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- [00:02]
Scott Horton
Get ready to take a flamethrower to
- [00:05]
Tom Woods
the official narrative and learn what the elites don't want you to know.
- [00:09]
Scott Horton
You're listening to the Tom Woods Show.
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Tom Woods
Hey, everybody, Tom woods here, episode 2766 of the Tom woods show with the great Scott Horton. He runs every organization and has written every book that's ever been written. Now, that is an exaggeration, but I mean, when you look at all the work he's done over the years, I mean, yeah, he's got the books behind him. He's got Anti war dot com. He's got the Libertarian Institute, which really, I mean, I know you people work with you on it, but I bet you're the guy who thought up the idea of the Libertarian Institute, which produces tremendous work online, but also these great books always coming out with really important books right there. He's got the Scott Horton Academy, Foreign policy and freedom. Scott hortonacademy.com Check that out. He's up to so much, doing everything he can to get the word out. And Scott, I wanted to have you on to maybe tie up some loose ends in my own mind that I bet other people have as well. And it has to do with the subject of Israel. Now, people say you're obsessed with Israel if you talk about it, but it's like during the years of COVID I guess you could say, if you wanted to put it that way, I was, quote, obsessed with COVID But I think I more charitable reading was that that was the thing on everybody's minds that was very important to the future of the country and the present. And so I, you know, I wanted to talk about it. I mean, that's a more charitable way of looking at it. So I do talk about Israel now because I want to understand better what's going on. So in particular, I want to go through a few examples of situations in which people say the relationship with Israel is not in the interest of the United States because, for one thing, Israel keeps dragging the United States into wars that are not in its interest. Now, that gets said over and over and over, and I want to put some meat on the bones there and see how true that is. Now, let's start, if we May, with the 2003 war in Iraq, because there you get a lot of people today saying, oh, that's not true. The prime minister wasn't even in favor of the war. And like, on and on and on, you hear all this. Now I understand why in retrospect, as you look back at that conflict, nobody wants to be associated with it. So I understand that the Israel lobby would want to say now wait a minute, hold on, this had nothing to do with us. But I also know that in the 1990s I can find more than one major document in which the removal of Saddam Hussein was identified as a key Israeli interest. Then we have 911 and we have a lot of confused Americans saying why are we going to war with Iraq? Iraq had nothing to do with 9 11. All right, well that's a good first start. It did have nothing to do with 9 11. So what is the motivating factor here? Well, is it really the case that George W. Bush was talked into that by the government of Israel or neocons and he might not have done it otherwise or what's the mechanism there?
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Scott Horton
Well, no, I don't think it's right that the neocons talked W. Bush into it. W. Bush wanted to do it and then neocons told him, you're smart, this is a great idea, we should definitely do that instead of not doing it. So you had more cautious voices like Colin Powell who did of course lie us into war, ultimately the Secretary of State, but who otherwise was not in a rock hawk and you know, had said, you know, this is right around the 13th anniversary of this time 2000. Oh sorry, not even 15th anniversary of this time 2001 of Powell and Connollyza Rice, the national Security Advisor, both announcing in I believe this is Rice's words, but they both said something to the effect of we have him in his box, he's contained. Saddam Hussein is contained, he has no weapons. We beat up his army real bad. And so you know, essentially the status quo can last. And then after September 11th they said, oh no, now the new doctrine is that you can't let rogue states have weapons of mass destruction because they could September 11th you. And so now you have to go and preempt these threats before they materialize based on the presumption that they will and the presumption that, well, if somebody's a dictator then they're definitely aggressive and after all, with America's, you know, half ass blessing, he invaded Kuwait and with America's help or at least American provided weapons, killed all the Kurds killed back when he worked for Ronald Reagan. And so that's why we gotta go and do this now. And essentially they concocted the doctrine around the policy just as they concocted and as the head of British intelligence, MI6 Richard Dearlove said, they fixed the facts around the policy. They fixed the policy around the wish list there. And as I've explained, I'm pretty sure on your show in numerous settings, but it is the key to this. There's actually even once upon a time, I don't know if anyone can find it anymore, but there was an interview of Richard Pearl by Tim Russert on Meet the Press where Tim Russert says, now, Richard Pearl, you were part of this paper in 1996, a clean break that said you wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein for Israel and that that was what would be good for Israel. So what is the connection between this policy now and that? And Pearl go kind of his eyes get big and he's like, oh, yeah, no, this has nothing to do with that. But of course it does. And the thinking was, you know, in a nutshell, it was Richard Pearl and his, you know, sort of lackey, David Wormser was really the principal author of the thing. And they had been convinced by the Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, that if they would get rid of Saddam Hussein and put in a Hashemite king, for example, the cousin of the king of Jordan, and later in the plan, they replaced that with just Chalabi himself. But if they would do that, then that would empower, yes, the Iraqi Shiite super majority. But that'd be fine because they will fall under the hypnosis and the magic spell of the Hashemite king, even though he's a Sunni, he claims to have the blood of the prophet. And what Chalabi convinced Worms are, who somehow still believes this to this day, apparently, as he stated in an interview with a evangelical Christian guy when they did a review of Tucker Carlson's 911 documentary last fall, I think it was last fall that he still believes that a Hashemite king would have this magical power over the Shiite super majority and even over the Shiite clergy, namely the Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani down in Najaf. I don't know if Worms are ever names him, but he's the boss in Najaf, let me tell you. And that then these religious authorities, these Shiite religious authorities would then use all of their weight against Iran and to break the Iranian Syrian Hezbollah axis of support for Israel's enemies, particularly Hezbollah. And the whole basis of the plan, the clean break, means a clean break with the Oslo peace process, a clean break with the Labor Party's strategy of dealing with Arafat, creating a sort of pseudo, sort of kind of Palestinian state and using that as the basis to then move on and make peace with the closer Arab neighbors. And what the Clean Break says is that, no, what we should do is continue to steal all of Palestine. But since it'll be hard to make peace with our neighbors, as long as that's the policy, then we'll just have to achieve a position of greater strength against them all. And the primary object of, you know, their attention at the time was this arc of power is what the King of Jordan later called it, the Shiite Crescent. When they finally followed through on attempting this policy, all they did really was, as we've discussed on the show before, is they put the Iraqi supermajority, and they're not so much the super majority, but the political leaders of the Iraqi supermajority in power there. And those are namely from the Dawah Party and Supreme Islamic Council, who were backed by Iran, just as Ahmed Chalabi was backed by Iran. They had to have known that INC Headquarters, Iraqi National Congress, Iraqi exile, you know, LIE factory headquarters was in Tehran. And obviously it was in the Ayatollah's interest to get rid of Saddam Hussein. But what happened, I mean, plainly was that Chalabi manipulated these American neoconservatives into believing that that the new Shiite Iraq, under the control of the Hashemites and later when they changed the plan to under the control of Chalabi himself, would be allies with Israel, would force Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and would even build oil pipeline to Haifa. Now, in regards to the point that you brought up that people do make, and there is some truth to this, that Ariel Sharon, who was the prime minister at the time, was much more of an Iran hawk then his padna Netanyahu, who at that time was. I'd have to check the exact dates, but he was the defense minister, I believe. I think he was defense minister in the coalition with Sharon at first, but then dropped out of the coalition. But he was still part of. They were sort of rivals within the same party. I forget exactly what Netanyahu's position was. I think he may have been out of government at that time or for part of the time he was a minister and part of the time not. But it was Netanyahu and who was closer to APAC in the United States and closer to the neoconservative movement. And again, clearly it was these American neoconservatives, David Wormser and Richard Pearl and along with Douglas Feith and Richard Barebanks III and a couple others who had come up with this clean break policy. And people can find this on my website, scothorton.org and it's still available. It was missing for a while from the original Israeli think tank that published it, so I republished it. But you can find it believe still at the. I think it's back again. I think you can find it at the Israeli think tank. It's called A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. And then the companion piece is called Coping with Crumbling States, A Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant. And then they publish a book called Tyranny's Ally, again by Wormser, but with a forward by Pearl. And in the latter two of those documents, ch's name comes up over and over again. It's clear where they're getting this stuff from. And this was essentially the thinking pretty much the entire neoconservative movement agreed that this would be, you know, good for Israel to get rid of Iraq. Now Ariel Sharon said, well, listen, our real problem is in Tehran. You should go after them first. But obviously Bush wanted to do Iraq. That was, you know, where his father had left off in 91, that he thought we should have gone all the way to Baghdad, just as Wolfowitz had back then. So Sharon said, okay, fine, but just promise me that you'll go to Iran and Syria next. And Bush said, yes, of course I will. That's fine. That's on the agenda. And so he said, of course, okay then, and got on board for the thing. It's not like he was trying to stop it or trying to warn Bush that you better not do it. Although I think he probably was wise to the fact that you really are going to empower Iran in Iraq, that this is probably not going to really give America and our friends sway over the Iraqis and then sway over Iran. I don't know if he ever really bought into that, but I think he bought into the idea that that we'll just keep going after Baghdad, will go on to Damascus and Tehran next. So then, you know, we know that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the neoconservative movement, which is just the vanguard of the Israel Lobby, that they are the ones who lied us into war. They are the ones who, you know, helped Ahmed Chalabi set up this Iraqi National Congress, or I guess the Iranians did, too, but they worked with this Iraqi National Congress to launder all the lies. So the CIA would not lie well enough. Right. They'd torture a guy into saying that Saddam Hussein taught him how to make chemical weapons or whatever, but they didn't, you know, other analysts didn't want to just make up the lies out of whole cloth that they needed for the war. So what happened was the Iraqi National Congress funneled all the lies through the neocons in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. And that was under the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and under him, Bill Ludy and Abram Sholski, and then under them, Michael Makofsky, Michael Maloof, Michael Rubin, Michael Ledeen, lots of Michaels in the OSP and a few others in the Office of Special Plans. And these were the guys who were in charge of laundering the lies about the weapons of mass destruction and in the case of Maloof, especially with worms or the lies about Osama bin Laden's ties to Saddam Hussein as well. And then they would take all of this stuff. And this is, you know, all of our great friend Karen Kotowski was the whistleblower in the Pentagon, the Air Force lieutenant colonel who watched all this happening right in front of her eyes. Bill Ludy was also her boss, even though he wore this other hat. So she knew all of what was going on here.
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Tom Woods
And I remember she said something like we were told, don't explain to anyone what this office is. If you're asked about it, don't, don't comment on, don't, don't explain what it is.
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Scott Horton
Right.
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Tom Woods
Oh, that seems normal.
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Scott Horton
She started writing for Soldiers for the Truth, which was David Hackworth's website, and he was the most decorated colonel from Vietnam who had turned, you know, anti war and tried to stop the Iraq war. In fact, I remember him on the radio before the war. But so she started writing for him about what was going on there and all that and eventually, you know, ended up in the orbit with LewRockwell.com and all that as one of our friends. So anyway, these were the guys who lied us into war. And they're clearly like, you know, Douglas Feist, law partner Mark Zell represented settlers on the West Bank. Right. Like all of these guys, if you look, were tied directly or indirectly by a degree or so from the laud. And you know, clearly this was the consensus and this was, you know, I know your friend Paul Gottfried has done a lot of the work on this where in the ancient times of the 1970s when it was like the last gasp of old WASP establishment where it was like Brooks Brothers kind of, you know, Yaley white guys only at the Council on Foreign Relations they had like, you know, token minority membership or whatever. Well, these guys made their own alliance. The Council on Foreign Relations being essentially the Rockefeller establishment, right? The central banking and, and oil so the military industrial complex and the Israel Lobby made their alliance. And in fact, Jude Waniski told me that he was. Sorry, that he was actually the guy who introduced Richard Pearl to Dick Cheney in the 1970s. And so this is where you have kind of this military industrial complex. Money and power from out west that had grown up post World War II, needed some eggheads, needed their own Council on Foreign Relations. So they made this alliance with the neoconservatives, who then took over the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage, and then backed by the Olin and Bradley and Scape Foundations and whatever other money, they created the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Center for Security Policy, the Project for a New American Century, the Jewish Institute for National Security affairs, and, I don't know, six or seven others, I'm forgetting. And then these guys became sort of the. The forest of experts in the echo chamber, you know, pushing for the war and always, you know, verifying each other's arguments for why this has to be done. And so you had, I don't know, 15 or 20 neocons literally in the government, working in Vice President Cheney's office, on the National Security Council as State and Defense. And then you had, you know, another 50 or 75 of these guys dominating the think tanks and of course, the Weekly Standard and National Review and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the New York Times. And of course, then, you know, also providing all the talking heads for Fox News in pushing us into that war. And so, you know, I remember even in the 90s, wondering, who is this Bill Crystal guy and why does he want to do Iraq so bad? I didn't understand what a neocon was. Didn't seem like a regular Republican to me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. You know what I mean? But that was what it was. They're a bunch of Israeli agents, essentially, the neoconservative movement. That's really who they are. And that was their idiot thinking, and that was the role they played in pushing us into that war. You know, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, it was in their briefing book for 2002 that you have to, you know, when we all go to Capitol Hill, everybody beat the drum that we have to go to Iraq to protect Israel. And, you know, it was a huge part of it. And then also, this should not go unsaid that these just. Absolutely. And look, I'm not a religious guy. I'm not going to sit here, and maybe I'm not in the right position. To claim what's blasphemy and somebody else's religion or whatever. But it's just the most preposterous crap in the world that, you know, John Hagee and these other people shoveled down their flocks throats about how you have to support this war in order to force Jesus to come back. And at that point he will kill all the Jews and send men to hell, but you will get raptured up to heaven in your body and then there'll be a big nuclear war and Satan will rule or the UN or, you know, the lost behind the left behind books that they all sold at Walmart and all of these, you know, major TV Christian preachers, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, both of them absolutely guilty as hell of this, of pushing this lie that somehow going with George Bush to the Middle east is fulfilling biblical prophecy, which is no more credible than if David Koresh was the same one telling you the same crap. You know, and he needs access to your wife too while he's at it. Get it 2000, get it? The middle East. And they just absolutely, in the most cynical fashion, exploited the goodwill and the good faith of millions of Americans who thought that they were supporting an effort to defend their country and millions of Christians who thought that this was part of their religion somehow was to go and overthrow the Baathists for the Likud, you know, and. Yeah, let me know if I left anything out there.
- [17:57]
Tom Woods
Hey folks, it's time to put into practice the ideas we talk about on this show. Of course, you want to get your tax guidance from someone who hates the tax man who with the same burning passion you do. I don't think I have to convince you of that. If you're a business owner or you're a high W2 earner paying at least 40k a year in taxes, there's a friend of mine you need to meet. The great Matthew C. Is a tax attorney who helps liberty minded folks just like you keep more of your money and stay out of trouble with the irs. And by the way, yes, I said attorney, not cpa. So your conversations with him are protected by attorney client privilege. That is a very big deal. You cannot get that kind of protection from your accountant. And it helps that Matt is one of us. He's sailed on my cruise, he's been at my murder mystery parties, he's a member of my elite mastermind. And he's been listening to the Tom Wood show since the beginning. He doesn't just do taxes. He builds strategies to legally starve the state. We're talking about entity structuring, income shifting, advanced planning. This is war by spreadsheet. He knows how to legally reduce your tax burden, structure your business the right way, and avoid trouble while keeping every dollar you're entitled to. So go to agoristtaxadvice.com woods that's a G O R I S T taxadvice.com woods and grab your free Agorist tax toolkit. It's full of powerful tools and templates you can use to get your business in order, track your expenses, and reduce how much the IRS takes from you without crossing any lines. Again, that's agorist tax advice.com woods take the first step to keeping what's yours. Well, there's a lot there. The thing I want to understand is, despite all that activity that you just described, if the US President is, especially in the wake of an unprecedented disaster on American soil, 911 is really determined to go to war with somebody and, you know, rallies his party to get on board with them for that, what do we need all this extra stuff for? I mean, this could have happened and perhaps would have happened, but without an Israel lobby or without all this organized activity. Could you defend or would you challenge that statement?
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Scott Horton
I would challenge that, I think, without Dick Cheney and the neocons. In fact, this is a fun anecdote from the W. Bush administration. Was the first guy that he interviewed for Secretary of defense was Dan Coats, a senator from, I think, Indiana or Illinois. And Dan Coats was just another Republican senator, man, straight out of the cellophane, right. But then they asked him about missile defense, and he goes, ah, that's a big boondoggle, man. We don't want to waste money on that. And they were like, what? Of course we do. We're the Republicans. That's, that's the whole point of getting elected, is to waste money on missile defense. Stupid. There's the door. Don't call us. We'll call you, but we won't. And then Dick Cheney said, well, you know, my old mentor Donald Rumsfeld is probably available. And that was how Rumsfeld got the job as Secretary of Defense. So, I mean, even that right there might have changed the whole everything askew to a tangent to a whole different timeline where this Coats guy doesn't hire Wolfowitz and doesn't hire Pearl and Fife and Adelman and all of these kooks, James Woolsey and all these kooks to run the Pentagon. And at that point, you know, maybe everything is different. You know, I'LL tell you what, because I was a cab driver at the time in Austin, Texas, where Governor Bush is, you know, nominally from. And I'm here to tell you that all of the Bush supporters agreed on one thing, which was we don't really believe in him very much. We like that Colin Powell. We trust him and we know that's his father's best guy and he's going to be driving, you know, as far as foreign policy and all the big questions going. So we know we can trust his judgment, but we know that Bush did not, that Bush chose Cheney over Powell. When Powell got our pilots sprung from China in the spring of 2000. Sorry, sprung in spring. An accident in the spring of 2001 when they crashed on Hunan island or whatever, that was like the last of Powell's political capital right there in facing down the hawks and saying, let's be sweet and get our and not confrontational with China and get our guys back. And, you know, by the fall, that was it. Nobody was listening to him anymore. Cheney and the neocons were driving on foreign policy. So, I mean, even if Powell had just been man enough to resign over it, or if Powell had been man enough to threaten to and say, look, man, it's not right. If we got a lie to do this, then we don't need to be doing it and we should not be doing it. And he did not do that. But if it had been him essentially in charge of, you know, helping Bush determine his foreign policy, we would have not gone to Iraq. You know, the record reflects that he advised Bush not to do it and, you know, also was the one who dragged his feet and insisted that they go to the United Nations Security Council and try to get a resolution to authorize it, which I think he probably knew they couldn't get and, you know, that kind of thing. So W. Bush alone, without the neoconservative movement, without the what Justin Raimondo called the axis of crystal, pushing for that thing from every angle, I don't think they could have done it. Because the fact is, Tom, anybody who knew anything about this stuff already, you know what I mean? Pre September 11, they could have all told you that. Come on, Saddam Hussein's not friends with Osama bin Laden. Like we already know about Bin Laden, declared war on us in 1996. His guys have been and, you know, associated type people have been attacking us since 1990. And, you know, had made it plain what they were about that whole time and all that. Nobody thought that they were. Oh, except for Lori Milroy, the neocon kook hoaxer from the American Enterprise Institute who tried to say that Al Qaeda was working for Saddam Hussein's mukbarat all along. But the CIA and FBI all debunked that and said that wasn't true. Again, the CIA wouldn't even lie well enough to get us into the war. That was why they had to resort to all the neocons to pumping in all the lies about the mobile biological weapons labs. That guy Curveball, that was Ahmed Chalabi's secretary's cousin, was the guy who came up with the biological weapons labs. And you know, all of the stuff, the rumors of the nukes and warehouses full of sarin and VX nerve gas just waiting, you know, advanced production going on, they can't wait to attack us with them. And all of that stuff that was all coming from the neocons. And without that, it would have been much more difficult for W. Bush to do it because after all, Saddam Hussein was like, dude, what are you upset about? I didn't do anything. He didn't want to fight. He clearly did not. So you know what I mean? It took, you remember how it was. It took this massive propaganda campaign and this massive like peer pressure campaign to make everybody get on board for that war, to fool people into being afraid enough to get on board for that war. And I think, you know, without the neocons, I don't think they'd have been able to do it. It been certainly much more difficult.
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Tom Woods
Well, obviously Syria, one more thing about
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Scott Horton
that is the Israel lobbies pressure on the liberal Democrats to support it too, because there is a huge partisan interest in just telling the truth and thwarting Bush. Why would the average Democrat want to go after Iraq? They just spent eight years not regime changing Iraq. I mean, Clinton had supported a failed coup in 95 and whatever, but barely. So all of a sudden all the Democratic leaders in the Senate want to do this. Why? It's because of the lobby.
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Tom Woods
Well, I do want to say something about Syria and of course Iran, because those are probably the most obvious examples. But are there parts of the war on terror that you can say have no connection to Israel at all, like Libya?
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Scott Horton
Well, you know, I wrote a whole book about Afghanistan and I think, you know, the only mention of Israel in there would probably be in the torture section. I could make, you know, a partial case that the reason that they decided to regime change Kabul and stay in the first place was, as Rumsfeld put it in the National Security Council meetings, was to extend the war in time and place so the American people would not get the mistaken impression that we already won the war and now we can come home. That's what you get for messing with us. We blow you up and then that's it. That nope, the American people need to should we start bombing Baghdad right now just so they know this thing is going to take place over a broader time and place. And that was why he and the neoconservatives insisted on grouping the Taliban and Al Qaeda together. When Connolly's arise, the National Security Advisor and the CIA were saying no, we should just be killing Arabs and we should be telling the Taliban we're not here for you. Just point out the Arab fighters to us and we'll get them. In fact you know there's a anecdote in Gary Burnson, the second CIA commander's book on the subject called Jawbreaker where he says he got a Taliban commander on the radio saying I want to surrender to you. And he says well do you have any Arab fighters with you? And the guy says yeah, because some of Bin Laden's guys were fighting with the Taliban against the Northern alliance, the 055 Brigade they call them I believe it was. And he said you have Arabs fighting with you? And the Taliban guy said yeah I do. And he said kill them. And the guy says, the Taliban guy says okay. And then you hear shouting and whatever, they line up all the Arabs and then rat tat tat tat and they murder all the Arabs. And he goes now can I surrender? And Gary Bernson says yes and accepts his surrender. So when it came to separating the Taliban from Al Qaeda in the initial stages of the Afghan war in October of 2001 and November and the rest, yes, they could have kept them separate, could have kept the mission limited to killing Bin Laden and his guys rather than focusing on regime change and long term occupation. So in that general sense the pre existing and already agreed upon plan to attack Iraq was part of the reason that they stayed in Afghanistan. And then a huge part of that was fighting this war for Israel's interests. And so you know that may be a stretch but eh, now when it comes to Libya they were on that list of 7 countries of Israel's enemies that they wanted overthrown. And I know that you know, at the time of the war in 2011 on the show I'd have to go back and see like which journalists I was talking to about this specifically but like we went through the different motives of, and this is in enough already too where I try to really go through and say, okay, so the Saudis were mad at Gaddafi for these reasons, the Qataris for these reasons, the French and the British for these reasons. And you know, maybe the Italians wanted to steal some oil, whatever. And then I honestly don't remember, I don't believe that I had anything specific about the Israelis pushing for that regime change. Now the neocons in America who are, you know, tend to not be able to distinguish between American national interests and Israeli national interests then yeah, they were all on board for it, right? You know, Max Boot at the Washington Post would have been a big one, but I think this would also include Crystal and Kagan and all of the biggest guys would have been. I'd have to go back and check the record, but I'm pretty sure all the worst neocons supported the war. I don't really know. Let's see. So that was 2011. So Netanyahu was back in office by then. I'd have to go back and check, but I think that it was really more NATO. You know, Sarkozy had the President of France. His election campaign had been bankrolled by Gaddafi and he was trying to cover that up. And so he had his own motive. Right? And the Saudis always hate him. I remember Eric Margulies told me that, oh, the Saudis hate Gaddafi because he always calls them women because they wear those long white gowns and he's like, haha, look at how they wear dresses like girls and like you know, make fun of them and call them homos and stuff and then had screwed them over on some oil deals and all that. And you know, now that I mentioned Margulies, Margulies told me then, yes, and the Israelis hate him because he always supported the Palestinians. You know, like again the specific one to one as far as like their role in pressuring Obama to do that, I don't know about that, I'd have to go back and look. But I'm sure that they weren't trying to stop him. You know what I mean? And what a mistake that was. You know they call that one the light touch, right? If, if Iraq was the heavy hand, then Libya was the light touch. We'll just go in there and we'll just help the local rebels do their regime change and then everything will work out. And then what they did was they completely destroyed the southern border of Libya and caused a massive migration crisis into Europe and they spread jihadi war. I mean the rebels whose side they took on the ground were essentially bin Ladenites, the leaders of them, at least, were veterans of Iraq War two who had just got home from fighting Americans with Al Qaeda in Iraq in Iraq War two. And they just come home. This is right at the time that Obama is killing Osama. In May of 2011, he's backing Osama bin Laden's men in Libya. And then the country is now split in two or three, depending on how you count it. Basically three. The Libya, the nation state of Libya doesn't really exist anymore. It's, you know, Benghazi ruled faction versus Tripoli ruled faction. And then there's another kind of breakaway bit in the south. And then the jihadi war spread from there down into Mali to Chad, Sierra Leone and Burkina Faso. And they ended up, the jihadis from Libya ended up making, you know, an alliance with Boko Haram in Nigeria who were already kind of Islamist marauders down there. And so the Libyan jihadis tell him, hey man, here's some guns and some how to read the Quran correctly guide books, you know what I mean? And like, and why they do it because Hillary wanted to run on it in 2016. She wanted to show that she can be just as tough as Bush, only she's smarter and she knows how to do it better than him. And then of course, by 2016, she ran away from that legacy, wanted nothing to do with the word Libya, and was asked in a debate about it, said no, that was Obama's fault. He was the president, not me. I was just Secretary of State. I don't know what you're talking about. But that was why he did it, was as a favor to her because she thought it was good politics, even though he just beat her for the nomination because she was a hawk and he was less of one. And so neither of them learned that lesson. And in fact, her hawkishness helped her lose in 2016. Remember, she was running on a no fly zone over Syria to protect Al Qaeda from Russian planes bombing them. We should be shooting down Russians to protect bin Ladenites was her position in the summer of 2016. And so you asked about Syria. That was all the Israel Abbey, dude, there is no reason in the world that Barack Obama and John Kerry and Hillary Clinton wanted Bashar Al Assad's scalp. That was the Likud. And you know, in my book. Enough already. See, here's the thing, man, like, if I tell you the story of the war in Afghanistan or Iraq, you'll just shake your head and tisk your tongue and be like, man, what a series of terrible errors that they made there. And like, and you can see the perverse incentives and some of the bad reasons why they did what they did and all that. But in Syria under Barack Obama in the dirty war Beginning in 2011, we're talking absolutely insane, like far beyond what they did in Libya. Just absolutely crazy, hard to explain even to your best friend who trusts you type policy. We are going to go after the secular dictator who protects all the religious minorities, wears a three piece suit and shaves his chin every morning and we're going to back the Bin Ladenite suicide bomber head chopper Islamist, you know, fanatics in a war against him. We're just going to call them moderate rebels even though they're just not, you know, in 2011, pretty sure 2011 they were already doing suicide bombings, murdering civilians and committing all kinds of terrorist attacks and God knows what from the beginning of the war. And we knew from good journalism in 2011 that America and our NATO and GCC allies are backing these guys. That Prince Bandar bin Sultan in Saudi Arabia has decided this is a brilliant idea, we're going to empty the prisons and send these Bin Ladenites off to Syria to fight in the jihad. And this was really a policy that goes back to 2006 and 07 under W. Bush, but in Syria at this point has got a huge boost under Obama. And then, sorry, my point was going to be that in enough already. When I explained to you this insane policy, I know that you're just going to, I'm going to lose you, right? So what I do is I show in there quote after quote after quote after quote after quote from Barack Obama, from Hillary Clinton, from David Petraeus, from Leon Panetta, from all kinds of experts in the media and highest level potentates and think tankers and administration officials all explaining why we're doing this. We're doing this for Israel. We're doing this because the Iraq war that they thought would empower Jordan and Turkey and weaken Iran's position in the Middle east, in fact really increase their position. Dawa and Skiri won that war. These are Iran's best friends. And their support for Hezbollah by way of Syria has only increased. So we have to do this to correct from the mistake we made in the last war.
- [35:14]
Tom Woods
But by the way, that was a mistake that anybody could have predicted.
- [35:18]
Scott Horton
Exactly right.
- [35:19]
Tom Woods
And likewise they didn't have to fall for Chalabi's promises. Apparently he told at least one of his colleagues that I'm just telling the Jews what they want to hear and then I'm going to turn around and double Cross them. I mean, I don't think the guy was that hard to see through.
- [35:32]
Scott Horton
That's right. And that is a direct quote, by the way. That's not Tom woods talking. That is from There's. I know, man, I hate to have to give this disclaimer, but please everybody, don't hate me. The guy, John Desard is a reporter from the Financial Times and he's a good reporter. He's not some kind of leftist. But the article is in salon.com, which of course has a horrible reputation now as being the wokest, gayest, most ridiculous type left wing website. But at the time that this article came out in 2004, they actually would publish decent articles from time to time, including an article by Karen Katowski called the New Pentagon Papers and another one called the State Department's Extreme Makeover. Now these are not, you know, left wing wokest articles, right? These are solid journalism. John is a good journalist. And the article and, and I dare anyone to read it regardless of the URL. It's called How Ahmed Chalabi Conned the Neocons by John Desard. So what Tom woods just did was Tom woods quoted John Desard quoting a business associate of Ahmed Jollibee. Quoting Jollibee. I asked Jollibee, he says, this Jordanian businessman, I asked Chalabi, what do you do when palling around with all these Zionists? And he told me, don't worry, I'm just telling the Jews what they need to hear until I get what I want. And by the Jews, he meant David Wormser and Richard Pearl, these absolute idiots who were actually running errands for the Ayatollah Comedy thinking that they were sticking it to him. Because they're as stupid as they are fat and ugly and cruel and premeditated in their murder plots. They're just fools. They ruined everything. And yes, anyone could have told you Saddam Hussein is the minority Sunni dictator, the Baathist, but Sunni minority dictator of Iraq. How is empowering the Shiite super majority supposed to hurt Iran? And then the answer was because Chalabi promised, as David Wormser wrote, a Shiite democratic Iraq would be a nightmare for Iran. Well, no, David Worms are stupid. That's the answer to that riddle is why that didn't work is because he didn't know what he was talking about. If that, if any of that stuff is true, as Dave Smith pointed out, why can't David Wormser just call the King of Jordan right now and tell him to invoke his magic blood and tell the Ayatollah to knock it off, man. He can't do that. Why does he need to take over Baghdad first? Why can't he just call the Ayatollah Sistani and tell the Ayatollah Sistani to pull rank over the new Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei junior And pull rank over whoever's the new leader of Hezbollah and tell them to all be friends with Israel, build the oil pipeline to Haifa. Why do you have to have a regime change him back that first? If the King of Jordan can do that, he can't do that. That's stupid. And David Worms are still thinks that's true, despite the fact that he lived through the war that he caused that resulted in the exact opposite of what he promised would happen. But he still thinks he's right anyway. You know, there's even a book about the neocons by Jacob Hilbrun called they Knew they were Right. How about they still think they're right despite everything that happened as a result of people listening to them and doing what they said? So then what happened when Obama backed the Bin Ladenites in Syria instead of moving west and sacking Damascus, the Iraqi dominated faction of Al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria split from the Syrian dominated faction of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria and said, we're creating an Islamic State caliphate of our own right now. And if Ayman Al Zawahiri says just keep fighting and don't create a caliphate yet, well then screw him. And they broke away from Al Qaeda and they declared the Islamic State. And one year later, they invaded western Iraq in June of 2014. And everybody remembers the iconic photo of the long line of Toyota Helix pickup trucks provided by Hillary Clinton, full with all their headlights on in that long trail caravan with all the jihadis with their rifles in the back of the trucks rolling on Mosul. And they sacked all of western Iraq. Ramadi took until about halfway through 15, but otherwise they took, you know, Samara to Crete, Mosul, Fuja, all of that within what, a couple of weeks in the summer of 2014, you know, declared a caliphate over land area about the size of Great Britain. Yet their leader, Baghdadi, who might as well have been bin Laden's son up there or bin Laden's clone up there as like sort of half bin Laden, half Mussolini, as he goes up on the balcony at the Grand Mosque in Mosul and declares himself the Caliph Ibrahim, the divinely ordained ruler of the caliphate. And then Obama has to launch Iraq War 3, the same one in the summer of 14 that lasted through 18, through Trump's first year and change of Trump's first term to destroy the caliphate again, to take the side of the same Shiites that they wish they hadn't fought Iraq War II for, because the caliphate blew up into something way bigger than they ever wanted to see happen. And in fact, as I show in the book, and people can find this, and pretty sure should be, you know, not very easy to find, but findable that when they liberated Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, it wasn't just Iranian backed Shiite militias on the ground and the Iraqi army on the ground. It was literally the Iranian Quds Force on the ground with American planes flying overhead as their air cover, fighting isis, destroying the caliphate and liberating Saddam Hussein's hometown. So they, the whole reason they built the caliphate in Syria was to spite the Shiites for us fighting the last war for them. But then we were too successful in backing the bin Ladenites, so we had to back the Shiites again in Iraq War 3. And so you could see Netanyahu's frustration here where everything that he does only results in Iran becoming more powerful. Right? Obama just pushed Syria deeper into Iran's arms, made him more dependent, put Assad more dependent on Hezbollah, which lasted all the way through 24, when Al Qaeda finally sacked Damascus at the end of 2024. But for, you know, a good 15 years there, almost 13 years there, Syria became more dependent on Iran than ever before. Iraq became more dependent on Iran than ever before. And yeah, there's just no question about it that in fact, you might even remember, Tom, when after the first fake, the first big fake sarin attack in Syria In August of 2013, Obama said, Listen, everyone in civil society who supports an invasion of Syria to get rid of Assad, I really need your help. I need you to go out there and bang the drum and help get support for this. And we joked about this on the time is why I remember is we joked about this at the time that maybe Obama already knew that the people were not with it and would not support it and that even the think tanks weren't really with it. And that essentially only the worst pro Israel Lakudnik types were going to stick their neck out and say, yeah, we got to get them, you know what I mean? And Apple Bomb or whoever over at the New Republic or whatever coops Jamie Rubin at Foreign Policy, those people and in fact, even, you know, win up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, things like that, they'll come out in favor of the war, but nobody else did. And I remember even joking that it probably wasn't true because Obama's such a horrible person, but that like, if he wanted to jerk their chain and kind of like out the Israel lobby as really being the only people who are in support of this policy, that would have been a pretty good way to do it because that was what happened. It was like Will Ferrell in old school where he's like naked streaking down the street and he thinks that everybody's with him, come on, everybody. But it's just him. And it was like that, where it was just the Israel lobby out there going, yeah, come on, let's invade Syria. And then everybody else said, absolutely hell no. And in fact, credit to Stephen Bannon at that time, because Bannon was running Breitbart.com and in that era, AM radio took all their cues from Breitbart, not Drudge. And it was Breitbart said, absolutely, hell no, we do not want to fight for Al Qaeda in Syria. And that helped rally the entire American right against it, which was really beneficial to us and really helped to cause the failure of the push for the war.
- [43:50]
Tom Woods
Hey, gang. A lot of people believe things that just ain't so. And one of them is that the only way to grow your money for retirement is to risk it by buying and selling stocks. But that's not true. You can reach your financial goals and dreams without taking any unnecessary risks. Bank on Yourself is the proven retirement plan alternative that lets you bypass Wall street, beat the banks at their own game, and take control of your financial future. We're talking guaranteed predictable growth and retirement income with no luck, skill or guesswork required. Your plan doesn't go backward when the markets tumble. Both your principal and growth are locked in. You get access to your money for emergencies and opportunities with no questions asked. There are no government penalties or restrictions on how much or when you can take it. And when you use your money, it keeps growing like you never touched it. Try doing that with a 401k or IRA, not to mention built in inflation protection. Your money is guaranteed to grow by a larger dollar amount every year in both good times and bad. You can get a free report with all the details on how the bank on Yourself strategy adds guarantees, predictability and control to your financial plan. Just go to bankonyourself.com woods that's bankonyourself.com woods now let me ask you the question, which is, obviously we know that you know there are Jewish and Israeli groups or you Know groups that favor Israeli interests, who influence elections, and everybody knows that except people who are trying to get away with something, basically. Okay, but now I'm in office, maybe I'm a lame duck. Technically, as a lame duck, I can do whatever the heck I want because I don't have to worry about the next election. And yet we still see that US Policy pretty much. It's not necessarily that Israel tells the US what to do every single time, but it certainly is the case that US Policy is very much aligned with what Israel would want anyway. So the question is, how do they get from A to B? I mean, yes, some of it is, but punishing dissident politicians and rewarding compliant ones. But is it, you know, blackmail? Is it bribery? Is it. Or in some cases, you don't have to do that because, like a Mike Huckabee, I think, is a true believer. You don't have to do anything to him. He believes in it already. So there are a variety of different motives. What's the mechanism? Is this something that we just speculate on, but we don't really know?
- [46:13]
Scott Horton
Oh, no, it's the money, man. You know, there may be some blackmail to it. I mean, the Epstein files seem to show, you know, a little bit of extortion here and there anyway. But I think mostly it's just bribery. And everyone should read at least the article. It's a long article. And you can also read the book the Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Mearsheimer and Walt. You can see it right here on Michelle when that came out in 2006. And I think they acknowledged that, yeah, there's some dirty tricks in there. But you know what it is, man, more than any other thing, is the squeaky wheel gets the grease in democracy, man. And they have. Their huge loophole is that they don't have to register as foreign agents and say, no, we're just patriotic Americans who happen to like this country a lot. And so we're not serving their interests, we're just serving our own and whatever kind of thing. So they have this huge loophole and by the way, at the Scott Wharton Academy, very soon, we have virtually all of the final recordings here. We just got to get all the production done, you know, the final mastering and everything. But we have Grant Smith's great course on the foundation of the Israel Lobby in the United States coming up@scothortonacademy.com very soon. So stay tuned for that. But so that's their huge loophole. They don't have to register as foreign agents. And then, man, it's just money. I mean, that's why they call them, you know, the wealthy, organized few. And all of us are the disorganized masses out here is that once you have a certain level of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, then you can afford the management to run a real operation, right? You can afford office towers full of secretaries and receptionists and lawyers and people whose job it is to, you know, who make real ass salaries making sure to get the job done. It's not the same thing as like, you know, the way regular people act and kind of trying to come together to support a candidate they like or whatever like that. Imagine if it was you and me and Dave running Libertarian Super PAC Inc. And we've got $50 billion or $20 billion to throw around. We can hire all of the secretaries and all of the interns and all of the infrastructure that we need to follow up, right? That's what it's all about. And so the way the Israel Lobby operates is if you decide you're running for Congress, they'll come straight to you and go, hi, nice to meet you. Here, sign this pledge that you'll do whatever AIPAC says. And most people just say, okay, fine, why not? Everybody likes Israel, right? I don't know, they sign the thing, great, but if you don't, and in fact, here's $58,000 if you sign it, right? But if you don't, well, that $58,000 is going to go to somebody else, your opponent in the primary. And if you win that primary, then we'll see in November, and if you win in November, then we'll see you in two years. And they don't forget, you're either going to come correct or you're going to get taken out. And remember all of the APAC tweets where they boasted, you know, quite crassly, you know, about how they helped to destroy Thomas Massie and then also bragging about these left wing congressmen that they took out Bowman and Corey Bush and a couple of others in the last cycle. Those were the two most expensive congressional campaigns ever before Massey's as the Israel lobby dumped tens of millions of dollars into these House campaigns to destroy these people. The same thing that happened to Cynthia McKinney. Everybody knows how she was run out of power back, you know, after voting wrong or whatever on one of the wars. Maybe she voted against Iraq War two or whatever it was. But it was only in Israel that the headline said, you know, Israeli money helps destroy this Pesky congresswoman that we don't like anymore and all that. You could read that in the Times of Israel or in Haret. So like, yep, we got her scalp, all right. But you wouldn't have learned that from NBC. They're like, oh, there's a foreign government that decides they don't like this congresswoman from Georgia anymore, which is what happened, you know, and we. We do have headlines like that about Massey, too. So that's what it really is when it comes down to Congress is just. It's the organization, man. And, you know, the gun manufacturers lobby, I don't call them the gun rights lobby because they're not. They're, you know, the NRA is mostly about helping gun manufacturers sell weapons to the government. Right? So they're, whatever. If you want your gun rights protected, you'll have to go elsewhere. But. But for the nra, like, hey, Congressman, don't you want to buy some guns for your cops? And then the congressman's answer is, of course I do. Like, what am I gonna do, tell you? No. Like, you guys show up, you got money, you don't go away. So, yes, what do you want? And they do with their, you know, and I'm all, gun rights guy. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that's how lobbying works. And when you have that, whether it's tobacco or whether it's agribusiness, look at Cargill and Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland. Those guys spend whatever, tens of millions of dollars or maybe even hundreds per year on lobbying the government to make sure that the regulations favor their actions. Right? I mean, that's the name of the game. That's why Hamilton created this government in the first place, man. Was, you know, regulatory capture is the name of the whole thing. So every interest, you know, has their lobby and works like hell to guarantee it. And now, from the point of view of the Israelis, Tom, there's nothing more important than their influence in Washington, D.C. right? Everything else is 99th on the list after that. So.
- [51:19]
Tom Woods
But, but, but, Scott. But they're not infallible. And so let's finish on this. They're not infallible. So they didn't want the jcpoa, the Iran deal under Obama. They did not want that. Sheldon Adelen did not. Didn't want them negotiating at all. So they did not want that. And by the way, that jcpoa, we have this impression because of Trump that it was full of holes and there were all kinds of problems with it. That thing was so unbelievably detailed, if you haven't taken a look at it, you would be shocked at what an effort that was. But anyway, they couldn't stop that. Now eventually they got Trump to withdraw from it, I'll grant you, but they couldn't stop that. So what was it, do you think? Is there any way we can kind of reverse engineer how that was done in defiance of them?
- [52:02]
Scott Horton
Yeah. So Obama, when he came in, he gave that the Cairo speech, he said he wanted to focus on a two state solution. And you know, there was pretty good reporting at the time that Netanyahu was like about to give in, at least to some significant degree. I say Netanyahu, I meant to, was about to give in to a certain degree. And then whoever it was convinced Obama that, no, you got to do Iran first. Once you take care of Iran first, then we can do Palestine. And that was in his first year. And then he spent the rest of his presidency trying to get the Iran deal done with the Israelis, trying to fight him every step of the way. And then of course, he never did anything about Palestine except sit there and watch those helpless people be slaughtered. But when it came to the Iran deal, there was definitely a time, I'm going to say, especially in 2012, the way I remember it, I think this is right in 2012 and maybe 13, where people really thought in Washington, really thought that Israel might start the war and force Iran essentially to hit American targets in retaliation and drag us into the war, which is something that had been floated in the Bush years as well by David Wormser, in fact, you know, with multiple confirmations of that story, that they would consider working with Israel to force W. Bush into the war. So I think Obama was concerned about that. And there were, you know, leaks and threats that Netanyahu and Netanyahu was really playing hardball, like, look, man, if you won't, we might. And so Obama's position was essentially, listen, I swear to God, I'm not going to allow Iran to break out and get a nuclear weapon, but I'm not going to war to stop it. Let me try my way and see if I can get a deal here, okay? And then he pushed for that. And the fact is, as you and I have discussed numerous times, Iran wasn't racing toward a nuke anyway. They weren't breaking out toward a nuke anyway. They were satisfied with having this sort of half assed latent nuclear deterrent. That said, obviously we know how to enrich uranium to whatever purity we want. So let's you not put Us in a position where maybe we want to have to decide that we need nuclear bombs after all. Okay? Like that was their position. So they were essentially happy to negotiate a fair deal with Obama. And you know, I always quote from the Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic on Syria because when they talk about Syria, Jeffrey Goldberg says, hey, don't you think that if we got rid of Assad that that'd be a good way to bring Iran down a peg and how that would be good for Israel? And Obama says yes, Jeffrey, that's exactly what we're doing in Syria right now. And he says, well can you tell me more about what you're doing? He says no, because your classified clearance isn't high enough. Like less funny play on I tell you, but I have to kill you joke, right? So I love quoting that article because it's there's Obama saying yes, we're getting rid of Assad because that's what Israel wants right there from the Commander in Chief's own mouth, right? When asked about it by Israel's most friendly of all American journalists, Jeffrey Goldberg, Commissar Goldberg enforcer of anti Semitism in the media as just Ramondo column. So that article is called, that interview of Obama is called as President I don't bluff. And what the article is essentially about is it's Obama begging Jeffrey Goldberg, Hey Jeffrey, they trust you. Would you please tell them that you believe me and then I'm not kidding, I really, really mean it. I will attack Iran and destroy them before I allow them to complete a Manhattan Project and get an atom bomb. Okay, tell them that you believe me when I promise you that. Okay, but I just have another method. So let me try to hammer out a deal here. That was where it came from was he really was afraid we were going to get dragged into a horrible no win war. We have no good way of getting out of current circumstances. And so that was the reason for the jcpoa. Now listen here, and I probably told you this back then. Tomorrow we didn't need the JCPOA because Iran was already a member of the non Proliferation Treaty and they already had a safeguards agreement with the IAEA and they had already foresworn nuclear weapons over and over again. But at that time it was as though the NPT and the safeguards agreement didn't even exist. People would say Iran's nuclear program, Iran's nuclear weapons program or they would say Iran's secret illicit nuclear weapons program. They would just pretend that there's a parallel program over there, or they would just pretend that the civilian program that we all know they have is actually a weapons program. No one would ever really explain. It's all just a bunch of sloganeering. You know, nuclear technology is complicated, and so they just kind of gloss over it. And so it was as though the NPT didn't exist. So when Obama did the JCPOA with them, all he was really doing, honestly, if you really boil it down, all he really did was add subsidiary arrangements to the safeguards agreement, Right? Additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements that just expanded inspections and rolled back their program significantly. That was what they agreed to do in the JCPOA and in his speech. And by the way, you might remember, Netanyahu came to Washington and they gave him. I forgot the number, but it was something like 70 standing ovations, more than any president ever gets in any speech before the US Congress. They just stayed on their feet clapping for the guy the whole damn time as he came to America at the invitation of the opposition party to undermine the president's diplomacy and try to. To get him to stop. And then Netanyahu, I mean, such a Freudian slip. I keep doing it. Obama gave a speech which is, like, pretty stark in terms of presidential speeches. You don't ever really hear them talk like this at all. Which is meaningful in its own kind of way, in a sense, right? What? Depending what you take from. But he gave a speech where he goes, listen, I heard the Prime Minister of Israel and his negative opinion about this policy loud and clear. However, I am the President of the United States of America, not Israel. And I've determined that it is in our interest to pursue this deal. And so that's what I'm doing. I mean, that is unheard of for him to even for any president to be essentially have his back to the wall so bad that he has to, in a public speech, just stomp his foot about it and say, listen, I heard you. Your dissent has been noted. Overruled. Right? Somebody's in charge here. It can't be the Prime Minister of Israel. You know, and Obama knew. And look, Robert Gates told him. Robert Gates of the Iraq and Afghan surges. Robert Gates, an absolute, you know, and the Libya war, an absolutely brutal Secretary of Defense told Obama, man, we don't want to get into this. He told Bush the same thing. We don't want to do this, man. It's too hard. We hit them, they hit back. Then what? We don't really have the ability to invade and overthrow their country. And it's a magic wish that the people are just going to rise up and overthrow their government for us. They're not either. And so, based on sound advice from his military men, Obama decided to seek a diplomatic solution. And now, look, I think it's fair to say, Tom, that Trump was right, that the deal was imperfect, especially in the sense of the sunset provisions, especially on the number of centrifuges operating at any time. Because the point of the deal was one, to expand the inspections, but also restrict their civilian program to such a degree that if they decided to break out and make a nuke, it would take them at least a year to finish. And that in that period of time, we could maybe even find a diplomatic solution, but we could definitely start a war against them and blow them all up before they finish the nuke thing. So that was the point, was getting them to, you know, send their stockpile of uranium out of the country to Russia to be turned into fuel rods and then sent back. And they poured concrete into their heavy water reactor and only kept their light water reactor going so that they're not able to produce weapons grade plutonium as waste and these kinds of things in order to essentially build in a fail safe. Right. That if they change their mind and start to make nukes, it'll take them so long to do it that we'll have plenty of time to find a way to resolve it before they're done. And that they'd never be able to do it in secret because of the expanded nature of the inspections and all that. But on the sunsets, what Trump could have done if he wasn't just completely, you know, in the thrall of Netanyahu is he could have said, listen here, Ayatollah, I don't like you, and I don't like my predecessor who signed this deal with you either. But a deal is a deal. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to reopen negotiations. I want to see about lifting these sunset provisions or raising them, adding 20 years to each of them or whatever it is. I want a better deal. Make me satisfied so that I don't get loco. But he didn't even do that. He didn't even do that. He just tore the damn thing up. And, and why did Netanyahu want him to tear it up? Because it was helping to prevent war. It was making it too apparent what they were not doing. They were. The IAEA was proving the negative and undermining the case for war. How are you going to get a regime change as W. Bush cried in his memoirs. How am I going to launch a war regime change when my own intelligence agencies say they're not making nuclear bombs? Well, if we can blind the intelligence agencies, then we can just pretend. And as your audience knows, if you listen to Trump talk about this all the time, he lies like Bill Clinton or W. Bush and just conflates even worse than them on this issue. Well, I don't know. Tied with W. Bush anyway on just conflating them having a nuclear program at all with having nuclear weapons. Oh, they can't have. We're doing this because they're not allowed to have nuclear weapons. Well, I mean, come on, man. They were not making nuclear weapons. That's just a completely ridiculous lie. You know, Donald Trump is just bluffing and just wants people to believe that. Well, he wouldn't tell that blatant of a lie, but yeah, he would, too, and he is telling a blatant lie. They were not making nukes. They had not made a decision to break out toward nuclear weapons. There's no indication that they diverted any of their uranium to military purposes before the attack last June, for example, or even since then.
- [62:09]
Tom Woods
Scott, let's. I'm filled with more things to ask you about, but let's save that for future episodes. I'm satisfied with the answers I got to things I was thinking about. I want to.
- [62:22]
Scott Horton
Joe Kent, who is the director of counterterrorism, who resigned over it, he goes, listen, here's the Israeli role here that I know that I saw from inside government, okay? They convinced Trump to move his red line. That's what it is.
- [62:37]
Tom Woods
Yeah.
- [62:38]
Scott Horton
Bush and Obama and Trump won. And Biden had said, don't you break out and try to make nuclear bombs or I will bomb the crap out of you before you're done again as president. I don't bluff. You better not even try it. But the Israelis, Netanyahu specifically, personally convince Trump to move the line that, come on, we all know for them to have a nuclear program at all is really a nuclear weapons program. If they're making electricity, they're making bombs. And we're just going to pretend that one equals two. We're just going to pretend. We're just going to conflate these things. We're just going to say. Trump sometimes won't even finish the sentence. He'll just say, no nuclear. They're not allowed to have nuclear. Oh, come on. They're not allowed to have nuclear. The Israelis convinced him to move that line to conflate these things as an excuse to start this war. So that's why some of the time he won't even make the ridiculous claim about they were two weeks away. He'll just say they're not allowed to have nuclear again, conflating having any nuclear technology at all, having civilian enrichment at all, a civilian electricity program with a nuclear weapons program, and just simply banking on the ignorance of the American people that will allow ourselves to be buffaloed by him into somehow being afraid because, you know, like he's Condoleezza Rice. Well, we can't let the proof be a mushroom cloud, so he'll just have to trust us.
- [63:59]
Tom Woods
Yeah, well, I've been following Joe Kent quite a bit since you interviewed him almost immediately after he resigned. I thought, wow, that, that's Scott Horton. He makes things happen. But you follow him. He's a very good follow on so called X. He's a very good follow. His posts are, are really worth, worth reading. Scott hortonacademy.com Every human being on earth listening to this needs to check that out. Scott hortonacademy.com Scott, thanks so much.
- [64:25]
Scott Horton
Hey, thanks very much, Tom. And let me say real quick about the academy for people not familiar. This is essentially my copy of Tom Wood's Great Liberty Classroom where you get to learn everything under the sun about everything except war basically. Maybe in a little foreign policy in there. But then, so this is my version of that and it's my in depth dives and explanations on everything, terror war as well as the, the Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. And then we also have Ramsey Barud and William Bupert and Adam Francisco and all these other great professors teaching their courses on Israel, Palestine, on Christian Zionism, on the history of America's interventions overseas. We got the great James Bovard on his career investigating the police state and as I mentioned earlier, our next course coming up. Well, I'm almost done. We're going to be putting out the, the very last of my course on the Cold War with Russia and the war in Ukraine. And then next after that very soon is going to be Grant F. Smith, the great Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy. And he has done a massive project on the foundations of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in the United States of America. And it is going to be fantastic. So that is Scott Horton academy.com and use promo code woods and save 10%.
- [65:38]
Tom Woods
All right, so check that out. Of course you're going to be on board the cruise, the Tom woods cruise this year which has Scott Horton on board all week. So check that out@tomwoodscruise.com but more importantly, Scott, HortonAcademy.com use code woods. All right, everybody, I'm intervening here. We were just wrapping up, but we're not even going to have the pretense that, that this is the same sit down period. You're going to get a sense right now of what it's like being friends with Scott Horton. We finished recording this episode and then Scott said dog gone it. He wrote to me and said I forgot to mention. And so we're going to cover one more topic and just we're going to stitch it in here as inelegantly as you can imagine. But it's in here and that's what matters. So, Scott, the issue that you wanted to talk about was one that we, we didn't get to, but yet it's the one that's kind of on everybody's minds right now because it's connected with the war in Iran, which has to do with, well, wait a minute, wasn't Iran enriching way, way beyond anything they would need for a civilian nuclear program? So wasn't there therefore some necessity to intervene and do something about that?
- [66:44]
Scott Horton
Right. First part, yes. Second part, no. So, and yeah, thank you for indulging me on this. I kind of, I think I got myself and or Joe Rogan in a little bit of trouble too. Where in that conversation we discussed the JCPOA and the rules under the JCPOA, but we didn't really cover the ground between 2018 and the war last June. Right. Since 2018 is when Trump tore up the JCPOA. And so what's been happening since then, and I sort of did the same thing to you, so try to not get you in that trouble and so cover that base. So what happens is this, and I, I may have mentioned this, but I don't remember in the JCPOA it said that if America or any major party leaves the deal and stops abiding by the deal, then Iran has the right to stop abiding by some of the stipulations in the deal. And so without breaking the deal, they can break parts of the deal. And so once Trump tore up the treaty, for one example, they started enriching up to 4.5% or something like that, just a little bit more just to kind of in protest. And they also, I think, expanded their research projects at Fordo. These are sort of, that's at calm, that's sort of the, you know, the fringes of, of violating aspects of the deal still within the stipulations of, or within the allowances of the deal itself. But then in Donald Trump's lame duck session in December, pardon me, late November, I've gotten this wrong a couple of times. I said December, but it was late November of 2020, after the election, the Israelis assassinated the head of Iran's nuclear program, a guy named Bakranzada, with an automatic machine gun enhanced by AI, they said that recognized his truck that had been placed there by the Mujahideen Ealk communist terrorist cult that works for the Israelis now. And so in protest after that, they started enriching up to 20%. Now, America, in the 1970s, when the Shah was still in power, provided Iran with their medical isotope research reactor that they have in Tehran. And this is where they need 20% enriched uranium. Or I admit I don't understand exactly how it works, but I believe the way Gordon Prather explained it to me was these are targets for their, in their medical isotope reactor, they bombard the 20% with whatever it is in order to get radioactive dye for looking at your circulatory system or, and, or for radiation for cancer treatment type products. And it was one of the only medical isotope reactors in the world. There was one in Canada, and there may be more now, but this is, you know, back at least 10 years ago or so. It was one of the only ones in the world and it was American provided. And it did enrich up to a higher, or it required higher percentage u235, 20%. But under the JCPOA, they were no longer enriching up to 20%. I forgot exactly how they were supposed to compensate for that, but I guess the idea was they had enough fuel rods to power it for now or whatever it was that they needed to power it for now. And maybe they would go back and get 20% from a foreign country or whatever later. I have to look into that. But anyway, they had not been enriching above 3.6 or, sorry, above 4% since 2018. But then after the assassination of the head of their nuclear program, they went up to 20 in protest, essentially, and to try to put more pressure on the Americans to get back in the deal. And this was, you know, with the Biden administration incoming in January of 2021. And of course, the Biden administration was made up of all Obama guys, Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken among them, who had participated in the crafting of the JCPOA in the first place. So Iran, you know, was obviously hoping to amp up, you know, ramp up the pressure. And in order to get the new administration back in the deal they hoped then in April of 2021. So just a couple of months, three. Four months into Biden's presidency, they blew up the Israelis. A sabotage. I think it was just a planted explosive, I believe it was. And blew up a part of the electricity facility at Natanz that is used to power the. The centrifuge facility there. And then, in reaction to that, was when they decided to leave their additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements and. And start to ENRICH up to 60% enriched uranium. Now, they were trying to increase pressure. They were trying to create a new bargaining chip so they'd have something to negotiate away. Essentially, you guys get nervous when we ENRICH Even a 3.6% and you don't like it when we go to four, four and a half, and you really start sweating bullets when we enrich up to 20%. Well, I know you ain't gonna like it when we get up to 60. And they're showing that obviously they could go up to weapons grade. Now, if you just follow the hawks on Twitter all day long, they'll go, oh, yeah, 60 this, 60 that. But they never answer the obvious question, why do they stop at 60? They imply, the Hawks always imply, that the 60% enriched uranium was part of a nuclear weapons program. You're supposed to just skip all of the details and go, you know, 99, 100, I guess. Yeah, but no, the obvious question is, why stop at 60? Marco Rubio said, you know, the only countries that have 60% enriched uranium have nuclear weapons. Well, that doesn't make sense. I mean, if you're enriching up to 90%, you would have. Some would be enriched up to 60% for a moment, but it wouldn't. You wouldn't stop there. The point is, it was just a bargaining chip. That's all it was. And there was a guy on Twitter the other day, and I do appreciate it when the hawks actually have some details. And this guy added to the 60% thing. Aha. The IAEA says that they found some uranium that was enriched up to 87.3%. Or maybe it was 83.7. I think it was 87.3%. And one of the guys on Twitter says, oh, yeah, where'd you get that from? And he says, from the iaea. And he has an IAEA report. And I read the link, and it does say that they found traces of this 87.3% enriched uranium. So then I just googled Iran's response to the 87.3% enriched uranium IAEA thing. And then the first thing that came up was the next IAEA report that says that the Iranians addressed the question. They explained to the IAEA inspectors how the installation of these new centrifuges that they were just calibrating and whatever had led to the output of this very small amount of that even more highly enriched uranium, and that the IAEA accepted that explanation and that that was the end of that. Now, I have to tell you, Tom, that happens all the time. They found. Oh, yeah, well, what about this? We have questions about that. We have resolved alleged studies. We need to know about this and that. And they've over the years have found different isotopes that then ended up being explained away. This was a little bit of pollution from this other place. This obviously came with the centrifuge facility. You know, materials that they bought from the Pakistanis in the first place had a little bit of a isotope here, there, whatever. They always explain it away. And what the IAEA has never done is say, aha, we caught them diverting uranium to military purposes or any other purpose. They always have. And you could say that there's holes in this or whatever, fine. But you could just make up whatever you want if you want. But they always have said that according to their sensors and according to their scales and according to their seals and according to their math and their cameras, they have no reason to believe, no indication that Iran has ever diverted nuclear material to a military purpose. So when we talk about 60% enriched uranium, we're still talking about their civilian nuclear program. They're open, alleged, declared, not alleged. They're open, declared, you know, capital D, safeguarded, capital S, nuclear program that everybody knows about and always has known about. There's no secret program there. And again, you'll never hear the hawks explain how 60% equals a weapons program. Now, it is technically true, theoretically true, that you could set off a bomb of 60% enriched uranium. There's no reason to believe that that's what they're doing here. And from what I have read about it, it would have to be a massive bomb and much harder to detonate and very unworkable compared to a higher percentage U235. So, you know, the Hiroshima bomb was 80% enriched uranium 235. And that was, I believe, the lowest amount of enrichment of any uranium atom bomb that's ever been detonated. They always go up to above 90%. And virtually all miniaturizable nuclear weapons in the world are made out of plutonium rather than uranium for various reasons that Gordon Prather explained to me years ago, but I don't remember. Now. There have been some miniaturized atomic warheads, but very small battlefield sized nukes that were still like, you know, nothing like a suitcase nuke. You'd still need like a Lincoln Town Car to drive it around in the trunk or something, you know, something at least that big. But that would be. Anyway, there's, there's no reason to believe the Iranians have been pursuing any of that either. So all this is really is just another big red herring. It's something that the war party likes to throw out there in the hopes that you'll just say, boy, that does sound suspicious to me. Right, Jesa, they only need 3%, 3.6%, 3.65 for their electricity program. And what's all this 60% about? Well, there are answers to that, right. They just try to leave it at that. So you're supposed to sort of infer that there is no other explanation. And so it must be the worst case scenario that you can go ahead and speculate the worst because it must not be knowable when in fact that's just not true.
- [77:01]
Tom Woods
Well, maybe we'll just do one more thing, we'll wrap up. But maybe what they mean by it is that it, you know, we've heard forever that Iran is just two weeks away from having a bomb. And the running joke is that we've been hearing this for 25 plus years. But maybe what they're saying now is with the 60%, maybe that means that they could develop a bomb now very quickly because of the 60%. I mean, maybe, maybe it's that now of course you would need a delivery mechanism. You would, you know, forget all that.
- [77:32]
Scott Horton
And the thing is, the thing is though, I mean, I guess I would need the time scales and whatever in front of me. Maybe I could follow up and interview an expert about this. But that is the argument. Yeah, that they're, or I guess if they bother to make one, it would be that it's easier to go from 60 to 90 than it is from 0 to 60 or whatever. But so you know what I mean, like they could still, if they, assuming they even still had a conversion facility so that they can go from metal to gas and back to metal again, which they don't anymore since the war last June. But even if they did that, whatever time, you know, that they would be saving, going from that amount of 60 to 90 compared to that amount of low enriched uranium to 90 is not that much of a time difference. And as we all know, Donald Trump can simply pick up the phone and B2 bomber pilots will take off from Missouri and destroy anything that he orders them to destroy, and there's nothing the Iranians can do about it. So if they were to break out and make a nuclear weapon, America would know it and America would bomb them. And as we talked about the same under Obama as it was under Trump, we're never going to let him go that far. What changed under Trump was they just moved the line from enrichment at all to, you know, from breaking out toward a nuke to enriching it, all being essentially equivalent in the same thing. And that was what changed. It was, it was Donald Trump's stated doctrine that changed. You know, the United States stated doctrine that changed. Not any actual development in terms of Iran's nuclear program on the ground just had nothing to do with it. Now, I should emphasize that I warned all along, and I still could be right about this, that if we bomb them, then they might break out and make a nuke. Now, they never really said that. In fact, I think, well, may, I shouldn't say that, never. But I, I, I think they rarely said that. I think it was mostly implied that, look, man, you know, we know how to enrich uranium, so let's just not escalate this conflict, right? But now that Trump called their bluff last June, that did two things. One, it vastly increased their incentive to go ahead and break out and try to get a nuke now, but it also set their program back severely, especially in the case of, you know, more or less burying the centrifuge facilities at Natan and Fordo, collapsing the tunnels. Nobody knows if the centrifuges have been completely destroyed down there, but they have no access to them, they cannot run them, and they have no conversion facility. The conversion facility at Ispahan, as I said, is crucial. That's how you take the yellow cake uranium, you know, semi refined ore or the refined ore, and you convert that to uranium hexafluoride gas, which that's what you introduce into the centrifuges that you spin in all those aluminum tubes, the cascades of aluminum tubes all connected together that, that enrich that uranium. Then you have the, the gas, the UF6, then you have to convert it back to a metal again. Well, America blew up, or maybe the Israelis, I think the United States blew up that facility last June 2025. So they're basically just treading water at this point. I think that was why before this current war, Tom, that the Ayatollah, before they killed him, was willing to climb way, way down and even agreed to a five year, according to the Omani middleman in the negotiations, was ready to agree to a five year moratorium on all enrichment. And it may be because his people had told him that, hey, at this point, what difference does it make, right? As Hillary Clinton might say, well, not going to have a conversion facility back online for another five years anyway, boss. You might as well give them what they want there. And which he was willing to do. And quite frankly, Tom, I believe that that Witkoff, in spite of himself, was achieving success and that the Iranians were ready to get into a deal that would be even better than the Obama deal, as Trump would have it. And that was why they started the war on February 28, because they could not allow the negotiations to be successful. The concern was not a nuclear weapons program. The concern was being able to use an alleged nuclear weapons threat as a pretext for war and regime change in Tehran. Witkoff was doing too good of a job and was essentially in danger of screwing up their fake pretext for war by solving the alleged crisis diplomatically. And that was why they launched that war. And it's also true, too, though, that the, I believe I'm right about this, that the IAEA inspectors have had no real presence in there since last June. Now, there's open source intelligence and then there's also, you know, allegedly classified intelligence published in the newspapers recently. Let's say, you know, we're recording this at the beginning of June of 26. So this would be, I'm going to say, like late April or May. There were newspaper reports, I'm pretty sure Wall Street Journal had it, that CIA says, you know, National Reconnaissance Office, whatever intel, says that they have not done anything to reopen Natanz or Fordo, that they've not achieved that. Now, there was a report yesterday from a former CAA officer named Larry Johnson that I like that said that the Iranians may have received a nuclear bomb from Pakistan. However, the other reporter that has that, I don't want to name names and getting anybody in trouble or whatever, but the other guy that is reporting that with Larry Johnson is someone whose credibility I do not put any stake in. I don't know where this report, if it came to them both at the same time or first one, then the other, or what. But, and it again, it is possible the old ayatollah who said that God's opinion was that you're not allowed to have nukes. Well, they kill him. And so we don't know what his son's opinion is about God's opinion about nukes here, Tom. And it could be that, you know, they say that the IRGC is in control and that the son, he's not really an ayatollah, but he is the supreme leader, the son, Khamenei son, that he may not be in the driver's seat anyway, right? You could have some IRGC hard liners. That's the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. You could have some severe hardliners calling these shots where they don't want to hear it from any Shiite clerics about Allah's opinion about A or H bombs. They're going to do what they think is right for, for their national security. Now, I'm not saying I know that or I don't know how to predict the likelihood of it in numbers, right? But we put their back to the wall and we prove North Korea is safe because they got a bombs. Saddam Hussein is dead, Muammar Gaddafi's dead, The Ayatollah Khamenee is dead, Bashar Al Assad is in exile in Moscow. And so Kim's son at least is the last one standing, sitting there on a pile of A bombs and his independence. And so the lesson is clear to whatever so called rogue states of the world that they better race toward a nuke before it's too late. And if the Iranian, if the current Iranian regime does that now, we should not be surprised. And we got nobody to blame but Tel Aviv and Washington.
- [84:29]
Tom Woods
All right, with that we'll wrap up and we're going to repeat links we gave as it at the moment when it seemed like we were wrapping up a little while ago. And they are. TomWoodsCruise.com Spend a week with Scott and me and then. Scott. Hortonacademy.com and use code WOODS. What other code are you going to use, Scott? Hortonacademy.com Check that out. Scott, I appreciate how conscientious you are that you said this thing cannot stand without this addendum added to it at the end. And here we go. By the way, I know everybody. I know I made a mistake in the Jeremy Kaufman episode. I was supposed to put the his speech at the end and I forgot to tell my team to do that. But I know that you guys are smart enough to think well, but I bet it's on the show notes page, which is where you'll find it. And we did put it in the description on the YouTube whatever. So we, we did our best to do damage control, but here Scott wanted something added and doggone it, it got added. So, Scott, thank you very much.
- [85:22]
Scott Horton
And another thing. No, I'm just kidding. Thank you, Tom.
- [85:25]
Tom Woods
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
- [85:28]
Scott Horton
Make yourself and those you love less
- [85:30]
Tom Woods
vulnerable to the regime, both mentally and physically.
- [85:34]
Scott Horton
Get more forbidden information@tomsfreebooks.com and be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you listen. See you next time.
- [85:50]
Tom Woods
Like the sound of the Tom Wood show, my audio production is provided by Podsworth Media. Check them out@podsworth.com Enter code WOODS50 to get 50% off your first order. If your recording sounds rough, the Podsworth app can make it not only listenable, but professional. Remember, when you use code WOODS50, you'll get half off your first order and you'll also be supporting this show.
- [86:15]
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- [86:41]
Scott Horton
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