Scott Horton: evaluation

Transcript context

…B-II bombers and drop 12 massive ordnance penetrators, which are these 30,000 pound bombs on Fordow in order to, as he said, obliterate it, more realistically to severely degrade it. So that happens. And then he offers the Iranians as he’s been offering all the way through. You have an option, you can go back to Oman, I told you Oman, and you decided to force me to go to Fordow, but now we can go back for negotiations, and he forces a ceasefire on the Iranians, gets the Israelis to agree and that’s where we are today. That’s where as you say, a tentative ceasefire that just came into effect and we’ll see now if the Iranians decide to take President Trump on his repeated offers, join him in Oman for another round of negotiations. Scott, is there some stuff you want to add to that? Sure. Well, he started with January, right? Trump’s second term here and the maximum pressure campaign essentially as should be clear to everyone. Now, all these negotiations were just a pretext for war. Trump and his entire cabinet must have known that the Ayatollah is not going to give up all enrichment. That is their latent nuclear deterrent. Their posture has been heavily implied, “Don’t attack us and we won’t make a nuke. ” While America’s position was if you make a nuke, if you start to we’ll attack you. So it was the perfect standoff, but what happened was, and you might remember a few weeks ago, there was some talk about, “Well, maybe we could find a way to compromise on some enrichment. Maybe they could do a consortium with the Saudis.” And then nope, the pressure came down. No enrichment, zero enrichment, but that’s a red line. Everyone knows and even now it’s probably less likely than ever that they’re going to give up enrichment. Sure, they bombed Fordow, but they didn’t destroy every last centrifuge in that place, and the Iranians are already announcing that they’re already begun construction on another facility under a taller mountain buried even deeper, and they figured out how to enrich uranium hexafluoride gas, what, 20 years ago now, and they will always be able to, and this is the slippery slope that we’re on with these wars is in fact, I saw a friend here on TV the other day. He almost pretty much just implied there saying, “Well now Trump has to go in.” We were told it’s just Israel doing it, don’t worry, but then no Trump has to hit Fordow or else now they’ll break out toward a nuclear weapon. So in for a penny, in for a pound, in for a ton. And now once we bomb Fordow again and Natanz again and the new facility again, then it’ll be decided that nope, as Benjamin Netanyahu said the other day, you know what would really solve this problem? If we just kill the Ayatollah, then everything will be fine. Then we’ll have a regime change and then what? Then we’ll have a civil war with Bin Ladenites again in the catbird seat, just like George Bush put them in Iraq and Barack Obama, put them in Libya and in Syria, and we’ll have Azeris and Baluchi suicide bombers and Shiite revolutionaries and whoever all vying for power in the new absolute chaos stand. If you listen to the administration and Mr. Dubowitz, they’re essentially just implying that like, oh yeah, mission accomplished. We did it. Their nuclear program’s destroyed. Now we don’t have to worry about that anymore, but that’s not true. Now there’s every reason to believe, and we don’t know for sure. mission accomplished. We did it. Their nuclear program’s destroyed. Now we don’t have to worry about that anymore, but that’s not true. Now there’s every reason to believe, and we don’t know for sure. There’s every reason to believe that at least is much more likely now that the Ayatollah will change his mind about God changing his mind and we’ll say that actually maybe we do need a nuclear deterrent. That’s really what it’s been for this whole time is a bluff. We have bullets in one pocket, revolver in another. Let’s not you and me fight and escalate this thing. It’s the same position by the way as Japan and Germany and Brazil. Two of the three of those are under America’s nuclear umbrella, I admit, but still where they’ve proven they’ve mastered the fuel cycle and they can make nuclear weapons, but hey, since nobody’s directly threatening them now, why escalate things and go ahead and make atom bombs? That has been their position the whole time because after all, they could not break out and make a nuke without everyone in the world knowing about it. And that’s why Lex, and I’m sure you could vouch for me on this, if you’ve been watching TV over the past few weeks, you’ll hear Marco Rubio and all the government officials and all the warhawks say, “Oh yes, 60%. What do you think they need with that 60%?” Implying that oh yes, see, they’re racing toward a bomb, but you see how they always just imply that? They won’t come right out and say that because it’s a ridiculous lie. They could have enriched up to 90 plus percent uranium 235 this whole time. The reason they were enriching up to 60% was in reaction to Israeli sabotage. First of all, assassinating their nuclear scientists and then their sabotage [inaudible 00:10:19]. They started enriching up to 60% just like they did in the Obama years to have a bargaining chip to negotiate away. Under the JCPOA, they shipped out every bit of their enriched uranium to France to be turned into fuel rods and then ship back into the country to be used in their reactors, and so they’re just trying to get us back in that deal. It is an illusion and I don’t know exactly what’s in this man’s mind, but it’s just not true that they’re making nuclear weapons, and it has been a lie of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party regime, and for that matter, the Khatima regime of Ehud Olmert before him that this is a threat that has to be preempted when in fact it never was anything more than a latent nuclear deterrent.…

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