Scott Horton

It's in my book that in 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who the revolution had happened on his watch, Operation Eagle Claw, the disaster of the rescue mission in 79 after the hostage crisis and everything, all that egg was on ZB's face.

But in 93, he said we should normalize relations.

We should build an oil pipeline across Iran so they can make money, we can make money, and we can start to normalize.

And Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, Alexander Haig, who had been Kissinger's right-hand man, agreed.

They both were trying to push that, but the Clinton administration went ahead with Martin Indyk, who had been Yitzhak Shamir's man, and inaugurated the dual containment policy instead because the Israelis were concerned that America had just beaten up on Iraq so bad in Iraq War I that now Iraq wasn't powerful enough to balance against Iran.

So America had to stay in Saudi to balance against them both.

And that was the origin of the dual containment policy.

It was Martin Indyk who had been Yitzhak Shamir's man who pushed it on Clinton.

And this was not the Israelis.

It was the Kuwaitis who lied that there was a truck bomb attempt assassination against H.W.

Bush, which was a total hoax.

It was debunked by Seymour Hersh by the end of the year.

It was just a whiskey smuggling ring.

And it was the same guy whose daughter had claimed to have seen the Iraqi soldiers throw the babies out of the incubators.

He was the guy who two years later made up this hoax about Saddam Hussein trying to murder Bush senior.

But when he did, that was when Bill Clinton finally gave in and adopted the dual containment policy because he had been interested in potentially reaching out to Saddam and the Ayatollah both at that time.

But instead of having normalization with both, we had to have permanent Cold War through the end of the century with both.

And my argument is simply it just didn't have to be that way.

It's the same thing with Russia.

Look at, you know, how determined the Democrats especially are to have this conflict with Russia.