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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means clouds of it's for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show, taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that cold war to be over.
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the Armed Forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun when the President doesn't.
That means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.
Alright, you guys introducing Reese Ehrlich.
He writes the syndicated column foreign correspondent, which we run at antiwar.com.
And he's got a book called the Iran agenda, which he's updated.
And the new edition will be coming out in September.
His website is Reese Ehrlich.com.
And welcome back to the show.
Reese, how are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thank you, Scott.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And inside Syria was the book before that I meant to mention.
And so speaking of which Syria and your column here, the US is permanently occupying northern Syria.
And that's trouble.
So everybody get out your map.
Reese, this is what the Battle of the Five Armies over there.
What the hell's going on?
Yeah, it is something out of Game of Thrones, isn't it?
Well, it's worth going back to 2014.
Just very briefly.
That's when you're the Hobbit.
I actually never saw the Game of Thrones.
Oh, the Hobbit.
I had the dwarves and the elves and the What do I know?
Cougars.
They can name five guerrilla groups in Syria.
And I haven't goals.
I know.
That's who it was.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
All right.
Check out Game of Thrones when you have a chance.
Anyway, 2014.
The Yazidi crisis was taking place.
Your listeners may remember, there's this horrible humanitarian disaster of the Islamic State taking over territory.
The US intervened, it bombed both in Iraq and Syria.
And the claim at the time was it's a humanitarian effort.
It's limited.
There will be no boots on the ground.
Well, guess what, folks?
I predicted at the time I wrote about it, that there's no such thing as a US humanitarian effort, and that for sure, the US would be sending in troops and first under Obama, some 500 troops, they weren't combat troops.
Of course, they were trainers, they were training the locals.
Gotta add here, gotta add.
It was Barbara Starr.
And I hate to quote her, but it was against interest at the time.
It was more like an admission, a confession, that when the special operations forces arrived on Mount Sinjar there, all of the Yazidis who wanted to flee had already been rescued by the Syrian Kurds.
And the ones who were there said, yeah, thanks anyway.
But that was the cause of spelling for Iraq War Three right there.
Yeah, exactly.
So they just needed the excuse.
They wanted to get back into Iraq, they wanted to get into Syria.
And sure enough, here we are now, two and a half years later, and the Trump administration has 2,000 plus troops in Syria, continue to bomb, and the announcement is they're going to stay there forever.
There is no limit on when those troops might come home.
So if there was ever a classic case of bait and switch, that was it.
So we bring it down to the current situation today.
It's very complicated, and I'm going to try and not lose you with all the acronyms and abbreviations and all that.
But basically, there's a group in northern Syria, in the Kurdish region that the US has allied with.
And interestingly enough, it's a leftist group, they actually have a kind of quasi-anarchist ideology that believes in women's rights, that believes in defending the rights of local minorities.
You know, there's a lot of ethnic and religious minorities in Syria.
And they have allied with the US and are being trained and armed by the US.
The Turks consider that group to be terrorists, and therefore, have started to invade and send their own troops into northern Syria.
And there's a very fierce battle going on in a city called Afrin.
It's in the far northwest of Syria.
And the Turks, like any occupying army, have been running into a lot of problems.
They've lost about 20 tanks, a sophisticated helicopter in an area where they were supposed to be able to just sweep in and take over pretty quickly.
So they're running into a lot of problems.
The US has kind of drawn a red line at a place called Manjib.
It's another city a bit to the west of Afrin.
And they're saying the Turks cannot come in starting there or anywhere else in northern Syria.
So you've got the United States fighting Turkey, which is a NATO ally.
And then in the south, you got a whole nother war going on with Israel, Iran, and the Russians.
So the US is involved in yet another quagmire.
And you mark my words, five years from now, everybody's gonna be saying, how did we get into this mess in the first place?
Yeah.
Well, not listening to you on my show.
That's how I wait.
So now at the same time that the Turks, because they're not really fighting the Americans, right?
They're just bombing America's friendly Kurds, and the Americans are sitting back and not stopping it.
They have an agreement, right, with the Turkish government that you're allowed to kill the YPG between here and here, but not here and here, right?
Yeah, not exactly.
You're quite right.
They're not in combat at the moment.
There's certainly a war of words going on between Turkey and the US.
It has not broken out yet into actual warfare, direct warfare.
But the Turks are convinced that those weapons that are shooting down their helicopter and blowing up their tanks are provided by the US.
So as far as the Turks are concerned, it's a state of kind of quasi-war with the US.
And there was a kind of agreement between Turkey and the US about where they each forces would fight.
But the Turks broke that by sending troops into Afrin.
So now there's this new line, as I mentioned, drawn at a place called Manju.
But it's not clear at all that the Turks will stick to that.
They've said they're going to come in there.
The US have sent in military officers and tanks and personnel carriers with flying big American flags to say, no, you know, you can't come in here.
But those agreements have been broken in the past.
Meanwhile, on the other end of Syria, in the eastern part, the YPG, as you mentioned, the Kurdish force, is operating outside the Kurdish area in an area near Deir ez-Zor.
And there, the US got involved in a shooting war with the Assad forces that included killing five Russians.
Right.
Yeah, I was just gonna say, they sit back and do nothing really while the Turks bombed the Kurds.
But then when is it even really right that the Syrian Arab Army attacked?
That was going to be my first question on this.
Is it even right that the Syrian Arab Army attacked the Kurds there?
Or was that just the claim of the Americans when they hit the Syrian Arab Army?
Well, what's right?
It's so it's so complicated, because the Syrian government, of which the obviously the those troops were connected, say, look, this is our country.
Everybody who's here is an outsider.
We have the right to take back our country.
Yeah, but the SAA isn't really at war with the YPG, are they?
Or this was supposed to be their first attack in that war or something?
Well, all right.
That's why I noted earlier how complicated this was.
All right, here we go, folks.
The YPG, or the group that's leading the Syrian Kurds, has always opposed Assad in Damascus.
But they intentionally did not go to war with Assad when some of the other groups did, because they realized how destructive that would be to the cities.
You know, when rebel groups started operating in various parts of Syria, the first thing the Syrian Arab Army did was come in and bomb them, destroy the civilian infrastructure.
So that didn't happen in the Kurdish region.
And for his part, Assad said, well, look, we don't want to fight too many people at the same time.
We got wars going on with the Sunnis in the south, and Saudi supported groups, etc, etc.
So we won't attack the Kurds either.
So there was a modus vivendi, a kind of an agreement not to fight each other, but they certainly did not support each other.
Well, now that the Islamic State is on the ropes, that they're not a serious threat anymore, they're not holding territory, everybody's scrambling for the territory that the Islamic State used to help.
So the US has backed the YPG in that part of Syria, it's in the eastern part.
And it's key because it's the oil resource rich area.
It's where the oil refineries, gas processing plants, oil wells are located, everybody wants to control that.
So the US and its allies took over there, and the Syrian Arab Army wants to take it back.
And that's what that fighting was all about.
Hmm.
Well, wait, so Assad, what, what exactly happened there?
What was this force that Assad then sent to, because that doesn't sound right to me that he was challenging the American Marine Corps in that oil land with some small column?
Well, the the reports are not complete.
Let's put it that way.
More news is continuing to come out from Moscow, etc.
Apparently what happened was, there was a group of Russian mercenaries, you know, contract soldiers, some of the Syrian backed militias that fight on the side of the government.
And they did some probing actions in a particular city in that area to see, you know, started lobbying some artillery shells and moving up some tanks.
It's not clear if they sought to take over the area or just kind of doing testing the metal of the other side.
And the US took it as a, an insult and proceeded to bomb the heck out of them sending in missiles, plane strikes and artillery that killed some hundred people, all affiliated with the Assad government in one way or another.
Yeah, well, now and elaborate on the part where some of them were Russians.
Yeah, the reports come out of Moscow, the Moscow, the Soviet or Soviet, the Russian government says five Russians were killed, they were not soldiers.
And but everybody thinks they were mercenaries, or, you know, just like the US hires mercenaries called contract soldiers, the Russians are doing the same.
And they do it because when they die, that doesn't have the same political impact back home, they can rent them cheaper than paying their regular soldiers and so on.
So well, now some of the Western media are saying it was 100 who died or 200 or something like that was 100 total 100 total that includes any Syrian troops that were involved, Syrian militias, and the Russians.
Yeah, so they're not inconsistent.
And then, you know, thank goodness I saw where the Russian I forget if it was an actual minister or a spokesman, basically playing it down and saying, well, you know, these guys, they're deniable volunteers, or whatever kind of thing.
And, and then the resistance on Twitter, one of their leaders, Molly McHugh was saying, Look, they don't even care when their own people die, whatever, when it when all he was doing was saying, Hey, hey, hey, just because some Americans killed some Russians on the ground in a war, let's not get carried away here, which is absolutely exactly what the other 7 billion and a half of us want to hear when Americans I mean, there should be no conflict, where we have a border dispute with Russians anywhere.
This is insane that we're even talking about this in this context.
However, when that does happen, what we want to hear is all sides play it down, instead of, you know, trying to exploit it and cause a conflict, use it as an excuse to demonize somebody.
Yeah, at the moment, it's definitely in Russians interest to downplay the incident, because they don't want to get in a direct confrontation with us.
They're playing everybody's playing a very tricky game in Syria.
Remember, you've got five outside armies, military bombing in Syria or forces, let me put it that way.
So the Syrian government, the Turks, the Russians, the United States, and the Israelis are all bombing, and or having troops on the ground in Syria.
And the danger of them conflicting getting in fights with the other side by mistake, or by inadvertence, is very real.
So the Russians are playing it down intentionally, so that their own public opinion doesn't get into a war mood where, well, we've got to go out and avenge the deaths of our guys who've been killed by these US imperialists.
So for the moment, the Russians are talking it down.
All right now, so what exactly is the American interest here?
I mean, obviously, I know that the Israel lobby and the neocons and all of them, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is all tied closely in with this administration, that for them, everything is Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran.
And yet, I mean, really, at the Pentagon, do they not see things a little bit differently at all that, hey, you know, maybe?
I mean, in other words, what the hell is the real point of America trying to hold on to Syrian Kurdistan, when, as you're saying, we're at the risk of getting in a war with the Russians, we're at risk of getting in a war with our NATO allies, the Turks, which would then just make them allies of the Russians outright.
We're at risk of, hey, you know, war with Russia means nuclear winter and humanity dies.
So what the hell is it worth?
A couple of oil fields?
When ISIS is no longer a state, it's just a group again.
We're, you know, the Brookings Institution guy, O'Hanlon, or Pollack, Ken Pollack, just put out a thing saying we got to double down on Bakken al-Nusra the other day.
So we're, the US is still apparently on the side of the jihadists there.
So what's the point, really, of staying there just because they're there, and they have a base, and they'll never get it up now?
It's all about location.
It's location, location, location, or geopolitics.
So Syria doesn't have a lot of oil, unlike Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and Iran, which are oil or natural gas rich.
But Syria has got its borders.
It borders Turkey, and Israel, and Lebanon, all critical, and Turkey, of course, all critical areas for the United States.
Israel seized the Golan in 1967, which was Syrian territory.
The Syrians have wanted to get it back ever since.
And we haven't talked about the Israelis yet today, but the Israelis have, are directly militarily involved in Syria, and have been since the beginning, or towards the beginning of the Syrian civil war.
So the idea, the reasoning in Washington is, who controls Syria has a big impact on what's going on in the rest of the region.
The Syrians support Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Syria and Lebanon oppose Israel.
Therefore, we have to back Israel.
That's the thinking.
Now, in reality, in order to carry that out, the US gets sucked in more and more into a spiral, a downward spiral, where you have some troops on the ground, some of those troops are going to get killed.
Then you have to double down with more troops, because you can't let our guys die in vain.
And pretty soon, you've got another Iraq, or maybe another Libya or Yemen, where you're just involved in a war that can't be won.
And this is completely predictable ahead of time.
So the argument in Washington is it's in our geopolitical interest to have a pro-US government in Syria, and it ain't gonna happen.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing, right, is this disconnect here.
Because even if America occupies Rojava and helps guarantee their autonomy, or, you know, semi-independence there, for whatever period of time, that doesn't really give us dominance over politics in Damascus.
And at some point, really, the American establishment has already, I don't know which all parts of it, maybe the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has a different agenda, but it seems like they basically chose not to go ahead and overthrow Assad.
They'll back al-Qaeda against him for years and years.
So both sides continue to hemorrhage to death, as the Israelis put it in the New York Times.
But they never did commit to overthrow Assad, carpet bombing Damascus and throwing his ass out of there and having their full regime change.
And so they don't really gain anything by sitting there in, I mean, you name all the adjacent hot zones, but I'm saying that's why not to be there, right?
And I know I'm not a general, but still.
That assumes Washington is logical.
Your argument relies on logic.
Their argument relies on power.
And basically, the Washington establishment has plan A, plan B, plan C, and plan A was to get rid of Assad.
When that didn't work, plan B was to back the rebel groups, the Sunni rebel groups backed by the CIA and the Pentagon.
When that didn't work, they're now into, well, we'll take northern Syria and we'll fragment the country.
If we can't control the whole thing, we'll take the part that we can and leave the other parts to other foreign powers.
And that's, we're down to plan C at this point.
So that's, that's what's going on.
Even though when those other foreign powers are the Iranians that they can't stop screaming about, right?
Right.
So they're not intent, they're not happy about that, but it's a situation, they tried everything else that failed.
So they're going to grab, they're grasping at what they think will be a viable plan.
And eventually they'll get rid of those other powers like Russia and Iran.
But they don't have any viable plan to do that.
So they'll fragment the country.
And so we saw that with Libya.
We saw that with Yemen, Somalia.
If you, if the US can't control the whole thing, they'll fragment it and control what they can.
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Well, you know, I always like to recommend this interview with Barack Obama by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic in the spring of 2012.
The title of it is as president, I don't bluff and that's him promising Iran will never get nuclear weapons.
But part of their discussion is about Syria.
And the entire context is, yes, Jeffrey, that's right.
It would help bring Iran down a peg if we could get rid of Assad.
And we're sure that that's in the cards here.
And he's going to be leaving here pretty soon.
And we're doing everything we can to help make that a reality in order to hurt the Iranians.
And then they joke because Goldberg says, Well, what more can you do?
And he says, Well, I can't tell you because you don't have the proper clearance.
Ha ha ha.
And they joke about American covert action.
All this was supposed to weaken Iran.
Now you just go forward six years.
And here we are.
And everyone's screaming that Iran's influence in Syria has increased, of course, in reaction to Barack Obama's policy, because hey, they had to come and help save Syria from the Islamic State Frankenstein monster that America and its allies had created there, that got out of control, and blew back into Western Iraq and all of that and had to start a whole new war against the consequences of their actions there.
And this doesn't seem to work.
You know, I like joking that Bush and Obama were working for Osama all along carrying out his agenda.
But you could just as easy say that the Ayatollah Khamenei is the master chess master of the whole world.
And he is secretly the real power behind the throne in Washington, DC, making every judgment call for them about what they should do next.
Well, it does lend itself to conspiracy theories, doesn't it?
And remember that Jeffrey Goldberg did a later interview with Obama in which he declared himself a non interventionist.
And he really believed somehow that he was a different kind of president who was fighting the war tendencies in Washington.
But yes, I think for sure, part of the geopolitics in Syria was to weaken Iran.
And so was the war in Iraq.
Remember, the war in Iraq was going to overthrow Saddam, bring in a pro US government and move on to having success in Iran as well.
And that all blew up.
And Iran is more influential in Iraq today than the United States is.
Yep.
And now I think all the claims as far as I know, all the claims about Iranian involvement in Yemen are bogus.
But even more to the point, they get credit for all this power and influence and intervention in Yemen without lifting a finger, just by all the fake accusations against them.
So they've increased their power and influence in a way there by spending not a dime.
The Yemenis are exporting weapons right now.
That's how many guns they've got.
Well, I think that for sure the Iranian support the Houthis in Yemen politically, I think there is military support there as well.
I think it's exaggerated by the US and by Saudi Arabia, in particular to justify their military actions.
Well, I'd like to see the particulars of amounting to what because all I ever hear is like, yeah, everybody knows that.
But without ever any specific, like Nikki Haley's claims.
There were a few captured boats and you at the UN did independent investigations.
Ah, no, Gareth Porter debunked all that, man.
Catch up.
I'll send you a link.
All right.
Anyway.
Point remains.
They had nothing to fight about in Yemen until the Americans turn that thing into a war there anyway.
So.
Let's talk about Israel and Syria.
That so just in the last week, the Israelis, the the invincible military power of the region had one of its jet shot down.
The excuse was that a Iranian drone had come into Israeli airspace and that they shot it down.
And in retaliation, they went into Syria.
And in the process, one of their very sophisticated F-16 jets was shot down.
What's really interesting in this is that the Israelis were prepared to escalate the fighting in Syria and do additional bombing.
Netanyahu got a phone call from Putin.
And then all of a sudden, all of those escalation plans were stopped and they they stopped with the initial bombings.
So the informed speculation is, is that Putin told the Israelis to back off, that the interestingly enough, Netanyahu is talking to Putin, not to Trump, that Russia is a much more significant power in Syria and in that region today than is the US.
And if Israel didn't want to push things too far.
So the danger, of course, is that there will not be an actual carrying out of an agreement that the Israelis will say, it's time to attack Lebanon, we've got to come after the Hezbollah group in Lebanon.
And yet another war will break out in a different part of Syria, not where the Kurds are, but in the south and possibly in Damascus.
So that's a very real danger at the moment.
And we'll see if the agreement between Putin and Netanyahu holds.
Yeah, I remember back in 2011, Patrick Coburn said, I fear this is going to be just like the Lebanese Civil War.
It's going to go on for 15 years.
And there's going to be all kinds of foreign powers intervening on all different sides.
And it's just going to be a damn nightmare.
And there's no end in sight, no negotiation in sight between what are now intractable, you know, differences and sides.
So here we are, you thought things, hey, the Islamic States defeated Jabhat al-Nusra, you know, down to Idlib province and whatever.
Here come the Turks.
And here come the Israelis, the American Marine Corps.
Yeah, nobody wants to allow the other guys to take over.
That's the problem.
You know, it's a lot like before World War One, where you had all these areas, zones of influence and different colonial powers vying for control of disputed areas.
Well, it's like that all over again.
It used to be the excuse was, oh, we're fighting Soviet communism.
When that collapsed.
Now, it's we're fighting terrorism.
But what it's really all about is grabbing territory, grabbing military bases, grabbing natural resources for the benefit of the colonial power or the imperial power to the exclusion of the enemies.
And that's what everybody's trying to do.
Yeah, you know, slightly off topic, but yeah, related.
I read this thing at Tom Dispatch the other day by a lady who helps run the cost of war project at Brown University, where they just try to do accounting of all the spending on the wars and the militarism and whatever.
And she was talking about how her other specialty is the police brutality in the ghettos in Brazil.
And how whenever she tells people these things, they're far more interested in that than the all of the different wars that America is fighting, you know, oh, you're you're a researcher on all eight of America's current bombing campaigns do tell no, they don't ever say that they go, Oh, wow.
Yeah, tell me about the Brazil thing.
That sounds interesting.
They just don't care.
They're so tuned out.
This might as well be happening at the hands of the British Empire has nothing to do with us at all.
Well, in the minds of Americans, apparently, I guess, unfortunately, there's an element of truth to that.
And Americans only start getting interested when our troops are dying, or when the trillions that are spent, become obvious and and cause economic problems at home.
You know, we spent several trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whereas we spent over a billion dollars just on training groups in Syria that went nowhere, the CIA and the Pentagon combined spent over a billion dollars.
That's actually a lot of money that could have been spent domestically for education and healthcare and infrastructure and all the other things we need.
I think that will change the attitudes of Americans will change when American soldiers are killed.
And unfortunately, that's it's going to happen.
We saw what happened when the several soldiers were killed in Niger and Africa.
We saw the reaction when some soldiers were killed in Iraq.
And I think the attitudes will change.
And I think there is a kind of a latent anti war sentiment in the US.
And it's linked up with the anti Trump sentiment.
And we saw some of it in the Women's Day marches, there were signs against the various wars.
It's wrapped up in some pro Trump sentiment to not too much, maybe, but that's Yeah, I mean, there's Trump supporters who are who are upset with the fact that he promised to get out of all these war situations and has doubled down in them.
It just ranks so low on the order of importance, though, they don't see the cause and effect with the economy and with the violations of liberty here at home.
And all these, you know, causations and correlations, it's just that last on the list of concerns, you know, that's why you've got your show, Scott, to change those attitudes.
Yeah, everybody quit being like that.
I know.
That's why you're listening.
Okay.
Hey, um, okay.
So, uh, well, no, I must interrupted you when you were on a on a thing telling us more about Israel.
So I know there's more to say about Israel and what they're up to here.
Sure.
So Israel always portrays itself as a defensive, small country with a surrounded by hostile Arabs, by hostile terrorists, and that they only act defensively.
And they're not like all these other powers around the world or in the region.
Of course, the people, the area realized that's never been true.
And it's certainly not true today.
The I've been to the Golan and there's areas that was an area occupied by Israel in 1967.
And to this day, the people of that area do not accept Israeli citizenship.
This is 50 years later, they are considered themselves citizens of Syria.
And you can sit in the what's called what the Israelis call the Golan Heights and look over the border into Syria, as I did and see the fighting going on between the at that time, the Al Qaeda supported group and the Syrian army and the Free Syrian Army.
So the is and the Israelis, despite what they claimed, were actively involved in the Syrian Civil War backing the anti Assad forces.
They had the same problem as the US, which is that the Free Syrian Army people that they backed didn't have much popular support, couldn't get much military traction.
So they made a de facto alliance with the Al Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliated group, and still have that to this day.
Basically, the Israelis will align with anybody who's the enemy of their enemy, if they think that that can get them somewhere.
And now that they've run in the same problems as the US, those same forces are isolated, didn't get much traction in Syria.
So now they're turning more to direct bombing.
And it's almost on a weekly basis that Israeli planes are going into Syria and bombing what they claim are Hezbollah missile factories or places developing advanced missiles.
They have a variety of excuses.
But basically, it's to weaken the Assad forces and their allies.
And now they're going after Iranian sites.
And it's a very dangerous escalation.
The only thing, as I mentioned earlier, that stopped it was the fact that the Russians said, this is don't go any further.
But that may or may not last.
So the Israelis and again, while claiming it's a defense against terrorism, what it really is, is they do not want the Palestinians to have any allies, they want to keep the status quo now in terms of denying Palestinian rights, and denying any right to a two state solution.
And they don't want anybody, whether it be Iran, or Syria, or Hezbollah, or anyone else in Lebanon, from helping the Palestinians or allying with them.
Now, all of those countries that I mentioned, have their own problems.
Internally, they have their own problems of human rights violations.
And anybody who's read my books or my writings can read that in much greater detail.
But all of that is not an excuse for Israel proceeding to bomb civilians all over Syria.
Yeah, well, okay, so but their side would say, yeah, but Hezbollah is building up because they're going to conquer, they're going to invade and overthrow and terrorize and destroy Israel.
So what are they going to do just sit back and wait for them to finish arming up till they're powerful enough to occupy part, you know, the northern part of Israel or something like that, wouldn't it?
Or do they even bother claiming that?
I'm just making that up.
But yeah.
If they were making an argument that this was defensive, they would say, Oh, no, Hezbollah, right?
What are we gonna do?
Allow them to get missiles?
I don't know.
The argument is that Hezbollah They just come out and go, we like aggressing.
Shut up.
We don't.
We don't have excuses.
We don't need them.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yes.
The argument is basically that Hezbollah is a pawn of Iran.
Iran is determined to kill all the Jews and wipe out the Israeli state.
So therefore, we must do something to prevent that from happening.
So if we go into Lebanon and start a war, it's defensive.
If Hezbollah fires missiles into Israel, it's aggressive.
So you've got it either way.
Whatever happens, Israel is on the right side and is only acting defensively, according to them.
The reality is Iran has no ability or no intention of destroying the Israeli state.
They have plenty of conventional weapons.
They have air fighters.
They have jets.
They have bombers.
They have missiles that can easily reach Israel.
And if they wanted to launch a war to annihilate Israel, they could.
But they haven't and they won't.
One, because they don't believe in doing that.
But if you think that's wrong, the Iranians realize that doing something like that would be an instant destruction of their country.
Because Israel and the United States, supported by most countries in the world, would immediately bomb Tehran and other major cities and overthrow the government in Iran.
So the Iranian leadership are not crazy.
They're not self-destructive.
They realize what the consequences would be.
And I would argue, and again, I've elaborated on this in my books, they're not for the destruction of the state of Israel.
They're willing to accept a two-state solution with the Palestinians if that's what the Palestinians agree to.
That's the short version.
Yeah, but you know what?
The war hawks then will say, yeah, but you're wrong about that, Rhys, because they want the 12th imam to come back.
And they don't mind if it causes a nuclear holocaust, because it's the apocalypse and the end of the world.
And that's what they're after anyway.
And some Christians envision Armageddon taking place in Jerusalem and the ascension to heaven, right?
And maybe the return of Jesus.
But yeah, well, Pat Robertson isn't the supreme leader here, though, is the difference, right?
Practically.
Well, but so is that really true, though?
I mean, because you just said that, nah, they're rational humans and they want their political government to live forever.
But is that really true, says Frank Gaffney or somebody?
Yeah, well, no, the answer is yes, they are rational human beings.
Yes, they're believers in Islam, but they've never allowed their belief, their religious beliefs, to lead them into situations where they're going to destroy their own country and destroy themselves.
I've interviewed medium level leaders in Iran and lots of ordinary folks, and they operate politically like any other country, which is they're hemmed in by the military political reality.
And that's why they signed the nuclear accord, just as one example, because it was a rational choice to get sanctions lifted.
In fact, it's really telling that the war party has to resort to those kinds of accusations, because it's sort of, you know, unfalsifiable what they truly believe and what they're really up to, despite of all of what they're doing, because they're sort of conceding that all of what they're doing actually is pretty rational, like signing a nuclear deal.
Yeah.
And, you know, you demonize an enemy by saying they're crazy, that they'll act irrationally.
Therefore, anything that you do is justified.
You know, a preemptive nuclear strike on Tehran would be justified if you think that Iran is about to launch missiles on Israel or something like that.
So you just build up this propaganda and demonize them and get people to think they'll do anything, even though that has nothing to do with reality.
All right.
Well, thanks very much again for coming on the show.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right, you guys.
And that's it for the show.
You know me, Scott Horton dot org, iTunes and Stitcher and YouTube, antiwar.com, Libertarian Institute, Fool's Aaron dot us for my book, Fool's Aaron, Time Down the War in Afghanistan.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton show.
