Horton, Scott
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Horton delivers an extraordinarily long, extensively cited oral history arguing that nearly every major US war since Vietnam has been manufactured through a repeating pattern: government officials (and allied foreign lobbies, chiefly Israel's) manufacture or exaggerate a threat, media and "think tanks" launder the resulting propaganda into respectable-sounding policy, the public is stampeded into supporting a war whose real rationale is never stated honestly, and the war's own blowback then supplies the pretext for the next one. He traces this arc in detail: Carter and Brzezinski's 1979 finding authorizing covert aid to Afghan mujahideen (deliberately baiting Soviet invasion to inflict a "Soviet Vietnam," per Brzezinski's own later admission that they knowingly "increased the probability" of invasion), the Iran-Iraq War (with the US backing Saddam's chemical-weapons program against Iran while also secretly arming Iran via Israel in Iran-Contra), the 1990-91 Gulf War (April Glaspie's ambiguous "no position" signal to Saddam, the fabricated Iraqi-incubator hoax, faked satellite evidence of an imminent invasion of Saudi Arabia, and America's repeated refusal to accept Iraq's negotiated withdrawal because the war was explicitly intended, per Brent Scowcroft and others on record, to "kick Vietnam syndrome" and restore public appetite for war), and the post-Gulf-War sanctions/no-fly-zone regime that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and directly motivated Osama bin Laden's declared war on the United States — a motivation Horton insists is documented in bin Laden's own stated grievances (US troops on Saudi soil, sanctions on Iraq, and US support for Israeli actions like the 1996 Qana massacre, which he argues directly radicalized 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta) rather than any abstract "hatred of freedom."
A central, heavily sourced thread is the role of neoconservative officials — many explicitly tied to Israel's Likud party (via documents like "A Clean Break" and the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq," funded partly by Lockheed's Bruce Jackson) — in fabricating the Iraq-al-Qaeda and WMD case for the 2003 invasion, using Ahmed Chalabi's fabrications and the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans" to launder discredited intelligence, with the explicit strategic goal (per Chalabi's own promises to Richard Perle and David Wurmser) of installing a friendly Iraqi government that would build an oil pipeline to Haifa and weaken Iran's supply lines to Hezbollah. Horton argues this war, fought "for the Shiites" (installing Iran-aligned exile parties SCIRI/Dawa in Baghdad), predictably empowered Iran, which in turn drove the Bush-era "redirection" policy of tilting back toward Sunni jihadist factions in Lebanon and eventually Syria — a policy Horton says Obama continued in Syria and Libya by backing al-Qaeda-linked "moderate rebels" (documented in leaked cables and Jamie Rubin's "Syria and Israel" memo), directly enabling ISIS's rise after the Sunni tribal "Awakening" had already crushed al-Qaeda in Iraq once. He extends the same lens to Somalia (a "self-licking ice cream cone" of continuous US intervention since 2001 that itself created al-Shabaab), Yemen (where a Saudi/UAE-driven war was continued under both Obama and Trump partly, per Peter Navarro, to subsidize defense contractors like Raytheon), and North Korea (arguing Clinton's Agreed Framework was working until Bush and Bolton tore it up in 2002, directly precipitating Pyongyang's actual nuclear breakout) — framing the "military-industrial complex" not as passively supplying wars decided by others but as an active, supply-side political force (echoing Eisenhower's own coinage of the term) that manufactures demand for weapons through captured think tanks and lobbying.
On Israel/Palestine, Horton gives an extended account of the 1948 Nakba and 1967 occupation as programs of deliberate, permanent dispossession (citing Ariel Sharon adviser Arnon Soffer's explicit "kill and kill" demographic rationale for the 2005 Gaza "disengagement," and Dov Weisglass's admission it was designed to "put the peace process in formaldehyde"), and characterizes the current Gaza war as a US-enabled genocide, citing Haaretz reporting on IDF free-fire zones, the killing of aid-seekers, and Netanyahu's own recorded admissions (the leaked 2001 "hurt them," and Shin Bet interrogation footage admitting Israel deliberately funded Hamas to keep Palestinians divided — "we control the height of the flame"). He argues US support for this policy is the direct cause of the post-9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil (citing FBI entrapment cases where recruits invariably cite US Middle East policy, not "hatred of freedom"), and separately details the 2025 US/Israeli strikes on Iran, arguing Iran was never close to a weapon, that assassinations and sabotage (not diplomacy) drove Iran's 60%-enrichment escalation as leverage, and that bombing has now made an actual Iranian nuclear breakout more likely, not less, since IAEA inspectors were expelled. The episode closes with an extensive account of NATO expansion as a broken promise (citing declassified 1990 James Baker/Genscher/Gates statements and Joshua Shifrinson's research) underlying the 2014 Maidan-triggered civil war and 2022 Russian invasion — which Horton calls unjustified but thoroughly provoked, given the West's refusal to negotiate a neutral status for Ukraine, implement the Minsk II accords, or address Russia's stated security concerns about NATO missile placements — and a detailed argument that Trump's efforts at diplomacy with Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been repeatedly sabotaged by hawkish advisers (Bolton) and by "Russiagate," which he calls a fabricated law-enforcement/intelligence coup attempt against a sitting president.
Excerpts
On the deliberate 1979-80 US strategy of baiting the Soviet Union into its own "Vietnam" in Afghanistan, and its stated purpose:
“The point of this operation... let's bait the Soviets into overexpansion... if we can bait the Soviets into Afghanistan and bog them down, we will be adding straw to the camel's back... bleed them to bankruptcy, and force them out the hard way." On Brzezinski's later confirmation: "We were not necessarily trying to provoke them into invading Afghanistan, but we were knowingly increasing the probability that they would.”
On why the neoconservative case for invading Iraq collapsed into farce once its architects' own promises were exposed:
“Chalabi assures us that a democratic Shiite Iraq will be a nightmare for Iran... Chalabi promised the neoconservatives, we'll build an oil pipeline from northern Iraq to Haifa, Israel... This was one of the reasons... that 4,500 Americans and a million Iraqis died in Iraq War II was so Israel could save a nickel a barrel on Iraqi oil.”
On the core argument that US support for Israeli policy — not abstract religious hatred — drives anti-American terrorism, illustrated by how FBI sting operations actually recruit their targets:
“Every time they entrap some idiot into a bin Laden plot, what do they tell him? Don't you hate freedom? No. They tell him, isn't it impossible to tolerate the violence that George Bush slash Barack Obama slash Donald Trump slash Joe Biden are bringing to the people of the Middle East, and don't you want to do something about it?... They cite American foreign policy 100% of the time.”