Scott Horton

The episode opens with small talk about headphones and a gift pipe, then moves to how media has changed. The participants compare a combative debate-show format, with its yes and no doors, to a plain interview. One speaker says they wanted an interview but the show preferred a format where you "mix it up with a guy." Both agree the interview format works better, while granting that the debate format is good for engagement and draws a massive viewership.

Traditional television is described as a hindrance. In this account, people now see it only through clips posted on X or YouTube, or by accident when a set happens to be on. The criticism is about format and control: breaks for commercials every seven minutes, no room for depth, executives in the presenter's ear, and edits of anything that might upset sponsors, the government, or the outlet's narrative.

TV TV is actually a hindrance now because the only way people watch TV TV is clips that someone takes inputs on X or YouTube.

One speaker describes their own path. Their podcast began as an archive of interviews from a radio show, and radio once meant real legitimacy because "somebody hired you," while anyone could podcast from a basement. That stopped being true. The speaker gave up their last radio show, on KPFK in Los Angeles, last year. They estimate its live audience at "high thousands, but not 10,000," even though the station is called the most powerful FM transmitter west of the Mississippi, grandfathered in at 115,000 watts. They blame a scattered schedule that is hard to follow, and describe the station as commercial-free, donation-funded, and not actually public radio.

The show was unpaid, but the speaker valued 14 or 15 years of airtime. While writing a book about Russia and Ukraine, they still used the weekly slot to cover Palestine with guests from the Libertarian Institute and Antiwar.com. Some listeners objected when the show ended. The speaker cites "6,200-something interviews since 2003" across their shows and points people to the archives.

Asked how they came to these subjects, the speaker says that in the 1990s they were "much more of like a New World Order" believer. They define that theory as the belief that American foreign policy aims to build a one-world federal government under the United Nations, which would in the end rule the United States. They link it to the John Birch Society and say they held it through the Clinton years and into the start of the George W. Bush administration.

The speaker says the conduct of the Iraq War changed their mind. Policy was driven by the National Security Council, Cheney and the neoconservatives, not by building up the UN Security Council. On this reading, George H.W. Bush's phrase "New World Order" meant an era of American empire with no rival to stop it.

It was never to build up the UN as the world government. It was to build up Washington, D.C. as the world government.

The other participant asks why governments would give up power and the wealth that comes with it. The speaker agrees and calls a totalitarian world government with a monopoly on nukes and police power a nightmare that is "centuries from now" if it comes at all. When the World Health Organization's push for global pandemic rules comes up, the speaker grants that international law keeps "widening and deepening." But they argue there is no world army or police force to enforce it except the United States. It works by "coercing and cajoling governments to go along."

The speaker treats Joe Biden's "liberal rules-based international order" as the same idea as Bush's New World Order: doing what America says. They call it a "pseudo empire," a neo-colonialism that uses money, CIA help to overthrow governments, or the bombing of capital cities when deemed necessary.

The speaker traces this posture to the Wolfowitz doctrine, the Defense Planning Guidance drafted after the first Gulf War. It was written by Paul Wolfowitz, described here as Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy at the time, with Scooter Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad. As summarized, it called for the United States to be the most dominant power on every continent and to block any nation or alliance from balancing against it, ideally building an order where American power was permanent and nobody tried.

The speaker connects the doctrine to a larger American presence in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and to building and arming alliances in East Asia. They describe the reasoning as "if it's not, us, it'll be somebody else, and it'll be so much worse." Their objection is mainly fiscal: "we certainly cannot afford to keep doing this." They add that the draft was rewritten after it leaked to the New York Times and became a scandal. The revision said allies and international institutions would be brought along. The other participant comments on Wolfowitz's appearance from a photo on screen, a remark with no argument behind it.

The conversation cites Jacob Heilbrunn's book on the neoconservatives, They Knew They Were Right, and then turns to a dispute between Coleman Hughes and Dave Smith. The dispute was over Wesley Clark's account of a plan to take on seven countries. As relayed here, Hughes argued there was no real proof the memo existed because Clark had been told about it, not shown it. Smith's reply, as reported secondhand, is that everything on the list happened except Iran. The source does not name the seven countries.

The speaker quotes journalist Andrew Cockburn's description of the neoconservatives, and treats the link between their doctrines and the George W. Bush administration's actions as "no mystery." In this account, weapons sellers needed intellectuals to justify policy, and the neoconservatives took that money to build think tanks and a consensus behind support for Israel and American hegemony.

the neoconservatives are crossed between the israel lobby and the military industrial complex the fighter bomber salesman needed eggheads to justify their policies

The Clark account itself is told in two parts and is secondhand. A military officer told the retired general, a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe under Clinton who led the Kosovo war, that a war with Iraq was being planned but could not say why. About a week later, the same officer mentioned a memo naming seven countries to be taken "all in five years." The speaker says one version was given to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now and does not recall where the other was given.

The speaker attributes the memo to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. They describe Donald Rumsfeld as "not a neo-conservative" but say his key staff were. They then list the network as they describe it:

At Defense: Paul Wolfowitz as deputy secretary, Stephen Cambone for intelligence, Douglas Feith for policy, and under him Abram Shulsky, Bill Luti, Michael Rubin and others working on the Iraq project. In the vice president's office: Scooter Libby and John Hannah, with David Wurmser moving between State, Defense and the vice president's office. On the National Security Council: Zalmay Khalilzad, Elliott Abrams, Robert Joseph, Stephen Hadley and Eric Edelman. On the Defense Policy Board: Richard Perle and associates, added later in the conversation.

In the speaker's account, these people already agreed on this policy through the 1990s and had built the Project for a New American Century around it.

The speaker argues that the doctrine of not tolerating any Middle Eastern regime that "supports terrorism" could justify almost anything. Their examples come from Iraq. Abu Nidal, called "a washed up old terrorist from a previous day," died in Iraq before the war began. The Mujahedin-e Khalq are described as Iranian communist cultists who left Iran and worked for Saddam Hussein. The speaker says the group had nothing to do with anti-American terrorism at the time, except perhaps attacks committed when it had worked for Iran during the revolution. After the invasion, they say, Rumsfeld inherited the group, which has worked for the US and Israel since and now has a base in Albania.

The conclusion drawn is that this "wasn't al-Qaeda" and was no real reason. The terrorism doctrine was used to check off governments they disliked, and in many cases this was "Israel's list of enemies."

The speaker offers a contrast with Colin Powell, whom they say voters in 2000 thought they were getting. In this counterfactual, a Powell-led policy would have meant a two-state solution in Palestine, a very limited war against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and police or special-forces action beyond that, with no invasion of Iraq. The speaker does not excuse Powell. They say he "did lie us into that war, and he's responsible for that," but that the policy came from the vice president's office and the neoconservatives.

Agreeing with Dave Smith, the speaker says the policy rests on "A Clean Break." They describe it as a 1996 paper by David Wurmser and Richard Perle, written for Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term as prime minister. As summarized here, it proposed dropping the Oslo peace process for "peace through a position of strength and total dominance over our neighbors." The speaker's own gloss is that this meant continuing to "devour" what remains of Palestine, "the 22% of what's left of historic Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza."

The strategic problem, as described, was Hezbollah on Israel's northern border, backed by Iran by way of Syria. This forms an arc of power from Tehran through Syria to the Shiite militia in southern Lebanon. Saddam Hussein was "the Sunni roadblock" in that arc.

They're as stupid as they are arrogant and certain in their policy.

The plan the speaker calls a "hairbrain scheme" ran as follows. Jordan and Turkey would dominate a post-Saddam Iraq. Its Shiite-majority population would accept a ruler, first a Hashemite cousin of Jordan's king and later Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who had sold them on the idea. Iraq's Shiite religious leaders would then press Hezbollah to drop Iran and befriend Israel. A pipeline to Haifa would be built, or the old British line reopened. The speaker says the documents are posted on their website, ScottHorton.org, including the companion paper "Coping with Crumbling States: A Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant."

The speaker also cites Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Remove Saddam Hussein, written by Wurmser with a foreword by Perle. They mock the title's idea that America was Saddam's ally simply because it would not launch a regime-change war. They say Wurmser recently defended the theory on a podcast, claiming the Shiites will do what the Hashemites say because they revere anyone claiming the Prophet's bloodline.

Two rebuttals follow. The first, credited to Dave Smith, is that if this were true, Washington could simply ask Jordan's king to have the Ayatollah or Hezbollah back off, with no regime change in Baghdad needed. The second is the speaker's own. Shiites do revere parts of the Prophet's lineage, but this is not "a magic spell of hypnosis." The Hashemites are Sunnis from a separate line, described as "the British sock puppet kings of Jordan," with "no purchase there whatsoever."

The result, in the speaker's account, was the reverse of the plan. The war did not empower Jordan, Turkey, America and Israel over the Iraqis. It gave Iran more power than ever, and "it blew up in the American's face." A sponsor segment follows.

After the break, the other participant asks whether the outcome came from real stupidity or whether the planners expected it and mainly wanted to sell weapons and war. Asked about cost, the speaker estimates "on Iraq alone, at least five or seven trillion" and "probably 10 trillion for the whole terror war." These are offered as rough figures, without a source. The questioner takes the lower number and asks how many defense contractors and lobbyists were enriched, and whether the stated reason mattered at all.

The speaker gives a mixed answer. They point to a current parallel: Netanyahu convinced Trump a war would be easy, "and then it wasn't." They argue Iraq was also meant to be easy, and the invasion was. The Third Infantry Division and the Marines finished regime change in about five weeks. The occupation and the slide into civil war were the failure.

plan A is it'll be fine, and then plan B is well, at least we can make some money and push this thing on and let both sides fight and weaken each other

Pressed on whether the planners believed in the plan or used it as cover, the speaker offers "one good argument" for the cynical view. It is the proposal by then-Senator Joe Biden to split Iraq into three parts, drawing lines that would in effect impose ethnic or sectarian cleansing and create three mini-states. The speaker notes that Antony Blinken was his right-hand man and calls them "Israel first Israel instead types."

The speaker goes back further, to a plan by an Israeli strategist from "I believe 1981." The transcript renders it as the "Oded-Yanan plan." As described, it assumed the Soviet Union would conquer the planet, leaving Israel alone, so the answer was to break neighboring Arab states "into as many warring tribal pieces as we possibly can." The speaker notes that this premise collapsed when the Soviet Union ceased to exist by the end of the decade.