>> Fox News has done what you would expect it to do in the follow-up to Donald Trump's
decision to assassinate Iran's top military commander.
They are defending him and they're doing so aggressively.
However, there was one person on Fox that kinda surprised me, and that was Geraldo Rivera,
take a look.
>> Now we have taken this huge military escalation.
Now I fear the worst.
You're gonna see the US markets go crazy today.
You're gonna see the price of oil spiking today.
This is a very, very big deal.
>> And I don't know if you heard, but this isn't about his resume of blood and death.
It is about what was next.
We stopped the next attack.
That's what I think you're missing.
>> According to the Secretary of State.
>> So we should allow the next attack?
>> By what credible source can you predict what the next Iranian move would be?
>> Right, so Secretary of State and American intelligence provided that material.
>> Well, they've been excellent.
They've been excellent.
The US intel just has been excellent.
Since 2003, when we invaded Iraq, disrupted the entire region for no real reason.
Don't for a minute start cheering this on.
What you have done, what we have done, we have unleashed-
>> I will cheer it on.
I will cheer it on.
>> Then you, like Lindsay Graham, have never met a war you didn't like.
>> That is not true, and don't even say that.
>> If President Trump wanted de-escalation- >> We should just let him kill us for another
15 years.
>> If President Trump wanted de-escalation and to bring our troops home.
What this was a reaction to- >> What about the 700 Americans who are dead?
Should they not be happy because of him?
>> What about the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died since 2003?
You have to start seeing things.
What the hell are we doing in Baghdad in the first place?
>> So you want- >> Why are we there?
>> So you want- >> Why aren't these forces home?
>> You're blaming President Bush for the maniacal killing of Saddam Hussein?
>> I am blaming President Bush.
I am blaming President Bush in 2003 for those fake weapons of mass destruction that never
existed.
>> My goodness.
>> And the con job that drew us into that war.
>> Every once in a while there is someone on Fox who has this like strange moment of
clarity, and it's always a fascinating thing to watch.
Especially when they're debating someone like Brian Kilmeade who just responds, I will cheer
it on I will cheer it on.
He's such a clown.
So Geraldo Rivera's absolutely right.
I mean, I love the fact that he cited the ridiculous, I mean, it was a lack of intelligence
indicating that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The American people were lied to, and we engage in a preemptive war.
And something very similar is happening today.
As we know, Mike Pompeo couldn't name anything specific when it came to Soleimani and how
he allegedly served as an imminent threat to the United States.
Where's the intelligence on that?
Can we see it?
No, we can't.
Which means that he's lying, right?
So it's just a repeat of what we went through in 2003.
We're still in Iraq.
>> Yeah.
>> And I love the fact that Geraldo is calling it how he sees it.
Because we need that in the media, especially on a platform like Fox News.
>> Well, also, the good thing that Geraldo did is that he questioned even the premise
that we're fit to dictate the events in the Middle East.
I mean, and he was even mentioning dead Iraqis, which you never hear in the US media-
>> Right, absolutely.
>> Even amongst liberals.
You never hear what about the tens of thousands of Iraqis we killed?
Which is probably even more than that but, so yeah, I mean, it is like a glitch in the
matrix a little bit when something on Fox goes like that and you kind of have to agree
with them.
But at the same time it made me feel a little bit heartened that this does feel like it's
different from 2002.
Cuz I remember that time really well I and it felt at the time that everyone was on board
with the war.
Like that everyone was cheering it on, enthusiastic.
There was a vibrant anti-war movement, but outside of that sort of what at the time was
a relatively fringe position there was genuine enthusiasm to go into Iraq.
I just don't see that now.
Even Kilmeade who is like a brain dead automaton can't even muster up the, he says the words
but I don't feel the same conviction.
>> Yeah, I think you're right.
Now, I'm seeing similarities, and we'll go to examples of that in just a minute.
But I think what makes this different is the country's in a different place right now.
Remember, the Bush administration tried to make it appear as though Iraq was somehow
involved in 9/11.
>> Yeah.
>> When it wasn't.
>> Right.
>> So that enthusiasm in 2002 I think had a lot to do with the intentional misinformation
about Iraq.
And then also look, I mean, we have been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq for a long time
now and we know what the cost is, both financially and when it comes to human lives.
And so, yeah, Americans are sick of it because chances are someone you know or you yourself
has a family member who has paid the consequences of this military profiteering.
>> Right, I would say that the political theater around this moment has striking parallels
to the lead up of what was happening with Bush administration and the drumming of war
in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan in general.
I think about this Howard Zinn quote where he says, how can you have a war on terrorism
when war itself is terrorism, right?
So we rarely think about the framing of national security.
We just jump in, especially traditional media, and yes, there was a fluke in Geraldo Rivera
and his rant which was phenomenal.
But if you've been watching Geraldo, he's actually taken surprising stances in this
last year defending Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib against attacks, vicious harassment
by Trump.
And so this is kind of, I think, him really having a moment of morality, and his own moral
clarity, around what this administration alledged to stand by, which was supposed to be ending
endless wars.
>> Right.
>> And then seeing what this was a continuation of in the worst possible way, right?
And that's what Bush's attack represented,or the Bush administration's involvement, continued
occupation in Iraq, continued involvement in Afghanistan also represented.
But I will also add that it's not just the lack of intelligence, it's fabricated intelligence.
>> Totally.
>> And also the rhetoric that we use to talk about it.
When we talk about the preeminent strike, and there's intelligence to suggest that they're
never gonna release, that this is something that we had to do.
Well, I would urge people to substitute preemptive with aggressive because that's what the US
has been doing but, again, under the veil of terrorism and that's how we get away with
it.
>> Right, look, it's like walking into someone's home.
>> Yeah.
>> Right?
And shooting them dead.
>> And then saying I suspected that this person was gonna harm me in the future and so I had
to- >> It's stand your ground laws.
>> Yeah.
>> It's absolutely stand your ground laws and this is the culture of America.
>> And look here's the thing, right?
So I know that there are gonna be bad actors, dishonest people who are gonna watch our coverage
and they're gonna try to make it seem as though we're defending someone like the person who
just got assassinated.
>> Yeah, Soleimani, yeah.
>> That is, Soleimani, that is not what's happening here.
We acknowledge he's a bad person.
>> Yeah.
>> But you also have to acknowledge that Mohammed Bin Salman's a bad person.
Saudi Arabia, bad actor, very much involved in 9/11.
But we work with the bad people all the time, right?
So don't buy into this narrative about like, this is about national security.
This is about keeping people safe.
Especially when they can't provide the fabricated intelligence that they keep citing.
>> This is the other thing that I just wanna add really quickly, because this proves that
the US is just aligning with its own interests, not aligning with good or bad people.
But the US had listed the IRGC as a terrorist organization back in April.
So you know that something was in the works.
At the same time, a couple of years ago, what did they do?
MEK, which is, some people would say, a guerrilla terrorist organization, they delisted them
off of the terrorist list because people like Giuliani and Bolton were getting money from
this group.
And so they had hedged their bets on MEK taking over and usurping the current Islamic revolutionary
movement.
So these guys are just looking out for themselves.
And that's the big issue and Soleimani, I do want to add this too, is definitely not
a good guy either.
And there are people in the region that are rejoicing in this moment because they've seen
the bloodshed that his tactical strategic involvement in Syria and Lebanon, putting
down protests.
He was just coming back From Beirut to Baghdad, actually, making sure that the protests were
not gonna upset or destabilize Hezbollah.
And so going from there to Iran's involvement in Iran, and of course Iraq and putting down
protests in Iran themselves, there's not a lot of love lost on this guy.
But that also doesn't mean we didn't need to put the region in a position to become
horribly destabilized.
>> Further destabilized, right?
>> Right.
>> So it's not simply about what the Trump Administration did and how it impacted Iran
or its military.
It's about what comes after that.
>> Absolutely.
>> And then one final thing, because we haven't mentioned it all through the show yet and
it's important to mention history, right?
And mention how US aggression, not just recently but throughout the decades, has led to the
moment that we're experiencing right now.
Look, the United States just engaged, orchestrated a coup in Bolivia to rid the country of a
popular leader, Evo Morales, right?
Now, leftist leader, of course.
The US has a history of doing coup d'etats everywhere, including Iran in 1953.
The United States decided we're gonna do a coup.
We're going to get rid of a democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh,
and those actions lead to consequences.
So when people ask, why is it that these Middle Eastern countries hate us so much?
They don't hate us cuz they're jealous of us, okay?
Don't listen to idiotic superficial morons like Bill Maher, okay?
Open a book, look into history, and understand how US aggression toward democratically elected
leaders in other countries has led to the experience that we're seeing today, period.
>> Yeah, the other thing that I would add is that just two weeks ago the Washington
published something called the Afghanistan Papers which showed that basically everything
that the government has told us about the war in Afghanistan since 2001, from the very
beginning, Bush administration, Obama administration, and the Trump administration, has been a lie.
Basically everything has been a lie.
So whatever narrative the Pentagon or the State Department pushes now on this intervention,
whether there was some sort of imminent strike coming on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard, it's all lies.
You can't trust any of it, any of it.
And that's what drives me crazy about the way the media reports, and not just Fox News
but like the New York Times.
They'll just parrot whatever the State Department or the Pentagon says uncritically when they
themselves just uncovered that everything about the Afghanistan War was a lie, basically
everything.
>> Right.
They'll just repeat the same mistakes over and over again in regurgitating State Department
talking points.
>> Right.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, and as you were saying, there's a formal public narrative that is being discussed
in traditional media and then there's informal policy that's happening on the ground through
our military, through our intelligence, through the Pentagon.
An example of that is our involvement between 1980 and 1988 in the Irani-Iraq War that happened.
We formally were supplying Iraq, but informally, through the Contras, selling weapons to Iran.
So we are just really in the game, as you were saying, of destabilizing the region for
our own economic benefit.
Which usually means expanding military involvement, which means private contractors winning out
or hold over nuclear weapons that Saddam had stockpiles of that we accused him of having
from us in the 1980s.
So I love that you were urging people to take a look at the history of our involvement in
the region because it's not only just been 1953.
>> It's throughout the decades >> It's throughout the decades.
And then also, this is something else we talked about earlier, Nando and I, was when we say
no war with Iran, we should take a step back because we have had economic sanctions on
Iran and that is a form of warfare.
>> Yes.
>> And who suffers?
It's always the people.
And I love the fact in the earlier hour you were talking about, and Geraldo Rivera too,
that the people on the ground are an afterthought to us in the US.
And we think about, it's gonna be World War III just because we think that American troops
are gonna come back in body bags.
That's our only conception of what it means for us to be violently involved.
And I think we just have to not only learn about our history, but expand our understanding
and our compassion for what our country has done to other people, and, again, why they
hate us for that.
>> Right, look, there's a reason why our public schools don't teach us about the US orchestrated
coups abroad, right?
>> Yeah.
>> It's because our government wants to keep its people stupid so we get scared every single
time they fear monger about the boogeyman abroad.
And we essentially allow them to carry out the type of aggression that we're seeing today.
We need to be smarter than that and we need to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
And it's devastating that we keep making the same mistake over and over again.