Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex | Lex Fridman Podcast #478

Across a roughly ten-hour conversation, Scott Horton lays out a sweeping revisionist history of American foreign policy from the end of Vietnam through the present. He argues that US interventionism, the self-perpetuating military-industrial complex, and the influence of the Israel lobby and neoconservatives have repeatedly provoked the very enemies and wars they claimed to be fighting. He walks chronologically through the 1953 Iran coup, the Iran-Iraq war, the two Gulf Wars, 9/11 as 'blowback,' the Iraq War lies, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, the Iran war, Israel-Palestine, and the Russia-Ukraine war. Throughout, Horton stresses that diplomacy rather than force is the answer, that whistleblowers and ordinary people often see truth more clearly than elites, and that war is a 'supply-side' business sustained by propaganda and inflationary money.

• Horton cites President Carter's July 3, 1979 finding authorizing covert CIA support for the Afghan mujahideen, arguing the US deliberately tried to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan to create 'a Soviet Vietnam.'
  00:25:11
• He says Gareth Porter found a classified document showing Brzezinski privately admitted to the Saudi foreign minister there was no real Soviet threat to Iran, making the pretext for the Carter Doctrine knowingly fake.
  00:33:20
• The 'Iraqi incubators' story used to sell the first Gulf War was a 100% hoax; the supposed nurse was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and wasn't even in the country during the invasion.
  01:02:46
• Horton argues the lead 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh decided to join al-Qaeda in reaction to Israel's 1996 Qana massacre in Lebanon, making 9/11 'blowback' from US support for Israel.
  01:26:42
• He claims the Taliban repeatedly offered to hand over or kill bin Laden and finally offered unconditional surrender to stop the bombing, but George W. Bush refused so the Afghan war could continue toward Iraq.
  02:24:52
• Horton says a major reason for the Iraq War was an Israeli-backed scheme (the 'Clean Break' / Ahmed Chalabi) to build an oil pipeline to Haifa, 'so Israel could save a nickel a barrel,' at a cost of thousands of American and over a million Iraqi lives.
  02:52:16
• He cites Peter Navarro telling the New York Times that Trump vetoed war-powers resolutions and kept the Yemen war going 'to pay Raytheon,' because the arms maker wanted the war for profit.
  03:11:21
• Horton points to the documentary 'The Bibi Files,' where on video Shin Bet interrogators ask Netanyahu why he funds Hamas via Qatar, and Netanyahu answers it is 'how we keep the Palestinians divided' while controlling 'the height of the flame.'
  08:08:01
• He argues James Baker promised the Soviets 'not one inch' of NATO expansion six times on Feb 9, 1990, with Gates telling the KGB the same that day, constituting a broken agreement that helped provoke the Ukraine war.
  09:09:09

• Horton cites Brown University's Costs of War estimates: 900,000-940,000 direct deaths, 3.6-3.8 million indirect deaths, and roughly $8 trillion spent on the post-9/11 wars, plus 37 million people displaced.
  00:01:04
• He notes that in Afghanistan, food insecurity went from 62% to 92%, acute child malnutrition from 9% to 50%, and poverty from 80% to 97% across the war period.
  00:02:38
• Horton recounts Gary Webb's 'Dark Alliance' reporting that the CIA-linked Contra operation brought cocaine into the US, and that Webb was driven to suicide after being discredited.
  00:38:31
• He claims the first Gulf War accidentally uncovered a real, secret early Iraqi nuclear weapons program the CIA hadn't known about, driven underground by Israel's 1981 Osirak strike.
  01:04:51
• During the 1990s, before the war on terror, the US searched for new enemies, hyping the Mexican and Peruvian drug cartels and fears that Germany and Japan would 'rise back up.'
  01:09:31
• Horton says Delta Force and CIA operators (per books like 'Kill Bin Laden' and 'Jawbreaker') were denied reinforcements and barred from chasing bin Laden across the Pakistan border at Tora Bora in December 2001.
  02:30:01
• He notes Eisenhower coined 'military-industrial complex' and warned in his farewell that future presidents would lack his ability to restrain the military's constant demands for more divisions.
  03:29:30
• At ISIS's peak it controlled a landmass roughly the size of Great Britain with a standing army Horton estimates at 250,000-300,000 men.
  05:48:23
• Horton recounts that at the 1986 Reykjavik summit Reagan and Gorbachev came close to a deal to abolish nuclear weapons, derailed by Reagan's insistence on the Star Wars missile-defense program.
  06:29:36
• He cites Obama telling Jeffrey Goldberg that Russia will always have 'escalation dominance' in Ukraine because it matters far more to Moscow than to Washington.
  09:55:01

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