All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got the great Eli Clifton.
He is a founding member of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and he has these two very important articles that I beseech you to go and look at.
They're both in the archives, the viewpoints there at antiwar.com as well.
The first is, amid coronavirus outbreak, Trump-aligned pressure group pushes to stop medicine sales to Iran.
The next one is, collective punishment has always been the stated goal of Iran sanctions hawks.
And before I say welcome, one more headline from this morning.
The top of the page on antiwar.com, recorded here today, March the 26th, U.S. imposes more new sanctions against Iran.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Eli?
I'm doing well.
I'm doing well.
Thanks so much for having me again.
I'm so happy to have you here, and you do such great work, and I am so grateful for it.
Could you describe for the people what is the shape of the U.S. sanctions regime against the state of Iran?
Well, what's so surprising is over the past week, we've actually seen new sanctions be imposed upon Iran, even as many of the United States' European allies are talking about that now might be a time to actually suspend or roll back the sanctions, given that coronavirus has been ravaging Iran at a level that pretty much exceeds most other countries in the world.
And the sanctions regime that's been imposed on Iran has, according to a lot of experts, played a direct or indirect role in the shortages of medical supplies facing Iran.
Now, what is so surprising, as I was just saying, is that the United States now sort of stands alone in terms of wanting to ratchet up sanctions.
And the arguments for doing so, which are made by people like Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, and others who have been supportive of this, at least over the past week, has been that, well, you know, the fact that Iran is ill-prepared to handle the public health crisis that's facing not just Iran, but obviously these have spillover effects to the rest of the world, is rooted in the fact that the government in Iran has fundamentally misspent the money that it has, has diverted resources away from public health, and has not as a result of the sanctions, but as a result of their own corruption, taken resources that were available through the humanitarian channels of the existing sanctions and routed them away from the humanitarian purposes that they were supposed to be utilized for.
Now, that's a pretty limited interpretation of it, because most other folks are saying, well, actually, the humanitarian channels from the existing sanctions regime were insufficient, as they already stood, and certainly insufficient to get the resources necessary into Iran right now.
So, there's a clear disconnect between the sanctions hawks, who right now are saying that more sanctions actually won't hurt the Iranians, and certainly will not hurt Iran's ability to respond to coronavirus, versus the rest of the world at this point that's saying, you know what, this has had a detrimental effect on Iran's ability to purchase medical supplies and medicine, and certainly new sanctions will further hamper Iran's ability to do so.
All right.
Well, so, channeling Pompeo and his minions here, you're just crazy, because we don't have any sanctions on medicine.
Why that would be cruel and wrong.
We would never do such a thing, Eli.
So what's the discrepancy here?
Well, there's a couple things.
One is just that the nature of the sanctions themselves, where you're increasingly sanctioning financial entities and banks that handle a variety of financial transactions in and out of Iran.
Now, admittedly, most, I'm sure in many cases, these institutions are engaged in activities that are sanctionable.
But you can only sanction so many financial entities and banks and other outfits that are engaged in various forms of foreign trade with Iran, or in and out of Iran, before that starts to impact other forms of trade that are not sanctionable.
So it's pretty hard to target this onto one form of, you know, I just want to sanction the IRGC, or I just want to sanction Iran's ability to buy equipment that might be used in their nuclear program.
Well, a lot of the entities that are engaged in such trade are involved in a variety of trade, some perhaps as broad as all forms of trade in and out of Iran.
So it's pretty hard to micro-target onto that.
So that's sort of where I would point to as being one of the problematic aspects about talking about, oh, we're just going to have sanctions that don't target humanitarian needs in Iran, is that it's pretty difficult, if not impossible, to do so.
But there's another piece of this, which is the pressure campaigns that have been handled not as a component of the sanctions, but on top of that.
And there's a group called United Against Nuclear Iran.
It's based here in New York.
It's pretty shady about who's behind it.
It would appear that there's, at least there's strong evidence that there's UAE and Saudi Arabia are funders of it.
And they have actually had this ongoing thing called their Iran Business Registry that lists, with the explicit purpose of trying to pressure companies who are engaged in trade with Iran to cease their trade with Iran.
Now, in some cases, these companies are engaged in, it would appear, in trade that might violate sanctions.
But in other cases, there are companies on this list that actually were engaged, that wound up on the list, because they weren't just engaged in legal trade with Iran.
They had actually gone out of their way to go to the Treasury Department and get licenses to engage in various forms of humanitarian trade with Iran, specifically for the purpose of selling medicine and medical equipment over the past 10 years or so.
And on that list are some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the United States and Europe.
So United Against Nuclear Iran, this is a place that John Bolton has been associated with.
This is a place that Mike Pompeo, I believe, has spoken twice now during their annual summits.
Very close ties to the Trump administration.
And they've been engaged in an ongoing pressure campaign to get the pharmaceutical and medical supply companies that engage in legal trade.
Not just legal, but actually trade that the U.S. government has gone out of their way to say is legal, to cease that trade.
Man.
And then they really do brag about it and talk about it, that the regular Joes, the civilians of Iran, are suffering, and that's good for us.
That helps weaken the government.
Maybe we can push it over now.
That's right.
And I think what's so interesting, so I was talking earlier about, well, how have the new round of sanctions that have been introduced been discussed, and they're being very careful about how sanctions hawks and Pompeo, sanctions hawks both inside and outside of the Trump administration, talk about it, and they say, well, you know, this isn't going to impact your average Iranian.
This is focusing on the elites.
This is focusing on financial channels that are used by IRGC.
And that's their language for the past week.
But when you really go back and look at what these people have been saying and how they justify and how they see the role of sanctions being used, when you look at what they've said over the past decade, their views on exactly how sanctions are supposed to work is pretty clear, and it's that they are advocating collective punishment.
They are advocating for various forms of shortages that will affect the general public.
And it's their belief that if you impose these hardships on the Iranian people, that they will eventually turn on their own government.
And time and time and time again, you can see them talking about this, even going so far as joking about food shortages, you know, whether or not that's an effective strategy.
You know, they should at least own that, that that's the strategy they've been advocating.
And they've openly said that that is their strategy is to, and the way that you would measure the success of sanctions is whether the entire financial system in Iran is on the verge of collapse, is whether there are various shortages of consumer goods, and whether the general public is feeling the pressure of the sanctions.
So that has been their stated strategy and purpose for the sanctions they've advocated for for quite a long time.
And over the past week, and since coronavirus has come in, they've tried to retool that a little because they suddenly know that, you know, what seemed like more harmless forms of collective punishment, such as joking about chicken shortages, or that people cannot afford chickens, is now taking a darker turn with coronavirus, where even if you don't care about what happens to the average Iranian or to all of Iran, you and I and everyone else knows that any country that is unable to combat this massive public health crisis, well, that's going to have spillover effects into the rest of the world.
Because while you might be able to cut off Iran's, from the global financial system, you're not able to cut out just the movement of people across borders.
And that's going to have severe ramifications for the rest of the world.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, what people like Mark Dubowitz out of power, out of official power over there at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and his colleagues say that's one thing.
But Mike Pompeo is actually the Secretary of State.
And he does know exactly what he's doing.
And I'm not exactly certain about all of his quotes on Iran.
But it's no different than what he said about North Korea back a year or so ago, when a boat washed up on the shore in Japan with dead North Korean fishermen on board, maybe just one dead old North Korean fisherman.
And he laughed about it and said that this is proof of the success of our sanctions.
Look at how desperate the people of North Korea are.
It's working.
Yeah.
Well, actually, Pompeo has said something pretty close, but now he didn't say that over the past week, because that's now suddenly not an acceptable thing to say when you're facing this global health crisis.
But he did say this.
He said the leadership has to make a decision, the leadership of Iran, that they want their people to eat.
They have to make a decision that they want to use their wealth to import medicine and not use their wealth to fund Qasem Soleimani's travels around the Middle East with causing death and destruction.
Okay.
So, you know, he thinks the responsibility lies on the leadership in Tehran.
That's a perspective.
But let's be clear here that he is believing that there is a strategy based on collective punishment, in this case around denying people food, or the threat of denying people food, that can make Iran change its behavior.
That has been the strategy.
That is the maximum pressure strategy that gets touted and talked about.
And the ramifications of it now, only now, I think, with coronavirus, are we seeing is that it's creating a really untenable collective punishment on the Iranian people.
And again, actually stoking a public health crisis that could impact the rest of the world.
Yeah.
So a couple of things there that this guy is known, I guess, notoriously as some sort of extreme born again Christian.
And so maybe that works in terms of identity and whose side are you on?
It's the born again, millennialist Zionists, you know, in league with Israel against Israel's enemies, even though there's what, 50,000 Jews live in Iran and that kind of thing.
But anyway, and all of this in absolute defiance of Jesus's actual teachings.
And anyone who thinks that it's a Christian thing to deliberately murder innocent people, to starve and to expose to disease, innocent people as a way to get through to their government.
Well, that's the definition of terrorism.
I mean, and I think it's really interesting that you point to that because, you know, his spiritual mentor of sorts, Ralph Drollinger of Capital Ministries, who now does Bible studies for a lot of the cabinet of the Trump administration, has been pretty outspoken about talking about, you know, really sort of crude Islamophobic portrayals of people in the Middle East, essentially painting them all as terrorists.
And it's very interesting that that relationship with Pompeo goes back to when Pompeo was actually in the House.
So he's actually had that longstanding relationship with Drollinger that even members of the Trump administration's cabinet have only developed over the past two or three years.
Pompeo and Drollinger go back at least several years further.
And it's also worth pointing out, too, that when they're complaining about Iran spreading terrorism throughout the region, they're talking about the IRGC, the Quds Force, helping, I guess the Quds Force is the subset of the IRGC.
They're responsible for helping the Assad government in Syria and the Abadi government in Iraq to defeat the Islamic State led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State of Iraq, which was just al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi's group that had been loyal to Osama bin Laden until America killed him.
And then they ended up breaking away from Zawahiri's rule in 2013 and are still essentially bin Ladenites.
And in fact, Baghdadi invoked the authority of the martyred bin Laden for his own claim to the caliphate and all of that.
And America was fighting, just like in Iraq War II, in Iraq War III, fighting essentially side by side, providing air cover, and with our, you know, MARSOC, Marine Special Operations guys on the ground, helping these guys kick the Islamic State, destroy the Islamic State that had conquered Western Iraq in 2014.
They're still the enemy in Syria, but at least on the Iraqi side of the line, they're America's allies in fighting the bin Ladenites.
It wasn't Iran that knocked our towers down, it was the bin Ladenites that knocked our towers down, and it was the Iranians who were killing them for us.
And you can even take that forward to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, who, you know, regardless of how one feels about the guy, you have to at least be willing to acknowledge that he probably was responsible for killing more members of ISIS than anyone else in the world.
So there is this incredibly short-sighted foreign policy that I think we're seeing play out with the Trump administration, where, you know, it's nearly sort of cartoonish level of understanding of, you know, well, Qasem Soleimani, bad guy, so we go kill him.
Okay.
That doesn't really take into account exactly the history or the, you know, the complexities of what you've just described.
Well, and you have a quote in here, too, where I guess it's Dubowitz or one of these guys was talking about, well, yeah, it is okay to, oh, here it is, quote, it's okay to take the food.
Listen to this.
This is Senator Mark Kirk, a senator.
It's okay to take the food out of the mouths of the citizens from a government that's plotting an attack directly on American soil, which is a just lie, a made up lie of an excuse to justify killing civilians.
That's right.
And Kirk now serves on the board of United Against Nuclear Iran and his foreign policy advisor, Richard Goldberg, who went on to join FDD, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he promoted military attacks against Iran.
And then he went to work in Trump's National Security Council, which was a really weird arrangement where Goldberg had his salary and travel expenses paid for by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies while working inside the National Security Council.
Unbelievable.
Where he advocated for expanded sanctions against Iran.
Right.
And, you know, so there may be people who they're racking their brain and they're trying to figure out what could he possibly be referring to in terms of a threat of an Iranian attack on American soil.
And the only one that anyone could come up with is the completely fake hoax of a plot against the Saudi ambassador to the United States, who was supposedly to be assassinated at a restaurant in Georgetown, when it turned out that the whole thing was completely fake.
And it was some bumbling idiot used car salesman from Corpus Christi who'd been caught on the phone with the Iranians planning possibly some kind of drug deal.
And they just spun it into this whole thing.
And when that story came out in, I'm going to say, 2013 or something like that, I'm not sure, somewhere around there.
I think it was further back.
I think it was like 2011 or so.
Yeah, the beginning of the last decade there.
And then, but there were immediately, there were six former CIA officers who came out within a week and said, this is a lie.
Don't believe it for a minute.
You know, it was Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Ray Close, Flint Leverett, Robert Baer, who is horrible and loves blaming Iran.
He even blamed Iran for 9-11, Robert Baer.
And he said that this is a total hoax.
And there's one more name I'm leaving off the list.
But you know that a terrorist plot against the Saudi ambassador in America is fake when six former CIA officers immediately come out and debunk it and say it's a damned lie.
I mean, one of the most remarkable things, to go back to sort of how you summarized that entire supposed assassination attempt, was this idea that the IRGC that we see built up is into this, you know, this force that of course is monolithic, but also it's everywhere.
It has global tentacles.
If you listen to Iran hawks and sanctions hawks talk about, you know, what the IRGC can do and how they're everywhere.
And then to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, their plan was to work with this.
This guy was a total nut job.
Yeah, Corpus Christi, Iranian American, used car salesman.
That's the best they can come up with, supposedly.
I mean, this doesn't actually pass the laugh test.
Well, and the ambassador at the time was just some peon.
He wasn't even a member of the royal family.
He was just some guy who is not worth killing and starting a war.
Like the Iranians are going to blow up a restaurant in Georgetown and America, even under Barack Obama, wouldn't just fly B-52s from Missouri straight over Tehran to teach them a lesson about that.
Give me a break.
Right.
I mean, yeah.
You're right.
We're a stupid lie.
And the justification for it, supposedly, again, the Iranians are great strategists.
Come on.
You're going to blow up a restaurant in Georgetown?
And that's all they got.
They don't have another fake excuse.
All they can do is complain that the Iranians kill al-Qaeda in Syria, and our government still favors al-Qaeda in Syria.
How dare they?
I hear you.
Well, now, when ISIS broke off, that's bad.
But Jabhat al-Nusra, aka Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, under the control of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the blood oath sworn loyal servant of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
No, they're still fine.
In fact, Donald Trump, to this day, is telling the Syrian government and Hezbollah and Russia that they better stop attacking our al-Qaeda allies in the Idlib province.
That's current day up to this month, Eli.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think what so much of this reveals is that while it's not a well-justified or thought out strategy, what we are talking about here, through the sanctions, through the attack on Qasem Soleimani, is an attempt at essentially as much of an outright war on Iran as they can possibly engage in, without actually engaging in something that could spill over into being an actual war against Iran.
And if imposing a collective punishment on the Iranian people, with some justification that maybe that will lead to regime instability, which doesn't seem like it's really done, then they'll pursue that.
If it means assassinating military leadership of the IRGC, which I know they'll say is not the Iranian military, in Baghdad, then they'll do that.
And I think what we see is actually a very interesting tension here, which is that Trump himself I think actively is very clear, in my understanding probably, that he does not want to have a war with Iran.
However, he has surrounded himself with people who do want that.
So they're trying to essentially find what is that middle ground, what does that compromised space look like?
And it's essentially driving up to exactly the point where it might turn into an actual shooting war, and sort of standing at the precipice of that, which is obviously an extremely dangerous place to be in, especially when there's all sorts of externalities here that could push you over the edge, even if you didn't intend to.
And I think we've seen that with the escalating, you know, over the last summer, the escalating tensions with Iran, the shoot down of the American drone, the attack on, obviously on Soleimani, the attack on the military base in Iraq.
There's obviously a cycle of escalation here, and to pretend that you can control that and really regulate it in a careful and conservative way is probably a very dangerous fool's errand.
Yeah, man.
And, you know, this week, or was it this week or last week, it was reported, I guess earlier this week, it was reported that after the recent rocket attacks in Iraq, which we're going to be talking with Reese Ehrlich later in the day about that, but in response to that, Pompeo, and I'm sorry, I'm blanking on the name of his, was it Grinnell, the guy that worked under him, that they were proposing strikes on Iran, and Trump shot them down.
In fact, the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed with the president, no, we're not going to do that, especially not in the middle of a pandemic, because it would obviously make us clearly the bad guys to bomb Iran when they are one of the very hardest hit countries by the coronavirus right now.
And after all, just because some liar says that every time a Shiite goes to the bathroom in Iraq, it's at the behest of the IRGC, that doesn't make it true at all.
This is true.
I mean, this is a common misnomer, right?
It's that it's that anything that's conducted by Shiite, let alone a Shiite militia inside Iraq is orchestrated and directed by someone in Tehran.
Now, are there connections between Shiite militias and Iran?
Sure.
Does that mean that they have day to day operational control?
No, it doesn't.
And that's a very dangerous situation when you start to assign that degree of responsibility to folks in Tehran for the activities of people that may or may not be coordinated and may or may not be something that is actually directed by the government in Tehran.
Yeah.
In the shades of 2007, when Dick Cheney was pushing so hard for strikes against the IRGC in Iran for their alleged role in sabotaging America's plans in Iraq, even though it was Cheney and Rumsfeld who put the U.S. Army at the beck and call of the Bata Brigade at the service of the IRGC and their proxies there.
But never mind that.
But it came down to George W. Bush and his cool, patient wisdom deciding that he was done listening to Dick Cheney and know he was not going to expand the war into Iran.
And now here we are relying on Donald Trump himself to tell his secretary of state, no, we're not going to do this.
This is a guy who could change his mind on a dime because of why his knee itches or something and to turn around and do something else.
Well, that's right.
And I think that what's so scary here is that, all right, so, so far, Trump has resisted the ongoing efforts to push him into what could very well snowball into an actual war with Iran.
But what I find the most concerning is the fact that it just keeps happening, that he doesn't replace these people.
These people are not, such as Pompeo, such as Grinnell, are not cast aside.
You don't get the sense that they've been, that they've lost their influence.
It's just, well, they lost this round.
But what you do see is that they keep coming back.
They keep making further attempts.
And we keep seeing the United States bringing itself up to the brink of perhaps being in a situation that we might not be able to control the outcome to.
So it's the fact that there's no learning going on here.
There's no evolution of this process.
We just keep staying at the very edge of this turning into something far more dangerous.
And even as, as you pointed out, we have the coronavirus, which is really occupying the concerns of most people in the world right now, that still hasn't stopped them.
They still haven't put this on the back burner.
They haven't put maximum pressure on the back burner.
And maximum pressure in and of itself is designed to bring Iran to a point where the government feels they have no other options than to give in to the U.S. demands.
But I think we all know that that's only one of the possible outcomes of how it may pressure and force the Iranian government to act.
They also may act out in ways that are actually fundamentally more dangerous as a result.
Well, and, you know, they talk about every time there's some protests in Tehran, like, oh, look, it's the fall of the regime.
But you know, even if the protest movement got so bad that the current Ayatollah and president had to step down, that still would not even begin to imply the fall of their entire constitutional system, however it's set up there, their Islamic Republic, as they call it there, any more than if, you know, Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence were all forced to resign.
That wouldn't mean the end of the Constitution.
That wouldn't mean the fall of the American state.
It would just mean, you know, a few top personnel replaced.
There really is no reason to believe, is there, Eli, that the actual regime in Tehran is in any way susceptible to overthrow right now from within?
Of course not.
Are you guaranteed that regardless of what degree of change could occur, that it would be, that it would produce an Iranian government that would be friendlier to the United States and U.S. allies in the region?
There's no guarantee of that.
Right.
And in fact, what's the opposite of that, right?
Whenever they say the policy is meant to achieve this, you look at the opposite and we know from the crippling sanctions era under Barack Obama before the Iran deal of 2015, that the more they clamped down, the stronger the radical right in Iran got.
And particularly the IRGC and the Quds Force.
Because when it's illegal to sell oil, guess who are the only people who can break the law and get away with it?
The Special Operations Brigade.
And so they're the ones consolidating.
They and their cronies get to consolidate power over what little of the economy is still operating.
And everyone who was a separate power faction, any powerful business leaders who were outside of that group, they all go bankrupt.
All of their power ends up being much more limited in response, too.
Well, and let's also look at this in terms of not just the scenario of the resignation of high level leadership.
Let's look at it just in a more day to day political context in Iran.
You have a leader like Rouhani, you have a foreign minister like Javad Zarif, and they've been severely debilitated internally because they stuck their necks out for the Iran deal.
They said, we have an opportunity to actually have a better relationship with the United States.
We're going to have to give a little to get a little.
And now the hardliners have been emboldened.
The critics of the Iran deal have been emboldened because they always said the United States simply can't be trusted, it can't keep its word.
And Zarif and Rouhani said, well, but I think that we have an agreement here that will be upheld.
They're in a tough spot.
So if your goal was to try to moderate the so-called regime in Iran, probably abrogating from the Iran deal and imposing maximum pressure sanctions, even while the IAEA says that Iran has still not made the decision to pursue a nuclear weapon, is a pretty egregious strategy to pursue, unless what you're actually pursuing is not to moderate Iran or to ensure that Iran doesn't develop a nuclear weapon, because the JCPOA was probably the best shot at achieving that.
If your goal is actually to try to stoke the environment for an actual war.
Right.
As ever, the moderates are the enemy.
And the worse the extremists can be empowered in Iran, the better for the war hawks here to say, see, I told you so, what terrorists these guys are, etc.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Hey, guys, just real quick, if you listen to the interviews only feed at the Institute or at scotthorton.org, I just want to make sure you know that I do a Q&A show from time to time at scotthorton.org slash show the old whole show feed.
And so if you like that kind of thing, check that out there.
Hey, guys, here's how to support this show.
You can donate in various amounts at scotthorton.org slash donate.
We've got some great kickbacks for you there.
Shop amazon.com by way of my link at scotthorton.org.
Leave a good review for the show at iTunes and Stitcher.
Tell a friend.
I don't know.
Oh, yeah.
And buy my books.
Fool's errand, time to end the war in Afghanistan and the great Ron Paul, the Scott Horton show interviews 2004 through 2019.
And thanks.
Hey, guys, check out listen and think audio books.
They're listen and think.com.
And of course on audible.com.
And they feature my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as brand new out inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audio books.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to listen and think audio books.
Just donate $100 to the Scott Horton show at scotthorton.org slash donate.
All right.
So one last question for you.
What's the role of moneybags Sheldon Adelson in all of this, Eli?
Well, Sheldon Adelson, at least in the past, has been a funder of the Foundation for Democracies.
He has been a funder of United Against Nuclear Iran.
Whether he's been an ongoing funder is a point of some question.
He, at Foundation for Defense Democracies, has said that Adelson is no longer a funder, at least in recent years.
And Sheldon Adelson is the biggest funder of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016 and the biggest funder of the Republican Party writ large.
And this all matters because Sheldon Adelson has been quite clear about what his priorities are and what his views are on Iran and on foreign policy matters.
And on Iran, he has said that he thought an effective negotiating strategy to get Iran to give up its nuclear program would be to drop a nuclear weapon in the Iranian desert, as he put it, and say that the second one is going to fall on Tehran.
And how that isn't basically advocating a war crime, it's certainly advocating collective punishment.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has not pursued that strategy exactly.
But I think it tells you who's whispering in Trump's ears, who's telling him what their priorities are.
And you better believe that Trump is going to need Adelson's money again as he draws closer to the election.
So I think this is somebody that Trump and the GOP has to listen to very carefully.
This is somebody who has openly said that one of their top priorities is U.S. policy in the Middle East, specifically as it relates to Israel, and that he believes, essentially, that Iran should be wiped off the map, or at least threatened with that.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we're all out of time here, but I want to thank you so much for your great work and your time again on the show, Eli.
I really appreciate it so much.
Thanks so much for having me.
All right, you guys.
That is the great Eli Clifton, founding partner over there at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
That's ResponsibleStatecraft.org.
And here's two very important ones for you.
Amid coronavirus outbreak, Trump-aligned pressure group pushes to stop medicine sales to Iran.
And here's the follow-up.
Collective punishment has always been the stated goal of Iran sanctions hawks.
