry if it wasn't the post, but I saw today was hugely high super duper majority estimates of. They survived this completely, dude. Every bit of that we obliterated all their stuff was complete. Just blowing smoke, man, 100%. And man. What? It's funny, man. You know, I'll tell you what, while I page through these super chats more, tell me about what you think, Daryl, about how this is going to look even a couple of years from now or five years from now. Just how much of an absolute strategic, you know, own goal. I mean, turns out, like, it's.

[Daryl Cooper]

It's sort of weird and it's hard to know exactly how to feel about it because what I think is going to happen is it's going to accomplish something that you and I would have dreamed about but see no way forward, plausible way forward to accomplish, which is the empire's got to roll back now. I mean, there's just so much of our global power was based on the uncertainty of what the limits of that power were. And not, not only our physical military power, but, but our economic power, you know, our ability to, to bring countries to their knees through sanctions and so forth. All of that stuff. Like, there's just no way, you know, there's no way anybody is going to look at us with the same trembling fear that they used to. I mean, if you're in a, you know, if you, if you're a Libya or an Iraq or whatever, like, especially like if you live, if you're a country that is like already, you know, you've got, you've got a boiling sort of ethnic or sectarian conflict going on at all times and the lids being kept on that by this oppressive government. Yeah, we might come in there and knock that over and your country will blow up and go to pieces. We still like retain that kind of power. But real countries, you know, real countries with actual militaries and bureaucratic governmental systems and all that, they're not going to look at us the same anymore. Like, people are not going to be as fearful of us. Allies are not going to be as confident in us. And so I really think that in five years, we'll look back and see this as the beginning of the end. I mean, again, America is not going to be some Third World backwater at any point. I mean, just. We have too many natural advantages to ever get to that point. But, you know, we're going to be wealthy. We're going to be all, you know, probably the suzerain of the. Of the Western Hemisphere, all those kind of things. But in terms of the global empire and this idea that we're responsible for what kind of weapons Iran has or what, I think that's. That's over. I think it's over. And that's great, man.

[Scott Horton]

You know, as we talked about this before, man, Trump sure called the ayatollahs bluff last June. You know, you always imply that maybe you'd make a nuke if I bombed you. I shouldn't bomb you if you don't make a nuke, and we had this standoff, but maybe I'll just bomb you and I'll blow up your nuke stuff so bad that you can't make a nuke anyway. So how do you like that? And that really did kind of work. I know there's this new intelligence estimate that says that so much of their nuclear program has survived. I'm sorry, I don't know. That's an intelligence assessment. This is just another news story. I'm sorry. I'm behind on everything, guys. I've been traveling, but there was a new report that said much of their nuclear program survived, but I think they haven't done anything with it. Natanz and Fordo are. I mean, I guess they can dig new tunnels down there, but Trump's already proven he's willing to drop bombs down any new tunnel. And.

[Daryl Cooper]

And I mean, the case better than anybody else a million different times that Iran is not failing to build a nuclear weapon because they're afraid of, sir, Israel or whatever. That is not the reason. Like, they're not doing it because they're afraid of what we're going to do or, you know, because they don't have the capability to do it or any of these things. They're not doing it because they're simply choosing not to do it as a strategic. It's a strategic decision. They, they, they live in a region where they have Turkey, which is, you know, if it came down to it, as a rival power, but otherwise they're the big dog in that region. And they have all the other countries that, you know, the Arab countries, they're no, they're no challenge to Iran whatsoever. And Israel is far enough away that they can, like, do some, you know, airstrikes, but they can retaliate with ballistic missiles, and they're not going to get invaded by Israel or anything. And so they are, they're the, they're the power, along with Turkey in the region. Why would they want to introduce a new factor that if, you know, Qatar, uae, Saudi Arabia, if they decide they want to get nuclear weapons now, it's like, well, now you're kind of at military parody with them when they're nowhere close to you right now. Why would you want to introduce that?

[Scott Horton]

You know, that's a, that's a very good point. I think it's also the case, I mean, never mind fear, but I think it's also rational calculation that if they really broke out toward a nuke, America would know it. And any president, including Barack Obama and I think quite credibly had sworn that he would absolutely not stop dropping bombs on wherever their Manhattan Project is until everybody was dead. If they were really making a nuke, he would prevent them from getting that far at any cost. And they all agreed about that. And I think the Iranians believe them about that, that there's no point in breaking out toward a nuke even if they did want one, even if we do want one, because the Americans will start air war against us before we're done. It would take them months at least. And so, well, especially, especially their conversion facilities offline, they could recreate it. But right now, they can't take uranium hexafluoride gas and turn it back into metal, and they can't take ore or, you know, refine yellow cake and transform it into uranium hexafluoride gas. And so I should have said that in the other order, but you get it. They're stuck. And so, and both of their enrichment facilities are married, so they could create a new one. But again, well, and they, they very well may. But I still, I agree with you that I think it doesn't, this war doesn't necessarily change their calculation about whether they want a nuke or not. I mean, the other thing, at the very least, it may change, like, their math on how they think about it. But I think if you were them, the way you put it. I agree that that would make the most sense for their point of view especially. Doesn't mean that they would agree with you though, necessarily.

[Daryl Cooper]

They have a weapon of mass destruction that doesn't carry the stigma of, or the danger of nuclear weapons, which is we can shut down a huge chunk of the world's oil industry, oil exporting industry, anytime we want. And like, that is a massive, massive weapon at their disposal. That obviously, as we've seen, does not carry the same. It's not. People don't like it, but it's not as if they nuke Tel Aviv. People aren't reacting in that way. Right. And it, you know, I just think, look, nuclear weapons, they, these are, these are things that do not have like a real military application. You know, like, nuclear weapons in a war are not useful items. You know, nuclear weapons are something to hold the civilian populations of enemy countries hostage, to prevent them from doing things that would destroy, you know, it depends.

[Scott Horton]

I mean, you can use them to take out military bases and stuff, you know.

[Daryl Cooper]

Well, sure, they're big bombs, but like, I mean, you can use them for that. But, you know, I, like, I'm strategic nuclear weapons, at least, which is what everybody's afraid of. You know, that's what everybody's really kind of talking about. Like, these are, these are, these are weapons that exist to hold enemy civilian populations hostage. I mean, when you think, when you look at Israel, for example, like, you know, Israel doesn't have those in case it decides to, you know, go to war against Hezbollah and Lebanon and things aren't really going as well as they'd hoped. So we're going to nuke Lebanon. That's not why they have, they have them to hold over everybody's head that if you guys ever, like, push too hard and, you know, push us to the brink, then we're going to kill all of you using these weapons. That's, that's the only thing they're for, you know, and like, is Iran. Do they really think that if they had a couple nuclear weapons that would stop the US And Israel from launching conventional strikes against them? I mean, if anything, like, you know, unless they had like, sufficient numbers of them and delivery devices that, you know, we could be sure that they were going to hit enough targets to cause real permanent damage to Israel? I don't, I don't really think that that would stop, you know, stop them at all. Like, I just, it doesn't make any sense to me. Like, people, people think of nuclear weapons in in terms that, in geopolitical terms that were applicable to the Cold War, that don't really apply anymore. I, I think.

[Scott Horton]

Yeah. All right, so this guy says it's kind of a loaded question. I don't know, can we explain how we keep our integrity after having every reason to be cynical, which I don't know, man, about those terms necessarily. I, I would not claim to have a lot of integrity, man. I'm just doing my job. But. And yeah, whether we're being naive, I guess that's the important part of the question. Look, my goal always has just been a place to go where people can find the truth. If I thought that I was gonna be able to change the course of how these things are playing out, then I would be. That's be a delusion in the first place that I could. And then secondly, I'd be all disappointed about how far short of my goal I fall all the time. Even though, I mean that is true, that I would very much like to think that like at least part of what we're doing, you know, plays into, you know, on the margin, a very, very thin margin. It does make some difference. But mostly I just want to be like a place where y' all can show up to if you need to know what the hell's going on around here. And then for whatever that's worth and whoever you are, maybe you are a four star general out there listening to this and maybe you're just some guy, but that's, that's my thing, so that makes it easy. And as far as integrity, I don't claim to have any more than the average psychopath, quite honestly. Jda. Good shows, he says. Thank you. This is a longtime friend of the show. I recognize your Froto avatar, dude. Thank you for coming around. Was the correct estimate of Iranian damage. We already did that one. Oh, Libertarian Overwatch is in the thing. He says Carl Cameron post 911 videos. You know, I still remember. This is how old I am. When Carl Cameron did that four part series. I saw him on Fox News and I heard him on the Carl Wigglesworth show doing an in depth interview about them all on 5:50am in San Antonio. I doubt those audios exist anymore. But he went in much more in depth with Carl Wigglesworth and I wish I could tell you anymore which extra assertions he made to Carl that he didn't make on Fox, but they were along the same lines anyway. You know, for people who don't know, that's Carl Cameron from Fox News. His four part series about the FBI arresting a bunch of Israeli spies and surmising that they must have known the attack was coming and did not warn or at least did not tell the FBI everything that they knew about the hijackers in the country. And if you want to read more into that, go read Ryan Dawson. I, he's definitely the best making that case. I'm not, I'm not completely sold yet, but I'm still open to him talking me into it. But there, there is a lot of weird ugliness there, man. And, and you know, I used to do a lot of interviews about this back in day. Christopher Ketchum and Philip Geraldi and others did a lot of journalism back, but it was so long ago. But if you search my name and Christopher ketchum and the 911 art students, you know, you'll find some stuff there. Let's see. Putin outgoing call to Trump this week. China summit soon. When do Russia China flex on Trump regarding the Iran war, where he must choose self preservation versus Israel's Netanyahu? Good question. I did see a thing, by the way, about there's a new railway from China, or not a new railway, but a massive increase in shipments from one train per week to several a day, I think they said, or maybe it was more specific like seven a day or something. But at the very least, daily new shipments by train from China to Iran, presumably of resupply of who knows what all. And which is funny, I saw a tweet like this which is completely correct, that in the grand the Grand Chessboard by zbigniew Brzezinski from 1997, where, you know, he describes America's battle for what he calls predominance in Eurasia. The, the great fear is that Russia will mend fences with China instead of being, instead of the west being able, successfully able to pull them west. And they'll turn to China and Iran, too. And then you would have this extremely powerful nuclear weapons and oil resources axis of power that could mount a challenge to American primacy. This is the worst thing that he could think of happening. And then, of course, that's the history of our entire era, is America making that happen. And so, you know, and whatever, dude, everybody goes, oh, wait, not the agency of the other world rulers. No, I don't. But I'm just saying, isn't it in the burden on the masters of the universe over here in the lone superpower to use their masterful diplomacy at their State Department to corral and control these states and bend them to our Will, why are Russia, China, and Iran not all competing for who can suck up to America the best right now? It must be because Washington sucks at this. You know, sorry, but they have played their cards poorly. You know, it's like Robert Kagan lamenting that, yeah, we just don't have the power in Europe that we. We should have needed to make Russia think twice about trying this. Oh, really? You think that might have anything to do with you and your brother Fred launching and then doubling two wars in the Middle east instead? Bob, Maybe. Not that I'm saying I would prefer the policy, but it gets pretty obvious at times how self destructive these people are. But as far as Russia and China flexing on Trump and. And what, forcing him to end the war? I don't know. You know what, man? I don't think that they would, in fact go back to that China story. That would seem to me to indicate that China's perfectly willing to play Joe Biden's role in Ukraine, that, hey, look, America wants to try to, you know, get stuck in this thing, let's give them their own Vietnam again, more. They love doing this stuff to themselves. So, you know, let them break their legs and teeth in on the mountains of Iran instead of fighting in on China's east Coast. Right.

[Daryl Cooper]

Somebody just. Somebody just threw out a very generous super chat wanting to know your opinion of Andor. I don't know what that is, and I like to answer that one. Then you're gonna have to do it on your own because my wife's got dinner on the table.

[Scott Horton]

Oh, man. You're gonna have to go then. Well, are there any more super chats after that? I don't see any more. All right, thanks, guys. Good night, Darrell. Y' all have a good one. This has been provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked underscore show on X and YouTube and tune in next time for more provoked.