Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been hacked.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing our old friend, Phil Durali, a former CIA officer.
And now he writes for UNZ.com.
Instead of lying us into war, he truths us out of war all the time.
Essentially, something like that.
I think it's today we're running it, or was it yesterday?
On antiwar.com, a great new piece about the threat of war with Iran.
How you doing, Phil?
I'm fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
Good to talk to you again.
So there's no good reason to attack Iran.
And in fact, the last I heard, even the big fake reason to attack Iran, that they were developing nuclear weapons, was taken completely off the table by the Iran nuclear deal, which America might have withdrawn from, but the Iranians are still in.
So I guess, first of all, I guess a two-parter.
So who wants to get us into a war, and under what excuse could they possibly push us into one?
Well, you know, you're absolutely right in what you're saying.
But the fact is that there are voices coming out of both the administration and out of Israel that are claiming that Iran persists in having some secret program to develop a nuclear weapon, that since it's a secret program, hasn't been discovered.
And this has been a claim that's been kind of floating out there for many, many years.
So that's essentially, on the surface, the motive.
But I've been suggesting, and some others are also suggesting, that what we're seeing here is something maybe a little more complicated, which is that Donald Trump clearly would like to see Benjamin Netanyahu reelected as prime minister.
And he has been doing all kinds of things to support that in terms of, you know, the sovereignty of Golden Heights, the move of the embassy, and so on and so forth.
And there's some speculation that a little kind of tweak of Iran, whether it amounts to what would be called a war or not, might be something that we could be seeing in the next two weeks.
Yeah, well, I guess, you know, we have our forces adjacent to theirs all over the place, don't we?
In Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, I guess sort of kind of in Afghanistan a bit.
But plenty of tripwires, I guess, if you wanted to blow one up, huh?
Yeah, and they're also, of course, there's a base in Iraq right next door.
There's the big base in the region, of course, is in Kuwait, which is not too far.
So, yeah, the resources are definitely there.
And one would have to think that as stupid as the people in the White House are, that they don't want to escalate to the point where we're talking about a major war, because that then opens other possibilities.
But I think if we were to see in the next two weeks the White House cranking it up against Iran to maybe get to some kind of, you know, nose-to-nose type conflict, I wouldn't be too surprised.
Yeah.
Well, got to admit, you know, obviously the motivation is there.
So the piece is called An Iranian April Surprise.
I guess I enunciated that all wrong.
An Iranian April Surprise, as opposed to an October Surprise like we have here.
And actually start out with a pretty good history of the October Surprise.
And you were in the CIA at the time, right?
Yeah, I was in the CIA at the time there was the October Surprise, which led to the election of Ronald Reagan.
And that was essentially a collusion on the part of a bunch of CIA chiefs of station working with the Iranians at that time to make sure that Jimmy Carter would not get reelected.
And I was suggesting in my piece that we're seeing a similar kind of collusion, but in this case we're seeing collusion to assist Netanyahu to get reelected, and with the expectation that Netanyahu will turn around and return the favor and come down very heavily on the side of Donald Trump.
So, you know, it's that kind of thing playing out.
Yeah.
Well, and of course you have Mike Pompeo, who I guess my best understanding is he really is like as crazy as a Kansas born again, forced Jesus to come back day after tomorrow type that you could get.
I mean, he's the Secretary of State.
And then, as it goes without saying, because we all think about it every 45 seconds or so, John Bolton is the National Security Advisor.
Yeah, Bolton is kind of the hidden guy on this one.
The front man is clearly Pompeo, and also Pence has spoken at AIPAC and basically has underlined the message that Pompeo also delivered at AIPAC, which is essentially that the United States is firmly in Benjamin Netanyahu's pocket.
And so these guys are the players on all this.
And the scary thing about, as you say, I mean, the dispensationalists that Pompeo is, and also Pence, these guys are basically base policy for all of us who may or may not be religious on what they think the Bible is all about.
And in the case of Pompeo, it was virtually a statement that God is talking to him, and God was responsible for getting Donald Trump elected.
Man.
And I mean, we should be really clear about this.
I know you have a Catholic background, what with the vowel at the end of your name and all.
There are a lot of people who believe in Jesus who don't believe that it's their job to force him to come back and send all the Israeli Jews to hell and create a new world order or whatever insane John Hagee philosophy a certain segment of American Protestantism has picked up on here.
So I don't want to, and even, they're good people, but damn, they got crazy politics when it comes to foreign policy, getting all mixed up in those kind of beliefs, you know?
Yeah, I mean, the whole point is, yeah, you're absolutely right.
I mean, they represent a very small fragment, basically, of Christianity in the United States, and essentially their view that the Second Coming is imminent and that there are certain conditions that have to be met is a very narrowly held view.
And yet, you know, here's the kicker for me, and I'm sure for you also, is the fact these people are representing all of us.
They're in high office where they are quite capable of doing all kinds of things to make mischief in the Middle East and elsewhere.
And the thing is, this is not right.
I have a piece coming out on Thursday in which I speculate, you know, where is the complaint from the New York Times editorial page or the Washington Post editorial page about Pompeo saying these kinds of things?
Because here he basically is setting out policies that are based on a holy book that he believes in.
Yeah, and which essentially makes dissent against these policies satanic evil.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's a hell of a mindset to be in, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And these people, you know, clearly, firmly, and totally believe in what they are seeing or what they understand about biblical prophecy in this case, which you know and I know is very much disputed.
This is a minority view, and it's a view that is not embraced by any of the major congregations in terms of Christianity.
Yeah, man.
All right, so now the good news is, right, that nobody's on board for this anywhere, right?
There are no other countries in the world that would ally with the U.S. in an attack on Iran.
I mean, even Saudi would sit there and say, you know, you and him go fight and try to stay out of it because they're within range.
So, I mean, I guess Israel might show up just for the PR skit of the thing, and be on America to do it, and the whole rest of the world would be in condemnation.
No one else believes that there's an excuse to attack Iran.
There's no anything like a consensus in any corner of the U.N. Security Council for this.
Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
It's not just there.
The European governments have been very nervous about this, and Asian allies too.
You know, as far over as Japan and all these others have expressed concern about U.S. policies, not just in the Middle East, but also in places like Venezuela.
The fact is there is something driving what we're seeing, and it's not good.
The administration, whether this is Trump being asleep at the wheel and people like Bolton and Pompeo and Pence more or less calling the shots, I mean, it's difficult to say.
But the fact is that this is not popular.
You're absolutely right.
Even the people who would like to see Iran destroyed, like the Saudis, basically recognize that some kind of intervention by the United States can go in a completely wrong direction.
It can go crazy.
And Iran is very well armed with defensive weapons, and it's quite capable of fighting back.
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Well, and you know, I mean, it's got to be, right?
I don't really know this, but it must be that the Army and the Marine Corps and the Special Operations Command must be saying, no, sir, no, sir, we don't want to do this, see, because Navy flyers and Air Force pilots, they might talk big stuff, but the special operators actually have to go in there and take out the anti-aircraft or die trying, and they don't want to do that, right?
Yeah, well, that's the whole point.
I mean, you know, the thing is, like I was reading in the paper a couple days ago, I guess there were two more American soldiers who were just killed in Afghanistan.
I mean, you know, these people are dying for nothing, you know, and it's inevitable.
It's been inevitable.
You and I have been talking for how many years on your show?
Fourteen.
And we've been saying right from the beginning that, you know, eventually Afghanistan is going to go the way it goes, and it has nothing to do with what the United States thinks it's going to be able to kind of change and things they're going to bring about.
And the fact is, so we're going to wind up at that same place with, you know, how many thousands more people dead as a kind of a transitional development.
I mean, it's just awful.
It's unspeakable.
And the fact that these soldiers are being called upon to fight a war, if they are called upon to fight a war against Iran with a country which they know, which even their generals know, you never count on the generals for knowing too much, but the fact is even they know that Iran does not threaten the United States and that this is a war that's being fought or being threatened purely for political reasons.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the coup plotters here in the U.S. admitted to CNN, they were just trying to hem him in, that Donald Trump, when they couldn't stop him from getting elected.
And now that their plot has completely fallen flat, everyone seems to agree that this is Donald Trump's best day.
He's got all the political capital, as much as he'll ever have to do essentially anything.
I think we'd all like to see him use that political capital stringing up John Brennan.
But Ray McGovern was on the show earlier today saying that, you know, he really fears that it's going to be Iran that gets the brunt of this.
And now that he's free to do what he wants, that this is what he's going to want to do.
What do you think?
Well, I think, Ray, it's a point that I would agree with.
You know, there's no logic to it.
You know, the problem is if we approach this by saying, you know, what's the sense of doing this?
As you say, he's on a roll.
Trump is on a roll.
He's been vindicated insofar as it's possible to be vindicated.
And, you know, he's going to be reelected.
But he probably, in his mind, has that at the back of his head.
Now, think back a year ago, and when the only time during Trump's career as president, when he's been praised as presidential and as a great leader, was when he launched a cruise missile attack against Syria based on false information.
And so he probably, in the back of his head, and I'm sure Bolton is encouraging those thoughts, thinks that, yeah, he's got a year left now.
He's got to kind of look like a war president.
And which country is the country that in all probability would be the most susceptible or the most likely to roll over an American offensive?
And, you know, he's looking at Iran.
There's no question that he's looking at Iran.
That's why we're doing all these things.
There were new sanctions last week.
They're talking about sanctioning and declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group, which is totally unprecedented.
So the pressure is increasing.
The pressure is there.
Yeah, well, and I guess the obvious place for it all to break out would be in Syria, for America to announce that they've decided they're not going to tolerate Iran's presence in Syria anymore and they mean to really end it.
Yeah, or alternatively, they let the, turn the Israelis loose, and then when Iran responds to Israel, the United States steps in with its ally.
You know, it's that kind of game playing.
Speaking of which, I mean, boy, have the Iranians been patient.
You know, the Israelis have bombed the hell out of them, I don't know, 200-something times since 2011 and the start of this war, and they haven't done a thing about it.
They don't even complain about it on press TV.
Yeah, that's right.
They just act like, well, I guess because they really can't do anything about it without everything going straight to hell, so they just sit there and take it on the chin, man, for years.
Yeah, that's right.
You're absolutely right.
They've had more than 200 incursions, attacks inside Syria, and they've almost all targeted either Iran or Hezbollah, which is seen as a proxy for Iran.
But there does have to be a limit, right?
Like if they launch enough strikes in one weekend, that could be enough where the Iranians feel like they have to do something for their own political reasons, you know, internal to Iran, for one thing, right?
Well, bear in mind that there is kind of a hard core, a hard line inside Iran, too.
The Revolutionary Guards, whom I just mentioned, are a powerful force inside and outside the government, and they are not really interested in negotiating with the West and would be quite happy to become or to create a situation in which the hostility is more overt.
So there's a faction inside Iran that would support this, too.
That's the danger that, you know, somebody kind of takes the next step, whether it's Israel or the United States or Iran, and then we're in a war situation.
Man.
Well, and again, back to geography here.
All of those refineries all up and down the west side of the Persian Gulf there, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, the Fifth Fleet at Bahrain, the Air Force at Qatar, all the Army and Marine and Air Force and everybody else bases in Kuwait, embedded special operations guys and spies and God knows who in fighting Iraq, we're three and a half there in Iraqi Sunnistan, the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, American forces still within range of local Hezbollah and Iranian forces inside Syria.
They are not in any kind of helpless position.
Maybe they're available to us in a few places around the region, but our forces are right within range of their home base all around the region as well.
And, you know, they don't have that massive of any kind of military force, but they got missiles.
Yeah, and they have missiles that are ship destroyers, that everyone concedes are state of the art and could well sink an aircraft carrier.
So think about that one.
And, you know, it's just, yeah, the whole thing is ridiculous.
But the fact is there are people out there who, unfortunately, in our administration and also inside Iran and certainly inside Israel, who don't think with any real clarity on these issues.
They see, you know, starting a conflict as something that is containable or manageable in terms of the way you want to see it go.
And that's a very optimistic position to be taking.
By the way, speaking of 14 years ago, the first story I saw yours was in the American Conservative about how Cheney had ordered the Air Force to come up with a plan to attack Iran if any terrorist attack happened anywhere.
That would be good enough.
And, unfortunately, I can't remember what it was anymore, but I can tell you that I just read a thing within the last couple of months that was old, but newer than what you said, but confirmed exactly what you said on that from a whole other different angle.
And I took the note somewhere, so it'll be in my next book.
I'm sorry, I can't remember what it was, but it was a whole other entire narrative, but that included exactly what you had said back then in that first story.
So how do you like that?
Yeah, I remember that.
And, of course, there was another Cheney doctrine, which was essentially that if that war started with Iran and Iran didn't immediately surrender, Cheney was basically trying to get the Pentagon to come up with a plan to use nuclear weapons to make them surrender.
So, you know, this is the level of insanity which we've had at the top of our government now for going on 20 years.
Yeah, that's what Gareth calls his book about Vietnam is the perils of dominance.
When you're that much stronger than everybody else, then you get fed completely, you know, feed yourself this illusion that, therefore, everyone will do whatever you say, because or else, when, in fact, everybody has their red line and everybody else likes fighting just as much as we do, and it just doesn't work that way.
So we end up getting ourselves into crazy fights where, you know what makes sense, is break out the H-bombs, because what we tried before didn't work when the whole plan was wrong, is the point.
Yeah, and it's interesting your use of the word dominance.
I had a discussion with a former general a couple weeks back, and that basically said, and he was basically defending, you know, the American posture around the world because it's national security and everything.
I said, look, you're not talking about national security.
You're talking about the United States exercising dominance over all these places, and that's a much different thing.
I mean, anybody, you can respect anyone who believes they have to do certain things to defend their country against possible aggression, that kind of thing.
You know, that's normal for any nation state, but the fact is we are talking about something quite different, which is that the United States should have a special status and be dominant and be able to tell other countries what to do and how to do it.
Yeah, and that's the whole thing, and that's why a threat really just means anyone who will stand up against us in any way, which is, it's sort of like when they talk about how much a tax cut will cost the government, so it's presupposing that the money really belongs to them first, and whatever they don't take in taxes is what they're letting us keep.
You know, yes, we have the right to determine everything in every other country, and any resistance against that is aggression against us.
Yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny how the United States, if you go back to the founding documents, has changed.
I mean, you know, it's just incredible, the whole idea of individual liberty, the idea that we are a country that acts in terms of consent of the people.
And I was thinking the other day, you know, just when was the last time the United States, the American voter, ever had a chance to express anything?
I recall when George Bush was running for his second term in 2004, he said that was the accountability moment.
What accountability?
The war in Iraq at that time was still not very clear, you know, just how bad it was going to be.
So this guy is looking at, you know, having just launched an invasion with overwhelming massive force and saying that was his accountability moment.
I mean, we haven't had an accountability moment in 20 years.
Yeah, and especially when right then he was running against his clone, John Kerry, who didn't dare criticize the war at all.
Yeah.
Who, in fact, could have won if he had, if he tried to lead on that issue at all, but instead he said, well, I'm going to implement George Bush's dumb war better than he is doing it, you know, which didn't impress anyone at all.
So there was no accountability because the war wasn't on the ballot.
That's right, and it never is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And here we still go.
All right.
Well, oh, what's the time?
Man, I'm sorry.
I have to go.
You have to go.
But listen, it's been great catching up.
Thanks for coming back on the show, Phil.
Okay, Scott.
It was good to talk to you.
Okay, guys.
That's Phil Giraldi.
It's a great article.
It's really important.
Pass it around.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
