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, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, introducing the great Dan McAdams from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.
And he is also, of course, the co-host of the Liberty Report with Ron Paul four days a week.
The best show on YouTube.
My favorite.
Good on everything.
Every time and with my exact same priorities in order to and everything.
It's just awesome.
My favorites, Dan and Ron.
The Dan and Ron Show.
Check them out at Liberty Report.
Wait, let me make sure I get it right.
RonPaulLibertyReport.com.
RonPaulLibertyReport.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How the hell are you, Dan?
Hey, Scott.
It's great to be back with you.
Good.
Well, I'm happy to talk with you, too.
And hey, there's a big doings going on down there in Venezuela.
And I'm always looking so far east, I'm not very good on the stuff to the south that much.
But I know a few things.
And so it looks like the Trump administration is in a real hurry to recognize and for with the Speaker of the Parliament or some kind of thing to to be the new leader and to freeze out Maduro.
And so so many questions raised here, starting with, I guess, how legitimate was the last election?
What are the gripes?
What are the sides on the ground in Venezuela?
And what right does America have to intervene in any way?
Yeah, that last one, I think, is the key point, Scott, because we don't need to know all of these things about Venezuela to know the main point, which is that we have no business telling them how to live and how to vote and what to do.
I wasn't down there as an election monitor, so I don't have information on the ground.
I do know that the party of the fellow who's claiming to be president did not participate in the elections and so therefore did not get any vote.
So that kind of messes up your democratic mandate to be president.
There are other things that he's claiming that he believes entitled him to that office, but we could talk about those as we go along.
But the fact of the matter is the administration and in fact, previous administrations going back to the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez, that was clearly the clearly the result of a U.S. CIA operation.
This is all being geared toward overthrowing the government in Venezuela, again, since at least 2002.
The Trump administration, for better or worse, at least is blatant about it.
Hey, we're going to overthrow the government.
So I guess in his own style, very blunt.
OK, but they say that this guy's got bad economics, and so the Americans are just trying to save the people of Venezuela.
Yeah, isn't that a great justification?
It's a socialist economy, so therefore we're justified in going in and turning it into Ukraine, or turning it into Libya, or turning it into somewhere like everywhere else the U.S. has put a regime change in, where everything has gone from bad to worse.
And what's really depressing, Scott, and I've spent a day and a half being bombarded, and sadly enough by a lot of libertarians, hey, you know, we've got to get rid of this socialist.
And they don't want to hear the argument that things will be worse afterward.
You can't simply pull the rug out from under a country and put someone in with no legitimacy and think everything's going to go hunky-dory.
You know, it's just a disaster.
And if we want to worry about socialism screwing up an economy, we've got some problems a lot closer to home.
Yeah, exactly.
In my state, and your state, and in Washington, D.C.
Yeah.
The biggest budget in the history of the solar system.
And I'll borrow from China.
I'm going to pay everybody else.
Hey, listen, so, now, who's this guy that they're trying to recognize as the new leader there?
Yeah, this is Juan Guaido.
He was the head of the National Assembly, which was the legislative body.
And that was dissolved in 2017.
Of course, the opposition didn't like that.
The Supreme Court dissolved it in favor of a, I think it's called the Constituent Assembly or something or the other.
Probably some shenanigans.
Don't know the details exactly.
And they're not that important.
But I'll tell you what, there was a great piece in Bloomberg by Noah Feldman on the 24th of January.
And he goes to the usual, mouthing the usual platitudes of how horrible Maduro is.
Okay, fair enough.
I'm sure he's not a great guy.
But he really takes apart the State Department's justification for derecognizing Maduro as president and recognizing Guaido as president.
And this shows the global U.S. empire.
We're going in there recognizing a different guy because we're trying to uphold the Venezuelan Constitution, which is just absurd.
But they cite Article 23 as justification for this guy taking on the role of president.
And Feldman makes a great point that if you read Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution, it in no way, shape, or form lays out the case or the legal means for succession the way that it's being interpreted by the State Department and by Trump's neocons, essentially.
Yeah, sort of the way they talk about the 25th Amendment with Trump.
Yeah, we'll just use the 25th Amendment.
Like the 25th Amendment says you can do a coup if you want.
Yeah, no problem.
If the guy's a jerk, get him out.
But Feldman does a great job.
He lays it out.
He gives the details of it.
And as he points out, it doesn't say the Assembly can remove the president.
It just says if the president is permanently unable to serve, the head of the National Assembly can fill the office for 30 days temporarily until elections are held.
Not this sort of, I've inaugurated myself president as he did yesterday, and now I'm the president.
Wow.
And you know what?
That really is a direct kind of analogy to the 25th Amendment.
Because what exactly do you mean by unable?
We thought it meant if he has a stroke like Woodrow Wilson, but now you're saying, oh, you mean if he wants to get out of NATO or whatever it is, right?
Yeah, or if he uses bad language or whatever.
Venezuela's been in Washington's crosshairs forever.
It doesn't hurt that they're sitting on a ton of oil, the largest of reserves in the world.
And of course, I'm not an oil expert.
Supposedly it's not the greatest oil, but there's a lot of it.
And it's strategic, and it's been in the crosshairs forever.
Congress, there's nothing that unites Congress like war.
They are all out in force.
Nancy Pelosi is congratulating the president on restoring democracy to Venezuela by putting in power a guy who has never received a single vote to be president.
This is restoring democracy.
Yeah, just like when John Kerry said it was restoring democracy in Egypt when the military overthrew the elected Muslim Brotherhood government in 2013.
Exactly, exactly.
And that's the case.
Well, but that's just because you have the full misunderstanding of the term democracy.
Democracy means a government compliant with the interests of the U.S. government.
That's all.
Exactly, yeah.
We need re-education.
Yeah, we'll show you.
Straight into the camp with you, McAdams.
Now, and so what's funny here, too, is all this stuff about America enforcing the Venezuelan constitution.
There's something in the U.S. constitution, I forget which article it is, 4 or something like that, 4 or 5, I guess, where it's the power of the national government versus the states and what they're allowed to force the states to put up with and different things the states are no longer allowed to do and stuff like that.
And it says that the U.S. government, the general government in D.C., has the authority to guarantee a republican form of government to every state in the union.
So if there's a communist or a fascist coup in Arkansas, then they can go in there and make sure that there remains an independent judiciary and a regularly elected bicameral legislature or something like that, right?
But what that goes to show, though, is that the constitution does not give them the authority to do that to any nation on the face of the earth.
It only says that about states that voluntarily joined this union, which is an entirely different question.
It just sort of goes to show, you know?
Absolutely.
I mean, it's just – I was looking at an interesting piece from the Center for Economic and Policy Research out of D.C., I think, and it's how did we get to this point where we just openly call for military coups?
You know, we openly tell the military of another country to overthrow its government.
Talk about opening a huge can of worms and fomenting chaos throughout the globe.
And I think it was – oh gosh, I'm forgetting the article now – but talking about this setting a precedent for all the disputed places in the rest of the world and what it might mean for global chaos.
It's just really a stunning turn of event.
Yeah.
Which, by the way, in this case, they openly called for the military to revolt against Maduro, and they were told, no, forget you, right?
Yeah, and it was actually Steny Hoyer, the great liberal from Maryland, who explicitly told the military to rise up and overthrow their government.
This is breathtakingly irresponsible for U.S. leaders to do this, and as I said on the Liberty Report yesterday, what this does is it gives the people in opposition who don't like their government – it's like, hey, welcome to the club – who don't like their government in Venezuela, it gives them this kind of implicit backing by the U.S. military.
This is a check that you cannot cash, in my opinion.
The U.S. military is not going to invade Venezuela.
It's not going to happen.
But it gives them the sense that the U.S. military is behind them, and so then they have this kind of moral hazard that they'll act more recklessly than they normally would.
They'll reject any kind of negotiations, any way to tone down the rhetoric, any way to tone down the violence, because, hey, the worse it gets, the sooner the Americans are going to get here to save us.
So it's not just empty words that people in Congress are uttering.
Right.
Well, and so this is to the thing, too, man.
As you said, this guy that is trying to seize power now, he could have run against Maduro in the recent election, and he chose not to.
And that's because, as we all know, the right in Venezuela is the minority.
Now, you know, I'm an individualist.
It's individual rights that count, and the rule of the majority is not somehow sacred to me.
But regular elections are better than military coup d'etats.
And just because, apparently, just because the leftists in charge have had really bad economic policies that have debased the currency and caused all kinds of crises there, the majority still prefers them to the right.
And by the way, you know, this is just kind of a detail, and I'm not the master of all this, but Greg Palast, he is a leftist, but still, he's a smart guy and really focuses on energy politics and stuff.
He has told me before in the past that all of the oil in Venezuela is on public land and it always has been.
And in fact, the land wasn't even stolen from the Indians because nobody lived there because it's total badlands.
And so, in other words, it's always been like Alaska, where the oil is owned by the state government there.
It used to be socialism for the small right-wing minority of the whitest, richest people only, and screw everybody else.
And then Chavez came and made it socialism for more people, and the right-wing have rebelled against that all along.
And as you and I understand, ultimately, even all that oil can't cash that check to pay for a total socialist system there, and so the thing is breaking down.
But it's not like, yeah, they used to have some libertarian private property paradise until these communists came and ruined it or anything like that.
You know, if anything, these guys really do represent the majority compared to a very small right-wing elite, which are the ones that the Americans have tried, as you say, in the past, and now are trying again to use force to put back in power against the will.
And, you know, apparently this guy's election was pretty secure.
That's why his opponent didn't even bother trying to run against him here, right?
Yeah, and it's an old trick that I saw from my days of election monitoring.
If you know you're going to get your butt kicked in an election, you just say, well, we're not going to participate because we know they're not going to be free and fair.
And so then you've already thrown the election into the area of not being able to be considered free and fair.
But, in fact, the election last year, as I say, I wasn't there, but the Americans predictably and the Colombians and all this sort of, as you say, the right-wing government in Latin America who are lined up with the U.S., they all said they were sham elections.
But there was the other side of the coin.
There was Russian and Chinese and other monitors there who said, you know, they were OK.
There was no problem.
There was not enough of a problem to delegitimize the result.
So, you know, at best, I would say it's a disputed election.
But as you point out, the other guy didn't run.
Interestingly enough, the first thing he did after proclaiming himself president was promise that he was going to privatize the oil to the U.S.
I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
My God, he said that publicly?
Like, that's my plan.
Yeah, yeah.
I can call it up and send it over to you.
Amazing.
And, you know, one of the things that Palacis always said is that the Kochs, for their part, they've always gotten along with the Venezuelans and that even at the height of all the Chavista rhetoric and what have you, that they always did business just fine.
A big part of the politics of the whole Keystone pipeline is that, as you were saying, the Venezuelan oil is a very poor quality.
So you need a very specialized kind of refinery.
And only the Kochs in the USA, there's only one refinery that's tooled to handle that heavy crude, and that's in Corpus Christi.
But you also have that same kind of heavy crude in Canada, and so somehow you've got to get it down to Corpus Christi, or else the Kochs have to build another plant up north somewhere.
And that's too expensive.
They would rather have the Keystone pipeline.
That's the key to that whole story, is they're trying to get it down.
But anyway, the point being that the Kochs have had this refinery down in Corpus, and I guess it's Shell Oil that they have their deal with.
They don't own Shell Oil, but their company is associated with it in terms of doing this processing for them and whatever it is.
Or is it Sitco still?
I forget which.
Maybe both.
And so, in other words, from that part of the establishment, at least, they don't need a regime change there.
I'd be surprised to find out that the Kochs really wanted to own that oil when they've had such a cushy deal with the national government there.
You know what I mean?
And maybe there are other oil interests in charge that want to limit their influence, and that's kind of part of a secret corporate war that we don't know about.
Texaco's pissed off or something.
I don't know, Dan.
Yeah, it could be.
And I think the Kochs just announced today that they're not going to back Trump in 2020, so maybe it's tit for tat.
Who knows?
But you know, on the point you mentioned earlier...
I wonder who does know.
Wait a minute, that's an important question.
Who really is good on this oil policy?
I really should get Pallas back on the show.
I think he's probably the most tuned into that.
Yeah, that could be true.
It is important to understand the oil politics, that's for sure.
But just circling back on a point you made about the Chavez revolution in Venezuela, I think it is an important point to make, because it's being painted, as you point out, a great, end-cap paradise where things were wonderful, and then all of a sudden Chavez came in and put up hammers and sickles and set up gulags.
And that wasn't the case, and this is not a defense of Chavez, it's not a defense of Maduro.
But in fact, if you look at the percentage of those in extreme poverty from when he took office to, I think, the most recent numbers of 2013, there is a precipitous decline in people in Venezuela living in extreme poverty.
And that doesn't say socialism worked.
No, it's a condemnation of the previous system.
It's saying that before that they had this hardcore right-wing government, which is not free-market libertarianism.
It's corporatist right-wing fascism, at least with a lowercase f.
And in fact, if you were probably like a poor Indian there, it would have been a capital F fascism to you back in pre-Chavez days.
And you know, this goes back to something you were saying at the beginning too, which is, hey, there's a real history of massive violence in Latin America as the result of these sorts of interventions by the United States.
Murderous dictators and, you know, the civil war in Guatemala and this kind of thing.
Americans are a lot of time oblivious to this kind of deal.
But if the shoes were on the other feet and the roles were reversed at all, and some power in Latin America had been treating us this way all this time, holy hell.
Yeah.
What really shocks and disappoints me is that Americans, or I should say many Americans, seem very excited and almost enchanted by the idea of masses of people in the street, a people's revolution.
I guess it feels sexy.
It feels important.
It feels dangerous.
But they love this idea.
But as I wrote in a thing that I did yesterday for our subscribers, what makes people on the streets, what makes their voices any more legitimate than people who actually voted?
Why do the people who voted for him not count?
And the people on the street, who in no way represent a majority because they just can't, how do they have more legitimacy?
It's the thing that perplexes me from Ukraine, from Syria on.
And it's this weird thing that Americans do where you get a few people in the street and, oh, hey, the government's got to go.
Can you imagine if that were the precedent for here?
Right.
Well, I mean, and we saw this with all of the color-coded revolutions, where this is just the NED script, is that when you lose the election, just refuse to accept that and go out there and stay out there until you somehow push it.
And then, like you're saying, the narrative doesn't really hold much water.
But in the case of Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, for a couple examples, the so-called pink or yellow revolution in Tajikistan and a couple of these others, you see exactly that, where it's that narrative, but there's no other narrative to choose from.
TV says that protest in the public square equals pro-American leader must take power, even though he lost.
And they actually got away with that quite a few times.
They do.
At least temporarily.
And they're still doing it with Chavez.
And it's really getting tiring, to be honest, Scott, and you may feel the same way, too, to have the same old epithets trotted out and hurled at you when you're against regime change, when you're against the regime change in a country, because you know how it dislocates the economy, how it hurts the poorest of the poor.
And again, yesterday, I was called a Maduro lover, a Maduro supporter, which is not the case.
I don't know anything about him.
Yeah, what's to love?
Seriously.
I mean, I don't support anything.
And sadly, people line up on one side or the other.
The people that do like socialism are furious about the U.S. intervention because they want to be proved right that socialism works.
Basically, they're fighting a fight that we're having here in the U.S.
The people that want to show that socialism doesn't work are cheering this revolution because they want to show.
And meanwhile, caught in the middle of these people whose lives are going to be turned upside down.
Yeah, it's too bad.
You're right.
Just as you said, it's all just about whose side are you on when, hey, the facts are, they got hyperinflation, you know, dictionary definition, wheelbarrows full, store and price controls, therefore empty store shelves everywhere and millions of economic refugees.
I don't think any of that's in question, right?
Still, the thing is, the CIA shouldn't exist.
And so without your CIA, how are you going to do a regime change?
The empire shouldn't exist.
This is none of the USA, the American government's business whatsoever, regardless of our personal opinions about it.
And that's what matters from our point of view only.
I mean, seriously, how ridiculous is it to think that, well, you just put Noriega first or you just favor Saddam Hussein.
What could anyone favor about Saddam Hussein?
You could accuse Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan of backing him too much, if you want.
But to say that whatever's bad about him is a justification to attack?
Come on.
And for anyone to fall for that, I mean, for people to falsely use those accusations, how come you love Maduro so much?
I mean, that's pretty obvious.
But for anyone to fall for that, that's just sad.
Yeah, but you know, they are dragging out the atrocity porn.
You know, they're dragging out the Gaddafi gave Viagra to a soldier stories.
And you'll see more of it.
It'll get more and more salacious about Venezuela.
You know, the stories that people are forced to eat zoo animals and things.
I don't buy any of that.
I think it's all lies.
And whereas I don't think people are doing super well there.
I don't believe the stories that they're over there eating dirt and eating grass because that's supposed to get Americans ginned up for a regime change.
And if you've, I know you're not on Twitter, Scott, but if you look on Twitter, you would not believe the proliferation of bots out there going on about, hey, I'm in Venezuela.
Let me tell you where we are.
You know, we're eating dirt.
We've got to please America come save us.
I don't buy it.
I think it's all propaganda.
And the other thing that's quite annoying is sadly a lot of libertarians do this.
Hey, I'm all for this regime change.
We've got to get the socialists out.
I just don't want the U.S. involved, but I'm sure it's cheering it on.
And I said, well, what are you talking about?
The U.S. has been involved for 20 years.
This is not a spontaneous uprising.
This is something that the CIA has been planning.
And in the Trump administration, I guess you give him credit, Pompeo was open.
We are planning to overthrow the Venezuelan government.
You know, this is not something that happened out of the blue.
The people showed up one day and said, you know what?
This economy sucks.
I want to overthrow the government.
This has been long planning.
There's plenty of evidence.
2016, the U.S. was clearly behind an attempted coup.
The U.S. is clearly bankrolling this coup.
The administration announced 200 million bucks are going to go to these guys.
They're clearly, clearly funding it, clearly bankrolling it.
This money is going to go to buy weapons.
We're going to see another My Dan sort of situation.
You're going to have militias shooting at cops and shooting at soldiers and shooting at people.
So this is not like, hey, I'm all for this, but I just wish, I just hope the U.S. government doesn't get involved.
No, no, they're in the thick of it.
I'm sorry.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, y'all, I was talking with Derek Sherriff from Listen and Think Audiobooks, and he agrees with me that it's so important that the Trump White House hears from large numbers of Americans who support his efforts to end the wars in Syrian Afghanistan, especially from combat veterans like himself.
The president must hear voices of support from out here in the real world to counteract the cries of the war party in D.C. and on TV.
Now, the phone lines are jammed, but they have a pretty good email system there at WhiteHouse.gov.
Email me, Scott at ScottHorton.org when you do, and Derek Sherriff at Listen and Think Audiobooks will give you two free ones for your effort.
Well, and Bolton, I think, was saying, I read a thing I think this morning or last night.
Yeah, this morning about Bolton saying, well, we're trying to work out, I'm working with the Treasury Department now.
We're going to figure out how to make sure that all future oil revenues are diverted to this new government.
And which they may have the power to carry out.
I don't know.
They may.
And there's what I think an estimated two billion dollars in Venezuelan assets being held offshore.
And those will be channeled to this opposition.
So these guys are going to be swimming in money.
There's going to be a lot of mansions bought and built in Miami or something off of this money.
But as you say, very overt, not covert.
Well, and probably both, but very overt intervention here.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
They're not trying to hide it.
And, you know, there are a lot of big question marks.
I mean, if the army stays with Maduro, if the army stays with the elected government, this thing will go on for a while, but it will fizzle out again.
And then this is where, you know, where Trump should, you know, look himself in the mirror and say, what the hell was I doing listening to idiot neocons?
Because after that, the U.S. is going to look absolutely ridiculous and foolish, as it did when it recognized the Syrian opposition.
If you remember back in 2011, we recognized this is the real government.
You know, and then 500,000 people dead later, it's back to status quo ante.
You know, I wish we could skip that medium step.
And same thing in 2002 here in Venezuela, which if people haven't ever seen it, there's the documentary, The Revolution Will Be Televised, that shows the entire coup d'etat from inside the palace.
And these kids, when the right wing took over, they just let them keep recording.
They just assumed that they were there with somebody or something and let them record the whole thing.
The whole failed coup that, as you're saying, should have reflected badly on the Bush government at that time.
Yeah.
Weren't they a couple of young French filmmakers?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very well may have been.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was a great film.
Everyone should watch it.
You know, it's overt.
I mean, it sounds crazy, but essentially, if I have the story right, it's been a few years, Dan, but where what happened was Chavez knew the coup was coming and had his most loyal paratroopers hiding in the secret passages in the walls of the presidential palace there.
And so he was kidnapped and on a plane to Africa or something.
And then I forget if they let him call back and tell them, like, hey, all of my paratroopers are here and you're surrounded.
And then all the guys came out of the walls and were like, your coup is canceled and nobody was shot and killed.
And the whole thing was like a movie or something.
And it's actually a movie, but it's a documentary, not Hollywood.
It's really great.
It's incredible to see.
And in the meantime, the New York Times and the Bush administration were hailing the coup and the great success and the permanence of it.
Exactly.
And the head of the IRI, the International Republican Institute, which is funded by the U.S. government, he said, we did it.
We got him out.
We kicked him out.
We overthrew him.
So it was they were taking credit for not realizing the craftiness of Hugo Chavez.
It's probably why they gave him cancer later on.
Who knows?
I don't know.
Actually, Palast was his buddy.
And Palast said he would drink scalding, like boiling hot coffee all day, every day, and that must have been what caused it.
It actually does make sense.
You know, that kind of damage on a constant basis like that.
But, yeah.
So, you know what?
I got to tell you, Dan, that I do have sort of, I guess, you know, all things considered, a good feeling about this, that at least so far, the military is not going.
This thing is going to fizzle because essentially you either have a monopoly on force or you don't, pal.
And if the military is going to stick with Maduro, then this guy, whatever his name is, I forgot.
Sorry.
Guaido, yeah.
And I guess they don't really have any right-wing militias of heavy armament or any real influence that could mount an armed challenge to the state at this point, do they?
I don't think at this point.
But, you know, again, look to Syria.
Look what happens when you throw a ton of, or actually look to Libya before that.
Look what happens when you throw a bunch of weapons around.
There's no question.
You've got CIA, you've got probably paramilitary, special ops in there, special forces in there.
They could be training some militias right now.
I don't think it takes that much to get things started.
And all you have to do, you know, here's what to look out for.
Look out for snipers.
Remember that?
In every one of these coups, there's always snipers shooting into the crowd.
And that, for some reason, there's some sort of a psychological component to having snipers that causes things.
I mean, it wasn't until that started happening in Ukraine that things really took off.
Well, yeah, because it incites that we have to stop this one way or the other right now, you know?
Yeah.
The level of fear and terror being picked off from afar and not even knowing where and which enemy you're facing and that kind of thing.
And you're talking about civilians in a crowd, as you said.
And there are some lonely voices in Congress that are on the right side.
I mean, it took Tulsi Gabbard a few days, but she did finally tweet out yesterday that we should leave Venezuela alone.
And Ro Khanna from California also has been pretty strong on that.
On the other hand, Bernie Sanders came down on the wrong side, even though he tried to mask it in a, well, the U.S. government shouldn't overthrow him, but then he repeated all the talking points of why we should, which is what a lot of people do.
But yeah, there's nothing that brings the parties together like the prospect of a foreign war.
Man.
Well, I don't know, man.
Let's hope that this is the beginning of the end of a failed short-term sort of a thing that didn't work out rather than the prospect.
I mean, I think the chances of, like, let's say, for example, I mean, I don't know what it would take.
I guess if they had one strong general who agreed to side with the right in this case, the military could well split.
I mean, you could have a real war over that.
It could be nasty.
It could be really, really awful.
And that's the sickest part about it.
It doesn't need to be.
And the other side, the ones that are not recognizing this other guy, at the risk of, again, once again, being said to be non-patriotic, but the Russians, the Chinese, even the Turks, they're on the right side.
They made a good point.
In fact, Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said yesterday in his usual sardonic way, he said the Americans are so paranoid about anyone interfering in their elections, even though they have no proof.
And here they are overtly interfering in the internal political affairs of another country.
I mean, the hypocrisy is so drippingly thick.
It's just amazing.
Yeah.
You know what?
You just don't understand American exceptionalism, Dan.
Let me explain it to you.
See, I am really special.
And therefore, my country is really special.
And therefore, no other existing laws of human morality apply to me and my side.
Isn't that great?
And you know why?
Because I say so.
That's why.
It's self-evident.
It's a mental...
Doesn't it seem like a mental illness?
You know, I mean, if someone came to a clinic with that kind of a thing, they would probably put them on some kind of antipsychotic medication.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, oh, wait a minute.
Listen, we're either going to have to lock you up with a straight jacket in a padded room or send you off to the Republican or Democratic Party to get some work done.
And the thing is, I do believe America is exceptional.
I love my country, but I also understand that other people feel the same way about theirs.
That's why I want to leave them alone.
Well, I mean, I always thought what was funny about that was, at the core of it, what was supposedly exceptional was that here we really believe in freedom and in principle and the rule of law first.
And we really mean that.
And that, yes, like it says in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, we were born free and allow this government to exist to protect our rights and only with the greatest Bill of Rights ever written by men.
And isn't it great?
And look, this is why people want to move here and keep the money that they earn when they work and take care of themselves and their families.
And isn't it wonderful?
And instead, they turn that into just if you live between Canada and Mexico or if you're the government from the area between Canada and Mexico, then you're magic and you can just commit sins and it's fine, which somehow they never explain the connection between one kind of exceptionalism and the other.
They just pretend it's there.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, there is blowback and it's coming.
Yeah.
You know, unfortunately, unfortunately, it just keeps coming and coming and coming.
But yeah.
Well, and so, you know what?
Speaking of which, let me keep you five more minutes and talk to you about Syria for a second.
So Gareth Porter says, yeah, they put him off for, you know, a couple of months in a tactical way.
But strategically, nothing's changed.
The Syria withdrawal remains on course and will be done within a few months.
And so what difference is that going to make?
Dan, tell me.
Or do you agree with that?
I guess, first of all, I agree with Gareth.
I always agree.
He's great.
But yeah, I think that's the case, too.
I think it's it's it's a done deal and not because for any reason that there is no mission left.
The U.S. has spoiled its relations with Turkey and with the Kurds.
We've managed to piss everyone off.
You know, the only people who aren't pissed off at us are the Israelis and the Saudis.
And they've become irrelevant to a degree.
All the Israelis still like to lob a few bombs around.
But, you know, the facts on the ground are different that the Russians are keeping the Turks in line.
The Turks have a legitimate beef, legitimate concern with a hyper armed Kurdish force on its border.
And why do they have that there?
Because the U.S. armed into the teeth because we couldn't find any of the proxy fighters to fight.
Fight for us.
So we created this disaster there and it's being untangled and unwound.
And the U.S. is finding itself on the short end of the stick, as it does with all these interventions.
Sadly, in Afghanistan, it's taken 17 years.
But you're also seeing it winding down in Iraq.
The Iraqis don't want us there anymore.
How dare they not like their liberation.
But, yeah, I think.
I think essentially it's all over there, you know, and it's it's it's done.
It's done.
I don't know what's going to be next at the neocon.
Keep their fingers on the levers of power.
They'll find something else to screw up, of course.
But for now, I think it's it's over.
You know what?
So tell me what you know about what's remaining of the al-Qaeda forces in the Idlib province where they're kind of stuck there in the northwest of the country between the Syrian Arab army and the Turks.
And they had this deal where I don't know what exactly was supposed to happen.
The Turks were supposed to repatriate these guys somehow or kill them or something.
And but so now here we are a couple of months later.
And so what is the deal there?
I think they're at least supposed to patrol them, which they've done kind of a moderate deal on issues with moderate success.
I think the whole deal was to forestall a pending U.S. attack on the Syrian Arab army.
I think that was definitely in the card.
And I think all sides thought in that and the Turks especially were able to get on board with this deal.
But it's sort of, yeah, I mean, excuse me, I agree with you.
It's kind of put everything in limbo.
The U.S. was going to bomb the SAA in order to protect the the Al-Qaeda guys there?
The terrorists.
Yeah.
No, no.
They're they're poor women and children.
I mean, but is that what they said?
The Americans said we are not going to let the Assad attack Idlib?
It was it was it was leading to that.
It was leading to a head.
If you go back and you know, right before the deal was announced, if you look at the headlines, if you look at the headlines, if you look what the administration was saying, they were leading us to that point where we are not going to allow, you know, this bombardment.
Yet another Aleppo.
They weren't going to allow it.
It was getting geared up.
The Washington Post, et cetera.
So I think that's where it was leading.
And so they put this deal together.
Basically, it just put everything kind of on hold in stasis, which at the time I thought was stupid, because if you've got this, you know, identify a concentration of these kinds of guys, probably best to deal with it because it's like a, you know, like a cancer.
You should get it out.
But but now with a few months having passed, all they're doing is sitting around killing each other.
They're having internecine warfare.
This faction is taking over that the other faction, you know, and this sort of thing is happening.
So, you know, maybe just it's the best idea is to wait it out for a while.
The only problem is that there are legitimate victims who are being held.
And we've seen this from areas that were liberated.
They say it was a nightmare living under ISIS and al Qaeda.
You know, they were they were horrible and this sort of thing.
So there are a lot of victims.
Unfortunately, they're stuck there.
But there's no at this point, no viable other solution.
You know, it's interesting that for all the talk about whether ISIS is defeated or not, this, that and the other thing, when the Islamic State has been destroyed as a state.
Right.
All of Western Iraq and eastern Syria are free of territorial domination even more than a couple of football fields by these guys.
Right.
They're they're just insurgents running around now.
The few that's left of them, a couple of thousand left.
But hey, if there's an Islamist bin Laden night state anywhere, America is still, I guess, de facto, essentially on their side.
And that's al Qaeda in the Idlib province, not the Islamic State that broke off from al Qaeda, but the last holdout of Abu Mohammed Jolani and his men, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, they call themselves now.
Right.
But it's Jabhat al-Nusra, which is just the Syrian faction of al Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II.
And the worst part of this, you know, Sunni based insurgency, whatever you call it, in Syria this whole time, although that's not to say all Sunnis were on the side of it by a long shot, but certainly no one else was.
But anyway, so, I mean, essentially this, you know, current kind of stasis on hold deal has created an Islamic State in Idlib province, a Bin Ladenite, directly Bin Ladenite Islamist state in the Idlib province.
And then, but nobody knows what to do about it.
Because I guess, as you said, you know, there's another massacre coming because nobody wants to send in all their ground forces to fight these guys house to house.
So instead it's going to be a massive air campaign.
And then another massive propaganda campaign to go along with that.
But I don't know what anyone else is supposed to do with these guys either.
You know, go in there and arrest them.
I don't think they're going to surrender.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think it's a good point.
And there are, you know, as for the argument that we can't leave until the last ISIS person is gone.
You know, as I mentioned on one of the Liberty reports a week or so ago, this is the classic Chuck Spinney self-licking ice cream cone.
Because as long as we're there, there will be more ISIS recruited.
Because that's the that's the reason they joined, because we're there.
And so, you know, it's round and round we go.
We get more ISIS because we're there.
We can't leave because there's more ISIS.
And this is the perfect scenario for the military industrial complex and the neocon warmongers.
Yep.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And in fact, if you look at it from just say history began in 2014 and somehow the Obama administration and their allies had accidentally built an Islamic state so powerful with bin Laden night state so powerful it was able to conquer all of Western Iraq.
Then they had to launch this Iraq War three to destroy the Islamic state where America again allied with the Shiites there.
To retake Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul and kick the Islamic state out of there and kick them out of Raqqa.
But that battle was done in the fall of 2017.
So if you look at that, you know, just all other things being equal and just assume the legitimacy of that project to destroy the Islamic state.
Well, once you've got it down to this low of a level of fighters right now or maybe a few months ago or something would be the perfect time to call it off because then as you're saying, the longer you stay, the more people start joining it in response.
So on one level, firepower is good for killing these guys off.
But the fact that it's the Americans still is a great way to keep recruiting them, too.
And so now is the best time to quit.
Right now is the time where you probably have the lowest number of ISIS fighters in eastern Syria that you could get with an American presence there.
But you get the Americans out.
Then the SAA can finish them off.
Yeah.
And that's the other false assumption.
And it's made by the neocons.
And unfortunately, a lot of Americans for some reason don't know better, I guess, because they're constantly propagandized.
But the assumption that somehow the Syrian army along with its allies, the Russians and Iranians, would just sit back and watch these people.
As you say, a couple of colonels of ISIS are left that they're going to sit back and wait until it becomes a full-blown Islamic state again.
You know, it's such a preposterous idea.
But of course, just like we were told the lie that Saddam had WMDs and was aligned with Al-Qaeda, you have the lie that Bashar Assad loves ISIS and is actually responsible for the rise of ISIS.
You know, so it's hard to deal with such a propagandized public.
Right.
Well, and in fact, so that was a big propaganda push a few years back to try to explain away the blowback from American policy, really, of supporting the jihad there, which had blown back into the form of this full-fledged Islamist state, of course.
But you also have that exact same lie this month, this week, and the last few ever since.
And, you know, going back to December, ever since Trump announced that he, you know, the beginning of this withdrawal, is that the way that they put it, and I think this must be deliberate in most cases.
I mean, some of these people are just parroting puppet idiots, but it seems to be a very deliberate deception, the way they say, the big winners of this, as though this is just, the first part of this is just self-evidently horrifying and bad.
The big winners of this are Assad and Iran and Russia.
So, okay, so that's begging a lot of questions there and assuming a lot of conclusions about how upset about that I'm supposed to be in the first place.
But then they throw in an ISIS.
And so it's Assad and Iran and Russia and ISIS.
And so, if you're just, you know, Joe who got home from work, sitting at your kitchen table, watching the news, it sure sounds like they're saying ISIS works for Iran and Russia and Assad, and that they're on one side of this war together.
When in fact, if anything, it's America that at least for the first few years of this war were on the side of ISIS.
After all, they started calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq back in 2006.
It's just Al-Qaeda and Iraq is all it is.
The only reason they call it ISIS now is to kind of, ever since they quit doing what Zawahiri said back in 2013.
But still, just all it is is Al-Qaeda and Iraq, Zarqawi's group.
Same guys.
Absolutely.
And it's a great point on the propaganda because, you're right, the average guy sitting there listening is going to say, well, damn, you know, we lost it.
You know, and the assumption, of course, is that it was ours to win.
You know, the big war is America.
It's not yours.
It's not your property.
And then with the reality taken into account, ISIS doesn't stand a chance against Assad and Hezbollah and Iran and Russia, do they?
You know, what do they need us for?
And that was what Trump said even in his statement.
He goes, hey, he said he actually got this right.
I don't know who finally explained it to him correctly.
There was a time where he just outright lumped in Hezbollah and ISIS together to the president of Lebanon.
Remember that?
And you've done a great job fighting terrorists like Hezbollah and ISIS, but it was Hezbollah that fought ISIS and got him out of there.
And he didn't even know the difference at all.
But in this case, he said, hey, ISIS is the enemy of Russia, Iran, and Assad.
So why are we fighting their battle for them?
At this point, we've done enough.
It's time to go.
That's the perfect explanation.
That's as coherent a reason to withdraw from a war as you could ever get out of a guy like that.
It was perfect.
No flaw in that argument.
Exactly.
And sometimes by accident, he's very crystal clear.
The response to the Israeli argument, he just said, hey, we give you guys a lot of money.
You can handle it.
We give you a lot of weapons.
You got this.
Which, by the way, they bomb Syria almost every day.
It's not like we're not sure if they're willing to do what it takes to defend themselves or anything.
Not that they're defending themselves, but I'm just saying, if it came to defense, they probably would since they're so willing to go on offense all the time.
Exactly.
Anyway, I don't want to waste any more of your Friday, but it wasn't a waste to me.
I love talking with you, Dan.
Thank you very much for coming on the show.
Thanks so much for having me on, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
Really enjoyed it.
That's the great Dan McAdams.
He's the co-host of the Ron Paul Liberty Report and that is at RonPaulLibertyReport.com and then, of course, also the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which is RonPaulInstitute.org Alright, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org at ScottHorton.org AntiWar.com and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us
