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 us, he died.
But 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.
All right, you guys, introducing Sam Husseini.
He runs the Institute for Public Accuracy at Accuracy.org.
And he's the founder of VotePact.org as well.
And he's got a very important piece here that's running at ConsortiumNews.com.
The film Official Secrets is the tip of a mammoth iceberg.
Welcome to the show.
Sam, how are you doing?
Good to be with you, Scott.
Yeah, good to talk to you again.
So listen, this is kind of a big deal, this movie.
I read a thing by Jonathan Schwartz saying this is the best movie about Iraq War II anybody ever made.
Or at least about how they lied us into it.
Yeah, I think so.
You know, it's not to say that it's flawless.
I have some criticisms of it, but I think that it's a very serious account of a very underreported story.
Catherine Gunn, she worked for the GCHQ, which is the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, so-called security agency.
And she got a memo from the NSA in early 2003 as the U.S. and Britain and company were building up to invade Iraq, saying let's have a spy search against the other members of the Security Council in order to ensure that we can get a U.N. resolution authorizing the invasion.
So, you know, let's figure out information that we can leverage, i.e. to blackmail and bully our way to a resolution for war.
She exposed that memo.
It eventually came out in the British Observer.
We did a ton of work on it immediately, trying to get some ripple of media in the United States.
And we weren't able to, but it did get media overseas.
So the U.S. was never able to get that resolution authorizing war beforehand.
And I think some of the credit for that goes to Catherine Gunn.
So there were real ramifications.
They tried to prosecute her, but- Well, wait, and stop on that point right there.
I mean, the fact is that their failure to get a second resolution should have been the end of that.
You can't start a war.
Aggressive war is illegal unless you get France and Russia and China to agree, and then you can.
But in this case, they could not do that.
Right.
Absolutely.
I mean, you know, I mean, I think it might not have been justified either way.
Of course not.
Even if they were able to bribe and bully their way.
Well, it was criminal no matter what, but it was also illegal.
Right.
But it was brazenly illegal.
And they had said repeatedly, Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. at the time, Bush himself, and obviously Blair, repeatedly said that they were trying to get a second resolution publicly, that this was a two-step process because they got one resolution that was a trumped-up resolution threatening Iraq in 2002, but they didn't do it.
So, you know, I mean, a lot of people might not even remember how the war started.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm against even having a U.N. Security Council or participating in any of this stuff, but supposedly they were invading to enforce U.N. resolutions.
So you can't have it both ways, or I guess you can.
Right.
You definitely can't have it both ways.
It might not be, in terms of justice, it's not a sufficient condition for having a war, but it's a minimal condition for plausibly having a just war, if you want to get into that realm of rhetoric.
But, you know, the war started with Bush saying, Saddam, you have 48 hours to get out, and we're withdrawing the weapons inspectors.
So the U.S. cut short the work of the weapons inspectors that it said it was so adamant in defending.
It ended their role and just issued a threat to Saddam Hussein saying, you know, you've got to get out of Iraq with your sons.
And then they put out a statement saying, even if you get out, we're still going to invade.
So there was no meaningful demand at Iraq.
The U.S. abided by all of the demands of the Security Council.
It allowed the weapons inspectors in after, we might recall, some of your listeners might recall, that in the late 1990s, the U.S. effectively ended the previous inspections regime because they bombed it in 1998 on the eve of Clinton's impeachment.
Well, and also in 2002, Saddam had given a 12,000-page dossier over to the U.N., essentially screaming, not guilty, man, here's everything I've got.
Right.
I mean, a lot of this is hinted at in the movie, but not really fleshed out.
I mean, a real honest account of the Iraq war has yet to be made, definitely by Hollywood.
This movie, Official Secrets, which I think opens nationally today, tells part of the story, a sliver of the story of Catherine Gunn and how she released the documents.
It gets into a little bit of the February 15th global protests, quasi-global protests against the war, which I think is a powerful aspect of the story.
But you're absolutely right.
There are so many other— February and March 15th, yeah.
It was huge.
It was millions of people around the world, including probably a hundred and something thousand in downtown Austin, Texas.
I bet it was.
I don't remember what was happening in Austin then.
I mean, New York had hundreds of thousands, if not a million.
I think London had at least two million.
Well, and speaking of media shutouts, I mean, this was essentially a secret.
The Washington Post and the New York Times, if they covered it all, gave it a couple column inches.
Oh, yeah, some hippies showed up and chanted at a curb.
In fact, when it was tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people in major cities all across the country and across the world doing what they could for what it was worth to try to stop the war.
But it wouldn't even get coverage.
And that is such an important part of this, the role that, as you talk about in your article and as you mentioned previously here, that the Post and the Times played in refusing to even discuss this huge scandal of Catherine Gunn's revelation here.
So talk a little bit more about, well, the media and the memo itself, too, please.
Absolutely.
I didn't realize, I mean, I've been following this for some time, but I didn't realize until recently that my colleague Norman Solomon had put out a book called Target Iraq, which pulled together a bunch of our work and some other bits.
And with Rhys Ehrlich, another great anti-war guy.
Right.
With Rhys Ehrlich, they pulled together the book.
It also included an appendix, a couple of appendices that I helped put together, debunking a lot of the speeches and the initial U.N. resolution and some material from FAIR.
And they got it out, incredibly enough, by January of 2003, early 2003.
So a little bit before, several months before the actual invasion, at least a couple of months.
I didn't realize until I saw Catherine Gunn in D.C., one of the D.C. showings of the movie a month or two ago, that she got a copy of that book, as well as another book by Melanne Rye, a British anti-war activist, and read them cover to cover that weekend and then made her decision to expose the NSA document.
And then after she exposed the NSA document, she is an honest person, so she couldn't hold the secret.
She exposed their lies, but she couldn't lie.
So she came forward and confessed who she was, and they were prosecuting her under the Official Secrets Act.
And they eventually backed off.
We got some celebrities to back her up and so on, and the British government backed off eventually.
This is after the invasion finally happened, because fundamentally they didn't want to put the war on trial, which the prosecuting her risked doing.
So that's how she ended up getting off.
Norman, my colleague Norman Solomon, who wrote that book, also questioned media at the time.
Why are you not covering this story, even before we knew her name?
We didn't know her name initially.
All we knew was that The Observer had this document, and we immediately jumped on that.
And then a little bit later, we learned that the British government had arrested a 28-year-old woman.
Still didn't know her name.
And on both those cases, we put out news releases at Accuracy.org, and they're still up there.
And Norman contacted major media saying, why aren't you covering this?
He talked to editors at The New York Times and so on.
And they were just vacuous statements about how we're looking into it or examining it, so on and so forth.
And they ended up giving it virtually no coverage whatsoever.
I think the Baltimore Sun had a couple of good pieces.
But other than that, in the mainstream U.S. press, there was virtual silence.
I think The Post had one small piece sort of mocking it.
Well, of course they're spying at the U.S.
I mean, you might as well say, well, of course Richard Nixon is going to spy on the Democrats.
I mean, when you have that attitude, this totally blase attitude about openly illegal activity, you're just going to excuse anything and everything if that's your agenda.
And indeed, that was their agenda.
But I think that this story, it's kind of remarkable in some ways that Hollywood has gotten into this.
Now, they don't get into it in the movie.
They don't really get into the non-media coverage of it.
There's actually one scene that almost seems to excuse the media coverage.
I don't want to get into too many spoilers.
That was a little disappointing in the movie, that they hyped up a potential excuse for the media.
But on the whole, the movie's remarkable, and it gets into this whole iceberg.
It's just literally the tip of the iceberg of all of the lies and the machinations around Iraq that preceded the Iraq invasion.
I mean, the U.S. government's been lying about Iraq since at least the first Gulf War in 1990, 1991, and continue to the present day.
Look at Joe Biden.
He's out there saying, as soon as Bush launched the war in the way that he did, I was out there against it.
It's a brazen lie by Joe Biden.
He was totally backing up Bush up until the invasion happened and then after the invasion happened.
He co-sponsored a resolution backing Bush just after the invasion happened.
Part of his criticism, Biden's criticism, is utterly hilarious.
He actually says stuff like, well, I criticized him for not bringing on the U.N.
Well, as the Katherine Gunn case showed, Bush did everything possible to try to bring on the U.N.
He failed, both legal and illegal.
They tried to coerce, they tried to bribe, they tried to make a case, but there was no case.
There was no legitimate case for war.
So they tried to spy and bully their way into war and they still failed.
And Biden is saying that the problem is, oh, they didn't get the U.N. authorization, implying that if he had been at the helm, he would have succeeded in charming the French and the other U.N. Security Council members into going along with it.
And then what difference would that have made?
The French would have stopped Rumsfeld from adopting the Battle Brigade or something?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, the whole the whole shebang was illegal.
And somehow, I mean, you sort of needed a craft person like Bush to pull the trigger on the invasion.
Right.
I mean, you know, the Clinton administration had hyped all of the, you know, WMD rhetoric throughout the 1990s, had, you know, done sporadic bombing, had destroyed the first weapons inspections regime.
And then they in effect facilitated Bush going in for the kill, for the invasion.
Biden himself chaired the hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that were totally stacked.
Scott Ritter totally called it out at the time, the sham hearing.
And just, you know, that you had people like, you know, I think Butler was there, the Australian head of the first, you know, UNSCOM, the first weapons inspectors who in effect did the U.S. bidding, the U.S. government bidding in the late 1990s, and totally stacked the deck.
Biden then actually said he put forward an amendment for the war authorization saying we want written, we want a written statement from the president if he decides to launch the war to say, you know, you know, under what provisions he's launching it.
And the Bush administration said, no, we're not going to give you that.
We just want this blanket authorization.
Now, if somebody was the least bit serious, they would have said, well, I'm not going to give it to you if you're not, you know.
I mean, the Bush administration actually telegraphed their intentions by refusing this amendment that Biden did put forward saying, I want a written statement as to why you're launching the war.
Bush administration said no, and Biden still voted to authorize them without any written statement, without any, you know, anything to go ahead and launch war.
So it's like they gave him the keys, they built the car for him, you know, they, you know, provided liquor if he might need it.
And then he goes mauling through a crowd and they pretend to be surprised that he went mauling through a crowd with the car that they built him and the keys that they gave him.
Yeah.
Well, and on the Biden point, you know, there was a piece in Slate where they found his first real criticism of the war was in the fall of 2005.
In other words, after Hurricane Katrina, after the reelection, but after Katrina, when finally everybody gave up on Bush.
And whereas up until then, you were the jerk for doubting the greatness of George Bush's wisdom and leadership in all cases.
As Jeb Bush said, don't you remember the rubble?
This is our greatest leader ever.
And how dare anyone criticize him until finally Katrina was what broke that so-called spell in the media, that that solid narrative in the media.
And only then did Biden come out and go, yeah, you know, geez, if I knew then what I knew now, I maybe would have made him do it better or something.
Right.
Right.
And it was always like that.
It was always it was a mistake to trust Bush.
I mean, it was never self-reflective.
You know, it was never like I really did something wrong here.
There was never that tinge of it.
And he also pushed for splitting Iraq into three without taking into account.
I heard him talk about that numerous times.
I never heard him say who gets the capital city and how many people got to die in the sectarian cleansing campaign to make that effective.
Once you kick the Sunnis out for the supermajority Shia, whose arms are they going to fall into besides bin Laden's?
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And from that and that mentality, you saw the rise of the Islamic State and so on and so forth.
Of course.
I mean, you know, the NPR had a report about Biden's things, you know, where they, you know, you know, they talked about this story being mired in history.
Like, you know, why are you looking backwards and all of this?
As if, you know, the decision to invade Iraq wasn't this monumental decision that has molded so much of the Middle East and so much U.S. foreign policy throughout the entire world.
It's just sort of comical.
And also Biden's remark that he was immediately against what Bush did.
It just totally goes against a deep feature of U.S. society that, you know, when the bombs start dropping, you know, virtually everybody except, you know, people who actually know what they're talking about, you know, line up behind the president.
Certainly the entire, you know, duopoly in Washington do that.
Well, even the NPR piece begins with Biden said this, and then the next paragraph is that's actually not true.
Here's the real record because they couldn't help it.
They couldn't cover for him on that one.
It was just too egregious.
Yeah, there were two NPR piece.
I think you were talking about the first one, which was better than the second one that, you know.
Yeah, I only saw the one.
Yeah, yeah.
The second one had brought in a pollster saying, you know, Biden would be better off not, you know, wasting his energy on these past, you know, controversy, you know, looking backward kind of stuff.
But, you know, the whole Catherine Gunn story, again, we didn't, you know, we didn't know that our work actually helped her to come forward until recently.
Yeah, that's really great.
I told Reese Ehrlich, I emailed him and said, hey, look, Reese Ehrlich in history, you know, you actually did something important here, man, not just covered a lot of important things.
Yeah, it's like the book blurb from God, you know, like, but I mean, it really speaks to the importance of doing outreach to people trying to find ways of reaching out to, you know, people who, you know, have security clearance.
You know, I mean, we did some billboards, you know, about, you know, encouraging people we had, you know, this poster with Dan Ellsberg's face, you know, don't do what I did, don't wait, come forward with, you know, documentation before it's too late.
And so I think that that speaks to a lot of, you know, trying to get material into the hands of people and doesn't have to be in DC elsewhere, who, you know, have security clearance, who, you know, are privy to this kind of clandestine work that they may be in a position of getting information out that can actually, you know, really cause a problem for the war makers.
For other powerful people who are up to machinations that are ultimately very destructive.
You know, go through the ultimate test of physical courage, but these people at the highest level, the officer level, and I'm including civilians too, who have all the power in the world to stand up and come forward and be credentialed enough to say, I demand to be interviewed on Tim Russert.
This is not right and I'm going to tell you why, because I'm the director of the CIA's lab for whatever the hell, right, and get out there and really do it.
And from Colin Powell on down, you had thousands of people and look at the, a lot of generals resigned, but they didn't come forward, you know.
Right.
They didn't come forward and they didn't leak documents.
And they could have, and they could have stopped that war because as we all know, as you knew, and I knew beforehand, the whole thing was an aggressive war, an illegal war, a war that they had to lie us into because there was no legitimate reason to do it.
Right.
And, you know, I mean, my focus during the buildup was, you know, pointing out the lies beforehand.
You know, I think a lot of people picked up the mantra, oh, now we know Bush lied after the war.
And no, you knew that if you were paying attention, you knew that Bush was lying and it was documentable that he was lying before the war.
It was difficult to know with all certainty that Iraq didn't have any WMDs, but Scott Ritter was saying that.
Right.
Well, in each one of the lies, as I think you did a good job back then of demonstrating in real time, each one of the lies was essentially a bunch of smoke blown.
I mean, I think I even found on the Wayback Machine where you can go back and find it in September of 2002, where it was on page A43 of the Washington Post.
I'm pretty sure that's right, A43 of the Washington Post.
But it was right up there in the group of the top headlines on Antiwar.com that every expert in the world outside of this one small office at the CIA says that the aluminum tubes are for rockets, not centrifuges, and that they couldn't possibly be used for such a purpose.
And then, oh, well, no one cared.
They went on to cite the aluminum tubes 5,000 times between September 2002 and the start of the war, as though you're just supposed to be afraid of the tube itself.
As Dave Chappelle said, like, oh, tubes, I got the tubes, I got a tube, tube.
There was nothing to it, but they kept using it anyway, even after it had been debunked in the Post itself.
They had talked to the guys at the Department of Energy, and they were like, you can't use that for a centrifuge.
And where the hell is Saddam Hussein supposed to run a bunch of centrifuges?
You know what I mean?
Oh, his giant Manhattan Project in the desert that they can't find anywhere?
But anyway, so no, I just wanted to back you up that you're not just bragging.
It's really true that I know that you and a lot of other people were debunking these lies one at a time as they came out.
Mobile biological weapons labs and warehouses full of sarin and VX and all the rest of this stuff in real time before the war.
Right, and Bush even would make statements like, you know, this IAEA report shows blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you had somebody like Rick MacArthur call the IAEA, saying there's no such report.
I mean, there were just a whole litany of claims.
On the thing with the tubes, I actually asked Judy Miller, who was sort of the one – it was such a media mantra for war, and she's the one person who sort of paid something of a price for it.
She, in effect, had to get out of the Times, although I'm sure she's had a very comfy living.
I actually asked her, so who was your lying source?
I mean, you know that they're lying now.
The entire claim was false, so why don't you out your lying source?
And she wouldn't do it.
I mean, that's one of the pillars of our hideous brand of mainstream journalism right now.
You should protect a source if they're a whistleblower, if they're exposing true information, especially if it's going against the official line.
But if they're pushing the official line and they're giving you false information, then why exactly are you protecting them?
And this happens repeatedly, and I think that it's a journalistic practice that needs to at least be scrutinized, if not ended.
And we know her source on that big one, the Saddam-seeking A-bomb parts, was Scooter Libby.
And they referred to him as a – she referred to him as a former congressional staffer when he was working directly as a special advisor to the president and the vice president of the United States at the time.
But that was technically true.
It was just she only told a little bit of his job description instead of the whole thing.
Right.
She wanted to hide the fact that he was.
And then famously, should be famously, although we're living far in the future now and people might not know this or they may have forgotten, that that was on a – almost certain on a Friday in – or it may have even been on that Sunday morning.
And then Dick Cheney goes on Meet the Press and cites it and says, see, it's all true, and it was his aide that put it in the New York Times.
Correct.
I was actually outside Meet the Press trying to – I used to go to these Sunday morning talk shows and try to ask questions as they left.
And I was like, what are these people talking about now?
And I was trying to get a question, but of course he wouldn't stop.
So what you were saying earlier about all of these people who had information and didn't come forward, didn't expose documents in real time in order to avert disaster, and we're still in effect living with that because – I mean look at the examples.
I mean Chelsea Manning exposed stuff well after the fact and is still suffering for, and of course Assange is as well.
Both of them sitting in jail right now.
Right.
One for contempt for refusing to testify against the other.
Right, right.
So I mean part of the ostensible reason that these people don't come forward is the possibility of massive retribution if they get caught as Manning did.
So I mean that fight is a very much related fight in terms of ensuring that real information, truthful information can come out in real time to avert utter catastrophes.
I mean Katherine Gunn was incredibly lucky because the case was in Britain, and we lined up these celebrities and there was enough attention, and her legal team found that they could probably put the war on trial.
And I don't know.
I mean I was at part of Manning's trial and that was not attempted.
I'm not sure if they couldn't do that or if they just decided not to.
But you know, so Katherine Gunn is sort of the best case that we have in recent memory.
Donate $100 to the Scott Horton Show and you can get a QR code commodity disc as my gift to you.
It's a one ounce silver disc with a QR code on the back.
You take a picture of it with your phone and it gives you the instant spot price and lets you know what that silver, that ounce of silver is worth on the market in Federal Reserve notes in real time.
It's the future of currency in the past too.
CommodityDiscs.com or just go to ScottHorton.org slash donate.
Hey guys, you know you probably need a new website.
A lot of people do.
What you need to do then is go to ExpandDesigns.com.
The great Harley Abbott and his team over at ExpandDesigns.com.
They'll hook you up with a great new website for 2019.
And in fact what you really should do is type in ExpandDesigns.com slash Scott and you'll save $500.
Has she ever written a book or talked about this?
Oh yeah, she's certainly talked about it.
She's been interviewed fairly extensively.
I found one interview in German TV with Ern Wilkerson who worked with Colin Powell.
And Wilkerson was very sheepish with her for exactly the reason that you said, Scott, because he knew that she did what he should have done.
Right.
Because he resigned eventually rather than stand up at the time, blow the whistle on it, expose the truth, expose the documents about what he well knew were machinations for an illegal war.
And we like him now because he's very upfront about that.
It's his huge regret that he'd gone along with them when he knew better.
Yeah, as best as you can.
And he's been a great anti-war guy ever since then, too.
So that's nice.
Yeah, I know that he's especially done stuff lately on the Yemen war as well as other stuff, but absolutely.
Yep.
All right.
Now, so, geez, are there any more aspects to, I guess, especially the run-up to Iraq War II that you want to make sure to highlight for the audience here?
You know, the movie gets into some of the debates inside the Observer newsroom, how the reporters were able to, how they got the documents in the first place through an activist, Yvonne Ridley, an anti-war activist.
And it also gets into how one of their reporters in D.C. talks to an old retired CIA guy who's obviously, it's obviously referenced to Mel Goodman, who you might know.
He sort of provides them with how to confirm that it's a document, that the document is an authentic document.
He in effect helps them do that.
I did not know that about him.
Yeah.
He wrote a valuable book.
Yeah, yeah.
I wasn't sure who it was.
I wasn't sure if it was Amber Rae McGovern or who.
I knew somebody had to do that, but I wasn't sure who.
It's a very sweet little anecdote that's somewhat accurately portrayed, not totally accurately portrayed in the film, as to how they were able to confirm that the document was an authentic document.
And one other part of it is, the reporter, one of the editors at the Observers, who most vociferously argued against publishing the document, even after the total apparatchik top editor wants to publish it, this guy still doesn't want to.
And now that guy, the one who was the most against it, is now editorial director at BBC.
So it just shows you how it's a microcosm of virtually everybody in media who went along with the war makers, who tried to do the work of the war makers, who in this case was just a tool of Tony Blair, ended up in a very powerful, very prosperous position.
And how every scrappy reporter who was trying to get at the facts and debunk the lies for war ended up quite marginal.
Yeah.
Well, and as you said, the way they treat it, it's like, yeah, you know, it was a thing that happened.
The first Iraq war was good.
The second one, it wasn't as good.
But anyway, that was a long time ago and this and that.
But yeah, no, we're talking north of a million people killed and chaos, political and ethnic and whatever chaos and war spread throughout the entire region ever since then and continuing to this moment.
And for the rest of our lives.
I mean, get real.
The Sunni kings of Arabia are going to be throwing suicide bombers at Baghdad from now on.
They can't take it back, but they can keep throwing suicide bombers at it.
That's never going to stop.
I mean, you know, the mainstream media loves to talk about the symptoms of things, you know, refugees or, you know, something like that.
You don't want to talk about the root cause.
Root cause is U.S. initiating an aggressive war that totally turned a region upside down, arguably intentionally in order to destabilize it.
And, you know, solidifying alliances with Saudi Arabia, with Israel in order to effectively dominate the region and a massive, massive cost of human suffering that we're still nowhere near the end of.
And hey, if it had worked, it still wouldn't have been worth it at all.
That's the other thing.
They haven't gained dominance of the region and they created some chaos, but it's given Iran more power and influence than the U.S. by far in the scheme of things.
Possibly.
I mean, we still don't know where they're going with that.
You know, I mean, we I mean, a lot of the same players, you know, I mean, Bolton was a player in this, you know, the U.N. Security Council was hardly the only target in their run up to war.
There was a guy, Bustani, who was head of the Chemical Weapons U.N.
Asian Brazilian, and Bolton forced him out.
He was part of the Bush administration entourage for war.
And, of course, Bolton is now back in as national security adviser.
You obviously have Abrams back in regarding Venezuela.
Haspel is back in the CIA.
So, I mean, you have a war cabinet now, you know, with a lot of the same players or at least their sort of intellectual descendants.
And so I think that that highlights how relevant this is.
And, of course, you know, there's alternatively threats towards Iran, whether or not they'll actually pull the trigger or whether or not, you know, Trump could end up being like, you know, like the Reagan administration, you know, like a massive military buildup, leaving that to a future administration.
But obviously there are a lot of threats pointing towards Iran.
So it's, you know, it's this concept of endless enemies.
And unless we confront how that's done, the mechanisms for lies, the political players that span the spectrum from Bolton to Biden and beyond, unless those are scrutinized, this is going to continue.
So I think that this story of the Katherine Gunn story with official secrets, I think is a really good step in that direction.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because after all, you know, it's pretty obvious in the thinking of a guy like John Bolton that, you know, even if the results of Iraq War II weren't what they wanted, they can still fix it.
Who cares if Iran dominates Iraq as long as we can take over Iran?
And then it's America friendly Iran that dominates Iraq.
And so it's all good.
Right.
So, I mean, you have one war and then your solution for it is another war.
Of course.
There's some logic to that.
And also, I mean, when we say what their goals are, I mean, I guess in their dream of dreams, they'd like everybody to be subservient to their dictates.
But that's not totally realistic.
So, I mean, some level of chaos and destabilization, I mean, they'd much rather have a failed state in Iraq than an independent Iraq.
Yeah, I agree with that.
You know, destabilization is basically plan B after paradise doesn't work out, after it turns out to not be easy.
Well, we'll just weaken everybody.
As the Israelis say in the New York Times about Syria, let both sides continue to hemorrhage to death.
Encourage to continue in fighting forever.
Exactly.
The Israeli press is more honest on this point, I think.
But occasionally you see it in the U.S. I remember Trump said it in one of the debates in 2016, let them both kill each other, regarding Syria.
So, I think we have to be somewhat mindful of that when we say it's a failure or it's a success.
It certainly isn't its stated goals, but their stated goals are never their actual goals, virtually.
You know, their stated goals are peace and democracy and nonproliferation and all of these things that are not disarmament, that are supposed to be good things.
But that war agenda continues.
I think now it continues at a simmer where you have Trump, who came in on sort of a quasi-isolationist, America first rhetoric, and who started out with a motley crew, has in effect been taken over by mushites, largely, in the administration.
Tillerson is out, Flynn is out, and so on and so forth.
And the whole Russiagate thing, I think, pushed Trump to be more and more obsequious towards the establishment foreign policy line.
So, it's a very dangerous thing.
I mean, they haven't built up a froth for war, for a new war.
We have a lot of wars that are continuing that don't get enough attention paid to them, whether it's Somalia or Syria or Yemen and so on.
But they're not building up towards a new war yet, but they could.
They well could.
And we see it periodically with strikes at Syria, and then the media running behind Trump calling presidential and all of that.
So, those fundamental dynamics are totally there.
And we need to build up the mechanisms to stop that, because whether it's under this administration or the next one, there will be another attempt for another war.
And whatever it is, genuinely building up journalistic and other infrastructures to try to challenge that, I think, is incredibly important.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know what, you do a great job every day and always, you know, year in and decade out here with a laser focus on all of the most important questions and nothing else either.
And I really appreciate it, Sam.
Thank you very much, Scott.
I mean, I hope people check out our webpage, accuracy.org.
Sign up for the morning email or the constant update there.
Yep.
Please do.
We make that available to the public as well.
And you know, I mean, I'm all ears.
You know, I mean, part of a lot of the content is from regular people who are like, hey, did you see this?
You know, there's so much out there.
And there are so few media institutions that are doing serious good work, at least within the United States, that it just requires, you know, constant attention.
Yeah.
All right.
There you go, everybody.
Sam Hussaini, accuracy.org.
Thanks again, Sam.
Thank you, Scott.
Bye-bye.
Yes.
