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Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president doesn't, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got Tim Shorrock, and he is the author of the book Spies for Hire, the secret world of intelligence outsourcing.
And he's got a couple of big articles here, how Sony, Obama, Seth Rogen, and the CIA secretly plan to force regime change in North Korea.
We're going to get to that in a minute.
But first, I think, you know, the more emergency stuff with the nuclear explosions and all at the nation.
Two important ones here.
The only sensible way out of the North Korea crisis and diplomacy with North Korea has worked before and can work again.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Tim?
I'm well, thank you.
I just feel silly saying back because it's been years since we've spoken.
It almost doesn't count as back again.
I've missed you.
I'm so happy to have you back on the show.
Glad to be back.
And you know what it is, is I really regret that I haven't read your book because I've heard of it a few times.
I guess I've probably read a couple of reviews of it.
I know it's been out for a few years now, and I've always wanted to get to it.
I don't even have it actually even on the pile as of yet.
But it's one of those.
I really want to know what's in there.
Bear with me, be patient, and sometime before 2025, I'll get to it.
All right.
If I can.
All right.
Anyway, so listen, you're great on Korea issues and especially on what's the most important thing, right?
Which is the oftentimes omitted or misrepresented backstory to how we got here.
And of course, you know, the center of that is the agreed framework deal that the Bill Clinton administration struck and the George W. Bush administration destroyed.
And as you quote here in your article, and I haven't been watching TV, lucky me, but you have all these quotes from CNN and I guess from the papers too, where it just goes without proving ever.
It's just the presumed premise of all of these discussions is you can't deal with North Korea and not just in a don't negotiate with evil Dick Cheney kind of a way.
But they cite experience and say they can't be trusted to live up to their deals.
So what's the point of making a deal with them?
And you say that that's really not true.
Yeah.
Well, what I point out there is that the 94 agreement, which all these pundits scoff at and they'll say that North Korea broke it the next day, which is not true.
But this 94 agreement, North Korea froze its nuclear program, which at that time was, you know, creating plutonium to make a bomb.
They didn't have a bomb, but they froze that program for 12 years.
And you know, they made other concessions as well.
And the U.S. agreed to provide them with fuel oil because they shut down a reactor.
And 500,000 tons of fuel oil a year and also agreed to help build two light water reactors for them with built by an international consortium.
And that was to be the light water reactor considered, you know, less more safe as far as proliferation goes.
And that and that agreement held for a number of years.
And but the most important part of it was that both sides agreed to drop their hostile policy toward each other and stop treating each other as enemy nations.
And they agreed to move forward as quickly as possible to full political and normal political and economic normalization.
And one of the facts about this agreement was it was signed in October 1994.
And in November 1994, the Republicans took over the House and Senate for the first time since the 1940s, led by Newt Gingrich.
And the first thing the Republicans did was begin attacking this agreement and undermining this agreement.
And so within a couple of years, when oil shipments were delayed and there was and North Koreans felt that there was no movement toward ending the hostile policy, they began complaining vociferously to the United States and to any anti-people, any U.S. representatives that they met with that the U.S. was not keeping its side of the bargain.
And so, you know, they felt that the U.S. broke the agreement.
Out of the 94 agreement came another set of negotiations about their missiles.
And by the end of the Clinton administration, they were very close to an agreement under which North Korea would have ceased its production and testing of all missiles.
And when Bush came to power in early 2001, and Bush and his neocons, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and others, they were against this, you know, negotiations with North Korea from the get-go.
And they were dead set against this agreed framework.
And they just did everything they could to undermine it.
And so in 2002, they dredged up some old intelligence showing that North Korea was, you know, building, buying equipment to enrich uranium, which could lead to another way to the bomb.
And they said, you know, they just sent this State Department guy to North Korea with orders just to tell them, this agreement is over because you're building this uranium facility, which turned out not to be true.
And they denied it, but they said they had a right to do it.
And they said they'd be happy to talk about it, but the U.S. refused to talk to them.
And just Bush after that, ripped up the agreement, put them on the list of the axis of evil.
And you know, North Korea said, okay, no agreement.
We're going to go forward with a nuclear program.
And by 2006, they had exploded their first nuclear bomb.
So that's a pretty big disaster as far as agreements go.
Right.
Cool.
Okay.
I want to follow up on a couple of things there.
First of all, about this uranium story, a couple of points.
If they did have a secret uranium enrichment program, would that have necessarily been in violation of the agreed framework?
Because actually, I don't know if I've actually ever read the deal itself, but I remember seeing Barbara Slavin, who knows a lot about this kind of thing and is not, you know, 100% a dove every time or anything like that.
I would say she's could be a pretty objective source to cite here.
And I saw her arguing with some hawks and saying, listen, even if that uranium story was true, that really wasn't a violation of the agreed framework, certainly not one that should lead to the disillusion of the deal at all.
That just means negotiate more if it is true, right?
Right.
I mean, actually, you know, there's some debate about that, whether it would have violated or not.
But the fact is, at the time they made the accusation, they did not have a uranium enrichment program.
I mean, that's been shown.
And also, you know, as I pointed out in that article, you know, Condoleezza Rice, who was, you know, first National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Bush, you know, regretted what they did with the uranium deal and said they really blew a chance to complete, you know, to close down their nuclear and missile program by making that charge and just using it as an excuse to rip up the agreement.
She herself admitted that in her own memoir.
And later, you know, when Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, she focused on that uranium issue and said, you know, the Bush administration, because of that failure to negotiate around it, led North Korea to proceed with their nuclear program.
So, you know, I think it's pretty clear that that's what that's what happened.
It may not have violated it anyway.
You know, as one State Department negotiator pointed out to me, also, you know, the United States itself, you know, took two routes to the bomb.
You know, I mean, the first one was a plutonium bomb, Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki was a uranium bomb.
But you know, so the point is, you know, the agreement was broken and they, you know, started, you know, going forward with their program.
And then Bush and Condoleezza Rice actually, you know, amazingly enough, three weeks after their first nuclear explosion, Bush approved negotiating with them directly.
And that cleared the way for the so-called Six-Party Talks.
Well, now, hold on, go back to 2002 for a minute with me here, Tim.
Now, so it wasn't just that they broke the deal or announced, the Americans announced the deal is off, but they also added new sanctions.
They announced the proliferation security initiative, which means their supposed right to seize North Korean boats on the high seas.
And then they also released a new document about their preemptive war strategy, which included North Korea.
And that was, I think, the final straw when they announced their withdrawal from the treaty.
But so it seems like when you put all that together, it seems like this is John Bolton talking.
This was a deliberate plan to provoke them, not just out of the agreed framework, but to provoke them into leaving the Non-Proliferation Treaty and their safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
So that what?
I mean, we're talking about right in the run-up to Iraq War II.
So I wonder what you think the thinking was there, that they really thought, well, we're just going to knock off Saddam, and then a few weeks later, we're going to roll right into Pyongyang, or what did they think was going to happen if they forced them out of the damn deal?
Except they're going to, you're going to make them make nukes, which is exactly what happened.
Right.
I mean, John Bolton was, you know, has made it very clear.
He said, you know, he said publicly in his own memoirs that, you know, his intention was to destroy this agreement and find a way to wreck it.
And, and, you know, he has been quoted as saying, you know, the only way to end the North Korea nuclear program is to end North Korea.
So they are, these are aggressive hawks who want to, you know, change the regime in North Korea.
But so in the Bush Jr. administration, what do you think that the president and the vice president thought that they were doing?
They thought that they were going to go ahead and attack North Korea the next year before they would have a chance to make nukes, along with Iraq?
Or what did they think?
Or did they just let Bolton decide?
Well, I think by the, you know, by, by the time that, you know, after, I mean, by, you know, that when they, when they opened the six party talks, you know, 2005, 2006, you know, by that time within the Bush administration, you know, Cheney had been kind of sidelined because of Iraq and Rumsfeld as well.
You know, so the neocons voice was, was, was less.
And so I think, you know, those, you know, I think Bush himself and Rice and others within the administration, you know, you know, I mean, realized that there had to be some kind of negotiation.
So I think there was, you know, a split between, you know, these, these sort of regime changers and people that, you know, wanted more war, the neocons and Bush by that point.
But it's, it's really hard to determine exactly what they were thinking.
I mean, Rumsfeld, for one, well, you know, he was, he was really obsessed with the issue of missile defense, of course.
And, you know, he had, during the nineties, he had chaired this commission on, on missile defense, which named Iran and North Korea as, you know, rogue nations building missiles.
And by that time, North Korea had only tested two missiles.
But it was, you know, it was like any country to them that they viewed as an enemy of the United States that had any kind of military capability had to be crushed.
That was their, that was their thinking.
Well, and they certainly said so at the time and wrote it down to right now.
So as far as and I'm sorry, because I'm, I'm way in the weeds here, but it's, it's for me.
I don't care whether the audience likes it or not.
I want to know just how certain you are that they did not have that parallel secret uranium program.
I mean, I can reason it out when I see that all the nukes that they've made have been made with plutonium, which means, you know, very, very likely that means that their implosion bombs, which is a much more difficult way to do if they had a uranium program, they could make a pretty simple Hiroshima gun type nuke bomb and have one really good, successful test.
Instead, they had a few fizzles.
And I guess we don't know what really happened after that.
But from all the information that we know about the nukes that they've tested, they've all been plutonium bombs and not uranium bombs.
And I guess I haven't heard about them enriching uranium for use as fuel in their Yongbyong reactor.
Well, they did, they did build a uranium and they eventually did build a enrichment facility and they showed it to Siegfried Hecker, who was the scientist from Los Alamos.
But this is years later after the accusation.
Yeah, years later.
They showed it to him in 2010, I think it was, you know, so eight years later they had built one.
But by that time, you know, the agreement was, you know, long gone.
That itself is the proof that they didn't have one back when they supposedly admitted they did in 2002, you're saying?
Yeah, the charge was bogus.
I mean, it was an excuse to destroy the agreement.
Yeah, Gordon Prather called it aluminum tubes, the sequel.
And it was that, yeah, they had bought some aluminum tubes, they had bought some old centrifuge first generation junk from AQ Khan, but that didn't mean that they had put it all together and gotten it working or anything.
I mean, the Iranians, think of what a huge project it was for the Iranians to build Natanz, right?
There's no evidence.
The thing is, like, you know, in the late 90s, the Clinton administration saw the same intelligence and the intelligence was, I'm sure it was NSA intercepts where they followed, you know, invoices and receipts electronically and so on.
And they could see that North Korea was going to, you know, Pakistan, Japan, other countries to buy, you know, equipment to make centrifuges and proceed.
And so, you know, the Clinton agreement, the Clinton administration saw the same intelligence in the late 90s and they decided, you know, they didn't didn't have a program.
And you know, that's what the Bush people seized upon, you know, a couple of years later.
Right.
You know, I'm trying to remember.
I'm 100 percent convinced they did not have a uranium program at the time they made the accusation.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
Now, I forget which documentary it was.
It may have been War Made Easy by Norman Solomon or something.
No, I forget.
Anyway, there is a documentary that begins about the first Bush junior term.
It could have been Hijacking Catastrophe, maybe.
I don't know.
But it sort of starts out with when the Bush administration is brand new, Colin Powell gives this big talk.
It was like the first or second day.
And Colin Powell gives this big speech about what our foreign policy is going to be.
And in the background, you can see Bush and Cheney and the other hawks back there.
And Cheney especially is just glaring at Colin Powell like, yeah, we're right.
That's what you think, punk.
And Powell is saying, well, yeah, we pretty much like the Bill Clinton North Korea policy, and we're going to stick with that, and we're going to do that.
So yeah, that was definitely not true.
But you could even see it.
It was as he was saying that that Cheney is just glaring at him.
And you can see that there's a fight on inside that administration about what they're going to do with Korea.
It's just endlessly puzzling to me about how they thought that was going to...
If they gamed it out, if Dick Cheney rubbed even two or three neurons together, how did he think this was going to work out?
If he forced them out of the deal, he was either going to have to attack them quick or they were going to get nukes.
But then they didn't seem to really plan for step two.
They're like, step one, force them out of the deal.
Step three, profit.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, you know, there was even a worse situation with Powell in the early part of the Bush administration when Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president, former opposition leader who had risked his whole presidency on a policy of sunshine policy toward North Korea, opening toward them.
And he eventually had a summit with Kim Jong-il, the first summit ever between two leaders of the Koreas.
You know, he came to Washington that morning.
He met with Colin Powell and Colin Powell said, we endorse, you know, we will work with Kim Dae-jung on this, you know, sunshine policy.
And then, you know, a couple hours later in that day, Bush, you know, and live television contradicted Powell and said, no, we're not going to do that.
And he looked at Kim Dae-jung and said, you know, we don't we don't trust North Korea and we're not going to negotiate.
So it was a really real repudiation of any kind of, you know, softer line within the administration from the very beginning.
Yeah.
Man.
I mean, if that's not really the bottom line argument against empire right there, that for whatever reason, exactly, the economics and politics, I'm not sure how it works.
But you end up with complete boobs running this thing with ultimate power.
I mean, the power of life and death over all of humanity.
When you look at America's H-bomb arsenal and the way we enforce this no near peer competitor and no rogue state policy and all of this stuff.
And these guys are really, really dangerous.
And they're really, really stupid.
And even when it's not the Bush's and Clinton's, it's Donald Trump.
Right.
And look what they're saying.
They're saying things like, we're going to we will annihilate you if you don't do what we say.
Annihilate.
They're talking about, you know, mass murder.
Twenty five million people live in North Korea.
I mean, I mean, you know, John McCain said something similar the other day and Jake Tapper just nodded.
True.
Why not?
You know, it's amazing to me.
The kind of statements these these kind of people are saying about North Korea and people think it's it's normal.
John McCain, North Korea must know the price for aggression is extinction, extinction.
We haven't heard, you know, that that's the kind of language that, you know, Hitler used against against countries he wanted to destroy.
I mean, well, it seems it's it's it's normal here.
It's normal talk, apparently, for the you know, for the U.S. media.
Well, and of course, we know that aggression to them means whatever they want.
Right.
Aggression means just declaring independence from the American empire is aggression.
So God's sake, extinction.
Yeah.
Wow.
All right.
Now, listen.
So here's the thing, though.
The dictator there is crazy and you can't deal with a crazy man like David Koresh and Saddam Hussein.
Everybody knows that he's got illegal weapons.
He's bad to his own people.
We got him surrounded.
We got to attack.
I've seen this movie.
That's how it goes, whether it's a hundred miles up the road from here or whether it's in North Korea.
And so but you're like butting in to my narrative here and saying, no, we could negotiate a piece right now.
There are plenty of things on the table that we can negotiate, contrary to all your right wing friends on Twitter, Scott.
So go ahead.
Well, first of all, they're not crazy.
It's a very logical thought process that they put out in terms of their analysis of the situation.
You know, it's certainly not crazy to defend yourself from a country saying they want to make you extinct.
And looking at the Iraq or, you know, Libya, Libya, where they gave up their nuclear weapons and then were assaulted by a U.S.-NATO combination of military and the government overthrown.
And they didn't have nukes.
And so, you know, Kim Jong Un and his regime will look at that and they go, well, you know, we have nukes and so we're going to protect ourselves.
And I think that's, that's pretty clear, even, you know, former U.S. intelligence leaders like, you know, Clapper, you know, have been saying this, you know, well, you know, we're going to have to recognize North Korea as having some nuclear weapons and, you know, try to limit it through negotiations.
But if you want to, you can't negotiate by just, you know, making threats and threats and threats, you got to offer some kind of ground for them to enter talks.
And this is what, you know, despite the fact that the Chinese and the Russians have voted on the sanctions at the U.N. and the vote the other day, they made it very clear that negotiation is the way to go.
And they were very strong on this issue of diplomacy.
And you know, like I said in a One Nation editorial I wrote, you know, their proposal is this kind of freeze for free, North Korea freeze its program, the U.S. freezes or puts, you know, slows down its, these massive military exercises it does, and that would be one opening, but that's been completely dismissed by the U.S.
So to me, you know, this policy of just trying to force them through sanctions and threats and whatever else they're doing in the cyber front, offensive cyber, you know, programs to just try to wreck their program internally, that kind of thing, without any kind of off ramp for North Korea, they're just going to keep doing what they're doing.
So it's a really kind of dangerous situation.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I mean, in the common narrative, or I guess certainly on the retail end of it, you know, on Twitter where people say the things that they think, they act as though it's unstated, obviously doesn't make any sense if you say it out loud, but they act as though there just are no translators or that there's some giant wall around North Korea that American planes could not fly over, that this is, you know, like it's a, it's another planet.
It's so remote, like they don't have telephones for us to call.
There is nothing to work out.
As far as we know, we have complete radio silence from them other than nuclear threats.
And what are we ever going to do about it?
How long can we sit around and wait while these crazy people threaten us?
And you know, it's sort of like the question of talking to them about anything is already pre dismissed.
It already just somehow goes without saying that they can't be talked to, whether they're crazy or whether they're just incommunicado or for whatever reason.
It just goes without saying most of the time that, you know, we've got to figure out what combination of threats to make to get them to give up all of their nukes, to surrender, to come at bend the knee.
I guess we're going to have to get China to make them do it or whatever it is.
But these are the premises that we're working from always.
And even during the Obama years, he didn't do a damn thing to resolve this issue.
It seems like he could have Obama made Obama made it worse.
You know, at least to go at least Bush thought it was a good idea to negotiate with him directly without making their complete denuclearization a precondition.
But Obama would not would not talk to them.
And as you know, as I pointed out in an alternate article, things got as bad as they could get under under Obama.
And, you know, I think I think, you know, a lot more focus should be put there as well, because, you know, they just kind of made this assumption that it was going to collapse on its own and wouldn't wouldn't exist beyond a few more years.
And that they should just not really worry about it, which is what they've been saying for 20 years.
Right.
It is completely stupid reasoning.
And, you know, so we have this situation now where it's it's escalated like this.
But, you know, you know, the things that Trump has said, these threats, you know, to, you know, fire and fury like the world has never seen.
I mean, you know, he's basically driving them with thermonuclear attack, ala Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That's the kind of that's what Truman used, almost the same words before he dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki.
And, you know, people it's like, you know, Trump delivers this message and, of course, it's heard in North Korea.
But, you know, people throughout both Koreas hear that, too.
And in Japan and everywhere else, people hear that kind of language.
It's like.
You're threatening a country with nuclear attack.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I mean, for the audience, you can hear by the guest's accent in mind that we're from here.
It's not like, you know, yeah, we're North Korean partisans here.
But the thing is, all you have to do is should be is just be an adult to be able to stop and consider for a second.
What does it mean?
OK.
They said, well, we're going to consider studying the targeting of an area near Guam.
OK.
Yeah.
That's pretty aggressive language.
And then Obama slash Trump, whoever fly B1B hydrogen bombers over the DMZ.
How threatening is that fire and fury the world's never seen?
And then they literally are flying B1s over the border.
Imagine what that looks like.
And right.
Americans, they're never asked to look at it from the point of view of the other side.
So it's like an outrageous thing for you and I to do so.
But that to me is I mean, imagine somebody's flying B1B bombers or their equivalent nuclear bombers off the coast of Texas or or near the border here in Louisiana or whatever.
Them's fighting words, man.
What are you talking about?
You can't do that.
You know.
Yeah.
You can imagine what the U.S. response would be to massive exercises, you know, by some other, you know, like Russia and, you know, I don't know, Russia and Cuba, say, in Mexico twice a year in which they practiced, you know, invading the United States and also practiced what they, you know, as the U.S. does these these decapitation strikes where they go in and, you know, kill the leadership of North Korea.
Imagine that happening, like in Mexico with Russia or something.
I mean, you know, the United States would just you know, what would the United States do?
I mean, it would it would see it as an act of war.
So, you know, it's important to see it, you know, of course, through the eyes of the North Koreans and just as I've been doing for years, you know, trying to explain, you know, what the what the struggle is about, what the crisis is about, and explain what their reasoning is doesn't mean you're supporting their government or their way of government or whatever.
It just means you're trying to give up the facts so we can defuse this situation.
A war is just as unthinkable and they should stop this talk of war.
All right.
Now, so Utopia, America elected Ron Paul in 2008 or 2012, and he got up there and he just said, whatever, we're dropping all sanctions.
I refuse to enforce any of them.
Admiral, pack up the boys, bring them home.
That's it.
We're leaving the Korean Peninsula.
Hey, Koreans, we want a peace treaty.
Let's work it out.
You guys reunify if you want, whatever.
But we're going to end the Korean war because I know that's exactly what he would have done, even if he had to wear a bulletproof helmet, you know, Kevlar helmet around all day.
That's what he would have done.
So but now if he had done that, then what would have happened?
North Koreans would have marched on the South and conquered them.
Or am I being too utopian and crazy to think that we could really just have a normal relationship with North Korea like it was a normal country the same way we do with China?
Well, once again, you have to look to the past.
And, you know, there was eight years of these sunshine policies between South and North and, you know, that they had reached agreements on all kinds of things.
You know, there was a South Korea helped create an industrial zone north of the DMZ.
And there was, you know, Korean companies, South Korean companies were there employing North Korean workers to produce goods for the world market.
And there was, you know, transfer of technology.
And it was seen as a slow process, you know.
And, you know, during that period of time, many North Koreans, you know, came south on cultural, you know, academic, different kinds of visits.
And many people from the South went to the North.
And so it's a slow process.
But, yeah, it's their country.
They have the right to proceed as they choose to, you know, just choose to see.
I mean, yeah, North Korea would like to see the country unified under, you know, a communist government.
And I and I think I think both the South Koreans have always known that, but they've been able to negotiate in the past and they've been able to make agreements on incremental changes to to how they operate with each other.
So, you know, I think if left up to the Koreas, there could be a peaceful way forward.
But, you know, like the United States has other goals in Asia besides, you know, confronting North Korea, you know, that all its U.S. forces there are, you know, forward based Marines, Navy, Air Force, you know, that that can be used that as a platform to attack, you know, countries all over the world.
So it's U.S. militarism is the big cause.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm sure you must have saw this in the L.A. Times.
I saw Peter Lee had tweeted it out a few weeks back, two or three weeks ago, I guess.
Now, I'm going to bring this up in all of my North Korea interviews from now on.
I should get the guy on the show.
I don't know.
He's some think tank guy from the Hoover Institution.
But boy, he sounded to me like he was speaking for the Pentagon and the national security state.
And the headline was it wasn't there's nothing coy about it whatsoever.
It said, look, we could make peace with North Korea.
Sure.
No problem.
But then we would lose influence over South Korea and Japan and they might end up declaring independence from us or even, God forbid, floating off into China's orbit and under their imperial dominance instead of ours.
And that is intolerable.
So even nuclear brinksmanship is preferable to that.
Well, isn't it amazing that seven years after World War Two, you know, the situation between the U.S., South Korea and Japan is the same as it was then.
I mean, you know, the United States has made sure to try to keep these countries within its military orbit.
And, you know, it's supported right wing governments in Japan for decades and decades, helped put the ruling party there that's now still the ruling party in power back in the 50s with CIA help.
And, you know, it's been manipulating Korean domestic politics for many years as well.
It's also important for listeners to understand that in South Korea, a U.S. general is in charge of the joint U.S.-South Korea command.
And in times of war, a U.S. general would be in control of the Korean South Korean army.
That's a situation that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world where you have a foreign general in charge of another country's army in times of war.
And, you know, that's a situation of, you know, subservience of South Korea to the United States.
And I think, you know, a lot of Koreans would like to like to change that.
Yeah.
Well, and then there's the other thing, too, right, is not only would America lose the threat of North Korea to beat South Korea and Japan over the head with, but if they had a real peace deal with the United States, well, then that would obviously include the South Koreans as well.
And that would put them five steps further down the path toward real reunification, at which point they would have the ability to be that much more independent from the U.S. as well.
North Korea's nukes with South Korea's economy and government, that kind of thing.
So, yeah, you could see how from Washington, D.C.'s point of view, not from the American people's point of view, not from the national interest point of view, but from the empire's point of view, that's intolerable.
It's better to be intolerable from the empire's point of view.
That's right.
It's better to have nuclear brinksmanship.
It's better to have these threats of actual atomic warfare back and forth like it's, you know, early 1960s with the Soviet Union or something rather than peace.
Well, it's very good for the missile defense industry, that's for sure.
You know, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and all these companies that are involved, you know, that's I think that's one of the biggest beneficiaries.
You know, you've got to have an enemy, you know, to keep that industry going.
And in the past, it was the Soviet Union when Reagan announced his, you know, big Star Wars and plan.
And now it's, you know, the big driving force for missile defense is all aimed at North Korea.
So, you know, if the situation is diffused easily, then what would happen with all this missile defense?
So, yeah, they'd all have to get jobs.
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it.
So anyway, listen, I've got to go.
I know I was going to say, I'm sorry we didn't get the chance to talk about this Seth Rogan piece, but I hope everyone will go and read it at the Gray Zone at Alternet, how Sony, Obama, Seth Rogan and the CIA secretly plan to force regime change in North Korea and a couple of good ones here at The Nation as well.
Thanks again, Tim.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Take care.
All right, you guys.
And check out the book.
It's Spies for Hire, The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, available for sale on the Internet.
All right.
That's Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys.
Scott Horton.org, Libertarian Institute.org.
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