Scott Horton on Lex Fridman: Why Saddam Hussein Was CIA-Made

1. 0:00 – 0:45

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Scott Horton. He's the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of endtwar.com, co-host of Provoked, and host of the Scott Horton Show on which he has done over 6,000 interviews since 2003. He's the author of Provoked, Enough Already, and other books and articles that have, over the past three decades, criticized US foreign policy, especially in regard to military interventionism and the military-industrial complex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Scott Horton.

2. 0:45 – 53:43

   From the Cold War to the War on Terror

   1. LFLex Fridman0:45

      I think one of the darkest and most disturbing chapters of modern American history is everything that happened around conducting the so-called Wars on Terror. I think, to me, it was a wake-up call. I think it was a wake-up call to a lot of Americans in understanding and seeing the military-industrial complex and seeing what the government's capacity is to mislead us into war and to continuously erode basic human freedoms. Uh, if I can, allow me to list some of the estimates from the Cost of War Project from Brown University just so we understand the cost of these wars. The post-911 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen led to an estimated 900,000 to 940,000 direct deaths and 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths. And the cost, in terms of dollars, was $8 trillion with $2.2 trillion on Afghanistan and $2.9 trillion on Iraq and, uh, Syria and the result on every front, as we'll talk about, I think it's fair to say they did not accomplish its purpose, and in fact, if we even just look at the human toll of the people of Afghanistan, I was also looking at the, the numbers before the war and after the war. Percent of Afghans facing food insecurity went from 62% to 92%. Percent of children under five experiencing acute malnutrition went from 9% to 50%. Percent of Afghans living in poverty went from 80% to 97%. So it was extremely costly for Americans, and it was extremely costly for Afghans. As you do in your book, Enough Already, uh, can you lay out how, the full history, the full context of how it is that the American people were misled into this War on Terror that was so costly in so many ways?

   2. SHScott Horton2:39

      Yeah, well first of all, thank you for having me again. It's great to be with you on the show. One important statistic, uh, that you could mention from the Cost of War Project as well is 37 million people displaced from their homes, right, and the same group, um, it was... Well, 'cause I'm telling you this like at least five years ago, God, it's the future now, this, this may have been seven, eight years ago that they did a study that determined that 30,000 American servicemen had blown their own brains out since then, well, one way or the other, deliberately crashing their motorcycle or whatever it is. So, talk about the cost of war, that's far beyond, you know, the actual deaths in the war. We had about 4,500 in Iraq and about 2,500 in Afghanistan of just official airmen, marines, and soldiers on the ground killed plus contractors and all that.

   3. LFLex Fridman3:27

      So that's speaking not just to the things that can be measured, but you can just imagine the, the scale of suffering that's going on in the veterans' minds.

   4. SHScott Horton3:36

      Yeah. And you know what too? Like, you would've guessed this probably, right? You probably know more about this subject than me, but it was a New York Times headline, I think yesterday, was... Oh my God, look at... Or maybe it was the Wall Street Journal. Look at this insane list of the kinds of drugs that all these depressed soldiers get put on. There's 15 different psychoactive drugs all to temper the side effects of the others and whatever, where, you know, and then they say that this could lead to suicide because of course we know that, right? They even have to say that on TV sometimes that some of these drugs cause suicidal or homicidal obsessions and this kind of thing, that we know that's one of the side effects, so some percentage of these guys might've made it if the government healthcare system hadn't helped them in the end is another bitter irony, you know? Um, the whole thing is just... Y- you know, you said we got nothing out of it, I, I said half in jest but it is serious but it's also, it, it shows by relief what a disaster this is. That the only thing we did get out of it, like literally, was advancements in prosthetic limbs for amputees whether they lost their limb in war or otherwise. Like, if you wanna boil it down, what did anyone get out of this other than, you know, some people got a dividend check from Lockheed or that kind of thing, but that's not to the benefit of the society whatsoever, so that does not count. You want to talk about what society got out of it, what America got out of it? We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before. That's it.

   5. LFLex Fridman5:03

      I don't think there's any more clear illustrations of the complete failure of the military-industrial complex. Ho- how did this begin? How do we get into this?

   6. SHScott Horton5:10

      Yeah. Well, so I'll try to tell the somewhat fast version, although, Lex, that's the kiss of death every time I say that.

   7. LFLex Fridman5:16

      Please.

   8. SHScott Horton5:17

      We'll go through...

   9. LFLex Fridman5:17

      Please go the slow version.

   10. SHScott Horton5:19

       Okay, so the slow version is... We'll start with the end of Vietnam, okay? So, one major aspect of the end of Vietnam was that Richard Nixon felt like he had to bribe the military-industrial complex some other way, and so one of the things that he did was he turned to the Shah, Reza Pahlavi in Iran, and asked him to increase arms sales. Now I guess I could go back. I think everybody knows that the CIA, uh, helped with the coup of 1953 to reinstall the Shah, who was the son of the last dictator and had already been in for a while, and they put him back in, and so now this is, uh, in... That was in '53, so now this is in the early 70s, 20 years later, and Nixon's saying, "Hey, you know what'd really help me would be if you would buy a bunch of fighter jets." So I think it's kinda n- notorious, right, that Iran still has F-4s and F-14s. Well that's where they got them from, was the Nixon and Ford administration and this push to do that, and the Shah was apparently pretty obsessed with looking very first world with his very fancy first world army that he couldn't really afford, and it helped to destabilize his regime somewhat. And then, I don't know the full extent of America turning on him before the revolution, but I know that by the time of the revolution in 1979, he was sick with cancer and very sick, and the Americans secretly knew that. CIA knew that, you know, but it was not public knowledge, that it was whatever, stage four or whatever, he was doomed. And so they knew the revolution was coming and they were trying to figure out how to handle it, and there was, the revolution was coming anyway, and it wasn't just, "There's going to be a change of leadership." When we say revolution here, we mean mobs in the street demanding an end to the old regime in huge numbers, right? A very large scale popular revolution. And they're trying to figure out how to get the handle on it. Some of Carter's critics said what he should have done was have the military just massacre all those people. "That'll shut them up." Or like, you know what I mean? They were trying to figure out what to do. Well, the CIA and the State Department told Jimmy Carter, "Listen. This Ayatollah Khomeini, he's not so bad. We know this guy. He was part of a group of Shiite clergy who helped to agitate against Mosaddegh in 1953, and so we have at least some contact and w- we think that we can deal with him." And-

   11. LFLex Fridman7:24

       Did they actually believe that?

   12. SHScott Horton7:26

       I, I think so.

   13. LFLex Fridman7:28

       Is this incompetence or malevolence? Like, how does-

   14. SHScott Horton7:31

       Hmm.

   15. LFLex Fridman7:31

       ... this whole process happen that you go into this process of regime change and keep installing people that are creating more and more, uh, instability and destruction in the world, and then you use that to then justify invading and starting wars? How does this happen?

   16. SHScott Horton7:51

       Well, there's a lot of things, and the whole time we, in our discussion here we'll be talking about a massive conspiracy of interests at play all the time, but this is... And I've never read a bunch of books about this. I probably should at least interview these guys. Uh, you'd be interested in this if you don't already, uh, know the subject. It's public choice theory. It's kind of a branch of libertarian political economy studies that says that essentially one of its major aspects is that there really is no national interest the way you and I might think of it sitting here hashing it out ac- across the table, because what becomes the national interest is the interests of the people in charge of making the decisions for the nation. And so they all ultimately are private choices, aren't they? And the national interests become subsumed by what's good for me now, and so telling all my bosses they're all wrong is not good for me now, and on the very basic level. You know, I've read quite a few books just from former insiders like Daniel Ellsberg and other people like that. Ellsberg tells the story of where he's the deputy undersecretary of state for making up nonsense or whatever it is, or defense of the... No, no, state, I believe, and his whole job is making his boss look good whether he ag- agrees with him or not, and then the hope is that next year he'll be in his boss's position and his boss will move up one, and then he'll, his job will be making his boss look good then. And how, and he explains how the truth and reality just gets washed out of this, right? Um, another famous one, or should be famous, is my friend David Hardy who wrote the best book about the Waco massacre. He was a great lawyer and he had been a former interior department cop, and he said there's truth and there's falsity. Like, that's the world we live in. But in government work there's our position, and our position takes place on an entirely different plane than truth and falsity. Our position is the thing a bunch of people in the room agreed that they would say and do as they can in committee, like come to a consensus, and then a lot of times once those decisions are made, now to go back on that decision means that you are attempting to disgrace the people who led the decision making on that thing and say that they were wrong and they shouldn't have done the thing they did. Now they gotta do this instead. And so you see just an absolute unwillingness to make change, and this is something that capitalism ultimately, like everybody's got ego problems, but ultimately the boss has to look at an accounting sheet and say, "This isn't working, so I'm gonna have to swallow my pride or go out of business," right? In government it's not like that. The worse they do, the better off they are. This is why it was the soldiers in Vietnam called the military itself, the army itself, the self-licking ice cream cone because it means that they cause chaos but then chaos is their job is to go and fix that. And so, you know, and if, and if you're a government bureaucrat getting paid way above the market, then what do you want to do? Go get a job? Um, a great example of this I cite in the book is at the end of the Afghan War, there were multiple military, uh, officers, like not too, too high but like high enough to be quoted by the news saying, "Well, now that that's over, we're looking for other things to do, so we're gonna pivot to Africa and go find some Islamists there because we are looking for ways to stay globally engaged." Because of course that's their interest to do. Whether that's good for Africa or good for the American people is just, it's kind of a separate question that they're not really dealing with, and so I think that's a huge part of it. I mean, one of the things was William Sullivan said that, "Well, Khomeini, he's like the Iranian Gandhi." Well, first of all, he's not a pacifist, but second of all, didn't Gandhi kick the British Empire out of India? So what are you saying? You're deliberately putting in a guy who's gonna limit your influence there and is gonna declare independence for you, from you. How are you gonna handle that? Like, they don't seem to think this through, and I, I have to say, uh, one of the great disappointments of growing up is you find out that the rest of the adults aren't so smart. They're just regular dudes like you, and I think a lot of times state department people might have very advanced knowledge. Doesn't mean they have very advanced wisdom. You know, there's something else Daniel Ellsberg talks about is when you have access to classified information then you don't pay any attention to anybody who doesn't because what do they know? You know all these things that they couldn't possibly be taking into account, so you immediately close your circle of people who you listen to. And I'll tell you a great example of this from my own experience was I interviewed a CIA analyst, uh, uh, apparently a pretty important executive at one time in the terror war named Cynthia Storer.And I asked her, I forget if it was in the interview or not, I hope I'm not, like, speaking out of school, I believe it was in the interview, that I asked her about, well... I can't remember the exact context, but I asked her about, "Well, don't you read Patrick Cockburn?" And she goes, "Who's Patrick Cockburn?" And I go, "Who's Patrick Cockburn? Patrick Cockburn is the most important Anglo in Iraq. He's the one who understands all of this stuff, more and better than all of y'all, and he writes in The Independent. You can read it for free, just register with your email address, for God's sake man. I can't believe..." And she's like, "Who even is that?"

   17. LFLex Fridman12:58

       So, a lack of basic curiosity, a rigor of research-

   18. SHScott Horton13:01

       Yeah.

   19. LFLex Fridman13:01

       ... understanding the situation.

   20. SHScott Horton13:03

       And she could know a lot of secret things, but without understanding what he understands, she does not understand what she needs to know. I can promise you that much, you know?

   21. LFLex Fridman13:13

       I think it's a basic lack of humility, the ego grows, the power grows, then you, to self-preserve, to maintain power, you start deluding yourself in that, in those closed rooms. You start shutting yourself off from the, uh, reality of the world.

   22. SHScott Horton13:27

       Mm-hmm.

   23. LFLex Fridman13:27

       And then as, as your own delusion drifts, you're more incentivized to grow that delusion. Incentivized to hide, to do secrecy, and then it just goes off.

   24. SHScott Horton13:38

       Mm-hmm.

   25. LFLex Fridman13:38

       And that's, that's why I was hoping you could speak to, um, more to Daniel Ellsberg. So the importance of somebody like that, so it sounds like if we think about the machinery of how this happens, it feels like heroic whistleblowers are essential to this process. If we talk about Snowden and Assange, and, uh, one of the OGs is Daniel Ellsberg.

   26. SHScott Horton13:58

       Mm-hmm.

   27. LFLex Fridman13:58

       Who, uh, just reading here, was an American military analyst, economist, and renowned whistleblower, best known for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Can you tell me about who he was and the importance of him?

   28. SHScott Horton14:09

       Oh, yeah, well, he's, uh, absolutely brilliant guy. I'm proud to say I was a friend, you know, for 10, 15 years there, I don't know, l- quite a while. So, he endorsed my first two books, I'm very proud to say, and, um, and he did not have a chance to read Provoked, unfortunately. But I know he would've liked it 'cause we were email buddies, and I know that he, uh, thought very much along the same lines as me and John Mearsheimer and others, you know, as, as people are probably familiar. Well, I think we'll get more into that. But, um, on that issue, he was great. But, um, he was a brilliant genius and, and he was a nuclear war planner. That was his second book, was called The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, and he had liberated a bunch of documents about nuclear war as well, but he had decided with his, uh, quote/unquote "co-conspirator" that they should just focus on Vietnam first, that's the thing that, it matters the most right now, and that was the Pentagon Papers. And then, all the papers that he had hidden away, he gave them to his brother and his brother lost them, and so then he decided later, "You know what? I remember enough of this stuff that I can go ahead and just write it from memory." And he was so brilliant, dude. I mean, I don't know what his IQ was, but I know his father built the first, um, assembly line for the atom bomb, and they asked him if he would do the same for the H-bomb, and he refused for moral reasons. So, that was his background in the first place, and he's just such a great guy, man.

   29. LFLex Fridman15:33

       So, he's the person who was able to see the situation. Like you mentioned, like, that room, and in that room, understand that there's some shit that's wrong that's going on here-

   30. SHScott Horton15:43

       Yeah. Yeah.
3. 53:43 – 1:21:48

   Iraq War 1

   1. SHScott Horton53:43

      yeah. No problem. So, um, Iraq War I. So America gives, like, a flashing yellow light to Saddam Hussein, their client, that- to go ahead and, and take back the northern oil fields. And- Oh, I left out one piece, was when I was talking about the left hand and the right hand. Wolfowitz worked for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon at that time, and he was always an Iraq hawk. And he had warned, m- maybe not knowing that the CIA or, or that Carter was encouraging it explicitly, but, um, uh, he had warned that Saddam was gonna attack Iran back in 1980, so he was always an Iraq hawk, and he was very worried that Iraq was gonna invade Kuwait, and he convinced Dick Cheney that we should make a statement telling Saddam not to do it. But then, um... Oh, I'm gonna think of his name in just one moment. Pete Williams, who later became the NBC News reporter, he was the Pentagon spokesman at that time. Isn't that funny how that works? Uh, if you go back in time, that's how it worked. Um, he was Pentagon spokesman, and he made a statement where he seemed to walk back their warning, which was probably just incompetence, right? He didn't know exactly what he was doing, but the way that he phrased it was softer than the way they had phrased it. So then they were like, "Oh, man," and they tried to get George Bush to write a letter. I- I believe it was like this, that Bush sent a letter, but then they thought, I believe Cheney and Wolfowitz thought, "It's too conciliatory. It's not clear enough that we're saying, 'Don't you do it.' So send another letter." But by then it was too late, and Hussein went ahead and rolled in.So, this is from all very elite accounts of the story from the inside, you know, these different books and whatever I read and all that. Um, th- this version of the story, and then you can see if you check the timeline where for the first few days they weren't threatening to do anything about it. Colin Powell chaired the National Security Council Meeting. He was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they announced the first day, "Well, they better just not move on Saudi Arabia. You roll into Riyadh, you got trouble with us, bub," but they were essentially prepared to accept the invasion of Kuwait.

   2. LFLex Fridman55:43

      It's crazy that Cheney was involved with all this 'cause then the story continues. (laughs)

   3. SHScott Horton55:47

      Right. So, yeah, he's- he's Secretary of Defense at that time, so.

   4. LFLex Fridman55:51

      That's wild.

   5. SHScott Horton55:52

      Um, he, um... And he was the only one in the government at that time who was not from the Reagan Administration. He had been in the Congress. All the rest of these guys were Reagan's guys. The vice president was now the president. Colin Powell had been National Security Advisor for Reagan, he's now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then you have James Baker was Treasury Secretary, he's now Secretary of State. Like, this is Brent Scowcroft, I forgot ex- maybe he was Deputy National Security Advisor under Reagan, now he's National Security Advisor under H.W. Bush. So this is the third Reagan term without Reagan, basically, is... And Cheney would have been the newer guy and tended to be more hawkish, and in this case, was like hawkish trying to stop the war from breaking out in the first place. In that sense, was more concerned about the- the danger of the thing and whatever.

   6. LFLex Fridman56:39

      Sorry if this is a distracting question-

   7. SHScott Horton56:41

      No, it's good.

   8. LFLex Fridman56:41

      ... but can we talk about the- the birth and the evolution of the Neocon movement? How does it connect to this?

   9. SHScott Horton56:46

      Yeah, we can mention here that, you know, there are... When I go through and- and look at, like, who were all the worst hawks on Iraq War I, many of them were the Neoconservatives.

   10. LFLex Fridman56:54

       Mm-hmm.

   11. SHScott Horton56:54

       So we probably shouldn't get into that whole, like, biography of a movement here or whatever, but they certainly were very much in support of this intervention in Desert Storm, or Iraq War I, as I call it. I'm trying to get that to catch on 'cause we're at Iraq War III and a half or IV now, so, like, gonna have to keep these things straight somehow.

   12. LFLex Fridman57:10

       But some of the same characters that were responsible for Iraq War II.

   13. SHScott Horton57:14

       That's right, because, of course, Clinton's in there for a while, but then it's President Bush's son is the next president. He brings Cheney and Powell with him, and then all this other stuff. But hold your horses now, be patient. So what happens is Margaret Thatcher comes to town-

   14. LFLex Fridman57:29

       Yes.

   15. SHScott Horton57:30

       ... and she gives... This is her people's term for it. She gives Bush Sr. a backbone transplant and she says to him, "Don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush." In other words, calling out his manhood, and she's a woman, so... And from a smaller, weaker country, and so what's he gonna do now? And that's when he says, "Yeah, this will not stand!" Just out of his own personal embarrassment. Speaking of Bill Hicks, this was a Bill Hicks joke, that this was the Wimp President. It was the cover of Newsweek, Wimp President, and apparently that stuck in this guy's craw a little bit, "I'll show you who's a wimp." And he had to go and really feel like he had to do something about that, and when Margaret Thatcher called him out, instead of being prudent, as he would say, and patient and conservative, he went, "Nuh-uh, I'm tougher than you, lady. I' show you how tough I am. I'll do a big tough thing." But meanwhile, what did America care about Kuwait, right? They had, uh... Britain had interests in Kuwaiti oil and the Kuwaiti royal family, His Highness Al-Jaber, had investments in British debt, but what do I care about that, Lex Fridman? Not one bit, you know what I mean? But that was a big part of how the war started, so after the first three days, they said, "We're not going. It's- we're gonna... They're not gonna invade Saudi. We're warning them, they better not invade Saudi," or whatever, and it was after that, that they decided, "Okay, now we are going." And then once they decided that, they refused to negotiate in good faith for the rest of the time.

   16. LFLex Fridman58:52

       Mm-hmm.

   17. SHScott Horton58:52

       And Noam Chomsky did the best of documenting this, but what did he document? He documented, like, 10 different sources from the summer of 1990 through January '91 where the Americans refused... The- the Bush Administration and Washington DC refused time after time after time after time after time to negotiate in good faith with Saddam to get him out of there peacefully, because once the gauntlet was thrown down, now we have a big set piece battle. Now we're gonna go in there and we're gonna rock 'em, and I have the quote from Brent Scowcroft in there. This was long an accusation from some liberal types that you might dismiss, but it is true. It was literally e- an explicitly stated part of their thinking was, "We have to defeat Vietnam syndrome, the reluctance of the American people to do things like this. We gotta give 'em one that we can do, that'll be short, that'll be sweet, that'll be fun, that'll be easy. Then we can hold a big ass parade and be victorious again like the old days, rebuild that martial spirit and make that normalcy in America, not the post-Vietnam anti-militarist malaise that you remember from the '70s and '80s. Now, it's time to get back to work remaking the world and give s- give the American people something to believe in again." And Bush Sr. then, after the fact, said, "By God, we kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all." So a huge part of it, and if you think about Iraq War I to this day, people still think of it as, like, short and sweet, and we used all this space age technology and- and we whooped 'em good, right? And Colonel McGregor and Daniel Davis and C- and General McMaster, then of lower rank, they went in there and won the big tank battle of '73 Easting and showed the superiority of American tanks versus Soviet tanks and all of these things that were so much fun for them, such a big deal for them at that time, that they wanted to, again, for our nation's overall long-term interests, or what was good for them, their donors, their benefactors, and the- the- the... Essentially, the psychological warfare campaign they w- they wanted to wage against the American people, that, "This is what we're here for. We go and rescue helpless little countries like His Royal Highness Al-Jaber's monarchy in Kuwait so we can reinstall the monarchy, because everybody knows how much superior they are to fascist dictatorships like the Iraqis have."... that we've supported for the last decade, by the way, including helping him gas people, not just (laughs) while he gassed people, while he's gassing his own people, supposedly the Kurds in the Anfal campaign, and the- r- along with the Iranians and the rest. Um, but now, he's Hitler. Now, he's gonna roll on Saudis, he's gonna take over... The next thing you know, he's gonna take over all of the Middle East resources. He's gonna build up a thousand-year reich, and roll on Paris. M- huh? Saddam Hussein is? And that was the way that they put it, and they absolutely lied us into war. They claimed that he had lined up his massive armored tank divisions on the Saudi border and was preparing to roll on Riyadh, and that was a lie. It was, the St. Petersburg Florida Times, uh, hired a Soviet company to... or maybe the Soviet government, to provide the satellite photos and show that there's nothing but empty desert out there. You know, they'd seen a couple patrols near the border, whatever, there's nothing like armored divisions preparing to expand the war into Saudi Arabia. They knew they were lying about that and in fact, the St. Petersburg Florida Times published that, like, a week and a half before the invasion. And AP, Reuters, CS- CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, whatever, all refused to run it and just buried it. And the other thing was, a major part of this, was... and it's amazing. It sounds so silly now after everything going on, uh, and that's gone on since then, but it was a huge deal. They did the Iraqi Incubators Hoax, where they brought in a girl who claimed to be a nurse, who said that she was in the hospital in Kuwait City when the Iraqi soldiers came in there, stole the incubators, threw the babies out of the incubators onto the cold floor to die, and then ran off with the incubators. Whether to just destroy them out of sadism or to bring them back to Baghdad w- 'cause they have a big incubator shorter in Baghdad, she didn't say. But it turns out she wasn't a nurse and she wasn't even in the country at the time of the invasion. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, and the thing was a 100% hoax. 0% of it ever happened, but Amnesty International vouched for it and said it was true, and so that was all you needed. So George Bush repeatedly brought this up and said, "See? This shows that Iraq was determined to systematically dismantle Iraq, that this isn't just an invasion, it's these horrible crimes against humanity, and what would we do if they were doing it to us? And, oh, we have to help the poor people." And they... That was a big part of what they used to beat people over the head about that war. And the other one was, and they learned this from the focus groups, was we have to threaten the American people with nukes. That even with moral atrocities like the Incubator Hoax going on, that Americans were still like, "Ah, I don't know." You know? Um, like Richard Pryor said in 1986, he had a bit where he stops joking and he just says, "Ain't it weird? Like, we sick on the Germans and the Soviets and now we're bombing Libya? Does that sound right? Like, they can't fight back even, like, it's just weird." Seems weird. So people needed a real reason to go, and that was atom bombs and the... and so people forget this now 'cause, uh, w- Iraq War II takes the place in their memory, right? But in Iraq War I, they also alleged repeatedly that Saddam Hussein was working on nuclear weapons or he very well could be-

   18. LFLex Fridman1:04:35

       They did.

   19. SHScott Horton1:04:36

       ... and this was one of the reasons why we had to go. Now, here's the screwed up part about that. They were lying, but they turned out to be telling the truth accidentally, because in fact, what they found out in the aftermath of the war when they occupied Southern Iraq was there was a bare, but a beginning of r- the beginnings of a nuclear weapons program there.

   20. LFLex Fridman1:04:53

       In the '90s.

   21. SHScott Horton1:04:53

       Very, very early. We're talking '91, right? Early '91 at the end of Iraq War I. So what happened was people always cite the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981 and say what a great success it was. No, that was a IAEA safeguarded facility. That was not producing weapons grade anything of any kind, and when they bombed it, all they did was drive his program underground. Now, it became a nuclear weapons program, and it was only a coincidence that America, after launching Iraq War I, found his secret program that the CIA had no idea about. And so this became a major consequence and here's why. Because Dick Cheney would later cite this and go, "Well, if the CIA can't find it, that doesn't mean it's not there. Remember that one time?" And so it became a big part of the Hawks' talking points after that. The- if the CIA claimed- like, confirmation bias again. CIA agrees? Then they're right. CIA disputes? Then yeah, well, we don't have to listen to them, right? Even when they're the ones that they cite as the authoritative source for every positive claim they're making.

   22. LFLex Fridman1:05:51

       So the playbook, even with, uh, Iraq War I, is you try to look for different stories, whether it's anecdotal stories with nurses or it's anecdotal... or it's stories about nuclear weapons, you're trying to find a way to justify war.

   23. SHScott Horton1:06:05

       That's right.

   24. LFLex Fridman1:06:06

       And the same playbook was applied-

   25. SHScott Horton1:06:08

       Yep.

   26. LFLex Fridman1:06:08

       ... in the second Iraq War.

   27. SHScott Horton1:06:10

       Yeah. And, and, and, and back to Noam Chomsky for one second about them refusing to accept Hussein's surrender, was that by the end of the thing, like, he had been demanding, "Come on, let me keep these uninhabited islands at the north of the Persian Gulf, where I could make, like, a oil shipping facility there." Or something like that, you know? He dropped all those demands. Here were his final demands. Right, he wasn't just gonna turn tail for nothing, he had to save some face. So his final demands were, "Promise that America will leave the Middle East and that Israel will leave the occupied territories someday." Right? In other words, nothing. He's demanding nothing. He's demanding, "Please let me keep the skin on my face only," is the only face he's saving, right? And they wouldn't give it to him, because that would've stopped the war from happening, Lex. I'm sorry, man, but that's the history of how that happened. I mean, think about the relative power of the United States of America with the entire UN Security Council on board too. Telling Iraq for six months, five months, "You better give in." And they couldn't figure out a way to get 'em to give in, huh?Yeah, they could too. They didn't want him to give in. You know, they had all of these chances and there were reports in Newsday and the New York Times and whatever, and that had all the stories where he kept making all these offers, and they would just reject them out of hand. In fact, Noam Chomsky talked about how it'd be in the business press in England that, "Oh, look um, oil prices fall because they think there's a peace deal." And, and the business press knows that this is happening, "Oh, it looks like they're going to have a peace deal." And so the price of oil falls from the relaxed tension. And then, nope, right? And then they cancel the thing and they go on anyway.

   28. LFLex Fridman1:07:57

       You mentioned the part which I think is fascinating about defeating Vietnam syndrome-

   29. SHScott Horton1:08:00

       Mm-hmm.

   30. LFLex Fridman1:08:00

       ... and reinvigorating martial spirit. Can you just psychoanalyze the State Department, CIA, people in government, why did they want to reinvigorate the martial spirit?

Episode duration: 10:26:30