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Was the Ukraine-Russia War Provoked by Washington? Scott Horton, author of Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia & the Catastrophe in Ukraine. He is challenging the mainstream


Scott Horton – editor-in-chief of Antiwar.com, the most important anti-war platform in the United States – is one of the most profound critics of US-dominated Western foreign policy. His new book, Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, is a milestone: in 900 pages, he dissects the history leading up to the war in Ukraine as the result of decades of Western provocation. Anyone who wants to understand the complexity of the conflict cannot ignore this work – a detailed review can be found here. In this interview, Horton analyses important aspects of NATO's eastward expansion, Western interference in Russian politics in the 1990s, and the five key wars – Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Georgia and Syria – that cemented Russia's trauma of ‘encirclement.’ The interview was conducted by Michael Holmes on 31 March 2025.

TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN WITH DEEPL

Michael Holmes: Hello, today I have the great pleasure of speaking with Scott Horton. You are the editorial director of antiwar.com, the most important resource for anti-war activists in the United States. Today we will be discussing your latest book, entitled Provoked. It is an absolute masterpiece. If you have the time and energy to read 900 pages, you should do so. In my opinion, it is the best book on the Ukraine war and the larger war between Russia and the West. Welcome, Scott Horton.

Scott Horton: Thank you for having me, Michael. It's good to be here.

Let's start with the present. Then we have to go back to the end of the last Cold War. Is there any hope now for a comprehensive ceasefire, perhaps even a peace agreement?


Well, yes, I try to be hopeful, but there are reasons to be pessimistic. I mean, the best we have right now is that President Donald Trump clearly wants to end the war. He ran on that. And unlike many other things, he really meant it. He was frustrated because he felt that Joe Biden had stolen the election from him and then ruined everything, and that this would never have happened under his watch, which I think is correct for many reasons. But I believe he was determined to reverse the problem, perhaps just to demonstrate his superiority over Joe Biden as president. But he has always sought better relations with Russia, which was one of the reasons he was accused of treason last time. So he wants to make a peace deal.

If it were my perspective, I wouldn't care, I would say let the whole thing go, come home, let the Europeans and the Russians negotiate whatever. I don't care what happens. But that's not the world we live in. And so his position is one in which he has to try to negotiate an end to the war, which in the worst case scenario means taking a kind of time-out, without having to make concessions on territories that the Russians have not yet taken or anything like that, right?

But the Ukrainian and the entire Western side are in a weak position here. The Russians control the battlefield from north to south. And as the latest intelligence assessment they just released correctly states, the momentum is on their side. The Ukrainians have fought bravely, but they are losing and have no chance of turning the tide. There is no magic weapon system that could change that for them. And the American army and the rest of the European armies are not coming, and to really change that, you would have to drop in the 82nd Airborne and send in the US Navy and so on. We will not do that for anything in the world. And Joe Biden himself has already ruled that out. It would lead directly to war between NATO and the Russian Federation. So we will support Ukraine, but no more than that. Well, that doesn't get you very far.

In other words, Donald Trump has very few cards to play. He can promise Russia that he will lift the sanctions and that he will try to normalise relations with Russia. He can promise them these positive things, but he can't really threaten them with anything. In his latest quote, he just said, ‘If they don't cooperate, then they'd better start cooperating.’ He said he was angry because Putin said, ‘Zelensky is an illegitimate leader, how am I supposed to deal with him? He wasn't even elected,’ which is just throwing a poison pill into the negotiations. He's basically just playing hardball here.

And Trump responded by saying that he was upset about it and that he said, ’Well, maybe I'll just add new sanctions.’ Well, come on, Joe Biden has already tried that. What other sanctions did Joe Biden have on the table that he hasn't already tried to impose? And if there are any left, what difference will they make? Not much. So the Russians are on the right track and could still take the Kharkiv Oblast. The same goes for Odessa, the jewel of the Black Sea on the other side of Crimea. And if they keep pushing, they could take it. I think they would face a pretty fierce uprising there, but they could take the city of Odessa and leave what's left of Ukraine as this little enclave dominated by Lviv, and they could recapture all of historic Russia and the so-called land bridge all the way to Transnistria. That's the strip of land on the western side of the Dnieper River that marks Ukraine's western border with Moldova and is now a kind of breakaway province under Russian protection. So that has always been the threat, hasn't it? That the Russians will keep pushing forward.

And at this point, I'm sure Putin is under a lot of pressure to keep going and not negotiate when they're so close. I don't know exactly how close they are, but here too, time is on their side. So if they keep going, they could take Odessa and Kharkiv. And then he'll get a lot of pressure from the right saying, ‘You can't give up now, right?’ All the Paul Wolfowitzes in Russia are saying, no, you have to go all the way to Baghdad. So he could very well listen to them and continue the war, which would be a real disaster because it would make Donald Trump look like a fool, because he said he could end this thing, and he can't even curb the appetite of the Russians, who are taking more and more territory. And where does that leave Trump?

If Donald Trump is the last hope for peaceful relations between America and Russia, and we are already too far into this war for the Russians to turn back, then Donald Trump has announced that he could end it. If the Russians don't feel like ending it and he's not in a position to do so, then it's all downhill from here. Then, I don't know, I guess we'll wait another two years until the Russians have conquered the entire coast of Ukraine, and only then, in Trump's last year in office, can he try to save face. But he has always sought better relations with Russia, and that is one of the reasons why they accused him of treason last time.

I must emphasise here that the book is very critical of both Putin and Donald Trump, for different reasons. Trump is certainly no peacemaker in general, he is really bad for Israel – he also supports genocide and all that – and for Yemen and so on. Many of our viewers and readers will not know you. Then there could be another misunderstanding, because your book also shows that in the past there were many, many opportunities for a really good peace agreement that was completely acceptable to Ukraine and the West, where they didn't have to give up much, basically just Crimea. Like you, I was always in favour of a peace agreement, but now I think: what can you do? Let's be careful. It is a fact that Putin has 20 per cent of the territory and will insist on keeping it, and there is no chance that Ukraine will get much of it back. It is tragic, and I can share the anger and sadness of Ukrainians who feel that this is an unfair deal. But in the past, there have been much better offers from Putin, and that is one of the many things you show in your book.

But let's start from the beginning. Our position, the peace camp, is often characterised as follows: ‘You say it's all about NATO expansion. For people who don't pay attention and don't understand international relations that well, it's hard to understand why NATO expansion should be such a big problem for Russia, because it sounds like a boring, bureaucratic issue, you know: ’Well, NATO is expanding eastwards. If it's a defence alliance, why act like you're concerned about it? So there's a misunderstanding that it's just a bureaucratic matter, and what's the big deal? The other thing is that there's so much more to it than just NATO expansion. I mean, NATO expansion takes up about 200 pages of your book, which is 900 pages long, I believe. I try to explain to people that the reason for Russia's invasion was NATO expansion plus plus plus. NATO expansion, extra expansion, extra expansion. There were the colour revolutions. There were all the wars, illegal wars, which actually violated all the laws of the so-called liberal international order. And they were all around Russia. There were all the broken arms and peace treaties and all the Western interference in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria and many other countries. So I think we need to start with NATO expansion, and I hope we can address some of the other issues that are closely related to it. But there is so much more at stake. There are 900 pages full of facts, many of which I did not know, even though I have been working intensively on this issue for many years.

As for NATO expansion, why is it so important? Why are the Russians concerned about it, and in particular about NATO expansion around Ukraine and Georgia?

The way you characterise it, the average listener might think, well, who cares? It's just a bureaucratic matter. I think many of the Americans involved see it the same way: NATO was just a fancy cocktail party, right? And more and more fancy people dress up and go to an event in a mansion or whatever in the evening. And that's the life they lead as high-ranking Eurocrats and Natocrats, isn't it? They're part of this thing, rubbing shoulders with foreign ministers and so on, with guys in nice tuxedos playing the piano and people pouring champagne and so on. And what else does that mean to them? That's literally the role it plays in their lives, isn't it? There's a big new NATO conference, we'll all sit together, and afterwards we'll go to a fancy party or something. And that's often how they talk about it.

And then when things get serious, they say we're just ensuring stability. It's America's security umbrella. Of course everyone wants to be under it. No one messes with America – except our own Islamist mercenaries when they sometimes fight back against us. And if you're Bulgaria, then, by God, you form an alliance with America and Germany and France to protect yourself from whoever, e.g. Russia. And, you know who has threatened Eastern Europe in recent decades and centuries? The Russians. And more recently, the goddamn totalitarian communist USSR absolutely enslaved them and imposed communist puppet dictatorships on them. Not only the republics, but all the states of the Warsaw Pact were essentially Soviet republics, enslaved under the tyranny of the Kremlin. They had no choice of their own and no leadership of their own. You know, under communism, the KGB chose everything for everyone.

You're not being sarcastic, I must say, because people don't know your views on this.

Oh, no, it was an absolute police state, that's right. And, you know, just as bad or worse than any right-winger you've ever heard characterise it. So there's a lot of resentment against Russia. There's a feeling that the Communist empire was the Russian empire under a different name and that the Russian empire and the Soviet system were dominated by the Russians as the largest nation in the union and the rest. For some Ukrainians, for example, the Russians and the Communists are still one and the same.

It's not that simple, because there were also many communists in all Eastern European countries, including Ukraine.

Oh yes, of course. And they are all native Ukrainians who are implementing this. But everyone knew who was the supreme ruler. And so there is a lot of this spirit in Eastern Europe. And of course they all want to join America's defence alliance. But against whom? Against Russia. This puts America and Russia in a very uncomfortable position, because it was actually Russia itself that overthrew and destroyed the Soviet Union in 1991. These were the people who killed communism for us and liberated the whole of Eastern Europe. And just when we should be making friends with them, we are instead making friends with their neighbours at their expense.

As I show in my book, the expansionists themselves, the people who wanted to expand NATO, from the George H. W. Bush administration to Bill Clinton and W. Bush, even they admitted that we cannot erase the dividing lines in Europe. We are just moving the dividing line further east and still directing it against Russia. As they called it in the Clinton years, neo-containment of the evil Russian bear. And so all the opponents said, ‘Listen, all you are doing is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Russians are not coming, but now you are making them your enemy. This will ultimately lead to conflict.’ The hawks couldn't ignore it because it was the wisest grey beards of the Council on Foreign Relations who warned against it. These were powerful and influential people who said that this is exactly what would happen.

They recognised this and said, for example, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's second Secretary of State: ‘Listen, if enlargement leads to a bad reaction from Russia, then at least we have NATO.’ So she recognises the self-fulfilling prophecy and says, ‘Yes, but the prophecy is: ’If we expand our military alliance, they will get angry. So what?‘ Because we'll have our expanded military alliance, so they can be as angry as they want, and there's nothing they can do about it.’ The only problem is: we forget the politics. We change the politics by no longer trying to be friends with the Russians, but continuing to contain them. That's not a new world order. Not that I endorse what Bush Senior said, but it's still the same old world order. We're just moving the dividing line further and further east, at their expense.

So it's not just about bringing these countries into our military alliance, which means building up, modernising and improving all their armed forces under American command. It's also about this kind of subordinate policy, the colour revolutions. What if there are countries that don't want to join NATO? Well, then we have to overthrow the government there. Then we have a compliant government that does what we want and joins our military alliance, whether the people there want it or not.

Another component of the policy is the expansion of missile defence to Romania and Poland. Now they say they want to defend Poland from Iran, but they don't have missiles that can reach that far, and they don't have nuclear weapons that they could deliver to Poland. The whole thing was nonsense. Vladimir Putin said, ‘You expect me to believe that you want to protect Poland from Iran with that? I think that you are perhaps trying to gain a first-strike capability against Russia, to surround our country with anti-ballistic missiles and defence missiles, and that means that you think you can strike our country with a nuclear first strike and then shoot down any retaliatory response. In other words, you are acquiring the capability to strike first, abolishing mutually assured destruction and giving yourselves licence to wage an offensive, aggressive nuclear war against us.’

And W. Bush said, ‘Come on, that's crazy, Vlad, because that's not enough missiles to shoot down a salvo from Russia – not even at full capacity. You know, you have thousands of nuclear weapons and we're talking about dozens of sparrows. We can't protect all of Europe from you with these missile stations.’ And Putin said, ‘You know, that's a good point. Maybe it's because the missile launchers are dual-use, the MK 41 or Mark missile launchers. Not only can you fire an anti-ballistic missile, but you can also fire Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can be equipped with hydrogen bombs.' And that would have violated the INF Treaty, but the INF Treaty no longer exists.

And they didn't allow the Russians to have an inspection system. All they had to do was sit an inspector on a bar stool to make sure no one was putting Tomahawk cruise missiles into the launchers, and everything would have been fine. They could have done that, and they were advised to do so back in 2004. If you continue with this, you will have to set up an inspection system with the Russians, with a Russian officer present to verify that you are not installing Tomahawk cruise missiles in these launchers, because the Russians have to be concerned about that. And here, too, the attitude was, well, screw them. What are they going to do? And you see it again and again, they admit it themselves and their friends criticise them for it. It's exactly what you hear the bullies say on the school playground. They always accuse the Russians of being the bully.

William Perry, who was Secretary of Defence under Bill Clinton, had spoken out against NATO expansion and later took responsibility for it. He obviously felt really terrible because he hadn't made it the fight of his life and career to stop this policy, because he knew it would cause a problem with the Russians. And he said, ‘I'm sorry, but frankly, Budapest and Warsaw are not as important as Moscow. We now have friends in Moscow. If we want to expand NATO, we should first involve the Russians, then it doesn't matter whether we include the Eastern European states, then everyone will understand that this is not an alliance directed against Russia or anyone else.

And in fact, they got the Russians to agree to this expansion and the continuation of NATO and its expansion by promising that we would transform NATO into a political organisation that would be more like the EU and the United States, and that we would replace it as a security organisation with the CSCE, now known as the OSCE, which already existed and of which all these countries were already members, including Russia. And they said we will use that.

Then, during the Clinton years, the Partnership for Peace was created, which still exists, but which was basically just an interim solution for NATO expansion to initiate the normalisation process and bring countries into NATO. But what they told Yeltsin at the time was: No, we will replace NATO with this, and you will be a member, and Ukraine will be a member, and we will all be members, because there is no enemy. So why do we need an alliance? We need a security architecture in which we can all work together on European problems and solve them without conflict.

Of course, they call it a defence alliance, as if that alone were enough to make it true. And yet, just three weeks after admitting its first three new members – Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – in the spring of 1999, it launched its first war of aggression against Serbia to separate its province of Kosovo, thereby violating every law under the sun, including its own.

I wanted to ask you about these wars because there were some that were very important for Russia and that really showed Russia how aggressive the West was, not only NATO, but also the United States. But first, I would also like to point out that you show that first Gorbachev, then Yeltsin and then Putin were initially open to all kinds of ideas on how to build this common European house, as it was often called, or simply some kind of security architecture that would include Russia and everyone else, such as Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine and Georgia, simply a security architecture in which Russia is part of it.

And they even meant it, which is really funny. You show that Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Putin suggested that Russia could join NATO. Your reaction was simply to say that must be a joke. They can't be serious. But they showed that they were serious in a way. They probably didn't expect it to happen, but they basically said that they didn't care how we all got along, but we want to get along. But you also have to respect our security interests, our concerns and our national sovereignty, and you don't do that.

And they were serious about it. You know, at one point, Putin had gone through the proper channels, as was expected of him, and there was a working group in Brussels that had already been set up to work on the process of bringing Russia in, and the Americans found out about it and freaked out and put a stop to it.

James Baker, Bush's Secretary of State, had started the tradition of simply ignoring the Russians when they brought up NATO membership. They said, ‘Well, maybe we'll join NATO,’ and he said, ‘You know, let's talk about the rouble or whatever,’ and just changed the subject.

And in the Clinton years, it seemed like there was a memo: If they bring it up, just change the subject, just ignore them. We don't want to be a jerk and say no to them, and we don't want to insult them by saying, well, get in line behind Bulgaria. So we just ignore them. And that became a kind of joke. I have no proof that there was a memo or anything like that, but apparently it became a tradition, because they just kept changing the subject. Even during the presidency of G. W. Bush, his Secretary of State Colin Powell changed the subject when Putin asked to participate in July 2001.

If you read a book by Russia hawks, and some of them are very factual, they are one-sided, but there is a lot of truth in them. And they say, ‘Look, there were the wars in Chechnya, the wars in Yugoslavia, the wars in Georgia and Syria, and now Ukraine. And that's the pattern. Here we have an aggressive, imperialist, expansionist Russia under Vladimir Putin, which started before him but then escalated. That's the picture they paint. When you read one of these books, it sounds very convincing, and in a way it is, because Russia has committed war crimes in all these countries and is pursuing a rather aggressive foreign policy. But as you show in your book, this aggressive foreign policy is very reactive. In all the cases I just mentioned, Russia responded to provocations from the West, starting with Chechnya and the Yugoslav wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, and continuing with Georgia and Syria. So I hope we can discuss these wars and you can tell me to what extent we actually provoked Russia in these cases?

Well, the Russians did not commit war crimes or anything like that in Bosnia. That was the job of the Americans, and they were eventually called in as part of the peacekeeping force in the aftermath. But the break-up of Yugoslavia led first to the Germans and then the Americans exploiting the situation to strengthen their own position in the country. So the Germans encouraged the secession of Slovenia and Croatia and then immediately recognised them, and the Americans basically tried to catch up with the Germans and not give up their position, and then hastily recognised Bosnia's independence, even though it was already clear that when the Germans recognised the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, fighting broke out in both cases and, in the latter case, led to a massive ethnic cleansing campaign against the Croatian Serbs.

So there was a precedent: if you do that, you have all these Bosnian Serbs who want to stay in Yugoslavia with Serbia, and then you have a central government controlled by Muslims who want to secede and force the Bosnian Serbs to come with them. So the whole thing was a recipe for conflict from the outset.

When opportunities arose to resolve the problem, the Americans ruined them. In particular, the Cutileiro Plan or the Lisbon Agreement of 1992: all sides were prepared to sign it. The Serbs, the Bosnian Serbs and the Croats had, I believe, already signalled their willingness, and the Bosnian Muslims had already signed. At the urging of Ambassador Warren Zimmerman, they then refused to sign because he promised them that they would receive better military support from the United States. So they fought for another three years, and hundreds of thousands more people were killed. And then they signed an agreement in which the Muslims got less than they would have gotten under the Lisbon Agreement. In the end, they had to give up even more territory and cities, with terrible losses and, above all, civilian casualties on all sides. This was an absolute horror show of a war, which even the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, who later became Secretary of State under W. Bush, said was basically a huge blunder by the State Department at best. That was putting it politely. And now they expected him to solve the problem by sending troops there, which he was trying to prevent at the time. So it was a gigantic failure – at the expense of the ethnic and religious relatives of the Russians, the Serbs.

Just one comment on that, because in Germany it has been largely forgotten that we supported the Croatian ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs – a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign, as you show in your book, supported at the time by the CIA, but above all by Germany. And they used the symbols of the Ustasha regime, which was an ally of Nazi Germany during the Second World War – a disgrace for Germany as well.

Absolutely right. It is interesting to note that the then President of Croatia, Franjo Tudjman, had fought on the side of the communists and partisans against the fascists during the war. But when he came to power, he revived their slogans, their flag, their national anthem and all these things. And the Krajina Serbs in particular had never been ruled from Zagreb. They had been settled there hundreds of years earlier by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a bulwark against the Muslims. And that was about 300 years ago, but they were always ruled from Sarajevo or Belgrade, not from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. Just because the communists drew the administrative border, they were basically stuck in Croatia, where they never really belonged.

But anyway, that's the whole bloody mess. And then, in complete violation of all the supposed international legal principles that justified the war in Bosnia, they waged war in Kosovo. So the whole theory of the Bosnian War was that Bosnia had the right to secede from Yugoslavia because it was a constituent republic within the entire nation state. But the Bosnian Serbs and their Republic of Srpska have no right to secede from Bosnia or even to remain with the other Serbs in Yugoslavia because they were not an administrative unit under the lines drawn by the communists. And that is the sacred principle according to which all these people had to die in that stupid war in Bosnia.

Then we come to Serbia a few years later. A group of Bin Laden's men, recruited by the Saudis, allies itself with the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is basically a bunch of drug dealers, gangsters and murderers trying to separate Kosovo to create a Greater Albania. And America says, okay, fine. Even though Kosovo wasn't an independent administrative unit, it was simply part of Serbia. It was nothing more than a district in Serbia. And so they said, oh, all these international laws and all this high-sounding crap we invoked for the previous war, all that is now null and void, because the real law is that America can do whatever it wants. And that's exactly what we're going to do.

They started the war on the basis of a total hoax that hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian civilians had been rounded up and murdered in huge execution chambers, that their bodies had been thrown into mine shafts and burned in huge incinerators, that press gangs had dug mass graves everywhere and set up mass rape rooms. It was all fabricated rubbish, all lies to justify this war. In the end, fewer than 3,000 bodies were found, and most of them were fighters who had been killed in battle. Of course, there were also some executions of prisoners and the like, but we are talking about 3,000, not 100,000. And they were not civilians.

In any case, this was again at the expense of Russia's friends, the Serbs, and almost led to war. Above all, however, it led to a horrified reaction in Russia. That was the absolute death knell for the credibility of the Russian liberals who were friends with the Americans, who had advised the other Russians that no, the Americans are our friends now. We can trust them. We like them. They like us. We don't need to worry about NATO expansion because they promised us that it's purely a defensive alliance and they mean no harm. All these people were completely discredited by this.

This war also began three weeks after the first round of NATO expansion was completed and the signatures were on paper. This completely discredited the entire pro-American side of Russian politics. It was their death sentence even before the turn of the millennium. This completely threw Yeltsin off course. His prime minister, Chernomyrdin, turned his plane around over the Atlantic and came home, and Yeltsin shouted at Bill Clinton on the phone that this would ruin everything. This triggered a violent reaction from them.

While the Americans were messing around on the Albanian border, the Russians seized the opportunity. They had a base in Bosnia, where they were part of the joint peacekeeping force, and they stormed the airport in Pristina, Kosovo, and took it over. At that point, General Wesley Clark ordered an Apache helicopter brigade and a detachment of troops to take the airport from them.

There is a famous English singer named James Blunt, and at the time he was a colonel in the British Army on the ground, perhaps a lieutenant colonel. His commander was Lieutenant General Michael Jackson, not the child-molesting pop star. But Blunt, the famous singer, was the man on the ground. These two were insubordinate. James Blunt called General Jackson and said, ‘Do you know what's going on here?’ Wesley Clark ordered Jackson to clear the airport, and Jackson refused, saying, ‘I'm not starting World War III for you.’

So Michael Jackson and James Blunt made sure there was no World War III – no end of the world. That's a funny, really cool story.

Yes, it sucks because I debated Wesley Clark, but I couldn't bring it up because I knew he would just deny it. I don't really have any sources other than what was said. I wasn't there. There was no real point in mentioning it. I thought I'd lost the argument, unfortunately. If I had humiliated him too much, it would have changed the tone of the debate.

The Chechen wars are the most underrated wars, I think. I think the Russian warfare in Ukraine was much more brutal than it is now. There were a lot of civilian casualties. I've spoken to soldiers who fought there, Russian soldiers, and it was an absolute mess. But we don't have clean hands there either. Please explain that.

Well, yes. So there are two wars there. We're talking about this tiny little Islamic republic in the northern Caucasus mountains. Dagestan is the one on the coast of the Caspian Sea. Click on the left side, that's Chechnya. To the west. And then there's Ingushetia and the rest. It's hard to remember them all. All these tiny North Caucasian subunits, small states within the Russian Federation.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Georgia, Azerbaijan and all the states south of the mountains, including Armenia, gained their freedom. But they drew the border around the North Caucasus and decided that these states were not allowed to secede. Well, the Chechens really wanted to secede. They had a terrible history with the Russians going back hundreds of years, and in particular with Joseph Stalin, who considered them all disloyal and, I believe, deported 500,000 or a million – I've forgotten how many there were, but it was a huge number – to Siberia for the duration of the Second World War. They eventually came home, but the resentment against Russia was very strong.

They declared independence almost immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the new Russian government was too weak to do anything about it. Things simmered there until 1994, when war really broke out. Bin Laden supporters who had fought in the secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan were then sent to Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya. In Chechnya, they were involved from the start of the war in 1994, although they only played a major role later on.

After a number of major successful terrorist attacks, the Russian government went to the negotiating table and negotiated with them. General Lebed, who led the negotiations, later said that the terrorists had credibly threatened to attack Russian nuclear power plants. That was the threat that finally brought them to the negotiating table – they didn't believe they would be able to prevent it. So they simply said, ‘Damn it, we'd better make a deal with them now.’ That ended the war from 1994 to 1996 on an uncertain, shaky basis – a ceasefire, but not a lasting peace. Later, the mujahideen grew stronger and resumed the war in 1999.

This first Chechen war was, in my view, supported by the West, by Britain and the United States.

Yes, America supported Russia in the first war. Both Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore compared Yeltsin to Abraham Lincoln, who was, of course, forced to hold the American nation together during the Civil War. They supported him with billions of dollars and may even have helped him assassinate some rebel leaders. But in 1999, they decided that it was more important to play the pipeline game in the Caucasus. To prevent the Russians from reactivating an old pipeline, the war had to continue. They worked with the British, the Saudis and Azerbaijan to support the mujahideen against the Russians. These were Islamists, head-choppers and suicide bombers. Their leaders had literally travelled to Afghanistan to pledge allegiance to Bin Laden and train with their men in his camps. And of course, Chechen membership of al-Qaeda is legendary, isn't it? Well, that's the connection. Their leader, Al-Khattab, was a Saudi, and his right-hand man was a Chechen named Basayev. They carried out a massive terrorist campaign within Russia.

Putin always gets the blame for their apartment bombings because most people didn't know the background. And then there was another suspicious thing: the police caught some FSB agents red-handed allegedly planting explosives in an apartment building where someone had called the police, and they were caught red-handed because they didn't know what the left hand was doing. The Russian excuse was: No, we were just training, and it was absurd that we would blow up our own building. It was just an exercise, and the explosives weren't real. Well, it's not 100 per cent conclusive either way, but part of the story that Americans and other Westerners almost always leave out is that the Chechens had invaded Dagestan a few weeks earlier and taken three villages, and the Russians bombed those three villages to the ground. And then there were Dagestani jihadists who claimed responsibility for the apartment bombings, and there was Basayev who claimed responsibility. There is a man named Ware, an expert on Dagestan, who also believes that it was the Dagestanis. And I show in the book that this raises significant doubts about the idea that Putin did it.

In the book, I talk about former FBI agent Ali Soufan, who says that the Chechen terrorists questioned bin Laden and said, ‘We don't understand why you are attacking the United States. They helped us in Afghanistan. They helped us in Bosnia. They helped us in Kosovo. And now they are helping us in Chechnya. So why are you turning against them?’ And that was because they didn't understand that he had a broader vision. What he really cares about are the Sunni Arabs who are under Saudi domination in the Middle East – who should bow to his wishes and not to a bunch of renegade puppet kingdoms under the control of the United States.

So he wanted to get rid of the United States so that he could carry out his own local revolutions and establish his own caliphate without American interference. And the way to do that is to destroy our towers and get us to invade Afghanistan, outflank us and bankrupt us, just as we had helped him destroy the Soviet Union ten years earlier. So that was all he tried to do, and he succeeded. It took 20 years. America is not completely bankrupt and has not withdrawn as the Soviet Union did in 1989. But at least he got his war in Afghanistan. I hope he's satisfied. His problem was that America bombed Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia and that America supported all the emirs and sultans and dictators and presidents of the Gulf Cooperation Council and so on. And that we support the Israelis and their merciless violence against the Palestinians and the Lebanese and their takeover of all of historic Palestine for Greater Israel.

The irony, of course, is that the American government clearly didn't care about 9/11, because George W. Bush waged the war in Iraq for Iran's best friends, but he did so because he's a stupid idiot and because he listened to a bunch of idiotic neocons who told him it would be great. It ruined everything.

So in 2006, Bush launched a project called ‘Redirection.’ Everyone should read Seymour Hersh and the March 2007 New Yorker, ‘The Redirection,’ and all the articles he wrote that year — ‘Preparing the Battlefield’ and ‘The Iran Plans’ and a few others. It's about how America decided that we screwed up by putting Iran, our regional rival, in power in Baghdad. So now we have to thwart them in Damascus. To that end, he supported a group called Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon to fight against Hezbollah. He started supporting the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

Some of our viewers may be a little confused at this point because we have to go back to Russia, but now we're coming to Syria – and with it, Russia.

Yes, this is all about Russia. It was literally Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Cheney, who headed an organisation called ISOG, the Iraq-Syria Operations Group. Its mission was to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. And she also supported a group called Jundallah in Iran, who were also the worst suicide bombers, cutting off heads.

That explains why Barack Obama supported al-Qaeda in Syria when he came to power – not because he was a secret Kenyan-born Muslim loyal to Osama bin Laden's ideology, but because he was a secret George W. Bush who agreed with the American foreign policy establishment on everything. And they had decided: Oops, we've built up the Shiites, now we have to move back towards the Bin Ladenists, because the Saudis have no army. We are the Saudis' army. And what else do we have? We have al-Qaeda shock troops.

And so the Saudis began emptying their prisons of Bin Ladenites and sending them to the holy jihad in Syria. This eventually led to the caliphate that conquered the entire western Iraq, and ultimately to Russia's return to the Middle East, where it had not been present since the end of the Cold War. They returned to Syria in 2015 to prop up their client Bashar al-Assad and prevent ISIS and al-Qaeda from looting Damascus and driving him from power, which was what Israel wanted – especially Israel, which was concerned about the Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus-Hezbollah axis. So they tried to take Damascus out of the game. That was the reason for the Russians' return. Their air force bombed al-Qaeda and anyone in its vicinity to smithereens on behalf of the Syrian government. But it was all Obama's fault. It was 100 per cent America's invasion.

And you can blame Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia and Prince Mohammed bin Zayed in the United Arab Emirates, and I am happy to do so. All these people supported al-Qaeda in Syria.

But Barack Obama was the world emperor, and it is his order in the Middle East that we are talking about here. All these Sunni presidents, emirs and sultans – they all belong to the American empire. So if Obama had told them, ‘I don't care what you think of Bashar al-Assad – our priority is to keep al-Qaeda down, and you're going to stay out of it,’ he would have got his way. But that wasn't his priority. Obviously, they don't give a damn about the American people. They want us to believe that it was Hezbollah that brought down the towers, not their adversary al-Qaeda. So that's what led to Russia's return to the Middle East.

Incidentally, I point out in my book that their air campaign, brutal as it was and as many civilians as it killed, was a copy of the American air campaign in eastern Syria and western Iraq, where we were fighting the Islamic State. The only thing they did was fight al-Qaeda when America was supporting al-Qaeda. That was after ISIS split from al-Qaeda in 2013.

During a visit to Iraq, I met an advisor to the US military – an African American – who was working for the US military on how to avoid civilian casualties. And he said, ‘They don't really care about my advice.’ I asked him to compare the Russian bombings in Syria with the American bombings in Syria and Iraq, and he said, ‘It's the same thing. We don't care. The French don't care. The British don't care. And the Russians don't care either. I mean, not much. We all kill a lot of civilians, and there's not much difference.’ And he worked for the US military.

I think the more important point is that, even though they try hard, they still kill civilians everywhere because the death toll on the ground doesn't depend on the precision of the strike. It's the population density in the neighbourhood. It doesn't matter how carefully you try to hit a corner of a house. There are other people living in that corner of the house besides the one you're trying to kill.

A well-known military strategist – I've forgotten his name now, it's in my last book – showed how they essentially levelled the entire city of Raqqa with precision strikes, one after the other. But it looks no different from the Russians carpet-bombing Aleppo – it's the same damn thing.

And Gaza looks the worst of all. Gaza is the worst of all.

Yes, that's right. But you know, even if you go back to the case of Aleppo, as it was called in the American media, the Russians and the Syrian army were fighting al-Qaeda terrorists there. And when they finally drove them out, peace returned there. They celebrated Christmas, and everything was fine again. People came back home. So, as it was portrayed on television, it really looked as if Assad woke up one morning and decided to murder the entire population of the country he rules. And luckily, al-Qaeda was there to fight and try to defend the people from this genocidal dictator – and not: Yes, America invaded the country with a bunch of jihadist terrorist mercenaries, and this man is fighting for his life to protect the population of his country that is not controlled by al-Qaeda from their wrath.

And then the Russians helped him to victory. The al-Qaeda people were all shipped off to the province of Idlib in northwestern Syria, where Turkey has housed them very well for many years. And then in November, they broke out of their pen and took Homs, Hama, Aleppo and Damascus within ten days. Now they rule Damascus and murder people every day because they belong to the wrong religion or ethnic group.

That was Assad's only merit – yes, he is a cruel dictator, but he is not an ethnic chauvinist. I suspect he favours his minority faction, but he protected the Shiite Arabs and all the different kinds of Christians, as well as all the Sunni Arabs who did not want to live like a bunch of Bin Ladenites and a bunch of Saudis.

So Russia was bad in Syria, but we were worse because al-Qaeda is worse than Assad?

That's right. It was brutal, but they did the right thing to prevent al-Qaeda from taking over Damascus. And it was definitely America that made it necessary for them to do so.

The important thing is that Barack Obama tried to get along with the Russians at the end of this affair. He was always afraid of what would happen if al-Qaeda really succeeded and took Damascus. And so, at the end of his presidency in 2016, he had John Kerry negotiate a deal with the Russians to jointly bomb ISIS in eastern Syria. And then the Secretary of Defence deliberately bombed a Syrian army position to destroy that agreement. And that helped ISIS kill a number of Syrian troops near Deir Ezzor and make progress. And he committed this act of treason. He had been openly speaking out against the deal in the newspapers for weeks and then simply intervened to prevent it. This guy, Ashton Carter – who the hell is he? He wasn't even a powerful political man. He was an arms dealer lobbyist whom they made defence secretary. And he just went over Barack Obama's head and said, ‘No, we're not going to do that.’

And it was also the Russians who prevented a war between the United States and Syria in 2013 when they negotiated the deal that gave America the right to destroy all Syrian chemical weapons if it did not invade in return, which is what happened.

I don't know how much authority Obama really wanted to exercise over his Ukraine policy. It seems as if he just let Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland – Robert Kagan's wife – and others run with it, which probably goes back to the colour coups.

Incidentally, there were jihadists from Kosovo and Chechnya who came to Syria to fight. And there are jihadists from Syria, from ISIS and al-Qaeda, who have now gone to Ukraine to fight. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true – and it's in the New York Times. I have various quotes in my book where Bin Ladenites from Syria have travelled to Ukraine, where the nationalist, right-wing Ukrainian forces are happy to join forces with them because they all want one thing: to kill Russians.

So why fight in Syria when we have another battlefield where there are Russians to kill who are closer to home? And so you have all these Chechens and Georgians and others going to Ukraine to fight in the war, including ISIS guys.

When the Russians accused Ukraine of being behind the attack on the Moscow theatre – the most recent attack was on an auditorium, a large music centre – Putin accused the Ukrainians... Maybe. I don't know the truth about who sent these people there. But it doesn't sound so crazy if you knew a little bit about it. There has been a lot of cooperation there for years.

By the way, since we're talking about war crimes, I visited Bucha two years ago, and it was just being rebuilt. And the main streets there – you can see that it was a battlefield. And I spoke to locals. They were very angry at Russia. They all claimed that Russia had committed war crimes there, but no one spoke of genocide or anything like that. Most parts of the city were intact. And I mean, it was a brutal fight, and people were angry about what Russia had done there. In your book, you show that yes, there were brutal war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. Some war crimes were also committed by the other side. But there is no genocide or anything like that. The genocide is happening in Gaza.

First of all, as I show in my book, I find nothing wrong with the investigations by the New York Times and PBS Frontline into what happened in Bucha. I think they are essentially correct: the Russians said they had simply drawn an invisible line and said, ‘If anyone crosses this line, we will kill them,’ because they would not let anyone in. But no one had been warned.

So there was a steady stream of civilians – including a woman on a bicycle and others – driving down this road and then simply being blown away by the Russians, who had orders that no one was to cross that line. And so they killed at least a few dozen people in this way. And then there were prisoners who were tied up and shot. But it was only a few dozen in total – not hundreds, not thousands.

Nevertheless, these are terrible war crimes. I didn't want to downplay them.

Sure, yes. No, I mean, if you put a single civilian up against a wall and shoot him in the head, that's just as big a crime as anything else. But I'm just saying that it was reported here that the Russians had carried out a campaign of extermination to murder everyone in Bucha.

And I think what you're pointing out is important. You know, there was a fake massacre – the Račak massacre – one of the pretexts for the start of the Kosovo war. It was completely fabricated. They simply took the Albanian Kosovars and took ten men who had been killed in a firefight – and threw them into a ditch and said, ‘Oh, look, they were lined up and shot,’ which was not true. But there were about ten men. And Bill Clinton said, ‘Oh my God, this is a casus belli! We can go to war because this proves the intention to commit genocide!' And by the way, here's a made-up number... “One hundred thousand people are missing and presumed executed.” And that was enough to start a war.

Look at what they're doing – they're supporting Israel against the poor Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I can't believe the death toll is only 50,000. They're trying to claim that Hamas is exaggerating. I think the Ministry of Health there is being as conservative as possible with these figures. I can't believe the number is that low. And when you look at the absolute devastation they've inflicted on these people.

Where is Bill Clinton calling for war against Tel Aviv because they dare to commit these atrocities against these people? It just shows how utterly hollow their excuses for their violence are – as if Americans give a damn about what happens to the people in Bucha or anywhere else.

Gaza makes all our arguments easier because people no longer trust the US empire. Why should they?

And look at what really happened – the vast majority of these losses were caused by the Ukrainians, and they admitted it. I have all the footnotes in the book because there is this narrow corridor from Bucha to Kiev. It's a kind of northern suburb. When the Russian tanks drove through that corridor, the Ukrainians simply unleashed their artillery on them. But it was just stupid artillery, and they blew up all the houses along the main road where they were coming down that road.

So there were many tens or hundreds of deaths – half of them came from there. And it was also the case – I don't really talk about it much in the book because it's hard to ascertain exactly – but there were examples of people wearing white armbands and Russian food rations next to their bodies when they were found, suggesting that they had been executed by local Nazi militias seeking revenge and retribution. And in a video, they say that's exactly what they're doing. They say, ‘Yes, we're going around looking for collaborators we can murder.’ Bodies were left behind as a symbol to other potential collaborators. They're wearing the white armband, which means they're on Russia's side. And here they have some Russian food rations – you have to imagine being under siege. You might be hungry and eat enemy food, but then you'll be shot.

But the real story is that it became a story at all. At the time, there was fighting of all kinds across the country. Why did this become a huge media event? Not because a few civilians had been killed. It was because they were trying to destroy the peace talks. They did everything they could to destroy the peace talks.

And instead of saying – and this could well have been their narrative – ‘Oh my God, a few hundred people have been killed. We must stop the fighting immediately before it gets worse,’ in fact, at that point there were probably already more than a thousand civilian casualties across the country, maybe even a few more. Instead of saying, ‘Oh my God, we have to stop the fighting,’ they said, ‘Oh no, this is genocide, and that's why we can't negotiate. That's why we have to continue the war. That's why we just have to supply more weapons and prevent the peace talks.’

And that was in the days of old Twitter, when the Twitter storm was absolutely crazy. This became the political consensus – and in the days of old Twitter: ‘It's genocide. Don't negotiate!’ – and all because they shot a woman on a bicycle in Bucha who they should never have shot. And the person who shot her belongs in the dock. But it's not genocide.

And look at the cities in the east of the country – they have been completely decimated by all this violence in the time that has passed since then. I don't know the exact figures from the UN, and I haven't checked in a while, but I think the latest UN figures were around... what? Seven or eight thousand civilians killed.

We know that hundreds of thousands of fighters have been killed – conscripts on both sides. And the country has been completely ravaged and destroyed – or the entire eastern third of it. And for what? For what reason?

Oh, you know what, guys? The topic of conversation today is this town I've never heard of, Bucha. How do you say that? ‘There's genocide going on there. So we can't have peace.’ That worked. That was three years ago. And they've kept the damn thing going ever since.

It's my fault we skipped so much. First of all, I want to go back to Georgia, because Scott – didn't Russia invade poor little Georgia for no reason?

No. Georgia invaded South Ossetia. That's a breakaway province in the South Caucasus. And there was no question about what was happening there. The Georgians invaded, killed a bunch of civilians and bombed residential complexes. I don't know what they were thinking. They bombed a bunch of apartments and killed hundreds of civilians. And then the Russians came across the Caucasus, destroyed them and drove them back.

They could have taken the whole of Georgia at that point, but they didn't. They could even have taken the BTC pipeline built by the Americans, which runs west and excludes them from the Caspian oil business. They didn't do that either. They could have done it, but Putin was still trying to reconcile with the Americans. But he didn't try to push his luck too far. He made sure that the Georgians' gains there were wiped out again.

The New York Times reported this correctly the next morning. Then they lied about it for a few months and then told the truth again in November. And then there is also an official EU investigation, which anyone can read, showing that it was the Georgians who started it.

Chivers of the New York Times, an ammunition expert and at times a decent journalist, wrote on the basis of the WikiLeaks documents when they were revealed in 2010: ‘Wow, boy, the US embassy had really been hijacked by the Georgians. They believed everything the Georgians told them, even though it was obviously a load of rubbish.’ And so he didn't just look at these cables [messages, editor's note] from the State Department and say that this was no proof that the Russians had started it, he looked at them and said that this was proof that the American ambassador was a complete tool and had been lied to by the Georgians and believed their lies. Well, from all this other evidence, especially from the OSCE observers' reports about who bombed whom and who invaded where, we know what happened there and that Georgia started it.

Two or three years after the war, I spoke with young liberals in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. They were totally pro-Western and anti-Russian. But they admitted it. They said, ‘We started this war.’ And they also admitted that most people in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other breakaway region, do not want to belong to Georgia. They want to be either independent or part of Russia.

They started the war because Bush promised to admit Georgia to NATO. In the Bucharest Declaration, Bush said, ‘One day we will admit Georgia to NATO.’ He did not give them a precise roadmap for membership because the Germans prevented it. But he said that it would happen one day. You cannot join NATO if you have an unresolved border dispute. So Saakashvili apparently decided that he had to resolve the problem of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. He could either recognise their full independence or recapture them by force, but he had to have a clear border before he could apply for NATO membership. So he thought now was probably the time to recapture them. I suspect that he had started to make efforts to recapture Abkhazia, but quickly gave up after it didn't work out with South Ossetia.

Dick Cheney advised Bush to launch missile strikes on the Roki Tunnel under the Caucasus Mountains, where the Russians wanted to send tank divisions for the war. At that point, Cheney advised starting World War III. But Bush and Stephen Hadley said, ‘No way, we're not doing that,’ and they didn't. We could have ended up in a war right there. Saakashvili, the then president of Georgia, had been installed by the Rose Revolution coup in 2003. He had sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. He was encouraged by the Americans, who trained and built up his military and unofficially assured him of their support. I don't know if it's proven, but I think it's logical that he believed America would back him if he started the war. Then he found out we weren't going to. Bush allowed him to bring some troops home from Iraq to symbolically show his support, but he didn't want to do more than that. So it was absolutely foolish of him to do something like that.

What you also discuss in your book are the colour revolutions. You talk about Serbia, Kyrgyzstan, the other -stans. They either supported colour revolutions or brutal dictatorships – as in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan – and mostly both. The West also interfered heavily in Belarus. You show that what they brought to power was often no more democratic or liberal. Sometimes it was worse, sometimes perhaps a little better, but no great difference.

The important thing is that they did the same in Russia and Ukraine itself. In Russia, they interfered massively in politics, supporting the Yeltsin regime and the IMF's shock therapy, which completely destroyed the economy – according to expert estimates, there were three million deaths. In Ukraine, of course, they first supported the Orange Revolution and then the famous Maidan Revolution. It's all in the book, and it's great.

Yes, I mean, I like to talk about shock therapy. I think it's important because the typical narrative is that it was too much capitalism too fast. It's in the name: shock therapy. People thought that if you forced the Soviets to switch to American-style capitalism, everything would be fine. Instead, it was a total disaster. But that's not true.

Who went to Russia? It wasn't the Austrian school or even the Chicago school. It was Harvard. It was a bunch of Bill Clinton supporters who were there – a bunch of damn liberal Democrats. Instead of saying, ‘What Russia needs is a strict rule of law that enforces property rights and contracts, and they need hard money. That's the basis of capitalism,’ they got a bunch of clientelistic big business crap. ’What we're going to do is give this company to this guy, and we're going to give that company to that guy, and we're going to give this guy a huge subsidy so he can get a bunch of vouchers and buy up this company.’ It was all ad hoc. It was all people with power who picked the winners and losers and rigged these auctions with these fake vouchers so that instead of privatising all the wealth into the hands of the people, they just handed the entire economy over to seven gangsters. And I mean gangsters – criminal types who had no interest in actually running these companies, but simply wanted to run them into the ground, liquidate all their capital and then spend all the money on coke and hookers, having fun and partying in London, Tel Aviv, New York and Paris.

They simply destroyed I don't know how many hundreds of billions of dollars, which either no longer existed, were smuggled out of the country or stolen, or were simply completely destroyed.

The transition from communism to capitalism would be extremely difficult in any case.

Then the IMF insisted that all former Soviet republics keep the rouble. But they were now all independent countries, each with its own central bank, and what did they all do? They all inflated their currencies. ‘We'd better print more money if we want to afford the rising prices, right?’ They destroyed the currency and the savings of those who had their money in Russian currency. They created an absolute fiasco.

They simply destroyed them, which caused the Russian people to harbour the greatest resentment towards the United States, as the general perception was that this was done deliberately. The Americans didn't really try to help them. We didn't try to give them a constitution based on ours, a free economy based on ours. We didn't have a free economy.

So the whole lesson of Versailles – that you should befriend your enemies after you defeat them, rebuild them, lull them into complacency and bring them over to your side – was completely ignored. Jeffrey Sachs, one of the liberals who had gone there, resigned after a year under Bill Clinton and said, ‘I don't want anything more to do with this,’ because he believed it was a deliberate plan by the Americans to ruin the Russian economy – to kick them while they were down and treat them like absolute trash.

And then this contributed in two ways to the rise of Vladimir Putin. First, it was the criminal Yeltsin family, led by Yeltsin and Berezovsky, that brought him to power. Second, there was so much nationalist resentment against the previous system that once he was in power, he could say, ‘No, now I am a right-wing nationalist, Russian-patriotic strongman. Now I am taking power for myself, marginalising and persecuting these oligarchs who are stepping out of line.’ And he had the support of the Russian people to act as a strong man and bring justice to the people compared to what the Americans and their cronies had done to them until then. So that was his starting point, but it is also the reason for his success as a politician in Russia – he put an end to corruption. More precisely, he kept many of the same oligarchs. Roman Abramovich is still his good buddy today. And there are many other oligarchs who have decided to remain loyal to Putin, stay out of politics and follow his guidelines. They are still very powerful in the country. What he did was to overthrow the corruption that had destroyed the Russian economy – the corruption that, ironically, had also led to his presidency. And then, when George W. Bush invaded Iraq, the price of oil doubled overnight. And that was really what ...

Editor's note: Due to a recording error, 50 minutes of the interview are unfortunately missing, including a brief debate on the IMF's shock therapy in Russia and Horton's analysis of the Maidan coup, Minsk and Istanbul. Michael Holmes covers these topics in his NDS book review. Horton has explored them in more depth in other interviews, such as here.

Cover image: Screenshot from the video interview.


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Scott Horton

Scott Horton is editorial director of Antiwar.com, director of the Libertarian Institute, and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from ScottHorton.org. He’s the author of the 2024 book Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine the 2021 book Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, the 2017 book, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the editor of the 2019 book, The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019. He’s conducted more than 5,500 interviews since 2003. Scott’s articles have appeared at Antiwar.com, The American Conservative magazine, the History News Network, The Future of Freedom, The National Interest and the Christian Science Monitor. He also contributed a chapter to the 2019 book, The Impact of War. Scott lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, investigative reporter Larisa Alexandrovna Horton. He is a fan of, but no relation to the lawyer from Harper’s. Scott’s Twitter, YouTube, Patreon.

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Very important his videos about the so calles war on terror:

scott horton enough already





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