Jeffrey Sachs

“The world economy is reeling. It's reeling because, as everybody has learned in their geography in the last few weeks, the Strait Of Hormuz is closed. As long as it's closed, it means that there is a worldwide economic crisis building. So time is not, permissive right now. We can't say, well, we'll decide in another month.”

“In 1953, Iran was a parliamentary democracy. Iran had not invaded or attacked another country for a century and a half. This was a peaceful country. And in 1953, the Iranian prime minister elected, respected, prime minister Mosaddegh had the audacity, to say the the thing never to be said by this region, which is I think the oil under our ground is Iranian, not British. And, when he uttered that thought, that maybe Iran's oil belonged to Iran, immediately the British Empire, in the form of MI6, came to the new ascendant American Empire in the guise of, the CIA and said, we got to overthrow this guy, which of course they did successfully.”

“Israel, thirty years ago this year, when Netanyahu first became prime minister, adopted a strategy that was explained in a public paper called the Clean Break Strategy. And those governments were Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. And we've now been pulled into Israel's seven wars. Six of those wars have led to blood baths and disasters, from Libya still in civil war, Sudan unbelievably in two civil wars because we broke the country apart and each of those two parts now has its own civil war.”

“What he thinks he learned from kidnapping the Venezuelan president and then suborning the Venezuelan government is I can do a decapitation and then own the oil of that country. And so part of the motivation now was revenge, bring Iran back into the empire. But part of the benefit of bringing Iran back into the American empire is you get the oil. And he thought within one day, he'll get the oil because just like removing Maduro, he thinks gave America Venezuela's oil, he thought killing the Iranian governmental leadership starting with this religious supreme leader and then the top, officials of the government that were meeting that day with the supreme leader, he would take the oil.”

“First of all, we should look at, Iranian invasions of other countries. As I said, it hasn't happened for two hundred thirty years if I have the, the arithmetic right. As far as I know, the the last actual military operation of Persia or Iran, was against Basra in the seventeen nineties. Iran is not out to destroy Israel. Iran does not want to be destroyed by a, a petulant, annoyed American empire from which it escaped.”

“Zionism did not originate with Judaism, strangely, and or with Jews, I should say. Herzl was encouraged in his Zionism by a Christian Zionist. And Christian Zionism was an evangelical belief that the Jews should go back to make a homeland in the promised land or the holy land. And that has roots hundreds of years before these Jewish secular Zionists started at the end of the nineteenth century. It happens, interestingly, that these Christian Zionists were often rather confirmed anti Semites, that wanted the Jews out of their own country.”

“Could Israel continue the war without The United States? Basically not for one day. Could Israel actually survive the global opprobrium, including the American opprobrium of Israel's extremism? I don't think for one day, actually. Israel needs to trade. It needs tourism. It needs contracts. It needs finance.”

“Normally, there would be the National Security Council with detailed interagency assessments. There would be the, national intelligence agencies reporting. Our friend, Tulsi Gabbard, the head of the director of National Intelligence would be weighing in heavily. The joint chiefs of staff would be explaining doubts which they clearly had. There would be consultations with senior members of Congress. That was routine. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president of The United States consulted with the leaders of Congress in detail, by the way, even though this was an emergency commander in chief.”

“It's more speculative, but the daily evidence is growing that the what we call the inter annual phenomenon of, ENSO, which is fluctuations in air pressure and currents in the or sea surface temperatures in the Pacific which cause El Ninos, which people know about, and La Ninas. It looks like a very large, maybe what they're calling a Super El Nino, is building for later this year. One of the things, for example, that happened in the nineteen seventy three, seventy four oil shock was that there was also an El Nino that year. It just, I'm remembering, and it was the combination that sent food prices soaring worldwide.”