Photo: Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar. See: Hour 2, Block B, Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics.
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
Co-host: Thaddeus McCotter, WJR, the Great Voice of the Great Lakes
 
Hour One
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 1, Block A: Tom Joscelyn, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies; & Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal; and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD; in re:  War-fighting. IDF and IAF struck an Iranian base just outside Damascus.  Presumed that Iran will respond. Iran deal is deceptive and made in falsehood. We expect conflict in northernmost Israel in connection with the Iran deal.
State Department is urging Taliban to run for office in northern Afghanistan.  Put the fox inside the henhouse and smile, expecting good. Release from Acting Secretary of State. 
Nightmare. All the Taliban want is to take over Afghanistan, receive all incoming funds, and impose sharia law.
Meanwhile, Comey attacks the House Intell Committee (esp its chairman, Devin Nunes); and NY Times Magazine makes multiple errors: it's curious that anyone is currently questioning what was found in the Abbotabad compound of Osama bin Laden; note that the CIA reversed its evaluation of what ObL was – he was not a figurehead, as CIA long asserted, but the hub of vast communications from around the globe.  We’ve been arguing that these files need to be released since May 2012 – they show that the US has a lasting challenge.   In June 2010, Panetta said that ObL had 50 to 100 ops in Afgh – wrong!  A memo from then shows that they had strong representation in at least eight Afgh provinces. Lengthy memos on ____; they held at a premium an ofc in Turkey.  Al Q relations w Pakistan, and with Somalia, Iraq, and elsewhere; for anyone to claim that these files are not essential to understand al Qaeda, he would be [deeply uninformed].  Rep Nunes went to CENTCOM to obtain the files, which eventually were released under the Trump Adm.
Arab Spring was supposed to be the death knell of al Q; not only did al Q take advantage of it but ISIS sprouted and flourished under it. This is the point of primary-source documents such as this. Publicly available. Incidentally, we need Arabic-speakers to translate.
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 1, Block B: Tom Joscelyn, Long War Journal and FDD; and Bill Roggio, Long War Journal and FDD; in re: SIGAR report. [https://www.sigar.mil/allreports/][ https://www.sigar.mil/pdf/quarterlyreports/2018-01-30qr.pdf]  US has spent $800 bil in Afgh, incl for a vast power station in the Northeast that has never worked at all. Schools, power plants, hospitals, Us has put in hundreds of billions and many o rmost of these have never functioned.  The Taliban are winning.  . . . In the Philippines: Mira ____ has been interlocutor . . .
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 1, Block C: Gordon Chang, Daily Beast and Forbes,com, in re: North Korea and China
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 1, Block D:  David Maxwell, Georgetown University,  in re:  North Korea
 
Hour Two
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 2, Block A    John Fund, NRO, in re:  North Korea; Ronny Jackson; Jon Tester; Scott Pruitt.
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 2, Block B:  Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, in re: Couple cowboys at Al Udeid airfield in Qatar used satellites to correct the ingoing missiles in Syria.
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 2, Block C: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re: Golan Heights. Iran’s unmerited confidence.  Significant airstrike in the last hours on an Iranian base near Damascus; so huge it recorded on the Richter scale. Large deployment of IDF armor in the north, tanks moving northward under camouflage.  “The Chinese curse” – interesting times.  Airstrike was carried out with 100-200 missiles, near Hama.  Hit ballistic missiles stored there; these had been destined for Hezbollah. Second, an air force base near Aleppo where Syrian troops had been seen unloading Iranian cargo planes.  Hezbollah has 150,000 missiles currently trained on Israel.  Strikes were very carefully aimed; nonetheless, Syrians perished. Israel has closed all air space of over the Golan.
PM Netanyahu’s speech about Iranian archives: Israel’s security agt penetrated a highly-secured archive, took 55,000 files on several hundred discs, removed them and quickly left, took ‘em to Israel. Since then, the data have been shared with the US Show that the entire complex of programs – enrich uranium, dvpg missiles and delivery systems, and affixing the bombs to the delivery system. The range isn’t as significant – the missiles can hit Israel, Egypt, Saudi — shows the lies that Iranians have been spreading.  Proves that Khamenei, Rouhani, Javad Zarif, all have been lying to the world, to Obama, to the US.  Relevant to the May 12 date when the US will or may not renew the JCPOA & renewal of sanctions.  As for that, the US can pave the way; will Paris, Berlin, London, go along with the lies??  They’re so committed because of the deals they have pending [massive finances] – I saw Trita Parsi on TV today – he represents NIAC, a front for the Iranian government.   
Monday   9 April 2018 / Hour 2, Block D: Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents, in re:  Go along the Bekaa where Syrians and Iranians have hundreds of thousands of missiles.  In Gaza, many demos: 80% of the Palestinians killed were deeply affiliated with Hamas. They now show up with wire cutters, pipe bombs, various arms, incl kites with firebombs and Molotov cocktails attached. Trying to escalate; instead of ending on 14 May (Nakhba day), they'll continue for weeks.  US State did a study under Obama Adm showing the number of Palestinian refugees is 30,000, not the hundreds of thousands claimed by UN/UNRWA.  Agitation in the US to have this released. 
New bldg. for US embassy will cost $150,000  for renovation of existing bldg.  One hopes that finally State Dept will conform with US law demanding that US passports of those born in Jerusalem say that the citizen was born in Israel.  Which State has consistently refused to do. [Note: State is a rogue operation out of control.---ed]
Iran is afraid that the 150K missiles in Hezbollah’s hands will bring in IAF: take out all levels  of defense so far expensively blt by Iran in Syria and Lebanon. 
 
Hour Three
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 3, Block A:  Andrew C McCarthy, NRO, in re: Less a revelation than a confirmation:  I’ve been looking back to columns from 2015, abt Mrs Clinton’s private email server.  Terms like “subject’ and “target,” the fact that there was no grand jury, which was necessary , they had no intention f filing an indictment. Obama promulgated he absurd legal [canard] about the Espionage Act. How much did Pres Obama have to give orders to the OJ? I don’t think a whole lot, that AG Lynch had to be told explicitly not to go forward with the investigation. What cd he have done? Either resign or shut up and salute.  She was not going to be charged. Had it not been for Dir Comey, we wouldn't know the facts.   . . .
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 3, Block B: Andrew C McCarthy, NRO, in re:  Mrs Clinton’s emails, et al.  
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 3, Block C: Richard Epstein, Chicago Law, NYU Law, Hoover ; in re: Libertarianism
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 3, Block D: Richard Epstein, Chicago Law, NYU Law, Hoover ; in re: Libertarianism
 
Hour Four
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 4, Block A: Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: Democrats under Wm Jennings Bryan had not been internationalists; ’twas Wilson who did that.  FDR was eager to separate himself from Wilson and was unable to.  In his last days, he was constantly working in creating a United Nations – he becomes the Wilsonian he was always trying to separate himself from. It’s that tension htat draws him back into transnational.   This duality is more like Manichaeism than the unifying yin and yang. 
Two new biographies: The Moralist (abt Wilson) and The Last Days of FDR.
The contests here have been between the transnationalistts and those who think of America as a fortress – the land between two oceans that cannot and must not be invaded; i.e., the nationalists.
America has always been [bipolar] – we see an existential opposition that can be resolved only through existential effort; since the beginning. There have been switching of positions and sides. It's a struggle of who owns virtue.
Paradoxical: divided from the beginning, as though America was made for civil war; and rooted in struggle, and draws strength from the struggle.
You can see this today as each side goes at the other – hatred?, and being engaged in something like little battles of the Trojan War.
How the nationalists go at it in Asia is to bash Beijing.  Looking not for a solution but to remove the king.  . . .  “You have a Sparta; embellish it!”  No easy way to have a coexistence between the two halves of America.
A disorder in American political life; we call it a civil war.   In the original case, they didn't actually call it “the Civil War” till forty years after it’d ended.
On TV: no efforts to accommodate or join the other side; rather, they believe what they say in harsh castigations.
Drawing your identity from what you oppose.
Gearing up by both sides to take it over the edge at some point. People finally will say, “Ohh, what the. . .?”  . . . , everyone pulled back.  But in the 1850s. same thing occurred, even up to John Brown. Didn’t push quite to civil war, but it hardened people. Policemen were basically assassinated — as the cops were at the GOP convention in 2016
The Civil War began in 1860 in the Dem convention in Charleston when they refused to  . . . At some time, we’ll be forced to choose. It won’t be possible to stand away. 
Greeks developed a mutual force; all other groups, factions, parties, don’t have the same commitment to violence which throws the majority into being more passive and choose to go with one of the two extremes that they don't like.  Recall Germany in the Thirties: Communists and Nazis pushing and pushing and pushing.
Right now we have a former director of the FBI touring the US; language is not designed to create comity.  Think of the Correspondents’s Dinner: stripping away of authority, institutional authority passed back and forth according to who won the elections,
With authority gone, legitimacy is gone.
The allegation is that the Chief Executive has sold out the country to a foreign power – this is a way to divide the country ferociously.
In the 1860s we were close to war with Great Britain. / JB: it’s usually assassination or impeachment [that triggers the actual war]. (1 of 2)
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 4, Block B: Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: The current incipient American civil war. (2 of 2)
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 4, Block C:  The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789, by Edward J. Larson
Monday 9 April 2018/ Hour 4, Block D:  The Return of George Washington: Uniting the States, 1783-1789, by Edward J. Larson
 
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