Prof. Jeffrey Sachs’ interview on The Duran podcast of January 11, 2025.
With Alexander Mercouris and Glenn Diesen hosting –
Jeffrey Sachs is one of the most famous economists and public policy analysts in the world.
This is how he describes himself: “Jeffrey D. Sachs is a world-renowned economics professor, bestselling author, innovative educator, and global leader in sustainable development.”
Prof. Sachs tends to have a Ciceronian speaking style, with many subordinate sentences. Technically, this is called hypotaxis, and it’s much more common in Italian, French and German than it is in American English.
However, his message always comes across as quite clear and powerful, also thanks to the fact that he delivers at a slower pace than usual — a habit coming perhaps from his conferences worldwide — using irony, satire and dark humor; avoiding ridiculous jargon; and placing a lot of emphasis on the key concepts he wants to discuss.
Of course, there are differences between a written text that is meant to be read, and an interview or discussion that is dynamic and ongoing, and primarily meant to be listened to.
When you transcribe the latter type of discourse, you must make decisions about how to deal with the speaker’s inevitable mistakes, colloquialisms, repetitions, digressions, and even the occasional incorrect metaphor or image, e.g. not ‘to feed’ a path but ‘to follow’ a path, etc.
Do you keep them as they are? Do you correct them? All these choices require great skill and expertise with language.
In my opinion, not too much, but SOME editing is the best. And there is a lot of value in a good transcription that can be used for reading, re-reading and doing research offline.
Hence, in this instance, a few colloquialisms were turned into standard English, and the long Deadly Betrayal paragraph was edited to achieve more clarity for the readers.
Mindless obfuscation is bankrupt and passé, like Joe Biden.
In academia, it became popular at the end of the 1970s.
It was intended for plagiarists, scammers, thieves, liars and ignorant assholes who pretended to know something, but in fact knew nothing at all.
These were all individuals who had nothing true and important to say, but still wanted to steal public and private money, wasting everybody’s time.
In the last couple of years, AI has put the proverbial final nails in the coffin of mindless obfuscation.
Now things have become much more difficult for ignorant scammers, weasels and sleazebags like Haun Sassy, cf. ANTIVIRUS 7.0 below.
Now the whole world can see that “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough,” and that’s exactly what people expect from good writers and public speakers.
Now you can enjoy the truth in the simple words of Jeffrey Sachs — and, as it turns out, the truth was complicated enough…
This is the first part we want to highlight in Prof. Sachs’s interview, approx. from min 9:15 to 17:02, see YouTube video below:
“I think what everybody does need to understand, because it’s one of the most pertinent questions in the world right now… There’s no doubt that Netanyahu has been on the war path for Iran for essentially 30 years. This is not a new story. And in the midst of all the wars that he has provoked, Iran is the last one to fall.
And this is very interesting, because, as I mentioned, his cheerleading for the war in Iraq, his cheerleading for the war in Syria is absolutely, plainly part of an agenda that included 7 wars. And for that we have the – well, we have many testimonials about that, but the most important is by the former U.S. commander of NATO, supreme commander Wesley Clark.
Wesley Clark famously went to the Pentagon soon after 9/11 and a senior Pentagon official handed him a piece of paper that shocked even General Clark. And then General Clark has subsequently talked about it extensively – again, you can find his discussions online.
[See Gen. Wesley Clark’s 2007 interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! in the link and video below, as well as Joe Rogan’s reaction 🙂 ]
But what that paper said was that it was the policy of U.S. government that there would be 7 wars in 5 years. This was Netanyahu’s list. And the 7 wars were wars across, essentially, the Arab region plus Iran. So, across the Middle East and East Africa. They included: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran; and then, in Africa: Libya, Somalia, and Sudan.
Now, the idea, according to a very important insider named Dennis Fritz – who was at the time a senior air-force commander, who later was tasked with going through classified documents about the Iraq war on behalf of Douglas Feith, one of the architects of that war – [Fritz] has told us in a book called Deadly Betrayal [The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq. OR Books, 2024] that yes, this idea of these serial wars, one after the other, was in fact the policy as early as late 2001. And what happened is very interesting.
Iraq was the first of the 7 wars. And then, it was supposed to be Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon and Iran.
And why did they choose Iraq first? Also, extremely interesting. Not the way the story is told on the surface.
They chose Iraq because they thought they had an excuse. And the excuse was a piece of legislation in the United States, in 1998, under Clinton – this is way before 9/11 – called the ‘Iraq Liberation’ Act. It’s stunning to read. It’s a law that says it is the intention of the U.S. government to overthrow Saddam Hussein. It’s a law, on the books, in 1998.
9/11, obviously, became the excuse, the moment to move. And then, when they decided, under these arch-Zionists in the U.S. government like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, that now we’re going to move, they decided what the order would be.
And the first one was Iraq because they thought, here’s a fig-leaf of legal justification. We can justify this war. But you can’t go to war over a congressional resolution in 1998. So, they had to concoct a story. And they actually had a policy group inside the Pentagon, headed by a man named Abram Shulsky, to come up with the storyline for war.
This sounds like a Hollywood movie. Now, of course, it -was- a Hollywood movie called Wag the Dog [1997, by Barry Levinson] about concocting the reasons for war. But that was a documentary, as it turns out, that wasn’t a Hollywood fiction.
This is exactly the Iraq war. And Netanyahu played his leading role – he made these cameo appearances in the U.S. Congress. This is the best thing you can ever do.
Now, what happened, according to Douglas Fritz – absolutely fascinating – was that the U.S. got bogged down in Iraq. You know, they thought it was like shooting fish in a barrel, as they say. That this was a no-brainer. That we take out Saddam – and they did, immediately.
But then there was local instability and insurrection – something the U.S. government never understands, never counts on, because it’s not about generals, it’s about politics and society, of which these fools know nothing. And they get everything wrong all the time.
So, they got it wrong. The U.S. got bogged down in Iraq. And the 7 wars in 5 years took longer. But the agenda was sustained.
And this is another important point about American foreign policy, one that President Putin has made on many occasions, which is: the presidents come and go, but there is a deep continuity.
After all, it was Clinton, under [whose administration] the ‘Iraq Liberation’ Act was signed. It was Bush Jr. who launched the war in Iraq. It was bush Jr. in his last year who invited Ukraine to join NATO. But it was Obama who presided over the coup that overthrew the Yanukovych government in 2014.
Now, these are supposedly very different characters: Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama… We spend a lot of time and a lot of political energy in the United States saying, ‘Oh, that one’s the bad guy, that one’s the good guy, this one’s crazy, this one’s on the left, this one’s on the right.’
This is ridiculous! This is just theater. No one’s on the left. No one’s on the right. They’re all just where they are supposed to be, doing the long-term, deep-state bidding.
So, this is why it’s interesting to add Donald Trump’s posts, it’s interesting to hear the things he’s saying. But don’t get too excited about anything because, as President Putin said in his famous interview with Le Figaro in 2017, ‘The presidents come into office, and they have ideas. But then, men in dark suits and blue ties come in and tell them about the reality.’
And there go the ideas, you’ll never hear about them again. Well, we’ll see, therefore. […]
*** ANTIVIRUS 7.0 ***
https://margheritamaleti.com/2024/05/10/criminal-complaint-rape-sex-trafficking-passport-theft/
https://margheritaviggiano.com/2024/05/10/criminal-complaint-rape-sex-trafficking-passport-theft/
Gen. Wesley Clark’s 2007 interview with Amy Goodman about the 7 wars in 5 years.
Transcript from the website of Democracy Now! that also includes the video of his entire 60-min interview:
https://www.democracynow.org/2007/3/2/gen_wesley_clark_weighs_presidential_bid
AMY GOODMAN:
Do you see a replay in what happened in the lead-up to the war with Iraq — the allegations of the weapons of mass destruction, the media leaping onto the bandwagon?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK:
Well, in a way. But, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself exactly twice. What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I said, if you want to worry about a state, it shouldn’t be Iraq, it should be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about Iraq, not Iran. I knew why, because I had been through the Pentagon right after 9/11.
About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in.
He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.”
I said, “Well, you’re too busy.”
He said, “No, no. We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September.
I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?”
He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.”
So, I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?”
He said, “No, no. There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.”
He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military, and we can take down governments.”
And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
So, I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?”
And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the secretary of defense’s office — “today.”
And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out 7 countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
I said, “Is it classified?”
He said, “Yes, sir.”
I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.”
And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?”
He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
AMY GOODMAN:
I’m sorry. What did you say his name was?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK:
I’m not going to give you his name.
AMY GOODMAN:
So, go through the countries again.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK:
Well, starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia and Sudan, and back to Iran.
Joe Rogan’s reaction to Gen. Wesley Clark:
“It’s just insane, that this was just said. How do they NOT talk about that every day???”