Listen to Episode 138
Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America this week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: Hey, Walter. How is it going? I’m sorry, I’m off. I’m in England, so my brain is on the wrong side of the road, I think is what’s going on but-
Walter Kirn: Watch your mouth over there, man, and don’t tweet. Try not to pass on any memes. Keep your ideas to yourself.
Matt Taibbi: Well, I was told this morning that that was a vastly exaggerated version of the situation and that I was not to harp on that.
Walter Kirn: Oh, okay. In other words, shut up about people being shut up.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Walter Kirn: Okay. Well, I’m in Montana, land of the free. We’re approaching the 4th of July, which is what they call Cowboy Christmas. I live in a town which is particularly enchanted with fireworks and getting drunk and cowboys with big belt buckles and-
Matt Taibbi: Awesome.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. So anarchy is coming, and I am really happy about that because the world right now could use some pressure valves that don’t end in death.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Maybe the whole world just needs a weekend of beer, fireworks and bare sex maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to ... I heard that would chill everybody out. But Walter, you know what? We, on Monday, promised the audience that we would just do a deep dive. We would go all the way in. We would crawl up the very anus of the Iran-Iraq situation.
Walter Kirn: No, Israel. Israel.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Sorry. Israel-Iran situation.
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: And so we will. We will leave no corpuscle unturned in this situation. I don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff to get to. The big theme in American media right now is MAGA rift. Apparently, war is not terribly important. The ostensible outcome of destabilizing the Middle East is not that important, but MAGA rift is very important, so we’re going to get to that. There’s a lot of amusing video on that score. But just to back up, for people who didn’t follow this story terribly closely, a week ago, at this time, Iran launched a series of coordinated attacks against-
Walter Kirn: Israel did.
Matt Taibbi: Sorry.
Walter Kirn: I know. They all start with I, and they’re all equally far away.
Matt Taibbi: You know what? Bud Trillin once wrote an article called Iran May Be Iraq. Did you read that?
Walter Kirn: No.
Matt Taibbi: I’ve done this ever since. Okay. So for those who haven’t followed the story, a week ago at this time, Israel launched a series of attacks, coordinated attacks against ostensibly Iran’s enrichment program, sites connected to it and ...
Walter Kirn: And people connected to it.
Matt Taibbi: And people connected to it. There was even a moment of what I would, I guess, call humor, although it’s very grim humor, where there was a television broadcast going on in an Iranian state TV in the middle of this, and right in the middle of proclaiming that bombs would never touch Iran because Allah is protecting them, the station got hit. So let’s take a look at that.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. I’m not sure that that’s the right translation. There’s one ... Apparently, what happened was that the anchor says bombs will not touch us because Allah is protecting us, and then 3.5 seconds later is when the bomb hits. I may have misunderstood that, but either way, that was part of what happened. Then there was the actual military operation, which apparently went rather well. Now this is important because the United States was hedging its bets publicly before the operation, and then there was this, sort of, wargasm that happened, similar to what happened after the shock and awe thing when suddenly there were people who thought, wow, that looks kind of awesome, and diplomats changed their mind. There was a lot of bomb cams from Israeli F-16s hitting targets. Can we take a look at those?
Matt Taibbi: It’s got that, kind of, the ring feeling to it at the end with the static. And then, of course, Iran returned fire. There was carnage in Tel Aviv and Haifa, and quite a lot of footage going back and forth, and the exchanges have been going on ever since. Let’s take a look at some of the Israeli damage.
Matt Taibbi: All right.
Walter Kirn: Why was their music like that?
Matt Taibbi: I don’t know. People on the internet, they want you to ... They’re multitasking. Maybe it’s like a rave, I don’t know, set to footage, war footage. Who knows?
And then there was, on Monday ... Now, in between all this, there were various statements by Trump and by other people. Trump fully backed the Israeli action after those first four days then began speaking as if the United States would actually join in the attack. We had John Bolton rising from the dead to talk about how overthrowing the Ayatollahs was the only way out. He looked a little bit tumescent.
And I don’t know, Walter, do you have any comment before we move on to the Tucker Carlson portion of the program? Because this was all touched off by an alleged real thing, which was, what was it, the international atomic energy ... or what’s the group? The IAEA basically said that Iran was in violation on ... I think it was last Thursday. So the Israelis attacked the next day.
Walter Kirn: It was also the expiration of the 60-
Matt Taibbi: Expiration of them.
Walter Kirn: ... the 60-day deadline that Trump had given them to come to the negotiation table. I suppose he probably took that as a personal affront that they had blown him off for two months when he was offering them the olive branch, apparently.
I think another thing we failed to mention was that it seems as though the general staff of Iran was wiped out in just a couple of days, including nuclear scientists, supposedly crucial to the program.
So my impression after the first couple of days was that from the Israeli point of view, it had been a rousing success that they had ... The word decapitation kept being used, that-
Matt Taibbi: Excellent word.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, both literally and figuratively. It seemed the people behind the program, the top of the military, the head of the inner circle, Praetorian guard part of the government had been disposed of, and they had made great progress not just with the missile launchers but with various facilities.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, with three locations. Now there’s one they can’t get to without our help, and we’re going to get to that later.
Walter Kirn: Right.
Matt Taibbi: But apparently, they carried out an operation that they say was a big success. I think there were six top nuclear scientists that they were claiming were killed. If we could show number 18, which is Trump’s truth social, after this, basically saying Iran should have taken the deal. Now look at you. Look at you now. Right? This is his Tony Montana tweet. “Iran should have signed the deal I told them. What a shame and what a waste of human life. Simply stated, Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. I said it over and over again. Everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran.” So now it’s essentially, we’re threatening to bomb Tehran, sort of, kind of, right?
Walter Kirn: I didn’t necessarily read that as our threat to bomb Tehran, but his advice that Tehran was going to be bombed.
Matt Taibbi: Okay. Yeah.
Walter Kirn: This is a word to the wise and it has since been. Other facilities than nuclear, an oil refinery or an oil depot have been hit, and apparently, there’s no internet there and hasn’t been. I’m not sure if that’s because they turned it off or because Iran turned it off or because it’s been damaged.
Matt Taibbi: There’s another report that the Iranian television has been taken over and that there is now something else being broadcast that maybe is being controlled by Israel. There are widespread reports of a big cyber attack. Okay. So this is all happening. It’s a revival of an issue that has come up periodically. Barack Obama, famously or infamously, depending on your point of view, came under tremendous criticism for making a deal with Iran once upon a time to, I guess, avoid the idea of Iran developing a nuclear bomb.
