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Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews
4/30/26 Larry Johnson on Trump’s Tenuous Ceasefire with Iran
00:46:35
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Transcript79 lines
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You ladies and gentlemen of the press
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have been less than honest according to the American people.
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What's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy mostly. When the president does it, that means
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that it is not a liberty.
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We're gonna take out seven countries.
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They don't know what the they're doing. Negotiate now. End this war.
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And now here's your host, Scott Horton.
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All right, you guys. Introducing Larry Johnson, former CIA officer turned no longer CIA officer. That's good. They say once a CIA officer always, I'm not sure that really counts with a few of these guys I know like you and Ray and John Kiriaku and couple others. But anyways, very happy to have you here. The guy who told me the night the war started that, oh, the war is definitely going to start today. And then it did, you know, before sun up anyway. And, and of course you've been writing on sonar21.com, your great website, your astute analysis that goes out in the email every morning and been doing endless interviews on all these shows informing people about all this stuff. People keep asking me, but to a great degree I'm just repeating the things that I've learned from the likes of you, Larry. So why don't you give us your good assessment here on where we stand in this war, Trump's options for getting us out all the way somehow and putting an end to this thing in any other way other than some idiotic also failed escalation going forward here.
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Yeah, I think, I think the only escape hatch we have now is for Trump to go totally against his personality and, or find out, find a way to say, hey, we won and, and walk away, get out of it. Because we do not have a viable military option. We cannot, we, we do not have the military force to defeat Iran, period. Because we can't do it maritime right now. We, our, our ships are restricted. They don't, they don't cross more than 200 miles in into Iranian waters. They stay 200 miles off coast. Why? Because Iran has cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, both short range, intermediate range, and drones that can hit those ships if they, if they're inside that 200 mile limit, they're vulnerable. They'll be hit, they'll be sunk. And so they stay outside that. That's why, you know, the Abraham Lincoln ventured in closer and it got, it got hammered pretty good. The administration's gone to great lengths to cover that up. So we don't have a viable military opera option. I mean, A viable naval option, maritime and on the air option side, basically we've hit about every target we could hit. And in the process we have seriously depleted a number of precision guided missiles, both offensive and defensive. The defensive side, the PAC 3 interceptors, the THAAD and offensive side, the JASSMS, the Tomahawks. Where the real vulnerability there is is the rare earth minerals that are required to produce guidance systems in all of those munitions. And those rare earth minerals are now controlled by China. So even if we wanted to, we don't have the supplies to ramp up production and replace what we have extinguished. CNN ran an article recently claiming that the PAC threes, the Patriot missiles interceptors were down 50%. That's not true. It is down like 90%. 90 to 95%. I can happily take anybody through the math. This is not complicated. So the, the, the, the, right now you've got Admiral Brad Cooper, he sick. He's the commander of centcom. He's called the Joint Forces Commander. He has divided up, he's put one guy in charge of aviation, one guy in charge of maritime operations. So the official title is Combined Forces Aviation Component Commander. You always got to have an acronym. If you can do military, you got to have that acronym. So the CFACC or the cfmcc, which is Combined Force Maritime Component Commander. So you got an admiral there, Air Force General on the aviation side. Notice what's missing. You don't have a ground Force component commander. Haven't named one yet. So that would be if you want to find a, an intel warning sign. If CENTCOM appoints Combined Forces Ground Component Commander, then you know, we're going to go in on the ground. But until that happens, we're not going in on the ground. We might, we might have some special operations raids, but nothing of any substance because the army's not going to let an admiral or an Air Force general command its ground forces. No more than the Navy would allow an army general to command an aircraft carrier. It's just, you know, different skill sets, different experience required. So the United States doesn't have any good military operations. The, the, the notion that we're, are. Our blockade is shut down. Iran nonsense. And the simple fact that we don't get 200 yards 200 miles closer to the shore, that means all Iran has to do is its ships, these tankers, they stay within Iranian territorial waters. The 12 mile limit just sell in there. US can't, can't attack. If US comes that close, they get sunk. So they just sell all along the coast until they get to Pakistan and they stay in Pakistani waters until they get to the Indian Ocean. If the United States to run an effective blockade, they would have to board every ship. And when you board a ship, you then have to attach a naval, a US Navy ship to accompany the one you seized. We don't have enough ships to do that, much less naval crews to do that. So this is, this is like a whole political theater that's being run in front of the American people. That said, Trump is under enormous pressure from the likes of Miriam Adelson, General Jack Keane, General Kellogg to hit Iran again. And Iran's ready. They vowed that they're gonna, they're gonna come back with greater force and more targets than they hit in the first five weeks. So, and, and China, China, I've said that Xi Jinping, he's got one of those big bags of buttered popcorn and he's sitting in the movie theater just watching, laughing and eating. Because, because the, Iran is depleting and attritting US Military capability to the point that if, if the war broke out with China, we wouldn't last three weeks.
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Well, so somebody asked me today, yeah, but what about conscription? I mean, they're talking about vamping up, revamping selective service, getting it going. Maybe they will just do a World War II style D Day invasion and conquer all of Persia and do whatever it takes.
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Yeah, how do they that today? Yeah, how do they do that? So, you know, the war, the face of war has changed in the last 23 years. 23 years ago, on the eve of our invasion into Iraq, we assembled 165,000 troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They're at bases. All the only things Saddam had at the time were Scuds and they weren't very reliable and they were easy to shoot down. Today, with the advent of drones and the advent of the sophisticated ballistic missiles and cruise missiles that Iran has developed, you couldn't, you couldn't assemble a group of 1,000 US soldiers in one place without them facing the risk of being blown up. So to actually assemble a force that would be large enough to go into Iran now, when you realize Iran's got an army of Russell, between the Revolutionary Guard, the Artash, the regular army and the Basij, sort of the militia that works with the irgc, we got a million guys. So the, the rule of thumb is there'll be the defenders. The attacking force usually has to have a 3 to 1 advantage. So that means we've got to come over 3 million men right now. We've got active duty, 452,000 in the army and 120,000 in the Marine Corps. We're shy a little bit, you know, about 2.5 million more we have to recruit. But then you no longer employ the, our armed forces in the same way we did 23 years ago. And look at what's happening with Ukraine. Russia's entire method of operating has changed as a result of drone threats and drone warfare. So we're in a whole new ball game. The problem with the United States is we continue, we're fighting, trying to fight a 21st century war with 20th century concepts.
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All right, so, you know, Trump is able to climb down quite a ways on just forgetting, right, his previous war goals. Now it's just about the straight and him saving a little bit of phase. So if he's really trying, if he, I don't know, sent a diplomat instead of his son in law or something, how difficult might it look? Sorry, I should have prefaced it like this. To me, the answer is always just leave. And in this case, not just for my, you know, predisposition, but it seems to me like that's actually the smart thing here, is to just completely bug out of the entire area and leave the entire burden on Iran to resolve with everybody else in Eurasia but us and see how far they get, you know, pushing their luck and, and being a jerk to everybody and, and learning their newfound dominance over the Gulf to, you know, extraordinary degrees and all of that let them have to worry about the fallout. All that, instead of it being all our fault, at least me, just makes sense. But then if we were having this discussion in Washington D.C. instead, then what would it take for him to actually be able to do that? Is that really possible? Or there's some damn concession that Jack Keane has to say we've achieved before that can be done or what?
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Yeah, I, I think just personality wise and watching the, the changes that have taken place in his mental status over the last 12 months, you know, it, people started, according to Robert Barnes and, and I trust Robert on this, people started noticing some serious changes in his mental, you know, mental faculty starting last September. Confabulation. You know, we start saying things that you think are true, you genuinely believe they're true, but they're absolutely false. Such as, oh, you know, I've stopped nine wars, I've solved nine wars. And it's like, well, no, you haven't, but we can't argue with you on that. Going into this war, he was advised for the New York Times is to be believed everyone on his staff, you know, from, you know, well, J.D. vance is vice President Marco Rubio, John Ratcliffe, and then Susie Wiles and even Scott Besset all recommended not, not to attack Iran. The only one who did say, yeah, we should do it was Pete Heth. And Trump overruled the military, all, all the other military advisers, and did it in part because he, you know, he'd been convinced that this would be a short war done in four days. You know, that is, that, that's been a common theme throughout American history. You know, go back to the opening battle at Bull Run in Civil War. Everybody thought this would be a, you know, this would be over in a week or two and not anticipating what the Civil War would become. So, you know, Trump, Trump's now captured on that front. He's not going to admit he's wrong. So you got to figure out a way to convince him that he's, he's won. Hey, you've now defeated the Iranian, the Iranian army's defeated, the Iranian navy's defeated. Iranian air force is defeated. You've obliterated their missile program, even though none of that's true. But let's just tell him that, get him convinced that that's true, and says, therefore, you can say, you know what, as a result, we no longer, we've, we've defanged Iran. We no longer have to keep our troops in the region because the de facto, they're not there right now because they can't. The bases that they once occupied have been destroyed, largely. So, and then y. Pull out, retreat. That's the only option. The United States does not have a military option for opening the Strait of Hormuz, because to open it, you're going to have to put a ground force that will penetrate up to 100 miles or more into Iran to take out the ballistic missile and cruise missile locations and drone sites that can be launched from the interior.
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Yay. Guess what, everybody.
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I'm a total twin. Well, actually, no, I'm me. I'm skater Scott. But I meet the total twins down at the local skate park where, as you can see, I'm doing a giant slob air.
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B
And I hang out with the kids
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and I teach them all about the foreign and domestic blowback consequences from American intervention in Iran and all the trouble that the US government has caused there since the 1950s.
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And of course, you know the great
- [14:36]
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Tuttle twins series by Elijah Stanfield, the great artist, and Connor Boyak, the primary author of all the stuff. And it's these great booklets and major books on history and on all different libertarian subject matters so that your kids don't have to be raised commie by all of the usual child age publications out there. So the total twins, they just do a really great job and if you have school age kids then you will
- [15:11]
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absolutely love their stuff and especially now because now I'm in it too. So all you got to do is
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go to totaltwins.com free magazine, get it tins.com free magazine and they'll send it right to you.
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B
And isn't that great? Now let me take you on a tangent there for a minute before we let you get back to your main point. Famously, this General Van Riper playing the Red Team Iran whooped the US Navy over and over again in the W. Bush years. I'm going to guess like 2005, something like that. And they did this test 2005 and they made him reset it over and over again and finally they kicked his ass out of there because he kept winning by using messengers on motorcycles with notepads instead of, you know, easy to intercept, you know, FM communications or whatever. And, and, and using small fast boats Sankar Navy and all this stuff now that's famous. And I've seen people bringing that up again recently, but I haven't seen anyone bring up recently is stuff that I read back then that said, well not, not that far back but like say I don't know, 07 or 01 or 01 or something that like. Yeah, but that was then and we learned those lessons from those red teams. And it wasn't just then Riper we red team the hell out of this thing. And of course if we fight Iran, they're going to try to close a straight of Hormuz. Well they can try because we know what to do about that now. And I know because you've told me this before how you've been involved in, you know, as a CIA guy but sort of like on loan on, I don't know, special activities guy or what the hell how exactly it works. But you've talked about helping plan missions for top tier special operations forces and stuff. So I know that I don't know exactly like the breadth of your expertise on that stuff, but obviously you've had the very highest type clearance about that. And obviously, man, if Van Riper showed them how raw open their Belly was in O5, they must have damn done something about it since then. Larry. But so then it sounds like you just skipped all that and said no, they, they have no way to open that straight.
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Yeah. So in 19, I. I first started scripting exercises or helping participate exercises for the Joint Special Operations Command. In the summer of 1993, I left state Department and this, this consulting group, it was set up by a guy named Cal Sasai. Cal had been the deputy commander of a group called ISA is a. It's a top secret. It, It. You can find it now as isa. It's, It's. That's sort of declassified. But at the time, ISA was this. The dark secret organization. And he had, he had developed a contract where he would script the exercises or his team would script the exercises for jsoc. They needed somebody that. That could write messages for. Let me turn the phone off. Sorry about that. That could write messages for State Department as communications from Secretary of State to embassies, embassies back to Secretary of State. So I got that gig. So I started doing that in 1994. I did that for the next 23 years. And in scripting these exercises, you develop scenarios that require the tier one units. And we're talking Delta Force or Seal Team 6 with support from like the. What's called the 24th Special Tactics Squadron, STS Task Force 160. And one of the exercises we scripted was going into Iran attacking what they called a hardened, deeply buried target, one of these mountain fortresses to try to recover nuclear material. And we have. At the end, you have lessons learned. And the lesson learned out of that was, don't do it. It's too, it's too costly in terms of human life. So this notion, I saw it over the course of 23 years, we'd always do these exercises. They call it a hot wash. And they're supposed to. What did we learn today? And what I discovered when I started, I had this assumption, man, you're going to build a knowledge on knowledge. This is going to be like a climbing a stair step. People will know more in five years than they did now. No, nobody learned. In fact, they forgot a lot. They wouldn't go back and look at it. So I, the joke was lessons learned. Yeah. Right. There is no learning. Yeah.
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The military, it's a government program. It's. It's not supposed to solve problems. Silly. That's not what's going on. All right, well. And I'm sorry because I interrupted your train of thought there about. So. And you were agreeing with me about how brilliant I am that Donald Trump ought to just say, no, forget it, we're done. Hey, we won. We give him a big medal ticker. Tape parade. And he's the big hero now. This is the 25th war he's ended through his supreme peacemaking powers. Fine, but is that really like the best we can do politically? Because I'm not sure that like just cutting it. Because, because see, I guess the way I conceive of it is short of just completely withdrawing from the region like Jordan too, and just forget it.
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Yeah.
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That it doesn't really work as well. You know what I mean? Of what we really need to do. If we just completely leave, then the burden is entirely on them. And people would say that's giving the total advantage to them, but I would say it's the war that's done that. But it seems actually like the more responsibilities they have as far as everybody around them and as far as East Asia and everybody else, the more they're likely to behave in a rational manner in order to have to, you know, get along with so many different customers and all of that without our interference. So. But is that realistic at all, that, that even Donald Trump, even in his most delirious moment, might just do it my way?
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Yeah, unfortunately, no. I wish that was the case. You know, Scott, the real problem here is economics. The, the economic impact of this war has not yet begun to be actually felt. You know, I, I, I've described it. It's like the tsunami. If you were sitting there on the beach in Phuket back in, was that 2012? You're sitting there watching the waves and all of a sudden the water starts going out to sea. Hey, Ms. Great. Look at all the open beach space. Well, if you recognize that for what it was, you would have picked your beach chair up and started running like hell for high ground. Because what was coming next was devastating. And what's coming next now is we've had a complete disruption of the international oil market. You know, 20% of it's gone away. And we had about a six week period from February 28th until about a week ago, that oil was still in those tankers that were being, you know, slowly going to their destinations. Now they're being offloaded, but they're being offloaded even though you get a paper price like you look at the, the price of Brent crude or West Texas Intermediate crude, that it'll say, oh, it's 105, but at the offload point you're paying 145. In fact, it's Singapore two weeks ago, one offload, they paid $221. So this paper price is a future prediction. The reality is what's going on, on when they deliver and there are no more deliveries out there lining up, waiting to go. So that, that now that impact is going to hit and you're going to start getting a very dramatic surge in oil prices around the world or prices for fuel, for diesel. Airline industry is particularly getting battered. And so is that airline industry starts collapsing. There, there's a, there is a, an American citizen lives in China named Alex. He writes it and broadcasts it. A place called Reporter Fi. And he's a, he's a derivatives trader. Been doing that for 20 years. And you know, because the derivatives market encompasses something like $600 trillion worth of assets, tremendously over leveraged. And according to Alex, he says the financial crisis that's coming as a result of all of this will make the 2008 collapse look small by comparison. So we haven't yet seen the full cascading effects of the, the loss of 20% of the oil, loss of 25% of the liquid natural gas lost, 35% of the fertilizer. They're already predicting now that rice production is, is falling off. So you're going to have falloffs in rice, falloffs in corn, fall offs in wheat because of the lack of fertilizer. And so what we're looking at down the road a year from now and two years from now are significant disruptions in the food supply. So then that, that translates into political chaos. So we're, you know, if this whole war stops tomorrow, man, we're not out of the woods. I mean it's the, that tsunami wave is going to hit us. The question is the longer this goes on, the bigger that tsunami wave gets.
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Yeah,
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boy.
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I guess my question is where's Marco Rubio on any of this? Not that he is an extremely capable guy. I would have told you he's the dumbest damn senator we have a couple of years ago. But like he has seemed to have tried to stay out of this somehow, even though he's the Secretary of State and National Security advisor. And I've heard other people say he's no dummy, which I guess means he can read or something. I don't know exactly what I mean by that. I, I guess what I'm saying in my be sweated desperation here is that like, is anyone intelligent advising the President that like, man, we got some real headwinds. You know, I was reading a thing where he said they're quoting Trump people and I guess they're quoting him that they believe that if they can just keep the blockade going for three months that then the Iranians, they won't be able to put their oil anywhere so they'll have to turn off all their refineries and then that's going to cause all this economic damage. They're really going to lose money then. And then they'll give in. You know, they didn't give in when we kill the Ayatollah and bomb the crap out of Tehran and all the other stuff that we were doing a few weeks ago there. But, but they're going to give in now if we just hold on for three months. And I'm thinking like one that's wishful thinking and sounds pretty thin and is a three month punt at least for this supposedly to take effect. But then like any idiot president in the same position, George W. Bush or Barack Obama or whoever would at this point think Gez, I don't know that's really going to work, right? Like there's got to be some kind of voice of reason up there. Is there? And, and I'm sorry, I guess I should have preface this whole interview with man I've been moving and traveling and so I don't really know anything. I'm sure there must be so much that I'm missing that's going on here as far as the reporting about what's happening in Washington here. But is, is there any voice of reason in on the National Security Council at all do you think?
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Apparent apparently JD Vance and I know there's some critics of Vance but he has been trying to do, you know, he, he's trying to walk that fine line that he doesn't want to challenge Trump. He knows that if he takes on Trump directly, Trump's going to get defensive. So he's trying to be, you know, be viewed as a loyal subordinate. But he's also been pushing hard to, you know, we shouldn't get into this war, we should be getting out. That said, you know, the other day I did an interview with Al Mayadeen television and they had one of their correspondents who had written a piece comparing, trying to show that how much Donald Trump is like Ronald Reagan and in some of their, you know, dealings with Iran. And you know, I had to correct him. I said, well, I disagree because I look back at Reagan with all of his flaws and, and bad policies. Still, Reagan, unlike Trump was, had good bipartisan relationships with the Democrats. He was great friends with Tip o'. Neill. He didn't, he didn't go out of his way to insult Democrats. He'd make jokes about him, jokes that would Actually, the Democrats would laugh at. He was, and he was accompanied, though he had a Secretary of State named George Schultz. Schultz was incredible. He had Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger. Cap was, it was outstanding. In fact, it was unfortunate was it was actually George Schultz who had talked Reagan into sending the Marines into Beirut in 1982 to try to help get in the middle of the civil, Lebanese civil war. And that decision was made without consulting Cap. And when Cap found out about it, he went to Reagan, he says, hey, this is crazy. Don't do it. And then Reagan said, well, I've already done it. And then when the Marines got blown up, then Reagan said, you're right, Cap, you know, pulled him out. But at least at that time around Reagan, who was in, he, he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, that nonetheless he was surrounded by some top notch security advisors. They were. Now that said Robert McFarland, who was his National Security advisor, got him into a lot of trouble with, with Iran Contra and, and that whole mess. In fact, I was going to suggest to you that might be another book for you to consider Provoke too. Because when you go back and look at the history of the United States, what we did to Iran and what we did with Iraq, providing the chemical weapons, providing biological weapons, providing the intelligence that was used by Iraq to attack Iran, you then begin to understand why the Iranians actually were really upset with us and were pushing back a part of the story we never heard. And also wrote that book first.
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It's called Enough already.
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Oh, okay. I haven't read that yet. I'm sorry. No problem, man. But, but, but, you know, the, our betrayal of Saddam Hussein, you know, Saddam had been basically our boy for nine years and then all of a sudden we turned on him viciously. And the, the reality was I, I was good friends with Pat Lang. I don't know if you know who he is, but yeah, sure, I read
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his blog for many years.
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Okay, so Pat was the one who was hand carrying the intelligence to Iraq for the last two years of that Iran Iraq war. And the reason Pat was doing it is Saddam Hussein got pissed off at the CIA because of Iran Contra. When Saddam found out that because all of his intel was coming to him via CIA. When he found out that CIA was betraying him and selling weapons to the Iranians that were being used to attack Iraq, he tossed out the CIA. Tom Twetton in that crowd. So I may say it's a very complicated past, but I would argue the United States, the one consistent bad actor throughout this process has been us, not them, us. And we never take account for what we've done.
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B
I wish I had known that anecdote or maybe I, if I had ever learned that I had forgotten it. Saddam's reaction to the outbreak of Iran Contra and then that would then coincide with what I do know about CIA encouraging the Kuwaitis to be intransigent towards him.
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Yeah.
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Not because they were trying to bait him into a trap, but just because they were trying to screw him by having the Kuwaitis demand their payments and, and, and all their overproduction of the oil and all of that stuff was.
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A
Yeah, that's why urging, I mean, that's why Pat Lang ended up hand carrying the intelligence for the last two years of the war. Because the Iraqis said to the CIA, you know, basically, go fuck yourself. We're not going to deal with you anymore. And so to keep the policy in place, Pat got tabbed. And so he did it for the last two years. But understand, when we're sharing that intelligence, we weren't, we weren't sharing what, what is, what is the Ayatollah like to eat for breakfast? Well, what are his preferred movies? No, no, no. We were giving targeting data so that they could attack and kill Iranian troops. That's what we were doing. And you know, it's just Americans fail to rip. It was during that entire 80s as all that's going on. Then we wonder, well, why is Iran sponsoring and backing people like Hezbollah? Well, because we're doing all this stuff to, you know, it's, it's a much more nuanced story instead of this black and white work. We're the good guys, they're the bad guys.
- [32:24]
C
Expand designs.com that's my friend Harley Abbott's company and he is the webmaster for the Scott Horton show as well as the Libertarian Institute. He is the guy that redesigned the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity website. He's done a lot of great work for other friends of mine. And unlike a lot of webmasters and web developers and different guys that I have worked with over the years, the thing is about Harley Abbott and his team is they do what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it and are just extremely reliable and extremely knowledgeable and 100 vouch for the great Harley Abbott over there. You got a website, you need it fixed up, you need a new one, you're setting up a business working on any kind of online project like that.
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B
Check out expand designs.com yeah, and you know, it's funny. Well, I don't know there's so much to it, but I guess basically the entire narrative that the policy is based around, if you hear it, and I'm sure that this is what Trump believes too. Like, you know, there were, George W. Bush probably believed some lies, but he told plenty of his own where he knew he was lying. Here we're like, seems like Donald Trump probably doesn't know the first thing about Iran's role in the region. You know, I actually have a quote in Enough Already where he talks about, in his first term, he goes, oh, the generals brought me into this room and there are these big boards. Wow. They were big and boardy. And the generals, they were so handsome, like Tom Cruise, only even more handsomer than that. He actually says that. And he says, and then all over the board was Iran. Now Iran is taking over the region. And it's like, yeah, but of course, like all they have is they support Hezbollah, they support the regime that America installed in power in Baghdad, they support the Houthis, but no one can ever really quantify that very well. It's all just mostly accusations based stuff. There we know that even Obama admitted, and there are other sources for this too. It was a concession on his part that the Iranians warned the Houthis not to take over Sanaa. They didn't want them to take over Sanaa because they knew that the Saudis would launch a war over it and they did it anyway.
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Yeah.
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B
So they're not like just, you know, they're friends and allies, but they're not just, you know, sock puppets of the Iranians or anything like that.
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A
But I, I don't know if you read the article I did, looking at the actual body count of Americans that have been killed by Hamas and Hezbollah, you know, since. From Hezbollah since 1982 and Hamas since 1987. Since 1987, the number for Hamas is 50 and the number for Hezbollah is less than 1100. And then you compare that to the United States that supported the MEK. MEK's body count for Iran is 17,000. And then if you include the US support for Iraq in the war, the, you know, giving them the chemical weapons or the precursors for both chemical and biological weapons that resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 Iranians. So, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to compare body counts, it's not even close. Not even close. And then we wonder what, and I'm
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B
sorry, Larry, when, when you say, has Bala killed 1100. That was 1100. Who?
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A
Both American civilians and military. 600. 663 military died in, in Iraq from roadside bombs that we attributed. And as you've made the case.
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B
Yeah, that's obvious.
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I mean, I'm agreeing. I agree with you totally. But I'm just saying that's how they count the statistics. They blame that on Iran. But then the, the 241Americans killed in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon.
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B
Let me ask you about that, by the way, because I don't know nearly enough about that. I know the Israelis knew it was coming and turned a blind eye. That's in by way of deception by Victor Ostrovsky. But can you tell me exactly what group did that and what all exact control Tehran had over them and. Or this specific act. Do you know those kind of details about that bombing?
- [36:37]
A
Only indirectly, through Alistair Crook. Alistair says it was a mall. Amal was actually controlled by Hafiz El Assad.
- [36:46]
B
So that was what Pat Buchanan said too, that it was the Amal militia that did it. Although I said that as though I knew it with Pat as the source, because I knew Pat worked for Reagan at the time. And Pat is a brilliant genius. He's not just some commentator where he's a absolute badass. So. And then someone got really mad at me and said I was totally wrong about that, and then it wasn't them at all. But then. So Amal is separate from Hisbalah, right? If that was them. Correct.
- [37:11]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So
- [37:15]
B
for the dictator of Seer, the Ba' Athist dictator of Syria, rather than for the Iranians.
- [37:20]
A
Right, correct. You know, remember of all started in 1972 and it wasn't. And it wasn't until 10 years later that Hezbollah shows up. Okay, so. And even Amal predated Iran. You know, the Iranian revolution took place in 1979.
- [37:39]
B
Have you ever heard any like, specific credible accusations for Tehran ordering that attack?
- [37:44]
A
No, no, none at all.
- [37:46]
B
Only general, vague ones. Right.
- [37:48]
A
Yeah. Well, we needed to blame, we needed to blame Iran. The, the real, the, the anger of the United States, the CIA, particularly at Iran, was the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was one of the few organic revolutions in history where there were no outside force was maneuvering, manipulating or controlling events. This was entirely internal. They rose up, tossed out the Shaw, who we, we along with the Brits had put in power. And that, that, that's the issue. How dare they. You know, we had control of this whole thing. It fit into a broader plan of going after Russia, going After China and now those damn Iranians blew that up. And again, but the, the other thing is instructive about that period, Even though we were providing the chemical weapon precursors to Iraq during that, and Iraq carried out 20 chemical weapons attacks from August of 83 through August of 88, not never did Iran turn around, say, you know what, we're going to go tit for tat. We're going to develop nuclear weapons or chemical weapons. They didn't do it. And the same principle for why they haven't developed nukes applied at that time as well.
- [39:00]
B
So, yeah, all right, so now I'm sorry, back to Washington. Like, what hope do you have for current diplomacy here? You know, with or without Vance or, you know, the Kushner thing. We saw the latest offer from Iran was, let's just talk about Hormuz and put off the nuclear issue until later. Trump responded with a tweet about how no more Mr. Nice Guy again, he would rather go back to war and force him to give up all uranium enrichment. I mean, that's a hell of a standoff. If he really is insisting still on absolutely no enrichment, they absolutely have to give that up. I mean, they've been, I have to admit, they have been willing to climb way, way, way down on that issue,
- [39:43]
A
but I don't know about all the
- [39:44]
B
way off the very last rung that they'd be willing to give up all enrichment. It seems like their claim was on the right to enrich has been extremely high priority there for more than a generation. And I don't know.
- [39:58]
A
Well, they're looking, from their standpoint to say, look, we're following international law.
- [40:02]
B
Of course, in the npt, they have the right, right there.
- [40:06]
A
Yeah, we signed the npt, we've allowed IAEA inspections. So we're not going to, we're not going to give up our sovereign right. I will say, tongue in cheek, I hope Alice Cooper sues Trump for copyright infringement. You know, no more Mr. Nice Guy, no more Mr. Clean. But actually, I, look, I think the way this is going to go, and, boy, I hope I'm wrong, but I, I think Trump's going to take another shot. They're going to allow the. He's going to get talked into it. Well, all we got to do is hit him one more time hard. And that compounded with this blockade, that's going to force him to crumble and it's going to have the exact opposite effect. Iran is going to strike back with more force. They've already got, they've already dramatically improved their air defenses over the course of the last three weeks. A week ago, we thought the war had started up again because there was reports of explosions over Tehran. Turns out they were conducting a live fire, military drill, military exercise. So Iran, Iran, they harbor no illusions. And this disinformation that's put out suggesting that Iran is split, the leadership's divided. Apparently people haven't read the history. You start the oldest one, Possesskian, 71. The youngest, the Ayatollah Mustafa, 56. Everybody in between that, Arachi, the Foreign Minister, Galiboff, the head of the parliament, and then the head of the irgc. I don't recall his name. All of those guys fought in the Iraq Iran war. All of them fought with the irgc. So in other words, they see the world from the same standpoint. What's interesting about possession, he was actually direct drafted into the army. He was a medic, but his medical services were entirely with the irgc. So that's why I said, these guys, you know, they, they come out of a generation. They shared, they shared a combat experience. Not necessarily in the same unit, but it was the same sort of generational thing that, like our, our greatest generation from World War II experienced and that, that has bonded them together in a way that Iran has never had a leadership as strong and unified as what they have now. And that the fact that Israel's feeding this bogus intelligence suggesting just the opposite is going to lead Trump to make some assumptions that I think he'll live to regret,
- [42:29]
B
man. Yeah, and it goes back to the senility thing. Does he remember what they promised before and how disappointed he was when it didn' work out like they said? I mean, he can't be that out of it, right? I don't know. But then again, you know, as I told you, the day that you predicted the war on the show, I said, yeah, but counterpoint, there's no need to do this at all. How can we do something? You know, I, and believe me, I, I knew how hard they were pushing and all that, especially, you know, Tel Aviv, but it just seems like it's already a proven. Yeah, idiot proposal at this point. And I get it that, you know, oh, we gotta say face. I, I guess I understand how someone was, you know, the Jack Keanes of the world would still be promising that a little bit more violence would do the trick.
- [43:22]
A
But, but you see, you, you, you,
- [43:24]
B
you shouldn't have to be Ron Paul to say, I don't know, you know, at this point.
- [43:30]
A
Well, you, you keep thinking about this in a logical, rational fashion.
- [43:33]
B
Oh, I'm sorry, man.
- [43:35]
A
And you got to realize that, you know, a lot of the logic and rationality goes out the window and it gets down to things as simple as emotion and things that people want to believe that may not be true, but they've convinced themselves that it's true.
- [43:50]
B
Yeah, credibility.
- [43:51]
A
Yeah, thanks.
- [43:52]
B
You got to save it. So, you know, when he ran out of every other thing. You know what, I'm sorry, I probably asked you this before, but in just a few minutes, I did a show today that I think I've been on there a couple times. Nice guy. But he was just sure that this whole Israel angle is a red herring and that ultimately this is all about America's cold war with China and depriving China of Iranian hydrocarbons. What role do you think that that plays in this?
- [44:20]
A
Not much because the dependence of China on Iranian oil has been declining over time. I think now, you know, about 15% of Chinese economy is, you know, really affected by oil because they've been shifting with a one of their five years plan going to electric, electricity, which is why they're building. They're not running oil fueled plants, they're running nuclear fuel plants. They've got massive solar fields. So you know, China's future is on the, the electric side. But, but they see Iran as a critical crossroads, economic crossroads, as it has been through history with the, you know, the, the old Silk Road ran right through Persia as well as the north south corridor for Moscow. So this, if anything, it's playing out the exact opposite. China is weakening the United States to the point that the United States, if, if a war broke out between China and the United States, US wouldn't be able to sustain the past three weeks. We would be defeated.
- [45:26]
B
And so in other words, Chairman Xi is Joe Biden in this situation inflicting a strategic defeat on us. Only it's working in this case.
- [45:34]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right.
- [45:38]
B
All right, thank you, Larry. Appreciate your time. Everybody check out Larry Johnson. Sign up for his email list so you don't miss a Single1. It's sonar21.com thank you, man.
- [45:47]
A
Hey, Scott. I appreciate it, brother.
- [45:49]
C
The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Robertson Roberts Brokerage, Inc. Mundo's Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books. Fool's Errand. Enough already. And my latest provoked How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine find all of the above@scott Horton.org and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at Scott Hortonshow.com and Patreon.com Scott Hortonshow Bumpers by Josh Langford Music intro and outro videos by Dissident Media Audio mastering by Podsworth Media. See y' all next time.