YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Horton

lines on the record: 802
first: 2025-08-24
most recent: 2025-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“They have promised the king, you let us get rid of Saddam and drive him out of Kuwait. And we have this on Dick Cheney's word himself. It's so funny. There's a podcast of Bill Crystal's podcast. Do you know Bill Crystal has a podcast? And he interviewed Dick Cheney. Somebody put this on archive.org before it's gone forever, man. And it's great because they talk about everything except Iraq War II. Don't say a word about it, either of them the whole time. So Dick Cheney explains in that interview to Bill Crystal that he was the one, never even mine James Baker the Secretary of State as Secretary of Defense, he promised King Fodd of Saudi Arabia that we promise we'll leave as soon as the war is over. And now”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is namely a most importantly the Bata Brigade, B-A-D-R, the Bada Brigade is the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is run by at that time a guy named Abdul Aziz al Hakim, who's now dead, but is a very important guy, and he's going to come back up in our story here. So when the Bada Brigade started coming across the border was when George Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and the boys all flinched and said, uh-oh, we, because again, this is the third Reagan term, essentially, right? So we just spent a decade supporting Saddam to contain the Iranian Revolution. Now we're the ones importing it into Iraq. That is a mistake. And so he call it off. He was more cautious and said, let's not do that. But the problem with that was $100,000 Kurds and Shiites were killed. But also, that then became the excuse for America to stay in Saudi Arabia.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't make that big of a deal at it at the time because it was a horrible Bay of Pigs type situation where America told them to do it. George Bush, his own voice on voice of America, encouraged them to rise up and finish Saddam Hussein. The Air Force dropped leaflets over predominantly Shiite Army divisions and the rest of them, I guess, too, and saying, now's everybody's chance to rise up and overthrow this guy. But then they changed their mind. And the reason they changed their mind was, remember when I said 1980, Why is the Dominic Iran? Because some Iraqis were choosing Iran's side in the war. And he was afraid they all were, and that the Iranian Revolution was going to come for him, right? So he conscripted the army and sent them to war against Iran instead. Well, now in the Shiite uprising, those very same Iraqis who'd been living in Iran for ten years and bought on Iran side in the war, they're now coming across the border to lead the uprisings. Does that make sense?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crushing the Shiite uprising. And that's what's going on in the background. So people remember that movie would be probably the most they ever learned about the crush Shiite uprising in 1991. That's fair. You know, that's how it is.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so now we got to put this off one second. I'm sorry, I left out. It's important to go back to the Shiite uprising of 1991 because in the aftermath of Iraq War I, Saddam Hussein crushed the Shiite uprising, which George Borsr Sr. had encouraged. And I'm not sure if you've ever seen the movie Three Kings. I like to bring this up as kind of a touchstone for people because a lot of people learn history just from movies, you know? So the movie is Ice Cube and Marky Mark and George Clooney. And they're soldiers on a gold heist, but they're in southern Iraq, occupying Iraq in the aftermath of the first Iraq War. And in the background,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it's just fascinating. Of course, the poorer Rockies are stuck in the middle of this thing is a big subtext of the story, right? But what's so great about that book is it's all, there's no news cycle stuff in there anywhere. It's all told from the point of view of the highest level military strategists in all three countries. And it started out, I believe, as his PhD and became this thing. But it is just a masterpiece. But anyway, he's the best guy to read about this. And the way that all this transpired, that essentially When the Ayatollah, the mean old Ayatollah, Khomeini, who died in 89, when he would be threatening the Israelis that like, oh, we're going to destroy you one day or whatever, they would be shipping him missiles that day, right? So this was this covert relationship that was going on behind the scenes even when they were, you know, saying very malicious things about each other in public that was really cover for the extent of their covert relationship that was still ongoing at that time.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I said, the Israelis had stayed friends with Iran through the Iran-Iraq War. They had no problem with fundamentalist Shiite Islam then, sold these guys weapons, in fact, treated Parsi shows in his absolutely excellent book, A Treacherous Alliance, which if you haven't read that, you'll absolutely love it. I'm so good. And pull that up. He's one of the co-founders of the Quincy Institute for International Statecraft.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he wasn't a neocon, right? He's an old waspy guy from the older establishment. And he called the neoconservatives the crazies. And he had told General Scowcroft to keep the crazies in the basement. In other words, they're allowed to kill people down in Latin America, but you keep them away from Middle East policy, right? They're not allowed to mess around with what we're doing over there. And I guess here's where let's start talking more about bringing Israel into our narrative here because”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lateral basis just without even an agreement. But you know what? We'll get rid of our class of those same kind of weapons too. So I got to give credit where it's due. He handled the end of the Cold War a lot better than he might have, I guess you could say.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hate to say this because I never was a HW Bush guy and I'm so critical of the all of his Middle East policy and all these things. But in a way you could say he's the most heroic guy who ever lived in the sense of working with the Russians, the Soviets, and then the Russians on these treaties to bring the global stockpile down from approximately 70,000 down to where we have about 7,000 each, which is way more than enough to do you. When the Soviets had 40,000 and we had 30, come on. Somebody's got to do something and Bush Sr. is the man who did something about it. And as I show in the book, well, we're skipping ahead of the other Cold War book here, but he did make unilateral cuts because he didn't have time to do negotiations. So you say made massive unilateral cuts in hopes that Gorbachev would respond in kind, or was it Yeltsin by then? And then I think it was Yeltsin by then. And then Yeltsin did respond in kind and made these drastic cuts on his own.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And before the war on terrorism, they tried for a while, even made Harrison Ford movies out of it and every tried to build up the war against the Mexican drug cartels and the Peruvian drug cartels because we got to have somebody to fight in the 90s while we're trying to get something else going on here, basically, you know, that they don't want to have to get a job. And yet, like Bush Sr., you've got to give them credit for this. He absolutely slashed military spending, slashed the bomber fleets, slashed the military, slash Army divisions and ships and everything. We don't need an anti-Soviet military for a world without the Soviet Union. And he really cut it way, way back, and especially on nuclear weapons.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just clamoring for power. It'd be Germany and Japan. I don't know if you remember this, but when the Soviet Union fell apart, oh my God, Germany and Japan are going to rise back up and take back over the world again.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can enforce what they called the new world order, which was, again, I borrow this from Chomsky, but I found two original citations for it. As George Bush Sr. himself said, what we say goes. So, this is what Biden and them call the liberal rules based international order of global governance, what it means is forget the UN Charter. Forget the UN Security Council. There's the U.S. National Security Council, and everybody's going to bow down and do what we say. It's our unipolar moment, as Charles Krauthammer put it in foreign affairs, and we're going to take full advantage of it. But don't worry, Lex. Again, as Bush Sr. said, the world trusts us with this power because they know that we are good people and we know what we're doing and we only have their best interests at heart we care about them so much and so the world allows us to be the global police force to enforce the law and make sure everything's fair because man what if we stopped holding the world together it would all just fall apart”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 him 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 they would be in the business press in England that, oh, look, oil prices fall because they think there's a peace deal. 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.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 an 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 going to 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. 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 have stopped the warfare.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the IAEA safeguarded facility. That was not producing weapons great 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, bound 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 Hawk's talking points after that. 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.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because in fact, what they found out in the aftermath of the war when they occupied southern Iraq was there was a bear, but a beginning, the beginnings of a nuclear weapons program there. Very, very early. We're talking 91, right? Early 91. At their end of Iraq War I.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We shake 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 so people forget this now because a record too 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. They did. 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.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Zero percent 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 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 are still like, I don't know, you know, like Richard Pryor said in 1986, he had a bit where he stops joking and he just says,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“St. Petersburg, Florida Times published that like a week and a half before the invasion. And A.P. Reuters, CS, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, whatever all refused to run it and just buried it. Then the other thing was a major part of this was, it's amazing, it sounds so silly now after everything going on and that's gone on since then. But it was a huge deal. He 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 because they have a big incubator shorter in Baghdad. She didn't say, but it turned out she wasn't a nurse.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Own people, supposedly the Kurds in the Antball campaign, along with the Iranians and the rest. But now he's Hitler. Now he's going to roll on Saudi. He's going to take over. The next thing you know, he's going to take over all of the Middle East resources. He's going to build up a thousand year Reich and roll on Paris. 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 a St. Petersburg, Florida times, 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 send a couple patrols near the border or 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...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lower rank. They went in there and won the big tank battle of 73 East 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 interest or what was good for them, their donors, their benefactors, and the essentially the psychological warfare campaign that 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 Jabbers 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 while he gas people, while he's gassing his own.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vietnam syndrome. The reluctance of the American people to do things like this. We got to give them one that we can do, that'll be short, that'll be sweet, that'll be fun, that'll be easy, that 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 seventies and eighties. Now it's time to get back to work, remaking the world, and give the American people something to believe in again. And Bush Sr. then after the fact, said, By God, we've kicked Vietnam's syndrome once and for all. So there's a huge part of it. People still think of it as like short and sweet, and we use all this space age technology, and we whooped em good, right? And Colonel McGregor and Daniel Davis and General McMaster.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Bush administration in 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 peace battle. Now we're going to go in there and we're going to rock them. 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 an explicitly stated.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And patient and conservative, he went, I'm tougher than you, lady, I'll show you how tough I am. I'll do a big tough thing. But meanwhile, what did America care about Kuwait? Right? They had Britain had interest in Kuwaiti oil, and the Kuwaiti royal family, his Highness Al Jabur, had investments in British debt. But what do I care about that, Lex Friedman? 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. They're not going to invade Saudi. We're warning them. They better not invade Saudi, whatever. And it was after 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. 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 ninety one.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, because of course Clinton's in there for a while, but then it's President Bush's son, it's the next president, he brings Cheney and Powell with him, and then all this other stuff. Behold yours and be patient. So what happens is Margaret Thatcher comes to town 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, 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 Bill Hicks joke, the cover news week present. Apparently that's stuck in this guy's crawl 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.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can mention here that there are when I go through and look alike who were all the worst hawks on Iraq War One, many of them were the neoconservatives. So we probably shouldn't get into that whole 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 because we're at Iraq War three and a half or four now. So I'm going to have to keep these things straight somehow.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, he's Secretary of Defense at that time. Wild. And he was the only one in the government at that time who was not from the Reagan. 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 with Treasury Secretary, is now Secretary of State. Like this is Brent Scowcroft. I forgot. 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. And Cheney would have been the newer guy and tended to be more hawkish. And in this case, he was like, hawkish trying to stop the war from breaking out in the first place. In that sense, was more concerned about the danger of the thing and whatever.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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're rolling to Riyadh, you got trouble with us, Bub, but we're essentially prepared to accept the invasion of Kuwait.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I'm going to 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? If you go back in time, that's how it worked. He was Pentagon spokesman. 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 believe it was like this, that Bush sent a letter.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is as well. Yeah, yeah, no problem. So Iraq War one. So America gives like a flash and yellow light to Saddam Hussein, their client. To go ahead and take back the northern oil fields. And oh, I left out one piece was, we're not talking about the left hand and the right hand. Wolfwitz worked for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon at that time, and he was always in a rock hawk. And he had warned maybe not knowing that the CIA or that Carter was encouraging it explicitly, but he had warned that Saddam was going to attack Iran back in 1980, so he was always in Iraq Hawk, and he was very worried that Iraq was going to invade Kuwait, and he convinced Dick Cheney that we should make a statement telling Saddam not to do it. But then”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people call him some kind of hater, and it's like, come on. That's because that's all you got. That's the only reason you could call him that is because you got no other thing to say, you know?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, he's a great guy. I emailed back and forth him too. I'm trying to get him on next week, and he just killed it on Tucker the other day, too. He was fantastic on there. He set such a great example, you know?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's the best of a man. He's Mearsheimer's partner on a lot of things. They're basically considered like the code deans of the realist school of foreign policy in America. So they're like, you know, Henry Kissinger, realpolitik, only without the bloody hands and the, you know, the hawkish instinct. I think both would be relative hawks on China compared to me, for example. They're not libertarian non-interventionists, but they're very skeptical of a lot of this misuse. You know, both of them oppose the Iraq war, for example, in the first place and that kind of thing.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saddam Hussein wasn't anticipating a war. He knew he's going to roll right into Kuwait. They couldn't stop him. He was counting on a coup d'omain. So when she says the president doesn't want a war, it sounds like she's saying the president won't go to war with you if you do this, and that he very well could have read it that way, and that was at the very least a flashing yellow light, if not a green light, to go right ahead. And we know that, again, John Kelly and Margaret Tutweiler also made statements essentially downplaying American concerns about what was happening.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now we always had the Iraqi version of that story published in The New York Times. But then we got from Manning and Assange. We got the State Department's version of that document. And so it's a little less explicit as far as how it makes the Americans look, but it's essentially the same. And in there, she says, now listen, George Bush wanted me to emphasize to you that he does not want a war in the Gulf. And so Stephen Walt from Harvard University at foreign policy.com. He said, now listen, in diplomatic language, These things are mathematical formulas. You got to be very careful how you say these things.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't believe that this was the deliberate trap. But in effect it was. I think what happened was it was a matter of, you know, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. There was no real unified policy that had been sent down from on high how to handle this, evidently. And so the CIA and CENCOM were encouraging, which had been created as part of the Carter Doctrine, were encouraging Kuwait to be intransigent against Saddam and tell him to go to hell. While the State Department James A. Baker through Ambassador Glasby and through Margaret Tutweiler and John Kelly, were sending signals that actually go ahead. We don't really care, and we just celebrated April Glasby Day the other day we do every year july twenty fifth, where she told Saddami saying, listen, it's the same thing when I was the ambassador to Kuwait. The Iraq issue and your border dispute is not associated with America. And we have no position on this. You're going to have to settle it.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That where your property and my property butt up next to each other, and we got mineral rights, but we have a shared oil well down there, then we have a quota, how much we pump. And you're not allowed to cheat and pump more out of our shared well than me in any given month or whatever, as per the contract. That's kind of how that thing works. So in this case, it's the same thing over an international border. And the Kuwaitis, at least they're also accused, and I know less about this, but they're accused also of using slant drilling techniques that they've been taught by Americans to drill that way and steal Iraqi oil from the margin. So Hussein's pissed about this at the same time they're putting the screws to him over calling in the war debts.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, okay, the war finally comes to an end in 1989. At the same time, the Soviets are withdrawing in Afghanistan. We're getting to get back to them in a minute. But the war comes to an end. And for the next couple of years, Saddam Hussein is in a struggle over war debts with his creditors, Kuwait, Saudi, and UAE, who are demanding all their money back that they gave him for the war they loaned to him for the war. Now, of course, he feels like he bought that war partially in their defense. And so, and also at this time, oil's trading at twelve dollars a barrel, so he has no ability to repay them, rebuild his country, or do any kind of thing. And they're completely put in the screws to him. And on top of that, this is disputed whether they were literally the Kuwaitis, literally slant drilling under the border, or whether it's really, that's kind of shorthand, I think, usually for they were overproducing from shared oil wells that straddled the border. And when you have a contract,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I gotta admit, I don't remember the story that well. It's very different than fear and loathing, but it's also very good.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I promise you will have a good time. And there's a joke in there about I'm Harris from the Post. He's pretending to be Harris from the post and he's hanging out in the bathroom with Richard Nixon. And I forgot the conversation. It's funny as hell, though.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course There's your authoritative source, everybody. Shane Harris from the post. That's a special inside joke for fans of where the buffalo roams, too. Remember Harris from the post? You ever seen that? The original fear and loathing in Las Vegas with Bill Murray.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now by the official rules of confirmation bias, when Shane Harris admits something that I'm accusing, that means it's definitely true. If I ever disagree with him while he's a liar from the post. Got that?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right there. Where did Iraq get its weapons of mass destruction? And I had mentioned this, I guess, on the Tucker show. And so I actually talked with Hornberger and I went back and I found and I made sure that all of those links are up to date and work for each of those stories so people can go through and take a very close look at those are just articles. Never mind all the books about it and stuff, which there are plenty.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me drop two good footnotes for people here. The first one would be Shane Harris, who's now at the Washington Post, you know, very official national security beat reporter. He wrote a piece about this at foreignpolicy.com a few years back, where he goes into extensive detail. So as far as like authoritative sources, there you go. Okay, nothing conspiratorial about this narrative at all. But then you want to do a deeper dive into it. Then go to fff.org. And this is the Future Freedom Foundation. And there they have a page. And I'm sorry, I always get the headline wrong, but it's something like where did Saddam get his WMDs or where does Saddam get his chemical weapons? You know what you can do? You can go cite colon fff.org and then that way you search just that site. And then you can do chemical weapons, Iraq, and I bet you'll find it.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do and they were, it was German chemical weapons, I believe, and maybe some French, but that were bought with supposed agricultural loans from the United States to Iraq, and they had a sophisticated biological weapons program too with anthrax and the rest, and the Americans sent them the precursors for the germs that he would need.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. Yeah, I don't know much about what they were saying about America's Iraq policy during that time, but I know that they were still friends with the Ayatollah. And we're not going to get to them switching gears on the Ayatollah until Rabin in 1993. So hold that thought. So the war is still going on. We have to mention the chemical weapons too. America Bottom, Taxpayers Bottom. There's a huge Iraq gate scandal, it was called, where people were put on trial for the money, but then they, their defense was, but the government made me do it. What are you talking about?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, let's go back to it wrong because the cocaine is really tied up in the contra end of the scandal. Point being, America's back in Saddam, except when they're helping Israel back Iran and by selling them these missiles and they're even, I don't have my footnote anymore, but it's findable, I'm sure, where they did talk about, you know what we do is we support one side till they start getting ahead a little bit, then we support the other side a little bit more and go, or we authorize the Israelis to increase support for Iran and play them back and forth against each other. So that's just not just offshore balancing and peacetime. That's balancing in wartime, encouraging them to keep killing each other, which is some pretty horrific policy to do.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, man, I learned about Bill Hicks like a month after he died. And so they started playing sane man on the access channel all the time. And I was like, oh my God, who's this guy? And then they're like, oh, he just died He has been a huge influence on me”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dude, it was Ronald Reagan's cocaine in his pocket like that guarantees a full pardon, man. Right? What are we talking about? That's not fair.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source