Scott Horton joins us to examine the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, asking how this war began, what strategic goals are driving it, and where it could lead next. We discuss the limits of air power, the risk of a wider or ground war, the longer arc of U.S. and Israeli policy toward Iran and Syria, Turkey’s role in the region, and the domestic political consequences inside the United States as Trump presses ahead without broad public or congressional support.
Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed: Hello and welcome to this Conversations on Groong episode. Today we’re speaking with Scott Horton, author, radio host, and editorial director of Antiwar.com and executive director of the Libertarian Institute. Scott is also the author of two recent books, Enough Already in 2021, and more recently, Provoked, in 2024.
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Asbed: Scott Horton, welcome back to The Groong Podcast.
Hovik: Welcome, Scott.
Scott: Happy to be here. Thank you.
Hovik: Folks, I want to remind our listeners that this episode will probably be published around March 20th or 21st, and we’re recording it on March 19. As you know, March 20th is the beginning of Persian New Year. So to all those celebrating, especially our friends in Iran right now who are facing a lot of hardship, We wish you and your loved ones peace, health, and a year of renewal. There’s a lot of pain going around, but we hope that all this craziness ends soon.
So, Nowruz Mubarak. Happy Nowruz.
Asbed: Stay strong. Well, Scott, here we are on the 20th day of this unprovoked U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. And despite claims of hitting over 15,000 targets, the Iranian regime remains in place. Perhaps it’s even more hardened and entrenched.
And so far, the U.S. and Israel have focused on airstrikes, and Iran has retaliated by targeting regional U.S. military bases and some energy infrastructures. You know, we’re still watching the limits of this air campaign. It doesn’t seem to be achieving the original stated goals of regime change. And we’re now sort of faced with the prospect of a ground invasion or quagmire in Iran.
Why are we in this war?
Scott: Look, I mean, the long and the short of it is that this policy comes from the Israelis. You know, as you guys probably understand this stuff a lot better than I do, and I should really be interviewing you guys maybe next week. But… You know, to vastly oversimplify it, America’s empire in the Middle East is the Sunni kingdoms and plus Turkey and Israel, right?
And so on the other side of that is the so-called Shiite crescent or the axis of resistance, which is Tehran, Baghdad was Damascus and Hezbollah, and then a little bit of the Houthis down there, Ansar Allah in Yemen, of course. And so the thing is, from the Israelis’ point of view, is the worst thing in the world is Hezbollah. Hezbollah backed by Iran, by way of Syria. And so this is their overriding security concern.
And yet… That’s different from America’s overriding security concern. If you wanted to presume that the purpose of the national government is actually protecting the lives and property and liberty and interests of the American people, well, the people who threaten us are the Bin Ladenites. And they’re not Iran’s guys.
They are typically American, British, and Saudi-backed mercenaries that work for us and also sometimes attack the United States and our interests and kill our people too. and I know everybody thinks that’s all false flag stuff I don’t I think you know it’s Frankenstein monster blowback type thing but anyway that’s who slaughters Americans civilians here in the united states and American soldiers in Iraq war, you know 4000 out of the 4500 that died in Iraq war died fighting the Sunni insurgency that the vanguard of which was al-Qaeda in Iraq which later became known as the islamic state in Iraq and the islamic state in Iraq and Syria that’s the Zarkawi faction who really were the worst of the civilian and American soldier butchering fighters on the Sunni side in the Iraq war.
Those are the guys who the American people need to look out for, Al-Qaeda and ISIS. That’s the ones who got our number. And so there’s a struggle, right? This is why the Israelis have to try so hard to push all their public relations about how, you know what the problem is, radical Islam, so that you can’t tell the difference between who rules which capital city and what difference it makes over there, right?
They wanna overly simplify the thing. So that, yeah, our enemies are your enemies, et cetera. And then you’re supposed to not get the joke that, well, wait a minute, why are your enemies our enemies? And I’ll end this answer with an anecdote that’s something that’s old, but I just learned it.
And you guys are probably familiar with the New York Times article. It’s got the date September 12th, 2001, but it was obviously written that night for publication in the next day’s issue there. A New York Times reporter called up Benjamin Netanyahu and asked him, what do you think that this attack means for America’s relationship with Israel? And Netanyahu said, it’s very good.
I mean, hey, not very good. You know what I mean? Just that, you know, we’ll be closer now as you realize your enemies are the same as ours, et cetera, et cetera, like that, right? But here’s something that I only just learned.
And I learned this from a leftist commentator named Jon Schwarz. He’s a good guy dating back to the Iraq war years, tiny revolution blogger. And I’m gonna have to find this footnote myself, but you could start there on his Twitter feed, Jon Schwarz with no T in Schwarz. And the quote is from that reporter that called Netanyahu that day, wrote a memoir.
And in the book, there’s a quote of Netanyahu that’s not in the New York Times story. That’s part of his answer. And you know what he says? He muses to her.
Will the American people blame us for this? No, I don’t think they will. I think that they’ll understand that we just have a common enemy here. Now, he wasn’t talking about all this conspiracy crap about Mossad agents planting bombs in the towers and all of this stuff.
It was just that he knew for a fact that this is why Al-Qaeda targets the United States is because of Israeli induced policies in the Gulf. Seriously, the dual containment policy of staying in Saudi Arabia was very much at Israeli behest. And of course, Israel’s wars against the Palestinians and against the Lebanese. And this had been the ongoing litany of al-Qaeda’s complaints against the United States, their recruitment shtick, their propaganda that they use to recruit their suicide bombers to attack us with.
He knew that good and well. And so he couldn’t help but muse out loud as like a hypothetical thing. Will the American people blame Israel for getting them into this mess? And then essentially, right, he had to bet that, nah, they don’t know the first thing about that.
And so it’ll be fine. I’ll just tell them that’s right. See, we are your allies and auxiliaries in this civilizational war against Islam that’s coming for you and all of this. And they just turned everything upside down.
And that was 25 years of war ago. And now here we are in a brand new one again at their interest. And I’m sorry, by the way, let me let me add this and I swear I’ll shut up. Iraq War II was very much meant to spite the Iranians.
They wanted to put the Iraqi supermajority Shiite Arabs in power, but then they thought that they would pwn them, that they would be able to tell them what to do, that somehow the Ayatollah Sistani would fall under the spell of either the Hashemite kingdom in Jordan or at least Ahmed Chalabi, the liar who sold the neocons all this mess in the first place, and that by controlling the religious clergy in Najaf, they would tell Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran. And then the people of Iraq would be so liberated that would put all this pressure on Iran. As David Wormser wrote, a liberated Iraq would be a nightmare for Iran.
So this was the thinking behind Iraq War II was, You know, we don’t want to go to Tehran. Come on, guys, be reasonable. But we could go to Baghdad and that will screw the Iranians. But that’s not what happened, of course.
Instead, what happened was the Iranians got their best guys in power, the Dawa Party, the Supreme Islamic Council. This is part of… Joe Kent, by the way, explains this in his Tucker Carlson interview as well, that they empowered the supermajority Iraqi Shiites. But then, of course, they’re very close to Iran, closer to Iran than they’ll ever be to us.
Told Bush to get out. Our only real base is they’re up in Kurdistan with tiny little bases after Iraq War Three. But then this is why. in the Obama years, that America backed al-Qaeda in Syria in order to spite Assad. Now, they wanted to drive Assad out of power, but what happened instead was al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria ended up bleeding back into Western Iraq.
Instead of going west to Damascus, they went east to Mosul and to Crete and Fallujah, right? And so they created the Islamic State Caliphate with this guy Baghdadi up there, like bin Laden himself on the… on the um balcony declaring himself the caliph Ibrahim divinely ordained ruler of the islamic state and so then America had to go back to war remember Iraq war three against the caliphate put us directly on the side of the Iranians again putting backing their best friends in power in Iraq.
And in fact, in the case of the liberation of the town of Tikrit from ISIS, you literally had the Iranian, literally, not only figuratively, but literally you had the Iranian Quds Force leading Iraqi militias on the ground with American air power, protecting them in the sky. And so they repeated what they wish they hadn’t done in Iraq War Two, in Iraq War Three, because the caliphate that they built to spite the Shiites and the Iranian led Shiites had blown up so badly that then they couldn’t let that stand. So they had to go back and do the same thing again. So you can see why.
Under all the Israelis’ bad advice, that America kept doing all these things that ended up empowering Iran and their Hezbollah-ish alliance throughout the region, right? Giving them Baghdad and then fighting two wars for them and all these things. So… When October 7th happened, they decided that’s it.
We’re going to do what they call the seven front war hit, you know, Hamas as hard as they can in Gaza, hit Hezbollah as hard as they can in Lebanon and see if they can get America to go all the way for the big prize and go to Tehran. And they knew that, or they were betting, I think that once they get the war started, that America will have to continue to escalate until they follow through and finally do kill that regime one way or the other.
Asbed: But Scott, when you say that this war was essentially instigated by Israel, still, when the United States got involved, was it because of a convergence of our interests? Or are they following completely divergent goals? Because I’ve certainly heard that as the United States is looking down this century, they’re also thinking about China, subduing China into a junior superpower role and stuff like that. Where’s the United States interest in all this?
Scott: Okay, well, on that particular question, go back to 1991. In fact, September 11th, 1991. No, no, no, sorry. September 11th, 1990, after the invasion of Kuwait, during Operation Desert Shield and the buildup for Iraq War I, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney testified to Congress about the importance of the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf oil and the choke point there.
Not that America is dependent on that oil, but our enemies and our allies in Asia are. And so that’s very important that America control that choke point. But then… He’s not saying we had to do regime change in Tehran to achieve that.
All we need to do is have a position of dominance throughout the Gulf. And, you know, and at that point, the Soviet Union still stood and the Carter Doctrine was, don’t you dare invade Iran’s Soviet Union or it’ll be nuclear war with us. Even though we hate the Iranians, still, we’re not going to let you Reds dominate the Gulf. So that was the Carter Doctrine of supremacy there.
And then As you guys know, even if let’s say Bin Ladinites, like, and I don’t mean CIA backed ones, but like truly America hating Bin Ladenites took over the whole Gulf and kicked every American potentate out of there. Well, America’s Navy could still sink or even just arrest, right? Pull over and seize any boat on the high seas that they feel like. Nobody doubts the power of the American Navy.
It is the global Navy. There is no other one. And we’re allied with all the other powerful navies in the world other than China and Russia. But still, it’s a lot.
And so just like the Iranians are proving in the Gulf, they don’t have to hit you just at the Strait of Hormuz. They can hit you anywhere in the Gulf. And that’s enough to shut the whole thing down or essentially force every boat captain to follow their commands. What else are they going to do?
Same thing on the high seas. If an American aircraft carrier, you know, puts the red siren on the roof and pulls you over, you’re cooked. What are you going to do? Get away?
So America can cut off China from exported, you know, oil parts, pardon me, imported oil from the sea. at any time that they wish in the event of a crisis, a real war with Iran, that’s a snap of a fingers. Point is that doesn’t really matter that much anymore because since Joe Biden gave the, this is Sparta kick in the chest to Putin and kicked him right out of Europe. I mean, yeah, he turned to Asia and has doubled and tripled down on his hydrocarbon exports, gas and oil to China. And then I actually didn’t know this, but learned recently, I was surprised to find out.
That China actually has far more domestic oil resources than I thought. They’re like the fifth biggest producer in the world or something. I did not realize that. And of course, they have plenty of coal and nuclear and whatever they want.
Asbed: They do have a lot of oil reserves. It’s just that their consumption level is so high that they still need to import a lot.
Scott: Sure. But so, oh, I’m sorry. Then to answer your broader question. I think it’s a bunch of essentially like Israeli propaganda and or just American kind of coping mechanism where people try to rationalize why we’re doing this.
You know, in fact, it’s funny, you hear the exact same phrase now, exact same phrase now that they said in 2002. I mean, they mean, meaning the public people would just say kind of repeating from TV or maybe just rationalizing themselves. well, they must have secret information that we don’t know about, right? Which is like a nice, it’s like a being polite at your friend’s mom’s house that like, well, I disagree with you, but you probably know more about this than me or what? Because like, what are you going to say?
In other words, every excuse they gave you so far, even you’re not buying it. You know what I mean? Regular John Q guy on the barstool thinks, well, you know, the chemical weapons.
Asbed: I don’t know who buys that since the whole WMD business.
Scott: Yeah. So then same thing here where they go, well, if it’s not like secret information about Iran’s nuclear weapons program that they must know that they’re not telling us, then it’s long term kind of underground secret geopolitical interests must be about China, because what else could it be? Must be about China. Right.
When again, This whole question was resolved by Dick Cheney 35 years ago when he was the defense secretary. Does is America going to continue the Carter Doctrine on into the new century? You’re gee damn right. We are.
You know, yes. And here we are still. So there’s not we never needed a regime change in Tehran for that. We just needed for. you know, our compliant regimes to persist along the Southeast coast.
And for that matter, a couple of aircraft carriers to sail up and down for the most part.
Hovik: Yeah. Scott, you mentioned Israel a few times, and I want to take us back to the clean break report from 1996, where much of one of these plans are spelled out or, you know, highlighted at a higher level of, And I also want to put an emphasis on Syria as a key case. So after more than a decade of sanctions and support for armed Islamist groups, the Assad government was finally overthrown. Now, that campaign involves not only the US and Israel, but also Turkey and others.
And today, the Jolani regime is effectively under Ankara’s influence, while parts of Syria remain under Israeli occupation. But what’s interesting is that while Turkey presents itself as as a force for peace you know if you look at the map of how the Israeli aircraft you know fly to bomb Iran they go right over Syria so that to me tells its own story so I wanted to ask you would this war with Iran be even possible without the destruction of Syria
Scott: Oh, that’s interesting. In other words, would they have been able to go ahead and launch the ward now if Assad and his guys were still there? I’m not really sure that all the dominoes had to fall in which order. I would say that it’s just the reality of the thing.
Everything’s coming up Likud here, right? They did not destroy, of course, but they severely hurt Hamas in Gaza. Um, apparently they did not set Hezbollah back as far as they thought they had, but they did kill their charismatic leader and, you know, destroy a lot of missiles and kill a lot of middle managers and so forth. Although obviously the group itself is designed to withstand that kind of thing.
And then, yeah, the overthrow of the Ba’athist regime and, you know, the Alawite-led Ba’athist regime in Syria is a huge blow to that whole Iranian arc of power, as David Wormser called it, in the clean break and all of that. So I think… That’s why they’re going for Tehran now. This is really the neocon doctrine of the W.
Bush years where, like in National Review, Michael Ledeen would write over and over again, faster, please, faster, please. We have to go after the terror masters in Tehran. Again, they like to conflate. You know, radical Islam, fundamentalist this and that, so that you forget who’s wearing the shirts and who’s wearing the skins and the game out there.
You know, in fact, in the there’s this really important article from 2007 by Seymour Hersh called The Redirection. It was about how essentially they realized that they had empowered Iran in Iraq so badly. Now, what the hell are we going to do about it? So they had to tell the Saudi king and the prime minister of Israel and everybody else that like, look, we’re going to try to figure this out and do everything we can.
And since we can’t reverse the entire sectarian war in Iraq and give the capital city back to the Sunni Arabs, well, we can still take out Assad in Damascus. And that was, you know, when they pivoted to there, it was, again, like to overcorrect from the flaw of Iraq War II. And you’re correct when you say that. The thinking behind of Rock War II, I was sort of paraphrasing it earlier, but I didn’t really explain that the thinking behind all that is delineated in this policy paper by a lackey of Richard Perle, a guy named David Wormser, and he’s the principal author of the thing.
And there are three pieces, really. It’s a clean break, a new strategy for securing the realm, coping with crumbling states, a U.S. and Israeli balance of power strategy for the Levant or something like that. And then Tyranny’s Ally is a short monograph of a book. It’s got a forward by Richard Perle, and then the main thing is by Wormser.
And it’s essentially the same thing over and over again. It’s saying, again, Israel’s problem is Iran backs Hezbollah by way of Syria. Now, I think Well, there’s so many different directions to go here. First of all, what it says in the thing is the solution to this is to overthrow Saddam in Baghdad.
Now, anyone listen to this and just think that doesn’t make any sense. He’s a secular Sunni Arab sitting on a minority dictatorship that basically requires foreign assistance to keep it in power. He’s like a perfect sock puppet for the empire if we were to have one. And why get rid of him and put in a majority Shiite authority there?
And again, the thinking was, as they had been promised by the Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, that the Hashemite king of Jordan would tell, he would just command the allegiance of all these Shiites and they would do what he said, which is completely false and stupid and wrong. But that was what they believed. And that was the kind of advice that this was the consensus among Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby and all of the neoconservatives in the W. Bush government that told W.
Bush, you want to go to Baghdad? Good idea. This is going to really be great. We gamed it all out, boss.
Trust us. And these were the guys who got us into the war.
Hovik: So, Scott, yeah, I mean, that part I understand well, and there was a direction to support Israel’s supremacy, but I was more interested in Turkey’s role in all this because… at least for what happened in Syria, Turkey was by many accounts a big time collaborator. Nowadays I think some Israeli analysts, or some people in Israel speak about Turkey as the next Iran once we get once they get done with Iran do you really see Turkey as an enemy or potential competitor for Israel or are they actually collaborators in all of this because at least to me that’s what it seems
Scott: like yeah Well, look, I, first of all, I got to tell you, this stuff gets very complicated and you can have grudges over things that to me would not seem like they make strategic sense for people to change their position on stuff.
So for example, I’m just totally making this up, but like when the Israel, not this part, when the Israelis seize a bunch of territory in Southwestern Syria, maybe that really pisses off Erdogan and then he does something and that causes a chain of of grudges back and forth that actually caused relations to deteriorate I’m not saying I know that but i’m saying that can happen and I really don’t have good enough x-ray eyes on that to see exactly how that is I can tell you for absolute certainty as I know you’re already aware but I can reaffirm and explain to your audience that when the Obama regime kicked off the dirty war in Syria in 2011, the Turks and the Israelis were aiding and abetting that all along.
And in fact, you know, I would argue that it was really the Zionist led war party in America that really pushed Obama to do that in the first place. on behalf of Israel um more of the flea wagon the dog there but then you know Saudi and Qatari and uh turkey also got in on it to a great degree and backed all of these Bin Ladenite militias from you know the outright al-Qaeda in Iraq in Syria Javad al-Nusra led by Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, now known as al-Shara, the president of Syria, but then Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham and a hundred others basically vying to be the Islamic State Caliphate themselves until basically the Iraqi-dominated faction of that group, as I had described before, went ahead and broke off all of eastern Syria and western Iraq and created their caliphate and caused Iraq War III and all of that. but it was there’s no question i mean for those of us who were against it at the time and in paying attention and all of that it was at least equivalent to the w bush years in terms of the slowest motionist most absolutely horrific like 8k quality train wreck in front of all of our eyes that like how can you do this they got so married And, you know, a lot of them were lying, but a lot of them were just so stupidly sincere where they just swore that somehow their slogan that we’re backing the moderate rebels was somehow true when there was no moderate rebels other than the guys that the extremists sent to collect the guns and the money.
And there was no question from the very beginning the thing was led by the bin Ladenites. And and it was predicted. including by me and many others in 2013 and 14, that they are going to invade Western Iraq and try to create that Islamic state that they named their group after that they wish to see in the world. And then, in fact, guys, I have to tell you that when when the Islamic State sacked Mosul, Right around then, I thought, oh, you see what’s gonna happen?
Erdogan is gonna roll his troops right in and be like, you know, Mosul really did belong to Turkey all along, and he’s using ISIS, which in fact, by the way, I should have stipulated this. if you go back to those years, 2012, 13, 14, during all of that, it was, you’d have different countries backing different suicide bomber groups and whatever. And most of the support for the Islamic State, after they broke off from the Jelani group, at least, and probably before that, was coming from the Turks.
And, you know, there was like a former CIA officer on my show who told me that he was in Ankara and there are ISIS fundraisers on the streets everywhere. Of course, this is where every jihadi in the world who went there to fight went through Turkey to get there and all this. And I remember thinking, Well, what’s he waiting for? He sent his shock trooper, suicide bomber, useless idiot, you know, bin Laden night, Arabs to do his dirty work for him.
Now I would have thought, and I don’t mean that Arabs like my point of view, but I mean his, that like these guys are like, you know, expendable. Now he’s going to march the Turkish army right in there and sack Mosul. And there’s your caliphate. Caliphate’s based in…
In Turkey, not in in in Raqqa. Right. But that didn’t happen. And I honestly don’t know why.
In fact, I think if it had, maybe Obama wouldn’t have even launched Iraq War three. You know what I mean? He might have just said, well, I guess let’s let Turkey have it.
Asbed: I don’t know. You know, Turkey is. MIT, their intelligence service, as an uncanny way of standing up these mercenary Islamic armies and doing their bidding. We saw that in the Artsakh war in Nagorno-Karabakh against Armenians and such.
And, you know, I’ll tell you, Hovig asked a question about whether Israel and Turkey are friends or foes, they’re frenemies. Here’s my barometer. I always look what’s going on with the Baku, Ceyhan, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil, 40% of Israel’s energy flows through that and that’s untouched. If it’s untouched, it doesn’t matter what Erdogan is saying or what they’re doing, you know, as long as the energy is flowing, they’re friends.
Scott, I want to shift gears just a little bit because I want to slightly pivot towards the domestic scene in the United States, because now we’re reaching, as I mentioned, the limits of “clean” air power in Iran. And there’s all this talk about, you know, finding a way to have a ground offensive on Iran to force it to break apart. And of course, as we look for proxies, as we being Trump looking for proxies, he has tried to recruit the Iranian Kurds and the Iraqi Kurds, but no takers. It seems like they’ve wisened up a little bit from history that they’re just getting used.
The last situation was in Syria. The Syrian Kurds were dumped. I mean, so far. No takers so far.
Hovik: So far. So no takers so far.
Asbed: And on the naval front, Trump tried to recruit NATO and Europe and also even China. No takers. Nobody wants to be involved in Trump’s war against Iran. Could the U.S. actually consider a ground invasion in Iran with U.S. troops?
We’ve heard that there are 2,000 Marines on the way there because this is going to put us in a quagmire. I mean, it’s going to become Vietnam if we do this. Do you think this is possible?
Scott: Well, okay. I really hope not. So here’s to break it down a little bit what’s at issue so far. No one is talking about… parachuting in the entire 75th Ranger Regimen to sack Tehran and force a regime change, kill any last Shiite cleric who dares to call himself supreme leader of anything until they just stop doing that.
Nobody’s saying that. It’s insane. And they don’t think that. But here’s what they are talking about potentially doing.
One is sending in maybe the 75th Rangers or the 82nd Airborne and or other special operations forces and air power to try to seize the nuclear facility at Isfahan, where there’s an adjacent facility, I believe it’s right there, called Pickaxe Mountain, where they think they’re hiding their enriched uranium gas in canisters there and that they want to seize that stockpile. Now to do that, I mean, the whole thing, I can picture it like a Hollywood movie, right? You guys can too. Send in all the special forces guys, like the highest tier seals and Delta and whoever in the middle.
And then you send in the second tier Rangers and Green Berets and whoever to secure the outside. And then you send in all the A-10s to machine gun with their Vulcan cannons, any of them terrible Persians who come and try to stop.
But how that might work in real life, uh would be anybody’s bet and i would think that it would be completely crazy i mean just you know what i already thought of this before an actual expert said this somewhere and i forget who but like it’s the obvious thing that you guys are probably thinking too what are they gonna do man they’re gonna drop in bulldozers They’re going to bring in like massive land moving equipment and they’re going to buy themselves how much time?
Asbed: And it’s a massive country. It’s not Venezuela here. No, of course not. And the shoreline that you can just, you know, come up to and drop off a bunch of Marines.
Scott: Yeah, exactly right. How do you get them in there? And how do you get them out of there? And how long is this thing going to take?
You could see the whole thing being no, no, no, totally cost. It sounds like a suicide mission if it was attempted. Then the other proposal is that they’ll try to do some kind of amphibious landing in the Gulf in order to stave off Iranian fire to reopen the gates of Hormuz. But guys, I mean, as soon as they started saying that, you guys saw it.
They set two American… Fuel tankers on fire up near Kuwait and in near Iraq, just to point out that, like, it doesn’t have to be the straight dum-dums. The whole Persian Gulf is up for grabs. They can reach out and touch whatever they want.
And so… Anyway, the stupidity of that, just the way that they have set this whole thing up is really something there. But look, I think, again, anyone who’s just a total amateur at this would find their own suspicions or concerns being… confirmed by real experts talking about this, that like, well, no. See, if you put a bunch of Marines on Kharg Island or you put a bunch of Marines right there on the Iranian coast adjacent the Strait of Hormuz, then what’s going to happen is they’re all going to get artilleried and or rocketed to death by guys in the mountains above them on their landing zone.
I mean, this is some World War II level D-Day style invasion type thing that would be necessary to accomplish these goals and I’m not I don’t think for a moment that anybody’s really contemplating that I mean you might just have I
Asbed: hope not but I’m trying to understand what is the domestic implication, I mean what does this mean for Trump at home, he didn’t bring anyone along. Even George W Bush went to the people to say we need to do this, it was all lies, but that’s a different story. Trump didn’t go to Congress, didn’t come to the American people. He just did this.
And even today, he has no plans to justify this war. So if this ground invasion were to happen, I mean, eventually, I’m going to come back to Joe Kent also. His MAGA base seems to be splintering a little bit. What are you seeing happen on the domestic front to the current administration?
Scott: Yeah. Well, I think obviously the Fox news audience like over 50 and whatever, maybe even older than that, not just Gen X-ers but the baby boomers really older than us X-ers, they’re buying this stuff but I think probably too bad we
Hovik: can’t put them on a plane and send them to Iran. I’m not just kidding yeah see how
Scott: they like it I could think of a few hosts… yeah I could think of a few Fox News hosts I would just use them as the payload and drop them over Tehran, but… I think, well…
Asbed: One of them is defense secretary now.
Scott: Yeah, they’ve been telling the same lies for so long. I think people are just, I think they’re over. And look, there’s every reason to believe. that if they drop a bunch of Marines in there or a bunch of 82nd Airborne in there, that those guys could get very killed. And that if that happens, what’s gonna be the reaction?
Trump’s gonna get emotional and double down, triple down, or he’s gonna realize that, boy, are people mad and have to back down. I mean, after all, Trump does understand that Iran is three times the size of Iraq. three, maybe four with three times. I think it’s four or three times the population and two big mountain ranges. And it’s just no, man.
Asbed: It’s again, it’d be like a World War Two type effort to do it for Americans, just for sizing. It’s over twice the size of Texas, I think.
Scott: Yes, two and a half Texases. And I’m from Texas and I’m telling you, it’s huge, man. Honestly, picture your map of North America in your head, okay? From Austin, Texas, which is more or less in the center, okay?
A little bit to the east, but more or less the center of Texas. From there to El Paso in West Texas is halfway to the Pacific Ocean. That’s the entire, from the center of Texas to the west of Texas is the entire distance across New Mexico, Arizona, and all of California till you get to the water. Okay, that’s how big that is for anybody who can’t make the adjustment in your head.
It’s humongous. Anyone who’s ever driven it across Texas could verify. So that’s a great way to measure it. It’s absolute, and in all of these years of the war party pushing this hype, nobody said, We ought to do like W.
Bush in 03 and roll our entire ground army in there and sack the Capitol and seize it and own it and regime change it and quote unquote, de-Ba’ath-ify it and create, build a whole new nation and all this crap. No one ever said that. They just said murder the Ayatollah and then the people will rise up and be free and blah, blah, blah kind of thing. In other words, encouraging the American regime to just bite the bullet and get it started and hope for the best, which seems to be exactly what happened here, right?
He got all this contrary advice and he decided, nah, you know what? Netanyahu promises it’ll be easy. And you know what too? Um, There was all this hype about the Iranian regime wiping out 30 to even 50 or 80,000 protesters in January when the popular protests broke out.
And obviously that was mostly intended to outrage people and soften up opinion for the war, right? To try to get us involved that look how brutal this regime is when in fact the real total is likely 3,000, maybe a little north of that. 10 times less. But the thing is about that hype is that there’s every reason to believe that Donald Trump bought that. If you look at all the idiots on Twitter who did.
And if Donald Trump bought that, then you think about that. It’s not just outrageous that they would kill so many people, right? But it tells a tale that that was necessary. that the Iranian regime had to kill something like 30,000 popular protesters before they would give up and go home. Cause otherwise they were clearly on the verge of overthrowing his regime.
If you have, if you have an uprising and it takes killing 30 to 50,000 of them to get the rest to quit in like world war one style, you know, battle of the Psalms sized massacres, then boy, is that a brittle regime that’s ready to fall if you just drop one 2,000 pound bomb on the Ayatollah’s head. Then you’ll see, and this is what Netanyahu was preaching. So all we got to do is hit them once and they’ll fall right over. And of course, that was nonsense.
Asbed: Yeah, Scott, but I want to talk just a little bit more about the domestic thing, because I was fascinated to hear about Joe Kent, who was Trump’s handpicked director of counterterrorism in this country, reporting directly to Tulsi Gabbard. Now, Gabbard has been quiet, but suddenly we have this WMD moment where Joe Kent says there was no justification for the war. I quit. What does this mean?
I mean, he was an extreme right-wing person. He came from the Charlie Kirk ranks, I think. What does this mean for the MAGA base? Are we seeing a splinter?
And are these people going to be able to hold on to power in November 2026? Are they going to lose the house? I’m really interested to hear your opinion on the domestic front. The other day, I was musing a little bit on another show that regime change is going to be achieved, except it’s going to be in the United States and not in Iran.
Scott: Yeah. Well, you know, they had elections here in Texas a couple of weeks ago. And regardless of the results on the Republican side, which was mostly sort of populist against incumbent, but more importantly, was Democratic turnout was way higher. It was mostly primary stuff.
Yeah. There’s way more enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Republicans are just staying home and and quitting in frustration. Seemingly morale is low.
And so I think, yeah, the tide is with the opposing party now. And, you know, like I was trying to tell everybody and some of them listen that. You’d have America first or Israel instead, but you can’t have it both ways. And this is clearly breaking the coalition on the Trumpian right.
And after all, You know, in 2000, when W. Bush was running against Al Gore, in one of the debates, he mumbled like something, something, we should have a humble foreign policy, something, something, so our empire will actually be more effective, but we should be nice and whatever. And people were like, oh, wow, he seems to be much more peace oriented than Al Gore, you know what I mean? But Donald Trump gets up there and beats his chest like King Kong and goes, I’m the greatest peacemaker in the history of the world.
I wage war against wars so that they’ll never happen anymore. And then so to flip flop from that, to turn around and launch an aggressive war. When his own government and everybody knows is all at Israel’s behest, he said it himself. He did it in the name of protecting Israel.
Maybe he was so depressed about not getting the Nobel Prize. Maybe that was it. Or maybe he would have dropped a nuke if they’d given it to him at this point.
Asbed: Who knows?
Scott: But yeah, he’s got hell to pay because a lot of people did really believe in that. And there were reasons why they should have known better, but still. And look, Joe Kent, they are trying desperately to smear him and attack him. They’re attacking his wife.
They’re saying, oh, he believes in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It’s just gone into character assassination mode. That’s right. And…
Virtually all that is going to fall on deaf ears. In other words, like the people who are most receptive to those narratives already believe that about everything that they hear that they don’t like, but nobody else is going to be impressed like that. And look, I’m not speaking for them, but I just sincerely doubt that military guys across this country are really going to buy that like, Yeah, I used to respect this Joe Kent guy, but now that I found out he hates Jews, like, no, that’s so stupid. He does not.
And he didn’t say anything like that at all. And of course, they have to completely twist his words and just make up sentiments. I saw yesterday where some of the leaders of the war party on Twitter, and maybe it was Mark Levin, are calling him a neo-Nazi guy. Yeah.
You know, in a way that is its own form of Holocaust denial. Right. Where you have to trivialize the Holocaust so bad to make this guy fit into it. When in fact, he’s much more like one of the American heroes who helped end the Holocaust in Europe in the Second World War than one of the guys who committed the thing.
Are you kidding me? And so I think. it should piss people off. I don’t like being lied to. And here they’re telling the American people that this special operations forces veteran of the terror wars, who clearly is not emotional and not angry and not, you know, causing a fight was not about to be fired.
Like in their anonymously spread rumors is just doing the right thing, standing on conviction. And there’s nothing that he says that makes him look bad. only them paraphrasing him can serve their purpose of making, you know, somehow assassinating his character. So they have a problem to reckon with there. He speaks for a lot of people inside and outside the military on the right who just, we know better than this.
And after all, you know, the neoconservatives who took W. Bush to war and represent the vanguard of the Republican War Party They’re a bunch of ex-communists and ex-democrats who became conservatives because that’s where the war was. So they went to be tough guy Reaganites in the face of Jane Fonda and Jimmy Carter-esque democratism. But otherwise, they’re a bunch of pinkos, right?
They always have been. And so… If you actually believe in conserving, for example, I don’t know, the budget or the Bill of Rights or anything like the stability of our republic over the long term, then the empire is your enemy. This is all ideological agendas of one kooks and two agents of foreign powers who are using us and abusing us to achieve their ends.
There’s nothing conservative about that. There’s no reason in the world why the population in any town that you can name in Iowa or Kansas cares whether the clergy in Najaf are telling Hezbollah to stop being friends with Iran or not. We don’t care about that. David Wormser and Richard Pearl, they’re Israeli agents. using and abusing the United States of America to achieve Israel’s ends.
And of course, failing completely. Nothing but, you know, Wile E. Coyote type stuff, blowing up bombs in their own stupid bases and all of ours,
Hovik: but still. Scott, you talk to Many people, many smart people. And I’m hoping that you have encountered some hidden insights that we haven’t yet been able to. But given where this is going, how do we get off this merry-go-round?
Tell us what you think might happen. And obviously, I think there are fears that if this goes longer than a few months, then worldwide economy takes a hit, a big hit. Do you think that’s a fixed boundary, that no matter what, they will have to finish this before then? Or do you think actually, like World War I, God forbid, there’s this book about World War I called The Sleepwalkers, where it describes how easy it was to start that war, but how difficult it was to stop it, despite every single party wanting very much to stop the war.
Do you think we can find ourselves in that scenario as well?
Scott: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a real threat right now, right, is if Trump says, OK, I won and declares victory that the Iranians are just going to keep firing missile after missile after missile at Israel and potentially even still at American bases in the region in order to prove the point that, like, actually, no, we’re not done with our side of this thing yet. And we’re going to show you that it’s way too expensive to take us on in the way that you did. And, you know, I’ve heard a lot of analysts say that, you know what I mean?
I don’t know that that actually is Iran’s strategic doctrine, but it does seem like, for example, the Ayatollah’s old policy of just barely hit them back, just enough to show we’re not pacifists, but deliberately miss, announce your missiles beforehand, you know, like after Soleimani and even last June, their sort of symbolic return fire against the United States.
Asbed: Face-saving responses.
Scott: Yes. That’s right. Well, they killed him. And then they announced that we’re going to kill all the rest of you, too, which means essentially use it or lose it.
Right. The same kind of nuclear doctrine that the United States has. We’re totally being our government is going to be destroyed. They’re going to launch every last nuke they got before they go out.
Well, these guys don’t have nukes, but same difference that. They’re saying, you know, and this is essentially the position of all states, right, is where would the country be without us to protect you? And if that means taking their whole dang country down with them, they will. Right.
And there’s no reason to believe Iran is exempt from those same kind of logic. Like they’re going to say, oh, we the IRGC is going to say, oh, we feel bad for getting the Iranian people in so much trouble with the superpower. Let us just go home and let them create a new government for our country or whatever. Like that’s just not going to happen.
Right. They’re going to fight. So it does make sense then that if the conservative dead old man’s policy of holding your fire and turning the other cheek is canceled, then the opposite of that is obviously not blow up the United States of America, sink our Navy and invade South Carolina. Right.
But although some of us would like to see a regime change in the Senate there. Yeah. But it’s not that they are a threat to us, but they’re a threat to American assets and allies in the region. And they can continue to, as you indicated, hold the entire world economy hostage until just every sovereign leader screaming uncle and screaming at Donald Trump that he’s got to do something to, you know, back down and and and hand them something.
So I think it’s just like if we’re talking about the Ukraine war two, three years ago, it’s like, look, you and you and me all know that this is completely stupid and crazy and it’s going nowhere. And the Russians are just going to keep winning and winning and winning slowly. And they’re destroying both countries. And it’s just a mess.
And they should stop now. And then and if you ask me, well, do you think it’s going to go on past the elections? You know, man, I hope not. But then the answer is yes. and then another set of elections and then another set of elections and the things that’s going on.
In fact, in late 23, the Biden government started telling Politico that, well, we’ve got to keep the Ukraine war going at least through the elections because they were embarrassed to admit defeat before the elections. So they were going to keep the war going on for another year, which, of course, same stupid war still going on. And they’re going to do it for the political reason that they can’t have failed before the election. And they haven’t failed until they admit they’ve failed.
So they keep doing the same stupid thing here. So, you know, the fact, gentlemen, that they should not is no indicator that they won’t. I mean, I really don’t know what’s going to happen. And I’m. and i’m afraid that donald trump could start actually getting emotional right if he starts really getting embarrassed some of his tweets are just insane and um you know how frustrated he can get is essentially probably you know pretty unlimited do
Asbed: you think he really really understands the situation like on a personal level or does he just react to the people around him i mean if people were actually
Scott: Go ahead. I was going to say he does seem to repeat a lot of propaganda, like the 30,000 killed and stuff.
Asbed: Yeah, exactly.
Scott: That’s what I was going to talk about. Yes, I think the people around him are basically feeding him a good, steady diet of Fox News. And that’s his narrative. That’s basically what he thinks he understands about it.
And as I’ve always said about Donald Trump, that the way to understand Donald Trump is he’s a Rush Limbaugh fan in a golf cart. Right. He couldn’t host the Rush Limbaugh show, which was actually like the most superficial and facile type Republican Party cheerleading garbage anyway. But he’s the kind of guy who’s driving around in a golf cart going, yeah, that’s what I think, too.
Right. But he doesn’t know anything about this stuff. It’s the same as, you know, they sent Wyckoff and Kushner to go and negotiate the nuclear deal. And they came back and started explaining the details of what was going on there.
And it was clear they didn’t know what they were talking about. Wyckoff thought that the Tehran research facility, the American-built medical research facility there, had a uranium enrichment plant there that they were refusing somehow to turn off and this and that. And it’s like, dude, you don’t even know what you’re talking about. And you’re the one saying we can’t have a deal because they’re being intransigent.
But you don’t know the difference from a uranium atom and atom.
Hovik: scott i i do appreciate you coming on our show again and uh we hope to have you back again but yeah you’re right that this is a very uh big mess that we’re in and i’m hoping to um in any way like you try to figure out like how to how to get out out of this uh the sooner the better but um yeah thank you thank you very much for coming on our podcast
Asbed: Yeah. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Scott. Absolutely. Thank you both.
Scott: Appreciate it.
Asbed: Take care. Okay, that’s our show today. It was recorded on March 19, 2026. We’ve been talking with Mr.
Scott Horton, who’s an American radio host, author, and prominent voice in the libertarian anti-war movement. He’s the executive director of the Libertarian Institute and Antiwar.com, as well as being the host of the Scott Horton Show. For more information on the participants in this episode and other related links and everything, just go to podcasts.groong.org/episode-number.
Hovik: And make sure, please, that you are subscribed to our channel. So if you’re watching this on YouTube, click on the subscribe button and then like, comment and share so that you can give us a little boost in terms of our reach. It will be much appreciated. I’m Hovik Manucharyan.
Asbed: And I’m Asbed Bedrossian, still in Los Angeles. We’ll talk to you soon.
Hovik: Take care.