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 had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as 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, been saying, saying 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 Kurt Mills.
He is the new Washington editor of the British Spectator.
Congratulations for that.
And of course, over at the National Interest, he is a foreign affairs reporter.
Nationalinterest.org.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Kurt?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing great.
Yourself?
I'm doing good, man.
Good to talk to you.
So you wrote an interesting thing that I think people want to know about.
It's titled, is Bolton's war with Iran becoming a reality in the Gulf?
A cold war is becoming a hot one, but really, no, the byline should be something about what's going on inside the White House.
Because that's pretty much really what's going on here.
But if you want, I guess, first of all, maybe catch us up just on the news with Iran in the last week and the big fake tensions and all of that, and then maybe we get into Bolton versus who, I don't know.
All right.
So if I had to boil this down for anyone who hasn't been paying attention for the last two years, which I don't think are your listeners, but just in case, the administration, at least the officials in the administration, generally have a pretty anti-Iranian regime line.
And they have pursued a policy course fairly uncompromisingly.
And that course has gone sort of at an even pace the last two years.
And basically people who weren't policy folks, who were Iran nuts, weren't really paying attention to it.
Stuff like designating the IRGC a terrorist organization, withdrawing from Obama's Iran deal, which of course people paid attention to.
But I would say that policy course, in the last two weeks, has really gone to change the dynamic, depending on your perspective, for good or ill.
So the Iranian economy is shrinking precipitously, about 5%.
I mean, they're in a major, major, major recession.
By way of comparison, in 2008, the American economy shrunk about a percent.
So this is five times worse than the financial crisis, in a certain way of looking at it.
And additionally, the sort of Cold War sort of, you know, the lack of diplomatic niceties between Iran and the United States is now meshing into an actual hot war, or something near it.
Essentially there was a, now of course the U.S. and Iran are the only parties here.
There are the Gulf state monarchies that are the rivals of the Iranians, and of course there's Israel.
And there was a, and of course there's the major war on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen, where both Iran and Riyadh have a stake.
And so what happened this week is there was a couple of Saudi oil tankers that were blown up.
And also it was ordered by the White House that they're moving a series of warships closer to Iran.
So what's going on, in sum, is all of the stuff that's been happening in the two years, appears to be coming to a head.
And the administration itself is riven by disagreement about how to proceed from here.
I don't think that there is much disagreement about the course they took the last two years.
But now it is, are we actually going to take Iran?
And it appears, and I put it in the article, based on everything that I'm aware of, and everything that I'm comfortable reporting, that there is a, there's daylight between the National Security Advisor, Ambassador Bolton, and the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, and the President himself.
The President and Pompeo appear to not want to get into a war.
And I would say, charitably, Mr. Bolton is ambivalent on whether or not we actually do it.
And now, of course, a war could be defined in a number of different ways.
I continue to believe that if this was going to get ratcheted up further, which it may not, that we're looking at more of a 1998-type scenario, where Clinton bombed Iraq, but it wasn't a formal invasion or annexation.
But, you know, these things have a tendency to get out of hand, or have the capacity to get out of hand.
And, you know, a train blows up in New York City, or San Francisco, and Al-Qaeda is implicated.
Well, this administration, and I would say the apparatus around it, has sort of concretely made the case that Iran is linked to Al-Qaeda.
So, you do the math.
Yeah.
And, you know, that might surprise most people, since it's such a stupid lie, but that's the official history of the world, according to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and according to Mike Pompeo, when he leaked all those lies selectively to the FDD, when he was the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
So, you know, and this is part of what's causing such cognitive dissonance in my brain here, Kurt, is that there's no good reason to have a war with Iran whatsoever.
As you said, the USA are the ones who pulled out of the Iran deal.
The Iranians have not.
They've stayed within the deal.
The Ayatollah himself, not just the president, says, we're not having a war with the Americans here.
We don't want to have a war with them.
And so, oh, but let me ask you this, because I can actually phrase this in the form of a question instead of just ranting at you.
How about, who's telling you that, yeah, it'll be like Operation Desert Fox in 1998, the impeachment strikes, as they should be known?
Right.
Look, I'm not going to reveal my sources, I think you understand.
But that's not your characterization.
That's one that you're passing on to me from someone in the White House who imagines that it might look like that.
Well, let me do this.
If I can tell the listeners anything, or you anything, a lot of this is hiding in plain sight.
Take a look at John Bolton's plan in National Review in the summer of 2017, before he was National Security Advisor, when he was, I think, shall we say, auditioning to be National Security Advisor.
He published a comprehensive plan, I think it was titled, How to Lead the Iran Deal, or How to Lead the JCPOA, something to that effect.
Just Google this, period.
And in the plan, I'm paraphrasing now, not quoting, but I think he said something very close to this, which is, with Israel and selected other allies, we will discuss a coordinated airstrike or airstrikes, something like that.
So, and then additionally, you see a piece in Arab News this week, in a paper owned by Mohammed bin Salman's brother, Crown Prince, arguing that the U.S. reaction to recent Iranian action should be a targeted, pinprick, quote-unquote, airstrike.
So, I think that's what would be, again, if it got hotter than it is now, that would be the most likely form in which this took.
Not, you know, Operation Iraqi Freedom, at least not yet.
Yeah, in other words, they think, based on the theory that Iran is Iraq, and that they can just do whatever they want with them, and Iran will sit there and take it because they'll know better than to defend themselves and get us really angry?
I think it's, oh yes, yes, I think there also is a Syria analog here, right?
You know, if this is my perspective, and I think you can draw your own conclusions on what my perspective is, but if you were Ambassador Bolton, and you wanted to escalate this, and clearly Bolton, some might deny it, but I think fairly clearly Bolton has an appetite for a military option, you would say to Mr. President, remember Syria.
Assad did something that we disapproved of, and we looked tough.
We showed him who was boss.
We bombed him in April 17, we bombed him in April 18, and the regime did not retaliate.
The chance for this to blow up is contained, because the Iranians won't retaliate.
And if they do retaliate, then that's proof positive that this regime is an unacceptable liability for the United States and its interests.
That would be the line.
Yeah, well, I can see Donald Trump buying it.
But so tell me more then about what you've heard about the fighting inside the administration.
You have a couple of interesting quotes here about Pompeo and Bolton are not getting along at all right now.
Pointing fingers at each other?
Look, these guys are all Republicans.
These guys support the President of the United States.
I think I do quote an official saying they're fighting all the time.
I might not characterize this fighting as real friction.
And it's real friction in approach and end goal.
So again, like I mentioned, this is an administration of Iran hawks, and that has to include the President.
Because the President pulled out of the JCPOA, which I think is an Iran hawkish thing to do.
Now, if we're boiling down, though, the distinction, we're distilling them, what's going on here, I think Bolton, I don't think, I know Bolton, has regime change in Iran as a concrete goal.
Now, Bolton runs a massive part of the government, the NSC, the National Security Council, but he is not the entirety of the government.
The U.S. maintained that it does not have a regime change policy in Iran.
It has a change in behavior policy in Iran.
However, it's fairly clear, and I remember Rudolf Giuliani told me this in New York last fall, that essentially, it is a regime change.
It's a regime change policy in all but name.
And the ask for the change in behavior is so substantial that it's unclear how Iran could abide by it without the sort of complete restructuring of their government.
Right.
You're referring to Mike Pompeo's speech at the Heritage Foundation.
Yes.
His list of demands there.
I think that it's important to realize that Bolton is far more ideological than Pompeo.
I know especially a lot of listeners of your radio and people in this universe do not care for the Secretary of State.
I would only push back a little bit and say this.
I think he is a ruthless pragmatist above all else.
And I think that he is going to run for president.
I think he will be a formidable candidate for president down the line.
But he knows that if he oversees a war in Iran that does not go well, that will doom his political fortunes.
And I think that's at the back of his mind.
Yeah.
Well, but you know, as director of CIA, I don't know exactly what his position was and what he was telling Trump.
But now he's Secretary of State in this same situation.
And he certainly, seemingly, even according to, as you say, his own political goals and interests there, he's done a very poor job of advising the president on this.
I mean, I think he, let's see, back when it was McMaster and Tillerson and I guess Kelly and the rest were telling Trump to stay in the JCPOA.
Do you know what Pompeo's position when he was a CIA director, what he was saying at the time about that?
No, I think it's clear that Pompeo favored changing the JCPOA.
He favored what now?
Changing it, you said?
Leaving.
Now, I mean, this gets a little bit hairy because I think Pompeo is definitely close to FTD and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy.
And FTD very much was a font of ideas for how the administration should approach Iran.
And Mr. Mark Dubowitz, the CEO, very interesting guy, maintained publicly that although he wanted to change the JCPOA, he didn't want to quite leave it.
And that's still the public position.
So there's a little bit of ambiguity here.
You can draw a conclusion to this distinction without a difference.
But I think it's important, if I'm reporting this, to note that the principles involved maintain ambiguity.
But as to Pompeo's approach here, I think that it's important to emphasize that a serious number of people, a supermajority of people inside the administration to deal with this matter, have been operating on the hope-nearing assumption that they can collapse the regime in Tehran organically.
How do I compare this?
I've written an article called, it was last summer, Iranhawks think it's 1989, not 2003.
So I've made the 1998 comparison, but I'll also make a 1989 comparison.
That essentially, with enough outside pressure, the government in Iran, the regime, will collapse upon its own contradictions.
And it will do so in a manner that's not cataclysmic, and not overly chaotic.
So I think the 1989 thesis has a little bit of a flaw, because obviously the eastern bloc countries did not collapse seamlessly, and those places aren't perfect places to live now.
But it was a lot less destructive and violent than, say, Iraq, right?
And so it's important to realize that this generation of national security officials were in some way spoiled by how bloodless the collapse of the Soviet Union was.
And it's very much their operating system to assume, if the US and its allies pressure and cause an internal rebellion, that it's something that we can control.
And I think you saw that perspective operating even in the Obama administration, when it's approach to the Arab Spring.
I think it's been borne out now that this does not work in the Middle East.
It doesn't work in Venezuela either.
We just saw them try to knock them over with a feather twice, and it didn't go so well at all.
So I think Pompeo actually knows this in the Arab world.
And I think a read-between-the-lines perspective is, well, the Persians are different.
It's a different culture.
And this is not even read-between-the-lines.
I think it's been published by a variety of sources that, look, Iran has had two major changes in government in the last 75 years, 1953 and 1979.
And I know it sounds like a little bit insane to say, but 1979, the transition wasn't – people get killed in changes of government, but it wasn't Syria, right?
It wasn't Iraq.
And so this is just the argument.
A change in government in Iran could be done relatively bloodlessly, I believe, is a perspective which is predominant.
And even so, if you take two of those further differences, too, that, okay, in 1953 it was a CIA coup where they paid all these groups to riot and blame it all on the communists and this, that, and the other thing.
Or if you look at 1979 where, really, it was the indigenous correction to that, a real revolution to overthrow that coup.
That, in both cases, yeah, it wasn't too bad as far as, if you don't count all the people tortured to death by the Saavik and all of that.
And so I see what you mean, how they could talk themselves into believing that they can do this.
But then the question is whether anybody has a break on it, too, where, okay, after this doesn't work, hypothetically speaking, then what?
Does that mean that now we've passed the regime change act of 1998, or, you know, equivalent, and that now we have to escalate, we can't back down, now we've said, too bad that didn't work, now we've got to try the next thing and the next thing until we finally get a full-scale bombing campaign?
Or does somebody say, okay, if it's so easy, then show me, but if it's not, then you only get your one try here, pal, or anything like that?
Not that I would advocate that, but I'm just trying to settle here, you know.
No, I mean, this is – let me say two things.
There's a tendency among skeptics of the administration to, you know, think the president is a dullard and the people around him represent the unreconstructed comeback of neoconservatism.
And I think it's far more complex.
I will say that the president is a complicated man.
I think that's clear.
He has a number of competing impulses, and he makes decisions in a very unique manner.
I will say that the person who has probably the most comprehensive worldview in this realm on what to do is Ambassador Bolton.
And you can hate him or love him.
I'm not sure he cares.
And his view is somewhat – it is distinctive from the neocons.
I used to think this was a distinction about a difference, but it's actually a major difference.
Bolton is not a neocon.
Bolton is a nationalist uber-hawk.
And his view on rogue regimes – he would term rogue regimes – is that they're unacceptable to the interests of the United States and its allies.
And if pressed, we level the regime and then we leave.
So he would actually have disagreed – he did disagree – with how the Bush administration approached Iraq, thinks we should have liquidated Saddam, and then left.
And he would advise the same if given complete carte blanche in Iran, in North Korea, and in Venezuela.
Now, you could say that's insane and just destroy a country, and then we even ask that they rebuild it in a manner that won't become a sort of another powder keg.
But that's the perspective.
I mean, I read a piece that reminded us that quote of him talking about North Korea, and someone saying, a war against North Korea would be such a disaster, though, and all these people would die.
And he said, oh, I don't do war.
I do policy.
So in other words, because of the diffusion of his responsibility off onto other people, if his policy leads to war, well, at that point he hands the baton off to them and they take care of that.
That's not his problem.
His idea is just deciding what it is the U.S. should do with whatever degree of violence necessary to get it done.
I think he said something.
I think he's repeated this a number of times, but I believe he began saying it after he left government the first time during Bush, right?
So he was at state, infamous presence at state, I would say.
And then he was the U.N. ambassador.
And then he, once the Dems took power in 2006 in the Congress, he wasn't going to be able to win.
He was a recess appointment for the U.N. job, so he wasn't going to win real confirmation there.
So he was withdrawn.
And so he started his major first retirement or civilian career, whatever you want to call it, in 2007.
So he began talking to people, journalists, and he said, you know, look, I agree with the decision on Iraq, but I would have said, hey, we hand it over to the Iraqi people and we hand them a copy of the Federalist Papers and say good luck.
That's his perspective.
So from within the bold view, and I think it's very important to understand how rigidly ideological he is, and I'll point you to something.
Donald Trump opposed the Iraq war, or he's debated, but he clearly thinks it was a major, major, major, major mistake, and he was opposing it quite loudly pretty early on, relatively early on.
So obviously bold view, and he has this view that Iraq remains an untrammeled, unbalanced success story for the United States, would be something he would probably try to de-emphasize.
But if pressed, he actually still says this.
So most people, including most supporters of the Iraq war, say it's a mistake now.
And I believe even Jeb Bush said that.
Marco Rubio said that.
Bolton's different, and Pompeo allegedly told that to Rand Paul.
Not allegedly, I think he had said it publicly.
Bolton's different.
If you asked Bolton, was Iraq a mistake, he would say no, and he said no on Tucker Carlson right before he became national security advisor.
It's something that could have completely jeopardized, if the president had paid close attention to it, his ascension as NSA.
But yet he continues to maintain that it was a success, and he would say, how can you believe that?
You know, 500,000 people died in Iraq.
Thousands of American troops died in Iraq.
Our reputation was besmirched internationally, you could say.
And he would say, Saddam is an opponent of America and its interests in the region.
We took him out, and today the government in Iraq is less of a threat.
That's the perspective.
So here's an important point from that, too, though, is that, you know, he is John Bolton, the kook who still says Iraq was fine, and yet once he embarks off on a policy toward Venezuela or toward Iran like this, instead of being treated with the most skepticism, people go, oh jeez, I don't know, I guess all the media seems to agree and all the political class seems to agree.
Hey, John Bolton is our great leader on this.
We better do something to get rid of that Maduro, or we better, did you hear what I heard about the Iranians are moving some missiles around or something?
They're going to sneak attack us like Pearl Harbor if we don't stop them.
And instead of saying, hey, these stories all sound fake.
In fact, they turn out to be fake, right?
Like the Abraham Lincoln was already on its way.
You know, that was a big part of it.
And the missiles, oh, they admitted later in one of the other major papers here that, yeah, they move those missiles around all the time and this and that.
It doesn't amount to a new thing at all, just a new characterization.
The new intelligence they got from the Israelis actually wasn't intelligence at all.
It was just a report by some analysts about what they would do if they were the Iranians and the Americans had just accused their IRGC of being a terrorist group, etc., etc., and all of these things.
And they were just using that as an excuse to react.
We already know this much has already come out, and yet the narrative overall in the media doesn't change.
This all sounds like poor little America is going to have to defend itself from the Iranian aggression again.
How come they're able to get away with that?
And especially when it's Bolton himself.
It's not even, I don't know, David Worms or somebody who looks serious.
It's this goofball.
Might as well be Frank Gaffney up there or something.
I mean, Bolton is associated quite heavily with Mr. Gaffney.
I know.
That's what I mean.
And I don't mean to give Worms too much credit, but I just mean he knows how to tie a tie straight and seems like a serious guy, regardless of how wrong he might be about this, that, or the other thing.
Policy polemics are not what I do.
What I will say is that you can agree or disagree with Ambassador Bolton and his ilk want to do, but this guy knows what he's doing.
He is, depending on your perspective, lethally effective at his perspective, and he sees it through.
Well, and, yeah, I guess the only question is, how come it's so easy for him?
That's what I'm trying to get to.
I mean, and you do live in D.C. and you talk to these people.
Why have he had more obstacles?
I'm sorry?
I mean, you can still hear me, correct?
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Just a little crosstalk there.
Go ahead.
No, no, no.
Okay.
Well, look, I don't think this was always – I don't think this was predetermined.
Bolton was not President Trump's first choice for National Security Advisor.
That was Michael Flynn.
He was not Trump's second choice for National Security Advisor.
That was H.R. McMaster.
That was H.R. McMaster.
John Bolton was not President Trump's choice for Secretary of State, which Bolton also coveted.
That went to Mr. Tillerson, then Mr. Pompeo, partially because Bolton probably couldn't have won Senate confirmation.
But Bolton is in this sphere.
How does the President make decisions?
How does he staff?
It's probably one area where you could pretty easily, pretty reasonably critique his hiring preferences.
Or not.
The President does not necessarily – people have different perspectives.
If you were President of the United States, you could go about it a number of different ways.
In a lot of ways, Trump's hiring actually mirrors the approach of his archenemy, Barack Obama.
Trump has brought together a cabinet that disagrees with itself.
Now, you can say that's a team of rivals kind of thing, as Obama famously favored.
Not much purpose behind it, but yeah, I know what you mean.
Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, but that's what's going on here.
He says it flat out sometimes.
He's like, look, Bolton is more hawkish than me, and I temper John.
Well, but I'm interested in everybody else in D.C. too.
I mean, I know you're important on the White House, but it seems important part of the narrative, the major narrative, about what's the worst thing about Trump is that he's some kind of foreign agent and insufficiently patriotic and insufficiently American or something.
Except when he's using the military, using the CIA to say bomb Syria or try to engineer a coup d'etat in Venezuela.
And then those kinds of actions make the sort of center democratic establishment and I guess the government itself and their friends in the media feel more secure.
That, okay, maybe he's not a Russian alien force.
At least in this case, he's doing what a president is supposed to do.
Intervene in these foreign countries in the name of the American flag.
So they rally around that because to them that's the normalcy that they crave.
I think when he attacked Syria in 18 and 17, that was a move that was very much in line with the foreign policy consensus in Washington.
I do think even a surgical strike on Iran or an outright attack would be something that, there definitely would be think tanks and people that favor it.
But that would not enjoy the same level of support.
And I think you can see it in the statements made by a lot of foreign policy grantees.
David Frum, you know, a core Iraq war proponent, argues in the Atlantic that Iran would be a disaster.
So there's a little bit more ambiguity here.
It's unclear how a war would actually look functionally.
Would he have to go to Congress?
Would the Senate be able to approve something like this?
But I think what's really going on is there are a set of dangerous elements at play that if it really heated up or something tragic happened, that this could get out of hand quickly.
I don't think that's likely.
But I think it's distressingly possible.
Yeah, well, thanks very much for your time, Kurt.
Really appreciate it.
We'll see what happens here.
But really good reporting, man, as always.
Appreciate it.
All right, y'all.
That's Kurt Mills from the National Interest Foreign Affairs reporter there and the new Washington editor of the British Spectator.
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