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

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“They started in Lebanon backing a group called Fatah Al Islam, bin Ladenite, suicide bomber head chopper, lunatic, terrorist, to fight against Hezbollah. In Syria, Elizabeth Chaney, who was then working in the State Department, later known as Liz Chaney, Dick Chaney's daughter, she had the job of working with.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are tilting back toward Osama bin Laden and the suicide bomber brigades. Saudis don't have an army. We don't trust them with one, probably, and we're their army for the most part. And so How are we going to make it up to the Israelis that we took their stupid idiot advice and launched this war, but empowered their regional rivals? And how are we going to make it up to the Saudis who tried to warn us for the most part, I think, against it, but we ignored their advice and did it anyway and empowered their regional rivals, the Iranians. And so how are we going to fix this? And how are we going to fix this is since we put Tehran up two pegs in Baghdad, we're going to take them down a peg in Damascus. And so”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the redirection was from the policy was really, I think, invented in late 05 and then sort of discussed and implemented in beginning in 2006. And the article is called the Redirection by Seymour Hirsch in the New Yorker magazine. So Hirsch, pardon me, yes, Hirsch has an incredible series from this whole year long. It includes The Coming Wars, preparing the battlefield, the redirection, and I forget the fourth one, maybe the fifth one. Had a bunch of great ones this time. So I might be combining these articles a little bit here, but it's along the same lines. Here's what you need to understand about the redirection, okay? Oops, we screwed up and we fought Iraq War II for the Shiites. Now to make up for that, we're tilting back toward the Sunnis. But what does that mean?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aggressive war after aggressive war. You can't say the same for him unless you want to, again, blame him for sending Ahmed Chalabi to lie to Richard Pearl, to lie to George W. Bush. You know, and so. And in fact, I'm skipping ahead, but in Iraq War III, we fought with them against the bin Ladenite Caliphate. And so here we fought really three wars for Iran against the Taliban and against Sunni Saddam and against Baghdadi, the bin Ladenite Caliph in fourteen through seventeen there. So why do we hate him, Lex? So much we keep biting wars for them. You know, like I used to joke with Patrick Coburn that like, man, they better sign this nuclear deal with Obama. They owe us a favor. After all that we've done for them lately, you know, despite all of the hatred and vitriol when you listen to the Lakudniks, what you end up doing is empowering the Ayatollah and his men.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, we couldn't negotiate it over them in the first place, and again, the CIA and Delta Force could have finished annihilating bin Laden Zawahari and their few hundred men. In the White Mountains in Nangahar Province at the Lionsden hideout in December of two thousand one, there's your whole actual terror war. So do we really need Iran to help us other than what hand over a few prisoners that they had captured who were trying to hide out in their country that they had put on house arrest? Yeah. But that's all the help we needed, right? We didn't have to have a new alliance with them, and we didn't have to try to pretend that the Ayatollah is a saint or that his republic is a republic at all, right? If it's a republic, then how come he's the supreme leader since 1989? Doesn't sound like a republic to me. But at the same time, you want to talk about flawed republics. We're sitting in one. And so, you know, in this case, lying us into a...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, good questions. I would not allie with anybody to kill anybody. The time of September 11th, there were only 400 bin Ladenites hiding out in Afghanistan. Any of the rest of their associates around the Middle East could be arrested by police forces”
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 are you going to do about it? And Khalil Sad says, Oh, I know you're Royal Majesty. I'm so, sorry about that. We're going to do everything that we can to try to fix it. This is the birth of the policy called the redirection, where America under Bush before Obama ever came to town, where Bush accepted that he had screwed up, that he had scored like in soccer an own goal for the other side of the ledger, the Shiite crescent, dominated by Tehran, and that now he had to make up for that by tilting toward the Sunnis.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was that we had to withdraw because he had fought the war for his adversaries, not our enemies, but America's regional rivals. In the Middle East, the Iranians, and their Shiite Axis, now including Baghdad, and also, of course, then Damascus and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. This is when the king of Jordan coined the term the Shiite crescent. It was America who made it. In, I think, January of 2006. The Sunni king of Saudi Arabia would have been King Abdullah. Read the riot act as all make Khalil's out, and said, listen, this is in the Wikileaks. He said, listen, it was always us and you and Saddam against Iran. Now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Refuse to negotiate with them in good faith when George Bush, as the ayatollah's errand boy in this thing, and refuses to acknowledge it, likes to pretend he's the emperor of the world or whatever, when he's serving their interests and putting their guys in power. And so that's why at the end of his presidency they made him sign the deal to get out by the end of 2011. And he said, well, can I have 64 bases? And they said, no. And he says, well, can I have 24 bases? And they said, no. Can I have any bases? And Noreel Maliki said, well, let me go talk to the guys. I'm not real sure. Sorry, I talked to the guys. They said, beat it, scum. Don't let the door hitch in the ass on the way out. Didn't even say thank you for fighting a gigantic eight-year civil war for them to exterminate their Sunni enemies and put them in power. It's Gonsum in power there. And so that was the sofa that Bush had to agree to in his last year in office in 2000.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hour, a coalition government that includes the Hazaras who are Shiites and friends with Iran. And in Iraq, we're putting their sock puppets from Dawa and Skiri in power. We fought an eight year civil war for Iran's guys, but refused to talk to them the whole time.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buildings and said, This is a secret Iranian nuclear weapons site. We just found it. Of course, it was total propaganda. They do that all the time. At one point, they put out a stock photo of a vault door from a vault door company or a vault company. And they said, behind this vault door, that's where the secret nuclear weapons program is. And they do that kind of thing all the time. And so America kept the MEK when they could have traded them with the Iranians. So just one more thing about that is on the NSC were two people who were now a married couple Flint, Leverett, and Hillary Mann Leverett. And I've interviewed both of them at length and they have talked all about how willing the Iranians were to negotiate with the Americans on essentially anything at that time and how essentially the Bush administration just refused to work for them. And now think about, you know, we're fighting for them in Afghanistan, putting in power.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rumors about Iran that come from Amik. Now, sometimes it's true. It's also known as the NCRI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran as their front. And they'll, in fact, right before the current war in the last few months, like in June, probably in May, they put out a picture of”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They helped crush the Kurds with their tanks in that as special agents of Saddam Dur in that. And then the U.S. inherited them when we invaded Iraq in 2003, and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld took control of them. Again, the MEK, they're called, the Mujadini Kalk, and the Raines are saying, look, let's trade. We got bin Ladenites, including bin Laden's son, and including this guy Hamza, who was extremely dangerous al-Qaeda terrorist. And we could have traded them, but the American, the neoconservatives, and I guess, you know, Rumsfeld and Chainey themselves said, nope, we would rather keep the MEK so that we can use them for operations inside Iran, which they did. In fact, my now wife wrote a story breaking that story for Ross's story back then that Rumsfeld was using the MEK for intelligence inside Iran. And a lot of times, usually working as cutouts for the Israelis nowadays, you will hear.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, it just like with Saddam Hussein. Dayato was showing his willingness to negotiate essentially anything of controversy, including support for Hamas and Hezbollah, including their nuclear program, which at that point was just, you could barely even call it nascent at all. They had not begun spinning a single centrifuge at that point. And they wanted to negotiate over these bin Ladenites if we would exchange them for members of the MEK, the Mujahideen E-Kalk communist terrorist cult, which was like some Jonestown total cookery type of a cult that level of cookery, like Heaven's Gate, you know, just comet chasing lunatics. And they had helped with the Iranian Revolution, but then they had betrayed it and had been kicked out of Iran by the Ayatollah. But then they went to work for Saddam Hussein. They helped Saddam Hussein during the Shiite and Kurdish uprising in 1900.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From, and they were offering to negotiate what was then called, they submitted this through the Swiss ambassador in the spring of oh three, either right before the war or right after the war. I think it must have been right after the invasion of Iraq. It was called the Golden Offer. And not only did Bush and his men reject it, but they even gave, I think John Bolton gave a big dressing down to the Swiss ambassador for daring to even bring the proposal to them.”
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 they said we have these common interests, and yet there was a terrorist attack in 2004, and the neocons just lied inside Saudi Arabia. And the neocons lied and said, bin Laden and his men had planned it from inside Iran, which was a total lie. It had nothing to do with Iran. But that was enough for idiot W. Bush, who doesn't know anything, to go along with, oh, okay then. And so now Iran is back on the enemy side of the ledger of the war on terror, where, of course, they have no alliance with bin Laden. The only time they backed bin Laden was as a favor to Bill Clinton in Bosnia in 1990s. And so they had no love for the bin Ladenites whatsoever. And despite all the lies, bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan, not in Iran and the bin Ladenites who did make it to Iran were under house arrest. And the Iranians were trying to negotiate with the Americans to hand them over, or at least hand them over to their home countries wherever they were from.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess who sponsored the Iraqi Shiite exile to tell the neoconservatives that the new Shiite supermajority regime will build the oil pipeline to Haifa and tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran and be nice to Israel?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Lex guess why. Clinton didn't do that, it was because the Israel lobby said no, that was in the Washington Post. They did this great series. And Dan Morgan, I think. Well, whatever. Morgan Ottawa. I forget their first names. They did a multi part series all about the oil politics of the Caspian Basin. And it was APAC. And the Israel lobby that said, no, you cannot normalize relations with Iran veto. And so Brzezinski and Haig back down from their plans on the companies that they were representing in doing that. And went the other way. In the Cold War with Iran remained all through the rest of the century again, waged from bases in Saudi, getting our towers knocked down. Now it's the new era. We go to war with the Taliban and Afghanistan. Iran says we'll do anything that we can to help you with that. Then you guys want to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Not only will we help you with that, guess what? Ahmed Chalabe's Iraqi National Congress's headquarters was in Tehran.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are irresponsible. We should lift the sanctions against Iran and we should do business with Iran because, after all, God didn't see fit to leave all the oil under wonderful Western Allied democracies. And so we have to deal with who we have to deal with. And that was in the interest of his company and quite frankly was in the interest of the United States of America at the time. Cause a little mini scandal because one of the times that Cheney repeated himself in these criticisms was in Australia. And that's supposed to be a cardinal sin to criticize your own country from the soil of another country. And he had been the former secretary of defense. So that was a kind of a, you know, social, you know, error or whatever that got him a little more controversy about those statements than probably they would have got any, probably more attention than they would have got otherwise for the substance of them. So we had every opportunity to deal with Iran in the 1990s.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open up an opportunity to normalize relations between our country and their country. The oil business is a great way to do that. Later in the 1990s, the CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, said the same thing, that Bill Clinton's sanctions”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, in 2001, they held a million man candlelight vigil in Tehran on September 12, and the Ayatollah said, Now's our chance to make friends with the United States. They hate Saddam Hussein and they hate the Taliban. Great us too. So they said, Now's our chance to again try to reach out to the United States. Did I skip and forget to mention that in nineteen ninety three? Oh, this was going to be part of our Cold War story, but it overlaps. In 1993, Zabigna Brzezinski, the right-wing sort of hawkish, realist national security advisor for Jimmy Carter, and Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger's right-hand man and was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, they both wanted to build oil pipelines across Iran to the Persian Gulf, one to make money and for American companies, but also two to bring in Iran from the cold.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Refuse, and Seymour Hirsch had another story just like that, where Hussein sent a Lebanese businessman to again surrender to say we're willing to negotiate on any and every term that you could possibly name for us, and America refused, and went to war anyway. By the way, when they did in 2003, the”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasonable to you. And then Saddam Hussein, of course, would have said, Of course. And in fact, Saddam Hussein, and you can read this only months later into the war, maybe a year into the war, James Risen wrote it in the New York Times, that Saddam Hussein sent an emissary to meet with Richard Pearl in London and surrendered to him, and say If this is about democracy, we'll hold elections. If this is about Israel, we'll stop funding Hamas. If this is about oil, we'll give you the mineral rights. If this is about weapons of mass destruction, you can send your army. An FBI wherever you want to look. Give up, please don't kill me And Richard Pearl told the emissary, You tell them we'll see him in Baghdad.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you think that Colin Powell wasn't man enough for that, don't you think that mean old Donald Rumsfeld, his old friend, from 1983 when Ronald Reagan sent him to be special emissary over there, when he offered Saddam Hussein support for his military campaign against Iran and browbeat him and tried to get him to build a pipeline to the port of Akaba for Israel? That famous picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein, that's what that meeting was about. One will give you weapons, two. We want you to build a pipeline for the Israelis. You think he could have sent Gruff old Donald Rumsfeld over there to tell Saddam Hussein one thing. Your job is keeping bin Ladenite's down. Read me? Okay, we have a new priority in our foreign policy in the Middle East. We don't want anyone to be friends with Osama bin Laden or his men.”
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 afraid. Is that real? Yes. Yes. No harm to us whatsoever. What they could have done, let me ask you to stretch your engineer's imagination here to like wild metaphysical type concepts outside of your usual reach. You know, you're maybe more of a right brain guy or something. Trip out Lex Fried Secretary of State was Colin Powell, the four star general, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You think he might have been tough enough to just send over there and tell Saddam Hussein? Here's the riot act, I'm going to read it to you, and then you're going to sign on the dot a line, buddy bo”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One guy's got a beret and a mustache. The other guy's got a beard and is all wearing a funny robe like Obi Wan Kenobi. And they clearly are extremely different men with extremely different sets of priorities, right? Couldn't be more different. And of course Saddam Hussein was terrified of Osama bin Laden and had no connection to his regime whatsoever. And in fact, we know now that he had kicked himself upstairs and was semi-retired writing a romance novel at the time of the invasion. That's how determined Saddam Hussein was to attack inside the United States to paraphrase the CIA warning George Bush about Al Qaeda on august sixth, two thousand one when he told Michael Morell, his briefer, the guy who later helped frame Donald Trump for treason with Russia and everything, he told Michael Morell, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, you've covered your ass.”
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 what made America's Michael Schuyer said bin Laden's only indispensable ally, right? That you could do like a reverse 9-11 trutherism where all the Americans are actually Al-Qaeda agents all this time because all they're doing is exactly what Bin Laden wants them to do. Michael Schuyer said that, oh, of course Afghanistan was the plan. But Iraq, that was the hoped for but unexpected gift to bin Laden. Bin Laden said on the eve of the invasion, rise up, Iraqis, kill the socialist infidels, Saddam Hussein, and then resist the Americans when they arrive.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bin Ladenites themselves and saying, You can't tell us what to do. Are insurgency into a counterproductive war by killing all these Shiite civilians and generating all new support for our crushing at their hands and all of that. So they were isolating and killing these guys off. And you got to figure, dude. I mean, this is like a magic wish come true, okay? George W. Bush comes and he turns all of western Iraq, right? Fallujah, Dakrete, much of Ramadi and obviously Mosul into bin Ladenistan, into jihadi university, bigger and better and worse than Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya. This is all those combined, and it's in western Iraq, right on the border of the Levant in Mesopotamia, not Nangar province out there in no man's land between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, I overstate that. We didn't lose. We failed to beat them. They did lose much territory to the Shiites. So they were licking their wounds at that time. The Sunni insurgency, the Iraqi Sunnis, had too many enemies. They were fighting the Shiites, they're fighting the Americans, and they had to deal with the bin Ladenites, and they hated the bin Ladenites. They didn't want to live like Saudis and a bunch of Egyptian weirdo suicide bombers trying to outlaw women from buying cucumbers at the market because it's some kind of sexual innuendo and where these people like get these people out of my face and I show in the book there plenty of reporting about there was plenty of reporting about this that beginning at least in early 2005 it was the local Sunni population this is two years before David Petraeus runs to try to get to the head of this parade two years previously in the beginning of 05 was when the local Sunnis started killing”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sending the desert ox Ray Odierno in there to kill every last living, fighting aged male in the Ambar province, we've lost mister President. And so what we're going to do is we're going to bribe the Sunni insurgency. Right now they have”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was not the justification for the escalation of the surge overall. The rationalization there was we are going to send an extra 30 or 40,000 troops to Baghdad. We are going to secure the capital city. And once we have peace in the capital city, the peace of desolation where we kill every last Sunni who resists by putting a power drill through his eyeball, then we'll be able to negotiate peacefully in the setting of our new Democratic Republic that we've built here. That was the justification there. And at the same time, David Betraeus, and this is the only victory that David Betraeus ever won in his entire stupid, stinking failure of a pathetic lying life, and that is when he convinced George W. Bush to surrender to the Sunni insurgency. Mr. President, you're not going to defeat the Sunni insurgency. Read me loud and clear. All this victory you've been promising all these years? All the people that you've killed trying to bring it”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Closed it down, embarrassed, and Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor himself, admitted we didn't have the proof that we needed to make the case, just promising. Oh, we're going to prove it. We're going to prove it. We're going to prove it. And kicking that can down the road for months until I think it must have been May or June when they finally did this press conference that fell apart and started to back down.”
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 Dubowitt said, Oh, yeah, well, Iran taught him how to do it then. No, Gareth Porter showed that it was the IRA, the Irish Republican Army that taught Lebanese Hezbollah, and it was Lebanese Hezbollah that taught the Shiite Iraqis how to do it. So when I said it was Lebanese Hezbollah, Dubois goes, aha, Iran, nope. They got it from the Irish. So sorry, Charlie, nice little propaganda campaign you got there. But then what happened was they did a big press conference where they laid out all the EFP bombs and the parts. And the reporters started milling around and they go, well, that's funny. That one says made in Haditha on it. Which is the city in Iraq. And that one says, made in UAE and all this. And then, so what do we have here? Do we have any evidence that any of this stuff came from Iran? No. And then what did they do, Lex? They canceled the press conference.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Siding Reuters and this Christian Science Monitor. Operation Black Eagle. I'm sorry I got the name of the Eagle thing wrong. I said Eagle Claw, didn't I? Operation Black Eagle was where the Christian science monitor was tagging along There's a bunch of these.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Magazine, The Brilliant Andrew Coburn, and a bunch of other great sources that just show these bombs were made in Iraq by Iraqis. I don't care what you say. And I disproved this over and over again on the blog at antiwar.com in 2007, over and over and over again. So, in fact, if you just search my name, antiwar.com, especially if you search antiwar.com slash blog and EFPs, you will get a bunch of hits because we went over this all at the time making me feel extra old right now.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was the one in charge of this essentially just this conspiracy to lie the American people into war through the pages of the New York Times. But I show that his colleague, Alyssa Rubin, proved that he's a damned liar because she was there with soldiers, printed it in his same newspaper. She was there with American soldiers when they found an EFP factory in Soder City, I'm pretty sure, but there was a bunch, wherever it was, it was in Shiite territory, in Iraq, and it was Iraqis working in a machine shop making these bombs. And now they go, okay, well, but the parts all came from Iran. Oh, yeah, no, they had the Iranians thought, you know what we'll do? We'll ship the parts into Iraq for them to make bombs out of instead of just sending them bombs. Like, whatever, man. It was obviously just a bunch of propaganda. And I cite in there the Christian Science Monitor was there when they did Operation Eagle Claw found another factory making EFPs, and then I cite also wireless.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Campaign in the spring of 2007. Every time a bomb goes off in Shiite territory, that was Iran that did it they claimed over and over, said the point is, and the problem is, and I cite in the book by names of the journalists and their affiliations at least eight or ten different American and other foreign reporters there. Nobody with a, you know, Iranian dog in the Han Lot citing press TV here. I'm citing the New York Times, Michael Gordon. He's now at the Wall Street Journal, but he was at the New York Times. He's the guy who bylined with Judy Miller every story where they lied that Saddam Hussein is seeking A-bomb parts and Saddam Hussein is making nuclear weapons and wants germs and chemicals and all these things. Judy Miller took the rap for the whole media. But her co-author, Michael Gordon, lived to still light us to this day in the Wall Street Journal.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they will need our money and our weapons more than they need Iran next door. So if we stick it out and even compromise repeatedly with Iran on who should be the prime minister, like Ibrahim Jafari and Nuri al Maliki from the Dawa party, and we come to this is the only time we talk to Iran at all, this sort of secretly quietly agreeing on who the Iraqi Prime Minister should be as we're doing this, right? So Matad al-Sadr, even though he is trying to limit Iranian authority, he also wants to limit ours. So the Americans decide they want to target him. So it wasn't Sauder that picked that bite. It was David Petraeus in the service of Dick Cheney working to try and inconspiracy with Michael Gordon of the New York Times to try to lie the American people into war with Iran then in the name of these bombs. And they made a massive propaganda.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Puppet of the major Shiite faction leaders because where Dawa and Skiri had lived in Iran for 20 years at this point, he hadn't. He'd stayed. And he was insisting that Iran and the United States butt out and leave Iraq to Iraqis. So you see the problem there. Even though he wants Iran to leave and wants to limit their influence, he also wants to limit ours. The Bush administration's idea is no, we're going to bet that the government of Iraq, mostly made of Dawa.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they had a copper core. And that copper core, when the explosive went off, would melt. And that molten copper would then slice right through armor. And that was what made it the new and improved bomb. Now, the propaganda at the time was, even though it was David Petraeus who at this time decided to attack Maktada al Sadr in the name of claiming that he was an Iranian agent. In fact, Maktada al Sadr I think I talked about this a little bit on a tangent I shouldn't have taken on the last time I was here. But Tatal Sadr was the least Iranian.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apart, right? Because they were too busy pretending that the Soviet Union was 12 feet tall at the time. Same guy. Bush Jr. brings him in, and he oversees the surge. And this is where they do the massive escalation in the beginning of 2007. And it's funny because they dropped all the propaganda about Iran's nuclear program for a little bit because they had a new line. And the new line was that whenever a Shiite sets off a bomb in Iraq, it's an Iranian bomb. And this is where you and your audience have heard a hundred times a thousand that Iran killed 600 of our guys in Iraq. That's what they say. Well, here's the truth of that. It was 500 guys, not six, and it wasn't Iran. Those bombs, they were a new and improved kind of IED improvised explosive device. Argues called them explosively formed penetrators, and they were.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“James Baker says, we got to get out of there. Old Guard brought in to say we need to figure out a way out. That's embarrassing for Bush. Bush decides, no, he wants to double down instead. He's going to do the surge at David Petreus' recommendation. He fired Rumsfeld, who now wanted out. Said, I told you light and fast. Let's get out, he said. We got to take the training wheels off. Let the Iraqi democracy figure out a way to work on its own without us now. Which was, you know what? Hell, take it. Right, cut and run. This ain't working, and he's really right. They're like, if they're going to figure this out, for good or for ill, through blood or through handshakes and bribes or what, it has to be up to them ultimately, and so yeah, so what a bush do? Kick him right out the door. It's the first time he said something reasonable, and he brought in Robert Gates, who's supposed to be like an old James Baker type, his father's guy who had been the head of the CIA, whose fault it was that the CIA didn't know that the Soviet Union was falling.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And David Petraeus, this is where we have what's called the El Salvador option, which what does that sound like? Paying right-wing death swas to go around killing commis in the case of El Salvador, preventing it from becoming a Nicaragua, right? In the nineteen eighties, it was John Negroponte who had worked for Ronald Reagan in El Salvador as the ambassador then on this covert action, killing all these people, who was then brought in to be ambassador to run what they call the El Salvador option of empowering the Shiite militias to finally finish crushing the Sunni insurgency, which of course they absolutely failed to do. They simply radicalize them and made it that much worse and worse and worse. And this was all on David Petraeus. He was the one in charge of this thing. So that made the civil war just absolutely horrific through 2005-06 and then coming into seven. Now in 06.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Botta Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council, they were the ones torturing people to death with power drills. Through the shoulder, through the heart, through the eyeball, through the ear, through the temple. So at that time, America was supporting the Botter Brigade. At that time, America is building the Bada Brigade into the Iraqi Army as we know it today.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His next job, right, after empowering the Sunni insurgency up in Mosul, was to go to Baghdad and to turn the Bada brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council. The same guys who Saddam feared in 1980, which is why he started the war, the same guys who George H.W. Bush feared in nineteen ninety one, which is why he betrayed their uprising. Same guys at W. Bush is now taking all the way to Baghdad. David Petraeus is now in charge of building them into the Iraqi army. And that's who was going around torturing everybody to death. And I don't know if you saw the movie American Sniper about Chris Kyle directed by Clenicewood. And I'm a real big Clen Eastwood fan. I'm really disappointed in this fact. It's really bad what he did in that movie. Was he portrayed the Sunni insurgents torturing people to death with power drills and portrayed Chris Kyle saving them? But that's not true. It was America's guys.”
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 they were essentially blowing up and sabotaging their own ability to use diplomacy to work with this guy. And he became the most intransigent part of the Sunni insurgency. There's so many different parts of this, but one of the things that's really important, I think, to talk about is that David Petraeus, his first job was up in Mosul trying to train up a militia to be our guys. And they just took the money and guns and joined the insurgency against us. It was an absolute catastrophe. He gave them a bunch of weapons and money and then was humiliated and kicked right the hell out of there.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An imperialist policy that they had supported when he was finally ready to completely capitulate to them they kill them so he couldn't. And that was what caused all this problem for America, not cause but contributed significantly to the problems during the war. Also during that same time, this was the first time that Muktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army fought against the Americans and he even sent Shiites and pickup trucks to Fallujah to go help in the name of Iraqi nationalism to help the Sunnis at that time, and they had a whole separate little war with him in Soder City in eastern Baghdad at that time, which is a real problem because, as I said, Soder had so much street credibility there among the people and where to this day he is still one of the most empowering and powerful kingmakers in Shiite politics in that country right now.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cities, they're kicking all the Sunnis out, and in the predominantly Shiite Sunni areas, they're kicking all the Shiites out, and people are being displaced. Darj Mail, I swear I looked and looked, and maybe I still could find it somewhere. I think the last time I tried to find it, I couldn't find it anymore, but it was Darjamail had this most brilliant article where he traced the cause and effect through the wars from the beginning of the, you know, the war began in 03, of course, but like the real worsening of the insurgency in 04 and the chain of events from this city to this city to this city where these different refugees are displacing other people and causing these worst consequences to go through and where more and more than the Sunnis, especially being cleansed from Baghdad and they're being pushed into the arms of the bin Ladenites. Again, all touched off by Israel, assassinating their own pseudo sock puppet, you know, terrorist front man, excuse for”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good at making bomb vests, but he's not good at math because there's just way too many Shiites. And so by boycotting the election, refusing to participate in the new order, which they got the American superpower occupying the country with three hundred thousand troops, or at that point maybe two hundred thousand, but still, and in alliance with the supermajority, those Sunni chiefs should have figured out a way to deal. saying no way let's fight was a huge mistake from them and then entering into alliance with the bin Ladenites only made it worse and this is it is directly because of Israel killing Yassin and then the Battle of Fallujah that helped drive a bunch of refugees out of Fallujah who then went to Baghdad who drove people out of their areas and then you had a lot of tit for tat back and forth as refugees from the different cities are being cleansed out so in the predominantly Shiite”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Destructive than bin Laden's doctrines ever were, and he was notoriously sectarian against the Shiites, where bin Laden, you know, I don't think, and I have not read everything the guy ever wrote, but I have read a lot of his stuff, and I never saw where he really seems to focus on problems against the Shiites. Again, Muhammad Ata and Ramsay bin Al-Shib, they were mad because of Shimon Perez and Naftali Bennett killing Shiite Palestinians in Lebanon. The fact that they were Shiites didn't make them less valuable as far as wanting to avenge their deaths, as far as that goes. Sarkawi, on the other hand, thought, no, the only good Shiite is a dead Shiite, God says so, and this kind of like cray bring on the apocalypse kind of deal and went for, you know, madness, suicide bombings, Shiite pilgrims, and doing just absolute atrocities against civilians, which, of course, like the guy may be.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source