3/5/26 Matthew Hoh on the Lie That Iran Killed Hundreds of Americans in Iraq

·54 min·4 clips

Take a paint can, fill it with explosive, cap it with a curved copper disc, that's the bomb the U.S. blamed on Iran.

1. Scott Horton interviews Matthew Hoh, a former Marine Corps captain in Iraq and State Department official who resigned in 2009 over the Afghan war escalation, about his antiwar.com article on the Iran-in-Iraq death toll claim. 2. Hoh is affiliated with the Eisenhower Media Network and has written extensively about the Iraq occupation. 3. The episode's core question is whether the claim that Iran killed hundreds or thousands of Americans in Iraq, now used to justify war with Iran, holds up to scrutiny. 4. Hoh says the real Department of Defense figure, last updated in 2019, is roughly 500 to 600 American deaths out of 4,500 total, attributed to Shia insurgent groups, while the majority of U.S. deaths came from the Sunni-led insurgency. 5. He explains Explosively Formed Penetrators as improvised weapons built from paint cans and concave metal discs, which use physics rather than raw explosive force to punch through armored vehicles. 6. Hoh says these weapons were built domestically in Iraqi workshops using techniques learned from Lebanese Hezbollah, who in turn learned the shaped-charge principle from the Irish Republican Army, not from Iran. 7. He cites journalists from the New York Times, Reuters, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Wired, and the New Yorker, who found the same EFP factories embedded with U.S. forces during raids. 8. Hoh recounts a 2007 Bush administration press conference meant to prove Iranian origin of the weapons that was abruptly cancelled after reporters spotted materials labeled made in Haditha rather than Iran. 9. He describes how General David Petraeus's forces armed and built up the Badr Brigade, the militia of an Iranian-aligned Shia faction, while targeting the more nationalist, less Iran-aligned Muqtada al-Sadr. 10. Hoh says Badr Brigade special-operations units, working under Petraeus, tortured people to death with power drills, and that U.S. ambassador John Negroponte, who oversaw the operation, had previously run El Salvador's death squads in the 1980s. 11. He describes personally witnessing $20 million in cash meant for youth sports programs in Iraq being handed directly to the Iran-aligned Skiri faction, with tens of millions more diverted through Balkan-era development contractors. 12. Hoh cites a leaked account that Vice President Cheney adviser David Wormser floated a 2007 plan to have Israel attack Iran, provoking Iranian retaliation against U.S. forces as a pretext for war, which Bush rejected on Pentagon advice. 13. He notes then-CENTCOM commander Admiral William Fallon was reportedly insubordinate in refusing to prepare for a war with Iran during this period. 14. Hoh argues the same fabricated evidence pattern used to build the Iran-Iraq narrative under Bush is now being recycled and amplified by the Trump administration to justify a new war with Iran. 15. He warns that Iran's population of 92 million, four times Iraq's size, combined with the Gulf monarchies now drawn in, points to a vastly larger scale of potential war profiteering and corruption than Iraq or Afghanistan. 16. Horton and Hoh both reference their own books and prior reporting, including Horton's Provoked and Enough Already and Patrick Cockburn's The Occupation, as further reading on the war's origins. 17. The conversation is a fast-paced, detail-heavy two-person interview built around debunking a specific propaganda claim point by point. 18. Both host and guest speak from direct personal and professional experience with the Iraq war, lending the discussion a first-hand, technical authority. 19. Listeners interested in Iraq War history, government accountability, or the propaganda campaign preceding a potential Iran war will find this valuable. 20. Listeners wanting a general news summary rather than a detailed, fact-by-fact rebuttal of a specific claim should skip it.

As heard by us

A focused challenge to an Iraq weapons claim now being used in arguments for war with Iran.

Scott Horton and Matthew Ho revisit an old Iraq war claim now being used in arguments for war with Iran: that explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, must have come from an industrialized state.

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You want to hear an Iraq weapons claim pulled back into the argument for war on Iran.

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