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We Can Do Hard Things
Jared Kushner, CIA Coups & the Bananas Reason We’re at War with Iran: Amanda with Jeremy Scahill
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A
Hello you. Thank you for coming back to we can do hard Things for my latest. You're not gonna believe this episode. Thank you for listening to all of them. I am really, really grateful for your encouragement and your enthusiasm for all the shows like why are Billionaires and everything you need to know about the Epstein Files series. I really love pulling back the curtain and learning all of these things with you. Also, if there are topics you want to hear about, please send me a message on Instagram. I'm there at Amanda F. Doyle. Send me a note if there are things that we should be talking about here. Okay. In the last days of February, we all woke up on a Saturday to find out that we were at war with Iran, having bombed them overnight, killing their Supreme Leader. On January 3rd, we launched a military strike in Venezuela and abducted their president and brought him to the United States. A couple of weeks later, Trump son in law, a multi billion dollar private equity fund guy whose biggest client is Saudi Arabia, named Trump's special envoy for peace, somehow announced a new master plan for Gaza as a real estate development opportunity. That same week, Trump doubled down on his threats to take control of Greenland, not ruling out the use of military force. And just last week Trump said of Cuba, against which the US has launched crushing oil blockades, creating a humanitarian crisis, that he would have, quote, the honor of taking c. He said, quote, I can do anything I want with it. All of this got me thinking. Well, a lot of things that I'm not going to say in case you want to send this episode to your mom. But it also got me thinking a lot about the United States history of regime change, the process by which we go into a country either covertly through a CIA coup or overtly through military action and overthrow a government that is not doing what we want. It got me thinking about why we say we do those things and then why we actually do those things and how often the justification is presented as well, that leader we took out was a really, really bad guy. Like in Iran, for example. Yes, he was a ruthless dictator who massacred his own people in Venezuela. He was a cruel authoritarian, guilty of horrendous human rights violations. Yes, and yes. And yet we have to go further because we often replace a bad guy with a even worse guy. Because taking out a bad guy is never our why. It's also overwhelming and chaotic that everything seems singularly insane and inexplicable. And when that happens, we have to widen the lens. We have to look back in order to see today clearly. So today we are Going to start by tracing the history of American CIA covert operations and military regime changes and to see how they've always happened. Then we're going to talk with brilliant investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill to help us understand where we are today with Iran and Gaza and what is ahead. So buckle up, buckaroos, because you are not going to believe this bullshit. American history of regime change goes back to. Well, actually, before we were America. The American Revolution precipitated a regime change, replacing a monarchy with a new representative democracy. As Americans, we hear a lot about what incited the American Revolution. The rebellion arose from taxation disputes. You know, no taxation without representation, tea in the Boston harbor and all that. It also arose from new Enlightenment ideas about the dignity of self government and from colonial resentment of imperial control. But something we don't really hear about as much as Americans because it doesn't fit that nicely into our revolution narrative is that a big part of that imperial control that colonial elites were fired up about and which was a main motivation for them to foment everyday colonials to take up arms, was that Britain had really messed up the profits of the colonial elites who had been heavily invested in land speculation to the west of the colonies. So after the Seven Years War, when Britain was really, really tired of the massive military cost of waging war with the indigenous nations on the American continent, they tried to solve this through the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This proclamation outlawed colonial settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. This was not only good for indigenous people who had lived on that land for thousands of years, it was great for Britain because it was sort of a truce on the very costly wars they were funding. But it was really not good for those wealthy colonists who had invested speculatively in the western lands. And these wealthy investors were super pissed. Who were they? Well, let's just say if you made a list of the Founding Fathers, the folks who were instrumental in galvanizing colonists to revolt, that list would have a lot of overlap with a list of folks who had invested large sums in companies planning to develop lands to the west of the Appalachians. George Washington was one of the largest land speculators in colonial America, owning and investing in tens of thousands of acres in the land that the Royal Proclamation now said was off limits. Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee and many more were likewise heavily invested in western land speculation and promotion. And as soon as the US Won independence, the new government quickly moved to open western lands through the Northwest Ordinance and also started a series of military actions to forcibly Remove indigenous peoples from those lands for settlement and profit. All of that to say, covert or military force. Regime change has been part of America since before America was even America. Today, we're diving in to see how America has, since its formation, deployed CIA covert actions to replace regimes and how it has used the military to oust and replace foreign leaders. And we're looking at how these regime changes always have an ideological fervor and rationale, most notably the promotion of democracy, even though we have often ousted democratically elected officials and replaced them with authoritarians. And when you peel back the layers, every regime change has a client, a client with a profit interest that is served by the particular policy or political order being installed. This is complicated, crazy stuff. So in order to start peeling back, we are starting with a banana. In 1899, an American railroad builder living in Costa Rica named Minor C. Keith and a Boston fruit importer named Andrew Preston, both with shipping networks and banana trade businesses across Central America, merged to form the United Fruit Company. They operated a vertically integrated empire owning and controlling every stage of the banana trade from Central America and the Caribbean to the US including the banana plantations, railroads, ports, shipping fleets, and distribution Networks. United Fruit Co. Was the largest land owner and employer in many of the countries in which they operated. It was the largest landowner in Guatemala. UFC owned 550,000 acres, including the country's most fertile agricultural land. It also controlled the railroads that moved goods to ports, the ports themselves, and much of the country's communications infrastructure. In practical terms, it functioned almost like a state within a state. In order to maintain its monopoly and soaring profits, UFC maintained tight control of political forces in Central America and the Caribbean by lobbying government officials and paying bribes over decades, in exchange for UFC's political support and financial incentives to leaders, leaders gave UFC what they wanted at the expense of their own people. Guatemala's dictator, Jorge Ubico, provided UFC vast land grants, allowed it to pay little or no taxes, and approved forced labor systems, victimizing rural indigenous populations. This blatant patronage, in which the government was organized to serve UFC's profits, is actually the origin of the phrase banana republic. UFC workers endured extremely low wages, dangerous conditions, violent, often lethal repression of strikes, and extreme hours. You know that song day o day o day? Like come man, me wanna go home that like, come Mr. Tally Man Tally me banana. That comes from the brutal hours and low wages of the ufc workers. In 1944, Guatemalan students, workers, and civilians bravely rose up in revolution against authoritarian rule, forcing Obiko out and opening Guatemala's 10 years of spring, the only sustained democratic experiment the country had ever known. In the second ever democratic election of 1951, Arbenz, one of the officers who led the revolution, was elected president. He was focused on four main democratic projects, labor rights, education, public health, and most importantly, land reform. The goal of his land reform, called Decree 990, was to modernize the Guatemalan economy from a feudal economy to a capitalist one by buying back unused Guatemalan land and allocating it to peasant farmers to work the land to support themselves, to increase agricultural production and create a domestic market to reduce dependence on the single export crop of bananas. This reform was vital. Guatemala's economy was stagnant because land wasn't being farmed productively. It was actually being intentionally hoarded and unused by the ufc. The UFC owned land that was actually not in use, but it was strategically holding the land vacant so it could continue to tightly control production and profits. It also often poisoned the land for the same reason, poison so no one else could farm it. And that poison still infects the land today. At this point in time, about 2% of landowners controlled more than 70% of Guatemala's land. And the majority of Guatemalans, especially indigenous Mayan farmers, had no land at all. So here comes our bends. He's a democratically elected capitalist with a plan for land reform, not by taking back from UFC the unused land given to it by an authoritarian in its pocket, but by buying it back at the same value that UFC itself had claimed the property worth on its own tax declaration. But you'll be shocked to learn that UFC had grossly undervalued its land on its own tax filings to avoid paying taxes. So when our bends used those same declared values to calculate compensation, UFC went and please forgive me bananas. Not only was this value that UFC had set itself an insult, but the problem was existential for ufc, because suddenly here was a Guatemalan leader who was acting like a leader of his people and not a client of ufc. And this could not be permitted. So UFC launched an aggressive lobbying campaign of the United States government and public relations campaign of the American people. Luckily for ufc, it didn't have to do much convincing of the US Government and Eisenhower administration. The US Secretary of State at the time, John Foster Dulles, had been a UFC attorney while at Sullivan and Cromwell, advising UFC on corporate and international legal issues and helping protect the company's interests in Guatemala and other countries. His brother Alan Dulles, who was then the director of the CIA, also worked at Sullivan and Cromwell during their representation of ufc. The brother of John Morris Cabot, an important State Department official on Inter American aff, had been the president of the ufc. And Anne Whitman, President Eisenhower's personal secretary, was married to Edmund Whitman, UFC's PR director and principal lobbyist. Okay, so you have to understand this is the early 1950s during the heart of Cold War anxieties. And UFC and its friends in the government framed what was in actuality a threat to the profits of one corporate interest as a Cold War emergency. American media was flooded with stories depicting Arbenz's land reforms as a communist threat, a Soviet foothold in the Western hemisphere even though Guatemala had no alliance with the Soviet Union and a threat to regional stability. Under the leadership of UFC connected government officials, Americans began to view the Guatemalan government under our bends as a threat to American democracy, not what it actually was, a threat to multinational corporate profits. In August 1953, the Dulles brothers presented the CIA plan to execute a covert coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala and Eisenhower. The coup codenamed PB Success. PB Success launched in June 1954 with the CIA recruiting and training armed rebel forces led by Armis, running psychological warfare operations, establishing fake radio propaganda broadcasts called Voice of Liberation, recruiting political allies, coordinating cross border attacks and air raids on the Guatemalan targets, blocking Guatemala from purchasing weapons to defend itself and preparing a list of individuals in Arbenza's government to quote, eliminate immediately in the event of a successful anti communist coup. This list of political and labor leaders became tools of terror. In the ensuing years the CIA propaganda machine claimed that massive rebel armies were advancing and they invented battlefield victories that never happened. This pressured the Guatemalan military officers to abandon the president. Facing military defections and political pressure, Arbenz resigned 6-27-1954 and the CIA backed armas was installed as the leader. ARMIS outlawed unions and peasant organizations that had received the land, banned political parties and initiated repressive intelligence networks and purges, arresting thousands of political opponents and assassinating, kidnapping and forcing into exile opposition leaders. The coup and ARMIS installation led to permanent militarization of Guatemala which has never recovered democratic stability, leading to military dictatorships, death squads, targeting of students, union leaders and indigenous activists and a a 36 year civil war in which 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, over 80% of whom were indigenous Mayan people. The UN backed truth commission ruled it a genocide by the Guatemalan state. All of which is a key root cause of the migration that the current US government bemoans. We only know all of this because of Freedom Information act lawsuits filed in 1979, which led to the release of CIA operations, including the agency's quote, study of assassination. It's this 19 page assassination manual giving particular and specific instructions about how precisely to kill people. It's really scary stuff. Washington D.C. called the ouster of our bends an installation of armas, a victory for freedom and democracy. Armis reversed land reforms, returning the land to UFC. UFC's freedom to pursue profits unimpeded was restored. Here's an interesting little epilogue to this particular story. In 1975, after investigations forced UFC, which was then United Brands, to admit that it had paid a 1.2 million bribe to the President of Honduras to reduce banana export taxes, the scandal led to rebranding in 1984 as Chiquita Banana, the same one you can get in your local grocery store. In 2007, Chiquita was forced to admit to making 1.7 million dollar payments to a Colombian right wing paramilitary organization designated by the US government as a foreign terrorist organization. And just two years ago, Chiquita was forced to pay 38.7 million to families whose loved ones were killed by the terrorist organization's death squad. A year in which the revenue was over 3 billion. All of this to say Guatemala is not an aberration, it's a pattern in American regime change. It's like a checklist with six parts and we're going to walk through them. The first step is that a nation controls something globally valuable, whether it's bananas or copper or oil or shipping routes, et cetera. The second step is that the government attempts to push for sovereignty or enact reform like nationalizing resources, redistributing land or renegotiating American corporate power, or challenging an established political order with America. The third step is that the American investors or corporations fear a loss of profits, a loss of control or a precedent of the same. The fourth step is the American ideological framing, so that quelling a threat to corporate interests is instead framed as defending democracy, stopping communism, stopping terrorism or maintaining stability. The fifth step is an American intervention, whether it's sanctions, covert CIA operations, coups or direct military intervention. The sixth step is the long term consequences, which generally include preservation of American corporate interest, but also for the nation's people, authoritarian rule, economic restructuring, regional instability and long term distrust of U.S. intentions. We're going to walk through some more stuff. But not safe for democracy often means not safe for multinational corporate profits. Threat to global order often means threat to corporate profits. Defending America abroad often means defending the foreign investment of American investors. It can be a democracy we're replacing or it can be a dictatorship. America seems pretty agnostic about that. Dictatorship is acceptable when it produces outcomes compatible with US capital. Democracy is only acceptable when it produces outcomes compatible with US capital. So that was Guatemala in 1954. It became the textbook case in 1960 when Patrice Lumumba called for political independence for Congo to control its own copper and uranium. It threatened US corporate mining interests leading to the CIA's support in the removal and assassination of Lumumba. We did the same thing in Iraq in 1963. At the time, Iraq's oil industry was dominated by the Iraq Petroleum Company. It was a consortium that included bp, Exxon and Shell. After Qassim overthrew the monarchy and seized most of the unused oil, dramatically reducing Western corporate control, the CIA provided intelligence to support coup plotters resulting in Qassim's ouster and assassination and the installation of the brutal Ba'ath Party regime, the party of Saddam Hussein, which would bring him back to Iraq from to work in the Ba'ath security apparatus organizing repression against political opponents and who would ultimately lead the nation starting in 1979 until the US also overthrew his government and captured him in 2003. In 1964, when Brazilian leader Goulard tried to institute land reforms and limits on foreign profit, it threatened US agribusinesses and led the US to support the military coup that led to brutal dictatorship. We followed the same pattern in Bolivia 1964 when Estancaro tried to nationalize the tin mines and redistribute land. Indonesia, which has vast oil reserves and huge deposits of copper, gold and other minerals as well as major shipping routes between the Pacific and Indian oceans, had been under Dutch colonial rule until the 1940s. During the 1950s its leader Sarkno began pursuing policies that would nationalize foreign companies and put limits on Western corporate powers including oil mining and shipping. For 11 devastating years the CIA funded a covert coup culminating in US backed and funded Indonesian military forces and allied militias carrying out mass killings of up to 1 million Indonesian people in a two year period. In 1965, U S backed Suharto consolidated power, aligning politically with the United States and inviting US Companies back into the country's resource sectors, including newly awarding Freeport McRoran, a publicly traded US company based in Arizona, the rights to develop one of the world's largest gold and copper mines in Indonesia, which it still operates. We followed the same pattern. Dominican Republic in 1965, intervening militarily when Bosch instituted labor Protections which threatened the profits of US sugar corporations eradicating their democracy in favor of stability for US investors. The next decade, when Chile's democratically elected Allende, who was a self described Marxist, moved to nationalize Chile's core resource copper, so that the copper might benefit Chilean people and not just American corporations. That action threatened huge US corporate copper giants, especially Anaconda and Kennecott. Executives of those corporations met with U.S. officials and threat to corporate losses were converted into an ideological theory to justify U.S. intervention. The CIA, Nixon and Kissinger framed Allende's efforts for Chilean economic sovereignty as radicalism and a communist threat. The US squeezed Chile's economy, funded destabilization and backed conditions that led to the 1973 coup which culminated in the ouster and death of Allende and the installation of US backed General Pinochet, a dictator who instituted mass detentions, tortures, disappearances and executions and who remained in power until 1990. The following decade we followed the same pattern in Nicaragua in the 1980s, investing in a Contra war and economic sabotage when Nicaragua moved toward land redistribution efforts. Venezuela, the nation with the world's largest proven crude oil reserves, an estimated 303 billion barrels in the ground, making up a fifth of all proven crude reserves on the planet. But in recent decades, under President Nicolas Maduro's leadership, Venezuela's oil production has dropped dramatically from a high of 3 million barrels a day to just 921,000 by the end of 2025. Surprising no. 1. By now Venezuela's moved to nationalize its oil, requiring U.S. companies to relinquish 60% of oil assets to the state. We have seen this movie before. In January of this year, the US launched a military strike in Venezuela abduct President Nicolas Maduro. Despite Maduro now facing drug and terrorism charges in the US with a long track record of human rights abuses against its own people. The US intervention was not, it seems, designed to help Venezuelans throw off authoritarian rule, determine their own future and control their own resources. Maduro was replaced not by Maria Corino Machado, the Nobel Prize winner and incredibly popular Venezuelan opposition leader who was barred by the Maduro administration from running for President. Instead. Instead, Maduro was replaced by his own right hand, Vice President Delsey Rodriguez, who is continuing to persecute her own people, but is willing to cave to America's pressure to reopen Venezuela's nationalized oil and mining sector to foreign investment. It is clear that the US intends to control Venezuela's oil. Trump has said that Venezuela would turn over $2.8 billion of oil money that would be, quote, controlled by means. Trump hosted oil companies at the White House to encourage them to set up shop in Venezuela. And he suggested that he will allow Venezuela to hold elections, quote, eventually after the US has redeveloped the oil sector to his satisfaction. So that was a lot of history. We started with Guatemala, and maybe at this point, you're wondering what all of this has to do with right now with Iran. Well, let's circle back, because the US couple of which nation was the model for the 1954 coup in Guatemala? Yes, friends, it was the 1953 coup in Iran. And that went pretty much exactly as you will now expect, given the established motives and outcomes of US Regime change. The king was Reza Shah. But During World War II, Britain and the Soviet Union feared that Reza Shah would align with Germany. So they invaded Iran and forced him to step down and install his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. So Iran sits on the world's largest oil and gas reserve, and it's the Strait of Hormuz. It carries about 20% of global oil supply. But the country was heavily influenced by foreign powers, including the country's vast oil industry, which was controlled by the British company, Anglo Iranian Oil Company, which was majority owned by the government of the UK and later became b. Okay. Under post World War II concession agreements, Britain controlled the oil fields and Iran received only a small share of the profits. In 1951, Iran's parliament elected Mohammed Mosaddeq as prime minister. Mossadegh was a nationalist politician who believed Iran should control its own resources and so decided to nationalize the oil industry, meaning that Iran would take back control of its own oil fields and the British company would lose its monopoly. Britain pushed the US to help get rid of Mossadegh and protect the Western oil system to prevent disruptions in global energy supply. We already know where this pattern inevitably leads. In Operation Ajac, the CIA and British intelligence created a covert coup operation in Iran to be run by CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, who is, incidentally, Theodore Roosevelt's son, who arrived in Iran with suitcases full of cash and relied on help from Iran. Stationed General Norman Schwarzkopf, who, incidentally, is the father of General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led Operation Desert Storm on Iraq in 1990. In that operation to topple Mosaddegh, the US employed a lot of the same moves they later did in Guatemala, including arming and training the Shah's secret police force, eventually getting the Shah to sign a decree dismissing and imprisoning Mosaddegh and appointing a new prime minister. This didn't really work out very well and the Shah fled the country. But the CIA persisted, and on August 19, 1953, military units loyal to the Shah seized control of Tehran. Mossadegh was arrested and the Shah returned to power. Western oil companies returned to Iran under a consortium that, surprise, surprise, included not only British oil, but now also included American oil companies. Standard Oil of New Jersey, later to be Exxon, Standard Oil of California, later to be Chevron, Gulf Oil and Texaco. These American companies together received about 40% of new Iranian oil. This crushing in 1953 of Iran's first democratic government ushered in 26 years of dictatorship under the Shah, who relied heavily on US Aid and arms, as well as secret police and military power. The 1979 Iranian Revolution that eventually toppled the Shah and established an Islamic republic was fomented by Islamic militancy and anti American backlash from the coup. The first post revolutionary supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. His successor was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom the United States killed in bombings last month.
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B
Honey, what do you think of when you hear this word investing? You know, I used to think investing was for really rich people. People who have wild amounts of excess money to play with and wild amounts of excess time to research everything, right? But a few years ago I really started thinking about about it differently because like investing small amounts as self care, isn't that a kind of an interesting way to think about it? Like just put it a little bit in, it's like breathing exercises. You just put a little bit of money in and it's like you're taking care of yourself.
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C
It's like paying for your future self.
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B
Exactly.
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C
It's like setting your coffee machine up the night before for your morning self.
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B
That's exactly right.
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A
Yeah, got it.
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B
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C
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B
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A
Jeremy Scahill is an author and investigative journalist who has reported from across the globe including Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Nigeria and the former Yugoslavia. He served as National Security Correspondent for the Nation and Democracy now and was one of the founding editors of the Intercept. He revealed the existence of a CIA run counterterrorism center and secret prison in Somalia, has documented the American government's extrajudicial killings and his work has sparked several congressional investigations. He wrote the books the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary army which won the prestigious George Polk Book Award, and Dirty wars, which was adapted into an Oscar nominated documentary film. Together with Ryan Grimm, he founded Dropsite News, which hosts an excellent podcast and invaluable newsletter and reporting on subsequent stack, both of which I strongly recommend to you. Jeremy, so happy you are here. Thank you.
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D
It's my honor. Thank you for having me.
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A
We have just been talking before you got on about how U.S. covert and military interventions always have a client. Historically, it has been US Corporate interests, capital interests. Now we are taking this conversation to our our current US Military actions, both directly in Iran and indirectly through funding and arming Israel's military actions against Palestine. I keep thinking of the old saying that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. Can we talk first about Iran and the stated rationales, what it's really about and who the clients, if any, are here?
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D
First of all, the United States preference in the world is that the only countries it wants to have nuclear weapons are countries that are adhering to US hegemony or are considered allies in the broader project. Some of which is related to what you said about capital interests and sort of the prevalence of free market politics backed up by the iron fist of militarism. In the case of Iran, I guess we would have to back up to the end of World War II briefly and recognize that coming out of World War II you have had two major powers emerge in the world as so called superpowers. The United States on the one hand, the Soviet Union on the other hand. And of course, while in America we're all taught that we won the war and America saved the world, the Soviet Union actually had exponentially more people die fighting fascism in Europe than the United States. But that history is often told as though it was sort of an afterthought. And so when Europe started to be divided up, you had the Soviets fighting for their spheres of influence, the United States fighting for its spheres of influence, of course being assisted by the British. But then the Middle east became a huge prize. And so what you saw in the 1950s with the rise and creation of what was called the Central Intelligence Agency, you had the kind of Cold War battle beginning over the control of oil resources. And so one of the first actions of the CIA and British intelligence in the region was to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohamed Moss Mossadegh in Iran. The United States was also engaged in similar activities inside of Iraq as well. And so Mossadegh is overthrown and the US Reimposed the Shah of Iran monarchist regime. And over the decades between 1953 and the 1979 Islamic Revolution, you had an increasingly brutal, autocratic, US backed dictatorship that was in control of Iran. And of course that dictatorship run by the Shah of Iran Iran was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution that brought Khomeini to power. And so from 1979 all the way to the present, Iran has existed as the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States has for all of those decades, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, portrayed Iran as the kind of great menace in the Middle East. Now, the counter narrative to that is that the imposition of the State of Israel on the region in 1948, 1949, beginning with the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Nakba, most people in that region would say that that was the sort of lighting of the fire for all of these wars, et cetera. And to bring it more into the modern context, both Democrats and Republicans have wanted to overthrow the Iranian government since 1979, when Donald Trump was in his first term in office. He ripped up, really a landmark deal that had been brokered in 2015 during the Obama administration that was meant to address what the US And Western European countries were saying was the kind of grave threat, that is that Iran would pursue a nuclear bomb. And so that agreement, by all measures, had ended any ideas in Iran about pursuing a nuclear weapon. It should also be stated that U.S. intelligence estimates going back decades said that at the end of 2003, the Iranians had abandoned any actual active program for making nuclear weapons. That remains the current intelligence, as briefed to Congress literally just this week by the Director of National Intelligence. And so in that first Trump administration, when he won the election against Hillary Clinton in 2016, one of the first things he did was to rip up the Obama era deal. He imposed these sweeping sanctions that were intended to kind of economically strangle the Iranian people in the hopes that they would rise up and bring down the government. Government. Trump was reluctant to get involved overtly with a regime change war, although he did, for instance, greenlight the assassination of the head of Iran's most elite military force, General Qasem Soleimani, at the Baghdad airport toward the very end of his first term. But he generally kept the kind of neocon wing of his administration in that first term one step outside of being able to push for this kind of regime change. What we've seen happen in the second Trump administration is that the strands of kind of libertarianism or isolationism within the MAGA movement have been entirely sidelined. I hear from people who are talking directly to officials within the Trump administration that anyone who is a dissenting voice is afraid to even say anything. And by dissenting voice, I mean people like Joe Kent, for instance, who just resigned as the head of the National Counterterrorism Center. They know that they're going to have their political heads cut off and they're going to be exiled. So there's Only a handful of these people left. And what I would say, in short, when you talk about the client, is that this time around, Donald Trump has managed to combine the worst aspects of neocon foreign policy represented by Bush and cheney in the post 911 world with the worst parts of American history from the CIA's early stages. And he's combined it with a totally erratic, insane form of his. Magai wouldn't even say ideology, because Trump is a transactional guy. I wouldn't even say he's ideological. But in essence, what has happened is that what I would call the Netanyahu, Mariam Adelson. Mariam Adelson, his number one campaign contributor, a citizen of Israel herself and a very militant Zionist. He's basically sold an aspect of American policy to the Miriam Adelson Netanyahu wing of the party. And he's put his son in law, Jared Kushner, Kushner, in charge of this whole project. So what we've seen in Gaza, what we've seen in Iran, you can say in a sense, yes, this is a war for Israel. But I think that maybe is too reductive. It's that you also have buy in and encouragement from a very powerful segment of the American wing of Trump's movement. But it's very much driven on a tactical level by Israel.
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A
That's very, very helpful. And I want to circle back to that whole Jared Kushner piece in terms of the influences around Trump. But can we back up? Because there's consensus documented that, you know, for 30 years Netanyahu has said, you know, a nuclear bomb by Iran is imminent literally all over the last 30 years, and has been lobbying presidents for decades to intervene in Iran. Why? Like, what is the shorthand for why Israel feels that's necessary?
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D
Well, remember that, you know, Netanyahu right now is at the apex of that multi decade career that you're talking about. And much of that career, he has been actually the prime minister of Israel. He had a few periods where he was out of power and he was a Fox News commentator. And in fact, he, he slept in Jared Kushner's childhood bedroom at the home of Kushner's father in New Jersey when he was kind of out of power and was still lobbying for these wars inside of the United States. The simplest way I would put it is that Netanyahu, even though he's not a religious man, Netanyahu represents this kind of militant Zionist ideology. And they don't want to just wage a war of annihilation against the Palestinians. Who live in historic Palestine. They also do have an ambition for a Greater Israel. And, you know, you had the US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who might as well just be the foreign minister of Israel. He seems to think that when you become ambassador to a country, you're supposed to then become like a spokesperson for that country. But he said on Tucker Carlson's show that it's perfectly defensible for Israel to aspire to or try to achieve a Greater Israel that goes from the Mediterranean State Sea all the way to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. I mean, then we're talking about moving into Iraq and elsewhere. And so what has stood in the way of that project has been the resilience of the Palestinian people. We can talk about Hamas, we can talk about Islamic Jihad, we can talk about armed resistance, but it's not just armed resistance. It's that Palestinians, by simply being born, have committed an act of resistance against Israel because the entire project is meant to erase them from that land. And so while Israel has had to increasingly fight an armed resistance, a guerrilla resistance in the form of, in these, in this era, Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they also have had to contend with Hezbollah in Lebanon, which also joined after October 7, you know, on the front. But most of the groups that Israel has been fighting against are what you'd call irregular armies. They're militias, they're paramilitary militaries. Yes, Hamas has shown an incredible ability to domestically produce its own weapons and its own rockets. And of course, you know, managed to conduct these operations on October 7, which really shocked the entire world with how effectively they were able to dismantle this military and intelligence state that always were taught is like, you know, the most advanced in the world. And the Americans study the Israelis. And yet October 7th happened, and you had dozens upon dozens of Israelis, many of them sold soldiers taken captive back to Gaza. It was shocking to most observers in the world. But the single greatest deterrent against Israel's expansionist agenda in terms of nation states has been Iran. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Hamas. It's not Hezbollah. It's a modern nation state with a very robust ballistic missile program and has shown a willingness to engage in both proxy warfare against Israel. Israel, but also in the case of the Gaza genocide period, has multiple times launched retaliatory missile strikes against Israel. And I think that Netanyahu has always understood that the main problem that they have in terms of a deterrence of their agenda is the existence of the Islamic Republic government in Iran. So, you know, what I would say, in short, is that they've concocted this nonsense about Iran always being like 30 seconds away from a nuclear bomb. Because what they really want is, is to smash the Iranian government. They want to smash that state. I'll tell you one thing that I think was very telling and I don't think it gets talked about enough, Amanda, and that is when Bashar al Assad fell in Syria, both Netanyahu and Trump to one degree or another, have sort of taken credit for it. And Trump said recently, like, hey, we put that guy who was a former Al Qaeda operative, by the way, we put that guy in power in Syria. But setting aside what anyone thinks about Syria, Syria, or Assad or Ahmed Al Shara, the new president, what did Israel do as soon as the rebels marched on Damascus, he authorized a sweeping operation by the Israeli military to go in and bomb the defensive conventional military capabilities of Syria preemptively. Why did they do that? They wanted to ensure that any government that would come to power in Syria, any Arab government that would come to power, wouldn't have an ability to defend itself like real nations states. So they went in and they decimated the conventional military capacity of Syria without even knowing who exactly was going to be in power. And so what I think we're seeing in Iran right now, we're being led on this sort of distraction operation to focus on the nuclear issue or to talk about Iran's ballistic missiles. Iran doesn't invade other countries. That's not how Iran wages its war. You know, it certainly is active on the proxy battle space. We could talk about that if people want. But what they're trying to do do is utterly smash it so that it has no defensive capabilities. And I don't think the US much cares who comes into power there. I think what we're witnessing right now is an attempt to turn Iran into a failed state so that it's malleable, so that it can be always under the kind of punishment regime of Israel if it's, if it steps out of line. I really think that that's a huge part of what we're witnessing right now.
- [44:40]
C
Foreign.
- [44:45]
A
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- [46:42]
B
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- [47:52]
A
The whole nuclear threat thing, that, I mean, that's been documented to be just patently false. After the US Airstrikes that happened in June, Trump said that the nuclear sites were completely and totally obliterated.
- [48:10]
D
Right.
- [48:11]
A
And said any, you know, any accounts to the contrary are fake news.
- [48:15]
D
They made a whole webpage on White House. On the White House website, which was still up, declaring fake news. Right.
- [48:20]
A
When we bombed them again, claiming an imminent nuclear threat. And just March 18, Tulsi Gabbard, director of National Intelligence, testified that as a result of last summer's airstrikes by us on Iran, Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. And she also testified that there had been no effort by Iran since then to rebuild their enrichment program. But the first thing that Trump's White House said after the February bombings was that the attacks were based on an imminent nuclear threat posed by the regime. So just to close that loop, their own National Intelligence director has testified to the opposite of that.
- [48:58]
D
Can I mention one thing that maybe people aren't familiar with? Because, you know, one of the things that I do that unfortunately has become uncommon in American media. It used to be much more common, but it's uncommon, is I've been talking to Iranian officials, not just since the bombing began, but also going back to when these negotiations were happening earlier in February between. Between Steve Witkoff, the President's special envoy, Jared Kushner, his son in law, and the Iranian side, and it was being mediated by the Sultanate of Oman. There was also a British nuclear expert who was present for some of these meetings. And what he has revealed is that the US didn't even bring nuclear experts to these negotiations. I really want people to understand what I'm about to say because it shows you what a fraud this entire thing was. So you have someone who actually was a true expert on these issues. He's there and he's saying that the Iranians put on the table a remarkable set of concessions when it came to the nuclear issue. I was talking to Iranian officials, this is before the war started, and they were saying to me, we believe the Americans were stunned by what we said we were willing to do in these negotiations and that our strategy in this was to go in knowing that we don't have a nuclear nuclear weapons program, to put everything on the table, and to make an offer that extends beyond what Barack Obama was able to get, because we understand that that's important to Trump, that he wants to be able to say, I did better than Obama. And so it's not that the Iranians had any illusions about who they were dealing with, but I had Iranian government sources who were saying, we feel like we've put everything possible on the table and we have cautious optimism that maybe they will see the light, that we're actually serious about this. I spoke to Rob Malley, who was one of the senior negotiators under Barack Obama of the original nuclear deal in 2015. And he said based on what he understood about what the Iranians put on the table, it went far beyond what the US was able to get in 2015. The US representatives then go backsteve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. And what they've been saying publicly, Witkoff has been saying this, is that the Iranians somehow came into the media meetings and they were bragging that they had all of these kilograms of weapons grade bomb making material. And, and the reality is, and this is so important for people to understand, the Iranians came in and they said, here, we're going to tell you everything that we have and we know that you're concerned about it and we're willing to either ship it to another country or dilute it as part of any deal. And the US Twisted that either through ignorance or malice into the Iranians were coming there and saying, we can make 10 or 11 bombs. The point is, none of this was about the nuclear. The entire point of this was that the US Needed to get as many interceptor missiles to the region as possible. They needed to get that second aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, because it had been involved with Venezuela. They had to move it all the way across the world. When they moved that ship, I knew there was going to be war because those soldiers were supposed to go on rotation and that's a big deal in the military, military. So they moved that thing over. The entire thing was a fraud, an epic lie. None of this was actually about Iran's nuclear weapons capacity. It never was. It was entirely about fraudulent negotiations as a veneer to build up enough military force to sustain what they believed would be a multi, potentially multi month massive bombing campaign.
- [52:16]
A
Let's hover there for a minute. In June, the first US airstrikes on Iran happened during the negotiations, Correct? We were actively negotiating with Iran during that time, or allegedly negotiating with them again. We are allegedly negotiating when the February airstrikes begin. But isn't it telling when you send to nuclear negotiations a real estate guy and an equity fund guy to do your nuclear negotiations, you gotta assume it's about real estate and equity, because it's not about nuclear issues or you have no actual real intent to negotiate those. It's just. It's evidenced by who you send as to what you're trying to get done. I mean, you're referring to the UK expert that actually said a deal is within reach. So let's go back to Kushner, because I am fascinated by this whole thread, because all of these conditions existed for a lot of administrations prior to this one. And Netanyahu was trying over and over to get a president to intervene, and this is the only one that did. So conditions did not change. But the person being willing to say, yes, let's do this did change. And so, as you said, Kushner, his father, brought Netanyahu over to America no less than four times. Netanyahu stayed in the Kushner family home in Jared's bed. He has a very long personal relationship with him. Can we just talk about for a minute? Because his financial ties feel very relevant to what is happening right now, both his ideological ties and his financial ties. In the first administration, the Kushner family had a crushing $1.2 billion mortgage on their property at 666 Fifth Ave. That was very much struggling. It needed a bailout, and they were looking for years and years to try to get someone to invest to bail them out. And then Brookfield, while Jared Kushner had an official role in the first administration, and he was advising on Middle east issues, there's all this, like, weird stuff with Rex Tillerson, who was actually Secretary of State, who was told to stand down on all Middle east issues because Kushner was going to act in that role. Brookfield came in and, using government of Qatar money, paid $1.2 billion for a lease on the family property. There's an hour you could do on just that. But I think what's interesting is that that Jared Kushner's family received that money from Qatar during the time that Donald Trump was trying to face a decision as to whether to support a blockade against Qatar by Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt. And in his own biography, Jared says that he led the diplomatic efforts to end the Gulf rift and reunite Qatar with the Gulf Cooperation Council. This is just like a taste of what feels like it's to come. But. But I want to talk a little bit about Saudi Arabia and then directly how it relates to the moments before and the days before our attack began, because affinity partners which is Jared's private equity fund. It received $1.5 billion from the Qatar sovereign wealth fund and investment fund linked to the UAE governments. But his biggest client is Saudi Arabia, which is a big time foe of Iran. Right. It has invested $2 billion in his fund. And Jared Kushner right now is actively seeking billions of dollars more. While he is officially tasked with going to negotiate in these regions. He also partnered with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund for the biggest private equity buyout ever, ever in history just at the end of last year. So talk me through this, because the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman, he is Jared Kushner's biggest client. He is making private phone calls to Trump in February advocating that the US Attack Iran. And he, according to New York Times, is continuing to call him right now advocating that he continue. So then Kushner is with Wyckoff doing these Iranian negotiations. On March 9, Trump said Kushner is one of a handful of top advisors who convinced him to launch the Iran attacks. He said, based on what Steve and Jared and Pete were telling me, Marco is also involved. I thought they were going to attack us. And as you said, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are telling Trump, we are in these negotiations. There is no way out of this. We're not gonna find a deal. And then that UK Security advisor said it was actually within reach. Does it seem to you like it's just the people around Trump with specific interests that are disconnected from what has typically been American interests here that convinced him to do this? Because I don't see a change in any other of the political order other than that.
- [57:50]
D
Well, I mean, a couple things here. One is, I think it's helpful to think about the way that Trump runs things while he's president. And this was true in his first term, and it's definitely true now. It's akin to kind of the Godfather, where Jared Kushner is like the Tom Hagen character, you know, the consigliere. And the, the challenge for the Gulf monarchies is that when they're dealing with Donald Trump, Trump, they're not just dealing with the President of the United States. They're also dealing with a corrupt crooked businessman who continues to make policy based on what he thinks is going to aid his family business and his cronies. And to have Jared Kushner in a non Senate confirmed position, not technically an official. They constantly say, oh, Jared's paying his own way to do everything, everything. You know, this is not public charity. They're doing this because when Jared Kushner enters the room, whether he's in Qatar or he's in Saudi Arabia, or he's dealing with the Emirates or he's in Israel, you know, he's a dual hatted guy. He's walking into those rooms with the full force of the backing of the President of the United States, who also happens to be his father in law and whose business interests are completely intertwined with the Trump family. I mean, he's literally married to Trump's daughter. And so some of the decision making that's gone on in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and elsewhere has been entirely about just currying favor to the king. Trump, I think when he was there visiting the Gulf, he was marveling at sort of the palaces, and he made some quips about not having to have elections. He clearly has a great affinity for the way they roll the royals. But I think if you look at it in really serious political terms, what you are we talking about here, we're talking about someone who is abusing the office of the Presidency of the United States for the personal benefit of himself, his family and his cronies. And they're treating the entire region as a plantation. And on this plantation, they have all of these monarchies that are allowed to have their own little fiefdoms, and they get to buy American weapons and they house American base bases. And in the case of the United Arab Emirates, you know, they quote, unquote, normalize relations with Israel. And part of the equation there, part of the problem for them is that Iran is not part of that program. And Iran controls a significant aspect of oil and gas in the world, but also it's a stain and a pox on their houses because all of these Gulf countries, they stood by for two and a half years of watching Palestinian children, children get burned alive in tents. They did nothing about it. They stand by and issue, at best, strongly worded statements and do nothing. And so, you know, what I think we're witnessing here is that Trump is using the White House as a vehicle for his business. They've cut all these deals with these Gulf countries. Yes, it's true what you said about Saudi Arabia, particularly in the first term. The real collusion was building a coalition against Iran. They were really contemplating this. There were all these meetings in Trump Tower with the Saudis, the Israelis, et cetera, over the period between, over the past two years. But really, over the period from the June war until now, an untold story was that there had been a rapprochement between Iran and many of these Gulf countries. Where Iran had a very dedicated campaign of diplomacy, and there was an improvement of relations going on in the. The Gulf. And Netanyahu did not like this at all. He hated this. You had these Gulf countries say, oh, you can't use our airspace, you can't use our territory. Now, of course, that's nonsense. They all have massive US Military facilities, including the arteries of the entire thing running through the GCC countries. But publicly they were stating this, and that was the result of this diplomacy going on. So what we've seen happen as Iran has engaged in retaliatory strikes, hitting at all these military bases on a regular basis, and now it's gotten really wild because we're talking about oil infrastructure, but just settling on the first part of it on military retaliatory strikes. I think that it's true that the Gulf countries dramatically underestimated what that was going to look like when Iran started striking back. And I think that they're learning that the United States is not their protector and that it is completely dedicated to Israel. And these Gulf countries continue, continue to bend the knee to this whole thing. They had UN Security Council resolution condemning Iran does not mention the terms United States or the term Israel at all in their resolution. If you were to just read the statements from the. The Gulf countries, you would think that Iran, unprovoked, started a war in the entire region and not that the United States and Israel started massively bombing Iran, bombed a school, killing 170 children and teachers at the school, bombed Iranian oil facilities, creating a toxic black rain down in the country, has systematically assassinated the entire leadership of Iran, including moderate, what Iranians would call flexible officials that could potentially be the ones to negotiate an end to this whole thing. And these Gulf countries have stood by and they've said nothing about it. Why they're so kind of put in check by Trump. They're so interwoven with the business deals, they're so interwoven with the Trump family. They've got the Jared Kushner relationships, they have the Trump relationships. And then they have their. Their kind of role as pawns on the board of US Hegemony in the region that they've willingly engaged in. And those countries bribe their own populations with oil revenue and say, oh, my God. Oh, our life is so good and our life is so peaceful. Peaceful. And the past three weeks have just been a huge dose of reality for them that Iran was not going to just sit around and say, sure, just, you know, overrun our country, overthrow our government. We can have a whole discussion about the internal politics of Iran, but just on a basic level. This is a lawless series of war crimes that the US And Israel are committing. And Iran's neighbors are portraying it to the world like Iran is the mad dog biting everyone in the neighborhood. And we just can't figure out why they would ever do this to us. CENTCOM is in Qatar. What is centcom? US Central Command is the entire brains of US Military action in the Middle east. And Qatar is saying, oh my God, why are they attacking Qatar? What's the entire brain of the operation is there? Bahrain houses the Fifth Fleet, the most important US Naval base in the region. All of these countries have massive, massive CIA or military operations inside of them. What we're witnessing right now, this is an external representation of the kind of corrupt nexus that exists under Donald Trump between Israel, the White House, the Trump family, Jared Kushner, Gulf monarchies and wars of aggression. It's like I said, it's a combination of some of the worst components of American political and imperial history. History all combined into this crazy, erratic lunatic that is currently sitting in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
- [65:20]
B
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- [66:22]
A
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- [67:24]
B
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- [68:31]
A
And he believes, I think that he saw what he did in Venezuela when he took Maduro and captured him and know you troops died during that and he got to ouster him and put in a client of the United States and take oil and he thought well that was easy and good. And so he clearly did not calculate what anyone with knowledge of Iran and their capabilities would have predicted. So what is your educated speculation about based on what you know about the psychological makeup of him and his past decisions, we feel like we're in it now. I mean, I don't even know that we could take our ball and go home and declare any kind of victory.
- [69:25]
D
This is something I've been talking about too. Just like with friends who aren't necessarily immersed in this the way that I am, you know, Trump is without question in a quagmire right now, and you see this kind of frantic reframing almost on a daily basis of what the objectives are. And, you know, let's back up and remember, you had these huge protests in Iran in January. And then you had had the overwhelming, huge, peaceful protests then start to be disrupted by smaller cells of people within them who are attacking police stations. And then the Iranian state responds brutally and forcefully. And you had this kind of humanitarian interventionism argument happening. Oh, my God, we need to intervene to save the Iranian people. And oh my God, the women of Iran are so oppressed. And Iran is a diverse country and, and there is completely legitimate reasons for Iranians to despise their government. You know, it's the right of anyone in this world. But this is cynically used to sell a war of choice that has nothing to do with freeing Iranian women. That has nothing to do with delivering democracy to the suffering masses of Iran. This is any more than when Laura Bush would say, we're in Afghanistan to save the women and get the burqa removed. None of that was what that war was about. And any of us that knew anything new, the Taliban is going to end up back in power. And this was yet another graveyard of imperialism adventure where American lives were lost, tens of thousands of Afghan lives were lost, and it all ends with the Taliban going back into power and reconsolidating things. I bring this up because American imperialism is filled with episodes of convincing the American people to step on the same, rake in the same position in the same yard every time, and it smacks you in the face. None of this is about humanitarianism. None of this is about saving any Iranian people or defending any Iranian women. This is a regime change war that is overwhelmingly being fought for Israel's strategic interests in the region. And because it's been a long term bipartisan project in the United States States, and they want to create a Middle east, in the case of Trump, that is good for the kind of business that his family does. I think that's what we're seeing here. The Maduro thing is interesting that you bring up. So they go in, they kidnap Nicolas Maduro and his wife, they fly them to the United States, but then they cut a deal with Delsey Rodriguez, the vice president, and they basically say to her, you can continue to talk about how you have a Bolivarian revolution here. You know, you do whatever you want as long as our oil companies get to do whatever we want them to do. So they come in, Trump then. And I heard this from sources that were in some of the briefings on this. Trump starts to get drunk on this. Like they're getting high on their own supply in a way, and they're saying, ooh, can we export this model? This is a great thing we've invented where you just chop off the top, you make a deal with number two, and you move on. And so they start talking about this. And the military guys, though, in the case of Iran, Iran start saying to Trump, you know, Iran has like a very sophisticated missile program. This is a highly educated country. This is a multi thousand year civilization. And they've been building horizontal state institutions for 47 years. And by the way, they've been preparing for decades for this kind of war. And they certainly have been preparing since last June when you lied to them about negotiations and then bombed them again. So his military advisors understood what was happening. But then when you have the political people yapping in the room and saying, oh, don't listen to the naysayers. So why was it that on day three of this war that started on February 28th, I'm hearing from Iranian officials that the US is reaching out to Iran and saying, can we start talking about this? Because I think they realized by the third or fourth day of this war, the Trump people realized this isn't going the way we thought it was going to be. They thought they kill the Supreme Leader and then it's like, there's going to be an upper. Well, that didn't work. You don't hear Trump talk anymore at all about the Iranian people. He couldn't care less about that. Right now. He's saying, we can make a deal with a religious person. I like religious people. The leader should be internal and eternal is what, you know, what Trump said, and he's referencing Venezuela, whereas Netanyahu is like, wait a minute, this person was the local dog catcher. Assassinate them. You know, senior officials been assassinated, they'll assassinate everybody. Because Israel isn't internal, interested in anything except smashing Iran into a million pieces. So once again, we've been led down this road where we're in this imperial war. Trump has painted himself into a corner. You know the drinking buddy frat guy, Pete Hegseth, who's masquerading as the war secretary every day is out there saying, I'm so great. We're winning, we're winning, we're winning. He's, you know, it's like anytime you're winning, when you have to tell everyone you're winning, you're probably, probably not actually winning. This is a long winded way of directly answering you, which is they don't have an off ramp right now. And so what they're doing is heinous. They are doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on just massively bombing Iran. And it's not going to work. The Iranians are not going to say, okay, well, this bomb did it. We surrender. Now they've killed off so many people that that actually would have had the capacity for diplomacy. And the people that are now coming into place place in Iran are people that have watched their colleagues be killed, killed, killed. And they are not going to make those mistakes. If they're going to die, they're going to go down fighting. And so, you know, how does this benefit any of us? How does it benefit the world? How does it benefit the people of Iran? How does it benefit the American people? The only beneficiary of this is the extremist agenda of Netanyahu and his dreams of annihilating the Palestinians and expanding his domination further in the region. It doesn't benefit any Americans or Iranians or anyone in the region, except the sort of Zionist expansionist project.
- [75:10]
A
Which brings us to Gaza. And another piece of this that heavily involves Jared Kushner. Can you please tell us a little bit about the Board of Peace? It was when Jared Kushner was in Davos, Davos, announcing that he is the chief architect of this new Gaza plan, presented as a master plan, also with his buddy, the real estate developer Steve Witkoff, who we just spoke about with Iran, said that they had been working for two years. That timing feels very, very interesting that they had been working for the past two years on this new Gaza plan while Gaza was fighting for its life, to basically turn Gaza, which is the site of genocidal war crimes. What should be happening now is the UN should be going in to collect evidence for war crimes. But that is not what's happening. The plans are to turn it into basically a Middle East Riviera. I mean, Donald Trump, who a couple years ago posted a video of that concept with Elon Musk on the beach, I mean, that seemed absurdist then, and it is so close to the act actual plan now that it's horrifying. But how did once again, Jared Kushner come to a place where he is in a position to be selling Gaza as a real estate development to the world?
- [76:47]
D
I think you're hitting the nail on the head there. The way that Kushner has viewed this for a long time. And again, he has deep business connections in Israel. Israel, not just the Gulf, but in Israel, family connections. To Netanyahu. And I think they truly do view Gaza's coastline as a prime piece of real estate. And I think, you know, it's plantation politics masquerading as a foreign policy. And so when they, when they created this Board of Peace, there were two, you know, sort of strands at play. One was Trump completely checked the United Nations Security Council. In fact, I would say this was maybe the lowest point in the entire history of the United Nations Security Council was to endorse Trump's Board of Peace, including its ability to deploy a privatized armed force inside of Gaza to back up the agenda. And according to the Board of Peace Charter, which the UN certified, Trump remains its chair even when he leaves the president presidency. I mean, it's extraordinary. And, and so what happened there is that the UN basically put a death stamp on its own claims to legitimacy having anything to do with Palestine by endorsing this. And so what they did is they, they cobbled together sort of a lot of second tier B class world leaders. It's like a Marvel superhero thing, but with like, really horrible autocratic, you know, figures on this government. Superhero, off brand superheroes, Right? And so, you know, then Trump, he loves to have these like, you know, horribly tacky ceremonies where everyone sits at these, like long banquet tables and it's like Joe Bluth asking everyone to roast him. You know, like, so they're sitting there and telling Trump how amazing he is, but what are they actually doing? He's saying, this isn't just about Gaza, this is how we can do it for the world. So it's privatization, it's corruption, it's gangster politics, it's mafia politics, politics. But what does it mean for Palestinians? The message that is being sent right now to Palestinians in Gaza is that Israel is in almost 60% control of Gaza as of now. They continue to occupy nearly 60% of Gaza all the way in the eastern section of Gaza. They're continuing to do periodic low intensity genocide bombings, etc. They still aren't allowing in the agreed upon life essentials. And they're telling Palestinians, Palestinians that the only way you're going to be allowed to live here is if you become the plantation workers for this massive real estate project that I guarantee you, both Witkoff and Kushner's family businesses are ultimately going to be involved with. Now, Israel may not love this plan because they want it to just be an all Israeli settlement. So there are certain things that the, that the guys on the same side have to work out with each other, but netanyahu Yahoo loves this idea of just forcing the Palestinians. They have to go through re education. According to this stuff. They're going to teach them to love, you know, Zionism.
- [79:43]
A
There's no freedom of movement. They have to like basically qualify to live in Gaza and their movements be tracked completely. And there's a family clause that says something about like, you know, complete families preferred. Which of the current people living in Gaza? There is a minuscule percentage of complete families. There have been what, 2,000 families just where there's only one living human left.
- [80:16]
D
One of my good friends who's Palestinian and has family from Gaza, her name is Leila Al Arian. She's an incredibly successful Emmy award winning TV documentary producer in the United States. Her mother, who I know has had more than 200 family members killed in Gaza. Anyone that knows a Palestinian, if you ask them, them you know how it's affected their family. Almost everyone, dozens upon dozens, if not more family members who've been killed. They've wiped out the family names of entire families in Gaza. I mean, we can get into the grotesque details of what this board is doing. But I think what's important on a conscience level for everybody to consider is this prophets are not people that see the future. They're people that understand the times in which we live and have the audacity in them to stand up and say, I want allow it. And you know, a lot of people from our generation remember, you know, maybe when I was coming of age, one of the big political struggles was against apartheid in South Africa. And we now look back on that and we say, my God, that was so grotesque. Or we look at pictures from American history from the 1940s and 1950s of black bodies hanging from trees. Or we look at signs that say whites only. Or kids are taught about the woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus, Rose parks. And we look back at that and we say, you know, wow, this was a horrible part of our history, but good people rose up and they did something about it. Martin Luther King wouldn't even be invited to Martin Luther King Day celebrations in the modern time if he had the audacity to say it in real time. He wouldn't even be invited to his own, you know, celebrations if he was alive today because he would see it for what it is. And I guess what I would say about Gaza is we've been so brainwashed into belief that Palestinians are terrorists that somehow they're akin to Al Qaeda or ISIS because they're resisting when the cold fact Is, and I'll debate anybody to the end of the earth on this. The United States is supporting a modern day apartheid colonialist project that has one set of rules for Jews and Israelis and one set of rules for Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians, including people that even are sick, citizens of Israel, but happen to be Arab. And this is what our tax dollars are going for and this is what our moral capital is going for. This is one of the most justified struggles of liberation in our time. And we're all bullied into saying, but October 7th, but Hamas, but this, you know, what about October 6th? What about 1948? What about 1982? We have to stop allowing. And actually young people have led the way on this because this notion of using the label of anti Semitic to tar and feather anybody who dares to speak out against this is getting shattered primarily because young people won't take it, their bravery, they've taught us so much, but the illusions are being shattered. And so we're at the dying end of this immoral, bankrupt policy in terms of public consciousness. And so all I would say is we have to question the dominant narratives. This isn't about saving women in Iran. This isn't about bringing democracy to Iran. Palestinians are not trying to kill the West. You know, Iranians are not trying to wage war on the world and get a nuclear bomb so they can start, you know, menacing the whole world. The lies are so blatant under Donald Trump, but in a way it's an epic case of the quiet part being said out loud because a lot of Democrats in Washington privately, they're happy Trump is doing this because if it goes bad, as it seems to be, it's bad for election because the gas is going to be expensive and costs are going to go up and oh my God, we're in another one of these wars. But if it goes good, great. We wanted that too. That sameness of policy between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to these, you know, to this foreign policy is something that, you know, people like Ralph Nader have been talking about their whole life and he gets tarred and feathered for, you know, know, things that, that, you know, for having the audacity of run against the two party system. And he, but if you go back and you look at it, the people that were saying this for a long time, they're proven right right now. You know, the whole thing is just, it's, it's an immoral state of bankruptcy in our hearts that we've allowed this to continue for so long.
- [84:24]
A
Thank you, Jeremy. Thank you for all of your intrepid reporting. Thank you for sharing your time today. I'm really so grateful for what you do at Dropsite News and bring us the perspectives that hard to find in the rest of media and I'm just grateful that you shared your time today.
- [84:46]
D
Well, I want to also thank you guys because I know you have an audience that I think is really thoughtful and I think you brought them along with your outspoken words in defense of the Palestinian people and you didn't have to do that. And I think there's what you guys have done and there's a number of other people who have you their platforms that you know have great risk to your reputation and I think it matters.
- [85:09]
A
Thank you very much.
- [85:11]
C
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