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Aug. 12, 2021 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
37:50
Episode 2: Afghanistan – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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The embattled Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
He could cause a lot of hiccups in passing the laws.
So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
Stand for the flag and kneel in prayer.
If you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots.
You are in the right place.
This is the movement for you.
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days, I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
I think Americans are pretty sick of nation building, but the general public can't really distinguish between 200,000 troops nation building, which does seem like a waste of money to a lot of people and a lot of waste of resources.
But they can't distinguish between that and keeping a security presence that prevents another 9-11.
People ask all the time, what do we get in the last 20 years of war?
No more 9-11s, that's what we got.
We're hungry to get out there and kill some bad guys.
Afghanistan is quickly going to fall into a pre-9-11 kind of situation.
Very, very quickly.
And I don't know what they're going to do with all that freedom.
I don't think they're going to build a really nice, happy civilization.
I don't think they're going to let women go to school.
I think they're going to hang people in the soccer fields.
We're out.
I mean, we're basically done.
Most of our troops are gone at this point.
So, it is what it is at this point.
Can't fight it anymore.
The great coach Vince Lombardi said, winning is habit.
Unfortunately, so is losing.
The United States has made habit of losing regime change wars.
Serious nations and responsible leaders learn from a loss.
The question after Afghanistan is will we?
Will America?
We are withdrawing from the graveyard of empires.
The Taliban will regain total control of the country.
It is just a matter of time.
The temporary victories that military officers and politicians have been telling you about will be reversed.
No intelligent person doubts this.
Afghanistan withdrawal is a lot like ending a bad romantic relationship after investing way too much time, emotion, and energy just to make things work.
Sometimes you just have to go.
The corrupt Afghan government and military leaders that we've backed, they will crumble and flee Afghanistan with whatever money they can steal.
There's even legislation in Congress to let any person who benefited off of the US-funded corruption immigrate here, right to the front of the line, one final golden parachute.
We have lost 2,442 of our fellow Americans according to the Cost of War project at Brown University.
The United States federal government has spent over $2 trillion.
Additionally, over 71,000 civilians, over 78,000 Afghan military and police, and over 84,000 opposition fighters have died.
I mean, you're talking nearly a quarter of a million people off the planet Earth.
And now, the Taliban is in better position than ever before.
This is what failure looks like.
The Afghan government we propped up was never going to fight or win.
They were never worth the blood of our bravest or the trillions from our treasury.
We support the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Biden is right to get the hell out.
The American people were lied to for decades about Afghanistan by warmongers in both political parties.
Some of the very same people who defied their oaths and needlessly sacrificed our service members for their corrupt objectives remain in vastly powerful positions in government and society today.
People like Liz Cheney, General Milley, Bill Kristol, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
There is a well-organized war cartel in America as I lay bare here.
I oppose the NDAA not because I'm against our troops, but because I love them so much.
America's fighting men and women are so precious that they should not have to die in some failed state, some faraway land that most Americans can't even point to on a map, so that defense contractors can Extend our involvement in these wars so that lobbyists can get rich and so that members of Congress can get re-elected.
This good bill has been hijacked by the forever war lobby and their bought and paid for allies in the United States Congress.
It puts barriers in the way of an administration that wants to bring our troops home and put America first.
This legislation has become too swampy.
It does good things to ensure that America can vanquish any foe on the battlefield, but we should only fight when that fight is just and proper.
We have spent two decades trading the same villages back and forth in Afghanistan, and I believe that the administration that leads our country should work to bring Turns out, we didn't know much about Afghanistan when we invaded.
My fiancé will not travel to a restaurant for dinner without reading the menus and reviews online first.
So, just maybe, before invading a country, a quick Yelp check.
Disorganized barbarians in caves who are constantly warring and totally ungovernable, quite a handful even before someone gave them Stinger missiles, signed Russia.
A land of tough terrain where our women and children were kidnapped by warring tribes.
Some of them were forced to marry their captors.
The mountains are pretty, though.
Signed, Great Britain.
Maybe Alexander the Great would leave the message.
A pesky, rebellious people, ungrateful and unwilling to be ruled.
Serious lack of bathhouses as well.
Dreams of nation-building eroded faster than Joe Biden's mental acuity.
You were lied to endlessly by generals acting like politicians and politicians parading around like tough generals.
Real toughness is standing up to the military-industrial complex.
Real patriotism doesn't require us to sacrifice the body parts and minds and marriages of our troops so that we can go pick winners and losers in tribal disputes in Central Asia.
America is a great nation, but great societies have fallen before by foolishly engaging in costly adventurism, some even in Afghanistan.
Adjusted for inflation, the United States spent more money on nation-building efforts in Afghanistan than it did with the Marshall Plan, which revived Europe after World War II. Would this have occurred if our leaders weren't such liars and crooks?
The losers of this 20-year effort clearly the United States government and the Afghanistan democracy hypothesis.
The winners?
The Taliban and the United States military-industrial complex.
Whether we're winning or losing, their stock goes up so long as we are fighting and bleeding and dying.
The American era of regime change stupidity needs to be over.
Are we done thinking we can build Jeffersonian democracies out of sand and blood and Arab militias?
Certainly the powerful interests with a profit motive for war are still around.
Let's study their tactics and endeavor to defeat them.
A great nation does not ask the next generation to fight the last generation's wars or settle their scores.
But we should learn from their mistakes, and we should never make them again.
Fifteen of the 19 9-11 attackers were Saudi.
Some had direct assistance from the Saudi government.
We'd all know a lot more if the full 9-11 files were declassified, which should happen.
Osama bin Laden is Saudi, the madrasas that teach his version of extreme Wahhabism spread from Saudi.
We actually know a great deal about the kingdom, more than our government will ever choose to disclose or admit.
Perhaps our arms deals, foreign aid, and military presence in Saudi Arabia prevent the establishment from addressing the realities that are staring us right in the face.
But enough about Saudi Arabia.
George Bush told us that we were invading Afghanistan, where none of the attackers were from, but where a ragtag group of Islamist fighters that our CIA once funded now kind of presided over a failed state.
They wouldn't hand over bin Laden.
Turns out, the Taliban got invaded for basically having the exact same Bin Laden policy as Pakistan, a nation we happily give guns and money to.
Apparently, if you buy enough F-16s and weapons, you can get away with letting Bin Laden live right under your nose.
The Bush administration, well, they didn't know a damn thing about Afghanistan.
Ambassador Ryan Crocker was sent to the country on the heels of our invasion.
Does this sound like a guy with an understanding of what to do or why?
Well, at that point we didn't know what the task was, what the U.S. was there to do.
In Washington as to whether we should embark on a long-term nation-building effort or whether we wanted to keep our role and our agenda very minimal.
Displaying the rather pathetic inability to gain sufficient situational awareness to get out after a decade, some people started to wake up to a reality.
Afghanistan is a resource baron, lawless, cultureless hellscape.
What were we even trying to win there anyway?
Like rights over the poppy fields?
Now, the usual suspects are pulling out every stop to justify our extended stay.
Russian bounties.
Russia will take advantage of the power vacuum.
The 80s can have their foreign policy back, one might say.
The Chinese will emerge in the United States' absence.
Iran will feel emboldened.
Girls won't be allowed to go to school or play gender-fluid sports, maybe, in Kabul anymore.
And the poor Afghan government will be driven from the capital, forced to flee or face the wall.
It's sad, actually.
Tragic.
And none of it remotely relevant to the interests of the American people.
Afghanistan is no asset to the United States.
So what makes it an asset to any other nation?
Hell, watching Russia and China get bogged down in nation building in Afghanistan might be good for American hegemony.
In fact, worst case scenario, the United States leaves Afghanistan as we found it with the Taliban in control.
After the U.S. had toiled in Afghanistan for a decade, UPenn anthropologist Brian Rose went, looking for a unifying nationalism to study and highlight and cherish.
Instead, he found a corrupt nationless band of tribes that hate each other.
National identity is something we take for granted as Americans.
We have a national identity.
There isn't one in Afghanistan that I could see.
There are tribes and there's a lot of rivalry among the tribes.
There's certainly a level of ethnic hatred among the tribes.
The thing about nationalism is in order for it to work you have to have some sort of confidence in The national government.
You have to view the capital with a sense of respect.
It's not clear to me that that's happening now.
It's not clear to me that anyone views the government with much respect.
The level of corruption in Afghanistan, I could see, is off the charts.
It's extraordinarily high.
The honest, politically incorrect truth is that Afghanistan isn't a country.
They aren't worth it, and they never were.
Their people weren't worth it.
Our money that we sent over there wasn't worth it.
The military gains were fleeting at best.
What's permanent is the pain, the damage, that folks like this widowed mother felt when she was left to raise seven children without the hugs of their father.
The corrupt government we propped up was definitely not worth it.
I'm not even sure they'll still be in Kabul when you listen to this episode.
That's how worthless they are.
The warlords who sided with the United States and Afghanistan weren't exactly the crowd you'd bring home to bomb.
Google Bacha Bazi if you want to vomit.
Dan Quinn, a former special forces captain, reported, the reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to the people.
How they were taking away human rights.
But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did.
That was something village elders voiced to me.
Dan Quinn was relieved of his special forces command after beating up an American-backed militia commander because he kept a boy chained to the commander's bed as a sex slave.
Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr.'s last phone call to his father included, at night we can hear the victims screaming, but they were not allowed to do anything about it.
U.S. officers told Buckley to look the other way because it's just Afghanistan's culture.
The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban.
But the soldiers and marines have been increasingly troubled.
So how surprised were we really when the savages who were raping children at the military encampments we built for them then turned on American troops?
Afghan security forces have been firing upon American and allied forces so frequently that 152 coalition troops have died and 200 troops have been injured from these green-on-blue attacks, several of them my constituents.
And it wasn't just frontline fighters who lacked value or virtue.
While we redirected hundreds of billions of dollars out of the U.S. economy and while we sent America's moms and dads to die, the very thugs and criminals we were dying for turned out to be lawless thugs and criminals.
Listen to the behavior of the Afghani Secretary of Defense that we had installed and who we were backing.
He was giggling.
And he proceeded to relate to us that a mob had gotten out of control at the airport and had murdered the Minister of Civil Aviation.
And he giggled while he related this.
Later, much later, it emerged, I don't know if it was ever verified or not, King Khan himself had the minister killed.
But I certainly came out of those opening months with the feeling that even by Afghan standards, The media criticized President Biden for pulling troops from Bagram Air Force Base in the middle of the night without telling the Afghans.
Well, what does it tell us about this war and all that we spent on it that even at the end, even after all of the blood and treasure, we couldn't even trust the Afghans to tell them that we were leaving?
Informing these so-called allies of our movements would have put American lives in danger.
It shows how bad they are and how pointless our mission of supporting them was.
They were so unworthy.
And our price was so high.
It was a solemn journey and the first of its kind for President Obama.
Shortly after midnight, he landed at Dover Air Base aboard Marine One to meet an Air Force C-17 cargo plane carrying 18 fallen personnel back to U.S. soil.
The latest casualties in the war in Afghanistan.
Among them, seven soldiers and three DEA agents who died in a helicopter crash Monday And eight soldiers killed the next day.
Before the somber salute and tribute, the president met privately with some of the relatives at a chapel on the base.
But Mr. Obama's choice to meet the fallen at Dover is in contrast to his predecessor.
George W. Bush chose not to travel there, saying the private meetings he held with hundreds of families were the most appropriate way to pay his respects.
His father's administration also barred cameras from photographing the events at Dover 18 years ago during the first war in Iraq.
President Obama lifted that ban in April, saying the human cost of war shouldn't be hidden from the public.
And now, not hidden from the Commander-in-Chief.
Bush wasn't a Dover guy, I guess.
Maybe it was the optics, maybe the guilt.
I've been to Dover, with President Trump.
We rode together from Air Force One to meet families of the fallen from my district.
I'm close with several of them to this day.
We have to show the country the cost of these wars and we must bring them all home, Trump said to me.
Trump and Obama had the same Dover policy, showcasing the costs of war, however searing on the soul.
America invaded a land we didn't understand and we made up for it by not learning much along the way.
Just look at how the mission was aimlessly wandering over time.
The goal of the United States remains a genuinely independent Afghanistan, free from external interference.
I said a long time ago one of our objectives is to smoke them out and get them running and bring them to justice.
We're smoking them out, they're running, and now we're going to bring them to justice.
Some of you fought in Afghanistan, some of you will deploy them.
As your Commander-in-Chief, I owe you a mission that is clearly defined, And worthy of your service.
This is a war we have to win.
I will send at least two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan and use this commitment to seek greater contributions with fewer restrictions from our NATO allies.
I will focus on training Afghan security forces and supporting an Afghan judiciary, with more resources and incentives for American officers who perform these missions.
And just as we succeeded in the Cold War by supporting allies who could sustain their own security, we must realize that the 21st century's front lines are not only on the field of battle.
They are found in training exercises near Kabul, in the police station in Kandahar, and in the rule of law in Harat.
Moreover, lasting security will only come if we heed General Marshall's lessons and help Afghans grow their economy from the bottom up.
The fact is, we went there for one reason.
To get those people who killed Americans.
Al-Qaeda.
We've decimated Al-Qaeda Central.
We have eliminated Osama Bin Laden.
That was our purpose.
Whatever the cost, however difficult the victory, we cannot afford it.
We must win.
I agree completely.
Reagan wanted Afghanistan to embrace Western democracy.
How quaint.
Bush wanted some revenge killings, I guess, but then he got bored and wandered off to Iraq, leaving Afghanistan as the forever war as a secondary plotline.
Obama embraced an Afghanistan surge, followed by reckless, hopeless nation-building.
It actually made things worse.
Maybe the American president with the proper Afghanistan policy was actually Bill Clinton.
There have been and will be times when law enforcement and diplomatic tools are simply not enough, when our very national security is challenged, and when we must take extraordinary steps to protect the safety of our citizens.
With compelling evidence that the bin Laden network of terrorist groups was planning to mount further attacks against Americans and other freedom-loving people, I decided America must act.
And so this morning, based on the unanimous recommendation of my national security team, I ordered our armed forces to take action to counter an immediate threat from the bin Laden network.
Earlier today, the United States carried out simultaneous strikes against terrorist facilities and infrastructure in Afghanistan.
Clinton's theory on Afghanistan is that we should mostly ignore them.
And when they get naughty and allow terrorist bases to build up, we should bomb the smithereens out of them from a very high altitude and then fly home.
After all, the Taliban isn't exactly an expeditionary force.
80% of Taliban fighters have never been more than 20 miles from their own home.
If bombing the bad guys without moving in with them for 20 years is wise, one of the key lessons we must take from the Afghanistan loss is that pouring US dollars into a vat of lawlessness does not a nation make.
U.S. efforts at nation-building actually make things worse, not better.
When Uncle Sam rounded up all the tribal Bedouins and tried to mold them into a provisional government, we always believed that more money would ultimately be the glue to create a stable democracy, national unity, and identity.
But it turns out, when you give a bunch of corrupt people more money than they could ever imagine, it only makes them more corrupt, especially in the eyes of their own people.
Regular Afghans didn't trust the provisional government.
Like, when they had more American money and support, they were able to demonstrate that they had the trappings of corruption all around them.
New cars, new houses.
This did not endure to create support among the people.
The endemic and deeply rooted nature of corruption, whether it's Kabul Bank or anything else, is now beyond the ability of even a determined Afghan president to correct.
There's a lot of guys that should have been arrested.
You've got to have accountability.
So that's part of the problem of instilling confidence in a population that they see it happening right in front of their eyes.
We see it happening.
And we don't...
Furthermore, in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution, Congress is given the sole power to declare war.
Over the years, this responsibility has been almost completely degraded and ceded to the executive branch.
The executive branch has been acting unilaterally, with only passive approval from the Congress in the form of authorizations of force instead of declarations of war, as our founders intended.
It is time that we repeal the authorization of military force from 2001 and bring our troops home.
On Wednesday, July 21st, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley held an Afghanistan briefing.
Both Austin and Milley confirmed President Biden's deadline to withdraw and they affirmed its efficacy.
Secretary of Defense Austin laid out five objectives as part of this withdrawal.
The President has made a decision that we're going to get it done and we're going to get it done right.
And we have four ongoing key tasks.
We remain committed to protecting our diplomatic presence in Afghanistan and to providing funding to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces and to advising Afghan security ministries and to preventing the re-emergence of transnational terrorist organizations.
And we've added a fifth urgent task, and that is working closely and urgently in support of the State Department as they relocate brave Afghans and their families who have provided such exceptional service during our long mission.
So let's review what Lloyd Austin is saying here.
His four ongoing key tasks are, one, to preserve America's diplomatic presence in Afghanistan.
Who are exactly we preserving ties with?
The corrupt regime we propped up and refused to prosecute when they stole our money and the people's money?
Or the Taliban?
Will we have real diplomatic relations in Afghanistan if there's no unified, centralized state with any semblance of federal authority?
The second and third key tasks are, two, to provide funding to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, and three, advising Afghan security ministries.
So, two trillion dollars in 20 years wasn't enough, but the next 12 billion the Biden government wants, that's the key to lock things up and to ensure the preservation of democracy and national unity in Afghanistan.
Give me a break.
It seems like we're clinging on to Afghanistan like a simp with separation anxiety clinging on to an X. It's furthered with the ongoing key task number four, preserving the re-emergence of transnational terrorist organizations.
Look, I hate terrorists and I hate terrorism, but does it bother anyone else that preventing transnational terrorist organizations was the reason we went into Afghanistan?
So it seems a little bizarre to say that we need to keep that going as we leave.
It takes me back to the 2000s, the very same words President George W. Bush used to get into these forever wars.
Now the Taliban will pay a price.
By destroying camps and disrupting communications, we will make it more difficult for the terror network to train new recruits and coordinate their evil plans.
Initially, the terrorists may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places.
Our military action is also designed to clear the way for sustained, comprehensive, and relentless operations to drive them out.
Moving on to General Milley.
Furthermore, all the military operating bases outside of Kabul have been fully transferred to the Afghan Ministry of Defense and the Afghan Security Forces.
A small contingent of predominantly military personnel, but some civilians and contractors along with Department of State remain in Afghanistan to provide security and bolster our diplomatic presence in Kabul.
The forces here are key to achieving the five ongoing tasks that the Secretary laid out in his comments.
A major component of sustaining a robust diplomatic presence in Kabul is to maintain a functioning and secure airport in Kabul.
So we continue to dedicate our security resources to that, to secure the embassy, to secure the international zone, and to secure HKIA, the international airport in Kabul, for our diplomats, our personnel, and our continued support to the government of Afghanistan.
The Afghan Security Forces have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country, and we will continue to support the Afghan Security Forces where necessary, in accordance with the guidance from the President and the Secretary of Defense.
The future of Afghanistan is squarely in the hands of the Afghan people.
And there are a range of possible outcomes in Afghanistan.
And I want to emphasize repeatedly, and I've said this before, a negative outcome, a Taliban automatic military takeover, is not a foregone conclusion.
General Milley declares that the Afghanistan security forces, who we will now continue to fund, presumably forever, have the capacity to fight and defend their country.
And we will continue to support them.
So, basic question.
If their security forces have the capacity to defend themselves, why will we continue to support them and fund them?
Is their capacity to defend themselves solely based on US taxpayer dollars continuing to flow to Afghanistan?
Was the two trillion dollars not enough for this crazy experiment?
I support President Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan.
But you have to realize that Lloyd Austin and Mark Milley's press conferences provide mixed messages.
And there should be additional clarity that leaving Afghanistan is not going to bind us to additional resources and additional personnel down the road.
And we must remain diligent in calling out these facts.
Because the media increasingly sides with the neocons.
And that powerful war cartel still exists in Washington today.
Just take a look at the debate that I had against Democrat Jason Crow and Republican Liz Cheney when they were trying to keep the United States forever in Afghanistan.
But here, many Republicans are going to support Mr. Crowe's amendment that in fact ties the administration's hands when it comes to leaving Afghanistan.
You know, the gentleman said there's always a right way and a wrong way to leave.
I would say that a great nation does not force the next generation to fight their wars.
And that's what we've done in Afghanistan.
I think the best day to have not had the war in Afghanistan was when we started it, and the next best day is tomorrow.
I don't think there's ever a bad day to end the war in Afghanistan.
Our generation is weary of this and tired of this, and what this amendment does is it puts additional barriers in front of the administration as they would try to leverage or withdraw and get the best conditions we can and And certainly, Afghanistan is a dangerous place.
The gentleman from Colorado said, well, you know, we might be able to prevent an Afghan civil war.
It is not my expectation that we are preventing a whole lot of violence there now.
You see the extent to which the administrative districts that the Afghan government is controlling is declining, not raising as a consequence of our continued involvement.
Even the military and governmental officials that were executing the war did not have a vision for victory and knew that we were entangled in a mire pile as it was going on.
We know this is a consequence of the Afghan papers.
Mr. Kahn and I have called on the committee to hold hearings on the Afghan papers so that we can ascertain the extent to which our government was negligent with the most precious resource our country has, and that's the blood of our bravest patriots.
I know that there are desires to continue to have American taxpayers invest in the Afghani security forces to a greater and greater degree.
I'm sure, ultimately, there'll be some defense contractors that do very well on those deals.
But, like, pardon me if I just like to make our country great again before we make Kandahar great again.
And I think that's, while on this committee that might not be a popular view, I think when we get to the broader Congress, if you've got the right-wing populists like myself and the left-wing populists that are members of the majority party working together, you know, it's going to be hard to stand against where a majority of the American people are, and that is against this war.
I yield back.
The gentleman yields.
Is there further debate on the amendment?
Mrs. Cheney?
Thank you very much, Madam Chairwoman.
I want to begin by thanking my colleague, Mr. Crow, for his very diligent work on this.
This is a very careful amendment, very careful piece of legislation that focuses on what's really critical about what we need to do to protect our security and what needs to be done in Afghanistan.
We need to make sure that we're denying terrorist safe havens, We need to make sure that we are able to continue counterterrorism activity.
You know, I listened to my colleague, Mr. Gates, say that, quote, we started it.
And I would just urge everyone in this room, and I know all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle recognize how flawed that assessment is.
We didn't start this.
We were attacked on 9-11.
And the reality of the situation is, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, a number of those same terrorist groups continue to operate in Afghanistan.
In fact, we have reports that Ayman al-Zawahiri has been in Afghanistan recently, may be there now.
So we have an obligation as we look at how we're going to be able to continue to protect this nation to do it in a way that is responsible.
Increasingly, I hear the term sustainable force around the Afghanistan debate.
Sustainable, after all, that's a good word.
We like sustainable.
But sustainable force is merely the language that allows our national security apparatus to convert these policing operations into forever wars.
The best thing to do with Afghanistan is to cut our losses, leave that hellscape wasteland, and endeavor to never make the mistakes that got us there in the first place.
There was a lot of conversation from my colleagues about the need for us to be obligated to secure Saudi Arabia's southern border.
I wish we had that much passion and interest in securing our own southern border.
To me, that would seemingly be a more consistent application of our principles.
And it seems odd to bang our chests about American leadership while referencing Afghanistan and Yemen.
If what we get from American leadership is involvement in one of the most brutal, horrific civil wars in Yemen, and then a multi-decade war in Afghanistan, one asks the question if that leadership is being properly husbanded for the benefit of our country.
There is an opportunity for the President under any circumstance To respond to terrorism, to threats against our forces, as my Republican colleagues have referenced, attacks against our interests and against our allies, we would still have the ability, under the language of the amendment, to fully respond to those things.
But what we do not need is excessive entanglement from the United States in some civil war where we're trying to build some democracy out of sand and blood.
And that is what we have done for far too long in the Middle East.
We have done great work in this legislation to raise our gaze to combat the real threat that we face, which is China.
Continuing to obsess about our Middle Eastern conquests just does not rise to the level of a great body or a great nation.
We just got word that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has ordered all members of the military vaccinated by September 15th.
And what's so frustrating is that the lead Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Mike Rogers, endorsed and went along with his decision.
He noted that 70% of the military is vaccinated now.
And he thinks that number should be 100%.
Here's the problem.
With the way they're hunting people over this faux sense of extremism in the military and now this, it's almost like they're trying to drive out anybody who's capable of independent thought.
Similarly, we don't know the long-term impacts of this vaccine on readiness, on the human body.
And the fact that we're forcing military families to take this vaccine before it goes through the normal process, That's deeply troubling to me, and I think Republicans should be fighting against this decision, not supporting it like Mike Rogers has.
Thanks for joining us for Firebrand.
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