08/16/07 – Charles Goyette Interviews Scott Horton – The Scott Horton Show

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We have a war on the cheap.
Americans think they can go around the world and maintaining an empire, killing people around the world, and there's no price.
Well, wake up, Bubba.
It's about time Americans realized the price of this war.
Where is the, by the way, where is oil at?
Almost $72 a barrel.
Well, fancy that.
Where's gold?
$674.90.
But when you see gold at $674.90, it tells you something about the Bush dollar, the Bernanke helicopter money.
When you see oil at roughly $72 a barrel, it tells you something about what the market says of the likelihood of us creating more wars around the world.
We're going to talk about that this morning on our show.
Joining us from Austin, Texas, our friend Scott Horton is the driving force behind Antiwar Radio, to which I contribute.
Antiwarradio at antiwar.com.
Boy, we sound hollow this morning.
Scott, good morning, buddy.
Good morning, Charles.
How are you?
I'm good.
You know, I just saw a great action figure, a Ben Bernanke and a helicopter, and it got bags of money.
Oh, tell it.
It's too easy, right?
Well, if I had a money machine, I'd probably have a war too.
Hey, and that's the only way they can have a war if they don't have a central bank.
That's right.
So anyway, which makes, of course, makes us think about Ron Paul.
There is, incidentally, in the Arizona Republic here, which I know you're gravely disappointed, Scott, that you don't get out there in Austin.
Yeah.
But in the Arizona Republic today, on the opinion page, such as it is, they have a column by Clarence Page, Tribune, Chicago Tribune.
Uh-huh.
And I haven't had a chance to read it, but it's called President of Fiberspace.
If the internet could pick the chief executive, it would be Ron Paul.
He's on to something.
Oh, Clarence Page wrote that, huh?
That's very nice.
Yeah, it shows a little sign of progress.
Yeah, absolutely.
This Ron Paul campaign is doing better than I could have ever imagined.
I'm so happy about it.
I couldn't even explain to you how happy I am.
You are absolutely right to be optimistic.
It's better.
I mean, they're all surprised.
And they'll start getting really nervous here before very long.
They'll call Karl Rove in retirement.
How do we stop this guy?
We're in danger of losing our death grip on the Republican Party.
We've got to stop this man.
Well, I just don't know how they can smear him, Charles.
His middle name is Ernest.
He's been married to the same woman for 50 years.
He delivers babies for a living.
I mean, what dirt could they possibly have on him?
He's never traded his vote for a dollar once.
Never.
Not once, I know.
But, you know, it doesn't have to be true for them to smear him.
Well, there's that.
Yeah, there's that.
Yeah.
Hey, I want to mention, just harken back to Grassroots America for us.
Grassroots America and our guest Tina Richards in Missouri this morning.
Just tell people real quickly about this, and then we'll move on.
She is, by the way, a Marine mom.
And she tells the story about how in the middle of the night, a couple of years ago, her son, who was a Marine corporal at the time, working on guard duty, who was back home in the United States, he woke his brother up with a phone call in the middle of the night, says, Mom, I've got a gun in my mouth, and I'm going to pull the trigger.
And she went, What son?
Son, what's wrong?
Hold on a minute, son.
And he says, I've killed too many women and children.
I don't deserve a mom and a sister.
And I guess that's what set her off.
Anyway, you can find out more about Grassroots America and Tina Richards and her story and the September 15th event in Washington, D.C., at Grassroots America 4, the digit 4 us.
Now, Scott Horton, the driving force behind Antiwar Radio, which is a great service available at antiwar.com.
Scott, they're cooking up another war for us, even while we're sitting here thinking we should be ending the first one.
Yeah, you're right.
I keep thinking I'm going to wake up in the morning and find out that the bombing against Iran has started and all of my efforts have been for nothing.
Yeah, and we will remember fondly the Democrats who refused to insert legislation, to pass legislation, reminding President Bush that he had no such authority unless it was specifically authorized.
That is, Iranian war authority unless it was specifically authorized by Congress.
I had an opportunity to do something about that back in March, and they decided they'd rather serve Washington power than uphold the Constitution.
That's exactly right.
All right.
You have been thinking a great deal, and when you filled in for me a couple, three weeks ago or so, you talked about the war with Iran.
I know you're thinking a great deal about the misrepresentations that are being used to justify a new war, and you're in the business of debunking these kinds of justifications.
Scott, where would you start?
Well, I'll start with the nukes.
And you're right, this is where I focus because I just can't stand being lied to.
And, of course, there are no actual reasons to have a war with Iran, only lies.
So that's all they have for us.
And the biggest lie of all is, of course, that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
And, in fact, even the president of the United States, Charles, last week said, well, they're enriching uranium, and we fear this is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program, which is an outright admission that they do not have a nuclear weapons program.
Every bit of their nuclear program is monitored by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.
Iran is a member in good standing of the Nonproliferation Treaty.
They have a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And, in fact, they're even following an additional protocol to that safeguards agreement that hasn't even been ratified by their parliament, which allows the IAEA unfettered access.
And the IAEA, quoting Mohamed ElBaradei, says he has no evidence and, further, no indication that any of Iran's nuclear material has been diverted to a special or other military purpose.
And so that's it.
They're enriching uranium to 3.5 percent.
You can't make a bomb out of that.
If they were to try to embark on a nuclear weapons program now, they would have to kick out the inspectors, withdraw from the Nonproliferation Treaty, and then begin to try to make a nuclear bomb with their first generation junk that they bought at A.Q.
Khan's garage sale, which they can barely even enrich the uranium high enough to make electricity.
The idea that they're on the verge of having a nuclear weapon is just a lie, period.
It is a lie, Charles.
Well, I don't doubt it.
It is reasonable to suppose, though, that in the current environment they'd feel a lot safer if they did have a nuclear weapons arsenal.
Well, I would agree with that.
In fact, if you look at Iran, they're surrounded on all sides by nuclear powers.
Russia, China, Pakistan, the United States, Israel.
And I don't know how seriously to take this.
I guess I don't take it all that seriously.
But the Supreme Ayatollah Khomeini has issued a fatwa saying that it is against Islam to have a nuclear bomb.
And, you know, frankly, they just don't have the technology to do it.
You know, if I buy your rusted old car, you know, sitting in the backyard, I'm not going to be able to win the NASCAR race with it tomorrow.
You know, if I can hit an RBI at the softball game, that doesn't mean I'm qualified now to bat for the Yankees.
It's just apples and oranges.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Okay, well, let's talk about Ahmadinejad.
He is certainly not a force for stability.
He strikes me as being the Iranian equivalent of George W. Bush, always full of bluster and telling us what's on the table and what's not on the table in the future.
Tell me what he is represented to do to upset the apple cart of the Middle East and to destroy Israel.
Well, the funny thing is he is a lot like George W. Bush in his bellicose statements.
Fortunately, his job description is much more like our Secretary of the Interior.
He has no power over the military.
So no matter what he says with his big mouth, Ahmadinejad does not decide foreign policy.
And second of all, the worst thing that he is reported to have said is that the Iranian government vows to wipe Israel off the map.
And when I guest hosted your show a few weeks back, I interviewed Juan Cole, who is a fluent Farsi speaker, who explained that the actual quote was, someday the regime in Jerusalem will vanish from the page of time, which is kind of the same as Bill Clinton signing an act in 98 saying we would like to have regime change in Iraq someday.
Although, in fact, even really less than that because that was actually declaring an official government policy.
Ahmadinejad went on to say that's why we ought to have a referendum in Palestine right now because the Jews will lose and the Palestinians will then own the government there, etc.
He did not threaten military action whatsoever, and in terms of wiping things off the map and what have you, there is no such idiom in Farsi.
He did not say that.
And the news reporters and newspaper writers who repeat that are liars.
All right, the administration is hell-bent to make the case that, in fact, they designated the Islamic Army the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a counterbalance to the, I guess you call it the civilian army of Iran.
They decided to designate them, as you know, a specially designated global terrorist.
They are hell-bent to create, at least in the mind of the American people, the linkage between Iran and the people who pulled off the event in 9-11, specifically Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Well, you are absolutely right about that.
And I fear, and I'm no lawyer, but I fear that that designation of the Quds Force as an international terrorist group is meant to bring war against Iran under the authorization to use military force from, was it September 15th, 2001, or September 13th, or whichever.
They're trying to make this the war on terror.
Well, I'm here to tell you, there are al-Qaeda in Iran, and you know what they're doing?
They're sitting in prison.
Iran has arrested al-Qaeda guys.
They helped us fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.
They tried, anyway.
They arrested al-Qaeda guys in the great peace offer of 2003.
They offered to turn them all over to us in exchange for Samuja Hadid al-Khalq, who are a former, kind of a communist cult terrorist group that used to work for Saddam Hussein and now works for us, that we're using in Iran.
And the closest thing to al-Qaeda that's doing any fighting or has any association with Iran would be Jundala in Pakistan, who are working for the United States, who are Sunni radical jihadists in the bin Laden mold, who are fighting against the government of Iran.
I'm sure you remember, just the end of June, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq threatened full-scale war against Iran if they didn't stop backing the United States back to government in Iraq.
So they are, al-Qaeda and the ayatollahs in Iran are avowed enemies.
They are on Osama bin Laden's list of governments he would like America to overthrow for him.
And here we go.
Scott, you keep confusing us with facts.
Why do you come on the radio and do that?
Well, I know the radio's really not the place for truth, but your show's an exception.
Your show's an exception.
So hang on a minute.
I suppose if it weren't so tragic, one of the comical things would be tilting Sunni, tilting Shiite friends here, killing Americans one week and they're your best buddies the next.
All of this stuff is awfully confusing, but as the administration and Dick Cheney continue to make the case for war with Iran, the business of the Mahdi army is going to come up.
Will you tell us about that when we continue in a moment?
Scott Horton, Anti-War Radio at antiwar.com on The Charles Boyette Show.
K.M. 1100.
Yeah, 751 in the morning.
The Charles Boyette Show is on the air.
Camp Next News Talk Radio 1100, looking at some of the economic news.
Construction of new homes fell to the lowest level in a decade.
Dow's kind of bouncing around.
Down 75, now down 67 this morning.
We're going to talk a little more about the economy, particularly about the real estate economy since the whole micro-economy of the Valley of the Sun is built on the macro-economy of credit and mortgages and construction and real estate.
Twist will join us.
That's her pseudonym.
You can understand why she would use it.
She'll join us on the phone this morning.
Twist from housingdoom.com this morning after the news at 8 o'clock.
In the meantime, our friend Scott Horton, you can hear Scott and the way he does some of the people that he does.
If you will go to antiwar.com and click on on the top right, click on Anti-War Radio at antiwar.com and selected interviews and discussions.
Scott Horton on the line with us from Austin, Texas.
By the way, Scott, I understand you made mincemeat of that moronic newspaper columnist the other day who said that we needed to have another 9-11 event.
This country would be a real good thing for it.
Well, to make a long story short, he didn't know what he was talking about.
It wasn't too difficult.
Yeah, but I heard you really abused him.
You mutilated him.
Well, actually, I kind of fell back because I started the show promising him that I wouldn't henotize him, that we would try to have a civil debate.
Well, I only kind of half-henotize him because I did use facts and stuff like that in my arguments, so it was a bit different than the Sean Hannity show, but I kind of went off and didn't really give him enough chance to respond.
We know what he thinks.
He knows that the prescription from this mad doctor newspaper columnist is another 9-11 event.
It would be real good for us in America.
Well, yeah, so we'll all rally around the president and have more war.
Yeah, that's good.
Hey, so tell me about the Mahdi army and which side we're tilting on and arming people and making friends with people who are friends of al-Qaeda or arming people and making friends with people who are killing Americans and how we scratch our head and can't make up our minds.
I'll try to keep this real brief.
Right now, America is backing the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party.
Those are the Iran factions.
Remember, Ahmed Chalabi was an Iranian spy, and he lied this country into war, and it was for the interests of Iran, and they got the south.
That was who won the election in 2005.
Okay, now the other major faction of Shiites is Mu'tad al-Sadr and the Mahdi army.
Now, they are nationalists.
They're a little bit friendly with Iran.
They're not enemies with Iran, but they are Arab nationalists, Iraqi nationalists, and they do not want the south of Iraq to be spun off into a strong federal-type system in alliance with Iran.
They don't want Shiaistan in alliance with Iran.
They want Iraq.
By the way, let's emphasize that they are Arab nationalists.
While it is so that they are Shia, they are not Persian.
They are Arab Shia, and there are tensions there as well.
Right, and the same goes for the Iran-backed factions.
They are Arabs.
I mean, they're Iraqis, but these are the Iraqis who fled and lived in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, took Iran's side.
The Sadr clan stayed.
That's really the big split here.
It's the Hakim clan versus the Sadr clan.
And so, anyway, America is doing everything it can to back the Iranian factions rather than the nationalists, because the nationalists are trying to form an alliance with the Sunni former Baathists and local religious leaders and with the Kurds.
They're trying to create what they call a government of national salvation, which is what our policy claims to be trying to do, is end the civil war and create a multi-ethnic coalition government in that country.
But our government is fighting them tooth and nail and will not let them create that coalition government, because that coalition government has as its first major demand an end to the American occupation.
And so, the Americans, despite all the rhetoric about trying to end the civil war and if we leave, things will get worse, etc., etc., America is backing the Iran factions above everyone else, because they're the only ones who need us.
And now, David Petraeus and the media are giving this wonderful victory to the surge, because they've capitulated and basically said, OK, Sunni insurgency, we're no longer fighting you.
You're the good guys now.
The terrorists, the dead-enders, the people that are soldiers, 3,500 plus have died, it's almost 37 now actually, have died, 100 have died fighting the Sunni insurgency.
But now, they're not the enemy anymore.
They're OK now, as long as they fight al-Qaeda, which we know has never been more than the tiniest percentage of the Sunni insurgency in the first place.
Unbelievable.
We'll dispense with this one for us, because we're almost out of time.
How about the idea of followers of the president, the numbers that I shudder to think, to estimate.
How about this idea that nuclear war will be a really good thing, because Jesus will come back and we'll get all the Jews in one place, the non-believers, and then they can be obliterated and incinerated or whatever it is, and the rest of us will be raptured?
Well, there's a very small percentage of the American people who believe that, and they're extremely well organized, they're a very important voting bloc in the Republican party, they have tremendous amount of influence inside the military, as you know from your interview with Mikey Weinstein.
And I'm telling you, there's nothing more dangerous than having a foreign policy based on magic and belief, rather than things that exist here in the real world that we can measure.
Well, I'm thinking if we have a nuclear war, and things don't turn out the way that they predict, and Jesus doesn't come back and take the believers up, then the American people will wake up and they'll realize that that was the wrong policy.
Well, we'll all go through the tribulation together and be much wiser for it.
And if I have one second, I want to throw in here with these accusations against Muqtada al-Sadr.
The lie is, first of all, that he is the Iran faction, rather than our guys, the Skiri and the Dawah, Maliki, and those guys are the Iran factions.
And also, mixed with the truth that it solders guys who are bombing our guys with these new EFP explosively formed penetrators.
Gareth Porter at Antiwar.com and at The American Prospect is the number one best source for this, I believe, and he'll be on my show later today.
These IEDs are made, Charles, by Iraqis in Iraq.
They're not being supplied by Iran.
The guy from Jane's Defense Weekly did a whole thing on it.
I did a great blog entry on it.
Well, it's great because of the links to all the information in it on Antiwar.com over the weekend.
The EFPs are not being made by Iran.
And you know, Joe Lieberman just passed in the Senate a resolution condemning Iran, saying that they're already at war with us.
Their bombs are killing our guys in Iraq.
And I'm here to tell you, it's pure lies, Charles, pure lies.
Well, gee, that wouldn't be unprecedented.
All right, I've got 30 seconds.
Scott, I'm going to ask you to handicap for me.
I'm going to ask you to give me the betting line on these guys' ability to pull off, to implement, to enact a war before the end of Bush's terms, a war with Iran.
I don't know of any organized force, really, that can stop Dick Cheney from bombing Iran unless maybe it's the governments in Europe.
Other than that, I don't know of anything that can stop Dick Cheney until he is removed from power.
All right.
Scott, thanks.
You're a great resource.
You do wonderful, wonderful work at AntiwarRadio, at Antiwar.com.
Our friend Scott Horton, hope to speak to you again soon.
Scott, thanks.
Thank you very much, Charles.
Be back.
I don't know whether we'll talk about the war or the economy when we continue on the show.
I think I'll flip a coin here during the news and make an executive decision.